There was an article recently appeared in the Deseret News wherein Brad Willcox, popular author and fireside speaker in the Morridor, minimized his own misconception of Religious Trauma Syndrome as if he was nailing "the critics" to the wall. He didn't. All he did was miss the point and perceive it as a form of calumny designed to shake either his faith in the church or the faith of others. We do not talk about religiously-induced post-traumatic stress to "attack the Mormons," but to lift up the hands that hang down and strengthen the feeble knees and inform the ignorant that it's ok to start recovering whenever they are ready.

Human beings don't belong to the corporation of the president of the church of jesus christ of latter-day saints just because they born into it. It teaches them that they do, but they don't. Human beings don't belong to their families either. If you are not having a good time in the Mormon community, you are allowed to leave. You've always known you were physically allowed to leave, but perhaps you're afraid that if you do, you will be damned and whatever you got going on in terms of guilt and depression will just get worse. You are allowed to stay too. Your life need not revolve around a cult if you don't want it to, though. You are allowed to be happy, and if that's not possible right now, you are allowed to do the self-care you've been putting off because you think that's what repentance entails.

We are taught that doubting God's existence, doubting Jesus Christ's supernatural reality, and doubting the LDS church as the one true church are all the same sin. We are taught that spirit prison is real where we will suffer something excruciating like unto eternal torment, even though it has an end in time, but we will always wear our shame to all eternity and cower in the light of more worthy individuals who weren't sinners like us... all this stress is real if we can't get a lid on our sins. We are also taught that if we ever stop attending church and taking this abuse every week of our lives, then the conditions of hell remain on us forever. We become the sons of perdition and he takes our reigns and has power over us forever. What's worse is that we don't really know if any of this is true, but everybody around us is acting like it probably is, and if we rebel against the system there is no sympathy -- none. There is nowhere to go but church and nothing to do but sit there in the pew with your mind silently oscillating between wanting to believe the doctrine with all your heart to belong to your community and your curiosity getting the better of you followed by the toxic self-talk you use to whip your mind back into obedient shape.

That's a lot of stress to put on a classroom full of children every sunday and every school day during seminary, but they do it all the time. It doesn't feel like a big deal to the teacher, because it was how they were raised too, but how each soul in the room digests that information is different. Mormons are only noticing neurodiversity when they tell themselves that the Holy Ghost speaks to each person in a unique way. That's not the Holy Ghost: that's just people under a holy fear of hell entertaining the moral law being laid down because nobody wants to be cast off from their friends and family and be forever alone and also everybody thinks or at least suspects that God is watching from the other side of the veil and their bishops can read their very thoughts as they have them. Now contemplate for a moment how damaging these teachings can be when the mind in question does not and never really had very healthy self-esteem, maybe has a propensity for scrupulosity, or God forbid a major trauma (e.g molestation or rape) they blame themselves for. The fiery sermons about hell, damnation, and the duration of eternity don't just create godly sorrow: they can kill hearts and wound delicate minds for life, and the Book of Mormon acknowledges this fact, to its credit.

Nephi's brother Jacob laid down some cautions about abusing the pulpit with too much hellfire and damnation talk in front of an audience of women and children. In the book of Jacob, the one after 2 Nephi, he preaches against the Nephites for their whoredoms in the strongest possible terms and then blames them double for the harm Jacob's words are causing the pure in heart in attendence.

"It grieveth me that I must use so much boldness of speach concerning you, before your wives and your children," Jacob cries. "many of whose feelings are exceedinly tender and chaste and delicate before God, which thing is pleasing unto God;

"And it supposeth me that they have come up hither to hear the pleasing word of God, yea, the word which healeth the wounded soul.

"Wherefore, it burdeneth my soul that I should... enlarge the wounds of those who are already wounded, instead of consoling and healing their wounds; and those who have not been wounded, instead of feasting upon the pleasing word of God have daggers placed to pierce their souls and wound their delicate minds." (Jacob 2:7-9)

I omit the parts where Jacob justifies doing it anyway, but he ends his sermon by saying, "And because of the stritness of the word of God, which cometh down against you, many hearts died, pierced with deep wounds" (v. 35).

As a teenager, those words were almost comforting, except for my toxic masculinity kicked in and I didn't want to be compared to "women and children" or described as "tender and delicate," but you know what... guys have emotional needs too, and mental illness afflicts us as much as anybody else. So words can kill hearts and wound any human minds according to Jacob. Not just any words: the words of God. Something about the words connoting a cosmic, universal, eternal, or inescapable destiny none can avoid probably has a lot to do with that. Oh, wielded responsibly, hearts and minds can also be patched up and made to sing the songs of redeeming love, but sometimes that's not how the words are internalized, and at least Jacob admits that. We cannot stress enough how damaging the messaging of the church can be, especially upon the sensitive and upon the eager who gobble it all up thinking every word is intended for them on some level.

CAN. How damaging it CAN be.

Nobody ever said that religion in all cases, everywhere, and all the time is inherently traumatizing for most people and that the best thing is to be socially isolate yourself from your religious community. That is not what anybody ever said. However, this church deliberately isolates people when it shows them the door the instant they start asking too many questions so that their doubts don't spread like a plague. Reading articles these days begging people to stay is very telling about how decades of creating a hostile social environment for critical thinking ended up working out for them, Nobody who grew up the way I did and tried to love it with all their hearts WANTS to leave as a first thought. We wanted to stay, but we needed to be able to live with ourselves too and be honest in our dealings with our fellow men. Why should I have to live in shame because I discovered some truth nobody else wants to hear? I'm not making it up, and I didn't decide how this universe is organized or what facts it wants to hit me over the head with tomorrow. Yet the church makes a person doubting his testimony in light of troubling news feel like it's his fault and if he voices his thoughts on that matter, he's being predatory somehow -- like in the sense of wolves in sheep's clothing. This confused state is compounded many times over by gaslighting: "it's because of your sins that you're doubting!" But everybody sins! That's very circular reasoning. But at this point you're already being marked and avoided by people who for their own sakes need to imagine you in terms of a spiritual leper, and if you keep it up the leaders put a scarlet letter on you or even ask you to leave and not come back. You never imagined being in another culture or doing something else every Sunday, but they just ask you to leave. It's very emotionally damaging, because it is intended to be so and they deliberately isolate you from the gentiles culturally in many ways to make it hurt even more to discourage independent thought, and not everybody deals with it very well.

Post-traumatic Stress Disorder can be very complex. cPTSD is also in the current diagnostics manual. It can be religiously themed and made very complex because a person suffering flashbacks and brain fog and severe anxiety and social dysfunction, stuck in perpetual survival mode, might also at the same time understand their situation in terms of it being all their fault, a punishment from God for their sins, or the natural consequences of losing the Holy Spirit, which makes them reticent to be told that it's ok to stop ruminating on their pain and suffering, which is only making everything worse. No, the ailing mind protests, I wanna repent, I wanna please God, I want the pain to stop, please I have godly sorrow and I'm doing my best, I'm sorry for my doubts, I'll never be curious again, please God take this guilt away from heart like you promised you would! This scene plays out in more hearts than you would think, even if they keep it all inward. It's not just a miscarriage of well-intended teachers wielding the word of God clumsily in the wrong: it's the intended affect of the scriptures in many passages, so says the scriptures themselves.

For example, in D&C section 19, we get God himself through the medium of Joseph Smith saying, "Again, it is written *eternal damnation*; wherefore it is more express than other scriptures, that it might work upon the hearts of the children of men, altogether for my name's glory (v. 7)."

Section 19 is a little bit of a peak into God's M.O., at least according to Joseph Smith. You see, hell doesn't actually last forever, but it's phrased in such a way to make you think that to terrorize you into repentance so that you straighten up and fly right like you're supposed to. That's very cynical. You have your free will, technically, but also I'm gonna immerse you in propaganda that terrorizes you until the very temptation to think for yourself makes you turn white as a ghost as you contemplate the consequences of sin. Joseph Smith wrote these verses despite what the Book of Mormon says about eternal punishment to get Martin Harris, who was a universalist and shrunk at the thought that a just God would punish any soul literally forever, to mortgage his farm and finance Smith's bookwriting. It wouldn't be for several more years until after he met Sydney Rigdon and came into contact with more theological ideas that he would articulate the three degrees of glory, then called The Vision. So at the time this verse was written, the Bible and Book of Mormon both put their foot down in down in a very final and eternal way against sin and sinners but this verse was floating around in the minds of a select few explaining that God just loves terrorizing people out of a concern for their eternal happiness. It's better to torment a mind to do the right thing than it is to let them be and fall into river of filthy water or get lost wandering in strange roads and then spend a thousand years in hell atoning for it. So goes the logic, more or less. So when Mormons get the intended impression their scriptures are deliberately giving them, but the anxiety and the existentialism gets out of hand, and then an LDS counselor gaslights them and tells them they were doing it wrong, that's very confusing, very very confusing especially since you're probably in a state of post-traumatic stress by then to some degree or another. By the way, it's not comforting to think that God misleads people for their own good; it just makes one wonder what all that God of truth nonsense is about. Why is it so wrong to trust one's own eyes and rational mind when the evidence is there telling you that all these jokers are taking you for a ride and that it's not in your interest to let them do it anymore? But the fear of death and discovering eternity on the left hand of God smite your mind as it thinks the thought, and you stew in your religiously-induced mental nightmare of anxiety and self-loathing a little longer, despite what the dude is trying to do for you, he's not granting you the greatest gift you can be given in a predicament like that: your own permission to think your own thoughts.

The fear of hell only works because it succeeds in making you afraid to deny the reality of hell. People who don't think there's a hell go to hell. Funny how that works. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled is convincing people he doesn't exist, we sometimes hear. Except that we can trace the evolution of the concept of devil throughout history. The snake in the garden was just a talking snake, if you're ignoring the triple combination and the Joseph Smith translation and only looking at Genesis and the consensus of academic scholarship, and yes that is ridiculous. In the bronze age, Israel was a backwater, not the "holy land" -- only the Jews maybe, and they had to constantly purge their skeptics and have religious revivals to keep their nation believing in Yahweh. The adversary/accuser (ha'satan) in the book of Job was just a member of Jehovah's divine court whose job was to prosecute humans before the throne of God to test them and prove them. The passages in Isaiah about the son of the morning falling from heaven were just pronouncements of doom upon the king of Babylon. What the Bible doesn't tell you is that in the four centuries or so between the book of Malachi and the gospel of Matthew, Judaism had been significantly influenced by the religion of the Medes and the Persions: Zoroastrianism. Zoroastrianism has one god of the good and one god of the bad, Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu. It preaches about a great prophet who shall come to separate the wheat from the chaff, it preaches about a resurrection, a final judgement, and even a millennium of peace. Zoroastrianism forces its adherents to view the whole world in terms of moral good or moral evil, order and chaos. The Old Testament (Torah) contains no definite teachings of Satan that cannot be called into question whether they even realized there was a Satan at that time in the progression of revelation, Satan meaning the antigod, that fallen angel behind all evil who makes God's plan go brr and tempted Jesus in the wilderness. By the New Testament times, the pharisees and sadducees were divided by whether there was a resurrection and everybody knew there was a devil. Go figure Judaism would have been significantly influenced by both Babylonian and Persian religion: the first diaspora lasted quite a while and not all of the Jews returned. My point is, take a college-level history of the world's religions class. It does wonders for helping you understand where your beliefs come from and what your options are. Even if you have to have your butt in a pew every sunday or else you don't know what to do with yourself, there are so many different takes on scripture, and no single one of them is more legit than the other by empirical standards, so pick a healthy one at least, and don't be afraid to empower yourself with historical knowledge about the Bible. Throw it all out if it torments you so.

There are too many people gumming up the works of the Mormon therapeutic cottage industry. Those people deserve better. They often exist in a state of limbo, because nothing the church or even their therapist tells them really lets them off their hooks and everything they're being taught in therapy about unconditional self-love flies to the whirlwind the instant they say they don't wanna go to church anymore. If mental health was the most important priority, the poor soul would go to a normal counselor, not shop for a Mormon one specifically. Talk about having itching ears. Mormons are scared to death of the psychology establishment, because they might find out their emotions are, just possibly NOT revelations from heaven. So they keep it in house, but unfortunately that means that even if the LDS counselor has the waters of life to share it's gonna get filtered through the jockstap of the general authorities' views first -- which might be the problem to begin with.

If the only virtue in that community is staying Mormon, Mormons are gonna keep abusing prescription pills and porn, O.D'ing on fentanyl and opioids, and putting guns to their heads at higher rates than the rest of the country. That doesn't mean the church is a terrible place for everyone, but God damn, smell the statistics sometime and try telling yourself it's just the thin, dry, cold mountain air or maybe it's the devil working overtime on God's chosen people. I dare you. Do it, and then see if you don't feel sick to your stomach at the many souls you would consign in your heart to the limbo I just described just to save your own ass from a little cognitive dissonance! It doesn't hurt anybody to admit that people have the right to leave the church for their own sakes: it saves lives. The only reason Mormons can't handle giving their family members and close friends this implicit permission is because they struggle wrapping their minds around the concept that they have that permission too, which tells you everything you need to know about why people call Mormonism a cult.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/12/2022 05:10PM by Cold-Dodger.