by troubled mind 14 Replies latest jw friends
I'm still active, but i've never felt so free in my life! I guess it comes from the fact that I no longer jump through the elders' hoops anymore. I don't feel the mental shackels anymore because in fact, I don't even care what they think anymore.
Freedom is grand.
R.F.
I'm four years out, thank heavens. But after a while of feeling guilty, it turned into feeling condemned by God.
I'm glad to be free of all that brainwashing! Within a few weeks of studying my way out, I literally felt all the burdens come off my shoulder. I was free.
You tattle because you will die at armageddon if you don't -- just like everything else .. LOL
Did you feel guilty when you missed meetings for no good reason ? Did you feel you had to hide from other witnesses seing you ? How did it make you feel if someone did see you , the next time you saw them did you make-up some excuse ?
Yes to all of the above. When I missed the meeting I used to stay inside until after it was over, even if I really needed to go out. I used to feel so guilty for missing the meetings, even when I did have a good excuse. When I would run into dubs, I would look so guilty and they would look so gleeful that they'd caught me out.
It feels sooooo good to be out of that craziness now.
When I first left, I found it both exhilarating and scary to be free from JW bondage - a real mixture of feelings. On the other hand, the "mechanisms" at work among the JWs are fairly common to some extent in most human societies. I liken the JWs to an overly-enmeshed family in which everyone knows - or claims to know - everyone else's business: it's like your every move is being scrutinised by others and you end uo doing things for the sake of impression management - not because you really want to.
Growing up in this kind of intensely petty and dramatic environment stunts the individual's normal development. Kind of like adult-children who've been under the thumb of their elderly parents and then finally decide to leave home when they're in their 30s. Talk about out of the frying pan and into the fire! It's little wonder that even though it's great to be free of such maddening (parental) bondage, so many who've been raised in the religion and who then leave, lack some neccesary skills to improve the quality of their lives and who struggle as never before!
