I have had too much shame to share my story with even my closest friends. I have been faithfully active for 40 years. In the past five years I have been on a break due to this very subject. I am bold and sassy and able to have a voice in every other area of…
Quite apart from the standard questions on masturbation and sexual purity that always made me feel uncomfortable, I had one incident that was the most harrowing. I did some things on two occasions as a teenager, which of course are no one’s business. When it came time for my interview to go on a mission,…
When I was 8 I was shown pornography by my older brother but I kept it hidden. As years went by I felt dirty and worthless especially at church. Then when I was 13 I had sex for the first time and talked to adult men online and my mom found out. I was forced…
Dear Sam: Thank you for fighting to protect LDS children. They need all the protectors they can get. It has taken me all week to write this letter; I have never told anyone else my story. Who would I have told? Who could I possibly trust with these details? My story goes back 50 years…
Growing up in the church, I first learned of masturbation from a bishopric member asking if I did it. I was young and being interviewed to go to the temple to do baptisms. I said “no,” as it sounded horrible, and then went home to look up the definition in the dictionary. (Thank goodness I…
My story is too long so I’m writing a book. To offer some insight I can tell you that my father was taking religious classes at BYU from 1959 -1967 and during that time he was taught secret doctrine that fed his narcissism and he began sexually abusing me when I was three. He would…
My boys went to our bishop in Henderson, NV in 1999 and told him that their older stepbrother (my husband’s son) was raping them, sexually abusing them and forcing them to perform sex acts on him. They were 9 and 12 years old at the time. The bishop related to my children as if they…
When I was 12 years old, I had a meeting with my Bishop. He asked me about the law of chastity. I told him that I sometimes masturbated. He became visibly upset. A few days later, there was a game of capture the flag going on down the street from my house. When I showed…
When I was about 13, a new bishop was called to my ward. From my very first encounter with him, he made me dread going to church. To everyone else he was a happy, jovial, fun-loving goofy guy, but to me (and from what I remember, other young women – my friends and classmates) he…
I was born and raised in the church and had both fantastic Bishops and then Bishops and other leaders that made my skin crawl. I was asked if I masturbated during Bishopric’s interviews and although I had I ALWAYS lied. The guilt from being “sinful” enough to masturbate was bad enough but when you add…