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
----------------------- 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 the psyche of
a believer to make a hundred and eighty degree 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 their own soul. The less darkness there 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. 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 is
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 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 principles
and effect 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 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 the 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 if she was thrown back into her abusive childhood and
even further back, into hell devoid
of any hope to escape – all those
feelings I repeat reaching a pinnacle while she is watching a narcissist priest
bring forward the Cup with Christ, her Beloved.
