As JWs, we became very good at accepting things we didn’t agree with. Trying to change anything or do anything other than accept the status quo was not only futile, but potentially even dangerous. You could bring shame on yourself, your family, on God, and on the organisation, only to end up cast out…
As self-indulgent as it may sound to anyone who has been a JW, getting to know yourself is the best thing you can do to help yourself learn to live after leaving. As a JW, your entire sense of self is set aside, squashed, and told that it has no right to exist. The…
Being one of Jehovah’s Witnesses affects us all differently. Believe it or not, some of us come through relatively unscathed. Perhaps the unscathed ones were lucky enough to have an extremely stable and loving family life despite the religion, and they grew up having at least some autonomy and agency over themselves and their…
Before leaving the Witnesses I had never even heard the words coercive control, and if I had, I certainly did not apply them in my own life. Control is normal in this organisation. If you were born-in, this is all you have ever known. You are totally unaware that every aspect of your life…
It is hard to know where to start with the damaging and controlling practices of my former religion, but Adam Harvey and the team at the ABC (Australia) recently gave it a good go in the Four Corners episode: ‘Escaping Jehovah’s Witnesses: Inside the dangerous world of a brutal religion’. They covered a lot…