Sounds like an oxymoron i know!
Having just watched the Danish Video on youtube, i realized that because our family is not hugely close and spread out all over australia, we never went thru the shunning shit much at all.
We were never a particularly close family to my memory, mum and dad had split over the religion when i was about ten, and the relationship with the step father was tough...hard to get a step father at 14, esp a tough discaplinarian. I left home at about 16 and a half, older brother left later i recall. Sisiter got married to get out of home. At that time we were in W.A, S.A and N.T. When older brother was DF i was in QLD. There really was not much shunning to be done, we never met up and for a time he just seemed to disapear. (his reasons to explain)
So fast forward to the time of ny sisters DAand my own DF, we were all still all over the country. We seemed to have more interest in catching up as we got older. Infact, 5 or 6 years ago we did just that and for the first time in 17 years we 3 were in the same place having coffee.
Seeing as our mum has stayed a JW but is isolated in scrub enviroment, some many kms out of town, nobody from the congo drops in, at least thats what we find when we visit her.
See, she wont shun us. Perhaps that is actually helped by us all being spread out and only making actual visits a couple of times a year. mean time, she is happy to speak on the phone anytime.
I realize that say we had all stayed in the same town we were all from, the elders would know every time mum even sneezed, so there would be no skirting the rules. There would have been no contact with the syblings 'out' at various times, and that would have made things harder.
oz who escaped with minor injuries