When You Need to Undergo Freaky Therapy to Deal With Obsession Over a Latter-day Saint Rock
By: Rhett Wilkinson
Tags: Mormon, Mental Health, Religion, Lds, Therapy

In Aug. 2015, it was revealed that much, if not all, of the Book of Mormon, a scripture holy to adherents of the Latter-day Saint movement, came from a rock. (The “revelation” came from one of the churches itself that are a part of that movement, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.)

The prior month, I had learned shocking and disturbing things about the history of the movement and, in the most psychologically, emotionally excruciating decision of my life, bowed out.

However, I couldn’t get over the rock revelation.

You see, LDS are taught that for the coming forth of the Book of Mormon, an angel named Moroni delivered gold plates to a young man named Joseph Smith and that Smith translated those plates through “the gift and power of God,” with spectacles called the Urim and Thummim, in particular.

It has nothing to do with a rock.

And it’s not like the shock after indoctrination concerned a different pair of spectacles or something like that.

The rock over which I obsessed and got EMDR treatment for that obsession. (photo credit: AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)

No, it had to be a rock.

Further, LDS have a culture of considering information that isn’t faith-promoting to be “anti-Mormon”. (The church was often called the Mormon church and the people, Mormons until church prophet Russell Nelson asked that that name no longer be used.) So there is the matter for LDS of needing to get over the realization that information that was considered to be anti-Mormon is now coming from the church. (One woman even wondered how “anti-Mormon” information made its way onto the church website after the church published “essays” with some information that wasn’t faith-promoting.)

Also, besides Sunday School manuals, missionary manuals, tracts and more, art depicts Joseph Smith translating the plates with the Urim and Thummim, calmly next to candlelight. Any practicing LDS knows this artwork — it’s used by the church in its official materials.

Needless to say, I couldn’t get over a rock for the next two years upon learning about it. (Though there is more than one, for me, it was one rock, as that was the focus of the Aug. 2015 press conference.) So when I asked my therapist, who I was seeing over faith and identity issues due to loss of the church and also because of the departure of my former wife, about treatment over the rock, she told me about this treatment called Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing.

In one way to practice it, a therapist trained in EMDR waves their hand back and forth as the recipient follows the movement with their eyes. (That was my case.) It’s supposed to help relieve the recipient of psychological trauma similar to how the body heals from physical trauma, according to EMDR.com.

Chelsea Robinson did EMDR therapy for me regarding fixation on the Latter-day Saint rock. (photo credit: Chelsea Robinson via Psychology Today)

It led the therapist to ask for referrals for EMDR since she wasn’t trained to do EMDR herself. And that led me to Chelsea Robinson. Chelsea would do the EMDR practice. And being the listening, caring therapist that she is, not considering the rock to be insignificant, but actually a central problem, she would ask me about “the rock.”

This is what the church does to you. It makes you obsess over a rock. It makes you have to undergo freaky therapy to get rid of such bizarre things.

I don’t think about the rock as much anymore (finally, almost five years later). Three years ago, Chelsea stopped doing the EMDR treatment after just a few sessions, so I don’t believe that EMDR healed me from obsession over the rock. Instead, I think it’s been time. However, I don’t know if I’m fully healed from that obsession, at the end of the day.

No, the rock is no longer my Facebook profile picture, but I will still have thoughts like “it’s pretty amazing that all of that (the Book of Mormon) came from a rock,” when there probably is nothing truly fantastical about the book.