Now let’s talk about home life. Not just the bugs and such that I mentioned were a problem for me when we first moved, but the actual dynamics of our house. I’m going to try to keep this story as close to the whole Jehovah’s Witness narrative as possible. My family was dysfunctional in many ways, but I’m going to do what I can to stick to the Witness story here. Out of respect for my family I’ll leave a lot of things out that aren’t necessarily pertinent to the subject at hand. I still have some measure of respect for them even though they’re shunning me and act like I no longer exist.
I already mentioned that the holidays went away. And I believe that the last Christmas that I referred to previously was truly my last holiday, period. That was it. The absence of holidays meant that we no longer saw our extended family much. If you think about it, that’s usually when everyone gets together. I didn’t see many of them for decades. In the end they weren’t Jehovah’s Witnesses and were therefore seen as bad association. We could do better. Doesn’t that sound horrible? But that’s actually how you start to feel. The us versus them attitude is a race to the bottom, and someone starts being seen as inhuman in order to justify the behavior. So with my extended family and holidays out of the way, gift giving and receiving went with it. As I stated before I was told that my parents no longer needed an excuse to get me gifts and that I could get them any time now, so we didn’t need holidays anymore. Of course we stopped getting gifts altogether after that. Even birthdays went away. No celebrations, no presents, nothing.
Speaking of presents, let’s talk about toys. Things like my GI Joes having guns, or weapons on other toys suddenly became an issue. Even water guns are a thing that many Jehovah’s Witnesses never have. Toys also aren’t supposed to be anything that they might deem spiritistic like wizards or sorcerers or ghosts or anything like that. Entertainment suddenly became a big deal as well. Witnesses aren’t supposed to watch anything that might even suggest magic or spiritism, sexuality, violence, or obscene language. So you learn to really watch the lyrics of the music you listen to and to judge for yourself based on how you think others will react. If one line says something that “Jehovah God won’t approve of”, you start to judge yourself for what you’re drawn to if it is a song you like. I remember one talk at the Kingdom Hall shaming us by saying asking us if we would watch or listen to some piece of entertainment if Jesus was in the room. If not, then we shouldn’t like it.
This applies to any video games as well. We did have games throughout the years but they were usually just sports games for the most part and games like Mario. Things that are fairly innocent, though I’m sure that if you dig deep enough into the Mario game you can find something wrong with it. I borrowed a game that I had to give back at one time because it was too violent. It was very mild but it had an army scene or something like that in it. We’re talking 1980s Nintendo here so it couldn’t have been very graphic or gory. My parents also decided that country music was the only acceptable music. They deemed it clean enough to listen to. As for myself, I loved pop and rap music, leaning toward rap. My parents would no longer let me listen to that kind of music. After that it was only my “achy breaky heart”. In my mid-teenage years my grandparents bought me a Sony Walkman. When I got home and my mom and dad found out that I had a Walkman, they made me take it back because they “couldn’t know what I was listening to”. Everything was controlled by my parents and what the cult told them to expect.
So let’s talk about demons real quick. Jehovah’s Witnesses were often afraid of buying things at yard sales because they might be demon possessed. Maybe the person who owned that piece of furniture or whatever, also had a Ouija board and they practiced that type of spiritism. This would invite demons into their house and the demons would then inhabit this piece of furniture or toy or other object. If we were to purchase that item and bring it into our house, we could unknowingly be bringing demons in with it.
This is going to sound farfetched to any normal and healthy adult, but there was actually a story that circulated through many congregations about a Smurf doll. The Smurfs weren’t really something we were supposed to be watching anyway. I don’t remember the narrative of that story. I watched Smurfs when I was little but I guess somehow it was seen as spiritistic. The legend that circulated as truth throughout the congregations was that a child brought a Smurf doll purchased at a yard sale to the Kingdom Hall, which is the Witnesses church. During the meeting, the demonized Smurf doll supposedly jumped out of his hands and ran up the aisle and out of the Kingdom Hall. Yes. This was actually circulated as truth. And yes, grown human adults actually took this seriously and perpetuated the ridiculous story.
Once as an adult, my wife and I went to eat dinner with friends, an older couple from our congregation. We were in our thirties at the time. They were in their fifties. It just happened to be Father’s Day when we went out to eat, and that caused an issue because the waiters would come by our table and they thought that maybe the husband of this other couple was either my father or my wife’s father. And of course we couldn’t celebrate Father’s Day, so there was a little trepidation over all of that. But this particular restaurant had hired a magician and he came by our table and joked around with us a little bit. He wanted to tell our fortune and he threw down something on the table called a fortune fish. I couldn’t honestly tell you what it really was at this point. It might as well have been a live rattlesnake because the couple that we were with, again grown people in their fifties, would not touch this fortune fish. My wife, seeing that they were completely freaked out and almost paralyzed by fear, quickly reached over and grabbed the fortune fish to save them, and us, and the magician. It was so awkward.
Another big decision for us to make invoved Chinese restaurants. If we went to one, were we to eat the fortune cookie or not? And if we did eat the cookie, what were we going to do with the fortune inside it? Would we read it and risk bringing demons upon us? I know that sounds silly, and I know that not every Witness took it so seriously, but people would judge one another on petty things like this.
As kids we were having this stuff drummed into our psyches. My parents were studying one of the JW books with a family they had met while knocking on doors, and the family was telling us about how they thought they had demons in their home. I remember as a kid sitting in their living room while my parents would study with these strangers and I would think that I saw stuff move in the house. Obviously it was just confirmation bias. I was told by them and by my parents to look out for certain things that might move and so anything that did move confirmed the messages that I was told. I’m sure that the heating and air conditioning system kicked on and some air was blown in the house and some leaves moved on a plant or something so I thought that was demons because that’s what I had been told.
These were the kinds of things being put in our heads as children.
I’ll get into more teachings like those in the next sections about my life at the Kingdom Hall meetings as one of Jehovah’s Witnesses. But it was applicable to this part of life at home and how things changed. Everything is very intertwined so it’s hard to separate these different issues fully as we go along.
Back to our family. Our parents had to start studying the Bible with us each week. Well, not the Bible necessarily but one of Jehovah’s Witnesses publications that were based on their interpretation of the Bible’s narrative. They were supposed to study with us weekly, but in the end it ended up being sporadic at best. My dad, as the husband, was supposed to take the lead in this. Our studies were excruciating. My mom never knew when it was her turn to read a paragraph out of whatever book or magazine it was what we were studying. Then my dad would get upset with her for not reading when it was her turn. We kids would answer questions to show that we were learning to the best of whatever ability we had. My mom was very emotional and she was really into this information. My dad was an emotional desert and he pretty much just seemed like he wanted to get it over with and do his duty as a Jehovah’s Witness father. If everyone wasn’t pissed off by the end of this study or someone hadn’t cried chances are we weren’t doing it right. It was absolutely miserable. When I got older my dad liked to wait until I was about to go out and do something with my friends, and then he would announce that now it was time for us to sit down as a family and have our family study. I hated it. And honestly by that time I hated him too.
My Dad
My dad was a very emotionally abusive man. Apparently, his own mother told my mom before they got married that “that boy has never loved anything or anyone, and you think he loves you”. Although he never hit us or got physical, he was just an absolutely miserable man that made everyone else absolutely miserable in his house. He was very mentally and emotionally abusive. I would later find out from a friend that they could hear my dad screaming at us from out on the street. I have a fuzzy memory of some people coming into our home to ask us questions once, perhaps child protective services, but I just remember being coached a bit on what to say. Nothing ever came from that meeting that I know of.
My dad was a totally different person at home than he was in public and especially at the meetings of Jehovah’s Witnesses. He would be happy there and everyone at the Kingdom Hall loved him. They thought he was great, and he was a great Jehovah’s Witness. He moved up through the ranks and became an elder in the congregation. An elder is one taking the lead. There is a problem though because according to the scriptures that they use as qualifications for those taking the lead as elders, he should have been presiding over his household in a fine manner. My dad never fit that description. He treated us like garbage. Then he would be assigned a public talk, the 45 minute discourses or sermons that are given on Sundays fat the Kingdom Hall. He would be given an outline and then he would give a talk on how to have a happy family life. He would get up and give his talk about how wonderful family was while we kids sat in the audience and rolled our eyes. It got so bad at times my mom would have to get up and physically leave the auditorium. It was so hypocritical.
It was easy to see, even as a child, that Jehovah’s Witnesses valued performance and appearance over substance. One of the first memories I have as a young Witness is that we were up on stage at a big assembly in front of thousands. It was myself, I know I had at least one younger brother at that point, my parents, and another elder in the congregation. Here we were, our perfect little Jehovah’s Witness family in front of thousands at this assembly and we were giving a well-rehearsed demonstration of how our family was a great example of a young Jehovah’s Witness family. We were sitting there with some brother who was interviewing us or performing an example of how a family study should be handled. And of course it was all a farce. I was a kid. I don’t know how old I was but even then I knew it was just an act and not reflective of our real life.
My mom would get upset about my dad and she would go to the congregation elders about him. That’s something that you need to know about Jehovah’s Witnesses. The elders in the congregation have been set up as those that you are to go to with any of your problems. So if you have marital problems you go to the elders. If your child has told you that someone in the congregation molested them you go to the elders, not the police. The elders are always the authority that you turn to. Everything is funneled through the congregation first. It is so indicative of the cult mentality that they had.
In this case, my parents are having issues between them. My mom would get so upset about my dad’s behavior that she would go to the corrugation elders about him. She was hoping that they would either help him or at least take action to remove him as an elder, which they had the power to do. However, my dad did anything the elders wanted him to do. If there were little jobs to be done around the congregation, or a talk to give at the last second, or anything they wanted from him, my dad could not say the word no. He was a yes man. In fact he once told me that if I was ever asked to do anything I should just say yes without even thinking about it because I should want to show that I wanted to serve Jehovah. Of course this wasn’t really about serving Jehovah, the name for God as Jehovah’s Witnesses teach. This was about serving the organization, serving the elders, serving the congregation. A lot of it was just busy work.
So think about that. Just think about what it tells a kid when he watches his parents completely submit to this organization and to be taught explicitly that your needs don’t matter, your desires don’t matter, just do whatever anyone tells you to do. It caused me great problems even as an adult until I got healthier, because I was to to not give any weight to my own needs and wants in life. I was taught to change who I was in order to keep other people happy, to seek their approval at all costs to myself.
As my mom would be talking to the elders about my dad, they would want to talk to me. They weren’t just going to take my mom’s word for it. They wanted a corroboration of some of the stories she told. So I told them all kinds of things. They didn’t care. They didn’t care for years. When I was in my late teens, maybe 18, they finally removed him as an elder in the congregation. I don’t know why but they did. Nothing seemed to have changed. Maybe there was something that happened that they couldn’t overlook anymore and had to take action. I don’t know what really forced their hand there. I was never aware of anything though. In the end it was all a farce because he was removed as an elder, and then within a short amount of time, he was an elder again. I’m sure it was all for show.
So I was caught in between an emotionally abusive father and my mom, not to mention my own relationship with each of them was extremely stressful. We were a part of an organization that claims to have the happiest families on earth because they all know the supposed “truth from the Bible”. But we were not happy. And frankly neither were most of the other families that we knew. There is so much drama and pain in those congregations. Most are just completely unaware of it.
Kingdom Hall Friends
I did at least have some friends at the Kingdom Hall. I couldn’t have any friends at school, of course, but I was fortunate to have other young people in my congregation to hang out with.
I actually had a good group of guys. You’ll notice that I said guys. Boys and girls can’t be friends, as the Witnesses I was around saw it, because if they were to get together then they’re going to fornicate. Sex is imminent, something that has to happen if a male and female are in the same room. So there were really no good reasons for people of the opposite sex to be friends. It just simply wasn’t okay in my congregation and that was the feeling in most congregations although there were varying levels of the extreme. I was probably in my late teens before I even spoke to a girl at our Kingdom Hall and it was just to give her some books or magazines or because of some job that I had in the congregation. They really kept us apart.
I was lucky enough to have a great friend who lived right next door to me. The Jehovah’s Witnesses that introduced us to the cult had a son my age. We did just about everything together. We would play toys out in the backyard or on the front porch, we played basketball, we’d play games. When I got older I was the first to drive and I had a car so we went places together. We did all kinds of things together. It was awesome. I’m glad that I had him for that time of my life. Otherwise it would have been so lonely even though I had other friends at the Kingdom Hall. Like I said I did have a group of guys, but it isn’t like we could just get together all the time. Having a friend next door was awesome.
One day my grandfather bought us a basketball goal. I loved basketball. I would have played all day, every single day if I could. But the goal that he bought us was sitting in its box for a long time at our house. It sat for so long that the box was getting torn up from us kids just playing around it in our play room. I would ask my dad to put it up, and of course he never would.
There came a time later that a neighbor across the alley put up a hoop on their garage in the alley. Some kids were playing on it and I wanted to play so bad. I remember going in and asking my parents if I could go out there and play ball with them. I was told no. I can remember crying and being devastated. I wanted to play basketball. I didn’t care that those other kids weren’t Witnesses. I just wanted to play and had a goal that my dad wouldn’t even put up. But playing with kids that weren’t Jehovah’s Witnesses was out of the question for us. They weren’t one of us, and we weren’t to be one of them.
We weren’t to be close to you, however we could come to your door and preach to you. But really that’s all any of you were there for. We had a name for you. Yeah you. You were called “worldly” people. In the real world, worldly is a term that is looked upon with some measure of admiration. A worldly person is a person who is maybe well-traveled, has great perspective on life, has learned a lot of things, or done a lot of things. Worldly people to a Witness of Jehovah are people of the world – people outside of our little group. Jesus had said in the Bible to be no part of the world, and that’s what we were trying to do. We were no part of you so you couldn’t be any part of us. So a kid might not be able to play basketball with your kid depending on how strict his parents were interpreting such things. At a minimum most are going to stay away as much as possible.
Although I had friends, you have to know something about Jehovah’s Witnesses. You see, people often think that we must have had a great community as Witnesses. Especially when you’ve got that whole us versus them mentality. So we must have been awesome, we must have been so close. We called each other brother or sister so it must have been like a family. Well no we weren’t. Remember, this is a performance based cult. People were constantly trying to one up another. I’ve actually heard of a term called “Jesus juking” that somebody mentioned in another religion once. Just trying to outmaneuver the next person to look better. You have to think though, this is a world where everyone is pretty much being forced to be the same. So how do you feel special? Well, you feel special by getting to know someone with a position in the congregation or maybe attaining that position yourself. Maybe you put in more hours knocking on doors than somebody else did, or you have more Bible studies, or you give better talks, or you comment more at the meetings. Just any little thing that could be done in Witness life. If you could do it just a little better, a little more, you feel a little better about yourself or in comparison to others. Maybe you commented at the meetings in your own words instead of reading it from a paragraph. And so you showed that you really believed. You know, just little things like that to try to one up one another.
There are also a lot of big families in the cult. Those families tend to gain prominence and Jehovah’s Witnesses are known for being very cliquey. There are a lot of cliques in the congregations. There’s always an in-crowd and then everybody else is picking up the crumbs trying to fit into the cool club that develops.
The flipside of that is that everyone is watching everyone else. There is necessity laid upon the brothers and sisters to “keep the congregation clean”. Since we can’t have any bad influences in the congregation, friends might turn in friends to the elders if they listen to a bad song or maybe if they saw you coming out of a movie theater where some rated R movie was playing. Not only were we supposed to keep the congregation clean, but they used different scriptures to essentially say that if I don’t tell on you then I am a sharer in your wicked deeds. Since I don’t want God to be mad at me and I want to keep the congregation clean then I’m going to go tell the elders that I saw you doing something that you aren’t supposed to do. And yeah, I did it. I think everybody did at some point. It’s just what you do and especially if you’re trying to be a good JW. Many people actually feel so much shame over things that they turn themselves in. And we’re not talking about kids here, we’re talking about grown people going to the elders and telling them what they did that they felt such shame for doing. There’s no confessional where you’re sitting in a booth and you don’t see somebody or you don’t know who’s on the other side that you’re unburdening to. We’re talking face to face interactions with authority figures. If you don’t want to be punished for whatever it was that you did, you have to show repentance. You have to show that you’re sorry and that you won’t do it again.
That gives those elders tremendous power because they get to determine whether you’re sorry or not, as if there’s any way they could actually tell. But you are at their mercy. So just let that sink in for a minute. Think about the indoctrination it takes and how powerful it must be to make grown people go grovel because they watched a movie they shouldn’t have watched. I knew a young brother who had a “problem with porn”. So he would go turn himself in to the elders and admit that he watched porn. And then they would deal with him. It is creepy and private and set up to be rife with abuse of power.
Back To The House
There was already a ton of pressure for me as a kid with my family dynamics, but adding in the cult dynamics made it horrific. As a kid in middle school I was under so much stress that I developed shingles. I had my right cheek burst out with all these fever blisters. So imagine going to a middle school with a side of your face blown up with fever blisters. As if I didn’t stand out enough already by not being able to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance and all of the other things that made me weird in school as a JW, now I had this. Looking back, I had some teachers who just gave me looks of pity. At the time I assumed it was just because I looked like a freak. Maybe they actually realized that I was a kid with shingles and knew that there had to be some reason behind it. And usually what brings on shingles is tremendous stress.
To give you an idea of the environment in my house, I like to say that we had “the three ups”. These were favorite terms from my dad. The three ups, in no particular order were “grow up, buck up, and shut up”. Did I mention that he gave talks from a platform as an example of the head of a happy family? Those three ups were the answer to just about anything. It was not a healthy environment.
I was a sensitive kid and my dad had zero emotional sensitivity as evidenced by the wisdom that he dispersed through these three ups. At night, when I was really little, I would cry myself to sleep. When I was younger, I would sometimes write notes and leave them out for my dad to see. I don’t know if he ever did see them but I would leave them taped up on the wall by my bed. My guess is that my mom intercepted them and took them down. Eventually I just learned to become dead inside and show no emotion. There were points in my life where the rage that built underneath then numb exterior started to show through. My best friend once told me that I had no heart because he told me something pretty emotional and I did not react at all. Looking back I can’t remember what it was but I’ll never forget what he said to me. He said that I had no heart. That really hit me.
On the other hand my mom was very emotional. When I was a kid something changed with her at a point in my childhood. Again, my goal here isn’t to exploit the personal issues of people that I was close to. I’m trying to only mention things that tie into the plots of the whole JW narrative. But I do feel that this relates. I’m going to try to ride a line here and we’ll see how I do. I’m trying to be sensitive but it does apply.
Suffice it to say that my mom went from a very vibrant person, to what could only be described as catatonic, when I was in my early teens, as I remember. She spent some time in some facilities trying to get help for whatever was going on. She would be gone for weeks at a time. I remember being at the meetings and she would just sit and rock during the meeting with a vacant look in her eyes. It was honestly pretty scary as a kid. She would disappear into the back rooms of the Kingdom Hall during meetings. And I remember watching the elders running back there after her. I didn’t really know what was going on but I did know that something had changed. Things changed and nobody was talking about it. We were just expected to sit there and pay attention at meetings like good little Jehovah’s Witness kids like nothing was going on.
There was a certain amount of denial that always hung over my family, and honestly Jehovah’s Witnesses in general. Nothing to see here move along. It’s all about appearances. Let’s make it look good. I mentioned already that we had neighbors on one side of our house that had a hoarded yard and some of the issues that we felt arose from pests and things like that. I also mentioned that the neighbors on the other side were Witnesses, and that the mother next door studied with my mom and they were friends. But what I didn’t say was that the mom next door was pretty abusive to us too. At one point she accused my mom of gouging her couch. Once, her kids came home from school with lice. She came over to accuse us of giving it to them and wanted to check us all for lice. And of course my mom would acquiesce because she couldn’t stand up. They always talked down to us like a lesser class of people. The lice must have come from those kids next door. Not that there’s any shame in having lice. It can happen to anybody, especially when you have kids at school. But we never had it. Not that that stopped her from blaming. She was going to blame us. It was always our fault. She would say that my friend next door and I played too much at my house. Then the complaint was that we were playing too much at her house. There was always some complaint and she was always pushing my mom around. I could not stand her, but my mom always defended her actions.
There was also abuse next door. Not only did they treat us poorly, but our houses were three feet apart and the walls were paper thin. So we heard all kinds of things that were going on. There was always someone screaming or yelling. There was a garage in the back where the kids would get punished, and we would hear some kid screaming while he was being hit. One time I was in the backyard playing with my friend next door and I heard his parents fighting. She was screaming at her husband like she often did. I believe she slapped him and then I heard a boom and a thud. He hit her back. I jumped the fence, went home, got my mom, and it was handled. I don’t remember if the police were called or what. But regardless, there were a lot of things going on next door, and later in life one child would go to jail for specific abuses.
There’s a certain synchronicity in life. Abusers and abuse victims seem to find each other somehow, and victims tend to let them stick around instead of putting up boundaries. I have to wonder if my mom stuck up for the mom next door so vehemently, even though she treated my mom like a dog, because she had that abuser vibe. I’m sure it made my mom feel at home in some way. She was always attracted to abusers, whether it be my dad, the cult, the lady next door, other so called friends that treated her poorly, and I think perhaps even the home she grew up in. It seemed to be almost destiny that led our family down the path of becoming Jehovah’s Witnesses. Everything fit together in one perfect storm of dysfunction and crazy. A chance real estate transaction put us next door to an abusive family that was in a cult that had a vibe that my mom was attracted to and then everything went in this horrible direction that would destroy both families in different ways.
We didn’t really have much money. My dad often worked a fairly low wage factory job. The company he worked for most of his adult life was horrible. He would have nightmares later in life, even after he quit working there, because of the conditions there. They would go on strike quite often, so when the company went on strike we would have no income. If it wasn’t for someone leaving bags of groceries on our car after a meeting one time I’m not sure what we would have had anything to eat that week. So thank you to the Jehovah’s Witnesses who did that. They reached out like a good human being and did truly help someone in need. Of course we did that because we’re expected to be this worldwide brotherhood and to take care of our own, and they probably wouldn’t do it for someone that wasn’t a Witness, but it was still a nice gesture that truly helped.
Jehovah’s Witnesses are discouraged from working overtime or giving any more to their employers than necessary because they have responsibilities to the organization, or to God as they see it. My dad had a ton of things to do in the congregation. He was an elder. So in addition to working full time he had those meetings – for an hour Tuesday night, two hours Thursday night, and two hours Sunday morning that we all went to as a family. He also made sure that we went out in field service. That’s the term for going out knocking on doors – field service, or field ministry. So we would go out in service knocking on doors on Saturdays from 9:30 to noon, or maybe 12:30 because he was an elder. Sometimes he would afterwards have special meetings that he had to attend with other elders on Saturday afternoons, to handle official congregation business. And then Sunday after the two hour meeting we would go out in the field ministry again for an hour after eating lunch.
So it’s not like he had a lot of time or energy to devote to getting us out of the hole financially. In fact, it was our tax returns every year that bailed us out of whatever jams we were in. We could finally get an oil change on our car. You know, the one annual oil change. We could get some used clothing, maybe some school supplies. There were other kids that usually kept me afloat in school with things like paper and pencils and stuff. I would “borrow” things from them. Obviously I never returned it. I couldn’t because I didn’t have anything to give them. But tax return time was like our Christmas even if there was no celebration. Everything just seemed a bit lighter, less heavy and stressed, when the tax return came, at least for a few weeks.
My dad was militant about us always being at all of those meetings, going out in the ministry on Saturday and Sunday – none of it was optional. At one point I noticed that it wasn’t really like we made a choice to do any of these things anymore, it was just compulsive. It was just what we did. And then if the opportunity came up to go fishing or something instead, usually we’d turn it down because dad said we had to go out in field service Saturday morning so we couldn’t go fishing. I will say that my parents’ brand of Jehovah’s Witnesses was more strict than some were. They went by the book, so to speak, where some other families might not.
Eventually my grandfather, who bought that basketball goal for us that I mentioned earlier, went ahead and paid for somebody to come out and install it for us after he saw that it sat in a box for what seemed like an eternity. My dad would actually even come out and play with us sometimes. He played basketball, he would throw a baseball with us sometimes, and that was absolute magic to kids who just were looking for any kind of positive attention from their dad. We would go fishing sometimes. The local minor league baseball team had free tickets all the time. It was never sold out so we could go to those games. These were rare moments, but valuable in their rarity.
My mom was good about trying to make sure we had things to do when she could. She would squirrel away change and we would go on little adventures at times. Or she might go up the street and get us McDonald’s as a treat. She was the only chance that we had of reasoning with my dad. His answer to pretty much everything in life was “no”. It really flies in the face of the fact that my dad always told me to tell the elders “yes” if I’m ever asked to do anything in the congregation. My answer was to be an automatic yes, as was his at the Kingdom Hall, but otherwise he just said no to everything.
My mom was a pretty good buffer. She would run interference sometimes. She would see that he was in a bad mood and tried to make life a little better, at least temporarily.
If you saw us at the meetings, you would think things were awesome. But it’s behind closed doors that monsters hide, not out in the open. Jehovah’s Witnesses are no different than other people, though they put an absolute premium on appearances.
Next I’m going to get into what actually happened in my life as one of Jehovah’s Witnesses as a young person. What happened at those meetings? What was it like to go knocking on strangers’ doors? How were we taught to view the world around us? There are so many things that we were taught that had lasting impact. There are literally people who have been out of the organization for decades that still struggle. They can’t shake certain things that they were indoctrinated with even though they’re free from the cult, and we’re going to learn about some of those things.