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Close your eyes and imagine what if the things in life that cause us the greatest pain, the things that bring us grief, are challenges, challenges designed to help us grow to ultimately become what we were always meant to be.
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We feel like we've been buried, but what if, like a seed, we've been planted and, having been planted, we grow to become a mighty tree?
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Now open your eyes.
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Open your eyes to this way of viewing life.
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Come with me as we explore your true, infinite, eternal nature.
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This is Grief to Growth, and I am your host, brian Smith.
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Hey there, I'm Brian.
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Host Brian Smith.
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Today's episode is a powerful one, and it's one that's deeply personal for me.
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I'm honored to welcome Dr Maurice Turmel, affectionately known as Dr Mo.
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Dr Mo is a seasoned spiritual psychologist, an acclaimed author and a performing songwriter whose path through trauma, healing and spiritual awakening offers a light to those navigating their own dark nights of the soul.
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With a PhD in counseling psychology and over 25 years in clinical practice, dr Mo has spent his life helping people heal emotionally and spiritually.
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But his expertise isn't just academic it's actually lived.
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He grew up with emotional trauma, religious repression and deep self-doubt.
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Yet he broke free from the chains of early conditioning and emerged with a life-affirming truth.
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We are spiritual beings on a human journey.
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In today's conversation we're going to explore how religion for some, can become a form of institutionalized trauma and how to begin untangling that conditioning.
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We're going to talk about what makes religious trauma unique and how to heal from it.
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We'll talk about the moment that Dr Mo broke the spell and reclaimed his inner authority.
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We'll talk about how to shift from guilt and fear into love and empowerment and even after decades of emotional repression, and how music and creativity became a spiritual lifeline in Dr Mo's personal journey.
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We'll talk about his latest books, including Breaking the Spell of Religion and Healing the Trauma and when Angels Call, coping with Grief and Loss, and how his work can guide others on their own healing and awakening paths.
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So if you've ever struggled with breaking free from harmful beliefs or if you're seeking a way forward after spiritual or emotional trauma, this episode is for you.
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And remember, after the episode, the conversation doesn't end here.
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Join me at grief to growthcom slash community to carry on the conversation there and, with that, like to welcome Dr Mo to grief to growth.
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Hi, Brian, and hi to all your listeners and yeah, yeah great, it's great to be here.
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It's great to have you here.
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We were starting to talk a little bit before we got started.
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We do have this thing in common.
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Anybody that's listened to me for any amount of time knows my background and I share a little bit of what I went through.
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But I want to talk about what you went through in terms of your religious upbringing or whatever it was that started you on this journey.
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Well, I was born into a typical Catholic family and, in my case, being up here in Canada, it just so happens that I also have a French-Canadian background.
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But it's Catholicism, no matter what language we speak, has its application and its general formats.
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And, as you and I were sharing earlier, before you started this session, all those typical practices that you got in childhood I got as well, you know, in terms of the conditioning towards your particular religion.
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Mine was obviously conditioning towards the Catholic view of life and my education was also overseen by nuns, who were not only instructors, you know, in the typical ABCs and mathematics of life, but you got your catechism and your rote learnings.
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You know that you had to practice on a regular basis and in Catholicism, basically, you're defined as a sinner and shame and guilt are pretty powerful tools that are used on you to condition you towards their definitions, the church's definitions of who and what you're supposed to be.
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And it becomes not that you know it when you're a child, because you'll recall in your own childhood you don't have references to guide you along and say, hey, this isn't right or things may not feel right, but if your parents were indoctrinated into this system, if your parents were indoctrinated into this system and they're your reference point at home, then there's no one to throw a kink or a monkey wrench into things here and say hey, no, no, this doesn't make sense.
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So what has to happen and I'm going to guess it happened for you because it happened for me there's an awakening at some point in your life and your younger adult life.
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But the first thing that happens is when you start self-reflecting.
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Then you start asking those questions like why doesn't this feel right?
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Or you know what's wrong with this, or how come there's so many contradictions in this so-called, this religion that I'm supposed to be part of?
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And why is it that I have to be perfect?
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And how the heck am I supposed to be perfect?
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You know, if I make the slightest mistake, then I failed, you know, and on and on it goes, and the latter that they present to you is well, then you can seek redemption, and that means praying and that means lighting candles and that means putting money into the kitty.
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Don't worry, we'll get you to heaven.
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We got the keys, but you have to be perfect and it goes, and that's my overview of my own upbringing.
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What happened for me?
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It was I was married very young the first time and within five years it wasn't working, and my wife and I at the time we had two children, two daughters, which are beautiful young women today and we both loved them, and her and I are not friends, but we're okay with each other because life was so different.
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But, for me.
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It sent me reeling and it sent me into an environment where I met a medical doctor who was into psychology and he introduced me to books and materials on psychology, and that opened the door for me to start questioning things, and and and that's when I like to use that term self-reflection, when we start to look at ourselves and we get and then those early stages, we get help.
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You know, we get to bounce ideas and thoughts and concerns and questions off of other people, people who are there in front of us with levels of skill and education that you know, we respect and we can admire, and they start saying things to us that make sense.
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And here's another thing that clicks in is when something makes sense, it feels right.
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And when things start to feel right, it's like our heart starts to vibrate and say, ooh, I got to understand more of this, I've got to find more of this.
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And so we keep seeking and we talk to these people who are giving us information, and they're not trying to program us, they're just saying, well, you know, look at this, read this book, look at that, and if you have questions, come back and talk to me, and all of a sudden we have permission to examine things that were drilled into us and you know, we can use more severe terms like brainwashing or, at the very least, indoctrination and we can start to question those things and we can start to develop this new inner map that says it's a good thing to start listening to our own heart.
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Our heart is telling us things, our feelings are telling us things.
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Even though the church told us or told me anyway, and maybe you had this experience too you can't trust your feelings because everything you need to know is in a book and read this here and boom, boom, boom, right.
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So one of the earliest and worst things done to us as children is we're taught not to trust ourselves and not to trust our own feelings.
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Yes, yes, there's a verse, I think it's in Jeremiah, that says the heart is wicked above all things, or something like that.
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And they tell you whatever you do, don't listen to your heart.
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There you go, and here's one that I like to throw back at them.
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Brian Jesus said the kingdom is within.
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All right and for me as a psychologist and before I became a psychologist, that resonated for me and that is one of the things, the key things, that allowed me to start to trust my own feelings.
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Yeah.
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For me that was the most important relic that I could take from that.
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And you know, let go of all the other stuff that came from the appliers of the religion, which are not spokespersons, you know, unless they have video of Jesus of Nazareth saying certain things to us, or a video of Him walking on water, then you know you might have made it up or you're certainly exaggerating, and I don't know if you have this in your Pentecostal system, but apparently with Catholicism you show up in the crib, in the needle-nail ward, and you got original sin.
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You know.
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Yeah, there's your start in life.
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Let's talk about that experience of being a child and going through this.
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You know, as you said, the original sin thing and you know, I remember being like a five-year-old kid, maybe eight, maybe I was a little older than five and they're like well, you're born in sin because Adam sinned.
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You sinned, therefore you sinned, and therefore God he loves you but he can't stand you.
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And you know, as you said earlier, when your parents take you to this place, where the nuns, or in my case, the Sunday school teachers, are telling you this, as a child, you have no defense and even though it doesn't feel right, you're like well, it must be true.
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Yeah, you're told it's true and, as you said, it's underlined by your own parents' faith and their indoctrination.
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And if somebody said that word to you when you're eight years old, you're not going to know what that means.
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This is your reality, this is how my family functions and my family goes to this church and this is the kind of instruction they got and now I'm getting, and you don't have the wherewithal yet and the self-reflective ability yet, because that only comes later in life, as you mature.
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You don't have those tools, so you go along, but at some level even you might not have words for it something doesn't feel right, something just doesn't feel right, and it's later on that you know, when you're capable of reflecting and you're getting guidance for that through a book or through someone you value about grief to growth For me.
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That was when the fire of personal growth lit up like an explosion, because all of a sudden, so, from book to book and from specialist to specialist, as I went through things, it's just like this big path opened up in front of me and I followed it.
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And there were some wrong turns, there were some bad forks in the road, but most of the path led to something valuable which led to something else valuable, which led to something else, and it just grew and it grew and it grew.
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And somewhere along the early stages of that path I said I want to be a psychologist.
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I didn't look it up in a book, I didn't look like a holistic policeman, this person, this person, lawyer, I didn't look it up, it just came from my heart, it came from inside.
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This is what I want to do, this makes sense to me and that was a very big turning point for me yeah.
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I'm thinking that it was for you yeah, so in your experience, um, when you were a child and you're, as you're, going through this, when did you realize there was something wrong, that it just didn't feel right to you?
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probably Probably early on, and not in the sense that I actually thought about it, but my father was prone to violence and I was the eldest and I got the worst of that.
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And so how can a religious-oriented person go off the rails like he did a few times with myself and my sisters and the only remedy was that, you know.
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So I would talk to a teacher about it or I would talk to my mother about it.
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My mother knew there was something going on there and at that age I had no information or wherewithal to understand that.
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He grew up in a violent home that was also surrounded with religion.
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So, like we've already seen, you have no access points for alternative ideas.
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You have no access points for alternative ideas not until later in life when you're more on your own and you can do the kind of self-explorations that you've obviously done, to be interested in what you do and to develop it into a podcast so that you provide a venue for people to come and talk about stuff and come and share their pain and their difficulties.
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You know there's a long trail that led to where Brian sits today.
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There's a long trail to where I sit today.
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And then you and I are meeting at this point and we're talking about hey, my trail was very much like yours, except, you know, I'm French-Canadian and da-da-da-da-da-da, but my religion did the same kinds of things to me as yours did to you.
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It's the same thing.
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And you know, for me I thought when I was younger, like what's wrong with me?
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You know why is this working for other people but it's not working for me?
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I just I couldn't accept the fact that.
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You know again, I was born a sinner.
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God only loved me because he killed Jesus for me.
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So I'm like I love Jesus but I don't want anything to do with this guy.
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But for some people it doesn't seem to bother them.
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Have you figured out why some people can go along with this for so long and it just seems to be okay?
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In most religions the systems are closed, so you can't go banging at the doors or opening cracks.
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There's a certain amount of comfort and predictability in being told what to do and being told that this is how life is now thinking and feeling.
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Persons at some point in their life are going to start questioning things.
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That's what's happened to you, that's what's happened to me.
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But there are people who come into your religion and come into the one I was born into as adults, and what they're there for and yeah, it's puzzling right.
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Yeah, but you know what they're there for, brian is the comfort of a place.
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It's.
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It's because religion is now like a super parent.
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They'll tell you what to do.
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They'll tell you what to think.
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They'll scold you when you make mistakes.
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They'll reward you in some fashion when you do something that they say you need to do.
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It's got a predictability to it.
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It's got a familiarity to it.
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It's a closed system.
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Every cult is and most religions are cults, even though the big ones that you and I know and grew up in.
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Typically, when they talk about cults, they talk about the Moonies and these people at airports who are dancing and collecting money for whatever.
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The fact is that most religions, these restrictive religions, they're cults, but that's comfortable for some people and they'll stay there.
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You have to actively and maybe not consciously, but actively submerge your own feelings.
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Something rises up and says, hey, this doesn't feel right.
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Oh, but the teacher said this, or the Sunday school teacher said that, or mom said this, or dad said that, and then it goes back down.
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So we're already repressing stuff in those early days, brian, and we're doing it not consciously.
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We're doing it because we need to survive in this environment that we're in, and so this is how it works here.
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So at those stages of our life we comply.
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Later on, when we are able to question and look at things from a different perspective, that changes, and then we get condemned for daring to challenge that right.
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Yes, yes, we get condemned.
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You know, in my former church there's excommunication.
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There may be something similar in what you grew up in, but what keeps people there to answer that question is there's a certain comfort to it, predictability to it, and they don't want to have to think or feel beyond what they're familiar with.
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So they comply.
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Yeah, I know you refer to religion as institutionalized pathology and we've also thrown around the c word here, the the cult word word.
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Yeah, and I remember when I was coming out and I found this guy named martin zender who was a christian and he wrote a book how to quit church without quitting god and I just and I was like you were saying so, I was just grabbing everything I find at the time and I remember there's a chapter and he listed 20 traits of a cult and then he compared this to the traits of the church and it was like it's a cult.
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It was pretty clear.
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So when you refer to religion as institutionalized pathology, what do you mean when you use that term?
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Well, pathology, Brian, is anything that harms you.
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So back in the 80s, and there's a very brave woman on television named Oprah Winfrey and she brought on experts in all kinds of areas and she was instrumental in opening the doors to people understanding the dynamics of dysfunctional families, starting with understanding the dynamics of a family where one or more of the parents, but usually one, was a raging alcoholic, an alcoholic, so dysfunctional family, a whole group of people on understanding these dysfunctional family dynamics.
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Well, when that door opened and Oprah had these guests on her show, there were great books to read and I read most of them, most from the guests that she presented, and it was amazing.
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most from the guests that you presented and it was amazing.
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Well, in the last 10, 15 years, as I was pulling my book together, I realized the synchronicity between understanding dysfunctional family dynamics and dysfunctional religions and same levels of pathology.
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Conditioning right, it's this way, this way, this way.
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That's the way it is.
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And, as you said, don't trust your feelings, don't trust your heart, Only trust what we say.
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It's written in scripture, it's etched in stone, so this is what you can believe and it's that they deliver that strict edict to you.
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This is how the world works.
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Then you read this book how to Quit Religion, but Not God.
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That's beautiful, because you don't give up spirituality to walk away from religion.
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As a matter of fact, your spirituality takes a much deeper turn now, because now the message now is I have to trust myself, I have to trust my deepest self, I have to trust it's not just have to, it's okay to trust my own feelings.
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And as we go through these layers, brian, the layers of indoctrination, and we take one away and then another one and another one, we get closer and closer and deeper and deeper into our own heart, deeper and deeper into our own heart, and our feelings start to reveal this beautiful, majestic, amazing world.
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And I don't know if this happens for you, but when I walk in nature now I talk to the trees, I just say good morning, you know, and I touch them because I can feel the vibrations coming from them and they're just waving in the wind, you know they're beautiful.
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Or flowers and the bugs and the butterflies and the bees you know floating about, and the best place to go is a playground and watch little kids yelling and screaming and having a ball.
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They're unhindered, right, they're unhindered, and they're just expressing that beautiful inner nature.
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Sure, they make mistakes, but mistakes can be corrected.
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When you define someone as defective, how does a child correct that hammer that knocks them down and keeps them trapped in that unhealthy, traumatizing situation?
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And that's it's my point of view with religion is they have committed crimes against humanity in terms of hammering away at our hearts, our feeling nature, which needs guidance, of course, needs nurturing, of course, and behavior needs guidance, of course.
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Correcting behavior and teaching kids that they can trust their feelings is far different than defining everything as negative and broken and defining the person as defective.
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That's a crime against humanity.
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I agree and you know the thing is, as I mentioned to you earlier, my grandfather was the pastor of my church and my parents, and you know and I know these people all had good intentions and I don't hold anything against them in terms of that.
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But looking at it now and looking at what people are teaching to children in the name of religion, it's child abuse.
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And when you were speaking about your father being a violent man and someone might say, well, how could someone who follows God be a violent man?
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Look at the guy they told us about.
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I mean, this is a guy who would literally torment you forever just for being the way that you were born.
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So why wouldn't you be a violent person?
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Yeah, yeah, good point, good point.
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That's a you know.
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You know who George Carlin is.
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Oh yeah.
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George Carlin.
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All right, he was raised Catholic.
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He goes through that long list of things that you've already cited.
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You know, just one after the other, all the definitions of how you're defective, and then the punchline is but God loves you.
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Yeah, yeah.
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How can that be One of the things that we need to understand in personal growth and you must be getting it now if you're trusting your heart.
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We have to love ourselves.
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Yeah.
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So the first step I call this my three-step system Self-reflection opens the door.
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It leads to self-acceptance.
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All right, now I'm okay, and now you're in that mode of well, I want to learn more and absorb more and try more.
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And self-acceptance leads to self-love touching your heart.
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Look, buddy, we gotta love ourselves, otherwise we can't.
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And you used these terms earlier, these questions why am I here?
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Who am I and why am I here?
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You use those, I use those very same phrases who am I and why am I here?
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Well, your heart will tell you why you're here.
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Home is where the heart is and that's where I live Inside my sorrows.
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I have learned to forgive.
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I have learned to love again.
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I am happy.
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No more chagrin.
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That's one of my song lyrics.
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I love that yeah.
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Thank you, it's just beautiful.
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The heart is the biggest and most important part of us, and even a guy named Albert Einstein you might be familiar with that name said love is the most powerful force in the universe.
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Well, when we feel it, we can feel how powerful that is, and sometimes it really shakes us as we dig down deeper and uncover, remove the rubble and the shambles of what we were indoctrinated with.
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We get into those deeper layers of feeling and love, not just for ourselves, because narcissists don't love themselves.
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Narcissists are people hiding behind a whole plethora of defense mechanisms.
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They are, but self-love excludes no one.
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In the healthiest sense it excludes no one.
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Why it's okay.
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I want my children to love themselves.
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I'm going to model that for them.
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We're going to correct behavior, but behavior is not a definition of who they are.
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It's an act that needs.
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We want them to trust their hearts because the natural goodness is there and they're like.
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You see kids playing with pets and with bugs and whatever you know.
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They're adorable in the way they care and the way they emote and show their feelings.
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It's beautiful.
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If that's our natural inclination, don't we want to favor that?
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Don't we want to allow that to grow and let them become whoever they are, whatever they're meant to be, including loving and accepting themselves along the way, because they're only going to have more success in terms of what they're going to bring to life, in terms of their gifts, in terms of their uniqueness, in terms of answering their question of who am I and why am I here.
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You can trust your heart my son, my daughter and your heart will tell you who you are and why you're here.
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Yeah.
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And that's your guidance.
00:29:15.721 --> 00:29:21.753
So for you you mentioned meeting someone who was a psychologist and you mentioned your marriage when you were young.
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Was there something in particular that said where you just said, okay, I can't do this anymore.
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Was there like a breaking point for you?
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Yeah, there was the first book that I got introduced to and you may or may not be familiar with it because this goes back to the early 70s, but it was called I'm Okay, You're Okay.
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It's that simple, and the author's name is Richard Harris, and he explained that I'm okay, you're okay simply means I'm a good person, you're a good person, you respect me, I respect you, I respect myself.
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And then he used the other combinations of it, and we can call them dysfunctional combinations of it.
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I'm okay, you're not okay.
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In other words, I'm a self-centered narcissist who thinks I'm better than everybody and you're a loser.
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And we know and we hear people, including people in politics, who use those phrases they're losers, they're losers, da-da-da-da-da.
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So I'm not okay, you're not okay.
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Well, that means we're all screwed up, that means we're all losers right.
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And yeah and I'm not okay, you're okay means I'm a loser and you're okay and kind of that kind of defines the way we come out of our religion.
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If our teachers and our nuns and these people who are indoctrinating us, if they're okay, then why do I feel bad about this?
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So that was a door opener, but so was.
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I can't think of his name.
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Anyway, he was probably a minister of some sorts, but his book was called the Power of Positive Thinking.
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Oh, Norman Vincent Peale.
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Norman Vincent Peale.
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I'm pushing 80 now, so my memory isn't as—recalling stuff like that, but what a powerhouse message that delivered the power of positive thinking.
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But you can't think positively if you're being programmed to think of yourself as a sinner and to think of yourself as defective in the eyes of this institution that your parents belong to and you belong to, that your parents belong to and you belong to.
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So between that, those were the early stirrings that led to, and there was mountains of books that came out in the 70s and some very famous psychologists coming out of the US, and in my profession one of the top ones was Carl Rogers, and Carl Rogers is what, in my profession, we call the father of client-centered therapy.
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He developed an approach to basically listening to people.
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Listening to people, which is the same thing you do for someone who's in pain, but it's the same thing you do for someone who is grieving the loss of a loved one.
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Listening to them and creating an environment where they can talk about what they're feeling.
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People who are grieving, they're hurting.
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They need to talk about that, to express those feelings.
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There's lots of tools that you can use, whether it's about grieving the loss of a loved one or grieving your own childhood and that poor little kid that you were, who was lost in that morass of all those do's and don'ts that were driving him crazy at that time.
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Well, now he, she, needs you, the adult, you, to look back down, look back on them.
