Recovering From People With A Spirit of Religion - Part Two - Ego

I want to continue on the subject of having a spirit of religion versus a spirit for God that I was talking about last week. This week I would like to talk a little bit about the warning signs to watch out for.

When I was growing up in a fundamentalist form of Christianity, television preachers were a common part of many people’s belief system. Some of our members believed so strongly in them that nothing could break their cognitive dissonance, not even failing to receive the reward that was promised for a big contribution. As my circle of friends grew beyond my church community, I realized that many people saw the untrustworthy television preachers for what they were. That doesn’t mean I think all television preachers are bad; I’m just saying be aware of the signs that may indicate one is untrustworthy. A few examples are: Is the preacher so charismatic that he outshines the message he is delivering? Does he frequently ask for money? When he asks for money, does he make you feel shamed or afraid something bad will happen to you if you don’t give? Does he promise rewards he can’t possibly deliver if you do give? Does he promise magical thinking solutions like immediate healing, immediate deliverance from financial woes, etc.? Does he have people who follow him blindly even when his promises don’t come true? Does he shun those and lead others to shun those who become aware and speak up to try to protect others from harm, even resorting to lies when necessary? Does he trigger on people who threaten his power? Most of these attributes, along with others, point to that person working from ego instead of spirit.

For those who can’t understand the “television preacher” stereotype, let me use another example. How many of us have heard similar things said about “used car salesmen?” How many of you have tried to buy a car from a salesman who knew how to guilt and/or shame you all the way to the pen laying on top of the contract?

Since I don’t believe all television preachers or used car salesmen are bad, I’m going to create my own term to describe the bad ones so I don’t do a disservice to the good ones. For the rest of this blog post, I’m going to call the religious leaders/people with dangerous charismatic qualities used religion salesmen. Or, maybe I should change that to user religion salesman, because too often these types of religious leaders/people use others to meet the needs of their own ego.

If a person has these qualities, whether they are a user religion salesman or not, my advice is to tread lightly. Actually, they can dominate in any setting, but my goal today is to talk about religious settings. My advice is beware wherever you encounter that type of personality. I want to give good religious people as much consideration as I gave the good television pastors and used car salesmen, so please let me add that I met many good people in both religions. My goal in this post; however, is to help people who are vulnerable like I was heal from and protect themselves from those who are not ethical. In this post, I will talk about how ethical both of my Reiki teachers were. I will talk about how ethical my Christian mentor Linde Grace was. I also talk about a group of ethical healers I know from a retreat. And, there are others as well. Unfortunately, vulnerable people often get snatched up by predatory personalities before they have an opportunity to build relationships with the good people; therefore, I want to share what I learned when I was in that state in case it is helpful to others.

In last week’s post, I talked about how I changed religions for a while. While in the other religion, I worked with spiritual gifts that are common in the Appalachian Mountain culture my family comes from. My grandmother had the gift of prophecy. I grew up hearing stories about how she predicted many things in the family before they happened; therefore, I’ve never been uncomfortable with my own or other people’s gifts. What I was uncomfortable with was the lack of humility behind those gifts.

While I was in that religion, I studied Reiki as an adjunct to my medical massage license. The two teachers who taught me emphasized ethics. As one example, I was told spirit messages (which many Christians call receiving a word) are to be interpreted by the recipient and not by me. That aligned with how I saw people use their gifts in the mountains. I was shocked by the number of “healers” I met who got mad and triggered on people who didn’t accept their interpretation of the message. It is NEVER appropriate to trigger and yell at someone for not accepting ego over spirit.

It is not surprising to me; however, that those types of ego outbursts, which I began to call ego-bursts, happened so often when I think of other ways ego was displayed. In addition to the stories I shared last week of both religious and spiritual people who were so lacking in compassion that they cruelly blamed sick people for their illnesses or for not recovering, I will give three of many examples, because three seems like a good stopping point for a short piece of writing.

I also have a degree in naturopathic medicine as an adjunct to my medical massage license. Medical anthropology was a topic of those studies. I learned that shamans spent a lifetime learning their craft and often didn’t work until many years after they began to study. However, I met one person who took a weekend shaman retreat and hung out a shingle on Monday morning after two days of training. Not only did she hang out a shingle, but she wrote letters to the group that was helping her begin her shamanic journey to tell them everything they were doing wrong. She said the God’s had chosen her the old-fashioned way, so she knew more after one weekend than they knew after a lifetime of study.

I watched someone use a vulnerable client as an avenue to get to know that client’s tribal leader relative. She then scapegoated the family member, helped get her pushed out, and took her place as an adoptee. After she was installed in her new role, she used the professional role that had led her to them to give an air of legitimacy to the ways she defined other tribal members, ultimately giving her control of the group dynamic.

I watched someone use prayer requests as a way to get information she could later use as readings to pull more people into her fold. If she suspected she was losing control over them, she would trigger on them in verbally violent ways, followed by spreading untrue rumors to discredit that person before they could reveal her to other people.

With these and many other stories I could tell, it’s not surprising that I met many “healers” who triggered on people who didn’t accept their interpretation of a message. That triggering was usually followed by rumor spreading that made anyone who could reveal the healer seem unreliable. The victim shaming, victim blaming, and reputation damaging is similar to shunning that is used in some religious groups. The person who can threaten the status quo with uncomfortable truths becomes the scapegoat who is ostracized “for the protection of the group.” Don’t get me wrong, I support healthy boundaries to protect yourself from behavior that will harm you. Shunning and ostracizing someone who doesn’t agree with us is a very different animal. I thought animal was a good word to use instead of thing, because ostracizing and shunning feels so carnivorous.

The comparison of movements who victim shame and blame versus shunning and ostracism shows that there can be many parallels across religious organizations that are more focused on goals and personal agendas than the spiritual health of its members. Now, let me share three similar stories from my fundamentalist Christian background that emphasize the similarities a little bit more.

I met several people while I was a fundamentalist Christian who thought a weekend retreat prepared them for everything they might encounter as a minister – just like the weekend shaman did. They would invest a lot of energy into outshining everyone else, so the pastor would make them a first choice for being ordained. Being ordained was more based on the favor you received from the pastor than on education, training, maturity or any other important factor.

The church I grew up in taught that the only way to get into heaven was to be dunked in baptism, and anyone who was baptized by sprinkling would go to hell. When I finally found the courage to cross the baptism line and attend a sprinkling church, I was surprised to find that pastors and priests were required to receive enough education and mentoring to prepare them to safely lead a flock – and those who are not prepared will not be ordained even after that much preparation. I now see the wisdom in that, because it makes a congregation safer. The wisdom in that practice became more apparent when a sprinkling leader recognized how vulnerable caregiver exhaustion had made me and placed me in a position where I had to bow down to his ego in order to be treated fairly. Living in someone’s favor under those circumstances helped me realize just how important education and oversight are.

I belonged to a prayer committee when I was still in a fundamentalist church. We were a group of women who traveled to those in need of pastoral care and prayed with them. That placed us in a role the required some decorum like the professional person who infiltrated a tribal community should have displayed decorum. Sadly, the ride home was usually spent ridiculing the state of homes that were in disarray due to illness or some other trial. Those same judgments were shared at church as well. That was untenable to me and the reason I quit going with them. My Mom taught me to do chores while I visited with a sick or elderly person. To this day, I wash the dishes and tidy up any time I go to my elderly in-law’s home for a meal or celebration. Being a caregiver and seeing physical limitations up close emphasized to me why that is so important.

I met many women in the fundamentalist church who used prayer requests as fuel for gossip -- just like the lady in the other religion used prayer requests as fuel for giving spiritual messages in a way that gave her power over others. Gossip can give a person power in a similar way. It is choosing how you want people to be seen and then implementing a plan that will allow them to be seen that way. That is very powerful stuff.

Am I saying that I am better than the people who did these and other things? Definitely not. I am saying that I reached a point where I became healthy enough that I could no longer tolerate it, ignore it, or see it as normal. When I reached that point, I began to learn to set boundaries that are teaching me how to associate with people who are safer for me.

Am I saying I’m innocent and I didn’t do anything wrong? Definitely not. I will say; however, that I didn’t do the wrongs I was accused of by those who wanted to make sure my truths didn’t get to the ears of their minions. I worked hard in counseling to figure out what I did wrong, and it was more along the lines of making myself too vulnerable, having weak boundaries, being enabling, etc. I own all of my wrongs and am working hard to correct them. I confessed them in this blog post that you are welcome to read: https://ronisharp.wixsite.com/mysite/blog/it-wasn-t-about-being-nice

The point I want to make by telling these stories is that there are parallels across religions. Those parallels lead me to believe there are basically two kinds of people in religion, even if they manifest in a variety of ways. I believe there are people who are fueled by ego, and there are people who are fueled by a desire to be spiritual. This list from Galatians 5 gives us some idea of what an ego-driven person might act like: hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy. This list from Galatians 5 gives us an idea of what a spiritual person might act like: love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Of course, the lists can be altered and/or expanded, but I think they provide a good starting point.

In addition, the way an organization handles people tells you all you need to know about them. Do they uphold the people with the ego behaviors while victim shaming and blaming the recipients of their bad behavior, or do they set the right boundaries to thwart ego behaviors and protect spiritual people.

When my first book, “The Blood Moon Sealed My Fate,” was released, I wrote in the original acknowledgements that I knew I was exactly where I was supposed to be and was grateful for those who were helping me strengthen my boundaries. I felt like a fraud when I soon learned caregiver exhaustion had allowed me to repeat my enabling patterns in a couple of environments. In reality, my words proved to be even more true when I extricated myself from those environments. I found myself surrounded by strong and supportive friends who buoyed me up until I regained my footing, and all of those people are still solidly in my life -- except for one beloved friend who has since passed away. Your past, present and future may overlap for a while, especially during difficult times that make you vulnerable again, but if you keep working on healing, the future you are looking for will soon take center stage.

My friend who has since passed away was Linde Grace White. She humbly paved so many healing roads for me, never expecting anything in return. Last week I was lamenting the mistakes I repeated when I became vulnerable from caregiver exhaustion. The person I was talking to reminded me that Linde Grace was the epitome of a friend to all of her friends. Linde Grace achieved this by really seeing her friends and allowing them to really see her. The people who have hurt me saw me for what they could get out of me, how they could control me, how I could make their life easier, etc. – but they didn’t see me. Linde Grace saw me. By seeing me, she taught me to surround myself with other people who see me, and their numbers grow every year. The friend who said all of this to me reminded me to see myself the way Linde Grace saw me whenever I’m feeling bad about myself for any reason, because then I will see myself clearly. This powerful truth brought me to tears. Like Pastor Robert Keefer said at Linde Grace’s funeral – my God did that woman know how to love!

Earlier in this blog post, I shared a post that told what I’d done wrong, which was basically being enabling to bad behaviors. Linde Grace never required me to be enabling in order to survive our friendship. I was free with her – free to be me, because she didn’t have anything to hide. I never had to worry about her saying anything bad about me or anyone else, because she wasn’t in competition with her friends. I never had to worry about her triggering on me, because she would talk to me with a goal of meeting both of our needs instead of protecting her own agenda.

Because of her, I’ve learned to find people like her in the world. She will always be my beacon of light, but I have found others who are more like her than the people I enabled in the past. One place I have found people like her are in a group of women who attend a retreat I’ve been attending for several years now. During the last retreat, I stepped across my fears of repeating my past when I realized I could trust them enough to participate in a spiritual practice that was frightening for me since it was similar to practices from my past. As I expressed my fears before the worship began, I looked into the eyes of the woman who was reassuring me and saw the same light that was in Linde Grace’s eyes. I realized she didn’t get defensive when I admitted my fears, because she was confident enough in what she had to offer that she didn’t need to protect it. I realized in all of the years of attending this retreat and the things we shared between the retreat, none of them had ever needed me to use my old enabling behaviors in order to survive in their environment. I had never heard these women speak bad about each other or anyone else. I had never seen any of these women trigger on each other or anyone else. I realized I was safe. I pushed down my desire to run from what was being offered, and this allowed me to experience a beautiful spiritual experience. When caregiving is behind me enough that I have control of my own schedule, I plan to share my spiritual walk with these women much more than I do now. I still fear that a person driven by ego will find their way into the group, or even worse one of the ones from my past will find their way there. I have to believe that if and when that happens, I will have healed and grown enough to be able to handle it. In the meantime, I have found a safe place, and I plan to enjoy it and the company of the lovely women who share that space with me.

I want everyone who read this to find that safe space. Look for what Linde Grace, these women, and others I have in my life who are like them have in common. They see you and accept you as you are. They don’t need you to enable them, because they have no agenda. They let you see them and accept them as they are. They do not gossip about each other, but instead use words that uplift. They do not compete, because they want everyone to succeed. They do not trigger, because they know how to communicate in a mature way that allows everyone’s needs to get met instead of just vying for what they want. If you can find a place like this, allow yourself to trust just enough to stay like I allowed myself to trust enough to stay for a worship that I almost ran from during the last retreat. If you can do that, I hope you find yourself as fulfilled as I found myself afterwards.