Personality Disorders Resulting from Physical & Emotional Abuse

CONSONANCE, DISSONANCE THEORY

When I tried to be a part of the Watchtower organization I experienced dissonance, that is an inner conflict which caused me discomfort and at times outright pain. Consonance, dissonance, as described by Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken, and Stanley Schachter in their 1956 book; WHEN PROPHECY FAILS, p.25 -30, is what happens to me when my beliefs and my actions are in conflict. Thus if my core belief is that The Watchtower, Bible, and Tract Society of Jehovah's Witnesses is God's only means to communicate with all the people on the entire earth , that the only way that I can merit God's favor is to attend 5 group meetings of Jehovah's Witnesses a week , distribute their literature, try to recruit my friends, non-witness relatives, and everyone else I meet into the group, and to believe whatever is the "present truth", when I , for whatever reason, can not do these things I feel, on some level, like a failure, a traitor to God and, at times, unworthy to live. When I tried to "just get on with my life" and simply deny my Watchtower training I experienced a dissonance (pain). When I experience the pain of internal conflict I will always eventually try to resolve the conflict or medicate the pain.

When I feel like I am a failure and rejected by God then I probably feel like a failure, unworthy, and rejected by any and everyone. If I try to run, I can't run fast enough or far enough so I'm always restless. If I try to change the cause of the dissonance when I don't understand what the cause is, I almost always change the wrong thing. The last thing I can look at is my core beliefs. My core beliefs are my reasons, my tests, my justifications, my security, and my very foundation. So I try to change my environment. I change jobs, houses, towns, friends, wives, and everything around me. To the world I appear radical, inconsistent, restless, irritable, and discontent. I have relationship problems and there always seems to be 3 crisis's, the one I'm just getting out of, the one that I'm in the middle of, and the one I'm working to create. The worse my life goes, to a degree, the less the dissonance because, in a sense, I am proving the Watchtower right when they said if I ever left the "organization" I would experience similar fates to others who left. The Jehovah's Witnesses I remember had a rumor network that would keep the members up to date on the terrible things happening to group members who were disfellowshipped or dared to quit "Jehovah's Organization". I never heard of anything good happening to a former member while I was a practicing member myself.

When I could not accept the behavior of the members toward me and each other, or accept all of their "present truth" teachings and when the pain of staying got greater than my fear of leaving I had to leave. I believe that I was set up by Jehovah's Witnesses to self destruct. When I try to change people, places, and things around me and nothing works, I only have a few choices. Go back to the Watchtower organization and see if the mind control works this time.

Go on trying to change people, places, and things around me, stay in turmoil. Sink deep in depression and possibly commit suicide. Medicate my feelings with alcohol, food, work, sex, or prescription drugs. Get in recovery , accept what was done to me, overcome it, and help others.

I choose to get in recovery. I choose to accept what happened to me as unchangeable by me now. I choose to get some power in my life by facing my past and actually changing most of my core beliefs. Before I can start to change I must accept some things about myself. Perhaps among the hardest things to accept about myself was my lack of personal boundaries, my lack of self esteem, and my almost compulsive attraction to people who reject and abuse me.