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 Rachel's story more >> “I was almost born a Jehovah’s Witness.” Yes, the JW practice of knocking on doors seeking converts does work sometimes! It is how my parents came to join the religion when I was a small baby and my sister was just three. Growing up, my mother and father seemed very happy in their faith and I, like most children, went along with whatever they said and did. As a young child, I can remember going to meetings and assemblies and out on field ministry with them – that’s mostly the knocking on doors bit! One of my earliest and happiest memories is of a JW assembly in Twickenham when I was about six or seven. I was wearing lovely white socks that got dustier and dirtier as the day went on. I remember sitting on a blanket in the corridor while my parents volunteered on the food stand, feeling lucky because I could play with my colouring books while all the other children had to sit in the stands reading their Bibles! 
I realised life wasn’t always going to be idyllic when my sister became a teenager. She started to rebel against the religion, refusing to go to the Kingdom Hall. There would be arguments and shouting but to no avail. By the time she was fifteen, we would come back from the Kingdom Hall to find my sister had disappeared, having left the house to go out without permission. Meanwhile, my baby brother was restless and my poor mum seemed to spend forever away from the main congregation trying to get him to settle and keep quiet. Services would go on for hours and it’s only since I’ve become a mother myself that I understand how impossible it is to get children to sit still. It must have been very hard for my mother. Because of all the problems my parents were having with my brother and sister, I felt stuck in the middle and just muddled along, trying to be good and do what I should be doing in the eyes of the elders and my religion. But I was also suffering at school. The rules of the Jehovah’s Witnesses meant I wasn’t allowed to attend school assemblies, in case we heard a corrupted version of ‘the truth.’ I had to sit in a side room and read my Bible and hear everyone else singing. I think this exclusion policy was one reason I was quite a loner at my infant school. “I don’t remember having any friends at all.” Junior school was much worse. I remember me and one other JW child sitting on a red bench outside the head teacher’s office during assemblies, a bench usually reserved for naughty children. We were often jeered at for sitting there, or asked “what’s that yellow book you have to read?” What I hated most was being taken out of school for the 2 weeks leading up to Christmas then, as soon as the Christmas holidays were over, being asked “what did you get for Christmas?” quickly followed by “Oh sorry – I forgot. You don’t get anything do you?” followed by cruel laughter. This hurt badly, having to miss all the school parties before coming back to be jeered at because I was the poor little religious girl who didn’t get Christmas presents. By this time, I had made one friend who used to get upset when I couldn’t go to her birthday party. She didn’t think it was fair and neither, later, did my friends at secondary school. On my 13th birthday, a group of girls organised a surprise party for me with a cake, two presents and a card. On the one hand, it was fantastic and a day I shall never forget it; on the other, it made me realise how unhappy I was. But I knew I couldn’t rebel as my sister had done as my parents would be devastated. I decided I would just have to put up and shut up and live the religious life my parents wanted. 
Then my sister got pregnant, at just sixteen. I thought at the time and still believe this was her desperate cry for help and her way of escaping the religion, which she did, eventually. “Such a terrible sin meant she was kicked out of the Religion.” Her disassociation was announced during a meeting and my father too was stripped of his ministerial duties and blamed for not being stricter with her. I was very angry. I knew how hard my parents had struggled to get my sister to the Kingdom hall and found myself screaming at the elder who made the announcement, telling him he had no right to say my dad could have done more and that he didn’t know anything. I was stunned by his blank response, that he had made his decision and that was that. What happened that day affected me severely. Meanwhile, the one time my sister needed loving support and friends and responsible adults care for her and help her, people in the Kingdom hall went out of their way to ignore her instead. They pretended not to know her, even going so far as to cross the street to avoid her. Crossed over the road – can you believe it? “I felt I had no option but to lead a double life.” I was so deeply shocked at this hypocrisy that, for the next few years, I lived a double life. I went to college, had boyfriends, went to parties and behaved like a normal teenager, while my friends and their parents covered up for me so I appeared to be the ‘good girl’ I was supposed to be. I started my first job at the age of 17 and celebrated my 18th birthday with friends in a nightclub, without my parent’s knowledge. Then, the lies started to get to me. I knew what I was doing wasn’t ‘good,’ it wasn’t nice for my parents and it was harming me mentally. I realised I had to either get out of the religion, which would mean moving out of my home, or start towing the line and throw myself into it. So, after many years of refusing baptism, I capitulated. To the joy of my parents, I got baptised on the 13th of March 1994. It was a day of mixed emotions; I was happy because my parents were and the elders and my congregation were over the moon. But I knew being baptised was a huge commitment. I doubted I could cope. “The religion puts you under tremendous pressure.” Just before I got baptised I went on one of the famous JW quick build programmes, where members build a new Kingdom hall in just four days, and met my future husband. I remember feeling sorry for him when I realised he lived alone and none of his family were in ‘the truth’ and, although he was fifteen years older than me, I believed that I could offer him a much more loving life with a religious family. Three weeks later, he met my family and rumours that I had met someone special in the religion began flying around the Kingdom hall. The interest in me was phenomenal and marriage was instantly believed to be on the agenda. So, with the force of the congregation behind me, my personal roller coaster began to plunge downhill; I got engaged just four months after meeting my fiancé and ten months later the ring was on my finger and I was living with my new husband in Sussex. So, there I was, in a town I didn’t know, with a husband I didn’t know, (JW rules prevented us being alone during our courtship) and in a new job. Then the real shock – all those loving JW members, so keen to have us around for tea, see us all the time, get the latest news on our wedding plans – it was all over. We were no longer hot news. It was as if they had dropped their much loved newly weds and turned into a cold shouldered, unloving congregation. As the years went on, I realised this behaviour wasn’t unusual. I got used to the way the congregation and elders shifted their attention from one couple getting married, to the next and then the next. The only interest the congregation now showed in us was in when we were going to have children. I say interest; what I really mean is pressure. That said, I did want children, although I had know since the age of seventeen that I would have trouble conceiving. However, I went ahead and had fertility treatment which resulted in my getting pregnant with twins. “If I didn’t accept a transfusion, I was likely to die” At just 30 weeks, ten weeks before my due date, I went into premature labour; it seemed I had picked up an infection and needed an emergency caesarean. I was already terrified, even before the doctors gave me the shocking news that I would probably need a blood transfusion. I refused absolutely. Still I stuck to my religious convictions, with the support of my husband, who was of course also opposed to my having a transfusion. Luckily I survived because the hospital gave me high boosts of iron instead. “I couldn’t believe that parents would force their daughter to get married against her will.” 
When my twins were three, my brother met a JW girl (or ‘sister’ as JW would refer to her) She and my brother went on holiday with her parents and shock, horror! They found out she was pregnant. My brother was really shaken. He was only twenty and his girlfriend just eighteen. Neither of them were ready to have a baby. The next day, the girl’s mother phoned for an emergency marriage licence from our local registry office. She insisted that the couple must get married. The night they came back from their holiday a meeting was called with the elders, at my house for some reason. It was decided between the sister’s parents and the elders that they should get married as soon as possible or my brother’s girlfriend would be disfellowshipped (they couldn’t disfellowship my brother as he was not baptised) and her parents would not be allowed to speak to their daughter again. So, within 5 weeks of finding out she was pregnant, a wedding to the tune of £10,000 was organised and their imposed married life began. It was a disaster. Their marriage was far from happy; my brother had various affairs and his wife spent huge amounts of money, getting them into debt. She was also violent, as was her mother, and on various occasions my brother got beaten up. I was absolutely outraged by this and begged my parents to intervene. They said it was up to the elders to deal with it. Did they do anything? No. The truth is that my brother’s wife and family were connected to some of most influential elders in the congregation and so her family were untouchable. By the summer of 2003 I was extremely depressed and beginning to crack under the pressure of my own and my brother’s suffering. “I had to do something for the sake of my children” The final straw came when my brother was badly beaten by his mother-in-law, in front of his father-in-law, an influential elder, and nothing was done about it. It was unbearable. I didn’t want my children or myself anywhere near these hypocritical people. I refused to go to our circuit assembly and told my husband and parents why. I stopped going to the Kingdom Hall altogether. A few weeks later the interrogations started. Elders came round asking where I had been. I explained my problems with the children, my panic attacks about the noise they might make and the problems I had with my sister in law and her family, criticising the elders for failing to help, despite their promises to the contrary. It was clear to me my childhood dreams of having my own happy family and taking them to meetings and assemblies with my loving, caring husband who would look after me had disintegrated. I began to contemplate something most dreadful; I began to contemplate having an affair. It sounds ridiculous now, but it was the only way I could think I might escape. Part of me was too frightened to just leave the religion and my dead marriage; I felt I would have to engineer something which would force the elders and my husband to drive me out. Less dramatic remedies might have been to start smoking. That would have got me disfellowshipped but I would have still been married. I could have had a legal separation but would have still been in the religion, even if I continued to refuse to go to the meetings. I didn’t want to ‘drift away,’ I wanted OUT. 
Around this time, I met up with an old friend who wasn’t a JW. I told him my problems and, to my amazement, he offered to help. “Just tell me what you want from me, and I’ll do it,” he said. To cut a long story short, we pretended to have an affair in the run up to Christmas, so I was rarely home, which must have aroused suspicion. After spending a wonderful New Years Eve together, I woke up on New Years Day 2004 deciding the day had come. I drove home terrified and crying, scared rigid about the implications of my decision. I told my parents first, saying I was having an affair and wanted out of the religion. Then I confronted my husband. “I’d like my life back please,” I said. He looked blank. I had to spell it out. “You’ve had nine years of my life, you’ve not been the caring Christian husband and father you should have been and I want my life back.” “Oh, so you’ve been seeing someone,” he said and that was it. No tears, no pleading, no: ‘let’s try again,” no: “I love you.” The elders made their first visit almost immediately. “It’s stress,” they said, “just a phase, you’ll get over it! Read these scriptures and we’ll come back next week.” A week later, another set of elders turned up and asked if I had read the scriptures they had set me. “No,” I said. “I just want out so hurry up and do what you have to do”. I did as they suggested and wrote a letter saying I no longer wished to be a Jehovah’s Witness and they should disfellowship me. Still they wouldn’t let me go. Two more elder delegations came to my house before the deed was finally done. 
By July I had sold the house and was able to pay my husband more than what he was legally due from the equity. My children and I moved into our own home. It was all ours, just ours. Between my disfellowshipment and my house move, my parents didn’t contact me and neither did my brother. I’m told his wife told him she would take his son away and he would never see him again if he contacted me. None of my JW brothers and sisters contacted me. I think they wanted me to feel lonely so I would go back into the religion but I wasn’t going to do that. Luckily, support came from unexpected quarters. My mum’s sister was great, always there in the middle of the night if I needed her. My boss too helped, giving me unofficial daily ‘counselling’ sessions and helping me through my problems step by step. He constantly reminded me this was the start of my new life and I had a right to make my own decisions. In 2006 my parents came out of the religion, as previously they could not accept my choices and felt that my children and I would die at Armageddon “Now my life is so much better!” It is quite amazing what I’ve done since leaving the Jehovah’s Witnesses, things I otherwise would never have dreamed of doing. Life has changed and improved so much for me. In October 2004 I did a tandem parachute jump to raise money for my daughter’s school. It was amazing jumping from 10,000 feet! I would never have done this were I still in the religion, because the religion zapped my confidence. This really boosted it! Then in December 2004, I met a wonderful man. I went to one of my first ever Christmas parties and there he was, looking simply gorgeous. We hit it off straightaway and I began seeing him. It was quite simply the cherry on the cake for me at the end of a terribly emotional and difficult year. Then I decided to throw a party for my 30th birthday. 80 people came to what was an fantastic party – certainly not a bad one for someone who hadn’t had a birthday party since one held in secret at junior school! To be celebrating my 30th birthday with the man of my dreams and a man I truly loved was astonishing for me. My divorce came through in May 2005. The same year, my brother separated from his wife and they too are now divorced. He too is out of the religion now. Life just keeps gets better. As I write, I am planning my second wedding, only this time how I want it! Looking back to that day I made the decision to change my life, I know I did the right thing. Mine and my children’s lives are so much better and happier than I could have ever imagined or wished for. 
So, although I know how difficult it is to summon up the courage to leave the JWs and how difficult it is when you come out, I hope my story proves to anyone who is going through what I’ve been through that it is possible to come out the other side. It is possible to discover you have a life so truly happy you want to leap out of bed in a morning instead of hide back under the covers. I hope you find this Website offers the help and support you need to get through your current pain so you can move on to find a new life that makes you a happier, better and stronger person. And, while that might seem impossible now, remember oak trees grow strong in rough winds and the most beautiful diamonds are made under pressure. “I am sure you too will recover and be able to embrace all life has to offer!” "Just wanted to drop you a line to say what a ray of hope this website will offer. I read your honest and heart "I have read your story and feel truly touched by your bravery. I feel so pleased you found the courage to make "I found the site most interesting. I am a registered and accredited counsellor, supervisor and trainer as well as Copyright Rachel Underhill 2007
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