Wow, pretty amazing stories, nice picture of your family Magwitch, nice to see real people with post.
It's incredible where the 'lights came on' for others who were just observing your departure. I fantasized about that happening in our cases but so far no word has gotten back but time may tell.
To Nickolas: I guess the common factor in our family was love and trust in each other, always. All of us kids always knew that our parents were the 'real deal' in the sense that we trusted their sensibility about things that touched us personally. We shared the same struggles. Like Desirous of Change mentioned, after being really a 'model' Jw family for 25 yrs. it took a bizarre and arbitrary disfellowshipping ruling on our youngest sister to cause my mom to turn outside , i.e the internet, for some answers. For six months she held it in, slowly gathering information, while supporting my dad as usual. Then she slowly started to drop hints to my brother about not necessarily 'having' to do things. What would happen if we stopped? During the whole time, we would always talk to each other like about our daily struggles to keep up the routines, etc. The difference was that none of us dared 'think' the unthinkable! that it wasn't real to begin with! Anyway, then she and my dad went through some tense, anxious weeks where she slowly revealed some things like UN to my dad and he freaked out, threatened to take her to the elders. (What else?) So over weeks, he began to realize that she was right. She was emailing the people at the UN to verify, the whole time holding out hope that it was somehow all a big ploy to discredit the society. (That's how engrained we were)
So, then, it took from fall of 2009 to about spring of 2011 for all of us to leave, I could write here all afternoon about the hows and whys of it all. maybe I will later on. I just know that the transition for myself went from considering provocative questions about the society, to reading Cult Mind Control, to reading and looking up bogus/odd literature points revealed on the internet, and finally reading Crisis. Still in all, it took me an entire year to make a complete separation.
Unfortunately, from the KH perspective, it all seems to make sense: the apostate family is now all split apart. To sum up: mom and dad are not together, 2 of my sisters are divorced from their still-in husbands, and my brother's wife just went kind of nuts and left him, sadly. However, it is for the fact that all of us are having to face real life for the first time and are no longer on the artificial life support of the society. Still in all, each of us is happier truly than ever before, just being able to be free from control.
I and my brother especially have difficulty seeing it as a better reality sometimes than before. We kind of hold onto the idealized family that we had, although it is only a notion. The reality was that it was damaging to each of us in various ways while appearing to be ideal. It is still hard for me to get that but it is sinking in.
Well, I digress a bit, but hey, you know.