I spent years lamenting over how doctrines didn't add up and didn't actually learn about the horrifying nature of church history until recently. I want to tell my story and hopefully offer some encouragement to others.

I was raised in Oregon in a very strict family, the second oldest of seven children, in which everyone had enormous egos. My parents didn't like me very much and would hand out cruelly severe, vindictive punishments (I was grounded for a month once because I called my dad a jerk) and then would justify their actions by saying that God had charged them with raising us in righteousness. They would also tell us that when children in ancient Israel were as disrespectful as we were, they would be stoned to death. In reality, they were harsh only to satisfy their own vanity and to show that it was by divine right that they could control their children's lives. Despite their use of religion to justify extreme behaviors, I was a good kid. I went to church, I went to seminary, I read my scriptures and prayed daily, and I did well in school. Being the first of my siblings to go on my mission, I worked my butt off to save over $10,000 for my mission and I was called to Italy.

Just before going, my parents' behaviors as well as some things about Joseph Smith (specifically the lost 116 pages) had caused me to begin to seriously doubt the church, but I wanted to go to Italy, so I went on my mission. Within two weeks of being in the MTC, I was completely brainwashed and believed as firmly as anyone could.

However, the MTC was where I got my first taste ever of Utah culture. My companion was as Utanic as a person can get and had absolutely no understanding of people who thought differently than him. Another elder in our district once said that he was thinking of going home, and instead of trying to convince that elder that he could do so much good for people out in the field, my companion told him that he would be mocked and everyone would think he was a loser if he went home early. I didn't have and didn't understand the Utah mentality and my companion soon had little tolerance for me either.

As I mentioned, I was raised in a family of egotists and I was unfortunately no exception. I would argue with people about things that I knew nothing of and I really felt that I knew more than everyone else, so I know it was irritating to everyone else (I had become aware of the fact that I did this a few months before getting my mission call, but it was an extremely difficult habit to break). My companion and I had promised that if either of us did anything that annoyed the other, we would tell each other, but I would tell him when he annoyed me and he never told me (although I did hear him complaining to others about it behind my back). By the end of our stay in the MTC, he refused to talk to me and would go around humming all day long (which he knew annoyed me). I would speak to him and he would hum over the top of it, and wouldn't respond.

We flew out of SLC and got to the Denver airport and he decided that then was the time to tell me how much he hated me. I got sick of listening to him and decided to leave and join the other missionaries, but he grabbed my arm roughly and yanked me back. I turned and gave him a severe look and I think he noticed that I balled up my hand in a fist, so he let me go. I don't think he has any idea how close he came to getting punched (and if I hadn't improved my temper while in the MTC, he would have been). But he convinced me to stay and told me all of the reasons that he despise me - most of which were things that I would have gladly stopped if he had let me know they were annoying him. I didn't have anything to tell him since I had, as I had promised when we were told we were companions, been telling him when he was annoying me - but that annoyed him since he didn't understand why I found certain things irritating and he didn't actually plan on following through with our promise.

I had a very difficult time getting over that, but I was trying so hard to swallow my pride that by the next time I saw him, I had gotten past it. That was huge for me since my family was big on holding grudges.


Once out in the field, I was determined to spread the word and the help others come to feel God's love. I had a little culture shock, but came to truly love the Italians and honestly wanted to help them find their salvation. I worked tirelessly, but I did have a very hard time learning the language (I didn't fully pick up the more difficult aspects of the grammar until I'd been there 8 months) and, being the egotist I was, I was still a bit difficult to get along with, but I got mostly over that by the time I had been out a year. And my first year was pretty pleasant. I was serving in ugly, boring cities, but I was working hard and most of my companions were pretty easy to get along with. (Although I did have one who refused to work and would lie about our numbers. I'm pretty sure that he ditched me once so he could sneak over to flirt with the dry cleaning attendant, which I had little tolerance for).

During that first year, I met a couple that had very similar interests to me (they were fantasy nuts and loved Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter - they even promised to kidnap me, tie me up, and force me to watch The Two Towers when they found out I wasn't allowed to watch movies as a missionary) and they took the discussions very seriously. They hadn't responded well to the discussions being presented to them and we began structuring our discussions around what they wanted to know and we ended up discussing the sons of perdition. They couldn't understand how a patient and loving God could vindictively cast out 1/3 of His children to be forever tormented. I was never able to explain that either, but I put it in the back of my mind, although it would resurface occasionally.

Also during that first year, I was given my first anti-Mormon pamphlet from an Evangelical couple. It was full of the usual lies - Mormons wear green underwear, etc, and it had some particularly outrageous ones - for example it said that the Book of Mormon taught that God was a spirit and then it quoted the Zoramites saying their abominable prayer as proof. Having seen that, we completely dismissed all of the claims about Joseph Smith marrying other men's wives and swindling people out of their money with the Kirtland safety society as lies too. I determined that anti-Mormon literature was not to be trusted.

I got a reputation for being the hardest working missionary in the mission (that's what three or four of my companions told me my mission president said about me) and the president would use me to send lazy missionaries home with a good last transfer or two. I actually spent 1/3 of my time in the field as the last companion of other missionaries. And yet, despite this reputation I had, I wasn't made senior companion until after I'd been on my mission for over a year. And then it was to a missionary who was going home, but he was a hard worker and a good missionary who followed the rules, so I didn't understand why I would be paired up with him as his senior companion. He was the district leader, so I hadn't really been given any trust or additional responsibility. And the situation was extremely awkward in many ways because he didn't need me to reform him and I couldn't understand what the mission president thought he was accomplishing by using me to straighten things out.

It was there - in Genova - that I really began to see an ugly side to Mormonism. My companion and I got along great (we're friends to this day and he played a very important part in my departure from the church 9 years later) and we worked hard. We became very good friends with a family that he had reactivated and they introduced us to a cousin named Vanessa who was our age and decided to get baptized. She also became a good friend and we both wrote to her after we finished our missions. But while we were doing this good work, our zone leaders were harping on us to do better. Our numbers weren't great, but we were out working and we were following the rules precisely - Italy is just a hard mission to have good numbers in. So the zone leaders decided to do splits with us to see what we were doing wrong. I had the flu at this time and my voice was so hoarse that I couldn't do any better than whisper. I should have been home in bed, but I was so determined not to waste any of my precious time on my mission that I went out with the z.l. and work anyway. He decided that we needed to try to talk to people on the bus. I tried to talk to several people, but buses are noisy and my voice was gone, so I eventually stopped trying because people were just telling me that they couldn't hear a word I said. The zl saw this and told me to go back and keep talking to people. I made a few more attempts, but no one could hear me, so I stopped and sat down. The zone leader observed this (he was at the other end of the bus, trying to talk to people) and we got off the bus and he began to chew me out for not talking to people. I tried to respond, but he couldn't hear my whisper-like voice over the top of the traffic and we had to go a block down to discuss it. He told me that if I had faith, then others would hear my voice. I was dismayed by the fact that he would accuse me of not wanting to spread the gospel or not having faith, but even as fanatical as I was, I knew that no one could hear me and the more I spoke, the worse my voice got. But he was my leader and it was an inspired choice, so I couldn't understand how he could be so obtuse. We had the only baptism in the zone the next transfer and one of 160 for the entire mission that year, so we weren't doing poorly by the numbers that mattered in the end, and yet, we got repeatedly criticized and belittled for not meeting up to the imaginary standards that the zone leaders had made up. That was hard on both of us, but I think my companion had it worse since I suspect that being on his last two transfers and yet getting assigned a senior companion was demeaning to him. Especially since he was probably the best companion I had - particularly when it came to working hard and following the rules, but not being fanatically unreasonable about it (I later had companions for whom following the rules was just not enough). And to make the whole thing worse, when the transfer ended, despite our hard work and Vanessa's baptism, they closed our companionship - my companion went home and I was sent North.

I was finally made senior companion and district leader and I was sent to Lecco on Lake Como, where I was given a companion whose ego made the ego I had when I started the mission (I was much less proud by this time) look extremely humble. He and I got along well enough, but I had to endure the embarrassment of hearing him belittle Italians in front of them. His ethnocentrism made him incapable of feeling any compassion toward the people he was supposed to be loving. It took several times of chastising him to convince him to quit it and I almost never chastised my junior companions (I believed in leading by example).

After two transfers with him, I was sent a young missionary who wasn't very good at following the rules and had some chip on his shoulder and decided to take it out on me. No matter what I did, he insisted it was wrong. He would speak to me in English if I spoke to him in Italian, and then vice versa. He hated the way I was systematically knocking on doors, and recording which ones we'd been to. However, I had already tapped the small branch (maybe 20 active members) for any referrals, and we were in a small city, so there was little better to do than knock on doors and my previous experience in small towns was that if you didn't keep track of which doors you knocked on, the next set of missionaries went right back to where you had just barely been before. He would tell everyone about how much he hated me and it completely killed the work. My mission president grew concerned about the situation and told me that I had to be strict with my companion and exercise firm leadership over him. He promised me that if I did, my companion would straighten out. I did exactly what I was told to do. I wasn't mean, but I was very firm and made executive decisions and told him he had to follow. Things got much worse. We were so prone to arguing that I dreaded going to church because he would argue in front of the members (I now suspect he did it to embarrass me) and he would speak English in front of them (it's incredibly rude to go to speak a language someone doesn't understand in front of them - especially in Italy at church). Finally, on the last week of the transfer, I asked him to take the role of senior companion so I could see what he thought we should be doing. He did exactly what I'd been doing the first week of the transfer. I had changed what we were doing repeatedly for him only to find out that what I'd started with was exactly how he felt things should be done. I had been so stressed in dealing with him, and I felt very confused because I had been promised (PROMISED!) by my mission president that he would respond well to me taking a firm stance with him and I couldn't understand how my inspired president could make a promise that failed so completely to come true.

As though the stress of dealing with that companion (who I now understand was emotionally disturbed) wasn't enough, that prep day, I received an email from my Genova companion (who I'll remind you had returned home) that informed me that Vanessa was feeling suicidal. Her family was extremely opposed to he joining the church and since joining, things had gone from bad to extremely bad. I didn't find this out until later, but her family had made things very hard on her and then her best friend, a homosexual man, had been killed (I don't know the details about that) and she had stopped going to church. The branch president, a man who I had found to be rather racist, went to talk to her and was very compassionate to begin with and tried to help her, but as soon as he found out that the friend who died was gay, he lost all empathy and said that if the friend was gay, then he deserved to die. She went into depression and I knew that I had played a role in that. What I had expected would make her happy had destroyed her life.

I had a nervous breakdown after that and I got transferred to Torino. I kept trying to work - I was up on time, I studied just like I was supposed to, but for about a month, I couldn't bring myself to talk to anyone about the gospel. We would go out and look for people to talk to about the gospel, but I let my companion do the talking. I couldn't even focus on what he was saying. I felt so inadequate and I feared that I lacked faith or otherwise I would have succeeded in getting along with my previous companion and I would have been able to find the strength to keep talking about the gospel. It was a very difficult time for me, but my new companion was a compassionate and understanding person. I was so stressed that I had a hard time being patient with him and I seriously regret that. I've tried finding him online so I could apologize to him, but haven't been able to.

After three or four weeks, I began to return to my previous mental strength and I was once again talking to everyone who was willing to listen and help bring them the happiness of the gospel. I worked hard and was beginning to enjoy being a missionary again. It was around this time that I had another experience that would eventually change my view on my religion forever. It was a very brief exchange with an Evangelical (we rarely encountered Evangelicals, so even though two of them had an effect on me, don't get the impression that they were common - Catholics simply rarely made any impression on me). He simply said that he knew his church was true because he had prayed about it and the Holy Spirit had answered that it was his religion. I was flabbergasted - only people in the LDS faith could ever have such and experience. No one else. It was impossible. I told him he was a liar and he politely ended the conversation. I regret having been so rude to him, but at the time I honestly thought he was lying to mock us.

Then, my first transfer in Torino ended. Up to that point, all of the missionaries in my district (which included myself, my companion, and the zone leaders) had gotten along well. We were all sensible people who worked hard and followed the rules, but understood that missionary life was tough. The one of the Zone leaders transferred out and we got Anziano Bingham (Anziano means elder). Bingham decided that, despite the fact I had respectable numbers, and despite the fact that when I had been at the same point in my mission as he was at that time I had had taught more people who had gotten baptized than him, he needed to somehow fix how I proselytized. He immediately told me that I was doing things wrong and that I had to do things his way. (I was uncomfortable talking to people about other things and weaseling my way from that into religion, preferring to ask people if they wanted to talk about religion and if they did, I'd talk to them - since my numbers worked out the same as everyone else's why not?) He then decided that, despite the fact that I rose on time and did my studying without sleeping, he had to make me get out of bed to study, but he would sleep with the window open, so it was freezing in the house (often as low as 50 degrees F when we woke up) and I was never warm. He refused to do anything to make the house warmer, and still complained when I got out of bed, but took all of the blankets with me (I should note that at this point in my life, I was six feet tall and weighed only 135 pounds, so I had a terrible time keeping warm. He told me that I had to leave my blankets on the bed, but I told him I would fight that one all the way to the mission president and he backed off. Then, he started making the entire zone get up 10 minutes earlier because he felt that when I prayed for the entire district first thing in the morning, I wasn't praying very well and I needed a few minutes to wake up before prayer. I was suffering from insomnia (and had been since my mid teen years) and needed every second of sleep I could get. Unfortunately, I was averaging between 4 and 6 hours per night for the previous 2 years and I never slept in (except when power outages knocked our alarm clocks out), but he didn't care. Everything I did was wrong even though it didn't break any rules and he kept making up new ones until I was breaking a rul. His hypocrisy extended so far that he would spend a week singing a song that wasn't allowed by mission rules, and then chastise me for, as district leader, not telling him to stop. There have been few times when I have felt as though I was being vindictively targeted for doing nothing. It was as bad as living with my parents. I put up with that for six weeks, then my companion got transferred out and I got Anziano Bean, who was a Utah brat in the worst way. He idolized Anziano Bingham and they became fast friends. My last transfer was hell. At least before, I only had to deal with Anziano Bingham when I was at home. Anziano Bean was a like the puppy dog version of Anziano Bingham - he followed me everywhere (as he was supposed to) and made up new rules that never existed before. Bean insisted on being no more than ten feet away from me (until even Bingham told him that we could talk to people about the church on opposite sides of the bus) and criticized my actions that were by the book because I didn't try to take them one step further.

We had an appointment at a member's house with an investigator who had had a baptism date set, but never showed up. The conversation was pleasant and we made progress. I thought I was feeling the spirit. However, he refused every invitation we made to him to come to church. He was embarrassed by not showing up for his baptism and he thought that the word of wisdom was stupid because he drank green tea and knew that it was healthy. He couldn't believe that anything with the health benefits of green tea would be banned by a commandment promoting good health. The investigator was speaking mostly with our host, so Bean slipped me a note saying he felt the spirit and we should invite him to be baptized. I said no. He slipped me another note saying that we should and I slipped him one back explaining that there would be no point in baptizing him so long as he continued to refuse to go to church. After we got out of the member's house, Bean began screaming at me that I was lucky that he hadn't invited him to be baptized anyway. It didn't matter to him that he would have been breaking a rule by going against his senior companion's judgment on that, or that the guy was clear that he refused to go to church - he had felt the spirit and therefor all logic and all other rules were void because the handbook says that if you feel the spirit, you invite them to be baptized. He barely talked to me for a week after that and I was shocked to see that the other missionaries in the group agreed with him.

I got so stressed out, and was suffering from being constantly too cold and I ended up getting sick. I lost one day of work, but I was so determined to be a good missionary that I took my second to last prep day and worked it and I worked through lunches (Bean was cool with that because it was exactly the kind of thing that he felt we should be doing anyway) to make up the hours I lost and I was able to go home saying that I never lost a single hour of work while I was a missionary. That's how fanatical I was and the others in my district were treating me like I wasn't dedicated enough.

It took me a while to get over my mission and aspects of it still make me mad. I was trying so hard to respect those who I thought were chosen by God to lead me that I failed to stand up for my rights and others really took advantage of it. My mission experiences fractured my testimony and I never got over it. I still believed, but I understood that there were things about the church that were didn't quite work. 1) some of the doctrines didn't add up. 2) Even if the church was perfect, it failed to inspire good behavior out of the people in it and 80% of the people in the church used it as a way of controlling others or looking down on people. 3) There were other religions that claimed to have divine inspiration and its members might believe that they were told by God through the Holy Ghost that their church was the true faith. 4) With the pervasive nudity in advertising and on beaches in Italy (we weren't supposed to go near beaches, but sometimes we had appointments near them and it couldn't be avoided), the Mormon missionaries were the perverted ones. The Italians looked on the nudity as though it was normal, thinking nothing of it (even the members frequently were completely okay with it), but the missionaries always added a sexual meaning to it even when there was none intended.

While a missionary, I had changed enormously. I no longer contradicted people, I had learned to swallow my pride, and I had learned to love others and not just myself. These changes made me a better person and I felt that, despite my difficulties in the mission field, the mission had been a very good experience for me.

I got home and I wasn't arguing with my parents, but I found myself the target of their extremism and realized for the first time that it hadn't only been my ego and my pride that kept us from getting along, but theirs as well. I received a condescending chastisement for not wanting to attend institute after working a 16 hour shift for the second day straight with only 8 hours to go before the next shift (I got a very good job after returning from my mission).

I worked through the summer and went to BYU-I, where I met a young woman who I quickly fell in love with. We prayed about it and, a little over three months after we met, we were married, but not without a scandal first. One of the people in my apartment was 35 years old and single. He had no respect for women and didn't deserve a romantic relationship until he could view them as being worth more than just sexual playthings. So he got super jealous after I got engaged and reported to the dean that we were breaking rules. We were - but not the ones he claimed. I would come home 5 minutes to 10 minutes after curfew on a regular basis and I wouldn't kick my future wife out into the cold if I was cooking a meal and everyone else in the apartment left, so we were occasionally in the apartment by ourselves. But he told the dean that we were lying on top of each other and I was fondling her, which simply wasn't true. We were very careful about our physical interaction. We kissed a lot - and sometimes passionately, but that was the extent of it. And I realized at that point that even though I wasn't a missionary, people in the church still had the ability to exercise control over me to satisfy their vindictive urges.

The summer after we were married, we went to work for a company run and owned by LDS people, selling home security systems. They lied to us about the work schedule and I was disgusted by the lies that they encouraged us to tell at the doors. We did this in Boise, where there is a reasonably high LDS population, and I was shocked by how often some of the most viciously hateful people would have pictures of temples on their walls. Then, my LDS boss began mistreating my wife and we quit.

Roughly a year after we were married, I came to discover that I was able to manipulate the way I feel to convince myself that I was getting warm and fuzzy feelings from the spirit. So I couldn't be sure that I had ever felt the spirit and was just convincing myself of what I wanted to think. I still thought that the church was true, but I couldn't any longer deny some of the doubts that I had had regarding the church. My mission experiences had left me feeling like I had done something wrong as a missionary, but I couldn't figure out what. But if I had been doing what God wanted, I wouldn't have conflicted with the people he'd chosen to lead me - unless he didn't really choose those people to lead me.

My doubts grew and grew and I soon told my wife, but I was afraid to tell her why in case I was wrong, I didn't want to risk her salvation. She was as supportive as someone under the mind control of the church can be expected to be, but we still argued over it on occasions. Despite this, she agreed with me on many of my criticisms of the church that I was willing to share, but didn't think that they meant that the church wasn't true. Up until 9 months ago, I still thought that there might be 5% chance that the church was true and, despite the fact that I had found many serious flaws in the "perfect" doctrines by this time, I still didn't want to risk her salvation in case I was wrong. However, because of the lies that I had seen in the anti-Mormon pamphlet, and the church's insistence that Satan will lie to destroy God's work, I was resistant to reading anything that was opposed to the church since I believed that it would be just as full of lies. So I spent 6-7 years in a state of doubt, but was unable to come to any conclusions because of how I limited my research to LDS friendly sources only.

I was saved by Game of Thrones. Sort of. I ended up discussing HBO's Game of Thrones with my companion from Genova, who remained an avid fan of fantasy and science fiction, but I thought was still devoutly LDS. I said that the series was brilliant, but graphic and, even though you could probably get around the sex scenes, you couldn't avoid the nudity and he responded by informing me that even though he was no longer LDS his wife would disapprove, so he couldn't watch it. I was shocked. I had felt very alone in doubting the church, so I carefully approached him about the reasons he was no longer LDS (and in case he had been excommunicated) I was very delicate, explaining that unless he had joined a Neo Nazi group, or slaughtered children, I was very unlikely to be judgmental. He responded by saying that he had been slaughtering children, but they were Jewish, so it should be alright. (Forgive the dark humor - if you view that as inappropriate, I'm sorry, but the joke actually loosened things up). He explained how he had researched into church history and found out the truth and he guided me to a few sources that we published by LDS sources or pro LDS sources and indicated that what he had discovered was true.

I immediately gobbled it up. I was cautious at first, but after finding an apologetic site that admitted that Joseph Smith married other men's wives, and after finding out about the Book of Abraham Papyri, that was more than enough to make the remaining 5% of my faith vanish. I read everything I could find and, with all of the important things (polyandry, Smith marrying teenagers, the fact that the Book of Mormon HAS been changed, the fact that every one of Smith's book of scripture either contradicts another book of scripture or ended up getting changed from one publication to the next) were confirmed by FAIRLDS or the Maxwell institute, or by looking at scans of original documents (many of which were on the Joseph Smith Papers). Thank you LDS church and apologetic sites for confirming my years-long suspicion that the church is, in fact, false.

My next issue now that I was absolutely convinced that the church was false was to try to explain what I had learned to my wife, so I began writing an essay explaining the doctrinal flaws and the church history. However she seemed just a step ahead of me, because just as I was starting the essay, she found a book on secret societies in the checkout aisle in the grocery store and began flipping through it. She saw a picture of Joseph Smith and put it back, saying, "well that's obviously not true." I asked her what and she told me what she saw and I told her that it probably listed him as a famous Freemason, so she went back and looked at it and found that I was right (I had known about Joseph Smith's freemasonry since early in my mission, and aspects relating to that fact had been a small part of my doubting). She didn't like the thought of that since she didn't have a very good view of Freemasons (in part due to the Book of Mormon's teachings about secret societies - way to go Smith, shooting yourself in the foot with that BoM doctrine) and she began asking me a lot of questions about it. I told her everything and she seemed very disturbed, but then I told her that that was nothing compared to some of the things that had happened in church history and she wanted to know more and I told her everything. She had a panic attack. Literally.

Over the next few weeks, we discussed the church and she checked my sources. At first, she was as skeptical about anything critical of the church as I had been (and in part because of me - I had told her about all of my mission experiences), but as she saw that the sources for the serious stuff were all pro LDS or officially LDS, she began to slowly realize that she had been duped. Within two weeks, she knew that the church wasn't true, and after a month, she decided to help me finish the essay about why the church isn't true.

I had already done most of the research, so all we had to do was write it. Two months later, it was done and, formatted for publishing (which we don't intend to do, but that indicates a standard to help you understand how long it really is), it was 140 pages long! With that, we were ready. We both told the bishop that we didn't want our callings anymore and then we told our families. My family reacted much better than I expected, but I had expected some pretty awful stuff, but they have so far been respectful about it (at least to our faces). My wife's parents, however, flew off the handle and immediately began blaming me (they've always thought I was a bad influence because they didn't see their daughter for the individual she had become until after she met me, but they blamed her occasional choice to skip church on me despite the fact that at that point, I was keen on being to church on time, and they blamed her watching R rated movies on me, despite the fact she owned R rated movies before we met and I had never watched one unedited - you know, mostly petty stuff that Mormons love to make a big deal about). They refused to read our essay about why we believe the church is a lie, calling it a manifesto. Ironically, the essay is very respectful and simply justifies our current beliefs while stating that we understand why others continue to believe. Now, my wife is in a sticky situation with them, not sure if they're shunning her, or if she is welcome by her parents (most of her siblings have either officially left the church or are deliberately completely inactive so there's not much concern with how they'll accept it - in fact one of my sisters-in-law has been very supportive through the whole ordeal and it's helped my wife reconnect with her).

So there it is. Much of my unhappiness was caused by the church and my wife now realizes that much of hers was too. We are grateful for the few benefits we found in the church, but we're glad to be free of it. Free of people trying to judge us by standards that they invented, but still feel we should follow. Free of people trying to use their interpretations of the doctrines to try to force us to do things that we don't want to do. Free from a huge financial burden (we were appalled to learn how little of our tithing went to humanitarian aid - even though I was seriously doubting the church, I paid tithing to keep peace with my wife and because I believed that a good portion of it would go to humanitarian aid - boy was I WRONG).

It's been two months since we announced our departure from the church to our families and we finally feel at peace with our beliefs. My wife and I are closer than we have been in a long time and she doesn't have to deal with people at church treating her poorly because she doesn't fit in (she's too intellectual for them). I am no longer tormented over fears that I may lead my family to damnation if I'm wrong because I am now more certain that the church is not true than I ever was that is might be - and I used to tell everyone that I met "I know this church is true."

That's it for now. I hope I may have said something that inspired hope in any of you struggling with Mormonism or wanting to leave Mormonism despite family opposition. I've read enough on this board and spoken with enough exMormons to know that it may not get better for many of you, but there is hope for some. If you are interested in reading our essay, we edited a few personal things out of it so it's a few pages shorter, but it can be found here. https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B6IWv1y1m4yzM1psTVF0T3dCNlU/edit?pli=1 The text highlighted in blue either takes you directly to our source online, or in the original document, it would lead to another point in the essay, but the linking to other parts of the document seems to have been disabled.