Continued thread
I'm not saying it makes me a man or anything. I'm just passing on the information.
Recent searches
Search options
#exmormon
6 posts5 participants2 posts today
Continued thread
Oh yeah. There's strong commentary on Mormonism. I just didn't understand it the first time.
I *can't* be the only one that sees it. #FountainPens #ExMormon
Some people leave the LDS Church individually. I was one of those.
But it's fascinating the times when it becomes a group project, when one's own doubts are generated by the doubts or struggles of others. It's less common perhaps, but it sometimes happens for couples and in close-knit extended families that don't immediately disown the first doubter.
It happened in the case of John Dehlin and tens of thousands of his Mormon Stories audience. As he tried to grapple with issues in a faith promoting way, his doubts grew, his listeners' doubts grew, and then when the Church excommunicated him, he took most of them with him.
Same with my client Natasha Helfer, on a smaller, more private scale. As she helped her therapeutic clients with faith crisis, or even just saw their pain trying so hard to live up to impossible ideals, or doing what the Church said and having tragic results, she learned from them, and they learned from her.
Until they excommunicated her, too.
It seems like they really don't like that, and will excommunicate the figurehead of this process.
But all those invisible participants are just as much part of it. It's a collective thing. It wasn't Dehlin or Helfer who "led them astray." It was the falseness of Church claims, and the people collectively figuring that out by the mirrors they held up to each other.
LDS Bishops told not to ask members for immigration status in temple recommend interviews.
I find this very, very interesting as I try to feel out the shape of power in these shifting times.
https://archive.pn/www.sltrib.com/religion/2025/04/25/lds-church-first-presidency-issues/
While we're interpreting the Pope's death right after Vance's visit in a certain humorous way, you'd better believe that a significant number of anti-Catholic evangelicals and Mormons will see it as Vance single-handedly conquering the church of the devil.
Continued thread
Also the economic system of Zion, The United Order, is basically communism, which the LDS Church fights tooth and nail.
The lyrics to John Lennon's Imagine basically described how things would be in New Jerusalem, and as a child this was crystal clear to me. (No religion either, because everyone would believe the same thing because Bro Jesus is like *right there*, so that's just "reality".)
But John Lennon was a hippie pinko commie so I was supposed to hate him. This was in fact one of the earliest items on my shelf. I might have been 7 when I had these thoughts. I never did, in fact, hate John Lennon. I mean, how can you?
Continued thread
I explored some of the logic of Zion awhile back, but more to do with power structures.
What does it say of a God that erases nearly all trace of a city that managed to eradicate poverty and abuses of power? Such that any knowledge of *how* they did it no longer exists, so that anyone hoping to replicate it will have to start from scratch?
If you've never been Mormon, keep in mind that Mormons do hope to replicate Zion. But that's kind of difficult when its leadership and perhaps even its God keeps putting up barriers.
To literalist promotors of life-dictating takes from the Bible, remember Christ's Pearl-Swine corollary:
Do not cast your costume jewelry before scholars.
An excerpt from the most recent issue of ICSA Today, on how to help someone escape coercive indoctrination, by Dr. Janja Lalich, one of the cult researchers I quote in Recovering Agency.
In short, DON'T PREACH. DON'T ARGUE.
Instead, show someone what having a choice looks like.
"Effective Intervention Approaches
"1. Creating Safe Spaces for Ambivalence: Rather than demanding immediate recognition of abuse or control, effective intervention allows people to safely explore their doubts without threatening their entire meaning system at once. This might mean supporting someone in questioning specific practices while temporarily accepting their continued commitment to the group’s core beliefs.
"2. Reconnecting with One’s Pre-Group Identity: Helping individuals reconnect with aspects of their identity that preceded their involvement in the totalistic environment. This isn’t about erasing their experience but about expanding their frame of reference beyond the bounded system. I describe this as doing something that will hopefully tug at their emotional heart strings, reawakening thoughts, feelings, memories that have been suppressed by the group’s indoctrination processes.
"3. Addressing Practical Constraints: Understanding that bounded choice operates through both ideological and practical constraints. Effective intervention often requires addressing concrete obstacles to leaving—financial dependencies, fear of social isolation, lack of practical life skills—along with psychological barriers.
"4. Building Alternative Support Systems: Recognizing that totalistic environments become self-reinforcing partly because they meet real human needs for belonging and meaning. Intervention must include helping individuals find alternative sources for these needs."
Continued thread
There's an aspect of #CPTSD I don't see much discussed or even studied, but you can bet that whoever is causing the CPTSD thinks of it this way, either with conscious awareness or not:
Behavior modification.
That's what really separates PTSD, say from a random act of violence, from complex PTSD that affects almost every area of one's life.
CPTSD is a result of a behavior modification program. An abuser or abusive system conditioned you to believe and behave a certain way, often many sets of behaviors across most areas of your life. That's what makes something a cult or a high-demand group. That's what makes for a domestic abuse situation – it's in the things they force you to do.
The recovery focus tends to be on the trauma itself -- ok we're in sympathetic nervous state, let's unpack triggers, get coping skills, EMDR, meditation, calm you down. Fine.
But rarely (outside of cult exit counseling) have I seen much focus on the BELIEFS an abuser or system has instilled in us. Beliefs that modify behavior. That sense that if I touch a hot stove I'll be burned, but it's not a stove, it's normal everyday things that I can't avoid and I'm wandering an inescapable maze of pain-points.
Address the beliefs themselves.
It's a major gap in how PTSD is treated in our culture. EVEN the helping professional community is so bogged down in these abuse culture assumptions (that trauma is "in the past," that the abusers are no longer present, that it's just a nervous system thing, just process the trauma events) that they often ignore the set of interlocking ever-present beliefs, and they ignore the very aspects of society we're just supposed to tolerate (bad workplaces, chronic stress, toxic religious beliefs).
What did my abuser make me *believe* about myself? What did my toxic religion make me believe about the world? How do I view reality through an abuser-provided lens?
#ReligiousTrauma
#fascism #antifa #Abuse
#exmo #exmormon #PTSD #AbuseCulture
Continued thread
lol looks like I was on about this last week when I was editing these letters. Probably the same letter. Because the behavior of a bishop and stake president towards a child in this case is not excusable. *I* am angry at them and I wasn't even there.
But I do understand that impulse to excuse and lay palm fronds in the path of my abusers. Very, very much.
DEF CON SocialMx. Luna Corbden (@corbden@defcon.social)Learning about the abuser mindset makes me read differently the arguments people make in seeking justice or trying to get people and systems to stop being abusive.
When abuse is the point, "Stop doing this because it's harming people" won't work.
My client, Natasha Helfer, was excommunicated from the LDS Church for a number of things, including calling out abuse of authority. I'm editing letters of support people sent that Stake President, for inclusion in the book.
They're like, "I'm a true believer, please don't excommunicate Sister Helfer, this is how she helped me escape abuse, or helped my daughter process her assault, or helped my gay kid, or saved my mental health from debilitating shame," and I'm reading them with President Daley's authoritarian mind (yeah, sue me, prick, your actions are clear), or with the mind of "the system," and like, naw, hun, this will not phase an abuser, who thinks you deserved it, your child needs to change, that guy is an acceptable casualty for the Lord, and haha you suckers you haven't even begun to figure out how this works, have you?
And I was thinking last night about the word "predator" while watching a homesteading show. Where the bears and cougars had people crying and ready to give up. You think "predator" is an insult to someone who does those things to women and kids? Naw, hun, that's a BADGE OF HONOR to some of those creeps. They like people crying and running around helplessly failing to stop them. They get off more on that than on the predation. Even better when they can trick a congregation full of "christlike" people to defend them and heap further abuse on a victim.
Some abusers are unconscious, and maybe this kind of language might sway them or at least shame them. For sure.
But the ones who are fully aware of who they are? Who have created an entire worldview around their impulses?
All of this pain and chaos is the point.
That's #AbuseCulture.
#ReligiousTrauma #exmo #exmormon #exvangelical #exvie
Continued thread
But that's just a (conspiracy) THEORY!
Continued thread
There's a reason why cults can get away with just about any crime in this society. And it isn't the First Amendment.
Cults serve an important function for the establishment:
They get passionate, principled people out of circulation, directing all that Change-the-World energy towards bullshit. Cults protect the status quo.
(You'll notice it's generally only the cults with large arsenals that they ever go after. I see you Janet Reno.)
Continued thread
idk I guess I'd like to think that some of the folks in that photo read Recovering Agency, got over a bunch of their pain and confusion, and were able to attend that protest because of it.
Based on feedback I've gotten in the past, this is very likely true.
And that's why I want to restore my health, so I can do more of that. That's my calling. That's what stirs my spirit.
Continued thread
That said, there's also a lot of authoritarianism running through Mormon doctrines, and those with authoritarian mindsets glom onto those ideals instead.
They have their eye on a Utah theocracy, just like ol' Brother Brigham once ruled over. And many of them are in Utah government and police. So I also wouldn't be surprised if that comes to blows.
The prophecy about separating the wheat from the chaff has never felt so poignant, so imminent.
#ReligiousTrauma
#Mormon
#LDS
#exmormon
#exmo
#USPol
#UTPol
#HandsOff
Continued thread
That photo of the Utah protest keeps going around. Social media and news outlets are all surprised for some reason.
I'm not. Not at all. That's because 1. I was raised LDS and know the fire they implanted in people like me to stand for what is right, and 2. I've followed activism in Mormon spaces for the last two decades, and know that when educated on these issues, nuanced Mormons and exmormons bring all that fire with them. They've been largely working within Mormon spaces to change the Church and help those wounded by it, and have accomplished amazing things, moving the mountain that is the world's wealthiest religion with hardly a mustard seed.
Most of the base values Mormonism teaches are perfect for anti-Trumpism. The Book of Mormon is anti-monarchy and pro-liberty. The driving core doctrine is "free agency." The world after Jesus returns is basically a functioning global commune.
This is why I've chosen to work in this space as my own activism, my calling, to heal Mormons and exmormons of their trauma, teach them critical thinking, educate them on these issues, expose them to progressive ideas, and then they'll have the energy for changing the wider world.
We were reared to change the world, pushed to magnify our talents, taught to be leaders, shown how to organize, and then they chained us to a hamster wheel of useless activity that did the opposite of changing the world.
Once released from that hamster wheel, we are a force to be reckoned with.
So yeah, folks in Utah are gonna show up. Don't underestimate the Mormons.
Continued thread
After all, the God of the Christian Bible as widely interpreted is awfully authoritarian. You couldn't find a better example of squishy principles, double-standards, might makes right, the ends justify the means, cruelty is the point, justice as defined by punishment, punishment that vastly outsizes the crime, transactional love, exclusion as a definitive value, hierarchy based on birthright as the perfect system, torture as a test of character, speaking love but not practicing it...
Almighty makes Alrighty.
It's a perfect fit for abusers. They shaped God into that figure, as the Bible was being written thousands of years ago, in how it was translated and encoded into traditions centuries ago, and in how they interpret it today. Whether at the top of the chain as a prophet or pope, or in the downline as a impoverished drunk who beats his kids, authoritarians are preferenced in the religious culture that has claimed a monopoly on love and morality.
And nobody really wins. Not the prophet or pope, and not the impoverished drunk or his kids. After a time, the system is the only entity that "wins" as it feeds on every human being involved.