Psychologist James Hillman describes how some life events “swamp the boat…some souls nonetheless seem to ‘work with it’; others remain fixated in the tar, struggling to work it out.” The image of “fixating in the tar” struck me. For the first 45 years of life, in my own development, I felt like was always “fixated in the tar.”  In my book, Journey into Love, I described my childhood trauma of being raised in an abusive family and a Church that fostered and nurtured that abuse. I also described how that abuse affected my view of God. Since writing the book, I have been doing a more intense study of childhood abuse and the impact on spiritual development.  The topic has not only been neglected by mental health professionals but also spirituality (or religion) was viewed as pathological by many of the earlier leaders in the field. But professional mindsets are changing with the advent of Trauma Informed Care and the ACE studies. If you are not familiar with the ACE studies, allow me this quick overview. The ACE- Adverse Childhood Experience Study was a CDC/Kaiser Permanente Health study in the 90’s which studied 17,000 Americans to determine how many have experienced adverse childhood experiences and how those ACES’s affected their life later as an adult.

First, what is meant by adverse childhood experiences? There were 10 adverse experiences that were studied:

• Recurrent physical abuse
• Recurrent emotional abuse
• Contact sexual abuse
• Emotional neglect
• Physical neglect
• Mother treated violently (domestic abuse)
• Household member abused substances
• Household member was depressed, mentally ill or attempted suicide.
• Parental separation, or loss of parent through death.
• Incarcerated household member.
  • Exposure to one category of ACE qualifies as one point. So if you experienced recurrent physical abuse and household member abused substances, your ACE score is 2 and so forth.
  • The results of the study were alarming. Individuals who had an ACE score of 4 or more were: 

Nearly two times more likely to smoke; have heart disease and/or cancer.

Seven times more like to suffer from chronic alcoholism

Eleven times more likely to engage in IV drug use.

Nineteen times more likely to attempt suicide.

By the way, The State of Iowa did its own study and can be found on the web at

http://www.iowaaces360.org.

Some other statistics that might interest you:

As many as 80% of individuals in Psychiatric hospitals have experienced physical or sexual abuse, most of them as children.

81% of adults diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder were abused as children.

Up to 2/3’s of both men and women in substance abuse treatment report childhood abuse or neglect.

It seems clear that Childhood Trauma impacts people over the course of their entire life, increasing health risk factors and behaviors that have been identified as causes for the early mortality rate among people with mental health illnesses. Just one example- a 2015 JAMA Psychiatry study revealed that “people with schizophrenia during the study period, they were more than 3.5 times more likely to die than the general population. These individuals are estimated to be losing 28.5 years of life, primarily because of natural causes. Eighty-five percent of the premature deaths were due to largely preventable conditions such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, and heart disease.”

While this study did not address childhood trauma and spirituality; the proven link between trauma and medical and mental problems certainly has opened the door to discussing the ramifications of abuse on spiritual development. One of the things that surprised me was the lack of studies on this plight of childhood trauma and spirituality. We really need to look at this carefully considering the numbers of children affected- and the lives damaged physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually. Consider:

“Every year more than 3.6 million referrals are made to child protection agencies involving more than 6.6 million children (a referral can include multiple children). The United States has one of the worst records among industrialized nations – losing on average between four and seven children every day to child abuse and neglect” (ChildCare)

So now we know about childhood trauma.

Let’s talk about spirituality. What is spirituality?

My answer is my answer. My view of spirituality is my view. My view of spirituality is unique to me. Spirituality is meant to be that way- very individually tailored. What that means is –each one of us has a right to view spirituality any damn way we want. I use the expletive to express my anger and annoyance at those who like me -25 years ago –thought that the only spirituality was my spiritual path. It was my way or the highway. Need I go on?

Be that as it may, here are some of my thoughts now in 2017 on what is spirituality?

Spirituality is that which gives meaning and purpose in life. It can be achieved through participation in religion, but not necessarily so. In the Spirituality groups that I have led- I always start the group with the question…what is spirituality to you and I emphasize there is no right or wrong answer. Here are some of the answers I have gotten….

1. I find the presence of a higher power in the world around me.
2. There is something sacred in relationships.
3. I am looking for meaning and purpose in my life.
4. I find it in working for justice for all people.
5. I enjoy the ritual and liturgy in my Church. It gives me peace.
6. I find it in silence.

The list goes on. Spirituality is unique to each one of us and by sharing our thoughts and experience we learn more about ourselves and spirituality.

• Spirituality connects one to something larger than the self.
• Spirituality leads to the development of a personal value system
• It encourages one to seek the best relationships with ourselves, and others.
• Spirituality views life as a journey.

As a Fundamentalist, with only one view of spirituality, I essentially cut myself off from learning …from growing. Thankfully, I move on and opened my ears, eyes, mind and heart to all views of spirituality.

I will follow up on this next time with Part Two, when I will dive into some of the studies on Childhood Trauma and Spirituality.

 

“The Lamps are different

But the light is the same,

It comes from beyond.”

Rumi

There is good historical and philosophical reasons for Hick’s Copernican revolution in religion; the shift from our religion being the center to God being the center and to which all religion revolve around.

1. Cultural Factors:

The late Professor Hick explained that because the Eternal or the Ultimate Reality can only be conceptualized by means of our experience, we cannot easily rise above our cultural categories in attempting to conceptualize what we call God. In his book entitled God has many names” he wrote the following:

“Religious faith is not an isolated aspect of our lives but is closely bound up with human culture and human history, which are in turn bound up with basic geographical, climatic and economic circumstances.”

In other words, our culture influences how we view God.

Here are some examples:

Nomadic-pastoral herd keeping societies– male patriarch dominated producing a God the Father image.

Agricultural people –aware of the fertile earth societies-God the Mother image.

• Philosophical reasons.

 

John Hick brings into this discussion a principle from Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Human Reason. Hick agrees with Kant that we cannot know noumena, things as they exist in themselves independent of our finite perception or cognitive apparatus. Applying this to God or the Ultimate reality or Higher Power, the thought here is each divine image persona represents the Eternal One as experienced through the filter of a human religious tradition.

So the God I experience is real yet it is a filtered experience- filtered through my human and cultural spectacles.

So there are different forms of human awareness of the one God- the one Ultimate Reality. There are many gods because of the filters we are using to see God with. There is only one God but because we are all wearing different spectacles- (culture ect), our experiences and how we view God creates the illusion of many gods.

John Hick again explains:

“Thus the many gods are not separate and distinct divine beings, but rather different personae formed in the interaction of divine presence and human projection. The divine presence is the presence of the Eternal One to our finite human consciousness, and the human projections are the culturally conditioned images and symbols in terms of which we concretize the basic concept of deity.”

Thomas Aquinas

“The thing known is in the knower according to the mode of the knower….”

I thought I knew all there was to know about God- I defined him – as a him in three persons- Father, Son and Holy Spirit but in so defining him- I limited him. In reality, I knew not and there is a certain freedom in not knowing and releasing that certainty of thinking and being able to learn from out faiths. Yes, I have learned from other faiths- by viewing the Ultimate Reality with other spectacles.

Something to think about.