Leaders Didn’t Want to Embarrass the Abuser By Disciplining Him
I just listened to the Mormonstories podcast episode where John interviews a former employee of the church who handled documents from disciplinary councils. She described the policy around certain transgressions, and some things have finally landed for me around an incident in my own life that I was never able to quite make sense of when it all happened many years ago.
I am feeling some way. Not sure what exactly. This is old stuff that goes back decades, and was indescribably stressful over many years. I have a huge memory gap of about 10-15 yrs around these events, I guess due to the trauma. This Mormonstories episode brought it all up, shone a clarifying light on some of it. I think this was a good thing, in the long run, but wow, it’s a time-bomb atm.
I can say from direct personal experience that either my priesthood leaders ignored specific policy (the person was neither disfellowshipped nor exed), OR the person lied to the bishop during his confession (which he only made at my absolute insistence) and no one ever asked me about what had actually happened or checked with me in any way to make sure people were actually safe going forward. Which I now realize the irony of; after hearing how many YW were made to describe intimate details of consensual sexual encounters. But I was asked no questions at all.
A thing that puzzled me at the time and angered me SO deeply, that I couldn’t quite sense the full force of it in real time, was; the bishop said they had decided not to disfellowship, because this person was in the bishopric and if he were disfellowshipped, he would have to be seen not taking the sacrament as he sat upon the stand during meetings. He said they didn’t want to humiliate him like that. I am not making this up. This was exactly what he told me. He honestly thought I would sympathize with this idea, even feel relieved by it.
I’m not really sure what was going on there, whether it was them covering up, or him lying, or some combination. It’s occurred to me that possibly he made it sound like I was exaggerating, or overreacting, because at one point nearly a year later, I mentioned a detail to the bishop that he seemed to be taken aback by, as if he’d not known about it, though he said nothing. It puzzled me at the time, but now it’s dawning on me that along with some other baffling moments, the whole picture makes more sense if he was told a very different story than what actually happened. I just don’t know.
This person was held to a few months of being barred from the temple, and having a few interviews with the bishop, who I suppose must have asked him if he had stopped doing the bad thing he did. TBC, this was a behavior that involved harming others, not porn or some silly matter that’s no one’s business.
There is a LOT here that I won’t go into, because this is a public billboard, effectively, but also it’s the only place I know of where it’s possible to process these Mormon experiences with other people who actually understand the full meaning of them. I can tell my therapist about this, and probably will because there’s a shit-ton of old stuff bubbling up that I’ve apparently repressed without even realizing. But while she can understand the human emotional aspects of such an experience, only another exmormon can understand the colors and textures of that full picture, so thanks for listening to this trauma-dump.
No really. THANK YOU.