I don't think you've learned to deal with it at all.
Why would you think that?
I don't live in denial of the genuine spiritual experiences I had as a Mormon, nor do I try to rationalise them away as some sort of figment of my imagination.
And I don't try to rationalize my emotional experiences as spiritual. I can prove my experiences are emotional, can you prove yorus are spiritual?
Of course not. But the Church seems to think testimonies about these experiences aee syupposed to work as proof because by simply hearing about them, the "spirit" testifies to the audience that it is true and this is verified by the warm fuzzies everyone receives while listening. This is psychological conditioning to the letter.
Every single experience I have had can easily be explained naturally - the supernatural explanation is something people strive for... they want it...they need it... their acceptance in the Church depends on it...so they convince themselves certain experiences are spiritual when a perfectly sound naturalistic explanation will suffice. The only experiences of mine that came close to being supernatural were those that occurred when I was not a member of the LDS Church - and I don't attribute them to belief in any particular faith.
Just last week, for example, a member in our ward went to my brother-in-law's house (across the street) for home teaching and tried to teach him about the doctrines of the Church. He is no longer interested in the LDS faith and doesn't go to Church, even though his wife does. After their meeting by brother-in-law told me he couldn't agree with anything the guy was saying, and he didn't like the way he was bashing Catholicism. The following sunday this person bore his testimony about his "spiritual" experience during this home teaching visit. He even started tearing up. He talked about how my brother-in-law was open to the truths, was being convinced, and how he anticipated his baptism. I almost laughed out loud but I just sat there and shook my head. But the point here is that people can make virtually anything "spiritual" if they want to. All they have to do is talk about how he or she felt, and wallah, you've got spirituality! Incidentally, this member was called to be the ward bishop the previous week.
I learned the hard way that the LDS faith cannot substantiate the plethora of extraordinary truth claims on which it is founded, and that it uses psychology to compensate for this problem, and to retain membership. Almost every TBM today bases his or her loyalty on what they insist are spiritual experiences - the irony is that they also try to prove the faith through natural means in venues like FARMS/FAIR. If ever they realize that these experiences are not really spiritual, the Church will have a much bigger problem than trying to maintain only a 35% activity rate. It will have to rely strictly on procreation for membership increases. It is easier to condition children who are born into the Church to believe they are elite and that every emotion they experience is God's way of saying something positive about their Church. This is why LDS whisper into their children's ears, the testimonies they wish they would obtain. And they parrot them in from of live audiences, making their parents proud and gaining acceptance in the community. Why would anyone want to abandon that! They don't, so they just keep reiterating the same "testimony" until they turn 8 and are baptized. During this time nobody teaches them to think critically, to question things, to differentiate the difference between spiritual and natural experiences. This is why so many people leave the faith once they grow up and learn these things on their own. It is also the reason why there is so much resentment from former LDS who feel like they were sheltered too much or even lied to. Of course, the LDS rationalize all of this away by saying the person just wasn't as spiritual as we thought, and Satan got the better of him. Again, everything in life is judged by a spiritual barometer. If something good happens, it is God, if not, it is Satan.
It is also easier to control and limit outside influences that might persuade LDS children to think otherwise. So there is a strong effort to give them their testimony while they are young.
I had to swallow the pride I had built up as an elite status CK-bound child of God. The Church tries to convince the members that everything is spiritual or non-spiritual. Emotion is taken as a synonym for spirituality. The guy who baptized me told me women are more spiritual than men. When I asked for proof, he said women are more inclined to cry because they are more in tuned with the spirit. This kind of thinking resonates in the Church. A member is spiritual or he-she isn't. Spirituality is something Mormons strive for and it is expressed and even bragged about during testimony meeting. At times it seems like there is a competition to see who can relate the most spiritual experiences. This served Paul H. Dunn quite well, as it has meny others, including the return missionariues who literally lie through their teeth when they relate ridiculous things like stories about garments stopping bullets. They cry and sniff and woo the audience when young mature men express such emotion publicly. It is an established fact that once you have established what kind of "spiritual" person you are, the rest of your status in the Church is determined by this. This is why so many RM's go through post mission syndrome. There is a lot of pressure to meet a certain spiritual plane upon returning.
I've heard enough of these "spiritual" stories to learn not to take these things at face value, and I even found a tendency in myself through the years, to wish I could have related an experience that was more spiritual that it really sounded. There is more myth and folklore in the LDS faith than perhaps any other faith on the planet. From dusting off the feet and causing homes to burn down, to garments stopping bullets... I cannot thing of any other faith that as garcefully absorbed so many myths.. er, I mean, "spiritual" experiences. Not even the Catholic Church can compete, and it is 1700 years older
“All knowledge of reality starts from experience and ends in it...Propositions arrived at by purely logical means are completely empty as regards reality." - Albert Einstein