Understanding Religious Trauma Part IV - The Divided Self & Mnchausen by Proxy

“The essence of trauma is disconnection from ourselves. Trauma is the very separation from the body and emotions. It is that scarring that makes you less flexible, more rigid, less feeling and more defended.”

Gabor Mate

Choose relationships with people who do not punish you for being yourself.  

Scott Kiloby

 

Creating souls stained with sin in order to require those souls to depend on spiritual sacraments that act like medicine for the soul - medicine that requires a miracle to turn wine into divine blood and bread into divine flesh, but stops short of fully curing an innocent child of the sin-stained soul they are born afflicted with - is the spiritual equivalent of mnchausen by proxy. Worse, it puts those in charge of administering the cure for such spiritual sickness an incredible amount of power, especially over the children who are taught to believe in both their own spiritual deformities and therefore their need for a life long dependence upon the priesthood that administers the only means of saving oneself from eternal torments that such flaws require to be purged from a soul. And all those who promote such "beliefs"- in both original sin stains and a necessary dependence upon a priesthood that acts as the only means of administering the sacraments needed to save oneself from the hell that is the just reward for such sins -  therefore become complicit in empowering those who use such power to prey upon children.

Munchausen syndrome by proxy is a mental illness and a form of child abuse. 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 of "sinfulness" in order to draw attention to itself as the only one with the cure to fix those spiritual ailments. 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 in order to draw attention to Himself, via his Catholic Church. 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 does this same thing to every child ever born.

 Parents around the world, for 2000 years, have taught their children of the need to be followers of Christianity. Stripped of the mystery and miracles which are so central to its claims to divinely revealed infallible truth, Christianity is predicated on a need to train children into accepting they are born sinners. The effect of accepting this "belief" as infallibly true is that it convinces a child that there is something inherently wrong with them, and there's nothing they can do to fix it. Instead, all they can do is try to save themselves from the fires of hell for the flaws they were born with (which is like tryig to save yourself for being born with the wrong skin color or eye color), by spending their entire life dependent on, and selling to others, their brand of Christianity. 

Children hope to win the approval of the Christian God in one of two ways. The first is to obey the Roman Catholic Church, regardless of how fallibly human those within that Church demonstrate themselves to be. And the second is to never doubt what that Church says about "faith and morals," regardless of the dire consequences that can result from the fallibility of popes and priests alike, for the Church as an institution is infallible. And because it is infallible, when the Church tells you you are born with the soul of an ugly ducking, spiritually speaking, you damn well better believe it - or there will be hell to pay. And if a priest abuses you and a pope fails to investigate or prevent that priest from doing it again, that should never be seen as a reflection of the Church itself. 

Note that this command morality, which requires obedience not to question the religion that tells you you are a born sinner, regardless of the sins of those who may work for the church, is by far the most unnatural thing imaginable to the overflowing curiosity of a child. Indeed, there is no greater offense to natural law than to command a child not to question a Church that insists the child is born a sinner that needs the Church to survive in this life and the afterlife. 

Worse, it does this by teaching the child to feel ashamed of asking questions, like why does a "perfect God" feel any need or desire to make such imperfect children in the first place, when He could just as easily make perfect ones instead, and then threatens to burn them alive for all eternity if they dare to use their woefully imperfect "free will," addled by the stain of original sin as it is, to mistakenly pick the wrong brand of God or religion to put their faith in? Who does that?

Such lessons become all the more confusing when the child feels pained either by the lessons they are being taught, that they are a sinner who contributed to the suffering of their savior and failure to accept that ensures they are destined for hell, or by actual physical or sexual abuse by someone clothed in the power and authority of God's one true Church.

Using Shame to Divide & Conquer 

If there is one ingredient that has the ability to use such emotional abuse to miraculously transform pure innocence into narcissism it is shame.  By dividing the mind and pitting it against itself, the true-self and the false-self battle each other for supremacy, like a dance in which both partners struggle to lead and neither wants to follow. Without true love, love's counterfeit becomes the only alternative for a child, the same way a starving person will eat candy if they cannot find actual food. And the emotional weapon that the false self uses to yoke us to conformity and overcome the desires of the true-self to actualize its unique authenticity, is shame.

The Bible says “a divided house cannot stand.” And nothing divides the house of our own mind more than starving a child of unconditional love and providing love based on judgement and approval instead. Such a divide and conquer strategy that convinces a child to prioritize attachment over authenticity was explained by Scottish psychologist R. D. Laing, in his book The Divided Self.  In it, Laing explains his theory about the origins of such psychotic symptoms, and how they can result from a person’s mind undergoing a form of mitosis by splitting in two. 

 The basic split that forms in the person’s personality, according to Laing, occurs “along the line of cleavage between his outward compliance and his inner withholding of compliance.” This happens when insecurity about one's existence prompts a defensive reaction in which the “self” splits into separate components, the “real self” and the “false self,” generating the psychotic symptoms characteristic of schizophrenia. “In conformity,” he explains, “what one perceives or fancies to be the thing one should be in the eyes of others becomes “the false-self,” a concept that Stephen King refers to in The Shining as a “false face.” This thing “may be a phoney sinner as well as a phoney saint,” Laing continues. “In the schizoid person, however, the whole of his being does not conform and comply in this way.” 

Shame is key. In Religion, we are taught to feel ashamed for being merely human or having human desires. Because of beliefs in the stain of original sin, religious shame is not simply about what sins we commit, but about the fact we are born sinners. In recovering from trauma, a child first has to unlearn beliefs about themself as being unworthy or inherently flawed, so they can see that their feelings of shame over being born broken are, in fact, a lie, and therefore are nothing to feel ashamed of. 

Guilt is different. We feel guilt for something we've done wrong that we can improve on or avoid doing wrong again. We learn how to add and subtract, for example, or not to play baseball near the neighbor’s house after we break their window with our baseball. Shame is something we can't stop doing, however, because it is the result of something being wrong with us. We either can't do simple arithmetic or we can't seem to care if we break a window or two with a baseball, and perhaps because we like to do so. 

Shame is a form of blame of who and what we are, while guilt is about what we did.  Guilt is something we can save ourselves from by learning to do better, but we need a “savior” to overcome our shame, because we are powerless to change being born with sin-stained soul. One says we are ugly ducklings that must be given angels wings by a God for us to ever become a swan, which we are rewarded with after we die but only if we spent enough of our life trying to sell our Christian brand. The other starts with the premise that we are swans that have been traumatized into believing, and therefore manipulated into accepting, that we are born with souls that are the spiritual equivalent of ugly ducklings. 

A parent that knows their unborn infant is perfectly healthy, but then decides to ingest alcohol in order to damage their child would be guilty of Munchausen by proxy -- a psychological disorder marked by attention-seeking behavior by a caregiver through those who are in their care. A rare disorder among humans that leads caretakers, often the mother, to actually induce symptoms of sickness through various means, such as poisoning, suffocating, starving, and causing infection. 

Christians worship their God for engaging in this very process, of creating children with souls sick with sin, and then go on to assure their own children that all of their problems are the result of not only being born with such an affliction, but failing to feed from the spiritual bosom of the Church that is the handmaiden of God Himself. When those children grow up and refuse to simply accept such claims from parents, especially from parents who hold such a "belief" as a source of spiritual pride while insisting such a "belief" makes them humble, it contributes to desires, and needs, by the children to distance themselves from such parents.  

As a result, children who are nurtured to believe they are spiritual cripples from birth that need a Church that acts like a spiritual crutch, which acts like a spiritual umbilical cord between the connects the "believer"  to God the Father, begin to pull away from their parents who were taught to believe the same thing about themself as a child. And the rejection felt by the parent when their child begins to pull away triggers the unconscious feelings of rejection the parent experienced as a child seeking the approval of their own parents. 

And in the same way the parent was nurtured to conflate the approval they were getting from their parents with love, so too the parent conflates interpreting their child's willingness to adopt their own "beliefs" as a sign of the child's love for their parent.  

In part five, we will examine how this need for approval that starts with a child conflating that approval for genuine love grows to become narcissism when the child becomes an adult and a parent that equates "love" with the willingness of others to mirror their behaviors and beliefs, and hate with seeking one's authenticity, as much in oneself as in others.