Who wouldn't be depressed in your situation? Realize there's nothing wrong with you, it's your circumstances. Eating disorders are often about controlling that one thing because otherwise you have no control in this. This is all on the cult and your parents. I second the recommendation of finding good online support for your eating disorder.
dubstepped
JoinedPosts by dubstepped
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62
How do you deal with depression?
by BlackWolf ini'm currently going through a bout of depression and my eating disorder has gotten worse.
ever since my parents actually told me that they are going to kick me out when i turn 18 i've felt kind of hopeless about my life.
my parents won't take me to the doctor because the psychiatrists won't have my "best interests" aka jw crap in mind, because really that's the root of all my problems.. i'm wondering if any of you guys have any advice with dealing with depression?
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Some Comments On Facebook From Some Of My Relatives After Leaving EU
by disillusioned 2 ineveryone talking about leaving the eu, i am concerned and excited.
mostly i look forward to seeing bible prophecy coming true and i keep my mum in the forefront of my mind.. me too sis!.
we left eu.
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dubstepped
Isn't there some "king of the north" thing they still have to work out, or have they wrapped that up somehow? They like to pick and choose prophecy from all over the confused mess of a book that they follow, so it's hard to keep it all straight.
Besides, I thought that 1986 and the year of peace and security was the beginning....errr....Y2k....errr....9/11.....errr.... Hurricane Katrina.....errr.....9/11.....errr....the tsunami in Japan....errr....any big deal ever was the beginning of the end. Nah, they're not doomsday cultists.
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Introduction - Any Believers?
by Believer ini’ve been reading it for a few of years off and on, but have been a little too ... maybe ... timid to join.
i left the watchtower organization almost 20 years ago but never abandoned my faith and belief in god.
i knew the gb/organization didn’t represent god, so when i lost my faith in them, i managed to keep my faith in an all wise benevolent creator.
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dubstepped
As I've said before, many who leave the dubs just become as forceful in their new beliefs as they were with the dubs. Vacillating from one edge to another, they are zealots for whatever they believe because of an internal need to be right, dominated by ego. They need to control others like any good narcissist, and others must have their beliefs seen in the light of that person's egoic need to control and be right. Just like the dubs, there is no live and let live, everyone must think like them or face relentless questioning. It's sad to be so wrapped up in one's own intellect that you no longer care if it hurts others because it's all about you. Been there, done that myself, and hopefully I'm past most of that on my journey now. I needed others to see things how I saw them because being right was more important than anything. It's not healthy for anyone.
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This Thing That Was My Mother
by TimeBandit inthis thing that was my mother.
this thing that was my mother, so withered and blackened now,.
was once so kind and loving, but things have changed somehow.. remember when you'd hold me, and soothe my childhood fears?.
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dubstepped
Nicely done man! I find an occasional poem to be good for my soul. I can't force it, but sometimes inspiration hits and it just flows. I think you beautifully expressed what many of us have felt. It doesn't have to be positive, it just has to be real.
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Suicide or Real Freedom? - My Story As One Of Jehovah's Witnesses
by dubstepped in"sometimes i think the only thing i could do that wouldn't upset someone would be to kill myself.".
those were the frustrated words of my friend as we stood out in his large yard in the country, just about to enjoy a nice bonfire on a beautiful night.
what was it that could have been a lesser evil than killing himself?
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dubstepped
Update 6/25/16
It is funny how things change. Our first major change came with me deconstructing the way that I felt internally and why. Then I was mentally and emotionally healthy enough to start deconstructing the specific religion that I was taught, and as time went by I could see that it wasn't what I was told it was. Even after we left the religion, I still believed in God and the Bible, but that brought up yet another question. What was the faith that I held for so long built upon? It is funny how we as humans have a knack for attributing surviving something bad to God but we don't blame him for why it was allowed to happen in the first place. I left our religon with more faith than ever because things had started to go better for me in life and well, it must be God's blessing, right? Learning about confirmation bias helped me to see that the reality was that my life went better when I started reaching out for better things, not necessarily because some god blessed me. I changed, and the current of my life changed with it.
So I decided to look into the Bible. I wanted to know its origins, the history of it, and honestly I started looking into what it truly said throughout, not just the parts that were picked and spoon-fed to me my entire life as part of a narrative devised by one particular religion. I won't go into all of the reasons here because this is more about my story and my life than my reasons for particular views, but they say that athiests aren't athiests because they've never read the Bible, they are athiests because they actually HAVE read it.
I now believe in possibility, but in nothing in particular. I don't have to know anymore. I am worried about controlling what is real today and what I can affect. At one point in my life I held that the Bible was the unerring Word of God. I'm sorry, but if a god wanted to give me a book that would give me the one path toward salvation, he should have made it clearer. That book is full of contradictions and some horrific atrocities performed by people following God's direction, so I just can't believe in it. I also can't believe that we humans are the top of the food chain and that nothing greater than us exists in this vast universe, so I do believe in some sort of "god" or energy or something bigger than us, but I can't tell you if it is benevolent or not. It just is whatever it is, and I'm not worried about it anymore.
My desire is to live a good life, to help others, and to do no harm. On my deathbed, rather than looking forward to a particular hope or in fear of some punishment to come, my goal is to look back on my life and to know that I gave it my best and left people better off for knowing me. I would rather find satisfaction in what I actually could have some impact on than have my waning moments wasted on something that is out of my control.
My wife and I have enjoyed our new life so far. We celebrated our first Thanksgiving celebrations with two different families that we clean for on two different days. They are beautiful people that invited us into their families and adopted us, and we'll never forget that. For our first Christmas, my wife and I still felt weird about the holiday from all of the indoctrination that we had be through our entire lives as to why it was wrong to celebrate. Well, to be honest my wife was ready for a tree and to go all out, and I was still hesitant because it felt bad to me. So we went camping on Christmas. Yep, on Christmas Day we were found in a campground by a ranger driving through to collect that night's payments and he sure was surprised to see us. We purchased some battery powered Christmas lights and strung them up in the brush around our campsite. We hiked in two parks and had a great time. Oh, and no, we didn't freeze to death like all of our friends were worried. It was drizzling rain and we did have difficulting getting a consistent fire going, but we had a nice sleeping bag and did just fine.
We still battle the residue of being ex-JW's. I received a call in April from my mom that my dad was in hospice with very little time left. He was dying at just 63 years old. My wife and I were allowed to see him one last time, though the room had to be cleared of current JW's who refused to be present if we were there. I saw the people as they left his room, people that I knew as a kid, people that bought me clothes because our family was poor, people that now shunned me even on my father's deathbed. I was not invited to the memorial after he died. I was unshunned for about 45 minutes, and then shunned again as soon as we left my father's side one last time. The good news is that I got to say goodbye and leave things on a better note than my previous last conversation with him that was an abusive rant as to how terrible I was for "loving the gays" and "taking their side" instead of condemning them. I did my best to give the man dignity in his most vulnerable hour and to get closure myself. Closure still really hasn't come though. Most people get that by being present at the funeral, by hanging out with family afterward, by going to the house and seeing that spot their loved one sat in all the time only to see it empty. I received none of that, and because I was shunned for that last year or so and had already said goodbye when leaving the religion, his death didn't really leave much of a hole in my life. I wasn't really allowed any normal grief because of our abnormal situation, so I can't really reach full resolution.
My wife still struggles with dreams of her family. It isn't natural to just have that shut off in one moment forever. She doesn't sleep as well as she once did, not because our new life is somehow bad as JW's would lead you to believe because they think they are the only way to happines, but actually because of the JW's and their abusive policies.
After the end of 2015, our "year of adventure", we decided that 2016 would be our "year of relationships". We have been concentrating on spending time with our new friends and deepening relationships, and reaching out for new ones. We've been reaquainted with some more ex-JW's in our area that we knew when younger. My wife is having her first ever birthday party in mid-July, and she is super excited about it. We've invited probably close to 100 people, and most are families that we clean for. Our cleaning business has been a lifeline in so many ways for us over these years, from helping us to see the lives of people outside of our isolationist religion and that we had been lied to about the lives of outsiders to helping us by being true friends with unconditional love once we left that cult environment behind. Now we hope to celebrate our new life with as many as possible at my wife's first birthday party. It truly is a re-birth and although we'll try, there is no celebration that can encapsulate the experience we've been through and the feeling of freedom that we now have.
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What to say? I Don't want to go to meetings anymore?
by Drifting Away inso it has been a couple of months since me and my family have attended a meeting.
we have received a few calls and visits.
but what do you say when people ask "where have you been"?
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dubstepped
Home, out having fun, how about you? Where have YOU been?
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Are photos allowed as evidence at a JC? Thought they weren't-re: pale.emporer thread.
by PaintedToeNail ini thought that photos weren't allowed as proof of sin to the jc because they can be faked.
same with audio recordings.. this thread in response to the pale.emporer thread where his sister-in-law snooped on his computer, found his info from here and took pictures of it.
if the photos and recording are not allowed for a jc, this could be valuable info to anyone else who has a sneaky relative trying to 'out' them with photos or recordings.. anyone have any info on this?.
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dubstepped
What Doc said. I mean, if memory serves they can have evidence that a person of sexual immorality by watching from a car as someone else's car is observed overnight at your house. There's no real evidence of sex, but it doesn't matter. Ultimately it's up to whatever 3 men decide on any given day. After all, God's spirit is directing them, right?
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Can you relate?
by TimeBandit ini used to try really hard to fit in when i was an active, true blue jw.
somehow it hardly ever paid off.
time after time i attempted to mingle and make jw friends.
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dubstepped
BlackWolf, I've loved following your story even through the pain. Why? Because you're so young and awake. It is a double edged sword in that you are at the mercy of your parents and other things at your young age, but on the other side you get to get out with your whole life ahead of you. You have a chance to learn and grow in ways that many of us didn't get because we wasted years trying to fit into someone else's mold. I'm so sorry for your pain but so excited for how awesome your life can be while those haters in your life now live in their tiny miserable box.
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Can you relate?
by TimeBandit ini used to try really hard to fit in when i was an active, true blue jw.
somehow it hardly ever paid off.
time after time i attempted to mingle and make jw friends.
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dubstepped
Oh yeah. I fit in at the congregation I grew up in because I had roots there. I moved not far away and started over and tried for years without ever fitting in. My wife and I tried hard, even had pretty much the entire congregation over for chili parties in small groups one year, but still nothing. We would go out to eat after meetings or just in general and come across the same cliques sitting together at a restaurant while we sat alone, over and over again. We heard tales of their epic camping trips that we were never invited to, how they all went up to watch a football game that we weren't invited to, and so on. I once bought a bunch of pizza because I had a bunch of young people that were supposed to come over back when I was single. Not one single person actually showed, they all went and did something else. On the plus side, I had leftover pizza that I could have eaten for weeks. :(
For an organization that claims to be identified by love, they are the most cliquish, judgmental, small minded douchebags I've ever had the displeasure of meeting. There was no real love or bond, just busy work and meetings where people talked because they were there for a common cause. Once the meeting was over, so was everything else unless you were in the cool club and lucky enough to have your own clique. There was no real inclusion. Large families dominated the landscape and were the focal point of those that had any hope of being in a group.
Like you I had people turn away when I approached at times, and it hurts, but what hurts more is being stuck in a cult because you fooled yourself into thinking those people actually care about you. I have friends now that care about ME, not me with some arbitrary rules system in between us.
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I've been found out!
by pale.emperor inwell, thats it folks.. my identity on here has been rumbled and reported to the elders.
someone, somehow, has figured out that im a member of this site and - rather than speak to me - has promptly reported me to the elders.
i just feel sad for my daughter.
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dubstepped
They don't care about privacy. They care about punishment, about rules, and about keeping up appearances. They don't care about people, about love, about any of the things they claim.
I DID like the point earlier about some sort of law that has to do with snooping around people's computers, and honestly if someone did that to me and it wrecked my life I'd probably come back with that law if it could work in my favor somehow. Or I'd just let it go and move on. Depending on the mood I'd either crush them like bugs or just let it ride and move on, lol.