I first stated masturbation at a young age. It was a secret I kept. I felt awkward about it when other boys talked about it as they learned about sex from their parents and I did not. I didn’t think much of it until I remember seeing a video with my Mormon peers which claimed that it was a sin. I immediately felt the shame. I had tried to stop earlier in life because of the feeling of the social stigma around it. Now I felt immense shame.
When I started meeting with the branch president about priesthood ordinances and going to the temple, masturbation often was brought up. The solutions provided by B. K. Packer and the branch president did not work. Being instructed to not partake of the sacrament didn’t help either. I fell away from the church as a teenager. When I was 18 I had a change of heart and effectively rejoined the church and served a mission. I thought that surely I would be able to overcome this “sin” on my mission but I couldn’t do it. I thought that marriage would be the salvation from self loathing and shame and guilt but it wasn’t. I began to think there was a real problem with myself. I became hopeless and eventually decided that I would no longer feel guilty about it. This was the first time I felt peace from it. At times I have contemplated suicide and cutting off my genitals because of this.
Later in life I became a sexual deviant and had sex outside of my marriage. My whole views around sex have been perverted by the evil doctrines of teaching shame around sexual thoughts and masturbation. I finally let the church go when I discovered this website, protect lds children. The stories really resonated. Some of them I could have written word for word. I realized that God does not create hopelessness and that he will provide a way to accomplish his commandments. I don’t know why God left me alone to struggle in this issue but maybe there were lessons I needed to learn. I AM thankful I was in the church despite all the awfulness surrounding this because I have a wonderful wife and family which I don’t think it would be the same without my activity in the church.
Recognizing that the prophets of the LDS church have created policy which has made people feel hopeless and despair, I recognized that they are not revelators for God but just ordinary men and I think they are quite arrogant as well. Where in the world did they come up with this idea that masturbation is a sin? Nothing mentioned in any of the standard works and they only mention it in the evil book “miracle of forgiveness”, the old version of “for the strength of youth”, and the perverted pamphlet “for young men only”. What a bunch of perverts to pretend that God instructed them to get involved in the lives of young children in a sexual way and shame them for natural feelings towards their bodies and sex.