7. It's okay to be angry

Fifty-eight per cent of the people I surveyed report anger or resentment as an ongoing mental drain. Fifty-three per cent still monitor JW scandals and developments.

I am not going to tell you that you shouldn't be angry. It's more than likely that every last bit of your anger is justified.

You are angry at an organisation that stole your childhood, your education, your relationships, and your right to think freely. You are angry at the leaders who enforced rules they knew were arbitrary. You are angry at the elders who sat on judicial committees and decided your worth based on compliance metrics. You are angry at the people who shunned you and called it love.

You may be angry at yourself for not leaving sooner - for staying five years, ten years, twenty years past the first doubt.

All of these feelings are valid, and I am not here to talk you out of them.

But I want to offer an observation, and you can do with it what you want.

There is a phase in recovery where anger is fuel. It powers you through the hardest parts of leaving a coercive system. It gives you the energy to walk away when your entire world is trying to pull you back. In that phase, anger is not a problem, it's an engine, and without it, many people would never make a stand for themselves and for real truth.

Then comes another phase, one where the anger stops being a catalyst and starts becoming a cage. Where monitoring every scandal, arguing in comment sections, re-reading articles about organisational failures, defining yourself primarily in opposition to what you left - all of it starts to feel less like processing and more like a second occupation. An unpaid, thankless, exhausting occupation at that. And the organisation, which you left to get away from, is still taking up hours of your week. It just changed from meetings and field service to outrage and consumption.

Here is a question, not for me to ask you, but for you to ask yourself:

How much time do you spend each week thinking about the organisation? Not productive thinking like "I'm processing something specific." The other kind. Scanning for new developments, arguing with people online, replaying old confrontations, running the same injustices through your head for the hundredth time.

Calculate it honestly, then multiply it by 52.

That is how much of your life you are still dedicating to an organisation you left. This isn't because you are weak or stuck, but because anything - including anger - once it becomes habitual, runs on autopilot. It becomes the background noise of your life, and you stop noticing it the same way you stop noticing the hum of a refrigerator.

There is a difference between anger as a visitor who arrives, stays as long as it needs to, and eventually leaves versus anger as a live-in landlord who starts collecting rent on every room in your head.

I am not asking you to let go of the anger, I am inviting you to notice whether it is serving you or costing you. Both answers are legitimate, and for you to determine for yourself, but the question is worth considering.

It's often said that living well is the best revenge, and every way in which you thrive is evidence that proves they no longer have power over you.