The revelation that I had when I learned that I had ADHD was huge for me because it took away the moralization that I gave to my struggles my whole life and showed me that although I was taught to turn to the cult for all of life’s questions, they didn’t really have the answers to everything. In fact, there was a famous talk that made the rounds in the organization by a Brother Mack that highlighted how we’re all just getting by on “pills and prayers brothers, pills and prayers.” I realized that the people around me weren’t “Jehovah’s happy people”, as they claimed to be, and that there was a miserable mindset to everything that they did. I was a part of that.
So I took this opportunity to dive further into things. I wanted to learn more about ADHD and I dove head first into some online forums about it. I wanted to see how other people lived with it. It is a spectrum, so not everyone is going to have the same experience. I spent the next couple of years heavily involved in that community, not only receiving help but I also stuck around and tried to help others as much as I could.
What I learned was that ADHD is an executive function disorder. That’s exactly what it sounds like. It’s a difficulty in executing things. Do to the lack of focus most face some measure of impulsivity and difficulty carrying out what they want to do. Unlike what the elders in the congregation had just told me, that we all do what we want to do and it all comes down to simple choice, our brains are often hijacked by many chemical imbalances and different disorders and trauma. It doesn’t mean that we have no choice in this world but it does mean that life doesn’t merely come down to a matter of conscious choices that are executed with intent. If it did and we had this total control and all we needed to do was to make better choices in life, then we could potentially be perfect if we just learned the right choices to make. And if we could be perfect, why would there be a need for the sacrifice of Jesus Christ that I held in such high esteem? Why would he need to sacrifice himself? What a waste, because we could overcome our sinful or imperfect natures simply by making better choices.
Self-Help
Speaking of choices, I ended up having one to make here. Jehovah’s Witnesses ridicule self-help, and for many years, they pretty much condemned any kind of psychology. After all, the only thing that you really needed was prayer and faith. Faith could move mountains. By the way, if you did go to see a psychologist, it was made clear that we wouldn’t want to mention that we were Jehovah’s Witnesses. If we were to do so and then talk about all of our problems we might make Jehovah (or Jehovah’s Witnesses, which is what they’re really concerned about), look bad, and we can’t have that. Once again it is evident that outside appearance is paramount to the cult. They like to talk about a scripture that references whitewashed graves that look good from the outside but inside are full of dead men’s bones and they would apply that verse to other religions. They did a lot of projecting. In reality they often claim things about others that were just as true, if not more so, within their own cult.
I was quickly realizing that I needed to look outside for some things. This one revelation was changing my worldview. It made me have some compassion for myself for once instead of self-hatred. I had to accept that I might not be able to do everything that I wanted to do because like every human being, I have limitations. Now that doesn’t mean that those limitations have to destroy my life or dominate it. It just means that I might need some coping tools or strategies to manage it. In the end I did end up leaving that ADD forum that I was a member of for so many years. At a point I realized that we all play roles in life. Some are the victors, some are the victims, but your attitude about things impacts your experience. I knew that I couldn’t get rid of ADHD, but I could better my life with it. A man without arms might not be able to catch a ball in his hands like everyone else, but that doesn’t mean that he can’t find some way to catch a ball. I’m not saying that we can all do everything, because we can’t. But we can all live happy and productive lives, even if they aren’t everything that we thought we wanted.
My goal here is to show you what I learned over the next seven years from audiobooks and podcasts that changed my perspective, opened my eyes and gave me a new and healthy life. It got me out of this cult mindset, away from the dysfunction and the toxic ways of being. I learned so much and I want to share it, because whether you were in a cult or not, this stuff can help everyone. I mean this isn’t cult or anti-cult books that I was reading, these were just books and podcasts that I listened to that are healthy for anyone. This is what I learned that turned my life around from a narcissistic, suicidal, self-loathing guy who was putting on pounds as quickly as debt with the IRS; to a person that has empathy for others and acceptance for myself and that has dropped the weight, gotten out of debt, and is actually happy and healthy.
Happiness
After learning about ADHD, I realized that I had a big problem with perfectionism, so I started looking into books on the subject. The one that made the greatest impact was a book called “Happier” by Tal Ben-Shahar. My biggest takeaway was this one phrase, “happiness is the ultimate currency”. In other words that’s what we’re all striving for. We think that once we get to a certain place we’ll be happy. For instance, you might go to college and you’re pushing so hard to achieve and you think that once you get that degree you’re going to be happy. Then you get a degree and you’re not, because now you have this job that you need to get. And you say that once you get that dream job then you’ll be happy. Then you get that dream job and you’re still not happy. Well, once I get that dream car, that dream house, or that family, or whatever it is for you personally, at that point you’ll be happy. Over and over again, that goal becomes happiness postponed. We have a distorted view of goals in the western world. Goals are there just to give us a direction. They tell us where we’re headed, and they set us on a journey. That is what really matters and where we can find our joy, if we take the time to enjoy the journey instead of looking to the accomplishment of a specific and narrow goal to be our joy in life.
There was an example in his book that actually impacted me very specifically. Happiness isn’t about what you do as much as it is about why you do it. They did a study on people that clean in hospitals, and it was found that they were very happy people. That may seem counterintuitive, after all they’re surrounded by people that are sick or dying and they have to clean up things like surgery rooms and other areas behind profoundly sick individuals every day. It seems from the outside like those people would hate their jobs. In reality though, those people didn’t see what they did as just cleaning up blood or vomit. They were helping people. They got to know people and saw what they did for what it was in totality instead of just the act that they were performing.
This really hit me, because back when I was listening to the book I was working in the cleaning industry. I didn’t clean because I liked cleaning. I mean let’s face it, the janitor or cleaner is the unfortunate butt of many jokes. Sometimes people treat you as a servant and see you as nothing more than that and you don’t always clean up the most pleasant things. But why did I clean? For the same reasons that many Jehovah’s Witnesses have cleaning businesses, it’s the only option that allowed us to make more money than a minimum wage job since we were discouraged from going to college. It gives many Jehovah’s Witnesses a flexible schedule to work around so that they can devote more time to pioneering and other Jehovah’s Witness interests. I kept trying to get away from it, but I kept getting sucked back in because we needed the money. I did like working with my wife, but here’s a secret. All of our clients would notice that I cleaned all of the bathrooms in every house. Want to know why? It’s because I had bad social anxiety and if I cleaned bathrooms nobody would talk to me. I wasn’t out and about in the house like my wife was. The internal shift of realizing that what I did was about helping people, not just about taking something that is dirty and making it clean, was the opposite of what I was taught as a JW. I wasn’t supposed to get to know my clients because they weren’t Jehovah’s Witnesses. No wonder I had such social anxiety. Over time these families got to know me well and maybe they wished I would stop talking at times, but it was better than where I had been. I was learning how to find the joy and happiness in life and in my work. I literally became “happier” just like the title of the book.
It was such a contrast to the way the cult taught me to see the world. I was taught to see it as bad and awful and to look toward the future for happiness rather than today. Like I said, I started to see our own cleaning business for what it was, which was about helping people. That’s something I love to do. In fact I started to realize how good cleaning was for me. Being a perfectionist, it gave me an outlet for some of those tendencies. It helped me to work physically while I listened to audiobooks and podcasts that expanded my mind every day. I actually loved what I did and the people that I did it for. I said it very early on, and I’ll say it here again – cleaning kind of saved my life. I’ll explain more later when I talk about our journey out of the cult.
Another book that hit me was the book “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Viktor Frankl. It is his tale of surviving the horrors of concentration camps. The quote that is famous from this book rings true. “Everything can be taken from a man except one thing. The last of human freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances. To choose one’s own way.”
Now as with everything, nothing is absolute. I’ve come to understand that although we do have that choice we may or may not have the tools needed to make a healthy choice, or we may have been coerced and controlled, but if we have healthy tools we can choose to see things differently. There are people in those camps that lacked good tools and that gave up and died or that turned into people that they wouldn’t have wanted to be otherwise. Frankl observed this and was able to see beyond those immediate circumstances. Clearly he had tools that others didn’t have around him. Nobody with the tools for something better would have chosen death. But ultimately I did have choice as to how I would continue to live my life, to choose my own path, instead of merely walking the prescribed path that my parents and the cult set before me.
Boundaries
In the book “Boundaries” by Henry Cloud I learned how to set proper boundaries with other people. This was big for both me and my wife. When you’re in a cult, it is difficult to have proper boundaries. They overreach those boundaries on a daily basis by dictating what to believe, how to think, how to behave, and how to feel. Back to that BITE model I discussed earlier. There are a lot of narcissists and codependent people in the cult which makes sense when you think about what it takes to control people. My wife was super codependent with me and I had my narcissistic tendencies too. It is interesting how the dynamics of Jehovah’s Witnesses are often mirrored in the relationships that come from it. This book helped me to see where other people end and I begin, to create separation and a lack of need to control anything that wasn’t mine, shining a light on my own controlling tendencies that came as a result of feeling so out of control my whole life.
Another good book by Henry Cloud was called “Necessary Endings”. I read this a little too early in my awakening process to see where it really could have applied to help me exit the cult sooner. But the lesson is so good for everyone. How do you get a prize winning rose to grow? Do you just let the plant run wild and never touch it? No. You have to prune it. There are things that are dead and even living blooms that you have to remove so that the plant has energy to devote to new life and energy into that prize winning rose. The same is true for our lives. There are often things that we’re involved in or people that we’re involved with that are sucking us dry. I like the term vampires for people like that because they really just take from us without offering us anything in return. Maybe it’s a job, a person, or a hobby or some other commitment that just really shouldn’t have a place in your life anymore because it’s just not giving you anything. In order to grow you need to get rid of it so that you will have the energy to grow, just like those roses. I remember at one point years later looking at my wife and pointing out that the cult just took and took and took from us and it never gave us anything in return. Eventually we both outgrew it and it was one of the healthiest things we’ve ever done to let it go.
Editing My Story
Probably my favorite book was a book called “A Million Miles In a Thousand Years” by Donald Miller. Now I don’t know if this book had the greatest impact, but I loved listening to it. The book is all about writing a better story, not necessarily a fictional one, but your own. It’s about editing your own life, taking that ten thousand foot view of it all or watching it as an outsider. Looking at the roles that you were playing in your own life. A quote that I like from it is, “And once you live a good story and you get a taste for a kind of meaning in life, you can’t go back to being normal. You can’t go back to meaningless scenes stitched together by the forgettable thread of wasted time”. This is so true. I’m at the point now in life where I’m free and outside of this cult. I could never go back to what I used to think was normal, and it’s almost difficult to believe that I was ever there.
I want to take this opportunity to beg you. If you’re listening to this and you’re unhappy with your life, expand your mind and read books that challenge your way of thinking or being no matter how uncomfortable it is. There is something better out there, you just have to find it. By challenging those areas in which you’re unhappy you’re likely to find a way out sooner. If it’s not for you, find out now. Don’t wait. Find out now. Jehovah’s Witnesses often talk about people like me that leave and they say that I left because my feelings got hurt in the congregation or because I just wanted to go live some debauched lifestyle, and in that way they can trivialize it like it was some snap decision borne out of never giving Jehovah a chance. Well I never sought to leave. I had no intentions of leaving. I could have never imagined that I would leave Jehovah’s Witnesses. It wasn’t one thing, it was a process of learning that took years and that was extremely difficult. Once you learn something good and healthy you can’t go back to that toxic wasteland. It’s over. They shouldn’t fault you for it, but they have to in order to justify staying there themselves, wishing pain and death upon you for leaving. They need you to be a terrible person in order to justify their own terrible narrative.
Another quote from “A Million Miles in a Thousand Years” is, “The human body essentially recreates itself every six months. Nearly every cell of your hair and skin and bone dies. And another is directed to its former place. You are not who you were last November.” Think about it. Your body is changing so quickly automatically while your mind and emotions can stay stuck in the exact same place for decades. What could happen in your life if you took the time to change your perspective on life or your emotional health by learning new tools that help you grow, just like your body does?
So I’m going to take this opportunity to tell you the “crabs in a bucket” story. It is said that if you go crabbing and you put crabs in a bucket, some will try to escape if you don’t have a lid on it. However as one gets close to escaping, the others will actually grab it and pull it back down. Now there may be simple reasons for this, but it’s a good illustration for how humans behave in a group. If you try to escape from your present situation, if you try to write a better story, as the book says, there are going to be people that will try to pull you back down. After all, if you can make a change in your life, that makes them feel bad because they make that kind of change and your actions shine a light on it. It’s like you are doing this to them. They take it personally and rather than being happy for you and celebrating with you they might actually try to pull you down. Assuming you’re doing healthy things, you may have leave some people behind. It’s just a fact of life. Well, actually you’re just moving forward and it is they that are choosing to stay behind.
For example I had mentioned before that we had a mounting tax debt. I listened to the Dave Ramsey Show for years. If you like podcasts you can listen to it as a podcast as well or watch it on YouTube. He also has a number of books. They’re all about how to handle money. Basically, if you have debt, it is like you are the gazelle and there is a cheetah trying to run you down. You should run as quickly as possible to get away from debt before it gets you. And once you get away from that cheetah you want to stay away from it.
Well the time came when we got a bill in the mail for fifty thousand dollars that we owed in back taxes to the IRS. It was during our awakening process and I was seeing my efforts pay off in other aspects of life. I told my wife that although there are no debtors’ prisons, we were going to have to do some hard time if we were ever going to pay off what we owed. We discussed our path out. I remember telling my mom that we were going to work super hard to pay off our debt like the gazelle that’s running from the cheetah. She told me in no uncertain terms that I would fail and that even if I did manage to get out of debt, things are just going to fall apart afterward. In other words you’re poor. Get used to it. Things can’t get better. Crabs in a bucket trying to pull me down. I’ll save the story for how all that played out for later, but let’s just say that she was wrong.
Emotional Intelligence
There was something in my life that was lacking and I could never quite put my finger on it. In fact it was something that was a big issue between my wife and I. She would always ask for this one thing and I could not give it to her…empathy. Empathy was a word that was not in my vocabulary. If you had a bad life it was just because you made bad choice, and if you just made better ones then you’d have what you wanted, just like the cult taught me to see things. So go fix it and be happy and stop talking about it. Of course this lack of empathy was directed at myself as well. That black and white attitude with no allowance for where people are in life, where they came from, what tools they might have, or their mental or emotional makeup, is so ugly. I had a lot to learn about emotional intelligence, something of which I had zero. I grew up in an emotional desert where emotions were bad and to be avoided at all costs. I learned the art of perspective taking to try to put myself in someone else’s shoes, to see things through the eyes of other people, something that actually I was never exposed to. Nobody ever cared about my feelings. Why would I care about anyone else’s? I had so much to learn.
One book that helped was called “The Emotionally Abusive Relationship” by Beverly Ingle. It helped me to recognize emotional abuse.
Another good book was called “Healing the Shame That Binds You” by John Bradshaw. One thing that I took away from it was the importance of feeling compassion for yourself and whatever happened to you. Often people that are abused in some way feel shame about it as if it were somehow their fault. The book said to get a picture of yourself at whatever age you were when something happened to you. For me I got pictures from right before my family became Jehovah’s Witnesses and everything changed. I scanned that picture in and I put it on my phone so that every time I used my cell phone I saw this picture. If this speaks to you, get your own picture of yourself when you were a child and something went wrong. Look at that image and feel compassion for that little boy or girl. I remember looking around at other kids and who they were and trying to imagine them up against what I was up against at or around that age. It was a very healing experience. When you see the innocence of a child and to realize that was once you, it has an impact. I think that in the trajectory of all of this I’ve kind of gone back to where I started as a kid with healthy emotions.
One of the books I read, I don’t remember which one, referred to your emotional state being like a pipe or plumbing. If you have any specific emotions that are plugged up then none of the emotions can’t go freely through that pipe anymore. Your pipe is clogged, and you need to figure out where you got stuck so as to free it up. Once you do you will find that the others start to flow more freely as well. We all went through a lot of trauma, and many of us have sadness and the anger that backs up and shows on the surface as evidence of what we need to go get set free from.
One of the most powerful books that I read was called “The Power of Vulnerability” by Brene Brown. I first saw one of her TED Talks on vulnerability. Coming from my world, vulnerability was seen as a weakness, especially because I was a male. You weren’t allowed to be vulnerable or have feelings as a guy. I was also bullied at home by my dad, and then at school by other kids who could smell my lack of self-worth like chum in the water. I felt vulnerable and that vulnerability was never a good thing. But this book changed all of that. I learned that often the tools that we use as children to avoid pain, those coping methods that we have as children end up being our greatest downfalls as adults. Like shutting down vulnerability. While they may work as children, they’re dysfunctional and they have an expiration date. The book taught me to see myself and to let others see me too. ITo this day I still walk with my head down and somewhat poor posture because I never wanted to be seen, as it was never safe among the wrong people. Allowing myself to be seen by the right people as I’ve learned to see myself, has been incredibly freeing.
Telling my story here is very vulnerable. Anyone that I know or might know in the future could learn all of these things about me. But it’s okay. Now they’ll know me better. Don’t be afraid to be known. Shame hides in the darkness. It thrives in the darkness, and when exposed to the light of day, shame starts to die. Let me take a second here to anyone else here that was once in a cult or that has had tough times – Tell your story to healthy people. If the experience of telling it is negative, you might be surrounded by the wrong people. Think about it. When you were in the cult, you couldn’t tell your story. People keep their stories to themselves and then they feel alone. All while someone else, likely in the same congregation, maybe even sitting next to you in the Hall, has the same story and they’re hiding theirs and feeling alone. How can the cult claim to have the truth when so much is hidden and discouraged from ever coming to light? Expose your story to the light.
In the book “The Power of Vulnerability”, there are two classes of people that are discussed. The “wholehearted” and everyone else. These people that she eventually called the wholehearted, these were healthy and happy people and she found some differences between them and everyone else. The wholehearted play and rest more while the others see exhaustion and productivity as their self-worth. She is the one that first introduced me to the concept that guilt is “I did a bad thing”, and that shame is “I am a bad person”, which is very unhealthy. It is healthy to have a measure of guilt. If you do a bad thing to someone, a little bit of remorse is a healthy thing. But when you take it to the point where you feel like you’re now a bad person, that shame that is incredibly unhealthy. I had a lot of what she calls “shame tapes” playing in my head. Unfortunately shame is often used to try to motivate people. It is a horribly unhealthy way to do so. As she explains, shaming an addict is like giving a person dying of thirst some salt water to drink. You’re just fueling their fire and sending them in deeper. This can be applied to so many situations.
In fact this was a book where I really started to learn empathy because she teaches empathy as the antidote to shame. That was huge for me. I needed it for myself and for others. She actually teaches empathy skills in the book. To be able to see the world as someone else sees it, and to learn to be non-judgmental, which was a big one for me. To not only understand someone else’s feelings but to be able to communicate to them that you understand so that they don’t feel so alone and to be vulnerable ourselves, this message absolutely changed my life. It’s hard to have narcissistic tendencies while exhibiting empathy. They are the complete antithesis of one another.
Speaking of empathy and walking in the shoes of somebody else there was a podcast that I listened to for years and that helped me tremendously. It is by a comedian named Paul Gilmartin, and the show is called “The Mental Illness Happy Hour”. I have taken so many lessons away from this podcast. He has one guest each week that he interviews, and speaking of vulnerability these people get deep into their lives and what they battle with. I will warn you that everything that you could imagine could be discussed in these episodes. They’re not really something you want to listen to with the kids in the car, but you can find one for just about anything that you personally battle. He also has surveys on his website that people can fill out and submit anonymously that help give insight into what people are dealing with. You might even find it cathartic yourself to go through some of those surveys and to let out some of what you’ve been through. People write about everything from their shame and secrets to their happy moments in life. He then takes those surveys and reads them on the show and comments on them in a very compassionate and emotionally healthy way. He deals with his own issues and he’s very open about them on the show. So you don’t have to feel alone. It can be very healing to people. It can be very dark at times, but that darkness is real too. And everything is done with a view to healing so there’s humor thrown in because it’s beautiful to be able to find the humor, even in those dark times.
That podcast was instrumental in helping me to see how much other people are dealing with behind the scenes. You have no idea what other people are going through. Just like nobody knew what I was going through. The only person that knew what I was going through at my lowest point was my wife. Even then I couldn’t express to her the intensity of what was really going on inside of me. No one else can understand exactly where you are, but if you look around, you really have no idea where other people are either. I remember it striking me how stupid it was that I assumed that I could go to some stranger’s door, knock on it out of the blue, offer them some cult propaganda, and then, if they rejected it, think that “oh they don’t deserve The Truth”. As if I had any idea who those people really were or what they went through on a daily basis. It was such shallow thinking. My appreciation for the human condition was deepening. I started seeing the bigger picture. Not this picture painted by a cult about God or from the prospect of some great war between God and Satan. The more I learned, the more I realized that I didn’t know near as much as I thought I did. Ignorance is a license for arrogance but once you challenge what you think and start expanding your horizons you really become more humble.
Through “The Mental Illness Happy Hour” podcast, I was introduced to various books that helped. One was called “The Narcissistic Family” by Robert Pressman and Stephanie Donaldson Pressman. When he described it, I knew this book was for me. I had once told my mom that I felt like I grew up in an alcoholic family without the alcohol. Well this book was actually written as a diagnostic manual for therapists by therapists because they saw these families that were exhibiting the same symptoms as though a parent was an alcoholic but nobody was drinking in the family. My dad was that alcoholic, even though he never touched alcohol, and my mom was codependent with him. If that sounds like your family, read this book.
The last book that I’m going to mention that I learned so much from is called “A New Earth” by Eckhart Tolle. Now this is a deep book that really finished off the last part of me that was in the way of my empathy fully expressing itself. And that was my ego. This book taught me how to just be. Not to over identify with things like my religion, my career, my status, etc. We are just ourselves when we are without ego. It is the ego that pushes us to do lots of unhealthy things in the end. That religion has its own problems. That job will end. That material thing will break or be replaced by something better, and so on.
He actually mentions a scripture where Jesus said that if someone takes your tunic, you should give them your cloak as well. The point is that you don’t want to let your ego get in the way. If someone took something from you, they took an item, not your identity. So rather than taking it personally, like it was done to you, realize that they took a thing. I’ll admit, I still have a natural tendency to get worked up about things because of ego like everyone does, but not over identifying with it helps you stay away from drama. Think about it. A person that loses their possessions in a fire, while it hurts in that moment they typically realize that what really matters is their lives and the lives of their loved ones that survived. Those are the things that matter.
I learned the ego comes from getting stuck in thought in one’s own mind. I’m sure that with my hyperactive ADHD mind I had a very strong ego because I naturally got anxious about things as my brain tends to ruminate. The whole book is about separating things out. Don’t say, “I am unhappy”, say “right now I have unhappiness inside me”. You see the difference there? Putting in some separation between who you are and what you experience. Again, don’t identify with your emotions as if they are you. The same goes for roles in life. People treat the CEO differently than the janitor. As he pointed out, this allows those roles to determine how they identified those people. We do the same with ourselves. Parents can identify too much with that role and forget who they are. Or maybe they try to fulfill their egos through their children.
You don’t have to ask how to be yourself. Just stop adding baggage to yourself by trying to figure out who you are. Like more roles. People keep trying them on in a search to find themselves. But the reality is we are who we are beneath all those external things. It really helped me to get myself out of my head, especially with my identification with the cult roles that were put upon me and that I then took upon myself later. A point that was made in the book that struck me was that people enjoy vacations so much because when you’re on vacation, each moment is new and experiential. It gets you out of your head. You’re being more yourself, you’re being curious, you’re just enjoying this new place and not being dominated by ego or playing some role.
Actually, I’m going to throw one more book out there real quick. If you struggle to figure out what actually matters to you in life I recommend the book “The Last Lecture” by Randy Pausch. Years ago his story made headlines. I think he was on Oprah. It’s his story of dying with pancreatic cancer, but it’s a lot more than that. It really is a story about living with pancreatic cancer. If you struggle to find the beauty in life, read this book.
Contrast these things here that I was taking in with the Fear, Obligation, and Guilt that the cult taught me to live my life by. Can you see how a person might start to wake up when exposed to such healthy thinking?
So what did it look like when I started making application of all of this information in my life? That’s what we’ll discuss next as everything comes crumbling down, not just for me, but my wife was along with me for this journey, and there were some odd things that happened along the way.