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This is the fifth and final episode in a series we’ve been doing on how our sexuality got shaped, and how to start thinking about it differently. If you haven’t listened to the first four, I really do suggest going back. Episode 428 started the series with the hundred-year story — the broader architecture of LDS sexual culture and how it got built, decade by decade, into the nervous systems of the people sitting in our wards today. Episodes 429 and 430 went deeper into what that history did specifically — to her and to him. Then last week in episode 431, we looked at one specific teaching that came out of that architecture, the idea that sexual sin is the sin next to murder, where that teaching originated, why it doesn’t hold up under scrutiny, and the very real damage it has done.

So far I’ve gotten great feedback on this series.  Some people found it so helpful and validating.  Others have really struggled and have shared the trauma that they have experienced and think I didn’t do enough or I made excuses for the Church, and I understand their perspective. I’ve tried to hold a delicate balance by sharing the problems without villainizing the church because I know that those of you who hold a more orthodox view wouldn’t be ok with that.  But I also want to acknowledge the real harm that these teaching have created in many of you, and I am truly sorry for what you have experienced.  Please forgive me as I am trying to create that balance and it does not invalidate the real trauma that you have experienced. 

Today’s episode is different from the previous four. Today we’re not looking backward. We’re looking at a framework that can help you move forward. Because understanding where your conditioning came from is only useful if it gives you somewhere to go. And this is that somewhere.

Most of us grew up with a very specific picture of what the natural man is. We were taught that the natural man is an enemy to God, and somewhere along the way, through lessons, firesides, and well-meaning talks, that teaching got fused with sexuality. The natural man became code for sexual desire. Our bodies wanted things, and that wanting was the problem. That wanting was what we were supposed to overcome.

I want to spend some time today pulling that apart. Because I don’t think that interpretation is accurate, and I think it has done a significant amount of damage to the sexual lives of married couples, especially in religious communities.

What Mosiah 3:19 Actually Says

The scripture is Mosiah 3:19. King Benjamin teaches that “the natural man is an enemy to God, and has been from the fall of Adam, and will be, forever and ever, unless he yields to the enticings of the Holy Spirit, and putteth off the natural man and becometh a saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord.”

Notice what he says the path forward is: yielding to the Spirit. Becoming a saint. The atonement of Christ. This is a call toward transformation, toward becoming more aligned with who God wants us to be. What it doesn’t say is that your body is the problem, or that desire is the problem, or that your sexuality is what needs to be put off.

So if it isn’t our sexuality that makes us natural men and women, what is it?

The Natural Man Is Ego

Neuroscience has shown us that we operate from two very different places inside ourselves. There’s the lower brain — the amygdala, the limbic system — and this part of your brain is ancient. It’s wired for survival. Its entire job is to protect you, keep you safe, help you avoid pain, and move you toward pleasure. It operates fast, often below conscious awareness, and it doesn’t have a lot of patience for nuance.

The natural man lives here. It’s ego. It’s the part of you that is constantly monitoring how you look, how you’re coming across, whether you’re being perceived the way you want to be perceived. It self-protects before it connects. It manages its image before it tells the truth. It guards itself before it gives anything. When the lower brain is running things, everything becomes about you — your comfort, your image, your protection. And that is the opposite of what genuine connection requires.

Now when I say ego, I want to be clear about what I mean — because most of us don’t think of ourselves as having an ego problem. We picture ego as arrogance, as someone who thinks they’re better than everyone else. But ego is much quieter than that most of the time. Ego is also the part of you that digs in when your spouse brings something hard up and your first instinct is to defend yourself rather than get curious. It’s the part that says I’m fine, this is just how I am, I don’t need to change. It’s the part that finds a reason why the feedback isn’t valid, or why your spouse is being unreasonable, rather than sitting with the possibility that they might be onto something.

Ego is self-protection. It’s the resistance to growth. It’s staying comfortable at the expense of becoming.

And here’s one that I think is especially relevant for people in religious communities: we’ve been taught that if something doesn’t feel good, it probably isn’t from the Spirit. That discomfort is a signal to back away. And while there’s some truth in that — the Spirit generally isn’t chaotic or coercive — it’s also been wildly misapplied. Because sometimes the discomfort you feel is not the Spirit warning you away. It’s your ego resisting change. It’s your lower brain interpreting growth as threat. Growing is uncomfortable. Becoming is uncomfortable. Yielding to the Spirit and letting go of the defended version of yourself is deeply uncomfortable. That discomfort isn’t a red flag. It’s often a sign you’re moving in exactly the right direction. The ego will tell you otherwise. That’s kind of its whole job.

Then there’s the higher brain — the prefrontal cortex. This is what sets us apart from every other creature on earth. Animals operate almost entirely from that lower survival brain. They react, they protect, they seek pleasure and avoid pain, and that’s about the extent of it. But we have the capacity to pause. To reflect. To ask ourselves what we actually value and then choose accordingly. The prefrontal cortex is where our agency lives. It’s where integrity comes from. It’s where we can look at our own patterns and say, that’s not who I want to be — and then actually do something about it.

The problem is that most of us aren’t using it very much. The lower brain is faster and louder, and it’s been running the show for so long that we just follow its lead without realizing we’re doing it. We react instead of respond. We protect instead of connect. We drift through our marriages on autopilot, making the same choices we made yesterday because we never stopped to question them.

And when we’re not using our agency — when we’re just being carried along by ego and habit and fear — we’re not listening to the Spirit either. The Spirit operates in that higher space. It speaks to our capacity for reflection and choice, not to our survival instincts. So when we’re stuck in ego, we’re effectively tuning it out.

But it goes deeper than that. The Spirit doesn’t just ask us to make better choices. It asks us to yield. To surrender. To let go of control, to be humble, to stop managing our image and just be honest about who we are and where we are. And that is the exact opposite of what ego does. Ego exists to protect itself. Surrendering feels like annihilation to the ego. So it doesn’t just fail to yield to the Spirit — it actively resists it. Every prompting toward humility, every nudge toward vulnerability, every invitation to choose your spouse over your self-protection — the ego pushes back against all of it. Because yielding means the ego is no longer in charge.

That’s why we become an enemy to God. Not because we have bodies. Not because we feel desire. But because we let our ego run the show and call it living — and in doing so, we resist the very process of becoming. God’s entire design for us is progression, transformation, becoming more like them. The ego wants to stay exactly as it is, defended and in control. Those two things cannot coexist. You’re either yielding to the Spirit and becoming, or you’re yielding to ego and staying stuck. King Benjamin wasn’t being dramatic. He was being precise.

And here’s what that costs us. Real connection — the kind that actually nourishes a marriage and a soul — can only come from conscious choice. It requires showing up on purpose, being present on purpose, choosing vulnerability and generosity on purpose. You can’t stumble into that from the lower brain. And so when we’re running on autopilot, we end up disconnected from our spouse and disconnected from God at the same time, because both of those relationships require the same thing: that we actually show up and choose.

None of this is about your sexuality. Your desire for your spouse is not the natural man. When we conflate the two, we end up with married couples actively trying to overcome their sexual desire — which disconnects them from each other and from one of the most profound forms of connection available to them.

The Natural Man in Your Marriage

A lot of us thought that the natural man would disappear once you get married. You wouldn’t have to fight those urges and that desire anymore.  But it doesn’t disappear.  It doesn’t even get quieter. It just changes costume. And in marriage, it shows up in ways that can slowly erode the kind of sexual and emotional connection both of you actually want.

Finn and Lily had been married for about six years when they came to talk with me. Finn described himself as the higher-desire spouse, and what he meant was that he wanted sex more often than Lily did. But as we talked, what became clear was that his desire had gotten tangled up with something else entirely. When Lily said no, or when she was tired, or distracted, or not in the mood, Finn would pull away. Sometimes he’d get quiet. Sometimes he’d make a comment. And then the next time, he’d approach again, but there was this undercurrent of pressure, like he was trying to make up for what he’d missed. Lily could feel it. And the more she felt it, the more she pulled back.

Finn genuinely wanted connection with his wife. But his ego had taken over the process. When Lily said no, what got activated wasn’t just disappointment — it was his image of himself as a desirable husband, his sense of whether he was wanted, whether he was enough. He was seeking pleasure and avoiding the pain of rejection in ways that had nothing to do with what he valued, and everything to do with protecting his ego from feeling inadequate.

On the other side of that same dynamic was Lily. She had absorbed everything we’ve been talking about these last three weeks. The idea that desire was something to manage rather than experience. That taking her faith seriously meant keeping her sexuality at arm’s length. That being a good woman and being a sexually present wife were somehow incompatible. So even though she loved Finn, her default was to stay guarded.

That is also the natural man. It’s ego operating from a different angle — instead of protecting an image of being desirable, Lily was protecting an image of being righteous. Her ego had decided that a good, faithful woman keeps her sexuality carefully managed. Self-protection dressed up as spirituality. And it keeps her just as stuck as Finn’s version kept him.

Jake and Dana had a similar pattern playing out, though it looked different on the surface. Dana genuinely wanted a good marriage. But in the bedroom, she felt disconnected from herself. She knew sex was allowed now, even good, but the felt sense of that hadn’t caught up to the intellectual knowledge. She was managing, rather than participating. And Jake didn’t know how to reach her in that space.

What was actually happening was ego, just a quieter version of it. Dana had spent years building an identity around being a spiritually serious woman. That identity had kept her safe — it gave her a sense of who she was and how she was supposed to show up. And somewhere in the construction of that identity, her sexuality had gotten left out. It didn’t fit the image. So her ego had quietly cornered it off.

In their marriage, this looked like Dana going through the motions while staying emotionally absent. She wasn’t refusing sex. She was just never really there for it. She’d check out, wait for it to be over, feel vaguely guilty that she wasn’t more present, and then move on. Jake could feel the absence even when she was physically there. And Dana, for her part, had convinced herself this was just how she was — that maybe she wasn’t a very sexual person, that this was just her cross to bear.

That’s the natural man at work. Just the slow, steady management of self — the ego protecting its carefully constructed image of who Dana was supposed to be, at the expense of who she could be in her marriage.

Both of these patterns have something in common. They’re not really about desire. They’re about what happens when ego makes all the decisions around vulnerability, around sex, around showing up for your spouse.

Let’s talk about what it actually looks like to move out of that ego-driven survival mode, because that’s the invitation in Mosiah 3:19. Not to shut down your sexuality, but to bring your whole self — your higher brain, your values, your genuine desire for connection — into your sexual relationship.

Starting with Awareness

The first move is almost always awareness. You can’t change what you haven’t noticed yet. And most of us are running these patterns completely on autopilot.

For Finn, awareness meant starting to notice what was actually happening inside him when Lily said no. When he sat with it honestly, he realized he wasn’t just disappointed about missing out on sex. He was afraid she didn’t want him. He was afraid something was wrong with the marriage. He was afraid he wasn’t enough. The sex had become a way of measuring his worth, a way of managing anxiety he hadn’t fully identified. And Lily wasn’t saying no to him — she was saying no to that particular pressure, which felt entirely different from a genuine invitation.

That’s ego at work. And the moment Finn could see it, really see it, everything started to shift.

For Lily, awareness looked different. She had to start noticing the moments when she was monitoring herself — when she felt a flicker of desire and immediately questioned it, or felt pleasure and immediately pulled back from it. That internal surveillance was so automatic she’d stopped registering it as a choice. Becoming aware of it meant she could begin to ask: where is that coming from? And is that aligned with who I want to be?

Awareness creates a pause. And in that pause, there’s something incredibly important: the possibility of choice.

For Dana, awareness was slower to come — and quieter when it did. It started when Jake said something simple during a Zoom call with me. He said he didn’t feel like she was actually there, even when she was. Dana’s first instinct was to defend herself. But something made her sit with it instead. And when she did, she realized he was right. She had been physically present and emotionally checked out for years. She had called it being low-desire. What it actually was, was self-protection. Her ego had kept her safely behind a wall, and she had never questioned it because it didn’t feel like a wall. It just felt like her.

Moving Into Agency

Agency is one of the central doctrines of the restoration. We believe that the ability to choose, to act rather than be acted upon, is fundamental to who we are as children of God. That capacity lives in the prefrontal cortex — and using it is exactly what King Benjamin was talking about.

And yet in our sexual relationships, so many of us are acting from old patterns, old wounds, and old beliefs we never consciously chose.

Moving into agency means asking: given who I am and what I value — not what my church or my family handed me, but what I’ve examined and chosen for myself — what do I want to choose here? Sometimes those values look the same once you’ve evaluated them. Sometimes they look different. But the key is that they’re yours, not just inherited.

And here’s the part nobody really warns you about: moving into agency is uncomfortable. The lower brain exists to protect you from threat, and choosing something different than your default pattern feels like a threat. Your nervous system will push back. There will be anxiety. The only way through it is to step into that anxiety anyway — to feel it and choose differently regardless. That’s not a sign something is wrong. That’s what change actually feels like.

For Finn, that meant learning to approach Lily differently. Instead of approaching her from that place of accumulated need and barely-concealed anxiety, he started slowing down. He started being genuinely curious about her day, about how she was feeling, about what was going on for her — without any of that being a setup for a request. He was choosing to show up as the husband he wanted to be, rather than the anxious ego-driven version who was just trying to manage his own discomfort.

It wasn’t easy at first. The old patterns were well-worn. But he kept choosing. And Lily noticed.

For Dana, agency meant giving herself permission, which is not as simple as it sounds. She had been told, in a thousand explicit and implicit ways, that her desire needed permission from her spirituality. Agency here meant recognizing that her sexuality and her faith are not in competition. That a God who designed her body, who created sex within marriage, who said it was very good — that God is not threatened by her desire. She could choose to believe that. She could choose to let that belief shape how she showed up in her marriage with Jake.

Alignment: When Your Values and Your Actions Match

This is where it comes together. Alignment is when what you’re doing in your marriage reflects what you believe and who you want to be. It’s you operating from your values instead of from self-protection and ego.

The natural man creates misalignment. Finn’s ego-driven pattern of pressure and withdrawal wasn’t aligned with his values. He valued his wife, he valued genuine connection, he valued being a loving husband. But his behavior wasn’t reflecting that. Lily’s self-protective withdrawal wasn’t aligned with her deepest desire for closeness with Finn, or with her actual beliefs about what marriage could be.

Alignment doesn’t mean everything is easy or that desire is always synchronized. It means when you approach your spouse, there’s an honesty and a generosity to it that doesn’t exist when ego is running things.

Finn and Lily have done a lot of work over the past year. They’re still navigating things — all couples are — but the quality of their connection has changed. Lily can feel when Finn is present with her versus when anxiety is driving him. And Finn has gotten much better at noticing that for himself, so he can redirect before it shapes how he shows up. Some nights he approaches her with genuine warmth and curiosity and she’s in. Some nights she’s exhausted and she says so, and he can receive that without the old spiral starting up. They’re not perfect. But they’re operating from a different place.

Dana told me recently that the shift for her was realizing that her sexuality isn’t something she has to earn permission for or protect herself from. It’s part of her. And bringing that part into her marriage with Jake isn’t the natural man. It’s the opposite. It’s showing up whole.

The Real Reframe

Your sexuality, approached with awareness and agency and alignment with your values, is not what the natural man looks like. It’s what transcending the natural man looks like.

The natural man is the version of you who is so busy managing how you’re perceived that you never show up. Who protects their ego instead of choosing their spouse. Who seeks pleasure or avoids pain in ways that serve the self but starve the relationship. Someone who goes through the motions of marriage without ever being genuinely present in it.

Your sexuality — your real, embodied, connected desire for your spouse — that is part of how you become who God designed you to be. It’s not something to overcome. It’s something to bring into integrity with the rest of your values.

Becoming a saint doesn’t mean becoming someone without desire. It means becoming someone who brings their whole self, including their desire, into alignment with love, integrity, and genuine connection.

Over these five episodes, we’ve looked at where the conditioning came from, how one specific teaching embedded it deeper, and now a framework for what to do with all of it. If you take nothing else from the series, take this: your sexuality isn’t the problem. It never was. The natural man was never about your body, or your desire, or the fact that you want your spouse. It’s about ego. It’s about the self-protective, image-managing, defended version of yourself that keeps you from being fully present in your marriage.

Setting that down — choosing your spouse over your self-protection, stepping into the discomfort of growth, yielding to the Spirit instead of your survival instincts — that is exactly the work King Benjamin was pointing to. And when you bring your whole self into your marriage, that is what transcending the natural man looks like.

That changes everything.

Alright my friends, that’s all I have for you today. Remember, love is a journey, not a destination. Stay committed, stay passionate, and stay connected. I’ll see you next week…ba-bye.