I miss my mom, but her death forced me to confront the monster in our relationship. And it wasn’t her.
The morning after she died, I discovered a small potted garden she had kept in front of the RV that was her home with my stepdad. Adorned with decorations and carefully arranged, it was a small but unexpected corner of beauty in an otherwise dismal expanse of weeds and asphalt. For years, I’d focused on the weeds: my mom’s addictions, her neglect of me and the shame I felt over her mistakes.
But now I was flooded with memories of the many other gardens my mother kept throughout my life: the clothes she bought for a poor friend of mine in high school, the basket of treats for a sick co-worker, snuggling through a movie together when I was younger, care packages of makeup and clothes when I was older in college.
I wish I’d realized these things sooner, but the reason it took so long is because anger and blame are not just feelings; they’re also muscles we strengthen. Just as our bodies change by adapting to the work we habitually ask them to do, so it is with our minds and hearts. In fact, this muscle memory was so strong that when my mom died, those impulses to accuse and condemn turned inward and sunk me into the deepest depression of my life.
My mom died unexpectedly nearly four years ago, most likely from an opioid overdose. She had a lot of health problems that were not her fault, but she added to them by abusing drugs and disregarding her doctors. She had been hospitalized so many times that I didn’t realize how serious things were until it was too late. I sobbed my goodbyes over the phone, just a few hours before boarding my flight in a futile attempt to see her once more before her passing.
My relationship with my mom was rocky for most of my life. The drinking and drugs played their part, but my anger stemmed less from her choices and more from the shame they caused. When she sold my things or missed my wedding, it was the piteous looks on my friends’ faces that I dreaded most.
Avoiding shame became a guiding principle in my life. Perhaps if I placed a gulf between me and my mom and filled it with all the things she did wrong, I believed, I could avoid ever facing that kind of shame again. Somewhere between inventorying her mistakes and fearing to become like her, I began seeing my mom as a monster.
When Christ said that “with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged,” I thought he was referring to a sort of divine karma in which God would use our own standards against us. Instead, I now believe the Lord was warning us about a pitfall in our own nature — that our impulses either to condemn or love others in their failings are the same ones that govern how we face our own.
Many of us are being baited into exercising the wrong spiritual and emotional muscles without realizing how that’s ultimately shaping our character and worldview.
The more we villainize others for their sins, the less we can afford to be guilty of them ourselves. This fear leads us either to hide our faults from ourselves or to condemn ourselves when forced to face them. Neither allows us to truly address them.
Staring at my mother’s garden the day after she died, I could no longer see her as a monster. But because I still needed a perpetrator, the anger and judgment I felt toward my mom did not die when she did — they rebounded. I told myself that if my mom wasn’t a monster like I’d believed, then the way I had treated her made me one.
Sigmund Freud claimed that depression is anger turned inward. He wrote that “self-reproaches and self-reviling” were what distinguished depression from other forms of sadness, like grief. There were other factors contributing to my declining mental health after my mom’s death, but when it became a deep, serious depression, I lacked the right mental muscles to climb out.
When I switched roles and became the monster, impulses to criticize and condemn kept me mired in “self-reviling” until I questioned whether I was worth saving at all.
I turned to trusted friends, attended therapy and studied prophetic counsel with the intensity that desperate times inspire. My progress out of depression was gradual, but while studying the words of Elder Neal A. Maxwell — a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints until his death in 2004 — I felt impressed to be more meek. That seemed like an odd way to handle depression, but as I heeded it, I realized how much of my therapy I was stubbornly dismissing.
Specifically, I bristled at the concept of self-compassion, believing that if I showed myself mercy, I was condoning my failings. In fact, relying on self-criticism was severely limiting my ability to deal with my mistakes.
Because tearing down is so much easier than building things up, criticism and judgment cannot develop the spiritual muscles we need to weather difficult trials or to change for the better. As I instead strove to use the mental muscles of mercy, patience and humility, the inner critic got weaker and I could make real progress.
I worry, however, that many of us are being baited into exercising the wrong spiritual and emotional muscles without realizing how that’s ultimately shaping our character and worldview.
As I’ve grown more aware of which mental muscles I’m using, I’ve realized that social media can be an elite gym for developing strong impulses of cynicism, contempt and accusation. When we doomscroll, we are not just consuming information; we are also being asked to use certain mental and emotional muscles. This can strengthen our capacity to find fault in others’ words and actions, saddle our healthy need for community with grievance, and train us to triumph at the misfortunes of others — but without the constraints we encounter in normal, day-to-day living.
I’ve come to see the prophetic call to be peacemakers as a desperately needed resistance-training program for the spiritual disfigurement which conflict invites. “By the shield of our faith in Jesus Christ,” Elder Neil L. Andersen of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles recently taught, “we become peacemakers, quenching — meaning to calm, cool or extinguish — all the fiery darts of the adversary.” I love this imagery because it shows how peacemaking is not merely for the benefit of others. It also protects us from emotional assault.
Being a peacemaker does not mean sacrificing our principles; it means refusing to let conflict determine what we become. The spirit of accusation impedes our ability to recognize and cope with our own mistakes, so I’m learning to be a peacemaker to keep myself in top spiritual and emotional form.