“Most of our tensions and frustrations stem from compulsive needs to act the to act the role of someone we are not.
János (Hans) Selye, M.D., The Stress of Life”
Trauma is when (our authentic selves) are not seen and known.
Bessel van der Kolk
In part one, we looked at how religious trauma, thanks to being taught to believe they are born with the stain of original sin on their souls, causes a child to see themselves as the spiritual equivalent of an ugly duckling. As a result of this belief, a child born with as much of a need for unconditional love as mother’s milk is given only conditional love instead. While these two versions of “love” can look as similar as our right hand looks to our left hand, one is natural and the other is as manufactured as Yoo-Hoo chocolate dink. The latter is made up mostly of High Fructose Corn Syrup!
Mother's milk is like liquid love for a new born child, while Yoo-Hoo is liquid-love's "near enemy." And as the nature of one nurtures us to become a swan of authenticity, drinking the processed sugar of the other leads us more and more to feel like an ugly duckling. As a result, we come to depend more and more on the approval of our tribe. Why does the parent make their "love" conditional? Because that was the only way they learned how to love. And the condition that parent requires is for the child to be, and think, and act, just like they do. Seeking to turn children into replicas of themselves is not only an admission that a parent sees themself as superior to any other version of human the child could ever become on their own, it also reflects a Narcissus's love of his own beauty. And the pool of water he fell into and drown merely illustrated how a child raised on conditional love grows up to become a narcissistic parent to their own child, perpetuating an endless cycle.
Love's Near Enemy
Buddhists have a concept of opposites they call “far enemies.” Like a Yin from a Yang, the far enemy of compassion is disdain, for example, while the far enemy of honor is shame. And the far enemy of love is, of course, hatred. But, with regards to the two kinds of love being discussed here, far more relevant than far enemies is the Buddhist concept of “near enemies” –– states that appear similar to the desired one, but in fact are counterfeits. While far enemies are the most obvious to us, near enemies are much sneakier and harder to spot because they look nearly identical. And because they do, they can therefore be far more destructive as a result.
With roots in Buddhist psychology, “near enemy” refers to a mental state that mimics a positive emotion but in truth undermines it. Unlike its opposite, which is easy to spot, the “near enemy” of a positive emotion flies under the radar and damages us from within. Indeed, the latter is like mold spores growing in the dark recesses of our soul, which Carl Jung called "the shadow" of all our repressed desires - desires which are repressed because the person has become convinced that the only emotion they should feel for having such desires to begin with is shame.
The difference between these two forms of love, as the Thudding psychologist Jack Kornfield explains, although as small as a butterfly in appearance, can be as destructive as a hurricane in its emotional and long term effects. "Each of the qualities of the awakened heart," Kornfield explains, "such as love, joy and peace, have these “near enemies”—aspects which mimic and limit them. While the "far enemy of love is hatred, the near enemy of love is attachment." Attachment, which can occur when we require someone's approval of us, masquerades as love. It says, “I will love this person (because I need something from them).” Or, “I’ll love you if you’ll love me back. I’ll love you, but only if you will be the way I want.” This, of course, is the basis of the Christian brand of "love."
"This isn’t the fullness of love," however. "Instead there is attachment—there is clinging and fear (of judgment and disapproval). True love allows, honors, and appreciates; attachment grasps, demands, needs, and aims to possess. If we examine our own attachment with compassion, we can see how it is constricted, fear-based and conditional; it offers love only to certain people in certain ways—it is exclusive. Then we can practice opening to love, in the sense of metta, used by the Buddha—a universal, heartfelt feeling of caring and connectedness. This love is a dedication to the welfare of—and a wishing the best for—others near and far," however similar or different from oneself. Indeed one glorifies diversity while the other, fearing it, glorifies in obedience and conformity instead.
Important to note here is how both love and it's near enemy of attachment, which is really based in fear of rejection, both trigger the same neurotransmitter in our brain: oxytocin. And this is in part why the fear which the near enemy of love creates can feel indistinguishable from real love. This is why love for some feels like unconditional acceptance, while for others, the ultimate "love" comes from God's final and incontestable judgement.
As Brene Brown pointed out, due in part to the difference between guilt and shame, the near enemy drives separation, both from our own authenticity and, as a result, the authenticity of others. That separation begins with a parent teaching a child to judge themselves to be a born sinner, one that can only be saved from damnation through a willingness to conform to the rules proscribed by a religion. Convinced the child is destined for a life of sin otherwise, the parents feel the need to save their child from such a fate by convincing their child to see itself the same way the parents see themselves: as flawed sinners on the one hand, but through their “faith,” as the righteous warriors of God on the other. The former are swans who are taught to believe they are ugly ducklings, and the latter are ugly ducklings who choose to “believe” they are swans.
Failure to succeed at complying with such rules can result in feelings of shame and unworthiness, which can then create more self-judgement, creating a feedback loop. After all, we are not simply ducklings, we are “ugly” ducklings. Such self-judgements can then snowball to become internal dissociation as the parts of ourselves we judge as failing to live up to the rules of our religion, failings that make us feel like unworthy or unlovable sinners, are all increasingly driven underground, and repressed. It’s as if certain ideas about ourselves live like slaves on plantations of ideals in our mind, and are forced to operate on an underground railroad of synapses to get around undetected by the CEO of all our ideals – the “belief” that we are made in the image and likeness of an "all-knowing" God.
For
Brown, the difference between guilt and shame are subtle but important. Guilt
is something we feel for something we’ve done, like accidentally breaking a
window after we were told to play baseball somewhere else. We can learn from
such an experience and avoid doing the same thing in the future. Shame,
however, is different. It is a feeling we have for something we are. The broken
window above, as such, is not evidence we made a bad choice, but evidence the
choices we make will always be bad, because we are.
In short, our parents wanted us to conform to their religion, which lead us to abandon any search for authenticity out of a need for attachment, and religion uses this, and the inborn sense of loneliness it creates by alienating us from our true selves (which in turn makes it impossible to appreciate let alone connect to the authenticity of others), to hijack our neurological needs for social connection, and use those needs to foster a dependence upon the community of those who all believe as “we” do. And as all those to whom we feel a need to maintain an attachment becomes the superego we call “us,” all those who think differently from “us” become devilish “thems.” From the perspective of religion, the “church” is the people who are comprised of “we” believers, who see themselves as God's chosen "swans," and as they see it, they are what they eat – the perfect unblemished Body of Christ. And this gives them permission to preserve their "faith" even if they sometimes have to act like Yahweh to do so.
Reduce all of Christianity to a single person, and we can see how Jesus of the New Testament and Yahweh of the Old, think and behave a lot like Norman Bates. Half of its personality is as docile and friendly as Norman is, and the other half is as vicious and righteous as his mother. One man who lived his Catholicism far more like Norman than Norma, was Thomas Merton (1915-1968), arguably the most influential American Catholic author of the twentieth century. Explaining the difference between genuine love and attachment masquerading as love, Merton said that the beginning of true love is not to boot camp a person into accepting your own “beliefs” as superior to whatever theirs happens to be, but “is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image.” He went on to point out that, “if loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them.” And where did we find Norman’s mom? Inside of him – through a psychopathic act of “communion.”
In effect, we become Narcissus by failing to realize our children are born as pure, and malleable, as water. And like Narcissus, those who think they are what they eat – i.e., a sinless and perfect resurrected body of Christ – fall more in love with their own reflection in their kid’s spirit, which is as clear and formless as water, than in allowing their children to design their spirit as uniquely as they may decorate their own bedrooms, or better yet, their secret club house or tree fort.
And one person who reflects how the butterfly of one can lead to a hurricane of horrors later on is Patricia Krenwinkel, who participated in the brutal murders orchestrated by Charles Manson in 1969. As Charles Manson said of her, she was “[not] a prizewinner for beauty but…she had smarts…At one time she had been pretty deep into the Bible…it was easy to see she didn’t believe in herself as much as she wanted others to believe.”
Krenwinkel grew into a girl paralyzed by insecurity. At school, she was bullied for being overweight and an embarrassing endocrine condition that caused her to grow excess hair on her arms. Then her parents divorced and, to cope with the pain of it all, she became a heroin addict. Such a trajectory from self-loathing to finding meaning and purpose in her religion based on Manson as her messiah reflects a common thread related to how religious trauma leads to devout believers: because she "Didn't believe in herself as much as she wanted others to believe."
From her prison cell in 2014, she recounted just how powerful our dependence on love can truly be, and how becoming addicted to its sugar substitute “attachment” masquerading as love can lead a person to act like Norman’s mother, she said “It is countless the number of lives that were shattered from the path of destruction that I was a part of,” she said, “and it all comes from such a simple thing as just wanting to be loved.” And those who burned witches were doing for their religion and the love of their God what Krenwinkel was doing for the “love” of the patron saint of narcissism, Charles Manson. And enough people are willing to act together like Norman’s mom for one narcissist or another, it can lead to witch-hunts and fascism of one flavor or another.
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