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Roy wrote:
The past will always be there. I think a big question is whether or not you are able to function and succeed in the life goals that you might set for yourself. If something is “holding you back” and keeping you from working towards your goals, then something needs to be done. As long as you are able to live the life that you want to live then maybe it is expecting too much of yourself to be completely ambivalent towards church matters.
I think a big part of why I feel held back is not having any sort of replacement for the things I have lost. I lost my community and social circle during my faith crisis, and years later I have yet to make new friends or find any new group where I feel like I belong. I lost my sense of purpose, and I still feel adrift in life without a clear direction for where I want to go. I still miss having that sense of community and purpose, and the church was the last place that I found it. But at the same time I am realizing what used to work for me no longer does, and there is no way to return to the way it was before. I just have a hard time accepting that and starting down a new path, because I now have no idea where I’m going.
SilentDawning wrote:I think you should write in your journal about your feelings. Even if it’s just stream of consciousness as you revisit the topics that have caused you to doubt or want a different relationship with the church.
I have mixed feelings about journaling. I do think it could help to get everything out of my head and onto paper, but every time I attempt it I find my words to be inadequate. My journals always end up sounding embarrassing, and I end up throwing them away. But I do think one reason I am still stuck on my mission is because I have never felt able to completely express the details of what happened and how it affected me, leaving me feeling completely alone with my experience. Writing it down could at least help me feel like my story has been told to someone, even if that someone is myself.
AmyJ wrote:
For the most part, the “crisis of faith” is settled – pretty much everything that was going to fall apart has fallen apart testimony-wise. A lot of the anger and pain has settled down.
I feel like I am at this point spiritually – the collapse of my testimony is pretty much done, and things have already fallen apart. I’m now just looking at the pile of rubble and trying to figure out what to do with it. In a sense this is an ending, but not a very satisfying one until I figure out what comes after.
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I have mixed feelings about journaling. I do think it could help to get everything out of my head and onto paper, but every time I attempt it I find my words to be inadequate. My journals always end up sounding embarrassing, and I end up throwing them away. But I do think one reason I am still stuck on my mission is that I have never felt able to completely express the details of what happened and how it affected me, leaving me feeling completely alone with my experience. Writing it down could at least help me feel like my story has been told to someone, even if that someone is myself.
I agree — do your best to express what you think in MS Word or some electronic medium so you can reflect on and edit what you wrote. Then you can go back to it and change it to reflect your feelings more accurately. I do that sometimes. A couple of weeks ago I wrote a scathing letter to my students in my journal. This one class was being lazy, giving bad early reviews in a course I am teaching for reasons other than teaching excellence, and showing all the signs of eschewing strong academic achievement. I then went back to the letter a few days later and found it embarrassing to read. So I deleted that letter and wrote a softer one with a more professional tone. It eventually captured what I would like to say to them, and then, I had no need to send it because I had communicated my feelings. This whole process brought closure to my feelings on this topic.
I think you might consider a similar approach to writing out your feelings about the church and re-editing it until it’s something you can read and find that it accurately reflects how you feel. This might help you feel closure eventually.
Arrakeen wrote:
I still miss having that sense of community and purpose, and the church was the last place that I found it.
I feel that way too regularly. It’s hard to know where to go to expose yourself as a human to find a community and purpose. Generally, there are several paths that seem to be useful to think about (in my opinion):
– Donating Blood, community drives (like recycling events) and other community efforts seem to be useful. If you show up over and over, others get to know you and talk to you. The specific *cause(s)* will vary – but I found it helpful to volunteer at a no-insurance medical clinic for a while – and that got me out the door.
– We became regulars at the library because it is free and got my girls and myself out of the house.
- Online Communities – there are scads of them. Joining and leaving them can be useful – I do recommend being “picky” about which ones you stay with and monitoring the time spent there a bit sometimes. Your mileage may vary.
Arrakeen wrote:
But at the same time I am realizing what used to work for me no longer does, and there is no way to return to the way it was before. I just have a hard time accepting that and starting down a new path, because I now have no idea where I’m going.
This is both extremely frightening and extremely liberating.
A useful part of it is that there isn’t a “timeline” anymore – the milestones of the “covenant path” don’t necessarily exist, and don’t have timers on them.
This is your season to “craft” the life you want with a lot of freedom of choice.
Arrakeen wrote:
Is it possible to find true closure for a faith journey, or is it a futile search because you never really know if you’ve reached the destination? How do I reconcile who I was before my faith crisis with who I am after, moving on towards the future without erasing the past? How do I know if it is still worth trying to “StayLDS”, or if doing so is holding me back?Tough questions.
How do I reconcile who I was before my faith crisis with who I am after, moving on towards the future without erasing the past?I wouldn’t be in a position to move into the future that I’m in a position to move into if it wasn’t for the past that brought me to this point. Who I am is is built on a framework of my past. If I took away who I was before joining the church, or took away who I was before serving a mission, or took away who I was before a faith crisis, or took away who I was after a faith transition… if I took away any of those elements I wouldn’t be who I was today.
I don’t necessarily discard elements of my past but I do try to recognize that what I was in the past was what I needed to be in the past, much like what I am now is what I need to be now, and that it won’t be what I need to be in the future. Maybe the lessons is to be more pliant and open to new beliefs and life experiences. Perhaps things that I wasn’t ready to do or even feared pre-faith crisis.
Is it possible to find true closure for a faith journey, or is it a futile search because you never really know if you’ve reached the destination?I’m not sure I’d want to? What is arriving at a destination for a faith journey? To me that would feel like death. But maybe you don’t mean closure in the sense of feeling as though you’ve solved the riddle of the meaning of life, maybe you mean a more tidy end to chapters along the way? What does closure mean to you?
It’s just that… who has solved the great mystery of the meaning of life? People have been at it as long as people have been sentient and we still don’t feel close enough to stick a fork in it. If the whole history of humanity hasn’t figured it out, what are the chances of me figuring it all out in my one lifetime by concentrating on it really, really hard?
You did touch on something. When do you know you’ve reached your destination? For me Mormonism (or maybe just the human condition contextualized by Mormonism) was always about chasing more. More righteous, more perfect, always more; enough was never enough. I hear that struggle color much of what’s said at church. It’s like making the horizon itself the destination, always in sight but impossible to arrive at.
At some point I decided to put it all down, stop chasing. Then I did a thought experiment, suppose I already attained what I’ve been chasing. Whatever I thought I lacked, I already possessed but was too caught up in the chase to realize it. In the Mormon context, stop chasing the celestial kingdom and the afterlife and acknowledge that if life is eternal, time is immaterial. I’m already in the celestial kingdom.
In that spirit the destination wasn’t some minimum level of perfection or some magical knowledge that made all the pieces fit. The destination was radical self-acceptance while still acknowledging that I will change over time. The destination wasn’t arriving somewhere I wasn’t before, it was a realization that it’s okay to stop chasing while still embracing an inner drive to explore.
nibbler wrote:
I’m not sure I’d want to? What is arriving at a destination for a faith journey? To me that would feel like death. But maybe you don’t mean closure in the sense of feeling as though you’ve solved the riddle of the meaning of life, maybe you mean a more tidy end to chapters along the way? What does closure mean to you?
DS is writing a paper for school on his journey as a writer. This culminated in him winning an award for a speech that he wrote. He felt that it would make a nice ending. A agree but I didn’t want to put any finality on it. I wanted to say something like, “I’m excited to see where writing will take me next.” or “little did I know at the time that this was only just the beginning…”
Otherwise it would seem that he had peaked at 14. Knowing how much life is still ahead of him, that just feels wrong.
I want to add to this thread even though it may not be active anymore… I have used about 4 different therapists in my life — one personally, and three for marriage counseling when my wife and I were on the edge of splitting up.
I have found the best therapists are working from some “standard” approach, and not from some self-styled, eclectic “best of” approach based on all the different theories they have studied.
One, an LDS Social Services therapist on my mission used Rational Emotive Therapy, which was effective in helping me overcome some self-esteem problems and misperceptions in my work as a zone leader with contrarian ward leaders and other missionaries. This theory uses logic and leaves you sitting there feeling stupid for erroneous beliefs you have developed about yourself. Not in a bad way, but in a good way. There were times I left the man’s office feeling truly liberated from my erroneous thinking.
The other one, in marriage counseling, used Imago Therapy. He taught me and my wife specific types of dialogues to use to discuss issues in our marriage. While we didn’t ever complete the steps, he did provide us with some techniques that I found helpful — Appreciation Dialogies, a Couple’s Dialog and a Behavior Change Request Dialog.
Just a comment about therapists. The eclectic therapists were not very good, and we broke off our relationship with them pretty early in the counselling process.
I have visited with therapists and counselors a little. The one that has been the most helpful was “trauma-informed” and had experience working with neurodiversity.
I have had experiences that I survived because I figured out ways to adapt and deal with them (that were decently healthy). But the bill has come due – the midlife deconstruction phase is in full swing over here:)
The neurodiversity angle is that “most people don’t think or act like I do” and “the times when I shifted to thinking and acting like those around me” has consequences for me and how I see myself (usually as inferior) and “the times when I stood out and didn’t or couldn’t act like those around me” also have consequences for me. It would have been nice to have had language and information when I was younger about the ways that I think and do things. It would have been easier to see myself as a minority rather than a full-fledged outsider.
AmyJ wrote:
The neurodiversity angle is that “most people don’t think or act like I do” and “the times when I shifted to thinking and acting like those around me” has consequences for me and how I see myself (usually as inferior) and “the times when I stood out and didn’t or couldn’t act like those around me” also have consequences for me. It would have been nice to have had language and information when I was younger about the ways that I think and do things. It would have been easier to see myself as a minority rather than a full-fledged outsider.
Amen. As a parent with a child on the Autism Spectrum, I very much relate to this. Some people are big into not using labels. I feel that labels are already being used, they need to be replaced with more accurate and healthy labels.
P.S. My son and I returned last weekend from the Special Olympics Summer Games (my son delivered his “personal best” and earned a bronze medal). There is something powerful being surrounded by a community that understands.
New guy here. I just wanted to thank everyone for their insights in this thread. The main one that resonated with me was the message about realizing the value of change, of growth. I hope that the OP was able to work with his challenges in a positive way for him. Bruceson wrote:
I hope that the OP was able to work with his challenges in a positive way for him.
Thanks, I’m still working through it all, but making progress!
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