Danger found on JWD!!!........... (page 2)

BluesBrother

"So once again Simon...thanks you for JWD and now JWN....and I sooo love you guys… and thank you sooo much for being here….....oompa"

Could not have said it better myself !

OnTheWayOut

I had been hoping to slow down with my posts, and I am very gradually doing that.

I still find that I come here everyday, but I don't sit for hours on end. I come for 10 minutes
or a little more, leave for hours and come back. I find that to be a step in the right direction.

You went through a traumatic experience. It takes some time. If you were totally free of it,
you might get away from here faster. Some of Simon's ancient posts discuss how he hoped
for himself and others that JWD was something to use during a stage of life and then that
stage would be over and he/they could move on.

I look at my life in the JW's as them being my lifeline. Not a gameshow lifeline, but more like
an actual rope to hold on to for my life as I dangled over the cliff. I trusted my rope because
Jehovah was holding it. Later, I find out that WTS kept me from seeing that the ground was
only inches below my feet. They deliberately kept that from me so I would continue holding
on. You don't fully trust things in the real world after you have been conned like that for
decades (an entire life in your situation).

I heard a theory of a formula that sounded close in many cases. It was that you needed to
obsess about your life in the cult for 6 months for every 5 years in the cult. If you are mid 40's
and it was your entire life, then that's about 9 times 6 months, or 4.5 years. You could look at
that (rough theoretical guess) as a short time that you are getting through. For some, it's more.
For some it's less. Because of the wife still being in, it will probably be more than that. But it
might taper off along the way.

I won't waste my breath trying to convince you for long, but you cannot take blame for hurting
your wife over your need to examine the religion and make friends who understand what you
are going through and leading a "double life" to avoid hurting her and, instead making that
double life into what you live for. (I know, run-on sentence) Anyway, you are innocent of
trying to destroy her life. You did things for yourself and you did things to be kind to her. Not
some terrible things at all. But that's as far as I will go. You will have to discover on your own
that it is the WTS that makes her blame you for what you are doing "to her" when you are not
doing it "to her" at all.

All the things you have done, you have done the best you could. The one problem I encountered
was that spending time on JWD, taking "secret" phone calls, and secretly meeting with other
ex-JW's made me feel like I was cheating on my wife. I was not cheating, and when I could, I
shared as much as my wife wanted to know about what I was doing so that I could get over that
cheating feeling. I even told her that I felt like I was cheating.

Do what you must do to find some personal happiness and try to step cautiously if you can- to
minimize the family's shunning. But if you cannot step cautiously enough for them, or if they will
shun you anyway, recognize that you must find personal happiness to avoid destroying yourself.
Don't take any blame for what the WTS and people's own blind loyalties do to them. It will hurt.
It will be like a black belt kicking your abdomen. But you know it will be better than taking all the
guilt upon yourself or refusing to seek personal happiness to avoid such guilt.

I don't want to keep rambling. Feel free to call anytime.

Peace out brother.

startingover

Excellent post Oompa!

I am in the same situation as you, as far as wife and family go, and have gone through exactly what you described (best description I have ever read BTW) I lived that double life as well, but an interesting thing seems to be happening to me. My wife has her JW life, and I have my life with other friends, and now my wife is comfortable being around my friends too, just as I am around the JW friends who still accept me. She will go to my friend's (an apparently now OUR friends) houses to have dinner, is willing to go on vacations with them (haven't done that yet but plan to this year) and only draws the line at birthday parties and holiday stuff. But she did go to my cousin's for Thanksgiving.

I guess I am in a very unique position, a comfortable one for me and apparently my wife, and I hope it can be maintained.

shamus100

Think of all the things you could have done other than typing that all out...

BabaYaga

Love ya, Oomps.

Very well said. And the bit about the elders not even letting you see the letter that the Society wrote to you is absolutely creepy.

truthsetsonefree

Thank goodness for a laptop where I can get other things done and view JWN while on the road. I find I need this place, or something like it. Its okay so long as it doesn't replace RW. And for me it definitely doesn't. With family in who I refuse to simply ignore due to "Christian" love that I have for them, and a daughter who they would love to enslave, I am regularly confronted with the effects of this cult. This board is a way of dealing with that through learning from and sharing with others who are going through the same things. Its the "whole association of brothers " I guess working here.

Isaac

Nathan Natas

Best wishes, Oompa.

Since you'll be cutting back on your JWN-ing for a while, it might be YEARS before you read these replies, but I just wanted to say that I don't understand a word of what you wrote.

Just kidding. I understood some of them, but there were a lot, so I think I got the sense of it. Something about cooking bratwursts over burning vinyl siding, right?

I think that people are similar. It is normal to seek those with whom we have common interests, be it vinyl siding, Watchtower theology or recipes for horse cookies. MOST people have a variety of areas that are of interest to them, so they have various friends with various interests. Being raised as a Dub, however, you were encouraged to extinguish any interest that was not promoted by the WTB&TS. If you enjoyed mathematics, for instance, you were told it was a "waste of time" because Armageddon was so close. If you wanted to dedicate your working hours to selling vinyl siding, you were told the same thing. Likewise if you wanted to spend Saturday afternoon baking horse cookies.

As a result, a great crowd of those leaving the Watchtower fold find themselves feeling kind of empty. They are missing some of the cognitive baggage that most of their neighbors cheerfully lug around with them day after day. They find they are unfamiliar and perhaps inarticulate when "worldly" subjects are being discussed. The only solution to this problem is in time and effort. Each XJW needs to put some energy into their re-education so that they can become the people they might otherwise have been.

So give some time - give A LOT of time - to YOU. Do things you think you might like to do. You may feel that some of them are not quite what you thought they'd be, but guess what? That's the way it is for everybody else. Then you put that thing down and move on to the next thing. Sooner than you think, you'll find something that fits you JUST RIGHT, and then you'll find other people who feel the same way about the same thing. Voila!

The danger for many XJWs is that the WATCHTOWER has taught them to be lazy and to let Jehovah take care of things for them, like making manna fall from the sky for lazy desert Israelites who didn't have to grow their own food, or lazy post-Armageddon Dubs who will let Jah's magical antimatter dispose of all the billions of rotting corpses while they move into the houses their hands didn't build and eat food - maybe manna again - that they didn't grow.

So don't be lazy. But you're not, as we can tell by the length of your post.

You might just find you like horse cookies.

Hope4Others

I don't know how one can move on if you don't have the friendships you have lost, one mate still in and you will always be alone. You can

never really be excepted again in the jw world unless you go back. Can you still build a happy relationship..I don't know, i guess you just try but you do need friends otherwise its a lonely exisitence.

For me the board has helped me move on, but I love all the close friendships that have come along this year...there is an understanding that only ex-jw's can understand. Being able to talk to so many has helped me move on to meet friends off the board..It has given me postive light, and hope that I can, it is becoming easier to to have good friends outside the Wt... this place has helped me to do so.

If it wasn't for being here I think I may have continued in the same direction I had been in the past 10 years.

I wish you the best we all know what we truly need and to each it is different..

h4o

Lady Lee

oompa I hear ya loud and clear. After living in a desert it is refreshing to come here and drink in the info and support from the posters here. At first we can't get enough.

People stay for a variety of reasons. But as you say we cannot abdicate our responsibilities in teh real world.

Finding balance takes time. Some people can leave for long periods of time and drop in to say hi and they are gone again. Some come back when a new crisis enfolds with JW family and they know they can get the support they need here.

Some like me never really leave but I have cut back on my posting.

Danger found on JWD!!!...........

LockedChaos