Effects of participation in the Fellowship

Many may be the effects that long-term participation in the Fellowship can induce and, overall, participants would concur in characterising most of the longer-term ones as extremely beneficial.

The more immediate effects following shortly upon initial commitment (customarily within the first couple of years or so) may not be quite as benevolent however... to say the least!

Obviously no written, or even oral, account can have the same impact or be comprehended and assimilated as fully as first-hand experience, but given the sometimes dramatic (and often traumatic) effects that active participation in the Fellowship can exert, conscience demanded that at least some sort of warning (no matter how inadequate) should be provided to potential new participants, if only to let them know what they were "letting themselves in for"; thus the original motivation for writing the "History of the Fellowship".

Needless to say, although newcomers avidly read Volume One and claimed to understand it, once they began to experience some of the traumas for themselves their response (almost without exception) was "but I didn't realise!".
Also needless to say, the impact of participation in the Fellowship has in the past proven so stressful that few are those that have successfully endured and "come out safely the other side".

Given the Fellowship's ethos and the deeply personal nature of many of the issues that participants find themselves confronting, such a phenomenon is not particularly surprising.

Commitment to full participation in the Fellowship is just another way of describing the act of embracing values and a way of being that in many cases is at odds with contemporary mindsets and lifestyles.
It can be likened to two divergent paths: the further the divergence at the time of initial participation, the greater is likely to be the upheaval experienced by the participant.
And the stress follows immediately therefrom as these upheavals occur in those areas that often have the greatest attachment for us - in one's family and domestic life; in one's relationships and emotions; and in one's career path.

Essentially one finds oneself being confronted with choices - many hard choices. And it is in the making and then enactment of those choices, and the self-knowledge that can be gleaned thereby, that consists the stresses and traumas.