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What was it like when you first started doubting the Mormon church?

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I lost a lot when I CONVERTED to Mormonism - my best friend from childhood couldn’t be freinds with me (it was too hard on him to see me in Mormonism), my family disowned me (my grandfather quit speaking to me altogether) and I was kicked out of the house) for joining Mormonism, but I had taken comfort that Mormonism was my “new family” and I had a lot of new LDS friends. Part of what they do is isolate you from your non-LDS friends(and sometimes family) by becoming your only social circle.

Even though (or perhaps because) of the cost of JOINING Mormonism in my life, I really believed Mormonism was true. All my LDS friends and given me the ‘well sometimes we must suffer for the truth (in that case Mormonism)’ and ‘your family is just Satan trying to keep you from the one true church’ support lines. And I bought it. I loved Mormonism, looking back I can see part of that was it fed my pride (one true church, becoming gods, etc). Being a new convert, I had a lot of new friends, new social circle, LDS boyfriend and I really had believed I found ‘the true church’. I had a very strong testimony and for many years that never faded.

Now to your question. Like most Mormons, I had a lot invested in my ‘testimony’ of Mormonism. I was living in Zion (Utah), attending BYU, all my friends were LDS, my fiance was LDS, all but one person at my job was LDS, I loved being Mormon and I was good at it. Mormonism could change my behavior (”Choose the Right”) but it couldn’t change my heart.

So, when I started researching to be able to apologize (traditional definition) for Mormonism, I was not expecting to find out that the ‘antis’ were telling the truth. When I started to see that things like Smith had guns, polygamy was denied long after it was an open secret in Mormonism, that there was a ‘strengthing members committee’ who filtered info, that the Temple rites were changed because of a Satanic ritual abuse scare (Pace Memo), and doubts started to creep in, I was devastated.

And I kept being devestated over and over again with every doubt that came up, every time I found out that the ‘antis’ were right about something, or a quote they used wasn’t out of context. At first, I was puzzled and asked questions and tried to get answers from my ‘priesthood leaders’ but their advice was just to ‘pray’ and only read Mormon material, and caution not to ‘think myself out of the Church’. That wasn’t going to make the facts I had learned go away.

Then came the fear, that I was falling victim to the antis and their lies, that my testimony was suffering. I didn’t want to go through all that loss again, like when I joined. I went into a spiritual crisis mode.
About that point, I remember praying “Heavenly Father, I want to know the truth, regardless of the cost, even if it means giving up Mormonism”. I was in so much pain, confusion, anger, but I had to know what the truth was so I kept going.

When I first went ‘inactive’ (stopped going to church, quit my ‘calling’), I really thought I would resolve my testimony and factual issues and go back, but the more I read, the more I realized I couldn’t trust my LDS leaders to tell me the truth, I had uncovered to many lies and half-truths. I had seen the sources. I prayed a lot, I wanted those ‘warm fuzzy feelings’ back, I didn’t want to lose my friends, my LDS family, my fiance, my schooling, or my job. But the more inactive I became, the less of a ‘testimony’ I had, the more it cost me until I had no choice but to move back to California.

It was then that I had to decide if I really believed in Mormonism any longer. I was reading a few ‘anti’ Mormon Christian books (What Mormons believe, Mormon Mirage type things) that the Christian bookstore owner in Provo had given me and I kept, mainly with the idea of correcting them. I read them, with pen in hand, “correcting” them and arguing with them, in essence. At the end of one of them, it presented the doctrine of Salvation by Grace with several Bible verse (basically a tract). By this point I had already been working as a ‘listener’ for the local AWANA group and had heard many of these verses and the gospel of grace but it really hadn’t sunk in that I needed it. One night, as I was finishing one of these books, I prayed for a ‘testimony’ (burning in the bosom) if what the antis were saying was ‘true’, same pattern I learned in Mormonism. This time the answer was that Mormonism was false, and what I had been hearing was ‘true’. The difference this time, was I had sources and Bible references in context, I wasn’t just relying on feelings (although now I see it as still a very Mormon thing to have done). That was the night I accepted Christ, and turned my back on Mormonism.