Picking the Scab

Do you ever feel that you are constantly picking away at your reasons for leaving Jehovahs Witness? It's like a scab on your knee when you were a kid.  You just can't help picking at the edges, no matter how disgusting it is and even how much it stings.  You keep easing it up, making the skin bleed a little here and a little there.  It smarts, sometimes it even hurts but you keep worrying at it, pulling, prodding, teasing it until you can see the raw, red skin beneath.

Today that scab is in your mind after you've exited the religion that has controlled your every thought for years.  You find yourself reading blogs like this or web surfing for ex-JW websites dishing out all the dirt on your former beliefs.  You scour the internet for magazine and newspaper articles about the Governing Body and the religion as a whole, happily reading and re-reading any that show the Witnesses in a bad light.  One day you realise that you're spending more time and energy looking for evidence that your old religion is as wrong as you want it to be than you ever did studying the Societies literature when you were attending the Kingdom Hall!

Why do we do it?  Why can't any of us just let it go?

In many ways it's like divorcing a marriage partner.  You spend a few happy years together, then a few not so happy, until eventually you go your separate ways, content in the knowledge that you will find someone else and you will move on with your life.  But of course, you don't.  You spend more time than ever with your 'mutual' friends hoping to hear some titbits of gossip about your ex, desperately hoping they haven't found someone else and, if they have, desperately hoping it doesn't work out.  You check their FaceBook page every twenty minutes for 'updates' and religiously follow their Twitter feeds 'just in case' your name is mentioned.

You don't want to get back together with them - that isn't your aim because those last few years were just awful. However you don't want them to be happier than you, you don't want them to get over you, before you've gotten over them.  And so, every day you 'pick at the scab' by following their social media output and imperceptibly (to you) shifting the conversations with their friends to find out if they are still (as you hope) trying to get over you.    

I've just read all the above again and it makes me appear to be a miserable, vindictive, needy stalker!! 

The truth is I am lucky enough to be married to my best friend of thirty years and I've absolutely no experience of what a divorce is like personally, however what I've written is based on the observations I have made of friends and colleagues who have gone through failed relationships.

What I see in their reactions to the break up is mirrored in the reactions I see in people who have left Jehovahs Witnesses, especially if they have spent a long time within the organisation, which includes me.

Watching from a distance, as some of my friends divorces panned out, I could see all the warning signs but of course, we don't interfere.  Then, months or years later, when those friends are still 'picking the scab' I would shake my head and wonder if they remembered the slanging matches, the pain of being cheated on or the intolerable silences before they finally separated.  I couldn't understand why some of them constantly picked away at that scab of the past.  I do now.

If we could look back at the final few years of our lives in the JW's objectively we wouldn't just see why we left, we would also FEEL why we finally decided to get out.  It is a religion based on lies, based on a self-penned version of the bible, based on an arrogant assumption that they are 'directed' by God, based on a chauvinistic viewpoint and based upon a version of morality that is divisive, sectarian and inhumane.  But all of that is tangible and simple facts - what we sometimes forget is how we FELT at the end; marginalised, confused, disaffected, humiliated, angry, sad, disillusioned, betrayed and frustrated. 

I am a fraud for writing this because I 'pick at the scab' as much as any of you but when I remember the feelings rather than the mechanics of why I left there is a sense of relief that none of my searching and writing can replicate.  I suppose I'm trying to say; don't try to justify your decision by constantly looking for ways to prove them wrong - justify it by realising they can't make you feel like crap anymore.