If you notice the title and you were never one of Jehovah’s Witnesses you may be wondering what in the world I’m referring to. “Get out of her, my people. It all comes crumbling down.” That is a reference to the scripture in Revelation 18 verse 2 that Jehovah’s Witnesses like to direct at all of the other religions of the world. The subject of all the proclamations found there is Babylon the Great. According to Jehovah’s Witnesses, this is believed to be the world empire of false religion just like Babylon in ancient times was a hub of false religion. So they aim these verses at false religion today. Because Jehovah’s Witnesses have “The Truth”, they believe that it applies to everyone else. For those of us that learn the truth about “The Truth” we can just as easily point this back at them.
In the New World Translation, Revelation chapter 18, verses 4 through 8 reads:
“4 And I heard another voice out of heaven say: “Get out of her, my people, if you do not want to share with her in her sins, and if you do not want to receive part of her plagues. 5 For her sins have massed together clear up to heaven, and God has called her acts of injustice to mind. 6 Repay her in the way she treated others, yes, pay her back double for the things she has done; in the cup she has mixed, mix a double portion for her. 7 To the extent that she glorified herself and lived in shameless luxury, to that extent give her torment and mourning. For she keeps saying in her heart: ‘I sit as queen, and I am not a widow, and I will never see mourning. 8 That is why in one day her plagues will come, death and mourning and famine, and she will be completely burned with fire, because Jehovah God, who judged her, is strong.”
I took these verses and pointed them right back at Jehovah’s Witnesses and this is my account of how everything came crumbling down for me, and for my wife as well. It’s time to show you how things progressed as I was learning all this new information. You’ll see how we got out of that debt that we had amassed, how my relationship with my dad changed, and how everything really started changing for the better, in the end. But eventually there was a hefty price to pay for all of it.
Family Changes
So let’s go back a bit to where I left off with my story. I was depressed. I had suicidal ideations and my life was a wreck. I started to become enlightened and I was getting deep into the realm of self-help and psychology. That helped me to realize that this organization that I was taught to look to for everything, didn’t have everything that I or others needed. This was my awakening process. I got healthier and decided that I wanted to be the one to right some wrongs even if I wasn’t the one that started them. I wanted to help others and to have better relationships.
For starters, I wanted to give my youngest brother and my sister that are 20 years younger than me a better life. So I would take them out and buy them clothes. My wife and I would help decorate my sister’s room. We gave them things like our Nintendo Wii. We bought them skateboards and other things. We tried to give them the kinds of things that I would have gotten from my grandfather. When he was alive, he would buy us things. He had the ability to make some things happen for us. Growing up kind of poor, we really didn’t have those opportunities otherwise. My grandpa wasn’t around anymore so I wanted to help out where I could. It’s tough when you grow up without the money to do fun things or you just don’t have much. Aside from that I wanted to make sure that I did things with my younger siblings. We took them places and had a good time togehter.
At one point I found out something about how things were going at my family’s home with my dad and my youngest brother. My mom would tell me things and I wasn’t going to just let it happen and continue on like it was. Nobody likes to see somebody get bullied, and at this point in my life, I didn’t live at home, so I didn’t have to stand idly by. I told my mom that I was coming to get my dad and we were going to go for a drive, which is something we had never done before. My wife and I went over on a Saturday and while she and my mom took bets on who would come back alive, I invited my dad to go for a ride. I took him to a nearby park, parked the car and we got out. It was honestly one of the harder things I had to do up to that point because my dad was very authoritarian. He generally refused to be questioned in any way or to be challenged. His answer was “no” to everything. He didn’t want to hear what you had to say, and that was that. It was his way or the highway. In this case, however, I held all of the cards. He was in my car and I took him out and I didn’t live under his roof anymore. So the power balance had shifted. Basically I told him everything from how I felt as a child to how my brothers felt. I told him what a jerk he was and that it needed to change and that this was his wake up call. I guess it was a “jerk intervention” of sorts. I didn’t mince words.
For me, I was standing up not just for my brother, but for a younger me that didn’t know how and that had no power. In fact, this is something I had tried to tell my dad when I was a kid. I would leave these notes to my dad sometimes. I’d write them and put them up outside of my bedroom door, hoping he would see them and change. I’m guessing my mom probably threw them away and that he probably never saw them. I don’t know. Nothing was ever said to me about it. But admittedly his emotional abuse was getting to me. I would often cry myself to sleep at night during certain periods of my childhood. There really wasn’t much love in my family.
People typically have one of a few responses to a given challenge. We have the fight, flight, freeze, and fawn responses. I’m not really one to flee. I’m just not wired that way. And it wasn’t like I had anywhere to go to as a kid anyway. The other two responses didn’t come naturally, so fight it was. In one particularly disturbed moment as a kid, I actually got up in the middle of the night with tears in my eyes after a particularly bad day with my dad. I went into the kitchen and grabbed a knife. I had plans, or at least impulsive thoughts, on putting an end to his abuse while he slept. Obviously, I couldn’t go through with it, which is for his benefit and for mine as well. I just ended up going back to bed.
I told my dad about this moment while at the park that I took him to, and if that doesn’t wake a person up to the realities of their impact on other people, then I don’t know what in the world could.
My dad said all the right things. He apologized for things. He told me a bit about his own upbringing. And I have to say, his own upbringing was pretty messed up from what he told me. One of the things any parent wants is to be a better parent than their own parents, and based on what he told me, I think he may have tried to do that. Unfortunately for both of us, it doesn’t sound like we’re setting a very high bar here. But anyway, when it came to us kids, my dad just thought we were moody teenagers and that’s why we were staying away. He didn’t know that we truly despised him so much. He actually went to a doctor after that, and if you know my dad, he did not volunteer to go to the doctor. I’ll talk more about that later. But in this case he actually went of his own volition and got medication for depression.
Now from what I was told by my mom he changed for the better, but it wasn’t long before he went off the meds and decided that he didn’t need them anymore. So whatever good was done there, I don’t know what the impact was. It’s not like he got therapy or talked to anyone or tried to work on his perception of the world, but at least he did something, even if but for a moment. I wish he would have gone deep and received professional help to heal over the long term.
My relationship with my dad did start to change. I realized he was never going to make it better on his own. So if I wanted something better, it was up to me. I reached out to him and invited him to do things. I’d take him fishing, and to baseball games. We went out and ate at restaurants. I even took him to his first ever University of Kentucky basketball game, despite my love for the rival school and my loathing for all things blue or cats. I told him that I would make a deal. I wouldn’t cheer for them, but I would at least refrain from booing. I tease, but it was the one time that I ever really rooted for them. I wanted them to win for my dad. In fact I chose the game that I did to make sure that they were going to win. I mean, props to Kentucky, they have a great basketball team. They do pretty much year in and year out. But there weren’t a lot of opportunities for us to go, so I wanted to maximize the fun he would have. We went and Kentucky and blew the other team out. My dad had a great time. I had a good time too, and ultimately that’s what it was all about.
I started to get to know my dad better. Like I mentioned before I found out a few things about his upbringing. But I started learning some about his past and how he grew up, some of the things he was interested in. He had never spoken a word about any of that in my entire life. And although he wasn’t extremely open about things, we were at least talking. He even worked for me, as I mentioned before. He and my wife and I would get to be pretty good friends, or at least so we thought. We’d go out and eat lunch together at work if we were at the same property. My wife went fishing with us and attended some of the baseball games that we went to together.
The problem was, you never really knew where you stood with my dad. I do remember that one time he told me he was proud of me when he was working for me. He said he was proud that I created the business that I had, the business that he was working for. That’s the only time I can remember my dad ever saying anything positive to me. Sometimes he and I would have these great conversations and he would say all the right things, but then later my mom would tell me that he got home and trashed what we had talked about. It was really messed up and it was hard to figure out what was real with him. He was just a really tough person to ever pin down and he was such a great actor.
Now as I mentioned before, I don’t drink because I was told that alcoholism runs in my family. My dad never drank, but he did have a problem with sugar and I’m not talking about eating one too many brownies and putting on a few pounds. It apparently started when he was 20 years old. He was drafted into the military and he was turned away because he had crazy blood sugar levels and high blood pressure. They told him they weren’t going to take him and that he should go take care of himself. He never did. At 50 years old his body was wasting away and an elder at the Kingdom Hall cornered him and invited him to take his blood sugar together. I believe that I was told it was an astronomical figure like 400 or 500 or something. When my dad went to the hospital, the doctors basically told him that his kidneys should have shut down years ago based on his medical history and that he was very lucky to get a second chance. They gave him a new diet and some pills to help manage his blood sugar.
But denial was my dad’s middle name. He lived a life full of it. In this case he didn’t really change his diet. He was fairly non-compliant on the medication as well, just like he was with the depression meds. So in his late 50s he was wasting away again. My mom caught him throwing up in the bathroom. She had noticed that he wasn’t eating much but apparently it had gotten to the point where he couldn’t even hold down water. She asked how long it had been, and he admitted that he had been throwing up everything for a month. He refused to go to the doctor. So I was called in to be the adult, to be the dad, to come in and make him go to the doctor. And I did. I told him that basically he was going to go one of three ways he could either go on his own, or I could pick his weak self up and take him, or he would go when he fell out and an ambulance was called. Those were his choices. He went voluntarily.
According to the doctors his kidneys had finally shut down. He was in end stage renal failure and they said that he would have died within 48 hours had he not come in right when he did. He was put on dialysis and his life completely changed this time. He had to change because when you do dialysis you can’t hide what you are doing. You go in and get hooked up to a machine three times a week. For him it was Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and they know all of your levels. They knew what he was eating. They knew what he was doing. There was no hiding anymore.
His outlook on life also changed. He felt so stupid and and he knew that he had done it to himself. He literally said so. He was a sugar addict, and if you think about it, what is alcohol if not sugar. To be honest, I struggle with sugar myself. I don’t just like sweets, sweets literally calm me down. The opposite of the effect it has on many. I could go drink a Mountain Dew and go to bed. Sugar is a stimulant and the meds that they give to people with ADHD are stimulants and they have the opposite impact on our brain chemistry that they would do on the average person.
Well, my dad ended up having to quit his job and went on disability. His life for the next six years or so would consist of going to dialysis in the morning, sleeping the rest of the day away as it was very tough on his body, and resting the next day. And then the following morning getting up and doing it all over again. It’s sad to say that the only day he ever even felt decent was Sunday because that was the farthest he ever got from a dialysis treatment. He would go Friday morning and would sleep the rest of that day. Then Saturday he would rest, but he would at least be up and around some. And then he had that extra day off Sunday, where he would finally start feeling better again. Monday morning he started all over again. None of this slowed his Jehovah’s Witness activities down more than a little bit. He still gave public talks from the stage. He still would go visit other congregations and give talks. He still went out door to door. Nothing could stop that compulsion.
We also found out that my dad was blind in one eye. We went out to eat with him one night and he always drove. After eating, he got in the car and forgot to defrost the windshield. I asked if he was going to do so as he started to leave because I could barely see out of it and I was sitting up front and he played it off. It turns out that that’s how everything looked to him. You’ve probably heard the saying, “he’s blind in one eye and can’t see out the other”. My dad was literally blind in one eye and had never told anyone and he literally could not see out of the other one because he had a cataract on it. Did I mention something about denial earlier?
My dad also had neuropathy in his legs where his nerves were dying from poor circulation. He would stumble around a lot because he couldn’t feel his lower extremities very well. There he was though, going from door to door, going up steps, knocking on people’s doors out in the field ministry. He fell off a porch at least once, although I know he was bruised up a few times. He had issues while he was giving public talks at other Kingdom Halls where he had to stop in the middle of his presentation. I think he almost passed out one time. There were multiple issues, but it didn’t matter. No matter what, that man’s compulsion to do anything that Jehovah’s Witnesses asked him came first. You might remember that he told me when I was young that if they asked me to do something then I should just say yes. And that was my dad. Anything they asked him to do, he said yes. It didn’t matter what his physical capabilities were or what was reasonable.
In fact, let’s talk about something that was both mind blowing and infuriating. Every summer at the annual convention of Jehovah’s Witnesses, my dad was assigned to be the head of a department. There are various departments at these regional or district conventions. They have departments for information or media relations or cleaning, things like that. Would you like to guess what department my dad was the head of? Nope, not cleaning. Even though he cleaned for us. Not the attendants to help people find where they’re going in the convention center. Not media relations. My dad was the head of the First Aid Department. Just let that soak in. Year after year, they made that man the head of health care while he was killing himself and doing nothing about it and they knew about it. He was falling out while giving talks, a total trainwreck physically. Do you know how that made us feel to see him set up as the head of first aid? Rushing to hand out medications while he destroyed himself for that awful cult? Being nurturing to other people while having disdain for the people that he lived with every day?
I have to mention that you were not going to the doctor at my house unless something was extremely wrong. In retrospect, I believe I’ve had at least two lisfranc injuries. That’s essentially the ligament in the arch of your foot pulling away from the bone. My foot turned black twice when I was a kid, once in each foot, and my dad had actually had similar injuries playing basketball when he was young. There were pictures of him with a cast on for his broken foot, but me, when I got hurt I was basically told to get over it. We didn’t go to the doctor for that stuff. But at conventions my dad is handing out meds like candy to people and being compassionate to them. Again, another example of him acting the exact opposite of who he was at home.
Despite it all I have to hand it to my dad. That man just kept plugging away. He got his cataract removed and he drove everywhere with one eye. That man dodged bullet after bullet and just kept on going. Ultimately though, nobody is truly bulletproof and dialysis patients don’t last forever.
There was a very poignant moment where my dad had complications while he was on dialysis and he was in denial. He had a port in his arm that he would get dialysis through and something had gone wrong with it. Dialysis wasn’t really working because of a blockage or something similar and the toxins were building up in his bloodstream, causing him to become delirious. My wife and I were cleaning a house and I was thinking about how things were going and feeling upset. I was just thinking about how my dad had never really lived. He never really seemed to want to live. That led to me thinking about how, as morbid as it sounds, I really should have just let the man die the last time I was called in to help. Utimately that’s what it seemed like he always wanted. He really kind of did everything he could to manifest that in his life. Who was I to push him to stay alive when he clearly didn’t really want to. It wasn’t fair to expect him to live for me or my mom or anyone else. He had always been depressed at a minimum.
Right then, my sister texted me and told me that my dad was delirious and singing. That was something that he never did. I don’t think he had ever sang anything in his life, other than the Kingdom Songs of Jehovah’s Witnesses. The song for this occasion was The Gambler by Kenny Rogers. I guess he was into old school country music. So let’s look at the lyrics that my dad was singing while I was sitting there thinking about this. It was literally what my sister typed in that text. ”You’ve got to know when to hold them, know when to fold them, know when to walk away, and know when to run.”
Now that’s all I even knew of the song but let’s play it out and read the rest of that part of the song. As if it wasn’t poignant enough just given the thoughts I was having and what I just told you, the lyrics go on, “you never count your money when you’re sitting at the table. There’ll be time enough for counting when the dealings done. Every gambler knows that the secret to surviving is knowing what to throw away and knowing what to keep, because every hand’s a winner and every hand’s a loser and the best you can hope for is to die in your sleep.” I broke down a bit when I heard what he was singing. It was exactly what I was thinking back then and it was exactly what he seemed to want. My dad did get better for a while and I’ll come back to how the saga ended.
Day To Day Changes
Other areas of my life were changing too. My marriage was becoming better and better as we both became more healthy and learned the lessons mentioned previously through different books. A relationship can only be as good as its weakest link and we both had a lot of weaknesses. So we just kept working on ourselves. We started to understand ourselves better on an individual level, and the more we learned the stronger we became together as well. I heard a quote once that I liked and it said, “If two people in a relationship are the same, then one of you is unnecessary”. I didn’t want my wife to be a carbon copy of me but she had been so sheltered that she had no idea who she was. Either her family or the cult had dictated who she should be during her life, and it had been me doing much of the same in our marriage, absent any real identity on her part. Looking back we weren’t ready to get married when we did. Not at all. That’s probably an obvious statement for people that grow up in the normal world, but we didn’t. If you weren’t married by your early twenties the chances of finding someone got slimmer and slimmer in the cult. Nobody is really ready at that age. Your brain isn’t even fully developed until you’re at least 25 years old. We had no clue who we were individually so we couldn’t have been a very good couple.
Somewhere around 2008 when I got to my lowest point of depression, we stopped going out in the door to door ministry work as Jehovah’s Witnesses. We were both pretty unhappy and we just couldn’t go invite people to become Witnesses so as to be as unhappy as we were. I could never sell anything that I didn’t believe in and this wasn’t making me happy. So how could I justify inviting other people to it now? I still thought that Jehovah’s Witnesses had the truth. As I had been told my whole life then, there must have been something wrong with me if something so true wasn’t fitting who I was, and I was clearly trying very hard to work on that side of things.
We also started missing meetings, as they just didn’t seem as important anymore. I wanted to opt out of life and missing the meetings just made me feel better about things. I would get terrible anxiety about going to meetings. Just being there felt awful, like going against the grain of something internally. It’s like my body knew something that I hadn’t consciously caught up to yet, that those meetings were not good for me at all. I would literally get up on a Sunday morning, get dressed in my suit and get all of my materials together. I would get in the car with my wife, drive all the way to the Kingdom Hall in another town, turn into the parking lot, do a 180 degree turn, and drive back home because I could not make myself get out of my car and into that Kingdom Hall. The sense of relief when I would leave that parking lot and head home was magical. My wife felt it too. Maybe not on the same level, maybe it wasn’t her objecting to going in the same way that I was, but she felt the relief when we would leave. I would be so anxious walking into that place, and somewhere deep inside I just must have known that it was messed up and not a healthy place to be. I just couldn’t bring myself to consciously accept that reality yet.
I mentioned early on that cleaning ultimately ended up saving me, and that one day we got a bill for fifty thousand dollars in the mail that we owed in back taxes. Let’s break that down to help you understand what that really meant at this stage in my life. As I mentioned previously, that fifty thousand dollar bill hit me hard. I had buried my head in the sand for a long time because the growing debt was overwhelming and my wife just never cared about money whatsoever, so neither of us were doing anything about it. If I think about it today, Jehovah’s Witnesses really teach people to avoid problems and to rely on Jehovah to take care of them, whether through some blessing or through the end of the world. I think I had been waiting on it to just go away or to find some magic answer that didn’t involve great sacrifice. But here I was engaging in my life differently and seeing progress as I was awakening more and more, so I knew it was time to engage with this in a different way. I told my wife that although there were no such things as debtors’ prisons, we were going to be in for some hard time. Dave Ramsey, a popular financial guru, said that most people only get out of debt by focusing solely on it. The goal was to become like a gazelle running from a cheetah that is trying to run it down, with complete focus on survival. I knew that the way I worked was in an all or nothing manner, and I knew that our debt was so large that we had to go all in or else it would eventually consume us.
So I told my mom that we were going to go all in, and like the crabs in a bucket example given previously, she told me that I would fail and that eventually even if I did succeed it would be short lived and something bad would happen. Well that fueled me even more. I’m naturally the type of person that if you tell me I’m not capable of doing something that seems like it’s within reach, not only will I do it, but I will do it faster and better than ever imagined. I’m a fighter. I will take on challenges and don’t often back down. I’ve watched people back down my whole life and live in denial. As I’ve seen the fruits of that inaction, it’s just not something that I can stomach for my own life.
My wife and I prayed and told God that we basically leave it in his hands. Alright God, you bring the work, and we’ll do whatever it takes. That was the deal. But watch what you ask for in life. The work came from everywhere. We told our clients what we were doing and we made ourselves available for literally whatever came our way. And I used every opportunity to tell people what we did. We cross-promoted our cleaning services with our mobile auto detailing business so that we could get more clients on either side. Over the next 18 months, just a year and a half, we worked like crazy people. At one point we worked 34 straight days, often twelve to fourteen hour work days if not longer. We cleaned houses and detailed cars and we would also house sit for clients, We’d actually live in their house while they were out of town and took care of their pets. We were amazed at how many opportunities arose out of making ourselves available. But that was also really tough to live up to.
Living and operating our business out of someone else’s house while watching their cats or walking their dogs meant that we’d have to pack our van with supplies and food and clothes for everything. As if it wasn’t tough enough spending most weeks working six long days out of seven, the addition of house sitting meant that we were pretty much working 24 hours a day. We also did some pressure washing, painted rooms for people, washed windows, and we even sealed a bunch of concrete, a driveway, and several large patios for a client. It was the first time we’d ever done anything like that. We really felt God was helping us. That’s how it seemed. The way things would happen was interesting. A client would have to go off the schedule for some reason, which would make my scarcity response act up because we were so focused on trying to pay this off and we didn’t really need to lose clients. But anytime somebody would cancel, someone else would call out of the blue requesting a one time cleaning on that same day and would fill that spot on the schedule. We never missed a beat. It was uncanny.
One day we were just absolutely exhausted. We still had one more house to clean and honestly I was so tired that I wanted to throw up out of sheer exhaustion. We decided to stop at a store and get some Gatorade to see if that would give us a boost. And while we were at that store, the lady at the last house of the day called my wife to say that her air conditioning had gone out and asked to reschedule. It felt like a miracle at the time and we got to go home.
We also had this van at the time that we bought that was recommended to us by a friend and the van turned out to be a horrific buy. Up until this time it had not gone a month straight without something going wrong. We even had to put a transmission in it. I think it was like the fourth transmission that van was on. It was just a van that had been problem after problem, but for the entire eighteen month stretch that van never broke down. We had a flat tire once while house sitting for a client. But the neighbor helped us with an air pump and we got it to the tire place, had it plugged and went about our day. It never skipped a beat.
Over those eighteen months of working nonstop we also were spending very little money. It’s kind of hard to spend money when you do nothing but work and sleep. We got our fifty thousand dollars saved to pay off the debt and then found out that we owed fifty five thousand dollars total now because of the time that had passed and interest and fees that accrued. That was really depressing. We thought that we were right there at the finish line, and then the finish line got moved. So I went out and got a pair of neon green and neon orange shoelaces. We each wrote the word “finish” on them. We each wore one green and one orange lace in our shoes during the final push. That way when we were tired and if we started to hang our heads, we could look down at our shoes and feel a little inspired.
In fact during what we thought was our last week of paying off the debt we came home to a broken water heater. So we had to drop a thousand dollars or so to replace that which set us back yet again. In the end though, it took eighteen months. We made it through. We had fifty five thousand dollars in the bank that we could throw at the IRS. When I called the IRS they could not believe that I was paying off the debt. In fact we were so far behind that we were close to meeting a ten year threshold that the IRS has in which they can collect and our debt was so old that some of it could have started to fall off of our record. But ultimately we owed the money. We wanted to make it right. We were getting healthier and it was time to right that wrong. I know that might make some people upset because they’re the IRS and everybody hates them. But given our sense of ethics, our personal integrity, we couldn’t do it anyother way. I didn’t do it for them, I did it for me.
But remember, in order to pay that fifty five thousand dollars off we couldn’t just make fifty five thousand dollars extra because we still had to pay taxes on the fifty five thousand that we made over that period of time. So ultimately we had to make about an extra eighty thousand dollars so that we could clear that fifty five grand over those 18 months. We gave that to the IRS and then had the rest of the money left over to pay the current taxes on the money that we earned to pay back taxes. That is a lot of cleaning and hard work and it felt awesome to get that done and behind us.
However, that was not even close to the best thing that came from this time. It really sped up our awakening process. You see, we started to realize why you had to attend so many meetings and constantly read their books and participate in their JW activities. It’s essentially a form of brainwashing yourself. It was like for the first time ever we had time away from the meetings to think about the things that we had been taught and our brain started processing what we had learned our entire lives. We had a lot of deep conversations during that eighteen month period about things that just didn’t add up to us. I’d look at my wife and say what about this one thing? Or she’d say people do this other thing and that’s weird. Now we still believed it was “The Truth” doctrinally, but we were starting to have doubts about some things. And in fact one such doubt came from the very fact that things went as well as they did in paying off the debts. My mom told me that we would fail and people at the Kingdom Hall were appalled at what we were doing. We were always taught to believe that Jehovah couldn’t bless us if we weren’t going to all the meetings and spending the required time in field service and yet here it appeared that we were being blessed immensely by God. In fact it was the first time ever in my life that I really thought we were being blessed and we were actually doing the opposite of everything I had been taught my entire life. It didn’t add up.
Not only that but during this time we got to see the lives of those that we clean for. We were starting to get more emotionally healthy and we started waking up to the fact that we cleaned for a lot of great people and great families. They were far more functional than the families that we grew up with including our own. How could that be? After all, we claimed that Jehovah’s Witnesses have the happiest families on earth. We had the truth and lived what we called quote “the Real Life”, but the non-JW people we knew were happy and so much healthier than we were.
We also realized that we had no real friends. During the eighteen months away nobody ever even called to see if we were alive. The elders, the supposed shepherds of the flock, never bothered with us. There were no shepherding calls to encourage us. Nobody from our congregation cared. At the same time, we had families that we worked for that would invite us to do things with them and we’d have to turn them down because we weren’t supposed to do things with them. We were praying for friends and turning down those that were friendly to us because the cult taught us that they were the wrong kind of friends. In fact, the term that Jehovah’s Witnesses actually use for each other is “The Friends”. We would say, “Let’s go see The Friends at the Kingdom Hall”. It’s just more cult speak and it was starting to wake us up to the realities of what we were in. We couldn’t help but notice that The Friends weren’t really such good friends. So you can see why the awakening from being away from meetings was far better for our life than the money that we paid off. The most important thing here was the time spent away from the indoctrination sessions and that it started to let us see things for what they really were in our lives.
In fact, since we’ve been out, we have come across other stories of people that left the congregation of their primary language to go help at a congregation in some other language, and that time spent in a foreign language actually helps wake people up sometimes. Not only does it give them time to process things, but also translating what they’re really saying into another language makes them look at the reality of things they’ve just accepted their entire lives. They start to really think about what they’ve learned. That’s why the cult encourages members to never miss any meetings. If you’re on vacation, you need to haul your suits and dresses and dress shoes, your book bags and books and find the Kingdom Hall local to where you’re vacationing so that you don’t miss a spiritual meal while you’re on a vacation having a good time. Because that would be horrible. The cult knows that their hold on you is tenuous. It’s just like an abusive spouse that doesn’t want their husband or wife to have friends outside of the relationship.They have to keep you close so that they can keep you under their spell.
After getting out of debt, I set my sights on dropping the weight that I accumulated. I decided that I would go sugar free. Well sugary sweets free, a human body does require some measure of sugar. Just like an alcoholic will always be an alcoholic whether they drink or not, I’m always going to be a sugar addict. I’m way better than I ever was. Although I’m not sugar free today, I’m much more moderate. For a time, I avoided all of the treats and sweets. I also started using the app MyFitnessPal on my phone to track caloric intake. It was really eye opening to see how many calories were in things that I loved. So it was really a matter of learning how to eat, just like I had to learn so many other new things. Ultimately I lost 50 pounds and felt a lot better.
I had noticed that we had that year and a half of focus on getting out of debt, and it worked. And then I had a year where I focused on my weight and not eating sugar so much and it worked. So I realized that having a singular focus while maintaining the rest of life seemed to kind of be the way to go for me. This ADHD guy finally found a way to sustain some sort of focus.
So my wife and I started adopting an official theme for each year starting in 2015. In fact I started a little journal on my phone, where I kept track of what I did. Little did I know I was chronicling the end of our lives as Jehovah’s Witnesses. This was the beginning of an entirely new life. So I was able to go back through and read it.
In 2014, a few things happened of note that I don’t have written in the journal. We had come off the years of getting out of debt and losing weight and were trying to work on our spirituality as Jehovah’s Witnesses. In fact, maybe that was the theme for that year. I don’t remember, but we started going back to meetings and even started making a push to get back out in field service after being inactive for some time. After all, we were getting healthier in other ways, so let’s get healthy spiritually as well. We went back to meetings, but it was a struggle. Sometimes I didn’t make it. We would turn around and go home.
Losing Our Religion
I would start having outbursts after the meetings on the way home with my wife in the car about things that were said at the meetings. This was dangerous. Honestly, my wife could have and should have turned me into the elders for attacking what was said at the meetings like that. Making your doubts known is dangerous, even to your spouse. People turn their husband or wife in, or their kids. I believe my dad was behind what happened to my brother. People turned their family in all the time. If it’s found out that you have doubts and the elders meet with you and you insist on your new way of thinking, they can disfellowship you for apostasy. It’s like literal thought crime, even if you never tell anyone what you believe. They want to know that your allegiance is to the organization, and if it’s compromised they may cut you off before you impact anyone else. A lot of times when this happens in a marriage, it ends up in divorce. So, I was very lucky. My wife knew that I had a good heart and that she could trust me. She knew that I wouldn’t bring something up if there wasn’t a good reason for it. Admittedly, I should have been more strategic with the way I brought things up, but I would just get so upset about the lack of real love shown in the congregation. I would also get so upset about the comments they would make about other people on the outside. It was eating me up inside. It was evil, and I just couldn’t hold my disdain for it inside. It was a fire inside of me that I had to let out.
One day while we were driving to a cleaning job, we were crossing some railroad tracks. According to my wife this is the moment I finally got through to her. I told her that in the end, we all have doubts. If you admit your doubts it doesn’t change anything because they already exist. It just puts them out in the open, and if you don’t like that you can pack your doubts up and put them back where they were. She told me that she didn’t really like me talking about my doubts and that it bothered her but she figured that she could participate this one time. She was willing to give it a try and if she didn’t like it she could go back and tell me “Hey, I tried. Now you need to keep your doubts to yourself and let’s just carry on.” But instead, she let out a few of her own doubts and things went well because I had made it safe enough for her to do so. We would then go on to have many conversations over time.
There was one memorable time when the circuit overseer was visiting and we were sitting in the front row of the Kingdom Hall. He was standing in front of us just a few steps away and he was talking about a recent tornado that we had in a nearby town. He was talking about how the brothers went up there from our congregation to help and how awesome Jehovah’s organization was for doing it. He then went on to talk about how all of the worldly people were out there just to show off or some went to steal from the wreckage. Oh how blessed we were in Jehovah’s organization to have such loving brothers, he said. Well, we cleaned in a neighborhood not far from there for years. We personally knew people that watched the tornadoes go over their house in the sky and then it ended up landing in that other town. We knew the people that were among the first that were up there helping. They donated their money, their time, their effort, and their vehicles. To hear this guy, the circuit overseer, talking about them like they were some sort of dishonest human garbage made me so angry. I also knew that Jehovah’s Witnesses did go up there, but way behind everyone else. And they only went up there to help their own. I mean they don’t even offer to help anyone who isn’t one of Jehovah’s Witnesses unless they’re somehow adjacent or a possible convert. I was livid. It was all I could do to NOT stand up in front of the congregation and shout his ignorance down, but I didn’t. I was literally sick over his description of others and that that us versus them ugliness that he was bringing to the congregation.
So the time came when I stepped up my awakening game and asked my wife for permission to do something huge in this process. I wanted to make sure that we were on the same page, and I was trying not to do anything that would hurt her. She was trying not to do anything that would hurt me. We were allowing each other to go at each other’s pace but checking in with the other to make sure no one got too far ahead. We were really trying to do this together as much as we could. We each had to individually process so much, and we knew that this could come between us which was the last thing that we wanted.
There are websites and online groups that are for ex-Jehovah’s Witnesses. We were always warned against going there. They said that it would put us in a seat at the table with Satan himself to ever go there, but I couldn’t resist anymore. I had to see what they had to say. I wanted to know what these ex-Jehovah’s Witnesses say about why they left. So I asked my wife if it was okay with her that I went down that path. I knew I couldn’t unring that bell. Once you open Pandora’s box so to speak, it’s kind of hard to go back.
We had always been told that people on those sites, those apostates as they were called, were mentally diseased. Well, if that’s the case then I was sick too, because a large part of what I saw was exactly the same things that I had noticed every time I got to see the man behind the curtain in the cult.
Some of these people were super angry or hateful. Some were pushy with how they saw things, and aggressive. I wasn’t ready for that yet. However, I could see that they were actually telling the truth about The Truth. I learned that it’s an actual term in the exJW community…TTATT… The Truth About The Truth. My eyes were opening even more. I saw Jehovah’s Witnesses as having a lot of problems organizationally, but I still believed the basic doctrine at that time.
I also read a book by Ray Franz, who was once a member of the governing body. I always heard allusions to this brother who had been so high up in the organization and who had left after knowing the truth. How could he, they would question with derision in their voice. Well it turns out that Ray Franz was the nephew of Fred Franz who was then the president of the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society. When Ray Franz got to the top, he got to see how everything worked. He got to sit in as one of the governing body of Jehovah’s Witnesses. They are the ones who made decisions on everything from what Jehovah’s Witnesses believe to how they would react to certain things that went on in the world or persecution in certain lands. The book is called Crisis of Conscience, and that book is a legend int he ex-JW community. It has been read by almost every exJW out there at some point, and it really lets you see what goes on behind closed doors. It confirmed so much of what I thought about what this organization really was.
On May 21st of 2013. I took my first big step toward a new life. I had actually reached out to my disfellowshipped brother on Facebook. I found him on there and I sent him a private message. It was a shot in the dark, but I apologized sincerely for how I had treated him. I would have understood it if he never wanted to talk to me again. But I had to at least do my part and put an apology out there for shunning him and for other feelings that we had over the years. He was forgiving. He too was raised in the cult and he knew the game. He knew what the deal was and we reconnected. I can’t tell you what that meant to me. Here we were, just chatting here and there on messenger or email or text. It was something special to at least be able to speak to my brother again.
Then in January of 2014, just seven months later, a friend from my past that had disassociated from the cult reached out to me on Facebook and sent me a friend request. Now a good fully indoctrinated Jehovah’s Witness would just dismiss it without a thought. But my humanity was waking up underneath the cult indoctrination. So I wanted to send him a nice message even though I told him that I couldn’t be Facebook friends with him. It would have been trouble for me in the cult if I had friends who were disassociated. I still have our conversations on messenger, and it’s interesting to me now to look back on how I thought back then. I was clearly doubting things because I challenged how unfair it was to see children making a decision to commit to the cult and get baptized. They are committing to an infinitely long contract with the organization. I knew that was wrong.
It’s interesting to look back and see that even then I told him to keep messaging me and I told him that maybe we could even eventually meet up and grab a bite to eat some time. This is two years before officially leaving the cult, but clearly I was waking up and willing to be a good person, instead of a good JW. I do have to say that my friend from back in the day did push me too fast. He immediately offered to have me over for pizza which was super awesome and nice, but way too much too soon. I shouldn’t have even been talking to him. So we couldn’t be friends like that. I know that’s where he was but he had the benefit of being out for years and I didn’t. So he caught me off guard. Still, him showing that he cared was something that I needed that summer.
In July we had a big deal for Jehovah’s Witnesses happening. It was something called an International Convention. It was essentially the District Convention that we always had, but instead of it just being our district, there were a lot more people. There were several districts that came, and it was a larger facility. There would be delegates that were missionaries from foreign lands as well. This was a big deal. It was held in Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis. It was to take place on July 11th, 12th, and 13th.
In the months before that, we really doubled down on things and were trying hard to be good JWs. We saw this as a chance to get right spiritually, so we tried to make the meetings, we commented at them, we participated in everything, we started going out in service again. We felt like this convention was our opportunity to get right. After all, we felt like Jehovah had done so much for us as our eyes were being opened. God blessed us and really helped us get on this better path that we were on. We even got a hotel on Thursday night so that we could be sure to have no problems getting to the first day of that convention on Friday morning. We were really excited about it and we wanted everything to go right.
We got up Friday morning a few hours early and we took off to the convention. We should have arrived around 8:30am according to any reasonable standard. The program doesn’t usually start until 9:30 or so. So we should have had plenty of time. We didn’t even get there until after 10 o’clock. There was a funeral procession for a fallen police officer that morning. We literally sat on the expressway for hours.
Then when we finally got to the convention there was another issue. The cult has to have their hand in everything. So you can’t just stay where you want to stay when you go to these conventions. They arrange supposed “deals” with hotels and tell you where you can and can’t stay, making it sound like they only do it to get us a good deal. They get kickbacks from doing so and they get free rooms for their people, as I understand it. So as long as we follow directions and stay in their hotels the organization itself gets a benefit. Well the same applies to parking. They arranged similar deals with parking lots for the convention.
Here we were sitting in mind boggling traffic for hours, and then when we finally got to the stadium we had to pass empty parking lot after empty parking lot right by the stadium so that we could prove ourselves obedient and stay in the approved lots. This lot was probably a mile from the stadium and gravel, which was not great for my wife walking in heels and me in my dress shoes. Once we got inside the stadium, we walked for what seemed like forever trying to just find a place to sit down. That place was cavernous, and the lower seats were either reserved or taken.
This convention was very different from any we had been to before. They had these huge video screens up and they would pump in videos for us to watch for the first time ever. They also had members of the governing body giving talks at locations and they pumped in those talks. That was supposed to be so encouraging, an oasis of spiritual refreshments as they would call it. Just hearing a talk from the actual governing body members was a pretty big deal back then. They were just starting to come out from behind the curtain and becoming superstars. Well it wasn’t nearly as refreshing and entertaining for us. We sat there listening to the speakers, watching these emotional videos that they now were making. This was clearly propaganda. We could see how manipulative they were for the first time. So I’m really glad that it corresponded with us waking up and we could see it for what it was.
We sat through the morning session. Then we ate lunch and my wife was having some issues. As lonely as it is to be the only person around, it’s even lonelier to be in a place with tens of thousands of people and to realize that nobody really cares about you. Nobody cares if you’re there. My wife was really struck by this and she felt so alone and was struggling with it. We were sitting by ourselves with strangers and nobody was really being friendly to us at even a basic level. None of our family or anyone contacted us. None of our friends in the congregation. We drove up alone and now we were there by ourselves in this sea of humanity.
I was having a different issue during the convention. I can’t remember if it was the morning or afternoon program, but a governing body member gave a talk about simplifying our lives so that we could do more in Jehovah’s service. This man gave an example of a brother that had a six figure job, but he simplified his life to work part time in retail or something so he could full time pioneer. He said that the brother found that he had been paying so much in taxes on that six figure income that he was actually making more money now that he was working part time at a low wage job. Now I just got done working my way out of a tax mess and I knew that what they were saying was patently false. It’s math. It’s not feelings, it’s math. That brother with a six figure income couldn’t be in the eighty to ninety percent tax bracket because that doesn’t exist. What that member of that governing body was doing was lying. He was lying and he was manipulating to get people to do more for their cult. It disgusted me.
About three quarters of the way through the first day my wife was literally in tears and I was super pissed off and dejected at what I just heard come out of a governing body member’s mouth. My wife wanted to leave. She sweetened the deal by saying -you know if we leave now we could beat the traffic. Well, that’s all I needed to hear. I was in so we packed up our stuff and walked out.
Yes, it was a long walk back to our car. Yes, it was super hot in mid-July wearing a suit. Yes, the gravel parking made the walk tougher. Yes, we had paid for our hotel and booked in advance so we might lose the money on two more nights of our hotel stay if we left. But we didn’t care. On that drive back to the hotel, I think we were in a little bit of shock. After we told the hotel we were leaving, they didn’t charge us for the future nights. We packed up our things and put them in the car. That two hour drive home felt so light and free. It was way better than ever leaving a meeting at the Kingdom Hall where I would drive in and do a 180 in the parking lot to leave. We had never left a convention like that before. That’s a pretty big deal. It was during that ride home that my wife and I decided we were done. July 11th 2014. We decided we were never going to anything from that cult again. Now just to reiterate we still believed it was the truth doctrinally but we knew that something was off. We just couldn’t handle it anymore. We were done.
In October of 2014 another big thing happened. My brother and his wife were coming into town for a wedding. They wanted to get together, and I couldn’t believe it. It was so cool that my brother was actually coming down from New York. We hadn’t seen each other in over a decade. So we set things up. They actually came over to our house. As an aside we actually had a house for them to come over to at this point. You remember that when I last left you on this subject our house was a disaster, full of flea market items from the business I tried to start to get us out of debt. The floors were a wreck after pulling up the carpet to find them to be damaged. We had essentially fled to the basement to live. Well, we had a basement leak. It would often get wet and smelled like cat urine because the woman that lived here before us had cats that peed in various places. And then when the water would come in, it would activate the smell, and it was just an awful experience. However, after we paid off the taxes, we rented a dumpster, we threw away lots of things, we put flooring down, bought new furniture, and we moved back upstairs. It was just another healthy change in our life. So my brother and his wife had this place to come over to and it was so awesome to see him again and to finally meet his wife. We had a good time. We just talked and went out and did a few things. I don’t know if we were the best hosts, as we had never done anything like that before, so we had no clue what to expect. Honestly we were just amazed at the prospect of even meeting them.
So after my brother and his wife went back to New York, I posted some pictures of us all together on Facebook. I wasn’t going to hide this as if I was somehow ashamed of my brother or ashamed of what we had done. I was proud of the people that my brother and his wife were and who we were becoming. All of us being together felt good, but this act changed things for my wife and I. In fact, after this we never could seem to get together with my family anymore. In retrospect, I wonder if the reason I had been told was true. You see, my dad had gone into the hospital a bit earlier. I had emailed my mom and we were set to come over one Saturday and she gave me a call to tell me that we couldn’t because he brought home bedbugs from the hospital. And maybe he did. I don’t know. But those bedbugs never seemed to quite go away and we were never able to go over there again. This was in late 2014 and it felt like we were being ghosted by my family. Soft shunning began, and we were being pushed away.
After this we were heading into 2015 and we decided that we were going to call it our Year of Adventure. After all, why not try to enjoy life. We knew it was all on us to do because things were getting weird otherwise. And wow, was calling it the year of adventure some foreshadowing!
The goal was to have fun and try new things. We went to our first ever concert together and saw Linkin Park and Rise Against in Indianapolis. This was big not just because it was our first show but we even pushed ourselves to go to an unfamiliar city for our first show. We went to the circus. We went to the local auto show. We went hiking in new places. I gave up soft drinks for good. We tried new restaurants. We went to our first ever non-JW wedding. We traveled to other cities and found fun things to do. We went to even more concerts. We watched Lord of the Rings, something we weren’t really technically supposed to do as Jehovah’s Witnesses. You know, the evil demons would get you if you watched such a movie. We went to our first ever away football game. We had so much fun.
The Last Supper
Along with all that fun we had something very serious going on. I’ll take you step by step because I actually have this journaled. 2015 was the biggest year of our life. February the 7th of 2015 is the day that my family officially died. We were making plans to go visit my brother in New York in May. I told my mom that I’d like to get some of our brother’s childhood pictures and mementos that we could take out to him when we went. I knew it was a tough ask. I knew it was a risky ask, but my brother didn’t have anything. My sister in law had never seen pictures of my brother as a little kid. It was like his life before her was completely erased. I thought it would be an awesome gift. Well, my mom took it upon herself to contact my sister in law out of nowhere and tried to work it out with her on Facebook to be friends and get her pictures. I was kind of irritated because it was my idea and my mom tried to undercut me. But ultimately, as long as my brother got the pictures, and he and his wife enjoyed them, that’s all I wanted. However, my sister in law had a great perspective on this. She simply told my mom, “I’m not going to speak to someone that won’t talk to my husband.” Jehovah’s Witnesses are so tone deaf to basic humanity that they can’t even hear how they come off to others. They do this stuff all the time. There might be a mom that is disfellowshipped but the grandparents expect her to come drop off the grandkids and disappear in shame as if she doesn’t exist. How messed up is that?
So, after being turned down by my sister in law, my mom calls me to arrange for me to get the photos of my brother. It was a move that made me mad to begin with, now only enhanced by the tone deafness my mom seemed to have about it. While on the phone we arranged things and then my mom started going in on me about how it all went down with my sister in law. I could feel the pressure building inside. I wanted to explode. She kept pushing my buttons and kept pushing them and pushing them as I tried to explain to her that my brother’s wife was an actual human being with her own feelings and such. And she just kept pushing and pushing and finally I just exploded. Let’s just say that I unleashed a primal scream of “Fuck Jehovah’s Witnesses! They ruined my fucking life!” and I hung up. I can’t explain to you the emotions that came pouring out in that one statement. It was the moment when the decades of frustrations came out and I couldn’t hold it back any longer.
After a short time, I calmed myself down. I thought about things and I realized that I could have cut that conversation off before it ever got to that point. I could have stood up for myself and changed the subject or just refused to be taken down that path. So I actually called back to apologize for the way that I handled it, but nobody answered so I sent an e-mail over. I didn’t apologize for my feelings because my feelings were valid and real but I could have handled it better. Of course there would be no apologies coming from the other direction. Ultimately I really couldn’t have ever handled it much differently. Life in the cult with my parents was never a safe place to have a reasonable conversation, which wasn’t on me. They set that up and carried it out. The reaction they got had been set up long before that moment.
A few hours later I was driving home from somewhere with my wife and I got a call from my dad. That was probably the first time my dad had ever called me of his own volition in his entire life. He wanted to know if I said what I said to mom. I said yes and began to explain, but my dad never cared about explanations. My dad never cared what anybody else had to say or their feelings or anything. He never cared about anyone else.
Apparently, years ago we were watching a show, probably Modern Family, and he made some remark about gay people. I responded about how people are born that way just like I was born heterosexual and I never really sat down and made a conscious choice as to my own feelings. I’m pretty sure they didn’t just sit down and make this conscious choice between same sex or opposite sex. They’re attracted to who they’re attracted to just like I am. If nothing else, why would anyone choose something that would lead to ostracism with so much pain in their lives? Well, I guess my dad held that statement against me for all those years. So instead of addressing what I even said to my mom he proceeded to scream at me for quote “loving the gays” and “taking their side and saying whatever they wanted me to say”. I was honestly waiting for him to accuse me of being gay during his tirade. I would try to discuss scripture with him and had many for him to think about. But all he could do was yell at me. It was a very abusive conversation that took me back to my childhood a lot. Unfortunately, although the Bible does say some things about that particular sexual expression it also says a lot of other things about love that he just really had no use for. When I got off the phone I was shaking. I was flooded with so much from my past again. It was just a truly awful experience. Ultimately, it was the day my family died.
Just a couple months later, on April 30 we would actually meet my family to get the pictures since we had plans to go to New York to see my brother in May. My family knew of this, or at least my mom did. I think my sister knew too. We met at a restaurant. We had to meet somewhere in public because we hadn’t been allowed over to their house in a long time. I guess it was still those pesky supposed bed bugs. Literally while I was driving over there, my brother from New York contacted me to ask me what was going on. It turned out that my sister had a Twitter account that my brother had followed and my sister had been talking about me and running me down behind my back. She had deemed that night “the Last Supper”. And so my brother let me know what we were headed into. We were friendly and had a decent time, although sitting next to my dad was a little tense. When we left, my mom went out to the car on purpose while my dad was paying and handed a bag of pictures to my wife. I’m sure she probably didn’t want my dad to know what was up. We all ended up out in the parking lot and she gave my wife, of course not me, a big hug like I’ve never seen her hug anyone and told her something. I can’t remember now and neither can my wife but it was something along the lines of be safe and take care of yourself. I could read a lot into that, but I’m sure that in the end my mom lost all hope that my wife and I would stay a good little cult victims.
In May we took our first ever ten day vacation and went to Manhattan to see my brother and his wife and we stayed with them. We had a great trip with him and of course we went with pictures for my brother and his wife to enjoy. It was awesome. I love New York. We went to all the boroughs. I picked up a lot of other blasts from the past to bring with me. When I was a kid, I had this case of baseball cards that looked like a baseball, and it was full of baseball cards that I used to collect. I gave it to my brother when I got older and moved out. Well, when my family moved at one point after I’d left, my dad made my brothers throw out a lot of things like those baseball cards because he was such a miserable jerk. Basically, he didn’t have material things that he cared about and neither should anyone else. He made my brother throw everything away. So I found an old case on eBay just like it. I bought a bunch of cards and filled it with some of the cards I had, some old unopened packs in there from back in the late eighties and early nineties that he could open. I found other things to pick up, some gifts for him and his wife, and brought them up. It was so much fun to get to do that.
So when we got home we posted photos of our trip on Facebook. My wife actually wanted to post the pictures while we were up in New York, but I told her it might cause drama and I didn’t want to ruin the trip. She didn’t think that her family would care but I’m glad we waited. The day I put the photos up, one of her sisters, the matriarch of the family, texted my wife about the trip. She asked about my brother, whether he was still disfellowshipped. My wife told her that yes he was, but that we had prayed about it and made a personal decision to go visit him. Immediately my wife’s sister texted her that she was an apostate and that she could have no further contact with my wife. That night, my wife watched as her social media followers all disappeared. Her sister went and told everyone and people from as far away as Florida dropped my wife without a word. She would never hear from any of them again.
So we found ourselves fully shunned by our families at this point because of a personal decision. At the end of the day, I would rather be shunned for doing the loving thing than loved for doing the shunning thing. If that’s what it comes down to so be it. I couldn’t get caught up in that toxic love that Jehovah’s Witnesses show any longer. It’s completely conditional and very sick. If it is so tenuous and can be taken away and given back at one’s whim, it’s not love, it is control. It was always control. Nobody stopped loving me at 38 years of age, I was just realizing then that they never truly had. They don’t even know what love is.
Now this brought us to a place that many Jehovah’s Witnesses eventually find themselves. There are choices to be made. If you want to leave the organization, you can do it in different ways. It’s a very personal decision though, how you choose to carry this out. Option number one is to fade away. A fader will typically just stop going to meetings, become inactive, and try to disappear. If you’re lucky, you can fall through the cracks and the elders will leave you alone and over time just basically forget about you. The benefit is that maybe you can keep your conditional family and friends. But the drawback is that you usually have to keep playing the game. Not always, but often you have to keep up pretenses with friends and family and you have to watch over your shoulders so that if you start doing things like celebrating holidays you don’t post a photo that gets the elders on your tail. You have to make sure none of your new friends tag you in posts where you are shown hanging out with people that aren’t Jehovah’s Witnesses. You’re kind of like a double agent. You have to live a double life. You have to keep pretending to be something that you’re not. But the benefit is that you do get to still have contacts with people that you care about. Now some faders, the ones that seem to be the most successful, will actually move, sometimes to the other side of the country. They’ll relocate so that their activities can’t be easily tracked by family. They can live their own life without worrying that their friends or family will find out that they’re not going to meetings or out in field service. The benefit of this is that they can just go live life. And as long as they don’t establish themselves in a new congregation, the elders in their new location probably won’t come after them. The drawback is that although they keep some friends and family, now there is this physical distance between them. Some people move into a new congregation, get burner phones, give numbers to the elders that they will drop later, fake an address, and disappear. It sounds like I’m describing trying to leave the mob or a gang, but this is one of the realities of leaving Jehovah’s Witnesses.
And then there is disassociation. That is basically like disfellowshipping the cult rather than waiting for them to disfellowship you. So there will be shunning that takes place. There’s a large stigma against it in the exJW community, which honestly makes me a little irritated. People will say that you’re playing their game if you choose to disassociate, and that Jehovah’s Witnesses want you to disassociate. So you shouldn’t do it., according to many, and they discourage others that ask for advice on how to do so. It was an enormous decision for my wife and I to go this route but it was our decision, despite the discouragement from others that couldn’t support us. I disagree that Jehovah’s Witnesses want you to disassociate. I understand it’s one of their terms. I understand they have a process for it. But if you disassociate you make them feel the pain of what they’re doing and it looks bad on them as opposed to fading where everyone just pretends like things are okay. Abusers always groom their victims to silently go away. At this point in my life I’ve met many that even had JW family or elders beg them to just walk away and keep their mouths shut so that they could still hang out. It’s all so disingenuous. At the end of the day it is an insanely difficult decision to make. It is not one that should ever be taken lightly. This is another bell that you cannot unring, essentially dropping a nuclear bomb on things. It is over, and there is little chance of coming back from this decision.
I actually told my mom once that I felt like I suffered from JW PTSD. At that time I didn’t know how true that really was. In fact many former Jehovah’s Witnesses are literally diagnosed with PTSD after leaving the cult, no matter how they leave. Being in a cult itself is traumatic whether you leave or not. Leaving it only adds to the trauma. So even though freedom lies on the other side, it’s a very traumatic experience.
Our decision was twofold. First, we were going to fade, even though our families had already started the shunning process, but we saw no benefit to doing anything else yet. Who knows, maybe things could change over time. Maybe our families would calm down at some point. At that time, we didn’t know the benefits of disassociation so fading felt freeing and disassociation was like this huge thing looming in the distance that was terrifying. Now that I’ve been on both sides, I’ll take disassociation any day. But we’d already been away from meetings, we were done with that part of our lives, so we were just going to try to move on. See where life took us. In fact, it was a lesson that we had learned from paying off the taxes. We were not trying to control things we couldn’t control anymore. In that experience of paying off the taxes, we just made ourselves available for whatever God or life brought. We would do it and move on, and we did the same thing with this. We just let it happen and we were going to react to it with new healthy ways of being. Things went pretty well for a bit.
The only caveat was that with this whole JW PTSD. We were not willing to play their games. In other words, because we have been left alone for a year or so we were content to leave that be. However if they started to come after us, for any reason, we were done. My wife and I made a pact that if it happened that they started coming after us or wanted to talk, we would write goodbye letters to our families and we would write letters of disassociation to the cult. We would put a bullet in all of it and we would walk away free.
At the end of the day, my wife and I both wanted to no longer be associated with the name Jehovah’s Witnesses. We wanted that label off of us. The last thing I would have wanted was for somebody to see me and think that I was one of Jehovah’s Witnesses at that point in my life.
Interestingly, Jehovah’s Witnesses had released a brochure that summer at the convention entitled Return To Jehovah. It was supposed to be a brochure to show how much they loved people who weren’t at the meetings anymore or who had left the organization. It was supposed to be given to people like us. In fact my wife and I, during this time while we were fading, placed wagers on how many of those brochures we would receive. I thought we would get two. There was one sister at our congregation who was a pretty good friend and she was worried about us. So I guessed that we would get a brochure from her, and I figured I’d throw one more out as a wild card, so I thought we might get two. My wife said that she thought we would get somewhere north of ten. Double digits. We got zero. Nobody tried to save us. Our families didn’t try to save us, our friends didn’t try to save us, the elders didn’t try to save us. Nobody did, and I would like to thank them for that. So thank you family for not trying to save us. Thank you to my wife’s family for not trying to save us. Thank you to our friends. Thank you to the organization as well, because had you actually tried to save us, had you showed that you cared, it might have sucked us back into this horrible cult. We’ve seen people get sucked back into it before and that pressure, the psychological pressure put on by family at that point, might have actually done the trick. Seeing a pamphlet left in our door may have made us think that someone cared about us. Eventually we likely would have left, we were going down that path already, we knew too much. There were too many things we couldn’t unsee at this point. But it says a lot that our own friends and family didn’t try to save us.
On July 12th my wife was given a few little birthday presents from people. It was the first time she’d ever gotten anything. We still weren’t officially out, but I guess it popped up on Facebook or something so a few of our cleaning clients got her birthday cards. My wife likes to do coloring books and other crafty things like that, so people got her some small gifts. That meant so much.
Breaking Free
We had started friending people on Facebook who were our cleaning clients. That introduced them to us in new ways. On August 1 of 2015, I made a post on Facebook about what had been going on. It was just time to be open about it. Now our profiles were locked down with privacy settings so only our Facebook friends could see our posts. Our only friends on there were our cleaning clients and they were very supportive.
As we went through this ordeal we really needed people in our corner. Our cleaning business saved us once again. Having people to talk to who were in our corner over the next few months was such a big deal to us. We just can’t thank people enough for being good humans and for being there in our time of need, because that is a tremendously hard path to walk alone. Everyone who was supposed to love and support us had turned their backs on us. We didn’t have friends outside in the real world because we had been conditioned to avoid them or be afraid of them. Many end up so isolated. Not everyone could understand what we were up against, of course, but it just helps to talk about it in any way. There were days where honestly, for the first time in my life, I didn’t care about cleaning at all. I was just completely numb at work, as was my wife. It was just super hard to have something that big weighing on us. Everything else paled in comparison.
On August 2nd, just a day after making that post, an elder from our congregation called us on the phone wanting to meet with us. I don’t know if this was just coincidence, or if somehow someone outed us, but it was literally the day after that post where I told people what was going on with us and in our life where I started to pour out what I had found out about the cult.
This was it. They were now going to try to make us play their game. My wife and I went home, we sat down, and wrote goodbye letters to our families. We wrote letters of disassociation and we were going to put them in the mail. That was a very difficult process particularly the letters to our families. We ignored the phone call that the elder had made and the message that was left for us. On August 3rd the letters didn’t go out. My wife honestly was struggling to put the addresses on them that morning. She was really feeling the impact. You know, once you sit down and write those letters, it gets real. So we went on to work and while we were at work, she had time to think. On the way home from work she said that she’s ready to send the letters. We arrived home and my wife said that she wanted a pizza for dinner so she took the only car that we had that day to get some pizza. We have other cars but they were being worked on at the time. When she came home with the pizza she also came with a story. As she was driving up our street, she saw the elder that had called us driving away from our house. Now I was inside the house but because there were no cars in the driveway, I guess they assumed that nobody was home and they didn’t come up. It was in that moment that my wife’s decision to go through with the disassociation was completely cemented. Thank you stalkers for helping to set us free and show us that we were doing the right thing.
On August 4th the letters went in the mail. A week or so later we were going out to dinner with the exJW friend that had reached out to me back in 2014, and I got a call from the elders. Again they want to arrange to meet us. I told them on the phone that we had disassociated and sent in letters and that I couldn’t believe he was calling. The poor guy was taken aback but was pleasant and respectful and said he’d check into the letters.
On August 12th, eight days later, it was my birthday and I got a few notes on Facebook. That was really cool. It meant a lot to me that even though we weren’t out yet, people were excited and would even wish me a happy birthday. It was very cool.
It turned out that the elders never got our letters. I would find out later that the address listed online for the Kingdom Hall was wrong. They eventually came back to us in the mail as undeliverable. So I got the personal address of the elder that was calling us. This was an elder that I liked and he was always very kind to me. In fact he had been very kind throughout this process. I mailed our letters directly to him, this time on August 22nd. On August 27th I got a call from a different elder letting me know that I forgot to sign my letter of disassociation. I had signed the first one that I mailed but it never reached them. I guess that when I sent the copy of the original I forgot to sign it. I had to voice verify over the phone with him and another elder that was on speaker phone that it was indeed me that sent the letter. I was proud to do so although I found the process to be frustrating and legalistic and stupid like the cult it always been. Honestly it was kind of a fitting end.
So the big day was September 2, 2015. On that day it was announced publicly to the congregation and the world that Brother Michael Shemwell and Sister Jennifer Shemwell are no longer Jehovah’s Witnesses.
The next day we contacted the elders to confirm that it had been announced and we were right. We were free. Now of course that freedom came with a cost. For starters, all 8 million Jehovah’s Witnesses worldwide must treat us like we are dead, not even saying a greeting to us. This goes for former friends, our own moms, dads, sisters, brothers, anyone that is in the religion. If we were in a store and we came upon one of them, they would likely walk the other way. In fact I was at a concert and I happened to see my younger brother and his wife. I haven’t seen them since July 12th of 2014. It was the day after we came back from that international convention. It happened to be the wedding day for my brother and his wife and we went to their wedding. I think we saw them at my parent’s house once or twice but really hadn’t seen them in years. Now I saw them at this concert. I walked up to my brother and his wife because I was determined to be a good human being, and to give them a chance to see what they would be. So my wife and I walked up to them. I stepped in front of them and said hi. I waved really big. They waved back at me, they said hi, they turned beet red, and then they literally both turned their heads to the right and looked away with both surprise and dread. I said okay, whatever, laughed at the absurdity of it all, and we walked on. We enjoyed the concert, but for a moment I made my brother and his wife face what they do when they shun someone. I hope that feeling sticks with them and they remember how devoid of love their religious cult truly makes them. If they still have that base humanity intact, they know it’s wrong to act like that.
When I was younger I don’t think I really ever ran into anybody that was shunned. Most people were just ashamed and walked away. I never shunned my brother that was disfellowshipped to his face, but he had disappeared and then he ended up moving to New York so I never had to do that. In this case, when I went up to my youngest brother, he had to shun me. He had to physically, literally shun me to my face when all I was doing was being polite and saying hi. That moment when their faces turned red, I hope that was their humanity kicking in, knowing that they had to do something embarrassing because they had dedicated their lives to something equally inhuman.
My wife and I turned around and walked back to where we had been and before we even had a chance to say a word to each other about what had happened, one of our new friends from our new life, this smiling young lady appeared behind us saying hi. She was excited to see us there at the same concert. And then just as we were talking to her, another one of our new friends from our new life just happened to be walking by. We said hi and talked to him. We would not see another one of our friends for the rest of that night. Actually I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that a third one of our new friends was there and was a security guard. She happened to know my brother. She’s the one who pointed out my brother to us in the first place. She also stopped by to talk to us a few times.
Just the way everything worked, it was like the universe giving us a hug after that moment with my brother. I’m very proud that we went up and we said hi to him and his wife. I’m very proud of the human beings that we have become, even in basic love and humanity and trying to be a better version than who we were as Jehovah’s Witnesses in that cult.
So now I’m going to do something very personal. I’m going to take a minute here to share my goodbye letter to my family. I’m not going to mention their names. This whole thing is about my life and I want to paint the very real picture here so that you can imagine what this must have been like.
Dear mom, dad, sister, and brother,
There’s a country song that I remember hearing when I was a kid that always stuck in my mind for some reason. I had to look it up but it’s by Patty Loveless and it’s called How Can I Help You Say Goodbye. It’s a heart wrenching song and I guess the strong sentiments always stuck with me. I seem to remember it when grandpa died. The one death that really made an impact on me. Well I guess the time has come and there’s no easy way to say it. Jenny and I have spent the last three years or so in deep research, prayer, and growth. We worked on ourselves physically, emotionally. and spiritually. We decided it was time to do what we asked people to do at the doors and challenge our own beliefs and to prove them to ourselves. Ultimately that’s something that we’re all encouraged to do. Sadly our consciences were troubled by some things and we have to follow those as we see Jehovah guiding them no matter what the cost. You would do the same, even being willing to die for your beliefs. And here we are, willing to sacrifice greatly for ours. We have submitted letters formally dissociating from the congregation of Jehovah’s Witnesses. We don’t want it to be that way but there is no room for us in the organization any longer as we simply cannot hold certain beliefs. We have no desire to influence anyone else’s conscience. First Corinthians 15:29 and 30 says, “For why should my freedom be judged by another person’s conscience? If I am partaking with thanks, why should I be spoken of abusively over that for which I give thanks?” I do not wish to speak abusively of anyone else’s conscience, but I also realize that the freedom to exercise mine isn’t my own in the organization that I’ve lived in. I therefore have no choice but to leave, and unfortunately I know the consequences of such action.
For the first time in my life I can say that I actually love Jehovah. Being away from meetings allowed me to form a real relationship with him without someone else being in the middle and telling me how to do so. I’ve developed a greater appreciation for Jesus Christ and his qualities that he demonstrated and that we are supposed to imitate. His love and mercy were abundant and so beautiful. It will be nice to see those things reflected in humanity someday.
So how can I help you to say goodbye? The only thing that I know to do is to be true and speak to what is in my heart. Dad, I love you, and I know that you think I take for granted that you love me too but I don’t. I realize that you went to work everyday in a job that you hated to show your love. I remember how giddy I would get when you would feel good enough to come out and play with my brother and I in the backyard, throwing grounders and pop flys to us. Playing basketball, taking us fishing, to the Redbirds games, even sitting in the freezing cold watching my high school football team play. And you did those things, not because you loved any of those teams or the company that you work for, but because you loved us. For whatever reason you and I have always had our differences, but I spent the last few years trying to create a new relationship with you. I wanted to return that love once I got in the position to do so. Taking you to your first UK basketball game, going to Land Between the Lakes, taking you fishing, going and eating at different restaurants and the like. I remember when you were working for us we would get Skyline Chili and sit out where the ducks were at the old abandoned Tumbleweed restaurant. Good times.
Mom. You’ve always been there to talk to and I will miss that. Whether it was sharing music that we both liked or talking about the deep things of life it was a lot of fun. You’ve always been open minded and that’s something I respect so much. I’ll always remember your sirloin patties, you can’t escape that one. And more importantly the laughs. You taught me how to drive and really taught me to broaden my perspective as well. I remember you saving change so that we could get some food at McDonald’s when we were kids during the summer as a special treat. I remember going a few times with you as you directed traffic at schools, the different hairstyles and colors over the years. You always loved the biggest cars even if you had to sit on a pillow to drive them. I think one thing I always remember is how you were just unabashedly you. You told me to never worry about what other people thought of me. That I shouldn’t bottle stuff up inside because it will always come out eventually. Just those two pieces of wisdom were something everyone should live by. I’ll always cherish those things. And I love you too.
Sister I’ll always remember you as that adorable little girl that was at our wedding. Cute as could be. Skater girl and baby Kreti are gone now and you’re a young lady with makeup and hair extensions. It’s hard to believe how fast time goes by. I’ll always remember that time that I took you fishing. Just you and me, out to Hodgenville Salem Lake. That was fun. I’ll always remember your obsession with people sitting back in their seat, saying “sit back” when we were on the couch. I’ve tried to be present even though I’m obviously so much older and not around so much. I wanted you to have some things like a cool room since I was able to provide that and I love to help people. My wife sees you as her little sister and you referred to her as your big sister at times, and that really made her feel good and important. It is such a shame that we have to part ways like this. I want to see you get married and have kids. Come on, you might say that you don’t want them, but I see how much you love other people’s kids. I want that for you someday if that’s what you want when you get to that place in life. You have a good head on your shoulders and remind me a lot of myself back in the day. But with more hair and it’s red and you’re a girl. My wife and I will always love you.
Brother. I really wish that I could have been closer with you. I had so much fun with you when we did things together. Like that time we went hiking up at Sharp Springs near Corydon. Just me and you. Remember the pic of you running through the tall grass and I put a big eagle or something chasing you behind it on a photo edit? That was some talent on display. I remember playing basketball and going fishing a few times. I remember how proud you were of your skateboarding scars. I really regret that when you were a little kid I didn’t spend much time with you. I had my own drama. Then of course like all teenagers, I was getting ready to go off on my own. I wish we could have played video games together on that PlayStation of mine though. Even then you probably would have annihilated me. You were always better at that than I was. I remembered how you stuck it out at different jobs and landed your own store in the end. I always respect hustle. I admire your dedication to working out, speaking of hustle. It’s hard to do something like that and stick with it. I guess now you have to buy your used cars that blow up, sometimes in a fantastic fashion, from people other than me. I’m going to say that I love you even though I know you hate it. So if you just pretend like I stood next to you and we were hugging like at your wedding. I’m so happy that I got to be there that day and I wish you and your wife nothing but happiness together. It’s a shame I never really got to know your wife. My wife and I always had hopes that maybe we could be good friends someday.
I’ll always love you guys. I will always be here for you. And I’m still me just missing a label that is likely to be the wall between us. I’ve always been a person that wants respect and it really hurts to know that my decision will probably cause you to lose all of that for me. I’m certainly not taking an easy way out by any means and it hurts, but I have to do it. I sincerely hope that someday someone may reach out to me and we can all grow from this in some way. Even if I know the likelihood is small, I’m a dreamer, a person full of hope. I’ll never stop hoping and I’ll never turn anyone away. I honestly don’t want to quit writing because when I stop that’s it. It’s over. You would die for me yesterday as brothers and sisters, but tomorrow you will never speak to me again and treat me as if it was I who already died. This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but here’s how I’ll end this. Time will ease your pain, life’s about changing, nothing ever stays the same.
With eternal love and hope for mere temporary goodbyes,
Mike
So that is the reality of what Jehovah’s Witnesses do to people. That is what they do to families. That is their legacy. There was a quote that I heard as I was waking up that always stuck with me, “Is the life you’re living worth the price you’re paying?” I heard it on a podcast and it just reverberated in my head over these years. “Is the life you’re living worth the price that you’re paying?” For my wife and I, the life we were living was not worth the price that we had been paying. Although we had to pay a very heavy price here in this instance, our new life of freedom and authenticity has been worth the price that we paid.
In the next chapter I’m going to talk about our next chapter, what life has been like since we’ve been out. At the time of this original writing, we’re coming up on our two year anniversary in September. In fact next month in August, I turn 40. My wife and I are going to celebrate by going to New York to hike in the Adirondack Mountains for the first time, and to see my brother again for the first time since May of 2015 before we were officially out of the cult.