I think that if I don't take the time to post this one out of me I may very well implode:(
Gosh I feel so bloody awful at the moment, and I apologise for laying this on my friends here when I know you all have your own ordeals to deal with.
I've been feeling intensley anxious lately about going home to visit my family at the end of the year. There's going to be a bit of a family reunion in my home town, which will mainly consist of my immediate family (my never been baptised brother, my disfellowshipped self, and my fence sitter baptised father) and my uncles family (once an elder of 20years, my aunty, their two 20somethings sons who've never been baptised, and my cousin who like me was diss'd a few or so years ago). It's just the strangest things that's developed over the past year or so, basically my once elder uncle has invited me back into his home with open arms. They've asked me co-ordinate a family holiday for us to all go away over a weekend to the Island while I'm up there, and have me booking flights for everyone, and are telling me how excited they are to be having everyone home. It's just been all a little too overwhelming for me, considering they have always been so hardline before, and it makes me intensley nervous. My aunty sent me a text message to ask me to if she call call me at home that night to discuss something. My immediate (sounds irrational, but is rational to me) feeling was that her and my uncle had talked about the situation and were retracking their offer in good conscience. This is of course was far from the case when she called, she just had more flights for me to book, and more talk of how excited she was that we were all going to be home. I've dwelled on it since then, and last night was incredibly upset about the whole thing. It seems like I'm sabotaging my life when good things come my way, but I find the situation so intensley confusing emotionally. It just feels like I'm walking a fine line where they could give or take me at any moment. I decided to call my uncle last night (in a pretty distressed state mind you) and we spoke for an hour about the whole situation. I believe I articulated myself very well, and he understood very well where I was coming from. We had a few debates which I was careful not to delve into too much, because I have no intention of making clear my intense anti-jw feelings, especially on the matter of shunning. I just told him that I wanted to know how he and his wife justified it to themselves to start associating with their children again, and with me considering I'm not even an immediate family member. I told him that while I personally do not believe there is any reason for it to be any other way, I am all too well aware of how they feel on the subject, and I asked him for an explanation. I told him that I wasn't prepared to put myself in harms way, and I wanted to know if it was a consious decision on their part, or just a matter of weakness and common sense that had created the change in them. He basically told me that they had been forced to compromise, and with that comes an element of hypocracy. He told me that he's not hiding it from anyone, and that it is for this reason that he is no longer and elder in a teaching position. He told me that of course he's not happy about it, but that the purpose of shunning, to put the person out so that they know what they're missing, in this case clearly hasn't worked. He told me that he still very much believes in the discipline of shunning, and believes that it does many people much good. Then went on to quote me an 80% recovery statistic of those that have left that return. I told him that I firmly disagree with him on this treatment, and that to me it is equivalent with abandonment in your childs greatest hour of need. It's like being a 'fair weather' family, went the going gets tough, they're out of there. I also told him that I believed that the main reason why good jw kids go off the rails in the first place, is because of the fear of failure and pressure they have on them their whole lives. He then went on to liken the situation with disfellowshipped children to heroine addicts (???). I told him not to go there, that the two situations don't warrant direct comparison. I told him that parents of heroine adicts would be mortified if they heard you reducing the intense horribleness of their situations to such that exists so unnecessarily within the jw faith. I had hoped that the conversation would give me some relief, but if anything is has riled me up further and makes me want to have nothing to do with people such as these (who I might add I love very much) who cannot accept that the treatment of me and thousands of you here on the forum is inexcusable. Even though he and his wife have found a way around it, he has sat on possibly hundreds of judicial committees and decided the fate of hundreds of young people who like me and my cousin for a time lost everything we'd ever known and everyone we'd ever loved. And despite being personally able to relate to the destruction that is causes in a family and to those children he can still sit their straight faced and tell me that he firmly believes that the organisation knows what is best. I left the organisation late 2001, was diss'd in May 2003, and with every passing month the anger for the injustice in me goes up another notch. It has consumed me completely now and I don't know how to find a way out of it. I'm supposed to be grateful for what I do have, my father, brother, and my uncle aunty and cousins (plus non-jw family members), but I can't forget the cruelty of having everything taken from me, and I can't accept that I've lost my mother, 2 older sisters, 2 younger sister, and younger brother. The problem of course is that I cannot possibly face these people even though they're welcoming me when they trivialise the causes of my pain and anger, and for a course that I feel so strongly about. If I continue to feel so strongly I'm going to sabotage the potential for anything good to come my way. I can't change these people's mindsets, god knows I've tried, and I try to respect their right to make meaning in whatever way they see fit, but at the end of the day I can't accept their position, as it is in direct oposition to mine. thinking of you all here, as always, luv frog xx