I had terrible anxiety issues as a JW. Looking back I realize this all stemmed from growing up in expectation that in the near future, my father, most of my relatives and possibly myself if I wasn't a good boy, would be destroyed at the hand of God at Armageddon. If I was deemed good enough to be spared from destruction, there would surely be some sort of torture or tribulation to endure before the whole thing was over.
Even as an otherwise normal man with a nice wife and family of my own, when I hit my mid 40's I started having free floating anxiety attacks. These didn't stop until about a week or so after I decided to stop going to meetings.
I spoke to different Drs. and Counselors during my decade long ordeal but I never talked to them about being a JW as I didn't want to bring "reproach" on the organization. They were baffled as to what was going on with me. Nothing they gave me or said to me helped.
It wasn't until I began to awaken from the TRUTH that I allowed myself to talk about that aspect of my life. It was then that all the pieces began to come together. I was diagnosed with a PTST like syndrome due to a childhood that was filled with horrific end times predictions that never occurred. My Counselor told me that Children aren't equipped with the emotional tools needed to process that kind of information and telling a child that the world is going to end in destruction, and that their father and friends and possibly themselves will be destroyed by god in a cataclysmic event, is a form of child abuse.
JW' s endure weekly if not daily doses of this kind of thing and there's no wonder so many of them are messed up. I am so thankful to be at peace with myself. Even with all the serious things going on out there, I have never felt more at ease with the world as I do now. It is so much easier to live knowing that certain weather events, natural disasters and human activities are random rather than caused by or as a result of a supreme being who purposely inflicted havoc on the human race.
