The Reality of Shunning

Source: This article is based on the YouTube video "Ex-Jehovah's Witness Meets with Elder Father After 2 Years of Shunning" from the Cults to Consciousness channel, featuring an interview with Alyssa Watson, a survivor of the Jehovah's Witnesses organization, conducted by Shalise Ansola. Alyssa's story illuminates the devastating practice of shunning and its impact on those who leave high-control religious groups. Her experiences provide the foundation for exploring the clinical and psychological dimensions of this form of coercive control.

When we think about coercive control, we often focus on overt manipulation or physical abuse. But one of the most devastating tactics used by high-control groups is something far quieter yet equally destructive: systematic social isolation through shunning. This practice doesn't just damage relationships—it fundamentally alters a person's sense of self, safety, and belonging in the world.

What Shunning Really Looks Like

"The second we were announced as no longer Jehovah's Witnesses, it was radio silence. We had friends and family—friends and my in-laws are like less than a mile from our house. So I see them at the grocery store, you know, out driving around or just at Target. I'm at Target all the time and I run into them there. They don't look at you. If you are on the same aisle and they see you, they turn and walk the other way. They pretend you do not exist. Everyone we've ever known has blocked us on like all social media. It's intense. Like you literally are dead to them. Like you don't exist in their life anymore."

This isn't just about losing touch with people. This isn't friends drifting apart naturally over time or family members having a falling out. Shunning is an organized, systematic practice of complete social exclusion that serves a specific purpose: to punish those who leave and to control those who remain.

Imagine living less than a mile from your own family and being treated as though you've ceased to exist. Everyone you've ever known blocks you on all social media. Friends and family members who once celebrated birthdays with you, who knew your children from birth, who shared your daily life—now cross the street to avoid eye contact. They turn around in grocery store aisles. They refuse to acknowledge your existence even when you're standing right in front of them.

This is the reality for those who leave high-control religious organizations that practice shunning. And it's not accidental—it's carefully orchestrated social death.

The Architecture of Social Control

To understand why shunning is so effective as a control mechanism, we need to understand what makes it different from ordinary social rejection. Shunning has several distinctive features:

Key Characteristics of Organized Shunning

• It's Total and Immediate

Unlike natural relationship changes that happen gradually, shunning typically begins the moment someone is formally announced as having left. There's no transition period, no chance to maintain some connections while losing others. It's an instant, complete severing of all social ties.

• It's Mandatory, Not Optional

Individual members don't get to decide whether to maintain the friendship. The organization dictates that all members must shun the person who left. Those who refuse to comply face being shunned themselves. This creates a powerful incentive for complete compliance.

• It's Public and Visible

The shunning isn't hidden or private. It happens in grocery stores, at community events, in public spaces. This public nature serves dual purposes: it punishes the person who left while simultaneously warning those still inside about the consequences of leaving.

• It Includes Family

Perhaps most devastatingly, shunning typically extends to immediate family members, including parents, siblings, children, and spouses. The message is clear: organizational loyalty supersedes even the most fundamental human bonds.

• It's Presented as Loving

High-control groups often frame shunning as an act of love designed to help the person "come to their senses" and return. This reframing serves to reduce cognitive dissonance for those doing the shunning and adds another layer of confusion for those being shunned.

Why Shunning Is Coercive Control

Coercive control is a pattern of behaviors used to dominate another person through isolation, intimidation, and the gradual erosion of autonomy. Dr. Evan Stark, who developed the coercive control framework, identifies several core tactics used in coercive relationships. Shunning embodies nearly all of them:

The Mechanisms of Control Through Shunning

• Isolation: By systematically removing all social connections, the group ensures that leaving becomes psychologically unbearable. You don't just lose your beliefs—you lose your entire social world. Every friend, every family member, every familiar face. The isolation is so complete that many people describe it as feeling like they've died, except they're still alive to experience the loss.
• Punishment and Deterrence: The practice serves as both punishment for those who leave and a powerful deterrent for those considering it. Current members witness the complete abandonment of former friends and think, "I can't survive that." They see people they loved treated as non-existent and internalize the message: question the group and lose everything.
• Maintained Dependence: When your entire social network exists within the group, questioning becomes terrifying. The group has created a situation where your emotional survival depends on continued membership. You can't gradually distance yourself while maintaining some connections—you're either in or you're completely out.
• Identity Erosion: When everyone who knows you treats you as though you don't exist, it attacks your fundamental sense of self. Your identity was built in relationship with these people. When they all simultaneously deny your existence, it can create profound questions about who you are.
• Reality Distortion: The group often tells members that shunning is actually a loving practice, creating cognitive dissonance. Those being shunned may struggle to reconcile the "loving" rationale with the devastating experience of total rejection. This gaslighting makes it harder to trust your own perceptions of what's happening.

The Neurobiology of Social Rejection

Understanding why shunning is so profoundly harmful requires looking at what happens in the brain when we experience social rejection. Neuroscience research has shown that social pain activates many of the same neural pathways as physical pain.

When you experience shunning, your brain doesn't distinguish it from a physical threat to your survival. For most of human evolution, being cast out from your social group was a death sentence. We evolved as deeply social creatures who depended on our communities for survival. The brain systems that alert us to social rejection are the same ones that alert us to physical danger.

This means that when someone turns away from you in a grocery store, when a family member blocks you on social media, when your entire community treats you as invisible—your nervous system is responding as though your actual survival is threatened. Because, ancestrally, it was.

The Body's Response to Shunning

People experiencing shunning often report physical symptoms that mirror trauma responses:

• Hypervigilance in public spaces (always scanning for people who might reject you)
• Anxiety or panic attacks when encountering former community members
• Sleep disturbances and nightmares
• Difficulty concentrating or making decisions
• Physical pain or tension, particularly in the chest or stomach
• A persistent sense of danger or impending doom
• Emotional numbing or dissociation

These aren't signs of weakness—they're signs that your nervous system is responding appropriately to a genuine threat to your wellbeing.

The Double Standard: "We Don't Shun"

One of the most insidious aspects of this practice is the public denial many high-control groups engage in. They claim they don't shun, even while actively enforcing it within their communities. This gaslighting adds another layer of harm—survivors are told their experience isn't real, even as they're living it.

The cognitive dissonance this creates is profound. You know what you're experiencing. You see people turning away from you. You've been blocked by everyone you know. Your family refuses to speak to you. But the organization publicly states they don't engage in shunning.

This denial serves several purposes for the organization:

• Public Relations Protection: By denying the practice publicly, they avoid criticism from outsiders and potential legal or social consequences.
• Internal Justification: The denial allows members to participate in shunning while maintaining a self-image as loving, compassionate people.
• Victim Silencing: When organizations deny shunning exists, it makes it harder for those experiencing it to speak out—who will believe them when the organization denies it?
• Reality Control: The denial is an exercise in controlling the narrative. The organization claims the authority to define reality, even when that reality contradicts lived experience.

The truth becomes evident when you listen to those who've left. The consistent pattern of complete social abandonment, the blocked phone numbers, the turned backs in public spaces—these testimonies reveal the reality behind the public denial.

The Ripple Effects on Mental Health

The psychological impact of shunning extends far beyond the immediate pain of social rejection. It creates complex, layered trauma that affects multiple dimensions of wellbeing:

Identity and Self-Worth

When everyone you know treats you as though you don't exist, it can create profound questions about your worth as a person. Your sense of self was built in relationship with these people—your family, your community, your identity within the group. When all of those relationships are suddenly severed, you may feel like you've lost not just your community but yourself.

Many survivors describe feeling like they're invisible, like they've become a ghost. This isn't metaphorical—it's an accurate description of what it feels like when every person you encounter refuses to acknowledge your presence.

Rebuilding self-worth after this experience requires recognizing that your value doesn't depend on whether others acknowledge it. But that's easier said than done when the messages of worthlessness come from everyone who once mattered to you.

Trust and Connection

Learning to build new relationships after experiencing complete abandonment requires rebuilding trust—both in yourself and in others. You may find yourself asking:

• Will these new people abandon me too if I say the wrong thing?

• Are any relationships truly unconditional?

• Can I trust my own judgment about who is safe?

• Am I capable of being loved outside the conditions I knew before?

These questions are normal after experiencing shunning. Your trust was betrayed by people who claimed to love you unconditionally. Learning to trust again takes time and often requires safe relationships where you can test whether connection can survive disagreement, difference, or change.

Grief and Ambiguous Loss

You're grieving relationships with people who are still alive but have chosen to treat you as dead. This type of loss—called ambiguous loss—can be particularly difficult to process.

With death, there's finality. With shunning, there's a constant possibility that someone might reach out, that things might change. You may find yourself:

• Holding onto hope that a family member will break the silence

• Scanning social media for signs that someone is thinking of you

• Imagining scenarios where relationships are restored

• Feeling unable to fully mourn because the people aren't actually gone

This ambiguity can prevent the natural grief process from unfolding. You're stuck between hoping and accepting, between fighting for connection and letting go.

Complex Trauma

The systematic nature of shunning creates layers of trauma—from the initial rejection to ongoing encounters with people who refuse to acknowledge your existence. This isn't a one-time traumatic event; it's a continuous experience of social threat that can create symptoms consistent with complex PTSD:

• Difficulty regulating emotions (particularly around rejection or abandonment)

• Negative self-concept (feeling fundamentally unworthy or damaged)

• Relationship difficulties (fear of abandonment, difficulty trusting)

• Physical health problems (the chronic stress of social threat affects the body)

• Dissociation (feeling disconnected from yourself or reality)

• Sense of meaninglessness (when your entire life framework is dismantled)

Recognizing these as trauma symptoms rather than personal failings is an important step in recovery. You're not broken—you're responding normally to an abnormal situation.

The Social Context: Living in a Fishbowl

What makes shunning particularly difficult is that it often happens in close-knit communities where you can't avoid encountering the people who are shunning you. You're not moving to a new city where you'd naturally lose touch with old friends. You're staying in the same place, shopping at the same stores, navigating the same spaces—but now everyone you know refuses to see you.

This creates a unique form of ongoing trauma. Every trip to the grocery store becomes an exercise in emotional endurance. Every community event carries the possibility of painful encounters. You find yourself planning your errands around avoiding certain places at certain times. You develop hypervigilance, constantly scanning your environment for people who might reject you.

Some survivors describe this as living in a glass prison—you can see your old life, your family, your community going on without you, but you can't reach them. They can see you too, but they've been instructed not to acknowledge what they see.

The Manipulation of "Loving" Discipline

High-control groups typically frame shunning as a loving act intended to help the person "come to their senses" and return. This reframing is manipulation that serves multiple purposes:

• For those doing the shunning, it reduces cognitive dissonance. They can maintain their self-image as loving, kind people while completely abandoning someone. "I'm not being cruel—I'm showing tough love that will ultimately help them."
• For those being shunned, it creates confusion and self-blame. If this treatment is actually loving, maybe you're the problem. Maybe you should go back. Maybe you're wrong to feel hurt by something that's supposedly for your benefit.
• For those still inside, it provides a justification that makes the practice seem reasonable rather than abusive. "We don't hate people who leave—we love them so much we're willing to do this difficult thing to save them."

But here's the truth: Love doesn't work this way. Love doesn't abandon someone for making an autonomous choice. Love doesn't require conformity as the price of connection. Love doesn't treat people as means to an end—even if that end is supposedly their salvation.

What Actual Love Looks Like

Genuine love respects autonomy. It allows people to make their own choices, even choices we disagree with, without threatening complete abandonment. It creates space for difference, for growth, for change.

Shunning is not love. It's control disguised as care, manipulation dressed up as concern. Recognizing this distinction is essential for healing.

Recognition and Recovery

If you're experiencing shunning or have survived it, here are some important truths to hold onto:

Your Experience Is Valid

Regardless of what the group claims publicly, what you're living through is real and significant. The pain you feel is not an overreaction—it's an appropriate response to a genuine harm. Your nervous system knows the truth even when the organization denies it.

You don't need the organization to validate your experience for it to be true. Your reality doesn't require their approval.

Shunning Is About Control, Not Love

Truly caring relationships don't evaporate because of differences in belief. They don't require conformity as the price of connection. Conditional relationships that disappear when you exercise autonomy were never about love—they were about compliance.

This doesn't mean the people shunning you don't care about you. Many of them probably do, in the way they're able to within the constraints of the system. But the system itself uses those caring feelings to enforce control. The problem isn't that individual people don't care—it's that the system requires them to demonstrate loyalty by abandoning care.

You Can Rebuild

While the pain is real and the loss is profound, many survivors find that building authentic relationships outside the high-control environment brings a quality of connection they never experienced before.

These new relationships may develop slowly. You may be cautious, testing whether connection can survive disagreement or difference. That's okay. That's wise. You're learning a new way of relating that isn't based on conditional acceptance.

Many survivors describe eventually developing relationships that feel more genuine than anything they experienced in the high-control group. Friendships based on authentic compatibility rather than enforced association. Connections that honor your whole self rather than requiring you to hide parts of who you are.

Healing Is Possible

With time, support, and often professional help, survivors of shunning can work through the complex trauma, rebuild their sense of identity, and create fulfilling lives with genuine connections.

Healing doesn't mean the pain disappears. It means the pain no longer controls your life. It means you can encounter someone who shunned you without it derailing your day. It means you've built a life and identity that doesn't depend on their acknowledgment.

The journey isn't linear. Some days will feel like progress; others will feel like setbacks. That's normal with this kind of complex grief and trauma. Be patient with yourself.

Practical Steps Toward Healing

If you're working through the aftermath of shunning, these concrete steps can support your healing:

• Find Trauma-Informed Support

Look for a therapist who understands both religious trauma and coercive control. Not all therapists are equipped to work with this specific kind of harm. You need someone who won't minimize your experience or suggest you "just forgive and move on." EMDR, Internal Family Systems (IFS), and other trauma-focused therapies can be particularly helpful for processing the layers of loss and rejection.

• Connect With Others Who Understand

Finding community with others who've left high-control groups can be profoundly validating. They understand in ways that people who've never experienced this can't. Online communities, support groups, and forums for ex-members can provide connection and validation. Just hearing someone else describe your exact experience—the turned backs in stores, the blocked numbers, the ambiguous loss—can help you feel less alone and less crazy.

• Process the Grief

Give yourself permission to grieve. You've lost people you love, even though they're still alive. You've lost your community, your identity, your assumptions about who would always be there. That deserves to be mourned. Grief with ambiguous loss doesn't follow a neat timeline. You might need to revisit it multiple times as you encounter new layers of the loss.

• Build New Meaning

The group provided a framework for understanding your life, your purpose, your place in the world. Building new meaning outside that framework is essential work. What matters to you now? What brings you joy? What kind of person do you want to be? What values do you choose for yourself? These questions, while challenging, are opportunities to build an authentic life.

• Practice Self-Compassion

You may judge yourself for struggling, for not "being over it" yet, for the days when the grief feels as fresh as it did at the beginning. This self-judgment adds suffering to pain. What you're going through is genuinely difficult. Your struggle isn't a sign of weakness—it's a sign of your humanity. Treat yourself with the compassion you'd offer a good friend going through the same thing.

💚 Moving Forward

Recovery from coercive control, including the practice of shunning, is a journey. It takes courage to recognize these patterns for what they are and to begin building a life based on authentic choice rather than fear of abandonment.

You deserve relationships that honor your autonomy. You deserve connection that doesn't require you to sacrifice your authentic self. You deserve to be seen, acknowledged, and valued for who you actually are—not for your compliance with someone else's expectations.

And you have the strength to create those relationships, even after experiencing the devastation of being systematically erased. Your resilience in surviving this speaks to your capacity to heal from it.