The thought of having all of the answers doesn’t comfort me at all. I still had anxiety from the fear of the unknown, because I don’t really believe the stories I always heard in churches. I always say, if there’s a god, god made me agnostic. To me, the only thing that has freed me from anxiety is what I consider real faith, and that is just accepting that everything is uncertain and enjoying your life and health while you have it, and evoking strength and endurance when you face challenges.

Run! Especially once you get your degree and start getting paid. You will have to make all new friends, so you’ll have to be patient, and you will have to sort out the morals you want to keep and the ones you don’t, but you will and you’ll find lots of good people. You’ll see how ugly JW’s can get and maybe your parents won’t have the guts to stand up to their peer pressure on your behalf and leave them as well, and if they don’t you may see the ugly side of your parents being disloyal to you, but that’s a sad reality. You may be disappointed and even suffer setbacks from being shunned - lack of emotional and sometimes economic support. Don’t let that make you think you’re making a mistake. That’s why they shun, because they hope that if they give you a hard time, you’ll give up and come back. It’s not Satan that’s making you suffer - it’s them. It’s not Jehovah who rewards you by coming back - it’s them. Oldest psychological trick in the book.

You can find other nice people to have as friends until one day you start your own family and show them that you can be a good person without being a JW. I now associate with Universal-Unitarians because they encourage independent thinking and focus on what most people have in common and go to church for like exchanging well-wishing, being thoughtful and supportive of each other through the ups and downs of life, doing meaningful community service, etc. We take insight and inspiration from many religious and secular works. We teach the kids in Sunday School all major world religions and encourage them to pick one or none, whichever suits their conscience.

You seem smart and nice. You can be a good person and not a JW or Christian for that matter! Most popular religion is based on a false sense of security. JW’s tell you that if you do this, that, and that, you’ll be happy forever within the current organisation and forever after in paradise. Here’s the fallacy - No’one really knows what we don’t know and there are no guarantees! I was so frustrated looking for them and never really finding them and am now actually happier accepting that there are no guarantees in this life or after and, because of that, enjoy each day and spread as much positivity as I can and enjoy my life and health why I have it, all the while following the golden rule. I am more Christian than most Christians I know. This is what I call my agnostic faith. I had the conflicting combination of having a JW mom a completely non-religious dad. We went to church and heard that we shouldn’t celebrate holidays if we wanted god to love us and then our dad gave us holiday presents. How irresponsible of my mother to raise us to feel bad about good things! Especially to take us to a place where we heard that our real life was bad and that somehow my father, more moral than most Christians I know, was someone to be ashamed of! They’ll deny they ever said that, but their expressed notions of good and bad ie JW vs non-JW were prejudiced against my dad from the get go and status system they have is designed to be more supportive of the families that are all in it together. A couple sociology and psychology classes made that clear, too. Information control is a cult feature. Every religion has a few cult features, some more than others. Discouraging college is obviously information control because education and critical thinking are a threat to the memorization and repetition concept of the church. I learned early about the cognitive disconnect that people are capable of, but it wasn’t until I went to college that I learned the words to describe it. I think Freedom of Religion is the last legal child abuse. I remember my childhood overshadowed with conflict and anxiety from JW politics that I was asked to evangelize at a young age. I didn’t fit in with the JW’s because my dad wasn’t one and I didn’t fit in anywhere else because I was one. Even my dad was disappointed that I wanted to be like my mom! How could my mom pit me against everyone like that, just so she could maintain her security blanket illusion which allowed her to avoid facing the pain in life by avoiding it and getting caught up in JW la-la-land. I don’t think it’s ok to tell kids that god won’t love them, especially not for arbitrary things, like celebrating birthdays and the hair thing you mentioned. Get used to that one, though. Other organizations you may work for may require a clean cut look. But it’s more about marketing than morals, as you are finding. Most JW’s aren’t smart enough to be aware of what they’re doing, though. If they were, they’d be too smart to be JW’s. JW’s aren’t the only religion guilty of not giving people a hard time about the right things and giving others a hard time about the wrong things. No wonder there are so many churches and yet still so many people who still have a void to fill and fill it with drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, lust, entertainment, food . . .

I do give the JW’s credit for developing my verbal strength at a young age. Being forced to memorize things helped me memorize things to do well in school. The theocratic ministry school prepared me to do well in sales. Sadly, though, that’s all it really does for people who are still JW’s, too. If you take a marketing class, you can see how manipulated you really were or “guided” at best. JW’s can’t believe they’re a cult because no’one seems to be profiting financially. Well anyone making a living, or at least having their family provided for in the headquarters, even just the basics, is profiting at least that much and everyone else gets ego profits of praise and status as they follow a track. Everyone else profits by maintaining the illusion of their false security.

This is the first time I ever reached out on-line. I’m 30 now and I rejected JW’s when I was a teen. My rebellion was similar to yours, except I didn’t have any facial hair to grow, so I just stopped dressing up for meetings. I wore jeans and sweatshirts. If my mom was going to make me go, she couldn’t make me dress up, and she, like the elders couldn’t give me any moral reason. In fact, churches should welcome everyone and it shouldn’t be about fashion. I understand wanting to get dressed up, too, to present your best self, but that’s a personal choice, and shouldn’t be a religious requirement. Some others tried the “Those dresses you used to wear were so nice . . .” I was already too smart and over it. I never regret not going back. It is amazing how things do creep up even this far and this much education later where I have an anal reaction to something and I realize I’m thinking in the dualistic absolute terms of a JW and I have to unravel the knot I get into and reconstruct the thought in relative terms. Sometimes, I get an almost PTSD reaction and panic if I sense conflict or fear that everyone will turn against me if I say something counter current. I have enough experience and new skills now, like conflict resolution, to work through that one, too, but it’s amazing how much that culture affected me. The fact that I’m pouring my heart out in the middle of the night to reach out to a stranger to say it’s ok, you’re not alone, you’re not crazy, you’re actually on the path to sanity.

If anyone wants to email me directly, you can at alelebo@yahoo.com

I used to study the Bible with Jehovah’s Witnesses when I was younger, but I left because I was bored, none of my parents did it with me, and because I did not have any teenage peers also in the congregation. I also didn’t agree with some of their doctrines, such as disassociating yourself from the outside ‘world,’ that really wasn’t for me and I feel now that if I stayed I would have rebelled and just been a hypocrite. When I used to study with them I used to see those children from JW families who were home schooled and pity them because they weren’t opened up to the outside world. I feel that if they were and they still remained JWs that would have been better for them as it would mean that they were true rather than just there because that’s all they know, if you understand what I mean. It’s mindless faith, rather than real faith.

It is unfortunate that your former congregation members won’t respect your wishes and leave you alone at your request. My husband is an ex-JW too and they would come to our home every month for years to try to get him back. We explicitly said we weren’t interested and to please leave us alone. When they showed up around Christmas time last year I’d had enough. I stood in front of our big picture windows decorating our Christmas tree in the nude. Guess what? They haven’t been back since! You may want to try something like this, because they do not want to subject their existing members to “corruption” and will flag your residence as a place from which to stay away.

May we all stay strong, happy, and free from guilt!! Life is made to be lived to the fullest of our dreams, without fear and full of love. A God of love does not operate through fear and guilt, and any organization that worships a god of fear and guilt does not truly know God, because God is undoubtedly made of Love. We all know this deep inside ourselves, and anything else cannot be real.