Trevor said they say:
. . . they are practising a form of principled love for the child . . .
when shunning or threatening them with everlasting whatever. Oh, yeah, they borrowed the "worldly" term, "tough love." However, they completely misunderstand and disabuse its power to heal.
When I read these posts, I feel validated in my decision to stay away from my family now. I was just feeling a bit ambivalent about it and was reminded by mimimimi's post how horrible my sister was treated and how I internalized the idea at a very young age that she somehow deserved it for not conforming enough, for being too argumentative, for being provocotive and disrespectful, etc., when what was really happening was black and white "splitting" behavior of my mother (and the Society's) teaching us that someone always had to be the bad child and another would be the golden child, etc.
As children, those concepts were also deeply, unconsciously and consciously internalized. They slam me in the face quite regularly, but with a lot less regularity than when I was enmeshed. Whenever I feel that sense of "disliking" someone for no apparent reason, or for some minor irritation or because they remind me of someone or something else, I can eventually come to a place that says, "this is splitting;" and ask, "what is good about this person, situation, etc. But it is very, very hard to do because so much of it is deeply unconscious; that unconscious sense of unworthiness, self-loathing, jealousy, etc. is projected onto others and makes relating profoundly difficult and causes a great deal of depression and isolation, which can lead one to return to the abusive situation (be it cult or family or both).
As the oldest child, and as the one who most often in mid- to late-childhood was favored, I was essentially given permission to "lord it over" my little brother and sister as the great exemplar, "the example," etc. and so forth. It completely ruined our relationships, in my opinion, and I feel disgusted both with myself for falling into the trap, and more disgusted with the adults in the family for encouraging it. This pattern also happened with many of my cousins who seemed to be allowed to be more physically abusive of each other than we were.
The black and white thinking of the Society only reinforced damaging, bullying, isolating parenting behaviours of my father's mom/family and of my mom's splitting behaviours due to mental illness. For a long time as a child I understood it to be the way things are, whether I liked it or not. When I was 13 I was baptized (more people-pleasing behavior, a deeply-ingrained lifelong pattern for me), and I was disfellowshipped at 15 (cutting self off from others consciously and unconsciously also became a deeply ingrained pattern and I still struggle against it). During that period my sister vacillated back and forth for a couple of years about her belief system.
When she went away to college, I thought she was home free from the bonds of the Watchtower, but thanks to this thread, I now see that she was simply caught up in a desperate fight/conflict for her independence versus winning the approval of my parents (probably because she was not baptized and felt conflicted over losing her disfellowshipped sister and because she had been so often cast into the role of bad child (although we did occasionally switch roles; I was also referred to as the one leading her down the primrose path whenever we got into trouble - most remarkably as a toddler and then as a teen-ager). When I "rebelliously" left home for college and refused to return to Jehovah, she finally had the opportunity to totally outshine me and to finally be conditionally loved by my parents - to become the golden child, or at least the less-hated one.
Additionally, she too had deeply internalized a lot of the black and white beliefs of the Society and had not really begun to reject them as wholeheartedly as I had. For the longest time, I felt it as a personal betrayal (that she "returned to Jehovah"), because after years of fighting like cats and dogs, sister and I began to become allies and to eschew The Society during the last two years of my high school. My going away to college a year before her was more of a boon to her enmeshment than an inspiration, I am very, very sad to say.
Eventually she caved in, despite the fact that she was badly abused emotionally and physically by my mother and has been an active witness for years. During this time, my baby brother also experienced his share of being the golden child and of being deeply pressured to remain loyal to Jehovah, etc. He too caved in to the incessant need to please and I think he might also have a bit of OCD. He even remarked to me about how intense the pressure was for him, years ago when we were still speaking occasionally, though rarely because of the d'fing policies. My sister could only say to me of our abuse that "we could have had a worse childhood," something I would never dispute, but I can certainly see it could have been better.
-Teresa Nichols
