I struggled with pornography and particularly masturbation from the age of 11, when I hit what I considered to be ‘early’ puberty. I’ve always had a strong sex drive. I also always kept every other commandment. From the age of 12, I went back and forth between periods of lying outright to ‘pass’ interviews and tearfully confessing to sin. As a teenager during a worthiness interview I was even told that my mother’s recovery from cancer partially depended on my being worthy of blessings from heaven. That fucked me up with crushing guilt for weeks and still hurts to think about (thankfully she’s fine a couple decades later).
I was never abused, never molested, but years and years of guilt around what I now consider to be completely normal for a teenage boy eventually made me so full of guilt and shame that I considered whether it wouldn’t be better to have my penis and testicles removed so that my ‘uncontrollable’ sex drive would finally no longer be a burden to me. I literally considered mutilating myself in order to comply with Mormon commandments, driven in large part by the guilt and shame that I felt in discussing masturbation with my bishops over the years.