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@whowatchesthewatchtower
Jehovah’s Witnesses punish sinners and dissenters using the same method. Shunning goes to a new level with dehumanization and gas lighting. The narcissistic behaviors of “the governing body” are pervasive among the men in the congregation, as well as with ‘the sisters’.
(via spunkygidget)
Birthdays As Ex-Jw's
I’m a recently disfellowshipped ex-jw and its my birthday today. I’m going through a really hard time recently with all this and I’d really appreciate some love and birthday wishes (gosh words I never thought I would say)
You are not alone!
“This seems to be an artists’ rendition of the never released special Jewish version of Marble Madness on Israeli Nintendo.”
I'm an atheist ex JW (I still pretend to be a witness). My story is long and I will type it when I have time. But I'm here for anyone that needs to talk, I know how hard it can be to talk about you situation with non ex JW's. You can message me off anon for my kik or talk to me on tumblr. I also speak Spanish.
Thanks for leaving a message and making yourself available for anyone that needs to talk.
it feels weird sometimes because on the surface for an ex-jw I look pretty lucky. I still have semi-regular contact with my family, I wasn’t physically or sexually abused, and I only came out of it with relatively mild emotional problems. I feel like I should feel lucky for that. I recognize that so many of us had it way worse than I did. But at the same time my mother uses that as an opportunity to emotionally manipulate me and guilt me into saying things I don’t want to. She drove a wedge between my siblings and I because she played on an existing rivalry I had with my sister and treated my brother with far more respect and understanding when he left than she ever gave us. My sister and I were both driven out of the house as soon as we couldn’t take living a lie anymore, and he was just left alone. I don’t resent him for that but at the same time I kind of do since I was forced to leave when I was unemployed and didn’t have time for work since I was in school at the time. I eventually had to drop out and have been barely able to support myself since then. I wasn’t cut out of the family completely but we’re so dysfunctional 99% of the time I wish they had. And then I feel bad about that too. My mother is arguably seriously mentally ill in addition to having a terminal illness and I haven’t spoken to my grandmother in 4 years. I should be compassionate and understanding about all that, but I’m not. Ironically I’ve driven myself to be more like Jesus than the “christians” I left despite being an aggressive atheist because I feel like I have to prove them wrong even though the world they separate themselves from is proof enough. Turns out trying to be like a sinless fictional demigod is impossible but I still feel bad about it.
Thank you for sharing.
Are all JWs abusive, or was it just my ex and his grandmother?
Not all JW’s are abusive I think individuals can be abusive. With that said, I think certain parts of their doctrine, like shunning and cutting people off if they don’t believe what you believe, is very detrimental to the growth of a person, and causes some serious psychological harm.
Hi thanks for following me, you probably followed because of one my religion posts. While I don't have any firsthand experience in Jehovah's Witnesses, just wanted to say your activism is appreciative. I know people affected by it. Thanks again.
Thank you!
“thank you and all the other ex jws i’ve seen on here. you remind me that i made the right choice thinking for myself and leaving, and i don’t want to go back.”
i just found this blog and…id like to thank you for making it. i hope you don’t mind if i put my (kinda lengthy) story here, i just feel like i need to share it to some people that will listen and actually understand for once.
first off, i’m 14 years old, i identify as nonbinary but i was raised as a girl, i have a mom, dad, one little sister, and an italian grandmother that i call nonna. just for reference.
i have always been a shy kid. i have never found making friends easy, and that wouldn’t have changed even if i hadn’t been a witness. however, because of that, and the “no-friends-outside-the-congregation” rule, and my very small beach town, i had a grand total of three actual, “allowed,” friends. i did have two friends at my elementary school, but i had to keep them kind of secret because they were not witnesses and therefore had the chance of “steering me away from jehovah.” my 3 jw friends were nice kids. they were good kids. and like me, they were completely brainwashed.
i didn’t suffer. at least, i thought i didn’t. i wasn’t outright abused by any means, but there were some bad effects of my time spent as a witness. first, my creativity and love of writing were suppressed. my stories, especially the fantasy ones, had magic and dragons and unicorns in them and that was bad. my writing was monitored and policed by my mom and nonna, and pretty much everyone in the congregation that i showed it to, and i soon stopped writing any fiction altogether for fear of upsetting jehovah with my “support of magic.” also, sometimes i would draw in my notebook at the meetings. i would write down scriptures, take sporadic notes, etc. but i mostly liked to draw. at first, i drew things like puppies and kittens and flowers. then i drew “biblical scenes” and cute little pictures of sheep. but when i started drawing creatures that weren’t real, or people that were “pretty” or not in extremely modest clothing, i got in trouble. the creatures were advocating magic. the people were signs of my “lust for the opposite gender” or my “succumbing to the worldly ideas of beauty.” my drawing-at-the-meetings privilege was revoked. bad chay.
as i started to grow up, i noticed that my friends were far more spiritual than i was. they didn’t have a problem with being “tempted by worldly desires –” that meaning they weren’t jealous of kids that celebrated holidays, and they didn’t care about fantasy stories. they were proud because they were different. i was ashamed for the same reason. years passed, though, and i suppressed these “worldly desires.” i started thinking i was better than others. and i was encouraged. i was a smart kid – in the gifted program at my school – plus i was part of the “one true religion.” how great could you get? sure, sometimes i was jealous of the kids that got things they’d always wanted for christmas or a birthday, and harry potter was a really big deal at my school, but…i was better than them for not giving in to what i wanted, right? right??
then everything changed when i moved. it was only a couple of years ago. i was 12. i was already starting to drift from the witnesses and i was getting into the internet and some less-than-clean webcomics and communities. then my family decided we would move across the country, from a barrier island off the east coast to the middle of colorado. uh, okay?
not only did i move away from all my “secret” school friends, i moved away from my congregation. i was optimistic, though. i could chat with my friends online, and i did. especially my very best friend. i’ll call her M. M had been my friend since i was two. we lived a couple hours away from each other, but we were still super close. i eagerly awaited every trip upstate to see her. M’s mom and mine were good friends as well, so i got to see her quite often. however, when i moved, things started to change. obviously, i couldn’t physically go to see her. but that wasn’t a huge problem for me. i knew i would come back to see her someday, when i was on vacation or something! we would stay best friends forever! at least we would have…if i had stayed a witness. i was letting the things i was getting into infect my way of typing. i was using words that were too close to cuss words. i was too open about being interested in things that were too worldly. i was becoming a “bad kid.”
i used to chat with M all the time. but slowly, she got quieter. she responded to my messages less and less. i still have the chatlogs from that time saved. i can’t look at them anymore, because i see the last week or so of messages and i start to break down. they’re all one-sided attempts at conversations from me. you can see me get more and more desperate. i sent her messages every day. i hoped that she would respond to me. i hoped that she was just busy. i hoped that we were still friends. M was my best friend for as long as i could remember. for a very long time, she was my only friend.
then one day i noticed that her account on a certain website we liked to go on…her account was blank. gone. her posts had been deleted. her friends list, cleared. i checked another site we went on together. her account was gone. another. i was removed from her friends list. another. she had changed her user name. on the sites she couldn’t escape from me on, she just abandoned. i still tried to message her at least once a day. i still wanted to be friends. but M’s mom didn’t want us to. about a week after i discovered her abandoned accounts, my mom pulled me into the guest room for a chat. she told me M wasn’t allowed to be my friend anymore. we weren’t witnesses anymore. and M was. she and her mom were super-involved in the damn cult. M was gone for good. my only friend for six years and my best friend for 10 was gone. and i hated myself for it.
i tried to figure out what i was doing wrong. i didn’t want to be a witness anymore. but i didn’t want to lose M. but the more i began to think for myself, and the more i began to learn about the world outside of my sheltered little bubble, the less i wanted to be a jw. it took a lot of effort and pain to do it, but i completely left the jehovah’s witnesses. my mom and dad have as well. a couple times when i was starting to pull away from it i would regret it and cry and beat myself up and pray and cry some more. i would apologize to jehovah over and over and i would do “bad” things over and over. i hated myself so much. i wanted to die because then at least i might still go to paradise.
thankfully i am completely out of it now. i still miss M. it still really hurts. i think about my old friends and it physically hurts in my chest, like something has eaten a hole out of it. but i could never go back to the jw. i realize now everything that’s wrong with it.
but sometimes…no, scratch that. at least once every other week…i check those old websites again. i look to see if M’s come back. i check my old messaging program. i look at her little status bubble. “busy.” every time. i search every possible version of any of her usernames i can think of. i miss her so much. jw brought us together and violently tore us apart, and i hate it. i hate that godawful cult and i feel so sorry for the well-meaning people that got sucked into it.
that’s my story – the shortened version. i passed up on a lot of details, and skipped whole parts because my hands hurt from typing so much. but there it is. i’ve been wanting to get most of this out for a long time, and now i have. and once again, thank you for this blog. thank you and all the other ex jws i’ve seen on here. you remind me that i made the right choice thinking for myself and leaving, and i don’t want to go back.
one day i want to meet all my fellow ex-jws and possibly make a support group out of all of us.
lets give ourselves a feeling of belonging to a family agian
There is an ex JW group on Facebook with over 6,000 members. We are not alone.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/xjwrg3/
An open letter to my parents
When you hurt me during my youth I tried to be understanding, when I was spanked, hit, or yelled at, I tried to understand you. I told myself “their childhood was bad” and kept telling myself that so that I could make your apologies to myself for you. Tell myself you hadn’t known any better because you hadn’t had a good example to go on, tell myself you were trying your hardest but falling short because you didn’t have it good yourselves so I would have to just understand. When I hit my teenage years, I got by. I wanted your pride and I became enslaved to the religion you had birthed me into well and truly. I wanted to be baptized and see you as proud of me as you were of my siblings when they got baptized. I wanted so badly to have a boyfriend, it was hard for me to ignore my crushes on boys and wait till I would be old enough to date with marriage in view. But I wanted to make you proud so I ignored it. I never kissed a boy till I was 17. Thinking back on it, even with the freedom to have a boyfriend I still wouldn’t have done it till I was older because I was so shy and all the other children teased me.
I wanted to celebrate christmas, birthdays, easter, all that stuff. I was so jealous of the other kids for what they could do, and embarrassed whenever I had to explain to people “no, I’m a jehovahs witness. I don’t do that” but people were proud of me when I had told them that I stood for what I believed in, and I liked that. I craved that kind of acceptance and pride. I tried in my late teens to leave the religion and have boyfriends twice, both times you forced me to break up with them, cut off my internet, cut me off from others, and upped the religious indoctrination. I’d study a few times a week. You’d question my motives for everything, tell me you couldn’t trust me, and acted like I’d murdered somebody. Both times I became horribly depressed under your watched, I recovered the first time, but the second time I was truly in love with the person you were separating me from. I wanted to die. Every time you found I had been contacting him you yelled at me. You demanded to know intimate details of his and I time spent together. Inappropriately intimate details.
Can you see now why I was so stressed out? Why I made that report against my brother? With all this being brought up, my personal and private life being violated, my rights being violated, all I could think about was how weak I was, how someone had done this to me before. I found comfort in my boyfriend, he knew about the molestation and what had happened and understood me, he supported me and told me it wasn’t my fault, validated that it was abuse and that he wouldn’t tell but he’d be by my side no matter what and support me when and if I chose to do something about it. You tried to take that away from me. You had no right to question the abuse because I allow things to happen in a sexual context with my boyfriend, I consented to sexual relations with him. He’s never forced anything on me. It’s healthy and healing and you have no right to assume nothing ever happened to me because I’m not as screwed up over my abuse as you are. I’ve tried to understand you for too long, my whole childhood you placed the task of understanding, apologizing, and making up for your shortcomings squarely on my shoulders. I was a child for gods sake! Why should I have to do that?
What you’ve done is your fault, your choice. I did nothing wrong by wanting to leave the religion, by loving another human being, by finding my own way. You never should have cut me off from my support and tried to ram my mind back into the tiny box of your brainless cult. I had made my choice, you should have respected that. Because for so long I have respected your choices while you abused me. No more.
Hang in there.
so i decided to call the JW headquarters and see what they say their sexual abuse policies are, i’ll keep all of you updated.
These fucking kingdom melodies are killing me
You are not alone.
JWs: We dont force our kids to get bapitized like other religions do
*forces kids go to every meeting twice a week, go out door knocking every week, stops talking to them when they grow up and decide they dont want to be a JW*
Who is REALLY the “Father of the Lie”???
Satan: “You certainly will not die!” (Adam and Eve died.)
J. F. Rutherford: “Millions now living will never die!” (Nearly everyone who was living when he said that has died.)
(Thanks to IcarusMourned on JWR Forum for this.)
Valid point.
THIS. MAKES. ME. PHYSICALLY. ILL.
(Member of The Governing Body of Jehovah’s Witnesses talking about their strong stance against child abuse when they have been covering up cases for decades.)
For those of you that don’t know I was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness. I know people whose abuses they’ve covered up, both children, and adults. They sent out memos to congregations telling them not to report sexual abuse cases. It is sick and disgusting, and this asshole has the nerve to lie straight to everyone’s face.
If you watch the rest of this you will also see him try and shame homosexuals and refer to them as child molesters. You will also see a “psa” entitled “protect your children” in which they tell children their conscience should tell them when an adult is doing something inappropriate, and considering they indoctrinate in their members that a conscience equals guilt and shame they are basically doing the work of keeping the kids quiet for the offender.
I just got so mad when I saw this.
The Governing Body is more and more defensive and more and more out of touch with reality.
“All defensiveness and emotional tumult is a fear response because of your need for acceptance and ruthless control of the territory of your safe fantasy world.”
Compare the difference when referring to people who want to join Jehovah's Witnesses, with those that leave:
“No one should be forced to worship in a way that he finds unacceptable or be made to choose between his beliefs and his family.” Awake! 2009 Jul p.29 “Do not look for excuses to associate with a disfellowshipped family member, for example, through e-mail.” Watchtower Study Edition 2013 Jan 15 p.16
my fiance is df'd (for the second time). i've never been religious. he's working toward being reinstated solely because he misses his family (he still struggles with his faith). i worry that i will resent his family and friends (once i meet them) because they wouldn't speak to him this entire time. and i also feel defensive already because i can imagine that the people in his congregation will think i'm the reason he got df'd (had nothing to do with me, we met after). guess i'm just venting.
Being an ex-JW has it’s challenges, just as being with someone that is an ex-jw has it’s challenges too! I think more people that date ex religious people should speak about their experiences. They need support too!
Thank you for sharing. No one is alone.
