Brooks Blames Church For Elizabeth Smarts Captivity

[Bikeemikey]

If I had been raped, I would have considered that something had been taken from me by force. I would have felt "robbed". But I wouldn't feel guilty, I don't think. Used, probably. But it's still fair to say that I had been robbed of my virtue. I think it's a short-hand way of saying it. If I had a dollar bill and someone stole it from me, then yes I've been robbed of my dollar. It wasn't my fault, but it's still lost to me.

I think that some people get all wrapped around the axle about the precise wording and the semantics.

Actually data suggested that if you were raped you would feel very guilty.

Rape is horrific and robs people of virtue... Whether they have had sex many times before or are a virgin. It takes years, decades even, to even just get to the point where you can feel that you have a normal kind of life.

So in the doctrinal sense does rape take away virtue? I don't really think so. But does it take something away that requires some people's whole lives to try and replace... Absolutely.

[teddyaware]

Actually data suggested that if you were raped you would feel very guilty.

Rape is horrific and robs people of virtue... Whether they have had sex many times before or are a virgin. It takes years, decades even, to even just get to the point where you can feel that you have a normal kind of life.

So in the doctrinal sense does rape take away virtue? I don't really think so. But does it take something away that requires some people's whole lives to try and replace... Absolutely.

Some much-needed words of wisdom on this thread.

[Jeanne]

I probably shouldn't even comment as I will not be able to respond much again..but I don't think it is a good idea for any of us to

assume what we would actually feel like after being raped...we have no idea what goes on in the hearts and minds of those who go

through such a thing. One question..though..my seminary did the "twinkie" thing as well as the lipped cupcake analogie in MIA;

tell me..is the twinkie female or male...and yeah..if I wore short sleeves in the summer..I am a bad influence on priesthood holders???

I was taught that it was MY responsibility to make sure that my priesthood holding friends remained pure in thought.

In any case, have a wonderful day..just my thoughts as this is a touchy subject for me and the other women who are LDS and in

my life.

[bluebell]

Sorry this reply is so late. I completely forgot about this conversation until this morning when i checked back in on it.

You previously said, "anyone who attempts to teach about the consequences of sin without an 'atonement addendum' is the person who has lost proper perspective and sense of proportion." The word "anyone" would include God and the prophets.

If i confused you, i'm sorry. Let me be more clear, any regular person in the church who is not deity and does not have an extremely unique relationship to the mind and will of God which mandates they speak for deity to all of mankind, who does that has lost perspective.

From now on, when i use the term 'anyone' just assume this is the definition i am using.

If you doubt that the Spirit can inspire snarkiness, I have a number of scriptures to which I could point you--one of my favorites being 'reprove betimes with sharpness."

Sharpness and snarkiness are not at all the same thing. The only people who think they are, are the one's who become snarky, and then try to justify it.

But, let me be clear, I think you are a wonderful person with a big heart and an admirable desire to do what is right and best. I don't want that prevailing sentiment to be overshadowed by my minor perception that you might have lost some perspective on this single point.

Right back at ya Wade.

[thesometimesaint]

I probably shouldn't even comment as I will not be able to respond much again..but I don't think it is a good idea for any of us to

assume what we would actually feel like after being raped...we have no idea what goes on in the hearts and minds of those who go

through such a thing. One question..though..my seminary did the "twinkie" thing as well as the lipped cupcake analogie in MIA;

tell me..is the twinkie female or male...and yeah..if I wore short sleeves in the summer..I am a bad influence on priesthood holders???

I was taught that it was MY responsibility to make sure that my priesthood holding friends remained pure in thought.

In any case, have a wonderful day..just my thoughts as this is a touchy subject for me and the other women who are LDS and in

my life.

We're not responsible for random thoughts and ideas that pop into our head. But we are responsible for our dwelling on them.

Edited May 15, 2013 by thesometimesaint

[Calm]

Actually data suggested that if you were raped you would feel very guilty.

No matter what one's upbringing is, what culture one is from, no matter what type of sexual life one had prior to this time, no matter if you were raped by a stranger or not, fought back or not, etc. etc. etc.....rape creates guilt and shame and the experience will lead to the individual feeling so confused and with all these feelings of guilt floating around, they tend to latch on to the hundreds of ideas that are out there that may either weaken them such as the chewing gum cliches or bullying remarks that they are fat and ugly or stupid or remarks from an abusive parent or sibling that no one loves them or from comparing themselves to the media and coming up short in the 'woman' department, etc, etc and this then leads the victim to focus on ideas that do not provide the good answers for healing and thus the guilt is strengthen, burrows into the soul and likely causes long term damage that may take a lot of work to get out.

What Sister Smart's talk about was creating another dialogue in their heads so that they would be able to fight off the worthless feelings and the manipulative script of their captors and thus remain more proactive in their ability to escape. Her dialogue that allowed her to survive (and eventually manipulate her captor into taking her back to where she was better known and probably felt more in control) was what she had been taught at home and church---that she had a loving father and mother who adored her and who along with God would never lose that love for her no matter what happened. This religious belief gave her hope and the ability to survive and to escape though she needed a great deal of help to take the final steps. The LDS teaching that we are the daughters of God with all that means is, if taught to the point of actually becoming part of their identity, another excellent, imo, bulwark against the sense of loss of control and virtue as well as being able to put the feelings of worthlessness that all rape victims feel and that paralyze them into a more accurate framework.

Rape is horrific and robs people of virtue... Whether they have had sex many times before or are a virgin. It takes years, decades even, to even just get to the point where you can feel that you have a normal kind of life.

So it should be obvious that whatever is going on about guilt and feelings of worthlessness it must involve much, much more than just a few cliched analogies that are indeed in my view screwed up and teaching false doctrine (how can a daughter of God be equated to a chewed up piece of gum), but highly unlikely to be the major determinant in a typical rape, even among LDS. As I cited before, Sister Smart details how she felt that way for a time, how her free form guilt latched on that as an object to make it more concrete (when people have strong physical reactions, emotions follow sometimes even without an attached cause with the reactions being so overwhelming and soul embracing that actual thought is often not possessed completely until some control has been established. At that point one looks around for reasons for why they are feeling guilty and if there isn't any obvious ones they will create their own--they shouldn't have looked the guy in the eye, they should have worn other clothing, they should not have been out that night, they should have not kept their window rolled up so he got mad when he came over to talk, she should have said yes so he wouldn't get mad, she should have said no so he wouldn't do it to her, she shouldn't have felt arousal while she was raped...that is wrong and I must be bad, it didn't hurt enough...I must be bad,.....there are likely an infinite number of reasons one can find to feel guilty===unreasonable reasons, but due to emotions and thoughts being out of control, unreason rules for the time being. The visualizing oneself as the chewed up gum analogy is just one of many reactions.

How deeply the victim invests in it as a source of guilt will depend on many things, probably if it is an ongoing abuse situation...it will depend a great deal on how protective she feels the idea is, how much does it help her create a sense of control where there is no control or how it might help her created a role to interact with her abuser in a nonthreatening way.

I think it was pretty obvious from the way Sister Smart expressed herself, the guilt she attached to the chewed gum analogy was not a lasting attachment because in her view it would have been counteracted by the teachings she had all her life in her family that she was loved and that there was nothing she could do that would cause her family to love her differently. And she likely had the same view of God (if one has positive feelings about one's family, one generally has positive feelings about God---we learn to trust God in part because we've learned to trust our families, those who don't have a family they can trust for whatever reason have a harder time developing that level of trust with God.) She expressed quite clearly that her relationship with her family--one created due to the deep religious environment that surrounded her family--was both a cost and a benefit during the kidnapping. Mitchell used threats to her family as the major way of controlling her. She might be willing to die, but she could not live with the idea of harming her family because of something she did or didn't do. OTOH, it was her secure, strong knowledge of the family's love for her that allowed her to move past the initial sense of worthless and realize that she did have worth, that her family wanted her no matter what and that is how, why and what she survived for.

So in the doctrinal sense does rape take away virtue? I don't really think so. But does it take something away that requires some people's whole lives to try and replace... Absolutely.

Rape is horrific and robs people of virtue.

I would say rather that it robs them of their sense of virtue, of the image of themselves as being a certain way....it is like they look in the same mirror but don't see the same person anymore but to everyone else nothing of real lasting import or value has changed, especially with the Lord. Our sense of identity and virtue is tightly linked to our sense of control, we are virtuous and chaste because we choose to refrain from sex or we have another image of ourselves and what virtue might mean or have another value of import to us that allows us to engage in sex outside of marriage...in all these views of our sexual and physical experience we are in control.

The result when attacked though is the same--they all feel worthless---but it is much more practical and possible approach to help someone achieve a more realistic perception of their new life than it is to try and help them rebuild their personal self value when what they feel gave them their value was destroyed in their eyes and often they feel it is irrecoverable (even those who have never heard the chewed gum analogy and never felt that way about themselves when they engaged in premarital sex either). In the first approach you are helping them see how others, how God views them and it is more of a reminding them of how valued they are to others rather than having to create the sense of worth from scratch, almost building oneself anew perhaps not from the ground up but close (if what I've heard from some victims is accurate).

So I do think it is important to make the distinction when counseling or just listening to a rape or abuse victim, recognize that they feel like something is lost, destroyed, but point out when they are ready that it is their feeling of being in control and being virtuous that was attacked and harmed and therefore they can do something about it themselves...though it will still be hard. Training oneself to think in a different way than one that has been imprinted on one through such trauma is not easy.

On to another point....Once someone is raped, among the first victims of our self is that loss of control because someone has forced us to do something we don't want to do, in a extreme way. The loss of control over our physical body and sensations is naturally going to be translated into a loss of virtue because we often measure it by the same things, speak of it in the same way...to the point that our culture speaks of rape as taking someone's virtue just as it takes their agency, their control away.

As such, if you want to help someone regain a sense of virtue, you need to help provide them with ways they feel like they can have control even in the most horrific situations. This is what Sister Smart was focusing on, teaching children about the situation, telling them what they might expect and how they might be able to respond, telling them their options, giving them permission to do something or not do it so they don't feel that they must remain passive and reactive all the time listening only to their captor, etc. etc.

This was not what Sister Brooks was doing in her article about Sister Smart's talk. At best she was hoping to remove a behaviour/cliche that guilt and shame might latch on to and thus allow such negative and destructive feelings to become more permanent and stronger then they had any right to be, but at worst, by focusing solely on that one part of her talk and doing so in that way, she deprived the audience that came to her to hear what Sister Smart had to say of the full import and most important focus of Sister Smart's talk. She took a minute or two out of a balanced and productive talk of 12 mins and turned it into a criticism of a church cultural practice that might contribute to an extended feeling of guilt....and she didn't even need to. All she or any others had to do was to play Sister Smart's own words and her strong condemnation of the analogy and firm dismissal of it---'you don't tell anyone that' with that look of disgust, bewilderment and something I hope was not horror, but might have been. Nothing can be more meaningful or convincing to drop using those analogies then what Sister Smart had already said...and to dress it up in their own words, to add extraneous ideas, to insist on asking yet again the question" why didn't you run away" after she had just told people they had no right to ask that, where anyone with half of an empathy chip would have realized the extreme pain that it causes her to relive everytime someone speaks before they think and insist on dissecting her yet again....all of that just cluttered up her very clear message and probably ended up doing more harm than good to their cause...if their cause was the stated one of wanting to help children avoid the useless guilt feelings such analogies create as well as the maladaptive behaviours such feelings of worthlessness might trigger.

Instead we have been flooded by do-gooders with different agendas--whether it's anti abstinent teaching, or claims that LDS morality leads to passible rape victims or something it....in the end very few were dealing with what Sister Smart sacrificed so much for, was willing to put herself in the public eye again, to endure the endless question from those who refuse to listen to her and care more about winning their personal 'insight' into a dark corner of her mind when what she most likely would prefer to be doing is anything but reliving those months yet again in her mind...but she chose to do that because she cared for her cause.

I hope that those who chose to treat the talk as just another soundbite for their mill and not as a thoughtful call to arms against letting our children be abused and stolen from us and from themselves will wake up and remember what the talk was really about--educating children to act, not to only react so they can avoid those situations completely or if they must, so that the level of harm will be much more diminished because they have been taught how to feel control even in what others would see as hopeless situations....if this truly happens than Sister Smart's sacrifice and possible suffering from having to be up in spotlights again were for something of more much value that what has occurred so far.

Edited May 15, 2013 by calmoriah

[Calm]

I was taught that it was MY responsibility to make sure that my priesthood holding friends remained pure in thought.

I would have gotten a checkboard with a list of pure thoughts and not so pure thoughts and run surveys every couple of days, give them some suggestions to help (wear bag over head for one) grade them as to their performance and then handed them a bill. Not taking on a job like that without some substantial personal incentive. Edited May 15, 2013 by calmoriah