Have you guys read the biography Educated by Tara Westover? I feel close kinship with that protagonist and how a view of the world from within her quack family slowly unfolded to her through her education.

How do you separate the difficulties that Mormonism creates for normal people from the difficulties that having your brain wired in a different way than what is typical creates for a neurodivergent? I’m lumping ADHD, which really more of a neurotype than a disorder, in with autism spectrum in this sense and just calling it all “neurodiversity.” I’m increasingly convinced I’m an aspie besides being a scatter-brain. Multiple professionals and aspies have commented along the same lines, but I’m not professionally diagnosed as ASD. Don’t know what the point in getting an official diagnosis on that one is, since there’s not an adderall for autism. It just is what it is, if that is the case. It just seems to explain the remainder of some of my odd behavior that others and myself can’t seem to make sense of and that ADHD doesn’t seem to fully describe. Im confident in the ADHD diagnosis, though, because I do respond very well to the stimulants. I feel but for the apostasy drama raging around me, I am more like a normal person now, just more nerdy and booky than average with a handful of manageable quirks.

I’m licking the wounds of having burned it all down for the purpose of giving myself (and feeling) permission to move on. I don’t know why I have to be so final and extreme to feel that, but I do. Somehow the progress I’ve made feels cheap and unreal when my dad is there at the dinner table telling me that I’m stupid and I should just go back to church and listen to him for medical advice like I used to. I honestly think about it, which it doesn’t deserve at this point, but I have to in order to keep myself confident that I gave his bullshit a fair shake and I always come to the same conclusion that he is a quack and his bullshit damaged me and set me back both on my recovery from that damage and getting a handle on the real underlying causes of my childhood misery.

My father was my quack doctor, my bishop, and my overbearing dad all rolled into one doobie that guaranteed a neurodivergent’s living hell with every hit. I loved and lived for that guy’s pride, since I never felt allowed to live for anything else, and it didn’t do me any favors in return. Early on when I was wrestling with my doubts, I wondered if my unbelief was because of my sins — because he told me it was. I also wondered if I had autism or something and if that was why the gospel didn’t work for me, because I had attended many “Taco Tuesdays” where he gave health talks that explicitly blamed vaccines for a host of neurological disorders and other ailments and he often used me as an example. My dad did not neatly compartmentalize these things for me either. He was my dad, my doc, and my bishop simultaneously all the time everywhere we were. His mind has one track and he took it upon himself to label it Truth and he doesn’t listen to anything else. He will be tactful about when he gets preachy, but when he’s withdrawn there’s still no mistaking what’s on his mind given the conversational context. When you live in someone’s house for decades, especially if you are withdrawn, anxious, watchful, and silent, and because people tend to treat you like a fly on the wall, not a person listening, you learn about people.

I internalized my dad’s worldview as a boy as I listened to him tell war stories from his mission or funny stories from Chiro school or insightful stories about interpersonal drama he’d had. Mormonism figured prominently in almost any story he ever told at least in forming the perspective at the end that we were supposed to take away from the story. As I got older, I came to see the wellsprings of axiomatic wisdom he drank from and went there like Nephi to see what my father had been blessed to see before me. I would drink deeply from it, become confident in it, and then become incensed at all the people online and at the Mesa temple pageant and the people here and there through our relations at school who dogged on Mormonism. I started fights of words, which was unlike me, anxious and clammed up as I usually was, to prove my dad correct. I usually lost spectacularly, so I got into apologetics and began internalizing a whole other way of seeing Mormonism with the goal posts all moved. It works for contenting myself that the critics don’t have everything figured out, but it started to make my own father sound like a moron to me when he had a hot take on the gospel but he didnt know that the latest apologetics have since ceded that ground to the opposition. There was a time that he would let me correct him, because he always assumed that I had a higher view of Mormonism waiting to give him which I always did… until I turned 25.

I was primed to know more than other Elders when I became an missionary. Leaving my comfort zone was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but once I dealt with the existentialism I threw my anxiety into something constructive: learning the scriptures forward and backward and how to use them to teach, preach, and bash. One of my dad’s own missionary war stories was of a day where he just happened to be fighting with a preacher who was trying to side swipe his recent converts’ newfound faith. He had prepared his scriptures with all manner of cross references, and he actually beat the guy when most Mormons just bear their testimonies and walk away. He swore that bible bashing was pointless most of the time, but in certain circumstances it was warranted. Well, I wanted to be like my dad, and I had plenty of circumstances where an honest soul was disturbed by Anti. So learned me them scriptures, and had much success making people think. I liked to think and make people think so that they could maybe briefly think on my level or my plane of existence and give me information that I would find riveting. I was on the prowl for ways to think my dad the genius and the hero I unhealthily always assumed him to be.

And I began to realize that he wasn’t. This was an unsettling revelation that happened multiple times, but I had a habit of spin-meisering it away. But as I transitioned into adulthood, the need to defend my father gave way to a need to deal with my own bullshit so I could be independent from him. I had a series of such revelations on my mission as I fought to keep my own recent convert from Anti and to help a few others from some other bad things, all while internally I was waring a warfare for my private respect for my father verses my own needs which were going severely unmet. When these apostasy stories are told, there’s usually a pressure to believe in Mormonism. This pressure may be unjust, but we’re tempted to keep giving in to it or acting like we believe to avoid what we know is coming next: the cold shoulders, the back biting, gainsaying, and the fiery ruins of bridges when it all blows up. In my case, it wasn’t just Mormonism, it was also this other stuff: chiropractic, the idea that vaccines are the root of all neurodivergence, and this pernicious idea that the only reason anyone thinks something opposite of my dad is because they like to watch porn and jerk off. That starts in Mormonism, but I’ve seen my dad use that logic in other areas of his life which is bizarre. It seems to form the basis of his hatred for liberals generally. Either that, or it’s the lowest fruit for critic dismissal that he reaches for in frustration. The guy never learned how to think critically about anything. I was an undiagnosed neurodivergent who was, I would say now, “masking” to the detriment of my own mental health trying to keep my father close in all the ways I could think to save my image of him without being outright intellectually dishonest. I was always dealing with multiple layers of long-running crises-staved-off-for-now while masking it while seriously tackling all the things that a thoughtful guy that age with my upbringing would naturally want to figure out, because I genuinely believed my mask, or the facade version of myself that used all of my intellectual ability to justify my daddy’s bullshit, would end up being the real me someday if only I fought for it hard enough.

My dad now likes to say that I have issues, and I do not deny this but I insist that his religion, his quack bullshit, and his shitty parenting had a lot to do with it. It’s easy to say that people can’t do any better than their religion lets them be, but dogma is not the only human impulse. It’s not even a human impulse. The impulse underlying dogma is the need to be considered (both inwardly by yourself and externally by others) moral/pro-social so you can secure footing in the hierarchy of the tribe. It’s subconscious driver of psychology which is the disease of 2021, methinks. But there’s another impulse to protect your own flesh and blood from needless harm that every neurotypical (and most neurodivergent) parents have to run over on their way to fulfill the dogmatic impulse, and the former is usually the stronger impulse. I guess if you grew up in a cult that constantly inflamed your fears of being cast off, that impulse to secure your social standing by being regarded by as many people as matter as “moral” might rival it, but you still have to make a decision which impulse you will let possess you. I do not believe my family members when they begin to comprehend my hurt and say they would have done things differently, because then they never do anything differently, not even a little.

None of this conflict would have happened if my parents had a healthy respect for boundaries, taught us to make and defend boundaries, or taught us that evidence-based logical thinking has merits which must at least be considered before you presuppose the restored gospel’s truthfulness in the cringiest ways. Mormonism has a general affect of this sort on all families to some extent or another, but family culture (the way the family is accustomed to the Mormonism being practically manifested in their household) plays a big roll. My parents are ideological narcissists (or people who simulate the signs and symptoms of a narcissistic abuser but specific to dogmas they are possessed with) that have extracted codependent social habits from me and all my siblings. The folks didn’t leave it at religion: they do it in politics and medicine as well — that’s our family culture. And I’ve had an especially hard time with that, because I’m not neuro-typical and I had no idea what mental health or anything was outside of the clammy insecure mindset my parents forced on me. So, I’ve had to survive, which I did, while placing myself in places where I could learn, while untangling the undue influence of Mormonism, chiropractic, anti-vax, and other pseudosciences from my toxic family dynamics while trying to comprehend what healthy dynamics would have been while also telling the symptoms that I would have exhibited regardless of my social context, and grabbing hold of the courage I needed to push my irrational need to people-please my parents way down and do what my intellectual integrity dictated instead. That’s my “journey,” as I’ve described it in private journals.

Uchdorf says “an error of just a few degrees” throws a plane wildly off course as time passes. I’ve been acutely watchful of my brothers and my parents for a long time. There was a hope that maybe we hadn’t diverged so much that we couldn’t still spark something. I just wanted to get to know the people whose house I grew up in without all my masks up for once and for them to get to know me. I guess I assumed that their testimonies were just “masks” like mine was. I don’t mean to say that I wasn’t sincere in my professed beliefs, or as sincere as anyone ever is, but I knew I was leaning into Mormonism to mask something —- I wouldn’t have known what to call it at the time. I was constantly exhausted from trying to figure out what “it” is while keeping up facades and acting like I thought I was supposed to while suffering depression, extreme anxiety, and some nasty imposter syndrome all at once. Under my father’s influence, I thought maybe “it” was just my sins, but as I submitted to priesthood authority none of their admonitions healed my exhausted and inflamed and sensitive heart. I figured they didn’t know everything and I could trust my own judgement, even though I’d set myself up for the abuse I knew was coming if I ever apostatized, which was depressing, because it was starting to look inevitable after I found the Race and the Priesthood essay.

My dad’s reputation seemed to form my entire social life, because it wasn’t me that chose any of our family connections, and the people over at our house were usually my brothers’ friends. I was just there along for the ride that is my existence, masking my anxiety and surviving and people-watching and trying to figure myself out within the shitty confines of Mormon thought-stopping. I was possessed by my dad’s dogmas and afraid to let him down which would happen if people figured out the “real me.” I would have had enough on my plate without several layers of cult to wade through before some progress could be made. Mormonism plus neurodivergence isolated me from the outside world, and my neurodivergence plus my Mormon scrupulosity isolated me from other Mormons too. It may sound crazy, but early in my teenage years as my libido was this new thing to me, which Inwas never educated or prepared for in any way, I thought maybe I was the only person who jerked off or thought about the opposite sex like that. Everyone else had squeaky clean thoughts even if they had the same impulses, I figured anyhow, but no one was having the tough time I was having as far as I could tell and I was not in a position then in the sense that my dad’s Mormonism had such a strong hold of me to make my own assessment of the human condition. If I had done that too soon, it just would have been smacked down and gaslit out of me.

Inside the Mormosphere are all the people who know the objects of my mental culture even if they can’t figure out how my brain does things it does with those objects, but outside the Mormosphere are all the people with all the facts I ever wanted but they don’t understand the Mormon demons that haunt my psychology. This is why BYUI was such a formative event in my intellectual life, because I had people with temple recommends hired by the church to teach the accredited material of which they were experts, and that cut through a lot of uncertainty and nonsense. Every class begins with a prayer and scripture devotionals are omnipresent, but I know that stuff and I know how to distinguish it from what I wanted, and what I wanted was the truth about the world I live in so I could gain an insightful understanding of my relationship to it. There’s a dream buried in there of somehow enjoying all the relationships I never felt like I got to enjoy, but these things are mutually exclusive it seems. I was either going to strike out on my own with my own confident understanding of the world or I was gonna keep masking and trying to make Mormonism work — neither way allows me to enjoy the company of anyone who used to populate my social consciousness, but I see now that I don’t even like most of those people — these are just habits I’ve had for a long time that die hard. Or maybe I was hoping that like me there was this whole other person underneath other people’s facades that was a truer version of themselves waiting to come out if only they realized they had permission.

Neurodivergence means that when you use things unique to yourself to form your theory of the minds of other people, you’re gonna be wrong most of the time. But sometimes you’re right, and what that means is you have discovered a fellow neurodivergent. One of the cruelest things that Mormons do to apostates is assume that their criticisms of Mormonism are mostly born from something that is wrong with them, because nothing is ever wrong with the holy gospel. This is that ideological narcissism I mentioned earlier, and it’s why Mormons love to go for your moral jugular vein when you challenge their beliefs. It’s a fight or flight response of pure anxiety. Being in a room with a perceived ally who you quickly discover is actually someone who could and wants take your paradigm apart axiom by axiom is a lot scarier than being thrown in a lion’s den. Although, enacting your revenge for arguments you’ve lost and times you’ve felt stupid by making sure your children are twice the child of dogma that you were is not kosher: that just guarantees that they’ll experience all the same frustration you did and misattribute the reasons to things that will always isolate them from other human beings and also never fix the root of the cognitive dissonance. Your kids are also not the people in your memories who you’ve never told them about, and they’re not tools for satan tempting you to doubt. So using your sharpest barbs that you would love to use on a critic on your growing boy who loves you and would internalize anything you told him is beyond the pale. I’m told that I’m crazy, but the whole setup for my life comes to me in the form that is has because of the people my dad carries around with him in his head, people he has had arguments with that didn’t go well, people he is still trying to beat once and for all, and he lashes out at those people who are wearing my face, who scooped out my soul and wear my face to torment him. But, it’s actually just me, only I’m not masking anymore. I’ve learned a lot about the world and undone a bunch of my anxiety which was directly related to my Mormon programming. He doesn’t like it. He rejects it. He looks for any and every explanation for it except the ones I give. He doesn’t even let me speak to him about how it happened. People condescendingly tell me that my fears of being utterly rejected were delusional, but then I get that reaction that from my own father. Of course my mother sides with him. My fears were never unjustified. They were prescient. All the things I was afraid would happen if I ever stopped masking have happened more or less how I was afraid they might. The only curve ball was this insultingly one-sided compromise my dad tried to set up where I, a neurodivergent, would agree to be silent on all my favorite intellectual captures, and in exchange I wouldn’t be ostracized from the family. That’s an ultimatum; not an agreement. It was never going to stand. I never should have even tacitly agreed to it, but I’m also fighting toxic family dynamics and I’m doing it alone. I don’t always resist the urge to surrender and say whatever pleases the family, which just makes me hate myself and revisit the issue with them later. But they’ve contented themselves that I’m weak, crazy, or amoral or all three, so they no longer feel the threat of my intellectual presence and view me as a freak on a lost cause crusade to get their beliefs from them.

I watched my brothers grow up. I was the oldest. I remember some early things they don’t. I remember times before each of them went church-broke. Becoming church-broke is a process; children are not born as Mormons. They have to be taught. They have to be turned upside down with the throat of their natural curiosity slit until all the blood drains out so you can turn them right back up again and give them the new blood of pure dogmatic bullshit that they will inflict on their children in the same way. I watched each of them develop a rebellious phase which gave way to the Mormon personalities they have now. I was masking as a good oldest son who made peace and knew things and always strive for what was right. I think I’m actually that person, but I never felt like it. Chief was masking his homosexuality and he’s also got ADHD, I think, but his mask was just the quiet quirky baby son of the family, and people overlooked it. I’ve watched people over 32 years go from kids as curious as anyone else about how things work to adults who are content to wallow in abject ignorance even though we all went to the same schools and learned the same things. I’ve watched the cruelty of how Mormonism discredits and controls teenage rebellion and how bishops beat them down with guilt and shame until they surrender and agree to having the last of their sinful curiosity and moral objections pulled from their system and replaced with the correlated corporate gospel their parents know they need. I’ve watched people forget who their younger selves were as though they only remember being a fully church-broke Mormon. But I remember the process in vivid detail, because I’ve been miserable and anxious for a long time and attentive to any detail or news I thought would fix “it.” I was aware of how I didn’t measure up to my peers, because I was always comparing their behavior and mine — trying to find a better mask, I suppose. Every Mormon is absolutely certain of the gospel when the right cues are given that someone in the room is doubting; but I am my father’s son and I used to enjoy access to people’s doubts just because they trusted me to resolve it for them to the best my, forgive my use of the word but it might be my right to use it, “autistic” ability to quote and interpret scripture on the spot. I remember all those moments too, so I know when the fake certainty in front of me is just a virtue signaling display born of existential dread. I’ve been on both sides of that exchange. I really never meant to put people on a state like that; I just wanted to understand myself and following that I just wanted companionship.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 09/24/2021 05:42PM by Cold-Dodger.

I always miss things when I’m making these stream of consciousness posts between stops at work.

I was gonna say it’s cruel to use the standard explanations for apostasy that Mormons use on a high-functioning Aspie with ADHD who is also your tender-hearted child in whom is no guile. If you tell him that people who doubt Mormonism just want to jerk off and be immoral; he’s honestly going to go on a little odyssey in his head wondering if that’s true, and if he loves you and wants your approval he’s probably not going to take his own side in the takeaway. If you talk shit about people who think science is an excuse to rebel against God, that little guy is going to wrestle with that shit for years to come, because he wants to justify you but he can’t lie or fake his mood very well and he gets taken apart at school when he challenges what is being taught because his daddy said something else. If you make intimacy with you contingent on a professed belief in Mormonism; that kid is going to suffer the severest feelings as he tries to make Mormonism true to himself only to find that it’s not. If you severely foreshorten the list of people he’s allowed to associate with or the emotions he’s allowed to feel visibly, he’s going to compensate for all that by clinging to you if you’ll let him, or he’ll at least try. Maybe he’s clinging to something in you that isn’t there. Maybe you don’t notice your own child’s private hells and how they continue to afflict him in adulthood. Maybe you don’t care as long as your testimony is safe from the devil. I just know that pulling that shit after having intimate “figuring out the world” conversations for years and you know better but you don’t care, that makes you a bad person. You can’t drag your kid into this hell which didn’t need to happen and then just leave him high and dry when he tries to have a moment with you to explain that he’s given it a lot of thought and he doesn’t think any of it is necessary. If you choose instead to have the most toxic overreaction possible, he’s gonna reciprocate because he deserves to be free from your amoral, pseudoscience-loving insanity if he wants to be, and you don’t get to have the last word either.

Almost all young men choke the chicken, and vaccines have no correlation with autism or other neurological disorders like ADHD as many studies have shown. These never had any bearing on the things I wanted to discuss with my father who I’ve always been able to talk about things with before. In fact, I had no choice but to discuss those intimate things with him, which is why I felt so trapped my the realization that Mormonism was not true. I knew what his quick go-tos would be, and I hate him for being so basic when I used to think the world of him. He’s not all that sophisticated at the end of the day, and I have to say this because it’s true and because he will never let me have my self-confidence if it remains up to him. With all the powers he has to invalidate me, he will, and people’s opinion of him seems to form the meat of our shared social circle. So I rejected it with him and cussed him out while calling him a quack on his Facebook wall in front of all his friends on his birthday. Everyone saw that, and I don’t care. I hope it stung, and I hope everyone knows that My father’s kid is cross with him over issues he likes to talk about every Taco Tuesday.

He treats me the way he’s afraid of being treated. He’s afraid of being called a quack and having all his years of study dismissed without a single book he’s read being cracked open by anyone else. That’s how I feel, but he’d have to let go of a lot of pride to see that, I guess. He’s never going to; he’s made that clear. But he’s still not allowed to teach perfect bullshit as a licensed medical practitioner in a profession regulated by the state, and I have the right as a patient to make a threat to complain to the board. That seems to have muted his anti-vax/“Covid is a conspiracy” crap. Or he at least doesn’t post it in his Facebook page anymore. I’m curious what he’s afraid of if I’m actually the crazy one without a point. Maybe he’s just afraid that the board is full of Big Pharma’s goons and they’ll pick him apart for telling the truth to his humble patients. That might be his fear more than any fear that he’s wrong, actually. I don’t know. I don’t talk to him anymore. I’ve had enough of his bullshit to last me three lifetimes crammed into just a third of one.