I don’t need to him to stop being Mormon, but to at least get to know each other in a way we never got to before.

So, I texted a tirade to the family a couple weeks ago cuz my mother was shutting me down for nth time by saying “you have your beliefs and we have ours.” I posted that convo here, names redacted. Everyone left the chat.

So, we got this other app called Marco Polo though. It’s a video chat app. They kept saying they wanted to see my face, so...

I’ve been posting videos in there for the last week criticizing family culture and our shitty skills at communicating and how some of us have lived in introverted shells tortured by shame. And people were watching. My brother’s wife commented that she never knew I had this emotional side. The sisters-in-law were watching. Number 3 was watching.

Number 3 finally responded to my videos. Number 3 is nortoriius for having a phase in his early twenties when he was wearing “porn kills love” t-shirts. Everyone knew what it meant — he had a porn addiction, probably — but everyone loved him anyway because he was revealing it in a very penitent way. My videos just laid everything on the table so that I could talk about my frustration with mom and dad. I tried to keep it emotional and leave the “anti” out of it. It worked. Number 3 watched it and reached out to me (first family member to respond), and we shared a moment. We connected. We saw each other. I apologized for being an asshole at times and told him I just wanted to clear the air and undercut of all the undue influence my parents get to wield over me by virtue of all the things they know about me. Number 2 and 3 never knew any of this. Number 2 hasn’t watched any of it. But numbers 3 did, and his wife did. And we connected. He let me know there were parts of my experience he really felt resonate with him, but then I would mix it in with “anti” in the next breath. So, I immediately validated him and apologized for being insensitive and told him to just know that I’ve been frustrated in all these different ways and I just want the ability to talk about things with my family. I told him that when people can talk about whatever, and they feel safe, it feels like you’re getting to know someone for the first time. I don’t need to take his testimony. I just needed to tell my story from my own lips and have people understand where I’m coming from snd it’s ok if we agree to disagree at the end, but you can’t agree to disagree before you even let the other party say anything about where they’re coming from. I’m only doing this because I do love him and I do want connection, and you know bonding over the ability to talk about porn with your siblings is really fucking weird but that’s the weird detail that I share in common with so many other Mormon males that has often been the only detail that breaks their shell and allows me to get underneath their usual defenses snd make a human connection.

This is just my life, and I’m trying to make the best of it. I feel like I never got to know my brothers when we were teens, or in my twenties either. As a teenager I was isolated and alone and depressed. My dad was my bishop, and there was so much shame and he controlled everything I thought. In my twenties, even more so, until I realized the church wasn’t true and converted to atheism, which enabled me for the first time to take some things I had learned in Mormon anti-porn therapy and twelve-step meetings about self-care and finally get my self-value back.

I’m connecting with my brothers for the first time in my life without dad being the priesthood-holding referee. We actually share a lot in common, cuz the same man raised us and screwed each of us over in a very similar way. Love my dad, but he did that shit, and I was the first and have been struggling the longest. This is how dad was raised. He has his own history with porn and shame (even way before the internet), and that’s how he became serious about the gospel. He means well when he’s scared to educate us about sex or even to ask us if we masturbate, because that’s how he learned to do it. Some bishop asked him back in the seventies if he masturbated and once he learned what it was, he went home and tried it out and became a “sex addict” filled with shame. His religiosity is almost a post-traumatic stress response to his sexual repression, and that’s how he raised me, and that’s basically what my testimony was too.

I have these ticks, a head twitch. My head twitches and I have a sharp intake of breath and my heart skips a beat whenever I think of an unpleasant memory, usually related to shame. A counselor in Rexburg told me those are mini anxiety attacks, the leftovers of a very traumatic relationship with shame and the stress that comes with it. I’m having them right now, but it’s not debilitating. They’re happening because, I may just connect with someone in my family and thereby overcome a massive source of anxiety and paranoia, and the hope is making me afraid because it’s almost too good to be true, but it’s a good kind of afraid. It’s the kind of gentle fear that comes with a return to be ok with vulnerability which precedes any fulfilling human relationship.

If we are able to get to a point like that, I won’t care that number 3 is mormon. I don’t care. I’m only resentful at the cult for what it’s done to me and how it has come between my family and I and made me anxious and insecure my self. If we can just work past that, then I will be alright, just all I needed first was to be allowed to lay the groundwork for them to understand where I’m coming from. I thought that meant “anti-ing” them. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe there were better ways to do this, but also I’m a wreck of a person with religious trauma syndrome trying to pull the pieces together and I think I’ve done ok considering the odds.

Wow. You've really made some great strides here. Keep up the good work. When I was a kid, I grew up in a very abusive household. It took me many years of having a calm and normal environment for me to stop having anxiety attacks whenever anyone would raise their voice. But it did stop. I haven't had one in decades.

What I’m doing with my family is, I guess you could say, aggressive self-therapy with occasional setbacks because my triggers are people with feelings who don’t understand what I’m trying to do for myself and for them in a sense, because if i can resolve everything and pull myself together finally, I’ll be a better person for them too. At my lowest point when I was 21, I made a couple realizations. I realized that other young adults were in my same shoes, and I also realized the church tends to put us in to this place (almost, as it were, on purpose) where we are completely broken down from sexual guilt so that it can rebuild us in its own image. You know, 80-85% of the time it works like a charm. Uh, but some of us have a hard time in perpetuity our entire lives even after we come and repent and all that fun stuff. So, thank God that I was lucid in my lowest moment and still using my brain cells. I want to be whole, but I will never give this church my soul. They don’t deserve it. I don’t care how painful it is to resist, and it has been very painful.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/26/2021 04:09PM by Cold-Dodger.