Understanding Religious Trauma Redux III

 

“Addiction is always a poor substitute for love.”

Gabor Mate

 

In part three of Understanding Religious Trauma, we consider the idea of neuroception, and how the effects of the two very different kinds of “love” – the genuine thing and the “near enemy” of attachment that is its mirrored opposite – can not only wreak havoc on a child’s emotional development, but do so by initiating an addiction to a religious brand of approval and attachment masquerading as divine "love;" an addiction that, because it is seen as the ultimate good and the source of all order and virtue, can lead people to justify any evil needed to maintain it.

Recall that in our last article we explained how feelings of guilt and shame effect our sense of safety and self-worth, with the former leading us to feel we are fundamentally good people who may have done something bad, like steal some candy from the local store, and the latter leading us to feel there is something fundamentally wrong with us to begin with, like we are born criminals who must always fight to resist our criminal nature. We also considered how unconditional love teaches us to feel a sense of security in ourselves while conditional forms of love teaches us to feel we are under a constant sense of judgment, and therefore insecurity about our self-worth.  That latter leads us to live in constant judgment of others, for our inner dialogue colors - or "stains" - our outer perspective.

 The effects of this difference on our emotional health between genuine and synthetic forms of love is like the difference on our overall health from a diet high in fruits and vegetables versus a diet high in processed sugars and fast food. And as we need the former to grow and stay healthy, emotionally and physically, the latter is like an addiction to a slow acting poison that makes us feel constantly anxious.  Indeed, a religion's ability to convince you to depend upon their brand of God depends upon our willingness to accept we are born so irreparably defective that only the grace of God can, in not fix us, at least forgive us, and then reward us for accepting how our defects necessitate a dependence upon a religion that acts as the spiritual umbilical cord to a God. 

 And to understand this difference, between unconditional love and religious love that comes with strings attached in the form of conditions of obedience and devotion, and how the latter replaces the former with an approval addiction masquerading as "the love (i.e., forgiveness) of God," we first need to understand the idea of neuroception. 

 

Neuroception

Neuroception refers to the neural circuits that allow our bodies to register whether an environment is safe or dangerous. Unlike perception, which delivers cognitive insights in the form of thoughts and sensory data, neuroception occurs outside of conscious thought.

Since neuroception is primitive, generated by parts of the brain that evolved much earlier than our conscious minds, our bodies sometimes detect and respond to signs of danger even in circumstances we consciously recognize as safe. Coined by neuroscientist Dr. Stephen Porges as part of the polyvagal theory, neuroception explains how the nervous system evolved to detect danger throughout our evolutionary history. 

According to the polyvagal perspective, long ago, as our species developed a wider set of behaviors, neural circuits evolved to “turn off” our defensive responses so we could convey and interpret social signals from others, learning to cooperate and co-regulate for the benefits of all. Porges refers to these circuits as the social engagement system, and it’s what enables communication, cooperation, and even creativity, along with other uniquely human processes. Interestingly, our automatic responses become increasingly primitive the more stressed we become. When we don’t feel physiologically safe, our bodies lose the ability to “down-regulate” or shut down our ancient defense systems. This is why stress can feel so debilitating: in these defensive states, it’s physiologically harder or impossible to access higher-order states like creativity, focus, and the ability to connect with others.

 

How Trauma Affects Neuroception

Trauma affects our neruoception. As Gabor Mate points on in The Myth of Normal, most trauma is pre-verbal. Stored in somatic memory, in our bodies and in our nervous systems, trauma is expressed as changes in our biological stress response. This leads our nervous system to process information through the lens of past experiences, resulting in Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. If your childhood home was marked by abuse and neglect while church was a peaceful place of peace where abusive and neglectful parents were kind and attentive, for example, your nervous system reacts to one like a war-zone, triggering a hyper-vigilant state of mind, and the other as a safe haven and even a real "home." It is no surprise, as such, that children who grow up in abusive homes develop a strong attachment to a "church" where priests and nuns are referred to as "father" and "mother." And in such a "home," father always knows best, and mother sets the example of how and why it is important to "honor and obey" "our father." 

 Such a dynamic can also make safe people feel dangerous and dangerous people feel safe. This makes a priest or a Cub Scout leader the perfect costume for a pedophile, for example. Likewise, you may date an abusive partner because they feel familiar to your family upbringing, reminding us on a neuro level of the home we grew up in, and avoid dating people who feel safer because there's no spark, so to speak, because they feel strange and unfamiliar to us. 

In When Religion Hurts You, Dr. Laura Anderson takes an honest look at how elements of fundamentalist church life–such as fear of hell, purity culture, corporal punishment, and authoritarian leaders–can cause psychological, relational, physical, and spiritual damage. “Because of the way I had embodied those messages about the consequences of going to hell, my body started to panic again, because I didn’t have this assurance of salvation,” Anderson explained to Religion News Service. Her fears were still ingrained in her body.  

“Prior to the last five, maybe 10 years, most dialogue around religious trauma in professional spaces suggested that to heal from it, you just needed to become an atheist. And for a myriad of reasons, I disagree with that. It can turn into fundamentalism very quickly, just on the other side of the spectrum. Also, that cognitive shift to atheism doesn’t address how trauma is embodied, how those messages, practices and lifestyles live inside of us even after we believe new things."

Research and clinical interventions show us trauma is a physiological state that is happening in our bodies. So when we understand religious trauma as trauma, it helps to validate the actual lived experience. Many of my clients have experienced shame and confusion over having psychological responses even after they don’t believe the same things anymore.”

 

True Love vs. Conditional “Love”

Replacing the security of unconditional love with addiction to conditional forms of “love” that require the acceptance of beliefs about one’s sinful nature is to replace the acceptance and security we feel from the release of oxytocin and serotonin in our brains with the euphoria we feel from the dopamine rush of approval. That's a bit like replacing baby formula with beer. And like the physical damage that can occur to a child’s body with such a replacement, so a child’s emotional intelligence can likewise become sickly and deformed.

 To visualize the damage that the “near enemy” of counterfeit love can have on our emotional and even spiritual development, we can compare it to the different physical effects that can result from different "near enemies" of mirrored arrangements of atoms on a molecular level.  That difference, and how one is perfectly healthy while the other can produce horrible deformities, can be seen in the effects of two kinds of isomers.

 During the 1950s and 1960s, a rash of babies were born with physical deformities. As it turned out, this was the result of two kinds of molecules known as isomers that looked like mirrored reflections of each other, otherwise known as “chiral:" the Greek word for "hand." An object is said to be chiral if the object and its mirror image are non-superimposable, just like our right and left hand.

An isomer is defined in chemistry as "each of two or more compounds with the same formula but a different arrangement of atoms in the molecule and different properties."  Examples include Glucose and Fructose sugars. Like the near enemies of love and attachment being similar but opposite, so isomers can be chiral because they come in left-handed and right-handed versions. In 1953, those two versions were used in a medication given to women in 46 countries for anxiety, trouble sleeping, tension, and morning sickness.  

But like the difference between genuine love and attachment-love, the right-handed and left-handed isomers had opposite effects. The right-handed version, which was perfectly safe, had the desired sedative effect on pregnant women. The left-handed version, however,  resulted in the "biggest man-made medical disaster ever." More than 10,000 children were born with a range of severe deformities, from the malformation of arms and legs into flipper-like appendages that comes from phocomelia, to thousands of miscarriages. The compound molecule created with these two kinds of isomers is better known as thalidomide. 

 

Why Childhood Trauma is Different

Childhood trauma is different from other trauma, like war trauma or natural disaster trauma. While attachment is a core need for children to bond with parents, according to trauma expert Gabor Mate, “our other core need is authenticity.” Mate 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" comes from accepting the belief we are born sinners in need of saving from eternal damnation.

And here’s the problem. The majority of trauma experienced by children happens with intimate family members, especially a parent. Whenever an interpersonal trauma occurs by a close family member, there's an implied sense that we deserve it.  Our total dependence upon our parents to survive means no amount of abuse ever causes a child to stop trusting or loving their parent as always being in the right. Simply put, the parent is like Mount Sinai while the child is like water that conforms to the shape, the "will," of the mountain.

As Stephanie Martson pointed out, children see their parents as a god, and God's power over our lives boils down to His ultimate ability to treat us as we deserve to be treated, whether we are invited into heaven or cast into hell.  And the child interprets their interactions with their parent the same way. 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. 

In this respect, there is no difference between the spiritual journey and the hidden trauma journey. Carl Jung captured this idea when he said “until we make the unconscious conscious, it will control our lives and we will call it fate.” And Kant captured the same idea when he said “''only the descent into the hell of self-cognition can pave the way to godliness.” Indeed, even Jesus captured this sentiment when he explained “the kingdom of God is within you.” All of them were expressing what the ancient Greek philosophers called both the hardest thing to do and the most necessary of all: “know thyself.” And to do that, we have to turn toward our trauma, not run away from it and toward a “savior,” which amounts to spiritual bypassing. 

Next time, we will begin to explore how organized religions, by instilling a need for approval in order to cultivate such spiritual bypassing as a virtue, paves the road to fascism.