I'm sure I'm not having some great big ephinany that no one else thought of, but to me this is sorta big to realize:
So many people in both congregations I attended as a Witness were soooooo depressed, severely, traumatizingly depressed, I would say. They would all comfort each other and say that Satan was attacking them personally and their depression was proof of it, and that this was the "best place this side of paradise" they could be. I've said that exact thing myself so many times.
That's perfect!Why would anybody who is so severely depressed leave "the best thing" in this system?If they believe, and I know I did, that the big bad world is so awful (I know a lot of bad things happen in this world, and I'm not saying it's some big shiny happy musical, but it's not the picture the JW's paint either - not everywhere ALL THE TIME. There ARE good people in the world, just like there are good people in the JW religion.), that anything outside of the JW religion would cause you to be even more severely depressed, why would you leave? You would be terrified to leave that place that was "so good" for fear of what you would find in the world.
I just think this is my mom. I have never known anyone sadder than my mom. It breaks my heart that she is so sad all the time. But she believes that if she leaves the JW's that she will go over the edge in her sadness, that the world is waaaaaaaaaay worse than what she is dealing with right now. It's a trick. It's a total trick. And it's genius. Because it works.
This is why my theory is that you have to go through something fairly traumatizing within the JW religion in order to wake up from it. There is a thought in my Toltec Wisdom book that says we will only allow the same amount of abuse from other people that we ourselves abuse ourselves. It makes sense then that the JW's squash your self esteem, tell you that you are a good-for-nothing slave, doing what you ought to have done, and not to think more of yourself than is necessary to think. If you have a low self-esteem, you will abuse yourself with negative self-talk, etc. And then you are prime to accept and put up with all kinds of abuse from THEM. This is one way they keep people in, isn't it? But then to drive this point home (I think), I would say that I woke up because I experienced MORE abuse from the religion than I would do to myself, because I was in therapy and learning how to think in a more healthy way about myself, and I reached my limit of what I would put up with, even at a great personal cost.
That's why they don't want you to go to therapy too! Because they want to keep you under their thumb. They want you to believe you suck. If you go to a professional psychiatrist or whatever, you will learn that you have been thinking very badly about yourself, and that is not healthy. And then slowly everything else around you will unravel...
I'm slowly putting the pieces together here...
What do you guys think? Did you feel like that when you were a JW? That even if it sucked (or maybe you couldn't even comprehend that it sucked), it was still better than being "in the world?"