So I'm resurrecting this old blog. Why did I stop posting here as soon as I started? Because I'm a big chicken, that's why. I have been concerned that old friends and family members might search my name and find me here. Well, that was silly. All those "old friends" and family members have disowned me anyway, so I guess it shouldn't concern me. Here I am. I keep talking my partner's ear off about things and he says, "BLOG IT!" and then I don't blog it. Maybe I will now. To start off, here is a letter I sent in to Freeminds.org a couple of years ago. I went to look it up recently and it's all in Spanish for some reason and I couldn't find the original version on the site anymore. Maybe I just missed it. Jeremy said I should post it here and put a link to it on freeminds.org in case anyone stumbles onto it. Note that this is a very, very brief version of my "story." Here goes:

I was born into the fourth generation of a family of Witnesses. When I was eighteen I began to lose my faith. I tried so hard to guard my faith from my doubts. I had about a thousand reasons to stay in the organization and no reasons to leave. I thought my life was over. I had no support system outside the cult. I wanted to die. Indeed, I thought dying would be better than leaving, or staying within the organization, a hypocrite, a wolf in sheep's clothing. That's what I felt like.

I thought I could never leave. My upbringing was severe and extreme even for a Witness. It made me...weird. Other people didn't know how to approach me and I didn't know how to approach them. I was socially inept. I despaired of ever having a normal life. Then one day, I stumbled over Freeminds.org. I systematically devoured everything on the site - several times. Randy, the things I found gave me courage and understanding. I was so relieved to find that I wasn't crazy, I wept. Often. In the most difficult of times, I would return to the website to read everything over again.

Six years later, things are still difficult. I have finally left the organization. I have been disowned by some. I have lost my job twice because I left (I worked for a Witness). I have had rumors started about me. Recently I was diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder stemming from my childhood experiences as a Jehovah's Witness. I am going through a lot right now, and I know it may take years more for me to heal and have a normal life. But I do not regret my decision to leave.

I know that without the many personal accounts on freeminds.org attesting to the fact that there is life after the organization, I may never have been strong enough to leave. I think that I probably would have killed myself eventually. I knew that my parents would rather have lost me to suicide than to "Satan." They would have been able to tell themselves that I was ill, and Jehovah would have mercy on me. Suicide seemed like the most loving (!!) course of action at one time. I do feel that finding your site saved my life. It certainly saved my sanity. I can talk about it to "outsiders" until I'm blue in the face but the only people capable of truly understanding the impact being a Witness has made on my life, are other ex-Witnesses. It's taken me six years to finally reach out to other ex-Witnesses on the internet. I hope that it helps. And as I continue to grow and heal, I hope my own words can help others, the way the accounts on your site helped me. I feel like it's more or less my responsibility to help others like me.

Thank you for all you have done to help me and other people searching for truth and comfort and understanding. And courage. I don't have much money but I will do all I can to support Freeminds.org to the day I die. I really do believe you are saving people's lives, even if they never write in to tell you that. After all, it took me six years just to be able to write you this e-mail.

I have to add that it is very hard to convey the proper emotion through typed words! Please know that this is heartfelt.

Leila Benoit

On "Sudden Revelations" After Leaving Cults

When you leave a cult, you leave for a variety of reasons. It's usually not just one thing, even if it was one thing that initially prompted you to consider it. And when you're out, you don't magically reject everything the cult taught you from birth to the day you left. That's because nothing is black and white; you don't get to go into your brain and find the folder labeled “Cult – 1986-2009” and click Delete. The cult's teachings seep into everything; they affect everything you believe and think you know. So for years, you'll have sudden revelations, some big, some minuscule, about things you Thought You Knew. Suddenly something that is obvious to most people will become instantly clear to you, and you'll feel really stupid for not having seen it before, and sort of angry because you were raised in such a way that you were deprived of that information, or deprived of the critical thinking skills needed to get to that revelation sooner.

So for the past few years, every once in a while I have these revelations of “knowledge” that come to me instantly formed, and I realize that before that, I was still operating on assumptions/viewpoints taught me by the cult. And there is really no way around this. There's no way to sit down when you leave the cult and analyze every bit of information in your mind to see where it came from and if it is actually valid. The trick is to be ready to admit that something may in fact not be valid; it may really be an old prejudice taught you as a child by the cult. If you can't admit the possibility that you may be unconsciously holding onto some of those things, then you end up being one of those idiots who goes to their grave (long after leaving the cult) insisting that Hershey's really does use blood to make their chocolate goodies, or that “smurf” really does mean “little blue demon” in the dictionary.

It's important that when you have these revelations, you allow the initial response of anger, sadness, betrayal, whatever, to be expressed – my partner is great, he never minds having long out-of-nowhere conversations with me about these sudden revelations and what they mean to my life now. Then, after that, if you can, laugh about it. Like, wow, I can't believe all this time I've been telling people to look up “smurf” in the dictionary. It sucks, I feel ignorant, but... it's kind of funny. If you can't laugh a little, you end up holding onto these old prejudices and bits of misinformation all the tighter, because if you give it up, you have to admit you were wrong and foolish, and then you feel humiliated. You end up sacrificing your own self-improvement to keep your ego safe and sound. Big mistake. Get angry, feel foolish and taken advantage of and held back, and then say, Wow, I'm so glad I got out.

I'm thinking of all this stuff tonight because last night, on my way to sleep, I suddenly remembered an event from childhood and saw it in a different light, thanks to adult perspective and being free of my old cultist mentality.

I was about twelve years old when this happened. I was staying at a friend's house. Her mom sent us to switch out the laundry; their washer and dryer was out on the back porch so we were outside. It was dark. We had the porch light on, so we couldn't see more than a few feet into the darkness. We couldn't see the trees or bushes that surrounded their house.

Well, we were used to being outside at night, no big deal, but then, clear as day, we heard this, coming from the darkness to one side of the porch:

“Psssst! Psst! Psssssssssst!”

No, it was not an insect or something dumb like that. It was very obviously a person's voice. There was no one at the house that could have been playing a trick on us. We got frightened and went inside.

We held hands in her room and sang, We're Jehovah's Witnesses, we speak out in fearlessness!, what we'd been counseled to do when we were afraid. We didn't tell her parents that we thought there was someone outside – because that's not what we thought. We thought, automatically, that it was a demon. That's why it was outside and not in, because there were Bibles and stuff in the house, so it couldn't come in. And why tell her parents? They wouldn't be able to hear it, because after all, “everyone knows” that demons mostly target kids, because they're more vulnerable and because no one will believe them.

Looking back, of course, I have a much more chilling idea of what was in the darkness trying to attract our attention – maybe hoping one of us would wander off the porch.

Thinking of the time frame in which this happened, it was around the time this guy in his late twenties, who worked at Walmart, took a liking to me. Once, when I was with my sister, he followed her home to see where I lived. Another time, I was with my friend's family and he followed them home. He showed up at their house more than once, trying to coax me into his car.

Is it more likely that a demon was saying, “Psst!” or that it was this man, who had already established a pattern of trying to get me into his car? And instead of going inside and telling her parents that someone was outside whispering to us, or calling the police, we went inside and prayed and sang together, terrified that a demon was trying to get into the house.

In a cult, children are basically shaped into little victims, especially girls. I can think of so many times, so many things I should have told my parents. Instead I closed my eyes and prayed.

This is just one example of a “revelation” that can occur years after leaving a cult. Of course it wasn't a demon trying to get into the house! If anything, it's mostly likely it was a man trying to draw us away from the house. When I thought of this incident and realized all this, I felt pretty pissed off. I was angry that I'd been terrified to such an extent by adults telling me over and over again that demons were trying to attack me every second of the day, that it never even occurred to me that it could be something besides a demon whispering to me from the trees. I was angry, too, that the only line of defense I'd been given was to pray to God and sing Kingdom Melodies and repeat His name, and nothing bad could happen then – if my faith was strong enough.

It does feel like a betrayal – a big part of me thinks the adults in my life should have done a better job of protecting me. I also feel pretty foolish and stupid. How could I have thought, even as a sheltered child, that a demon was trying to get me? How could it be that it never even popped into my mind that maybe something else was going on? It's embarrassing just to admit it. But, it did happen that way. Nothing I can do to change it now. All I can do is process it, correct my erroneous thinking, make sure any kids in my care are better protected, and remember How Glad I Am That I Got Out. Because sometimes it's hard to laugh at it; and some things aren't made for laughing at. Sometimes the best you can do is to be thankful you're out of the cult now.

Resources for Ex-Jehovah's Witnesses

Freeminds.org - This website saved my life! It is a great resource for anyone who has left the Witnesses, or is thinking about leaving. It's also a very accurate and instructional place for non-Witnesses to learn about the organization, for example, someone with a JW co-worker or someone with a family member who has suddenly become a JW. Here you can learn about how to approach Witnesses about their beliefs, and how to judge whether or not you even should. The life stories (under "People") are very helpful to ex-JWs, and the "Articles" section is good, too. There is also an LGBT section, though I do not think it is as widely developed as can be hoped. It's a relatively new feature of the site though, so they are still working on it.

Jehovahs-Witness.net - A discussion forum for ex-Witnesses. Pretty much free from trolls.

Crisis of Conscience - This book, by Ray Franz, a former member of the Governing Body of Jehovah's Witnesses, has changed many lives. Ray brings compassion and love to this subject that most people have a hard time addressing without a certain amount of bitterness. Long, but completely worth the read.

Starter Post

I have been wanting to create a blog for some time now. I guess it would be easier to have a blog devoted to one subject, but there are too many things I want to talk about. I couldn't choose just one. So bear with me as I work through my labels. If I reach just one person who is looking for the precise thing I have to say – it's worth it.

Just a few of the things I want to talk about here: Gender, sexuality and religion.

I welcome all viewpoints here – if they can be expressed in a civil way. This is not the place for hate speech. I do not feed trolls. I want to talk to people who want to talk about the issues at hand. Not people who want to provoke or antagonize. So be free with your comments, but be civil, too.

This is a personal blog, and sometimes I will get personal, so reader beware!