1704: My Mormon Family Fell Apart - Kelsey Edwards Pt. 1
Mormon Stories Podcast
Dr. John Dehlin
4.6 • 5.2K Ratings
🗓️ 12 December 2022
⏱️ 157 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Kelsey Edwards has a unique upbringing as a child actor who was homeschooled by her Mormon parents. Driven by a desire to do what’s right and excel, Kelsey develops a perfectionism that goes beyond religious adherence into body image and leads to disordered eating. Kelsey is able to recover with help from her parents, only to be thrown into another family crisis as her father succumbs to an opiate addiction after chronic back pain and leaves both the Church and the family. As many children do, Kelsey feels she shares blame for the destruction of her family and re-commits to the LDS religion for strength and comfort.
When her family moves to Provo, Utah, Mormon purity culture has costs for Kelsey’s self-esteem and body image as she continues pursuing performance at high school and BYU. Kelsey’s first doubts come as she serves a mission in Birmingham Alabama and grapples with the spirituality and fulfillment members of other faiths feel. Kelsey realizes belief in “eternal families” is far from unique to Mormonism but what IS unique about the Mormon version is the dark element that it’s predicated on a God deliberately separating families first.
Join us for the rest in Part 2!
Social Media:
- New Song: Life in a Box
- Insta: www.instagram.com/kelseymarieedwards
- TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@kelseymarieedwards
- YouTube.com/@kelseyedwards
- Kelsey Edwards on IMDB
Squad Goals: Courses.kelseyedwards.co (For teen girls about making/keeping good friends)
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I am your host John DeLin. It's November 28th |
| 0:06.7 | 2022 and |
| 0:08.7 | I am joined today by my partner in goodness and righteousness Margie. Hey Margie. Hey there. Thanks for joining us. Yes my pleasure |
| 0:16.4 | Today, I am super excited for our interview today. We're interviewing Kelsey Edwards. Hey Kelsey. Hello |
| 0:23.8 | How's it going? |
| 0:24.7 | There are several themes that we're going to be discussing today many of you might know Kelsey at least if you follow |
| 0:31.6 | TikTok and Instagram |
| 0:33.6 | She recently released a song called Life in a Box |
| 0:37.6 | Which is about her own faith journey and it's a lovely song. I highly recommended it's available on Apple and Spotify |
| 0:45.9 | So that's kind of how I got to know Kelsey is through that amazing song |
| 0:49.4 | You also may have seen her share that song with her believing Mormon mom |
| 0:54.0 | on tiktok and on Instagram and |
| 0:58.2 | That caught a lot of eyeballs, but anyway just pause right now go listen to Life on a Box |
| 1:03.3 | Come right back and you'll know who we're dealing with |
| 1:05.9 | But the themes for today are all really relevant and important themes of course. We've been covering kind of |
| 1:13.1 | Gen Z and Mormon millennials who you know more recently have |
| 1:18.2 | experienced a faith journey within a Mormon context so we're going to be talking about |
| 1:22.0 | Her faith journey as a return missionary Mormon |
| 1:26.5 | Millennial or someone in her mid-20s |
| 1:29.5 | But we're also going to be talking about kind of perfectionism as a young Mormon woman |
| 1:34.4 | devout Orthodox Mormonism because Kelsey self-describes as a very devout Orthodox Mormon |
| 1:40.3 | She even put in her kind of outline the idea of like how does someone totally committed and devoted to the church end up |
... |
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