A former church member has described the "clinical culture shock" he experienced in adjusting to life in the outside world after leaving the Exclusive Brethren church.
Vaughan Thomas spoke to TVNZ's Breakfast today about growing up in the church and his life after leaving at the age of 22.
"Growing up, for me, that meant that I didn't have any contact with people outside of the church, I went to school in the church, I socialised with members of the church and I worked for them and my family, and the only family I had contact with was inside the church," Mr Thomas said.
"It was all you knew because that's all you'd ever know so there was very little comparison. You could always look on to the outside world, but that was a window to the outside world - that was all you could really see."
Mr Thomas said life inside the church meant growing up without things people may take for granted, such as technology or going to the movie theatre.
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"Mobiles phones, whilst they now have a version of them, we didn't grow up with that. We didn't grow up with television; we didn't grow up with even pre-recorded music, as we used to call it - having a CD or a tape just wasn't the done thing. And going to the cinemas. It wasn't what we did.
"I've only ever been on the internet for about six-and-a-half years."
He said he left the Exclusive Brethren "primarily because I disagreed with the way that things were run in the church, the way the leadership worked, and the principles of which they - what they referred to as head fellowship", or how followers showed their faith.
Mr Thomas says that when people in the church realised he was considering leaving tried to "pressure him to remain" and told him he wouldn't be successful on the outside.
The consequences for leaving were "quite significant", he said, as he learned to adjust to life on the outside without many of his friends or family.
"When I did leave, I went through a six month period of, effectively, clinical culture shock. Everything was so different for me than what I thought it would be. It took that whole period of time to adjust just to simple things [like] using a TV remote, going to a restaurant - I'd never done that before. [I] didn't know how things worked or what I should or shouldn't do - it was completely foreign to me."
Mr Thomas said he no longer has "regular contact with [his] family at all" after leaving the church.
"In some ways, they're effectively not there, or they've effectively died. You know they're there, but there is just no recognition."
However Mr Thomas says he's learned to "readjust" after leaving the church with the help of his partner, friends and work colleagues.
"It's been a roller coaster journey, but we're definitely on the up - just restarting your life, really, from scratch in every area is what it's about."
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