The voice that turned out not to be god
On shame, vigilance, and moral surveillance after Mormonism
I thought the auditor worked for God.
The stakes were clear. If I sinned. If I made a mistake. If I let go for even a moment, the Holy Ghost would leave me. And if the Holy Ghost left me, my children could be dying in the next room, and I would feel nothing. No prompting. No warning. Just me, oblivious, while something terrible happened that I could have prevented. If only I had just kept myself clean enough to deserve the warning.
That is what I believed. That is what I was taught.
Then there were my brothers. Two of them gone before I was grown. And my children’s covenants. Whether we would all make it back. Whether I would be the reason we didn’t. And the natural man. The thing inside me that defaulted to damnation if I stopped watching it. If I looked away for even a second.
So I didn’t look away.
I was nine when my little brother died.
It was all there in the funeral. Over the pulpit. The plan of salvation. My brother died. Taken away from us at only 8 years old. But never fear. We will be with him again someday. My parents were sealed in the temple, so my siblings and I were born in the covenant. Under the laws of heaven we would be reunited.
My chest constricted.
Everyone around me was being comforted. I was receiving a verdict.
They didn’t know. But I did. About the darkness in me. The thing that made me different in all the wrong ways. You couldn’t see the Savior in my countenance. Just me. Just my face. The face of a girl whose room was so messy you couldn’t walk across the floor. Whose temper raged when she’d had enough. Who was inconsistent at everything good and right. Who lied when she forgot to do something.
My family would be together.
But not me. Not automatically. Not the way it worked for people who didn’t have whatever I had inside me.
All I could do was keep trying. Not to be better. That wasn’t good enough. not for the celestial kingdom. To do it perfectly. When I’d do something childish… make a selfish mistake, I’d look over my shoulder. Was Braden there? Watching? Is he disappointed? Is he watching me drift away? Powerless to stop it?
When I left the church, I expected the monitoring to stop. Or at least to tone down. I’ve been doing the work. I had names for things now. I understood what had happened to me. I had language for the harm.
The auditor did not care about my language.
Same voice. Same inventory. Same verdict assembled and waiting. Taking any opening it could find.
Only then did I finally understand it was never actually about God.
The doctrine didn’t create the shame. It latched on to something older. Something that was already running before I had doctrine to explain it. The church gave it a frame. Eternal consequences. Stakes large enough to justify the level of vigilance I was already running on my own. But I hadn’t built the auditor inside the church.
I had brought something in. And the church had exploited it. Made it forever.
When the church left, the forever left with it.
The auditor stayed anyway.
It showed up at work. My coworkers dreaded giving me feedback. I couldn’t take it. It was a condemnation of me as a person. A problem. Someone’s day was ruined by my oversight, who then ruined someone else’s day over it, who then had to confront me… and watch me turn into a puddle.
The horror. These are my friends! I am representing their business. Our clients trusted me! And I failed them. My coworker started sending texts: No one is mad. But just so you know… My insides shredded across the middle. And then a kick. No apology was enough. Too profuse. Over the top. But from my end, still not enough. I didn’t have a god to grovel to. So instead it was Mercedes.
Recently, a friend of sixteen years told me that my liking the book Yesteryear had broken her heart. The word she used was evil. That’s not the Brittney she knows.
She needed some time. Again.
I know this pattern. The bomb dropping without warning. The destabilization. The knot in my stomach while I wait for her to work through it. Until it’s time to renegotiate. To figure out how to spare her pain next time.
I know it’s not healthy. I know our relationship has run its course. I know I can’t keep doing this. I don’t have the bandwidth. But as I try to assemble language around this, to have the conversation, the voices arrive. Right on schedule.
Selfish. Bad friend. Inconsistent. Quitter.
I recognize them immediately.
They used to have bigger stakes attached. Eternal separation. A brother watching from the sky. Children who needed me worthy enough to receive warnings on their behalf. The natural man asking to be squashed.
Now they show up like this. In everyday moments.
Same audit. Same inventory. Same verdict waiting to be delivered.
The auditor didn’t retire when I left. It switched tracks. It stopped checking whether I was worthy of the celestial kingdom and started checking whether I was worthy of the people in my life.
The script still runs every day. The automatic thoughts kick me in the gut. My stomach turns. And that’s my signal. What’s true now? What do I believe? What do I value? What’s old news? And my body settles. My thoughts fall into their new places. Every time a little quicker. A little more automatic. A little less intense. Frustration, exhaustion, and then hope.
If you have something in your life that keeps catching in the same place, bring it to a Clarity Reset session.
One relationship. One decision. One recurring spiral. One thing you keep circling and can’t seem to move.
We’ll look at what’s actually going on underneath it and work toward concrete next steps that fit your real life and capacity.
You don’t need to bring everything. Just the thing that’s stuck.
Thank you for this post. It helps me understand me.