Compassion for a Younger You

My Mormon story of Purity Culture, Pain, and Self-Compassion

I’ll apologize in advance for jumping around. This will be journaling, and a bit stream-of-consciousness, but we’ll see if it shapes itself into something coherent.

In keeping with my commitment to not write another word of poetry or my novel until I get caught up with sleep and actually figure out how to carve out meaningful creative time from my week as a tech professional and a father of 4, I’ve focused a bit more on putting down my phone and reading here and there.

I’m reading one of the foundational works of the Western esoteric tradition, “The Corpus Hermeticum,” but I also began re-reading the first chapter of a fantasy saga I was working on at the age of 18. Reading both has been eye-opening for different reasons. The Corpus alerted me to fascinating synchronicities with how I’ve opened my science fiction novel, containing startling parallels with attributes of the story’s setting and characters. Its working title is “A Game of Life”, on creating life with language in the Void, much how the Logos acts upon the Moist Nature in Poimandres, the first passage of the Corpus.

But what I want to share with you are some insights I’ve had after reading my fiction writings from 23 years ago.

On Retroactive Compassion

Here’s the passage:

“Taris Tomere, are you going to keep ignoring me or will you have some sense and listen?” By this time his mother was facing him, arms folded and staring down at him.
“Oh, uh, I was just thinking—“
“You were just thinking about three months ago.” He and Bekwin had agreed that they would not tell anyone save family.
“Yes.” He hesitated. “Mother, would you advise seeing beyond what the eyes do? You know, looking into things that can’t be explained?”
“Of course, Taris.” Where there is belief in the Lifelord, you can always think the unnatural possible.” This was a question on which she never had to think. Practical thinking was something that came very naturally to her.
“Thanks, Mother. I guess I’ll go and run in the Race.”

You know that cringey feeling you get when you read shit you wrote years ago? There was an inkling of that—I thought I could be the next Robert Jordan—but mostly, I feel compassion for myself and nostalgia for a time I will never get back. A time when I viewed the world with innocent eyes but still knew there were layers to reality I hadn’t peeled back. A time when my mom was alive.

Taris was me, and his mother was how I wished my mom could be, accepting of differing viewpoints, open-minded. She was a devout God-fearing woman who never dared question God or the purpose which the Church had instilled in her.

I’d planned for Taris’s story to be a Hero’s Journey, where strange happenings and traumatic experiences left mysterious traces as clues—a Campbellian Call-to-Adventure that the protagonist would follow with the aid of a wise mentor or two.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that my life would follow my protagonist’s path. Where instead of triumph over evil, I’ve gained wisdom through deconstructing illusion. My triumphs happened on my inward journey, in conquering the blockage in my own psyche to speak and write my mind and stand up for what I know is right (for me, at least). I still wrestle with the fear of self-expression, a survival instinct honed after years of suppressing my emotions out of a desire to manage the emotions of others.

But my greatest triumph has been discovering that under all that fear and conditioning, I am already held by love both pure and simple. That insight has pierced the illusion of unworthiness.

On LDS Worthiness (Mormon Purity Culture)

Self-expression was a problem made worse by the sexual shame I experienced as a teen inculcated in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This affected my life in a profound way. I was taught and urged to confess and repent for masturbation and porn use to men (my dad included) who in all statistical likelihood also looked at it or struggled with it. Because the alternative was that dying in sin would relegate us to the lower kingdoms of heaven, separating us from our loved ones, FOR ETERNITY.

I always felt broken, defective, an addict-in-denial. My healthy curiosity about and interest in sex was weaponized against me by an institution that coerces loyalty from its most impressionable population: Children.

Adding to the shame was the fact that my bishop (the one I had to confess to) was my own dad throughout most of my adolescence.

Children and Teens are the first casualties in many cases. The second is marriages. Sexual purity culture plants fissures in the devout married and betrothed. I was found out to have looked at porn by my wife after she had returned from traveling out of the country. What followed was traumatic—an understatement. For both of us, for different reasons.

I was a failure, a disappointment, a liar, and a pervert not to be trusted. My wife stopped talking to me for weeks. I attended overcrowded 12-step addiction recovery programs 1-2 times a week for 6 months after that to try and fix whatever was broken in me. I was living just off campus of the church’s private university, Brigham Young University, and the vast majority there was Mormon, and the numbers of “porn addicts” in those meetings help you to see the extent of the shame and suffering that faithful Mormon men carry.

My stake president (the one that bishops report to) told me fasting would be like chemotherapy to root out the cancer of impurity/addiction. I fasted for 24 hours once a week to purge my system of sin. I was told porn addiction was “worse than heroin”. The 12-step program encouraged me to take inventory of everything I had ever done, and confess it. When I did that, my bishop gave me a silent stare, reminded me of the heroin myth. I felt like a lost cause.

In desperation not to lose my wife and kids, I embraced radical honesty. My wife assured me I would lose her and my daughter if I ever looked at porn again. Years later, I began confessing even seeing boobs online by accident to my wife. Each confession, I risked resurfacing the trauma my original sin caused in her, for different Mormon reasons. Ex-mormon women, I know you understand. Not to mention one of my wife’s exes (an almost fiancé, also Mormon) had groomed and had sex with his younger sister while my wife was dating him. My transgression, mostly the lies of omission, resurfaced profound feelings of betrayal—and disgust—in her.

My greatest teacher

One morning, in the aftermath of being “discovered”, I was with my firstborn daughter, keeping her quietly asleep in her rocker to allow my wife to sleep a little extra after a bout of insomnia. I was depressed, thinking how much longer would I have to repent for my sins, when my daughter woke up and smiled at me.

A feeling of being unworthy of divine love, of my daughter’s love, crashed around me, pulling me down to the floor in tears. Sobbing racked my body for a minute before I looked at her again and returned her smile.

My daughter’s love was God’s love. They were no different.

Was I unworthy? Her love was the answer. I was not unworthy of God’s love. I was never unworthy. I was not “forgiven” by God, because my daughter was God, and God was me. I held this truth as a secret for years, keeping it even from myself.

Love ≠ Blessings

The idea itself of being worthy of God’s blessings is the greatest illusion in Mormonism. Blessings get conflated with love in the minds of the faithful. It did for me, anyway. We’re taught God loves us always, but that we shouldn’t expect any blessings (including material prosperity) if we’re unworthy. In fact, we’re promised blessings for complete obedience to the laws and ordinances of the gospel. We’re taught that godlike love is unconditional, but in practice it’s conditional, and the faithful carry that model into their familial relationships. Those are the fissures in the foundation.

Self-Compassion = Divine Love

These experiences taught me to have compassion for myself. They also taught me how to read my own past differently. Where before, I felt finally forgiven in that moment on the floor, I can rewrite that moment with divine love as the focal point, not a fear of eternal separation from my family, from my daughter.

When I look back at my fantasy main character Taris, I don’t see the cringe. I see a kid trying to write himself out of a world where every stray thought and urge could damn him forever. His “call to adventure” wasn’t a dragon or a dark lord; it was the quiet, stubborn sense that there had to be more mercy in the universe than the adults around him could imagine.

Hermeticism talks about the world as mind-made, about Logos as the creative word. I used to think that meant I had to speak the right words, live the right story, confess the right sins. The story I’m telling with my life is changing because I’m asserting I was never broken. I am, and have always been, whole.