The impact and consequences of being born into the jehovahs witness cult. (page 5)

Finkelstein

I forgot to welcome you to the forum Rayo

So welcome and thank you for being so open to discussion,

Its good for all concerned, there are actually quite a few people who do look at this forum and browse over the information in content.

RayoFlight2014

Peacefulpete,

I am so sorry you lost friends to suicide most likely because of the isolation that is the product of shunning ?

We certainly are affected differently according to our individual circumstance.

I would have thought the examination and identifying exactly what makes a person do this or that would be the key to unlocking the driving force or mechanism that will empower us to know our own mind.

If you have time I'd like to explore your position on this because I've read some of your posts while lurking and found the content educational.

I'm happy to be schooled on any subject if anyone is willing to walk me through it and allow me to object or ask questions.

Thanks for your input peacefulpete.

RayoFlight2014

Hi Simon,

It is a shocking and an extreme act of violence to endanger people's lives by attacking a place of worship.

Rightly to be considered unacceptable behaviour and condemned in the strongest possible terms by the exjw community.

It's great to have dialogue like this because even if we have mostly recovered we can learn new techniques and other perspectives; all character building and developing a better community.

Just like you said, the fact that I had inherent family issues, I was not born with the potential to be highly intelligent, came from a low income family and was an introvert, are all factors that would still be present, with or without watchtower.

I feel it's an important undertaking to dissect and scrutinize our experience with WTS.

To peel it back to its core and discover in what ways watchtower genuinely impacted us positively or negatively.

Only then will we have a clearer view of what to keep, what to discard, how to identify undue influence, learn to own our inherent faults and make positive change where we can.

RayoFlight2014

Hi again Fink,

Thank you for your warm welcome.

I find open, non hostile debate and discussion to be a most valuable asset to a forum such as this.

There will be folk just like me who were or are lurking, watching the dialogue play out and seeing we aren't all that different from them, we are kindly, we have empathy but we won't just tickle their ears either. We will call them out for nonsense or ask for clarification.

That is healthy, meaningful and productive. We all win.

Diogenesister

Simon if we're helpless because of what others did to us then it's going to be a pretty miserable existence.

For sure I think it's called "learned helplessness" and I've noticed it seems to be pretty common among witnesses and affects their chances of moving out and on with their lives.

Giordano

Hi Rayo and welcome!

When my wife and I left the JW construct in our young twenties we had one C-minus high school diploma between us. We had little to nothing in our lives when we broke with the so called truth. All the WT reading I had done up to this point counted for nothing. But thank goodness I was a reader and was able to go into a library and pick out anything that I was curious about.

Two books made the critical difference for me back in the early 1960's (No internet in those days). The first was The True Believer by Eric Hoffer, a longshoreman who became a blue collar Social Philosopher who analyzed Mass Movements that turned out True Believers. Oddly enough he never mentioned the JW's or the WTBTS though he described them to a tee. Here is a quote I referenced recently:

All active mass movements strive, therefore, to interpose a fact-proof screen between the faithful and the realities of the world. ...by claiming that the ultimate and absolute truth is already embodied in their doctrine and that there is no truth nor certitude outside it. ...To rely on the evidence of senses and of reason is heresy and treason. It is startling to realize how much unbelief is necessary to make belief possible. What we know as blind faith is sustained by innumerable unbelief's.

I also read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich........ After finishing that book there was no doubt in my mind that the Corporate structure of the WT never had any special connection to a god. It was all made up BS. A 100 million people died in WW2 and no god interfered on any level. In fact God's original chosen ones were exterminated as were the JW's.

It didn't take me long to cancel my positions in the congregation and with my wonderful wife, who was my pioneer partner, pack up and leave.

Since this was in the mid 1960's......Vietnam was becoming a death zone for American Soldiers, and I was now eligible to be drafted. Then a few years later The Society launched 1975. My thought at that point was 'Damn my timing really sucked".

We also missed Woodstock as we had a new baby son. He did keep me out of Vietnam and in return we kept him out of the JW world.

1975 came and went and it was in March of 76 before I remembered.

When you totally don't set your calendar on any meeting night, or Assembly or the Memorial you know your out.

Finkelstein

One thing one might come to realize is just how the leaders of the WTS have tried to mentally control people's minds by creating and structuring informational biases, such as we are right they are wrong, we are righteous ,they are not, they lie we dont, they are evil and therefore dont have god's approval.

The implication of fear and guilt is strongly utilized and exploited by the WTS heads which they use to substantiate and identify their own self empowerment and personal stature.

But still grounded and built upon human ignorance out of using the bible as a social moral standard.

The WTS. uses and exploits this guilt and fear to get people to distribute the WTS's literature, cultivate free labor and money to the organization, which ends up in their own personal use and means. $$$

This black and white mind control takes quite some time to melt away but fortunately when it does you come to a clear and honest picture to so many things pertaining to the likes of human psychology, human sociological behavior, facts pertaining to the physical world in which we live through scientific discovery etc

RayoFlight2014

Hi Giordano and thaks for rhe welcome.

As a child i would sneak unapproved library books home and read them with a torch under the blankets till 3 am.

I didn't read anything of real substance back then, mostly fantasy and science fiction. Still, it incresed my vocabulary and helped me think beyond controlled ideas.

My parents were born in the forties and neither of them were readers of anything but propaganda. Our conversations always circle back to whatever hyperbole that feeds into their end times world view.

I don't learn much from my father and that's such a pity, because I could listen for hours uninterrupted to older folk who are a wealth of information; I love learning and having my beliefs challenged.

Thank you for sharing your personal experience with me, it gives me a sense of who you are. I've noticed you mention those books on previous posts.(while I was lurking)

I was too young to understand the significance of the 1975 hyp and I almost missed the significance of 2014 and what that meant in terms of "this Generation". Boy were my eyes opened wide that year as I discovered the overlap and the UN affiliation and the tsunami of child rape cover-ups and the changes to blood doctrine and the lies,half truths and misquote's.

My head was in a spin. And I'm still a bit dizzy.

I don't recognize that as being the same religion I left in 1991.

blondie

I come from a different category, born into family with only one jw parent, mother. (if the only jw is the father, that has its own dynamics depending on how much the non-jw father exercises or is allowed to exercise his head of the household authority).

In my case, I lived in a limbo like status. Not good enough for the KH crowd, my father's worldliness might be catching; but viewed with suspicion by non-jws hoping especially when my mother went into full conversion mode. They were confused when they saw here doing things that they knew were not allowed by the WTS.

If we wanted to do something not jw-approved, we would just say my father said we had to do it. As long as it was not a df'ing issue the KH elders would back off. (I know some elders would still try to interfere, but not the ones who knew my father).

I was in a situation that I had little control over. When I started getting some control over things, I made my move. I had plenty non-jw contacts in school, the neighbors, father's friends and workmates, so I had escapes and support. I have always been on the border, PIMO, for a long time before I realized that I should become POMO.

Family is not all the tv happy happy scenario for non-jws. There would have been no guarantee that if neither of my parents had been jws that things would have been better. Actually, I think it would have been much worse; at least we had time away from our father who was not a nice man at all to his children.

RayoFlight2014

Hi Fink,

Indeed what you say is true, that is why it's vitally important for us to learn from our experience by challenging authorities and each others opinions and beliefs while allowing others to challenge our perspectives without being aggressive, ask for evidence where required and doing so with kindness and appropriate respect.

By doing that we turn some of the negative impacts and consequences into positives ; we won't be fooled or deceived again.

The impact and consequences of being born into the jehovahs witness cult.

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