Linked wrote: ↑Tue Oct 04, 2022 3:30 pm
alas wrote: ↑Mon Oct 03, 2022 4:10 pm
I was thinking that without purity culture, we don’t even need the Savior. The atonement as taught in most of Christianity is all about making us clean from our sins, not learning from our mistakes. My first counselor was an exMormon who had converted as an adult, and he was careful not to destroy my faith in the church, but once he said that with Mormons, it isn’t about repentance, it is about absolution. Repentance requires that you learn and change. Absolution just washes it away as if it never was. He was talking about how the church was coddling my father and not requiring that he prove that he has changed. It was about how my father is so nice to the bishop, but still emotionally abusive to my mom. But absolution is the only “repentance” Mormons know. It is all through Mormonism. It is all about how Christ will pay the price and how He will suffer for us so we don’t have to. It isn’t really about learning, but the atonement is about getting out of punishment, getting out of suffering for our sins. But I know personally, when I repent, that takes the misery of knowing that I screwed up and hurt someone. That is painful, but I really would not want Christ to take that pain away, because the pain comes from knowing I hurt someone. If I don’t feel that, then I don’t learn and I do it again.
This is really insightful.
One of the things the church sells is this absolution for sins. If you mormon hard enough then you don't have to go through the hard process of recognizing the pain you cause and working to make it right for those you injured. Instead, if you go to the bishop with hat in hand then you are forgiven. And if the injured person doesn't accept you back and love you then THEY are the one who are in the wrong.
That absolution is not the church's to give. There is no 3rd-party leger that the offender and victim need to go to in order to know if they are good or not.
This absolution short circuits the natural course of the relationship between offender and victim. What the victim needs from the offender to repair the relationship is the victim's prerogative. If the offense feels great enough then the victim is right to end that relationship. But the church claims ownership of what is required of the offender and determining what the victim has a right to.
It further screws things up when a victim feels like they just need to forgive, and they can't because their needs aren't being met. The victim is not taught the tools they need to figure out how to heal and move on. They don't know how to name and express their need for space or behavior changes because the church tells them that if they demand space or behavior changes then they are not forgiving right. So even if the relationship could be repaired the church mangles the repair process.
So even if the relationship could be repaired the church mangles the repair process.
So even if the relationship could be repaired the church mangles the repair process.
So even if the relationship could be repaired the church mangles the repair process.
So even if the relationship could be repaired the church mangles the repair process.
That last sentence, so many times that last sentence.
What I found in counseling sexual abuse victims is that if the offender was a relative, the church forbade the victim from any anger. But if the offender was a stranger, anger was quite understandable. Think Elizabeth Smart. She was allowed to be angry.
But then consider who feels most betrayed by the abuse. You trust your relatives, so they have the bigger trust violation, so the victim has more anger. Now think about how anger is used by the victim to put blame where it belongs instead of self blame. But with a relative the person is much more likely to blame themselves. Now add in that the more times it happens, the more anger there is. So, when it is a relative the victim needs to have lots more anger, for much longer, but all they get is pressure to forgive.
I know I had a steps to forgiveness that ran parallel to the steps to repentance the church teaches that I taught my Mormon clients. 1 you have to recognize that you have been injured by someone else’s sin. This takes knowing that you didn’t deserve it. 2 you have to feel the appropriate emotion anger. 3 you have to repair the damage. With or without help from the sinner. 4 reconciliation, *if* the sinner has gone through their own steps.
But the church never taught me that. I learned it by doing it. The church just got in the road.