ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
Blogger, Christian convert, general strange one. https://shapesinthefog.substack.com/
User ID: 3709
A bit different from the religious stuff I've been posting lately, but figured this might interest some people here. I've briefly brought up emotional work / somatic practices and folks have asked me about it before. As always, full link to Substack here for pictures and such, but all the text is below: https://shapesinthefog.substack.com/p/learning-to-regulate-my-nervous-system
For folks who’ve read me before, you know that I’ve dealt with a lot of chronic pain. I’ve had spiritual crises, struggled with depression and anxiety, and for a long time felt like I was just treading water. I put in a lot of work without making any real headway, and fell into what is, sadly, really common in our society: using drugs and alcohol to deal with the painful parts of life.
It took me a lot of work and a lot of exploring to figure out what was going on, and what I want to do here is try and lay out a bit of the path I’ve walked in terms of various techniques, in the hopes that it may interest or help others dealing with similar issues. If you’d like a more complete list without all the background from my story, I’ve got a list here:
https://shapesinthefog.substack.com/p/chronic-pain-resources-research
So, how did I get into nervous system regulation in the first place?
Late 2023, about three and a half years ago, I left a job at a brutal startup that really wrecked me physically and emotionally. I decided to take a sabbatical because, thank God, I was lucky enough to get some money from trading away my equity in the company.
It wasn’t some crazy life-changing amount, just around half a year’s income. But it was enough that I felt comfortable taking six months off looking for a job to focus on healing, figuring out my chronic pain issues, and generally trying to get my life back together.
At the time, I was really struggling with carpal tunnel (pain in the wrists/hands) and had been for years. Of course, working a computer job makes that especially brutal. I was using a program called Talon Voice, which I’ve talked about here a few times before, and in that community there are a lot of people dealing with chronic pain, RSI, and carpal tunnel. Someone there pointed me toward a course called Nervous System Mastery by Jonny Miller.
To be honest, I was very hesitant. The course was kind of expensive, and I remember thinking, “Man, you want me to pay hundreds of dollars for an online course? That’s insane lmao.” But a couple people I talked to said it had genuinely changed their lives, and I was desperate, so I went for it anyway.
In the course, Jonny goes over a variety of techniques for regulating your nervous system. I actually don’t like the phrase “mastery.” It feels a little gross to me. I think it’s more accurate to say that he introduces people to a variety of techniques and practices that can help them regulate or soothe their nervous systems.
(If you want to know what a nervous system actually is, Jonny has a podcast episode with Joe Hudson, another great teacher in this space, on defining ‘nervous system’)
I want to emphasize again that I was pretty skeptical when I first got into this stuff. Most nerdy, intellectual, rationalist type folks are. But over just a couple years they have absolutely changed my life.
Now, it’s worth mentioning up front that these techniques didn’t instantly solve all of my problems. A lot of times I’d try something and think, “Oh, that’s interesting.” Other times I’d think, “Oh my God, this is life-changing. I’m going to do this every day forever.”
Then I’d do it for two weeks, stop completely, forget about it, and come back six months later only to find that my experience of it had changed.
So if you’re exploring this territory yourself, I’d encourage you to experiment, circle back to things, and revisit practices that didn’t click the first time around. A lot of these methods are worth keeping in your back pocket, even if they don’t wow you the first time around.
Emotional Work
The first broad category of practices is what I’ll call emotional work or emotional inquiry. There are a lot of different approaches to this. Some people like the method of Gendlin Focusing. Jonny talks a lot about interoception, which is basically a fancy word for feeling into your body.
The bones of the practice are simple. You sit down, lie down, or otherwise get comfortable and move your attention into your body. Honestly, you can stop right there. That’s a complete practice in itself. A lot of somatic work is just about feeling the body, becoming aware of sensation, and creating states of safety, peace, and connection.
The emotional inquiry side goes a step further. You’re feeling into your body, trying to settle into a relatively safe state, and then you start trying to connect with your emotions.
Now, a lot of teachers recommend actually having conversations with your emotions. They might encourage you to ask your anger what it wants or ask your sadness what it’s trying to tell you. Not gonna lie, that approach hasn’t worked particularly well for me. I don’t tend to communicate with my emotions through words. For me it’s more of a vibe. I just feel into my body and try to connect with whatever is there.
It’s hard to explain exactly what this is like. One of the challenges with this whole area is that people often try to put the process into words more than the experience warrants, in my opinion.
You might journal beforehand and write, “I want to get in touch with anger,” then sit quietly and look for what anger actually feels like in your body. Where is it? What sensations accompany it? How does it move? What happens if you pay attention to it?
This stuff sounds incredibly basic, and maybe for some people it is. Maybe some people naturally grow up doing this. I didn’t! So even this very basic level of emotional awareness can be surprisingly helpful.
From there, emotional work branches out in all sorts of directions. You can work on expressing emotions, for instance.
Anger is the easiest example. You can intentionally practice expressing anger by yelling into an empty room, punching the air, hitting a pillow, or yelling into a pillow. People do this sort of thing in movies all the time, but you can actually get a lot of mileage out of practicing it deliberately.
You can also practice crying. You can sit there and try to connect with grief or sadness. See what brings you closer to tears, see what makes your heart close up and go stiff. Play with going back and forth between the two states.
Really the possibilities are endless here. Again, just experiment!
Anyway, that’s emotional work in a nutshell. It sometimes seems to basic and obvious to be not worth mentioning, but the practices have been very impactful for me.
Also, it’s more necessary than ever in the modern world. Especially for intellectual, nerdy types like myself. More than almost any other time in human history, we’re up in our heads and disconnected from our bodies and emotions. That’s partly technology and partly modernity as a broader socio-cultural and historical phenomenon.
Good luck. On to the next!
Breathwork
Another broad category of nervous system regulation techniques is breathwork.
Now, working with the breath can be dangerous. Just saying, you’ve been warned, don’t sue me, et cetera.
Breathwork is complicated. You have the basic meditation instructions where people tell you to focus on the breath, and honestly those have never been particularly helpful for me. (I mean to be honest I think a lot of the “just focus on the breath” advice is extremely retarded, unhelpful, and basically makes people worse, but that’s beside the point.)
There are all sorts of different styles. Wim Hof is one of the most popular…. but I’ve also heard a lot of people recommend avoiding it because it’s apparently more dangerous than a lot of other techniques.
Then you’ve got box breathing, extending your inhale or exhale, pausing between breaths, and about a million other ways of relating to the breath. Again, just research some stuff and experiment.
One thing that’s been surprisingly helpful for me lately is the Buteyko method, which is actually about breathing less and intentionally creating what they call air hunger. Basically, you take shallower breaths and pause more often between them while trying to maintain a sense of safety, warmth, and calm in the body. It reliably seems to stimulate a low level of fear.
For me, that’s actually been useful. It gives me a chance to work with fear directly while remaining grounded, and it generally leaves me feeling energized. What’s funny is that for almost a decade I tried to take deeper breaths because that’s what everyone says you’re supposed to do. Then, somewhat counterintuitively, shallower breathing ended up helping me more. It’s interesting how that works.
If you want to read more on Buteyko breathing specifically, I recommend this article:
A related category, which maybe deserves its own section, is humming and singing. You’ll sometimes hear people talk about polyvagal exercises. My understanding is that the vagus nerve runs throughout the body, but there are ways of stimulating it through vibration in the throat and neck.
Humming at certain frequencies can stimulate the vagus nerve, and be surprisingly soothing. Just learning to hum deeply and comfortably can have a calming effect, I’ve found it to be quite pleasant.
Singing belongs here too. I joined my church choir about a year and a half ago, and singing, especially collective religious singing, has been really good for regulating my breathing, my emotions, and my nervous system more generally.
Learning to Rest
The third broad category is related to meditation, albeit a little more passive. This practice goes by various names, but the basic idea is simply learning to rest.
It’s somewhat difficult to distinguish from meditation. You can almost think of it as a kind of Zen “do nothing” practice. It’s called “active rest” in the Alexander Technique, which is often used by people dealing with chronic pain and chronic muscular issues.
The practice is again, quite simple. You sit or lie in a comfortable position. A common setup that I especially like is lying on your back with your lower legs elevated on a couch or chair so that your knees are bent at roughly ninety degrees.
Then you just stay there for ten or fifteen minutes. Unlike in other meditation styles, you’re not trying to manage your breathing. You’re not trying to focus your attention like in Vipassana, or meditate on the impermanent nature of all things. You’re not trying to generate a feeling of boundless love for yourself or all beings, like in metta.
You’re legit just laying there, chilling, resting.
Again, this sounds incredibly basic, but there are a lot of nuances to it, and I’d recommend trying it. Over time you’ll begin to notice habitual patterns of muscular tension, and learn to release them. You’ll find areas of what’s called “parasitic attraction,” like when your shoulders tense up whenever your neck tenses up.
Eventually, your body will slowly learn to carry the rested, relaxed, safe state more and more in your day to day life. But to start, it’s crucial to have a foundation of stillness and rest.
Movement and Exercise
The last major category I want to mention is exercise and movement more generally. This one is obvious. Anyone dealing with chronic pain, depression, anxiety, or really anyone who isn’t deaf eventually gets told to exercise, lift weights, go to the gym, and so on. (…you know what deaf people probably get told to exercise too.)
The distinction I’d suggest is to think about exercise less like powerlifting and more like dancing. For years I tried forcing myself through stretches and exercise routines that I didn’t enjoy. At the same time, I was also a dancer.
At one point I had a realization: what if I just treated cardio like dance?
I started putting on workout videos with music I liked. Sometimes I’d do the exercises the instructor was doing. Sometimes I wouldn’t. Sometimes I’d just dance around the room and move however I felt like moving.
That mindset shift unlocked something for me. For the first time, I was able to exercise consistently without feeling like I was constantly forcing myself. It became fun. It gave me energy. It felt good in my body. And now I’d say it’s one of the most important practices I do for daily nervous system regulation.
Over time, you build it up. Years ago I started with just 5 or 10 minutes of light cardio a day. Nowadays I’ll do more like 20 or 30 minutes of cardio a day, go to the gym twice a week, and dance at least once a week. But I didn’t get there by telling myself “YOU’VE GOT TO GET TO THE GYM YOU LAZY FAT ASS!” I got there by learning to have fun with it, and slowly building up.
Closing Out
There are plenty of other practices that deserve a short mention as well:
Eye contact exercises can be surprisingly powerful. Sustained eye contact with another person, especially while talking about difficult emotions, can be deeply regulating. It’s also intense, and you probably want some guidance if you’re exploring it seriously.
There’s therapy and coaching, though the challenge there is finding someone who is both competent and a good fit for you.
There’s journaling, writing about your experiences, writing about how you want your future to be.
There’s art more generally. Creative expression can be a powerful way of processing emotion, regulating the nervous system, and discovering things about yourself that are difficult to access via other means.
So, those are some of the main techniques that I’ve found helpful, along with a few observations about how I’ve worked with them. I want to repeat: none of these practices are magic bullets.
Most of them work differently at different points in life. But collectively they’ve given me a much larger toolbox for dealing with chronic pain, anxiety, difficult emotions, and the general pain and suffering of living as a human being.
If there’s one thing I want to emphasize, it’s experimentation. Try things. Come back to them later. Don’t assume a technique that didn’t work six months ago won’t work today. A lot of this is less about finding the perfect method and more about slowly learning how your particular mind and body actually function.
And remember that it is absolutely, unequivocally achievable to feel WAY better than you do now. You can feel better than you ever believed possible. It’s not always easy, and it may take a while, but don’t give up hope.
Full text here, go to Substack if you want the pictures and links and such.
The basic case for Universalism, or why hell must be temporary
Let’s talk about where your soul is going after you die.
A heavy way to start the article, eh? Unfortunately, this type of heavy handed language is often used by Christians to imply that non-believers or even Christians with the ‘wrong’ theology will go to hell. Not just go to hell, but go to hell FOREVER!
This frankly insane strategy has been quite successful, especially in Protestant culture. The threat of hellfire and brimstone and being poked by a demon’s trident for eternity is extremely effective at scaring some people into a brittle, false kind of faith.
Especially sensitive, neurotic, and generally imaginative types like myself.
Sadly though, while it may bring some people back to faith and have use on the margins, it tends to drive people away from Christianity more than anything. Almost every Christian apostate I’ve talked to has some story of religious trauma, where their parent or friend or pastor told them if they didn’t live a perfectly saintly life, they were going to hell.
They then obsessed over their eternal fate until they got so neurotic, so afraid, so twisted up inside they had to decide that the whole damn religion was fake. And honestly, I don’t even blame them.
So this article is meant as a quick overview of the idea of eternal hell - where it came from, and whether or not it’s valid. To be clear, this is just my own research to get a basic understanding, I’m not a theologian and I won’t be going extremely into the depths on this one.
I’ll also admit up front that even before I did this research, moral intuition insisted that eternal hell is not a true teaching. I can’t conceive of a good and loving God who creates a universe in which legions and legions of His creations, made in His image, are tortured brutally for all eternity. It simply makes no sense whatsoever.
After living as an atheist/buddhist for over ten years, I followed my moral intuition and the voice of God in my heart to Christ and the Orthodox church, so I was conflicted when I first started wondering about the fate of the damned. I was pleasantly surprised to find that many others in the Orthodox and Catholic churches felt the same way, and that the argument against eternal punishment had a long and storied history.
Some basic definitions:
Universalist: Holds that all will ultimately be saved
Infernalist: Holds that some face eternal punishment from God
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The Bible Said So
If you were raised by a certain type of Christian parent, you’ve probably been threatened with hell.
It’s sadly common in Christian circles: “do X or you’ll go to hell!” The fact that we casually threaten children with eternal torment is a bit crazy, but hey, culture is weird sometimes.
Where does this come from? Well, there are a lot of admonitions in Scripture about how sin leads to punishment in the afterlife:
Matthew 25:45
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Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.
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And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal.
Thessalonians 1:7
- They will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might…
Revelation 14:10
- And the smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever, and they have no rest, day or night, these worshipers of the beast and its image, and whoever receives the mark of its name.
Now, a straightforward reading of the English here would indicate okay, yes, if we are sinners in this life, or at least don’t pass the bar for God, we go to hell forever. To suffer, and be tormented, over and over and over, without ceasing.
Pretty scary stuff.
However, many scholars have argued that these translations are… faulty, to say the least. The argument typically hinges on the translation of the Greek phrase “kolasin aiōnion,” which has often been translated as “eternal punishment,” and the Greek phrase “eis tous aiōnas tōn aiōnōn,” translated as “forever and ever.”
The problem comes in when you realize that the word “aiōnion” has a dual meaning in ancient Greek - it could either mean:
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A really long time! Literally “until the end of the age,” which in practice just meant a really long time
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Actually forever, infinite, eternal. Will never cease. Trillions and trillions of years go by and it’s still happening
The debate hinges on which of the two time periods these phrases actually refer to. Universalists are not just pulling this out of their rear ends, so to speak. There are uses of aiōnion in the Old Testament that clearly refer to a temporary happening, such as when Moses blessed the “eternal hills” of Joseph’s land in Deuteronomy 33:15, or the “eternal fire” of Sodom in Jude 7.
Another major debate is over the doctrine of “apokatastasis,” or the promised restoration of all things in eternity. Many classical writers, most notably Saint Paul, talked about this concept. Specifically:
Colossians 1:19–20 “through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven”.
1 Timothy 2:4 “God desires all people to be saved.”
2 Peter 3:9 “not wishing any to perish.”
1 Corinthians 15:22–28 “as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ… that God may be all in all.”
I could go on and on. There are all sorts of minor debates over other terms, and theological minutiae. Suffice to say, there is no clear cut, black and white answer as to whether Scripture declares eternal punishment, and the popularity of the infernalist versus universalist position has oscillated back and forth throughout Christian history depending on when and where you look.
The Church Said So
For the Orthodox and Catholic (and some Protestant) believers, we luckily have an institution to interpret Scripture for us: the Church!
Pretty much every infernalist, when backed into a corner and made to doubt their understanding of eternal torment, will immediately turn and say, “well the Church teaches that the damned suffer in hell forever!”
As in the section above, they aren’t necessarily wrong, but they also aren’t completely right.
So, what does the Church actually say? I’ll focus on the Orthodox church here, but ultimately the major decision point was well before the schism of 1054, so this section applies mostly to both Catholic and Orthodox doctrine.
This discussion centers around the Fifth Ecumenical Council in 553. Imagine a room full of men with long beards, in fancy robes, full of the Holy Spirit, conferring in the heart of Constantinople, at the Hagia Sophia. (Arguably the most beautiful church in the world at the time, though sadly a mosque now.)
So all of these guys get together to discuss some problems in the early church, and figure out what was going on. A side character in this drama, a man by the name of Origen of Alexandria, had caused some problems with interpretations of his teachings a while back, and he was on the list to discuss.
Specifically, Origen believed in the pre-existence of souls before birth, and reincarnation after death, as well as universal reconciliation or the restoration of all things and beings. Even the devil, and fallen angels!
The council ruled definitively that this specific system of Origen’s belief as a whole was condemned. The line that is often trotted out, which I admit looks quite bad, is as follows:
“If anyone says or thinks that the punishment of demons and of impious men is only temporary, and will one day have an end, and that a restoration [apokatastasis] will take place of demons and of impious men, let him be anathema.”
The way most universalists combat this objection is that:
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This was referring to Origen’s overall system, not specifically claiming that the damned are tormented forever or even giving a concrete definition of punishment in the afterlife
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The ‘restoration’ discussed here is actually referring more to Origen’s belief that humans existed somehow outside the body before birth, and would be ‘restored’ to that state afterward. Not how most universalists use ‘restored’, to mean reconciled to God.
To be absolutely clear on this point: there is no specific Church dogma that definitively declares the damned are punished eternally. In fact, glorified saints such as Saint Gregory of Nyssa and Saint Isaac the Syrian explicitly taught universalism and held universalist positions until they died, and have not been condemned by the Church.
I emphasize this because when you wade into online discussions of universalism versus infernalism, the argument via doctrine is by far the most common problem infernalist argument you see. Sadly many people see this argument then simply take it at face value that their church believes the damned will be tortured forever, not being bothered enough by that teaching to actually check for themselves.
So again, in terms of actual church doctrine, just like with interpretation of Scripture, we have a somewhat murky picture in which neither the universalist or infernalist position clearly wins out.
I’ll add as well that at least in the Orthodox tradition, church doctrine is not strictly binding forever and ever as it is in the Catholic church. The councils are not perfectly infallible. Through consensus and the living tradition of the Church, our dogmas and doctrines can be updated as new information or revelations come out.
So even if there was a strong consensus that infernalism was what a council taught, it could be changed!
Sadly, many ‘Orthobros’ in America have converted from Protestant backgrounds where “sola scriptura,” or a strict black and white, legalistic understanding of the faith, is the default worldview. Even after conversion, this way of seeing the faith is carried over, and they tend to try and use church councils as a bludgeon, with a liberal use of the words “heresy” and “heretic.”
You’d think if they cared so strictly about the rules they would let the bishops decide who was heretical instead of taking it upon themselves, but that’s how it goes on the internet.
Meaninglessness or the Noble Lie
Finally I will give a notable mention to another couple of arguments.
The first goes something like: “life has no meaning if there isn’t eternal punishment.”
Another argument is that the doctrine of eternal hell acts as some sort of “Noble Lie,” where it’s not really true, but the masses just aren’t ready to understand the truth and they will act up if they learn that they’ll eventually go to heaven.
Speaking about universal salvation online, I’ve gotten well over a dozen responses forwarding these lines of belief. They aren’t very compelling to me, so my only guess here is that these people have a misunderstanding of the actual universalist position.
When a universalist argues that God will reconcile all things in the end, they are not saying that hell doesn’t exist. Instead, simply that hell is not eternal.
For instance, if you have somebody really bad like an unrepentant serial killer die and go to hell, they may be there a long, long time. Perhaps hundreds, thousands, or millions of years, subjectively. That still constitutes an extremely strong reason to avoid sin, and work out your salvation! Just because hell isn’t fully, forever eternal, does not mean hell has no value as a deterrent.
Eternity, forever, infinite, etc. are complicated concepts, and it makes sense as to why people wouldn’t really grok it or be able to reason about it well. Heck, I don’t even understand it fully, and there are some tricky arguments about how true Eternity is “outside of time” that make eternal punishment make sense. I don’t want to get into that here.
In conclusion, if you are a Christian of any stripe, even Orthodox or Catholic, and you want to hope for universal salvation, you are well within your rights to do so. No church has explicitly condemned it, and there are very good reasons to believe it. As I owned up to in the beginning of this article, I see it as a requirement to satisfy my own moral intuitions about the goodness of God. How could a loving Father create children in His own image knowing many, or even most, are condemned to eternal torture?
Be warned however that if you decide to hope for universal salvation, you may want to keep it close to your chest. The infernalist position tends to correlate with extremely dogmatic, rigorist, and frankly spiteful believers who are often extremely difficult to have open and productive conversations with. I’d caution you against arguing too much, unless you’re like me, and simply can’t help yourself.
All this being said, I also want to emphasize the fact that not all universalists are going to heaven, and not all infernalists are going to hell. Having the ‘right belief’ does not give us a free pass. We must love one another, and purify our hearts to the best of our ability. As a wise friend cautioned me during this discussion:
Where is the heart? are there tears of longing for light, and love, and holiness, for the capacity to heal others? on either side of the universalist/infernalist debate, there are people whose hearts are longing for God, and people who are just manipulating words with pride and worshipping their minds.
I hope this article has been helpful or at least interesting for you, and may we all move our hearts closer to God.
Shapes in the Fog is a reader-supported publication. Subscribe, or you’ll go to hell forever! (Just kidding)
Another blog post, reproduced here in full, but go to substack if you want the pictures and such.
On Writing, Fiction, and Modern Escapism
Do our stories bring us down to earth, or keep our heads in the clouds?
“Interesting Reading” by Theodor Kleehaas, c. 1890
Dear reader, it’s time to read my writing about writing.
I’ve got a complicated relationship with the ol’ written word. I grew up having my parents read Lord of the Rings and other classics to me before I could even speak. While I come from a long line of rural southerners without a ton of education or wealth, I truly admire that my parents were both readers, despite the anti-reading social stigma in their class, and worked hard to pass that on to me.
As soon as I could read, I became obsessed with the written word. I remember clearly how my mother would always brag about how I could read and pronounce the word ‘indubitably’ by the time I was three years old. (She still brags about this, occasionally.)
Growing up, I lived a typical ‘millennial nerd-life’ so to speak. Both of my parents were working, and I had no siblings, so I spent a lot of time alone. As I’ve written elsewhere, much of my time I spent gaming; the time I didn’t spend gaming was mostly spent with my nose in a book.
Fantasy and science fiction, speculative fiction as it’s now called, gripped me far more than anything else. I still read non-fiction, especially scientific reading, since my mother had a career in laboratory science, so it felt relevant to me.
With hindsight, it’s obvious that my obsession with fantasy in the broader sense - worlds beyond the one I am actually in - was perhaps not the most salutary way to spend my time as a child. Instead of playing outside, socializing, or learning discipline, I took every spare moment I could to escape the physical realm and into the realm of imagination.
I’m not attempting to bemoan my situation overmuch though.
Since the 70s or so, the two-income household has been the norm, and leads to the majority of kids spending very little time with their parents. Historically, this was not the norm at all. We live in a society of orphans, raised by the state more than their parents.
Either way, one concept that helped me make sense of what I was doing as a kid is the emotional pattern sometimes called the ‘Leaving Pattern’. I first encountered it in the book The Five Personality Patterns, but it’s an older psychological pattern first typified by Wilhelm Reich, the schizoid typology. Whatever you call it, the basic idea is as follows:
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A child, for one reason or another, grows up feeling unsafe in their body / in the physical world
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As a defense, they end up ‘leaving’ their body, often going into an imaginary world, or physically withdrawing into themselves
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In order to function in the world, they create a persona that is split off from their ‘true self,’ and keep said true self in the fantasy world
Now I’ll be the first to admit that psychology is a spotty science at best, and it’s good not to read too much into these sorts of types. You can quite easily become trapped by an abstract concept, and psychology can never capture all of what a human being is. However, I still find myself relating to this pattern quite strongly, and thinking about it has helped me combat some of my problematic habits.
Okay, But… Writing?
“A Man at his Desk” by Salomon Koninck, c. 1655
Now you might be thinking, ‘Ok thanks for the dramatic sob story Thomas, how does this relate to writing again?’
Growing up, due to my love for and even obsession with reading, my career dreams such as they existed revolved around becoming a writer. I felt that good books had taught me so much, had saved me from a difficult world, and truly given me a reason to live, when I didn’t have much of one during the worst parts of my youth.
I dreamt of writing a book series that could reach out to other young children and grip them the same way. Teach them good values via stories, help provide solace in their pain, and save them the way I thought good books and stories had saved me.
Ironically, I’ve come to question this story a bit.
As I outlined above, I’m not so sure that getting deep into fantasy, science fiction, and gaming was good for me as a youth. In fact, I’m pretty confident it led to some bad outcomes for me later on. When you always cope by retreating into fantasy, you set yourself up for delayed maturation in the ‘real world,’ at the least.
Many young people who get obsessed with fantasy worlds essentially never grow up, permanently stuck in an adolescent phase. You see this quite often nowadays with Marvel, or Disney, or other major commercialized fantasy worlds.
So I have had to take a step back and ask myself: is it truly helping the world to add yet another fictional realm for people to escape into? What if I simply perpetuate the tendency for people to ‘leave’ themselves and cause the same problems I’ve had to deal with as I grew up and was forced to confront reality?
These musings are a large part of why I ended up starting this blog, and done much of my writing in a more non-fiction, ‘serious’ realm so to speak, where I’m trying to confront real problems instead of go into a fantasy realm.
I’ll also admit that, having tried to write speculative fiction, it is quite difficult. I’ve started more novels than I can remember, only to peter out a little ways into them. Part of what has stopped me is my philosophical wranglings above, but it would be dishonest not to admit that a lack of discipline and commitment plays into it as well.
And if we zoom out from just writing, looking at the modern world as a whole, it seems to me that with the rise of phones, social media, and the digital realm generally, we are increasingly plunging ourselves into the abstract, the mental, the imaginary. We are leaving our bodies en masse in favor of intellectualized distractions, artificial connection, and disembodied dopaminergic entertainment.
A large part of my own path to healing has been learning to embrace my body, the sensations from it, and ground within the physical world, instead of spending all of my time running away from uncomfortable sensations.
While I love fantasy, science fiction, video games, and other imaginative delights, I can’t help but see these things more and more as junk food, as an unhealthy indulgence that may be good to have occasionally, but certainly should not be the core of an adult life.
And yet… I still remember being a young child, and diving into my first few fantasy worlds. I remember being exposed to depths of being and understanding that I had no conception of beforehand. I remember learning about heroism, about sacrifice, and about the depths of love that human beings can attain, with the right measure of wisdom and courage.
I remember finding something holy within the pages of these fictional worlds, something that I still feel resonates deep in my heart to this day.
Ultimately, as Jonathan Pageau, Jordan Peterson, and many other Christian writers have discussed, stories are fundamental to who we are as humans. When Christ was presented with dilemmas during His teaching, He would often teach others by telling stories, or parables. There’s a way in which stories can get at a truth deeper than ‘reality’ can, a way in which the narrative realm speaks to the deepest parts of us, makes us come alive. We desperately need stories just in order to make sense of the world.
So perhaps the problem isn’t whether fictional stories as a whole are good in themselves, but the types of stories we choose to tell, and whether they keep us trapped in our heads, or ground us in reality.
Had some more people asking about my conversion lately, finally got around to writing more about it. Link to substack article here if you want pictures etc., otherwise reposting the text below:
Been thinking about the above post from QC a lot since I’m basically exactly the type of guy he’s is calling out here. I didn’t reply initially because I felt kind of attacked or insecure, and still do a bit, but either way I think this is a great time to go into more detail with my own conversion story.
I’ve already talked about my conversion to Orthodox Christianity a bit in a previous post, which you can check out if you want more backstory / a different focus (more on my chronic pain issues):
Ultimately I convert for a variety of reasons, which I still don’t fully understand myself. A big part of it was that, as QC said, I did a ton of inner work, meditative, and psychedelic stuff for a long time. I went to a woo-woo Christian church as a kid, and was meditating and getting into Buddhism from like 13 years old onward. I was also an avowed atheist for much of that time.
Sadly Buddhism just kind of failed me. At least that’s how I saw it. I consumed soooo many books and podcasts and talks on Buddhism, spent so much time meditating and trying different techniques. I even went to a couple of Buddhist temples, but they were so alien to me culturally I basically left immediately after the service.
Looking back, I’m sure that someone who’s really into Buddhism could point out a ton of ways I didn’t try the path of the Buddha in the ‘right way’. For instance:
- I never went on a ‘serious,’ multi-day meditation retreat (though I did do a few partial day ones, some solo some with others)
- Didn’t have a formal sangha, or group of people I meditated with
- Never went and studied under an actual Buddhist teacher, got the vast majority of my instruction from the internet or books or other Buddhist dabblers who didn’t really know what they were doing
- My lifestyle throughout all of this was still quite hedonistic, was doing drugs, having casual sex, eating whatever I wanted, etc. Not practicing right action or any of the formal Buddhist moral strictures
Oftentimes I look back myself and wonder, what could have happened in my life if I managed to find the right teacher, or the right group, or even stumble into this corner of Twitter I’m in now, that actually has a lot of more grounded & mature buddhists, back before I gave up on Buddhism? I honestly don’t know.
Maybe I’d be a meditation teacher now, gallivanting around the country, no job, sleeping with hot Buddhist women (but in a totally cool, consensual, morally correct way ofc), doing DMT at cool parties in the woods, dipping to chill in a monastery whenever I want, and other things I see Buddhist teachers in the tpot/online dharma scene doing. The lifestyle certainly looks attractive, and a deep part of me still really longs for a life like that.
Regardless, it didn’t work out for me that way. The Buddhism that I encountered and that informed so much of my teenage and early adult life left me hollowed out, addicted, and broken. I had such deep issues with chronic pain, depression, and anxiety that I had to quit multiple jobs, and turned to pretty hardcore substance abuse just to numb the suffering.
I saw Buddhism and spirituality as a lifeboat, a rope thrown down that could save me from my pain and my struggles. That’s what the Buddha promised, after all! An end to suffering! But it never worked for me. I beat my head against the wall of Buddhist meditation and teachings and therapy and emotional work for over a decade, and while I would find temporary relief here and there, overall I felt I was going nowhere with it.
Encountering Christ
Christ Appears to Mary Magdalene on Easter Morning (Noli me tangere), by Peter Paul Rubens & Jan Brueghel the Younger
That’s when Christ came into my life.
It wasn’t something I actively looked for. Just happened to have a couple of friends I had really admired pop back into my life and mention hey, maybe Christianity is cooler than you think. Some of them encountered Christian teachings through AA and recovery, some had always been Christians, I just never knew it before because we hadn’t talked about it.
Either way, I took a hard look at my life, and realized I hadn’t given Christ a fair shake. I had a bachelor’s degree in history at this point, so I knew a bunch about Christ and Christianity from a sort of dry, objective, historical perspective. I had even read the New Testament a couple of times. But I had never taken the ideas seriously. I had never actually gone and looked at Christ, what He said, what He did, with anything close to an open mind.
As part of the therapy and emotional work I was doing, I realized I had a huge chip on my shoulder when it came to Christ, and had for most of my life.
You see, when I was eight years old, my dad had a stroke.
I got sent to the neighbor’s house while he and my mom went to the hospital, some of those evangelical Protestants who talk a big game about being godly and everything, but ultimately were completely uninformed assholes in real life. I stayed up all night pacing around, not knowing if my dad was going to live or die.
My neighbor woke up from me pacing around, grumpily said “if you just pray hard enough, God will save your dad, don’t worry,” and went back to sleep. So of course as an anxious kid with OCD tendencies, I prayed nonstop all night. I pleaded and bargained and begged God with every ounce of my being, telling Him I would do whatever He wanted if he just saved my dad.
As you might have guessed, it didn’t work, and the next day I woke up to find my father gone.
I’m sure for my neighbor, this comment was a relatively minor thing. She was annoyed, tired, this kid just got foisted on her and she needed sleep. She was a single mom, after all, and had her own worries I had no idea about. But still, her throwaway advice that night completely changed the trajectory of my life. From the next morning onward, I decided that I hated God. If He even existed, He must have been so unspeakably evil that the world was completely fucked. It was easier to just think He didn’t exist, and that the universe was a bunch of atoms randomly bumping into one another. It was in vogue at the time, after all.
Anyway, all this to say, when Buddhism failed to fix my problems, I was desperate enough to examine the chip on my shoulder. As I started poking at Christianity, I got more and more interested and surprised. I began to realize just how ridiculously deeply Christianity informed everything in our culture, from morals to random references in songs and movies to the names of cities and towns.
I devoured Jordan Peterson’s early lectures on Genesis, feeling an incredible tsunami of insight while listening to them, that I failed to get even after hours of vipassana meditation. Talking to more seriously intellectual Christians, I found out about Girard, and read a book by one of his students, Violence Unveiled, that blew my mind even harder about the impact of Christ on humanity, on history.
Then I reconnected with another friend, who I hadn’t spoken to in years. He happened to be Orthodox. We chatted a lot and slowly rekindled our friendship, mostly talking about Christianity. He had fallen away from the faith in college and early adulthood, and was coming back to it at the same time I was learning about it really for the first time.
Somewhere in all this, I also did some more psychedelics, and spent some weekends camping solo wilderness in the mountains, far away from civilization and any other campers. I had some experiences with Christ that caused me to question my materialist assumptions, and which I won’t recount more deeply here.
Converting to Orthodoxy
Later on, my Orthodox friend invited me to his church, for a Divine Liturgy. The first time I saw it, I was overwhelmed. He sat next to me and was explaining how the Liturgy was largely the same as the one they practiced in 300 AD, giving me all the little tidbits of symbolism and tradition. Told me about how people would reach out to touch the priest’s robe during the Grand Entrance, calling back to the woman in the Gospel who was healed by touching Christ’s garment.
I was overwhelmed. Half of it was in Greek, and I barely knew what was going on. But I knew there was something special there, something beautiful.
A few weeks went by, maybe a month or two, I don’t remember. I continued learning about Christianity and Orthodoxy, and went to another Divine Liturgy. My buddy either wasn’t there, or showed up late, so I sat by myself in the back, with a view right into the altar, looking at the crucified Christ hanging under the giant icon of the Theotokos.
It’s hard to explain what happened during that service, but something broke open in me. I remember looking at Christ, willing Him to talk to me, to become more real, to help me, to save me. And then the tears came. For some reason, in the midst of hundreds of people I had never met, in a weird church service that was half in a different language, I started crying. Tears poured out of my eyes nonstop for well over an hour. I wasn’t sobbing hysterically, just silently crying, trying not to draw attention to myself.
I had never cried like that before in my life, and never have since. I cried for so long, staying after the service, that one of the parish council members had to come and gently shoo me out of the sanctuary, as they were locking up the church.
I remember being shocked afterwards that I had been able to cry at all. I rarely cried, even when I wanted to. And I had horrible social anxiety, so crying in public like that was extremely out of character. But for some reason, I finally felt safe enough to let out the pain I had carried since I was a youth. To start to thaw the walls around my heart that had kept me from really connecting with other people my entire life.
From there, I was hooked. It still took me years to convert formally to Orthodoxy. A lot of conversations with my priest going over my doubts, and him explaining that faith was an action, not a propositional belief. That the Resurrection, the Trinity, and other core Christian teachings were Holy Mysteries, something to be approached with the heart, not with the intellect.
And here I remain, in the church, and I feel like I belong. Not because I’m an upstanding Christian, or because I deeply believe Christ was the Son of God with an intense zeal, or anything like that. But because I was, and still am, sick.
I think that, whether it’s true of ‘Real Buddhism’ or not, when I was a Buddhist I was hoping to fix myself. I was sitting there acting as if I had the power, the tools, the skill and ability to look at who I was as a person, fiddle around with my mind, and set everything in the right place. Make myself whole, perfect enlightened.
Coming to Christ was a different story. It was more about acknowledging that I am sick, and I need saving. That I can’t do it on my own, I can’t get anywhere on my own. That I need someone else, something else, to pull me out of the hole I had dug myself into.
It’s not easy. I’m not married and settled down (yet) so to go back to the original quoted tweet from QC, it’s really not a ‘relief’ in that sense. I still have tons of doubts and questions, I still look at Buddhism and other ethical systems and wonder, think about what they say, and how it compares to Christianity.
But I have been healed, in a real way. I’m sick, but on the mend, and obviously trending in the right direction. At least from my perspective. And that’s enough for me, for now. I pray it continues to be enough, and that I get to stay with Him for the rest of my days, and for life everlasting.
Another copy and pasted article from my blog. Don't worry, I normally don't post this much. Substack link if you want pictures.
My struggles as an Orthodox Christian convert, and why I can't seem to walk away from Christ despite my doubts
Going to church today for the proto-anastasian liturgy (Easter is tomorrow for us Orthodox Christians), I have to admit I have some doubts about the Resurrection and the whole story of Christ being the Son of God.
Usually I can sort of deny these doubts within myself, but during Holy Week, the sincerity of the people around me, the Church services every night and during the day (not that I go to them all), and just the general intensity of everything really brings my cognitive dissonance to the forefront.
I’m about a year and a half post my conversion to Orthodox Christianity, and when I took the vows to follow Christ, bear His cross, and keep to the strictures of the Nicene Creed, I was sincere. At least as sincere as I could be. I had doubts of course, and my priest was well aware. After all, I took the name of the premier doubter in the Christian mythos, Saint Thomas the Apostle.
When I was converting, I had multiple experiences of Christ coming to me. I dealt with extreme chronic pain, debilitating suffering, and He saved me. I don’t talk about this often online because it feels gauche, and I won’t go into detail now. But suffice to say I had genuine experiential evidence to believe the Christian story.
Unfortunately, as Christianity has ceased to be novel and exciting and a big change in my life, that evidence feels more and more hollow, less convincing to my overly rationalized, modern mind.
More and more I find myself thinking: “Is this really true? What if His body was just snatched away and lies were spread? Wouldn’t it make more sense for all the women at the tomb and the apostles to just be delusional, even if they genuinely believed it? The Jews said that they stole the body, the early Christians obviously claimed they were lying, how can we ever know for sure?”
When I first started to doubt, even before I converted, these thoughts would plague and torment me. Sitting there in church I would fret, “How can I feel this way and sing hymns, how can I take communion while not genuinely believing that it’s the Body and Blood of Christ?”
Still today these doubts and thoughts bother me, but I’m learning to be more at home with them. I can’t ever know the truth of the Resurrection. In all likelihood, the intense experiences that convinced me to convert won’t come back. My spiritual father and my elders in the faith have all warned me that’s the case.
So, if I doubt the Christian story so much, why continue going? Aren’t I living a double life? Aren’t I lying to myself and my community?
Perhaps I am. It certainly bothers me, as I pride myself (heh) on being an honest and open person. I discuss my doubts with my priest and close confidants, but generally keep them close to the chest in my broader church community.
In a way it would be easier to just leave church. To take the path I took as a teenager, be an atheist, say it’s all fake. But I simply can’t deny the beauty of Holy Orthodoxy, the haunting power of Christ’s story, and His words.
When I first saw an Orthodox Divine Liturgy, I was blown away. I came back a second time and ended up bawling the entire service, crying more in that couple of hours than I had my entire life prior. Eventually one of the parish council members had to shoo me out of the pews, because I stayed there crying so long that everyone had packed up and they were closing the church.
Something about Orthodoxy, something about Christ, just compels me. Even if it doesn’t make sense to my rational mind, my heart can’t let go of Him. Reading the pre-communion prayers, I do honestly have difficulty firmly and strongly acclaiming that YES, I DO believe this bread is the Body of Christ, and the wine is the Blood of Christ.
But I can honestly say that I love Him, that I want Him dearly, that I long for Him to be a part of me. I can say that when I participate in the Eucharist, I feel filled with a mysterious life that I can’t explain, that perhaps isn’t divine but certainly is closer than almost anything else I’ve experienced in this world.
Who knows what actually happened two thousand years ago in the tomb of Christ, it’s probably one of, if not the most, controversial historical topics ever. We will never truly know what happened, regardless of what evidence comes out or new techniques archaeologists discover.
All I know is that for me, the beauty and power of Christ’s Church and His legacy that has been kept alive for almost two thousands years by His followers is something I can’t seem to do without. It has made my life better in every way, and made me more like Him. My role model, my Lord, my Savior. When the mood strikes me, my King and my God.
Perhaps I’m a hypocrite, one of those people Christ condemned that mouthed the prayers without really believing deep in their hearts. I certainly know I’m a sinner. But ultimately, I just can’t seem to walk away despite the dissonance and the doubts and the confusion.
I’m reminded of the story in the Gospel, when Christ was about to go to His Passion, and he gave his disciples the ritual of the Eucharist. He told them that they would be eating His body, drinking His blood. Many of His followers, even those healed by Him, were freaked out, and understandably so!
They went Ok dude, we can accept that you’re a holy prophet healing us, but you want us to be cannibals? You want us to EAT you?! That’s a little too weird for me, sorry, I’m out.
Christ turned to His disciples and said, “Will ye also go away?”
Simon Peter responded, in a quote that haunts me two thousand years later because I feel the exact same damn way. He looked at this beautiful Man, this incredible healer, teacher, prophet, king. He searched his heart, and responded:
“Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life.”
Link to my recent Substack article, if you want pictures and links. Reposting the full text here.
When I was five years old, I got a GameBoy Color for Christmas. I started with only one game: Pokémon Red.
I proceeded to train Pokémon so much over the next week and withdraw so much from the world that my mom had to take my GameBoy back a few days after Christmas. That ended up being the first of hundreds of similar fights over my time spent gaming that we had throughout my childhood.
Video games are a controversial topic in the modern world. Nowadays, most parents are at least aware of the dangers of screen time and letting children spend too much time in front of a computer, phone, tablet, or other device. Not that every parent cares, or has the time/attention/energy/discipline to keep their kids away from screens.
But for those of us growing up in the 90s and early 2000s, this cultural awareness wasn’t there yet. During my own childhood, I spent many thousands of hours in front of a screen, mostly playing video games. Someone in my corner of Twitter, , recently posted about this phenomenon. Here’s a quoted excerpt, but I’d recommend reading the full tweet (really a short article) if you’re curious:
so, just objectively - without any ethical judgement at all, our parents (speaking generally) just had us in front of screens for literally thousands of hours. many thousands. if i expanded the range here (down into age 7 and up into 14) and really squeezed it, its possible we could get close to 10,000 hours.
For especially young male millennials, this amount of screentime was quite common. Owen even admits later in the tweet that he is probably on the low end of the spectrum, since he was mostly playing games like Harvest Moon and never got into TV or movies.
Growing Up with Games
After I graduated high school and went off to college, I gradually accepted that I had a bit of a problem when it came to time spent gaming, and decided to quit playing video games entirely. I felt a lot of shame about the fact that I had, as I saw it, “wasted” so much of my life sitting in front of a screen.
However, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to change my mind on video games to some degree. I’ve slowly picked the controller (or mouse and keyboard, as it were) back up. The natural constraints of working a full-time job, living with my girlfriend (and now fiancé), being involved in my church community, as well as working out and staying physically fit, have helped me balance video games with the rest of my life.
I’ve found that gaming just fills something in my soul that I haven’t been able to find elsewhere. There’s a sort of instant camaraderie you get when you join a community of gamers and start playing together. I recently had one of the most wholesome nights of my life gaming with a group of guys I had only met a couple weeks prior.
So, we were gaming as per usual. I played pretty badly, and lost hard. I rage quit the game, left the Discord voice chat. Checked 10 minutes later and they were all pinging me, sending GIFs of dudes kissing saying “this could be us.”
I replied by posting some stupid copypasta calling them all degen retarded apes. Then they brought me back, had me play again, gave me a bunch of buffs so I easily steamrolled everybody as they gassed me up.
It’s hard to describe how wholesome it felt… I was so ashamed at losing so badly and then rage quitting, only to see 10+ guys all immediately coming out in support. Keep in mind these dudes also constantly flame each other and call each other retards and other things I won’t repeat here on the daily.
And yet when I had a bad time, they all immediately came together and spent over an hour of their night building me back up. It actually brought tears to my eyes when I thought about it.
Gaming gets a lot of flak from all corners, and there are obviously many problems with gaming addiction, escapism, etc. But where else in today’s world can a young man experience this sort of instant camaraderie with other young men, doing a shared activity he actually gives a shit about? The opportunities in the “real world” seem vanishingly rare, for one reason or another.
I was addicted to gaming growing up and felt a lot of shame around it for a long time. But I’m getting more into it recently and I’m glad I am. I love gaming and all the beautiful, absurd, ridiculous moments it can lead to. I hope if I have kids I can teach them to game from a place of joy and balance so they can enjoy it too, and maybe we can even game together.
I’ve done a lot of emotional work and somatic meditation around shame, and as anyone who has done this work knows, it can be hard to make progress. You can get stuck at the same spot for months, or years.
Reflecting on how it felt to get support from this random community of gamers, I felt a huge knot release deep in my stomach and lower back. It’s hard to explain how strongly it impacted me, to experience a community come together to support me when I felt such deep shame. When I thought for sure I’d be rejected.
Striving, Competition, Aggression
Another benefit of coming back to gaming from a more mature space is learning to strive and compete in a healthy way. If you can’t tell from the story above, I’ve struggle with a tendency to be a sore loser. Video games provide me a somewhat low-stakes environment to practice failing at something and resolving to get better instead of just sinking into negative and unproductive emotions, venting rage, or other destructive reactions.
Perhaps most importantly, video games allow us to connect with an unfettered and childlike joy! It can be so hard to find a place where joy, excitement, and silliness are not just allowed, but shared by a whole group. Gaming, at its best, is all about fun and connecting with that childlike sense of joy. And while there can definitely be a lot of toxicity in the gaming world, some communities are able to bring that joy to the forefront quite often.
Now, would it be ideal to find this sort of wholesome support and community in the physical world, wrapped up in a set of deeper and more grounded relationships? Absolutely. I don’t doubt that for a second.
Unfortunately though, the opportunity for this sort of connection, especially for young men, has become harder to find than perhaps ever. The most common similar social group would be a sports team, but for myself (and I know for many, many other young men in my generation) sports and the culture around it is so alien as to be almost impossible to get into.
But even with sports teams, it’s difficult to find a group where you can have an experience like the one I described above. Especially when it comes to… innapropriate behavior like everyone calling me a retard and making gay jokes. As a friend put it to me when I shared the story, the type of bonding and community I described above is pretty uniquely male.
The ability to turn on a dime from giving someone shit and calling them all sorts of offensive names to supporting them and building them up isn’t something you often see in groups where women are involved. There have been endless online screeds about the problem of incels and otherwise disaffected young men becoming a lot more common, and I think a huge reason for this is that it’s very difficult for young men to access male-only spaces. You can’t really have the same level of offensive behavior when women are around, even if the women are totally down. Socially, it just isn’t the same.
In fact, gaming is one of the last places men can congregate together in at least somewhat private groups and break social norms, say offensive things, and not be scolded or censored for it.
While the dopamine induced from the flashing lights and compelling music that video games provide does explain part of video game addiction, I think the greater part here is actually the fact that many young men find real community and a real chance to be themselves and connect in a way that feels right from a masculine perspective. Again, something that is increasingly hard to find in the physical world.
Overall I still have a complicated relationship with gaming. I often wonder whether my life would feel more complete and satisfying if I were able to put the same energy into different pursuits. Many people I respect, like Simon Sarris, have claimed that once you find more meaningful activities to passionately engage with, gaming no longer attracts you.
Video games lost their appeal coinciding with starting to date my wife. I think I can credit desire with a major change in perspective. Realizing that I wanted more/other things. My (then) gf of course but a trajectory for life generally…
Having an opportunity to make a house and gardens made it very easy to give up something like video games. I used to make beautiful structures in minecraft, but its a bore compared to physicality. I feel like I am shaping my own little national park. For my family, for the town.
I’ve related more and less to the quote above at various times in my life. Unfortunately, whatever I tend to put my energy and effort in ends up disappointing somehow, or perhaps I simply lose my zeal for it.
Either way, for the moment at least, I’m happy to continue gaming. While it may not be ‘productive’ in a certain sense, I’m learning to strive and connect with others in a healthier way. Plus I’m just having fun.
I don’t know what God has in store for my life, but I do hope that even as I get older, I at least dust off my gaming PC or console or VR headset (or whatever people use to game in the future) once or twice every year or two.
Hey folks I wrote a blog post on therapy vs confession. If you want to see the images and stuff go to the substack link, otherwise putting all the text here cuz fk forcing people onto my blog. Hope you're having a good weekend.
People nowadays are always talking about how therapy is the new priesthood. Therapists are just secular priests, therapeutic work is the same as confession, etc etc. While I can understand where people are coming from, I want to tease apart the major differences I’ve found as someone who has done both a lot of therapy, and been blessed with the sacrament of holy confession.
Goals of Therapy vs Confession
What people often think of when they think about this is the traditional stereotypical role of a priest: you go into a little Catholic box that’s dark and has a little wooden screen. You’ve probably seen it in movies or TV shows. You confess all your deepest, darkest sins, etc., etc.
But for most people who don’t do confession anymore (at least in America, where a lot of modern culture and media is produced) most people aren’t going to confession. Even most Christians don’t really do it, as far as I know. Confession isn’t a huge thing in Protestant circles, and most American Christians are still Protestant. So you have this weird situation where the sacrament of holy confession has fallen out of the public consciousness quite a bit.
Therapy, at first glance, seems kind of like confession: you go into a room. Traditionally in psychoanalysis you don’t look at the psychoanalyst, right? Now it’s more common to have a face-to-face chat. You go through all your deepest, darkest secrets. You tell the therapist, and the therapist tries to help you with those deep, dark secrets, like the priest would as well.
But there are some major differences right from the start. First of all, when it comes to the actual rite, there’s a big difference in how you approach your quote-unquote “confessing” in therapy versus confession.
To start with, in confession (as someone who’s done holy confession a number of times and been blessed with that) it’s really a beautiful sacrament. The goal is to confess your sins. You’re going in there saying, “Okay, Father, I have sinned. I have made mistakes. I have done things that I knew were wrong and bad, and this is what they are.” You go in confessing sins (things you’re admitting to the Father are bad) and you ask for forgiveness. You ask for absolution from God, from Christ, the Holy Trinity, etc.
That’s a pretty important distinction because going in and saying, “Hey, I have sinned, I have made mistakes, I have offended God, I have been immoral” (however you want to put it) and asking for absolution and forgiveness is very different from what you’re doing in therapy.
In therapy, the goal is to go to your therapist and say, “Hey, I have some problems. I have mental health problems, interpersonal problems, and I want you to help me fix them.” You’re working together with the therapist. They call it the therapeutic relationship or whatever. But as the client and the therapist, you’re collaborating to solve problems that come up in your mind, your relationships, your job, etc.
While they may seem similar on the surface, these are extremely different things. When you go to confession and tell a priest, “Hey, I’ve sinned,” typically the priest isn’t sitting there hashing out with you how to fix it. That might happen a little, sometimes before or after, but the sacrament of confession is mainly the priest listening, maybe clarifying if something’s a sin worthy of confession, offering a bit of guidance, mostly just letting you confess, and then praying the prayers of holy confession to absolve you of your sin.
As opposed to therapy, where you go deep into it. In therapy the moral category isn’t as central. A therapist might say, “Oh no, that was bad, you shouldn’t have done that,” or “this person shouldn’t have done this,” but usually they have a much more problem-solving approach to interpersonal and mental issues.
So again to emphasize: the overall purpose, the telos, of confession versus therapy is very, very different.
The goal of confession is to absolve you of your sins. Holy confession has that power. This gets tricky depending on how much you believe Christian doctrine, of course? But as someone who’s done a lot of psychotherapy and also holy confession, I can tell you that even just experientially, phenomenologically, it feels extremely different.
In holy confession, you confess your sins. You tearfully tell your spiritual father the things you’re ashamed of, he puts his stole over your head, prays for you, and asks for and receives forgiveness and absolution. It’s beautiful. It’s an incredible experience.
You feel it in your heart and gut: the release of pressure, shame, and guilt. It’s divine.
I’ll add the caveat that you probably have to believe in God for this to work fully. The ritual and religious aspects have psychological effects even if you don’t believe, but if you don’t believe in God, it’s not nearly as impactful. I’ve never done holy confession without believing, so your mileage may vary.
With a therapist, you can have deep emotional experiences too. I’ve had sessions where I’ve gone deep into grief over losing loved ones, deep into childhood traumas, cried for 30 to 40 minutes. It’s meaningful and important to go through that and reach those difficult emotions.
But at the end of the day, it’s not as powerful as holy confession, at least in the moment. Therapy tends to work over far longer time periods, and it’s more of a knowledge-based process of learning and applying mental techniques. It’s in a different ballpark entirely.
Social Roles of Therapist vs Priest
Another important aspect of the distinction here is the different relationship you have with your therapist versus your priest. This gets confused a little in the modern era too. We’re not as tied into our church parishes as we used to be as Christians. I’m going to speak specifically here to priests of the Orthodox/Catholic and other high church groups.
As a client working with a therapist, it’s clear that you’re going to a professional you don’t have a personal connection with, who is “objective” about your situation, and who is using a rationalized set of techniques to help with your problems.
When you confess to a priest, that priest is your spiritual father (whom you literally call ‘father), and at least in the ideal parish situation, he’s someone who knows you well, who has seen you through difficulties and triumphs, and is a crucial part of your church community. You have a connection with him, and not just you: your loved ones, your spouse, your children, your parents, your friends and fellow parishioners, they all have a connection with this man too.
Therapy is by its nature very atomized, very individualistic: it’s you and a therapist talking about your problems. When you’re confessing to a priest, of course the seal of confession means he’ll never (or at least should never) discuss your sins with anyone else. (In my experience it doesn’t happen as much as people think. It’s very rare for priests to break the seal in Orthodox and Catholic churches.)
But you’re still telling your shameful secrets the leader of your community, a spiritual father who has relationships with you and the people around you. You’re inviting him to hear your deepest, darkest problems, sins, mistakes.
On the other hand, a therapist is never (or at least traditionally should never be) integrated into your community. There are many warnings for therapists in training about doing separate therapy with both a person and their spouse or children, for instance. There’s couples therapy and family therapy, but therapy cannot (and I don’t think should) replace the entire parish community. It can’t.
Perspective of a Therapist vs a Priest
So that’s how these two roles are different your perspective as a client or parishioner. But also, from the perspective of the therapist and the priest, the actual person doing the job has a distinct focus depending on the role.
For the priest, holy confession is a very important sacrament and a key part of their role, but it’s still a small part. The priest’s main job is to run the parish as an administrator, preach, pray the liturgy, lead the divine services, however many times a day or week.
So for a priest, hearing people’s deepest, darkest secrets and shames is something they do, and it’s very important. Holy confession is an incredibly beautiful sacrament, vital for healing, but it doesn’t happen every day for most priests, and it’s not what they spend most of their time on. Most of their time goes to leading the parish, the congregation, running the church.
Whereas for a therapist, probably 20 to 40 hours a week they’re hearing people’s shames, difficulties, and problems. So the therapist’s role is much more focused on that deep-dark-secret thing.
Ironically, I think that gives them a very different psychology. Priests in holy confession aren’t as focused on digging into every detail. “Oh, you feel this shame because of this childhood thing” or “maybe if you focus on it this way you won’t feel the shame.” The goal is to hear sins and absolve them.
For the therapist, the goal is to lean (ideally scientifically) into your inner neuroses, emotional issues, and solve them, or at least help you get back to functioning.
That gets to maybe the core distinction: a therapist’s job is to solve your problems and help you become a quote-unquote “functioning” person. The role of the priest in confession is to absolve you of your sins, via divine grace.
A therapist tends to see someone as a problem to be solved, in order to get them functional. A priest sees everyone as equally sinful, only ‘improving’ by the grace of God.
The Deeper Divide between Religion & Secular Technique
The lines between the emotional/mental/therapeutic world and the spiritual/religious world are notoriously blurry. There’s overlap and confusion.
If you talk to genuinely religious people who take faith seriously (and I think this holds for Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, etc.), they feel a real difference between psychotherapy and religious rites, rituals, and practices.
We could talk endlessly about why: whether there’s actual grace, or it’s psychological/ritualistic artifacts of our minds. But experientially, as the person actually going through them, you can tell that these two rituals are worlds apart.
I’m not sure why or how exactly, that’s a whole series of blog posts in itself.
Overall it’s easy to look at things with surface similarities and call them the same. We love to do it in the flattened modern world. But ultimately when it comes to therapy and confession, it’s just not true.
The purposes of the role, the experience of working with them, and the overall social context between a therapist and a priest have discrete, and crucial characteristics.
To be clear, both therapy and confession can be helpful and salutary. In general I’d pick holy confession if I had to choose one, but it’s a tight race for me.
Either way, I hope you come away from this article understanding a bit more about the differences, especially if you’ve never gotten the chance to confess your sings.
If you have objections, questions, or your own thoughts, feel free to leave a comment below.
This is an overview of my struggles with chronic pain. It's a bit of a personal post, but also in the end dips slightly into how I overcame my issues via coming back to Christ. I hope it's useful/interesting for folks.
Pasting the whole thing below here, although there are images in the Substack that I reference so I recommend checking it out if you're curious:
You’ve probably seen it before. Your friend is a broken wreck, they can’t work, their life is steadily plummeting towards the abyss. They get diagnosed with fibromyalgia, CPTSD, hypermobility/EDS, or early onset arthritis. You give up hope they’ll ever be normal.
Then all of the sudden, out of seemingly nowhere, they start drinking celery juice every day and all their problems disappear! (This one actually happened to my mom, bless her heart.)
Or they go gluten-free. Or find Jesus. Or see a $500/hr chiropractor who’s written a book about ghosts. Whatever it is, it "fixes" them.
You roll your eyes. But also… you kind of want it to be true. Because maybe you’ll finally get to stop listening to them complain. Maybe, just maybe, the cloud of misery around them that has slowly pushed away you and everyone else in their life is finally parting, and you’ll get to see them be happy for the first time in years.
Modern chronic pain causes an incredible amount of misery. The typical cited prevalence of chronic pain is somewhere around 50 million people in the U.S. daily experiencing at least some pain.
Now when you think of someone with chronic pain, you probably picture an old mill worker with a bad back, or hips, or knees. Perhaps all three.
But chronic pain doesn’t just hit the old, the worn down, the obviously crippled. There are also people like me, not so long ago. A 23-year-old man sobbing silently as his tongue goes numb, his jaw locks, and he tries to decide whether or not to call 911 for the third time that month.
That kind of moment where you stare death in the face is characteristic of what the medical field calls “high-impact” chronic pain. The dry description of “daily activities are significantly limited” doesn’t quite capture how it feels from the inside.
When you look at these stats and medical phrases, it’s easy to distance yourself emotionally. But if you’ll allow me, dear reader, I want to give you a bit of an inside look into what it’s like to go through crushing, daily, seemingly inescapable pain.
How all of your worst fears seemingly become realized.
You stare down decades of living as a cripple.
When your own body betrays you constantly, forcing you to go from a bright energetic youth to a shuffling old man over the course of a couple of years.
How you think you’ve finally found a cure, only to have the hope cruelly ripped out of your weak grasp over, and over. And over.
Hopefully, this inside look can help you understand and sympathize with those unfortunates who, like me, have dealt with the hell we so clinically call “chronic pain.”
23 Years Young, Staring Death in the Face
Sitting on the bed at my mom’s house, at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, the soft afternoon sunlight streamed through the window. At the age of 23, I thought I was about to die.
My tongue burned all down the left side, then promptly went numb. It felt like a snake had lodged itself in my throat all of the sudden, and started to swell. The muscles along my jaw bunched, locked and then started to spasm. I fought for breath.
Rushing in after hearing some of the noises I was making, my mother panicked and asked if we needed to go to the E.R. I told her no, by shaking my head of course. I wasn’t capable of speech at this point.
You see, I had already been to the E.R. once for something similar, just a few months ago. They made me wait for hours, spent five minutes looking at me, told me I was ‘normal’ and then pushed me out, charging me close to $1,000 for the pleasure. Would’ve been five times more if I had called an ambulance. It was not covered by my insurance via work at the time, of course.
Then I had gone to urgent care a few times. Similar story. At least those docs gave me some drugs, to try and make me feel better.
So I told my mom no, and got up and decided to walk with her. In my head, though I was convinced that the reaper stalked behind me, about to pounce, I wanted to see the sunlight one last time. We opened the door and strolled through the afternoon sunshine. Oh, the light was so beautiful. It brought tears to my eyes. At the time I still subscribed to a sort of half-hearted atheism, but if I had believed in God I likely would’ve dropped to my knees and sung out His praise.
I’ve done that a few times between then and now.
Talking shit till I get lockjaw
A$AP Rocky has some good lyrics, okay?
Rewinding a bit, my official diagnosis for the numb tongue and the locking jaw was TMJ, or temporomandibular joint dysfunction. It began a few months after my first job out of college, a stressful, boiler-room-esque sales job where we were expected to make close to 100 ‘touches’ (calls/emails) a day to potential customers. Not horrible, as far as volume of entry level sales goes, but horrible enough to break me.
The first time I felt any issue, I thought someone had hit me in the head, or something. A lightning bolt of pain shot across my face, and a good proportion of the muscles from the side of my lip up to my right eye went numb. I was on a sales call at the time! To my credit (perhaps) I finished the call, though slurring a bit, called my manager, and told him I was taking the rest of the day off.
I had dealt with some chronic pain previously, mainly in my sciatica nerve down the side of my leg. That one, I thought, was easier to explain though. I had been doing hardcore ballroom dance competitions, it came on over a period of time, and I must have overstressed the leg. This time was different - a bolt out of the blue in a completely near area of my body, that had never felt any pain like this before.
That episode started the first of my four FMLA leave periods from sales jobs, in a five year span. While I do complain about the Western medical system, I have to admit the Family Medical Leave Act is pretty amazing. It gave me a lot of flexibility when I needed it most.
So, what do you do when a random, major illness strikes you out of nowhere? Call the doctor, of course! So I did. I went to my primary care doctor. They referred me to a TMJ specialist at a big, national name hospital nearby. Of course, all of this took over a month, since every new specialist takes between 2 and 6 weeks to even get the first appointment with.
It was during this waiting period that the drama above unfolded.
Anyway, this doctor saw me a couple of times, warned that I may need surgery and may never heal, and sent me off to a dentist who specialized in TMJ. One of the handful in the country, who happened to be in this medical system that my insurance actually did cover.
Side note: It’s completely insane how many doctors will just off-handedly tell you that you may need surgery, and/or that you’ll have to live with something forever. I would be told that at least a dozen times throughout my medical journey.
I was one of the lucky ones, despite the difficulty. So far I was in only a few hundred bucks, chump change.
So I saw this dentist who specialized in TMJ. He calmed me down, told me that things would be ok. That he had dealt with cases as severe as mine plenty of times, and no I wouldn’t need surgery. He molded a night guard for me to sleep with to stop me clenching my jaw all night, sent me to a specialized TMJ physical therapist (who cost $150 per session, uncovered by insurance) and prescribed me a benzodiazepam. Klonopin, to be specific.
Now, all of these treatments together actually worked quite well! I wasn’t back to 100%, but I was able to go back to work in a few weeks, and get rid of the impending sense of doom that whispered that I was going to die, or never be able to talk or eat again. The Klonipin caused me some… other problems, but that’s a story for another post.
Sadly, the TMJ was only the beginning of my story with chronic pain.
The Carpal Tunnel of Love
Great song, by the way. Some of Fall Out Boy’s best.
After my first successful foray into getting medical treatment for my issues, I returned to work somewhat hesitantly, but things seemingly turned around for me. My focus and drive returned, even leading to me getting promoted after another few months in the job.
However, about a year after having to take leave for TMJ, I found myself forced to quit the working world once again.
The next problematic area was my hands and wrists. When I say problematic, I don’t mean the next painful area. At this point I had already started to develop tons of pain in my low back, hips, and legs as well; despite all the physical therapy, working out, and yoga I was doing. It got to the point where they started calling me the “old man” around my office, despite the fact that I was in my early 20s.
Either way, the combined stress of a high-pressure laptop job and me gaming a ton, led to my wrists basically completely blowing out next. I pushed through the pain for a while, but ultimately had to call it. Another dramatic discussion with my bosses about taking leave, this one FAR less friendly. Luckily however, they were legally obliged to let me take more FMLA, as a year had passed since my last medical leave.
So off I went, back to stay at home for a month, stress about doctor’s appointments, and generally just convalesce. I didn’t handle this period of time off work as well as the last. My strategy to cope with the pain had increasingly become mixing my anti anxieties with alcohol and cannabis in order to basically numb myself out of whatever I was feeling at any given moment. As the reader likely knows, that strategy doesn’t pan out well in the long run.
Anyway, I had continued working with my physical therapist this entire time, despite racking up a bill of thousands of dollars with him in over a year of weekly treatments, so I got him to give me some referrals to carpal tunnel docs.
Same old shtick. Took forever to get an appointment. When I did, they told me I would likely need surgery, and sent me off to another specialist. One of them spent months trying to prescribe me mild muscle relaxant type drugs like cyclobenzaprine, gabapentin, or flexeril, which are weak beer when you’re in so much pain you can barely lift a glass of water to your mouth with both hands.
I started to get all sorts of fancy diagnoses at this point. Early onset arthritis. Fibromyalgia. Hypermobility (EDS). CPTSD. Et cetera.
My FMLA leave quickly got eaten up, so I had to go back to work. I started using a program called Talon Voice in order to control my computer almost entirely via my dulcet tones. It was actually really cool, my friends even started calling me a cyborg for a minute there. I got an eye tracker to move my mouse and everything, like a real disabled person!
People can even code with this software, it’s wild:
Via a combination of wrist braces, new drugs, quitting all video games and recreational use of my hands (listened to a lot of audio books), I slowly managed to get back to a ‘functional’ place with my job. Of course, none of this would’ve been possible without the patient and loving support of my girlfriend, to whom I owe an incredible amount for sticking with me through these difficulties. I shudder to think what would’ve happened if I didn’t have her by my side.
Either way, at this point I was several thousand dollars down the drain, and still partially crippled. Unfortunately, life wasn’t done with me yet.
The Sound of Silence
Hello darkness, my old friend…
When I first lost my voice, I like to think my girlfriend was secretly relieved. I do talk a lot, after all!
At first I thought I just had bronchitis or something, so I took a few days off of work to just let my voice recover. Surely it’s just a bug, right? Though in the back of my head, fear was rising that something even worse was coming for my already fractured health.
So I went back to work after my voice had recovered and, lo and behold, after just a couple days on the job, the voice went again. By this time I knew the drill, so I immediately researched the most well-regarded vocal therapist in the area, and scheduled an appointment.
Of course, it took multiple weeks to even see her, so I had to go on FMLA leave again. At this point I was starting to seriously eat into my savings I had carefully built up. Have I mentioned that FMLA leave is unpaid?
Regardless, given that my computer use had switched over almost entirely to voice, and I was still talking for my sales job, I suppose losing my voice was inevitable. At the time though, the defeat was crushing. First my legs hurt, then my jaw, my hands, and now my ability to even communicate with other human beings. What would God take away from me next?
I sunk into a pretty deep pit of despair at this point. I had struggled with suicidal thoughts as a teenager, but it’s a different animal contemplating suicide past 25 due to medical complications that multiple doctors have told you are essentially incurable. Admittedly, the drugs and booze probably didn’t help.
So I went to the vocal coach, added another set of tasks to my daily exercises to manage my various conditions, which at this point had ballooned to over two hours a day of stretching, doing vocal warm ups, doing specific exercises, self-massage via tennis ball, and resting in various positions to take the stress out of certain muscles.
At one point during this time, at the advice of my vocal coach, I completely stopped talking for two weeks. The idea was we could perhaps “reset” my vocal cords, and help me learn to speak in a more “natural” way. At first, this was brutal. I had always been quite chatty, and the silence was agonizing the first few days.
But after about a week of no talking, something strange started to happen. For the first time in a LONG time, I didn’t feel quite so hopeless. I couldn’t have explained it to you at the time (because I was silent, duh! ;P), yet I just started to get this sense of silliness. That even though my body was falling apart before my 30th birthday, my relationship was on the rocks because I couldn’t even talk to my girlfriend, and my managers were looking for excuses to fire me, there was a sort of… underlying okayness to the whole thing. I was able to laugh, and relax, despite my circumstances.
The Gates of Repentance
This priest has the best voice ever, seriously. Check out this chant, it’s amazing.
A little before the voice loss I had stumbled upon some people in the Talon Voice community talking about chronic pain being a spiritual/emotional issue. Up until now, I had sort of brushed this off while thinking eh, even if this is an emotional issue, how am I going to fix my emotions? I was already doing therapy as well and that barely helped.
So there I was, over $15,000 and years of my life spent on medical treatments that amounted to temporary bandaids at best, with little to no understanding of the deeper roots of my chronic pain, or how I was going to fix it. I had some inkling that maybe there was an emotional or spiritual issue, but I barely took it seriously. From a ‘logical’ perspective, things seemed quite bleak.
Something in the silence spoke to me, though. Despite my utter lack of belief in anything beyond the material, physical reality, I began to feel as if a presence was watching over me. I didn’t know it at the time, but looking back, it’s obvious to me that it was Christ reaching out, now that my heart had finally been humbled enough to hear Him.
Thomas Merton says:
In silence, God ceases to be an object and becomes an experience.
Perhaps he’s right.
While it would take a while for my heart to fully turn around, the bitterness that had consumed me slowly started to lift. Possibilities began to open up, doors opening that had seemed firmly shut. Before I began to believe in Christ, or even the supernatural, I started to believe in myself. In Life. From seemingly out of nowhere, a hope blossomed in my chest. A hope that I wouldn’t be a cripple, that I’d get to live a good life, despite my troubles, that somehow, some way, I would be able to overcome the various illnesses that had plagued me from my youth.
Glory be to God, that hope has been fulfilled. That’s a story for another time.
Posting the full text from a recent article on my Substack, about Internal Family Systems, the idea of integrating different parts of ourselves, and the classical Christian conception of demonic influence. Can't figure out how to paste images so... might be a tad confusing. Sorry!
I made a post on twitter about how the negative voice in the head can be considered “demonic” and man, it was polarizing!
(text): When I first started realizing that the "negative voice in my head" was demonic in origin, it was pretty terrifying
As I've gotten more used to the idea though, it's actually extremely helpful! Not identifying with that voice is crucial to positive growth
Ultimately a lot of people just said the basic “yup” but quite a few folks that I respected chimed in to tell me that no actually, this voice was “me.” Thinking it’s demonic is stupid and wrong:
And most of the language used to rebut me was, of course psychological in nature:
I'm sorry but this is a terrible idea. Firstly because it isn't true. Secondly you're doing the same thing that people do when they set up some kind of discrimination between their ego and their heart or their thoughts and their feelings or whatever mental apartheid; all of these will from then on impede their thoughts from thinking together as a team. Because all that is neuronal activities, mental events, all of the same type and they can work together better if they realize this. And I didn't see how an extra helping of manichean supernaturalism is going to do anything except make it worse.
It’s fascinating to me because I do think modern psychology has made great strides. Personally I’ve benefited quite a bit from various psychological frameworks, especially a focus on loving emotions, not shaming them, and learning to feel the things we shove down.
loving those voices vs demonising them may be more effective.
you can lovingly release them into light . vs struggle of resistance
Which is why I’m frustrated that Delia here is basically telling me that I’m wrong because I’m not loving myself enough!
Perhaps the best way to frame this issue is that there are two major religious worldviews clashing here: that of the Christian, and that of the Psychological.
The ‘Self’ as a Recent Invention
The modern idea of the ‘Self’ as we currently understand it is likely quite new, historically speaking. Threading back to the Greek polymaths Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, there’s a line often drawn between their ideas, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment, where the rational part of humanity slowly grows larger, and the individual, rational, atomized self becomes ascendant in the modern world.
If you want to look into this further, I recommend The Dream of Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Philosophy by Anthony Gottlieb.
Of course given that this change in worldviews all happened in Western Europe, it means that the Psychological view has many elements that are quite reminiscent of (Western) Christianity, such as dividing everything into ‘good’ versus ‘sinful’, especially people!
In the psychological worldview, the valence is just switched where ‘good’ becomes ‘healthy’ or ‘functional’ and ‘sinful’ becomes ‘unhealthy’ or ‘dysfunctional.’
When you have this framework, anything that turns you ‘against yourself’ is ‘unhealthy.’ We should strive to be fully integrated beings, loving every part of ourselves.
Except this sort of mental exercise requires a LOT of gymnastics to get it to actually work. Like, for instance, let’s say there’s a part of me that wants to smack a friend in the face. I could take the approach of saying “oh ok, that’s just a part of me that is hurt and it lashing out, I should love that anger because it just wants to protect me.”
On the flip side, I could say “no this is an evil temptation, striking my brother in anger is wrong, and I will refuse the call of the Evil One.”
Both of these paths are valid, and in my opinion useful in different scenarios. Sometimes you will find it useful to go down the path of your past trauma, analyze why your emotions are reacting the way they are, and try and “solve” whatever part of you is triggered.
Other times, this process will just lead you through a funhouse hall of mirrors, where you constantly analyze and re-analyze every tiny change in emotion, sift through all your memories for anything with the slightest hint of similarity, and drive yourself mad trying to cobble together some just-so story that explains your “trauma.”
In the latter case, it’s better to just say it’s demonic, and move on. If anything, it’s a far more practical way to live your life.
Part of the problem with the Psychological mindset is that, similar to the Protestant mindset, every new generation feels the need to reinvent the wheel. You can’t just use the concepts Freud, Jung, Reich, and the other early psychologists did, you have to create an entirely new paradigm!
Seriously - mainstream psychology has, just in my lifetime, gone from Cognitive Behavior Therapy being flavor of the month, to Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, to Exposure Therapy, to Emotion-Focused Therapy, to Internal Family Systems… etc etc.
To put it more succinctly:
When you’re constantly reinventing words and concepts like this, it stalls out overall progress in the field. Not only that, it makes it hard for different generations to relate to each other because their terminology is changed.
I can read a Saint from over a thousand years ago talking about the temptations of demons, and understand what he or she means, at least to some degree. I highly doubt psychologists that far out will make any sense whatsoever.
So Why Demons?
Well, let me link you a great book review from Scott Alexander on the IFS book, The Others Within Us. The TL;DR is:
What I gather from the manuals: IFS is about working with “parts”. You treat your mind as containing a Self - a sort of perfect angelic intellect without any flaws or mental illnesses - and various Parts - little sub-minds with their own agendas who can sometimes occlude or overwhelm the Self. During therapy, you talk to the Parts, learn their motives, and bargain with them.
…The second assumption is that everything inside your mind is part of you, and everything inside your mind is good. You might think of [a negative part] as some kind of hostile interloper, ruining your relationships with people you love. But actually she’s a part of your unconscious, which you have in some sense willed into existence, looking out for your best interests. You neither can nor should fight her. If you try to excise her, you will psychically wound yourself. Instead, you should bargain with her the same way you would with any other friend or loved one, until either she convinces you that relationships are bad, or you and the therapist together convince her that they aren’t. This is one of the pillars of classical IFS.
The secret is: no, actually some of these things are literal demons.
Now ironically, I actually think this framing is TOO strong! The Orthodox Christian framing doesn’t tend to see demons as this extremely powerful, terrifying force that must be avoided at all costs. In fact, as St. Porphyrios says:
Show contempt for the devil. Don’t meet him head on. When you struggle against the devil with obstinacy, he flies at you like a tiger or a wild cat... Don’t look at evil. Turn your eyes to God’s embrace and fall into His arms and continue on your way.
Just because demons are real, doesn’t mean we should focus on them and fear them. Doing so is a mistake. At the same time, the psychological worldview is not sufficient for all the strange things that can go on in our minds. Sometimes the thing whispering in your ear really isn’t you. And pretending it is can make you crazy.
Not every impulse needs to be analyzed, integrated, or lovingly massaged into wholeness. Some things you’re safe to look at, say “this isn’t Good,” and promptly ignore them.
That’s the thing, calling these thoughts demonic ideally isn’t about fear or hatred, towards yourself or even the demon. It’s about clarity & practicality. It’s about denying evil the ability to worm its way inside your head, and pretend to be you.
Again, the core problem critics of this view of inner voices as demons seem to have is that you’ll be “turning against yourself.” I just want to clarify strongly, that is NOT my position. We should not be afraid of the depths of our souls, or feel we are turning against and having to crush a part of us. Living in fear is not the way, and hating ourselves is not the way either.
I’ll leave you with the words of a beautifully pious holy man, St. John Chrysostom, who says it better than I ever could myself:
Why do you fear the Devil, O Christians? He cannot force you to do anything. The Devil should, rather, fear you, not you the Devil, for you are clad in the armor and panoply of God; you have as a sling the sign of the Precious Cross, with which, and from a distance, you can smite all of the demons; you wield, as a two-edged sword, the Name of our Lord Jesus Christ, which the demons fear and at which they tremble.
Thanks for reading me ramble about demons. If you want more, you know what to do.
