What if JWs had never been part of your life......?

by Scully 31 Replies latest jw friends

• 

  cat1759

  Greven I understand now why I am like I am. It only took my parents three months after my sister was born to concieve me...no perfection there.

  I would never have had any children. I didn't want children. I would be working in the computer industry as that was a great love of mine as they were new back then. I would have a house on the ocean whereby I could dangle my feet off the dock after a hard day with a martini in my hand. I would never have been married as I saw no need to have a relationship. That in part was due to walking on eggshells all my life with my parents. Never knowing when the axe was going to fall.

  I would have lived a very selfish, unknowing life of what love really is and how deep it flows. I just wanted to have peace at all costs. Not come home to a man that nags worse than my mother. I wanted to be free.

  Am I better off for the experiences being raised as a jws. Yes. No matter how bad things were I learned to not be so selfish in my life. I learned to give love. I also learned to trust who I am. Well still working on the last one.

  I have found out that children are the greatest gift this life has to offer and I would have missed out on all the learning and experiences I have had with them. So maybe we really are where we need to be.

  Cathy
• 

  tazmaniac

  Hmmmm good question. I probably would have a college degree. I would perhaps still be married to my first wife. She suffers with major depression problems. Not that she wouldnt have psychological problems but they are/were magnified greatly by all the pressures to do more more more. I think the thought of a terrible annihilation from the sky was constantly looming in her mind and caused her to completly snap. To the positive side...if I had never been a witness I dont know if I would have survived being anywhere from 18-28 or so. I know I would have been wild and gotten into lots of trouble if not death.
• 

  Lady Lee

  • Where do you think you'd be if the JWs and the WTS had never been part of your life?

  Well better established in my career for sure. I would have finished high school and gone on to University right away

  • How would your life be different from what it is now?

  Well I wouldn't have married the person I did - but then I wouldn't have my daughters or granddaughter either. I would still have the scars from the pre-JW abuse but at least it would have stopped at some point in my childhood instead of continuing through to my marriage and eventual divorce. Hmmm and I would have left him a lot sooner instead of staying and trying to be a better wife

  • What do you think you might have accomplished or done differently without the encumberances of the JWs in your life?

  see above

  • What kind of relationship would you have with your family?

  well not any different. They were abusers before and that didn't change when my mother became a JW - think it gave her permission to beat the crap out of us

  • Who would you be?

  Me? the same person I am now - therapy has done a lot to let me find the real me and not live in fear
• 

  maxwell

  • Where do you think you'd be if the JWs and the WTS had never been part of your life?
  • How would your life be different from what it is now?
  • What do you think you might have accomplished or done differently without the encumberances of the JWs in your life?

  The first three questions kind of run together for me. Of course, I'll never know, but I have interests like music that I didn't pursue seriously because I was a JW. A lot of values that I was taught I would have been taught no matter what my religion. But like others, I think I would have done a few more wild things perhaps. I'm not sure that I would have been married.

  • What kind of relationship would you have with your family?

  If my immediate family had not been JW, I think the family bond would have been stronger. Even as JW, my father always taught that family comes first and blood comes thicker than water. But as a JW, I didn't quite buy that fully. In my logical mind, I always thought my dad was overemphasizing family over right. If family is wrong I believed then and still believe now that I wouldn't be standing behind my family. I don't automatically jump to my family's side just because they are my family. I have to believe that they are in the right, whereas my father will jump to the family's side first and ask questions later. If we had not been JW, my father would have still taught the same lesson and I think I probably would have bought into it. In general, I'd probably be a more feeling person and be better able to simply bond with my family and others.

  • Who would you be?

  I'm sure I'd be different in many ways because of different experiences. But hopefully, my basic value structure would still be in place.
• 

  95stormfront

  • Where do you think you'd be if the JWs and the WTS had never been part of your life?
  • How would your life be different from what it is now?
  • What do you think you might have accomplished or done differently without the encumberances of the JWs in your life?
  • What kind of relationship would you have with your family?
  • Who would you be?

  I remember my first contact with a group of elders.......

  After a few years of marriage, my wife, after jumping from job to job and feeling guilty that she wasn't I guess spiritual enough or progressing fast enough in her life, had me accompany her to a meeting she'd set up with the elder body of the congregation whose territory we lived in. Right after they closed the door and after introductions, the big crocodile tears began to flow from her almost on cue and she started talking about things I can't even remember now, and they, the elders, looked at me and asked me did I know that she felt this way. Yes, the implications started that very day. They set her up as a study with two older pioneer partners and so began my life continueing this day of WT meddling and JW self-righteous sanctimonious arrogance.

  Oh.....if I knew then what I know now...........

  Can't say for sure how my life would be as far as relationships with family goes but I can surely say that I would've accomplished more had I not been introduced to dubdom. I certainly would've went to school earlier. I would've spent more time doing things I enjoyed, rather than going to useless meetings and being held back by self-serving and shifting organization "trooths". I wouldn't have spent a year studying, being baptised...ummmm pledging allegiance to the organization, spent any time constantly trying to measure up to standards of living imposed by people far removed from the realities of life.

  I realize how hard headed I was to not heed the warnings my family gave me about getting involved with the WTBS. But with only rumour and innuendo, they were not armed with enough knowledge to present the darker side of life as a dub.
• 

  SixofNine

  • • Where do you think you'd be if the JWs and the WTS had never been part of your life?
    • How would your life be different from what it is now?
    • What do you think you might have accomplished or done differently without the encumberances of the JWs in your life?
    • Who would you be?

  Six~ toungue in cheek but whose? class
• 

  Hamas

  If my father was a king, then I would be a prince.
• 

  Country Girl

  Well, I wouldn't be where I am today, and I'm not sure if I like that idea all too well. Life has taken some valuable turns for me because I *was* a Witness, and the experiences I garnered from it have served me by some token over the years. I might be someplace else, but I am not sure if I would have appreciated it quite as deeply, or as thankfully, as I do now.

  CG
• 

  GentlyFeral

  Well, if I had been able to outgrow my insecurities and grow some self-respect (a task I avoided by getting baptized)...y'all might know me from the movies by now. I wanted to be an actress and would have been a good one.

  Without the jaydubs, I might have sought therapy sooner than I did and gotten more good out of it (working on deeper and more important issues than postpartum depression).

  Given even a modest amount of success in life, instead of hiding away amongst the other Stepford wives, I might have become a traveler, an adventurer.

  Might still have married the same man; he introduced me to the jaydubs but was not baptized when we met. That means I'd still have the same kids, hurrah!

  Most conservative positive estimate: I might have been what I am now, only richer and better-educated. I'd certainly be a damn hippie; I loved that stuff and believed in it.

  GentlyFeral
• 

  Euphemism

  I've thought about this question... and I've realized, as someone else said, that I wouldn't have been me.

  My parents probably would have had kids sooner than they did, if they didn't spend their 20's pioneering. So I would have been born at a different time, had a different genetic makeup, and so forth.

  But just for the sake of hypothesizing, let's put that aside for a minute...

  One thing I wonder is whether I would be healthy. My parents' regular pioneer assignment was near a toxic waste dump, and they both came down with CFS, which I inherited. Whether there's actually a correlation there, no one knows. But it's an interesting possibility, one which would certainly change my life a lot.

  If my parents hadn't been witnesses, my father probably would have gotten a PhD and been teaching English in some college somewhere. His friends would probably be other intelligent, intellectually minded people, so maybe they would have had intelligent kids, and I wouldn't have grown up feeling like such a freak. I dunno... just a possibility.

  One thing's for sure... my father is, by nature, an easy-going man. If he wasn't a witness, I'm sure he wouldn't have pressured me from a young age to be responsible, to be mature, to be sinless, etc. He wouldn't have felt that he had to turn me into a perfectly obedient child by the time I was two years old, which means I would be free of considerable emotional hangups that come from that attempt.

  I suppose his latent perfectionism might have found some other way to manifest itself, and that might have harmed me emotionally. But I am sure that whatever it was, it couldn't have harmed me as much as "the truth."