When your ancestor created the system, you learn to see the code clearly.

BREAKING SPIRITS, BUILDING BATTERIES

Growing up as Joseph Smith’s great-great-grandniece gave me a unique perspective on Mormon psychological programming. When your family created the system, you see its mechanisms more clearly. But as a child, I couldn’t distinguish what family rules were from God’s rules. They were interwoven entirely in my mind.

The Matrix’s architects discovered something profound: the perfect prison is built with beliefs, not bars.

My ancestor understood this instinctively. Joseph Smith engineered a psychological control system disguised as a religion, and it has been refined over 200 years into something he could never have imagined.

The programming runs deeper than doctrine. It controls what you wear under your clothes, whom you marry, how many children you have, what you drink, how you spend your Sundays, what you believe about reality itself.

This is mind control with a celestial marketing department, dressed up as religion, and I grew up watching how the sausage was made.

THE TEMPLE ALGORITHM

Mormon temples represent the pinnacle of psychological programming. Members make secret covenants, wear ritual clothing, and participate in ceremonies that bond them permanently to the institution.

The genius is in the secrecy. Members can’t discuss temple content with outsiders, or even with other members outside temple walls. This creates information silos that prevent critical evaluation.

The programming works. Temple-attending Mormons exhibit classic characteristics of institutional capture: they interpret criticism as persecution, view questioning as spiritual weakness, and actively recruit others into the same system.

THE PERFECTIONISM VIRUS

Growing up as a Smith, the expectation went beyond being a good Mormon. I was supposed to be living proof that Joseph Smith’s legacy produced perfect disciples.

Mormon culture injects a psychological virus more destructive than any computer malware: the perfectionism protocol.

Members learn they can “choose to be happy.” Depression becomes evidence of insufficient faith. Struggling with impossible standards means you’re not trying hard enough.

As the founder’s kin, I experienced this programming on steroids. Every failure reflected not just on me, but on the entire Smith family legacy. The psychological pressure was suffocating.

The data reveals the damage. Utah ranked 46th out of 51 states for mental health in both 2023 and 2024. Utahns report depression symptoms at 17.5%, well above the 13.7% national average. Utah youth suicide rose 136% between 2011 and 2015, nearly six times the national increase over the same period. And for LGBTQ Mormons who stay in the faith, the data show something specific: those who remain actively affiliated report lower life satisfaction and higher suicide risk than those who leave.

The system literally makes people sick while convincing them their sickness proves they need more system.

THE TRAUMA BOND

Like an abusive relationship, the church alternates between love-bombing and emotional terrorism. Members experience the intense spiritual highs of bonded community followed by crushing guilt for never measuring up.

This creates trauma bonding, a psychological state where victims become emotionally attached to their abusers. Members stay because leaving feels like emotional death.

The fear runs deeper than social embarrassment. Members genuinely believe questioning church authority threatens their eternal souls. The system has weaponized the afterlife as a compliance mechanism.

PROGRAMMING THE NEXT GENERATION

Children born into the Mormon Matrix never experience unfiltered reality. From age three, they attend Primary classes that teach institutional loyalty before critical thinking develops.

Youth programs reinforce the programming: missions at eighteen, temple marriage by twenty-five, immediate childrearing to prevent questioning during formative adult years.

Each generation becomes more thoroughly programmed than the last.

THE GASLIGHTING PROTOCOL

When reality conflicts with institutional narrative, the church deploys sophisticated gaslighting techniques. Historical problems become anti-Mormon lies. Financial secrecy becomes sacred stewardship. Psychological damage becomes trials that build faith. Exploitation becomes opportunities to serve.

Members learn to distrust their own perceptions in favor of institutional interpretation.

THE GENDER PROGRAMMING DIVIDE

Mormon women face additional psychological programming designed to ensure compliance and reproduction. Divine destiny is fulfilled only through motherhood. Spiritual authority stays reserved for men. Economic dependence gets encouraged through stay-at-home expectations. Self-worth is tied to family size and a husband’s position in the church hierarchy.

The results are predictable. Mormon women show higher rates of depression, anxiety, and eating disorders. The system that claims to honor motherhood actually destroys the psychological well-being of mothers.

THE UNWORTHINESS ENGINE

Perhaps the most insidious programming element is the unworthiness engine, a psychological mechanism that ensures members never feel good enough. Monthly testimony meetings, where members profess and reinforce allegiance to the truth of the church. Impossible behavioral standards. Constant measurement against idealized examples, such as Mormon influencers. Shame-based compliance, dressed up as devotion.

Members work harder while feeling worse about themselves. Perfect psychological exploitation.

BREAKING THE CODE

Like Neo learning to see the Matrix’s code, my awakening came from trying to defend my Mormon faith in a non-Mormon university religion class. My research led me to forbidden books, and religious history scholars, and I discovered the truth. (See my blog of the experience on my website: lynsmithgregory.com.) Slowly, I was then able to unravel and recognize the psychological machinery that had shaped my entire childhood.

A con artist created the shame I felt, not God. The impossible standards existed to ensure compliance, dressed up as divine will. And what I’d taken for spiritual validation, I now recognize as an emotional programming technique.

Growing up inside the founding family gave me access to family stories the church doesn’t want told. My father was the Director of the Utah State Historical Society and gained access to Church History archives in 1972, including documents he shared with me. (My family had long ago donated all our family letters, journals, and personal effects at the Church’s request.) I learned about Joseph Smith’s documented pattern of using “revelation” to justify whatever served his personal interests. I saw how my family maintained the mythology, but I could see the troubling reality.

Once you see the psychological machinery, you can’t unsee it.

At 19, I made the hardest choice of my life: break free from generations of family legacy or perpetuate a lie that was damaging millions of lives.

THE RECOVERY PROTOCOL

Escaping Mormon psychological programming requires deprogramming similar to leaving any high-control group. Rebuilding trust in your own perception. Developing the critical thinking skills that were actively suppressed. Processing years of psychological manipulation as the trauma it actually was. Reconstructing an identity that exists beyond institutional definitions.

Many never fully recover. The programming runs too deep.

THE HUMAN COST

These are real psychological casualties, not abstract theological debates, and I feel a responsibility to speak out. Families destroyed by institutional loyalty demands. Young people who stayed, and paid for it with their mental health. Women crushed under impossible expectations. Children inheriting psychological damage they never chose.

The Mormon Matrix harvests more than resources. It harvests human psychological well-being and converts it into institutional power.

Joseph Smith created a con that became a psychological weapon. The machines in The Matrix were honest about their exploitation. The Mormon Church calls it salvation.

Which is worse?

I chose to break the cycle. I took the red pill. The question is: will you? Share your experience of reclaiming yourself after leaving a high-control religion in the comments. I respond to every one.

THE RENEGOTIATION DIARIES

Are you finding out, usually much later than you’d like, that you never actually owned the parts of yourself you thought were yours? Let me explain.

Maybe your perfectionist tendencies aren’t just part of your personality. Maybe your disdain for loud, bossy women isn’t just how you feel about outspoken women. Maybe your obsession with being a good mother isn’t an innate instinct.

Maybe an outsourced authority is still shaping your most intimate thoughts and feelings, even though you’ve discarded that authority, i.e., left the church, the political party, your family.

I’ve been sitting with an essay by Jim Palmer (Deconstructionology on Substack) this week about authority. What are you supposed to do when any doctrine you were handed stops making sense?

Palmer calls this shift “from outsourced authority to grounded self-authorship.”

WHAT OUTSOURCED AUTHORITY ACTUALLY MEANS

Outsourced authority isn’t just believing what someone else tells you. Plenty of people do that and still know, somewhere underneath, that they’re the ones doing the believing. Outsourced authority is subtler and more complete than that. It’s handing over the whole job of deciding what’s true, not just the answer someone gave you, but your right to ask the question in the first place. Somewhere else, someone else, some book or Bishop or Board of Elders, held the final interpretation.

Your job was reception, not authorship.

I grew up as the great-great-grandniece of the man who built one of these systems from scratch. Mormonism. Joseph Smith didn’t just claim to know God’s will. He claimed to be the channel through which anyone could know it, which meant every other channel, including your own conscience, ranked beneath his. That’s the architecture. Once it’s in place, doubting the message and doubting yourself become the same felt experience. You don’t feel like you’re disagreeing with a man. You feel like you’re malfunctioning. What’s wrong is you, not the message.

And the whole design of a totalizing system is to make the choice to submit to the system invisible to the person making it.

WHAT IT COSTS

Here’s what nobody tells you about leaving a system like that: the belief is the easy part to drop. The muscle underneath it, the actual capacity to trust your own read of a situation without checking it against some outside authority first, that has atrophied. And atrophied muscle doesn’t announce itself. It just quietly fails to show up when you need it.

I’ve written before about how my analytical brain became my favorite hiding place after I left the Church. Understanding my family, labeling my trauma, building a clean narrative out of the wreckage, all of it felt like freedom. It was, and it wasn’t. It was also a new authority, speaking in a therapist’s voice instead of a Bishop’s. I’d traded one system that told me what to think for a private system that told me what to feel, and I was just as unpracticed at trusting myself, what I thought, without a script.

This is the part that surprises people most: leaving a high-control system doesn’t automatically produce a self capable of standing on its own. It just removes the scaffolding. Some people go looking for new scaffolding immediately: a guru, a marathon, a political movement, anything with the same shape as the thing they left, because the shape is what they’re actually addicted to, not the specific content.

Others collapse into a kind of flat cynicism, deciding that if that authority was fake, all authority must be fake, which is its own way of refusing the work. Which is the path I took and became an atheist.

Determined to resolve the question of my faith, I retreated to a private spot on our ranch to pray to God. On my knees in the damp earth, I prayed that God would show me a sign that the Mormon Church was true. Silence. Nothing. Emptiness inside me. I stood up and whispered out loud, “I’m not a Mormon anymore” to the pale blue sky above me. “And I don’t believe in God now.”

I didn’t realize I was just outsourcing my authority to another authority: Atheists. I thought I was the one choosing, but I was seeking another system to explain the world to me, not thinking for myself.

I didn’t remain an atheist; I slowly realized that system couldn’t encapsulate or explain all of my experiences and feelings, and that was when the true self-authorship began.

THE WORK OF BECOMING THE AUTHOR

Grounded self-authorship doesn’t mean you get to be right about everything now that nobody’s grading you. It means something smaller and harder: you’re formed by things you didn’t choose, language, family, history, the body you woke up in, and you still have to test what you make of it against real consequences and other people’s eyes. You don’t get to be right about everything, the way you don’t get to decide the weather. You just get to decide how you walk through it. You don’t get final say over reality. You just stop pretending someone else has it instead of you.

Practically, this looks less dramatic than it sounds. It looks like sitting with a decision long enough to notice whose voice is actually making it, yours, or some internalized authority you never formally agreed to keep consulting. It looks like tolerating the discomfort of not being sure, instead of resolving that discomfort by outsourcing it again, to a new expert, a new ideology, a new person who seems to have it more figured out than you do. Religion isn’t the only place that happens. It’s just the most thorough one I’ve personally survived.

Bertrand Russell called the alternative a morality of initiative, action taken by people who can hold ambiguity without fleeing into another structure of submission. I’d add one thing to that: initiative isn’t a personality trait some people have and others don’t. It’s a capacity you rebuild, slowly, the same way you’d rebuild any muscle you spent twenty years not using. Inconsistently. With real setbacks. But it comes back.

The question was never really whether you’d trust an authority. Everyone does, all the time, doctors, mechanics, the people who wrote the instructions for your dishwasher.

The question is whether you remember that you’re the one who decided to trust them, and whether you’re still capable of deciding otherwise.

Where did you first notice you’d outsourced your own judgment? And what did it take to notice you’d gotten it back? Share in the comments.

My ancestor started a fraud. I want to share how it became America’s most sophisticated exploitation machine.

THE CHOICE YOU NEVER KNEW YOU WERE MAKING

I am the great-great-grandniece of Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon Church. At 19, I took the red pill and escaped the matrix my ancestor created. I’d discovered the fraud behind the curtain.

Neo, in the movie The Matrix, faced a choice between two pills: one offering comfortable illusion, the other painful truth. Every Mormon faces the same choice, but most don’t even know it’s an option.

Growing up in the founding family, we were considered ‘Mormon Royalty.’ I cherished my specialness. Strove to live up to my legacy. My belief sat at the core of my identity, load-bearing, the thing everything else was built on. I learned at 19 that the Mormon Church narrative was a carefully constructed mythology when a university professor challenged me to defend my faith.

To rebut him, I read what Mormons are forbidden to read: scholarly and historical accounts of Joseph Smith and the early Church. Eyewitness testimony. Newspaper and court records. Signed affidavits. Proof that the Church’s founding narrative was false and self-serving.

Sitting in a library cubicle one night, my world collapsed. The evidence was overwhelming. I was no longer a believer, and I knew it in my body before my mind caught up. I pulled myself into a tight ball and bit my clenched fist to stop myself from screaming out loud. I was furious. Betrayed by everything and everyone I trusted. I had no idea who I even was anymore. So I fled to NYC, to shed my identity in the anonymity of Manhattan, to avoid shaming my family with my heresy. (Running didn’t work out as well as I’d hoped. That’s another essay.)

Forget prophet. My ancestor was a treasure hunter, and he’d found something worth more than gold plates: the ability to turn human faith into personal wealth.

The movie The Matrix presented a simulated reality so convincing that its inhabitants never questioned their imprisonment. Joseph Smith created something eerily similar, a religious worldview so comprehensive that questioning it feels like spiritual suicide.

Both systems share the same fundamental architecture: voluntary participation in your own exploitation.

THE PERFECT PRISON

In The Matrix, humans served as batteries. Their life energy powered the very machines that enslaved them.

Sound familiar?

The LDS Church operates on identical principles. Members contribute 10% of their income as tithing. They donate thousands of unpaid hours through church “callings.” They fund and staff missions, maintain buildings, and recruit the new members who will do it all again. All of it paid for by the very people doing the giving.

Meanwhile, the organization accumulates wealth at a staggering pace.

The numbers are damning. The church’s estimated net worth has reached $293 billion as of 2025 financial reports (Widow’s Mite 2026). Investment returns now exceed member donations. The organization could fund operations forever without collecting another dollar in tithing. By 2040, the Mormon Church is expected to reach the trillion-dollar mark.

Yet the extraction continues.

AGENT SMITH WAS HONEST ABOUT HIS CONTEMPT

Here’s where the Mormon Matrix proves more insidious than its Hollywood counterpart. Agent Smith openly despised humanity. Mormon leadership claims to love their members while systematically exploiting them.

Church leaders preach sacrifice while sitting on a fortune that could eliminate poverty in entire nations. They demand widow’s mites from struggling families while investing billions in shopping malls and luxury real estate.

The cruelest irony? When asked whether impoverished members could be exempted from tithing, church leadership responded that even financially struggling families should still pay 10% tithing because “the pathway out of poverty is keeping the commandments of God.”

Let that sink in. The machine doesn’t need the energy but demands it anyway.

THE RED PILL MOMENT

Some Mormons are waking up. They’re discovering the church’s hidden wealth. Others are questioning why humanitarian aid represents less than 0.1% of total assets. And some are realizing what temple garments really are: a uniform of submission.

My red pill moment came at 19.

The truth was uglier than I’d imagined. My ancestor’s polygamous relationships with teenagers. Smith’s documented fraud and treasure hunting. His pattern of claiming divine revelation whenever he needed to justify personal desires, or deflect criticism.

Awakening members face the same disorientation as Neo. Everything they believed about reality crumbles. Relationships strain. Families fracture. Some choose to stay plugged in rather than face the isolation of truth.

But once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

THE BLUE PILL BRIGADE

The exploited members are genuinely kind, sincere people. The institutional defenders are the truly tragic figures. Like Agent Smith’s ability to possess any person still connected to the Matrix, church loyalty can transform reasonable people into fierce protectors of their own exploitation.

Question tithing? You lack faith. Critique leadership? You’re on the path to apostasy. Demand transparency? You don’t understand God’s plan.

The system has programmed its own antibodies.

LET ME BE CLEAR: MORMON MEMBERS ARE MISGUIDED, NOT EVIL

Mormon members are good people trying their best to live according to what they believe is God’s will. They sacrifice, serve, and love with sincere hearts. My criticism is aimed at the institution that exploits their goodness, and their faith deserves better than this sophisticated deception.

WELCOME TO THE DESERT OF THE REAL

As kin to Joseph Smith, I was pressured to stay silent. I could have benefited from the family name and legacy. Instead, I feel compelled to expose the truth after seeing the suffering it has caused for so many people. My ancestor committed a sophisticated fraud that has evolved into the most successful wealth-extraction operation in American religious history.

The Mormon Matrix represents something unprecedented: a con man’s lie that became a self-replicating system for harvesting human spiritual energy and converting it to institutional power.

They think they’re serving God. They’re serving a machine my ancestor built to serve himself.

Forget whether God exists. Ask whether this organization serves God, or perpetuates a two-hundred-year-old con that outgrew its creator’s wildest dreams.

The Matrix trilogy taught us that the first step to liberation is recognizing your prison.

Welcome to the Mormon Matrix.

The choice is yours. Red pill or blue pill?

This is the first part of a three-part series. Subscribe to read the entire series.

Have you ever kept participating in something you no longer believed in, because leaving felt like too much to lose? What was your awakening moment? Share in the comments.

Photo by Darius Bashar on Unsplash

I couldn’t stop the tears or my jagged breathing, confused and embarrassed at this display of emotion and my inability to control myself.

The others tiptoed around me to gather their mats, while the yoga teacher waited, then squatted close, put her hand on my arm, and gently explained that this sometimes happens to newcomers. That emotions stored in the body had been activated by the mind/body practice and were being released.

What?

I had already processed my family and religious traumas in therapy; I could provide you with a lengthy and professional analysis of my past; I had completed the work. I was on the other side of it. Wasn’t I?

My logical, analytical brain has saved me many times in my life. It helped me leave the Mormon Church at 19 when confronted with the historical evidence of massive lies and fraud in my faith, despite being the great-great-grandniece of its founder, Joseph Smith.

In therapy, it helped me understand and label my family as dysfunctional, understand that my mother was a narcissist, and that I had trauma from being raised in a high-control religion. My brain told me understanding my past was the path to freedom.

BUT MY BRAIN LIED

Thinking is not the same as feeling. I understood myself, my family, and my destructive coping skills better, and there was relief in naming and labeling my emotions. But the clarity I achieved in that also allowed me the false sense that I had dealt with my past traumas, worked through them, and was finished. But what I had really done was psychologically bypass them, much the same as spiritual bypassing, defined by psychotherapist John Welwood as “the tendency to sidestep or avoid facing emotional issues, psychological wounds and undeveloped developmental tasks.”

It was the beginning of understanding how much I would rather think than feel. And how much I would rather talk about what I’m thinking about my feelings than actually feel them, especially some of the hardest ones: rage, grief, fear.

Many things that I called feelings were, in fact, thoughts and opinions about feelings, and these thoughts and opinions, often eloquently expressed, became shields that I hid behind when the big feelings, especially fear and anger, arose.

THE WORDS THAT HIDE THE FEELING

Whenever I told someone that I felt betrayed by the Mormon Church, that wasn’t a feeling. Betrayal is a thought, an opinion about a feeling, not the feeling itself. The feeling I was actually experiencing was rage, mixed with other feelings called fear and sadness.

But calling it betrayal distanced me from the raw messiness of anger and fear. It also allowed me to focus on the awfulness of the Mormon Church, rather than my uncomfortable feelings of fury and grief. Now the Church is the problem, not the feelings I am having. The feelings have been dodged, and now I’m in a discussion. And my analytical brain is so much more comfortable in discussion, than in feeling.

I discovered that what I called feelings were often “smokescreen emotions” obscuring the underlying true emotion too scary to feel.

“I feel disappointed.”

“I feel left out.”

“I feel annoyed.”

All opinions about feelings, not the base feeling underneath that separates you from the feeling.

FEAR

I’m angry with my daughter for coming home after curfew.

The driving emotion underneath is fear. Fear for her safety, fear that I can’t protect her.

How differently all our conversations might go if we are able to first feel, and then express, the base emotions that we’re actually having of fear, anger, and sadness.

“I was worried. I felt scared that something bad might have happened. I don’t like being scared about you. What can we do about curfew so that I don’t have to worry and you are safe?”

WHAT’S UNDERNEATH ALL OF IT

When I drill down even deeper to the real dark emotion, buried at the base of all of these other feelings and feelings-adjacent experiences, what do I find?

Fear. It’s just fear.

Fear that I’m not loved. Fear that I, or someone I care about, is in danger. Fear of pain, now, or in the future. Fear of humiliation. Fear that I am not respected. Fear that I am not wanted. Fear that I am not enough.

And when the “fear” switch is on, other scary emotions arise, like anger and sadness, which I then turn into stories about abandonment, betrayal, exclusion, or resentment, stories I polish into gleaming stones of righteous indignation and moral outrage, which is really about trying to maintain an illusion of control, not about feeling anything at all.

HOW TO ACTUALLY FEEL IT

We have to let ourselves feel the fear, to sit with it and really feel it, without trying to control it, assign blame, or intellectualize it away. And then to meet that fear with compassion for ourselves, instead of strategies, minimizing, escape fantasies, or blame.

Meet it with unconditional love for yourself. (Learning how to love ourselves is challenging and the topic of another essay.)

Often we need help to feel our base feelings. Internal Family Systems therapy is a combined talk and somatic therapy, where we learn that our minds have many parts or sub-personalities and healing happens when a core ‘self’ integrates and understands these parts. (For more information on IFS: https//www.psychologytoday.com/us/therapy-types/internal-family-systems-therapy)

In the meantime, ask yourself a question when you realize you may be having an opinion about a feeling:

What’s underneath that?

And underneath that? And underneath that?

It may take several answers before you get to the base emotion.

I didn’t really begin to heal from my religious trauma until I felt all of my rage, fear and grief about the damage the Mormon Church had done. Decades after leaving. Healing motivated me to begin writing my memoir: We Were Smiths, A Mormon Princess Betrays the Kingdom. (Subscribe to follow me on my path to publication.)

Are you having feelings? Or are you having thoughts about feelings? Share in the comments.

Hannah Neeleman is thirty-four years old, has nine children, 23 million Instagram followers, and a husband whose millionaire father founded JetBlue. She milks cows, gathers eggs, bakes bread, competes in beauty pageants for fun, and just opened a retail store in Midway, Utah, that draws crowds. She is, by any social media metric, a phenomenon.

The internet has spent considerable energy debating whether her “trad wife” lifestyle, the philosophy of returning to traditional values where women stay home, find fulfillment in domestic life, and support their husbands as primary breadwinners, represents an empowered choice or a step backward for feminism. Both sides argue with confidence.

I keep asking a different question. One that seems to have gotten lost entirely.

Did Hannah Neeleman actually have a choice?

I grew up Mormon. Hannah Neeleman is a Mormon. I am also the great-great-grandniece of Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon faith. I know this story. I grew up in a version of it. And when I read about Ballerina Farm, I am not watching a woman who chose the traditional life. I am watching a woman who was raised to believe it was the only life that mattered, one that guaranteed her eternal salvation.

THE COMMENT THAT SAID EVERYTHING

Hannah’s off-hand comment to a reporter, “this is just what we do,” is the line that told the truth. It carries the flat, unremarkable weight of someone describing the weather. This is just what we do.

That sentence is the language of someone who never fully understood she had options to weigh.

The Mormon Church, officially the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, has always maintained that a woman’s highest calling is the home. Wife. Mother. Helpmate. The more children the Lord sends, the greater the blessing. These are doctrinal positions delivered from the pulpit and reinforced in every Sunday lesson, every Young Women’s meeting, every Temple ceremony. A Mormon girl grows up hearing, repeatedly and in the most sacred contexts her culture possesses, that her eternal salvation is tied directly to how well she fulfills this role.

With that much at stake, is there really a choice to be made?

I am certain Hannah would find my question insulting. I am certain she believes she is capable of making her own choices and has made them freely. I believed the same thing. Until I left.

Only with distance did I recognize how completely I had absorbed the idea that a woman’s place was in the home, submitting to her husband’s patriarchy, not because someone forced me to believe it, but because it was the only reality I knew. The indoctrination does not feel cruel, but like truth, and it is constant, persistent, and everywhere.

MY MOTHER’S VERSION OF THIS STORY

My mother’s trajectory mirrors Hannah’s with an eerie precision. She trained to be an opera singer. She was accepted to Juilliard on a voice scholarship. She turned it down to marry my father at nineteen, a Smith with a royal pedigree, at her own mother’s urging. Marrying into the Smith family would secure the highest levels of exaltation in the hereafter.

My father wanted ten children. She gave him nine, one after another, until the doctors said no more. My father expected her to stay thin, feminine, and attractive while simultaneously raising nine children, maintaining a large garden, baking bread, cooking every meal from scratch, and supervising her children in managing the chickens, cow, horses, and goats that populated our family property.

She put on a happy face at Church and in the community. But we kids knew better. She struggled with migraine headaches and depression, overwhelmed and exhausted, blaming herself for not measuring up, for not being cheerful enough, grateful enough, faithful enough. Being the star soloist in church services was the only crumb left from her dream of an opera career. Church doctrine suggests that unhappiness is a personal spiritual failure and always instructs its members to project warmth and positivity. Her suffering was invisible to anyone outside our walls.

But my mother’s unhappiness planted my first seeds of doubt. When she developed nodules on her vocal cords and couldn’t sing anymore, I became angry at God. Why would He give her this talent and then take it away? Didn’t God want us to be happy? She had been faithful, obeyed every doctrine, and this happened?

I stumbled into her bedroom after the doctor delivered the news of her vocal trauma, interrupting her kneeling in prayer. She motioned me in. Tears streaked her cheeks.

“I’m too proud of my voice. God is humbling me,” she said. The one solace she had left from giving up her dream was now gone. She blamed herself. My heart broke for her. I remember my fury and helplessness at the unfairness, but how do you defy God? But my anger led to the courage I found just a few years later to question the Church’s dogma and ultimately, leave.

“This is just what we do.” Hannah’s words. Did my mother have choices? Does she?

And this is the norm in Mormon culture, not an anomaly in my family alone. And I see it playing out in real time on Ballerina Farm. Just backed with millions of dollars and assistants to make the life look romantic, glamorous.

WHAT THE CAMERAS DON’T SHOW

The reporter who profiled Hannah for The Times piece tried repeatedly to get time alone with her. Hannah’s husband Daniel kept intervening; answering questions directed at his wife, interrupting, redirecting. The reporter noted it. Most readers moved past it. I did not.

The epidural story is another detail that stayed with me. Hannah had delivered multiple children without pain relief. Then, two weeks overdue, carrying a ten-pound baby, with Daniel away, she got an epidural.

She lowered her voice.

“And it was an amazing experience,” she said. (Daniel was in the next room.) She didn’t want Daniel to hear.

She whispered about her own medical decision in her own home regarding her own body. That whisper contains everything this conversation has been missing.

Then there was the birthday gift. Hannah hoped for tickets to Greece, a brief reprieve for her and her husband, long postponed. She got an egg-gathering apron. For her chores. She tried it on for the family, working to hide her disappointment. When she didn’t express gratitude quickly enough, Daniel said: “You’re welcome.”

These are small moments, the kind that accumulate over decades into a life you didn’t fully know you were choosing.

THE LOOK THAT COSTS SOMETHING

The beauty pageants belong here too. Hannah competes in them “for fun,” the articles say. And she did, once just 12 days after giving birth. But pageants are not incidental to Mormon culture; they are deeply embedded in it. My mother represented her hometown in the Miss Wyoming pageant. The Church instructs its members to present a perfectly groomed, attractive, and wholesome image to attract potential converts. “Every member a missionary” is the Mormon Church motto.

Utah ranks tenth nationally in board-certified plastic surgeons per capita, with cosmetic enhancement rates much higher than the national average. Appearance matters in the Mormon faith.

Behind the carefully maintained appearance is a different picture. Utah has some of the highest numbers of antidepressant prescriptions, rooted in cultural pressures that have not disappeared. Utah women are encouraged to suppress negative emotion as a condition of faithful standing. Anger, sadness, and disappointment are not spiritually acceptable responses. The approved persona is warm, calm, and positive, always. The gap between that requirement and a woman’s actual interior life has nowhere to go. Except to try harder to meet the goal of perfection and blame themselves for coming up short.

Look at the Mormon Mommy Influencer landscape. All of them are strikingly, uniformly beautiful, impeccably groomed, radiantly happy, advertising a lifestyle of cheerful abundance. The sameness is not coincidence. It is the product of a culture that has very specific ideas about what a faithful Mormon woman looks like.

THE QUESTION FEMINISM FORGOT TO ASK

The media debate about Hannah Neeleman treats her lifestyle as a freely made choice that feminism either should celebrate or should challenge. Both framings miss the structural reality. Fish don’t question water. It is just their reality.

Feminism, as far as I’m concerned, represents the freedom for all women to have genuine autonomy over their lives, to achieve whatever they desire without institutional suppression. The Mormon Church has no role models of women in meaningful positions of leadership. Men hold the priesthood, the power to act in God’s name. Women are instructed to support their husbands’ aspirations and focus on motherhood. The institutional structure is not subtle about this.

Some women may find genuine fulfillment in a traditional domestic life. They have other options and freely choose it. That is real choice.

But for a woman raised in the Mormon Church, the calculus is different. The traditional path is the only path that promises eternal salvation. Every other choice — a serious career, having one child, remaining unmarried — carries the implicit threat of spiritual failure and diminished standing in the hereafter. When the consequences of deviation are eternal, the word “choice” requires some examination.

I left the Church at nineteen after discovering what historians and scholars reported about my famous relative, by reading books and research that had been forbidden to me. What I found was a founder who was a liar, a fraud, and a predator, and a religious institution built on the suppression of exactly the questions I was asking. It was shattering, but once I could see it clearly, I could not unsee it.

Distance gave me something I did not expect: the ability to recognize which of my choices had actually been mine, which of my mother’s choices had been hers.

I think about Hannah Neeleman, the girl who trained as a star ballerina, who had a body capable of extraordinary discipline and artistry, who whispers about her own epidural in her own home. I wonder what she would choose if the eternal consequences were removed from the equation. If the choice were simply hers.

I wonder if she’ll ever know.

Do you recognize this system in your own life? A system that shaped your choices before you were old enough to question them? When did you first recognize it? Leave it in the comments.

THE RENEGOTIATION DIARIES

By Lyn Smith Gregory

At my first NYC party, I dressed to fit in, sipped the offered glass of wine, and held a cigarette to calm my nerves. I looked the part, like I belonged, in my thigh-high black boots and mini-skirt, my careful, made-up, nonchalant face. But when a handsome stranger asked me about myself, innocent cocktail chatter, I froze. Went completely blank. Lost any sophistication I was attempting. Stunned, I realized I simply didn’t know what to say.

Who was I without my ex-Mormon, heretic identity? I had no sense of how to describe myself to the questioner. I truly didn’t know who I was without my prior identity, which I intended to keep a secret.

I fled Utah for NYC, sight unseen, after leaving the Mormon Church at nineteen. As the great-great-grandniece of Joseph Smith, its founder, I was hoping to find anonymity and outrun my family legacy in the iconic city of reinvention. I’d adopt the mannerisms, style, and beliefs of its native inhabitants and become a New Yorker. That didn’t work out, by the way.

The self I was performing had no content. The self I had abandoned at nineteen did, content I hoped to shed, like a snake sheds an old skin.

So, who am I now?

The question comes for people leaving high-control religions. It comes for people getting sober. At the end of a marriage. The loss of a child. Anything that catapults you into new and unfamiliar territory. It can feel like devastation or like freedom, but it is almost always disorienting, the vertigo of looking in the mirror and not quite recognizing the person looking back.

Maybe the question is not who you should become. Maybe the question is who you already were before the religion, the drinking, the marriage, the career, or whatever else made you someone else.

GO BACK BEFORE THE TAKEOVER

The most direct route to your essential self runs through your childhood, specifically, through the version of you that existed before the religion claimed you, or the drinking started, or being a mother consumed you. Eight, nine, ten years old. What did you love then? What made you lose track of time? What were you curious about before curiosity got managed or extinguished?

It is reconnaissance, not nostalgia.

The things that absorbed you at eight were not random. They are data about who you are at the level underneath socialization and survival. The child who read everything about Anne Frank or Arctic explorers. The child who took apart the toaster to see how it worked. The child who wanted to bike over the other side of the hill. That child is still in there, waiting with considerable patience for you to come back.

Ask the people who knew you then. Ask your mother, a childhood friend, a sibling. “What did I love as a kid?” You may be surprised by what they remember that you have forgotten. You may also be surprised by how quickly you recognize yourself in the answer.

“Mom? What was I like as an eight-year old? Was there anything I was crazy about?” She paused. “Hmmm...well, I was surprised at how obsessed you were about horse books. Black Beauty. The Red Pony. Misty of Chincoteague. You read everything you could lay your hands on. While practically ignoring your own horses in the corral just outside. I couldn’t figure it out.”

I was transported back to my reading spot, the window seat in my bedroom, eagerly devouring a new horse book. Books that showed the private bond between a young girl and a perfect horse, one that only she could tame. Nothing like our three horses: Pinto, the old, tired mare who wouldn’t ever gallop, Smoky, the gray Shetland pony who always tried to scrape you off him on a fence, or Dorkie, no explanation needed. My reality wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted passion. I wanted adventure. I wanted more. And I got my first clue about who I am underneath what I became: the dutiful, high-achieving, obedient Mormon girl.

I also wanted a project with a completion date, but it doesn’t work that way. It spirals and surprises. The path back to yourself is rarely straight or fast, and it tends to happen sideways, in a sentence that catches you off guard, in the thing you found yourself doing for two hours without noticing, in the moment you stopped performing and felt somehow solid.

Last week, I gathered with girlfriends in the mountains and watched the stars come out, sitting around a fire pit, listening to old rock ballads, tired from an afternoon of horseback riding. No glass of wine. No cigarette. No thigh-high boots. No pretending. Having a sense of myself as transparent, that my insides line up with my outsides. Integrated. Comfortable just being me. And knowing who she is — not fully, not permanently, but I recognize her now.

The eight-year-old you wanted something from life. Go back and ask her.

What did you love before life told you what to love? Tell me in the comments. I read every one.

When my fun, romantic, guitar-playing brother, who begged for my dating advice, returned from his Mormon mission, I almost didn’t recognize him. His longish, blonde curls had been replaced by the identical shorn head of all Mormon missionaries, but more upsetting was discovering that his mischievous sparkling eyes, giant smile, and spontaneous laugh were also gone. He was rigid in my engulfing ‘welcome home’ hug; he didn’t hug me back but responded with a careful pat on my back.

Where had my brother gone? I still miss him. My brother was not an exception. He was the product.

The Substack writer Celeste Davis recently asked why everyone thinks Mormon men are gay. Her piece in Matriarchal Blessings argues that Mormon men appear feminized because patriarchal dominion over women removes the pressure to perform conventional masculine traits. Perhaps. But the story I am telling goes deeper.

I believe Mormon men aren’t perceived as gay because they’re feminine. They’re perceived as gay because the traits we culturally associate with masculinity — sexual confidence, emotional directness, autonomous judgment, the capacity for controlled aggression — have been systematically removed. What remains reads as absence. And absence, in a man, gets misread as femininity.

The Mormon Church will tell you it produces strong men. Men who lead their families, hold the priesthood, preside over congregations, and exercise the authority of God on earth.

What the Church actually produces is something more complicated, more contradictory, and more quietly devastating: men who hold the architecture of authority while being systematically stripped of the interior life that makes authority real. Men who have power over women and no power over themselves.

This is not an accident. It is the logical outcome of three institutional forces operating simultaneously on every Mormon male from the time he is ordained a deacon at twelve years old. Sexual shame. Performed niceness. Obedience without autonomy. Together, they do not make a patriarch. They make a man-shaped cavity where a self was supposed to be.

THE BODY AS THE ENEMY

The Mormon Church’s relationship with male sexuality begins with a premise so foundational it is rarely examined: the natural man is an enemy to God.

That phrase comes from the Book of Mormon — Mosiah 3:19 — and it functions in Mormon culture as a theological justification for one of the most comprehensive programs of sexual repression in American religious life. The natural man, the man who feels desire, who has urges, who experiences his body as alive and wanting — that man is spiritually dangerous. He must be overcome. Subdued. Replaced with something holier.

For Mormon boys, this theology arrives early and lands hard. Masturbation is not merely discouraged; it is treated as a serious sin requiring confession to a bishop, a middle-aged man in a private office, potentially resulting in loss of temple recommend, inability to serve a mission, or formal church discipline. The For the Strength of Youth pamphlet, distributed to every Mormon teenager, instructs: “Do not arouse those emotions in your own body.”

Do not arouse those emotions in your own body. The Church is not merely telling young men not to act on desire. It is telling them not to feel it.

The emotion itself is the sin.

What happens to a man who spends his formative years learning that his body’s most basic drives are spiritually dangerous? He does not simply suppress them. He learns to be afraid of them. He learns to distrust his own interior experience. He develops what psychologists call sexual shame — not guilt, which is about behavior, but shame, which is about identity. Guilt says I did something wrong. Shame says I am something wrong.

The research on sexual shame is unambiguous: men who carry deep sexual shame show higher rates of sexual dysfunction, intimacy avoidance, and what therapists call “erotic rigidity” — the inability to be spontaneous, playful, or present in sexual experience. They also show something more diffuse and harder to name: a quality of self-absence. A man who has learned to distrust his own desire has learned to distrust himself. That distrust does not stay in the bedroom. It follows him into every room.

A man who is afraid of his own desire is a man who has lost access to his own power. Sexual shame does not exist in isolation. It requires a culture of performed wellness to keep it hidden. In Mormonism, that culture has a name.

THE SMILE THAT ISN’T

Ask anyone who has spent time around Mormons, and they will tell you the same thing: ‘Mormons are so nice.’ Genuinely, persistently, sometimes disconcertingly nice. Friendly at the door. Helpful with the move. Casseroles after the surgery.

The niceness is real. It is also a mask. And for Mormon men specifically, it is a mask over a face that was never fully allowed to form.

The Church does not merely encourage pleasantness. It enforces emotional performance as a condition of spiritual standing. To be angry is to lack the Spirit. To be uncertain is to lack faith. To be sad — genuinely sad, not the kind of sad that resolves into a testimony — is to be spiritually deficient. A faithful Mormon man is expected to project a particular emotional register: warm, calm, positive, encouraging, untroubled.

Mormon men are expected to be providers of emotional support, not recipients of it. They are not asked how their marriages are doing. They are not asked about their personal happiness. They are asked about their qualifications for their Temple Recommend, their job, their ability to provide and pay tithing.

The result is a specific kind of loneliness that Mormon men rarely have language for, because the language of loneliness requires acknowledging an interior life, and the interior life has been so thoroughly managed and monitored that many Mormon men genuinely do not know what they feel. They know what they are supposed to feel. They perform it reliably. But the man behind the performance — the man who might be furious, terrified, sexually frustrated, or simply exhausted by his own mandatory optimism — that man has nowhere to go.

Nice is not a personality.

Nice is what happens when a personality has been told it is too dangerous to come out. But the deepest damage is not visible at all.

THE AUTHORITY THAT ISN’T HIS

Of the three forces operating on Mormon men, this one is the most hidden and the most corrosive: the systematic destruction of personal autonomy in the name of priesthood authority.

The Mormon Church is organized as a rigid hierarchical structure. The prophet at the top receives revelation from God. The chain descends — apostles, stake presidents, bishops, elders — each man receiving from above, each man obligated to pass it down unchanged. At every level, the man below is expected to follow the man above, not out of admiration or persuasion or reasoned agreement, but out of obedience. The Oath and Covenant of the Priesthood, delivered in the temple, demands strict obedience to all duties at every level of the organization. Deviation is not spiritual independence. It is faithlessness.

What this produces, over decades of formation, is a man who has never developed the musculature of personal judgment. He has not had to evaluate a situation and decide what he thinks. He has been told what to think by the man above him, who was told by the man above him, who was told by the prophet, who was told by God. The chain of authority is total. The individual conscience is, at best, a mechanism for confirming what has already been decided above.

An Exponent II piece on Toxic Mormon Masculinity named this precisely: “Instead of embracing a full spectrum of positive human traits, Mormon men are instructed to perform their masculinity in particular ways, especially in regard to presiding, leadership and decision-making.” But the presiding is scripted. The leadership is prescribed. The decision-making is bounded by what the handbook permits. A man can preside over a meeting whose agenda he did not set, in a role he did not choose, according to rules he did not make, reporting to a leader whose authority he cannot question. He has the title of patriarch without ever having made a genuinely patriarchal decision in his life.

This is the deepest wound, and the one most invisible from outside. The Mormon man appears to hold power. He does hold power — over his wife, over his children, over the women in his ward who cannot hold the priesthood he was handed at twelve. But the power flows through him from above. It is not his.

He is a conduit, not a source.

Personal power — the real kind, the kind that comes from knowing your own mind and acting on it — requires exactly what the Mormon Church forbids. It requires tolerating doubt without resolving it through obedience. It requires sitting with anger long enough to understand what it is telling you. It requires the capacity to look at what you have been taught and ask whether it is true. Every one of those capacities is systematically suppressed in Mormon male formation.

THE PARADOX OF THE PATRIARCH

The Mormon Church does not merely substitute patriarchal authority for embodied masculinity. It destroys embodied masculinity from the inside and then hands the hollowed-out man the title of patriarch.

The man who has been shamed out of his sexuality, trained to perform emotions he does not feel, and conditioned to outsource his judgment to the man above him is not a man who has been relieved of the burden of proving himself. He is a man who has been denied the experiences through which a self is formed. The sexuality he was never allowed to own. The anger he was never allowed to feel. The decisions he was never allowed to make. The doubt he was never allowed to hold.

What remains when you remove all of that is not a patriarch. It is a performance of a patriarch, running on institutional authority rather than personal power, maintained by compliance rather than conviction. It looks like leadership from the outside. From the inside, many of these men have described it as a kind of numbness — going through the motions of a life that was constructed for them before they were old enough to choose it.

A man cannot be a man from a self he was never allowed to develop.

I resented my brother’s transformation. I felt I had lost a sibling. I was angry at him for years. Now I understand what was taken from him before I ever had the chance to be angry about it.

The toll the Mormon Church extracts from Mormon women is well-known and documented. But the men are also harmed, and their trauma isn’t well understood or discussed. They lack the inclination to seek support, the resources to find it, and the language to name what the indoctrination cost them, to grieve the sexuality that was shamed out of them.

I think about what it would have cost my brother to doubt. To be honest. Just honest with himself about what he wanted, what he doubted, what he felt in the moments the Church had already answered for him.

He has learned to use those answers instead of himself.

That is the inheritance I am describing. Not the patriarchy men were promised. The vacancy it left behind. The hollow Mormon man.

Did you know a man like this? Are you one? What did the Church take from the men in your life that it never gave back? Leave it in the comments.

Further Reading: Matriarchal Blessings, Celeste Davis: https://substack.com/home/post/p-205137194

The cursor blinks. My coffee is full. The pencils are sharpened. I am completely, inexplicably unable to begin.

When I left my corporate career to write full-time, I couldn’t make myself write. First I told myself I was too busy raising children, then learning new parenting skills, which morphed into teaching parent education classes in schools throughout Atlanta. Meanwhile, the desire didn’t go away. It grew louder.

Even when I finally had the time, I still couldn’t move. I took a writing class at the local college. Read every craft book I could find. Joined an Artist’s Way group. Told myself I was preparing. What I was actually doing was protecting myself from the answer to a question I wasn’t ready to ask.

Here is what nobody tells you about procrastination: it is almost never about the thing you are not doing.

It is about the thing you are afraid to become.

We have built an entire industrial complex around the lie that procrastination is a discipline problem. Get up earlier. Use the Pomodoro technique. Break it into smaller steps. Reward yourself with a gold star. The self-help industry charges considerable money for this advice, and it works approximately as well as telling someone with a broken leg to try harder at walking.

Procrastination is not a failure of will. It is an act of loyalty. You are protecting something: an identity, a relationship, a story you have been telling about who you are for so long that you have mistaken it for a fact. The project you cannot start. The conversation you cannot have. The decision you cannot make. Look closely at any of them, and you will find, underneath the avoidance, something you are not ready to face.

The writer who never finishes the book is protecting the identity of someone who might write a great book someday. The woman who stays in the wrong job is protecting a self-image that does not include failure. The person who cannot leave is protecting the version of themselves that made the right choice when they stayed.

As long as you don’t finish, you can’t fail. As long as you don’t decide, you can’t be wrong. As long as you don’t move, you are still the person you were before the move changed you.

That is the logic. It is airtight. It is also slowly swallowing your life.

But here is what the procrastination conversation almost always misses: for some of us, this is not just psychology. It is theology.

High-control religions do not simply give you beliefs. They install a cognitive operating system. The core code is this: there is always a right answer, locating it is your moral obligation, and being wrong carries consequences that outlast your lifetime. Sin is not just a mistake. It is a permanent mark on an eternal record. Doubt is not curiosity. It is spiritual weakness. Imperfection is not human. It is evidence of insufficient faith.

If you live inside that system long enough, it rewires the circuitry. Every decision becomes a test. Every choice becomes a referendum on your worth. Every incomplete thing becomes proof of your inadequacy before God. The stakes are not just high. They are infinite.

Researcher Brené Brown has spent two decades documenting what perfectionism actually is: not the pursuit of excellence, but a shield. “Perfectionism,” she writes, “is the belief that if we do things perfectly and look perfect, we can minimize or avoid the pain of blame, judgment, and shame.” High-control religion doesn’t just encourage that shield. It forges it. It hands it to you at eight years old and calls it righteousness.

And then one day you leave. Or the faith leaves you. Or you simply stop being able to pretend that you believe what you no longer believe.

The theology goes. The operating system stays.

This is the part nobody warns you about. You walk out of the church, the congregation, the community or family standards, and you carry the cognitive architecture with you like a structure you cannot see but keep running into in the dark. Perfectionism is what certainty looks like when it has nowhere left to land. The paralysis you feel in front of an unfinished essay, an unmade phone call, or a life decision that refuses to be resolved isn’t a character flaw. That is a faith system still running on hardware you thought you’d replaced.

The bar was set at eternal perfection. Everything since has felt insufficient by comparison. Of course you cannot start. Of course you cannot finish. Of course you are waiting for the conditions to be exactly right before you move.

They were never going to be exactly right. That was always the point.

And here is the thing about an unmade decision: it does not wait for you.

While you are standing still, protecting yourself from the risk of being wrong, the decision is being made. By default. By drift. By the slow, quiet accumulation of days in which you chose not to choose. The relationship you could not bring yourself to leave either ends without you or becomes permanent without your consent. The life you could not bring yourself to claim becomes the life you watched someone else live, the regret you will have at the end of life.

Not deciding is always a decision. It is simply the one we don’t think we’re making.

Psychologists who study decision avoidance note that people consistently underestimate the cost of inaction. We treat staying still as neutral, a holding pattern, a safe harbor. It is none of those things. Inaction has consequences as real and as permanent as action. The difference is that when you act and it goes wrong, you know why. When you fail to act and your life contracts around you, it happens slowly enough that you can tell yourself a story about how it wasn’t your fault.

That story is the most expensive story you will ever tell.

So here is the move. Not a productivity hack. Not a morning routine. Not a vision board.

Ask yourself what you are protecting.

Sit with the thing you cannot make yourself do and ask: if I do this, who do I stop being? What story ends? What identity has to be revised? What relationship with a person, a belief, a version of myself, gets renegotiated the moment I move?

The answer is usually not comfortable, but it’s almost always honest.

Maybe you are protecting the dream over the reality, because the dream is still perfect and the reality will have edges and disappointments and days when you wonder if you made the right choice. Maybe you are protecting a relationship with a parent or a community or a God who needs you to stay small in order to stay approved of. Maybe you are protecting yourself from the terrifying discovery that you are capable of more than you have allowed, because that discovery comes with responsibility, and responsibility is heavy, and it is easier to stay uncertain.

Whatever it is: name it. Out loud. On paper. The naming does not make it disappear. But it makes you honest about what is actually happening. And honesty is the only ground from which anything real can be built.

Done is not the enemy of good. Done is the only version that exists outside your head. Everything else is just an intention, a fantasy you’ve agreed to call a plan.

The perfectionism that high-control religion installs is a particularly cruel inheritance because it masquerades as virtue. You are not paralyzed by fear. You are being thorough. You are not protecting your ego. You are maintaining standards. You are not afraid of being wrong. You are simply waiting until you are certain you are right.

You could wait forever. That was always an option.

Or you could do the thing imperfectly, in the wrong order, with insufficient preparation, on a day when the conditions are not ideal and the outcome is not guaranteed — and discover that the world does not end when you are not perfect. That the people who matter do not leave when you make a mistake. That you are more durable than the system that raised you needed you to believe.

The renegotiation is not with the task. It is with the belief that your worth depends on your flawlessness.

That belief was installed by people who needed you compliant. It was never true.

I finally asked myself the question I had been avoiding for years: what was I most afraid would happen if I actually wrote something?

The answer arrived without ceremony: failure. Maybe I wasn’t good enough. Maybe the dream I had carried for decades, the one that felt safer as a fantasy than a test, would simply end. And I had chosen, without fully knowing I was choosing, to keep the dream alive by never risking it.

The memoir I couldn’t let myself start for years is finished now. It’s called We Were Smiths, my story of leaving the Mormon Church as a descendant of its founder, Joseph Smith. It began the morning I decided I would rather fail out loud than succeed silently at doing nothing and live with that regret.

The cursor still blinks. Some mornings the paralysis still visits. But now I know its name. And named things, it turns out, have considerably less power.

What are you protecting right now? What story ends the moment you begin? Leave it in the comments. I read every one. Thank you.

“It requires discernment and is held to a different standard. It can’t be treated or interpreted the way other histories can.”

I stared at him in disbelief.

My father wasn’t just a devoted Mormon. He was the Director of the Utah State Historical Society, one of the top authorities on Mormon history, and a direct descendant of Samuel Smith, Joseph Smith’s younger brother. If anyone could explain away what I’d discovered, it was him.

Instead, he quietly admitted he’d known all along.

What shattered me wasn’t what I’d learned about my great-great-uncle. It was realizing my father had already reconciled it with his faith.

Until that moment, I thought I had come to him for answers. Instead, I found myself confronting a different question entirely: How could someone I admired for his integrity know these things and still believe?

I’ve been trying to answer that question ever since.

I come from the family that started the Mormon Church. I also come from the family that lied to build it.

For most of my life, I didn’t know those were the same sentence.

Growing up Mormon, Joseph Smith wasn’t simply a historical figure. He was family. His story belonged to me before I ever learned American history. Like millions of Latter-day Saints, I was taught that Joseph, guided by God, translated an ancient record engraved on golden plates using sacred instruments called the Urim and Thummim, entrusted to him by the angel Moroni.

The paintings of it were everywhere.

A young prophet bent reverently over gleaming gold plates, carefully translating an ancient language by the gift and power of God.

It was beautiful.

It was also a painting of something that never happened.

I was nineteen when I first encountered a very different history in Fawn Brodie’s No Man Knows My History.

No Sunday School teacher had ever mentioned a seer stone. No one had told me Joseph Smith had been arrested before founding the Church. No one had mentioned that years before he claimed to translate scripture, he earned money claiming he could locate buried treasure by gazing into a stone.

As I kept reading, the floor beneath me seemed to disappear. If the Church hadn’t told me this, what else hadn’t it told me?

That question marked the beginning of the end of my certainty and the unraveling of my faith.

Long before there were golden plates, Joseph Smith had built a reputation as a treasure seer.

That wasn’t especially unusual in rural upstate New York during the 1820s. Folk magic flourished. Men searched for buried Spanish treasure with divining rods, seer stones, and stories of guardian spirits protecting hidden riches. Joseph Smith wasn’t an outsider to that culture. By all accounts, he became one of its most sought-after practitioners.

In 1825, a prosperous farmer named Josiah Stowell hired the twenty-year-old Smith because he believed Joseph possessed supernatural sight. Stowell hoped Smith could locate a lost Spanish silver mine buried near the New York-Pennsylvania border.

They dug. They found nothing.

Eventually, members of Stowell’s own family concluded they were watching an intelligent man being deceived. One of them filed a complaint.

On March 20, 1826, Joseph Smith stood before Justice Albert Neely in Bainbridge, New York, accused of charging people money to locate buried treasure with a seer stone.

Joseph acknowledged using the stone. Stowell defended him, insisting he had never felt cheated. Historians still debate exactly how the hearing ended. But one fact is not disputed. The trial happened.

But the Mormon Church never included it in its narrative about Joseph Smith.

Then came the discovery that stunned me even more.

The witnesses who described Joseph translating the Book of Mormon were remarkably consistent. He wasn’t studying characters engraved on golden plates.He placed a seer stone into the crown of a hat. He buried his face inside the hat to block out the light. Then he dictated words he said appeared before him.

Martin Harris, Joseph’s first scribe, later said it was through this same stone that Joseph first discovered where the plates were hidden.

The realization struck me with astonishing force.

The same stone that failed to find buried treasure became the stone that produced scripture.

I couldn’t reconcile those two histories.

So I turned to my father.

If anyone could explain it, surely he could. Instead, he quietly told me he’d always known.

He knew about the treasure digging. He knew about the 1826 hearing. He knew about the seer stone. He knew Joseph translated with his face buried in a hat rather than studying golden plates.

And he still believed.

“Religious history is complicated, Lyn. It requires discernment and is held to a different standard.”

I remember feeling something inside me shift.

I had trusted my father above everyone else, revered him like a God, and he suddenly became simply a man.

To his immense credit, he never demanded that I believe as he did. Instead, he offered me access to copies of the original family letters, journals, and documents our family had donated to the Church years earlier. I read everything.

“Decide for yourself.”

I did.

We reached different conclusions.

Before we ended that conversation, he offered one final piece of advice.

“Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water.”

Then he paused.

“This isn’t just Church history. This is family history. Your history. Choose carefully.”

He was right. It was my inheritance. Just not in the way either of us imagined.

I’ve often thought that every family inherits stories. Some inspire us. Some protect us. Some conceal things we’d rather not examine.

Sometimes, we have a moment when the inherited story collides with documented history.

Mine happened to involve one of America’s most influential religious movements.

Yours may have nothing to do with religion at all.

But the question is the same.

What do we do when the story we’ve inherited can no longer contain the truth we’ve discovered?

I’ve spent much of my life trying to answer that question.

I’m still answering it.

Has there been a moment in your own life when you learned something you couldn’t unknow? About your faith, your marriage, your family, or yourself? I’d love to hear your story in the comments. I read every one.

I’ve spent years writing about leaving the Mormon Church as the great-great-grandniece of the founder, Joseph Smith. Yeah. That guy. Religious trauma. Family estrangement. The long, unsettling work of deconstruction. Important things. True things. Sacred, even.

What happens when you blow up your certainties is that you don’t come to some place, arrive, and stop. You must keep going. Past the rubble. Past the rebuilding. The opposite of Mormon isn’t enlightened Ex-Mormon. It’s human.

This newsletter is about being fully human with all its messiness and wonder.

What “The Renegotiation” Means to Me

You don’t have to have left a religion to be here. You just need to know what it is to have felt certain about something, a belief, a marriage, a political tribe, an identity, a version of yourself, and then lose that certainty. You might have stood in the ruins of your own convictions and thought, “Okay. Now what?”

This is about the now what.

What You’ll Find Here — and What You’ll Take With You

I have no special program; this isn’t a self-help space. No proprietary framework for becoming your best self. I’m deeply suspicious of anyone who has answers for everyone.

What I have is a particular vantage point: someone who dismantled her entire inherited worldview at nineteen, spent decades rebuilding it, and came out the other side with a finely calibrated nonsense detector and an embarrassing number of opinions about how to live.

Two recurring dispatches anchor this newsletter. The Renegotiation Files arrives every other week: one relationship, one specific renegotiation move: the conversation you finally had, the silence you finally broke, the version of yourself you finally stopped defending. The Smith Inheritance arrives monthly: a deep excavation of Smith family history, including secrets and lies, from four generations of Mormon devotion, by the woman who was supposed to carry it forward. Everything else grows from these two roots.

These are the territories I keep returning to, not as separate subjects, but as different angles on the same question: what does it mean to live honestly, once you’ve stopped accepting someone else’s answers?

Family Relationships

When you don’t want to duplicate the dysfunctional parenting model you were raised with. I see parenting as the most spiritually demanding work most of us will ever do. The ‘how’ of raising humans: with presence, honesty, and the humility to admit, even decades later, when you got it wrong. Also, the messy realities of family estrangement, renegotiating original marriage contracts, and loving people across a chasm of irreconcilable belief.

Recovery

Not just putting down the drink, but the larger project of returning to who you could be before the coping mechanisms became the personality. Sobriety as a launching pad, not a destination. How drinking and drugging became a solution to feelings of discomfort, residual shame, and trauma, from a system that didn’t work for you.

Spirituality

Specifically for people who broke up with organized religion and long for something they can’t quite name. The hunger doesn’t go away just because the institution did. Meditation, sitting still to find out what is really there when the noise of your mind quiets, as a tool for self-awareness, emotional regulation, and developing discernment. My practice didn’t just make me calmer. It made me honest.

Writing

Why picking up a pen in your fifties, sixties, or seventies is an act of reclamation. Processing your feelings. We Were Smiths, my memoir, was an outgrowth of writing to better understand myself and the world. It’s also a way of insisting, on the page and off it, that your story has a plot twist; it isn’t finished.

Reading This Newsletter, You Will:

• Find company. The specific relief of reading something and thinking, yes, someone else too.

• Encounter ideas that unsettle the comfortable ones. About faith, identity, belonging, aging, and what it means to live with intention when the manual has been discarded.

• Laugh. Sometimes at me. Sometimes at yourself. Occasionally at the same time, which is the best kind.

• Leave with something. A question, a reframe, a line you’ll be thinking about three days later in the shower.

What Subscribers Get

Free subscribers receive:

• The Renegotiation Diaries— every other week, the relational dispatch: one relationship, one renegotiation move. The conversation you finally had. The silence you finally broke. The version of yourself you finally stopped defending.

• The Smith Inheritance — a bi-weekly deep-dive into the artifacts, letters, and scenes of four generations of Mormon devotion, by the woman who was supposed to carry the legacy forward. The rawest material. The closest thing to live memoir.

• Named-figure essays and timely cultural commentary when the moment calls for it.

• Practical essays on the actual work of rebuilding: what therapy helped, what meditation did and didn’t fix, what sobriety taught me, what parenting without a rulebook looks like.

• Occasional dispatches from the road, the dinner table, and my Savannah garden, where I do some of my best thinking and most of my procrastinating.

Paid subscribers get everything above, plus:

• Sneak peeks and deleted scenes from We Were Smiths, my completed memoir.

• Quarterly book club, Dog-eared and Dangerous, Zoom meeting where we discuss a controversial book in the news, suggested by another member or me.

• Up-to-date information on the status of this crazy path to publication

• The knowledge that you are funding someone’s ongoing education in being a human being, which is, it turns out, more expensive than anticipated.

About Me

I’m Lyn Smith Gregory. I live in Savannah, Georgia, with my husband, Kent. Our three children have grown. I have an adorable Maltepoo named Callie and a collection of strong opinions I’m always in the process of revising.

I left the Mormon Church at nineteen with a quiet, terrifying certainty that it wasn’t true. This was complicated by the fact that I am the great-great-grandniece of Joseph Smith Jr., which made my departure feel, to certain family members, like a personal betrayal of them and of our legacy. It was not. Or it was, and I did it anyway.

I had a career in tech after getting an MBA from NYU, then spent a decade teaching parent education before returning to my first love: writing. My memoir, We Were Smiths, explores the cost of family secrets and facades, the burden of legacy, the price of authenticity and belonging, and how we built a fragile bridge of connection between radically different belief camps: Mormons and Heretics.

I am not an expert on your life. I am, however, a very experienced practitioner of revising my own. And I’ve found that reading about someone doing it honestly, without performance, without perfect resolution, has a way of giving you permission to do the same.

To be human.

The Renegotiation publishes four times per month. Start wherever you are.

The Renegotiation Diaries

By Lyn Smith Gregory

I grew up watching a marriage I never questioned. My parents’ marriage. It was like all the marriages in my Mormon community. Just the way things are. The same way fish don’t ask what water is; it’s just the shape of reality itself.

I left the Mormon Church at nineteen, long before I stood at any altar. But the marriage I watched, and absorbed, and normalized across every year of my childhood was a patriarchal marriage: the husband as the head of the household, the priesthood holder, the presiding authority in the home. The wife as his helpmeet, his partner, with the lion’s share of responsibility for raising the children and performing the household work.

What I didn’t know was that there were choices in marriage. Or that the marriage structure I observed had been absorbed into my very bones, carried forward long after I stopped believing in the system that prescribed it.

This is the particular damage a high-control religion does, not only to the marriages formed inside it, but to the people who leave. It doesn’t just prescribe the roles. It makes the roles invisible as roles. They become the water you swim in. By the time you finally examine what you actually believe about partnership and equity and who gets to make which decisions, you are looking at assumptions you didn’t know you had.

All I knew when I left at nineteen was that I didn’t want my parents’ marriage. I was terrified of marriage, so I ran from commitments, fearful of losing my hard-won autonomy. I didn’t marry until I was 29, a spinster by Mormon standards, who overwhelmingly marry very young, and only then after testing my fiancé for three years, while looking for signs of controlling behavior to emerge in our relationship.

What I have found, in years of conversations with women who left high-control, patriarchal faiths, is that it is almost always the women who become disenchanted first with the terms of the arrangement. This makes a certain painful sense. They have the most to gain from leaving the old structure. In the Mormon framework, they held the least power: no priesthood authority, no presiding role in the home, no vote in the major decisions that shaped their own lives. The husband decided. The wife supported. God had arranged it this way, and who were any of us to argue with God?

When the belief goes, the arrangement loses its justification. The machinery keeps running, out of habit, out of fear, out of the sheer inertia of an existing marriage, but the engine that powered it is gone. And what you are left with is a woman asking, for the first time, why she is asking permission to spend money she earned. Why she is getting driving directions she didn’t request. Why every major decision seems to flow through one person’s priorities rather than two.

Her husband, meanwhile, may have left the Church right alongside her. He may consider himself fully deconstructed, liberated from the old rules. He simply hasn’t noticed that the power arrangement, the one that benefited him, came along for the ride.

According to a 2025 Pew Research Study, 35% of U.S. adults have switched or left religion since childhood. For those whose marriages were built inside that faith, a renegotiation almost always follows.

Data from the General Social Survey suggests that people who left Mormonism are more than twice as likely to divorce as those who stayed, roughly one in four versus one in ten.

This is not because leaving a high-control religion is bad for marriages. It is because the faith was often the load-bearing wall, and when it comes down, everything has to be rebuilt. The couples who make it through are the ones who rebuild intentionally, together, rather than assuming the old structure will hold with new plumbing.

Dr. Harriet Lerner, the psychologist whose book The Dance of Anger has sold over three million copies, describes marriage as a choreography: a series of repetitive, often unconscious patterns that partners fall into together. Breaking free from destructive patterns requires recognizing your role in the dance and taking responsibility for changing your own steps. In a faith-transition marriage, the choreography was set by the Church. Neither partner invented it. Both performed it, for years, because that was what you did. Changing the steps requires first admitting that the dance was a dance, not destiny.

Lerner’s essential insight for anyone attempting this renegotiation: if one person in a couple genuinely changes their own behavior, it generates significant positive change in the overall dynamic. You cannot change your partner. You can change your steps. And changed steps require a changed partner to respond to.

Here is what I have learned about how to begin this conversation.

Think of these as a sequence. Each step makes the next one possible.

• Start with what is working. Name it specifically. Your love. Your history. The qualities in your partner that you chose and still choose. You are not issuing an indictment. You are renegotiating a contract that was written by an institution you both left. That framing matters.

• Lead with feelings, not accusations. Lerner’s advice here is precise: the difference between “You don’t trust me” and “I feel like I’m not trusted” is the difference between a fight and a conversation. Shifting from accusatory language to “I” statements moves the focus from blame to what can actually be changed. “When you question every purchase I make, I feel treated like a child, not a partner.” That is a sentence a person can respond to. “You treat me like a child” is a sentence that requires a defense.

• Ask for one small change to start. One. The impulse is to lay out the entire accumulated grievance, the years of decisions made without consultation, the unpaid domestic labor, the driving advice, the deferred dreams. Resist it. One change: “I would like us to make financial decisions together rather than separately.” Build from there.

• Acknowledge every positive shift. Specifically, immediately, genuinely. Changed behavior that goes unacknowledged tends to revert. Changed behavior that is met with warmth tends to grow.

• Be patient with resistance. It can feel threatening to relinquish a decision-making role you’ve always held. The goal is not to humiliate, but to build something that actually fits who you both are now.

But the hardest thing I have had to sit with in any renegotiation is not the other person’s resistance. It is my own. Because leaving a high-control religion does not automatically leave you with a fully formed set of beliefs about what you want from partnership. It leaves you with a gap where the old beliefs were, and filling that gap requires knowing yourself in ways you were never encouraged to explore.

What do I actually want? What arrangement actually serves us both? What does equity look like when you build it from scratch rather than inherit it?

The marriages that survive faith transitions, ones that come out stronger rather than hollowed out, are the ones where both people are willing to keep asking those questions together. Not once and arriving. Again and again, each time with slightly more fluency, slightly less fear.

That is exactly what renegotiation means.

We are celebrating 40 years of marriage this year. With a history and an equal partnership I could never have imagined as a child. It’s a possibility for you, too.

Start wherever you are.

Are you renegotiating a marriage or a long-term partnership after leaving a faith or a belief system that defined your roles? What has been hardest? What has surprised you?

Leave a comment

A note on the research:

Pew Research Center, February 2025 — 35% of U.S. adults have switched or left religion since childhood

Divorce and faith transition statistics: General Social Survey, cited by the Mormon Social Science Association

Clinical research on LDS faith transitions and identity: Clinical Social Work Journal, 2021

Harriet Lerner: The Dance of Anger (1985, revised 2014) and Marriage Rules (2012)

The sound that comes from my father’s fist to my sister’s face is like nothing I’ve ever heard before. Crack! Blood blooms from her nose. The blow knocks her down. I stand in shock, paralyzed, helpless. I see that my father is also stunned by his behavior. My mother begins to wail, doubling over.

My seventeen-year-old sister continues her defiance, only touching her face as the blood drips into her blouse, unwilling to let him see her cry. She has come home from a Church dance, drunk, after making a spectacle of herself at the dance. It’s the last straw. He kicks her out of the house into the cold November night.

“If you don’t want to act like a Smith, fine! See how far you get on your own.” And she is gone. She never returns home again.

That night was the beginning of something neither of them could have predicted.

I come from people who believed they had the answers.

Not as arrogance, exactly. As inheritance. As a great-great-granddaughter of Samuel Smith, the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith’s younger brother, I grew up inside a complete operating system for how the universe worked. Obey God. Keep the commandments. Work hard. Maintain high standards. The righteous are rewarded. The formula is reliable. The formula is guaranteed by God Himself.

I broke from that formula at nineteen when I left the Mormon faith. And I spent years afterward watching what happens when someone you love refuses to follow it at all and watching what that refusal does to the person who believes in the formula most.

My father was that person. And my sister was his greatest teacher.

My father was a man built for the formula. A professor. A historian. Director of the Utah State Historical Society. President of a multitude of history associations. Published author. The kind of man who had spent his career studying the impact of history, who believed that if you understood the rules, you could predict and shape the outcome.

The rules that mattered most were God’s rules, as defined by the Mormon Church. God promises. God delivers if we are obedient to Him. He applied that belief to his daughter with everything he had.

Consequences. Punishments. Harsher consequences. Finally, the ultimate lever: cutting her out of the family entirely.

My sister’s drinking spiraled into alcoholism. She became bulimic. The solution was rehab, therapy, controlled environments. Where he saw clear rules for solutions, she saw cages.

Nothing worked. Nothing he tried changed the course of her life. He was stunned in a way I recognized even as a teen watching it happen. He truly could not believe there wasn’t some program, some combination of love and force and prayer that would bring her in line. God had promised him righteous children in exchange for righteous living. He had kept his end of the bargain. The formula was supposed to be foolproof.

It wasn’t.

Eventually, in total exhaustion and frustration, my father sat down in an Al-Anon meeting.

Al-Anon’s Three C’s hit him hard:

you didn’t cause it,

you can’t control it,

you can’t cure it.

Three sentences that took my father, by his own account, years to fully believe, because believing them required dismantling something far larger than his approach to his daughter.

It required dismantling the formula itself.

My father was a product of a controlling upbringing. And had inherited a system that told him love and control were the same thing. That if you loved someone enough, and applied the right formula with enough discipline, you could keep them safe and on the right path in life.

What Al-Anon and, later, A Course in Miracles gave him, slowly, imperfectly, was a different definition of love. We talked frequently about my sister, and he said that A Course in Miracles taught him something that he shared with me then, and I have never forgotten:

“It is impossible to love and judge at the same time.”

He had been judging his daughter. Judging her choices, her rebellion, her refusal to be who he needed her to be. He had mistaken that judgment for love. He had mistaken control for care.

Mormonism had taught him that love was expressed through intervention, through correction, through the relentless application of righteous standards to the people in your care. To stop trying to fix someone was to abandon them.

The formula had not only failed to help his daughter. It had prevented him from seeing her.

Here is what I have come to understand about certainty: it does not only armor us against fear. It blinds us.

When we are certain we know what another person needs, we stop looking at who they actually are. We stop asking questions. We stop seeing the human being in front of us because we are too busy seeing the version of them we have already decided they should be.

My father’s certainty that his daughter could be controlled through the right application of love and force kept him from the one thing she needed most: to be seen. Not the daughter who was failing his formula. The one living inside her own life, with her own logic, her own wounds, her own path that was never going to look like his.

And it kept him from examining the formula itself. As long as the formula was right and his daughter was wrong, he did not have to ask the harder question, whether the system he had inherited, the one with guaranteed outcomes at its center, was as reliable as he had been raised to believe.

My sister handed him that question whether he wanted it or not.

My father went to therapy in confusion and desperation. He read of other spiritual paths, other philosophies, other ways of understanding what a life is for. He came back to his daughter without leverage. Without the formula. With something he had never quite offered her before.

Curiosity about who she actually was. Why control felt like a cage.

She became, in the end, his greatest teacher. Not because she changed; her path has been long and difficult and has remained her own, but because she broke something in him: the certainty that he had all the answers. That love expressed as control was love at all.

I watched my father transform. Started asking himself, instead of The Church for answers. Listened to what his experiences told him, instead of what The Church said was right. Became less critical, judgmental and controlling. Apologized for his parenting errors through tears. Less certainty led to healing.

Certainty is a closed door. And sometimes the most loving thing we can do for the people we love — and for ourselves — is to open it.

When did certainty about someone you loved turn out to be about you? When did releasing control give you back something — or someone — you thought you’d already lost?

Tell me in the comments. Or hit reply. I read every one.

My grandson plays video games the way I once prayed: with total absorption, complete devotion, and a certainty that nothing else in the world matters quite as much right now.

It triggers me every time.

I watch him on the couch, controller in hand, screen flickering, entirely unreachable, and something old and tight contracts in my chest. I know this feeling. I have been here before. And I know, because I’ve painfully learned from other experiences, that this is a red flag for me, that the feeling is mine to examine, not his to fix.

My son was obsessed with video games from the time he was twelve. Not casually interested. Not occasionally entertained. Obsessed, the way brilliant, restless kids get obsessed with things that let their minds run fast without anyone telling them to slow down.

I responded the way I knew how: with control.

Parental controls. Timers. Video games as reward currency, dispensed only after homework was completed, chores were done, and I had determined, in my infinite parental wisdom, that he had earned the privilege. I had goals for my son. A vision of who he was supposed to become. And video games, I had decided with the confidence of someone who knew absolutely nothing about video games, were a threat to that vision.

He found ways around every system I built. He was, it turned out, exactly as intelligent as I had always believed him to be, just applying that intelligence to circumventing me rather than to the future I had planned for him. The games became a battleground. The battleground became a distance. The distance became something that lived in our relationship those teen years, a low hum of friction interfering with our closeness.

Last year, watching my grandson on that couch, the tightness in my chest arrived right on schedule. But now I knew to examine my feelings more closely.

I thought about my son, now a man in his thirties, who had just become one of the youngest partners at his law firm, accomplished by any external measure. And a great husband. A great father. I thought about how certain I had been that video games would derail him. How that certainty had felt like love. How it had functioned like fear.

I took a deep breath and called him.

I told him I had been thinking about the video game years and that I owed him an apology. He was gracious, too kind, really, generous with my imperfect attempt to make something right.

“It’s okay, Mom,” he said. “I knew you were doing what you thought best. Trying to be a good mom.”

And then his voice became wistful. “I just wish you had sat down with me once or twice. Been more curious about why I liked them so much. I wasn’t playing shooter games or watching porn.” A pause. “But you acted as if they were evil. Like I was being led astray by the devil.”

Boom! I sat very still with the phone in my hand.

Led astray by the devil. The language of my childhood. The language my own family had used when I left the Mormon Church at nineteen. They had not asked why I was leaving. It had not occurred to them to be curious, because the answer was already settled: I was simply wrong. Deceived. Lost.

My son had just described my family’s response to my leaving, using the same words, the same logic, the same incurious certainty, except this time, I was the one who had done it to him. Ouch!

This is what I have come to understand about certainty: it is almost never about the thing you are certain about.

My certainty about video games was not really about video games. It was about fear, fear that I would fail as a mother, fear that my son would not become what I needed him to become, fear that love alone was not enough to keep him safe. Certainty was the armor I wore over that fear so I would not have to feel it directly. If I was sure enough, I would not have to be afraid.

My family’s certainty about my leaving Mormonism was not really about Mormonism either. It was about the same terror that lives under every rigid belief: that if one person can leave, the whole structure might be less solid than it appeared. My departure threatened something they needed to be permanent. Certainty was their armor, too.

Philosopher Bertrand Russell observed that the whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, while wiser people are so full of doubts. In my experience, the moments I have been most absolutely sure of something are precisely the moments most worth interrogating. Certainty, I have learned, is a red flag.

The antidote to certainty is not doubt. It is curiosity.

My grandson is on the couch again. Controller in hand. Entirely absorbed.The tightness arrives. I notice it. I let it be information rather than instruction.

I sit down next to him.

“Hey,” I say. “Show me what you’re playing? Teach me how?”

He looks at me, genuinely startled, the way children are startled when adults do something unexpected and kind. Then his face opens into the particular joy of someone who has been waiting, without knowing it, to be asked.

He tells me about the game. The characters, the strategy, the logic of the world he’s been building. He is articulate and precise and completely at home in something I had dismissed without curiosity.

“Tell me more,” I say.

And he does.

I called my son after that afternoon with his sister’s son.

I told him what had happened. He laughed. “That’s great, Mom. Good for you. I guess I turned out okay, afterall.” Not just okay. Great. He has all the qualities I admire in a person.

They usually do, our children, when we love them well enough and imperfectly enough and get out of their way enough. The ones we fail by being too certain tend to forgive us anyway, if we are willing to finally ask the question we should have asked at the beginning.

“Tell me more.”

When did certainty show up in your life as something other than what it claimed to be? When did you realize the thing you were sure about was really a fear you hadn’t named?

Tell me in the comments or hit reply. I read and respond to every one.

I grew up knowing I was descended from people who had seen God.

In the flesh. Not metaphorically. Not as a figure of speech. As a Smith, I was raised with the family understanding that Joseph Smith Jr. had spoken with the Almighty personally, received golden plates from an angel, and restored the only true church on earth. My great-great-grandfather, Samuel, was Joseph’s younger brother, the first to be baptized and one of the Eight Witnesses who signed their names at the front of the Book of Mormon. We were not merely members of the faith. We were its original material.

Now I was standing outside the Salt Lake City Temple while my little sister got married inside. Barred from joining my family to witness her wedding because I wasn’t deemed worthy enough to attend.

Since I had left the Mormon faith, I no longer qualified as an upstanding, tithing-paying Mormon, a requirement for entrance.

Anger burned in my chest as I waited. I had been shattered at nineteen when I discovered that the sacred temple marriage ceremony, the holiest rite in Mormonism, had been borrowed from a fraternal lodge that Joseph joined seven weeks before he introduced it to his followers as revelation from God.

He lied.

Seven weeks after becoming a Freemason, Joseph Smith introduced those same rituals to his followers as divine revelation. And yet I was the one considered unworthy to stand with my family. Deemed unworthy by a liar.

Sit with the timeline: Seven weeks after becoming a Freemason, Joseph Smith got a revelation of Mormon Temple rituals that just happened to be almost identical to the Freemason initiation rituals.

The timeline is not disputed, not even by the Mormon Church itself.

On March 15, 1842, Joseph Smith received the first degree in Freemasonry in the Nauvoo Lodge, assembled in his general business office. The following day he rose to the sublime degree, becoming a Master Mason. On May 4–5, 1842, mere weeks after obtaining the Masonic rituals, Smith introduced the LDS endowment ceremony to close friends, including nearly identical tokens, signs, penalties, prayer circle, new name ritual, and apron.

Those penalties were not abstract. The original ceremony required participants to physically mime their own execution, throat slitting, heart removal, and disembowelment, as the price of revealing what they had witnessed.

The Church quietly removed these gestures in 1990. For generations before that, members performed them without ever having been told, before they arrived at the ceremony, what they were agreeing to. The secrecy was enforced from inside the ritual itself.

I was raised to believe those ceremonies were ancient. Eternal. Based on the original ceremonies in King Solomon’s Temple. Kept, as the Doctrine and Covenants puts it, “hid from before the foundations of the earth.” My mother and my sisters let strangers anoint their bodies’ private parts with oil and whisper a new name to them through a veil, and I was told this was sacred and holy.

It wasn’t holiness I was missing. It was information.

“There is absolutely no question in my mind that the Mormon ceremony which came to be known as the Endowment, introduced by Joseph Smith to Mormon Masons, had an immediate inspiration from Masonry.” — Dr. Reed Durham, LDS Historian, 1974

Durham was not an anti-Mormon critic. He was the director of the LDS Institute of Religion, delivering his findings at a Mormon History Association conference, and the blowback he received from Church leadership afterward was, to put it diplomatically, considerable.

Masonic author Mervin Hogan observed that Mormonism and Freemasonry are so intimately and inextricably interwoven that the two can never be dissociated.

Even the Church’s own scholars have acknowledged the connection, if carefully. Apostle Heber C. Kimball, himself a Mason and a member of the original Quorum of the Twelve, wrote to fellow Apostle Parley Pratt in 1842 that there was “a similarity of priesthood in Masonry,” and that Joseph said Masonry had been “taken from priesthood but has become degenerated.”

This was Joseph’s explanation: that Masonry was a corrupted remnant of the ancient priesthood, and that he was restoring the original. He had found the degenerated version in a lodge in Illinois and purified it through revelation.

I have spent considerable time sitting with the audacity of this explanation, and I have to admit, as someone raised on Joseph’s particular brand of theological confidence, that it has a certain grandeur to it. The man could sell a story. I come from people who bought it for generations. I cannot be entirely unsympathetic.

But the story stopped working for me the day I learned the timeline.

What I lost was the specific claim, the one that justified the secrecy, the coercion, the shame, the bodies of young girls and boys anointed by strangers, that this had come from God. It had come from a lodge in Nauvoo, Illinois. On March 15, 1842. Seven weeks before God revealed it.

So, there I stood outside the Salt Lake Temple, waiting for the family photograph. The one where everyone smiles in their wedding best and the bride glows and the moment looks like what a wedding is supposed to look like.

My sister and I were close, so I pulled her aside afterward, and told her how painful it had been to be excluded. To stand outside while my own family celebrated inside.

She looked at me with genuine puzzlement. “Since you weren’t Mormon anymore,” she said, “why would you even want to be there?”

She wasn’t being cruel. That was the most devastating part. She had been so thoroughly shaped by the institution that the ordinary human logic of weddings, that they are for everyone who loves the people being married, had been replaced by a membership requirement. She couldn’t feel what she couldn’t see. And the Church had made sure she couldn’t see it.

None of my Mormon family understood why I was upset. Which made me feel even more invisible than standing outside the temple had.

I am a great-great-grandniece of the Smith family. I carry that name and that legacy and the complicated inheritance of being descended from people who built something damaging and harmful. I do not write about this to wound the faithful. I write about it because I was faithful and was not told the truth, and that withholding shaped the first decades of my life in ways I am still mapping.

This is what The Smith Inheritance is for. The things we were never supposed to say out loud. The secrets. The truth.

We’re saying them now.

Have you ever been excluded from a family event — a wedding, a funeral, a celebration — because you left a belief, a religion, a marriage, or a way of life? What did it cost you to stand outside that door?

And paid subscribers — what’s the piece of your own inheritance you were never supposed to examine? The family secret, the institutional lie, the history that was kept from you until you found it yourself? Tell me in the comments. That’s what The Smith Inheritance is built for.

Hit reply. I read every one.

A YouTube video about the secret Mormon Temple Wedding Ceremony was playing as my sister-in-law walked past the open door to her daughters’ bedroom.

Her twin teenage girls, a laptop open, were watching a secretly filmed Mormon temple ceremony of a strange couple in weird, white costumes performing weird rituals that she instantly recognized from her own marriage ceremony in the Mormon temple.

They looked up guiltily, then asked: “That can’t be what your wedding day was like, was it, Mom? Was Dad dressed in a funny mushroom hat?”

She saw her marriage vows through her daughters’ eyes, with their horrified reactions, and stopped cold.

“You weren’t in your beautiful wedding dress? You did those weird hand clasps? Someone gave you a new name?”

She remembered everything. Her shock at the whole procedure. Green aprons. White chef-like hats. The whispered name. The veil. The anointing of oil in private places by strangers’ hands. All of it exactly as it had happened the day she married at seventeen, confused, frightened, telling herself that what felt deeply wrong was simply her own unworthiness, not the institution’s.

Her breast cancer had just returned. She was vulnerable, already asking the questions you ask when time becomes uncertain. Facing death is exactly what makes a mother ask what she’d be handing her daughters to inherit.

She sat down on the bed with her daughters.

“Tell me more,” she said.

What followed was two hours of Mormon history she had managed, somehow, not to hold all at once. Joseph Smith’s plural wives. Girls as young as fourteen. Women already married to other men. Facts the Church had always given her a story for. She had accepted the stories. She had been young and certain that her discomfort was her own fault. She had swallowed it and moved forward and built a life inside it.

But watching it now through her daughters’ eyes, the story simply stopped working.

She didn’t want this for them. The knowledge arrived before the thought finished forming. Clean, complete. The clarity was almost violent.

You’d never allow it for someone you love. So why do you allow it for yourself?

The bubble burst. Just like that.

I knew exactly what had happened to her when she told me the story. I had my own hallway moment.

The first time I held my daughter on the day she was born. The specific fierceness of it, the way love arrived as a certainty of protectiveness. I would not let her carry the shame I had carried. She would not learn that her body was a source of sin before she knew what sin meant. She would not be taught that her worth was conditional on someone else’s approval of her obedience. She would know, from the beginning, that she was already whole.

As the great, great grandniece of Joseph Smith, I had been raised as Mormon royalty, a Smith, a faithful and obedient daughter with an impressive legacy. Leaving at 19, cost me a family, a church, and the only legacy I was ever supposed to carry.

But the question my infant daughter’s face asked me, without words, was the same question my sister-in-law’s daughters asked in that bedroom doorway.

What do you want for me?

Our children are the most powerful self-distancing lens most of us will ever hold. Love for them bypasses the elaborate defense systems we build around our own pain. We would fight for them without negotiation, without the long internal argument we’ve been running for years. The question borrows that ferocity and turns it inward.

Psychologist Igor Grossmann calls it “Solomon’s Paradox.” He found that people display wiser reasoning about someone else’s problems than about their own, more willing to recognize the limits of their knowledge, consider other viewpoints, and acknowledge what they actually know versus what they’ve been telling themselves. The solution, his research suggests, is self-distancing, deliberately stepping outside your own perspective to see a situation as you would see it for someone you love.

This is not only a Mormon phenomenon.

The woman who has stayed in a job that demeans her, one she would never accept for her daughter. The man who has spent decades inside a political identity that no longer reflects his values, the ones he wants to pass on to his son. The person managing a parent’s cruelty by calling it love. The one still inside a marriage that stopped being good years ago. None of them would hand that situation to their child and call it acceptable.

They already know this.

They have known it longer than they think.

My sister-in-law left the Church within the year. She is still here, and passed the five-year cancer-free mark, still fierce and funny.

But I keep coming back to that doorway. Her daughters’ faces. My baby girl’s innocent and perfect face as I rocked her to sleep. The question that had no answer except the true one.

The question I’m asking you now:

What belief, situation, or relationship in your own life would you refuse to hand to your child intact?

You already know.

You’ve known longer than you think.

Tell me in the comments. Or hit reply. I read every one.

I was nineteen when I walked out of the only world I had ever known.

I am the great-great-grandniece of Joseph Smith. My faith wasn’t just belief. It was bloodline. Identity. Inheritance.

Leaving cost me things I still grieve. But those losses, the ones that nearly unmade me, turned out to be the most incredible gifts of my life.

The first hard thing: You lose certainty.

The Church gives you a complete world. Every question answered. Every doubt pre-addressed. You know who you are, why you’re here, where you’re going. That scaffolding holds everything up.

When you leave, it collapses.

The silence where the answers used to live is not peaceful at first. It is deafening. Existential philosopher Paul Tillich called this the anxiety of meaninglessness, the vertigo that hits when the ground you’ve stood on your whole life simply isn’t there anymore.

I remember lying awake wondering if anything was true. Not just the doctrine. Anything.

But here’s what I didn’t expect. Rollo May, the existential psychologist, wrote that anxiety is not the enemy of freedom, it is the price of it. That vertigo is what genuine inquiry feels like. It’s what wonder feels like before it learns to trust itself.

The gift hiding inside the loss of certainty is this: a sense of awe that can actually be earned. Not assigned. Not inherited. The sky gets bigger when you stop already knowing what’s in it. Questions become luminous. Curiosity stops being dangerous and becomes the whole point.

I fell in love with ideas for the first time at nineteen. Frankl. Camus. The Stoics. Not as threats to my faith, but as companions in the dark.

That’s not nothing. That is almost everything.

The second hard thing: You lose your community.

This one didn’t always announce itself the same way. And sometimes it arrives in increments.

The friend who lectured me about falling for Satan’s voice. The cousin who spoke to me in the practiced warmth of someone visiting a patient. The way my mother’s face changed when my name came up at family gatherings I’m not quite invited to. Embarrassed. Long-time girlfriends who dropped me from their wedding guest lists.

In my family, leaving the church didn’t just mean leaving a congregation. It meant stepping outside the gravitational field of a dynasty. The Smiths didn’t just practice Mormonism. We were woven into its founding myth. My departure was, to some, a kind of apostasy with a genealogical footnote.

The grief of that is real. I won’t dress it up.

But Brené Brown makes a distinction I’ve held close ever since: belonging is not the same as fitting in. Fitting in requires you to be what others need you to be. Belonging requires you to show up as yourself and find the people who can receive that.

I didn’t know what belonging felt like until I left. I had only ever experienced the other thing.

What I have now, the friendships built outside any institutional framework, the connections forged in the honest territory of here is who I actually am, are the deepest relationships of my life. They are held together not by shared doctrine but by authenticity, vulnerability and shared humanity.

That is a rarer thing. And it is mine.

The third hard thing: You lose yourself.

Or rather, you discover there was never a self there to begin with. You can feel lost. Empty. Who am I?

High-control religion doesn’t just tell you what to believe. It tells you who to be. What to want. How to feel about what you want. The self that emerges inside that system is not really yours. It’s a composite of approved options.

When that system falls away, there is a terrifying blankness where your identity used to be.

Carl Jung called this individuation, the lifelong, often brutal process of becoming who you actually are, as distinct from who you were told to be. He didn’t promise it would be comfortable. He promised it would be real.

The gift of that loss is the one I reach for most often when I write.

Self-directed autonomy. The daily, deliberate act of choosing your own values, not inheriting them. Building a life from the inside out rather than the outside in.

I spent years writing my memoir about the family and the faith I came from. What I discovered, chapter by chapter, is that the fracturing was not the tragedy. The fracturing was the beginning.

The wound was the door. It wasn’t the end.

With Love,

Lyn

I write about this at the intersection of faith, fracture, and reconstruction. If this landed somewhere real for you, please share it with someone still standing in the rubble. They need to know the rubble turns into something. And if you want to be notified when my memoir becomes available, subscribe to my Substack here.

I was twelve years old the first time I understood I was too much. A tomboy who was too tall, ungraceful, and loud.

Not in a way anyone said outright. It came quieter than that, in a glance held a half-second too long, in the way a room rearranged itself when I walked in, a misfit among the quiet girls in pretty pastel dresses.

I learned to make myself smaller. I learned the geography of a room before I crossed the threshold. I learned that my job was to be lovely, which was a different thing entirely from being real.

I was a Smith. And Smiths had an image to protect.

What I didn’t know then, what took me decades to understand, is that I had inherited a story. A fiction. And I was living inside it as if it were fact.

We All Do This

We live haunted by narratives stitched into us by careless words, absent glances, moments of shame that baked into belief before we had language to question them. They arrive wrapped in a mother’s doubt, a father’s frustration, a religion’s insistence that you were born broken and must earn your way back to whole. Society’s quiet smirk at the flower unlike all the others in the bed.

And we carry them as if they’re gospel.

Albert Ellis, a founding father of cognitive-behavioral therapy, called these irrational beliefs — the invisible architecture of emotional disturbance. Most of us live by musts: I must be approved. I must succeed. I must be enough.

These are the bones beneath the flesh of our daily thinking. But here is the question no one taught me to ask: Where did these musts come from?

The Story I Performed for Decades

I spent years performing goodness inside a faith tradition that measured worth by compliance. As a descendant of Joseph Smith’s original family line, the stakes felt mythic. Legacy. Covenant. Bloodline. These were not metaphors in my house — they were requirements.

My worth was constructed entirely outside myself. Outsourced to a God I couldn’t question, a prophet I couldn’t critique, a family I couldn’t disappoint.

When I finally began to deconstruct, when the architecture of belief started to crack and I could see daylight through the fractures, I didn’t feel free.

I felt empty. Because I had never learned who I was without the story.

The Slow Work of Seeing Clearly

I’m walking alongside a woman I’ll call Margo, a brilliant, articulate former Mormon in her own deconstruction. She believed, with her whole chest, that she was too much. A man she dated said she made everything heavy. A teacher once asked, “Why do you always take things so personally?” as if depth were a flaw, as if caring were the problem.

So she learned to edit herself. Smile when she felt rage. Nod when she disagreed. Disappear just enough to be liked.

We traced it back. To a childhood home where her mother shut down every tear with a tight-lipped You’re fine. An inheritance, passed quietly through the women in her family, of shrinking as a form of love.

The reframe came slowly. First she named the belief: I’m too much. Then challenged it: According to whom? Is emotional depth a flaw, or a gift?

She practiced. Said what she felt without apologizing. Cried in front of a friend.

No one ran. Some leaned in.

The belief lost its power. Not by force. By letting it into the light

Five Ways to Begin

Reframing isn’t toxic positivity. It’s a slow, honest interrogation — a shift from this is who I am to this is what I learned. And I get to unlearn it.

Belief tracking. When shame or fear surges, ask: What am I believing right now? Where did it come from? Is it still true?

Self-dialogue. Write a conversation between your inner critic and inner advocate. Let them argue. You might be surprised who wins.

Compassionate contradiction. Meet the old belief with something kind and precise: I am doing the best I can. That is worthy.

Re-authoring. Write your story from a different vantage. Not the victim — the survivor. Give yourself the narrative you were denied.

Viktor Frankl, forged in the horror of Auschwitz, wrote that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the freedom to choose one’s attitude in any given circumstance. Reframing isn’t soft therapy. It’s existential revolt.

The Spell Is Just a Story

A friend believed she was cursed. Every plane delayed. Every winter, the flu. Layoffs. She arrived at a spiritual retreat hollowed out, desperate.

They told her: You’re not cursed. You’re carrying someone else’s story.

They sat her by a fire. Name every belief you carry. Ask: Who gave this to me? If you can’t name the giver, throw it in.

She came back days later. Eyes clear. Something loosened.

Sometimes the spell is just a story we forgot we had the power to end.

Many of these beliefs were never yours to begin with. Your mother’s fears, handed down like heirlooms. Your church’s control, spoken in the language of love. Your culture’s preferences, mistaken for your identity.

Reframing is threefold: a reckoning with the stories absorbed when you were too young to refuse them, a remembering of who you were before the world decided, and a return to the self that was always there, underneath the performance.

Worth is not earned. It is revealed.

We stop outsourcing our value. We stop waiting for permission from people who never had the authority to grant it.

We build from here. The story isn’t finished. Write the ending you deserve.

With Love,

Lyn

*Lyn Smith Gregory is the author of the forthcoming memoir “We Were Smiths” and writes the Substack publication “Heretic Survivor: From Mormon to Me.”

MADAME BUTTERFLY

We found the recording in a box of my mother’s things she saved from High school. Amid programs of plays she’d starred in, dances she’d attended, dried corsages from dating. A 45, the label handwritten in careful script: Marlene Threet, Juilliard submission.

My sister slid it onto the turntable. The scratch and pop, then my mother’s voice filled the room. Nineteen years old, singing an aria from Madame Butterfly.

Her voice soared and fell and climbed again, full of longing.

I was twelve. I’d never heard her sound like that. Not in sacrament meeting, where she sang hymns with perfect Mormon propriety. Not at home, where she sang while folding laundry or hummed lullabies we’d long outgrown.

This voice was something else. Hungry. Alive. Uncontained.

“She gave this up?” my sister whispered.

For my father. For marriage. For us.

The aria ended. The record crackled into silence.

Neither of us knew what to say.

THE FINISH LINE

At fifteen, I made the Varsity Track Team and won the 100-yard dash in the district country meet.

My father left work early to watch me run. He stood in the stands near the finish line, rare pride flickering across his face as I crossed. That night at dinner, he told the story three times,my time, my placement, my determination.

My mother set plates on the table and smiled but said nothing.

I didn’t notice her silence then. I was too busy basking in my father’s attention, something I’d spent years learning to earn. Achievement. Discipline. Toughness. These were the currencies he recognized.

I chose them. Chose him.

And in choosing, I pushed her further into shadow.

THE BREAKING

The migraines started when I was a young teen.

She’d retreat to her bedroom, curtains drawn, a cold washcloth across her forehead. The house would go quiet. We’d tiptoe past her door, speaking in whispers.

They came after church plays closed, ones she had directed and coached. After Relief Society meetings where she’d smiled through criticism about the ward’s visiting teachers outreach. After my father’s rages, when she’d absorbed his fury and said nothing.

When she developed nodules on her throat and couldn’t sing, she believed God was punishing her. That’s what she told her bishop. She was too proud, wasn’t righteous enough, wasn’t faithful enough, wasn’t enough.

After nine children, she did lemon juice fasts to keep her figure after each baby. She bore her testimony with trembling conviction. She performed perfection until her body broke under the weight.

But I didn’t see it as the system crushing her.

I saw it as weakness.

THE REAL WORLD

My father valued the real world. Facts. Achievement. Intellectual rigor.

My mother valued beauty. Music. Art. The warmth of unconditional love.

I learned early which one mattered more.

I stopped daydreaming. Stopped playing the guitar. I focused on running, on grades, on debate team. Things that could be measured. Things that earned his nod of approval.

When my father dismissed my mother’s parenting style as “ineffective and soft-hearted,” I said nothing.

My silence was agreement.

I became stoic. Intellectual. Driven. I became my father’s daughter, and in doing so, I became complicit in making my mother small.

THE CIRCLE

In college, I joined a women’s support group. We sat in a circle in a basement classroom, reading about patriachy, about socialized gender roles, about the ways systems shape us before we know we’re being shaped.

I understood it intellectually first. Saw how the Mormon Church had molded my mother into silence, into service, into disappearing.

But understanding didn’t touch the anger yet. Didn’t undo years of choosing my father’s approval. Didn’t make me stop seeing her as the cautionary tale,the woman who gave up everything and got nothing.

It would take another decade before I felt it.

THE APOLOGY

Eventually, I realized the damage I’d done in siding with my father. I called my mother.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “For choosing Dad. For not being more supportive of you. For all the years I made you feel like loving me wasn’t enough.”

The phone line was quiet for a long time.

“Oh, honey,” she finally said. “I never blamed you for that.”

But I blamed myself.

BECOMING A MOTHER

When my children were born, I thought I’d parent differently.

Strong. Logical. No guilt trips, no passive aggression, no martyrdom.

I’d be the opposite of my mother.

But you can’t raise a child on stoicism alone. You can’t teach emotional intelligence by avoiding emotions. You can’t build connection through achievement. I realized I’d also adopted my father’s anger, and that it came out when parenting my children. It was unacceptable to me. I had to learn other ways to be a good parent.

I needed the soft skills I’d spent years rejecting.

I needed to know how to sit with feelings instead of solving them. How to create beauty for its own sake. How to love without conditions, without keeping score.

My mother had given me all of that. I’d just been too busy chasing my father’s approval to notice.

RECONCILIATION

Long before she died, we reconciled, and I enjoyed two decades of making it up to my mother.

I told her about the recording. About how hearing her voice, that young, hungry, uncontained voice, had cracked something open in me.

“I was good, wasn’t I?” she said, smiling.

“You were extraordinary.”

“Well,” she said. “I made different choices. I don’t regret them.”

I wanted to argue. Wanted to rage against what had been taken from her. But she was at peace with it in a way I couldn’t be.

Maybe that’s the difference between us.

She survived the system by accepting it. I survived by leaving it.

Neither choice was wrong. Both came with costs.

REACHING FOR LIGHT

Here’s what I didn’t understand when I was young:

My mother wasn’t weak for choosing softness in a system that demanded hardness. She was brave.

She wasn’t failing when she couldn’t protect me from my father’s rage. She was surviving in the only way the system allowed.

She wasn’t small. The church made her small. My father made her small.

And I, reaching for the light, pushed her further into shadow.

FULL CIRCLE

I think about the recording sometimes.

That aria from Madame Butterfly. The story of a woman who gives up everything for love, for a man who never sees her as an equal. Who dies waiting for him to return.

My mother must have known that story when she sang it. Must have felt its tragedy in her nineteen-year-old throat.

And still she chose marriage. Chose silence. Chose to make herself small enough to fit into my father’s dreams, the church’s expectations, a life that was never meant to hold her.

I don’t know if she ever mourned what she lost.

But I mourn it now. For both of us.

MY MOTHER’S GIFTS

What my mother couldn’t give me was simple:

She couldn’t give me what was never given to her.

She couldn’t model ambition when ambition was called selfishness. Couldn’t teach me to take up space when she’d been trained to disappear. Couldn’t show me how to want things when wanting was a sin.

But here’s what she did give me:

The ability to love without conditions. To find beauty in small moments. To create art for its own sake. To forgive.

It took me twenty years to recognize those as gifts instead of weaknesses.

To see that I needed both parents’ strengths to become whole.

To understand that the friction between us was never personal failure.

It was evidence of a system doing exactly what it was designed to do.

WHAT I KNOW NOW

I wish I still had the recording. I long to listen to it.

My mother’s voice, nineteen and full of possibility, singing about love and sacrifice and waiting.

I’d hear her differently now.

Not as the woman who chose wrong. Not as the cautionary tale.

But as a girl who had a gift, and gave it up, and somehow kept singing anyway.

That takes a different kind of courage than I understood when I was young.

The kind that doesn’t announce itself. Doesn’t demand recognition.

The kind that survives.

Do you see and understand your mother differently now than you did when you were young? Are you estranged, or did you reconcile? Share your story here. Love to hear from you.

With Love,

Lyn

*Lyn Smith Gregory is the author of the forthcoming memoir “We Were Smiths” and writes the Substack publication “Heretic Survivor: From Mormon to Me.”

My Mormon family members and I disagree about nearly everything.

They believe the Book of Mormon is literally true, that ancient prophets wrote on gold plates, that Joseph Smith translated them by divine power, and that our family bloodline makes us special in God’s eyes. I believe my great-great-uncle, Joseph Smith, was a charismatic narcissist who fabricated a religion in his quest for power and wealth.

They think I’m deceived by Satan. I think they’re trapped in a system requiring intellectual dishonesty. We’re both right about each other being wrong.

And yet, somehow, we’re still talking.

Not because either of us changed our minds. We’re talking because we decided‚ separately, painfully, with a lot of therapy. And that being family mattered more than being right.

I realize this sounds impossibly naïve when half the country isn’t speaking to the other half. When Easter tables have empty chairs because Uncle Bob voted wrong, or your family’s candidate makes you want to scream into a pillow.

I don’t have an answer that fits everyone. Some divisions involve genuine harm‚ abuse, violence, dehumanization. Those require distance, not bridge-building.

But for families fractured by ideology rather than injury, I keep thinking about what it took for my Mormon family and me to stay connected across an unbridgeable divide. It wasn’t easy. It required giving up things I desperately wanted. Being right. Being validated. Being understood.

But we’re here. We can gather without it devolving into arguments.

Maybe that counts for something.

Stop Trying to Change Them

My Mormon brother will never wake up and announce, “You’re right. The church is a fraud.” Not even after his own children left the faith. He’s deeply invested.

His children can’t discuss their reasons for leaving without sounding accusatory. They love their parents. Don’t want to hurt them. And there’s no real invitation anyway. My brother and his wife aren’t truly curious about why their children left, just what they did wrong as parents that led to it.

When I left, my family didn’t want explanations or evidence. They already knew. Satan led me astray. End of story.

Some ex-Mormons persist in arguing their case. If only they could explain clearly enough, present enough evidence, use the right tone, they’d finally get it. But there are deep reasons people cling to beliefs. Decades invested in having the one truth. Identity fused with a closed community. The devastation of admitting you were wrong. And in my family’s case, our royal Mormon legacy.

Karl Pillemer, a Cornell sociologist studying family estrangement, found that successful reconcilers did one thing: they gave up forcing their interpretation on the other person. Stopped needing to be right. Focused on the present relationship rather than rehashing the past.

When I first left, this felt impossible. How could I not correct demonstrable falsehoods? Wasn’t I betraying truth itself?

But here’s what I finally understood: I wasn’t going to change their minds. They weren’t going to change mine. We were both dug in, armed with evidence, certain.

The only question left: could we love each other anyway?

If your goal is changing someone’s political beliefs, save yourself the heartbreak. It won’t work. But staying connected despite fundamental disagreement? That might actually be possible.

You just have to stop preaching.

Accept the Unfairness

I spent years silently furious that my family didn’t validate my religious trauma. They dismissed my pain. Misunderstood my reasons for leaving. Treated me as the outlier.

It wasn’t fair. It isn’t fair.

I had to accept it anyway.

Joshua Coleman, a psychologist specializing in estrangement, says this is the hardest part: accepting that the other person’s version of events contradicts yours and you can’t force them to see it differently.

My parents genuinely believe they were loving, supportive, gave me everything, especially the right religious path. I genuinely believe I was raised in a system that prioritized obedience over authenticity, control over truth, and dogma that was especially damaging to women.

We’re both telling the truth from our respective psychologies. Everyone’s story is real to them, even when stories contradict.

I wanted my parents to apologize for raising me in a system that hurt me. They wanted me to apologize for abandoning the faith and breaking their hearts. Neither of us was getting what we wanted.

So I stopped waiting for fairness and started asking: What do I actually control?

I couldn’t make them understand my pain. Couldn’t force validation. But I could decide what kind of daughter and sibling I wanted to be. Could choose my response. Could set boundaries. Could show up without requiring them to change first.

Infuriating, honestly. Why should I do all the emotional labor? Why accommodate their delusions when they won’t acknowledge my reality?

Because the alternative was losing them entirely.

Waiting for apologies rarely leads to reconciliation. The apology never comes. Or when it does, it doesn’t satisfy. Doesn’t undo the hurt. You’re left with a choice: accept the unfairness and build something new anyway, or let unfairness be the final word.

It helped me to realize: I’d been where they still were. But they’d never been outside the faith. They had no context for my experience. They literally couldn’t understand.

Religious estrangement and political estrangement are the same thing, just dressed in different clothes

My Mormon family believes they have divine truth revealed through prophets. Your MAGA uncle believes he has truth revealed through channels exposing what “mainstream media” won’t tell you. Your progressive cousin believes she has truth revealed through academic research and her lived experience.

All certain. All with evidence. All surrounded by communities reinforcing their certainty.

The mechanisms are identical. Identity fused with belief. Moral certainty ‚Äî not just right, but righteous. Threat perception, the other side isn’t just wrong, they’re dangerous. Information silos. At the neurological level, the psychological level, the family-systems level, it’s the same problem.

You can’t logic someone out of an identity. Can’t fact-check someone out of a tribe. Can’t debate someone out of a reality they need to believe.

But you can decide the relationship matters more than winning the argument.

Just as I had to accept my brother would never leave the Mormon Church, you may have to accept your father will never vote differently. Just as my Mormon family had to accept I wouldn’t return, your conservative sister may have to accept that you’re staying socially liberal.

The question isn’t *How do I change their mind?*

The question is *Can we be family anyway?*

Set Boundaries. Enforce Them

Staying connected didn’t mean accepting everything they said or did. It meant figuring out what I could tolerate and what I absolutely couldn’t.

I don’t help fund their children’s missions. Don’t attend grandchildren’s baptisms. Don’t engage in doctrine debates. But I show up for birthdays and weddings. Listen respectfully about church callings. Ask about my sister’s garden. Find common ground.

For political divisions, this might look like: we don’t discuss elections at holiday gatherings. We don’t send inflammatory articles. We don’t use family chats to debate policy. If someone violates that boundary, there are consequences. Not punitive. Protective.

“I’m stepping outside.” “I need to end this call.” “I’m not available for this conversation.”

Boundaries aren’t about controlling the other person. They’re about protecting yourself so you can stay in relationship without sacrificing your sanity or your identity.

Consider What You’re Giving Up

I’m not here to sell you on reconciliation. Some family relationships are toxic, abusive, dangerous. Some people weaponize “family loyalty” to demand you tolerate harm. If someone is actively hurting you, dehumanizing you, making your life miserable, you don’t owe them your presence.

But if you’re considering estrangement solely because of political or ideological differences, think carefully about what you’re giving up.

Pillemer’s research found that most people who reconciled said it was transformative. No regrets. But people who stayed estranged described it as one of the most painful experiences of their lives. Something that haunted them for decades.

I’m not saying tolerate everything in the name of family. I’m saying: weigh the decision to cut someone off against the reality that you might carry that loss for the rest of your life.

What Reconciliation Actually Looks Like

Nobody tells you this about reconciliation: it doesn’t feel triumphant. No moment where everything clicks into place. No hugging it out to inspirational music.

Last Christmas, my brother mentioned he’d been called as the new Elder’s Quorum president. In the old days, I would have tensed. Bitten back commentary about unpaid church labor and patriarchal authority.

This time, I asked about it. Not because I suddenly respect Mormon priesthood structure. But because it matters to him. And he matters to me.

He talked for ten minutes about families he’d serve, teenagers he worried about, hopes for building community. Stripped of doctrine I can’t accept, he was just talking about wanting to help people.

Same team after all. Different uniforms

That’s reconciliation in practice. Not agreement. Not even understanding. The willingness to be curious about what matters to someone you love, even when you can’t share their framework.

Quiet moments. The decision to stay at the table. The choice to ask a question instead of making a statement. The willingness to witness someone else’s reality without needing to dismantle it.

The opposite of polarization isn’t agreement. It’s connection across difference

Every family that stays together despite ideological divisions is a small act of resistance against the forces pulling us apart. Every holiday table holding both Republicans and Democrats is proof that Americans can still be American together.

I’m not naive enough to think family reconciliation will heal our national divisions. But we can’t heal as a nation if we can’t stay connected as families.

I’ve been on both sides. Estranged and reconciled. The work it took ‚Äî giving up the need to be right, accepting unfairness, setting boundaries, showing up anyway ‚Äî that’s the same work required to bridge any divide.

Reconciliation is harder. More emotional labor. More therapy. More biting your tongue.

But estrangement hurts you. Every holiday where their absence screams louder than their presence ever did. Every moment you want to pick up the phone and remember you’re not talking anymore.

My answer, earned through years of practice: yes. We can love people whose politics make us sick, whose beliefs we find incomprehensible, whose votes feel like betrayals.

Not easily. Not perfectly.

But yes.

And that’s still worth something.

Maybe it’s worth everything.

With Love,

Lyn

*Lyn Smith Gregory is a memoirist and the great-great-grandniece of Joseph Smith, and the first descendant from the founding-era Mormon family to publicly break ranks. Her memoir “We Were Smiths” is forthcoming.

I spent years hoping my mother would say it.

“I’m sorry I chose the church over you. I’m sorry I made your worth conditional on obedience. I’m sorry I let spiritual certainty matter more than your wellbeing.”

She never said it. She couldn’t say it—not because she was a bad person, but because she remained inside the system. She believed the Church’s narrative about my apostasy. She needed me to be wrong so her choices could be right.

For years, I suffered over that. Not just the inevitable pain of “my mother can’t give me what I need,” but the extra suffering I added: “She should apologize. She owes me this. It’s not fair.”

Then I accepted it.

Not with bitterness. Not with resignation. With clarity.

She was exactly who she was. She did the best she could with the framework she had. Her limitations weren’t punishment. It wasn’t personal. Just reality.

And from that acceptance, I could stop waiting. Stop performing. Stop abandoning myself trying to earn something she didn’t have to give. When she passed, I was at peace with her. Serenity found through acceptance. Power instead of victimhood.

That’s what nineteen years in high-control religion couldn’t teach me: The only real freedom is accepting what already is.

The Dangerous Lie About Control (And Why You Believed It)

The Mormon Church sold me a beautiful lie: Your worthiness determines your outcomes.

Pay your tithing and God will bless you financially. Keep the Word of Wisdom and your body won’t betray you. Raise your children in righteousness and they’ll stay faithful. Marry in the temple and your marriage will be eternal.

It’s a cruel version of spiritual cause-and-effect. Do everything right and reality will reward you. Suffer and it’s evidence you haven’t perfected the formula yet.

I’d been taught that acceptance was weakness. That righteous people fought. Changed things. Refused to surrender.

I didn’t understand the paradox yet.

The paradox that Carl Rogers, the father of humanistic psychology, understood perfectly: “Until I accept myself exactly as I am, I cannot change.”

Until I accept what is, I cannot change what is.

Radical Acceptance Isn’t Weakness—Here’s What It Actually Is

Radical acceptance isn’t saying abuse is fine. It’s not pretending injustice is God’s plan. It’s not spiritual bypassing or toxic positivity.

That’s what leaders say when they want you compliant.

Radical acceptance is harder: It’s the refusal to lie about what’s happening. It’s dropping the internal fistfight with reality long enough to see clearly what actually is, so whatever action you take next isn’t poisoned by denial.

When I discovered the private family documents confirming that Joseph Smith—founder of the Mormon Church and my great-great-great uncle—was a fraud, radical acceptance meant facing the fact that my ancestor built a religious empire based on lies, deception, and manipulation.

The discovery shattered my world. Everything I thought was sacred turned to ashes.

Acceptance meant I had to stop wishing the history was different. Stop bargaining with what the evidence showed. Stop wasting energy protesting that it wasn’t right or fair.

The pain of that revelation was inevitable.

The suffering I added, the months of “but what if I’m wrong” and “but these are good, faithful people” and “but speaking this truth will destroy relationships,”that was optional.

And I chose it. For months. Until I didn’t.

The Life-Changing Difference Between Pain and Suffering

Pain is what happens when reality doesn’t match our hopes. When prophets turn out to be con men. When families choose institutional loyalty over connection. When bodies betray us despite perfect obedience.

Pain is inevitable. It’s part of being human.

Suffering is what we add on top. The resistance. The internal argument. The demand that reality be different than it is.

I spent months arguing with the fact that I’d been lied to. That my entire framework for reality was fiction. That the adults I trusted had either been deceived or were complicit.

None of that argument changed the facts.

It just kept me stuck. Stuck in “they should have known better” and “it shouldn’t have been a lie” and “why didn’t anyone protect me?”

All that energy. All that suffering.

And none of it changed what was.

What Acceptance Looks Like in Real Life (My Publisher Story)

Last spring, I spent six months trying to publish my memoir through with the Big Five publishers. They passed. Then a smaller publisher agreed to buy it, until they halted the purchase over liability concerns about my allegations against the Church.

I could have spent years resisting that reality. Rewriting to soften the allegations. Making the book safer, smaller, less true.

Instead, I accepted what is: Traditional publishing may not want to touch accusations against a $398 billion organization with deep legal pockets and a propensity to sue.

That hurt. I grieved it. The pain was real.

But I didn’t add the suffering of “but it’s not fair” or “but I worked so hard.”

I accepted the reality. And from that acceptance, I could act.

I formed my LLC for personal protection. Had my memoir legally vetted by a media law firm. I’ll publish it myself if a smaller press doesn’t accept it.

That’s freedom.

Not controlling the outcome I wanted. Accepting the outcome I got—and choosing my next move from clarity instead of delusion.

Why Fighting Reality Is Literally Insane (And How to Stop)

The mind wants to be the iron-fisted manager of the universe. It wants the comforting illusion that if you pray enough, work hard enough, manifest correctly enough, reality will comply.

But have you ever won an argument with reality?

I tried for years. I tried to make my patriarchal blessings come true through perfect obedience. I perfected my speech about why I left, hoping to change non-receptive family members who thought they already knew.

Exhaustion comes from spending energy on what was never ours to control, then feeling betrayed when reality doesn’t comply.

Resisting what is, demanding it be different, railing against the unfairness, that’s the definition of insanity.

It’s already happened. It’s the past.

I know. I was insane for years.

The Paradox That Changes Everything

We think: First, I’ll fix myself, then I’ll accept myself. First, I’ll make reality different, then I’ll stop fighting it.

But it doesn’t work that way.

Change doesn’t come from resistance. It comes from acceptance.

When I accepted that I’d spent nineteen years in a fraudulent religion, I could finally grieve it instead of railing against the unfairness of such religions existing.

When I accepted that some family relationships might never heal, I could finally stop contorting myself and invest in the relationships that could grow.

When I accepted that my mother would never apologize, I could build the relationship we actually had instead of grieving the one I wanted.

Acceptance isn’t giving up. It’s giving up the fight with what already is so you can focus your energy on what you can actually influence.

When You Can’t Change the System: Acceptance on a Larger Scale

Some realities aren’t personal. They’re collective. Made of history, power, ideology, systems.

Joseph Smith didn’t just hurt my family. He built an empire on fraud that’s still operating. Still controlling. Still covering up.

I can’t change that history. I can’t undo the harm. I can’t make the institution suddenly become honest.

But I can stop exhausting myself wishing it were different.

I can accept what is: The Mormon Church was founded on lies and has spent nearly two centuries protecting those lies.

And from that acceptance, I can write. Bear witness. Publish the documents. Tell the stories they don’t want told.

Not because I’ll destroy the institution. But because I’m not wasting energy lamenting its existence.

That’s where power lives. Not in controlling outcomes. In accepting reality clearly enough to act from truth instead of fantasy.

This Is the Only Freedom That Actually Exists

True freedom isn’t getting reality to comply.

It’s accepting reality clearly enough to act from truth instead of delusion.

Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. And suffering arises almost entirely from resisting what is.

Acceptance transforms you from victim to agent. From “it shouldn’t be this way” to “it is this way—now what?” From wasting energy on what you can’t control to focusing energy on what you can.

I can’t control whether my memoir becomes a bestseller or disappears into obscurity. I can’t control whether my family ever validates my experience. I can’t control whether the Mormon Church admits the truth.

None of that is up to me.

What’s up to me is this: Do I waste my life resisting realities I can’t change? Or do I accept what is clearly enough to focus my energy on what I can actually influence?

That’s the paradox. That’s the freedom.

Not the power to control outcomes. Just the clarity to see what is and the courage to meet it honestly.

With Love,

Lyn

Tell me: What reality are you still fighting? What would happen if you stopped?

Share this if it resonated. Forward it to someone who needs to hear it. Hit reply and tell me what you’re learning to accept.