[AmyJ]

I am asking that y’all do what it is you were going to do anyways, which is provide feedback/thoughts/impressions to stuff that I post:)

As always, Thanks!

[AmyJ]

There are 2 parts to this problem…

1) Genuine Addicts who need the support and assistance and are too prideful to ask/associate with it. Sometimes it takes a “Come to Jesus” moment to get through that pride. There is probably a sub-group that could handle their challenges without this assistance, but I think it is rarer than common, personally.

2) Casual users who get branded as “addicts” by people making more of the problem than it actually is. The blatant example is divorces over p usage – and only for p usage.

I think we don’t tell our youth that there will need to be a series of conversations about this topic throughout their marriage. I think we treat it as “out of sight, out of mind”. Maybe we don’t have neutral conversations giving the head’s up in regards to the situation because it is such a charged topic, or maybe because there is no good way of doing so.

I haven’t taken a gospel marriage or family relations course, but when I was in YW (15 years ago) we didn’t talk about serious relationship conversations we would be having with our spouses. All of this was just… left out.

P.S. If I am ever called to teach the laurels in YW, I am going to borrow stuff from the “Marriage Builders” website and I am going to devote at least 1 lesson a quarter on effective inter-spousal/boyfriend communication techniques. I am going to see what kind of YW I have and see what kinds of conversations I can comfortably and respectfully have…. Which is probably why they know better than to call me for YW.

[AmyJ]

Spiritual Strength = Perspective (the ability to see a specific course of action) + Faith (belief that a course of action is valid) + Perseverance (action towards completing or maintaining a course of action).

I see an increase in my spiritual strength as I gain perspective on different points of view and apply them to my life, reflect on times in my life when past things I believed were validated (or were not validated and I am given some understanding as to why they weren’t validated), and as I keep making choices to act on that faith.

EXAMPLES:

PERSPECTIVE: I was lucky that while I was growing up without knowing that I might be an undiagnosed Aspie, my father kept teaching me about perspective and how my vastly different perspective was equally valid to my mom’s non-Aspie perspective day after day, week after week for easily 10 years. Now, it is easier for me to see other perspectives and not be hung up on mine being the only one.

FAITH: For me, I have had a number of touchstone experiences where I felt that I was given needed inspiration. These are the experiences I remember when I am looking forward in making current decisions.

PERSEVERENCE: When I persevered and acted on it, my life was changed for the better. More to the point, my circumstances changed because I hung in there. My husband and I had a rough few months over the past winter for a variety of reasons (not important right now), and we both had times we were starting to think about what other options were out there. However, we kept talking and listening and showing respect for eachother, we persevered in our faith that we loved eachother and that our marriage was a good foundation for our life. Because we kept at it, our relationship is stronger and deeper – we have a better understanding of eachother.

[AmyJ]

Roy wrote:

Let me say that checklists were at one point very stable, grounding, and certain to me. It says in the Lectures on Faith that on thing needed in order to generate faith sufficient to take hold on salvation was a knowledge that my life was lived in accordance to Gods will… I had a much more moderate approach – Checklists! I could know that I would be saved, even exalted, in an eternal family by checking off the boxes. I can understand a person living their whole life under such a paradigm and being successful.

However, my new religious framework is much more adjustable. My beliefs are much more like art than an engineered science. I have graduated from the “paint by numbers” program and can experiment with new color combinations, etc. to express the yearning within my soul. It is less structured and more freeform. It is less connect the dots and more exploration.

I agree that checklists can be useful, but not for everyone every time.

I am beginning to think that we should use checklists as a template for working with God to design our own “checklist” based on our individual circumstances. However, while I have been circling around to that idea for some time (since I started on this forum), I have not had the courage to make the personal checklist yet.

[AmyJ]

My husband and I were talking last night about how leadership roulette worked in our favor when we went to the YSA ward. Our ward was about 1 year old when we started attending it at different times. Our bishopric was focused on drawing us closer to Christ first – that was their #1 priority. After that, they made it clear they were there to help and serve us achieve our temporal goals of schooling and jobs, dating if the opportunity arose. They did NOT try to marry us off, just planned activities where we could feel the Spirit and become a ward family – mourn with those that mourn, rejoice with those that rejoice. It helped that our ward at the time was more mature – we had more members between 25 and 31.

I was there for about a year, and in a year’s time we must have had at least 8 couples get sealed in the temple from our ward.

My husband and I still chuckle over the first Sunday we sat together at church as boyfriend/girlfriend. Both of us were not daters, and rather private people. I saw our bishop (whom I’d known for years) and gave him a smile, he smiled back saw I was with a guy and got a huge school-boy grin on his face and then he elbowed his counselor (whom I had known for 10+ years) and pointed us out almost giggling with joy. Then his counselor nearly pummeled the other counselor (whom I’d also known for 5+ years) with his elbow trying to get his attention so he could point us out (more big grins).

[AmyJ]

Thanks Roy and Mom3.

I hadn’t thought about it that way. I had been focused on what I felt went wrong instead what what may have gone right:)

[AmyJ]

Heber13 wrote:

What do you think is worse…needing to drink coffee every morning and being addicted to it, or consuming porn regularly and being addicted to it?

On their own independent of other circumstances, I consider them personal choices equal in scope.

But if my need for coffee takes up several hours a day, or causes a family member extreme angst because they were conditioned to treat it as poison and that was not resolvable, well that may change things. If my spouse considered my coffee-drinking an insult against their coffee bean growing abilities, that would also change things. If I am spending too many family resources on premiere coffee that my children actually need for survival, that changes things. If there is no conversation about my coffee habits because of anger and stonewalling, that is a clear sign that something needs to change.

I think the greatest harm that p does is set the spouses against themselves in expectations. we set the expectation up that our youth won’t have to think about these choices, that they are default “wrong”, and then when everything doesn’t proceed to plan and these choices have to be thought out, we hand them nothing.

Heber13 wrote:

Perhaps consumption of both affects some people way more than others, and can be dangerous to some people.

I think that there is a segment of society that tends to take habits towards addictions – they are biologically wired to do so. I think that if keeping the behavior labeled as an “addiction” instead of a “habit” is useful because it validates the seriousness of what they are fighting.

I do think that the church labels things as “addictions” that may not necessarily be addictions. I think that what matters more is the support shown to the individual – “addiction” or “habit” – and that is something we are not comfortable giving as a church.

[AmyJ]

Roy wrote:

I think that it is important to emphasize that nobody is saying that P use does not have consequences nor (I believe) that it is not habit forming. The study is saying that these things do not necessarily make an addiction

Absolutely. I do fear the casual user being labeled an “addict” while the true addict shrugging it off as “just a habit”. Since it is a spectrum of use with hushed, vaguely defined terms and (sometimes unrealistic) expectations, it is a loaded grenade waiting to go off and send shrapnel everywhere.

Roy wrote:

and further that applying the addiction label has negative consequences all on its own.

However, sometimes the shock value of “addiction” gets through where “habit causing problems” doesn’t and helps get down to the root causes of the behavior(s) – which may not be (and probably isn’t) the behaviors themselves.

[AmyJ]

Roadrunner wrote:

My experience in my local area and family is that that more like 90% of guys do and 60% of girls do. I’d bet that if you look up on the stand at ward or stake conference the majority of the men sitting there hide it. Virtually every young man in the church struggles with it, which is not pleasant to think about as you take the sacrament each week.

I agree. I wish I knew what to tell our youth/young adults. I wound up having a frank conversation about this statistic with my YSA sister a few years ago when she was getting married, and I am not sure she believed me. I think that some of the marriage problems we are seeing is because of this circumstance – we candy coat/hide the behaviors and then leave it up to people to deal with the fallout of those choices in their choices towards themselves, their relationships, and in counseling.

Roadrunner wrote:

Psychologists I’ve spoken to say that porn doesn’t fit the traditional medical definition of “addiction” but that some behaviors are similar to addiction. I don’t know enough to say whether it meets the technical addiction but it seems to drive almost uncontrollable compulsion to view it. That being said, I don’t think it has quite the same degree of negative consequences as say drug addiction. Maybe it does and I just don’t know it…

I think that there is an addiction component to this topic. However, while I have thought about it a lot, I haven’t figured out where the line between normal and addiction is yet.

I do know that there are negative consequences to p. I can see where it can contribute to marriage issues – especially where lying is involved. I can see where it can be blown out of proportion and divide spouses further. I can see where the resources (time, money, emotional) spent on p can be detrimental to the family.

[AmyJ]

Hi,

I am glad it worked out for you.

I had had visions of snuggling my oldest daughter while being spiritually fed during the Women’s conference. Yeah, no that did not happen.

My daughter is 7.75 years old, so I thought she was finally old enough.

My husband was at the end of his rope and being curt to all of us Saturday afternoon, so I took both our 7.75 year old daughter (close enough in age to the cutoff) and my 1 year old (still under the baby rule) up to the church building.

DD#1 played in the nursery during the RS festivities (I didn’t have the heart to pull her out and checked on her periodically) and DD#2 held court on the carpet. DD#1 spent the session munching deserts and trying to compete with her sister to snuggle in my lap. They were both tired, so not showing their most quiet and respectful selves. I had cordoned off 1 row of the chapel for DD#2 to play in (we had a total of 8 sisters come up to the chapel for conference, so it’s not like I was competing for space) and that seemed to help for a while. I did get snippets of the conference, and cherish Pres. Uchtdorf’s talk between tending the needs of both of them.

As near as I can tell, my RS sisters were compassionate to me and my daughters (non-judgemental) even though I don’t know that I made the best judgement call in bringing them. It helps that most of the sisters who attended are approaching the age where hearing loss is becoming an issue, and they may have been sitting up front and actually not heard my daughters.

[AmyJ]

SilentDawning wrote:

Leaders do inspire people, they are relationship oriented, have vision and are supportive. Managers are about compliance, sticking with policy, budgeting, etcetera. They tend to be less interested in individuals’ growth and development, and tend to stick with the status quo.

I think we can see this in how assignments are given in families. It seems that in every situation I co-parent with my spouse in, one of us is the manager (taking care of the details) and one of us is the leader (having the vision). And it isn’t always the same person having the vision while the other person manages it. Maybe one of the parts of growing up spiritually is learning to accept and execute with humility the role that you are needed to have at the time and being able to switch with equal dexterity and humility as circumstances change.

SilentDawning wrote:

Speaking realistically, I think every leader has to embrace a certain amount of management. There are always existing structures and policies that have to be followed in conventional organizations. There are times when the growth of followers has to take a backseat to managerial imperatives. But leaders are have far more vision, relationship building, and genuine concern for their followers than managers do.

Sadly, most of the people I’ve reported to have been managers. The ones who were leaders always seemed to get fired, and then started their own businesses and leadership experiences.

This reminds me of the passages of scripture dealing with shepherds vs hired hands. Maybe hired hands are shepherds in training learning the gist of care-taking and those responsibilities before they become shepherds of their own flocks?

[AmyJ]

SamBee wrote:

Well we seem to use church made videos here (yes videos – those cassette things) and DVDs very occasionally, but powerpoint etc are a no-no.

Our Gospel Doctrine teacher in our last ward put together power point lessons every week and no one even batted an eye. It might be one of those “our mileage may vary situations”.

[AmyJ]

cwald wrote:

Jwald decided last year that we will either go to church together as a family, or we would stay home as a family.

I think this is what my family is coming to. I am the more active church attender because I do not have chronic health problems to the magnitude that my husband does. I hate it when I felt pressured or put pressure on myself to attend church without him for the sake of the “kids”. I wind up resenting him for not having to get dressed up and deal with people. Plus, our 7 year old usually chooses to act out at church when it is just her, me and her little sister. I also don’t like the double standard I see where if he is sick I should take the kids and go to church, but if I am sick the family stays home.

My husband has a new calling where he is the branch executive secretary, and so far that seems to have pulled him to church more.

cwald wrote:

I will stay home for a bit to support jwald, like she did last year to support me.

Peace.

Here is hoping that in applying this principle, we are “trading up”.

[AmyJ]

Yay! I am happy for you!

[AmyJ]

Heber13 wrote:

We have to find our personal testimony to deal with an imperfect organization, imperfect prophets and leaders, and yet still look towards the gospel standards we need to seek after and practice, even while the church evolves to seek after that truth.

The value of StayLDS to me, is to continue to practice how to be a better person myself, while realizing there is no perfect organization on the earth to go find. I need to try to improve in the midst of imperfection.

We have regular differences in perspective based on brain chemistry, abilities, personality, experiences, ect. that wreck havoc with our perception of “perfection”.

To make things even more interesting, “perfect” by definition is a true/false, black/white construct. If something is perfect, that means it is “without flaw” which means a checklist to go against to determine its perfection. I am steering away form labeling things as “perfect” because I don’t want to think in terms of binary for most things. I am choosing “excellent”, “effective”, “justified” as more specific words to use to describe choices that have merit. “That’s the perfect choice.” does not have the same meaning as “That is the most effective choice.” If the “perfect” choice is taken off the table, you are scrambling around until you find another one. If the “most effective” choice is taken off the table, well then you move on to a less effective choice, or go back to the drawing board.

I feel that part of mortality is going through the 5 stages of grief while learning to work with others until we reach a state “acceptance” with that person. With some people we bargain, we deny what they are talking about, we experience frustration/anger, and we can become depressed in our efforts to work with a person. More conversations then I would like to admit go through the frustration/anger, denial, depression, bargaining stages before we reach a state of “acceptance” and have a course of action planned out.

[Author]

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