It was kind of a sad realization I had the other day that as a Witness you are conditioned to not have friends. I realize that most of this fact is related to my own stupidity and arrogance.
When I was in my teenage years I had a great group of friends that I ran around with. Unfortunately many of them decided to leave the organization or were forced to leave. That resulted in my being left alone and being forced by the religion to turn my back on these old friends. So the guys that I had grown up with me were jettisoned away in a show of self righteousness. I was forced to lose contact with them because many of them were disfellowshipped. Many of them were rightfully pissed at me for casting them off as freinds.
Years went by and I was appointed as an Elder. Due to my own stupidity and position as an Elder I never developed real friendships with anyone simply because I was supposed to have all of the answers and be a stellar example. Many Witnesses will scrutinize your conduct as an Elder and then beat you if you do not live up to their expectations. So I did not want anyone to see that I was not as perfect as I pretended to be. "Keep your distance and it is harder to be screwed over", I thought. I was worried that if I became too close to someone, how would I be able to fulfill my job as an Elder and perhaps one day disfellowship someone I really liked? The other side of the coin is that many people are standoffish from the elders for good reason. They don’t want to get counseled or disciplined for piddly ass stuff.
Now that I am on my way out of the cult, too slowly I might add, it struck me that as a Witness you are among the loneliest people on earth. You can’t trust anyone with your true thoughts about the religion, you can’t make outside friendships without being counseled or looked down upon, and if you decide to leave outright, you lose the few friendships that you have had, superficial as they might be. Normal things that a person might do with his buddies, such as concerts, backpacking, ballgames are discouraged because of the time it takes away from the ministry.
The Witnesses will brag about how “Nowhere else will you find friendships such as are found in in God’s organization”. It’s true. You will never find a group of people as judgmental, paranoid, and superficial as Jehovah’s Witnesses.
SIAM