Hello, I want share my story about how I found the Mormon church and why I left.

I am currently a 35 year old who is residing in northern Israel. So I was born in the south in Georgia very close to the city Warm Springs. I was born to a Catholic family who were both raised up North. My parents are very liberal and taught me to keep an open mind about religion. To this day neither of my parents are devoutly Catholic, but they still are both very spiritual.

Now, just a tiny bit of background about my childhood, my mom raised me for the most part because my birth dad came out as gay and from what I understand the divorce was somewhat amicable. She also married a second time a man my ex-stepfather who wound up cheating on her with a younger woman.

So growing up this was very hard for me to handle emotionally. I often blamed myself for mom's divorce I felt my birth dad and mom they would've stayed together if I were better behaved. I wanted desperately for them to get together even though the fighting scared me and lead to trauma/anxiety issues later in my life. They divorced when I was around the age of six. My first memory was of them fighting and yelling at each other. I mean there were definitely good times when they were together, overall it was best they divorced. My birth dad had joint custody of me for a fair amount of time of my childhood. We saw each other every other weekend but it was to much for me handle because he had bad temper and it was hard for me to deal because, I was very emotional and sensitive. My mom eventually told me my birth was gay and why they divorced.
My stepfather was flat out emotionally abusive he always put his birth son on a pedestal. He was highly critical of me, of what I wanted do with my life, and teased me constantly, when he knew for fact I was teased constantly at school. I could never escape the teasing even at home. He also would punish me but never punished his birth son, or if he did it was a slap on the wrist. He accused me of terrible things I don’t want mention, but later turned out be false. He accused me of causing him to sleep with a university student assistant, who I only met once. I never was aware of any of this and in middle school at time. I hardly ever went to school and never ran into her ever again.
So I met my ex-husband online who turned out to be part of Mormon family. His parents never forced me to join but they heavily implied I should. I converted because the missionaries came off as very kind. I wanted so badly to fit in to their good girl box. The church was very kind to me. However I realized I couldn’t conform to their ideas of how women should be treated and their beliefs on the LGBT community. My ex husband also no longer considers be Mormon but refuses to tell his parents. He forced me to hide being bisexual and being pagan. He wanted me to put on an act for his conservative family. He threatened to leave me if I said anything about my true beliefs. Even though my ex-husband likes open relationships, looks at porn constantly, and is strongly attracted to men.He would rather look at porn than have sex with his wife. When I left him he blackmailed me into not dividing our property by claiming I committed adultery even though we both agreed upon open a open relationship.
For a long time I refused to read anything negative about the church. But in about 2015 I read everything I could on ex-mormons, etc. I am now out as lesbian and pagan. It feels good to be free.