When Love, Peace and Spirituality are Reaction Formations
Keeping it real
I had been mulling over the idea of writing a blog with the above title. After a discussion with a friend who has been through similar experiences to mine that included being lied about by someone who claimed spiritual authority and not really being supported by those who knew us both, here is the blog.
During discussions about this, my friend said something along the lines of everyone deserves the opportunity to be part of a spiritual group. This was in my response to including someone in a mediation group who had actively engaged in harmful behaviors toward me.
Well, they do until they don’t. “Don’t” includes any form of harm or abuse to another. Anyone can screw up, but truly conscious and loving people can own their behavior, call it out and make amends as needed. They are willing to dialogue about what has happened. Anyone who is too blind and unconscious to see and own their own behaviors does not belong in a group of those who have that consciousness. Any person who can’t see and own what they have done is sure to repeat the behavior. Someone who offends is stuck right there as far as their development spiritually and mentally. They become experts at creating delusions and getting others to buy into their delusion, but the truth is, they are parked at the place they offended. Every other assertion of ‘love’, ‘peace’ and ‘spirituality’ after this point is a reaction formation. (Reaction formation is a defense mechanism in which emotions and impulses which are anxiety-producing or perceived to be unacceptable are mastered by exaggeration of the directly opposing tendency.[1][2] The reaction formations belong to Level 3 of neurotic defense mechanisms, which also include dissociation, displacement, intellectualization, and repression. Wikipedia). Think homophobe who secretly engages same-sex activities, think of the spiritual authority/priest/monk who sexually offends yet rails against sexual misconduct, think of the little boy who bullies the girl he secretly has a crush on.
One ex-husband was a master of spinning delusion with his advanced degrees. His chronic lying and cheating required him to dig deeper into his delusion until that was all he had left. His gift to me was for me to see where I had been delusional and working through the pain. That work has resulted in the awareness that makes me unable to engage in self-delusion again. No more pretending not to see what is going on…with others or myself.
The kindest, most compassionate thing we can do for a friend who has/is offending is to tell them you see it and that they need to seek help. (Shunning those who are acquaintances is sufficient.) If they won’t seek help, we’re not missing anything by not having them in our lives. Keeping them around won’t result in their being saved from themselves. If there is anything I have learned over the decades that I’ve facilitated thousands on their paths to more conscious lives, is that unless they can make at least 51% of the effort, there is nothing I can do to help them. I have ended up regretting every time I made too much of an effort to help someone.
And here is another hard truth: if you do nothing, you are complicit in their abuse to another.
Buying into delusion is very, very harmful for our spiritual and mental health. Among other things, it creates double-bind communications. We see what is really going on but because we want to belong, we believe that person is our friend, and/or we don’t want to experience the discomfort of a disagreement, we gloss it over with some delusion or we dissociate from what we’ve seen. This behavior will create an internal split. And then we live in the split. Double-bind communications are considered one cause of schizophrenia. From the National Institute of Mental Health: Schizophrenia is a mental disorder characterized by disruptions in thought processes, perceptions, emotional responsiveness, and social interactions.
Doesn’t that describe the world we are living in? A world that is living in the split with disruptions in thought processes, perceptions, emotional responsiveness and social interactions? A world of no real consequences because so many can’t see what is going on, so many benefit from the global insanity and so many more who lack the courage to do the right thing.
We only get a different world when we create what we want to see in our micro-world. And it isn’t easy…we’ve been programmed for thousands of years to put up with behaviors that are anti-social. So few have values and the behaviors that go with them that will result in a transformed world…I still think that there are enough of us for a critical mass to create sanity. But I guess I’ll see!
Pura Vida,
Tree
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