4. Grieving the living

There is a particular kind of grief that most people in the world will never experience.

It's not the grief of losing someone to death, where at least the finality is clear and the world around you understands what you are going through on some level. It's the grief of losing people who are still alive. Who are still breathing, still eating breakfast, still posting on social media - and choosing, actively, repeatedly, to pretend you do not exist.

"Everyone in my support network was in the org so I am completely alone."

"The people I love most in the world are indoctrinated and I know they'll be compelled to cut me off for my own good, even if they know deep down it's not right."

Shunning is not metaphorical in this context. It is policy, and it is enforced.

Your parents, your siblings, your children, they've all been conditioned to believe that cutting you off is an act of love. The most intimate bonds of your life, severed not by personal conflict but by institutional mandate. And the particularly cruel part is that they genuinely believe they are doing the right thing, just as you and I did when we shunned people. They believe that shunning you is what a loving person does, because the organisation redefined love to mean compliance long before any of us were old enough to question it.

Even with the recent changes lightening the shunning policies to be more "merciful", many who have left are still being ostracised all the same.

There is no Hallmark card for this kind of loss. There is no established grieving process, because the people you are grieving are not gone - they are right there, just beyond a wall of policy you cannot dismantle. On darker days you may even catch yourself thinking you could just go back. Say the right words, attend enough meetings, perform enough repentance, get reinstated. Get your family back. And you could. That door is always open - as long as you are willing to pay the price of authenticity and truth.

If this article is stirring something painful, I want to acknowledge that directly. This is heavy territory, and you do not have to process it all today - in fact you don't have to process it at all right now. If a subject is emotionally charged for us, that's useful data that lets us know there is some way in which our past is still exerting power over our present.

If you are ready to start gently addressing this, I want to offer one reframe that changed how I understood my own grief.

Grief is proportional to love, not to error.

You grieve because you loved genuinely. Your love for your family, your friends, your community - that was real. It was never contingent on the system being true. You loved those people because you are a person capable of deep connection, not because a governing body told you to. The system was false, but your love was not.

The intensity of your grief is not evidence that you made the wrong choice by leaving. It is evidence that you loved genuinely, even inside a harmful system. Those two things can coexist: the system was wrong, and your love was real. You do not have to choose between them.

Some days will be fine. Some days a photograph, a date on the calendar, a song you used to listen to with friends will undo you. That's how grief works, especially when the losses are layered (identity, community, family, worldview, purpose, time) and when the people you grieve are still present in the world, but out of reach.

There is no timeline for recovering from this, no "you should be over it by now". If you spent twenty years loving these people, the idea that you should be over it in two is not reasonable.

Recovery is possible, and please do seek help and do whatever is needed to achieve it.

But don't rush it, and definitely don't condemn yourself for being a human being who loves sincerely.