It was my birthday this week. I turned 50. So I spoke with several of my family members. They said Cousin Ed died but they only heard about it through the news.

Sad my father didn't get to go to his funeral. They are the same age. They kept in touch their whole lives. My father had to spend summers in Provo with Ed when he was a kid. He told us Ed played "jokes" on him. My mother said Ed was cruel to my father. But my father never spoke poorly of him and admired him. Ed in return admired my father's father Rulon Jeffs. Explains a bit.

"``He's tall and stately and conservative, very patriarchal,'' said Ed Firmage, a University of Utah law professor and Zola Hodson's nephew. "

"``Over time, the old man's powerful personality just captivated Rulon,'' said Firmage. "
https://culteducation.com/group/1099-polygamist-groups/17294-rulon-jeffs-patriarch-president-prophet-for-polygamy.html

https://www.exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,974538,974588,quote=1

But Ed had much more freedom than most Mormons. He was able to marry his High School girlfriend before going on a mission.

I don't think many Mormons could claim like his son did for him to have his Mormonism layered cake and to eat it too!

"He remained a Latter-day Saint of record until the day he died, but the activist drew on several other faith traditions — including Catholic, Episcopal and Buddhist — to add layers to his Mormonism."
https://www.sltrib.com/news/2020/10/16/ed-firmage-pacifist-utah/

Hinckley was adamant about coming to Mormonism to get the extra layering and not the reverse.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/22/2020 03:29PM by Elder Berry.

Wow.

I have a now-deceased relative who was on a mission with Firmage and told me many things about the man. Quite a figure.

And I'm stunned to see yet another connection between you and prominent Mormon figures both good and bad. What a different world you and your families represent, spanning such a wide swathe of the Mormon experience.

It is a curse. I'm so entangled with Mormonism that any thought of it not being in my life is impossible. I would have to disavow everything I love and all my past to attempt to escape it and it would be a vain attempt. I maintain a truce with it and poke it here and there when I can.

Yeah, Hugh Brown represents the establishment; Rulon Jeffs, the heterodoxy with ties to the establishment; and Gary Gilmore, the deranged fringe engendered by bizarre doctrine, damaged families, twisted emotions, and a vulnerability exposed by a chance encounter with Gary's father, a true psychopath. It was a familial match made in hell.

Am I correct in recalling that Gilmore's mother's maiden name was Brown? I haven't read that book for many years but I have an inkling. . .



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/23/2020 07:19PM by Lot's Wife.

>Am I correct in recalling that Gilmore's mother's maiden name was Brown?

Yes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Gilmore_(criminal)

"On a whim, he married Bessie (née Brown)"

"On a whim" a dysfunctional family let a demon into the home and the children and those they touched, as always, paid the price.

I've been thinking of reading this.

https://www.amazon.com/Body-Never-Lies-Lingering-Parenting/dp/0393328635

Yes my mother marrying my father was a match of two neglected and abused kids made in heaven. The problem is that we happened to be related to famous and infamous people.

Edwin Firmage's father Ed senior was awful. I once witnesses him grabbing my great aunt's breasts and talking about what a wonderful women she was. He was pretty much Trump. He didn't like malls so his store went under probably. My parents met in his shoe department in Provo where my father sold my mother a pair of shoes. He got the job from his connection.

Two poor kids who had awful parents. My mother's mother was a loving mother but allowed her husband to do whatever he wanted to their children. My grandmother had been a dance hall girl in the 20s in Provo and married a member of the band. My father was the grandchild of a polygamist who's son rose to level of prophet in the ever evolving group that is the FLDS. My grandfather actually game them the name.

What a tragic pairing but they both knew the pains of abandonment as children. That might be what brought them together. They are still alive living the same house I grew up in condemned by COVID to only be able to socialize with their children when they would much rather be out socializing with others people. COVID is payback I guess.

Oh boy, you stumbled on Alice Mueller/Miller. She's the bomb.

From the 1950s through the 1980s two or three different people/groups stumbled from very different vantages on what are now known as the personality disorders: psychopathy, narcissism, borderline personality disorder, and avoidant personality disorder.

The first was John Bowlby, who in the 1950s was researching adolescent psychopaths and discovered they had virtually all had the same childhood. [Compare Trump's infancy.] Deciding that that childhood experience--separation from parents during the first 2-3 years of life due to hospitalization, maternal depression, drug abuse or other factors--increased the frequency of adolescent and adult dysfunction massively, Bowlby fought a fierce battle against Britain's hospital establishment to test what would happen if you let the parents interact daily with the isolated kids. The results were so spectacularly good that the experiment was not completed: the hospitals pre-emptively switched to a child-friendly system throughout the UK, the US, Canada and Australia. Bowlby is one of my greatest heroes: he literally changed how pediatrics function throughout the Anglophone world.

He went on to research this phenomenon in great detail and thus engendered "Attachment Theory," the notion that how you treat a child in its first three years determines how your human relationships will function throughout life. The field expanded dramatically and produced incredible predictive and explanatory power. There is a great book on Attachment Theory, written by a psychologist/expert in the field called Robert Karen. I strongly recommend his book, Becoming Attached, to you. It's a simply written but highly regarded volume that will break your heart many times. I gave a dentist friend a copy of the volume and he came back and said, "now I know why my family is as it is and why I am as I am." It is the Rosetta Stone of human social behavior.

Meanwhile there was a frumpy psychologist in Switzerland who independently made many of the same discoveries. That would be Alice Miller. She noticed commonalities in people who had had similar backgrounds and reached some very powerful conclusions. In The Drama of the Gifted Child she noted that German parents taught their kids to use the toilet at very young ages, made them start reading by 3 or 4, etc., and that while the kids could do that the psychological damage was profound and permanent. In The Body Never Lies, she says much what Bowlby did: that trauma early childhood create brain patterns that dominate the child's later life even if the mind has no memory of those events. If you look at her list of books, you'll see several that will appeal.

There are elements of her analysis that she presents from time to time as asides that I at first found eyebrow-raising. For instance, she said that Nazism was a result of abusive child-rearing techniques. I thought the connection to national politics was liberal self-indulgence. But as I read more of her work, I realized she was on to something. There are differences in child-rearing techniques between different societies. As Bowlby's acolytes discovered, in Kenya children breastfeed until age six or seven or eight and quit when they want. Ask a Kenyan if a kid is a bad kid and she will answer, "how can a kid be bad?" The point being that if the child is given a sufficiently loving and supportive experience, they simply don't become what Westerners would call narcissists and psychopaths.

What Miller was saying was that many of the common child-rearing techniques employed in the Germanic cultures contributed to Nazism. Parental distance, "seen but not heard" demands, etc., produced adults who were much more alienated and self-harmful than in French and Italian societies and much more inclined towards larger movements in which the individual could find meaning. Expressed that way, the point makes sense. To a significant extent your culture determines your childhood, which determines your adult life.

You can see where I am going with this. I believe that Mormonism changes the way people parent their children, that that results in systemic problems for Mormon adults, and that the damage is passed on from generation to generation. Like you (but at less vertiginous heights) my families have long been Mormon and, in my view, suffer from Mormon practices that caused systemic and predictable damage to both the families and the individuals.

That will make sense to a man of your emotional sensitivity and intelligence. With you in particular in mind, I couldn't recommend Miller's books more highly--and the same is true of Robert Karen's seminal Becoming Attached.


https://www.amazon.com/Becoming-Attached-First-Relationships-Capacity/dp/0195115015/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=Robert+Karen&qid=1603736162&s=books&sr=1-1

Wow. I'm going to have to dive into the deep end.

I came across Miller in reading reviews for the book The Body Keeps Score. A reviewer claimed the author had stolen from Miller. So I looked up Miller. In reading some book reviews I realized in reading The Body book I had come to the same conclusion as Miller. Childhood trauma had profound effects upon my adult behaviors and personality.

I am a unique individual with deep groves of learned behaviors based upon experiences where my body is keeping score. It is a tablet which was written upon by others and I keep rewriting their words in different ways to tell myself I'm in control of the story of my life.

I can influence myself obviously and I can recognize the affects of what effected my early life. But I'm not some agent of free will able to intimately and decisively plot out my own fate. My body is really good at keeping a score for my life in comparison to what it learned closer it its conception.

That is the funny thing about abortion. Many religious people use the unborn to hold up as something precious and yet don't use much of their energy for the unborn and unimprinted towards the children whose bodies are tallying terrible scores and who will have genes turned on and memories stored and mental strategies scarred into their brains to blossom in young and even later and late adulthood as painful personality problems being haunted by the shadows of their lifelong struggle to adapt to the spectrum of abuse to loving relationships.

Thank you for your reply.

I would recommend Becoming Attached, The Drama of the Gifted Child, The Body Never Lies, and For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence.

My guess is that you will love them all and shed many a tear.

Thank you! Added to my list.

And the young Bessie met Frank, older and charismatic, in front of the Hotel Utah in SLC. . .

A belated Happy Birthday to you, Elder Berry! I remember really liking my early to mid-50s. I hope that you enjoy them as well.

I don't think it was as common to go on a mission in the old days, was it?

Thanks. I've been asked if 50 feels any different. It doesn't and I doubt our human constitutions are made to feel different as we age. I would like to think we blossom or turn into butterflies. One thing I do know is like Plato wrote in The Repulic, 50+ is a better age for leaders because I beleive with age comes experience for many people. Your reflexes aren't as fast but it might be because you tend more to think before you leap?

summer Wrote:
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> I don't think it was as common to go on a mission
> in the old days, was it?

It wasn't according to my parents.

I think that 50 (or so) is the perfect blend of age and experience vs. your body still looking decent and doing what you want it to do. At a certain point arthritis kicks in and then things are not quite as much fun.

I'm on the other side of the hill.