I’ve been reading a book called Another Country by Mary Pipher, which was published in the 1990s for Boomers who were facing elder care for their Greatest Gen parents, and dealing with all the stresses, generation gaps, and misunderstandings that these life changes brought to the surface. For me, it’s been helpful to understand both of those generations who predate mine (I’m Gen X) and comprise my birth family. I have 6 siblings who are Boomers, and my parents are from the tail end of the Greatest Generation; nearly all of their cohort has passed on at this point. (Silent Generation is the one between Greatest Gen and Boomers). Now the Boomers are the ones entering their final years.
Something the book identified that was an interesting perspective is that before the Boomers, psychology was not reputable or reliable as a way to deal with trauma or mental illness. Part of the stigma to mental illness was because if you were accused of it, you might end up in a sanitarium, given dangerous medications, subject to life-destroying therapies like lobotomy or electric shock treatments, or given diagnoses that are now considered complete bunk. It’s not just a skepticism of experts that people in this age group have; they didn’t really have “experts” to be skeptical about. By today’s standards these “doctors” were sadists and quacks.
So what did people do to deal with the abundance of trauma in their lives? They had several “therapies” that worked for them:
- Alcoholism. As Homer Simpson said, both the cause and cure of all ills. Obviously this isn’t a great strategy for dealing with mental issues or trauma, alcoholism was a huge feature of the culture in the first half of the 20th century.
- Hobbies & Activities. A lot of older people used activities like fishing or painting to de-stress and to de-clutter their minds or to reduce anxiety and worry.
- Community. Our elders lived in much closer-knit communities than we do today. I literally do not know the names of most of the neighbors. OK, in all honestly, I only know the name of one of my neighbors. The invention of the nuclear family and the urbanization and subsequent suburbanization of the country means that we no longer live in communal, multi-generational environments that were the norm to older generations.
- Prayer. Whereas many Boomers turned away from religion and toward more new age practices like meditation and drug experimentation, their parents used prayer to deal with stresses and trauma. It’s one reason that they see the erosion of religious practice as a threat to the fabric of society.
These last two categories were often covered by actively belonging to a Church, as well as the strength and proximity of extended family networks. Thanks to the nuclear family and the urbanization of jobs in the United States at least, the support of an extended family network is no longer the norm. As Boomers matured, their rightful distrust of authority (particularly after the Vietnam War and Watergate) went hand in hand with decreased participation in Church congregations. These shifts were alarming to the two older generations: the Silent Generation and the Greatest Generation.
Bear in mind, these geriatric forebears were people who were raised during the Depression, who fought in World War II and saw or even committed atrocities to protect life, including their own, they lost siblings or parents, they had higher rates of infant mortality, they had far more deaths due to lack of safety in vehicles and home building, and sexual predators and rapists living among them were far less likely to be held to account. Victim blaming was the norm. Talking about these things was simply not done. Things like suicide, divorce, extra-marital pregnancy, and miscarriage, were all stigmatized, not just for those directly involved, but for their entire families. Every generation has its traumas, but they had a lot, and not talking about them was a core strategy, one that made it harder to understand the trauma.
The book also pointed out a huge disconnect is that the definition of mental health is not the same for these two generations. For Boomers, talking about feelings and dealing with trauma is considered healthy; for older generations, this is considered self-indulgent, wallowing or looking for trouble, not healthy, even selfish, bad for the self and for the community. For some Boomers, therapy replaced one of the vital roles faith and prayer (both of which are conveniently private and internal) filled for their parents. As many Boomers left religion behind, their parents felt they were leaving their community and mental health behind.
It occurs to me that both faith and therapy can be turned into a grift for vulnerable people. I once heard someone say that the only reason to pay for therapy is if you didn’t have actual friends; a therapist was considered by this person to be filling the same role a friend would, someone to whom you can vent, who will be a mix of supportive and challenging in positive ways. (And the trope is that bartenders can also fill this role, while filling their clientele with alcohol). Clearly a therapist may have training and skills that someone untrained may not have, but it’s also true that some need for therapy is adequately filled by having a supportive network.
Prayer can be a form of free self-help, just like writing in a journal, reading a book or article or practicing meditation or yoga might be, a practice to ground the self, to reduce stress or restore balance, to vent “negativity” or unproductive thoughts, to let go of control or mental chatter. Prayer may be free, but religion often is not free, expecting donations and tithes to support the Church, and applying social pressure to conform. Like alcohol, for some people, religion creates the trauma that it then purports to solve (or hand-waves the solutions as something to expect in the eternities). People bogged down by guilt or shame or scrupulosity become mentally unhealthy, then turn to their faith to solve these religion-generated problems.
“Here’s to alcohol: the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.”
Homer Simpson
The role of faith and prayer (the free spiritual stuff) is hard to separate from the potentially harmful or anxiety-inducing aspects of religion, but these positive activities can be helpful, particularly for young people who often feel their lives are not in their control, and who may experience stress as they come to terms to adulthood and their increasing responsibilities. A child nursing hurt feelings may find comfort in feeling God’s love through prayer. A teen with friendship drama may find peace in turning it over to God. A parent worried about a child may find comfort in seeing their child as God sees them, through the act of prayer. Or, conversely, there’s always therapy.
It seems though, that therapy at least should have an end date at some point. When are you “healthy” enough to go without it, to manage your stresses on your own? When does the therapist say you’ve graduated and have gained the skills to no longer need the talk therapy? By the same token, when does religion say that you’re now able to do it without paying into the coffers? (Never is the answer to that one, just ask Elder Poelman whose talk in which he said this was memory-holed).
- Do you think faith and therapy can fill the same role for people with similar success rates?
- Have you seen either faith or therapy be a grift, a way to take money indefinitely from people while increasing their reliance?
- Have you seen a disconnect between how generations define mental health?
- Are you noticing an increase in Church leaders’ understanding of mental health as the older cohort is replaced by Boomers?
- Have you experienced being told that the solution to your trauma or mental health can only be obtained through religion when the problem also originated in that same faith tradition? Did the solution work or was it a cycle of trauma and healing with no end date?
Discuss.
Wheat & Tares 
“As the older cohort is replaced by Boomers”
And that, right there, is really something. Only at church are the Boomers still the up-and-comers.
My Boomer parents still distrust therapy generally. And one of their kids -is- a therapist. I’ve inherited some of their prejudices. I think too many of my cohort (and younger) seem to view therapy as a panacea. “If only we’d all go to therapy,” my sibling once wept on the phone, “we could solve all of our family’s problems.” They were early in their training at that point. Nearly a decade into their career, they now have a, uh, narrower view of what therapy can and cannot accomplish and for whom. They do good work. But I wish more people had their 2023 view of therapy as opposed to their 2010 view. It won’t fix everything, sometimes it doesn’t fix anything, and attaching inordinate amounts of virtue to regular therapy sessions (just like regular church attendance) is probably not a smart way to figure out whether or not someone is -actually- trying to be a good person.
My geriatric millennial .02 🙂
Here is from the LDS Social Services page, oddly titled “Family Services — Provident Living” (as if such problems are largely about spending too much money), under the “what services are available” link:
Family Services provides short-term professional counseling for individuals, couples, and families. Services need to be authorized by a bishop, stake president, or mission president.
And here’s some of what is under the “what resources are available to Church leaders” link:
Church leaders may consult with Family Services staff to better understand the social and emotional needs and challenges of their members and to determine what resources and services are available. … All consultation specialists are licensed mental health professionals who can assist with a wide array of mental health challenges faced by members.
On the positive side, by baby steps over the years LDS leadership has come from more or less rejecting the whole field of psychiatry and therapy to, now, even making such services available through the LDS system. But notice the implicit comparison between “professional counseling” by “licensed mental health professionals” and the implied “unprofessional counseling” provided by untrained bishops. They really need to give more explicit directives to local leadership to get out of the unprofessional counseling business.
With professional therapy, a person can shop around, as it were, to find a therapist who is a good fit, get a second opinion (good advice for lots of medical care), even try out a therapist who uses a completely different approach. With the church as therapist, you don’t have that option (and if you are using LDS social services, that’s another discussion!) If you question the value of the church as therapist, you are the problem.
I think the biggest difference is that church is by definition “Non-person centered” [either “God-centered” as interpreted through prophets and other visionaries AND/OR “church organization” centered and focused on “what the organization needs” AND/OR “community centered” and focused on providing some level of community connection (mostly through recreation services). Therapy at it’s best is “person-centered” (and to a degree “person-adjacent” centered.
If you can’t fit the mold of “human as described by leadership” (primarily through performing one’s biological gender “properly”), don’t provide “what the organization needs/wants” according to the terms of the leadership, and have problems fitting into the “community experience” for any number of reasons – church can become very painful and harsh.
In this vein, I think we do our local leadership the greatest amount of disservice by throwing them into pastoral/counseling situations with a variable level of support, and then throwing the burden of running the rest of the ward (and the young men’s organization) onto those shoulders with various amounts of training and awareness. Relief Society and EQ presidencies are supposed to pick up the slack – but I don’t know how much of the culture has changed around that.
Therapy has its own problems – as mentioned above. I think that our ability as people to “mourn with those that mourn” and “comfort those that stand in need of comfort” has decreased as the nuclear family became more standardized and the economy required the majority of adults to be in the paid workforce instead of doing the unpaid social work they were doing – watching children, monitoring physical environments, etc. Instead, we have essentially created “professional mourners” and “professional comforters” aka therapists and other individuals. We have also added to the job descriptions considerably for “part-time comforters/mourners” in terms of K-12 social workers, counselors, etc. in the fields working with children and teenagers.
The “greatest generation” (in quotes because they named them selves that in an act of blatant pride) had a big advantage as far as mental health went. Their trauma was community trauma shared by just about everyone. Everyone, even the well to do, were affected by the Great Depression, then every family had someone in WWII. Unlike the Boomers who had a minority go to Vietnam, and job loss in the recessions we went through only affected some. It doesn’t take talking about it to resolve the trauma when everyone shared the trauma, because others know and understand. WWII was supported on the home front and soldiers returned as hero’s, while those coming back from Viet Nam were treated as criminals and spat on upon returning. So, religion and community were much more effective in supporting the trauma they went through.
So, part the the huge negative judgement handed down from the greatest braggarts generation toward the Boomers was really based on a different kind of trauma. It is different growing up seeing everybody struggling to find work and feed their families than it was growing up during the height of the Cold War when we were hiding under our school desks as if that would protect us from a nuclear bomb and building bomb shelters in the back yard. There s a huge difference between coming home as a Vet when you are treated as a returning hero rather than a war criminal. There is a huge difference in trusting authority when the government tries to help by having work programs as it did during the Great Depression compared to seeing the president of the US resign in disgrace after Watergate. Part of the definition of PTSD is that the trauma be uncommon, rape instead of unfortunately normal cat calling, or Viet Nam instead of WWII. So, instead of shared experience, the traumas of the Boomer generation were damaging trauma. Then, instead of giving a damn, the greatest braggart generation just condemned and judged and decided they were better, so they named themselves the greatest. Bah.
Enough generational comparison. Every generation has strengths and weaknesses in equal proportion to every other generation. No one generation is better or stronger.
OK, as a mental health professional, part of our training is to NOT get the client too dependent. Compared to religion and AA who teach you to be dependent on them for life. As professionals we are taught to recognize when our clients are ready for life without therapy. And we are taught to wean them off. It s like raising children; the whole goal is to teach them life skills, coping methods, and get them independent and strong enough to live a good life. With religion, the goal is to keep them “in the boat.” There is no life skills training, especially in Mormonism. We are encouraged to stay “as little children” and taught that church leaders are there to guide us for life. We are kept dependent on the church.
As far as success rates the helping with mental health, there are ineffective therapists and there are even therapists who encourage unhealthy dependence, and therapists who spend the time talking about themselves. And there are some religions that are better than others at community, at supporting members, and mourning with those who mourn. Some religions encourage OCD by teaching scrupulousity and encourage unhealthy shame and guilt. Just like you should shop around for a good therapist, you need to be a cafeteria Mormon and carefully shop around for those things in religion that help you rather than harm.
The problem with Mormonism is that we are placed in the total environment as small children who are too young to avoid the mental health traps. We don’t get to shop around for an environment that is helpful rather than damaging. Even as adults, we can’t switch congregations when we find ourselves in an emotionally abusive situation. Then, when we become a feminist, or cafeteria Mormon, we find ourselves outside of the community, on the fringe, and cut off from community support.
Back when I was a TBM and served in various leadership callings, I was shocked (at first) to see how many members of the ward were willing to reveal all their problems to the bishop. Some of these problems were very personal and had nothing to do with the Gospel. And I only heard about a fraction of it because every bishop I worked with (in callings) was very discreet. I don’t blame the Church for the high involvement bishops have in members’ lives. I blame the members who seem to think that it’s the bishop’s job to help resolve their problems.
The Church’s deliberate destruction of the “Mormon” Community has created a whole host of problems. With the loss of the sense of community and family, therapists are left to pick up the pieces.
When we were Mormons, we were a community of friends. We served, played, and worshiped together. Doing so allowed for talking to one another about all kinds of things, including problems. It also allowed for answers and advice from those we trusted, because we spent so much time with them.
Now, we are a church of individuals who spend little time together during the week. And those who merely zoom in spend no time at all with their fellow congregants. There is no sense of trust that is needed for in-depth conversations about problems and needs.
The average bishop spends his time in unplanned activities with the young men—usually basketball. The bishop simply is too busy to form any real relationship with other members of the ward.
That leaves the therapists to pick up the pieces. Or rather, to try and pick up the pieces. But there is only so much they can do for members who will spend their days in social isolation until the next therapy session.
Great post. I’ll leave the dissecting of each generation’s solutions to trauma to others, except to say that I do think one problem with my parent’s generation (they were both born in their 30s) was that they lacked the language to describe both the trauma they had both undergone and their inner emotional landscape generally. That seemed to cause both of my parents a great deal of misery, heartbreak and, sadly, a sense that they had wasted their lives. Quite devastating to witness.
I think faith and therapy are similar in that both are often used by soulless, amoral grifters to exploit the truly wounded; this is what disgusts me about a lot of Christian jackassery like televangelists bilking poor people out of their meager savings and the LDS Church promising eternal salvation and eternal families only if you pay money to enter the temple and make covenants that you weren’t warned about beforehand. Taking psychological and emotional care of people is one of the most important, vital, and sacred things one can do; it must therefore be done with both pure intent and a deep, ethical sense of empathy. In rare cases, I do think that both faith and therapy can help, but I hold out very little hope that Mormonism can cure anyone’s ills, especially since, as a couple of people have already noted, church leadership is unquestionably ill-equipped to actually help people in any meaningful sense beyond offering some vaguely comforting platitudes. And, sorry if this offends any folks, using a framework of faith or any kind of theology that associates unhappiness with sinfulness/wickedness/not fitting in with the status quo is absolutely the last thing that should be done to help people who are really suffering/have suffered trauma. It can only do harm. I think that’s sort of what your last question implies. Taking the most wounded among us and promising salvation or happiness if they just straighten up and fly right is essentially doing the opposite of actually caring for them. It’s why when a few members over the years have approached me to ask about my own journey through therapy, the first thing I advise them is to find a non-Mormon therapist.
I a big supporter of pubs for Mormons. You know, a non-alcoholic (or nearly so) version of “Cheers”.
Admit it. You all want a place:
“Where everybody knows your name.
And they’re always glad you came.
You wanna go where people know
People are all the same.
You wanna go where everybody knows your name.”
Sadly that isn’t church.
As a bishop, I never felt qualified to provide serious mental health counseling (including for severe marital issues). The default recommendation was to refer ward members to LDS Social Services which, in most cases, provided woefully inadequate care. It is unreasonable for the institutional Mormon Church to expect bishops to fill the role of professional therapists. Praying and reading the BoM are not long-term clinical solutions. The risks are real in terms of suicides, broken families and permanently damaged lives. I suspect most honest bishops feel this same sense of inadequacy.
I wrote a post about my four years in the Church’s 12-step program for the wives of men addicted to porn (now it’s considered a compulsive behavior, rather than an addiction, I believe, but that was the terminology at the time). https://wheatandtares.org/2023/03/24/step-one-admit-we-are-powerless/
I won all the Church roulette in that 12-step group. Years later, I identified the first three of the twelve steps to be something parallel to what therapists call “radical acceptance.” I ran my entire life through those first three steps. I journaled extensively, had a regular support group of women in a similar situation, and some of the most amazing prayer experiences of my life. I didn’t talk much to bishops about any of this. But that 12-step group set me on the pathway to mental health. I talked to a professional therapist while attending for about 8 weeks, to get past something that was too deep for a support group.
Then, of course, the Church modified it to the point that it was useless for me and I left in tears, but the four previous years were outstanding.
Some situations can be solved with a friend group. However, not everything is appropriate for a friend group. When I was another woman’s 12-step sponsor, I had to tell her that I wasn’t a therapist because I couldn’t deal with the child abuse she was describing. I don’t tell my friends the stuff I tell a therapist. It’s too heavy and difficult to deal with. I tried dumping some of it on a bishop, but the poor man would give me the ‘deer in the headlights’ look and I stopped trying to treat the bishop as a therapist. A second thumbs up for every commenter pointing out that bishops don’t have the training to be therapists and that’s an unfair burden to place on them.
Church caused me some stress and angst too. In balance though, that 12-step group outweighed a lot of harm. It set me on the path to mental health, connected me with other women in the same situation, taught me to pray, and laid a strong enough foundation for my connection with God that it eventually led me right out of the Church.
And … this is going to be unpopular to say here, but scripture study was a huge part of my mental health progress. I got hold of Colleen G. Harrison’s book “He Did Deliver Me From Bondage.” She writes the 12 steps using scriptures from the Book of Mormon. It blew my mind; it was so profound. I did all the writing exercises. It changed the way I thought about everything I’d been through.
Regular Church caused me harm — the victim-blaming; the constant pressure to be more forgiving; the teachings about eternal families; the assumption that prayer and scriptures fix problems; getting lectured about service.
But that 12-step program took prayer and scripture to a whole new level. I’d have to write a book to explain it. We called it “Coming Unto Christ for Dummies” and it helped many of us.
At age 52 I am finally working on my mental health (with a therapist!) due to growing up with an engineer dad (b.1937) who had NO patience with my right-brained approach to things and who was otherwise emotionally unavailable. Also creating my own path of faith/belief so it all feels quite refreshing. Wife is still quite TBM but healing the emotional component will have the greatest impact for our relationship.
The pressure to serve a mission is something that needs to be cancelled as it is a form of thought control.
Then you get Oaks with his May fireside telling the young adults to “date more, marry earlier, don’t delay having children — even for financial reasons” (SL Tribune 21 May 2023). At that age, I may not have been a crazed rabbit haunting the honky-tonks but sometimes I wonder how it played out for me in an alternate universe.
I’ve been a mormon for 50 years and a therapist for 30, and had four therapists in that time, all offered me something different and I mostly chose to use it either sooner or later. I never had therapy that ‘worked’, but it did work on me over time. I’d just be repeating history without it, it has increased my self awareness and therefore my ability to exercise agency and change. I think the gospel helped me to get therapy by showing me that change was necessary, and it’s a church so I don’t expect therapy from it but an experience of working on community and what that shows me about myself.
My therapeutic practice has been about noticing with clients how the past might be repeating in the present, exploring forgiveness of the self by understanding how the person got to this place, and exploring what changes might be possible and what happens to get in the way of that. None of that is a quick fix, it happens in real time. I have no quick fixes because life is long. I’ve loved my work.
And to address your excellent questions, I think our own individual and collective pathologies intersect with the gospel and produce our very own gone wrong mix, which I think is where therapy can be useful in attempting to navigate our own pathology in relation to that. Punitive Fathers, Withholding parents, enacting our unmet needs, persecutory guilt amongst a panoply of infernal mechanisms get triggered and we just have to attempt to navigate our way through it. Not bad or wrong, just human, as were our parents. I love it when we try to understand, and their enacted trauma is only now becoming understood. That’s culture huh, ‘as the fish is in the sea and the sea is in the fish’. I think that’s from Arthur Miller.
Jany, would love a post or many about ‘Coming unto Christ’ for Dummies’. Are we not all dummies?
Many good comments. My experience and observation is a LDS congregation provides a social environment that is constructive to Self-Help. A person has a church to attend each Sunday. One has the opportunity to make friends. One has the opportunity to attend the temple, to pray and to read scriptures. One can even meet with the bishop. That said, the local LDS church congregation is not equipped and leaders are not trained to provide therapy.
One of the great ironies of the LDS church is that for all the hours it spends on “leadership training” the leaders are not trained at all in how to handle human psychology. Leaders are trained on the church program but left to themselves to figure out why the people they lead have the problems they have. Most LDS church leaders try their best with varying degrees of effectiveness. It is a good change that leaders are now encouraged to send members to professional counseling. However, there still persists in the church the members who, whether unintentional or not, are destructive to those they lead and counsel because they insist on imposing on others the habits and thought processes that they believe work for them.
I’m a Boomer. What you say about Boomers not trusting the mental health profession doesn’t ring true to me. Maybe to my parents’ generation, but not to mine. I have a child with a severe mental health disorder. We’ve spent a lot of time with mental health providers. None of them have really been able to help much, but it’s not because we didn’t trust them. It’s just that they haven’t had any answers for this particular child’s illness. My older sister has also sought care for her bipolar husband. She has had better luck, but the point is the same. She has trusted the mental health profession and sought their help. So I don’t necessarily buy what Pipher is selling.
Bert: “What you say about Boomers not trusting the mental health profession doesn’t ring true to me.” Just to clarify, that was commenter Margie (first comment), *not* the OP. The OP (based on the book Another Country) states that Boomers were the first generation to *embrace* therapy, to reframe mental health, to pursue it, to believe that expressing emotions was healthy. The rejection of therapy by prior generations is partly because psychology prior to that generation was sketch as hell, involving lobotomies, sanitariums, electro-shock therapy, etc.
From my perspective, I’ve encountered a lot more laggers within the Church when it comes to embracing therapy as a positive approach to mental health, and I suspect that is due to the Church being run by a gerontocracy.
For a weird example, my second child was going through some anxiety and depression, and their former YM leader asked about them. I mentioned the anxiety / depression and said they had a job they liked at a nearby pizza place. This YM leader said he’d go by my child’s workplace, which I mistook as a nice gesture to say hello. No, what this YM leader was proposing was a tough love conversation that depression was all BS and that my child just needed to get over it. This same YM leader also called a missionary who was currently serving but wanted to come home because his mom had cancer surgery, and he called this kid and berated him for thinking like a quitter, trying to hype him up into staying on his mission. Now, obviously, this is a guy who has no qualms about inserting himself into people’s lives in ways nobody asked for, but he also was very anti-therapy and defining mental health more like those Silent Gen and Greatest Gen folks–if you just smile, work and go to church, you won’t be depressed, and any mental health struggles are a sign of moral failing.
In my experience, limited and anecdotal as it may be, LDS boomers (those who are still active and believing) are cut from a different cloth than their non-LDS generational cohorts. They were the ones who rejected the idealism of their generation, they openly mocked the “dirty hippies”, stayed as far away from Woodstock as possible, voted for Nixon both times, and did not get involved with protest movements, except to oppose the ERA a few years later. Many went on missions specifically to avoid the draft (2 of my uncles did this). A few years ago I sat through a nauseating stake conference talk in which the boomer visiting 70 talked about how “truly blessed” he was because his mission call got him a draft deferment with just days to spare before he was due to report for induction, because his then-bishop was able to work some connections and find loopholes to the rules at the time. I can understand being opposed to the war, but the hubris behind expressions of faith like this is just baffling, suggesting that they were “too righteous” or “too important” for military service. LDS Boomers are certainly old enough to remember the pre-1978 racial restrictions; they grew up with it, but as adults they accepted it as the status quo and did pretty much nothing to oppose it. I asked my boomer parents about it once; they claimed they were never racist and opposed it all along, though I posited that if they truly opposed it, they would have been excommunicated (they had no response to that rejoinder). Even the youngest members of the Q12 today were serving missions when the restrictions were in effect, and were actively teaching the policy as a gospel principle as official representatives of the Church.
The LDS boomers I know (including my parents) tend to be distrustful of mental health care professionals, though not quite as severely as their parents were. BRM’s Mormon Doctrine is likely to blame for this. Still, when someone in my ward’s facebook group asks for recommendations for a therapist (for themselves or their children), there is sure to be a boomer piping up about making sure they only see an LDS therapist, no matter how far away of a drive it is, or how long it takes to wait for an appointment (I’m not in the Morridor, so LDS therapists are few and far between). There is still a persistent, irrational fear among older Church members that secular therapists are all godless liberals who will just convince their clients to leave the Church. This is incorrect because; (a) ethical therapists don’t impose religious views or advocate for or against any faith; and (b) for some people I know, for whom the Church is the most toxic part of their lives, providing the option of leaving is not necessarily bad advice.
You don’t find many LDS boomers experiencing faith crises these days. Any members of that generation who were doubting, or nuanced, or had any inclination to leave the Church, already left decades ago, leaving behind their conservative, orthodox contemporaries to become more entrenched and eventually run the Church, which is what we have to look forward to in the likely eventual presidency of Elder Bednar.
Hi again.
Hawkgrrl, that YM leader. Yikes.
To clarify, my earlier comment was only about my own Boomer parents. On the other hand, most of of my non-LDS Boomer aunts and uncles are all-in on therapy. Their mileage (by their own admission) has varied. So has mine. Finding the right person, having clear goals, understanding its limits: it all matters. (All three of those things are much harder in the LDS pastoral setting.)
I do agree with the posters who note that many LDS Boomers seem, in general, to have a different and more hostile attitude toward therapy than the rest of their cohort.
Jack H.
I was with you until the last paragraph. That one expressed an unhealthy black and white view of the church and it’s members.
I just looked up the meaning of boomer. The estimate is people born between 1945 and 1965. My parents were born slightly before this definition. My husband is a boomer. I was born a couple years after the boom.
My parents are both trained counselors and they have been in and out of a faith expansion/crisis for several years. They no longer attend church and temple regularly because of health concerns. They still consider themselves members.
My husband and I still attend church but we are definitely going through a faith expansion/crisis. We no longer understand our faith like we once did and we are renegotiating our various commitments and what they mean to us.
I am applying to get my masters degree and become a therapist.
My biggest problem with the church is that much of it’s culture and doctrines can and often do, specifically undermine mental health. It doesn’t have to be that way.
An important part of my membership in the church right now is speaking up, so that an alternative point of view is presented, and room is made for different points of view that support mental health and individuality of members.
For me blind black and white conformity, in or out of the church, is the problem. The solution is listening to one another as individuals and humbly accepting that just because we can’t understand something and haven’t had an experience, doesn’t mean it isn’t real and didn’t happen to someone else.
I’m a boomer but raised in UK and perhaps some of my experiences growing up and world view was a lot different to what Jack Hughes suggest – I’ve always tended to lean socialist, even though I was raised in the church by a convert mother.
You hear so much about PTSD now and I’m sure some of our parents generation and those preceding it had more than a fair share of it but there wasn’t a label to it then or even discussed. I don’t really remember my parents saying too much about the war except for some of the funnier stories, yet I know they experienced a lot of hardship and trauma and I think many folk turned to alcohol to cope with it. Like the OP says – so many subjects were considered shameful and taboo – mental illness, divorce, illegitimate births etc. And there was definite risk for people having what would be described as a mental breakdown.
I think the church over the years has strongly suggested that the gospel and its teachings are the panacea for all our ills, which is a sad thing because it can just lead to more shame, depression, self flagellation or whatever when it doesn’t work to heal us.
I definitely feel more mentally healthy after turning away from my past beliefs.
I wrote this comment last week and got distracted before I could post it.
This post is excellent, as are many of the comments. I’m smack in the middle of the boomer cohort, and I disagreed with some commenters, who I thought were a bit heavy handed with their judgement of us boomers. Some of us were closet hippies, secretly desiring social progress and free expression; others properly and vocally disapproved of anything counterculture. Even in the 60s/70s there was a liberal-ish active membership amongst the respectable folks in the pews. There was a renaissance of books, journals, and historical research that enjoyed a short golden period of publishing and dialogue before the powers-that-be lowered the boom.
As a young adult I worked to learn about mental health, to understand myself and find what options existed for help, out of necessity because of trauma and depression, but back then good therapeutic practices were few and newly evolving. And the church actively fenced in members who were casting about looking for effective help, discouraging anything without their stamp of approval and encouraging in-house options. But I cast about anyway to glean useful knowledge, and I learned from hard experience to stay out of the bishop’s office. When I was at BYU, I had regular “therapeutic” visits with my bishop, and one of the results was that I dropped out of school in the middle of a semester. Yep, this guy who was basically an adjunct instructor, and 21-year-old me put that plan together, for me to execute, which I consider one of my worst bad decisions ever. I learned a lot from that.
As I soldiered on for decades, the struggle to understand what I needed to heal was always filtered through a church lens that was mostly about what God (and the church) needed from me. The standard of care I received at church was prayer, scripture study, and stricter obedience to non-scriptural rules, given me by lay-practitioners. Also poor guidance with finding professional help. While not actually forbidden, it was frowned upon and discreetly discouraged. It came to a point where my challenges were too pressing, and my resources were so depleted that I had nothing with which to meet the expectations from church, and had to abandon them. I dropped everything like a stone without much forethought.
Looking back, I can see that for many of us who struggle with our mental health, especially those who experience challenges that deviate from church norms, can expect to have those struggles added upon from church sources. The way the church approaches some kinds of mental health issues exacerbates the problem and causes further, unnecessary damage resulting in a need for extra healing. And the guys in charge either cannot see it or don’t care. For many of us the only path forward is to abandon ship.
YMMV, of course. There’s always an exception to prove the rule.
lws, good for you. Your most difficult clients will be members. Keep your boundaries.