Just want to lend my support to you and all the 'UBM's out there, CYP (and yes, it is an unbelievably arrogant term). Just thinking about the hell that you all are living in makes me feel very sad.
tal
Attn Unbeleiving Mates (ubm's): "I'm a dub! I'm right! Join or who cares!"
by Check_Your_Premises 71 Replies latest jw friends
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kls
Just thinking about the hell that you all are living in makes me feel very sad.
tal
And i know my good friend Tales , really means it
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Jankyn
CYP--
I thought I'd weigh in as the child of an uber-JW with a df'd mate. (She's a fourth generation JW; he studied and was baptized to marry her; then was df'd after 10 years of marriage--when I was 8.) At first, after his df'ing, my dad did as you have been--made it easy for mom to continue to be a JW, and supported her in raising us kids as JWs.
Later on, he made it difficult--the result was that she turned it into "persecution," and used it in an attempt to turn us against dad. It worked, but only partially.
What it did completely was set up a dynamic in which the kids could take control of the situation by playing one parent against the other--we could switch sides in order to get what we wanted at any given moment. It was truly destructive to the family, and 30 years later, the repercussions are still being felt.
It also turned their marriage into a battleground, where points "scored" were more important than the health of the marriage. They celebrated their 47th anniversary last month, and I've never seen two people more unhappily married.
My advice: allow her to practice her religion unimpeded, while continuing to insist on your right to full parenthood. That means taking the kids to other churches, or at least making sure that they know that you do not share their mother's beliefs, and that they are free to choose what they believe.
The most powerful mantra I have these days is this: "Reasonable people can disagree." If my parents had used that as a premise in their relationship, I think we'd all have been healthier and happier.
Wishing you the best in your journey,
Jankyn
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carla
Dear Jankyn,
While I agree that reasonable people should be able to agree to disagree, that's not how it really works in a jw household. The one who cannot swallow the lies of the wt are left ALONE in a marriage. They are relegated to being an obligation to the jw spouse. Even if the wt tells them they should do this or that, do you really want to be married to someone who only does something because some men in Brooklyn have told them they 'should'?
The jw has become a part time spouse and parent. And what? The non jw is supposed to be 'available' when the jw's time slot is open? In reality it goes something like this, "ok dear, between work and my meetings and door to door time I have the following opening available to you and the kids" and we are all supposed to be grateful they 'made time' for us?! By the end of the week, in our home, people are so sick of the jw's lack of interest in any of us, by that point it's like - your home? big deal. It comes to the point where the children don't even bother to tell the parent what's going in their life. Why? he won't remember anyway. Yet, they seem to remember what is going on in the childrens life in the hall. How do you think that makes a child feel?
Sorry Jankyn, almost forgot who I was writing to, you of course know. I was thinking of defd at the same time as well as my spouse.
My point is that the jw's change relationships. The closeness, the silent language of marriage, intimacy, the list goes on. The jw is willing to give up the relationship in exchange for the 'maybe making it past the big A'. How does anyone compete with eternity? even if it is fantasy doctrine.
carla
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kls
Bravo Carla ,excellent and exact
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garybuss
Carla, That was an on point post. Thanks! My life as a spouse of a Witness was a lonely life. The one big thing that kept me in my role was that I was a believer to a degree. I kept thinking in my mind that I MUST have missed something in the Witness studies that made it all make sense. Upon examination, I hadn't and it doesn't.
I didn't really have time to examine everything when I was younger and my sons were in school and I had to hustle and work and make money. After I sold my business in 1992 I took 5 years off. I made a point of looking at my life and deciding if I wanted the last 30 years of my life to be like the previous 30 years and I didn't. In 1992 I was 48.
The last thing I wanted to do in 1992 was to dredge up all the Witness stuff I was carrying around but my counselors insisted it was a HUGE chunk of unfinished business and it needed to be dealt with on a rational level. I found out there's no Witness alive I have ever met who will deal with the Witness culture on a rational level. They almost run out the door.
When I insisted that they explain their huge errors like the mess they made of the 1975 prediction, they lied to me and they started to shun me. That didn't help my relationship with my Witness wife and my Witness relatives.
Finally they got me so aggravated I disfellowshipped THEM.
I'd rather be dead than be married to a Witness now. -
Finally-Free
I found out there's no Witness alive I have ever met who will deal with the Witness culture on a rational level. They almost run out the door.
Yes. After I left the JWs my spouse felt free to continue to spout JW propaganda at me, but every time I voiced my disagreement I was accused of attacking her, persecuting her, undermining her faith, etc. But I never once received a rational response to a rational question. And she found it difficult to have a relationship with a man who she knew was dead meat at armageddon, just because he doesn't like pedophiles.
W
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M.J.
very late to the thread. Excellent letter and I wish my head was clear enough to spell things out like that when communicating with my wife.
Communication has been lousy in the past. But my current track is making communication better. I still have to get over the hump of her making everything into a sales pitch though. Like yesterday she told me that the new book from the DC "is right on." I felt like I wanted to hurl but said nothing. I do, however, think that my wife has been pretty fair minded for a dub, but there are hard limits to how far that can go, I realize. Sooner or later a big conflict will insue over something and I dread that day. Especially with regard to our young children. At this point in time, the JW intrusion on our family life is not nearly as extreme as it is for you, CYP.
As far as communication goes, my main goals are to get her to be more candid with me about her real feelings, even if they go against the "sales pitch" mentality. I think it was a tremendous milestone when she started opening up about certain shortcomings of certain people in the congregation.
Of course, I realize that I do the "sales pitch" thing myself to a certain extent, with respect to faith that can be experienced outside the WTS. So in my case at least, I will in good faith demonstrate that I can be candid about my own doubts and my own true feelings and thoughts. For myself, I can definitely say that I am deficient at communicating well! And when I do, I am about as articulate as Homer Simpson.
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garybuss
Finally-Free, A Witness is like an attorney who is losing in court. If they can't beat on my case, they beat on the table, and if they can't beat on the table, they beat on me. The way a Witness will toss up a straw man is they will question my motives, they will question my sources, they will try to discredit me as a person. As soon as a person goes down one of these roads instead of addressing the topic at hand, you know you have them beat. Just keep going back to the topic and repeat the last question.
If a Witness is flipping the pages in her Bible, she is chanting. Quit talking until she quits flipping pages. If she is flipping pages, she can't hear you. They will always keep flipping pages a minute or so after you quit talking. Pretty soon they will notice you quit talking and they will look up.
Never talk to two Witnesses at a time because they will do a tag team on ya. Always only one at a time.
When talking to a Witness, remember they think and reason in capsules and a principle that they apply in one capsule, they will not apply at all or they will not apply the same in another capsule. An example is the teaching that worldly associations are wrong but they are not wrong when applied to making money or saving money on things like public schools verses private church run schools. Watch for violation of the equal application of principle rule and point it out to them. They hate it when you do that. -
TooOpinionated
A sister that stood up in my wedding had an unbelieving mate. He was a fine, fine man, kind, good, treated his wife well-a husband to be proud. She became a Witness shortly after their marriage. She told me on numerous occasions that she would always be upset that "the Truth" came into her life after instead of before her marriage, because she would be alone in the New System and was envious of complete Witness families. It didn't stop some mild flirtations with brothers at the hall, either, probably because even the worse Witness male is considered superior to the finest"worldly" male. The poor man was always made to feel inferior, even though there was nothing at all wrong with him.
Right before I left, another sister with an unbelieving mate had 5 children. An elder I worked with mentioned that the elder body had advised this woman that things had gotten so bad for her that he was a "spiritual endangerment" to her, and could divorce him. Be warned, if you find this religion (cult) is not for you a few years down the road, the elders will do the same with your wife (assuming she will be your wife then. Witnesses don't allow dating for too long before you are counselled to marry.) It is just their opinions on what spiritual endangerment entails, and then your life would be dictated by mere man's whims. I know you can't see all this now-I couldn't, either. I pooh-poohed everything until it came back to hit me right between the eyes. I don't want it to happen to you.