How Mormonism shapes
your relationship with sex.
The LDS church has one of the most psychologically intensive systems of sexual regulation of any major religion. Understanding what it did — and undoing it — is real clinical work.
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The Psychological Reality
This isn't about blaming the church. It's about understanding what happened.
Most people who were raised LDS know intellectually that their church had strong teachings about sexuality. What's less obvious is the specific psychological mechanisms by which those teachings get internalized — and why they're often so persistent, even after belief changes.
The goal of this kind of therapy isn't to make someone feel angry at the church. It's to understand, with some clinical precision, what was learned — and to build a new relationship with sexuality that is actually chosen rather than conditioned.
Dr. Hansen has deep familiarity with LDS culture and the specific sexual shame dynamics that emerge in a Mormon upbringing. Below is some of what the research and clinical experience tells us about how this conditioning works.
How It Works Psychologically
Six ways Mormon teachings shape sexuality.
The Law of Chastity as a psychological architecture
From a young age, LDS members learn that sexual thoughts, feelings, and behaviors outside very narrow parameters are serious sins — second only to murder in early church teaching. This framing doesn't just regulate behavior; it restructures how a person relates to their own body, desires, and inner life. Desire becomes evidence of unworthiness. Arousal becomes something to confess.
Bishop interviews and the mechanics of shame
Beginning in adolescence, worthiness interviews with a bishop — often an untrained male layperson — ask direct questions about sexual behavior including masturbation, pornography, and sexual contact. These interviews normalize adult authority over a young person's sexuality in ways that many adults later recognize as deeply inappropriate. The interviews create patterns of surveillance, confession, and shame cycles that can persist for decades.
Porn and the 'addiction' frame
The LDS church has been one of the loudest institutional voices promoting the 'pornography addiction' framework. This framing increases shame, reduces agency, and often makes the behavior worse by adding secrecy and self-condemnation to the mix. Psychologically, compulsive porn use in a Mormon context is almost always primarily a shame problem, not a neurological one — and treating it as addiction without addressing the shame rarely works.
Sexuality in marriage: what happens after the wedding night
For many devout LDS members, marriage is framed as the gateway to a healthy sexuality. In practice, years of shame conditioning don't disappear at the altar. Many couples — especially women — experience significant sexual dysfunction, avoidance, dissociation during sex, or chronic low desire rooted in years of being taught that their arousal is spiritually dangerous. The wedding night often becomes a collision between expectation and the body's actual response.
LGBTQ+ identity in a context of structural rejection
For gay, lesbian, bisexual, and queer members of the LDS church, the sexual shame is layered with fundamental identity rejection. The church's position — that same-sex attraction is not sinful but acting on it is — creates an impossible psychological bind. Many LGBTQ+ Latter-day Saints carry deep shame not just about sexuality but about the core of who they are. The psychological consequences are significant and well-documented.
What leaving the church doesn't fix
Many people assume that leaving the LDS church will resolve the sexual shame. For some it helps. For many, the conditioned shame response is not attached to belief — it's stored in the body and the nervous system. You can fully reject the church intellectually and still feel visceral shame during sex, still struggle to be present in your body, still hear the voice of a bishop in moments of intimacy. Therapy is often the thing that actually moves it.
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