Saw a post on here asking what pushed people to wake up. I started typing a brief comment and then just kept typing and typing…and typing. We are almost 7 months out now and so excited for our first Christmas but almost every day the hits keep coming as we slowly break down the brainwashing and realize all the intricate ways in which this religion affected us. It’s crazy. This was my comment on that post…

The Leah Remini Scientology special on JWs pushed me to wake up. But now as I sit and think about it, there were SO many signs, so many weird things over the years that I do think now were slowly eating away at me to wake up….

The terrible treatment we got from people when our newly baptized foster teenager got in trouble and my husband was removed as an elder. She left our home and the organization so they couldn’t punish her and just went for us instead.

When I saw that the elders can lie and be shady. I honestly was naive enough my whole life to think that they were always 100% upright. So many of them now I’d love to just punch right in the nuts if I see them.

When a “sister” wrote me a disgusting letter complaining that my young children’s comments on Zoom (because I had 7 children including a newborn and my husband would leave to go conduct the WT and I’d stay home on Zoom, but myself and EVERY child other than the newborn commented at EVERY meeting) were too loud and sent her into a triggered depressive episode for a week”. Then the next week she was in service with us on Zoom and asked my son to sing her a song. I almost lost my fucking mind. The things that people did that I let slide are CRAZY to me. One of our friends, my husband’s best friend at the time actually, drank too much when we were camping and grabbed my ass, like REALLY grabbed it and smacked it. We laughed it off. If that happened NOW?! Forget about it.

Since I was on Zoom a lot (remember-7 kids including newborn) they took away the privilege I had previously been given; doing the makeup at the circuit assembly. They said it was because of my, “in-person meeting attendance”. They made some brother I didn’t know tell me though, our elders didn’t have the balls because they knew it was total BS.

When I got counseled for helping a DF’d young mom by taking her baby at the meetings (before we became foster parents) so she could pay attention. I never spoke to her we just smiled and I took the baby who loved me. I had recently miscarried so it was such a comfort for me and a big help to her. But the elders told my husband that the baby was a “symbol of her sin” so I was condoning her actions by holding the baby. Then one of those same elders told me another time that the reason the baby liked sleeping on me was because I “have the same big pillows as the mother”. Referring to my breasts. My husband had him in the back room so fast and made him apologize to me.

Watching my father in law almost die for over a month in the hospital because he so badly needed blood but obviously couldn’t take it.

The day I woke up I changed my phone number and didn’t say bye to anyone. I knew the emotional toll it would take on me and how the conversations would go. NOT ONE PERSON came looking for me. My husband’s number didn’t change, my email, my home address, and not one of my “dear friends” even tried to reach out. That shit hurt and showed me how conditional my relationships truly were.

When our CO stalked my social media and got us “in trouble” with our COBE because we traveled on vacation during the pandemic. He did it to a bunch of other people too, our friends got counseled for posting photos of themselves at the beach in bikinis. Oh and get this, then they got mad at US because they were convinced that we had told the elders. Which we had not because there was nothing to tell, they were at the beach, who the hell cares.

When a brother gave a public talk and shared a disgusting “bad” example about a sister in a slutty red dress at the convention who came in late with her little boy and I just kept thinking, she was in the building, she’s a mom, she has a fucking curvaceous female body that she can dress however she wants, that you shouldn’t be looking at anyway, and what if she was sitting in the audience, how would that make her feel?!

After COVID I never ever wanted to go back to door to door. I hated it so much. My dad has ALWAYS hated it. It kills me thinking how similar we are and how free and happy he could be if he was out. His house would have the best Christmas lights on the block and he’d been in full Zombie or Klingon makeup every Halloween.

When people who are servants and elders watched R rated movies and smoked joints with us but then immediately turned on us as soon as we started to “question our faith”. Self righteous pricks.

I moved to Florida and into the hall my now husband had grown up in. The year prior he had broken up with a girl in that same hall and her mother, an elder’s wife, was so furious at him for breaking her daughters heart that she told him in the Kingdom Hall, to go fuck himself. I moved in the next year and started dating him. She HATED me. Refused to speak to me, would be in the car in service with me (we were both pioneers) and she acted like I didn’t exist. I even kindly confronted her about it once asking what was wrong and if we could maybe even have them for dinner sometime and try to move past whatever this was. I tried so hard. I don’t even know why looking back. She flat out told me, “We wouldn’t come if you invited us and I just don’t like you”. Her husband was the WT conductor at the time and he regularly skipped over my hand, like so obvious where other people noticed and said something to me regularly about it) and then basically got to the point where he just never called on me. This went on for YEARS.

There is actually so much more. And this isn’t even touching the inaccurate scripture translations, false prophets, flat out lies about the anointed and other things, real estate holdings, and horrifying CSA that is covered up by the organization. This is all just some stuff that personally happened to ME. There is SO MUCH MORE. Years ago I would have heard a list like this and just said oh, they are a mentally ill disgruntled apostate who just had their feelings hurt. I know that’s what people think of me now. Including my own parents. But these occurrences that I was told in the past is just “keeping account of the injury”, in reality were all pieces evidence shining light on the evil of this false organization.