When the Church Leaves the Body Last: Sex, Intimacy, and Healing From Purity Culture as a Couple

I'd been working with Enore and Michael for about three months before either of them ever brought up sex. It wasn't that I hadn't asked, but neither of them had felt safe enough to discuss it. We'd worked through parenting challenges (so obviously they had had sex) and on skills for healthy conflict.

During one session, I noticed Enore had turned bright red, so I asked, "Is there something you're wanting to say?"

I almost couldn't make it out when she finally said it. "We want to talk about sex."

They'd told me they both grew up in Arkansas, in religious families, so I wasn't surprised. What she said next did surprise me. "He doesn't want to anymore."

Michael was crimson, looking down at his shoes.

"It's not that I don't want to…" he started, then stalled.

I waited, and he continued. "I just feel so bad for hurting her, so I apologize, and she cries, and then we never talk about it."

If you grew up in purity culture, you may have left it behind years ago only to find its beliefs waiting for you in bed.

Purity culture refers to the teachings, widespread in evangelical and conservative Christian communities from the 1990s onward, that make sexual abstinence before marriage the measure of a person's worth, especially a young woman's. The impact of shame and the minimizing of normal desire on intimacy lasts because those teachings were stored as fear. You are still bracing in your nervous system, even though your mind has updated.

Imagine the alphabet. You learned it as a kid, through hours of practice, repetition, and singing the song.

Imagine now if I told you, "Hey, that alphabet you learned, just forget it. It was wrong, it's not the real alphabet."

You might believe me, especially if you'd done the reading and research. But the learning would still be there, underneath. Every time you saw a piece of writing, your brain would try to apply those old letters and symbols.

Unlearning purity culture in the body is similar. Even if your mind has outgrown those beliefs, your sexuality developed under them. You trained your natural responses of libido, arousal, and desire to behave in certain ways. Fear got wired in alongside turn-on. Shame with arousal.

How I relatE

I did not grow up in evangelical Christianity, but in a very liberal, even cozy, Methodist youth experience. There was no hell, no sin, no evil. When I speak of my religious upbringing, it is generally with warm regard and gratitude for having my spirituality met as a young person. I was taught integrity and ethics rather than hatred or body shame. For years I would have told you my faith had almost no impact on my sexuality.

Then I remember one afternoon at youth group, and I'm less sure. It's also the memory that helps me most in relating to clients whose sexuality and intimacy have been shaped by purity culture, even after they've left.

At a youth group event, the leaders took a kid out to the next room while the rest of us waited, not knowing what was happening. Each time they returned, they brought back the person who had just left, who then chose the next person to go with them. Both then left the room.

I was eagerly awaiting my turn. I had high trust in our youth leaders. The energy in the room felt heightened, like something big was happening. Finally, Matt M. chose me. I was happy and excited, since I had a little crush on him.

When we got to the next room, all the other kids were waiting in a circle. The first one started a kiss on the cheek, which was passed along the circle. I was thrilled. Matt was going to kiss me!

But when the kiss got to me, it turned into a slap. You read that right. Matt slapped me.

And everyone laughed.

I was then led back to the first room to choose my victim. And you know that when I got that kiss, I transformed it right into a slap.

Why?

To teach us that our desire is not to be trusted. It's the only reason I can work out now, 40 years later. Don't trust your excitement, don't trust his desire, and when it comes time to pass the kiss along, you slap like you were slapped.

Over the years, a startling number of former purity culture kids have shown up in my office, wondering why sex and intimacy are still challenging, even after leaving the church.

Some grew up Mormon, others evangelical or fundamentalist, but the impact of religion on sexuality is strikingly similar. They are out now. They have done the reading, the deconstructing, the long nights of arguing with a God many no longer believe in.

​What they have not been able to do is enjoy each other without some old alarm going off. What follows is for them, and for you, if their story sounds familiar.

What Is Purity Culture, and Why Does It Follow You?

Purity culture is a set of teachings about sex, gender, and virtue that told young people their bodies were dangerous, their desire was a threat, and their future marriage depended on staying "pure" until the wedding. It follows people out because it was taught to your body through ritual, fear, and repetition, long before you were old enough to question it.

If you were raised in it, I'm sure you remember the props. The silver rings, the pledge cards, and all the strange teachings like the chewed piece of gum, or the glass of water ruined by a single drop of food coloring. I've heard the stories from my clients: everything that touches you spoils you, and there is no coming back.

The rules fell hardest on my female clients. Modesty codes made young women responsible for the thoughts of the boys around them, which meant a girl's body became something to manage on behalf of other people. Boys absorbed their own version, where their desire was a beast to be battled daily and every failure confirmed they were rotten and perverse.

My clients often thought about leaving for a long time before they did, and leaving happens in the mind first. Bodies takes longer. A queer friend of mine left his Southern town and evangelical family for Harvard, surrounded himself with people who celebrated him, and still struggled for years to accept his own sexuality. His mind had left long before his body got the news.

Kids need to belong in order to be safe. So it makes sense that your body learned the rules, and you grew around them. And now that you are grown, those survival strategies are still at work, even though your mind has changed.

What Purity Culture Taught Your Body

Purity culture taught your body to treat arousal as danger. Years of monitoring your thoughts, suppressing the flickers of desire, and bracing against shame trained your nervous system to respond to sexual feelings with vigilance, contraction, or shutdown, and those responses keep firing long after the beliefs behind them are gone.

Shame has a physiology. Heat rises in the face, the gaze drops, the chest caves slightly as if to protect the heart, and people often describe a dropping or hollow feeling in their stomach. Neuroscience has a phrase for how patterns like these take hold, drawn from the work of psychologist Donald Hebb: neurons that fire together, wire together.

A child who feels a shame sequence every time a crush crosses their mind will, over enough years, wire desire and shame together tightly. When my clients describe how sex feels for them now, they often use similar words: bracing, holding, waiting for something bad to happen, watching themselves from the ceiling.

Sex educator Emily Nagoski popularized what researchers John Bancroft and Erick Janssen at the Kinsey Institute call the dual control model of arousal, a system with an accelerator and a brake. The accelerator responds to everything that turns you on. The brake responds to everything that signals threat, including stress, fear, and the anticipation of judgment. Purity culture spent years pressing the brake to the floor and calling it holy. Many survivors have perfectly functional accelerators and a brake so sensitive that a partner's hand on their hip can set it off.

I've seen women who've faked orgasms for 25 years tell their devastated husbands. I've seen men who have suppressed their own sexuality, because "good" men don't have desires, especially toward their wives. I've seen a husband tell his wife that she needed to want him or else. I've seen queer people struggle to feel their relationships are legitimate, afraid to tell their families. I've seen women leave long, painful marriages to men only to discover they are queer. I've watched men struggle to articulate any emotional needs, even as they're drowning in them. Vaginismus. Erectile dysfunction. Inability to know what you want. Sexual aversion. Anhedonia. All of these are impacts on your body from being told, on repeat, that feeling what is normal to feel was bad, wrong, and going to send you to hell.

Some survivors also experience what the literature calls arousal non-concordance, where the body shows signs of arousal while the person feels nothing, or feels afraid. For someone raised to believe desire was sinful, a body responding without the mind's permission can feel like proof. Others dissociate during sex. Freezing, going numb, or leaving are the nervous system's oldest protections, and for many survivors they were the only protections available.
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Psychologist Marlene Winell coined the term religious trauma syndrome (RTS) to describe the cluster of effects many people experience after leaving authoritarian religion, including anxiety, depression, identity confusion, and difficulty with pleasure. You do not need a diagnosis. If this is you, you can understand that what your body is doing is what it was trained to do. And I am here to tell you that training can be revised.

"Religious trauma can be compared to betrayal trauma because of the trust placed in authoritarian communities and religious leaders which causes harm to individuals. Betrayal trauma theory also acknowledges the power of shattered assumptions to cause trauma. With RTS, individuals are not only experiencing betrayal from family, religious community, and trusted faith leaders, they are also experiencing a shattered faith." ~Marlene Winell

The Wedding Night Myth

The central promise of purity culture turned out to be a bait and switch. Say no to everything for years, you were told, and on your wedding night desire would arrive as an ecstatic, holy yes. For most couples it never arrived, because bodies just don't work like that. 

One couple I worked with married young in the church, and told me their wedding night and the months that followed were a mix of dark comedy and heartbreak. Two virgins, knowing nothing about arousal or lube, in the dark, trying to have sex that was painful, both of them ending up in tears.

For many women, the body's guarding shows up as pain: the involuntary tightening of pelvic floor muscles clinicians call vaginismus, or a general sense that penetration is something to be endured. For many men, the long war against their own desire leaves behind performance anxiety, erectile trouble, or a compulsive relationship with porn followed by crushing shame.

When a couple sits in my office describing years of painful, avoided, or dutiful sex, one or both partners almost always believes they are the broken one. Neither of them is broken. Their nervous systems were trained to brace against pleasure, and then they were placed in a bed together and told to enjoy it. If avoidance has become the pattern, my writing on sexual aversion goes deeper into why bodies learn to avoid touch and how to heal it.

How Purity Culture Shapes Relationships Long After You Leave

Purity culture shapes relationships through the habits it installed around desire, communication, gender, and power. Long after leaving the religious institution, couples often struggle with mismatched desire, sex that feels like obligation, trouble asking for what they want, and lingering scripts about how sex is supposed to go.

Desire discrepancy shows up in nearly every couple I see, but with purity culture survivors it carries extra charge. The partner with less desire often suspects their low libido is damage, proof that something in them was ruined back in the day. The partner with more desire can feel like the living embodiment of every warning they heard about lust. Both end up ashamed, and shame is a terrible aphrodisiac.

Duty sex is another inheritance. Many women were taught, explicitly, that providing sex is a wife's obligation and a defense against her husband's straying. Even after rejecting that teaching (many of my clients are feminist!), I've worked with many women who find themselves saying yes out of habit, then feeling their bodies go distant and resentful. A partner who senses the distance can feel rejected even while technically being accepted.

Couples often have a challenging time discussing sex, either lacking the language or not feeling safe enough to name what feels good and what doesn't. It's hard to ask for what you want if you don't have the words, or if they get caught in your throat.
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Consent was also never really taught. You weren't taught to consider what you wanted, and if now was the moment you wanted it. People raised this way often have little practice noticing their own yes and no in real time, let alone voicing them. But if you can't say "no," you can't trust your "yes."

Queer and Trans Survivors of Purity Culture

Queer and trans survivors received a double message from purity culture: sex is dangerous, and your particular desires are an abomination. Healing often means unlearning both the general shame about sex and the specific shame about who they love and who they are.

Many queer survivors came out of the closet and out of the church in the same few years, sometimes in the same conversation. They were taught that their bodies were a battlefield twice over. Some spent years in programs or prayer groups designed to change them. Others hid so thoroughly they barely knew their own desire until adulthood.

​When two queer survivors partner, they may carry overlapping wounds that amplify each other. When a queer survivor partners with someone who grew up secular, the secular partner can struggle to understand the triggers around intimacy.

Queer and trans couples deserve a practitioner who needs no education on the basics of their lives and relationships. My LGBTQ+ Couples Work begins from that assumption.

Why Purity Culture Survivors Choose to Work With a Queer, Non-Binary Practitioner

Why do they come to me, a queer non-binary practitioner? Initially, I couldn't figure it out but then I realized: 

I think it's because they can see I've done a version of this work in my own life. Queerness helped me reclaim my desire and learn to trust it. I've deconstructed sexuality and gender in real ways, in my own body and relationships, and survivors seem to recognize someone who has walked a similar road out.

Purity culture handed my clients a script for their bodies written by someone else, complete with assigned roles for men and women, rules about who desires whom, and a single approved ending. Living as queer and non-binary has meant walking out of a script written for my body by someone else, too. Survivors seem to sense, correctly, that I will not flinch at anything they bring into the room.

They also know I will not hand them a new set of rules. Leaving fundamentalism and immediately adopting a different dogma, whether about sex, spirituality, or how liberated they should feel by now, is a common trap. I was in a ritual once designed for sexual freedom, and someone invoked freedom from the pressure to be sexually liberated. What survivors want most is permission to find out what is true for them, at their own pace, with someone who trusts they can.

What Healing From Purity Culture Looks Like for Couples

When I work with two people who have both come out of purity culture, we have to teach both nervous systems that intimacy is safe, and we have to do so slowly enough that both bodies can trust it. Somatic work is an ideal tool here, because it focuses on building safety before arousal, building healthy boundaries in the couple, and helping clients learn what consent actually feels like. There is often grief and anger to work through as well, as people reclaim their sexuality.

Most couples arrive hoping they can use their brains to recover, but they already have enough information. If they could have thought their way out of it, they would have. What needs to happen is addressing the body-level threat many of them experience. Slowness is our friend. Capacity is built through repeated successful experiences.

Instead of pushing through, my clients learn to pause, name what is happening, and come back. Each pause is a small revision of the old training.

Learning to touch for enjoyment, without a goal, is often a turning point. Sex has been obligation, pressure, a finish line… but now it becomes about embodiment and curiosity. Couples are frequently surprised by how much desire appears once nothing is required of it.

Reclaiming no is essential too. Survivors often need to practice refusing, out loud and without apology, before their yes can mean anything. Partners learn to receive a no without collapsing into rejection, which rebuilds trust in both directions. Then comes language: slowly assembling a shared vocabulary for sex that belongs to the two of them, neither clinical nor sinful, sometimes very funny. I had a couple name their dynamic "Bob" once. As in, "Oh no, Bob's in the room again!" 

And there is grief and anger, which I welcome into the room. Every client I've ever had with sexual or religious trauma has felt some version of grief over lost time. Survivors were robbed of years they could have spent discovering their bodies with curiosity. Some were robbed of their first experiences of sex. Rage at the institutions that did that is healthy, and so is mourning. Couples who make space for both tend to find that their intimacy softens.

Reclaiming the Sacred

Many survivors want to keep something reverent about sex without the fundamentalism that surrounded it. Reclaiming the sacred means discovering that awe, devotion, and meaning can live in your body and in partnership, on your own terms.
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Some couples leave religion and want nothing to do with spirituality ever again, and that is entirely theirs to choose. Others find, somewhere in the healing, that they still long for a sense of the holy. The body they were taught to distrust can become a remarkable place for wonder. Sometimes sex becomes a form of prayer and connection.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can purity culture cause sexual dysfunction?
Yes. Many people raised in purity culture experience pain during sex, low desire, difficulty with arousal or orgasm, erectile problems, or dissociation. Years of pairing desire with shame train the nervous system to brace against sexual feeling, and those responses can persist long after someone rejects their beliefs.
Is religious trauma real?
Religious trauma describes the lasting psychological and physical effects of harmful religious experiences, particularly in authoritarian, high-control, or fear-based communities. Psychologist Marlene Winell coined the term religious trauma syndrome to describe symptoms like anxiety, shame, identity confusion, and difficulty with pleasure. Many survivors recognize these effects in their bodies and relationships.
Why do I still feel guilty after sex even though I left the church?
Guilt after sex often lives in your nervous system rather than in your conscious belief. If shame was paired with desire throughout childhood and adolescence, your body can keep producing that shame automatically. Somatic approaches help your body update gradually through safe, repeated experiences of pleasure without threat.
How does purity culture affect marriage?
Purity culture can leave couples with mismatched desire, sex that feels like duty, difficulty communicating needs, painful or avoided intercourse, and lingering gender scripts about who initiates and decides. Couples who married young inside the church often struggle most, since they entered marriage with fear and little accurate information.
How long does it take to heal from purity culture?
Healing timelines vary widely. Many people notice meaningful shifts within months of focused somatic or relational work, while deeper patterns may take longer to settle. Pacing matters more than speed, since pushing the nervous system too quickly can reinforce the very bracing healing aims to soften.
Can couples therapy help with religious trauma and intimacy?
Couples work can help significantly, especially approaches that include the body. Working together allows partners to understand each other's responses, build new experiences of safe touch, and develop shared language for desire. Intensive formats offer extended time for the nervous system to settle and for lasting change to begin.

The Long Way Home

Near the end of my time working with Enore and Michael, I remember them sitting facing each other, knees almost touching. I had asked them to simply look at each other, gently, and let themselves be seen.
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She kept laughing and glancing away, and he kept waiting for her to come back, and she did, every time, a little longer. At one point he reached out and rested his fingertips on her wrist, and I watched her body decide, in real time, whether to brace. Her shoulders rose, and then, like snow sliding off a roof in the first warm sun of spring, they let go.

"Huh," she said.

He did not apologize.

If you and your partner have left purity culture behind and still find it waiting in bed with you, you may need some focused and supported time to help both of your bodies catch up to what your minds already know. You can begin with a free connection call.