These days, when most people think of “shunning”, they probably think of religions or cults cutting off their ex-members, like former Jehovah’s Witnesses and Scientologists frequently report: the practice of a group isolating its members by making turning away too painful and isolated to bear. It’s designed to keep you in, to trap you so you don’t escape.
In my case, it was something a little different. I was a non-Mormon in Utah, and I was shunned growing up by the Mormons around me. The practice left me deeply traumatized in ways I’m still struggling to grasp (let alone heal), and something distressing to me is how very little information is out there about this form of cruelty and abuse. Even more distressing is the knowledge that this practice is still being inflicted on children in Utah to this day.
This will probably be a long read. I apologize in advance. Maybe take a break and come back to it from time to time; it took me decades to live it, I won’t be offended if it takes you more than a single afternoon to read about it.
I used to hesitate to describe what I went through as “shunning” in the past. It always felt like a very dramatic word to use, but over the years it’s become plain as day that no other word fits quite so well. Instead, I have discovered almost the opposite: people hear the word and rather than think I’m exaggerating or being dramatic, they don’t seem to fully grasp just what it means to be shunned from childhood, how total it is and how devastating. Even I didn’t really get it until I was seeing a therapist who, after hearing the story of my youth, responded, “That’s child abuse. I’ve never seen a community abuse a child like that instead of the family, but it’s absolutely abusive behavior.”
I had a loving home life, with parents who treasured me, showered me with unconditional love and support, and treated me with dignity and respect. In contrast to many abused children, who look for any reason to avoid going home and dread the moment they reach their own front door, I was the inverse: I dreaded leaving our apartment to go anywhere but a different relative’s home. At school, I was unwelcome and unwanted. Other kids refused to speak to me unless they absolutely had to, would refuse to look at me, play with me, or interact with me.
If we were broken up into groups to work on something, I was ignored. Any time I spoke up, the rest of the group stared silently until I finished talking, then resumed their own discussions as though I had never said anything in the first place. I spent my recesses alone, at first unwillingly and desperately trying to join in on other games, but always excluded. If the game had a way to force a player “out”, I was always targeted and driven “out” first. If no such option to eject me existed (such as with basketball), I was simply ignored and played around, like an obstacle on the field.
I vividly recall finally making friends, briefly, with a new girl to our school. She and I hit it off, had a lot of fun together, and she invited me to her upcoming birthday party, the very first (and last) one I would ever attend. These were mythical events to me: I’d heard about other kids having birthday parties from relatives’ stories about their own childhoods, as well as from TV and movies and the like, but I’d never gotten to go to another kid’s birthday before...well, except for my little brother’s, of course. The party itself was everything I’d hoped for: cake, other kids, lots of games, a goody bag from the parents with candy and toys, honest-to-God TOYS in it, just free for the taking (the concept of anyone getting presents besides the birthday boy or girl blew my mind). When it was my turn to get my goody bag, the girl’s parents greeted me with wide smiles and excited voices.
“Well, hello there! I don’t think we’ve seen you around before. Did you just move here?”
“No, we’ve lived here for a long time.”
“Oh? Well, we haven’t seen you at the ward (Mormon for “church”) before.”
“I don’t go to the ward, we’re not Mormon. I go to the Lutheran church.”
“Oh! How nice! Well, here’s your goody bag.” I smiled and said “thank you”, they smiled and said “you’re welcome”.
The next day at school, their daughter refused to even look at me. Literally, she would not speak to me, would not acknowledge me, and turned her face away from me if I tried to talk to her. We never played together again, and I never went to another party.
My mother recalled a heartbreaking moment, driving me to school, when I asked her “Why don’t the other kids like me?” She had no good answer for me. Unfortunately, the teachers at my school decided they did have one. When my mother confronted them about how I was being treated, we were told I was a bully: other kids merely refused to play with me because I was rude and demanding and bossy, totally unwilling to play with other kids unless they did exactly what I wanted. My mother knew this was a crock of shit, but I panicked: the other kids thought I was a bully, and mean? I couldn’t understand what I had done to deserve this, but I resolved to fix it by being the nicest, friendliest, most easy-going person of all. I asked other kids what they wanted to do, and was met with silence. I tried bringing toys to school and offering to share, to no avail. God help me, I finally wound up making carrot sticks and passing them around to other kids during recess, hoping that by bringing snacks to all the other kids my selflessness would be rewarded with realizing I wasn’t a bully after all, just misunderstood.
It worked about as well as you would expect meekly serving snacks to your own abusers would work at ending the abuse.
This continued until I hit middle school, when my parents could no longer stand it and, despite our poverty, had scrimped and saved enough to send me to a Christian private school. At last, among fellow Christians, I would surely find my place. I didn’t, of course, because the church that ran the school was a Missouri Synod congregation, Lutheranism’s contribution to the world of regressive and conservative denominations. There I experienced more typical bullying, coupled with the gaslighting of my bullies driving me to near suicide while they teasingly insisted “We’re your friends!” (I was stopped from killing myself only because my mother caught me hoarding a pocket full of painkillers while getting ready one morning, my plan being to swallow them at the start of the day and hopefully drop dead in the middle of class, to spitefully traumatize them for it). Even a couple of the teachers joined in from time to time. So, rather than continue to waste our family’s precious income on a private school that was driving me to the edge, I returned to public school to finish middle school and then go on to high school (if I was going to be bullied and mistreated, we may as well not be forced to pay for it to boot).
High school was more of the same, though at least now I could get eye contact and some mild social interaction sometimes. I was still an outsider though, in every way: I was never invited to parties (birthday or otherwise), I was still ignored during sports and games (I ended up taking weight lifting in high school just to get out of PE and the shame of being picked on or ignored every single day of it), and I never dated. Oh sure, twice I had the honor of taking a girl from school out for a burger and a movie, but both girls ended the outing with “This was fun, but I actually already have a boyfriend” before once again never speaking to me. I suppose if you’re hungry, bored, and broke you’ll put up with anything to get a day out...or maybe they wanted to spite their boyfriends, I don’t know. It’s not like I had the social circle to know anything about their lives before or after. Most of the girls, though, simply said “No” and that was that. I didn't get my first kiss until I met my wife, in my mid 20’s. Or my first hug from someone outside of my family. Or first hand-holding. Or my first actual date. Actually, first anything with someone who wasn’t family wasn’t until I met her. A part of me still finds it impossible to envision teenagers kissing or having parties or anything like that, like the entire idea is something Hollywood made up along with casting actors who are clearly in their late 20s and early 30s to play teenagers. I did win her a stuffed animal at a theme park once, so I know that happens sometimes.
It’s common for people who are abused growing up to normalize it, and I was no different. I tried desperately to please people, to not upset them, to go along with others and refuse to speak up lest I make them think I was being too pushy or bossy or demanding. I became a chef because serving good food makes people happy, and I wanted others to be happy so maybe they would like me. I developed a sense of humor quite by accident when I made a room full of people laugh and for the first time in my life felt a rush as I wasn’t just acknowledged, but applauded, and figured that if I could make people laugh maybe THEN they’d like being around me. Eventually, I normalized it by spiraling deep into self-loathing and hatred. I was a rational, logical child; a student of science at my core, I reasoned that there were only two options here:
1. Everyone else is wrong, I am not the problem here, they are, and I don’t deserve this.
2. I am wrong and everyone else is correct. I do deserve this, it’s entirely my fault and self-inflicted.
Occam’s Razor dictated that, clearly, number 2 was the simplest answer: was it realistic to believe that everyone around me despised me for no reason at all, and I had nothing to do with it? Of course not, I told myself: just because I couldn’t see what was wrong with me didn’t mean I wasn’t broken and worthless. I was told by many people (especially my family) that I was loved, I was worthy, I was special, I shouldn’t feel this way about myself, but none of that made sense to me. How could I have self-esteem, or value myself? Value is determined collectively, by others: the value of a dollar isn’t intrinsic, it’s valuable because we all agree it is. A painting by a great artist is valuable because the artist is talented and the piece is objectively good; a painting by a nobody that is poorly done is worthless because nobody likes it, and nobody cares who made it.
Of course I hated myself and blamed myself for my predicament: who else was there to blame? Everyone else? I’d heard so many times people scoff at people who did that, shaking their heads with disappointment about how people like that refused to take any responsibility for their actions or blame for their situation. Not I; my parents had raised me better than that, after all. I took full responsibility, and just because I couldn’t explain it or make sense of it didn’t change, to me, that this was all my fault and I hated myself for it. I spent a lot of time in high school trying to think of a way to kill myself that was both guaranteed to succeed AND guaranteed to be seen as a tragic accident (I didn’t want to hurt my family, so I figured if I must die then at the very least I should ensure they could console themselves with thinking it was a random tragedy that they couldn’t have stopped). Unable to think of something, I settled on walking in the streets on the way to school in winter: the road to school was curvy, on a hill, and people often sped through it regardless of the school zone signs. I would walk on the road, a good foot away from the curb, in the hopes someone would come flying around the corner, skid on the ice, and slam into me. Clearly, it never happened, but everything else I could think of either carried too high a risk of failure, or too great a chance of being discovered as deliberate, so I survived in spite of my best efforts.
I normalized so many other things that I have no idea when I will find them all, let alone begin working on them. I cannot handle people being angry at me, and can work myself into a panic if I feel I’ve upset someone when I didn’t mean to. I don’t trust anyone and assume everyone is talking about me behind my back, loathing me and just wishing I would disappear (even my own wife). I have no close friends, and can count on one hand the number of friends I’ve made at all in life, all of whom I’ve lost touch with; I simply don’t know how to make and keep friends and don’t truly believe they want me around anyway. I have no self-esteem or self-confidence, what little I build up pops like a soap bubble at the slightest disturbance (my life is littered with the remains of half-started projects and dreams abandoned at the slightest criticism or setback as I convinced myself I was a hopeless failure yet again). I don’t have any real sense of self or identity: I’ve spent so much time trying to be the person people like and don’t hate, trying to make them laugh or feel good or cook them something tasty that I genuinely don’t even know who I am, what I like, or what I want to be. I remember the first time I learned about “code switching”, it immediately made sense to me even though I did it for entirely different reasons: changing everything about how I talk, act, and behave at an instant was second nature to me as a desperate attempt to make sure nobody I was around had a reason to dislike me, to try and fit in at all times regardless of the crowd I was with. These days I mostly wear t-shirts I either bought at Wal-Mart (I’m particularly fond of St. Patrick’s Day shirts, since I can get away with wearing them most of the year because I have red hair) or free shirts I got from donating blood and platelets. I rarely leave my home now that I’m work from home, so I don’t need a lot of options (I used to like Hawaiian shirts, but thanks to alt-right trolls and their ilk co-opting them now I’m afraid to wear them lest I be mistaken for a fascist). I have a beard because...I can grow one. It looks good. At least I think so. My haircut hasn't changed since...ever, actually. It’s a bland and ordinary “white guy” cut, because it’s safe and ordinary and I don’t know what else to do with my hair anyway. I even cut it myself now since it’s always the same. It’s taken me forever to start taking care of myself, because why take care of something you hate and resent? I have never had a sense of community or belonging. The closest I came was when I moved out and wound up in LA in a poverty-stricken, high-crime, majority-black neighborhood and finally felt some measure of acceptance from those around me...until I was beaten, stabbed once, shot at, and told that I should “go back to be with [my] own kind”. That’s a story for another time, perhaps, but I ended up retreating even further into my shell as a result.
While I have made some baby-steps towards normalcy (I have, after all, a loving wife, spoiled rotten pets to comfort me, my family, and I’ve managed to lose a total of 80 pounds so far), the journey is so far from over I feel I haven’t even begun it yet. For me, the greatest tragedy of this story isn’t even MY story, but the fact that what I endured isn’t unusual or a relic of the past. It’s still happening, to God only knows how many children in Utah. This article, (Link: www.cityweekly.net/...) published in the City Weekly in 2013, describes the exact sort of thing happening to the author’s children around 2008.
Two little boys, now just out of high school, are the latest victims. When I googled things like “Utah Mormons shunning” and various related phrases, most of the answers were either from Mormons insisting loudly that their church NEVER practices shunning, or from Ex-Mormons and support groups for them discussing the shunning they experienced after leaving the church itself. The article above was the lone example of what I experienced.
It’s happening, right now. Children in Utah are going to bed crying, wondering why they have no friends, why nobody likes them. I wrote this because I want former kids like me to know they’re not alone, that they’re not crazy or wrong to think that what they went through was wrong and cruel, and that they didn’t make it all up. I want people to know that this DOES happen, that anyone who says it doesn’t is at best an ignorant fool who doesn’t know what they’re talking about and at worst someone lying to try and hide what they’ve done before, continue to do, and are passing on to their children so someone will keeping doing it (and denying it) long after they’re gone. It breaks my heart, and I don’t know what to do about it, but I must do something.
I was shunned. My story is not the first. It isn’t the last. But, it isn’t unique, and maybe together we can ensure somebody’s story IS the last one.
AFTERWORD: I don’t know what I’m going to do going forward. I feel awkward everywhere I go, and in everything I do. I’ve never felt at home here either, and that’s not on anyone here and I don’t want anyone to think they’ve done anything to push me away. This has been a great community and I still try to read as many diaries as I can every day to benefit from the wealth of perspective and knowledge this place offers. I want to make a positive impact in the world, but I’m so lost as to how to do it. I feel like if I don’t figure out how to take care of myself and start healing, I’m never going to be able to help others or make a positive difference. It feels incredibly selfish of me to want to take a step back and try to care for myself when so many others out there, like BIPOC, women, LGBTQ+ people, and others (or any combination of the above) have to deal with so much cruelty and bigotry and oppression every day on top of their own mental health issues which are as bad or worse than mine (not to mention egotistical to think I’ve made an impression beyond “Who are you, again?” with most of you), but I feel I’ve reached a breaking point. After months of work, mental recuperation, and playing the wild-ass-guessing game that is psychiatric drug treatment, I have gone without suicidal thoughts and urges for almost a month solid, the first time in over 25 years I’ve finally had a day without them. Maybe it is selfish, but the other day I had my first setback that didn’t result in me spending the rest of the day thinking “I should kill myself” on repeat for hours on end, and I liked it. I would like to get that to be a lot more normal before I throw myself into anything else. This isn’t a GBCW/Delete My Fucking Account, Kos! post, but just a notice that if you don’t see me for a long time try not to worry: you can message me, if you like, but I really just need a breather.
