Fear and Want

Well, I think there has been a lot of anger for what the Mormon Church has caused me. I think that the Mormon Church has made me like strange, evil people. Because after a while, the contradictory and over-restrictive doctrines just made me crazy. Did I know the difference between good and evil or did I flatter myself into believing that I did?

Everywhere I turned someone found something else to disapprove of in someone in the human race. It was to the point that my psychoanalysis of someone else's situation did not yield a sympathetic or normal result.

First of all, most worth mentioning, is the idea that if you have sinned the Holy Spirit completely leaves you and it makes you feel depressed and worthless and hopeless. It causes you despair. Here's the hitch. Plenty of people have had despair. Does it mean that they have all sinned? Actually, I correlate despair with a lack of hope that life is going to work out. Maybe some people despair because of their debts. Some may despair because they are so lonely. I see despair as a warning sign, not a curse or a brand. Despair says, "You need to start trying to solve this situation, either by physically changing it, or developing new perspectives."

Despair has good messages for us. Any emotional state can be exploited for our good in the end. So why should a religion try to control or over-label someone's emotions? I just don't know! I could swear that people judged me ill if they ever thought I was depressed. They thought I had done something wrong, as in that I had sinned, or they thought I had used illegal drugs. We were told we were supposed to be of good cheer. We were actually supposed to look happy and cheerful and be positive. We were supposed to have been comforted in our grief by the Holy Spirit so that we would no longer grieve or despair if we had lost something major or experienced the death of a loved one. We were supposed to want certain things. We were supposed to want to go to the temple. We were supposed to want to get married in the temple. We were supposed to want to share life with a spouse from a rather young age. We were supposed to want children. We were supposed to have righteous desires. We were supposed to want to serve a mission. We were supposed to want to spread the gospel. Yes, we considered ourselves as having the good news of the gospel. We were supposed to want to do everything for our families and children and the church. We were supposed to want to go to church and enjoy the Sabbath Day. We were supposed to have good attitudes. It went on and on and on and on.

After a while, I supposed that I really was supposed to want certain things. After a while, I wanted nothing, because I was stuffed full of what I was supposed to want. I was supposed to want to feast on the scriptures and the words of the prophets. Well, I took that one so far that it created doubt in my mind about what I was supposed to want and if I even wanted to participate in the church anymore. For you see, I really wanted the truth and was gradually sickened more and more to analyze the speech of those professing to be the saints of God. They weren't saintly. They were mean and thoughtless and shallow. And when they spoke of Jesus Christ, it was in a New Agey way that indicated they thought that Jesus fixed everything for them. More than one person said that they had turned their lives over to God or Christ. More than one woman who spoke up in Relief Society said that they had stopped making decisions. God was making all their decisions for them. I will begin to describe the dysfunction this caused in my own life.

I would like to say that since I was fed so much of what I should want that it caused dysfunction in my life when I made my decisions. First of all, I was very concerned that my decisions were all the right decisions. Though the Mormon Church preaches about free agency, they like to say that we only really have the right to use our free will to make the right choices. We are not supposed to consciously make a bad choice. This froze me up. I couldn't even decide if I wanted pizza or ice cream for lunch! It was that bad. Other people, I am sure, saw this dysfunction, but they hardly ever said anything about it. I am now wondering if they did not also have this dysfunction.

Secondly, I was looking for someone to tell me what the right decision was. God wouldn't tell me, so I looked everywhere I could for people who would tell me what to do. I watched Oprah and Dr. Phil. I could swear I was getting good information. However, what was happening was that I was becoming a sucker for every idea that their shows offered. And I only got more anxious. Dr. Phil, I have started to notice, is not the world's most compassionate TV personality.

Then there were the self-help books. I kept reading self-help books with the idea that they would tell me what to do with my life. Again, I was brainwashed into thinking I couldn't make my own decisions without making spiritually costly mistakes and killing my free agency. We are actually taught that making bad choices limits our free agency so that we can only choose from a more and more limited menu, due to the fact that our sins are bringing consequences of imprisoning our lives. So, in my fear, I was sure someone else new the formula for my life. The self-help books all read very nicely. Maybe there was a plan that lasted eight weeks? Maybe it would completely change my life? Well, often these plans were actually for the very ambitious, and I couldn't even start on them. I kept despairing. I kept giving up. I started being the person who would never... (fill in the blank with anything I might ever try to do.)

Again, I was a child of God who just couldn't seem to get it right. There was a commandment I wasn't obeying. I wasn't praying for the right thing. I didn't have enough faith. I hadn't been to the temple. Again, I never went for the endowment ceremonies. I only ever went to do baptisms for the dead, a boring and harmless ritual itself.

After a while, I was very, very worn out. I had anxious thinking that spun me around in circles. I wasn't a normal, functioning adult. It turns out that I was over zealous, and still thinking that I was one of the worst LDS people out there.

After a while, I started to take care of my anxiety. I started programming myself with how I should live. I started learning to console myself. I had anxiety attacks, but after a while, instead of just thinking I was a mess, I started to think of myself with more compassion. I trained myself to relax during an attack so that it couldn't go on and ruin my whole day and wear me out completely. I read a lot of books and got a little therapy, and after a while, I was on my own. I was my own anti-anxiety coach.

After becoming my own anti-anxiety coach, I started noticing that people were condemning fear. They were saying in the meetings that fear was a sin. It was a sin to fear. They were using this scriptural reference: "There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love" ( 1 John 4:18).

People were using this scripture to mean that if you had fear you were unloving and unspiritual. If you had the love of God in you, you wouldn't be fearful. I sort of believed and disbelieved this philosophy. It was hard to talk against the Bible. However, I knew that my vicious cycle of fear and anxiety meant that something was physically wrong and I did not completely know how to cope with life. I began to not be able to cope with life at all.

Now I know that it was out of fear that people were pointing out this Biblical idea. They were afraid people would think they were fearful. So, instead of fessing up about their fear, they decided to condemn fear in all people. They were anxiety-ridden too. They were deflecting the spotlight off of themselves and onto all those sinners out there.

Apparently, we weren't supposed to have any fear about what our leaders were telling us to do. In some cases, we may have been humiliating ourselves in front of other people to prove we were faithful to the Mormon Church. Some members served two-year missions and did every form of proselyting behavior their mission president asked them to do. They were out in public, constantly trying to attract attention to the Mormon Church. They had to approach people and ask them personal questions about their religious and spiritual beliefs. They constantly had to tell people that they knew that the Mormon Church was true. And the members were supposed to be missionaries too. They had to give out Books of Mormon to their friends. They were supposed to bear their testimonies to their friends, saying things like, "And I know that Jesus Christ is the Savior of the world," and on and on and on.

And then, on top of the humiliation and constant swimming against the social current, these poor people are supposed to be perfect. And that is the burden I carried. And nothing lightened the load.

I suppose now, that it was a sign that I was allowed to endure. It was not taken from me. And that is a good thing. It was a sign I had better start to at least distance myself emotionally from that which I could not do or handle. It was a sign that I was the only one who knew myself. My leaders did not know me. And I knew it. It didn't matter how much I thought they were called of God, they were not telepathic mind-readers. They DID NOT KNOW ME.

I knew myself. I knew myself enough to keep myself alive for one more day. And they only hampered my efforts.