Consciousness & Christianity |How we trauma bond with “god”

Before we explore this topic: let me just say that I trauma bonded with “god.” Not everyone knows what trauma bonding is, but most people have experienced what it is, especially if you’ve been in a toxic relationship.

So what is trauma bonding, and how do we end up trauma bonding with “god?”

Trauma bonding happens in a relationship when both abuse + love exist in the experience of the relationship. In a nutshell one begins to associate often unconsciously, abuse = love.

The chain of trauma bonding:

• Child experiences abuse + rejection + love growing up.
• Child associates love with abuse.
• Child learns to shut down their feelings.
• Child blames themselves when bad things happen.
• Child internalizes that love hurts and is “hard” or has to be worked for
• Child grows up and meets a partner that is abusive (emotionally, physically, or psychologically).
• Adult shuts down their feelings, wants, and needs.
• Adult blames themself for partner’s behaviors
• Adult strives to be “good enough” for their partner
• Partner reinforces this attachment by alternating between kind acts + acts of rejection
• Adult makes excuses for partner and is subconsciously trying to feel good enough for their parents.

My experience and framework with trauma bonding

This is literally my experience with “christianity” and until I came into the conscious community that opened me up to the facets of psychology that helped me make sense of my childhood, I thought this was normal.

I grew up not knowing that I had a subconscious belief that “I deserved rejection” when I “made my parents mad.” I lived in a perpetual reward/punishment paradigm and this is honestly something that is rife within the world that we live in. Humans are inherently performance based creatures, and I believe that that proclivity is the fallen condition of our fallen consciousness.

I am going to go into how I trauma bonded with “god” reinforced by toxic and abusive theology that only kept me on the perpetual hamster wheel of working for love and trying to be good enough.

How I trauma bonded with “god” through the chain of trauma bonding

The “gospel” that subconsciously appeals to many people who are co-dependent is one that is replete with our ‘inherent badness’ and our need to cling to a “god” who will only love us when we meet the criteria or abuse us forever in hell if we don’t comply.

The modern Christian message is a form of Stockholm syndrome. “You were born broken, now beg me to fix you. I’ll love you ‘unconditionally’ if you’ll believe and obey me. That’s how you show me your love. If you don’t “I will utterly destroy you.”

The trauma bond began when I was love bombed by christians who taught me a God of love, but required so much after I was baited into the church with “love.” Afterward the adult aspect of the chain of trauma bonding began.

Child grows up and meets a partner (God) that is abusive (emotionally, physically, or psychologically). Examples-(threats of eternal hell fire, rejecting me based on my behavior, one moment God loves me and I’m forgiven and the next moment he takes his presence away from me because I’m not holy obedient enough).

God is not actually abusive or toxic or a narcissist, but the way certain theologies present God can certainly make God seem that way. I had to unlearn toxic theology in order to truly find the gospel that is actually good news.

When I projected my subconscious image of my abusive relationship with my parents onto God, especially because of bad theology and unquestioned groupthink, I shut my emotions down.

Adult shuts down their feelings, wants, and needs. This would be our feelings of sadness or anger or anything we need to work through to make sense of our moment to moment experience. If we embrace a toxic view of God’s love that is given to us in increments correlated to our ability or performances to be pleasing to God we don’t communicate our wants and needs to God and especially the church that indoctrinates us with these toxic ideas.

So what happens when God is unapproachable and is uncaring or indifferent to our feelings wants, and needs? We look externally towards things, people, or substances to meet our unmet wants and needs. We are literally conditioned to deny our feelings as invalid, especially if they don’t immediately line up with the bible. The church then turns around and shames and criticizes the person and triggers that cycle of trauma bonding all over again. When I sin “God is far from me” and “doesn’t want me” because “He can’t look upon sin, and I’m nothing but a sinner.”

When I have tried to put language to an experience that did not fit in with the paradigm of the church they wrote me off by calling it “psychobabble” and didn’t really offer any real help other than pray and read your bible more.

Adult blames themself for partner’s (God’s) behaviors. God never leaves us or forsakes us, but when we are given a bi-polar image of God that is contingent upon our keeping God in a good mood, we can often interpret difficult emotions as our repelling God from us. What did I do or not do for God that I now feel this way? or let’s say a normal life hardship happens, immediately with a toxic view of God we can quickly look to our behavior and start taking inventory as to why God has “removed his blessing” and this bad thing has happened.

Adult strives to be “good enough” for their partner (God). This is where legalism is born. Striving is birthed in the idea that we lack something and now need to make up for our lack. I flesh this idea out more in my first blog post on this. When we have a deeply imbedded belief of being “not good enough” our first reaction is to immediately do something so that we “are good enough.” This happens when we go all the way back and learn that relationships are a little mix of abuse + rejection +love growing up. We are taught things like “gotta take the good with the bad” and or “God is love, but he’s also hate, or wrath, or justice in the form of retribution.” When we get this version of a hot/cold “god” who we have to walk on eggshells around we end up with a trauma bond with “god”.

Partner (God) reinforces this attachment by alternating between kind acts + acts of rejection. This one here is the saddest of the chain in my opinion. I say this because this expression of the toxic trauma bond cycle is where many Christians suffer a great deal. When we view God with this toxic lens reinforced by religion and really shitty theology, we do things like interpret life in this way. We do it dualistically making every moment either an “act of kindness from god” or an “act of rejection from god”, and we measure it by putting our religious devotion on a scale wherein we determine our worthiness. Religion reinforces this part of the trauma bonding cycle by preaching the lies of God being distant or his blessings being delayed based on how well we do or do not perform.

Adult makes excuses (use bible verses) for partner (God) and is subconsciously trying to feel good enough for their parents (perform for love). The excuses we make for God, or rather are conditioned by religion to make for this false and abusive toxic god are wrapped up in biblio-idolatry. We excuse this god’s toxicity by by-passing it with bible verses that seem to affirm god’s toxic behavior as his “justice” or “righteous indignation”. After someone becomes a christian and now begin to see God as their father, if they’re given bad theology, they see the Father as the bad guy, and Jesus is the good guy. They play good cop/bad cop with God the Father and Jesus. This is how Jesus and the Father are presented by certain brands of christianity.

Penal Substitutionary Atonement theory is one such example

“So God the Son became man so that by his suffering and death he could pay the price of sin. This seems to be based on an idea of punishment as a kind of payment, a repayment; the criminal undergoing punishment ‘pays his debt to society’, as we say. It takes a divine man, however, to pay our debt to divine justice.

Now, I can make no literal sense of this idea, whether you apply it to criminals or to Christ. I cannot see how a man in prison is paying a debt to society or paying anything else at all to society. On the contrary, it is rather expensive to keep him there. I can see the point in the criminal being bound to make restitution to anyone he has injured, when that is possible; but that is not the same as punishment. I can see the point in punishment as something painful that people will want to avoid and (we may reasonably hope) something to encourage them to avoid committing crimes; but this is not paying a debt. It is impossible to see Christ on the cross as literally engaged either in making restitution or in serving as a warning to others. If God will not forgive us until his son has been tortured to death for us then God is a lot less forgiving than ever we are sometimes. If a society feels itself somehow compensated for its loss by the satisfaction of watching the sufferings of a criminal, then society is being vengeful in a pretty infantile way. And if God is satisfied and compensated for sin by the suffering of mankind in Christ, he must be even more infantile.” (“Good Friday,” God Matters, pp. 91–92) Fr Herbert McCabe

I believe that the reason many people gravitate towards this trauma bond view of God, is that they are subconsciously projecting their own childhood trauma on to God, that is then reinforced by bad theology that makes God out to be a cosmic narcissist and us the co-dependent feeble sacks of sinful blood and bones who merely exist to make this god happy at all times.

God then becomes merely a pragmatic utility to quell our ever present sense of unworthiness through our participation in a religious performance based system much like our familial performance based system. So that we get a sense of acceptance or love from this god who unbeknownst to us, reflects what we were taught love was in the context of our relationship to our parents.

Thus, we do not truly worship god, but we rather choose the abusive projection of our unhealed and unresolved parental relationships onto the face of God. We become again, like Adam & Eve and exchange the truth for a lie and worship the creature rather than the creator. We then negate our humanity as they did, and hide in a fear of retribution, as they did. We try to cover up our shame with our own self-constructed leaves, as they did.

We actually exist for love and connection and union in the most healthy expression there is, the Trinity. However, we would never know it with abuse + rejection + love as our reference for “how relationships work.”

It is time to heal from toxic Christianity and purely experience the love of God; minus the abuse + rejection. Minus the anxiety, and self deprecation that come with a theology and or church community that only furthers the toxicity with micro-traumas, as you sit under teaching and messages that don’t bring healing, but subjugate you to further invalidate your very real human experience.