Recovery and RELIGIOUS TRAUMA

religious shame and guilt does not make people more moral it is demonstrably the greatest factor in people acting out in morally repugnant ways that they themselves are a my question relates to something I've heard you speak about in the past uh with regards to the 12 steps of recovery and my question is um you've mentioned that as a person reaches their fourth step or if a person does a thorough and honest fourth step inventory and sorry to any of the listeners who are not familiar with the work um I appreciate you bearing with me in my question um but um a person if a person does a thorough and honest for step it will likely bring them closer to the religion of their father and my question is is someone who was raised in a traditionally Orthodox and from household I've definitely deviated a little bit or maybe a lot of bit from the Traditions that I was raised with and a result of that is being filled with a lot of Shame and guilt and I'm wondering if or rather what you would suggest as a method of coping with that shame and guilt between steps one and four MH um so that when I reach step four and do that thorough and honest inventory and God willing you know develop a closer relationship with the religion of my father what would you suggest in the interim okay so as you said there's a lot of inside baseball over here there are terms that not everyone's going to be familiar with but I think that's fine because a lot of the stuff is self-explanatory and I will try to fill in a little bit of a little bit of it for those who are unfamiliar um there are two two things here that I'm hearing from you I love this question uh I love it because it's relevant meaning you're actually asking for yourself it's not just theoretical and uh it's also uh it's a very common question it's very common I'm sure you know that it's common but there are many other people who have the same question so I know that this will benefit many people who are listening first of all I want to clarify you mentioned that I said or you've heard me say that after your fourth step there should be some maybe call it re normalization of religious observance okay I want to just clarify now maybe you meant this and you just didn't say it as explicit itly as I would have liked you to have said it or maybe you didn't even catch it when I said it because I didn't say it as explicitly as I would have liked to have said it and that is the following what have I said and I and I do stand by this and I and I admit that I've said this many many times and I and I still stand by saying it someone who is raised religious let's back up a second the 12-step model it is essential and inherent to the 12-step model that one needs a relationship with a higher power because the 12 steps are non sectarian they do not dictate who that higher power is or what theology one is to believe in they stay out of your religion they just tell you you need to have higher power okay but when someone was raised with a belief in God when someone was raised religious very often when they come into the rooms of recovery they come in already with a lot of baggage surrounding the idea of God to the extent that I think just my humble little opinion here someone who comes from an atheistic background will find it much easier to find a higher power than someone who comes from a traumatic religious upbringing the the person who comes from an atheistic background you might think that that constitutes a pretty formidable challenge but it's not because by the time someone comes into the rooms of recovery they're pretty humble uh they're they're they're ready to entertain some new ideas and and I haven't found that it is a real insurmountable obstacle however in contrast somebody who comes from a religious background that is fraught with a lot of trauma it can be quite difficult to find that relationship with their higher power and that is why I often say and still stand by saying that if you come from a religious background and you are finding it difficult to forget about return to that religion but even entertain any notion of a higher power because of the associations that the whole God concept has for you then it is absolutely essential that when you do your fourth step which is an inventory but a a large part of the inventory is the resentments list that you make sure that you include God and religion and religious leaders and everything else that has any uh negative association for you you put that in your resentment list and you work through it just like every other resentment that you are going to work through in that inventory so just to clarify I'm not sure if that's what you meant or um if it wasn't as clear as it could have been but what I said about the power of the fourth step particularly with people who are coming from a background of religious trauma is please by all means include all of the religious Trum drama whether it's God himself or the Torah or Oru or anything anything if you have a resentment if you feel a resentment do not be so Pious and holy to be afraid to put it on your resentment list because I promise you you're not doing any favors to yourself or to the god of Israel by shying away from putting it on your resentment list I promise you if you put it on your resentment list I mean if it's genuine if don't put it on your resentment list just to be a tough guy but you know to try to be edgy but if you really have a resentment put it on your resentment list work through it in the way that the fourth step works with the columns and I'm not going to get into that here because that's really inside baseball but by all means work through it and by the time you finish working through that resentment you will find that a large degree of the resistance the internal resistance which was really self- protection it was is you protecting yourself from toxicity and from abuse a lot of that will have been removed and you will have the freedom to re-engage with God in a way that is safe so I just want to clarify did you understand that that was the context within which I had mentioned the fourth step not entirely but now that you you've remind me I'm reminded thank you okay great um since you mentioned the fourth step like just do the fourth step and you're going to have this massive shift uh which I'm saying is not exactly true what I was saying is if you have religious trauma please please please include that in your resentments but since you mentioned a step that has this sort of uh Epiphany tied into it then I would say the ninth step is like that for many many people it's not a coincidence that that's where in the big book it talks about the promises the ninth step promises we'll be amazed before if we're painstaking about this phase of our development we'll be amazed before we're halfway through right so that when the ninth step is the amends when you actually and it's terrifying it's terrifying the amends are terrifying when you actually go and you confront people and you try to start repairing relationships that can have an amazingly healing effect where all of a sudden all the obstacles are just removed and the light just starts shining in so if there's a step that has that kind of massive shift associated with it I would say it's nine but regarding uh step four yeah if you have religious trauma use the fourth step to work through it the fourth step is your tool for working through it okay now the other point that you raised was how do you deal with religious shame and guilt while you're still not as observant as it sounds like you yourself may even wish you were okay so let's talk about that so first of all how do we know that there's a problem with religious shame and guilt maybe it's not problematic maybe it's good maybe it'll help you I'm I'm asking this in Earnest why am I asking it in Earnest because there are many people if not a majority of people who actually believe well I shouldn't say majority of people majority of religious people who actually believe that religious shame and religious guilt will actually make people more moral okay so I really have no time or patience or energy for proving my point so I'm going to make my point in a very sloppy lazy way in which case you have no I mean you're never bound you're You're Never Bound By any agreement to um believe anything I say but especially here I'm not going to prove this to anybody so if you want to just completely reject it by all means completely reject it but I'm just going to tell you what I believe and that is um religious shame and guilt does not make people more moral it is demonstrably the greatest factor in people acting out in morally repugnant ways that they themselves are appalled with and it initiates a guilt cycle which actually you see the Tanya map behind me so in chapter 26 of Tanya the AL actually describes this pretty vividly he says sometimes the Yahara comes to you in a cloak of piety and ask it asks you to feel guilt about your moral failings but it's only doing so to make you feel pain emotional pain which then you'll try to numb through Indulgence and then you'll have something to really feel guilty about and then of course you'll try to numb the emotional pain with even greater Indulgence in even even lower uh forms of acting out because of course you're in Greater pain and you have an even lower opinion of yourself and it becomes this vicious cycle so chapter 26 of Tanya says pretty clearly how dangerous guilt religious guilt can be and what is his Solution by the way in chapter 26 of Tanya he says set a time set an appointment set an appointment which uh you could call that your 10th step inventory after you do your fourth step people have different opinions whether you do that once in a lifetime or or not but certainly a 10th step is a spot check inventory and uh to do it on a daily basis especially at your bedtime shma is a is a good time to do it so yeah chapter 26 of Tanya says make an inventory daily inventory have an appointment have a certain time and a place that is marked off for cleaning up your deficiencies but the rest of your day don't think about it because it's not Pious it's not cute it's not productive you're not helping anyone this is not what God wants this is just you can call it your disease you can call it the atahar but it's a a negative Force coming to you in a cloak of piety trying to undermine your recovery SL Tashua process so my advice to you would be don't touch it don't look at it ignore it like you would a voice that tells you that the solution right now is to pick up just like a voice would come to you right now and say I know it'll make you feel better pick up your drug of choice and now hopefully at this point of sobriety you'd be able to say oh that voice is not helpful it's not going to do listening to that voice is not going to do anything I'm going to be happy I listen to and the same thing with religious guilt completely ignore it it's not coming from a healthy place it's not keep doing your step work speed up by the way in akan they used to pound out the steps in a day okay so really find a sponsor who will do the step work with you quickly get through that fourth step and you know what I I sense in your voice and in your words that you're yearning to return to yish kite and you will and you'll see how your recovery and your tsha process not only dovetail but ultimately you'll see how it's one thing um does that help you what I just said yes tremendously thank you okay amazing thank you for uh your vulnerability you can keep the duck by the way you heard that joke so I would just want to make a commentary so um in a 12-step meeting everybody shares and there's nobody who ends up being the sucker and sometimes in our religious life we don't find that level of honesty and vulnerability and we lament that so what I would like to encourage you to do is bring the honesty and the vulnerability of the rooms to your Faith Community you're going to say but I'm not such a strong member of my faith community I know not yet but you will be you will be in time and one of the things you can do is bring the lessons of recovery to your faith community and remember that the original version of the 12th step actually said to carry this message to others not to other alcoholics billw originally wanted to bring the message of the spiritual awakening to everybody not just to alcoholics but then they told him you know manage your expectations let's let's focus you know just pick a niche and bring the message to alcoholics but originally the 12 step was to bring uh to uh to bring the message of recovery which is really just the message of Spiritual Awakening to everybody so you should have a lot of success in that okay thank you very much yeah my pleasure we'd like to extend special thanks to mendal Simon and 9x9 tech for powering this call-in show and making it possible for us to connect with 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