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…
Damn. It was three days out from my husband’s birthday and I realised I had done it again: Totally forgotten it. “I’m so sorry!’ I exclaimed, thoroughly disappointed in myself, ‘I’m just not used to remembering birthdays!’. We’ve probably all had a similar experience at one time or another because as former JWs, we…
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…
In Part 3 we pulled apart the various JW views of work and how these may have affected us, but now we are going to focus on identifying your own values about work and what you want from it in your post-JW life. Like pretty much everything in our lives after leaving the religion,…
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…
This post explores how the meaning of death is distorted in Jehovah’s Witness teachings and culture, and three ways that rethinking everything we formerly believed about death can help us learn to be truly alive. Reassessing JW beliefs about death Many of us struggle to figure out what we want after leaving the Witnesses….
Self-help, Life coaching, Counsellors, Therapists, Psychologists, and Psychiatrists: What’s the difference?! What do I need? This post is about the many different ‘helping’ options out there to help you find the one that is right for you. As JWs we were never encouraged to seek any form of mental health treatment outside of the…