Introduction and Episode Overview

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Hello, everyone, and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I'm your host, John Dehlin. It is January 27, 2026, and today we are going to be hearing a story that we've titled How My Mormon Mission in Russia Almost Broke Me. And it's an almost because as Margi will tell you, the reconstruction, rebuilding part of today's episode is something not to miss. Is that right, Margi?

Margi Dehlin [00:00:30] Absolutely.

John Dehlin [00:00:31] Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [00:00:31] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:00:32] And today we're going to be interviewing someone whose video has really struck a chord in Mormonism and ex Mormonism and beyond. His name is Kyson Dana. Is that how I pronounce it?

Kyson Dana [00:00:45] That's right, yep.

John Dehlin [00:00:46] And Kyson recently released a video on YouTube that went relatively viral within, you know, within a Mormon context anyway. And that video was called what, Kyson?

Kyson Dana [00:00:58] The Dark side of My Mormon Mission.

John Dehlin [00:01:00] Yeah. Do we have an episode called exactly that?

Kyson Dana [00:01:04] You do.

John Dehlin [00:01:04] Yeah, yeah, let's, let's do a little

Margi Dehlin [00:01:08] hat tip to Brinley Jensen.

Kyson Dana [00:01:09] Yeah, definitely, definitely.

John Dehlin [00:01:12] But, but, but your video is a totally different thing. Really beautifully edited and well done. We'll, we'll create a link to it. How many minutes is it?

Kyson Dana [00:01:21] It's 25 minutes.

Margi Dehlin [00:01:22] Very moving. Highly recommend.

John Dehlin [00:01:25] Super high quality to view it.

Kyson Dana [00:01:26] Thank you.

John Dehlin [00:01:27] Yeah, so check that out. But this is the longer version where we're just going to hear Kyson's Mormon story, but with a particular emphasis on his mission. The trauma from serving a mission in Russia, but also, you know, he was a part of fighting the new drug, this anti porn Mormon grounded movement after his mission. And then we're going to talk about his own journey. Processing the CPTSD from his mission, the complex post traumatic stress disorder that he started to grapple with after his mission was over, and then what resources he discovered to help him through that journey. Anything you would want to add, edit, or take away from the intro, Kyson?

Kyson Dana [00:02:21] No, that sounds great. I'm excited to share and I think what's fun is the film I put together is like a cinematic kind of poetic storytelling of my own life experience where this is a great opportunity to kind of get into the details in the weeds and say some of the things that I obviously couldn't say in a 25 minute video. So I appreciate the opportunity.

John Dehlin [00:02:42] All right. And of course I'm grateful to have Margi, my wife and co host here. Thanks for joining us.

Margi Dehlin [00:02:48] Yeah, I'm so excited.

Family Background and Mormon Heritage

John Dehlin [00:02:50] Okay, so Kyson, were your parents lds? Did they get temple married? And what do you want to give us about your parents and your ancestors? Background before we dive into your Rexburg Mormon story.

Kyson Dana [00:03:05] Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, the. That question is not like a quick, easy answer. When I first started doing therapy, my therapist asked me to write down my religious story from the beginning. And she is not a Mormon. Didn't have a lot of Mormon context. And so I started to write, like, well, I was born in Provo, Utah. My parents were LDs. They were attending BYU at the time. I'm the oldest of, you know, three, the oldest of four children. And then as I started to write and talk about what it was like growing up there, I realized, like, well, I don't know if my religious story actually begins with me. I think it begins before me because my parents parented in a way that was influenced by their own family system that they were part of. So then I backed up and started to write their story. My parents both grew up in Star Valley, Wyoming. They both grew up in homes that were not active Mormon. And my dad had this big, dramatic life transformation around age 18 after he was arrested for like, his fourth or fifth DUI. At that time, he grew up in a rough family environment. Drugs and alcohol were rampant. He's got stories of like, smoking cigarettes on the way to school as a seven year old. Drinking was like, so like he could pull a Brit beer out of the fridge at any time and drink. His mom was 16 when he was born. His dad was 19. So Star Valley has kind of this two cultures that exist there. You've got like the devout Mormon culture, and then you've got the people that fell away from Mormonism. And it's a kind of a cowboy culture. It's a bit rough. And he was in that cowboy rough culture. And then when he was 18, he realized that his life was not going in the way that he wanted to go and connected with the only types of authority figures that he knew at that time that could help with wanting to make a change, which was his local bishop. His local bishop was a therapist. And so he knew how, the skills, you know, to talk through, how to make change in life and what to do. And my dad got his patriarchal blessing. There were some really, like, profound things that were said to him in that blessing that gave him, like, a new perspective on himself and his own life and grounded him in a story and a theology that he hadn't known before. And that just rocketed him in a wildly different direction for his life. So he, like, one year later, was on a mission, Easter in Louisiana, came home, met my mom, they got married. And then a Year later, I was born. So when I started to write my own story, I realized I had to start there because understanding that context, understanding why my parents parented in the way that they did, if I look at it as a reaction to that upbringing, it makes a lot of sense. And it makes sense in the ways that if I critique Mormonism really hard and say, hey, this hurt me and this broke me in different ways, it didn't do that to my dad. And I have to. I've learned to, like, hold that truth as well. That Mormonism actually helped him in profound and tremendous ways. It was one of the few resources that he had available to him at that time. And it's taken a long time to, like, hold both of those truths at the same time. Yeah, so that's his background. My mom's is different, but similar. Her. Her dad was part of that rough cowboy culture of Star Valley. Not active Mormon. I think he had 12 siblings. He grew up, like, moved away from home at a very young age, before he was even an adult. Got into drugs and alcohol. She was born, and then the family started to kind of go through, like, a lot of trauma and relationships there and abuse scenarios. And he had this big moment where he was like an alcoholic, basically. And a local bishop called him to be the elders quorum president or first counselor or something like that. And he's like, I can't do that. I'm not worthy to be there. And they said, go pray about it. And so he did this. This long 48 hour fast and prayer thing that he hadn't done ever before and had this big confirmation that this was right for him and he needed to change his life. So he quit everything right then, became active in the church, and their life did a big transformation. And she was. My mom was 11 at that time, so she has, like a really stark mental difference of this is life without the church and this is life with the church. So both of them, when I show up in the scene, you know, as a newborn, had like a level of orthodoxy and religiosity that was really intense in a loving way. Like, it was a. It was a loving family. We connected well. But I now can hold that there was a lot of intensity there based on the backgrounds that they had.

Margi Dehlin [00:07:38] Can I say something really quick about that? That I think is interesting is, you know, we talk about. You hear the language, particularly in religion, around saving, but in this, in this way, I would imagine your parents from their backgrounds really do feel like the church saved them from. And that's very Real. And I think it lands really differently how religion comes into your life, particularly as a convert or I think is really, it's an important part of, I think how it's lived and experienced like you say. So yeah, I love you brought that, you brought that out.

John Dehlin [00:08:16] Yeah.

Kyson Dana [00:08:16] And it's what's changed for me over time too is recognizing that we are like a family system. Like my mom's trauma or my dad's trauma lives in me still, even if I'm not aware of it and is going to probably live in my children in different ways. And whether that's like epigenetic and you can measure that or whether it's just the way that, you know, their parenting affects me and my parenting affects my child and it's all attachment based. I'm not really sure where you draw the line there. But I, I don't separate my Mormon story from their Mormon story. And then if you go back far enough for Star Valley, Wyoming, like the first settlement that was there in Star Valley was in the 1800s. The people were sent there by Brigham Young. It was a very difficult climate to live in. The reason Star Valley was selected is because it was right on the border of Idaho and Wyoming. The town that they first founded was called Freedom. And the Mormon leaders would flee back and forth across that border to avoid polygamy. And I grew up just down the road from that. So I don't know where, I don't know where to begin when I'm like, when people are like, well, tell me, how did your, what was your Mormon background like? It's like, you know, in many ways some of the probably pain that existed in those communities has rippled through time and also the goodness of those communities has rippled through time. And here I am just trying to make do, you know, I shut up now.

Margi Dehlin [00:09:39] So absolutely.

John Dehlin [00:09:41] Yeah, yeah. I sometimes my listeners get really mad at me when I talk about the good I see still in the church. And I just, you're, your parents seem to be a really great example of that. Like it was a non trivial thing to pull someone out of drug or alcohol addiction or abuse and to turn a life around. And if you're a secular person, if you're doing that with people, great. But if you're not, then hopefully you can just see that even suboptimal or even organizations that do harm also if they're turning people's lives around, you have to say there's good and bad in that organization. And also I would just say to parent is to parent as a reaction to however, you were parented. I don't know any other way that people parent.

Kyson Dana [00:10:27] That's what I'm doing right now in my own version, you know.

Margi Dehlin [00:10:30] Right.

Kyson Dana [00:10:31] I hold. When I look at, like, my. Probably my dad, it's more pointed. I can see it more clearly. Like a lot of his friends that he grew up with either ended up dead or in prison. He was not academically oriented at all. Was on a mission, became hardcore in the mission, became so intense about understanding religious theology within Mormonism that they called him Dr. Dana on the mission. They'd come to him with, like, the big theological questions. His mission president wrote him a letter of recommendation and got him into byu. He could not have got there based on his gpa. And then he went on and earned a master's degree and became a therapist and helped people with drug and alcohol abuse. And so, like, I will give the Mormon, the LDS Church, like, so much praise for that. He needed a rigid. Rigid structure at that point in his life to make the changes that he needed to make. And Mormonism is a great rigid structure to jump into. So. So yeah, there's a. One other thing that I've learned in looking at their stories is there's a psychological framework called spiral dynamics that talks about, you know, the stages of change that they go through.

John Dehlin [00:11:42] We did an episode of Mormon Stories about spiral dynamics.

Kyson Dana [00:11:44] Okay. It's beautiful. It's given. That framework has given me so much, like, orientation on understanding my own journey and understanding differences between me and my parents and why we've each made changes in the ways that we have. My dad, for example, was living in a state of chaos before, and Mormonism pulled him into what would be a blue, where it was like, authority. There's an authority structure. There's rules. There's the in group and the out group, and then there's a lot of benefits to living in that. But eventually, you don't want to stay there forever because it. It limits your own development. And so to transcend out of that is difficult. And you have to. You're in a world, especially within Mormon culture, where everything is black and white and binary. And to step out of that is triggering and scary for people. And. And then. But I guess seeing it as a framework that helps me ground that My dad's story makes a lot of sense. It's not some weird anomaly that my dad got sucked into a cult. It's like, no, this was a stage change that he needed to personally go through.

Margi Dehlin [00:12:40] Absolutely. And can I just bring out one thing that I'm Relating to. My parents were converts too. And I think it's been helpful as well in looking at family systems, being able to look at your parents family systems and realize that, you know, when you. It's almost like a vulnerability you wear. I think when you come out of family systems where there's either abuse or, you know, there's just a lot of chaos that you have, it comes from this intention and desire to want to create a different family system blueprint. But you don't feel like you have the resources on your own based on where you come from. And that's been. Do you feel like there was some of that as well with them?

Kyson Dana [00:13:24] Definitely. Yeah, definitely. And the LDS Church is so good at providing those resources. Like, we did daily family scripture study. We did weekly family evening lessons. We had the chart on the wall. We rotated who did what in each week. We. We had responsibility with that. We did chores that were related to like, it was all this idea that we're building your character to become a good person someday, which it did in many ways and caused some harm later down the road. Yep.

Margi Dehlin [00:13:53] And it can also cause harm. Yeah.

Kyson Dana [00:13:54] Yep.

John Dehlin [00:13:55] So, yeah. What are the parts of your pre mission Mormon experience that are really integral to your story?

Growing Up in the Church

Kyson Dana [00:14:03] Yeah, that's a good question. Um, when I look at the stages of, like, development and identity development that I passed through, the younger years was awesome. Like, I felt deeply connected to who I was, deeply connected to my family system. My extended family is really close, and so I was. Spent a lot of time with cousins and grandparents.

John Dehlin [00:14:24] This is in Rexburg.

Kyson Dana [00:14:25] This was in Star Valley. We lived in Provo until I was seven. And then we moved to Star Valley and I was baptized there. My grandparents and cousins all lived there. And then when I was 11, just turning 12, we moved to Rexburg.

John Dehlin [00:14:41] Okay.

Kyson Dana [00:14:42] And so my dad moved. My dad was a therapist in Utah and then became a therapist in Star Valley. I think he felt like the Star Valley is a small town and when you're a therapist, you suddenly know everybody's problems and too closely. And he's like, I gotta get it to a wider pasture here. So we moved to Rexburg and he got a job at BYU Idaho in the counseling center in the Dean of Students office.

John Dehlin [00:15:03] Oh.

Kyson Dana [00:15:04] Oh, yep, yep.

John Dehlin [00:15:05] Kicking people out of BYU Idaho. No, I'm joking.

Kyson Dana [00:15:09] But kind of I could let him tell his story, but that was. That was the beginning of his own faith transformation that started to happen, was beginning there because he had been working with people that were drug and alcohol, like victims, addicts and going through major trauma in their lives. And then he wanted to help people. And then he gets to BYU Idaho and he's doing therapy with people about like, you need a haircut. And you know, like the level of intensity there was just somewhat silly. So he didn't last very long at BYU Idaho and then left.

John Dehlin [00:15:38] Julie wants me to interview your dad next. You should.

Kyson Dana [00:15:41] My dad is.

John Dehlin [00:15:42] Tell him to apply.

Kyson Dana [00:15:43] Very articulate. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:15:46] All right.

Kyson Dana [00:15:46] Yeah. So that was, that was like younger years probably when I got to be 11, 12, I was moving to Rexburg when I started to experience what I would I now see as like the first versions of pain. From the structure that I grew up in then I couldn't have identified it as that. So you know, you begin doing bishop's interviews where you're regularly called in and are asked about your worthiness. And the concept of worthiness became introduced to me then. I remember having a conversation with my parents once around 12 years old and just saying like, well, I just won't sin anymore. Like, I'll just be perfect. Like, it can't be that hard to just like not make mistakes anymore. And they were like, well you can try but like, you're gonna need to repent when you make mistakes. But I now look at like myself as a 12 year old, holding that question even of like, I need to be perfect from here on out is kind of unique. And that I was holding, I was self policing in that way. I also developed this deep sense that I wasn't good enough yet. I. And, and it's funny now to say that because I was waking up every day at 6am and reading my scriptures, I like rarely missed. I'd read the whole Book of Mormon twice before I'd finished high school. I gave like the talk at my seminary graduation. I was devout as you could possibly be and yet carried this inner monologue that I wasn't good enough and that I was failing and I was bad. I. In making these films that I've been working on, I've dug up all my old journals and I've gone back and read things and to see like what was my mindset then. And a big part of my life then was my own sexual development, going through puberty and internalizing the messages of the church there. So I read the For Strength of Youth book like, like the Bible, you know, I read it like every single day, trying to understand things and really want to understand what is where. What does God think about pornography, sexuality, masturbation, impure thoughts, like all of These were really heavy topics for me. And the language in some of these manuals was so precise. And like, I read Miracle Forgiveness as like a 15 year old.

John Dehlin [00:17:57] Ouch.

Kyson Dana [00:17:59] I. That really damaged my own inner world. I. I wrote in my journal that I found when I was 15 that I said, if I'm still struggling with this a year from now, I might have to end things so that it doesn't get too bad. And then the next year I could found the note where I reflected on that and I said, I'm still struggling. I'm not going to give up yet. But I can't let this keep going.

John Dehlin [00:18:21] So that's like ongoing suicidal ideation. Yeah.

Kyson Dana [00:18:23] I didn't. I wouldn't have. If somebody had asked me back then, like, are you having suicidal ideation? I would have said no, but I was definitely. And then when I look at like, well, what behavior was I so conflicted about? I was looking at a JCPenney lingerie catalog. I was having questions about my own sexuality and like thoughts about sex, you know, and those impure thoughts just crushed me as like, Satan's in my head, Satan's got a hold of me. I'm on this like Ted Bundy track to become like this perverted killer someday or abuser. I really viewed myself as like a bad person despite being like a really, really good person. And that's having.

Margi Dehlin [00:19:09] And kind of having a sexual self.

Kyson Dana [00:19:10] Exactly.

Margi Dehlin [00:19:11] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:19:12] Yeah.

Kyson Dana [00:19:12] So that's when I look back, I can see that that's when. That's the stage when I sort of like consciousness came online for me of I'm not just a child having like a good time riding my dirt bike around in Wyoming. I'm actually like, I'm having an inner world that's deep and complex and I'm not sure where to navigate it. I opened up to my parents about, like, things and they eventually, you know, checked the, the computer history and found some sites that I had visited and like did this intervention moment for me. And like, we found the things like, you need to confess. And I cried. And

Margi Dehlin [00:19:47] how old were you here when that happened? How old?

Kyson Dana [00:19:50] I was like 15 or 16.

Margi Dehlin [00:19:51] Wow.

Kyson Dana [00:19:53] My mom had actually like printed off all of the history on our computer and went through it line by line of like, what was on this site and what did you see? And they then were like, are you gay? Like, we're worried you might be gay from this. And I was like, oh, I'm not, like, what? No, I'm not gay. And even if I was gay, like, whatever, like I was confused, actually, for a long time why that question was even asked to me at that time. Like, what is the relationship here between pornography and being gay? Like, it didn't register and that.

Margi Dehlin [00:20:24] Really worried that you might really worry them.

Kyson Dana [00:20:27] It really worried me then, like, am I gay because I've looked at pornography? And my dad, after that conversation, it was like three hours long in the car. I was crying, you know. We then schedule a bishop interview. My dad takes me to the bishop so I can confess. Drops me off. I go in. He's waiting for me in the parking lot. I don't confess because I don't want to tell the bishop. I assume that he knows because he has the gift of discernment. He can see through what I'm not confessing or confessing. And so I just couldn't get myself to, like, tell. And then I get in the car and my dad says, like, so did you tell him everything? And I was like, yep. And he said, what did you say? And then I made up some story about how his reaction was. And my dad's like, oh, he didn't. He didn't tell you you couldn't take the sacrament? I was like, no. Like, we're good. And he's like, wow.

Margi Dehlin [00:21:16] Yeah, but.

Kyson Dana [00:21:17] Yeah, but as a child, it was confusing. Um, that's a. That word, confusing has been one that I. Now, as an adult, I've learned to. When I want to slip into, like, blaming or victimizing or feel like, anger, I can. It's my new word that I say. That was confusing.

Margi Dehlin [00:21:33] That's right.

Kyson Dana [00:21:34] That was confusing. And that allows me to hold, like, the goodness of my parents and the good things that I had in my upbringing with the parts that were painful and just like, that's confusing. And it gives me, like, a lot of, like, I can hold my inner child in a way that I. I couldn't, you know, growing up.

Margi Dehlin [00:21:51] Yeah, yeah. How it felt.

Kyson Dana [00:21:53] Yep. Because it was confusing.

Margi Dehlin [00:21:55] Absolutely. Okay, so I'm hearing a bit so far. So would you say this time that you've talked about teen years, A bit of a birth of a part of you with, let's just say, a highly evaluative self or part and aggressive, part art.

Kyson Dana [00:22:14] Yep. Yep. Like, quite religiously OCD about my own worthiness and my own goodness. And if I was measuring up to that. One other thing, as I look back at the teen years that's interesting to me to investigate now is I was very into emo music and the punk music scene, which sounds ironic. You wouldn't Imagine that exists in Rexburg. But Rexburg at that time had this like vibrant underground hardcore music scene with like screamo music. And guys would come through on tour that were like all black emo. Like the nose piercings, the lip rings, the tattoos. And we would go to these shows and thrash around in the mosh pits. And me and all my friends, and we love the music. That's actually where I met my wife was like in part of that scene. And then I would go to church on Sunday and it was like wholesome and beautiful. In fact, my friends and I started this band in high school, the band we called With Conviction. And I got that band name idea reading Called To Serve in the hymn book and it told you how to sing it. It was like with Conviction. I was like, ooh, that's cool. Like, it'd be cool to have a ban where we say what we want to say with conviction. And so I can now see those like, parts of me that were existing at the same time. And I wasn't even like aware of what was happening inside of myself.

Margi Dehlin [00:23:24] I actually really love that. I love this idea that you weren't even conscious. Yeah, but Mormonism tends to be so let. Let's just say good at the positive feelings. It's like when it comes to like, be happy, be grateful, be, but with, let's just say, negative or harder feelings. Right. Mormonism, not so. So within a self there's a. There's a type of person that's allowed to show up in a, in a church or religious environment as a Mormon. Right, Right. So you found, but you found a place for that part, for those feelings, for that part of your experience to actually exist. And it's within this music culture that then could let you be a whole. Not at the same time maybe, but like a whole person.

John Dehlin [00:24:14] Exactly.

Kyson Dana [00:24:14] And that that culture was the beginnings of my own creative expression and creatively working with my inner world in ways that maybe I wasn't even like conscious of. So I started making like posters for the bands that would go on tour through Rexburg. We, as I was like 16 years old and my friend and I were hosting shows, so we book venues and have people come out and tour with like, like these are legit real bands on tour. And we would contact our tour manager, they'd show up and be like, wait, you guys are 16 year old kids hosting this show in this Mormon town? Like, how bizarre that they would arrive, like surprised at what they would find. But that's also where I started doing a lot of Photography and helping brand my own brand and became conscious of identity from like a branding perspective, which we'll get into later. But that kind of is where my career ended up going. So that that music scene was a big, a really big part of my life. I'd go to Warped Tour in Salt Lake City every year and meet these kids with mohawks and angry kids. And I love the angry music. We'd get in the mosh pits and thrash around until somebody had nosebleeds. And I wore like, they didn't make skinny jeans back then for guys. And so my friends and I would go to the women's section of the clothing store and buy tight women's pants and we would wear those and put like the studded belt on. And it's funny because I was so good according to Mormonism, like I was reading my scriptures every day, attending seminary, doing everything that I should have been doing and then had this other part of myself that existed as well. That part of me really concerned my mom. I remember coming home from school one day and she had all of the CDs that I loved with all of the covers pulled out and on the floor with their lyrics exposed and was like, do you realize the things that these, this music is saying? We should not have this music in our home. I felt a lot of like confusion again. I felt a lot of confusion like, why do I like this when it's bad? But it was so core to my identity and so core to the identity of the friend group that I was in that I didn't want to just give it up. But I did actually, I think back on it, my mom really pressured me and said, like, this is not good for you. You need to choose God and find the Holy Ghost. This music isn't in the Holy Ghost. And I took this huge stack of CDs of hardcore music and threw it all in the garbage and committed that I'm going on a mission. I'm leaving that music behind. I had been dating a girl for a few months and my mom wanted me to break up with her too. And so I did to make her happy and to make God happy. And, and yeah, and I can see that she was doing this because she wanted me to be happy. Like it wasn't like she wanted to be controlling, but it was very much a fear based decision that she was making on how to, how to parent me.

Worthiness Anxiety and Self-Harm

John Dehlin [00:27:11] You mentioned in your outline self harm around some of your worthiness ruminations.

Kyson Dana [00:27:18] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:27:18] Do you want to mention that briefly?

Kyson Dana [00:27:19] Yeah, yeah. The self harm Was I like, I started, you know, when you get like sexually aroused as a pubescent teenage boy. I registered that that was bad and wrong and that I needed to somehow convince my own body that it shouldn't be doing that. So when that would happen, I would hurt myself in my genital areas regularly to try to intentionally associate pain with feeling sexual arousal.

John Dehlin [00:27:54] Wow, I'm so sorry. We don't see that. I'm sure you're not in any way alone in that. I've mentioned like a couple missionaries having thoughts of wanting to castrate themselves because they're not able to kind of slay that demon, so to speak. But the, the self harm thing was a bit of a, you know, something I thought might be worth at least noting as something that can't happen because it makes total sense to me.

Kyson Dana [00:28:27] It does. And I don't have like a lot of shame in saying that either because I, I'm sure it goes on in these communities. I, at that time in high school, I had a close friend, a neighbor gal, pass away in a car accident. And that was like, that rocked my world pretty heavily. When she passed away, we had like some like a corm of the 70 guy come and give like a big talk at her funeral and explain that nothing could like basically just explained away what happened there so that we as teenagers didn't feel sadness about it. But I also had other friends that attempted suicide in high school that I was really close to. I had friends that were like cutting in their arms. And again, it was, it was confusing because all of us were good kids doing the right things and yet we're having these like negative experiences emerging. And I didn't know, I didn't know how to hold that. And I also didn't like, honestly I didn't investigate it too deeply. It just was what life was. If I investigated it at all, it was that probably that the music and the culture that we were part of had Satan's influence in it. And I was in a dangerous place and needed to repent and come clean and let that go behind me. But there was a lot of. Between the music I was listening to, the friends that I was with, and then the culture that I was part of. Suicidality was a common thing in my world. There was a guy in my ward that committed suicide when I was there. So yeah, it was like, like my teenage years felt beautiful and heavy. Yeah, I.

John Dehlin [00:30:04] The more I'm swimming in Mormon spaces, the more I feel like the combination of severe sexual shame and guilt, along with the Teaching of the existence of demons or demonic spirits or Satan's spiritual demonic influence is just a dangerous combination.

Kyson Dana [00:30:27] Yeah, yeah. You don't have the, I didn't have the like wherewithal to parent myself through those things. So your inner monologue just starts going crazy and there's nothing that's going to disrupt that. Even if you get like some good talk at a Sunday school meeting, they're, you know, they're like you're worthy no matter what. It just doesn't have like a place to register in your psyche. And like they showed us the Ted Bundy clip in Deakins of him saying that pornography caused him to murder, become a serial killer.

John Dehlin [00:30:59] Yeah. That's literally cultivating an association in young minds that that's a possibility.

Kyson Dana [00:31:08] Yep.

John Dehlin [00:31:09] There's nothing healthy about that.

Kyson Dana [00:31:11] Yeah. And of course they walk it back and like this is an extreme case, not everybody does this, but I don't know, like how do you walk that back in the minds of a 12 year old? You know, I have an 11 year old son now and I, when I think of putting him in places where those types of messages are being taught, it just like, oh yeah, couldn't do it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Preparing and Saving for a Mission

John Dehlin [00:31:32] All right. You also write in your outline about preparing and saving permission. Do you want to talk about that?

Kyson Dana [00:31:37] Yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:31:38] Before we go to your mission.

Kyson Dana [00:31:38] Yeah. Part of the character building that my parents really believed in deeply was that I needed to pay for my own mission and then I needed to like work through high school. So I did like every summer I would actually when we lived in Rexburg, I would move to Wyoming and spend the summer living at my grandparents place. My grandpa owned a concrete pouring business and a construction company and so I'd live with them and work, which was on one hand like a really unique and cool experience to be able to be that close to my grandparents. My grandpa was a patriarch in the stake and he has like this really beautiful, simple, mystical version of faith. He's not highly intellectual and highly educated in the academic sense. He has just this farm mentality of faith. And every day before we would pour concrete, he would pray and ask God, is it going to rain today in this place that we're pouring? And he would feel like he got answers. Sometimes it would be sunny and he'd say, nope, we're not pouring today. God said, don't do it. And I really just like revered his faith and everybody in the community did too. And that's why he was called to be a patriarch and deliver patriarchal blessings. So I did that. But there was a part of me that really resented my parents that I didn't get. The summers in my hometown with my friends doing the things that my friends were doing. They were skateboarding and playing music and jumping off bridges and swimming, and I was working all the time. We were working 12 hour shifts doing hard, concrete labor. So I. But I saved up all my money for my mission. I was really proud of, like, hitting that $10,000 milestone. And then I took all the mission prep classes. Like, I think I did three rounds of mission prep. I read Preach My Gospel in and out. I read BYU's book on World religions so I could understand the world better. Like I said, I read Miracle Forgiveness. I read True to the Faith. I was so committed to going on a mission and being a good missionary. Yeah, it was. It was the central focus and goal of my entire life. Like. Like, truly, like my entire life was to get there and be a valiant missionary. And then right after high school. Unless. Do you want to pause there for a second?

Margi Dehlin [00:33:53] Well, yeah, I was gonna say. I was gonna just say how very, you know, Mormon and human it is, but this is really pronounced, how future focused, how, like, you know, not present to the actual present moment.

Kyson Dana [00:34:10] Right.

Margi Dehlin [00:34:11] Oftentimes Mormonism is that it's always about some. Some future time. And also that something that's standing out is just the seriousness of Mormonism. You know, as. As a teenager, you're talking about your friends playing for the summer, you know, water stuff, you're working. And also the work ethic within Mormonism, even the work ethic of character, just to show up on Sunday in the form that is allowed, that is approved of, that is valued in your own family system, which is like, oftentimes, you know, another place of Mormon culture just at home lived. Right. To show up every day, positive, like in the form where you're perceived as being a righteous member, exhausting.

Kyson Dana [00:35:02] Like, there's labor. There's labor. It's a physical labor to. To do that every day.

Margi Dehlin [00:35:07] And that really stands out, I think, in your story.

Kyson Dana [00:35:09] Yeah. And. And I don't hold that as, like, a resentment, as though it was a bad thing. And I wish I didn't build the character of hard work and labor, because I can hold that as, like, a good thing. I started moving sprinkler pipes at age 13.

John Dehlin [00:35:23] These are, like, massive farm pipes.

Kyson Dana [00:35:25] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:35:26] We're not talking little yard, you know, front yard pipes. We're talking massive pipes for large farming, industrial enterprise.

Kyson Dana [00:35:35] Yeah. And if you picture like a. There's a line of them. So the field has 100 sprinkler pipes. Each pipe is about 30ft long and they're full of water. So you go and you disconnect it, you lift it up and you dump the water out of one end. And then you carry it, you know, a hundred feet to the next place in the field and put it down. And then you go back and you get the next pipe. And I was 13.

John Dehlin [00:35:54] Connect them all, right?

Kyson Dana [00:35:55] Yeah, you got to connect them all.

John Dehlin [00:35:56] Yeah.

Kyson Dana [00:35:57] And if you don't connect them properly, like, the pipe blows and you got to walk all the way back down the field and fix it. So I was 13 and doing this, I had to get up at 5:30 in the morning. I'd ride my motorcycle to the farm that I worked at and would carry these pipes. And when I first started doing it, the first day that I did it, and my dad got me this job and he was really proud of me to go work on this farm. I made it about 10 pipes in and couldn't lift any more pipe. And I had a hundred pipe to go and just was crying. And I cried my way through all 100 pipes until I was able to finish it. And then I got home and I whined to my parents, like, I cannot do this. Like, you do not make me go back. And my dad told me, like, you can do this. This is character building. And he's like, I'll go with you tomorrow and I'll help you. And so he takes me to the field. We had this beautiful time. Like, sun's coming up in this wheat field. We're carrying pipes. And we finished the thing. We were able to do it together. And then he never came back and helped me again. So it was like, you know, on day three, now you've got the muscles and you're going to handle it. And I learned to do it like I did that. I did. Sprinkler pipe. Moving 13 to age 15 and grew to love and appreciate it. I loved waking up before the sun came up. I loved the dew on the grass. And I would speak to God while I was out there and like, have this sort of communion experience. And I always told myself, like, this is going to be what it's like to knock doors someday when you're a missionary and you face hardships and it feels like you can't go on. And so I was mentally treating even that moment as like, this is preparation for my mission, that I'm going to go on.

Margi Dehlin [00:37:25] It's like training.

Kyson Dana [00:37:26] Yep. Yep. Viewed it like a bootcamp almost.

John Dehlin [00:37:30] And then you write that you avoided dating girls because they would. Were too tempting.

Kyson Dana [00:37:36] Yeah, yeah, yeah. I, I think that fear was instilled on me from my mother. Anytime I'd start dating somebody and start to like them too much, she would swoop in with all these cautions of like, you don't cross these lines or else you can't go on your mission. And so I would, I would date girls and I liked girls, but I was very intense about, like, what are the boundaries? What are the lines? I never crossed any of those lines with anybody that I ever dated and would self police who I was allowed to date. Yeah, it was a lot of, like, a lot of self policing. A lot of. I grew up feeling like God is watching me at all times. I'm constantly being judged and evaluated and I am good enough and valiant enough that I will prove to God that I can do this. And I did. Like, I, I really did. If, if you were to look back at who I was then and the, the, the way, like the church leaders, like the bishops loved me, like I said, I spoke at seminary graduation. I was like their golden child of like, the way to. The way to be like normal and cool and friendly and musical and talented and artistic and a good Mormon. Like, I fit that in a way that was great.

John Dehlin [00:38:46] In some ways, this sounds like the ideal Mormon upbringing. Honestly.

Margi Dehlin [00:38:49] Well, it reminds me of my own side.

John Dehlin [00:38:51] Well, that's, that's why I say it.

Margi Dehlin [00:38:53] Yeah. From the outside. Yeah.

Kyson Dana [00:38:55] Yep.

Margi Dehlin [00:38:56] But I'm also.

John Dehlin [00:38:57] Did it feel that way for you?

Kyson Dana [00:38:58] Yeah. At the time, I, I didn't know any different. I didn't know any different. I, like, I grew up in. From Provo to Star Valley to Rexburg. I. There was a strong idea in my head of the world. And then us, them and us, we had the truth. We had happiness. They didn't. And we felt bad for them and we were going to go help them. And there was the mission field, if you move outside of these areas. So I didn't even like, realize the water that I was swimming in. You know, there's that parable of the fish where it's like old fish swims by the two younger fish and says, you know, how's the water, boys? And they look at each other and goes, what's water? That. That's how it felt for me growing up in Rexburg.

Margi Dehlin [00:39:37] It's occurring to me too. The. That's what being. What is being born through this process is really priming you for Your mission, which is, you know, a distrust of yourself. And as we distrust these different parts or feelings or desires that we have that are not okay, and you kind of exile them. I do feel like it leaves you vulnerable or also, like, more apt to listen to external voices, make you more obedient. Tell me. Because, I don't know, like, I'm. I can't trust myself here. So you tell me. You tell me what I need to do. You tell me.

Kyson Dana [00:40:16] Right, exactly. I can look back now, too, and understand the ways that the messages that I received in the Mormon culture, like, how it gave me an identity that was fused with the church from, like, a really young age. Like, I'm a child of God was like a nursery song. You know, they. It wasn't like a. Here's a belief system we're exploring or we look at and we kind of believe. It was like, no, this is true. This is who you are as a person. And so, yeah, just to even say, like, the Mormon culture, it was the water I was swimming in. Like, it wasn't just the water. It was like it was me in and out. Like, those external voices of leaders were an extension of my own identity. Like, when the prophet spoke, it was like, this is, I guess, what I am to do. This is who I am to be. And so later, like, when we'll get into, like, questioning that, it was. It was big. You know, you're. You're. You're leaving you. In a way, yeah. I didn't have a way to separate anything that was happening there from myself in the church and my family. Like, I'll just say, like, the. Sometimes when I've been critical of the Mormon Church, like, around family that are still, like, living within the Mormon bubble, it's easy to say, like, well, this isn't a Mormon church problem. You're wasting your energy criticizing the church. This is. The struggles that you're having are relational. It's between you and your parents or you and your neighbors. And I can say, yeah, like, that is true. The church. I didn't know Gordon B. Hinckley growing up, but I knew Gordon B. Hinckley translated through my parents. And so I can't say, like, well, where did the parents cause harm? Where did the church cause harm? Where did the culture and the community lived in cause harm? Because they all were blended as one thing. Especially in a place like Rexburg.

Margi Dehlin [00:42:05] Yeah, absolutely.

Receiving a Mission Call to Russia

John Dehlin [00:42:06] Let's talk about your mission.

Kyson Dana [00:42:08] Okay. I submitted my papers, went through the works, was really excited to go, and I got my mission call. It arrived in the mail, and I actually did not want to open it with my family around because I was afraid that I might not have the reaction that I should have based on where I was called to go. So I went into my house. Nobody was home at the time. I opened my mission call. And it actually. It's funny how they're written, because I went back and found it as I was working on this film. It said, you're called to the Rostov Nadanu mission. And then later on says, you'll be speaking Russian. And I. I was like, rostov, that must be in Russia. I didn't. I didn't even have, like, the context to understand what the Rostov Nandanu mission was. So then I start Googling Rostov Don Danu. It's, you know, obviously written in different ways because it's a Russian. The Russian Cyrillic Alphabet. So it. I. I didn't know if, like, sometimes it said Rostov on Don. Sometimes it's Rostov Nadanu. I kept looking up cities and be like, I don't even know if this is the place that I'm going. So that was like. I was like, oh, that's. I guess I say that just to show how foreign this place was to me and my understanding of the world. And I knew that Russia was going to be, like, a hard mission. And everybody reaffirmed that to me. Whenever I would tell them where I was going on my mission, it's like, ooh, that's going to be a hard mission. And I internalize that. Of. Of course it's going to be hard because I am so well prepared, and I have got this work ethic of this Idaho farm boy. They probably send Idaho farm boys to Russia because of how difficult it is. And I internalized it as a validation of my own specialness and how good of a person I really am because I was called to such a unique and challenging place.

Margi Dehlin [00:43:58] So relatable. Absolutely. I was going to ask you really quickly if you at all had a hope for where you would go or if that was like, part of character is like, nope, I'll send. I'll go where God wants me to go. I have no preference. My desires are. I have no desires.

Kyson Dana [00:44:18] No, I had desires. I wanted to go foreign, probably because I felt like going foreign would validate my specialness. Again, if I could have picked anywhere, I probably would have chosen India. I was quite fascinated after reading that World Religions book. I was fascinated by India and the intersection between Buddhism and Hinduism and this, like, crazy cultural clash that was so foreign to me.

John Dehlin [00:44:39] I took that class as well at byu.

Margi Dehlin [00:44:41] I did, too.

John Dehlin [00:44:42] Jainism.

Margi Dehlin [00:44:43] It was a great class, you know?

John Dehlin [00:44:45] Yeah, yeah.

Kyson Dana [00:44:46] And what I wanted to go to India for was to look for where they have parts of the truth, but not the wholeness of truth. It was still from this ethnocentric point of view of a Mormon. But, yeah, I didn't really want to go to Russia. Russia didn't sound good.

Margi Dehlin [00:45:00] That wasn't a. How about. What had you been. What did you absorbed or been taught about a mission? Like, did you have any expectations or hopes, let's say, for your mission?

Kyson Dana [00:45:11] Yeah, at that point, I'm sure I did. I. My dad's mission was so transformative for him, and he was like AP on his mission. He thrived on his mission and only shared positive stories about the mission. Ironically, I didn't ever hear about the people that my dad knew on my mission. It was never about, like, this person's life changed. And this is why it's meaningful to me. He didn't really stay in contact with anybody that he was with, but it was like a. This is the person that I became because of my mission. And so that's kind of how I mentally approached the mission too. Obviously, read, like, the stories of Alma and Amulek and like, these, like, heroic missionaries. I had this idea, and they actually reinforced this pretty heavily in the mtc, that Russia was hard. Russia is a low baptizing mission to go to. But I was going to be the thing that changed that.

John Dehlin [00:45:59] To quote the Book of Mormon musical, I want to be the Mormon who changes all mankind.

Kyson Dana [00:46:03] Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course I believe that. Like, truly. I truly believe that. In fact, to jump ahead just a little bit in the mtc, I remember, in fact, they even. They did this lesson where they had all these balloons that the teacher was holding at this big conference. And he said, how many of you were told that your mission was going to be hard and that it would be hard to baptize people? And we all raise our hands because we're all going to Russia. And he goes like, pops the balloon. And he goes, that was your first faith bubble pop. He's like. And then how many believe that themselves? And the pops the second balloon and he just goes down until there's one balloon left. And he said, your mission, the outcome of your mission will only be based on the faith that you bring to your mission. If you believe, you won't be baptizing and that you're not going to have A successful mission, then you will not. And all of us just, like, you could feel, like, the energy of, like, we will have a good mission. I'm going to, like, just manifest the goodness of this outcome.

John Dehlin [00:46:55] There needs to be a documentary just on toxic Mormon object lessons.

Kyson Dana [00:46:59] Yeah. Yeah. Especially in the mtc. The MTC is unique. The MTC is a bizarre, unique place. It feels like a prison, but in, like, this fake happiness level of prison. Like. Like, two weeks ago, we were all just, like, a bunch of jerk teenagers doing reckless pranks on each other, and now we're, like, smiling and happy and shaking hands and talking about God. It's like a weird. It's a weird transition. Yeah.

Arriving in Russia and Early Mission Life

John Dehlin [00:47:23] I have to ask, what year did you go on your mission?

Kyson Dana [00:47:26] 2009.

John Dehlin [00:47:27] Whoa. 2009. Okay. And, you know, I grew up in the 80s when the Cold War was still on, so it wasn't even Russia. It was the Soviet Union. And the Soviet Union was literally politically, not religiously, but politically the evil empire.

Kyson Dana [00:47:45] Right.

John Dehlin [00:47:46] And, yeah, it was like communism, Evil Russia, nuclear bombs, and communic, godless communism. I'm curious, what. 2009. Did you say 2010. I'm curious what a 2009 Mormon from Rexburg thinks of Russia.

Kyson Dana [00:48:08] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:48:09] If anything.

Kyson Dana [00:48:11] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:48:12] This is pre Russia. Russia, Russia. Donald Trump stuff, right?

Kyson Dana [00:48:15] Yeah, definitely.

John Dehlin [00:48:16] Pre.

Kyson Dana [00:48:16] Pre war with Ukraine. I.

John Dehlin [00:48:20] Did you even think anything?

Kyson Dana [00:48:22] No, I really didn't think about Russia.

John Dehlin [00:48:24] Okay.

Kyson Dana [00:48:24] I thought of Russia as being cold.

John Dehlin [00:48:26] Yeah.

Kyson Dana [00:48:26] I didn't have, like, a lot of fear. I didn't have them as the evil empire.

John Dehlin [00:48:29] Okay.

Kyson Dana [00:48:30] I knew that the Soviet wall, you know, come down in 92. I immediately got a bunch of books from the library and started to try to learn about Russia's history so that I could understand. I got.

John Dehlin [00:48:42] Did you read, like. Did you read, like, Animal Farm or.

Kyson Dana [00:48:45] I read Animal Farm in high school.

John Dehlin [00:48:46] So indeed were you told that was a metaphor for Trotsky and style and Lenin?

Kyson Dana [00:48:50] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:48:51] And so did you know about the communist Bolshevik revolution and all that stuff in high school? Did you?

Kyson Dana [00:48:56] I probably knew about the Bolshevik Revolution briefly after reading Animal Farm, but I didn't. It wasn't something I could have regurgitated. Back to you.

John Dehlin [00:49:02] Yeah. Like, if you weren't living the Cold War, it'd be hard for the. The lessons of, like, Animal Farm to really sink in.

Kyson Dana [00:49:11] Yeah. Yeah. You know, I had an. I had the sense that the attitude I. I went to Russia with was that this was a country that had faced a lot of trauma and war and evilness from communism, that. That had collapsed and they were probably in a state of disarray and were looking for the truth and that we were going to bring it.

Margi Dehlin [00:49:32] They were primed for you.

Kyson Dana [00:49:33] Yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:49:35] Oh, man.

Kyson Dana [00:49:36] Did I know anything about Eastern Orthodox Christianity? Did I understand that Christianity actually originated from that part of the world and that there were monasteries that some of the apostles that were with Christ are said to have died in those places? Like, no. I had no respect for their religion, their culture. I just went thinking that I had what they were missing and I was ready to give it to them.

Margi Dehlin [00:49:58] Yeah.

Kyson Dana [00:49:59] And then in the mtc, you don't learn any of that either. They teach you a few little like. Like, they like potatoes. Yeah, yeah. And like a few little like, nursery rhyme songs that are in Russian. But I did not get educated on their culture. And not like, obviously the. The teachers were from. Had served Russia missions, and so they had a lot of love for the people of Russia and respected them. But yeah, it was a very ethnocentric point of view that I was approaching that with.

John Dehlin [00:50:25] And how many missions. How many Russia missions were there at the time you got called there?

Kyson Dana [00:50:31] I want to say five.

John Dehlin [00:50:32] Really?

Kyson Dana [00:50:32] Yeah. There was like, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Samara, Novosibirsk, and then Rostov, Nadanu.

John Dehlin [00:50:42] How many are there now? Just for context, do you know?

Kyson Dana [00:50:44] Zero. Zero. It's all shut down. Yeah, yeah. And what you really failed, brother? I did, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:50:52] I'm kidding.

Kyson Dana [00:50:53] The Kiev Temple was dedicated while we were there, so the work was. Was working. What also happened that was unique is there was a wave of. Of missionaries sent to Russia in the 90s that kind of established the church. Right when the wall came down, Russia was more open for that wave. And they actually had a lot of success in baptizing and building up branches. So there were. There were a lot of members that were there on the books. And then it. It shut down for a period of time and I'm not. I'm not sure why, and then reopened about two years before I got my call. And there was a big wave of missionaries that went then. And then it shut down again and they didn't allow anybody else in. There was an incident that they had where the Russian government had a conflict with Jehovah Witnesses about something that happened with them. And somebody was like, killed. There was a Jehovah Witness killed somebody or something. Some drama happened in Russia. And then Russia really like, hyper cut down on how much proselytizing they were going to allow from these Western Protestant religions. And when there were like, in my the mission that I was called to, There were about 200 missionaries there two years before I arrived. And then it. It was shut down. And we were the first wave of new missionaries to come back in. And so when we arrived, all of these missionaries that were experienced went home. Within six months, like, all of them were gone. And so we had no senior missionaries that had more experience than we did. We were the senior missionaries, like, right away.

Margi Dehlin [00:52:25] Wow.

Kyson Dana [00:52:26] And there were only 30 of us.

Margi Dehlin [00:52:28] 30?

Kyson Dana [00:52:28] 30, yeah.

Margi Dehlin [00:52:29] Versus 200.

Kyson Dana [00:52:30] Versus 200. Yep. And we arrived at the same time that our new mission president arrived. We all went in together. He was Russian. He was a convert, did not have Mormon culture down, had never lived in Utah and Provo, didn't understand the rules of what it means to be a good mission president. Um, and so I actually really, really like him. And. And we got along really well. Um, and I really love his wife, but I could tell that, like, as I got going in the mission, I could see him going through his own version of, like, whoa. Like, this is hard. And I don't know if I'm. I don't know what I've signed up for. And we've got years of this left to get through. And he had a teenage daughter that was there with them on the mission. They lived in a nice neighborhood in a mission home, so they had it. They weren't proselytizing every day like we were as missionaries, so they had it easier. But I think they were also shocked by what we, as young boys from Utah and Idaho, were suddenly facing.

John Dehlin [00:53:22] This is totally off track, but any idea if your mission president is still an active, faithful member today?

Kyson Dana [00:53:29] I don't know about today. When I was going through my faith crisis later, I reached out to him for support and did not get it. He shut it down.

John Dehlin [00:53:40] Yeah.

Kyson Dana [00:53:40] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:53:41] We just interviewed, released yesterday, an interview with one of the first mission presidents in Italy. And he was a recent young convert to Italy back in, I don't know, the 70s. And then immediately he and his wife were called as mission presidents. And he's just recently left the church.

Kyson Dana [00:53:58] Wow.

John Dehlin [00:53:59] And I just. I. There's certain contexts that would just seem to be almost too much for a young Mormon convert with the young family. And that's your situation seems to be.

Kyson Dana [00:54:12] Yeah. I wonder. I wonder. And they were highly intelligent. He was like a businessman. Worked with a man that was from Utah. That's how he was introduced to the LDS Church. So when. When communism fell, they began an exporting business where they would take things like grand pianos and Ship them from Russia really cheaply and sell them in the US he was kind of like the Russian handler there. In Russia.

John Dehlin [00:54:32] I thought you were going to say he was the Doterra representative in Russia.

Kyson Dana [00:54:35] I actually, I met a lot of Doterra representatives in Russia that would try to get us into their mlm.

Margi Dehlin [00:54:38] That's hilarious.

Kyson Dana [00:54:40] They would be so excited when they meet us. They'd be like, oh, Mormons. Like we have, we're the same. And I'm like, I don't see the connection here now. Later I'm like, oh, I get the MLM connection.

Margi Dehlin [00:54:49] So a quick follow up to that. Did it. Was that something you recognized and that landed with you at the time, this reticence in your mission president, like to me going into a different country language, all the things you're facing, sometimes you looked, I would imagine you're looking to leadership of like, are we good? Are we good? If they're kind of like, you know, if you sense this, wow. This feel like this may be daunting or some type of reticence from the. Did that land with you? Of like, woo. Maybe this is going to be harder than I thought. Or oh. Or was it. Did it not. Was it kind of just one of the many points?

Kyson Dana [00:55:30] Yeah. And I think, I think both he and I entered the the mission field with the same level of like zealot. Like the mission has been waiting for us to arrive. Like he seemed, they seemed very excited to be there at the beginning. Matched. Matched my own level of enthusiasm. So yeah, I can get into later. As I was going through difficulties, I watched him internalizing them as he's witnessing all of us going through difficulties. And I watched his faith shift. He might completely disagree if you were to hear this, but that's fine. But it was hard and I don't think there's a single missionary in my mission that would have a difficult time hearing some of the stories that I'm probably going to share in a minute and be like, yep, that happened and that was hard.

John Dehlin [00:56:15] Yeah. Well, you mentioned in your outline that violence just started occurring almost immediately. Like just really quickly. I was never assaulted on my mission. I looking back, there are things I did that were really dangerous. Like I rode on the top of a bus through the mountains for hours. Where did you serve in Guatemala where there were like steep hill, you know, where the drop offs, where if the bus went over the edge I'd be dead, you know. Yep. Like, you know, or just like the, the traffic could be unsafe or the pollution. But Margi's brother went to Brazil and he had a gun. Actually, now that I say it, my mission president and his wife were carjacked a couple times where people just walked up to them while they were stopped at a stoplight and stuck a gun either in their head or in their chest and said, get out of the car. And they drove away with their cars. Like, that's. And then we've done. We've done former Mormon stories episodes with, like, sister missionaries that were literally raped or assaulted on their mission because they were put in unsafe places.

Violence, Danger, and Trauma on the Mission

Kyson Dana [00:57:20] Right.

John Dehlin [00:57:20] And one thing that we just don't cover enough and that I don't think the church. I think the church could do better with is putting missionaries in harm's way.

Kyson Dana [00:57:31] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:57:31] And so just a, Just a bit of a. Just a heads up that we're going to be talking about violence. And it's important because way too many missionaries are probably unintentionally put in harm's way.

Kyson Dana [00:57:44] Yep.

John Dehlin [00:57:45] So, yep, the violence begins almost immediately.

Kyson Dana [00:57:48] Yeah. Yeah. I arrived week one jet lagged. You spend the night in the mission home. The next day they give you your companion and we immediately start proselytizing, like knocking doors and trying to talk to people. I can't speak Russian, obviously, at all. I thought I could until I arrived. I was like, I can't understand anything anybody's saying and I don't know what's going on. The first person I tried to walk up to yelled something at me and spit on me. First person. And I, I was like, what did he say? And he's like, he just said, f you. And I was like, oh, okay. Like, that's cool. And at the time, it was like, almost like this honorary badge of honor, you know, like, we're, we're facing hardships and I'm here to take it. And I knew this is going to be how it is.

John Dehlin [00:58:32] The fulfillment of prophecy.

Kyson Dana [00:58:33] Exactly. And we had to go. I can't remember what we were doing. We had to get to the mission office. I was in. I was. My first city I was in was in Rostov, the main city of the mission, which is a huge city. Um, I'm not sure what the population is, but I had never been in cities before. Like, Salt Lake City was the biggest city I'd ever been in up until that point. And I'm willing to, like, I can look at myself now as, like, you know, the TV show Kimmy Schmidt. Like, I was naive. I thought I knew the world. I thought I was, like, educated and tough. And I Was so outside of my element and kind of scared, but I was stuffing that scared feeling down every single day. Just like, you're good, you're good. And the first week we're going. We have to get to the mission office. We're going through this underground pedestrian tunnel, and it's to cross this busy highway. So there's, like, a lot of people passing through in the tunnel. There's all these shops and, like, trinket things are selling DVDs that are bootlegged. Like, it's. It's chaotic in there. And ahead of us in this tunnel, we can see these people kind of brushing up against each other and arguing and yelling and these two men. And I don't know what's going on. We also. I don't know why this was the case, but none of the missionaries. It was our group of missionaries that were passing through, the new missionaries. So we weren't with anybody that was experienced at all. And so none of us can speak Russian. None of us really know what's going on. We see this fight breaking out ahead of us, and then suddenly people start screaming, and we, like, 10ft away from this going on. And I watched this man grab a piece of rebar that was there next to one of these booths and just run it through the stomach of this guy he was arguing with, and he just collapsed the floor. Like, eyes rolled back in his head, blood everywhere. People are wailing, and we just walk past it and then get out of the tunnel. And we needed to get lunch, and we go into a McDonald's and we sit down and we eat our hamburgers, and all of us are just sitting there in silence. And none of us in that group talked about that experience ever. Like, we didn't talk about it with each other. We didn't talk about it with our mission president. Yeah, yeah.

Margi Dehlin [01:00:50] And.

Kyson Dana [01:00:51] And if I would have, like, the interim dialogue I was having in my head at the time was like, whoa, so glad God protected us. And part of me. It's kind of strange. I'm going to share some more scary stories, and I don't know why. I had a lot of circumstances where I would say God did protect me. Like, some weird things happened where I could have been killed and I wasn't. And that's confusing. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:01:22] When I was on a mission, there was a rule in the handbook. Don't write home about negative things.

Kyson Dana [01:01:27] Oh, yeah? Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:01:27] Was that the same mission?

Kyson Dana [01:01:29] Yeah, they. They told us that over and over and over again in the MTC before we were Even there, which almost.

Margi Dehlin [01:01:34] What.

John Dehlin [01:01:34] What type of message does that send to a missionary in terms of how to process. Like you just said, how to process something bad that happens. What is it? Yeah, what does that do? What. Why do you think none of you talked about.

Kyson Dana [01:01:54] Was. It was confusing to hold at that. At that first week I was. I remember grappling with like the length of time that I was going to be in this place. It like hit me really abruptly of like, this is sketchy. Like, the apartment we lived in was made of concrete. It had like a rug on the floor to provide carpeted floor against concrete. The shower was in a concrete shower. The food was not good. We did not feel safe. Like, I got spit on. And so then watching this person be murdered in front of me, it was like, well, what are you going to do about it? Like, what are you going to do? It felt like changing sprinkler pipes. Like I'm at the beginning of this hundred pipe field and I'm on pipe three and I'm crying because I can't lift this, but what are you going to do? You've got to move all those pipe. And I remember feeling like I missed my family, but I couldn't miss my family. I wanted to go home, but I couldn't wanna go home. I did not wanna be there, but I couldn't not wanna be there. And so I literally remember writing in my journal. Cause you have to write in your journal every night before you go to bed about what happened that day. And I remember writing like, I will not feel these feelings and God will help me not feel them. And I, like, it was like a internal, like I packaged it up, pushed it down, and it was gone. And I never cried one time my whole mission. I never felt homesick. I never complained to my parents about how I was facing difficulties. I never complained to my mission president that I was facing difficulties. It was just something in me cut off that very first week emotionally. And I never opened it back up again.

Margi Dehlin [01:03:38] Interesting.

John Dehlin [01:03:38] And I don't, I don't mean to compare it to something as significant as like a, a combat veteran, but I, I relate, you know, later in my life, people in my life who loved me won't name any names, you know, would, would, would notice that sometimes I could be harsh or unfeeling or just disconnected from my own feelings or experiences or from others.

Kyson Dana [01:04:16] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:04:16] And I think, oh, I kind of learned that on my mission.

Kyson Dana [01:04:18] Yeah. My wife can tell you lots of stories of me being the same way. It was difficult. What Was strange is I could conjure emotionality when talking about the gospel, but I could not conjure emotionality when it was related to my own inner experience that I was having.

John Dehlin [01:04:33] Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [01:04:34] Oh, that's so significant.

John Dehlin [01:04:35] Yeah, yeah.

Margi Dehlin [01:04:36] So significant.

John Dehlin [01:04:37] Yeah, yeah.

Margi Dehlin [01:04:38] So when you. So looking back at that, was it like more of a disassociate, like, dissociating or a freeze? Do you think it was like a freeze? Like, how do you think about it? Or like, parts work, you exiled parts in that moment of like, we will not survive if these parts of me live. So I'm exiling the parts that feel that actually, you know.

Kyson Dana [01:05:04] Yeah, you said that really well. It was like a survival feeling. The. The feeling was I have too long to be here in this environment to feel the whole time. I can't feel all of this. It's too scary. I. I don't want to be here deeply enough. And the. I have to point out that the feeling of not wanting to be there was the same feeling of like, I'm having a sexual thought and that's not allowed to exist within me. So the. Even the idea of not wanting to be there was packed with shame that I even wanted to think about not wanting to be there anymore.

Margi Dehlin [01:05:41] Yes.

John Dehlin [01:05:42] Yeah.

Kyson Dana [01:05:42] So I gave. I gave myself no room. It wasn't like. It wasn't like I spent the next two years wishing that I wasn't on my mission. I took those thoughts and put them away, and they never came out again.

Margi Dehlin [01:05:53] Do you know what it reminds me of? And I think this does come up in our. In mission stories a bit, is it's like the annihilation of any remnant of a self that's not the conditioned self.

Kyson Dana [01:06:07] Yeah. In fact, I have an example of that. Specifically, they told us to take with us a photo book of our family and our life before so that we could share it with people. Because they told us, like, the Russians will be really curious what your life in America is like. So we had this little flip book, and I'd cater onto my scripture case and like, show people just to start conversation. And I threw it away the first week because I did not. I would, like, look at those images and, like, I would look at me with my friends. I would look at me like skiing with my family. I'd look at me in the outdoors. And I. Right after high school, I had gone to Alaska and I was like this river guide, and that was like. I was like, alive with, like, the. The feeling the world is big and I get to explore it everywhere. And so I had photos of that and I was like, nope. Like, that cannot exist within me. I. I was. My wife and I weren't dating. Like, she wasn't, like, waiting for me. But we were still in close contact. We knew each other and dated before my mission. And I wrote her a letter and said, I, this is going to hurt your feelings, but I can't talk to you anymore because it's. I'm dedicated to. The work is how I framed it to her. And what it really was is that, like, I'm having, like a really hard time all of a sudden and

John Dehlin [01:07:18] anything

Kyson Dana [01:07:18] of my past has to be cut off because it's going to hurt way too much to do this for the next two years in this way. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:07:26] And there's so much more to your story that we'll get to. But I just have to say one last thing. In the Book of Mormon musical, the elder that wants to go to Orlando, you know, Elder Price gets called to Uganda, and he gets to Uganda. And maybe in different ways, but comparably he experiences a reality in Uganda very different from the Orlando experience he wanted.

Kyson Dana [01:07:50] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:07:50] And that's when the song Turn it off comes in.

Kyson Dana [01:07:52] Yep.

John Dehlin [01:07:52] Because he. I think he witnesses a death or a murder too, or gangsters or whatever. And we always. I think it's common to take that song, Turn it Off as a joke, just apply it. Well, as a joke, or to just

Margi Dehlin [01:08:04] apply it to being gay or sexuality, Sexual desire. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:08:08] But it's much more than that.

Kyson Dana [01:08:10] Yep.

John Dehlin [01:08:11] And I think that's what my story in yours and others is. You turn off you.

Kyson Dana [01:08:18] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:08:19] Like Mormonism at its worst, a Mormon mission at its worst, teaches you to turn off you.

Kyson Dana [01:08:26] Yeah. Yeah, it does. And the film that I created that got all these views, what I tried to do with that is tell that story using music and visuals and tell it. I didn't want to tell it. Like an intellectual. This isn't an intellectual thing that I went through. This isn't like a, oh, I didn't have a good enough faith or I didn't understand. I didn't. Like, I get all these comments from people that are like, oh, you clearly, like, weren't a good missionary, or you didn't have. Your parents must have forced you to go. And it's so opposite of what I was like at the time. And yeah, like, it's deeply emotional. It was a deeply emotional cutting off to go through.

John Dehlin [01:09:08] So Week two skinheads.

Kyson Dana [01:09:10] Yeah, it didn't get better at all. My trainer was awesome. I loved my trainer and he loved emo music, and it was like a saving grace for me. We would talk about music all day long about. And that was like. It was both of our ways of, like, disassociating from the current present place that we were in and talking about, like, what we actually loved. One thing was when we walked into our. My first apartment, I love playing guitar. And in fact, in my patriarchal blessing, it tells me that music will be a way that I will process pain and difficulties in life. So I walk into my apartment and there's a guitar there that some missionary had purchased and had left in there. And I was like, oh, like, by saving grace, I've been thinking for the three months that I was in the mtc, I cannot wait to get home and finally play the guitar. And I thought I had to wait all those two years and to have one there was just like a gift from God. And I unpack my stuff, I pick up the guitar, and I walk into, like, around the corner into the kitchen area, and I'm just like, picking some songs. And it's like, like. It was like such a relief. It was an emotional relief to have this place of safety for me. And my trainer did what he was supposed to do. He walked into the room and said, hey, Elder, just so you know, we can only play guitar for one hour on Mondays. I was like, b day. I was like, oh, okay. And then we put it back under the bed. And I remember being like, that sucks. Like, I was. I was feeling such an emotional relief to have this thing of safety for me that felt familiar and it got taken away. That was the one rule that later in my mission I blatantly broke. And I did not care at all because I was like, I need this. And I justified it with my patriarchal blessing. It was like, God knows something about me that these people don't. And I'm going to follow that.

Margi Dehlin [01:10:53] Yeah.

Kyson Dana [01:10:55] So that was like week Joseph Smith

John Dehlin [01:10:56] told Nancy Rigdon, what's wrong in one circumstance.

Kyson Dana [01:10:59] Exactly. Yeah. Can you use the doctrine against itself?

John Dehlin [01:11:03] It's called the happiness letter. Yep.

Kyson Dana [01:11:05] Yep. So week two, we would just start proselyting. And we didn't have any investigators, we didn't have any people we were working with. We would go into these tall apartment buildings that were Soviet built. The stairwells of them were grungy, and they would paint the walls with like, this chalky paint stuff so that you wouldn't touch the wall, because if you touched it, it would get white all over your clothes and that would prevent, like, graffiti and stuff in there, but they were cold and dark and not lit. And we would go up, like, 60 stories, walking up these stairs, and then we would just start knocking doors. And everybody's doors had two layers to them. There's the outside door that's metal, and then the inside door that's wooden that actually opens into their house. We knocked the metal one. People didn't open their doors. They would come to the door and yell at us like, who is it? And just like, these old ladies would yell at us, and we'd be like, we're the missionaries. And the word missionary is sounds like militiari, which is police. And they'd be like, you're the police? And like, no, we're the. We're the missionaries from the church. And they're like, which church? And like, the Mormon Church. And then they would yell back, like, sectanti, which is like your cult members. And then we would just do it again. And we would do that all day long.

John Dehlin [01:12:16] I wonder how Russians learned that, because most people, even the United States, if you say Mormons are like, what's that? I mean, that's changed in the past couple years because of all the reality tv. But just five years ago, you asked the average US Citizen what a Mormon is. They're like, I think they're Mennonites or Amish. I'm not sure. Something about polygamy. But to know that they're a culture. Yeah, most people in the world don't even know that. So I wonder how so many Russians.

Hostility, Attacks, and Abductions in Russia

Kyson Dana [01:12:44] You know, I think to view the

John Dehlin [01:12:45] Mormon Church as a cult.

Kyson Dana [01:12:46] I think I have an answer to that. And it's cool. It's. The Jehovah Witnesses were also very prominent in Russia, and they were proselytizing as well. We would run into them all the time on the streets, and I would think they were so weird, like, just so funny. Now we would, like, Bible bash with them. And then I walk away like, those guys are so strange. Not at all, like, recognizing that I am the same thing as that. But they.

John Dehlin [01:13:10] It's like that Spider man meme where, like.

Kyson Dana [01:13:12] Yeah, exactly. Exactly. They had an incident, which. This is why the. The missionaries, the numbers got cut back. I think what ended up happening is somebody was proselyting that was a Jehovah Witness. They told somebody that if they killed themselves, they wouldn't. Like, they wouldn't exist after they did. I don't know what their theology is that explains where you go after you die. Well, the person killed themselves, and then the Russian national tv, because Their whole. Their media is all nationalized, their church is nationalized. They just spread the propaganda that these are cults, this is what they look like and don't talk to them. And so we showed up about six months after that incident happened. So we got. We had no receptivity. And I think that was part of the violence that we received as well. I was seen as a symbol of a thing, not as a human. I was. I was seen not just a religious symbol, but like a symbol of Western ideology creeping into Russia. And this is a part of Russia that is like as MAGA and conservative as you can be, but within Russia. They were uneducated, a lot of them, highly conservative, highly Russia first kind of a mindset.

John Dehlin [01:14:22] And so you can, you can say they weren't educated. Maybe let's just start time to maga.

Kyson Dana [01:14:26] Yeah, we'll bring in MAGA to it. They. It just felt like. It felt actually deeply familiar to me of Idaho. It was a farm, farming areas. They grew potatoes. It was flat, it was cold. And these people would. They hated us. They hated us. There was a wall that Russians had up against letting people in and especially Westerners and especially religious foreign Westerners. And once you. There were some people that, like, we got to know and that I became friends with and we converted some people too. And once their wall would come down, like, they were so kind and so loving and beautiful. And I get why they had that wall. Like, they had faced incredible, like decades and decades of trauma in their own lives. And. And yeah, I understand it if I'm

John Dehlin [01:15:16] Russia and the United States is my mortal enemy. And I know that Mormon missionaries supply the CIA and the State Department and the FBI, you know, more per capita employees than any other tradition. Yep. There's no way I'm letting Mormon missionaries in my country.

Kyson Dana [01:15:41] Yeah. So it's justified skepticism.

John Dehlin [01:15:44] Or if I am, it's like with a lot of concern and caution.

Kyson Dana [01:15:48] Yeah. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:15:49] Why would Russia want Mormon missionaries in, you know, Russia?

Kyson Dana [01:15:53] I'm not sure.

John Dehlin [01:15:53] Yeah. They clearly don't.

Kyson Dana [01:15:56] Well, and the. The KGB knew us. They knew where we lived.

John Dehlin [01:15:59] Yeah.

Kyson Dana [01:16:00] They would follow us. Sometimes we would have incidences where we'd be like asleep at 11 o' clock at night, somebody be pounding on the door. We'd get up and we look through little peephole and they'd be like, we're the kgb. I didn't know if they were the KGB or not, or if they were just some like, dude that wanted to mug us so we wouldn't open the door. And then they would just eventually leave. But, like, the feeling of, like, facing violence on a daily basis and then having, like, awakened in the night with somebody that's like, we're the police. You need to open the door. It just put us into, like, this. This heightened state of vigilance that never could be turned off, ever.

John Dehlin [01:16:35] It's like constant cortisol.

Kyson Dana [01:16:36] Yeah, Constant cortisol.

Margi Dehlin [01:16:38] Survival mode.

Kyson Dana [01:16:38] Yeah. And we learned to do it. Like, we. We managed to exist in that world. But, like. So, like you asked, week two. Week two. We are going.

John Dehlin [01:16:47] We're only on week two.

Kyson Dana [01:16:49] Yeah, yeah. Week two. I'm going home after, like, proselytizing. It's. It's getting to be. It's October. It's getting to be cold. And this group of, like, young men that are kind of like. They call them pats oni. Like, these, like, kind of gangster kids that are out there on the street see us and start heckling us, start throwing rocks at us. And then. And then we go around another corner, and there's a bunch of dudes there that have their heads shaved and are wearing these, like, big army boots. And they just start telling us they're sorry. I don't know what they're saying because I don't speak Russian. They're yelling at us. My companions just, like, backing away. And then he just goes running. And we start running, and these guys are chasing us, and they're yelling at us the whole time, and we run. We're running back to our apartment, but then we're like, we don't know if we want them to know where we live. So we, like, do this big loop around the block to try to lose them. We're hiding behind cars. We eventually make our way to our apartment, run up the stairs, shut the door and lock it, turn our lights off just in case they saw us go in so they wouldn't see the lights go on and know where we live. And then I'm like, what were they yelling at us? And he said they were saying they were going to scalp us. I was like, you think they really would? He's like, I don't know. They were like, there are some, like, skinhead types here that are violent with people. And so I was like, okay. And then he's like, by the way, I should probably tell you, my companion that I had previous to you one time got abducted and shoved into a back of a car in this neighborhood over here. So that's why we don't go over there. And I was like, okay, this is terrifying. Yeah. And the heightened sense of.

John Dehlin [01:18:14] Wait, is there a movie about that? There is a Mormon movie.

Kyson Dana [01:18:16] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:18:17] No one. The guy who got shoved into the trunk attended a Thrive conference he lives in.

Kyson Dana [01:18:21] Oh, really? Okay.

John Dehlin [01:18:22] Yeah. What's that? The Cara Pop experience or something like that.

Kyson Dana [01:18:26] I haven't watched them intentionally.

John Dehlin [01:18:27] Yeah, it's too triggering for no kid.

Margi Dehlin [01:18:29] I can imagine.

John Dehlin [01:18:29] Yeah. There is a Mormon movie that. That retells that story. And one of our listeners is the. Is the missionary who was shoved in the trunk.

Kyson Dana [01:18:37] Well, we. We.

John Dehlin [01:18:39] If it's the same story, but I.

Kyson Dana [01:18:41] I don't think it's the same. I think that one happened in Moscow.

John Dehlin [01:18:43] Oh, okay. Okay.

Kyson Dana [01:18:44] This was a. This was a thing that happened.

Margi Dehlin [01:18:46] Oh, this is terrifying. I cannot imagine.

Kyson Dana [01:18:49] Yeah, and what was so strange is, like, you know, you're. You're 19. You're, like, zealous and reckless, and danger is fun. And so we're facing these things, and then would, like, rally when we get to zone conferences and swap stories about, like, sketchy things that were happening, and we took it as a badge of honor. But what I didn't. Excuse me. What I wasn't able to hold at that time and that I can hold now is badge of honor or not, you're still like a mammal with a nervous system. And when you're put into circumstances where you're facing violence and trauma regularly, that's going to play a role in your nervous system. And so you can, like, laugh it away all you want, but, like, it's still going to impact you. Can I just.

John Dehlin [01:19:29] Yeah, like, I'm just processing all this. The Book of Mormon has. Probably the most famous story in the Book of Mormon that missionaries connect to is the story of Ammon. In the story of Ammon, this Nephite, this white Nephite just wanders into a violent Lamanite tribe. Slash, civilization, starts getting attacked by Lamanites, and he engages in sword combat, but because God's with him, he chops off the arms of dozens, if not hundreds of Lamanites. And then it's a happy ending because eventually he kills or chops off enough arms that the king brings him in front of the king to say, who is this man with so much power? And the man says, I'm a prophet of God or whatever. And then he converts the king.

Margi Dehlin [01:20:21] Doesn't he bring the arms?

John Dehlin [01:20:23] Yeah, the arms are piled up in a pile in front of the king. Yes. And what message does that send to missionaries?

Kyson Dana [01:20:30] Right. Well, you know what's ironic about that all is it sends a Miss a message that part of being a missionary is violent. So it validated that what we were experiencing is what we should be experiencing as a missionary. But ironically, we were specifically told, if anybody assaults you, do not hit back ever. Ever. Under any circumstances can you hit back. Because if you hit back, you will be sent home immediately and the Russian mission might shut down entirely. Yeah, if Russia has an excuse to shut down the missions that they will, and they don't. You don't want to be that excuse for them. So it was a strange, like, feeling of being. It was like. It felt like being in like a sketchy combat zone without a gun in a way. And like, and intentionally trying to like, like. I learned to de escalate situations really well because of the stuff we'd face. Um, can I share another story?

John Dehlin [01:21:20] Like, week three, by the way, Saratov approaches the movie. Thanks, Julius. Approach. But that's just one of many missionary abductions. But yes, week three, this is like week three.

Kyson Dana [01:21:32] Week five. It was somewhere in the first transfer. We go up to the top of this apartment building. I think There are about eight stories there. It's morning time. Like 10am in the morning. We're just getting started in the day.

John Dehlin [01:21:42] Only 96 more weeks to go, by the way.

Kyson Dana [01:21:44] Exactly. We knock on this door and this guy opens the door and he's. Pupils are like great big. He's clearly on drugs and drunk. And we were like, oh, we're missionaries. But like, we'll come back later. Like, and he's just yells at us, like, get out of this building. And we're like, well, we might want to talk to your neighbors. Like, we can talk to them. We just won't bother you. And he's like, no, get out of this building, like right now. And my companion kind of like sasses him back and like, pushes against it, like, listen, bud, like, we're going to leave. We're going to leave you alone, but we're going to keep talking to knocking doors on the rest of the building. The guy grabs a knife that's sitting there on his mantle and steps out with a knife and runs at my companion. My companion takes off down the stairs. I'm then behind him fleeing down the stairs too. And this guy is following me and grabbing at my coat the whole time I'm running on the stairs. We spiral down all eight stories. He is with me the entire time. When we get to the bottom of the stairs, there is a, like a dark stairwell and there's no light that's down there. And we can't see anything. And so both of us just, like, smash into the door and. And come flying out onto the sidewalk, like, on our hands and knees. I'm crawling, trying to get away, and then I roll over and put my feet up because I'm expecting to need to, like, kick this dude that's going to want to stab me. And luckily, the door that we bust out never swings open. He doesn't follow us all the way out. And I got up in that time, and I was shaking so badly, and I, like, I just. I was afraid I was going to cry. And I'm crying for my companion, and he just got up and was, like, laughing and brushed himself off. And he's like, we should probably go to a different area today so that we don't run into this guy again. And I was like, yeah. And so we go. And we get to go to the bus stop, and we get on the bus, and, you know, you're supposed to talk to everybody that's on the bus. And so we intentionally don't sit by each other so that we can double our odds of talking to the next person. This lady sits down next to me, and I just thought, like, I can't talk to her. And, like, I remember just, like, staring out the window as we drove to a different area, just like, what am I doing? Like, am I really gonna do this for two years? And, like, I did, you know, I eventually became that senior companion that could laugh and brush off, like, really dangerous things. And it's kind of bizarre to, like, hold. Now, looking back,

John Dehlin [01:24:08] I think at least a couple dozen Mormon missionaries, as I understand it, die each year on their mission. But I think the church's response is more young Mormons who don't serve missions die than who die serving their missions. So staying home is slightly more dangerous. More dangerous than going on a Mormon mission? On average. But.

Kyson Dana [01:24:32] Yeah, interesting.

John Dehlin [01:24:33] But it's. Anyway.

Margi Dehlin [01:24:35] But the interesting thing about that is death isn't the only horrible thing that

Kyson Dana [01:24:42] can happen to you.

Margi Dehlin [01:24:43] Maybe we shouldn't be measuring.

Kyson Dana [01:24:45] Death is the ultimate number to decide whether it's a good thing or a bad thing.

John Dehlin [01:24:49] Yeah, there's more. Yeah, yeah. And so you, You. You mentioned this previously, but your mission starts deteriorating in terms of how many missionaries there are.

Kyson Dana [01:24:58] Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we had a big group. I think when I arrived, there were about 60, but dwindling really quickly. Every transfer, like a whole new batch would go home, and then we would get maybe three or four new ones. So, like, 30 would leave, and three or four new. And the previous missionaries had so much nostalgia for the good old days when there were hundreds of them and they had this American mission president that cared about them. They loved to talk badly about our current mission president that was Russian, and maybe a little more. Like, these things didn't shake him because this is the culture that he grew up in. So if we. It was like, who am I going to complain to about these things? Like, can't complain to this guy. And so we didn't really even talk to him about it, but he did give us a right. When we arrived, they gave us a little tag that had the church's lawyer's phone number on it and said, if any incidents happen or you need help, this is, like, the number to call. I didn't know who that person was, but they were at least aware enough of violence and arrests that were happening to missionaries that they armed us with that legal contact.

Margi Dehlin [01:25:51] You got a card.

Kyson Dana [01:25:52] Yep.

John Dehlin [01:25:53] And remind me, did they ever explain why the mission had been downsized from 120 missionaries the year before you arrived to only 30?

Kyson Dana [01:26:02] They said, yeah. They said it was because of the incident that happened with the Jehovah Witness proselytization. Yeah. So. So that. That really emphasized to us, like, do not fight back.

John Dehlin [01:26:11] Yeah. Pressure.

Kyson Dana [01:26:12] You could ruin this whole thing. And some missionaries would carry around chapstick in their palms of their hands while we proselyted, because some of them were like, screw that. Like, if some dude hits me in the face or pulls a knife on me, I'm not just gonna die. Like. And it was kind of like this joke. I love serving with companions that were big and strong and loved to, like, work out, because I just was like, I'm safe.

Margi Dehlin [01:26:32] Yeah.

Kyson Dana [01:26:32] And I'm, like, six foot one. I'm not, like, a small guy, but I'm not ripped or built or anything. So. Yeah. When I had companions later on, when I was a senior companion that weren't very strong either, are the number of incidents that we would have happened to us just, like, skyrocketed. Like, it would. We were a target factor.

Margi Dehlin [01:26:49] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:26:50] Julie's asking, why chapstick?

Kyson Dana [01:26:52] Oh, because Chapstick would increase the strength of their fist if they were to punch somebody with something in your hand.

Margi Dehlin [01:26:59] Right.

Kyson Dana [01:27:00] Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [01:27:00] And it's something you likely would. Could have. Have access to that wasn't.

Kyson Dana [01:27:04] Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [01:27:05] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:27:06] So really quickly, during that first year before you became assistant to the president. Congratulations.

Kyson Dana [01:27:11] Thank you.

John Dehlin [01:27:16] I mean, it was you or 29 other guys, right?

Kyson Dana [01:27:18] Yeah. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:27:19] Just joking.

Kyson Dana [01:27:19] But, no, we joked about that. We took turns in different leadership roles because there was enough people to fill them.

John Dehlin [01:27:25] I'm totally just being silly. Yeah. Well, how receptive were the Russian people? What? Like, you know, the. The pers. The perception that I would have been given growing up is that they were all turned atheist because of godless communism, that they would. They would all be depressed, they would all be alcoholics addicted to vodka or whatever, and just dark, sad, depressed, atheist, alcoholic people who were poor.

Kyson Dana [01:27:55] Like, that's what that was, a stereotype given.

John Dehlin [01:27:57] Yeah, yeah.

Kyson Dana [01:27:58] Some of that is true and is based in reality. Some of it's not. Just like everywhere in the world, you're going to get a mix of people. There was a. Definitely a big alcohol and drug problem in Russia. And in the cities I was in, the streets had needles on them everywhere, and there was alcohol everywhere. Every one of those stairwells that we'd go up had needles in the. The stairwells. Um, the apartments that were nicer, where the wealthier people lived had a security code to door that we often couldn't get into. And so we didn't ever interact with people that were of higher income or higher, like, education and career stuff. If we met those types of people, it was always through somebody in the branch that had a contact and could connect us. We were always just like, begging for good contacts because we could not find them on the street. It was pretty depressing, to be honest, like, to face the violence and to face, like, the weather and the distance from family and then to face zero, like success as a missionary. Just it. It was the. And that was the straw that kind of broke last for me, because you're like, oh, if I'm just valiant enough, it's going to get better. And then four months in, nothing's changed. Six months in, nothing's changed. A year in, nothing's changed. And some of the places, like, some cities were nice. And in fact, the part of Russia I was in goes down to the bottom of the Black Sea or like, it borders the Black Sea. So like Sochi, where the Olympics were held, is part of the area that I was in. And Sochi's beautiful. It's. It's Mediterranean. There's palm trees. There's other parts that are very cold, like Volgograd or Stalingrad, where the Russians defeated the Nazis. Very cold. Like, when you think Russia, it's that. So big diversity of place. And with that was a big diversity of people. You go to Sochi and the people were, like, more relaxed and chill and way less violence. Weren't Receptive to the gospel that we were sharing with them. But you go to the poor towns, like this one area called Shakti, which is this like mining town that I spent six months in, was very sketchy. Like it was. Their economy had collapsed, their poverty level was insane. Our apartment was terrible. It had like a crack in the window. And in the winter when the wind would blow, it would blow our papers like off our desks. Like, you know, you'd wake up cold, you'd go to bed cold. Sometimes the water would shut off for like two or three weeks at a time of warm water. So you'd, in the winter taking cold showers every day. And the, the adventure of the mission wore off. Like after a year of that, you know, it wasn't fun anymore.

John Dehlin [01:30:29] Was the food good?

Kyson Dana [01:30:30] No, food wasn't good either.

John Dehlin [01:30:32] What was the food like?

Kyson Dana [01:30:33] Like meat and potatoes, pasta. Usually she got meat, but you know what? We didn't. I probably ate with Russians like five times. They didn't. It wasn't a culture where they hosted us. We rarely got invited to people's houses and members houses to eat food with them. So it was just these 19 year old kids that had never cooked their own meals before. So we would, the staple meal that we would eat was pasta with a bunch of like Russian mayonnaise, which is actually quite good for mayonnaise squirted into the pasta and hot dogs cut up and we just mix that all up in a big bowl and just eat that every day. And that's where like it was weird because the. I went with like, I can handle anything. The adventure is going to be fun. Put me in the crappy apartment, let me like suffer a little. And what I didn't anticipate is that I am a human with like, with a threshold of how much I can take. And I started to get really depressed.

John Dehlin [01:31:26] Yeah, it's not a trivial thing. Like you, you as a kid growing up Mormon, you hear these stories, especially in seminary of like the early Mormon pioneers who were sent to England as missionaries and they would stand up on a crate in the middle of the town square and what, finish the sentence.

Kyson Dana [01:31:44] They'd preach and people would gather and then they'd all go baptize 100 of them the next day.

John Dehlin [01:31:49] And literally one missionary would convert thousands on their mission.

Kyson Dana [01:31:52] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:31:52] So you, you put that on a missionary and you say, okay, now you could do this in Russia, you know what I mean?

Kyson Dana [01:31:58] Right.

John Dehlin [01:31:58] But the truth is, like, take all the prophecies of all the general authorities who ever told the Russian saints, how the church was going to blossom there like a rose. You can be this bright eyed bushy tailed Mormon missionary from. From Rexburg, righteous and faithful, and you're going to be the missionary that converts a thousand. But it's all pretty much out of your control, right? And then what happens when the opposite happens and everyone spits in your face, hates you and you have no success? What? There's this idea of blame reversal. I don't mean to see your response, but like what happens in your brain when that's not what happens and yet you're doing your best.

Questioning the Purpose of the Mission

Kyson Dana [01:32:42] Yeah, well, that question is one that all of us had to wrestle with and we would talk about it openly, like, what are we doing here? Because our. The branch numbers were declining, the missionary numbers were declining, the converts were declining. And so you have to ask yourself, like, what are we here for? What are we doing? Why did God send us here? The way that I internalized that and made sense, made, tried to make meaning out of the suffering that we were experiencing was that I was here to convert myself. I was here to prove to God that I could be valiant enough to withstand this trial of whatever I was given. And it wasn't. I was there to serve and I was there to love people, but I was not getting any fruits of that labor. And so it was like it had to be about me and about me helping the missionaries that I'm with. And it was us trying to survive this thing together. Like, I caught, I. We caught the. This town I was in, Shakti, this mining town, it was a terrible place. In fact, there's a YouTube video I stumbled across that's like the worst place in Russia created by Russians and they focused Shakti, Russia is the place. It is, it is bad. It's a mining town. And like picture like a decrepit mining town that no longer mines anymore, but nobody has an economy. It's just like, like, can we just

Margi Dehlin [01:33:53] have a moment for that too? Like human beings.

Kyson Dana [01:33:57] Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [01:33:57] That's their life.

Kyson Dana [01:33:58] It is their life. Yeah. Some people will criticize me when I talk about how it was hard being a missionary and be like, well, those people live there all the time. How can you, you know, lucky you, you get to go back home. And I'm like, yeah, lucky me. Like, I don't, I am not, trust me, I'm not naive to that suffering that these people are going through.

Margi Dehlin [01:34:17] Oh, to be clear, I was not thinking you were.

Kyson Dana [01:34:19] Yeah, I know.

Margi Dehlin [01:34:20] I wasn't saying you were hitting me as a human being. The Places you're describing, you know, just a moment. That's their life.

Kyson Dana [01:34:27] Yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:34:28] But going back to the idea of what are we doing here? Like, even if you got even by some miracle, you overcame international geopolitical dynamics to get a Russian interested in Mormonism. Then you bring them to a local branch and what's their experience?

Kyson Dana [01:34:48] Well, like in Shakti, for example, There was about 12 people there in attendance. We rented a second story office building to meet in. The branch president was the only male priesthood holder in the branch. We went to use the computer at the church one time to write emails home on P day. And we walk in and he's in there looking at porn on the computer. So we do what good Mormon boys do, and we reported him to the mission president that he was looking at porn. He gets released, and then he ends up leaving his wife, that transfer. So now we have no active priesthood holder that's attending. So then my companion gets put in as the branch president and he had come out with me on my mission. We were new missionaries and we'd only been there for six months. And both of us, when we were sent to Shakti, we were, we were fresh, like in the mission still. We could barely get by in Russian and we hyped ourselves up to no end of like, dude, this is our moment. This is the town that's shutting down. This is the branch that's dying and we're gonna go save this thing. And it didn't happen. Yeah. And so that was like a reckoning for me of like, what's my worth? Who am I? What am I doing here?

John Dehlin [01:36:01] But was there. I'm not being righteous enough.

Kyson Dana [01:36:04] Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. In fact, this connects back to the sexuality stuff that we were talking about at the beginning. So because we started doing these, like, inventories of like, what. What is wrong with us that's preventing success from occurring on the mission. And we got the 12 step addiction recovery book and started going through the 12 steps with each other to help overcome our own sexual desires that we had, you know, within ourselves. If, if one of us were to like, masturbate, you know, we would confess it to each other and apologize in tears and be like, I'm so sorry, I've ruined this day. Like, we're not going to have any success today because I made a mistake today in the shower, which is just terribly sad that that was, like, internalized so deeply in us.

Margi Dehlin [01:36:51] Absolutely.

Kyson Dana [01:36:52] That, that, that place in Shakti is when I had my very first, very first, like, crack in the worldview that I was holding to make sense of everything. And I started to wonder, like, is this good? Like, is this whole thing good for me? And are we doing something that's good? Because nothing that was happening aligned with any of the narratives that I was told about why I was there and what I was doing. That kind of changed at times. And, like, I ended up baptizing people and so that I made up for that or whatever. But, yeah, can I. Can I share one more thing that I kind of skipped over that's kind of important? To be in Russia, we had to have our visa renewed every three months. And previous to us arriving to renew your visa, what they would do is they would ship the missionaries to Sweden or to Finland, and they would stay on the temple grounds for, like, two weeks while their visa went through processing. They'd get the new visa, and then they'd fly back to Russia. And the missionaries loved those breaks every three months. And they would talk about that. They'd go on splits with the Swedish missionaries and just be like, dude, their mission is so different than ours. Like, it's so fun. And they're having success and the branches are huge, and they. They get to go to the temple in Finland when they were there and get this, like, revitalization. Well, when we arrived, the legal department of the church figured out a loophole where we could have two passports and carry two passports at the same time in our name. And one passport would be out of the country getting a new visa while we're using the current visa while we're in the country. And then we would have to cross the border into Ukraine, and we would meet a handler there in the bus station that would give us our new passport. We'd give him our old, and then they would put us back on the bus and back across the border.

John Dehlin [01:38:41] And they took away, like, the only solace that a Mormon missionary in Russia could have.

Kyson Dana [01:38:47] They did. And then what happened happened is the border that they would send us across is one of the most dangerous borders in the world.

John Dehlin [01:38:54] This is where there's war.

Kyson Dana [01:38:55] This is where there's now. The cities that they would send us to were Donetsk and Mariupol, and those cities don't have occupants anymore. They've been carpet bombed out entirely. They don't exist. Wow. And that's a weird. That is weird for me to hold and watch on the news. And when we would cross these borders, the first time crossing the border and three months into the mission, barely getting oriented, the bus gets to the border, you know, and there's like, a line of cars, and you have to go through the station. We go to the station. There are German shepherd dogs everywhere. There are men carrying around huge machine guns and bulletproof vests. They are yelling at everybody. Like, the heightened tension. There is intense.

John Dehlin [01:39:34] Sounds like Minnesota.

Kyson Dana [01:39:35] Yeah, yeah. No, in a way that does.

John Dehlin [01:39:37] Sorry, sorry.

Kyson Dana [01:39:39] They get us this. The soldier gets on the bus that we're on, looks at us sitting there in the front. He grabs me right here and goes, like. Pulls me off the bus. He's yelling at me, Russia. I don't know what he's saying. Pulls me into this little room, sits me down by myself and starts yelling at me, yelling. I don't know. I don't have a clue what he's saying. Two other guys come in. They're carrying machine guns. They sit across the table with me. They're yelling at me, too. The dog is there. The dog is barking. I have my passport out, and I'm like, I'm okay. Like, we're leaving your country. Like, I don't know what you're so upset about. And then finally, one of the guys comes in who speaks a little bit of English. He goes, money, money. And I was like, oh, they want money. So I empty my wallet, and then they put me back on the bus, and we get. We go across. It was just a bribe center. They're trying to scare us, knowing that we're Americans. And once I started to figure out that game after three times crossing the border, I would just load up with cash. I would stuff it in my shoe so that if I got robbed, they wouldn't find it in my wallet. And then when we get in there and if something happened, I would pull out the money and give it, slip it to them. And then they let us through the border. So then later, as I'm a more experienced missionary and we'd take younger missionaries with us across the border, we'd prep them. Like, you're going to get bribed. They're going to scare you into a bribe. Don't be intimidated. They're not really going to hurt you, but it's going to feel scary. Here's the money, sister. So and so, like, just slip it to them. And they'd yank the sisters off the bus. They'd yank anybody off the bus. And it became like this almost like initiation ritual of, like, oh, you're going on your first border crossing. Like, hang tight.

John Dehlin [01:41:09] So there were sister missionaries.

Kyson Dana [01:41:10] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:41:11] Okay. And did your parents have any idea that you were being harassed and sequestered by Russian soldiers and needing to bribe them. Zero in dangerous war zone, like, areas just to be able to stay.

Kyson Dana [01:41:26] Not at all.

Communication Restrictions and Elder Holland's Visit

John Dehlin [01:41:26] So, like, that's a huge point, is that this, you know, I think sometimes there's just flat out unmitigated evils. And one evil, if the Mormon missionary white Bible still says, don't write home about difficult stuff, that's evil. And that needs to change because parents, Mormon parents, on average. And this doubly applies to, like, Africa, you know, and, like, sometimes Mormon parents have no idea how much of a dangerous situation their own missionaries are in. And the missionaries are literally told not to write home about the difficult stuff. And that feels abusive and wrong to me.

Kyson Dana [01:42:07] Well, we. We were explicitly told on these border crossings to not write home about what happens. Explicitly. It wasn't just in the handbook. It was like something that we culturally talked about as a mission group. So I agree. I think. I don't know, as a parent now of children. My oldest, I see myself in him so much. It's like a little mirror. He's sensitive, he's emotional, he's deep. The thought of watching him go through what I know I went through and not feeling safe enough to tell me, it's kind of just heartbreaking.

Margi Dehlin [01:42:41] Yeah.

Kyson Dana [01:42:41] And what's hard is I think hearing this, not understanding full context, they might say, like, well, why? That's clearly a problem between you and your parents, like, why? Or a problem of my own that I should have just, like, been like, screw these rules. Like, I'm just going to tell my parents what's happening. I'm scared, and I feel like I'm in danger. That was a failing on my behalf that I didn't do that. And I can. I can hold part of that as true. I can also hold a part of it that the system of thought that you're part of is so deep and so entrenched that you just do what you're told with the faith that if you do what you're told, everything will work out for your good. And I believe that deeply. And what I was told was, don't write home. And I'm told this by people that are representing to be the mouthpieces of God. Like, Holland came to the MTC when we were there and gave this talk and said, I don't want you to come home early unless you're in a coffin. He said, I want you to work yourself to death.

John Dehlin [01:43:38] Oh, my gosh.

Kyson Dana [01:43:39] And I had those voices going through my head of like, I might end up home in A coffin. You know, like, this is sketchy. And so this wasn't trivial. Like, we took that, like you said, you mentioned Margi at the beginning. Like, as a Mormon, you take things very serious. And I took those direction, like directives from the church very, very seriously, I have to say.

John Dehlin [01:43:59] I. So Elder Holland just passed away. I've avoided doing an episode about him or Elder Nelson for various reasons. I, I've talked about Mormon Stories podcast. I played tennis with Elder Holland once and I was a BYU student. I had two lunches with him during my Mormon Stories years because of my brother. Like, I've, I've had, I've spent time with this guy. He does not strike me in those conversations as the type of man that would show up in a super dangerous mission and tell missionaries that it's better to come home dead than early. And yet on Reddit, ex Mormon Reddit, I've seen multiple instances where Holland, Elder Jeffrey R. Holland is quoted as having said really extreme, harmful types of things to Mormon missionaries. And so, yeah, part of me is like, I don't believe that he said that to you. But the. But then I've just seen enough other stories where I actually believe you and it's just, it's, it's unbelievable.

Kyson Dana [01:45:06] It is, it's. What I now label it as is confusing because, Because Holland on one hand boosted my faith, rallied me, gave me purpose and meaning and direction in my states of suffering. And I would read his conference talks and listen to them for solace as I was experiencing pain. And yet it was also his words that were like ringing through my head, preventing me from being open and stepping into my truth about what I was actually experiencing. And so that was confusing. Yeah, it's the same, it's the same version of like Kaisen, this punk music, emo loving kid that's also like a goody goody seminary boy. It's like the split part of me that's like, I don't know what to like, make of these two worlds together. I will say that I had. So I, I was hardcore missionary like. And in fact, most of the missionaries that were there were, we had very few, kind of like what we would call as Mormons, like a dud missionary that just like isn't working. And it's probably because they looked for the types of these. We had a lot of guys from Idaho and Utah, like the farm parts of Idaho and Utah. They probably, you know, in their, whatever criteria they used were like, these guys know how to work hard. And we all did. And what we would end up doing is. We call it Hell Week. You might have heard this from other missionaries where we would wake up an hour earlier than we were told to, which is 5:30 instead of 6:30. We would do extra studies and then we would leave the door. Instead of nine, we'd leave at eight. And then we would fast every other day all week long to show God that we were willing to sacrifice everything if he would just give us success. And so on top of the suffering that we're going through, we are inflicting more suffering upon ourselves to prove to God that we are worthy of, like, the blessings that he's going to give us. And that, that to me is a wonderful case study in the spiritual psychosis that you start to get into your mission, which I did. Like, I, I was having dreams about seeing Jesus and I would write home in my emails a testimony of, like, you guys will never believe what just happened to me this week. Like, I saw God. Like, he appeared to me and told me these things. And I, I don't, I didn't make that up.

John Dehlin [01:47:18] They're like trauma visions.

Margi Dehlin [01:47:21] Yeah. Really?

Kyson Dana [01:47:22] Yeah, yeah, yeah. I had a, I had a senior missionary that finally. And I, I love, I loved him and his wife a lot. They were very grounded. We had a couple senior missionaries that were there, like, like three couples, those six missionaries. And I felt really bad for them because they couldn't speak Russian and they never learned Russian the whole mission. They couldn't proselytize, they couldn't really help the branch. They're kind of just like bodies there representing the church as older people. And one time we went to their house for like, some training thing and I think the older guy could see that I was going through like a mental health breakdown. I was breaking, I was deeply breaking. And he was very good at. He just called me out straightforward and said, listen, when Elder Holland told you to come home in a coffin, he was not speaking to you. Said he was speaking to the lazy missionary that just sits in his house and watches TV all day and doesn't want to go out and work. He's like, you're good. You need to tone it down and like, settle down. That was, that was hard for me to hear, but, like, it gave myself grace for the first time on my mission to like, hold what I was doing as, like, good enough. Like, I'm doing good enough. There's nothing more, more that I need to sacrifice. And I, I stopped from then on out doing these like hell weeks and stopped making my companions do These hell weeks. I feel bad, like, I made people do them with me because I thought we had to prove like, my. The guy I trained in this shock d city, this mining town, I took him through these like hell weeks to prove to him, which were what, again, like, extra. We just worked. We'd leave an hour early. We'd come home an hour later.

Margi Dehlin [01:48:54] We took the.

Kyson Dana [01:48:55] We'd fast every other day.

Margi Dehlin [01:48:57] Really?

Kyson Dana [01:48:57] We fast entire days every other day for a week.

Margi Dehlin [01:48:59] Every day. Yeah.

Kyson Dana [01:49:01] Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [01:49:01] Unbelievable.

Kyson Dana [01:49:02] We would cut our lunch, which was an hour long, into 30 minutes, and we would give up p day. We didn't. We would write home and be like, we're not gonna be riding home this week because we're. We're doing a hell week.

John Dehlin [01:49:10] That's psychosis. I mean, that's it.

Margi Dehlin [01:49:13] It feels like. Like spiritual abuse.

John Dehlin [01:49:16] Yes, but self abuse.

Margi Dehlin [01:49:17] But self abuse. Yeah.

Kyson Dana [01:49:19] And. And it is self. And it's systemic because. Yeah, because.

John Dehlin [01:49:24] Yeah, well, it is systemic.

Margi Dehlin [01:49:26] It first and foremost a systemic.

Kyson Dana [01:49:27] Yeah. Well, you average only system in. In Russia, the missionaries aver. And I learned this later as an AP 0.6 baptisms per missionary for the duration of the mission.

John Dehlin [01:49:40] You're lucky to get one baptism in two years. Yep.

Kyson Dana [01:49:42] For our mission, what this. What was hard is when there were 200 missionaries there, we could look at their numbers and say, okay, they baptized 80 people that year. And then it went to 50 people that year. And then when we were there, it just kept dropping. And our mission was getting like 12 baptisms in a year for the whole mission. And we had data of what the other missions were getting when we're APs. And it was like this unspoken competition between mission presidents about who was getting missions baptisms. And our mission president said, we need to set a new goal for the new year. And we came into zone conferences and said, we are going to baptize 100 people this year. 100 people. And we rallied everyone. And I believed it. And it was like, if we just have enough faith, God will provide this miracle. And I think we baptized like 12 that year. And so what you watched is every missionary was going through this, like, what's wrong with me? Why can't I qualify to receive the blessings that God promised us via our mission president? And I think this is when I started to watch him start to break a little bit, because he also believed that if we just had enough faith, we could get those hundred.

John Dehlin [01:50:46] Your mission president.

Kyson Dana [01:50:47] Yeah, that if we could just had enough faith, we could do the hundred baptisms. And Nelson came and visited Our president, Nelson, when we were on our missions, he toured our mission as a prophet or as. I don't believe so, I think. Yep. He came out to dedicate the Kiev temple and then came over to visit us. I was so excited to visit him. I was ap. On my mission too, at that time. So I was like, I gotta be close to this apostle. And I was so deeply disappointed by

John Dehlin [01:51:14] him as a believing, faithful missionary. Why?

Kyson Dana [01:51:16] Yeah, he was cold to us. He didn't seem to care. In fact, he told us in his Zone conference talk, he's like, my heart is not here today. It's with the people in Kiev because we had such a beautiful spiritual experience. And when I would hear those words with, like, my desperation of needing to be seen and validated and given a gift and a blessing of God, it was just like, oh, yeah, right.

Margi Dehlin [01:51:41] Not what I needed.

Kyson Dana [01:51:42] Not what I needed. Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [01:51:45] And no discernment.

Kyson Dana [01:51:46] No. Again, yeah, he did talk about that. He discerns that some of us are wanting to go home. And he said, don't do it blatantly. And he said, I can discern that there are people here struggling that want to go home. So in my film that I used, I found a clip of Holland saying the same thing and actually added it in because I didn't have one recording of Nelson, but I had that inner dialogue of. I'm sitting there at the Zone conference, this man is speaking, and he looks around and he looks at me, and he knows me better than I know my own self. And he discerns that I'm not having a good experience here. And he's telling me, I know your inner world better than you do, and you cannot do what you feel is right for you. It was very confusing to hold.

Margi Dehlin [01:52:25] It's like, don't even think about it.

Kyson Dana [01:52:26] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:52:31] I have to just say that on my mission, a missionary was sent home for sexually molesting a kid, dressing them for their baptism. And in the next Zone conference, the mission president played the clip play showed on, like, an overhead, the quote that it's better to come home in a pine box than without honor on your mission. So, I mean. Oh, wow, I got that too.

Kyson Dana [01:52:54] Yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:52:55] Just in a different way.

Margi Dehlin [01:52:56] And that was such an interesting. Sorry. Just to go back for a minute, that was such a. Like, I realized, you know, speaking to that leader at that time that made that discernment about you, like, that isn't meant for you. It shouldn't be meant for anyone.

Kyson Dana [01:53:10] Right, right.

Margi Dehlin [01:53:11] Like, the fact that that was, like, the Placating message is not for you, it's for the missionary in the how. But it's for nobody. No pine box for anyone.

Kyson Dana [01:53:20] Right?

Margi Dehlin [01:53:20] Yeah.

Kyson Dana [01:53:20] Like what would be. In hindsight now I'm like, what would be wrong with a 19 year old being like, I don't really want to do this, I'd rather watch TV. Honestly, most 19 year olds would do that.

Margi Dehlin [01:53:28] That sounds actually reasonable.

Kyson Dana [01:53:29] That's a healthy response to the conditions that you're responding to.

John Dehlin [01:53:32] I've also, I've often, like, I read your outline. Like I had a companion who just didn't want to be there. I, looking back now, I do wonder whether he was gay and kind of forced to come on his mission. Not that those are in any way.

Kyson Dana [01:53:46] Can you imagine being gay on a mission too?

John Dehlin [01:53:48] Yeah.

Kyson Dana [01:53:48] Like the.

John Dehlin [01:53:49] Oh, I just interviewed David Archuletta yesterday and it's wild what they experience.

Kyson Dana [01:53:54] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:53:54] And what I realized too is that there were missionaries on my mission. They were called flohos in Guatemala. That's Spanish for like lazy or soft. And if a missionary wasn't a hard worker, if they slept in, if they didn't want to proselyte, if they were disobedient, they would be called blohos. It's kind of like slacker.

Kyson Dana [01:54:14] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:54:15] And they were looked down upon on the mission. What I had to have had to re. And mistreated and what I had to realize after is some of those guys could have very well just been smart realizing it was a bad thing.

Kyson Dana [01:54:30] Right.

John Dehlin [01:54:31] That we were telling everyone that their lives were wrong and that we had the truth, that this was all kind of a racket. Especially in my, my mission. It was a corrupt statistical numbers game. That was really corrupt.

Kyson Dana [01:54:45] Yeah.

Judging Other Missionaries and Encounter with Hare Krishna

John Dehlin [01:54:45] And those missionaries that we all judged and mistreated, some of them just saw it for what it was and didn't want to be a part of it. So it was actually an, a display of intelligence, not an integrity and character for them, not laziness. But what they got was dismissal. And I had a mission this, this, this missionary elder via. That I had. He didn't want to go out and proselyte and so he was just depressed and he wouldn't get out of bed. And I remember, literally, I'm not proud of this, but I remember trying to pull him up out of his bed and he hit me and I punched him in the leg. We hit each other and it was because I was wanting to be an obedient missionary and he just, day after day after day wouldn't get out of Bed. I didn't have any sense for mental health stuff. I'm just like, you're not being faithful, you're not being righteous, and I'm going to give you tough love, you know, and, you know, that only happened once and.

Margi Dehlin [01:55:50] But was he your companion?

John Dehlin [01:55:52] Yeah. Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [01:55:53] So don't you have to be with your companion?

John Dehlin [01:55:55] Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [01:55:56] So you're, you're like, connect. You're. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:55:59] No, I can't do my job.

Margi Dehlin [01:56:00] That's right.

John Dehlin [01:56:01] If you won't get out of bed and do his job. But he was clearly just depressed.

Margi Dehlin [01:56:05] Absolutely. But.

John Dehlin [01:56:06] But there's no room for that.

Kyson Dana [01:56:07] No.

John Dehlin [01:56:08] Yeah, yeah.

Kyson Dana [01:56:09] To build on that. I. I have one experience that comes to mind where I was in the city. I'm like, halfway through my mission right now, and my companion is a Russian guy. He's from somewhere in Siberia. His brother passes away. His brother's not Mormon, and he's just obviously heartbroken at his brother passing away. So they arrange for him to be able to travel home to go to the funeral. He goes home and then three days later is back in the mission with me as his companion, clearly having a difficult time. And I don't know how you would not be having a difficult time after your brother just passed away and he doesn't want to work, doesn't want to go out. And I'm. I'm like, I'm wrestling with this, like, I don't know, this dissonance inside of, like, I get it. Like, I don't want to make you go work either. I wouldn't want to work if my brother just passed away. And. And yet, like, these are our commandments and we're supposed to do this thing. And I gave him a lot of grace and I didn't try to push him, which I'm really grateful for in hindsight. He ends up going home. But before he goes home, it's like 11 o' clock at night. He. I hear this noise, shuffling. And I wake up and he's packing his bags. And I was like, what's going on? And he's like, you're not going to stop me from going home. And I was like, I know I'm not going to stop you from going home. If you want to go home, you can. And he, like, grabbed a knife and was, like, holding it to me. He was having, like a mental breakdown. And he's like, you're not going to stop me. And I got the keys to our apartment and I handed him the keys and said, you can go. I'll walk with you to the bus station where you can get on the train. Don't worry about me. We'll figure out something for me. I can go to the senior missionary's home if I need to tonight. And we did. We packed his bag at 11 o' clock at night. We walked him to the train station and he left. And then I didn't know what to do. So I went back to my apartment. I'm by myself for the first time in a year and call my mission president the next morning and tell him what's going on. They I was the only missionary in the city which was a pretty. Only elder, I guess there was a other sister missionary companionship that was there and then these senior missionaries and they didn't want to shut down that city. So he said, he's like, we're probably gonna have to shut down your city though temporarily and have you relocate somewhere else and work in like a threesome group. Well, there's a guy that we had just baptized two weeks before that's 24 years old, he's awesome. And he hears what's going on and he says, I'll be your companion. And they said, yeah. So I had like literally baptized him two weeks earlier. And he then moves in with me and becomes my mission companion. And I would have to teach him the lessons in the morning that we were going to try to teach that day.

Margi Dehlin [01:58:41] Wow, that's wild.

Kyson Dana [01:58:42] And then both of us would go out in the street and teach. And he did not care about mission rules. He was not a set apart missionary. He was brand new to the church, so he was learning things like, like, and he didn't speak any English, so we're speaking in Russian all the time. And he, I remember him like one day like, wait, we can't masturbate. I was like, no. And he's like, wait a second. Like it was him being like, I don't know if I know what I'm signed up for here.

Margi Dehlin [01:59:07] Talk about informed consent.

Kyson Dana [01:59:08] Exactly. And, and he's like, he's like, dude, I have like a hard drive full of porn in my house. Can I have that? I was like, no, you have to get rid of that.

Margi Dehlin [01:59:16] That would be a definitely not exactly.

Kyson Dana [01:59:18] And so I was going through this weird, like, this is like when I was having a breaking point because I was going through this weird feeling of like, I have no one to help me. I don't have a companion that's doing this with me. I don't have family, I can't tell anybody anything. And now I Have this guy that I'm, like, teaching the lessons, and then we're going out together. And I. I had a mental health, like, breakdown. I. I was experiencing huge waves of anxiety coming through me. I love him, and I did this. Not his fault at all. But I was having a hard time, and I. I was intentionally standing next to busy roads so the cars would hit me because I wanted to go home, and I couldn't go home honestly and honorably. And it was bad enough that one time he grabbed me and yanked me back, like, aggressively and was like, what are you doing? And I was like, dude, just back off. Like, let me just stand where I want to stand. I. I didn't realize at the time how dangerous I was with, like, a mental health state. What turned that around for me? One was the mission senior missionary that said, like, chill, like, you're working hard enough. Relax. The other was, I ran into this guy on the street that was a Hare Krishna devotee, had his head shaved, wearing the robes and the beads, and was handing out Bhagavad Gita books to people. And we run into each other, and we were, like, swapping stories. And I'm genuinely curious about him. And like, I said at the beginning, I thought it would be cool to go to India. And this was my closest encounter with, like, India. And he goes, hey, I have something for you. I have an English Bhagavad Gita. Do you. Do you want it? And my companion then is this Russian kid that's not a missionary, doesn't know any of the rules. I'm not supposed to be reading anything other than Mormon literature. And I was like, yeah. And so he gives it to me. We meet up, like, a different day. He gives me the Bhagavad Gita, and I start devouring this book. And it was the first time, even though I had taken the Mormon religion class previously or the world religions class, it was the first time I had ever ran into the edge and the limits of where my religion was serving me. And then it started to encounter a different theology and a different understanding of what is suffering, what is obedience, what is. Who am I? I encountered concepts of, like, instead of God, they called it, you know, atman, which is this energetic force that moves through and animates all of life. And it was like, oh, that is beautiful. Maybe there is no distinct separation between creator and creation. Maybe it's. Maybe this is way more poetic than what I had encountered before. And it rattled me. Like, I was having intense, like, cognitive dissonance between the things that I wanted to go learn about, which were I wanted to study Hinduism. I wanted. Then I was like, I gotta go to India. And of course, in my Mormon mindset, I read the Bhagavad Gita, felt the Holy Ghost testifying that it was true, and was like, I think I'm supposed to become a Hare Krishna devotee and shave my head with a little ponytail in the back and join this group. And maybe God sent me here on my mission to meet Alex, who gave me this book. And this is. This is actually the path for me. And I was just, like, floundering.

John Dehlin [02:02:25] This is where a bad epistemology goes sideways.

Kyson Dana [02:02:28] Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [02:02:29] So interesting.

John Dehlin [02:02:29] Feelings are divine communication.

Kyson Dana [02:02:32] That's a problem. Yeah, huge problem. And I didn't know how to talk about this. I could not talk about this with anybody I knew. If I went to my mission president with the dilemma that I was having in my world, I was not going to be supported or understood. I knew I couldn't write home to my parents, anybody, couldn't talk to my newly converted companion. So what I ended up doing is this guy Alex is like, dude, you should. You should come over to one of our chant nights. And we chant and we sing Kirtan, and we chant Hare Krishna and do these drum circles. And he's like, it'll be good. And I was like, that sounds like a great cultural experience. Like, let's go do that. And he's like, and our leader is coming from India and he's going to, like, share a message with us. And he loves Mormons and would love to talk to you. He's American. I was like, oh, that's cool. And I thought, like, you know what? If he understands Mormons enough, I could go and I could ask him my question. Like, what do I do with this? Because I'm about to just flee my mission and go to India and become a Hare Krishna devotee, and we go to this night with this guy. They do the chanting and the singing. I was so moved by their chanting and singing. I can't even describe what was going on in my head. I didn't know if what I was encountering was, like, demonic or spiritual. It felt good, though. It was this group of people banging these big Indian drums and just chanting, Hare Krishna. Hare Krishna, Krishna, Krishna, Hari, Hari, Hari, Rama, Hari, Rama, Rama, Rama, Hari, Hari.

John Dehlin [02:03:53] Sounds like a George Harrison song.

Margi Dehlin [02:03:55] Sounds familiar.

Kyson Dana [02:03:56] And they said that whenever you encounter difficulties in life, chant the Hare Krishna chant and trust that what's unfolding is unfolding exactly as it's supposed to be. And I am this Mormon missionary walking around Russia chanting Hare Krishna in my head. Because it was the only. Like, I was like, the tools I've been given to navigate this are not serving me anymore. Alex taught me how to meditate, and so for the first time, I started meditating. The first time I meditated, he did a body awareness scan with me. And I just started, like, crying because I was like. I was, like, feeling my body for the first time in, like, two. In a year. And, like, I felt. I told him. I was like, dude, I. I didn't know how to process this, though. I didn't understand it. It's like, this is. This is somatic therapy in a way. I thought that I was feeling the Holy Ghost testifying that this is the right path for me. And when I told him that, he's like, it is God telling you it's the right path? Because obviously he's trying to convert people, just like I'm trying to convert people. And he's like, you really need to talk to my leader when he comes. And so my companion at the end of it says, he needs to use the restroom. So he steps out. And I was like, this is my chance. So I walk up to the leader. I said, I have a very small amount of time, and I need to tell you something really important. I've read your book. I'm a Mormon missionary. Obviously, I'm in a white shirt and tie in this, like, kirtan chanting place. I said, I think I'm supposed to go to India and become a Hare Krishna devotee. And he smiled at me and said, I've been to the Tabernacle Square. I've met with your leaders before. Mormons are really good people. He said, you know, he kind of explained the concept of Dharma to me and said that everybody is born with a certain. There's certain gifts and certain duties that they're supposed to fulfill. And he said, you look like you were born to be a really good Mormon, and you should be a really, really good Mormon. And I didn't like that answer. In fact, I was kind of disappointed if he. If he had given me the push and been like, go to India. I was like, okay, adventure time. Like, let's go. I'm running away. We're going to India. And he grounded me and was like, you just need to be a really good Mormon. And I was like, well, what does it mean to be a really good Mormon? And he said, you need to learn to transcend the binary of, like, Good people, bad people. Right in church, wrong in church. He's like, what I would do if I were you is everybody that you encounter, find what is meaningful and beautiful to them and tell them to do more of that. He said, if you'll start to do that, he's like, you probably will convert more people to Mormonism. And I did. And I baptized like six people in the next year. Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:06:25] That's pretty much all the baptisms for that mission that year.

Kyson Dana [02:06:27] Yeah. And I. It feels slightly. I now feel manipulative in what I was doing there because those people were feeling seen and welcomed and heard in the way that I was responding to them. And then I learned through my training how to take those feelings, to validate them, to point them out to them, to say, this is the Holy Ghost testifying of truth, and you should join our church. And then they would.

John Dehlin [02:06:48] All right, Mormon Church headquarters. You now know the secret to getting more converts.

Kyson Dana [02:06:51] Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [02:06:52] But for just wisdom.

John Dehlin [02:06:55] Yeah.

Kyson Dana [02:06:56] And that's what I needed.

Margi Dehlin [02:06:57] And without the mission, without the, like, trying to convert people part, that's. It's beautiful.

Kyson Dana [02:07:04] It was beautiful. It was life changing for me enough that I. The cognitive dissonance of, like, which church should I be part of, which religion should I align my life to? Stopped. And I actually threw the Bhagavad Gita away that Alex had gifted me. And I said, I'm going to put this aside. I'm going to be a really, really good Mormon and I'm going to look at this stuff when I come back and maybe I can revisit these questions that I have. But I was like, I'm going to suffer endlessly for the next year if I keep holding the questions that I'm holding right now.

Margi Dehlin [02:07:30] Yep. That makes sense.

Kyson Dana [02:07:31] Yep.

John Dehlin [02:07:32] Thanks for sharing that. Tell us your Osama bin Laden story.

Osama bin Laden's Death and Safety Concerns

Kyson Dana [02:07:36] Well, Osama bin Laden was killed while we were there. And they. It suddenly became scary. We were right on the border of like, Georgia and Uzbekistan, and Iran is just over the mountainside, Turkeys across the Black Sea, and we're not in US Friendly territory. Everybody called us Yankees or Yankees when they would, like, throw stuff at us. And so there was clearly, like, some tension there. And we're also told, don't talk to Muslims. They're like, when you encounter Muslim, don't talk to them. Because Muslims have this, like, zealously about them that could be dangerous for you. Ironically, the Muslims were the nicest people that we ever encountered and the Armenians were the best. So when Osama bin Laden was killed, we Were locked down and stayed indoors for, like, three days just to be safe and let that blow over so that we didn't. Because we didn't know what the repercussions could be.

John Dehlin [02:08:28] Yeah. Because, I mean, who knows when you're in Russia what side people are on.

Kyson Dana [02:08:34] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:08:34] Battle.

Kyson Dana [02:08:34] And there was a lot of religious extremism even there because Russia had invaded Chechnya not too long before I arrived. And Chechnya was a border to the mission that I was part of.

John Dehlin [02:08:45] Yeah.

Kyson Dana [02:08:45] And so we had a lot of Chechens that were there. The week before I arrived, some Chechnyans did a. A bomb in the Moscow airport. So when I arrived, part of the airport was shut down because of that bomb that had just happened. One of the cities I was in, Stavropol, they shut down the mission there because they felt like it was too dangerous for the missionaries. It bordered too much of a war zone. But we would go and visit occasionally the. The branch there. And while I was there, a car bomb went off, like, several blocks from us. So it. What was odd, though, is I look back at that, like, the car bomb goes off, and everybody's talking about it, and I was just, like, entirely unfazed. Like, I did not feel scared. I didn't. It was just like, oh, there's another one. I. By that point, I'd become this, like, veteran missionary that could just hold stress.

John Dehlin [02:09:31] It just didn't feel.

Kyson Dana [02:09:32] It didn't feel. Yeah, that's pretty much it. We had a new missionary that was there, a sister missionary, and we took her out. I would try to find ways to make missionary mission work fun, because knocking doors was entirely unproductive. We taught English classes so that we could use those to recruit people and then would invite them to hear the lessons afterwards. But then our mission president, for some reason, felt like that was a waste of time and shut down the English classes. Then we were back to just knocking doors every day. And I'm artistic, and I learned that I could draw on the ground with chalk these great big murals, and people would come and look at us and talk about the murals, and then we could talk to people. And it also disarmed people because I wasn't trying to approach them. I was just drawing, and they would get curious. So I'd do these big murals of the Plan of Salvation or, like, the Second Coming or the Jesus visiting the Americas. And other missionaries had done this too, because my mom texts me photos of, like, hey, here's some other people. So I'd study how they did it. And I'd practice in my notebook during study time, and then we'd go out in the day and draw. And the missionaries that we served with loved it. They loved, like, when I was in their area and when I was ap, we tore around, and I'd bring my chalk with me, and we'd sit down and do these big drawings. And we're doing these drawings, and one time we're in this park, and the police all of a sudden just show up aggressively. Machine guns, scary stuff. And the sister missionary, that's, like, her third day, just eyes great big. And I remember looking at her and realizing, like, the emotional distance that I had covered from when I arrived to where I was now. Because when they arrived, like, we pull out the passports, we show them. We show them we're good, and we'll tell them we'll leave. She was just certain that we were about to die. The same sister missionary had a. We were doing, again, these chalk drawings, and some guy walks up and grabs her from behind and holds a knife up to her throat. And I see it happening, and I walk over, and I was like, hey, like, let's turn this down. She looks so scared. She's shaking. And I just. I'd learned to, like, de. Escalate tense situations after having them so often occurring to us. And he was able to get down and put the knife away. My companion then kicked the knife out of his hand and then was like, get out of here. Like, it was a little bit more aggressive, like, now that you're away, like, we want you to leave. And then we just packed up and left and went to a different place. But, yeah, it was just, like, I could tell you 100 more, like, violent episodes. And when I was AP is when I started to realize that this wasn't a me thing. Because missionaries would call in and report when violence would happen. And so they would call us and be like, hey, we were just trying to get money out of the ATM today to go buy groceries. And as soon as we turned around, these two guys jumped us and knocked us both in the head with their elbows. And I'm bleeding, and I think I need to get stitches. And then we'd arrange to get them help and, like, just take a rest day. You guys are good. And then the next day, the sisters would call and be like, hey, some guy keeps following us home every night. And we'd be like, okay, we'll get you a new apartment. And we'd arranged to, like, quickly move them so that somebody couldn't Follow them and stalk them. And that when I became ap, was about a year into my mission, and you joked about us, like, taking turns because there's only 30 missionaries. But it's wasn't a joke. Like, we truly just took turns in different roles. And then I was AP for a year because there was nobody ahead of us that was more senior. And so I heard, like, lots of those stories that would happen. And that's when I started to watch my mission president and his wife, like, emotionally carrying the burden of keeping these, like, children safe, essentially, in Russia. And it was a lot for them to hold.

Margi Dehlin [02:12:41] Absolutely. I just wanted to ask around safety. So the chaos, so much potential for violence. I think just you living your life there. So was your reaction, like, did you. Did you ever go through a period of either being. I guess what I'm asking is what was your response overall? Was it like hyper vigilance? Like there was there a part of you that was surveilling at all times and. Or did you feel like you were just kind of disconnected? Disconnected in a way where it's like, numb not. Or did you vacillate? I mean, there were only on only two options. But I'm just kind of curious, like,

Kyson Dana [02:13:27] how did you live?

Margi Dehlin [02:13:28] How did you respond? Was it more numbing? Was it more hyper vigilant? Almost like OCD around safety?

Kyson Dana [02:13:38] It wasn't OCD around safety, but definitely hyper vigilant. Like, I was aware at all times where people were around me, who was around me, which side of me my companion was on, how well my companion could hold his own if he. If something happened. Yeah, yeah, like, hyper vigilant is a good, good way to describe that. In fact, I was. I was in San Francisco a couple months ago, and we were in an area that's kind of sketchy, and I realized my comfort zone to walk through that area was really, really high. And it was like. It was like all these. These, like, radar antennas that I had not used in a long time. Something like, went online and it was like, I can see, like, this 360 view around me. I'm tracking where everyone is. Probably in a similar way that like a combat vet comes home and knows how to, like, activate this hyper awareness mode. I can do that.

Margi Dehlin [02:14:31] Interesting. Yep.

John Dehlin [02:14:33] Yeah, I'll just have to. We're kind of trauma relating, but, like, I. I had a mission companion who was transferred to me on an emergency transfer because I think he had had a relationship with a. A young girl in his previous area. So he was sent to me as A problem missionary. And he had served in the military before he came on his mission. And the mission president told me, you know, this guy, it's his last chance before he gets sent home. And when he, you know, when he got there, we talked about his military service. He told me that he had a gun with him on the mission.

Kyson Dana [02:15:08] On the mission.

John Dehlin [02:15:09] And he showed it to me. And then fast forward a few weeks later, we're going to zone conference. We get all the money to hand out to all the missionaries in the zone.

Kyson Dana [02:15:19] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:15:20] And on the bus ride home, that money disappears. And I just assume it's this guy who stole it. So I confront him with it, and he basically says, I'm leaving the mission, but we have to figure out what to do about the gun because we're worried that he's going to shoot us.

Kyson Dana [02:15:32] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:15:33] So a really strong elder named Elder Shin Guard just. Just takes the gun and, like, wrestles with the missionary and takes the gun and he's like, give me my gun. And the guy's like, I'm not giving you the gun. Sorry. And so he leaves the mission. While he's my companion, he deserts the mission. But as he's leaving, he says to me, I just want you to know I have another one.

Kyson Dana [02:15:55] Oh, no.

John Dehlin [02:15:57] So, I mean, and that reminds me,

Margi Dehlin [02:15:58] that's like a threat to you.

John Dehlin [02:15:59] Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I live with that thread.

Kyson Dana [02:16:01] Just.

John Dehlin [02:16:02] Is he ever. Is he gonna show up in one of my areas?

Kyson Dana [02:16:03] Yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [02:16:05] And, you know, but.

Kyson Dana [02:16:06] Well, and I want to point out too, that you're a child at this time.

John Dehlin [02:16:13] 20. Yeah.

Kyson Dana [02:16:14] You're not like, like, you're. You don't have the. I didn't have. I'll speak for myself. I didn't have the emotional intelligence, the skills to navigate these things. It's kind of a miracle in ways that we weren't more harmed that people didn't die. The fact that that happened, I think there's a level of brazen confidence that you have as a missionary that actually protects you. Of, like, I have this name tag on. You can't hurt me. Like, I embarrassingly, like, raised my hand to the square and called upon Jesus to get people to back off. And they would be like, whoa. Like, okay. And they would. And so I don't think that there's any, like, special, unique power of priesthood that we were carrying, you know, to go do those things. But there's a level of just self confidence of like, when somebody's assaulting you and you just step up and say, like, you're gonna back down right now. There's some power there.

John Dehlin [02:17:07] You mentioned in your outline that this 23 year old man who became your companion stumbled on Mormon thing. Did you already mention that part?

Kyson Dana [02:17:14] I haven't, no.

John Dehlin [02:17:15] Just, I just thought that'd be.

Kyson Dana [02:17:16] Yeah, it wasn't the end of your mission, but yeah. We were in like a computer cafe riding home and he didn't need to write home so he would just like play games and browse the web and stuff. Did he speak English?

John Dehlin [02:17:27] Because I don't think there's a Russian version of Mormon think is there maybe

Kyson Dana [02:17:32] he could read a little bit. Because I remember I could read the things. There are some anti Mormon Russian websites too.

John Dehlin [02:17:42] Okay.

Kyson Dana [02:17:42] Because I remember he printed some stuff off when it was translated maybe.

John Dehlin [02:17:46] Okay.

Kyson Dana [02:17:46] But he, he looked up, it basically came from me telling him like, dude, you got to throw that hard drive away and you, you can't self pleasure and we've got a lot of rules. And he started to be like, what? And so I think when we'd go to these computer labs, yeah, he'd Google things and then he started some on these websites. And then I quickly was like, I was angry with him. I was like, you do not go to those websites. We do not read those things. And he respected me and shut it down. And then I like watching him. I don't know, it's like it was like witnessing somebody else encounter that. That was a big shelf moment for me of like, huh, huh. Why can't I read those things? And like, why is that so scary? Because I had never read them before.

Margi Dehlin [02:18:25] Right.

Kyson Dana [02:18:25] I didn't know the true history of the religion that I was out there selling. Yeah, yeah.

Final Days and Leaving the Mission

John Dehlin [02:18:30] You mentioned your last day in Russia. An experience.

Kyson Dana [02:18:34] Yeah, the last day I was walking home with my companion and were like, I'm trying to like find the good in it. And I, I will say there was good. Like there was. I had beautiful spiritual experiences there. I had moments that I felt like were divinely led. People that we met, I made really good friends. Some of the people that everybody that we baptized didn't stay Mormon. They were done being Mormon even before I left. And I felt bad about that. But, but I still cherished like the connections that we made with them and the choices that they made. And I speak Russian so I could hold, I could hold all these good things that happened there. And just like I appreciated the, the uniqueness of the whole thing. That wasn't lost on me.

John Dehlin [02:19:18] It's a life experience.

Kyson Dana [02:19:19] It is a life experience. I'm In a part of the world that very few Americans have ever been and will probably ever go. And I'm doing a thing that very few Americans definitely have ever done. And I. At the end of two years, I could hold that. So I'm trying to, like, go through my mind of, like, all the good. Because I had this. I don't know where I got this planted in my head, but I had this image of flying away, looking out the window and crying because you just love the people so much and you're so sad to be leaving. And we go around the corner. There's this group of men there. Immediately, like, hits me in the gut, rips my bag off me, dumps my bag on the ground, thinking he's going to rob me, and then realizes it's just a bunch of books. Mormon. Books of Mormon. Books of Mormon, however you say that. And he picked my stuff up. We go. And I started like, oh, I hate this place. Like, I am so done.

John Dehlin [02:20:08] You get the wall, right? Yeah, yeah.

Kyson Dana [02:20:10] Like, slam against this brick wall. I was like, I'm just done. And it wasn't, like, on the spectrum of, like, things that happened to me, that. That one was, like, low. Like, that was a minor. Like.

Margi Dehlin [02:20:19] But it was, like, symbolic.

Kyson Dana [02:20:20] It was symbolic on the Tuesday. Yeah. I'm 50ft from my house of the last time I'm ever going to walk home as a missionary. And then this happened, and I was like, I'm just done. And I was committed in my mind before. Like, when I go home, I'm going to follow the mission rules all the way until I get to the mission president's house and, like, get released. And I got on the plane and I downloaded a bunch of bootleg music to an MP3 player that was excited to listen to when I got home. And I put in my hardcore email music the first time I listened to in two years. And I was like, I'm done. I don't know what that means for me, but, like, whatever this is, it's over and I'm glad. And I was trying to think, like, what am I going to share in my homecoming talk? That makes a nice bow on the end of this experience because I could hold the good, but it was collectively, like, hard. So hard. Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [02:21:07] It's so interesting, too, because that immediate pressure to package it.

Kyson Dana [02:21:12] Yeah. And make a. Make a moral. Make sense of it. Give it to back it to your community as a gift of how good it was for all of them. And I just didn't have it. So I gave my I still remember the talk I gave, which was on, when things are bad, they can always get worse, but that doesn't last forever.

John Dehlin [02:21:29] Oh, man.

Kyson Dana [02:21:30] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:21:31] I always look on the bright side,

Kyson Dana [02:21:32] which is a very, like, Russian philosophy of approaching the world, too. Of like, yeah, you're going to face hard things and it can't always get worse, but it doesn't last forever, which is a good, valuable lesson. I don't.

Margi Dehlin [02:21:43] That's Buddhism. Impermanence.

Kyson Dana [02:21:45] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:21:45] Acceptance.

Kyson Dana [02:21:46] Acceptance.

Margi Dehlin [02:21:47] Yep.

Kyson Dana [02:21:47] Yep.

Margi Dehlin [02:21:48] Wow.

Kyson Dana [02:21:49] But that doesn't take away from the pain that I experienced and the trauma that was inflicted on us doing that,

John Dehlin [02:21:54] which is what we're going to talk about next. Really quickly. Just have a quick. We don't do product placements or anything on Mormon stories. I just want to ask people, please consider liking this episode, if you like it, commenting on it, and if you're willing to consider subscribing to the channel on YouTube or Spotify. We're about 3,000 away from hitting 300,000. We'd really like to meet that threshold. It's probably the most we'll ever get, maybe, but we. If we could hit that, that'd be great. So please subscribe, like, comment and share. All right. So if. If people had asked you, how's your mission? You probably didn't say, I. I experienced trauma. That I'll never be the same. You know, in. You know, sort of answer, right? The. The common answer is, it's the best two years of my life so far. Right?

Processing the Hardest Two Years of Life

Kyson Dana [02:22:48] I never said it was the best two years. I. I could hold that. It was. It was definitely not the best two years. It was. It was definitely the worst two years of my life. And I could. I could see that clearly even then. But I hold it still with reverence and that it was a meaningful two years, the hardest two years. But also in the same way that I could reflect back on, like, moving sprinkler pipes is like, that sucked. And it was cool to be up in the morning and to be in the dew of the grass. And so that's the same way I held my mission.

Margi Dehlin [02:23:16] Did you move to that pretty quickly? Were you aware of. Just, like, you had to have kind of a package for your ward congregation in that talk, that you also had to have a package for your family, for your things that you would say about the mission so they wouldn't worry about you or. Or were you more connected to being

Kyson Dana [02:23:39] honest or like, oh, no, I was. I was not connected to being honest myself. I didn't even realize that I was going Through a process of packaging my own inner world to deliver to anybody else. I was just. I was still in the water, you know, in the water of being in this culture. And so, yeah, came home. One thing I do remember that was pretty quickly, quickly confronting early on was I didn't want to talk about it very much. When people would ask questions, I could tell them, like, I could tell them the horror stories, and I would laugh about it, like, hard laugh, like, belly laugh about these crazy things that happened of, like. And I've. I've skimmed the surface right here. Like, I've got more, like, guns to chest and, like, put in a jail cell or put in the back of a car of, like, a KGB police officer. Like, scary things.

John Dehlin [02:24:31] Those things also happen to you.

Kyson Dana [02:24:32] Yeah, we had to call.

John Dehlin [02:24:33] The gun to the chest thing wasn't even.

Kyson Dana [02:24:35] No, I had three. Three different times somebody held a gun to my chest. Once was the police. Once was a drunk guy. We knocked on his door, and he opened the door and immediately just clicked the hammer back and put it, like, right here to, like, lower throat. And I just had to be like, we're leaving. Like, we're gonna go, and we just would walk away. But by the time those things were happening, though, I was so numb that, like, I don't. I don't even. I don't even, like.

John Dehlin [02:25:00] In fact, I didn't even mention them in your main mission story.

Kyson Dana [02:25:03] In fact, I'm doing right now.

Margi Dehlin [02:25:06] We'll.

Kyson Dana [02:25:06] We'll complete the circle eventually. I'm in somatic experiencing therapy right now, and it's on. It's uncovering, it's creating safety where I can talk about some of these things. And I'm having, like, memories come up that I forgot about that are really emotional. The first one that happened was that very beginning story of the man getting stabbed in the stomach. I knew that that happened in my psyche, but I never felt any emotions about it until I started to talk about it in therapy. And then it started to, like. I was like, dry heaving. I was crying so hard. I was. It wrecked me. It felt like this demon was, like, coming out of my body, had so much, like, emotional release from it. I was laying on the floor of my therapy thing. My therapist had her hand on my shoulder, was like, you're okay. You're okay. You just cry. It's like, you belong. You're held. We've got you.

Margi Dehlin [02:25:47] Yeah, right. Doesn't that make so much sense in looking at it? Because you think about. There was so much extreme living in that experience. For you and violence and you couldn't talk about it. So where does it go?

Kyson Dana [02:26:04] It goes in. It goes in.

Margi Dehlin [02:26:06] Yeah. You're like holding all of that, tamping it down and now you're home and it still lives in you.

Kyson Dana [02:26:13] Still lives you. That, that was so surprising. Like I, I would moved back in with my parents. I was there for one week and I felt so bad. I was so irritable, which was so surprising because I missed my family deeply. And then I was home and I did not want to see them. I didn't want to spend any time with them. I wanted to leave right away. So I moved like a mile down the road to live with my friend instead, with his parents instead of my family. And I'm sure. And the, my justification was it's close to the BYUI campus so I can just walk to school instead of like drive. Um, but I could tell it was confusing for them. It was confusing for me. I didn't have these, like, I wasn't back like boosting the faith of my little sisters. It was just kind of like my mission experience happened and I did it and I did a really good job and I'm done and I'm moving on to something else now. Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:27:02] To tell a bunch of, to try and polish that turd and tell a bunch of happy warm hearted Mormon missionary stories. I just, how could you?

Kyson Dana [02:27:12] Yeah. I can tell you funny stories and I can tell you like things that happened in Companions. I can tell you that like the good parts of it. But I can't.

John Dehlin [02:27:19] That'd be a betrayal of the trauma you kind of experienced.

Kyson Dana [02:27:22] There was enough trauma that I, I, it would be, it would be deeply on dishonest to my own lived experience that I just had. That was fresh.

John Dehlin [02:27:30] Yeah.

Kyson Dana [02:27:30] To like try to pretend like that didn't happen.

John Dehlin [02:27:32] Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [02:27:33] Yeah.

Kyson Dana [02:27:34] I didn't register though that it was a systemic problem or that it was the church had made any like that they weren't accountable to what they, where they had sent me. I still interpreted that God sent me here, that it was where I was meant to be. And the lessons I learned, I was meant to learn. And I planted some seeds with people that will germinate into something else later on. And maybe I was just holding ground for the church to then blossom in the future. And yeah, we didn't baptize it. We didn't get the church shut out of Russia yet. It's shut out now. Which was also like, as we get forward, like psychologically confusing for me to watch the mission shut Down. Watch Russia invade Ukraine. Watch Russia destroy the cities that I lived in, because it was like, any meaning that I had made out of, like, planting seeds just got bombed out.

Margi Dehlin [02:28:21] Of course. Yeah. Wow. So confronting.

Kyson Dana [02:28:24] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:28:25] What's that like to now think about towns that you served in being completely bombed out and all the people being displaced from the towns?

Kyson Dana [02:28:37] It doesn't feel real. It feels like a bad dream that I had, and that doesn't really exist a real place. When I was making the film that I put together, I was looking online for, like, archival footage of different things, because I don't have a lot of footage. So I borrowed some clips from different places, and for a minute, I was like, maybe to ground where this took place. I could talk about the war in Ukraine, because that gives some cultural relevancy today. And started watching some clips of that, and I just had to shut down. I felt myself, like, become really dizzy as I talk about it now, I can feel myself become really dizzy, and I'm not sure why. It's like a. I guess, like, I do love those people. Yeah. I still love those people. I don't. Like. I don't blame them for the ways that I was treated, and I. My heart, like, breaks for them. And in a way, like, finally going deep enough to encounter my own pain, that's, like, opened up. It's opened up my ability to connect with people that are also in pain. And there's a lot of pain over there. There's a lot of pain.

Margi Dehlin [02:29:53] Yeah.

Kyson Dana [02:29:54] And so it's surreal. It's hard to process. And I think the pain that they're experiencing is also systemic. It's not their fault, the conditions that they're living in. And so if I zoom out wide enough, my story isn't a Mormon story. Their story isn't a Russian story. It's a human story. And every human on this planet is experiencing pain in a unique way to them. And we can use narratives to try to explain the pain away, but that just creates more division between us, because then your story conflicts with my story. But if we just let it go. And you're just like, man, that hurts, doesn't it?

Margi Dehlin [02:30:29] That's right.

Kyson Dana [02:30:30] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:30:33] This is just. Thank you for that. And this is just trying to make sense of it all. I have a question. You wonder how President Putin can get away with initiating a war that's resulted in hundreds of thousands of Russians being killed, and it's spanned multiple years. And one of the only ways I can think that he can get away with it is that Those soldiers led such lives that, like being in the trenches fighting a war actually gives them more of a sense of meaning and purpose than the life they were living. Is that possible?

Kyson Dana [02:31:12] Definitely. They military service is mandated in Russia. So every 18 year old shaves their head and joins the military and they march around. We'd see them all the time and then are indoctrinated with Russian nationalism. It was those. It was that age group that was the most violent to us as well.

Margi Dehlin [02:31:29] Yeah.

Kyson Dana [02:31:29] It felt like a nationalist duty for them when they would finish their military service to repel us and make us not want to be seen and known. In a way, they were using war and violence to tell their story about existing in the world, where I was using spirituality to tell my story about existing in the world. But we're doing the same thing.

Margi Dehlin [02:31:47] Absolutely.

John Dehlin [02:31:47] Wow.

Margi Dehlin [02:31:48] Yep.

Kyson Dana [02:31:49] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:31:51] So as a reward for your service and your mission in Russia, you get assigned to a 12 step addiction recovery program by your bishop.

Kyson Dana [02:31:59] Should we go there? Yeah, we can go there. And even before that, I could say I was immediately struggling with mental health stuff. Right. When I got home, I, Sarah and I, my wife got back in touch and started dating again. And we actually, we didn't have anywhere to, like, hang out, so we were, we went to an IKEA that's down the road here and we.

John Dehlin [02:32:19] Swedish meatballs.

Kyson Dana [02:32:19] Yeah. And we were sitting in a fake bedroom on a bed talking, and people were just like passing by. And I was telling her some of these things about that I experienced and went through. And as I'm telling her, I was starting to feel dizzy, which I now identify as, like, that's your trauma response, like, putting you back into that disassociative state. And I was feeling dizzy enough that I was like. When I look down and I look at my hands, I feel like I'm seeing myself, seeing myself, seeing myself, seeing myself in this, like, fractaling mirror experience of being me. And. And she, she's like, wow, like, you have so much, like, awareness, self awareness. And I was like, yeah, I do. And I was like, it's because I've been meditating every day. Like, I. I took that as like a me. Like, it was like a thing that I was just cultivating in myself, but, like a massive amount of body disassociation happening. I loved skiing before. It was like my life. And I got a job at Grand Targhee Ski Resort teaching ski school and just didn't have fun. I could not find enjoyment in it. I remember just like, not even wanting to go and it was confusing for me. I was like, oh, I guess I've grown up and we just don't do the things that we used to like to do anymore. Now I register that as like a symptom of PTSD and trauma and depression. Yeah. I continue playing music with friends that was like a life through line that stuck with me. I actually wrote a lot of music on my mission with my guitar and the lyrics and came home and would play in bands with friends and go through those lyrics. And now when I read them, they are me poetically crying out for help. Like, my lines are so specific. Like, I've got a line in one of my songs that I wrote that said, I hear this drumbeat that sinks through my skin, but the preacher doesn't like it, so I push it within. Like, I did not even realize writing that that what I was writing. And so for me, like, artistry has always been a way. It's artistic endeavors are like kind of ahead of my own intelligence. Like I'm saying conscious process. Exactly. Like I'm creating things and then I create it and then I can look at it, be like, oh, like that's what I'm experiencing right now. And so for me to create these films online, you know, I get commenters that are like, you're just in it for the ex Mormon, like fame, like, oh, it's the best, let me tell you. And I'm like, no, I'm actually trying to make sense of my own life and putting myself into an artistic creation and then releasing it into the world. So it's outside of me is the way that I've learned to do that.

Pornography, Fight the New Drug, and the Church

Margi Dehlin [02:34:48] Wow.

Kyson Dana [02:34:50] I went on a tangent. Your question was 12 step recovery program,

John Dehlin [02:34:53] 12 step sexual as a thank you for your mission.

Kyson Dana [02:34:56] Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I started dating my now wife seriously and felt like she needed to know everything about me. So I confess that I look at porn and then I'm phrased it as I'm addicted to porn. She's like, you probably need to see your bishop beforehand. She also told her parents that I was addicted to porn. So then they held like a conversation with me to see if I'm worthy enough to be dating their daughter. And all of this is like out of love. That's the hard part that I can see now is like nobody's wanting to inflict shame on anybody, but it's just the way that you're conditioned to process these types of information. So I go to my bishop, he recommends I go to this 12 step recovery group. I'M like, I have immense shame at the thought of going in there and talking openly about pornography. It's hosted at byu, Idaho. I walk in, feels so much shame. And there in that room is this guy I went to high school with that was a couple years older than me that is like the goody, goody guy of our friend group. He was also in some bands, and I just, like, I loved him so much. And he's so happy and vibrant, and he, like, sees me, he's like, kyson gives me this huge hug, and he's like, you're good, man. Like, I know how weird it is to walk in here the first time. Like, welcome, you got a place with us. And it actually was really freeing for me to, like, pull the tension and all the energetic pressure about that topic out. And like, every week, I don't think what they were doing was helpful. And, like, I wasn't addicted to pornography. I was viewing it, like, once every three months. But I, in my inner dialogue, I was like a cocaine addict, you know? But to talk about it every week with this group of people helped me externalize it as not me. It's like a thing out there. Yeah. Sadly enough, I'm jumping ahead. But that young man took his own life later. Yeah. I don't know why, but it was about four years later when I was finishing my time at 5:30 drug, I found out that he had killed himself. And he had two kids at that time and was married. And that was hard.

Margi Dehlin [02:36:59] Sorry. Yeah.

Kyson Dana [02:37:00] And I wasn't, like, that close to him. And, like, I don't. I'm sure there were different circumstances happening there, but just to have somebody that would, like, knew a vulnerable part of me, and I knew a vulnerable part of him, and to know personally, like, I saw in him my own pain, and then to watch his pain, like, come out to end in that was, like, really difficult to hold.

John Dehlin [02:37:19] Generally, when someone dies in that way, they feel trapped. And I counseled enough students at USU during my six years of my psychology PhD to know that if you truly believe that poor to masturbation are evil and you can't stop even if it's once every three weeks, that can put you in a suicidal place eventually, because you can just get to the point where you feel like, I'm. I'm never going to be worthy.

Kyson Dana [02:37:50] Right.

John Dehlin [02:37:51] How do I get out of this trap? And.

Kyson Dana [02:37:53] Right.

John Dehlin [02:37:54] We talk a lot about LGBT suicides, which is valid, I think. There have also been porn masturbation suicides, if we could call it, like, Many

Kyson Dana [02:38:05] of them a shame based suicide.

Margi Dehlin [02:38:07] That's right.

Kyson Dana [02:38:08] Being gay as a Mormon is shame. Being looking at porn as a Mormon is shame. I'm sure there's other versions of that that people are grappling with, which is really unfortunate because the unfortunate part is when you zoom out. Like, I was so good. I had done. I'd never broken the law. I never swore. Like, all of the ways that you could judge a person as being a bad person. I was so far from that. And yet the inner monologue that I was walking around with every day is how bad I am.

Margi Dehlin [02:38:39] That's right.

Kyson Dana [02:38:40] That's unfortunate.

Margi Dehlin [02:38:41] It's like you're defined by the ways you fall short always.

Kyson Dana [02:38:45] Right.

Margi Dehlin [02:38:45] And the impact of all the things you do. Right. They're not a. They're not something that. Yeah.

Kyson Dana [02:38:50] And I don't. I don't know, like, again, holding, like, two paradoxical things. I can take personal responsibility in the ways that I treated myself and I can hold ways that part of that could be parenting and part of that could be the system of the church. And all of those things as a Mormon, are so melded together that I can't find a line between all of them. And so I have to, like, hold them collectively and look at them as a whole.

Margi Dehlin [02:39:14] Yeah.

Kyson Dana [02:39:15] And I. Yeah. And I don't do that as a victim to the circumstances. I actually see my willingness to hold it as like, transcending the victim mindset is like, I'm actually going to look at it openly and honestly and talk about it and name it. Because that actually feels like the most empowering thing I've ever done in my life is to openly and publicly name some of these things.

Margi Dehlin [02:39:37] Absolutely.

John Dehlin [02:39:39] The next part of your story in your outline notes, sort of a nexus between your story and mine. When I was living in North Logan in Cache Valley, getting my PhD, a member of my ward in North Logan teamed with somebody else to start an online initiative called Fight the New Drug, which basically was comparing pornography use and masturbation to, like, cocaine and meth use. And it became almost a national phenomenon. And I knew just as my PhD was starting. I'm like, this is not good. It's not going to end well. But I'm really curious how. Yeah, yeah. How you got involved and then what your involvement was.

Kyson Dana [02:40:27] Yeah. Yeah. So I'll start with. I was at byu, Idaho, in this group. I did one semester there in the art program. I wanted to learn to be a graphic designer. And I had in my mindset that the point of school is to get a job. And as soon as you can get good jobs, you can be done with school. And so one semester in, again, like, going through all the band stuff and creating all these things. I'd learned Photoshop. I learned how to take photos. I started applying for internships just to see how relevant I was in the marketplace. And I got an internship first in Logan, Utah, at Icon Fitness, and was there for, like, six weeks. And then while I was there, I had this moment where I was not enjoying my job there. And I started to question, like, do I really want to be a graphic designer? Like, is this really the career path I want? Like, just to sit in a cubicle and put sticker graphics on treadmills? Like, not really. And yet I didn't know, like, what I wanted and what I wanted to do. It was wintertime. I was quite depressed. I had just proposed to my girlfriend, thinking that that would fix whatever I was going that would pull me out of the depression. And I came home, and I was really, really, really, really, really down on myself about the pornography side of things. And I got on Craigslist looking for jobs, and, well, actually, I watched an Alan Watts video first about, like, if you could do anything in the world, world, what would you do? And I was like, I want to help people. I want to help people. And I got on Craigslist, and I see this job posting, and it was like, we're looking for a creative director to join this nonprofit group to help teens understand the harms and dangers of pornography. And for me, at that point in my life, I was like, bingo. Like, that's. That's the silver bowl that I'm looking for. And so I start looking at their website, and it's branded quite scary. Like, it was black and red. Like, that was, like, their color theme and their text, you know, fight the new drug was, like, the serif font and, like, grungy. And I saw it, and I was like, okay, I think what they're doing, I think the message is actually good. And they are really bad at branding because it's being portrayed as, like, scary. And if you're going to want to talk to teens about this, we've got to destigmatize the scariness of this thing. So I reached out and applied and was like, I'd love to work with you guys if you're interested. I had done some design work for the nonprofit group called Invisible Children that, like, helps children in Uganda that were trafficked by war. I wanted to go more in that direction, and I Thought I if I took what Invisible Children did with branding and marketing and brought it to this group, I think we could create like a movement between this thing and it wouldn't just be like a topic that we're creating. So I showed them my portfolio. They were like, let's do it. They hired me, I got a salary job, I dropped outta school. I'd only done a one semester of like design school. And I was like, this is the best. And there was really took it got

John Dehlin [02:43:13] a lot, it made a lot of money, it took off. The idea really resonated with that.

Kyson Dana [02:43:17] We had like Facebook was a big thing then. I think we had like 4,000 Facebook followers when I joined and I rebranded the organization. I'll say we because it was a collective group. There's like three or four of us working there and we're all under 30 years old. And rebranded the organization made it like palatable. The other thing that we did is we realized that we needed research to back up our claims because without that it was just like it looked really zealous. And so we hired like an external researcher that went through and put together a case study on the ways that porn harms your brain and affects like the dopamine receptors in the brain, how porn affects relationships and then how porn affects society through sex trafficking and just wider implications of pornography in the world. And all of those things I still hold as like, there's some truth in every one of those categories that is valid and is good to recognize.

John Dehlin [02:44:10] What bothered me was that the ads I would see would say, did you know that porn lights up the same parts of your brain as cocaine?

Kyson Dana [02:44:17] Correct.

John Dehlin [02:44:18] But yeah, we have pleasure sensors. But that doesn't mean porn. Porn equivalence is analogous to drug addiction.

Kyson Dana [02:44:29] Exactly.

John Dehlin [02:44:30] So it's a harmful analogy that sometimes in my experience can make it worse. Because when you demonize it, pathologize it, make it like pedophilia or drug abuse, it just can deepen the shame, which can deepen the spiral. But you tell me about what you experienced.

Kyson Dana [02:44:48] Yeah, yeah. Everything that you're saying was, were things that we began realizing as we're going. And again, we're a bunch of Mormons touting that this is a non religious organization. Yeah, we're going around, we're giving assemblies to children as low as fifth graders at middle school, middle schoolers, and we're giving like a non religious secular understanding of these things. We never in the presentation are saying like porn is a, is as harmful as meth or cocaine. But we were definitely heightening the intensity on this topic and at the same time de stigmatizing the topic because so many young what's porn? Are like, well, fifth graders are like, what's porn? Well, every. Every assembly we do, though, the fifth graders were too naive and didn't understand, and we would really dumb down the presentations for them and just more talk about, like, somebody asked for pictures of you. Don't send them. And had like a. Like, basically like a sexual digital safety talk kind of for them, which I think is healthy. We got a lot of consultations from different psychologists. They were all Mormon, though, on what was good to say, not say. What was surprising to me is we would do these presentations, and every time young men would come up to us afterwards, they'd come up to me and be like, I have a problem and I don't know what to do about it. I am one of those people that's addicted. And we'd just be like, talk to your parents. Like, we didn't really have a good place to point them and, like, how to solve that. But what they. What was the first. What I can appreciate, though, is we were the first people that many of them were ever opening up with. Like, I've been suicidal, like, all through my teen years because of the shame that I felt with this. And you're the first person I've ever told. And that was kind of a beautiful experience because we were offering a counter narrative to the. You're a spiritual failure narrative that the church had been spreading for, like, the last 25 years. And I think that was a healthy step in the right direction. But it has a con similar to, like, my dad got help from the Mormon Church by becoming Mormon, but it had, like, some cons attached to it. And so it reminds me of the

John Dehlin [02:46:46] LGBT participants of my research. They reported some benefit from conversion therapy or conversion therapy groups because at least they had someone to talk to and. Or at least they met other people they could talk to. Even though the conversion therapy itself was harmful, they still reported some benefits from the treatment.

Kyson Dana [02:47:06] Yeah, that makes sense. And like, all of us that were there had our own stories, personal stories related to pornography. Either we had been struggling ourselves or somebody in the family had been struggling. Like, we have a couple, like, female co workers that they would claim it wasn't an issue for them, which I don't know if it was, but I now know that pornography is just prevalent, male or female. It is.

John Dehlin [02:47:27] It's just as prevalent.

Kyson Dana [02:47:28] Probably not just as prevalent, but very common in a female population.

John Dehlin [02:47:31] Significant. Yeah.

Kyson Dana [02:47:32] And And a lot of shame, especially in Mormon culture, from women. They, they have a harder time even opening up to it than men do. And they think that they're even more deviant and more broken because they've looked at pornography, because there's no room for that in that culture at all.

Margi Dehlin [02:47:47] That's right. You're defined by your virtue.

Kyson Dana [02:47:49] Exactly. And so we're going around, we're doing these presentations and I am feeling a tremendous amount of meaning and purpose and belonging in life. I'm back to being a missionary with a message and I knew what to do with that and I was good at doing it and I was good at branding and storytelling. And we were getting funding that was quite a bit of funding from Mormon donors that loved what we were doing. We'd go to Silicon Valley and a foundation there that was ran by a Mormon family would give us money to do more of what we were doing. And we also started to get funding from different, like founders or people that ran foundations in evangelical cultures that were also hyper intense about the dangers of pornography. And so it started off being a rather like Mormon oriented community, but then blew up and grew to like this national thing. Wherever there was a religious pocket of intensity, we were welcomed and invited to come. And then all these teenagers were coming up afterwards talking about addiction and they don't know what to do. And so what we decided we were going to do is instead of just telling them to go off to their parents, we're like, why don't we create like an online course that they could go through that helps tell them, like, here's how the brain works, here's how you can have understanding, here's how the shame cycle works. Because the shame cycle is perpetuating. You go back to porn over and over again. And we, we did it with like the right intent to be good. And we realized that if we're going to get into like the recovery side of things, that we needed some professional consultation because we don't know enough to do that. And so they hired an advisory board and one of their lead advisors was the, a man from BYU's psychology department. And he helped us derive like the curriculum to do this thing. And then he had this brilliant idea. He said, if you're going to get people to sign up for this, we should create surveys when they enter to understand and track their changes of behavior through the program so that we can measure the efficacy of what we've created, which is smart, a smart way to approach it. So we offered a paid version of the course for anybody over 18 or a free version of the course for anybody under 18. And within a year, we had like 300,000 teenagers that had signed up to go through this thing.

John Dehlin [02:49:55] Whoa.

Margi Dehlin [02:49:56] Yeah, that's.

Kyson Dana [02:49:57] It was huge.

John Dehlin [02:49:57] And that's not just lds.

Kyson Dana [02:49:59] Not just LDS at that point.

Margi Dehlin [02:50:00] Yeah.

Kyson Dana [02:50:01] Um. Which was incredibly validating to me.

Margi Dehlin [02:50:03] Yeah.

Kyson Dana [02:50:04] Um. And it helped me ground the story of pornography in a context that was beyond Mormonism, which was also helpful for me to understand. This isn't a spiritual failing thing. I can now say. This is a brain chemistry problem and a compulsion problem and a shame problem, which it is. And I think that's like a healthy recognition to get to. When it started to slip for me was one we start. We were telling everybody that we were a non religious organization and yet, like, Elder Ballard would drop by the office and we would help him write his talks that he would then deliver like a keynote youth conference event.

John Dehlin [02:50:36] Did you meet Elder Ballard? Yeah. So you just like with Tim Ballard. M. Russell Ballard would just have y' all help him write talks?

Kyson Dana [02:50:45] Yeah, we met Tim Ballard too. He came to the office once as a he. We were putting together a collaboration and a prize for donating a certain amount of money to our organization would be to go with Tim Ballard on one of these, like, rescue missions.

John Dehlin [02:51:02] It's wild. In my interview with David Arceletta yesterday, which probably won't be released. They'll probably be released after your episode. Elder Ballard was assigned to David Archuleta as his, like, apostle. Assigned apostle. Because Elder Ballard was head of PR and mystery work.

Kyson Dana [02:51:19] Okay.

John Dehlin [02:51:20] But it's so disturbing. David's account of how clueless Elder Ballard actually was around LGBT stuff. What. How did you experience him around similarly? Masturbation.

Kyson Dana [02:51:34] Similarly. In fact, I wasn't invited into these circles often. It was mostly like the founder of the organization. They would invite him in to, like, counsel with them. Here's what we're going to say. Is this perpetuating shame in our culture or is this alleviating shame? And he was actually quite good at helping them write their messages in ways that didn't perpetuate harm. Because the. The Hinckley era of pornography was incredibly damaging. The Boyd K. Packer era of self harm, like touching yourself, is akin to sexual abuse. Like that. Those were the messages that were putting me into suicidal ideation as a teenager. And I can. I'm proud to say that at 5, the new drug, we helped steer those conversations in Mormon culture in a different direction. And I can say that confidently because we were invited into the inner circles that were creating that curriculum.

Margi Dehlin [02:52:19] The.

Kyson Dana [02:52:20] What started to rattle me, though, is we're getting all this data coming in. For one, the. The psychology professor from BYU did a good job of saying, like, listen, when you eat a candy bar, dopamine fires in your brain.

John Dehlin [02:52:31] Right? Exactly.

Kyson Dana [02:52:32] He said, when you smoke a cigarette, dopamine fires in your brain. When you smoke or when you shoot up heroin, dopamine also fires in your brain. But to say that a candy bar and heroin are the same thing because they're both using the brain receptors is not equivalent.

John Dehlin [02:52:43] Just to make that comparison.

Kyson Dana [02:52:45] Yes.

John Dehlin [02:52:45] Problematic.

Kyson Dana [02:52:46] And we went through a big internal debate of should we change the name of the organ? We felt like it was doing good things, but we recognized that calling it Fight, the new drug immediately, like, puts you in a place in people's minds. And so we talked about, maybe we call it fight for love, Fight for something else.

John Dehlin [02:53:01] But it's such an. It was such an effective, catchy, so effective campaign name.

Kyson Dana [02:53:07] Yep.

John Dehlin [02:53:08] And if the money's rolling in, which it was the. In the inertia is just because it's hard to make money these days.

Kyson Dana [02:53:16] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:53:16] And it's hard for college kids to run a nonprofit. That's six or seven figures.

Kyson Dana [02:53:22] Yep.

John Dehlin [02:53:22] So to just like, even if you know the name is wrong, I imagine it's a really hard decision to change the name when it's catching on.

Kyson Dana [02:53:30] And we've got some IP that's created there, some brand. Brand value. The. Well, we were conscious of. We didn't want it to feel scary. So we did some things like how do we turn the website light and bright? How do we bring real people, real faces into the thing? How do we point people to resources and actual, like, evidence rather than getting stuck in, like, the hyperbole of. Of anti porn culture? And I. I appreciated that. I designed this shirt. I laugh now. Called this. Said porn kills love on it. It's like a red shirt. It's got a square around it. And it went viral. I'm sure you've seen those shirts around. And it went viral enough that, like, Terry Crews, like, the celebrity, wore it on, like, the Good Morning America show and was talking about the harms of porn. And I was wrestling with, like, it felt like this momentum was going on this thing, and I was part of it. And I was doing a really good, effective job at storytelling for this organization. My message was, like, resonating in ways, and yet I was questioning whether or not it was good. Similarly, it was a similar feeling of, like, I'M baptizing people in my mission. And I don't know if this is a good thing because I'm actually not doing great in this place. And when I started to look at the data that we were collecting from these 300,000 teenagers going through the program, there was something that stood out very, very strong. And it was when you looked at the correlation between three different data points that we had, you had people that were rating themselves 10 out of 10 addicted. So the question was, how addicted do you consider yourself? And then we had the question of how often are you viewing pornography? And like a scale of like once a day, once a week, once a month, once a year. And then how religious do you consider yourself? And when you put those things together, how addicted they were was directly correlated with how religious they were and had zero correlation with how often they were viewing pornography. You were getting young men that were signing up that viewed porn once a year and were 10 out of 10 addicted and 10 out of 10 religious. And that was a big shelf breaker moment for me to be like, wait a second, it could be that my religiosity and that the culture around my religion is actually causing the problem here and not porn. It's not a brain chemistry problem. It's the culture around this problem. And when I started to do that, I then gave about three more assemblies and I could not pull like the energy to rally the kids to join the cause anymore. And I quit and moved to California.

John Dehlin [02:55:54] Yeah, and when we talk about this stuff, I always get these comments like, stop being pro porn.

Kyson Dana [02:55:59] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:55:59] It's like, it's not that we're pro people porn. It's that the way the Mormon church talks about porn and deals with porn makes it worse, makes the problem worse.

Kyson Dana [02:56:10] I have an 11 year old boy and so this is a topic that I'm like getting into with him of like, how do we handle this? I am not like, free sex, free porn all you want. Here's a phone, here's, here's the websites. Go for it. I can hold that. The three tenants, the fighting and drug champion was the porn harms your brain, your relationships and society. And there is truth in all of those. And especially with smartphones now being so it's just in your pocket constantly. You can, you can look at a billion pictures before you even get out of bed in the morning. I think that's not going to be healthy on adolescent brain development and sexual identity creation. But I think that the shame that was caused in Mormon culture was equally, if not more equal More harmful to me, actually, I would probably say it's more harmful to me than the avoiding porn would have been.

John Dehlin [02:56:56] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So many other cultures that are more secular don't have the per capita problem. It just has to be that by amping it up, saying that it's a sin next to murder, saying that demonic spirits are all around you. My, my, my description or my conceptualization of this is we cause so much distress in driving home deep shame that then people use that same porn masturbation as a way to self medicate and it just creates this downwards self reinforcing negative spiral. Plus by talking about all the time.

Margi Dehlin [02:57:35] That's right.

John Dehlin [02:57:35] We're promoting awareness of it and then usage of it. And my son himself will tell me as soon as you tell someone not to do something or that it's really bad and forbidden, that makes it weirdly more pleasurable, more expensive, more dopamine is released. So we're actually making porn more interesting or enjoyable or desirable for the brain because those dopamine centers fire more. Because it's a very. Described as a very dangerous, terrible, horrible thing.

Kyson Dana [02:58:09] Right, right, right, Totally. That's why it was.

Margi Dehlin [02:58:12] Yeah.

Kyson Dana [02:58:12] A secular adult might get into like some kink culture because there's something about crossing a line that you're not supposed to be crossing that provides more pleasure to the experience.

Margi Dehlin [02:58:19] That's right. Not to mention the psychological principle of like whatever you do, don't think of the pink elephant, just don't, don't do it. And what that does to a brain. And I think sometimes that's the messaging too, how much it's brought up and you shouldn't do it. And you. It elicits actually psychologically.

Kyson Dana [02:58:38] Yep.

Margi Dehlin [02:58:38] Yeah.

Kyson Dana [02:58:39] And I'll contrast fight the new drug's message with when I eventually had confessed one time to a bishop that I had masturbated. He pulled out the scriptures and read to me the story of somewhere in the Old Testament somebody spilling their seed on the floor and an angel coming and killing him. And then he closed the scriptures and he's like, so now we know that God doesn't want us to do this. And so that was my starting point. Fighting drug was a level above that to understand. But I wouldn't say that either of those are a healthy understanding of sexual development.

Margi Dehlin [02:59:08] Yeah, indeed. Indeed.

John Dehlin [02:59:09] Yeah. So to deal with all this, you not just quit school, you quit the nonprofit and you move to the Bay Area.

Kyson Dana [02:59:17] Yep.

John Dehlin [02:59:17] Why the Bay Area?

Kyson Dana [02:59:19] You know, what year was this, by the way? This was like 2016.

John Dehlin [02:59:22] Okay.

Kyson Dana [02:59:24] I am not sure why I had a friend. Well, one thing I did with Fight the New Drug, I was invited out to this design studio once. It was did a three day storytelling workshop. And the people leading the workshop that a group's called Duarte and they write most of the TED talks that are viral online. And so their storytelling ability, they helped write the Inconvenient Truth for Al Gore. Their ability to structure, story and tell a story was huge for me. Like light bulbs all over. I took what they did, applied it to fight the drug and then it worked and resonated. And so I wanted to be around people that were those types of thinkers and those types of creatives. So that was my appeal to the Bay Area. I came out and worked for this company called SolarCity. That was Elon Musk's. I think I've met Elon Musk on several occasions.

John Dehlin [03:00:08] What's he like? What was he like then?

Kyson Dana [03:00:11] Awkward. Like normal and awkward. I don't know. What was that?

John Dehlin [03:00:16] Was he brilliant?

Kyson Dana [03:00:17] I didn't go deep enough with him there to know. I know he was. I worked closely with his like cousins and all their exec team. I was still very Mormon at that time. And yeah, there's probably things I could say there but that will get too much attention online than I want to go right now. So we'll just park that one for a second.

John Dehlin [03:00:36] Yeah.

Post-Mission Life, Career, and Faith Crisis

Kyson Dana [03:00:38] Solar City gave me meaning and purpose. I was like, you know, against climate change, clean energy. And then I didn't know this at the time, but Silicon Valley and San Francisco is like a hub of design. Like there are the best in the world. Designers go to this place, they go to there in New York City. And I didn't know that. I was just there and having a good time and suddenly I'm like swept up into this world of startup culture, the tech culture. I had a blast. So I I getting invited to like these conferences and I didn't realize that I'm really good at design too, despite not going to school. So I'm getting like job offers from Apple and Google and Facebook and just like I'm riding sky high like I'm the king of the world and. But it was there that I started encountering different worldviews that were starkly different than what I had known before. I was becoming friends with people that were not Mormon and were really happy, good people that were raising families in a secular way, had brilliant children that were happy and knew they're belonging in the world. And that started to feel confusing on how that could be that way. At first, I showed up with a little bit of Mormon zealousy, and I tried to convert co workers and invite them to ward parties and. And things. And then after a year or two of that, I just stopped. I was like, I actually would be embarrassed for you to come to my ward party because you're so cool, and we're not so cool over here at church. And. And then Fight the New Drug ran a campaign. Then they targeted the Bay Area, and they called it the Porn Kills Love campaign. And so while I'm there, all of these billboards pop up with their messaging all over the Bay Area.

John Dehlin [03:02:12] Man, you gotta have a lot of money to be advertising in the Bay Area.

Kyson Dana [03:02:15] You do. And it was their local Bay Area donor that funded the campaign. And then I watched the cultural response to that, and I then started to read the blogs and the reactions to that campaign because people were like, hey, you, do you. If you want to run your campaign in Utah with your people and champion your views, go for it. But, like, this is not your people. This is not your place. We have a very different version of understanding of sexuality than you do, and let us navigate that on our own. And for the first time, I, like, held that as a valid critique and as a valid way to operate through the world. And I. I then just mentally started to, like, kind of distance myself from that being a part of my past.

John Dehlin [03:02:54] And I guess you equated it with the church and how it approached the same problem. And so did it start developing cracks in your faith?

Kyson Dana [03:03:03] It did, because I, in my ward, like, my bishop, knew that I had worked at 5:20 Drug and said they. They would ask me to, like, lead a youth fireside thing, and I would and give the spiel, but I just, like, I couldn't do it anymore. Like, I couldn't talk about it in the same way that I could. And then I think they were disappointed in my response because I was trying to be too nuanced with everything. And then I started to become liberal, and that's a slippery slope. And I mean, politically liberal. Politically liberal. I don't think I had, like, a political opinion before, but I started to have an opinion. And I. One of my really good friends was gay there and had a beautiful partner, and they were so fun to be around and so happy. And I met a lot of people that were gay because San Francisco has a really big, thriving LGBTQ scene, and they were happy. And they all spoke of religious trauma of their past. Like, deep, deep pain. A lot of them had grown up in the south and then moved to San Francisco to find solace and peace. And I just started, like, I don't know, the shelf just started to get bigger and bigger and bigger and. But in my, like, zealot way, the bigger the shelf got, the more, like, I kept having this, like, split personality, and I would just get more intense with my own individual, like, religiosity. And so, like, riding the train to San Francisco. Every day, I'd listen to podcasts that were faith affirming. And then one day, I listened to a thoughtful faith podcast.

John Dehlin [03:04:30] Now, is that Gina Colvin, Mormon story sponsor to Thoughtful Faith Podcast or Jacob Hansen YouTube channel?

Kyson Dana [03:04:38] No, no, no, no, no, no. Not Jacob Hansen. So, yeah, good clarification.

John Dehlin [03:04:41] Back in the day, a New Zealander named Gina Colvin used to run a podcast that I started called A Thoughtful Faith, which is trying to do it restore and Faith Matters does now help people help model, faithful, engage thoughtful, faithful intellectual engagement with Mormonism.

Kyson Dana [03:04:56] Yep.

John Dehlin [03:04:57] So you started listening to Gina Colvin.

Kyson Dana [03:04:58] Yep. I joined the Facebook group that they had ran, and it was the first time in that Facebook group I could put out questions and difficulties that I was holding without feeling like. Like, Reddit kind of scared me. I feel like if I put any question there, I'm just going to get a lot of anger and hate from people being like, leave the cult. And I was like, I don't. It's good. It's good. And. But this group could hold my nuance. And there were really brilliant people that were participating in the group, too.

John Dehlin [03:05:19] Yeah.

Kyson Dana [03:05:21] One name that stood out to me was, I think was David Bacavoy. I believe he was in there. It was somebody like him that could hold, like, nuance in ways that I just could not do at that time. And so I started to become a very, very nuanced Mormon. I had my talking points of, when this is said, this is how I respond. But one day, listening to a thoughtful podcast, somebody that they were interviewing said, well, they mentioned something about the Book of Mormon. Like, well, and if the Book of Mormon was even real, you know, I was like, what? And I was like, is it even real?

John Dehlin [03:05:48] Oops.

Kyson Dana [03:05:49] Like, I didn't know that was a possibility. And then I started to go down the rabbit hole of like, is it real? And ask those questions. Then I stumbled into the CES letter and read that. And then I began listening devout, like, very intensely to Mormon stories, podcasts that were historical in nature, like, intellectual and logical. And you. You broke it down really, really well. For me to understand. And there was one day I. Like, this stands out to me specifically. I'm riding on the train, I'm listening to some podcast of yours, and they're going through. You're going through revelations in context. So, like, the big revelations of, say, eternal families or ceilings, or the prophet being the one and only prophet call of God. It was like, okay, when did he make this claim and what was going on around that? When the claim was made, when Joseph Smith was tarred and feathered, what happened and what was going on contextually around that? When Joseph was killed, what happened and what was going on around it? And I. The context changed everything for me in a way that didn't. I didn't even feel, like, angry at the church. I actually just felt, like, embarrassed that I had lived all of my life not knowing the full context of what I was doing. And it was nighttime. I'm riding in the train, and I just started to cry, like, uncontrollably cry. It was like this feeling of, like, I can't go back ever to how it was ever. Even if I wanted to remain a nuanced Mormon, I. I have crossed a line, a threshold that can't be walked back from. And I remember, like, these flooding feelings of fear and confusion. And at the same time, I look over across the aisle, and there's this older Asian gentleman that's there, and he's got, like, his little handbag that you'd carry around, like, all his groceries with, like, probably didn't speak English. And I looked at him and suddenly realized, like, we're the same thing. Like, we're both humans and we don't know what we're doing. And you were born somewhere, and I was born somewhere, and we both are as clueless about how to exist in this life as each other. And I could hold, like, really acutely. This was one of the first times I remember holding, like, two feelings at the same time. I could hold the fear of the unknown and the shame and the embarrassment of being Mormon in the ways that I thought I was Mormon, and hold this, like, deeply beautiful, connected feeling with humanity as a whole. And that, like, anchored me in a way that was like, you're going to keep going. Like, you're going to go further into stepping into your belonging with humanity, and it's okay, and you can do it. And that. That began, like, my official exodus. I came home that night, told my wife that I am not going to be Mormon anymore.

John Dehlin [03:08:45] Whoa, that's jarring.

Kyson Dana [03:08:47] Yeah. She had no idea that I was having doubts about any of it. She knew that, like, she was. She's quite like, politically liberal and nuanced in her own perspective. She served a mission in Bolivia and got sick right away and came home and had a really difficult time with shame from that. And so some of the things that we could talk about, we knew that there was problematic things within our culture, but we did the classic, well, there's a culture and then there's the doctrine and then there's the church and then there's the family and separating everything. And my compartmentalization just didn't hold anymore. Hers was still holding. And I told her, I think I'm done. And she just started to cry uncontrollably, was terrified that we were going to get a divorce. And it was hard because I, like, I couldn't, I couldn't. I couldn't do anything to comfort her. Like, I couldn't walk back the way that I felt. I couldn't repackage it in a way that was more palatable.

Margi Dehlin [03:09:37] Yeah.

Kyson Dana [03:09:39] I couldn't force her to read the things that I had read or to. Even if she had read it, I couldn't force her to understand it in the ways that I understood it. It was just this feeling of like, I have to go forward with this and life is going to unfold as life needs to unfold. And I hope that this person remains part of my story, but I have to, like, release myself from demanding that. And she ended up that night staying up all night long, just terrified and stressed out. She texts her brother, who was living in LA at the time, and said, hey, Kyson doesn't want to be Mormon anymore. He's having a faith crisis.

John Dehlin [03:10:14] First you look at porn, then you have a faith crisis.

Kyson Dana [03:10:17] Yeah, yeah. The narrative connected easily. And he text her back and said, sarah, everything that Kyson's telling you is true and you should read the CES letter. And he had made his own exit, but hadn't told anybody in the family yet either. And I thank him so much because he saved our marriage. Sarah slowed down that night, read the letter. I woke up the next morning, she's blurry eyed and was like, I'm really confused, but I understand and I want to figure this out with you. And that began both of our processes and we kind of just stayed together the whole time we went through it. He goes to her. Yeah, huge, huge.

John Dehlin [03:10:54] That's a more rare occurrence.

Kyson Dana [03:10:57] I've since watched other friends go through, like, their families falling apart as they go through a faith transition.

John Dehlin [03:11:02] That's kind of how Margi responded to me.

Kyson Dana [03:11:04] Yeah.

John Dehlin [03:11:05] Except we didn't have CS letters, so she read Von Brody's no Man Knows My History. And we did it together, fortunately. Yeah.

Kyson Dana [03:11:13] And I don't. I don't blame anybody that has that response, because if you walk back to the very beginning, your identity is fused with the church. Before you're even verbal. You're being sung beautiful songs like, I'm a child of God and Teach me to walk in the light, and I love to see the temple. And then that sense of belonging and meaning as a child is profound, and it's deeply connected to your sense of belonging with your parents. And then it translates in teenager years to becoming problematic. And then when you start to question it, like, you don't know how to hold both of those two things at the same time. And it's just. It's hard. It's really hard. You're stepping out of an identity and into a new one, but you don't have a new one to step into yet. And so it's just like this. Like, I'm, like, into the void here.

Margi Dehlin [03:11:57] Yeah. I'm curious about what happened in these years that you've talked about, where it really feels like your life has kind of moved forward. How would you describe what happened to the trauma piece inside you? Was it kind of latent?

Kyson Dana [03:12:18] Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [03:12:19] How would you describe that?

Kyson Dana [03:12:20] That's a good question. It was very latent. I didn't. I left the Church with an intellectual understanding of why I needed to longer be Mormon. I did not leave, like, with this idea of, like, I'm having too much shame or I'm so depressed I can't be Mormon anymore. I was like, oh, it doesn't make sense logically. I was told things that I no longer believe, therefore I'll step away. The first time I ever encountered, like, some of the pain, like, the somatic pain in my body, and I'll just add, like, that's an understanding that I didn't understand at the time. I thought that trauma was, like, conceptual and that if I just, like, tried harder or decided that my mission was going to be a thing of my past or decided that I was going to turn it into something good, that that would just do the trick. And it was a. It was a decision I could make. But I started having a lot of anxiety that was uncontrollable, arising in my body, and a lot of somatic pain. I woke up one day on a Saturday. It was a Sunday. Oddly, all these pain incidences Started happening on Sundays. So we stopped going to church. And I woke up on a Sunday with severe pain in my side, like, severe. And I was like, we have got to get to the ER right now. Something's wrong. And I'm. I'm in danger. And Sarah takes me to the er. I'm there for hours, and they're like, you're stressed? And sent me back home. And I was like, what? How could stress be causing this? I feel like I'm going to die. And then I had it again happen. Same response. Like, I was like, this time it's real. And they wrote stressed, and then sent me home. And so I never. I still hadn't connected trauma with those somatic experiences. I thought that I must have just tummy aches, you know, this idea, the

John Dehlin [03:14:03] body keeps the score kind of thing. Is that right? It was starting to externalize. It was all you had internalized.

Margi Dehlin [03:14:09] And to be clear, this was after you read CES letter, after. So there was a whole period. It sounds like when you got married and you're kind of working these jobs that you've described where it lived in you, but it sounds like it didn't leak. Let's just say that. Or express.

Kyson Dana [03:14:32] Yep, that's right.

Margi Dehlin [03:14:33] Just wanted to be clear about that. Okay.

Kyson Dana [03:14:35] And when we left Mormonism, it was hard to leave and hard to make that decision. And there's pain that kind of occurred in that decision. But we went through this, like, honeymoon phase of, like, we're good. We're out of here. We're. Life changed. Like, we moved to a new neighborhood, started surfing on Sundays all the time. Sarah could wear tank tops and little shorts, and we were just like, this is it. And then what was so beautiful is a couple of my friends that I grew up with in Rexburg had moved to the Bay Area, too, for different jobs. And then we all connected and all left at the same time together. And so we would host these parties of, like, we've never smoked weed before, and we'd invite each other over and we would smoke weed and, like, giggle and do it all wrong and, like. But we had this, like, container of safety to try new things. And it was so much fun and

Margi Dehlin [03:15:17] community, which oftentimes is a huge loss for people.

Kyson Dana [03:15:20] Yep. Yep. It was once. Once the. Once the pandemic hit, those people moved away is when the somatic stuff really started to come out. For. For me, I was. I was no longer able to, Like, I no longer had a community. And then it was like, I no longer could hold back the dam of somatic experiencing stuff that I was having and it really just started to rupture. So the first big one that I had was I, I joined this new company, Rivian, to work for them as a designer, working on their brand identity and electronic trucks. Electronic trucks, yep. And I was one of their, like, I was like the second designer to join the team. They were still very, very early. We were years away from creating the first vehicles.

John Dehlin [03:16:04] There was like a huge online waiting list of people putting down deposits for $100,000. Trucks.

Kyson Dana [03:16:11] Yep. First. Yep, yep. First ever electric vehicle truck to be created. And the, the messaging that was created before I was there was so beautiful and altruistic about like, humans need to rally together to help with climate change and we believe we can do this. It wasn't a fear based organization. And I, I was spinning out with like, what is meaning and purpose in life and I don't have any of it. And I was in this, like, void. And I came to this realization that like, the church was my meaning and purpose. And if that's gone, I got to pick something else that's meaningful to dedicate my life toward. And climate change became that thing. Cause I was like, I love nature, I love the outdoors, and I love my children and I want to create a good future for them. So as soon as I decided it was climate change, then I started surveying around, like, where can I work? And looking for a job. And then I found this job at Rivian and they hired me. And it just felt like the stars aligned and everything was perfect and beautiful. And then the pandemic hit two weeks after accepting that job. So we shifted to working remote and alone. My wife was pregnant at that time with our second child. It was really stressful to go through pregnancy with the pandemic because there were so many unknowns. The California fires erupted badly there in the Bay Area specifically. We went like, at one point, they had three days where the sun wasn't seen and the street lights stayed on because it was so dark from all the smoke.

John Dehlin [03:17:22] That was the Book of Mormon, man.

Kyson Dana [03:17:24] It was.

John Dehlin [03:17:24] Yeah, it was at midday.

Kyson Dana [03:17:27] Jesus never came, though. That was the one disappointment at the end of those three days.

John Dehlin [03:17:30] Well, when he came in the Book of Mormon, it was bad.

Kyson Dana [03:17:33] Yeah.

John Dehlin [03:17:34] Like volcanoes fell on top of people's heads, basically.

Kyson Dana [03:17:36] Right.

John Dehlin [03:17:37] So, but Sonoma was basically on fire. Right. And.

Kyson Dana [03:17:40] And like all around, Santa Cruz was on fire.

Margi Dehlin [03:17:42] Yeah. So surreal.

Kyson Dana [03:17:43] And so there was a. There was like this mammalian instinct of danger that you could just like feel or your body's like, I. I need to get out of here. And I got on this zoom call with this guy that I worked with, and he. He's like, hey, we should reconnect. And I was like, sure. And he's like, this gentleman's probably, like, in his 50s. He gets on. He's like, so you're from Rexburg? And I was like, yeah. Like, how do you know that? He's like, oh, somebody told me that you're from Rexburg. He's like, my daughter's at school there. Isn't Rexburg. So cool. Starts going on and on about Mormonism. He's a bishop of his ward, and rightfully so. Like, assumed I was Mormon, too, and just wanted to connect on this thing and kept throwing out comments about, like, the world. And it's kind of hard working here with the world, isn't it? And I got off the phone with him and stood up to walk into the other room, and all of a sudden I was like, oh, something's wrong. I'm. My heart's stopping right now. Like, I'm having a heart attack. And I fell to the ground. I could not breathe. My whole vision, like, went into, like, tunnel vision black. And I was crawling, sobbing, and screaming like, sarah, I'm having a heart attack, sir. I'm having a heart attack. And I crawled to the back door, fell out on the ground. She calls an ambulance. The ambulance gets there, puts me in there. I am 100% convinced that I'm having a heart attack. And I get to the hospital, and they do all the tests, and they're like, no, you're having an anxiety attack. And that was, like. That was when I finally accepted, like, okay, something is going on in my body, and I don't have the skills to, like, move through this very well. It was a huge, like, turning point and really disorienting. Yeah, that's when I. I went to, like, I'm. I feel like I'm broken, and I mentally am not. But, like, my body is just, like, I'm in this ship of a human, and it's doing things that I can't stop from it doing. And I hate this feeling.

Margi Dehlin [03:19:20] Yep.

Kyson Dana [03:19:20] Yeah.

John Dehlin [03:19:20] That's panic disorder.

Kyson Dana [03:19:22] Yep.

John Dehlin [03:19:22] Yeah.

Kyson Dana [03:19:23] Yep.

John Dehlin [03:19:24] Yeah. So, yeah, how do you pull out of that? Like, that sounds pretty dark.

Kyson Dana [03:19:30] It was pretty dark.

Margi Dehlin [03:19:32] Yeah.

Kyson Dana [03:19:33] Well, I tried a couple online therapists that weren't Mormon because I didn't want a Mormon therapist. I don't know why I decided I didn't want a Mormon therapist or even an ex Mormon. Almost Called an anti Mormon therapist, an ex Mormon therapist. But I just didn't want to talk about Mormonism anymore. I was like, this is a thing of my past, and I just want to, like. Like, can you just help me with therapy and I don't have to talk about my background?

Therapy, Psychedelics, and Spiritual Reconstruction

Margi Dehlin [03:19:54] Or it's like, can you make my panic attack stop?

Kyson Dana [03:19:57] Exactly.

Margi Dehlin [03:19:58] Yeah.

Kyson Dana [03:19:58] And so I tried a couple of those therapists. They always were just like, it sounds like church is really important for you. Have you tried finding a new church? And it was like, nah, like, this is not what I'm needing right now. So then I finally accepted I might need a therapist that's worked with, like, religious, high demand religious people. So I found Marlene Whannell. She's amazing. She's kind of written a lot. And on research, religious ptsd, and how religious and complex PTSD is connected. So PTSD is a traumatic event that happens once or maybe twice, and then it registers in your body as a trauma. Complex ptsd, she helped me understand, is when it's ongoing trauma for an ongoing period of time, and it's both psychological and physical. It can end up in ways where your nervous system just does not know how to respond, and you end up feeling unsafe being you.

Margi Dehlin [03:20:45] Right.

Kyson Dana [03:20:45] And it's pervasive, and it's confusing. And she started to name the symptoms, and I was like, check, check, check, check, check. I'm doing all the things that you say. And her biggest advice was like, you are going to have to learn to be in your body and to learn to trust what your body is telling you. And until you can learn to do that, you're going to really struggle. And she had, like, a thing where she couldn't meet ongoing. So we did, like, three sessions and then set me off on my own. And I had a friend at the time recommend psilocybin mushrooms. And he said, hey, there's a lot of research coming out. He wasn't Mormon. He's like, you should take this, and I think it will heal you. I was like, okay, that sounds great. And so he gave me this chocolate bar. It wasn't very much. And I sat in my backyard by myself under this big oak tree next to this creek and took mushrooms. And the day before taking mushrooms, I would have said that I was so severely depressed and nihilistic that I didn't even see a point to ending my own life. It felt so devoid of being real. It was like everything just felt like it was this illusionary video game that I was existing in. And it's like, yeah, you could end it, but like. Or you could just. I don't know, it just felt like it didn't have a point. And when I took those mushrooms, I didn't have like this big trip experience, but I. It was like spirituality in my body had been turned off and it suddenly turned back on. And I was one with the tree that I was sitting below. I was one with the water that was moving by. I felt myself in the sky. I looked at this tree that was next to me that was like all crooked and wavy. And I was listening to this music. And in the part of the song they had, it didn't have any lyrics, but they had put in like a Ram Dass voice that came in and he actually said in that song, like, you're perfect. Like you're perfect just as you are. There's nothing that needs to change about you. And you're as perfect as that crooked tree. And it was like while I'm laying there looking at these trees and I just started to like sob and weep and feel like it's gonna be okay. And then what. The coolest part of that experience that felt divine to me was there was this monarch butterfly that was like flying around and I like just put up my hand and because it was circling around me and it landed on my finger and I just wept and wept and wept. And it was like, it was like, I don't. I'd so cut off like the feeling of being spiritual and the idea that God is there and that hears me and knows me and cares about me. That that butterfly lining on my finger just like reopened the mystery, like blew it open. And I, I just like, I don't, I don't know what's out there and I don't know what's going on, but I know that I feel like a lot of love right now and I feel connected to being a human on earth. And that was enough for me to like start this process of. It was a turning point in my journey. I then became really into meditation. Like I was doing it before but like took a bunch of courses on it. Took like a bunch of meditation teacher training courses so I could understand how it works and what goes on. And did a couple like six hour day long meditations where you're just sitting in silence meditating for like really long periods of time and started to study Buddhist philosophy and accepting of change and accepting of suffering. And it gave me a new theological understanding that I didn't have before. And everything just started to, to slowly change. It wasn't like instantly better, but it changed.

Margi Dehlin [03:24:16] Yeah, yeah. It does sound like your experience with mushrooms under the tree. It's sort of like brought you back into connection and it feels like the world was kind of dead or like remote and even maybe you were to yourself. And it sounds like it just brought you back to aliveness, connectedness, wholeness.

Kyson Dana [03:24:45] Yeah. If I go back to some of the first ideas I encountered in the Bhagavad Gita while in Russia, they speak of Atman, which is the life that animates everything. I had lost any sense of connection to that life, and the mushrooms reconnected it. I still interpreted what happened on my mushrooms from a Mormon boy perspective. So like I said, like, at one point in the trip that I was having, I closed my eyes and I see this like, figure appear before me and it's this like, beautiful divine goddess. And she gives me this like, tour of my life. And I end, I come out of the trip and I was like, whoa, I met God and she's actually a woman. And I, I took my understanding of God being literally a man with a beard in the sky and then translated it to God being a woman. And it took me a while to like soften and realize that those are. I don't know what they are. They're mysterious, but they're like, in a way, subconscious projections of things that you need to hold and work through. And I don't hold them as like fundamentalist as I did for a minute there.

Margi Dehlin [03:25:39] Yeah.

Kyson Dana [03:25:40] But, yeah, it was a really profound experience. And this was before I, before mushrooms kind of hit the zeitgeist of Mormonism stuff. I didn't know that other people were getting into this. Once I dabbled there and then started finding things, it was like, oh, this isn't a thing that's unique to me.

John Dehlin [03:25:57] I made the joke a few times. We get a thousand applications a year and over a majority of those who apply have two things in common. They have some sort of abuse in a Mormon related context and they've experimented with some sort of psychedelic to cope with their transition. And a lot of people write in and say, oh, you're promoting drug use. And I'm just like, people are just telling their stories.

Kyson Dana [03:26:28] Yeah.

John Dehlin [03:26:28] We're not here to promote illegal activities at all. And it's, it's clearly something that's happening. And by the report of many friends and family, they're saying that it's helping them and research.

Margi Dehlin [03:26:42] Yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [03:26:43] What do you, what do you say to like, a believing Mormon that's going through their own journey, but now they're like, oh, not. They're promoting drugs. Like, I gotta shut this down because now we've gone too far. If you wanted to try and keep them from shutting off the interview right now, what would you say to that? Or would you even try?

Kyson Dana [03:27:01] I don't think I'd try.

John Dehlin [03:27:02] Okay.

Kyson Dana [03:27:02] To bleed more. They wouldn't understand. And the experience on psychedelics is so unique and indescribable that it wouldn't do anybody any good for me to try to explain why they should be open to that experience. I also don't.

John Dehlin [03:27:20] How about just why it's not bad because it's illegal and yes, it's drugs, you know?

Kyson Dana [03:27:24] Yeah. There's a whole rabbit hole on that discussion on how it even became.

Margi Dehlin [03:27:27] For days, I feel like I know.

Kyson Dana [03:27:29] Go read how to change your mind by Michael Poland if you want to go deeper there. I would say that, like, there is a time and a place for things. Everything is. Everything is relatively neutral, and it's your relationship to the thing that's going to change how you experience it.

John Dehlin [03:27:45] So you wouldn't say that about meth or cocaine, right?

Kyson Dana [03:27:48] I would. I say it's relatively neutral. But don't. You probably shouldn't do it. But, like, it as a thing is going to be like, people take in a hospital, they're going to give you drugs that are the same as heroin. And then after your legs healed, you walk out and you're. You're healed. So it's not that the drug is the problem. The problem is your relationship to the drug, the dosage, the setting, the environment.

John Dehlin [03:28:08] True. Like, we're watching the pit right now, and they're. They're prescribing fentanyl all the time in the pit. So, I mean, in that sense.

Kyson Dana [03:28:15] But it is a. It is a nuanced conversation. What I would not do is I would not encourage anybody to go take psychedelics on their own. I think what I did, my experience was really, really positive. But since doing mine and then talking to a lot of other people that have gone through things like psychedelic trips can be really, really scary. And. And they take a really long time to reintegrate. It's not the. It's not the three hours that actually is meaningful. It's like the weeks and months and years afterward. And you need a lot of support to navigate that because it could, like. It's a delusional state of being. There's illusions that you're experiencing and you're interacting with and It'd be really easy to interpret those illusions as like. That's right, real. And they're not real. It's poetry. It's poetry manifest from your own inner world into an experience that you can relate to. So. Yeah, but I, I won't deny that they've been incredibly meaningful to me, so I wouldn't promote it, but I wouldn't tell anybody if it's calling to you to go find a way to explore that in a healthy way.

John Dehlin [03:29:20] You also mentioned EMDR as a helpful treatment, you know, grounding exercises. The. You mentioned the CPTSD diagnosis, but you also say that it sometimes got worse before it got better, that you experienced suicidality as you were seeking therapeutic support. Yeah, it's not a straight line.

Kyson Dana [03:29:47] No, not at all. In fact, at first I felt like if you'd interviewed me three years ago, I would have been like, mushrooms are the panacea. They're the solvol. Just take that and then everything's good. And I did that for like a year. It was like regular big trips and big integration sessions and things. And I haven't used psychedelics for like two years now.

John Dehlin [03:30:09] Yeah, they're not traditionally addictive, like going back to fight the new drug. Don't think about. We're not for. Against anything. But what's just objectively a fact is that cocaine and meth and heroin are totally different classes of drugs than things like LSD and psilocybin and ayahuasca, because they're not. You had that experience. You can't turn around the next day and have that experience again. It literally does something in terms of depletion of your brain chemicals. Number one, you often don't want to have that experience again sometimes, ever. But if. Sometimes six months or a year, but you literally can't take the next day and then the next day and then the next day because your brain just won't have the same impact. So I've heard them described as anti addictive. Yeah, but I, again, I'm not an evangelist for anything.

Kyson Dana [03:31:04] What I would, what I would say is imagine going into therapy and you're going to have the most deeply emotional experience you've ever had in a therapy session in your life. It's going to get to the bottom of your pain and expose it to you in ways that are, that are going to rock you so hard you're going to think you're going to die, and then it's going to turn you and pull you back out of that and give you some, like the arc will complete in that story. But then you come out of the trip and then you've got to figure out, what do I do with that? So you come out of those and you're like, I don't ever want to do that again. It's like having a good therapy session. If they're like, you want to do that again with your therapist tomorrow? You're like, no, like, give me some time. Like, I got to figure out what this thing is about. It's not a pleasurable experience. You have to really, you go in like, okay, here we go. And it kind of just beats you to death. But I, my outside world was having, I was having so many adverse experiences just existing as a human that those deeply emotional, traumatic in a way like experiences on psychedelics were. They felt like a necessary thing to pass through to understand what's happening inside me. When I did like that day long meditation retreat the very first time in meditation you can kind of get to a similar state. Not that you're tripping and seeing things, but you start to feel like you are one and connected with lots of things. Your, your sense of self widens, your brain slows down. And when I had that happen the first time, I immediately felt this like nausea and this pain come into my diaphragm and it started building and building and building until I, I had to step out and like purge on the ground outside because it was. There's too much energy there. And that's what psychedelics kind of feel like. It's like it's going to be a lot. And so anyways, I don't, I, like, this is my experience. I wouldn't, I'm not an advocate of go do it all because after I did that all and I took a long break from them, it didn't get suddenly better. In a lot of ways, psychedelics kind of enhanced like a spiritual psychosis phase for me where I got really into like the golden ratio and numbers and we're all like connected through math and like aliens because you're having these like deity encounters and these things. And I, I can now look back and just be like, okay, you, you over applied yourself on that one, but you recognize it and you stepped back.

Margi Dehlin [03:33:22] Interesting.

Kyson Dana [03:33:23] That's good. Where, where my story got harder though is working at Rivian. I loved working there and it gave me so much meaning and purpose. But I did the same thing I was doing to myself on my mission where I overworked myself and I did not set boundaries for myself and I was getting so many positive Feedback loops about the work that I was doing and how meaningful it was that I was put on more and more important projects. I was like traveling the country doing cool photo shoots and video shoots and designing like really big, big campaigns and events and was leading all the work and at the same time was going through a. Familiar with the term like collapse awareness. We talked about that. I was going through a period of collapse awareness with climate change where I was so committed that this was going to be the solution to climate change. But then I started to have doubts of that and I had a faith crisis in the solutions that we're doing for climate change. My deconstruction brain started to kick online.

Margi Dehlin [03:34:18] That's right.

Kyson Dana [03:34:18] In the same way that I had to do through Mormonism, I started to do it towards climate change. And I like just to show you how intense I was about this, is I went to the UN's website and downloaded all of their like 200 page documents on like their what the data is saying about climate change in the around the globe. And then I went and. Because they give a summary of it and they give the most optimistic, conservative version because they don't want to panic people. But some of the data is. It goes even deeper. And I went and found their data sources and then downloaded all that data. And then I'm nerdy. So I created like this AI tool to process the data so that I could talk to the AI and interact with what is the data actually saying, not the summarized version of that data. And it rocked me like a level that was scary to handle because I was still holding onto this belief that if we just come up with the right solution, we can free ourselves from suffering. We will not have to suffer and our children will not have to suffer.

John Dehlin [03:35:13] It's like anti Buddhism. You're an anti Buddhist.

Kyson Dana [03:35:16] Yeah, in a way. Which was the same thing that Mormonism is doing, that you will, you will not lose your family if you get sealed together in the temple. You can avoid that suffering. And I'm then going, we will not lose the beautiful animals and creatures and places of this earth if we can solve climate change by getting everybody to drive electric vehicles.

Margi Dehlin [03:35:31] So relatable.

Kyson Dana [03:35:32] Yeah. And so when I was getting all of my meaning and purpose there, I started to lose it and entered like, what I would call the second, like dark night of the soul moment where I lost all meaning and purpose. And what was most disorienting about this one is I had done the mushroom thing, I had done the therapy thing, and I felt like life just Sucks. It just sucks. And it's going to be hard for everybody. And I don't know if I want to do this anymore. And I got, like, right back into, like, the suicidal phase of things. And coupled that with, like, an extreme burnout work culture that I was dealing with, and I was in a hole, and I could not get myself out of that hole, and I couldn't find a new job because I didn't have any mental energy to go find anyone. And it felt like, well, what's the point? Because we're all part of this, like, corrupt capitalist system that's going to, like, take the earth down because we're trying to endlessly grow on an earth that can't endlessly grow forever. And there's a bunch of groups online for collapse awareness. And I literally went through the same Mormon exodus experience, but through my relationship to change with the earth. Yeah, that was hard to hold.

John Dehlin [03:36:39] Yeah, I think a lot. I think there's. There's a lot of anxiety, depression, mental illness in sort of younger generations, Gen Z, Gen X, you know, millennials. And I think collapse awareness is playing a role there.

Kyson Dana [03:36:55] Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that. That story, what was hard is hardest for me is I could look at Mormonism and I could say, these are the systemic ways this problem is causing harm, and I'm going to remove myself from it and create a new life for me.

Margi Dehlin [03:37:09] That's right.

Kyson Dana [03:37:10] I can't remove myself from existing on this planet at this point in time in life.

Margi Dehlin [03:37:14] Yeah.

Kyson Dana [03:37:16] And so then it was like, well, what do you do? What do you do about that? And that's when I started encountering the work of Joanna Macy and was able to relocate myself in a wider story. And that. That process of relocating myself into a different story is what I would now call whatever phase of growth I'm in and restructuring that I'm going through. When it comes to spirituality, storytelling now is my new spiritual practice.

Margi Dehlin [03:37:47] Okay, before we go there, can I ask you a couple questions around the collapse awareness time? All right, so when you are reflecting about, let's say, your mission time and then how it seems to me, but I want to make sure I'm actually making the right connections here that particularly with the Rivian era, let's just say that you deconstructed some things about Mormonism, I feel, but not others. And would you say that so in this way of, like, you know, Mormonism is all about this grand purpose. Like, purpose is big meaning. Is big meaning you're special, you're gonna. You need to change the world you're responsible for. Like literally the world we need to go out and save other people. It's our responsibility. Meaning and purpose are huge things. And it feels like you found another kind of huge purpose which I think can be a buoy temporarily. Right. And give you sort of energy to work toward this thing and then work. That work ethic feels familiar with the mission. Like you're working again, super hard in ways that kind of take you away from yourself. You're outside of yourself trying to produce this world. That is not. It isn't, you know.

Kyson Dana [03:39:15] Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [03:39:16] So I'm seeing kind of parallels. Do you look at it that way?

Kyson Dana [03:39:19] I do.

Margi Dehlin [03:39:20] Okay.

Kyson Dana [03:39:20] Yeah. I can totally see that. What at the, at the root of like bought the. The bottom of both of those worldviews is a fear of some of the existential fears that every human feels everywhere.

Margi Dehlin [03:39:31] That's right.

Kyson Dana [03:39:32] And I was willing to look at it briefly or attribute that Mormonism doesn't solve it in the ways that it should, but I didn't. I was scared to look at it directly. Like to look. To hold the fact like you will die, like your children will die, you will suffer, people will suffer, change happens. Those are big human fears. I don't think any of us want to look at that very directly.

Margi Dehlin [03:40:00] That's right. And I think too if you're, if you're. And John and I just read an article in Psychology Today recently about this and it's talking about purpose for people and how, you know, I think they were saying up to 91% of people within a given. I can't remember the parameters. Experience, purpose, anxiety. And it's because of how it's been talked about religiously, culturally, that it has to be big and the pressure of that. And I think young people do feel that. They feel it in college. They feel it like the scope of meaning and purpose just should be. And what they found is actually, you know, studying different cultures, where they live really where they live long, high quality lives is purpose can be as simple as connecting with beauty outside planting flowers

Kyson Dana [03:40:58] in your front yard.

Margi Dehlin [03:40:58] And it's equally. It can bring equal meanings. Very small purpose, meeting with a friend for the day, or that these small things of connection can. Are equal to and oftentimes come without the huge baggage of that anxiety. And so I guess in, in speaking of like purpose in that way, do you feel like you've deconstructed for yourself or that resonates with you in any way?

Struggling with Purpose, Suicidal Thoughts, and Healing

Kyson Dana [03:41:26] Oh, that deeply resonates, yeah. Everything that you're saying I don't, I think I'm still, and I probably will be forever deconstructing that, that sense of purpose, because I think as a human, you want to feel like your life is meaningful and you want to feel like you belong and that you're dedicating towards something greater than yourself. What I don't want to do is I don't want to ever again suppress a part of me that's being harmed not by the system, but even by, at this point, my own self and my own psyche. I don't want to be going through like a burnout period of work and just think like, well, the greater purpose justifies my intensity.

Margi Dehlin [03:42:05] That's right. Or your well being.

Kyson Dana [03:42:07] Yep, yep. So I, with, with that I, when I, I, I didn't end my period at Rivian in a smooth like. And now I'm gonna have a new job. I. It was in January actually of last year, so. 2025. 20. Yeah, 2025. I came back from holiday break, started working again and couldn't sleep anymore. I had like a, an emotional rupture that happened like just in family stuff. And it was like the thing that tipped me over the edge. And I went three days without sleeping, despite trying to sleep, but was not tired at all. I was, it was, I was waking up at 5:30am and running like 10 miles and manic episode. And I was putting all these like these silly inspiring quotes on my Strava reports about how fast I was running of like life's about just attacking it strong. And I was like, I'm gonna just power my way through this pain. And then it, it just collapsed entirely and I became really suicidal. Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [03:43:13] And that was about a year ago.

Kyson Dana [03:43:15] That was a year ago. I'm still quite fresh with that one. What I did differently though, this time, experiencing that lower because I feel like I've learned the tools to see what was happening in a way I could hold myself when I started to step back from it in a way that I couldn't before. And when I was having those feelings as a teenager, when I was having those feelings in Russia and then I was having those feelings again. Now I decided that I'm going to talk about it openly. I'm no longer just. This isn't my internal thing anymore. And yeah, I called my dad and said, I, I'm having a really hard time and I don't want to live anymore. And he's just like, it's okay. Like, I understand. You're all right. Like, what can we do to help you would you need a, do you need to take a break from work? Like, do you need to step away for a minute? Like, do you need us to come watch the kids? And he, he showed up for me in that moment in a way that I wish he could have shown up for me when I was 19 and in Russia and having like a big fallout with life. And I showed up for me in a way that I wish I could have when I was 19 in Russia. And it was, it was beautiful to like, it didn't take away the pain, but to say like, like, I can't do this on my own anymore. And this pain isn't only mine to hold anymore and I need some help. And I opened up to Sarah about all my feelings inside. I. My work gave me like a leave period of like a couple months. And then I ended up just like letting them know, like I'm. But the leave period covered like pay so that I could not have to worry about finances while I was getting help. California has an amazing program. Go Liberal Politics. I'm just poking you on that one. And then I was able to get some help and started like somatic experiencing therapy. What I really started doing though that was something that I'd never done before is I started writing like a lot. Writing and telling my own story and taking what's in me and putting it outside of me. And then what I could start to do when I would write is I could see like a, what felt like chaos to me and had no way to get through in writing. I could start to see like what you pointed out earlier, like themes and arcs of like, okay, you left this structure, but you, you applied the same framework that you had before now at your workplace. And it still is the same framework that causes your self harm. How do we let that one go? How do we step out of that structure? So I got a new job that's not demanding. I work from home remotely. I surf multiple times a week. I'm so relaxed. And what's weird for me is in this new demanding job, when I show up for design reviews, I'm convinced every time that they're going to fire me because I have haven't like done enough yet. And they're just like, wow, you're so good. We're so happy you're here. And it's like I get off the call and I'm like, they still like me. Like, I'm still a good person even though I didn't sacrifice my own well being to get to that point.

Margi Dehlin [03:46:17] Yeah.

Kyson Dana [03:46:18] And as that started to happen and my writing started to happen, I started to go, we live in this, in this beautiful area, the bay area, right on the coast. Got the beach one mile one direction and the redwoods another mile the other direction. And I just started spending because I didn't have to work like a tremendous amount of time in the forest. And these redwoods for me became spiritual. They became these like ancient beings that are hundreds of years old that I could, I could just like sit with and like cry. And yeah, it was, I can't, I don't know what, what goes on in those redwood forests, but they're like,

Margi Dehlin [03:46:59] I

Kyson Dana [03:46:59] felt held by, like, by that atman, that, that earth energy, that life that animates everything was like, like, you're part of us too. You're okay. And that's when I started like writing a lot and then seeing a through line. And then I was taking photos out there in the forest and then I was like, you know what? I don't think my pain is just mine. And I want to talk about it like openly and, and look for, look for patterns in my own well being. Because what I'm realizing, and this is a, a thing that goes along with cptsd, is that I live disconnected from my own lived experience. And the more I'm learning to expand my willingness to feel big feelings, the more, the more I'm able to like, find grounding and to tell stories that are deeper and more painful and I can go a layer below what I thought I could do. So as I've been working on like these, these films, I make a first draft and then I sit down with a friend that's a filmmaker and show it to him and he's not Mormon. And then he asks me lots of questions and I realized like, he's like, so you're eight minutes into this video and you haven't mentioned that you grew up Mormon. It's like, why? I was like, well, I just don't want that part to be the center central focus of my video. And he's like, well, it's been the biggest part of your whole life. Maybe you should like investigate it more deeply. And, and then I'll go one layer deeper. And then I start to uncover some pain. And then what if I can learn to like, not run as soon as that pain comes? Like, find the existential fear that I've been avoiding and like go deeper with it and then find voices that speak directly to that internal fear, like different Buddhist teachers, and then sit in meditation and sit with it and then translate it into an artistic expression. It. It does something in my own psyche that. It's hard to describe, but it gives me a sense of, like, confidence and grounding and belonging in life that I've never had in my entire life. Yeah. I would treat it now as. It's a spiritual practice for me to create these stories.

Margi Dehlin [03:49:03] Yeah.

Kyson Dana [03:49:04] And I've become really interested in Carl Jung and like, the different archetypes and Joseph Campbell's hero's journey and Dan Harmon's like, eight Steps to a Story. And like, the idea of things coming together and then falling apart, and then coming together and falling apart and then finding where am I in that coming together and falling apart. And right now I'm entering a coming together period. And at some point I'm going to fall apart again. And. But what I can see that I'm doing is I'm creating the language to identify it. Rather than be like, a victim to the falling apart. I can now, like, whoa, this is a lot, and hold it in a way that I never could. And what's sad is I had to get, like, all the way to the bottom of that pain of like. Like, there's Kant gives a quote that says the. The only question that's valid in philosophy is whether or not you should kill yourself. That sounds really harsh to hear. And I feel like for myself, I got to the point where I low enough that I'm like, I could if I wanted to and I don't want to. And I. Something about that being a freedom of choice. I don't know. It's hard to hold. If I say that out loud, I can tell it makes people uneasy, but it doesn't actually make me uneasy. It actually feels relaxing to be like, you're okay. There's nothing that's going to take you away from your sense of belonging and where you find yourself now in this wider story of existing.

Margi Dehlin [03:50:28] I think. Oh, yeah, I think we'll see.

Kyson Dana [03:50:31] We'll see what life can throw.

Margi Dehlin [03:50:33] There's layers, but, yeah, I mean, it's occurring to me a little bit that you have worked, done a lot of work with regard to facing fears, facing and metabolizing pain. And I think that, like, what happens oftentimes when, you know, we oftentimes need support to do that, we need a lot of skills, tools. Like, it's not an easy light thing. I'm not talking about it in a very glib way, but I think there also can be a great freedom where you're not controlled by what you Fear, like, there's a lot when we're holding things that have happened to us and they're just sitting there, they tend to come out eventually or control us in. In some way. And so this, like, oftentimes I think about it like a house, and oftentimes we like to live on the. The floors with the windows and. And it looks light there, and, you know, it feels good there. And many times in life, we kind of shove things into this, the basement, and we kind of shut the door. It lives in the dark. We're going to live up here. We want to live up here. Just ignore that. You've got this hole. But what happens is it builds, builds, builds. The room's getting bigger and it starts to see. And eventually, you know, not on your mission, not when you're in survival, not when you're in trauma, but there's a time to go down with a flashlight, with good help, good support, and look through those boxes and integrate ourselves with our experiences. And that's kind of what I'm hearing.

Kyson Dana [03:52:21] Yeah, I think you're right. And I love that you mentioned the support, too, because right now my wife and I see a couple's therapist and I see a somatic experiencing therapist, and I'm on an online group that helps with storytelling. And I've got my friend that's a filmmaker that gives me feedback on these things because this mission video was the fourth film that I made, and it was by far the hardest to go into emotionally. I didn't realize. I came home from Hawaii with my family, like my sisters and parents and all of us went to Hawaii in November. And I came home expecting I was going to make like, a fun travel recap video. And then in making a video like that, you've got two options. You can either talk about where you went, or you can talk about why you went. And I decided I'll talk about why I went. And I expressed it like, I reconnected with my sisters and my family, and it felt so fun in a way that I hadn't felt since childhood. And then my friend rightfully asked me, well, what stopped that from staying that way? Like, what. What changed in your life that put you in a place where you no longer felt connected? And then I was like, well, I went to Russia for two years and it just never was the same coming back. And then that opened up this door where these experiences started happening. And I realized that I had never. I started telling him some stories and he. He was like, whoa, like, that's a lot. And I realized that I still couldn't cry. I still couldn't cry. Like six months ago. I had never cried about my mission experience. And it was when I started to realize that, that I needed, I needed help getting it out of me. And that's when I started like somatic experiencing therapy so they could pull up those emotions and then just like allow me a space to just like cry. And what I started to do is in the film, I go into the redwoods when it was raining because the redwood trees mean so much to me. And I said, if I can't cry, I'll let like the earth cry for me and I will tell my story and let it witness. And I went out with the camera fully expecting to set the camera up and like, just talk about my mission for a minute. And that was the first time it's on film that I started to cry about my mission. And I haven't been able to like put it back in yet. And I don't really want to because I find that that pain is like, it's like one of those beautiful things to feel for the field now.

Margi Dehlin [03:54:32] That's right, yeah. And you are, it is like it can feel like a metabolization and an integration. Like literally you're integrating kind of the locked away pain into your being in a way where they can all exist together. They're all just sort of swirling together. And yeah, I love hearing that joy, that child joy can be accessed too because it feels like that might have been exiled for a while as well. And these are all it's all about. Like, we could talk about parts, but like these parts being allowed to sit at the table of who you are again.

Internal Family Systems and Emotional Integration

Kyson Dana [03:55:11] Yeah. I've read a lot of the books on internal family systems and parts therapy. And what I can see now is when a big flood of emotions comes up, the part of me today that is sitting here can hold the part of me that feels sad. And that's what I tried to do at the end of the film is I wrote a letter to that part of me that's still stuck in Russia in some ways and still processing the pain that's there to complete that. That hero's journey arc from like or you left the ordinary world, you were called on an adventure, you faced some dragons. And part of me is still stuck back there facing those dragons. And for me to then be like, you're okay and you've, you're creating a beautiful life and you belong and you're welcome. And that was really healing for me. And the Biggest surprise I got in making that film was the response that's come back from it. When I was doing it, I was working with an art therapist as well. And I would work on the video and then take it to her and be like, what are you seeing? Like, is this good, bad? And she's always just like, it's not good or bad. You're just making stuff. Like, the point of art therapy is to make your mark and to like, give voice to yourself. And where was I going with this?

John Dehlin [03:56:21] I mean, what. I'll just say you're thinking about that. What I'm resonating with a lot is I. So I leave Microsoft in 2004. Podcasts don't yet exist. It's right on the threshold of like, ipods are about to be created, but as far as I knew, they didn't exist. So I leave Microsoft 2004, go to Logan to start an instructional technology program. And in that first year in Hawaii, there's this instructional technology conference I fly to and there's a workshop called Digital Storytelling. And by that point I discovered Ken Burns. And I love documentaries. So like, huh, I wonder what the emergence of the Internet and video and the YouTube didn't even exist yet.

Kyson Dana [03:57:03] Wow.

John Dehlin [03:57:04] I'm like, huh, Like, I'll go to this thing and see. And in the workshop they preach the gospel of the power of stories and then the power of telling stories through video and audio. And for that class, that workshop I made a little five minute video on. Weirdly, I picked blacks and black people in the priesthood as like. And that's the first video I uploaded to YouTube was a digital storytelling video telling a story about, about racism and my experience in the church. And that's. From there I'm like, ah, I learned about podcasts. And I'm like, oh, I want to start a podcast. What's the most effective way I could start a podcast? Back in 2005, way before, you know, anything ever evolved, including YouTube, I'm like, I'm just gonna have people tell their stories because stories are the most powerful medium. And so that's, you know, it's 20 years later.

Kyson Dana [03:58:06] Amazing.

Margi Dehlin [03:58:06] So are you relating to him?

John Dehlin [03:58:07] Yeah, he left high tech and fell in love with the power of stories. And now he's being a digital storyteller.

Margi Dehlin [03:58:16] And I feel like you were following a thread around what it's meant to you to release them and what people have, how they've responded.

John Dehlin [03:58:25] Yeah, it's the healing power story.

Margi Dehlin [03:58:27] So what has that been like for you?

Kyson Dana [03:58:29] Surprising, honestly. Like, I had uploaded. I made one video first about Rexburg, and I put it on YouTube. I had 12 followers at the time. And the video got 140 views. And I was like, I did not want it to like, blow up because I was like, this is for me, this is my own therapy. And what I was doing is I've branded it very intentionally. I've taken all of the skills of identity creation and meaning making that I've done and learned to do for brands, and I've turned it and I've inverted it on myself. And so I call the project Second Nature because it's me rediscovering the nature that's always been there all along. And then I just didn't know how to access it. I've titled each episode the Search for Blank. And it's like the search for something and it's. It's getting into like those existential fears. So like the search for belonging, the search for meaning, the search for religion or something like that. And then. And then the story unfold that tells that story. And I uploaded two, I've uploaded then a video about like foraging for mushrooms, the edible kind of non, non trippy kind. And then a video about taking. I take my kids every Sunday to the forest and we like, look for animals and banana slugs and crawdads and stuff.

Margi Dehlin [03:59:38] Yeah.

Kyson Dana [03:59:38] As a new practice. Because I was having these moments every Sunday where I'm like, oh, what am I doing? I've left my kids blank here. And then as we've done that ritual every Sunday, I'm like, no. Like, they will look back at this time as the way that I look back at Primary. Like, how cool their experience is going to be with dad in the Redwood Forest on hikes. Like, that's beautiful. So I was like, I'm going to tell that story. And then this mission story kind of got in line as the next story that wanted to be told. And I uploaded it Christmas Eve. I'm in Rexburg at the time, visiting family. That's all rather Mormon. And I just put it on the Internet and walked away. And then it just took off, like instantly. It ended up really quickly on Reddit. It ended up all over in Facebook. And within like 24 hours, I had like 20,000 views. And then I started getting emails and comments. And the comments weren't just like, this is cool, or like, good job, or like, how dare you betray your faith. They were long, beautiful, heartfelt comments from people saying like, I have been home from a mission for 20 years and this is the first time I've ever cried about my mission or I. And then there were so many people that were like, I'm a Jehovah Witness. And you just articulated pain in a way that I have never been able to express. And then I had people that were like medics. And I've seen trauma through those things. Saying, like, what you're describing with cptsd, I have dealt with too. And it was like this collective belonging that suddenly emerged of when I was willing to show up with my pain. Everybody else felt willing to show up with their pain. And it gave me this really powerful sense of the pain is the gift of belonging. And I wouldn't want to give anybody that pain. And I would want to help everybody avoid pain where they can, but I wouldn't ever take away the pain that I have in me, because my pain has allowed me to create the things I've created and connect with people in ways that I didn't know was possible.

John Dehlin [04:01:38] Like the price of admission to humanity, pain is.

Kyson Dana [04:01:42] And it's helped me zoom out. So you've got like, a Mormon. Like, the reason I did not want to make videos about Mormonism, and I really did not want to. I've been avoiding doing that as a creative effort for a long time is because I don't want to make videos about Mormonism. I was like, that's my past and I'm done. I'm ready to move on. But I couldn't for some reason. It was like this gravity pull of, like this. This is the story that wants to be told. And I think it's because in this culture is where I have pain. I can't talk about my pain without talking about Mormonism. Yeah, I can't talk about why I didn't write home on my mission despite facing trauma over and over and over again without explaining the indoctrination that happened from birth Till I was 19. And I can't talk about, like, why foraging for mushrooms means so much to me unless I talk about the loss of meaning that I experienced once I left Mormonism.

Margi Dehlin [04:02:29] That's right.

Kyson Dana [04:02:30] And as I've been like, it's almost like it feels like for the first time in my life, I'm. I'm okay with the narrative story that I was born into, and I'm willing to hold it and talk about it. But I also can see that that is a story in a. It's a smaller story in a larger story of pain and suffering that all humans go through. And if I can play with the Calibration of how do I talk about mine so that you can talk about yours.

Margi Dehlin [04:02:57] That's right.

Kyson Dana [04:02:58] It feels. It's giving me a sense of meaning and purpose to exist as a creative person that has this kind of wacky backstory that I'm learning is actually not that wacky. It's actually beautiful fuel to tell really deep, meaningful stories. And so I can. I can make meaning out of it. That. That makes the most coherent sense to me now than it ever has before.

Margi Dehlin [04:03:20] Something that's so meaningful that I'm seeing in this moment for you, that I so wanted for you on your mission is just like. That was such extreme pain and extreme isolation. Like, your resources were so. You were so alone, you know, and asking to hold so much. But now it's. It's like now you're. You're sharing. You're vocalizing and making real the things inside, and you're not alone anymore. And you're having people come to you. They're coming to you. And it doesn't have to be the exact same thing. It's just hearing the suffering. And there's a me, too. And you're not alone.

Kyson Dana [04:04:09] Right. The other day was at a dinner party, and with some friends and another friend there basically was recently leaving, become being a Jehovah Witness. He had recognized that it was causing a lot of harm in his own life, and he. He moved away from wherever, like back east, where he's living, to. To Santa Cruz, just to get a break from that and to live with his. His family that lived there. And I could see in him the pain, like, it was so acute and so familiar because he was so. He's so good, and he wants to be so good, and he wants to be. He wants to be known as being good. But then as he's stepping away from this, he's being. People are writing his narrative for him that he's not good and that he's falling away. And he even has language sometimes where he's like, yeah, and I'm, you know, kind of falling away. And I, like, stop and be like, can we tell a different story? Because maybe you're not falling away. Maybe you're growing. Maybe you're shifting or changing, or maybe the box that you were in just too small now, and you're. You're being brave to, like, expand outside of it. And what was cool is to be at a place now where I can name that and I can talk about it. And one thing as I was talking to him, that was like a click for Me is in Mormonism, like, the core. The core Mormon story. If you get to, like, what people actually believe, it's around Jesus Christ, this God that died and then was born again, so that we can all be born again, too. And if you take a mytho literal reading of that story, it's like, okay, well, then that's the God and that's who we go worship. And that's. That's the point is to worship this person. But if you take a mythopoetic version of that story, Joseph Campbell does a lot of this work to articulate this. You can actually find that you are that main character in that story. And that could sound blasphemous to Mormons is to identify yourself as Christ. But I think when Christ says, come, follow me. Be like me. Step into your own story. Be willing to go to the bottom of your pain. Find your guest enemy. Recognize that some of the pain that you're going to feel is not yours to feel, but you're going to feel it anyways. It was given to you from generations that existed before you or the culture around you. You're going to feel like you're going to die. The people that you love and are closest to are going to be the ones that feel like are going to kill you. And they don't know what they're doing. And Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. And then you're going to be born again, and then you're going to create a new version of story. Like, if you look at that as a myth that's replicated, like Krishna does the same thing in Hinduism. This story shows up all over through culture. I then can look at my life as the most spiritual thing that I've ever gone through in my life. And I'm right where I should be. And I can look at my friend that's leaving his Jehovah Witness faith. And instead of like, like, I'm so sorry what you're going through, I could actually say, like, that is hard and it's beautiful and it is sacred and it's reverent and keep going. Like, I believe in you and I'm here to support you. Yeah, that. That is like. That to me is religion. That is spirituality without the organization. Like, that gets in the way of all of it.

Margi Dehlin [04:07:19] That's right. That's right. Oh, I have so many thoughts going through my. I know for me, you're reminding me of a time when I would say I was in nihilism, really dark. And I read. I'm Very much into nature, find a lot of meaning in nature. And I had read about caterpillars and how when they cocoon, they actually. Sorry, it always makes me cry, but they kind of digest. I don't know how to kind of say. Yeah, they dissolve actually, you know, parts of themselves to become a different form. The butterfly.

Finding Meaning Outside Mormonism

John Dehlin [04:07:58] Right.

Margi Dehlin [04:07:59] And I just think that's so meaningful. You've. You've given voice to, like, confusing. Holding opposing things that are true, that are confusing to hold together and difficult to understand. Right. And I think so much of life is this way. We recently read a memoir called Lost and Found. About. It's a memoir about the author loses her father and finds love. And the last chapter is called and so it's Lost, Found. And. And how do we hold. How do we hold experiences where, you know, juxtaposing realities that are harsh and beautiful, brutal and, you know, and so I just think it's. It's such a beautiful and difficult, like, thing to render in ourselves, I guess, that we can be lost and found in the same moment, in the same time, in the same, you know.

Kyson Dana [04:09:00] Yeah. Yeah. And then I love that you're like, the caterpillar reference is beautiful. The. My second nature logo is a butterfly. Based on that is that it's your second nature. It's the second part of you that's always been there that has just been waiting to emerge, but you had to dissolve and you had to die before it could come back up. The. That metaphor, though, shows up everywhere in nature. I was recently walking through the redwoods and was looking at, like, all these mushrooms that are blooming, or I don't know if you call them blooming. Emerging as. It's starting to rain in Santa Cruz and mushrooms take the things that have died and digest them so that they can be transformed back into life. Like that in and of itself is a death and rebirth resurrection story in nature.

Margi Dehlin [04:09:43] Fantastic fungi, everyone.

Kyson Dana [04:09:45] Yeah.

Margi Dehlin [04:09:45] It's magic.

Kyson Dana [04:09:46] It is magic. And. And then you can look at the way what I've seen. Another common thing I see in nature now that I can find myself in is the emotions that I go through. I used to describe them as waves. Like, oh, I'm in a wave where I'm not experiencing a lot of, like, trauma feelings. But now I describe it as a spiral.

Margi Dehlin [04:10:05] Yeah.

Kyson Dana [04:10:06] Sometimes it's a different version that I'm experiencing, and then sometimes it goes big, but it always widens. And every time I come back to the same place, like coming back to my mission pain, I'm in a Different place now than I was five years ago. And coming back to it, and five years from now, when I cycle back around and I have to confront another layer there that I didn't understand, I'm going to be in a different place then. And it's just. There's a poem by Rilke that says, I live my life in widening circles, and I love that feeling. And I see that as, like, a pattern in nature, too. So nature, walking through nature, taking photos of nature is like a spiritual experience. There is no. There's no longer for me, the church and then the world, life, and then spirituality.

Margi Dehlin [04:10:47] Absolutely.

Kyson Dana [04:10:48] You are in it. It's a soup, and you're in it.

Margi Dehlin [04:10:50] Yes. Yeah, I feel that.

Kyson Dana [04:10:53] And you can even start to explain death in those ways in that story. Like, death is now about, like, the literal, physical death. Like, I will die someday.

Margi Dehlin [04:11:01] Yep.

Kyson Dana [04:11:01] And I will be changed into the soil where my body lies, and then I will be born again, and the people that come after me will learn to love me. And, like, I'm sitting next to, like, a redwood tree crying. What died on that ground 400 years ago that was transformed into the nutrients that created that tree?

Margi Dehlin [04:11:19] That's right.

Kyson Dana [04:11:19] That. That gave birth to life. And that healed me. Like, I don't need some deep religious theology to explain that metaphor. Like, I can just sit in it and be like, I am that metaphor. I'm in it right now. Now.

John Dehlin [04:11:31] So wait, you'd rather be a tree or a mushroom than a God creating world, endless worlds?

Kyson Dana [04:11:37] I would. I would rather. I would rather. This is a blasphemous realization that I had one day. And I'll plug Sophie Strand. She's an amazing author who got this idea in my head. I would rather bury Jesus in the ground and have his body transformed into the soil so that he could come back to life through the living things that exist. That, to me, is a more sacred story than a God that emerges from the tomb and flies off into heaven to never be seen again.

John Dehlin [04:12:03] I love Joseph Smith. No, I'm kidding.

Kyson Dana [04:12:06] Yeah, exactly. I love, though, the thought of. I love the thought of the second coming of Christ also being mythopoetic in that same way. Like, it's an awakening. It's a. It's an individual thing of, like, realizing you're born again and you're. It's back alive. And if. And maybe if we ever get to a point where the world collectively plunges into a deep period of pain and we're all able to collectively pull back out of that pain together Maybe that will be this unifying, conscious moment that we have where we transcend our divisions and stuff that we're seeing in the world. I don't know. But that is a way for me to now that framing gives me grace. When I talk to Mormons, too, that are very devout because their story in that sense is still true, they. They're just playing at a plane of understanding that story that's different than the plane that I'm understanding it. What I like is that my plane can create a container where their story can exist. Theirs doesn't create a container very well where my story can exist. And I have to give them grace. That that's just going to be how it is for a while.

John Dehlin [04:13:09] I, when I used to do faith crisis retreats, we would always talk about the Adam and Eve story as a metaphor for an awakening, you know, But I never thought about using the Jesus crucifixion resurrection story as a metaphor for kind of second half of life. Although I know we have often talk about. I do think we have because this idea of being born again. Like, have you studied Richard Rohr? Did you get in Richard Rohr? Like, he has this idea first half of life and second half of life. And as problematic as you or others may find Mormonism, and I see you, the people in the camera, you're going to be raised in a system and they're all going to be flawed and problematic, and you're going to have a faith crisis against any system you're raised in. But the important thing is that hopefully your system got you to adulthood, to consciousness, and then you have this opportunity of having a faith crisis and, or dying in your first framework, and then the opportunity for being born again and a reawakening for the second half of life. And I think that's. Yep, that's what Jesus was pointing to.

Kyson Dana [04:14:26] And it's Abraham Isaac story. It's the mother placing her baby in the basket and sending them down the river. It's, it's, it's the story. It's the sacred story of life.

John Dehlin [04:14:36] It's a human story.

Margi Dehlin [04:14:36] And it's not what I love about. Here's what I connect about with Mormon stories and knowing that stories can really limit us and they can set us free. Right? It like stories. It's. I think it's wise to be conscious of the stories that we hold and how we create them, you know, how we make them. But I do feel like the gift of a deconstruction, as painful as they can be, is that we will Likely then realize we're deconstructing for the rest of our lives. We'll likely be deconstructing. And now we have some idea of how to do that. You know, like, for. Yes, Mormon stories is about a faith deconstruction, but, you know, it's most of us, once we deconstruct faith, we are deconstructing other histories, our country's history, what we've been taught that way, or the medical system is another system that we can deconstruct, or the educational system or

Kyson Dana [04:15:38] capitalism or climate change.

Margi Dehlin [04:15:39] I mean. Right. Like, it just. It can go on and on.

Kyson Dana [04:15:42] Yep.

Margi Dehlin [04:15:43] But I think once. Once you do that initially, and I, I do think, you know, they're not all created equally, but you have a sense for how to do it. Yeah, right.

Kyson Dana [04:15:54] Yeah. And. And it becomes a gift in a way. Like, I can talk to people now, like coworkers or something, that are going through a crisis of meaning in their own lives. And that's not a unique feeling to arrive at just for Mormons. John Vervake has, like, a ton of beautiful work and lectures online about that. And when I hear them talk about their crisis of meaning, I can now I can. I can identify in my own mind where they are in that story arc and. And understand it in a way that I couldn't have before. My Mormon crisis of meaning was my version. Theirs might be something else. You know, maybe they grew up in some Ivy League family that expected high outcomes and a job of a certain degree, and they have to deconstruct that worldview.

Margi Dehlin [04:16:38] System, culture. Yeah.

Kyson Dana [04:16:39] Yep. Yep. That doesn't take away. And this is another one of those, like, double truths you can hold. Not all systems are equal. Not all worldviews have the same pain and trauma attached to it.

Margi Dehlin [04:16:48] That's right.

Kyson Dana [04:16:48] And so I, I, that's where I could hold that. Mormonism, just like every other system, is a framework that you're gonna. We were born into and we're gonna pass through and experience. And it's easy to say, like, well, somebody at an Ivy League school might go through that. Somebody that's Jehovah Witness might go through that. Somebody that's a Catholic might go through that. Somebody that just like their whole family was about science might go through that. But Mormonism also has a version of pain that is created there that is unique to Mormonism.

Margi Dehlin [04:17:15] I agree.

Kyson Dana [04:17:17] But we all have pain, and that's the connector. That's the connector.

John Dehlin [04:17:22] It's the price of admission.

Kyson Dana [04:17:23] Yep.

John Dehlin [04:17:24] To humanity.

Kyson Dana [04:17:24] Yep. Another one of the songs that I wrote on my mission that I didn't know until later reading. I have a line in there that says the song is called they Don't Know what God Knows that I know. And that was, like, the feeling that I was having on my mission of, like, the people around me don't know what God knows that I know about what I'm experiencing. And in the line. There's a line in there that says, are little boys born that they might suffer? It's asking this question, like, what, are we all just. Are we just born to suffer and die? And that sounds so, like, bleak and nihilistic, to put it that way. And yet what I now know is that. Yes, and when you get to the bottom of that suffering, you actually experience freedom in a way that you can't while you're resisting that suffering.

Margi Dehlin [04:18:13] Absolutely.

Kyson Dana [04:18:14] And then you can take big problems in the world, say, like we see witnessing going on out there right now, or climate change, or these causes that actually are important and do matter to people. And I can respond to them in a way that isn't a fear reaction. I can now respond in a way that's out of love, because I love the earth and I want to protect it or care for it, as opposed to before it was like, oh, no, we gotta hurry and, like, stop this thing before it plummets off a cliff and.

John Dehlin [04:18:43] Yeah.

Kyson Dana [04:18:43] But before I can get there, though, I had to, like, I had to suffer a lot.

John Dehlin [04:18:49] Well, I feel like we could go on forever. And as I read your outline, there's so much reconstruction you've done that just seems so possibly instructive for so many of us. I'll just say as I'm. As I'm kind of wrapping up my thoughts, you know, we. We created years ago a series called the Gift of the Mormon Faith Crisis that came about as a result of all the workshops and retreats we were doing. You know, I realized really early in Mormon stories, we don't just want to deconstruct. We people feel lost when they lose their faith. They're not choosing it, but also if we could also help provide support for the transition and the healing and growth after then. We're trying to support all the way along, not just in the deconstructive phase. So we created Gift of the Mormon Faith Crisis. It really never took off. And, you know, and we did workshops and retreats, but then Covid happened, and we kind of got out of that practice. And then, you know, I've been working with Beau Euler and Julie Hanks and Jenna Spengler and others trying to think about, but, you know, bridge building and there's. Anyway, what I'm saying is the work you're doing and this interview today just is reinforcing in me this idea that, you know, we. I don't know that creating a new religion is going to be the answer, but at the same time, there's enough wisdom that many of us are learning or experiencing. There's got to be a way to share it, to create community around it and to provide workshops or retreats or books or podcasts or even podcast series that can just help people through that. I mean, if people can love LDS discussion series or John Turner's Joseph Smith series, why can't we have a series on like, healing and growing and, and, or, or your, your YouTube channel? But I mean, I just, I wish I want there to be more of this in the world that people can hold and work with. And I guess everybody's got to do it on their own. But I also think certainly there's a way for us to help accelerate or incubate or facilitate the process so that it's more efficient and more people end up in better places. You know what I mean? So anyway, that's.

Kyson Dana [04:21:16] I, I relate with that desire. That's one of the, One of the feedback things I've got from people is I've had a lot of people email me or contact me on Instagram that will say, I want to tell a story too, about my life. Because when you hear people tell a story, it, like, inspires you. And the natural response is like, what camera are you using? It's like, it's going to have to go deeper than what camera. But I have found a community where I can. It's small, but where I can workshop my stories because there's layers there that I'm blind to. And until somebody points it out, I don't know about it. So I plug this. I bought the Domain Second Nature Club, and I'm planning to do a storytelling community. Not where I'm the guru of anybody's story, because I'm not. But I think if people want to do show and tell and workshop stories and we drop some resources and links to storytelling frameworks like Joseph Campbell or John Vervecki or Joanna Macy, and you can start to work on it because there is something beautiful about both for yourself to work through your own story. But then when somebody tells you their story, you just love them and you want to hug them and like, be like, yeah, you belong too.

John Dehlin [04:22:18] We're all kind of like the moth. You remember the moth?

Kyson Dana [04:22:20] Yeah, yeah, yeah. Monster is.

John Dehlin [04:22:22] Yeah.

Kyson Dana [04:22:23] Yep.

John Dehlin [04:22:24] Yeah. No, it's good. Well, yeah, well, let's just. So tell everybody your YouTube channel again and how to get a hold of you.

Reflections, Takeaways, and Closing Thoughts

Kyson Dana [04:22:31] My YouTube channel is @kaisendana, which is my name, first and last name with

John Dehlin [04:22:36] K, Y, S, O N D A N A. Is that right?

Kyson Dana [04:22:38] That's right.

John Dehlin [04:22:38] Okay.

Kyson Dana [04:22:39] Or you can find me on Instagram the same way. Or my website, which is kaisendana.com and I don't know what's going to come from all my stories, but I have a lot of ideas of like, ways to workshop and a lot of people that want to get involved in their own version of whatever this is. So come hang out and we'll see. I'm only four videos in and this one blew up in ways that I didn't expect. And so I'm now grappling with like, what does that mean for me?

Margi Dehlin [04:23:03] Yes. Understandably.

Kyson Dana [04:23:05] Yep.

John Dehlin [04:23:05] Well, I'm glad you're around. I'm glad you're doing good things and who knows where it will lead. But if we can, you know, we're happy to let people know about you. And if we can, let's stay in touch so that we can potentially collaborate. Because on the one hand, people always say, john, don't shorten Mormon stories. We like the long form. On the other hand, I'm more aware than anyone that a 20 minute, you know, Johnny Harris, like a 20 minute or a one hour story that's really well produced is going to reach a lot of people that are four or five, in this case almost, you know, four and a half hour story isn't going to be able to reach people because so many people on Mormon stories drop off after the first 30 minutes and they never hear the rest. So on the one hand, I. They won't let me stop doing what we're doing. On the other hand, there's. There's a market and a need for other. Other approaches.

Kyson Dana [04:23:56] Yeah. So more of like a YouTuber Gen Z friendly version of like.

John Dehlin [04:24:00] Yeah.

Kyson Dana [04:24:00] Discussing pain. Yeah.

John Dehlin [04:24:02] Yeah. So make us obsolete.

Kyson Dana [04:24:04] Okay. I'll do my best.

John Dehlin [04:24:06] Will you do that, Grayson? Dana? Make Mormon stories irrelevant.

Kyson Dana [04:24:10] Well, I would not be in the place that I'm at today without the work that you two are doing. And I don't mean that just to butter you up. No, I'm serious. I told you this when I first walked in the door that I know your voice is at a creepy level because they've been living in my ears for so many years. So I just am really grateful and appreciative of both of you.

John Dehlin [04:24:33] Thank you.

Kyson Dana [04:24:33] Yeah. And I know firsthand how bizarre it is to get in the public spotlight and to get the comments that you get and to get the. You talk about these things and people get triggered on all sorts of whoever they are. I have active Mormons that are very triggered. I've got family that I know are going to be triggered by me doing this interview. And yeah, yeah. It's not easy to put yourself out there.

Margi Dehlin [04:24:56] Thank you for that. Thank you for sharing your story in the detail you did and with the insight and reflection that you did. I'm really touched by it.

Kyson Dana [04:25:06] Thank you.

Margi Dehlin [04:25:07] So feel so grateful.

John Dehlin [04:25:08] And Margi always taps out after 4. So you got Margi for 4 hours and 30 minutes.

Kyson Dana [04:25:12] Oh, good. I saved the nature stuff for the end, so I had to keep her,

John Dehlin [04:25:16] you know, you know, beautiful. All right, well, Margi, thanks for joining us today. It's been great to have you.

Margi Dehlin [04:25:23] Yes, thank you, John. Thank you.

John Dehlin [04:25:26] And really quick, please subscribe and like and comment and email us@mormonstoriesgmail.com and check out Kyson Dana YouTube channel and Instagram channel for more cool digital storytelling videos.

Kyson Dana [04:25:42] All right. That's right. Thanks for having me.

John Dehlin [04:25:44] All right. Thanks to Julia and Brooklyn for all they do behind the scenes. Thanks to everyone who supports us. Be good to each other, be kind to each other, and we'll see you all again soon on another episode of Mormon Stories podcast. Take care

Kyson Dana [04:25:59] of.

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