The process of my awakening started when I was still deeply involved in my community and in its parent organization. It was a road that was long and hard, one with many doubts that oftentimes I still grapple with. I have lost my home, my family, my friends, and my faith. I have gained things, too, such as the realization that the foundation of my life was based on a lie, the recognition that my whole childhood, which was not a childhood at all, has been tainted by the ever present eye of a cruel God watching me, and that the doomsday clock hanging over my head was fabricated all along. There is no happy moment, no comforting memory, without it. I gained pain, suffering, discomfort. I also gained conformation of something I’ve known for a while but hoped was incorrect, that my parents love was always conditional, and that my place in their lives and in their hearts — regardless of what they may tell you — was never absolute.

That is a lot to handle.

There are many things I could say about the cult I grew up in. Across my whole lifetime, I’m not sure I could say all of it. It does not look like the cults that the media parades past your TV and computer screens every few years. We did not live on a compound or a commune, we did not wear prairie dresses. The adults (usually) had normal jobs and the children (usually) went to normal schools. We liked music and movies, games and sports, although much of our “recreation” time was limited and regulated.

When I was a teenager, it was impossible for me to understand that my interest in high control groups went beyond morbid fascination and had its origins in something more sinister. I often wonder how my life would have changed had I realized earlier how much danger I was in.

I know I don’t give myself enough credit. Most adults born into cults never wake up to the fact they have been manipulated and duped, much less teenagers who barely have any critical thinking skills at all. I very vividly remember admiring these groups for their high moral standards (which is now laughable), and for the fact that although they did not have the true religion, in my mind, they still stuck to their guns and followed their God regardless of what the political and law enforcement authorities had to say about it. That was praiseworthy from my perspective — not allowing secular authorities to bully you into disavowing your religious beliefs just because they don’t understand them. I remember thinking to myself, “They’re just like us! Only they don’t have the truth.”

The Truth. That’s what we called it. Internally, that’s what we called our doctrine, that’s what we called our faith. If we were speaking to each other, and wanted to know whether someone else was also involved in our group, we might ask, “Is he in The Truth?”

While that is what we considered ourselves, people who are in The Truth (and The Truth is in us), outsiders knew us by another name: Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Normal people do not generally have to resort to running away in the middle of the night to leave their religions

Jehovah’s Witnesses are known mostly for their evangelical work. It’s what they’re good at: talking in circles and convincing people that the all powerful Watchtower Bible and Tract Society — I mean, Jehovah God — know better for them than they do for themselves. Some of their more provocative and controversial beliefs are that all holidays, including birthday celebrations, are of Satanic origin and should be avoided, that the United Nations is the prophesied “wild beast” of the Bible, that blood transfusions are sin and are to be avoided at risk of death, that all those who are not Jehovah’s Witnesses will die in a fiery Armageddon unless they convert immediately, and, as of more recently, that Russia is the Biblical “King of the North”, as prophesied in the book of Daniel (which is very convenient, considering the current political climate in the United States, even though the Witnesses claim to be wholly politically neutral).

A photo from a Jehovah’s Witness publication

Jehovah's Witnesses do a very good job of making themselves seem harmless. Up until recently, the average person knew nothing of Jehovah’s Witnesses except their door to door work and the occasional comedic quip at their expense. Only lately have they been in the news otherwise, due to their countless child abuse lawsuits piling up around the world, which is pushing the general public into looking behind the curtain and seeing the religion for what it is: a high control cult.

I have not always had such a view of the religion. It took me months after leaving in June 2017 to even acknowledge that that the religion had all of the main attributes of a cult. It took me even longer to reconcile what they truly meant for me, as a freshly out survivor. It shouldn’t have been that hard to figure out. To get away from the group and from my family, which is three generations deep of Witnesses, I had to devise a plan that involved me covertly packing up the few things I could call my own in my car and driving three hours away to stay with my boyfriend for a night before we headed to Chicago, four hours from my native Detroit, for good. Normal people do not generally have to resort to running away in the middle of the night to leave their religions. But I was not a normal person, and this was not a normal situation.

They treat shunned, or “disfellowshipped”, members of the congregation like they are dead

At one time, I was very devout. Actually, throughout most of my life I was very devout. As a child, teenager, and young adult, the idea of leaving the faith I had grown up in brought me extreme pain. There was nothing more devastating to me than the thought of not being within my community, and by proxy, forfeiting my chance at life on a paradise Earth. For Jehovah’s Witnesses, there is no hope of heavenly life after death, but instead that of eternal life in paradise, the whole world transformed into what it was before the “Fall of Man”, an Eden-like planet that would never again be plagued by war or sickness or death. A perfect world, full of Jehovah’s Witnesses. The New System, we called it, or sometimes The New Order or The New World, which now sounds eerily similar to the “New World Order” of several conspiracy theories.

According to Steven Hassan’s BITE Model, which is the leading philosophy for identifying cults, cult control can be split into four main attributes, and within those four there are various identifying markers for cults. If your group (whether it be religious, political, lifestyle, multilevel-marketing, or otherwise) fits most of these, or even just some of these, you’re probably in trouble. I didn’t look into the BITE Model until well after I had decided I was not going to continue being one of Jehovah’s Witnesses. I had already left the group, but I still struggled with calling it what it was. Many ex Witnesses have this issue; you may know that the organization is wrong, you may know that they lie, that they are abusive, that they actively facilitate abuse. You may even know that they use mind control and brainwashing in their tactics for both recruiting new members (because yes, no matter what they tell you, going door to door is about converting people) and in keeping current members in the fold. But there is something so damning about calling it a cult, because once you have done so there is no going back from that point. You can’t unlearn what you have dug up.

The four points of the BITE Model are Behavior Control, Information Control, Thought Control, and Emotional Control. I did not even have to read their bullet points and further descriptions to know that the Jehovah’s Witness organization fit all of them.

For me, it was all downhill from there. From finding out that Jehovah’s Witnesses founder Charles Taze Russell had some pretty interesting beliefs himself, and based his new religion on some very peculiar and alarming ideas, things modern Jehovah’s Witnesses would call “demonic” or “pagan”, to finally accepting that their bizarre shunning policy that had been held over my head for years, keeping me emotionally and physically hostage from the moment I was baptized at twelve years old, was just as cruel and inhumane as ex-JW activists have been trying to convince people for decades, I was out.

Paradise, according to Jehovah’s Witnesses

Leaving has been monumentally difficult — every memory I have, everything that was important to me, it all goes back to the organization. They teach that people who leave, and worse, people who leave and then speak out about the abuses and human rights violations endured while inside, are “antichrists”, “mentally diseased”, “dining at the table of Satan” and “fit for destruction”. How does one deal with that? Knowing that not only does my community, people I have grown up with, people who I have loved and felt were some of my closest friends, believe this about me, but so do my parents, my sister, my grandmother, my cousins, aunts and uncles, and so on. For them, leaving the congregation is nothing more than a death sentence. They treat shunned, or “disfellowshipped”, members of the congregation like they are dead, but worse, they do not mourn for them, because in their eyes we have made our choice to leave the “table of Jehovah”.

The abuse does not matter. The false doctrine does not matter. The circular thinking, the twisted words, the failed prophecies, the mind control, the brainwashing, none of it matters. I recall, as do many ex-JW activists, Jehovah’s Witnesses who would say, in response to being called brainwashed, that there is nothing wrong with brainwashing. “What’s wrong with having a clean brain?”

I go back and forth daily between being angry and just being sad. I am angry that an organization headed by eight men, eight abusers, eight pedophile apologists, eight psychopaths, has convinced my family that it is acceptable to shun me due to not wanting to be apart of their religion anymore. I am angry I will likely not get to go to my baby sister’s high school graduation, and if she continues in the faith, know anything about her life afterwards. I am angry that I will not be invited to my parents funeral’s when they pass. I am angry that the first twenty years of my life, and all of theirs, have been given up to this dysfunctional and sadistic organization. I am angry that I could see through their lies, and yet my parents who were supposed to protect me from harm continue to swallow the deception that the organization serves them without a lick of criticism whatsoever. But this is also what makes me sad.

Both of my parents were raised Jehovah’s Witnesses, my mother from birth and my father from when he was a young child. Both were active in their congregations, thirty miles away from each other from Detroit to Ypsilanti. My maternal grandmother was a pioneer (a type of missionary service, given that in the 60s and 70s around one hundred hours a month of evangelism was required to the organization) for my mother’s whole life, and she embedded the “fear of Jehovah” in her children honestly. I don’t think my mother ever really imagined doing anything else. My father’s parents were a little less active; my first memories of my grandmother were when she was “inactive” in the organization, not going to meetings or doing the evangelizing work. We didn’t visit her all that often because of this. As I grew up she became more active again, despite her chronic and severe asthma, giving herself back to the organization and pioneering whenever she could. My father, for the most part, was always active. He was 25 when my parents got married, and a few months after I was born, still under 30, he was made an elder in our congregation. He always dreamed of being a circuit overseer, an elder “employed” by the Watchtower organization to go around to various congregations every week and make sure they were staying on track. He probably could have been, had he not had children, and he would have been good at it, too.

I wonder whether they ever had a chance at all. I was able to get out, find “the truth about the truth” when I was still young and while the internet and criticism of religion were at their heights. My parents didn’t have anything of the sort. The closest that they came to people speaking out was not blogs or Twitter threads, but men and women protesting outside of Kingdom Hall’s and Assembly Hall’s, screaming through megaphones but still drowned out by Witnesses inherent fear of apostates. I remember seeing some myself in 2014 outside of our international convention in Detroit at Ford Field. It was not hard to ignore them, because to us they looked and acted as if they were crazy. How much harder would it have been in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, when the information was not a simple Google search away? I am sad because for my parents — and for others in their generation and the generations before them — leaving and finding the truth was even more difficult than it is now. They have spent 40+ years believing the organization with their heart and soul. Because of this, oftentimes I understand why my parents choose to stay in the hands of the organization, even if that meant losing their oldest child. The Watchtower Society knows how to touch people’s hearts. While their logic is not sound, it is incredibly convincing.

Then I think about my own future children, and whether I would be able to give them up so easily because eight men hiding from prosecution in New York tell me to. That’s when I become angry, and the cycle begins again.

I am twenty one years old. Most days, I have no idea what I am doing. Although Jehovah’s Witnesses consider themselves “no part of the world”, looking back I never truly considered myself apart of something wholly different than the world around me. I loved the world for what it was, even on its bad days, and for much of my life I felt ashamed of that. Now that I am out in it, though, my perspective has changed. Living in a cult for the first twenty years of my life has forever scarred me. I will never be a normal human being. I look into the world and I feel like a puzzle piece that does not fit; I don’t know or understand anything about it, and likewise the world and the people within it do not understand me. They don’t understand where I come from, why I think the way I do, why the things that are important to me are important to me. It is the little things, most times. Other times, it is the big things, and I have the suffer through them like nothing is wrong, like I am not wrong, not tainted, not broken, as though I was not a hostage for all of my childhood. Most people I interact with day to day do not know, and I don’t want them to. I am a victim, as we all are, but I am not a pity case. I do not want sympathy, I want change. Every day a new article, video, or interview comes out about what is truly happening behind the mask of Jehovah’s Witnesses is one day closer to the organization as a whole crashing and burning. I don’t know what that will look like; sometimes I worry it will end in tragedy, a last blood sacrifice to the men who have eight million people in the palm of their hands. I hope not.

Right now, I simply want peace. I want the noise in the back of my head that sounds like Witness music, Kingdom Melodies, to stop playing. I want to feel like a complete person for the first time in my life. I don’t know what that feels like, right now, but I’m dying to find out.