Hi, folks. It's been a while since I've posted here. I've been trying to figure out a way to live inside my mind.
I'm not going to post my entire history again, but here's the deal.
I am a baptized, card-carrying forty-year-old Borg member. I no longer believe in a god of any kind. I am an atheist. I tried to leave the Witnesses when I was 23, was guilted and shamed by my mother into not doing so, convinced myself that there was some value to the Witnesses, and remained one. I did a decent job of blocking out logic and not critically thinking for a few years until my brain threatened to implode under the pressure.
I have been dealing with depression lately, and very painfully so. Last year, though I didn't actually contemplate it to the point that I tried to find ways to do it, I thought about suicide. People said it was a permanent solution to a temporary problem but I didn't (and still don't) see this problem as temporary.
I have three kids and a wife. I not only despise the Witnesses, but all religion. I think that it is a blight on humanity. The problem is that I love my wife and kids. My wife, like the rest of my family, has given themselves over to the Lie and allow their thoughts to be one with the Borg. My wife is a Zealot and she would let them cut her heart out on an altar in the Kingdom Hall if they asked her to.
Some people have suggested just going through with the eventual divorce that would occur, but I really don't want to put my kids out like that, either. Either I stick around in excrutiating mental pain, but be a father to my kids or this ends in disaster. I can see them on weekends or a couple of times per week, but that's not what I want. And I'd never get custody, what with no support system. My wife has her family and mine to help her support them whereas I have nobody but myself. I'd rather it not come to that.
My wife doesn't care about thinking critically or science. She's otherwise a very intelligent person, as many Witnesses are. She's never going to "come around" to my way of thinking. The kids I think eventually will see the Lie for what it is. They are open to my preaching to them about scientific things.
But back to me. I feel my life slipping away day by day. I have lost all joy and all interest in just about everything. I just try to make it through each day. I've not gone to a therapist of any kind because there isn't much point. I already know what the source is. I just can't stop it without making a bigger crater. The depression of ruining my family and "joint custody" of my kids doesn't seem like a better fate.
I no longer have pleasant suicidal thoughts of me just being permanently at rest. I have this depressing vision of my growing old in a world that I can't fully partake of or enjoy.
And I've even tried to look up psychological information of how prisoners cope with life sentences, but I've not been able to find anything. The only information I have found is on prisoners who will eventually be released. This is discomforting to me.
EDIT: I would like to also point out that my sister's ex-husband left the Lie a couple of years ago. He left my sister and their daughter. He sees her once a month and during holidays and this is what I am trying to avoid. I don't want the family destroyed. Further, both his family and my family hate him. He is little better than Satan himself in their eyes. But he seemed to be okay with that, went and got remarried to another woman, moved to a different city, etc. I can't see myself doing that, not in a million years.