Why I Left - Elder's Wife & Pioneer

the elders made me an apostate and ultimately that's the truth but before we get to that point i'm going to rewind a little bit and see if i can give you a clear outline of the things that happened to me that essentially woke me up my wake-up process was quite a lengthy one and if i think back now it probably started very early on in my childhood and culminated with my husband waking up and the way the congregation had responded to that process for him i was born in cape town south africa and i then relocated with my family to a very small congregation in donegal ireland and that is where i would say i had the bulk of my indoctrination as a teenager i witnessed the ruining of reputations rather scathingly within that congregation i witnessed fights sometimes physical fights or backhanded comments as well within that congregation and that is also the congregation where my family ended up splitting apart my parents separated in that corrugation so a lot of things happened during my teenage years that would have initially started to set off alarm bells but it wasn't really until i firstly started pioneering that the wake up process really began there were things i noticed when i started out pioneering that made me very uncomfortable firstly it wasn't something that i ever set out to do i pioneered because at the time i could not find suitable work and my hand was forced by the elders in the congregation they said i had no excuse and so the only option for me was to pioneer and being the people pleaser i was that's what i did i did find work which of course they said was jehovah's blessing which it was not it was a lot of hard work to eventually find a job and i continued to pioneer i think i only made it two years of pioneering really and that was then before my daughter was born and at that point i'd step down but while pioneering there were things i'd noticed such as the way other pioneers weren't positive there was a lot of talk and i know mental health is a sensitive subject but there was a lot of talk over poor mental health being a pioneer many of the pioneers were on medication to help them cope with almost all of them really that i knew some form of medication for anxiety and i felt a lot of pressure once i had become a pioneer that made me understand why those others had got to the point of needing medication there are a lot of expectations put on pioneers um a lot that i guess people don't really talk about and maybe that's worth another video but also something i noticed was with regard to the lack of positivity in the environment was coffee breaks tea breaks were spent snooping on people who had been disfellowshipped or people who were inactive looking at their facebook profiles or gossiping about people who appeared weaker in the congregation and me being a very private person that made me feel terribly uncomfortable i never said anything to anyone because of course i don't like to ruffle feathers or i didn't at the time and over time it wore me down a little bit and i was actually very grateful that when my daughter was born i had an excuse to stop pioneering although i had every intention of trying to continue realistically it wasn't going to happen another shake in the armor or the cracking of the armor was when my daughter herself was born and that's a big life change a really big life change that in our particular congregation not many people understood it was a predominant predominantly older congregation filled with pioneers regular pioneers special pioneers i think at one point fifty percent of that congregation was pioneers so very few people who had understanding of what it was like to have children and there were a lot of again expectations put on us as a young couple with a child to keep her quiet to silence her she wasn't allowed to make a sound she wasn't allowed to get up from her seat there were talks on the platform about it and it just got progressively worse as we then went on to have a second child and maybe a couple more families moved into the hall and so the noise level naturally went up children cannot sit for two hours silently it is impossible to expect this of them at one point an elder physically took my daughter put her in her pram and pushed me out the kingdom hall door and said don't come back until she says she was asleep at that point in time i was pregnant with my second which i had a high risk pregnancy and i was technically supposed to be on bed rest so i was breaking my bed rest rules to make sure that i went to the kingdom hall and here i was being pushed out onto the street to push her around when really i shouldn't have even been on my feet in the first place with no regard for my well-being her well-being nothing and it was something that had worn me down over a period of time something i couldn't stop thinking about as it progressively got worse and there were more local needs on children needing to behave um it really got on my nerves it really really did that was a major thing for me but something that i'm very grateful for was my daughter's free thinking from a very young age at only i think between about 14 14 to 16 months old she was able to point out to me in my book of bible stories the picture um on the account of the flood where the mother and baby were sitting on the rock and she said to me mummy are they going to die and i was absolutely shocked to my core i realized i couldn't give her an answer i didn't want to give her an answer it was how do you explain death to such a young child a one-year-old it's a very difficult subject and so that was it that was the last time i read my book of bible stories tour i closed the book and i put it on the shelf and at this point i did not tell patrick about any of that i didn't tell him about the things that were upsetting me in the congregation because by the time our second was on her way patrick had been made an elder and prior to him even being made an elder i could see that things were changing with him i wasn't sure if it was something i was doing or if he was facing pressures at work it was not something that we spoke about it seemed like a very sensitive subject but once we got to a certain point where something upsetting had happened in the congregation and i said to him i'm not sure that this is the truth sometimes i just wonder how can this possibly be the truth when people behave like that that is when he confessed to me how he had been feeling and that ultimately he didn't think he could remain a witness because he did not believe in jehovah anymore or the organization so the things were beginning to mount i didn't know that he'd been having these feelings and obviously that had been happening for a number of years for him and in the midst of all of that happening there also was an incident with our eldest in the congregation which i know spoken about in an early video but i thought it would be good to chat about it do this video again from a slightly more healed viewpoint we had an incident in the kingdom hall with my eldest and another child um having inappropriate behavior toward her i'm not going to go into detail on this point but it is it's a very sensitive subject and it had set off a lot of emotional trauma that i thought i'd put behind me because i had had similar ongoing abuse experience with an older child in my childhood from around the age of five to the age of ten and witnessing because i was the only one who witnessed what happened with my daughter triggered a lot of things in me a lot of suppressed trauma layered on top of the fact that abuse within the organization was not something that i was unfamiliar with on another level in our family let's just say there has been a history in one side of my family of child abuse so things were really beginning to break apart and i was terrified absolutely terrified i'd eventually spoken to a close friend about um some the thing that had happened the um incident with our eldest daughter and she was the only one that i had opened up to about it because there are so many things that were unspoken [Music] and many of you know in the organization that they keep us quiet they shut you up they literally they tape your mouth shut and you are trapped it really does feel like entrapment you can't openly talk about things without being seen as weak or without believing that you are going to be punished and i know this is a very sensitive subject and one that maybe would be better off in its own video entirely but just to touch on it so that was something that really did that was beyond crack really that that broke me and made me emotionally able to hear and understand what patrick was going to going going through and although it took some time it took me a solid two years from patrick telling me that he was awake to myself being awake to the point of leaving before things really came to a head in that time frame i was also faced with the fact again as previously mentioned in another video that i couldn't leave my mum and that was a really big thing for me and probably why my waking process was slowed down somewhat because i fought it and i fought it really hard but eventually it became exhausting and i just couldn't keep up the charade any longer going to meetings eventually on my own with the children on my own and then starting to fade the children out of going to the kingdom hall because we at that point had agreed with patrick that the girls would stay home with him and that i'd come to the realization that i couldn't raise them as jehovah's witnesses and i didn't want to raise them as jehovah's witnesses but that i would continue to hold on for the sake of my mom things from that point sped up quite a bit because patrick and i are very very close couple and i found it very upsetting to deal with the way it got to the point that he was almost ignored in conversation i would have with other people inside the congregation they just pretended he didn't exist like it was it was easier for them to pretend that he was dead he never came up in conversation the only person invited places with other jehovah's witnesses would be me and he would just be excluded all together or you know would be me and possibly the kids and to me it just didn't feel right because it was either take all of us or none of us and that's something i don't think they could understand many people had spread rumors i had more than one person come up to me on occasion and say that they're sorry that patrick has cheated on me so obviously the gossip mill was well and truly underway other people saying they thought that depression had skipped him in the family as there is a history with patrick's family anyway and saying ah how disappointing it is to see him go from such a good man to being what he is now and also someone very close to us who said that if he doesn't start going back to the meetings he might still be good now but that's not going to last he's going to be bad i simply couldn't cope with hearing such negativity about someone i love so much and things that i knew were not true so again that contributed to my waking up process but to get around to the elders and how the elders ultimately turned me into an apostate was one evening in february 2019 and if you remember correctly from other videos that was the month that we finally disassociated two elders two very new elders in the congregation showed up at my front door on a friday evening when my sister-in-law had only just shown up herself about half an hour prior to them paddy was out for the evening playing a game of dungeons and dragons not that they knew that and not that i admitted to that but they came in to my house unannounced which is something that i asked them not to do and they sat down on the sofa and basically said to me that it has come in exactly their words it has come to their attention that i had made an accusation an accusation of a serious nature that involved the congregation and i was absolutely floored i thought what on earth on earth have i done surely i hadn't done anything wrong i hadn't spoken to anyone i was keeping myself to myself at this point and all together was finding it very hard to attend any meetings at all turns out that the friend i had confided in about the incident with our daughter had then gone and not out of any malice at all had gone to her elders in a different congregation and had asked them what measures did they have in place for protecting children in their congregation because if something like this could happen and it happened in the main auditorium in front of the congregation no one else saw it except me by chance but if something like that can happen in a kingdom hall and to someone she knows she wanted to know how her elders were implementing safety measures for their congregation but as we know that is not the way it was taken instead that elder went to my body of elders and made it out that i had made an accusation of a child which i had not and which i would never do having been a child in that position before myself growing up having been an abuse victim and truly i did not know what to say to them i i sat there probably a good few minutes before eventually coming out with the fact that i didn't appreciate them saying to me that i accused anyone because i wouldn't and i couldn't it's just not in me to behave like that towards a child and of course they started changing their tune pretty quickly started backtracking say they shouldn't have used that language and all of a sudden change the subject know how are you know how is your child no question of how can we support you which is what the normal human thing a normal human response would have been my mind was blown instead they asked me would i then since paddy wasn't home like to divulge any information on my husband to which shocked me a second time because of even the language that they used to divulge information it almost sounded like i was being interrogated you know like i was on the stand standing trial for something and i said no i then proceeded to change it back to the question of child protective measures and i started drilling them with questions thank you very much to reddit for those questions and the community on there with questions are of what kind of things they had implemented in the congregation to safeguard children and trying to make them think about the fact that the things they'd implemented weren't actually any implementation at all of safety measures and that it was just a whole lot of fluff if you will a whole lot of talking and no action and at that point i think they must have realized that i was armed with more information than they were prepared for and the elder tried to catch me out he tried to catch me out on the on a website he cut the way he worded it was what information had i been read had i been reading on websites but when i said to him i don't understand what he's asking because i was referring to the the policy on jw.org shall we say and so he very quickly went oh oh right okay okay and then brought up the policy which was on the website which i already knew and at that point things got quite uncomfortable that particular elder then started crying about his own um history of abuse within the family and i can't tell you how uncomfortable the whole situation was i mean it was an hour and a half of absolute mental and emotional torture i didn't know what to do with a full-grown man crying on my couch that i didn't know i really didn't know him i hadn't been attending meetings as regularly and he brought a second elder who was very young in his early 20s with him who simply sat and got deeper and deeper into my sofa because he also didn't know what to say he didn't know what to do he was probably the most uncomfortable person in the room and at that point through the conversation with them i knew that that that was it those two elders truly i should thank them because it was at that point that the switch just flipped i knew i couldn't do it any longer i knew that i would take my sister-in-law to the meeting on sunday i would leave my kids behind i would hug who i needed to and that's just what i did and that i would never set foot in there again and ultimately those two elders did more for me in that hour and a half of mental and emotional torture than anyone had done in the organization in my whole life because they finally helped me make up my mind to take the steps to freedom that i needed for my family and that is the point at which i said to patrick can we please disassociate i am done by that sunday evening we had written our disassociation letters on the monday i went and i said goodbye to my very best friend who i grew up with in the organization who is sadly still in she was my maid of honor and someone who i miss dearly uh i went and i said my goodbyes to her i have to thank her if she ever sees this video for listening to me for giving me the time of day to have a coffee and hear me out she heard me out for over an hour and i just hope one day what i had to say resonates with her because i would love nothing more than to hug her again and after that there were maybe a handful of people to send a message to to say goodbye to um two of which of my close friends have now also left which is wonderful and our disassociation letters went in valentine's day 2019 which we now refer to as our freedom day so this year in february 2022 will mark our third anniversary of freedom from jehovah's witnesses and that is a little bit of an overview of my story and my experience of waking up of course there's probably many things that i have left off and forgotten about and that i will remember after this video but i wanted to sit down with you all and say it from a different point of view because i know i previously in those very early videos the early days of leaving were so raw and so broken and held a lot of anger and a lot of pain in them but i don't have that anger or that pain it's not burning hot anymore sometimes it creeps up on me and i think that's only natural we're all human but for the most part i can talk about and i can think about the process of leaving and i can think about my experience as a jehovah's witness with a very neutral attitude and it's taken a lot of time and a lot of hard work to get there and i just hope that by telling my story and my experience that it it gives comfort to someone out there and that maybe even my friends or my family will watch it and know that i love them still and i'm thinking of them and thinking of anyone going through the waking up process and i do genuinely appreciate all of you who have sat and listened to me waffle on but it's very therapeutic to say it and i look forward to hearing your experiences of leaving please i would love to hear what are the things that started breaking down your beliefs in jehovah's witnesses how did your cracks appear and thank you very much for watching

Channel: The Exjw Family

Views: 110,794

Keywords: exjw, exjw story, exjw elder, exjw pioneer, Jehovah's Witnesses, leaving Jehovah's Witnesses, leaving watchtower, watchtower, cult, escaping a cult, jw, ex jw, elder, pioneer

Id: ueHd9T2iWxI

Length: 27min 41sec (1661 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 04 2022