Religious Trauma Redux

There are as many different Christian "gods," and Christianity is practiced in as many different ways, as there are Christians. And like everything else, some are better than others. As an institutionalized idea, however, Christianity requires children born with the souls of spiritual swans to believe they are born with the soul of an ugly duckling. Why do people willingly believe such a thing? Because, when given a choice between the anxiety about the unknown and a "belief" that provides some relief from such anxiety, people will often opt for the latter. And this is especially true of those suffering from trauma, of which addiction to anything that alleviates such suffering - especially magical "beliefs" that promise "salvation" from such an internal hell - is common. 

As a form of spiritual medicine for the anxieties generated by the ever growing number of uncertainties of life, Christianity sells itself as the only "true" cure. That cure comes in the form of the self-shaming beliefs it requires its spiritual patients to "believe" they are born afflicted with.  Selling itself as indispensable for shaping moral development due to the stain of original sin it requires its adherents to accept mars their souls from conception, the Roman Catholic Church claims to be the handmaiden of God, one charged with treating Catholics as if they were her children. But if she is the surrogate mother to our spiritual development, requiring children to accept such "beliefs" as infallibly true means she is a mother suffering from Munchausen syndrome by proxy - a mental illness and a form of child abuse. And what those who accept such claims as their greatest "truth" come to define as “love,” as a result, is really fear generated in response to such abuse.

Munchausen syndrome describes when the caretaker of a child, most often a mother, either makes up fake symptoms or causes real symptoms to make it look like the child is sick. On the one hand, the Catholic Church has a need to make up fake symptoms like the plague of "original sin" so it can claim to be only institution God provided with the cure to fix the spiritual ailments it tells its followers they must "believe" they are all born suffering from. On the other hand, if every child is indeed born suffering from the defect of original sin, then the God who gives the "gift of life" to such defective souls does so out of a need to recruit people like a Kardashian seeking Instagram followers. While any Catholic would be horrified to discover a parent does such a thing, and would be even more horrified to discover that others worship such a parent, all Catholics worship a God who, by ensuring each and every soul born into the world is unnecessarily suffering from the stain of original sin - which such a God could as easily withhold from every child as he choose to withhold it from his Jesus avatar - does this same thing to every child ever born.

Children raised in such emotional environments are conditioned to conflate real love with artificial love. The former cultivates connection through the development of one’s authenticity, while the latter cultivates attachment by conflating authenticity with devotion to a religious brand of perception. The lack of genuine love can severely damage our emotional development, opening the door to the ability to condition children into emotional dependence upon a “savior” or a religion. To see the devastating impact that a lack of genuine love can have on healthy human development, consider the study by Dr. Rene Spitz in the 1940’s, which was controversially repeated in the Harlow Study of the 1960’s.

 Spitz examined institutionalized children that were raised in a nursing home. While these children were properly fed and taken care of, short staff meant that many were deprived of touch and affection. The result was devastating. By 2 years, a third had died. After 3 years, those who had managed to survive could not walk or talk. And after 40 years, 21 were still living in an institution. These same children also showed progressive mental deterioration, extreme bodily retardation, and lowered resistance to disease. Spitz ultimately concluded from his study that such damage inflicted on children during their first year of life was irreparable. In the 1960s, Harry Harlow performed a similar experiment by separating baby monkeys from their mothers. Doing so led to a degree of social isolation “so devastating and debilitating that it almost obliterated the animals socially.”      

 

Love's Near Enemy

The effects seen in the Spitz and the Harlow studies demonstrate how “man does not live on bread alone,” because a total lack of love, even when all the food and shelter needed to thrive was provided, resulted in death or deforms a person’s natural physical, emotional, and social development. This is like a child dying from a lack of water, because the doctors didn’t realize we can’t live on bread alone. But what happens when you supply a kind of “love” that is more like kool-aid than genuine water, and addict children to preferring the artificial sweetener in the former even though 70% their own bodies is the latter? To a blind person, water and kool-aid feel the same, and to a colorblind person they even look the same. And teaching children to perceive the world in black and white terms color blinds them from seeing the difference between the water of true love and love’s kool-aid twin: attachment.

 Buddhists have two concepts that capture the idea of things that look the same but are opposites, like reflections in a mirror. Called “far enemies and “near enemies,” the former reflect polar opposites but the latter reflects mirrored opposites. While far enemies are the most obvious to us, like love and hate, near enemies are much sneakier and harder to spot because they look nearly identical. “Near enemies” appear similar to the desired one, the way water and kool-aid can look so similar, especially to the color blind person, but in fact are counterfeits of the real thing.  And because they look so similar, what is sometimes offered as a form of love can be the difference between raising your child on pure kool aid, which is a manufactured commodity that preys on our taste buds for profit, or on pure water, which we have lived on for millions of years,  is as free as air, and is as natural to us as a mother’s milk.  

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. Although as small as a butterfly in appearance, like the effects found in the Spitz and Harlow studies, the difference between love and its’ near enemy can be as destructive as a hurricane in its emotional and long term effects. 

"Each of the qualities of the awakened heart," explains psychologist Jack Kornfield, "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 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.

Important to understand here is that both love and attachment are necessary for healthy emotional development. We need attachment just as much as we need love. The problem is that, while attachment is important for bonding with friends, families, and tribes, so is authenticity is important for becoming uniquely ourselves. The two are often presented as if they are in conflict, between pure liberty and pure loyalty, but they are not. Love that is unconditional cultivates the courage to find one's authenticity,  and nothing forges loyalty more than being accepted for who we are. Love that is conditional, on the other hand,  can so addict us to a need for attachment that it cripples or even completely overrides a person's ability to become authentic. In fact, it can so completely replace a person's need for authenticity that a person can become convinced that their most authentic self is to seek pure attachment - to a religion, or a God. 

It is also important to note a tandem relationship between attachment and dopamine in our brains. When our need for attachment surpasses our need for authenticity, it begins to be experienced as a fear of rejection. A fear of rejection triggers the same neurotransmitter in our brain as love: oxytocin.  And this is in part why the fear which the near enemy of love creates can feel indistinguishable from real love, especially for those who have never had pure love undiluted by needs of approval. This is why love for some feels like unconditional acceptance, while for others, the ultimate "love" comes from God's final and incontestable judgement, of who is worthy or unworthy of salvation.

Now consider how your brain reacts to getting approval. When a social media user gets a like, a retweet, or an emoticon notification, the brain receives a flood of dopamine and sends it along reward pathways. It feels wonderful, but it also acts to reinforce our need to satisfy the feeling next time, to see approval and validation from others, again and again and again. Dopamine is also activated by drugs such as cocaine and nicotine so no wonder some people say they feel addicted to love!

A molecule called vasopressin is also released as we form attachments. Linked to territorial behavior this molecule can, in healthy relationships, increase feelings of loyalty and causing people to feel protective of their partners whilst promoting fidelity. When that partner is a God, the fidelity becomes God's handmaiden - the Church.  Like a seesaw, a rising need for attachment due to insecurities about this life or the next, can result in smothering our need for authenticity in its crib. 

As Brene Brown pointed out, in this way, the near enemy can promote tribe loyalty while also driving separation, both from our own authenticity and, as a result, the ability to recognize in others the difference between authenticity and approval-seeking. The latter often comes in the form of status seeking. Such separation begins with a parent teaching a child to see themselves as a born sinner, one that can only be saved from damnation through a willingness to conform to the rules proscribed by a religion. While love must be unconditional to cultivate authenticity which envelopes us like a suit of armor that, like bamboo, is strong but extremely flexible, the inauthenticity that results from being nourished by the near-enemy of love comes with conditions which make a person's boundaries look like Swiss cheese.

For Brown, the difference between guilt and shame are subtle but important here, because one is like water and the other like kool-aid. Guilt is something we feel for something we’ve done, Brown observes, like accidentally breaking a window while playing baseball in the street. If you believe you are ultimately a good person at heart, you'll learn from such an experience and avoid doing the same thing in the future. But shame is different. It is a feeling we have for something we are. The broken window above, as such, is not evidence we had failed to consider the consequences of our actions, but evidence we are born defective to begin with. In the former, we are born with souls as pure as water, while the latter colors our souls in the crimson kool-aid of forgiveness from a God.  

To nurture children on systems steeped in self-shaming “beliefs” that see the world in black and white is to starve them of the kind of authentic non-judgmental love needed to cultivate one’s unique authenticity. Inauthentic selves, on the other hand, are manufactured by religious belief systems that use judgment based “love” to clone emotionally dependent replicas of paying customers. It’s really a brilliant business model, when you think about it.  And this is why people who define themselves as non-binary are treated like such a threat, because they reflect a third option of thinking about what it means to be made in the image and likeness of a God that is just as non-binary.

As a result of such nurturing, a child learns to see the near-enemy of love as genuine love, and to see genuine love as a frightening threat to the only "love" they've may have ever known. As Dr. Elan Golomb explains in her book, Trapped in the Mirror: Adult Children of Narcissists in their Struggle for Self, "All children need love to not only survive but thrive. If there is no real affection, the child will interpret what attention the parent does offer as love," even when it ain't. "If all the child receives is criticism, then criticism is interpreted as love and the behavior the parent criticized will be repeated to get more "love." If the child was only attended to for being slow, sloppy, lazy, careless, etc, all passive aggressive traits, then these will be retained into adulthood. This is how maladaptive behaviors can become ingrained and cause all kinds of difficulty in later life."

Teaching children to conflate attachment-love for real love, especially when it results in the emotional problems that stem from religious conditioning, qualifies as a form of child abuse that is as abhorrent as Munchausen syndrome by proxy.

As trauma specialist Dr. Gabor Mate points out,

It makes sense: if what’s normal is assumed to be natural, the norm will endure; on the other hand, when suspicions emerge that the way things are may not be how they’re meant to be . . . well, the quo may not be status for long. Thus do cultures generate notions— myths, in effect—of selfish, aggressive striving and dominance as behavioral baselines, encouraging characteristics that place a lesser value on connectedness to others  and to Nature itself.

 In our present capitalist society, Darcia Narvaez suggested to me, we have become “species-atypical,” a sobering idea when you think about it: no other species has ever had the ability to be untrue to itself, to forsake its own needs, never mind to convince itself that such is the way things ought to be. 

Today’s culture, as a result, “hastens human development along unhealthy lines from conception onward (like the stain of original sin idea), leading to a “normal” that, from the perspective of the needs and evolutionary history of our species (a need to feel safe and loved, which we can only feel when we are not constantly judged), is utterly aberrant. 

Christianity likewise teaches us to forsake our own needs for those of God and, because "he" chooses to remain largely inaccessible to our best efforts to try and know any for certain about "him," his Church. Martyrdom is a prime example of how a person can come to believe that sacrificing their earthly life will win them a life of eternal approval. And the eternal rejection that hell represents is seen by Christians as simply the choice made, not by the God who created them and the hell in which they will suffer for all eternity, but those being tortured for all eternity. Mate continued,

Today’s culture, as a result, “hastens human development along unhealthy lines from conception onward (like the stain of original sin idea), leading to a “normal” that, from the perspective of the needs and evolutionary history of our species (a need to feel safe by being loved unconditionally, which we can only feel when we are not constantly judged), is utterly aberrant. 

Like innocent swans taught to believe they are sin-stained ugly ducklings, children who are born with a natural affinity for drinking water can be overridden by conditioning that teaches them to prefer sugary fruit drinks and bubbly sodas instead. And the result is that such children develop identities that are wholly dependent upon those manufacturing the kool-aid they are addicted to, who preach that anyone who prefers to drink and think as pure as water is your enemy, just because they have a different way of looking at the world than you.