I'm reading a book called Leaving the Fold.

Religious Trauma Syndrome...

I never thought there was a word for this. The further I read, the more it seems that this thing, or combination of things, called RTS can be beat.

She describes a personality subset within those who leave religion of people who are passionate, for whom compassion and devotion and loyalty lead them to take the religion more seriously and stick around for abuse longer before they jettison their general spiritual experience for the poison it is. They feel the wounds deeper, they bleed longer, and they take longer to heal.

Fear, shame, anxiety, learned helplessness, conditioned thought stopping, oddly bottled-up emotions, and stunted psychological growth compared to others your age...

I have the inattentive type of ADHD –– a major clue to a childhood I am only beginning to make sense of.

(I come here to RfM and talk about how bad I got it, and I know many of you read my stuff and smack your foreheads because of how early in my life I was able to figure all this stuff out.

It doesn't mean it doesn't hurt, and it doesn't mean I don't need the soundboard to know I'm not crazy.)

The ADHD is no person's or institution's fault. My passionate and compulsive nature is no one's fault either. I was born to trouble as sparks fly upwards.

And yet, I was kept from help I needed by a house that thought the medical establishment was the Great Satan 2.0. Besides all the churches out there that were deliberately set up by Satan to distract the world from how fudging fantabulous it is to be a Mormon, the second great gospel message was homeopathic remedies and other multilevel marketing scams.

The burden of proof be damned: anecdotal evidence trumps all the "science" and "facts," which are actually lies crafted by evil and conspiring men in the last days to enslave us and to make money.

The health care law that bears the AntiChrist’s name –– as it is belovingly labeled after another great satan, the muslim in the white house, by good deluded folks like my family –– is the culmination of evil that signifies that the Second Coming is right around the corner. This feigned misery is thus turned into a foreshadowing of ecstatic joy just around the corner (which is why I'm convinced so many people double down and oppose something which is not the greatest, but isn't the worst either, and has passed all constitutional channels and yet they still oppose it –– you see, jesus is coming, folks).

I was born smack dab in the middle of medical lunacy, raised in it, and shouldn't be surprised that I bought it all too for a while. My dad (not a doctor, but in the health business –– I won't name it specifically for anonymity's sake) filled my head with ideas about superbugs in hospitals which made just walking in the front door a life-risking venture. It clearly wasn't worth going to the hospital for any reason, even to visit, unless I liable to die anyways.

Vitamins, garlic, fish oil and priesthood blessings were what I relied on to get me through my childhood with my health in tact. Lucky me: the human body is resilient and I was fortunate enough to have had some of my shots before my parents went full loco in the coco about shots. More recently, they have been falling hook, line and sinker for one MLM scheme after another as my dad starts looking for a way to set up his retirement. Dhoterra oil, Livewave frequency patches, and on and on and on... it's all anecdotal (and I'm certain mostly placebo), but he sincerely believes it and can sell anyone else on the idea (well, mostly people from the stake, I guess).

My ADHD caused me a lot of suffering as a kid... a lot of loneliness caused by a quirkiness that left me quite friendless and wondering what spiritual thing I had to do to get God to help me remember names and faces and pay attention in school. I felt obligated to try out the way my parents saw the world first and only move on if it utterly failed, and probably not even then...

Lucky me: I'm a thinker who found out early on he liked to be praised for it. It got me through school with good grades, but those good grades thwarted the one symptom that might have garnered some sort of attention by the school faculty. I was functional enough to get by, but only in the sense that obligation swept me along and kept me going despite a motivation that was growing weaker and weaker every school year. An undiagnosed disorder is a tragedy, but a misdiagnosed disorder is a travesty.

The anti-vaxxing, the oils, the patches, the hostility towards hospitals aside, I don't think I was ever in any danger as a white, middle-class kid in America of catching a debilitating physical ailment from something. No... the way this affected me was psychologically. Spirituality doesn't make you stupid toward the undeniable. Everyone seems to know no amount of blessings will make a limb grow back or cause blood to stop gushing.

But –– here's the kicker –– it is believed that there is no psychological ailment that Jesus Christ's atonement can't handle single-handedly. But this is only the half of it. The other half is that psychologists and counselors are probably all atheists looking to deceive the naive soul simple enough to ask for their help instead of going to his bishop.

When I became old enough to understand that making assumptions like this was ridiculous, I was quickly re-got by the explenation that there was hidden core of secret combinations working from the shadows and everyone else was just deceived because they didn't have the gift of the holy ghost. As it was in the religious scene, so was it in the medical establishment –– and pharmesudical drugs of any kind were the devil.

So, I was worse off than if I had no help. I was in the middle of the absolute worst culture for my condition and daily indoctrinated against ever leaving of thinking there was a legitimate 2nd opinion outside somewhere.

My ADHD quirks created a feedback loop of self-doubt and embarrassment that caused me to think something was wrong with me which caused me to turn to my heavenly father and allow my parents' world view to more vividly color my mind. Using my understanding of Heavenly Father and the atonement of Christ, I tried finding a social place at school and deal with my cognitive disability which I didn't know was a cognitive disability. I failed, and I thought I must really be a hard case testing Heavenly Father's patience. All of this thinking had taken root about the time of, or just after, my baptism.

This is why I think the "restored gospel" is nothing but poison. The patterns of perfectionism, black and white thinking, and victim blaming were set in my mind long before I ever thought my penis was possessed by an evil spirit.

So, when I became the age (7, 8, or 9) that the church starts indoctrinating kids to think about missions and marriage and sexual purity, I was primed already to take it in the worst way possible... and I did.

God, I still remember that first interview for the aaronic priesthood, ordination as a deacon –– the M word I had never heard before and the way every alarm bell in my 12 year old mind sounded off when I realized that I had just been positioned to be embarrassed in front of all my extended family from both sides who had already planned a major family get-together around my ordination. I could accept the humiliation at the tender age of 12 or become a liar and piss off the Father and the Son and void what little patience I already knew they had for me... at the age of 12.

That began a vicious ten year cycle of self-blame followed by desperate repentance and psychological self-flagellation and other attempts at penance followed by despair followed by self-blame, repeat ad nauseum until I lost my mind. All the while, I was still dealing with the same social issues and cognitive disability from my childhood, but with terrible anxiety and depression and bitter self-loathing and a hopeless guilt complex to boot –– all courtesy of my loving Heavenly Father and his anointed servants.

It finally imploded after my mission, and I have been picking up the pieces ever since.

But I am happier. I really am. My life is starting to make sense. My apostasy is poised to lose me the life I had in my home stake once BYU-I is over, but it was so empty anyway, there's no big loss there. I'm used to being alone. I enjoy it most the time, but occasionally there's an episode of sadness at the loneliness and the hopelessness at the prospect of making friends, especially here.

Religious Trauma Syndrome is really the only label that even begins to make sense of how I feel right now: traumatized.

Trauma? But how? My parents are a bit coocoo, but they love me and I love them. They were stern with me when I was younger as religious fundamentalist households tend to be, but my worst interpretations of those experiences don't even begin to account for the daily anxiety attacks and my broken ability to navigate life outside my parents' home. Who was my abuser? It was my religious experience itself.

I'm over being angry (the sort of angry that needs revenge of some kind). I still get angry when the church does stupid, culty things with my family's unwavering obedience to them, but this is an anger born of frustration. When it comes, it goes and cools into an annoyed sort of pity or hesitant sympathy.

There is no one to be angry with. There is no God –– no Mormon God anyhow. No Mormon Jesus. No Holy Ghost by the laying on of hands. All the priesthood leaders are delusional, thinking they are serving and building up the kingdom of these elusive phantoms. They get the Nuremberg defense for what it's worth: They didn't mean to hurt me, but they did. I wonder if my pain went completely unnoticed or if one of these bozos knew they were hurting me, but thought they were investing in my godly sorrow that would work repentance and eventually turn into peace.

Whenever my family doubts, their sense of duty and their assumption that smarter people than they have asked these questions before and keep on keeping on anyway, so so do they.

Experimenting with adderoll is opening my eyes to what "normal" feels like. Well, there is no normal, but there are disabilities. It's like being color blind one moment and then being able to see one of those star wars light shows on Imaxx in all its vivid, glowing glorious spectrum. I never knew my mind was capable of this. I'm still experimenting with the right cocktail of drugs for anxiety, depression, and inattentive ADHD. Perhaps there is no combination of drugs that will be a magic bullet until I can get me the hell out of Rexburg (one semester guys, one semester left), but I'm hopeful that the keys will be found and the doors to a normal life will unlock as long as I don't give up looking.

God, life sucks, but it's also so wonderful... sometimes... but it's enough to stick around for more.

Bring it on, Life, you bitch.