And they wonder why I don't go at all. You miss one of them, you might as well miss every single one of them--it seems to be getting worse every year. The same thing happens if you are fairly regular with field circus, but you miss a week or a day--or if they hound you to pio-sneer, you do it for just that month to keep the hounders off your back, and then go back to normal. "You did it that month, so we know you can do it all the time. And so does Jehovah--and, since he knows you can pio-sneer all the time, if you don't, you will die."
[2nd attempt] "We missed you SO much at the meeting...."
by Duncan 15 Replies latest jw friends
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The Quiet One
I think that there are a great deal of phrases that jw's often use, likely subconciously, to put pressure on people to be at the next meeting/next service effort, they're programmed in a sense to 'encourage' others to 'do more in Jehovahs service'. I missed an assembly and an elder told me he'd 'missed seeing me' and read me the "not forsaking the gathering of yourselves together" scripture. It wasn't encouraging, all he'd really done was point out what I hadn't done, and I came away more depressed than ever. Someone answered at a meeting once, "peer pressure isn't a bad thing if mostly everyone around you is pioneering". You can't really retaliate when people give you guilt trips about not doing things, you see, because it's only encouragement. You're just looking at it the wrong way :)
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Yan Bibiyan
Encourage - my a$$!
What made you think that I was in any way DISCOURAGED in a first place?
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corpusdei
It flows back into the Witness practice of creating an insular, isolated community. The congregation is your family, more so than your blood relatives. The congregation is your support. The congregation loves you more than the parent or wife or child who is an unbeliever. The congregation has your best interests at heart, worldly friends will tempt you into sin and death. They justify it by stating that Jesus said he would come as a sword to divide the family, and then shift the blame by stating that the rift is caused by the actions of the unbeliever (Wt 1/15/75, p. 29).
The goal is to create a dependancy on the congregation. Once social ties outside of that are weakened or lost, it makes it significantly difficult to leave because there's nowhere to go and no-one to go to. That isolation and social dependancy is one of the primary tools used by fringe cults to indoctrinate and maintain followers, because it creates a circular, self-sustaining thought process - the outside viewpoint that the Witnesses are wrong is taken by the Witness and used as evidence that it is right, and any stife or attempts by friends and family to get the person to leave feeds back into the conviction to stay.
*shudders* Just ... evil. I'm still not sure how I got out.
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RayPublisher
Excellent analysis of the phrase- very interesting.
And there has even been information at the meetings about not asking that question and putting someone on the spot. But that's part of the written/unwritten laws and the dichotomy of language used by high control groups.
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Rocky_Girl
((Fortis)) my mom is the travel agent for guilt trips. The last time one of my friends said "we missed you at the meeting last night," I responded "I missed you at my wedding last month." That's what I call a conversation stopper.