Credit: SWNS / Ieva Brown
An ex-Jehovah's Witness who felt "shunned" by her church after her divorce believes leaving her congregation was the best decision she's made.
Ieva Brown, 41, joined the Jehovah's Witnesses - a Christian-based religious group - in 1996 at just 14 years old after attending a bible group in Latvia with a friend.
After moving to England in 1999, Ieva joined a local group before marrying a non-believer - who then converted. But a decade later their marriage broke down.
Ieva claims she felt "shunned" by her church community due to strict divorce beliefs.
Feeling ''isolated and shamed'', Ieva says she became so stressed she was too unwell to leave the house and suffered exhaustion and anxiety.
Ieva decided to leave the Jehovah's Witnesses in October 2018 to improve her health, she said.
An ex-Jehovah's Witness who felt "shunned" by her church after her divorce believes leaving her congregation was the best decision she's made.
Ieva Brown, 41, joined the Jehovah's Witnesses - a Christian-based religious group - in 1996 at just 14 years old after attending a bible group in Latvia with a friend.
After moving to England in 1999, Ieva joined a local group before marrying a non-believer - who then converted. But a decade later their marriage broke down.
Ieva claims she felt "shunned" by her church community due to strict divorce beliefs.
Feeling ''isolated and shamed'', Ieva says she became so stressed she was too unwell to leave the house and suffered exhaustion and anxiety.
Ieva decided to leave the Jehovah's Witnesses in October 2018 to improve her health, she said.
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00Once you're baptised they put you in your place and now you have to behave and
00:03be a good Jehovah's Witness, otherwise you'll get kicked out.
00:12My name is Eva, I'm originally from Latvia. I was recruited as one of Jehovah's Witnesses
00:17at age of 14 and a half and then 22 years later I left, probably age seven or eight,
00:25when I was first told by somebody, do you know there's a God? I'm like, wow. I think
00:33there was sort of a euphoria when everything opened up after being banned, people flocked
00:41to churches, people were interested in even when these groups would knock on the door or give out
00:47their literature. It was just, would you like a Bible study? And I was 14 and a half and we thought,
00:55well why not? I started studying the Bible with Witnesses in March 1996. There was this sense that
01:02Armageddon is coming any time soon. Once you're baptised they put you in your place and now you
01:08have to behave and be a good Jehovah's Witness, otherwise you'll get kicked out and nobody will
01:14ever talk to you again. I didn't really have any family apart from my mum, as my dad died when I
01:21was 10. So you have to kind of make friends among Jehovah's Witnesses. I was still at school so
01:30there were people I would talk to. When you told them you were one of Jehovah's Witnesses they were
01:35terrified and in that first year I got baptised, a 17 year old would refuse blood and the parents
01:43obviously refused it and she died because they couldn't give her a life-saving treatment.
01:49And I think after that happened I didn't really advertise I was one of Jehovah's Witnesses at
01:57school because it was making my life difficult. I just sort of kept myself to myself. I was told
02:04that Jehovah's Witnesses are not supposed to go out or marry anyone who's not a Jehovah's Witness
02:11and if you do it's classed as disobedience. You can't really choose who you fall in love with
02:18so me and their grandson we sort of started seeing each other secretly. I actually got engaged
02:27pretty quick and then it came out and I had people writing nasty letters to me from the
02:35English congregation in Ripley and I got pulled up by the elders in Riga.
02:42It was like an interrogation for about two hours, they wanted to know every single detail.
02:47Sat me down and put one of their videos on about Jehovah's Witnesses should not make friends with
02:54those who are not Jehovah's Witnesses and definitely not date them. It wasn't really
02:58their place it just something in me just did not want to go along with it and I just said well I'm
03:06going to think about it and obviously people stopped talking to me and avoided me because
03:11now I had a bad reputation for dating somebody who wasn't a Jehovah's Witness.
03:17I want my children to have the freedom to do whatever they want. If they want to go to university
03:22they go to university and that was another reason I just wanted them out of my life so that
03:32they can have a future. I'm able to explore things in life that I couldn't before and
03:37for myself and my children we really love our life now. I know I'm 42 but it's not too late to go
03:46back to university, you know something that I could have done when I was 18. Do your research,
03:54take your time, do not let anybody pressure you and decide what's best for you regardless of what
04:03people say.