Glad to have you here! You have just struck gold in finding this forum. There are many exjw forums out there, but this one is by FAR the best! You could also count yourself very very lucky that you were never baptized. It would have been just one more thing for you to deal with. I think your parents reaction is pretty typical of jw parents. I wouldn't take alot of what they did or said to heart though. Time heals all wounds. Perhaps over time they will come around and accept your choices in life. If not, then that is THEIR loss, not yours. As you have already discovered, there are many many loving and caring people in the "world". You will make a new family of your very own and that is all that counts.

This is mainly because it's just now becoming evident to me that a lot of my problems stem from the incredible guilt I still feel. Heavy guilt was forced into me growing up and I'm still trying to overcome it.
  One thing that helped me overcome most of the guilt was research. Something you have just started. Once I was able to dissprove all of their doctrines, beliefs and practices I began to get past that guilt. But I'm not going to lie.....I still struggle with flashes of guilt here and there when I choose to do something I would normally not have done as a jw. I firmly believe it is caused by something called "Cognitive Dissonance". Cognitive dissonance is an uncomfortable feeling caused by holding two contradictory ideas simultaneously. I remember someone on this forum telling me something when I was first leaving the organization and dealing with this guilt. They told me "It's like someone telling you that the color blue is called red your whole life and everyone else says it's blue. Then you grow up, research it, and find out that blue is indeed called blue and not red. So you go about your life calling the color blue ....blue....but it just never feels right to you." Its the same thing with what we were taught as jw's. Trying to forget what we were taught as "truth" and replacing it with a new "truth" is very difficult. This .....in my opinion....the the root cause of all the guilt we as exjw's feel. Here is some good information on cognitive dissonance as it relates to exjw's ( http://www.jwfacts.com/watchtower/cognitive-dissonance.php ). That site, by the way, is a treasure trove of information on the jw's that expose all of their lies and untruths. You might want to look into that site more.

Hope to see more of you on the forum!