I have read your statements about the Catholic religion with a smile on my face. I experienced all the various parts of a young Catholic's life just about how you have described them. I agree that the dogma presented repeatedly in Catholic schools, youth organizations and other places can have a detrimental effect on a person's mind and/or spirit later in life.
While I haven't ended up too much the worse for wear, it took a while until I was comfortably out from under the influence of this mindset. The mental efforts of quite a few years have enabled me to sit back and be amused at the "Catholic experience" going on around me still.
I have been aware of my spirituality since my teenage years, and it was then that I decided to leave the Catholic religion behind. Most of my relatives are still Catholic, so I still run into the dogma at the occasional funeral or wedding. I can now go through the ceremonies with quiet indifference.
I don't know if your statements are part hype or not, but your Catholic upbringing seems to have disturbed you a lot more than mine did. I don't feel the need for counseling or some type of religious therapy. I am not very bothered by the Catholic crap any more.
If there are those out there who do feel the need for some help or support from others in a similar place, I wish you all the best and may you find all the strength and happiness you need and desire.
Which leads me to the point of this ramble... the question. I agree that I may still have some of the old religious programming influencing my current life. My question to you is:
"What is your advice to a person, who is over being a guilty, penetant Catholic, and wishes to remove the last mental and psychological traces of the negative religious programming that may still be present in their mind and spirit?"
My anger at the church is not hype. It is how I feel as I work through its deeper emotional effects on my life. I also know that when I deal with subjects like this, the initial anger and rage settles down fairly quickly and what's really bothering me at a deeper level can now come to the surface. That initial anger is usually protective in nature, because we are poking at wounds that we thought we were done with. The fact that we feel pain during our internal investigations clearly indicates there is work to be done.
As to your question, be glad you have achieved what you have in terms of distancing yourself from Catholicism. Celebrate the fact that you put that religion into perspective and did not let it infect your adult life as it could have. What you are suggesting though is that there may be still be some painful feelings lingering in your heart that need attention.
Having a good intellectual understanding of a life experience like religion is no guarantee that the underlying feelings have been dealt with. Religion infected us when we were children and children "feel" pain, guilt and shame when adults impose that on them. These feelings then get locked up and stuffed away because they are painful and no one wants to hear them. In many cases, our feelings of anger and hurt about being abused are also shamed by religious authorities, so now we have double damage. "How dare you complain about how I am treating you? I speak for God you know."
Your intellectual understanding of who and what religion is will do nothing for those feelings. They need to be heard, felt and accepted before they will actually dissolve away. Until then they remain locked up inside and keep pressing for attention. This is the closet most of us need to clean out, especially we men who are prone to stuffing our feelings as a primitive method of coping. As adults we have to make friends with our inner child and let him/her reveal this pain to us in order to achieve a final resolution to our experiences of having been abused.
I recommend "Journaling" for self-communication and for venting of past hurts and painful feelings, especially those coming from Catholic guilt and shame. I've been doing it for over 30 years and it is the single most effective tool in my therapeutic kit bag.
Journaling is about writing out your feelings on a subject. At the top of the page you write the question "How do I feel about . . . .?" which is not to be confused with "What do I think?" Contrary to what some practitioners claim, it is our feelings that affect our thinking and not the other way around. Getting our feelings out on paper reduces their emotional pressure which then allows us to see what the problem is so we can address it. Our inner child only wants to be heard.
When you were a child no one listened because they were all caught up in the same system of guilt and shame. Your parents couldn't listen because they were also infected with the same poison. Today we have a great variety of tools for dealing with all issues from our past and journaling is one of the best I know of. Journaling is second only to talking with a good therapist who knows what questions to ask and will challenge you on your defenses against seeing what in fact lives in your heart.
I am journaling openly about my religious upbringing because my inner self has told me that it's time to get the rest of that garbage out of my system. I've been a seeker all my adult life and I've known for years how my religion adversely affected me. I had a very good intellectual understanding. What I didn't realize was how deeply my anger feelings towards the nuns and the church were rooted. By venting in my journal that deeper layer of anger and pain has come up. It looks quite venomous initially because it was laid down when I was a child and my child is pretty pissed off.
My parents and family, like yours, were all caught up in the same drama and couldn't see their way out of it. How could they help the child that I was with my pain when they were in total denial of their own. Journaling is initiated by the adult me who knows how important it is to listen to the child in me. That benefit comes from years of therapeutic experience. That child is me. If I don't listen who will. It's up to me at this point to help him heal those wounds. This is a good thing and results in real peace coming into my life. Once my feelings are out, I no longer have to fight with myself to try and keep them stuffed down. That released energy is now avialable for the more fun and creative pursuits in my life.
The thing with journaling is you have to be willing to let whatever is inside come to the surface. We all have defenses which not only block negative experiences from having an adverse effect on us, but block awareness of our internal life as well. This is always true when we have uncomfortable feelings about past events and hurtful life experiences. Journaling short circuits these defenses and lets us see what we've been hiding from ourselves out of self-protection.
See for yourself if there's anything left in that emotional closet from your past experiences with the Catholic Religion. You do this to please yourself, and for no other reason. You may be surprised at what you find.
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