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Hi all- I have been missing you a lot. Some will remember me from some time ago when I started coming out of the Matrix and not having anyone to talk to about it– like so many of you. I posted a bunch for a while and then my journey took me some other places for a while. I didn’t share much about my personal situation back then since I didn’t feel safe doing so at the time, but I am cycling back I guess. One of the places I have been spending my time is a support group for people whose SO’s have Borderline Personality Disorder. Like mine does. Oh it is loads of fun. Like swimming. With a shark. While it is eating you. Slowly. During my time over there I have learned much. Like my first husband has Narcissistic Personality Disorder. So I know- right? WTH is wrong with me that I chose these men?? Stupid shark addiction I guess. So while I am trying to figure out how the heck I got myself here and what to do about it, I came upon some reading that put into words very eloquently one of the main reasons I came to this board to begin with. I just really felt a need to share it with someone so I thought I would put a link here. This woman who wrote this is not LDS but what she wrote here was so eerily my story that I would almost think she hacked through my tinfoil hat to steal my memories. I link to only one article but she has a whole slew of them that also echo my story anyone else can read there if desired and I highly recommend. You can read the article here>
http://www.hurtbylove.com/the-church-that-kept-me-there/ What drove me to start to question everything was essentially this- God would help Bro. Joe find his lost keys. But even though he made a specific promise to me in a priesthood blessing a received early in my marriage, he left me to suffer for 17 years in hell where my children suffered terribly, and some have become lost to the mental torture we endured. Why didn’t I leave? Because I was taught that as long as I didn’t catch him in the act of adultery; and as long as he didn’t actually hit me; I had to save my marriage at all costs. I thought I was doing the right thing. And every time I went to a priesthood leader in agony and begged for help I was rebuked and told to try harder and pray harder and stay there no matter because if I left, I would for sure pay the price with the eternal damnation of my children’s souls. When I finally did leave, my kids were so badly scarred in many ways I coulnd’t fix it. But the irony was it wasn’t the divorce that killed them. It was the toxic marriage that I stayed in for way too long! And THEN when I finally jumped from that frying pan I found myself in another for another — and seeking help again just led to judgment and a complete lack of help in any way. Bad advice after bad advice from men I was taught were more inspired than me- that I believed were- men I trusted. I really thought when I was told “if you leave now you will screw up your kids so bad you will never be able to fix them” that this priesthood leader actually must have inspiration I didn’t have. I was always taught that if your own inspiration and that of a leader conflicted that you had to follow the leader because only a super small percentage were uninspired. What a load of malodorous excrement that turned out to be. And it wasn’t just one bishop who I had who turned out to be horribly misguided and uninspired- it was many! Then my eyes started opening to too much– I ran into too many other stories- saw too many things. Some days I so wish I could go back to the days of innocence when I could keep my eyes comfortably shut. I never wanted to see how much pain existed in this world.
I felt so abandoned. Abandoned by the God who I was taught finds car keys. He finds keys but wouldn’t lift a finger to help me remove myself from the situation that was eating me and my children alive from the inside like a bad cancer- even though the specific promise he made in a blessing to me that was very clear said that wouldn’t happen. But it did. And I tried all the mental gymnastics- like I just wasn’t righteous enough, or I heard the blessing wrong or the blessing was meant for the next life. The thing is, I know in my heart with a clear conscience that while I was not prefect, I was righteous. I did all the check box things, and I loved, and I gave, and I tried, and I forgave, and I ran as fast as I could for as long as I could. In the end I figured if a God could just hold a carrot on a stick like that and say “na na boo boo can’t catch me” that way I didn’t want any part of that. And as a mother, I don’t say misleading things to my kids like “if you clean your room we will go to the movies” and then when they clean it I turn around and yell “psyche! I got you! I just meant we would go to the movies next month!” Sorry I won’t play that. I won’t follow that God. Then so many other things stopped making sense and adding up- so many things that used to make sense.
The worst realization I came to was to realize that compared to most people in the world during most of the history of time, my life is actually easy. The hell I have suffered is a daydream for countless souls– and it’s not like those people didn’t try, didn’t pray, weren’t righteous enough, or weren’t valiant enough in the preexistence. What a terrible judgement to pass on babies who are raped and tortured- but we do that in this church! The church seems to want us to believe that happiness and prosperity are the norm, while suffering is temporary, far away and generally deserved. I now think it’s the other way around- most people are in a great amount of pain most of the time. We are spoiled here in the US, to live here in these conditions and at this time. We forget that life is hard, and life is pain. For most people, most of the time, throughout most of history. And it has nothing to do with deserving. Pain IS normal. How can we not know this anymore? How can we not see what goes on outside of our comfort zones? How can we be so blind and judgmental and still call ourselves servants of God?
Anyway- I am back. I am still trying to find a place of healing and a way out– still thinking there is truth here– but God is not as advertised in sacrament meeting.
Thanks for sharing and welcome back. I hope you stay and share more. RagDollSallyUT wrote:— still thinking there is truth here– but God is not as advertised in sacrament meeting.
I’m sorry for the pain you have been through, but I’m glad you are still fighting to find what’s right for you.
Agreed with the above, God is not as advertised in the LDS sacrament meeting. I hope you can find some peace.
-SBRed
I know exactly how you feel. I too stayed in a tough marital situation for decades because I felt the church and its leaders would frown on divorce. In the region I lived, the leaders would say over the pulpit “we never counsel anyone to split up” which I took as an implicit statement meaning “don’t split up”. I’m still in the marriage nowit now. The whole idea of eternal marriage also left me feeling like a failure if I got a divorce. I won’t go into the details, but suffice to say, I aged really fast the first 5 years of my marriage (everyone commented on it), and was in living hell for the longest time. As time has passed, my wife and I have made it work, but I gave up a lot of stay in my marriage. At a couple points the challenge in the marriage threatened my very salvation and integrity. And then, the church failed to support myself and my wife in an adoption after I decided to stay with the marriage, rejecting us in the most cruel and heartless manner. So you have the church leaders on one side implying you should keep your marriage together at all costs, and their agencies refusing to support you in the eternal family concept after you resolve to make it work.
If I did not have the influence of the church, I would have been out of it 16 years ago, and potentially, wiser. Fortunately, my kids haven’t sufferred too much from the dysfunction in my marriage as there wasn’t the kind of emotional abuse you have sufferred, but I certainly believe the church has very little business telling people to stay in marriages, or FAILING TO ACKNOWLEDGE there are times when its better for everyone to move on.
My wife says our marriage is a 9/10 now, and I rate it a bit lower (7/10) but at least I’m not suffering anymore, other than with regret of what I lost during my 21 years of marriage, particularly in the beginning when I was young.
I echo your thoughts — priesthood leaders are good men, but they are limited in their ability to counsel people — often bound by their own life experience. And they can give bad advice. I’ve had my share.
Thanks for sharing. I look forward to hearing more from your perspective. Welcome back and Thank you RDS, I agree that we have a theology that is better suited to optimism and blessings and forward progression than to suffering and misery.
This is not necessarily a bad thing as it really works well for people who have experienced mostly good lives with good families (that the church community helps to promote).
Unfortunately this can ring hollow or untrue for some – especially for those that experience long-term, chronic suffering.
As to the priesthood leaders. I think it is a double tragedy to make bad life decisions relying on the counsel of someone in a position of authority. Bad life decisions are painful – but at least they are yours. You can own them and learn from them. Surrendering your decisions over to another is extra disappointing.
I wish all could understand more fully the idea that church leaders give general advice that is generally good for the group – but for individual cases and circumstances the right of personal revelation, adaptation, and decision making should be claimed.
I wish you piece and success with your personal throny path RDS.
Early in my marriage, I read a quote by a church leader that said something to the effect that you didn’t have to put up with the abuse, but said it in a way that led me to believe I didn’t have to leave either. I wish I could remember it better, but I can’t. At any rate, I believed that and prayed for guidance on how to stop my husband from emotionally abusing me. I was able to put my foot down early in our marriage and teach him not to abuse me. But it only extended to a certain point. He was still emotionally abusive, but because it was at a level that I was used to, because I had grown up with emotional abuse, I didn’t realize I was still being abused. Years later in the marriage, the Lord opened my eyes and I began to pray again for ways to stop him from abusing me. The Lord showed me what to do and after a few months, my husband was treating me a lot better.
Unfortunately, I found that my husband’s improved behavior boiled down to the fact that he was now afraid of me. It was control or be controlled. Finally he left me because of the things I was doing to stand up to him. I have since found another man who is much more loving and kind. I believe that my husband (we are divorced but I still call him my husband) was instrumental in helping me learn to overcome abuse. But he wouldn’t really change and so we couldn’t stay together. I feel the Lord worked everything out for me so that I was able to learn the lessons I needed to and move on to a better situation.
Wow called to serve, I sure wish God would have told me something to do to fix it. But in my case I don’t think Heaven and Earth could have (or maybe just wouldn’t have) stopped either one of husbands. There were occasions when I would have had enough, and I would leave, and that would invoke a temporary change. Usually just enough to get me hooked, and then the resources were clamped down even harder and I would find it even more impossible to make another attempt. I was forever optimistic though that deep down they really were good guys who loved me and just didn’t know how to function yet, and I could somehow love them through it and be a good enough wife that they would realize they never wanted to live without me. I really thought that one day they would see how much what they did was hurting, and since I thought at heart they were really good people deep down, they would just stop. As it turns out, my first was so extremely narcissist that he didn’t even love his own kids, even stealing their medicines etc. If he could benefit from the death or injury of one of his kids he would jump on it. No- this isn’t just a bitter ex wife talking. There are real reasons I say this. My current husband, idk, I am still deciding how much of a heart he really has or not. In some ways he is so much more abusive than the first, but he at least is capable of loving his children anyway. I am coming to the point of forming my exit strategy but trying to do so in such as way I don’t end up homeless or near it. Or dead.
To really understand the reasons I would go back after the few escape attempts I have made, check out this article:
http://www.hurtbylove.com/checklist-blackmail/ If I could just grab my kids (and my dogs and my photography stuff) I would disappear and never look back. But then real life creeps back in.
We all definitely have to deal with our issues in the way that best suits us individually. My husband was not nearly as abusive as many abusive husbands. He is Korean and was raised in a society where physical abuse is the norm, but he refrained from physical abuse for years until I started pushing back against the emotional abuse. He truly did not want to be abusive; it was just that he didn’t know any other way and as long as it wasn’t physical, he didn’t think there was anything wrong with it. I am sorry you are stuck in your situation. I understand how difficult it can be. I was in Korea with my husband, with no family around to help. The Lord showed me the way to leave and go home with my children.
Although I understand your struggles are different from mine, I urge you to consult the Lord in everything you do. He is the only one wise enough to lead you to true safety. He can and he will.
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