Using God for Control (The Subtlety of Neglect)

An Ideal, God-Loving Family

Trigger Warning: This post discusses religious trauma and its impact on mental health. It may be distressing for readers who have experienced harm in religious or faith-based settings. Please read with care and prioritize your well-being.

We were the ideal family: two beautiful children born to a young married couple, a golden retriever, and a home built by my father’s hands in the Cascade Mountains. Our home was peaceful and quiet, but too quiet. Lurking just barely below the skin of our idyllic life was a tempestuous sea of generational neglect, crippling repression, lifelong grudges, and a strange kind of don’t ask, don’t tell perpetuated by the religion that our lives revolved around.

As far as I could tell, we were a typical family; we had enough money and a supportive community, and my parents seemed to love me. But I knew we were different: we were Jehovah’s Witnesses. We didn’t celebrate birthdays or holidays or spend time with people outside of our religion. There were even more peculiarities, but I knew why we did them, at least according to the doctrine. At 12 years old, my relationship with God was palpable. I prayed often and believed in a loving creator whose only legitimate organization on earth I was lucky enough to have been born into. I decided to get baptized, but I was unaware of what the commitment entailed. I thought I committed myself to God, but instead I committed to the religion.

The religion slowly and silently destroyed our relationships with each other and ourselves. It kept us busy and restricted us to the point that the religious structure defined every aspect of our lives. Meaningful friendships were hard to find, and everyone stayed on their toes out of fear of being exposed for sinning and subsequently punished by the leadership.

After generations of involvement in the religion, everyone on both sides of my family has been swallowed up or banished from the faith. I have aunts, uncles, and cousins who have been estranged for decades: some I’ve never met, some I don’t even know the name of, and I’m one of them.

When Things Started to Break

It wasn’t until after my baptism and becoming an official member of the Jehovah’s Witnesses that I started to see cracks in our idyllic life. I couldn’t be honest with my parents, and they couldn’t be honest with me. My father was the only one allowed to express anger. My mother kept every square inch of the house clean at all times. My sister and I were always at odds, and I was isolated since there was only one boy around my age in our church. I told myself we were normal, that our eccentricities were because we knew the truth about God, and I believed it. I believed what I learned at church as the dysfunction grew in me and at home.

My personality fractured, and I became one person at school and another at home. The Jehovah’s Witnesses warned us about living a “double life” and how sinful it was. The double life distressed me; I thought moral failure or weak faith was to blame, and due to its classification as a sin, it was one more thing I couldn’t talk to my parents about. I couldn’t understand why I spontaneously became a different person, and I kept it a secret from my family for fear of being grounded or lectured. I kept my pain and confusion a secret outside of the family because living a double life is a sin, and the elders of the congregation could punish me for it.

But I didn’t escape the elders for long, and at 18, I discovered what religious punishment really meant.

Why So Many Secrets

The pressure of keeping so many secrets and the pain and confusion of why I couldn’t stop sinning, even though I wanted to, found its tipping point after my mother caught me smoking and my grandmother caught me drinking. I felt horrible, and everything seemed to be my fault, so I finally devised an idea to relieve the burden.

I spent a full school day writing a letter to my parents telling them everything. They read the letter and gave it to the elders without my knowledge.

The elders formed a judicial committee and “disfellowshipped” me less than 2 weeks after receiving the letter. After their decision, one of the elders announced it to the congregation during the midweek service. From that announcement on, every Jehovah’s Witness has been forbidden to contact me. That includes my friends, family, and even the JWs who knock on my front door. And if they do, they risk being disfellowshipped, too.

Like the sword of Damocles, the Jehovah’s Witnesses reserve the right to cut any baptized member out of the fold depending on the exclusive option of three elders. They decide privately with no responsibility to explain their reasoning and no method for overturning the decision once it’s made.

At last, I discovered how my family had become so fractured and distrustful. At my most vulnerable, honest, and hopeless moment, everyone I had ever known betrayed me.

With a Judas Kiss, the elders told me that the disfellowshipment process is a loving arrangement, created directly by God, for my benefit. As a disfellowshipped person, they say I’m mentally diseased, that all I want is to destroy the Jehovah’s Witnesses, serve Satan in a life of pleasure, and deceive any Jehovah’s Witnesses I find into sin. The period after my disfellowshipment exposed me to life-threatening situations regularly. I was hurt and confused, with nobody to trust or talk to, and estranged from everything I had ever known.

I still thought it was all my fault.

The Journey Begins

Only after noticing the myriad knots of trauma and neglect hidden deep did I begin to see that it wasn’t all my fault. I questioned and slowly rebuilt everything I took for granted in order to see the truth. Many of my family and friends are still mostly gone, and I’ve never gotten an apology or recognition of my struggle, and likely never will.

Instead, I’ve recovered something much more valuable, my Self. They say recovery is easy; all you have to do is change everything.

Complex trauma comes in many forms that are undramatic and seemingly normal. The Jehovah’s Witnesses use members’ families as blackmail to keep them from leaving or questioning doctrine. In another life, the organization and blackmail material could have been different, but the effects would be the same.

To all those quietly suffering, with your sense of reality and responsibility twisted against you, I hope you, too, can realize that it’s not your fault and that recovery is not only possible but one of the most beautiful things in the world.

Featured Image: Unsplash

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