The trap of spirituality

[trenton]

I am coming to the realization that my seeking of truth is fundamentally a self-deception designed to prevent me from true self discovery. This is common in people with trauma who try to find meaning, purpose, and healing through truth, God, love, and spirituality. So long as the pursuit of truth is a compensatory value based on trauma, it is not my genuine value.

This kind of behavior started when I was six. What happened was my mom accused me of sexually abusing my sister. I lied badly. This led to a cascading effect of trauma responses. This included my fear of self-deception which was rooted in my mother making me feel like a terrible person in addition to lying. The trauma was so severe that it undermined my entire sense of reality.

This is when I created a persona which revolved around seeking higher purpose and truth. These were not intrinsic values because they were imposed with the intent to rebuild a sense of self worth. In this process I isolated myself from others, convincing myself that love, connection, and relationships were either of low value or something that would fail to demonstrate the value of my existence. 

As I operated under the sense of valuing truth, I ended up creating a lot of defenses through intellectualization. This included the rationalizations for why incest is okay. I actually made countless intellectualizations designed to shield myself from underlying pain. Over the years this developed into using spirituality and philosophy as a source of further intellectualization. Therefore, although the point of spirituality is to discover the true self, for me these philosophies only served to obscure any genuine self discovery. This is likely the reason why people can work on this stuff for decades and get nowhere.

I started to think about what my values might be if they were not truth, intelligence, God, or things of that nature. My intellectualization was never about truth. I know before the trauma I used to value love and connection. I felt that having a deep connection to someone gave me meaning and maybe it in a way validates my existence. I also held money as a high value. This makes sense because if I had 5 million dollars, then I would be free from the job I don't like which is sucking my life away. It makes sense then, that I can be looking for something that will make me money.

I came to these realizations as I did a deeper dive into biology and its implications in psychology. What I discovered is that in a freeing, liberating sense, I am a normal human being. It helps me to view myself and others through a more compassionate lens, seeing how my struggle shaped me along with the realization that I suffer in a similar way through similar challenges to a lot of other normal people. The desire to prove myself exceptional or special was also a source of seeking self worth, which is also very human and normal.

My mind continues to get more and more peaceful as I understand myself at deeper and deeper levels. In a sense the intellectual side of me was extremely helpful in driving me to seek this understanding. It drove me to research so much about a variety of topics in seeking freedom from my own inner chaos. I may continue to educate as needed, but I feel my mind slowing down significantly after processing this trauma linked to the beginning of my truth seeking.

Perhaps true self discovery can finally begin for me. As it stands I have a lot of possible exploration in terms of what could fulfill me. Currently, I don't really know, but my childhood values points to the possibility of love being a source of fulfillment.

[Juressic]

Great for you! Intellectualization is the first part of self-actualization. Self actualization is like a slingshot, the more you pull back further you will throw but problem is if you pulling back and never transcending your "knowledge", especially for people with some kind of trauma who are using Intellectualization as a quick scheme solution to untie their knots and set them free, but what could happen is the opposite... Instead of using wisdom to actively scatter our mind, to free our essence (by contemplation, deep feeling, meditating with new info, etc...), we are filling ourselves with more unactualized pieces of information in hop for some eureka moments. But unfortunately, chances are lower as your intellectualization gets bigger. We are not our mind, mind is our tool and that tool is covered with tons of garbage that we feel as tensions, fears, pain....
Yeah, we get to a point in our life when we realize that discovery should begin because we have covered our essence with intellectualization and that way we are becoming homeless, our mind is occupying our organs and pushing us out of our body.  At some point our body becomes like a spooky fortress that we have to conquer back, we become totally oblivious of what is going on inside . Some people never accept that siege, they rather decide to get lost in the forest to get drunk with someone.  😊

[Lyubov]

You’re brave for sharing a very personal story like that. I would really focus on cultivating a honest relationship with that part of you which was misunderstood and accused as a child. I would also suggest to you that in this moment no one can make you feel anything but yourself, the beliefs and viewpoints you choose. It seems you chose to see yourself as less than or damaged by what you went through as a child. But I would ask do you believe a child that is mistreated is less than or lacking value and not a part of this grand truth and spirit you label as a trap in your title? I would say you are whole and valuable no matter what you’ve went through and spiritually you’ve always been normal even if you may have been through these challenges and mistakenly saw yourself in a way as fundamentally altered by these events. You have always been a normal and lovable human being, no matter what.

Edited March 14 by Lyubov

[trenton]

@Lyubov Yes, the child is still part of this grand truth. In fact it is possible that everything about God and spirituality still stands as true.

The problem is that although it may be true in the ultimate sense, People who begin doing spiritual work are often unaware of the unconscious forces that get them into spirituality in the first place. If these forces involve severe trauma, then spirituality quickly devolves into further layers of an ego identity which in turn masks the deeper pain, and thus prevents self discovery.

I believe this is one of the reasons why spirituality fails for many people and why so many people fail to awaken. They could be chasing spirituality for their entire life hoping God realization will change their lives, but in reality they never realized that the reason they started seeking truth to begin with was actually to create an elaborate method of avoiding the truth.

Thank you for recognizing my value as a human being. I know your life is probably just as complicated and probably involves suffering that you never fully expressed along with various confusions and contridictions. Whatever struggle you face, I hope you know you were always lovable too.