I am a nevermo myself, just hanging here because I am a little bit fashinated by the mormon church. I have been listing a lot to people who have lost their faith and left their church. Some of them say that leaving a church is like going through a divorce or dealing with the death of a family member.

All the time spent in the church, all the emotional investment all of that has been in vain.

Or was it just piece a cake, like graduating from it shitty school. Just be thankful you don't have to spend another hour there.

I dumped a nosy, judgemental, arrogant, willfully-ignorant friend.

Hard. For me anyways. When you're in it you forget that the majority of the world is not Mormon and so you're focused on your little social circle and how they will react (it seems huge because it's all you see at the time and I personally thought my life was basically over from a social and emotional standpoint) - it's hard to see through to the other side of the tunnel and all of the new relationships you will be able to forge in the future.

For me there is of course a huge risk of losing the family I built, since my spouse is a true believer and probably always will be. It really does ruin a marriage, discovering the truth.

I have lost some friends, still losing others, and a few have surprisingly stuck by me but at the time of "discovery" there was a HUGE fear of what would happen - all of the social backlash. And it did't help that a lot of the first people I told about my journey left me high and dry AND decided I was clearly a sinner or something...

It's your whole world at that point and you're about to tear it all down...so yeah it was hard for me.

My father made it hard right up to the point of assaulting me in front of the family and sending me to a boy's ranch. It was fucking hard.

NO not for me. It was like turning my back on a pile of dog

poop. I was so angry to be lied to and betrayed that nothing

was going to stop me from leaving, and nothing did.

Yes and no. Once I realized it could not be true there has been zero guilt not attending church and throwing the garments away.

The aftermath is hard and incredibly depressing. I based my biggest life's decisions around "the gospel". Now my life is forever changed that can never be repaired.

No. Took as long as filling out the form letter and hitting send. My parents are dead and my brother is long inactive too, my wife is Catholic and I have almost no contact with my Mormon extended family so zero downside.

RB

Well I actually had some help from none other than (then) apostle Gordon B Hinckley who refused my mission call until I waited a year.

A year later I was a draft-dodging party animal with no desire to spread the mormon disease.

It was easy for me to leave. The fallout, however, was a bit harder to deal with. My mom was pretty upset, we went through a lot of periods not speaking to each other.

The only reason it was so easy for me to leave was I already had friends and life experience outside of the cult and knew it was possible to not just survive, but thrive and be perfectly happy.

Not for me. I was the only member in my family. It was no biggie.
For others, the fallout is far more painful and hard to deal with. They loose so much.

I can give you an answer from an "in process" person. I realized that the church is most definitely NOT true about 2 1/2 months ago. It is some of both for me.

Only my husband, one member of my family,and some nevermo friends know I don't believe. So, I'm not even "out" to other people, but I'm out in my head, stopped going, took off my garments, etc. I'm not out because of my husband (who also doesn't believe, but wants to do this on the down low more). I can't tell you how happy that it is both of us! It ruins some marriages if you are not on the same page with this.

I was not prepared to feel so relieved once I realized it was not true. I felt free, happy, and like I've taken my power back.

I'm in my late 30s and have been a faithful member my entire life. It is just mind blowing to realize that what you spent your life believing something so completely wrong. It felt like a gut punch. I'm still asking myself how did I not realize this before now?! Looking back from this side I feel foolish.

So, part of the difficulty for me is upset at being deceived. I'm furious!

There is a part of me that grieves for what was a huge part of my life and belief system and social net that is now gone. But, the happiness of not being a member outweighs that.

It is also huge that I just made the leap from Mormon to agnostic, just a complete paradigm shift.

I expect it to be unpleasant when our families find out though! That is the tough part- causing people you love to grieve, get angry at you, and in some cases cause permanent damage to your relationship. I fully expect to lost 90% of my church "friends" and acquaintances. Luckily, I have non-Mormon friends too.

If I lived in Utah (used to) this would be exceptionally horrible, so I'm glad I don't!

I'm in counseling right now because I already had depression and anxiety before this...so this is triggering things. This is just a lot to process! So, it is bad enough leaving for me, even though it is part happy, to require counseling.

Aside from family stuff, long term I expect it to be a very positive thing. I think the next year or two might be a bit rocky adjusting.

Congratulations! :)

What I appreciated was the fact it opened my mind. As a Mormon, you are allowed to think only within the box. Don't let your mind wander out of the box-that comes from the Devil's promptings!
I am angry at myself for not challenging my mind more during my time as a Mormon.

Not really that hard, more of a relief once I realized it was not true. I never married and had no kids, nor were any of my family in the morg. It was easy by far, compared to what others have gone through.

Other Susan

No, but it took a while to move past the mentality. There's a lot to process. Passive aggressive behavior was a big thing to unlearn. God, I was such an ass. These people would never utter a curse word, while they're quick to use their passive aggressiveness to say "Go f**ck yourself".

I think, though, that it's a lot easier in hindsight. I just watched Alice Cooper's "Poison" video, and at the time my relationship with TSCC was just like that.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/12/2016 04:24PM by bradley.

Choosing to leave was not difficult. It was a relief to finally do it. I was a convert, married in the temple, with five children. I divorced my devoted forever mo husband and the church knowing that I would be hated by all in the church. Amazingly my church friends from my teen years are still my friends and biggest support system. Most other mormons avoid me like the plague although I left 18 years ago.

The hardest part of leaving was learning to think for myself. It was surprising to me how brainwashed I was to automatically think a certain mind set. Of course I had given the church my all for over 20 years. I did do counseling and that helped. I literally believe I left a cult and had to be retaught. Twenty years later I will sometimes be emotional and find myself falling into old ways and start laughing and reminding myself how wonderful it is to be away from the cult,

All five of my children have NOTHING to do with the church or their father who is an active member. YAY!!!

It was gleeful!
:D
It was like the most delicious food I had ever eaten.
:)
I may resign again and again like people who renew their wedding vows.
:-)
I may resign my dogs!
:^}

I was very unhappy. I was doing my duty. Church. Temple. Tithing. Whatever. But, that church duty was against my very nature. It never felt good. The mission felt wrong but I did my best. The only thing I liked was speaking in Sacrament Meeting oddly enough, helping to keep the brainwashing going. Helping to keep myself indoctrinated. Hoping and praying the gay would go away. Sick of the pressure to get married knowing that was what I HAD to do.

The moment I realized the church was a lie was the most thrilling, the happiest, the most intoxicatingly joyful moment of my life. It was like a thousand million tons of pain were instantly lifted off of my shoulders. I was floating. I was grinning.

It was over. IT was all over. It was beyond thrilling.

It was like having gangrene. Sometimes it costs a couple of limbs to get rid of it.

Leaving was pretty easy but looking back at all the wasted time, money, effort, bogus friendships, and erroneous life teachings is very depressing and angering. The anger lessens as time goes by but to use the "shitty school" analogy....It would be like finally graduating with your PhD after working, studying, and paying inflated tuition for 40 years and then finding out the school is not accredited and your degree is useless.

Extremely hard. Dumping the stupid doctrine, the "answers to life's questions", the magical thinking, etc... was easy. It was even easy to get over the fact that I'd given the "church" years of my life and tens of thousands of dollars. It was dealing with the fallout that was difficult. Having my wife and parents turn their backs on me was unexpected and devastating. I spent a year feeling alone and thinking about killing myself daily, praying for death, cursing God, etc... I probably would have followed through if I hadn't found this site at the right time. My wife is still a believing member, but she's come around to an extent.

I was so unhappy in it and sick of their shit, it was easy to freeze them out and get out of dodge. I dont know if I'll live long enough to get over tha terrible stuff I was cheated of and done to me.

Leaving was a roller coaster process that finally ended when I finally came to an understanding of J. Smith not a prophet of the living God. Once that became clear leaving was a no brainer.

Leaving the church wasn't hard at all. Turning my back on my handcart pioneer ancestors was hell. It's still damn hard after forty-five years of being free of the cult. I'll always be proud of the sacrifices they made coming here that resulted in my being born in this country. I'm honestly not sure I would have gone through what they did.

It wasn't hard for me. I think partly because I was a 30 year veteran, full time CES employee who had seen about all that I could stomach of the fraud.

Not for me. Never considered my self a true Mormon. The small farm town I was raised in was all Mormon. I went along to get along. About a week after I graduated HS, I left and never looked back. I had a wonderful and understanding family. I got out about 1960. Never regretted it.

It had it's hard parts. In my case, it was a long process over several years. I was an adult convert, well into a three decade marriage to a TBM so it required a lot of patience on my part. Patience was a hard part! :-) By the time I left, most of our adult kids had left so that made it easier. Last one just left this year. I kept various types of relationships with some of my associates/friends/relatives.

If one steeped the church for his or her formative years, it shapes many central aspects of personal identity.
It tells you what your actual nature is.
It tells you where you came from.
It tells you Your purpose in life.
It tells you Glad you're essential nature is inherently flawed, and offers you the solution to your flaws.
It tells you what is moral and what is not. It offers you the means to determine what is moral and what is not.
It offers you and epistemology, it offers you a means of determining what is true and what is not.
It offers a sense of community. Congregations are like family for many people.
It gives you a sense of place in life, by offering a series of milestones primary, young women's, ordination to the priesthood, serving a mission, temple marriage, increasingly senior positions at church…

For many of us, losing the Compass of the church is almost analogist to losing the ones spine. It takes many people many years to replace all of the functions that the church used to offer. This is one of the reasons why when members of the church ask why we can "leave the church but not leave it alone" it boggles the mind how they do not understand the many functions that the church plays in one's personal identity. It is like an added Twyst of the knife after we leave.

There are a few mistakes in the above post, it is because I dictated it. The errors are due to voice recognition and AutoCorrect software.

That list is why the term "perpetual childhood" gets attached to mormons. Becoming an adult means wrestling with all of those big existential questions and coming to your own conclusions.

Mormonism gives you spoon-fed, pat answers, so when you leave you start doing what everyone else started doing at about age 12.

When it came time to leave it was a piece of cake. But it took over a decade of misery to get there.

The Mormon shunning, the Mormon gossip, the Mormon harassment, the Mormon threats have been upsetting--but nothing has ever been as bad as being one of them. It was not hard for me to leave--it was impossible for me to stay.

It all happened in one illuminating, beautiful explosion, after my children told me about the Mormon abuse they had been enduring for several years in our new ward. It was a split-second decision that happened as the words were coming out of my mouth:

"You don't ever have to go to that church, again!"

Those words rang true. I believed more strongly in my own mother-love, than I had ever believed in the Mormon God.

A split second before I said those words, I believed in the Mormon church with all my heart--and a split-second later, I didn't care! We never were going back, and that was that. I used to pray about all my decisions, but I didn't need to pray about that one. We were done.

(It was after we left, that I discovered The Truth on RFM.)

I didn't leave the "church".
The "church" left me.

Yes and no. When it's all you've ever known since birth, it can feel like death for a while. Every one is different but in my case from nearly 30 years ago: feelings of deepest betrayal confusingly mixed with even deeper (surprising) relief, followed by self-doubt, rage, confusion, grief, and eventually acceptance and freedom.

It was hard for me. When you are encouraged to be friends with other Mormons and date only Mormons and to convert peers who aren't Mormon, you isolate yourself. Non-Mormons distance themselves from you because you've pushed your religious agenda on them. And Mormons shun you because you've denounced their faith. Family relationships are also damaged because you will no longer be "together forever" and they either stop including you or shamelessly push to reconvert you.

That said, I have never regretted my decision to leave and have never been happier. It was not easy but it was completely worth it.

My wife and I sent the bishop and stake president a resignation letter in 1998. Rather than honoring our letter, the SP trumped up charges of "conduct unbecoming a member of the church" against me. I had to threaten to sue him and the church to force him to honor our resignation letter. We were the subject of the Mormon gossip mill for several months until our resignation was final. Some Mormons even spread the false rumor that my wife and I were divorcing.

Also, our leaving upset my elderly Mormon mother terribly. I'm the youngest of her 12 kids, and the only one to serve a mission and to serve in church leadership positions. I was her Mormon pride and joy. From the time we resigned in 1998 to her death in 2010, she never let up on chiding me for leaving or pleading with me to go back, until she became senile a few months before her death.

On top of that, some of my Mormon siblings over the years told me things like "You've broken your mother's heart by leaving the church!" The most offensive aspect of this behavior is a) those relatives don't know why we left the church, and they're too scared to ask us, and b) they think that a 40-something father of four, and a business owner, doesn't have the right or the gumption to decide whether or not he wants to be a member of a particular church.

Well, for me there is the emotional trauma of discovering what you loved and were emotionally invested in was a fraud and it was heartbreaking to come to that realization.

Once I got over the fact that Mormonism was not true, it was almost equally as hard leaving it because of the family and community. Being an apostate is just about the worst thing in the eyes of a Mormon. You become an outsider to them. In most cases, Mormons will either judge or shun you. You become ostracized from your social network.

So you are terrified of "coming out" to your Mormon family, friends, co-workers, ward and community.

Granted not all Mormons are going to shun you, and its a case by case situation, but its very difficult for most Mormons to fully accept you as a former believer. Some handle it better than others. When I came out as a non-believer, I found out real quick who was a true friend and who wasn't.