Did The Watchtower Society Give You Your Personality? (page 2)

bigdreaux

i definately think i am who i am in spite of them, but am who i am because of them. yeah, that sounds right, i think. lol god, i sound like popeye. rofl

I trully believe we are born with a core personality. Our upbringing and life experiences "tweak" it to some extent, but the personality is set. As a "born JW" I would say many of my natural tendencies were stifled, which caused frustration, which caused me to leave , which brought me here.

OnTheWayOut

I hate to admit that they caused me to develop a more outgoing personality.
Without developing such, I could have remained happily introverted.

I assume I would have worked out of it, anyway.

looking_glass

Well, I would say that I got my humor from the boyz I grew up w/. However, my personality is part nurture and part nature. So I suspect it is a little of the WTBTS and a little som'n else.

Flowerpetal

No it didn't.

sparrow

firstly I have to say - you guys crack me up with the expressions - witless, jehobah, da troof.

Secondly I say no to this - I was growed up as a "witless" but as I said in another post I am the same person as I was when I was a witness. Not because I grew up with it but because that is the person I am. My father - still a witness - agrees and is why still has dinner with me even though I am DF'd. What backs this up is my new family (in-laws) think I'm the best thing since sliced bread. They are not and never have been witnesses but they base this on me and my personality.

I have thought about this before - if there is no such thing as everlasting life and what I do now has no meaning in the big picture - what would I do? Steal from people to get what I want, tread on people to get to the top, do whatever is needed become a millionare. Fact is I couldn't...

Paralipomenon

Not personally.

I was always myself and didn't allow anyone to influence who I was. Looking back now I can see many attempts to get me to conform to the JW mindset, but I was oblivious to such attempts at the time.

Mariusuk.

To a large degree yes

You cannot spend that much of your young years without it having a major effect on your personality, I have some positive parts of my personality as a result of being a witness, years of "studying" ironically did give me a thirst for knowledge which i guess was counterproductive for them. However I am by nature quite skeptical and emotionally hardened which again is a result of being a witness in my opinion. If i had never been a JW I know for a fact I would be a completely different person to who I am now

poppers

"lol god, i sound like popeye."

Hey, no worries; most people love that guy. "I am what I am and that's all that I am" - it's pretty profound, actually.

brinjen

Definitely not. Like others have already posted, growing up with them hampered my personality more than anything else. When I left I had no social skills, very little education and I had been unemployed for several years. The first think I did was finish school, with subjects such as Legal Studies & Women's Studies (or Liberal Feminism). I would say it took me a good five years (or more) to de-program what they 'taught' me.

Your social skills suffer big time because, well, you don't have any thanks to them. Most of my 'social' time was spent with people who I wouldn't have had a thing to do with if we weren't in the same cult. Even then, I always felt a 'falseness' in the atmosphere, like I was acting a role in a play and never being myself.

Did The Watchtower Society Give You Your Personality?