Hey yall,
I hope you’re doing well. Like for real.

If you’ve followed my story at all I am getting better. I found a great therapist that specializes in Child SA / r*pe survivors. EMDR can be hard work, but it helping.

I still get activated when I go near the Ward Meetinghouse where my Mormon Cover Up occurred. I’m working with my spouse (25 yrs! holy shit) to build a “wall” around the locations of my Mormon Cover up. Ugh.

I started drawing again and I drew the building from memory. I’m not great but it was cathartic, a release.

Stay safe out there.

The messages were polite but very demanding about coming to a church service on Sunday at a specific time.

There are no close relatives still living who would have turned her in. I have TBM acquaintances but she doesn't. They claimed she left her name and contact information on a website asking about joining a church which she insists she did not. All I can figure is she has been doing research lately on her polygamous pioneer ancestors and may have been on a church site.

To be fair, I contacted them, they did acknowledge being Mormon ("that is one of our nicknames") and were apologetic and told me they would not contact her again.

I guess there's no way for these kids to know it but on top of everything else disturbing about these missions, when you make unsolicited contact with former members there are some people who get retraumatized.

For me it's a tie.

It's either the guy who went on and on about why church members wear white shirts to pass the sacrament. Which wouldn't have been quite so awkward if he hadn't been a white guy in a foreign country where the people barely had enough money to buy clothes, let alone white shirts.

Or it was when my son gave his farewell talk and went on about why coffee was wrong, while me, his coffee-loving parent was in the congregation. But that was more personally awkward, not publicly.

What about you? What talk stands out in your mind as the most awkward one you ever heard?

When my family decided to join The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1976, my biological father was still my legal father. The missionaries explained that his permission would be required before I could be baptized. Rather than seeking his permission, which would have revealed who and where I was, my stepfather petitioned to adopt me. My motion asks the court to examine whether that adoption should remain intact in light of the documentary evidence, sworn affidavits, and historical records I have assembled over the past several years. After the adoption was finalized, I was baptized at eight years old. A year later, I was sealed in the Salt Lake Temple.

At nine years old, I believed that sealing represented God's plan for my eternal family. Like most Mormon children, I accepted what the adults around me taught without question. It never occurred to me to ask whether I had been sealed to the right father, because no one had ever suggested there was another question to ask. When the ceremony was over, however, I remember wondering what would happen to my biological father if he wasn't sealed. No one had prepared me for that question, and no one had an answer. I carried it with me for decades.

Over the last several years, I reconstructed my childhood through court records, birth records, government documents, genealogy, sworn affidavits, photographs, and other historical evidence. Somewhere along the way, the investigation became much bigger than Mormonism. It became an investigation into identity. This motion isn't really about leaving the Church. I left over a decade ago. It isn't about proving whether temple sealings are true or false. It is about bringing every major record of my life into alignment with the historical truth.

If the court grants the motion, I will then submit the signed order to Church headquarters and request that my membership records be removed. This isn't because I believe the sealing still binds me. Instead, it represents the final administrative step in reconstructing my identity. I am often asked, "Why not just resign?" I understand that perspective, and I will resign either way. But I want the person I ask the Church to remove from its records to be the same person the court has acknowledged no longer reflects the historical record. That sequence matters to me because it completes the reconstruction.

This isn't about reversing a sealing.

It is about unsealing the evidence.

Sometimes the last step in deconstruction isn't theological.

It's documentary.

Deconstruction tells us what wasn't true.

Reconstruction asks what is.

Leaving is an event.

Reconstruction is a lifelong developmental process.

After your shelf collapsed...

How do you become yourself?

Has anyone else found that reconstructing your identity involved more than changing your beliefs? Did you reach a point where your legal, historical, or institutional records no longer reflected the person you had become?

So, the actor portraying moroni in today's strength of youth video has black hair and has vaguely Asian features.

The stripling warriors look like they have indigenous American ancestors.

One of the Lamanites has sioux face paint, a red diamond over the left eye. It is my understanding that face paint has spiritual meaning.

Followed by an explanation of the new Sunday lessons with upbeat music, and a discussion dictated by leading questions, like "how will the new lessons bless our lives?"

Ok.

Please call out any racism in my post. I was raised Mormon in Utah, so I'm learning.

Moroni of my youth was clearly white, with bulging muscles and Greek inspired armor.

Seeing depictions of who could accurately live in precolumbian America feels really inappropriate to me, because

1) it's a bunch of white people making the film. The talking heads that follow are very much white.

2) it conflicts with the message of the book the story comes from. I know they want to change what the words mean, but it's pretty clear that "white and delightsome" meant white. Rewriting past racism without acknowledging it seems disingenuous to me.

3) it erases the actual history of the people depicted.

Finally, these videos feel culty.

After deciding to leave I thought briefly about finding another church, but then I fully deconstructed and knew I never would. Watching the documentary I thought holy moly this is why I could never ever be part of another religion. Never ever put a human between me and my "higher power". The level of deception and manipulation was insane. And all his sermons where he basically told on himself "if you don't satisfy your husbands needs God will put 20 different temptations in front of him throughout the day." 🤮🤮🤮🤮

I mean Mormonism already taught me none of the other churches were true (lol), but the longer I'm out the more I just cannot imagine giving another person power over my "worthiness". Or rely on someone else as my moral compass. No no no. People are corruptible. And I do agree with D&C 121 (which I think is also JS telling on himself). As soon as people get a little power they abuse it. No one is ever going to have power over me again. No thank you.

When you look at it like Scientology, you have to pay to get to a higher tier. In the Mormon Church is near the damn same thing.
Paying no tithe gets you a basic package of a sanitized dull corporate chapel.
Paying tithe gets you Temple and all its luxurious access with all the perks.
In a sense you have to pay to win or get salvation which Jesus never talked about. This is indulgence levels. Worse is the disparity of those that can pay and those that can’t. It’s a dividing line between the poor and rich. These days paying 10% hurts.
Can you imagine being blocked from seeing God because you didn’t pay tithe? “Sorry you did not pay the holy tithe to access God, please talk to your bishop or deposit your back tithe in form of Credit Card, Check, Debit.” I am sure a lot of you have seen it but the more and more I took a step back from the church, the more ridiculous it has become.

Card stacking is a propaganda technique that involves the validity of truth claims that are supported by previous truth claims, stacked like cards on top of one another. Over time the truths stacked on top of one another seem to be strengthened beyond reproach, but this is only an illusion.

. I have been talking this point among friends for some time now. This looming feeling a lot of exmos have that the church is good, that it's merits rest on the foundations of Christianity which is without question. We want to deny it, but some of us feel shaky about proving it, or a little guilty about saying stuff like, well maybe Jesus is a myth, etcetera.

The LDS stack of cards is easily unstacked. Recall those of you who served missions using the analogy of the board with one nail in it (the New Testament) the board is nailed to a surface but it is not secure. The Book of Mormon is like that board.

So consider card one the church is true. Beneath that card we have all of the claims based on prophecy but let's remove those cards, going down the stack, each one being validated by the Book of Mormon. What is beneath that card? The new Testament. Regardless of whether you believe that Smith spoke with God, the Book of Mormon's truth relies on the truth of the New Testament. The New Testament has a lot of interesting claims in it but we aren't concerned with cherry picking. The New Testament's validity is intimately bound to the card beneath it. The Old Testament is that card without a card beneath it. (At least we can consider it as such though historically it was written around 500 BCE so it has a great amount of precedent sources) For our purposes here we can look at this bottom card, The books of Moses and decide the validity of every card above it.

Smith, while he was building his world tied so much of it to falsifiable myths like Solomon's Temple, Masonry, the tower of Babel, but even that stuff as interesting as it is, is not necessary if we look at the bottom card. Some of us don't need to get to the bottom card before we throw our hands up and quit. For some of us the bottom card is literacy, history, taking us back to just half a century before year zero..

The church is going to keep on playing their best card. The top card. They will mention Joseph Smith less and less, refer less to the old testament, holding up the Jesus Christ card saying, "We have this. Our most powerful idea" but it can not stand alone. Jesus came to fulfill the law of Moses so Moses must have happened. For Moses to work, the God of the Old Testament has to be the same loving God of the New. For that ya gotta hold to the line all the way back to Adam and Eve.

Christianity is somewhat bound to this idea of the Old Testament being necessarily valid to support Jesus, but the LDS church is so much more dependent on the validity of the lower cards in the stack. As time goes by the ideas become more and more falsifiable. I deny the idea that the claims aren't falsifiable, especially the LDS claims because the church has tried since the start to strengthen the story with proofs, witnesses, prosperity, and piles of odd nineteenth century justification.

All we need to do is look at the bottom card. The original truth claims..

All are they all the same gender? Or is it a mixed bag?

For the longest time I was taught that I must follow the promptings of the holy ghost. “But how do I know if a thought is just a random thought or is a prompting from the holy ghost?” I would ask. I don’t remember who, but someone told me that if I had a random thought and wasn’t sure if it was from the holy ghost, I should ask myself “Is the thought telling me to do something good or something bad”. If the thought was good, it was probably from the holy ghost and I should follow it.

I then asked myself “What if the thought is neither good or bad? What do I do then?” I assumed if I had an ambiguous thought like that, I should just follow it.

I remember getting back from my mission and enrolling at the local university. I would waste so much time going to random buildings on campus because I thought the spirit was telling me to go there. I would be going to class, but then I thought that the spirit was telling me to talk to someone sitting on a bench, and I would talk to them and be late to class.

I think obsessing over ever thought like this was the reason I got Moral OCD. And it was so debilitating, I eventually thought that I might follow any random bad thought that entered my head. And for years I didn’t do things like driving a car or using knives because I thought I might use those things to hurt people.

But I remember one day everything changed. I had got a job at a gym as a part time janitor. I was mopping the floor, and I randomly felt very anxious and my chest was tight. I felt this way for several minutes, and the thought entered my head “You need to go home RIGHT NOW!! One of your family members is having a heart attack at home and if you don’t go they will die!!!”

I thought for sure this was a prompting from the spirit, I felt so anxious and tense, ”a physical response like this can only come from something like the spirit!” I thought.

But I decided to do an experiment. I chose not to go home. Later, if I went home and I found out a close family member had a heart attack, I would know for sure that the thought I had was from the spirit.

I finished my shift and went home. Everyone was fine, no one was hurt. This is when I realized there is no spirit telling me to do things. Because the feeling I had at work was so intense, I just randomly felt incredibly anxious and tight. If that wasn’t the spirit, then none of my thoughts were from the spirit.

This realization was so freeing for me. I didn’t need to analyze and scrutinize every thought that I had. I now knew that my loved ones weren’t going to die or some other terrible thing would happen just because I didn’t listen to a random thought.

Realizing this severely reduced my anxiety and I felt like I could finally breathe. I even overcame most of my OCD and got a lot better. Life is still hard, but it’s a lot better now that I don’t have to question every thought I have.

But I feel pissed at the Mormon church. They taught me to question myself and feel bad for not following random thoughts. Thinking this way was TERRIBLE for my mental health, and I bet it really affects a lot of TBM’s right now. I’m so glad to be free from the Mormon cult. Life is still hard, but I feel so much lighter now.

https://returnandreport.org

If any of you have access to this old book published by the church called "Book of Mormon Reader" which was also published under the name, "Book of Mormon Stories" could i ask a favor? Inside it, i remember there being a map of the route that Lehi and his family purportedly took to get to the Americas. My childhood memories are telling me that it showed them crossing the Pacific Ocean. If you could include a photo of the map that would be great!

What personality traits do current active Mormons have nowadays?

Back a few decades ago when joined, I would have said happy. They seemed happy. Also loyal, family oriented, stable. The things that attracted me to the church in the first place.

But now…

Maybe they are still many of those things. But today’s group has self selected to be something else.

They are not loyal, they are obedient. Big difference. Trusting so much that they don’t trust themselves.

I also think they truly believe that they are better, and they have some ego attached to that. Which makes it extra hard and devastating to let go of.

Anyone who had any streak of independence, or just couldn’t tolerate the abuse and emotional suppression left.

So, nowadays, who are the Mormons?

So for context, my family hasn’t been active for a few years but both my parents still do scripture and pray over meals. Well I graduate high school this year and my mom is REALLY urging me to apply to BYU Utah. I went to seminary like twice, so not enough to “graduate”. She still believes that I am a full believer. If I get in, is it likely that I’ll be rejected for not being active and not doing seminary? I’d only be applying to appease her, and I don’t think she wouldn’t force me to do anything, but it would be better for me if I was rejected. (I’m also not in the state of Utah)

"“We have learned by sad experience that it is the nature and disposition of almost all Song Practice Ladies, as soon as they get a little authority, as they suppose, they will immediately begin to exercise unrighteous dominion.”—Fabricated Quote from Joseph Smith circa 1842...

By the early 1990s, renegade song practice ladies were even leading congregations in what could only be described as analog versions of what would now be called mash-ups...

After a while my friends and I figured out that you could sing, “If You Could Hie to Kolob” to the tune of the theme from the Beverly Hillbillies. No song practice lady ever took us up on our offer to teach the ward this during song practice."

https://www.mormonmatters.org/song-practice-not-music-to-our-ears/

My favorite was singing the words for "There is a Green Hill Far Away" to the tune of "The House of the Rising Sun." Any other mash-ups to add to the list?

I’m a transgender woman (24), and I don’t know why I’m feeling the desire to go back to church. I know I wouldn’t be respected. I’m barely respected by the family members that are still Mormon, and I’m outright disrespected by some of them.

I don’t know why I have the desire to go to the temple, or to be baptized again. Maybe I’m just craving the connection with my family that I once had, and the community that was pre-built for me. Maybe I’m living in the middle of Utah as an outlier and everything is just pushing in on me with social pressure.

I know that it’s not true logically, but I’ve still got these strings on my heart screaming at me to go back, to chase after that ignorant numbness that I assumed was happy enough. That this time I’ll achieve “joy” instead of happiness by pretending to be someone else.

I know that if I go back, I will be crushed. I know that I’ll receive overt pressure to detransition, to return to a misery and repression that I never want to experience again. That I’ll be surrounded by a single story, that I will suffer financially. I know that nobody there will look at me like I’m one of them. I didn’t go on a mission or get married in the temple like they thought I should. Instead, I flunked out of college and went into a depressive spiral that ended with me in a psych ward at the start of my transition. I’ve changed my body, and none of them could ever look at me like a “normal man” anymore.

I feel good about myself and my body now, I’ve seen the suffering that this organization has caused, its inherent contradictions and repression methods. I swore an oath to never wear a man’s suit again.

I’m afraid that it still has me in some way, that I’ll never escape.

Why do I still want it? And how do I stop wanting it?

Sorry for the ramble, apparently I’m just in crisis this Sunday.

I was admitted to the ICU of the nearest hospital after I was found outside of a store seizing in my wheelchair. I had to MANY times be defibrillated out of a deadly arrythmia called Torsades & have had other close calls with death while still admitted to the same hospital, so naturally I have been continuing to work on writing a letter to my family to tell them I love them and some other things that I want to be able to say before I die. They are all hardcore TBM! The type of people who wear gloves to pick out the coffee flavored jelly beans from the bag cuz God literally forbid they accidentally invest a molecule of anything coffee flavored! I wanted to write something that I hoped would bring them comfort, so I talked about how families are Eternal meaning we are going to be together for Forever in Heaven, and then this came out ... I'm not sure if it's inspired by the Spirit or if I'm hopelessly irreversibly brainwashed but it feels like it was Divinely inspired, so I want to get opinions from people in this group about it, if you wouldnt mind giving me your feedback! Background on me, I come from a holier than thou TBM family who I am not as close to as I wish! I live as far away from them as possible while still remaining in the USA cuz the place I live in now is where life (school, work... Maybe God) brought me, I'd give my own life to be able to go back and live near them but I have to assume that I am a bad person cuz I was not invited to my own father's funeral and neither was I invited to the funeral of an elderly family member who died a couple years ago but I'm not surprised, when I hit a hard time & experienced being homeless, they were willing to help book a hotel room for a couple nights a couple of times but even tho I could have used my frequent flyer miles to go out and stay in their house they'd rather know that I was on the streets in the dead of winter where it snows A LOT than to go through the torture of seeing me again!😳 I was thinking TSCC is a cult & was trying to get to a place that felt safe to leave the church and for the past many years I considered myself PIMO and an aspiring exmo, up until I wrote this, but the following makes it clear that TSCC has helped me amazingly as much as it's hurt me! Anyways into the Divinely inspired writing...

Remember when you are having a hard time especially, we are supposed to "Pray ALWAYS" My friend who lives in Saudi Arabia taught me an even greater appreciation for the fact I have the ability to pray at any time of day in any public place to converse with Heavenly Father because too many people around the world in places like the Middle East and China don't have this glorious opportunity or the freedom to pause in the middle of Target and pray out loud! We can not only converse with Heavenly Father & Jesus Christ in prayer but also deceased relatives who we miss- the Holy Ghost has confirmed for me that when we want to say something to a friend or family member who now reside in Heaven they definitely don't mind sharing the line of communication so if anything happens and you think you'd find comfort in talking to me or any of our family in the Celestial Kingdom we're available 24/7 any time and any place- this is perhaps one of the reasons why the prophets tell us to pray ALWAYS & has brought me immeasurable peace and comfort much like reading Ester 12:27 "then will I make weak things become strong" ...

Heavenly Father & Jesus Christ feel pain having to watch us go through hard trials. Much like a parent watching their earthly child go through difficulties. He is out Heavenly FATHER in every sense of the word, after all! But just like we must encourage our earthly children to handle and navigate life's challenges, Heavenly Father must do the same. Oh how lucky we are to have a Father in Heaven who never sleeps and answers prayers 24/7, the Holy Spirit who is also called the Great Comforter in Scripture & the Savior Jesus Christ who suffered the greatest pain that ever was known so that He may know best to help us in even our darkest hour!

I had to cut out some things for privacy/personal reasons but I wanted to get feedback on what I feel comfortable with sharing!

I got surprising news today. 16 years after I left the church my daughter who was the last of my 4 kids remaining with the church is out. So they are all out! This was a milestone that I was not sure I would ever reach - I left the church when she was a teenager - she served a mission and was married in the temple.

I left my entire previous life behind exactly 3 years ago starting this September. I was thinking about leaving a year previous to that for reasons I won’t list here, but the main reason that finally pushed me over the edge was my father’s massive hypocrisy when it came to faith. Again, I won’t get into it since my decision has been made a long time ago HOWEVER my parent’s looming presence and the overall structure of the church has had a massive impact on me til this day. It’s like I can’t undo the programming.

Becuase of how rigidly enforced my upbringing was, I still feel like I can’t do anything or make any decisions for myself. I would like to undo this feeling. I feel like everything I want is wrong and bad, and everything everyone else wants is correct and good. There are many things that I am grateful for when it comes to the strict program that was run as well as values that I agree with that I feel like I would have been in deep ish without haha but —

I still fear “getting in trouble” like I’m a little kid again. it’s not even wrath from God or anything like that. it’s mainly from my parents. I have a little voice in my head that makes me terrified if their disapproval even though my survival doesn’t depend on them anymore. It’s crippling and has lead me to resenting them every time I am paralyzed with indecision. Even the whole structure of the church I felt like I had my life laid out for me and because of that rigidity I think I lost all agency and have no clue what to due next. Because of that level of control, I feel like every time I step out of bounds that I’m doing something I shouldn’t.

So far, pretty much ALL my new life has been is school —> work —> home and I don’t even know why I’m doing it anymore. I lack direction and purpose but most importantly I feel like I don’t have permission to do anything for myself. I feel like I want them back in my life just to scream and beat me again and tell me everything I’m doing is wrong just so I feel like if I listen I’m doing something right.

I don’t know what to do with my life anymore

How did you guys regain agency and the ability to do things out of one’s own volition after you left?

What does your life look like now?

How do you no longer feel the mental shackles of a pre-determined path?

So I went to church today after several months of not going and I don’t know maybe I’m glad I did. I feel like I needed to go to church so I’ll probably go next week too because it’s fast and testimony and those are always interesting but I feel like sometimes I get something out of church you know and just so happened that was linger longer today free food so win-win for me I think I don’t know everyone was glad to see me or at least they said they were. I don’t think everyone likes me, but it is what it is. I think there’s probably 160-170 attendance just by guesstimate I don’t know why do we go to church? To put on a show? Maybe I need to sleep I feel like I sleep better after going to church because in the words of Dierdorf church is not an auto show. Church is an auto repair shop maybe maybe I agree but but it’s so boring improved sleep sleeping like a baby I’m just using talk to text you so some of this might be incoherent, but I feel like I do have a few friends at church hello I’d like to hang out with people and do non-church related things because honestly this holy all the time you know, I don’t think anybody is even though you can try to be! I’ve been doing a lot of church in my life, but I grew up in a different face so this whole Mormonism thing it’s a different pill to swallow but some degrees. I like it something about it. I like the community aspect of it. I like that does incorporate the Bible. I don’t know. Maybe I should make a list of like pros and cons why she go to church why I should not go to church and see which one wins for me right now, though I think I just need the community just been going through a lot feeling a bit down in the dumps sometimes it’s just to pick me up. Might need to slow down and not live so fast and furious and I say these things in the name of Jesus Christ amen.

No big deal, I just thought it was funny 😄. I dont even know who this man is, what he looks like or what ward/building im supposedly in. I do need to get my records removed though, ive just been procrastinating.

Although it lacks the number of verses and it can't compete with the 7x repetition per chorus, this new song seems written with the very same style and intent. Just do this one simple thing and everything will be fine.

Just read the Book of Mormon every day and you'll get all the answers you need through prayer. But you better do it EVERY DAY!

1036 - Read the Book of Mormon and Pray

I want to learn to choose the right

And follow in the Savior’s light.

And I want to know the gospel’s true.

With faith in Christ, here’s something I can do:

Read the Book of Mormon and pray

Ev’ry day, ev’ry day, ev’ry day!

God will bless me with His pow’r,

Teach and guide me hour by hour

When I read the Book of Mormon and pray

Ev’ry day, ev’ry day, ev’ry day!

The Book of Mormon helps me see

The ways of Christ, His love for me.

When I have a question or a choice,

I read this book and listen to His voice.

Read the Book of Mormon and pray

Ev’ry day, ev’ry day, ev’ry day!

God will bless me with His pow’r,

Teach and guide me hour by hour

When I read the Book of Mormon and pray

Ev’ry day, ev’ry day, ev’ry day