This came to us through our Letters from Lazy Learners form. The writer shared an account of what it felt like to move from one painful ward experience straight into another. She describes years of gossip, exclusion, and spiritual harm.
She tried to serve. She tried to connect. She tried to stay.
But every attempt left her feeling smaller, ignored, and blamed for her own mistreatment.
Letter from a Sister Who Tried to Be Enough
I wrote this while I was still active in the church. This is long, but just one tiny drop in the bucket.
Imagine this…
For 5 years you live in a ward where you are repeatedly gossiped about, falsely accused, betrayed, and belittled by your bishop and RS (Relief Society) presidents and develop PTSD from their spiritual and emotional abuse. You keep going thinking that it has to get better, and after being yelled at for an hour in your house by your RS president who tells you that you are using your calling to seek revenge (which isn’t true), you decide to attend a new ward. It takes several months, but the first time you go to your new ward, the person conducting RS (the president in this case) asks if you are new, you say you’re visiting (since its complicated), and she walks away and doesn’t ask your name or bother to introduce you. Hmmm… The “Visitors Welcome” sign must have fallen off from outside the building. You visit for a several more weeks and even attend and participate in a ward activity and the RS president stands next to you for 30+ minutes and doesn’t acknowledge you exist (you don’t know she is the president at this time, just a member of the presidency). Then, you try to sit next to someone in RS who happens to be in the presidency and you start talking to them, and they don’t look at you but kinda say something and then get up and walk away when you are in the middle of a sentence. Nobody else from the presidency talks to you, Finally, a week before your records are transferred, you are asked why you are still coming. You say that your records are getting transferred and finally they say, oh by the way, this is Amy. (Thanks. Everybody already knows me by now because I am one of the only people who talks during RS and lots of people have come up to me and said they like my comments, but not you.)
Then, your records get transferred in and nobody from the presidency continues to talk to you for 2 months. No ministering assignment, no contact at all. Then, after you say you have anxiety attending church, they say they need to come visit and they were “too busy” to visit before (it’s a small ward without much turnover and they only do minimal activities…what are they “busy” doing?) So, after 4 months of being in the ward, you allow the presidency to come check their box saying they visited you. However, instead of showing up to your house, they go to your neighbor’s house and just walk in and sit down on her couch for 10 minutes before her kids go upstairs and say that there are some strange ladies sitting on the couch downstairs. And your neighbor (who is inactive in the church) freaks out that there are strange church ladies in her home without her knowing. Then they come visit you very late and very short and have a very superficial conversation in which the president says, “The stake said counseling is good so I would go if I ever needed it.” You hold your tongue when you want to say, “Oh, you need it right now,” and wonder why she needs permission from the stake to attend personal counseling.
You then have to spend a lot of time reassuring your ex-Mormon neighbor about why a RS presidency for a ward she didn’t live in was in her house without her permission. Then you get a text from someone in your old ward saying how they heard that you love your new RS president, which was never something you said. You feel confused and are worried about what other gossip had been shared about you. However, you decided to reach out and ask you president for help with something because you know it helps people feel good to help them feel important. You ask if she knows anyone who could babysit for a couple hours during the day so you could attend an appointment. She says she doesn’t know but gives you two names of people she thinks you could ask. You say thanks even though you know the names she gave you are of people who work full-time and wouldn’t be able to help out. You wonder how you know that only being in the ward a few months and she doesn’t.
Then, nobody from the presidency continues to sit next to you or talk to you, until one day, one of them starts to say, “I knew you were ward shopping, but…” and you suspect that someone has been gossiping about you again and wonder why RS tends to be a middle school girls bathroom. You find other people to connect with so who cares about the presidency. Then, you don’t get a calling like most people when they move into a ward and your husband feels like he needs to talk to the bishop about life and ends up talking the whole time about you instead and the bishop says he isn’t going to give you a calling because you have too much going on. Your husband says that isn’t going to help anything so the bishop gives you a calling that someone else already has and there isn’t very much to do and is dependent upon the RS president delegating. You hope this is an opportunity to build a relationship with the president and try your best to put the trauma aside.
The president takes a month to acknowledge that you got the calling and when she finally sends you a quick text she says they might ask you do something, but it will be very minimal! (exclamation mark included) You reply that you want to serve and she says thanks, but doesn’t talk to you again for a few months. Meanwhile, you aren’t asked to speak in sacrament meeting like people normally are when they go to a new ward, so you have to initiate that as well. Then there is a funeral that the RS president planned everything for and just needs someone to make a sign-up genius. Many people in the service coordinators calling get to plan the funeral, but you try to be grateful that you get the important assignment to make a sign-up genius. Its been over a year since you had something to do in calling! And now you get to use your testimony and spiritual gifts to make a sign-up genius! You make the sign-up genius and then she changes her mind afterwards and sends out a text to everyone making it sound like the sign up genius was wrong. Everyone praises her up the wazoo about how amazing she is. It hurts that she made you look bad to everyone else. You reach out privately to her and thank her for helping and say that you can help with that next time and she acts offended and says she just wanted to make sure that it got done. Ok… (I can get things done too if you give me a chance.) There is another sign-up genius that goes out about cleaning someone’s house that was made by the presidency and you say that you are more than willing to help and you are told it was easier if they just do it themselves. You have one job, to make sign-up geniuses, and you aren’t even given the opportunity to. You feel so unimportant and unwanted.
There is an opportunity to go to lunch with others from RS. During lunch, someone mentions how much they appreciate your kids being in primary. The RS president, in front of everyone, says, “Well, we need more kids in the neighborhood.” Everyone goes silent. Its embarrassing for you. Its hard enough to attend a ward you don’t live in, but when people treat you differently because of it, that makes it even worse. You already feel like an outcast and you aren’t being fully accepted because you left an abusive situation. At another point you are grocery shopping and the president is too and sees you and then ignores you and pretends like she didn’t see you. Instead of making things awkward by checking out at the same time, you spend some extra time walking around the store. Luckily you run into a good friend you hadn’t seen in a while.
You try to do various other things with your calling without any support or even acknowledgement that you are offering to help and are finally given the task of delivering a couple birthday treats a month. They tell you to make the cookies yourself and you don’t get reimbursed and then you are supposed to say they are from the presidency. Ok. The only thing the presidency did is make the little thing that is says “Love, The RS presidency.” You do this because you are absolutely desperate to be just like a normal person (except normal people don’t try to initiate things with their callings) and not have problems, but it is so triggering to have your calling be making the presidency look good, especially when they haven’t treated you very well. You are dying inside but keep your sh*t together on the outside and end up making a couple more sign-up geniuses for various things and you are then get asked to make a sign-up genius for an emotional health activity. You volunteer to help with it because you are the only one in the ward with a background in mental health and get no response back. You don’t attend because you feel so unwanted, unloved, and unimportant. By this point everything is building up to a point where you can’t handle it anymore. You talk with the bishop about your struggles and you are told that leadership/administrative stuff isn’t important and callings like yours are the really important ones. You are really confused because you had been RS president and you delegated all the administrative stuff to others like it says in the handbook so you could spend multiple hours a week ministering. Not only that, making sign up geniuses is an administrative task.
Meanwhile, the distress from feeling unwanted and unimportant in your calling has built up so much that you are emotionally unstable most of the time. One day you get triggered after someone bore testimony of how blessed they were by having a time intensive church calling and wonder why leaders keep denying you blessings by not giving you opportunities to serve, even when you volunteer. You leave early and go home and sit in your bed and stare at the picture of Jesus with outstretched arms on the wall across the room and you ask, “what do I do?” The answer is very clear that you need to ask to be released. You ask to be released multiple times and it takes a month or so for this to happen. The trauma and panic of being trapped in another calling where you were being treated poorly was building and the distress level was unbearable.
Meanwhile, another opportunity to make a sign-up genius happens and the presidency doesn’t reach out. They don’t know you asked to be released. You have been afraid to say anything to the president because you had tested the waters before and knew you knew she was too insecure to be able to handle hearing how you felt. However, you thought it is important for her to know so you face your fear and reach out and tell her that you want to contribute and don’t feel like you are getting a chance in this calling. She invalidates you. You explain how difficult it is for you to attend church and you point out multiple opportunities where she could have helped you feel more included. She justifies and rationalizes every decision they made, even saying that they were inspired, and manages to contradict herself multiple times. She keeps telling you that you need to talk to the bishop and not her because she doesn’t have any control over callings. You try to reassure her that you are not attacking and she responds that she doesn’t get offended easily. You also reassure her that she does have some control over callings and tell her that she has the keys to submit names and to also say no. She doesn’t respond to that but says you need to be more patient and give her more grace. (Where’s my grace? I am the one that was hurt. Why am I the bad guy for feeling hurt?)
She then continues to pretend you don’t exist. You feel hurt by how she responded to you, so you reach out again and let her know how you feel hurt. She doesn’t acknowledge you at all. Her husband is then assigned to come to your house during a very vulnerable time and you don’t feel comfortable with that and you express this and he responds with, “Good for you! Please never contact me again.” (Well, jokes on him because after a zero-tolerance response like that I don’t ever want to talk to him again). You wonder if he is a narcissist, which would make sense with how the president acts.
Then you just cry and cry wondering why this is happening to you. You try not to fall into the hole that this somehow must be a representation of your worth, but its so hard. You wonder why you aren’t good enough to be loved by your RS president. That’s her only job so what is wrong with you that she wouldn’t love you? You start noticing occasional thoughts of wanting to be dead and then think of all people that you are able to help outside the church in your job as a therapist. You wonder if you should stay in the church with how poorly leaders have treated you, but you just can’t leave because of the trauma bond that holds you there.
Unfortunately, this type of emotional control that the church had over her is all too common. The way leaders spoke to her shaped how she saw her own pain. They flipped her concerns back onto her, told her to be more patient, and framed her anxiety as a personal flaw instead of a normal response to mistreatment.
She kept trying to serve and connect, hoping that effort would change how she was treated. But every boundary she set got twisted into a sign of weakness or bad attitude. Over time, that kind of pressure doesn’t just wear someone down. It teaches them to doubt their own instincts and to feel guilty for needing basic respect. If you want to see how emotional control works inside high-demand systems, be sure to read up on the BITE model.
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