by dubstepped 47 Replies latest jw experiences
Dubstepped, I dont know how I didnt see your story until now but Im so glad I got to read it.
Following you through your younger years up to now was a powerful and very moving experience.
I hope this thread stays near the top so new people coming to this forum can read it and find comfort and hope in your words like I did.
Thanks for sharing your story bro.
I am also about to turn 31, although its no longer 2008, and I often feel like I am at the end of my rope so to speak.
Perhaps I will feel the need to tell my story in 2022.
@Diogenesister - Feel free to share my story with anyone that you think it might help or that might help you by reading it. I have put it up on Facebook in one of the groups as well. I hate to think that all that I went through was for nothing, so I'm thrilled that it might help others. And I do know that it wasn't for nothing. I wouldn't be who I am today without some of it, but still it helps to put it out there and know that others appreciate it in some way.
@2+2=5 - Is that a reference to Orwell's 1984? Methinks it is, and I love that. I just bought the audiobook and listened to it at work and wow, it mirrored so much of the JW religion. I just felt like I needed a shower after finishing that book. So reminiscent of life as a dub.
Thank you so much Dubstepped, I just saw my therapist but I didn't want to show her till I heard from you, I will email it to her with a message as she knows I wanted her to see it. It's hard for people who don't know the religon to get a sense of just how much scrutiny you are under & how much you deem yourself unworthy no matter what you do.
Your piece is marvellous, it taught me about feelings I could not identify in me as focusing on self knowledge & self care is frowned on by the WT unless its to boost 'productivity'.xxx anna
Update 6/25/16
It is funny how things change. Our first major change came with me deconstructing the way that I felt internally and why. Then I was mentally and emotionally healthy enough to start deconstructing the specific religion that I was taught, and as time went by I could see that it wasn't what I was told it was. Even after we left the religion, I still believed in God and the Bible, but that brought up yet another question. What was the faith that I held for so long built upon? It is funny how we as humans have a knack for attributing surviving something bad to God but we don't blame him for why it was allowed to happen in the first place. I left our religon with more faith than ever because things had started to go better for me in life and well, it must be God's blessing, right? Learning about confirmation bias helped me to see that the reality was that my life went better when I started reaching out for better things, not necessarily because some god blessed me. I changed, and the current of my life changed with it.
So I decided to look into the Bible. I wanted to know its origins, the history of it, and honestly I started looking into what it truly said throughout, not just the parts that were picked and spoon-fed to me my entire life as part of a narrative devised by one particular religion. I won't go into all of the reasons here because this is more about my story and my life than my reasons for particular views, but they say that athiests aren't athiests because they've never read the Bible, they are athiests because they actually HAVE read it.
I now believe in possibility, but in nothing in particular. I don't have to know anymore. I am worried about controlling what is real today and what I can affect. At one point in my life I held that the Bible was the unerring Word of God. I'm sorry, but if a god wanted to give me a book that would give me the one path toward salvation, he should have made it clearer. That book is full of contradictions and some horrific atrocities performed by people following God's direction, so I just can't believe in it. I also can't believe that we humans are the top of the food chain and that nothing greater than us exists in this vast universe, so I do believe in some sort of "god" or energy or something bigger than us, but I can't tell you if it is benevolent or not. It just is whatever it is, and I'm not worried about it anymore.
My desire is to live a good life, to help others, and to do no harm. On my deathbed, rather than looking forward to a particular hope or in fear of some punishment to come, my goal is to look back on my life and to know that I gave it my best and left people better off for knowing me. I would rather find satisfaction in what I actually could have some impact on than have my waning moments wasted on something that is out of my control.
My wife and I have enjoyed our new life so far. We celebrated our first Thanksgiving celebrations with two different families that we clean for on two different days. They are beautiful people that invited us into their families and adopted us, and we'll never forget that. For our first Christmas, my wife and I still felt weird about the holiday from all of the indoctrination that we had be through our entire lives as to why it was wrong to celebrate. Well, to be honest my wife was ready for a tree and to go all out, and I was still hesitant because it felt bad to me. So we went camping on Christmas. Yep, on Christmas Day we were found in a campground by a ranger driving through to collect that night's payments and he sure was surprised to see us. We purchased some battery powered Christmas lights and strung them up in the brush around our campsite. We hiked in two parks and had a great time. Oh, and no, we didn't freeze to death like all of our friends were worried. It was drizzling rain and we did have difficulting getting a consistent fire going, but we had a nice sleeping bag and did just fine.
We still battle the residue of being ex-JW's. I received a call in April from my mom that my dad was in hospice with very little time left. He was dying at just 63 years old. My wife and I were allowed to see him one last time, though the room had to be cleared of current JW's who refused to be present if we were there. I saw the people as they left his room, people that I knew as a kid, people that bought me clothes because our family was poor, people that now shunned me even on my father's deathbed. I was not invited to the memorial after he died. I was unshunned for about 45 minutes, and then shunned again as soon as we left my father's side one last time. The good news is that I got to say goodbye and leave things on a better note than my previous last conversation with him that was an abusive rant as to how terrible I was for "loving the gays" and "taking their side" instead of condemning them. I did my best to give the man dignity in his most vulnerable hour and to get closure myself. Closure still really hasn't come though. Most people get that by being present at the funeral, by hanging out with family afterward, by going to the house and seeing that spot their loved one sat in all the time only to see it empty. I received none of that, and because I was shunned for that last year or so and had already said goodbye when leaving the religion, his death didn't really leave much of a hole in my life. I wasn't really allowed any normal grief because of our abnormal situation, so I can't really reach full resolution.
My wife still struggles with dreams of her family. It isn't natural to just have that shut off in one moment forever. She doesn't sleep as well as she once did, not because our new life is somehow bad as JW's would lead you to believe because they think they are the only way to happines, but actually because of the JW's and their abusive policies.
After the end of 2015, our "year of adventure", we decided that 2016 would be our "year of relationships". We have been concentrating on spending time with our new friends and deepening relationships, and reaching out for new ones. We've been reaquainted with some more ex-JW's in our area that we knew when younger. My wife is having her first ever birthday party in mid-July, and she is super excited about it. We've invited probably close to 100 people, and most are families that we clean for. Our cleaning business has been a lifeline in so many ways for us over these years, from helping us to see the lives of people outside of our isolationist religion and that we had been lied to about the lives of outsiders to helping us by being true friends with unconditional love once we left that cult environment behind. Now we hope to celebrate our new life with as many as possible at my wife's first birthday party. It truly is a re-birth and although we'll try, there is no celebration that can encapsulate the experience we've been through and the feeling of freedom that we now have.
Thank you, dubstepped, for sharing your story. Like some other forum members, I, too, am seeing this for the first time. Strange -- often we fail to see or respond to so many valuable and life-affirming threads.
I now believe in possibility, but in nothing in particular. I don't have to know anymore. I am worried about controlling what is real today and what I can affect. At one point in my life I held that the Bible was the unerring Word of God. I'm sorry, but if a god wanted to give me a book that would give me the one path toward salvation, he should have made it clearer. That book is full of contradictions and some horrific atrocities performed by people following God's direction, so I just can't believe in it. I also can't believe that we humans are the top of the food chain and that nothing greater than us exists in this vast universe, so I do believe in some sort of "god" or energy or something bigger than us, but I can't tell you if it is benevolent or not. It just is whatever it is, and I'm not worried about it anymore.
Likewise, when my eyes opened, my shattered faith encompassed disillusionment with both the Society's teachings and the stories of the Bible. What I highlighted from your copied and pasted paragraph above expresses exactly my current sentiments.
I am not worried . . . I am NOT!
With gratitude to you and your dear wife,
CoCo
It sounds like you have found peace. I agree with you about beliefs - I don't have to know, I don't have to be right, I can live right now, however I choose because I am not worried about it anymore. I hope it keeps getting better and better for you and your wife.
I do believe in some sort of "god" or energy or something bigger than us, but I can't tell you if it is benevolent or not. It just is whatever it is, and I'm not worried about it anymore.
My desire is to live a good life, to help others, and to do no harm. On my deathbed, rather than looking forward to a particular hope or in fear of some punishment to come, my goal is to look back on my life and to know that I gave it my best and left people better off for knowing me. I would rather find satisfaction in what I actually could have some impact on than have my waning moments wasted on something that is out of my control.
This is a profound statement! I enjoyed this post read the entire thread. I can relate with you in so many ways, everyday I ask myself did I make a mistake?, Could I have gotten it wrong? I always answer the same.....No. This a abusive cult that has ruined my life, 45 years of servitude and it stops....no more. I'm still working through the mind control hooks that linger in the deep crevices of my mind. I at time find myself looking at things with the JW mind set. I anxiously wait for the day that I'm normal and no longer have any connection to anything or anyone JW.
It is great that you and your wife have found the way out together it makes it easier to leave with your partner on your side.
