A More Nuanced Look at Default Mode Network and Spirituality
Lust, Dopamine, Trauma, and the Long Road from Propositions to Presence
There is a particular spiritual suffering that does not look like atheism, rebellion, or indifference. It looks, instead, like certainty without intimacy. God is affirmed as true, coherent, unavoidable—yet experienced as distant, abstract, almost procedural. Prayer feels like routine. Sacraments feel correct but dry. Faith feels intellectually intact but relationally hollow.
This condition is often misdiagnosed. It is labeled lukewarmness, hypocrisy, lack of desire, or secret unbelief. In reality, it is something far older, more human, and more tragic: a fracture between truth and presence.
This fracture commonly appears in those who are intellectually convinced, morally serious, and deeply wounded—particularly where long-term compulsive lust, trauma, and dopamine dysregulation intersect. The person does not lack faith. They lack the capacity to perceive presence without stimulation.
Understanding this distinction is essential. Without it, spiritual counsel becomes cruel, confession becomes a psychological reset button, and God is unconsciously reduced to a proposition that must be defended rather than a presence that can be endured.
I. Propositional Certainty vs. Relational Perception
Human beings do not encounter reality through a single faculty. The intellect assents to truth, coherence, and evidence. Relational presence, however, is perceived through a different interior capacity—what the Christian tradition calls the nous: the receptive, unitive faculty by which one remains with another without analysis or control.
One can therefore believe something is true while being unable to experience it as near.
This is not theoretical. Trauma research, attachment theory, and neuroscience all confirm that belief and felt presence are dissociable. A person may know another loves them and still feel abandoned. A grieving spouse may affirm the reality of their partner’s existence and yet experience only absence. No one calls this pretending. It is perceptual disruption.
When God is known propositionally but not relationally, the problem is not disbelief. It is a wounded capacity for presence.
II. Lust as a Disorder of Intimacy, Not Simply of Desire
Chronic lust—especially when formed early in adolescence—does not merely train sexual appetite. It trains the nervous system to associate intimacy with:
intensity rather than endurance
stimulation rather than presence
secrecy rather than exposure
control rather than mutual surrender
Over time, desire becomes procedural. It has triggers and rituals, not a telos. It aims at regulation, not union.
This explains why certain forms of lust feel “relational” without being loving. The draw is not simply to bodies or images, but to reciprocal erotic recognition without cost—being desired, engaged with, mirrored—without vulnerability, permanence, or consequence.
When the object threatens to become genuinely personal, the desire collapses. What is sought is not the other person, but the experience of desire itself, contained and controlled.
This is not perversion. It is a distorted echo of real goods: mutuality, attention, responsiveness. But stripped of sacrifice, patience, and truth.
III. Dopamine and the Eclipse of Presence
Modern neuroscience clarifies what the Fathers already knew intuitively: stimulation suppresses presence.
High-dopamine behaviors—pornography, endless scrolling, novelty seeking—quiet the Default Mode Network, the neural system associated with self-referential awareness, meaning, and relational attunement. The very faculty by which presence is perceived is chemically inhibited.
Thus, when stimulation is removed, the first experience is not peace but emptiness. Silence feels unreal. God feels abstract. Doubt intensifies.
This is not evidence that God is absent. It is evidence that the perceptual system is relearning how to be awake without anesthesia.
IV. Why God Feels Like Silence—and Why That Matters
A common objection arises here: If God is only silence, how is this different from pretending?
The answer lies in how illusions behave.
Illusions require reinforcement. They comfort, reward, stabilize identity, and bend to desire. They collapse when unrewarded.
But the “silence” encountered in this spiritual state does the opposite:
it unsettles rather than soothes
it strips false consolations
it exposes compulsions
it resists instrumentalization
This silence acts. It produces non-random effects. It dismantles rather than reinforces fantasy.
God does not present Himself as stimulus precisely because anything that stimulates can be confused with imagination. Emotion, warmth, and reassurance are psychologically ambiguous. Silence that refuses to console is not.
God’s presence is not absent because it is unfelt; it is present without coercion.
V. Trauma, Attachment, and the Fear of Closeness
Trauma does not primarily destroy belief. It destroys felt safety in intimacy.
The traumatized soul learns that exposure costs too much, that being known leads to pain, and that control is safer than communion. God, who offers total knowing without force, is therefore experienced as dangerous—not intellectually, but somatically.
Propositions feel safe. Presence does not.
This explains why apologetics can flourish while prayer feels empty. The intellect remains intact. The relational faculty is guarded.
VI. Confession, Paralysis, and the Lie of Despair
In this condition, failure often triggers paralysis. The soul concludes it is no longer in grace and therefore cannot move toward God until confession restores access. This belief is understandable—and false.
The Church has always distinguished between sanctifying grace and actual grace. Even after grave sin, God continues to act, draw, and invite. If grace truly vanished, no one would return.
The Fathers consistently warned that despair after sin is more dangerous than the sin itself. Despair immobilizes. It replaces trust with self-punishment and treats grace as a reward for success rather than medicine for the sick.
Confession does not summon God back. It declares what God has already offered.
VII. The Ache for Another World
Alongside this struggle often appears a deep, childlike longing: a desire to return to innocence, to live inside a morally coherent world like those first encountered in stories—worlds of Aslan, Middle-earth, or Hogwarts.
This longing is not escapism in the shallow sense. It is eschatological homesickness: the memory of a mode of being where meaning, belonging, and goodness were not yet fragmented.
C.S. Lewis understood this precisely. Stories wound us because they awaken a desire for the “real country,” not because they distract us from reality. They remind the soul of a home it has not yet reached.
This longing intensifies as false consolations are stripped away. When pleasure recedes, true desire becomes audible.
VIII. Why God Allows This Long, Dry Passage
God does not heal this condition by overwhelming the soul with feeling. To do so would merely replace one dependency with another. Instead, He allows Himself to be known first as true, faithful, and steady—before being felt as affectionate.
Relational encounter returns not as intensity, but as endurance:
the ability to remain without fleeing
silence without panic
desire without acting
doubt without despair
Only later does warmth return. Love matures before it comforts.
IX. The Central Truth
This condition is not evidence of divided loyalty or weak faith. It is the cost of healing.
God feels propositional rather than relational because the soul is relearning how to perceive presence without stimulation, control, or illusion. That relearning feels like absence. It is not.
You do not make God relational.
You become capable of relationship again.
And that process—slow, painful, humiliating—is already grace at work.