Hi, fyi: d'f'd a month ago, and glad you're all here.
I'm just assessing the sum of the madness that happened since my parents guilt-tripped me into confessing what got me disfellowshipped. I do very sharply recall that at the moment I decided to do so I had an overwhelming feeling of relief which at the time I thought was me hating the lying about what I'd done and wanting to come clean about that and clear my conscience as a witness, but have since thought might have been me hating the lying about how I feel about the organisation and wanting to come clean about that as a human, ie, whether I'd turned the corner as a witness or I was glad to be getting away from it. I still don't know, I'm utterly hating being disfellowshipped and want my family back, but I know that I don't want to be reinstated unless I change something about how I feel. I'm not a good enough actress to pull off faking faith in a committee meeting; it's easy enough when you're just an invisible inactive sister who keeps her head down, but now I've got to summon the joy of the newly interested, the conviction of the newly baptised, the humility of the... that's it, that's what I'm trying to say; I'm truly repentant of what I've done, but I'm not repentant of how I feel towards the organisation. They'll smell that a mile off. It might be better for everybody if I just get on with my life and stay out.
It's a very confusing time - deciding whether I have been rejected by a cult who are wrong wrong wrong and to count my blessings and move on, or to run back to it and reject these thoughts. I think that now is the time that I finally have to face them and work through them. I am attending meetings as that is the only thing that the elders can see, but they weren't interested in what had always worried me or what my motives are, and never will be. This is something I always needed to investigate on my own but I always took the advice not to and to only research and study things from the organisation. I think that if your faith can't stand up to just a bit of questioning you need to ask yourself why you have it. So I'm not doing anything wrong now, haven't for a long time, but I shouldn't get reinstated asap for the sake of stopping the hurt within my friends and family and because I miss them. But I thought as it was happening that I'd attend the meetings anyway, regardles of how I hate them, just to get in credit for that year or two of penance you have to do before you're reinstated.
I think that I and my family might have been better off if my folks had turned a blind eye and minded their business, I'd 'repented' but we'd all be better off if I wasn't disfellowshipped. But I'd be interested to know, if anybody has done the maths; did you get caught out and hauled before the committee, did you get guilt tripped and go there yourself, or did you deliberately opt out?
Coz I'm wondering what that feeling of relief was about.