Thank you Noah, for Stepping up and Talking about your life story. And shutting light On your experiences and prospectives As a young child growing up In a religious organization. Please continue telling your stories. Your grandparents are very very proud of you For having the courage To just be you. A beautiful soul , and No one can ever take that away from you.. ❤
Thank you for sharing Noah. As you work at finding that “inner child”, be mindful of any trauma you may encounter that sits below the surface. Hope to hear more of your story.
Hey Thanks Man. Yeah i feel like the inner low vibrations and scars that I thought were unchangeable are being felt, challenged, and cut the F loose. But I appreciate you pointing that out. 🙂↔️😀
I love hearing individual stories of how people woke up. Thankyou for starting yours and hopefully you will do more on you life since leaving. Your grandparents sounded awesome
❤❤dear Noah love and greetings from Australia left 2020 as an 80 year old was born in . Be happy to be free . Sorry you have not got your grandma still wishing you to find lovely friends. Many greetings bev
First of all congratulations for breaking free from this is a vile cult i was brainwashed as a young boy i woke up 1986 threw all my literature out never looked back..all the best Noha move on enjoy ur life.❤
I grew up JW, born in 72. My grandparents were weird, jw converts but not hardcore and my parents were really hardcore until us kids showed up. They were both strict and lax. Bible lessons but real world lessons and trust. When i turned 25 i did a altavista search for JWs and i realized it was all made up garbage. I told my dad and he understood and got crisis of conscience and a bunch of other stuff and we had great discussions. One day the elders from my old congregation showed up at my house, i hadn't been to a meeting for a few years. Someone saw me shooting pool with my df'd friend so o got df'd. Nobody in my family shunned me. I'm pretty fortunate. Anyway the elders got my JW wife to leave me for a while. She came back but it just didn't work. Which sucks because i should've been better to her. Anyway the JW experience is like having the world by the balls and being a rebel kind of like a special agent and normal people are like "dude you are weird".
I wish I could speak out so openly. I’m 4th generation JW. Both sides of my family are JWs. I’m not attending meetings or service for years now but not df’d or disassociated so just faded. If I speak out.. the remnants of any interactions are gone. I don’t want to give the BORG that power. Keep talking. It helps us and you.
I think we all have different stories to tell while growing up. My mother and maternal grandmother started studying with JWs when my mom was pregnant with me, I think they did it out of something to do at first, It took a little longer for my father who was an atheist/agnostic to join in. His big issue was "Where did God come from?" But they were able to skirt around the objection and draw him in. Since he's brilliant of mind his mind gravitated toward all the deep things the JWs had to offer, like the 607 BCE-1914 and 539 calculations which made perfect sense to him at the time. I had a good childhood too. Wonderful loving parents but I still feel they took "spare the rod and spoil the child" a little too seriously. My sister and I were obedient children. We didn't talk back and did what we were told. Maybe we scattered our toys a little too much in our room. lol But isn't that what children do? I grew up in a fairly affluent household. Nice homes and lots of family vacations. My father was a pilot and flew us around in private planes. My parents never villainized non-JW relatives, or shunned them, or even worldly people for that matter. We didn't socialize with non-JW people, only relatives though, for the most part. My father was an elder, one of the best. A logical and fair-minded person and very measured. I may have been told not to get interested in "worldly boys" as a teen, actually it was a given, and of course certain things were expected of us in terms of not dating and living up to a high moral standard, but I didn't mind that, I found it easy to do and I felt protected. My mom's non-JW side of the family was a little crazy, but fun. They lived in San Francisco, and LA, and various places so I wouldn't see them very often. But when they showed up I found it to be highly entertaining and completely the opposite of what I was used to. Their lifestyles were wild and I found them to be loud and profane and highly competitive. They drank and smoked and sometimes caused chaos. Several were alcoholics I suspect. My great aunt was a Bette Davis type and my Great uncle like Cary Grant. One time my great aunt, when she was drunk, stuck her hand in the gravy bowl and started to massage it into her brother's hair. He was very particular about his appearance but he was so stoned himself he just stared into space with a placid look on his face. I was maybe 10 at the time. My dad didn't go to these occasional dinners at my grandmother's. He'd had enough of the crazy relatives for a variety of reasons, lol, but my mother and I found humor in all of their crazy antics. It was quite a diversion from my structured life in terms of going to the meetings, etc., but looking back on it, they were some of my fondest memories in life. In saying that, I feel I experienced the best of both worlds. I could write a book on all of my childhood memories. I will give one example of it being hard as a child. There came a time when all the girls in my 4th grade class joined either the Camp Fire Girls or the Girl Scouts. Every girl in my classroom joined one or the other but me. I couldn't join because there was some kind of political connotation to it. But being an outsider caused me great distress. Suddenly I had no friends because joining these groups turned into a click. In other words, neither side would play with the other side, and I was left out in the cold completely. One girl said, "I'm sorry but I can't play with you anymore because you're not a Girl Scout." So my mother decided to throw a party for all the girls in my class. It was an exciting party with lots of gifts and games, etc. Every girl in my class showed up and the very next day I was the most popular girl in the class. lol Everyone wanted to be my friend and the divisions stopped. The clicks stopped and everyone played together again. Did my mother do the wrong thing by throwing a party for so called (worldly girls?) No, she actually created harmony again and saved me a world of grief:-) I was raised with an interesting mix of structure and discipline but at the same time my parents weren't stiff. They played by JW standards but there was still an allowance when I was a teen that I was so very grateful for. They allowed me and my sister to dress the way we wanted to dress in school and during our free time. They let us have individuality when it came to style of dress and we were not restricted in that manner which to me was like a safety net, because I feel that life would have been much harder and sadder if they hadn't. We couldn't date and we lived by the rules but our unique style of dress was the one thing we could do and that meant so much to us. Did we tame it down at the KH? Yes, but we pushed it to the limit:-) I took being a JW to heart because I believed it was the Truth. It was devastating to slowly wake up, but I'm still a believer in God.
Did I forget to mention that my father's Non-JW family is normal? They are very decent and upright people and live by the golden rule and many believe in God. I had to throw this into the mix since my mother's side is so eccentric. lol
