Hello from New Zealand Fairmind!
It sounds like you have been going through a very tough time and I just want to encourage you to give yourself some time to sort things out. It will probably feel overwhelming for some time to come, but it's all part of facing the important questions in your life. Some days will be worse than others but one day you may look back and see this time of confusion as impelling you to work out what is really important to you, regardless of what others think. Sometimes in life there is pain no matter we decide and there are no easy answers. I agree with you: It is scary and scared people are sometimes too wiling to hand over to others the responsibility they would be better off keeping in their own adult possession.
I remember the confusion I felt as a teenager trying to sort out a host of questions: Is the Watchtower really the truth? If not, who or what else is there? The world was such a scary place back in the late 60s-early 70s and the JWs seemed to have worked out what it was all about. In my local Kingdom Hall, we had a kind of unofficial countdown to 1975 which was the year that Watchtower publications embued with fearsome significance. But I was still plagued by uneasiness - some of the easiness was about not feeling worthy enough to be baptised (I thought I was beyond help because of a personal problem). However, I was also troubled by things I saw happening among the JWs - especially the double standards. And the Watchtower's cold hubris truly disturbed me.
Trouble was, my JW family and relatives kept telling me that time was running out and that is was dangerous to doubt. Oh, if only I had met someone who could tell me, "Hey, the witnesses are always saying the end is near and it's so normal to doubt... especially teachings that keep changing!"
Now I realised that, if I didn't doubt, I would never have questioned anything and have never learnt anything. Surely, if Charles Taze Russell had never doubted the established religions back in his day, he would never have been "moved" to come up with his ideas on what was Scriptural truth. Doubt is the ordinary everyday stuff of human life; faith, on the other hand, is the strangely unsettling thing that requires blinkers and blind spots to embrace, and for many people in religious cults, faith is more an act of willpower than of a reflection of belief in God.
Fairmind, I read through your story and noted the strong parallels with my own earlier experiences. The JWs recipe for helping me was simply to do more of what wasn't working: Pray more, study more, attend meetings more, witness more.
Imagine: Trying to solve long-standing problems by doing more of what already hasn't worked! I look back as an older, wiser man, and am saddened but also staggered by the stupidity of it all: How helpful is it to keep doing the very thing that's making things worse? Children do that and it takes a loving parent to say, "Hey, son, you're hurting yourself there. Let's try something else".
Now, contrary to the experience of most people who have been disfellowshipped, I finally started to grow up and take responsibility for my own life, the day the Jws decided to kick me out. It's a scary world out there, whether it's the 60s, 70s or tens and the "child" part of me still longs to be taken care of and reassured. But the "adult" part needs to keep taking responsibility for thinking things through carefully and making strong decisions without JW- or any other kind of contrived emotional blackmail. Yes, I went through periods of low mood and experienced a lot of anxiety when I was disfellowshipped. But as I look back on my life - I'm about to turn 51 years old and am now a registered clinical psychologist - I will always thank the Witnesses for disfellowshipping me; they kick-started me into a new and more grown-up developmental phase of life: I was literally forced to come to terms with my normal doubting disposition and had to also give serious thought to how I wanted to live my life.
I hope that, whatever difficult decisions await you, Fairchild, that by taking increasing amounts of personal responsibility for how you live your life, you will be empowered. It won't happen overnight, and it may be helpful to keep talking this over with others. Keep talking to people who encourage you to take greater responsibility for your life decisions and who urge you to not hand your heart, soul and mind over to an organisation that shows contempt for those who dare to exercise their normal capacity to question and doubt.
All the best in your endeavours.
Steve
