When Enduring Harm Feels Like Growth
She threatened them with bear spray. They let her stay.
Opening
A woman had threatened an entire congregation with bear spray.
And instead of being kicked out…
she was given conditional attendance.
Now I’m sitting in the living room of one of the group’s senior leaders.
I say, “Yeah, I’m surprised she wasn’t just removed.”
Understatement of the year.
She replies:
“She made an assault accusation. How would it look if we kicked her out?”
That’s the moment something strange happens to your brain.
Because now you’re not evaluating what happened anymore.
You’re evaluating how it looks. What they called optics.
And once that shift happens, the system doesn’t have to deal with reality—at all.
The Paradox
Here’s what makes this so hard to see from the inside.
People in these systems don’t feel like they’re excusing harm. They feel like they’re being nuanced about it. Mature. They feel like they’re finding meaning in difficulty.
That’s exactly what makes this dangerous.
It doesn’t feel like moral drift. It feels like seeing things from multiple perspectives. It feels like flexibility. Non-reactivity. Evidence of genuine personal growth.
And the smarter you are, the more convincing that feeling is — because you have more ways to construct the interpretation, more internal resources to make it feel airtight. Intelligence doesn’t protect you here. It arms the self-deception.
Reframing Isn’t the Problem
I want to be careful here, because reframing isn’t inherently bad. It’s actually one of the things healthy growth requires.
The ability to see a problem differently — to find meaning in difficulty, to not be flattened by setbacks — that’s a real skill. Cultures that have produced genuine wisdom have always had some version of it.
The problem is when reframing stops serving evaluation and starts replacing it.
When the question shifts from “What is actually happening here?” to “What does this mean for my growth?” — and that second question permanently displaces the first — something has gone wrong.
How It Works Psychologically
Let me be specific about the mechanism, because it operates at a level most people don’t think to look at.
It’s not primarily about what people believe. It’s about how they categorize events — and categorization happens before conscious reasoning even begins.
Harm can be categorized as a lesson. Coercion can be categorized as an initiation. Boundary violation can be categorized as discomfort you need to transcend. Confusion can be categorized as spiritual depth. Exploitation can be categorized as service. Manipulation can be categorized as healing.
Once you change the category, you change what action feels appropriate.
If something is a crime, you intervene. But if it’s a lesson, you endure.
If it’s abuse, you leave. But if it’s growth, you stay.
The system doesn’t have to tell you what to do. It just has to control which bin the experience goes into. After that, your own reasoning takes over — and does the work for it.
The Principle in Action
Once that shift happens, the system can tolerate things that should be completely intolerable.
The person I mentioned earlier — the one who threatened people with bear spray — was eventually kicked out.
But not for that.
She was kicked out after writing an 80-page manifesto in which she expressed her desire to kill everyone in the world — with magick.
Think about what that means.
A real-world threat gets reframed.
A fantasy gets taken seriously.
Reality becomes negotiable. Imagination doesn’t.
That’s not nuance.
That’s what happens when a system loses contact with reality.
Where You’ve Seen This Before
This isn’t just cults. You’ve seen this before.
“The humiliation you feel is ego-death.”
“This isn’t manipulation. It’s your trauma.”
“This reflects your vibration.”
“This is a growth opportunity.”
“Your sister didn’t violate your boundaries. She loves you in her own way, and this is your chance to mature.”
Different vocabulary, same machinery.
In every case, the framing offers you something that’s hard to refuse:
it lets you keep the relationship and feel like you’re growing.
It gives you the sense that all of this suffering is leading somewhere, that it’s part of a larger story of which this is only one redeemable moment.
That is often more emotionally tolerable than the alternative: that this is just harm, and I need to act.
The System’s Move
The systems that do this most effectively don’t just offer you one reframe when something bad happens.
They train you to experience everything as potentially meaningful, all the time.
Which sounds like depth.
But it has a very specific side effect:
you stop being able to tell what actually requires action.
Every symbol points to another symbol. Every difficulty is a metaphor. Every conflict is an initiation. Every emotion is a message from your deeper self.
The whole environment becomes a hall of mirrors, where nothing ever refers to anything outside the system itself. You’re surrounded by reflections — and all of them reflect back on you.
This feels like depth. It feels like being part of something larger than yourself.
But something is quietly breaking down. Because when everything is potentially meaningful, nothing clearly demands action.
Everything feels important, so nothing clearly tells you: “Act now.”
In the group I was once in, a senior figure — someone widely respected, someone whose word carried enormous weight — gave a talk to a large group of members. And what he said, out loud, in front of everyone, was something like this:
All the conflict, the confusion, the politics, even what he called “the stupidity and the bullshit” — none of that was a problem with the system. It was a metaphor. A reflection of your own spiritual metamorphosis.
And he didn’t stop there.
He said that survival — just staying — was itself the first and last ordeal of initiation.
And when he finished, he got a standing ovation.
Think about what that does.
If dysfunction is just dysfunction, the rational response is to challenge it or leave. But once it’s been reframed in purely spiritual terms, endurance becomes success. Staying becomes growth. Challenging it, or leaving, becomes failure.
The system no longer needs to keep you in. You start measuring your own progress by whether you’re still there.
What It Does to You Over Time
If you stay inside something like this long enough, something deeper happens than just getting individual events wrong.
You stop trusting your own perception.
You stop letting things present themselves to you clearly. You stop evaluating people’s character, because evaluating character feels like judgment, and judgment feels like immaturity. You become someone who can recognize harm in the abstract — in other situations, in other people’s lives — but not in the moment when it actually matters, happening to you, right now.
And here’s the thing that took me the longest to see: it doesn’t feel like losing yourself. It feels like becoming a bigger version of yourself. You feel superior for having the capacity to transcend petty reactions, to see through surface drama, to hold complexity.
But the superiority is only apparent. It’s relative to a system that is quietly shrinking your agency.
You’re ascending decks on a ship that is sinking.
And I know this because I was one of the people telling others the ship was fine.
I was welcoming people into something dangerous. I was making it sound safe. Making it sound deep.
I wasn’t lying. I genuinely believed what I was saying. That’s the part that still stays with me.
Because the reframing had reached my identity, not just my beliefs. I didn’t just see individual events through the system’s categories. I had started to see myself through them. I was someone who had grown. Someone who could endure. Someone who understood what others couldn’t.
Which meant that everything the system had done to narrow my world, I experienced as expansion.
What Healthy Growth Actually Looks Like
Healthy growth doesn’t require you to misname harm.
It increases your agency. It clarifies what’s happening to you. It expands your options. It helps you act.
There’s a question I’ve come to think is worth asking about any community you’re part of — spiritual group, church, fitness community, close friendship:
What skills am I developing here that work outside of here?
Not: am I becoming a better member of this group. But: am I becoming a better father, friend, coworker, citizen?
Or am I just becoming better at navigating the specific flavor of childish shit that keeps turning up in this one place?
If you can’t clearly answer that, it’s worth sitting with.
Because relationships — communities — are like ecological niches. Your mind adapts to them the way living things adapt to environments. You will mold to what’s expected of you, whether you realize it or not. The question is whether what you’re being shaped into has a life outside the system shaping you.
A Note on What’s Underneath This
What I’ve described today is one part of a two-part process.
There’s a deeper mechanism operating underneath all of this — one that explains not just how harm gets reframed, but how the reframing gets installed in you at the level of perception, and how it keeps you from seeing it happening.
Once you see that mechanism, what I’ve described today starts to look not just harmful, but structurally inevitable — the predictable output of a system working exactly as designed.
I’ll get into that in the next video.
Closing
One of the most dangerous things a bad system can do isn’t convince you that harm is good.
It’s subtler than that.
It teaches you to experience harm as meaningful in a way that keeps you from resisting it.
And once that happens, the system no longer needs to control you directly.
It only needs to help you narrate what is happening.