Mormon Stories 1449: Navigating a Mixed-Faith Mormon Family - Linda and Savannah Clyde Pt. 1

hello everyone and welcome to another edition of mormon stories podcast i'm your host john dillin we are recording here at the mormon stories podcast studios in holiday utah and i could not be more excited for my guests today my guests are linda and savannah clyde hey guys hey hi welcome thanks so much for joining us it's good to be here um i don't expect that a ton of you will know who lyndon and savannah clyde are i learned about linda first a month or two ago when i learned that linda had worked for five years for the church of jesus christ of latter-day saints lds.org mormon.org as a copywriter in i think what she describes as their marketing department but it's really um writing headlines and title and copy for lds.org mormon.org and many other um internet assets and other things that we'll learn about today but it's interesting to think about it sometimes you can look at the church through a corporate lens kind of like it's a corporation and sometimes you can look at its different business units as units of the business and and if you look at it that way and i think linda characterizes it that way she worked for the marketing arm of the lds church so she has a lot of insider perspective and information about how they think about um the messages that they share with members in the world the headlines search engine optimization and just how they get the message out to the world and market the product market um the church of jesus christ literary saints um but that's not the only reason we're interviewing linda um i stumbled also on her someone recommended her tick tock channel to me she has a tick tock channel um where she has been sharing her experiences um as a mormon and her experiences working with the church and it's just a it's a lovely thoughtful um and fun uh tik tok channel and of course you know mormon stories podcast is is working to um to become involved on all the platforms where we can help get the message out and fulfill the mission of the open stories foundation which is to um help provide informed consent for current past and future potential members of the church of jesus christ of latter-day saints we think everybody should know the truth about the church and then of course the open stories foundation and warmer stories podcast wants to help people who are in a faith transition or who have left the church we want to help them find healing growth in community in or out of the church we just want to fill the voids that the church is not able to support so as i stumbled upon linda's tick tock channel learned about her story i thought it would it'd be really cool to have her in to tell her story but that's not it as i learned more about linda's story um i also learned about savannah and it turns out savannah savannah's 19 years old is that right savannah and savannah was an important part of linda's journey um helping linda see the mormon church the church of jesus christ of latter-day saints more clearly and savannah's got her own story of sort of being a teen middle school and high school in utah county and uh what that was like for her and so this is just one of the types of mormon stories podcast episodes i love most are kind of parent-child uh sort of stories kind of like you know lee and cody young and and brinley young and so many others uh the the hackings and their son kyle um donna showalter and and her son uh michael just uh we we love those types of stories and so uh guys i'm just so excited to have you here did i get anything wrong in the introduction no no that's great anything you want to add or correct no it's great it's a great introduction okay all right um and of course we are so excited to have with us in studio cara burrell hey um cara cara burrell has uh has been working with us now for a month or two she does so many important things for us including here in studio producing these episodes helping with the cameras and the audio time codes now we just want to make sure everybody understands that for all youtube videos going forward we we provide time codes in the description where you can jump is are they called time codes what are what are you gen x or gen zeros call them these days um that is not me i am definitely a millennial i mean all right time time stamps time codes where you can actually see an outline of what we're going to be talking about and jump to certain sections of the interview either to go back and see things you really liked or to jump forward or back to parts you you want to review so care you know care helps with those time codes um she provides important insightful funny witty thoughtful commentary and um and that's in addition to the the support of brooklyn alden who does our editing in gerardo who does our cinematography and our thumbnails because of your support we are able to do so much more now um in the open source foundation with mormon stories but kara it's just so great to have you uh with us yeah it's been so much fun working for you john and working with gerardo in brooklyn and meeting the guests and interviewing and i was just chatting with our lovely guests here i think this is gonna be a really good one i think everyone should buckle up it's gonna be very insightful i can tell already these are two very intelligent ladies absolutely all right so uh yeah so without any further ado we are going to jump into linda and savannah's story and this is going to be one of those you know multi-hour three to four hour kind of interviews but i promise you it's gonna be worth it so uh how's that for a build-up there you go all right linda well let's start okay where does your mormon story begin my mormon story begins in utah county born and raised there um i i was born in payson and raised mormon kind of i will kind of put kind of in there just because my uh my mom was more of a believer my dad had his questions um back in the 80s my dad attended byu and the religion classes really put him off really yeah he was there when i was there honestly probably i think it would have been early 80s yeah so that was their late 80s okay so sometime around there yeah so so i agree did he have a faith crisis you know he didn't talk to us about it a lot but he was very antagonistic i'll say that much toward the church and and as a young kid it really affected my relationship with him too because i was i was born kind of a believer i just you know going to church for me was i loved the stories i loved primary i loved god i loved jesus i loved joseph smith i loved joseph smith i thought i identified with joseph smith in many ways i just felt like you know i spiritually you know i thought okay i would i would be one to go and kneel in a in a forest grove and pray and and actually believe that i was receiving you know a response to a prayer so i don't know it wasn't hard for me to follow the joseph smith story and i was um i really identified with what i was told about joseph smith early on so with your with your dad so i'm assuming he he met your did he meet your mom at byu and you know did did your mom know that he was struggling and did they in the temple like tell us about their what do you know about their courtship prior okay so um my mom did not go to college and she um that's one of her biggest regrets actually um so my dad was uh he did the whole byu thing um graduated in construction management but they met they were high school sweethearts and my husband and i are also high school sweethearts so they couldn't say anything to us when yeah anyway we'll get to that we'll get to that but um yeah so i don't know that she really knew full-on but they were married civilly first and when i think when my mom was expecting my oldest sister she uh they went through the temple at that point and i don't really remember hearing any stories or any negativity about their temple experience they didn't attend the temple we weren't super active growing up my mom made sure we went through all the rights and rituals as as kids and my dad actually performed all the rights and rituals so he was in enough to do that to bless and baptize all of us so things started to change a little bit once i got to be once we started getting married you know that was and i don't know what he was reading during all of that time but we we weren't ones that really did uh follow the family home evening we didn't have family prayer we didn't have we were often known as the inactives um in the ward and i i often felt that growing up i knew that when specific young women were reaching out to me that it was a fellowshipping thing and i was grateful to them and i was appreciative that they would reach out to me but i did feel a little bit othered growing up and i think that my sisters felt the same way too so i don't know we just didn't really talk a whole lot especially with my dad we didn't talk a whole lot about religion but but we knew that there was conflict because if we ever did talk much about it he would kind of shut it down pretty quick you know if we were ever talking about i don't know testimonies or talking about the church he would it would ruffle his feathers we knew that much that it would upset him so as we got to be more if you talked positively about the church it would upset your dad so so like this is you know most of the people that we interview a mormon story's podcast are raised in these hyper orthodox super faithful um and so this is really inter more mormon families this is super interesting yeah so i guess you don't you don't know or you didn't know if your dad just didn't believe if your mom did or didn't believe if they were just cultural mormons to fit the mold but privately had doubts did you have any idea why you guys were lukewarm mormons growing up in in utah county right is pacing utah county yeah payson is utah county we weren't actually in pace and i grew up in spanish for spanish but i was born in payson so um my mom would talk to us a lot about church my mom taught me to pray my mom would talk to us about religion she would answer our questions she would encourage us to go to church and she if we were going to church she was the instigator she was the one that was taking us and i do remember my dad being there sometimes but it was always he was always bored out of his mind and trying to entertain trying to entertain us i remember i don't know if anybody ever did that hand thing where you like sit with each other and you like push all the blood out of your hand and then you pretend to pull a string out of the middle of your hand and the blood rushes back in my dad did that with that's my memory of my dad in church is just kind of playing with our playing with our hands and playing little tricks and tim telling us little jokes and it was never like engaging with what was being spoken over the pulpit really and so i had so much cognitive dissonance as a kid because i was i was getting as a little kid i was getting these two really strong messages you know pro church which i really really identified with and then you know my dad's really antagonistic view and for me as a young kid all i could do was look at my dad and think dad why what's wrong with you dad you know why aren't you being a priesthood leader why aren't you doing you know a b c and d that we were taught to do and so it's tough it like really damaged my relationship with him as a young kid so um and i remember once like just to kind of as an example of of when the cognitive dissonance was really strong just a memory as i remember driving in the car with my family and my parents were in the front seat i was in the back and with my sisters and my dad was my mom and dad started having a conversation about joseph smith and my dad started to kind of go off on joseph smith and i remember like breaking down sobbing in the back seat because i did not know what to do with the information i was i i loved to joseph smith i loved the story and i thought why how could anybody hate joseph smith it was tough it was really really tough and i didn't know what to do with it i didn't know who to turn to my mom was kind my mom would listen but i don't feel like she could really help me she was my mom has always been sandwiched between um she was sandwiched between her parents because her dad was not really a believer and her mom was a believer so she was sandwiched too her whole life she's been kind of stuck in the middle and so again here she is in this situation she's got her husband she's got to keep the peace with her husband you know but yet kind of just in case it's true she feels like she has to teach her kids the truth so she was in a tough position position so she would help me she would talk things through with me i did have a grandmother that i would turn to who was super stalwart mormon and and she kind of gave me the special complex she told me that i was special because i was so spiritual because i was such a believer as a kid and so i that's where i got value was from my grandma because i wasn't really getting it at home i didn't so anyway i just really identified with that spirituality and that was praised through my grandma my relationship with my dad was was really rough growing up i couldn't connect with him and you don't want to feel like your dad's bad you know but i had a lot of those moments where it's like i just hated him because he wouldn't i was like because it was church was good for me everything about it seemed good and wonderful and i felt good when i was there and so the the non-conformity of my dad was really really difficult as a kid some that's so hard to be split yeah yeah especially and it's hard how you know usually this comes at the end of a story when an interviewee enters into a mixed faith marriage right but you were born into a mixed faith you know with mixed faith parents yes and i could just imagine the tension it's yeah yeah the tension was really tough i i remember once and i know that my sisters felt the same just because we were going to church we were being indoctrinated and so you know we all wanted to save dad you know we all wanted to help dad figure it out um and once my sister and i remember going down to once she could drive going down to a store with her like a church bookstore i can't remember what it was probably a desert book and it was some kind of church bookstore and trying to find just the right book that would help my dad that he might like he might listen to he might find something in it that would help him see and understand you know that the church was true and that's what he needed to help him live up to his covenants you know all of these things that we're being indoctrinated with so we spent hours i just remember just her and i just pouring over all these books and we finally settled on a book by von jay featherstone and it was a book about jesus christ and i thought we thought okay this is safe because we we clearly were able to pick up at that point that that it was a lot of the church leaders that he had trouble with so we focused on jesus christ that that was probably something that was safe we wrapped it up and gave it to him you know as a gift and he opened it up and i and i feel sad sharing this because i know he would be sad to hear this now but um he just looked at it and just said what is this you know sat it down i was like i don't want this and it crushed us you know because we were just we just wanted to help we just wanted to feel that connection and that spiritual connection with dad so it was especially hard on me i don't haven't talked to my sister about that for years but um there were a lot of moments like that growing up that were really hard so just being sandwiched in a home like that i did have people that i i turned to but um yeah like i said grandma i had a grandma that i turned to a lot that was really helpful during those times but it never went away it was a hard house a hard roof roof to live under because there was constant contention over religion in our home so yeah the tough i mean the church i think the church moral church really believes that families are the most important thing and it often leads in marketing with this idea that families are the most important thing that families are eternal and the whole purpose of life is families right and so we all are raised thinking that oh well that's what the church does it strengthens families but now you know for the past 10 or 20 years i've been realizing that it doesn't always strengthen families no no um and i think that that's kind of where i'm at now i mean i won't jump forward but looking back it's never united my family just from the very beginning and even my grandparents story i'm named after my grandparents baby they lost a baby when she was an infant her and her name was linda i was named after her um and their story religion also kind of was a dividing thing for them as well and um my grandma clung to religion because she believed that that was the only way she was ever gonna see that baby again and um and the loss the loss of the baby made their marriage really hard but my grandma was often a little bit difficult to live with because of how how strict she lived it and how and her expectations around around religion but a lot of it stemmed from that grief and that indoctrination the belief that in order to be with that baby again and raise that baby in the next life she had to follow a b c and d you know and that's a pretty motivating factor to keep people in to keep people you know following and doing everything that they're told to do you know it just the way that it the church gets into every family relationship you know between my grandma and her baby my my grandma and her marriage you know between my my dad and my mom between my dad and all of us sisters um so it's um i'm losing patience with with how much it's been involved in my family and my family relationships i'm tired so so how did your childhood and teen years progress well um i loved the church through um through childhood through my teen years um teen years were i like i said i married my high school sweetheart so my husband was a part of my life starting i knew him from sixth grade on but we were we were friends until about our sophomore year in high school um and we we were both active his family is is far more more active than mine ever was vanna can yeah attest to that very active very mormon um but his family has their own things too so he and i uh we believed we wanted to you know we we our plan was to get married in the temple and i i think feel like for me i was i was seeking somebody that would would be the things that my dad wasn't um maybe subconsciously and i wanted i wanted a priesthood holder i wanted all the things that i thought were going to make everything better so but we we did not really follow the the typical path either he decided that he did not want to serve an lds mission once we hit kind of that senior the senior year he didn't want to and we were broke up for a seat or senior year for a little while and that's kind of when he really made that decision and he got a lot of backlash from making that decision and most of it came when he decided that he was going to get married at such a young age we got married the october after we graduated high school so super young so let me just ask uh so you guys met you met at what age we were in sixth grade when we met so we were really good friends all the way up until about our sophomore year and then we started dating and did you did he communicate in those let's just say early high school years that he was that super faithful you know kid that would be the non-dad you know that would be the not your dad um i felt confident we we liked to talk about um about spiritual things he was very open to talking about all of those things um i don't know that he communicated that he was going to be the poster boy for sure he was the oldest in his family um so i know that he did feel some pressures there he knew the expectation that was there to go on a mission his dad did serve a mission um and i but his mom raised the kids a lot alone because his dad worked for wwe clyde and was out of town a lot so it was kind of just home on the weekend so his dad wasn't necessarily the strongest example with pushing missions so i don't know that it clearly it didn't really stick he decided that that wasn't going to be for him that he didn't want to go um but he had people say you know we've invested so much in you you know he was eagle scouted like age 13 he was he went to church every single week they were active i i did go to church with them sometimes when um when we were in high school just because my family wasn't super active so um yeah so he i as far as you know promising to be that i i felt confident that he would be better at that than your dad than my dad had been and it's just so it's unfortunate that in these this is one of the biggest tragedies of a mixed faith marriage yeah well it's the kids view the non-believing parent as a disappointment or as a failure or as inadequate and then i'm just thinking about how you're trying to find a boyfriend that won't be your dad and what that's like for your dad and what that's like for your relationship with your dad yeah and just how that can sometimes we talk about how people can be bitter like non-believers can be bitter or angry yeah i just wonder what it would be like not not to say that your dad's was perfect or that you know that there are white hats and black hats but just what does it do to live year after year after year where someone in a family feels like a constant disappointment to everyone including their own children you're like you're focusing on what they're not instead of everything that they are yeah yeah and i have so much guilt now no no no no i'm not trying to rub that no no no no no i that's that's just me like um it was i know that it was really hard for him and i can have compassion for that now i have a lot of compassion for that now i couldn't at the time um i just was so angry so angry at him um for for just so much just like and and i think part of that too is just he he lacked a lot of tact when he would say something so that's a lot that's a lot that's a lot just personality you know he's just blunt and that's okay um yeah so but but also like some people in your position would have tried to find the biggest peter priesthood in this high school to make sure that history wouldn't repeat itself yeah it sounds like you kind of tried but you also just i married a best friend i married my dad in many ways though we do that we do that sometimes right yeah and my husband is is super super driven um it just they're they're a lot alike in many many ways my husband is just has better social skills in some ways better people skills he's less blunt and he's more soft-spoken and that's really what i needed the most so um i accepted the fact that he did not want to go on a mission and i kind of embraced that early on because his reason again was was what he didn't want to he and i think but he believed yeah he was a believer but i feel like um i've always steered the religion bus for us very much so we have annika and attest to that that he is very um but his dad is rather passive too so his example was pretty passive when it came to that um his mom leads and drives the religion bus two in their home i think for the most part so that was normal and familiar to him too i was i was familiar my me driving the driving the religion bus that's just what came to mind so um yeah so he was okay with it and i i was all right with him not going on a mission for multiple reasons um one we i'm gonna just put it out there we we were sexually active before before we we got married and that was a that was a tough thing too um especially when people found out that we weren't getting sealed in the temple right off the bat it was like oh my gosh she's pregnant everybody was like oh she must be pregnant here we go you know um i didn't i mean clearly we didn't feel worthy to go to the temple at that point but it wasn't like that was not a goal for us that was something that we wanted to do that we'd talked about that was definitely the direction i was steering us toward and he was fine with that um but the worthiness issue there was it was really difficult for me too feeling worthy to go to the temple that took that took a long time to get to that point we were married for a couple of years before um before we got to that point we were ready to go to the temple but this is a this is a tough question and um i hope it comes across the way i intend it but so knowing that your parents had so much conflict knowing that at the time your dad was such a disappointment knowing the life and this is not a shaming question it's a question to help others understand mindsets yeah because it's very human and developmentally normal what what you were doing right yeah but tell us what that was like in your brain to not want to have the marriage your parents had to not want to have the husband that your your dad was to your mom and yet to maybe not be fully living the church's standards what was that like for you in your mind at the time like living that conflict yeah um and again what you're doing is perfectly normal for me i think what was driving really indian even on a very subconscious level what was driving my decision-making with getting married so young and following that path which was very similar to my own parents was i wanted out of my parents home the conflict there was very difficult for me and my and my husband getting married that was the only way i saw out because i didn't see it as a um i i didn't i didn't really envision myself as a a college student or i i had this i was going to be a mormon mommy you know that's that's really the the paradigm that i had i never even considered anything else never considered it which and maybe it was just the example that i had if my mom my mom didn't wasn't a college grad you know that i was just following the pattern that it had been set for me so um i don't know that i was thinking about it super i mean i wanted my husband to be maybe i felt like i could shape him some on a subconscious level you know that he was he was kinder more soft-spoken and he would listen and we were very close so i think that maybe that there was a part of me that felt like i could i could shape him and he wasn't opposed to the church in the way that my dad was so there was a future for us seemed like a step up in some ways yeah in the religion ways yes yeah so so yeah um what was your what was your testimony like in high school i'm assuming you went to release time seminary i did in high school what was your developing faith like was it bursar mcconkey like mormonism was it was it you know was doctrine important to you were scriptures important what was your prayer life like all that okay so i think where i didn't grow up in a home that was immersed in doctrine i was getting all of my doctrine from church and occasionally when i decided to from general conference so in a way i wasn't indoctrinated in the same way that families are that have you know your family home evening that are doing the abc indeed i didn't really have that i was dependent on sundays to get my doctrine but as far as my my prayer life and my my i developed a really strong connection with the idea of god just because of the um the dissonance that i experienced all the time i was always trying to turn to some somewhere for comfort and so um i had a a relationship with with god that i and that was kind of something i felt like was getting me through those years um so i didn't identify and this may be how did god help you um how did a belief in god help you i think that prayer um i think it was just comforting it was comforting to feel like there was a source there was something there that could see what was happening in my life and in my home um and but but still kind of was there like just just believing that there was something that was there that could see the pain could they could see each one of us and believe that it knew what was going on with my dad what was going on with me with my mom they could see all the pain but could stay constant and be there and love all of us so i clung to that a lot of prayer prayer did you feel like he answered your prayers uh um sometimes yes yeah i felt like there was a time or two where i had you know those strong spiritual experiences um and i don't know that i necessarily um i don't know how i feel about those now i'm still sorting some of those things out but um but i did feel comforted i did feel comforted by by going that route and i was you know and i was also being promised at church if i did go that route that you know that was kind of reinforcement for the god belief and but being able to separate god from religion for me was really really important later on that i had that kind of an early age i'm just thinking to a kid who's got so much tension in the home and a dad she feels mixed things about to have this all-powerful all-loving unconditionally loving heavenly father yeah it's always there to support you and encourage you and lead you on yeah to listen to you and to help you whenever you need it that's how is that not in many ways a very healing and a an empowering thing yeah yeah it was super empowering and it's really i know a lot of people who have daddy issues have a hard time believing in god you know heavenly father because their own father wasn't those things but it does show that my dad did a good job in a lot of ways like he was a good dad and is a good dad um gosh i hate being so emotional um yeah so i definitely was able to retain a feeling that god was there a lot of good um good feelings as far as believing that god was there but the doctrine um like the church being true in the book of mormon being true those sorts of things i swallowed all of that just what do you mean i mean i i believed it um i didn't really study the scriptures a lot as a kid but like i said i did go through primary i went all the way through church young women's program i did seminary um so i did study the scriptures as much as i had to i don't think that back then we were required to read the scriptures in the way that they require now in seminary so i got through it um and i picked up plenty of doctrine along the way and i and i swallowed it all i i did believe it all though i think that early on i um because of my dad i had a more um ingrained nature of asking why the wh was it felt a lot more normal for me to ask why and a question and that that was okay because my my dad did it so i was able to see both sides of um you know be an inner being out i knew what that looked like for people um because i lived it i was you know i lived it that's that was my life i grew up in that you know seeing what it looks like for people and loving people i think that's the important part is loving my dad and seeing what it was like for him loving my mom seeing what it was like for her it gave me a really i feel like now a very unique perspective just because my family was not a stalwart they were not devout and that perspective is what um i think it served me well later on working for the church because i was able to reach a broader audience you had empathy for all types of people i was able to write for for everyone so how did you handle repentance with your bishop and the law of chastity because you were you guys for those who aren't mormon law of chastity is the law that basically says no sexual relations at all of any sort before marriage yeah you guys you you've been vulnerable and honest enough to admit you guys were sexually active which i don't think is unheard of within within utah county or any type of mormonism or anywhere in the world but yeah but we're taught as mormons if you're a teenager and you sin i'm saying that in air quotes for those listening then you have to go repent to your bishop right so how did you handle that well where we married civilly right out of um right out of high school before even in high school i do remember going to a bishop once um and confessing um my mom drove me to this appointment which was really interesting to think back on too because she's like why why do you need to go you know why why do you need to go and talk to the bishop why you know i said mom i've just done some things that i need to i need to clear up i need to talk about and she is so interesting now looking back you don't need to do this she said that you don't need to do this so you don't need to talk to them she says you don't need to do this he doesn't need to know go grandma he got he doesn't need to know and she says you really really don't need to do this but i was insistent that i i needed to go in i remember sitting in the car with her before i walked inside how old were you i was i had to have been 17 or 18. incredible wow yeah so she was telling me no don't don't do it why'd you do it anyway why did you feel like you needed to do it anyway i'd been told i needed to do it and i felt and i did feel shame i felt ashamed and i understood the repentance process and i believed in it and i had faith in it and i did connect it enough with god that i wanted to be right with god that was really really a motivating factor for me just because i felt close to god i didn't want god to have anything he was upset with me for so yes even if it was hard i was going to do it i did i went in and sat down with that bishop who i barely knew because we weren't super active so that was a little bit difficult were you alone alone yes uh 17 maybe 17 year old woman with a bishop yeah okay 16 or 17 years yeah yeah yes i think it was on a weekday i think i don't think that there was really even anybody else in in the building and i don't remember if my mom waited for me i assumed she did but i was within walking distance of the church so i don't really remember that part but i do remember the conversation before going in um but yeah i mean he he did ask detailed questions he wanted to know you know and i just said you know i just um i i don't remember um i do remember i could naturally remember being uncomfortable with what he asked but he and he did types of detailed questions so you probably won't remember perfectly um he wanted to know specifically what you know what sexual acts you know that we had we had done um and i i told him as much as i felt comfortable and until he kind of was seemed satisfied and i do remember him giving me the miracle of forgiveness that was handed to me and i did take it home and i spent some time reading it um so yeah more shame more shame there did you read that book and and a lot of our a lot of our listeners won't you know we did a we did an episode i did an episode on the miracle forgiveness and and the teachings in it do you want to for those who have never been mormon or haven't read the book do you remember anything i don't remember a lot of details of it i i just perused it it just um i'll just can i jump in yeah please it basically says that having any sexual having extramarital sexual relations is next to murder in severity it also says that you know being gay is caused by masturbating it says that being gay is an abomination is disgusting and revolting like yeah it but but but for a kid in your situation it basically says that you're there's like murder and then like right under that is what you and your you is you murderers and then right under there is linda yeah yeah yeah so clearly i didn't read all the book and i didn't absorb it because i didn't remember all of those details i just thought okay i did my job i went in and i confessed and i did what i was supposed to do and then i got back on my it's me and you god bandwagon you know i did that was i checked that off of my list and as i'm thinking about it now i'm i'm thinking okay the timeline is not right for that interview because that interview was younger that was not i was not confessing things um with my husband on that interview that was actually a little bit younger and i'd done something with a different boy not sex not full on sex but there was some petting that had happened that i had felt guilty about so i'm like that that was that interview because confessing what i did with my husband um came uh at least a year and a half two years into our marriage so you didn't tell the bishop no there was no reason we were getting married civilly we no i mean in that interview told you not to go into i did tell i did tell what i had done everything okay okay i did and yeah did the bishop help you you make it better no no i didn't feel like it was better at all you leave it with you um from what i remember you know he's like you know thank you basically thank you for coming in you've done you know you've you've done the first step going over the the four steps of repentance you know which was i i'm trying to remember if it was you know acknowledge the sin um and never do it again and i didn't do so great with it i'll do it again i was a human being with feelings and emotions and drives so um so yeah so i i feel like i left that with okay i checked it off i checked off i did what i was supposed to do okay so you didn't feel horrible though he didn't make no okay good no i don't remember feeling horrible i i remember feeling very very uncomfortable yeah during that interview but not i don't remember feeling uh additional shame more any more than i already felt did you leave wishing you would listen to your mom or no you said you felt glad you did it yeah i was the i was the driving force for that i was tell me that was i i should have listened to my mom how many times does a kid grow up saying that yeah so um so yeah let's see where do we go from here um yeah that was the only i've only had a couple of confession interviews so but so you by the time you graduate from high school what's life looking like what are your goals what are your you know oh man okay so i grew up with not a super strong self-esteem and kind of being maybe not verbally told but just kind of treated like my capacity was a mother that i didn't necessarily have the intellectual capacity i followed a 4.0 awesome academically inclined sister and so i always grew up kind of feeling a little bit inferior to her and so i was kind of treated you know like pat on the head you're going to be a great mom you know and so i didn't really believe that there was a lot uh out there for me other than motherhood so i remember sitting in high school and having um kind of one of those interviews with the counselor where you're talking about college and your future and and him saying okay so you know what college do you want to go to what are you thinking you want to do and i was like um i think i'm just going to be a beautician and he was like what you know no no no no don't don't just settle for that you you can do you can do more and i was like no no no no and i i was like oh my gosh she's gonna find out that i'm stupid i just no no i'm just i just need to be i just need to be a hair stylist that's what i'm gonna do and so he couldn't he couldn't even talk me out of like this plan this plan i just needed to be a mom that was safe that was what i had capacity for so just i grew up with kind of a low self-esteem and part of that was just following a a a really academically amazing sister and then just um intelligence was really really encouraged and um praised in my home and i was praised for how well i did my hair so that's what i was gonna be so i was gonna be a mom that just looked cute i was going to be your typical mormon mommy all these years later you're on camera and your hair looks fabulous thank you and all paid off and interviewed [Laughter] yeah so um so yeah that was that was my agenda i was going to go to beauty school parents paid for they had us pay for all of it and then to encourage me to finish they said that they would reimburse half of it when i was done so i finished beauty school in a year and went to work so my husband um headed to college he went to uvu and kind of was following in my father's footsteps which was really interesting in construction management um so he went to a couple years of college and kind of felt like hey i'm already doing everything i'm going to college for and he didn't finish but he's still working in that field and being very successful in that field so that's that's where we um that was our plan and as far as um temple marriage yeah i started to push for that you know pretty quickly into our marriage we were married for two years i think tell tell our listeners what it's like in the heart of mormonism i sometimes call i guess utah county isn't the equivalent of saudi arabian mormonism utah next to rexburg idaho i think utah county is known as being one of the most orthodox yeah centers of mormonism what's it like to grow up in one of the most conservative counties in all of orthodox mormonism but to get married not in the temple to get married in a civil ceremony tell us what that's like and what what that communicates to all every all your neighbors everyone around you everyone you grew up with can you talk us through that because i don't think that's something we've really covered and i don't think people understand when we say oh i got married civilly in the heart of mormonism what that what that what that's really about yeah can you fill all that in it's a scarlet letter yeah take us all the way through that okay even if you want to start with doctrine or whatever sure well um everybody everybody knows that if you are not getting getting married in the temple and you're getting married that young your spouse is not your your fiance is not serving an lds mission you have sinned obviously everybody knows you've had sex okay you know that's um and i don't know that we really tried to deny that nobody asked us it's very passive aggressive nobody flat out asked us if we'd had sex but the next question you get to kind of get around and figure that out you know to figure out somebody's getting married in the temple or not which is have you had sex or not are you a sinner or not that's what that question is i had i went to a high school football game right after we graduated so this was a football game that was um you know with the the year younger than us and one of my friends was there that had graduated with our class my class my husband's class and he's like he's like so i heard you're getting married and i'm like yeah and he's like so temple getting married in the temple and i was like it's like no and he just looked at me like right in the eyes he says i am so disappointed in you you know and i'll never forget that that's that was painful you know what was that what did you feel i um just it was just confirmation of the worries you know that you have all those words like what is everybody thinking about me you know what does everybody really think and it was just confirmation that yes everybody is thinking that everybody is thinking you're a sinner that you're not worthy that you're a second-class citizen and that was really hard but i was very much in love and we had a wonderful relationship you know so i people couldn't be happy for me and that was that was really hard um i had another another young man at church because i clearly i have a memory of being at church after i was engaged so i even if we were sitting i still trying to attend church and i don't really remember details about what most of that was like but it like but i do remember an interaction with another young man that was also my age that had graduated with our class and a couple of girls that were close to my age would come up and were like looking at my ring i said oh my gosh i can't believe you're engaged they were you know they were they were being kind probably trying to get information too i don't know but he walked up to me and he looked again looked straight at me and said i bet if you took that ring off your finger he'd go on a mission what does that mean uh that means that it was my fault that my husband was choosing to not serve an lds mission that i was um he was putting all the blame on me that you were a what that i was a sinner that i was i was a temptress that it was it was on me um that was really painful as well that hurt that was another confirmation that i was less than you know which i'd grown up with anyway a little bit from everybody in utah county you know when you're not the active family everybody knows you know everybody you're always being trying to be people are always trying to fellowship you they're always trying to invite you to church which with me they were pretty successful with but not with all of my family but so yeah those are two of the the um the most painful things i had just from peers that you know that's just a just kind of a taste of what it felt like that's all really interesting because i grew up in provo and those are all the things that i wanted to avoid so i feel a lot of parallels to that of i did get married in the temple at 19 because i didn't want people to say those things about me it's very realistic it's a very realistic um reason that you you covenant you go through this temple ceremony you do all these things a lot of this yes so that you can have a relationship with god to make these covenants that you've always been waiting to make and you you assume that you're gonna you know fulfill this potential by getting married in the temple but a lot of it is because you don't want people to talk crap about you let's be realistic it's that's really painful to hear and that's that's something that i wanted to avoid and if you if you didn't care what people thought yeah my life might have been different and if if it's okay i just want to i just want to note a few things i've been i've been studying a lot about undue influence we're about to release an episode on mormon stories about the ways that unhealthy organizations wield undue influence so luna lindsey corbin's book called recovering agency talks about this a lot it's basically techniques that unhealthy organizations high demand religions and or cults use and i want to just call out two things at least about your experience one is how central shame is um to the business model or the theological model of many high demand religions because it it's the actual that so much wraps around if you can get people feeling awful about themselves get them feeling like they're unworthy then they need the church and jesus and god to feel worthy and they've got you chained to them if they can make you feel a ton of shame there's a secondary benefit to that too in that in that um having the temple as something where there's restricted access to unless you're worthy um and then tying the payment of tithing and social reputation yeah social reputation cannot be understated like that's so important tying tithing and social reputation to temple worthiness ensures that people are living not just living the way the church wants but giving money to the church because you can't be temple worthy without paying tithing and so this is all so inextricably linked it's why we always come back to law of chastity within mormonism because it's the way they get everybody in line shame is the way they get everybody in line to feel dependent on the church and then to give the church it's its lives their lives and their money and i don't i don't think it's intentionally nefarious i think this is a system right that got set up really early that everyone in the system is a victim of there's one other thing i just want to note and that's there's this awful irony because there were thousands of mormon couples your age all over the world that were also sexually active prior to marriage but they just lied they just lied they got all the benefits of a temple marriage no scarlet letter so they were they were taught to lie and and they were rewarded for lying yeah so in a weird way the the less valiant the less faithful the less honest get rewarded get elevated and then sometimes and then sometimes the most honest and in some ways the most righteous the ones that said no i i'm not worthy i'm not gonna lie i'm gonna just do the honorable thing and wear the scarlet letter instead of lie it's the it's sometimes the honest people that get punished yeah are you saying religion is sometimes performative john are we breaking new ground here yeah i mean i'm just saying we grow up thinking who's is a mormon we grow up well they're good and they're bad yeah oh these people did the right and these people were bad but it's it's it's often way more complicated than that right and i remember shortly after we're married we had some we had some super close friends who did it the right way um and i didn't know saying that in quotes i would say that the right way i didn't know that they had also been sexually active before they got married i didn't know like and i i was i always had this less than complex around her um and i would i tended to talk about it she was a safe space for me so i would talk about you know that we had had sex before we were married and one day i'll never forget this too because she must have gotten just annoyed with me because she's like oh my gosh we did too you know and i was i was like what you did too and she and i in a way it was harder for her too because they were going to almost they were going to weekly like weekly and monthly bishops interviews confessing and confessing if they couldn't keep their hands off each other you know they were doing the same things that we were doing but they were they weren't willing to get married civilly first they couldn't the pressures were too strong in their family to do it the way that we had done it uh so they suffered for a full year you know with it's just hard to even be around each other like for them it was hard to even be around each other you know because they were so afraid they were gonna mess up and have to confess again so that shame for them having to relive it over and over and over again month after month you know for a year because they would mess up you know so that that that made me feel so much better to know that she had two that i had somebody that i knew that had done what i had done you know but had just kind of chosen a different avenue you know because of the pressures in her family her family was very religious and so she didn't feel like that was she didn't want to get married civilly first three principles that we're outlining here are a culture of of purity purity culture is one tool of undue influence um a second is confession yeah you know scientology uses it brilliantly uh confession is a is a tool of undue influence purity culture confession and then milieu control oh no shame shame and guilt that's a third shaming guilt and then a fourth is milieu control which is where this the social culture is used to control people even beyond what the church itself is is explicitly and overtly controlling and it sounds like all four of those really worked oh yeah yeah and the social i think the social aspect was pretty that was the one of the hardest parts for me um i know that my grandma was probably disappointed in me um but she couldn't say anything either she was married at 17. so i had a lot of high school sweetheart you know stories in my life so that part wasn't a big deal getting married young for me you know and being married civilly first that really wasn't i didn't nobody could back that up and saying you do it the way that i did it because everybody was doing it the way that you know not the right way so so that made it easier for me but yeah a lot of a lot of social pressures leading up to our actual marriage yeah it was difficult so what type of wife and mom does that make you uh once you've been through the the shame parade as we call it ah what kind of a wife and mother did it make me um from a religious standpoint what kind of a mother was isabella we can go there what did you want what what you know because at least i i get the sense that even though you didn't start out your marriage in the perfect way you probably said well now i can create the family that yeah that that the good family i can now create the good family i know is that right yes yes i knew it was going to take some time for people to accept me people that knew me but i could move out of my ward my husband could move out of his ward and we could start fresh where nobody really knew us um and and be the the perfect mormons i don't know that i ever felt like i was going to be a perfect mormon but but yeah we could do things right and we could be accepted in our in our culture in our in our society um and it's interesting though because we didn't end up being super active right off the bat we didn't and maybe that was the shame maybe that was um it took some time to feel like we were ready to go and be in those surroundings maybe worthy yeah maybe you didn't feel worthy i i know i didn't it was hard and i remember when we were starting to think about getting inactive getting active because we were inactive we did try to go to church one week and to introduce yourself at in a more new mormon congregation is always it's a little bit draining i every meeting that you walk into oh who are you tell us your story tell us all about you and so i remember going to a springville ward we moved to springville during that the second year that we were married i don't think that we went at all during our first show well maybe we might have a little bit but we started to try to get a little bit active our second year of marriage and so going to church the first time in this new ward in springville i had a girl turn around to me in relief society and there was a question to me wasn't you know what's your name how are you you know it wasn't any of that it was like what temple did you get married in that was the first question that came out of her mouth and i drew blank i'm like oh crap you know i hadn't been sealed yet i did not know how to answer this girl and i was like oh we were married in spanish fork we were married at you know the shalon reception center in spanish fork and what was that like for you well the look on her face was like the response is what killed me because that was not what she was expecting and it was like oh and she had to turn around to talk to me and she turned right back around and never spoke to me again and so i you remember those moments like okay this is going to be harder than i thought to reintegrate myself into this culture and i just wanted i mean i thought afterward i thought why didn't i say oh spanish work temple you haven't heard of that one you know i've thought many times what i should have said but she wasn't really interested in talking to me or she had gotten too uncomfortable in that moment to you know to know what to say to me you know what else could she say to me she i don't think that she i think it was more she was shocked by my answer and just uncomfortable and didn't know how to oh you're a sinner oh scarlet letter i don't know what she thought but she didn't talk to me again and wasn't comfortable speaking to me and it was it was tough we it was really difficult for us to integrate ourselves into the ward so we did have home teachers i remember them coming to visit us and feeling talked down to what do you mean um where we weren't super active they knew we weren't active it because it was being difficult to integrate ourselves into the culture into the ward when they would come to visit they just walked in with uh there was a holier than thou feeling that came with them you know they're they come into our house sit on our couch and are i felt i felt kind of talked down to like they had all the answers they did everything right we were i just felt less than i felt like i felt that second class citizen feeling a lot um and after they left feeling kind of relieved that it was just my husband and i again so my husband was my safe space we were each other's safe space um so that's a that's a positive that was a positive we had each other um and we weren't we knew we weren't bad people that's good so anyway we were less close with my husband's family during that time closer to mine and that makes a lot of sense just with where we were in the way that we chose to do things um so yeah so a lot of those experiences early in our marriage hard to reintegrate um we finally went we did get sealed eventually um that was in the year 2000 so we got married in 97 and we got sealed in st george in the year 2000 and what was that process like okay so what's the mindset kind of interesting for me because you've already been married so explain to like non-mormons why you need to get married again okay well our our salvation was on the line that's the that's the mormon teaching you have to be married in the temple you have to um yeah you have to you have to be sealed in the temple or or you won't be able to go to the celestial kingdom and live with god and for me living with god that was a big deal like i felt pretty strong about god so if you didn't get married in the temple what would happen and i wouldn't be able to be with my husband forever that was for your kids or my kids which we didn't have kids for four years so which surprised a lot of people yeah where was that pregnancy baby so he got married so funny we ran into an old girlfriend of my husband's um like two after we had her it was after we had her and we're walking through a blockbuster looking for movie that shows how old i am um and she was she came up and was talking to us a little bit and she's like don't you have one that's older than her i was like whoa that shows exactly what you thought you know that we that we'd had to get had to get married because i was pregnant and it's like no she's our oldest you know and we let we let it be at that but um yeah so we had experience like that even way later on you know after we were already integrated come on it haunts you a little bit but um and just going by i'm for we have so many non-mormon listeners now uh that i just have to make this really explicit that if we're talking about um undue influence one of the mormon teachings is that if you don't get married in a mormon temple to your spouse sealed in the mormon temple then you can't go to the highest degree of heaven which is the celestial kingdom where you can become a god someday but also where you get to live with god and you get to live with your spouse forever and you get to live with your kids forever and your parents and all the good mormons they're all in the highest degree of the celestial kingdom and temple marriage is a requirement for all that if you don't get sealed in the temple which is not just unrighteous mormons but all the rest of the world all of you right and all of the people who aren't faithful mormons don't get to live with heavenly father in heaven for eternity don't get to live with their spouses in heaven for eternity don't get to live with their children for eternity it's like you're alone in some other place in heaven which kind of is hell for eternity yeah and and again paying money to the church and obeying the church is all wrapped in with temple worthiness or temple attendance and so there's a lot at stake hold on is that is that why you partly why you wanted to of course that's all that's the whole reason i wanted to go you know it just the forever family i remember as a kid singing you know that i loved that song you know i have you know i have a family here on earth they are so good to me you know um i want to share my i want to share my life with them for all eternity families can be together forever families can be together forever so yeah that i loved that song i worried as a kid when i heard that song and it was always my dad yeah so always worried about losing dad not being with that and then you know so of course i was going to go through with the temple you know i was going to make sure that those those family relationships were sure um yeah there's i was definitely gonna do that i had to do that you know with that belief system i had to do that to have my family with me so um so yeah so 2000 year 2000 the the situation on this is interesting and i wanted to talk really quickly about um a conversation that i had with my dad so by the year 2000 my husband and i had moved down to st george we're living in hurricane for just a little while he was working for um wwe clyde with his family with his dad on on a project down there so he and i were invited just to live down there for about nine months while this project was going on while we were down there i think that i felt safe enough being away from my dad to pursue the temple without too much conflict i think this was also kind of a subconscious thing so we were away from utah county i mean not that st george is a lot different but it was our own space where we could pursue the temple and i wouldn't have to worry about the conflict with my dad so um but one one weekend i was up we were up visiting and my dad had me alone in the kitchen and he he knew that we were doing the temple prep classes down there and he he said i just want you to know you don't have to do this you know you don't have to do this and i again the cognitive dissonance was so hard because i just i said okay dad you know okay i just i felt it it felt confrontational but it wasn't he was coming from a place of love but i couldn't see it why do you think he would have how how could that have been a loving message from his perspective i'm just curious what you think well looking back on it now i know that that he was seeing he just he has had such a broader perspective than i did which was you know just that it you know the temple isn't necessary you know for happiness to have a you know a good life and a good marriage and it's not necessary he was seeing all of those things but i couldn't see it i was so so wrapped up in it that i that was not even on my radar and so when he brought it up it felt like conflict immediately i was back in that space of being a child you know not knowing how to handle my dad and and the feelings of like but i have to do this this is right um so i just kind of was very passive in that moment just said hey dad you know okay i you know i understand but the second that that conversation was over i was in my car beeline it back to st george i was and my husband was still in st george so i was visiting alone that weekend and i cried the whole way back to st george because because the cognitive dissonance was so difficult you know um and and just wanting to have that relationship with my dad wanting my dad to feel happy for me you know that i was getting to the point where i was i was worthy you know that i was taking the steps to be you know to do what i was supposed to do i just couldn't connect with him so it was a combination of just not being able to connect with him the the pain of that and then just all of the religious stuff on top of it was really overwhelming so i got home you know to st george and talk to my husband about it and i um but i'll never forget that too because it was such an emotionally charged thing my mom got home and she talked to my dad she's like what did you do because i was gone i was supposed to stay for another night or two and i was like i couldn't handle it couldn't do it um yeah so um i had asked my dad if he would be there if he would come to the temple which gosh i feel so bad i feel so bad about that now because the hoops that my dad had to jump through to be in that temple with my husband and i in st george when we the day of when we finally decided to do it i know that he was meeting with the bishop constantly you know and and i'm sure he was discussing all of his issues with the church but um giving i'm sure he gave i'm sure he gave that bishop hell honestly because i'm sure that he was playing the card i need to be there for my daughter my daughter has asked me to be there and you're the only thing between me and my daughter right now you know and i think i i i think we need to back up just a tiny bit for non-mormons and just i can hear another mormon saying wait why is dad not attending the wedding of his own daughter yeah explain explain that okay so dad was not being an active he was not doing a b c and d he wasn't towing the line he wasn't being obedient meaning what going to church attending the temple paying his tithing doing all all of the things that are required to attend the lds temple he had to do all of those things to attend the temple for somebody who doesn't believe it to jump through those hoops is is asking way way too much you know and so so he was set yeah just to be clear your parent was set to not be not being able to attend your wedding yes your temple our temple wedding he did get to walk me down through the aisle down the aisle when we did our civil ceremony so and he was very grateful for that experience but in in the temple my dad wouldn't play any role in the experience or even be able to or even be able to and again we have to go back to the scarlet letter right explain what it might be like for a parent okay for my dad excruciating to not be able to excruciatingly why to not be at a wedding of his child to sit outside and be shamed you know to not to not be able to be in there and observe that special ceremony without neighbors and strangers oh and everybody yeah everybody that knows him you know it's a scarlet letter for him to not be there you know so um i know that that was a very difficult thing i know that he he went through multiple bishops interviews um and i'm sure he like i said i'm sure he gave the bishop hell because my dad is pretty blunt and pretty straightforward um somehow i don't know how and i've never talked to my dad about the details of how he was able to do it but he did it he got a temple recommend he probably had to pay tithing i don't know what he had sometimes people have to pay back tithing for all the years yeah they didn't pay tithing sometimes they have to say a lot of personal things to a stranger sometimes they have to either manufacture a genuine belief or deceive about their beliefs yeah and i'm sure my dad wouldn't lie but it's all shame parade stuff it's all shame and get in line yeah and it's it ends up being behavioral control and pay us money underwear control too right what's that underwear control right like wouldn't he have had to like go to the distribution center literally and start he probably did if you don't worry you're mormon underwear you also can't attend the temple yeah yeah so it's not just a b c d it's e f g h i j k l it's a powerful mechanism of all the things all the things and i'm sure that if i really had to hear the details of the hoops my dad had to jump through to be at my wedding on that day my temple ceremony on that day it would break my heart to really hear what he had to do but he did it for me he was there and the saddest thing ever is is that day um being in the temple with my dad he's such a sorry that he couldn't he couldn't be reverent he was not he he didn't love being there he was more interested in um in checking out the historicity of the temple like he was he was kind of trying to sneak off into hidden rooms he was snooping you know he came in he was he made it through into the celestial room and all of that uh he was you know i think it was oh he was the endowment day so we didn't down one day and then we did the temple ceremony the next day but on the day of the endowment when he was there for that as well and he kept trying to kind of sneak off and check out the same dad that is so weird like that's literally word for word exactly what my dad did yeah it was very interesting kind of a joke about it in the building because it's one of the oldest mormon mormon temples is saint george so he was pretty interested in in the building and i remember being kind of upset with him that he was not focused come on dad focus i wonder if he was a tiny bit resentful oh what he had to do to get there absolutely i'm sure there's no doubt that he was resentful um and my grandma who was also there the really religious grandma she was there too so the other memory of that temple ceremony day was her once we're all in the celestial room her throwing her arms open now we can all be together forever because my dad was there too and that was huge for her i mean this is his mom this is actually my maternal grandmother mom's mom yes but there was a lot of conflict between my dad and my grandma because they're polar opposites on the religious spectrum so for my dad to be there um my grandma was having this emotional response in the temple in in the celestial room and spiked the spiritual and i remember being a little bit embarrassed by how she was how she was acting i was like oh grandma i don't think he's quite there you know in that space but he's here let's just you know anyway so what was the actual endowment ceremony like for you it was awesome or was it problematic in any way a lot of our interviewees had a difficult time going through the mormon temple themselves prior to the wedding because for for non-mormon listeners there's an endowment ceremony that you go through before you get married in the temple um where you where you are given the garments to wear this underwear that you're supposed to wear as a mormon but also you make all these covenants to the church to give your time your life your money everything to the church for the for eternity yeah and then and then there's a movie you watch and it you know um what was was that at all and it's all borrowed from the masonic lodge so if you go back in time joseph smith was a mason for a short period of time and he basically just ripped off a bunch of rituals from the masonic ceremony with genesis yeah and created um a mormon temple ceremony so what was it like for you that endowment okay yeah that was great i didn't have a lot of problems with it there were i mean thinking back there were a couple of things that that were notable in my head i knew that i was driving the religion bus in our relationship and so when they said that i would answer to my husband as my husband answers to god i was like dude how's your relationship with god because me and god are pretty tight are you sure you know like i mean not that my husband didn't the woman covenanted to hearken to her husband while her husband covened yeah to hearken to god yeah so this is something that they just recently changed because of internet activism frankly yeah but for for almost two centuries the man covenanted with god and the woman covenanted with her husband yeah with a veil over her face is that all right yeah i did notice that i did notice that because i thought that that was strange i knew that i would i just by nature had i was more spiritually inclined and that i prayed a lot more and that i was i mean because we'd been married for two years at that point i knew i prayed more than my husband at least like visually i mean you could see me kneel down and pray i knew i mean i not that he didn't pray i mean i feel like my husband had a good handle on you know his spirituality too but um i i i'm gonna be a little bit arrogant and say that i felt like i was i was more spiritual than my husband was so i thought that that felt strange that felt odd that i was going to answer to my husband as he answers to god because i'm like i have my own relationship with god that just felt weird so that was the only part that i and the handshakes were all strange like that was all really weird and i thought for me i was very much like i wonder what it means i just need to keep coming so i understand what all these handshakes mean because they have to have this meaning where can i learn more about the meaning it was kind of unexpected but i just i was really into symbolism and spirituality so i was like okay there's got to be something that's got to mean something so for me i was like okay i guess i just have to come more but i wasn't super weirded out by it oh other other notable thing was um you know raising my hands to the air the true order of prayer the whole that was a little bit of a red flag too because that it felt cult-like i did have a moment where like that feels really weird that feels weird so so yeah those those two things were were strange and i do remember my first experience being like i'm not sure how i feel about that but you it sounds like you were kind of already assuming that the the church is true obviously so there's something wrong and something that you're going to have to learn you're just going to have to keep going over and over again until you had to be me when whenever there's a problem it's you that's the problem and i was used to that like just my nature and my upbringing i was used to that that that was a very easy narrative in my brain to follow just that it had to be me so i embraced that i was like okay i guess i just need to go more i already felt i i was less than i had things to learn so makes you more committed yeah oh yeah so yeah it was that was my temple experience and my husband he didn't we didn't ever talk a lot about it he didn't like going he definitely didn't like going there were a few times that i went by myself but even still i probably been to the temple maybe 10 20 times in my whole life i haven't been a lot um but more than he has he didn't really like he didn't like being there and he the first time he saw the temple close he saw somebody walking by in the temple closed before we'd ever had gone through the endowment and he thought you know it looked like a chef's house he's like i wonder they have a kitchen somewhere that was his i was like anyway that was his impression of the clothing at first like there's a chef that's walking around here oh wait i'm going to be wearing that in about 10 minutes yeah they definitely do not prep you for that wait these are the clothes i'm gonna be wearing too anyway did he get endowed the same day as you you went through together yes okay that's kind of rare most couples never get that chance yeah we experienced that together so normally the boy goes through if he's been on an lds mission he would have gone through before me but it was new for both of us so so yeah we did it all together so that was cool i hope you had an interesting car ride home right or not or you just don't talk we didn't talk about that about the temple right we didn't talk about it we went back we did go back in st george i think one time um and the ones we were asked to be the witness couple which is um for those yeah i guess yeah i don't know we just looked like we needed to be the witness couple to whoever was asking that day um but that is for those who don't know for those who aren't mormon there is an altar at the at the front of the room of the endowment room and a couple is asked to kind of show everybody um what's supposed to be done so play the role play the role of adam and eve right and b at the altar and we've been asked more than once that was another time we were asked to do it i think it was my cousin's wedding and manti so yeah we've done it more than once and so did you like it did you have a panic attack no i was good i felt like i was arriving the scarlet letter was fading i was becoming more right more righteous i don't know so yeah i it was it was a good feeling it was validating for me it's like they're feeling my spirituality now it's been there all along i'm finally being recognized so your countenance glows when you get to the right come to the front to be the couple at the altar you know you were shamed into feeling unworthy for a couple decades yeah and then if you get it if you start obeying and following wow magically you start feeling worthy and you start feeling better right once you start obeying what they want you to do right which which i definitely say i would i experienced i definitely started it was good it did feel like male felt much better it's way better not to be shunned in your society and your culture yeah i felt a lot better so so yeah that was good it was good so my temple experience i can't ever say that it was horrible you know some of it was validating you know being a witness couple but my husband really never liked to go and for me i always he did express that a little bit you know want to be like you know you want to go with me trying to drive that religion bus and he's like yeah you know i don't really want to go and so i always tried to be respectful of that but then again i would you know i start putting the pressure on him you know to perform a b c and d you got to start doing these things dude because it's your job now you know so i'm doing what i've been taught to do and trying to pressure my husband to start you know being what he's supposed to be so we can fit into the culture we can fit into the society we can everybody can be proud of us you know i wanted that i wanted everybody to be proud of us so i was the driving force and i i did i did start putting pressure on him why are you getting him why are you feeling emotions um just because i wish i wouldn't have you know i think it's a respect thing you know he was feeling those things he wasn't comfortable there he wasn't comfortable at the temple and he he wasn't necessarily super great at voicing that you know but i had i had this you know my agenda was now the same agenda as the church the fact that i adopted that and i kind of pushed that and maybe potentially made him feel bad makes me feel bad now you know in hindsight um yeah just not be not not as respectful as i should have been to his feelings and it starts to repeat the role yes your parents oh marriage right yeah i don't want to fill that in i don't want to project that yeah yeah in a way um but then my husband was like never antagonistic he didn't he wasn't he's not super interested in in the reading and the intellectual side of things like my dad is so my dad was pushy like when he was gonna say something he was gonna say something it was gonna be in your face so my husband was not like that so i always felt peaceful being married to my husband i never felt like he was pushing anything on me if anything it was the reverse because i became my dad in our relationship yeah that i would i kind of just in my demeanor my nature that i was i became pushy with my husband not not overly so not as much as many of the stories that i've heard but enough that i i do feel a little bit bad about it now so so how did that change your family um going to the temple how did it change your church experience like take us forward i guess okay so the wedding is there anything you want to say about the actual wedding no okay not really not both parents were there yep my mom and dad were there his parents were there um both my husband's religious grandma my religious grandma were there a couple aunts and uncles it was pretty small religious grandpas uh one i think let's see who is excluded who is excluded um it was very quiet if anybody would have been excluded it would probably you know would have been my dad but we kept the invitation list pretty small just because it was it was two years after we had been married so everybody that we really cared about had seen us married so we just invited those we felt like it would really matter to you know and people that really mattered to us a lot you know just having my both my parents there mattered to me so so i asked them but yeah i don't feel like anybody i hope that i'm not missing anybody i hope nobody felt excluded on that day so thankfully we didn't have a whole lot of that but i don't know i do have guilt looking back and pushing putting the pressure on my dad to be there so so yeah but moving on um yeah we like i said we're married for four years before we had kids and we were in and out of being active throughout throughout that time and we lived in multiple different places in utah county and down in st george just for the nine months but um four years in we had savannah that's where i come in [Laughter] um and so she was born in the covenant which you know which means when you've been married in the temple um that your children are born in in the covenant they're automatically sealed to you which means what we get to be we would get to be a family forever yes if we keep the covenants that we made in the temple so i was good up until i was eight you know yeah so um how did your family change like our like my husband and i and our children or like just everything did going to the temple change your family um well i know that on his side of the family that they were very they were i mean your relationship in with your kids you know your trajectory um yeah yeah it did we we were just on the path to mormondom i mean we were we were on the right path the right path you know after going through the temple you know which means you started doing what behaviors uh we we got better at going to church because like i said we had a hard time integrating but once savannah was born we were all in yeah i don't remember like a time in my childhood up until my late teens that we weren't going to church we went like even every move that we had we started in new wards i remember different primaries like i have like really really early memories in a church building so so she actually got a more mormon um upbringing than i did i insured that what does all-in mean we went to church every sunday we went to youth activities we went to activity days when we were young um what about family prayer scripture study we didn't do so much scripture study we did a lot of family prayer and we were like my husband's family so yeah at the end of night before we all went to our own rooms to go to bed we would say prayers um we would try to do family home evening it was never a super consistent thing it was usually when like we'd have a lesson in church that was just like oh you guys should be doing family home evening we'd do it for two weeks and then we kind of faltered off so that was never really consistent mark especially because we all had pretty busy schedules but but definitely weekly church attendance yes coffee absolutely not no well okay tea yes i did do some tea just because i had only herbal though yeah i had some i had some stomach issues and peppermint tea seems okay seemed to help so i but i remember i asked my bishop about it to make sure that it was okay and he's like this was when we lived in colorado he's like honestly he's like i really don't know that much about tea um he's like do you feel good about it and i was like yes i feel fine about it it's helping my stomach and so he's like it's fine then you feel worthy to go to the temple i said yes so that was yeah so occasionally a little bit of tea no alcohol no tobacco no drugs no okay this is a bishop's interview [Laughter] [Laughter] yeah so yeah we raising the kids in the church they were all chris blessed all of them he baptized all of them and i was you know making sure that we were we were in yes well okay so early on when they were really little not so much so there was a um up until the point when we moved to colorado which is kind of a transition point in our marriage and in our family um we we weren't great at paying tithing before that but after we moved let me back up just a teeny bit my husband worked with my dad in construction and with my older sister in construction who also graduated from byu and construction management my sister and my dad and then my husband were all they're all partners in my dad's company that he'd run for a really long time so we were we're very enmeshed as a family and i was not super comfortable with that like i had a really hard time with that um just because i have a lot of daddy issues and and with this particular older sister too i just had a lot of issues and so i needed a break i needed to break from that and so i was pushing for him my husband to stop working with my dad and my sister and we needed to make a break and go go somewhere else and so secretly we were kind of talking about it um i also kind of got had gotten the point where i wanted to go to college so i applied at csu in colorado colorado state university yeah um and uh i got accepted so that was one of the reasons it's like okay let's go you know there's a reason there's the reason we need to let's go like but i had three little kids i don't know what i was thinking so i mean people do it all the time but anyway was the mormon mommy wanting to get educated um it was it was that's off script that's off plan yeah i mean once you've had the kids right yeah it was um okay i i dove into the narrative the mormon mommy narrative had my three little kids by the time we were going to move to colorado i had three little kids i had how old were you when we moved to colorado i was eight i just she'd just been baptized and by this time um the kids were starting to get a little bit older whereas like i was realizing i don't know who the heck i am i have no identity you know i had never like getting married at 18 i had no idea who i was and um i kind of started to dream a little bit i'm like maybe i'm not as dumb as i thought it was maybe i could do more than being a hairstylist no no not just sitting on hair stylist it's a great occupation and it served me well but i wanted more i wanted i wanted a little bit more and so i think just getting accepted to college was actually a huge step for me a huge step with my self-esteem it's a little bit off script though i'm not i mean i don't want to yeah misjudge mormon yeah the mormon way but yeah so for me you know with that at the time that that kind of wasn't what was always done um that going to the going to college with three little kids yeah yeah yeah i knew that that was that was probably a little too ambitious but i bet there was a part of me that really wanted it so i think just even applying and doing um just filling all out all the paperwork and writing an essay and all of those kinds of things that you have to do to get in college was like really cool for me and it was validating for me to get accepted into college that's not a big deal for a lot of people but for me that was a big deal um so we're like okay let's go let's let's up and move my dad was really upset with that decision but it was healthy it was really healthy for us to break away from my family and from utah county and moving outside the bubble it was really great um our family like our our church family in colorado became our family while we were there those were our closest friends it's almost like no matter where you move with the lds church you have kind of a built-in family system if you're going to be active if you're going to stay on the path you have a built-in family so immediately that's one of the first things we did when we moved to colorado was we sought out the closest ward the bishop and and got ourselves integrated there and made some really wonderful friends um while we were there i did not end up attending college because i realized that that was a little too ambitious and we were really poor this was when 2008 economy this is when the economy tanked and it was a good time to break away from my dad's company and do something different we sold off everything we had our house our van we had one vehicle and we took the kids and we moved to colorado my dad thought we were nuts he's like what are you doing you know and my husband went and worked at home depot for a little while and which was a huge step down he'd been building parade homes with my dad here um it was so financially it was it was really tough that was a really tough time i ended up going to to i did go to work while we were there as a beautician because i could make good money in colorado as a beautician so as soon as all the kids were in school i i went to work at a high-end salon there and that was that was great that was a good experience so and i it increased my self-esteem my self-worth as a woman to be providing in a way you know to be able to make make the good money there were days that you know i was doing maybe three or four hundred dollars a day just doing hair so it was good it was good so i i just want to just note some of these subtleties along the way that the mormon church has taught forever that a woman's place is in the home that women don't need an education beyond you know whatever they get before they get married but that their primary role is to be a mommy and a housewife um the woman shouldn't work outside the home which you were kind of technically sinning but but also just trying to survive yeah right yes but then also in mormonism there's this general you know there's a love-hate relationship with education because if you're going to become an accountant or a lawyer or a doctor or an engineer and you're a man then yes get educated because then you'll become a successful wealthy sort of provider to your family and the church right but then any kind of liberal arts education or any education for women is at best unnecessary yeah but at worst dangerous because uh because faith is what matters right you know the learned become prideful yeah the learned find out start asking questions yes and and um and so there's this love hate relationship with education in the church but especially with with women because it can lead to a po it can lead to faithlessness it could lead to what the church would call pride right and apostasy yeah what maybe the rest of the world would call enlightenment exactly but you were empowering yourself yes which is dangerous to faith yeah i don't know if you felt that at the time um to me it just felt good i i did okay i had moments okay so when my youngest was finally old enough to go to preschool in kindergarten i was like oh you're going you know you're going because mama needs this kind of a thing i was having i was having a hard time i i don't know that really looking back on it now that i was as wired for mormon mommyhood as i thought that i was just because there was this part of me that was always trying to speak up like i wanted to learn i wanted to learn i wanted to i wanted to experience more than just being a stay-at-home mom and i don't i don't disparage that i think it's a wonderful beautiful thing some people are better at it than others i was okay i was okay um my mom was incredible was an incredible stay-at-home mom still is like us kids we are her everything and she's awesome and i i remember feeling guilt any time i had a thought that that might not be enough for me you know but i but those things were absolutely creeping up once i got out of the stage with my kids when they were all consuming you know when they could all go to school i remember i was like oh breathing a sigh of relief and being like okay i can learn something i can figure out who the heck i am i can i can breathe you know it was it was really tough so baby steps toward that for sure um that just felt amazing it was empowering for me to earn some money to contribute contributing was huge for me i loved it absolutely loved it still love it still you know just to be able to contribute is huge to our our home in that way financially is an awesome thing i encourage any woman out there to do it figure out ways to do it because it's so healthy i became a healthier individual once i was working and better healthier for my family too and even though it was just it was just going you know to work in a salon my youngest i'm like okay yeah you're doing all day kindergarten because they offered that in colorado as soon as she was doing that i was working quite a bit um in the salon and it was it was good not not my not my perfect environment but um but to earn that money was great that's great i feel any guilt for not yes following the church's path what why what would have made you feel guilt um just that narrative that my place was in the home you know that i might be um you know no success can compensate for failure in the home that was ingrained i did have that i did worry about that i did worry about you know failing my kids in some way not being what they needed me to be i had never heard a narrative that just being an example of a working mom for your children would be a good thing you know i'd never heard of that before and the first time i i saw examples of that it was very emotional for me because um to see that your kids can watch you um just that it's your example you know that teaches them yes you can also be there for your kids and be a working parent you can provide the things that they need and still have a good loving relationship with your kids and and and not be the reason that you know that they're gonna fail you know so super super awesome time for me in colorado a lot of growth for me and for my husband there he he got his contractor's license there started his own company while we lived there so he he grew wings as well in a way there so um we gained some independence we grew super tight-knit as our own little family unit it was a beautiful three years very healthy in many ways for us though we were like so in the church which is the halloween what's this like for you in colorado savannah i loved colorado in a lot of ways i still really consider it a home away from home because i didn't i didn't feel that conformity that i was expected to fill um so when i was there i went i was the third grade through fifth grade there and i had to talk about what it was like before colorado for you yeah that'd probably be good sorry back up and just talk about that um so yeah i was born in provo i was you know came out hurt um yeah we were very consistent in the church i um i was a very big personality i talked very early i was reading books very early um i drove her nuts just because i was a sponge i wanted all this information um i kind of loved it i kind of loved it i loved it i mean you ready like she read to me so much when i was younger um but i i didn't really love church i maybe it was four and i was in the kitchen telling mom i don't want to go to church i don't want to put on a dress i don't want to wear tights like i want to just stay in my shorts and play and do what i want on sunday um but you know we went we definitely had some battles um but we went and i i guess i was kind of in different i mean i was like i was baptized at eight and then we moved to colorado so like i mean early on it was just a part of life i didn't really give it a ton of thought i mean there were some things like i did grow up hearing the conversations with my mom and my grandpa and so there were there were little things conversations the types of like stuff about joseph smith some things that were questionable um i think i like just absorb some of that and which kind of put it on my shelf you know as you do but um i do remember when we lived in utah before i moved to colorado um asking a primary teacher i was really young like asking a primary teacher didn't joseph smith have another wife like when they were teaching us about emma and joseph smith and the teacher like got super uncomfortable and i was like okay and she's and she tells me she's like yeah he took on one other wife toward the end of his life which is very much not true but um i was like okay that's weird but um the fact that i was asking those questions super young i was probably just absorbing a lot of the conversations my mom was having with my grandparents and so i was just trying to connect those dots and so so a lot of that stuff was uh kind of implanted and up but it was just kind of there um so yeah then we moved to colorado we had a lot of mormon friends but in addition to that i was one of three mormons in my elementary school so like um what city were you guys in we're in fort collins yeah yeah it's like a little bit north of down i lived there when that temple got announced yeah so um but i also had friends who were catholic i had friends who and most of my friends didn't go to church at all it wasn't really a big thing for them and i remember being in our art class and we all talked about we did on sundays and i remember my catholic friend teaching me about communion and i was like oh that's kind of like our sacrament thing you know it's different but it's kind of similar so i was exposed to that variety of religious views pretty early on and um so that was great i didn't feel pressures of the community as much i felt more free to be myself and then it was the biggest culture shock moving from colorado to utah like the heart of utah county springville and going into sixth grade it was weird because all of a sudden everyone was mormon and all of the standards that i kept as a mormon in colorado seemed to be applied to everyone regardless of if you were a mormon or not they were just universal community standards rather than they were just for us what town again uh springville springville so that's also still utah county yes so it's those who don't know what's going on 15 minutes south of provo yeah really close so it was all of a sudden that was universal there were churches on every corner my elementary school was right next to a state center and like even still like they're all over the place and so that was a huge culture shock and um i was i remember writing in like my sixth grade journal like everybody looks at me weird like um because i was still a big personality and a lot of people were super quiet and super clicky so it was just very hard to integrate into those groups because your church friends were your school friends and if you weren't part of that already that you didn't grow up there with them it was a lot harder to integrate than when i moved from utah to colorado and everybody was a lot more unified in colorado just because we were kids rather than religion wasn't a huge difference it wasn't a huge factor so that was a huge difference so you were there it was clicky and did you struggle to find a group yeah it was very difficult because i mean until i started like so the standards i said are a lot higher you know and mormon standards in the way of like the lifestyle is pretty much universal and then if you're not mormon you're very ostracized you're not included um unless they're trying to fellowship you often they don't know how yeah they just don't know how because it's like you're not the same when everybody's very um very similar in belief um so yeah it was it was really difficult to um you know get myself into friend groups until i started acting super mormon until i embodied that because like i mean i was a very like oh very much an overachiever so as soon as i realized i'm like okay i have to be the best mormon i can in order to make friends in order to adapt and so i went all in like really she did well we were pleased i mean yeah so um we moved back to utah when i like right after colorado when i was maybe 11 or 12. i was just going into sixth grade and um yeah i did i like started doing everything you know we and there were a lot more activities during the weekdays than there were in colorado and i was in young women's now so it's like we had church we had like young women's like activities once a week and um yeah and so i just i was praying i was reading my scriptures i was like going to um activities i was planning activities i got my patriarchal blessing when i was 12 years old what does that mean what's a magical blessing and when is it normally given so patriarchal blessing is like i mean it's kind of a fortune telling but like it's a very personal unique blessing given to you by a ward patriarch super so it's like a basically a blessing given to you from god that is written down and you get to keep and it's kind of a guidance for your life um and so i was like okay i'm living all these standards i'm doing really good mormon stuff you know i'm gonna i think i can do it i think i'm old enough i'm ready to get my blessing so just the baseline i was a super devout orthodox mormon i think i got mine at 16 yeah and i think that's kind of more normal yeah 14 to 16 i feel like is pretty normal but i was you wanted to be uber mormon yeah so i was 12. i was 12. yeah i was the youngest the patriarch had ever given a blessing to we encouraged her to wait we wanted her to wait but she was pretty insistent no mom i feel like i feel like i felt i felt ready and i'm just like i think i'll pursue it i'm ready so and then i mean they asked me to fast and so i fasted and then a couple sundays later we went after church to the patriarchs house and gave me like put his hands on my head you know and gave me this like really big like talk before and after and then gave me my blessing and it was pretty long it tells you what tribe you are from the 12 tribes of israel and um i was in ephraim so which is the big like missionary um one so that's like your job that's the job if you're in the tribe of the term is the missionary work i swear half my blessing was about going on a mission and um it told me i was going to have a lot of kids which was uh not in the cards for me i was i mean when i was little i was telling i was asking her to like hey mom will you watch my kids while i go to work i was like really young like am i kidding i don't even remember those conversations you know and i was i was i was so little i was like too young to be thinking about that but she was gonna go on a mission be a missionary yeah be a mission lots of kids lots of kids uh yeah and it's like basically she was already trying to ponder kids off on me exactly i'm just like yeah my hypothetical kids i'm thinking about as like a four-year-old you know like because that's something that's so expected of you and like they indoctrinate that into you very young that you you should be a mom and have kids as your number one priority they should be your biggest goals so i mean i felt like that was a pretty spiritual experience getting my patriarchal blessing but also i now i look back on that and i think it's i was so special to me because it was somebody saying confirming oh you are going to be great you are going to do something important and it's like that was very validating for me because that's always feelings i'd had in myself and that was like i'm reading like tons of books and her like encouraging like me and it was all like something that was confirming for me that was like i'm gonna be something great um i just have to say there are a couple more techniques that are i identify there one is kind of this idea of mystical power so you talk about it being fortune telling a patriarchal blessing just like kind of priesthood blessings for healing it's one of these moments where the church is telling you you're about to engage in the supernatural this this guy who's super righteous and faithful this older man now gets to talk to god and see the future for you for you and tell you what your future is going to be that's you know if i could tell you your future that would make me a very powerful special person and that's what every mormon teen is is experiencing is the impression that this man is now going to predict the future on your behalf so that's one thing it's imbuing in you the sense that the church men with the priesthood have special powers like superman like yeah definitely but then but then secondly it's just something you notice about these patriarchal blessings they never say you'll be single you'll be a great working mom you will you know you will go on and be a ceo of a major fortune 500 corporation you will have no kids but you will go to africa and serve you know help bring water to popular you know starving populations everything is always what the church wants you to do so of telling you your future it's it's um it's pretty easy to tell the future when everybody's future's like supposed to be the same but it's a form of control because it's it's it's posed as predict or foretelling the future but what it's really doing is it's a self-fulfilling prophecy it's telling you be a mom have lots of kids be a missionary for the church it's all i i'm not saying it's intentionally this way because i think the patriarchs believe that they're channeling the future and of course it's all based on your worthiness so if none of this comes to pass there's the blame reversal where it's going to all be put back on you as well you didn't live up to your righteousness but it but it is unfortunately it's a very controlling technique that basically tells you here's your place here's your role you're going to be a mommy with lots of kids which incidentally is what your mom was before you and her mom was before her and it's exactly the role the church wants you to fill yeah and it's like i remember being like is that fair i don't know i think i think no i totally think that's fair um yeah i just remember be kind of disappointed i'm just like is there anything kind of cooler i didn't want to like diss on the role of like motherhood because i had always been taught that was the most important thing like that you could do as a woman and i was like okay that's cool but i want to do other things too and so for quite a while during that super mormon period of my life i was like okay so i guess i'll have that later and that'll be something i'm kind of feeling like i have to do i guess i'm just gonna dive in to try and be like the best future missionary that i could be but i think the reason i played into that is because i really wanted to escape i really wanted to travel i had all these dreams and i'm like okay that's the closest thing within mormonism that fits close enough you know that could get me out and having life experiences and being kind of who i want to be you know it's close i'm going to get so i dove into doctrine i start i read a ton and i actually got my young women young woman recognition medallion which is kind of like kind of like an eagle scout but for young women it's a lot less work um but yeah you go through it's not fun it's not fun to get it but you do a bunch of like service things and read a bunch of scriptures and basically check off all these requirements and um it's like a female eagle scout yeah pretty much and so once you do all that you get your young womanhood medallion and certificate and it's like the highest award you can get as a young woman and i did that like days before i finished it days before i turned 13 as i wanted to make sure that like i could do it a before i was third before i turned 14 and b so i could be recognized like on the stand in um church on sunday as like one of the youngest people in the ward who had done that why were you wanting to hyper achieve even in a mormon context i mean i was always an overachiever i really wanted to i was very all in and especially like trying to like fit in i just wanted to show everybody that i could be this perfect mormon you know um and i was very ambitious so like that seemed like the easiest way to do so is to just achieve as much as i could you know but it actually burned me out faster we'll get there yeah for sure do you feel like i'm watching you were you gonna say something i was just gonna ask it sounds like you had a lot of this performative nature then so did your peers and did the people at school in church did you feel like they looked up to you and you had to like continue along this line um i think i was also over comprehensive overcompensating for the fact that i was i personality wise did not fit the mold of what mormon like girls were supposed to be i was very loud i was argumentative i had no problem telling people when they were wrong which kind of sucks because like um i look back and i was a lot of things i did were very judgmental like i was i was that mormon girl who's going to judge you if you weren't doing everything perfectly because i want to i was making sure i was doing everything perfectly so um yeah it was very performative in nature and it was definitely overcompensating for a bunch of other things the deficits i had because i wasn't the perfect mormon girl just by nature i didn't i did not fit into that mormon female role easily at all so that was the closest thing i could get but i did get super frustrated when um all the young men got to do way cooler things they got to go and like do all these like uh high adventure things they got to do scouting stradad which we did as a family we like sat in the church and made bookmarks like the young women and yeah the boys were out doing high adventure yeah and they always want to do like just domestic homemaking things and i got really frustrated because my my dad is the type of person that's like let's go do stuff and he would always take us canyoneering and hiking and i went hunting with him as like a kid and so it's just like to the fact that he was taking me to do these things but i had to do it separately as our family rather than as part of my role in the church i i was so i was like so jealous that he got to take the young men to hike king's peak and do these overnight camping trips and to get pretty bent out of shape yeah i was so mad and then i mean at 11 i was like hey dad can i do an eagle scout thing because i'd finished my young women recognition i'm like what's next for me but um yeah i was just kind of shot down just because it was like only boys can do the eagle scout stuff you know well i mean he was willing to walk through and do those but i couldn't get anything to be official you couldn't get the awards you couldn't get the same i didn't end up doing it but that was something i would have done had it been like for me you got your titan chip i did get my tone chip because i wanted to get a knife it's a boy scout thing to use a pocket knife safely and what night my husband made each of them do the scouting requirements before they could have a pocket yeah it's called what the tote and chip and chip yeah okay so it's like yeah basically a safety thing you do before you can get a knife when you're a boy scout and so once he made all of us girls do it he didn't he wanted to i wanted to but like before because we wanted a pocket knife because that was cool and um so he made us do that boy scout thing beforehand which was cool so he had no sons he was very much he did all the the things you might do with sons with our girls yeah so so it was very good that way okay i have two super quick questions for you linda yeah as you reflect on savannah so there's two themes i want you to address one is i'm already seeing her as a 12 and 13 year old girl hyper achieve in ways that you didn't yes and i'm wondering as a parent as you had all this shame and inadequacy what it's like to see your oldest daughter yeah maybe i'm the one i project but like living out the dream that you didn't live out and her becoming what you didn't become as a girl that's the first thing okay and then the second one is were you and and treat each one separately if you don't mind okay the second one is what was it like did you notice that her personality maybe wasn't a perfect fit with the mold and were you sensing any of that discrepancy and how are you processing that but let's start with how did it feel as a mom to see your daughter living the the going down the path that you didn't quite follow yeah did you feel great you know i i tried to teach her from the time she was young i was very encouraging um just because i feel like my my natural gifts as a kid were not like they weren't spotted they weren't really noticed by my parents and so that was that was a hard thing for me so i was like super alert to what my kids natural gifts were so i was always super encouraging okay you're curious about egypt let's go to the library and get books about egypt let's go i mean a really young age she was just fascinated with cultures and she didn't really necessarily want to read all the fiction stuff we did read fiction together but she was like i want to learn about people i want to learn about cultures i want to learn about and so i like fed her everything i could find on those likes before asking the librarian for books on english we visited libraries we like i knowledge and education was always really really important i was a big reader as a kid thank heaven i was a big reader that was my saving grace so that was the one one thing i really made sure to instill in the kids and savannah ate it up gobbled it up from the time she could communicate with me i mean from six months she was pointing you know asking me what everything was called she was and she could speak really early so i loved it i loved seeing her want to learn and i really encouraged that i i knew how valuable that would be for her and the fact that she loved i just really encouraged it thrilled i was thrilled with that that she was wanting to learn and was so ambitious with learning so yeah i tried very hard to encourage her i would say that yeah i was encouraging like that yeah we read a lot together yeah i didn't i wasn't real good at playing with my kids i i just wasn't wired that way and i felt i did feel guilty for that sometimes i wasn't a good mom that way but the way that i could be a good mom was to read with my kids to provide you know opportunities like that to learn so i was i would loved it i loved it that she was very ambitious and that she was the righteousness part you know i was i i liked seeing that at the state that the stage that we were in i was like great you know she's on the path she's doing the things she's supposed to do i was proud of her when she wanted to get her blessing that early and i was willing to help her and encourage her to if she wanted to do it we did it you know i ended up getting a huge fight with my dad over that patriarchal blessing yeah we're getting to that when she got that that was a yeah that was um probably the first thing what happened um so um so when they when you get your patriarchal blessing they have tape recorders and they record it and they transcribe that and write it down for you and an official like document um and you get that later we didn't talk to my dad about it when she got her patreon no your dad didn't go well her dad did yeah so when we kept it from him we didn't want him yeah we didn't really tell him but he also knew the patriarch because of like building stuff right through the airport actually through the airport okay so yeah my grandpa knew the patriarch that i'd gotten my blessing from but we didn't really talk to him about it we kept it underwraps because at this point um my grandparents my mom's parents were ver were ex-mormons we don't talk about that we don't spend a lot of time with them my parents yes so when she was baptized at eight my parents had just had their names removed from the records of the church both what year was that it would have been what year were you baptized what you're 2010 11 years ago yeah 2010 2011. um okay so your parents so maybe we need to back up my timeline 2010 so mormon story starts in 2005. so between 2005 and 2010 that's when the mormon internet starts to really emerge blogs yes podcasts mormon think this is pre-ces letter this is pre-gospel topics essays but that that 2005. so he um he had a lot of books on his shelf like uh no man knows my history by fon brodie and like that's a book i actually have on my bookshelf nell from them which is um but yeah at this point they were the ex-mormons we didn't talk to them we didn't um we still talked to them so my my mom spilled the beans as we were getting ready to move to colorado she because i was inviting her to the baptism savannah's baptism and so i was on the phone with her and then she started crying and she said i just want to let you know you know that we've had our names removed we'll we will come we will come you know but she also said i want you to know that i chose this that this wasn't this wasn't your dad pushing it on me because me immediately i would have gone straight to that this is dad's fault the dad's pressured you to to not be a member anymore you know and i so by this point your mom has lost her faith yes yes and i didn't know that she hadn't no no she kept it pretty quiet you know and it was something that she and my dad were kind of working out on their own and i'd been out of the house for a long time but by that point but i didn't know you know i knew that my dad was not happy with it but he i knew that he had said to her i want to have my name removed and he made that clear to me too did he say why um he just didn't want to be associated with the church anymore it got he his feelings got stronger and stronger as the years went on i think the more you learn that it tends to do that yes um but um he was reading books oh all kinds of things yeah really i think he was pretty educated early on but it really compounded over the years grant palmer's you know an insider's view of mormon origin he read a lot very intellectual guy yeah so um yeah so my mom finally was was out and and by around round when we moved to colorado so when she was baptized yeah so that's my that's unique because normally it's the parents and the grandparents that are kind of the enforcers you know speaking about milieu control they're the ones that are always pressuring their kids and grandkids to stay faithful yeah so this is where kind of the modern era let's just say the past 11 15 15 11 to 15 years things start flipping because it can be the parents and the grandparents that lose their faith first and then and the kids and the grandkids that are staying faithful right and so that's that's a different experience for you to have your grandparents apostatize and resign from the church and for you to have your your faithful mom lose her faith and and to tell you she's leaving the church while you're trying to become more faithful so you and your daughter and your family are becoming more faithful wow linda your parents are are leaving the church and becoming more angry at the church what's that like uh boy the rift grew very between me and my parents i was there was not it got to the point where there was not tons of communication every communication we had was uh stressful um because that was the elephant in the room you know any conversation because we were we were doing things right my husband and i and our kids we were doing things right at that point and and knowing that my mom and dad were completely out i really did blame my dad i blamed my dad for my mom's loss of faith but she and she tried to assure me that it was her you know that she'd done some reading and i was like no way because my dad was so i just a strong personality my mom's a little more passive i was like it's all you dad you know i blamed it on him and and he when my younger sister got married in the temple my parents did not go through my both my parents were outside by that point because they were no longer members so i mean i have two younger sisters so they missed your sister they missed both of my younger sisters weddings i just want to i just want to be clear these are in mormonism if parents leave the church they don't get to attend their own children's weddings yeah just sit with that for a minute yeah imagine that all these strangers and neighbors get to watch your children get married your daughter your son get married and you're sitting outside the temple and you're missing the whole thing there's the scarlet letter shame about that and then there's just the kind of exclusion that is inhumane and shameful i think yeah super painful for my parents so yeah my sister that's just younger than me when she went through me and my older sister were there and i think my i can remember my youngest sister probably would have been there i don't remember but i remember i do remember walking out of the temple that day and seeing my parents outside the temple and while we had been inside the temple actually i think maybe all of us were there all my sisters because there was a relative that had said to us while we were in the temple you need to tell your mom that she's done such a great job with you kids you know because we were all in there yeah my parents were sitting outside so we went out and i i told my mom that you know i said mom you know you need to know that you did a good job you know how awful now now that i now that i think back on it you know but the second i spoke to my mother my dad had my arm in a lock and was dragging me away from her and said don't you think for a second that she's that she's not in there you know because because she what i can't remember what he said to me he was protecting my mom you know it because of what she he knew what she was going through in that moment and it was such an emotionally intense thing for them to be sitting outside but i just remember his intensity and him protecting my mom when i was speaking to my mom and i wasn't speaking mean to her anything i was just letting him know what that she'd done a good job and that somebody else was praising how well they'd done you know that all their kids were there in the temple and thinking back on that now i was like i i hated my dad in that moment because he was so intense and i just remember thinking that his spirit was so the spirit he brought with him to the temple was so awful you know we were just inside having this beautiful experience and i come out and my dad is angry you know so the contradiction but i i associated it with evil i i didn't associate it with pain you know and it's easy for me to do now my gosh i can't believe i didn't associate with pain i look at it now in hindsight's 20 20. you know but i didn't have compassion for my parents in that moment i was angry at my parents and and hurt that they would have those reactions because we were all doing things right you know yeah so yeah yeah and this is just i you know i just have to call these things out because i'm trying under i'm trying to understand them better and i hope this is helpful to some of our listeners to start paying attention to this number one mormons are taught that any negative emotions are bad so contention's bad disagreeing is bad and anger's bad it's it's all what contention is it's evil it's evil it's from the devil yeah and so that means that you know your dad is is bad for being angry and sad so he's being your parents are being left out of their own daughter's weddings their other children who are faithful are able to attend but they're missing their own children's weddings not because they're bad people but because they learned things and just decided this belief system didn't work for them they're being excluded from their own children's weddings which of course you're going to be angry yeah and hurt and sad and defensive and that's healthy that's good for you to be angry and sad and disappointed that a church is dividing your family keeping you out of your own children's weddings but then the church will teach its members that those see ex-mormons you leave the church and you're angry you're bitter yeah and so then that becomes this this reinforcing thing to the believer that yep see mom and dad are bitter mom and dad are angry and that's of the devil and that's contention and so this is just a very i don't mean to be pedantic i don't mean to be ham-fisted but this is where the rubber meets the road this is where this supposedly beautiful teaching of eternal families that's supposed to be just so it's it's the mormon church's main selling point it's their premium prize the eternal family that teaching becomes so sinister and pernicious because what it's really doing is just fracturing and sowing contention in a family and making non-believers out to be horrible bad people yeah and sowing contention between father and daughter between parents and children yeah making him evil even to his daughter you know that i'm thinking that i'm feeling it you know evil coming off of him when it's just it was pain it was just raw pain you know so healthy pain yeah very healthy pain for what he was experiencing so and what my mama's experience i can't i can't imagine i i probably will never have to experience that that kind of pain you know so i have a lot of compassion now for that but but these teachings have always caused pain in my family always you know from from my grandparents to my parents to me this the going to the temple and these teachings have have never brought me joy in my relationships with my family members it's always brought pain it's because there's always been somebody that can't conform completely so yeah and the other what was the other question you wanted me to answer about savannah jumping back to that seeing her being super righteous and then noticing a discrepancy between her personality strong assertive and how you know were you seeing how that might at 12 and 13 did you have any premonition that that might not serve her well going down the mormon way right there was a lot of there's a lot of tone it downs yeah oh i'm sure i'm sure i was asking her to tone it down a lot how was that for you it was hard because i'm just like i i didn't feel like i needed to be turned like turned down i mean at this while i was living the super righteous thing i was also like if i can be a strong woman i want to encourage other people so i had a lot of themes of like feminism and like women empowerment early on and i was very i was trying really hard to like incorporate those like i mean when i was in like a maya made presidency and stuff i was trying to get so we were going and doing cool things like the boy scouts did and um they didn't fly with the other yeah it didn't fly to the other young woman because they're like no that's she wasn't stuff was very different you know young men in our particular award yeah they liked the home gender stratifier very much the gender roles were very very strong um and i just didn't like she stood out like a sore thumb well it was also i had both parents working so it's like i didn't see why not like i mean we had a functional family like i didn't understand why yeah real quick just so so moving back from colorado within six months i was working for the church and we will tell that story yeah but so she was see seeing parents work she did see me work in colorado salon and then dad working and then it was a flip-flop you know we yeah that's why we're so close as a family is because we had both parents in and out of the home so much yeah we both we both parented our children you know early on it was mostly me at home with the little ones but by the time she was eight and older we really we both parented had really strong parenting both earned income yes worked yes yeah so i mean that was hard i feel like there was a bunch of stuff in my personality that i just that was um just not right it was kind of villainized almost well yeah in our word it was but as far as my perspective with that i always said it's going to serve you well someday your personality people might not like it right now they might not understand right now but my my message to her i said as a woman is going to serve you well i knew it would and so i i kept hoping for that and that was kind of what kept us like going and yeah i i i encouraged it i i did have occasionally i had some concerns um but i didn't i didn't realize the problem the lay ahead of us and the um the experiences that she would feel culturally until later like how intense it would become for her until a little bit later 12 was a little early um and she wasn't really completely coming into her own yet yeah because i mean i enjoyed a lot of the crap i was very crafty i enjoyed it artistic yeah you didn't love the crafts okay some of the crafts because they wanted me to do exactly how like and i was very much like oh i want to do something we have a non non-conformity blood a little bit in our family so yeah but anyway so that was that was difficult but i still was really trying to live the church stuff um but like watching all the stuff with my grandpa he was kind of like almost painted in a dangerous light we didn't ever want to talk to grandpa about church um and i remember like i have this one one memory of my mom arguing with my grandma about church stuff and i was trying to keep my little siblings in the basement playing so they didn't hear a lot of that stuff so i like kind of sometimes had to step into that protective older sister role to keep my sisters like out of that um those negative emotions so that kind of those negative emotions did trickle down to some extent and i think the biggest blowout where i didn't talk to my grandpa for a couple years after my patriarchal blessing because he had taken me and one of my cousins rollerblading for the day and so we were rollerblading on this trail and he was just attacking religion over and over and me as this 12 13 year old who is really trying to be faithful really trying to do everything i'm supposed to i'm just i'm just almost like verbally fighting my grandpa about all these things and just i mean he brought up all sorts of topics and called he would he referred to my patriarchal blessing as um fortune telling because i told him about it because that was a big thing as a 12 year old i'm like guess what grandpa i got my patriarchal blessing i don't think he would have known about it if you hadn't been with him that day and you and the patriarch called to come and pick it up yeah so the patriarch called and uh said hey it's ready if you want to come pick it up and my grandpa was like oh i know i know him i i cannot go get it when we i take you home and so um i this yeah it was really hard because i'm like oh grandpa i'll just go in and get it you don't have to come in and he's like no i want to come in i want to say hi like i want to and there was this huge tension between the patriarch and my grandpa as i'm trying to get my patriarchal blessing and um the patriarch he gives me this big hug and he's like you're special don't ever forget that and i'm like okay so now i'm just like it's this big confidence what was he trying to do he was he just went in to visit with the patriarch because he knew him he was on a first name basis as friends my dad's pretty well known in the community and just knows the patriarch so she happened to have savannah with him when the paid the patriarchal blessing was ready to pick up to take home so my dad was the one that took her to the patriarchs home to pick it up went and visited and there was like attention about what it was patriarch any idea what your dad was thinking or feeling he just probably thought it was dumb and well he he and i had a blow up a few days later at a family gathering about it and he he said he told me that he you know it was fortune-telling and just given me that whole line and i and i i bit back and i didn't usually do that with him but um really it was really uncomfortable and he brought he started bringing up all kinds of things you know that he'd been learning and i wasn't in a space to hear it you know so our relationship was really strained at that point and i really did not like him and i did not want him to be around my kids and um i'm so sad saying it now well that's again this is like so important that we talk about this or at least shine a light on it yeah from your dad's perspective well from you as a believer your perspective is here's this man who's who's he's desecrating our sacred beliefs he's he's anti-mormon he's trying to tear down my sacred beliefs he's fighting against god and jesus and all righteousness what a wicked evil bad man i thought of something i do want to share yeah okay i'll just say what from your perspective it's what a wicked evil bad man that's trying to tear our faith down and fight against jesus and god yeah that's your perspective and that's valid right and then from his perspective it's like i'm trying to save i'm he's feeling like his his child and his grandchildren maybe you're in a cult or maybe in a high demand religion or maybe just are going down a path that's not true that's not right that could hurt them later so from his perspective he's just saying i'm trying to i'm trying to wake up i'm trying to save my child i'm trying to save my grandchildren from further pain later i'm trying to help them not live base their life in something that isn't true but you're seeing him as evil and wicked he's seeing himself as trying to help you how do you bridge that gap it's it's so hard to bridge that gap you know in that moment when we had that blow up i do remember the one thing that he said that set me off the very mouth and and i said it was something about um i said would you would you kill my my children's faith you know and he said absolutely absolutely i would kill their faith you know i would take down their faith and i i felt like i'd been smacked you know and i'm like what more confirmation do i need to keep them away from you then you know if you're not going to help them have faith and believe in god and believe in and you know equating god and the religion is one you know that it's all lumped together as one um you know i i was so upset and we there was no way we were going to be able to to bridge the gap or meet in the middle it just it just tore us apart my relationship with my dad was terrible at that time you know and to have my children be um you know the sparks for some of these these awful interactions was was really hard too because i want them to be able to spend time with their grandpa i want him to have these this relationship with my dad i love my dad he's a great man you do love him oh absolutely i absolutely love my dad cherish my dad yeah so it's hard it's hard to think how much i've heard him but it was unknowing he knows you know i never meant to hurt him so yeah he is a great man and he will always be a great man to me yeah and yeah those moments were hard yeah take it away and after that experience like with my grandpa just kind of like attacking my beliefs and that was a new thing for me i was told i was like i was 12 yeah because and um he has so much more power than you yeah exactly i'm just like okay like grandpa why are you attacking these things that are so special to me and that i feel very proud of because i mean at this point i'm this huge church overachiever i'm like i'm being ambitious i'm doing the things i'm supposed to and this was the first time and the first time that my beliefs were attacked was by my grandpa and that was on the side of the family that was on the side of the family that i got along with better i always got along better with my mom's side of the family then my dad's side because my dad's side's super traditional super mormon and even though i was like very mormon at the time i still like got along better with my mom's side and so and then i didn't talk to my grandpa for a few years after that just because that hurt so much as a kid and i spent very minimal time with my own side of the family because it was like this is so bad i don't need this on my journey you know and i think there was like a little sprinkle of like well i guess they're not going to be there in heaven when i get there which is a very hard thing and i'm like looking back i'm like you're 12 you shouldn't be thinking about an eternal perspective you shouldn't have to be grieving a hypothetical loss of family members you shouldn't be dealing with all these big existential problems you should be being a kid and like enjoying life before you like are an adult you know and i feel like a lot of that stuff made me mature a lot faster than i would have liked to um i mean i was i was always told i was very mature for my age and i think that came from a lot um a lot dealing with a lot of like big concepts very young um it's all very tough stuff to like think about as a kid and i remember being like super worried about like second coming stuff like i was um i mean i was 12 13 around that time i got my periodical blessing i was really diving into like joseph's with matthew which is like the whole um part of the book of mormon that's talking about when jesus comes again and all the terrible things that are going to happen and what we need to do to be prepared for that and so i'm just this is a very real thing for me um what about the second coming it was like i mean in my patriarchal blessing i was told when the second coming happens you will be called forward and all the righteous people that you help convert will follow behind you so in my brain i'm just like okay god's gonna come down he's gonna be like savannah you were righteous like and then bring all the people you helped convert with you and one day mormonism happens to the people who aren't righteous during the second coming they go to outer darkness um which is worse than that it's it burns yeah and so it's like i knew that there was no way to because my grandpa's very stubborn very blunt um which i feel like i got some of those qualities actually um but um yeah i'm like okay i guess i don't want to spend time with him i don't want to get attached to him because he's not going to be there and that was a very very real fact for me and so i kind of kept going with i didn't tell her that i know but like i was doing a ton of reading on my own i loved books i loved reading i loved all the stories like i love stories like and um especially like jen like the creation myth in genesis um and all that jazz you know um very like a very intellectual approach to things and i just want to learn as much as i can and that was a very real concept for me because i was being told that is real and um yeah so you're saying you went a couple years did i hear you say that right you went a couple years without really talking to your grandpa yeah there's definitely a gap in there where i just don't have any memories speaking to him so and um it was i don't really i didn't really rekindle that relationship with my grandpa until i was maybe like 16 or 17. so let me just take a tiny quick moment just to this is kind of a coaching moment for people because i care about families we care about families that's one of the main things we're trying to do is keep families together if you are going through a faith crisis in your parent or grandparent or spouse doesn't matter or kid the most important thing you can do is make your believing family feel safe it's way more important to make them feel safe than to try and educate them or change their mind because if you get angry and forceful with them and try and cram your knowledge down their throats what you create is called the backfire effect which means they actually cling tighter to their beliefs and then they which you don't want you don't want them believing more strongly in the things that you don't believe but then they also push you away because they see you as unsafe and as dangerous and as bad and evil so your strategy as a questioner and or non-believer with your believing family has to be i will not talk to you about my doubts i will keep them private and i will just do whatever i can to make you feel safe spouse make you feel safe mom and dad grandma and grandpa make you feel safe child or grandchild and that way they want to keep you in their lives and that way later they will become more open to asking you questions or getting feedback when their own questions naturally arise you'll feel safe to them and again you won't be creating the opposite thing that you want which is distance from them and strengthening their beliefs and i just i have to call that out because it is the counter-intuitive smartest way to approach believing uh family and friends for sure oh yeah i think that that's fair but it's super hard to do yeah and my dad wasn't always good at it but boy he got better at it yeah he's gotten so much better because of his love for us like he got a lot better at that he would hold his tongue he would try to support us when he could he got really really good at it and and for his personality type that was extremely difficult so hats off to my dad he got a lot better at that he did he did so yeah that was definitely the first relationship i really cut off due to religion and there were unfortunately there were a lot more to follow because as i went into junior high um i was very much a goody two-shoes in addition to my like church stuff so i was this very um i had i was felt very superior i was very like academically like inclined i got a ton of like awards in school i got all my religion stuff i was a very good church attending and at this point i'm like okay i need to start converting my friends because i found like a really good seventh grade like friend group that i hung out with every day in the library and um half of them were not mormon and so i had um i had like a handful that i like saw at like steak activities but then the other half it was like we never we didn't see them on the weekends or anything just because we didn't see them at church and um i tried very hard to convert them all and um eventually it was just like they were like dude we can't deal with you pushing all these beliefs we're not like that we this isn't like that's crazy although like you're at i mean now i look at it and it's like um you're asking somebody change their entire lifestyle you know what were the kind of things that you'd say to them or conversations you had i would get after them for like for swearing and dirty jokes and i would get i would just like um get mad at them for like seeing them policing them driving away the spirit exactly so it's just yeah i would try to get them to come to church and when they didn't want to i was like well i don't want you guys to like go to hell you know um and eventually i actually had friends cut me off and i cut friends off really um some of which i've actually been able to rekindle now that i'm not in the church anymore and one of them is actually my roommate now really yeah i mean uh they had me blocked for like five years we discovered yeah discovered that it was kind of he had like blocked because yeah so he's my roommate now um but uh we were friends in like seventh eighth grade and he was he was never mormon but we were friends and um i just got so sick of all of his jokes he was always like doing all this stuff and he wasn't even that bad i look back now and i'm like that was so minimal um but eventually got to the point where i told him he needed to like fix his life basically and he like we stopped talking but i i guess he blocked me and then years later after we graduate high school we start talking again and we have a mutual friend who is also in that seventh grade friend group and um we can't he's picking me up from the airport and i can't we can't figure out why the phone like he can't call me and i can't call him you know and then a couple weeks later he was like do you still have the same number from when from seventh grade and i was like yeah why and he's like he unblocks me on his phone and i cried i was just like oh my gosh because it's like i felt so much guilt for all the things i'd said and guilted people for not being like good enough mormons or not even being mormon and um i ruined a lot of relationships very early on due to that i had no idea she was doing that i wasn't encouraging your missionary behavior i mean when you are a righteous person your number one priority becomes getting converting people and especially where i just got on my phra blessing where i was in the tribe of ephraim my job was to be a missionary half my blessing seriously half my blessing was like you're gonna preach to many lands to many people and you're gonna bring a lot of people a lot of happiness by bringing them to the church and i remember telling one of my other friends like i'm gonna convert you like i brought her to church a couple times and she was like i said i'm gonna convert you yeah i did i was like i was i was just 12th i was yeah i was a seventh grader and like eventually that was kind of yeah and i mean up through eighth grade i was very much a goody two-shoes very mormon um yeah just very much so we're the only friends that i had were others who were very very mormon so eventually all the non-mormon friends i'd had faded away or like got cut off or they cut me off and all those friendships stopped and the only ones i had left were all my mormon friends um and then eventually i got yeah just so don't don't forget what you're about to say i just want to call this out so there's a couple things going on there one is high demand religions and organizations teach cultural superiority they teach that believers and in-group members are superior to out-group members which of course create of course creates this natural division um they have to teach a sense of superiority they also teach proselytizing so um so you know you wanting to be a missionary it's just a way to make you you know reinforce the fact that you are superior and that you have a lot to teach other people and and there's also milieu control going on because all these people in utah county that aren't living the standards are getting excluded from things which then sends a message hey if you want to be included you need to get with the program and join the group yeah and so all of these things are coming by you very naturally because these are really important reinforcement techniques that the church and high demand religions use to their advent to their advantage so you're you're just you're coming by it honestly because that's how the system is designed exactly yeah um yeah so all my friends up through like 8th and 9th grade were all mormon like all very good mormons too like ones that followed all the rules that and all the standards and um i mean we did group temple trips and things we all went to girls camp together we went to youth conference together and um then i was i just felt i just didn't feel right i was like my mental health started spiraling i um just didn't ever feel fully like inclu like no matter how much i did or how good of a mormon i was i always didn't fit the mold just because of i felt who i felt i was and how my ambitious ambitions and i mean you're told like all the things like that to be like as a woman you know you're just like you're going to be a mom and i wanted a career like i was very i was very driven like i and i'm like okay so i had to deal with this trying to compartmentalize how am i gonna do both like there's no way that i'm gonna have the life i want if i have kids and like and it's just yeah so all of that was really hard and um for those things i got a lot of backlash and i always ask so many questions so like all like all of a sudden i completely surrounded myself with this church atmosphere and it was closing in on me so i would ask a ton of questions in sunday school and i would get shot down by my classmates and my teachers and i was a huge history buff and i was like that doesn't sound right for a lot of things i had like what types of things so i actually had a young women's leader teach us that columbus and henry viii were both like sent by god to further the church things so that the mormon church could exist and in that same year i was had learned that columbus was the reason we had a mass genocide and that henry viii literally created the church of england for so he could divorce his wife and so in my brain i'm just like these were not good guys these are actually some of the worst ones we got he decapitated him yeah he like i mean he had a bunch of them some of them he decapitated some of them he like created the church of england so we could divorce them but yeah i had this teacher saying that like these were divine men who were like put there so that the church could exist later in america just like wait a minute i'm just like uh listen sister i don't think that's right um and did you call her out that day i remember talking about it after church we had a conversation i think i may have walked out actually and like gone like just to leave the classroom because i was like i can't i can't deal with this because i'd already been shot down for a bunch of other things because like i um i remember advocating for like other religions and how other religions kind of understood other concepts better like supposing like the mormon church was the only true church but other religions had pieces right and some of them i i think i said other religions have other pieces that they probably understand better than we do even though we have the same pieces and there and then i had another young woman snap at me and be like but this is the only true one like the only completely true one and i'm just like okay and so it was that was happening over and over again from teachers and like like bishops and classmates and i wasn't with her like i wasn't with her in these classes at church when a lot of this stuff was happening so i was hearing a little bit it started to happen a little bit after church where we would discuss some of the things the experiences that she was having so it was slow but it was steady and it just happened over and over again and then i got to the point where i'm just like okay i need to make sure that if i'm gonna do all this like fully and be full fully in i need to understand the complete history and that's when like you dive into things you know i started reading like as much as i could get my hands on i read gospel topics essays my mom actually has this bible that has different versions of the bible all side by side so you can see the difference in comparison and so eventually when i was like 16 17 i started like staying home from church or leaving early sometimes and i would do my own bible study because i found it way more i learned way more on my own from that right she was getting in church she wasn't getting i wasn't getting anything because like it was all the same things eventually feeding that intellect and feeding that heart it wasn't yeah so i wanted to have a full understanding and then all of a sudden just like the more and more like things pile up i mean we talk about yeah so what i want to do is i know that um i know linda that you have your whole you know parallel to this even before you're having you you become an employee employee of the church and you're working for the church and and a combination of your experiences with the church and then seeing how things start to unravel for savannah yeah that becomes kind of where for the whole family everything starts to unravel so if it's okay savannah like i think you've brought us to a really important point which is how things start unraveling for you is that right this is true so so i mean that's thank you for taking us to that point is is it okay if we pause that yeah for sure we'll go back to your mom's journey with the church this one's great and then we'll take it and we'll come right back to the point where then those things kind of come together and really start but what i hear from you is saying that that things started to unravel oh yeah just the culture got very very toxic when you start asking questions and all of a sudden it was uh oh she's that one i got written off as the ward feminist and i just asked way too many questions well we want to hear all i literally want to hear every single one of those questions and i want to understand in depth how your faith unraveled i just want to yeah we can totally jump over this we'll jump back to your mom's story and then we'll come right back to it or hit that very hard and in-depth all right we're going to dig deep all right yeah okay all right okay so linda let's back up a little bit now okay and when you come back from colorado fort collins when you come back when you move to utah from fort collins an interesting relationship that you end up having with your bishop yes leads to you working for the church is that is that yeah maybe i'll back you up even a little bit further just to kind of talk about this um relationship with the bishop savannah's story is a cliffhanger savannah's story that we're going to come back to yeah so we lived in mapleton we had a small home in mapleton that we lived in before we moved to colorado okay so my relationship with this particular bishop that i want to kind of bring into the story started there so before we ever even left to colorado i like i said i had daddy issues i had these religious issues with my dad i had all of these problems and that i was trying to to deal with um and so while we were living in mapleton while the three kids were young um i we were going to we were going to church pretty steady at that point and um my bishop there and i'm going to try really hard not to say his name because he's a big part of my story so i'll talk about him a fair amount but um i started talking to him one-on-one and building a relationship with him and he he stepped in as almost kind of like a father figure for me um and just filled a little bit of a hole he was he was very willing to talk about spirituality very compassionate individual i was in a very very vulnerable place when it came to just just you know my situation with my dad i just it was always in my heart always on my mind it was just such a huge part of my story and so he stepped in and kind of made me feel special um you know that i just um that my spirituality was a gift um a lot of those kinds of things um but during the period that we lived in this house it was four or five years that we lived in that house of mapleton when the kids were young um he was our bishop that entire time uh exmo lex was in our award so this is the scene mcdonald's lexie mcdonald yes she was the little one she was young she's a little bit older than savannah she was a teen yeah okay yeah so yeah so same word yeah so i don't know that she will remember me but my husband served with her dad so for the time that we're there so this particular bishop i felt i did fall away for about six months during the time that we lived in this first mapleton house and the reason was i was up at my parents house one day nobody was up there and i noticed the book the 19th wife sitting on my dad's counter in his kitchen and curiosity killed the cat like i started just kind of thumbing through it because i i like books i like to learn and i stole it i brought i took it home and i read the whole thing cover to cover like like that i mean it was i couldn't i couldn't put it down um do you want to go into what that book that book is a book about uh one of brigham young's wives that went rogue kind of really in a nutshell you know so she basically told her story um early on and uh that wrote went rogue in what way against mormonism against brigham young again lost her faith and told the whole story so for me to find that book and read it was really really eye opening i'd never read anything that was considered anti at that point but i was so curious you know what's driving my dad you know it was just a curiosity thing so i took it home read it fell away for six months like we after that we did not go to church for six months yeah so i had kind of a first little mini faith crisis during that time and this uh and my husband has been great through all of my faith in and out of my all my experiences he's been great lets me drive the religion bus and he just kind of does what i do he stayed home with us supported us was really great but um this bishop reached out to me kind of after the six months and i had been not very nice to even primary teachers that came to our door trying to take bring things to my kids at that time and just said you don't think i'm teaching my kids about god you know don't like i've got it kind of a thing i wasn't i wasn't super nice to one or two people that were trying to fellowship at that time but this bishop decided he was going to reach out and he wanted to talk to me about it that's when we really started developing this relationship and he said when i told him i'm like look i have questions there's i read some things that are really hard for me and he told me he says why are you looking for diamonds in sewage you know that was the line that he gave me and it made sense at the time i was like yeah it doesn't feel very good it does feel like sewage it's awful awful stuff and i don't want to read it anymore i don't want to learn any more about it i don't want to and i really i really hadn't gone past that book i didn't dive any deeper and i just have to call it out that's a thought-stopping cliche is what that's called yeah it's it's some pithy quote that packs a very heavy emotional punch that gets you to stop learning and stop thinking because high demand religions have to control the information that their members receive and they have because they need to control them from having questions that might lead to doubts and then disbelief and so things like they leave the church they can't leave it alone yeah um doubt your doubts yeah why are you looking for diamonds and sewage those are all thought-stopping techniques to get you not not to learn and i'm not saying that bishop's a bad human no he's not we have to learn to call out these techniques because they're effective oh unfortunately yeah it was it was effective for me you know and like i said i was in a vulnerable place and he stepped in you know during that time and said you know i and he'd said too i read i read a lot of those things too and kind of told me his story that he had been um uh ostracized from his family when he converted as a older teenager you know so shared his story with me and so we just i just felt like we had a lot in common um he was a writer i wanted to be a writer so we just had a lot of these commonalities we're both super into spirituality and both pretty creative we just had lots in common so he became kind of a father figure for me and i just revered him revered him would have done anything to please him it was kind of a it was a i just transferred these feelings that i wanted to have for my dad to him and it was unhealthy it was kind of we just would have these really deep spiritual conversations um and it was never never ever in a in a bad way or anything you know but it's like like you know where people go okay did you have like weird feelings for him or anything like that sexual or anything no absolutely not no no and he's like my dad's age you know they're within months of each other in age and so it was always very much like a father figure for me and i think that it was a i think it was similar for him but over the course of our relationship he he would try to kind of label what what our relationship was and neither one of us could ever label it as like i don't know like a father-daughter type thing or i always just kind of called it a friendship because it was a friendship for me i don't know what it was for him i think it was it got a little weirder for him because he started putting me on a pedestal and i'll get into that a little bit and making me feel like super special and that was weird it's called love bombing it was weird you know and it made me uncomfortable but and so i was always making sure that i was super clear with my husband i would talk to my husband about everything that we talked about you know because that made me feel at peace about the relationship with this bishop it's just that i was being clear that i was talking to somebody else about it you know everything that we were talking about when you say talking are you like on the phone are you into the bishop's office these are like lots of emails okay lots of emails occasionally in the bishop's office um we didn't really have a lot of phone conversations so early on it was just a lot of emails and throughout our whole relationship really it was a lot of email because we did end up working together so um i just have to say a couple quick things okay sorry we're bringing up everything this is so good this is so important i mean we just did an episode of the shakespeare episode where we talk about when when an adult woman is alone with an adult married man behind closed doors or in emails for a long period of time a couple things happen one is you're developing emotional intimacy yeah with someone that is in your husband yeah so that's one thing that doesn't necessarily have to be bad we can have friendships yeah but if you combine the emotional intimacy that you're developing with the power differential which is he is your authority he is in a position of priesthood power he's god's spokesman for you yeah that is a power differential that that can be abused and it can go into the sexual path which it did you know it does with so many right sometimes he can go to an abuse path where a bishop or a mission president will tell a woman she's going to be a plural wife or whatever or abuse them or infidelity happens that can happen but even if it never goes down that awful road you know these bishops aren't trained as therapists or as counselors they don't they aren't taught boundaries they aren't taught healthy boundaries they aren't taught about dual relationships and they aren't taught the basic ethics of of neutrality so a therapist is taught it's not your job as a counselor or therapist to promote your values to your clients it's your job to help them figure out what's best for them and your values don't matter you're supposed to be values neutral and just facilitate their healing and growth that's the only ethical position in that power differential right because otherwise you're in a position of a father figure which is not appropriate honestly for this man who is representing the church and the only there's only one good path that you linda need to follow and he's representing that path yeah with that power differential and then he's using that love bombing and that emotional intimacy that you're developing to then have you follow the path that you're supposed to be leading and that's that's unethical and it leads to a lot of harm if it's not the worst case scenario of sexual abuse or infidelity something more benign is absolute power and control over your path with that untrained counseling position power differential and i don't mean to make it sound so awful no we have to learn to identify what's going on oh absolutely i appreciate all this influence in your in your life with good intentions and that's the thing it's not like he says bad man he's just trying to help you yeah yeah so is that okay no i appreciate that so very much because just because for me like i i didn't know i you don't know what's appropriate you don't know what the boundaries are you don't know you know how much to interact what the appropriateness like there's no guidelines there's nothing to know you know he didn't know i didn't know you know so we're just having a lot lots of conversation you know and it was feeling it was filling a void for me and it was filling a void for him like coming to find out like he had mommy issues his mom had ms within his entire growing up she wasn't present you know so he's putting me on this strange pedestal you know as being like you know kind of special divine having abilities and things like that and i'm going and that was always weird to me you know anytime he kind of pushed that on me i was like that doesn't feel right you know i did also feel good a little bit there at moments i think it felt good but i think i had a a good enough upbringing to know you know i i had some boundaries you know i think way more than he did as far as um how much communication and whatnot not early on but my boundaries grew a lot stronger as our relationship went on i'm just saying it's god a bishop represents god to a ward member and here god's mouthpiece the bishop is telling you how amazing you are that's got to be validating yeah oh yeah it was validated when you come from and i needed it of always feeling shame and unworthiness now absolutely the highest leader for you in your congregation is telling you how amazing you are yeah so it was very validating for me it was i absolutely was and he in order to kind of pull me back in he says i want to give you a calling you know i'm like okay you know i hadn't been to church in six months and i'm like okay maybe i can do this and this is after having a one-on-one interview um with him and he said you know i i want you to teach relief society and i'm are you kidding me you know he says just so this is just the women's group there's an hour that's um one of the the three hour block which was then is two hours now they're getting a little more progressive but um yeah so i would teach one one week of the month the women in church in church all the adult women yeah yeah it's kind of an honor yeah and it would be it would be from the conference talks you know it would be that one particular talk um that they would choose and and i said i what if i run into something that i can't teach that i can't you know feel good about and he's like we're gonna cater this calling to you not you to the calling and i went okay all right i'm in i can do that if there's something because that was within my comfort zone if there's something i can't teach whether it's joseph smith or brigham young or whatever i can say nope i can't do that one give me something else and so that made it doable so for a while i i i taught and some of my lessons i think were very uncond unconventional you know but the women were also very kind and they were probably fellowshipping me too at that point um but it was good for me so that was that was really the nutshell of the story that i wanted to talk about while we were in the mapleton for the first time before we moved to colorado as i'd established this relationship this close friendship this father figure relationship with this bishop and then we moved to colorado and it was fine and we really kind of lost touch during those three years that we were in colorado he during the those three years that i was gone he ended up getting a job with the church becoming the manager of the editing department up there which means what so he had just managed all of the editors and the church actually has a lot of editors very very few writers lots and lots of editors so um he just was over running you know helping them run their schedules helping what their projects some people don't know what that means okay so the church puts out a lot of um a lot of writing you know in all kinds of areas magazines um digital lots and lots of digital nowadays i used to be the magazines a lot but the magazines aren't focused on nearly as much now websites blog posts articles yeah yeah yeah and there's lots of different departments there's also a huge translation department where everything that's written many things that are deemed important enough are translated into multiple languages huge translation department um so yeah so he was over all of the the editors and um really their editing was just editing like grammar punctuation um they weren't correlation this is actual editors that could get a job any magazine any any place you know that's putting out digital content being editors so that was his job so he was over the managers or managing over the editors and while i was in colorado i didn't know that he'd gotten that job i didn't know where he was working we did kind of lose touch during that time then about six months before we were thinking about moving back i did hear from him and he said hey are you interested in just trying to write some articles for the church and i was like yeah yeah you know because i was just i was just a lowly hair stylist at this point and i was i was aspiring i was growing and i'd expressed to him how much i wanted to be a writer and at the time i was really wanting to be a novelist i'm like i just want to write books i want to be a novelist very creative person so um so i said yes and so he's like okay he's like we have some articles there are some talks by boyd k packer that we want to um kind of highlight so it was all about kind of boosting pr for boyd k packer was the first things that i wrote about so i'd go through his his conference talk or whatever they were wanting to meet me to go over and i would just soften everything you know soften the language soften the message and make it uh tumblr i would be writing like it would be like a conference talk like a talk that he'd given in general conference that would be given to me and i would keep the message from it but just kind of soften the language and for the platform of like tumblr like in like social media or you know just i would rewrite an article based on what he had taught so let me tell me if i have this right and i want you to correct me because you lived it so so the church has a website which is its face to the world and to the membership which is going to be releasing articles regularly and then the church has these monthly magazines traditionally it was called the ensign right and then that's for the u.s english-speaking version of the church's monthly magazine to the membership yeah that's to the adults and then there's the new era which is a magazine monthly magazine to the youth and then there's a children's friend which is a magazine to the children right and then there's the liahona which historically was a version of the ensign but but globally and these articles primarily are for believing members to help an ongoing education slash indoctrination right as to what the brethren are saying what the top leaders are saying what they want the members to know what the monthly message needs to be in the home teaching lesson or in the visiting teaching lesson when those home teachers come to teach the families yeah and then it's also like as the church enters into the social media realm how the the teachings of the first presidency the quorum of the twelve apostles gets communicated not just to the membership but to the world so this is this is all education slash indoctrination to the members in the world yes and then sometimes like a talk by elder packer would be pretty harsh or even condemning to lgbt people or to women or whatever right okay now okay so your role then is yeah so my role with these first articles and it wasn't like overtly said you know this is boyd k packer we want you to boost his pr we want you to make him sound nice you know it was it was really just an article that he had he had you know or a talk he had given that was given to me saying let's just write another more conversational piece on based on this message so it really wasn't given to me like you know let's fix let's fix this or make it better or you know or give boost his pr it wasn't handed to me in that way um so it was just to repackage it repackage it make it more conversational okay so and that's that's often what i did

Channel: Mormon Stories Podcast

Views: 22,791

Rating: 4.7260275 out of 5

Keywords: lds, mormon

Id: O9wOU2NBPYU

Length: 180min 53sec (10853 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 07 2021