Healing Spiritual Blockage Case Study

Asha Clinton, MSW, PhD

Healing spiritual blockage
(DX = V62.89, Religious or Spiritual Problem)

From the Seemorg perspective, babies experience their parents as part of the unity into which they are born. They consequently experience the universe or God as acting hurtfully or abusively if their parents do so because they project their parents' negative qualities and actions onto the Divine. This was the case with Vanessa, 46, who came into therapy to heal her inability to connect with the masculine Divine. She had grown up going to weekly church services and from an early age had been devoted to the Virgin Mary. However, she felt little connection either to Jesus or to God. As a young adult she had developed deep relationships with the triune goddess as well as Isis and Kwan Yin. In time she came to feel that although her connection with the Divine feminine was wonderful, her spirituality was out of balance.

After the Covenant, muscle testing indicated that Vanessa's early experience of her father had blocked her relationship to the masculine Divine. When I asked about her father, Vanessa told me that he had been a distant figure in her life who spent long hours at work supporting his large family. When he was home, he either lay on the couch drinking beer and watching TV or harshly judged the activities of his seven children. Angry, silent withdrawal often followed judgment. Vanessa remembered his once not speaking to her for a week.

I muscle tested her to see whether there were other Originating Traumata that had caused her distance from the masculine Divine, and there was one that we would discover later. We treated her issue with the Paternal Projections on the Divine Protocol, which removes negative father projections from the client's experience of the Divine. Following the steps of the protocol, I asked her first what was problematic for her about the masculine Divine. She talked about the harsh Old Testament God, his distance, his lack of caring for her and everyone else, his wrath and vengefulness, and his lack of compassion. She said he played with people as if we were the rats in his lab.

Next, I asked about her father's problematic qualities. There was a pause as she felt this through, and then a flash of surprise and recognition in her eyes. "They are the same as God's," she exclaimed and added, "I've projected the worst of my father on God." In two sessions we energetically treated all her negative experiences of her father as Originating Traumata. We treated her projective negative experiences of the Judeo-Christian God as Initiating Traumata during the next session. In the fourth session we treated all the connections between her negative experiences of her father and God. Then I sent Vanessa home with the suggestion that she try a spiritual experience that would involve masculine divinity before our next session.

She was smiling softly when we next sat down together. "I knew I couldn't go back to my old church," she said. "Too many bad memories. So I went with my sister Jill to the church she goes to. Sunlight was shining through the stained glass right onto Jesus, and I felt his love pouring right into me. It was awesome. No anger or vengeance; just love."

Vanessa was soon able to expand her spiritual connection into ongoing dialogue with and devotion of the Christ. After some weeks she felt ready to confront Yahweh. Muscle testing indicated that it was time for us to use the Protocol for Treating Trauma-Based Conceptions of God. Following the steps of the protocol, Vanessa responded to a number of questions, e.g., "How has God hurt you?" "How have God's intentions affected you?" And "How does God interact with you?" For each question I wrote down Vanessa's trauma-based responses. Then we treated each of them as a trauma or traumatic pattern, including "All the times and ways God has judged and punished me harshly" and "All the times and ways God abandoned me and didn't protect me." By the time we finished Vanessa said,

"I feel very different now. For me the Old Testament God is just the dark side of the real God, a part of the whole God. So are my wonderful goddesses. Masculinity is just a part of the real God. The real God is way beyond that, way beyond masculine and feminine, bigger than everything."

By now Vanessa was developing a relationship to the spiritual masculine and had begun to transform her understanding of Divinity, but she realized that she still suffered from many spiritual traumata from her childhood. Muscle testing indicated that it was time to work with the Religious Wounds Protocol. First I asked her to remember the spiritual traumata she had experienced as a child, and she listed several, including the harsh and rigid attitudes of several clergy who had taught her in Sunday school as a child. One had excoriated her for sexual activity before she had experienced any. Another, aware of some mild adolescent acting out, had told her that she was too sinful to be saved. In the subsequent sessions we explored and treated the repercussions of those traumata in her life; they included sexual fears, a lack of self-confidence, and an inability to value herself. Finally we delineated and treated the connections among these Originating and Initiating Traumata, and Vanessa realized that her childhood experiences with male clerics were another origin of her disavowal of masculine divinity. We treated this as well.

After we completed the Religious Wounds Protocol I suggested to Vanessa that she revisit her childhood church to see whether anything she experienced there would trigger more traumatic memories that we might treat. She chose to visit during mass and entered her next session in a very vibrant state. She told me that she had not been triggered and, though she had no intention of returning to worship there, she now felt at peace with her church and its clerics.

From the beginning of Vanessa's therapy I had suggested that she practice various Seemorg meditations on a daily basis, and she had happily complied. Her reportage indicated to me that she had an intermittent connection with her center. I suggested to her that she work with the Seemorg Centering Meditation. She did so and found her connection to her center strengthening. Once it is considerable stronger, we plan to work next with the Ego Surrender Protocol, which uses energy movement to reduce the ego's resistance to surrendering to the center.

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