Posted by:
Cold-Dodger
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Date: October 04, 2021 05:37PM
My parents and I were working on my mental health for a long time before I decided to become an atheist and then I waited a year before I decided it was time to tell them. My parents are not the best people I could have asked for to hold my hand at the intitial stages of that journey. My dad gives these health talks every Tuesday where he blames the expansion of the vaccine schedule for kids for the increase in diagnoses of autism, ADHD, other neurological disorders and mental illnesses. This guy thinks this and he’s my dad and he was also my bishop and later he was a stake presidency councilor. The people who love him, love him. He is a mixture of charismatic and genuine, so it’s hard to argue he’s trying to hurt people. He’s not. He’s just a pressuppositionalist, which he learned from Mormonism.
Growing up as a fly on his wall I often thought the arguments he had with “vaxxers” and the arguments he had with “anti-Mormons” sounded eerily up the same creek. He says he’s done his research, but he hasn’t published anything. What he means is that he’s been reading screeds and apologetics until he’s confident he’s memorized a way to gainsay any objection that can be raised against his positions. Now that’s not the same thing as having evidence for your position, but presuppositionalists don’t seem to understand that. They have rooted in their epistemology a special exemption for their foundational axioms from any form of scrutiny which might have been legitimate in their eyes had it been aimed at anything else, especially things they have no emotional investment in either way.
I am neurodivergent. My dad couldn’t tell. He “knows” that vaccines cause autism and ADHD just like he “knows” that the church true. While under his roof, I rolled the two together just like he does. He downloaded his epistemology into my head, not just the things he believes. And I suffered for it. I went undiagnosed for 26 years and had no resources but what he gave me because I trusted him and he said not to trust other sources unless he approved. In my Mormon mind, his authority as a chiropractor got rolled into his authority as a priesthood holder and as my patriarch.
I was not a happy kid. I struggled with so much anxiety especially in social situations and it didn’t get better as I got older, so it started to become depression too. I wasn’t stupid. I had As and Bs typically. Bringing a C home was like bringing an F home, and we went to a fancy-pants school where As were counted 100%-93%, Bs were 92% to 84%, Cs were 83% to 76%, and Ds were 75% to 68% or something like that. I just remember being surprised in public high school that As were the entire ninetieth percentile. I’d been held to a “higher standard” this whole time and treated like that what was what expected of everybody. So when I failed, I took it hard on my self-esteem but no one told me that in any other school I’d still done pretty good. It’s an allegory for my religious experience too.
I got some funny ideas in my head between Mormonism being absolutely fucking insane and my dad pretending to know better that set me up to think that I was morally failing in ways that other people didn’t. My social isolation and tendency to take things literally is to blame for much of that, but also my father should have been able to see what I was suffering from and get me effective help since he pretends to know all about medicine and neuroscience. Maybe that’s not fair, because as a kid I tended not to have anything in common with my peers and found it easier to socialize with adults, not that it was easy, but I gravitated towards a friendship with my dad because I didn’t have anybody else. It was a weird codependent thing I formed with him, and judging from the fights we’ve had and the things he said to my face before I cut him off, I don’t know if he ever noticed the service I used to do for him or why I was doing it. The kids these days call it “simping” when a male defends everything a female does because he subconsciously hopes that she will notice him but she hardly ever does. More broadly, “simping” has come to mean going to bat for someone or something that doesn’t notice you and doesn’t care about you. I was a simp for my father, ideologically.
I understood that I did not have to bundle his medical and religious advice into one thing or treat them as similar in any way, but I chose to, because I was a simp. I defended my father on his medical ideas the same way I defended his church hoping that he would notice me like he used to. After a while, these were MY philosophies too. Only I was smart and I accepted the validity of the dialectic if for no other reason than my neurodivergence doesn’t give me any other way to think about things without high levels of anxiety. I don’t do uncertainty well, but I will also never lie and misstate my degree of certainty if I can help it. Between these two forces, my intellectual spirit was born and the seeds of my atheism were sewn. Looking back on it all, my testimony was doomed, it was just a matter of having enough life experience, getting enough education, letting my mind carry logical queries all the way to their logical ends, and dealing with the emotional fallout of realizing it was all wrong.
And doing it all alone.
How? How do you give up on the one relationship that means anything to you? That you live for? Because you found purpose in this relationship when you didn’t have anything else, breaking it is the hardest possible thing even after keeping it intact doesn’t make any sense anymore. I’ll tell you how: you have that person gaslight you to your face. In the full daylight while he’s on the ropes while you’re taking him apart as accurately as you know how, because you’re trying to prove to him to that you know him and you’ve been watching everything he does —- you’ve considered his points but he needs to listen to reason now and look at evidence that conflicts with his views because he could be killing people —- if he doesn’t believe that he should consider at least how his pretended expertise has failed you —- and in that moment he just calls you crazy and offers to take you to get “get help.”
How did we get to that point? Well, he’s proud and he thinks he sees through me. He was my bishop. I used to think maybe my sexual sins were what drove my childhood difficulty. I’m only talking about normal psychosexual development. I didn’t even look at porn until I was 21, although when I did I ran to him like a teenager literally two days into the habit. Beginning going at 17, I told him everything about myself. I had to hone the accuracy of my words and my ability to search my own soul and confidently say that I had confessed everything there was to confess, because otherwise my priesthood leaders saw my angst and anxiety and gaslit me because they took me for a liar who was holding something back, and I’m just trying to survive so I couldn’t help but search my own soul like I actually had held something back. I got so good at articulation and soul searching, because nothing less would quiet my own soul or give me the confidence to state something with certainty during a priesthood inquisition without shaking and looking guilty. I wonder if I could have even passed a lie detector test in those days if they had asked me my own name and put a spotlight on me.
When it was time to go on a mission, shit hit the fan. I really should not have gone given my levels of anxiety, but I had a quack for my father who was also the bishop signing my papers. I anticipated serving a foreign-Spanish speaking mission, but they’d ent me to Iowa. My patriarchal blessing had said it would be foreign. He would have signed my medical check too if he could have, so we had to go see an MD. It was someone in the stake. First MD I’d ever seen in the capacity of a patient getting some kind of physical. I was nineteen. This same MD would be the first to prescribe me my first SSRIs for the anxiety and the depression after I came home from my mission as a total wreck on the verge of giving up. I served in Iowa, English speaking. I had a suspicion that I “overly-honestly” answered my medical questionnaire almost like a hypochondriac, but my father was there filling it out for me. He read the part to me about being honest before God or else hell for you, and I just froze, gripped with that anxiety I’ve known since my previous bishop had broadsided me by prying into my sex habits when I was 11-turning-12.
Me, my gonads, my adrenal glands, God, my father, and my cognitive disorder have had an unhealthy relationship for a very long time to say the least. I’ve met other dads whose sons were like me and their sons are no longer with us on this earth. Those dads are now weeping messes trying to raise awareness up Natasha Hefler’s avenue that the church kills people. It kills people with ignorant and negligent advice given by way of commandment and revelation that passes because it’s protected under the first amendment of this constitution. It kills people because those people are trapped in a mental prison made of dogma and trauma and they don’t know what else do to escape. You can’t imagine the pain that I feel when I listen to these fathers tell their stories, or rather the stories of their sons. When they read the last letters that their sons left them on their pillows. Listening to their sons try to describe that pain, try to describe that fear of disappointing everybody and God, that depression that there is nothing left to do. I know that pain. There is no dimension of that pain that I do not know and that I couldn’t describe to one of these grieving fathers in exquisite detail if only they’d believe me.
I don’t know: maybe I’m just functional enough as someone with a cognitive disorder, or maybe I’ve had glimpses of the world outside of Mormonism to know that there was another option. But I avoided doing that. I chose instead to give myself a chance try new things, to come at this in a different way. So I recovered from my little emotional breakdown when I was an RM fresh off the plane and I kept going. I got stronger. I started seeing through bullshit better. I started having confidence in my own opinions. The totality of my experiences has been very clarifying, because I existed in a state of self-doubting self-convicting anxiety before my mission that was easily agitated. So I had no choice but to listen to what the talking heads were saying and do it their way as precisely as I knew how, and look at what I got for it. I don’t think the experience of neurotypical members is that different from mine except that other people know how to lie and keep secrets and set healthier boundaries. Healthier. Not healthy, just healthier. The church damages everybody psycho/sexually. A decade of learning about others’ experiences has made that very clear to me. Mormons are not a healthy community when it comes to psycho-sexual development and mental illness. What made me unique is that I didn’t make those boundaries and continued the interviews past what others would. A neurotypical runs up against a wall and is satisfied they have confessed enough, they’ll just pay their tithing and do whatever the church wants from now on. God, it’s not worth fighting. Which is the effect the church goes for, I think. I mean the Q15 and whoever at HQ is responsible for deciding that the Mormons were gonna develop a curriculum around an obsession with making the Mormons the only church full of Christians in the 21st century who honestly don’t look at internet porn or even self-abuse. But all it has done apparently is make them one of the most abusing and the most mentally ill and least we’ll-adjusted out of all the communities trying to figure porn out. The negative effects of porn on such an accessible are an open scientific question, but we have to be equally honest about the futility of making a society full of lonely men stop using it without better answers for them about why they’re doing it in the first place. Cuz there are tens of thousands of BYU students who wanna stop but can’t. I’ve seen them with my own eyes. The revelation that what was done to me was only systematic and to get a glimpse of the scale of all the people they’re damaging like me punched me in my gob.
It was BYUI where I got my diagnosis. Instead of fading away as a jackmormon, I got myself together after my post-mission burnout to go to the Lord’s college. I was not giving up and getting to the bottom of all the questions I ever had about things, and I was no longer content with non-answers or that I would get the answers after I die. No, the other side of the controversies I had in mind kept saying that they actually have the answers, and I wanted to know. My trust in the church and in my father’s intelligence and open-mindedness were waining. I have this memory during those interviews I had with my dad where I said “if the Book of Mormon is not the thing that heals me, I’ll be heartbroken.” He acted startled, so I didn’t press that thought. But what I meant was that I was struggling with a cracking shelf and with exacerbated mental illness when all of my dad’s “enemies” seemed to have all the answers. I was giving his worldview this one chance to keep me: the Book of Mormon had to heal my feelings, or my recovery had to somehow spring from the wellspring of the marvelous work and the wonder. Otherwise I was done trusting these people. I had listened, and I had obeyed with all the energy I had to give, which may not have been much, but it was my widow’s night, and my curiosity was calling me elsewhere.
When I told my father I no longer believed, I was expecting some kind of discussion or a showdown or something. I didn’t expect the silence. After all I’d been through, after all he and I had been through together, and he was gonna react to me like that. I have actually invested a lot of my life and time and energy into this, and he wouldn’t help me resolve it or at least come to an understanding that could give both of us closure and save our relationship. No, he’s content to think that I heart porn more than Jesus, and anything else I have to say about anything be damned. So these last few years have been my attempt to prove that I’m authentic and that I’m willing to bear all in the hopes that maybe then he’d give me something. He gave me nothing. Instead, he twists my arm in the way he knows is most painful, “you just wanna look at porn.” So after pulling my hair out trying to convince my parents that someone like Sydney Powell was a lunatic only for them to throw it in face, I finally twisted his arm and threatened to go to the Chiropractic board of Arizona. That hit him where it hurt and finally got his attention. It also alienated Chief from me, but Chief doesn’t understand what I was trying to do. He thought I was just trying to throw my parents out on the streets. That’s not it.
My dad behaves like he doesn’t have to account to anybody but God and the truth. Not just religiously. But his truth is only his perception of the truth and his God ain’t real in my experience. He has the right to believe whatever he wants to believe, but the Chiropractic Board of Arizona may want him to keep his health talks inside of the scope of evidence-based science and what is good for the public health. Chiropractors inhabit this special status somewhere between “other experts don’t care what they think” and “but all fifty states recognize them as a legitimate healthcare provider for purposes of billing, even holding them accountable to a governing board.” My dad is not a scientist or a researcher or even a doctor. He despises people who believe in Evolution and he used to tell me that psychologists only think what they think cuz they wanna beat their meat. I was utterly amazed when in my lowest moment (back when I was 21) he recommended I go see a shrink. He didn’t go as far as wanting me to be on any pills for anything. But I know he loves me in his way; my point is that way he loves me almost killed me. He doesn’t trust me enough to trust that I mean my criticisms of his worldview out of the most genuine place possible: concern for truth and the hippocratic impulse to reduce harm. I don’t know if he ever took the Oath. I just can’t endure another moment of being treated like a moral weakling while he’s out there damaging people as both a bishop (he’s a bishop again, this time of a YSA) and a medical quack in all the same ways he damaged me. I took away his ability to say that I’m a coward who is just hiding his sins by contemptuously telling my story that I have perfected here on this board on my Facebook wall for all his friends to see. It was very cathartic. Along the way, I discovered that I only have a predisposition for anxiety but am not doomed to have it dialed up to 11 all the time. He asked me what my game is and called me crazy to my face.
He drives me crazy in a sense, but I’m not crazy. I’ve stayed surprising sane through this whole fucking thing between me and him. He has ruined my life in so many different ways. But the thing that makes it so hard is that that’s not what he was trying to do. He’s a simple guy who, I think like me, is desperately trying to quiet the same kinds of ruminating thoughts left in his head by the same church in the same ways that I have tried. He passed those demons on to me, and after my Nephi’s Dream (which is when a son duplicates the experiences of his father because he wants to understand his father) I came to him with glad tidings of how this all really works and what our options really are. But he was too focused on preventing his own bad feelings from resurfacing, which he thought he conquered a long time ago, that he won’t even give me the time of day. In another timeline where my “nexus event” (if you watched Loki on Disney Plus) is that I never had a cognitive disorder that derailed everything, I may have become just like him. I almost became just like him anyway, but the church and the priesthood leaders (who are just regular guys without training) tried just a little too hard to prove too much and to exert too much control over my mind and the problem never was that I wasn’t listening or that I didn’t care. But my disorder simulates that effect. Which is why they treated me like that. Which is what broke my perception of their ability to read minds.
The Mormon priesthood cannot read minds and does not receive revelation that is more valid than science. That’s crazy. That’s loco in the cabeza to think anyone can do that. Would to God that some Mormons would “get help” or at least let their own youth get a second opinion to compliment the the first one received from their parents and the church. Then maybe for those Mormon professionals who blend their religious morality and epistemology with their medical profession: those are what witch doctors and shamans used to be. You can criticize science. Science is all about free inquiry, because good science has the goods to show you and can prove itself in any number of ways. Free inquiry makes science better. But some people are trying to gainsay science so that they can substitute their own ideas which don’t subject themselves to falsification at all. Sometimes science suffers from corruption or from people who aren’t fully honest about their work because they’re trying to make their career. Scientists are humans after all, and I consider medical doctors a kind of scientist.
I come to scientists now the way I used to come to bishops, stake presidents, even temple presidents. I’ve had a whole tour of people you can confess your sins to in Mormonism. They say to be patient with your bishops because they’re only human, but they are also sitting on priesthood keys to revelation as valid within their spiritual jurisdiction as Peter’s authority of the church in ancient times was, or that’s the claim anyway. This is why we don’t professional train bishops in counseling: they channel the Lord in a very real way, supposedly. They have to deliver the words that could have only have come from God, the words which heal the wounded soul. God, if only some one of them had had the words they would have kept me. But they didn’t. They just made it all worse and punished me for my honesty and then punished me for being skeptical. I may have Asperger’s besides ADHD. It’s pretty obvious to me by now, but the diagnosis is still pending. I think it flew under the radar for this long because in a one on one setting where we’re talking about my own mental health, I have lots of practice making eye contact and having a back a forth that masks the symptoms pretty well. I do it even better under ADHD medication. So, I don’t know, maybe I’m just an ADHDr with trauma and weird obsessions because of his upbringing, but ASPIE (they say ASD now) would make so much sense and would be the missing puzzle piece to a lifetime of searching for why I was so different, so divergent, as a kid. But I have my peace. I can sit still in my own house without my ruminating thoughts dragging my conscious mind down to hell. I read books. I play games. I listen to music. I work for a living. I’m alone, but I felt more alone before I started questioning Mormonism. Back then, I didn’t even have my own good company to take the edge off. Now I do.