Introduction and Guest Welcome

Part 1 of 3 · Ep. 1144

John Dehlin [00:00:03] Shapes.

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:00:05] Oh, society loves their shapes.

John Dehlin [00:00:09] Mormon Stories is a production of the Open Stories foundation and relies solely upon the support of people like you, its listeners to help keep the podcast alive or to become a member of the community. Please become a monthly subscriber by visiting MormonStories.org and clicking on the donate button or on the right side of the page under support. All contributions to Mormon Stories are completely tax deductible in the United States and go towards producing the podcast and building communities and programs of support for Mormons like you. Thanks for your support. Hello, everyone, and welcome to another edition of the Gift of the Mormon Faith Crisis podcast. I am your co host, John Dehlin, and today we're doing something almost heretical. We're doing an episode without Margi Dehlin.

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:01:21] It does feel heretical. Oh, that's such a good word.

John Dehlin [00:01:25] Is it sinful? Is it heretical? What is it? What are we doing here?

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:01:28] It's apostate.

John Dehlin [00:01:30] It's apostate.

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:01:31] Like, yeah, I miss her already. What's that? I miss her already. It's just like me and you, like, we're.

John Dehlin [00:01:39] I know.

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:01:40] I feel like the lame one.

John Dehlin [00:01:41] Feel a little bit naked, I feel. Which is appropriate for today's topic. So I am here, of course, with the lovely, the talented, the brilliant, the wise, the experienced, Natasha Hoover Parker. Natasha, welcome.

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:01:58] Thank you, John. I am here with the lovely, lonely, very kind, smart, witty joggle limb.

John Dehlin [00:02:08] Margi's in Vermont and enjoying a vacation and her family. And I'm holding down the fort, so I get a little sense for what it's like. Margi's always holding down the fort for me. Now I'm holding down the fort for her.

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:02:20] That's good. That's a good thing to do for each other.

John Dehlin [00:02:24] That's good. Okay, well, we're going to do a special episode on a special topic, and it's one that Natasha has a lot of experience in for well over a decade, probably two decades now. And we're just going to dive right in today without a lot of announcements, I think. Are there any announcements you want to make, Natasha?

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:02:44] I don't think so. Okay. Do we want to just talk really fast about. Well, I don't. I have a September faith transition event coming up in September, so if people want to sign up for that, it's going to be in Oklahoma City, but I need to have so many people signed up for it before. I'll hold it. So kind of we probably need to get on that. If people are interested, I probably need to know by August Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:03:12] So go to mormonfaithcrisis.com events if you want to attend the Oklahoma City workshop. The dates are September 13th through 14th, and you can find all that information on the website. But Natasha does great work. She's inspired. And check it out if anybody's listening. It's July 9th. Tomorrow night, July 10th, Margi and I will be presenting a Community of Christ for three hours on the topic of parenting and conscious parenting after a Mormon faith crisis. It's a free workshop, 7 to 10 Community of Christ Building, and we're really excited about that. And we may have another Thrive in the Works coming soon, but we won't talk about that now, but we're really excited about it. All right, so I guess we should always begin with our kind of mission and our theme and why we do this. Natasha, do you have that handy or should I pull it up?

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:04:16] I don't have it handy, but let me see if I can remember it.

John Dehlin [00:04:19] Okay, go for it.

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:04:21] There's three P's.

John Dehlin [00:04:23] Yes, the three P's.

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:04:25] We want to be practical. We want to be positive

John Dehlin [00:04:32] and personal.

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:04:33] And personal.

John Dehlin [00:04:34] Yay. Positive, practical, and personal. Tips for navigating a Mormon faith crisis or for those wishing to understand those in faith crisis. So we want this podcast to be friendly for both those going through a faith crisis, but also the faithful people who are trying to understand it. And it's fitting Natasha is still an active attending member of the church, on her own terms, of course, and I'm not. But we want everyone to feel safe listening to this. And what's our message about a faith crisis, Natasha?

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:05:07] Well, we called it the gift of the Mormon Faith Crisis, because in a lot of ways, even though change is hard and oftentimes very painful and faith transitions are very painful, they hit kind of at the core of a lot of our identity and lifestyle and family relationships. And yet beautiful things come out of change, and beautiful things come out of shifts and new perspectives and. And I think that's true of wherever you are on the spectrum, whether you're the one going through the faith transition or you're the one supporting somebody in faith transition. As I work with mixed faith couples and I work with mixed faith families, I often hear from all sides that, no, we probably wouldn't want to go back to the way it was before because of all the things that we have benefited from and having to renegotiate and recalibrate and improve. We've seen improvements in the intimacy and the ability and the quality of our relationships in our lives. So There's a lot of positives that come out of pain. And isn't that kind of a Mormon construct? And of itself, I mean, that's kind of the story within Mormonism is this idea that we're here to experience things and we're not always sure what we're going to experience, but we know that pain is part of it, and we know that joy is part of it. And that's a very Mormon kind of way of looking at things. And I think faith crises, sometimes people don't think of it in that terms. We expect problems to be things that are not faith crisis related. But I think it very much fits that bill.

John Dehlin [00:06:49] Absolutely. And I feel like a faith crisis is just a stage of life that basically it's a chance to deepen and your perspectives in life to become stronger, to have better relationships. And it's something that isn't just a Mormon thing. If you read Richard Rohr, who's kind of a Catholic, I don't know, coach or therapist around people having a faith crisis in Catholicism, he's studied all different religious traditions and has found that it's just normal to go through a faith crisis if you're alive and if you're paying attention. So we're not pathologizing it. We're actually here to say it's an incredible opportunity.

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:07:38] Yeah.

Overview of a Sensitive and Important Topic

John Dehlin [00:07:39] So we're glad you guys have joined us. And we have a really important and a sensitive topic today. It's one that we've covered a lot on Mormon Stories Podcast, which I've hosted. And of course, you, Natasha, have covered this a lot on your various outlets and channels, which are what?

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:07:58] I have the Mormon Sex Info Podcast. I have Mormon mental health podcasts, both of which have talked about sexuality a lot. And I have my website, natashaparker.org and I've also been doing quite a few webinars and things available on the sex talk with Natasha.com website.

John Dehlin [00:08:23] Yeah. And so I know for a fact there's no greater sex expert within Mormonism than Natasha. No one's been doing it longer. No one's been doing it more intensely. No one's probably counseled more couples. Very few are actually licensed. And this is something that comes with a lot of experience and passion for you. And that's why I'm so honored I'm going to play the role of kind of interviewer today, and you'll be kind of the expert. And since I have studied a thing or two, I do have a degree in psychology. I'll throw some things in my experience And I have personal experience in this topic as well. But this is a topic that affects people everywhere. Not just Mormons, but couples everywhere, individuals. Let's go back and I'm just going to start by asking you some questions. Is that okay, Natasha?

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:09:15] Yeah, yeah. And for sure, like, pipe in because I'm not the only expert in all of this. But you're right, I've been very passionate about it for a very long time because I've been working with Mormons who've been very upset about these topics. So I've been caring about this issue for, gosh, over 15 years, for sure, really looking into this.

The Church's Historical Stance on Masturbation and Pornography

John Dehlin [00:09:40] Let's just have you explain to begin, what is, what has been historically the church's approach to masturbation and pornography? How would you describe it?

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:09:54] Well, there's some interesting thoughts about their history with masturbation. Mark Millan, by the way, has done an excellent job at doing a kind of overview of the history of masturbation that that paper has several. It's like decades old now, but it's very good. And I was lucky enough to find that article. Yeah, yeah. It's from like the, like the history of when masturbation kind of became a sin that we started talking about because it wasn't something that was talked about like in Joseph and Smith's time or Young's time or anything like that. It was more like in the 60s, 70s that started being an issue. So anyway, really interesting read there. And but I think in general, for the amount of time that we all have been members of the church, you know, if you're like in your 40s, 50s, 60s or younger than that, both masturbation and of course anything pornographic has been considered dire sin. And to the point that it's, you know, usually when I, when I read articles and see the things that have come over the pulpit, it's what I would call very provocative language that is used to describe these types of sins. So, you know, perverse, evil, destructive, horrible, you know, in the grasps of Satan's clutches. I know Ted Callister gave a talk where he like, gave this imagery of like an octopus's tentacles coming to get you. There was like a video not too long ago that, you know, talked about kind of encouraging BYU students to turn in their roommates if they knew they were masturbating or looking at erotic adult materials kind of as part of like, helping them, which of course, I think crosses immense boundaries and is very harmful in of itself of advice anyway, you know, and it's been really interesting to watch the spectrum of sexuality. You know, as the Internet has approached, yes, we do have a lot more access to sexually explicit materials. That's a fact. And I think that also in this new social justice era, we have been, as a nation and as a world, becoming much more LGBTQ affirming. So I guess it's not super surprising that because those two things have been shifting, a lot of attention has been given to those, you know, what the church considers sins. And it's really, I think, a missed opportunity and very sad, because the reality is that we do have a lot of sexual problems. We have a lot of sexual crime. We have a lot of things in society that we could be addressing from a sexual lens, and it's not masturbation and pornography. And yet, because we've seen these cultural shifts, it's like the leaders haven't been able to move away from those, from focusing on those types of issues versus the much more serious issues which have to do with sexual abuse and sexual assault and sexual trauma and things that are happening and have happened for decades, for millennia, forever. And yet you never see the amount of. Of energy and time spent on those issues that affect so many of us as you do. These kind of periphery issues that I think just fall under kind of, for the most part, normative human behavior.

John Dehlin [00:13:52] Yeah. So let me dig into that a bit and I'll paint a little bit of a picture. I think if our audience is people new to a faith crisis or going through one, and even they're believing family and friends, my sense is they're gonna have a very different view, which is the same view that I grew up with and held for a long time. And I'll just try and restate it, which is that sex is sacred, that sex is to be only had between a man and a woman. It's that anything that arouses, and I think this is from the Strength of the Youth pamphlet, anything that arouses the passions, especially outside of marriage, is sort of gonna be pushing you towards being a sexually active creature before you're supposed to be, which is after you make your covenants in the temple with your. With your opposite sex spouse. And so for a teen to be masturbating, it's dirty, it's private, it's seedy. Especially pornography is involved, and it can lead to being gay, it can lead to abuse, it can lead to just bad behaviors. And then, most importantly, it can get you, as Boyd K. Packer wrote in his little factories talk, it can get your kind of your sex factory Going so that then you are more likely to act out either with opposite sex or the same sex in some way sexual. And we know that in Mormonism historically, extramarital sex is a sin next to murder. And so there's all of that. And that's for, you know, teens primarily. And then there's the issue with adults, which is with adults, sex is for you and your. You're supposed to be married when you're an adult and married to the opposite sex. And then once you're married, you're supposed to have sex with your partner. And that's when you have sex, you don't have sex with yourself. You don't have sex with other people. And pornography for an adult is betrayal. It's cheating on your partner, it's a lack of mastery, it's a violation of your sacred covenants, it's a moral failure. And it's dirty and it's perverse, and it's an insult and a betrayal to your partner. And that's kind of how I think many Mormons see it. I think that's the church's general position these days. And then what as a result, you know, my understanding is the church would say to a teen, you can't take the sacrament if you're masturbating and looking at porn because you're not worthy. You, you can't enter the temple if you're masturbating or looking at porn. You probably should go to some sort of 12 step program that the church is a sponsor of, or they have these service missionaries that will teach you many of the principles developed at Alcoholics Anonymous, kind of with the gospel twist. And you'll start talking about yourself in terms of addiction, in terms of sobriety, in terms of again, being an addict. And you may even go to special therapists or even therapeutic centers for addiction, the same types of ones that eating disorder people would go to. People with eating disorders that drug and alcohol addicts would go to, you would go to a similar type of set because. And again, I think this is the porn kills love sort of view, or the fight the new drug view, which is that. And they will show imaging scans of the brain and the parts of the brain that light up. And they will try and tell you that masturbation and pornography is a lot like. It basically activates the same centers in the brain as cocaine and heroin. And so it needs to be treated like an addiction, just like heavy drugs and alcohol. So you need to go to an addiction center for recovery from this addiction, because it's just all really serious and you're not worthy and you're kind of a dirty, bad person if you do these things. And is that, am I overstating it?

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:18:28] Nope, you sure are not. That's pretty much where we're coming from.

John Dehlin [00:18:34] So like I, you know, from a believing Mormon's perspective, if the prophet says that it's true and the prophets of all this is all kind of what the prophets have been saying and doing for decades, if it's revelation, this is what God thinks and feels. This is definitely incorporated into bishops interviews, stake presidents interviews, worthiness interviews. This is all tied to temple mission service and temple service. And so it must be the way God thinks and the way God wants it if that's the way it is in the church. And that, you know, obviously if you're going through a faith crisis, you're going to be confused about that. But that's kind of a really strong, compelling mindset. And if I can just raise the stakes even a tiny bit higher. As a therapist at Utah State University for six years, I saw how pre missionaries and post missionaries and even missionaries were tormented over this shaming and guilt around pornography, masturbation to the point of either severe depression and anxiety. I've had some who have had thoughts of self mutilation as a way to solve this problem because they're unable to solve it. And I've even heard of attempts at suicide or even actual successful completions of suicide as a result of people being so tormented over this issue. And not to mention in the married realm, husbands and sometimes wives being deeply shamed over their engagement in this activities, again to the point of severe stress on the marriage, sometimes even divorce and the fracturing of a family and not to mention the severe mental illness sort of ramifications of this approach. Again, Natasha, am I overstating that in your expert?

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:20:45] No, no, you're not overstating at all. And it is, I mean, it's why I've been so passionate about this work for so long, because I see all these things that you're talking about and it's excruciating as somebody who's trying to help somebody in wellness and mental health. And you know, when you think about a therapeutic approach, it's all about framing things and watching the ways that we think and trying to recalibrate ways that we think that are unhealthy. A lot of that is, you know, cognitive behavioral therapies are about reframing and taking your thoughts to task. Right. And kind of seeing is there evidence for These thoughts and why do I have this negative self dialogue? And so what's unfortunately kind of a dilemma that we're all in while we're parts of religious communities is that in some areas, and I would say sexuality is definitely one of those areas, what is coming out of social science and mental health kind of studies and research and treatment is contraindicated with what's coming out of religious leaders from, you know, religious sects that are more traditional, conservative. There's not every religion out there or every pastor out there or every bishop has these necessarily negative views. But in general, Mormon background fits into that. And so what. What is being told and what is being said is coming from not only a leader, but from God themselves is contraindicated to good sexual health and sexual intimacy. So that puts people in a real dilemma, and it puts also mental health professionals in the dilemma, because we're always trying to do that kind of, you know, respecting people's values and respecting their beliefs and respecting where they're coming from as far as a spiritual construction. And yet we have information or knowledge about certain things from a scientific, medical perspective that are at odds with those values and beliefs. And the stories that we tell are very powerful. So to your point, yes, people do become depressed, people do suicide, people do divorce, people do see this as infidelity. Not because people are stupid, because people are part of a system where the story, where the narrative, where the script has been. That's the way you respond to this. This is serious enough that that's how you should respond to this. So people are, in a sense, doing a very good job of living out the stories that we provide in a Mormon construct in regards to sexuality. And I guess before we even go further, what I'd like to just spend a minute on here, because I'm not. I think sometimes when I present, it's difficult because I want to give accurate information. And at the same time, I don't want to minimize very legitimate pain. Right. So I'm not by any means trying to say, oh, if you're a spouse who has felt cheated on because your partner has been looking at porn, oh, that's a silly thing, you shouldn't be feeling that way. That's not what I'm saying at all. I think that's a very legitimate feeling. I think it is devastating, especially when you feel like something is happening without your knowledge and secrecy, kind of against the entire contract or understanding that you have about what your marriage should look like or what it should be about. I think that if you're dealing with self shame about these issues. Again, it's what we've taught you to feel. And so part of faith transitioning is making room for new stories, new interpretations, new ways of having a relationship with certain aspects of your life. And I would say sexuality is definitely an area where we want to do a lot of that work. And even some of the things that you kind of stereotypically brushed with a big brush doesn't mean that, you know, every person, every bishop out there, you know, stops people from taking the sacrament because they're masturbating or stops people from going to the temple. I mean, there's a wide range even within Mormon circles as to how serious these things are treated or how what the narratives are. But in general, and I say in general because I look at top down the top leadership has been very rigid and very serious and very dour about the language and the consequences about anything that doesn't fall into what you very adeptly pictured as the ideal sexual way of being, which we know is not how humans work. It's not. So if you want to have that picture, that ideal picture that the, that the Mormon narrative gives about how to be a sexual being, we're all gonna fail at that. All of us are gonna fail at that. And so if you have a system where everybody's failing in one way or another, it's just gonna be a recipe kind of for disaster and shame. And this is when we're talking about sexual shame and sexual negativity, this is what we're talking about. And if you don't think that this has impacted you, it has. I mean, there's just no way to get around not having had this impact you in some way or another, even in how you, even if you don't feel like you're having issues and how you perceive other people and how you perceive a potential partner or your partner. And it's a recipe for secrecy because we don't feel safe and really sharing and being open with ourselves and with others. And it's a recipe for decreased intimacy because there's a lot of shoulds and parameters on how you can be together instead of actually being together. So it's devastatingly sad for me to see the amount of pain and sadness. And the research shows that we, coming from religiously conservative systems, are a vulnerable population for these kinds of narratives, that we are much more higher. We're much higher vulnerable to the sex addiction kind of narrative, for example. We're much higher vulnerable to the infidelity type of narrative. We are much higher vulnerable for rates of divorce for this particular issue. And we're much higherly vulnerable for depression, anxiety, OCD issues and all of that in regards to self shame. When it comes to dealing with the natural drive of sexuality that we all have in one way, shape or another, that's just kind of wired within us, whether that's our frequency or our libido or erotic preferences, the things that turn us on, those things are just kind of wired within us and we're constantly at battle with ourselves or with our partner self. And so it's really a recipe for disaster.

Sexual Shame, Marriage, and Belief

John Dehlin [00:28:13] Amen. And just a couple few framings from my perspective before we really dive in. For believers and even liberal progressive believers. How do we square the fact that the church has been teaching X approach to pornography and masturbation for decades and now Natasha and John and the whole world of mental health? Pretty much. And anyone who knows anything about kind of mental health and well being, who's kind of, I don't know, considered legitimate in 2019, is sort of holding a different view. And I'll say that I'm sure there are exceptions in the field just like there are anywhere. But is it fair to say it's kind of a mainstream view in the mental health field that the way that religions have been approaching masturbation and pornography hasn't been healthy? Is that, is that fair to kind of stereotype or to summarize it in that way?

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:29:16] Yeah, I think in masturbation it's definitely true. I mean, the American Pediatric association came out decades ago normalizing masturbation, especially for children and adolescents. So that's been, I think, in the mainstream for a long time. Pornography is a different issue. I think that there is a lot of taboo around sexually explicit materials. And quite frankly, we live in a country, especially in the red states like one that I'm in, where there are, I think, a lot of biases that mental health professionals aren't necessarily challenging themselves sufficiently on. So you have people that are licensed and clinical practitioners and do, I would think, a fairly good job in most areas. And yet when it comes to sexuality, they inadvertently also hold on to some shaming narratives. And the sex addiction field definitely falls into that. People who are sex addiction specialists tend to come from social work, marriage and family therapy backgrounds, professional counseling backgrounds. So they're actually very adept at many things, but they've not necessarily gotten what I would consider correct training in this particular area of how they work with people. And I see that bias a lot. In Kansas, where I live with Christian therapists, evangelical therapists. So there is, I think, problem in that regard with professionals. And it's a big dialogue that's happening in our kind of professional circles today. Now, I would say in the sex field, if you've actually, like, actually studied sexology and become certified with ASEC or gone through any type of formal process, those professionals would all be on the same page for sure.

John Dehlin [00:31:04] Yeah. And within orthodox Mormonism, it's just so simple and elegant and easy to say that God talks to prophets and then prophets tell us what's up. And that's easy and it's simple, or at least it appears that way. And so then we just do what the prophets tell us. One of the opportunities of progressive and post Mormonism provides or a faith crisis is to realize that that is not kind of really the way it works. If you just look at the scientific realm, whether it's the age of the earth, you know, Noah's ark, organic evolution, all sorts of different scientific realms, even the idea that the earth revolves around the sun versus the sun around the Earth, if you go back in time, what you'll find is that religions tend to be conservative organizations that tend to want to preserve. So whatever has been going on in the past religion, the default gravity or inertia or momentum in a religion is to always preserve what's in the past. And so often what's preserved in the past, we think is God's revelation. But really it's just cultural, conservative social mores of the times. And so whether it's, you know, whether it's, you know, they're also. So there are all sorts of issues, age of the earth, you know, polygamy, just all sorts of conservative elements of religiosity we just carry forward. So we hate evolution. We're suspicious of science. We, you know, we cling to the things that our parents and our grandparents taught us out of safety. But then when science comes along and really educates us, shows us that the Earth is billions of years old, shows us that Noah's ark couldn't have possibly happened, shows us that evolution is accepted by all scientists as the way that life evolved. Thus, Adam, an Adam, a literal Adam and Eve figure who existed 6,000 years ago, couldn't have happened because we've got multiple strains of humanity existing for tens or hundreds of thousands of years before the timeline that the Bible would allow for Adam and Eve to have been the first humans. Then we have to adjust. And pretty much in every case, when science and religion have come up against each other, it really has been science that won in religion retreated. And that's not bad. That's just the way it works. And religion still has an important place in humanity. It still provides important structures. And we've covered a lot of that here on the Gift of the Mormon Faith Crisis. But this really, in part is just a matter of science, and it's a matter of paying attention. And that doesn't mean that the church leaders don't have value, that they're never inspired. It just means that we have to become flexible and realize that sometimes Mormon church leaders get it wrong. A really clear example is that is the story of oral sex and the bishop's memo. Do you want to tell that story really quick? Natasha?

Church Leadership Directives on Sexual Behavior

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:34:24] Yeah. Well, back in the 80s, there was a memo that came out, I guess, to bishops and stake presidents that, you know, was stating that oral sex was an unholy practice, that married couples should be dissuaded from enjoying oral sex as a marital dyad. And yeah, I think my understanding of that, I mean, I wasn't married or really very much of an adult when that happens, I'm not too aware. But my understanding is that that didn't go over very well. And after six months of pushback from bishop saying we're not comfortable asking people about oral sex, and maybe a lot of people didn't even agree with that, just kind of went by the wayside, you know, I mean, the church, what the church doesn't do well is it doesn't own when it makes a mistake. Right. And so it doesn't want to admit that it makes mistakes because somehow I think it feels like if it does that it depletes its people's confidence that they're inspired to begin with. And so they just kind of have it go to the wayside without really announcing, oh, by the way, this thing that some of you have been affected by, by the way, because some bishops did ask married couples about that and did say that that was an unholy practice and that they shouldn't be doing those things. It's something I always ask about if I see any couple like 45 or older. I ask about that because it still shows up a lot in my practice that they're functioning under that type of shame and sadness about a part of their marital life that nobody had any business interfering with. You know, and so. But the church doesn't own it. They don't apologize for it. They don't reverse course. And so then those who are affected by those narratives keep them. Those who aren't, you know, move on. But I think it's very tragic for the many, you know, thousands and thousands of couples that felt like they had to hone in their marital sexual activity in regards to something as normative and beautiful for many as oral sex is. Oral sex is not something that everybody enjoys, but a majority of people enjoy that. I think it's just devastating that the church interfered in so many marriages in that very inappropriate, and I'll say even abusive way. I mean, it's abusive when you get in the way of people's normal, natural sexual relationships and, you know, start making sins out of things that are just normal. Because then we see ourselves broken. We see ourselves as dirty or perverse or wrong or inappropriate when in reality,

John Dehlin [00:37:26] you have partners or our partners or unworthy.

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:37:30] Right, right. And I think about, you know, young couples who are excited, who've done everything. You know, I mean, this is what's so maddening to me is that Mormon people, for the most part, and even Jana Reese's recent book on kind of statistics around sexuality, shows that a lot of Mormons do wait until they're married or do have a lot of strong sexual values. And so we're not talking about harming people that are kind of like, on the fringe and, you know, doing things that maybe most of us would still think is taboo. We're talking about very mainstream, good, righteous, active, beautiful couples that love each other, that enjoy their intimacy, and yet they have these parameters and these rigid kind of things that have been imposed upon them unnecessarily. So, and that are being damaged by that, to me, it's just tragic.

John Dehlin [00:38:29] And to the maybe meta point as well, is that that very edict that was given to bishops and stake presidents prohibiting oral sex was rescinded. That just shows that the church leaders can make mistakes, even if they don't like to always be really explicit about that. Another very clear example of the church making clear mistakes in the matter of sexuality is how they've dealt with LGBTQ members and same sex attraction for decades and decades. And this is something I studied in my doctoral dissertation. For decades and decades, the church's approach to masturbation, to homosexuality was, it's a sin to even have the thoughts or the feelings of being gay or lesbian or bisexual and, you know, same sex sexuality, Homosexuality can, can be cured through going to a therapist and doing reparative therapy. One of the ways it can be cured is by marrying someone of the opposite sex. And that will cure you. And so, you know, so tens of thousands of Mormon couples were counseled by their bishops to enter into mixed orientation marriages that almost always ended catastrophically, with children, often as collateral damage.

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:39:54] And in secret, I will add, most men were told not to tell their wives.

John Dehlin [00:39:59] Absolutely, absolutely.

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:40:00] Or potential wives that they were having those kinds of feelings.

John Dehlin [00:40:04] Yep. And all that reparative therapy stuff led to severe instances of anxiety and depression and many instances of suicidality. And we all know about the LGBTQ epidemic, you know, suicide epidemic that's been happening for years. And also the church would have the position for decades that same sex sexuality is a choice or it's a result of abuse or sin, but that it's not biological. And Boyd Key Packer has the famous quote, why would a loving heavenly father do that to anyone? Meaning why would God ever make anyone gay? And what I can say positively in 2019 is the church has backtracked on all those issues. They haven't come out with the General Conference talk and said we were wrong. But if you look at their messages on the Mormons and gays website, if you look at their rhetoric around same sex sexuality, it's 180 degree reverse from what it was just 10 years ago. It's not a sin to have same sex attraction anymore. They don't recommend overtly, at least explicitly, reparative therapy or conversion therapy. The group Evergreen, that was the church's reparative therapy organization, has been disassembled. The church no longer recommends that you enter into a mixed orientation marriage as a way to cure yourself of being gay, even though they still celebrate mixed orientation marriages, which for me is a problem. And, you know, and the church is even willing to now concede that there is a biological basis for homosexuality. So again, we've got a really critical domain of sexuality where for decades and decades, decades, the church got it wrong, harmed hundreds of thousands of people, and fortunately paid attention enough to science to the point where they reversed almost every one of those damaging teachings. The only sort of little step they have to go is in just saying that homosexuality is a normal variant of human sexual behavior, which it is. And that's what the scientific community would say. It's a normal variant of human sexual behavior. And then to just celebrate same sex relationships. And if they want to just only celebrate monogamous, committed, legal, same sex relationships, there are millions of us who would celebrate that. That concession. But it's just, you know, so that's the one point I wanted to make, is that as much as we respect much of what Mormon church and Mormon church leaders have done and do, they do get it. Wrong on science, and especially on science and sexuality. And we hope you can understand that as you're. As you're trying to reconsider a more healthy view. The only second point I wanted to make before we dive in is that what I'm concerned about is as a mental health professional and as someone who counsels couples and individuals on this on a weekly basis, I'm concerned about what's effective, Right? So I'll give you an example. If there's a policy, a religious policy, that leads to severe depression and suicide, then I think by. In and of itself, that must not be the best policy. That policy must need improvement. If a policy damages a marriage, if it makes married couples who otherwise would have been relatively happy and healthy, if it makes them hate each other and want to divorce each other and disrespect each other, in other words, a policy is destroying families or intimacy between couples, I see that as a problem because I value marriages and healthy marriages and healthy relationships. And I think the final thing I'd say is that if a policy actually increases the behavior that it claims to abhor. In other words, if a policy increases one's frequency of masturbation and it actually increases one's usage of pornography as it denounces masturbation and pornography, then I think for sure that policy is ineffective and harmful. And I think we might be able to make the case. And in my decade or more of experience dealing with this issue, I would say that in many, many cases, the historical policy on porn and masturbation within Mormonism, actually, for many people, leads to an increase of masturbation and pornography use simultaneous as the church denounces it and encourages people to go into these addiction recovery programs.

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:45:01] Absolutely. It's called the anxiety feedback loop. I mean, there's like a name for it. The more anxious you are, the more upset you are, the more shame do you feel about something. Well, guess what our bodies are wired to do. Our bodies are wired to soothe ourselves because, you know, we are wired to prevent pain and stress and negative emotions. So in that moment, you will usually lean into whatever that thing is that helps you feel better. And pornography and masturbation are excellent ways to help you feel better in the moment, just like gambling does and just like eating donuts does and just like yelling at our kids does. I mean, in the moment, it can feel very good and stress relieving to do something, even if it goes against your values. And so the more that we have upped the ante on shame and anxiety and punishment and public Shame, you know, because these things become, even though we want to say these things are confidential, if you're not taking the sacrament, your wife or your husband or your parent notices that or you're.

John Dehlin [00:46:20] Or if you can't go to the temple. Right. Or if you can't go on a mission. If you can't go on your mission.

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:46:24] Right, exactly. People, these things become public shaming events. Very, very dire public shaming events. And so, yeah, so your anxiety now is much higher than it was before. And these approaches that are punitive and shaming and increase that anxiety feedback loop. And so you're inability. And that's why it's fallen into this kind of. Why so many people think it falls into this addiction realm. Well, it's something that I just come back to and that I can't stop and that I. It's not necessarily addiction to be in a feedback anxiety loop. And yeah, it can feel that way. It can feel out of control. It can feel like you're doing something that goes against everything you want to be doing. And that's true of many human behaviors. But again, we tend to hone in on sexual behaviors much more so than we do any other behaviors. And like I said, we even hone in on normative sexual behaviors much more so than we do criminal and horrible sexual behaviors that we should be focusing on more. So it's just, it's just an interesting phenomenon. And again, you know, to your point, I think that we have within our scriptures by the fruit, you shall know it. And to your point, if the fruit shows anxiety, depression, suicidality, divorce, shame, increase

John Dehlin [00:47:49] in pornography and masturbation use, the fruit is rotten.

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:47:55] Right. And so I think what we also want to be very careful in saying is that John and I are not like anything goes and go do whatever, free love, you know, we are very much. Both John and I feel very strongly about this word values. You know, having values, having. And what values mean is how do you want to conduct yourself in life and what do you value? And do you value monogamy? Do you value the sacredness of a sexual relationship? Do you value, you know, having mutual pleasure with your partner? Do you value making sure you know, you're being consistent, consensual? And there's so many wonderful values that you can incorporate into a sexual narrative and a sexual script that are healthy, that do propel you to act and behave and feel good about yourself and feel good about how you interact with other people. So we are not by any means trying to say anything goes and go do Whatever. And it's too bad we were shamed. And, you know, who cares about anybody but yourself? That's not the message here. The message is there's a correct way to go about talking about values and sexual sacredness that is helpful to people, and there's ways it isn't. And unfortunately, what we see as mental health professionals is that the majority of the approach has really ignored the sex positive messages that we have within Mormonism and has unfortunately focused on some very harmful practices that I think most of us have been affected by.

Mental Health Impacts of Sexual Shame

John Dehlin [00:49:28] Amen. And so even if you're not compelled by the science, even if your mind isn't changed about the sinfulness or the damage or the harm of masturbation, pornography, as two people who have counseled as many or more people than anyone else sort of in this field over the past 10 years, we would ask you to at least consider effectiveness that you care about your loved ones. You don't want them having major anxiety and depression disorders, you don't want them suicidal, you don't want them actually increasing the behavior that you want to extinguish. And so we're offering you a more effective approach to masturbation and pornography. And I can attest, you know, let me just tell a quick story. I had a client at Utah State University a few years back who had an extreme bishop. And this extreme bishop basically said, he asked this client of mine if the client masturbated, looked at pornography, and the client said he did. So the bishop said, okay, you can't take the sacrament. So this kid's going to college with all these other men and women. And when the sacrament comes, he's gotta pass the tray and everybody, and he's feeling just the eyes of shame upon him while everyone's wondering why he's passing the sacrament and not taking it. When there's a ward temple night in his ward, he's not able to go to the temple. And so all his friends are like, hey, you go to the temple with us. And he's like, I can't. And of course, he's feeling more heaped on shame. More heaped on shame. It got to the point where he was actually, you know, masturbating, looking at porn more than what he had been when he first went to the bishop. And so the bishop's like, well, this is getting really serious, not realizing that the intervention was part of the problem. So the bishop actually told my client, what I need you to do is text me at the end of every night, and I want you to tell me whether you masturbated or not.

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:51:41] Oh, my goodness.

John Dehlin [00:51:41] And so this kid didn't want to lie to the Lord and lie to the bishop. And so every night, all day long, it'd be like, I can't masturbate. I can't masturbate. Oh, I can't masturbate. Oh, oh. So he's thinking about it all the time, trying not to think about it, trying not to shame himself in front of his bishop. And so inevitably, he would masturbate, and then he would have to tell the bishop that night he masturbated. It got to the point where he came in and reported to me that he was injuring himself, masturbating so much. So we're talking bruises and pain and dysfunction in his genitals. Because this intervention that was supposed to be inspired by a bishop who is a voice, mouthpiece for the Lord, was actually making him look at porn and masturbate to the point of injuring himself. And that's when I just realized, oh, my gosh, the cure is part of the poison in this case. And then I can also flip it. I can flip it and say that I've had many, many clients who lived for decades in shame over privately, occasionally masturbating or looking at porn when they came out about it to their spouse, when their spouse got a healthy view about it, when it became normalized, when it was no longer shameful, when it was no longer taboo. Guess what happened to the frequency of. Of their masturbation and pornography use? Can anyone guess? Natasha, do you want to guess?

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:53:14] It lowers.

John Dehlin [00:53:17] Once the spouse was said, hey, I love you no matter what. You're not bad. You're not broken. How can we talk about sexuality in a healthy way? How can you no longer feel shame? And then how can we just have a healthier sex life together? Miracle of miracles, the person all of a sudden is thinking about masturbation less. They're feeling less shame and guilt. They're having a better sex life, their partner. And so all of a sudden, their interest in masturbation declines, and their interest in pornography can decline, not always to the point of it disappearing completely. And we might even talk about whether it should. But the point is that if you really care about the results, which is a healthy, happy individual, whether it's a youth or an adult, a healthy, happy partner, a healthy, happy marriage. What we're telling you is from our feet on the ground experience, the approach that we're about to teach you is actually going to be the most effective approach to Dealing with masturbation pornography.

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:54:25] Well, and I would, I could second that story with so many clients, John. I mean, I think what really got me to finally write a post on my Mormon therapist blog about masturbation was I could not handle one more virgin teenager coming into my office. These are the kids, right? I mean, this is what's even more upsetting about it is that the kids who are like kind of able to roll their eyes at all of us older people, including their bishop, they're not going in and saying, oh yeah, I masturbated. They're like not gonna tell anybody about that. And they go to the temple trips and they pass the sacrament and they take the sacrament and they could care less. And they're not very. They're not allowing necessarily that shame to infiltrate. Or they are, but they're still doing it in secret, right? So they're not, they're not putting themselves out there, so they can still be internalized. Shame about that. The kids who suffer the most about this are the ones who are most likely to obey. And, you know, they go in and they, like you're saying, they tell the bishop every single time and they do these continual confessionals. And I was getting, I mean, I had had probably, I can't, I can't even count how many teenagers in my office who were actually self injuring. I'm talking about, you know, cutting, burning, tearing out their hair due to the anxiety of having had masturbated. Even just masturbation. Forget porn, just the masturbation piece. Several young women in my office in that position around masturbation have never had a serious relationship with a boy, have never done anything sexually with a boy. And yet they were telling me they were giving me the scripture of the sin next to murder because they had masturbated. And the shame that they felt around that was leading to horrific consequences in their mental health. So I finally said, I can't do this anymore, I have to speak up. And I wrote my blog on the Mormon therapist, which I knew my relationship with the church would change the minute I hit publish on that blog. And it did. It did. Because for the first time I published something that the church wouldn't agree with from my area of expertise, which is not their area of expertise. And they've done so much damage. And, you know, I used to say unintentionally, and now I don't even know. I mean, the research is out there, there's many of us talking about it, and they're just not listening. So I'm not even really willing to say unintentional harm at this point. I just. It's just harm. They're just harming our teens and our young adults. And that harm carries over into our adult sexuality. And then we're were impacted with internalized shame for the rest of our lives. And I can't tell you how many faith transitioners I'm working with that are really trying to recover from internalized sexual shame as they try to have better sexual relationships with their spouse and with themselves. And it's all unnecessary tragedy. To your point, John, I think you said last time, if I didn't have to see anybody about these issues, you know, there's plenty of mental health issues that happen just because of our biology. I could stay plenty busy just seeing people through issues of genetic depression, anxiety disorders, et cetera. But these are like issues that have come into people's lives artificially, so they're not wired into you. You've been taught this type of narrative, and it's affected you, and it's changed the way you see yourself, the way you interact with others. And now I'm in the business of helping people shift from something that was artificially, unnecessarily, tragically introduced. And that's just what burns me up.

Inconsistent Enforcement and Harm to Members

John Dehlin [00:58:32] Amen. And a couple other things that come to mind. I know of bishops and stake presidents that don't view masturbation as wrong. And on the one hand, you're gonna go, oh, well, that's wonderful, right? Well, it's not. If you think about the fact that that's left to the discretion of the bishop or the stake president. And there's plenty of bishops and stake presidents that are like, oh, you masturbate. Don't worry about it. Oh, you look at porn. Don't worry about it. Just, you know, try not to do it. And live your best, most righteous life. Take the sacrament. You need that for your spiritual development. Go to the temple. You need that for your spiritual development. Go on your mission. That'll be good for you. And so when we know that there's this whole host of bishops and stake presidents that don't ask that question, that don't make it an issue, and that encourage those healthy youth, then that makes all the atrocities of the youth who are shamed and tormented that much more pernicious. Because we see that there's this bishop roulette, this ecclesiastical roulette, that's capricious and kind of arbitrary, where some are literally shamed in front of their congregations, kept home from their missions, they feel unworthy to actually marry in the temple, so they don't even follow the gospel route and find a righteous partner to marry because they feel so unworthy that they end up really going off the deep end into a really sad and self destructing life just because they got the wrong bishop or the wrong stake president. That makes it, you know, extra. Not only tragic, but also it's another reason. Yeah, it's unfair, but it's another reason to realize that how we're doing it is wrong and we need to have a different approach and we can't. Just one of the gifts of the Mormon transition is you realize you can't just blindly trust your Mormon leaders, even the prophet. You can have respect for them, you can listen to them, you can hearken to their counsel, but ultimately you can't always trust them because sometimes the council or the system that they've set up is harmful. And so, and so that's kind of where we are. And so if you, it's like luck

Natasha Helfer Parker [01:00:44] of the draw if you're gonna be affected in this horrific way that can take decades to recover from. I mean, it's just, it is, it's just, it's so upsetting. I can't even hardly self soothe right now. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:00:59] And I saw Sam Young come on and I just want to really quickly address. There's even, it's kind of like there's this guy named Ron Popeil that had these commercials in the 80s. They were like infomercials and it was like, but wait, there's more. If you act now, you can order the Ginsu knives and the smokeless ashtray and you know, rubber cement, you know, like, there's more. Like we've talked about all the pain of this policy. There's more yet there's more. When you think about the fact that these policies have led bishops to feel, okay, bishops, stake presidents, mission presidents to grill little 12 and 13 year old boys and girls about where they touch themselves. Some people feel like that is actually grooming young children to feel like it's okay for adults and other people to get involved in matters that should be private and sacred and your own.

Natasha Helfer Parker [01:01:57] It's a form of sexual abuse is what it is.

John Dehlin [01:02:00] It's a form of sexual abuse. But then also on top of that, this fascination and obsession with sexuality, you know, you just have to look. Utah leads the nation per capita not only in pornography use, but also in sexual abuse. And so it has to be all these stories of Joseph Bishop and of Lowell Robinson and Sterling Von Wagner and Just the tens of thousands of cases of sexual abuse, of child abuse, have to stem from this toxic pathologization of healthy sexuality and then an obsession with sexuality, and then this whole culture of learning to lie and having this double life. Because some people, like you said, don't want to admit to the bishop or stake president that they look at porn. And so what they do is they just learn to lie. So they learn to have this public self that they present to the public and then this private self, and those things diverge. And it's just never healthy to always be living one private life, but one public life, feeling like you're dirty and sinful, living in the darkness, living in the shadows, acting out a form of your sexuality. And it's no surprise that we have stake presidents and sometimes even general authorities that are private sexual predators. And we have evidence of that. We have at least one general authority that was released and excommunicated as a general authority for child sex abuse. But we also have stake presidents that were secretly seeing prostitutes, that were secretly abusing their grandchildren. And I have to think that the toxic shaming environment and messages around sexuality have to contribute in a negative way, along with the lack of appropriate boundaries about thinking and talking about sexuality, that has to lead to an increase in unhealthy sexual acting out and even criminal behavior around sexuality. Do you think I'm overstating that, Natasha?

Natasha Helfer Parker [01:04:07] Not at all. Not at all. It's. Yeah, it's a whole nother topic, really, than what we're talking about today. But I do think that one of the issues that we have, coming from a Mormon background, is that from a very early age, we have not been taught appropriate sexual boundaries. And that affects people in many different ways. And that's kind of its own podcast or its own topic, but it affects consent, issues of consent, it affects issues of exploitation. It does groom people. By no means. I think the majority of bishops are doing the best they know how and they're working under narratives and scripts. Right. And so I think that it is very well intended. And yet the way that the. Because our leaders have not really focused on being a trauma informed congregation and church entity, they just have refused to become a trauma informed entity. They have put very kind, loving men who are in bishop and stake present positions in very highly liable and also damaging positions. And they don't even realize the damage that they're provoking in our people.

John Dehlin [01:05:30] Yeah, I think. Yeah, I think we're all victims. Right?

Natasha Helfer Parker [01:05:34] It's a huge mess. Yeah. Yeah. I don't I don't. I. We are all victims. And at the same time, I'm very comfortable at this point holding the leaders of our church accountable because other churches have been willing to become trauma informed. I mean, I think the entire United States could say we're victims of sexual negative framings. We all come from a puritanical background. You know, we have lots of things that over the decades and years, millennia of sex, negative stuff that we're all trying to recover from. But there are peoples and groups and entities and churches that are willing to do the work necessary and willing to tap into the resources that are available through our own government. Our own government has a section that helps congregations become trauma informed. The Department of Health and Human Services offers that right now. And I know through conversations with people at the Department of Health and Human Services that our church has not been interested in participating in that. So even though I agree that we're all victims, I do hold our leaders, the 70, the auxiliary leaders, our Relief Society presidents, our young women's Presidents, definitely the 15, the top 15, responsible for continuing to act and inform people in ways that continue to harm us.

John Dehlin [01:07:10] And so that's why we do this podcast, because we are trying to offer better way. And if there's anything 2019 has taught us, with all the flurry of changes that Russell M. Nelson has introduced to Mormonism based on recommendations we've been making now for well over a decade on the Mormon Internet, we're excited because we are optimistic that just like we've been able to provide some leadership. And when I say we, I mean many podcasts, many blogs, many writers, many scholars, many organizations. Just like we've been able to provide leadership to the Mormon church. Leadership on matters of church history, on, you know, same sex sexuality, on ways to make the culture more feminist friendly, all these other ways that the church is now changing, we're humbly and gently and kindly and firmly offering a new approach, a more effective approach to masturbation and pornography.

John Dehlin [01:08:15] Thank you for joining us today on Mormon Stories. If you enjoyed this episode, please help us make more like it by becoming a monthly subscriber@mormonstories.org

John Dehlin [01:08:30] rabbit hole. An album chronicling the heartaches and rewarding discoveries of her Mormon faith crisis. You can purchase her album on itunes or by visiting mindygledhill.com. It doesn't now it's all just poison in disguise. Teacups full of candy.

Part 2 of 3 · Ep. 1145

John Dehlin [00:00:09] Mormon Stories is a production of the Open Stories foundation and relies solely upon the support of people like you, its listeners to help keep the podcast alive or to become a member of the community. Please become a monthly subscriber by visiting MormonStories.org and clicking on the Donate button on the right side of the page under support. All contributions to Mormon Stories are completely tax deductible in the United States and go towards producing the podcast and building communities and programs of support for Mormons like you. Thanks for your support. Teacups for Love Candy so there we have it. So we spent an hour about talking about the problem. What if we now talk an hour about the solution? Does that sound okay?

A Healthier Framework for Sexual Development

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:01:12] Natasha I think that would be great.

John Dehlin [00:01:14] Okay, so how do we begin. How do we begin looking at sexuality and even masturbation in a healthier way? And we're going to both talk about teens and adults, even married adults in our scope. So can you start us off with a healthy framing around sexuality? Masturbation?

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:01:41] Okay, well, by no means is the next hour going to be comprehensive. Trying to remember all the many things I've talked about on this subject. But yeah, let's start with masturbation because I think masturbation is something that, like I said, all scientific kind of entities are very comfortable understanding that masturbation is a normal part of being a human being. We touch ourselves and find genital soothing from very, very early ages. In fact, in the womb you can see a fetus linger on their genital areas longer than other areas of their of their body. Those things are not necessarily sexualized. So If a young 4 year old or 2 year old or even 7 year old is touching themselves, it's not necessarily coming from a sexualized position. It's the same as sucking your thumb or pulling on your ear or rubbing your elbow. I mean just touch and stroking and soothing ourselves is a very normal part of being a human being. And in fact we want lots of ways, we want diverse ways to be able to self soothe. So masturbation is one of those things that we can actually see as an asset and you can frame it in a sex positive way. Meaning that actually when even when it does become sexualized, it's a wonderful first step into our sexual exploration that does not include another person because including another person ups the ante and social skills, anxieties, potential ability for harm or pleasure. I mean there's lots of things that can happen when you involve another person. I think a wonderful way to reframe Is, isn't it beautiful, even from a believing perspective, that heavenly parents would create kind of this self sufficient system within ourselves where we can access self soothing, where we can access ejaculation and orgasm and, and sexual imagination and creativity all in the context of ourself first. Because at 12, at 10, maybe even at 14, we're not necessarily prepared to share those kinds of things in their totality with another person. It's maybe when we start having crushes and maybe start exploring a little bit with other people by the time we're 16, 18, 20, we've explored a lot more. But especially in those first few developmental years of sexual development, it's really wonderful that we have this self kind of efficient system. We don't have to rely on anybody else. Plus it really, from the get go starts the conversation of consent in a very different way. Even though we can think that marital sex is sacred and isn't it beautiful that you're going to share this part of your life with another person. When, when we put the entirety of our sexual needs, desires, wants and experience on another person, this is where the boundaries and consent can all of a sudden become very, very stressed and where we actually have quite a bit of exploitation in marriages about managing high and lower libido differences within a couple. So if you can really have a sex positive approach towards yourself in the beginning and you don't ever need to impose yourself or owe anybody anything sexually when you know how to take care of yourself. So right off the bat, we're starting on so many directions in a positive way when we can look at masturbation as a sex positive, normal part of human development. And in fact, even with our teens, you know, they might be out on a date, they might have a boyfriend or girlfriend if their values are to wait until they're married, to have certain types of sexual experiences like intercourse. Masturbation is a wonderful way to manage the normal kind of feelings and intensity that you have after you've, you know, kissed somebody for 10 or 15 minutes or started some small ways of sexual exploration, or maybe you are comfortable, you know, having some type of touch or some type of exploration with a partner, like grinding or touching, you know, breasts or maybe even touching over clothing, but you're still not wanting necessarily to go, quote unquote, all the way. Masturbation is a wonderful way to talk to our teens about, you have the access to that, to that, to that release without ever depending on another person for that. You can take care of your values, of your pacing, of what you're comfortable with because you can always count on yourself. You never have to feel like you're dependent on another person for those things. So right off the bat, we've got lots of benefits to sex. Positive perspectives on masturbation.

John Dehlin [00:06:59] Yeah. And if I, if I had to think a little bit about how, I would summarize it. There's a reason why you want to teach sex positivity to a child from the beginning. One is that one is so that they can develop a healthy relationship with their sexuality for their own benefit, because they're going to be having sex in their lives and sex is a good thing ultimately or none of us would be here, none of our children would be here, and we as a species wouldn't be here. So by default it has to be a positive, a good thing. So we want to develop healthy sexuality on an individual basis. But then also the extent to which a human is feeling positive about sex, sexuality and self aware when they enter into a relationship and ultimately a marriage, if they choose to get married, they have more self awareness, they see sex positively, they are skilled somewhat in self knowledge and in how they think about sexual such that they will have a much healthier and happier sex life once they got married. And we all know that a healthy sex, you know, a healthy sex life is one of the main benefits of a committed relationship. And it can also be one of the biggest problems in a committed relationship if it's not healthy finances. You know, children and sex are kind of three of the big things that couples have stress over and sometimes end up divorcing over. So for all the reasons in the world you want and for many others that you express, Natasha, you just want your kids starting with positive messages about sexuality, not negative ones.

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:08:40] Yes, Right. And sex positivity is much larger of a concept than what we're focusing on today with masturbation and sexually explicit materials. Right. So you know, talking about consent and body autonomy, I mean, those are all things that we can do from a very early age. And so I'm focusing mainly on this masturbation piece, but we're really talking about a topic that's much broader, that has a lot more to do than just these two topics of today.

John Dehlin [00:09:10] But it's also foundational for people in a Mormon upbringing because what are the messages we often get? Sex, don't do it, it's bad, it's wrong. Don't touch yourself. You know, that's dirty, that's sinful. How can we get inundated with, with decades of negative messaging around Sexuality and somehow think we're going to enter into marriage with a healthy approach to sexuality. Just the brain doesn't work that way. Too many negative associations. It's how hard it's impossible to cut off and rewire all those negative messages just on the wedding night.

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:09:49] Absolutely.

John Dehlin [00:09:50] Many, many, many men and women take years, if not decades to reprogram their brain to all of a sudden think that their body is good, that their pleasure, the sexual pleasure is good, and that they can enjoy sex and that sex should be something that should be something that contributes to your mental health and strengthens your relationship. But all of that begins with sex. Positive messaging to children and to teenagers. And it can all be foiled if we allow the only messaging to children to be stop, don't. It's bad, it's dirty, you're wrong, it's wicked. And so I think those stakes are high.

How to Talk to Children About Masturbation

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:10:32] Yeah, I agree. And I think that, you know, I talk to a lot of people that will tell me something, maybe even more particularly women who will tell me I never did masturbate. That wasn't anything I ever did. And I would just encourage people to really. We don't know. We don't really know because our first three to four years of life, we really don't remember. And it's very, very typical to have a baby who their hand kind of goes to their genitals when the diaper comes off or you might have been touching yourself in the bathtub when you were 2. And it's very, very typical for a parent to say stop it or smack your hand away or don't do that. And so you don't always know or remember the ways that you were kind of either forbidden or discouraged from self exploration from a very early age. And I would be willing to bet that most of us had some type of experience like that if you grew up in a home that, you know, had these kinds of ideas. Another resource that's out there that's interesting is a parent's guide by the church on LDS.org and nobody ever talks about it or refers to it, but it's there. And their first 12 years of development, child development actually encourages people, parents to not worry about whether or not your child is touching yourself. So it's actually fairly sex positive information. Then of course, when you get to the 12 year olds, then their information shifts and they have really bad advice after that. But those first 12 years, like the primary age children, actually has some fairly okay guidelines in there as far as don't shame your child, don't draw attention to it. You know, focus on privacy and things of that nature. So I think that's interesting that the church has that resource where it actually encourages parents not to shame small children.

John Dehlin [00:12:41] So let's just say let's skip to the part of puberty. And you know, there's this famous in US culture, the birds and the bees, the talk about sexuality. You know, we would all imagine that the most common Mormon parental approach to masturbation is to never talk about it, to never talk explicitly about it with their kid. And so all the kid does is they either learn what they learn at school or on the Internet or they hear these messages at church. Masturbation's wrong, porn's wrong, don't self stimulate. And that we imagine that that's. And that many kids don't even learn what the word masturbation is until they're in a church setting, which in and of itself can be really bizarre, that they're getting sex ed at church, learning what even the word masturbation means. So anyway, that's kind of one probably the most common approach, which is it's never talked about, which in itself can be problematic or disastrous. And then the second approach is where a parent sits a kid down. Just say they're the more zealot parents but more communicative, and they might sit that kid down and say, hey, there's this thing called masturbation, or they might call it self abuse and it's not a good thing to do, so don't do it. And if you ever feel the desire, don't do it. And if you ever, if you ever start having bad thoughts, sing a hymn and say a prayer. And if you ever actually do it, you need to tell us, you need to tell your bishop. And then you need to go through the repentance process because it's a sin. Let's say that those two approaches are not the optimal approaches for either a progressive Mormon or a post Mormon. What is an effective, healthy approach? Because a lot of people come to me and say, well, I'm not just going to sit down with my kid and tell them to masturbate, to go crazy, that masturbation is awesome and they should do it whenever chance they get, like. And there are a lot of people that still preserve their very conservative mores and standards around sexuality and they don't know how to talk to their kid about masturbation. How would you model Natasha HELFER PARKER SEX THERAPIST how would you model talking to your kid about masturbation?

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:15:01] All right, so I'll give some ideas. Again, not comprehensive. And there's lots of ways of doing this because we all do have different personality style. Some of us are more talkative, some of us are more like here's a book, here's chat. Sometimes your kids are different personalities and they need different approaches from you. But I do think starting early is important. So just some things that I noticed, I've raised both boys and girls. Boys are pretty much two or three telling you oh look at me, what's going on? And they're looking at their erect peace. And so you can say something like that's an erection, right? Oh, that's good. That means your penis is working. That means blood is going into your penis. That happens sometimes to penises. Woo hoo. You know, and you just have that kind of approach from a very early age. I remember one time going over a bump in the road and my daughter said something, I think she was 2 or 3 and she was like, oh, that tickled my vulva, you know, And I was like, oh, isn't that fun? And isn't it fun when our vulvas get tickled? That's a fun feeling, right? And so yeah, that happens. We are able to talk about it. And then as they get older, you know, 10, 11, 12, I just am very education centric. So I do have books around that I make readily available for them and I do have conversations and sometimes I have one on one conversations and sometimes I have family home evening conversations and we've had family home evening conversations on masturbation, what the word means. I also give them permission to tell me other ways that their peers are talking about it. And when they look at me like I'm not going to say those words, I'm like, well you know, like jacking off. Has anybody heard jacking off? You know, and they're like yes, we've heard that, right? And so we can talk about how other non clinical ways these types of terms come up and what their friends might be saying about those things. And then we all giggle and we kind of laugh and I'm sure some of my kids love it and, and some of my kids hate it and they're all going to need to go to therapy anyway themselves. But I'm offering lots of information right around these issues. And so I say, well you know, we all have genitals. We all, for most people, touching your genitals feels good. Sometimes you touch them just kind of like you would sucking your thumb and you don't really do anything else. Sometimes you touch them long enough or in a way in a rhythm that it kind of leads you to what we call an orgasm, which is like a really nice feeling, like, wow, something really explosive has happened in my body. Sometimes for boys that means that you get ejaculate, sperm comes out of your penis, right? So I'm very upfront about what's happening in the body. For girls, you might notice that you have some wetness in your vagina. And I don't necessarily split them up either. I want them to understand boys and girls, what's happening in boys and girls bodies. Right. And female male bodies so they can understand what's happening not just in their own body, but in the opposite sex. So those are things that I've tried and been very frank about. And I've said, you know, you have the right to touch your body at any point, your body is your own. Of course, that goes into also a lot of, you know, like child abuse type of conversations, like who doesn't have the right to touch your body? What situations would you not want somebody to touch your body? And what can you do if you're in a situation like that? So we also go down that route. I talk about privacy, especially when you have a five year old or seven year old, or usually about the time of seven, they become more private. But before that they might be rubbing up against the grocery cart, you know, because their legs are in between this thing and they might be, you know, like rubbing up against that. And I'm like, you know, I'm glad that that feels good. And yet we're in public. So let's wait until we're in a private space to have our genitals feel good. Right? So that's something that just in our culture we just kind of decided that was private, private stuff to do.

Breaking the Culture of Silence Around Sexuality

John Dehlin [00:19:08] So a couple questions are coming to mind for me with my kind of orthodox hat on. The first is we've got the obstacle in Mormonism of never wanting to talk explicitly about anatomical parts or even the term sex. I would guess that most Mormons have never heard the word sex actually uttered in sacrament meeting or, you know, at church. Instead we if we're even going to talk about the topic of sexuality other than don't look at porn, we're basically going to use the word intimacy in replace of the word sexual. And of course, in a church setting, you're never going to hear the word penis or vulva or vagina or ejaculate in church because we are constitutionally uncomfortable talking about terms Explicitly within Mormonism. So that's the first problem that my orthodox brain has with your suggestion. How do we get over that? And then beyond that, I think there's a, you know, when you're talking about, like, oh, you have an erect penis. Wonderful. Let's celebrate, you know, or, oh, your bulb is tickled while you're driving in the car. That's wonderful. That's something you can enjoy when you're alone. Like, I think that there is a fear that, number one, if we talk, if we use sexually explicit terms or sexually accurate terms or anatomically accurate terms, and if we talk about genitals and erections and stimulation and orgasms, all in a very positive, explicit way, that that's gonna make kids more likely to have premarital sex, which means that they'll get STIs and unwanted teen pregnancy and they'll commit sins next to murder. So I think there's just this fear that talking about it, talking explicitly about it, using anatomically correct terms, and even being positive about it is gonna lead to the behavior we don't want. Can you help us maybe dispel that myth, or is that just true that a side effect of being sex positive and talking about anatomically correct terms and celebrating sexuality means your kids are gonna be having lots of sex as teens in high school?

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:21:33] Okay, so many things that you said there that I'm gonna try to revisit. So first of all, the main thing I would say to parents. Cause, yes, I agree, most of us were not offered what I'm saying we should be offering our kids, which means that we're going to be dealing with our own anxiety, our own misinformation. And so we really have to take our own sexual education very seriously and look for good resources. And I've got tons of resources on my web page and on sex talk with Natasha that you can look at. As far as books you can give your kids books you can read yourself, TED Talks, Parents podcast, Mormon Sex Info has tons of that. I did an entire parenting series on sex talk with Natasha. I mean, there's lots of resources, either mine or other people's, that you can hone in on and really start getting comfortable with this information and with the language yourself. Because a lot of how we present the tone to our children, if we're super nervous and anxious, then they're going to pick up on, oh, well, Mom's talking about this or Dad's talking about this, but it's obviously still not super cool to talk about this. Right. And so we Want our children to feel like we are fairly comfortable when we're not. It's okay to just tell our kids that. It's okay to tell your kid. You know what? I'm not really good at talking about this either. Nobody talked to me about things the way I wish people had talked to me. So I'm trying to do a better job with you, but sometimes I get nervous or I might giggle or I might not know something, or I might, you know, feel flustered, and you might see that, and that's okay. So talking about process with kids can be really important, especially teenage kids who pick up on your process very, very easily. So, yes, educate yourself, get comfortable with this type of information. Even me, with all the training I have, have faced my own discomfort on a regular basis with my kids. And that's okay. We can be patient with ourselves. As far as the other. The other thing I was going to say, I don't think that. I mean, I'm not a proponent that church has to be the place where we're talking about sex and ejaculates and erections and penises and vulvas. I don't know that it's our church's role to necessarily be a sexual educator. I think the church can have some parameters around sexual values and sexual principles and how we relate as a people and as a community and in sexual ways that are fairly basic and fall under kind of like golden rule type ideas around any type of life, right? Like be kind and be nice and treat people nicely and be a good sexual partner. I mean, I think that there's some room for church to do that, but I don't think especially Mormon church shouldn't be the place that we're wanting sexual education to come from. The only church I know of that does a good job with that is the Unitarian Church with their OWL program our whole lives. And they've done a very good integrative approach with sexual values and comprehensive, positive sexual education, and they've married those two. But that comes with a lot of flexibility and how people are going to show up sexually, which we don't necessarily have in our Mormon kind of standards. So I don't want church to be a place where they're hearing all those things. That's the place where at home we need to be offering that and the public schools offer that at some level. And they do, I would say, a C job for the most part, because. And the only reason they do a C plus job is because we as taxpayers have limited the amount of information that we are comfortable giving our children. So we do not have comprehensive sexual education in this country because we as taxpayers vote against it every single time. So. So there's only so much that the school system can do. They are really focused on reproductive sexual education and risk oriented sexual education and that's it. And abstinence only education in many, many areas and not LGBTQ affirming. So even the school is very, very limited. So it really does fall on us as parents to be the primary sexual educators of our children and to do so in non abusive, non shaming ways. When we know better, we do better. And I hope that that's what we're offering here. So when we know better, we do better. And we can always. I don't care how old your kid is, if you've got kids who are adults, you can go back and tell them, you know what? I know better now. I know that what I did or what I said wasn't helpful to you. And I'd like for you to at least have the acknowledgement that maybe some of the things that I said while I was raising you played a negative impact in your life. That can be a life changing moment for a person to have a parent go back even in their adulthood and have a conversation that's much more sex positive because they're still having sex, right? They're still having to deal with those messages that maybe you are a part of sharing. Now, as far as your last point, I mean, the research is just super clear on it. I don't really have to spend too much time on it. The research shows that the more information our kids have, the more language they have, the more sex positive information they have, the more options they have, the better they do. They wait for risk, the riskier types of sexual activity. So they wait longer to have penis, vaginal intercourse, penis anal intercourse. They wait longer for even oral sex. That doesn't mean that they necessarily will wait to be sexual in some way or another. But. But all of the European countries that have comprehensive sexual education have us be on every single statistic from waiting for intercourse to unwanted pregnancies, to all kinds of things. So that fear that somehow if I give my kid information, they're going to take that information and use it in ways that I don't want is really unfounded. And we actually take much higher risks when we leave our kids uneducated. The reality is that unwanted pregnancies happen most with people who've been educated in abstinence only approaches because they don't know how to protect themselves from an unwanted pregnancy. And in some cases, I mean, just like anything in life, I think about a cooking show, for example. If you see something or hear something that you weren't aware of before, you might try it out or think about it. So maybe if you talk to your 11 year old about masturbation, maybe they haven't thought about it quite yet. Maybe now they will and instead of me waiting till they were 13. But I would much rather your kid have that risk than the majority of the other risks that happen when you don't talk to your kids. So you really have to do a risk cost analysis and risk benefit analysis, and the benefits way outweigh the risks when we're talking to our kids in sex. Positive, educational, comprehensive educational ways.

John Dehlin [00:28:39] Yeah. And if we just look at, if we look at maybe some of these myths are Mormon kids masturbating. Absolutely. It's an epidemic everywhere. So clearly what we're doing, you know, it's an epidemic.

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:29:00] Like pooping. Pooping is an epidemic?

John Dehlin [00:29:02] Yeah, It's a water drinking water. I get an epidemic. There's a sleeping epidemic and there's a masturbation epidemic. Right. So, I mean, it's not logical to think that if we change our approach, you know, kids will start masturbating because they already are in droves. You talk to any bishop, I think they would say it's the biggest problem in the ward is masturbation. Like, ask any BYU bishop or bishopric member, it's the biggest problem. And they're so tired of dealing with it because it's just, it's ridiculous. So they're masturbating anyway. You've already shown that, you know, you've already told us from the scientific evidence that what's effective, they're less likely to get pregnant. They're less likely to have, you know, penis vaginal intercourse. They're less likely to get STIs. Like, what indicator do you need to realize that talking openly and healthily and positively about sexuality is good for your kids? It's just effective. But on the counter side, I'll never, ever forget, I'm working at mit. I'm working with these professors from all over the world. And I have this professor from the De Anza Foothill College in California system say to me, oh, John, are you Mormon? Okay. You know, I had the weirdest thing happen. I've got these, you know, these female students that work with me or that are my students, and they kind of treat me as their second mom. And they disclosed to me Confidentially, that they and their boyfriends who were set to go on missions were having anal sex because anal sex isn't. Isn't intercourse, so it doesn't violate the law of chastity and they don't get pregnant. And so it's not that bad. And I know that we're not here to shame anal sex and some people find ways to incorporate that in a healthy way, but are there health risks, Natasha, to not talking about these issues and having youth sort of take whatever folk wisdom is on the street and, and incorporate into that sort of do's and don'ts about how they're going to navigate their sexuality?

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:31:23] Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's very different to have anal sex because you're curious and wanting to experience something fun and new and, and may find it really pleasurable as you explore that versus, oh, this is an avenue. This is a loophole to some other type of sex that I would actually much rather have and much rather would enjoy or much rather would explain first. And, you know, and of course, a lot of kids aren't necessarily that savvy about how to have anal sex without, you know, tearing or unnecessary pain or all those kinds of things using lubrication. You know, I mean, who's teaching them those things? And so I think that it's, it's, they do have much higher risks. Plus one thing that we didn't talk about either is when you, when you talk about, when you give your children correct anatomical language, that puts them at much less risk of not knowing what's happened to them if there was some type of trauma or assault or abuse. You know, it's like. I've talked to many children's prosecutors or interviewers, you know, when they're trying to figure out what's happened. And when a child says, well, they touched me down there or they touched my hoo, he or my wee wee. You know, the investigators don't really know what that means. You know, is that my scrotum, my testicles, my shaft, my vulva, my inside the vagina, hips, my hips, stomach, my butt, my anus? I mean, so I think it's really, really important that kids know all the different parts of their body so that when and if anything happens, they're very equipped to say, yeah, that was, that was that area of the body that was touched or penetrated or whatever happened. So it's just, so, it's just so education in every aspect of life benefits people, whether it's sexual or any other area of life.

John Dehlin [00:33:30] And don't not Talk about, don't not be sex positive and don't not talk openly with your kids about sexuality because you think that's going to help prevent masturbation and sexual exploration. My kids went to high school in Utah. Sex and sexuality is everywhere. Masturbation is everywhere. What we're doing isn't working. And what we're trying to tell you is a more effective approach, even for the outcomes you want, which is a decreased chance or likelihood of premarital intercourse or a decreased likelihood of rape or a decreased likelihood of getting an STI or teen pregnancy. Whatever metric you care about, being sex positive and talking openly in an educated way, accurately, about masturbation and body parts is going to help you achieve your ultimate goal. Right?

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:34:23] Yeah. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:34:25] Okay.

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:34:25] And Tamara Dexter says, you know, every kid is different. I was very open about sexuality with my kids. I have a child that became a teen parent. I worried that I had encouraged sex, but then I realized that this particular child would have made the choices she did no matter what I taught. I did my part to get her birth control young because I realized she was a risk taker and an adventure seeker. My other daughter said she wanted to wait because she wanted to be a teenager longer. She saw her sister's experience and didn't want that for herself. I think since we're talking to a group of faith transitioners, this is one of the things that can happen. Happen is there's no guarantee that, of course sexual education is going to keep your child from taking risks or from having experiences that they regret or that they love or that they love or any of those things. And I think sometimes when we're going through a faith transition, we get into that panic mode, like, oh, my gosh, what have I done? I thought I was choosing the right thing, and maybe I would have avoided all of this by staying more orthodox and taking the approach that the Mormon Church told me to take. That's a very normal response. And what I want to say is just, you know, repeat what John said. Plenty of people that are very Mormon and grow up in very orthodox Mormon homes become teen parents. Many people have sexual experiences. Many people masturbate. Many people do all those kinds of things, regardless of their upbringing. So all we can control is what we are offering as parents. And in that space, the research is behind education every single time.

John Dehlin [00:35:59] Kristin Gluth Crannie, one of our special listeners, our expert listeners, our fans, she writes, there is a zero tolerance view on masturbation and pornography in the church. If it is happening, happiness cannot be attained personally or in a marriage not only because of the evil and dangerous nature of the behavior of, but also the teaching that you are not worthy of blessings or the Holy Ghost. Thank you, Kristen. That is a really.

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:36:29] Yeah, that's part of the problem. I mean, going back to what we were talking about, the problem is that when it comes to sexuality, more so than any other sin, again, if you want to consider it sin, we have a zero sum tolerance for it. Right. So if you're, if your goal is to try to yell less at your kids, you're usually not going to go into the bishop and confess every single time you yelled at your kids. You know, you're going to maybe go see a therapist, you're going to go take a parent parenting class. You're still going to yell at your kids. But if you decrease that behavior BY let's say 50%, you still feel pretty good about yourself and you're doing well and you're feeling more, you know, in line with your values. We don't really offer that in the sexuality realm. It's either you're not doing it at all and that's the only way that you can be quote, unquote righteous or you're doing it. It doesn't matter what spectrum you're now in this sin awful, you know, not worthy type of reality. And that is a very unhealthy approach to any type of human behavior that we're trying to progress in or have, you know, a shift in.

John Dehlin [00:37:35] I love it. Lots of other cool comments. Marcy writes, I'm so grateful that I still have three kids at home. Did you already read that one?

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:37:43] No.

John Dehlin [00:37:43] I haven't been shamed or guilted for doing something that is so healthy and natural. In fact, being able to discuss Openly with our 20 year old son about how our views on masturbation have evolved prevented him from going on a mission a couple years ago, which would have been devastating to us and him. He would have gone for all the wrong reasons and failed his mission. President interviews miserably thank you, Marcy. We're so happy for you. Penny writes, I agree that our kids should not be shamed for masturbation and for looking at pornography. I believe in having a conversation about healthy sexuality. And of course Aaron, another one of our superfans and friends, writes, this is a really important topic. Thanks guys. So Natasha, if it's important to have healthy conversations, I just want to hear it. You're sitting your 14 year old son or your 16 year old daughter or your 12 year old son or daughter down. Talk us through how you have the talk about masturbation.

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:38:40] Is it? Well, yeah, it's much of what I've just said. And as they get older, I do, I say, you know what, the fact that you can masturbate is a wonderful way to self regulate. You don't ever have to do anything with a boyfriend or girlfriend or any friend that you're not comfortable doing. If you want to pause or come home and take care of yourself, that's awesome.

John Dehlin [00:39:01] Or even before you go on a date, take care of yourself before you

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:39:04] go on a date so that you're not all angsty. And another thing, because I do have, you know, one particular child who still goes to church and you know, is very interested in his relationship with that. And so my main area of being very upfront with him has been in this area. So I'm like, well, you know my positions on things, you know, that the church teaches very differently about pornography, masturbation, you know, and I also tell them, I tell them a lot about privacy. It's none of my business. If you're masturbating, you don't have to tell me, you don't have to tell me. If you're looking at sexually explicit things, here's what I can tell you about sexually explicit things. I mean, that's where we're moving next, you know, into that category. But it's not my business. And it's especially, Masturbation is never my business. If you want to tell me about that, if you have a question about it, if you're worried about anything, I'm here. But it's not something that you need to tell me about and it's not something that the business bishop should be asking you about. Now, I have had very specific conversations with my bishop about what he's allowed to ask my kids. I have told him I would prefer for him to leave the law of chastity question out altogether. He told me he's not comfortable doing that, but that he is comfortable just asking that question without any further, you know, like probing questions, which I know in our stake in particular, they have been asked to ask the probing questions about pornography and masturbation. So I know that in our stake that currently is what's being asked of the bishops to ask for. So I've told him, you're not allowed to do that with my son. And so we've, we've said the law of chastity. And I said, okay, and I will teach the law of chastity to my Son how I see fit. So we talk about sexual principles in my home, the six principles of sexual health, which I think many people have heard me talk about. I have and I've told, you know, my son, basically they, this is the only question that they get to ask you and you get to interpret that to mean what you want it to mean. And this is how I would like for you to have that mean that you are, you know, feeling healthy, that you feel like your sexuality is important, balance with the rest of your life, that if you are masturbating or looking at things, that those are things that you do in balance with the rest of your life, that you're respectful of anybody you would date, that you would never do anything non consensual, that you would never participate in something you're not comfortable participating in because you feel pressured. Because it's not just girls that feel pressured to do sexual things. And I just have those conversations very openly. He's going to efy here in a week. And I say, you know what, I'm probably going to agree with my most of the things they say there, except for anything they talk about with sex. So just keep that critical thinking lens on. Now I know that he can choose not to believe me and he can choose to believe the church. That's true of pretty much any entity that's out there for my children. The best I can do is prepare my children with information that I have. And so far that's worked for us.

John Dehlin [00:42:16] Yeah. And, and when I've, and I'll just add when I've had this conversation with my children and I have had this conversation with all our children, it goes something like this, it goes something like as biological creatures, we are, you know, we've evolved to have sex, to procreate, to create offspring. And biologically, you know, it's advantageous for that to feel good because we're, that, that's nature, that's evolution motivating us to replicate and procreate because that's how our species stays alive. And so with, once you reach puberty, you have built within you this sort of like urge to be sexual. And, and, but, but it's also not, not healthy and optimal for you to be having babies when you're 13 or 14 or 15, because you got to get an education, you got to get financially set, you got to get your feet on the ground, you got to get a stable life, get emotionally and physically mature. And so you're going to have this conflicting feelings of these regular sexual urges coming out urging you to procreate. And we have standards or we have values, but that sort of say you want to be really thoughtful and careful about sexuality in those early years. And so that combination is naturally going to make you want to self stimulate or masturbate because number one, your body sort of calls for a sexual release and it feels really good. And so I just want to tell you that you're going to get a lot of messages about masturbation and a lot of them are going to be negative. And I just want to tell you that it is completely normal. It is nothing to be ashamed of. It's nothing, it's not dirty, it's not bad, it's actually normal. The statistics show that probably over 90% of men. And what's the percentage of women? Natasha?

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:44:24] I think the research shows like, I think it's like 95% of men and about 89, almost 90% of women say that they've masturbated at some point or another. That's somewhat, that's probably like five years old too. And I think that the more we see the stigmas of things going away, the more people are willing to say that they've done things. Even in anonymous surveys, people will lie about sexual things pretty often just because they have internalized shame.

John Dehlin [00:44:56] But the point is, pretty much everyone has either done it or is doing it, including the bishop or the Relief Society president that's telling you not to, including the mission president and all the missionaries that you see. I mean, it is a common battle for missionaries to have to try and cope with their feelings on that two year mission or one and a half year mission. But the point is it's healthy, it's normal. There are things to look out for. If you're having a lot of anxiety or depression or boredom or whatever. It's one thing to sort of have it be a natural release or a source of joy, it's another thing to be using it as a form of self medicating. When you should find a way to cope with your anxiety and depression in other ways or at least directly address the anxiety and the depression and not avoid getting treatment or support and have it be a mask or something that you, that kind of covers up other healing that you need to do. And of course you should be thoughtful about where and how you do it. You don't want to be an exhibitionist. You don't want to do it where people can catch you or see you. You want to be discreet or thoughtful about it. And there probably comes a point where it can become excessive. And I don't know medically what that would be. But. But the point I want to tell you, child, is you never need to feel shame or guilt about it. It's normal. If you do it, that's great. If you don't do it, that's great. Everybody's going to be doing it differently. And like you said, Natasha, ultimately it's your private business. No one needs to have any input or feedback into what you do, as long as you're kind of smart and thoughtful about it. And that's just kind of the general message. Anything you'd want to add to that before we go on to the pornography discussion?

Masturbation as Stress Relief and Self-Care

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:46:52] No, I just. I would agree. I do. I mean, I'm glad you clarified it. I do tell them that it's a wonderful way to deal with stress and anxiety and depression. You know, it's one way to deal. It shouldn't be your only way to deal. Right. And to your point, it shouldn't be the only way you treat those things if they're serious things. Right. So if you're depressed or anxious, then there's other things we should be doing to address that topic, like therapy or medication or exercise or, you know, other things. But one of the things that's very difficult for me to see on sex addiction questionnaires is do you use sex or anything sexual to cope with the stressors of life? And if you say yes to that, that puts you in that category of your probably, you know, one more category of your sex addict. And I'm like, oh, my gosh. Like, it's actually a very healthy way to deal with the stressors and difficulties of life. Is this wonderful system we have within ourselves to have a sexual release. It releases wonderful hormonal shifts and dopamine and all this estrogen and everything that kind of just flows through your body and makes you feel good.

John Dehlin [00:48:04] Oxytocin. Don't forget about that.

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:48:06] Oxytocin. Right. We want sex and masturbation to be part of your coping mechanism in life. We just don't. We just want you to have a diversity of things that you can count on that it's not. And as far as how many times you masturbate a day, there's really not

John Dehlin [00:48:22] a week or a month.

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:48:24] Yeah, it doesn't really matter. I mean, the only thing that we want to maybe say is, you know, don't. To the point that maybe you're harming yourself. Like the one kind of extreme case that you gave where there's genital sores and things like that, then yeah, that's become something that's out of balance in your life. What's that about? And let's. And remember, that's not usually a masturbation problem. That's a depression problem or an anxiety problem or so to try to say, oh, let's take masturbation away, because that's going to be the way that we deal with this problem, which is what the church does. Just take masturbation away, does nothing to address whatever underlying problem is causing that symptom. So that's what we want to figure out.

John Dehlin [00:49:06] I love it. Okay, so now let's talk about how to talk to a child about pornography. Is there any level setting you want to do about our. You know, there is a lot of probably overwhelming amount of negativity, especially in the orthodox and progressive Mormon space around, and just in general Judeo Christian world around pornography being evil, perverted, bad, unhealthy, disrespectful to women, setting unrealistic expectations around performance and sex and sexuality. You know, there's child porn which is atrocious. There's different types of porn which seem to be unhealthy or really disproportionate. So, you know, and then there's a whole problem of, of the health, the physical, mental and psychological, spiritual health of the sex workers. There's a lot of abuse and I've heard disease sometimes in some of these. In the porn industry there's a lot of exploitation and there's the issue of sex trafficking and that sort of thing. And you know, and then there's just the feelings that it's betrayal. So, you know, there are all sorts of feelings and even data around how the pornography industry and pornography viewing is problematic. So how can you straighten that out for us, Natasha? Is that all legitimate? Is some of it legitimate, some of it not? How do we look at pornography?

Introducing Pornography Conversations with Kids

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:50:46] Oh man, you just brought up like a five hour discussion with all of that. So one thing I'm going to exclude from this from, from today's topic altogether is anything criminal. So child pornography, anything that's done by force, anything like that, I'm just going to excuse because those are criminal behaviors and condemn. You mean.

John Dehlin [00:51:11] Not excuse.

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:51:13] Excuse from our conversation.

John Dehlin [00:51:14] Okay, got it, got it, got it.

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:51:16] Right. Like just not. I'm not going to be talking about it from a criminal perspective. So the type of sexually explicit materials I will talk about today are where there are sex workers who are paid to do what they want to do or really the rising type of sexual Explicit materials out there is just voyeuristic, exhibitionistic types of people who just in the amateur world, enjoy filming themselves and putting it online. So that's actually the number one growing type of sexual explicit material out there. Just a couple and people who enjoy doing that. So that's what I'm going to be talking about. And I want to start off before we even start talking about how we talk about it to kids. I just like to talk about it in general. So sexually explicit materials have been around forever. You can find wonderful cave drawings of penises ejaculating and people having sex and all kinds of fun, weird positions and kink and all kinds of things on cape drawings. Okay, so that's been around forever. We've always been curious about each other's sexualities. We've always been influenced by each other's sexualities. And depending on the culture and religion and time that you grew up in, some of those things, you know, there's some cultures that really didn't make a very big deal about even public forms of sexual activity versus, you know, system today, which is very much in closed bedrooms. And we don't really show anything that's happening sexual. So I just want to normalize that. Also, the research shows that all of us are aroused by sexually explicit materials. Now remember, arousal is different than desire. So arousal means that you'll probably get an erection or you'll lubricate or your pupils will dilate, or your nipples will pilot, become hard, or your heartbeat will increase. That's, that's signs of arousal. Even if you're having a disgust emotion around what you're watching, you may still have, you will probably still have an arousal response. Desire is more like, am I enjoying it? Am I liking it? Do I want to have this type of, you know, material in front of me? Do I enjoy that? This aspect of my arousal? So just remember that those are two different things. So we. What is different today than any other time is that sexually explicit materials are now more available than ever before. You know, on our smartphones, our computers. I mean, just in the touch of your hand, you have, you have access to sexually explicit materials. Most people use sexual, sexually explicit materials to masturbate. So most people use sexually explicit materials as a form or something to help them masturbate. So instead of having to come up with something in their own creative mind, here's, you know, something that is turning me on. And that's why most people use sexually explicit materials for the, you know, two minutes to 20 minutes it takes to have an orgasmic response, an ejaculatory response or something of that nature. And that's how most people use it.

John Dehlin [00:54:40] And most people just, they feel this pent up release, sorry, this pent up pressure, this sort of biological need to have an orgasm. And porn becomes the way that they achieve the orgasm. Whether it's a 2 minute or 20 minute thing that, that's it. That's overwhelmingly the primary how it's used,

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:55:04] probably the second primary way it's used, and this is probably where it's most problematic is our teenagers use it for sexual education. When they're curious about something, they'll Google it and voila. So that's a problem. But you know, in the grand scheme of things, what's interesting about the research that is done under the parameters that I would consider research, because there's a lot of data out there, you have to be careful who's doing the research, who's behind the research, and then who's interpreting the research. So I've had, I've talked to a lot of neuroscientists that are saying, you know what, this research that I did is being used now by religious right entities in ways that are incorrect ways to correlate the our findings. So that happens. So you have to be very careful about what you think is good research on porn.

John Dehlin [00:55:59] And so is fight the new drug or porn kills love. When they show the brain scans and they compare it to drug addiction, you know, the viewing of pornography is that scientifically credible, useful. Why not? Why not?

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:56:15] Well, and I, I'm not a neuroscientist, so I will just say Mormon Sex Info podcast with Nicole Prowse is the podcast you want to listen to. She does an excellent job and she's a prominent researcher in our country today that just has debunked and has all the terms that I would not know how to very, how to very clearly talk about it. But what I will say is that sexuality is different from other behaviors. And mainly what I understood is satiety. Satiety. Satiety, however you say that word.

John Dehlin [00:56:51] Right.

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:56:52] So when people gamble, for example, which is a behavioral kind of out of control, it can become a behavioral out of control kind of thing. They can win, you know, all the coins come out and they're right back at the next thing. It doesn't. There's no satiety that kicks in. And so that's why in the DSM 5 you find gambling as a disorder. Okay, Sexuality, pretty much, once you have an orgasm, it forces you into that stage. Of now, you know, you kind of stop masturbating, you stop looking at porn. So it doesn't have the same drive that other types of behaviors do. Video gaming right now seems to be something that could potentially become. It's right now in the back of the DSM 5, which means it's still needing to have a lot of research around it. But it's one of those things again where you. There's. It potentially has that disturbance of satiety, like you don't ever get satiated. And so you just, it becomes like hours and hours and hours that you could spend on things like that without your brain saying, hey, we've had enough. Let's go do something else. So that's probably the number one thing that I can share as far as, from a neuroscience perspective that disqualifies anything to do with sex as kind of this. And again, I don't ever want to use the term addiction because that's not even really a clinical term. It's more about a dependence type of format. And it's very, very different than substances. So they can say, well, you know, yes, sex. They can show that dopamine goes through the brain and releases. Well, that's true, but that's also true of the brain that's looking at puppy pictures on your Instagram post. Or it's true of the time when you eat chocolate. That's a normal response. We don't want to pathologize normal responses. And the other thing that all of these studies have a problem with is that when there is a brain issue, there wasn't a brain study before the brain had an issue. So they're automatically correlating sexually explicit materials with the brain issue. When maybe what we're really finding is that some people have certain disorders or certain sexual drive. Like if you're a higher drive person, which that's. There are people who have higher sexual drives than others, your behavior is going to act look different than a lower drive person. But now all of a sudden we're blaming porn for that instead of the fact that you have a higher drive to begin with. So there's no way to really, you know, take two equal brains and see, oh yeah, this is going to really affect you. The fact that you've been doing this for two months and you haven't now your brain looks different than this person. So the biggest kind of critique of these studies, that the brains could have been different to begin with. And then all of these people who are parts of these studies are self, you know, they're self already they're self identifying as addicts. They're coming and they're studying these people who are self identifying in these ways that they're saying that they have a problem. So lots and lots of problems with the data that's been collected on this kind of stuff.

Questioning the Pornography Addiction Framework

John Dehlin [01:00:23] Yeah. One of the fundamental rules of science is don't conflate correlation with causation. Just because two things happen at an increased frequency together doesn't mean one causes the other or that they cause each other. And that's the classic example is the rooster crows and the sun rises. That doesn't mean that the rooster's crowing causes the sun to rise. It's just that they both happen to happen at the same time. And so some of these fight the new drug and porn kills love movements. They really do advance bad science. So an example would be they show the brain scans of the brain lighting up when it's on cocaine or heroin. And then they show the brain scans when someone's looking at porn and similar regions are lighting up. Therefore, porn is like drugs. But the problem is those are pleasure centers in the brain lining up. And if drugs cause pleasure and, you know, ejaculation causes pleasure, then of course the same areas of the brain are going to be lighting up. But that doesn't mean that porn is the same thing in terms of being an addictive thing as drugs. It's just a total false equivalence. And it's bad science to make that suggestion.

Natasha Helfer Parker [01:01:41] And those same areas would light up if you're having vanilla sex and a great orgasm with your husband.

John Dehlin [01:01:47] Right.

Natasha Helfer Parker [01:01:47] Addicted to your husband. Right.

John Dehlin [01:01:49] Or eating or, you know, other forms of pleasure, like you said, looking at kittens. But another thing is, they'll say things like, well, Jeffrey Dahmer, the mass murderer, started out looking at porn, you know, or Ted Bundy started out by looking at porn. Or some serial killer said in their dying testimony before they were on death row, it all started with looking up porn. You know what I mean? But they all drank water, they all slept, you know, they all lived. They all were humans. Like, you can't ever just sort of say it all began with porn, because there's a billion billions of people on the earth that masturbated and looked at porn, who didn't become serial killers and who were just fine.

Natasha Helfer Parker [01:02:31] And in fact, the reality is, which is kind of an ethical dilemma for many of us, is that the more porn there is to watch, the less criminal activity we see. So those people who are maybe slated towards Having, you know, psychopathic or sociopathic or criminal types of predispositions. When they have an outlet, they're less likely to offend. So that's actually been the case. And all the research has shown that very, very adequately. And again, since we're in this kind of experiment of having sexual explicit materials at our fingertips, more than ever before, we are not seeing an increase in anything criminally. We're not seeing an increase in erectile dysfunction, which you hear a lot of myths about that. We're not seeing an increase in rapes or assaults. We're not seeing an increase in violence and sexuality or teenage pregnancy or sti. So if this would be kind of. If the stories we were telling about pornography and sexually explosive materials were true, the last 20 years should have us, like, overwhelmed in our clinics and our practices. You know, as a sex therapist, I don't see anything. I see actually less people with erectile dysfunction because I think more people are educating themselves about, oh, I don't have to feel bad if my, you know, penis goes lumped every now and then. So they're not, like, as anxious about it. So education and resources actually help shapes. Society loves their shapes.

John Dehlin [01:04:15] Thank you for joining us today on Mormon Stories. If you enjoyed this episode, please help us make more like it by becoming a monthly subscriber@mormonstories.org. Rabbit Hole. An album chronicling the heartaches and rewarding discoveries of her Mormon faith crisis. You can purchase her album on itunes or by visiting mindygledhill.

Natasha Helfer Parker [01:04:46] Imperfections. But it doesn't matter now it doesn't

John Dehlin [01:04:54] matter

Natasha Helfer Parker [01:04:57] now it's all just poison in disguise

John Dehlin [01:05:05] Teacups full of candy Cool in the sky.

Part 3 of 3 · Ep. 1146

John Dehlin [00:00:03] Shapes.

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:00:05] Oh, society loves their shapes.

John Dehlin [00:00:09] Mormon Stories is a production of the Open Stories foundation and relies solely upon the support of people like you, its listeners to help keep the podcast alive or to become a member of the community. Please become a monthly subscriber by visiting MormonStories.org and clicking on the Donate button or on the right side of the page under support. All contributions to Mormon Stories are completely tax deductible in the United States and go towards producing the podcast and building communities and programs of support for Mormons like you. Thanks for your support.

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:01:03] Now, that's not to dismiss that there aren't issues. I don't want to just say there's never issues, but I would say that the majority of the people that come into my clinic around sexually explicit materials fall into and I would say like 85 to 90% of the people who come in are typically men, are typically the higher libido partner. So sometimes women who are the higher libido partner and are being shamed on the spectrum where it's really tragic, you know, like they may look at something once a month or once every six months, or maybe they haven't looked at something for three years and all of a sudden they looked at something again and they're coming in in high levels of distress themselves and with their partners, again with these betrayal narratives, very, very much. Their, their marriage is in danger of ending and they're considering themselves addicts and their spouses are considering themselves addicts. Okay? So that would be like a majority of the people that I've seen coming from a Mormon clientele. And even here in Wichita with an evangelical clientele, that's how people present.

John Dehlin [00:02:12] For me, it was often three weeks. It was like every three weeks. I try not to do it. I try not to do it. I'm an addict because about it, once every three weeks I masturbate and maybe look at a little bit of porn and then they double down again to try and stop. And it's just so weird to hear someone who's masturbating basically once a month calling themselves an addict.

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:02:35] Right? Which isn't even accurate as far as when you think about substance dependence, which is what most people think about when they think about addiction, that's typically like a daily issue, you know, that people have gotten to a point where they daily are dependent. Their body has become dependent on a chemical, and if they don't have that chemical, they go into a withdrawal type of effect that can actually be very. Make them very sick. And so just to conflate Those two things. And to have the language now be about your sexuality, like you're diseased and you're always going to have. You're always going to have this disease and you're going to have to be sober. And I mean, people talk about their sexuality and their partner sexuality in this type of, you know, 12 step program type of language, which is just a horrific way to approach your human sexuality, which is part of who you are. And really the reality for like 85 to 90% of that clientele that come in is that they have poor sexual education. They've grown up with negative scripts, they don't know how to contract maritally, they don't know realistic expectations about sexuality. They don't know how to really show up in their sexual selves. Those are the real problems that are happening, you know, and we're blaming it all on porn. And on top of it, we're making one person usually in that program sick and we're making the other person, the enabler, which becomes this horrific way of having a marriage around your sexual health. So now for the 10 to 15% of the people that I would say have become out of balance with their sexuality in some way, where it is becoming a daily issue, where they've spent, you know, monies that they didn't have to spend on it. When things have become what we would consider maybe more out of control secrecy, lots of lying to their partner, lots of infidelity, which I tend to count, you know, a person as infidelity, not just something you're looking at, then, yes, you have other things that might be going on. But again, it's not addiction. It's something. What's that symptom is a symptom of something else. And so lots of things in the addiction model go untreated, like personality disorders. You know, when I get a wife who comes to me and says, I can't believe what you said in your presentation, you don't understand my reality. You don't understand what I've been through. You don't understand, you know, and I'm like, I'm like.

John Dehlin [00:05:08] And it's often like, my husband sleeps with prostitutes.

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:05:11] Yeah, my husband sleeping with prostitutes.

John Dehlin [00:05:12] He's a serial adulterer.

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:05:14] I've been putting up with his, you know, disgusting behavior for like 20 years. I'm like, that's not, that's not porn addiction. That's not sex addiction. That you're, you're probably married to a personality disordered person or there's some type of mental health diagnosis there that has gone untreated and that has, you know, completely like, taken over both of your lives. And yes, absolutely, you have a right to be upset about that. You absolutely have a right to not want to be married to that. And you have a right to place boundaries and get divorced or whatever you need to do to take care of yourself in a situation like that.

John Dehlin [00:05:49] And by the way, a lot of these people are active in church, and it'd be just as erroneous to blame the church for their prostitution habit or serial adultery habit. It would be just as erroneous to blame the church as it would be porn, because you're making something causal. That's just a correlation. And porn may be an outgrowth of their own personality or biological disposition, not the cause. So you can't. Again, directionality is important. It's very easy to say porn causes all these problems. If I stop the porn, I'll cause all these problems. But maybe his prostitution, serial infidelity and porn use, or porn, excessive use is a function to untreated disorders. But somehow we sometimes over associate and over blame the porn when you may as well blame sleeping or drinking water or attending church as the reason he's seeing prostitutes or sex workers, whatever the.

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:06:52] And if you don't get a correct assessment, and if you don't really understand what's going on, it doesn't, you're not going to be able to ever shift those things. So I put porn issues that come into my office into three categories. One is that it's really coming in from a narrative and a values perspective that's too rigid and is unrealistic around human sexuality. I put most of the people that come into my practice in that regard. You can still be upset about it. It can still not fit your values. You can still want to decrease the amount of that or have to negotiate in your marriage. That's all fine, but it falls under that category. Second is that there's some underlying diagnosis that's not going, that hasn't been treated, or personality disorder, and those things are not being treated. And the third thing that pisses me off even the most is that there's a legal criminal part of this behavior. This doesn't come into my office as much, but I hear about it in the news all the time and all the conferences that I go to. And what's happening is that the sex addiction model is being used to lessen the accountability. So, well, you know, yeah, he molested five people, but he's a sex addict, so he's sick. So now we're going to, you know, put him in jail for less amount of time because, you know, this is a disease and it's not that at all. And there's. I mean, sex offender treatment is a whole different perspective and whole different world. And yet this addiction model is being used kind of as an excuse for people's criminal behavior. So for me, the sex addiction model fails on every single level. It's just so atrocious and so not backed by science. And so the Mormon Mental Health association was actually. We were like, ahead of some other organizations in making a position statement against sex addiction treatment and protocols and modalities, because Mormon people are, again, vulnerable to that kind of shenanigan. It's a shenanigan, and we're vulnerable to it. Even good therapists are vulnerable to it because it fits under their paradigm. So. So they go and get this training and they think that they're doing the right thing. And it's not backed by effectivity treatment. It's not best standard of care treatment.

Practical Guidance When You Discover a Child Viewing Porn

John Dehlin [00:09:13] How do you talk to your kid about porn? So let's just say you catch your kid. They're 13, they're 14, they're in the shower, they're in their bedroom, they've got their mobile phone, they've got their iPad, they're on the computer, or you're browsing the history. You find out either preventatively, you want to talk to your kid about porn, or. Or even more likely, you catch your kid looking at porn. Give us a framework for a healthy conversation with your kid about porn. Because I'm hearing my orthodox listeners go, what, are you just gonna tell your kid to go crazy, look at porn all the time? Like, how do you have a conversation with your kid about porn?

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:09:49] Right, well, so a few things that I'll just give out as resources. Marty Klein, who's a nationally known sexologist, did a porn literacy checklist. I've also done a webinar on how to talk to kids about porn. So whatever I say in 10 minutes, you can probably do better as far as the types of stuff that's out there. But the main thing that we want to tell kids, first of all, is to normalize it. It's normal to be curious, it's normal to be aroused. It's normal to find those things erotic, and it's normal to find them easy to masturbate to. The second thing is, we want to watch our tone so that we're not becoming anxious and screechy and weird and start taking away smartphones and monitoring Everything. Because it's not going to help putting

John Dehlin [00:10:38] on filters and all that stuff.

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:10:40] Right. Our kids are so savvy. They're always going to beat us on those kinds of things.

John Dehlin [00:10:44] We're sending them to addiction recovery program.

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:10:46] Please don't do that. Because then you start the disease model with your child and that's abusive. In my point of view. That's an abusive thing to do to your child is to make them feel diseased about their sexuality, which is normal. The main thing that you want to tell your kids is that pornography is adult entertainment. There's adult entertainment and I usually give the Fast and Furious analogy. So you go to Fast and Furious and you see them drive these cars and you know, yes, from personal experience, you know that our cars in our driveway don't look like the cars on Fast and Furious. You know that mom and dad drive in ways that, that are very different from how they drive on Fast and Furious. You know that because you've been sitting in a car seat since you were a baby and you've been able to see us drive and you see the cars and you see how we take care of them. And you see you have lots of experiential experience. So you go to Fast and Furious and you can have a good time and you can be entertained, but you don't see people coming out of Fast and Furious and start driving like maniacs out of the parking lot, right. And start driving out of buildings and jumping pools and whatever they're doing on that show. It's entertainment. It's pretend. It's actors and actresses, you know, doing a show. The problem with pornography is that you haven't been in my bedroom with dad. You probably, other than a few moments of embarrassment, you probably haven't seen me naked very much. You haven't, you know, had a lot of hands on experience with sexuality because it's this private thing in our culture and we keep that to ourselves. And that's appropriate boundaries. So if you're going to look at pornography, you're going to be seeing a movie just like Fast and Furious. It's not realistic. That has a lot of things that are going on. They. What you might see in a two minute clip may have taken three hours to make that two minute clip. They may have injected a penis with a certain type of drug to keep it more erect for longer. They may have lighting and certain positions. Actors are usually not normal people. They don't look like the rest of us. They're in different types of shape. She may be able to do things with her leg and be flexible in ways that your girlfriend or your friend would not be able to put themselves in those kinds of positions. Dad and I don't get into those positions. So you may be seeing kind of unrealistic ways of even having a sexual encounter. There's not a lot of talking in pornography. There's not a lot of negotiating. There's not a lot of things that happen normally, like queefs and smiles or having to stop to go to the bathroom or putting on a condom or, you know, all these things that happen in regular sexual, you know, negotiated spaces. You may not see pubic hair. Your girlfriend or boyfriend may have pubic hair. You may not, you know, you may see a certain type of vulva that, you know, just like in movies, we see size 2 bodies more than we see size 24 bodies. Right? Well, you may not have that same experience. You know, you may see circumcised penises versus an uncircumcised penis. So I tell them a lot of these things. And this is kind of, again, going through that porn literacy checklist of making sure our kids understand that pornography is entertainment. It's a movie. It's not real. You're not going to learn how to have good sex or be a good lover if you have expectations that sex is going to be that way. You can potentially put a lot of pressure on yourself. That's not healthy. And you can put a lot of pressure on a partner. That's not healthy. So please put it into context. And the other thing that I tell

John Dehlin [00:14:57] so so far, you said, normalize it. Watch your tone. Don't shame it. I even like the idea of just saying, hey, okay, this is. You're now. You're now doing what most kids do. Like, welcome to learning about sexuality. Because that's what teens do. No shame, no guilt. I'm glad we're talking about it. So watch your tone. Normalize it. And then you're talking about manage expectations so that you educate them and you set their expectations that porn isn't the real world. I love that. Okay, keep going.

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:15:30] And then shoot. I was going to say something else. Darn it.

John Dehlin [00:15:37] Oh, I interrupted you.

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:15:39] No, that's okay. And what about talking about, okay, the values piece? Because, you know, there is a lot of this idea about objectifying and women are objectified. And I'll just say this. I mean, a lot of times our narratives around what's objectifying, oftentimes we use word degrading, right?

John Dehlin [00:15:59] It's degrading to women.

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:16:01] Right. And the reality is that a lot of that comes from our patriarchal culture. So we have this idea that non degrading sex is a woman being embraced and loved and gazed upon and having like, you know, sweet, loving, making love. But what if a woman wants to, you know, have anal sex from behind? Wants her, you know, wants her husband to grab her hair and wants to, you know, have him say to her, I want you to fuck me. And what if she likes that? What if that's totally in her erotic template? Is that degrading her? Right. So it's interesting how we have these like, ideas around what's degrading, what's not degrading, what's righteous, what's not righteous, what's holy, what's what's unholy. Back to our oral sex idea, right? Like oral sex for many people was considered degrading. It's degrading to expect that you're going to put his penis in your mouth. Well, what if you like to have his penis in your mouth? Or what if you like to have her vulva in your mouth? You know, what's degrading about that? So this is where I think we have to be very careful about our own biases, our own erotic templates, our own tastes and preferences. Because kink and dom sub types of themes and rough play and rough words can very much be part of the erotic playground of our sexual lives.

John Dehlin [00:17:36] You often say, don't yum my yuck and don't yuck my yum. I heard that from you.

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:17:42] Yes. And you'll see much more violent themes, I think, in music videos than you will in most mainstream pornography. Just because you don't like what's happening in a pornographic scene doesn't mean that it's in of itself degrading to the people who are involved in that scene and who maybe enjoy that type of sexual play.

John Dehlin [00:18:06] But as we talk about this, Natasha, I can empathize with the listeners who are more conservative, who are just like, whoa, now all of a sudden you're saying that this isn't terrible, that this isn't awful, that some of it's okay. And the thing you're not doing, Natasha, is just saying, stay away from it. It's bad. And so many people, especially coming out of a Mormon context, are just going to say porn is bad, kids shouldn't watch it, tell them not to watch it, and tell them that it's evil and gross and perverted and objectifying. And you're not doing that, Natasha.

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:18:43] Well, I would prefer for kids not to look at porn. And I've told my kids that I would prefer you not look at porn. And this is the point I've forgotten. I tell my kids, you know, sometimes you'll see things in a movie and I don't mean just porn, I mean like horror movies and super violent movies that, you know, those images kind of can stay with you or they can influence you. And I would prefer for your first sexual experiences and as you get to know people that you know, you have somewhat, not so many of those images in your head that you can explore what you like and what you are excited about kind of more yourself. That would be my preference for you. That would be my ideal thoughts for you. At the same time, I have no control over what you're going to look at or not look at. So here's what I want you to know about those things. They're made up, they're not realistic all the time. They may, as you look at some of those things, they may be introduced into your erotic template. So some of those things you might enjoy doing because you've watched them. It's kind of like cooking shows. Again, I maybe wouldn't have put basil on my ice cream if I hadn't seen somebody do it first. Now I kind of like it. So yes, we are influenced by other people. If you see something that, that you're uncomfortable with or don't like, pay attention to that feeling. Know what that feels like. Know how to turn something off or find something different. Don't put yourself in positions where you're concerned or worried and know that this whole realm of sexual exploration is somewhat normal. And then I also talk to them about themes that they're going to see that are not that healthy. I mean, it's very typical, for example, to see on poor pornhub, oh, you know, young girl, teenage girl getting it on with her stepdad or stepdad seducing, like incest type themes. So I talked to them about that. I say there are themes in movies and in porn and in music that are really unhealthy, relational themes. And I would rather you not introduce that kind of stuff into your mind because I don't think it's good for you.

John Dehlin [00:21:06] And so if we're talking, let's say that our, let's say that we all agree, and I do, that porn is not a healthy thing for kids and even adults, that first of all there's a lot of porn that's just unhealthy. And let's just say we can Debate about whether there's some healthy porn or not. But let's say we can all agree that we probably don't. That we don't want our kids looking at porn. If we're talking about an effective approach, is just condemning it and scaring them and shaming them and trying to control them. Not the most effective approach if our goal is to minimize their porn use.

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:21:43] Yeah. It's back to your whole point about the anxiety feedback loop. When you forbid things, it's like the cookie jar.

John Dehlin [00:21:50] Don't look in the closet.

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:21:51] People are more drawn to it, like, why, you know, and this is. And then if they do look at it and they feel bad about it, then they can't tell you about it. They can't talk to you about it. And so then it gives them even. It gives that. We give those themes a lot of power when we forbid them.

John Dehlin [00:22:08] Gives it power.

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:22:09] We don't want to give porn more power than it deserves. Does that make sense? And I would say, you know, moving away from kids, some people actually very much benefit from sexually explicit materials. Some couples really enjoy it. It's part of their kind of toolbox. Some women in particular, who maybe are having a hard time becoming orgasmic, need more like stimulation, intellectual stimulation, for them to watch something erotic with their husband. It can be. Actually. It can benefit their relationship. So I don't like to say porn is bad or porn is good. I think it's like most things, it can be used in really awful ways. It can be used in really beneficial ways. You have to figure out how it fits with your values, how it fits with your lifestyle, whether or not there's benefits or risks, what outweighs what, and how you want to incorporate it or not incorporate it into your relationship with your spouse. If you're married, for example.

John Dehlin [00:23:09] Yeah. And again, there's a reason why we titled this episode A More Effective Approach. I worked at university counseling centers, and I interviewed at probably 15 university counseling centers. And there's an epidemic at BYU Provo, BYU, Idaho, and Utah State University that literally does not exist in any other university counseling center in the United States that I'm aware of, other than maybe some conservative evangelical Christian or Catholic ones. And that's this idea of kids coming to the counseling center 18, 19, 22, and reporting again, a pornography addiction in other universities, in other states, in other traditions. They're not developing this pornography obsession and addiction at the same rates. Somehow our Mormon approach in 2019 to pornography is actually making pornography viewing more common and more prevalent. Because in other Traditions, secular and more liberal Christian and other traditions. It's just like, oh, porn, you know, okay, I checked it out. I sometimes look at it. It's not a big deal, and it's not this all consuming part of their lives at such a high prevalence rate. And in other university counseling centers, it wouldn't even be on the top 10 of presenting problems. It's only in these really hyper conservative religious traditions generally, where people become obsessed about sexuality and thus become, quote, addicts to porn. So again, I'm just trying to make the point that how we are approaching pornography is actually increasing its usage and it's making it an epidemic when in other traditions it just wouldn't be that big of a deal. And I'm not saying that they just look at it obsessively, but they just don't think it's wrong. I'm saying they look at porn less because it's less stigmatized, less shamed, and less obsessed about. And so we have a porn epidemic in Mormonism because of the way we talk about and treat pornography.

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:25:16] Yes. And the research, there's been some recent research. Joshua Grubbs has done some excellent work showing that people in sex addiction treatment centers are usually actually acting out less than the general population and yet are spending thousands of thousands of dollars and seeing themselves as diseased. So it is, it's like, you know, I often, like, say, you know, cocaine doesn't know if you're Mormon. Cocaine doesn't know if you're an atheist. Cocaine doesn't know if you're, you know, Jehovah's Witness. It's gonna affect everybody the same way. And you're gonna, you know, if you get addicted to cocaine, you're gonna have to figure out some type of treatment approach. Pornography knows we're Mormon. It knows because other people who don't have the same stories and narratives and scripts that we have don't respond to it the same way we do. They don't have the same levels of marital difficulty that we do. They don't have the same levels of self shame and treatments and people, you know, like taking out a second mortgage for a $50,000 in treatment approach to porn addiction that doesn't even show any efficacy in working. It just, it maddens me when my people are vulnerable and being taken advantage of in a certain modality or way of thinking because of where we come from and how we've been trained to think about certain aspects. So you don't have to like porn. You can see it as something that doesn't fall into your value system, that's fine, but please do it in a way that doesn't cause these kinds of problems, that exacerbates and makes everything worse in ways that just ends up harming everybody. It harms the spouse, it harms the person, it harms the kids. It harms our community.

John Dehlin [00:27:20] Jeremy writes, I love this. We will definitely watch this with our kids. Great talking points. I love the idea of families watching Natasha Helford Parker talk about these things. I also love, Natasha that you shared a bunch of the links talking to your kids about sex five Lies We've Been Told about porn. I'm out of control. These are all from sex talks with Natasha and I'm just super thrilled you're sharing those. I'm going to ask Cody to include all these links when he makes the post. Okay, so let's change the subject slightly, Natasha. So let's talk quickly about and we're not going to do it justice, but let's talk just quickly about approaching porn, porn and masturbation in marriage. Because most of the time I see this as something that the males are confronted with with wives that are concerned. And I know that's a false stereotype, but generally it's sort of like wife, Mormon wife catches Mormon husband masturbating, or Mormon wife finds pornography in the history or catches a husband in the act of watching porn. Mormon wife shames Mormon husband, unrighteous priesthood holder, wicked, evil, dirty, perverted, unrighteous priesthood holder. I'm going to withhold my sex from you. We're not going to have a sexual intimacy until you stop. You're dirty. Go talk to the bishop. And it just becomes this major hurricane of stress and sadness in the marriage. So okay, that's not good. And then I hear orthodox or conservative Mormons thinking, okay, well, what's the opposite where the wife just says, husband, look at all the porn you want. Masturbate all you want, even to the point of the husband not being available to his spouse because he's already satisfied himself and he would rather pleasure himself than be with the wife. And again, I'm 100% aware that women look at porn too, and that women masturbate to and that this dynamic often can happen in the reverse. I don't see it nearly as much, almost never. But it's important to one realize that I'm talking about dichotomies that are not reflecting reality for many people. But I've just given us two sort of extremes. One is like shame, guilt, awfulness, which we know is destructive but then the opposite, which is everything goes and anything goes. And I think a lot of listeners are not going to be happy with that either. So how can a, let's say that a spouse catches another spouse either masturbating, looking at porn, go. What can be a way for them to talk about it and process it that can lead to health and more effective outcomes?

Pornography and Masturbation Within Marriage

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:30:14] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:30:15] So

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:30:18] I think that, you know, part of what you're talking about with differences of men and women is because we've been taught differently as men and women as Mormons. And we, I think, covered quite a bit of this in our podcast or the podcast that we just did about women in particular. You know, the challenges that they face as faith transitioners. We talked about the sexual messages that we get as women. And the reason why we see so much of the stereotype of what you're talking about with the man coming in as the naughty one is because it's not that women aren't looking at porn or reading erotic novels or reading, you know, looking at erotic movies or being turned on by other things. It's just that we have very different narratives about how to respond as a woman and how to respond as a man to those types of issues. Because there really isn't as many differences as we'd like to think between men and women in regards to even drive and sexual tastes and things like that. So that's a lot of stuff that we've just been impacted by far as what we've been taught to think. So I'll just start with that. As far as, you know, what I would hope would be some ways that could be looked at differently. Again, if we have a more sex positive view of masturbation to begin with, I think from the very beginning we stay away from an ownership mentality in a marriage. Somehow this romantic idea of you belong to me and I belong to you, really not a helpful approach to a long term monogamous relationship. Because not only in the realms of sexuality, it's in the realms of any behavior that you act differently than I would want you to. Now we've got a big mess on our hands. And the reality is that marriage is all about that, because you've got two different people who are going to think differently. I mean, we think a lot the same because that's why we were attracted to each other. But there's always going to be differences and how we prefer to parent, how we prefer to spend money, how we prefer to spend a Sunday afternoon, how we prefer to be sexual. And so this idea that somehow if your behavior doesn't align with what I want now, it means that you don't love me, you don't prioritize me. I'm not important, I'm not sexy, I'm not attractive, or you're out of control, or you're frigid or you're this or you're that. I mean, we can get into so many meaning ruts that are so devastating to people, when in reality all it is is that we're different. And we need to figure out that we can. We can have good physical intimacy and good sex lives together and yet not expect our partner to always be on the same page as us. Because if that's your expectation, you're going to automatically fail at that just by the. By the reality of life. And so I think masturbation can be used as a wonderful way to, you know, deal with libido differences, deal with erotic preference differences. It can be a way to deal with situational things like pregnancies or illnesses or surgeries or, you know, things that come up where one of us isn't as sexually available as we are used to.

John Dehlin [00:33:33] To being.

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:33:35] There's just lots of ways to be able to use masturbation. And the real tricks to that is to have that be part of your marital contract, that you both agree that as individuals, even though you are a partnership, you still have a right to your individual self. There's an aspect of your sexuality that your partner does not own. You do not own your spouse's sexuality. Just like I don't want my husband to own mine, I can't expect that I would own his. So he's maybe going to have sexual fantasies or ideas or thoughts or things that I am not going to have to be privy to. Just like I would like to have some privacy. And in fact, what we know now through the work of people like Esther Perel and other sex therapists, is that in order to actually have better outcome in monogamy, in other words, like, you're going to actually be together with somebody for 30, 40, 50, 60 years these days, because we're living so much longer, that's a long time to stay interesting to another person. And the reality is that if you can mix in a little bit of mystery, a little bit of not knowing absolutely everything about your partner, those relationships actually last. The desire and the eroticism in those relationships lasts longer and does better. So the masturbation can be a wonderful way to have your own sense of sexuality. And it doesn't. There's no need for it to interfere with your coupled sexuality. Now, in the extreme case where you said, well, I would rather, you know, go masturbate on my own than have sex with my partner, we'd like to blame masturbation for that. I would say that's not a masturbation problem. That's a conflict problem. Why is it easier to go masturbate by myself than to enjoy an evening or a nice, you know, afternoon delight or whatever with my partner? And usually there's some type of either conflict or avoidance. There's some type of thing that's going on where a partner's either feeling shamed or worried or upset, and it may have to do with sexuality. It may not. I mean, if you're grumpy at each other for any type of reason, it may not feel very fun to go have sex together. Sometimes there can be some real sexual shaming themes in marriages, whether maybe a person is worried about erections. So I'd rather, yeah, I can go masturbate by myself or I can go be with my wife who has a fit every time my penis isn't erect and thinks that I don't love her. And so, yeah, it's easier for me to go masturbate. Well, is that masturbation's problem? No, that's a couple relational erectile dysfunction problem that isn't being addressed. So I get very curious about why people are avoiding sexual contact with one another. Would rather go and masturbate with the person because, yeah, your penis isn't mad at you. Your vulva and your clitoris isn't going to yell at you. It's easier to have a relationship with yourself than with another person. So why, why are we avoiding the relational sex as far as erotic, you know, erotic type of materials? I think, again, there's a part of that that should be personal and that can be really hard to get our head around. That if I want to read a novel that has a sex scene in it, I don't want my partner monitoring me on that. That makes me feel like a little kid. That makes me feel like a little girl that's in trouble. And I can tell you right now that that's probably the worst thing that can happen in my marriage is when I feel like a little girl in trouble. I go berserk when I feel that way. And I would think others just disconnect.

John Dehlin [00:37:32] Others just like others disconnect and stonewall and just become emotionally distant.

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:37:38] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:37:39] So we, we always, we always quote you as saying, you know, you never want to Be married to your mother, your dad, your teacher, your parents, your boss. You know, you want to be married to your lover. Right. Your missionary. Right. You want to be married to your lover. And so just. Just the dynamic of policing your spouse's sexuality toxic to your relationship.

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:38:02] That's right. And so if you have a sense of like, well, I think that this is a deal breaker. If you're gonna do certain behaviors, sexual. Certain sexual behaviors that don't include me, you may have to have a conversation like that. I would hope that pornography and erotic novels and erotic music would not be a deal breaker for most couples. I think that there are other types of sexual activities that could be deal breakers for sure, for people, especially infidelity, serial infidelity. You know, things of that nature.

John Dehlin [00:38:39] If a spouse comes to you, Natasha, and says it's infidelity, like he's looking at another man or woman, he's clearly finding them attractive and not me. He's clearly, you know, that it's a rejection of me, but also it's cheating on me. What do you say to a spouse that feels like pornography viewing is tantamount to infidelity?

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:39:01] Yeah, well, people have a right to that opinion. And if they want to end a marriage over that opinion, that's. That's definitely their prerogative. I try to see if there's any room for. Instead of labeling as infidelity as maybe betrayal. I think it is a betrayal when we.

John Dehlin [00:39:19] If there's an agreement not to do that.

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:39:21] Yeah, if you're kind of functioning. Which is Mormons, we are doing that. Right. We're kind of functioning with this sexual contract that the church has given us. Right. The church gave us our marital sexual contract, and these are all the things we're not supposed to do. And I think a lot of people just assume that their partner is on the same page about that. And so I think there is a right in being upset about that and feeling betrayed and feeling like, you mean this has been happening for years or. I mean, the, you know, secrecy is very. Especially in your primary partnership can feel very difficult and is a form of betrayal. I think there's a difference between secrecy and privacy, and you have to really contract together what. What the difference between those two things are and be on the same page about those things. And those are skills that none of us were taught. So the fact that you're coming to me in distress, I normalize that. I'm like, of course you're upset. Of course you're not happy about this. Of course you've been told, especially as women, that this is a direct. It's like a direct kind of inference on how he feels about you, that you're not sexy enough, that you're not pretty enough, that you're not good enough, that you're not offering enough if you bed. And yet we now have research that doesn't support any of that. Any of that. And so hopefully, if they stick with me, over time, we can reframe some of those things. And the person who's been acting in secret can take responsibility for the fact that they would have preferred to avoid conflict than to be really real about their sexuality. It's not just the one person that needs to change their mind about pornography. It's the other person who needs to be willing to be honest and talk about what they're really. What that does for them and whether or not they really want to stop. You know, a lot of times it's the classic, oh, yes, I'll stop. And okay, but then we're in the same cycle, you know, month after month after month. And I'm just saying you're not being honest that this is probably not something you really do want to stop. And so let's. Can we integrate this? And what would be difficult about that? And. But people astound me all the time in how they can recalibrate and relearn things and have new ideas and how educating themselves and having the research that I share with them really move and become more flexible about these things where it doesn't have to be that meaning at all. And in fact, their intimacy increases because now they're actually showing up together. They're not just pretending they're a certain sexual being. They're getting to know the sexual being that each of them really are. And that's not something that in Mormonism, we. We teach or we even encourage. We encourage everybody to be a certain sexual being. This is how you should be. And most of us aren't that. And so then, you know, I think both partners feel very inadequate, and I'm sad for that. So I empathize a lot. I'm not here going, well, you need to change your mind about that. That's. That doesn't. That woman usually has that perspective and those feelings for very legitimate reasons, just like he does, you know, and how do we step back and recalibrate? And is there room for different ways of looking at this? And typically, people who work with me are able to negotiate something different.

John Dehlin [00:43:00] And what is a common outcome? What is a common approach? Or when Couples work with you when they settle, when they learn to communicate, when they kind of change their. When they normalize things, when they take the shame out, when they take the guilt out, when they take these assumptions around infidelity out, and they still have each other, they have themselves. And then they have the possibility of masturbation and pornography. I know there's going to be a wide variety of how couples end up, but give us a common scenario for where couples end up with porn and masturbation in their relationship and with their own sex lives. Once they take a healthier approach, how does this often end?

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:43:49] Yeah, so for some people, porn viewing and masturbation is a way to do deal with libido differences. So for some men in particular might say, well, I never want to pressure or make my wife feel like she needs to have sex with me. Or maybe I've tried to initiate and she's not in the mood. So then that's when I go and kind of take care of myself. So if you're needing help with negotiating libido differences, the reframing is that maybe that's an actually legitimate way to deal with a libido or erotic taste difference. And so we make room for that. But it's more in this honest space. And maybe he can approach her and she can be like, yeah, you're right, I'm not in the mood, and I don't want to. And I don't want to feel pressured into that. So now, the fact that you're taking care of yourself isn't from the framing of that you don't love me or want to be with me or don't find me attractive. It's that you're honoring my libido and you're honoring my schedule and the fact that I'm exhausted and that I don't have energy for that tonight. And so that's one way other men or women use those kinds of things more for stress relief. And it doesn't really interfere. That's something I'm asking all the time. At the very beginning, if you didn't know this, would you have been upset with your sex life? And many people say, no, our sex life is great. There's nothing wrong with our sex life. And that's even why it's more confusing. So when I turn to the partner who's using some of these materials, I'm like, well, what's this about for you? Well, yeah, sometimes when I just feel stressed out, you know, I just like to do this for 15 minutes or so, and it doesn't ever interfere with me wanting to have sex with my partner. And so those kinds of couples maybe just make room for that. It doesn't interfere with their sex life. Why can't somebody just like, if I want to go to the coffee shop and have a Starbucks by myself and read the paper, why can't somebody else be, you know, having a 10 to 15 minute solo sex session? It just doesn't, it doesn't interfere with how we come together. So then they reframe.

John Dehlin [00:45:53] If I'm on a business trip and I'm gone several days, and I certainly don't want to be unfaithful, but I need a release. I, you know, there's just an understanding where you, you either do phone sex or you'll take care of yourself. And that's not a big deal. I have to add, in my case, when I came out to Margi and told her that I'd occasionally looked at porn and, or images, her response was, well, I love you. And, you know, and we worked into this. This wasn't the immediate response was sadness and tears because it wasn't, I think she felt like that wasn't, you know, what we had understood. We had never really talked about it, but I think she had just assumed

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:46:37] that wasn't true, never talked about it.

John Dehlin [00:46:39] It was going on. But once we kind of work through those early emotions, the way we worked it out was she said, listen, I'm not going to shame you. I don't think you're awful. I'm not going to tell you you can't do it. But I want you to know that if you would like to make changes in our sex life or increase the frequency, I am more than thrilled and happy to accommodate and to increase our frequency or to try different things because personally, as your wife, if we can have a healthier and happier sex life, which would lead to you feeling the need to look at porn more, I'd rather be doing that with you than have you doing that alone. And so what it led to for us was just a better sex life. It was all uphill. It was just we have sex more often and we have better sex more often and that makes me just less interested in masturbation and porn because I'm very happy with our sex life. And that doesn't need to be everyone's outcome, but that was the outcome with me and Margi and I'm just being open and honest about that.

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:47:47] Yeah. And that's something that can happen. It's just, you know, instead of Sometimes we assume things like, oh my. Especially from this patriarchal position. My wife wouldn't be interested in that kind of sex. Right. Or I don't want to sully my perfect, beautiful wife with doing this kind of sex type act or something. And then they talk about it and she's like, actually, that's super hot. You know, I'd love to try that. But again, we made a lot of assumptions. My only concern with that example is that there are women or men who really don't want to. And I wouldn't want anybody feeling pressured, right? Like, oh, now I have to be interested in these kinds of things so they don't look at porn. And that's why I'm saying you don't have to be. You don't have to be interested. You're not going to be interested in everything the same way as your partner is. That's just the reality of being two different people. And so if somebody has a fetish or an interest or a kink or something that you really don't enjoy, erotic materials can be a wonderful outlet for that without, you know, having to step outside your marriage. Or some people, you know, negotiate non monogamy for those kinds of issues. But that's a fairly, you know, more drastic step and many, many people don't want to do that. So why can't? You know, I read novels, I have novels with. I mean, I remember reading Outlander. Lots of people like Outlander.

John Dehlin [00:49:18] Or watching the series.

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:49:20] Yeah, or watching the series. It's very erotic. And that, that didn't take away from me and my husband. That like, made me more interested in sexuality and I'd actually lean into my husband after watching those episodes or whatever, which is actually what the research shows. The research shows that when people look at arousing materials, it's not that they don't want to be with their partners. They actually want to be with their partners more. They have more arousal and they. Where does that arousal go? Well, oh, you're my partner. I'd like that arousal to go to you. Or if I've watched a movie with like Brad Pitt or somebody that I think is super hot, I don't go and try to find Brad Pitt's number. You know, I'm going home to Andy and saying, hey, let's deal with my sexual energies together. And I'm not thinking about Brad Pitt either when I'm having sex with Andy. It's just, it got me, it got those juices flowing. And that's a lot of times what sexual, explicit Materials do.

John Dehlin [00:50:21] And then also I love that. And I also want to say, in my case, even though I'm, I'm thrilled at Margi's response to my disclosure, technically it's not always going to be the spouse's job to satisfy the other spouse.

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:50:36] Like, that's exactly right.

John Dehlin [00:50:37] There are going to be situations where the spouse just isn't interested or isn't comfortable or, or doesn't want to always be the way that their spouse, you know, achieves their level of frequency that they desire. And so spouses shouldn't be put pressure, shouldn't be pressured to be responsible for their partner having all their sexual needs met if that's not what feels right to them.

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:51:06] That's exactly right. And that's why I think couples that can be like, oh, you know, not tonight. Can you just take care of yourself in the shower or do your own thing? And the other partner's like, oh, no problem, honey. That's a wonderful moment. That's not a rejecting moment. That's a wonderful moment where they've negotiated something differently.

John Dehlin [00:51:29] You even talked about a partner being with their partner while they take care of themselves, haven't you?

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:51:35] Yeah, that sometimes can happen with masturbation. You know, it's like, I'm not really into it or I can't offer you that energy, but I don't mind holding you masturbate next to me, or if I hold you or if I stroke your back while you masturbate or get the sex toy out or, you know, it doesn't. We don't have to be in the same willingness of eroticism to still be relationally willing. Right. And so, and every now and then, leaning into relational willingness does start something. You know, I can't tell you how many times I've been like, yeah, okay, let's have a quickie. And then halfway in, I'm like, pause on the quickie. I'm more into this than I thought I'd be. So return. It's just, you know, I think the give and take and the not feeling like we owe each other, that we own each other is very important in long term marital success. Success with realistic expectations and outlets where we can have some private sexual energy to ourselves and then also share the majority of that with our partner is a really good equation.

Closing Reflections and Resources

John Dehlin [00:52:49] Well, Natasha, it looks like we turned a one hour topic into a three hour topic.

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:52:53] And I could keep going, surprise, surprise.

John Dehlin [00:52:56] And I just want to make a plug for Natasha and for sex therapists. Like, if you're experiencing intimacy challenges in your marriage and all do. If you're going through a midlife crisis, if there's an infidelity, if things just aren't as you want, you would hire a brain surgeon to do brain surgery. You'd hire a cardiologist to do heart surgery. Things like sexuality in a marriage or mixed faith marriages or whatever it is need experts. And so hire Natasha, Hire other therapists from what's the name of your Symmetry Solutions? Go to Mormon. Oh, man, my brain's not working today. Mormon Mental Health Association. Go to Kristen Bennion. Go to any of the licensed sex therapists. Dodson Hodson, what's her name? Kristen Hodson.

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:53:53] Kristen Hodson. Braxton Dutson, Shannon Hickman. Those are all people in Utah and there's several that are undergoing training. Paige Vandersloot, she does excellent work. So I mean there's. And there. Most of those I think are on the Mormon Mental Health Association's directory. I've got several training under me right now at Symmetry Solutions. Lisa Butterworth, Jennifer White, Sarah Hughes Zibawa is about to start. So I mean, there's lots of people that understand the cultural context, are trained or under supervision and training to do this kind of work in effective sex positive ways. Because unfortunately, even in the profession of marriage and family therapy, I realized even though I was very well trained in every other aspect, I felt I had a lot of biases going into sexual issues even outside of Mormonism, just kind of in my training. So I'm very, very pleased that I got my sex therapy certification training, which really forced me to look at things much, much differently.

John Dehlin [00:55:01] Yeah. So get an expert and get well. And again, you know, the bad news is we as Mormons have had a super dysfunctional relationship with sexuality. The good news is we can make it better. And so let's do it. My hard drive is running out of space, so I think we have to end.

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:55:23] All right, well, that's one way to finish things off.

John Dehlin [00:55:28] No? Yeah. Well, Natasha, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom. You're an expert. Tell us again your resources that people can consult.

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:55:39] Mormonsex Info is a great podcast and I have so many things on there about specifically about pornography. If you want to delve more into that Mormon mental health podcast, of course, sex talkwithnatasha.com is where I have lots of webinars on this on lots of different topics. But these, all these topics that we talked about today, natashaparker.org I have a recommendations list there books and things like that that you can look at asec I've linked to that is just the National Organization of Accredited Sex Educators, Counselors and Therapists. Mormon Mental Health association has a great list of providers, many of whom have been trained in sexuality. We have a position statement on MMHA that deals specifically around porn and sex addiction that might be helpful for some of you. Yeah, it's been my passion for so long. I've tried to create so many different things. I wrote a book called Check youk Baggage, which helps you kind of think about these messages that we grew up listening to and how to try to start shifting away from having those things affect you. What else can I think of? That's all this work I've done with you. I mean, we talk about sexuality a lot and pretty much every time I present with you, I'm often another room somewhere talking about sex. So.

John Dehlin [00:57:02] So get help, get support, educate, talk, communicate openly. Good things will come.

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:57:10] Yes, they will come and come.

John Dehlin [00:57:17] Natasha.

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:57:19] Oh, I just have to put in a little something. Keep it fun.

John Dehlin [00:57:24] Thanks to all our listeners today who joined us. Thanks to everyone who supports the Gift of the Mormon Faith Crisis podcast through financial donations. Your donations make this possible. We don't have very many donors and we could really use more support. So if you find this content to be useful or valuable, we would really, really appreciate your Support. Go to MormonFaithCrisis.com Click on the Donate button. 10, 50, 100 bucks a month, whatever you can afford. It would really be useful to helping us be able to sustain and keep this going. Thanks to the Open Stories foundation that makes all this possible. And of course, thanks to Cody Layton who does our audio video production. We Miss Margi. Shout out to Margi. We love you. We hope to see you soon. And also a huge shout out to all our loyal listeners who join us, who make comments, who make suggestions. If any of you have any tips or questions or concerns or, or criticisms or ideas, we'd love you to email us@mormonfaithcrisismail.com, send us messages, whatever you need to do. We would love to make this everything you need it to be. And if you have other topics you want us to explore, we'd love to hear that over the summer. Our frequency is going to be a little bit spotty. Is that right, Natasha?

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:58:50] Probably. Probably. Yeah. At least this month, July, I mean, I think we've been pretty good up till now.

John Dehlin [00:58:56] Yeah. So we're happy with our volume for this year. We're well over 40 episodes and we're certainly less than 40 weeks into the year. So we hope you've enjoyed our volume and our substance. If we miss a week here or there, please don't hold it against us just trying to get our lives done. And honestly, it's hard to do this all the time every week without the support. So if you want to see more of this, if you value it, if you want to pay it forward to other people, please consider supporting us financially.

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:59:31] Yeah. Thank you, John, for that. I think that's a really important message. We can't do this without your support. It's a lot of time and energy on all of our behalfs, which we love offering, but it has to be supported financially as well. So thank you, John.

John Dehlin [00:59:44] All right.

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:59:44] All right, everybody.

John Dehlin [00:59:46] Thank you, everybody.

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:59:47] We'll see you again soon. We missed you, Margi.

John Dehlin [00:59:50] See you guys soon. See you guys in another episode of the Gift of the Mormon Faith Crisis. Take care.

Natasha Helfer Parker [00:59:55] Goodbye.

John Dehlin [01:00:06] Thank you for joining us today on Mormon Stories. If you enjoyed this episode, please help us make more like it by becoming a monthly subscriber at Mormon Stories stories.org. Rabbit Hole an album chronicling the heartaches and rewarding discoveries of her Mormon faith crisis. You can purchase her album on itunes or by visiting mindygledhill.com.

Natasha Helfer Parker [01:00:39] It doesn't matter now it doesn't matter now it's all just poison in disguise

John Dehlin [01:00:56] Teacups full of candy coated poison in the sky.

Transcript © 2026 John P. Dehlin. All rights reserved. Brief quotations are welcome with attribution and a link to mormonstories.org; all other use requires written permission.