My Lifelong Struggle With Mormonism
How I Lived My Life As a Mormon Until Eventually Leaving at 38
The therapist looked at me, tapped his pen on the side of his face, and asked, “How would you feel if you were excommunicated from the Mormon church because of your porn addiction?” I realized something then that I had never thought of before. I realized it might just be the best thing that could ever happen to me.
“How would you feel if you were excommunicated from the Mormon church because of your porn addiction?”
I was a Mormon, or a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints for most of my life. I was born into the church, just like my father, and his father, and his father before him. We have family who have been in the Mormon church since its inception in 1830.
I say, “I was a Mormon,” because at 40, after the discussion described above, I decided to leave the Mormon church, once and for all, despite having been raised in the church. I think I first realized I was unhappy in my 30s, but I seriously questioned whether I should be a Mormon any longer when I first got back from my 2-year Mormon mission in the 80s.
My Struggle
I struggled with something that was taboo in Mormon church, that of sexuality for much of my life. I didn’t struggle with my sexual identity, but rather, I struggled with something the Mormons call, “The Law of Chastity.” This law states that you shouldn’t have sex with anybody outside of marriage. Which includes yourself.
Unfortunately, like many pubescent teens, I discovered pornographic magazines at twelve years old. Which eventually led to masturbation, something that completely blew my mind and something I began to do on a regular basis. In fact, it was a sacrament I tried to take at least on a daily basis. That’s really when my double life began.
I was a good Mormon teen most of the time, except in my private times where I gradually became a “degenerate.” At least this is how I saw myself based on the Mormon standards I had been given and taught.
Once a week I would take the “real” sacrament in church, a chance for me to repent from my week of sinning and renew my commitments to God. But it didn’t really stop me from taking my daily sacrament.
Personal Worthiness Interviews
There were times when my ecclesiastical leaders would check in on me to see if I was still worthy or not. In the Mormon church, these men are called bishops, but it’s a lay clergy, meaning these men weren’t professionally trained but volunteered to be the bishop. In fact, except for the leaders at the very top of the Mormon food chain (those who run the show in Salt Lake), all members operate the church on a volunteer basis.
About yearly, a bishop would ask me questions about my worthiness. “Was I being honest? Was I being a good son? Was I keeping the Word of Wisdom (another Mormon law that they are known for, the no-drinking-smoking-law)?” And then the dreaded question, “Was I living the law of chastity?”
Sometimes I would tell the truth and unload the burden I was carrying. Even though it was painful and embarrassing for me to confess. Once it was over, I always felt lighter. My burden was lifted for a time.
But of course, it had become a habit at this point and teens will be teens. Lots of things enter a teen’s mind and the hormones rage like no other. So it was only a matter of time before I was partaking of my own daily sacrament again and going down the self-hatred rabbit hole.
I love how Louis C.K. describes masturbation as if it turns him into the Incredible Hulk, chasing after the climax like he’s gone mad until it finally happens. Then he wakes up not even realizing where he’s been for the past 30 minutes, there are 2 dead guys in the room, and his clothes are torn. He then talks about the shame and self-hatred afterward, which I am all too familiar with.
All My Sins
Like many teens, I rebelled against my parents and the Mormon church in other ways. I wasn’t old enough to buy cigarettes or adult magazines, so I found other ways to get them, mostly by stealing. I started stealing cigarettes from cars on my paper route and trying them. And dirty magazines, when I couldn’t find them on the street, I would steal them from liquor stores. Just as I had stolen candy as a kid.
I also started getting high in High School. My first time was at a High School Choral competition. My friends told me it would make me sing better. It just made me paranoid the whole time. But I tried it a few more times until I started to enjoy it.
Betrayal and an Interview With My Dad
I decided I could trust my older sister and confide in her that I was smoking weed. She had smoked a lot of pot when I was younger, with her husband. I assumed she would be safe and my confidant. Boy was I wrong.
She no longer got high and decided to tell my dad, who was also my bishop at the time. He had a worthiness interview with me and told me she had told him about the pot. He then proceeded to go down the list of every possibility in the Mormon-list-of-wrong-doings.
He asked about pornography and masturbation, smoking, and drinking, and ended with a discussion about homosexuality. He had noticed I had become quite chummy with a new high school friend, and since I was also smoking weed with him, he just assumed I might have decided to be gay as well.
I apologize for how this sounds. Mormons still believe that being gay is a choice. But at the time I was furious that my sister had narced me out to my dad, and also that he had assumed I’d become gay as well. At this point, I wasn’t even sexually active with anybody. I guess in some Mormon minds, once you’ve started acting out, all sins were fair game.
He ended up threatening me with the possibility of not getting my license at 16 if I didn’t stop smoking pot immediately. I stopped. Until I got my license. Then I started smoking and drinking again.
Being a Normal Teen
Throughout my teenage years, I was like most teenagers, constantly looking for sexual gratification in one way or another. I had sex with several girls in High School. Because I was a Mormon and wasn’t supposed to be having sex, I didn’t really practice safe sex and didn’t have condoms on me. My only saving grace was it was before AIDS became a problem.
I did pick up something once which scared the shit out of me. I called my best friend — also a Mormon — but he was aware I was sexually active. I told him it burned when I urinated and I wasn’t sure what to do. Between the two of us, we figured out to how to go to a clinic (thank god I got my license at 16). They did a swab and gave me antibiotics, and luckily it cleared up. I still don’t know exactly what it was. But I was saved!
Of course, that didn’t stop me from having unprotected sex. But luckily I dodged the bullet a few more times until I stopped altogether. Of course, the reason I did things unsafely was because sex was not discussed in my family, other than to forbid it completely. There were no discussions about safe sex at dinner. Just condemnation for those who did it at all.
When I graduated from High School, my parents decided to move away from the town we lived in from the time I was in 5th grade. Both me and my younger brother were on a destructive path (for Mormons) and they wanted to move to a new place to give us a chance to start over. New friends. Less comfortable in our surroundings. Of course, I was at a party the first weekend we were in the new town.
Crystal Meth Turned Me to Mormonism
I planned a weekend getaway, back to my old town, to party with some friends. We were going to do Crystal Meth, something I had never tried, but all my friends had. They had talked to me about only snorting it and never partying with guys who shot it in their arms with needles. I took their warning and decided I wouldn’t do that. This whole conversation happened 2 months before the event.
On the party weekend, we all got together. I was the only one among them that had a job, so I ended up financing much of the meth purchase. And damn it all, all of my friends shot that shit up in their arms. I was the only one snorting it that weekend.
It was a pretty intense weekend for me. I did a lot of things that weekend and I was tripping the whole time. I didn’t sleep a wink. And I saw things I’d never seen before, especially while watching one of my favorite movies, Pink Floyd, The Wall. I’d never seen the speed symbolism throughout the movie. We also saw Ronnie James Dio that weekend, Rainbow In The Dark Tour. It was 1983 and it was a wild weekend.
It was almost time for me to go home and I still hadn’t slept. I remember smoking a bowl of weed, trying to bring myself down, but all it did was aggravate the high and I still didn’t sleep.
The next week I came down hard. I was expecting it since I had been up all weekend, and I had been warned I would crash. But I didn’t realize how bad it would be. Long story short, through some sort of self-evaluation, I decided that God was no longer with me — I had lost the spirit.
Another friend of mine, also Mormon, had been described to me as someone who “lost the spirit” because of all the drugs he took. While I was thinking about that idea, I had an experience, an almost out-of-body experience, that made me think it was a confirmation that I too had lost the spirit.
That week I decided I needed to go to the bishop (NOT my father this time) and confess all my sins. This time I wasn’t going to sin anymore. I was going to go cold turkey on everything — drinking, smoking, masturbating, sex, even cussing. My brother and my best friend started calling me a church boy, which was something we used to call good Mormons we knew. It hurt a little, but I was determined to change my life and be a good Mormon.
I’ve joked many times since this happened, that I need to write a book and call it, “Crystal Meth Turned Me To Mormonism.”
Mission
I decided to go on a mission like all good Mormons aspire to do. I saved up enough money to buy a couple of suits and pay for the first couple of months of my mission. After that, my parents took care of it, until they couldn’t, and then my older brother paid for it.
My mission was great. It really allowed me to stay focused on being a good Mormon as I sought out others to teach about Mormonism. It was a disciplined environment, very much like the military. We got up at a certain time, went to bed at a certain time, and started proselyting at a certain time. We had goals for learning new words, teaching so many lessons per week, talking to so many people per week, reading the scriptures for an hour a day, etc. Lots of goals. No time to really think about other things.
Wrong Crowd
But then about eight months into my mission, I ended up with a group of missionaries — four of us — who all had wild backgrounds from our teen years. And we started talking about those years, and bragging about them, and relishing in them. And slowly, we started teaching less and just hanging out more. One thing led to another and one day we decided to buy a bottle of rum — Barbancourt Rum, a Haitian-brand rum. And we all got wasted.
Hyper-Guilt Complex
The next day, I started feeling guilty. Here we were on this mission and we were supposed to be the BEST of Mormons, but we had slipped pretty far from that. Something I haven’t mentioned is my amplified feelings of guilt. Every time I had sex as a teen, whether with someone or by myself, I always felt extremely guilty. I didn’t feel those same feelings about partying, but I had been pretty much perfect, by many standards, since that Crystal Meth weekend, and I had just pissed all of that away. I also masturbated some time during that drunken night, which also added to my guilt.
So, the next day, feeling guilty as sin, I talked to the other missionaries about telling the mission president — basically our bishop while we were on our mission. I wanted to come clean so we could get back on track. However, each one of them was convinced that if I told the mission president, we would all be sent home, dishonorably, shaming ourselves and our families for years to come. Culturally speaking, it was pretty tragic to be sent home in this way from your mission, so I understood the fear.
So I swallowed the bile that was forming and pushed down my feelings of guilt, squishing those feelings down so they weren’t screaming at me. And we all stopped working completely. We spent the rest of our 2 months together (the night of drunkenness happened near the end of month 1) sunbathing and listening to Pink Floyd. In fact, it was there on that rooftop, that I discovered Pink Floyd’s Animal album, one of my favorite albums to this day.
The Guilt Followed Me
Mission transfers came and I was shipped off to a different area. I hadn’t taught a lesson in weeks. The suppressed guilt was starting to eat at me, however, and I was feeling pretty awful about myself.
The first lesson I taught after a month was to a woman whose last name was Barbancourt. Her family owned the Barbancourt rum distillery business. And the lesson was about The Word of Wisdom, the law we broke as missionaries, the month before.
When I got home from that lesson, I laid down on my bed and crawled up into a fetal position. I remember wishing that the mountains would fall on me and make me no more, which is a famous Book of Mormon quote about a guy who was trying to repent of all of his wicked ways.
I finally confided in another missionary about my horrible sense of guilt and what had caused it. My friend convinced me that I needed to talk to the mission president because he could tell how much it was affecting me. Also, one of the party missionaries was going home soon, and my friend felt I should confess before he went home, not allowing him to get off scot-free. In hindsight, I see that this was the wrong reason to confess, but I decided to do it, nonetheless.
Confession
I went into the mission president's office and confessed everything about that night and other things that happened since then. I remember believing that I would be going home dishonorably, as well as the other missionaries whom I told on. But I was convinced it was the only way I could come clean and get back on track as a missionary.
I remember coming out of the mission president’s office and I felt as light as a feather. There’s something about this guilt thing that really weighs me down, emotionally and physically. I actually did a bunch of pushups and felt like I could do as many as I wanted to, that’s how light I felt after confessing my sins.
My mission president didn’t send any of us home. And he reached out to all my companions from that time, telling him he knew about it and chastised them for not telling, but assured them he wasn’t sending them home. I still feel bad about that, however.
The other missionaries, even though they were glad it was done, seemed to harbor some negative emotions towards me for “ratting” on them. There really wasn’t a way to confess such a thing, however, without all of them being pulled into it. Since we were never supposed to leave each other’s side, my confessing that I alone bought a bottle of rum and drank it without my missionary companion knowing about it was highly unbelievable.
Seeds of My Ultimate Downfall
I think that this event on my mission, after eighteen months of being as perfect of a Mormon as I could be, and then falling in the way that I did, was really the beginning of the end for me. I don’t think I have ever fully recovered since then, although I definitely put on a good show for the next 22 years.
I had other mishaps on my mission after this. I kissed a girl in the next area I lived in. I also had occasional slips of masturbation for the next several months. I did have a couple of months of productive work where I felt like I was making progress, but it felt like it was too little, too late. I definitely couldn’t gain back the momentum I felt during the first 8 months of my mission. I really felt like I had experienced an awakening during that time. But it was over.
I was finally at the end of my mission. In fact, I was going home the next day. For some reason, I was hanging out with the missionary friend of mine, the one who convinced me to confess to the mission president. And he said he had a going away present for me. He told me that if we drove up to the ladies of the night in that area, they would reach in and rub us for free, in hopes that we would actually buy something. So we did that.
I Was a “Natural Man”
I remember leaving my mission and thinking about it as I went home. It made me feel guilty, yes, but even more, it made me question whether I was really cut out to be a Mormon or not. Because I enjoyed that experience and I wanted it. I was a “natural man,” as the Book of Mormon describes, who is, “an enemy to god.” The natural man allows himself to be led by his temptations and thoughts and acts upon them.
A good Mormon, and especially a “Return Missionary” Mormon was supposed to be better than that. So maybe I shouldn’t be a Mormon at all. That’s what the one voice in my head was telling me.
But, there were a bunch of other voices. The voices of my leaders and my family who were telling me to go home and find a good girl, get married right away, and start living the gospel to the best ability. “That’s the Mormon way.”
I told myself: Ignore those ideas in your head that maybe you’re not cut out for this or maybe you have desires that aren’t “Mormon-like.” You can work on this, especially if you find a really strong woman to be your wife. She can help you to stay on the straight and narrow road that leads back to God.
So, instead of listening to the first voice, what I now realize was my true voice, I listened to the other voices and went forward with that plan with zeal and vigor! I now realized I had to find the strongest Mormon woman I could find if she was going to help me stay on the straight and narrow. And I knew exactly who that was.
Honestly, the reason they want you to get married right away is because if you wait too long after your mission to get married, you’ll most likely end up in sin. Because 21-year-old men are filled up to the brim with hormones!
Getting Married
I had been talking with a girl off and on during my mission and she also went on a mission. She was a born leader and at a young age had already served in several leadership positions in the church. She was probably the strongest Mormon woman I knew at the time and she came from a great family.
We had talked in code during our missions about finding a worthy companion to get married to when we got back. I say, “in code,” because it was mostly hinting at the idea that we could be that for each other. And in fact, when she got home, six months after I did, it took quite a bit of convincing to sell her on the idea that we could get married.
Even though she knew it would probably be the best thing to do, she was concerned about my lack of income and prospects. I believe she thought it would be better to wait until we had a degree or a good job. But the current prophet helped me with my sales pitch.
We went to a Mormon fireside and he spoke to her directly when he said something along the lines of, “Don’t wait to get married until everything is perfect. Don’t wait until your finances and your degrees are complete. Do it now!” We got engaged that night.
Of course, I didn’t tell her anything about my “natural man” proclivities, nor that I wasn’t a virgin. That discussion happened before we got married, however, and it wasn’t a pleasant one, since she was a virgin. She was able to get over it, however, and we ended up getting married a few months after we got engaged.
Sex in a Mormon Marriage
When you don’t have sex with each other before marriage, you have no idea what each other’s appetites are. You have no idea whether you will be compatible, sexually or not. In my opinion, it’s a complete gamble, and honestly one I will never do again.
Nobody told me how to treat a woman like her and I might have rushed things a little. And once I turned the tap on, sexually, my appetite only grew. I wanted to have sex all the time, just like I had when I was having sex with myself as a teenager. And she really didn’t want to do that. I wanted to have sex multiple times in a session and she wasn’t interested in that. So one night, after we had sex, I decided to masturbate.
I think I’ve already mentioned how taboo and against the Law of Chastity it is to masturbate. It was a couple of months into our marriage. And for some reason, partly because of my amplified sense of guilt, I felt like I had to confess what I had done to her.
If I am honest about this, that was probably the beginning of the end of our marriage, even though it lasted for another 19 years. That was the beginning of me having to meet with the bishop with her to discuss my issues. That was the first time when I felt almost suicidal and weak for what I had done “to her.” It was also the first time I realized how incompatible we were, sexually.
R-Rated Movies and The Internet
I don’t really remember this sort of event repeating after this for a long time. I do remember wanting to watch movies that were R-rated. Watching R-rated movies was a big no-no in the Mormon church since the reason for them being rated this way was usually nudity or sex. But I slowly started finding opportunities to watch these sorts of movies.
I had a job where I would spend the night at a group home and I would watch Showtime and other premium channel movies. I know I would sneak these kinds of things in, but I don’t remember having any issues with masturbation at that time.
But everything changed in the early 90s when the World Wide Web began to happen. I was working at a software company at the time and my buddies at work, despite most of them being Mormon, started realizing that the internet was a great place to download naked pictures.
I resisted doing so for a while, but eventually, I too started to download and collect them. This went on for several months and I started staying after work to do it. I was afraid I would lose my job, but I was also enticed by that danger. And this is also when I started to masturbate again.
Porn Addiction?
One day when I was thinking of creative ways to search for pictures, I typed the words, Porn addiction, and was surprised at what I found. It was the first time that I realized I might be addicted to this porn because of the pages that discussed porn addiction. I decided I would use my work health benefits to investigate this further, by scheduling an appointment with a therapist.
Of course, the therapist was Mormon, because we were living in a Mormon community at the time. He told me that in order for me to get over my “addiction” I would need to tell my wife about it. I would say that this was the 2nd nail in the coffin of our marriage. Because this was something that despite trying, she would not be able to overcome for the rest of our marriage.
I’d like to clarify something here. I have since come to realize that for most people, porn isn’t addictive. However, if you are in a religion that is very restrictive and porn and masturbation are both taboo to the equivalent of adultery, that porn ends up becoming addictive for many of those people.
The allure becomes amplified because of its taboo nature. And so it was for me. It didn’t help that the Mormon church eventually labeled me as a sex addict and as part of my therapy had me going to Sex Addicts Anonymous (SAA) meetings as a treatment for my “addiction.”
Labeled as a Sex Addict
I learned a lot about addiction by attending these meetings and other 12-step programs. I learned that I was powerless to overcome my addiction without a higher power. That’s the first step. And probably the one that caused me the most trouble. I basically became crippled by this, mentally, since I was unable to consistently get god to help me with this.
So, at the suggestion of one of my therapists, I went on medication. I didn’t want to do this, but it was suggested as a good way to overcome it. And they were right. I started taking Paxil and immediately lost my desire for porn. I also lost my desire for everything. It completely flattened me out, emotionally and physically. I didn’t desire sex at all. I gained about 50 lbs. After 2 years of that, I decided I had had enough and stopped taking it.
I did okay for a while, but slowly porn started creeping back in. I started traveling as a computer consultant which left me alone in a hotel a little too much for someone with my proclivities. I started looking at porn on occasion and masturbating. Which led to feelings of guilt and shame, which led to confession to my wife and bishop. That led to discipline in the church. Especially since I had become part of a bishopric at the time. I wasn’t the bishop, but I was one of his counselors.
This situation went off and on for the next few years. I would stop for a year and not have any issues, but then it would creep back in. Eventually it led to a situation where every 3 months, I would look at porn for a day or two, culminating in masturbation, guilt, shame, suicidal thoughts, confession, and discipline, and then it would last for another 3 months. I called it the repentance Ferris wheel. But my disappointment with myself and my wife’s disappointment grew greater and greater each time. And the suicidal thoughts were becoming stronger each time as well.
All during this time I was seeing Mormon therapists, both alone and with my wife, attending SAA meetings, and trying to learn more about my addiction. For it had truly become an addiction for me that I was unable to kick. And every time I slipped, my wife believed that I was cheating on her. Which of course added to my sense of guilt and shame.
My Epiphany
I was sitting in a therapist’s office one day with my wife. He started asking me some questions. One question was, “Why do you feel the need to be naughty?” As a Mormon adult, I really didn’t know how to answer that question. I had no idea. Looking back, that’s the kind of question you ask a 10-year-old when you catch them cheating on a test or stealing some candy. But as a Mormon adult, I could think of no answer to give him.
In another session, this same therapist asked me the question that I call Pandora’s Box. It’s the question that changed everything for me and once I answered it, there was no going back. He asked me, “How would you feel if you were excommunicated for your problem?” meaning, looking at porn and masturbating once a quarter.
“How would you feel if you were excommunicated for your problem?”
I have since come to call that experience my First Vision moment, since Joseph Smith, the man who started the Mormon Church, supposedly had a vision where he saw God and Jesus appear above him and talk to him. It was a pivotal event for him and for the Mormon Church, just as my therapist’s question was for me.
I only thought about his question for a few seconds, but time seemed to slow down completely, and I felt as if a portal opened in the wall of his office, to the outside. I realized as I looked through the portal that on the other side was happiness!
If I was excommunicated from the Mormon church, I would no longer feel guilt, shame, or suicidal thoughts for doing these things. I would no longer have to confess those sins to my bishop or anybody if I didn’t choose to, because technically, it was only in the Mormon church, for me, where I felt guilt and shame for these things. It was only by being a member of the Mormon church that those things were wrong.
Upon realizing all of this, in the few seconds after he asked me the question, I turned to him and responded, “I would probably turn, run, and never look back.” I could see my wife’s response in my peripheral vision. Her jaw dropped into her lap. I was looking directly at my therapist and he really didn’t know how to respond to what I said. He just tapped his pen against the side of his face, a nervous tick he did when he was thinking.
“I would probably turn, run, and never look back.”
I don’t remember how the rest of the session went, but my wife laid into me as soon as we got into the car. “How could you say that? Why wouldn’t you be willing to fight for me?” See, for her, this was mostly about her and my love, or lack of love, for her. And there may have been some truth in that, but even greater was that I had realized a truth for me and spoke it out loud. He had opened Pandora’s Box, I looked inside and answered with my truth. And my life would never be the same again.
I told my wife the reason I responded like that was because it was true for me. I realized if I was no longer Mormon I could be happy again. And I also believed that if I wasn’t Mormon, the addiction would go away. Because it wasn’t “naughty” to look at porn outside the Mormon church, it wouldn’t be a taboo thing to do, and it would lose all of its grasp on me. And of course, I was right. Masturbation and porn are a normal thing to do outside the church and I won’t feel guilty about it anymore.
Another byproduct of leaving the Mormon church would also be that I could end my marriage which was struggling at best. We were mostly together because we were Mormon and it was the Mormon thing to stay together and not consider divorce. We were also together for the kids. But if the Mormon church was no longer in the picture, then that’s one of the two legs our marriage was built on, completely gone.
Leaving the Church & My Marriage
Within a few months of answering this therapist’s question, I had left the church. And another few months after that, my marriage ended. I was finally responding to the things I felt back when I was fresh off my Mormon mission, 20 years before. I was finally being true to myself and listening to my own voice, rather than to the voices around me.
I’m happy to say that it has now been 16 years since I left the Mormon church and I have never thought twice about my decision to leave. There have been lonely times. My entire community and support structure disappeared overnight and I had to build a new one from scratch. I also had to build a new belief system from scratch. But all of that has been a good experience for me. A struggle I have happily made, as I’ve been true to my own voice. If I had to do it all over again, I would still choose to leave the church.
I am also happy to report that all of my children have also chosen to follow their own voices and leave the Mormon church. I never pressured them one way or the other, but one by one they realized it also wasn’t for them, much to the chagrin of their very Mormon mother. Despite the fact that the Mormon church is all about families being “together forever,” when you’re not part of the Mormon church, it is very divisive when it comes to families, so it’s been nice having them outside of the church with me.
Is My Lifelong Struggle Over?
My lifelong struggle of fighting against being Mormon is over. I haven’t experienced guilt, shame, depression, or suicidal thoughts in 16 years. I’ve had some lonely times as I’ve rebuilt my social circle. I’ve struggled to rebuild my belief system. But it’s all mine. And I still obviously dabble in Mormonism. The fact that I’m writing an article about it tells you that it is still a part of me. All of my family except for my kids are Mormon. It’s still a part of my life whether I want it to be or not. But it’s more peripheral.
I’ve been inside a Mormon church exactly 2 times in the past 16 years. Both times were for funerals. Many Mormons leave the church and eventually return. I’ve found lasting happiness outside the Mormon church. I’ll definitely not be returning. Everybody has to find their own path and I’m not going to fault anybody for deciding to let their path be Mormon. I’m just glad that I finally figured out that mine no longer had to be.
© Rockwell Porter Johnson 2021
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