The "Not My Experience" Conundrum
When leaning too hard into identity means dismissing everyone else's.
At the end of February, Hulu released Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke. There must be a post-Mormon producer working at Hulu—so much Mormon content is coming from them! I haven’t watched it (your girl can only take so much Mormon narratives these days, regardless of how it’s framed). But still, the conversations I’m hearing around Devil in the Family are the same I’ve heard time and time again, so I’m going to peripherally dive in.
For context, the mini series explores content creator Ruby Franke’s downfall, as she forced her children to be a part of her YouTube vlogs to the extent of actual child abuse. She’s now in prison for literally torturing her children. After watching the series, another family vlogger who’s been content creating for over a decade decided to speak out against Franke’s atrocities—but not in the way you’d expect.
Instead of focusing on the way religion manipulated Franke’s decisions (she was under the impression her children were possessed by some demonic force), or the unethical aspects of posting your children online without consent, this other vlogger decided to talk about the smaller details that didn’t sit right with her. She brought up the lists Franke had made as a youth in the Mormon church, where she wrote down the qualities she demanded in her future husband.
“I don’t stand for what she did,” the vlogger said. “But I do have a few things to debunk…the list that she made while she was dating? That’s not normal. That’s not something we’re taught to do.”
Comments flooded in, with multiple people telling this vlogger that making a list of future husband attributes actually very much is what girls of our generation were taught to do. It was even written out plainly in a Young Women manual that provided lesson plans and ideas for Mormon church leaders (though I’ve been informed they don’t use a specific manual anymore) .
The specific lesson I’m referencing said:
“Give the young women pieces of paper and pencils. Ask them to make a list of characteristics they hope to find in their future marriage partners. Ask the young women to keep the list to be referred to later in the lesson. Remind them that since they will marry those whom they date, this same list should serve as a guide in dating. Explain to the young women that they will spend eternity with their marriage partner. They should establish standards in the most important areas to guide them in choosing this person.”
The vlogger has since turned off comments, but the video is still up.
I find something so familiar in the way she deviated from the core issue of child abuse and using your children for content. So many online and in-person conversations between Mormons and post-Mormons occur this way—when real, deep issues come up, the easiest way out is to say, essentially, “That’s not my experience.”
I do believe that this vlogger probably never made a future-husband-attribute list. Not all Mormons experience every single thing the same way. I didn’t learn certain girls’ camp songs that others have memorized. I never had a terrible interaction with my bishop, like so many other women commiserate about. But even if it’s not my experience, I don’t write off theirs. I can see, plainly, how Mormon culture can bring about these types of life experiences: of course some Mormons learn silly girls’ camp songs, as every one of our church meetings involves music. Of course someone might have a bad interaction with their bishop, because the church’s focus on a bishop’s patriarchal power and revelatory guidance for his entire congregation would give him a larger-than-life sense of identity. To go on the internet and state, with full confidence, that something must not be true because I didn’t experience it would feel purposefully dismissive.
And yet, many times when I’ve tried to communicate my experience with the Mormon church, I get that same response: “That’s not my experience.” It’s almost a refusal of empathy, a thought-terminating cliche that ends all deeper conversation. Whether or not the person means harm, it’s certainly not helpful to cut off meaningful discussions by acting, in some ways, that a different reality can’t be real.
The ironic part is that in the post-Mormon world, so many of our experiences are the same. We can commiserate about aspects of Mormonism—like harmful doctrine, temple work, missions—staring at each other wide-eyed at the confirmation that we’re not actually alone. I listen to the Girlscamp podcast often, and I’ve been surprised multiple times when the hosts and guests use the same language—sometimes verbatim!—that I’d just used the other day in a private conversation with my husband to describe an experience within Mormonism. It’s a weird, uncanny feeling to know there are people out there that understand me deep to my core, even if we didn’t sing the same songs at girls’ camp.
Sometimes I wonder if “That’s not my experience” is simply the wall we must put up to stay strong in our beliefs. I did the same thing while I still subscribed to Mormonism. I remember my heart racing when friends would admit some qualm they had with the doctrine—this internal pressure to make the situation okay, however that looked. I wanted to make the racing heart go away, for both of us, to go back to our blind faith where it was comfortable.
So, it’s interesting to me that such vast and varied experiences can also flip a 180 when deconstructing religion. Suddenly, our experiences feel shared because we can admit more freely how we felt when we were on the inside. It makes me think that the people claiming they have never experienced the same qualms or hurt or pain that I did might actually be experiencing the same racing heart I used to feel.
One of the best examples of this dissonance is occurring right now: the Mormon church decided to alter the garments all “worthy” members must wear after they’ve gone through the temple. What used to be cap-sleeved undershirts and undershorts that reach the knee can now be tank tops and slips. A lot of post-Mormons are enraged, because they’ve screamed into a void for years about how uncomfortable garments were, and how they played into a harmful modesty culture. Now, all of a sudden the members who might have said, “That’s not my experience” are celebrating the change, opening up about how they’ve always wanted the church to listen to their very real concerns about the clothing they’re forced to wear.
I don’t respond to a lot of messages I get from old friends or acquaintances asking me to justify my experience within and outside of Mormonism. If they’re asking me for proof of emotion, I can never give it to them. I just did feel the things I felt: I was insulted in Young Women’s meetings where I was told my sole purpose in life was to be a wife and a mother. I was angry about doctrine that excluded BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ individuals. I was confused about weird interactions I had with some men who misused their perceived power. It seems they don’t like to hear that. It seems they want for my experience to not be true, because it’s threatening to their own.
I can’t speak for the vlogger who missed the mark in her response video. But I can imagine her distress, because I’ve been there, seeing a religion I used to love sliced at every angle and laid bare for the world to criticize. I’d want to clear up the minutiae, too. To the outside world, our doctrine and culture just is a little bizarre. But projecting an individual experience—not having made lists—to a large group—that very much made lists—is what gets us in trouble in the first place.
Mormons distancing themselves from post-Mormons/the outside world and vice versa is not helping us understand one another. I’ve written a lot in the past few months about how trying to separate ourselves into different groups is actually kind of harmful. Imagine how we could talk to each other if our identities weren’t at stake in every conversation.
One of my favorite quotes is from the poet James Russell Lowell, who I basically know nothing about. But I’ve had it screenshotted in my phone since 2018:
“Whatever you may be sure of, be sure of this — that you are dreadfully like other people.”
Dreadfully like. I love that phrasing. Neither side is the villain. Neither is crazy. Neither is wrong. But I, at least, start to feel like a crazy, wrong villain when my experience is so easily dismissed as something that couldn’t possibly be real. It just is. It all is, whether it suits our narratives or not.
The ability and maturity needed to sit with the internal dissonance of "this is good for me and it was bad for them" is [tragically] not something taught in the church. In fact, I think it's the opposite. The "one true church" narrative bleeds into "one true experience of that church." It leaves those of us who have stepped away to have to hold "this was bad for me but it's good for them" if we want to keep relationship with people who are still in. Unfortunately we have to hold that while also witnessing all the greater harm the organization as a whole has caused. That is extremely difficult.
The horror of Ruby Franke and Lori Daybell comes from exactly the same as place as other monsters--our ability to see ourselves reflected in them. "Not my experience" is 100% a thought-terminating cliche.