Understanding the impacts of coercive control for former JWs.
Self-help, Life coaching, Counsellors, Therapists, Psychologists, and Psychiatrists: What’s the difference?! What do I need? This post is about the many different ‘helping’ options out there to help you find the one that is right for you. As JWs we were never encouraged to seek any form of mental health treatment outside of the…
Being one of Jehovah’s Witnesses affects us all differently. Believe it or not, some of us come through relatively unscathed. Perhaps the unscathed ones were lucky enough to have an extremely stable and loving family life despite the religion, and they grew up having at least some autonomy and agency over themselves and their…
Before leaving the Witnesses I had never even heard the words coercive control, and if I had, I certainly did not apply them in my own life. Control is normal in this organisation. If you were born-in, this is all you have ever known. You are totally unaware that every aspect of your life…
It is hard to know where to start with the damaging and controlling practices of my former religion, but Adam Harvey and the team at the ABC (Australia) recently gave it a good go in the Four Corners episode: ‘Escaping Jehovah’s Witnesses: Inside the dangerous world of a brutal religion’. They covered a lot…