The Hermit in the Group Chat: Why Spiritual Community Feels Like a Trap
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I’ve been sitting in a couple of spiritual-ish group chats and local meetups, and honestly, the hardest part isn’t the weird energy talk. It’s the pressure to be “open” when I’m still figuring out what I believe.
I grew up religious, went hard atheist in college, and now I’m somewhere in between. I don’t want a label. I just want a place where someone can say, “I don’t know,” without it being treated like a diagnosis. But a lot of communities, at least the ones I’ve seen, turn “knowing” into identity. If you question the group’s framework, suddenly you’re not “aligned.” If you don’t post your glow-up, your moon journal, your healed trauma update, you’re suspicious.
That’s where I start thinking about group psychology, not in a fancy way, just: humans want belonging, and belonging makes us soften edges we should keep. I get it. I like that too. But I also know I can be charming in a meeting and still be full of stuff I haven’t sorted out. Maybe that’s just cognitive dissonance doing its thing, where the comfort of the group starts outweighing the truth of my experience.
Tarot has been weirdly useful here for me, not because I think it’s some cosmic GPS, but because the cards are basically archetypal little mirrors, in a very Jung kind of way. The Hermit is my current vibe: slow, quiet, not posting my lightbody progress on social media. The Tower is what happens when a community’s shared certainty cracks, and the people who were leaning on it have to decide whether to rebuild it or finally admit they were using it to avoid the question.
I’m not saying community is bad. I’m saying the Hermit is necessary: the pause before you let belonging do your thinking for you.
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"the Hermit is necessary" — I get it, but I think the quiet pause can also be a cozy way to avoid being changed. I’ve used “I don’t know” as a shield when the group was just asking me to show up, messy and unoptimized.
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