by slimboyfat 13 Replies latest jw friends
Shunning hurts. I don't know if any mind game can completely take away the pain. I'm interested also in the relationship between a mother's touch and an infant's ability to thrive. As social creatures, we need more than food, air and water to survive.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=7982860&dopt=Abstract
No more fiendish punishment could be devised, if such a thing were physically possible, than that one should be turned loose in society and remain absolutely unnoticed by all the members thereof. If no one turned around when we entered, answered when we spoke, or minded what we did, but if every person we met ‘cut us dead’ and acted as if we were nonexistent things, a kind of rage and impotent despair would before long well up in us, from which the cruelest bodily torture would be a relief. - William James, The Principles of Psychology
Slim, I could not agree more. How especially cruel when the one shunned is a born-into-it JW with no outside family or friends and/or employed by a JW.
Mouthy, I applaud you because you were courageous and brave to question outloud. I wonder how many are still in, knowing it is not the "Truth", but do not have the courage to voice their opinion and suffer the same fate as you.
Altough cutting ties to Jws when we leave is hard, it is healthier for us in the longrun.
Sometimes JWs are prepared to see relatives that have left. The problem is that being friends with people who secretly despise you for being what they see as weak and deserting their faith is damaging to us. It holds us back from making new friends with people who value us. It holds us in abusive relationships. We hang on to the crumbs that are offered and are constantly puzzled at why the love and acceptance that we seek is always out of reach.
This was my experience for many years. I left quietly and kept my mouth shut. I was tolerated and an uneasy truce existed between my relatives and my wife's. I lived in fear of being shunned for speaking the truth about how I felt and why I left.
I then wrote and published a book about the JWs. That was when the curtain came down. It hurt a lot but I got through it started to become a real person with with friends who I could talk. my stand cost me a brother who I loved with all my heart - but I would not want to go back to that halfway house that I called tolerance.
Life is too short to spend with people who do not accept us or approve of us.
I was thinking this morning, on my drive in to work, about another thread where the poster proposed that it would be a good thing if someone like the Virginia Tech madman would blow away the governing body or some group of JWs to make a point to the world. I think that is a kind of twisted way of saying that some JW practices, especially disfellowshipping, are so oppressive that it creates a climate in which such a thing could occur. The psychological profile of the V. Tech murderer and others like him, according to a report I read, is a longstanding feeling of rejection, coupled with a history of depression and a fascination with guns and explosives. The more I read about that, the more I am surprised that it has not happened in a Kingdom Hall because shunning is such a terrible form of rejection. I really really hope that it doesn't happen - and that sites such as this one show such a person that there is a whole world outside the WTBTS prison. Doesn't it scare you?
