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:

1. Critical thinking
2. How to have respectful debates (including accepting that you may in-fact, be wrong)
3. Showing genuine respect, empathy, and acceptance towards others
4. Recognising manipulative and controlling behaviour
5. Self-care and boundaries

And now for essential life skills six to ten:

6. Knowing who you are and where you fit in the real world

The real world is very different to the JW world. In the ‘real world’, you get to choose how you will think, what you believe, and how you will behave. Nothing is dictated. Here, you have the freedom to choose your own rules, but also the responsibility to choose a way of life that is meaningful to you. It isn’t dished up to us on a platter. You need to work it out for yourself.

In the ‘real-world’, ‘normal’ people care about things we were never allowed to care about as JWs. Things like careers, having fun, playing sport, hobbies, looking after health, spending time with family regardless of who believes what, celebrating events, volunteering for charities, giving back to their communities, doing things for others, campaigning for rights of some kind, taking pride in their homes, enjoying nice cars or other ‘toys’ that bring pleasure, going on holidays, giving their kids good life experience, meditating, learning good communication skills, preparing for a good retirement. The list goes on.

If you don’t know who you are and what you stand for outside of the JW indoctrination, navigating through all of this can be incredibly overwhelming. You may find yourself a bit awash, going one way and then the next. It can even seem somewhat attractive to run back to the ‘safety’ of the organisation so you don’t have to make all of these difficult decisions. I can only encourage you to try and push through this. Once you have a grasp on who you are, what your values are, and what you want for your life now, living that life will make it all worthwhile.

I have focussed a lot on identity suppression and the importance of getting to know yourself after leaving on this website. There is a section on this in the Recovery Toolkit page, and a full post about it here: Recovery Priority #1: Getting to know yourself.

Tips for getting to know yourself:

Connect the dots. Understand and accept your ‘story’: Analyse your life as if you are a third-party observer. Learn about how and why you got to where you are now so that you can better accept yourself and your life, and take responsibility for your journey from now on.

Get to know your underlying thought processes, feelings, and emotions: As JWs we are disconnected from how we really feel. Learn to identify your emotions and what you are reacting to so that you can understand yourself and what you need. This will also help you handle stressful situations more effectively.

Identify your values: Living in a way which does not line up with your values is bad for your mental health. To make better decisions for yourself and improve the congruence between who you are and who you want to be, you need to identify your values.

7. How to make good decisions.

Making good decisions is something we never learn as JWs. Everything is spoon-fed to us because the organisation wants it to be as easy as possible for us to follow the tracks that they lay down. Even when we do make decisions as JWs, we must rely solely on information provided by an organisation that does not have our best interests at heart. For example, should you work full-time or pioneer? Hmm. I wonder which one the organisation will encourage you to do…

After you leave, the basis for all of your decisions will change: You no longer need to make decisions based on what will please God (or the JW version of God); You no longer need to make decisions based on how much you may or may not upset your family or other JWs, because, well, if they are JWs, they likely aren’t in your life anymore; and you no longer need to go against your own inner compass to please an organisation that only wants to exploit you. Quite simply, you no longer need to live a certain way just to please others.

Tips on making good decisions (or at least the best decisions for you) in your post-JW life:

• Get to know yourself (see number six), then;
• Identify what you want. As JWs we are not allowed to pursue what we want, or even try to work it out. The JW life is very sheltered, so expose yourself to a bunch of new viewpoints, opinions, experiences, and ideas, then, do some free-writing to work out what you want for a career, as a hobby, or in life generally. Jot down all the options available to you and see what resonates.
• Once you know what you want, the steps to get there and the decisions you need to make will become clearer.
• Identify what you can compromise on and what you can’t. The ‘opportunity cost’ principle can help here. This involves identifying what you are willing to give up to do a certain thing. As an example, the opportunity cost of higher education is the full-time wage you would normally earn for those years. Is this something you are able to give up to realise the benefits at the end?
• When facing a decision, write out all of the pros and cons, and think about all of the knock-on impacts (who and what may be affected by this decision), to work out what you are comfortable with. Using the higher education example, who will be affected if you are not working full time for a while, but also, who will benefit after you have obtained your degree? Can you make ends meet while studying? What support do you have? What are the benefits of getting a degree? Will the long-term benefits outweigh the short-term costs?
• Don’t fall for the ‘sunk cost fallacy’. This is when you stick with something longer than you should, simply because you have already sunk time, effort, and resources into it. If something is no longer serving you, let it go. There is nothing to be gained by hanging on to it just because of time, effort, and resources that you will never get back anyway. This kind of thinking is what gets people trapped in cults. Forget about what you have lost and focus on what you will gain by letting it go.
• Make decisions that take you closer to the life you want, not further away from it.

8. Unconditional love

Whether we realised it or not at the time, the type of love we learnt as JWs is entirely conditional. At our core, everyone needs to feel loved for exactly who they are, but this can never happen in the JW religion because the standards are so impossibly high that no one can ever meet them. As a result, members constantly feel unworthy, and the hole inside is filled through the ‘privilege’ of having ‘the Truth’.

The love you learn as a JW teaches that:

• You don’t deserve unconditional love, so why should anyone else?
• You can only truly care for someone and be close to them if they have exactly the same beliefs as you.
• If someone doesn’t behave a certain way or believe what you do, you should avoid them.
• You should only help people if there is something to be gained from it.

All of the above applies to family members too. The people who, out of anyone on this planet, deserve your unconditional love and you theirs.

As JWs, the organisation is the only thing you are meant to show unconditional love for. For them, you are meant to tolerate manipulation, gaslighting, blackmail, living in fear, and giving up your entire identity. But this isn’t unconditional love. This is coercive control.

So what actually is unconditional love?  

Unconditional love is:

• Giving someone the safety and security of being themselves, and doing everything you reasonably can to ensure they know you love them and will be there for them, no matter what.
• Accepting that you are not perfect, so you can’t expect your family, partner, or kids (either yours or anyone else’s) to be perfect either, but you love and support them anyway.
• Lifting someone up when they need it, regardless of how you feel at that moment and regardless of whether you agree with their reasons for feeling low.
• Not making yourself feel better at someone else’s expense.
• Truly understanding someone, and even if you don’t share their views, you can be happy for them and support them in doing what makes them happy.
• Showing respect for boundaries.
• The ability to reconcile after a rupture, compromise, and strengthen trust through that process.
• Not about judgement. It’s about acceptance.

However, unconditional love does not mean accepting bad behaviour or putting up with abuse. At times, unconditional love is also about calling out bad behaviour and not tolerating it, either in yourself or others.

9. How to relax and enjoy life

After getting off the JW treadmill, it may be tempting to go and find another one because we actually have no idea how to relax and enjoy life.

So here are a few tips for relaxing and enjoying the post-JW life you have gone through so much to have:

• Let go of resentment. It will do nothing but drag yourself and others down.
• Identify when negative thoughts are weighing you down. Accept that they are there, but then choose to ignore them and live your life anyway.
• Remind yourself that you deserve to enjoy life. The earlier ‘JW training’ that you are unworthy of having fun, or that is isn’t important, is not needed now.
• Cultivate opportunities to feel happiness and contentment more often, but remember that a meaningful life isn’t about being ‘happy’ all the time (see earlier post: Recovery Priority #3: Your happiness).
• Reconnect with friends and family (where possible). As challenging as social interaction can be, all studies on life satisfaction highlight just how important social connection is for living a meaningful and satisfying life.
• Identify what you need and make sure you get it (self-care and boundaries).
• Remember that it isn’t your responsibility to over-perform to make up for poor performance in others. Let others do their jobs, while you do yours. 
• Accept that you don’t know everything and be comfortable with that. You will make mistakes, you will get stuff wrong, and you will possibly even offend people. But have the confidence that you are strong enough to apologise and repair relationships. It’s not about being perfect. It’s about being ‘good enough’.
• Don’t take yourself too seriously. Learn to laugh at yourself. It’s endearing to others too.

10. The art of living well

I’m sure everyone knows someone who just seems to have it all together. They say the right things at the right time, manage their time well, have jobs they enjoy and a close family too, and just generally seem to be awesome and have awesome lives. Obviously they will have their issues, but whatever comes their way, they handle it. They are the kind of people who will arrive before you, even if you left at the same time and from the same place. Traffic jams and parking spaces just somehow magically open up for them, while you end up parking miles away and then get rained on while walking to meet them.

To me, these are people who somehow have ‘the art of living’ down pat. It can’t possibly be that their lives are perfect to the point where they are immune from traffic jams, but they just know how to handle whatever comes their way. They think ahead, they learn from their past experiences, they have created a life that works for them, and they are somehow still patient with all of your idiocy. All you see is the end result of all this so-called perfection and laugh at how miserably you compare.

Living well is an art form in the sense that there are so many moving parts, so many decisions, so much you can’t control but so much you can, and navigating your way through it all to create a life that really works for you takes time, effort, thought, understanding, and multiple failures, like any piece of beautiful art.

The art of living well is a skill which requires us to balance all the competing demands in our lives. This includes, but is not limited to:

• Putting strategies in place to make sure you get the best out of yourself, starting with small daily habits and routines.
• Valuing and prioritising your time effectively.
• Having the right balance between your needs and responsibilities, and everyone else’s.
• Showing up and pitching in, but not to the point of people pleasing.
• Being loving and caring towards others, but not to the point that it wears you down.
• Learning from your life experience and forgiving yourself for any mistakes, rather than beating yourself up over them.
• Kindness and understanding for yourself and others, and never expecting more of anyone than they are able to give, including yourself.

The art of living well is something you will definitely never learn, or even learn to appreciate, as a JW. Your life, time, resources, and energy all centre around the religion and nothing else really matters. Doing things the hard way is apparently noble. Painting a kingdom hall with a toothbrush is laudable if requested of you by an Elder. I can’t imagine anyone who appreciates the art of living well, someone who respects themselves and their time on this earth, wasting their lives away in such pointless activities as this, to apparently please a God who will kill them if they don’t.

Many of these essential life skills will be the focus of more detailed posts in the future, but in the meantime, I wish you all the best in developing skills you likely never learnt as a JW. Your post-JW life will be all the better for it  😊

Thanks for stopping by!

Until next time,

Renee