Since as early as she remembers, an orphaned child has
been locked in a basement by a group of unscrupulous abusers. Rather
than sending her to school; letting her socialize and explore her
surrounding, they keep her in a dark room and make her perform
repetitive tasks until exhaustion, both mental and physical. For
decades, they have selectively deprived her of knowledge, punishing even
her weakest attempts at critical thinking. She cannot hope to become
self-sufficient, yet she is expected to be grateful for being allowed to
live. When she dares questioning her condition, she gets reminded that
her real parents were drug-addict failures who left her starving in a
park at night.
She is enslaved
and not only does she ignore it, she is expected to express enjoyment. How can she possibly help it, considering the way she was raised in
this misery? Is she supposed to keep paying for her parents' errors?
Succeeding at anything grants her no self-esteem, no credit. Any
failure, though, is to be blamed on her and her only. After all, she is
the incompetent, abandoned child of pathetic losers. Doubting her
abductor's good intentions is a basis for violent physical punishment
and she is expected to be afraid of the consequences. What makes this
even worse, is that her true parents never abandoned her. She will never
try to get to know them; her life is a lie.
According to a very successful TED Talk by researcher Brené Brown, professor at the University of Houston, shame involves a
two-step thinking pattern. It feels as if you were stuck in a loop. First, you
believe that you are not good enough, which is hard to overcome. When
you finally manage to get your self-esteem out of that vacuum,
you then get stuck in an alternate mental state, asking yourself: "Who do you
think you are?" and you fall again. It's pretty much as if you were
building your own walls of fear and when you manage to overcome them,
after so much work and hardship, timidly, you peek outside and then remind yourself you're not good enough, so you start
rebuilding.
It certainly wouldn't come as a surprise if these facts had been
intuitively figured out by the same people who came up with the idea of organized religion. For example, Islam drowns you in an endless list of daily requirements and acts punishable for insanely obscure reasons that fit all the criterias of a totalitarian ideology, not so unlike Christian
faith which tells you to blame yourself, constantly, under the false pretense
of keeping you humble. Both seem designed to shame you into submitting to a being whose hypothetical
existence you should not risk questioning. Because of unreliable ancestors you've never
met, you're screwed; so you should be ashamed and obedient.
As many other ex-members of religions or groups that actively discourage and punish independent thinking, I chronically experience: social anxiety; adjustment disorder; unneeded guilt; an unfair and unjustified lack of self-esteem. Although the difficulties I experience in life cannot all be blamed on my parents' educational choices, I honestly think that, had I not been inculcated with these repugnant values of shame; submission and dependency, it would have been a lot easier. In fact, dependency is the best term I can find to describe how it feels. Indeed, it's much simpler to be a non-smoker than an ex-smoker and the tobacco industry could hardly care less about ex-smokers.
While we do not have time to analyze every single religion out there, it seems fair to say that organized monotheistic religions as we know them, however their doctrines are applied, appear precisely designed to control people through, perhaps not nicotine, but self-esteem. Unless they can indoctrinate children from the womb, these religions are widely known to target people in their weakest
moments, promising comfort to the afflicted, sending missionaries to
starving people; going door to door, hoping to recruit weak people ready
to throw themselves in this not-so-subtle loop of shame and passivism; offering them comfort and community, though not without conditions.
If, like countless other people, you have been indoctrinated with such ideas, you know how
shame feels because you have been taught that it's wrong to do most of
the things that would actually allow a person to develop self-esteem. Worse, you have been told the lie that such a contradictory relationship is beneficial to you, just like tobacco companies still get away with selling the idea that nicotine actually relaxes you. Yes, it makes you feel better, but we all know that's because it temporarily chases the crave for nicotine, a problem created by cigarette makers in the first place. At least, tobacco companies are not threatening us with eternal damnation for not buying their lies.
According to the September 2012 issue of Psychology Today, a study on self-esteem concludes that the efforts required to raise it as an adult are so large
compared to what little leverage you would get that it's actually more efficient to try and just think about it less. Any ideology basing its principles on guilt and shame is potently harmful to mental health. It can have side effects that are very noticeable, especially when people quit. These are even used as arguments against quitting. If you stop smoking, you might gain weight; and leaving a religion can cause feelings of stress; fear; anxiety. The nicotine analogy is shockingly accurate and we know the benefits of quitting cigarette.