PTSD: The Remnant From Spiritual Abuse
Jehovah's Witness Theology Leaves Scars on the Soul
I have PTSD. Yes, I was actually diagnosed with it. A gift from the Jehovah’s Witnesses that keeps on giving, I experience a fright that is greater than fright, a ripping asunder of body from soul into a nothingness in which there is no protection, for God does not love me.
I have not been delivered of this since salvation. But really, no, I’m okay. Honestly.
There are some things that may erase progressively or not be removed until Kingdom Come. I don’t know. So let me explain the PTSD, and no, I am not the only ex or current JW who has this. It is pretty common, in fact, the norm.
Because it’s part of the plan.
As a small child before you have the ability to sort through and reason whether a thing may or may not be true, you are exposed to childhood reading materials that look strangely like the attacks on 9/11 years before they ever happen.
Picture this. The year is 1982 or 1983. You’re at a weekly book study held at the home of a brother or sister in the basement, and the chapter is being read one paragraph at a time, followed by questions. Each person can raise their hand for a chance to answer.
You raise your hand.
Tentatively.
You don’t actually know what was asked, but you want to say, “you better be good, so you can go to the New System”, and hope you get cute points for saying something so cliche but also true.
But you end up being too shy to say anything, unsure of whether the ruse will work. All eyes are on you for a moment before moving on. Your face burns red.
Your copy of My Book of Bible Stories has it all, Jezebel falling to her death and getting eaten by dogs, the drag queenesque makeup on her contorted face displaying horror in her final moment, and the depiction of what are sure to be your final moments: the return of God.
See, it works like this. There is no plan of salvation. You have never heard one. Jesus is not God. He didn’t come to save you, and you have no concept of this. All that stands between you and destruction are your own, pitiful works. And what are those paltry deeds, you ask?
Handing out magazines from the Jehovah’s Witness organization. I kid you not. They used to sell them but then switched to asking for a donation and found people gave more money. I believe it also works out differently tax-wise.
We also have to not smoke, not get drunk, not fornicate, not adulerate, be careful with what entertainment we watch, make as many weekly meetings as possible, not celebrate holidays, not receive blood transfusions or products, read as much Witness material as we can, refuse bad associations with the wrong friends, and not engage in politics or hold down employment in law enforcement or in the military.
Also — no saying of the Pledge of Allegiance.
The most important of these, of course, was going door-to-door distributing magazines.
We are never told where the goalposts are. Just do as much as you can, and maybe when this is all over, God will deign to spare you. But it’s no guarantee, and He could just as easily save someone who has no affiliation with the Jehovah’s Witnesses whatsoever.
You had to try — because to not do so was to throw every chance down the toilet, and you just couldn’t do that. The thing is that no one could know the mind of God, that would be presumptuous, and so, the business of who would make it was vastly unknowable and a total and complete mystery.
But one day — one day — He is going to come back, suddenly and when He does, it is to reap destruction. All those people who refused being a Jehovah’s Witness, even though I just told you that might not even matter, but it was still emphasized that He was coming for all those who rejected us in the past.
It gave just a slight feeling of being smug to those who were repeatedly told to beat it when approaching a homeowner. Eventually, they would be sorry. But in the meantime, they would laugh at or make fun of us for seeming like dorks in badly fitted brown suits. Little did they know eventually the tables would be turned.
Like the people pictured in the water, knocking on the boat for Noah to let them in as the rain poured, they would be shit out of luck. All this drudgery living life as a Witness would definitely pay off.
I pause to take a little break to tell you of the Jehovah’s Witness artwork.
You have to know that every service that is performed for the Jehovah’s Witness organization is volunteer work. Because they are cheapos. And they are very efficient with how they operate, owning a printing press for their operations, for example.
Owning a farm to source food to feed their in-house workers.
And part of this, the production of written material, comes with graphic artistry that is produced by artists who donate their time and talents. And they are quite good at what they do. So proficient, in fact, that many of their illustrations circulate on social media as viral memes of heaven or of a paradise Earth, and people don’t recognize these for what they are.
And so, for any little Jehovah’s Witness kid, the vivid imagery is part of the indoctrination. Fantastic facial expressions are worn on the faces of Bible characters, like Cain when he slays Abel, while wearing a dark brown skirt, sandals, and shaggy 1970s-style beard. His back is visible with rippling muscles and an alarming set of taut biceps, and his hair comes in thick in gentle, tousled waves.
So, back to the image at hand. Fireballs shoot through the air in a depiction like that of a comic book. People look on in horror as they realize there is nowhere to escape amid skyscrapers in an urban hellscape appearing to be New York City.
Others run away, screaming, passing parked vehicles on the streets, and you can tell who are the worldly people and the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Worldly people are wearing tank tops, sporting dyed hair, unlike Witnesses who are in skirts or dresses if they are women or badly pleated pants, belts, and dress shirts if they are men.
The sky is razed, red, and burned-out buildings dot the landscape amid explosions and sulfuric clouds trail off dramatically.
The underlying message? PLACE MORE MAGAZINES, YOU SLACKER! YOU DON’T WANT THIS TO BE YOUR FUTURE, DO YOU???
And how many was enough? Nobody knew. You could never be too sure. Beware, you who thought you were standing, lest you would fall. And yes, scripture was misused aplenty.
It wasn’t subtle.
Even a three-year old could catch it. Even one like me. It was communicated in a language all could viably understand. Fear. Cold, hard fright like the kind that accompanied you at night after an encounter watching a scary movie.
Or after you’ve been abandoned by somebody you really loved and you’re left to think and ponder and ruminate over and over, boring grooves into your brain in a path of etched loneliness.
Nobody wants you. Not even God. You didn’t publish His word as you ought. Your discussions with others were fruitless. Never mind that Noah didn’t convert anyone, either. Was Noah a Jehovah’s Witness?
Technically, yes, they would say. The thread of true religion was lost along the way but picked up again in 1870 when the Jehovah’s Witnesses were founded.
And what about those born before this enlightenment? We didn’t like to talk about it. It was amorphous at best. Only God knew. We assumed some had been chosen, and if not, God had them recorded in His memory.
You see, it gets even stranger still.
The result is still PTSD and incredible, never-ending pangs of guilt for, presumably, the rest of my life, but whatever.
When you die, you do not go on to heaven. Or to hell, for that matter. Everyone who dies is stored in God’s memory to be brought back at a later time, kind of like a reconstitution. Or information on a floppy drive that could be accessed later on.
We would have no awareness in this state, and if we were bad, the flaming fires of hell would not touch us. Because it did not exist. There was no such thing.
And so, if you were really bad or at least sure you weren’t making the cut, this was kind of a relief. If you liked cigarettes and kissing boys on the steps of the Baptist Church next door to your house, at least you wouldn’t burn for it.
It was kind of a get-out-of-hell pass. At least, I tried to tell myself.
Except it didn’t work.
The term was destroyed.
Those who didn’t make the cut were destroyed. Sinners would be destroyed. Worldly people would be destroyed. Jehovah’s Witnesses who God didn’t like would be destroyed. That neighbor who looked at you cross-eyed when you attempted to start a Bible study? Destroyed. The atheist down the way? Destroyed. You who shirked going out in service, as it was called, shucking off magazines one Sunday after the Kingdom Hall?
You got it.
De-stroyed.
D-E-S-T-R-O-Y-E-D.
Annihilation.
Ceasing to exist.
Oh, and how they tried to comfort us with this.
You’ll never have to pay for all those bad things you did. And we know you did them. Your friends have told on you. Jehovah’s Witness friends were notorious for telling on one another, because harboring secrets for one another was a sin.
Above all, you could not trust anybody.
If you wanted to make out with boys, you had to find the ones who didn’t run with your religion. Which also was a sin. But at least no one would find out.
The main, unmistakable feature in these scenes was that of a darkening sky. It was obvious that a storm of some sort preceded the doom and gloom to come. So in many a young Jehovah’s Witness mind cements the connection between an impending weather event and imminent destruction.
And believe you, me, we were looking for it.
Primed to see the end coming like a hawk. There was no rest for the sexually curious adolescent.
There was no telling which mistake was your last or how arbitrary God’s choosing system really was. They emphasized that eternal life was a free gift, meaning you could not get it unless it was bestowed. But just who or why or how, nobody knew. It just meant the bar kept rising, and you had to keep jumping.
But.
There were sort of these measures you could see. There were labels given for the level of service you engaged in. If you were in the part-time or full-time ministry. And everyone wanted to either be full-time or support someone financially, like a spouse, in it. Because this counted, too. Your brownie points could come via enabling your wife to go door-to-door everyday.
It was not uncommon to forestall having children indefinitely to this end.
Many childless couples exist within the Jehovah’s Witness infrastructure, particularly as birth control is not frowned upon, and it is considered wrong to bring offspring into such a world as this where the end is nigh.
There is no pro-life ethic such as exists among many other groups. They don’t believe in abortion, of course, but I have observed firsthand how a young person who has children will be looked down upon as unwise.
You’re always counting, counting, counting. Numbers of hours in service. Numbers of magazines placed. Numbers of householders spoken to. Number of Bible studies started. Number of people converted. Numbers of those baptized. Numbers of those added to the flock.
Or, if you were like me, adding those hours in reverse like a debt you could never pay, ever falling further behind. Was your father a Jehovah’s Witness? No. Check. Did you make every meeting? No. Check, check, check. Did you place magazines? Start a discussion with your friends? Abstain from tobacco? Try a little bit of that alcohol?
A row of checks.
Tally the bill up. Oops. You can’t pay it. From now until forever. You run to catch up, but the finish lines ebbs ever farther into the distance.
All is hopeless.
You hide your face from your seemingly angry Father until annihilation can hold you in its sweet grasp.
During the day, you can manage. You have classes, you go to school. You have acquaintances, people you talk to. You shuffle the halls. You go for a walk. Ride your bike. But at night, something interesting happens.
All is stripped away, and you imagine a lonely graveside, unbidden by your conscience mind but displayed in full pathos by your unconscious counterpart. The grass is blown by the harsh winds.
You view the stone that marks where you lie, forgotten because God did not care.
Though, seemingly, inside, you have a tenderness for God. You want to get close, but He feels so far away. The bridge unreachable. The gap is untenable. You cannot reach Him. No, not ever, and He is seemingly only angry with you, and you wait until the day you can’t avoid it anymore.
The day of the fireballs.
That retractable morning when the brimstone will find you like a laser-targeting scud missile. You cannot escape. It is pointless to hide. You’ve read that some will want the rocks to cover them. You are those people. It is you, and it is hopeless.
God knows you. And it isn’t good. Everything about you is terrible. He has seen it all, and it isn’t pretty.
I experience something like existential dread like if Edward Munch’s painting were real. You are trapped in a landscape where all is chaos and barren, unrelenting desert. There is dread and also a type of solitude like that you only experience inside a dream. Pitch black, no lights on, kind of space where no one can enter unless written into the script.
Edvard Munch, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
And everything you know is held against you. They let you know that you are “responsible” for everything you hear, meaning that if you attended a meeting and heard their teaching, God would hold you responsible for not applying what you learned.
Even going to meetings was dangerous.
It meant you were held to a higher standard each time you did. But to not go was a sin.
I would attempt to be present at a meeting but to tune out the meeting so as to circumvent the knowing that would surely be my doom.
Because there was no way I could be everything I was expected to be.
My parents were not pioneers. This was the name for full-time ministers who went out in the door-to-door service 70 hours a month. My father was an atheist, and he also did not believe in wasting gas on this endeavor as far as my mother was concerned.
He felt it was all nonsense.
And Jehovah’s Witness hierarchy is very much set up by dynasty. Who you are related to matters. You can see it like the families of politicians. The mayor and his wife and children are assigned a certain status in their town very often. You want to go into office? Well, it helps to be related to the top-tier people. Or at least be very close friends to them.
When you are the red-headed step-children with no ministerial pedigree, your hopes are pretty much dashed. You better get ready for annihilation. Oh, it also didn’t help when people regularly told you your father was going to be destroyed.
And if you think that post-salvation, I am a picture of peace, perfect serenity on a plate, someone who has put this all behind me, you would be wrong.
One cannot be wrung out like a sponge of all its innocence, made to be worrying about end times theology and dates when other kids are learning their ABCs, and you’re trying to figure out if you’ve crossed the invisible ledge into being irredeemable.
That kind of a mind twist does not simply come out in the wash. Unless you’ve been delivered. And I have not been.
I am justified positionally. I am at peace with God. I am reconciled. I am not, however, a tranquil bay but a tempest on the sea.
My thoughts rage about, lashing against the boat that transports me securely to the shore.
The low pressure system amasses cold air and warm air into a palpable tension, and my bones feel it. Primed to sense destruction, teeth chatter by fear. Instinct seeks to protect the organism to cling to life. Doing so means to scurry under the bed, to find shelter in a closet.
To protect oneself from God.
Sometimes we hear about the intellectual faith not being enough. Faith, however, is a gift from God. You can ask the Lord to help your unbelief. Ragging on others for the capacity to experience the graces of God is not charitable. Some of us have been through literal hell.
My therapist told me of a portion of my brain that was trying to keep me safe by screaming danger, danger, DANGER when in a situation it recognized as hazardous. It remembers scenery that is familiar when it was little and did not know any better.
When in church, it sends signals that make it hard to breathe, and I start to hyperventilate. It’s because this wasn’t a place that was safe. But that I have to consciously self-soothe and tell myself that this isn’t that. And over time, it will start to change the programming.
But it won’t be instant. Or overnight.
This is the way God designed us. It’s not a flaw. It is a signal that something isn’t right. And something wasn’t.
We were created with synapses and dendrites, nerve endings, and feelings. Emotions give us information calculated at rapid speed that takes the conscious mind time to catch up to.
Emerging from a cult is a Herculean task that takes unraveling of the layers of techniques that led to such devastating terror. Escaping was the tearing down of strongholds that happens when the darkness is exposed to the light of God’s word.
Like a prisoner released from a hostage situation, you may be wound tight for a while. And that’s to be expected. If these tactics were not so insidious, cults would not resort to them. The mark made is indelible.
Even so, sins once like scarlet are made white like snow. The past has no effect on that present truth. PTSD cannot nullify the power of the gospel. God does not penalize those pulled from the wreckage of spiritual abuse nor regard us with chastisement. He is like a rescuer in a war zone, searching diligently for movement below the rubble.
The angels in heaven rejoice greatly with each one who is found and raised to new life in Jesus. There is no condemnation here.
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About the Author
Rosa A. Hopkins has hosted radio shows on 11 Christian stations, is a writer of gospel songs, has promoted Heartbeat legislation, and is a singer and songwriter. Her writings can also be found on her Facebook page. Join 29,000 other readers here.