Understanding the impacts of coercive control for former JWs.
It’s a well-established fact that we learn what love looks like from those around us as we are growing up. While some of us may have had strong examples of loving relationships modelled by our parents or caregivers, chances are, if your family were Jehovah’s Witnesses, all of you were at least somewhat affected…
While we all judge and compare ourselves to others from time to time, for Jehovah’s Witnesses, it’s a way of life. Members of the JW religion experience a strange dichotomy where they mean nothing as individuals, but as one of the only group on earth with God’s approval, they are superior to all other…
Making good decisions is an essential life skill you will never learn as a JW. The organisation simply cannot have its members making decisions for themselves all over the place and not involving them. That would be chaos, and they need to control it, so they keep members infantalised and dependent on them to…
Critical thinking is an essential life skill that improves the quality of our lives, but it can be a vague concept to grasp, particularly for anyone who has not been taught what it is and how to go about it. In this post we will explore a practical example by applying the critical thinking…
Critical thinking is an essential life skill that you will never learn as a JW. Without us even realising it, the Organisation trains us not to think too critically about anything, and it can take years to understand or even notice the full extent of the impact on our critical thinking skills. If you…
Following on from the earlier post covering numbers one to five, this post covers the remaining six to ten essential life skills that you will never learn as a JW. As a quick re-cap, the first five are: And now for essential life skills six to ten: 6. Knowing who you are and where…
Being manipulated and coerced into living a life ruled by fear and devoid of the full range of human experience means there are essential life skills that JWs simply never learn. Previous posts have covered how the JW organisation controls its members and the harmful impacts this can have. In this post, we are…
This is a question we all likely heard the Elders address from the platform from time to time. It is also clearly a topic the organisation feels strongly about, because they have chosen to include it in the FAQs on the JW.org website. Do they really answer the question though? Or does their own…
Work. Some of us love it and some of us hate it, but either way, we all spend a lot of time doing it. While it’s normal to have the odd bad day at work, no one enjoys doing work they genuinely dislike, day, after day, after day. As JWs, our work simply HAD…
If you struggle to feel passionate about anything and look at people who do with a slightly green tinge on your face, don’t worry too much. You are not alone. This is something many people struggle with, and not just former JWs! However, former JWs do face a unique set of circumstances that…