Episode #289 - Pausing Doubt

Many times to obtain the truth we need we must pause our doubt.  Pausing doubt can be one of the most beneficial things we can do when afflicted with mental health concerns.

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Welcome to Episode #289 – Pausing Doubt.  If you have listened to these podcasts for any length of time you will have come to know that I have dealt with doubt frequently as a part of my mental health concerns.  Doubt is a negative emotion that our body abhors.  Our brain and our body do not like the feelings that doubt brings upon the mind.  When I mean negative emotion, I mean that doubt is one of the strongest negative emotions that the body and mind can produce besides pain.  Interestingly enough doubt can also produce pain.  Our body and mind need to feel that they have a strong and firm grip on reality and what is real.  The body uses the information we gather and feel to be real to make the various choices in our lives.  This body of information is crucial to the predictive and modeling behavior of the brain.  The brain is consistently creating our reality and it does so from the truths we have stored in our core emotions.  For instance, I am walking down an unknown street and I see a person in the distance.  My mind will automatically begin to predict the reality of this person and whether the person is a threat or not to me.  It will use all types of information but the reality is that our history, experience and the truths we believe will cause me to act.  I may cross the road.  I may look for somewhere public to be for a moment.  I will look to see if the person has a uniform.  If they are a man or a woman.  If they make threatening moves.  If they are staring at me.  The point is that we need these truths in our lives to make informed decisions.  All too often our information is wrong but nonetheless the body will make the assumptions anyway as part of the protective system we have developed.

These truths we hold dear in our heart minds and deep emotions guide us on our mortal journey.  For us they must represent truth.  Doubt arises when we are presented information that contradicts or at less questions our personal truths.  This doubt says that the two ideas cannot coexist and therefore I must choose between the two of them or at least reconcile the two truths with another truth.  Due to the nature of doubt as an emotion and its negative impact upon the brain and our emotional health.  The brain wants the reconciliation as quickly as possible.  It will do anything to find the answers it needs to be fully at peace again with its truths.  Even if that means getting the wrong answer.  Often the answer is more important than coming to fully understand what is true.  That is just the nature of who we are as human beings.  We also don’t like to change our core nature and truths.  So to actually make a change in truth we must open our minds and hearts to truly evaluate what is true and what is not.

As examples today I am going to take two different truths that have given rise to a great deal of doubt and confusion.  Each has its purpose and intent.  My intent is not to convince anyone of the truths I have used to reconcile these issues but to provide the space to discussion doubt as an emotion and the value of pausing doubt in our minds as we work through difficulties of truth arising in our lives.

The first of these examples will we Jospeh Smith as a prophet of God and his additional marriages.  The second will be the law of chastity and its relationship to same sex attraction.  As we consider these two difficulties that arise, I want you to focus more on the process of doubt than the actual problem being discussed.  The purpose of using such difficult problems is to help us to feel the process and what it means for the body and mind to pause doubt.  

Now let’s start with the first example.  Many individuals find it difficult to reconcile Joseph Smith as a prophet and his multiple marriages, especially to younger women.  Our doubt often begins when we first hear of this practice.  We have been taught the law of chastity for some time that a man and a woman should be married together.  Our society like many western societies has taught that more than one wife is an abomination.  It is seeking out sexual relationships beyond the marital vows.  When one first comes in contact with this information, it would seem to greatly contradict our own teachings and traditions within society.  This might be especially true when young women were married to Joseph.  We as a society find marriage to younger women below the age of 16 to be reprehensible.  This is a cultural value that has changed over the years of extended life expectancy but it doesn’t make it any less real to those of us who have included it as part of our true nature.  When we are presented with the information that Joseph had several wives and at least one of the them was below the age of 16, we are likely to find that this does not coexist with our current cultural beliefs and perhaps even the law of chastity that we hold true.  As these facts and emotions come together, the resulting emotion is doubt.  We must evaluate our truths that we hold Joseph to be a prophet who was true to the religion and to the Lord and his actions along with our current feelings about marriage.  This moment of evaluation does not feel good.  When we are asked by the brain and body to evaluate our truths it hurts us emotionally.  We could be wrong about what we have believed and the brain just cannot reconcile it.  So we begin the evaluation process under this cloud of doubt.  We must ask ourselves if the actions of Jospeh constitute another truth we must include or if there is some type of reconciliation where both truths can exist.

We will pass through various iterations, emotions and trust evaluations as we attempt to understand how both things can be true.  My personal evaluation went something like this.  I believe that Jospeh is a prophet, is there anyway that he could remain a prophet and have many wives and even younger ones.  My first thought is always what do the scriptures say.  The first thing I noticed was that many of the great patriarchs had several wives including Abraham, Jacob, David and many righteous individuals within the true gospel.  If God doesn’t change than the idea of multiple wives should also exist in our time and the Lord has explained this fairly clearly in D&C 132.  The matter of younger wives is the second issue and this can be explained fairly easily as part of life expectancy and cultural change.  Marriage to a young woman of 14-17 was not considered a problem during Jospeh’s time culturally or spiritually.  This was due to the life expectancy being less than 60 years old.  As life expectancy has changed over the years, the age of consent has risen accordingly.  Thus, if I now look at the two truths of what I was taught and Joseph’s wives I can clearly reconcile the two with another couple of truths from society and the scriptures.  

What is important is that we give place for doubt to exist and allow us to evaluate our core beliefs.  We must allow for doubt to exist and avoid shutting the emotion down until we have completely vetted our question.  I have allowed for doubt to exist on a regular basis as I work through various answers to gospel questions.  I do this by placing the question in my mind and then waiting for answers from the Lord.  At times the answers come quickly and at other times answers are much slower and methodical.  Sometimes I get just a piece at a time and other times I get the whole answer.  The reality of doubt and allowing for a question to sit in the mind is to wait for the Lord’s answer to the problem rather than to shack the doubt as quickly as possible.

My second example is a little different as it includes some of the difficulties we face in a mortal world.  We know that the law of chastity as stated allows for only a man and a woman to be married.  Now what if I have feelings of same sex attraction.  The question arises how can God allow me to feel this way and then make a commandment in opposition to the way that I feel deeply in my heart and mind?  How can he make things so difficult and still call himself a loving God?  This type of doubt is the most distressing in its nature because it not only involves the interact to two opposing truths but it involves deep emotional desires that contradict what the Lord has stated as what is true.  To feel deeply one way and to have the Spirit of the Lord direct us in a completely opposing way feels as though you heart and mind are being torn apart.  This feeling is doubt and the body does not like it.  The pain it causes can be very difficult to bear.  The body refuses to be comforted until the doubt is reconciled.  However, this kind of doubt where emotions run deep is not easily reconciled.

This is where pausing doubt makes sense.  Our body drives us to fix the truth issue but in reality it is better that we pause and place our doubt in an emotional cage as we work through the issue in our hearts and minds.  The reason for this pause is that it allows for us to evaluate the problem and to find answers and solutions that do not come easy.  It also allows for emotional bias to be detained for some time so that we can truly work through our issues with the Lord.  We tend to have a bias to our own feelings and emotions.  If something doesn’t match we tend to stick with our own feelings and emotions discarding anything that doesn’t match with what we believe.  However, we also live within the gospel of change and so to better make changes in our lives we must pause the doubt and cage it for sometime as we work through our emotional bias and issues.

As we work through our truths there are some things we can do to better align ourselves with the Lord.  The first is that we can evaluate everything we feel, see, hear and come to know by the scriptures.  What has the Lord said in the scriptures about the subject.  This will also include the scrutinized talks that come through general conference.  Second, what do I really want?  What is my nature and is it correct?  Third what do I feel from the Spirit of the Lord?  As we consider these things with the doubt paused we can better come up with solutions and resolutions to better align ourselves with the Lord.  If we allow the doubt to work upon us without a pause we are not likely to spend time really evaluating the truth of the matter and what we should really do.  Our personal emotions will drive us to conclusions that might be incorrect or worse partially correct. These personal deep emotions that come with mortality are very likely to drive us to keep our personal beliefs because the mind rewards us when we fulfill our emotional desires.  This reward process feels good and can feel right even when it may not follow the Lord’s plan for us.

So how do we push out the emotional bias and avoid the problems associated with our mortal body.  First is the doubt pause.  We need to avoid allowing doubt to cause us to react quickly.  Along with this doubt pause we need to pause our own personal emotions.  This is difficult to accomplish.  Often for me I must allow my emotions to subside somewhat and place the problem out of my current reality.  It takes time for me to isolate the problem and allow for revelation to occur.  Sometimes this is just a few days and other times it has been months to years.  Time helps me alleviate my personal emotional and mental bias and allow for revelation to occur.  Does this always work for me?  Most of the time but even then sometimes I need to make a decision and move forward.  When I move forward and listen, I often understand what the Lord desires.  I have found that the Lord provides the answer when the timing is right and when we are ready to hear.

Sometimes we will hear the wrong thing in our revelation because our bias is so strong.  What I have found when this happens is that the question will continue to linger in my heart and mind along with a negative doubt emotion until the right answer is found and implemented.  Just because we have the right answer does always mean that we implement it into our lives.  Until we emotionally take the truth into our lives, we will not implement it.  We must feel the truth rather than simply know it.  Our personal truths must come to match real truth through a process of emotional core change.  

These emotional core changes come a couple of ways.  First, we can make changes over time to our personal truths by typical repetitive processes of action and learning.  Second when the emotions run much deeper, we often need significant help to change our nature.  That is where the Spirit of the Lord comes into play and what is called the change of heart in the scriptures.  We must do our part and work to live the truth we know, even when it doesn’t match our mortal emotions and the Spirit of the Lord will work to change our core emotions.  This process can take months to years for the entire conversion to take place.  This is the definition of conversion.  Taking the truth of the Lord and converting our core emotions to that truth through the aid of the Spirit of the Lord.  Conversion is often a daily process where we see little change from day to day but significant change from year to year as we apply the principles of change.

My purpose today was simply to help us understand the nature of doubt and its design and purpose in our lives.  Pausing doubt in whatever way makes sense for you will provide the opening in the heart needed for change to occur and for truth to become part of who we are.  However, learning to pause doubt takes practice and significant effort.  Once we learn it though it will become a valuable asset in our conversion process.  May the Lord be ever with you.  Until next week do your part so that the Lord can do his.