I recently listened to Valerie Hamaker’s Latter-day Struggles podcast interview with therapist Liz MacDonald. Liz treats many former LDS patients who are dealing with religious trauma, including difficulty maintaining family relationships with their parents when they no longer share the same religious beliefs. In this first episode in a series talking about Liz MacDonald’s research, they discuss a problem that came up in every interview, parents whose personalities were so consumed by their church identity that they could not connect with their children. There are three facets of this “selfless” parenting that were discussed:
- Parents not being in touch with their own feelings, desires, joy, or wishes as individuals, instead deferring to the church’s plan for themselves or how the church expects them to feel about these things, what the church has taught them they should want, etc.
- Parents unable to relate or connect with others on an authentic level because they do not know themselves. You can’t show up for your kids if you never showed up for yourself. You can’t care about them as individuals if you don’t allow yourself to be an individual first.
- Parents unable to enjoy the present moment because their thoughts are always focused on the future (when their family will be torn apart in the eternities) or the past (what did I do wrong as a parent to cause this)? Interactions that could be enjoyable, like family dinners or trips, are instead full of regret and guilt. Even if parents turn these negative feelings inward, these feelings erode the possibility of a healthy relationship with their kids.
This is by no means exclusively a church-related problem, even though it is pervasive in many families in the church. Many first generation immigrant families share these dynamics. In the movie, The Big Sick, the main character is the son of Pakistani immigrants who have come to America to make a better life for their son with more opportunities. Now that he’s of dating age, they begin to set him up on dates with Pakistani women, but he already has an American girlfriend. He can’t bring himself to tell his parents that he loves and wants to marry his American girlfriend, not a Pakistani stranger, and that he isn’t interested in living a Pakistani lifestyle because he’s an American. Things come to a head with his girlfriend when she finds all the photos of beautiful Pakistani women that his parents have given him, and she realizes that he’s not yet free to be with her because he will have to confront his parents, shattering their dreams for him, and he has so far been unwilling or unable to do so.
I used to observe that some people, where a personality should be, just have the church instead. This “church identity” vs. a personal individuation is something Steve Hassan talks about as being a facet of undue influence that is common in cults (bearing in mind that it can also apply to other cultures as well). Because the affiliation with the group is so strong, the identity required by that group takes the place of the person’s actual individual identity. For people who were raised in the church, they may not have developed their own personality fully because individuation happens as we go through adolescence into young adulthood. It’s one reason that some who leave the church go off the rails a bit, experimenting in the way a teenager normally does. They might think they are “making up for lost time,” but they are also undergoing the phase of individuation that they might have skipped when most people go through it. It’s one reason I was baffled when a college friend suggested that maybe in the Celestial Kingdom we wouldn’t have any individuality: everyone would look and act exactly the same. That sounded like hell to me, not heaven, but it’s also not an outlandish assumption given some church teachings and culture.
It is best understood as a system that disrupts an individual’s healthy identity development. An identity is made up of elements such as beliefs, behavior, thought processes, and emotions that constitute a definite pattern. . . [this] becomes replaced with another identity, often one that they would not have chosen for themself without tremendous social pressure.
Combating Cult Mind Control, Steve Hassan
There was a brief time in my mission when I tried to become exacting in obeying the mission rules, even the ones that really were stupid and made no sense. I was miserable, and it was making me depressed. I asked a fellow missionary what to do about it, and the advice was to both obey the rules but be happy about it. But to do that, I would have had to stop being myself, to instead pretend that I agreed with things I didn’t, to cut out the joy from my life, and living in the present moment. I would have to be ever vigilant for things that weren’t important to me. I gave it up after a few more days, and I was much happier (and more successful) after that.
At the time, I kept thinking about Steve Martin’s short story The Cruel Shoes, in which a customer in a shoe store looking for something truly special and unique is shown the exclusive “cruel shoes” that are forced on her feet, held together by razor blades and tape, pointing the toes in impossible directions, breaking and ruining her feet in the process of putting them on. She looks at her bloody feet in the store mirror and says “I like them,” pays the sales person, and crawls out of the store. Later in the day, the store clerk is heard telling another customer “Well, that’s everything in the store, unless you’d like to see the Cruel Shoes…”
When a parent doesn’t have a fully differentiated personality or has trained him/herself to be truly “selfless,” with an identity defined by duty to the church rather than by personal interests, values, and views that are separate from those dictated by the church, they may find it disorienting when their child, as a burgeoning adult, begins to develop their own uniquely individual personality that deviates from the church’s dictates. A parent who is uncomfortable with a child’s development into adulthood, and the differentiation that accompanies that development, may find it jarring because they have not allowed themselves to differentiate.
Additionally, a parent who has not differentiated from a church-identity will be unable to truly connect with other people including their children. Liz MacDonald shares an example of parents who are unable to express affection or emotion unless it is in the context of “church-centered spirituality.” She shares the example of a father whose interactions with his children are all “PPIs” (personal priesthood interviews) in which he asks intrusive questions in a “presiding” role rather than inviting confidences through mutual sharing and affection. When parents are not differentiated individuals, they instead become church gate-keepers, assessing their children on a set of church-approved, conditional worthiness tests. If children don’t pass these tests, approval and affection are withdrawn, either overtly or subtly, to encourage the (adult) child to comply with the church’s wishes (which the parent pretends are their own wishes, but these parents are not in touch with their own desires and feelings–they feel duty-bound to uphold the church’s standards over what their own might have been if they were in touch with their own feelings).
These relationships are very unhealthy, strained, and controlling; trust is demanded by these parents, but has not been earned. Liz mentioned that several children went to great lengths to pretend to conform for the sake of their parents, pretending to believe, wearing an undershirt to look like garments, or even studying church lessons to be able to “pass” as a believer at family dinners, despite not attending church in their private lives. All this work by these adult children is done to protect these fragile parents and to preserve the illusion of harmonious relationships, but these are not good relationships. Everyone involved loses out.
Which brings us to the final point, that parents who have these issues are generally incapable of living in the present moment because they have been programmed to be so completely focused on “eternal” families, that they destroy the relationships they could be having right here and now. Instead they obsess over what will happen when we die, starting the grieving process now, even though their living child is right in front of them, trying to connect. Or they obsess about what they could have done differently as a parent that would have resulted in more “faithful” children. Nobody wants to be in an eternal relationship with that. It sounds like actual hell.
It seems to me that most of the parenting advice I have heard from Church leaders, while well-meaning, is worse than my own instincts as a parent. There is a lot of fear-mongering and focusing on eternity rather than what’s right in front of us. Additionally, when we insert a monitor (like the church) into our interactions with other people, even if we only do so mentally, it makes it difficult to show up as a real person. As parents, we want our kids to be good people, to have healthy relationships of support with their friends and partners, and to be able to support themselves even after we are gone. We want them to be able to live happy lives that bring them meaning and joy. When the church tries to highjack that into “and the only way you can do that is…” then we start down a path that it’s hard to turn back from, alienating our kids and teaching them that parental love is conditional, and they are under constant scrutiny. It’s impossible to pass these parental tests, and eventually, kids will be so exhausted of these hoops they must jump through that they will simply quit visiting, quit calling, and focus instead on their own lives.
- Do you see any of these parenting traits in yourself or your parents?
- Have you struggled with a church personality that didn’t match your real wishes and identity?
- Does this explanation give you more patience for those who are out of touch with themselves, instead taking on a false identity that conforms to the church’s norms?
- What could the church do to create better parents? Will it, or is it too focused on member retention to allow for healthy non-fear-based relationships?
- Are/were your own parents like this description? Can you think of times when they allowed themselves to be authentic? How did you deal with it?
Discuss.
Wheat & Tares 
These are my parents. It’s a really tough situation. I always understood their love was conditional on my obedience to their exacting (and exaggerated) definition of what the church requires. Our relationship even in my childhood was strained as a result. Only in raising my own kids do I see how much. Our nine year-old told us she was not ready to be baptized last year. We are honoring that, but I’m seeing the way my parents’ relationship with her has become completely about persuading her to get baptized. They’ve told that she shouldn’t get a choice and her sins will be on my head. It’s so toxic. She’s not a granddaughter, she’s a project. So we are distancing from them, even more than I have already had to as an adult to maintain my sanity.
On the spectrum of my siblings, I’m somewhere in the middle when it comes to my connection to the church: still in and regularly attending but very outside edge and on my own terms. But even my most orthodox sibling says things like “Oh, you can only tell them what they want to hear,” and “The church is more important to them than we’ll ever be.”
I think I still see value in the institutional church, but it’s become so tied up in maintaining a relationship with my parents that I think of it a little like Fredo—nothing’s going to happen to it, so long as my mother is alive.
There are cultural attributes which are charming and part of our existence. Sort of like how the Greek culture is parodied in the film My Big Fat Greek Wedding. But extreme examples damage effective parenting and the church community in a variety of ways. As teens seek increased individuation (which is natural), they find that they are pushing against religious barriers that are not real spiritual barriers but which carry real social and familial penalties. I have seen parents upset about dyed hair, an extra piercing, a mustache, etc. The reaction is as if the kids had stolen a car or sold drugs. This carries over into how local church leaders treat adults. There is a reason that the word infantilizing is frequently used in the bloggernacle to describe the relationships between church leaders and adult members. The LDS community is not good at allowing individuation even when it is within the rules. In fact, it frequently penalizes it.
As I was reading the OP, I kept thinking, “think Celestial.” That is such bad advice. Well, it is bad advice the way Nelson practices it, with conditional love based on how good of a Mormon one is.
But me, I think in the CK where Jesus is, my pagan lesbian daughter, her pink haired wife, our transgender friend, my gay friend who died of aids, my green haired asexual granddaughter and a few other people who would horrify D H Oaks, will all be welcomed with open arms. They are good loving people, even if they are not all about Tcojcolds.
Good post, I’ve experienced this firsthand, especially the grieving parent part. When I left my mother visibly grieved for about 8 months. I asked my dad if her worry of my salvation was the cause and he didn’t answer me. Thankfully she’s recovered and seems to be back to her old self.
My relationship with my parents will never be the same. Before I left the church I’d call about every week and we’d chat for 30 minutes, probably half of that time covering church related topics. Now I call about once every 3 weeks and we simply don’t discuss church. To make it worse, my mom and I shared a hobby that led to a lot of commiserating and discussion: playing the organ. We’re both trained organists and share a love for classical music, especially piano classical music. Growing up my mother would say I have free agency except when it came to practicing the piano. That was a little extreme, but it was successful in producing a skilled amateur pianist and organist. I even attended college on a partial music scholarship. For good or bad I no longer practice the piano, and definitely not hymns on church organs, so we also lost that thing in common in addition to regular church topics.
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To be sure, part of the distancing is caused by me, but if I had to identify a root cause it would be along the lines of the OP: that neither me or my mother developed our sense of self outside of a prescribed church identity.
I have no meaningful suggestions to the LDS church for how to coach parents better without losing its core LDS identity. Maybe adopt secular humanism as the paradigm??
This is a post that feels timely to me, as I’ve recently talked with several friends whose children have left the church. The line about parents who haven’t differentiated from their church identity being unable to connect with their children rings especially true to me. This conversation is part of the conversation revolving around the hazards of emphasizing only one kind of “successful” family. I’ve heard so many stories of members literally not being able to process or accept their children leaving the church; it’s so sad to see people who have good hearts and good intentions believing that their family is irretrievably and eternally broken. Of course, it’s on those parents to learn to love themselves first, their children second and then the church a distant third, but a lot of this is to be expected given the way that the church talks and teaches about family.
And I think you’re right about the ways in which fear-mongering appears to be the default strategy when the church talks about parenting (among many other things). I know a good number of parents of young children in our ward and many of them seem terrified at the prospect of “failing” their children. This strikes me as a patently unhealthy way to go about things. I think one thing that helped me as a Mormon parent was that, after my kids reached a certain age (around 11 or 12), I didn’t care if they attended church. They both went to about a year and a half of seminary, and then they didn’t want to go anymore, so I told them that was fine. They learned a lot of good things from church; everything from how to talk to adults to how to lead others and how to behave ethically and with care for others. But there was, frankly, a lot about the church that I didn’t want them to internalize, and fortunately they didn’t. So I feel good about my parenting choices involving the church, but I also realize a lot of Mormon parents don’t approach the issue with a lot of nuance and I really do understand how difficult it is to break out of the Mormon groupthink box. It’s tough to watch young parents struggle with that at church, and it’s especially tough to see the stress they’re under because of the fear-mongering you mention.
While bishop, a ward member (mother of 8 grown children) asked to meet to discuss a ‘family matter’. Turns out one daughter and her family were inactive and grandma was tearfully mourning the loss of her eternal family. You know the drill – how could she ever again be in the celestial room with her entire family, etc.
She was actively lobbying her daughter to begin divorce proceedings and bring the 4 grandchildren back to live with their grandparents. I advised her to allow the daughter to exercise free agency and left it at that.
Fast forward a month and I had occasion to see the ‘wayward’ daughter at a wedding reception. Turns out that 5 of the 8 children were in the process of leaving the church. The daughter candidly told me her mother raised the family in an environment of strict isolation. Private LDS schools, missions, BYU and temple marriages. She related that, despite the damaged parental relationship, she had never been happier.
Far too many Mormon parents play the isolation card as a control mechanism. Very cultlike and prone to backfiring.
De Novo: It seems that the “isolationist” approach to parenting that is prevalent in some Mormon families is a burgeoning trend in the political right currently. Be on the lookout for expanded programs like vouchers for homeschooling, reducing educational requirements on homeschooling parents, etc. Homeschooling, when done right, can be a great option for families with specific needs (ex-pat families, for example, or kids with special needs or who are exceptionally advanced). When it’s done to prevent kids from peer relationships with non-believers, or to make sure they aren’t taught about things like evolution or dinosaurs or slavery, that’s a whole ‘nother thing, and that seems to be the rising trend on the right.
I was talking with one of my kids (who has left the church) about why they never took us up on the offer to skip early morning seminary. They needed their sleep (as did we!), and their grades were slipping. Early morning seminary was not helping, although it wasn’t necessarily the core problem either. They said that even though we assured them that we were sincere that they didn’t have to go, they thought it was a test, and that they had to give the right answer and say they wanted to go. Now, obviously that’s messed up since it was not a test, but the thing I didn’t realize at the time is that you can be as nuanced as you are, but the church is basically a third parent, undermining the things you say and do, and you have to be clear-eyed about that. I was not.
Angela: Excellent points re: Mormon parenting trends and the relationship to right wing doublespeak. I am still learning the elusive art of how to politely disengage from friends who spout the typical ‘everything is a conspiracy’ talking points. The tension escalated last night when I received a text postulating that the missionary who passed away over the weekend was likely a victim of Covid vaccine complications. I drafted a terse response and asked my wife to edit. Fortunately, she hit the delete button. Baby steps.
Going back ten years or more now, when one of my siblings had since their teens been a self declared atheist, and was not involved in the church. On the one hand my parents respected their agency, and continued to love them and to treat them and their family like the rest of us. On the other hand they would confide in at least some of us active kids the stress that they felt about our sibling’s unbelief, and would try and find reasons for it. Was it something they did or didn’t do? Could they have done more with family scripture study or family home evenings (no they couldn’t, literally these were absolutely consistent daily/ weekly activities over my lifetime)? It was painful to listen to. To have to reassure them that this sibling is a good, caring, honest person. That they might not have a testimony of the church, but have surely done their best with what they’ve been given and isn’t that what a just God expects. The worst was when a parent expressed a dream describing a pre-earth scene in which the family was together apart from this sibling who on passing by was asked by this parent if they had a place yet, and on hearing they didn’t invited them to join our family. An invitation they accepted. It pained me to feel that the only way this parent could cope with my sibling’s disbelief was to assign them a position of maverick from the outset, who had agreed to join the family in the absence of any other option, but who was not a part of the core unit. That still hurts.
What could the church do … ?
Start by dropping the psycho-religious babble “think celestial”. It’s nonsense fronting as inspiration.
I just listened to this podcast yesterday at the gym!
My relationship with my dad was akin to priesthood holder/PPI when I was young. He tried to remedy this when I was older but to some degree that ship had sailed unfortunately.
A big part of my parent’s life was the church, and to this day it dominates a lot of family conversations. I realized I was going to have to put in the hard work to think of other things to talk about with my mom and it’s actually been really rewarding. Instead of talking about callings, I ask her specific questions about her childhood. Instead of talking about the latest temple dedication, I ask for advice on how she managed life working and raising five kids. We’ve found plenty of other things to talk about and bond over; go figure.
I agree with Angela’s experience. I realized that it was exhausting to have the Church every Sunday undermine my parenting while I was simultaneously undermining the Church’s parenting the other days of the week. My kids were confused. A clean break was right for us.
The church could fix this and be healthier in this regard. They could start by encouraging anything Julie Hanks has to say on the subject. But they won’t.
Growing up, I knew my place in the family and it was below the “Church”. Church always came first and it didn’t matter what the church asked of my parents, they would comply regardless of personal or family consequences. My brother (one of six) left the church over 35 years ago. It was a devastation to my parents and honestly none of us knew how to handle this aberration. Fifteen years later on my father’s deathbed, my dad confided to another brother that this was the one thing that he regretted or mourned – not successfully bringing that son (and his 3 kids) back into the fold. Fast forward, three of us have resigned including that early pioneer brother. We have not told the two oldest brothers this news but the other sibling knows. Reasons are varied but include: it hasn’t come up, don’t want to hurt them, don’t know how they’ll respond (with already infrequent contact), and don’t want to damage what relationship there is currently. If it comes up, I won’t lie and will share but I know it will be stressful. I don’t need more guilt in my life, I’ve had decades of it. It’s kind of the invisible elephant in the room and time will tell if keeping the secret is the right decision.
I recall commuting with a co-worker whose husband was raised LDS but had long left. She was commenting on her BIL who was wildly successful and active. One or more of his children had left the fold and the parents were inconsolable. She didn’t get it – the kids were independent, successful, and kind people – what was the problem? In the church world, we’ve been taught there is no greater failure than failure in the home and between teachings like that and community shame, they could imagine nothing worse than losing their eternal family as they’ve been taught (and everyone knowing it). The church pressure is immense in this area.
I also remember being taught quite clearly that love of self was a sin. You should only be concerned with serving others – it doesn’t matter if your own reservoir is empty, just have faith and persevere. Oh, and if you’re depressed, just repent.
How could the church fix this?
To begin with they could stop mouthing the platitude about family comes first and start actually acting like it. They treat people like they are sinning if they ever say no to a calling or ask to be released. They give bishops so much responsibility that their family never sees them. I have known several families where they were happily married, until he became bishop. Then the wife felt so neglected as she was abandoned every night and all weekend, and the only way she knew she had a husband was she was still doing his laundry. So many wives hung in until he was released and handed him divorce papers within a year of his release. There are several changes that need to happen to actually start putting families as more important than callings, but the church isn’t even looking for any. And they keep making changes, like asking members to clean buildings, that make the situation worse. They burn young couples out, with no respect for the needs to spend time with children when they are young, then wonder why seniors refuse to accept callings. They say that your family is your first priority, then your job, then the church, but they treat everybody as if that is priorities in reverse order.
and I love the comment above about the church on Sunday trying to undo your parenting, then you spend the week trying to undo the church’s parenting. Yeah, I remember those days. It is like a custody fight with a hostile ex.
I grew up with “No other success can compensate for failure in the home”.
That was one of the driving forces for a lot of decisions I have made with my spouse – to this day. And it has been a struggle to define “failure in the home” – because it is a subjective perspective masquerading an a more objective perspective.
In this case, sometimes “failure” is defined in “Obedience/Purity Culture” terms (WoW, church activity, church testimony, etc.) and sometimes it is defined in “Loving Kindness” terms (“good citizen” terms & values etc.).
I still believe the adage is true, there is only so much time available to each of us to act in (and failures in the home are a legacy passed down the generations) – but I use it to drive myself to being the individual my children need as a mentor as they outgrow me. My voice is one of the voices they will use in their heads to drive their narratives – so I need to do the best I can to make it an authentic, healthy, relatable, reliable voice.
I was lucky to grow up in a home with chill parents in the 60s-70s. We were active, but my parents were not strict. We didn’t talk about religion at home or read scriptures, but we were fully active. As a kid I was so obnoxious about the church – I was the one pressuring my family into doing things like going to church on vacation – even while camping.
I regret being a strict Mormon mom. It was clearly not the right approach for at least one of my kids. But I guess I improved because when 2 of my kids decided to leave the church, I understood and never bothered them. It didn’t even bother me. Everyone is entitled to their own faith journey – or no faith journey.
A sister in my ward lamented that her daughter left the church, and wondered how things would be in the celestial kingdom without her. She finally found an answer that calmed her mind – she would at least be able to go “down to the terrestrial kingdom to visit her”. The “families can be together forever” doctrine is downright pernicious. Why on earth are we teaching such traumatic doctrine? It’s the opposite of what we claim is so important.
My parents wrapped up their identities in the Church, with the results you would expect. Conversations at family get-togethers were always very shallow. Mostly chitchat about Church and funny things the kids had done. I was very surprised to find out that some people talk about politics with their parents, or go to their parents for help with difficult times. We all knew not to expect the parents to handle any of that. Some of the stuff we covered up was pretty extreme. In fact, the first time I thought, “I don’t want to be like my parents” was when yet another sibling confided about a struggle and immediately said, “of course, I could never tell mom and dad.” And I agreed with them. Never tell that to mom and dad. They’re too fragile to handle the challenge.
Janey: “Some of the stuff we covered up was pretty extreme.” This is an interesting twist in Liz MacDonald’s research. While 100% of those she interviewed described the “selfless” parents above across those three dimensions, 80% of the participants also revealed that as a result, they had engaged in risky behaviors to themselves in order to protect the parents and preserve the illusion of compliance. This included things like unprotected sex (to avoid someone ratting them out for obtaining birth control or condoms) and not reporting sexual assault (to avoid being blamed by parents for being in a bad situation), as well as things like not getting out of a bad relationship. I can also imagine it would include things like not asking parents to pick them up if they don’t have a sober driver as well. Female participants specifically mentioned that consensual sexual activity was always considered to be the fault of the woman, that she was jeopardizing the only person who actually mattered, the man (the potential priesthood holder). I too had heard this exact same thing at BYU, so I know it’s a script out there, although I didn’t hear it from my parents.
This reminds me of a conversation I had on my mission. Someone who had been a member for maybe 6-8 months, very dedicated to studying everything to know about the church, asked me, if the ultimate goal is being with a family in the celestial kingdom, how does one experience true joy in that kingdom when family members are missing? I struggled to come up with a good answer. What’s striking to me now is to consider that this member had never participated in a general conference as it was not available where we were, and hadn’t spent a lifetime steeped in Mormon culture. All she had done was read our scriptures and the Gospel Principles book and pretty quickly landed on this difficult question, which suggests to me that this is a dilemma built into our core theology. Nobody has ever offered a good answer to the question, instead just more sermons about making sure that dilemma doesn’t apply to you. And the family situations you describe is where that all leads. I’m now starting to wonder whether there’s a path toward better family relationships in the church that doesn’t require some kind of reconsideration of afterlife theology.
Quentin,
I think this all goes away if we consider a model which allows progress between kingdoms.
(Sorry, I accidentally submitted my comment before I was complete)
It makes sense to me. There is no “sad heaven” because those in the celestial kingdom minister to those of the lower kingdoms. If family members have problems or are working through something, they are not abandoned. There is no breaking of familial bonds for eternity. There is no cessation of prayers. God’s power is eternal and we will be eternally edified and lifted up until we are together again. I do advocate making and keeping covenants with God. But I believe those covenants that apply to this life also apply to eternity. We love and help each other. I think even the most conservative LDS member would consider this quote:
Angela C: that’s very validating. The children raise themselves to protect their parents. Some of the things we covered up were what you listed. The daughters got hurt the most.
For a long time, I was proud of myself for being quite accepting of how any member chose to navigate their relationship with the Church. If someone wanted to be an orthodox Mormon. Great! If someone decided to leave the Church and say bad stuff about it, no problem, we can totally still be friends.
And then I had a kid, who while in high school, decided the Church wasn’t something they wanted to be a part of. All of a sudden I discovered that I wasn’t the cool accepting Mormon that I thought I was when it came to my own kids. I had so deeply internalized the Church’s message about a parent’s role in preserving their eternal family, that even though I was cool with everyone else outside of my own little family making their own choices, I struggled to accept my own child’s choices. Fortunately, I recognized my own hypocrisy in this regard, and I think I was able to work through my incorrect thinking on my own without trying to force the Church’s way on my child. As a result, I do have a real, authentic relationship with this child who is now and adult.
This struggle I had really surprised me. I always thought I’d naturally be the cool, accepting Mormon parent if I had a kid reject the Church. And then it happened, and I discovered how not cool I really was. I have since become a much more accepting as a parent when it comes to my kids’ relationship with the Church, but it didn’t come naturally. I had to really work through it mentally and emotionally to get there.
Janey: Your phrasing above “the children raise themselves to protect their parents” sounded so similar to what psychologists describe about the children of alcoholic parents that I wonder if there are more similarities or if it’s in some ways a parallel experience. The unreliability and need to pretend are certainly similar qualities.
Thi
This sounds like my former bishop before I left. He was completely incapable of relating to the issue of how unfriendly the ward was to people that did not grow up in town. His answer was always the same in that he would change the subject to all the things he was doing for the youth. The isolation and loneliness I felt as a single dad was just awful. I provided solutions and he refused to support anything. In desperation I went to an Evangelical Christian Church nearby which had actual normal friendly and relatable people. They would actually let you visit on a Sunday instead of the LDS approach of keeping everyone isolated on Sunday. My house could be burning down on a Sunday and no one would help if it interfered with the approved schedule from SLC. All the rules and requirements turns the Gospel into a joke as LDS miss the whole point of why Jesus came. Repentance and dying for our sins and inability and to be perfect but save us from our failings at being good. LDS just has an endless list of ordinances and events that they don’t even get what the gospel is any more. Certainly no love in it.