This worked for me and maybe only because of the uniqueness of my experience, which was not quite the same as the rest of yours.
I'm not saying you guys all had the same experience. Just that you have a lot in common with each other but not with me. Namely, you actually were involved with TWI for quite some time and gave that group a significant part of your life. I was with TWI for under a year and was far more influenced by my experience in an offshoot than I was with the mothership.
So that said, I want to confess that I never really broke free from TWI and its offshoots until a couple of years ago. This was after figuring out what was right with it and what was wrong with it. This was after documenting actual errors in a hilarious but shockingly failed bid to get a devoted sycophant to recognize that there were real flaws in the work. This was after finding the original works of the robbed authors to document the rampant plagiarism that some people refuse to acknowledge to this day.
This was after my last twig, branch, fellowship, home teaching, tape, whatever you want to put as the word there.
This was after the Living Epistles Society, after To Wit, after generating and eliminating my own message board, after coming to terms with being ex-Way and ex-JW and an ex-husband to boot.
After all this, I finally broke free. And here's how.
I threw it all out.
I kept a couple of souvenirs, don't get me wrong, but most of the stuff is gone. If you searched my home today, you would find scant evidence that anyone named Wierwille ever existed, or that I ever once counted myself as an admirer of the books that were published in his name.
I threw it all out.
Every enslaving, insipid, ripped off piece of pseudo-religious propaganda is gone.
I threw it all out.
Because I never want my son to pick up a weathered copy of Christians Should Be Preposterous and ask, "Daddy, what's this?"
I threw it all out.
And when someone wrote something defending it, I didn't care anymore. And when someone wrote something exalting it above anything else that has ever been written, I didn't care anymore.
I threw it all out.
Physically. It's gone. And soon, it was gone mentally as well.
Oh sure, I'll never erase certain things. There was plenty of salvageable material in there that transcended its use and abuse, and I have been able to hang on to those things I want to keep. But I do the same with the things I learned in college. In high school. In church. In court. It's not an unusual process. It doesn't consume me. I don't lose sleep over it.
I threw it all out.
There's a great freedom in that.
Just my two cents. Keep the change.
