My mother was inactive LDS growing up. My dad was of another faith. I didn’t go to church often, but would at times go play basketball with neighborhood friends who were LDS. At one of these shootarounds when I was thirteen, I was pulled into the bishop’s office without either of my parent’s consent or…
I’ve written about a hundred pages worth of material trying to figure out what I want to say and get it down to something less than a thousand words. This is around two thousand. My difficulty in being succinct is perhaps evidence of the severity of the trauma and my need to talk about it.…
My mother taught me that it was wrong to touch my private parts. I was afraid to sin and was very careful not to ever touch myself, even as a young child. At some point I began to masturbate, as a young teen or perhaps sooner. I did not know what it was that I…
As a young 13 year old girl, this was a very uncomfortable, if not traumatizing situation for me speaking to an older man about my sexual “transgressions.” This, in combination with the church’s many lessons about chastity and comparing me to a chewed piece of gum for losing my virginity shattered me as a person.…
There was a time a little girl was happy, at least she tried to pretend she was, because she did not know what was going on.
I was sexually abused by an uncle when I was three. He made me touch his penis. We were in the same ward growing up and he was later called as a bishop when I was a teenager. I remember being so sad and confused that someone like him could be called. Why would priesthood…
I grew up being exposed to sexual activities and situations from my neighborhood peers, starting at a very young age. I always felt shame around things I had been exposed to or reluctantly participated in based on what I learned at church. As a youth, I regularly visited the bishop for worthiness interviews. I always…
Growing up in the church I was frequently asked about masturbation. The cumulative doctrine during my formative years was very clear that this was a sin of the highest severity. This came in the form of “For Young Men Only” pamphlets, Books such as Miracle of Forgiveness, frequent priesthood preview meetings, quorum curriculum, general conference…
I was a hyper-sexual child who didn’t know the word masturbating until five or six years after I’d started having regular orgasms. I started cutting myself as I learned about the church’s stances on everything outside of standard married intercourse and that my value had been diminished as a result. I felt so out of…
I really don’t have a great sense of exactly how to communicate just how damaging these one on one bishop interviews involving sexual topics by untrained men with authority for and from the church have been to me so this will probably come off long and not very concise. I think those that read the…