The five blocks hindering life: psychology, spirituality, and divine mercy.

# “I Came So That They May Have Life and Have It Abundantly”## I. The Five Barriers: The Issue and Action of the AdversaryHuman life is called to fullness. This assertion is not merely a pious desire, but the central declaration of Christ himself in the Gospel of John: “I came so that they may have life and have it abundantly” (John 10:10).However, pastoral and clinical experience confirms what creation theology and the doctrine on original sin have taught since the earliest centuries: between the vocation to fullness and its concrete realization stand five fundamental barriers—the wounds and gaps that paralyze interior freedom in human beings.Father Sandro Santos, a priest exorcist and professor at Locus Mariologicus, has dedicated decades of pastoral and spiritual accompaniment to precisely identifying the mechanisms by which these barriers take root in the soul, and to indicating the paths to liberation that Christian faith offers.In an extensive interview broadcast on SantoFlow, a program focused on spiritual depth (Episode No. 424), Father Sandro systematized the five spiritual barriers that, in his experience as an exorcist and spiritual companion, lie at the root of situations of greatest suffering, compulsion to evil, and sometimes demonic oppression or infestation.## The Five Spiritual Barriers: Liberation Through Divine MercyThe following reflection is not a treatise on demonology, although a demonological perspective is necessarily present. It is rather a theological and pastoral reading of the wounded human condition, illuminated by exorcism experience and the theology of Divine Mercy.### Distinguishing Between Ordinary and Extraordinary## Methodological Distinction and the Five BlocksBefore identifying the five blocks, a crucial methodological distinction must be made, emphasized by Father Sandro: differentiating between what belongs to the psychological and psychiatric domain and that which falls within the strictly spiritual realm.The exorcist addressing the five blocks does not begin with the extraordinary. They start with the ordinary. Schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and other severe mental health conditions present symptoms that, at first glance, might be mistaken for possession or demonic oppression phenomena.Father Sandro argues this distinction is subtle and requires specific training, intellectual humility, and above all, respect for the suffering individual. Referring someone in need of psychiatric treatment to exorcism is a grave imprudence. Collaboration between psychological and spiritual fields is not optional; it’s essential for the integrity of pastoral care.**This distinction itself is an act of mercy.**## First Block: Lack of Fundamental LoveThe first of the five blocks identified by Father Sandro is the lack of fundamental love. This refers to the love a child should receive in their early years, particularly before the age of six, primarily from their parents.This love isn’t merely an emotional add-on; it’s the foundation of a person’s inner constitution. When this love is absent, the child develops with difficulties, becomes stuck, unable to give what they never received. Psychological terms describe early affective deprivation. Theological language recognizes here a wound to the image of God in creation, as parental love is the first sacrament of God’s love, the ordinary means by which a child learns there is someone, that they matter, and are desired.The clinical and pastoral consequences of this first block are extensive: difficulty expressing affection, struggles pronouncing words of tenderness, compulsive seeking of physical intimacy devoid of warmth, and aridity in relationships, including marital ones.Father Sandro describes, within the context of the five blocks, cases of men who physically froze when trying to say “I love you” to their wives, not due to a lack of love but because the expression of that love was blocked during a pre-verbal developmental phase.A man who, after an unlocking exercise, finally spoke those words of love at a silver wedding anniversary party, caused a wave of emotion among all present. The rarity of the gesture revealed the depth of the healed wound.This primary deficiency can be compounded by severe aggravating factors: physical and verbal abuse, systematic indifference, and paternal alcoholism that destroys family predictability and security.Children of alcoholic parents learn to distrust every promise, as promises are repeatedly broken. They may come to desire their father’s death, not out of cruelty, but from exhaustion of the violence no child should endure. This desire, itself a result of extreme suffering, can become a crack that the adversary exploits, exacerbating the first of the **five blocks**.**III. The second block: Rejection**Rejection, according to Father Sandro, is one of the most devastating among the **five blocks**. Its origins may date back to the very period of gestation: the unwanted child, not planned, unloved by the father who abandoned the mother, or by a mother who was not ready for motherhood. The unconscious of the child forming in the womb does not start as a blank slate. It records the emotional tone of the surrounding environment.The pain of rejection, one of the **five blocks**, is comparable, in Father Sandro’s words, to a psycho-emotional cancer.The person who grows up with this wound often becomes difficult to get along with, excessively sensitive to any form of exclusion. Everything hurts them because everything confirms the original message imprinted on their unconscious: «You are not wanted, you don’t belong, you are not welcome». This message, repeated throughout life in various relational forms, deepens the wound rather than healing it.Rejection is one of the great gaps exploited by the adversary precisely because the rejected person is desperately seeking acceptance, and this search can lead to places of great spiritual vulnerability: cults, occult groups, esoteric practices, where the promise of belonging and recognition works like a trap. The person, more than embracing occultism, goes towards the first voice that tells them: «You belong here».Somatization is common: the body expresses what the soul cannot articulate. Tremors, states of revolt and anger that seem disproportionate to the immediate stimulus, behaviors difficult to explain using conventional psychiatric methods. Father Sandro reports cases where people, during moments of prayer or spiritual accompaniment, expressed phrases like «You don’t love me, you don’t want me alive», revealing the original pain that the unconscious had guarded for decades, exposing the second of the **five blocks**.**IV. The third block: Abandonment**Abandonment, the third of the **five blocks**, distinguishes itself from rejection by its temporal dynamics: while rejection may date back to the prenatal period, abandonment typically manifests itself between the ages of six and ten, when the child begins to observe the world with more comparative eyes.In this third of the **five blocks**, a child whose parents work excessively and are not present during pivotal moments in school and family life observes peers with parents who attend parties, travel, and activities. The unconscious conclusion the child draws is not simply “My parents work too much,” but rather, “I am not important enough to deserve their presence.” This non-verbal, genuinely felt conclusion within the child forms the core of the abandonment block.The adult consequences are predictable and painful. Affective codependency is the most common: a person who has been abandoned becomes unable to let go of the other, needing a total and continuous presence that no human can offer. When this presence leaves, even for completely normal and natural reasons, the individual relives the original abandonment experience with all its intensity. In extreme cases, this revivification may lead to suicidal thoughts, as the question arises: if the person who was my world has left, what’s the point of continuing?Abandonment requires prolonged accompaniment, delving into the deepest layers of personal history, and forgiveness that extends not only to human perpetrators but also to the representation of God that was tainted by this experience. For the parent who abandons their child projects themselves onto the image of God the Father. The parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32) resurfaces here with all its pastoral force: the father who runs to meet his returning son is the image Christ offers to those grappling with the abandonment block. Not the parent who abandoned, but the Father who awaits, who sees from afar, who runs, who embraces – divine response to the third of the **five blocks**.V. The fourth block: Unprocessed GriefUnprocessed grief, the fourth of the **five blocks**, is a universal, inevitable, and necessary experience. **Inevitable because without grief there is no integration of loss.** Christian theology does not eliminate grief; it sublimates it: faith in resurrection and communion of saints does not dispense individuals from caring for their deceased, feeling the absence, or traversing the darkness of separation.The confusion between faith and the absence of grief is a common spiritual distortion. The implicit message many receive in well-intentioned but under-formed religious environments is that caring for the dead is a sign of weak faith. The faithful person does not care because they know their loved one is with God. This seemingly pious message is theologically incorrect and pastorally devastating.Unprocessed grief accumulates within the individual and manifests itself in unexpected ways.Loss of sense of life, chronic depression, inability to return to places associated with the deceased, a physical block in relation to the cemetery that refuses to be visited. The 2020-2021 pandemic left in this domain a particularly grave mark of collective suffering: thousands of people who were unable to bid farewell to their loved ones, saying goodbye through a phone call or video call, without the embrace, without the ritual, without the support.Father Sandro narrates the case of a couple who lost a son who jumped from the twelfth floor of a building. The father, who had tried to hold his son and failed, carried a guilt that was not his: Why didn’t I hold him? Why wasn’t I with him?This question, repeated obsessively, was a sign of an elaboration of grief that hadn’t occurred, of a sense of guilt that hadn’t found its way to forgiveness, of pain that needed to be finally named and surrendered.Healing comes through forgiving oneself and accepting the freedom of others. The son made a choice, though mistaken and tragic. It wasn’t the parents’ fault. **Love cannot enslave anyone’s freedom.**The Community of Consolation and Merciful Healing, founded by Father Sandro in João Pessoa, pays special attention to these bereaved families by suicide, offering psychological, psychiatric, and interior healing support to people who, in most cases, do not find this type of care elsewhere, remaining prisoners of the five blocks.**VI. The fifth block: Childhood trauma**The fifth of the **five blocks** is childhood trauma, and Father Sandro specifically refers to abuse practiced by family members, which constitutes one of the deepest and most challenging wounds in pastoral and clinical experience.A child abused by a trusted adult suffers a double betrayal: the betrayal of trust and the betrayal of their own body. The body that should be inviolable becomes the site of violence that leaves marks on memory, bodily sensation, and relationship with one’s own identity. Self-loathing. Difficulty in any form of intimacy, whether physical or emotional. Anger that finds no appropriate expression. Envy of others who seem to live without this shadow.Father Sandro introduces here the concept of intergenerational trauma, which arises from genetic memory and spiritual realities passed down through generations. Moral theology and clinical psychology converge at this point: certain vulnerabilities, certain compulsions, certain patterns of suffering repeat within families in ways that go beyond mere behavioral imitation. Traditional spiritual theology recognizes here the weight of parental inheritance, as referred to in the doctrine on original sin transmitted.These traumas constitute zones of vulnerability that the adversary can exploit, inciting in the traumatized the quest for help promising to alleviate pain but instead deepening it, dragging the person further away from the source of healing. Spiritual discernment is absolutely indispensable to overcome the five barriers.**VII. The Solution: Forgiveness**The response to the five barriers, according to Father Sandro, is one simple word: forgiveness.This response might seem simplistic if it were not rooted in a dense theology of mercy as presented by Father Sandro, primarily from the testimony of Saint Faustina Kowalska, apostle of Divine Mercy.In her *Diary* (n. 1486), Jesus tells her: “You need to be merciful as I am merciful to you.” The saint responds that this demand is humanly impossible. She is right; it is humanly impossible. But with God’s grace, according to the same Saint Faustina, it is possible. Forgiving prepares one to receive many graces, including breaking free from the barriers that paralyze life.The forgiveness spoken of is not a feeling. It is not suppressing the memory of the wound. It is not condoning what was done. It is an act of will, supported by grace, in which one refuses to let the wounds of the past continue dictating the conditions of the present. **Forgiving is freeing oneself from the jailer of one’s own history.**The biblical references Father Sandro invokes are powerful. Jesus on the cross utters words that definitively close the gap of resentment: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34).The adulteress finds in Jesus’ gaze not the condemnation she expected but liberation: “No one condemned you? No, Lord. Now go and do not sin again” (John 8:10-11). The Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well, an emotional codependent with five husbands, encounters in Christ’s dialogue her first glimpse of herself and her freedom from using others. The prodigal son discovers that the Father’s love was not destroyed by his abandonment.In all these cases, forgiveness is not an abstract idea. It is a meeting. It is a face. It is mercy made present in the concrete history of each person.**VIII. Vigilance without Fear**One of the overarching themes in identifying the five barriers is the relationship between necessary spiritual vigilance and the paralyzing fear some have of the adversary.Sacred Scripture invites us “not to be afraid” 365 times, once for every day of the year. This number is not a statistical curiosity. It indicates that fear is the permanent temptation and overcoming fear is the daily work of faith. The demon is already defeated; Christ’s victory in the resurrection is definitive and final. Living in a constant state of terror, even after identifying the five barriers, is paradoxically giving power to something that Christian faith refuses.

The spiritual tradition’s recommended vigilance does not focus on the power of demons but on the gaps that our own lives may present: unconfessed sin, unresolved unforgiveness, cultivated resentment, and desired vengeance. These are the doors, if left open, that facilitate the adversary’s action. The solution is not fear, but closing these gaps through conversion, sacramental confession, Eucharist, practice of mercy, and forgiveness.

Closing these gaps is the only preventive exorcism accessible to everyone.

IX. The blessing with a relic of Saint Faustina

This colloquy on the five blocks concluded with a moment of prayer where Father Sandro blessed those present with a relic of Saint Faustina Kowalska, a fragment of her bone, according to the theology of relics that St. Thomas Aquinas precisely formulated: where there is a relic of a saint, there is the saint himself.

The invocation spoken over the relic calls upon the “Five open wounds, wounded heart, blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ” as a barrier between those present and spiritual danger. This language, rooted in the tradition of liberation prayers, is not magic. It is the liturgical affirmation that Christ’s blood is the only effective protection against evil power because it alone destroys evil at its root: sin.

Saint Faustina is invoked not as a magical intermediary but as an apostle of mercy, one who received and transmitted the message that is the ultimate answer to all human blocks. God’s mercy is greater than any wound, any rejection, any abandonment, or any trauma. To Merciful Jesus, Saint Faustina heard the promise: “I will respond to you, Faustina, wherever you are, with whoever you are, for whoever you pray”. These words are balm over the five blocks.

X. The contribution of the Mariological locus

It is not without significance that Father Sandro Santos, who mapped out the five blocks, an exorcist and spiritual therapist, is also a professor and student at the Locus Mariologicus, dedicated to the academic and contemplative study of Mariology, Angelology, Demonology, and Josefology.

Mariology is not a peripheral branch of theology. It is the place where one reads the mystery of the Church and the destiny of humanity called to grace.

In the logic of the five blocks, Mary, Immaculate Conception, is the human being who did not experience the block of original sin. Mary, Mother of the Savior, is the human being who endured God’s apparent abandonment in the night of Calvary and stood firm (John 19:25). Mary, invoked by tradition as Mater Misericordiae, is the figure that traditional Mariology universally interposes between the sinner and the Son, not as an obstacle but as a gateway to mercy that heals.

The rigorous theological formation offered by Locus, directly linked to understanding the five blocks, with international certification in Mariology, Angelology, Demonology, and Josefology, is not merely an academic project. It provides the indispensable intellectual support for pastoral, spiritual, and exorcistic action to be carried out with the discernment required by the complexity of human suffering. Father Sandro embodies this synthesis: theological depth at the service of concrete pastoral life, rigorous study aimed at effective liberation of individuals.Thought without contemplation is barren. Contemplation without thought is naive. Marian theology is the school for both, and the school that illuminates the five blocks.To delve deeper into these five blocks from the perspective of spiritual theology and Mariology, consult the program for the **Post-Graduate Program in Mariology** at Locus Mariologicus. For doctrinal context, see the **Catechism of the Catholic Church**, nn. 407-412 (on original sin and its consequences for spiritual life).