Transcript of the podcast Mormon Expression Episode 76: Mistakes were made: How not to leave the Church. Featuring John, Niel, Jim, Zilpha, and Richard.
John: All right, welcome back to another episode of Mormon Expression. I'm your host, John Larsen. Tonight I'm being joined by a few of our regulars. Uh, first of all we have Niel. Hey Niel!
Niel: Hey, how's it going?
John: And then, it's been a little while, but Jim's back with us. Hey Jim.
Jim: Hey there. It's good to be back.
John: And also, I have Zilpha here.
Zilpha: Hello!
John: Hello! All right, tonight we're talking about a topic we posted out there a few weeks ago and tried to get some feedback on. It's one that I've been thinking about for some time. I titled this, "Mistakes Were Made." It's been a few years... how many years has it been so far since we quit going to church?
Zilpha: Hmm. Maybe four? Five?
John: The last time was in... '05. Either '04 or '05 that we went to church.
Zilpha: So maybe five?
John: We've had the pleasure of associating with a lot of New Order Mormons, and ex-Mormons, and everything in between. And we have seen—and ourselves have made—some mistakes in the transition out of the Church. So this podcast, I intend to just talk about some of the things that all of us have seen and done incorrectly, or that we could have handled better... fully realizing that there's the hindsight of 20-20 going on here, that's not always clear when you're in it. ...Zilpha looks like she's going to say something but she isn't saying anything.
Zilpha: I was going to say, I don't know if "mistakes" is always a good term, because the whole thing is so complicated. I don't think it's possible to leave the Church with ease and having everything go smoothly as far as your family and the decision. I don't know if everything is exactly a "mistake." I don't know if there's a correct way of doing things, but I guess we can explore that a little bit.
Jim: Yeah. I mean, it's kind of like surgery. You've gotta extract yourself from the Church, and that process is never going to be easy... unless you have very limited initial experience in the Church, say if you're a convert of a year or two, that's pretty easy to do if you're fairly new into the Church. But if you're raised in the Church, if you have friends and family that are still aligned with the Church, then it's very difficult to extract yourself from the Church. I dunno, I guess "surgery" would be my way of looking at it, where there is a painful process that you have to go through, and there is recovery after surgery that you have to go through, and you know that in the end, once you're through it, you're better off for it.
Zilpha: As long as you don't die in the process.
Jim: Yeah.
Niel: Lots of blood and infection. Lots of pus, in both cases, I suppose.
Zlipha: That's what we want to try to avoid, the pus and the infection.
Jim: The bile...
John: I like the analogy of surgery. The one thing I want to add on that is I don't think you can ever, for most of us, extract yourself from the Church completely. We use this phrase over and over again; the Mormons accuse those who leave of "leaving the Church but not leaving it alone." Well, that's because you can't leave it alone. It's constantly there. It shades relationships... I mean, one thing that the Church has done is co-opted all of our family relationships, our marriages, our relationships to our children...
Niel: Social networks...
John: Our social networks, all that stuff. So I think what a lot of people who are really firm inside the Church don't realize is that's going to be constantly in your face.
Jim: Yeah. It's cultural at that point, and there's no way to escape that culture.
Niel: So maybe instead of the surgery, it's more like a divorce where she got the kids.
Zilpha: Mm.
John: Yeah. A lot more like that. And...
Jim: Sometimes literally.
John: Yeah, that's what I was going to say! Well, that'll come out here, but that's sometimes very literal.
John: I just want, before we get rolling in the conversation, I wanted to point out that we're all here because we're the members of the panel who've gone through this. Others still go to Church, but Niel, you have actually resigned your membership, right?
Niel: That's correct.
Jim: And I think, James, you're in the same boat that Zilpha and I have; you're still a member of record, is that right?
Jim: Yeah, I'm still a member of record.
Niel: Cowards! [Laughter] You know the Danites aren't real, right?
Zilpha: For me it's more laziness than anything.
Jim: I just don't want to go through the hassle. Because in a way—and maybe it's kind of childish—I feel like even though I'm resigning, I'm still submitting to their authority where I have to tell them that I'm not going to show up. If I don't resign and go through that process, I can still say, you know, "They still don't have a clue that I just don't want to go anymore."
John: There's a lot of reasons I haven't resigned, and that's one of them. I mean, it's sort of investing them again with the power. You're trying to say that you have to go through the Church again to resign from the Church. If you don't want to go to Church, just walk out! You don't have to have their permission.
Zilpha: John, you were telling me about someone who posted on the board about how they had resigned from the Church, and then announced, kind of proudly, to their parents that they had done this. And then it was only later that they realized how painful that was for their parents to have to deal with, because their parents still believed in the sealings that were part of that membership. As long as she was a member, those sealings weren't officially broken, so by her resignation she was kind of cutting them pretty deeply.
John: Yeah. That's an excellent segue into our first one. I think the first mistake that probably we've all made, I and see made over and over again, is that sort of really wanting to announce to the world that you're severing these ties. What Zilpha is referring to is a thoughtful Ex-Mormon who has been around for quite a while, who was reflecting on when she resigned from the Church. She was reflecting on her parents, and what it means to them to have their children born in the covenant. To her, it really didn't mean anything anymore—it was something that she had moved beyond—but to her parents it was something that was very, very, very important. And she reflected, later in her life, that she had done a lot of emotional damage to her parents for something that really didn't matter to her that much. It's kind of a "teenagers destroying something you don't care about, but that's something that's precious to somebody else." And I think that that oftentimes, in our going forth and rubbing it in other people's noses, that can happen.
Jim: It's kinda like a teenager kid telling their little brother that Santa Claus doesn't exist. It might not mean much to the teenager, but to that little kid, it means a lot, and it's very damaging to their psyche. They believe it. They put stock in it, and it means a lot to them and their experience. The teenager maybe does not fully realize what he's telling their little brother or sister. It can be very painful.
Niel: I would go with that, except, well, you've got to own your life. If that's what you want to do to move on with your life, or to make a point—or not make a point!—or for whatever reason you may want to choose to resign, I think you need to do that regardless of the ties the Church has already interjected over you, using your family and their emotions to manipulate you like that.
Jim: Well, yeah. I mean, I felt like I flipped it on its head, when I left the Church. I would say some very... what they would perceive as very hateful things. To me or to anybody outside the Church, it would be just common sense things, but to them it was very painful. And in the course of conversation, they would say, "Well that's, that's something horrible that you just said to me, saying that Joseph Smith was a treasure digger!" For instance, my brother had this big hangup about Joseph Smith's polygamy: "How can you say that?"
Niel: But that's... you're not the one who created this world. The world is as it is. You're not the one who's created the world as it is. I'm all for being as sensitive as you can, but, I mean, are you to pretend to stay in the little sheltered world that they're living in?
Jim: I guess the mistake that I made was that I thought that saying those things could change their mind. When in actuality it was just masturbation, when it came down to it. There was no purpose to it. They weren't going to change because of what I was telling them. And at that point, it just becomes something hateful, the way they see it. They see it as something hateful. The person leaving the Church sees it as something just normal, and somebody outside the Church sees it as something normal. But, you know, it's all in perception. That "perception is reality" type of type of thinking.
Niel: I went through something very similar, and, you know, to be honest, I didn't even realize what I was doing. What was it for you, in the interactions with you and your family, that made you realize that something was wrong in that sense?
Jim: Well, it was... that you're basically stating historical facts, and they don't want to realize that you're stating historical facts. They want to circle back and say, "Well, what you believe is wrong." And then you just counter with, "Well, this isn't something that I believe, this is something that is stated on record!" And it just gets into this vicious cycle that you spiral into, because they don't want to accept reality for how it is. Not only do you have to counter about the facts that you're telling them, but you have to counter this kind of bizarro-world outlook of their perceptions. And so it's a double-edged sword.
Niel: Absolutely. I was just thinking about, when it really hit home for me, is when I was talking to my mother and, I was sort of explaining my point of view, she was in tears! It's sort of a jarring thing to realize that you've made your mother cry. And you weren't even trying to, you weren't trying to get in a fight, you weren't trying to hurt her. And you have to remember, you have to take a step back and remember how you felt when you were in that position, that these things you say feel like an attack on the Church. And the way we were raised, an attack on the Church is an attack on our person. I guess that's the moment that I was talking about.
Jim: Yeah, totally. That's a very good point, Niel. The separation between attacking the Church and attacking someone personally... there is no difference. It's this binding that the Church performs, and a very visceral stress response is produced when a Mormon feels the Church is being attacked. It's a very visceral kind of stress response that's kicked up; the heart starts to beat faster, and you start to sweat, you know, and they feel that they're being attacked personally.
Zilpha: But I think that... I mean, I can imagine the tears of Niel's mother, and we've seen those tears ourselves with our mothers' experiences. I don't think it's so much that they feel like they're being attacked; they're just heartbroken that everything that they've worked so hard for for all these years... you have to remember how important to a Mormon woman motherhood is. I mean, it's everything. It's their eternal role. And so you are taking part of their family away from them forever.
Niel: Yeah, certainly.
John: Yeah, I think that's true. And you know, Zilpha, we were always pretty careful to try to not say things that they would take to be offensive. I know that a lot of people leaving the Church don't want to go around offending people, although there's some that do, but for the most part, most of them don't want to go around offending people. But they want to justify themselves. Because from a Mormon, a regular, fully-in-the-trench Mormon, to leave the Church is unthinkable. So, you want to try to explain that.
John: For example, I've had, sometimes, old friends who see something on Facebook or whatever, and they figure out that I'm no longer in the Church. This has happened a couple of times, where they'll send an email saying, "What happened!? How, why did you... how could you have left the Church!?" And so I put a response, try to put it together as sensitive as I can, to try to explain that there are things I don't believe anymore, because they asked the question! But invariably, they'll be offended by whatever I put. Just the fact that I say, "I no longer believe [X]," for many Mormons, is offensive.
Niel: I think one thing that I've seen—and maybe this isn't true, this is just my personal thought—is that they were already offended at that point. At that point, they were looking for any reason to justify their offense, because they don't know how to explain why they're so offended by you leaving the Church or expressing something against the Church. And so at that point, they're in justification mode, and they're looking for a reason to justify that offense.
Zilpha: Also, it just doesn't make sense to them, why someone would leave the Church. When I was a believing member, and even when I started having some doubts, we visit-taught a woman who said to us that she wasn't sure if she could believe it. That statement made absolutely no sense to me. I mean, even though I was figuring out some of historical issues and stuff for myself at that point, I wasn't to the place in my mind where I could say, "I don't believe it." It didn't make sense to me how someone could not believe it.
Jim: I think, also, when you're starting to leave the Church, and you're trying to get that narrative in your mind together for why you are leaving it, when you talk to members, you try to find that "magic bullet," you know, that kind of silver bullet that you can tell any Mormon, and suddenly the light will come on and they'll say, "Oh yeah! Yeah, that makes sense why you left the Church!" But the problem is that, what I feel is that there is no magic bullet. There is no magic word or story or thing that you can impart to people that will say, "Oh well, that makes sense. You know, that is a good reason for leaving the Church." Because there is none in their minds.
John: I solicited some comments out there, and interestingly enough, on this issue, there are two ways of making the mistake. I think we've kind of gone over the one; we were talking about doing it nicely. There are ex-Mormons who go out there and say, "Look what I discovered!" and kind of shove it in people's faces.
John: The one piece of advice I would offer is once you start leaving the Church, treat the Church the way you would treat anything else in the world. It's true, Mormons believe some wacky stuff. But if you work anywhere, you're going to be interacting with people who also believe wacky stuff. And it's likely, like if you meet your first, I dunno, Jehovah Witness or Scientologist, you're not going to be like, "How in the world do you believe all that crazy crap!?" You're going to treat them politely. "Oh, that's nice... I saw your new kingdom hall, that's a pretty color you just painted it..." You take it to a polite level.
John: I think, sometimes, because of the intimacy—the "we shared," meaning we, the ex-Mormons had—that's kind of hard. We used the analogy earlier in the podcast about divorce. One of the reasons divorcing couples have problems is they had such intimacy. I mean, they shared everything, physically, and they knew everything about each other. And for most people, to back out of that intimacy, and then get onto a level where they can be friends and acquaintances, and treat people like they would strangers—meaning to treat them decently—is too hard for most people. Likewise, in the Church, it's the same thing. We have to back away from that intimacy as being members and try to maintain those relationships. So I think that the piece of advice here would be, "Err on the side of not sharing too much information." Hold back a little bit.
John: We have our first caller for the podcast... we have Richard. Hey Richard. How you doing?
Richard: Great, thanks.
John: Okay, Richard! We're talking about making mistakes, especially when leaving the Church... you have a mistake you want to share with us?
Richard: Yeah, I made quite a few mistakes. I mean, my wife wanted me to call in and help anyone who might in the future be leaving the fold, because I gave her a lot of grief when I left. So, the main message, I guess, is to communicate well with the spouse before breaking the the big reveal, the big news to her about my disbelief. I wish that I could go back and have kind of brought her along with me, as far as just keeping her informed on my doubts and everything, instead of keeping it to myself and coming up with my conclusions on my own and then just informing her.
John: Yeah. So I've talked to quite a few people who, when they start finding things out and start studying, they're trying to work it out, and they kind of keep it to themselves. They don't necessarily say, "Hey, look at this thing I just found out about Joseph Smith!" Is that kinda what you're saying?
Richard: That's right. I ordered a bunch of books from amazon.com, and I tried giving her one on Emma Smith, called Mormon Enigma. I dunno if you guys have read that.
Zilpha: That's a great book. Yeah, I love that.
Richard: It's excellent! She was slightly disturbed by that one. She didn't read the whole thing, but she started reading it, and thought, "Man, goodness, this has a lot of kinda disturbing things in it!" So I thought, "Oh my gosh, maybe it's not such a good idea to include her." Also, we read together, we read, um, a couple of chapters from Todd Compton's In Sacred Loneliness. And she was also disturbed by that. So, I dunno, I got the wrong impression that she would rather I just keep this stuff to myself. So the rest of this stuff I just read on my own.
Zilpha: When she would respond, did she respond in anger about what she read? What do you mean she was "disturbed" by it?
Richard: Well, I would ask her, "So how are you coming in that book? What do you think of it?" And she would say, "Oh, it's kind of disturbing. I don't think I like it so much." That type of thing. She's kind of reserved, so she didn't tell me very much, but I could tell it wasn't very positive. And when we read together, we were reading the book In Sacred Loneliness and we got through just basically the introduction and the first chapter. But in the introduction where they're talking about polyandry and stuff, she was really disturbed by him marrying married women, you know? It's that type of thing.
Zilpha: So she basically communicated that she didn't really want to pursue it anymore?
Richard: Well, she didn't really communicate it. I interpreted her response as that, which I think now is the false interpretation. But I think she saw it as negative, and would rather that I just read it on my own, but she didn't realize, I guess, that I was reading because I was having doubts and that I was losing my testimony or whatever. She thought I was just doing it as a hobby or out of interest in history, which I guess I was, but she didn't realize the extent of what it was doing to me.
John: I think one of the keys there is to over-communicate when it comes to, like, your feelings and how you're processing it, and especially to keep communicating the fact that your relationship is important and that sort of thing. And maybe under-communicate the facts, you know? I'm going to read from our friend Michael who sent this in. He said, "One of the biggest and most common mistakes I've seen is to expect your spouse to read everything you've read, come to the same conclusions you have, and jump ship with you right away. Unless they are already leaning that way, that doesn't seem to happen very often. Pushing your spouse hard is more likely to damage the relationship than to get your spouse on board with you."
John: So Richard, I think what you're saying is exactly right, but there's the other side of that blade, which is you can really push too hard. I think we all need to be careful in terms of letting each person be a person. Everybody's going to handle it different. Some people—like some of the great people we have on this podcast, like Tom—know all this stuff, but they decide to stay in the Church. And that might be what your spouse decides. But we don't want to try to destroy everything in the path that they don't agree with us 100% on.
Jim: Yeah. I tried to get my wife to read what I was reading at the time—In Sacred Loneliness and books along those lines—and she wouldn't touch them. Anything a bit askew from the traditional Mormon outlook is viewed as almost pornography in their eyes.
Niel: That's exactly how I felt years ago whenever I would encounter the Anti literature or whatever claims like that. I'd be sitting up late at night reading it on the computer, that sort of darkened-room setting where you hope your wife doesn't walk in and you have to hurry up and turn off the computer before she sees the Anti-Mormon stuff on there! [Laughter]
Jim: And make sure to clear your history! I remember when I started posting to exmormon.org, I'd make sure to clear my Internet history and do it when I couldn't be caught. So yeah, there is that kind of secretive angle to it.
Richard: Now you can use Google Chrome incognito so you don't need to worry about that kind of stuff.
Jim: That's right! Safe Search for the win! [Laughter]
Richard: I was just going to say, another mistake I made was after I had basically come to the conclusion that, "The Church is not what it claims, I don't believe that anymore," I thought, "Okay, I need to share this with her." So I took her out to a fancy restaurant and I thought I would break the news to her there, and... that's a big mistake, I think. I would not recommend that type of a setting.
Niel: Did you put your CTR ring back into the champagne? [Laughter]
Richard: That would have been much more clever than what I did.
John: I think, for a believing Mormon, when you tell your spouse that you no longer believe the Church or have real strong doubts emotionally, that's the equivalent of telling them that you have a lover. That you've been cheating on them.
Richard: Yeah!
John: Honestly, it takes that sort of level of processing. I don't think most ex-Mormons who were first going through the process realize how much of a horrific thing it is to hear. It's usually because whoever's going through the process is doing that every minute of the day they're thinking about it, and they're working through it and they're adjusting themselves to living outside the Church umbrella. The spouse or the parent or the child has not necessarily had that time, and it hits them like a ton of bricks.
Jim: Yeah. I mean, it's worse than if you were to have died, to be quite honest, because to them they've lost their eternal soulmate that they're going to, you know, build new planets with, for instance. It can be very disconcerting to them that all this stuff you've worked up to is now invalid and moot.
Richard: In my case, she burst into tears, and she was shaking her head and saying, "No, no, no, no, no, no." Then she got up and ran out of the restaurant. It was just a horrible, horrible scene. It was terrible results. I tried breaking it to her...
Zilpha: You know, this sounds exactly like when we went out to dinner one time with my sister and her husband. And her husband had just recently come out that he was leaving the Church, and they hadn't really talked about it, because my sister, it was so painful for her that she didn't want to hear anything about it. So now, in this restaurant scenario, he and we were on the same kind of team, and my sister was the odd one out, and we were having this conversation about our doubts and kind of what it meant. And my sister did the same thing. She burst into tears and ran out of the restaurant. And that was kind of a... I mean, at the time you're like, "Whoa, I didn't know my sister was crazy!" But, I mean, to her, she felt like not only had she lost her sister, but now, like you said, her eternal companion didn't really want her enough to stay in the Church. Like he chose "leaving the Church" over her, kind of feeling.
Niel: Oh, wow, that's just..
Richard: It was heartbreaking for me.
Niel: The Church is just... this is just blowing my mind here. I went through nothing nearly as bad as... I worked it out with my mom, you know, we talked it through, it took hours, but we came to an understanding. I can't believe this sort of stuff goes on. It's just, wow! And then people will seriously wonder why the ex-Mormons will get mad at the Church. I mean, really!?
John: Yeah. I feel the same way, but blaming the Church doesn't do any good in terms of maintaining those relationships. And that's why... go to the boards! Vent on the boards! Find some ex-Mormon friends, vent with them. But don't, for the love of God, do it to your mother. It's not gonna do any good. It's not going to help.
Niel: I agree. I agree. I don't want to sound like I did that. I totally agree with that. I definitely agree with what you're saying, but man, still, burn it down.
John: So I've got another story—we're talking about mistakes being made, and here's another one for me—it's one that I still don't know what the right answer was. So, this occurred right about the time that we had become really inactive. We were still struggling with a lot of doubts. At that point we were probably saying, "No, the Church is probably not true," but still trying to figure out and work out our relationship with our family.
John: Well, about that time my nephew was due for his baptism, he turned eight and we were invited. If course, being invited to the baptism means that you're going to participate in the confirmation, 'cause all the priesthood holders participate in the confirmation. It's something I did not feel comfortable doing at all. I didn't ever feel comfortable in that sort of, "Well, I'm just going to fake it and it doesn't matter cause I don't believe it anyway." So, I did not want to go. Because at the time I also didn't want to announce to everybody—all my extended family—because, you know, they would immediately think that I was doing something awful if I'm not going to participate in the circle.
John: I was worrying about it, and thinking about it, and the day came, the Saturday came, and I just really didn't feel very good that day, partly from stress and partly from worry. So I called my brother and said I didn't feel good, that I wouldn't be showing up, but Zilpha took the kids. Years later—this was about six months ago—my mother told me that my actions about not going were very hard, hurtful to the family and to my brother. My brother never said a word about it to me.
John: So, the mistake that was made is, you know, maybe if I was a little bit more upfront...? But I tell you, I don't know what the answer was, because I was still struggling inside. And maybe this goes to Niel's point: blame it on the damn Church, because the Church forces us into those positions where we can't not participate because then they'll accuse us of adultery, but if we participate then we're breaking their rules and we're doing something we're not comfortable with.
Jim: Well, the Church puts a catch-22 in there as a mechanism to keep you in the Church. You wonder how many people throughout the history of the Church have gone through, with full doubts and totally willing to walk away, but they can't, because of the situation that's created by the culture, in that you are shackled to the Church. Your family relationships are tied in a direct relationship to your performance in the Church. How many people wanted to leave but couldn't because of situations like what you stated about the baptism? You're put in this catch-22 spot of, well, you lose everything if you leave the Church. It's a de facto—almost given—that socially, your life is damaged if you do leave the Church.
John: Yeah, absolutely. Now, we're talking family here. I want to take a moment and talk about people who aren't family. Our good friend Dr. Shades, when I asked for comments on this, he gave me a simple sentence. He said, "What not to do: tell anyone that you left." I actually agree with this very much when it comes to our casual acquaintances.
John: Once again, here's a mistake that I had. When I was leaving the Church, I worked for a company and I had a good friend of mine. We worked together, we did the same job, we traveled together. And one time, we were on the road, it was after dinner, we were sitting around in a hotel lobby and we start talking about religion. And I was saying that, you know, I didn't believe anymore. I just didn't believe it. He asked me some good questions, and I thought it was a really great discussion. At the end, he said, "You know, I just, I think you're wrong on this one." And I said, "I respect that, but I'm pretty sure I'm right." And that that was the end of it.
John: ...And that was the end of our relationship too. He never talked to me, really, again. The really sad part of it is, I left the company about three or four months later, and about a year after that, another friend of mine left the company who had started later. He had started right after this happened. This supposed friend of mine, who I had discussed religion about, approached the brand-new employee right after he started and warned him off of me. Said, "You need to stay away from him. He's an apostate, he's a liar, he's a cheat, he's an adulterer. Stay away from him." Of course, I'd done none of those things, but, he had no problem—
Richard: He called you an adulterer!
John: Well, he said this to the other person. Because, for a lot of Mormons, if you're leaving the Church, you're doing it because of sin, right? So what what I'm saying is it poisoned my work—and I've been very careful to keep religion out of my work, but—it poisoned my work relationship, and probably contributed to me leaving the company. I left on my own accord, but it probably contributed to some of those factors. You've got to be very, very, very careful who you say, and who you tell, that you are no longer a member of the Church, especially if you're in Utah.
Niel: But that's still tied to the Church again, huh?
Zilpha: So let's get into sinning and drinking...
John: Wait, wait, I'm going to read one more thing. Let's talk about sin next, but I want to read one more comment we got. This is from the poster Arizona Evil Single Guy and he gave four great points on what we've been talking about that I want to read. He said, "Number 1: not venting to someone else and acting in the moment. Don't act in the moment. Consider and study your actions out first. Do, however, allow yourself to get angry. Just don't act on it until you calm down." And I think that really goes with everything we've been talking about, especially with your spouse.
John: Um, "Number 2: after six months to a year of recovery, spending too much time fixating on Mormonism instead of restarting your life outside of Mormonism." Apparently we're not good at that. [Laughter] Probably good advice.
Niel: It's on the shelf.
John: "Number 3: not asking for help when you need it," And, "Number 4: not replacing the old social networks with a new one. Some friends will stay your friends, but many will not." That's absolutely true, but I think that's a good segue into the next thing, which is sin.
Richard: What do you think he means by not asking for help when you need it? I don't understand what that meant.
Niel: I think he means, don't be afraid to ask for help if you need it. So that would have been the mistake, to not ask for help.
Richard: Oh, okay. It sounded like the opposite. Yeah. Okay. Right.
John: Yeah. I think probably—now I hesitate to say this; I think it's really super great advice, which is—get counseling. For most people, they should probably get into counseling right away. The reason I hesitate is because I never did. So I feel a little off recommending that. But I think the extraction of yourself from the Church is very, very psychologically difficult. And probably, the fact that I didn't get counseling is why I have, like, a podcast. I sit and talk about it every week. Maybe if I'd got counseling, I'd have been moving onto, like, building model railroads or something.
Richard: I was just going to say, Bruce R. McConkie says that we should stay away from those counselors. It's kind of scary to think that...
John: Well, that's all the advice you need. [Laughter]
John: No, no, you're right. It is scary. I did have a Mormon bias, absolutely, against counseling. And, you know, these things are really hard to work through, but I know that, I've heard some people who talk about going to counseling, saying, it's hard to get a counselor who can really, who's... if they're LDS, they try to tell you to, you know, pay attention to what President Hinckley says. And if they're a non LDS person, they just don't get it. So it'd be hard to find a counselor who can really understand what you're talking about.
Jim: I started going to counseling after I'd moved here to the South, about four years after I had left the Church. It made a huge difference in my life, so I can't stress that enough. Counseling is a definite plus after going through a traumatic experience such as leaving the Church. There's no way around it: leaving the Church is a traumatic experience, and the only—I shouldn't say the only, but a very good—way of dealing with that, and learning how to cope with some of the stress and anxiety and worry that comes with leaving the Church, is to go through counseling.
Niel: Yeah, it's nice if you can afford it.
Jim: Yeah. It does get pretty expensive.
Niel: What could you do instead of counseling if you don't have that kind of money just to drop?
Zilpha: Get some other ex-Mormon friends. I think that that really helped us a lot, when we connected with other ex-Mormons who could understand us and we could discuss things.
John: There are other communities out there too. I mean, I don't want to shill for the Unitarian church again, but the Unitarian church, for example, is full of refugees from other religions. The most empathy outside of ex-Mormons that I've ever gotten are from ex-Baptists and ex-Catholics. Sometimes just having that sense of community, some others who aren't going to judge you from the Mormon sense and that you can talk to. But I would say almost any liberal theology church, if you can stomach church, is a good way to go. It's free. And sometimes your company, if you work for a company, they might have some employee assistance things where you can go talk about stuff like that. There are ways to kind of dig that out.
Zilpha: Can we get into the sex now? [Laughter]
John: Yeah! Let's talk about sex and sin.
Richard: That was actually one of my points as well. Well, not sex, but the, um, bad habits stuff.
Zilpha: Bad habits?
Richard: Yeah. One of my points on my list was to assure your spouse that you still have the same morals as before, and don't start any bad habits like—in my case it was swearing—some people I guess start drinking or doing something worse.
John: Now, that's interesting, I think that's good, but there's another one that I'm looking for here. There was one other piece of advice related to this and I thought it was really good, which is, "Don't make any promises." I think that the individual was saying things like, "Well, we promised that he we're still going to give 10% of our income, and we're not going to ever drink, or we're not going to ever do this or that or the other..." The piece of advice is, as you're leaving the Church, be very cautious. Take everything super slow.
John: And that leads to talking about sin again. First of all, I want to state unequivocally that I do not believe there's any such thing as "sin." There's just no such thing. Is it a complete false construction. However, every action that we do has consequence. It has a potential problem. For example, if I go a-whoring, I might catch some sort of disease. Zilpha might divorce me. I might get caught on the newspaper and go to jail. I might lose my reputation at work. There's a whole host of things that could happen from those actions. None of that is sinful, but it's just the natural consequence of things. If I jump out of an airplane without a parachute, when I hit the ground, I'm going to explode. It has nothing to do with the fact that not having a parachute is a sin.
John: I think there are some ex-Mormons—and others; teenagers do this all the time—that want to just inverse the Church. They want to just say, "Well, if the Church tells me I shouldn't inject cough syrup into my veins, I'm gonna inject cough syrup into my veins!" It's just an asinine way to go.
Zilpha: It's kind of like, you've been on this really strict diet for a long time. The diet has all these rules and the company that does the diet, they give you these diet cookies, and this diet drink, and that's all you have. And then you finally say, "This diet isn't working for me." So you leave that diet, and then you just start eating cake, and candy, and all this crap that isn't going to work for you either.
Jim: I think though, eventually, that kind of subsides and things get normal.
Zilpha: Definitely.
Jim: Yeah, you're going to go nuts and you're going to eat a bunch of junk food, but eventually you're going to go, "You know what? This isn't as fun as I thought it was."
Zilpha: "Just because the diet people told me not to eat this doesn't mean that now that I've stopped the diet, I should eat it."
John: I can't remember if I've said this on the podcast, but we've been to ex-Mormon parties where there's a bunch of 30 and 40 year olds doing, like, tequila shots and all this sort of stuff. And then, we went back to a party with the same group, six months later, and they were sitting around sipping a little Merlot. They just got it out of their system, because they didn't do it when they were 20 like the rest of the world did. They wanted to see what it was. They wanted to taste what beer tastes like or whatever. I really actually don't think there's a lot of problem with that. I think that can be very psychologically healthy. It can be healthy to explore a lot of different things.
John: But the caution comes in when you do things that can be harmful. I have seen, unfortunately, in the years that I've been involved in the ex-Mormon community, the rare person—and it's probably not any more common than inside the Church—the rare person who says, "The Church and their rules don't have any control on me anymore. So I am going to go have an affair! I'm going to have what I wanted. I'm going to go sleep with this person." And there are natural consequences to that. And there are marriages and broken hearts and broken feelings all over the place. That's that whole "taking it slow" thing.
Niel: I've never known anybody who did it like that.
John: I wish I could say the same.
Richard: Hm. Interesting.
Niel: I don't think they had everything screwed down tight in the first place, then.
John: Unfortunately, there was a big sort of kerfuffle around this stuff on one of the boards in the last week or two—I won't go into any more details—but, as I was reading those from my perspective now, I was saying, "Man, this is a regular midlife crisis. Guys, this probably has zero to do with the Church." You know, 'cause there was some blaming on, "Well, the reason that she's going crazy and doing all this stuff in bars is because she grew up so puritanically!" Well there's 40 year old girls all over the country doing crazy stuff in bars who never had anything to do with Mormonism, you know!
Richard: Niel, didn't you have a similar situation with your ex-wife? I remember in your interview on your podcast a few months back.
Niel: Yeah, she seemed to definitely become a wild child for a little while. She definitely settled down after getting it out of her system. She behaved in ways that I never thought she had in her!
John: And I think you guys were saying this and I think that's true—people do get it out of their system—but what happens in the meantime? That's what's scary,
Jim: Damage can be done during that time, even if it's only temporary.
Zilpha: It's really hard; in our culture, and especially in Mormonism, we're taught to kind of "go with your feelings," that "your feelings are your guide." And so if your feelings are telling you, "Ooh, I want to sleep with that guy!" and it's a really strong feeling, then it's hard to combat that. All humans have to struggle with those strong feelings, and then trying to determine, using our brain, "Is that something we should act on or not?"...
John: And when you're in this tailspin that comes about from leaving the Church, where everything is turned on its head—it takes about, I would say, two years to get your moral compass straight again—I think that's where problems go.
John: This is a cautionary tale to you girls. I'm sorry if this sounds sexist, but for us guys, if we decide on Thursday night that we want to have an affair, unless we have a wallet full of money, for most of us it ain't happening. But that's not necessarily true for the sisters. If you go into a bar, and you're ready for action, you can probably get it. So, the advice is to be very careful with things like your sexuality.
Niel: If you're committed.
John: I mean, I don't want to sound overly prudish here. There's all sorts of people who do all sorts of things; there's people who have open marriages, there's people who are involved in organized swinging, there's people who are polyamorous, and if it works for them, good luck. But my inclination is, for a lot of people, I wouldn't do that first out of the Church. If you're going to turn into a swinger, I would say, wait a few years out of the Church. Because the things that you're willing to do in that first transition period are probably not going to be the things that you're going to be doing five years from now.
John: And even then, if the couple goes and does weird stuff together—you both go smoke pot together, or take your LSD trip—fine. But if one of you goes and does it and the other one is not there, you're likely to damage the relationship.
Niel: I was talking about single people who are leaving the church.
John: Oh! No rules, man. [Laughter]
Jim: And just as a side note, anybody thinking that swinging is some great sexual adventure... it's not all it's cracked up to be. I'm not speaking directly from experience, but...
Zilpha: You certainly sound like you are! [Laughter]
Niel: I was wondering there for a second! So, how's it going? Is there another reason you're moving?
Jim: I mean, specifically, it's not all it's cracked up to be...
Niel: I mean, James, you have HBO, right? So it's okay.
Zilpha: It all sounds good and fun, but when you get right down to the nitty gritty—and the nutty gritty—there's people, um, there's diseases... it's more complicated than it seems in fantasy.
Jim: All I'm saying is this, you're not going to have a house full of strippers. And that's all I'll say.
John: I think the key is, organized swingers or whatever—and I don't know why we're talking about swingers, but—these are people who have recreational sex, right? They have sex like other people play badminton. For most of us, we can't separate sex from emotion, and there's some real physiological things... you can read about, for women, when they have sex with somebody, they tend to have a serotonin surge which causes them to have feelings towards whoever they're with. It doesn't always happen to everybody, but you can get emotionally tangled up into something that you don't want.
John: I've heard all sorts of things about all sorts of people through the whisper networks of ex-Mormons, and once again, it goes back to that reputation. You want to make sure you're plenty discreet. Because if you don't know how to hold your liquor, and you go to a party and do something that you would never do sober and you're going to regret, and you just had 75 people witness it... It's going to get out there.
Niel: I feel like I'm running in totally different ex-Mormon circles. [Laughter]
John: You feel like you've been missing out, huh?
Richard: I was actually thinking the same thing. This is all news to me.
John: I have to say, that I think most ex-Mormons go through this just fine. The failure rate of divorce and adultery, I don't think it's any greater for the ex-Mormons than it is for the Mormons. Talk to any bishop in any ward and you've got two or three couples at any given time that are going through these same issues. Heaven knows there's been rumors about the Utah County Swinging Underground for years.
Richard: I'm still anxious to hear your and Zilpha's LSD trip story!
John: I haven't taken LSD. I'm too much of a wuss. I wouldn't know where to get it.
Zilpha: I need my brain cells way too much.
John: Plus, you know, half the time I'm on a bad trip anyway without any chemicals! I'm sure mine wouldn't be good.
Jim: When your brain's bleeding on your spinal cord in order to get a trip, that just doesn't seem very, uh, very good. If you have to hemorrhage in order to trip? No, that's a bad trip.
Zilpha: Can, can I bring up something, a women's issue?
John: Please.
Zilpha: I'm sure that men struggle with this somewhat, but I think it's more having to do with women. When I was working through my leaving of the Church, I had to kind of reassess my motherhood. I had to reassess what that meant to me. Because, you know, all of a sudden I was free from this need, this commitment. I mean, obviously when you have children, you're committed, but in the Church, that is your role as a woman. That is everything. And then when you leave the Church, you're all of a sudden given kind of a... I'm having a hard time expressing this, but it was hard to determine what my new role as a mother was at that point.
John: So what's the mistake in there?
Zilpha: Well, I think, I tried not to do this, but I saw it at some of the parties we went to... ignoring your kids for the sake of partying, kind of? All of a sudden you don't want to be a mother anymore. It's not really what you really wanted to do in the first place. You felt kind of pushed into it. And now all of a sudden you can say, "You know, that's not what I wanted." But then at the same time, the mistake is, you've done it. You have these children, they need you. You can't just walk away from that commitment at this point, even though you may have felt pressured into it.
Jim: But at the same time—not to downplay it, but—people neglect their kids in the Church all the time, from callings and from, you know, where they're neglecting their children, but at the same time they're so engrossed in Mormonism, or bringing Mormonism to their kids, or what they think is bringing Mormonism to their kids, that they're neglecting their children as well. I think you're going to find neglect in any situation, whether inside the Church or out.
Zilpha: You're right. But I think they feel justified, morally, and I don't know if anybody can ever really feel justified morally when they're partying and not taking care of their kids.
John: I don't know that it's necessarily a moral justification. It's just, like, a sluffing off of everything. It does throw you into this sort of fog where, when you exit Mormonism, you're giving up the way you see the universe! I mean, the very fabric of everything! Where you come from, what roles of humanity, what the sexes mean...
Zilpha: What your feelings mean...
John: What your feelings mean... everything is potentially off the charts. So I think that that's true. I think some couples might go out and start going to bars every night and just leaving their kids at home and not paying attention to them. It's because their compass, not their moral compass, but their whole compass of self is just spinning around. That stops. That doesn't go on forever. But when you're in it, you can't necessarily see that. And that's why the advice that we get from so many people is just "slow everything down." Just take it super slow.
Niel: Can I jump in here? I think part of what Zilpha was mentioning might also be because in the Church, you have a lot of parents just kind of coast through parenthood and leave a lot of the parenting choices up to the Church. They figure, "Well, you know, we take them to Primary, we go to all these activities..." So the Church kind of raises your kids for you. And so when you get out of that and you don't have the Church anymore to help you with that, then for a lot of people, it might be natural to automatically start neglecting your kids, without it being intentional.
Jim: Right, because they were already neglecting their kids. It's just more obvious now.
Niel: Right, right.
Zilpha: Also, like I was saying, the whole perception of, "You're building this eternal family," it doesn't hold water. So you have to restructure your family in your mind; what it means, and what it means to be a parent, and what your children mean to you and all that.
Jim: Definitely.
John: Okay. I've saved the most controversial piece of advice for last. This one—I'm not going to go into details—I got this from a couple different people, but it was basically this. It says, "The individual had doubts in 1999 or so. Went to his wife, his wife made him feel really bad about that, so he just kind of filed them away. Had three kids, went on, tried the marriage out for another 10 years." I think they divorced last year. The issue is... don't wait too long. You've got to be true to yourself to some extent.
John: The reason I say this is controversial is, I know there's a lot of people who can make it work by going to church in a New Order Mormon thing. But I think there comes a point when you realize, "The Church is not for me. This marriage, she wants to be married to a TBM future stake president. That's not going to be me. My family, they want me to be this sort of person. I'm not going to do that." And at some point, you just have to say, "I'm not that person," and let the chips fall where they are, and pull the bandaid off.
Niel: You've got to. That's, that's fantastic advice. You've got to do that.
Jim: I would agree wholeheartedly. I waited too long to leave.
Niel: I mean, think about it. You're on the planet one time, right? Just look at it in that context.
Zilpha: But nobody wants to pull the tablecloth out from under their family.
Niel: But when you're looking back at your life, are you going to say, "I'm glad that I suppressed my own self-identity, my own ability to develop spiritually, my own sense of self, to avoid problems at home?" I mean, who's going to look back and say that?
Zilpha: Some people might. They might actually look back and say, "I'm glad I did this. It saved my children from possible damage." I mean, some people might actually look back proudly at that achievement, but, I mean, I don't think I could do it personally.
John: We should do—like we've talked about—due diligence to save your marriage, to try to live in that space. But I think we've all met people who have a spouse, for example—to use the theme of divorce—who loathes them. She loathes her husband and she hates her marriage and she hates her life. And then the husband will keep trying and trying and trying... you just want to hit the poor sap on the head and say, "It will never work! Just divorce her already! You can go on with your life!"
John: I think for some people that's the way that the Church... you see these poor people—and there are people who go to the church in a NOM sort of way, who enjoy it; I'm not talking about that—there are people who are absolutely miserable. And they're saying, "Well, for the sake of my marriage..."—which is a miserable marriage—"...and for the sake of my family..."—which are all miserable relationships—"...I'm going to stay in." Just like Niel was saying, it doesn't have to be that way! It's true, you're going to have pain, but it's better to have a year of pain and a painful divorce and pay alimony than it is to live the next 30 years of your life in an absolute miserable hell.
Jim: And the longer you stay in, the more ammunition you're giving to the Church, and the more ammunition you're giving to very dysfunctional relationships in your family generated from the Church. And the more emotional ties that you bind yourself to the Church with, the more painful it's going to be to get out.
Niel: No... try it this way. If you love your wife, you love your family, you should want to share who you are with them. You shouldn't want to deceive them, or put a spin on who you are for them. If you love them, share who you are with them. And I would bet, in almost every case, they're going to love you back. They're going to say, "This is painful, we're going to adjust to this, but I'm so happy to have my husband or my wife or whoever back. It feels like they've been gone forever, but they're back, finally!"
Zilpha: Very good point.
John: Okay guys, any last minute thoughts?
Niel: Burn it down.
John: My last minute thought is not to take advice from a random podcast that you download off the Internet. [Laughter]
Jim: Get counseling. I mean, not you, but...
John: that's probably not bad advice. I could probably use some myself.
John: As always, the discussion continues on the web page at mormonexpression.com, or you can send us an email at mail@mormonexpression.com, or you can call us at our illustrious number, (801) 906-6722.
Zilpha: Thanks for calling, Richard!
John: Yeah, thanks Richard!