Answer

I Keep Struggling With Masturbation. How Do I Actually Stop?

You have tried to stop, more than once, and it keeps coming back. By now the shame may be worse than the habit, and the cycle of a good stretch, a slip and then a fortnight of not really trying will be familiar. You are not unusual, and you are not disqualified from anything.

Start by separating two things that shame keeps welding together: the feeling and the choice. Sexual feelings are not sinful. They are part of the body Heavenly Father gave you. What He asks is that you learn to govern them, and governing is the right word, because it means something ongoing rather than a switch you find once and never touch again.

Eternal Truths

Your body is a gift you are learning to direct, not an enemy. Paul told the Corinthian Saints that the body is the temple of the Holy Ghost and asked them to glorify God in it (1 Corinthians 6:19-20). Alma put it the other way round: bridle your passions, “that ye may be filled with love” (Alma 38:12). The point of the bridle is what it makes you capable of.

Repentance does not wear out from use. The Lord’s promise is that He who has repented is forgiven, and He remembers the sins no more (Doctrine and Covenants 58:42-43). Elder Dale G. Renlund taught in “Repentance: A Joyful Choice” that the Savior wants to forgive because forgiving is one of His divine attributes, and that He is joyful when we choose to repent. It is the mechanism, not a limited allowance you use up.

Struggling does not mean something is spiritually wrong with you. It means you have a body and a will and they are not yet fully agreed. That is the ordinary human situation, and it is exactly what the Atonement of Jesus Christ is for.

What Can Make This Confusing?

“It is natural and harmless” is persuasive because half of it is true. The feelings are natural. The conclusion does not follow, because plenty of natural capacities are ones we choose when and how to use. The argument works by sliding from “this is normal” to “therefore nothing is at stake”, and the second step stopped being about biology.

Questions to Think About

• When does this reliably happen, and what is going on in the hour before?
• Is my whole plan set to activate at the moment of greatest pressure?
• Is despair after a slip costing me more than the slip did?

What You Can Do

Change one thing that sits earlier in the chain this week. What your phone can reach after eleven at night. What you do with the specific stretch of time when this usually happens. Whether you are sleeping at all. Willpower applied at the last second is the wrong plan; the changes that work are unglamorous and happen well before the moment. If it feels genuinely compulsive, get someone else involved: a bishop where repentance is needed, the Church’s Addiction Recovery Program where the pattern has its own momentum, and a therapist where anxiety, isolation or trauma is doing the driving, which is more often than people expect.

Jesus Christ is not surprised by this and He does not tire of you, and He can give you back both self-control and the ability to look Him in the face.