What Leaving Jehovah's Witnesses Religion Does to Your Brain

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]Hello, hello. Welcome back to Cult to Consciousness.

[00:00:05]My name is Deena Moore and today we are going to be talking about those of us that have left high control religions, whether it's Jehovah's Witnesses or Mormon or any other high control religion, people that have been out for years, sometimes even decades. Why is it that [clears throat] we still cringe or flinch when we hear certain words?

[00:00:27]You know, maybe some of your trigger words might be encouragement >> [laughter] >> or the Bible, even even simpler words like prayer, God, the Bible can sometimes cause us to just kind of cringe up.

[00:00:39]Maybe [clears throat] we feel guilty about things that we stopped believing a long time ago or maybe you struggle with to make decisions without consulting somebody else first.

[00:00:50]This is not a weakness.

[00:00:52]It is not a spiritual problem. This is neuroscience and today I'm going to explain exactly what's happening in your brain and more importantly, what you can actually do about it. So, for those of you who are new to this channel, my name is Deena Moore. I'm a certified neurolinguistic programming master practitioner since 2005.

[00:01:13]I was born into Jehovah's Witnesses five generations.

[00:01:16]I spent over [clears throat] 20 years as a regular pioneer and I got out in 2014, so that makes about 12 years of rebuilding my life in a way that I actually wanted, in a way that works.

[00:01:30]And now I work with cult survivors walking them through this exact process, the psychological and the neurological rewiring that takes you from stuck and surviving post cult life to actually genuinely thriving and creating a life that you love and creating something that's worth living.

[00:01:51]This video, this topic is probably one of the ones that I wish had existed when I left, but it didn't.

[00:01:58]So, you get to have it. Let's get right into it. So, >> [clears throat] >> the first thing I want you to understand is what I call the installed threat response. What this means is your brain has an alarm system called the amygdala. It's ancient, it's fast.

[00:02:15]That's entire job is to scan your environment for danger and trigger a response, the fight, flight or freeze response before your conscious mind even has a chance to process what's going on. Now, in a healthy environment, not a doomsday cult, the amygdala learns appropriate threat signals. It learns to sort and filter for actual danger triggers at the alarm with safety as the baseline. But, when you [clears throat] come from a high control religion like Jehovah's Witnesses, your amygdala is deliberately trained to flag things that are not actually dangerous as existential threats.

[00:02:58]Questions that challenge doctrine, danger, danger, friendship with the world, horrible, horrible, missing a meeting, catastrophe, reading apostate material, life threatening to your soul. And when you leave, that [clears throat] threat mapping from the amygdala doesn't automatically reset. Your amygdala still fires on those old signals. You know, I might just mention one of these other ones. A lot a lot of lot of ex Jehovah's Witnesses struggle with Armageddon. And so, even though politics, maybe what you see going on in the world, even if it doesn't quite trigger the Armageddon feelings, the Armageddon scenes in your head, it can still trigger that freeze when you hear things like wars and reports of wars and earthquakes in one place after another. And again, that is because your amygdala has been trained to see those things as a threat when the truth is they're actually normal human occurrences. So, when your amygdala is still firing on these on this old program programming, that is why you can intellectually know that everything's okay. You can intellectually be free free and still kind of feel your stomach go boom when you see a preaching cart on the side of the road or when you hear something on the news. Your amygdala [clears throat] doesn't know you left the religion and it's still running that old programming.

[00:04:26]The second area that takes a real hit is what is connected to your identity. It's connected to what the neuroscientists call your default mode network. This default mode network is the brain network that activates when you're not focused on an external task. So, if you're daydreaming, you're reflecting on yourself, you're imagining your future, it's essentially a neural infrastructure of who you are. And in high control religions, that network gets hijacked because your sense of self is not built on genuine growth and self reflection, it's an identity and a sense of self that has been given to you.

[00:05:13]You are Jehovah's Witness. You are an elder or an elder's wife or a pioneer or a publisher, one of Jehovah's people, that's the whole answer.

[00:05:24]Your preferences, your relationships, your future, your purpose, all of that is predetermined and anything that doesn't fit into this new personality, >> [clears throat] >> it doesn't doesn't apply.

[00:05:37]So, when you leave, this new personality that you've been given, this identity, it completely collapses and because you've never developed an actual self constructed identity, this default mode network default mode network literally has nothing to run on.

[00:05:56]So, this is why so many ex Jehovah's Witnesses describe like this this blankness, like, I don't know who I am.

[00:06:04]This [clears throat] is not a philosophical crisis. It's a it's an actual real gap in your neural architecture.

[00:06:13]And here's the important part. That architecture can be built, but it does take some effort. It does take some deliberate practice. It's not going to just happen by accident.

[00:06:25]Next, the third area is your prefrontal [clears throat] cortex.

[00:06:30]This is the part of your brain that is responsible for planning, decision making, delayed gratitude and here's the crucial part, imagining your future. So, this prefrontal prefrontal cortex is where future building actually happens and it's one of the last regions to fully develop, which means it's also one of the most ones that is the most shaped and influenced by your environment.

[00:07:00]>> [snorts] >> So, growing up that believing that Armageddon was imminent, that planning for the future was spiritually suspect, higher education was a trap, the only future worth investing in is the new world, that belief system actively suppresses prefrontal cortex development. You were never taught to imagine a future, so your brain never built strong pathways for it. This is a crucial thing to understand. This is why visualization exercises feel hollow or fake for so many cult survivors. You know, when I when we ask, "What do you want to do with your life? What do you see for yourself in the future?" We get this great big I have no idea. This blank stare. And this is the reason why. There's not something wrong with you. You have literally atrophied a crucial part of your brain, not you, the cult, the religion atrophied our brain. So, again, visualizations that can feel hollow, fake and it's not that you're doing it wrong.

[00:08:07]It's that the neural infrastructure for it wasn't given any place or any room to develop. But, here's what's true. The prefrontal cortex retains neural plasticity throughout adulthood. So, those pathways can be built. I've experienced it personally. I've watched it happen in other people. It takes consistent practice and the right protocols, but this is real.

[00:08:31]You are not stuck. There is hope.

[00:08:34]>> [laughter] >> There is hope. Neuroplasticity is the magic word that's going to give us this hope.

[00:08:40]And that I think this is probably the part that I love most. What does neuroplasticity mean?

[00:08:46]It means that your brain is not fixed.

[00:08:49]Your brain is never finished. It's not a document that got saved in a bad format and can't be changed. Neuroplasticity is the brain's ability to form new neural pathways, new connections. Means that your brain has the ability to prune old ones and to reorganize itself based on experience and practice. And the fact that you're listening to this video is proof of neuroplasticity because at one time you were probably devout Jehovah's Witnesses and you're thanks to the neuroplasticity of your brain, you were able to start pruning some of those old connections and you find yourself here in a place that maybe five years ago you never would have imagined listening to a video like this. That is thanks to the gift of neuroplasticity.

[00:09:38]That is proof right there that you can change and that you can grow.

[00:09:43]What it also means practically is that the beliefs that were installed through repetition can be uninstalled through repetition of something else. The threat responses that were conditioned in us can be reconditioned. The identity that was assigned to us as the new personality, we can replace that with a personality and an identity that we actually chose.

[00:10:07]And this is what NLP works with directly, the structure of how experiences are encoded in your nervous system and how to change that structure at the root rather than just kind of limping along with the symptoms and maybe even hoping that they just go away by themselves. Now, [clears throat] there is no magic wand for healing and growth.

[00:10:29]The work is real.

[00:10:31]It takes time, but your brain is designed to change and that's not just a metaphor, that is literal biology.

[00:10:40]So, what does this look like in practice? What does this look like in real life? Well, there are three things that directly support neuro rewiring post-cult. First, naming the pattern before it runs you.

[00:10:56]So, when you feel that familiar anxiety, that freeze, or the guilt, or the compulsion to just like give up to somebody else's opinion, pause and recognize it. This This is also called metacognition. It's when we think about what we're actually doing and this is a crucial skill to develop as you're rewiring your brain. So, you pause and then you name it. Oh, wait, this fear, oh, I feel this. This is the installed threat response. Not, I'm weak, I'm broken, panic. We are going to recognize it and name it. Now, this might seem cheesy, but that's because you grew up in a cult. This is actually protocols that are taught for neuro reprogramming. Naming it activates the prefrontal cortex and it starts to interrupt the automatic response.

[00:11:47]Secondly, deliberate future building and I literally do mean this literally, spending time every day consciously making up, imagining your life the way you want it to look and this feels fake at first and that feeling >> [clears throat] >> in this is the gap in the neural architecture. So, what you're doing is you're building pathways through practice, not through insight and remember, we have this imagination part of our brain atrophied. We have not ever really used this this tool for creating our future.

[00:12:26]So, as you're doing this exercise, I'll tell you what not to do. Do not think about how you're going to get there.

[00:12:36]Dream as big as you want because you're stimulating this muscle that's been asleep for a long time. So, you know, what would it be like to be an astronaut? You know, what would it be like to be a scientist? What would it be like to be a a zookeeper on safari?

[00:12:54]>> [clears throat] >> You're stimulating the creative side of your mind and that is going to be crucial to recreating your life.

[00:13:01]Now, the third is providing safety cues for the nervous system. We need to learn to tell our nervous system, "Whoa, chill out. It's okay."

[00:13:11]Our amygdala excuse me, learned that certain things were dangerous.

[00:13:17]So, we can actively retrain it by creating new, consistent associations between the triggers and physical safety.

[00:13:25]Excuse me. [clears throat] How can we do this? Breathwork is a great one, controlling our breathing, somatic body-based movements, body-based practices. There are other specific protocols from NLP.

[00:13:39]Um, meditation is a great one. All of these tools we were never taught.

[00:13:44]And the reason is because we were in a high-control cult that wanted us to stay in the fear mode. Now, we need to learn to control our brain, control this amygdala and deactivate our nervous system when it's doesn't need to be activated. So, the [clears throat] reason I went deep on the science today is because I think too many cult survivors are told that your issues, your struggles, they're spiritual, they're personal, or evidence is that something's wrong with you and they're not.

[00:14:15]These are predictable neurological responses to a very specific set of conditions that I can almost guarantee that everybody listening to this video has and predictable means workable.

[00:14:30]So, if you want to start figuring out exactly which of these patterns are still active for you, I created a quick a quick free download.

[00:14:38]I've called it the reality gap. It's the gap between the life you have and the life that you want. It takes 10 minutes, it's a free download. I'll put the link in the description. I have had a lot of people say that the download can go to spam, so check the spam.

[00:14:52]Work [clears throat] through the worksheet because it will give you some insight into what exactly you're working with. So, if you're new here, please subscribe.

[00:15:01]>> [clears throat] >> For the rest of you, like, leave me a comment. I love hearing from you guys. I read all of the comments and I respond to them.

[00:15:09]What I really like to know is which of these three areas you resonated with, whether it's that threat response, the identity gap, or the lack of being able to build a future. I really want to know. Okay. All right, guys, I'll talk to you soon.