When Religion Becomes Trauma: Dr. Moe's Journey to Healing w/ Dr. Maurice Turmel | EP 444

You know you need something, you're just not sure what. You've been listening, you're doing the work, but there's still this feeling that you're circling the same place, like you're waiting for the thing that finally moves you. Now maybe you've thought about working with me one-on-one. Maybe something's held you back, the timing, the money, or you're just not sure you're ready yet. I get that.

And I want you to know there's still a place for you.

I built a resource for exactly this moment, guided meditations for when the waves hit and you just need to breathe. Workbooks to help you get out of your head and onto the page, ebooks on what near-death experiences tell us about the people we've lost, and whether they're really gone, a full course for widows and widowers who are ready to find their way back to living, and a full course for the evidence of the afterlife. And all of it is available for pay what you want. Nobody gets turned away because of money. I think these resources are valuable, but I don't want to hold them back because you don't have the money to pay for them. You don't have to wait until you're ready for coaching. The next step might be a lot smaller than you think. To find out, go to grief2growth.com/store. That's grief, the numeral 2, growth.com/store. And check out the resources I've made for you. Close your eyes and imagine. What are 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. 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. Now, open your eyes. Open your eyes to this way of viewing life. Come with me as we explore your true, infinite, eternal nature. This is Grief to Growth. And I am your host, Brian D Smith.

Hey there, I'm Brian D Smith. And whether you're joining us for the first time, or you've been with us for a while, I want to welcome you to Grief 2 Growth. This is a podcast that helps you navigate life's toughest challenges by exploring life's biggest questions. Who are we? Why are we here? What happens when we leave this world? Today's episode is a powerful one, and it's one that's deeply personal for me. I'm honored to welcome Dr. Maurice Trammell, affectionately known as Dr. Mo. 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. 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. But his expertise isn't just academic, it's actually lived. He grew up with emotional trauma, religious repression, and deep self-doubt, yet he broke free from the chains of early conditioning and emerged with a life-affirming truth: we are spiritual beings on a human journey. In today's conversation, we're going to explore how religion for some can be— become a form of institutionalized trauma and how to begin untangling that conditioning. We're going to talk about what makes religious trauma unique and how to heal from it. We'll talk about the moment that Dr. Mo broke the spell and reclaimed his inner authority. We talk about how to shift from guilt and fear into love and empowerment, and even after, even after decades of emotional repression, and how music and creativity became a spiritual lifeline in Dr. Mo's personal journey. 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. 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. And remember, after the episode, it doesn't— the conversation doesn't end here. Join me at grieftogrowth.com/community to carry on the conversation there. And with that, I'd like to welcome Dr. Mo to Grief to Growth.

Hi Brian, and hi to all your listeners. And, uh, yeah, yeah, great. It's great to be here.

It's great to have you here. We were starting to talk a little bit before we got started. We do have this thing in common. Anybody that's listened to me for any amount of time knows my, my background, and I share a little bit of what I went through. Um, but I want to talk about what you went through in terms of your, your religious, uh, upbringing or whatever it was that started you on this journey.

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. But it's Catholicism that no matter what language we speak, you know, has its application and then its general formats. 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, 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, 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. 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, and they're your reference point at home, then there's no one to throw a kink into the monkey, or a monkey wrench into things here. Hey, no, no, this doesn't make sense. 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, in your younger adult life, but the first thing that happens is when you start self-reflecting, then you start asking those questions like, why doesn't this feel right? Or, you know, what's wrong with this? Or how come there's there's so many contradictions in this so-called, this religion that I'm supposed to be part of. And why is it that I have to be perfect? And how the heck am I supposed to be perfect? You know, if I make the slightest mistake, then I failed, you know? And on and on it goes. And the ladder that they present to you is, well, then, you know, then you can seek redemption. And that means, you know, praying. And that means lighting candles. And that means putting money into the kitty. Don't worry, we'll get you to heaven. We got the keys. But you have to be perfect. Yeah. And on it goes. And that's my overview of my own upbringing. What happened for me, it was I was married very young the first time. And within 5 years, it wasn't working. And my wife and I at the time, we had 2 children, 2 daughters, which are beautiful young women today. And we both love them. And her and I are not friends, but we're were okay with each other because life was so different. But for me, 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, 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 in those early stages, we get help, 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 start saying things to us that make sense. And here's another thing that clicks in. Is when something makes sense, it feels right. And when things start to feel right, it's like our heart starts to vibrate and say, ooh, I gotta understand more of this, I've gotta find more of this. 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, that says it's a good thing to start listening to our own heart. Our heart is telling us things, our feelings are telling us things, even though the church told us, or told me anyway, and maybe you had this experience too, you can't trust your feelings, 'cause everything you need to know is in a book and read this here and boom, boom, boom, right? Right, yeah. So one of the worst and early, The 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.

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. And they tell you, whatever you do, don't listen to your heart.

There you go.

Yeah.

And here's one that I like to throw back at them, Brian D Smith. Jesus said The kingdom is within.

Yeah.

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.

Yeah.

For me, that was the most important, most important relic that I could take from that. And, you know, let go of all the, all the other stuff. That came from the appliers of the religion, which are not spokespersons, you know, unless, 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.

Yeah.

And I don't know if you had this in your Pentecostal system, but apparently with Catholicism, you show up in the crib in the neonatal ward and you got original sin. You know, yeah, there's your start in life.

Yeah, let's talk about that experience of being a child and going through this, uh, you know, as you said, the original sin thing. And, you know, I remember being like a 5-year-old kid, maybe 8, maybe it was a little older than 5, and they're like, well, you're, you're born in sin because Adam sinned, you sinned, therefore you've sinned, and therefore God, he, he loves you but he can't stand you. And as you know, and that, 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.

Yeah, you're told it's true. And as you said, it's underlined by your own parents' faith and their indoctrination. And if somebody said that word to you when you're 8 years old, you You're not going to know what that means. 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. You don't have those tools, so you go along. 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 when you're capable of reflecting and you're getting guidance for that through a book or through someone you value and trust, as I mentioned earlier, that's when that spark starts to lift and starts to open from you. Yeah. And And another way to put that in your terms, given that this is about grief to growth, for me, 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. And yeah, 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. And somewhere along that, the early stages of that path, I said, I want to be a psychologist. I just, 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. This is what I want to do. This makes sense to me. And that, that was a, that was a very big turning point for me.

Yeah.

So I'm thinking it was for you.

Yeah. So in your experience, 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? Stay with us. We'll be right back.

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Probably early on, and not in the sense that I actually thought about it, But I— my father, my father was prone to violence. And I was the eldest, and I, and I got the worst of that. And so how can a religious-oriented, religious-oriented person go off, go off the, go off the rails like he did a few times with myself and my sisters? And, and, and and the only remedy was that, you know, so I would, I would talk to a teacher about it or I would talk to my mother about it. My mother knew there was something going on there. And, and at that age, I had, I had no information or wherewithal to understand that he grew up in a violent home that was also surrounded with religion. So the, like, like we've already seen, 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. You know, that there's a long trail that led to where Brian sits today. There's a long trail to where I sit today. 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 ta-da-da-da-da-da, but my religion did the same kinds of things to me as yours did to you.

Yeah, it's the same thing. And, you know, for me, I thought when I was younger like, what's, what's wrong with me? You know, why, why is this working for other people but it's not working for me?

Yeah.

Um, I just, I couldn't accept the fact that, you know, again, I was, I was born a sinner. God, God only loved me because Jesus— because he killed Jesus for me. So I'm like, I love, I love Jesus, but I don't— this God, yeah, I don't want anything to do with this guy. Um, but for some people, you know, they don't— it doesn't seem to bother them. If you figured out why Why does some people can go along with this for so long and it just, it seems to be okay?

In, in most religions, the systems are, the systems are closed. Okay. So you can't go banging at the doors or opening cracks. There's a certain amount of comfort and predictability in being told what to do and in being told that this is how life is. Now, thinking and feeling persons at some point in their life are going to start questioning things. That's what's happened to you. That's what's happened to me. 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? Yeah. But you know what they're there for, Brian? Is the comfort of a place. It's, it's because religion is now like a super parent. They'll tell you what to do. They'll tell you what to think. They'll, they'll scold you when you, when you make mistakes and they'll reward you in some fashion when you do something that they say you need to do. It's got a predictability to it. It's got a familiarity to it. It's a closed system, every cult is, and most religions are cults, even though the big ones that you and I know and grew up in, you know, typically when they talk about cults, they talk about the Moonies and these people at airports who are dancing and, you know, and collecting money for whatever. But the fact is that most religions, these restrictive religions, They're cults, but that's comfortable for some people, and they'll stay there. And you have to actively, and maybe not consciously, but actively submerge your own feelings. Something rises up and says, hey, this doesn't feel right. 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. So we're already repressing stuff in those early days, Brian, and we're doing it not consciously. We're doing it because we need to survive in this environment that we're in. And so this is how it works here. So at those stages of our life, we comply. 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 them, right?

Yes, yes.

We get condemned, you know, in my former church there's excommunication, 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, so they comply.

Yeah, yeah. I know you refer to religion as institutionalized pathology, and we've also thrown around the C word here, the, the cult word.

Yeah.

And I remember when I was coming out and there 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, it's— 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. It was, it was pretty clear. So when you refer to, to religion as institutionalized pathology, what do you mean when you use that term?

Well, pathology, pathology, Brian D Smith, is anything that harms you. So Back in the '80s, and there was 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. 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. 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 pathos— same levels of pathology conditioning, right? It's this way, this way, this way. That's the way it is. And, you know, and as you said, don't trust your feelings, don't trust your heart. "Only trust what we say, 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, "This is how the world works." Then you read this book, How to Quit Religion But Not God, that's beautiful. Because you don't give up spirituality to walk away from religion. 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. And as we go through these layers, Brian D Smith, 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. And our feelings start to reveal this beautiful, majestic, amazing world. And, 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. 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. They're unhindered, right? They're unhindered and they're just expressing that beautiful inner nature. Sure, they make mistakes, but mistakes can be corrected. When you define someone as defective, how does a child correct that? Yes, that's the hammer that knocks them down and keeps them trapped in that unhealthy, traumatizing situation. And that's it. My, my point, my point of view with religion is they have committed crimes against humanity in terms of, in terms of hammering away at our hearts, our feeling nature, which, which needs guidance, of course, needs nurturing, of course. And behavior needs guidance, of course. 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. That's a crime against humanity. I agree.

And 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, you know, in terms of that. But looking at it now and looking at what people are teaching to children in the name of religion, it is— it's, it's child abuse. And, you know, 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? Look at the God they told us about. I mean, this is a God who would literally torment you forever just for being the way that you were born. So why wouldn't you be a violent person?

Yeah, yeah, good point. It's a good point. It's, uh, do you know who, you know who George Carlin is? Oh yeah, yeah, George Carlin. All right. He goes through, he was raised Catholic, he goes through that long list of things that you've already cited, you know, just one after the other, all the definitions of how you're defective, and then the punchline is, but God loves you.

Yeah, yeah.

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, we have to love ourselves.

Yeah.

So the first step, I call this my, it's my three-step system. Self-reflection opens the door. It leads to self-acceptance. All right, now I'm okay. And now you're in that mode of, I want to learn more and absorb more and try more. And self-acceptance leads to self-love. Touching your heart. Look, buddy, we gotta love ourselves. Otherwise we can't— and you used these terms earlier, these questions. Why am I here? Who am I and why am I here? You've used those. I use those very same phrases. Who am I and why am I here? Well, your heart will tell you why you're here. Home is where the heart is. And that's where I live. Inside my sorrows, I have learned to forgive. I have learned to love again. I am happy. No more chagrin. That's one of my song lyrics.

I love that. Yeah.

Thank you. It's just beautiful. 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. Well, when we feel it, we can feel how powerful that is. And sometimes it really shakes us. You know, as we dig down deeper and uncover, remove the rubble and the shambles of what we were indoctrinated with, we get into those deeper layers of feeling and love, not just for ourselves, because narcissists don't love themselves. Narcissists are people hiding behind a whole plethora of defense mechanisms. Yeah, they, they, they are. But self-love excludes no one in the healthiest sense. It excludes no one. Why? It's okay. I want my children to love themselves. I'm going to model that for them. We're going to correct behavior, but behavior is not a definition of who they are. It's an act. That needs— we want them to trust their hearts because the natural goodness is there. And they're like, you see kids playing with pets and with bugs and whatever, you know, they're adorable in the way they care and the way they emote and show their feelings. It's beautiful. If that's our natural inclination, don't we want to favor that? 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? You can trust your heart, my son, my daughter. And your heart will tell you who you are and why you're here. Yeah. And that's your guidance.

So for you, you mentioned meeting someone who was a psychologist and you mentioned your marriage when you were young. Was there something in particular that said where you just said, okay, I can't do this anymore? Was there like a breaking point for you?

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. 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. I— you respect me. I respect you. I respect myself. And then he used the other combinations of it and the— we can call them dysfunctional combinations of it. I'm okay. You're not okay. In other words, I'm a self-centered narcissist who thinks I'm better than everybody, and you're a loser, right? And we know and we hear people, including people in politics, who use those phrases. You know, they're losers, they're losers, ta-da-ta-da-ta-da. So I'm not okay, you're not okay. Well, that means we're all screwed up. That means we're all losers, right? 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. If our teachers and our nuns and these people who are indoctrinating us, if they're okay, and then why do I feel bad about this? So that was a door opener. But so was, I can't think of his name. Anyway, he was probably a minister of some sorts, but his book was called The Power of Positive Thinking.

Oh, Norman Vincent Peale.

Norman Vincent Peale. I'm pushing 80 now, so my memory isn't recalling stuff like that. But what a powerhouse message that delivered, the power of positive thinking. 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. 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. He developed an approach to basically listening to people, 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, listening to them and creating an environment where they can talk about what they're feeling. You know, people who are grieving, they're hurting. They need to talk about that, to express those feelings. And 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 dos and don'ts that, you know, were driving them crazy at that time. Well, now he, she needs you, the adult you, to look back down, look back on them, not down on them, but look back on them and say, hey, I know what you've been through. I mean, you know what, you lived it. But I, the adult me, know what you, the child me, have been through. And we're listening. I'm listening. Tell me what you're feeling. And if you need to cry, let's cry. If you need to scream because you're angry, scream, you know, get the feelings out, you know. And that's the safest thing to do with a safe person or a safe environment. Or you can use tools like journaling, talking to a friend, joining a group. There's grief groups for all kinds of things. There's personal growth groups. Well, you're talking about grief and growth. They go together.

Yeah.

Grieving a lost childhood is not much different than grieving the loss of a loved one.

I want to emphasize what you just said there because, um, when I was going through, you know, my, my deconstruction phase and everything, I remember I was in my mid-30s and I was like, I, I was on antidepressants, I was having panic attacks all the time, and I was like, okay, there's something, I've got to figure out what this is. And I, I had enough intuition, I guess, to say I'm gonna go to a counselor, but it has to be a Christian counselor. Yeah, so I went to a Christian counselor, and she helped me to understand that I had to grieve for that child. And I thought it was nonsense at the time. I'm like, what are you talking about, inner child? You know? And I, I got what I needed, you know? She's like, well, did you get what you need? I'm like, yeah, I was fed, I was, you know, I was clothed, I was taken to, you know, taken to Sunday school. Um, but I realized that was something really important for me to figure out because I was, I was traumatized. And again, I'm not blaming my, my parents or even my Sunday school teachers. They were doing the best they could. But for me, I just felt like, why is God so angry at me? You know, what is the— you know, what did I do? What? And, and I felt like I would never be good enough. And that lasted until I was in my mid-30s.

Yeah, that's a big load to carry. And you see how what you, what you just described is how all that conditioning worked. And you were still, in your mind, fighting with yourself because the definitions you've been given was suggesting that God's angry at you for something, so, "Well, what have I done wrong?" And I don't know if you had the same terminology as we had with original sin, but if you're born defective, then what possible chance do you have to to have a decent fulfilling life or to make a positive contribution to mankind, because you're already broken. How did you get broken? Well, you can't figure that out because you never were broken, you were just conditioned to believe by the same system that indoctrinated your parents, by the same system that indoctrinated your parents' parents, and all the way back, by these systems that basically are in the service of keeping those institutions afloat and keeping them prominent on the landscape where they have major influence in our lives. You know, how many directives come from the Vatican, and now that you've got an American Pope from Chicago who is sitting in that chair now, you know, all of these things, but the foundation upon which those things are built, their enunciations, their references to scripture and this and that, show me the videos, show me the origins, show me when Christ said this, or when God said, you know, you're defective and I am pissed off with you. No, no, no, no. Yeah. Here's the punchline, and you know this already, but if not, you'll get it. We are God.

Yeah.

That is what we're getting in touch with. That is our original spirituality. We are spiritual. And so that book you read, How to Break Free of Religion and, and, but still, still be friends with God. Yeah. It's a beautiful thing. There's someone who opened the door for for you. Yeah, right. You read that, that opened the door for you. And for me, same thing happened, but, you know, just a different array of books. But back in my mind, see, a lot of people who break free of religion, and there's books like this, and there's one by, uh, his name is Dr. Darryl Ray, and it's called The God Virus. Uh, he's, he's an atheist, and, uh, You know, so you have atheists or agnostics. There's something lost there, you know. Then all we are is this human form inside this body, you know, with a very strict due date, you know, like expiry date, right? Yeah, yeah. That's going to come up and then we're gone. I always— I didn't have evidence at the time, but I always thought there's got to be more to this. Than just this me being in this body. Yeah. And, and if that's the case, why am I going through these particular life lessons, right? Why are these particular challenges coming? Well, at this point, and you may agree with me, you and I have walked the path to this point where we learned with others, because they're doing, or they're coming up against the same things you came up with years ago when things broke open for you. Same thing with me. People need our experience, and we're benefiting from people ahead of us who offered us their experience. You see the pattern there? And so, we could be upset about why we were born into these circumstances, or we can turn it into life lessons and gifts to ourselves ultimately, but gifts to the generations coming up behind us. And the beautiful part about regaining spirituality— and, and I like being, I like being identified as a spiritual psychologist because most people in my profession don't. No, I like doing that because it's part of the access of our deepest inner self. It's part of connecting with our heart.

Yeah, I want to get back to that because I really appreciate you using that term. But I also want to emphasize a point you just made. Religions can do such a disservice in so many ways, but one of the ways they do a disservice is they can kill our spirituality. And that they can, you know, again, tell us we're less than nothing. Or like my friend, I remember he was part of, uh, we were part of the church called The Vineyard, which is a huge, you know, movement and stuff. And he was all into it. He was a missionary, etc. But then when it started to fall apart from him, he went to the other extreme and became the atheistic materialist and completely lost his spirituality because he said if If this is what God is, this doesn't make any sense.

Yeah, yeah. That's 180 degrees from the original problem is still a problem.

Exactly right.

Exactly.

Throwing the baby out with the bathwater. And for some people, that's a hard conception to buy. So what this person is actually exhibiting by throwing the baby out with the bathwater is that there's this big pool of rage inside of him or her, and that's their answer to just throw the whole thing away, throw it all away, and I want nothing to do with it. And that's a loss because the path that that you're on and I'm on, and the path that, that, that these experiences recommend is regaining trust in our own heart. And our own heart will lead us to what we need and the spiritual dimensions which are there all around us. I have no problem with that. I don't need to see them to know they're there because funny things show up in your life when you least expect them. But they're exactly what you need at that moment. How did this happen? How did Zinder's book show up when you needed it? You know, the kinds of things that showed up for me, the things that we needed when we needed them. And, you know, so where is that direction coming from? Well, it isn't going to be till a long time later that you're now— you're ready to accept the spirit, your spiritual nature in your heart, that you realize there's been something kind of guiding you along and just He's giving you little nudges, "Hey, look at this, buddy. What do you think of this? Try this on." And that's the beauty of the spiritual connection and the understanding that we're part of something way bigger. And this body is a vehicle for this life experience on this planet at this time and for what we're here to learn. And for what we're here to give, for what we're here to return, to, you know, to pass on to others. And I think, and I know in my heart, that there's an awakening going on. And people like you and I and many others, and people that, that we look to for guidance and instruction, are part of it. And the awakening is that we're good beautiful people on the inside, that we have beautiful, brave hearts, that we care, that love is the most powerful force in the universe, and we want to spread that around like wildfire because it's the best medicine for healing just about anything. Yeah, right.

Yeah, it's nice you're saying that because, um, we can get very almost evangelical, you know, uh, which is to spread the good news. There's nothing wrong with that word, right? We And, and I'm like, I ironically, I, because I used to be, um, I was, I was a Christian apologist. I, I would go back in the day, AOL, I'd go in the chat rooms with the atheists and Jewish people and I try to convert people. And I, I had websites to convert people to Christianity. Um, so I was doing all that stuff and I don't, I don't do that at this point in my life, but I do want to offer people what was offered to me. I found a site called Tentmakers back in the day when Internet was just coming up, and I found these people that, that gave me permission to think differently. Because when you're in that, as you called it, it's a closed loop. You can't think outside that box. And they indoctrinate. They will tell you, don't listen to your heart, don't listen when anybody tells you anything. They're going to tell you these things, and they're going to sound really good, but you can't listen to them. And those things keep playing back in our heads.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's, there's, there's the resonating factor of these that are early, our earliest conditioning that plays out. So it's a growth process, you know, once that door, once we flip that door open and, and we, we apply those tools that are now readily available, the first one being self-reflection. Self-reflection, it just didn't happen. A book opened your mind, opened your heart, you know, an encounter with person, or a TV program, something started to make sense to you, and you dug deeper, and now, I like to use the analogy of peeling away layers, because none of this gets done in one fell swoop, it doesn't happen that way, and it's not desirable for things to happen that way. I know And there's people maybe still in the Christian traditions that say they have a rebirth experience. I'm not sure what that is, and it's not something I aspire to or I think I need in my own life. If what I'm going through is a rebirth experience, well, the rebirth is simply that, you know, I'm trusting the original self that I was born with. Born into before all the garbage got tossed on top of it, trusting that part of me and my own inner goodness. And that's an important thing to recognize in ourselves because that's when black becomes white, you know, things just flip right around. You were defined and held that definition of yourself as defective for so long. But that thing had to flip. And when it did, and now you're coming from the position of, I'm a good person who's learning, who's got stuff to share, who's growing, and I've got lots more to learn, and as long as I'm here, I want to keep learning, therefore that's what I do, I grow. Well, growing is a process, it's never a fait accompli, it's a process. And we keep growing. And I like to quote George Burns once in a while. George Burns, great comic. He said, "I ain't done till I'm done." And he was in his 90s and he was still working and he was still expressing who he was. And he had a great sense of humor and genuine heart and kindness. And he just showed that. All the time and right till the last minute. And that's, that's what I want for me. Yeah, that's what I want for me. And that's what I want for my kids and my grandkids. I've got several of those now. That's what I want for them to, to learn to trust themselves and, and to follow the inner directives, which is where we need to be to recognize that we're divine to begin with, as opposed to defective. As we were schooled to believe. We are divine, but we're all divine. So I'm not better than you, and you're not better than me. We have all these capacities, and when we see it in other people, it makes us smile. You know, we have conversations with people that you can see they're happy with themselves. We can see their genuine kindness, you know, just their way of being in the world. You feel good when you're with them. Yeah, feel good, right? Why do I trust them? Because it feels good, and I trust what I feel.

You know, it's funny, you, you mentioned something about rebirth, and I've been thinking about that recently because I still think a lot— I read— I still think about the Bible a lot, and, um, I, I— there's a lot— I think there's a lot of good stuff in the Bible. I think there's a lot of good stuff in religion. And Jesus talks about being born again, and I'm like, okay, well, what does that mean? And when I— I know you're in the music— there's a song by a group, uh, the group is called Enigma, and the song is called Return to Innocence. And when they're playing, when they do the video for the song, they show this person, they're old, and they're just getting younger and younger and younger. And the song's about returning to innocence. So for me, being born again, it's like we come into this world and we are innocent. We are born innocent. We are born good. And then the world says, no, you suck, you know, you're broken. And then we have to fight to get back to that. So for me, that's what my rebirth is about. My rebirth is returning to that innocent child that I was before they told me I was broken.

Yeah. And Brian D Smith, that's psychologically speaking, we're talking about the same thing, right? You know, all these psychology people who talked about and brought out all the dimensions that we now understand about connecting with your inner child, that's what it's about. So, you know, whatever language you're comfortable with and it defines that experience, but recovering that beautiful, nascent, innocent child and And now knowing, now knowing in a vastly different way than what you were conditioned to, that of course I was innocent. I tell people this, you know, when we're dealing with the religious subject in terms of grieving, I say, go to a hospital and go to the neonatal ward and look at those babies. And start, you know, point at one and say, "Hey, you got original sin," and point at another one and say that. Can you do that? Some people have tried it, they can't. You can't assign that negativity to that, you know, this thing is wiggling around and it's breathing and it just arrived, hey, it just arrived! Just arrived! It hasn't had time to screw up.

It's interesting to talk about this because I was raised, um, you talked about original sin, but Catholics to me are interesting because— and I was raised to believe the Catholics were going to hell, by the way. So, but you know, Catholics have this concept, well, you have to baptize the baby right away because they have original sin. We didn't have that in our, in our faith. You had, you had to be baptized as an adult. So what they did was actually made this whole thing up. It's not in the Bible at all. They call it age of accountability. So if you were good up until a certain very fuzzy age, but you, you had original sin, but God at least knew enough not to send babies to hell. So yeah, that was one advantage we had.

Yeah. Yes, you were, you were ahead of us.

Because people would say, well, you can't look at a baby, send the baby to hell. Not even God would do that. So no, they're good up until they understand what they're doing.

Yeah, the hardest thing for, as we're traveling that path, and you can't introduce the idea too early on for people who are recovering from religion and recovering themselves, the idea that we're divine, that just seems blasphemous to even suggest that idea.

Yes, yes.

And, but we have to—

Jesus said it.

Yeah, we have to get past those early definitions.

Yeah.

And when we're at a point where we can accept that, it's not about thinking we're so superior. It's just about recognizing that we are energy and our soul is energy and our soul is the active ingredient inside our bodies. When our bodies are done, our soul goes on to do whatever. And maybe come back. Two-thirds of the planet believes in reincarnation. I don't have any problem with it. But also, most religions, and mine included, will teach you only have one life. So, well, you know, what does that do? That gives them more control.

Exactly.

Because if you have reincarnation, well, I can come back and I'll do it better next time, or next time and next time. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, you got to do it perfect this time. According to them. So, but getting to that spiritual point where you recognize that divinity, and all you're doing is you're recognizing that, that energy that you are, the primal energy that showed up in that little baby's body when you first showed up, and then, and then you grew into this environment, the Earth environment, and life experiences, and now you're you're working through those issues that defined you early on but damaged you and hurt you, and now you recognize that, and now you're recovering from that, but you haven't tossed away the idea of spirit, your spiritual self. Well, now you can accommodate yourself to that idea, and at some point you can just simply accept it. And it's not like we glow in the dark, you know, like we're being a big exploding star. We're just divine, just package of energy. We're having experiences and we're driven by our hearts, which are basically home base for love. The fuel that fuels life and makes life beautiful and warm and cozy and fuzzy and all those good things. And, uh, you know, we hug together as family. And, and, uh, as, uh, what, what, do you have a partner or wife or—

Yeah, yeah, I have one.

Yeah. And children?

I, I have one, one child in spirit and one child here. Yeah.

All right.

Yeah.

Well then, yeah, I understand that you've gone through some heavy grief.

Yeah. And, and, you know, as we're talking about you know, grief. And we, we talk about grief as losing, you know, losing people, losing children, parents, whatever. There's also the grief of losing your religion. There, there is a real, you know, that for me was a scary, scary process.

Wow.

Where you feel like you're stepping off a cliff sometimes, right? It's like, yeah, if I let go of this, will there be anything there to catch me?

Yeah. Yeah, that fits in with what you asked me earlier, what keeps people inside. It's that comfort and familiarity. But yeah, that's a good description, like you're stepping off a cliff because you're stepping out of that familiar definition of who and what you are and what life is and why it's safer in here and those people over there. In your case, you were pointing at Catholics while we were busy pointing at you. Yeah. But what you and I have in common is the understanding of our spirituality.

Yeah.

And we're exactly the same.

We are.

Exactly the same.

Well, I'd like to— we talked a lot about breaking free of trauma or religious trauma. Talk about your book. And what people will find when they read your book? How will it help people on their journey?

The title says everything that you and I have been talking about— Breaking the Spell of Religion. You standing on the top of a cliff and ready to go and healing the trauma. The trauma is all those negative definitions that we receive, all of that conditioning, all of that indoctrination. You know, just psychologically speaking, defining people as broken, as negative, as a failure is— well, you took all the antidepressants and all the medication to try and undo that. And to a point, that'll give you an artificial lift. But redefining yourself or rediscovering who and what you are is much better medicine than your antidepressants. And connecting with your heart and now trusting yourself and now being able to send love to that little Brian who grew up in that hellhole. You know, he needs you and he's going to be more playful. The more attention you pay to him, the more playful he's going to be because he's just going to be that kid in the playground dancing around, looking at bugs and looking at birds and, you know, talking to the grass, you're talking to the rabbits or the birds or the trees or whatever, and just, just enjoying life. You, you get to recover that, that, that's a rebirth experience. That's a beautiful thing to pass on. So for me, it ties into— I look, I come at it from the psychological point of view, but it's no different than your point of view. Yeah, you're talking— we're talking the same language, but the trauma is very, very harmful. And trauma means that there's going to be pain and sorrow and there's going to be some crying and there's going to be some anger. There is going to be some anger about how we were mistreated, how we were defined in those negative ways. So one of the tools I always recommend to people is journaling. Write it down. Write it down. Get it out. I've been journaling for 30-plus years. I write things down every few months. I shred the last few months' stuff because I don't need to look at it again. It's just a place where I can talk to myself about my feelings. And sometimes I can have a conversation with little Maurice, the little child in me. And I'll just put— so I'll put in the margin, me, adult me, say, "Hi, how are you doing today, little Maurice?" And then I'll put little M, and I let that voice speak to me. I just write it down. And he tells me what you're feeling. And it's a conversation. It's a part of you from the past speaking to the adult you now, and you speaking to them. And you're making room for them to express themselves because in, in those early days, Brian D Smith, survival meant numbing out because things didn't make sense and we were being crushed with all these negative definitions of ourselves. The only thing we could do was numb out. Yeah, don't consciously do that. It's just a natural protective mechanism. That's why with psychology we can dismantle, we can identify and then dismantle all those defense mechanisms, projection, anger. And I had anxiety attacks too before I started getting the medical and psychological help. And that's our bodies rebelling against these definitions of ourselves. And anxiety attacks are basically little wars in our own body with different parts of ourselves. And they're a clear sign that something doesn't make sense and isn't working. So as we unpack that, you don't have anxiety attacks now, do you?

I don't, no.

No, you don't. Neither do I. Those things got taken care of because we had different parts of ourselves, so different dimensions of our own energy, at war, colliding with ourselves. And anyway, that's the simplest picture as I can give. But at this stage and everything you've come through, and you've climbed quite a mountain or dove off quite a cliff, so have I. And we have the perspective of all of that behind us. And the realization that the growth path that we're still on is still there in front of us, and we're not done yet. We're learning every day. I talk to you, you talk to me, we learn from each other. I get confirmation of, or I get to recognize, I'm looking in a mirror. I see a guy named Brian, but he's lived very similar things to me. Back when you were a Pentecostal and I was a Catholic, you and I would have never talked to each other.

Right.

Because for different reasons, you were going to hell and so was I. Yeah, exactly. But now we're on the same page. Yeah, that's a beautiful thing.

Yeah. And I want to thank you so much for the work that you're doing, the work you've done, for putting your books out in the world, for calling yourself a spiritual psychologist. I think that's beautiful because a lot of times people in that profession run away from spirituality. And I don't— you can't, you can't treat somebody without understanding they're, that they're spiritual beings in the first place. I don't understand how we can, you know, get away from that. So I want to thank you for doing that. Um, let people know, uh, Dr. Mo, where they can reach you, where they can find out more about you.

Um, well, they can, they can reach— go to Amazon and, and you'll find my books there. So Breaking the Spell of Religion and Healing the Trauma and When Angels Call, Coping with Grief and Loss. So I like angels. And, and, and in the descriptions of each item, there's references to my, to my music site, which is at Bandcamp. And I have songs that are spiritual in nature.

Nice one.

In terms of affirming the very things that you and I are talking about. You know, and I like that song that you referenced, uh, was it Enigma?

Enigma, Return to Innocence.

Yeah, yeah, Return to Innocence. I'm, I'm going to check that out. So, um, or otherwise you just Google my name. Oh, I'm on Facebook again. Oh, here, I'm on Facebook, uh, yeah, under the title of Dr. Mose. If you Google my name at Facebook. I got 3 sites, Spiritual Connection, Mo Termel, just Mo Termel, my personal site, and, and, uh, yeah, what is that one called? Dr. Mo's Cosmic Perspective. Okay, Dr. Mo's Cosmic Perspective. That's a big word. But I like the word cosmic. And my YouTube site is The Spiritual Psychologist.

All right, cool. Very good. So great to meet you. We'll have to do this again. There's some more things that we could talk about. I love to talk about spirituality and music. I used to be a big CCM fan, Christian contemporary music, which I can't listen to anymore. So I'm always looking for good spiritual music. So we'll have to talk again.

Brian, if you want to write this down— oh no, it's on my signature on my emails. There's a link there that'll take you to the music site.

All right.

Okay. So go and sample what's there. It's free streaming at the site. And if you choose to download stuff, then you pay. But while you're there, you can look at anything. And most of the songs The lyrics are there. And then let's— and I like the idea of coming back and meeting with you again. Last week I had a meeting with a person that we did a podcast last summer, and it was, it was like a whole new, a whole new view of where he was at and where I'm at and what we had to share. And I was worried that we'd just be repeating ourselves, but we weren't. No, he changed and I changed. And a few months down the road, 6 months down the road, whenever, you and I, we're going to have more to talk about and more to share. And that's good for me. And I— and if it's good for you, then it's win-win for both of us.

Sounds great. Well, enjoy the rest of your afternoon.

I'll talk to you later.

All right. Thanks for this.

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