Though I still have some of the personality traits, especially apocalyptic fears, that made me vulnerable in the first place, really once I started my internet investigations in the Spring of 2002, I got over JWism really fast. I wasn't raised in it and don't have any family in it, so that probably made it easier for me to let go of it all than it is for people who have life-long connections to it.
How Long Did It Take You To Snap Out Of Watchtower Think?
by The wanderer 27 Replies latest jw friends
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aniron
The fact that we are replying to this question still shows that we have somewhere in our minds the Watchtower still lurks.
!, 2, 3, 5 10, 20 years since leaving yet we still post about the Watchtower.
As someone said "You can leave the Watchtower, but the Watchtower never leaves you."
Even more so when you have family still in.
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Terry
Watchtower Think
Do not think....let the Watchtower think for you.
The Watchtower Society's publications give you your view of how the world works.
You filter everything you see and hear through the worldview from old men in Brooklyn, New York.
A Jehovah's Witness is better than anybody else on earth. A Jehovah's Witness has pure worship.
Everybody but Jehovah's Witnesses (in good standing) deserve to die.
Until and unless this sort of thinking is replaced by individuality----it continues long after a person leaves the Kingdom Hall.
Why?
Nothing comes from nothing. You have to base your thinking on "something". You can't just leave a hole and operate off of thin air.
Active re-examination is required of EVERY SINGLE VALUE you possess.
Rooting out the exact definitions of words and concepts is the ONLY WAY to free oneself of Watchtower think.
The TRUTH must correspond to REALITY. Until you can see what is real and embrace the reality through your OWN EXPERIENCE fresh and anew---everything smells like "worldly" "goatlike" "false religious" "bad association".
Watchtower think forces you to label people as "THEM" and JW's as "US".
Divide people and you conquer them. Divide their thinking into "us" and "them" and you disable their rational mind.
Our mind needs tools to think. Take away the Watchtower tools and something has to replace them.
NOT TRUSTING your own mind is the work of Watchtower thinking.
It is scary to be an adult in a world you do not know and to have no compass.
All your anchor points have been wrongly labeled by the Watchtower. Do you have the strength and determination to START ALL OVER?
That is the only way to proceed in order to free yourself from this insidious influence.
You begin life anew as a child would whose parents have lied to them about who and what everything is.
Freeing your mind from Watchtower Thinking is the hardest and most rewarding thing you will ever do.
How long does it take?
My answer is this. It takes just as long to GET OUT as it did to GET IN.
In my case; almost 20 years!
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anewme
It has taken a year and a half on this forum to start to feel the correct view regarding the Watchtower Society.
I still (if you review my posting) retain that " be a good little girl" thinking and from time to time I inflict it on others.
But always someone here corrects me and I am learning to respect and allow others their freedom and to give myself permission to be an adult too and make my own choices.
I am slow, but I am learning to let go of the fear they instilled in me and the arrogance. -
jgnat
When I read Steve Hassan's book, I found it interesting that he recorded a much faster turnaround from the cults he's dealt with. But then again, they have a much faster and more intense conversion regime.
I've thought since that the longer conversion time for a Witness (average two years to baptism?) results in a similarly long exit time.
Then again, some of you had that blazing flash of insight, a Damascus experience. The rest was mop-up.
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Euphemism
Interesting point, jgnat. Another important difference is that most of those who leave have to gradually figure out the 'truth about the truth' for themselves; I don't know if Hassan's figures were for people who leave cults on their own, or for people who have an expert like Hassan leading them.
Typical cults are also more immersive than the Witnesses, and I would guess that a lot of the mindset is keyed to that immersion. Whereas the Witnesses are accustomed to being 'in the world but not of it', so they can go about their normal lives--even no longer having any contact with the Witnesses--and still maintain a lot of the thinking.
And of course, I'm sure Hassan would say that the process is much more difficult for people who were raised in the group, which is the case for most people on this board.
Personally, I did have a Damascus moment; it just took me ten months to get to it. The stuff afterwards was a matter of figuring out what I believed, but the guilt and fear were all gone the day I decided to leave.
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FlyingHighNow
It took me ten years of complete inactivity to fully let go and make the decision that I was going to fully investigate and let go. I began to fully wake up in the year 2000. Part of the reason was my JW sister sending me scary secular newspaper articles from New Mexico about some fringe group who thinks the US is going to throw people in concentration camps after doing away with religion and try to turn it back into mostly wilderness. After reading that crap, I figured what the hell, I'm not ever gonna be acceptable to Jehovah anymore since I've been goofing off and being more worldly for ten years. I might as well live a normal life.
I had read a web page or two about Ray Franz and JW's in early 1999, when I first signed onto the internet. I put in Watchtower, innocently looking for the official stuff. As I had always known, I'd have to read "apostate" literature, I wouldn't be able to throw it out. In the summer of 2001, Andy ecouraged me to look more seriously into reading C of C and investigate the sites. That's when I first read some at JWD.
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Gayle
No "snap" - maybe they would have had to put me "away" if it happened that way. It was evolutionary for me. Like peeling an artichoke, Ray Franz' book Crises of Crises finally took care of the heart of it all for me. Took about 8 years.