Epilogue — On Sex, Instinct, and the Work Still to Come

This post belongs to a wider body of work that is being released in stages. It can be read on its own, or as part of the whole. The Prologue offers a natural point of entry for sequential reading.

There is one subject this book has deliberately not carried at its centre.

That subject is sex.

Not because it is peripheral, but because it cannot be approached in isolation.

In practice, sex belongs within a triad that has quietly governed human life across cultures and epochs: Death, Sex, and Money. These are not merely social issues or psychological themes. They are existential pressures — points at which instinct, law, culture, and meaning converge.

In modern clinical language, these pressures have been fragmented and redistributed across diagnostic categories, behavioural labels, and treatment pathways. In older traditions, they were understood relationally. What mattered was not the presence of death, sex, or money, but a person’s relationship to them.

It is within this relational field that conscience individuates.

Conscience is not born fully formed. It emerges within law, learns through law, and, at certain historical moments, is required to challenge law. The recent legal changes around homosexuality are one such moment — not the abandonment of moral order, but the visible sign of conscience arriving where it had previously been excluded.

DRT approaches these developments neither as pathology nor as ideology. It understands them as expressions of the same underlying question: how does instinct come into right relationship with being human?

At the heart of this question is not biology alone, nor identity alone, but the singular reality of The Human, being a person.

Whatever their name, whatever their history, whatever their configuration of instinct, the person is the only place where biology can be united with ontology — where flesh, meaning, responsibility, and dignity can meet without violence.

Without this singular focus, discussions of sex, gender, death, and money inevitably collapse into abstraction, ideology, or control. With it, even the most contested territories can be approached relationally, lawfully, and with care.

In the language of recovery, sex belongs to the instinctual life. Alongside security and social instincts, it forms one of the three great energetic forces that shape behaviour long before thought, belief, or identity enter the picture.

The Basic Text of Alcoholics Anonymous is unusually clear on this point. It states that relapse is not a possibility but an inevitability when the sex instinct is not brought into harmony with the social and security instincts. This is not moral teaching. It is phenomenological observation.

DRT takes this observation seriously.

Sex, in this framework, is not an identity. It is not an ideology. It is an energy — powerful, creative, destabilising, and essential. When rightly oriented, it serves life. When mis-governed, it recruits behaviour to manage pressures that conscience has not yet learned to hold.

The present moment places unprecedented pressure on this instinct. Young people are encountering sexual imagery before conscience is born, before social instinct has matured, and before security has stabilised. Pornography has become an unregulated educator. Gender has become a symbolic battleground. Language itself is being asked to carry pressures it was never designed to hold alone.

In this climate, distress around sex and gender is often treated either as pathology or as ideology. DRT proposes a third position: to understand these struggles as signals of instinctual pressure seeking orientation.

This does not deny the lived reality of trans and gender-fluid experience. Nor does it collapse the sex instinct into identity claims that cannot bear its weight. It asks a different question altogether: how is instinct being governed, and by what?

From a clinical perspective — including formation in sex-therapy–informed practice — it is increasingly clear that attempts to stabilise sexual pressure solely through affirmation, suppression, or medication leave the deeper question untouched.

That question is orientation.

Without the education and stabilisation of conscience described in this book, instinct will always seek expression through extremes. Addiction, compulsion, dissociation, and fragmentation are not moral failures. They are signals that energy has lost its proper governance.

For this reason, the material touched on here cannot be concluded in an epilogue. It requires further books, further papers, and careful dialogue across clinical, spiritual, and cultural domains.

This book has had a more limited task: to restore the architecture within which such conversations can occur without coercion, collapse, or harm.

If The Holy Con has done its work, it has not told the reader what to think about sex, gender, or identity. It has restored the conditions in which these realities can be approached with humility, responsibility, and care.

The rest belongs to future work — and to a culture willing to listen rather than shout.