One of the most destructive and evil aspects of the JW religion is the mind programming and hypnosis that is used to fill a person’s mind with post hypnotic suggestions that operate as beliefs much like an operating system on a pc. These beliefs for the most part are outside of a person’s conscious awareness and they can dredge up feelings of fear and paranoia, this is a programmed form of posttraumatic syndrome.
I once worked with a JW client who was a vet loading corpses on choppers. As you may imagine this type of experience was very emotional and hard to do. Many years later if he heard a chopper he would age regress to the feelings wired in his neurology and go into a state of high anxiety. The nervous system operates as a stimulus response mechanism. Any one of the five senses can trigger these feelings from the past that are programmed in the person. All it took was one session with this person to neutralize those feelings and to put useful post hypnotic suggestions to partition the feelings. This type of phenomena requires professional help as a first choice.
As a second choice what can a person do? Educate them selves on this disorder.
According to one researcher the following factors may interfere with recovery.
Guilt that can be divided into four components:
a) Perceived responsibility for causing a negative outcome. As irrational as it sounds a person may blame them selves completely for the abandonment of the Watchtower. They may rationalize and justify the unjust treatment they received from their hard and sometimes cruel JW taskmasters.
b) Perceived lack of justification for actions taken. This leads a person to minimize his or her own reasons for leaving being harsh on one’s self and denying their past experience.
c) Perceived violation of values. If a person committed some moral infraction due to any number of factors they tend to overlook the factors that lead to their choices. The bottom line is that they lack compassion for themselves and they are punitive with themselves.
d) A belief that one knew what was going to happen before the outcome was observed. This leads to a lot of self inflicted shame, guilt and fear due to taking selective Biblical passages that may fit the current crisis and viewing it as total truth on the part of the Watchtower. What the person fails to see is that any ambiguous prophetic writings can be used to fit any crisis much like Nostradamus writings.