As a result of the recent series on fake authors, I have seen a lot of cliche’d arguments about how we interact and how we are supposed to interact within our community and several of these are extremely harmful.
The ones that concern me most at the moment come across like this:
“How dare your speak of ill of your witchy sisters!”
~ An email I received but have since deleted
While I’m not encouraging making shit up and passing it around, I think that refusing to speak anything negative about anyone else just because you share a community with them is EXACTLY how harm, abuse, misinformation, and other dangers spread through a community.
Not to mention that most folk who condemn sharing information are the first to resort to name calling, hyperbole, and exaggerated condemnation.
It’s easy to point at other communities – Catholic Churches, the Boy Scouts, and others – for hiding their predators and abusers, but we have that same history in Pagan,Witchy and Wiccan communities. For a long time, we didn’t talk about the Nazis in our community, particular in the Heathen communities, and we have our histories with serial sexual abusers in places of authority.
Again, I am not encouraging making shit up to spread about each other, but I DO think it’s essential that we feel free to warn each other of trouble or issues when we see them. This is not to CONTROL each other’s behavior, but to give each other a head’s up and then allow that other person to use their own discernment.
But demanding that we never “speak ill of” or “pass judgement” on someone just for being part of our community is to give any ill behavior – from poor manners to violence and abuse – a free pass to run unchecked.
Folks have claimed that my original article was “gaslighting” – who I’m supposed to be gaslighting, I’m not sure, but let’s talk about gaslighting for a moment. Keeping in mind, I do have a background in mental health, so using terms like this as a synonym for “insult” or “mean” is inaccurate and inappropriate.
From the very easily accessible Wikipedia:
Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation in which a person or a group covertly sows seeds of doubt in a targeted individual, making them question their own memory, perception, or judgment, often evoking in them cognitive dissonance and other changes such as low self-esteem. Using denial, misdirection, contradiction, and misinformation, gaslighting involves attempts to destabilize the victim and delegitimize the victim’s beliefs. Instances may range from the denial by an abuser that previous abusive incidents ever occurred to the staging of bizarre events by the abuser with the intention of disorienting the victim.
Wikipedia
So, no, I am not gaslighting anyone – I’m not even demanding that people do anything in particular. I’m just giving folks information about these books’ likely origins. By all means, buy them if you want. Now that you have the infromation I have, if you still want them, go for it – it’s your money and your life. But for the people that DO care, they should have access to the information.
But this claim on gaslighting is part of the normal spiritual bypassing we experience in the witchy, pagan, and spiritual communities in general. We talk about spiritual bypassing in our We Witches Three podcast episode here. Let’s talk about it again, though, because every conversation on this is absolutely necessary.
Spiritual bypassing is “tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks”.
Wikipedia
You can read more about Spiritual Bypassing over on Psychology Today. We see this all the time, and we know it isn’t healthy. We are told SO OFTEN not to “focus on the negative,” to “not speak ill of others,” to “focus only on the light,” to “let go of the negative.” But then we also turn around and acknowledge that all this dark and negative HAS to be address by couching it in sacred terms that suggest work done in solitude, alone, not to be shared with our community: Shadow Work.
We celebrate together, but suffer and process alone.
When tragedy or trauma strikes, we’re told that we are learning a lesson, to take the benefit from it that we can, people reframe things to give it a more positive spin, the silver lining is rubbed in our faces, and our “negative vibes” are unwelcome.
This is not a sincere “honoring of the path” – to honor a path is to recognize the easy ride and the hard slog alike. We aren’t accepted, because to be accepted is to be WHOLLY accepted – not only when we’re being pleasant, pretty, and optimistic.
Spiritual Bypassing is real “Brave New World”/”1984” monitor your feelings/keep the peace policing of people’s thoughts and emotions, where truths can only be spoken in secret and the shadows.
That is not what I want in my community. It’s the reason I am just starting to speak in this community after over 30 years in it. And I don’t want to see other people feel silenced because they see these comments and feel invalid, unworthy, and unwelcome.
