The Five Blockages That Hold Life Back: Psychology, Spirituality, and Divine Mercy

“Ego veni ut vitam habeant et abundantius habeant”
(Jn 10:10)

I. The Five Blockages: The Question and the Action of the Adversary

Human life is called to fullness. This affirmation is not merely a pious wish: it is the central declaration of Christ Himself in the Gospel of John: “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly” (Jn 10:10).

Yet pastoral and clinical experience confirms what the theology of creation and the doctrine of original sin have taught since the earliest centuries: between the vocation to fullness and its concrete realization there stand the five fundamental blockages, the wounds and breaches that paralyze the interior freedom of the person.

Father Sandro Santos, an exorcist priest and professor at Locus Mariologicus, has devoted decades of pastoral and spiritual accompaniment to identifying with precision the mechanisms by which these blockages take hold in the human soul, and to pointing out the paths of liberation that the Christian faith offers.

In an extensive colloquium broadcast on SantoFlow, a program dedicated to deepening the spiritual life (episode no. 424), Father Sandro systematized the five psycho-spiritual blockages which, in his experience as an exorcist and spiritual companion, lie at the root of the situations of greatest suffering, of compulsion toward evil and, at times, of demonic oppression or infestation.

The reflection that follows is not a treatise on demonology, although the demonological perspective is necessarily present. It is, rather, a theological and pastoral reading of the wounded human condition, illuminated by the experience of exorcism and by the theology of Divine Mercy.

The Distinction between the Ordinary and the Extraordinary

Before identifying the five blockages, a methodological distinction of the first importance is required, one that Father Sandro underscores insistently: the discernment between what belongs to the psychological and psychiatric field and what belongs to the spiritual field properly so called.

The exorcist who works with the five blockages does not begin with the extraordinary. He begins with the ordinary. Schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and other serious psychic disturbances present symptoms that, to a superficial glance, can be confused with phenomena of demonic possession or oppression.

The distinction, according to Father Sandro, is very fine and demands specific training, intellectual humility, and, above all, respect for the person who suffers. To refer a person who needs psychiatric treatment to exorcism is a grave imprudence. Collaboration between the psychological field and the spiritual field is not optional: it is required by the integrity of the pastoral approach.

This distinction is itself an act of mercy.

II. The First Blockage: The Lack of Fundamental Love

The first of the five blockages identified by Father Sandro is the lack of fundamental love. This is the love that ought to be received by the child in the first years of life, especially up to six years of age, and that comes primarily from the parents.

This love is not an affective ornament. It is the foundation of the interior constitution of the person. When this love is not received, the child grows up impaired, held back, incapable of giving what he never received. Psychological language speaks of early affective deprivation. Theological language recognizes here a wounding of the image of God in the creature, for parental love is the first sacrament of the love of God, the ordinary means by which the child learns that he exists, that he has worth, that he is wanted.

The clinical and pastoral consequences of this first of the five blockages are numerous: the inability to express affection, the difficulty in pronouncing words of tenderness, the compulsive search for physical intimacy devoid of warmth, the relational aridity that permeates every bond, including the marital one.

Father Sandro describes, in the context of the five blockages, the case of men who literally froze when trying to say “I love you” to their wives, not for lack of love, but because the articulation of that love was blocked at a pre-verbal stage of development.

One man who, after an unblocking exercise, pronounced that phrase of love to his wife for the first time at a silver wedding anniversary celebration set off an effect of deep emotion in all those present, precisely because the rarity of the gesture revealed the extent of the wound that had been healed.

To this primary deprivation, grave aggravating factors can be added: physical and verbal abuse, systematic indifference, paternal alcoholism that destroys the predictability and the security of the family environment.

Children of alcoholic parents learn to distrust every promise, since promises were repeatedly betrayed. They may come to desire the death of their father, not out of cruelty, but out of exhaustion from a violence that no child should have to bear. This desire, in itself the fruit of extreme suffering, can become a breach that the adversary exploits, aggravating the first of the five blockages.

III. The Second Blockage: Rejection

Rejection is, according to Father Sandro, one of the most devastating among the five blockages. Its origin can go back to the period of gestation itself: the child not desired, not planned, unwanted by the father who abandoned the mother, or by a mother who was not ready for motherhood. The unconscious of the child being formed in the maternal womb is not a blank slate. It registers the emotional tone of the environment that surrounds it.

The pain of rejection, one of the five blockages, is comparable, in the words of Father Sandro, to a psycho-emotional cancer.

The person who grows up with this wound often becomes difficult to live with, excessively sensitive to any form of exclusion. Everything wounds him, because everything confirms the original message engraved in the unconscious: “you are not desired, you do not belong, you are not welcome”. This message, repeated throughout life in the most varied relational forms, keeps deepening the wound instead of healing it.

Rejection is one of the great breaches of the adversary, precisely because the rejected person is in desperate search of acceptance, and that search can lead to places of great spiritual vulnerability: sects, occult groups, esoteric practices, where the promise of belonging and of recognition works as a trap. More than toward the occult, the person goes toward the first voice that says: “you belong here”.

Somatization is frequent: the body expresses what the soul cannot articulate. Tremors, states of revolt and rage that seem disproportionate to the immediate stimulus, behaviors difficult to explain in conventional psychiatric terms. Father Sandro reports cases in which people, during moments of prayer or spiritual accompaniment, uttered phrases such as “you do not love me, you do not want me alive”, revealing the original pain that the unconscious had kept for decades, disclosing the second of the five blockages.

IV. The Third Blockage: Abandonment

Abandonment, the third of the five blockages, is distinguished from rejection by its temporal dynamic: while rejection can go back to the prenatal period, abandonment typically manifests itself between the sixth and the tenth year of the child’s life, when he begins to observe the world with more comparative eyes.

In this third of the five blockages, the child whose parents work excessively and are not present at the decisive moments of school and family life observes classmates whose parents are present at the parties, on the trips, in the activities. The conclusion that his unconscious draws is not “my parents work a lot”, but “I am not important enough to deserve their presence”. This conclusion, formulated in a non-verbal way and absolutely sincere within the child, is the core of the blockage of abandonment.

The consequences in adult life are predictable and painful. Affective codependency is the most frequent: the person who was abandoned becomes incapable of letting the other go, needing a total and continuous presence that no human being can offer.

When that presence withdraws, even for completely normal and natural reasons, the person relives the experience of the original abandonment with all its intensity. In extreme cases, this reliving can lead to suicidal thoughts, for the question that resurfaces is: if that person who was my world is gone, what is the use of going on?

Abandonment demands a prolonged accompaniment, a descent into the deepest layers of personal history, and a forgiveness that reaches not only the human authors of the abandonment, but also the representation of God that was contaminated by that experience.

For the father who abandons his son is inevitably projected onto the image of God the Father. The parable of the prodigal son (Lk 15:11-32) resurfaces here with all its pastoral force: the father who runs to meet the son who returns is the image that Christ offers to those who carry the blockage of abandonment. Not the father who abandoned, but the Father who waits, who sees from afar, who runs, who embraces: the divine response to the third of the five blockages.

V. The Fourth Blockage: Unresolved Grief

Unresolved grief, the fourth of the five blockages, is a universal, inevitable, and necessary experience. Necessary, because without grief there is no integration of loss. Christian theology does not eliminate grief, it sublimates it: faith in the resurrection and in the communion of saints does not dispense the person from caring for his dead, from feeling the absence, from passing through the darkness of separation.

The confusion between faith and the absence of grief is a frequent spiritual deformation. The implicit message that many receive, in well-intentioned but poorly formed religious settings, is that caring for the dead is a sign of weak faith. The strong believer does not care for them, because he knows that the loved one is with God. This message, apparently pious, is theologically incorrect and pastorally devastating.

Unresolved grief accumulates within the person and manifests itself in unexpected ways.

Loss of the meaning of life, chronic depression, inability to return to the places associated with the deceased person, a physical blockage with regard to the cemetery that one refuses to visit. The pandemic of 2020-2021 left in this domain a particularly grave mark of collective suffering: thousands of people who could not keep vigil over their dead, who said farewell to their relatives in a telephone call or a video call, without the embrace, without the ritual, without the accompaniment.

Father Sandro recounts 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 back and had not managed to, carried a guilt that was not his own: Why did I not hold him? Why did I not go with him?

This question, repeated obsessively, was the sign of a grief that had not been worked through, of a guilt that had not found the way to forgiveness, of a pain that needed at last to be named and surrendered.

Healing comes through the forgiveness of oneself and through the acceptance of the freedom of the other. The son made a choice, however wrong and tragic. It was not the fault of the parents. Love cannot chain anyone’s freedom.

The Comunidade Consolação Misericordiosa, founded by Father Sandro in João Pessoa, devotes specific attention precisely to these families bereaved by suicide, offering psychological, psychiatric, and inner-healing care to people who, in most cases, do not find this kind of accompaniment elsewhere, remaining prisoners of the fourth of the five blockages.

VI. The Fifth Blockage: Trauma in Childhood

The fifth of the five blockages is trauma in childhood, and Father Sandro refers in particular to abuse committed by family members, which constitutes one of the deepest wounds and the most difficult to resolve in pastoral and clinical experience.

The child abused by a trusted adult lives a double betrayal: the betrayal of trust and the betrayal of his own body. The body that ought to be inviolable becomes the place of a violence that leaves marks on the memory, on bodily sensation, on the relationship with one’s own identity. Disgust with oneself. The difficulty with any form of intimacy, whether physical or emotional. The rage that finds no adequate expression. The envy of the other who seems to live without that shadow.

Father Sandro introduces here the concept of intergenerational traumas, which come from genetic memory and from spiritual realities transmitted from generation to generation. Moral theology and clinical psychology converge on this point: certain vulnerabilities, certain compulsions, certain patterns of suffering repeat themselves in families in a way that goes beyond mere behavioral imitation. The tradition of spiritual theology recognizes here the weight of the inheritance of the fathers, to which the doctrine of transmitted original sin refers.

These traumas constitute zones of vulnerability that the adversary can exploit, prompting in the traumatized person the search for forms of help that promise to relieve the pain but that deepen it, dragging the person toward practices that take him even farther from the source of healing. Careful spiritual discernment is, in order to overcome the five blockages, absolutely indispensable.

VII. The Solution: Forgiveness

The answer to the five blockages is, according to Father Sandro, a single word: forgiveness.

This answer might seem simplistic were it not rooted in a theology of mercy as dense as the one that Father Sandro presents, drawn above all from the witness of Saint Faustina Kowalska, apostle of Divine Mercy.

In the Diary of Saint Faustina (no. 1486), Jesus says to her: “You need to be merciful as I am merciful toward you”. The saint answers that this demand is humanly impossible. And she is right: it is humanly impossible. But with the grace of God, according to Saint Faustina herself, it is possible. Whoever forgives prepares himself to receive many graces, including the breaking of the blockages that paralyze life.

The forgiveness spoken of here is not a feeling. It is not the suppression of the memory of the wound. It is not the approval of what was done. It is an act of the will, sustained by grace, by which the person refuses to let the wound of the past go on dictating the conditions of the present. To forgive is to free oneself from the jailer of one’s own history.

The Gospel references that Father Sandro calls upon are eloquent. Jesus on the cross pronounces the words that definitively close the breach of resentment: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Lk 23:34).

The adulteress finds in the gaze of Jesus not the condemnation she expected, but the liberation she did not dare to ask for: “Has no one condemned you? No one, Lord. Now go and sin no more” (Jn 8:10-11). The Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well, an affective codependent with five husbands, finds in her dialogue with Christ the first touch that sees her and knows her without using her. The prodigal son discovers that the love of the Father was not destroyed by the abandonment that he himself had committed.

In all these cases, forgiveness is not an abstract idea. It is an encounter. It is a face. It is mercy that makes itself present in the flesh of the concrete history of each person.

VIII. Vigilance without Fear

One of the themes that run through the identification of the five blockages is the relationship between the necessary spiritual vigilance and the paralyzing fear that some devote to the adversary.

Sacred Scripture issues the invitation “do not be afraid” on 365 occasions, one for each day of the year. This number is not a statistical curiosity. It is the indication that fear is the permanent temptation and that the overcoming of fear is the daily work of faith. The devil is already defeated: the victory of Christ in the resurrection is definitive and without appeal. To live in a permanent state of terror, even after the five blockages have been identified, is, paradoxically, to give him an importance that the Christian faith refuses.

The vigilance that the spiritual tradition recommends does not bear upon the power of the devil, but upon the breaches that our own life can offer: unconfessed sin, unresolved lovelessness, cultivated resentment, desired revenge. These are the doors that, if they are left open, facilitate the action of the adversary. The solution is not fear: it is the closing of the breaches, which is accomplished through conversion, through sacramental confession, through the Eucharist, through the practice of mercy, and through forgiveness.

Closing the breaches is the only preventive exorcism within the reach of all.

IX. The Blessing with the Relic of Saint Faustina

This colloquium on the five blockages closed with a moment of prayer in which Father Sandro blessed those present with a relic of Saint Faustina Kowalska, a fragment of bone of the saint, according to the theology of relics that Saint Thomas Aquinas formulated with precision: where the relic of a saint is, there is the saint himself.

The invocation pronounced 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 the prayers of deliverance, is not magic. It is the liturgical affirmation that the blood of Christ is the only effective apotropaic against the power of evil, because it is the only one that destroys evil at the root: sin.

Saint Faustina is invoked not as a magical intermediary, but as the apostle of mercy, the one who received and transmitted the message that is the definitive answer to all human blockages. The mercy of God is greater than any wound, greater than any rejection, greater than any abandonment, greater than any trauma. From Merciful Jesus, Saint Faustina had heard the promise: “I will answer you, Faustina, wherever you are, with whomever you are, for whomever you ask”. These words are balm upon the five blockages.

X. The Contribution of Locus Mariologicus

It is not without significance that Father Sandro Santos, who mapped the five blockages, an exorcist and spiritual therapist, is at the same time a professor and a student at Locus Mariologicus, an institution dedicated to the academic and contemplative study of Mariology, Angelology, Demonology, and Josephology.

Mariology is not a peripheral branch of theology. It is the place where the mystery of the Church and the destiny of the human being called to grace are read.

In the logic of the five blockages, Mary, the Immaculate Conception, is the human being who did not know the blockage of original sin. Mary, Mother of the Savior, is the human being who passed through the apparent abandonment by God on the night of Calvary and remained standing (Jn 19:25). Mary, invoked by tradition as Mater Misericordiae, is the figure that the universal Marian tradition places between the sinner and the Son, not as an obstacle but as a doorway into the mercy that heals.

The rigorous theological formation that Locus offers, directly linked to the understanding of the five blockages, with international certification in Mariology, Angelology, Demonology, and Josephology, is not a merely academic project. It is the indispensable intellectual support so that pastoral, spiritual, and exorcistic action may be exercised with the discernment that the complexity of human suffering demands. Father Sandro represents precisely this synthesis: theological depth at the service of concrete pastoral life, rigorous study at the service of the effective liberation of persons.

Thought without contemplation is arid. Contemplation without thought is naive. Marian Theology is the school of both, and the school that illuminates the five blockages.

For a deeper study of these five blockages from the perspective of spiritual theology and of Mariology, consult the Postgraduate Program in Mariology of Locus Mariologicus. For the doctrinal framework, cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church, nos. 407-412 (on original sin and its consequences in the spiritual life).