Thanks so much for all the great comments!
I have to agree with the sentiments regarding how as JWs, we were conditioned to NOT show emotion, to lack empathy and compassion for other people. In some ways, I think it's a survival mechanism - after all, we were taught that 99.9% of the world's population was going to be destroyed just because they were not JWs. If JWs had any empathy at all, they would realize just how absurd and bizarre and unjust and unloving that concept is, especially when they try to couch it in terms of this being Jehovah's Love Balanced with Justice?.
Blondie and LadyLee, perhaps all we can do in situations where abuse is an issue is to not withhold our emotions from ourselves regarding the past. Many times survivors put up emotional barriers out of self-preservation, and who can blame them? But maybe one gift we can give ourselves is the freedom to express our own emotions regarding our own experiences. We can give ourselves permission to be angry and hurt over the way we were abused by people we trusted. But we can also give ourselves permission to have empathy for ourselves, to nurture ourselves in a way that we did not have when in an abusive situation. Years of abuse plant powerful negative messages in people regarding their self-worth and lovableness, so what needs to happen is to replace those negative messages with ones that are affirmations of self-worth and validate the experiences and the responses to it. You are both strong, incredible, wise ladies with such a huge capacity for love and caring - you have shown those qualities consistently on this forum, and I have no doubt that you do likewise away from this forum. You have risen above your past experiences and used them to break the negative cycles that "could have been" and replaced them with positive ones. You deserve all the credit in the world for that.
(((( Blondie )))) (((( Lady Lee ))))
As a follow-up to the trailer that I was quoting from, Dr Phil was addressing a woman who is the eldest of 5 children. Her mother was 18 when she was born and her father was 43. The mother who was an abusive alcoholic, decided to walk away from the family when this woman was 12 years old. She put all the children in foster care. What Dr Phil observed, through his meeting her siblings, was that she was repeating the pattern of emotional barrenness with her siblings and her own children. Her siblings needed to hear messages of love and validation from her, and so did her children. She had been afraid that if she let them know that she loved them, that she would open herself up to being hurt or rejected. Instead, she was sending a message that she was rejecting them before they could reject her.
That's when he looked her in the eye and said "Withholding emotion is one of the most mean and vicious and aggressive things you can do."
Love, Scully