#15 My Life in Mormon Blue, A Path that Worked until it Didn't: Spiral Dynamics Blue Stage CHAPTER 3

What happens when the worldview that gave your life meaning, identity, community, and purpose no longer fits?

In this deeply personal episode of Deep Play, I explore my own experience growing up inside the Blue stage of Spiral Dynamics through Mormonism—and why Inspector Javert's worldview in Les Misérables once felt strangely familiar to me.

I grew up believing there was a single right path through life. God had a plan. Prophets and scriptures told me what was true. Obedience brought blessings. Sacrifice was virtuous. Authority could be trusted. And when my own desires conflicted with what God expected of me, righteousness meant learning to surrender my will.

That worldview gave me a lot.

It gave me discipline, community, family traditions, purpose, service, leadership, belonging, and the ability to sacrifice for something larger than myself. For much of my life, it was a beautiful and remarkably coherent way of understanding the world.

But it also taught me to become very good at asking “What should I do?” while burying the question “What do I want?”

Eventually, the structure began to crack.

Leaving Mormonism wasn't simply a matter of changing my mind about religion. It meant separating destroying my own identity that had been constructed around Mormonism from the time I was born.

It's been four years since leaving and I'm still untangling what was authentically mine, and what was put on me. I've lost certainty, questioned and unquestionable authority, rebuilt my own path, and watching relationships change and distance as I stepped outside the path that once connected me to my community, my belief system and everything I knew.

And that's where Javert becomes unexpectedly personal.

He's not a classic villain. I see something of my former self in him: someone whose identity was built around duty, order, certainty, obedience, and the sincere belief that there really was one correct way to live. His conviction was too rigid to allow for growth and change. Fortunately for me, my story is different.

This episode isn't about throwing away my Blue-Stage Mormon Identify entirely.

It's about transcending and including it—keeping the discipline, service, commitment, community, and meaning that Mormonism gave me while letting go of the shame, fear, rigidity, black-and-white thinking, and dependence on external authority that came with it.

My relationship with Blue is ultimately a story of two things that can exist at the same time:

Gratitude for the worldview that built me—and grief for what happened when I could no longer live inside it.

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