Highlights from Vincent Gomez's Journey Out of the Watchtower:
"That late-winter day, my soul was ripped out of me. Our brains are chemical/electrical components. What happens when you discover that what you have dedicated your life to is a lie, is like pouring water over electronics. Your brain literally short circuits. Everything you believed and everything you were, suddenly cannot be processed by the mind. It almost is seizure like."
"The entire range of emotions was something I will never forget. Even the way I viewed my physical surroundings suddenly changed. No longer would I drive to work thinking about talks or having kingdom melodies in my head. Now, there was this indescribable silence of the world around me. The real world became a foreign and mysterious place."
"Shortly after that, I received a phone call from my mom one evening. Word had gotten out that I was questioning things. Quickly, she started saying, "Tell me what is going on?!" I tried to calmly tell her what I had discovered. Within seconds, she said, "You are an apostate! I don't even know you anymore!" This was stated several times in our short conversation. She then hung up on me. I can honestly say, that her tone of voice was no different than what you would hear on a horror film. It was simply evil. I will never forget how she spoke those words to me."
"What I once considered to be a clean and undefiled people, was now becoming a dark and mysterious entity. Something to be feared."
"One day my older children came over. Something snapped within me. It was like a dam of emotions erupted that had been built up over a few weeks. That is when I began to pace the floor and experience what I described in the opening paragraph. The Watchtower likes to run with such experiences. Simply because it appears to be that Satan is taking control, but in reality, I was having a nervous breakdown."
"By the time I went to my second meeting, I had done much research on mind control, known as undue influence. I was taking in information from many unbiased sources. This is when things really turned dark for me. As I walked into the kingdom hall that evening, the kingdom hall became a very frightening place. I now could hear the “cult talk”. My mind could now take note of this type of control on the mind. The parroting of answers from publications began to seem strange and pointless. Personalities became plastic in so many ways. I began to see how difficult it is to separate the authentic person from the cult. I was terrified."
"The kingdom hall was now haunted, by the seven spirits of the governing body that sit in New York controlling every facet of my thinking."