Shownotes Transcript
This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services. I had no reference point of how to live or behave or anything. I was completely lost. It was like this cocoon had been just ripped away from me and I didn't know what my beliefs really were. From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein.
You are listening to This Is Actually Happening. Episode 212. What if everyone pretended you were dead?
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My parents were adults when they became Jehovah's Witnesses. They got married when my father was 19 and my mother was 22. And I came along in 1983. And so I was born into the Jehovah's Witness. We lived in a small town that was probably about 4,000 to 5,000 people. It was a farming town.
And then we were in a congregation of probably about 80 other Jehovah's Witnesses, and we would attend what they call the Kingdom Hall three times a week. And then we also had to go out in service, is what they call it, which is knocking on doors, trying to save people and kind of convert them. Basically, Jehovah's Witnesses follow everything in the Bible literally,
They believe that they are the only true religion and that everyone else is worldly and that if we do not save our neighbors and family members and friends by having them become a Jehovah's Witness, that they are going to die in Armageddon and we're the only ones who have everything figured out.
We're special because, you know, we've been picked to be the people that are going to be resurrected when we die into a paradise on earth. And then 144,000, like it says in the book of Revelation, will be anointed to the heavens to rule as kings and priests with Jesus and Jehovah.
We're going to be persecuted. We're going to be different from the world. We know we're doing it right if we're being persecuted, and we have to be prepared at any time to follow God's law instead of man's.
They also believe sex before marriage is wrong, homosexuality is wrong, they can drink a little but being drunk is not allowed, and birthdays. They don't celebrate birthdays. They feel like it's a selfish thing that's condemned by the Bible. Basically every holiday there's a reason from the Bible that they take literally that means that they don't celebrate that.
If you do certain things, people can turn you in to the elders and then you can get in trouble for the sins that you've committed or you can turn yourself in like I have done in the past.
So they basically have judicial committees where they have elders having you sit there in front of them and tell them every single thing that you did wrong. And then they have to evaluate through the scriptures and through prayer and all this stuff what your punishment will be. And those range from being privately reproved, which means you did this wrong. This is a scriptural thing. This is what you need to do. You're approved, but it's just between us.
The next step would be public reproof, which means the same thing, but they announce your name in front of the congregation so they know that this person is not doing what they're supposed to be doing and they could be a danger to others.
And then the final step would be disfellowshipping or disassociation. And that means they will give you a week where you can say goodbye to your loved ones and your family. And then they say you're dead to God, so you're dead to us. And it's better to be dead than not to be in the organization. The service and knocking on doors, they genuinely think that they are saving people and that they have to do this or there's going to be this terrible catastrophe.
That's something I think that a lot of people don't realize that their motives are honestly that they're trying to help people, but they don't realize that this organization causes them to judge people who are quote unquote worldly. They wrap all of it in this like feeling of love and compassion. And yet it's not. It's fear and it's judgment. And it's definitely like not a happy, loving atmosphere, but they've convinced themselves it is.
When I was younger, I really did enjoy it. I had a feeling of a close-knit group. Everyone was your friend and you could trust everyone, it felt like. Growing up, my parents were definitely very affectionate and loving parents. I'm an only child, so it was the three of us. And they always made sure to tell me that they loved me. When I did good things, they definitely praised me a lot.
My mother was my everything growing up. We were very, very close. We were always hugging and I was always hanging on her and she made sure all my needs were met. She was very protective of me and I really couldn't have asked for a better mother, honestly. And my relationship with my father, he definitely had a very strong desire to connect with me and to have a good relationship with me.
Unfortunately, I think some of his own mental issues and some of the trauma in his past made that a little difficult for him. You know, I've never doubted that he loves me very much and would love to have a better relationship. He just doesn't really, I think, have the tools of how to do that or how to understand me.
I was 10 years old when I decided to dedicate myself to Jehovah and get baptized, which is very young. I wanted my parents to be proud of me and I wanted to do, quote unquote, the right thing
My father was an elder, which is the highest position that a male can reach in their kingdom hall. And my mother was a regular pioneer, which is the highest that a female can reach. A regular pioneer means that she dedicated 90 hours a month, every month, knocking on the doors to preach the Bible to people. So growing up, I was in the vans and cars a lot with her and the other women who were going and doing this work.
So I kind of grew up very deep into this faith. We weren't just like kind of in it. It was like we were the family, you know, that everyone was like, they know what's going on. They're who we look to as an example. I remember feeling different though, from a very, very young age, probably around four. I knew something was different about me, but I didn't know what it was.
I remember, and there's also a picture of me in my mom's high heels and in my dad's t-shirt that went down past my knees. And I would strut around like it was a runway because I wanted to be pretty.
My father's a poet and sculptor. My mother's an artist and photographer. So I was always doing different types of art. And I also wanted to play with G.I. Joes, but since they were violent, according to the faith, they gave me Barbies. So I was very into playing with them, with their hair, with their fashion.
I was very precocious as a child. And when I would be in the van with all the ladies, I remember one time I got in the car and I said, okay, ladies, what are we going to talk about? Having babies or our periods today? And my mom and them were just like shocked and they laughed.
My parents were encouraging that I like to play with the Barbies and they were very encouraging that I was into art and stuff. My dad was very disappointed with me with sports and he would try to get me to play catch or do more guy things. But I always was very awkward and not coordinated and it would always end up in a huge blowout fight, pretty much always. And I would run inside bawling to my mother.
I kind of looked at men. I didn't realize really what it was at the time, but it was like a draw to look at them. I get a little fixated and I didn't know why really.
I would continuously have a dream where I was in front of this family friend's house and I was in their front yard, four years old, laying on the ground and I was humping the ground and being very aroused. And I remember in the dream, his mother running out and stopping me because that was wrong. I kept having that dream all the time and I didn't understand kind of what it was about.
I had all the symptoms of someone who'd been molested. My mom had thought I'd been molested. So did my dad. We couldn't figure it out. It was kind of like one of those things where I didn't really know. And then all of a sudden, it kind of just started coming flooding back to me. And I realized at age four, he was an older than me and he was having us pretend that we were foxes, which just sounds weird. But I remember this distinct thing in my head at four years old. It was
It was like, if you've ever seen those metal balls that they kind of like go in a spiral and then fall in the hole, my mind just went into that. And that's all I pictured. And then I guess later on, when I had asked my parents as an adult, they told me that I had told them, mommy, we played sex. They were freaked out and they talked to his parents and they made rules of us not being with the door closed and, you know, various things like that.
I felt kind of like a little more of a darkness come over me, a little less joy in me. And I felt more isolated and alone. And I remember that I started having more of those dark thoughts or just like having these strong emotions. And so it kind of made me retreat into myself. And I took it kind of like something was wrong with me.
At the age of six, I was in like one of those slides that has the top is like dark and then you go down the slide. And I remember just sitting in there and I was just thinking to myself, I'm not supposed to be here. I don't want to be here. I'm not right. I'm not supposed to be here.
It was a hopeless, very dark feeling of I didn't quite know exactly what was wrong, but I knew that I was inherently wrong and I was not meant to be a part of the world. Between six and adolescence, I was experiencing a very large amount of bullying and harassment at school. My movements were too gay. The way I talked was too gay or anything they could kind of latch onto.
So it was a lot of wanting to make people proud of me, wanting to feel good enough, wanting to earn love. A lot of the doctrines that were taught were, you know, your heart is treacherous and you can't trust it and you're supposed to pummel your body and lead it as a slave.
Tomorrow's the end of the world. So is that constant, everything's going to end. And if you don't do things right, then you're going to die. Or, you know, just this big, huge universal sovereignty was in my hands as a child is how it felt. I guess I started cracking under that pressure along with my having, you know, a predisposition for mental illness as well.
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It was based around sexual things because I was going through puberty and the faith was very strict about sexual things. It was kind of like pounded in your head that this was wrong. So I would have these thought intrusions where it was like a fear of having a thought, if that makes any sense.
Am I thinking sexually about men? Am I thinking sexually about family members? Am I thinking sexually about animals? Am I thinking sexually about it could be anything? And it wasn't even like fantasizing in my head. It was just this loop of a fear of a thought that I was having that was improper and it just wouldn't stop. It was just this intense thing that just would spiral.
as an adolescent, masturbation is something healthy and normal that you do. But if I would do that, I couldn't touch anything with my hands. I had to open the door of my bedroom with my feet so that I could wash my hands. I couldn't touch the faucet. I had to wash the faucet off. It was so like no one could touch it. If I touched that and anything happened, it was just the worst thing ever.
I couldn't live up to that. I felt like I'm deficient because all these other people in this congregation are doing great. And like, I don't fit in at school at all. I don't fit in in this congregation at all. I don't fit in anywhere.
About age 13 or so, I had been told in talks that we had had in the congregation that we were not allowed to research outside sources about Jehovah's Witnesses. They call them apostates and that it would usurp our faith to do this research. And at 13 years old, that rubbed me the wrong way. That if I can't research this, then how can it for sure be true? I'm supposed to just have a blind faith?
I can't really do that because of the early onset of bipolar disorder and because of these strict fear tactics that were being taught to me through the faith. I was just kind of like in this depressive, overactive mind, just kind of flipping out. And my parents noticed they decided that I needed to go to therapy immediately.
They were very, very concerned that the therapist was going to speak against their faith. So they were trying to kind of direct my therapy a little bit because they didn't want them to mess with my head to think that the faith was wrong. They wanted it to be that I had mental problems.
So as I was getting older, I was getting more and more resentful of all of the rules and regulations and the strict atmosphere that was around me and feeling like I was being watched. And it was starting to very much make me be very resentful and kind of rebellious. And as I was going through therapy,
The therapists were talking to me and they were unlocking a new world to me that had nothing to do with what I had been taught and what had been pounded into my head since birth. They were telling me about the real world. So that was kind of like opening my mind where I thought, is this false? Has this all been a lie? What is going on?
I didn't feel like I could really talk to anyone about it because they could turn you in and you would get in trouble. I really withdrew into myself and would go into deep depressions. I would do self-harm and cut myself. It was the only way I could get these feelings out of me.
I think I was 15 or 16, and one of my closest friends, he for some reason wanted me to smoke cigarette butts with him, and he had me try some beers. And we also looked at some straight pornography. I was just wracked with guilt, just shattered and wracked with guilt. So I confessed to my parents, and that was my first judicial committee.
I had to go in length of everything we had done wrong. And so then it ended up that I was publicly reproved. And so they announced in front of a judicial committee, he has shown repentance. And then lo and behold, 20 minutes or so later, there's a talk about the perils of pornography, cigarettes, and alcohol.
At this point in time, I knew that I was attracted to males, but I didn't really realize that men could have sex together.
My best friend, he was around the same age, getting closer to 17. And he had actually been doing physical things with other Jehovah's Witness teenage guys because they thought that it was some sort of way to get around not having sex before marriage. When in actuality, homosexuality is considered a worse sin than fornication or sex before marriage.
So basically, over a little bit of time, he was kind of seducing me, basically. And after a while, I just couldn't resist and didn't want to resist. And I had my first experience with him. Oh, my goodness, I can do this with another man.
But I was so wracked with guilt when this had happened that I literally remember when we were done that I went to the drain in the basement where we were at and I just dry heaved so hard that I could feel it in the inside of me, like pain. It hurt so bad. That's how sick I was. And once again, I told on him and myself and went through another judicial committee and
So I had to explain every detail of my sex life as a 16-year-old and be judged by it. They decided to publicly reprove me again and 20 minutes later, talk about homosexuality and stuff like that.
I was about to turn 17. I had another sexual encounter with a different Jehovah's Witness teenager. And once again, I was wracked with guilt and had been pounded into my head of how wrong these things were. So I confessed to my parents again. And then there was another judicial committee.
Basically, I went into that and I told them everything. And I told them that I felt that they had stunted my growth as an adolescent and that I thought it was inappropriate for them to be asking me questions about my sex life as a teenager. And that I wanted no part of this anymore. It felt so empowering, just like absolutely the right thing to do. I was shocked that I was able to do it, but it did definitely feel right to
They told my parents that they were going to approve me publicly again, but they had no choice with everything that I said. And so I was disfellowshipped and shunned. My parents were outside waiting. And when I came out, they were bawling. And they asked, why couldn't you have just pretended like you were sorry and just faded away? Because now you're disfellowshipped, you're disassociated. We can't talk to you once you turn 18. Why couldn't you have just faded out?
But I couldn't do anything else. I could no longer not speak my truth. And I knew what it would cost me. And I had to do it anyway. I just couldn't live anymore.
Like that. I was blamed for breaking up our family and I was forced to go to all of the meetings where no one would act like I was there or, you know, alive basically. People that I had known since I was born, if they caught eye contact with you instantly, they would avert their eyes.
Like you are not worthy of being looked at. I didn't even try to talk to anyone because I felt that it was disrespectful to their beliefs. I was trying to be respectful to them. And I remember just realizing I no longer had my grandmother and I no longer had my aunt who was like a second mother to me.
and that my parents had said that two days after graduation, I was kicked out of the house and that they hoped I hit rock bottom so that I would come back. Leading up to leaving the faith and even afterwards when I was on my own, there was a lot of confusion. I was very confused as to what if they're right? What if this is true? What if I'm wrong? Do I need to go back? Can I survive out here alone?
My mindset was just completely upside down. There were parts of me that did believe certain doctrines that I had been taught. And then there was other parts of me that definitely knew things were really wrong and that they weren't appropriate. I battled that for many years after I left.
I also had a fear of praying at all to anyone, period, because I thought that if it was true, Jehovah would catch me and he would force me to go back. And a lot of the subconscious programming was definitely an effect that I didn't know about. Being raised in this faith, it was a programming of can't trust yourself. You have to be told the answers. You can't rely on your own thought processes.
You're programmed as a Jehovah's Witness that the organization and the congregation and everyone, they have all the answers and that you don't. Your own thoughts are not your own thoughts. They have to be the thoughts that are in line with what you're being told. The individuality, it's like sucked out of you. Like you're not supposed to be your authentic self.
Any doubts or thoughts that you have that might be different are considered to be your danger to the rest of the people. That's why they get rid of you. In the first months after I had left the faith, it was just such a huge shock to my system.
I had no reference point of how to live or behave or anything. I was completely lost. It was like this cocoon had been just ripped away from me, and I didn't know what my beliefs really were.
I knew who I was as a person. I knew I was a homosexual male. I knew that I was a creative person. I knew all these things about my personality traits, but I didn't know what I actually believed. I was just so up and down and confused about that I just really had no rational thoughts about it. Two days after graduation, I wasn't allowed to live in my parents' home anymore, and I actually ended up being homeless in my car.
I did not have a place with the Jehovah's Witnesses. I did not have a place with the quote-unquote worldly people. I didn't have a place in the gay community. I just felt worthless, and I behaved as if I was worthless. They also try to feed on any guilt that you have. So in my subconscious, I was going for toxic-type relationships because that's what I thought I deserved.
I just started to try to do anything I could to take all this pain away from me. And I just became a big partier. I would drink a ton and snort pills. I did meth every weekend for probably like four or five months. I snorted heroin twice. I also did lots of shrooms and different other things like that to try to escape my feelings of worthlessness.
I also used sex as a way for me to feel like I had some sort of something to offer and an intimacy and maybe a little bit of a love feeling. But that was more taken advantage of. So it was definitely a double edged sword because it made everything worse.
I got very suicidal. I was in the psych ward seven times. I know there was two suicide attempts that were pretty serious and they definitely were directly linked to alcohol and drugs.
I don't think I would have been as extreme had I been sober, you know, drinking all night and just bawling and freaking out and just slitting my wrists and bleeding everywhere because my blood was thin from all the alcohol and then having to be rushed in the ambulance to the hospital. And the second one was up drinking all night and snorting Adderall and different pills, getting into a fight with my father and just saying, I can't do this anymore.
This would be in my early to mid-20s. And I just took all of my psychotropic drugs. I took all of them.
I called my best friend to tell her goodbye and that she'd been such a good person to me. And she said, can you hold on a sec? I have a phone call coming in. And I thought in my head, geez, she doesn't even fucking care about me. And really what it was is she was calling the ambulance, thank goodness. And the cops came and they kind of weren't taking it super seriously. So they were driving me along the highway and I became incoherent and started puking chemical foam.
So they had to have the ambulance stop behind the car and get me out on a stretcher in the middle of the highway to work on me. And I had to go to the hospital and I had to be on a suicide watch 24 hours a day. That was the closest time I came to losing my life. I always had the thought in the back of my head and the fear in the back of my head that I'm going to kill myself because I can't deal with all of this. And the sobriety issues just amplified it all.
I've been out almost 21 years and I'm still suffering. I did have some contact with my parents. I would call a lot because I missed them so much and I was so lost and I was suffering and I was scared. They would tell me I was calling too much and not to talk to them. It was just kind of a mindset of I'm literally worth nothing to anyone.
I don't know anything about this outside world. All I am experiencing, it feels like, is pain. I cannot get through this. I cannot live like this. I don't know why I was born gay, a Jehovah's Witness, and with mental illnesses. And how in the fuck am I supposed to get past that? I had no chance. That's how I felt.
During this six-year period of spiraling down, I had stopped any therapy and any medications. So throughout this whole time, I was having severe panic attacks that felt like heart attacks, couldn't breathe, shaking uncontrollably. I started to try to figure things out, and I got diagnosed as having bipolar disorder when I was probably 25 or
It had become a loophole in the Jehovah's Witness faith that since I had this diagnosis, my parents were allowed to speak to me because of family emergency or family health. I wanted nothing to do with them because I was so angry and hurt, but there was this loophole and I needed the help.
During this period of time, I probably reached out to my parents twice a month, especially when I was on drugs and having a really bad trip. I would call and leave voicemails that were very upsetting and disturbing very late at night.
I was so alone and I felt so dead to the world and I just didn't care who I was around. I got involved in a really rough crowd.
I put myself in very dangerous positions. I remember there was one time I had gone with some stranger up to this apartment and it ended up being like this big gang hangout. And I remember that a gun was pulled on me because I was gay. It was a pink gun because it was the guy's girlfriend's. And I thought it was a toy because I was so fucked up. So I poked at it and was laughing. And the guy I came there with said, don't do that. And he like got me out of there right away.
I remember certain experiences where I was toying with death and I just had no value for my life at all. I just didn't really care if I lived or died. In my late teens until late 20s, I was very much drawn into very unstable, abusive relationships.
I was with my first serious boyfriend who was abusive to me and who had gotten me into cocaine and alcohol specifically. He was stealing from me. He was using my car and my apartment to cheat on me with many different men while I was working two jobs to support us because he could not get a job because he had eight felonies, which I did not know about until later.
He also got physically abusive with me, punching me in the face, pulling me out of the car by my hair and dragging me up to the apartment. It was like the abusive type boyfriends could sniff out that I was a good person and they could sniff out that I was very naive still.
I was so starved for love. I was so starved for feeling like I was worth something, yearning so much to have acceptance and love that I was willing to put up with anything. Being raised a Jehovah's Witness, we're taught to be very patient with people and that people with problems can definitely change and that they can be saved. And so I think I was trying to reenact that savior complex of I can help this boyfriend
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All of it had come to a head and I was just in such a depression, a deep depression that
I remember I drank all night with a friend and my dad was supposed to come over in the morning to give me a ride to therapy. And when he got there, I was still drunk and he just tore into me. And I think he had every right to be upset with me, honestly. But when he left, I just took that as, I've tried so hard to please you. I've tried so hard to please everyone. I've tried so hard to just exist. And it was just like a snap decision. And I just took a...
big bottle of Depakote and another bottle of pills. When I was more aware in the hospital after my severe suicide attempt, it clicked in my head of how serious the situation really was. The fact that someone was literally sitting in a chair in my room watching me at all times, it kind of all clicked with me how serious this was and that I really was going to kill myself if something didn't change.
I was starting to lose touch with reality because of not being properly medicated still. I was thinking that my emotions were controlling the weather. I was bawling and upset, so it was raining. So I knew rationally I couldn't control the weather, but I thought I was. So I had a huge mental breakdown when I was probably 28. It forced me to move back in with my parents.
They did let me move in with them a couple of times when I mental breakdown and I had to get myself back on track somehow. The loophole, you know, obviously did help me get stable mentally, even though it was something that I definitely resented. It just really forced me to make a decision of, are you going to let this break you? Or are you going to realize that you're strong and you're going to fight? And I decided to fight.
That started the first seeds of knowing that I needed to quit drinking. And I definitely needed to try to figure out what was wrong with me mentally and to try to form some life that I could call my own and be proud of.
I went to therapy all the time. I found a therapist that was completely just on the same page as I was, who was so helpful to me. I tried over 40 different medications to try to figure out the right cocktail to get my symptoms in order. I just kind of went full throttle into getting better one
once I got through that huge mental breakdown. And then that led to me being able to be sober. And I am almost six years without any alcohol and I quit smoking four years ago, cigarettes. My parents were very supportive of me getting mentally stable and figuring out the root of the mental health issues.
Unfortunately, the fact that we have so much love for each other and that it is a complicated situation, there have been many times where my dad has said, "Don't worry, we're never going to do this again. We love you. We know you have these mental illnesses and we're not going anywhere." And then he would pull the rug out again. And that happened numerous times to me.
I became more and more resentful of that loophole, and so I tried to do everything more on my own. And I haven't spoken to him in like two and a half years. My mother has definitely been a reliable support, and she definitely is there for me with the mental health stuff as much as I am willing to reach out to her.
It's hard for me to reach out to her because I would like to just say, I left, I was disowned, and that's it. So get out of my life. I would love to be able to do that, honestly. But in my case, I do need to rely on my mother sometimes when it comes to my medications or mental health issues, or I have chronic kidney disease because of the lithium that I was on. So I've had to
suck up my pride and be like, my mom's willing to support me in these issues. And so I'm going to be thankful and we're going to just appreciate this relationship for what it is. My father, he has definitely made it known through my mother that he loves me and that he has remorse about things and that we've just realized that it is not healthy for us to have any contact.
I take that for what it is as well. I'm definitely learning to appreciate and be grateful for what I have. During the time period where I was getting stable, I was feeling good, but I still had this kind of an empty feeling inside and I was still having a lot of grief.
And so I was realizing that even though I had become stable and mentally healthy, I was still being ruled by a lot of this subconscious programming and thought processes that I didn't even know were going on with me. I started to realize that the problem wasn't solved just by the medication and the therapy. The problem was that I had to heal from this past trauma as well.
I had met other ex-Jehovah's Witnesses and stuff, and it just seemed like there were a lot of them that never could recover really either. It felt like everyone was stuck, like a lot of them were just stuck.
I decided to join some ex-Jehovah's Witness support groups on Facebook. They were talking about how you might be out of the cult or whatever you want to call it, but you're not necessarily free from it because of all these subconscious thought processes. Even though you rationally don't believe the doctrines anymore, your mind has made these connections that are automatic. And so you're automatically thinking through a lens that's distorted.
And so I was lucky enough to meet Jonam Ross. He's an NLP master practitioner, a hypnotherapist, and a behavioral profile specialist who was also raised as a Jehovah's Witness. And he has a program called Religion Rehab, Rise from Religious Trauma. I watched a free webinar that he had given me. And within the first couple of minutes, it had spoken about emotional blackmail and
And I started bawling from relief and from validation because I didn't know what that word or term was, but I knew what it felt like. The more and more I got to learn about this program and everything, the more and more my mindset started shifting and I started to realize this was not your fault. You are not a deficient person. You have these subconscious thought processes that can be changed.
You're not screwed from birth on. I have the power to take the things I'm learning and enact them and change the lens that I see the world in. I've never felt more empowered in my entire life. I've never felt more clear headed. And I just feel like this sense of hope that I can definitely just have this life that I've always dreamt of that I thought was never going to be available to me.
All of these other people who are raised the same way that I was raised have almost exactly the same self-worth feelings and issues now.
and are all being led by these subconscious things. And so it was an epiphany of, I am not alone. I am not isolated like I thought. I am not just so far gone that I can't be helped. All of these people were a community. I have a community. And that has just been so incredibly validating for me as a human being that I am not worthless and that I am not inherently wrong. I just was raised a certain way.
In my recovery and through my sobriety, my brain has almost like leveled up to a point where now I am able to delve deep into this trauma and the subconscious thought processes that I have that have been ruling my decisions for 20 years.
I've come to a point of, I know that I have a very good heart. I know that I am worth a lot. I know that I am a nurturing, loving person. I know that I help others. I know that I make mistakes, but I learn from them. I know that I'm strong. I'm not weak like I thought. I know who I am now more than I ever did before.
I've come to realize throughout the years about religion and spirituality and about my parents. I believe the whole purpose in life is to find what you really truly believe in and to follow that fully. I think it was worth it to my parents to keep their faith alive.
because they truly do 100% believe that this is the truth. And I think that although I know that they have suffered immensely from the loss of the relationship that we used to have or that we've wanted, I do believe that they think the sacrifice is worth it, although I know they wish that it could have been different.
The hardest part of everything that I've been through is the fact that there are the dual sides, that my parents love me dearly, and I love them so much too.
I want to be able to just be angry and just be done with all of it. But I just, I can't fault them for truly believing what they believe and fully going for it. And that there can't be a hate or a breaking off or a shattering of like this anger of you're totally wrong and your religion is totally wrong and you're wrong and you've lived your life wrong. But I believe that they just did what they thought was right.
I can't fault them for that and I can't change it. I got into a relationship with a man that is very healthy and he's very understanding and patient with me and is very, very supportive. And his family, his mother and siblings and extended family are all very supportive and loving of me as well. And it has really given me a lot more confidence and I have a place where I fit.
I've really worked hard to fall in love with myself, with all my imperfections and all of my contradictory beliefs and different things going on. And I just feel like if you keep working at finding out who you are and being able to love yourself, then you can extend that love to other people, even people that you may feel have wronged you.
I was born into this faith and I really didn't have any decision to know whether or not I believed it was true or if it wasn't. I had no choice but that I have to tell my real story and my truth. And I am not the one that can judge anyone else, let alone my own parents.
I have come to a point where I just have to love them and just know that I just need to accept my parents for who they are. It's just the beliefs that they have. And to know that they do love me so much and that I love them so much, it's just the way it is. And that's okay. And that can free me.
Today's episode featured Benjamin. If you'd like to reach out, you can email him at exjwbw at yahoo.com.
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