This post is all about learning to be happy after leaving the Witnesses. We explore happiness, contentment, and satisfaction, and what these concepts mean when the JW distortions have been stripped away. 

Despite everything you were told as a JW, your own personal happiness is actually extremely important. Feeling happy is important, pursuing what makes you happy is important, and spending time working out what makes you genuinely happy is also important. You are allowed to seek opportunities to feel happy and you will likely regret it if you don’t. Experiencing happiness is a fundamental part of being human, but as former JWs, it is something we were never allowed to prioritise, and so never learnt how to do.

Allowing ourselves to feel happy, or even knowing what makes us happy, is something many of us struggle with after we have left. Some former Witnesses feel guilty for pursuing things that make them happy, and this guilt takes away from the measure of success and happiness they have achieved. Others blame the organisation for everything which has ever gone wrong with their lives, and may still be going wrong, and end up stuck in a cycle of perpetual discontent.  

Why many former JWs struggle with happiness

When we were JWs the organisation had full control over our happiness. They would tell us when we should be happy, and we would feel all sorts of guilt if we didn’t actually feel happy at the things we were meant to feel happy about: If we didn’t relish the ‘joy’ of sharing the ‘good news’ out in the ministry, then we were spiritually weak and it was something to feel bad about; If we didn’t look forward to spending our evenings bored out of our brains going over the same material again and again, then there was something wrong with us because, apparently, this mind-numbing activity was meant to make us happy.

Not only did this require us to accept things we didn’t agree with, it also required us to wait patiently for a time when everything will be perfect and our happiness would be guaranteed, permanently. We didn’t need to think about what it would actually take to be happy in that perfect new world, it would just happen. We also didn’t need to think about our personal happiness now, in this world, because it simply didn’t matter. ‘True’ happiness is what mattered, and to achieve that we just needed to do as we were told.

JWs also never need to face the fact that humans are just not designed to be happy literally all the time. They are taught that any unhappiness has a source and a scapegoat: Satan and Satan’s system. And because Satan and all the bad things he causes will one day be done away with, all we need to do is look forward to when he is gone and distract ourselves with ‘the truth’ until then. We are pretty much told to just put our heads in the sand and wait until it all goes away. Healthy ways of coping with unhappiness, or doing anything to identify what is causing it so we can address it, are not skills we learn as JWs.

Unfortunately, this way of thinking is a recipe for total complacency, resistance, and even self-sabotage when it comes to actively pursuing our own happiness, even after the restraints of the religion are gone. Your happiness has never mattered, so why should it matter now?

Answer: Honestly? It matters because no one else cares about your life the way you do. Your life, and your happiness, is your responsibility. Regardless of your beliefs about what happens when we die, you only get one shot at this part of your life. If you don’t take responsibility for it, no one else will, and then it will be over, and you will wish you had cared.  

This may sound harsh, but so are ex-JW hang-ups which strip our lives of all genuine happiness. Sometimes you need to fight fire with fire.

Taking responsibility for our own happiness

Our job now is to undo the years of programming and take responsibility for our own happiness. A good place to start is understanding the difference between happiness, contentment, and satisfaction, and what these concepts mean to us now in our post-JW lives.

The difference between happiness and contentment

Happiness and contentment are slightly different. Happiness is more of a short-term emotion when we feel pleasure, while contentment is a longer-term sense of inner satisfaction which is more stable than happiness. We simply can’t be happy all the time. Despite what the organisation would have us believe by teaching that happiness will one day be a permanent state of affairs, this is just not how humans work. Our feelings and emotions function through contrasts. This is what makes life so rich. You can only feel elated joy if you have experienced soul-shattering lows.

Pursuing happiness as a non-JW

Regardless of whether someone is or was a JW, feelings of happiness are often influenced by external factors. For JWs this is meant to be theocratic activities, serving God, spending time knocking on unanswered doors and telling yourself you are being productive. For ‘normal’ people, happiness also quite legitimately comes from external factors, but it is not centred around furthering the cause of a religion. It might be something big such as finally achieving a hard-earned goal, or making a long-awaited purchase, but it can also be smaller daily things like being with friends and family, enjoying a great meal, playing sport or getting involved in your hobbies, playing with pets, or doing a good job at your work.

The thing with happiness is that regardless of whether you are a JW or not, the mere fact that happiness is influenced by external factors means that it comes and goes. It is simply not possible to do what makes us happy all the time. It may make us happy to go out for dinner, but going out every night would send us broke. It may make us happy to play video games all day, but we need to actually get some work done to pay our way in this world. Having a few drinks occasionally is no issue, but becoming dependent on it daily is harmful to our health. And on it goes. Anything in excess is generally not all that good for us and will not make us happy in the long run.

Pursuing things which make us happy is perfectly ok, as long as what we are doing is not harmful to others, violating their personal boundaries or human rights, or negatively impacting our own health or prospects for happiness in the longer term. These are the only caveats. Other than these considerations, you are perfectly entitled to pursue whatever makes you happy now, without the restraints of a religion which formerly dictated to you how, when, and in what ways you should feel happy.

Because happiness comes and goes, we need to learn to be ok with not feeling happy sometimes. This is normal and not something to worry about. On the flip-side though, because it is not guaranteed, it is essential to make the most of any happiness we experience whenever we have it. Treasure it. Revel in it and be grateful for it. There are plenty of people in the world experiencing incredible hardships right now who would want to jump up and smack you on the nose for taking any happiness for granted.

Contentment as a non-JW

Despite the ups and downs and the uncertainty inherent in just being alive, you can foster and develop a sense of contentment which is with you regardless of anything else that is happening in your life. It is a sense of inner satisfaction with yourself and your life, and it is indifferent to the types of situations and stressors which bring short-term emotions such as happiness and sadness. It is with you when you have had a great day, kicking goals and generally being amazing at life, and it is with you when you have had a bad day too. A sense of inner contentment prevents those bad days from spiralling into bad weeks, bad months, and bad years. It helps put any negative events into perspective.

As a JW, you no doubt got your sense of inner contentment from feeling that you were making the ‘Supreme Being of the Universe’ happy. ‘A good conscience is the best pillow’ is a saying I remember well. Helping the brothers and sisters or contributing to the running of the hall, giving a good talk, and supporting someone to get out in the ‘ministry’, are all things that likely brought a sense of contentment by making you feel like you were doing something useful with your life.

However, in a world where your goal is not to do everything you can to stay in the organisation, or to please a God who will kill you if you displease him, learning where contentment actually comes from, and what it means to you, is a key step in your recovery process. Here are a few things you may find helpful:

Tips for developing contentment in your post-JW life:

• Accept what you can’t change and let it go. This includes the past, other people, other people’s decisions, and the fact that some people you love may still be JWs. Learn to focus on what you can change and channel your energies there. It will bring far more contentment than harbouring anger and resentment ever will (see previous post, Recovery priority #2: Acceptance).

• Accept that you are not special. As JWs we were taught to feel special and different from the rest of humankind because we were selected by God to be one of his people. But, we were special because of the religion, not as an individual. It can take some adjustment to realise that now, you are also ‘just’ a human, like everyone else on the planet.

• Develop a healthy sense of self-worth and self-esteem. This is about knowing your value as a unique human being. Understand the positive things about yourself while being realistic about the areas which could use some work. Get to know yourself and feel good about yourself, for yourself and who you are, rather than the religion you belong to. See Recovery Toolkit resources.

• Realise that other people are not thinking about you as much as you think they are. People who have never been JWs are far less judgemental than your average JW. How much do you think of other people? This is a good gauge for how much they are likely thinking of you. This can help you to stop caring too much about the opinions of others.

• Don’t compare yourself to people who have never been a JW. They have not lived your life and were not stunted the way JWs are in their development.

• Don’t compare yourself to anyone! Only compare yourself to who you were they day before, or the week before, or a few years before. If you are learning, having new experiences, making mistakes, and learning from them, then you can be assured that you are a better version of you than you were before. That is all you need to care about.

• Be realistic about other ways of life. No one has had a perfect life. Not many people, including non-JWs, genuinely look back on their childhood and think it was perfect. All families have their ups and downs and strange quirks. Non-JWs will have had different challenges compared to us.

• Be kind to yourself and take care of yourself. This is a foreign concept to a JW or former JW. We were conditioned to ignore our own needs to ‘put the kingdom first’. We didn’t learn how to take care of ourselves or to even think that doing so is ok. Unfortunately, it is impossible to feel content if you have no idea how to be kind to yourself. You will just keep flogging yourself at your own expense and then wonder why you are unable to feel happy. Give yourself permission to look after yourself and follow through on what you need.

• Understand your boundaries. Taking care of yourself also requires an understanding of boundaries. This means knowing what you need and what you don’t need. See a great video on personal boundaries here: Julia Kristina Counselling: Boundaries for beginners

• Learn to be ok with uncertainty and difficulty. Whether you are within the organisation or out of it, life can be unfair, difficult, and painful. For everyone. We need to accept and be ok with uncertainty before we can feel genuinely content.

• Show gratitude. It is well documented that taking regular notice of things you are grateful for contributes to a life of contentment. Now that you are free, no one is telling you what to feel grateful for or how to show that gratitude. You can decide for yourself. However you go about it, just try to think of things that you are grateful for as often as you can.

Satisfaction as a non-JW

Satisfaction is a bit different again from happiness and contentment. We feel satisfied when a particular need or desire is met, and something that is universally satisfying to humans is problem solving. I can almost guarantee you that if you take a problem to someone, their first reaction will be to try and solve it, or try and help you solve it, or provide you with advice as to how they would solve it if they were you. It’s just what we do. We love to solve problems, either ours or someone else’s, because it brings us enormous satisfaction.

As JWs, we had a desire to make God happy and to support our brothers and sisters, so doing anything along these lines brought us satisfaction even if we didn’t really enjoy the task so much. What we probably didn’t realise though is that a lot of our satisfaction came from the problems we solved along the way. The JW life brings a unique set of challenges or problems for us to solve, from what we are going to wear to the meeting, to how we can fit in time out witnessing, to making life decisions based on what we believe God wants of us.

The solution to one problem tends to create more new problems that need solving. For example, if we lost our job because we went AWOL to attend a convention, we then had the problem of finding another job. Much of our lives are spent creating problems and solving them. Our job now is to find problems we like to solve or want to solve, not ones forced upon us by others.

Finding creative ways to overcome obstacles, solve problems, and successfully rise to the various challenges which come our way, is incredibly satisfying. This includes anything from solving puzzles, fixing things, making things, saving things such as a struggling pot-plant from dying, through to major challenges around work, family, homes, and health. It all counts. Think about the last time you felt really satisfied with a small accomplishment. What was it? What about it made you feel so good? What challenges did you overcome to get there? What does this tell you about the types of challenges that bring you satisfaction?

There is a great chapter on ‘choosing your struggle’ in the book ‘The Subtle Art of not giving a F*ck’ by Mark Manson. See Chapter 2 ‘Happiness is a problem’. In fact, if you are up for it, just read the whole book. I highly recommend it.

Activity: What brings you happiness, contentment, and satisfaction?

As a brain-storming activity, write down everything you do which makes you feel happy, satisfied, or content, however small or insignificant it may be. Even your morning cuppa counts. Being with friends and family. Washing your dog. Finding a way to rescue your dying pot-plant (yes, this is a real problem I am currently trying to solve and every day he isn’t dead is enormously satisfying). Whatever it may be, jot it down. I found this hard to start with, but after I got going, I had a page of things in no time.

Knowing what makes you happy, satisfied, or content can help you create opportunities to make these things happen more often. After writing your list, can you find ways to make any of those things happen more often? Is there even one small adjustment you can make in your life so you can get more of what you enjoy? If something is not working for you in your life it is your responsibility to identify it and, if possible, change it. No one else can do this for you.

Seeing in print all of the things which make you happy can also be really helpful for when you may have a bad day, or series of bad days, and are at risk of wondering if it is all worth it. It can remind you of all the things you genuinely enjoy doing and which make life worth living.

If you ever do have one of those bad days, or series of bad days, just take each minute as it comes. Don’t look too far ahead. Just do the next thing. You may find that when all pressure and judgement is gone, you actually do feel like spending even just a few minutes doing something you enjoy.

Your happiness is possible

Happiness, contentment, and satisfaction are just different paths that all lead to the same place: Improving your quality of life. Because the temporary emotion of happiness can come and go, developing your inner contentment, and doing things that bring satisfaction, will help you build resilience and cope more effectively with all of the ups and downs which life will inevitably throw at you. 

Despite what the organisation would have us believe, our happiness is possible without them. We do not need to depend on them or anyone else to tell us when we are happy. There is no need to wait for paradise or for any nebulous future state which may or may not happen before we can be happy. You don’t have to accept anyone else’s definition of happiness anymore. You now have the freedom, and the responsibility, to create your own.

Here’s to you and your happiness in your post-JW world.

Renee