The Link Between Vaccine Refusal, Spiritual Bypassing, & Narcissistic Entitlement

Why Willfully Unvaccinated White People Have Lost The Right To Consider Themselves "Spiritual"

When I started my blog in 2009, I hired someone to help me get started, and she said, “You need a tagline.” I’d never heard of a blog or read a blog before, but after writing a book 30 publishers rejected because I didn’t have a “platform,” my agent begrudgingly told me I had to start one of these bloggie thingamabobs. So I needed a title- and a tagline.

The marketing person I hired interviewed me for several hours to try to distill my message down to one sentence, and with wrinkled brow, she said, “Well, your message is something like ‘You’re special but you’re not special.’” Followed by “But you can’t use that!”

So I didn’t.

But 14 years later, I’m amazed at how accurate she was! “You’re special but you’re not special” is still, all these years later, a core tenet of my overarching message.

You’re special because you have a spark of divinity inside you that is absolutely unique, unrepeatable, beautiful, uncorruptible, sparkly, and luminous. You’re not special because everyone does. We’re not special- because there are 8 billion of us and we’re all of equal value at our core. Nobody has more or less inherent value and worth than anyone else, no matter your race, gender or sexual identity, socioeconomic status, talents, intellect, religious affiliation, or level of personal or spiritual development. We are all precious, beautiful children of God, and we are all equally valuable.

We all have an understandable human need to feel special. It’s absolutely natural to want to feel like someone’s favorite, whether we’re special to our parents, a romantic partner, a mentor, a bestie, or even a pet. We need to feel chosen, prioritized, and preferred, and that’s normal. There’s nothing wrong with having our human preferences. We prefer being around some people, and we are repulsed by others. Welcome to the human condition!

Feeling special or prioritizing special others can be seen as having preferences and being preferred by others. There is nothing wrong with having preferences or identifying with our “in” group. We feel safer when we’re with our chosen family, and we tend to feel unsafe when we’re with others who may be very different, especially if others hold strongly opposing morals or values. We gain a welcome sense of belonging by hanging out with those who make us feel special- and those who we value as special in our lives.

None of this is a problem- this special/ not special paradox or our human tendency to prefer some people and not others. It only becomes problematic when we fail to recognize that it’s a paradox, when we default to only one side, leading to “in group” superiority and collective narcissism and “out group” hatred and oppression. Specialness and preferences only become problematic when the drive to feel special leads to narcissistic entitlement, narcissistic behaviors, and political systems of oppression.

Specialness In Narcissistic Relationships & Systems

We see the potential problem with specialness clearly in narcissistic family systems. Good enough parents do not choose one child as the special one and turn on another child as less special. Yes, maybe as parents we prefer the easy, compliant child and get frustrated or impatient with the rebellious kids, but good enough parents are mature enough to love all of their kids equally.

This is not the case with narcissistic parents, where one compliant, obedient, people pleasing child may be made to feel special and winds up the golden child and another, perhaps less compliant child, is treated as less special and winds up the scapegoat. We see this in narcissistic romances too, when a narcissist love bombs someone people pleasing and compliant to hook them with that hit of specialness, as a tool for manipulation, and then turns on them and treats that same person like they’re worthless if they thwart the narcissist’s agenda or disobey.

At the macro scale, we see the entitlement of narcissism play out in unjust hierarchical systems, such as white supremacy, the monarchy, and the Indian caste system. We see it in religious cults that have a leader, an inner circle, and an outer circle. We see it among the socioeconomically privileged 1% of end stage capitalism built upon the backs of the exploited, oppressed, and poverty-stricken. We see across the globe narcissistic leaders like Putin who feel entitled to commit unprovoked war crimes against innocent Ukrainians. We see corporate giants who feel entitled to destroy the environment for short term profit over valuing long term environmental health and safety for the next generations.

When the desire to feel special veers off course into narcissistic entitlement, the impulse to make some people more special than others has resulted in not just interpersonal abuse, but also human rights abuses at a mass scale- colonization, genocide, slavery, war, and extremes of wealth and poverty. Those who insist on doubling down on the privileges that have historically made them special don’t seem to understand that they are not actually entitled to being more special because of unjust and unearned privileges.

Specialness is fine, as long as it helps us belong and feel loved. But when we get addicted to the hit of specialness and specialness leads to out of control entitlement and the normalization of narcissism, we have a massive problem.

Sure, it’s understandable that the mostly white, heterosexual, cis-gender, able-bodied, property owning, educated men have liked feeling special in a society that privileges them above all others. It’s also understandable that the women who have all the privileges except one (they are female) would like feeling special too. These folks who want to hang onto their specialness bond with each other over doubling down on the oppression of those not like them so they can “make America great again.”

Narcissism In Christian Nationalism & The New Age Movement

Many Republicans want men to be more special than women. They want Christians to be more special than non-Christians. They want straight people to be more special than queer people. They want rich people to be more special than poor people. Many in the Republican party are unapologetic about all their racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia, and capitalist greed. They don’t feel bad about believing that these majority groups are more special than the marginalized and oppressed groups they genuinely believe they have the right to step on in order to keep their specialness.

But it’s not just Christian nationalists or Republicans that are guilty of this kind of entitled thinking and behaving. I left the Christian church when I was 18 and gave up on believing I had any power to influence these folks when my teenage self rebelled against white supremacy by leaving largely racist North Carolina after graduating from Duke University in 1991 and deciding never to come back. But it took me years to realize how many “spiritual white people” outside of conventional religion were equally married to their specialness and unwilling to do what it takes to lift up those they deem less special.

The pandemic made that very obvious. A huge swath of mostly white people in the wellness world, alternative medicine world, and “spiritual but not religious” world posted virtue signaling memes in support of Black Lives Matter after George Floyd died, while simultaneously spouting anti-vax propaganda that led to a disproportionate of BIPOC deaths, compared to white deaths. Yet, when called out for the hypocrisy of this kind of messaging, they cried, “But I’m not racist! I just don’t trust the medical system.”

I get the distrust of the medical system. I left being at the center of it as a practicing physician in 2007 and started blowing the whistle on what I saw happening inside conventional medicine because I had lost trust in the institution I represented. As a physician who was never an early adopter of new medications, I too was hesitant to get a vaccine that got rushed to market so quickly. But I overrode my hesitation because the science we had thus far proved that it was far safer to get vaccinated than to get Covid if you were unvaccinated, and because getting vaccinated was the right thing to do as a moral act, most notably because the people most likely to die from Covid were BIPOC. There was cognitive dissonance in my system to even imagine sincerely picketing for “Black Lives Matter” and also willfully refusing vaccination once it was my turn. Public health measures became a racial issue, whether we spiritual white folks in the wellness world liked it or not.

According to the Covid Tracking Project through Boston University, a year into the pandemic, before vaccines were available, 178 Black Americans per 100,000 died; 172 per 100,000 Native Americans died, 154 Latinx Americans per 100,000 died, 144 Native Hawaiians or Pacific Islanders died, and 124 white Americans per 100,000 died. There is no question that minority races were dying at a higher and faster rate from Covid than white people. And yet, when vaccines rolled around and we had the chance to stop the hemorrhage of BIPOC people, spiritual white people (and Christian nationalists) represented a huge swath of the willfully unvaccinated, who felt entitled to refuse to cooperate with what needed to be one massive, coordinated, collective vaccination effort to save the lives of all people, but especially the BIPOC who were dying the most. Many seemed to think they were too special to need the vaccine.

“My immune system will protect me because I’m vegan.”

“God only gives Covid to those who lack faith.”

“Yogis don’t get infections.”

“But I’m taking my $40/day supplements. I’m good.”

Now I am happy to grant a wide berth of compassion for BIPOC folks who are scared of vaccination because of horrors like Tuskegee or their distrust of an unapologetically white supremacist medical system. Yet in my world, most of the people who refused vaccination were not BIPOC; they were primarily privileged “spiritual white women” who were no longer satisfied to just put their kids in expensive private schools so they can avoid the public school vaccine mandates. They obviously didn’t under the basic tenets of public health- which is a collective intervention, not a personal one and requires mass cooperation.

It became obvious to me that those hijacking spiritual spaces to demonize and attack the vaccinated and virally spread anti-vax propaganda to promote their agenda did either didn’t realize how spiritual bypassing and white supremacy inevitably overlap- or they did not care.

*For those who care but simply don’t understand how New Age or Christian nationalism belief systems, anti-vax agendas, and spiritual bypassing feed white supremacy, I wrote a whole unpublished manuscript that I’ll be drip feeding for paid subscribers on Substack- Love Bigger: An Exploration of Spirituality Without Spiritual Bypassing. For those who simply don’t care, I give up trying to elicit any empathy and cannot count those people among the “spiritual” at all.

The Dark Side Of Specialness

So we’re back to the dark side of specialness- entitlement. The Merriam Webster dictionary defines entitlement as “the belief that one is deserving of or entitled to certain privileges.” During the pandemic, a whole swath of America seemed to believe it was entitled not to follow public health measures meant to protect the collective, as if they were too special to need to comply with recommendations meant to protect the most vulnerable among us- the elderly, the chronically ill, the BIPOC, the essential workers. Either these people who claimed to be “spiritual” apparently were truly indoctrinated by narcissistic wellness influencers and spiritual leaders who were cashing in on their insistence that Covid was a hoax (or at least nothing their $100 supplements couldn’t protect you from) and that public health measures were not only unnecessary but could kill you (in which case, they were victims of the narcissistic influencers whose sway they were under.) Or even more disturbingly, they were exercising their free will choice- a huge privilege in the United States that those in other authoritarian countries do not have- to rebel against public health measures because they felt entitled not to give a shit about those more vulnerable to Covid than they were.

I can’t claim to understand the motives, but as someone safely locked down at home but on the front lines of the fight for the lives of the vulnerable on social media, the level of entitlement of “spiritual white people” during the pandemic frankly shocked me. They apparently felt entitled to post all kinds of unscientific nonsense on my public platforms, even though I set boundaries and made it clear that I would not tolerate anti-vaxxers using my platform to spread disinformation. They felt entitled to cross all the boundaries I tried to set on social media. They felt entitled to viciously abuse me and anyone else who tried to correct their disinformation or delete their lies, claiming I was silencing their voices when I was really just trying to avoid confusing the clear message those of us who care about public health were trying to make crystal clear- that vaccines save far more lives than they harm and that mass cooperation is the only way to avoid millions of unnecessary deaths among the most vulnerable.

Taking A Stand Against Disinformation As A Moral Act

They labelled as “divisive” for taking a firm stand, and they labeled me “judgmental” for calling out by name anti-vaxxers like those Surgeon General Vivek Murthy also called out by name as the Disinformation Dozen responsible for 65% of the vaccine hoaxes on social media. In case you don’t know who you should not trust, their names are:

1. Joseph Mercola

2. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

3. Ty and Charlene Bollinger

4. Sherri Tenpenny

5. Rizza Islam

6. Rashid Buttar

7. Erin Elizabeth

8. Sayer Ji

9. Kelly Brogan

10. Christiane Northrup

11. Ben Tapper

12. Kevin Jenkins

In spite of public attempts to deplatform these twelve influencers with blood on their hands, I still get chastised for being “unspiritual”, “polarizing,” “judgmental,” or “divisive” if I name Oprah-touted Christiane Northrup as the Disinformation Dozen physician I am most disappointed in, given that she is an actual doctor, we used to be colleagues, she wrote the foreword to my first book, and I used to trust at least some of her messaging. This is how insidious spiritual bypassing can be. When the sincere attempt to use our scientific critical thinking to cut through the noise, discern what is true and false, and attempt to protect the public and use our online influence to broadcast a clear public health message becomes twisted into something “unspiritual,” we’ve landed, like little children playing “Opposite Day” into the topsy turvy of narcissistic gaslighting.

I was also shocked how many people with online influence who followed and trusted public health recommendations personally and got triply vaccinated themselves avoided putting themselves in the line of the anti-vax hatred spewed by “spiritual white people” by just keeping their mouths shut. Rather than doing the right thing and taking a stand, they just kept quiet. I can give them the benefit of the doubt and surmise that they mistakenly still think conflict avoidance is “spiritual” (the very definition of spiritual bypassing.) Or maybe bad things happened when there was conflict in childhood and they just haven’t done the trauma treatment necessary to confront disinformation with truth even when it means facing the kinds of death threats I’ve had to face for promoting the truth. But still- if you consider yourself a good person with a noble mission, isn’t the whole point of having influence is to be a benevolent presence in the world and use your influence to help the collective?

Maybe some with influence have not done the hard somatic work to temper our nervous systems to be able to stand in the firing line of mob-like online hatred and keep calm enough to carry on with leveraging our influence to save lives- because in my opinion, that’s the actual ethical and “spiritual” thing to do.

Or maybe it’s not so rosy. Maybe they give lip service to spiritual values but are so entitled that they really only care about fame, money, being liked, avoiding upsetting anyone or losing fans and clients, and promoting whatever their “mission” might be, no matter how much they have to sell out the lives of the vulnerable in order to achieve that mission. The cultic leader and their followers thinking that the ends justifies the means and all that, no matter who gets hurt in the process.

All that pandemic entitlement among spiritual white influencers and those who took on their messaging made me realize, for the first time, that the willful refusal of vaccination I had seem commonly among spiritual white women, including the Waldorf mothers at the school where I sent my vaccinated child, might have a link to narcissistic entitlement and white supremacy, something BIPOC have been talking about for ages but which I simply hadn’t put together so obviously.

Compliance & Rebellion As Trauma Symptoms

This dawning awareness in me during the pandemic does not mean I don’t have compassion for spiritual white anti-vaxxers or those with narcissistically entitled parts. I know that trauma survivors- regardless of race- are often triggered by feeling like their agency and autonomy are being taken away, especially if they were overpowered or stripped of their agency in childhood. Some trauma survivors reflexively comply with and fawn authority figures- because they were abused by authority figures if they rebelled in childhood and fawning was the only safe response. Other trauma survivors grow up rebelling against authority figures, even if they agree with what they are recommending.

Reflexive compliance and reflexive rebellion are always problematic. Perfectly good-hearted Germans who reflexively complied with authority wound up with blood on their hands, while those who rebelled and hid Jews demonstrated the essence of compassion and other spiritual values. Likewise, perfectly good-hearted spiritual white folks have wound up with blood on their hands by rebelling against public health measures, and those of us who overrode our understandable vaccine hesitation were part of a compassionate collective effort to ease the suffering of millions.

In other words, we should never automatically comply with or reflexively rebel against authority. We always have to keep our critical thinking online when we’re figuring out whether it’s most ethical to comply with or rebel against authority- or find a middle ground that aligns with our morality and spiritual values. But in addition to keeping our critical thinking online, we also have to keep our hearts open and extend compassion beyond our “in group” or those preferred individuals we deem “special.” This open-hearted empathy that can extend beyond our in group can be difficult for trauma survivors, especially in times of uncertainty. But whether we believe vaccination saves lives or not, it helps to try to extend empathy to each other- to come back to that “You’re special and you’re not special” paradox.

It’s not easy to extend empathy to the people who don’t extend empathy towards you or to others who might be have less privilege and be more vulnerable to suffering. But staying in our hearts and finding morsels of empathy for those who might be in our “out group” or who might not reciprocate empathy towards us is at the root of all esoteric spiritual teachings. It’s not easy to “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” when they’re not doing it unto you. But that can be our growth edge as we learn to love bigger.

The Moral High Ground

Now, lest you judge me for taking some sort of moral high ground and looking down on the willfully unvaccinated “spiritual white people” as if they are less special than the vaccinated folks, it’s true that I think anti-vaxxers are making an immoral choice, as much as I think voting for Donald Trump or voting for white supremacist laws is an immoral choice. And I, like many others, experienced religious trauma in childhood from a narcissistic mother and a narcissistic church who controlled me in the name of a false “morality” I ultimately spent years climbing out from under. So I know the pain of being oppressed in the name of a false morality that cast white, cis-gender, heterosexual Christians as more moral and spiritual than everyone else. So I can relate to anyone who feels confused by a conversation about morality and vaccination. It took me years to sort out what I truly believed was moral for myself after my Christian indoctrination and to get out from under the thumb of my narcissistic mother’s entitled belief that she had a right to control me, even as an adult, because I was her child.

All that indoctrination put me at risk of turning into my mother as I grew up, so I’ve had to work hard in therapy not to become yet another moralizing narcissist, which means acknowledging the humanity and inherent worth and specialness of those who are not like me. I can cop to my own righteous parts that look down on people who don’t care about human rights for all and seem to care only about their ruthless self interest. I can understand why those who feel entitled to vote for a man who brags about grabbing women by their pussies and is trying to destroy democracy in America look down on moralizing activists like me who get in the way of their out of control entitlement who poke at the shame they must feel under all that shamelessness. Deep down, under the hit of grandiosity, it must feel truly awful to be that mean and hateful, and it must feel worse when activists needle the parts that might feel worthless underneath all that bravado.

I can feel compassion for those parts of people that might feel shame when someone like me rolls around and suggests that vaccination and race are bedfellows, whether we like it or not. I don’t have to like those people. They don’t have to like me. And we’re all entitled to be imperfect in how we talk about issues like this.

But we all live in the same country, and we do have to face the elephant in the room- how narcissistic entitlement is destroying our society, and it’s hurting the underprivileged more than those who cling to those privileges like the privileged Titanic survivors clung to their lifeboats while others drowned.

While I really do hold all that compassion in my heart, I also don’t buy into the moral relativism of “non-dual” spiritual white folks who claim “It’s all good.” Yes, we can have empathy for people on both sides of polarizing issues, but at some point, there are some issues upon which we have to take a moral stand.

I know many anti-vaxxers are as certain that they are taking a moral stand as those touting public health guidelines believe we are. But that doesn’t make their stand accurate, empathic, or ethical. At the end of the day, I stand by what I said last week in the Spirituality Without Bypassing workshop I taught with Internal Family Systems (IFS) founder Dick Schwartz, which erupted in a messy, chaotic chat fight between the vaccinated and the willfully unvaccinated after I made the statement that any spirituality worth its salt must resist the tendency towards conflict avoidance and be willing to take a firm stand for equal human rights, including cooperating with public health measures during the pandemic.

What inflamed some people is that I was pointing out that one dangerous aspect of spiritual bypassing is how people use spirituality to avoid taking a stand- labelling any strong stance as “divisive” or “polarizing” and coaxing us back to “unity.” These people (who typically are in a privileged majority race, social class, and gender/sexual identification) tend to use non-dual “both sides are good” language to justify conflict avoidance and the refusal to take a firm stand in situations where taking a firm stand is a moral, pro-social, anti-oppressive, compassionate choice for the collective.

Sometimes There’s Only One Right Side To History

I made the statement that there are some cases where both-side-ism is appropriate, where we can hold seemingly conflicting and paradoxical truths as equally true. For example, in my book Sacred Medicine, I wrote about these “paradoxes of healing:”

You can heal yourself  AND you can’t do it alone.

Keep an open mind AND don’t be so open your brains fall out.

Trust your intuition AND follow the science and apply critical thinking.

Believe in magic and miracles AND avoid indulging in magical thinking and denial.

Your disease is not your fault AND your healing journey is your responsibility.

Follow spiritual guidance AND never be too certain you’ve got the direct line to God.

Your thoughts influence reality AND your thoughts cannot control reality.

There are other situations in which both-side-ism is completely inappropriate and immoral, such as Trump’s insistence after the Charlottesville white supremacist march that there are “very fine people on both sides.” This is simply false. There were hate-spewing, torch-bearing, violent and narcissistic white supremacists who feel entitled to hold onto unfair racial privilege on one side, and there are those who actively protested this abuse on the other.

I think it’s equally false to suggest that the people who took the risk- to get vaccinated (as a risky but life-saving moral choice meant to protect the collective and the vulnerable) and those who felt entitled to put others at risk by refusing vaccination and still going out in public- are morally equivalent. Sometimes, there is only one right side of history, and it can be confusing in times of darkness, uncertainty, and moral ambiguity to know where things will settle out. But the data is clear now who made the ethical choice and who did not. Anyone who still doubles down on believing willful refusal of vaccination was the moral choice just can’t seem to admit to their mistake, which is typical for those at the more extreme end of narcissism, who rarely admit to their mistakes, blame those they hurt, lack remorse, rarely if ever apologize, or resist making the moral choice to try to make amends to those they’ve hurt.

This is not to say that anyone in the human family is a monster we should demonize and hate. Even sociopathic individuals who behave in floridly evil ways do not deserve to be dehumanized or cast out of the wholeness of humanity. We can hold them to account and boundary against getting close to them unless they’ve gone through a process of justice, repair, and reconciliation. But we only make things worse if we make them monsters and give them no avenue for rehabilitation.

So we’re back where we started. We’re special and we’re not special- all of us. But if we consider ourselves “spiritual,” I strongly believe that we must stand firmly and openly against hate and oppression, even if it means putting ourselves at some risk by protesting white supremacy and other forms of oppression (countless innocent people have died fighting for equal human rights for all). And I firmly believe that abiding by public health measures- as imperfect as they are during times of uncertainty while the slow, plodding pace of science figures out what’s happening- is equally a moral choice. Enduring the relatively small risks of vaccination (yes, some vaccinated people died because they did the right thing too) feels like a small sacrifice compared to all the anti-oppression activists who have died fighting for equal human rights.

I think it all comes down to whether we demonize or cast out of the wholeness of humanity those who are different than our in group. We can extend the awareness that those not like us are equally valuable and worthy on the spiritual plane, while simultaneously boundarying against those who leave us feeling unsafe and traumatized. On the personal level, we can extend or withhold certain privileges, like welcoming people into our house or not, based on whether we discern them into our “in group” or not. We don’t have to like all people, and we’re entitled to clear boundaries that protect us from people who make us feel unsafe. We don’t have to hang out with people who make choices that put us in harm’s way, like not getting vaccinated. But we don’t have to demonize and hate the people we choose to keep at a distance.

Privilege & Entitlement

As a society, we can also extend or withhold certain privileges depending on whether someone can cooperate with a pro-social choice like getting vaccinated. In spite of the cries of the willfully unvaccinated who claimed they were being oppressed by being kept out of restaurants or forbidden from attending school or fired from their jobs if they did not cooperate with public safety, nobody is actually entitled to many of the privileges we enjoy in a free society, like going to a restaurant or getting a free education or seeing a concert or being gainfully employed. The one bit of leverage public health officials and other private companies trying to do the right thing and fight against entitled American individualism is to extend or take away privileges based on vaccine statue- like free public school education or the privilege of eating in a restaurant during a pandemic or the privilege of entering the workplace so you can earn a good living or the privilege of going to a retreat center.

This is where, in my opinion, the morality of taking a firm, boundaried stand comes in. If we do not “take sides” to make sure all people have an equal chance at life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, if we don’t take a stand to help ease the suffering of all beings, regardless of whether they’re in our in group or out group, if we do not care enough to liberate the oppressed, even if it means giving up some of our entitled privileges to do so, we stand with the oppressor. And if we stand with the oppressor because we’re either too scared of conflict, too frozen, collapsed, and dissociated to risk standing against the oppressor, or if we stand with the oppressor because we don’t wish to lose certain privileges that come with enabling the oppressor, we need to at least own up to that- and if we wish to be better allies with the oppressed, get trauma treatment so our nervous systems can handle doing the right thing, even when it’s scary.

I’m typically happy to be challenged and learn from my online communities, especially when I’m getting schooled in anti-oppressive nuance by those who call me out. I make mistakes all the time and I suspect I will be doing so for the rest of my life because things like white supremacy and other forms of macro and microaggressions against those in oppressed minorities are so baked into every aspect of our society.

But I’ve given up trying to have open-hearted, educated, social justice conscious, fact and science-based conversations with the spiritual white people who still insist that vaccinations are more unsafe than safe. All conversations in that arena seem to lead to the same place- vicious and unwarranted personal attacks by the anti-vaxxers on the vaccinated and anyone who disagrees with their point of view and a shocking lack of awareness about how vaccines, race, and oppression are intimately interlinked.

I have come to conclude that spiritual white folks who insist on their right to refuse vaccination without a medical indication show signs of extreme narcissism the minute you poke at their entitlement or their unacknowledged white supremacy. And if you actually challenge the narcissistic entitlement, the white fragility and narcissistic rage erupts, as the racialized trauma blows through the room.

Spiritual Narcissism

If you suggest to spiritual white people that vaccine refusal might be an unethical or racist choice or otherwise boundary against letting them use your platform to broadcast anti-science propaganda, you wind up the target of the narcissistic strategy Dr. Ramani of Navigating Narcissism calls DARVO- Defend, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. Suddenly, the anti-vaxxers defend their position, attack anyone who disagrees, cast the vaccinated as the perpetrator, and then the anti-vaxxers then claim to be the victim of oppression by the vaccinated. This narcissistic gaslighting technique makes any logical conversation about vaccinations virtually impossible- so I have given up and done what Dr. Ramani recommends- “Gray Rock” the narcissists. This typically makes the narcissistic anti-vaxxers bonkers, but it ultimately makes them go away and find someone more willing than I am to engage in a debate about ethics and science with people who do not understand public health.

I’m not the only one to conclude that willful refusal of vaccination is linked to narcissism. This study conducted during the pandemic linked belief in Covid conspiracies and vaccine hesitation with psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and collective narcissism. These researchers also quoted two other studies. “Across two studies, they found that collective narcissism (i.e., inflated superiority of one's self which extends to inflated in-group superiority) positively correlated with heightened conspiracy beliefs as well as intentional dissemination of Covid-19 related conspiracy theories. Individuals with a heightened sense of in-group superiority feel that public health crises reveal in-group failings and perceive such pandemics as a threat to their national image, and use conspiracies to reduce, deny or provide alternative explanations to manage heightened hypersensitivity to these in-group threats…Individuals high in the Dark Triad (psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellianism) personality traits report increased levels of out-group hostility and in-group favoritism, suggesting they may view their in-groups as superior in a similar way to collective narcissists.”

Yet, when challenged, few New Age wellness world white anti-vaxxers will cop to their narcissistic entitlement or the racism baked into willful refusal of vaccination. Very few of those that I’ve tried to engage in conversation about vaccines and race seem capable of acknowledging that the decision to refuse vaccination without a valid medical indication upholds white supremacy and participated in a racial divide in Covid deaths in the United States. They could not see how their refusal to cooperate with public health measures meant to benefit the whole point to unhealthy levels of entitlement. Instead, they have co-opted liberal language typically used for abortion about “choice” and “freedom” to twist the narrative and cast themselves as victims of public health boundaries set around vaccination, such as vaccine mandates for public schools or certain kinds of entertainment or employment during Covid.

With seemingly little awareness or concern for the fact that many essential workers were BIPOC and many people working from home in lockdown were white, that racial profiles of those who died of Covid in the first year showed that BIPOC were dying at much higher rates than white folks, the willingly unvaccinated continue to claim they are victims of oppression, even now that vaccine mandates everywhere except public schools have mostly been lifted.

The pandemic made obvious to many white folks like me what had already been quite obvious to BIPOC about spiritual white circles and people in the wellness world-that entitlement often trumps the most spiritual of all values- genuine compassion for those who are oppressed and suffering. Those who feel entitled to refuse vaccination, who rebelled against masks and social distancing, who feel entitled to continue to enjoy unearned privileges built atop the oppression of innocent people, who feel entitled to doing whatever they want, even if it harms the public good, need to begin facing that they cannot claim the title of “spiritual” if they insist on holding onto these entitled, narcissistic values. That’s just spiritualized narcissism, not the kind of morality, integrity, nobility, or goodness that comes from a true spiritual core.

This is not to say that we don’t all hold a spiritual core, even the spiritualized narcissists. I don’t believe anyone lacks this genuine spiritual core or that anyone was born evil or damaged. But I do believe we lose touch with it when we’ve been traumatized enough, and we can behave in ways that are not kind or loving or compassionate, ways that look truly evil. We certainly saw a lot of that kind of unconscionable behavior during the pandemic.

I’ve given up most of what I was indoctrinated to believe in most of the spiritual circles I’ve been influenced by over the 54 years of my life. Most of what I believe now can be boiled down into one sentence, what Harvard professor and global health physician Paul Farmer, MD said:

“The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that is wrong with the world.”

If we claim to care about spiritual values like compassion, generosity of spirit, helping the oppressed, uplifting those who suffer, and honoring the God in us all, we must extend our circles of compassion wider and get therapy to deal with the narcissistic tendencies that might make us prioritize only those we deem “special.”

Entitled, narcissistic, and abusive parts are trauma responses related to “parts” as much as other “firefighter” parts are. If we claim to be “spiritual” or care about self help, personal growth, trauma healing, or IFS, we must be willing to approach parts that might constellate around polarizing issues like race and vaccination with curiosity, compassion, confidence, calmness, clarity, creativity, connectedness, and most of all- the courage to at least try to do the right thing, even when it’s confusing or uncertain or scary or risky. It would be a misunderstanding of IFS to assume that the idea that there are “no bad parts” because they’re all trying to protect us in some way means we aren’t obligated to get treatment- and heal, discipline, contain, and Self-lead the parts that constellate around our own entitlement or narcissistic tendencies.

And so we end where we began- we’re special and we’re not special. At the end of the day, I don’t believe in some human utopia where we’re all in unity and bliss. Humans have always been tribal, making special those in our in group and polarizing against those in the out group. But if we care at all about living in a more peaceful, harmonious, spiritually enlightened world, we all have to do the hard, painful anti-racism work, face the shadows of our own entitlement, educate ourselves about the insidiousness of oppressive systems and oppressive spiritual teachings, strengthen our internal family systems to tolerate more conflict and confrontation, and, as Resmaa Menakem teaches, temper our nervous systems to be able to better tolerate standing up for what we believe in, even if our scared parts may feel like a mob of people with pitchforks are coming to attack us and even if taking a stand may put as in harm’s way.

We’re special and we’re not special. And yet, we can’t let our desire to feel special prevent us from dealing with the root of all that is wrong with our world- the idea that some lives matter less and that we can look the other way and cling to our privilege and entitlement, casting a blind eye on those we oppress.

*I’d love to hear your feedback, but in order to protect the safety of my own parts and this community from the viciousness of those who can’t seem to abide by the boundary of speaking on behalf of parts, I’m choosing to make comments on this post only available to paid subscribers. You’re welcome to disagree with me, but please- let us all treat each other with some measure of respect. If you feel you want to be heard, I only ask you to speak on behalf of your parts, rather than “blending” with them.