My story of pain from polygamy doctrine by Colleen Kelson Rogers
As a child, I had a happy home where I felt loved and free. I was the family peacemaker, middle child of seven. Adult life has not been so easy though. I don’t want to go back to what my adult life used to be. It’s still so hard to visit some of those painful memories.
I remember as a newly-wed crying myself to sleep some nights because I felt so alone. I had moved away from all my family and everything I knew to marry my husband who was basically a stranger to me. I always told people we had a marriage arranged by God, only six dates spread out over three years and 700 miles before we got engaged. I was a stranger to my husband too and to everyone in my new life. I didn’t have any built in support system. I completely lost my identity without connection to my old life and family. This was before the days of internet and cell phones, so communication was limited to snail mail.
I remember being a 20 year old newly-wed and having my husband look (I interpreted it as more of an ogle than a look) at a well-endowed woman crossing the road while I was sitting next to him in the car. When he saw me notice, he used the excuse that he was just checking her out for his brother who wasn’t married. I was not blessed with large breasts, almost non-existent in the opinion of a young man in one of my high school classes who loudly announced to the entire class how deficient I was in that area. He knew because he had looked down my shirt (which was very modest by the way) and saw that I was so underdeveloped that I didn’t even need a bra. I was 16 at the time. Was my new husband looking forward to choosing another woman who was more “well-endowed” than I was? Surely he would enjoy her more than me. Doesn’t polygamy allow for that?
I remember as a young mother praying for my husband to be guided by the Lord in his dreams (his patriarchal blessing says he would be). Shortly after those very specific prayers, my husband said he had had a dream. You might imagine my excitement believing that the Lord had heard my prayers. My mood quickly sank as he told me he dreamed that he took his old girlfriend as a second wife. He didn’t believe that the dream was anything prophetic, just a dream, but I wondered if his dream was some kind of cruel answer to my prayer to prepare me for future polygamy. Are women’s feeling really so unimportant to God? Did my husband secretly long for another wife? Wasn’t I enough for him? Was I already being replaced in his heart?
I remember being introduced to the article by Eugene England published in 1987, (on fidelity, polygamy and celestial marriage) and feeling thrilled about the possibility of monogamy in heaven, that polygamy was nothing more than an Abrahamic test to try God’s people. For the first time in my life since knowing about polygamy, I felt comfort and hope. I was then a young mother of just two children. I remember sharing my joy about the article with my husband. I did my best to communicate the comfort it brought to my pained heart, making it clear that I wasn’t taking it as doctrine, but as something that gave me hope, only to be met with chastisement for believing something that didn’t come from the brethren. Something within me died that day. I accepted the belief that my thoughts and feelings didn’t matter to my husband. It wasn’t safe to express them. I accepted the belief that women’s thoughts and feelings didn’t matter to God either, because no God who cared about His daughters would allow polygamy. I locked away a part of me and resigned myself to silencing my voice, submitting to men and their opinions because it felt safer. It felt like the nail in the coffin of my self-worth.
When we got married in the temple, I made a covenant to submit to my husband for all eternity. I remember covenanting to give myself to my husband, but he didn’t have to covenant to give himself to me. I remember my ears being consecrated to hear my husband not God. I remember being told that my husband is the head of the home and was to rule over me. The message that women need to stay in their place and cannot access God except through a man was LOUD and clear. If my husband had an opinion different than mine, I withheld mine because righteous women submit to their husbands. I think I began to feel like I was just a possession, something to be owned, not really a person. Aren’t all these things remnants of polygamy?
The culture of the church taught me that giving my authority over to men was needed for me to live a righteous life, and my greatest desire was to be righteous and follow God. All of that righteous desire just caused me to bury my thoughts and feelings until I felt buried alive.
In the church, I feel that women are taught submission not consent, which is a recipe for sexual dysfunction. I remember what it was like to not have ownership of my body or my sexuality. I remember having very limited knowledge about my body and how it even worked sexually because I thought it was shameful to even think or learn about that. I remember after I got engaged being too afraid and uncomfortable to even think about my upcoming wedding night, afraid of sexuality, my husband’s and my own. Arousal and sex were things I identified as embarrassing, carnal and unrighteous. I think women are hyper sexualized when they are taught modesty/purity doctrine and it damages their identity and disconnects them from their bodies. Sometimes I think it’s a miracle any LDS couple can have any resemblance of healthy sexual function in their relationship, especially when we consider the alarming statistics around sexual abuse (1 in 3 women). True intimacy was something that didn’t exist in my marriage. Sex was happening because I felt I could never say no to my husband, but there wasn’t any recharging of my depleted battery (30 years without ever having an orgasm or even knowing what one was). How much did my yes mean if I didn’t think I was allowed to say no to my husband? Even if I tried to be a good actor, I knew my husband could feel that I was just giving into him. Think about the effects of that on my poor husband! Shame is a common companion to LDS men as I know it was for my husband. I knew he felt shame for his desires and often felt that he was just using me to satisfy himself, and yes, I did feel used. I remember the first time I realized that I was dissociating during physical intimacy. I was escaping what felt traumatic. It felt traumatic to me without the emotional intimacy which obviously couldn’t exist when I was repressing all my emotions and thoughts. I needed to feel known and loved on a deep level in order for physical intimacy to truly be a good experience. Since that didn’t exist, sex became trauma and damaged our relationship and the very fiber of my soul. I didn’t feel loved or known by my husband. Sometimes I felt that he despised me because I brought out his own shame and worthlessness. How could I be an equal partner in a relationship I was dissociating in? How could I participate in making family planning decisions when my frontal cortex was shutting down during sex? I just got pregnant every time I weened a baby whether I was physically, emotionally, or mentally ready. I felt I had no more value than a breeding cow, basically a sex slave. Was my experience like those of the women in polygamy cults like Warren Jeff’s FLDS cult?
I remember the anxiety and terrible panic attacks that could hit me without warning in situations that didn’t warrant any fear. I remember what it felt like to have the adrenaline coursing through me, causing me to want to curl up in fetal position and rock back and forth, non-functional. No wonder I had a nervous breakdown at age 35! No wonder so many women in polygamy experience mental health issues. They don’t get to have emotional intimacy with a husband and they are taught that their only worth is in birthing children. That sounds an awful lot like what I was experiencing, remnants of polygamy.
I was living a life of absolute depression, feeling completely dead inside. I remember thinking it would be better to be physically dead than to experience what I was feeling. I would never have taken my own life, not that I didn’t consider it though. I loved my six children and knew they needed me and I loved being a mother, even though it was so depleting. It gave me a purpose, a reason to live.
I remember my eighth and final pregnancy, begging the Lord to forgive me for not being happy, pleading for my baby to forgive me, telling her that I did love her, but feeling that I wouldn’t live to raise her and my other six children. I remember choosing who I wanted my husband to marry and raise my children after I died, someone I would be okay sharing my husband with. I remember the pain of losing that baby (it wasn’t my first miscarriage, just my last) and the spiritual knowledge that I would never again carry a baby inside me. Did I still have value or had my value expired with that last miscarriage? If I lived during the early days of the church, my husband would have just taken another wife, a younger prettier one that could produce children for him.
My husband and I seemed to be part of the 10% that did 90% of the work in every ward we belonged to. I remember feeling like a single parent, carrying the bulk of the mental/emotional load of raising our family without support (bishopric widow syndrome and the generation of very separate defined roles of men and women). Even though I felt like I was parenting alone, I remember believing I didn’t have the
freedom to parent how I wanted, that I could only do things if I had my husband’s permission.
I want to pause and make it clear that it was never my husband’s intent to oppress, control or hurt me. That’s just a natural effect of the programing men receive in the patriarchal culture of the church. We were both just functioning with unhealthy generational programming. And those years were not completely void of happy times and many tender mercies of the Lord. There was just always the undercurrent of self-betrayal and suppression within me.
I remember a time that I was serving in a Relief Society presidency and was in charge of our enrichment meeting. I went to the kitchen to invite the women who were preparing the food to come for the opening prayer. As soon as I walked through the kitchen door, a woman said, “I don’t know why Colleen’s husband married her. She doesn’t have boobs or a butt.” Is it remnants of polygamy that cause women in the church to internalize that their greatest sin and their greatest worth is entirely dependent on their ability to be an object of sexual pleasure for men?
What I consider remnants of polygamy, affected my service in the church. I have served as president of every auxiliary (that women are allowed to) on the ward level and have served in multiple stake leadership positions too. I’ve been a temple ordinance worker. In none of those callings have I ever felt equal to a man with the priesthood because I could do nothing without a man’s permission. I remember a time when I had received what I felt was divine inspiration about a decision for my stake calling, not just a thought, but peace and clarity and scriptures to back up the decision. When the priesthood leaders rejected my answer, I was so confused. How could I have been so deceived? It obviously must be me who was wrong, not the men. Maybe I really didn’t know how to hear the Lord after all. None of it made any sense. All I could do was cry when I tried to talk to the stake president about it. I didn’t know then, but I know now that my emotional reaction was a trauma response. How could I believe that I had value and my voice mattered in callings when I experienced men behind closed doors, without the input of any woman, making decisions that affected young women in my stewardship, decisions I was expected to support when the young women were not comfortable with them at all? I had to teach those girls that what was important to them wasn’t as important as following the men. I cringe now thinking about my participation in perpetuating the grooming of girls to give their authority over to men. I remember experiencing the frustration of trying to do what the men in leadership required of me without being given any support or any power to make decisions. Oh yes, I did hear the men talk about the incredible value of women, but their words just felt more patronizing than uplifting, like they were just tying to keep us within the systematic oppression.
Let me pause to say that I have worked with many good brethren who supported me in callings. I truly believe most men never have any intent to exercise unrighteous dominion. They are just oblivious to women’s experiences in the church. In the numerous ward counsels I have participated in, women are always the minority and therefore don’t have the same voice. The men’s opinions will always override the women’s opinions, because women are always out numbered.
I remember feeling stripped of all power to make any choices in my life. I remember feeling stripped of value. I didn’t even know who I was anymore. I remember realizing that I hated myself for allowing myself to be used like a dirty doormat, giving my authority over to men.
I remember crying after Russel M. Nelson’s conference talk about joy in October of 2016. I believed men are that they might have joy, but women certainly weren’t allowed to have it. I didn’t see how it was possible. I pled with the Lord to help me learn how to have joy while wondering if God even cared about His daughter’s feeling. I constantly focused on Christ and the gospel and worked harder trying to be perfect, to serve more, going out with the missionaries weekly, attending the temple weekly, always putting my name on every clipboard that was passed around at church hoping that eventually those things might relieve me of the depression. I was drowning, and of course I never would have asked for help (another trauma response).
I’m not sure anyone could have seen from the outside just how dysfunctional and depressing life was for me. I worked hard to hide behind my smile and keep myself distracted from the pain by all the busyness of raising a large family, trying so hard to be perfect and serving in the church, and never saying no.
I recognize not everyone experiences these things, but I think it’s important to shine light on the fact that many do.
Because I have had many experiences where I felt powerless and oppressed as a woman (remnants of polygamy), I feel polygamy is a damming Luciferian doctrine straight from the pits of hell. I believe remnants of polygamy were a big part of what made my life hell, or taught me to allow my life to be hell. The fruits of polygamy are rotten to the very core. Teaching women that they will need to accept polygamy in the next life in order to reach the highest degree of glory is the epitome of anti-Christ. Isn’t He the only way? If anyone wonders why I speak out against a doctrine that is no longer practiced in our church, it is because I feel compelled to protect other women from having experiences like mine. The remnants of polygamy are alive and well. I truly believe the Lord sees the sorrows of His daughters and counts their tears. I remember when I finally received the answer that polygamy was never ordained of God. That one glimmer of light was part of what began to heal my relationship with God and with His gospel.
It took 30 years of marriage before I was able to start making real progress in healing my relationship with myself and my husband. I thank the Lord for giving me the courage to do the excruciating work of facing all my pain and dysfunction. It was a very long hard road that I couldn’t have done without the Lord’s guidance each step of the way, a hard road that required me to immerse myself in the dirty mud of it all, exposing all of my shadows and demons, and getting to truly know myself and what was going on in my inner world. I had to learn to ask the Lord questions I never allowed myself to ask. I had to learn to be accountable for my part and get out of victim mode, to change my old patterns of thinking and behavior so I could create something new. I had to learn to love every part of me, especially the parts that I had previously hated. They say you have to feel it to heal it, well I felt it all, the depth of all my repressed emotions, the pain of my self betrayal. It was not uncommon for me to be in tears fighting my mind’s desire to dissociate as I tried to stay fully present with the Lord and work through it all.
The Lord has said that our body is the temple. My healing journey has required a lot of temple work, as my body is where all the negative experiences were stored, creating my book of life. I feel like the Lord had to get out His whip and turn over all my internal tables, but it is in that cleansing of my personal temple that I have received the spirit of the Lord to dwell with me. I have come to learn that although the process is not comfortable, it is essential if one wants to truly come unto Christ. It’s nice to be free from living in denial of my problems and the depression that accompanies that. The truths I have discovered in the muddy depths of my soul have set me free from the dysfunctions that had previously consumed my life.
Trauma does interesting things to the psyche. I still get triggered sometimes, but with much less intensity. It’s much easier to find the truth and wisdom hiding under the trigger as I offer myself the gift of compassionate curiosity. I know the road that needs to be traveled and Who we need to have by our side as we go on that difficult journey of healing.
My story is meant to shine a light on the darkness that many people experience, not to seek pity. I’ve grown quite comfortable diving into the dark muddy depths of my soul because it is there that I find clarity and Christ’s love and healing. I know that I will emerge with greater wisdom and love. I am able to see where I have gotten out of alignment with God, correct my course and restore my peace.
I’m not plagued by the emotional charge of those memories anymore. They have been thoroughly uncovered and brought to the light, even more so with this public sharing of my story. Things lose their power when they are brought to the light. Light always dispels darkness. I’m grateful for the light that frees me from the darkness of my past.
I love my life now even though it is far from being free from trials. Now that I have changed how I show up in my relationship with my husband, the depth of love and connection we share is a source of great joy. I finally love myself enough to risk being completely honest, open and vulnerable in my marriage, to have different opinions than my husband, and I’ve had enough experience to prove that it is safe to do that because my husband has grown enough to create a safe place for it. I give myself permission to have needs and ask for those needs to be met in our relationship. We enjoy greater balance and partnership.
I don’t have to hold onto resentment for the church anymore because I have changed how I show up in that relationship as well. I have reclaimed my personal authority and don’t trust in the arm of flesh. I give myself permission to have spiritual sovereignty and to say no to the things that don’t align with me. I go directly to the Lord for confirmation of any counsel or teaching I receive. Is the church perfect? No, but neither am I. I have grace to offer because the Lord has given me His grace. Resentment and judgment have melted away thanks to healing through Christ’s atonement. I feel deeply connected to my Savior Jesus Christ. I know He loves me and I trust myself to hear Him. None of those blessings and joys would exist had I not gone through those trials. Even though I feel the familiar pit in my stomach and tension in my shoulders that comes when remembering the pain of the past, I say “Blessed be the name of the Most High God!”
