Impact of Religious Trauma Series: The Unchaperoned Life | Post 1 of 6
I was five years old when I learned I was trash.
Not metaphorically. Not as a passing frustration someone immediately walked back. I was told I deserved to be thrown away — and to make the lesson stick, I was handed a small suitcase, told to pack my things, and driven toward the county landfill.
I don't know how far we got. I know I believed it was real.
I don't tell you that story for sympathy. I tell you because if you grew up in a high-demand religious culture — LDS, Catholic, evangelical, it doesn't matter much — there's a version of that story living somewhere in your body right now. Maybe yours wasn't a suitcase and a landfill. Maybe it was a bishop's office and a worthiness interview. Maybe it was the quiet withdrawal of a parent who was "disappointed in you." Maybe it was the moment someone you loved stopped touching you, and nobody ever explained why, and you decided in the silence that it must be you.
Whatever form it took, you learned the same lesson I did.
You are acceptable only when you perform correctly. Fall short, and you will be abandoned.
That lesson didn't just shape your childhood. It's running your love life right now — and it's costing you more than you know.
The Most Important Thing Tony Robbins Identified
Tony Robbins has built a career on the insight that almost every human fear — at its core — is an existential one. Strip away the surface anxiety about being rejected on a date, or the panic about saying the wrong thing in a text, or the hypervigilance you feel when someone you're falling for suddenly goes quiet, and underneath all of it you find the same two fears:
I am not enough.
And if they find out, I will be abandoned.
These aren't neurotic fears. They're ancient ones. For most of human history, being cast out of your tribe was a death sentence. Your nervous system hasn't updated its threat assessment in ten thousand years. It still treats emotional rejection the same way your ancestors treated being left behind on the savanna.
Now add a religious framework that makes that fear institutional.
In LDS culture, "worthiness" isn't just a personal standard — it's a formal, recurring evaluation. Biannual worthiness interviews with your bishopric. Temple recommend interviews. Mission eligibility interviews. Ecclesiastical Recommendations for BYU. PPIs. From the time you're old enough to take the sacrament, you are taught — in the most loving, well-intentioned terms possible — that your access to community, to spiritual standing, to eternity itself, depends on your performance.
Elder David A. Bednar described the Atonement as a power that enables us to become "more than we currently are." It's a beautiful doctrine. But for many of us, the practice of worthiness in our wards and homes didn't always feel like grace. It felt like a scoreboard.
And scoreboards create one very specific kind of person: someone who is always, always watching for signs that they're falling behind.
Compassion for the Lamanites
When I was young, during a moment that had pushed my mother to the edge of her patience, she told me I was like Laman (and Lemuel). That I belonged in a society with other bad people.
If you grew up in the church, you know exactly how that landed. Laman and Lemuel aren't just bad guys in a story — they're the cautionary tale. The older brothers who murmured. The ones who doubted. The ones who, despite having an angel appear to them, still couldn't get it right. They are the archetype of someone who is fundamentally, constitutionally not enough for the covenant.
I was five or six. And I believed it.
That's not a knock on my mother, who was doing the best she could with tools she'd been given. It's a window into how powerfully religious language shapes a child's interior world. When the vocabulary of salvation gets applied to ordinary human failure — a frustrated parent, a bad day, a child who won't sit still — it fuses two things that should never be fused:
Your behavior in this moment and your fundamental worth as a person.
Brené Brown has spent two decades researching the difference between guilt and shame. Guilt says: I did something bad. Shame says: I am bad. Guilt is useful — it tells you that your actions are out of alignment with your values. Shame is corrosive. It doesn't motivate change; it motivates hiding.
LDS culture, at its best, teaches the positive aspects of guilt — accountability, repentance, growth. At its worst, it teaches shame. And for a lot of Millennial and Gen X kids who grew up in the church, those lines blurred constantly. The threat wasn't just "that behavior is wrong." It was "you won't be able to go on your mission." "You won't be allowed in the temple." "Jesus is disappointed in you."
You weren't just making a mistake. You were in danger of being left behind. Spiritually. Eternally. Literally separated from everyone you loved. Yes, families can be together forever– but there are performance requirements.
When that's the water you swim in, your nervous system doesn't distinguish between "they didn't text back" and "I'm about to be cast out." They feel the same.
What Marriage Taught Me About the Pattern
On the second day in our first apartment as a married couple, my ex-wife began a silent treatment that lasted for three days. Not as a fleeting reaction — as a sustained, deliberate withdrawal. No eye contact. No acknowledgment. No response. I had exasperatedly raised my voice about a credit card debt, and the response was total emotional blackout.
I didn't have language for it then. I just knew it felt like the landfill.
What followed over the years was a recurring pattern where physical and emotional intimacy became conditional — something that could be granted or withdrawn depending on invisible standards I could never quite meet. I want to be respectful here, because my ex-wife is the mother of my children and she has her own story. What I can tell you is what it did to me.
I learned that desire — my need for connection and closeness — was something to be ashamed of. The message, reinforced by church teachings I'd absorbed since childhood, was that real love was not about sex. Sex (and feelings of love) were something to be controlled, not celebrated. And so I spent decades at war with a completely natural human need — and losing — and feeling ashamed of losing.
Joe Dispenza talks about the way the body becomes conditioned to emotional states. When you experience the same emotional loop long enough, your body doesn't just remember the feeling — it starts to anticipate it. Your nervous system gets ahead of the situation. It doesn't wait for rejection to feel rejected. It starts scanning for anything that might lead to the familiar pain.
That's hypervigilance. It's not paranoia. It's a very smart nervous system that learned, in the most formative years of your life, that abandonment comes without warning — and decided to never be caught off guard again.
The Hypervigilance That Looks Like High Standards
After my divorce, I got very good at keeping busy. Work, runs, hikes, podcasts, skiing, dating. I thought I was thriving — and in a lot of ways, I was.
What I didn't realize until much later was that I was also running — not toward anything, but away from the silence. From the feeling that had lived in the gap between me and the people I loved for most of my life. The moment I stopped moving, it would catch up with me. That's not healing. That's very sophisticated avoidance. And it looked so good from the outside that even I was convinced.
Here's the tell: when a woman I was dating showed any sign of the pattern — any withdrawal, any expressed reluctance, any hint that her affection came with conditions I'd eventually fail to meet — I was done. Respectfully, calmly, completely. I told myself it was healthy boundaries. And partly it was.
But partly it was a five-year-old who'd decided, somewhere on the drive toward that landfill, that a self-respecting person doesn't wait around to be thrown away.
The problem is: you can't outrun a wound and find love at the same time. Running requires that you stay ahead of the pain. Love requires that you slow down enough to be seen.
Matthew 5:3 reads: "Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." Most scholars read "poor in spirit" as humble — emptied of pretense, stripped of performance. The blessing isn't for the ones who have it together. It's for the ones who've finally admitted they don't.
The Real Question Underneath Every First Date
Almost every struggle in midlife dating — the hypervigilance, the avoidance, the endless searching and discarding, the inability to be vulnerable, the terror of being truly known — comes back to a single question that was answered wrong a very long time ago.
Am I enough?
And the tragedy is that most of us don't even know we're still asking it. We think we're evaluating compatibility. We think we're setting healthy standards. We think we're being discerning. And some of that is true.
But underneath it, in the oldest part of us, we're still waiting to find out if this is the person who's finally going to say: you were never trash. You were never Laman and Lemuel. You were never something to be managed into worthiness. You were always enough.
So What Do You Do With This?
I'm not going to hand you a five-step program, because this isn't a five-step problem. But here's what's actually worked — not from a textbook, but from living it.
Name the wound correctly. Not "I have trust issues." Get specific. What did you learn, and when, and from whom? The more precise you can be, the less power the old story has. Write it out: "When I was _____, I learned that I was only acceptable when _____." That sentence alone can change everything.
Separate the message from the messenger. Your parent(s), your bishop, your ex-spouse passed on what was passed on to them. Understanding that doesn't erase the wound, but it ends the story where it belongs. Their fear became your fear. It doesn't have to stay yours.
Let your body update its assessment. This is where Joe Dispenza, Tony Robbins, and the church's own teachings on prayer and meditation all converge. Visualization, journaling, setting intentions — these aren't self-help clichés. They're methods of creating new neural pathways that override old conditioning. The church calls it bringing your desires before the Lord. Dispenza calls it rehearsing the elevated emotion of the future. The mechanism is different. The practice is surprisingly similar.
Slow down before you run. The next time you feel the urge to pull back — from someone, from a feeling, from a moment of vulnerability — just pause. For one breath. Ask yourself: am I responding to this person, or to a ghost? You don't have to stay. But you deserve to know which one it is.
The series continues from here. Because once you understand where the wound came from, the next question is the harder one: what do you do when the person you're falling for is carrying their own wound — and it looks completely different from yours?
That's the next post. And it's all too raw, real, and recent.
Unchaperoned Life exists for people who are done performing worthiness — and ready to find out what love actually looks like when it's built on something real.
Next: "Part 2: When Her Values Are Real — and Still a Red Flag"