The Exodist of the Jehovah's Witness on a Ex-Jehovah's Witness board

[year2027]

God first

Beloved all

God loves us all my dear friend

The Exodist of the Jehovah's Witness on a Ex-Jehovah's Witness board

Gold Community Ex-Jehovah's Witness Forum and Recovery Site

> Debate and Controversy

http://p196.ezboard.com/fexjehovahswitness...=61&stop=62

great read

http://modetwo.net/users/nachimir/exodist/

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The Exodist

Introduction:

This is an examination of the process of leaving Jehovah's Witnesses, intended for any people doing so or thinking of it. I've written a small glossary for those interested in this but not familiar with JW. A summary of this entire essay is here.

Leaving will be extremely distressing, and will make a complete mess of you. You will have to rebuild a lot of things, starting with yourself. You can complete the process and become a happy, balanced individual.

This is not autobiographical; there is no way that could solve your problems. That is your responsibility, and it isn't going to be easy at all. I was raised a witness, and I'm not anymore. I rejected it on philosophical grounds, and no longer adhere to any religious beliefs. I am generally happy now, and wasn't when I was a witness. That's all you need know about me, but there might be more between the lines if you really want to infer it.

Very early in this document, I will use the form "You" and "They" in reference to Jehovah's Witnesses. If you don't agree with it disregard it, but it's an important distinction, and whether or not you find yourself able to use it will be revealing.

None of this essay is motivated by so-called "apostate literature", because I looked at that sort of thing a long time ago and found most of it to be ill thought out and badly argued screed. Unlike the writers of such stuff, I will try to avoid using emotionally charged terms such as "cult", and "brain-washing". When referring to what you might still call "the organisation", I will use the neutral term "the construct". Most occurrences of terminology specific to the construct will be enclosed in quotes. Hatred and conspiracy theories are not the motivation behind this essay, but instead four ideas:

* The belief system of Jehovah's Witnesses is wrong.

* Leaving it is a traumatic process.

* Help and support in doing so speeds up progress toward a healthy mental state.

* A happy life away from the construct is possible.

Of course, any official witness line would be that this is "apostate literature", so if you don't agree with the things I say herein, refute them for your own sake. I can't stress enough: You can disagree with anything at all, it's not a case of being "allowed" to.

This certainly can't replace professional help if you need it, nor will it cover every possible repercussion of leaving JW: only the aspects I am familiar with.

Intent:

If think that you might not want to be a JW any longer, or even if you know for sure, it is vital that you define your possible motives. If you don't, you won't be able to justify your decision to anyone who wants you to, i.e. elders and other witnesses. So what's your reason for leaving, or wanting to? Personal or social problems? Emotionally based rebellion? A fundamental philosophical disagreement with the belief system? Wanting to do something that is forbidden within JW society, yet not wanting to live hypocritically? Are you repelled by something internal to the construct, pulled by something external, or both? The answer to those questions is not any of these paragraphs, it's within you. I don't know it: you must define it.

Leaving fast takes courage and resolve. To do it healthily you have to know why you are doing it, otherwise you may simply be motivated by negative emotions such as spite or pride, then not know what you want or why you just did what you did. Once you are gone, ties are cut absolutely. You will be leaving behind any witnesses you count as friends, and possibly family too. Most witnesses will deny you even a cursory greeting.

It's easier to slowly drop out. Your meeting attendance and hours on door to door gradually drop. You speak less at the meetings, and perhaps avoid socialisation. If you don't really know why you're not being a witness, yet are evidently de-motivated, you'll probably stick around half-heartedly and others will notice the trend. First, you will be "encouraged". Then you will be "counseled".

If you don't find out the whys of your situation, this counseling will become cyclical: You won't know how to explain yourself to the elders (But you'll feel obliged to), and they won't be able to motivate you to come back. You will constantly be shamed by your inactive status, yet not motivated by any amount of "Shepherding" to counteract it in the way they want you to.

Jehovah's Witnesses are told, and hence think, that their belief system is the best catalyst for happiness, so if all you can say is that you aren't happy, then the immediate assumption is that you are doing something wrong. If you cite a specific social problem, then you will be lectured on love, imperfection, and how you can improve the situation by trying to forget about it and thinking instead of the "New System". From within the construct, there isn't a rebuttal to any such line of reasoning. Without the construct there are plenty, but if you use reasoning not dependent on the construct you'd better know where you're headed with it, because the "counsel" will become more insistent as a result.

If you do not know why you are not happy being a JW, then you will likely vacillate and become increasingly unhappy. If you can actually find out your reasons, then you can find the courage to leave, and at the same time the knowledge to explain yourself when asked.

No half measures, neurotic doubts, cynicism, or vagueness will cut it when you are under questioning, and you will be questioned. The elders and others will try their hardest to keep you a witness, and their actions are genuine: In trying to persuade you to stay, they are not motivated by any sinister agenda of profit or brainwashing. You cannot refute their sincerity, and you certainly cannot explicate your own position or actions by trying to do so.

Conversely, they cannot make you stay. They can only play on your self doubts, and beliefs that humans are "imperfect" and the bible is "perfect", therefore saying that the bible is right and you are wrong.

Sometimes a friend will ask me how to refute a witness on a particular issue. It usually comes down to the following three facts:

1. Witnesses are not necessarily wholly wrong about a lot of things.

2. For the rest of the issue, their "faith" (a.k.a. delusion) is pretty much unmovable.

3. If you're using a second-hand argument that's been passed on verbally without any comprehensive knowledge of the issue, there's a much greater chance that you'll backed into a corner you can't get out of.

If you feel some as yet inexplicable anger or dissonance with witness beliefs, you may want to go looking for reasons. The most readily available source is "apostate literature" on the net. Get out there, examine it closely, and you'll find that it is largely emotional and obsessive propaganda, quite often written by ex-witnesses who have converted to rival belief systems. Other than that, it will mostly be little known secrets from the past of the construct, examples of hypocrisy, information on financial dealings, frequently accompanied by conspiracy theories.

Everyone and everything can put ideas into your head, but no-one else, i.e. apostate, witness, a contemporary, or me, can put words in your mouth unless you are weak. Weakness can be eradicated if you work at it, psychological strength is cultivated by thought.

Perhaps you have had a personal revelation, or circumstance has shown a shortcoming in the construct or belief system. No matter how much you may want to spread this realisation, witnesses who are orthodox will refuse to see it. You have very little to gain by sticking around and causing trouble; instead you could be free of it and pursuing a life more fulfilling.

What you are facing is a personal armageddon, where you must sort out your own motivations and beliefs then act upon them. Whether you remain a witness or not, to not act on this will mean either easily cracked delusions of happiness, or suspension in a depressed, limbo like state. Arguing finer social and theological points with witnesses is a self-avoidance strategy that might last for the rest of your life if you don't put a stop to it.

The process is extremely traumatic; your identity will change if you follow this through. Parts of you will die; other parts will emerge from dormancy or be created from scratch. It is extremely likely that you will experience phases of self-loathing, doubt, mystification, fragmentation, and sometimes seem completely mad to those around you. This is normal. You will be extremely vulnerable and perhaps impressionable during this process. Get help if you can't do it alone, but make sure that help isn't:

* A witness.

* A strong, bullying person with a moral agenda to reshape you according to.

* Someone acting solely as a representative of any organisation whatsoever that uses volunteers, has followers, a distinct ideology or system of belief, etc. This might not necessarily be religious in nature: two other examples are political and commercial organisations.

During the time in which you rebuild yourself and decide what to believe and be, there will be many things ready to erode your resolve, de-motivate you and send you into negative states. There are also tempting quick fixes for such things that don't actually work out (mostly dependencies such as opiates, unhealthy relationships, and other already formed systems of belief). I'll cover the issues I'm familiar with in the next section.

Fear:

So, you've established your reasons and disentangled yourself from the construct - or have you? You may have officially left and burned your bridge, but there are still conditioned urges and habits that will emerge slowly into harsh relief. One is calling it "The Truth". Stop it. Stop comparing your life to stories from the bible too: Your life is much more complex than any set of historical abstractions, so any comparison is unavoidably simplistic. You're free now, and that's extremely scary. I have no alternative beliefs, or "Truth" to offer you. You have to make your own.

Within the construct it is now expected that you will fail to achieve happiness. From the witness perspective, the only possibilities are that you will have negative experiences with the big bad "World", then slowly either disintegrate into madness, become permanently angry, bitter or melancholy, or return to being a Jehovah's Witness. If you have spent a significant amount of time as one, these ideas are probably a fairly big complex of doubt and fear for you right now.

It's likely you will experience a raft of negative emotions, including anger, bitterness, and melancholy. It's important to realise these are not permanent states or a result of "losing jehovah's spirit", rather they are a natural reaction to the hurt and confusion that leaving entails.

You have emerged from a moral system that very clearly and equivocally states judgements of "right" and "wrong". You now have very few of those absolutes from which to draw your conduct. Instead of being told that murder, violence, homosexuality, drugs, fornication, pornography, blood transfusions, short-term relationships, philosophy et al. are wrong, and that marriage, monogamy, heterosexuality, preaching et al. are right, and then believing it on pain of death, you now have to think about each of those issues alone and formulate conclusions.

Do not underestimate the complexity and difficulty these issues, or of developing opinions in such a way that you're happy with and can justify your conclusions. Also, you probably won't be able to do all of it with one attempt, as your attitudes will change in relation to situations. You might still detest abortion until you're a potential parent, or homosexuality until you meet a homosexual who unknowingly shows your preconceptions and fears to be wrong.

While in the construct, you've always had a reference from which to adopt a moral position on any issue, which means you might feel the urge to have an opinion on everything. Fusing sentiments is an easy thing to do, but does not count as rational thought or considered opinion. Try to be informed and decisive, but also learn to be content when you can't be, and that you can now change your mind and revise thinking without fear of divine reprisals. Generalisations and simple answers do not suffice. The JW belief system is full of them, so they're what you're used to.

Because of this urge to have opinions, you might also be attracted to other belief systems, organisations or sub-cultures. There are a large number of constructs out there ready to hoover you up and ladle their own morality into your mind. JW is just one of many that can subsume a weak person and tell them what to think. Be content to not belong to anything for a while until you stabilise and find out about yourself. You may also feel the urge to cling to some of the JW belief system and discard other bits of it, but if you do that it's likely you'll hold on to some of the negative conditioning too. Try to accept things simply as possibilities for a while, rather than truths or falsehoods.

There is one major thing you can do to combat JW belief and conditioning: Get rid of all of your JW "literature", and don't replace it with anything else. You have had rows of books dominating your thoughts, and now they are not useful reference, they are an encumbrance.

I passionately recommend recycling it all - that's what I did. I tore all the books out of their bindings; the paper was pulped and reused, washed clean of all delusion and dogma. Plus, I did it publicly in a supermarket car park with paper bins. It was cathartic, because I was worried about being seen (and hence judged) by witnesses, and my emotions ran a gamut from ....-scared to jubilant.

That doesn't make up for all of it though. In addition to belief systems, there are all sorts of mild and severe unhealthy addictions that you can transfer your anxiety to, such as food, porn, computer games, recreational drugs, shopping, the internet, and TV. None of those things in moderation are likely to harm you, but by adopting one or more as an opiate, you will only sedate yourself and either postpone or compound anxiety rather than resolve it. There is going to be major psychological fallout when you hit rejection of the bits you probably want to believe. Such as:

* Wicked people are punished in the end.

* By being a good person you will get to live eternally in paradise.

There is no giant entity or mechanism that punishes the evil and rewards the good: only action and consequence. Responsibility is in your hands, and it is your choice.

You are going to die, whether you accept it or not. The witness-propagated ideals of perfection and paradise are extremely hard to let go of, especially if you have been believed them since childhood. On it's own, the idea of death is hard to come to terms with, but with those ideals in the background it is exceptionally distressing. When you are weak you will want to believe anything that abnegates mortality.

From this moment on, every setback will be harder, because there is no shining utopian hope. You cannot look to some external factor to cure you of "imperfection". Your future is no longer in the hands of god or angels, and when you screw up you can't blame demons.

You are not going to paradise. The witnesses also think this, but only because they believe you will be judged a sinner and killed at "Armageddon". "Armageddon" and the "New System" are not going to happen. You are not going to suddenly lack "Jehovah's spirit" and shrivel up into unhappiness. Your energy is your energy. It will vary just like your mood, and it is not holy spirit given by "Jehovah". You are not under the surveillance of angels.

The reason you may still fear armageddon is that you have believed in it simply by repeating the word for years along with a welter of emotional connotations. It will take time for you to progress out of such conditions, so remember that there is no proof in a prophecy - only faith, which within the construct is believing in something without proof.

People whom you previously would have labeled "bad associates" will prove not to be. You'll also realise that some of the witnesses you knew might have been superb people, while others might have been despicable. As you free yourself of prejudice regarding non-witnesses and broaden your socialising, you'll find that (while there are major differences) the microcosm of witness society is roughly equivalent to any other cross section of society at large, all containing both negative and positive.

Your self, responsibilities, decisions, actions, and consequences are now your own. Keep them that way. If it scares you, accept that and work with it. Running away from such fear will make it worse.

The last few paragraphs will be very heavy going if put into practice. It will be especially hard if you are disabled or aging, but is it really worth deluding yourself for whatever remains of your life? Confusion and depression are very likely in the months, even years, after you leave the JW construct.

You might experience a massive aversion to seeing witnesses you knew. You will probably feel upset when they ignore a greeting. You know that those who are disfellowshipped or disassociated are denied even the most casual of social contact, and any dealings that are unavoidable a witness will usually handle in the most perfunctory manner possible. Let them believe they are holy for this, move onto things that are worth worrying about. You no longer need approval, support, consent, or validation from them, so stop wanting it.

Major and rapid changes of your state, from lethargy to euphoria and outright mania, might happen to you. If this occurs, most people will find it hard to understand it, even if they know your background. Be mindful of the fact that whatever extreme moods you experience are temporary, and over time you can de-clutter your psyche, bring into balance your rational and emotional sides, and level out your moods. You might be able to do this on your own, but you might need medical or psychiatric help. If you are suffering acutely and need help, you really shouldn't be ashamed: mental illness is not a crime, nor is it a sign of inferiority.

To begin, find things that make you happy, preferably activities that don't necessarily involve social contact. If you don't find any, persevere. Keep trying new things. If you're feeling a lot of depression, neurosis, anxiety, and doubt, it's likely that you'll find it difficult to connect with people, especially when meeting them for the first time. If you make genuinely supportive friends who can understand and tolerate your present state, then you're incredibly skilled or lucky.

However, your state might make you vulnerable to exploitation, especially if you've been a witness since childhood, or were taken out of school to be educated at home. You may feel like a fool or a rube, and indeed in comparison to others might be, so take things slowly. You're effectively a foreigner, but that's not a permanent state. Unless you started to make "wordly" friends before leaving, it might be best to seek out non-witness family if you have any, or begin carefully in a more physically safe environment like the internet.

Psychotherapy and counseling can be expensive, and in some countries nigh unavailable. There are tools that can help you effect a cure on yourself.

One very powerful tool is writing. Your thoughts will rage in turmoil, the same ones will barge through your consciousness repeatedly. Writing about it pins them down and enforces some kind of linearity. You don't need to show it to anyone else; it doesn't have to make sense or win a Pulitzer, just get it on paper. Sense will emerge in patterns, which may take months to emerge. For this technique to work, you must write about whatever you are thinking and feeling, rather than restricting yourself to certain subjects or avoiding things that elicit shame, guilt, etc. By burying such negatives, you will simply postpone them. Remember, no-one has to see what you write, and you are not under divine observation.

Another is Cognitive behavioral therapy. A fundamental concept of it is that we have automatic thoughts, and that humans, because we are creative, can amplify mental states. Normally, depression is a useful state because it demotivates us (and other animals) from actions that are useless. However, we can induce, project, and amplify this state for erroneous reasons. Just one possible chain of depressive autothoughts is this:

She didn't talk to me tonight

That means she isn't interested in me at all

She rejects me

I want love but do not have it

I am unlovable

Everyone hates me

Life is not worth living

Look at the jump from the first thought to the last, and consider just how illogical each jump is. Add the concepts of "God", "Sin", "Imperfection", "External judgement" and "Punishment" into that mix, and it gets much worse. A chain of autothoughts happens very fast - they're meant to. The example given in a book I read (See below) was an antelope running from movement in the bushes. If it paused to evaluate whether or not that movement was really caused by a predator, it might end up dead. So it acts reflexively.

We have similar conditioned and instinctual reflexes, and they are triggered in all kinds of complex and uniquely human situations. We are so lacking in consciousness that we let them influence us significantly. By becoming conscious of autothoughts and changing them, you can transform your general mood, and also prevent a depressive cycle when you feel it starting. Please don't take my word for it though; find a book that can give you a thorough grounding in the theory and more essential advice.

The process you're going through is natural, will be painful, has no predefined conclusion, and will take time. You have lived your life by a system defined by the JW construct, constantly evaluating and correcting yourself according to the words of others. No matter how intellectually or emotionally your reject that system now, you will have a lot of conditioning to hack through.

You might have guilt associations with all sorts of things, such as smoking, sex, voting, blood transfusions, drugs...

* Two examples: Masturbation. Nearly everyone wanks. No-one worth listening to is going to judge you adversely for doing it (within reason, that is).

* Swearing. Lots of people do this to the point of blasphemy without fear of divine vengeance. You might not want to do it for various reasons, but at least accept the fact that you are now free to curse as you please. Try saying some things out loud when alone, until they lose the guilt associations.

You'll feel odd when not praying before a meal. Knocking on a door might feel strange without a bag full of tracts and Watchtowers. Knowing you can listen to someone's opinion and not have to refute or commend it with scripture may make conversation perplexing to begin with. Angels and demons do not perpetrate the good and bad things in your life. Suddenly, you have extra evenings and can lie in on Sunday mornings. You'll feel strange for while and have to combat guilt conditioning, but now you don't have to justify, for instance, TV programs you watch, books you read, and computer games you play to anyone but yourself. Breaking the rules you lived by might not be a set of habits you want, but it can be a very healthy way to reclaim your mind.

One very important boundary to violate is education: Discouragement of further and higher education is, though largely unspoken, common among witnesses. Academic education is usually supplanted with study of the bible and pioneer service, those things being viewed as more important. Conditioning against education may run very deep.

There are much bigger fears too. The worst case scenario is that there is no god and death is final. This is nihilism, and can lead to hatred, irresponsibility, and hedonism. There is no way for us to prove that god does or does not exist. Evolution and creation are both theories that use linear time and suppose that everything came from something, and that something either came from nothing, or it didn't i.e. it is eternal. These lines of thought lead to questions that (at the very least) we cannot yet answer.

From the nihilistic viewpoint there is no morality. It is not that everything can be justified through nihilism, but that nothing has to be justified by or to a true nihilist. Nihilism is the diametric opposite of theological orthodoxy, a compete absence of any moral boundaries. A view where not only does no-one else have the right to tell you what you can and can't do, but where conversely you do not have the right to tell anyone else what they can and can't do.

It's easy to run to that, so ask yourself if you truly want to. It's down to you.

The book on Depression and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy:

Overcoming Depression, by Paul Gilbert. Published by BCA, no ISDN

Time:

The separation between your mind and the JW belief system is an extremely important distinction. Rejecting the belief system is only the first step; for long after, the effects wrought upon your psyche by living by it and then leaving it will still resound internally.

You might feel angry, both with others for what happened to you while you were a witness, and with yourself for being one. You have to accept that it was a part of your life, and that your past is a defining part of yourself. It would be foolish to waste the life you now have on resentment.

Not every teaching and belief of witnesses is poisonous. They have some good points, and some delusions. For example, there is a small risk of disease when you have a blood transfusion, and your body will react adversely to someone else's blood. It's better than dying though.

Descent into hatred and crusading against witnesses will probably send you into paroxysms of bitterness, small-mindedness, and diametrically opposite delusions. The beliefs and motivations of apostates and other detractors are often as flawed and deluded as those of witnesses. In the end it is still not constructive, and instead you could work through your negative emotions and move on to healthier things. Not trying to destroy something doesn't mean you agree with it by default.

Low self-esteem and feelings of unworthiness are extremely common among witnesses, and are caused and conditioned into them by failure to live up to high and irrational moral standards, the ideal of perfection. These are habits that are amplified to the extreme by leaving the construct altogether, and indeed may long outlast any vestiges of the belief system. They must be broken to attain happiness. Residual segments will surface occasionally in relation to particular situations.

You have to return to your motivation for leaving, evaluate and reaffirm it, then integrate your past with your present, and hence yourself. You mustn't let it dominate your future. In doing so you'll have to deal with all emergent effects from the individual to the social. Just one of these might be the gulf in experience and understanding created between you and most other people. Most people do not go through acute separation from a system of belief. You can't expect everyone to understand what you've been through. Other people will do what they want to, even if that is just sitting with comfortable delusions. You can only truly change yourself.

The surface of a mirror may look perfect, but at less tangible and immediate levels it is not. There are impurities that can't readily be perceived. Perfection is a nice ideal, but it doesn't exist empirically. It is a subjective matter, and there is no authority that can objectify it. Humans are indeed very imperfect, we live in a society that creates anxiety, neurosis, delusions, and other irrational behavior. Whatever thoughts and feelings you have left over from the JW construct, you can beat them. I'm advising you to take control of the forces both around and within you to the greatest degree you can, and stop being a victim.

You will pass a point where problems that may have been caused by the construct are no longer connected to it. You might even realise that certain problems were things you always suffered with, and that JW life compounded them. Whatever the case is, you must also realise that, unless you were seriously or even criminally harmed by individuals in the construct, the solutions to these problems now lie soley within you.

You're on your own now, and fear is only one of many possible negative or positive reactions to that. Awareness of your self, past, and present is the most powerful tool you have to effect change, but neurotic delusions and anxiety can obfuscate that. While you may benefit from external help, any changes that you make are down to your actions and inactions. No organisation, society, system, culture, or construct can take credit, because none of them really reach to the core of what makes us human or alive: they are merely systems of belief, perception, thought, and action. That doesn't make all such things intrinsically bad, merely insufficient to define or complete you. You can't change what has happened to you or anyone else, but you can deal with it. Only you can decide now what you believe, who you want to be, and what you want to do with the rest of your life.

A summary of this essay.

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I might not agree with every part 100% percent but I believe you will enjoy it help you understand some of our friends of EX-JW that might come here and it may help some of us

thank you

with love and a holy kiss blowing your way Roy

[excathedra]

thank you roy

[year2027]

God first

Beloved excathedra

God loves you my dear friend

I am glad you enjoyed

its all ways good to see you my dear friend

thank you

with love and a holy kiss blowing your way Roy

[dmiller]

Hey there Roy. :)

That's a long read -- and I'll look at it more completely later, but thought I'd toss in something here.

I got invited to another ex-JW board, EXJW,

where the conversation is a little bit more, uhmmmm - decent than that found on JWO, and on Thom's.

One of the threads going on there is about *announcements*.

Announcements (I found out) are when the *leaders* read a letter (from higher up)

publically condemning a certain member, and *dis-fellowshipping* them,

right there in the meeting at their local Kingdom Hall.

Their version of M & A.

(maybe this was covered in the article you posted -- Haven't read it all yet.)

But the stories of the folks who went throught the M & A (dis-fellowshipping) process,

and how it affected them, and their families, loved ones *lost* due to religion,

broken families, broken lives, hard choices to be made, don't-give-a-$h!t-attitude by their ORG ---

Is damn near identical to twi (sorry for the cussing), where the *big boys* call the shots,

regardless of who suffers.

Their ORG (and *our* ORG) are interested only in PUPPETS, and they are yanking the string.

I feel as sorry for these folks, as I do for those in twi.

In the beginning -- they were a lot like us --- wanting to do their best for God/ Jehovah.

Zeal got caught up in legalism, and legalism led to slavery.

God save us all -- especially from the *ORGS*

[year2027]

God first

Beloved dmiller

God loves you my dear friend

Yes it is a long read but it has some good points and that seems to be a good board

I will check out the new board you have join

A link to find more is

http://members.aol.com/beyondjw/bj.htm#MSGBRD

yes some times we need to do cussing to get the point accross so yes I understand

yes their "Zeal got caught up in legalism, and legalism led to slavery." as it did in the "the way ministry" a church of the underworld

or at least it seems that way now

thank you

with love and a holy kiss blowing your way Roy