Please share.

For me, it changed who I was forever unapologetically. And I had to be the one who turned that into something that was art. I had to take all that pain and grief and turn it into brush strokes worthy to stand up to public scrutiny.

What did Mormonism do, or take from you?

Split my family, which they claim is their Highest Value!

I thought of something else but this is way bigger. The active role that Mormonism played in splitting my dysfunctional family is part of the reason I post here. The Mormons need to be found out.


P.S. Bravo for your post, Raptor; I feel that way myself.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/07/2016 11:55PM by donbagley.

GNPE Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Split my family, which they claim is their Highest
> Value!

Ditto. Bishop essentially commanded TBM mom to divorce "less than active" dad.

Then it got me to give it 2 years of my life.

God damn cult.

Instilled a sense of guilt and imperfection as a child that persisted for years, shaping my self view and my family life.

Made a whole bunch of cool stuff a sin that isn't.

RB

It made me hate myself for not being perfect--according to its cultish definitions of perfection. The Boner.

Put a gigantic wedge between me and my children--in their eyes I am broken and weak!

Helped warp my thinking by explaining how a man could survive having his heart ripped out by a priest of Kali-Ma. No, I'm not being flippant.

http://exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,1779513



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/07/2016 11:09PM by Itzpapalotl.

Put their nose into a family issue where they completely stomped on the rights of caring parents. I wish my husband and I would have had the wherewithall to have sued their sorry asses.

Family comes first!...... yeah, right.

I hate the cult for the continual harm it does to families in so, so many ways. It is pure evil.

Same as what Boner said. It expected perfection from me and in turn stole my sense of self-worth.

The church made me feel like I was unworthy because I had doubts. I could never go along and always had questions even as a small child. It makes good parents into bad parents. I will never forget my mother telling me that she would rather me be dead than for me to lose my virginity before marriage.

It formed me into a self righteous, prudish, snobbish, bigoted, misogynistic, homophobic jerk.

Bishop told my wife she should divorce me if I did not get active.

she did

Unable to make good decisions, fake friends, and constant guilt. Being brainwashed at an early age is a very serious thing to try and undo. Listen...all you TBMs...do you realize your children will grow up unable to think for themselves? Shame on you...shame on you...shame on you..

Hurt family relationships, scam me of thousands of dollars, and rip me apart psychologically and emotionally so that it took quite a while to recover.

The Miracle of Forgiveness convinced my mother that she was unforgivable. She tried to take her life on four separate occasions. I saw the aftermath of one when she called out to me specifically by name - the blood on the floor and the slash marks on her wrists. She survived, due in all measure the the quick response of EMTs.

My bishop and stake president convinced me that Jesus would heal us both of our trauma if I went on a mission. But that just exposed me to more opportunities to be exploited and abused.

And here I am, nearly 20 years later, still triggering over nightmares about my mother.

Assholes. I should have been in therapy.

Robbed me of:
My family
My money
My time
My identity
My ability to reason
My sense of self worth
My friends (when I returned after a period of activity and chose to no longer associated with heathen practices such as drinking and having sex outside of marriage)
Etc

Stole the joy of youth. Replaced it with agnst, dispair and sorrow.

Destroyed the humanity of my parents, grandparents and siblings. Left them as only partial human beings.

Robbed my children of grandparents, great grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins.

Almost destroyed me mentally and physically on my mission.

Betrayed my trust, love, and dedication.

It made me lie about who I really was and what I really believed. I think I've really been an atheist my entire life, but I didn't want to risk being an outcast. So I put on the facade of a believer for decades. I was a hypocrite.

And all of that lying contributed greatly to the development of anxiety and depression for me. THAT is what I cannot forgive or forget, because it's still with me every day.

outlawed oral sex in a loving marriage

they soon un-outlawed it when they realised the profit had been a complete idiot to ever mention it in the first place

but, by then, the damage had been done, as far as my marriage was concerned

Stole from me and my family. Then denied it with the help of the Bishop and SP.

instead of serving humanity as a Peace Corp volunteer for the same amount of time. (While on my stupid mission I met two female Peace Corp volunteers and concluded that they were "wasting" their time because their work was so temporary while my work was "eternal.") My self righteous ass could not have had more bass ackwards!

As a youth I worried more about how to get to Kolob than how to truly wonder about the universe, embrace science and develop my natural curiosity. Most of that youthful energy went to self shaming and self loathing. Too have all of those wasted hours sitting in church and hours of mental/emotional anguish back would be a real gift to my soul.

complete and utter distrust of any motive from anyone.

Instill a sense of unworthiness and self hatred in my early development. Thankfully I've worked past most of that in the years I've been away from that stupid cult. But those feelings it cultivated are hard to forget.

The Big Lie. The fact that it falsely teaches that it is led continuously by a living prophet/seer/revelator of God when they MUST know, they MUST KNOW, that that isn't true. This very huge lie empowers their leadership to say/do whatever they want and to seem irrefutable, since any mandates they come up with are supposedly coming directly from God through his current mouthpiece. In other words, they're always right because God told them so. That is a really big and really dangerous lie.

But Prophets don't ascend from a line of succession. In fact, if I think about it, "Prophets" basically choose themselves - because they are just that crazy. Every now and then throughout history, there will emerge some mentally imbalanced guy who will start spouting off that he has special powers or connections or visions that are coming from a supreme being, namely God. That's a prophet.

Normally, people never get the title of prophet based on moving up a ladder of seniority, but based on:
1) a person prophesying about stuff
2) people believing him

The LDS church just passes the title down without the person having to prophesy, see, or reveal ANYTHING. They ONLY have to be loyal.

But by CLAIMING that they are ALWAYS led by a prophet of God, a true MOUTHPIECE of God, their followers are stripped of their freedom to truly think for themselves because to question the church is to question God. It falsely uses the weight of ultimate authority, namely God, to coerce.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/08/2016 08:54AM by seekyr.

It didn't cause divorce because my mother put her first priority with her marriage and family. Isn't that what TSCC teaches?????

It did however, put a rather large strain on the marriage and on my own relationship with my dad. Dad was a trooper and tried pointing out all the things I now know about LDS, Inc. but we were blinded by the power or a prophet. The missionaries did a great job of throwing Dad under the bus and convincing us that an old, dying, white guy in Utah, who didn't even know us, had more power to seek our best interest than our own father. Yuck, yuck, double yuck!!!!!!

They told a lie upon which I married and started a a family. When the lie was unmasked, my wife decided to continue to believe it and the church has been a sharp divide in our lives ever since.

Mission. I returned having lost self confidence and self esteem. Finland was not a particularly fertile place for converts. We were constantly told failure was our fault. I believed it. I was an idiot in addition to feeling depressed. A mission does cause serious emotional damage. Those who take missions to heart suffer the most.

They took a terrified gay kid and taught me how to imitate life rather than live life and left me empty. They taught me to be manipulative and a liar--anything to keep the facade of the perfect Mormon kid going because I knew that was all that counted. And I did fool them all for a very long time while they taught me to fool myself--and I did.

But they couldn't keep a good man or woman down as proved by this amazing thread.

The most insidious bit of brainwashing that I still have to contend with is that little nagging that when I die there will be people who will add up all the points I either did or didn't score during life and either pat me on the back or look at me like, "geez, what happened? You talked a big game before you went down there and then you just flopped."

I don't worry about so-called judgment from a god or anything, but I still can't shake that "a bunch of people are watching you" indoctrination which just annoys me to no end...

Without a doubt, it's that it sucked away all my self-esteem before I even hit puberty. It made my father into the what he was and he never missed an opportunity to let me know how worthless I was. I'd figured out in early teenhood that I was not only not good enough, but that I must not have been very valiant in the pre-existence. Everything that was wrong with me physically, emotionally, etc., was because something I'd done bad before I was even born. That's a real mindfuck to pull on a kid.

It made me think that The Osmonds REALLY DO LIE and they DO! AND YES, they DO Drink...and I do NOT mean Koolaid!.

It taught me to doubt myself, my perceptions, and my worthiness. It taught me to look to others (including God) for approval and sense of worth, and stunted my ability to make decisions for my own life. It made me a perfectionist and helped me perfect the art of guilt.

On the positive side, it also taught me to look for a higher purpose in life, and taught me introspection. Perfectionism prepared me for 'detail-oriented' work ;-). When I left the church, I learned things about myself and other people, and eventually questioned things--like the existence of God--that I never would have questioned, had I been born into a less blatantly false and toxic religion.

Maybe it's a bit freaky, but I think being in a cult, and then leaving it, has given me a unique perspective. I learned a lot. I guess my only regret would be decisions I made, and things I suffered for that were based on false assumptions. And BTW, I still have a LOT of work to do to get to where I feel 'normal'.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 03/08/2016 11:11AM by imaworkinonit.

I think the worst thing, as many have stated, is the damage Mormonism does to family relationships from so many angles--and that's while being active and not apostates. Everything goes from bad to worse when you take the blinders off.

Mormonism took my childhood. I was the live-in babysitter to my five younger sibs while my mother chased MLM pyramid schemes, all in the effort to be a successful stay-at-home mom. She still chases the unreachable MLM pot of gold, which keeps her busy and not involved in her children's, grandchildren's, and great grandchildren's lives.

Mormonism took away my desire to go to college. Being a mother was far more important, so I married young, popped out three babies, and worked odd jobs--and yes, some short-lived MLMs--to try to remain a stay-at-home mom.

I married an RM 25 years ago, a wonderful guy but troubled from his own abusive childhood. He suffered PTSD from a mission in a Central American war zone. I'll let him list his own "worst things." Together, we went on for 17 years avoiding the topics and refusing to place the blame where it truly belonged. The next 8 years to the present have been spent peeling back the stinky onion layers piled on from generations of brainwashing.

Mormonism harmed our ability to communicate. We were taught how to be passive-aggressive to get what we wanted. Even though we've been out of the cult for 8 years, the behavior remains. It takes constant awareness to identify and halt, and takes even more effort to communicate with direct requests and not beat-around-the-bush hints. Counseling has been a really good thing.

I think I'll show this thread to my therapist so he can better understand Mormonism.