Same Parents, Completely Different Paths: A Raw Conversation About Faith Transition With My Brother

This conversation is with my younger brother, Ryan Liston. One of my favorite people on the planet and one of my closest friends. We were both raised in a Latter-day Saint household with the same parents, same expectations, and same foundation. But our paths have looked very different, and I think that's exactly why this conversation is so worth having.

Ryan's story is beautiful and hard and full of the kind of growth that only comes from doing really uncomfortable inner work. I'm so proud of him.

✨Listen to the full episode or read for the breakdown.

Same Home, Different Journeys

Ryan and I are seven years apart. I'm the oldest, he's the youngest. And it's genuinely fascinating how differently we experienced the same upbringing. Where I kind of floated through the rules and didn't lose sleep over missing a scripture reading, Ryan was all in. Like, reading 45 minutes instead of the assigned 15, memorizing scriptures, going an entire year without turning on the radio because he wanted to stay close to God. His relationship with the church wasn't just religious. It was his entire identity.

He's since recognized that he also craved external validation, and growing up in Utah where most of the people around him were LDS, everything in his world pointed back to the church as the highest standard. If you wanted to be good at school, work, relationships, or anything at all, you had to be a good Mormon. That belief ran deep.

When the Questions Started

Ryan's faith questions began while he was a student at BYU, somewhere around age 21 or 22. It wasn't a dramatic moment. It started with reading the Old Testament and hitting a passage where God commands the Israelites to slaughter an entire population. For someone who had been taught that God's defining characteristic was love, that just didn't compute. From there, more questions came. And no matter how many professors he emailed, how many bishops he talked to, or how many explanations he read, he couldn't reconcile what he was feeling.

For almost two years, he was on his knees weekly, sobbing, begging God to help him find his way back to belief. He kept going to church. Kept reading his scriptures. Kept trying.

And kept sinking deeper into depression and anxiety.

Eventually, going to church was making things worse, not better. So he stopped.

"I chose to feel anger, but I chose not to be angry. What matters is that you let yourself experience what you're going to experience, but you also choose what emotional place you want to land in on the other side."

The Identity Crisis Nobody Warns You About

What Ryan's therapist eventually helped him see was that leaving the church wasn't just a religious shift. It was a full identity crisis. When your entire sense of self is built around a belief system and that belief system falls away, you're left asking the most basic questions imaginable.

Ryan described standing on the stairs at BYU at 24 years old, genuinely not knowing why honesty mattered. Not as a rhetorical question. He literally didn't have an answer. Everything that had given him a moral framework was gone, and he had to rebuild from scratch.

That process has been slow, painful, and nonlinear. But he's done it. He's landed on a foundation of kindness, integrity, honesty, and care for people. And those four things now guide him in a way that feels truly his own.

"I spent almost two years, probably almost weekly, sobbing on my knees begging God to help me understand how to believe. And no matter what I did, I just couldn't anymore."

Choosing to Live, Choosing to Try

This part of our conversation hit me hard.

Ryan shared that there was about a three year period where he wasn't very interested in living anymore. He wasn't giving up, but without a strong sense of self, there wasn't much fuel to keep going.

What pulled him through wasn't a single moment.

It was a choice.

He decided to stop just surviving and start actually trying to live. To wake up every day and say, let's see what this one has to offer. That shift, from barely hanging on to actively choosing, changed everything. He's still figuring out the specifics and jokes that at 29 he still doesn't know what he wants to be when he grows up. But he knows he wants community, connection, deep relationships, and to keep experiencing what this life has to offer.

Where He Stands Spiritually Now

Ryan describes himself as "skeptically agnostic." Some days he leans toward believing there's something out there, some days he doesn't. He's comfortable sitting in that uncertainty, which is a huge shift from someone who used to need all the answers. He doesn't know if Jesus existed, but he respects the example. He misses the feeling of connection to something divine sometimes, but hasn't found something to replace it with yet.

And he's okay with that for now.

What's Helped Him Most

Ryan shared some really valuable resources for anyone navigating a faith transition, or for loved ones trying to understand someone who is.

He recommends the Faith Matters podcast, which covers a wide range of experiences and perspectives within and around the LDS faith. He also strongly recommends therapy, not just for those who are questioning, but for family members struggling to find empathy on either side. He pointed to the research on the stages of faith by James Fowler, which helped him feel less alone and less abnormal in his journey. And he recommends the book Navigating Mormon Faith Crisis by Thomas McConkie, which he said felt like it was written directly about him.

Beyond resources, his biggest piece of advice is this.

Give yourself compassion. Let your experience look like your experience. And choose, even if just as a baseline intention, to come out the other side as peaceful and loving as you can.

"I made a choice to choose to try living. I said, I'm clearly not giving up, so instead I'm going to dive in and choose every single day to make that the choice."

Why This Conversation Matters

I started this podcast because I believe people can hold different beliefs and still lead with love. Ryan's story is proof of that. He's kind, he's thoughtful, he shows up for the people he loves, and he's doing the hard, unglamorous work of figuring out who he is without a roadmap.

I don't think there's anything braver than that.

I hope this episode resonates with someone, whether you're in the middle of your own transition, loving someone who is, or just curious about what it looks like to rebuild from the ground up.

You got this!

💕 Brynne

Thanks for Being Here

Hi, I’m Brynne. I share my journey of becoming through stories and reflection - guided by a higher power as I explore identity, faith, and everyday life, inviting you to grow alongside me.

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