I was born to wonderful, loving parents and raised in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Life was good, until age 11, when I was groomed and molested by an adult relative. The abuse continued for many months until it was finally uncovered, but unfortunately it was treated as equal part my fault and his. I was sent to my bishop to confess my "sins," was put on church discipline for a few weeks, and was then expected to forget what happened as my sin had therefore been forgiven. My abuser promptly left on his mission, everyone moved on, and I was left to largely manage the trauma of the experience on my own. I hid away any thoughts of the abuse, as well as the shame and self-loathing that came along with it, as if I were hiding bags of putrid trash under my floor boards. I couldn't see the trash, but I could smell the stench, and it made me feel terrible. Through my teenage years, I experienced intense anxiety and depression which made it hard to make friends and feel comfortable in my own skin. I engaged all the addictive behaviors I could in order to not smell that trash - I drank alcohol, smoked marijuana, and looked at pornography to dull the pain. These behaviors only reinforced my feelings of shame, as now I was committing "real" sins, and God was surely judging me harshly for them. Nevertheless, at age 15, by the grace of God and through His spirit, I was given a witness of the truth existing in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. I stopped most of the destructive behaviors, and I managed to pull my life together enough to get out on a mission at age 19, and it was a great experience.
When I returned home, I started community college, moved out, and felt like things were going decent. However, the social anxiety began to return as I confronted dating and real relationships. I had never had a romantic relationship before age 21, and this new reality exploded my anxiety. I transferred to BYU after a couple years, but being in a new environment and having to make a new set of friends only amplified the anxiety further. The sustained anxiety led to significant depression, which led me to get re-acquainted with pornography, which does a great job of dulling emotional pain. More positively, I engaged the help of the on-campus counseling services, and I also had an incredible bishop who listened to me and didn't dismiss my emotional struggles out of hand. He even started a small, anonymous group of ward members who came to him with emotional issues. Around this time, in one of my many conversations with this bishop, he asked me why I thought I was dealing with all these struggles. The childhood abuse popped into my mind, and I mentioned to him that is was something that had happened, and his eyes got wide, and he said "That is a big deal, and it was not your fault." I replied that it was at least part my fault and that it wasn't a big deal, I had "repented" of it years ago. He repeated his statement, and when I still disagreed, he jumped up on his desk (in his suit) and forcefully told me again that it wasn't my fault. This moment hit me like a hundred lightning bolts. For the very first time I considered that my mental struggles might be related to my abuse, and it sent me spinning. This experience had the effect of ripping up the floor boards and exposing all the trash that had been stinking up my life….and that stench was significantly worse than the hidden version. The pain was intense, and I went into a brutal spiral. I started drinking alcohol compulsively and came perilously close to suicide a couple of times. The only thing that saved me was being able to talk with my bishop and a few friends that I had made through the group the bishop had formed. As an extension of all of this, I began to wonder where God was. I was angry the church had caused so much of this pain in the first place, and it became very triggering for me to participate. I got to a point where I wanted nothing to do with God or the church, and I decided that I was done. In fact, I started to question my whole life up to this point. It felt like I needed to re-do my adolescence, and that included going out and seeing what life was like outside of the LDS bubble. All of this led me to a hardship withdrawal from all my classes at BYU just four weeks before the semester was over. I left BYU and moved back to Arizona.
After moving home, I started to live as an ex-Mormon. As many others who have left the church have reported, you feel an initial sense of relief when you let go of the "restrictions" the church puts on you. All of a sudden, I didn't have to feel bad for all the "sinful" behaviors I wanted to do. I connected with an old roommate who had come out as gay and had left the church, and we got an apartment together. This period opened my eyes to the difficult experience of being gay and a member of the church, and I learned much and made many friends from that community. Also during this period I began intense weekly therapy. Over the next 8 years, I probably saw 10 different therapists, from counselors to life coaches to psychologists and psychiatrists. I tried many different psych medications, some of which helped, but I also continued to self-medicate with a lot of alcohol and drugs. My drinking and drug use got so bad that my roommate staged a mini intervention, and I ended up moving out.
Over the next few years I tried to improve my mental health with therapy while trying to not ruin myself with substances and partying. As I got better emotionally, I slowly started to get tired of my lifestyle, and I began to start asking myself the "big" life questions again. I had come to identify as agnostic, and yet I was uncomfortable not having an answer to why everything was. I studied philosophy and arguments for and against God, and I came to the conclusion that I could see almost as much evidence against the existence of a God as for one. To me, it felt like a choice, one that I had to make on faith, either way. I decided that the order of all things in the universe made it less likely there was no creator, so I decided to believe. I began to explore all religions, including Taoism and Buddhism. I read books on philosophy, and I visited churches of different Christian denominations. However, nothing seemed to fully satisfy my questions or seem to connect me all the way to God like I was hoping to find. Ever since I had left the Church, I always had in the back of my mind the experience I had with the Holy Ghost as a teenager, and I felt like I needed to reconcile that at some point. Now that I had kind of exhausted all the other avenues, I decided I had to give The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints a fair shot, even though I desperately didn't want to reach the conclusion it was true! I found my old Book of Mormon, pulled it out, and began to read. Almost immediately I was filled with this feeling, something I recognized but hadn’t felt in a long time. It was warm and comforting and definitely different than what I had been feeling over the last several years. I closed the book and went back to my regular lifestyle, and the feeling went away. But now and again, I would come back and read, and every time I did that feeling would return. It stood out dramatically in contrast to the feelings I was getting from my regular activities, and it felt so much more desirable. So, I decided to attempt to go back to the church I started in. Although difficult at first, I enjoyed integrating socially with the members of the church, and I felt like I wanted to make changes… but I also wasn't completely convinced of the virtue of The Gospel and I continued to enjoy my old lifestyle. One night I made some extra-poor choices, and the next day I was feeling very dark, very depressed. I wasn't sure where I was and where God was. In this state, I opened my e-mail and there was a random message from a friend I had made years before at BYU, who knew of my struggles and was there when I decided to leave the church. I hadn't spoken to her in years - or even thought about her - and yet here was this message. It was simple, all she said was "I don't know if this is still your e-mail address, or if you will get this, but I just feel like I want to tell you that God loves you and cares about you." As I read these words I was hit with The Spirit, a massive feeling that I recognized from being a teenager. I began to sob and immediately I dropped to my knees in prayer. I felt this overwhelming closeness to God and I knew for sure that He knew me, that He had been watching me this whole time, and that I needed to pursue Him if I wanted to find the peace I was looking for. I responded to this friend, telling her all that had been going on and how her message impacted me. She responded, telling me the reason she sent the email was that she had been sitting in church and had asked God who she could help or reach out to and my name popped into her mind. She was surprised, because she hadn't thought about me in years, but she fired off that small message, and it changed my life.
After this experience I did two things - one, I went to the bishop and told him that I wanted to repent, to come back and be a full member of the church again. Two, I decided that if I was going to be a Christian, then I needed to allow God to tell me what I needed to do and what He wanted me to know, and I needed to be willing to follow whatever I was taught. I did not want to only believe in the God I wanted to believe in, but I wanted Him to reveal Himself to me and teach me the truth. So I began to study the scriptures and learn, and I attempted to forsake my sins and live in The Spirit. The learning part went well, but the forsaking of the sins proved much more difficult than I might have thought. I kept trying - and failing - to stop looking at pornography or to resist the pull to use drugs and drink alcohol. I attended the church's Addiction Recovery Program, both for alcohol and for pornography, but I couldn't shake the addictions. After about a year, I gave up. I decided that it was just too hard to live "righteously," and I stopped going to church again. I returned to the lifestyle that was much easier and more comfortable.
I did not, however, stop believing in the truth of the Gospel of Jesus; I just felt like I couldn't live it. Another year went by like this, and I considered moving to another state for a life change; but by the grace of God, I was given a vision of what my life would look like if I made that choice. I could see that by moving I would likely never participate in the Church again, and that I was at a literal crossroads in my life. Up to this point, it had felt like my choices had been largely driven by necessity, and for the first time it felt like I was healthy enough and mature enough to make a real decision. I contemplated both sides and, ultimately, I decided that if I believed The Church of Jesus Christ contained truth and God wanted me to be in it, then I needed to do what it would take to be all the way in. I couldn't live between both worlds…so I chose in. I began meeting with the bishop and I told him that I wanted to get my temple recommend. Through significant help from the Holy Ghost, I stopped drinking and using drugs, and I even managed to stop looking at pornography. Nine months later, I sat in my bishop's office and I answered all the temple recommend questions with tears streaming down my face. I knew I had a testimony of Jesus Christ, and that it was only by His power and grace I was sitting there, making this progress in my life.
With this new-found commitment, I moved over to the local singles ward, and within a year I was married to the most beautiful, kind, and loving person I have ever known. Marriage didn't suddenly solve my emotional issues, however, and I continued with therapy and Xanax to manage my anxiety. I improved somewhat, but eventually Xanax began to have a stronger hold on me than I felt comfortable with. I would try to stop, only to find myself digging through cabinets hoping I had hid some somewhere. It was around this time that I was introduced to Melanie Kasper, the life coach who finally brought together the psychology, science, and spirituality that I needed to continue progressing. In the several years I spent as a client, I learned truths about myself and about God that I had never heard before, and that took my spirituality to another level. I was able to finally break my addiction to Xanax, and I found myself gaining progressively more peace and knowledge as I consistently applied the principles she taught me.
Eventually, I progressed enough to feel that for me to finally move beyond my abuse, I needed to remove the shame I felt and stop hiding that part of my life. So, I posted on Facebook about my history, and I started a small group for other LDS men who had a history of sexual abuse. This group brought me an incredible amount of joy, as I connected with other men towards whom I felt I could provide a level of understanding and support. I loved working with them so much that I considered the idea of becoming a life coach myself, hoping that I could use my experience and the principles I had learned to really help other people. And that's where I am today. As I look back, I feel only gratitude to God for the way my character has changed and grown through the years of pain, struggle, and learning. I know that we are on this earth to align our thoughts and character with that of our Savior, and I am positive that without the darkness I have experienced I would not be able to fully appreciate the light I currently live in. My ultimate hope and prayer is that I can be of service to someone else the same way I have been helped by so many others.