There are many ways that spirituality can turn abusive.
Spiritual beliefs can be used to justify abuse,
to cover up abuse
and even be abusive in and of themselves.
I'm gonna be talking about these abusive friendly dynamics
over the course of my career at length,
but today, I'm gonna start with one;
And that is,
the abuse in the spiritual field surrounding the concept of reactivity.
Non Reactivity (A Doorway For Spiritual Abuse)
The first thing to understand is that most people in the world
and even in the spiritual field do not differentiate
between a reaction and the actions that are inspired from a reaction.
They're lumped into the same category.
Let me give you an example:
If you see a nasty comment from someone posted on your social media post
you may immediately react with feelings of being hurt,
feeling shame, flushing red,
feeling anger and the impulse to fight back.
This is a reaction.
If you act on the impulse by posting a mean comment back,
that is an action that was inspired by the reaction.
We need to make the distinction between reactions
and actions inspired by reactions.
It doesn't take a genius to see
that reactions can cause a lot of problems on the planet Earth,
For example, let's say that a wife cheats on her husband
and he gets so jealous, that's his reaction,
that he then murders his wife...
Nobody's gonna look at that and be like "oh, that was good".
Reactivity can lead to dangerous things.
And if we've been hurt in the past by people becoming reactive,
then it's easy for us to throw out reactivity
with the bathwater,
and make all reactions and reactivity not okay.
Traditional spiritual gurus
have perfected a persona into the world
of being individuals who either have no reactivity,
or who have entirely mastered their reactivity.
They set the standard
of not only what's expected of any master or teacher,
but also the standard of what being a perfect human is.
Therefore, our idea of what we all strive to be and must be
in order to be perfectly loved is non-reactive.
We imagine that in a state of non-reactivity,
we are constantly open, unconditionally loving,
and perfectly in control of ourselves.
The bottom line is,
if we subscribe to these ideas
and face non-reactivity as what we expect from ourselves,
as well as each other.
So what if I told you today
that you can't actually control your initial primary reactions?
Feelings don't exist inside of a vacuum.
They only arise as the result of something else.
This means feelings are always towards something or about something.
When you came into this world you were in essence,
engaging in the world through primarily felt perception.
You came endowed with the capacity to perceive,
as well as reflexes.
One of these reflexes which is really common
and most people know about, is the Moro reflex.
you see this in infants.
Where when you hold them on their back with their hands loose
they instantly react as if they are falling.
That reactivity is not something that the infant can actually control
The nervous system is going to take over,
it doesn't matter what the cognitive mind is going to say or not say.
Here's another example,
the child does not have to think about being abandoned
or the consequences of abandonment
when mom goes away,
it simply has a reaction to that separation
and cries out for its mother for her to come back.
That's another example of a reaction.
What we are dealing with here is cause and effect.
Can you imagine expecting a dog to not react when it's kicked?
Can you imagine poking a sea anemone with a stick
and expecting it not to close up?
Can you imagine expecting a baby calf
not to cry out when it loses its mother in a field?
Unless you are disconnected and dissociated,
you will have a reaction to things in the world.
It's called being alive.
Our reactions also happen
in direct proportion to what we've already experienced in our life.
So it's really common to hear people talking about
how someone overreacted.
Actually, there is no such thing as overreaction.
There's only ever reactions in direct proportion
to what we've previously experienced before.
We do this all the time, though, when someone reacts in a way
that we wouldn't have reacted if we were in the same place.
But guess what?
You didn't have the same experience.
Obviously, and I love using the scenario,
but it's really really good to use,
let's say that we're in a 4th of July party
and there are fireworks going off.
If somebody is freaking out and reacting as if they're getting shot at,
We may go: "Goddamn, that was overreaction".
But what if you knew that that person was at war?
What if you knew that that person was reacting in direct proportion
to what they were perceiving having occurred?
I need you to understand
that there's no such thing as an overreaction.
Your experiences become encoded in your nervous system.
Your nervous system then reacts accordingly.
For this reason I want you to watch my video titled:
Drama (How to Avoid Drama and Drama Queens)
The most abusive hallmark of an abusive home environment,
usually those of us, who are familiar with dysfunctional home dynamics
this takes place in the home with a narcissist.
What will happen is that the narcissist usually,
will inflict some kind of injury.
They'll do something.
Now the person who reacts to that something
is then made the bad guy.
So it's not what I did,
it's how you reacted that's the problem.
A few years back I was working with a woman
who grew up in this type of a dynamic
with a severely abusive man.
Now in this particular memory,
just to give you a picture of how this goes,
she was tied to a hitching post
and this man who was abusing her in her childhood
was forcibly raping her.
The force of the rape caused her to have a bloody nose
When he got done raping her,
and he noticed the fact that she was not only crying,
but having a bloody nose,
it's not the fact that he raped her that was the problem,
It's the fact that she's so weak for having a bloody nose and crying.
I'm gonna tell you a reality of our physical universe
which is not really something
that most people who are spiritual want to accept:
We live in a universe based on cause and effect.
Now I know that that can get highly complicated in a quantum universe,
but here's the thing...
If someone punches you hard enough in the nose, it's bleeding.
Guess what?
If someone sets up to punch you, you're gonna flinch.
You're gonna feel the hit of adrenaline.
So you can understand the potential spiritual abuse that can take place
when we make an enemy of reactivity all together,
I want you to picture this:
I want you to pretend that I walk up to you
and I punch you in the nose and it starts bleeding,
and then I go:
"Wow, something must seriously be wrong with you
because your nose is bleeding right now.
Like, you need to get that handled.
Maybe we should take you to see someone."
In the spiritual communities
we are doing this to ourselves and to each other
all the time.
We can't own the shame
of having done something that caused a negative reaction,
so we immediately make the person wrong for having a negative reaction.
And even more wrong for any action inspired from that negative reaction.
And this is called shame deflection.
To learn more about this dynamic of shame deflection,
I ask you to watch my videos titled:
Deflection (the Coping Mechanism from Hell)
and... The #1 Relationship Obstacle (and How Dissolve it)
If people refuse to feel their own shame,
they can't take responsibility.
This is true if someone is perpetually in the victim role
to escape responsibility,
or if someone is doing something to hurt others
and will not accept that fact, and thus makes the victim
the one to blame for his or her reactions.
I'm gonna give you a tiny,
and I mean infinitesimal little tiny little piece
of an example of how this works in spiritual communities:
We expect ourselves and each other
to have no reaction when someone betrays us.
It's just a part of us betraying us
and so if you just focus on that, you won't get mad back.
We expect ourselves and each other
to have no reaction when horrible memories are triggered.
"It's the past, it's not now.
if we can just be in the now, we won't feel those feelings."
We expect ourselves and each other to have no reaction
when someone says something painful to us.
Try to see them with compassion, instead.
They wouldn't be doing it if they weren't an even worse pain.
We expect ourselves and each other to have no reaction
when we lose our loved ones.
"There's no death, and if you feel loss you're stuck in illusion."
Do you see how this goes yet?
I can make a list 5,000 miles long about how spiritual beliefs
are used to suppress reaction and to make reaction wrong.
They're used to shame you if you have a reaction.
In other words, if you have a reaction
you're falling short of the standard of human perfection
and something is wrong with you.
How many times in social circles
have you heard the following statements?
"How people treat you is their Karma and how you react is your karma",
or "It's not what happens it's how you respond to it",
or "How you react emotionally is your responsibility".
Like I said,
it genuinely takes a freaking idiot
to not see that our reactivity if it goes completely unchecked
and if we're unaware of it, specifically,
that can lead to some seriously damaging ends.
Nobody's arguing with that.
But what I'm here to present to you today
is the real danger
in making an enemy of reactivity.
We can use these teachings
to avoid looking at and owning the impact we have on others completely.
That can lead to a wickedly painful world.
One where as if it's not bad enough
that we did something that had negative impact on someone and hurt them,
we also make them feel like something's wrong with them
for feeling bad or getting hurt or having a negative reaction
when we did that thing.
We can use these beliefs to completely avoid
seriously looking at what we're doing to other people
and what we need to do differently.
We can use these beliefs to shame ourselves on top of our pain,
which creates even more reactivity.
Aside from the obvious external world of pain
we can create through doing this,
what I'm really concerned about is that we can create an atmosphere
of such incredible toxic shame and self blame by doing this.
If we have this attitude that reactions are not okay,
we will make an enemy of our own emotions.
That's what will happen.
So as if it's not bad enough that they are occurring
and guess what? You can't help that,
what will happen is that on top of it
you'll feel like something is really bad and messed up about you for that.
In other words, every time you have a negative reaction to something,
you'll believe you're bad and wrong for having it
or that something needs to be fixed about you
if you even had the reaction.
Therefore instead of being able to address the very valid reaction you had,
you will immediately unconsciously invalidate it.
So this is how this works:
You have a painful reaction, all people do...
If you kick a dog, it's not gonna feel good.
So, there's that negative feeling.
If you have the judgment
that it's not okay to have a reaction to something,
then all of that "It's not okay this needs to be fixed"
"I'm not a good person because I had that reaction"
slides over the top
kind of like ice over water.
Now the only way to actually deal with your reactivity
Which is what we need to be doing not getting away from reactivity,
we need to be caretaking our reactivity,
you can't actually get down into it if you do that.
Instead, you're resting over the ice
kind of fighting with the ice,
and there's nothing you can do to make yourself feel better.
The shame will in essence suppress our reaction,
but the pressure of it will cause so much pain
that it will either explode or collapse.
And so often when we "overreact" in an emotional crisis,
or have an emotional breakdown,
this is the tormenting process that is occurring within us.
These beliefs lead to bigger reactions
instead of smaller ones.
I have to mention at this point
that if this is a chronic pattern in your childhood
it's a guarantee that the caretakers you had in your life
couldn't own that they ever caused a negative reaction within you.
These were people who couldn't own their own shame.
So, what happened when they inflicted some kind of pain
that caused you to have a negative reaction?
They made you the problem for having the reaction.
They took no responsibility for causing it,
and instead, decided the negative reaction
was not, could not possibly be warranted.
If any of you suffered from bulimia or were cutters,
or were diagnosed with borderline personality disorder,
you can thank this pattern for a lot of it.
I know that if many of you are watching this
and you've already made an enemy of reactivity,
then you're almost getting triggered when I'm talking
because what you're thinking is:
"Oh my gosh, I'm just gonna condone reactive abuse".
"So, for example if we condone reactivity
all we're gonna do is say
Fine! It's okay to just get mad and murder people,
revenge is fine, and all of this type of highly abusive stuff is fine."
That's why you wanna make an enemy of reactivity in the first place, right?
Because you think that's where the world is headed if you make it okay
Again, I wanna say that we have to separate out the concept of reaction
from the action that that reaction inspires,
and stop judging reaction as not okay.
You've got to accept that you're going to have a reaction.
It doesn't matter whether you want to or not.
And that initial reaction is gonna occur
at a much more primal level
far below your capacity to cognitively understand something.
So as to stop it in the process of occurring.
And at that level there is no such thing as overreacting.
If we accept this,
then we meet our reactivity.
We have to begin to care take our reactions
as if there's a real reason for the reaction.
A real reaction that was either caused or triggered by someone else.
This is the real responsibility we have...
is to face it as if it is valid, because it is.
If we sink into victimhood,
we avoid taking responsibility for caretaking our pain.
Which might not only involve finding ways to heal and feel better,
but also asking a person to change a behavior towards us.
If we sink into the opposite,
which is shame for having a reaction to being hurt,
we also take no responsibility for caretaking our very real reaction.
Every reaction that you have is valid and real
because it's coming from a real place.
The question is:
What is that place?
As long as you're alive, you're gonna have reactions
and so is everyone else.
Expecting yourself to read a terrible comment
somebody has put on your Facebook wall,
and to have no reaction,
is super super damaging.
Expecting yourself to lose a loved one,
not really feel grief, definitely not for long...
really, really abusive.
If we can see these initial reactions as valid and real
so as to not add shame on top of them,
we can figure out what that reaction is telling us
about our truth in the moment,
and about our past and unresolved pain,
and about what we actually need in this moment.
We can use them to become more aware.
We can address them like we would address real wounds.
And by doing that,
the actions we take towards others as a result of our reactions,
will actually change.
If a trigger is to blame in a situation
where you're having a reaction to something
that somebody else is doing,
it probably isn't their fault in that moment
that you're feeling the way that you're feeling,
but that doesn't make the way that you're feeling
and the reaction you're having not okay, and not valid.
It is absolutely valid.
So blaming them for the trigger, isn't fair.
But neither is expecting yourself not to have it
or telling yourself that something is sick or wrong with you
because you have it,
or telling yourself that because this is a trigger,
you shouldn't have the reaction towards the new situation.
So let's pretend that a dog who was battered,
goes to a new home,
and that new home is super loving.
You don't look at the dog and say:
"Oh, it shouldn't be having that reaction. It's ridiculous. It's just a trigger."
Even though it's in the loving home.
No.
That's gonna be a really really intense process of rehabilitation
that needs to take place.
So, we're not doing this with dogs...
Why are we doing this with each other?
We have the tendency of believing that if we just changed our perspective,
or changed our perceptions of what's occurring...
or changed the way we were thinking,
or we're enlightened enough,
we wouldn't have reactions in the first place.
Can you see that this puts you at war with reactions in the first place?
You can't take care of something
you don't think should be there in the first place.
You're not going to be able to meet something with compassion,
if you're judgmental towards it in the first place.
You're already pushing it away.
So how can you pull it close enough to explore it examine it and care take it?
I realize I'm beating a dead horse here,
but...
If you have a reaction and it's very real,
in the same way that if someone walked up to you
and hit your leg with a lead pipe and it broke,
you wouldn't be like:
"Oh my gosh, I don't know what's going wrong,
It couldn't possibly happen this way".
No, actually, that would be exactly in order
with the reaction that we'd expect your leg to have
to being hit with a metal pipe.
But it works the same way with emotions.
We have to look at the cause.
We have to look at what it caused us to feel in our bodies
and feel emotionally
and what it caused us to think.
We have to ask:
What is this letting us know about what we need?
We need to meet those needs
and this includes communicating needs that we have
to people around us.
Action, actually comes after reaction.
We have made an enemy of reactions
because we confuse actions that are taken as a result of a reaction
as a reaction.
We can intercept this chain
from reaction to action.
But we need to stop expecting ourselves
to intercept this chain from external event, to reaction.
Because let's just be honest, it's freakin futile.
Your reaction is always legitimate.
So what I want you to do
is to let your altering of your perceptions,
let your exploring of your emotions
and all of those types of steps you would usually take
to try to avoid reaction in the first place...
Instead, be a way of caretaking
or taking care of the reaction that has occurred.
If we wanna learn to intercept the chain between reaction and action,
what we have to do
is to stop trying to intercept the chain
between action that happened,
and the reaction we had to it.
Here's the thing,
if we're making an enemy of reactions,
you don't even have to say anything,
people can feel it in your energy field.
If you act like a reaction is not legitimate,
it will escalate the situation.
People will be a thousand times more likely to take an action
that causes serious impact
from reaction that is treated as if it's not legitimate.
Any reaction you have
can be used as a tool
to access more awareness about your personal truth
and universal truth.
But, beware of expecting yourself
to not have a reaction in the first place.
And especially,
beware of feeling shame for having a reaction.
Have a good week.
Join the volunteer subtitle group on Facebook ASK TEAL TRADUCTION/TRANSLATION