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Thoughts and
Sayings about the Psychology of Spiritual Healing |
THIS
WEBSITE, along with A Guide
to Psychology and its Practice, has so much information on it that
a person could spend hours reading all the various web pages.
Therefore, I have started
to collect here many short sayings and thoughts from both websites to provide
an overview of the entire work.
Click on the initial
letter of any quote to go to the web page from which the quote
originates.
Anger |
Competition |
Culture |
Despair |
Depression |
Evil |
Family |
Fear |
Forgiveness |
Hate |
Healing |
Honesty |
Hope |
Humility |
Identity |
Love |
Peace |
Prayer |
Romance and
Eroticism |
Self-sabotage |
Sin |
Spirituality |
Spiritual
Purgation |
Suffering |
Suicide |
Trauma |
The
Unconscious |
Victimization
Romance
and Eroticism
Courtly
“love”—that is, romance—is not a pagan concept, and,
though it was influenced by Christian morality, it has nothing in common
with real Christian love either. Like the famous quest for the “holy
grail,” courtly love is a medieval literary creation.
. . . In other words, the chalice of courtly love—and
all the romantic sentiments and eroticism that fill it—is an illusion.
It’s simply impossible to heal your own emotional brokenness through
the body of another person as mortal and broken as you are.
Severed from responsibility
to the family, the erotic desire for “recognition” in another
person—supported by the contemporary social pressure for every individual
to be in a “relationship”—amounts to nothing but a narcissistic
renunciation of love itself.
Love does not come from
another person—it’s important to learn that right away. Love is
not about romantic sentiments. Love is not about eroticism. Mystics have
known that for ages. True love is a matter of seeking God more than anything
else, more even than your own life.
Because romance is not
based in true love, romance is, in technical psychological terms, a
game—and to play this game, you must put yourself in competition with
everyone else playing the same game. This explains the essence of
jealousy: in your fear of losing what you desperately want, you hate
any person who might come between you and what you want.
Once you strip the concept
of “relationship” of its chaste and holy dignity and reduce it
essentially to a self-satisfying sport—a game designed to drown out
your emotional loneliness—then you place yourself on the playing field
as a blatant sexual object in full competition with all the other players.
Any woman who has a more pretty face or larger breasts or more shapely legs,
or who is taller or thinner or more rich or more socially connected or more
glamorous or more fashionably dressed is, by definition, a rival and a threat
to your security. And even if in anger you try to assault the gaze of the
world with body fat, tattoos, body piercings galore, and purple hair, you
don’t really leave the playing field, you just take up new, sometimes
covert, tactics in the competitive game.
Some people skip from
one “partner” to another over the surface of existential pain,
like a stone skipping over water. As long as they stay above the surface
they’re perfectly happy; but when an affair ends, and they come crashing
down, they’re desperate for the next leap, sometimes searching for a
new partner even at the funeral for the old one. Yet sooner or later the
stone loses vitality, and with a final splunk falls into the depths of
tribulation.
Being “natural,”
bodily pleasure can come from anyone or anything. And God knows, some people
have tried anything. Literally. That’s the real underlying philosophy
to the Marquis de Sade’s writings, for example. It all comes down to
saying, “Anything goes if it serves your pleasure. Any body—man,
woman, child, or animal—is as good as any other body.”
So there’s the natural for you.
The psychological problem
with the intoxication of sex, therefore, is that the pleasure becomes an
end in itself. Anything and everything becomes an object of pleasurable
stimulation. It may even seem natural, but like all natural disasters, a
sexual addiction leaves nothing in its path but a barren swath of emotional
destruction.
Just as philosophers
through the ages have noted that we can find hints and traces of divinity
in the natural world, so too we all experience a “hunger” for spiritual
connectedness with each other and with God, as a sort of deep aching for
what is missing in ordinary life. But given our state of separation from
God, and the spiritual blindness that results from that separation, most
of us fill our hunger with what is most immediately available: the five physical
senses of the flesh.
The allure of erotic
pleasure resides in immediate, tangible gratification. For men, it can be
the thrill of just reaching out and taking what you want, whether it be the
body of another person or your own body. For women, it can be physical pleasure,
or it can be the satisfaction of feeling wanted and protected. But, however
it’s experienced, male or female, this “common love” is just
an immediate way of getting something that you want.
Child sexual abuse, too,
is a form of common “love.” But whereas most common “love”
takes the form of willing manipulation, child abuse is coercive: the abuser
preys upon a child’s moral and intellectual helplessness. The abuser
gets all the self-satisfaction he or she wants and in the process leaves
the child with a life-long emotional scar of having been exposed to the
manipulative aspects of eroticism well before having developed healthy defense
mechanisms to cope with such psychological assaults. The abuser walks away
smacking his lips, and the child is left as bones for the garbage.
Thus, in all erotic fantasies
you take from the “other” some sort of satisfaction that
unconsciously compensates for the love you did not receive from your parents.
That missing love—that lack—is a wound that drives you to
fill its emptiness. None of this drive has anything to do with true love,
except for the fact that, in all the arousal, true love is
missing.
As unpleasant as it may
be to admit it, adult eroticism is largely based on infantile needs to be
received, accepted, and satisfied. When a person feels intensely received,
accepted, and satisfied, then he or she is “in love.” But sooner
or later that intensity will be broken. The break doesn’t even have
to be the result of malicious neglect; it can simply be the result of a need
to attend to other obligations in the world, and, in the person feeling
neglected, intense jealousy can flare up. So, regardless of how it happens,
as those primitive needs are not met, then the “love” flip-flops
into hatred and aggression. If you don’t believe it, take a look at
the ugly process of our divorce courts for a perfect example. The world is
cluttered with broken relationships that began in sweet love and ended in
bitter anger and hate.
And all of this proves that real love, which is based
in giving, not receiving, is pure and eternal and can never flip-flop into
hate.
Look as hard as you can,
but you will never find a single reference in the New Testament to
“romantic relationships.” Sexuality has a temporal value in regard
to the sacrament of Holy Matrimony for the sake of raising a family in holy
service to God, but it has no enduring place in the Kingdom of
Heaven.
Until you stop being
obsessed with eroticism you will never be able to find true spirituality;
until you stop insisting that God accept your sexual perversions before you
can accept God, you will never truly know God; until you stop looking for
yourself in the desire of others, you will never find God; until you die
to yourself—and your selfish desires—you will never have
life.
Chastity is not the
repression of sexuality, it is the purifiying transformation of desire into
love.
Mystics through the ages
have noted that the choice between spirit and flesh is
either–or. Just like Christ and John the
Baptist, as one increases, the other must decrease. If we don’t understand
that, then we simply miss the point of what Christianity is all about: entering
into the awesome and glorious presence of God, to be filled, not with erotic
fantasies, but with all the fullness of God (cf. Ephesians
3:19).
 
Self-sabotage
Some persons will
unconsciously persist in trying to punish themselves for their failures even
though they say, “Jesus, I trust in You!” dozens of times a day.
Why? Well, all that self-punishment is just a veiled attempt to hurt
someone else—usually a parent—who failed you in some way, somehow
leaving you feeling rejected, unloved, unwanted, or incompetent. If you are
blind to this unconscious desire to hurt others, you will not be able to
purify yourself from its effects, and it will poison your heart and kill
off any love that might try to grow there.
How can you come to terms
with the ugly part of human nature if you can’t see it in yourself and
if you can’t accept your personal responsibility for constantly placing
yourself at risk? If you don’t recognize the repetition, all the
king’s horses and all the king’s men—and all the anger management
classes in the world—won’t save you from your own unconscious efforts
to destroy yourself as you remain locked in the dark identity of being a
victim.
Now, the especially sad
thing here is that, because unconscious desires can’t be seen directly,
most persons will deny that they have them. But, just as an animal’s
presence can be deduced by the evidence of its tracks, so desires can be
deduced by the evidence of the behavior they cause. For example, maybe you
can’t see your secret desire to destroy yourself, but maybe you can
see that you smoke cigarettes, overeat, drink heavily, are prone to arguing,
take risks, procrastinate, have difficulty finishing projects, can’t
read maps, harbor suspicions about others, avoid cleaning, or tolerate
clutter—and so on.
Many persons have such
deep anger at their parents that they unconsciously desire to keep themselves
dysfunctional as a way to get back at their parents. Thus they can have the
satisfaction of hurting their parents by saying, under their breath, “Look
what a mess I am! It’s all your fault!”
So, considering that
boundaries have a core purpose in civilization, an individual’s lack
of personal, psychological boundaries isn’t really a true lack—at
least, it’s not a lack in the philosophical sense of something
“missing.” Instead, this apparent lack is really a refusal
to defend one’s own dignity. And it’s a refusal based on hatred.
That’s right. Hatred: a hatred of the self that results from living
always in fear because of having been abused as a child. Unable to make sense
of senseless abuse, a child, using the full effort of imperfect childhood
logic, arrives at the only “logical” conclusion: “It must
be my fault. I’m just a worthless person. I deserve condemnation.”
And there you have it: self-hatred engendered by fear that is engendered
by abuse.
What strange satisfaction
maintains all this self-destruction? Well, it’s the satisfaction of
unconsciously hoping to show the world how wrong it is. Like Hamlet holding
a mirror up to his mother, the person trapped in victim anger will hold up
his own destruction as “evidence” that, he hopes, will condemn
the world.
Unlike a martyr, who
lays down his or her life out of pure love, this self-destruction has its
deep motivation in bitterness and hatred, and an obstinate rejection of
forgiveness.
If your response is,
“Yeah, right. God is telling me that He hates me and that I’m just
a piece of garbage!” then your sarcasm reveals the depth of your anger
at your parents, the magnitude of your resentment of others, and the
pervasiveness of your unconscious tendency to turn that anger against yourself
in repeated self-sabotage. Truly, it’s far easier to say that God hates
you, as an excuse for your hating others, than it is to set aside the pride
of defending your wounded ego.
Unfortunately, some souls
are so caught in feelings of victimization that they will send themselves
right to hell in a futile attempt to “show” God how mean and
unfairly—so they believe—he has treated them. In psychological
language, this is called masochism.
What is the deepest
motivation for all this unconsciously self-inflicted pain? It’s the
veiled hope that you can make others love you. That’s right—it’s
the hope that others, in seeing how much you are willing to suffer abuse,
will somehow be made to admire you—and therefore love you.
This hope of being loved brings us, finally, to the
difference between humility and masochism. To live in humility
is to live always in total confidence of God’s love, protection, and
guidance and therefore to have no concern for yourself when others insult
you—or praise you. Secure in God’s love, you don’t have to
base your identity on whether or not others like you. In masochism, on the
other hand, you invite others to insult you because, as a psychological defense
against the pain of deep emotional wounds, you take unconscious pleasure
in being demeaned in the secret hope that you will somehow, someday, earn
someone’s admiration for your willingness to endure painful
abuse.
Sin
A secular, philosophical
understanding of the concept could describe sin as a sort of infatuation
with the vanity of your personal desires and a reliance on social prestige
or power to defeat or destroy anyone or anything that stands in the way of
your getting what you want. Or, to say it more simply, most people are
narcissistically preoccupied with their immediate desires and have little,
if any, altruistic awareness of anyone or anything else around them.
Psychologically, this behavior allows you to feel good about yourself
(that is, to feel strong and “in control”) by using, hurting, or
neglecting someone else. Sin therefore leads you away from true love and
compassion, and it sends you right into all the predicaments of self-indulgence.
Sin really does hurt others because sin defiles love.
Was Mary Magdalene really
a prostitute? Well, just consider any of the movie stars and socialites of
today who fill the supermarket tabloids and celebrity magazines with scandal
and gossip. Are they prostitutes? Or are they just broken, lost souls, possessed
by decadence and sin, hiding their emotional pain behind empty illusions
of vanity and glamor?
Along the path of least
resistance—the path of sin, the easy way, the way to hell—love
is nowhere to be seen, for it remains banished behind the thorny hedges of
psychological defenses.
To most persons today
“love” means satisfaction. It means happiness. It means having
one’s emotional emptiness filled with, well . . . just
about anything, as long as it’s filling. It means “I’m OK,
you’re OK.” In all its meanings, “love” means
self-indulgence. And so, in this definition of “love” cleverly
constructed to suit popular culture, something is missing: sin. In popular
culture, sin does not exist. And that’s precisely where everything goes
wrong.
God’s love for us,
however, is not an “anything goes, I’m OK, you’re OK”
kind of sentimental acceptance. To say that God loves us means that God calls
us away from our sins into a life of holiness.
God’s creation is
good. God loves His creation. God created us to be good—to be capable
of sharing in divine love. Knowing we have fallen into sin and disobedience,
He still loves us. But does this mean that “anything goes” and
that “everyone will go to heaven”? Well, no. God loves us by
calling us out of our sins—the very offenses that separate souls
from God in this life (and that separate souls from God eternally in hell)
if they are not repented. When the Jews talked about God “wiping away
sins,” they referred to God’s willingness to allow us to be reconciled
to Him if we repented our sins. God’s willingness for reconciliation
with us was later sealed with blood—Christ’s blood—as a contract,
the New Covenant of Christianity.
God is love, and God
welcomes us all into His presence. He loves us as we are, despite our
wretchedness—but those persons who do not recognize and repent their
sins reject God’s love for them, and those persons who reject love have
no place in the Kingdom of Heaven.
God does not
“overlook” our sins—in fact, quite the contrary: He knows
that our sins will condemn us to everlasting separation from Him if we do
not repent them. But if only we do repent our sins then God will love us
as deeply as if we had never sinned at all.
Christ was not a
sentimentalist. Christ called everyone—and still calls everyone—to
repentance. In His own time, many persons heard His call and obeyed. But
there were many persons Christ refused to heal because they refused to
acknowledge and repent their sins. There were many persons He refused as
disciples because they sought worldly glory instead of Heavenly peace. There
were many persons He criticized as hypocrites—Pharisees, Saduccees,
and Herodians. Christ was not a sentimentalist who accepted everyone “as
they are.” He revealed the truth of our brokenness and called everyone
to repent their sins. And, ultimately, many of those He offended gathered
up their grudges against Him and crucified Him.
A legalistic life that
meticulously avoids mortal sin is not sufficient to gain entrance to Heaven;
only a person with a humble, loving heart, free from pride and hatred, can
be admitted to Heaven. Conversely, a “nice” person who does great,
loving deeds for others can still be excluded from Heaven by unrepentant
mortal sin.
The point of rules is
to help us stay in an enlightened place of humble obedience to love. When
you say, “I won’t do this!” or “I’ll die if I have
to do that!” or “I want do it my way!” every I-I-I from your
mouth is a defiant expression of Self-Self-Self which flows from
Pride-Pride-Pride, and it all plunges you, like a reverse-baptism, into the
arrogance of sin-sin-sin.
In order to love others
in the way of true love, we have to see sin for what it is, in all its pervasive,
ugly reality. This isn’t at all depressing—in fact, it should be
a cause for joy, because seeing sin for what it is opens the possibility
of mercy. What greater charity is there than this?
But if we can’t see sin for what it is, then we
aren’t loving our neighbor, we’re loving his sin. And that
is depressing.
When someone says, “Go
to hell,” that is judgment. But to tell someone that he is living in
sin and is in grave danger of ending up in hell is a warning. As for what
will actually happen to this poor soul . . . well, only God can make that
judgment.
Spirituality
If you value spirituality,
what do you have to lose? Mediocrity. What do you have to gain?
Everything.
In today’s world,
especially in the San Francisco Bay area, we often hear of persons who claim
to value spirituality. In this sense, spirituality does not mean much more
than an awareness of some sort of “enlightenment” that imbues
one’s life with an esoteric, otherworldly feeling while making no particular
demands on anyone.
True spirituality must
have a psychological component. Unlike the pagan worship offered by the ancient
Greeks and Romans merely to appease the vanity of the gods—gods who
had no interest at all in the moral behavior of humanity—genuine
spirituality calls a person into a deep psychological change.
Lust. Competition. Vengeance.
Three sins, any one of which will stop any man dead in his tracks on the
Way of Perfection.
In fact, the most common
impediment to spiritual progress is this: the grudge that chains you to the
past.
True spirituality expressed
in religion—that is, faithful service to God through devout
worship—requires complete denial of the psychological “self”
and a profound absorption in divine love. It’s not an easy process,
and it doesn’t work by magic—that is, simply by claiming to believe
in something.
If you pray, “Lord,
increase my faith,” don’t expect God to magically anoint you with
a large dose of faith. Instead, you will have affliction after affliction
heaped upon your head, and as you graciously cope with it all through loving
perseverance, you will emerge from the struggle to find that your faith has,
indeed, increased.
In his fantasy book The
Hobbit, the precursor to the Lord of the Rings trilogy, J. R.
R. Tolkien tells of a journey through the dark and dangerous Mirkwood Forest.
The travelers were warned to stay on the path and never leave it,
no matter what should happen. Yet, no sooner did they get started than they
spied fairy lights flickering in the darkness. Enthralled with the allure
of the lights, they left the path in the hope of discovering the fairies
themselves. But the more they sought after the fairies, the more the lights
receded into the distance. And then, far from the safety of the path and
wandering helplessly in the darkness, the travelers were snared by giant
spiders.
Well, the story continues . . . but the lesson is clear:
if you forsake the true path to chase after fairy lights, you do so at great
peril.
When priests, rabbis,
and ministers molest children, it only goes to show how much they are caught
in the grip of false spirituality. Instead of seeking divine sustenance through
spiritual denial of self, they choose to deny the good in order to glorify
their own perverted emptiness.
Thus the fear of the
self-denial part holds back many people from any spiritual progress. How
can you hear the “still small voice” of the Holy Spirit if you’re
always drowning it out with television and movies and music and sports and
all other entertainment? It’s simply impossible. To make any substantial
spiritual progress, you have to detach yourself from a world that does nothing
but infect you at every turn with its sin and corruption.
Living a devout Christian
life, in general, does not require any great intellectual skills. Christ,
after all, had no need for Plato and Aristotle in order to preach his sermons.
True religion is a matter of heart and will, not of reason. And, for that
matter, that’s why Christ preached in parables: to bypass the intellect
and pierce right into our hearts and souls.
Many persons shopping
for a spiritual life will inquire of the Catholic Church, “This wisdom
and peace you offer—how much does it cost?”
The reply is simple and straightforward. “Everything
you have: All your heart, and all your soul, and all your mind, and all your
strength.”
They shake their heads. “No, that’s too expensive.
We want something the ordinary person can afford.”
Spiritual
Purgation
Spiritual growth is not
a matter of forbidding pleasure; it’s a matter of pruning away useless
branches that bear no fruit. Without pruning, the fruit is sparse and bitter;
with pruning the fruit becomes abundant and sweet.
This is what mortification means: to prune the
“vine” so that it becomes more productive.
In spiritual purgation
you learn to surrender yourself to total trust in God so that, no matter
what happens to you, you can bring the pain before God and ask for the strength
and courage to deal, in imitation of Christ, with what needs to be
done.
Unfortunately, there
are many persons who don’t want to do the hard work of self-denial.
So, sad to say, they take up superficial religious sentiments as an unconscious
way to hide their own fears of abandonment and loneliness. Terrified of their
own psychological darkness, they pervert religion into a desperate attempt
to “feel good” about themselves—to validate their pride and
their perversions, not to cleanse their hearts and souls of all that is
unholy.
They might act like pious members of their communities,
but deep inside some part of them holds a dark resentment that the world
has not given them the recognition that they secretly crave. And one way
or another—through disobedience, through terrorism, or through sexual
scandal—their façade crumbles. They talked the talk all right,
but they didn’t know the first thing about real love. In fact, they
feared love all along and were blind to their own blindness.
Suffering
One particular atheistic
natural philosophy teaches that all suffering is the result of desire. Suffering
has no value in such a philosophy, so it teaches a deadening of all desire
as an escape from suffering.
Many individuals, therefore, are drawn to these practices
because they seem to offer an esoteric “spirituality” while making
no moral demands on a person beyond the ethics of non-attachment and
acceptance.
But genuine spirituality must embrace the redemptive
purpose of sacrifice and suffering when endured in love for others, as Christ
demanded, and this true love, therefore, can be understood properly only
in the context of Christian theology. Without God, there can be no love,
only self-indulgence. And without a proper understanding of love in the first
place there can be no meaning in suffering as the only means to overcome
sin: that which “misses the point” about love.
If only you would understand
that Christ accepted all suffering willingly, not as a victim, and that,
in carrying the cross, He bore for our sake the pain of all unjust and irrational
punishment. He gave meaning to suffering. That is, He bore it all
openly and without anger for our redemption from sin, and, in doing so, He
showed us that true love means the willingness to bear the emotional pain
of others, suffering for them in the hope of their salvation.
If only you would pray for others and take up your
suffering as Christ did—not as punishment, but as a gift of forgiveness
to others—then you would no longer need to hide your pain and you would
no longer be terrified of your own capacity for anger; then you could listen
honestly to your family and friends, to bear their anger without flinching
from it, and to help them heal their pain and take up their own
crosses.
If you watch people in
church, however, you will often see them making the Sign of the Cross so
hastily that they seem to be brushing flies away from their faces. Make the
sign deliberately and with reverence, for, when you do make the Sign of the
Cross, you make an implicit agreement to take up your own cross by
accepting—without argument or resentment—all suffering for the
sake of the conversion of sinners. Whether you keep that agreement, well,
only God knows. That thought should give you pause.
How do we know for sure
whether our suffering is the result of sin or if it serves some unfathomable
purpose of God? To anyone but a Christian, there’s no solution. But
every Christian has the answer hanging right before him: Christ
crucified. In Christ on the cross, we comprehend perfect obedience to
God’s deepest motives. On the cross, even innocent suffering glorifies
God, for it leads us to persevere in obedience despite all the opposition
the world can inflict on us.
So when a Christian suffers, it doesn’t matter
whether the suffering is the consequence of sin or not. All that matters
is that all suffering be accepted and carried as one’s cross. Let it
be a testament to God’s glory and a penance for all the sins that nailed
Christ to the cross. Christ endured all suffering for our redemption, so
as we bear our suffering gracefully, we share the burden of the cross with
Christ. Let all suffering end in love.
A child copes with life
by trying to get others to change their behavior, so as to make things more
manageable for himself. Persons of mature wisdom, however, cope with life
by patiently enduring suffering—without hatred and without anger—for
the sake of love itself: to be filled with love and to sow seeds of that
love in the world around them.
Suicide
Suicidal fantasies, when
spoken in a therapeutic setting, can actually be quite helpful in getting
to some painful emotions that have been suppressed through the years. Of
course, it can be difficult and frightening work to voice these
feelings—and this points to the fact that it’s not life itself
that’s unbearable—as some desperate persons claim—but it’s
the thought of facing up to one’s own inner pain that seems
unbearable.
It’s a difficult
thing to admit that your parents did not love you. Most likely, though, they
didn’t love you because they couldn’t love because
they were afraid of love because their parents didn’t love
them.
And what is the proof of this?
Well, the whole purpose of bringing a child into the
world is to take responsibility for guiding an innocent soul into mature
purity before God. If your childhood was filled with loving trust in God
because your parents lived in chaste loving trust in God, then we can say
your parents loved you. But if your childhood was filled with self-loathing,
disobedience, insecurity, and hostility, then you have the truth right under
your nose. All you have to do is see it.
Yes, all you have to do is see it.
Sadly, some persons prefer to destroy themselves by suicide
or by slow self-sabotage rather than admit that they hate their parents for
not loving them.
Any actual suicide attempt
is really a disavowal of love and forgiveness, because in effect you’re
denying yourself the very things you so desperately need: suicide cuts you
off from any healing you might attain because of psychological change; it
cuts you off from all the good that you could do, for the rest of your life,
as true payment for your past mistakes; and it is, in essence, an act of
hatred, by which you throw evidence of your failure into the faces of those
who failed you, as proof of their failures.
So remember, to despise
yourself is to hide your anger at the world and to run from mercy and
forgiveness. If, however, you stop running in fear and learn to live an
emotionally honest life, you can then, in mercy, call others out of their
illusions into honesty as well. And that’s important, because when you
reject forgiveness for others, you reject if for yourself, but when you call
others to accept accountability for their lives, you discover real love for
yourself as well.
Trauma
Remember—an event
is traumatic because it disrupts your previously secure sense of self.
Consider that wild animals live with a sharp awareness of perpetual danger,
yet most people live with a naive—and deceptive—sense of safety
and security to the point of denying their basic vulnerability and fragmented
sense of self. So when something disastrous happens, the psychological damage
from the shattering of one’s illusions about life and identity may be
more problematic than any physical damage.
The world is generally
quite stable. We go to bed at night and fully expect our slippers to be there,
right where we left them the night before, when we wake up. Without this
sense of stability we would be living in an Alice in Wonderland type
of craziness. We couldn’t function.
Yet consider just how fragile this sense of daily security
really is. Any number of things—from a car crash to an
earthquake—could happen suddenly, without warning, and leave us in chaos.
How is it possible to live secure and peaceful in the moment while knowing
that in the next moment everything and anything worldly that we rely
upon—possessions and bodies—can be wiped away?
Well, many persons prefer to ignore that “next
moment” and instead make gods of their possessions and bodies. They
rarely think of their dependence on our true God—until something disasterous
happens; and then, if they survive, it won’t be long before they return
to their old ways.
To live an honest and humble life, however, each soul
needs its own inner sense of confidence to guide it through the confusion
of the unexpected. Complete trust in Christ and faith in the ultimate stability
of God is a blessed gift of peace—a tiny whispering sound (1 Kings
19:12)—that endures behind the noise of chaos.
As odd as it might seem,
even something as ordinary as having a tooth pulled or extracted can provoke
considerable anxiety.
“A tooth?” you might ask. “I don’t
get it.”
Well, think about it. We all cut our hair, and our
fingernails, and our toenails. Notice, however, that these things grow back.
Teeth don’t grow back. Of course, baby teeth are lost and replaced with
adult teeth, but once an adult tooth is lost, that’s it. Extracting
a tooth is like the amputation of an arm or a leg—or a breast
due to breast cancer—or the abortion of a fetal child.
Technically, the loss of any body part can provoke a
castration anxiety. We commonly castrate male animals by surgically
removing their testicles so as to make the animals less aggressive or to
make them reproductively sterile. Sigmund Freud, in his philosophy of
psychoanalysis, gave a psychological twist to castration when he assumed
that all young boys felt an anxiety about losing the penis, and that all
young girls felt an anxiety about having lost it.
Jacques Lacan, however, understood that these sexual
images were just a screen covering an even deeper anxiety. Castration, for
Lacan, meant the horrifying recognition of our human fragmentation, the very
fragmentation that the infant has to “cover up” through its
identifications with the world as it builds up a coherent personality.
In the loss of a tooth, then, is a confrontation—an
encounter—with the reality of bodily fragmentation and, ultimately,
with death itself. In essence, the loss says, “You’re not as glamorous
and powerful as you think. You’re just a flesh-covered skeleton that
can break at any time. Your image of yourself is all a lie.”
The loss of any body part, therefore—even a dream
about such a loss, or even an abortion—should never be minimized. For
with the bodily loss comes the loss of smug confidence in bodily invulnerability.
If you don’t understand what you’ve really lost, trauma will hit,
and it will hit hard.
The debilitating effects
of trauma derive from its ability to overwhelm a person emotionally while
driving out any rational understanding of what is happening psychologically.
By consciously creating a narrative structure for the trauma—in
psychotherapy, in personal journaling, in prayer—you help to dispel
the illusion that the traumatic event has control over you, and you cease
to be a helpless victim.
Through the process of
repeatedly talking psychotherapeutically about your traumatic experiences,
several things can happen:
1. You experience your thoughts and feelings in the
safety of psychotherapy, and this helps to reduce the belief that
your thoughts and feelings are dangerous.
2. You become habituated to your thoughts and
feelings. That is, much like a wild animal being tamed, you learn to accept
your memories without perceiving them as a threat.
3. You prevent yourself from falling into the habit of
avoiding your thoughts and feelings as an unhealthy defense against
fear.
4. You learn to distinguish troubling thoughts and feelings
from ordinary thoughts and feelings so that everything does not seem
threatening.
5. You learn to transform your feelings of
helplessness into competence.
6. You learn to think of yourself less
negatively.
Learning to speak about
the non-verbal pain and terror provides a sense of safety, through
an acceptance of your thoughts and feelings as non-threatening; it
desensitizes you to the troubling aspects of your memories of the
traumatic experience; and it integrates positive growth into your
lifestyle. Thus you can draw wisdom from pain and tragedy.
No matter what happened
to him, Saint Paul did not get depressed; he did not get Posttraumatic Stress
Disorder (PTSD); he did not stop working. Why? Well, when he said, “I
have been crucified with Christ; yet I live, no longer I, but Christ lives
in me” (Galatians 2:19b-20a), he wasn’t just speaking flowery
poetry—he meant it, literally. He really was “dead” to
psychological conflicts about pride and revenge.
Just like Saint Paul,
all those who live devout Christian lives will experience periods of uncertainty
and anguish—all aspects of personal suffering. Just look at the lives
of the saints. But, if everything is accepted with complete faith, none of
it has to become a psychiatric disorder.
Remember, worry can make
nothing happen except disaster itself.
The only treatment for
. . . trauma is spiritual. Religious mystics have said for ages that you
only begin to live when you learn to die to yourself in every moment. So
when your life is motivated by pure faith, hope, and love, when you are prepared
to die in any moment, and when death is no longer a fearful, ugly mystery,
trauma has no place to sink its claws in you.
For example, anxiety
and nightmares following a trauma can often be the result of repressed anger,
and if the anger is resolved in a spiritual context, rather than suppressed
with medication, the “psychiatric disorder” of PTSD will resolve
right along with the anger. Similarly, depression is often the result of
anger turned inwards; it can derive from a desperate need for social approval
and a self-condemnation for not receiving that approval. But if you seek
only the approval of Christ, not the world, you have no reason for anger
and no reason to condemn yourself.
The
Unconscious
Even many ordinary,
non-abusive frustrations of childhood will provoke feelings of hurt and secret
fantasies of revenge. But because children are not usually taught to express
hostile thoughts and feelings by speaking about them—and because they
aren’t taught the psychological meaning of anger, and because they
aren’t taught the real meaning of mercy and forgiveness and
reparation—children quickly learn, through fear and guilt, to hide their
true feelings from their parents.
The ultimate psychological problem, however, is that
these unexpressed thoughts and feelings get pushed into the unconscious where
they continue to grow in darkness, like mold on the walls. It may be hidden
from conscious sight, and it may be hidden from public view. But it can’t
be hidden from God.
That is, unconscious anger, no matter how much you try
to deny it, will continue to stain all your interpersonal relationships.
With this anger festering inside of you, it becomes almost impossible to
give true love to anyone, including God, even in Confession. Right now, when
difficult things happen to you, you fall kersplash! right into the swamp
of childhood anger.
Some individuals from
dysfunctional families are often drawn to religious life—or quasi-religious
life (i.e., secular religious orders)—because they think that obedience
is easy. But, really, obedience for them is not an act of love, it’s
an act of spite, a mere psychological defense against unconscious
anger. “All right. So you’re going to treat me miserably? Well,
I’ll show you! I’ll take everything you can dish out and I’ll
take it without a murmur. So there!” But, oh! Just wait. Slowly the
frustration builds, and then the anger erupts! It all goes to prove the point
that you can’t carry your cross if you are carrying
resentment.
In the field of psychology
and psychoanalysis, only one psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, clearly understood
and articulated the unconscious aspects of our human brokenness. Psychoanalysis,
though, can offer no healing from this wretched state of being; all
psychoanalysis can do is encourage us to face our being through an honest
awareness of its lack. Real healing for our brokenness comes only from Christ
in the broken bread of the Eucharist, but as long as we keep defending our
own unconscious attempts to protect ourselves from emotional pain,
we will never be able to allow Christ to heal us.
Our entire social structure
has its unconscious basis in the need to “hide” feelings of
vulnerability and helplessness with feelings of power and grandiosity. Just
look at our political system, our law-enforcement system, and our military
system. It’s all filled with overblown rhetoric and pride.
And look at some of our most profound social problems
today. Certain elements of certain societies feel oppressed and disavowed.
So, to make themselves feel powerful, they lash out with violent acts. Those
who are terrorized feel momentarily helpless, and then they respond in turn
with grandiose acts of retaliation.
So, if our entire culture has oriented itself around
power and retaliation as a response to fear and vulnerability, imagine how
difficult it can be for one individual to be healed from the depression and
grandiosity that result from this unconscious cultural infection.
And that is why Christ calls us out of what we merely
think we are and, through an experience of true love, leads us into
the depths of a pure heart.
Our wills are motivated
by desire, and desire is largely unconscious. In fact, it is through the
“desire of the Other”—that is, social desire, such as in movies
and TV and music and advertising—that we become “infected”
with anti-Christian values without even being aware of it. Moreover, there
are powerful, unconscious parts inside all of us that are so terrified of
abandonment and loss that they will refuse holiness itself in order to seize
from the world any satisfaction and pleasure they can get, pursuing their
desires at all costs, even if the ultimate cost is hell itself.
Therefore, the unconscious
can be examined only indirectly, through linguistic associations, dreams,
and behavioral clues. Any attempt to approach the unconscious directly will
be met with fear and denial.
Have you ever had a dream
in which you are a passenger in a car while someone else is driving? That’s
an unconscious way for you to realize that, in terms of your current behavior,
you are being pushed—that is, driven—by some hidden emotional issue.
The dream may not tell you exactly what the issue is, but it does give you
the clue that, just as you can be driven like a passenger in a car, so your
life is being driven by some need outside your conscious awareness. Finding
out what that “need” might be is the conscious task of interpreting
that dream.
Just as a child who does
not understand the concept of dirt and disease will resist taking a bath,
persons who do not believe they are governed by unconscious defenses will
resist spiritual purification. When confronted by personal trials, they will
tend to seek a way to “get rid of the problem.” And what a wasted
opportunity! If only they would look inside themselves with deep scrutiny
so as to recognize and then remedy the unconscious conflicts keeping the
problem alive, they could see that the trial is God’s way of calling
them to overcome old weaknesses and develop new virtues.
A conflict refers
to the psychological fact that one part of your mind wants healing and health
and another part of your mind resists healing. This resistance usually derives
from two things. First, because you have been so mistreated by others, in
the depths of your unconscious you secretly believe that you are worthless
and don’t deserve anything good. Second, because you are so angry at
others for having mistreated you, you experience a certain unconscious
satisfaction in maintaining feelings of victimization so that you can
“throw your pain back into their faces” in protest. Thus, to be
psychologically and spiritually healed you must recognize and resolve your
conflicts about healing itself.
When you are tormented
with scruples you are essentially caught in an unconscious conflict, such
that even as you are confessing your sins you are secretly trying to hide
them.
Sadly, persons untrained
in psychology have a tendency to scoff at the idea of unconscious defenses.
“That’s ridiculous. My life isn’t controlled by
defenses. I’m not secretly afraid of the world!” Therefore,
such persons have three choices. They can enter psychotherapy and find out
for themselves that what I say is true. Or they can submit to spiritual
purgation, as described by Saint John of the Cross, and let the Holy Spirit
show them what is true. Perhaps, like Saint Catherine of Genoa, they will
find “many natural desires destroyed within me which had previous seemed
to me very good and perfect; but when they were thus removed I saw that they
had been depraved and faulty, and . . . which, being hidden
from me, I had not supposed myself to possess” (Life and Doctrine,
XXIV). And the third option? They can continue to believe that saintliness
is a “denial of humanity,” and in the process they can essentially
deny their capacity for holiness. In that case, they will have to stand on
that terrible day before Christ the Judge and find out the hard way what’s
true and what isn’t.
Victimization
In the ancient sense
of the word, victim means an animal offered in sacrifice. These
sacrificial animals, however, did not offer themselves—they were taken
from the flocks—and so, through the ages, the term victim became
unconsciously associated with the idea of someone who (a) loses something
against his will or (b) is cheated or duped by another. Consequently, in
modern secular society at least, the meaning of a holy victim has
been lost to us, and our use of the term victim carries with it all
the unconscious resentment we feel for being cheated, duped, or unfairly
treated. In essence, according to today’s language, a victim is someone
who has been victimized.
And so, when we call someone a victim today we imply
that the person suffered unwillingly and unfairly; moreover, according to
modern sensibilities, we unconsciously assume that this injustice deserves
some compensation. If the compensation does not come freely, we demand it.
We sue. We protest. We even kill.
This very attitude, this bitterness and resentment for
having been treated unfairly, is the poison that prevents emotional wounds
from healing.
In contrast, those who entrust the pain to God free
themselves from unconscious resentment and blame; in letting their suffering
joyfully flow through them in imitation of Christ as the true holy victim,
they choose not to feel victimized. No matter what happens to them,
they never lose the mystical peace of healing through divine love.
Christ was, and
is, a victim in the ancient sense of the term, which referred to an
animal offered in sacrifice: as the Paschal Lamb, Christ willingly offered
Himself in sacrifice on the cross for our salvation. Keep in mind, though,
that in His sacrifice, Christ neither lost anything nor was He cheated or
duped. He did, however, “cheat” death of its power over us, and,
in that sense, death itself was made a “victim” of His
sacrifice.
If we get caught in feelings
of victimization, then, we will always be trying to tell others what to do.
This can happen openly through argumentativeness, protest, or aggression,
and it can happen in subtle, unconscious ways, such as sarcasm, cynicism,
and passive aggressiveness. And when others don’t do what we want them
to do, then we feel even more victimized. It all becomes a vicious
circle.
Whenever you pray for
divine guidance, answers will come through encounters with mundane, daily
events. As these events occur—however difficult or disappointing they
may be—ask, “What is God trying to teach me in this?” Then
open your mind and heart to what you need to learn about yourself through
your encounter with the event. And grow in wisdom.
In contrast, if you complain in bitterness, “Why
is this happening to me? Why is God so mean to me?” you will remain
stuck in feelings of victimization and you will squander the spiritual gifts
God is giving you.
Only by accepting the
spiritual and psychological death of your worldly identity can you step outside
the victim role. Only when you stop desiring to get anything from the world,
and only when you start giving to the world what you don’t really
“have”—pure, divine love—will you stop being a victim.
Only by breaking bread and giving it away can you multiply it.
None of this is easy.
It doesn’t happen just by thinking about it. It requires mental and
physical discipline. It takes hard work. It takes courage. And, if your father
was lacking, then you lack courage, don’t you? Therefore, the only way
to learn to trust in God is to strip away everything we use to hide from
Him so that, left with nothing of our own making—with no arrogance,
no pride, no hatred, and no bitterness for what others have done to us—we
have no choice but to acknowledge our wounds, feel the pain, bring it all
to Christ, and depend on Him alone.
  
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