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Date: January 15, 2018 05:08AM
Adam, the fact that you didn't serve a mission means that you DID stand up to your parents and/or church authorities at least once in your life. In that regard, you're a better man than I. I lacked the nerve to assert myself and went on the mission even though I knew it was the wrong thing to do. Parents are daunting figures to children, and their influence sometimes continues into adulthood. Learning to assert oneself to one's parents can take half a lifetime. Don't give up in your pursuit of independence just because you've slipped up once or twice.
Think about it for a moment. Your life could be even worse than it presently seems. You could have been coerced to serve a mission. You might have been at the mercy of a tyrannical mission president and bullying district and zone leaders, and your life might have been screwed up beyond what it is now. You might have contracted intestinal parasites in some third-world country that might have plagued you to this day in addition to your other health issues. My sister's nephew lost three feet of his ileum because of unsanitary conditions and a mission president who refused to allow him to seek medical care. Whatever is one's situation, there are probably wways that it could be worse. My point is not to make you feel guilty for feeling that your life sucks as it is. Still, it's good to remember that you've done at least a few things right and self-preserving in your life, for which you should congratulate yourself.
Not everything that happened as a result of my mission was bad. I picked up carpentry skills that I still use on a regular basis, and I speak Spanish far more fluently than I would have had the sum of my instruction been classroom Spanish. Still, by and large the mission was a waste of my time. I could have begun my medical education and career two years earlier had I skipped out on the mission. My initial mission president was very hard on my psyche and drove me to deep despair. My family is relatively well-connected in church circles. I hate to think of how the bastard mission president treated the children of nobodies in the church and the converts who served under him. Had he been there much longer, I might have gone off the deep end. I could have studied in Spain or Argentina for a year and would have walked away with the same Spanish-speaking skills I now have, plus I would not have delayed my education for two years. All things considered, my mission offered far more drawbacks than benefits. Going directly through undergraduate education, joining the military, or signing up with the Peace Corps all would have been preferable alternatives to serving an LDS mission. You allowed yourself not to be goaded into wasting two years of your life. Good for you!
Many missionaries are just like you are and I am in many ways in that they were unable to be straight with their parents when it counted. It seems rather judgmental of you to hate all of them them so vociferously when many of them went through what you and I did. In some cases, what they're going through is worse, as they're in foreign lands with lousy food, no clean water supply, substandard lodging, poor-to-non-existent medical care, and at at the mercy of tyrannical mission presidents and their sadistic underlings. I'm not suggesting that you have any obligation to spend time with them or to listen to the preaching or proselytizing of missionaries. In fact, if they violate your physical boundaries by showing up at your homw when they've been asked not to come, you always have the option of turning the garden hose on them as Cheryl did.
I am saying that they are people -- usually very young -- just like you and I were. I'm glad you're getting the help that you need, but somewhere down the line, you have a choice to make. You need either to live with your affiliation with the LDS church because you feel that you may need the practical and financial assistance they may provide, or you need to cut ties with them. The hanging on for potential benefits while decrying them as the virtual Antchrist isn't healthful and isn't going to help in your recovery.
As far as litigation or prosecution are concerned, you can check into statutes of limitations in terms of the guy who tried to choke you and also in terms of any church authority who had knowledge of the incident and failed to report it. There's nothing to prevent you from suing to reclaim tithing money, either, but your chances of prevailing are somewhere between nil and zero. How many tithing receipts or cancelled checks have you saved? You would need physical evidence beyond "I qualified for a temple recommend and I earned $50,000 that year; therefore I MUST have given the church at least 5 grand." Furthermore, the tithing receipts state clearly that all contributions are voluntary. You CAN sue, but you're highly unlikely to recover.
You have to do what is right for you, but my recommendation would be to take whatever funds are available from whatever source you can get them in order to regain your physical and mental health, but then to walk away from the church without looking back, which would include ceasing to blame the church for everything that is wrong in your life.
Regarding parents, it was sort of a roll of the dice in terms of with whom we got stuck. Some of us were born to parents who locked us in closets until we were sixteen years old and eventually found dead.Others of us benefited from the most generous and nurturing parents on the planet. Most of us fell somewhere in between. Except for the very most evil of parents, for whom I can offer no excuse or explanation except that evil exists in this world, or the most ignorant of parents, who can only be disclaimed with the explanation that even sub-morons can, unfortunately, reproduce, most of our parents tried to do a better job than their own parents did. Some succeeded and some did not. For those of us who were the beneficiaries of cruel or incompetent parenting, all we can do is try to end the cycle either by not reproducing or by doing everything in our power to be better parents to our children than our own parents were to us. (Mom and Dad, if you read this and happen to recognize the author as your son, please be aware that while you weren't perfect, because no parent can be perfect, I consider myself incredibly fortunate to have been raised by you.)
Adam, I wish you physical and mental health, happiness, financial stability, companionship, longevity, and peace in your life. That's all anyone can really hope for, and all anyone really needs.