TMS: Leaving the JW religion is not like leaving town, quitting a job or getting a divorce, all stressful situations in their own right.
Leaving the JW religion of your own volition is a rejection of your core values, a destabilization of your psychological foundation. If your departure is the result of injustice or oppression from the organization itself, it's not just a matter of rethinking things. You have to erase the blackboard of your life.
I relive my life in my dreams. I angrily react to all of the situations i experienced in JWdom. I relive my entry level job of 30 years. My anger is for things I didn't say, thing's I didn't do. In daytime hours my mind constantly wanders to living my life over again with what I know now. The irony? I allowed JW's to steal my youth and, in a sense steal my last years.
Yes, "Core Values" are crushed! Everything you once believed with conviction, is in question -- or worse, shattered! It's like losing your life-long investments. All our life-long investments in beliefs and way-of-life attitudes and all, but also in (a lesser way) one's financial situation for the balance of one's life. (For many) it's too late to start building a new life with new goals and new directions and new thinking every bit as much as it's too late to start rebuilding the 401K or pension that you were convinced into believing you would never use or need.
There is the shock upon realizing that you, your entire family (spouse, children, parents, etc) are NOT going to breeze on from this "system of things" into the Paradise New World without experiencing sickness or death. For me, this happened when I realized that I will be burying my elderly "believeing" family members -- grandparents, parents, in-laws, etc. They were NOT supposed to get old and die in this system. They have. I WAS NOT supposed to get old and die in this system. I HAVE gotten old. I realize now that I will die. I wonder how. Will it be a slow agonizing death of cancer? Will I lose my mind to Alzheimers and eventually just wither and die months or years later in a nursing home with all my meager assets depleted? (My family history.)
Will I die first or my wife? At one time, we were all thought to be of the privileged "Great Crowd" who would clearly survive Armageddon into Paradise and never see death. We never had to worry about having enough life insurance, or retirement investments, or burial plots. I've gone through that planning with my elderly parents and realize now that these are the decisions I imminently face for my wife and me. How is an uneducated, unskilled, unprepared JW supposed to do all that? (Trust in Jehovah.)
Were they (GB, Writing Dept, Teaching Dept, etc) also deceived? Or were they just lying? At some point did they realize that all of their predictions were BS, but keep publishing the same old cut & paste rhetoric, crossing their fingers and hoping that The Big "A" would come and bail them out on their Fred Franz chronological screw-up? How do you dare admit to 7 million people that you are NOT the God-Inspired Prophet that you claimed/insinuated to be all this time? Yes, how do they dare admit that and prevent THEIR empire from collapsing around them, just as our world has collapsed around us? Simple. They don't!
Doc
