Breaking the Chains: Embracing Freedom after Exiting the Jehovah's Witnesses

Breaking the Chains: Embracing Freedom after Exiting the Jehovah's Witnesses

By Carrie Willard

Life is a journey of self-discovery and growth, and for me, it took decades to find the courage to break free from the grip of Jehovah's Witnesses—a cult I was born into and deeply entrenched in for most of my life. 

I was a born-in, but my parents joined the religion as adults. They had a childhood, adolescent and adult identity outside a high-control religion. I did not. My seven children were also raised in the cult, a fact that adds to the deep sense of shame I feel as a result of religious trauma. But those children also helped me wake up from the fog (fear, obligation and guilt) I was in. 

I got baptized at age 14. As I think about that now, it stuns me that I was allowed to make such a serious decision at that age. I was too young to consent to sex, vote, drink alcohol, get a job, drive a car, sign a legal document - but I was expected to make a lifelong commitment under duress. I’d wanted to be baptized at 12, but secretly feared disfellowshipping. I didn’t tell my parents this, but being separated from people I loved felt like a fate worse than Hell (which incidentally, JW’s don’t believe in - they say a God of love would never torture people in fire, but they practice some of the worst shunning of any religion today, which is a kind of torture and most certainly unloving). 

Like so many other young JWs, I married far too young to a person I hadn’t had a chance to really get to know. It was a real shitshow. My husband was horribly traumatized due to severe abuse at the hands of several JW women - his mother, grandmother and aunt. Our relationship was abusive and I was afraid of him, but JW elders encouraged me to stay. Finally, I got the courage to leave - but I had four children to raise, no education, no job skills and no child support. I couldn’t face being rejected by the only community I’d ever known. 

While I’d had doubts about the religion all my life, I shelved them as soon as they appeared in my mind. It never made sense to me that a powerful God allowed wickedness. My mother had been abused by her parents, and I would pray to Jehovah to turn back time so he could bring about the end of this system of things before my mother was harmed. Even though that meant I would never have been born, I was ok with that. I knew the answer the cult gave to this question, and accepted it mentally, but it still troubled my little heart. 

As a newly divorced woman, however, I was waking up. The harsh treatment of the elders in my congregation accelerated that. And because I didn’t have a “spiritual head” anymore, they couldn’t control me as much as before. I got a taste of freedom, and I loved it. I toyed with the idea of getting disfellowshipped intentionally so I could leave the cult. But, I was reliant on my parents’ support emotionally and couldn’t face getting shunned. So, I stayed in. 

A few years later, I met my second husband. He was a good man, and very kind to me. But like others who were born-ins to a cult, he was hiding a crucial, fundamental aspect of himself from me from the start. Our marriage was a good friendship, but we were not lovers. I was depressed and lonely for years but decided to focus on the positive so I could survive. 

As my family grew in size, I did my best to teach my children to love God. I wasn’t a strict JW parent. I didn’t force my children to preach at the doors in field service, or comment if they didn’t want to. I especially hated how the cult taught that masturbation was wrong. I told my children they should never feel ashamed of normal sexual desires. 

But despite trying to raise my kids “in the truth”, the doubts were getting louder and louder in my head. I saw a constant dumbing-down of the organization’s study material. Meetings and conventions became boring. Doctrine was changing from year to year. Some of the new “understandings” were nonsensical to me, such as the overlapping generations teaching. I saw a lot of hypocrisy in the organization’s unwritten rules and culture. 

In addition, many Witnesses I encountered in the several Kingdom Halls I attended were unloving, hypocritical, judgemental, backstabbing people who I would never have sought out intentionally to spend time with. It was difficult making friends, especially because I was raising my children gently. I cringed when I observed JW moms spanking their kids or speaking harshly to them for normal childish behavior like wiggling or playing with toys at meetings. I never felt “encouraged” at the Hall. It was harder and harder for me to pray or donate money to the worldwide work. So I stopped. 

One of the final blows to my faith was when my seventh child, a 27-weeker preemie was born. During my pregnancy, I read everything about high risk pregnancies and preemies in the Watchtower Online Library. I knew that if my life was in danger, I could terminate the pregnancy. So when I checked myself into the hospital and elders from my Hall visited and told me as such, I wasn’t surprised. My husband was shocked, however. The thing that seemed crazy to me was that while I could abort him if my life was in danger (and it was, due to placenta previa), I could not allow the doctors to give him a teaspoon of red blood cells to save his life once he was born. It became obvious to me that the blood teaching was a man-made rule. It had nothing to do with God or the Bible. 

Once my preemie was born, I slipped into a deep well of anxiety and depression. I had cPTSD, undiagnosed at the time. The fear I’d felt my entire life about the upcoming Armageddon ramped up to a fever pitch. I became obsessed with crime statistics and embarrassingly, thought of buying a gun (I didn’t!). Looking for answers, I began reading extensively. I checked out dozens of books from the library written by well-known, respected scientists. I’d always felt self-conscious about my lack of formal education and had always read a lot in an attempt to fill gaps. 

Slowly, I began believing in evolution. I thought that perhaps Jehovah used it to create the world. But by then, I no longer believed there was a God who cared about my life. I hadn’t felt his hand in my life for decades. And the more I read about human progress, science and history, the more I understood that humankind was not living in any “last days”. Rather, things were better than ever. Man had more prosperity and safety than at any point in history. The JW narrative and the God delusion was crumbling in my mind. I was becoming an atheist. 

Enter a global pandemic. My ex husband and I watched as the “lifesaving” preaching work we’d been told since infancy was more important than even our very lives, was canceled. Meeting attendance was moved to Zoom. I felt relieved. But I was so good at ignoring my own feelings, my own gut, the sensations in my body, that it didn’t register initially that staying away from the Kingdom Hall made me… happier. 

During the pandemic, my husband and I began taking daily walks after dinner. Away from the children, we began to open up to each other about things we’d suppressed for our entire lives. Our complaints about the way the organization was doing things. How unloving the congregations were. How those with responsibilities in the congregation didn’t seem to care about us. How our kids struggled to find decent friends in the organization. How we struggled to find friends. How so many of “God’s happy people” seemed downright miserable. How the “persecution porn” kept ramping up. 

Another thing happened that would be a fatal blow to my faith: my second-born son woke up. He told the brothers that he no longer wanted to be identified as a publisher (thankfully he’d never been baptized!). I admired him for sticking up for himself and acting like a man, under the intimidating circumstances of an elder inquisition. He stayed respectful to me and his stepdad, and kind to his siblings. And he told his stepfather why he no longer believed the Witnesses had the truth: among other reasons, they were hiding a huge problem with child sexual abuse. 

I’ll never forget the day my ex husband walked up to me, his face white as a ghost, and told me he’d researched the information my son had shared with him. He loudly whispered to me, “it’s all true!”. I shut down. I wasn’t ready to hear it yet. But it wasn’t long after this that I too read the testimony of Governing Body members Losch and Jackson to the Australian Royal Commission. I read their words, and watched video of them them lying, like cowardly little boys, to the professionals querying them. I lost all respect for the leadership, and the religion I’d held dear for forty years, fell apart. I realized that the men behind the curtain were scared, out-of-touch, narcissistic nincompoops. 

Like a house of cards, the deconstruction was swift and effortless. I had no guilt. I had little fear. In fact, the fear and anxiety I’d been plagued with my entire life began to lift. I allowed myself to research deeply. I stayed up several nights in a row and read accounts of apostates and unbiased history of the beginnings of the religion. A clear picture of a cult emerged. I’d been lied to my entire life. While this was the hardest thing I’d ever been through, I was finally free. 

The ex and I announced to our children (my eldest had already moved out) that we were leaving the organization on November 28. (They were overjoyed!) We celebrate this as our “freedom day”. We did a hard fade with no explanation to the elders. We owe them nothing. We’d been an “exemplary” family. We’d had multiple parts on assemblies, the ex had served as a ministerial servant and I’d been a former pioneer. We went from attending every meeting and never missing Saturday service to disappearing overnight. 

Fast forward a couple of years. My ex and I are amicably divorced and co-parenting our children peacefully. Sadly, my eldest son is still in the cult and shunning me and his older siblings. I’ve had to grieve the loss of this relationship, but have hopes that as the organization gets increasingly desperate in their “obey even when it seems impractical or strange from a human standpoint” messaging, he will wake up too. 

I’m thrilled that my younger kids will barely remember their time as Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the older ones will be able to enjoy their young adulthood free from the constraints of an apocalyptic doomsday cult. One of the most wonderful things to come from my leaving the cult is helping my mother to wake up, even after 50 years as a JW. Life is good. 

Carrie is a mother of seven, a reader and nature-lover. She writes about raising a large family frugally at http://www.CarrieWillard.com