You can read the first part of this post here.
After my trainer and I were no longer companions, I thought a lot about the experiences that we had had together. I think I needed to process what had happened because it was such an intense experience. One thing that really angered me about the situation was that I had put forth so much effort to make her happy and to make the relationship work, but she treated me horribly. I resented the fact that I had invested more time, energy, and thought than I had invested in any previous relationship, and I invested it in someone who obviously didn’t care about me. This definitely led me to a resolution to never let myself be treated that way again.
This companionship also caused me to reflect a lot on the mission president as my priesthood leader. I fully believed that decisions in the mission were guided by inspiration, so I puzzled over why the mission president had been inspired to assign me to this trainer. One conclusion that I came to was that this experience helped me understand to a small degree the feelings of other people in abusive relationships. I felt like I had more compassion and understanding for why people in abusive relationships didn’t end the relationship. I understood how quickly your thought processes could change in these types of circumstances and the fear you have of the person who has real or imagined power over you. After my mission, I really wanted to write my mission president a letter or ask him at a reunion why he made the decision that he did, but I never did. I came to accept that mission presidents have to make lots of decision, some of which are more inspired than others, and at the end of the day, he was human and made a bad decision.
Even though I was only with my mission trainer for six weeks, this experience did have some long-term effects on my life. I developed a mild form of PTSD that would manifest itself if someone criticized the way I was doing things, or told me what to do. In these situations I tended to freeze up, shut down my emotions, and withdraw. Because I recognized where these feelings were coming from, I was able to lessen the effects over the years. However, these feelings and responses are still there. For example, during a recent family trip I overheard two family members having a heated argument. I started feeling very scared and escaped to the absolute opposite end of the house in order to be as far away from the conflict as possible. Later, I felt guilty about reacting this way because I felt like I could have intervened or told someone else what was going on in order to stop the argument from escalating further. Although, I know that I can’t blame myself for this situation, I would like to develop the skills to be strong enough to be able to deal with these types of situations.
I did have one situation in graduate school that was somewhat similar to my experiences with my trainer. I was assigned to work on a project with a member of another lab. I was at the end of my graduate school years, and she was a lab manager who had recently finished her undergraduate degree. When we started working together, I considered us equal collaborators in the project. However, although I outranked her in experience, she was constantly checking up on my progress. She was an extremely detailed oriented person (as am I) and started micromanaging me to the nth degree. We would take turns guiding kids through the tasks that they were required to do, but anytime I would test a kid she would ask me a million questions about what I had done. (Did you record the data? Did you save the video? etc. etc.) At first it just seemed like friendly reminders, but after a week or so, she was driving me absolutely bonkers. On one particular day, a child refused to continue during the second of three tasks so I sent the child home. This research assistant came storming in the room and grilled me about why I hadn’t completed the final task with the child. When I explained to her what happened I asked her, “Did you think I just forget?” She responded, “Yeah, I thought you forgot.” I couldn’t believe it. I had seven years of experience doing research and she didn’t trust my abilities doing a simple task. Similar to my trainer, she showed very little trust in my abilities. She often treated me like I had the memory span of a hamster. I racked my brain about how to deal with this situation because I didn’t want to have a big negative confrontation, which would make it difficult for us to continue to work together. In contrast to my trainer, nothing about this researcher’s behavior really seemed malicious. Instead, it just felt like she was a perfectionist and that she had to have her hand in all aspects of the project in order to make sure it was done correctly. I finally thought of a solution that I hoped would end the problems. Whenever she asked if I had done task, such as file the data for a particular child, I would respond “Oh, I always file the data after the kid goes home.” The amazing thing was that this response worked. Once I started responding this way, she stopped asking. Although I never felt completely comfortable and at ease around her, we were able to finish the project together and I felt pretty happy that I had dealt with the situation in a positive way.
Another interesting experience I had was with a friend who worked at a retail store in the mall. When we would get together and I would ask her about work, she would describe her experiences with her boss, which sounded very similar to my experiences with my trainer. Her boss showed very little trust in my friend’s ability to do things the right way even though my friend is a very competent and organized person. One time, my friend found her boss digging through the desk drawers her office in order to double check on something that she didn’t think my friend was doing right. This boss would often criticize my friend unexpectedly for doing something the wrong way, while she was completely charming to costumers. As my friend would describe these experiences, I urged her to find another job if at all possible. I knew the emotional toll that this kind of relationship can have on you. It seemed to help my friend that I could really relate to what she was feeling. My friend did eventually leave that job when she decided that she couldn’t take the emotional abuse anymore.
Overall, I am still frustrated that I had those experiences with my trainer and that they still impact my life in negative ways. On the other hand, I feel stronger and more aware of how to prevent emotional abuse to myself and to others. In church settings, we are taught to be submissive, meek, and humble. While I don’t think there is anything inherently wrong with these qualities, I think we also need to learn how to stand up for ourselves. We need to be able to recognize abuse in all its forms and know how to prevent that abuse from continuing. I feel that we should teach members of the church, especially women, about how to stand up for themselves and how to speak out to priesthood leaders and others when needed.
Thanks for your post, B. I've been mulling over what you have to say here, and it strikes me that the structure of the mission and its extreme stress on absolute obedience and sacrifice is for the most part both negative and psychologically damaging. When considered in light of the most recent post on Exponent II about priesthood and privilege ( http://www.the-exponent.com/2011/08/03/priesthood-as-privilege/ ) and the discussions on fMh about Joseph Smith's swept-under-the-rug wives (http://www.feministmormonhousewives.org/?p=5848 ), your situation has me thinking more broadly in terms of the organizational structure that encourages silence and obedience among women (and to a lesser extent among men), and offers almost no formal institutional opportunities for women to speak out about things that may not be working. This, combined with a whole host of cultural incentives for women to just quietly accept inappropriate behavior as a marker of their own faith and perseverance, means that many LDS women are ill-equipped to know when they should fight back and make a stink about something. (And women feel if they do raise an issue, they will be considered faithless /rabble rousers/ etc.)
ReplyDeleteTo clarify, I think that mission culture can be psychologically damaging to men as well. I'm interested in finding out more about that. (Yet I don't mean to imply that I think missions are, in the aggregate, necessarily bad or wounding. I just think there's a danger - and a big one - in the 'obey without questioning' dictum, and that crosses lines of sex/gender.) And I wonder about the extent to which not having opportunities for formal institutional leadership effects women's responses to the injunctions to be teachable/humble/submissive, etc.
ReplyDeleteI left my mission feeling like what I had learned was how to act like a Mormon woman. I carried myself in a specific way, spoke in a specific way, knew the specific culturally-appropriate vernacular. I had also learned not to talk at all about anything that troubled me. For example, I remember that the area in which you trained me, B, had just been completely redesigned when we were both whitewashed into it. Unfortunately, the lines on the map were not thoughtfully drawn, and we managed to get an area that was mostly commuters who left to the city in the early morning and didn't return until the evening. I remember spending hours, days, and weeks, going from neighborhood to neighborhood, walking around empty houses. And I remember going to talk with the Elders about how we were having a tough time finding people - in the most literal sense - in our area. It didn't make any difference, even though just a couple of miles away across our area borders were neighborhoods, markets, shopping centers brimming with people. It would have been a very easy and effective thing to redraw the lines yet again. There were many instances like that throughout the mission, in which something small could have been tweaked with the likely result of more effective use of time. Yet what I learned was to not bother bringing it up, and just quietly do my ineffective thing. At the very end of my mission I remember the MP talking to me and saying, approvingly "Why Galdralag, you've gone from Martha to Mary." And I remember wanting to just cry, because my heart was unchanged, I just felt more helpless than I had at the beginning.
Galdralag,
ReplyDeleteA lot of interesting thoughts. When I served as a temple worker, we would have training meetings. At one of the training meetings the temple president asked us whether direction in the church should come from the top-down or from the bottom-up. I was thinking to myself, "Well, both. How will the leaders know how their decisions are effecting people unless they ask?" However, the temple president said that direction should always come from the top-down. He essentially went on to say that we shouldn't presume to tell our leaders what they should be doing.
I think there is an interesting tension with these top-down and bottom-up forces within the mission and the church in general. I don't think I spoke up about my trainer because I was new and because I was really scared of her. However, I had many sick companions during the mission and I was completely open and honest with the mission president about the situation. I remember once my district leader was questioning the number of hours that we worked etc, and I called the mission president to talk to him directly about what was going on. He said, "I trust you implicitly." which meant a lot to me. So in this case, it certainly wasn't blind obedience, but rather him putting trust in my ability to figure out what was best to do in the situation.
In the mission culture there are elements of both bottom-up and top-down direction. While strict obedience is emphasized, it seems like the whole point of DLs and ZLs going on exchanges and then having planning meetings was to let the mission president know from the bottom-up what was going on and what was working and not working. Obviously, as we already have discussed, sisters don't have much of a voice in these meetings.
So it seems like the bottom-up vs. top-down style of leadership can both function within an LDS context. Some Bishops and Stake Presidents really listen to their counselors and members of their ward, while others may emphasize blind obedience. I think there are also variations in how much women are listened to. However, as many have pointed out on other blogs, when the involvement and input of women is left up to the discretion of local leaders (all male) than that is a problem.
What did the mission president mean by "going from a Mary to a Martha." Why do you think that that statement affected you so negatively?
There are some situations where an issue may not reach the top, including with Temples. Like, I've heard of at least one Bishop who refused to give a sister in a wheelchair a Temple Recommend, even though she was worthy otherwise, because it would cause "a hardship" for others at the Temple.
ReplyDeleteThen, I heard about a Counselor in a Bishopric, who was conducting a Temple Recommend Interview with a sister who had been married for a few years, but had no children. The Counselor claimed that he was inspired to ask about her not having had any children yet. The sister replied she had a miscarriage a week earlier. Oops.
So, if you ever claim to be inspired, you better be BEFORE you say something! Otherwise, don't claim inspiration on a topic you discuss.
There's a huge difference between being meek and humble and letting someone walk all over you. I think that's why a lot of people in the Mormon culture don't know how to take me. I'm very direct and don't mince words. To me that's more polite than leading someone to believe things that aren't true to be "nice." I've worked in retail and had experiences just like your friend, which was infuriating to me, especially when I was about 10 times smarter than my boss. I get really tired of people worshiping authority and blinding submitting to any command instead of using their own minds. That's not the Gospel. We were given the gift of discernment for a reason.
ReplyDelete