For Those Who Left And Contemplate Returning

by gubberningbody 2 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

  • gubberningbody
    gubberningbody

    " Remember how you felt in the not-so-good times? While we certainly remember what happened, our emotional recall dims with time. Researchers have found that the mind is biased toward positive emotional memories—as negative emotions fade faster. This isn't universal, however, as mild depression can skew emotional memory toward the negative.

    "People have an inherent bias to view their experiences in a positive light," says study author Richard Walker, Ph.D., assistant professor of psychology at Winston-Salem State University in North Carolina. For one, the positive bias can be explained simply because there are more positive events than negative ones, explains Walker.

    In his research, he found that happier emotions have a longer shelf life in our memories. In a review of 12 studies, he found that people consistently report experiencing more positive events. Negative emotions tended to fade faster than positive ones.

    This "fading effect" works differently for those with depression. The researcher tracked the emotional recollection of 330 participants and found that their positive and negative emotions fade at the same rate. "The folks who are mildly depressed tend to report more negative life events," says Walker. "And they tend to have more difficulty dealing with negative emotions. This is likely to be one of the contributing factors [to depression]."

    This excepted from " Past Perfect: Why Bad Memories Fade
    How memory is biased towards positive emotional memories, except for those with mild depression" - Colin Allen

    For these reasons it's important that you write down why you left, not so you can brood eternally about the bad, but so that you don't become that proverbial dog returning to its vomit. The JW world, like the world of a gang-member can call you back in, and not to your betterment, but to your ruination.

  • Scarred for life
    Scarred for life

    Interesting. But I remember many bad memories from my old JW days. Not to worry.

  • WTWizard
    WTWizard

    I have noticed this, until I made a conscious effort to be more fully integrated. Without that effort, I might see the first few years as a witless as being worth reclaiming, without factoring out the events that had nothing to do with being a witless or that were unique to the period. Now I am able to factor all that out, and find out what's left--the drudgery of wasting all my time in field circus, having all the good blocks of time taken away, loss of my money to the Worldwide Pedophile Defense Fund and to Washtowel activities, and having to dread Christmas and the music from that season. And I am able to see, objectively, how wimpy things actually were--who would get excited about a trip to the hand car wash or to a chain drug store?

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