Several
years ago I wrote in my paper
‘The curse of the
choice’:
“I am
convinced that many disorders have in their very
beginning a double bind of the choice between
good and evil, life and death presented by the
closest attachment figure, mother or her
viceroy.
The
formula of the “original choice”: a quadruple
bind
abusive mother
to
stay = death to leave = death
----------------------- child
-----------------------
to stay = life to leave =
life
The
upper line: To stay with an abusive mother means
to die (it feels like it to a child; it is
always the spiritual reality and sometimes the
physical reality as well) but to leave her also
means death for a child according to her primary
instinct. It is the first double bind which
forms the basis of the future persistent
darkness in the life of an individual, along the
line “there is no exit” out of any life
situation which involves a relationship with
other(s).
The
bottom line: To stay with an abusive mother
means to live (the security that a child needs)
but to leave her means also to live (this is the
voice which grows stronger as a person grows
older; a mother will defend herself against it
via inducing shame and guilt into her child,
crushing her personality and thus keeping her on
a “baby level” psychologically). This is the
second double bind which is “a fake light of
hope” in the life of an individual, the “secure
passivity” of never growing aided by the dreams
of something better which are never realized.”
Further
in that paper and in several others I explored
the effect of the parental abuse on the
relationships of a grown abused individual with
God. I established that in the beginning of her
relationship with Jesus Christ such a person
inevitably relates to Him as if He was her
abusive parent, reincarnating a parent in
Christ, so to speak. Paradoxically, the
perceived love of God triggers an automatic
response, a fear of inescapable doom that is
always attached to “the love” she knew before.
If a
person perseveres, with time she will gain
enough experience of being with Christ to
realize that He is Love that cannot contain even
the slightest trace of evil or darkness –
therefore the quadruple bind in which she has
existed for all her life begins dissolving.
There is still a choice but now it is a choice
between evil and good, between Satan and Christ
– not between “good evil” and “evil good”,
between “evil God” and “Divine evil”. The
accumulating new experiences of Love untainted
by the evil will eventually cause a psyche of a
believer to make a hundred eighty degrees turn,
from the vector of fear i.e. inwards (the
habitual mode of relating to others formed by
the quadruple bind) to the vector of trust,
outwards.
I will
note here briefly that it follows from the
definition of God as light in Whom there is no
darkness that anyone who wishes to be with Him
must get rid of the darkness in own soul. The
less darkness is in the believer the fuller is
his union with Christ, the most desirable state
for a Christian soul and the sole purpose of her
life. Only a desire to be with Christ can enable
a soul to endure her “undoing” by Him, from the
evil that the abuse had incorporated in her very
structure. The words are inadequate to convey
what is at stake even if a very legitimate
parallel with an attachment to a human person is
employed because Jesus Christ, while being a
perfect human, is immeasurably more i.e. He is
God; His divinity raises this attachment and
everything that involved to the level of the
absolute, life or death, all or nothing. It is
all about the taste of the meaning of existence
of a soul at last – justification, redemption,
deification – in one word, it is living through,
not just reading, the Gospel story, with Christ,
the story being applied to me, the
concrete me. It is the experiential
knowledge of the truth of Christian revelation,
something a believer gets to know in the
biblical sense of this word, soul, spirit, and
body.
The
objective reality which a believer discovers
experientially: Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is
Love and He cannot change. The believer then is
always perfectly safe with Him; this safety is
the foundation of her path to Him, something
that initiated her restructuring. Christ is the
Head of the Church and the Church is His Body,
according to the Christian teaching. A believer
then, abused or not, has all rights to expect
the Church of Christ to be the safest place for
her or for him.
Unfortunately, it is not always so. I do not
mean what is much talked about nowadays, the
child sexual abuse within the Church, although
its principals and effect are in essence do not
differ from what I am about to describe. I am
interested here in a more subtle manifestation
of the same phenomenon, namely a situation when
a victim of a narcissistic abuse in childhood
later in life finds Christ, learns to trust Him,
comes to His Church and then one day out of blue
suddenly beholds her abusive mother being
reincarnated in the Church, in a sight of a
priest holding the Eucharistic Cup. I am
very interested to understand what is there that
makes an adult, a firm believer who knows the
Love of Christ on her own experience, to feel as
she was thrown back into her abusive childhood
and even further back, into hell devoid
of hope to escape – all those feelings I
repeat reaching a pinnacle while she is watching
a narcissist priest to bring forward the Cup
with Christ, her Beloved.
Let us
consider again the dilemma of an abused child,
a Quadruple Bind-I:
abusive mother
[biologically, a source of life]
to stay
[with mother] = death to leave
= death [without mother]
------------------------------------------
child
-------------------------------------------------
to stay [with mother] =
life to leave = life
[without mother]
Compare it with
Quadruple Bind-II:
narcissist priest [“source” of
Life (communion=Christ)]
to stay [with Christ]=
death to leave = death
[without Christ]
---------------------------------------
believer
-----------------------------------------------
to stay [with Christ] = life
to leave = life [without
Christ]
They are identical, with one small
difference: in the first case it is the mother
who is considered and named and the actions of a
child are in relation to her; in the second case
a narcissist priest is considered but the
actions of a believer are in relation to Christ.
In a case of a mother it is “staying with
mother – separation from mother”;
in a case of a narcissist priest it is
staying with Christ – separating from
Christ (we are considering here a case of a
believer whose primary reason for coming to the
Church is to be united with Christ, in the
Eucharist; he feels that he cannot live without
communion with Him).
The way
out of Quadruple Bind-I (mother), the
diagonal lines:
to stay
[with mother] = death to leave
= death [without mother]
------------------------------------------
child
-------------------------------------------------
to stay [with mother] =
life to leave = life
[without mother]
i.e.:
to stay
[with mother] = death and to leave = life
[without mother]
or
to leave [without mother] = death and to stay
= life [with mother]
Those
two lines are representations of two mutually
exclusive realities, “an abusive mother, a
murderess” and “a good mother, a life-giver”.
The way out of
Quadruple Bind-II (narc. priest), the
diagonal lines:
narcissist priest [“source” of
Life (communion=Christ)]
to stay [with Christ] =
death to leave =
death [without Christ]
--------------------------------------------
believer
---------------------------------------------
to stay [with Christ] = life
to leave = life [without Christ]
i.e.:
to stay [with Christ] =
death and to leave = life [without Christ]
or
to leave = death [without Christ] and to stay =
life [with Christ]
Those two lines are
representations of two mutually exclusive
realities, “a narcissist priest, a murderer” and
“a good priest, a Life-giver”.
Compare
now the first and second lines of two binds, of
mother and of priest.
The
second lines are identical and straightforward;
they represent normality:
to leave
[without mother] = death and to stay = life
[with mother] – “a good mother, a life-giver”
to leave = death
[without Christ] and to stay = life [with
Christ] – a good priest, a Life-giver (Christ)
But the
first lines present different pictures:
to stay
[with mother] = death and to leave = life
[without mother] – “an abusive mother, a
murderess”
to stay [with Christ] =
death and to leave = life [without Christ] –
narcissist priest, a murderer
It is
possible to come to a conclusion that the mother
is a murderess so the line makes a sense (albeit
unbearably painful).
It is impossible though to reconcile oneself
with “to stay with Christ in communion – death
and to leave Him – life”. Impossible. It
would be very straightforward if we connected
death with the one who spreads it, not with
Christ:
to stay [with a narc.
priest] = death and to leave = life [without a
narc. priest] – narcissist priest, a murderer
makes a
perfect sense and there would be no question
whether to leave or not if there was no
Christ involved – not just “a good priest”,
a mask a narcissist priest wears but Christ in
communion, the omnipotent God.
To a
believer, Christ is huge and overweights a
priest (and a mother as a matter of a fact; this
is why the healing is possible). Yet, they are
joined via the Holy Communion (a priest as a
consecrator and distributer); the bind works in
proportion with the faith of a believer in the
Real Presence. The more a believer is attached
to Christ the more she is likely to stay. The
more she believes in His omnipotence the more
she is likely to disregard the narcissist abuse
and its effect on her. Paradoxically, in a
mind of an ardent believer, to leave is “to make
Christ smaller than a narcissist priest”.
Ultimately, to leave means to betray Christ.
Hence
here is the real “hook” of the whole situation:
if I leave I will give to a narcissist priest
(a human) more importance than to Christ (God);
if I stay I will reinforce that a narcissist
priest (a human) does not matter and Christ
(God) can nullify every evil. If I leave I deny
the omnipotence of God.
Staying though erodes a soul and a body and
works as a “proof” that faith in Christ (God) is
futile. From here follows that the
phenomenon of a narcissist priest in the Church
of Christ turns upside down all teaching without
altering anything dogmatically: staying in the
Church for the sake of Christ, because I love
Him, inevitably ruins a believer and his faith.
[I
consider here the situation when there is no
other church around available (i.e. a place
where one can receive communion). Yet, the same
dynamics work when there is a choice because of
the very nature of the narcissistic abuse i.e.
invisible, mind-clouding, gas-lighting and so on
(as I stated before I am not considering here
the sexual or physical abuse but emotional and
spiritual which a narcissist seem to radiate
naturally; this phenomenon was explored in
‘Antipriest’ and ‘The heart of the New
Testament’). For example, a believer may reason
that “Christ will protect me – why should I
leave my congregation?” or “to run away is
cowardice, Christians should not be cowards”,
etc.]
To add
blur:
to leave = death
[without Christ] and to stay = life [with
Christ] – a good priest, a Life-giver (Christ)
to stay [with Christ] = death and to leave =
life [without Christ] – narcissist priest, a
murderer
are in
fact not two entirely opposite realities. To
leave Christ, the Ultimate Life, is always death
regardless who is a priest, good or evil. To
stay with Christ is always life, regardless who
is a priest, good or evil. It is so
metaphysically speaking. Psychologically
speaking, it is death to stay with Christ if the
evil (a narcissist priest) is a compulsory
attachment to this staying – not because Christ
“is not powerful enough” but because a believer,
a human being, is not strong enough to withstand
the evil without consequences. Contrary to the
Church teaching about the validity of the
Sacraments, the evil priest is capable of
destroying communion – not metaphysically but in
the mind/soul of a believer. Or, better to say,
he is not destroying the One Whom he gives,
Jesus Christ in communion – he destroys the
receiving end, a human being so eventually there
is no one to receive. Hence the Church’s
teaching is true, nothing changes the validity
of the sacrament per se, objectively speaking –
if the communion was not to be received, not to
relate to – but then of course it would not be
called communion.
I would
like again to highlight quite unthinkable: more
ardently a believer (abused when he was a child)
wishes to receive Christ more damaged he will
end up. More vivid and conscious is his
communion with Christ, more damage from a priest
he will suffer. An argument, that the holier is
an individual the easier for him to withstand
the evil, does not work in this particular case
in my opinion because of the perceived
“impossible mix”, of the good and the evil
(shadowy, zero) distributing Good (infinite,
the Source of all). It is akin to the shiver and
shock one experiences when one reads about a
murderous mother. If the evil was scattering the
Hosts on the ground and pissing on them it would
not be shocking at all. So it is the perception
of unthinkable what screws up a believer’s mind
and soul returning him back to the beginning of
his life, but this time the abuse is multiplied
by the infinite component, God, attached to it.
I propose that “the unthinkable”, the perceived
mix of the good and the evil is the real trigger
of the emotional flashbacks and the most
powerful weapon the evil can get, over a soul.
Hence
the formula of re-traumatisation in the
narcissistic true i.e. possessing the true Holy
Communion church:
An abused child:
to stay
[with mother] = death to leave
= death [without mother]
------------------------------------------
child
-------------------------------------------------
to stay [with mother] =
life to leave = life
[without mother]
a
conclusion:
to stay
[with mother] = death and to leave = life
[without mother]
An abused adult who found Christ and now is
in the narcissistic church:
to stay
[with Christ] =
death to leave =
death [without Christ]
-----------------------------------------
believer
---------------------------------------------
to stay [with Christ] =
life to leave
= life [without Christ]
a
conclusion:
to stay
[with Christ] = death and to leave = life
[without Christ] – narcissist priest, a murderer
I will
put them together:
to stay
[with mother] = death and to leave = life
[without mother]
to stay [with Christ] = death and to leave =
life [without Christ] – narcissist priest, a
murderer
And, if
one tries to engage in “a rational action” of
separating Christ from a priest it becomes even
more all-embracing (all things are coming
together here making a perfect parody),
especially if one recalls the normal Christian
definitions, theological as well as
psychological, of a priest as a father and the
Church as a mother:
to stay
[with father, narcissist priest] = death and
to leave = life [without father, narcissist
priest]
to stay [with mother, the Church] = death and
to leave = life [without mother, the Church]
to stay [with Christ, God] = death and to leave
= life [without Christ, God]
What is
left then?
PS:
Notes on metaphysics
“When I see the heavens, the work of Your
hands,
the moon and the stars which You arranged,
what is man that You should keep him in mind,
mortal man that You care for him?
Yet
You made him little less than a god;
with glory and honour You crowned him,
gave him power over the works of Your hand,
put all things under his feet.”
(Psalm 8)
As it
was said above, a narcissist parent makes her
child to partake the knowledge of “evil good and
good evil”, “evil is always a part of good; good
serves to trap” etc. incarnated in her own
person. I tend to think that even when God is
healing the soul this knowledge remains present
(albeit consciously rejected), hugely in
unconscious, breaking out in a form of
irrational fears and nightmares which lessen
with a progress of healing.
When
such a person comes to a narcissistic parish, a
narcissist priest activates this unconscious
knowledge just like the ancient mysteries did
it, using symbols. Or as Christian sacraments,
the Baptism for example: we are buried with
Christ (the immersion) to rise with Christ
(emerging from water to the new life).
Similarly, in the Eucharist we receive the Body
and Blood of Christ to become one with Him. In a
case of the Church with valid (true) sacraments
and the faith in the Real Presence the communion
is not just symbol – it is the real Christ. An
extreme narcissist priest then, being flesh and
blood = the en-fleshed (incarnated) evil = being
totally controlled by the evil holds the Body
and Blood of Christ = the Absolute Good = God,
in the Cup and distributes them. He thus, in his
action, is acting out = activates the rejected
and now unconscious knowledge of an abused by a
narcissist parent parishioner, that the Good
exists only to trap him. Hence Christ, in his
mind, being in the Cup, is a trap. It is
impossible however, for a believer in God, to
think that Christ, God i.e. the pre-existent, is
being used by the evil (a shadow) hence the
natural end of this activation of unconscious is
“Christ = God made evil to trap me” – that is,
of course, destroys the Christian knowledge of
God. Hence a believer is presented with two
unthinkable: “God is a tool of Satan” and “God
uses the evil” – all this while approaching the
Cup with a firm conviction that “it is truly
Christ, my Lord and my God Who sacrificed
Himself for me”.
This is
how the childhood experience of the narcissist
abuse is raised, in the narcissist church, on
the metaphysical = eternal level and acted out,
the believer being forced – not by God of course
– to participate in the upgraded “mystery”, of
symbolic undoing of everything the Incarnation
of Christ has done (if the Incarnation
understood as an event which enables humans to
choose between good and evil and to resist evil,
being free from ancestral sin).
An
important development: while the abuse in
childhood is overwhelming there is typically a
hope, a dream about “a rescuer figure”. Hence
there is now, of the torture, which is
clouded/obliterated by habitual
depersonalisation/derealisation but there is
also an escape in a dream about the future.
The
sacraments and the Mass in the Christ’s Church
are beyond time, they are eternal. The Sacrifice
of Christ, on Golgotha, happens now,
during Mass and in eternity. It is the
eternal now and a believer is included in this
eternal now, of the Kingdom of God which is, in
Eucharist, is already now, the eternity now.
Hence the power of a narcissist priest: by the
means of his inclusion into that eternal now of
the Church – the inclusion which is not due to
God but to human perversion – he adds to each of
his actions the dimension of eternity. Thus the
re-experiencing the childhood abuse now has
eternal dimension. A believer is reliving his
abuse in eternity, having a full impression that
God ordered it this way and there is no escape,
ever. It is not the eternal Kingdom of God but
eternal hell, Christ being swallowed by Hell.
The “rescuer figure” of a childhood is a fake.
And, if a believer already has some experience
of Christ being omnipotent and a Rescuer indeed
he is even more broken, unable to reconcile the
two.