Torment and Religious Abuse!

Interview with The Story Behind the Story:

The story comes out of over thirty years of treating patients in psychotherapy who are survivors of the dark side of religion…have been used and abused and cast to the side. I’ve seen that when this happens people, those around the victim, to include family and friends, often turn a blind eye and deny what has happened. Rather than writing a self help book I decided to approach this realm of human suffering in fiction. To tell a story moves the reader into a deep and unconscious dimension that bypasses conscious defenses, leaving us open to truths that otherwise would be blocked. So, dramatizing the dark side of religion, pulling what can be the most vile and evil, and pivoting it against an innocent and sincerely searching soul leaves the reader on edge, hopeful, but unsure as to what will happen and who in the end will survive…a truth conveyed symbolically and dramatically. To have written out a list of what to do or not to do in the midst of religious abuse might have helped some individuals, but would have left many people stone cold because there is no emotion is such guidance. In The Unholy, the story is pure emotion, fear and rage and hope and challenge, that inspires and frightens and causes us to stay up late at night in order to finish the story. Dream and chronic nightmares plagues people who’ve gone through the horror of being abused within a religious system. It could be emotional, spiritual, physical, or sexual torment—or all of the above—a true encounter with the unholy—that people undergo during childhood or adolescence or adulthood.

http://thestorybehindthebook.wordpress.com/2014/06/10/the-story-behind-the-unholy-by-paul-deblassie-iii/

Religion...Terrifying and Damaging!

A recent interview about The Unholy in The Writer's Life eMagazine asked, "I know you've had some specific experiences in your role as a psychologist that led to your decision to write this book. Tell me about that."

I commented, "Religion can be both terrifying and damaging. I help people to heal from the dark side of religion. Decades of such experience led me to write this book and the ones that will follow. Each phantasmagoric story, much like The Unholy, plumbs the dark and light sides of human nature and spiritual experience."

Dark and light infiltrate human experience. What we do with them is what matters. To collude with the darkness of deceit, in the case of The Unholy, deception within a religious context, deadens the soul, extinguishes life. Claire, the protagonist in The Unholy, wrestles with the matter of deceit versus truth to self.

Deceit versus truth to self spiritually is no easy wrestling match. Our lives can depend on it, the decision, the outcome. Claire must either run from what she sees and knows or face it and deal with what comes.

Terrifying and damaging is the dark side of religion, but so is the running from what must be considered, dealt with, as a matter of life and death, consciousness, and personal integrity.

http://www.thewriterslife.blogspot.com/2014/06/interview-with-paul-deblassie-iii.html