My Story: Why I Left Mormonism

hello YouTube it's so good to be here today I am so excited this is our very very first episode of the emancipation of a male Mormon I'm gonna be your host I'm Terri Hales and honestly the very first question I always always get when I tell people that I left the church was how did you leave and number two how Mormon were you to start with so let's go ahead I want to get into how Mormon we were to start with because that's important right you want to know who you're dealing with all right so just to paint a little picture for you of how Mormon we were um let's see where to start oh goodness so I grew up in a convert family and I am the oldest of three kids and let's see I was a seminary president I only applied to BYU during college I remember in eighth grade thinking you know what I just found out that there was a LDS school called BYU I had never heard of it before because hello convert and I remember asking my friend's sister who was going there like what do you have to do to get there and she gave me the number to the administration office and I called as a 13 year old and I said okay I really want to come to your school whenever I'm older what do I have to do I was in eighth grade guys and so I was like all right so they told me I needed letters of recommendation they told me I needed a certain GPA they told me I would need a certain a CT score I don't even remember what those were all I remember is that every single person in my life that had anything to do with being a leader to me at all I asked them for a letter of recommendation and when it came time to apply for colleges I said 50 plus letters of recommendation to the admin office at BYU and I remember my very first class for economics or whatever I was in this huge auditorium and I was one of the first people to sit down for a CT scores and I was one of the first people to sit down when they talked about GPAs I guarantee you I only got into that College because I really really wanted it and I had letters dated from being 13 they could tell that I had planned for this for years and I was tenacious so yeah anyway went to BYU planned on that for years did all of the clubs all of the you know Civic things I could do to make myself look like a good candidate for BYU all right went to BYU and while I was there super super active everything I could do followed all the rules to a tee met my husband my sophomore year we dated for ten whole long months and I thought our engagement was so super long um he was in Jerusalem for three of those and we got married in the san diego temple five days after he got home from Jerusalem so um I was barely 20 he was 23 and we started our journey together and we finished up our time at BYU both of us graduating with degrees in marriage family and human development I realized pretty quickly after that that therapy was not what I wanted to go into but I am so fascinated with the workings of emotions and the mind and how that all goes together I love studying about relationships and about just how people work together in connections my husband did go on to become a marriage and Family Therapist and he currently works as a therapist with couples and with individuals um dealing with everything from addictions to just relationship issues to sometimes even faith transitions though faith transitions are not his sole specialty all right how else okay we we always paid our tithing always um always pay our fast offerings donated to the Perpetual Education Fund and occasionally the temple and missionary funds as well when we had the missionary surge our family welcomed in two missionaries into our home into our like extra bedroom here had missionaries live with us for a few months um it was actually a shelf item for me I loved those missionaries but actually seeing what a mission was up close because I didn't serve one and my husband's in Brazil was totally different um a little bit of a shelf item for me there um what else served in whatever calling we were ever asked to serve in didn't even question even if it was a second calling or a third calling if I mean for much of my LDS experience if you ask me to bake six dozen cookies for you in two hours I would get on it and I would do it if you needed me to you know make some sort of activity or drive people to the temple I was your girl I was gonna be there and that's what I was gonna be doing and let me just tell you um I bent over backwards to be the best Mormon possible I wanted to be the kind of woman that when people looked at me Christ's light would shine from my countenance and they would be able to tell that you know obviously something good was at work here because I had been able to accomplish so much and I think that was really one of the problems with my journey is that works works being emphasized in the church was really a downfall for me because a I'm a high achiever I have been from the time I was born be I'm a perfectionist and see I was raised to be a people pleaser and so I've got lots praise from from pleasing people and really got a lot of self-worth from that as well so it was kind of a perfect storm for my particular personality because works I loved achieving things I loved the challenge of Mormonism of trying to juggle like two callings and being you know a stay-at-home mom a homeschooling mom in my case of like you know being able to to juggle all the balls and all the things that are required of us I really actually enjoyed the challenge of being Moorman there was so much to do in so many ways to prove yourself and I like the challenge of trying to prove myself where it became a bit of an issue is I'm also a perfectionist and a people pleaser and so please perform perfect that like that was my that was my jam that was my recipe and so perfectionism starting at about BYU coming from a convert family I realized I was a little bit different um my growing up experience was not the same as somebody in Utah first of all I had to wake up at like 5:30 in the morning to go to seminary so I had to wake up get ready go to seminary at 6:00 and then head on over to the high school so I could hit acapella practice in the choir you know a 7 a.m. before church even started her before school even started so that was a little bit um a little bit of a nice thing you guys in Utah had but even more than that my entire ward were converts so a lot of the things that you would have gotten judged for in Utah wearing pants to church as a woman really wasn't a problem wearing jeans to church not really a problem wearing a sleeveless dress not really a problem in fact I still remember my freshman year this was one of those moments where I really realized that my upbringing was maybe a little bit different than mainstream Mormonism was I we were having our first general conference while I was at BYU and it was Saturday morning and um you know I'm getting ready to go out like it's Saturday I don't have to work I don't have any classes I was gonna go do some studying like maybe do a little shopping and my roommate said hey are you gonna watch General Conference with us and I thought to myself yeah do that I'll see you tomorrow and they said wait Terry it's Saturday and I said yeah I know Saturday I'll see you like Sunday is General Conference where I grew up General Conference we only watched the sessions on Sunday I didn't even know there were sessions on Saturday in fact when we had state conference we live so far away from the stake Center that most the people in our Ward took the day off so it was no Church day for state conference so I remember my roommate saying Oh Terry general conference is Saturday morning and Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning and Sunday afternoon and there's pre secession and oh by the way the week before there's also you know young women's or general the general Relief Society session and I thought to myself what so yeah I remember calling my mom and telling her we've been missing a half of Jenny conference this is insane so I really really started there trying to figure out what the perfect Mormon girl looked like especially because everybody's trying to get married and there are a lot of women there vying for the men I really wanted to make sure that I was like as perfect a wife material as I could possibly be right so I was perfecting my cooking and I wanted to make sure I was a good mom even though I hated babysitting and kids are not my thing growing up wanted to be a good mom I wanted to make sure that you know I dressed appropriately and that I spoke appropriately and really really was trying to fit myself in that Mormon woman mold so for those of you who are like what is a moly Mormon anyway my perception of a MOLLE Mormon was somebody who was soft-spoken always kind never lost her temper put everybody else above herself um studied the Scriptures like I just pictured these like mothers of the stripling warriors as being these like perfect Saints that never lost it and always kept their cool let me tell you something about me I'm a firecracker I always have been but man I was trying so hard not to be I'm stubborn I come from a line of stubborn strong women who also cuss and I was trying really hard not to be angry her cuss or do any of those things so I could be the perfect woman let's fast-forward a little bit after about a decade of trying to fit myself in the box I can I can assure you things got a little messy I wasn't fitting in the box the box was uncomfortable and I started to get depressed in fact I started to get so depressed that I was angry my depression manifested itself as rage and I remember after trying to fix it myself by reading scriptures and praying more and going to the temple more and all those things that we hear will bring more of the Spirit feeling like I was broken maybe I was doing something wrong and I went to my bishop who was like the sweetest man and um always talked in a general conference voice so I sat down with him and I just said I am so angry I want to punch someone in the face and I remember how shocked he was because I was presenting myself as this like sweet soft-spoken yes woman who said yes to everything I had zero boundaries I would do whatever you ask me to do I was working so hard to make everybody like me and to make God like me and I was just doing anything and everything and exhausting myself and really that's what it came down to I had a really really busy calling I had a toddler my husband was deployed for ten months that year and I had been trying to fit myself in this box on very little sleep because my toddler wasn't sleeping and yeah of course of course I melted down but this man was clueless he did his best he told me to read scriptures more to pray a little bit more and I came home and I was even more ticked in fact if I could have punched someone I probably would have punched him because I just remember thinking I have done everything that I can do I've read scriptures I've prayed I fasted I've gone to the temple and it's not enough for God he's not gonna bless me with peace he's not gonna give me some comfort I have to keep soldiering on I have to fit more into my schedule and I remember being really really angry after a little bit of time trying to do that I hit rock bottom there was nothing left for me I just lost I was so depressed I just lost all desire to do anything I was burnt out at about that time I started getting therapy my husband was going to school to be a marriage and family therapist I had to set aside the stigma that I had for people who had to go to therapy it was so ridiculous since he's gonna be a therapist and in my degree was in therapy as well and I finally went to a therapist and I remember sitting down and telling him everything that was going on all the balls I was juggling everything I was trying to pack into 24 hours every day how little I was sleeping and I remember my therapist being like yeah I'd be overwhelmed too I think what you're experiencing is massive burnout and overwhelmed and it's manifesting itself whose rage of depression and I was like okay he's like you're normal like that's okay as my husband went through his training a little bit further we started learning amazing things about emotions I didn't fill a full range of emotions I just wasn't aware of them I remember learning about shame and thinking to myself no no no I don't I don't experience that emotion and then realizing oh my gosh I experience it all the time I am swimming in shame and it was just so mind-blowing to me that I was like I'm in shame all the time and that's why I don't recognize it it's because it's everywhere so as I got to recognize my emotions more I was able to pinpoint where those emotions were coming from I could recognize myself experiencing shame and then I would recognize oh I'm feeling shame because I feel like a bad mom because of that like that was said that triggered bad mom feelings and now I'm feeling shame okay and I could start to like deal with some of those things then as I really got good at recognizing my emotions I realized oh my gosh most of the time when I'm at church I'm feeling fear or shame I didn't feel right to me as I started studying and I started paying attention to the messages that were causing those flare-ups of shame and fear oh I couldn't help it I started bucking against some of those messages they didn't feel right to me I still remember um in January of 2017 sitting in relief society we were learning from elder Nelson's talk about divine love and I remember this one line where it said you know God's love could be described as many things but unconditional wasn't one of them and it just hit me right there I started thinking about my relationship with my kids there's nothing my kids could do that would make me not love them anymore there is nothing my kids could do that would make me not want to have them live with me anymore and I started thinking about God and thinking if their version of God is true he's not a very nice guy if I don't praise him an offer pray to him enough for if I mess up he's gonna kick me out for ever and ever and never see me again it just didn't feel like love and so I had a dilemma on my hands either I could believe that God was a jerk like the prophets were telling me he was or I could believe that the prophets maybe didn't understand God as well as I thought they did and I went with that one I realized somewhere along my journey probably about the time they told us how to vote on a local issue that the prophets didn't always have all the answers in fact when they told us how to vote on the local issue I was ticked because I had been taught that we teach people correct principles and we let them govern themselves but here I was being told to just mindlessly vote the way the church thought I should vote it didn't sit well with me at all I came to the conclusion that maybe we had drifted from the truth just like in the Book of Mormon after three or four generations you know people start going off and doing crazy things maybe that had happened to our church it wasn't that hard to imagine they had prophets back then and they still drifted maybe that's what happened to us and I decided ok I want to know what it was like at the beginning and I started studying church history now before you get all crazy on me I stuck to church approved materials the things that led me away from the church are found on lds.org they're found on fair Mormon which is written by church apologists and historians it's crazy reading the church essays I still remember the first color of my testimony falling flat on the ground just reading what was on lds.org the first vision had always been something that bolstered me up even when polygamy was back crazy and even when the 2015 policy about gay people's kids was totally off and even when all these crazy things happened in the church I could count on three things we were different because God the Father and Jesus Christ came and spoke to Joseph and told him to restore the church we had priesthood Authority and we were the only Christian Church that had forever families those were my three pillars I still remember learning about the first vision and finding out that not only was there not just one version there were 14 but as I read the versions myself just the four that were written by Joseph Smith they had different main characters they had different main ideas they had different settings he was a different age everything was different and I found that the one that was written closest to the event the one that was written 12 years after was so much less spectacular than the one that was written years after that one in my experience history doesn't elaborate the further you get from it tall tales do that and I had to sit and I had to justify is it likely that God helped Joseph remember more as he got older or is it more likely but he embellished to make it sound more fantastic than it was oh it was so hard to come to terms with that and every single issue that I looked into ended up that way polygamy blocks with the priesthood some really crazy anachronisms in the book of mormon things I had never thought of things I had thought of and just thought well that doesn't make sense but maybe I just don't understand the further I got into it the more I realized I don't think it's true I don't think it's what it says it's supposed to be does that mean it's bad absolutely not so those of you who are watching I don't think it's bad no worse than any other religion I think there are good things it teaches but I think there's a lot of things that are harmful especially when if you're like me and you believed it was black and white and you have to accept all of it or none of it in order to be a good latter-day saint that was a problem I still remember Gordon B Hinckley saying you know it's true isn't it then what else matters that's what I would keep coming back to you when something was crazy or something was too hard or too much was being asked of me or I felt like I was breaking I would say it's true isn't it then what else matters but the opposite is also true right if there are parts of it huge parts of it like the first vision temple covenants prophecy the fallacy of prophecy priesthood ordination if those things aren't true what else matters so for me the purpose of this podcast is not really to lead people away from the church there are enough resources out there if you're wanting to look into history if you're wanting to you know prove that the church is true there are lots of resources out there for you to support whatever you want to support whatever you want to look into my purpose is in the two years that we've been out we've seen people suffer and struggle because of unaddressed shame tapes but they gathered from their upbringing because of inability to know how to set down because of not understanding what the grieving process looks like and that it's normal or how to make new relationships there's lots and lots of things that we didn't know how to do when we left the church it made it more difficult than it had to be we want to help people with the skills that we've acquired both through our professional training and their just life experience to help make your transition easier or if you have somebody in your life that is going through a faith transition and you're still in the church we want to help you understand sometimes it's just easier to hear it from a third party especially one that's not in you know the the throes of finding out that they're everything they believed feels like a sham it feels like betrayal so that is the intent of our podcast we're so excited to explore emotional topics and psychological topics to really dig down into the feelings and the psychology of Mormonism and to help hopefully bridge relationships between people on both sides to also help set boundaries to figure out your individuality your own authority um and to help you create the life that you've always wanted both for you for your family and for your extended family so we can't wait for you all the to Neng we can't wait to share with you all this is gonna be a learning experience for all of us we don't have all the answers we've been through a lot but we don't have all the answers we're excited to learn with you and to grow with you and to share with you what we've learned and hopefully collaborate with some of you in the future and help us all learn and grow and make this life the very best it can be thanks so much for tuning in and we'll see you for the first episode bye

Channel: Teri Jean Hales

Views: 307,843

Keywords: mormon faith transition, exmormon story, leaving mormonism, why i left the mormon church, emancipated molly, the emancipation of a molly mo, molly mormon, my story why I left mormonism, life after mormonism, mormon stories, post mormon transition, emotionally healthy faith tran, the psychology of a faith cris, understanding faith crisis, answers to faith crisis

Id: WkdMDm9g0sI

Length: 23min 59sec (1439 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 21 2019