Ex-JW: Which Group Do You Belong To?
I won’t write here about people who deconvert because they no longer believe. The process may be as painful as the one that undergo people whom I’m going to talk about, but rarely comes all of a sudden, leaving them lost, alone, and unprepared.
When you deconvert as a Jehovah’s witness because of your moral rules no longer in concordance to your religion’s, the main feeling you associate with the pain is betrayal. You can’t support bad behaviors any longer ; you can’t endorse them. You feel betrayed, because you have been betrayed. It’s not a feeling that comes from nowhere. It goes much farther than the mere recognition of the immoral attitude.
All of a sudden, every bit of what you were told is falling apart. You see that outside your religious cocoon, people are making the right things within the right laws. It’s a shock to realize that lay people are more moral than your religious leaders. You grew up believing the contrary : the world is bad ; men’s laws are not as good as God’s laws ; wicked people rule under Satan’s influence… until the straw breaks the camel’s back.
For thousands of Jehovah’s witnesses, the straw, the mishandling -to say the least- of child’s sexual abuse, has weighed more than a trunk. You are not alone, but because of the shunning policy you don’t know that the people who leave will soon be more numerous than the people who accept anything.
You left. At first, you thought you left only the moral part. But as soon as the indoctrination stops, the mind starts to work. After years of being a fervent believer, the sense of having been lied to since your first day, without even knowing you could have been mentally aggressed, since you lack the basic means of comparison, and in the case of Jehovah’s witnesses parents, often physically repressed, this sense of betrayal wins everything else. People you trusted the most, your family, your elders, are those who betrayed you.
You start to think that they knew it was not the “right” religion, that they couldn’t have not known. You remember some discussions that ended with the usual thought stopper : “It’s Jehovah’s organization, they can’t be wrong”. But the very fact that they needed a thought stopper proves that their belief was not as strong as they said, you think. You may be wrong. Many of these people were in the same situation as yours, but today you’re not in the spirit of forgiveness.
You feel ashamed for having shunned someone, ridiculous for having fought against the evidences for evolution during a science class, exposing your ignorance and you arrogance.
The first step was to cut yourself from your coreligionaries because you couldn’t accept that the protection of the kids was less important than the protection of the reputation of the religion. In the background, without being aware of allowing these questions to come up, you’d like to know why God couldn’t protect his name all by himself, or why he didn’t choose to protect the kids, or to prevent the pedophiles from entering his organization.
At this point, two groups are forming.
The first group, the more numerous one, gathers those who may ask themselves some questions, but without looking for the answers. Either they think they know them (Jehovah puts his followers on the test, for example) or they prefer not to dig too much because they are afraid of being expelled and thus lose their families and friends (Jehovah’s witnesses are not allowed to even only speak with someone who has been expelled, even when they are living under the same roof!).
Most of them stay within the organization and often still believe in what they were taught. They just ignore the Governing Body’s policy about the two-witness rule and other biblical choices that give the pedophiles free rein, but generally keep on following the teachings of the bible, as they are understood and explained by the cult.
Being derived from the first group, when they no longer can hide they somewhat disagree with the Governing Body (a sin punished by being expelled and shunned) a no negligible number of ex-Jehovah’s witnesses rebuild what they think is a better version of the true religion through the internet.
The new gurus explain what is wrong with the biblical interpretations by the Watchtower Tract and Bible Society (the commercial arm of the cult) and give their own views. The followers rejoice in bashing what and who they once adored. They follow a different leader and keep being victims.
That’s for the main attitudes in the first group.
Those in the second group aren’t satisfied with asking difficult questions. They try to find the right answers. That’s when the deconversion starts.
To deconvert from a religion as the Jehovah’s witnesses goes farther than not to believe because every part of a witness’s life belongs to the organization. Their friends, spouse, time.
That’s from that small group that I get my clients. I help them to find their place in the real world. More important (from my point of view, because them, they don’t know they are at risk) I do my best to prevent them from being prey to another predatory cult.
When a Jehovah’s witness’s world is destroyed because of a conscience matter, it’s not by a slow, beautiful and colorful fall of a dancing automn leaf. It’s by an earthquake beyond any means of measurements. Weeks and month after the event, their earth is still quaking.
Since they are at once used to obey and spiritually oriented, they are prone to looking for a spiritual guide, someone who could prevent their ground from trembling. Despite everything they know about how to look for and find a proselyte — they did so on a regular, and monitored, basis for years- they are in the mental state of frailness that allows human wild animals to close their claws on them.
I first listen, because it’s important for a victim to say their story, to put it into words, then we exchange. I go from using past tenses to using the present. My part goes more or less as below :
The new situation allowed you to think for yourself. You felt angry. Angry for all these lost years, a lost life. Angry for these opportunities that passed you without your raising your hand to grab one. Angry against these false friends that didn’t support your quest for the truth, the true truth, whatever it might be. You didn’t understand how it was possible for them not to see what you saw, already forgetting that it took you years to question the teaching you had received.
Your rage might calm down, but the bitterness ate you alive. Each and every point of the life “outside” reminded you of your inadequacy. You didn’t fit. Though you might not be aware of it, the indoctrination was still there and its shadow spread over so many thoughts.
For example, you felt you had no future. Armaguedon was not going to happen and resolve all the issues for you. You had to find your own answers and they never appeared as simple and clear as the teaching you received when you were right and the whole world was wrong.
That was the result of years of indoctrination. Let it sink in the past.
You can be part of the world, and the part you want to be. You know deeply that your leaders, whatever their attempts to justify their attitudes, were what they did : molesters. Whatever you choose to do, you can do ; whoever you choose to be, you can be. You are what you do. As the ad goes : “Just do it !” You’re afraid. What makes you think that people who have never been Jehovah’s witnesses ignore what it is to fear something ?
You are ignorant. It’s one of your biggest challenge when it comes to enter the real world, particularly the professional one. If you were working in a Bethel maybe you don’t even know how to write a resumé. Learn. It’s always the answer. Invest in yourself, you’re worth it.
Understand that anything you learn is useful. It opens your mind. Learning to play the guitar is not only about music. It’s also about music. Music will make you more sensitive to tones and intonations which will help to learn a foreign langage. You will learn to be resilient, and to be really humble. For years you’ve believed you were the best people in the world. That’s humility according to Jehovah’s witnesses. Performing in front of an audience who is not jailed in a Kingdom Hall may be an experience really different from giving a pre-written speech to a pre-sold audience.
Whatever you’ll learn will enrich you. You have been stripped of your right to pursue your dreams. You have been given a dream that wasn’t yours. It’s time to reclaim your life. The best and fastest way to do so is by learning as much as you can. The more you learn, the wider your choices.
And you’re going to like it, because learning comes with its own rewards : the taste of freedom, a drop of revenge, a dash of hope, sprinkled with genuine pride. Yes ! You did it !
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