Welcome Jake and thats for sharing your story with us. I hope you have a happy, healthy, and fullfilling future, now you have discovered the truth about the truth!
Best Wishes, Paula x
Introduction Bio
by JakeM2012 45 Replies latest jw friends
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Flossycat
Hi Jake, from Melbourne, Australia. Wow - what a well written and powerful testimony. So glad your wife has seen the hypocrisy with you.
I was a teenage JW in the early 1970s and remember well how everyone was holding their breath for the big event in 1975/76. (Kingdom Ministry praising brothers&sisters for selling their homes to pioneer etc) I left the JW early '80s. About 9 years ago bumped into an elder from my old congregation - at my local gym. I had really loved the people in that congo, and he was just the best elder. I went over to him. He didn't recognize me after so many years - turned out he and his wife and kids got disfellowshipped in the mid '80s. He said in the lead-up to 1975, at the elders' meetings, he was the only one to voice doubts that Armageddon might not come in 1975. Shock-horror! The other elders looked down on him, to the extent (he later found out) they'd begun having 'special' private elders meetings without him, to discuss him.
On the point you raise on how could we have fallen for such a string of lies and hypocrisy and just plain crazy doctrines: In March, at the national (Australian) Cult Info&Family Support conference, one of the clinical psychologists spoke of this. Might just add here - there were testimonials given from some who'd joined cults as young adults (early 20s) who had come from very well-educated secular backgrounds; they had university degrees, great incomes, good friends - yet still got sucked in to the most severely controlled cults that totally stripped their dignity and ability to think for themselves. It can happen to anyone, which is the mystifying part - all they could say was they were looking for something more fulfilling in life's purpose. But for those born-in, this is how the psychologist explained it: - the brain is 'plastic', the brain's neuron-synapse connections need new experiences, needs to continually learn to think outside the box. If it doesn't get this stimulation the brain 'whithers' in its capacity to rationalise. Also the brain, from childhood if living in a good-v-evil/reward v destruction environment, quickly normalises this kind of behaviour and attitude. That's it in a nutshell.
Look forward to hearing more from you.
Flossycat
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Quandry
Welcome!
My husband and I voluntarily started studying in 1973, moving quickly so that we could come in "in the last remaining months before Armageddon." We stayed in over thirty years, and my husband was an elder for twenty. How we wish we could get those years back.....
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arwen
Welcome to the board and thank you so much for sharing your story!
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Knowsnothing
It was a long read, but certainly worth it. I recommend you allow JWfacts post it on his website to help others, if you aren't currently worried about your identity. These bio threads tend to get lost in the endless sand of new threads, and having it on a "fixed" site would help a bunch.
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lisaBObeesa
*marking*