Pity and Negativity

I have been working on my resignation letter. I feel like I have gotten halfway through the first draft. The challenge is to make sure I remember all that I would like to write about in my reasons for leaving the LDS Church. I am covering a number of topics.

Today, I opened my eyes to a new topic. It is how I felt when I went to church and how I feel the LDS members are being educated on an emotional level. Fear isn't the only thing that LDS people are taught. I also picked up on a tendency for people to feel sorry for themselves. Self-pity is a serious topic in the LDS Church.

First, there is the epidemic of depression. A large number of LDS people actually experience depression without having any idea why. I was like that for a while. I felt, often, like I was drowning in negative emotions and a lack of energy. This kind of experience is often described as depression. Sometimes people refer to it as "burnout."

But I finally got that feeling sorry for yourself is one thing that the leaders of the LDS Church may make members feel. My mother came home from church and told me that she knew I was discouraged. She went on and on and bore her testimony of the Book of Mormon. By the time she stopped I thought I was going crazy. All of the things she said actually depressed me. Basically, she thinks I am discouraged and so reading anti-Mormon lit and refusing to participate in the Church at all. This is obviously not it at all. In fact, she made me feel sick inside, and as the feeling faded, I realized that the pity she was heaping on me was the pity I always felt when in church meetings.

Pity is a funny thing. It is actually a comfortable feeling for some people. A certain amount of pity feels like compassion. But pity is not compassion. Pity is an emotion that gives you the excuse to stay stuck and look for answers, yet never find any. Because pity is more comfortable to some people than owning up to who they really are and what the truth really is.

Pity actually assumes there is something wrong with you. It often masquerades as some type of sympathy, but the key to recognizing it is that it is based on the idea that there is something wrong with the person either experiencing self-pity or being given pity. Pity has nothing to do with personal growth. And once that gets into your head, you begin to despise it.

I think that my mother was trying to guilt me back into going to church. I think she thinks I believe in the Book of Mormon, but that I might say I don't believe in it just to be rebellious. But I am not ten years old or thirteen years old. These are the low ages you must be to actually rebel to get attention. I am over the age of thirty. It's not rebellion. By the time you are my age, you are sick of fooling around with your life, and you do mean business. That my mother does not know this is shocking to me.

Basically, I realized that some lessons that are given in church meetings actually do make you feel sorry for yourself. The grief lesson that I spoke of in a previous blog was the type of lesson that messed with your emotions. You started out feeling sorry for yourself, and you ended feeling chastised. It never erased the feeling of self-pity you may have had in the first place, but in the end it just made you an angry, self-pitying person. For some reason, somebody higher up wants all of the members to feel negative emotions and just crash into a kind of despair.

I don't completely understand it, but I think that the higher up's in the LDS Church are constantly playing with people's emotions as if they are shiny Christmas toys. They flatter people, then they make them feel ashamed. They instruct them, and then they make them feel discouraged. The whole thing is some kind of sick game. The game always ends with the members feeling some sort of unresolved negative emotion. It never ends.

Basically, this makes me feel sicker and sicker about the LDS Church. It is makes it really obvious that I must stay away, and not just for a while, but forever. After a while, staying away forever was my plan. But now I am completely sickened. It's like I know that the Devil is behind the games played with the members lives. I know that the members are being corrupted and twisted around. I know it is dangerous for people to assume that the church is wholesome or even just harmless. Watch out! The LDS Church will get you.