Conversations about the religious and spiritual life on the other side of fundamentalism
 
364:  Death By a Thousand Cuts:  Ordinary Mormon Trauma:  Lindsay Hansen Park

364: Death By a Thousand Cuts: Ordinary Mormon Trauma: Lindsay Hansen Park

We were made for tenderness, gentleness, openness, authenticity, vulnerability, compassion and caring.  We are threaded through with the strands of genuine goodness.  Our true selves, our inner landscapes are beautiful and potentiated for wholeness, fullness and love.

Mormon trauma is most profoundly felt into being culturally, or institutionally permitted to be our true selves but to live in this highly controlled world where we are treated as potentiated for evil and best kept managed, where the greatest virtue is obedience. 

Mormon trauma is experienced as death by a thousand cuts, from the way that policy and doctrine  is dropped to way we serve, teach and lead, to the way we are with each other and in our families, to the stories we tell about the world beyond Mormonism.

Lindsay Hansen Park joins me to discuss the ordinariness of Mormon trauma.

Photo Credit: Hartwig HKD

2 Comments

  1. Ryan

    I was profoundly struck by the observation about the recurring trauma of constantly reacting to the LDS leadership, such as, extending callings, releasing from callings, changes policies and practices, etc.

    With it being the water I swam in for decades, it never occurred to me how that lack of control and being in a perpetual reactive state was traumatic, but it certainly was.

    The Book of Mormon asserts that Jesus Christ redeems us, allowing humankind “to act for themselves and not to be acted upon”. (2 Nephi 2:26) Yet the LDS church implements the opposite: a system in which church members are acted upon and are not permitted to act for themselves.

    Christ redeems. The LDS church traumatizes. The contrast could not be more stark.

    1. Gina Colvin

      The more I look into this the more it becomes apparent that the LDS Church was percolated in trauma. When it realises this it might become worthy or its association with Jesus Christ.

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