Sleepy,
We all had emotional triggers carefully welded to our personalities by the WTS. With some people, like Mulan, over many decades. I think that she and her family have done remarkably well to have settled themselves into their own personal philosophy so quickly, two years after all, is only twenty-four months.
These implanted emotional triggers fire when certain situations are met, a terrible news report, an outrageous act of brutality, an earthquake, morality issues, issues of a purposeful life, even the word 'religion', United Nations etc. produce an emotional response in us.
When a person leaves the WTS these triggers are still there, deeply implanted and in many cases might never actually disappear, but they do need to be controlled.
As XJW's we find ourselves moving from a world of absolutes to a realization that we now have to struggle, like mankind has had to for thousands of years with the same basic questions of human identity that actually no person has ever been able to answer satisfactorily. No longer do we live in the absolute world of right and wrong, Saint and sinner that the WTS built around us. It is very hard coming to terms with abstractions when you have lived in a world of steel and rock, philosophically speaking.
The WTS sneer at 'apostates' calling them 'confused' and unable to offer anybody any real spiritual direction once they leave the fold. They accuse them of becoming immoral, dropping their standards, wallowing in vulgarity, hopeless and faithless, and many do go through periods where they fit the WTS negative descriptions perfectly. Some stay at that stage, some move on to other religions, some to a Godless life, some shrug their shoulders a just live. In this XJW’s are no different than the countless generations of humans that lived before them.
What has happened is that we have all become people again, plain and simple. Many have to re-discover their humanity, chart their own course, grapple with their own demons, rather than like children be kept in suspended hibernation emotionally, by spoon-fed philosophies.
My own journey has led me to places that frankly I did not want to go to, but as Willie The Shake wrote - ‘To thine own self be true’. I would personally prefer a life of suffering without delusion, than comfort and joy in a sterile wilderness of attaché cases, manufactured hope and practiced smiles.
Best regards - HS
