All of us (especially those of us who were raised in da troof) are dysfunctional to some degree or other; dysfunctionality after all does not spontaneously heal itself.
We had "parents," our real ones plus the ones down at the kingdom hall all telling us how dumb we were and how we'd never make it and a vast number of other mostly negative evaluations about is. Being children in one way or another, we believed what these role models told us about ourselves. After all, they were the adults and we were the children and they knew everything and we knew nothing and they were always right and we were always wrong no matter how much we suspected the obverse.
And we have carried these absured beliefs about ourselves forward into our adulthoods, some we carried to our graves without questioning, without ever healing, without ever discovering or suspecting what unique, what valuable people we really were. We never knew the truth about ourselves.
I was told growing up that I was stupid, that if my brains were changed to dynamite I'd not have enough to blow my nose; that when brains were handed out, I thought they'd said trains and missed mine, and on and on and on in that vein. (What I discovered later was that my father was over-compensating for gross feelings of incompetence).
Later, I skipped the seventh grade. In high school on standardized tests in science, my grades in biology were in the 99th percentile; same in physics and chemistry. I got advanced placement in chemistry and was on my way to an undergraduate degree in organic chemistry when journalism's siren call grabbed me and has held me ever since.
I've discovered, or friends around me have discovered, that I have a finely tuned ability to tease out the real nature of relationship problems between husbands and wives, and between unmarried couples and between parents and children. Married couples have been coming to me (esp. JW married couples on the sly to be sure) since I was about 17 for help with their faltering relationships, and these people may have been in their thirties or forties. I suppose it may have something to do with living around so much dysfunctionality and dishonesty growing up. I could recognize the bullshit instantly.
But there seems always to be a payoff for having had to suffer unfairly at a young age. Remember sneaking quietly into your home, "sniffing" the air?, taking the "temperature" of your home before letting anyone know you were in there? And if the vibes were bad, you sneaked into your room and locked the door, and if the vibes were good, you entered the LR or den and had a casual seat and acted as if all were OK? Training, my friends, training at observation and analysis; training of the most important kind - the self survival kind. And I daresay you're all very good at it. And you can use it today.
The summary comment upon all this is that we are all likely very much better persons than we have been led to believe by our screwed up parents and "religious leaders" and likely this is true because they could see that we were better than they were all along in terms of spiritual insight and practice and in terms of the requirements of daily living. So the only way to deal with us, we who by comparison made them look so bad, was to attempt to make us look bad instead. That's easy work when you're dealing with children. Not so easy when you're dealing with informed adults. That's why the WT wants to get rid of us, put us in the basement like the family's crazy aunt. We have the goods on 'em and on their cultic, phoney-baloney religion.
Think well of yourselves my friends, you deserve it.
francois
