15 Red Flags of Spiritual Narcissism

How Attention Seeking Hijacks The Holy

When I first left my hospital job as a practicing OB/GYN in 2007, I became fascinated with what the medical community called “spontaneous remissions” and which the religious community called “miracles.” I couldn’t get enough of reading stories about people who were cured from incurable diseases and sought out such stories on social media. Fascinated by bestselling books about people who survived against all odds and enchanted by these folks when I met them in person and listened to their stories, I didn’t realize, at the time, that I was easy narcissistic supply for people who reified their “miracle” and were enjoying being the center of attention because they felt “chosen” and “special” for being worthy of a rare cure.

I started to grow wary about such situations after meeting Proof Of Heaven author neurosurgeon Eben Alexander at Omega Institute, where we were both teaching. His alleged account of his journey to heaven while brain dead from a near-deadly bout of meningitis that should have left him perished or in a vegetative state got him a lot of attention and money. The problem is that there were other people who were there at his bedside in the know about what was happening medically, and they claimed that’s not at all what happened. Turns out Dr. Alexander has a credibility problem. (Read this, this, and this if you’re curious what investigative reporters dug up.)

Dr. Alexander is not the only person who claims to have had a miracle cure and turned out to be exaggerating. When my partner and Harvard Medical School professor Jeffrey Rediger, MD, MDiv spent 17 years rigorously researching such alleged miracles, requiring before and after medical records to prove the veracity of the claims, he found, like I did, that the majority of claims do not hold up to such rigor. People love to write blogs and memoirs about their miracle cures, but when you try to prove that they’re telling the truth, usually it turns out that they’re not.

Which made me start wondering… What in the world would make someone twist the truth, exaggerate, or flat out fabricate something so seemingly sacred and holy as a miracle cure or “proof of heaven?” That was before I learned how to spot the “spiritual narcissist.”

Most narcissists are easy to spot. They’re flashy, charismatic, power hungry, charming, successful, appearance-driven, show-offy, entitled braggers who command the center of attention and wind up as actors, rock stars, sports stars, politicians, corporate giants, and Instagram influencers. It wasn’t until I was researching my book Sacred Medicine that I realized that some were good at hiding their narcissism behind the holy. Many gurus, spiritual leaders, energy healers, channelers, psychics, intuitive healers, yoga teachers, New Age YouTubers, and…wait for it…those who claim to have had miracle cures (who really didn’t) share one thing in common: they attract attention because they claim to be “spiritually special.”

As a physician studying spiritual phenomena, Jeff and I were easy targets for narcissists looking for willing supply. I listened for years to some of these healers and sick people who falsely alleged miracle cures. And even more so, I validated their lies, as a doctor, until I woke up to what was happening. Jeff too. Because he worked with John Mack at Harvard, he also listened for decades to people who claimed to have been abducted by aliens. What people who falsely claimed to have had miracle cures and people who claimed to have been abducted by aliens had in common is that the cure or the abduction granted them a kind of specialness that their wounded parts may have needed. Whether or not the event actually happened was often less important than being validated by doctors who said “I believe you,” even if what they said turned out to be debunked by actual facts, as was the case for many of the people Jeff and I spent years listening to.

Speaking for myself, I can say that I listened, in large part, out of curiosity and fascination and a desire to believe the world is a bigger, more mysterious place. Parts of us want to believe larger-than-life spiritual experiences are true. And since Jeff and I have both had our own mystical experiences, we’re prone to believing others when they say something happened to them. But we were naive and gullible too. We didn’t realize some people will lie about such things, just to get attention from people like us.

We both learned that even if miracle cures and spiritual experiences are real (there really are legitimate spontaneous remissions out there, as I wrote about in Mind Over Medicine and Sacred Medicine and as Jeff wrote about in CURED), some people reify these experiences and use them to attract attention, make money, and show off in ways that are much more subtle than the bragging rock star, sports star, supermodel, or politician. I came to label those folks the “spiritual narcissists.”

I figured this out, in part, because of how triggered people who claimed to have had miracle cures got when I asked them to sign records releases so I could read their medical records. You’d think that if someone had a legitimate radical remission, they’d be thrilled to let a doctor see before and after proof! But no…they’d backpedal and then attack me for doubting them. The same was true for many of the healers with grandiose claims who swore they were curing cancer with their hands and reversing heart disease with their love. They’d switch from sucking up to me because they loved the idea of having a doctor validate their claims and write about them in a book to turning on me like I was the Devil Incarnate, just because I was asking for proof.

What put the nail in the coffin of my impulse to write about medical mysteries and miracle cures was one woman whose daughter was terribly ill. She came to me with such earnestness in her eyes and said, “Please Dr. Rankin, I beg of you. Stop telling miracle stories. I know some people find them inspiring and they give them hope, but they just make me and my daughter cry. We don’t understand why she’s not good enough for God to grant her a miracle, while some of the most horrible people we know seem to get their miracle. It doesn’t feel fair.” That broke my heart.

I couldn’t resist confiding in her, letting her know that I had met a lot of those people who claimed to be special enough to get their miracle, and most of them were not telling the whole truth. I told her about Eben Alexander, who by 2013 had already sold over 2 million copies of his bestseller and raked in the dough from his exaggerated fairy tale after the damning Esquire article told more of his backstory, including his malpractice history and credibility issues with what actually happened while he was sick in the hospital. I told her about the people who claimed to have been cured by John of God (who is now in jail for life on countless rape charges) but turned out not to be cured at all once Jeff and I dug deeper into trying to prove their claims. I told her that making up fake miracle stories feeds the grandiosity of some people who don’t have another easy way to feel special, chosen, or elevated in stature.

I also apologized for telling miracle stories that, even if they’re sometimes real, might not be so helpful to the 99.9% of people who do NOT get cured from their “incurable” diseases.

I wound up thinking about all the ordinary people I had met over the years who told me grandiose stories about remarkable and hard to believe things over the years. The psychics who told me they were employed by the CIA to bolster national security with their remote viewing skills. Or the meditators who told me they were trying to broker planetary peace in the “Galactic Chamber” with the Druids and the Atlanteans and other such beings and invited me to join their planetary rescue mission. Or the people who claimed to be benevolent aliens send to Earth to teach us how to be better planetary citizens. Or the people who claimed to be the direct reincarnation of Mary Magdalene, capable of telling her secret-but-covered-up story. Or the people who approached me at conferences claiming to have messages from the other side for me from spirit guides who have chosen them as the intermediary so they can get through to me. Or the gurus who tell me their magical manifestation stories and claim to have created gold out of thin air (literally.)

And on and on and on they go with their spiritual narcissism.

A part of me wanted to believe these stories and validate these people and their magic stories, if only because the empathic parts of me could feel how hard it was for them to deal with the skepticism of pretty much everyone, but especially the materialist scientists, like most doctors. I also have a part that got a hit off feeling good about myself for helping people finally feel validated by someone with an MD after my name when they tell their spiritual experiences and are disbelieved. These folks have often been scapegoated, scorned, rejected, mocked, and invalidated-which is often a recreation of their childhood wounding and needles core wounds.

I also could relate personally. I’ve had my own seemingly magical experiences, and they confused the hell out of me and led me to seek out mental health experts, because I wondered if I was having a mental break with reality. When those mental health experts told me they believed me, it was supremely comforting. It also inflated me a bit. Yes, I admit it. Having highly respected physicians and mental health experts and spiritual leaders validate my stories made me feel special sometimes when I felt really low and worthless and shitty about myself.

I could relate personally to how validating it’s been to some of my parts when I was able to tell those crazy-sounding stories to credible people (like my Harvard MD partner Jeff) and have others believe my stories and help me feel less crazy. So I have parts that wanted to offer the same listening, believing, and validation to others, even if I didn’t really know whether I believed their stories or not, especially when there was no factual proof or even the possibility of objectively verifying their claims. (How do I know whether they’re really astral traveling to the Galactic Chamber or not?)

I also have parts that really want to believe wild spiritual stories like the ones people tend to tell me, simply because it’s COOL. Who wants to believe the world is a boring, dead place lacking in magic? It’s so much more exciting to believe in a multiverse full of hidden realities we can’t all see or understand, but that are real and mysterious. I like to believe that maybe some people can see what the rest of us can’t, and they can report back to us.

I used to have a certain kind of special respect for people who seemed to be psychic or channeling or astral traveling or experiencing “siddhis” in some way. I now see it as neutral. I now believe some people do have access to certain kinds of spiritual experiences and “gifts,” but I also believe it’s a side effect of boundary wounding and trauma.

In fact, there is some evidence that a certain kind of spiritual openness might be “caused” (I say caused lightly, because it’s probably more like a side effect) by early, first year of life developmental trauma. When a baby’s bonding needs with the biological birth mother are interrupted, developmental trauma experts believe this prevents the human infant’s soul from fully incarnating into the body and can lead to a human betwixt-and-between worlds, one caught between dimensions and therefore granted access to other-worldly experiences those of us with less trauma may not see, hear, know, or experience. (I wrote a little bit about this pattern here in case you’re curious. For more details, read Healing Developmental Trauma.)

In my research into shamanism for Sacred Medicine, I learned that some Indigenous cultures do this on purpose, separating a chosen baby away from its parent or choosing a child whose mother has died and then sometimes also hiding them away in sensory deprivation caves to help them develop other-worldly gifts or heighten other senses and human potentials. Cultivating these spiritual superpowers can then develop shamanic gifts that can help the tribe.

But power is power, and spiritual superpowers, just like worldly powers, can create narcissistic individuals, as we see with many cultic leaders in the world of gurus, meditation teachers, yoga teachers, and other so-called spiritual leaders.

So…I’ve found myself backing off from the “spiritual” world in the post-pandemic world, especially because so many spiritual narcissists refused to cooperate with public health guidelines and were leveraging their considerable power to influence people to avoid masking, social distancing, and vaccination.

But I still believe there’s more out there than our small little human brains can possibly understand or control. I have not lost my belief that there are cosmic surprises and that we might be granted some kind of spiritual surprise, not because we’re better than those who don’t get the miracle cure or the synchronicity guiding the way or the downloaded insight, but just because mysterious things we can’t control do sometimes happen. And sometimes, they don’t.

When I went to a TED event and they asked us to list on our name tags what we like talking about, I filled in the “Talk to me about…” with “Your spiritual experience.” I thought about writing “Your vagina” or “Sex” (because I am an OB/GYN.) But spiritual experiences are so much more interesting to talk about. And because almost everyone I’ve ever met has a secret story they rarely speak about out loud, and I enjoy listening to those stories.

The problem is that I just can’t reconcile how to deal with the people who wind up feeling awful because some of us have had seemingly magical, mysterious, synchronistic, and spiritually special-making experiences, while others have not and wind up feeling “lesser” because of this. I especially can’t reconcile how these magic stories tend to be reported disproportionately from people with a lot of unearned privileges, like whiteness, heteronormativity, stereotypical beauty, and social class privilege, among others.

So now, I rarely tell stories of miracle cures. (I leave that job to Kelly Turner and the Radical Remission Project and Jeffrey Rediger, who talks about the people he studied for CURED.) Instead, I limit what I talk about to what I’ve learned from those who have medical evidence proving that they’ve experienced better than expected outcomes from illnesses believed to be incurable.

I’m gearing up to teach a weekend workshop about what I’ve learned over the past 14 years of studying this material. I might even get Jeff to come join in and share some of his patient stories. Maybe they’ll make some people feel badly and other people feel hopeful. But I’ll stick to offering practical tips and insights some chronically sick people may not have tried. So stay tuned and make sure you’re on my regular newsletter list if you might be interested in joining the weekend workshop in September.

Keep in mind that all forms of narcissism are the result of developmental trauma, and all trauma deserves our compassion. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be protecting ourselves from people who could cause us great harm. (For more information about how narcissism develops, I love The Wizard Of Oz & Other Narcissists, as well as The Drama Of The Gifted Child.)

For now, as a cheat sheet, here are a few tips for spotting the spiritual narcissists, so you can detect the red flags and protect yourself.

15 RED FLAGS OF SPIRITUAL NARCISSISM

1. Grandiose superiority and inflated sense of self (direct 411 to God, direct access to special historical or religious figures, direct psychic knowing, etc)

2. Looking down on those they judge as less “spiritual” and expect to be treated as special

3. Unflinching certainty that they are right (without a doubt and with the certainty that you will be attacked if you express doubt or ask for proof)

4. Distrust of anyone who shows up with critical thinking online and healthy skepticism

5. Excessive need for admiration and devotion (while not reciprocating that admiration and devotion to their followers or people who listen to their grandiose stories)

6. Intrusive eye gazing and other evidence of boundary wounding and boundary crossing, often with the vacuous look in the eyes of someone who has meditated too much (a trauma symptom of disembodied dissociation)

7. Attention-seeking behavior

8. Paranoia about not being believed or respected

9. Love bombing you if you do believe them, especially if you’re in a position of authority, as a physician, scientist, or university professor, for example

10. Tendency to brag about their spiritual superpowers

11. Proclivity for exaggeration or outright lying in order to impress others

12. Will “one up” your spiritual experience with theirs as a show of superiority

13. Entitlement hidden under a display of false humility

14. Hypersensitive to criticism, quick to attack or abandon and shun you if you call them out on their narcissistic behavior or prove that they’re lying

15. Tendency to employ DARVO (deny, attack, reverse victim and offender) if you hold them to account for abusive or out of integrity behavior

If you spot these red flags, beware. The spiritual narcissists can be sneaky abusers in holy drag, but don’t let their white robes fool you. They can cause just as much harm- or more- than your garden variety worldly narcissist. And because we might tend to trust people in positions of spiritual authority, we might let our guard down more than usual, making ourselves particularly vulnerable.

No need to be paranoid, but if you’re spiritually seeking, you have to be extra careful, especially if you have a trauma history, which can make you particularly vulnerable to being seduced by a spiritual narcissist, which can be painfully re-traumatizing, when spiritual seekers are typically seeking out healing.

In general, you’re better off steering clear of anyone claiming to be “spiritual.” The people who really are spiritually developed rarely advertise it. You might not even recognize them, hiding in plain sight among the people you bump into at the grocery store or pass in airports- without an entourage, a halo, or the tendency to talk your ear off about their meditations, astral travel, channeled wisdom, astrology readings, psychic knowing, manifested magick, or miracle cures.

The people who really do experience spiritual experiences without being inflated by them tend to hold them close, as sacred secrets they share only with those who can help hold these sacred moments safe and precious.