It is easy to understand the worst-case-scenario dangers of LDS worthiness interviews, as a blogger at fMh I’ve been in a position to hear countless renditions of this story, stories of middle-aged men asking young girls and boys very detailed utterly-inappropriate sexual questions, stories of “well-meaning” bishops blaming rape victims for their “loss of virtue”, stories of hard-working dentists and engineers (aka all-male lay clergy) with zero mental-health training (usually accidently) retraumatizing folks who have been abused, bishops grooming women as plural wives.

I’ll be honest, this is not my personal experience with worthiness interviews. In fact I would say that my personal experience with these interviews is as close to “best case scenario” as a person is likely to get. And still, as a mental-health professional (LPC) I cannot overstate my conviction that even when everything goes right, worthiness interviews are deeply harmful and bordering on (mostly unintended) sexual abuse (of generations of children). I know this may sound extreme to a lot of people, it would have sounded extreme to me not so long ago, before I came to a deeper understanding of a variety of cultural and mental health issues.

I don’t blame my (I do believe truly well-meaning) Bishops for this. They were doing-what-they-know, and the subtle thing about “doing what we know” is that almost anything can feel normal when we are used to it.

For me, worthiness interviews felt utterly completely normal, and deeply uncomfortable, and it never occured to me that I was being damaged by them. Even after I had a feminist blog, that for years published people’s stories of ecclesiastical abuse, and it was easy to see the *clearly abusive* aspects of the interviews, it still felt kinda-sorta mostly normal to me, or at least not that bad (when things went well) and even sometimes helpful (when things went really well).

In my first “Human Sexuality in Counseling” class we were asked to share “sex-talk” memories. I shared a memory (pretty normal and not-too-bad) about a worthiness interview in which my bishop was delicately explaining The Law of Chastity to twelve-year-old me, and suddenly, I could see in the eyes of my not-Mormon classmates a level of horror and shock that startled me. This memory that had seemed fairly benign to me was shocking to outsiders. Not shocking because I was describing something horrible and obviously abusive that happened in my interview, but shocking in the very premise of worthiness interviews. Something shocking about an old guy asking twelve-year-old girls about sex.

In that moment, the intellectual understanding that worthiness interviews were inappropriate shifted inside of me into something deeper, and I began to see all my not-too-bad stories through a different lens. On one level this is a fairly common “awakening” story, seeing our culture through an outsider’s lens is excellent way to get a wider view, to shine some light. It doesn’t automatically follow however that the outsider’s view (even as mental-health-professionals-in-training) was more correct than the fairly common view within Mormonism that worthiness interviews play a necessary and important role. To try to understand the gap between their shock and my mostly-normal sense of this situation I started to dig deeper.

The questions I began to ask myself were:

What roles do most Mormons believe that worthiness interviews play?

Are these interviews effective in fulfilling their intended purposes?

What are the unintended mental-health costs of worthiness interviews?

How do these mental health costs play out in people’s lives?

I will try to discuss the first two questions assuming the best of intentions, because I do believe that most of us have good intentions. If you had asked mainstream-orthodox me the purpose of Worthiness Interviews, I think I would have said that worthiness interviews could help people to live the standards of the gospel and repent of their sins when they did not. That Bishops would use their priesthood keys to help people to seek God’s forgiveness and assure that people were worthy of participating in sacred ordinances.

Based upon hearing my clients’ stories and in my own life experience I’d be inclined to say that those outcomes are probably sometimes achieved, depending of course upon how one defines sin and repentance and forgiveness and worthiness. (I could write another whole post about the mental-health problems in some of the ways we define those things.) And “probably sometimes effective” means the flip side is “often not so much”, not to mention “sometimes dangerous and blatantly abusive”. There is no data, so questions of efficacy will remain anecdotal.

But ultimately, if I were to talk to the old-orthodox me, I don’t know that I was particularly interested in the efficacy of the practice, or rather I don’t know that I could have been convinced of the inefficacy of the practice, or even perhaps I could not see the relevance of efficacy, because I was more interested in what I thought (as I’d been taught) God wanted, I was taught that being good and worthy depended upon not doubting or questioning these interviews. This is the rub, because the process of worthiness was not in my hands, I did not feel worthy to make an informed decision about what God wanted, nor to question what I’d been told God wanted. To do so would call my own worthiness into question.

The system itself made the cost of questioning incredibly high, I was not consciously aware of making a choice, but on some level I knew that losing my “worthiness” (as seen by my bishop) would mean losing all of my social capital, potentially losing identity, family, belonging, purpose, and faith.

And this catch 22 is the crux of the deep mental health costs I see in the worthiness interview process. I would define this problem as having three layers 1. That worthiness is externalized: someone else, someone who often hardly knows me, always has more authority than I do to decide if I’m worthy, and 2. that worthiness is constantly questioned: even if I’m deemed worthy, at any time, for any reason one guy can take that worthiness away, and there is nothing I can do about it and 3. worthiness is inextricably tied to “worth”, my very worth is seen as fragile and changeable and outside of my control. This framework teaches the opposite of the sound evidence-based therapeutic mental health principles.

This is in fact a perfect hot house for shame production. Most of my clients (LDS or not) struggle with shame on some level, every LDS client uses the word “unworthy” to describe this feeling, and not once has the word “unworthy” come out of the mouth of a non-LDS client. Not once. Many of these Mormon clients, like myself, had best-case-scenario worthiness interview experiences, many of them are active, believing, and orthodox and yet this word “worthiness” dwells deep and is doing daily damage.

Shame can be confusing, sometimes we wonder if perhaps we *should* feel shame, when we have done something wrong, when we need to repent. Let me clear this up, we often use the words “shame” and “guilt” interchangeably, but in most psychological circles they have separate and distinct meanings. Guilt is an internal process, it’s the thing we feel when our behaviors are not line with our values and morals, guilt questions our behavior. Shame is an external process, it’s what we feel when we feel judged by others, shame questions our value, lovability, and belonging. Guilt says, “I did something bad, I don’t like hurting others, I’d like to change.” Shame says, “I am bad, I’m not good enough, I better hide my badness or no one will love me.”

Guilt tends to help folks use their mistakes to learn and grow, they tend to feel connected to the people they love, and they tend to use healthy coping mechanisms and show resilience when dealing with life’s struggles. Shame tends to lead folks to hide their fears of unworthiness (if people knew how bad I really was they wouldn’t love me), secrecy and silence tends to lead toward isolation and loneliness (even when surrounded by people) and it often leads toward unhealthy numbing and coping, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and feeling out-of-control around self-soothing behaviors like drugs, alcohol, sex, and porn. Furthermore, we can feel shame about all kinds of things that have nothing to do with our morals or beliefs. We feel shame *anytime* we do something that doesn’t align with social norms, including flicking boogers on the couch or having zits. Shame is simply not an effective monitor of morality.

To be clear, I do not remember being taught that I was actually worthless if I did not “pass” a worthiness interview. Mormon theology clearly teaches that we have divine nature which I have always believed means that we are in fact never worthless, and could never be worthless. And yet “I feel unworthy” was a defining aspect of my life until I did a lot of deep work to build shame resilience, and I see this theme play out over and over again in all kinds of LDS and former Mormon clients. Somehow we learn to feel deeply “unworthy” through indirect or implied teachings and practices such as worthiness interviews.

I think that most Bishops are hopeful that worthiness interviews will be a healing and positive experience for their congregants, much as I hope that my therapy session with clients are healing and positive. And yet everything I have learned about effective therapy requires a strong “therapeutic alliance” at the heart of which is something psychology likes to call “unconditional positive regard” which is a fancy way of saying something like “unconditional love” or “I believe in your desire and ability to grow toward self-actualization” the same thing I think Mormons would call “divine nature” and other christians might call “grace.” Everything I have ever read that researches resilience and growth (including post-traumatic growth) emphasizes the role of belonging and safe & affirming attachments to the healing process. In other words, social rejection and threats to belonging are highly predictive of PTSD, Depression, and Anxiety disorders.

And worthiness interviews are a pre-packaged, ever present, unceasing, threat to belonging. I know we don’t *mean* it that way. We aren’t intending to threaten anyone’s belonging when we are judging people’s worthiness, but that’s just how it works. If some random person pointed at me and said “You’re bad” or “You’re unworthy”, I would not feel inclined to move closer and get to know that person, to belong with that person. I would have an instant defensive wall up, because that feels very unsafe. I would not try harder to do my best for that person, because I would feel I’d already failed. Moral judgment like this always creates distance, it always feels judgmental, I’m convinced this is the reason Jesus said “Judge not”, because when we are judgmental we condemn ourselves to loneliness.

Which is not to say we can’t use wise judgment to determine if a behavior is good or bad, effective or ineffective at getting our needs met, but that is a different thing than determining if a person is good or bad, worthy or unworthy.

I would like to point out that the consequences of this reach far beyond sexual sin. I hear stories of folks feeling “threats to belonging” for being in a part member family, for being abused, for being a person of color, for not wearing a white shirt, for not being neurotypical, for not going on a mission, for not having family home evening.

My orthodox voice would like to point out that worthiness interviews “shouldn’t” imply that if a person is found unworthy, that unworthiness is forever, if they go through the repentance process they will be forgiven and the slate will be wiped clean. I agree that this is what we teach, but in practice the minute we share our sins with the bishop, this process is entirely outside of our control. The bishop determines how serious our sin is (and this varies widely from ward to ward), the bishop determines the consequence, and the bishop is the one who will tell us when we are right with God. This removes our agency, our relationship with God, and our own feelings from the process. For instance if the bishop tells me I am forgiven, why do I still feel guilty, did I forget to tell him some detail, did I leave something out, have I committed another wrong? I can’t tell you how many perfectly normal and healthy people I know who spent hundreds of hours torturing themselves wondering if their (pretty tame) make-out sessions needed to be reported to the bishop, or agonizing if they should confess to french kissing their spouse since the last bishop told them that french kissing was always bad even after marriage, or wondering if every stray sexual thought meant they would not live with their forever family.

This is what I am talking about how even “best case scenario” worthiness interviews border on (unintended) sexual abuse. This level of anxiety and fear around sexuality is toxic. And it is a direct result of a system that undermines and inhibits normal healthy sexuality and adult moral development. That is abusive and unacceptable.

When we do not “feel worthy” to determine for ourselves if our behaviors are in line with our morals and beliefs, we can not make solid grown-up decisions about our behaviors and their consequence, we can not consult with own conscious and with God to determine if our actions are ethical and moral. And when every bishop has a different idea about what is right and wrong, our ability to determine what we should do is shaky and unpredictable. There is no way to avoid feeling helpless, lost, and anxious when we do not feel we have the ability to be right with ourselves and with God with any kind of predictability.

I’m sure if you’ve gotten this far in the essay you are wondering what could be done with this process to make it better. I’ll be honest, I have little hope for that. I know many parents are talking to bishops about sitting in with their children to assure that nothing inappropriate happens, and this is an action I fully endorse, but in the end it does not address the deeper issues here. That we are not teaching our children to be responsible for their own moral choices, that their worth is immutable, and that their belonging should never be threated. That many of us are barely learning this ourselves.

I can’t think of a way to make the process less problematic to mental health outcomes, I think changing the name away from the word “worthiness” would be a small start, but not enough. Our worth, our divine nature, must always be assumed to be unquestionable. Our ability to determine if our behaviors are in line with our values must be a personal and internal process (it just doesn’t work any other way). Our desires to move toward behaviors that make the world more beautiful and wonderful must be believed in and trusted by our leaders and our people. And I know that orthodox me would remain unmoved by all of these statements, because the cost of questioning would have been too high. That is how shame works.