Pornography and Missionaries: Why It's Usually Not an Addiction, and How to Break the Shame Cycle

It happened again last night. He is fourteen months into his mission, a district leader, the elder the newer missionaries look up to. And this morning, while his companion is in the shower, he is sitting on the edge of his bed doing the same math he always does. How many days since the last time. How long since he last sat across from his mission president, and whether he can bring himself to confess again. He has already decided what all of it means. It means he is a fraud. It means every lesson he taught this week was hollow. If the people he is teaching knew the truth about him, they would never believe another word he said.

He is not alone, but he is almost certain that he is. Pornography is one of the most common struggles I see in missionaries and returned missionaries, and too often one of the hardest to talk about. Some struggle with it in the field and finish their missions without anyone ever knowing. Some come home early, at least in part because of it. And many finish honorably, come home, date, marry, and carry it quietly for years afterward, convinced they are the only one. This article is for all three. It is also for the parents, spouses, and leaders who love them and want to know how to help.

Most missionaries who struggle with pornography are not addicted and labeling them that way often makes the struggle harder to overcome. For most, what keeps the pattern going is a cycle of shame and secrecy. Approaches built on acceptance and values, rather than willpower alone, have strong research support, including studies with Latter-day Saints, and the doctrine of the Atonement speaks directly to the shame that drives this cycle.

I want to say up front that I am going to write about this honestly, both as a clinician and as a returned missionary. I will not minimize it. Pornography matters, it has real consequences, and the standards the Church teaches around it are worth keeping. But it's also important to recognize that how we understand this struggle has a great deal to do with whether someone gets out of it.

Why It's Particularly Difficult for Missionaries

Part of what makes this struggle so heavy for missionaries is the context. A missionary is almost never alone. They live, eat, study, and work with a companion around the clock. They sit in regular interviews with leaders. They are, in a very real sense, representing the Savior every hour of the day. In that setting, a slip does not just feel like a personal mistake. It can feel like a betrayal of their companion, their mission president, their family back home, the people they are teaching, and God Himself, all at once. When the stakes feel that high, silence starts to feel like the only safe option. And silence is exactly what allows this struggle to take root and grow.

After the mission, the pressure doesn't go away, it just changes shape. Temple recommend interviews, dating, the expectation to marry, and the unspoken assumption that a returned missionary should have all of this figured out by now can make it feel even harder to talk about than it was in the field.

It's also important to point out something that often gets missed. This is not only a young men's struggle. In my experience, sister missionaries and young women who struggle with pornography often shoulder an extra layer of shame, because nearly every conversation about it is framed as something men deal with. If that's you, you're not an anomaly, and you're not alone either.

Addiction, Compulsion, or Something Else?

The word addiction gets used almost everywhere this topic comes up. It is in lessons, in firesides, in support group names, and in the way many people describe themselves. So it may surprise you to learn that pornography addiction is not an official diagnosis.

When the American Psychiatric Association published the DSM-5, the manual clinicians in the United States use to diagnose mental health conditions, a proposed diagnosis called hypersexual disorder was considered and ultimately rejected. The closest formal diagnosis that exists today comes from the World Health Organization's ICD-11, which added compulsive sexual behavior disorder (CSBD) (Kraus et al., 2018). What's important to note is that it wasn't placed with the addictions, but with the impulse control disorders, alongside conditions like kleptomania and intermittent explosive disorder.

To be fair, researchers are still debating this. Some argue that the compulsive form works enough like other addictions that it should be classified as one, and a few brain studies of that smaller group do show some similarities (Lichte et al., 2025). But that debate is about the small group with a true disorder, not most of the people who struggle with this.

To put this plainly, CSBD describes a persistent pattern of failing to control intense, repetitive sexual urges, where the behavior becomes a central focus of a person's life to the point of neglecting health, relationships, or responsibilities. It includes repeated, unsuccessful efforts to cut back, continuing despite serious consequences or even when the behavior brings little satisfaction anymore, and significant distress or impairment that holds over an extended period of time.

And then the ICD-11 adds a sentence I think every missionary, parent, and leader should read twice. It states that distress that comes entirely from moral judgments and disapproval about one's sexual urges or behavior is not, by itself, enough to make the diagnosis.

Why the Label Matters So Much

This might sound like an argument over semantics, but it isn't. The words we use shape how a person sees themselves, what they believe is possible, and what kind of help they go looking for.

Addiction language tends to carry an identity with it. I am an addict. I am powerless. This is who I am and who I will always be. For someone who truly has a compulsive pattern, understanding that it is bigger than willpower can be helpful. But for someone whose struggle is not actually compulsive, taking on that identity can convince them that change is out of reach, and that belief tends to become self-fulfilling.

The research backs this up. A study by Brigham Young University researchers of 686 unmarried young adults found that roughly 45 percent labeled themselves as addicted to pornography, while only about 10 to 15 percent showed a genuinely compulsive, out-of-control pattern of use (Leonhardt, Willoughby, & Young-Petersen, 2018). In other words, roughly three people believed they were addicted for every one whose behavior actually looked like it.

The Church has recognized this same gap. Its guidance for leaders cautions against labeling people as addicts and notes that most people who use pornography, especially youth, should not be considered addicted, because self-labeling can weaken their efforts to change (Counseling Resources). The Church's resource guide written directly for missionaries goes further, stating plainly that most missionaries who struggle with pornography are not addicted, and that labeling them that way incorrectly can deepen their shame and make overcoming it harder (Missionary Resource Guide: Addressing Pornography).

It is important to pause here and acknowledge that saying most people are not addicted does not mean pornography is not a problem, and it does not mean no one is genuinely compulsive. For a smaller group of people, this does meet the level of a disorder and calls for professional treatment. What it does mean is that for most people, the problem is different than they have been told. And when you are working on the wrong aspect of a problem, you tend to use the wrong tools.

Why It Hits Harder in Faithful Communities

One of the most consistent findings in this area of research is something called moral incongruence, the experience of your behavior being out of line with your deeply held beliefs. Researchers have built a model showing that a person's sense of being addicted to pornography can come from two different places: actual difficulty controlling the behavior, or the painful gap between what they believe and what they are doing (Grubbs, Perry, Wilt, & Reid, 2019). Very often, it is a mix of both. But for people of faith, the second pathway tends to carry far more weight than most of us realize.

The same BYU study I mentioned above found that more religious young adults who viewed pornography were more likely to keep it secret and more likely to hold back from dating relationships because they believed they were addicted. Another study found that religiousness was connected to feeling addicted largely through shame, and that this effect was strongest in people who also leaned toward scrupulosity, the religious form of OCD (De Jong & Cook, 2021). If that word sounds familiar, I have written about it in depth in Scrupulosity in Missionaries, and the two patterns overlap more often than people expect.

What I have found in my own work is that the people who care the most about living the gospel are often the ones who suffer the most in this area, and it is not because they are the most out of control. It is because the conflict between who they want to be and their actions cuts so deep.

However, it's important to point out what this research does not say. It does not say your faith is the problem, and it does not say the standards are the problem. Other research has found that general difficulty coping with stress and how often someone views pornography both matter too, and that the direct effect of religiosity on its own is fairly small (Lewczuk et al., 2020). Some findings even suggest faith can be protective for wellbeing overall. The problem is not the devotion. The problem is what shame does when it gets attached to that devotion.

The Behavior Is Not the Identity

Elder Dallin H. Oaks offered a framework I find really helpful here, describing four different levels of involvement with pornography: inadvertent exposure, occasional use, intensive use, and compulsive use (Oaks, 2015). He taught that inadvertent exposure, when a person turns away from it, is not a sin at all, and he cautioned against labeling even intensive or habitual use as addiction. Most missionaries I have worked with who struggle fall somewhere in the middle two levels, not the last one.

That framework matters because it separates the behavior from the person. There is a real difference between guilt and shame. Guilt says, I did something wrong, while shame says, I am something wrong. Guilt points toward change and toward the Savior. Shame points toward failure and hiding. I have written more about that distinction in Did Coming Home Early Ruin God's Plan for You?, and it applies here just as much.

You can take a behavior seriously, repent of it, and work hard to change it, without deciding that it is who you are or that it makes you unworthy of happiness and the Savior's love.

What Happens in the Brain

A lot of people have heard that pornography "rewires your brain" or that it affects the brain the same way cocaine does. I hear this from parents fairly often. Some of it has truth to it, but most of it goes further than the research actually does.

Here is what we do know. The brain's reward system is very good at learning. When something brings relief or pleasure, the brain starts to notice what was happening right before it, like being alone, being tired late at night, having a phone in your hand, or coming off a hard day. After enough repetition, those things by themselves can set off a strong urge. This is a big part of why urges can seem to show up out of nowhere, even though they usually follow a pretty predictable pattern once you start looking for it.

Researchers describe this as something that can change over time. Early on, most people turn to pornography because it makes them feel better for a little while, usually as an escape from stress, boredom, or loneliness. For a smaller group, repeated use can move into something that feels more automatic, more like "I have to" than "I want to." In one brain imaging study of men seeking treatment, their brains reacted more strongly than other men's while they were anticipating sexual content, but not while they were actually viewing it (Gola et al., 2017). The craving had grown, but the enjoyment hadn't kept up with it. I see the same thing in the people I work with, many of whom tell me they don't even enjoy it anymore, or as much.

I also want to note the limits of this research. Most of these studies are small, and the results don't always agree with each other (Lichte et al., 2025). The study most often cited for the claim that pornography shrinks the brain found a link between heavier use and less gray matter in part of the reward system, but the researchers themselves said they couldn't tell whether pornography caused that or whether people whose brains were already that way were more drawn to it (Kühn & Gallinat, 2014).

Where the research is more consistent is around frequency and control. People who view more often are more likely to struggle with it (Chen et al., 2022). But when researchers looked at who actually ends up seeking treatment, the amount of use didn't predict it very well. What did was loss of control and the negative impact it was having on their lives (Gola, Lewczuk, & Skorko, 2016). That fits with the levels Elder Oaks described. And because these patterns are learned, they can also be changed, which is where the tools in the rest of this article come in.

The Shame Cycle, Step by Step

If you have been caught in this pattern, the steps below will probably feel uncomfortably familiar. Seeing them laid out is often the first time people realize they are dealing with a cycle and not just a character flaw.

1. A trigger. Very often it has nothing to do with sex at all. Loneliness, stress, rejection, boredom, exhaustion, a discouraging day in the field, or a hard conversation back home. Research on compulsive sexual behavior consistently finds that people often turn to it as a way to cope with difficult emotions like sadness, shame, loneliness, boredom, or anger (Gola et al., 2022).
2. An urge. The mind reaches for something that will make the painful feeling go away, fast.
3. The behavior. For a short time, it works. The painful feeling is numbed or pushed aside.
4. Shame. Then it floods in. I am disgusting. I am a fraud. God must be so disappointed in me. I will never change.
5. Secrecy and isolation. Shame says hide it. Don't tell your companion, your mission president, your parents, your spouse. Pull back from the people who could actually help.
6. More pain. Now the person is lonelier, more stressed, and feeling worse about themselves than before. Which is exactly the kind of trigger that started the whole thing.

Shame does not stop the cycle. It fuels it. Shame is itself one of the most painful feelings a person can carry, and it becomes one more thing the behavior is being used to escape. In essence, the problem becomes the solution. The person turns to the relief pornography brings to medicate the very feelings of depression, shame, and failure that the pornography use created in the first place.

How Others Respond Can Keep the Cycle Going

There is another piece of this cycle that doesn't get talked about nearly enough, and it has less to do with the person who is struggling than with the people around them. Secrecy doesn't come out of nowhere. Most missionaries have learned long before they ever say a word what they believe will happen if they do. When pornography is talked about as an unbeatable addiction, as one of the most egregious sins a person can commit, or as something that permanently ruins a mission, a temple marriage, or a future, the message a struggling young person hears is simple: if anyone finds out, my life is over. When that is the message, hiding starts to make a lot of sense.

I see this play out in families, in wards, in dating relationships, and in marriages. A parent who reacts with horror. A companion who suddenly treats them differently. Someone they are dating who ends things on the spot. A lesson that talks about people who struggle with this as if they were beyond saving. These reactions rarely come from a bad place. Most come from fear, from love, and from simply not knowing what else to do. But each one can reinforce the belief that this is too shameful to ever bring into the light, and that belief keeps the cycle turning.

I need to say something here honestly, and carefully, because I have deep respect for the men who serve as bishops and mission presidents. They are volunteers carrying an enormous load, and many of them handle this with real compassion. Some of the most healing experiences I have heard about in this area came from a bishop or mission president who responded with love, patience, and hope. But leaders vary. They are human, and most have no formal training in this area. Some have not yet had the chance to learn the things covered in this article and understandably fall back on the more fearful messages they grew up hearing. When that happens, a missionary who finally found the courage to be honest can walk away feeling more ashamed, more hopeless, and less likely to ever come forward again. If that has happened to you, please hear this: one hard conversation does not define how God sees you. It is not a reason to stop reaching out. It is a reason to keep reaching, whether that is back to your leader, to another trusted adult, to a licensed therapist, or to a life coach.

If you are a parent, a spouse, or a leader reading this, how you respond in that first moment may be one of the biggest factors in whether someone keeps hiding or starts healing. The Church's own guidance for leaders encourages expressing love and gratitude to the person for their strength in coming forward, regardless of the degree of the problem (Counseling Resources: Pornography Use). A calm, loving response keeps that door open. Fear, disgust, or catastrophizing tends to slam it shut.

Why Willpower and Confession Alone Often Don't Break It

Most missionaries fight this struggle the same way they approached everything else on their missions. Work harder, pray harder, white-knuckle it. Count the days. That effort comes from a good place, but it often doesn't work, and there are good reasons why.

Willpower alone usually takes the form of trying not to think about it, pushing every urge and every thought out of the mind as fast as it shows up. Decades of research on thought suppression show that trying hard not to think about something tends to make that thought come back more often and with more force (Abramowitz, Tolin, & Street, 2001). Streak counting can add to this. Forty days of success followed by one slip becomes, I am back to zero, which feeds right back into the shame that drives the next slip.

Confession is a different matter. It is an important part of repentance, and it matters. The Church's guidance for missionaries encourages them to pray for courage and be honest with their mission president, who has been called to help. But when confession becomes the only tool, it can quietly become part of the cycle itself: a brief wave of relief, followed by the same trigger, the same urge, and the same slip. Confession settles the spiritual accounting. It does not, by itself, teach anyone a new way to handle the loneliness at eleven o'clock at night. That is where a different kind of tool comes in.

A Different Approach: What ACT Offers

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, or ACT, is a research-based approach that I have written about before in Post-Mission Depression. Rather than trying to argue with urges or eliminate them, ACT helps a person change their relationship to those urges and thoughts and then move toward what they actually value.

Here are five pieces of that approach that I've found most useful.

1. Make Room for the Urge Instead of Fighting It

An urge is not a command. It is a wave. It builds, it peaks, and if you do not feed it or fight it, it passes, usually much faster than people expect. Some call this urge surfing. The goal is not to never have an urge again. That is an impossible standard, and chasing it is part of what keeps people stuck. The goal is learning that you can feel an urge fully and still choose what you do next.

2. The Ten-Minute Rule

One of the most useful tools I have found sounds a little backward at first. When an urge hits, give yourself permission to act on it, but only after ten minutes. And during those ten minutes, you have to do something else, somewhere else.

Get up and change where you are. Leave the bedroom. Go for a walk, get a drink of water, step outside, text or call someone, shoot some hoops, do a set of pushups. Change your surroundings and your circumstances, even for a few minutes.

Why does this work? Part of it is what we just talked about: urges are waves, and most of them crest and start to fall well within ten minutes. But part of it is the permission itself. When the only two options in your mind are total victory or total failure right now, the pressure builds until something gives. Telling yourself, I can decide in ten minutes, takes that all-or-nothing fight off the table. You are not white-knuckling against the urge. You are simply pausing and stepping away from it. In my experience, by the time those ten minutes are up, the urge has usually changed. It is weaker, more manageable, and you are in a different place, literally and mentally, to make a choice that lines up with who you want to be. And even on the days it doesn't go perfectly, those ten minutes teach you something important: the urge does not get to set the timeline. Only you do.

3. Unhook From the Thoughts

When the shame thoughts show up, I am a fraud, I will never change, God is done with me, they feel like facts. But there is a real difference between the sentence "I am a failure" and the sentence "I am having the thought that I am a failure." The second version creates a little space between you and the thought, and that space is where your ability to choose comes back. You do not have to argue with the thought or prove it wrong. You just have to stop treating it like a revelation from God Himself.

4. Know What You're Moving Toward

"Stop viewing pornography" is a goal about what you are running from. It is hard to build a life on running from something. Values give you something to run toward. What kind of companion do you want to be? What kind of husband or wife, father or mother, friend, or disciple? When the answer to that question gets clear and personal, it becomes a much stronger motivator than fear or shame ever will be. One exercise I have found helpful for identifying these core values is what ACT calls the eulogy exercise. Imagine attending your own funeral and listening to the people you love talk about how you lived your life. What would you most want them to say about you? Then identify the values behind those words, and start living by them.

5. Take Small, Committed Actions

Values only matter once they turn into action, and small actions count. Texting a friend when you feel the loneliness building. Keeping your phone out of your bedroom at night. And when a slip happens, treating it as information rather than as proof of who you are. What was the trigger? What did I actually need in that moment? What will I try next time? A slip is not a return to zero. It's something you can learn from, and the growth you have made does not disappear just because you slipped up.

You Are Not Outside the Reach of the Atonement

I want to speak now to the part of this struggle that no study can fully address. Many missionaries and returned missionaries who struggle with pornography come to believe, somewhere deep down, that they have put themselves outside of God's reach. That they have used up their chances. That the Savior's grace is for other people, people who have not done what they have done, or have not done it as many times.

That belief is false, and the Church itself says so directly. Its resource guide for missionaries describes shame as one of the adversary's most effective tools and teaches that if you ever feel worthless or that you can never change, those feelings do not come from God (Missionary Resource Guide). The voice telling you that you are beyond hope is not the voice of the Spirit.

Elder Jeffrey R. Holland taught that no matter how far we feel we have traveled or how many mistakes we feel we have made, it is not possible to sink lower than "the infinite light of Christ's Atonement shines" (Holland, 2012). Elder Dale G. Renlund taught that God is far more interested in who we are and "who we are becoming than about who we once were," and that what He cares about is that we keep on trying (Renlund, 2015).

What "After All We Can Do" Really Means

Many of us grew up reading 2 Nephi 25:23, "it is by grace that we are saved, after all we can do," as a kind of spiritual job description. Do everything right first and then grace makes up the difference. For someone struggling with pornography, that reading is crushing, because they know they haven't done all they can do. They slipped again last week.

But President Dieter F. Uchtdorf taught that we need to understand that "after" does not equal "because" (Uchtdorf, 2015). And the Book of Mormon itself tells us what "all we can do" actually means. The Anti-Nephi-Lehies, people who described themselves as having been "the most lost of all mankind," explained that it had been all they could do to repent of their sins and let God take the guilt from their hearts (Alma 24:10-11). Not flawless performance, just simple repentance.

Jacob makes the order even clearer:

We are saved only through grace. What comes before it is reconciliation, turning our will back toward God's, and reconciliation itself is made possible through the Atonement of Jesus Christ. The scriptures describe it as submitting ourselves to God, confessing, and forgiving one another. It is a direction of the heart, not a finish line we have to cross first.

So all we can do is keep repenting and keep turning back toward God. Grace does the saving. It does not wait for you to finish repenting. It meets you while you are repenting.

Can I Still Feel the Spirit?

This is one of the most common and most painful questions I hear. The companionship of the Holy Ghost is connected to worthiness, but worthiness in the gospel has never meant perfection. King Benjamin described the Spirit withdrawing from those who withdraw themselves from it and come out in open rebellion against God (Mosiah 2:36-37). That is not a description of someone who is struggling, slipping, and trying again. That is a description of a heart that has stopped caring and stopped turning.

As long as you are sincerely working at repenting and reconciling yourself to God, you are doing all you can do, and the Spirit does not abandon you in the middle of that work, even through setbacks. Think about what you feel after a slip. The ache. The desire to be better. The pull to pray even when you feel like you have no right to. The wish to go to your bishop even though you are terrified. That is not evidence that the Spirit is gone. That is evidence that the Spirit is still with you, still pulling you home.

Shame tells you to hide from God until you have fixed yourself. The gospel of Jesus Christ tells you to come to Him so that He can help you. Those are two very different messages, and only one of them is true.

When to Involve a Bishop, a Therapist, or Both

Your bishop, or your mission president if you are serving, is the right person for the ecclesiastical side of this: repentance, worthiness, and spiritual support. The Church's missionary guidance also makes a point I love, that working with a therapist does not mean you are not good enough or that your problem is extreme. Everyone needs help at times.

It is time to involve a licensed therapist, ideally one who understands both compulsive sexual behavior and faith, if any of the following are true:

1. You have made many sincere, serious attempts to stop or cut back and have not been able to.
2. The behavior is taking up more and more of your time or attention or is escalating.
3. It is causing you to neglect school, work, sleep, relationships, or responsibilities.
4. You keep going back to it despite serious consequences, or even when it no longer brings any real satisfaction.
5. You are dealing with depression, anxiety, OCD, or scrupulosity that is long-standing, severe, or was there before this struggle began, or with trauma or a history of abuse.
6. You are having thoughts of hopelessness or of hurting yourself. If that is you right now, please call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, today.

For many people, the most effective path involves both, a bishop for the spiritual side and a therapist for the clinical side, working at the same time.

Where Coaching Fits

I want to be clear about an important line here. Everything I have written in this article comes from my training and more than 25 years as a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist. But Returning Stronger is a coaching practice, not a therapy practice, and when I work with someone through Returning Stronger, I do so in a coaching capacity only. Coaching does not diagnose or treat mental health conditions.

That said, it does not mean coaching is off the table for anyone who is feeling anxious or down. The distinction that matters is the nature of what someone is experiencing. It is completely normal for a person caught in this cycle to feel discouraged, anxious, or low, and when those feelings are situational, a natural response to the struggle itself rather than something long-standing, coaching can be a very appropriate fit. What points toward a licensed therapist is when depression or anxiety is persistent, severe, interfering with daily life, or was present long before this struggle began, or when trauma, OCD, or a pattern that meets the level of compulsive sexual behavior disorder is part of the picture.

I have found that coaching can be a valuable source of support in this area, either alongside other care or on its own when the struggle does not rise to a clinical level. Here is where it tends to help most:

1. Goals built around values. Not just "stop," but what you are building instead, and what the next small, concrete step toward it looks like this week.
2. Accountability without surveillance. A consistent person in your corner who is not your bishop, your parents, or your spouse, someone whose only job is to help you move forward, not to judge where you have been.
3. The divine worth conversation. Separating who you are from what you have done is rarely a one-time realization. For most people, it has to be revisited again and again until it starts to feel true. Having someone who will keep having that conversation with you matters.
4. Building a life with fewer empty spaces. Structure, purpose, connection, and direction after the mission leave less room for the loneliness and boredom that so often start the cycle.

Coaching also does not carry the same stigma many people attach to therapy. There is less focus on what is wrong and more on moving forward. Sessions are online, so there is no office, no waiting room, and no chance of running into someone you know. Just honest conversation from wherever you feel most comfortable.

A Final Word

If you are the elder sitting on the edge of his bed, or the sister who has never told a single person, or the returned missionary who has been carrying this for years, I want you to hear this. You are not a fraud. You are not beyond help. And you are not the only one who struggles with this.

You are a disciple of Christ who is struggling with something hard, in a world that makes it easier than ever to stumble. The way out is rarely more shame and more white-knuckling. It is honesty, the right kind of help, small steps in the direction of what you value, and a Savior whose grace reaches exactly where you are standing right now.

This is not the end of your story. It may just be the part where you stop hiding and start healing. If any part of this felt like it was written about you, a free 30-minute discovery call is a good, private place to start talking through what comes next.