Mormonism taught me that what I now know as mental illness was the result of insufficient righteousness or outright sin. It taught me this both directly and indirectly. The only way to be healed was to repent of every last speck of sin, do good constantly, and beg Jesus to fix me. Then wait patiently for him to notice all the backlogged prayers.¹

Amazingly, those methods were not helpful. I believe I went above and beyond the expected level of effort — religious scrupulosity is one of the manifestations of my mental illness (and will be a recurring topic when I write about my own experiences), and it meant that I grew up in constant anxiety over whether I was being righteous enough, not only in my actions and words but even in my private thoughts. I wasn’t perfect, but goddamn did I try hard, and I repented even harder when I felt I had fallen short.²

I was trapped in endless mental loops. Basic assumptions, many with no valid basis in reality or ethics, were indoctrinated into me before I was capable of critical thinking or personal choice. That’s bad enough, but even worse is the way that these assumptions (“beliefs”) come preloaded with defenses against later examination and critical thinking (the greatest dangers to indoctrinated ideas everywhere).

Some of these defenses are thought-stopping clichés (e.g. “God works in mysterious ways”, “We just have to have faith, and everything will make sense in the next life”). Others, far more effective on a young scrupulous me, are doctrines condemning questions, doubts, and in fact the slightest suggestion that anything in the scriptures or teachings of modern leaders was inconsistent or harmful or anything other than inspired.

Essentially, the indoctrination I internalized from a very young age was an extremely sophisticated mental virus. It took up residence in my mind, took over many of my thought processes and choices, and it fooled my mental immune system into believing it was was vital to my continued (spiritual) health. I’d no sooner allow myself to question it than I would question the sharpness of a nail with the bare sole of my foot.

But I had a reflective, introspective nature (and also very few friends), so of course I thought a lot about all the stories and doctrines and practices that were supposed to be so heavily involved in my salvation.

Mainstream modern mormonism has about 2000 pages of canonized scripture, three hours minimum of church services and classes every Sunday (even for little kids with social anxiety and restless legs), with hundreds of manuals and handbooks and lesson plans to be used there, and at home on Monday nights (church-decreed family night), and in hour-long classes every weekday for teens, and so on.

To the introspection and frequent church-mandated time, add the fact that I was a serious reader from an early age, and felt that god expected me to study all I could, and it’s not surprising that I ran into a lot of inconsistencies and troubling questions, very early on. Most of these centered on inconsistencies between the supposed goodness of god and the terrible things attributed to his express command.

The guy who tells Moses “thou shalt not murder” is ordering Moses & friends to commit multiple genocides not many pages later. The guy who’s supposed to have revealed to Joseph Smith that, “he denieth none that come unto him, black and white, bond and free, male and female; and he remembereth the heathen; and all are alike unto God, both Jew and Gentile” (2 Nephi 26:33) also banned black people from the highest heavens, and black men from the priesthood, until 1978.

…Um, well, or maybe just chalk that up to imperfect men? And maybe god really wanted to fix the mistake but the members of the church weren’t ready for it? (Though that doesn’t seem to have stopped, oh, polygamy from being a thing…) Point is, somebody obviously shit the bed on that one. It was so obvious.

It was so obvious, and yet impossible to contemplate for long. Because this same dangerous, capricious, genocidal guy in outer space was constantly reading my mind and watching for me to so much as think something unrighteous.

Only instead of a pistol, he’d use, like, damnation lasers or something.

This whole mess — the contradictions of doctrine, of versions of history, and of avowed morals against incongruent actions and policies, not to mention the need for constant vigilance against private thoughtcrime — weighed heavy on me. And whose fault was that? The other kids in my youth Sunday school class never seemed troubled by any of it, after all; so what was wrong with me?

Maybe I wouldn’t have these issues, I told myself, if I hadn’t seen topless tribal women in the National Geographic and liked it so much.³

That’s a joke now, but it wasn’t at the time. Mormonism gave me a magical worldview. When people say “with God, all things are possible,” they usually mean “maybe I’ll get what I want even though it’s unlikely to happen” — and I had my fair share of sending wishes to god like letters to Santa, except that I would inevitably feel guilty about being selfish when there were much worse things in the world that needed god’s attention first. But no one but me seemed to be thinking of the flip side of “with God, all things are possible”: any goddamn thing can happen at any time for any reason.

“See, Jesus, this is why you’re my favorite son. Lucifer would have just tried to give them knowledge or some stupid shit like that.”

The magical worldview was directly at odds with empiricism and rational thought; how could I trust the scientific method when my trickster god was liable to go unwinding cause and effect to further whatever zany adventures he was having?

I wish I could say I had a sudden, dramatic realization that, as Tim Minchin puts it, “Throughout history, every mystery ever solved has turned out to be…not magic.”⁴ That this god person’s interactions with the human world come at a directly inverse proportion to human understanding of natural phenomena. And so on. But it was not sudden or action-packed; science seldom works that way.

Instead, I grew up a little, then a little more. I went from high school to one year of college at BYU⁵, then a two-year mission, then back to BYU. I read and studied and learned everything I could. I stayed troubled about the inconsistencies of my religion, and I kept burying my concerns as deep as I could and just trying to be the best person I could be. I studied a number of branches of science, and although science was always taught as a series of facts more than a means of discovering new knowledge, empiricism did make some headway in my mind.

Meanwhile, things at church just got more and more ethically troubling. I had all kinds of privilege in mormonism, being white, male, straight, and American, and grew more and more aware of how different the mormon experience could be for people of color, women, non-hetero and non-cis people, and non-Americans (who are not the primary audience of mormonism, and have less access to information about it).

I also had more compassion for others than I had for myself. So when close friends expressed what it was like to live with mental illness in a church that teaches mental illness isn’t real, or comes from sin, or should be treated with prayer and patience rather than medical help, my heart broke for them. I begged god to help me understand why they were treated that way.

But for the longest time, I couldn’t see that I was really one of them. This slowly transitioned into seeing, but refusing to believe — I got really good at rationalizing and downplaying things as a mormon — but eventually the weight of it all was too much. I didn’t just need to pray longer, harder, or more sincerely. My problems weren’t the kind that could be treated by attending even more secret mormon temple rituals, or studying the scriptures even more fervently, or thinking even less about myself and doing more service that I didn’t have the energy or time to do.

Instead, I had a crippling cocktail of anxiety, depression, and what I would later come to know as obsessive-compulsive disorder with a focus on religious and moral scrupulosity. They came from a complex set of environmental, genetic, chemical, and neurological factors, not because god wasn’t satisfied with my efforts. In fact, whether or not this god existed, he certainly gave zero apparent fucks about my suffering or my pleas for help.

I had mental illnesses, and they were real and legitimate and describable in purely naturalistic terms, with no place for the supernatural. And my own mind had fought for years to keep me from this important realization. That fucker.

— Why had I believed things that were false? Some were obvious, others less so. Many had harmful effects on me or others, or at very least were parasites that contributed nothing to my existence. Why had I not only believed them, but struggled to maintain them in spite of both fact and their observable effects?

— What else did I believe, even then, that would end up being false when I looked straight at it for the first time? What other beliefs would need to be demolished, and what foundation would I be left with?

— How could I know anything?

These are scary questions. When you’ve based your whole life and identity on assumptions and ways of thinking that no longer work, it can feel like the ground has dissolved beneath your feet and you’re in an eternal freefall. Worse, people who still subscribe to the faulty assumptions seldom take it well when others bring them into question; the social pressure to still act like a believer can be immense. For me, it was almost as bad as the internal pressure of my scrupulosity’s last-ditch effort to maintain its hold on my mind.

But even with all that distress, I was also relieved. I was no longer split between irreconcilable demands. I no longer felt obligated to justify the unjustifiable or rationalize the irrational. And I had a starting point: the knowledge that my consciousness was not as rational as it thought itself to be. That some cognitive traps are invisible at first, that they might even seem to be a necessary part of the self — but that even these can be escaped.

How? With metacognition, thinking about thinking. Why do I think the things I think, and believe the things I believe? What qualifies as “knowledge” and how can I test ideas or facts that I think I know? Empiricism, rational thought, skepticism.

My mind is prone to distorted and irrational thinking. So is yours, although perhaps less so than mine; it’s not a contest. It doesn’t matter. Realizing and accepting that you are susceptible to cognitive traps might be a disappointment compared to thinking you know everything with total certainty, but get the fuck over it! The person with perceived total certainty will go on believing every dumbass thing they believe, but you and I stand a fighting chance. We know our vulnerability and so we can examine, scrutinize, and test beliefs. Little by little, we can become less and less wrong.