Love yourself as Christ loves you. Not as the institution has taught you to love yourself—conditionally, provisionally, always keeping one eye on the gap between who you are and who you are supposed to be. Love yourself the way Christ does: completely, presently, without reservation.
”And he shall go forth, suffering pains and afflictions and temptations of every kind; and this that the word might be fulfilled which saith he will take upon him the pains and the sicknesses of his people.”
In the traditional recovery framework, a “change of heart” means becoming willing to let God remove your character defects. For a gay Latter-day Saint man, the “change of heart” is radically different. You are not asking God to change your heart away from who you are. You are asking God to change your heart back—back to the state it was in before shame distorted it, before self-hatred took root, before the institution taught you that the most natural part of your being was the most dangerous.
This is perhaps the most emotionally complex step in this program, because it requires you to simultaneously hold two truths: first, that the damage is real—the anxiety, the depression, the dissociation, the hypervigilance, the self-destructive patterns that so many gay Latter-day Saints develop as survival mechanisms—and second, that the damage is not you. The damage was done to you. And the Christ who suffered pains and afflictions and sicknesses of every kind is uniquely qualified to heal it, because He has already borne it.
Alma teaches that the Savior took upon Himself not only the sins of the world, but the pains, the sicknesses, and the infirmities of His people. This was not just about guilt. It was about everything: the loneliness of the closeted teenager in a Utah ward who lies awake at night bargaining with God. The devastation of the returned missionary who thought obedience would cure him. The grief of the divorced father who lost his marriage because the institution told him the marriage would fix him. The slow erosion of self-worth that comes from decades of being told that the deepest part of you is the worst part of you. Christ took all of it. Not so that He could judge you for it, but so that He could stand beside you in it and say: I know. I understand. And I am here.
Becoming “entirely ready” means reaching the point where you are willing to let the healing happen. This sounds simple, but it is not. Many gay Latter-day Saint men have developed a complicated relationship with their wounds. The shame has become so familiar that releasing it feels like losing a part of yourself. The self-punishment has become so habitual that the idea of not hating yourself feels almost disloyal to the faith. The performance has become so ingrained that the prospect of authenticity is genuinely frightening. Being entirely ready means being willing to let all of that go—the familiar pain, the comfortable self-rejection, the identity you built around being broken—and to trust that what remains, when the damage is removed, is not nothing, but everything.
What remains is you. The real you. The you that existed before the shame arrived. The you that God knew in the premortal existence, the you He sent to earth with specific gifts and a specific capacity to love, the you who has been trying to claw back to the surface through decades of suppression. That person is not a shadow or a compromise. That person is a son of God in full, radiant, undiminished form. And He is waiting for you to let Him out.
What are the specific wounds that shame has inflicted on you? Name them. Anxiety? Depression? Difficulty trusting? Inability to accept love? Self-destructive behavior? Be specific about the damage, because specificity is the beginning of healing.
In what ways has your pain become part of your identity? What would it mean to let go of the familiar suffering? What are you afraid of finding underneath?
Write a prayer asking God not to change your orientation, but to heal the damage that the attempt to change it has caused. Be specific about what healing would look like for you.
I am ready to let God heal the damage that shame has done. My wounds are not my identity. I am more than what was done to me, and the real me—the whole me—is waiting to emerge.
In Latter-day Saint theology, the “mighty change of heart” described by Alma is one of the most powerful concepts in all of scripture. King Benjamin’s people experienced it. Alma the Younger experienced it. Enos experienced it. In each case, the change was not about becoming a different person. It was about becoming more fully the person God always intended. The change of heart is not subtraction. It is revelation—the removal of what obscures, so that what was always true can finally be seen.
For you, the mighty change of heart may look like this: waking up one morning and realizing that the self-hatred is gone. Not suppressed, not managed, not white-knuckled into submission—gone. Replaced by something that feels foreign at first because you have never experienced it: self-acceptance. Not arrogance. Not defiance. Just the quiet, steady knowledge that you are who you are, and that who you are is good.
It may look like praying without pretending. Imagine a prayer in which you do not code-switch, do not use euphemisms, do not perform the version of yourself that you think God wants to hear. Imagine a prayer in which you simply talk to your Father as you are—gay, faithful, imperfect, striving, human—and feel His love wash over you without a single caveat. That is the change of heart. That is what restoration feels like.
It may look like weeping—not the tears of shame you have known, but the tears of relief. The relief of finally being seen. The relief of setting down a burden you have carried since childhood. The relief of discovering that the God you have loved your whole life loves you back, exactly as you are, and has been trying to tell you so for decades.
”And he shall go forth, suffering pains and afflictions and temptations of every kind; and this that the word might be fulfilled which saith he will take upon him the pains and the sicknesses of his people. And he will take upon him death, that he may loose the bands of death which bind his people; and he will take upon him their infirmities, that his bowels may be filled with mercy, according to the flesh, that he may know according to the flesh how to succor his people according to their infirmities.”
Read those verses again, slowly. He took upon Him your pains. Your sicknesses. Your infirmities. Not to judge you for them, but to understand them—so that His bowels might be filled with mercy. The Christ who stands ready to heal you is not a distant, clinical God reviewing your case file. He is a Savior who has already felt everything you have felt—the loneliness, the shame, the fear, the grief of being told that the truest part of you is the worst part of you. He felt it so He could succor you. Let Him.
Psychologist Kristin Neff (2003, 2011) identifies three components of self-compassion: self-kindness (versus self-judgment), common humanity (versus isolation), and mindfulness (versus over-identification with suffering). For LGBTQ individuals raised in non-affirming religious environments, all three components are systematically undermined: self-judgment is framed as righteous humility, isolation is enforced through stigma, and over-identification with suffering is encouraged through the narrative that same-sex orientation is a “cross to bear.”
The AFFIRM intervention (Craig et al., 2021) demonstrates that cognitive restructuring—identifying and challenging internalized negative beliefs about one’s identity—significantly reduces depression and improves coping among LGBTQ individuals. In a faith context, this becomes what might be called theological restructuring: examining whether the beliefs that produce shame are actually supported by scripture, or whether they are institutional overlays that scripture does not require.
The second great commandment—”Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” (Matthew 22:39)—contains a presupposition that is almost never taught: it assumes you love yourself. It uses self-love as the standard from which neighbor-love is measured. Self-love is not the opposite of humility. It is the precondition for every other act of love Christ commands. The pride the scriptures warn against—as Ezra Taft Benson taught—is the pride that sets one’s will against God’s, that looks down on others, that refuses correction. Self-love for a gay believer is not setting one’s will against God. It is aligning with God’s declaration that His creation is good.