Hello, Everyone! I was added fairly recently to the AAWA network (Thank You Richard E. Kelly ) and have been a lurker/fader for many years. The ex-jw community, from a far, has offered me so many ways to help go through my own thinking while awakening and working through my own Crisis of Conscience. However, I do have a critique of our community. It seems that many of us, though not all, often talk more about what they don't believe and what we see wrong, a reactive way of thinking, and less more about how to make things right, a proactive way of thinking, while in our respective paths. So, I hope to fill that gap. I want to share two things that helped me considerably. However, before I share these tools I need to talk about the big question, "Who am I?" I agree with Stephan Hassan when he says that even if we are born into a cult, which I was, we are all born with an authentic self. It is my opinion that discovering our authentic self unhitched from the the undue influence that some of us grew up under is key to discovering a life well lived. It is in that vein that I would like to share two psychological questionnaires that have been critiqued via peer reviewed journals and validated statistically and scientifically to have value for many people. The first tool is called the Myers-Briggs, this tool allows you to see your strengths and faults and gives you the broad strokes of your personality type! In the psychology classes I took the full version, which actually costs money to take, I took a free version that gave me just about the same result and will share the link below, though the free version just has a tad less detail. I scored an INTP/ENTP, let me know what you scored! The next tool is called the VIA, it is rooted in positive psychology, which basically focuses on the positive or healthy aspects of ones psychological states to improve the short-comings. We all have strengths that we can use. My strengths, for instance, "strengths are "Love of Learning" and "Creativity", My two lowest are Humility and Perverseness. So a way I plan on becoming a better version of my self is to use my love of learning and creativity to research what it means to have Humility and to have Perverseness. Here are the tests that helped me understand my self and hopefully they will be of benefit to you as well. I would also like to suggest to the admins that we have a subject area for Recovery in this, the greatest board for exjw issues on the entire internet.
For the Myers-Briggs go here .. http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/jtypes2.asp
For the VIA go here...
If you have difficulties or would like someone to walk through what your scores mean, feel free to pm me.