I was born into the Mormon church. I’m not sure how far back the church goes in my family … but it’s pretty far. My ancestors crossed the plains … my family history is rife with pioneer stories, polygamy, etc. My dad was employed by the church education system as a seminary / institute teacher for many years. My mom has always been a devout member. There are 11 kids in my family … a few of which have stopped believing in religion, a few of which are in various stages of inactivity, but most of which are still very much active. This is my story of how I got to where I am now.

For the most part I did as most kids do, and accepted whole-heartedly what my parents were “giving” to me as a belief system. I took the church to heart. I very much internalized it. It fused into my belief system in a very profound, extensive way. I was very devoted. At one point in my life I was actually going to the temple once a week. I didn’t have much reason to doubt because I was surrounded by people who believed the same thing I did (we grew up in Utah).

The oldest memories I can come up with where I doubted a little are from high school.

I once had a seminary teacher who told us that he believed that the dinosaur fossils found on the earth had come from other planets. I was very much interested in science, and I thought this a rather strange thing to believe. He explained to us that no one could die before the fall of Adam and Eve, and therefore the dinosaurs couldn’t have lived on the earth and died out millions of years ago as scientists claim … thus the “other worlds” theory.

Combine that with another thing I heard from my dad. In his time teaching institute he had many a chance to try and convert non-believers. In one case there was a kid who said he couldn’t believe in the church because he believed in aliens. My dad went on to explain to him (using scriptures) that believing in aliens is in fact very much in harmony with the gospel, that we believe that God created many worlds … many of which might also be populated with his spiritual offspring, that in fact Christ’s atonement … effectuated on this planet … served to bring about salvation for all those people, across the universe.

I found both of these accounts to be kind of weird, but more troubling was the contradiction when you put them together. If the atonement applied universe-wide … and therefore Adam’s fall as well … then it contradicts my seminary teacher’s belief that dinosaurs on other worlds could have died before Adam. I was a little troubled by this contradiction between two esteemed adults in my life, but I didn’t let it bother me too much. I moved on.

There is another memory from high school … I had a history teacher one day who brought up Sigmund Freud. He talked about him briefly, only to mention his contributions to modern-day understanding of psychology. One of the things he mentioned was Freud’s theories on sex … that sexual acts were the very natural venting of subconscious desires … which if suppressed can lead to various types of psychological disturbances.

At this point in my life I had discovered masturbation … and I did it from time to time even though I hated myself for it. I assumed I was too weak to resist temptation … that I was being disobedient to the law of chastity. For years I went through various stages of psychological hell because of this that are stories for another occasion. Sufficed to say that when I heard about Freud I was petrified. What if this desire to pleasure myself really is a subconscious “force” that I will never be able to overcome? And why did the church teach that masturbation was wrong if, according to a scientist like Freud, it was perfectly healthy, even necessary … to allow oneself to do it? This continued to nag at my consciousness for years, even though I went on believing 100 percent in the church.

Then while at BYU I had a history of civilization course. I have always loved studying about ancient civilizations, and so I really drank it up when we talked about the Egyptians, the Persians, the Babylonians, etc. I was fascinated by the practices, technologies, and religious beliefs of these various people. I remember the point where we came to the unit on the Hebrews. As I started to read that chapter in the textbook I told myself to pay particularly close attention. After all … these were the people who had the “one true church” in antiquity. But to my dismay the textbook presented them in the exact same way as all the other civilizations … an ancient group of people who reacted in their own unique way to the quandaries of life by coming up with mythical explanations for how everything worked. They practiced monotheism, just as the Egyptians practiced polytheism … it was merely their “story” for explaining how the world worked. It was weird for me to see the writers of the old testament put in the same light as any other ancient people, as if there was nothing special about them. Even though it bothered me, it was very easy to scoff at the account as merely being a “worldly” view.

So on I went, putting seemingly minor doubts into the back of my mind, and I ended up going on a mission, just as I was expected to do. Truth be told I was horrified to go, not because I didn’t believe in the church, but because I had severe social anxiety. I had no idea that it was anxiety at the time … I had never heard a clinical definition of the word … I just assumed I was shy, and quiet by nature. But to be honest, the prospect of confronting complete strangers in a foreign land and talking to them about my beliefs was horrifying to me. I overcame that fear by reminding myself about my sincere conviction that what I was doing was good and right, and looking back I can now see that I was also motivated by a large dose of social pressure, as indeed many missionaries are.

So I managed to go on a mission, and I survived the whole 2 years. It was very hard for me … I constantly wished I could go home, and constantly suffered severe anxiety and even depression for much of my mission. I was very quiet about this and didn’t speak of it in the letters to my family, or even in my journal, because I was convinced that I was doing the Lord’s will, and that would make me look back on my suffering as a trial that would make me into a better man. To this day it amazes me that I made it through. It was most certainly not the “best 2 years” of my life.

Looking back I can see that the suffering on my mission was an indicator of things to come … psychological suffering that was going to play a big part in how I perceived the church. I was so happy to be home, however, that I put it all behind me and went on to what I was sure would be a very fulfilling life. I continued to live the gospel with all my heart, and continued to conduct my life according to the grand expectations of the church. I was prepared to do it all … graduate from college and get a career going, get married and start a family, etc etc.

A few years later I crumbled under those expectations. My last year at byu was a very stressful one for me … I had unbelievably-hard classes ( I had decided to major in physics for some reason), the prospect of having to go out and start a career was putting pressure on me, and for the first time in my life I had a girlfriend. Up until this point in my life I had assumed that the stress I felt from these sources was very natural, that it was identical to what everyone else went through. One day I was waiting to have my hair cut at a barber shop, and I picked up a sports magazine to read. In it was a story about Ricky Williams … a famous football player who had been diagnosed with social anxiety disorder. I was intrigued, and I later went to one of the websites mentioned in the article. I was blown away. As I read the experiences of people with social anxiety and the lists of symptoms, I so strongly related to it all that I was quickly convinced that I was suffering from the same thing.

After I graduated I went into a deep, prolonged depression. When this did not subside, I was forced to face the fact that this was not merely a passing bout of “low mood.” I wasn’t getting anywhere with my job hunting, and I was feeling quite awful about my life. I started to seek help. I started doing research on anxiety and depression. I already knew a little because of my research on the Ricky Williams article. I went on to educate myself about mental health, and found that I was indeed suffering from clinical depression and severe social anxiety. I also discovered that other members of my family, as well as many people in my extended family on my mom’s side had also suffered from mental health issues. The next year-or-so of my life was a very hard one … I reached depths of depression that I never knew were even possible.

It was during this period that I went to visit my brother in Arizona, which I had planned to be a job-hunting trip. One night I got into a conversation with my brother and his wife about religion. Up until this point I had assumed (wrongly) that all of my 10 siblings were still very active in the church. I was shocked to discover while conversing with my brother that he no longer had the same die-hard convictions of the church that I still did. It was completely de-stabilizing to my belief system. My siblings had always been the core of my support system in life, and to think one of them didn’t have the same world view as me was troubling.

That night as I was preparing for bed I went to pray as I always did. For a second I sat there thinking, and suddenly had a sort of epiphany. I asked myself: what would happen if I took a more relaxed approach to the commandments of the church? What if I “let myself off the hook” a little with respect to living up to church standards? After thinking about this and for the first time “allowing” myself to consider it, I was amazed at the relief I suddenly felt. It made me feel more at peace, even excited. Eventually that would become confusing to me … how could I be feeling the “fruits of the spirit” when I was in the process of considering distancing myself a little bit from the strict doctrines of the church?

For the most part I continued on in the church as ever, with just that slight “drifting away” from it in my mind. Over the next several years I continued to suffer through long bouts with depression. I learned about various techniques I could use for it, including cognitive behavioral therapy. While I was learning to apply these techniques, I realized that some of the negative thinking that was leading to my depression was wrapped up in my religious beliefs. It made me more than a little upset to find that the source of these horrible mental issues I was having was in part connected to the gospel – that which was supposed to be the most precious thing in my life. I continued to be an active member, yet started to be a little easier on myself when it came to measuring up to the expectations in the church and the culture of Utah Valley. I allowed myself to miss meetings sometimes, I allowed myself to not read and pray quite as religiously as before. It was easier for me to “talk bad” about the church to certain people, to complain about certain things in the church that bothered me.

At one point I fell in love with a girl who was not a member. I was reluctant to pursue anything with her, but I was lonely, and we seemed to get along so well together. We continued to get closer and closer, one thing led to another, we started dating, and at one point we had sex. After it was over, after she had left … I had what one could only describe as a nervous breakdown. I was devastated. What had I done? The guilt attacked me with a vengeance. I had been okay with my “drifting” away from the church, I had been able to survive the masturbation, but this? This had to be so much worse. Surely this meant that I had really messed up. Surely the intense pangs of guilt were indication that I had strayed too far.

My girlfriend was very understanding. She listened as I cried and poured out my soul about how bad I felt. She understood that the law of chastity was of utmost importance to me … she even felt bad for having “tempted” me into sin, even though she didn’t see it as being wrong herself. At one point I remember her saying (much later on) that a religion that caused that kind of a psychological reaction to having sex was simply not healthy. I think on some level I agreed with her, but I was still very wrapped up in guilt.

Time went on, and even though I had created some distance psychologically between me and the church, I continued to have the ever-present voices in my head. Voices that said: you have gone off the straight and narrow … you have been seduced by Satan, he has tricked you with his “flaxen cords” (2 Ne 26:22), and has led you astray. So I tried to “repent.” I went to my bishop and told him of my sexual behavior. I tried to work through what I had been taught was the repentance process. I was frustrated by this process, just as I had been at times in the past as I had tried to repent of my masturbation “problem.” I was frustrated with the concept of guilt. From a psychological perspective it seemed to be such a worthless, damaging emotion, but in the church it was one of the critical steps that we had been taught in primary that had to accompany the repentance process.

Several more years went by, I tried to reconcile my issues, I tried to continue active in the church, but it was harder and harder. It was easier and easier with time to see the church as something that had been psychologically damaging to me. I explained this away by saying that psychology was a product of man … that I couldn’t depend on it for ultimate truth … that by making decisions based on psychology I was looking for truth outside the accepted sphere of the church. I used the same reasoning to explain away my other scientific and historical doubts. I continued on through various periods of semi-activity.

One time I listened to an audio book that dealt with famous works of literature from western civilization. Included in this discussion was, of course, the bible. It was the first time I had heard an account of the bible from the standpoint of a historian … an objective view that wasn’t controlled through the official church “pipeline” of information. The audio book made complete sense to me. It made the bible look very much like a group of writings from a people that, over time, were trying very hard to “manage” the way they wanted people to look at them and their religious ideals. I began to see the bible as something very different from being inspired by a supreme being who knows all. A voice in my head was trying to say … you are being deceived by Satan, by the precepts of men … this is simply a challenge of your faith. But this audio book was not written by an anti-mormon, or anti-anything, for that matter. It was written by someone who had studied, and objectively evaluated facts to try and arrive at truth. More and more these types of issues were catching up to me. More and more the scientific beliefs in my mind were warring with the religious ones.

One day recently I was on facebook, and a cousin of mine had posted a link to a website called “mormon stories.” It was a presentation by John Dehlin called “top 5 myths and truths about why committed mormons leave the church.” I really liked the presentation … it seemed very fair in its objective analysis of the church from both the believer’s side, and the skeptic’s side. At the end of the presentation he recommended some websites … one of which was “mormonthink.com.” I went to this site and started reading.

One of the first articles I read was about the book of Abraham. OH … MY … GOD. I was stunned. I was shocked. I was dismayed. My world was rocked. I have always had a very scientific mind. I have always valued that process of discovery that comes about by presenting facts in an objective way, and making conclusions based on that. That’s exactly what I was seeing in that article … a very fair presentation of historical facts that left no doubt in my mind that the book of Abraham, translated by Joseph Smith, was a fraud. The dominoes started to fall. Once I saw the book of Abraham as a fraud, I saw Joseph Smith himself as a fraud … and of course that included the church that he founded.

I went on to read many, many more things about church history, that along with my scientific concerns, were very damning to the church in my mind. Always in the past these doubts had been explained away by other members who gave me explanations that, while they weren’t very convincing, I swallowed them up because I couldn’t bear the thought of doubting this thing … this enormous set of beliefs … that had been such a large part of my life for so many years. But now there were so many damning things … right there in front of me … now it was impossible to ignore these issues as being minor concerns or simply the ravings of some bitter anti-mormon. These were verifiable historical facts. I had officially reached my “crisis of faith.”

Through all of this, as the dominoes were starting to fall, one major bastion of my faith that continued to stand was that of my spiritual witnesses that I had obtained over the years. Surely those proved to me that the church was still true … surely those provided a more pure, a more faith-promoting testimony than anything I could find through fact-checking on the internet. There was nothing to question about that, right? Well, I started to look at my “testimony” a little closer. I had never really stopped to ask myself what really goes into that. I had been told all my life that the fruits of the spirit (Galatians 5:22) would be the way in which the holy ghost would confirm the truth. I was positive that had happened to me hundreds of times.

But those feelings … the peace, the joy, the love … they are, in the end, just feelings. How did I know that said feelings meant anything other than … well, typical human feelings? I knew I had experienced those during other times in my life … when I wasn’t following the “commandments,” like when I would go walking instead of going to church on Sundays, or when I was intimate with girls in a way that was a violation of the law of chastity. Ah, but the church had an answer for that too. The spirit will never reveal something to you that is a contradiction of revealed church doctrine. I have heard this many times. For the first time I stopped to think about that concept, and I came up with an analogy.

Suppose a scientist comes up to you and says, here are some hypotheses that I’ve come up with. In order to convince yourself that they are correct, I’ve designed an experiment you can do to prove it to yourself. You don’t have to take my word for it … you can perform the same experiment I did and you will be convinced that I am right. Oh, and by the way, if the experiment reveals anything that isn’t in accordance with my hypotheses, then it is invalid! For the first time in my life it hit me … what a ridiculous, manipulating, circular piece of logic!! How could anyone right in their mind buy into that? Yet that is basically what the church has been telling me my whole life!! Unbelievable!! I was astounded at my ignorance, that I had bought into it for so long, and so thoroughly. I started to go through a phase of feeling simultaneously stupid at having taken so long to see the truth, and angry that I had been so betrayed. For a few weeks now it has completely consumed me. One of the hardest things to accept is how many years went by in this daze. Why did it take me so long?

I guess I can’t be too hard on myself for that. The church has effectively trapped many, many people with that logic. The only thing I can do is have the courage to move on. I think I am slowly starting to do that. There may be some more bumps in the road, especially as I share my experience with others who are still very much in the psychological trap that is religion. I don’t regret my life. I value everything that has happened in it. Going through experiences like that is part of what it means to be human. I can’t be bitter about it. All I can do is be grateful for the time that is given to me, and try to live it to the fullest. I still struggle with my mental health demons. Hopefully this process of liberation from the church will be a healthy step towards overcoming those. What a wild trip it has been.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/10/2013 09:25AM by psychobabble.