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! 

It's taken me a while to realize it, but I was afraid to question because I was afraid of being shunned

 I will forever be ashamed of all the HORRIBLE things the Mormon cult made me believe. I wish I would have seen through the lies earlier.

I have a brother who is very rational. Not really swayed by emotional arguments. He saw through the church's bull shit at a very young age and was treated horribly. One leader told the other kids not to hang out with him. One kid told him, "I don't know how your family loves you".

When we were in high school, my brother told me that Joseph Smith was a polygamist. My response? "Where'd you read that? The Internet??" said with as much disdain as my pompous Mormon butt could muster.

Yes. Yes, he did read that on the Internet. Did that make him wrong? No. Did it make me a brainwashed cult victim who was too afraid to look at non-cult-approved sources? Yes. Yes, it did. I am still ashamed it took me 5 years to leave after that.

But I saw the way my brother was treated. I can only assume that it's a big part of the reason I was afraid to question. Afraid to read things on the evil Internet the way my brother had.

Church culture instilled in me the idea that questioning would bring disdain and shunning.

It hurts to think about it. I hurt for my brother. I hurt for myself. This is abuse. The cult doesn't just ALLOW this horrendous behavior. It ENCOURAGES children and adults to be treated this way.

They discourage questioning and hide the truth to the extent that their law firm, Kirton McConkie, DESTROYS DOCUMENTS related to child sex abuse. They systematically suppress truth.

Joseph Smith questioned and looked for truth, but he's the only one allowed to do that. As a member, it's your job to have faith and never doubt.

It's a disgusting cult.

The Work and the Glory book series depicted Joseph Smith's polygamy as an anti-Mormon lie.

Hey, Mormons! Remember how The Work and the Glory books depict Joseph Smith as DEFINITELY NOT a sexual predator practicing secret polygamy and polyandry and any character who disagreed was an anti-Mormon liar? Guess what? That's a dishonest portrayal of history and those "anti-Mormons" weren't the liars.

This feels really important to me because of how prominently this book series was displayed in Mormon households around me growing up. 

I did a lot of babysitting for Mormon families in the 2000s, and it was always there, right on the family room shelf next to a bunch of other church books. 

My grandma still has her copies, the ones that I borrowed and read one summer during high school.

I didn't bat an eye when I read that Joseph Smith's polygamy was an anti-Mormon lie in the books because I was never taught the truth!

The church lied to me. 

The church knew I was not learning an accurate narrative. They didn't bother to tell the truth. They're only reluctantly doing so now because the Internet has freed people to find information on their own and that's for forcing the church's hand. 

Controlling information by whitewashing, actively lying, and gaslighting members when we complain that we WERE NOT taught this information about very relevant and important church history is one of many reasons I think the church is a cult.  

I'm tired of genuine expressions of pain being labeled as "hate"

It's culty to silence people who talk about why they left the church. People should be able to talk about the ways the church caused them pain and trauma.

This focus on keeping it all "positive" and spreading "peace" is impossible when there is real harm done by the church.

It is not "hate" or "being anti-Mormon" to tell real stories and express real pain!

When you hear a Mormon say that someone is spreading "hate" or being really "anti", that probably means they heard someone talk about real pain caused by the church, but they just don't want to hear it.

For most of us who leave, we realllllly want to be heard! Just to be heard! That's all. We don't have to agree. We don't have to believe the same things.

But so many of us never even get to talk because we are told we are being hateful, that we are deceived, or that we are attacking someone's faith by expressing our own pain... 

The church does real harm, but Mormons will ignore it for the sake of following the prophet.

I'm heartbroken, distressed, and feel emotionally exhausted every time there is a push to try and bring Mormon church abuses to light, but then nothing substantial changes. The church does real harm. It's so frustrating. 😢😢😢

It also makes me feel unsafe.

This kind of thing (the recent focus on the mishandling of sexual abuse by the church) makes me realize how much more important the organization of the church is to Mormons than the actual suffering of human beings. Following the prophet is more important than anything else, even when prophets are wrong and causing irreparable harm.

Prophets can be wrong! It's a fact!

That obedience to an organization is such a huge part of some people's lives that to acknowledge the pain it causes is a bridge too far, and that's terrifying to me.

It's terrifying and culty to see that human suffering has to be dismissed by good people in order to hold their beliefs together.

Can I phone a friend??

 

I recently had a friend make a post about leaving the church and it's making me relive the hell that was trying to leave.

Cults don't let you leave with dignity. That's one of the many reasons why I think Mormonism is a cult.

I should have been free to leave the church with the support of people who love me and who would understand that I did not find the behavior of the "prophets" at all acceptable.

Instead, I was told that I was being influenced by the devil, that I was not trustworthy, that I was a disappointment, that I used to be respected, and on and on about how sad I was making people.

Oh, and that I REALLY shouldn't talk about why I left!

For the answer to the question in the picture, here's a hint: It's the answer you would expect from any man-made religion that matches the normal human patterns that have existed for centuries... Not the one I expected from "the one true church", and one of many reasons why I resigned from Mormonism.