by Doubledecker 26 Replies latest jw friends
Hi , this is my first post .
I left JWs 30 years ago as 18 year old unbaptised youth and after the initial fallout from leaving pretty much put the whole thing in a box and buried it .
However , I am now starting to realise how much the doomsday messages and the ‘them and us’ doctrines that’s fed to you from birth has remained in my core beliefs.
How have others managed to reprogram themselves ?
thanks for reading , have a good day
DD
I don't think you ever get "over" it but you can get past it. Its like a woman being raped, she never will get over it or forget it but can get past it and live their life. Put the energy into telling anyone you think would be interested in how damaging the cult is.
Its fear that permeates into a person's subconscious that can stay there for the rest of their lives.
When you pose a suggestion of life or death and integrate that with what is good and what is evil, it sticks for along time.
Being that JWS are deeply brainwashed with right or wrong, life or death, guilt and shame, it off balances many people's thinking when they leave that very programming effect.
DOUBLEDECKER:
Yes, in your forties things from your youth that weren’t dealt with come popping to the surface like a cork.
Since you ‘buried’ the religion (which it deserves to be really)..you never actually dealt with it or analyzed it. Leaving the religion is one thing..but you have to analyze why it was wrong. This can only be done when you are in a cool logical mind. Now sounds like the time.
Doubledecker,
The problem with doomsday beliefs is that most have them. Left, right and popular science have their own doomsday predictions. So whenever the ex jw hear about the global problems his or her mind commonly tie that to JW interpretations of prophecy. And we may reason it all goes one way, although not at the speed of these prophets.
As for the particular JW beliefs and their authority, you can do a study and relatively quickly assure yourself they are wrong such as 1914, blood or the way they ignore the main character of the new testament Jesus. If they got all that wrong, how can they be "the truth" and what weight can their particular doomsday have. But in the long run, you have to adopt a philosophy that allows you to deal with the phenomen of doomsdays.
hi Double decker--a warm welcome here
you:" has remained in my core beliefs."
would you care to say what your core beliefs are ?
I can't speak for anyone else, but...
...in retrospect, 9-11 and Roland Emmerich movies (seriously) actually helped me realize just how fucking horrible a planet-wide cataclysm and the near-extinction of the human species would actually be...
...and, in turn, how little I actually wanted it to happen (as opposed to the supernatural revenge fantasy "Armageddon" represented in my youth).
As for the "them-vs-us" thing, I'd always regularly stayed in touch (and on good terms) with my non-JW relatives, which probably mitigated that particular mentality.
Lucky, I guess.
I don't care what people say about Jordan Maxwell, there is quite a bit of controversy on what people say about him. I watched a few of his videos on Youtube where he went into things that actually made things click in my mind. Before I really didn't know which way to think and was always going back and forth on things in my mind.
Doubledecker would you want to live in a paradise earth that was built over the bones of billions of innocent people?
Do you still carry that JW approved suicide note........ called the No Blood Card in your wallet?
JWfacts.com can be a powerful tool to start to learn how corrupt the WTBTS is.
Good luck with working through this.
When I realized just this last year and I'm in my 40s that many other people from other fundamentalist religious backgrounds feel the same way about core beliefs did I start viewing things differently.
I like this definition of "belief" - A belief is just a thought you keep thinking over and over again.
Personally I would recommend working on building upon your value system and new beliefs will rise out of that. Its something that I am working on and its helping. I found that my value system is way different than what I was taught to believe.
