A common question, or concern, while waking up is “but what if they’re right”. The fear instilled in us leads to doubt. Let’s play that out together.
One of the most difficult things that one of Jehovah’s Witnesses can experience as they wake up and leave is the reality that their spouse or someone the love isn’t on that same path. I discuss some options here.
One of the hallmarks of a cult is that there’s not good way to leave without a heavy price to pay. It’s part of the control. Let’s discuss some of the options
Once you learn the realities of what you were involved in for so long it is easy to feel a loss of purpose and certainty. It can be confusing. Let’s discuss next steps.
When you start to learn the truth about “The Truth”, you can really be hard on yourself. How could you not have seen these things before? Let’s answer this question.
Once we leave we often find ourselves trying to rebuild a social circle. Is it normal to struggle to do so?
We often referred to the entirety of the congregation we were in as “the friends”. What is a friend though? Was what we were involved in a good example of what a friend should be?
What are some strategies that can be used to make new friends? Are we alone in the struggle?
Some that fade or have family that don’t abide by shunning rules still have contact. That contact can be fraught with dysfunction, and we need to be able to identify and navigate the issues that arise.
Most of us have people inside the cult that we would like to wake up. How can we do so? Should we expect to be able to?
Comparison comes natural to all of us as humans, but especially when raised in a cult that played us off one another to push controlling performance standards. Jehovah’s Witnesses created a culture of comparison that created a race to the bottom, using our inherent negative biases against us. Let’s look at that together and learn to “hike our own hike”.
The past can teach us many things. Although our tendency may be to walk away and leave it behind, it did imprint upon us and if we don’t learn to recognize patterns created by it, we may find ourselves repeating those same patterns. Looking at the past isn’t easy, but it can help us to understand where we come from and why we may do things that we do. If the life you’re living isn’t worth the price you’re paying, perhaps the past is still working in the present in ways that you can’t see without going back to the wreckage of the past and figuring out exactly what went wrong.
As Jehovah’s Witnesses nothing we could do was ever “good enough”. There was always more that we could have done in service to god, the congregation, or our neighbor. Many of us had extremely critical parents that were holding us to impossible cult standards. That conditional love, or control, can stay with us and impact our daily lives. We can internalize it, and therefore have that same conditional love for ourselves.