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Am I alone in thinking that Mormon parents are experts about making their kids feel guilty? I’m a middle aged man with a wife and family and my parents can still make me feel like a guilty teenager. My Mom is just devestated that I’m not the perfect true believer I “should” be. She talks to me about how my kids are being hurt because I’m not Mr. Active anymore. She laments that I’m not yet a Stake President because she was so sure I would be by now. I tell her that frankly, I’m glad I’m not a SP but that only makes it worse. It’s frustrating to me because for the first time in decades I am FINALLY getting to a point where I’m happy about who I am. For the first time in years I’m finally feeling GOOD about my relationship to God (and even getting there in my relationship with the Church). Apparently this isn’t good enough for my parents. In their minds any disagreement with ANYTHING the church teaches means I’ve turned my back on them and God. I have tried to tell them that I still believe but they don’t want to hear it. And I really do still believe in like 90% of what the church teaches… there are things I will never agree with or believe but I’m not leaving the church over them.
Sure I don’t go to meetings very often but I’m trying to go more and more. But to them unless I am the perfect TBM I’m hurting them and my kids. My Dad is asks all the time how could I do this to my poor, dear mother? That if I don’t stay close to the church (meaning if I’m not a TBM) that I will lose EVERYTHING? Well, I’m not doing this to her, I’m trying to find my own way in life and I’m actually doing okay right now. I’m really sick of dealing with them but they are my parents so I can’t very well shut them out of my life. Can’t they see that I’m happy now, that I actually feel good about myself? Why isn’t that enough for them?
I’m right there with you Sam Spade. My parents visited us just this last weekend, spent the whole weekend with us. They live 700 miles away, so they stay a couple days when they get a chance to see us. They know my wife is a total non-believer now. They know sort of partially about me, kind of. It’s a little more fuzzy in their mind because I do still go to Church. I’m active. Only one of my daughters went to Church with me and my parents on Sunday (we have 6 kids).
My parents are wonderful people. They don’t do the direct guilt stuff to the level you mentioned, but my mother poor mother. I went to hug her goodbye on Monday morning. She just clung to me a long time and finally whispered in my ear “remember you temple covenants, dear.” It was meant with all the love and concern of a mother, not to make me feel bad at all. Still … how do you deal with disappointing your parents? That relationship is forever I guess. I don’t want my parents to feel bad, like they are somehow failures for not raising me right, or thinking they will never see us all in the afterlife.
Sorry to laugh at you but 😆 …join the [moderated] club.It’s my in-laws AND my parents double-teaming me so, there.
Ray’s mentioned this in other threads (check them out, there are ALOT on this topic), but it seems to be the most common parenting method for orthodox TBM’s: emotional abuse to get kids to obey, to look “right”, to act “right”, etc. And it doesn’t seem to end. No matter the age. My parents had a huge dislocation last year, three of their six children resigned within weeks around Prop 8 (and other issues) so they have been in therapy and are getting much better.
I’m not sure how you engage them (I still haven’t with my in-laws) but you should probably know that it’s not you that they have a problem. It’s usually the fact that they have to admit either internally or externally that one of their children has “gone astray”. It’s an image thing.
Trust me, it has nothing to do with you. No matter how much they say that they’re “just concerned”, “want what’s best”, “know that you know”, “doing it out of love”, “trying to avoid inevitable hurt”, etc, etc., IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU. It’s about them. And their image, either that they are projecting or their self-image. You have no control over that. You can’t do anything to change that. Only they can change that. Even if you said “psych, just kidding” and go back to TBM, you can’t fix them. It’s just wall-papering.
Life is singular. You only get one. Live it the way that you feel it. Your kids will thank you some day in a very profound way.
Sorry to double up but I’ve been thinking about this lately. There is an idea in our society/culture whatever that we are “forming” or “molding” or whatever when it comes to parenting. And the mormon culture is this x10. That is where the emotional abuse as #1 parenting tool comes in. Parents are either “molding” their children for what THEY want their children to become, or for what they THINK everyone else will see them as. This may be a form of “parenting” but it has nothing to do with the concept of “preparing them for life”.
Grandparents would actually make the best parents, imho. The grandkids can do no wrong, they love them unconditionally, they accept them for what they are, they don’t pressure, or guilt, or make fun. And they’re proud of them no matter what they do and they show it.
Shouldn’t this be parenting? Sorry for the hammer but… how would Christ parent?
“When I was a child I spake as a child” is one of my favorite scriptures. Some parents have a hard time realizing that they can’t control their children, and that their children are now adults. Personally, I’m not a fan of emotional manipulation – I don’t even like chick flicks. The key is to be totally personally responsible for your life as an adult and to view yourself as an adult talking to another adult with affection and respect, but as an equal. Not so easy sometimes. swimordie wrote:Shouldn’t this be parenting? Sorry for the hammer but… how would Christ parent?
Christ is my parent, my father. I think He loves me and forgives me when I make dumb mistakes. I think He tries to teach me how to be nice and share with others. I think He teaches by example how I should be when I grow up. And I think He kicks me out of the house and tells me to come back in when I’ve washed my hands and am cleaned up.
swimordie wrote:Ray’s mentioned this in other threads (check them out, there are ALOT on this topic), but it seems to be the most common parenting method for orthodox TBM’s: emotional abuse to get kids to obey, to look “right”, to act “right”, etc. And it doesn’t seem to end. No matter the age.
With earthly parents, I think there is a generation gap issue as well. How different are they raising us from how they were raised? Maybe more different than we think sometimes…they too had their issues with their parents accepting them, IMO. I’ve certainly seen that with my mom and my grandma.
For me, an important tool to smooth things over is always having respect for them, even when as an adult, even if I think they are wrong. I may not choose to blindly obey them, but respecting them and sometimes giving in and obeying just to build the relationship goes far. I don’t try to tell my mom now my current views are “more mature” than her views, I still have to remember I’m her son. She gets less attacking and less on the offensive when I talk lovingly and respectfully to her.
In an episode of “Law & Order”, Jack McCoy says, “I’m Catholic. I can feel guilty about anything.” I think Mormonism has a long way to go to catch up to Catholicism.
My advice is to quit expecting them to be the adults. Love them regardless of their actions, simply because they care enough to try – no matter how much you dislike the actual effort.
My wife and I have opened our home to friends of our kids who crave attention and concern and care – who get apathy from their parents instead.
Thank God your parents care enough to meddle.Honor thy father and thy mother for it. SERIOUSLY, consider the alternative I’ve seen WAY too much – and thank God your parents care. This is why I’m grateful I found this site. I can vent and maybe it is venting to just total strangers but it helps. It helps to hear other people say that they are right there with me. It helps to hear others express the same frustration. I appreciate it and continue to be grateful that I’ve found this site. Thanks for helping. My parents have been gone for 15 years. I visited their graves a few weeks ago, they each got two long stem red roses (four more graves required roses in the same lawn). The folks left this world nearly together, ages 88 and 95. They left just my brother and me (as they had married late), but we gave them twelve grandkids. They were so thrilled. Dad was 65 before the first one came along. We lived within blocks of each other and were always together. They were Protestants. My bro married Catholic and I married LDS, so the folks were kept busy with LDS blessings, RC baptisms, LDS baptisms, RC confirmations and LDS mission farewells for twenty years. They never missed anything and gifts were always presence. Because of our mixed religious heritage, religion was never seriously discussed, but the rituals of all the churches were enjoyed and praised. It was the same with politics, it wasn’t considered a subject worth getting feelings hurt over, just always a reminder to “do your duty and vote.” Dad was a union man and might say, “If the union is on the ballot, remember!” When I read these stories of pressure applied by loved ones to conform and be obedience and follow a narrow path, I think of my own loved ones, and I smile at their wisdom. You see, I think we will all one day stand on that beautiful shore (leaning on the Grace of our Lord of course). I can’t imagine heaven with restricted real estate, nor would I want to be part of it. Love your parents, TBM or not.
You gotta love mormon guilt! Is there anything worse? Hmmm.. …. Catholic guilt, maybe? I think we can decide not to take on all this guilt even if it coming on us like a fire hose. I often say that we are all in process. That helps me when people aren’t doing what I think they should when I think they should. And it helps me when I have been trying to sift thru all the doctrine and all the “what this person said” or “what this person wrote”…..and then all the feelings that seem to accompany it. It has taken me these last three years to feel ok about the church again. And even that I can’t say without reservation. And I am ok with it. God is ok with it too as far as I can tell. I think I underestimated his immense patience and understanding. I think only He knows really what I have been through and how it has affected and shaped me.
I have a MIL that deals out guilt like she passes out cookies! Always cloaked in passivity and always laced with shame and usually supported by some scripture. And she tends to dispense it when we are alone…….something that makes calling her out very difficult as it tends to make me look like a big fat meanie. I felt awful for so many years. Tried to make the woman happy. Tried to win her approval, or tell her my feelings, or ask her to stop. Nothing worked. In fact, all my efforts just fueled the fire. And so, I decided to think differently about her. Now I don’t let her have an opinion on what I am doing or how I am doing it. I guess I just decided that I would be the one to decide how I really feel about things….. including how I feel about my progress with spiritual things. And I look for more evolved people to share my feelings with. That usually means that the only person I talk to is God.
Wouldn’t it be so much better if we could actually listen to one another? Wouldn’t it be cool if we could all just let each other be instead of trying to “fix”?
I wish members of the church were more evolved with this kind of stuff. I mean didn’t we learn anything from the 50’s?
Guilt is something that really sticks out between my wife’s experience with the Church and mine. My MIL frames a lot of the overall Church experience in terms of guilt and shame (failing perfection). I really think it is a major difference between my personal reaction to my crisis of faith compared to DW’s. To her, letting go of the Church was an act of letting go of all her childhood guilt. That was a big part of it. Her mother is very extreme about the Church. It’s 110% overdone or you are going to hell in a handbasket. DW needed to drop the whole Church thing in order to free herself from that dysfunction. That’s something I think about sometimes. My parents are much less guilt oriented, even if they are very TBM. I don’t feel threatened much by the Church through my parental relationship with them. They never used the Church as a tool to manipulate me growing up. Even though my father’s dread form of discipline was having to talk to him in his office, just like a BP’s interview (he was a BP for several years). He never yelled and rarely spanked us. Even as adults, to this day, my siblings and I, and their spouses all joke about dreading being called in to his office to talk with him. LOL. The thought of him being disappointed …
Valoel, this makes sense to me. I don’t really feel guilty for not measuring up to my ideals, let alone others’. However, for Silas, the guilt game affects him very differently. Yet, my parents have come down much harder on me for questioning the church than his own parents have. I suppose there’s a whole lot that goes into our experiences. Internal, external, how we interpret or understand the teachings, etc.
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