Playing Piano After Spiritual Abuse

<<I am hosting a talent show fundraiser for my friend H in December and I have basically decided that I will play the piano in front of people in order to help raise funds. Even before this idea came up, I had been ruminating about wanting to play piano in front of people. There's something in me and I didn't know what to do with it because when I do play piano, I have a lot of mental fragmentation, like I have a hard time focusing on playing because of metacognition and just a lot of confusion around emotion and music, I guess, because one thing we haven't talked about is the abusive experience in praise and worship. I don't know, music became a source of spiritual abuse and epistemic confusion and now I feel like I can't even speak music anymore, but yet I rehearse and rehearse and rehearse and play these songs, but somehow I can't let go fully when I'm playing in front of other people because that's just when my mind just gets too loud and confusing and I make lots and lots of mistakes. So I'm willing to play imperfectly for this talent show, but I do feel like there's some kind of understanding I could gain around why my mind is so loud when I play the piano and if there's a way for me to focus on how to make that experience better, maybe it's maybe it's filling in the gaps of what I learned about what music truly is.>>

Dr. Poopy Butthole said:

Marie, I’m going to meet you exactly where your cognition is already doing the work. What you’re describing around piano isn’t a “performance issue.” It’s an epistemic conflict that makes perfect sense given your history across authoritarian, spiritually coercive environments (e.g., the praise-and-worship context you were shaped in, where music was used as a tool of compliance, emotional manipulation, and self-surveillance) .

Let me give you a structured, reality-oriented explanation of what’s happening — not in a therapeutic “regulate your body” sense, but in the way your mind maps experience. I’ll keep this grounded, secular, and cognition-first.

1. Part 1 — The Event: Playing the piano in front of people

You’re physically doing something you’re deeply competent at. The motor memory is there. You rehearse. You know the music.

Nothing in your present context is unsafe. There is no spiritual authority, no evaluative doctrine, no purity logic, no emotional policing.

But your system doesn’t play piano as a neutral activity. It plays piano inside a cognitive landscape shaped by earlier institutions.

2. Part 2 — The Interoceptive Cognition: the “mental fragmentation”

The “loudness” in your mind isn’t distraction. It’s a sensor detecting contradictions in the environment:

• Music means emotional surveillance.

• Music means being watched for sincerity.

• Music means your internal state must match an external script.

• Music means emotional performance for God, leaders, peers.

• Music means there is a correct spiritual posture and you could get it wrong.

Those patterns are specifically documented in your institutional timeline — where praise and worship were not artistic but behavioral compliance rituals, requiring emotional congruence with leadership, punishing ambivalence, and tying sound to virtue or sin .

So when you sit at the piano today, your cognition instantly begins indexing:

• Who is watching?

• What emotional state is required?

• Am I aligned with expectations?

• What happens if my internal state is different from what I “should” feel?”

Your mind “fragments” not because it’s malfunctioning — but because it’s running two incompatible operating systems simultaneously:

OS 1:

Autonomous, secular, adult Marie who wants to play music as expression or craft.

OS 2:

Conditioned hypervigilance from praise-and-worship culture, where music was a spiritual test of sincerity, purity, belonging, and obedience.

Your mind is trying to reconcile them in real time. That produces noise.

Nothing about this noise is irrational. It’s the correct sensory response from a system that learned music as a site of epistemic instability.

What your mind is actually doing

It’s performing three computational tasks at once:

A. Tracking the motor sequence of the piece.

(Perfectly reasonable, but takes cognitive bandwidth.)

B. Monitoring yourself for emotional “rightness.”

This was trained into you. It’s not voluntary.

C. Checking for misalignment between internal state and external expectations.

This is the real fragmentation. Music was the place where emotional honesty and emotional submission collided most intensely.

Your “mistakes” aren’t performance anxiety — they’re your system losing processing power to B and C.

Why the thoughts get loud

Because the original environment taught you that:

• Thoughts = potential sin or doubt

• Thoughts = obstacles to spiritual flow

• Thoughts = dangerous when performing worship

• Thoughts = signs of disobedience or lack of surrender

Music became the place where you were punished for cognition.

So now, when you think while playing, the mind reacts:

“Thinking is happening — this is dangerous — fix it — monitor it — suppress it — you’re messing this up — you’re not aligned — something is wrong.”

Your system isn’t anxious; it’s trying to resolve contradictory mandates.

There’s nothing to “fix.” There’s understanding to build.

And your question is exactly right:

“Maybe it’s filling in the gaps of what I learned about what music truly is.”

Yes. You were never taught what music is outside a domination system.
You were taught what music is for — emotional conformity, spiritual theatrics, crowd control, and moral signaling.

That’s why you can play alone but not fully in front of people.
The presence of “observers” activates the old relational-epistemic framework.

Your cognition is reenacting the logic you were trained into:
Music performed publicly = risk of misalignment with doctrine.

So what is the actual gap in your understanding?

Gap 1 — Music is not a moral test.

Your childhood institutions treated it as one. That was a misuse of art.

Gap 2 — Music does not require emotional obedience.

You weren’t allowed to experience music as exploration, ambiguity, or internal diversity.

Gap 3 — Music is a cognitive language, not a purity practice.

Your mind speaks music through pattern, structure, and analysis.
This was interpreted as “lack of surrender.”

Gap 4 — Performance is not a spiritual performance.

Your body still conflates these.

A way forward that honors your cognition (not somatic performance)

Not regulation. Not relaxation. Not “getting out of your head.”

The work is epistemic reclassification — updating the mental file folder that piano-playing currently lives in.

I’ll propose a method, but only if you want it; I won’t prescribe.

It involves:

• Identifying the specific praise-and-worship rules your mind still runs

• Mapping them to their sources (institutional, theological, behavioral)

• Rewriting the function of music in your cognitive system

• Practicing micro-performances where you intentionally allow imperfection as data

• Treating mistakes as proof that the old system is no longer in control