Dealing with feelings of betrayal — when your spouse apostatizes

Great informative post Stephen. Thanks so much for sharing. I have favourited those links

Great thoughts. I have always wondered why people in the church as a whole have such a hard time loving those who leave. Sometimes I think the response makes things worse. I left a little over a year ago. And for the first year I really thought about going back on a regular basis. But the experience I had with members of the church left me realizing that not knowing what I wanted to do was simply not ok. There was so many assumptions were quite difficult. People just couldn’t understand that I could no longer carry my doubts of the gospel in addition to the other heavy loads I had to carry. After 9 straight years (starting at age 24) of a living hell and finding that I simply could not do it all.

If more people were willing to have that love and patience I know I would be more likley to give it another shot once my other burdens ease up. I would be willing to give trying despite my doubts another chance. The problem is that most people I have encountered cannot take the patience part.

I know that people I am close to feel betrayed that I left. The flip-side is that I felt betrayed when I found out certain aspects of church history or docterines. I also felt betrayed that so many people chalked up my leaving to weakness or sin.

I think all parties feel betrayed when someone leaves. Both the people who leave, and those who stay and want the other party to stay.

Ray, perhaps my experience is based on my parents in particular. Maybe it is 99% psychological. However, as a member of the church, I was always looking to be touched by the spirit, I fasted prayed, did everything I was supposed to do, went on a mission and got married in the temple. However, all I felt was a feeling that I would never be good enough or worthy enough.

Now, I have questioned the very existence of God, or if Jesus was even a real person, or just some made up fairy tale.

Zelph,

What you wrote triggered some things, and makes me feel like unloading a bit.

I do well to remember that we are in a church where a leader once advised us to chain someone’s arms to a bedpost rather than countenance them masturbating. When we say that the church hasn’t been perfect – it really, really hasn’t been perfect. The doctrines have always been there – waiting in the collective unconscious of the church, as Neal Maxwell once said – but they haven’t always been foregrounded in ways that would have been helpful to so many of us. I also think that with perfectly good intensions, and even some inspiration, folks made statements that, while true strictly speaking in and of themselves, have completely failed to make space for the mercy, long-suffering and liberal nature of God – and also failed to take into account the moral ambiguity and difficulty that we find in a fallen world, where our very own nature works against us. Yes – we need to be striving to keep the commandments – but it is also not required that we run faster than we have strength. I think that many of us have felt that the compnaionship of the Spirit was something that we earned – I mean, you know, if we took a sideways glance at the wine section as we walked through the store that might be cause to lose the Holy Ghost. That we sanctify ourselves for the Spirit rather understaning that ultimately we are sanctified BY the Spirit.

For me, it played out like this. I didn’t go on a mission, I kept hidden that I had no interest in it whatsoever – because I loved my parents, and especially my mother, who put so much stock in me going. Also, since every worthy young man of course desires to go, to confess that it had no place in me meant that I was terribly flawed. I was UNworthy. It was a real dilemna for me. I solved it, literally, by getting my girlfriend pregnant and getting married. That was how drastic it was in my poor addled head. I couldn’t bring myself to simply say, “I don’t want to go” or “I don’t have a testimony of the kind that makes me want to go.” In other words, the space that I’d grown up in made it very very difficult for me to tell the truth. I see now that unwittingly a whole culture, and my parents, with nothing but good intentions, had been exercising unrigheous dominion on me. It shouldn’t be hard to admit – it is the nature and disposition of virtually everyone, why not us, as well.

Anyway – after getting married – I was still only 20, I decided to find out if I should take the church seriously. I will cut that short by simply saying that it lead to a period of intense activity between the ages of 20 and 25. I did indeed have the Spirit, and had spirtual experiences of what I saw as an exceptional nature. My marriage, however, was very very difficult. This is a public forum, and my ex-wife is still in the church, and is sometimes a friend of mine, and so I won’t go into that too much. And, obviously, there is everything that I brought negative to the relationship – which, over the years, I’ve come to see as a lot. But, she had had a very difficult childhood – about as bad as I was able to imagine at that time. (I’ve since heard worse.) I see and know now that she was trying very hard with what she knew and had, but most of what she had was hurt. I really hate the fact that I, against what I imagined could come from me, brought more pain into her life. I went in basically beleiving that if you were kind, everything would work out. And I also believed that if I was 100%, that the Lord would soften her heart, and make things easier for me, bless me for the righteous desires of my heart. (I’ve come to understand that you can’t manipulate a person by your own attempts at righteousness, and that it is wrong to try.) And so I went hard to work. I was as 100% as you can get: home teaching, tithing, temple, everything. This is what we are taught: obedience = blessings. And I was blessed for that, looking back – but not in the ways I expected, or that I saw at the time. Instead of getting easier, my marriage got harder and harder. Everything got harder. And the tenision between what I thought would happen and what did happen ground and ground at me, and there were constant emotional assaults, till one night sitting in the dark I found myself considering suicide, and thinking of it as a good idea – and that scared me pretty good, and lead to a series of decisions that culminated in divorce. It is strange that I haven’t really thought about this in a long time – and how fresh some of the feelings are for me. Was I commiting sins? Yes, I see now, though I have barely recognized it, that by this time I had begun to commit sins taht would later intensify. I didn’t really know how to offer up my broken heart to God. I understood little about grace, in part because, while the doctrines were there and I had been taught them, the much stronger emphasis had been on following the carnal law and conforming outwardly to certain norms. I didn’t really understand that I should offer my heart, I didn’t understand what the Lord wanted me to be, what it was that I was meant to sacrifice.

Around this time I fell in love with the wife of a friend of mine – a woman who is still a friend to this day, who I care about a great deal, although for everyone’s good we don’t see each other often. (I’m still friends with her husband, too, I’m happy to say. He’s a very good guy, rather unlike me in many respects.) Again, this is a public forum, and this is something I could write hundreds of pages about. But I wanted to write it, because it certainly was a contributing factor in everything that happened. Again, I can hardly find fault. No one’s deepest intensions were evil. But faults were there, we are fallen people. There is a lot that happened, some of it seems almost cliche at this distance. I had a run in with a bishop who accused me, claiming that if I hadn’t committed certain sins I wouldn’t find myself in the situation I was in. He was right that I had committed some sins – though nothing like what I would later do – but the specific things he accused me of are things that, then and now, are not a part of my nature. I recall that he became very angry, red in the face and shouting, and I remember thinking to myself “this is the voice of the church speaking to you.” I could hardly believe it. I expected that I would get healing, and I was getting more grief. Again this is a public forum, and I should add that this man and I came to understand each other a little bit, admitted his own mistake in the incidient, and in many ways behaved very helpfully in some things that followed. And, beyond that, he is a person that I really like.

It is so easy to take all the conflicting factors and sum them up in one statment. I want to say, after the divorce it was simply easier to not go to church. And that is probably the biggest thing that contributed to me leaving. But, I was beginning to commit serious sins, and wanted to commit some others. Anyway, I quit going. I felt immensely free of several years of tension, and that first year away from the church was one of the happiest of my life. I never denied the spiritual expereinces that had happened to me in my early 20s, and I kept them in my heart, and would think about them from time to time, with more than a littel confusion. But I no longer sought for more. After a number of years, I saw some other things that I didn’t imagine I would – and I myself became, not a very good person, not really trying to be. (Because, in spite of everything, I always have thought of myself as a basically good person it is tough to reconcile myself to some way that I became, things that I did, pain that I caused. One lesson is how difficult it is to become aware of the shadowy side of one’s own nature.)

I did, of course, eventually come back to the church. In many ways, things I’m going through now mirror some of those earlier difficulties. I’ve been 100%, I’ve made a genuine good faith effort, and yet I haven’t been blessed with all the things I thought I would be. But, I’ve learned that what the Lord wants for me is something quite different from the pictures I’ve painted, and that have been painted for me. Do I feel free, oh yes.

This is what I wanted to write. It was triggered by this: “I fasted prayed, did everything I was supposed to do, went on a mission and got married in the temple.” Because I know that you can make a really truly good faith effort at righteousness, and still not get what you think is in store for you. Also, I think many, maybe even most, active members of the church don’t recognize the Spirit working in thier lives. What I know is that it is possible to be keeping the commandments, and be really trying, and still not find the thing that you need to find. Because sometimes there is a fatal flaw, a thing that we need to see that we just aren’t seeing. That is one reason why the Lord is so patient with us. Even Jesus learned. In His last moment he had the Spirit withdrawn from Him, and He couldn’t understand why. But then He did understand, and it was finished. It may be, Zelph, that you will have a particular set of insights that you can use to bless many people. Just don’t think the journey is over when you’re only half way through.

much love to you mah brutha!

~

Carlos, That’s an incredibly broad statement. I know there are insensitive members who are judgmental and might say such things, but the vast majority of those I have known in my lifetime aren’t like that.

Having said that, I think issues like this (nosy, jedgmental people in general – NOT just Mormons) are exacerbated in close-knit communities where everyone knows everyone and it’s all too easy to take sides. Hence, this is more of an issue in rural areas than in the cities – in wards that are 4 blocks squared – in congregations where there is a dominant family of 12 adult kids who all live in the same town and populate every organizational presidency – etc.

There is obviously a lot to know about this. I think you made some good points about how to relationships work.