ICSA Pre-Conference Day - Coming to Terms with Your Story: Writing to Heal

by Lady Lee 18 Replies latest jw experiences

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  Lady Lee

  Hi Chris Listing is what it is. You make a list of things you might want to talk about. Many people make lists of places they lived or schools they went to or simply their age. My lists tend to follow ehere we lived since we moved so often.

  I think Truth or Consequenses might be interesting to try. I tend to see this as cause and effects or action/reactions. Sort of an if...then type of thinking. I think I plan things this way. A sort of strategizing way of decision-making esppecially when both choices are negative and you still have to choose one.

  In the workshop we got to try everything for a few minutes. I did really well with Lists and freewriting well that just lets me go in any direction. I like it a lot because I just let my mind do the work and never quite know where I will end up. I am amazed at how much can come up for me using thies. I think I want to try Truth or Consequencesa again. This might be very helpful for me to examine some of the choices I have made and the options that were available to me at that time. I think I need to not feel so guilty about some things when there were so few options open to me.

  Which groups - There were so many that I never heard of before. Many were small groups. Many people never said which group they were from and that was ok. There were a few ex-Moonies, q1uite a few ex-various-Christian groups. I think I was the only ex-JW but I could be wrong. Some people from political groups. While the divorce of Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise was talked about I don't recall anyone saying they were an ex-Scientologist.

  What surprised me so much was that few people thought of the JWs as a cult. Most people just thought they were weird. BUT all of the professionals knew better. They all had JWs on their lists.
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  Lady Lee

  Vulnerability certainly has a huge imapct on a person getting involved in any group that will take advantage of them. I think whenever someone is vulnerable they feel pretty needy. They are looking for something to support them, help them deal withh all their problems. And along comes someone who tells them that they have just the right answer for them. You don't have to be unstable to get sucked in.

  Do you think there is a difference between a second generation cult member, one who was born in, and one who joins on their own?

  Presumably the one who joins has some memory of their life before joining. If they were feeling vulnerable and then got handed a magical solution to all their problems it might be harder for them to stop and think, really think about how "magical" that solution really is. It is easy to let go of the bad stuff and tell yourself that NOW you have the truth, the secret or whatever.

  If you are born in you don't know anything else. There is no "other" frame of reference. So they might stay longer because of fear or curiosity may get the better of them and they try leading the double life. Bothe present different perspectives on staying or leaving. It is just so individual. You were an exception so young and then to get the rest of the family involved too. Not your typical little boy. Can you imagine one of your kids doing that when he was 9?
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  Big Tex

  Vulnerability certainly has a huge imapct on a person getting involved in any group that will take advantage of them. I think whenever someone is vulnerable they feel pretty needy. They are looking for something to support them, help them deal withh all their problems. And along comes someone who tells them that they have just the right answer for them. You don't have to be unstable to get sucked in.

  Agreed. In need, vulnerable, in pain and casting about for answers and then someone shows up with easy, quick answers to me that makes for the perfect target of a cult.

  The older I get the more I realize I'm a weird guy. 9 year old kids don't think about the things I thought about. But it made me the ideal cult target.
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  Big Tex

  BTW LL I'm glad you were able to make the conference.
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  Lady Lee

  Chris not too many kids had to cope with the things we did either.

  At 10 yrs old I was getting up Sunday mornings, getting dressed in my Sunday clothes and taking a bus to my favorite church -- by myself. I even tried different churches. I badly needed to believe there was a God who might help me
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  Dogpatch

  Great comments, Lee!

  I first began going to these conferences (CAN - Cult Awareness Network) in 1984 in Berkeley, Santa Barbara, and other places. They give you infinitely more wisdom than hanging in a forum like this where all are very similar. Like being in a small town and never seeing the Big City. I, too, was the only ex-JW at any of them.

  Big Tex,

  I thought I joined the JWs for idealistic reasons myself for many years, even after I left. I was a TRUE BELIEVER (Eric Hoffer). But later becoming an exit-counselor I saw my own primal needs being met by the JWs in the same exact way that most of the others did.

  If you are merely idealistic, you don't need to join a group of people... you can just read and believe. But you have to actually JOIN and become part of the cult's SUPER-EGO before you get the real PRIMAL satisfaction it secretly provides. You have to FEEL it!

  I didn't realize that for many years - it took me watching many others do the same thing in many different groups to finally "get it."

  Just my two cents. :-))

  Randy
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  Dogpatch

  Lee said,

  I badly needed to believe there was a God who might help me

  That was the #1 reason I joined - God HAD to be there! (or I would go nuts). I actually told myself that before I quit smoking, cut my long hippie hair, and turned into a whole different person. I couldn't really PROVE ANYTHING.

  Before the JWs I was almost autistic by comparison.

  Randy
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  Lady Lee

  Randy it was so fascinating to be around no Witnesses but know everyone understood what out lives were like. It really didn't matter what group we came from. We were all taken advantage of, all lied to and betrayed. All lost something they had believed in for a long time.

  The young women I was hanging out with were just realizing that they were still walk-away believers. They had never heard that term before. And they were pretty determined to find all those things and root them out. It was like looking at myself back in 1995, 10 years after I left.

  The other thing that was really great is everyone had open minds. They wanted to be free. They were getting all this new information and they were surprised sometimes, but determined to see things in a different light. They were open to new ways of thinking about themselves and how the experience they had gone through might still be affecting them and even holding them back in some ways.

  I have a whole new appreciation for what other cult survivors have gone through. We are more alike than I ever thought was possible
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  Lady Lee

  BTW Thanks Chris It is ALWAYS good to see you