Have Your Relationships Been Affected Because You Were A Jehovah’s Witness? (page 2)

LongHairGal

MINIMUS:

I was a young adult when I joined the JW religion and my family and friends thought I lost my mind...Meanwhile I was only interested in end-time prophecy and had no idea I was getting involved with a high-control group or cult.

Over the years I had several rude awakenings and the real story became clear... But I resisted peer pressure and obeyed my instincts..I couldn’t care less about the religion’s silly titles of ‘pioneer’. 🙄..I knew I had to support myself and I held on to my job. I didn’t care if Witnesses didn’t ‘approve’ of me..I finally did a ‘fade’, reconnected with friends and family and am now retired.

zeb

people thought I was nice but weird.

minimus

Zeb that’s what many exjws are

peacefulpete

I like to think I'm a better husband now that we left. No more having to be the master of the house, BS. We have a real partnership. I had no meaningful relationships outside the church before. A few relatives we'd see once a year. School mates that I didn't do much with as I had JW classmates. Now I have friends of many backgrounds and I have learned much about the cruelty religions of many brands can show. Identity crises and depression and worthlessness are part of the lives of many people who have been kicked or separated from Baptists, Wi. syn. Lutherans, even Catholics,(I have 2 former nun associates.) We can relate on a deep level, though small details differ.

DesirousOfChange

Most definitely.

JW's avoid making friends with "normal" (wicked, worldly) people at shcool or work, thus there simply are no relationships with them.

JW's even avoid non-JW (wicked, worldly) family members, thus there are usually only "damaged" relationships with extended family. (JW's won't go to their weddings or funerals in a church of if officiated by a (wicked) clergyman of Christendom, but they are expected to go to the Kingdumb Hall for JW events.)

JW's don't even learn how to really make friends, because all of the other JW's are their "automatic" (conditional) friends just because they are both JW's. Thus, once leaving the Troof, former JW's have poor skills at making friends with "normal" (wicked, worldly) people because it is NOT to make REAL FRIENDS as it was to make (fake) JW Friends.

blondie

I grew up with a non-jw father who had many non-jw friends that we socialized with. I had no problem making friends with non-jws because I already had as a jw. My father had not socialized with his family for years because of grudges from the past, so that's why we never saw them.

As to people at the KH, I knew that I had very few were true friends. That made me think, why were non-jws so caring and helpful especially when we had troubles and jws stayed away from us even more thinking the would catch the plague of worldliness we had caught from our non-jw father. Now that doesn't mean we didn't have non-jw family (my in-laws) who shunned my husband and I before when we were jws and after when we left. We attended funerals and weddings and anniversaries, etc., before we when we were jws, so we had not given offense that way.

I always wondered how jws could go door to door and talk to strangers about the kingdom, people that they believed were already toast at Armageddon. It wasn't the eternal lives of those strangers that motivated them to preach and sometimes teach, it was securing their own eternal life.

iwasblind

Yep, I was not DF'd but lost all of my friends except 2 or 3 because we moved away and stopped going to meetings.

Not 1 has ever reached out as a friend to see if I was ok.

Having said that I have found so much real love "out there" in the world.

Tameria2001

Even though he was raised as a JW, my husband never believed in a word of it. I did not know this at the time we got together. He basically went with the flow to make his mother happy. He waited for me to finally wake up, and we officially left it together.

My husband has no problems making friends, but when he was attending meetings he had what you would call quite a few "worldly" friends, and he didn't care what the JWs said about the matter. He still has a few friends he had since high school.

Myself, on the other hand, I'm what you would call a recluse. I was never one to make friends in or out of the JWs. I grew up in a very abusive home, and my parents moved around a lot, 63 times to be exact. 63 different locations from the time I was born until the time I got married to my husband. I did attempt to make a few friends but found they all had alterative motives, one even did her damndest to destroy my marriage. After that, I stopped even trying.

moley

Yes. I find it hard to trust people

punkofnice

When I left the cult, my wife left me. It broke up the family.

..........so there is that.

Have Your Relationships Been Affected Because You Were A Jehovah’s Witness?

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