For Ali Millar, the experience of writing her difficult life story wasn't cathartic, it was traumatic.
"I would be sick. I had panic attacks. I've never showered as much in my life. Every time I finished writing, I would really need to wash," she tells ABC RN's Late Night Live.
Now London-based, Millar was born and raised in a small village in the Scottish Borders among the Jehovah's Witnesses, a religion with around eight million followers around the world.
It's a religion she now firmly rejects.
She says growing up she was told what to read and wear, experienced oppressive guilt and shame, and was constantly terrified of an impending Armageddon.
After documenting her story, Millar began to change how she felt about the past.
"I started to realise that a lot of things that I blamed myself for weren't my fault. I started to understand the [Jehovah's Witnesses] organisation and its mechanisms far better," she says.
Millar, whose memoir is The Last Days: A Memoir of Faith, Desire and Freedom, argues there's a common misconception of the Jehovah's Witnesses group as "benign".
But she describes it as a "deeply coercive and manipulative organisation".
"And that's really why it's important for me to speak out."
'The end is always imminent'
When Millar was born, her mother learnt that she'd been deceived by her new child's father, and that he was already married with children. He didn't stick around.
"When he left, she was really vulnerable," Millar says.
"And the Witnesses came knocking."
The young family entered the organisation voluntarily but they needed to adopt new beliefs.
"[The Witnesses] believe that God's kingdom was established on Earth in 1914," Millar says.
"They believe that Armageddon is imminent, and that war, famine, pestilence [and] earthquakes are all signs of the end."
She says in Witnesses' teachings "the end is always imminent" and only Witnesses will be saved, "to live forever in a paradise on Earth".
"We were told as Witnesses that when the end came, worldly people would eat their babies because there'd be so little food … that mobs would roam the streets."
Avoiding this fate is not as simple as being a Witness, however. "Membership doesn't guarantee your salvation," Millar says.
"It's God who gets to decide at the end, so you're constantly worrying about your behaviour."
As are other members of the organisation.
"There's quite tight peer control over what you listen to, what you read, what you watch ... It's all very carefully monitored," she says.
Millar says the organisation is also "completely patriarchal" and that women are "encouraged not to pursue further education".
She says that in the community she grew up in, "Women aren't allowed to lead in any kind of worship. If women pray in public, they have to have head coverings on … Women aren't allowed to wear trousers to the meetings or on field service.
"What they wear is tightly controlled," she says.
"People think, 'Oh, these are nice people' … but their beliefs aren't. And the structure and the system which they live inside is deeply, deeply coercive."
In a statement to the ABC, Jehovah's Witnesses Australasian spokesperson Tom Pecipajkovski denied that the religious group controls what women wear, stating: "Each individual Jehovah's Witness has the freedom to choose what type of clothing to wear. Our organisation does not list which styles of clothing are acceptable and which are objectionable."
He also denied that women are discouraged from further education, stating: "Enrolling in a post secondary education course is a personal decision completely unrelated to a person's gender, age or race".
"We commonly encounter the false allegation that Jehovah's Witnesses 'control' various aspects of a congregant's life. There is no basis for this," the spokesperson said.
He also referred to international international human rights cases, such as a 2010 Russian case, recognising the right of Jehovah’s Witnesses to practise their religion, and questioned the reliability of former members' perceptions of religions they have left.
Eating disorder was a way 'to be pure'
By her teens, Millar says she was doing "normal" things like having relationships and experimenting with alcohol. But she was hiding all of it from her mother and the church.
"I was really ashamed … and I just wanted to be pure," she says.
She developed an eating disorder as a "way of me trying to become clean".
"I became obsessed with cleanliness … It was a way of me trying to escape the situation I was in," she says.
But Millar's sense of shame only grew in her mid-20s after she married a fellow Witness.
"My heart wasn't in [the marriage] at all," she says.
"I thought there was something wrong with me. I thought that I didn't have enough faith or that I had somehow been contaminated by the world.
"I didn't at that stage think that there was anything wrong with the organisation."
Millar became increasingly mentally unwell.
"I was really tortured by doubts and by this disconnect that I felt. I started to behave in ways that the Witnesses saw as unchristian," she says.
Like falling in love with someone else from the congregation.
When her husband became suspicious, he alerted the Witness elders, three of whom came to Millar's home.
"They questioned me about that [relationship] with my husband present. And the questions were really, really intimate," she says.
"At no stage did I think, 'I don't need to answer these'. I was conditioned to believe I did need to answer them."
Millar says the elders remained at her house for several hours, questioning her and deliberating about whether she could remain as a Witness.
They decided she could, but she would not go unpunished.
"They basically told the whole congregation everything that had been going on and then said that people were allowed to decide if they still wanted to associate with me," Millar says.
Her husband left her.
"I was increasingly ostracised by the congregation, by people who I'd called friends, by people who I believed I was going to live forever with.
"And that's really when my faith began to unravel … I began to think there's no love here."
'Disloyalty to Jehovah'
In 2017, after Millar's public shaming and separation from her husband, her mother disowned her.
She'd discovered that Millar was questioning her faith.
At a Witnesses convention that Millar's mother attended, a video was played about a girl choosing to leave the religion, and her parents consequently shunning her.
"That was shown as a loving provision; as the right thing to do," Millar says.
"So my mother watched that, and then a few days after … she emailed me to say that because I had shown disloyalty to Jehovah, she couldn't have anything to do with me, and that her loyalty to Jehovah was more important than her loyalty to me."
Millar says she felt "deeply wronged".
"[It] caused so much grief being severed from her in a way that I couldn't explain and couldn't fully understand."
After several desperate but fruitless attempts to contact her mother, she began a slow and difficult process of trying to unpick the situation and find empathy for her mother.
"I realised that the wrong she'd done to me paled in comparison to the wrong done to her by this deeply coercive, manipulative organisation," she says.
"That was actually the thought that brought the healing."
And while writing about her experience hasn't been a catharsis, Millar says "it certainly fixed something about the past".
"There's something about a book becoming this physical object that you can keep a story inside. I feel like this story is kind of boxed up," she says.
"And I can move on now."
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