Understanding Religious Trauma: Part III Splitting the Adam

Unless by pain and suffering thou art taught, Thou canst not guide thyself aright in aught.

St. Augustine

 

In part II, we looked at how love has a near enemy that, while it looks a lot like love, is in fact its opposite masquerading as the real thing. One leads to the development of an emotionally healthy person, while the other creates emotional deformities that foster spiritual dependence. One creates healthy boundaries while the other creates porous boundaries. And as one nurtures our inner swan, the other fosters a belief we are ugly ducklings.Ugly ducklings, in turn, learn how to get approval by being and doing whatever they need to to be accepted. And the addiction to approval they develop can lead to two results. One is an extreme altruism, and the other is a narcissism. And Christianity allows for the former to be used as a Trojan horse for the latter. 

In this installment, we will discuss two key parts to understanding how religious trauma affects us and sets us on a spiritual conveyor belt from ugly ducklings to narcissism, and how a Church functions to facilitate both into a feedback loop in which it can charge you 10% of your income in exchange for the "love" it provides. But as we will see, the "love" it provides is as different from real love as a candy bar is different from real food. 

The first thing we will need to understand is how beliefs that teach us to think of ourselves as inherently flawed and needing forgiveness not only sets us up for having to be continually adjusted, which is like buying a car you have to take to a mechanic every week, it addicts us to a counterfeit form of "love" which is really approval. Doing so frames all forms of abuse, from neglect to physical or sexual abuse, as being both necessary and deserved, since suffering is understood as the only way to "redeem" us of the sinfully flawed nature we are born with. From the viewpoint of the person who sincerely "believes" they are flawed to begin with, for which Jesus has to suffer for their "sins," accepting that such sin-flaws can only be remedied through suffering - suffering that serves as necessary punishment for those flaws - becomes a Pavlovian conditioned emotional response, one they come to believe they must experience as the price for God's approval/"love" on Judgement Day.

Second, because such beliefs color perception, religious beliefs about one's inherently sinful nature on the one hand, and that such sin requires expiation on the other,  greatly impairs our ability to tell the difference between love that cultivates our curiosity and authenticity, and attachment “love” that fosters a need for approval and acceptance. Only attachment-love validates feelings of being flawed and sinful by nature, while only by healing from such beliefs can a person discover that such feelings are learned responses to abuse, for genuine love is the very opposite of judgements about imperfections. 

No parent wills their child to be born flawed, even though God wills that all children are born sinners, and then blames the pre-sin-stained souls he "intelligently designs" on the "sinners" themselves. This is like making a computer and installing a flawed operating system then blaming the problem for the operating system on anyone who buys the computer. (With such reasoning, which every Christian has an obligation to employ, is it any wonder it is impossible to win an argument about the logic of Christianity?)

And as far as curiosity goes, it is often treated in religion as "good" only when it leads a person to accept and depend ever more on the branded definition of the word "God" being sold by one religion or another, and "bad" when it leads to any other brand of God or no brand at all. 

Worse still, the inability to tell the difference between these two versions of "love" not only results in the forming of an abusive relationship with ourselves, effectively reincarnating our inner ego into the "image and likeness" of an abusive parent within us like Norman Bates does with his own mother - the "god" within, as it were - but does so on both a psychological and even a neurological level. In effect, we develop an "auto-immune" disease of the mind, the effects of which can lead to not only the behaviors of Norman's mom, but also serious health (and legal) problems for Norman himself. 

And as it turns out, the magic ingredient for transforming pure innocence into narcissism that masquerades as altruism is shame. 

 

The Punishment We Deserve

When a Catholic engages in the sacrament of Confession, three things occur, two of which are real and one of which is "believed." The first is they confess their sins to a priest. The second is the priest gives them penance to perform, which often includes saying a number of Our Fathers and Hail Marys. And third, the Catholic is suddenly and miraculously forgiven or "cured" of their "sin." Purgatory serves a similar function for saving souls.

For Catholics, Purgatory is a temporary hell in which the remnants of sin left on a person's soul after they die are finally burned away, or 'purged.' Such a necessary purging of sins prior to being admitted through the pearly gates, in the form of both penance and the suffering of purgatory, illustrate for the child how, even if sin is "forgiven" through Jesus, only by purging oneself of all sin are we capable of being in the presence of God. Suffering, as such, is not only the thing that makes us sacred, it is what happens when an unclean and imperfect being finds itself in the presence of a holy and perfect God. 

Every child who dies as an infant, from this perspective, must still experience some form of suffering as their stain of original sin must still be purged from their soul before they can be in the presence of God. Christians bemoan abortion, claiming that the soul inhabits the fetus at conception (even though their "inerrant" scriptures says it does so only at birth), but praise a God who requires such suffering before those same souls can be in His divine presence. (To do this, they simply forget that if the soul they claim inhabits the soul at conception is also stained with original sin, and all sin is burned away in the presence of God, then even miscarriages result in the souls of innocent children having to suffer before they can be in the presence of such a God. How anyone is okay with worshiping such a God is a miracle. But I digress.)

 Although described in physical terms, children are taught to interpret feelings of shame as a law of cause and effect, and proof of God. Shame, so they are taught, is the effect caused by their "sin" against God. Feelings of shame, as a result, are used as the surest evidence that proves the existence of God, because if there was no God, then why would the child feel shame? 

When Christians ask "if there was no God, why wouldn't you just run around killing and raping people?" they are expressing the same idea, that their fear of God comes with a sense of shame that keeps people (or just themselves) from running around killing and raping. For those who do not see shame as something implanted in us more to foster a dependence upon a brand of God (which really means a dependence upon a brand of Church or religion that is offering their own definition of such a word), not wanting to rape and kill other people is a function of a healthy sense of empathy, which leads them to "do unto others as you would have others do unto you," regardless of whether or what brand of "God" you subscribe to.

 And while shame can be a natural response, it can also be a conditioned response to brands of ideology,  the same way a dog can be made to salivate not from food but from the ringing of a bell that the dog associates with the coming of food. And this is especially the case toward a narcissistic parent who requires the child to conform to the wishes of that parent, or priests and nuns who often teach that God requires similar conformity with His divine will.    

Looking at the world through the lens of a belief that they are guilty of offending a perfect God, as Christianity requires them to believe we are, allows any suffering a child may encounter to be automatically interpreted as a form of punishment justly deserved. Such a perspective operates to silence children from complaining about physical abuse they may be subjected to at home or in school, especially a Christian school. 

Coupled with a sense of shame related to sex, with the shame itself being the lasting effect of the abuse, such a perspective is doubly effective in convincing the child they truly deserve to be punished if they are sexually abused, because taboo sexual acts trigger both a feeling of suffering the child may think they deserve for being a born sinner, but also feelings of shame for the "sin" they have become a party to, even though they don't like it and didn't have a choice. Using the idea that such "shame" and suffering was the only way to purge one's soul of sin  was why abusers so often told the children they were abusing that the abuse they were inflicting on those children was "God's will." And since to doubt the priest is a sin deserving of hell, and suffering is the necessary means of purging one's soul of its sinful nature, all the child could do was be as submissive to the priest as Jesus was to the will of the Sanhedrin.

A child does not separate the physical act of a "sin" from whether they have consented to engage in it. They do not separate a guilty body from a guilty mind. For them, since the body is born flawed, it is the body that is engaged in the sin and the shame they feel is their soul telling them they are engaged in a sin. And the more shame a child feels, the more that feeling confirms the child is guilty of being the sinner they are taught to believe they are. And as everything from penance to purgatory to Christ crucified confirms, the only way for the child to expunge their soul of such sin is through their own punishment and suffering.   

This feedback loop of a "belief" in one's sinful nature triggering feelings of shame that confirm the "belief" one is a born sinner, as such, is the basis of childhood trauma caused by Christianity. 

 

Childhood Trauma is Different

Childhood trauma is different from other trauma, like war trauma or natural disaster trauma. “Our other core need is authenticity, as Gabor Mate points out in The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture. He defines "authenticity" as "the quality of being true to oneself, and the capacity to shape one’s own life from a deep knowledge of that self.” Christianity, however, requires us to believe that "being true to oneself" is to accept we are born sinners, and because we are, we owe an eternal dept of gratitude for a man who died for us as born sinners. But the only evidence offered by Christians to support the "belief" every child is a born sinner is that they are convinced that they are. This is hardly proof, of course, but it is more than enough for Christians. 

How can someone have the capacity to shape their own life from a deep knowledge of themself, if they must first accept they are the spiritual equivalent of an ugly duckling, when they may in fact be a flawless swan?

The majority of trauma experienced by children happens with intimate family members, especially when the family member is a parent who teaches their child they are born sinners who need forgiveness.. Whenever there's an interpersonal trauma by a close family member, there's an implied sense that we deserve it. Because of this, abuse never causes a child to stop trusting or loving their parent. Because real love is without judgement, a child is incapable of ever judging their parent's behavior toward them as being either right or wrong. Instead, limited by their trusting innocence (which they are forced to rely on) to only being able to love without judgement, the child fully accepts the parent's behavior as always being "true" and justified. 

As Stephanie Martson pointed out, children see their parents as a god, and God's power over our lives boils down to His ultimately ability to judge us and sentence us accordingly. And in the same way Christians never question the righteousness of God's judgement to treat Sodom and Gomorrah like Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or to flood the earth to drown sinners, so a child never questions the righteousness of their own parent either, no matter how abusive the parent may be, or how abusive a priest or nun may be as well. It is only decades later, once the child has learned to question such abuse, that they fully understand how they were being abused. Prior to that, their own mind will bury it to protect them from having to relive it.  

  Because of the emotional reaction it causes in the child, abusive treatment is just as "true" to the child as treatment that is supportive and nurturing. Both are equally "right" to the child.  Incapable of judging the parent as wrong, because they not only have nothing to compare it to but the part of their brain responsible for doing such comparisons won't fully form until they are in their mid 20s, the child is left to interpret their treatment as always being valid. Being taught to believe they are born a sinner who is powerless to change their sinful nature only reinforces the child's perception that, if they are being abused in some way, it must be their fault, at least to some degree.

From the child's perspective, what they feel is simply a reflection of what the parent feels. The child, in this sense, is simply an emotional mirror, which they happen to get trapped inside of. If the parent is angry toward the child, the child accepts they must therefore be responsible for causing that anger and seek to learn how to avoid doing so again. So, there's a level of blame that accompanies the abuse and the trauma. If someone hates me this much, so the belief tells us, it must therefore means there is something wrong, not with them, but with me. 

Because most of the child's natural behavior is met with disapproval, much of their efforts are spent trying to please yet never finding out what is effective and acceptable. The ante is always being upped, leaving the child to feel ever more confused, angry and depressed. Preoccupied with navigating such a maze, they never learn to please themself. Indeed, trying to do so only leads the child to feel "selfish," which is often what they are accused of by an abusive parent.

And when the child grows up, the child part of their mind continues to try to win the "love" of the internalized parent, the way Norman tries to win the approval of his internalized "mother." At the same time that Norman manifests his mother's disgust through his violent actions, so the dress he wears while engaging in such violence exonerates him of that crime, transferring responsibility for it to his internalized mother. So too, Christians transfer their own guilt and shame onto the cross even when the burn witches and heretics alike, while the person who serves as the conduit between Jesus and his faithful flock is a priest - who wears robes that look a bit like the dress Norman wears when he kills the object of his lust.  

One way Norman's mother orchestrated this process whereby her ghost inhabited Norman began  by requiring him to conform to her wishes the same way she had to conform to the wishes of her own abusive parent when she was a child. After all, if it turned out to be good for her, since she is convinced she turned out to be the best version of herself (at least as far as she's concerned), than for Norman to win the love of his internalized "mother" requires adopting her parenting style and applying it. And either he applies it to his own child or, since Norman has no children, he applies it instead to his tenants - like Marion Crane.

 Inside Norman, his mother's rigid Christian rules went to war with Norman's lust for Marion Crane, with the former doing with a kitchen knife what the latter wanted to do with his penis, preserving salvation by replacing with sacred violence and suffering the shameful feeling of lust that threatened to drag Norman's soul into the everlasting fires of hell.