"Sometimes I think the only thing I could do that wouldn't upset someone would be to kill myself."
Those were the frustrated words of my friend as we stood out in his large yard in the country, just about to enjoy a nice bonfire on a beautiful night. What was it that could have been a lesser evil than killing himself? My friend was discussing how people in his congregation might get upset, or "stumbled" as Jehovah's Witnesses might call it, if he were to do something as extreme as wearing an article of clothing with a logo of a sports team on it. So let's step aside for a minute and as a rational person let's look at the notion that one might be looked upon with more disfavor and judged more for wearing a shirt or hat with his favorite team on it versus killing himself. Although there he was reaching with his comparison, on a level such is the life of one of Jehovah's Witnesses. It was a life filled with constant scrutiny and a litany of rules, spoken and unspoken, written and unwritten, that plagued many.
So it really shouldn't be a surprise that I found myself in 2008 near the end of my rope, almost literally. I was almost 31 years of age, and grew up as one of Jehovah's Witnesses. At this point in my life I truly hated myself. I couldn't live up to the expectations that I adopted as my own from the religion that encompassed my life. No, I didn't truly want to die, but I felt that I deserved it on a level, and I certainly didn't want to live. I wouldn't have premeditated my death, but if I had a gun in the house I likely would have shot myself to get it over with. Then again, that's easy to say because the fact is that I didn't have one, but I do believe with the feelings I had and the flashes of rage that I at least could have done it.
When I was a little kid I was very sensitive. I remember my mom telling me that my kindergarten teachers thought there was something wrong with me because I cried so much, and not in a spoiled bratty way, I just got my feelings trampled on easily. By 2008 I pretty much hated everyone including myself. How in the world did I get from that sensitive kid with lots of feelings to the rage filled self-loathing guy that I became?
Let's take a little trip down memory lane. I spent the earliest years of my childhood celebrating holidays with family, and then when I was maybe 8 or so we happened to move in next door to some Jehovah's Witnesses. My mom had always looked for answers to her Biblical questions, and they seemed to have all of the answers, so she started studying with them out of their books. She got baptized into the church, and although my dad had been kind of opposed to her early on, he did the same the following year. With that my young life changed. No more holidays, as Witnesses do not celebrate any holidays, and our family grew more distant, as Witnesses are discouraged from spending too much time with those outside of the religion.
I spent most of my years growing up in school being bullied fairly mercilessly. Not only did I excel academically (nerd!) but I was rail thin and because we weren't doing well financially my clothes all came from second hand stores at best. To add gasoline to the fire I was the kid that didn't salute the flag and had to go outside into the hallway at the beginning of every day for my religion. I had to abstain from any holiday celebrations at school in every way. No singing holiday songs, no doing holiday projects, no eating holiday treats. Participation in any extracurricular activities was discouraged as unnecessary association with the world that was doomed and those in it that might tempt us to live an immoral life. So no organized sports or friends. In middle school I developed shingles on my face from the stress which were not only painful, but that really intensified the bullying. In high school attending pep rally's was discouraged as giving too much weight to school pride and competition, so while other kids attended those I had to go sit in the lunch room and do homework or work on math or something. While other young men and women were taking college prep tests, I was discouraged from higher education as one of Jehovah's Witnesses, so despite earning the honor of salutatorian of my graduating class and while having counselors and teachers begging me to go to college with colleges interested in me, I chose to go into the full-time ministry work for my religion.
There is a lot put upon young people that are raised in this way. You are expected to dedicate your life to Jehovah God and to the organization, often during your teens, through water baptism. Doing so is viewed as a lifelong contract to live for God first as part of His organization, which Jehovah's Witnesses feel they are chosen to be. I was baptized in 1992 at the age of 14, thus solidifying a lifelong contract at an age where I could not hold a job, get married, and probably enjoyed playing with toys from time to time. Those who fail to get baptised often become outcasts, looked down upon as "unspiritual" in the congregation. Once baptised, you then qualify for a level of public ministry that requires you to go out knocking doors for what was 60 hours per month back then, and I did so during the summers while other young people had fun. Again, it is kind of expected that young ones like me that were set up as the high achievers in the congregation should sign up for that range of service, so I did. From an early age you learn that it doesn't matter what you think or feel, only what the pages of the Watchtower magazine articles state, or what a brother says from the platform at congregation meetings and conventions. You are told what to think, what to feel, and how to act. We were told time and again that the world was watching us expecting us to set the example because if we were to slip up we would justify the world's hatred of us as Witnesses and cause shame to our heavenly Father. That breeds a special brand of paranoia. Nevermind the fact that everyone in the congregation around you was watching you in case you slipped up so that they could report you. Scriptures were picked and expounded upon to let us know that we were good for nothing slaves for God and that anything good was truly undeserved kindness from Jehovah, because we are just sinners deserving of death. That was always great for the self-esteem.
Even young children are shown illustrated pictures of the end of this world as we know it, when God comes to destroy everyone that is not one of Jehovah's Witnesses (they will deny it, but we all know what is taught within those four walls). We were pushed to go out and knock on doors of strangers to give this warning message that the end of the world is coming, and if you aren't for us you're against us, us being synonymous with Jehovah God of course. We referred to our religion as "The Truth", setting up a mind control tactic that promotes to all involved that anything else must therefore be false. Those of my generation were brought up to believe that we would never die. This world would be destroyed and since we were Witnesses, we'd undoubtably march right on into the paradise on earth that would be established when everyone else was destroyed at Armageddon. I was never supposed to drive, to graduate high school, to get married, to live out my life. As I stand here looking down the barrel of 40, it is a weird feeling because the fact is that I likely will die, just as all of those people died who were on the cover of a Watchtower magazine proclaiming that "millions now living will never die" back decades ago. The world was supposed to end in 1874, 1914, 1925, 1975, and even last year they passive agressively asked if this might be the last Memorial observation, kind of the Easter of Jehovah's Witnesses (without the fun and the only annual observation that they have).
The expectation for adult Witness men is that we pioneer out of high school, which back then was to dedicate 90 hours per month in the public ministry work. I did that for one year while working up to three part time jobs to try and support myself through doing so before I burnt out and couldn't continue. If you absolutely have to have sex, you can marry another Witness only. If possible though, it would be better if you could not be burdened with marriage so that you can devote more time to the public ministry and other aspects of service, like providing volunteer labor to build construction projects for the organization. Because really, marriage isn't about love or anything like that, it's merely an outlet for the sexual frustrations of those weak enough to give into them. If you pray enough though, you can fight such temptation off and serve the organization more fully.
Regardless of whether you have to marry to satisfy your own selfish needs or not, you're expected as a man, a brother in the congregation, to reach out for privileges of service, to be "used" by the congregation, an appropriate term. You get to handle maintenance of the church building, distribution of published materials to the congregants, handling the funds, just doing odd jobs around the church with the aim of becoming a ministerial servant so that you can have a title along with the activities. After time spend doing that, you may be appointed an elder at some point in time, at which point you get to actively "shepherd the flock of God" by giving private counsel and taking the lead in giving Bible talks and handling parts of various congregation meetings.
Every individual in the congregation faces pressure. Why? If you are caught doing anything deemed wrong at any level by anyone else in the congregation, you may be subjected to a meeting with the elders to correct your thinking, your actions, or whatever you've done that causes someone else to report you. You could be counseled for the length of your hair, the color of your suit, a word that someone overheard you say, an off color joke, the movie that you watched, the music that you listen to, for a relationship with the opposite sex before being of age to legally marry, if someone were to find out that a married person engaged in oral sex and you had priveleges in the congregation as a fine example, for the job that you chose, for the hours that you chose to work at that job if they interfered in any way with carrying out the expectations of the organization that were put upon you, and I could go on and on. If nothing else, you're always under the watchful eye of Jehovah God, who sees everything, even the thoughts and feelings within you. After all, Jesus said that if you even so much as look at a woman with lust for her, you've committed adultery in your heart. So guilt and shame is heaped upon you for every imperfection you have, and even for natural desires. You are expected to perform in the organization as a perfect little automaton.
There's another level of pressure though that really keeps people trapped and scared in the religion. If you have any sexual contact with someone prior to marriage, smoke cigarettes, take a life saving blood transfusion, ask too many questions and doubt the religion out loud, and a host of other transgressions, you are then subjected to the dreaded "judicial committee". In these you get to sit down in front of three men, elders in the congregation, who ask about every detail in the hopes of coming to a decision on your standing in the congregation. If you are deemed truly repentant, something that no man can ever tell because some people react differently to such a situation and men cannot read your heart, you might get off with merely being "reproved" for your conduct. This was sometimes announced from the platform in a public meeting and you might be given restrictions in the congregation as to what you could do for a period of time. If you are found to be an unrepentant and willful sinner, you are disfellowshipped, in which case you are ousted from the congregation and viewed as dead. Your parents, siblings, friends, everyone you know must shun you, not even saying a greeting to you. They will act as though you are dead, literally. THAT is some crazy pressure to put on someone. The only way back in is to be at all of the meetings and meet with elders, often over the course of a year or so even though there's no predetermined amount of time, during which you are to arrive late and leave early so as not to upset the others in the congregation with your mere presence. After that time you might be reinstated, after which people will accept you back while always being leery of you thereafter because you have the scarlet "D" for disfellowshipped that will follow you around. There really is no such thing as forgiving and forgetting. They keep files on this stuff forever.
There was a one hour meeting on Tuesday, a two hour meeting on Thursday, and another two hour meeting on Sunday. There was studying to be done prior to every meeting so that you knew what was going to be discussed and had already gone through it. That way you could raise your hand and regurgitate the information that they were indoctrinating you with during the meeting's question and answer sessions. Most of us were also on the "school" where we were assigned topics and information to give Bible talks on. Even as a kid I gave 5 minute Bible talks in front of the congregation, usually once a month. That's a lot of pressure on a kid with school and everything, and you were guided on public speaking through various counsel given as you were essentially graded for your performance. There were also large assemblies and conventions with thousands of Witnesses in attendance. I've been featured on conventions in front of twelve thousand or so Witnesses for my good example. However, I quickly learned while developing that interview that even then my "spiritual goals" that I had weren't enough. I was told to think hard about my answers and that if my goals weren't high enough they could help me develop some for the part on the convention. I came to realized that many of the examples given were fluffed up to be more and more sensational. That impacted my view of what I was being told, but I dismissed it as a kid. I didn't have much choice.
When not at meetings, you were still expected to keep your religion first and foremost in your life. We went out knocking on doors in the field ministry every Saturday, often from 9:30-noon or so. Then we might go home and study the Watchtower lesson that we would go over on Sunday at the meeting. As a child my parents would occasionally sign up for that 60 hour requirement that I mentioned earlier, as there was a lot of pressure applied by the organization to do so. Dad worked, and in order to get his time in for the month we would all go out as a family after work for him and school for us. While other kids were doing homework and playing or watching tv, we were our knocking on their doors as kids to help our parents meet their 60 hour requirement for the month. There were rules about how to count that time as well, but I digress.
My life revolved around all of those expectations. I was a very conscientious person and took it all very seriously. I wanted to be "good enough" so that the people around me, my parents, friends, those in the congregation, would accept me. When your whole world is filled with those people, the possibility of being ostracized is a terrifying prospect. I was finding it harder and harder to keep up with everything that they expected. I was hustling and working really hard in my cleaning business to make ends meet. After all, avoiding college is a way of life in the religion, so wages are limited. I was given few money handling skills as money was to be seen as temporary as this world is going away, and I was going deep in debt because I had no clue how to manage any of this. I knew how to work hard, as I had since the time I was a kid, but I was just digging myself in deeper. I was married with a great wife that was there with me, but the pressure was really getting to me. I became deeply depressed, as I could not measure up to the perfectionistic, rigid standards set before me since I was a child. I was filled with anxiety. Areas of our home looked like a hoarder lived there because I just gave up. I remember going to the elders once and asking them what I was doing wrong since I couldn't keep up with it all and found my time devoted to the religion suffering. Their response was to essentially blame the victim, declaring that ultimately we all do what we want to do. You see, all of this legalistic rule making wasn't merely about whether or not you could uphold the rules and meet the standards, there was a morality attached to every one of them. Clearly I didn't really want to serve God and didn't care about or love Him was what they were really accusing me of. It couldn't possibly be human imperfection or anything else, it has to be about the desire to do what has been deemed by them as "right". That was the wrong thing to tell a person already deeply depressed because they couldn't perform as the perfect little representative of their organization. It was salt in the wound and hurt a lot. "We do what we choose" just echoed in my head, over and over again, making me doubt my motivations and what I really cared about. They say that guilt is the belief that I did a bad thing, and shame is the belief that I am a bad person. I was deeply shamed by now. I had decades of it embedded in me for every bad thought, every bad song that I liked on the radio, every time that I fell short of their expectations, and of course, those expectations became my expectations of myself, so I owned it all.
So I found myself in 2008 just loathing everything about myself. I am a driven person anyway, and I come by perfectionism honestly, but I was a control freak that was watching life become totally out of control. No matter how hard I tried, no matter how much I beat myself up, nothing worked, go figure. I can't tell you how many times while driving I thought about just turning that wheel a little to the right and going right into that rock wall on the side of I-71 on the way back home. I told my wife about my feelings and she was well aware, and honestly her being in that car with me on our way home from a hard day of work was probably what saved me. I didn't care about myself anymore, but I did care about her.
One day at a particularly low point I was on a business forum online to distract myself. I had been praying and praying for help, any help, because I was ready for this to end and didn't care how. I spent hours on business forums though, pontificating on my ideas and offering ideas to help others. It was a welcome distraction and part of me hoped to find that one magic idea that would get us out of mounting debt. This particular day someone noticed my posts and asked me if they could send me a private message. In it they let me know that they saw something in me. It turns out that the guy was a retired ADHD specialist, and in the way my mind bounced around and was prolific in coming up with ideas he saw a reflection of his past patients. He recommened a book to me entitled "Driven To Distraction" that was all about ADHD, and I bought it in audio format. My wife and I went to detail a car that weekend and listened to it separately, though at the same time, while we worked. It was the first time in my life that someone seemed to understand the way my brain worked, and I cried when the book ended because I liked the feeling of finally being understood. My wife and I would just look at each other in amazement as we detailed that car, seeing point after point in the book that explained many of my troubles in executing what I wanted to do, as ADHD is an executive function disorder. I wasn't just fighting ridiculous standards set by a high control religion, I also had something going on that made it hard for many people to do what they wanted to do. Sometimes it isn't a matter of desire like the elders tried to get me to believe, it is just a matter of ability. I was overmatched by all of this.
That bad advice by the elders really touched a nerve. For the first time I could now see that these people didn't necessarily understand life. Heck, I didn't understand life either, as I saw it through the lens they provided me with. I thought I knew it all in that religion and here I had been humbled enough to see that I might have a problem like ADHD, something that formerly I thought was a made up disorder for parents that were too lazy to parent their kids. After all, everything and everyone can be controlled, or so I thought. The religion made me almost believe that perfection was achievable with enough control. Now I knew that things weren't all under my control, and I started to see that the religion was out of touch with reality.
I spent about two years in an ADHD community online learning everything that I could about the real lives of people dealing with it. I then realized that ADHD didn't even come close to explaining everything, but it was a starting point. I started listening to books like "Happier", "Boundaries", "Healing The Shame That Binds", "Codependent No More", "The Narcissistic Family", "A New Earth", and "The Power Of Vulnerability". There were more, but these formed a foundation of mental and emotional health that I had never been taught. It is easy to stay locked into a religion, or a cult as some call Jehovah's Witnesses, when you're held down emotionally and mentally. Getting healthy was a catalyst for a total transformation.
We had always been told that people outside of our religion were to be feared as a potential danger to us not just spiritually, but morally and in so many other ways. My wife and I cleaned homes for people that were really eye opening for us. Genuinely caring, beautiful people that didn't live the catastrophic lives of unhappiness and dysfunction that I was brought up to believe. They taught us a new way of seeing people as just people, without the chasm separating us. We learned that we weren't so different, no matter how hard the religion tried to make us such. In fact, we saw people that were often happy and well adjusted, whereas in the religion we saw people dealing with so much depression despite laying claim to Jehovah, "the happy god". People in our congregations often lived, as one speaker once put it, on pills and prayers. That's not a healthy way of being.
As I mentioned earlier, my wife and I were not good with money. We found ourselves in $55,000 of IRS debt, primarily because we never put emphasis on making what we really needed to make ends meet and pay taxes. For years we just never had the money at the end of the year, and when the envelope arrived showing that the debt had eclipsed $50,000 at the time, I told my wife that we had to focus on this and knock it out. There may be no debtors prisons, but we were about to do hard time. For the next 18 months we worked 7 days a week many weeks. We cleaned houses, detailed cars, sealed concrete, painted, pressure washed, cleaned carpet, and we would house sit for our clients that would go out of town and watch their pets. We might clean three houses during the day, clean an office that evening, and then spend the night away from home to watch someone's home and pet while they were on vacation. When that time was over we paid off every penny that we owed, and it was good because I'm not sure how much longer we could have made it. We literally worked ourselves sick over and over, but we got through it. As great as paying off the debt was, there was something even bigger going on.
For that year and a half we were forced to be away from all of the church meetings and study. People told us that Jehovah would not bless us for our efforts and that we would fail, in no uncertain terms. Honestly, we kind of felt the same. However, we prayed about it and told God that we didn't know what to do but that we would make ourselves available. You bring us the work, and we'll do it, was our request. In that year and a half our van, which previously had not run for longer than a few months without needing major repairs, ran for the entire duration without needing anything but one minor thing like a tire or something. No down time whatsoever. One day when we were dead tired and couldn't fathom doing that last job of the day, the client called to tell us that her air conditioning went out and that she couldn't have us over that day. We would have a client cancel for some reason and someone would call out of the blue and request the very day and spot that we just had open up. Work and money just came. It was really surprising and exhilarating to see that things could indeed work and we could be blessed even though we weren't doing all of the "right things" according to the religion. We also had lots of serious discussions during that time as we began to awaken to the possibilities that things we were taught didn't add up. Getting away from the constant indoctrination allowed us time to process and question things and to really look at them for what they were instead of just moving on to the next indoctrination session. Suddenly "The Truth" didn't add up so much anymore. There were glaring flaws that we never had time to see before, and those that we had both seen from our lives in it were getting clearer.
Over the past couple of years our search for what some refer to as "The Truth About The Truth" deepened. We were always cautioned not to read any materials about our religion not published by the organization. I finally started to look into things and found out quickly that I was not alone in my feelings about the organization. I started to read in black and white the quotations from secular authorities that the religion took out of context to misuse as support for points that they wanted to make. I started to see that the context to scriptures that they would use to support certain doctrines shined a totally different light on those verses than what I was lead to believe. I cannot live a lie. I have always been a seeker in every aspect of life but my religion. I always stood up as a staunch supporter of what I was lead to believe was the truth. I faced ridicule and opposition from classmates, teachers, strangers, family, and I wore it with pride. I defended "The Truth" vehemently against all persecution. So you can imagine my disappointment at finding out that I had been manipulated and lied to. All of those years of suffering, and for what? My wife and I knew that there was only one choice. Just as we both stood up as teenagers and made a public declaration of our dedication to God and the organization claiming to own him, it was time to stand up and take a stand for what we now realized was true.
Our first stand involved my younger brother. He had been disfellowshipped when he was in his early twenties, and I had shunned him like a good Witness should, along with everyone else. It always bothered me, and initially when he was kicked out of the organization I tried to find him and reach out but never could. He moved away. Well, after shunning him for close to a decade, I found him on Facebook. I sent him a private message and apologized for some things. The books that I had listened to on emotional abuse and narcissism and the like woke me up to an entire range of emotions that had died at some point in my childhood in the religion. Real love for a person, not conditional love that abandons at the first sign of tribulation, was something that I finally found. I was so sorry that I ever treated him that way. He understood, as he grew up in it too, and we reconnected. My wife and I got to meet him and his wife when they came down to our area for a wedding. It was amazing. I chose not to hide it and posted photos on Facebook, the very place that we reconnected. My family saw those photos and it was the beginning of the end of our relationship. For the next six months to a year (the timeline gets fuzzy) they really backed away and had little to do with us. We would email or text, but previously we would go to my parents house a couple of times each month. It became clear that we weren't really welcome. It grew very cold.
The stand didn't end there though. My wife and I planned a trip to go to Manhattan to visit my brother and his wife where they lived. I contacted my mom to get some childhood pictures for my brother and his wife to enjoy, as they had nothing as he was always shunned in their married life. I was able to get some photos when we met one night at a Mexican restaurant that we always enjoyed, a night that one relative deemed "the last supper" before we met, something we learned on the way there through social media. It truly was the last time that we saw each other.
So we took those photos and made the trek to see my brother and his wife in Manhattan. That was even more amazing than meeting them here, getting to visit my brother and his wife and to see the life they had built for themselves. There just aren't words for the impact that made on both my wife and I. When we got back I posted photos on Facebook again because I'm not going to hide or be ashamed of our relationship any longer. The cult indoctrination made me do that for long enough. We never really heard from my family again, and when a relative of my wife inquired as to my brother's standing in the religion and she answered truthfully, she was instantly labeled an apostate and told that she would be shunned. Boom, just like that. Literally one or two sentences on a text message. My wife's relative quickly spread the word and by the next morning my wife lost all family and friends even in other states on social media. She was both unfriended and blocked so that she can't even see their lives anymore. Instant shunning, the product of cult indoctrination so strong that it is an immediate reaction, in this case above and beyond the call of duty. Associating with my brother wasn't necessarily something that would have resulted in being cast out of the organization, though it admittedly was frowned upon. They couldn't even handle that.
That set us on our final journey in the religion. It was time to make some tough decisions. We had already lost our family with no way to get them back without abandoning our new course of love. We had hoped to fade from the congregtion and to be left alone, but not formally exit with the shunning mandate that would carry. However, after over a year of not attending anything related to the religion our congregation elders suddenly decided to reach out to us. We ignored their phone calls and they tried to catch us at home, stopping by one night as we happened to be coming home and saw them. We knew from reading the experiences of others that we were unlikely to be left alone, which is all that we wanted. Our plan was that if that pursuit started we would immediately formally disassociate from the religion. We weren't willing to play their games. So we sat down and wrote goodbye letters to our families. There aren't really words for how hard it is to do something like that, but we knew that if we didn't get a chance to do so and they found out we disassociated they would never even read something that we sent to them, much less talk to us. After that we wrote our formal letters of disassociation. We sent them out and waited.
My mom sent me a goodbye email response. Not one other person in our families had anything to say to us.
On September 2, 2015, we were both formally and publicly announced as no longer being one of Jehovah's Witnesses in our local congregation. This decision came with a great price, just like our initial decisions as kids to join officially came with a great price. We are now and forever shunned by our parents, our siblings in the religion, and 8 million plus Jehovah's Witnesses worldwide, as to them we no longer exist. All of those years spent serving an organization and getting to know the people in it disappeared in the blink of an eye. In the end, nothing stacks up to the fact that we now have freedom. We have the freedom to make friends that actually care about us for who we authentically are, not for the role that we play in an organization. We can think for ourselves and research anything and everything we want. It would be easy to let our faith in God go, after all, it was part of the devastation of our lives. A lot has been lost on our part in His name, however we now have Christian Freedom. We are free agents now, serving God with a personal relationship formed by our experiences rather than rigid proclamations of others claiming to speak for Him. Could that change? Why not, as I never thought I'd be where I am now. Not in a million years, so who knows where life will take us? The biggest difference is that now I'm not trying to control life and feeling the desperation of trying to do so and frustration of failing. I ride the tide of life and make choices inside the current that I find myself in. Trying to control the tide is an exercise in futility, and insanity. The depression is gone and I'm happier and more focused than I've ever been in life. I've reconnected with that emotionally sensitive kid that existed so many years ago. I'm emotionally and mentally healthy and well adjusted, well, according to me. I am free, and rebuilding my life with my wife by my side. We are forming new friendships and reconnecting with family that we were distanced from. We look forward to our new life.
Mike (and my wife Jenny) - here's a pic of us from that fateful trip to NYC