The fear of rejection has once again controlled my life and my actions in an unintentional act of self destruction brought on by how I was raised to view life. I have come to the conclusion that I will probably be battling this psychological whirlpool of self sabotage for the rest of my life and I do not think I have the ability to completely eliminate it. Talking about it here is a start. I have to beat this thing before it kills me like a cancer. If it only affected me I wouldn't worry about it, but it has effected some very good people that have come in and out of my life.
When it gets to this point the thoughts of blowing my brains out becomes very strong. The only thought that has kept me from pulling that trigger is the thought of my three sons and what killing myself would do to them. I have had the gun in my hand three times in my life because of those thoughts. I have had the gun to my head with the hammer pulled back once. I don't think I would ever kill myself, I'm not that crazy, but, the thoughts about ending it all comes and goes as situations in my life show me that I am so tired of living, loosing, and trying to catch up to the rest of the human race. Sometimes you just get tired of fighting yourself along with everyone else. I have always been extremely strong in my thoughts and convictions and have taken on and beaten more bullshit in my life than most people could ever handle.
This is not anything close to what some poor slob in a third world country has to deal with just trying to fill his belly every day. Thinking about this as a major problem compared to the other problems in the world makes me want to take myself into a room and slap the hell out of myself. Trying to minimize it and put it into perspective does not lesson the pain and anguish this has caused me over the years. It is my empty food bowl and my fatal disease.
I have tried to piece together the puzzle that lead me to this reoccurring psychological dilemma and have come up with some reasonable conclusions that some of you might identify with. For those who have read my posts over the past year or so you know that I am not one who posts problems that I am having in my life. I have been more the kind of person who tries to help others with their problems as I bury mine deeper and deeper inside of me. I am not asking for help here. I rarely ask anyone for any kind of help and try to recognize my own problems and deal with them myself. When someone tries to help or offer a sympathetic shoulder to lean on it only makes things worse for me and I tend to run away again.
I am writing this to share my thoughts and feelings with all of you not only try to help myself accept this problem and deal with it better but also to see if others on this board may experience this same problem and possibly recognize it for what it is and see where it has caused problems in their own life. If anyone has had this problem and beaten it I would like to know how you did it. If your answer is god or another controlling mythical manipulative religious line of bullshit please kept that one to yourself. It won't help! It is that kind of thing that got me into this hellish situation in life in the first place.
I have spent two and a half years alone not wanting to be in a relationship and rejecting all women who I felt were showing some interest in me. I just wanted to be alone and avoid anything that would lead to something that would end up having me blindly stare at the walls for several months after it was all over. I spent this two and a half years alone to see if I could figure out why I can never keep a good relationship and why I keep destroying something I now have to force myself to admit I need. I have read the books and I have known how they say to fix it in others but I can't seem to fix myself. I guess it took this last failed relationship to pull my thoughts all together and make me see the problem as the monster it really is.
Here are my thoughts on why I have this fear and why I have seen this in so many of us in this little group of rejected human beings. Sometimes I think we are more than just exJW's. We are rejected humans. Rejected from having a chance to live a normal life with normal thoughts and normal reactions to some of life's simple problems.
I think I first developed this fear by being forced to go door to door as a young child. As most of us know we would get up on Saturday mornings and face the world with our little book bag filled with Watchtower literature. We have had doors slammed in our faces, people threaten to get guns the next time we showed up and have had people's dogs sent out to scare us away. Every Saturday rejection after rejection after rejection. People yelling, screaming, threatening, and scaring the shit out of little kids that should be home playing or watching Saturday morning cartoons. Simply walking up to someone's door brought a devastating fear of the unknown to me, a little kid who only wanted to have everybody like him as most kids do was forced to have people reject him and slam their door in his face every god dammed weekend. To speak up and express your thoughts about how much you hated doing this to your parents would mean a lecture about dying at Armageddon and having god make the birds eat the eyes out of your cold dead little body. We not only heard these words but saw them graphically depicted in the big orange Paradise book designed to teach us kids about gods love disguised as fear and vengeance.
My next devastating jolt of rejection came when I was five years old and my dad moved out of our house and divorced my mom. He would not become a JW and he left us. He not only rejected the religion but my mom, my two little sisters, my brother and me. I rarely saw my dad as a young child. Every kid needs his dad. All I understood at that age is he didn't want me.
As I grew up the feeling of rejection was added to by the feeling of not fitting in. We were not allowed to stay in school for holiday parties like the rest of our class mates. We were forced to identify ourselves as different and defiant to our own countries by standing with the rest of our class mates at the pledge of allegiance to the flag with our little arms straight at our sides and our little mouths silent. We were looked at as weird and different and even sometimes as communist or little kids who hated their country. The first few minutes of every day in class from grades one through six was a reminder that we were not the same as everyone else. We were not invited to parties or any other activities that all the other kids took for granted. We were force to REJECT OURSELVES from society.
This form of self rejection and denial of what we really wanted and needed in our lives to try and be normal continued on through our entire youth. Be different, reject what is bad according the whims of twelve senile old men in New York and you will live forever. If you do not practice self rejection you will die. It was a simple cut and dried black and white life. Reject your true self and you will please your parents and your only friends and god. Do not reject the joys and pleasures in life and god will reject you and you will die and never see your mom and dad again.
As I grew older and got married to my JW wife a new form of rejection was introduced to me. As with many JW girls her mother told her about the evils of sex and how men only wanted to have their bodies. It was evil, a sin and something disgusting to them their whole lives. Then in a twist of the absurd the JW's encourage young teenagers who know nothing about real life or how to truly identify love get married so as not to sin by having normal sexual desires. They expect that what they have taught their young women their whole lives to be turned off, could be turned on as if it was as simple as flipping a light switch. When my now ex-wife and I got marred she hated sex. She was afraid of it and could not gain any kind of real sexual desire. Years of brainwashing had taken a hold of her and both her and I had to pay for it. She would not let me touch her and only on rare occasions did we have sex. To her it was like I was raping her. I became like the devil in her eyes and she felt the only thing I wanted from her was to take control of her body. We fought this for six and a half very horrible years. To add to that I was taught that I was the head of the household and what I said was the law. When I demanded sex it only made her fight me more and grow father apart. I spent my sexual prime getting rejected night after night after night. After six and a half years of that kind of rejection I lost all sense of any kind of romance or real love for a mate.
My ex-wife and I got a divorce when I was 27 years old. I left her, my kids, my religion, my mom and step dad, my brothers and sisters the only group of friends I was allowed to have on one hot summer day in 1984. I had simply reached a breaking point and had to make a decision to honestly see the lies and phony feeling of love and twisted logic I was raised with. After a life of rejecting my own personal honesty and thoughts the JW's had to show me their version of love one last time. The rejected me from life in their fucking twisted sense of justice by disfellowshipping me from my own family. I have seen my mom three times in 19 years and that is what they call love. I can't even say I love my mom anymore. I no longer know who she is and she definitely dose not know me.
For the past 19 years that impulsive reaction to reject has never left me. I have had so many short relationships with women I can't even count them or remember them all. It was always their fault. They had problems that I couldn't deal with so I rejected them. Some of them saw problems in me so they rejected me. If they didn't do or say what I needed to have or hear I took that as a rejection and I ended it. I could not see that a big part of the problem was this fear of rejection. I see it now. I have lived a simple cut and dried, black and white life and it is killing me. I reject what I love before it rejects me.
I thought I was over all this JW shit. I have never realized how much control it still had over me. It's not even the religious doctrine or warped sense of god that effects me, I have realized that for what it was a long time ago. It is the feeling of rejection that I have not been able to shake. The absolute need to walk away before I have to suffer another devastating rejection. It is the running from that door before the person has a chance to answer it and tell me to get lost or they are not interested. It is not being able to stand at that door and feel that something good may behind it instead of something that was going to reject me. I learned how to reject and feel rejected at a very young age and it has stuck with me. It is a part of my life that has been learned from childhood and it is devastating. It is as hard to get out of my head as it would be to try and forget the language I learned to speak as a child.
Last summer I hooked up with a woman whom I have known for several years but had not seen in over a year. As much as I tried to fight it and explain to her I did not want or need a woman in my life but just wanted to be alone my desire to be with her was too strong. She kept inviting me over to hang out with her and her mom, it was hard for me to say no any longer. I would go weeks between seeing her because I know how I felt about her and she just wanted to be friends. She is an incredible human being and I think I have loved her since the day I met her so many years ago. It eventually got to the point that I wanted to try once again to have a woman in my life, not any woman, but just this particular one. After talking her into trying to have something more than just a friendship it only took a couple of months before I destroyed it. My fear of rejection has turned into as she says, "a self fulfilling prophecy."
When she showed the slightest inclination of not being sure about us I ran out the door and bolted it behind me. In the past few months I did not do this just once but at least four times to her. She kept wanting to see me, I kept running away. She has only a hand full of her own problems and she is trying to work them out. I saw her very few problems and insecurities as a rejection of me and instead of what they really were and I ran one last time. I made her think the problem was with her and I could not see that it was with me. I amplified what I thought she was saying into a clear and absolute rejection. I'm tired of fucking up like this. I scared her. I scared myself. I not only may have lost her for good as a friend, I lost her mom who was better to me in those few short months than my mom has been to me for almost twenty years. I know if I tried to work it out again, I would only screw it again. Normal people can only take so much of us and they give up.
What might have been the best thing that has happened to me in my life I once again rejected it before I gave it a chance to find out what it could be. The thought of it eventually ending like every other relationship I have had was too much to deal with so I cut it off before that might happen. I was more concerned with what might not happen then I was about what might. I was more afraid of how I will feel for several months after it ended than I was about how I would feel if it worked out. I never really gave it a good chance to bulid. I wanted it all now, I wanted to know if it was going to work right now. My fear of rejection destroyed it. My fear of rejection is one of the only fears in my life. I have wrestled most of the demons in my life and have won. I am one strong and fairly well adjusted human being. But, this one thing, this thing that I refuse to admit means so much to me I keep running away from.
The only thing I can do is write about it on this board. The writing helps me see it and may eventually help me beat it down. I have not posted in quite a while. I do not talk about my problems here. This time, I had no other choice. I had no where else to turn. This is my therapy. This is the place that has the only people on the planet who may understand my battel with rejection. No one can solve this for me, I have to do this myself or it won't stick. No one can change what is done, all you can do is understand. Sometimes understanding is all we have left. I can now admit I have this problem. I can now see how it has effected my life. I want it to end.
The next time the JW's come to your door if a little boy or little girl is with them, please try and be kind.
If it is just two adults tell them to fuck off!
Dave
"The only enemy I have is the one who does not listen to the voice inside of me"
-Dave Malone