” I hate to break this to you, but those people whom you think left the Catholic Church are really still Catholics “
I would think, certainly, that there are those who were baptised Catholic, left attending that church, get baptised in a Protestant denomination and still are haunted by the memories of their Catholic upbringing. I went to a Baptist Church with many whose testimonies obsessed about the awfulness of Roman Catholicism to the point where those of us who were never Catholic began to suspect that “the lady doth protest too much.” It is an interesting perspective that you provide, a little repressive to those of us born Protestant, but perhaps very true given my experience.
If you weren't raised Catholic, then you can't really come to that conclusion because you don't know.