This article is adapted from a presentation I’ve given to clinicians, church leaders, and families on my clinical approach to pornography concerns — the framework behind my book project Divine Sexuality. One caveat I always give in person belongs here too: what follows is drawn from a decade of clinical observation, not controlled research. I see a particular clientele, and client bias is real. Take these as field notes from the office, offered because the traditional approaches so many of my clients had already tried were not just failing them — they were making things worse.
The phone call that reframed everything
Years ago, early in my practice, a woman called me on a Saturday afternoon. She vetted me carefully — was I married, was I LDS, was I active — and then she said something I’ve never forgotten: “Either I don’t have enough faith, or God doesn’t exist, because I have done everything to conquer my desire for pornography.”
She wasn’t exaggerating about “everything.” Daily scripture study, journaling, fasting, temple service, callings, years of bishop interviews, the Addiction Recovery Program, accountability partners. She was, by every visible measure, one of the most devoted people I have ever worked with. And she had concluded that the only remaining explanations were her own faithlessness or God’s absence.
That is not a pornography problem. That is a treatment-approach problem. (She has since shared her full story publicly — including the part where the pattern finally ended and never came back.)
“Stop language” and sexual silence
Most traditional approaches run on what I call stop language: stop this, remove it, don’t go there, avoid your triggers at all costs. It sounds like discipline. In practice it hands enormous power to the very thing you’re trying to shrink. Carl Jung’s line fits my clinical experience exactly: what you resist not only persists — it grows.
I’ve watched stop language metastasize in ways that would be almost comic if they weren’t so destructive. Spouses who can’t go to the gym or the beach because “there might be a trigger there.” A man counseled to avoid his triggers at all costs who eventually identified his own wife as the trigger — and quietly engineered five years without intimacy, right up to the edge of divorce, while believing he was being obedient. A returned missionary who had gone longer without pornography than ever in his life, until a well-meaning leader set a one-year benchmark he hadn’t reached — and the frame of failure sent him straight back into the old pattern.
Stop language’s quieter sibling is sexual silence: the topic itself becomes unspeakable, which makes it bigger. This isn’t new, and it isn’t uniquely modern. A 1927 Relief Society Magazine case study warned that fear-based, information-free approaches to children’s sexuality — telling a girl she would “go crazy” if she didn’t stop masturbating — produced serious emotional harm. We documented the cost of sexual silence nearly a century ago. We keep paying it.
The shame cycle, from the inside
Picture a fourteen-year-old whose hormones arrive on their own schedule, in the most random moments, exactly as they’re designed to. He’s taught that these thoughts are evil. He prays for them to be removed. They aren’t — because they’re biology, not rebellion. So he concludes the Atonement works for everyone except him. He passes the sacrament carrying what he believes is evidence of his own damnation. One young man I worked with had escalated from two-minute prayers to ninety minutes, kneeling in his backyard, begging for his own body to stop working.
Here is the theological problem the traditional approach never faces: we are a church that teaches an infinite Atonement, and our treatment culture routinely convinces people they’re outside it. When behavior gets incorrectly classified as addiction, the person concludes they’ve lost their agency — and someone who believes they have no agency stops trying. BYU researcher Brian Willoughby’s work points the same direction my office does: the self-perception — seeing yourself as “a porn addict,” as damaged, as someone no good person could love — is frequently more damaging than the viewing itself.
This is also where I ask families to examine their own side of the cycle. We talk constantly about the porn user objectifying others. We almost never notice how thoroughly we objectify the porn user — reducing a whole person to a problem to be managed, a liar to be monitored, a project to be fixed. Both objectifications damage the relationship.
What I do instead
Celebrate first. Someone walked into the room carrying years of shame. Meet it with warmth: you’re here, that’s the win, tell me more. “Tell me more” is the single most powerful phrase I know for these conversations — for therapists, for spouses, for parents. When one of my own children told us he was struggling, there was no stop language, just “tell me more” — and I watched a scared kid physically lighten in front of me.
Assess before treating. I have worked with people who spent tens of thousands of dollars on intensive treatment without anyone ever establishing a baseline. Some had viewed perhaps an hour of pornography in their entire adult life and were being treated as full-blown addicts. So we measure: minutes of use — not “wins and losses,” which put you at ground zero every morning — alongside prayer, scripture study, sleep, stress, mood. Two strange things happen. First, for many people, simply tracking without judgment drops the behavior toward zero — the desire deflates the moment it’s observed with curiosity instead of fear. Second, the data exposes the real pattern: religious activity spikes, then use, then “I’m not worthy to pray,” then collapse, then repeat. When the gospel is deployed as a prevention tool — fifteen more minutes of scripture reading to hold off a slip — we’ve built a conditioning loop that eventually makes the scriptures themselves a trigger. The gospel deserves better than to be used as a fire extinguisher.
Use their definitions, not yours. What counts as pornography? What counts as success? I’ve seen marriages where the “pornography problem” appeared only after the wedding — because the spouses carried different definitions. I ask a question that startles people: if this weren’t a problem for your bishop or your spouse, would it be a problem for you? The answer tells us whose goal we’ve been chasing — and a goal that belongs to someone else is rarely sustainable.
Take control back deliberately. Borrowed from strategic family therapy — the same logic as scheduling a couple’s argument for 5:30 tomorrow — scheduling turns a compulsion that ambushes you into a decision you make. Clients consistently describe the same shift: “For the first time in ten years, I was the one in control.” The urge loses its emergency status (“thanks for showing up — you’re on the calendar”), the marathon binges collapse into minutes, and for many people the desire itself fades because it was never really about the pornography. This is not a step anyone should improvise from a blog post — it’s one tool, used inside a clinical relationship, tailored to a specific person’s situation. But it illustrates the principle: agency is the treatment. You cannot shame someone into self-mastery.
Change the language of prayer. From “please take this desire away” — stop language aimed at God — to “help me understand what this desire is and how it fits my values.” One is a plea to be less human. The other is a conversation. Perfect love casts out fear; fear-based prayer keeps the fear.
Expect the stressor, not the relapse story
One more pattern worth knowing: if someone with a pornography history gets married, starts a demanding job, or becomes a parent, old behavior often resurfaces — not because they’re weak or the change was fake, but because human beings under unfamiliar stress reach for familiar regulation. Homeostasis is not a character flaw. Couples who expect this respond with curiosity instead of catastrophe, and the moment passes as a data point instead of becoming a crisis of trust. That’s also the difference between white-knuckle sobriety and actual self-mastery: the person who has learned their own body and desires knows how to come back to balance when new stress arrives.
Where to go from here
If you’re the one struggling: your desires are not evidence against your soul, and the cycle you’re in has a structure that can be mapped and changed. If you’re the spouse: the four problems tangled together in pornography conflict — behavior, shame, secrecy, and broken trust — are different problems needing different treatment, which is the heart of my pornography conflict and trust repair work. And if the shame conditioning underneath all of this is the deeper story, start with why you can’t just switch it off and religious trauma therapy. Therapy is available online in California and Utah; coaching, courses, and community are available worldwide.
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