@PaintedToeNail
You are spot on when you say that as a child, hearing the adults you trusted and depended upon, speak of torture and persecution, is the cause of your life long struggle with anxiety. The older of my two sisters, the one I referred to in my earlier post, (a lovely beautiful girl) has had terrible difficulty with this all of her life. She learned to be afraid at an early age and her brain has been wired to go directly to panic at the first sign of any kind of uncertainty..I dealt with this myself but to a lesser degree and it disappeared without a trace a few weeks after I decided to stop being a JW.
It was very ignorant, selfish and unloving for the adult leaders of this organization not to stress the importance of shielding children who haven't developed the necessary coping skills, from being present when this kind of information is being discussed. If they needed to talk about this stuff, they should have held a special meeting and ask parents not to bring their children and or made arrangements for the kids to be brought into the back room for some kind of kid friendly program.
Instead they made sure we, along with the adults, were intentionally frightened out of our skin. They thought of it as a way to keep us in line and as a way of making sure we stayed with "the truth". We spent our lives prepared for a cataclysmic event that never materialized.
I'm very sorry you've had to deal with this unnecessary affliction and burden in your life.
