My
Christian path and my abuse recovery work have often been at odds, over the
“f-word:” Faith.
I
say that, to illustrate the unique challenges that come when a Christian, in
this case, me, locks antlers with the secular tools of healing, via
therapy and recovery work. Inner child stuff, exploration of options and life
choices, and viewing oneself as more than just a Christian woman can all
lead to some bumpy nights, where we need to fasten our seatbelts.
And
we need to realize there is no Bette Davis character of Margo Channing/ “All
About Eve” movie guided tour for the pleasure of doing so.
Big,
spiritual-human- being-wearing- underwear- being- pulled- up moments. And, I
found out during my personal experience, there’s often a lot of ping-ponging
between the two: the spiritual and the secular therapeutic paths. Managing the
inner child and the self-denying, in favor the bigger picture spiritual tendencies
are not about the smooth ride. Speed bumps are EVERYWHERE.
All
while trying, the entire time, to be loved, to be an individual, and to be healed.
This
is your friendly warning.
The
sticky wicket of the situation often centers on the faith issue. Looking that
squarely in the eyes, encountering the proverbial Kodiak bear who hasn’t eaten
in a few days, can make us realize just how powerful, misunderstood, and potentially
harmful the faith word and the magical thinking concepts can become as we try
to heal from the issues of life, while in therapy.
About
Faith:
“Now faith is the substance of things hoped
for, the evidence of things not seen.”
Hebrews 11:1
Faith.
Seeing
things that are not there.
Sure.
No problem reconciling that with good mental health.
Within
many a religious context, there is a pressure to practice blind, total
obedience to faith, while embracing how we see no evidence, whatsoever, of what
we are praying, wishing, hoping, and crying for.
Our
spirituality and our faith, it can be asserted, often demands that we
forsake fact and evidence, over that invisible substance of the “not yet.”
Refusal or inability to enthusiastically be able to do that can get us labeled
as weak, heretics, “Doubting Thomas’s,” and, of course, your favorite and mine,
“not good enough.”
Yay,
lots of healing and life- thriving to be found there.
We
can further be pressured, especially if we are hurt by abuse and
struggles to “pick a side.”
We
are pressured to believe and live that “all we need is God,” whatever that God
means to and for us.
“God
or bust,” perhaps.
We
want the Divine? Then we need to reject therapy. Besides, God will heal
us, without all of that shrink stuff.
All
we need is the Lord.
Uh-huh.
About
Magical Thinking:
“Now faith is the substance of things hoped
for, the evidence of things not seen.”
Hebrews 11:1
No, we will not get the unconditional love of
Mommy and Daddy.
No, we will not get a do-over of our
childhoods or the memories attached to them.
No, the traumas and the abuses of our younger
years will not be eradicated or undone.
We are encouraged to integrate the
imperfection, the pain, the disappointment, the grief, and the loss, in the
name of healing.
And sometimes, we are encouraged to not do
with this work without the influence of a Deity.
“God is dead.” Huh. Worked for Nietzsche, right?
Magical
thinking, after all, gets a bad reputation. It is representative of the toxic
hope, the codependency, and the unrealistic expectations that keep us mired in unhealthy
patterns and systems. We need to get real and accept what is, not what we yearn
for. The harsh, imperfect state of life, of our lives… and the world.
The harshness of imperfect people, like our families of origin. No room for
fairytale dreams to come true, through the toxic hope, a/k/a, the toxic faith,
of wanting the desires of our inner child selves to come magically true.
And we live
happily ever after.
Yeah, therapy
often slaughters that simplistic notion.
But, If we About Faith…
“So we are always of good courage… we walk by faith, not by sight.”
2 Corinthians 5:6-7
Here we are, back at the dilemma. Believing
what we cannot see.
But more than that. We walk towards
this faith, invest hope, time, love, energy into this faith, as we’re
taking our stroll.
Faith encourages us to look beyond the here
and now. And that can be dicey, let’s be honest.
At least, it was dicey for me. My spiritual
path recommended I trust in what I could not see. So, what, exactly, did that mean?
Give any abusive people multiple chances to redeem themselves and/or continue
to be intermittently toxic?
How was that going to go? How was that
going to speed up my healing process?
How was I going to reconcile the deep longings
and needs of my needy inner child, in the face of cold, hard reality?
Where was there room for miracles and the
Divine, when I’m simply trying to stay safe and survive?
I still wanted to believe in miracles. I
wanted to believe in love, especially concerning the people that I loved,
as well as believing in those who claimed to love me.
What am I supposed to do with those harsh challenges?
About Magical Thinking:
“So we are always of good courage… we walk by faith, not by sight.”
2 Corinthians 5:6-7
Well, I ping-ponged back into
my secular therapy. Not because I believed I needed to negate my faith, but because
I needed to preserve it… safely. No easy feat here. Through thought stopping.
Challenging the thoughts. Challenging the fears, or the “negative, unduly
catastrophic, faith.”
My secular therapy threw me a
curveball. As I have been about my healing process, I assumed that the
challenging and stopping of my thoughts would immediately require that I
banish the spiritual perspective. I could not, I reasoned, have both at the
same time, and be healthy at the same time. Something had to give.
But my challenged thoughts
and thought stopping, instead, dealt more with my version of my
negative faith, and less to do with ancient scriptures themselves.
Who/what told me that I
needed to be punished and mistreated? Did scripture do that?
Or was it, instead, the
inaccurate, harmful, disordered instructions of the fallible people and the
systems which may or may not have had agendas to control me?
Whatever the deeper and more
complicated answers may have been, it was still within my power and
responsibility to now take charge of my healing. Someone or something else may
have caused the damage. But what am I going to do NOW?
What would I believe about my
faith, my right to healing, and my worth? All were spiritual, regardless
of the secular counseling I was involved in.
About Faith:
“…if you have faith like a grain of mustard
seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will
move, and nothing will be impossible for you.”
Matthew 17:20
And
that leads me back to still more ping-ponging on the matter. (I never said this
was a straight, linear line to healing). In the many scriptures that address
Christian faith, this one stands out and dispels the fallacy that faith is
passive in nature. It is not.
Faith,
passive, twiddling thumbs, waiting on “someday my Prince will come.” You and I
are NOT Snow White!
“For as the
body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also.”
James 2:26
This
is beyond waiting for a Divine Savior. This deals with utilizing the provisions
we, as human beings, are Divinely equipped with, even while we are imperfect
screw ups, missing the point and the mark.
And
we are capable- and accountable- to do that. It has more to do with
willingness. Are we willing?
What
I needed to face about my own spiritual path, was that I had to address and
correct any passivity I had, in the name of faith. And that means I needed to
add some action to whatever belief I had. Waiting and twiddling holy thumbs
would only go so far.
Actions
can speak louder than words. And, if I insisted on weakly saying, “Move,
Mountain,” while not believing the best health for myself doing so, I
would be extremely limited with what I’d experience in my life.
But
wait.
My
life, my issues, and my faith were not solved in that one fell swoop. There was
more to be done.
About
Magical Thinking:
Matthew 17:20
Well,
well, well, we’re back here, at my therapy again, dealing with the spiritual within
the secular.
For much
like the recognition I realized I needed to put (secular) action to my
(spiritual) faith/lip service, conversely, within my therapy, I also needed to
allow for the unconditional and the unexpected to exist around the rigid
performance and results-oriented pressures I placed upon myself.
There also needed to be room for doable hope. Even hope in the potential for
miracles or unexpected, wonderful occurrences to occur.
I
needed to employ, at least, part-time, my inner child to believe optimistically when my inner cynic wanted
to slash and burn everything.
Ah,
moderation. Part faith, part acceptance of what is.
Faith
and Magical Thinking:
So,
where am I now?
Well,
to quote Stealers Wheel’s song’s lyrics…
“Here I am, stuck in the
middle with you.”
I
say that, not to be trite or cliché, but to proclaim the uneasy, messy, and
ongoing struggle of this healing thing, in and out of spiritual and secular
realities. I am trying to heal as a person of faith, even when
that faith has been influenced by lies, toxicity, harmful fairytales
assertions, and, of course, my own human fallibility.
And
all
of that, as trite and cliché as it sounds, will not go away.
I
also struggle, as trite and as cliché as it may be, to not throw the Baby Jesus
out with the bathwater as I endeavor to “practically” heal, employing methods
that go beyond scripture and showing up in a “place of worship” structure.
That’s not for the faint of heart either. I need to hang on, however
challenging it is to do so, to some
remnant of childlike faith and/or magical thinking, trying to reframe it in as
healthy of a life experience as I can.
So,
yes, Faith and Magical thinking: I need them both,
to a certain degree.
If
I have learned anything bumping along this bumpy night, without the Pleasure of
Bette Davis’ character, Margo’s company, it is that this issue is not
black and white, like the film, “All About Eve.”
I
would like to be more the insightful, wizened sage, with Eureka thoughts. Nope,
still, often times, only a hot mess in current day circumstances, possibly
bordering on identity crisis.
But
what takes some of the edge off from said bordering identity crisis is
recognizing faith and magical thinking are both more nuanced than we give them
credit for being. Faith is not necessarily always healthy, pure, and innocent.
Magical thinking is not always toxic hope. It’s not one-way good or bad regarding
either. Both are complicated, potentially abusive, harmful, disordered,
life-affirming, joyful, and
necessary for the human animal’s survival.
It
is my messy, subjective, in-process, personal belief that we need BOTH. We need
to examine, correct, implement, and derive meaning about what BOTH mean to and
for us.
Bumpy.
Uneasy. Imperfect. Painful. But necessary.
Maybe,
in a few years, I’ll feel radically different about that. But, from where I am
now, an ongoing individual, I am co-existing with them both.
There’s
value is doing so. I don’t believe, whether it’s of the faith variety, or of
the magical thinking variety, that will change any time soon.
So,
in the meantime, I say to you, “Have fun, and good health,
believing!”
Copyright © 2022 by Sheryle Cruse
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