Is Masturbation a Sin? Mike Frazier Asks the Hard Questions.

Full Transcript:

0:00:00.0 Narrator: Welcome to Improving Intimacy, a podcast to help single and married, Latter-Day Saints strengthen their family connections and marriages. Daniel A. Burgess is the host of Improving Intimacy, Daniel is a Marriage and Family Therapist, father, husband, and author. Here's Daniel on this episode of Improving Intimacy.

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0:00:26.3 Mike Frasier: Alright men, welcome to today's episode. I've got a special guest for us today. This is Daniel Burgess. So he is a family therapist that runs a family therapy, and helps couples and individuals with their marriages, and I met him in his Facebook group, Improving Intimacy, and used to be called Mormon marriages. Now it's called In Latter Day Saint marriages.

0:00:52.7 MF: I complied.

[laughter]

0:00:55.3 MF: So yeah, anything else you want the audience know about you Daniel?

0:01:00.0 DB: That's great, I love that. Yeah, come check it out.

0:01:03.2 MF: Yeah, yeah he does great work. And I've really enjoyed his...

0:01:07.6 DB: Thank you.

0:01:08.6 MF: Yeah, his group and the stuff he's doing. So yeah, so today we're talking about a more sensitive topic, at least in the LDS Community, which is masturbation, and Daniel has done a lot of study about this, a lot of work on it, it was coming into our group, actually, Daniel, that kinda got me thinking about it in a different way. And was really a good journey for me.

0:01:35.9 DB: Wonderful.

0:01:36.8 MF: Actually, so I appreciate your work on that, so I guess what I wanted to start with, and I think this is really the big question on most LDS people's minds, is whether masturbation is actually a sin or not, and when I asked that question, I wanted to look up what sin actually was. And so I think this is a good definition an immoral act that's considered to be a transgression against divine law, meaning there's a law that says, no masturbation. And then when you break that, you are breaking that law. So, yeah. Thoughts on that.

0:02:14.0 DB: That's a great question. It's one that I get quite frequently and to kinda set up the answer here, I just did an interview for my podcast Improving Intimacy for Latter-Day Saint relationships with Kari Ferguson, who wrote the book, The OCD Mormon. And the reason why I bring that up is a big part of our discussion is something that I've seen, definitely in clients who tend to ask this question is rigidity in their thinking around spirituality and sin, and how that negatively affects ironically, maybe even paradoxically, our spirituality, a fabulous book a wonderful person, and we explore those thoughts in deep and I'll reference you to that for further discussion. But in short, I love that definition that I learned at least on my mission was, Anything acting against the will of God is sin, and sin is essentially a guide for us to draw closer to Him, not to sin, to draw closer to Him, but to avoid sin or things that separate us from God, and when we can think about in that context, we can now see self-mastery in a different view. We even talked about transgression, Joseph Fielding Smith says there's a big difference between transgression and sin, transgression is one of the things that we as humans learn to be better at that heavenly Father expects us to make mistakes, that's why the atone is there.

0:03:42.4 DB: Now, to answer that question, is masturbation a sin? I don't wanna sound avoidant of the answer, but it really depends. It really depends on the person. Is this drawing you closer to God? Is this helping you understand your body, is this creating better self-awareness, self-mastery, is it creating peace in your life? If it isn't, then that needs to be explored and understood better, that's the whole purpose of this life is to master our minds and our bodies, and what does that look like? Especially when we're dealing with different biology, and sometimes people