Part of what you are experiencing is a natural phenomenon. This might sound odd, but you are going through what is called an “identity crisis.”
You might think it is a spiritual crisis, but it isn’t…not exactly. I used to be one of JWs, and now I work in the field of Bible scholarship and translation. It’s been about a couple of decades since I was a part of the Watchtower religion, but I’ve been exactly where you are.
What we believe actually defines what and who we think we are. When this core belief system gets damaged or destroyed, the same thing happens to us. We are who we think we are, and a lot of that has to do with how we understand the world and the universe around us.
When we were Jehovah’s Witnesses we defined everything according to what we were taught. Upon leaving we might step into a vacuum unless we are ready to agree that everything, not just a little bit, but everything we learned from the JWs can’t be relied upon. Even things that might be accurate or true are affected in one way or another by the false doctrines and teachings of the JW religion.
The only way to get through this is to start from scratch.
That means you have to ignore anything and everything you learned from the Watchtower…at least learn not to trust any of it unless you can verify what you learned as a Witness from other sources and people (and person experience).
This means you can’t believe anything about the Bible, religion, other cultures, the world, or even the universe that was taught to you by the JW religion. You have to start all over again. You must take nothing for granted.
You might end up being an atheist, an agnostic, or even choosing a different religion. It sounds like you might feel the need for some spirituality—at least for now, at that’s okay. You can find hope and spiritual answers outside of the Watchtower. You can also learn to live without them and not feel that you are lacking hope or direction—yes, without a religion or spirituality.
But the reason you feel this way now is because you still believe that the only type of hope you can have is the religious one you were exposed to as a JW. That isn’t true. If you really want to understand religion in general, then open yourself to learning and even experiencing them and the people who belong to these other religious traditions. How do Hindus or Muslims deal with life? What kind of hope do Buddhists or Jews have? Is faith an earmark of all religious or spiritual movements?
You might also learn that religion might not hold the answers you seek. You might find that hope and faith are not as important to you in the end. But you can’t get even to this point unless you take the previous steps of letting go of the Watchtower and admitting you weren’t given a real hope or faith or religion as a Witness.
You didn’t really know anything about the Bible or God or Christianity because JWs don’t know any of those things. So you had no real hope to begin with. You were denied a hope, a faith, a religious experience as long as you remained a JW. If you really want one then you need to go find one as very different from the JWs as you possibly can.
Be patient. Don’t give up. You will find things out if you let them work themselves out. There’s an old Jewish adage that states: “Pray as if everything depends on God, but act as if everything depends on you.”
Go ahead, pray, ask God for help. Whether it is God or something else you end up embracing in the end, you will get there. But don’t expect answers to come down from the sky to your lap. Search them out yourself. The end result might not be what you are expecting, but nothing will improve unless you make it improve yourself. (And we will do our best to help you along on your journey, wherever it may take you. You're going to be okay.)
