Staying and Leaving
When someone has been in a spiritually abusive relationship –– one in which a person has been the recipient of spiritual abuse rather than the individual or individuals who have been the perpetrator(s) of such abuse -- there are a great many conflicting emotions which race across the inner screen of consciousness. Although there are differences among individuals which reflect the uniqueness of their particular set of circumstances, nonetheless, there often are a great many feelings which are shared in common by people who have been abused.
A person’s feeling of having been a fool is one of the emotions which, at one time or another, almost everyone who has been spiritually abused feels. We think back over our experiences with the individual and/or individuals who have abused us and we begin to look at various past events in a new light and start to intuit the real nature of what those events actually meant instead of how we may have interpreted them at the time they happened.
We wonder how we could have missed the clues which, in the light of new experience, seem so obvious now. We tend to berate ourselves and become somewhat judgmental and are inclined to become a little spiritually abusive toward our own being through such self-directed criticisms and evaluations.
Spiritual charlatans and spiritually abusive people have most of us at a disadvantage. They are playing a game according to a set of rules which they have invented for the purposes of exploiting other people and which, therefore, favors their side -- a game which most of the rest of us do not even realize we are in until we begin to encounter problems and experience destructive consequences.
We meet people -- whether in real life or on-line -- and we engage them according to our intentions -- which may be, among other things, sincere, open, honest, caring, empathetic, and so on. We are looking for a way, which gives expression to truth, justice, integrity, love, acceptance, knowledge, understanding, identity, happiness, peace, friendship, realization of inner potential, and so on.
If the people whom we encounter are spiritually abusive people, then, they will use the information we give them to profile us and chart our vulnerabilities and exploitable dimensions of life history, personality and interests. They will use the information we give them to frame themselves in a way which will resonate with our likes, dislikes, interests, needs, goals, commitments, world view, and so on.
In a very short period of time, we begin to feel a very strong and developing emotional bond with these individuals. We have told them what we are looking for, and they script the interaction so that, little by little, we are led to where they wish us to go -- that is, to consider them as friends, confidants, people that have our welfare at heart, people whom we can trust, people who are like-minded and like-hearted.
They encourage us to associate with them, and why wouldn't we want to do that because through these individuals we are beginning to develop a sense of acceptance, identity, belonging, community, family, togetherness. Doubts, fears, questions, worries, and anxieties start to melt away. We begin to feel like we have found an oasis in the desert of life -- all the qualities we have been searching for (either consciously or unconsciously) seem to be present in these individuals.
Then, here and there, certain things happen. Maybe, nothing very major, but, still, whatever it is that has happened or that we have noticed leaves an unpleasant taste in our spiritual mouths or we are uncomfortable with something that has gone on.
In the beginning we tend to shelve these incidents and store them in the archives of our memories, far away from our every-day sort of consciousness. The reason many of us do this is that we tend to think either one of two things: (a) people are human and they make mistakes and we should be forbearing, tolerant, forgiving, and compassionate -- this is all part of Sufi adab, and this is all part of loving someone, and, so, we try to put into practice the various teachings and principles of the Sufi path. In short, we shouldn't concern ourselves with the speck in someone else's eye, but, rather, attend to the beam in our own eye; (b) because of our low spiritual state and lack of deep spiritual understanding, we don't properly understand the significance of what we have seen or witnessed, and if only we had the requisite insight, then, everything would be capable of being explained in a way that is fully reconcilable with the principles and teachings of the Sufi tradition.
But, still, the anomalous events and happenings keep returning to consciousness, and we are haunted by them because although they make us feel anxious and uncomfortable, we don't know how to reconcile them with everything else we believe we have experienced and everything else we believe we know about these individuals. When we are haunted by memories of these unexplained events and happenings, doubts arise in our mind.
Ah, we say to ourselves. This is but the rebellious nafs and the whisperings of Iblis trying to seduce us away from all that is good and decent. We feel guilty and ashamed for harboring such thoughts about other individuals. We struggle with our doubts, thinking they are our enemies when, in truth, these are flashes of inspiration which are rooted in Divine assistance concerning issues of truth and propriety.
Yet, perhaps, we have been led to believe by the people whom we have encountered that Iblis and nafs will try to attack us and separate us off from the teacher or the group. And, lo and behold, here we are experiencing the very sort of event which we have been warned about.
We began to lose trust in our essential selves ... our sense of right and wrong ... our sense of decency and propriety ... our sense of justice and fairness. We begin to feel we will be lost without the teacher and/or the group because many of us have been induced to look to the teacher or the group as our means of consensual validation with respect to the nature of reality.
Now, if the teacher were an authentic shaykh, then, to be sure, our understanding of ourselves and the nature of reality will be deeply influenced, colored, oriented and shaped by what goes on in our relationship with such an individual. But, a real teacher never wishes to make another individual dependent on him or her -- rather, the intention is always to help an individual develop the person's own spiritual sense of taste or dhawk concerning interior events so that one can learn to distinguish truth from falsehood and so that one can learn how to trust one's essential Self (as opposed to one's surface self which is rooted in an unredeemed nafs).
But, fraudulent spiritual teachers and groups seek to undermine the foregoing framework of essential growth in understanding. Consequently, most of the people who are in abusive relationships would prefer to doubt ourselves than we would doubt the perpetrators of abuse -- especially those whom we would like to believe, or whom we have been induced to believe, are more knowledgeable than we are or better than we are.
In spiritually abusive groups, questioning tends to be discouraged or dealt with in elusive, indirect, and ambiguous ways. No one will give a straight answer to questions, or the importance of such questions are dismissed, deflected or trivialized. In time, we begin to find ourselves acting as our own censors in order to stay out of stress-laden areas.
As with all abusive situations, silence of one kind or another descends on the abusive relationship and no one is permitted to address the issue of on-going abusiveness. This is one of the cardinal rules of all abusive relationships -- keep the silence.
People begin to live in fear. Fear of crossing boundaries that have been established through techniques of compliance, obedience, duress, emotional blackmail (through, say, the threat of shunning or alienation of affection, or expulsion), and so on, help to enhance the underlying sense of surreal stress, anxiety, uncertainty, and ambiguity which are being felt but which cannot be talked about or explored in a direct manner.
In addition, oftentimes, when we become part of an abusive group -- although this was not our original wish or intention -- we make statements of commitment about friendship, love, purpose, and so on. There are psychological forces within us which, due to issues of self-image and a sense of consistency and coherency, are resistant to either disengaging from those public statements and commitments ... we want to think of ourselves as reliable, stable, consistent individuals, and withdrawing from a previously made public statement about commitment to the teacher or the group tends to make us feel unreliable, unstable, and inconsistent.
Abusive spiritual groups have no problem with changing the rules of the game to suit their purposes. But, they tend to be very quick to remind us about our own commitments and public statements and the 'need' to live up to what we have said or promised.
If we begin to think about withdrawing from a group because we have become burdened down by the nature of the events to which we have been witness or by the nature of the information which we have learned that has very serious, problematic implications concerning either the so-called teacher and/or the group, we often experience anxiety, fear, guilt, and shame. How could we have allowed ourselves to get into such a situation? What will we do? Where will we go? Whom can we trust? Is this a punishment from God? Am I cursed? Is Satan now my constant companion?
We tend to bounce about among anger, shame, guilt, and a sense of betrayal, like the steel ball in a pin-ball machine, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, we harbor a fervent hope that, perhaps, everything is really OK vis-a-vis the teacher and/or group and that whatever damage has been done can be healed with time. We think back on the positive, pleasant, enjoyable, exciting facets of our coming to be associated with the teacher and group through a haze of nostalgia and wish for the innocence of those times to return -- when, to use the words of Bob Seeger: "I wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then."
Three, and only three possibilities, confront an individual at this point. (1) the individual, not being able to deal with the pain of disengaging from the abusive teacher or group, will choose to become further entrenched in a spiritually abusive relationship and suffer the consequences of that choice (spiritually, emotionally, psychologically, socially, and physically) -- essentially, this means that the abusers have won the battle; (2) the individual, despite the pain associated with disengaging oneself from a abusive relationship, will seek out the help and support necessary to complete the disengagement knowing that one's future happiness, identity, peace of mind, and opportunity for continued spiritual growth are, insha' Allah, absolutely dependent on making such a choice and following through on it; (3) the individual will vacillate back and forth at a sort of spiritual fail-safe point, circling around and around, not knowing whether to continue on or return to base -- and base here should be construed to be a function of seeking the truth of things.
Those of us who have experienced spiritual abuse are intimately familiar with the anger, guilt, shame, betrayal, alienation, loneliness, bewilderment, uncertainty, anxiety, and fear which you may be feeling about your situation. All that can be said is that these feelings do pass in time and that there is a future full of optimistic possibilities which exists beyond the horizons of an abusive relationship.
But, coming to this realization takes time. The problems presented by this interim period is one of the reasons why this spiritual abuse recovery group was created -- to help people who are seeking assistance to move on with their lives in a constructive fashion -- spiritually, and in other ways as well.
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