The attempt to escape from pain, is what creates more pain.
The greatest damage done by neglect, trauma or emotional loss is not the immediate pain they inflict but the long-term distortions they induce in the way a developing child will continue to interpret the world and her situation in it.
Gabor Mate
This is a brief synopsis of how religious trauma acts like the flapping of a butterfly's wings to create a hurricane that produces witch hunts and even fascism. And it all starts with how we teach our children to believe they are ugly ducklings. This is part one of four.
According to psychologist and best-selling author Stephanie Marston, children see their parents as authority figures and even like gods. As a result, children also think that the way their parents treat them is the way they deserve to be treated. “What you say about me is what I am’ is a literal truth to your child,” Marston points out. When treated with respect, a child concludes that they deserve respect, leading to the development of emotional maturity, healthy boundaries, and independence of thought. What we tell our children, as such, shapes their brains and nervous systems into the lens through which they see the world, which is merely a projection of how they see, and more importantly how they feel about themselves. Perception determines our reality, in this way, even if our reality isn’t true. And that’s why the story of the ugly duckling is so important for understanding religious trauma, and how it leads to Norman Bates.
As you probably know, the story of the ugly duckling is an old children’s tale. Designed as a warning to remind us that we are the stories we tell ourselves, it’s about a bird born into a family of ducklings. Different in appearance from all the other ducklings, it eventually gets labeled as ugly. Well, it turns out the reason it was so funny looking was because it wasn’t a duckling at all – it was a swan. And only after it had shed the false narrative of itself as an “ugly duckling” did it learn to see its true beauty and fly as high as the sky. The problem is that many children are taught to believe they are ugly ducklings, at least on a spiritual level, and go on to suffer under that delusion their whole life.
Humans are social and communal by nature, but that nature can be molded to lead us to cling to one group and fear others. Today, survival instincts that led us to depend upon our tribe can easily be molded to create an emotional dependence to an ideological perspective. Fear of the jungle or starvation being far less a threat to us today than the days of old, new fears of what awaits us in the afterlife have taken their place. And what many children who are subjected to such conditioning never realize is how the very thing they are relying on to free them from feeling like they were born with the soul of an ugly duckling – which is to fear being rejected as unworthy by their tribe in the next life – is the very same thing they cling to for a sense of identity and community in this life, which required them to accept they were born with such a befouled soul in the first place: Christianity.
Designed to facilitate community within particular political structures, Christianity is a sacred story about the origins of the universe and each person’s place and role in it. In simplest terms, it is the story of the God who created the universe and everything in it, sacrificing His son, who is also God, to forgive humanity for their sins. Those who accept such a story see themselves as a “family of believers,” calling themselves collectively “the children of God.” God is both your Father, in this sense, while His son is also your “Lord and savior.”
All of us are born predisposed to committing sin, so this story assures us, thanks to the fact we are all born with the stain of original sin alleged to have been committed by Adam & Eve. Their sin, which has bedeviled our species ever since, was the result of their disobedience. Exercising their "free will" by breaking the rules, they ate the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, after being told that doing so would allow them to “become like God.” Christianity, on the other hand, calls its’ followers to strive to be like Jesus, who is one and the same with the God Adam & Eve were striving to be like when they committed the sin that required one to be sacrificed to the other, and all because they had created us with both “free will” and the audacity to use it. Ever since then, in addition to supernatural sacraments designed to operate like divine vaccines against the swine flu of sin, threats of hell and promises of heaven have been relied on to condition obedience to one brand of Christianity or another; of which there are over 40,000 different brands available and growing.
While most Christians within those brands focus on the forgiveness of such a story, conflating it with “love,” it is impossible to separate that forgiveness from the fact we are all born pre-judged as “guilty” and in need of Jesus’s self-sacrifice (even though this is like the ocean incarnating itself as a fish to forgive us for polluting the oceans). As a result, each parent accepts, and in turn teaches their child to accept, that they are born owing a debt to the God who had to die to forgive them for the birthmark of “original sin.” This is like starting a religion in which everyone with any actual birthmark celebrates being “saved” from eternal torments for being born with the “stain” of a birthmark which that same God had taken the effort to write into their genetic code. So too, the “stain of original sin” is written into our spiritual code, even though God is said to have chosen to withhold such a stain from the human avatar Jesus drove around in. (Doing the same thing for everyone else would have foiled God's "plan" to kill himself disguised as Jesus, apparently.)
That’s like Microsoft blaming its customers for the bugs it deliberately encoded in its own operating system, and then creating one system without such a bug just so it could be thrown into a trash compactor so Bill Gates could forgive his customers for buying his operating system. Put another way, it’s like starting a religion for ducklings who, having come to accept they are “ugly,” now wear such a label as a badge of righteousness, because they have chosen to “believe” that it grants them special access to divine definitions of what "love" really is, and what is right and what is wrong. Such ideas, which seem to be intentionally self-contradictory by design in order to separate the more rational members of our species from the more emotional ones, constitute the DNA of religious trauma.
According to Marlene Wineall, a psychologist who coined the term Religious Trauma Syndrome (RTS) after encountering it in so many of her patients, religious trauma “can impact individuals differently, and can have a devastating effect on someone’s self-esteem, sense of self-worth and identity.” Far from being the result of simply poor instruction or even physical abuse, just the doctrines of original sin and eternal damnation alone can cause the most psychological distress, and therefore have the most adverse effects. As Wineall explains, they do so by creating the ultimate double bind. On the one hand, “you are guilty and responsible, and face eternal punishment,” according to Winealll, yet on the other hand, “You have no ability to do anything about it.”
Taught to believe they can never stop sinning altogether due to being born with a soul stained with a sugar addiction for sin, the child is subsequently taught to believe their only chance of avoiding a damnation that makes the afterlife look like the ovens of Auschwitz, comes from spending their entire life participating in the weekly reenactment of the slaughter of an innocent man-God (the “son”) for their sins. And they are expected to do so as a way of both worshiping God for having created us and apologizing for causing his death and suffering on our behalf due to how we were “intelligently designed” by God (the Father). The differences between the two are as schizophrenic, and at times as psychopathic, as the two personalities trying to live side-by-side within Norman Bates, a relationship that at times looks a bit like the one between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
In part two, we’ll look at how the narrative of original sin dilutes the purity of a mother’s love for her child with “beliefs” that the child needs to be forgiven, lest it deserves to be cast into an eternal furnace. The result of these conflicting forms of “love” operating under the same label is that, emotionally and psychologically, the child becomes unable to tell the difference between love that cultivates authenticity and “love” that fosters a dependence upon attachment, acceptance, and approval of others. The former is necessary for cultivating one’s independence, curiosity, and uniqueness, which are necessary for creating healthy relationships and healthy boundaries, while the latter is necessary to create a dependence on a brand of ideology. One runs on true love, the other runs on fear masquerading as love.
The problem that makes telling these two apart even more difficult is that both love and fear trigger the same endorphin release in our brain: oxytocin. And while some see love as unconditional acceptance, others see the greatest "love" as being God's divine judgement, of who is saved and who is damned. And the battleground where these two ideas about "love" are continually sloshing back and forth like a lava lamp is our minds, both collectively and individually.
Comments
Post a Comment