7 Things I Wish I Knew During Deconstruction
Faith deconstruction isn't a clean process. You're rebuilding a self while still going to work, parenting, managing a marriage and a household. There's no roadmap for it — you're improvising for the first time in a life that used to hand you all the answers. In this episode, I'm walking through the things I got wrong along the way. Not to give you one more thing to get right, but so you can spot the patterns faster than I did.
What I cover: Not being able to sit with uncertainty. After decades inside a system that had all the answers, uncertainty feels intolerable. I talk about the pull to replace one authority with another — wellness culture, politics, self-help, even coaching — and why developing a tolerance for not knowing is what actually makes you free.
Making decisions from reaction. Anger is what gets you out the door. It's not where you want to make your future decisions from. I unpack the difference between total rejection of the old system and actually deciding for yourself what you think — because doing the opposite of what you were told is still letting the old system set the terms.
All-or-nothing thinking. Mormonism trains this hard — good or bad, worthy or unworthy, no in between. I talk about how that binary doesn't disappear when you leave, it just switches teams. The nuance is harder to hold, but a self built on binary categories is just as brittle as the one you left.
Not telling my family sooner. I sat on this for years, partly to protect them and partly to protect myself. I get honest about what that silence actually communicated, and why there's no universal right timeline here — just your own judgment about your specific people.
Assuming my kids' experience matched mine. I projected my own reckoning onto my three kids, who each had a completely different relationship to the church depending on their age when we left. I talk about what I missed and why staying curious about their experience mattered more than narrating mine to them.
Staying in my head. The information binge — podcasts, documentaries, historical records — is a necessary stage, but it can also become a way to avoid the grief underneath it. I talk about what finally got me out of my head and into my body, including how painting became part of my process.
Expecting a linear timeline. Healing isn't a straight line, it's a spiral. I still get hit with grief or anger I don't expect. I talk about why that's normal and not a sign you're doing it wrong.
Closing thought: Nothing is wrong with you. Things haven't gone wrong. Setting out on this journey at all is the brave part — the mess is just what it looks like from the inside.
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