The Majority Vote.

Martha Beck writes in "Leaving the Saints"..... After a family therapy session where Martha  remained the one lone family member willing to see abuse.." I could see that my siblings' truth, as well as that of all other Latter-Day Saints, would always be based on group consensus.  I read psychology tests about the effects of socialization on perception, pondered the famous experiments by Solomon Asch that demonstrated how subjects who didn't know they were being tested changed their perceptions in order to agree with other people. Shown two lines, one long, one short, in the company of people who all claimed that the lines were of equal length, the naive subjects almost always agreed with the majority, rather than the evidence of their own senses.  They not only said that the lines were equal; they often came to actually SEE them as being equal." What is alarming and comforting at the same time, is that my family isn't any different from the test folks, who automatically side with the majority. That very few will use the evidence of their senses and stand alone. She also wrote about losing her family, " It would have been less painful to lose my family to war or natural disaster; less shame, less confusion, less personalized energy.   I did lose them you see.  I've never really been back. Though there isn't an official "no contact" rule between us, my siblings and I stopped most communication after that bloody battle.  I hear from other relatives that I am the black sheep now, the traitor to our family's code, the enemy of every thing we once stood for together...." And the last few lines that caught my attention..."Sometimes I think there is not enough room in the Universe for the sorrow of that exile." Being exiled from your family for going against the majority vote.