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Very much so, GL.
Rather differently from you, because, thank goodness, none of my family were ever involved.
The most noticeable effect on me came in two areas. One, while I was still being pressured and psychologically bullied by the woman who was supposedly preparing me for "baptism", the wife of the congregation Secreatary. Somehow it was as if she was controlling my thoughts, so that even I was checking my own thoughts and reasoning, trying to force them into "acceptable" avenues, not to try to work out how the GB could reconcile giving a date to Adam's year of creation with all the scientific evidence about prehistory. I never did of course, but the psychological manipulation I was under was phenomenal, and I saw how people only allowed their conversation along certain train tracks, as it were.
The second experience that comes to mind is something that to me is very sad. Because the WT were so very motivated to recruit me, I had visits and contact from the DO. He had put in touch with me an elderly lady in her eighties in a congregation about an hour's drive from me, because my background circumstances were unusual and she was the only other similar person he had ever met who had become a JW from a similar background. His instinct was sound. We really clicked, talked each other's language very well, and a very warm and close friendship developed between us. I am very fond of her still, and we talked on the phone a great deal, about many things other than Witness stuff.
She had become JW against great family opposition 56 years before, as a young married woman. Once I understood the reality of what was happening to me...somehow I was being manipulated and pressured by something very bad trying to ensnare me... I was resolute in trying to eradicate all elements of the brainwashing process that had got under way.
On JWN I encountered for the first time the concept of cognitive dissonance, and I knew that was exactly what I had been struggling with. I never stopped believing the tenets of the Creed, but my mind had been wrestling with what I can picture as the sticky cobweb strands of the psychological WT web that my brain had not realised was trying to ensnare me. I can only imagine that this is what happens to everyone who gets drawn in.
Anyway, my lovely elderly friend, still sharply witty and intelligent, had a fine brain totally ensnared. She continued to ring me for a very long time after I walked away from the KH. Whereas local JW's variously shunned me or considered me still fair game for conversion efforts, my dear friend and I were sure we could continue our friendship. However, it became clear to me that she was so totally immersed in WT culture that she wasn't able to separate in her mind our friendship and her conviction that unless I became "baptised" I would not have life. Her own family had become split both ways, and it was excruciating to watch how readily she wrote off generations of her own offspring who like me had turned away from it.
More and more it became impossible to escape her efforts to bring Jehovah into every conversation. She would get more and more upset as I would gently steer the conversation away. I never said to her that our contact like this could not continue, but I was still untangling myself from the vile web in my mind. I had to give priority to my own family and my own healing.
I've never broken off the friendship, but I've just stopped ringing her, though she does just very occasionally still ring me. Every single conversation eventually goes to Jehovah. She is totally ensnared in the net of her congregation. She's lost more than half of her grandchildren because they have been disfellowshipped for using their own powers of reason, and she's lost 50% of her own children for the same reason.
I love her dearly, but, sad as it is, and it is very sad, it's a friendship that cannot be, as much for her very frail health as for myself. It is not good for either of us.
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