Lane Huitt | CPTSDfoundation.org https://cptsdfoundation.org The Foundation for Post-Traumatic Healing and Complex Trauma Research Mon, 02 Mar 2026 12:36:19 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 https://cptsdfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/cropped-Daily-Recovery-Support-Globe-iPad-Fav-32x32.png Lane Huitt | CPTSDfoundation.org https://cptsdfoundation.org 32 32 Using God for Control (The Subtlety of Neglect) https://cptsdfoundation.org/2026/03/02/using-god-for-control-the-subtlety-of-neglect/ https://cptsdfoundation.org/2026/03/02/using-god-for-control-the-subtlety-of-neglect/#respond Mon, 02 Mar 2026 11:00:00 +0000 https://cptsdfoundation.org/?p=987502723

An Ideal, God-Loving Family

Trigger Warning: This post discusses religious trauma and its impact on mental health. It may be distressing for readers who have experienced harm in religious or faith-based settings. Please read with care and prioritize your well-being.

We were the ideal family: two beautiful children born to a young married couple, a golden retriever, and a home built by my father’s hands in the Cascade Mountains. Our home was peaceful and quiet, but too quiet. Lurking just barely below the skin of our idyllic life was a tempestuous sea of generational neglect, crippling repression, lifelong grudges, and a strange kind of don’t ask, don’t tell perpetuated by the religion that our lives revolved around.

As far as I could tell, we were a typical family; we had enough money and a supportive community, and my parents seemed to love me. But I knew we were different: we were Jehovah’s Witnesses. We didn’t celebrate birthdays or holidays or spend time with people outside of our religion. There were even more peculiarities, but I knew why we did them, at least according to the doctrine. At 12 years old, my relationship with God was palpable. I prayed often and believed in a loving creator whose only legitimate organization on earth I was lucky enough to have been born into. I decided to get baptized, but I was unaware of what the commitment entailed. I thought I committed myself to God, but instead I committed to the religion.

The religion slowly and silently destroyed our relationships with each other and ourselves. It kept us busy and restricted us to the point that the religious structure defined every aspect of our lives. Meaningful friendships were hard to find, and everyone stayed on their toes out of fear of being exposed for sinning and subsequently punished by the leadership.

After generations of involvement in the religion, everyone on both sides of my family has been swallowed up or banished from the faith. I have aunts, uncles, and cousins who have been estranged for decades: some I’ve never met, some I don’t even know the name of, and I’m one of them.

When Things Started to Break

It wasn’t until after my baptism and becoming an official member of the Jehovah’s Witnesses that I started to see cracks in our idyllic life. I couldn’t be honest with my parents, and they couldn’t be honest with me. My father was the only one allowed to express anger. My mother kept every square inch of the house clean at all times. My sister and I were always at odds, and I was isolated since there was only one boy around my age in our church. I told myself we were normal, that our eccentricities were because we knew the truth about God, and I believed it. I believed what I learned at church as the dysfunction grew in me and at home.

My personality fractured, and I became one person at school and another at home. The Jehovah’s Witnesses warned us about living a “double life” and how sinful it was. The double life distressed me; I thought moral failure or weak faith was to blame, and due to its classification as a sin, it was one more thing I couldn’t talk to my parents about. I couldn’t understand why I spontaneously became a different person, and I kept it a secret from my family for fear of being grounded or lectured. I kept my pain and confusion a secret outside of the family because living a double life is a sin, and the elders of the congregation could punish me for it.

But I didn’t escape the elders for long, and at 18, I discovered what religious punishment really meant.

Why So Many Secrets

The pressure of keeping so many secrets and the pain and confusion of why I couldn’t stop sinning, even though I wanted to, found its tipping point after my mother caught me smoking and my grandmother caught me drinking. I felt horrible, and everything seemed to be my fault, so I finally devised an idea to relieve the burden.

I spent a full school day writing a letter to my parents telling them everything. They read the letter and gave it to the elders without my knowledge.

The elders formed a judicial committee and “disfellowshipped” me less than 2 weeks after receiving the letter. After their decision, one of the elders announced it to the congregation during the midweek service. From that announcement on, every Jehovah’s Witness has been forbidden to contact me. That includes my friends, family, and even the JWs who knock on my front door. And if they do, they risk being disfellowshipped, too.

Like the sword of Damocles, the Jehovah’s Witnesses reserve the right to cut any baptized member out of the fold depending on the exclusive option of three elders. They decide privately with no responsibility to explain their reasoning and no method for overturning the decision once it’s made.

At last, I discovered how my family had become so fractured and distrustful. At my most vulnerable, honest, and hopeless moment, everyone I had ever known betrayed me.

With a Judas Kiss, the elders told me that the disfellowshipment process is a loving arrangement, created directly by God, for my benefit. As a disfellowshipped person, they say I’m mentally diseased, that all I want is to destroy the Jehovah’s Witnesses, serve Satan in a life of pleasure, and deceive any Jehovah’s Witnesses I find into sin. The period after my disfellowshipment exposed me to life-threatening situations regularly. I was hurt and confused, with nobody to trust or talk to, and estranged from everything I had ever known.

I still thought it was all my fault.

The Journey Begins

Only after noticing the myriad knots of trauma and neglect hidden deep did I begin to see that it wasn’t all my fault. I questioned and slowly rebuilt everything I took for granted in order to see the truth. Many of my family and friends are still mostly gone, and I’ve never gotten an apology or recognition of my struggle, and likely never will.

Instead, I’ve recovered something much more valuable, my Self. They say recovery is easy; all you have to do is change everything.

Complex trauma comes in many forms that are undramatic and seemingly normal. The Jehovah’s Witnesses use members’ families as blackmail to keep them from leaving or questioning doctrine. In another life, the organization and blackmail material could have been different, but the effects would be the same.

To all those quietly suffering, with your sense of reality and responsibility twisted against you, I hope you, too, can realize that it’s not your fault and that recovery is not only possible but one of the most beautiful things in the world.

Featured Image: Unsplash

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]]> https://cptsdfoundation.org/2026/03/02/using-god-for-control-the-subtlety-of-neglect/feed/ 0 The Confusing Complexity of Religious Abuse https://cptsdfoundation.org/2026/02/12/the-confusing-complexity-of-religious-abuse/ https://cptsdfoundation.org/2026/02/12/the-confusing-complexity-of-religious-abuse/#respond Thu, 12 Feb 2026 11:00:00 +0000 https://cptsdfoundation.org/?p=987502721 Trigger Warning: This post discusses religious trauma and spiritual abuse. Please prioritize your well-being while reading

Reading about Complex-PTSD leaves me with two distinct impressions: (1) I definitely have CPTSD, and (2) I barely relate to any of the examples. How did I get this trauma?

My parents don’t display clear indicators of toxic personality disorders, and their consistent neglect seems minor to me. My physical needs were taken care of, affection was displayed, and despite the issues, my parents were proud of me at times. My father’s lectures and moods were unpleasant, his drinking was limited to a few beers (daily), my mother fell short of fully soothing me when needed, but would still try, and so on.

Nobody at church was directly harming me (seemingly). They all had smiles and superficial presentations of well-being, offered good conversation, and stories of travel. So, at 12 years old, I became a baptized member of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. I was told the baptism represented my commitment to God, but the commitment to the religion took precedence. However, I wouldn’t discover the true demands of the organization until my high school graduation.

The Abusive Organization

My first clear trauma happened when I was 13-14 years old, but the trauma grew out of already existing dysfunction instead of dysfunction emerging from the trauma. Let me explain.

In lieu of an individual abuser, the Jehovah’s Witnesses evenly distribute abuse and neglect by tying themselves to the abusive organizational structure of the religion. Every baptized member is forced into dysfunction by the threat of “disfellowshipment” if any of the strict moral codes are broken without “remorse,” and the judge of remorsefulness is left up to a judicial committee of three elders. What happens after disfellowshipment is public shaming and complete ostracization from the religious community. If one wants to return, they must attend every public meeting indefinitely without speaking to any other members, with limited exceptions granted to family relations.

Only very recently has the organization begun to reform due to state pressure and various lawsuits.

In short, an off-brand Sword of Damocles hovers over every baptized member, which may fall the moment they smoke a cigarette and enjoy it. Meanwhile, some abusers are actively protected by the JW’s judicial criteria. They believe that if someone is accused of wrongdoing and they don’t admit their fault, two people must witness the abuse directly to punish the wrongdoer. Meaning, anything done in private between two people can be denied, and nothing will be done. It doesn’t take much imagination to picture the horrors of such a policy.

Living in alignment with such policies makes every faithful member an abuser. Period. The level of abuse may be low individually, but it compounds collectively.

Within the abusive organization, every member must develop wide-ranging trust issues, strong personas to mask normal human messiness, and many resort to covert addiction and serious abuse to maintain the facade. True love and support are virtually impossible since any confided mistake or struggle could be reported to the elders and result in disfellowshipment.

The Elders participate in a psychopathic contest to maintain purity within the congregation in order to advance in the organization. Some elders go so far as to perform surprise visits to members’ houses to ensure there aren’t Christmas trees installed or anything else “anti-Christian” lying around the house. Music tastes, dress, grooming, speech, educational advancement, and so on are regulated and policed by the elders.

Even now, after being disfellowshipped for over 10 years, if any JW I once knew finds this article, I may be labeled as an “apostate” and “mentally diseased” servant of Satan’s world, which the organization will still try to use against me to retain control.

Where Things Get Confusing

Without the abusive organizational structure, I doubt I’d have C-PTSD or PTSD today, even if I experienced all of my eventual traumas. The fracturing and distrust within my family due to organizational priorities is the primary cause of the neglect I faced. This is where my first clear trauma comes in as a telling example.

When I was around 13-14 years old, a friend of the family discovered that his daughter had been abused by another family friend’s son. The abuser, whom we’ll call Jake, was a year older than me, and though we lived states apart, I thought he was my best friend. When the news came out, and the police got involved, Jake accused me of being the abuser and that his daughter falsely accused him. Jake was eventually convicted, and I was cleared, and nobody doubted the outcome, besides my parents.

My father sat me down one day and stated his position: he and my mother would remain agnostic and support whatever decision the courts came to. This was a serious matter, and they wouldn’t take it lightly. I did not understand and remain unconvinced that I fully understand this decision. However, I can see how the organization’s extreme individualization of guilt and punishment tied into my father’s decision. He may have thought that this would serve as a character-building experience, but he may have been afraid of getting caught up in the religious fallout if I was guilty and he backed me.

At the time, I was only confused and internalized that I had done something deeply wrong without knowing it. Regardless, in a couple of weeks, I was betrayed by most of the people I loved and did not know why.

What (I think) it All Means

A lifetime of trying to live in and by the rules of an abusive organization can convince someone that betraying their son is the moral thing to do. An otherwise self-reflective, caring person can become a vehicle for abuse if the organization they belong to has an abusive structure. The ambiguity of my abusers being victims themselves and plausibly unaware of the abuse they produce is overwhelming. The only abuser I can accuse and fully blame is the set of abusive policies and organizational incentives of the Jehovah’s Witnesses religion.

Sometimes, I crave the seeming simplicity of having one clearly toxic person as an abuser, but I think my experience sheds light on a largely unrecognized and invisible form of psychological abuse, organizational abuse. A bad job, political cause, religion, or hobby group can suck people into a structure that makes them abusive to others in the organization and/or at home.

Photo credit: Unsplash

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