I think the year was 2011. I was driving and I said “My whole life is a lie”. Wow. There it was, the blinders were off. Was it like this with you?

I can look it up. I had struggled with mormonism since I found out my boyfriend/husband was gay, but it was all I knew, so I turned to mormonism for answers to this and I continued to live it. My life blew up. I was too busy taking care of my kids and earning money to support us and dealing with the end of my marriage to think about much of anything else.

Finally, I had some time to get out and walk and I walked about 5 miles a day. My friend's daughter was getting married and her daughter kept saying if anything went wrong with the wedding plans: "The church is still true, so why does it matter?" I kept thinking of that statement. I was out walking and it hit me, "IT MATTERED TO ME." That was it. I was done. I came home and wrote in my journal about I believed God wanted us to be happy and not to have to jump through all these hoops to prove something to him.

My life has improved SIGNIFICANTLY since that day.

"IT MATTERED TO ME." That was it. I was done. I came home and wrote in my journal about I believed God wanted us to be happy and not to have to jump through all these hoops to prove something to him.

YES!!!

Why is God so insecure? All that required worship. Why did he create me so crummy and then judge me for it?

Comedian Bill Burr does a riff on this theme, wherein he addresses ghawd:

"Hey, you made me! You made me suck at math, and you made hookers...! Was there ever any doubt that this was going off the rails! This is all on you!!"

lol

"Line upon line, precept upon precept" I learned all the problems with the history and doctrine of the so called church. Then one day I realized that I could no longer just go along to get along.
Life has been so much better since that day.

You suffered from shelf collapse.

You can’t really appreciate the collapse of an identity unless you’ve lived through it.

On becoming a single mom and divorcee in the cult is when it began to dawn on me that "all was not well in Zion." The blinders were being peeled from me layer by layer, as the dysfunction began to become more clear until it became blindingly clear.

The church was a crock and a hoax. Once I started to study the actual history then it began to fall into place for me. By then I had worked through the process of sorting it out, but it had taken years for me to do the mental work of unlearning the brainwashing that had begun in early childhood.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 07/30/2019 12:03PM by Amyjo.

My moment was when I realized the BofA was all made up. My exact thought was "if Joseph Smith made that up, he made it ALL up!"

There was no going back.

My realization was a lot like that. I was a BYU student in my senior year. I was complying with the standards, but also struggling with my lesbian identity and what to do with that. Marry my boyfriend? Go on a mission? Come out? My roommates became aware that I was a lesbian and turned me in the standards office, telling some outrageous lies - I had tried to seduce them all! Yeah, I'm that irresistible. I was "counseled out" of school. On paper it looked like I voluntarily withdrew from classes, but I had no choice in the matter. I was in a sort of haze for a few months. I had always been taught that if I did what was right, everything would turn out right for me. I was kind of waiting for things to magically turn around for me, when, just like OP, one day I was driving in my car and it hit me what had happened - my roommates stole my education from me, BYU expelled me for nothing except that fact that I was/am a lesbian, shelf broken! I was so angry, finally. Stupid, hateful church! The nagging feminist concerns I had about the church that I had stuffed down all came bobbing back up. Just garbage, all the church teachings.

I was standing in Panda Express in Sandy Utah in 2007 and I thought, "If I can name five reasons why Mormonism isn't true I'm going to quit." I quickly thought of five reasons and thought, "Ok ten." Then "Fifteen"

I walked into the restaurant a struggling Mormon and walked out an Ex.

I was in the temple, trying to put a square peg in a round hole for the 100th time, and I just asked god if he gave a shit...

god said no, then he quit talking to me altogether.

It was glorious.

I was in my last year at YBU. (The year was...well...suffice it to say it was back in ancient times.)

I was finding myself in the position of constantly trying to come with ever more convoluted theories and creative explanations to reconcile all of the inconsistencies, contradictions and incoherent elements of the "gospel" that I had been discovering faster than I could explain them away.

At one point, I half-jokingly told myself, "you know, it would all make perfect sense and be super easily explained if it turned out that the whole "gospel" thing was just a bunch of man-made doctrines cobbled together on a foundation created by a lying con-man named Joseph Smith...just as the critics are always claiming. Ha ha."

I half-jokingly told myself that...and that's when I had my light bulb moment. The joke was that the critics had been right all along and it was ridiculously obvious once you gave yourself permission to open your eyes and see it.

It was a thing that happened over the course of several months and during that time I found out more and more about the history of the church that only made sense if the church wasn’t true. I read a lot of FairMormon and their explanations were clearly a load of crap: mental gymnastics to make sense out of the nonsensical. To be honest, it still took me time to accept it. I searched everywhere for an explanation but there just wasn’t one.

But I got to the point of questioning and searching because of stuff that happened. I’d had this underlying feeling for a while that things weren’t right. I was a single mother and the way people interacted with me was really off, and generally people weren’t very ‘christ-like’. I could honestly write a whole book just on that.

The first conscious red flag that led to me to this researching was this - and you could say this was when the shelf broke for me: I went to stake conference and the subject was something to do with jesus; but ALL the stake presidency spoke about for two hours was TITHING. (And when they weren’t they were talking about themselves, how wonderful their callings, their lives and their families were - I actually really liked the stake president but it was narcissistic to a nauseating degree). I’d just finished a psychology degree and I was aware of what manipulation was.

I was literally like: “What the f***?”
That was the beginning of the end.

The end was when I read all about Joseph Smith. I’d like to say this was a quick process with a specific a-ha moment, but the guy did so much shit that it took ages. Major points though were: he married a 14 year old and he was a Freemason. I’d been guilt tripped and shamed (manipulated) by the church for the relationship I’d had with my daughter’s father who I’d met when I was 15; but here was the idolised prophet doing something worse, and I saw RED. (Red flag, plus I was angry). I’ve since done away with religious guilt and gotten over the spiritual abuse inflicted on me by this Cult, thankfully.

The final straw was this: church history was changed by the Morg, and I kept hearing leaders say that we shouldn’t question (and we shouldn’t look). The deception and manipulation was then extremely obvious, and I was DONE. So if I were to explain it without writing a book, it would come down to this one point.

Oh, one ore thing: I was an abuse survivor but the bishop seemed to hold me partly responsible and also made an incorrect assumption that I hadn’t forgiven my ex partner. It was major gaslighting; it was also manipulative because he used it to guilt trip me into doing things I wasn’t comfortable with.
Then I read statement by other church leaders that were clearly victim-shaming. This cult is so misogynistic.
If I were to explain why I’m no longer a Mormon, I’d have to say it’s because of everything this Cult says, believes and does.

I was sitting in a car along with the EQP. It was right after meetings. He said that you can't live a lie. That is when the light came on. A few weeks later the bishop asked if I would take the missionary lessons. I foolishly agreed. I went home and did an Internet search on what those lessons entailed. That is when I found RFM. I spent a couple of months through all the posts and the stories. By the end of the year, I started saying that I was not mormon.

Most stories I read on RFM talk about a gradual awakening, but my moment of truth was also very abrupt. It happened very much like others have described. I gave myself permission to consider the possibility that it was all a bunch of man-made hooey.

I had just discovered the information about Fanny in the barn. I had a beautiful 16-year-old daughter at the time. I walked into the bedroom and thought, “How could Joseph do that? Fanny had no one to protect her.” I literally walked out of the bedroom a non-believer. Took about 30 seconds. My motherly love trumped everything I had learned over the past 40 years (having been born and raised in TSCC).

I remember the date that my life and thinking changed: April 6, 2015. I was listening to a local radio talk show host and he said that he came to the studio that morning with the intent of discussing world events and suddenly, on the way there, he changed his mind and decided to talk about "changing your thoughts" and how we need to re-wire our thinking because a lot of people have been brainwashed since childhood into thinking that they are never good enough. Listening to him that morning lead me to start searching on the internet for the "anti mormon" information. When I saw the drawing of JS with his face stuffed into his hat, that was a shock to me and my moment of truth.