On Demoralization
There is a particular kind of suffering that is difficult to describe to anyone who is not currently inside of it, and very easy to describe to anyone who is. It is not, exactly, sadness. It is not, exactly, despair. It does not necessarily arrive with the shape of a clear event — a loss, a betrayal, a diagnosis — that gives it a story to belong to. It is, instead, a slow and patient attrition of the conviction that one's life, and the lives of those one loves, are situated within a current of contextual cohesion. It is the exhaustion of trying to hold meaning together by oneself, alone, with materials that turn out not to have been adequate to the task.
The older spiritual vocabularies had a word for this. They called it demoralization.
It is also the word that names the condition Ekstaeses Sanctuary exists to relieve. We name it carefully, because the word matters.
The word and what it carries
To be demoralized, in the original sense, is to have lost one's moral in the older meaning of that word — not one's ethics, but one's bearing. One's orientation and enthusiasm. The interior compass by which one finds one's way through the long ordinary hours of a life. A person who has been demoralized has not necessarily done anything wrong. They have not necessarily been visited by tragedy. What has happened is that the framework within which their life made sense has, by stages or all at once, ceased to be load-bearing.
This is not a small thing. Most of us do not realize, until it is gone, how much of our moment-to-moment coherence depends on a quiet background sense that our experience is held within something larger than itself. When that sense is intact, even very difficult things can be borne. When it is gone, even very ordinary things can become unbearable. The dishes in the sink, the email unanswered, the second coffee — these are not the problem. The problem is that there is nothing beneath the dishes.
Demoralization is what we call the condition of trying to live without questioning what is beneath superficial perceptions, inherited data and assigned meaning.
The one suffering and its many names
There is a teaching at the heart of the foundational text we work with that says, plainly, that there is only one problem the human soul has ever had, and that every suffering we have ever named is, underneath, that one thing wearing a different costume. The one problem is the perceived separation from the Source of All Things. Everything else — the anxieties, the depressions, the angers, the longings, the demoralizations — is the surface texture of that single underlying condition appearing in whatever vocabulary the sufferer's life has presented them with.
If that teaching is true, and we believe that it is, then it dissolves a question that might otherwise seem urgent. The question is whether what we are describing here, under the name demoralization, is the same thing as what a clinician would describe under the name depression, or anxiety, or any of the other diagnoses that modern care may cite. The answer, is twofold.
Yes, in the sense that all suffering is finally one suffering. No, in the sense that the remedy to the perceived suffering is inherent to the applicable language surrounding the many costumes the perceived suffering wears. The articulation of the answer for each individual is not necessarily interchangeable. It requires a careful recognition of what language a particular soul resonates with in that moment and is not arbitrary. Each soul, at each stage of its life, is willing to receive the work of healing in some languages and not in others. For one person, the clinical vocabulary is the door that opens. They are willing to identify their suffering as a condition with a name and a treatment, and within that framework they can begin to receive what they need. For another person, that frame has been tried and exhausted, and the suffering has shown itself to be of a different order than the medical language can hold. For that person, a different articulation is required. Demoralization, with all of its theological openness, is sometimes that other language.
We are not in competition with clinical care. We are not commenting on whether anyone should take the medication they have been prescribed, or stop, or start. Those are decisions for each person and the practitioners they trust, and they belong to a domain we do not enter. What we are doing is something different. We are recovering a vocabulary for the kind of suffering that the medical languages, by the nature of their domain, are not designed to address — a vocabulary that locates the suffering at the level of the soul's relationship to its Source, because that is where, for many people, the actual work of healing must finally take place.
The medications, the diagnoses, the therapies, the practices, the rituals, the sacraments — none of these are the healer. They are the languages and the spaces in which the healer is met. The healer is the recognition itself. The remembrance. It is the dissolution of the perceived separation, in whatever vocabulary the soul has been able to receive it. That is what relief from demoralization, at the deepest level, finally is.
Why we use this word
We use the word demoralization for several reasons.
It is honest. It is explicit. It does not pretend the condition we are addressing is more dramatic than it is, or less. It is grounded. It does not romanticize the suffering as a requisite dark night of the advanced contemplative. It locates the condition where it actually lives, in the space between the soul and its Source - the real underlying condition of its meaning.
It is dignified. The demoralized person has not failed. They have, in many cases, succeeded — at independence, at competence, at the management of an adult life under the demands of the modern world. What they are discovering is that the conditions of the modern world were not, in fact, designed to nourish the part of the human being that requires nourishment of a different kind. The discovery is painful, but it is also the beginning of a more honest accounting.
And it is theologically open. It does not infer a new permanent identity for the user. The Latin root of demoralized carries within it the implication of something to be re-moralized — bearings to be recovered, an orientation to be restored. This is not a claim we make casually. It is the claim our practices exist to test, and our community exists to demonstrate. Many of the people now in our congregation came to us demoralized, in their own language for that condition, and have come, by careful and patient stages, into something else. We do not promise this outcome. We hold the door open and trust the work to do what it so eloquently does.
What demoralization wants
Every kind of suffering is also, in some way, a request. Acute pain wants attention. Grief wants witness. Anger wants justice. Demoralization wants something more particular than any of these. It wants a frame within which the sufferer's experience of life is intelligible. It wants meaning that is not manufactured by the sufferer alone, because meaning manufactured by the self alone is, inevitably, what the demoralized person has discovered to be insufficient.
This is why so many of the standard interventions fail when offered to a demoralized soul. Encouragements to think positively. Reminders of one's blessings. Suggestions of new hobbies, exercise routines, gratitude practices. These are not bad things, and in another life they may even have been helpful. But the demoralized person has typically tried all of them, and the reason none of them worked is that they all rest on the same underlying assumption — that meaning is something the self can generate by force of will if it just tries hard enough. The demoralized person knows, at a level too deep for argument, that this assumption is false. They have been trying, and it is precisely the failure of the trying that has brought them to where they are.
What the demoralized soul actually wants, though it may not have words for it, is to be relieved of the impossible task of holding meaning together alone. It wants to discover that the meaning was never its own job to manufacture in the first place — that there is a Source from which meaning flows, that this Source is real, that it can be encountered, and that to live in conscious relationship with it is to be returned to one's bearings.
This is what we mean when we say that the mission of Ekstaeses is relief from demoralization and suffering through recognition and direct experience of oneness with the Divine. The wording is exact. We do not say reduction of suffering. We say relief. We do not say belief in the Divine. We say direct experience of the Divine. The vocabulary was chosen deliberately, because it was demoralization that chose it.
The shape of relief
Elsewhere we have made the claim that truth, can only be experienced. It is a short walk from that claim to the diagnosis we have offered here. Demoralization is, in many cases, exactly what happens when a soul has tried to live leaning on descriptions of the Divine rather than encounters with the Divine — when it has done everything that was asked of it on the inherited terms, and discovered that the inherited terms cannot, by themselves, sustain a life. The exhaustion that follows is not a sign of failure. It is information. The experimentation was still worthwhile to exhaust perceived options and learn from those choices as well. It is the soul's accurate report that what it has been offered thus far is not enough, and that what it actually needs lies on the other side of a different kind of door.
The work of Ekstaeses, in its largest sense, is the careful tending of its own door. It is not the only door, but it is an open offering here and now.
If you have recognized yourself anywhere in the description above, you are not alone in it, and you are not broken by it. You have simply been demoralized, in a particular and specific sense, and demoralization is a thing that has answers. Some of those answers we have begun to find. We are willing to share what we have found, with whoever is willing to come and look.