Healthy Psychology, Toxic Spirituality (More)

 

HEALTHY PSYCHOLOGY, TOXIC SPIRITUALITY (MORE)

Parents and other caregivers in the nuclear or extended family are essential to a child’s healthy psychological and related development into adulthood. By disrupting this necessary process during adolescence into college years, Opus Dei inflicts debilitating, sometimes lasting harm on numeraries, besides doing violence to healthy family life (we are speaking here of the original family, not the Opus Dei “family”).

Numeraries in their teens and sometimes in their early twenties are not yet ready to commit themselves to religious life, if it is indeed this kind of life that they want—numerary life amounts to religious life, in some respects a severe and abusive version of it—so that indoctrination in the highly restricted Opus Dei lifestyle, involving mass psychogenic illness, that is, delusion, amounts to child and adolescent abuse. Maturing into adulthood inside Opus Dei, numeraries are threatened by their handlers with eternal damnation for leaving the institution. In many aspects Opus Dei substitutes healthy individual psychology with toxic spirituality.

The American Psychological Association expounds the indispensable role played by a loving environment of parents and related family members for healthy individual psychological maturation. No exceptions.

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Parents and caregivers are the most important people in a child's life. They offer love, acceptance, appreciation, encouragement, and guidance, and provide the most intimate context for the nurturing and protection of children as they develop their personalities and identities and also as they mature physically, cognitively, emotionally, and socially.

Infancy and childhood

Babies whose needs are met quickly and warmly (e.g., feeding, changing, holding/cradling, and soothing them) achieve a crucial developmental task—attachment. This bond of affection between parents and children is necessary for a healthy parent-child relationship, and also extends to relationships between children, their siblings, and other family members (e.g., grandparents, aunts/uncles, etc) and caregivers. When infants attach successfully to their parents and caregivers, they learn to trust that the outside world is a welcoming place and are more likely to explore and interact with their environment. This lays the groundwork for further social, emotional, and cognitive development.

Research has found that relationships between parents and caregivers and youth that:

are warm, open, and communicative;

include appropriate limits; and

provide reasoning for rules for behavior

are associated with higher self-esteem, better performance in school, and fewer negative outcomes such as depression or drug use in children and teenagers.

…Adolescence

As children reach adolescence, parents and caregivers face a whole new set of tasks that require new approaches to deal with the changing needs of children. Children are changing on a physical as well as cognitive and social basis.

Parents and caregivers must prepare for the upcoming changes in the parent-child relationship; teens will begin to detach to a greater degree from existing family bonds and focus more on their peers and the outside world. This quest for greater independence and autonomy is a natural part of the developmental process in adolescence. Parents and caregivers must find the delicate balance between maintaining the familial bond and allowing teens increasing autonomy as they mature. Teenagers who feel connected to yet not constrained by their families tend to flourish.

Research has found that parents and caregivers that maintain a warm, communicative, and reasoned style of parenting raise teenagers who have higher rates of socially competent behavior, take fewer drugs, and exhibit less anxiety or depression.

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https://www.apa.org/topics/families/parents-caregivers-kids-healthy-development

—“Parents and caregivers are essential to children’s healthy development,” American Psychological Association, created March 31, 2009, reviewed August 2, 2023

Opus Dei purposely takes aim at disrupting this necessary process of healthy psychological development among numeraries growing into adulthood.

Opus Dei official policy is to directly attack loving family relations and destroy them whenever the original family—the parents in particular—opposes the membership of the numerary, which is more often the case than not.

Opus Dei expects numeraries to substitute their original family relations by relating to other numerary members in a manner similar yet avowedly superior—“superior,” because it is purportedly “spiritual”—a restrictive regime which is not only manufactured and unrealistic but also dysfunctional and toxic.

Categorically, Opus Dei members are not collective members of a “family” in the original sense of the term. Opus Dei is a social artifice resulting in psychological and spiritual harm.

How to avoid damaging outcomes so endemic to Opus Dei numeraries—

Do not assault, undermine, and destroy original family relations but rather, drawing on developmental psychology and related areas, address on a case-to-case basis specific family dynamics—not every family is the same—and apply appropriate spiritual direction, helping to foster loving and healthy relationships within the original family.

Candidates should join Opus Dei when they are psychologically ready and not when they are at their most vulnerable to spiritual abuse. This approach is the correct one, genuinely helpful, charitable and compassionate besides.

The directive Opus Dei propagates among its members of targeting naïve unsuspecting youth for numerary membership using underwater harpoons is predatory and just plain warped.