ex-jw Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder

There's Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder; what about Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder? Why have I never heard of that before? It's real, I've had more flashforwards than I have flashbacks. Of all the horrible experiences I've suffered in life, most of them never happened.
True story: A group of us were watching a movie at a friend's house. I don't recall the name of it, but the scene of several families fleeing the Nazis in WWII Europe stood out in my mind. They were making their way throught the forest, as quietly as they could, hiding between trees and bushes. They knew that Nazi soldiers were nearby, somewhere.
I had to leave the room, step outside, breathe, relax. That movie evoked some of the most frightening memories in me. No I'm not going to tell you I was there some 70 years ago. And nothing even remotely like that ever occured to me in real life. But I did grow up with full certainty that atrocities like that will, without a doubt, happen to me and everyone I knew in a few short years or sooner.
Growing up as a  Jehovah's Witness I was made to believe in the end of the world, that Armageddon will annihilate the vast majority of humankind with epic catastrophes, both natural and manmade. On top of those horrors, the condemned will also start to become rotting corpses before they're killed, but vivid images of that on top of everything else also haunted me. It's in the Bible so it must be true. (Zechariah 14:12,  “And this is the scourge with which Jehovah will scourge all the peoples who wage war against Jerusalem. Their flesh will rot away while they stand on their feet, their eyes will rot away in their sockets, and their tongues will rot away in their mouths.")
You understand why many Jehovah's Witnesses grow up traumatized by this future that's just around the corner, will happen sooner than you think!!! But for me, despite all the nightmares from that alone, what terrified me more was what was going to happen before the final war between God and Satan, the "Great Tribulation." Once all the nations of the earth declared that they've established peace and security, plagues will issue forth, the United Nations (depicted as the 666-marked Wild Beast of Revelation 13:18, "This is where it calls for wisdom: Let the one who has insight calculate the number of the wild beast, for it is a man’s number, and its number is 666.") During these unprecedented events is when the whole world will wage war against Jehovah's Witnesses. All other religions have been exterminated by the UN, as depicted by the Wild Beast turning on Babylon the Great, that being the world empire of false religion. And with the only true religion remaining, with Satan and the demons focused entirely on us, massing every military force upon us just as the Nazis focused their efforts on destroying the Jews, Gypsies, other undesireable and yes, Jehovah's Witnesses were also hunted down, sent to concentration camps where more than 2,000 died. This terrified me mostly because if we compromised our faith in any way during this time, if I gave in to the fear of man, I was going to perish in some horrific way at Armageddon. I was convinced that I couldn't do it. If I was embarrassed by my religion at school, of not saluting the flag, of not celebraring the holidays, then how could I not give in and give up when the world Tribulates Greatly??? That time will be far more traumatic than any other time in history, meaning that what we will face is going to be worse that what the victims of the Nazi holocaust endured! If I was incapable of witnessing to strangers by myself, if I was unable to witness to the kids at school, then of course I was going to die at Armageddon.
Testimonies from Jehovah's Witnesses that survived the Holocaust were endless, their extreme tests of faith amidst the violence and killings documented in so many issues of The Watchtower and Awake! magazines and in their publications, plus an occasional survivor would be on stage at a convention giving his experiences. It didn't help that I read and saw photographs from a book on the Nazis and their "Final Solution", the haunting pictures of the skeletal victims in the camps, stripped of clothing, dignity and hope just before they were murdered. All of that, the Nazi Holocaust being the small-scale equivalent of the Great Tribulation haunted me day and night.
No wonder I wanted so much to die before then! Not by suicide, for people who commit self-murder won't be resurrected. And leaving the religion, everything and everyone I know to be part of the wicked world ruled by Satan, no longer having Jehovah's protection from demons was not an option. Getting killed while I was in the door-to-door ministry was the best bet. An angry householder killing me while I was serving Jehovah would have been the best thing for me with it's guarantee of a resurrection into an earthly paradise. And yet I hardly ever went out in service because of my anxiety. I couldn't even prepare my presentations because of nervousness shutting down my brain!
The Great Tribulation was a worse nightmare for me than Armageddon, because if you're still faithful to Jehovah despite the horrors, your eyes won't rot out of their sockets as you're getting killed in some gruesome fashion by the armies of heaven.
Then somehow, thanks to the miraculous healing powers of Jehovah's holy spirit you won't be crippled by post-traumatic stress disorder. Thanks to the inhumane indoctrination I've had plenty of pre-traumatic stress disorder to cripple me many times over.