*I'm on a mission. I don't know where it will take me, if any where yet. But I feel driven to see what I can do to help women I care about so very much. This letter came out of my heart as effortlessly as anything I have ever written. No blog post ever formed so well or so quickly. I've prayed about this letter for more than a year and often laughed at myself for ever thinking I could undertake a project like this. Maybe this letter will be nothing more than my purging and a sheet of paper given to my local SP. Right now, I've prayed for the Lord to put His hand on this and guide this to those who will act on it.
Dear Brethren,
If you are reading
this letter today, it is because someone is calling -- no pleading -- to you to
hear the cries of the sisters. These
sisters are the tender wives and mothers of the kingdom. If you continue to read this, please do so without
the typical stereotypes or judgments
that are often assigned to women of our day.
We are not crazy, emotional, or hormonal. We are hurt.
We have been injured, repeatedly by our husbands and then again, by men
who hold the priesthood of God.
I am reaching out to
all who will listen, and I pray with every fiber of my being that you will hear
with your heart. I pray that you will
see this concern, shared by so many of your sisters and respond as the Savior
would.
Mortality is
messy. Often the messes we face are the
result of the choices of others. General
Authorities speak of these types of trials in General Conference frequently. The mess I want to address today is that of
sexual addiction. Sexual addiction is
not an issue isolated outside of the church.
Quite the contrary. In fact, many
of our brethren, your brethren, suffer from various types of sexual
addiction. Many fight it daily. Many of these addicts are men who served
missions and are now sealed in the temple to a wife who has been T-boned by
this.
Some of these men
didn’t realize, initially, how badly they were addicted. Often this is the case because a priesthood
leader, in their attempt to love the sinner, made light of the initial few
confessions, causing them to think what they have done ‘is not that bad.’
I want to go on
record to tell each of your reading this plea today -- this IS that bad! Please do not do that again, if you sit in a
position to council our brothers. Ask
more questions. I know this is a
difficult spot for you to be in. No one
wants to come across voyeuristic in these discussions. The Lord will help you as you help those within
your stewardship. In the wise words of
one wife-of-a-porn-addict, “you cannot kill (or cure) addiction with kindness.”
Yes, the Savior is kind. He stooped to write in the dirt when the adulteress
was brought to him. This is not the
same. You are dealing with an individual
with a broken brain. He does not process
information the same as you, or anyone, not affected by addiction.
In this case, the
old idiom applies; “You cannot really know a man until you’ve walked a mile in
his shoes.” You cannot really know the
damage addiction causes the soul of a wife until you’ve walked a mile in her
shoes. Let me tell you, from personal
experiences with both, I would rather pull thousands more of my miscarried
babies from toilets than deal with another of my husband’s disclosures of being
with another woman.
Brethren, please, if
a sister comes to you in confidence, she does so bringing you her cannon ball
shot up soul on a platter. She needs
your support. She needs you to
listen. She needs you to think outside
the box with her and help her find the solutions that will fit her individual
needs. Yes, she needs prayers and
scriptures and the temple, but she needs so very much more than just those
things.
She does not need to
be blown off or discounted. You may
think you “know” things about addiction, or porn. You may ‘get’ how insidious this is. Unless you have lived it, unless you have
walked in her shoes, this is new, and fresh, and death to her, and you
do NOT know! Listen to the
spirit with her, for her. She needs the
priesthood. She needs to be loved and cared for just as her Savior would. He is not here to hold her. He expects you to fill that role for
Him, with all the empathy and compassion He would offer her.
If you are out of
your element, and likely you will be, start researching addiction. There is tons of help on the Internet. Ask the wife what resources she has. There is no weakness in not knowing. It won’t tarnish your mantle.
Above all, please,
do everything in your power to not cause this sister to feel more shame and
rejection than she already feels. Please
know, that she seeks you out because she trusts you. Trust is a huge thing to a wife whose
marriage has been violated and made a mockery of. Dismissing her will damage her
testimony. You do not want that on your
conscience.
We are faithful Latter-day Saint women. We understand and have a testimony of the gospel of Jesus Christ. We know and understand the powerful gift of the Atonement. The length of time our healing takes has nothing to do with a lack of an application of the Atonement. It has to do with the depth of trauma this betrayal has caused us. We love the scriptures and the temple too. Please know, that while those practices are great foundational principles, we will need so much more than more of that to heal.
So that you can get
a sense of how serious this is, I am including at the end of my letter some of
the feelings of these sisters of whom I speak.
These are their words, unedited and used with permission.
We need your
help. Is your heart open enough to hear
our cries?
Wife #1's Experience: Personally my Bishops talked to me very little, maybe having one meeting with my husband and I, and never bringing it up again. Which was fine for me at the time, because I thought we were 'good' now too. When he hit rock bottom and we 'got' that this was an addiction, I had a FANTASTIC Bishop in terms of support and nurturing of me (although, he did tell my husband he didn't need to go to 12 step, because he wasn't one of 'those addicts' :-)). He regularly checked in, and it was just nice to finally feel like I was a part of this and not just an after thought. The problem was once we got further into recovery, especially with Greg doing SA and LifeStar, it was like we lost 'street cred', 'cause we weren't doing the' Church' way of recovery. Even though he repeatedly told Greg he was the only person the Bishop was working with that had any kind of sobriety. But it like once we chose a 'non-traditional' path, we were outside of things and he was uncomfortable talking to us. Which was sad for us, because things were finally going SO well. We also felt like we had so much to share the more we were learning and growing. Anyway, since then we've gotten a new Bishop. We had a few conversations that went prety good (although, I could tell my discussion of things like boundaries and stuff made him very uncomfortable and I think they really started to turn him off to the topic of therapy.) Then I spoke in Stake Women's Conference. I didn't hear from him or the SP, but then when I started getting some pretty sad feedback from women in my Stake, and I emailed them some of my concerns and heartbreak (repeatedly saying I so admire these Bishops and all that they're doing, and the time they spent away from their families to help counsel and work with others, but if there was anyway we could help them or share with them our experiences, we were more than willing. I had resources to pass on if they were interested. I got a heartbreaking call from my Bishop, telling me him and my SP were concerned about my email and wanted to know what my 'motivations' were and what my 'intent' was, and to remember that I only had the women's side of the story and they're concerned with how much I just talk about the women in all this, forgetting that men are dealing with stuff too. (I added I am extremely compassionate to those trapped in addiction (heck, all my favorite men are addicts ), but that I'm sharing the message of recovery to women because that's what I've been through. It was hard. I've felt distrusted and distance from them every since and it really hurts. Iv'e felt uncomfortable at Church, and even sometimes fantasizing about moving and 'starting fresh' . . . with people who don't see me as 'rogue'
It's hard to put into words how profoundly this has negatively affected my relationship with my Bishop. He is such an amazingly kind and awesome person -- before this happened, he spent one morning outside talking to me while I was crying about my kids' medical issues and asking questions to clarifying questions through the whole first 15 minutes of Sacrament Meeting (that he was supposed to be conducting.) He asked how we were doing all the time. Since this all went down, the three times I've emailed him to tell him about our latest endoscopy and/or colonoscopy on the kids and the continued bad news we've gotten, he's never once emailed back, asked us how we are doing or stopped us in the halls to check in. . . I feel really, really cut off. And he is seriously once of the most compassionate Christlike people I know -- and that scares me. That me being a 'voice' in any of this can make me that outcast. That I could that quickly turn really good men against me, because I even tried to speak up. It does sometimes make me wonder how I fit into this Church in the long run. Will I always be an outsider, distrusted by leadership, if I speak up for the things I believe in, if I live authentically? ((And this was one email about concerns I had -- it's not like I shouted them from the rooftop or even brought them up in Sunday School or something.) Because this has hurt more than I could've imagined. And I don't know what comes next. I dont know if we should move, wait out a leadership change, keep our mouths shut . . . but we've learned so much. So much about recovery and the atonement and hope and peace and healing -- I want to share that. I just don't know how to do it without putting my family in an outcast role. It also hurts because I'm fairly convinced that if it had been my husabnd sharing the same concerns, it would've been taken differently -- that me as a woman rattled people more because I was a woman that pointed out that people were being hurt. I never once growing up thought there was anything about being a girl that made me any less or robbed me of any chances or opportunities -- until this -- I will always be an outsider when it comes to leadership. I will never be in a role to affect change. I can be the Creative Director of a nonprofit dealing with this issue, I can serve on the Advisory Board of UCAP, I can talk to women around the country going through this -- and I will always be able to be easily dismissed by some of my leaders because I'm not 'one of them' . . . (not that any of those things make me an expert or anything -- I just have heard a lot, I've talked to a lot of people, I've seen a lot of patterns, I could be useful to leaders who would use me. All I want is to spread the word of recovery and hope and healing. I could share that with Bishops or others, and maybe it would help someone else. I just feel like within the Church, I will be seen as a trouble maker or something if I share what I've learned if it conflicts at all with a leaders views on the same topics.)
Wife #2's Experience: We had a bishop change in the middle of all my husband's latest acting out. My husband was inactive and had recently been disfellowshipped by the previous bishop. I asked to speck to new one (our current bishop) when he first took over. He didn't even want to know what happened. When my husband came back to church (but was still acting out) he said this couldn't be better. The HP group was so glad to have him back. My bishop was my home teacher before they made him bishop. By agreement with the SP he kept my family to home teach, even though that isn't typically done. He did this because of the military connection with my husband. All this is fine, except that of course we rarely saw him. The only time he came over during any of the five separations this year (2014) was when I asked to have my home dedicated. I don't think he even knew how many times I was separated.
When my husband came back this last time bearing "gifts" from all his sexual encounters, I begged for a blessing. For whatever reason it just never happened. My husband was excommunicated and not once did my bishop say a word to me. He hasn't been over to home teach. Last month my husband made at appointment to see the bishop, I asked to come along because I needed that blessing I never got.When I told bishop I was really struggling with all of this and needed help, he looked me dead in the eye with such an incredulous look and asked "why are you still struggling?" It was all I could do not to walk right out.
This is the reason women have problems in the church. Empathy and compassion are so crucial to healing the destroyed heart and life of the addict's wife.
We may look on the outside like we have it all together, but most of the time we are one loose thread from crumbling.
Wife #3's Experience: I had a similar experience with the "one and done" conversations with my bishop, but the difference was, *I* knew we weren't good. So I kept making appointments, and telling him that I was at the brink, ready to leave my marriage, and... crickets. He didn't reach out to me. He didn't have the Relief Society presidency check on me. He didn't offer me a blessing. When my husband went to talk to him about something unrelated, my bishop lamented, "You shouldn't talk to your wife about disclosures. She has an anger problem." NOTHING supportive for three years, and after discovering how pervasive the problem was in our ward and not hearing a single lesson about it in the entire three years, I taught a lesson (I was supposed to be teaching about David and adultery, but I apply ALL of my lessons to present day applications), and people were SO upset and talking to the bishop about my "inappropriate" lesson, that he finally reached out to me. Not to check on me. Not out of concern for my well-being. But to scold me, and to make sure I never brought up the "p" word again. And told me that while he understood why I had personal reasons for wanting to discuss it at church, that our ward's resources need to be used elsewhere. Meanwhile, I have an addict husband, and both of my home teachers are addicts, so I have no direct access to a priesthood blessing if my husband relapses. Awesome. Thanks for caring so much about pornography.
And can we talk about the phrase, "feel like we are dying"? Because I know I literally felt like I was going to die. I had no idea how I was still alive. My heart was broken. And not, "Aw, man, they're out of my favorite kind of nail polish in the color I want!" heartbroken, but what that word truly means. Nothing has hurt more. The pain was so intense it was a shock and a disappointment when I woke up in the morning, every morning, for an entire year. I know I told my bishop I felt like I was dying. I told him I felt like I'd been stabbed, and I was bleeding, and everyone was walking past as if nothing was wrong. That was how intense, how devastating, the pain was. And I felt like my use of the term "dying" was treated like I was being dramatic. I was exaggerating. I wanted attention. Something. So I wonder if a lot of bishops/leaders/whomever hear that we're dying, and it's dismissed. But we are. Emotionally, spiritually, every way but physically. And it's shocking and frustrating that it isn't physically, because if we were physically wounded, THEN someone would care. They're obligated to, right? I can't go to the ER with my destroyed spirit, heart, and faith and get treated. But if I'm physically broken, then someone has to treat me. They HAVE to. No one expects an accident victim to suture themselves. Why are the broken women expected to also be their own surgeons and also save their marriages? The burden is unfair.
