Why I'm Still Unpacking

I picked the name "Unpacking Mormonism" for my blog about leaving Mormonism because being raised in the church is a sunk cost in my life that I wish I could leave behind (and have tried to do just that), but I realized that there are hardly any things in my life that the church didn't try to take over and control.

I actually CAN'T just ignore my upbringing as I work on moving forward.

I wish I could.

But to understand where I am at and how to improve, it helps to understand how I got here.

So that means I'm left doing a lot of "unpacking".

I end up still spending a lot of time reflecting on current emotional issues and tracing those feelings back to their roots.

Unsurprisingly, most of my emotional hang-ups are related to coping mechanisms or teachings from growing up Mormon.

Some of it also has to do with generational trauma, but even those issues are tightly tied to my Mormon ancestry.

My angry-Exmormoness ebbs and flows with the experiences I have in my life and how closely or not my emotions dip into areas related to my upbringing in the church.

I definitely am my own person. By that, I mean, I don't feel like I'm beholden to my past or my experiences. They don't dictate who I get to be.

I'm responsible for my life going forward.

I get to control my own choices.

But my emotions are also very real and not as easy for me to control or understand.

Sometimes things will hit me out of the blue that cripple me in unexpected ways and make it hard for me to live the life I want.

The biggest example of this is how it feels for me to be around my Mormon family.

Cognitively, I want to be able to make the choice to spend time around them as long as they respect my boundaries and treat me in healthy ways.

Emotionally, though, things aren't that simple.

Sometimes my emotions just aren't ready for certain situations.

For example, Christmas has been an off-and-on thing for me since I left Mormonism.

Some years things are fine, and other years, I'm left unpacking deep fears or sadness, or anger because of a single Christmas song.

I wish that didn't happen.

I wish I could just move on and choose to be unaffected by my past, but it doesn't work that way.

The best I can do is love myself, be patient, and keep on unpacking.

To Nelson and all of the Mormon church leaders and lawyers: You get zero credit for being against abuse. ZERO.

No one is FOR abuse!! You need to apologize for the role you played in abuse continuing when it could have been stopped if YOU had reported it correctly. APOLOGIZE. 

I've forgotten about General Conference for the past few years, but this year, this October 2022 conference is really getting to me. They are showing themselves to be the heartless cult that they are.

My heart beaks for all abuse victims. They don't deserve what happens to them. They deserve for the organizations that fail them to be held accountable.

We like to think we're so rational and logical, but I think leaving a cult is really all about emotion.

Hear me out: Everyone leaves because of emotion. The emotional costs of staying have to be higher than the emotional costs of leaving before our brains acknowledge the logical stuff. That's why we all had "shelves". We couldn't immediately leave any time we came across something that felt wrong.

Our brains are always doing this cost-benefit analysis, and most of the time as members we just couldn't afford to acknowledge the problems, no matter how immoral or illogical.

So many people are still trapped because of this! The emotional damage that could be done if they leave can be very high.

Maybe you are a child who has to fit in to please your parents. 

Maybe you will lose your spouse and children if you stop believing. 

Maybe you are just someone who really needs to feel like you have a social group to belong to. All of us humans need that feeling!

Maybe it's all of these emotional costs and more! 

Whatever it is, the cult had trapped many of us emotionally to the point that even the most ridiculous, fantastical, immoral, and illogical things ended up on our shelves.

They create a system that traps others still today because the emotional costs of leaving are just way too high.

So that leads me to the next logical step in this: what is it that finally puts so many of us over the edge eventually? What is it that finally makes the emotional costs of staying outweigh the very high emotional costs of leaving?

What do you guys think? What feelings did you have that eventually led you to be able to face the cognitive dissonance and leave?

Personally, I've realized that becoming financially independent from my parents really helped me leave the church. Once I had that freedom, it was like the "costs of leaving" side of the equation instantly shrunk because I didn't have to be afraid of losing my parents' support. I was finally able to acknowledge the "costs of staying" side and decide that those costs were too high to stay.

They still cut me off... One day after I told them I thought it was a cult I woke up to find that the cell phone they were paying for just didn't work anymore. Heh. Whatever. 

It's been like 7 years now, and we're finally rebuilding those bridges in healthy, loving ways that don't involve the conditional-love teachings of a cult. 

So glad I left!