When Spirituality is Evil
In your quest to find answers, relief and solutions, as you play General manager in your relationship, you’ve undoubtedly come across many different approaches to how to change yourself in relation to your life, and how to fix your behaviors and/or reactions, in hopes that it may help prod him to do the same. You are desperately seeking help and counsel, advice and comfort-whether you are glued to Oprah and Dr. Phil, reading women’s magazines, talking to ministers, getting involved in church, praying for your man and/or yourself-you begin to look for some esoteric, mystical or metaphysical reasoning for what you are experiencing.
“Everything happens for a reason” “Everyone is our teacher and student” “ What would Jesus do?” You read current trendy and popular spiritual ideologies such as The Secret or The Power of Now, and it at first seems to be a relief, but what it really does is help propel you back into or to remain entrenched in denial of what you are experiencing. You really get freaked out that you somehow “created” this reality or that your soul incarnated to experience this relationship for it’s “lessons.” You tell yourself that relationships of any sort are strange in what they bring out in us. Some people intimidate, others bring you out of your shell. Some people you feel you can be yourself with, others you feel inhibited by. For whatever reasons, sometimes our “energies” with another can conflict, irritate or magnify tendencies we have. Some people just seem to bring out our worst. Some people really do hit our buttons, our delicate emotional nerves, the Pandora’s box of a lifetime worth of pain that we pull in our wagon. We listen to pop-psychology and new wave spirituality's that suggest we are subconsciously attracting and re-creating past traumas in the hopes to find closure and to “fix” the past. This only serves to confuse us more, until we are out of it.
"How the hell do you change your unconscious thoughts when you aren’t conscious of them?" you wonder. You didn’t think you were different than a lot of people who haven’t created this in their world, and you know many people who don’t feel all that great about themselves. And you are angry as the world sits back and judges and says “You were both at a fault. Him for doing, you for letting, so, just let it go, move on, get past, let it be, it is what it is, and focus on you, not him.” You set out to change your perceptions, give him a break-and this is where “forgiving” and any spiritual paradigms can really get you into trouble by fostering and cementing a severe form of denial.
Much of my adult life has been spent exploring spiritual avenues for peace and happiness, and I have dabbled in many of the worlds’ religious and spiritual beliefs. I am all for that. I have a few beliefs myself. However-while you are in midst of an abusive relationship under its dictatorship, and even shortly after you’ve come out of it, be very careful what you read and get into to try and help “heal.” I strongly suggest a counselor well versed in personality disorders or Domestic abuse and violence-because the spiritual tenets can and will confuse you further.
As it is, society expects us as women to be the nurtures, the caretakers, “Mother Earth”, goodness and light, love and warmth, emotionally caring and fostering peace. That is our nature. Yet at the same time, we are humans, with human natures. When you are still involved with a man who is abusing you, and you start following paths that tell you to live in the moment only, that the past and future don’t exists, that you create reality with your thoughts, that you must forgive and turn the other cheek, and that anger is “bad“-it can really, for lack of a better word-fuck you up.
As you are being abused, you decide that you are going to “forgive” him. That you’ve just been perceiving him wrong. If you come from a Judea-Christian background, it may be part of why you have put up with him at all. Lots of things in those religions to suggest that you have to forgive your enemies, love people and treat them as you want to be treated, and if he is spiritually abusing you, he will conveniently throw biblical passages at you that suggest that a woman’s place is to respect and obey her man. If he has no beliefs, he will simply play up on yours and press that guilt button to suggest that you are NOT the spiritual person you are trying to be, or are, and that you are really "bad."
The spiritual guilt you may feel alone makes it hard to leave him. Your spiritual beliefs tell you that people are essentially good, and that you need to show them compassion and love, and because he is so abusive you assume that is what he needs more of. Jesus forgave the worst in people, so you think, you should as well. Buddha never let anybody get to him this way, the Dali Lama has peaceful protests, and Gandhi himself said “Be the change you want to see in the world.”-ascetics is cool, and anger and rage is “sinful” or at the very least, not spiritual, not enlightened, "not cool."
So, you are going to love him even MORE. You are going to show more compassion and caring, because LOVE is the answer, LOVE is everything. You want to be the light worker, the angelic enlightened one who forgives them- for they know not what they do.
No sisters, they DO know. And if you can be a light worker, then you have met a dark worker. You cannot change the abuse by changing your perceptions about it. These life philosophies are very wise and helpful indeed-AFTER YOU ARE AWAY FROM YOUR ABUSER. Once you’ve accepted the REALITY that it he is EXACTLY what he seems to be. You are not just being “negative.” You are not choosing to see him this way, your “perceptions” are not off. Your thoughts certainly did NOT create him-he was like this before he met you and will be afterwards,and if you just shift your focus from his bad onto his “good”, he will not magically shift along with it.
It is OKAY to judge him and his behavior towards you and others you learn he is hurtful to. It’s OKAY to be angry. If it makes you feel better-even Jesus himself got angry at no good people. All the love and light in the world isn’t going to change what is between you and this man-start loving yourself. Start forgiving yourself. Just because you forgive a person, doesn’t mean that you have to take their crap. Forgiveness in the form of allowing yourself to give chance after chance to be walked on, is not forgiveness, it is martyrdom. Yet its often why we take them back, whether they do the leaving or we struggle to.
In my case, I really used to hang on to the notion that the drug abuse and alcoholic drinking that these men do is the reason why they are abusive. How could I not have compassion and forgive that? If they could just clean up, get sober, get straight, find God themselves-it could get better. I’ve seen it happen with other men. I’ve seen it happen with women. People get away from that, and they change. It took me forever and a day to accept that some people, aren’t just nice guys with a drug problem that made him bad, but that they are bad guys, who just happened to be addicted to drugs.
If you think that you may have somehow created it, because your “thoughts”, perhaps because you’ve been exposed to abuse so many times in the past, your subconscious thoughts and beliefs think this is “normal”, okay. Believe that. But get the hell out of the relationship and then ponder all of that, and heal it. UNCREATE him.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment