Mental Health and Psychology

In many ways, a faith transition is more about mental health and psychology than anything else. Losing your worldview is inherently traumatic, and you need to heal from that trauma and any others you’re processing.

I’ll try to cover key concepts in my forthcoming Apostasy 101: Mental Health and Psychology posts.

General Resources

For more mental health skills, I recommend Therapy in a Nutshell videos (which are great but for educational purposes and are not a substitute for a qualified counselor, which I also recommend seeing).

(Full disclosure: I have done editing work for the creator, Emma, before, so I am biased, but she is great. She is not paying me to say that, nor did she ask me to. I just like her content.) These videos are general videos not related to Mormonism, so they are appropriate for everyone from TBMs to ex-Mormons.

If you are ex-Mormon or leaving the Church, you may also enjoy the relatively short Cognitive Dissidents podcast, which will help you better understand your brain and how belief works. You may, like me, be wary of the last episode because it centers on a debate between Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson. If you can stand the sound of Jordan Peterson’s voice, then it can still be an interesting episode. He doesn’t go off on a misogynistic or transphobic rant or anything.

My favorite episodes from Cognitive Dissidents are on my Mental Health and Psychology YouTube playlist, which contains videos with various opinions and insights about mental health and psychology, especially as relates to Mormonism and faith transitions. You may find these videos helpful in getting to better know yourself and change any thinking and belief patterns you’d like to leave behind.

Grief

If you want to learn more about grief, I suggest these videos and the Grief playlist they’re on. Learning more about grief can also help you identify grief in someone else, such as a child you care for.