You Can Be Woo but Still Say No to Marianne Williamson

Image by Enrique Meseguer, Pixabay.

I left hellfire and brimstone Christianity at age 13. I should say that I was still in a household run by a believer, but thankfully wasn't forced to go back to church when I said I didn't believe and actually felt sick to my stomach with the thought of going back. My path to Paganism started with reading Edgar Cayce, aka The Sleeping Prophet, in my teens. He was a devout Christian but was a conundrum to those of his faith who eschewed any kind of psychic phenomena or belief in reincarnation. This laid down the road for me to enter the '90s in my full New-Age girl glory. I loved this new path and experienced deep healing of childhood abuse and learned about Wicca and other Pagan paths. I became an energy healer and massage therapist for a decade, but I also saw some of the same hypocrisy in that community that Christians were accused of and often found myself in disagreement with some of the principles.

• As a childhood physical and sexual abuse survivor, I internalized the You Can Heal Your Life, positive thinking mindset of popular New-Age author, Louise Hay. This became just as detrimental to my health as my family's Christian forgiveness-cult beliefs.
• As a sufferer of PTSD and depression, I found that both of those cultures could have killed me if I went all in with either of them. Prozac and therapy saved my life when I needed it. Reiki, crystals, acupuncture, and massage complemented medical therapy and sometimes gave me continued strength to continue on.

In 1985, I was experiencing suicidal depression and flashbacks. In the '80s, depression and PTSD were not well understood and especially not taken seriously in teens. I had only known about PTSD as the daughter of a disabled Vietnam veteran. I hadn't learned that it was applicable to abuse survivors. When I told my mom I wanted to die and some symptoms that I could describe, she said, "Then we should pray." I know she was lost as a domestic abuse survivor herself, so this post isn't meant to be hateful toward my mother.

Out of desperation, I went missing for a day. I knew of no other way to impress upon her the need for real help. She later took me to a therapist who promptly thought I was just being a bratty teen and told me to suck it up. Thankfully, I stood up to this and asked my mother to take me to another therapist who knew what she was doing. Mom chose the therapist who helped her after leaving our abusive household a few years earlier.  This started me on the long road to healing. I'm grateful to my mom for eventually understanding the seriousness of the situation.

That healing is ongoing, the length of which is something both certain Christians and New-Agers seem to think is my fault. I've always known that healing is multilayered, but the more I learn about religious trauma syndrome, the more I realize that our entire culture will be recovering for decades if not more. When I later brought up abuse issues in New-Age groups, it rarely ended in understanding or compassion but with positive thinking platitudes. I don't blame the average person for not understanding mental illness. I blame hucksters like Democratic candidate for president, Marianne Williamson, for spreading just as much ignorance as megachurch preachers.

Being a former '90s New-Age girl, I know Williamson's work well. She was a huge proponent of A Course in Miracles, a book that author, Helen Schucman, states was dictated to her directly from Jesus. Mind you, I'm much more open to the idea of channeled information than most. I haven't read the Course, so I'll leave it up to you to decide what you think about it. Based on her own writing, the book informed Williamson's work greatly, and it follows along the same lines as New Thought Christianity.

I once witnessed my grandmother throw away her heart medication because she believed she wasn't showing enough faith in God, which made her more of a sinner. She was a hellfire and brimstone, evangelical Christian who thought my mother should physically drag me back to church. From my experience with some New Thought churches and New-Age groups, they might endorse throwing away needed meds, but their reasoning would be that my grandmother wasn't showing enough faith in herself as a child of God. As the saying goes—two sides, same coin.

"You are a child of the Universe; no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here." ~ Max Ehrmann from the Desidarata

I believe in our divine nature. I'm not an atheist, but I rarely trust people who say they have the universe figured out. I became a healer because of two things: I needed healing physically and emotionally, and I actually felt the energy of things and people. Reiki and other energy healing forms (including massage because the physical is still energetic in nature) were and are still second nature to me. But shit happens and genetics is a thing.

You can be woo and still say no to Marianne Williamson and her ilk. You are not to blame for your illness or crime that happened to you. We need to leave that shit in the '90s. If you think I'm only dunking on Williamson, I'm not. The right wing has its fair share of science deniers including climate deniers and folks like this Texas lawmaker who accused a vaccine scientist of sorcery.

I left the Democratic Party over the feminist hypocrisy with the Clintons and gun rights. I left the GOP over hypocrisy with Trump, racism, and culture war nonsense. He has helped embolden the unleashing of, but admittedly not create, the worst hate of our culture—that of white nationalism. I regret helping the GOP pre-2015 bring this about. I don't necessarily want to vote for a Democrat, but ironically, it was Marianne Williamson last night who stated the most obvious truth when she was advising Democrats to stay focused and make this election about defeating Trump:

"This is part of the dark underbelly of American society, the racism, the bigotry, and the entire conversation that we’re having here tonight. If you think any of this wonkiness is going to deal with this dark psychic force of the collectivized hatred that this president is bringing up in this country, then I’m afraid that the Democrats are going to see some very dark days." ~ Marianne Williamson

No, I wouldn't vote for her. I want her to drop out of the race because of her victim blaming, and I want to see the more serious candidates get more air time. But I always supported her right to debate. New-Age thought was a gateway out of monotheism for me, and it will be for others. Some will stay in that space and call it home, and yet other seekers will educate themselves about other paths and spread that seed around. That's always a good thing.

Maybe in that sense, Williamson's candidacy will, along with our evolution on other social issues, help us prevent such a "dark psychic force" from taking over our political sphere again.

See, that's me being positive.

Update 2/28/20:  Williamson has since dropped out of the race, thankfully.  Her denial of her victim blaming on Twitter has made me lose any shred of respect for her even for the quote above. Some articles of interest: 

• Marianne Williamson's Democratic...she's no friend to the left
• Her idiocy on depression, vaccines and disabilities

© Trish Deneen