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Posts tagged ‘Spiritual direction’

Aug 13

Reflections, Part 6

Read Part 5 here.

The Dissection

Giving that outfit I wore on the day of Jon’s death a send-off was hard, and it opened the door to other life changes. Like the outfit, I gave other changes time and sat with each one over a period of time. The first major life change was my exit from the Mormon Church. It had been brewing for years, and when I finally did leave, I left peacefully. No regrets or looking back: only looking forward now.

The spiritual direction program I became involved in was about my soul journey and being led to a new place in my life. That happened four years after I became a widow and took a full two years to complete. It opened up a new way of framing spirituality in my life. It taught me that “fixing” a perceived wrong in someone is not the only path to healing. Therapists fix; spiritual directors don’t, and whatever needs healing happens. Sometimes the healing comes from within, and spiritual direction facilitates changes in its own powerful way. Prior to 2016, I had not been aware of what power “direction” could hold. I had to be out from my former church for that to happen.

Covid-19 taught me about staying safe and challenged me to accept my own vulnerability. While we as a world sat isolated in our homes, we each came to grips in our own way that this thing could kill us. When I was told by a doctor to not risk going out, I listened, and that choice was a no-brainer for me. It also made me realize that this was one thing I was glad that Jon wasn’t around for. He’d have been unreasonably scared. Part of his bipolar pathology revolved around outside threats. We were all scared of something we couldn’t see, and watching friends and family get sick and die was hard. Knowing it could kill us was worse in many ways. And so, in 2023, when the doctors told me to not travel anywhere where I couldn’t get to a hospital fast, I listened, and I cancelled a planned trip. Four years into the process (2020), I listened because I was learning to make choices that kept me safe. This would serve me well when, in 2023, I listened to a friend, and then to myself. It saved my life—twice.

Walking this new path enabled me to admit to myself that it was time to do the personal therapy I needed to take on. I needed to stop stuffing it in and jettisoning the entire trauma. My captive iceberg needed to be freed.

Looking back on all of it now, I see the chain of events that led up to where I am now.

The freedom of exploring my life after I left Mormondom also allowed me to look at who I am as a woman. As women in the Mormon Church, we have a narrow field of options: sister, daughter, wife, and mother. Being raised in the 1960s and 1970s, the options in adult life were wife and mother.

I knew early on that marriage was not in the plans for me. I understood that I needed to follow a professional path. The problem in the Mormon Church is that you are taught from an early age to trust fifteen old white men. You are at their mercy, and if they are super conservative in their thinking, your options get quelled. In the 1960s and 1970s, women started finding jobs out of the home, and the war within raged as it did with me in the 2000s when I was married. With a prophet in the 1970s telling women to stay home, and a prophet in the 1980s telling women to leave jobs and to go back into the home, women were pulled and torn between what was best for them on a personal level and what church leadership was saying they should do.

I made the choice while in the Mormon Church to pursue my professional goals, and to work as a therapist. This was a personal choice, and one that only I could make. Like other women of my generation, I made the choice that would enable me to pursue the goal I’d set at sixteen: becoming a therapist.

When I married in 1998, the war waged on in my mind. Wife vs. wanting and needing to do what I loved doing: working in my profession. The good Mormon wife stayed home. We didn’t have children, and we’d never have children. I was torn between guilt and what I knew my personal truth to be. Whether it was volunteer work in the early 2000s, or paid work later on, I chose to work.

Once I left the Mormon Church, it all opened up! I didn’t have to play a role. I could enter into life not having to ask if I should walk a path that would allow me to be seen as Gail the woman, and not the wife, the woman who was not a mother, the woman who loves her profession, the woman who is even free to explore her sexuality—no matter who she is. This was just as liberating as the day in September of 2016 when I walked into the hair salon and announced that I wanted to go grey. Oh my, the women celebrated my newfound freedom from the bottle. That journey took six months and has been something I’ve enjoyed. Yes, Jon, I will never bottle my hair again.

And so, like the grey hair, I settled in to enjoying the real Gail.

I stand in my petiteness, and I claim myself as I am. I understand that who I am is mine alone to claim. I honor the process of releasing the trauma of my life—all of it had to go. I sit here and recall the mail I got right before the therapy session. My therapist sent it to me. It was the story of an iceberg. I crushed on the iceberg. “She” gave me courage. With her in my thoughts and at my side, I tore into the trauma, and I set it free. I owe my happy iceberg a huge thank you. I owe myself a thank you. Where will this journey head to next?

May 1

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Author’s Pick: Velvet Deconstructions

This is the last in a series of “author’s picks” of posts from the last few years. This one was originally posted on August 10, 2022.

In 2006 my husband fell down the rabbit hole of a faith deconstruction process that would last until his death in 2016. In 2006 I listened and supported, but didn’t follow down into the rabbit hole of Mormonism. I didn’t feel I needed to know what was and wasn’t down there. It wasn’t my time. It has to be the right time to fall down that hole.

At the beginning of this tale, I should state that I was raised in a home where reason and logic were present. This would come in rather useful in the years to come.

It took me six years to go there. I’m sure that seemed like a long time of waiting for Jon, waiting for me to dive rapidly into that same hole. When I did, it was scary, sad, depressing, and full of questions, culminating in a process of mourning what could no longer be. In 2012 I entered what I now look back on as my “velvet deconstruction.”

I’ve never written about this because, to be honest, I haven’t seen—or felt—the need to do so. That has changed. What changed?

This year I’ve read a series of books that began with delight and quickly turned to needing to rethink, reframe, and reconstruct the Western Jesus. I realized my journey had challenged me in ways I hadn’t seen coming and left me feeling as if I was splayed on a spiritual floor. This time around it wasn’t velvet: it was brutal. As of the time of this writing, I’m healing, looking back, and wondering why I missed this until I was so deep within the process that the mess was ginormous.

Having a crisis of faith should be normal for everyone who is on a healthy self-development path. James W. Fowler researched and wrote about personality and faith development in Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning. Stages is a classic and outlines our cognitive development throughout life. This is an academic work of research. What I really love about Fowler is that he illustrates that we never fully arrive. We cycle through all the stages over time, arriving at a higher level, only to begin the process over again. As with all things in life, learning never ends, and we’ll be doing it until our last breath.

So, I should have seen a second deconstruction coming, and I didn’t. I’d settled into a sweet spot, and when it ripped me apart it really tore at my soul!

How did this all happen? The simple answer is that I moved from one stage to another. The more complex answer is that I began to explore my values, my beliefs, and my life in new and deeper ways.

While I began to explore faith, I was enrolled in a rehab program for people with vision issues. It began as a five-day residential process, and during this time of my life I was confronted in a bold manner, asked to face my visual realities, and supported on multiple levels. And, in the end, I was able to confront myself. Looking at my religious life became an extension of that. For fifteen months I reconstructed my visual self; I wrote about it in Living With Disability. It was a life-changing experience.

Because of the work I was doing in this part of my life, it followed that I would look at the rest of my life. I began to allow myself to feel the sadness and pain of understanding that things are seldom what they seem. And so, it happened on a Sunday morning as we drove to church that I uttered the words that altered everything: “Can I make this church a place to stay and do good things?” That was in 2013, and I was trying to figure it out while realizing my husband’s need to stay away from it all. By 2014 I was still in place to try and a find a path to change. That all ended in November of 2015 when Salt Lake City announced what became known as “The Policy.”

This policy was set to discriminate against children who had an LGBTQIA+ parent in a relationship that was not heterosexual. That evening at dinner I lost it. How could a church deny baptism or anything else to a child?!!! Up until that moment I had thought I could make it work. Now I realized that I could not support such thinking. (The policy was reversed in April 2019 and the damage that was done couldn’t be undone or unseen.)

Suicide alters everything in the way you think, and in 2016, when Jon decided that the pain and suffering, he’d been enduring for the majority of his life needed to end, I was changed. I began to realize that I couldn’t go back to that church, and slowly during 2017 I drifted into nowhere land. I wasn’t making any major life decisions. I was moving to something, and someplace, new. I didn’t understand what it was—I just knew I was changing.

I was traumatized from a suicide, trying to re-establish a life. In the fall of 2017, I was discovering that another faith home was calling to me. I had to check it out. Certainly, I could look and still stay LDS. October of 2017 rolled around, and I found myself in a Starbucks at the Utrecht train station, having a conversation with someone whom I would come to love and respect. He wanted to know what I thought, not what I felt! It was in that realization that I knew I had a problem. Everything in me had been raised to be LDS. I was dealing with multiple generations of Mormons in my family. How could I even think of leaving? It wasn’t doctrine so much as other things that were tugging at me, calling me out to something that felt so different, so new, and where I needed to be. I told myself that I could attend this church service on Sunday evenings and it didn’t mean I was going to do more than that. Why would I ever leave? I didn’t need to do that.

I began to read, to learn, and to discover new ways of thinking. Growth is about freeing the soul and giving it permission to walk into new paths. By the spring of 2018 I was no longer feeling I could stay LDS and realized my value structure had shifted or rewired itself. I let go and relaxed into the process.

Looking back on all of it, I can see that this entire process was velvet. While there were tears, trauma, and fear involved, the process was gentle. Considering everything I went through from 2006 through 2018, it really was velvet. How could this be? As I look back, I think I view it as gentle because I wasn’t trying to force tings. I allowed the questions to surface, didn’t panic, and the few difficult situations didn’t last that long. The most difficult week was a conversation with my mother, and it ended with her apologizing to me. My mother and I could talk about most anything and giggle over life. We had a mutual respect, and she was open to many things that many LDS would have flipped out over.

I’ve come to the conclusion that faith transitions or journeys are more about a rethinking of a value system. Many people who choose to develop and leave the safety of certainty can remain in the same faith and approach things differently. For others, the choice to stay in one’s faith of origin is not an option. There are times when what we need changes because our ladders are sitting against a new wall. Sometimes the search can take years. The search for a new faith home can lead us out and to something completely different.

As I complete the last few months of my spiritual direction certification, I’m amazed by the paths that people are finding that bring them peace. I look back with my new understanding, and the new tools that got put in my toolbox, and offer up gratitude for both the velvet, and the not-so-velvet of the past few years. My new home is just what I needed.