Trauma bonds (also referred to as traumatic bonds) is a term developed by Patrick Carnes to describe emotional bonds with an individual (and sometimes, with a group) that arise from a recurring, cyclical pattern of abuse perpetuated by intermittent reinforcement through rewards and punishments. The process of forming trauma bonds is referred to as trauma bonding or traumatic bonding. A trauma bond usually involves a victim and a perpetrator in a uni-directional relationship wherein the victim forms an emotional bond with the perpetrator. This can also be conceptualized as a dominated-dominator or an abused-abuser dynamic. Two main factors are involved in the establishment of a trauma bond: a power imbalance and intermittent reinforcement of good and bad treatment, or reward and punishment. Trauma bonding can occur in the realms of romantic relationships, platonic friendships, parent-child relationships, incestuous relationships, cults, hostage situations, manager vs their direct reports, sex trafficking (especially that of minors), or tours of duty among military personnel. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traumatic_bonding)
Thanks to concepts of heaven and hell, and sin and forgiveness, all Christian religions therefore operate on cultivating a dependence upon some form of trauma bonding.The relationship a person has with their religion and their God is clearly a form of dominated-dominator or an abused-abuser dynamic. As a result, I argue that there are two kinds of people who suffer from RTS or "Religious Trauma Syndrome," defined here https://www.journeyfree.org/rts/ . The first are those who, like myself for most of my life, never realize that their addiction to religion is the result of underlying trauma. That underlying trauma is the glue that addicted me to a desperate need for my own pain to carry some "holy" meaning that makes it bearable, and a hope of being rewarded for suffering it as Christ obediently suffered his crucifixion (and all for my miserably sinful soul). The second are those who, like myself in the last decade, are people who finally realize that their addiction to religion was simply the result of some mixture of fear and underlying trauma.
A simpler way to think about this difference comes from a quote by Carl Jung: “Until we make the unconscious conscious, it will control our lives and we will call it fate.” So the difference between me now and then is that, then, my own RTS was operating on an unconscious level. And now, it isn’t.
In The Myth of Normal, Gabor Mate points out that most trauma is pre-verbal. This means that the trauma suffered by a child, from physical to emotional and psychological, sinks into the "unconcsious" non-verbal part of a child’s developing psyche or “soul.” As Jung further pointed out, there, such experiences assemble themselves together like a transformer or a Frankenstein monster and take on a life of their own.
Along the same lines as Jung, C. S. Lewis described hell as a place where the door is locked from the inside. And why is it locked from the inside? Because the trauma that has settled into our unconscious pre-verbal part of our brain - our emotional or “reptilian” brain that is not only capable of hijacking our rational brain, which does not develop until we are in our mid 20s, but is also the most emotionally unstable and the least developed and least accessible to us through language – becomes the “invisible hand” that animates our behaviors and shapes our choices. And it does this all without our awareness that such trauma is struming the strings of our nervous system like the hand of God. It is only when we drag that unconscious trauma, kicking and screaming, into the light of our conscious awareness that we can free ourselves from those who prey upon that truama to empower themselves.
Read “The Body Keeps the Score” by Bessel Van de Kolk, “When the Body Says No” by Gabor Mate, or any of a growing number of other books about trauma, and you quickly discover that the Christian claim to “free will” is largely a myth. Instead, such trauma, especially prolonged trauma that can result in complex-PTSD, which highly sensitive children are more susceptible to, operates under the surface of conscious awareness, triggering our nervous system to react in ways that lead us to make choices based on emotional responses that have been gilded with fear of hell and hope in sacred stories.
Christianity is a sacred story that clothes trauma in ideas of right and wrong, heaven and hell, human suffering for disobedience to God and eternal reward for obeying His Church. Unbeknownst to a child, their emotional reaction to ideas that their religion equates with grave sins against God, like having sex outside of wedlock (which sounds like a prison door being locked behind a person after they enter), are not evidence of objective truths about whether sex outside of wedlock is an even more sinful and unnatural act than a man who devotes himself to an immaterial "logos" (i.e., idea) by living his life like a eunuch. Instead, far from being something any child is born with, such reactions are conditioned responses to a religious programing that teaches the child to equate such an idea with eternal rejection and eternal suffering. By doing this, the child becomes addicted to their "us" group for fear of being rejected by that group as "one of them." God forbid.
This is where the gaslighting becomes an important and highly effective means of capturing a child's mind/soul through trauma bonding. My brother is a Catholic priest. And because he is, he simply chooses to “believe” that such claims are simply “beliefs” by those who offer them for which, according to him, “there is no evidence to support.” For my brother, the “belief” that Christianity only improves people is far more preferable than that it ever does any harm to anyone. He prefers this “belief” to any evidence that suggests otherwise for at least two reasons. The first is that doing so provides him with gainful employment for which even child rape is not grounds for termination. The second is that it protects him from ever having to consider how much his “belief” in his own original sin contributed to his own trauma, and how much that trauma may have contributed to him forgoing any other life other than becoming a Catholic priest. It protects him, in other words, from having to consider that his choices were not the result of as much “free will” as he supposes. It protects him, as such, from the hell of considering the life he could’ve had over the one he has chosen. And hell is surely the feeling that, like a slave or a robot, we did not have a choice in the life we are living.
To avoid such a hell, my brother has devoted himself to indoctrinating other parents and children into believing they have “free will,” even though they have no say about being born as sinners who are incapable of ever fully resisting the pull of sin, who must therefore spend their whole life apologizing for being born in such a miserable state or risk eternal torments for their failure to do so. Again, for my brother, none of this could ever cause trauma to a child. And he “believes” this because, well, because he simply chooses to “believe” it, because that's what feels right to him.
What makes the gaslighting of religion so powerful is how it is injected into a child's brain long before that brain develops its neocortex, which is the part of the brain Christians use to defend their own brains in adulthood from ever accepting that all of the religions and gods that they are wise enough to reject as false could ever be as true as their own brand. The neocortex, which is the part of our brain that allows us to engage in critical thinking, is part of a triune brain model. The three parts of the brain, according to such a model, are believed to develop sequentially.
The first part of our brain to develop, when we are still pooping our pants or suckling at our mother's breast, is the basal ganglia. Referred to as the reptilian or primal brain, this structure is in control of our innate and automatic self-preserving behavior patterns, which ensure our survival and that of our species. It largely operates with relexive response of fear of punishment and hope for reward. This is the stage of development that Christianty hopes to dig its teeth into their soul of a child because it reflects the goal posts of heaven and hell the will become the carrot and stick Christiant will hang over the child's head for the rest of their life. Our primal brain is also in charge of what are often referred to as, the four Fs: Feeding, Fighting, Fleeing, and… Reproduction This is followed by the limbic system (which consists of various component brain structures, such as the amygdala and hippocampus), then the neocortex (which is implicated in conscious thought, language and reasoning). This second part is our emotional level where pre-verbal trauma is written into the ROM memories of our brain. (https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/our-three-brains-the-reptilian-brain)
ROM memory in a computer is the non-volatile (here, think non-verbal) memory that permanently stores instructions for your computer. In the human brain, this is only “permanent” to the degree the person is unwilling or unable to access or challenge their reaction to the information that has been stored there through trauma, conditioning, and childhood indoctrination. Some prefer to never access or challenge what is written into the subconscious mind, perferring instead to see it as the "will of God," while others recognize that the true power of being made in "the image and likeness of an infinite" being is that we are read-writable.
Note that the part of the brain religion is therefore writing itself into when we are children is the primal brain. And it is this primal brain that deals with our fight, flight, or freeze responses, and is chiefly focused on saving ourselves from pain, such as the eternal fires of hell or the temporary fire of purgatory, and seeks rewards, like the eternal pleasures of heaven or feeding from mommy's bosom which the Church ultimately takes the place of, and then gives its' faithful flock wine instead, to keep them drunk on the drug of "hope" of slavation from the hell they are requried to believe they so justly deserve.
In this way, religion uses the trauma of convincing a child they are a natural born sinner deserving of hell to emotionally addict them to a lifelong belief that they can only save themself from such suffering by becoming a lifelong Catholic or Christian who, no matter what, is never as critical of their own religion as they are required to be of every other brand. The point of the Church is to prove to such people that there is no need to be critical of the Church, regardless of what "sins" it commits, simply because it has been around longer than all of the other brands of Christianity. As far as religions and gods that preceded Christianity, they are simply rejected from the start as being as foolish as a belief in the tooth fairy. Why does the Christian never suspect their own brand of “God” is no different from all of the other gods they reject as false? Answer: because they “believe” it is, because the bible of their emotions tells them so.
Doug Robertson, in a reply on Quora.com, does a masterful job of deconstructing how this kind of emotional manipulation is used to create a feedback-loop inside of which a "believer" becomes trapped in a repeating pattern. My own lifelong addiction to Catholicism is, without question, exactly what Roberston describes here:
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-people-get-angry-when-I-try-to-share-the-word-of-God-with-them-I-only-do-it-because-I-care-about-them-deeply-and-don-t-want-them-to-end-up-in-hell-I-feel-like-some-people-avoid-me-because-of-this-Is-there-any/answer/Doug-Robertson-3?share=1
As he writes: The entire process is not what you think it is.It is specifically designed to be uncomfortable for the other person because it isn’t about converting them to your religion. It is about manipulating you so you can’t leave yours.If this tactic was about converting people it would be considered a horrible failure. It recruits almost no one who isn’t already willing to join. Bake sales are more effective recruiting tools."
Read the entire impressive post to see how this works. Christian Nationalism is simply a outer crust of the trauma sandwich children are force-fed by their parents from birth. .
Thanks to concepts of heaven and hell, and sin and forgiveness, all Christian religions therefore operate on cultivating a dependence upon some form of trauma bonding.The relationship a person has with their religion and their God is clearly a form of dominated-dominator or an abused-abuser dynamic. As a result, I argue that there are two kinds of people who suffer from RTS or "Religious Trauma Syndrome," defined here https://www.journeyfree.org/rts/ . The first are those who, like myself for most of my life, never realize that their addiction to religion is the result of underlying trauma. That underlying trauma is the glue that addicted me to a desperate need for my own pain to carry some "holy" meaning that makes it bearable, and a hope of being rewarded for suffering it as Christ obediently suffered his crucifixion (and all for my miserably sinful soul). The second are those who, like myself in the last decade, are people who finally realize that their addiction to religion was simply the result of some mixture of fear and underlying trauma.
A simpler way to think about this difference comes from a quote by Carl Jung: “Until we make the unconscious conscious, it will control our lives and we will call it fate.” So the difference between me now and then is that, then, my own RTS was operating on an unconscious level. And now, it isn’t.
In The Myth of Normal, Gabor Mate points out that most trauma is pre-verbal. This means that the trauma suffered by a child, from physical to emotional and psychological, sinks into the "unconcsious" non-verbal part of a child’s developing psyche or “soul.” As Jung further pointed out, there, such experiences assemble themselves together like a transformer or a Frankenstein monster and take on a life of their own.
Along the same lines as Jung, C. S. Lewis described hell as a place where the door is locked from the inside. And why is it locked from the inside? Because the trauma that has settled into our unconscious pre-verbal part of our brain - our emotional or “reptilian” brain that is not only capable of hijacking our rational brain, which does not develop until we are in our mid 20s, but is also the most emotionally unstable and the least developed and least accessible to us through language – becomes the “invisible hand” that animates our behaviors and shapes our choices. And it does this all without our awareness that such trauma is struming the strings of our nervous system like the hand of God. It is only when we drag that unconscious trauma, kicking and screaming, into the light of our conscious awareness that we can free ourselves from those who prey upon that truama to empower themselves.
Read “The Body Keeps the Score” by Bessel Van de Kolk, “When the Body Says No” by Gabor Mate, or any of a growing number of other books about trauma, and you quickly discover that the Christian claim to “free will” is largely a myth. Instead, such trauma, especially prolonged trauma that can result in complex-PTSD, which highly sensitive children are more susceptible to, operates under the surface of conscious awareness, triggering our nervous system to react in ways that lead us to make choices based on emotional responses that have been gilded with fear of hell and hope in sacred stories.
Christianity is a sacred story that clothes trauma in ideas of right and wrong, heaven and hell, human suffering for disobedience to God and eternal reward for obeying His Church. Unbeknownst to a child, their emotional reaction to ideas that their religion equates with grave sins against God, like having sex outside of wedlock (which sounds like a prison door being locked behind a person after they enter), are not evidence of objective truths about whether sex outside of wedlock is an even more sinful and unnatural act than a man who devotes himself to an immaterial "logos" (i.e., idea) by living his life like a eunuch. Instead, far from being something any child is born with, such reactions are conditioned responses to a religious programing that teaches the child to equate such an idea with eternal rejection and eternal suffering. By doing this, the child becomes addicted to their "us" group for fear of being rejected by that group as "one of them." God forbid.
This is where the gaslighting becomes an important and highly effective means of capturing a child's mind/soul through trauma bonding. My brother is a Catholic priest. And because he is, he simply chooses to “believe” that such claims are simply “beliefs” by those who offer them for which, according to him, “there is no evidence to support.” For my brother, the “belief” that Christianity only improves people is far more preferable than that it ever does any harm to anyone. He prefers this “belief” to any evidence that suggests otherwise for at least two reasons. The first is that doing so provides him with gainful employment for which even child rape is not grounds for termination. The second is that it protects him from ever having to consider how much his “belief” in his own original sin contributed to his own trauma, and how much that trauma may have contributed to him forgoing any other life other than becoming a Catholic priest. It protects him, in other words, from having to consider that his choices were not the result of as much “free will” as he supposes. It protects him, as such, from the hell of considering the life he could’ve had over the one he has chosen. And hell is surely the feeling that, like a slave or a robot, we did not have a choice in the life we are living.
To avoid such a hell, my brother has devoted himself to indoctrinating other parents and children into believing they have “free will,” even though they have no say about being born as sinners who are incapable of ever fully resisting the pull of sin, who must therefore spend their whole life apologizing for being born in such a miserable state or risk eternal torments for their failure to do so. Again, for my brother, none of this could ever cause trauma to a child. And he “believes” this because, well, because he simply chooses to “believe” it, because that's what feels right to him.
What makes the gaslighting of religion so powerful is how it is injected into a child's brain long before that brain develops its neocortex, which is the part of the brain Christians use to defend their own brains in adulthood from ever accepting that all of the religions and gods that they are wise enough to reject as false could ever be as true as their own brand. The neocortex, which is the part of our brain that allows us to engage in critical thinking, is part of a triune brain model. The three parts of the brain, according to such a model, are believed to develop sequentially.
The first part of our brain to develop, when we are still pooping our pants or suckling at our mother's breast, is the basal ganglia. Referred to as the reptilian or primal brain, this structure is in control of our innate and automatic self-preserving behavior patterns, which ensure our survival and that of our species. It largely operates with relexive response of fear of punishment and hope for reward. This is the stage of development that Christianty hopes to dig its teeth into their soul of a child because it reflects the goal posts of heaven and hell the will become the carrot and stick Christiant will hang over the child's head for the rest of their life. Our primal brain is also in charge of what are often referred to as, the four Fs: Feeding, Fighting, Fleeing, and… Reproduction This is followed by the limbic system (which consists of various component brain structures, such as the amygdala and hippocampus), then the neocortex (which is implicated in conscious thought, language and reasoning). This second part is our emotional level where pre-verbal trauma is written into the ROM memories of our brain. (https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/our-three-brains-the-reptilian-brain)
ROM memory in a computer is the non-volatile (here, think non-verbal) memory that permanently stores instructions for your computer. In the human brain, this is only “permanent” to the degree the person is unwilling or unable to access or challenge their reaction to the information that has been stored there through trauma, conditioning, and childhood indoctrination. Some prefer to never access or challenge what is written into the subconscious mind, perferring instead to see it as the "will of God," while others recognize that the true power of being made in "the image and likeness of an infinite" being is that we are read-writable.
Note that the part of the brain religion is therefore writing itself into when we are children is the primal brain. And it is this primal brain that deals with our fight, flight, or freeze responses, and is chiefly focused on saving ourselves from pain, such as the eternal fires of hell or the temporary fire of purgatory, and seeks rewards, like the eternal pleasures of heaven or feeding from mommy's bosom which the Church ultimately takes the place of, and then gives its' faithful flock wine instead, to keep them drunk on the drug of "hope" of slavation from the hell they are requried to believe they so justly deserve.
In this way, religion uses the trauma of convincing a child they are a natural born sinner deserving of hell to emotionally addict them to a lifelong belief that they can only save themself from such suffering by becoming a lifelong Catholic or Christian who, no matter what, is never as critical of their own religion as they are required to be of every other brand. The point of the Church is to prove to such people that there is no need to be critical of the Church, regardless of what "sins" it commits, simply because it has been around longer than all of the other brands of Christianity. As far as religions and gods that preceded Christianity, they are simply rejected from the start as being as foolish as a belief in the tooth fairy. Why does the Christian never suspect their own brand of “God” is no different from all of the other gods they reject as false? Answer: because they “believe” it is, because the bible of their emotions tells them so.
Doug Robertson, in a reply on Quora.com, does a masterful job of deconstructing how this kind of emotional manipulation is used to create a feedback-loop inside of which a "believer" becomes trapped in a repeating pattern. My own lifelong addiction to Catholicism is, without question, exactly what Roberston describes here:
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-people-get-angry-when-I-try-to-share-the-word-of-God-with-them-I-only-do-it-because-I-care-about-them-deeply-and-don-t-want-them-to-end-up-in-hell-I-feel-like-some-people-avoid-me-because-of-this-Is-there-any/answer/Doug-Robertson-3?share=1
As he writes: The entire process is not what you think it is.It is specifically designed to be uncomfortable for the other person because it isn’t about converting them to your religion. It is about manipulating you so you can’t leave yours.If this tactic was about converting people it would be considered a horrible failure. It recruits almost no one who isn’t already willing to join. Bake sales are more effective recruiting tools."
Read the entire impressive post to see how this works. Christian Nationalism is simply a outer crust of the trauma sandwich children are force-fed by their parents from birth. .
Comments
Post a Comment