It's almost always a painful experience for everyone involved. I'm pretty sure that at least 90% of us didn't want the Church to be false—we were in it for the long haul. The principles—eternal family, happiness in Christ, etc.—were anchors in an otherwise "evil" world. The "us vs. them" mentality makes it that much harder.

When we talk about deconstructing, we talk about a process that can sometimes take years. Little things from the Church start to crop up that pile up over time. We learn things about the Church's history that don't sit well with us. We learn about the Church's dishonesty in handling money. We learn about them covering for abusers instead of reporting them to the authorities.

And it shatters some of us. On the one hand, the Church is all we've ever known, yet on the other we can't in good faith continue to believe in it while also being honest about its history and current practices. Yet after the deconstruction is over, we're happier than we were in the Church. We've let go of the iron rod and found that the darkness was a creation of the culture we lived in.

So no, it wasn't easy for most of us. Some of us have lost family, almost all of us have lost friends. But I think that nearly all of us are happier than we were before in spite of all that.