This is an excellent, illuminating, wise, and spot on piece by Lissa Rankin. Over the many years of my own spiritual journey, I have also at times been pulled into New Age beliefs and shaming narratives espoused bypassing spiritual teachers. Gratefully, I've come to recognize the dangers of emotional spiritual bypassing and any teaching which leads us away from the heart of our emotions and the experience of growing into our wholeness as fully embodied human beings. It also is not possible to bring deep empathic awareness and understanding to anyone else if we are depriving ourselves of compassion and absorbing harmful beliefs which keep us empathically impaired. All of which makes this piece, and so much more by Lissa Rankin, a potentially deep gift to us all. — Molly
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One woman summed it up. “I think, originally, the Human Potential Movement and New Age beliefs were more about recognizing that we are more than just human. But somewhere along the way, we lost our humanness.”
How Emotion-Shaming Spiritual Teachings & Beliefs Might Cause You To Lose Empathy In The Face Of Human Suffering
I’m thinking of the time I had to leave my home as a wildfire refugee because the California wildfires were less than a mile from my house, which tipped the Air Quality Index over 600. We could not breathe without coughing inside my house, even with the air purifiers on. It was quite terrifying to realize that California might become uninhabitable because of climate crisis, and we might lose our home. We had to drive five hours to find clean air and get ourselves safe. When I posted about this on social media, some asshat told me I had manifested this wildfire and smoky air with my impure thoughts, and if only I cleaned up my fiery, smoky thinking, the fire would disappear and the air around me would magically clear up.
I was shocked by the ridiculousness and magical thinking of imagining a clear air bubble just around on my head if I cleared up my thinking- and not around the heads of other smoky thinkers. But I was even more shocked by the utter lack of empathy when my family and I were legitimately frightened and in danger. This was the second time in two years that we had to leave our home because of wildfires.
This guy considered himself “spiritual,” but his spirituality was making him not only delusional, but flat out mean. He wasn’t the only one.
It made me realize that some people really can’t handle feeling the emotions that arise in the face of random tragedies that are out of our control. Maybe it makes people feel better- and offers a strange solace or feeling of having more control- to believe that our thoughts create our reality, or our soul chose these random tragedies, or God has a reason for inflicting pain on innocent people.
But if your spirituality is making you mean, we might need to rethink these knee jerk responses to tragedy. I propose we get help treating our traumas so we can improve our ability to tolerate intense feelings, to stay in our bodies and compost our feelings, to train our nervous systems to have more flexibility so we can be with our feelings- and with the feelings of others. If we get help treating our traumas, we can have more emotional range and tolerate feeling our own pain, so we can be more empathic with our own “parts, and also, so we can be more empathic with others who are in pain.
As an empathy-improving exercise, take a moment to think about how unempathic these kinds of emotion-shaming “spiritual” messages might feel when applied to someone in emotional pain who needs real empathy.
Your soul chose this
Everything happens for a reason.
God doesn’t give you anything you can’t handle.
The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
Don't cry because it's over; smile because it happened.
It is what it is.
Love is the opposite of fear.
Man up, buck up; suck it up.
Don’t worry, be happy.
There's a lesson to be learned in this.
Look for the gift in the situation.
That's just your ego talking.
You’re too sensitive.
Focus on the positive.
This too shall pass.
Take a chill pill.
Be thankful and stop complaining.
Blessed are the peacemakers.
It didn't happen to you; it happened for you.
Be here now.
Get out of your victim story.
What you see in me is just a mirror of yourself.
That’s just a story.
Look for the silver lining.
Have you tried medication?
Even the Dalai Lama said, “Like anyone else, I too have anger in me. However, I try to recall that anger is a destructive emotion. I remind myself that scientists now say that anger is bad for our health; it eats into our immune system. So, anger destroys our peace of mind and our physical health. We shouldn't welcome it or think of it as natural or as a friend.”
Do spiritual leaders really not realize the damage they do by shaming people for having legitimate, valid human emotions that are meant to protect them and protect others? Do people not realize that their spirituality might be grooming them to be victims of abuse? Or that it could be turning them into perpetrators of insensitivity or even cruelty?
It makes sense though, if you think it through. If I wanted to be a cult leader who got to live by a separate set of rules than the ones I’m preaching, if I wanted to verbally, physically, financially, spiritually, or sexually abuse people with no accountability and no protests from those I considered “less than” myself, I’d definitely have to demonize anger as an unspiritual emotion. I’d have to humiliate people if they tried to call me out, tone policing them to detract from the content of what they’re accusing me of. I’d have to teach people how to check out and dissociate during meditation or prayer so they wouldn’t feel their rage and grief at the way I’m mistreating them. I’d also have to dial down my own shame so I don’t feel bad when I’m controlling, dominating, and exploiting people to prop myself up in my grandiosity and wealth. Shaming people for having real emotions would be good business for me, to the peril of those who listen to my teachings.
If someone refused to buy into my indoctrination, if they felt their feelings and acted in response to them, it would be hard for me to maintain total control. I’d have to kick that person out of my cult or risk getting exposed for the fraud I really would be.
The Ways Spirituality Can Make You Mean
To get a sense for how people might have been harmed by emotion-shaming messages or emotion-bypassing spiritual beliefs they applied to themselves or had applied to them by others, I asked to hear from people in my Facebook community.
A Holocaust survivor expressed her horror at being told by a “spiritual teacher” that those in the concentration camps manifested their reality as part of their soul’s journey. Someone who survived a suicide attempt was told by a spiritual group that she had to get out of “victim mode” and “let love in,” while empathy for the ways in which she had been legitimately victimized was utterly absent. Their version of victim-blaming spirituality landed her back in the psych ward, harming rather than helping her.
A Hospice nurse’s partner was deeply steeped in New Age spirituality when her father fell in Hawaii and had a symptomatic subdural hematoma. Wanting to “keep things positive,” the New Ager tried to bypass her father’s emergency, planning fun trips to the beach instead. When her partner suggested they stay and support her sick father, she apparently exploded with rage, telling her partner that he was “giving energy to that negativity” (her favorite trope) and that her partner must want him to die. According to her belief system, if he suggested that harm might come to her father if they didn’t immediately call an ambulance, he was contributing to making her father die. At first, the nurse caved in to the pressure his partner put upon him, but finally, he called an ambulance. Had he not, the elderly man likely would have died.
A rape survivor expressed how she spent tens of thousands of dollars on New Age programs that preached that there was something in her subconscious that she could never seem to find that was the root cause of her sexual abuse. The rapist was never discussed, but the one who got raped was fleeced financially and tormented in the name of spirituality, when what she needed was trauma healing.
A woman whose baby had died at 14 months was told by her spiritual teacher that she brought on her baby’s illness and death for a good reason that would grow her spiritually. That same woman was then diagnosed with rectal cancer and had to leave her spiritual community so as not to get blamed for her cancer when what she needed was empathy.
One person said, “The New Age felt like a drug when I was suicidal, but it made me worse. I also met the most abusive people in those circles, who took advantage of me financially and emotionally, adding to my pain. The New Age was a fake, superficial prison, and it almost killed me.”
Another said, “I strongly feel as though this train of thought feeds the ‘not good enough’ that is inherent in the human psyche. Promising to ‘remove blocks,’ sell ‘enlightenment,’ or dangle up a life with a goddamn perfect cherry on top causes a type of striving and dissatisfaction. I have been in circles where I’ve felt judged and rejected for questioning the status quo and the ‘gurus’ themselves. It’s been 10 years and I’m still healing from the false promises I naively swallowed.”
One man said he took in all the New Age books about abundance but stayed poverty stricken and then blamed himself. Another BIPOC woman told a story about how she would speak out about social justice issues and get silencing, denial, minimization, and shaming. She said, “These teachings have been used to disqualify my experience so others can get a sense of importance and power over me. The New Age required magical thinking and suspending your intellect in order to live your life by oracle or imagine we are evolving into angelic beings while all around disenfranchisement, poverty and abusive systems remain in place. It was problematic and substantively dangerous to our mental health.”
One said, ““Nationalism masked as devotion to a past life. Supremacy masked as higher intelligence. Delusional thinking masked as positive thinking. A binary hierarchy that prioritizes cis-privilege over human decency masked as a dance of the masculine & feminine. Blind faith that is masked as loyalty. The list of false beliefs that are really just masked political agendas is pretty much endless in the spiritual community. Truly a toxic cesspool that bases their beliefs on privilege rather than evidence or application of their beliefs in truly challenging situations. Not to mention how predatory the whole community is to people that are dealing with mental health issues.”
Another said, ““As I see it, underlying many of these grandiose New Age concepts is the illusion of American exceptionalism. Spirituality, which traditionally has been about compassion, modesty, and sometimes even asceticism, has been washed with ideas of wealth, abundance, and all kinds of life hacks. This, in turn, might have been fueled by a societal structure that encourages competition over cooperation, stardom over community, and, as a driving force, fear of poverty and sickness over security and health care. In my opinion, societal values are reflected in our religions and beliefs. How could it be otherwise?”
One woman summed it up. “I think, originally, the Human Potential Movement and New Age beliefs were more about recognizing that we are more than just human. But somewhere along the way, we lost our humanness.”
Many other sad stories flooded in that made me realize we really needed to unpack some of the commonly parroted beliefs and aphorisms that float around spiritual circles and filter them through a lens of empathy, diversity, inclusivity, kindness, and basic human decency. What I realized as I crowdsourced what might need to be examined is that so much of the messaging in spiritual circles shuts down at least half the normal human emotional range as bizarrely “unspiritual,” as if God didn’t give humans the ability to feel all emotions for a very good reason!
In addition to feeling blamed for the tragedies that befell them, many of the people who shared their stories also spoke bluntly about how New Age beliefs groomed them for abuse in relationships. Because anger was demonized, their spiritual belief systems taught them to neurotically tolerate and suppress healthy protest when they wound up in gaslighting relationships they should have protected themselves from. Instead of responding to their own healthy anger as a boundary-protecting emotion, they dialed down or turned that anger on themselves and failed to hold perpetrators accountable.
They also tended to prematurely forgive people who lacked remorse and wouldn’t even confess to the ways they were behaving abusively, long before they were held to account and underwent a legitimate repair and amends process.
Because fear was demonized, their spiritual belief systems indoctrinated them into not responding protectively when there was legitimate danger. Fear is not an enemy we need to slay. At some times, it’s a legitimate emotion meant to warn you and keep you safe in times of danger. At other times, fear arises from an inner child we need to love, retrieve from the past, and integrate into the wholeness of our humanity. Either way, there’s nothing helpful in demonizing fear.
People with brain damage who cannot feel fear tend to die young. While it’s true that unchecked fear resulting from past trauma can paralyze and misguide us, it’s also true that fear is a safety mechanism that is intimately related to intuition, something none of us would want to divorce ourselves from. Discerning between the true fear that helps us survive and old fears related to past traumas is an important step in becoming more responsive, mature, and courageous in the face of scary times. Yet demonizing fear, even if it’s related to past fears from hurt parts of ourselves, does not serve our healing, personally or globally. Only healing the traumas that cause such fears moves us to a deepening of consciousness and the kind of true awakening that allows us to respond to fear in a helpful, loving, socially just and compassionate way.
Civil rights activist and lawyer Valarie Kaur knows better. In her TED talk, she says, “Mothering has taught me that all of our emotions are necessary. Joy is the gift of love. Grief is the price of love. Anger is the force that protects it.”
At a conference I attended, Daniel Schmactenberger called out the authors of The Secret and other New Age bestselling authors who teach A Course In Miracles. He said:
“Stop broadcasting this fear/love dichotomy, how you can’t feel fear and love at the same time. It’s bullshit. It’s just not true. I can only be afraid of something I love being harmed because I love it. If I’m afraid for my kids, it’s because I love them. Care is what fuels fear. If I’m angry, it’s proportional to what I care about. Every negative emotion is a response to care and love. If you feel angry, find what it is that you hold as sacred and ask “How is what I hold sacred getting violated?” See the sacredness in it and ask “Am I willing to make sacrifices to protect that sacred thing?” That’s when it’s appropriate to use your will, aligned with what you love. To do this, you’ll need your mind, your heart, and your gut. Your mind needs clarity on what it is that you love and hold sacred and are willing to protect. Your heart needs to feel heartbroken because what you care about is being hurt. Your gut will give you the courage to do something about it. Think about and feel into what is most sacred to you. What will still matter after you’re dead? What are you devoted to and willing to sacrifice your comfort for- because it matters so much and you love it so much? What is at the heart of what is meaningful about life? Take time to feel into it and connect to whatever has you feel that. Between now and when you die, think about the biggest problems in the world that you understand- climate change, racism, AI warfare, human trafficking. What do you really care about? Feel what bothers you. What is the actual state of the world you live in? Then ask yourself, “If this is really what I care about, what should I be doing to be congruent with my own self, my own deepest values? What am I doing now that is different than that? How do I close that gap?”
So if we’re better off feeling our feelings and using them as part of our guidance system, how do we go about doing that? I highly recommend reading all of Karla McLaren’s The Language of Emotions, which has an entire chapter about the value and gifts of each emotion, which she defines as an “action-requiring neurological program.” Similar to Internal Family System’s non-demonizing approach to all parts, Karla holds an entirely non-pathologizing and non-demonizing approach to every human emotion. She teaches that while we tend to valence emotions into positive and negative emotions, and while we are often conditioned as children (and in spiritual circles) to avoid the “negative ones” in ways that cut us off from healthy access to the full range of the emotional library, all emotions are here to help. Her book offers tips for decoding each emotion. Here’s her cheat sheet.
The Gifts in Your Emotions
Adapted from The Language Of Emotions by Karla McLaren
McLaren writes, “Emotions are your tools; they’re your empathic entrée into understanding yourself and others more deeply. These sixteen emotional categories will give you a working vocabulary and a working set of tools to begin to understand emotions empathically- as nuanced and reliable action-requiring responses to very specific stimuli.” In my opinion, these tools are good medicine.
Please go here to continue reading this post by Lissa Rankin: https://lissarankinmd.substack.com/p/is-your-spirituality-making-you-mean
Spiritual beliefsoffer a sense of purpose and connection that goes beyond the material world. They guide us in finding inner peace and understanding our place in the universe. Whether through meditation, prayer, or simply reflecting on the beauty of nature, spirituality helps us connect with a higher power and the deeper meaning of life. It is a personal journey that shapes our values, inspires kindness, and brings comfort in times of uncertainty. Embracing spiritual beliefs can be a powerful way to cultivate a sense of fulfillment and gratitude in our daily lives.
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