Who are you, deep inside, at the core of your being?  Who lives in the inmost chamber of your personhood?  Join us on an adventure to discover your core identity.  Catholic experts Dr. Gerry Crete and Dr. Peter Martin find the convergences and synergies in Scripture, the early Church Fathers, the Eastern and Western Catholic monastic traditions, Doctors of the Church, the medieval Catholic theologians, the writings of contemplative saints, and the magisterial teachings of the Church -- supplemented by attachment theory, Internal Family Systems and other parts and systems approaches in the modern era – all in the service of answering the question – “Who is my inmost self?”  What do the words inmost self, heart, soul, “nous,” and the “eyes of the soul” mean from a Catholic perspective?  We bring together the best of the old and new, the spiritual and the secular, to help you know who you are at your core, all grounded in an authentically Catholic understanding of your human person.  With an experiential exercise from Dr. Gerry, too.   For the full experience with visuals, slides, B-roll, conversation and discussion in the comments section and so much more, check us out on our YouTube channel here:  www.youtube.com/@InteriorIntegration4Catholics

We offer you a new and better way of understanding yourself and others – Internal Family Systems (IFS).  But what is IFS?  What are “parts”?  Who are our internal managers, firefighters, and exiles?  Who is your innermost self and what are his or her eight primary characteristics?  What are burdens and what are the extreme roles parts take on after trauma, attachment injuries, or relational wounds?  What is “blending”?  Join IFS therapists Marion Moreland, David Edwards, and me, Dr. Peter, for this overview of IFS as we begin our 2025 deep dive into IFS, grounded in a Catholic understanding of the human person – not just with information for our heads, but also with an experiential exercise for our hearts. For the full experience with visuals, slides, B-roll, conversation and discussion in the comments section and so much more, check us out on our YouTube channel here:  www.youtube.com/@InteriorIntegration4Catholics

Fr. Dave Pivonka TOR, president of Franciscan University joins us to discuss the integration of personal formation for college students.  We address the danger of over-spiritualizing – spiritual bypassing – and how many of the struggles in the Church in the last 50 years are due to human formation deficits.  Fr. Pivonka shares his insights about how transformation first happens interiorly, inside oneself – and then radiates outward to change the world.  We discuss the difficulties that college students frequently face, the importance of community, concerns about pietism, and embracing our true identity.  College students and their parents will not want to miss this episode. 

1. Intro: Welcome to the podcast Interior Integration for Catholics 
   1. Interior Integration for Catholics brings to you in each episode the best psychological information essential for your human formation, knowledge that is fundamental in shoring up the natural foundation for your Catholic spiritual life.  
   2. Often said that if you want to start an argument, bring up sex, politics or religion.  Those are the tried and true, sure-fire ways to stoke disagreement among people.  
   3. This podcast helps you focus inward on your interior integration -- to help you bring together the different parts of yourself into unity and harmony with God -- so we're going to leave the politics and social justice questions and societal reform efforts and climate change and all those big-picture, macro-level, externally-focused topics out of our conversation, so that leaves us with sex and religion.  And we're going to take on both of them together because 
   4. In this podcast, we confront the tough internal questions we Catholics have in our day-to-day lives, we confront head-on our struggles in the natural realm, the psychological difficulties that keep us from fully loving our Lord and our Lady in a deep, personal, intimate way and living out our vocations, including our vocation to Catholic marriage which necessarily brings in both sexuality and religion.
   5. And we're dealing with sexuality and religion in this episode for two primary reasons: first to free you to love God our Father, Jesus our Brother, the Holy Spirit and Our Mother Mary more and more over time and 
   6. Second, to love you neighbor as yourself -- And who is your neighbor?  If you are married, your first neighbor, your closest neighbor, the neighbor toward whom you have the most responsibilities is your spouse.  Because of your marriage vows.  

I, Roger, take you, Sarah, to be my wife. I promise to be true to you in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health. I will love you and honor you all the days of my life. 

1. I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski and I am here with you, to be your host and guide.  
2. This podcast is part of Souls and Hearts, our online outreach at soulsandhearts.com, which is all about shoring up our natural foundation for the Catholic spiritual life, all about overcoming psychological obstacles to being loved and to loving God and neighbor
3. This is episode 58, released on March 8, 2021
4. This is the tenth episode in our series on sexuality the second in our subseries on Catholic marriages 
5. Way back in episode 50, the second one in this series on sexuality, we explored what a healthy, ordered, fully Catholic sexuality looks like.  
6. Now we are zeroing in on sexuality within Catholic marriages and we're going diagnose some extremely common relational problems between Catholic spouses that get expressed through how they relate sexually.  
7. So this episode is titled The Catholic Marriage Bed.  The Catholic Marriage Bed.
8. So get ready, prepare yourself for light bulbs to switch on and shine brightly as we explore new and much clearer ways of thinking about sexual life in Catholic marriages, grounded in the perennial teachings of the Catholic Church and informed by the best of psychology. 
9. I'm doing this subseries on sexuality within Catholic marriage because I want you to have ways out of the sexual traps that so many Catholic married couple find themselves in, the negative cycles, the problematic repeating patterns that are so frustrating, that cause so much conflict and that harm people, even Catholic spouses who want to do the right thing.   
10. And even if you're not trapped, your marriage is sound, love is growing -- there is going to be so much in these episodes to deepen the understanding, the awareness, the empathy, the commitment, and the love.  
11. So we are discussing the marriage bed.  I'm using the image of a canopy bed to illustrate all the psychological and relational aspects in the natural realm that go into a vibrant, life-giving Catholic married sexuality.  We're going to be painting a word picture, a conceptual diagram of a canopy bed, with all the pieces of that bed named, labels and defined, and show how all the parts of the bed are essential to a grounded, peaceful, harmonious shared sexual life in Catholic marriage.   
12. But first let's review the Lay of the Land, the Current Situation
     
    1. We are going to start with a broad overview here.  Key Words:  Confusion.  Lot of confusion about sexuality in our culture today
        
       1. Wider array of generally socially accepted sexual practices in our land than has ever existed before.  
          1. Internet has provided a forum to bring together people who practice all kinds of 
    2. 
       
       1. Greater amount of disagreement about what healthy sexual life looks like
    3.  
       1. Moving away from natural law
    4.  
       1. Things that were obvious even 20 years ago, even 10 years are not being questioned
           
          1. Can a man become a woman? -- now an open question being debated in our society
       2.  
          1. Can two men and a woman all be in the same marriage?  Can a woman marry a dolphin?  In 2006, British millionaire Sharon Tendler married a dolphin named Cinderella, at the Eilat Reef.
       3.  
    5. 
       
13. 
    
    1. Lot of Confusion about what a healthy, ordered  Catholic Sexuality should look like -- reviewed this in episode 50
        
       1. Opinions:  Survey data -- wide variety of opinions on sexual morality
           
          1. Pew 2014 Survey of more than 7200 Catholics, 57% Favor or Strongly Favor Same-sex Marriages 
       2. 
          
          1. Pew 2016 survey of 817 Catholics only 8% of Catholics believe using contraception is morally wrong.  41% believe its morally acceptable and 48% believe it's not a moral issue.
       3.  
          1. Pew 2019 Survey of 675 adult Catholics -- 62% of Catholic said that casual sex between consenting adults who are not in a committed relationship is always or sometimes acceptable.  Only 22% of Catholics said consensual casual sex never acceptable.  
       4. 
          
    2. 
       
       1. Wide Diversity of Sexual practices among Catholics
           
          1. Hard to find solid, recent data on this.  Talking to people you find out things. 
       2. 
          
          1. What about oral sex, role-play sex, mutual masturbation, viewing pornography together, using sex toys together, and going beyond into anal sex, fetishes of various kinds, bondage and the list goes on and on.  
       3. 
          
          1. Global sex toy market -- $34 billion  $4.50 for every man woman and child.  Tens of billions, estimates ranging up to $100 billion per year for porn.   
       4. 
          
    3. 
       
       1. But much more personally, for many Catholic spouses their sexual experiences in marriage are a great source of distress, pain, confusion  
          1. Internal conflicts about what is morally right and wrong
          2. Disagreements about sexual practices between Catholic spouses -- limited conflict resolutions'
          3. Inability for Catholic spouses to communicate about intimate sexual matters 
          4. Feeling devalued in the sexual aspects of the marital relationship
          5. Feeling used sexually, exploited, neglected.  
          6. High levels of dissatisfaction in the sexual relationship and intimacy more generally
          7. Not feeling seen, known, heard, understood, accepted as ...

The One Main Psychological Reason Why Catholic Marriages Fail

1. Intro: Welcome to the podcast Interior Integration for Catholics 
   1. Interior Integration for Catholics brings to you in each episode the best psychological information essential for your human formation, knowledge that is fundamental in shoring up the natural foundation for your Catholic spiritual life.  
   2. In this podcast, we confront the tough questions we Catholics have in our day-to-day lives, we confront head on our struggles in the natural realm, the psychological difficulties that keep us from fully loving our Lord and our Lady in a deep, personal, intimate way and living out our vocations. 
   3. And we deal with these difficult, demanding issues for one primary reason: to free you to love God our Father, Jesus our Brother, the Holy Spirit and Our Mother Mary more and more over time.  
   4. This podcast helps you focus inward on your interior integration -- to help you bring together the different parts of yourself into unity and harmony with God.
   5. Together, we are on a journey toward deep transformation, a radical conversion at the core of our being so that our souls can one day enter into contemplative union with God. 
   6. I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski and I am here with you, to be your host and guide.  
   7. This podcast is part of Souls and Hearts, our online outreach at soulsandhearts.com, which is all about shoring up our natural foundation for the Catholic spiritual life, all about overcoming psychological obstacles to being loved and to loving God and neighbor
   8. This is episode 57, released on March 1, 2021
   9. This is the ninth episode in our series on sexuality and in this episode, we are turning our attention to Catholic marriages -- such an important, essential topic for our day and age, Catholic marriages
   10. And we are going to start with the real, deeper, often hidden reasons why Catholic marriages fall apart
   11. So this episode is titled The One Main Psychological Reason Why Catholic Marriages Fail
   12. Get ready for the deep dive into new ways of thinking about Catholic marriages, from an informed psychological perspective. 
   13. Focusing on the psychological aspects here -- not the spiritual ones. 
       1. Not qualified to judge souls, make statements about their virtues or vices
       2. Not criticizing or condemning, but rather focusing on understanding with gentleness and compassion
       3. You catch more flies with honey than vinegar  
       4. Focus on the natural level.   
   14.  What about you, Dr. Peter -- what do you know about marriage?  Fair question.  25th year of marriage, one marriage, 7 children.  
2. Windup: The Current State of Catholic Marriages
    
   1. Definitions
       
      1. What is Catholic Marriage 
         1. Catholic Dictionary:  
   2. 
      
3. 
   

As a natural institution, the lasting union of a man and a woman who agree to give and receive rights over each other for the performance of the act of generation and for the fostering of their mutual love.

The state of marriage implies four chief conditions: 1. there must be a union of opposite sexes; it is therefore opposed to all forms of unnatural, homosexual behavior; 2. it is a permanent union until the death of either spouse; 3. it is an exclusive union, so that extramarital acts are a violation of justice; and 4. its permanence and exclusiveness are guaranteed by contract; mere living together, without mutually binding themselves to do so, is concubinage and not marriage.

Christ elevated marriage to a sacrament of the New Law. Christian spouses signify and partake of the mystery of that unity and fruitful love which exists between Christ and his Church, helping each other attain to holiness in their married life and in the rearing and education of their children. 

1. Emphasis on the Sacramental Aspect -- discussing sacramental marriages here.  
2. Covenant, goes far beyond a Contract - no fault divorce, temporary contract.  
3. What is fail?
    
   1. Broad Definition:  
      1. To prove deficient or lacking
      2. to perform ineffectively or inadequately
      3. to fall short of success or achievement in something expected, attempted, desired, or approved
      4. to leave something undone  
4. 
   
   1. One way that we could consider a marriage to fail is by divorce
       
      1. Stats
          
         1. 2014 Pew Research Survey of 885 Catholics 19% of those Catholic adults 18 years old were divorced or separated
      2.  
         1. Consistent with Georgetown's Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate
             
            1. About 20% or one in five Catholic adults have experienced divorce in their lifetimes 
         2. 
            
            1. About 36% of Americans who marry divorce at some point.  
         3. 
            
            1. 28% of Catholics who marry ever divorce -- lower than the general average
         4.  
      3. 
         
         1. Old canard that half of all Catholic marriage end in divorce -- not true.  More like a quarter.  
      4. 
         
         1. Still that's a lot -- 28%.  
      5. 
         
         1. And I don't think success in marriage is defined by not getting divorced
      6.  
         1. Not getting divorced by itself is not sufficient to call a marriage successful.  
      7. 
         
   2. 
      
5. 
   
   1. Abusive marriages held together by 
6. 
   
   1. Distant Roommates -- coolness, tolerating each other's existence
7.  
   1. Contrast with a life-giving marriage
8.  
9. Ways marriages fail
    
   1. Unilateral -- one spouse abandons the other
10.  
    1. Mutual -- each spouse abandons the other
11.  
    1. Distancing -- roommate model -- could be cordial or not
12.  
13. God's view of marriage
     
    1. Marriage as a covenant, not a contract  
       1. CCC 1603 God himself is the author of marriage.  The vocation to marriage is written in the very nature of man and woman as they came from the hand of the Creator.  
       2. Wedding at Cana -- Beginning of Jesus public life
       3. Life of Mary as Seen by the Mystics -- Jesus playing
14. 
    
15. Hurdle
     
    1. Marriage is Tough
        
       1. Reasons
           
          1. No one can hurt us, disappoint us, or get under our skin quite like a spouse. 
       2. 
          
          1. Hard to anticipate the difficulties.  The crosses.   
       3. 
          
    2. 
       
16. 
    
    1. Marriage Difficulties affect us all
17.  
    1. Even if we aren't married
        
       1. Considering our parents' marriage
    2.  
       1. Friends' marriages
    3.  
18. 
    
    1. Marriage as bedrock of society -- USCCB
        
       1. Aristotle wrote that the family is nature’s established association for the supply of mankind’s everyday wants. 
    2. 
       
       1. USCCB: Marriage is the bedrock of society.  
    3. 
       
19. 
    

Marriages benefit society by building and strengthening human relationships within the home

(among spouses and children) and beyond (involving relatives, neighbors, and communities). For

this reason, the family has long been understood as the fundamental unit of society, the

foundation f...

1. Intro: Welcome to the podcast Interior Integration for Catholics 
   1. Interior Integration for Catholics brings to you in each episode the best psychological information essential for your human formation, knowledge that is fundamental in shoring up the natural foundation for your Catholic spiritual life.  
   2. In this podcast, we confront the tough questions we Catholics have in our day-to-day lives, we confront head on our struggles in the natural realm, the psychological difficulties that keep us from fully loving our Lord and our Lady in a deep, personal, intimate way. 
   3. And we deal with these difficult, demanding issues for one primary reason: to free you to love God our Father, Jesus our Brother, the Holy Spirit and Our Mother Mary more and more over time.  
   4. This podcast helps you focus inward on your interior integration -- to help you bring together the different parts of yourself into unity and harmony with God.
   5. 'Together, we are on a journey toward deep transformation in our mindsets, our heartsets and our bodysets, a radical transformation at the core of our being so that our souls can one day enter into contemplative union with God. 
   6. I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski and I am here with you, to be your host and guide.  
   7. This podcast is part of Souls and Hearts, our online outreach at soulsandhearts.com, which is all about shoring up our natural foundation for the Catholic spiritual life, all about overcoming psychological obstacles to being loved and to loving God and neighbor
   8. This is episode 56, released on February 22, 2021
   9. This is the eighth episode in our series on sexuality and the second one on Pornography.  
   10. And it is titled: What is Essential for Catholics to Recover from Porn?
   11. And I am really happy to have Dr. Gerry Crete, past president of the Catholic Psychological Association and the CEO and co-founder of Souls and Hearts with me for this episode

1. Recognize that the fantasy involved in the pornography choices represent a dynamic that seeks to meet the unmet need
    
   1. Safety
2.  
   1. Attachment injuries
3.  
   1. Being seen
4.  
   1. Seeing others
5.  
   1. Connection
6.  
   1. Sense of “power” or agency
7.  
   1. Traumatic re-enactment
8.  
   1. The fantasy may provide a temporary answer to those needs while avoiding the pain
9.  
   1. Allow him to experience having his needs met in a healthy way
10.  
    1. What new information can you share with him
11.  
    1. What new role or position can the protector have now
12.  
    1. Recognize the courage it takes for the protector to seek a new role and embrace change
13.  
    1. Allow time to grieve the losses that pornography use has brought
        
       1. Recognize negative effects of pornography or other sexual acting out behavior in one’s life
    2.  
14. 
    
    1. Prepare to make reparations
        
       1. Wife/Family
    2.  
       1. Self
    3.  
       1. Others
    4.  
       1. God
    5.  
15. 
    
    1. Invite protector to grow and embrace freedom – recognize there will be a period of growth – it will need time and patience. Commit to being by his side
16.  
    1. What does it mean for the parts to be “in recovery”
        
       1. The self is present – better connections with others
    2.  
       1. Completing tasks with a sense of completion rather than trying to escape pain (life)
    3.  
       1. Ability to set goals and focus on them rather than obsession with momentary perceived needs
    4.  
       1. Willingness to receive feedback
    5.  
       1. Ability to recognize time rather than entering into a blackhole of time
    6.  
       1. Finds meaning in activities and relationships
    7.  
17. 
    

1. Intro: Welcome to the podcast Interior Integration for Catholics 
   1. Interior Integration for Catholics brings to you in each episode the best psychological information essential for your human formation, knowledge that is fundamental in shoring up the natural foundation for your Catholic spiritual life.  
   2. In this podcast, we confront the tough questions we Catholics have in our day-to-day lives, we confront head on our struggles in the natural realm, the psychological difficulties that keep us from fully loving our Lord and our Lady in a deep, personal, intimate way. 
   3. And we deal with these difficult, demanding issues for one primary reason: to free you to love God our Father, Jesus our Brother, the Holy Spirit and Our Mother Mary more and more over time.  
   4. This podcast helps you focus inward on your interior integration -- to help you bring together the different parts of yourself into unity and harmony with God.
   5. 'Together, we are on a journey toward deep transformation in our mindsets, our heartsets and our bodysets, a radical transformation at the core of our being so that our souls can one day enter into contemplative union with God. 
   6. I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski and I am here with you, to be your host and guide.  
   7. This podcast is part of Souls and Hearts, our online outreach at soulsandhearts.com, which is all about shoring up our natural foundation for the Catholic spiritual life, all about overcoming psychological obstacles to being loved and to loving God and neighbor
   8. This is episode 55, released on February 15, 2021
   9. This is the seventh episode in our series on sexuality and the fourth one on masturbation.  
   10. And it is titled: Why Catholics Use Pornography
2. Practical steps you can take to overcome a pornography problem. These are good but only go so far:
    
   1. Device management
3.  
   1. Accountability
4.  
   1. Support Group
5.  
   1. Therapy
6.  
7.  Inner Work: Here we get to the root of the problem and find lasting solutions
    
   1. Recognize that the pornography use has a negative effect on one’s life
       
      1. Marriage and family
   2.  
      1. Career
   3.  
      1. Downtime
   4.  
      1. Relationships
   5.  
      1. Spiritual life
   6.  
8. 
   
   1. Awareness that something must be done and that one needs to commit to change
9.  
   1. What part of me doesn’t want to change? It’s a “protector”
10.  
    1. Recognize that the part of you turning to pornography is a protector
11.  
    1. The protector doesn’t want the system to feel pain
12.  
    1. At some point the protector learned that pornography is an escape from pain
13.  
    1. The protector also learned that pornography can meet unmet needs
14.  
    1. Identify the positive intention of the “pornography” protector
15.  
    1. Identify what this protector really believes about why pornography is the only answer
16.  
    1. See this protector (unblend) and recognize his misguided but sincere intention
17.  
    1. If the protector is protecting an exile (the pain) then promise to attend to the exile
18.  
    1. Allow him to share with you his real unmet needs
19.  
    1. Recognize that the fantasy involved in the pornography choices represent a dynamic that seeks to meet the unmet need
        
       1. Safety
    2.  
       1. Attachment injuries
    3.  
       1. Being seen
    4.  
       1. Seeing others
    5.  
       1. Connection
    6.  
       1. Sense of “power” or agency
    7.  
       1. Traumatic re-enactment
    8.  
20. 
    

1. Intro: Welcome to the podcast Interior Integration for Catholics 
   1. Interior Integration for Catholics brings to you in each episode the best psychological information essential for your human formation, knowledge that is fundamental in shoring up the natural foundation for your Catholic spiritual life.  
   2. In this podcast, we confront the tough questions we Catholics have in our day-to-day lives, we confront head on our struggles in the natural realm, the psychological difficulties that keep us from fully loving our Lord and our Lady in a deep, personal, intimate way. 
   3. And we deal with these difficult, demanding issues for one primary reason: to free you to love God our Father, Jesus our Brother, the Holy Spirit and Our Mother Mary more and more over time.  
   4. This podcast helps you focus inward on your interior integration -- to help you bring together the different parts of yourself into unity and harmony with God.
   5. 'Together, we are on a journey toward deep transformation in our mindsets, our heartsets and our bodysets, a radical transformation at the core of our being so that our souls can one day enter into contemplative union with God. 
   6. I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski and I am here with you, to be your host and guide.  
   7. This podcast is part of Souls and Hearts, our online outreach at soulsandhearts.com, which is all about shoring up our natural foundation for the Catholic spiritual life, all about overcoming psychological obstacles to being loved and to loving God and neighbor
   8. This is episode 54, released on February 8, 2021
   9. This is the sixth episode in our series on sexuality and the fourth one on masturbation.  
   10. And it is titled:  Masturbation Recovery Stories
   11. We're following up on our last three episodes, number 51, 52 and 53, which have all been about masturbation, the Top 10 reasons why Catholic men masturbate, the 10 common mistakes they make as they try to recover from masturbation and live chaste lives, and the 20 remedies for those 10 common mistakes.   
   12. we're getting into answers for Catholics who experience masturbation as a dead-end, as a failed promise, as an inadequate answer for their deeper needs and desires. 
   13. So today, we're pulling all the conceptual information together and we are going to do three things.
   14. First, We will briefly review the 10 common mistakes and the 20 remedies for those mistakes
   15. Second, will discuss how to make an individualized recovery plan for masturbation
   16.  Third, we will pull all the information together into the stories of Richard and Luis, who we introduced in episode 51 -- we will review their histories, look at the mistakes they made is trying to free themselves from masturbation, discuss how they made their individualized plans for recovery, and how they broke free from masturbation.  
2. Review:  
   1. 10 Common Mistakes that Catholics make in breaking free from masturbation:
       
      1. Considering masturbation as the primary problem. -- Gotta go deeper
   2.  
      1. Pursuing compartmentalization or fragmentation instead of interior integration
   3.  
      1. Going it alone
   4.  
      1. Using only the spiritual means
   5.  
      1. Having a Power spirituality or a macho spirituality
   6.  
      1. Passive Spirituality
   7.  
      1. The why for the change
   8.  
      1. Shaming the self for failures
   9.  
      1. The All or Nothing Trap
   10.  
       1.  Failing to see the struggle with masturbation as a gift
   11.  
   12. 20 Remedies for those mistakes
        
       1. Commit to finding the real reason, with God's help.
   13.  
       1.  Bring God or Mary or a saint or your angel  into the search for the underlying causes
   14.  
       1. Committing to interior integration:   Interior acceptance of all parts, all desires, all impulses, all thoughts, all memories as real -- as part of reality. 
   15. 
       
       1. Find a confidant with whom you can check in daily.   Daily.  Not just regularly.  Daily
   16.  
       1. Get to confession and address the spiritual dimensions.  Talk about it.  Spiritual Director, Confessor
   17.  
       1. Working toward Intimate relationship with God
   18.  
       1. Time with Friends -- being deliberate out it.
   19.  
       1. Therapists -- especially Catholic IFS-informed  therapist
   20.  
       1. Sexaholics Anonymous or other groups
   21.  
       1. Online groups -- like the Resilient Catholic Community
   22.  
       1. Embracing the parts that carry our powerlessness, smallness, neediness -- we need those things, they are essential for us to be small enough to approach God.  Those parts are precious
   23.  
       1.  Focus on Humility.  Litany of humility.  Litany of Trust
   24.  
       1. Entering into relationship with God as a little child. Let the little children come to me.    St. Therese of Lisieux. 
   25. 
       
       1. Serenity Prayer:   Pray it every day.  And listen.  
   26. 
       
       1. Commit to doing what you can, even it seems like very little.  Remembering that as little children we can offer very little.
   27.  
       1. Exploring and discussing our motives with our trusted person.   Ask that person how he or she sees our motives.  
   28. 
       
       1.  Bringing those motives to prayer.  Lord that I may see.  Prayer of blind Bartimeus.  Domine ut vidiam. 
   29. 
       
       1. really working with our internal critic.  Understanding the reasons for the shaming, the good that the critic seeks in that -- and helping that critic integrate with the rest of your system, under the leadership of your core self.
   30.  
       1. Perseverance.  It's normal to fall.  We are fallen human beings in a fallen world.  We need to get up.  Every time. 
   31. 
       
       1. Seeking for how the struggle with masturbation is a gift.  
   32. 
       
3. Making a Plan
    
   1. All the above can be overwhelming-- Do I have to do it all? 
      1. First Overarching principle -- Work your plan out with someone else, someone you trust, someone that you sense is competent to help you. 
         1. This is vitally important, so you are not repeating mistake number 3, which is going it alone. 
         2. Talk it out with that person at length.  The whys and wherefores of each component of the plan.  
      2. Second Overarching principle Write out your plan.  It all becomes so much when you write it out.  
      3. Third Overarching principle --  take what is helpful for you in your plan and discard what is not.  Be flexible in your plan over time.  
      4. Fourth overarching principle -- build up your plan.  It make take time, build it up over time. 
         1. General trend over time -- general trajectory
         2. Week by week -- once you consolidate a part of your plan, add another part
      5. Fifth overarching principle -- adherence to the plan is your target.  Stay with the plan.  Much more certain than just having periods of abstinence from masturbation
4. 
   
5. Review of Parts
    
   1. IFS by Richard Schwartz  
6. 
   
   1. IF...

1. Intro: Welcome to the podcast Interior Integration for Catholics -- the podcast formerly known as Coronavirus Crisis: Carpe Diem!  
   1. Interior Integration for Catholics brings to you in each episode the best psychological information essential for your human formation, knowledge that is fundamental in shoring up the natural foundation for your Catholic spiritual life.  
   2. In this podcast, we confront the tough questions we Catholics have in our day-to-day lives, we confront head on our struggles in the natural realm, the psychological difficulties that keep us from fully loving our Lord and our Lady in a deep, personal, intimate way. 
   3. And we deal with these difficult, demanding issues for one primary reason: to free you to love God our Father, Jesus our Brother, the Holy Spirit and Our Mother Mary more and more over time.  
   4. This podcast helps you focus inward on your interior integration -- to help you bring together the different parts of yourself into unity and harmony with God.
   5. 'Together, we are on a journey toward deep transformation in our mindsets, our heartsets and our bodysets, a radical transformation at the core of our being so that our souls can one day enter into contemplative union with God. 
   6. I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski and I am here with you, to be your host and guide.  
   7. This podcast is part of Souls and Hearts, our online outreach at soulsandhearts.com, which is all about shoring up our natural foundation for the Catholic spiritual life, all about overcoming psychological obstacles to being loved and to loving God and neighbor
   8. This is episode 53, released on February 1, 2021
   9. This is the fifth episode in our series on sexuality and the third one on masturbation.  
   10. And it is titled:  Breaking Free from Masturbation, Part 2
   11. We're following up on our last episode, episode 52 -- Breaking free from masturbation Part 1.  Part 2 is following Part 1.  
   12. So today, we're continuing with finding answers for Catholics who deeply desire to have their sexuality ordered toward relationship, toward God, and toward their spouses or future spouses in a way that is life-giving.
   13. we're getting into answers for Catholics who experience masturbation as a dead-end, as a failed promise, as an inadequate answer for their deeper needs and desires. 
   14. We address 6 more mistakes that Catholics make in their attempts to overcome masturbation
   15. And we will get into 10 more remedies for those additional six mistakes, and the last remedy is the most important one -- so important that I think of it as the secret solution, the one so few people who struggle with masturbation really consider, so we're saving the best for last there.  
   16. Not just about masturbation -- you can take out masturbation and substitute in any other sexual problem -- fetishes, porn, sexting, sexual obsessions, sexual compulsions, excessive sexual fantasies, whatever
   17. People are also finding that these episodes are helpful for getting to the root any symptomatic behavior -- binge eating, excessive shopping or video games, too much vegging out on Netflix, and so on.  
   18. Just to review, in the last episode, I promised you a map, not a ride in a limousine or on a flying carpet to your destination.  It's a map, not an individualized treatment plan.  This is not therapy.  It's not magic.  You still have to make your own journey.  But this map lays out the terrain and the compass will provide direction for you on that journey.  
   19. Some of you have been suffering for a long time.  I get that.  God sees your efforts, he sees your good intentions.  
2. Focus of this podcast is on interior integration -- overarching goal in the natural realm.  Not talking about spiritual goals here, we are talking about the natural realm.  
   1. So we need a way of understanding and modeling interior integration and also its nemesis -- interior fragmentation.  
   2. I borrow heavily from Internal Family Systems approach, aka IFS approach, originated by Richard Schwartz.
   3. I reviewed it in the last episode, number 52.  
   4. Parts are like personalities within us.  Imagine a kid who is considering taking a cookie from the cookie jar.  One part of him wants to have the cookie and another part wants him to be good and not have to struggle with a guilty conscience, and another part doesn't want to face Mom's anger if he gets caught.  
3. Mistakes
    
   1. List of mistakes
       
      1. Review of the first four
          
         1. Considering masturbation as the primary problem. -- Gotta go deeper
      2.  
         1. Pursuing compartmentalization or fragmentation instead of interior integration
      3.  
         1. Going it alone
      4.  
         1. Using only the spiritual means
      5.  
   2. 
      
      1. Here are the next six
          
         1. Having a Power spirituality or a macho spirituality
      2.  
         1. Passive Spirituality
      3.  
         1. The why for the change
      4.  
         1. Shaming the self for failures
      5.  
         1. The All or Nothing Trap
      6.  
         1. The biggest Mistake, the one almost everybody makes with this.  Stay tuned till the end
      7.  
   3. 
      
4. 
   
   1. Mistake 5:  Power spirituality -- Macho spirituality
       
      1. Slogan for the Power Spirituality -- God helps those who help themselves
          
         1. In February of 2000 George Barna did a poll asking if “The Bible teaches that God helps those who help themselves” and the results were eye-opening:
             
            • 53% of Americans agree strongly [that it could be found in the Bible]
         2.  
            • 22% agree somewhat
         3.  
            • 7% disagree somewhat
         4.  
            • 14% disagree strongly
         5.  
            • 5% stated they don’t know
         6.  
      2. 
         
   2. 
      
5. 
   

Of “born-again” Christians 68% agreed, and 81% of non “born-again” Christians agreed with the statement. Despite being of non-Biblical origin, the phrase topped a poll of the most widely known Bible verses. Seventy-five percent (75%) of American teens said they believed that it was the central message of the Bible.  

1. This saying is ancient, goes back to Greece -- The Gods help those who help themselves, you see this expressed in two of Aesop's fables  
2.  Aesop was an extraordinarily ugly slave who by his wit and intelligence gains his freedom and becomes a counsellor to rulers in Greece.  He is believed to have lived between 620 and 564 BC -- his stories may be much older than that, having been handed down in an oral tradition.  

    A WAGGONER was once driving a heavy load along a very muddy way. At last he came to a part of the road where the wheels sank half-way into the mire, and the more the horses pulled, the deeper sank the wheels. So the Waggoner threw down his whip, and knelt down and prayed to Hercules the Strong. “O Hercules, help me in this my hour of distress,” quoth he. But Hercules appeared to him, and said:

    “Tut, man, don’t sprawl there. Get up and put your shoulder to the wheel."

    “The gods help them that help themselves.”

1. 17th Century English political theorist Algernon Sidney made the modern rendering in English.  
2. My grandpa Roberts ...

1. Intro: Welcome to the podcast Interior Integration for Catholics -- the podcast formerly known as Coronavirus Crisis: Carpe Diem!  
   1. Interior Integration for Catholics brings to you each week the best psychological information essential for your human formation, knowledge that is fundamental in shoring up the natural foundation for your Catholic spiritual life.  
   2. In this podcast, we ask and answer the tough questions about the real problems we Catholics have in our day-to-day lives, our struggles in the natural realm, the psychological difficulties that keep us from fully loving our Lord and our Lady in a deep, personal, intimate way. 
   3. And we deal with these tough issues for one primary reason: to free you to love God our Father, Jesus our Brother, the Holy Spirit and Our Mother Mary more and more over time.  
   4. This podcast helps you focus inward on your interior integration -- to help you bring together the different parts of yourself into unity and harmony with God's truth, goodness and beauty
   5. Together, we are looking for a deep transformation in our mindsets, our heartsets and our bodysets, a radical transformation at the core of our being so that our souls unite with God and we can rise to the challenges and opportunities He provides us.   
   6. I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski and I am here with you, to be your host and guide.  
   7. This podcast is part of Souls and Hearts, our online outreach at soulsandhearts.com, which is all about shoring up our natural foundation for the Catholic spiritual life, all about overcoming psychological obstacles to being loved and to loving God and neighbor
   8. This is episode 52, released on January 25, 2021
   9. This is the fourth episode in our series on sexuality and the second one on masturbation.  
   10. And it is titled:  Breaking Free from Masturbation -- A Roadmap  
   11. We're following up on our last episode, episode 51 -- The Top 10 Reasons Why Catholic Men Masturbate.
        
       1. In that episode, we covered the underlying psychological issues that fuel impulses to masturbate.
   12.  
       1. But it's not enough to just understand the issues more clearly
   13.  
       1. We need guidance on how to live differently, how to work with the entirety of ourselves -- all of our parts, all of our modes of operating -- in the area of sexuality.
   14.  
   15. So today, we're getting into answers for Catholics who deeply desire to have their sexuality ordered toward relationship, toward God, and toward their spouses or future spouses in a way that is life-giving.
   16. we're getting into answers for Catholics who experience masturbation as a dead-end, as a failed promise, as an inadequate answer for their deeper needs and desires. 
   17. We will get into the first four mistakes that Catholics make in their attempts to overcome masturbation
   18. And we will get into the 10 remedies for those first four mistakes
   19. Not just about masturbation -- you can take out masturbation and substitute in any other sexual problem -- fetishes, porn, sexting, sexual obsessions, sexual compulsions, excessive sexual fantasies, whatever
   20. Remember that I promised you a map, not a ride in a limousine or on a magic carpet to your destination.  It's a map, not an individualized treatment plan.  This is not therapy.  It's not magic.  You still have to make your own journey.  But this map lays out the terrain and the compass will provide direction for you on that journey.  
   21. Some of you have been suffering for a long time.  I get that.  God sees your efforts, he sees your good intentions.  
2. Focus of this podcast is on interior integration -- overarching goal in the natural realm.  Not talking about spiritual goals here, we are talking about the natural realm.  
   1. So we need a way of understanding and modeling interior integration and also its nemesis -- interior fragmentation.  
   2. I borrow heavily from Internal Family Systems approach, aka IFS approach, originated by Richard Schwartz.
       
      1. Really helps me clinically to understand the polarizations inside of myself and others -- the tensions, the conflicting desires and impulses, the internal tug-of-war, especially about moral issues that carry so much emotional weight, like masturbation
   3.  
      1. And IFS not only helps us understand our internal world, it guides us as to how to heal, how to change, how to grow in the natural realm.  
   4. 
      

This podcast is heavily influenced by IFS, but IFS grounded in a Catholic worldview.

1. Review of Parts -- IFS perspective
    
   1. Multiplicity and Unity of Self
2.  
   1. Really helpful for understanding why Catholic men do what they don't want to do.
       
      1. Romans 7:15 -- St. Paul's lament  I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.
   2.  
3. 
   
   1. Discussion of Parts
       
      1. within each person are separate collections thoughts, emotions, attitudes, impulses, desires, abilities, interests, relational styles, body sensations, and worldviews that are not just transient emotional states, but rather constitute discrete “parts,” subpersonalities or distinct modes of operating within the person’s larger internal system -- they seem like selves within us. 
   2. 
      
      1. Each part within us can metaphorically seem like its own little person, with its own particular range of emotion, style of expression, abilities, desires views of the world. 
         1. Modes of operating
         2. Subpersonalities
         3. Orchestra model
         4. Focus is on integration.  
      2. Get forced into extreme roles -- attachment injuries and relational traumas
      3. Three roles -- exiles, managers, and firefighters.  
         1. Exiles -- 
            1. most sensitive -- become injured or outraged by important other in the family or social world.  Threatens the system, external relationships
            2. Exploited, rejected, abandoned in external relationships
            3. Want care and love, rescue, redemption
            4. shame.  Need for redemption 
         2. Managers
             
            1. Protective, strategic, controlling environment, keep things safe
         3.  
            1. Obsessions. Compulsions, reclusiveness, passivity, numbing. Panic attacks, somatic complaints, depressive episodes, hypervigilance.
         4.  
         5. Firefighters
             
            1. Stifle, anesthetize, distract from feelings of exiles
         6.  
            1. No concern for consequences
         7.  
            1. Binge eating, drug/alcohol use, dissociation, sexual risk taking, cutting
         8.  
      4. Parts can take over the person
          
         1. Like in Pixar Movie Inside Out -- anger taking over the control panel of the main character Riley
      5.  
         1. We call it blending.  
      6. 
         
4. 
   
   1. Intentions of parts -- always good, but the means they choose can be very harmful, maladaptive.  
5. 
   
6. Mistakes
    
   1. List of mistakes
       
      1. Considering masturbation as the primary problem. -- Gotta go deeper
   2.  
      1. Pursuing compartmentalization or fragmentation instead of interior integration
   3.  
      1. Going it alone
   4.  
      1. Using only the spiritual means
   5.  
      1. Six more common mistakes, but those are...

1. Intro: Welcome to the podcast Interior Integration for Catholics -- the podcast formerly known as Coronavirus Crisis: Carpe Diem!  
   1. Interior Integration for Catholics brings to you each week the best psychological information essential for your human formation, knowledge that is so fundamental in shoring up the natural foundation for your Catholic spiritual life.  
   2. In this podcast, we ask and answer the tough questions about the real problems we Catholics have in our day-to-day lives, our struggles in the natural realm, the psychological difficulties that keep us from fully loving our Lord and our Lady in a deep, personal, intimate way. 
   3. In order to free you to love God the Father, Jesus, the Holy Spirit and Our Mother Mary, I help to you focus inward on your interior integration -- to help you bring together the different parts of yourself into unity and harmony with God's truth, goodness and beauty
   4. Together, we are looking for a deep transformation in our mindsets, our heartsets and our bodysets, a radical transformation at the core of our being so that our souls unite with God and we can rise to the challenges and opportunities He provides us.   
   5. I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski and I am here with you, to be your host and guide.  
   6. This podcast is part of Souls and Hearts, our online outreach at soulsandhearts.com, which is all about shoring up our natural foundation for the Catholic spiritual life, all about overcoming psychological obstacles to being loved and to loving God and neighbor
   7. This is episode 51, released on January 18, 2021
   8. This is the third episode in our series on sexuality. 
   9. and it is titled: Top 10 Reasons Why Catholic Men Masturbate.
   10. And maybe some of you think you know why Catholic Men masturbate.  
   11. But maybe, just maybe some of you are not satisfied with the simple, surface answers.  Maybe some of you suspect that there are psychological reasons may be a lot deeper than the common explanations would suggest.  
   12. I'm here to say that I think there is so much more going on with masturbation than what may be available in conscious awareness.  I've been a psychologist since 2001 and in the last 20 years, I've had the opportunity to explore the reasons for masturbation in the lives of many, many Catholic men.  
       1. Top ten reasons that Catholic men give for why they masturbate  -- but wait, there's more
       2. Top ten deeper reasons why they really masturbate
   13. So if you are interested in getting a much more complete answers, answers that plumb the depths of our psyches stay tuned.  
   14. Why not women?  Fair question.  I've seen far more Catholic men actively struggling with this than Catholic women -- and I'm going off my clinical experience.  Masturbation is a great concern for some women.  I just know less about it in the lives of women. 
       1. Many of the points are likely to be equally valid for women as for men.  
       2. Valuable for women to understand why Catholic men masturbate.  
   15. Parents, be mindful of how much of this you may want your young children to hear.  
2. Definitions
    
   1. Important to define our terms and be clear about the concepts 
      1. Confucius:  The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper names
      2. APA Dictionary of Psychology:  n. manipulation of one’s own genital organs, typically the penis or clitoris, for purposes of sexual gratification. The act is usually accompanied by sexual fantasies or erotic literature, pictures, or videos. Masturbation may also include the use of mechanical devices (e.g., a vibrator) or self-stimulation of other organs, such as the anus or nipples. 
      3. Objections:  overdone sense of propriety --  
         1. Victorian age -- women not able to be examined
         2. Coded language, often poorly understood
         3. Often driven by a sense of shame -- a desire to hide. 
         4. Victorian Age characterized by a lot of sexual acting out.  Lots of it.   
         5. "Self-abuse"  
         6. Fear of talking about masturbation will increase the likelihood of masturbating.  
            1. Depends on the context.  
            2. In a clinical context, no.  
      4. Rebuttal -- if we can put our experiences into language and share them verbally
          
         1. Much better able to engage our intellect
             
            1. Fr. John Hardon -- his 1981 book "The Catholic Catechism": in addressing masturbation P. 355:  More than ever, the Church is becoming aware of the need for probing beneath the surface of not only what a person is doing by why he is doing it.  Impulses and tendencies that well up from the subconscious (or unconscious) are seen as contributing to overt actions that reflect the behavioral pattern of the environment, even while they contradict the deepest values in which a person believes. 
         2. 
            
            1. Experiences no longer pre-verbal -- chaos of emotions, body sensations, images, sensory experiences, desires, impulses -- we need to be able to name them, or they remain shadowy, dark, ominous
         3.  
      5. 
         
         1. And our will -- we are less likely to act out on them 
      6. 
         
         1. less likely to sin
      7.  
         1. Contradicts a commonly held notion - that if we ignore, suppress, repress, avoid a problem it will go away
             
            1. Sin thrives in the darkness
         2.  
      8. 
         
3. 
   
   1. Secular Psychology Views on Masturbation
       
      1. Joe Kort, Ph.D.  2020 Article in Psychology Today:  Masturbation is Sexual Health.
   2.  
4. 
   

And yet here we are in 2020 and talking about masturbation is still taboo in most of society. And that’s a shame, literally and figuratively, because masturbation is still widely considered shameful, and because for most people it’s a healthy and normal activity. There is actually a term these days for those who prefer masturbation over other forms of sex: solosexual.

1. World has radically different views from the Catholic Church on sexuality.  
2. Mine is a minority opinion -- you can write me off as fringey if you want.  
3. Catholic teaching on Masturbation
    
   1. CCC  
4. 
   

 2351 Lust is disordered desire for or inordinate enjoyment of sexual pleasure. Sexual pleasure is morally disordered when sought for itself, isolated from its procreative and unitive purposes.

2352 By masturbation is to be understood the deliberate stimulation of the genital organs in order to derive sexual pleasure. "Both the Magisterium of the Church, in the course of a constant tradition, and the moral sense of the faithful have been in no doubt and have firmly maintained that masturbation is an intrinsically and gravely disordered action.""The deliberate use of the sexual faculty, for whatever reason, outside of marriage is essentially contrary to its purpose." For here sexual pleasure is sought outside of "the sexual relationship which is demanded by the moral order and in which the total meaning of mutual self-giving and human procreation in the context of true love is achieved."139

1. Is Masturbation a Mortal Sin?
    
   1. CCC  1857 For a sin to be mortal, three conditions must together be met: "Mortal sin is sin whose object is grave matter and which is also committed with full knowledge and deliberate consent."131
2.  
   1. Grave matter -- Grave ...

1. Intro: Welcome to the podcast Interior Integration for Catholics -- the podcast formerly known as Coronavirus Crisis: Carpe Diem! And for one episode, the last episode we called it "Resilient Catholics" -- but there is a podcast out there already called "The Resilient Catholic" so we don’t want to create confusion and division. 
   1. Interior
   2. Integration
   3. Catholics
   4. Encompasses
       
      1. Human Formation
   5.  
      1. Radical Transformation
   6.  
      1. Shoring up the natural foundation for the spiritual life
   7.  
      1. Resilience
   8.  
   9. I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski and I am here with you, to be your host and guide.  
   10. This podcast is part of Souls and Hearts, our online outreach at soulsandhearts.com, which is all about shoring up our natural foundation for the Catholic spiritual life, all about overcoming psychological obstacles to being loved and to loving God and neighbor
   11. This is episode 50, released on January 11, 2021
   12. and it is titled: In Search of a healthy, ordered sexuality.  
   13. This is the second episode in our series on sexuality.  
   14. We are going to spend time on sexuality and in the coming weeks we will address many topics, including masturbation, pornography, adulterous affairs, pre-marital sex, asexuality, homosexuality, artificial contraception and sexual trauma and its effects.  
   15. But to put those issues into context, we need to understand what a health sexuality looks like.  
       1. Vitally important because sexuality is so sensitive to how we live our lives in the natural realm   
       2. Also vitally important because an authentic Catholic view on sexuality is so radically different from what the world offers us. 
       3. Most baptized Catholic reject Catholic teaching on many sexual issues. 
       4. So many Catholics struggle with sexual issues.  Lots of confusion. Lots of distress.  
       5. We need a guiding star, an image of what sexuality should be.  That's what this episode is about.
           
          1. We will look at the authoritative sources of Catholic teaching
       6.  
          1. but really flesh them out in a way that appreciates how people are wired physiologically, neurologically and psychologically
       7.  
          1. So we can have answers to why we so often find ourselves falling and going astray in the sexual realm.  
       8. 
          
   16. Parts
   17. Examples
2. Vitally important to recognize a healthy sexuality because our sexuality is so sensitive to how we live our lives in the natural realm -- are we living in an ordered, virtuous way in harmony with natural and divine realities, or are we basing our actions on our subjective, distorted perceptions of reality.  Sexuality is either the first or one of the first areas in our life to go wrong when we depart from reality.  Sensitive barometer to how things are ordered or not ordered in our lives.  
3. Most baptized Catholic report that they reject Catholic teaching on many sexual issues. 
   1. Pew 2014 Survey of more than 7200 Catholics, 57% Favor or Strongly Favor Same-sex Marriages 
   2. Pew 2016 survey of 817 Catholics only 8% of Catholics believe using contraception is morally wrong.  41% believe its morally acceptable and 48% believe it's not a moral issue.
   3. Lots more statistics
   4. Social referencing:  evaluating one’s own modes of thinking, expression, or behavior by comparing them with those of other people so as to understand how to react in a particular situation and to adapt one’s actions and reactions in ways that are perceived to be appropriate.  APA dictionary
   5. Lukewarm Catholics look a lot like lukewarm Methodists, look a lot like lukewarm Jews, look a lot like lukewarm Buddhists, look a lot like lukewarm agnostics, look a lot like lukewarm atheists. 
      1. Going with the cultural flow
      2. Relying on own perceptions and insights
      3. Everybody being influenced by the societal trends.  
   6. We don't want to be constrained
       
      1. Reductionism.  Universal, Eternal Moral Laws --> Confining, chafing Rules -->  outdated decrees from decades or centuries ago, promulgated by old white men in black cassocks who aren't supposed to be having sex anyway -- what do they know?  How are these teaching possibly relevant to my life in the 2020s.  Thou shalt not, thou shalt not, creating an impression that sex is bad, almost any sexual activity is bad, I'm tired of being told how bad I am . 
   7. 
      
      1. License vs. freedom 
         1. Freedom is the capacity to choose the good for me and for others
             
            1. Freedom is the power, rooted in reason and will, to act or not to act, to do this or that, and so to perform deliberate actions on one's own responsibility. By free will one shapes one's own life. Human freedom is a force for growth and maturity in truth and goodness; it attains its perfection when directed toward God, our beatitude (#1731).
         2.  
         3. License is the capacity to choose what I want -- to take what I want
             
            1.  root of licentiousness -- lacking legal or moral restraints and especially disregarding sexual restraints
         4.  
   8. 
      
      1. Me as the measure
          
         1. Enlightenment -- man as the measure of all things instead of God.
      2.  
         1. Ordered sexuality is what I think it is for me.  
            1. Assumption that I know what is best for me, by my own lights
                
               1. No need for divine revelation
            2.  
               1. No acceptance of an external authority
            3.  
               1. Chesterton “We do not really want a religion that is right where we are right. What we want is a religion that is right where we are wrong.” The Catholic Church and Conversion
            4.  
            5. Assumption that I can determine what is best for me.  
      3. 
         
   9. 
      

1. So many Catholics struggle with sexual issues.  Lots of confusion. Lots of distress.  
   1. Catholic teaching on sexuality is very misunderstood, often watered down, often misrepresented.
   2. Intensity of bodily experience -- affects us.  
   3. Market for it.  We have itching ears 
      1. 2 Timothy 4: 2-4  Preach the word: be instant in season, out of season: reprove, entreat, rebuke in all patience and doctrine.  3 For there shall be a time, when they will not endure sound doctrine; but, according to their own desires, they will heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears: 4 And will indeed turn away their hearing from the truth, but will be turned unto fables.
          
         1. St. Hilary of Poitiers:  mid-fourth century AD:  …they will gather teachers together for these things which they desire. They will compile a doctrine that fits in with their desires, since they are no longer eager to be taught. They want to bring together teachers for that which they already desire in order that this large number of teachers whom they have sought and assembled may satisfy the doctrines of their own passionate desires. ON THE TRINITY 10.2.69
      2.  
         1. GK Chesterton:  The Catholic Church and Conversion 1926 : We do not really want a religion that is right where we are right. What we want is a religion that is right where we are wrong. In these current fashions it is not really a question of the religion allowing us liberty; but (at the best) of the liberty allowing us a religion. Th...

1. Intro: Welcome to the podcast Resilient Catholics -- the podcast formerly known as Coronavirus Crisis: Carpe Diem!  That's right, in this new year we have a new name, and it's fitting because we have broadened our scope to do so much more than help you, our listeners deal with the Coronavirus Crisis.  
   1. When this started out.
       
      1. Coping skills, build resilience, not alone-- crisis management.  Now a long crisis.  
   2. 
      
   3. Now not just about making it through the coronavirus crisis
   4. Now we are really about increasing resilience through transformation -- a radical transformation of self, overcoming anything that gets in the way of us loving God our Father and Mary our Mother with the trust and dependence of a little child. 
      1. Resilience from a Catholic perspective
      2. And there are both great similarities and great differences in resilience understood from a Catholic Perspective and Resilience from a secular perspective
   5. Resilience through Human formation --  a lot more to say about this in the future. 
   6. We are still all about rising up and embrace the possibilities and opportunities for spiritual and psychological growth right now, in these days, all grounded in a Catholic worldview.    
   7. I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski and I am here with you, to be your host and guide.  
   8. This podcast is part of Souls and Hearts, our online outreach at soulsandhearts.com, which is all about shoring up our natural foundation for the Catholic spiritual life, all about overcoming psychological obstacles to being loved and to loving God and neighbor
   9. This is episode 49, released on January 4, 2021
   10. and it is titled: The secret impact of our shame on our sexuality
   11. This is the 13th and final episode in our series on shame.  We are wrapping up that series, but we will be coming back to shame over and over again in future episodes, because of how central it is in our lives.  
   12. This is also the first episode on a new series of episodes, a new series all about sexuality.  
       1. We are going to spend time on sexuality and in the coming weeks we will address many topics, including masturbation, pornography, adulterous affairs, pre-marital sex, asexuality, homosexuality, and sexual trauma and its effects.  
       2. And we're going to get into the topic of sexuality the same way we do with all the topics on this podcast.
           
          1. We assume that what the Catholic Church has always infallibly taught to be true is indeed true, and then starting from that theological, philosophical and metaphysical base, we bring in the best of what psychology offers.  And we harmonize the best of psychology with what we know  to be true by Divine Revelation.  Here we don't try to reshape Catholicism to fit the latest and greatest woke ideas from the world about sexuality.  
       3. 
          
          1. So I will be coming from that Catholic base.  And that is a minority position in psychology -- if you want to know what the latest trends and beliefs are in the secular psychology community you can check out the guidelines that the American Psychological Association puts out on its website APA.org. This podcast is for people who really want to understand psychology harmonized with the perennial teaching of the Catholic church
       4.  
          1. And to that end, I invite feedback, especially if I teach anything that is in error.  Please get in touch with me at crisis@soulsandhearts.com or at 317.567.9594.  
             1. Citations -- Catechism, Canon Law, Denzinger's Compendium, Ludwig Ott Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma
             2. Don't email me and tell me that a confessor you went to ten years ago said that masturbation is normal and God doesn't mind it all.  That's not helpful.   
       5. 
          
2. Sexuality is such a huge and complex issue and so confusing for people.  One of the two most difficult topics for people to discuss.  The other one?  My relationship God, how I see God, all the personal or lack of personal connection with Jesus, with God our Father, with the Holy Spirit, with Mary, our Mother. 
   1. Sexuality is difficult and confusing for so many reasons
       
      1. Shame is at the center -- hard to talk about this because it is so personal and so intimate, and often so bound up with shame.  
         1. Sexuality not talked about, not discussed
             
            1. Modeling from parents -- conveyed a sense of embarrassment
         2.  
            1. No modeling from others
         3.  
            1. Deep feelings of incompetence, not knowing, not understanding
         4.  
            1. Not sure about what is normal and not normal, what is morally acceptable, what is not
         5.  
            1. Not wanting to embarrass a spouse or fiancé or girlfriend or boyfriend
         6.  
            1. Not wanting to make the listener uncomfortable
         7.  
            1. Not sure if the other person -- like a therapist -- will respect Catholic beliefs.
                
               1. Many clients reach out to Catholic therapists because of this fear -- if I am struggling with porn use or masturbation will this therapist inwardly mock my beliefs -- or outwardly say that masturbation is normal and porn use can enhance one's sexual experience.  
            2. 
               
               1. Many clients are afraid to disclose to a Catholic therapist their sexual experiences, for fear of being judged -- two-edged sword
                   
                  1. Some grounds for that -- some Catholic therapists are uncomfortable with hearing, may feel undue pressure to make sure some change happens,  May be overly concerned with their own "participation" in some way with sexual material coming up.  Not know what to do, and signal to the client that it's better "not to go there."  
               2. 
                  
            3. 
               
         8. 
            
         9. Sexuality part and parcel of our bodies, all about our bodies
             
            1. Body keeps the Score -- body is where we tend to hide all kinds of unresolved psychological issues
         10.  
             1. Catholics often hold Manichean and Jansenist ideas about the body.  
         11. 
             
         12. Catholics who are serious about their faith often have a propensity to start with self-judgement and self-condemnation, like at the end of a trial, without really understanding themselves well.
              
             1. Internal self-shaming
         13.  
         14. And all of this makes sense, makes sense, because almost all of us Catholic adults have sinned sexually.  
         15. Review of Shame (Episodes 37, 38 for full picture)
              
             1. Shame is:  a primary emotion, a bodily reaction, a signal,  a judgement, and an action. (Click to episode 38 for a summary)
         16.  
             1. Qualities of shame
                 
                1. Shame is hidden.  Hidden from others, hidden from God, often hidden from the therapist, hidden from self.  
             2. 
                
                1.   Shame inhibits positive emotions
             3.  
         17. 
             
   2. 
      
      1. And a Catholic view of sexuality, in which sexuality is ordered to what is good, true and beautiful is so different than what the world offers us. Moral issues
          
         1. Stating a standard -- even reading a Bible passage can be considered hate speech.  
            1. Cancel culture.  
      2. 
         
         1. Rule based rather than relationship-based approaches
      3.  
   3. 
      
      1. So many needs and messages being expressed

Join Dr. Jared Staudt, the Director of Content at Exodus 90 and guest host Dr. Gerry Crete to discuss the integration of personal formation in Exodus. Join in to learn how asceticism is part of human formation, and how both are oriented toward love. Dr. Staudt and Dr. Gerry discuss the difficulties that secularism and individualism cause in our culture and within ourselves, especially for men. What do vulnerability and authenticity look like for men? And finally, how can I be different, how can I change and grow? The Exodus website is at https://exodus90.com/ 

1. Intro: Welcome to the podcast Coronavirus Crisis: Carpe Diem!, where by God’s grace, you and I rise up and embrace the possibilities and opportunities for spiritual and psychological growth right now, in these days, all grounded in a Catholic worldview.   This podcast is about transformation -- a radical transformation of self, overcoming anything that gets in the way of us loving God our Father and Mary our Mother with the trust and dependence of a little child.  This podcast is all about real love in real relationships and it's messy.   I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski and I am here with you, to be your host and guide.  This podcast is part of Souls and Hearts, our online outreach at soulsandhearts.com, which is all about shoring up our natural foundation for the Catholic spiritual life, all about overcoming psychological obstacles to being loved and to loving God and neighbor -- This is episode 48, released on December 28, 2020
    
   1. and it is titled: Shame and Repentance: St. Dismas
2.  
   1. it is the 12th episode in our series on shame.  
3. 
   
   1. Thank you for being here with me. 
4. 
   
   1. This episode stands alone
5.  
   1. Episodes 37, 38 and 39 lay out the conceptual foundations on shame
6.  
   1. Two episode we discussed how shame can lead to tragedy in the story of Judas Iscariot, and last episode, we looked at shame and redemption in the story of St. Peter 
7. 
   
   1. Continuing to illustrate shame and related concepts with stories
       
      1. Now we are going to look at an story of intense shame and repentance.  
         1. The story of the St. Dismas -- aka the "good thief" crucified at Jesus right hand
         2. Really going to look inside of the mind, heart, body and soul today of St. Dismas in his passion
         3. Really focus on understanding what happened in his life
             
            1. Understanding him in terms of his parts -- his different modes of operating, or his subpersonalities.
         4.  
            1. Making sense of his decisions, his choices
         5.  
   2. 
      
      1. In our suffering, we can learn from St. Dismas.  
         1. An incredibly hopeful story
         2. A story that offers us so much more than immediately meets the eye in the few verses devoted to him in the Gospels. 
   3. 
      
8. 
   

1. Intro: Welcome to the podcast Coronavirus Crisis: Carpe Diem!, where by God’s grace, you and I rise up and embrace the possibilities and opportunities for spiritual and psychological growth right now, in these days, all grounded in a Catholic worldview.   This podcast is about transformation -- a radical transformation of self, overcoming anything that gets in the way of us loving God our Father and Mary our Mother with the trust and dependence of a little child.  This podcast is all about real love in real relationships and it's messy.   I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski and I am here with you, to be your host and guide.  This podcast is part of Souls and Hearts, our online outreach at soulsandhearts.com, which is all about shoring up our natural foundation for the Catholic spiritual life, all about overcoming psychological obstacles to being loved and to loving God and neighbor -- This is episode 47, released on December 21, 2020
    
   1. and it is titled: Shame and Redemption: St. Peter and You
2.  
   1. it is the 11th episode in our series on shame.  
3. 
   
   1. Thank you for being here with me. 
4. 
   
   1. This episode stands alone
5.  
   1. Episodes 37, 38 and 39 lay out the conceptual foundations on shame
6.  
   1. Last episode we discussed how shame can lead to tragedy in the story of Judas Iscariot.  
7. 
   
   1. Continuing to illustrate shame and related concepts with stories
       
      1. Now we are going to look at an story of intense shame and redemption.  
         1. The story of the Apostle Peter
         2. Really going to look inside of Peter's mind, heart, body and soul today
         3. Really focus on understanding what happened in his life
             
            1. Making sense of his decisions, his choices
         4.  
            1. I share his name.  I connect with him, he makes so much sense to me.  Very similar parts. 
         5. 
            
   2. 
      
      1. In our fallen world, in our fallen human condition, all of us have elements of what Peter struggled with.  
         1. We can learn from Peter's redemption 
   3. 
      
8. 
   
9. Profiling St. Peter
    
   1. Teaching you to recognize parts in other, parts in yourself  
10. 
    
    1. I am an IFS therapist -- really interested in parts of people
11.  
    1. Understanding parts really helps us grow in the understanding of ourselves and others
        
       1. Socrates:  Know thyself
    2.  
       1. Jesus:  Removing the beam in your own eye
    3.  
       1. Recognizing, identifying your parts and the parts of others is really helpful for loving the other person.  Why?
    4.  
       1. Loving a person means accepting loving all their parts.  All of them. 
          1. It is really helpful to know a part in order understand what it needs.   
          2. Doesn't mean affirming every action
          3. Doesn't mean agreeing with every opinion
          4. Doesn't mean endorsing every desire
          5. Doesn't mean encouraging every impulse
    5. 
       
12. 
    
    1. See what you resonate with
13.  
    1. What are parts?
        
       1. Discrete, autonomous mental systems, each with own idiosyncratic range of emotion, style of expression, abilities, desires views of the world. 
          1. Modes of operating
          2. Subpersonalities
          3. Orchestra model
          4. Focus is on integration.  
    2. 
       
       1. Get forced into extreme roles -- attachment injuries and relational traumas
    3.  
       1. Three roles
           
          1. Exiles -- 
             1. most sensitive -- become injured or outraged.  Threatens the system, external relationships
             2. Exploited, rejected, abandoned in external relationships
             3. Want care and love, rescue, redemption
             4. shame.  Need for redemption 
       2. 
          
          1. Managers
              
             1. Protective, strategic, controlling environment, keep things safe
          2.  
             1. Obsessions. Compulsions, reclusiveness, passivity, numbing. Panic attacks, somatic complaints, depressive episodes, hypervigiliance.
          3.  
       3. 
          
          1. Firefighters
              
             1. Stifle, anesthetize, distract from feelings of exiles
          2.  
             1. No concern for consequences
          3.  
             1. Binge eating, drug/alcohol use, dissociation, sexual risk taking, cutting
          4.  
       4. 
          
    4. 
       
       1. Parts can take over the person
           
          1. Like in Pixar Movie Inside Out -- anger taking over the control panel of the main character Riley
       2.  
          1. We call it blending.  
       3. 
          
    5. 
       
14. 
    
    1. IFS on the Self -- (recorded)
        
       1. Self defined as the seat of consciousness
    2.  
       1. Self can be occluded or overwhelmed by parts
    3.  
       1. When self accepts and loves parts, those parts transform back into who they were meant to be
    4.  
       1. Self-led mind is self-righting.
    5.  
       1. self -- Active inner leader -- more than mindfulness
    6.  
       1. Parts find the relationship with the self very reassuring
           
          1. But to reap the benefits they have to unblend from and notice the self
       2.  
          1. This is frightening can challenging to parts
       3.  
          1. Agency in the parts -- parts are making decisions about unblending in IFS model
       4.  
    7. 
       
       1. Intrinsic qualities of the self
           
          1. Curiosity
       2.  
          1. Compassion
       3.  
          1. Calm
       4.  
          1. Confidence
       5.  
          1. Courage
       6.  
          1. Clarity
       7.  
          1. Creativity
       8.  
          1. Connectedness
       9.  
          1. Kindness
       10.  
    8. 
       
       1. The self can be easily occluded, obscured, hidden by protective parts who take over in response to fear, anger or shame
    9.  
15. 
    
    1. St. Peters Parts -- or modes of operating
        
       1. Boldness, self confidence  Overconfidence
           
          1. Manager Part.  
       2. 
          
          1. Fisherman who owned his own boat
              
             1. A part that wants to be big.  
          2. 
             
             1. Have to make quick decisions
          3.  
             1. Dangerous occupation
          4.  
       3. 
          
          1. Respected in Galilee, a leader
       4.  
          1. Courage, Fortitude
       5.  
          1. Leads to forgetting the teaching of Jesus
       6.  
          1. Established, married.  
       7. 
          
          1. Defends against a shame exile.  
       8. 
          
    2. 
       
       1. Spontaneity/Impulsivity 
          1. Manager leaping in
          2. Quick reactions -- this part leaps into action instantaneously
              
             1. Man of action
          3.  
             1. Courage here too
          4.  
          5. Trusted his instincts.  
          6. Capable of intense emotion
          7. Driven by that emotion
              
             1. Seizing opportunities as they arise 
                1. See opportunity, seize opportunity
                2. No dithering
          8. 
             
             1. Can lead to ra...

1. Intro: Welcome to the podcast Coronavirus Crisis: Carpe Diem!, where by God’s grace, you and I rise up and embrace the possibilities and opportunities for spiritual and psychological growth right now, in these days, all grounded in a Catholic worldview.   We are going beyond mere resilience, to rising up to the challenges in our lives and becoming even healthier in the natural and the spiritual realms.  I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski and I am here with you, to be your host and guide.  This podcast is part of Souls and Hearts, our online outreach at soulsandhearts.com, which is all about shoring up our natural foundation for the Catholic spiritual life, all about overcoming psychological obstacles to being loved and to loving God and neighbor -- it short, this podcast is all about relationships -- it's all about becoming much more relational in our lives and in our faith. 
   1. This is episode 46, released on December 14, 2020
   2. and it is titled: Shame and Tragedy: Judas Iscariot and You
   3. it is the tenth episode in our series on shame.  
   4. Thank you for being here with me. 
   5. Last episode we discussed how shame can lead to idolatry.  
      1. Now we are going to look at an example of how shame did lead to idolatry 
      2. the rejection of the true God for a false god
      3. the story of Judas, whose life ended in tragedy, the tragedy of abandoning and betraying Jesus Christ, true God and true man
   6. Really excited about this episode
       
      1. Really going to look inside of Judas' mind, heart, body and soul today
   7.  
      1. Really focus on understanding what happened in his life, why did he act the way he did. 
         1. Why did he do it?  
         2. I don't accept the typical explanations for Judas' behavior because they seem too simplistic, they don't resonate at all with me.  
   8. 
      
      1. In our fallen world, in our fallen human condition, all of us have elements of what Judas struggled with.  
         1. I believe that there is the potential in you to repeat what Judas did.  Fallen world, fallen natures.  
         2. There but for the grace of God go I.  Origin unknown, often attributed to John Bradford, Evangelical preacher of the 16th century.  
         3. We can learn from Judas' tragic end.  
   9. 
      
   10. We are continuing to really immerse ourselves in the spiritual dimensions of shame.
        
       1. How shame on the natural level can impact us in spiritual ways 
          1. Grace builds on nature -- disorder in the natural realm undermines the spiritual life.  
   11. 
       
       1. I like to teach through familiar stories, weaving stories together.  
          1. Especially through Scripture, really getting into the Word of God.
          2. Deeper understand of the people in the Bible stories, to see them in three dimension, bringing them to life
          3. Scripture is a gift from God to us -- a precious gift
              
             1. a way that God reveals himself to us
          4.  
             1. And a way that God reveals you to you.  If you look carefully, you can see aspects of yourself, parts of yourself in the people of Scripture 
          5. 
             
             1. You can connect with their experience, and I am here to help you with that. 
          6. 
             
          7. Stories help to illustrate the concepts we are learning and connect with them.  Stories give us tangible examples so that we can really grip on to what we are trying to understand.  
   12. 
       
2. Judas was an important, powerful, evocative and mysterious figure to me growing up from when I was 5
    
   1. I remember being about 5 years old and insisting to my mother that Good Friday should really be called "Bad Friday" because of how Jesus died.  
      1. Deeply impressed by the story of the passion and death of Jesus.  
      2. 5 and 6 year old think in black and white -- clear, simple categories
      3. And I thought Judas was very, very naughty to betray Jesus and tell Jewish priests how to catch him so they could nail him to the cross.  That was very naughty.  
      4. And Judas was a thief, too.  He stole things.  That was important to me.  
         1. Let me tell you a story about my history as a thief.  
         2. I was not a very good thief.  But I was a thief at one time.  
         3. Stealing was not tolerated in my family. 
         4. When I was five we were on our road trip back from the Christmas visit with grandma and grandpa, and we stopped at a gas station.  Inside the store, there was a Christmas tree decorated with striped candy sticks. Not just red and white, this one had all the colors of the rainbow. 
            1. Oooh, pretty.  Oooh, tasty.  Shiny, too.  Pretty, tasty, shiny.  I took one.  
            2. I'm not sure I was even really aware I was stealing.  
         5. Sucking on it in the car, making it sharp and pointy.  Where did you get that?  No pretense.  
         6. Mom and Dad -- that's not right,  Dad makes a U-turn on the two lane highway, and  drove me back about 10 miles to the gas station and I had to go in and tell the manager what I had done.  I surrendered the half-eaten pointed little striped candy stick.  I was mortified.  Manager was very gracious, made it no big deal.  I experienced real shame at the time.  And I vowed to reform and not steal ever again.    
         7. From my parents' reaction, I learned that stealing was very, very bad.  It was a rule not to steal, even a commandment -- Thou shalt not steal, and that included taking candy canes off of Christmas trees inside gas stations.  
         8. A part of me really learned that to be good, you have to know the rules and follow the rules 
            1. and Judas was not following the rules about not killing Jesus and not stealing money.  
            2. Could Judas be any worse?  Judas was very, very naughty.  
3. 
   
   1. Fast forward two years.  When I was about 7, a man named Tim Rice came into my life.  He told me a riveting story, portraying Judas in a very different way than just being very, very naughty.  He told me about Judas' feelings and thoughts and worries and how distressed Judas had been and how Judas had done some bad things, but Judas was very human.  I listened to the story that Tim Rice told me -- I wanted to hear it over and over again.  Judas was so different than I had thought.  He was more than just a stealer who betrayed Jesus.
       
      1. Who was Tim Rice? -- wrote the lyrics for the Rock Opera Jesus Christ Superstar.  
         1. Andrew Lloyd Weber wrote the lyrics.  
         2. Blast from the past-- anybody going back to the 1970s with me now?
   2. 
      
      1. Mom and Dad had the vinyl -- the two volume set and though I didn't have TV growing up, we did have a nice stereo and I was allowed to play records the turntable.  Looking back on that it seemed a little ridiculous to let a seven year old play records on this really, really nice audio equipment, but there it was
   3.  
      1. And I, at seven years old, eight years, nine years  old -- all the way until my sophomore years of college, I really gripped on to this musical
          
         1. JC Superstar was so emotionally evocative for me.  Emotions just welled up in me in so many ways that never really happened at Mass or in religion class.  
      2. 
         
         1. Tim Rice really was telling me the most compelling story of Jesus and Judas and the Apos...

1. Intro: Welcome to the podcast Coronavirus Crisis: Carpe Diem!, where by God’s grace, you and I rise up and embrace the possibilities and opportunities for spiritual and psychological growth right now, in these days, all grounded in a Catholic worldview.   We are going beyond mere resilience, to rising up to the challenges in our lives and becoming even healthier in the natural and the spiritual realms.  I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski and I am here with you, to be your host and guide.  This podcast is part of Souls and Hearts, our online outreach at soulsandhearts.com, which is all about shoring up our natural foundation for the Catholic spiritual life, all about overcoming psychological obstacles to being loved and to loving God and neighbor -- it short, this podcast is all about relationships -- it's all about becoming much more relational in our lives and in our faith.  
   1. This is episode 45, released on December 7, 2020
   2. Thank you for being here with me.  
   3. and it is the ninth episode in our series on shame.  
   4. and it is titled: How Shame Leads Us to Idolatry
   5. We are now Diving into the spiritual dimension of shame.
   6. This podcast is all about transformation -- fundamental transformation of all of us -- all parts of us.  Even the parts we keep secret, hidden.  
      1. This podcast is all about removing psychological obstacles to following the two great commandments
      2. Not entertainment.  Not about having a good time, just enjoying a entertaining podcast, funny and distracting.
      3. No this podcast is about developing a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, a personal relationship with the Holy Spirit, a personal relationship with God our spiritual Father, and a personal relationship with the Blessed Virgin Mary, our spiritual Mother
      4. Any psychological obstacles you have to relating with others, you will have in relating to God.  
         1. You will bring those relational inhibitions, those relational problems into your spiritual life because they are formed into you and they have not been healed through experiencing throughout your whole being who God really is.   
         2. Spiritual realm is not some special place where the relational limitations you have are just dispensed, you're no longer trouble with them.  No, you are still you in the spiritual realm.  
      5. Any psychological issues you have with your earthly father and mother you will bring into your relationship with God as Father and Mary as Mother.  
         1. Child psychologist -- transferences
2. Two major assumptions in the natural realm for why we don't have a personal relationship with a loving God.
    
   1. Assumption 1.  We do not believe that we are worthy to be in relationship with God -- driven by shame
3.  
   1. Assumption 2.  We do not believe that God is worthy to be in relationship with us -- driven by negative God images -- see episodes 23-29
       
      1. Idolatry.  We are not worshiping God as He is. 
   2. 
      
4. 
   
   1. And here is the more tragic part:  We stay with those assumptions, even though they are so manifestly problematic and harmful.  We don't seek, we assume that assumptions one and two are true.  
5. 
   
   1. Her is the great offer I am making to you.  I am inviting you on an adventure, an adventure to discover who you really are, an adventure to discover who God really is, and adventure in learning to relate and to connect with our God, our God who is personal, who is relational, who is loving, who is Love Himself.  
6. 
   
   1. If you really knew who God was and you really knew who you are, and you really knew how God truly saw you -- you would always run to His loving arms.  You really would.  
7. 
   
   1. But you don't know these realities at a deep, integrated level.  We know them to some degree in our heads, in a theological way, in an abstract way, we can quote the Catechism.  But not in our hearts, our souls, and our bones.  
8. 
   
   1. In fact, at a gut level, at an intuitive level  the vast majority of us have varying degrees of certainty or confidence in very warped assumptions about ourselves and assumptions about God.  These assumptions are wildly different from what God reveals to us about who he is and who we are through Scripture, through Tradition, and through the perennial teachings of our Catholic Church.  In our hearts, in our bodies, in the depths of our souls, in our unconscious, We believe in lies.  This is so common.  And it's deadly and so much of it is driven by shame.  
9. 
   
10. Review of Shame
     
    1. Definition of Shame
        
       1. Explored this in a lot of detail in Episode 37, the first in our series on shame.  Shame is: 
          1. The primary problem we have in the natural realm -- foundational problem.  Grace perfects nature, if our natural foundation is infused with shame, it makes the foundation for our spiritual life shaky, unreliable, uncertain.  
          2. That gives birth to so many secondary problems -- we tend to focus on the secondary problems, the problems that are further downstream -- so we are not getting to the root.  
    2. 
       
       1. Shame is:  a primary emotion, a bodily reaction, a signal,  a judgement, and an action. (Click to episode 38 for a summary)
    3.  
       1. Qualities of shame
           
          1. Shame is hidden.  Hidden from others, hidden from God, often hidden from the therapist, hidden from self.  
       2. 
          
          1.   Shame inhibits positive emotions
       3.  
    4. 
       
       1. Strategies for coping with shame
    5.  
11. 
    
    1. Chronic shame needs to be attenuated, reduced, titrated, ordered, regulated. 
       1. Chronic shame develops when a little boy or little girl has a sense of being rejected, unwanted, a burden.  
       2. When the child changes behaviors, does what he can to be better in the eyes of the adult and still is rejected, he can conclude that he just is a bad kid.  
       3. The difficulty is in the response of the others -- the caregivers.  
       4. But the child bears the burden of shame caused by the shaming of the caregivers.  
       5. Child sees parts of himself that are unacknowledged and unacceptable
       6. Ostracized or invaded.  
12. 
    
    1. And we assume that God responds to us like our shaming caregivers -- soulset.  We generalize from our experiences of shame and assume that God is like those caregivers.  This is called a transference.  
       1. Transference is a phenomenon within psychotherapy in which the feelings a person has about their parents, as one example, are unconsciously redirected or transferred onto the therapist. It usually concerns feelings from a primary relationship during childhood.
13. 
    
    1. Ubiquity of Shame.  
14. 
    
15. Shame as the silent killer -- Episode 37
     
    1. Shame can lead to spiritual death. 
16. 
    
    1. Shame is the Silent Killer who Stalks you from inside  (episode 37) and despair is the murder weapon. 
17. 
    
    1. Spiritual view on this
        
       1. Primary struggle is against powers and principalities. 
    2. 
       
       1. Satan's goals -- personal relationship with you. 
          1. Satan is real, folks.  Big effort in certain very mainstream Christian c...

1. Intro: Welcome to the podcast Coronavirus Crisis: Carpe Diem!, where by God’s grace, you and I rise up and embrace the possibilities and opportunities for spiritual and psychological growth in this time of crisis, all grounded in a Catholic worldview.   We are going beyond mere resilience, to rising up to the challenges of this pandemic and becoming even healthier in the natural and the spiritual realms than we were before.  I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski and I am here with you, to be your host and guide.  This podcast is part of Souls and Hearts, our online outreach at soulsandhearts.com, which is all about shoring up our natural foundation for the Catholic spiritual life, all about overcoming psychological obstacles to being loved and to loving.  
   1. This is episode 44, released on November 30, 2020
   2. Thank you for being here with me.  
   3. and it is the eighth episode in our series on shame.  
   4. and it is titled: Rape, Incest, Shame, and Silence: A True Story Reexamined, Part 3
   5. We continuing to deal with very heavy, very difficult material.  
   6. We are continuing our deep exploration of the internal worlds of Crown Prince Amnon and Princess Tamar as recounted in 2 Samuel 13.   
   7. We opened that up in Episode 40, with Part 1 
   8. We continued  the story in Episode 43, last week with Part 2
   9. Now in Part 3, we are continuing to learn what we learned about shame in the conceptual information about shame from Episodes 37, 38, 39.
   10. We're going to focus on listening as we were learning about in Episodes 42 and that we continued practicing in episode 43 -- important to listen to episodes 40 and 43 before this one.  
2. Cautions  (summarize below)
    
   1. There is an incestuous rape of a teenager in this story.
       
      1. I am not going into unnecessary graphic aspects about the rape itself
   2.  
      1. there isn't a need to get into the all the specific details of it
   3.  
      1. However, I am bringing out the emotional, relational and psychological impact of the traumas here, and not just the rape, but the betrayals and the failures to protect, and the injustice of it all and all the aftermath
          
         1. Those aspects -- betrayal, abandonment, the implications, the meaning of those contextual factors can be and often are worse than the actual physical violations.  And Tamar tells us that in the scripture.  
      2. 
         
         1. Those realities can be very difficult to take, it's understandable why people want to avoid discussing them.  
      3. 
         
         1. We need to be real about these things.  People who are traumatized, people who are burdened with shame, who are confused, who are lost -- they need resources.  These kinds of awful violations happen.  A lot.  We need to talk about them.  In this podcast I go into them.  
      4. 
         
         1. There is no neat and tidy way to talk about incest and sexual violence and its aftermath, especially the experience of shame.  No whitewash, no clichés, no pious pablum.  
      5. 
         
         1. And we need to be able to put these thing into a Catholic context, see them from a Catholic viewpoint. 
      6. 
         
   4. 
      
3. 
   
4. Warnings --Summarize below.   let's be prudent here in listening to the story -- not an episode for little kids to necessarily be listening to.  
   1. As important as it is to deal with these topics
   2. Be thoughtful about where you are in your life journey, where you are in your healing -- this story may strike close to home for many of you
   3. You don't have to listen to the story or my analysis of it -- listen only if it is good for you -- even for people who are really psychologically well integrated, this is painful stuff.  
      1. Unresolved sexual trauma -- this may be a great time, it may be a terrible time listen to it.  
      2. Unresolved incest
      3. Unresolved betrayal
      4. Unresolved abandonment, especially by parents or church or civic leaders
      5. Sibling issues.  
   4. Window of tolerance
       
      1. the zone of nervous system arousal in which you are able to function most effectively. When you are within this zone, you can readily take in information, process that information, and integrate that information more readily. 
   5. 
      
      1. You can listen.  
   6. 
      
      1. People in the window of tolerance are feeling emotions at moderate levels, not overwhelmed with emotion (hyperarousal) and not numbing their feelings out (hypoarousal).
   7.  
5. Review of levels of listening -- check out episode 42.  Brief review.  Summarize below
    
   1. Listening to trauma may be easier with a written narrative than in person with the people immediately present
6.  
   1. Listening to --  Level 1 listening -- Listening with your mind, taking in information
       
      1. Often called active listening
   2.  
      1. Listen carefully to what is happening in the story
   3.  
      1. Grasping the content, the facts
   4.  
      1. Requires attention, concentration, taking in what the person is saying.  
   5. 
      
      1. Focus externally on the characters, not internally on what is going on with your parts.  Not distracted by own self-focus
   6.  
7. 
   
   1. Listening for -- Level 2 listening -- Rarer.    
      1. This is speculative, we hold it lightly
      2. Listening to fill in the gaps in each character's big picture
      3. What is beyond and behind the words?
          
         1. Listening for the deeper layers of meaning in order to perceive what has not been said outright.
      4.  
         1. understanding the experiential context for each of the characters
      5.  
      6. Listening to what the character does not say or do -- omissions.  
      7. What are we listening for when we are listening for?  
         1. The person's experience -- to grasp the person's experience -- all the inner stuff.  
         2. Emotions
         3. Intentions
         4. Thoughts
         5. Desires
         6. Attitudes toward the world 
         7. Impulses 
         8. Vision of the world
         9. Working models of the world, assumptions.  
         10. Values
         11. Purpose in life
         12. I listen for identity
         13.  and for shame.  
      8. Engage the Faculty of imagination to help us fill in the gaps  
      9. Taking in what the person means (in contrast to what the person says in Level 1) 
      10. What we are not doing:  
          1. Not evaluating the merits of that perspective, not getting caught up in judging that perspective
          2. Not looking to right wrongs, not looking for justice, not asking deep existential questions about how could that terrible thing have happened to the person, not formulating advice, not looking to impress.  
          3. Setting all that aside.   To be with the characters in their stories, their narrative.  Understanding them first.  
          4. Taking that character's perspective in.  Seeing the world through the other person's eyes.  No matter how inaccurate or distorted that perception of the world may seem to be to us.  
8. 
   
   1. Listening with -- Level 3 listening -- Very rare -- characteristic of great therapists
       
      1. Listening with your whole self. 
   <...

1. Intro: Welcome to the podcast Coronavirus Crisis: Carpe Diem!, where by God’s grace, you and I rise up and embrace the possibilities and opportunities for spiritual and psychological growth in this time of crisis, all grounded in a Catholic worldview.   We are going beyond mere resilience, to rising up to the challenges of this pandemic and becoming even healthier in the natural and the spiritual realms than we were before.  I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski and I am here with you, to be your host and guide.  This podcast is part of Souls and Hearts, our online outreach at soulsandhearts.com, which is all about shoring up our natural foundation for the Catholic spiritual life, all about overcoming psychological obstacles to being loved and to loving.  
   1. This is episode 43, released on November 23, 2020
   2. Thank you for being here with me.  
   3. and it is the seventh episode in our series on shame.  
   4. and it is titled: Rape, Incest, Shame, and Silence: A True Story Reexamined, Part 2
   5. We are back to dealing with very heavy, very difficult material.  
   6. We are going back to the story of Crown Prince Amnon rape of his half-sister the princess Tamar that is recounted in 2 Samuel 13.  Remember that both Prince Amnon and Princess Tamar were King David's children.  
   7. We opened that up in Episode 40, with Part 1 -- now that we have taken two episodes to look deeply at King David's upbringing, especially around shame and his wounds
       
      1. So that we can better understand his role in this present situation
   8.  
      1. And now we are ready to return to the rape and so much of what went into it and came out of it.  
   9. 
      
   10. We are going to be applying what we learned about shame in the conceptual information from Episodes 37, 38, 39.
   11. We're going to focus on listening as we were learning about in Episodes 41 and especially 42.  
2. Cautions  
   1. There is an incestuous rape of a teenager in this story.
       
      1. I am not going into unnecessary graphic aspects about the rape itself
   2.  
      1. there isn't a need to get into the all the specific details of it
   3.  
      1. However, I am bringing out the emotional, relational and psychological impact of the traumas here, and not just the rape, but the betrayals and the failures to protect, and the injustice of it all and all the aftermath
          
         1. Those aspects -- betrayal, abandonment, the implications, the meaning of those contextual factors can be and often are worse than the actual physical violations.  And Tamar tells us that in the scripture.  
      2. 
         
         1. Those realities can be very difficult to take, it's understandable why people want to avoid discussing them.  
      3. 
         
         1. We need to be real about these things.  People who are traumatized, people who are burdened with shame, who are confused, who are lost -- they need resources.  These kinds of awful violations happen.  A lot.  We need to talk about them.  In this podcast I go into them.  
      4. 
         
         1. There is no neat and tidy way to talk about incest and sexual violence and its aftermath, especially the experience of shame.  No whitewash, no clichés, no pious pablum.  
      5. 
         
         1. And we need to be able to put these thing into a Catholic context, see them from a Catholic viewpoint. 
      6. 
         
   4. 
      
3. Warnings -- let's be prudent here in listening to the story -- not an episode for little kids to necessarily be listening to.  
   1. As important as it is to deal with these topics
   2. Be thoughtful about where you are in your life journey, where you are in your healing -- this story may strike close to home for many of you
   3. You don't have to listen to the story or my analysis of it -- listen only if it is good for you -- even for people who are really psychologically well integrated, this is painful stuff.  
      1. Unresolved sexual trauma -- this may be a great time, it may be a terrible time listen to it.  
      2. Unresolved incest
      3. Unresolved betrayal
      4. Unresolved abandonment, especially by parents or church or civic leaders
      5. Sibling issues.  
   4. Window of tolerance
       
      1. the zone of nervous system arousal in which you are able to function most effectively. When you are within this zone, you can readily take in information, process that information, and integrate that information more readily. 
   5. 
      
      1. You can listen.  
   6. 
      
      1. People in the window of tolerance are feeling emotions at moderate levels, not overwhelmed with emotion (hyperarousal) and not numbing their feelings out (hypoarousal).
   7.  
4. Review of levels of listening -- check out last episode
    
   1. Listening to trauma may be easier with a written narrative than in person with the people immediately present
5.  
   1. Listening to --  Level 1 listening -- Listening with your mind, taking in information
       
      1. Often called active listening
   2.  
      1. Listen carefully to what is happening in the story
   3.  
      1. Grasping the content, the facts
   4.  
      1. Requires attention, concentration, taking in what the person is saying.  
   5. 
      
      1. Focus externally on the characters, not internally on what is going on with your parts.  Not distracted by own self-focus
   6.  
6. 
   
   1. Listening for -- Level 2 listening -- Rarer.    
      1. This is speculative, we hold it lightly
      2. Listening to fill in the gaps in each character's big picture
      3. What is beyond and behind the words?
          
         1. Listening for the deeper layers of meaning in order to perceive what has not been said outright.
      4.  
         1. understanding the experiential context for each of the characters
      5.  
      6. Listening to what the character does not say or do -- omissions.  
      7. What are we listening for when we are listening for?  
         1. The person's experience -- to grasp the person's experience -- all the inner stuff.  
         2. Emotions
         3. Intentions
         4. Thoughts
         5. Desires
         6. Attitudes toward the world 
         7. Impulses 
         8. Vision of the world
         9. Working models of the world, assumptions.  
         10. Values
         11. Purpose in life
         12. I listen for identity
         13.  and for shame.  
      8. Engage the Faculty of imagination to help us fill in the gaps  
      9. Taking in what the person means (in contrast to what the person says in Level 1) 
      10. What we are not doing:  
          1. Not evaluating the merits of that perspective, not getting caught up in judging that perspective
          2. Not looking to right wrongs, not looking for justice, not asking deep existential questions about how could that terrible thing have happened to the person, not formulating advice, not looking to impress.  
          3. Setting all that aside.   To be with the characters in their stories, their narrative.  Understanding them first.  
          4. Taking that character's perspective in.  Seeing the world through the other person's eyes.  No matter how inaccurate or distorted that perception of the world may seem to be to us.  
7. 
   
   1. Listening with...

1. Intro: Welcome to the podcast Coronavirus Crisis: Carpe Diem!, where by God’s grace, you and I rise up and embrace the possibilities and opportunities for spiritual and psychological growth in this time of crisis, all grounded in a Catholic worldview.   We are going beyond mere resilience, to rising up to the challenges of this pandemic and becoming even healthier in the natural and the spiritual realms than we were before.  I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski and I am here with you, to be your host and guide.  This podcast is part of Souls and Hearts, our online outreach at soulsandhearts.com, which is all about shoring up our natural foundation for the Catholic spiritual life, all about overcoming psychological obstacles to being loved and to loving.  
   1. This is episode 42, released on November 16, 2020
   2. Thank you for being here with me.  
   3. and it is the sixth episode in our series on shame.  
   4. and it is titled: Practicing Deep Listening:  Understanding King David's Shame
2. Introduction to IFS.
    
   1. Developed by Richard Schwartz  
3. 
   
   1. Discussion of Parts
       
      1. Discrete, autonomous mental systems, each with own idiosyncratic range of emotion, style of expression, abilities, desires views of the world. 
         1. Modes of operating
         2. Subpersonalities
         3. Orchestra model
         4. Focus is on integration.  
   2. 
      
      1. Get forced into extreme roles -- attachment injuries and relational traumas
   3.  
      1. Three roles
          
         1. Exiles -- 
            1. most sensitive -- become injured or outraged.  Threatens the system, external relationships
            2. Exploited, rejected, abandoned in external relationships
            3. Want care and love, rescue, redemption
            4. shame.  Need for redemption 
      2. 
         
         1. Managers
             
            1. Protective, strategic, controlling environment, keep things safe
         2.  
            1. Obsessions. Compulsions, reclusiveness, passivity, numbing. Panic attacks, somatic complaints, depressive episodes, hypervigiliance.
         3.  
      3. 
         
         1. Firefighters
             
            1. Stifle, anesthetize, distract from feelings of exiles
         2.  
            1. No concern for consequences
         3.  
            1. Binge eating, drug/alcohol use, dissociation, sexual risk taking, cutting
         4.  
      4. 
         
   4. 
      
      1. Parts can take over the person
          
         1. Like in Pixar Movie Inside Out -- anger taking over the control panel of the main character Riley
      2.  
         1. We call it blending.  
      3. 
         
   5. 
      
4. 
   
5. IFS on the Self -- (recorded)
    
   1. Self defined as the seat of consciousness
6.  
   1. Self can be occluded or overwhelmed by parts
7.  
   1. When self accepts and loves parts, those parts transform back into who they were meant to be
8.  
   1. Self-led mind is self-righting.
9.  
   1. self -- Active inner leader -- more than mindfulness
10.  
    1. Parts find the relationship with the self very reassuring
        
       1. But to reap the benefits they have to unblend from and notice the self
    2.  
       1. This is frightening can challenging to parts
    3.  
       1. Agency in the parts -- parts are making decisions about unblending in IFS model
    4.  
11. 
    
    1. Intrinsic qualities of the self
        
       1. Curiosity
    2.  
       1. Compassion
    3.  
       1. Calm
    4.  
       1. Confidence
    5.  
       1. Courage
    6.  
       1. Clarity
    7.  
       1. Creativity
    8.  
       1. Connectedness
    9.  
       1. Kindness
    10.  
12. 
    
    1. The self can be easily occluded, obscured, hidden by protective parts who take over in response to fear, anger or shame
        
       1. General state for most people is to be quite blended
    2.  
       1. Leads to self-absorption
    3.  
13. 
    
14. 3 levels of Listening -- Laura Whitworth, Henry Kimsey-House, Phil Sandahl & John Whitemore 1998  Co-active Coaching: New skills for coaching people toward success in work and life.    I am expanding their concepts.  
    1. Listening to --  Level 1 listening -- Listening with your mind -- Many people struggle with this
        
       1. Often called active listening
    2.  
       1. Listen carefully to what the person says
    3.  
       1. Grasping the content
    4.  
       1. Requires attention, concentration, taking in what the person is saying.  
    5. 
       
       1. Focus externally on the other person, not internally.  Not distracted by own self-focus
    6.  
    7. Listening for -- Level 2 listening -- Rarer.  Characteristic of very good therapists.  
       1. Listening in search of something-- filling in the gaps in the person's big picture
       2. What is beyond and behind the words?
       3. Holding it lightly.  Speculative endeavor.  
       4. Listening to what the person does not say
       5. Listening with the third ear  The "third ear," a concept introduced by psychoanalyst Theodor Reik 1983 Book , refers to a special kind of listening -- listening for the deeper layers of meaning in order to perceive what has not been said outright. It means understanding the emotional underpinnings conveyed when someone is speaking to you.
       6. What are we listening for?  
          1. The person's experience -- to grasp the person's experience
          2. Emotions
          3. Intentions
          4. Thoughts
          5. Desire
          6. Attitudes toward the world 
             1. Glass half empty or half full
          7. Impulses 
          8. Vision of the world
          9. Working models of the world, assumptions.  
          10. Values
          11. Purpose in life
          12. I listen for identity and for shame.  
       7. Listening for both the words and the entire context 
          1. 70-93% of communication is nonverbal -- Albert Mehrabia, Professor Emeritus at UCLA
              
             1. Voice -- tone, inflection, volume 38% of communication
          2.  
             1. Body language -- glance patterns, facial expressions (including micrexpressions -- smiling matters a lot), posture, fidgeting, head movements, hand gestures, 
          3. 
             
          4. Summarized in his 1971/1980 book Silent Messages
          5. Based on one word communications
          6. Challenged by Philip Yaffe debate about it.
       8. Faculty of imagination   -- What Aristotle called Phantasia activities in thoughts, dreams and memories.  
          1. imagination is a faculty in humans and most other animals which produces, stores, and recalls the images used in a variety of cognitive activities, including those which motivate and guide action (De Anima iii 3, 429a4–7, De Memoria 1, 450a22–25).
       9. Focus here on understanding, entering into the other person's perspective
           
          1. Taking in what the person means (in contrast to what the person says in Level 1) 
       10. 
           
           1. Not evaluating the merits of that perspective, not getting caught up in judging that perspective
       11.  
           1. Not looking to right wrongs, not looking for justice, not asking dee...

1. Intro: Welcome to the podcast Coronavirus Crisis: Carpe Diem!, where by God’s grace, you and I rise up and embrace the possibilities and opportunities for spiritual and psychological growth in this time of crisis, all grounded in a Catholic worldview.   We are going beyond mere resilience, to rising up to the challenges of this pandemic and becoming even healthier in the natural and the spiritual realms than we were before.  I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski and I am here with you, to be your host and guide.  This podcast is part of Souls and Hearts, our online outreach at soulsandhearts.com, which is all about shoring up our natural foundation for the Catholic spiritual life, all about overcoming psychological obstacles to being loved and to loving.  
   1. This is episode 41, released on November 9, 2020
   2. Thank you for being here with me.  
   3. and it is the fifth episode in our series on shame.  
   4. and it is titled: Rewind: Trauma and Shame in King David's Childhood
   5. We cover really difficult topics in this podcast -- 
      1. we go to the really challenging places that other podcasts are unwilling or unable to go.  
      2. Because we have to.  Because people are caught in those places and they are hurting, because people are trapped and people are in danger, they are in peril.  
      3. And we need to reach out to them.  
      4. And you know what?  We are those people too.  
         1. We have parts of us trapped in bad places, places we don't understand, places we are afraid of, places that we don't want to go by ourselves, all alone
         2. But together, each of us can understand much more of our unconscious.    
   6. This is the second of a subseries highly experiential episodes -- these episodes are opportunities for experiential learning -- to learn a lot about yourself -- about who you really are, about your history.  
      1. St. Paul
          
         1. Romans 7:15   I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. 
      2. 
         
         1. Romans 7:18b-19  I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want [that] is what I do. 
      3. 
         
         1. St. Paul doesn't understand himself -- St. Paul, a pillar of virtue, author of half the books in the New Testament, St. Paul, who endured outrageous sufferings, amazing self sacrifice -- he's admitting to being dominated by his unconscious.  
      4. 
         
         1. Isn't a question of willpower -- Paul had extraordinary willpower, hard to imagine many saints that can best him in terms of willpower.  
      5. 
         
         1. It’s a question of insight.  Of understanding.  
            1. Won't be complete
            2. But we can have much more insight and understanding than we do now.  
      6. 
         
   7. Continuing story of Princess Tamar, Crown Prince Amnon, Prince Absalom, and King David
       
      1. But diving much deeper into in the inner experience of these characters and others 
         1. Why did they do the things that they did
         2. Why did they say the things that they did
         3. What were they thinking, feeling, sensing, believing, desiring, seeking
         4. And what where they missing, what where they forgetting, not noticing?
         5. What made them tick?
   8. 
      
      1. Through clinical eyes.  
   9. 
      
      1. Much more to the story than the brief account in 2 Samuel 13
          
         1. We will be using other sources -- e.g. archeology to help us understand the time and culture
      2.  
         1. But also psychological insights about shame, trauma, the motives for the rape, 
      3. 
         
   10. 
       
       1. Why -- not just to understand this story and the people this story
   11.  
       1. But to help you understand your story and the people in your story 
          1. Really about you understanding you
              
             1. I will be discussing the different internal parts or modes of operating for these men and women to help you gain insight into them. To make sense of their actions to see them in 3 dimensions instead of just in the short account given in the Scripture
          2.  
             1. Scripture is the word of God -- we need to unpack it, we need to decode the human language of revelation as the Pontifical Bible Commission put it in
                 
                1. The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church -- 1993 Pontifical Bible Commission, endorsed by St. Pope John Paul II
                    
                   1.  Psychology and theology continue their mutual dialogue. The modern extension of psychological research to the study of the dynamic structures of the subconscious has given rise to fresh attempts at interpreting ancient texts, including the Bible. 
                2. 
                   
                   1. Psychological and psychoanalytical studies do bring a certain enrichment to biblical exegesis in that, because of them, the texts of the Bible can be better understood in terms of experience of life and norms of behavior. 
                3. 
                   
                   1. As is well known, religion is always in a relationship of conflict or debate with the unconscious. 
                4. 
                   
                   1. It  [the unconscious] plays a significant role in the proper orientation of human drives. Psychology and psychoanalysis… lead to a multidimensional understanding of Scripture and help decode the human language of revelation. 
                5. 
                   
             2. 
                
                1. What I am offering is admittedly speculative --  I am speculating about motives, internal conflicts, internal experience of the real people in the story
                    
                   1. I won't get it all right
                2.  
                   1. But the point is to show you a way to think about internal experience -- your own and others in a much deeper, more insightful way.  It's about learning how to seek inside yourself to understand your own internal experience -- emotions, sensations, beliefs, attitudes, impulses, desires, intentions, conflicts, all the internal stuff.  It's about that process, learning to seek.  Seek and ye shall find.  
                3. 
                   
                   1. It's a way to understand the unconscious -- your unconscious, all the conflict inside, all the mysterious elements
                4.  
             3. 
                
                1. Utterly faithful to the fullness of truth as revealed by the Catholic Church.  
             4. 
                
                1. We are bringing the best of psychology to the fullness of divine revelation -- all in the service of being able to understand ourselves better so we can understand others better
                    
                   1. You can really understanding anybody else very well if you don't understand yourself.  You'll misinterpret what you see in the other person.  
                      1. If you don't tolerate awareness of anger in yourself, and you sense anger in your relationship with another person, you'll assume it's the other person who is angry -- defense of projection
                2. 
                   
             5. 
                
          3. 
             
   12. 
       

1. Not just some psychological self-discovery project -- 
   1. to help you understand the story of others, and the people in their stories
   2. So you can love them -- and love Christ in them.  
2. We are going to get some of this wrong -- we won't be 100% accurate, but that's it's not the point right now.  Tamar doesn't need us, at this point in her life, to empathize with her.  She's dead and experiencing her eternity.  So is King David, Prince Amnon, Prince Absalom, the...

1. Intro: Welcome to the podcast Coronavirus Crisis: Carpe Diem!, where by God’s grace, you and I rise up and embrace the possibilities and opportunities for spiritual and psychological growth in this time of crisis, all grounded in a Catholic worldview.   We are going beyond mere resilience, to rising up to the challenges of this pandemic and becoming even healthier in the natural and the spiritual realms than we were before.  I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski and I am here with you, to be your host and guide.  This podcast is part of Souls and Hearts, our online outreach at soulsandhearts.com, which is all about shoring up our natural foundation for the Catholic spiritual life, all about overcoming psychological obstacles to being loved and to loving.  
   1. This is episode 40, released on November 2, 2020 -- we made it to forty together.   
   2. Thank you for being here with me.  
   3. Steep learning curve -- starting to find my groove now, not nearly as rough and awkward as when I started.  
   4. and it is the fourth episode in our series on shame.  
   5. and it is titled: Rape, Incest, Shame, and Silence: A True Story Reexamined, Part 1
   6. This is the first of three or four highly experiential episodes -- these episodes are opportunities for experiential learning -- to learn a lot about yourself and your history.  
   7. Pushing the envelope of what is possible for learning from our experiences in an interactive podcast.  
2. Review
    
   1. Series on shame is vitally important. 
      1. Most people can't define shame -- if we can't put what shame is into words adequate, we can't think about it clearly, we can't engage our intellect and our will
      2. Deficits even in experts' definitions -- they can be very incomplete -- even Brene Brown's definitions are incomplete
      3. Really critical to understand what shame and guilt are and what they cause, what they do to us.  More than just natural life and death -- also spiritual life and death.  
3. 
   
   1. We have been really exercising our deductive reasoning skills so far in this series on shame.
       
      1. Deductive reasoning
          
         1. Start by understanding basic principles and general concepts 
      2. 
         
         1. And reasoning from those, arrives at specific observations and conclusions
             
            1. Top down approach
         2.  
            1. Starting from the general, and getting down to specifics
         3.  
      3. 
         
         1. Clarified definitions of shame and guilt -- really necessary
             
            1. Three episodes ago, in episode 37, we introduced shame as the silent killer who stalks us from within
                
               1. Defined shame -- I drew from many sources
            2.  
               1. Conceptual exploration -- understanding a much more complete picture of shame as not only an emotion, but also a bodily response, a signal, a self-judgement and an  action. 
            3. 
               
         2. 
            
            1. Two episodes ago in episode 38, I invited you to see the signs of shame in yourself and others, to recognize shame in ourselves and in others, becoming better able to detect it, because shame very often, almost always, remains hidden and unrecognized from what it really is.     
         3. 
            
            1. Last episode, Episode 39 we discussed shame and guilt conceptually -- multifaceted aspects of guilt, three aspects -- guilt as a moral state, guilt as a legal state and guilt as an emotion. 
               1. Comparing and contrasting shame and guilt -- conceptual distinctions
         4. 
            
      4. 
         
   2. 
      
4. 
   
   1. But a lot of us struggle to learn that way -- with deductive reasoning, staring with generalities and drawing specific conclusions from them.  Seems so intellectual, so conceptual, it can be hard for some of us to see it --   
      1. we need concrete examples, something we can see, feel, sense, something tangible that we can wrap our minds around.
      2. We need a story -- preferably a true story with real people who did real things, said real words, and who had real experiences.  That kind of thing helps me understand the overarching principles. 
      3. Stories and case histories help us with inductive reasoning -- going from the specifics of a real, given situation to general conclusions.
          
         1. Sometimes called bottom-up reasoning.
      4.  
5. 
   
6. Our Plan with the Story
    
   1. Today, we are going to start with a true story, a real story, chock-full of trauma, shame and guilt. 
      1. And we will go through this story multiple times to really flesh it out. 
      2. We will begin with the facts, the particulars, we will be getting into the details
      3. And from those specifics, we will work our way upward toward clarifying the general principles by studying them in a real-life context 
      4. Can think of the principles we've learned about shame and guilt as the first broad strokes in a drawing, the outline of shame -- now we are going to bring in specifics, we will bring in details in color and this drawing will come alive in the story
      5.  That is what we are doing today.  We are start with a story.  And eventually we will review what we have learned about shame and guilt, the conceptual ideas and we are going to put bring those concepts into this real-life situation.  
7. 
   
   1. Preparation
       
      1. So the last three episodes provide the conceptual foundation for understanding shame and guilt in the natural realm, in the psychological realm.  
         1. If you haven't listened to them and you are a conceptual thinker, you like the principles and ideas first, I would encourage you to listen to Episodes 37, 38 and 39 -- lots of conceptual meat in them
         2. For those of you who learn through examples and stories, those three conceptual episodes may make a lot more sense once we work through this case history -- you can go back and listen top episodes 37, 38, 39 after hearing out this story, get a lot more out of those conceptual episodes the second time around.  
   2. 
      
8. 
   
   1. What is our plan with this story -- delicate material, no surprises
       
      1. Brief go over some cautions about this story, how to listen prudently
   2.  
      1. Next I will go through some training with you as to how to listen to this story to really engage with the story and apply it to your experience -- this is a really important part of your work, so I hope you'll tune into the section that is coming up on how to listen to this story.  
   3. 
      
      1. Then, I am going to introduce the main figures in the story -- today in this episode, number 40  
   4. 
      
      1. Next , in this episode, I will give a little bit of the context and the back story behind the story, things I was able to find out and pull together about the story.
   5.  
      1. And in this episode, I will read the story as it was originally published -- this is in the public domain, it's fairly easy to find -- you can google it.  
         1. The published version is quite short -- 4 paragraphs, about 680 words more or less, depending on the version
         2. While there is detail and substance, the story is not told in a particularly psychologically-minded way -- it's more like a news report focused on the facts -- the behaviors of the characters, not as focused on their internal experiences and their relational connections. 

1. Intro: Welcome to the podcast Coronavirus Crisis: Carpe Diem!, where by God’s grace, you and I rise up and embrace the possibilities and opportunities for spiritual and psychological growth in this time of crisis, all grounded in a Catholic worldview.   We are going beyond mere resilience, to rising up to the challenges of this pandemic and becoming even healthier in the natural and the spiritual realms than we were before.  I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski and I am here with you, to be your host and guide.  This podcast is part of Souls and Hearts, our online outreach at soulsandhearts.com, which is all about shoring up our natural foundation for the Catholic spiritual life, all about overcoming psychological obstacles to being loved and to loving.  
   1. Thank you for being here with me.  This is episode 39, released on October 26, 2020 and it is the third episode in our series on shame.  
   2. and it is titled: The Real, Radical, and Resounding Differences Between Shame and Guilt.  
      1. Two episode ago, in episode 37, we introduced shame as the silent killer who stalks us from within.  
      2. Last episode, episode 38, I invited you to see the signs of shame in yourself and others, to recognize shame in ourselves and in others, becoming better able to detect it.     
         1. That's important, because shame pulls us to allow our shame to remain hidden, unobserved, unrecognized for what it is.  
         2. Shame is tricky, it's slippery, it loves to camouflage itself. 
      3. Encourage you to listen to those last two episodes, very rich, RCCD community members discussing listening multiple times, really working on understanding.  
   3. Now that we have a much better understanding of shame from the last two episodes, we are going to take the next step.
       
      1. This episode will stand alone, I will give you the context.  
   4. 
      
      1. Today, in Episode 39.  We are going to understand much more deeply the difference between shame and guilt. 
         1. Many people use them interchangeably they don't recognize a difference.  I feel bad with both of them because something is wrong.
             
            1. Shame vs. Guilt  Distinction.  I asked about this in intake evaluations.  
         2. 
            
            1. Five negative emotions.  Anger, Sadness, Fear, Shame and Guilt.  
         3. 
            
            1. What's the difference between shame and guilt.  
         4. 
            
            1. Most people could not tell me the difference.  Rare that someone could give me a good answer.     
         5. 
            
         6. Do you know the difference between shame and guilt?  Do your siblings know the difference? Does your spouse or significant other, do your friends, your kids, your siblings.  
   5. 
      
      1. As we will see, it a crucial distinction -- because the upshot is that we work with them in very different ways.   
   6. 
      
      1. focusing today recognizing the difference between shame and guilt
          
         1. Important psychologically
      2.  
         1. Important spiritually
      3.  
         1. Not just an idle curiosity, the kind of thing philosopher like to debate about 
      4. 
         
         1. But a real world concern
             
            1. Brene Brown: I believe the differences between shame and guilt are critical in informing everything from the way we parent and engage in relationships, to the way we give feedback at work and school.
         2.  
      5. 
         
   7. 
      
      1. Bernard Williams (1993) claims that guilt and shame overlap to a significant degree and we will not understand either unless we take both seriously.
   8.  
      1. Catholic guilt or Catholic shame.  
   9. 
      
2. Review.  
   1. Shame has been very difficult to define.  Most definitions have been inadequate and very contradictory.  
   2. Shame mentioned only once in the entire Catechism of the Catholic Church. 
      1. CCC1216 on Baptism: Baptism is God's most beautiful and magnificent gift. . . .We call it gift, grace, anointing, enlightenment, garment of immortality, bath of rebirth, seal, and most precious gift. It is called gift because it is conferred on those who bring nothing of their own; grace since it is given even to the guilty; Baptism because sin is buried in the water; anointing for it is priestly and royal as are those who are anointed; enlightenment because it radiates light; clothing since it veils our shame; bath because it washes; and seal as it is our guard and the sign of God's Lordship. 
   3. Shame not mentioned in Fr. Hardon's modern Catholic dictionary or in the Traditional Catholic Dictionary or in the 1917 Catholic encyclopedia.  
      1. Shame also not listed in the American Psychological Association's Dictionary of Psychology.  Ooops.  
   4. Brene Brown: 
      1. I define shame as the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging – something we’ve experienced, done, or failed to do makes us unworthy of connection.
   5. Shame has five dimensions: shame is a primary emotion, shame is a bodily reaction, shame is a signal to us,  shame is an internal self-judgement, and shame is an action -- a verb (review).  
      1. Shame as primary emotion--  primary emotions are those that we feel first, as a first response to a situation. They are unthinking, instinctive, automatic emotions that we have.   Heartset
          
         1. Can be conscious or unconscious
      2.  
         1. Held by a part of us. -- part of us burdened with shame.  Doesn't just come and go in waves
      3.  
         1. Also a self-conscious emotion
      4.  
         1. Also a moral emotion.
      5.  
      6. Shame as a bodily reaction not under bodily control -- bodyset
          
         1. Hyperarousal -- this is where our sympathetic nervous system revs us up, gets into fight or flight mode in response to shame
             
            1. Heart starts racing
         2.  
            1. Breathing quickens
         3.  
            1. Pupils dilate
         4.  
            1. Blood rushes to arms and legs
         5.  
            1. Face can flush red 
         6. 
            
            1. Get ready to defend ourselves or attack or run away 
         7. 
            
      7. 
         
         1. Hypoarousal, when the parasympathetic nervous system shuts us down -- freeze response, like a deer in the headlights
             
            1. Shut down.  Numb out.  Dissociate
         2.  
            1. Head drops
         3.  
            1. Breaking off eye contact
         4.  
            1. Tightening up of muscles, curling up in a ball (spine) -- hunching to protect vital organs.  Making one's body smaller, less visible
         5.  
            1. Feeling like ice water in the veins, cold freezing sensation
         6.  
            1. Fluttering in belly.
         7.  
      8. 
         
      9. Shame as a judgment  -- a negative, critical, global judgment of who I am as a person. -- mindset  
         1. Part of me holds this disparaging perspective of myself
         2. Part of me accuses me of being incompetent, inadequate, worthless, unlovable, bad or even evil,
         3. A judgement about who I really am originally picked up from the perspective of an important other who was perceived as critical or rejecting. 
      10. Shame as a signal

Joey Pontarelli joins guest host Dr. Gerry Crete to share the impact of his parents’ divorce on him as a child, the ways that divorce rocked his world, and his journey of recovery. And that journey of recovery includes his founding of Restored, a ministry for teens and young adults whose parents' marriages failed, giving them a place to share their stories, help for them to find healthy responses to an unhealthy family situation, to seek “integration, rather than amputation” of their internal experiences and to correct the lies beneath their fear, anger, and shame. 

1. Intro: Welcome to the podcast Coronavirus Crisis: Carpe Diem!, where by God’s grace, you and I rise up and embrace the possibilities and opportunities for spiritual and psychological growth in this time of crisis, all grounded in a Catholic worldview.   We are going beyond mere resilience, to rising up to the challenges of this pandemic and becoming even healthier in the natural and the spiritual realms than we were before.  I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski and I am here with you, to be your host and guide.  This podcast is part of Souls and Hearts, our online outreach at soulsandhearts.com, which is all about shoring up our natural foundation for the spiritual life, all about overcoming psychological obstacles to being loved and to loving.  
   1. Thank you for being here with me.  This is episode 38, released on October 19, 2020 
   2. and it is titled: Seeing the signs of shame in yourself and others. 
   3. We are going to understand much more deeply the nature of shame, where shame comes from and how it manifests itself inside of us, and how it is expressed.  
   4. We are focusing today on learning more about shame and recognizing it -- recognizing it in ourselves and in others, becoming better able to detect it.     
   5. Remember parts of the dynamics of shame include shame remaining hidden, unobserved, unrecognized for what it is.  Shame is tricky, it's slippery, it loves to camouflage itself. 
   6. We are in a series of episodes about shame.  In future episodes we will get to how shame affects our spiritual lives and we will also focus on how to heal from shame, how to break out of the vicious shame cycles in which we find ourselves spinning.  
2.  So Let's start by Circling back -- review of shame from the last session and then adding some real depth and nuance as we review and expand upon what we covered in the last episode, Episode 37.  
3. Shame is: 
   1. The primary problem we have in the natural realm
   2. That gives birth to so many secondary problems -- we tend to focus on the secondary problems, the problems that are further downstream -- so we are not getting to the root.  
   3. Drawing heavily from Kathy Steele, Suzette Boon, and Otto van Der Hart -- trauma clinicians and researchers who have worked with real clinical population, real people, not just academicians. 
   4. Also drawing from Richard Schwartz and Regina Goulding -- Mosaic Mind.   
      1. Be open to really learning about this
          
         1. this can be challenging 
      2. 
         
         1. take what suits you -- can slow way down.  If this is really activating for you, consider psychotherapy -- Souls and Hearts course on how to choose a therapist.
      3.  
      4. If you can resolve your dysfunctional shame -- have a deep sense of being lovable and loved, by God, others and yourself, you've solved most of your psychological issues on the natural level.  
      5. Shame has five dimensions: shame is a primary emotion, shame is a bodily reaction, shame is a signal to us,  shame is an internal self-judgement, and shame is an action -- a verb (review).  
      6. Adding today behavioral expression of shame
          
         1. These behavioral expressions of shame are not shame itself, but they are intimately linked with shame and some of the best indicators of unrecognized shame.  
      7. 
         
   5. Shame is more than most people assume.  We tend to have very limited, very primitive understandings of shame -- very unidimensional.  
   6. Let's review the five dimensions of shame.  
   7. Shame is a primary emotion -- heartset
       
      1. Primary emotions are those that we feel first, as a first response to a situation. They are unthinking, instinctive, emotions that rise up spontaneously
   8.  
      1. More nuanced.  Just because you're not feeling shame in the moment does not mean that it's not there.  
         1. Consider how a wave of anger feels.  You feel normal, fine, then something happens and there is this intense anger or even rage, and then it passes, the anger goes away again.   That how we typically think of these emotional experience. That how we make sense of them.  But that's not how it is.  That is a dangerous illusion.  A falsehood.  A pipe dream.  The anger didn't just come and go, just like that.  And you know this at some level, because sometimes you ask yourself -- why am I so angry about that little thing, why did something so minor just set me off?  The emotional reaction is disproportionate to the trivial event.    
         2. A wave of shame -- feels like it wasn't there, and then something happened, like a negative review from your boss it was there in all its intensity and you're just trying to hold it together through the rest of your performance review, and then the shame passes and you're not feeling it anymore.  If I don't feel it, it's not there.  Seems reasonable, right?
         3. But what if, what if that wasn't what really happened.  What if the same amount of shame was within you the whole time -- it was just latent, outside of awareness.  And rather than the shame coming and then going, what if it was your awareness of your shame and anger that changed.   What if you at first where disconnected from your shame out of touch with it.  Then your defenses were overrun and you were overwhelmed with shame, and then your defenses were able to come back online and you no longer felt the shame. What if the intense shame was there the whole time?   That's a whole different model  Let's say that you were disconnected from unresolved shame.  
         4. A high level of shame or anger can endure within us and be intensely felt only on rare occasions when our defenses open up, when they dilate and we can see and feel the shame or anger.  In other words, all that anger or shame generally resides in the unconscious.  
         5. Unconscious
             
            1. The term was coined by the 18th-century German Romantic philosopher Friedrich Schelling  -- 
               1. Schelling suggests that there are two principles in us: “an unconscious, dark principle and a conscious principle” 
               2. later introduced into English by the poet and essayist Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1797, who read the 18th century German idealists.
         6. 
            
            1. Freud.  Unconscious  Mind is like an iceberg  10% above the water -- visible -- that is consciousness -- what we are aware of in the moment.  The vast majority of the iceberg is below the water, outside awareness  -- what you sense is what you get.  
         7. 
            
         8. In North America, we largely don't act as if we believe in the unconscious.  
         9. I think all of us, because of original sin, the sins of others, our own personal sins, the fallen world we live in and our fallen natures -- we have deep reservoirs of shame.  We know we need redemption.  We can sense it at a primal level, and we have ways of distracting ourselves from that reality, from defending ourselves from that reality.  
         10. Richard Schwartz on parts -- we are not just single unitary personalities  Understanding Parts
              
             1. Separate mental systems each with their own
                 
                1. Emotions
             2.  
                1. Expressive style
             3.  
                1. Abilities
             4.  
                1. Roles in the system of the person
             5.  
                1. God images
             6.  

1.      Intro: Welcome to the podcast Coronavirus Crisis: Carpe Diem!, where by God’s grace, you and I rise up and embrace the possibilities and opportunities for spiritual and psychological growth in this time of crisis, all grounded in a Catholic worldview.   We are going beyond mere resilience, to rising up to the challenges of this pandemic and becoming even healthier in the natural and the spiritual realms than we were before.  I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski and I am here with you, to be your host and guide.  This podcast is part of Souls and Hearts, our online outreach at soulsandhearts.com, which is all about shoring up our natural foundation for the spiritual life, all about overcoming psychological obstacles to being loved and to loving.  

a.       Thank you for being here with me.  This is episode 37, released on October 12, 2020 

b.      and it is titled: The Silent Killer Who Stalks You From Inside.  

2.      I want to talk with you about the silent killer, the worst adversary I face clinically, the greatest rival, the greatest opponent to love and life that I have ever met within another person or within myself. 

3.      This one is a very stealthy, effective, ruthless killer -- often hidden beneath the surface of our consciousness, in the murky waters deep below where we can see.  But then at times it surfaces, Powerful, moving.  And maybe you think I'm being dramatic -- but I'm not.  I've seen it kill other and I've been seriously wounded by it myself.     

a.       Killer on the natural level and also on the spiritual level.  This assassin slays not only hearts, minds and bodies but also souls.  A very comprehensive murderer, very complete, this hitman does his work often slowly but very thoroughly.  

b.      Who is this killer?  High blood pressure?  No.  Stroke?  No.  Heart disease?  No.  Diabetes?  No.  Cancer? No.  These can and do kill bodies, but as serious as they are, they are nowhere near as deadly to most people as our silent killer.  

c.       Who is this killer?  The devil you say?  Satan?  No.  Not Satan.  Satan cherishes this killer, and prizes the stealthy sneaking, clandestine work.

d.      No, it's not Satan because this killer lives within us in a way that demons ordinarily do not.  This killer has a pass to roam within us, to move in our being.  Satan doesn't, unless we are possessed.  Besides, Satan does not have permission to slay us, or to harm us unless God permits it, at least with His passive will, and only then for our greater good.  

e.       This killer seems meek and modest, but when it whispers its messages in our ear, it evokes in us fear, anxiety, depression, and efforts to do more and more, and it can also provoke us to anger, aggression, and violence.  Unchecked, this killer can bring us all the way to helpless, despair and suicide.  

f.        Some of us try to numb ourselves to distract ourselves from this killer by using alcohol, drugs, food, binging on Netflix, hours of social media, masturbation, porn, shopping, compulsive exercise, gambling, surfing the web, video games, sleeping the day away, dissociating and even cutting and burning our bodies, all in an attempt to escape.

g.      Who is this killer?  It is absolutely vital for us to know -- is it guilt -- no.  Depression -- no, Anxiety, Fear, Anger -- no, no, no.  Is it pride?  No, not pride.  But this killer has a close and intimate relationship with pride.  The killer feeds pride and is nourished by pride.  Who is it?  Take a moment and really think about it.  We need to know this killer, this adversary.  And we will.  Today we will be getting to know this silent killer.  But not yet.  We've got to look beyond the killer for a moment.  

4.      There is one thing that disarms this killer.  One thing.  And that one thing is Love.  Real authentic Love.  Charity.   Love rescues us from this killer.  It transforms us, makes us immune to the silent killer who no longer has power over us.  So let's talk about love.  

5.      Shifting gears.  Two great commandments -- 

a.       Matthew 22:35-40    And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question, to test him. “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?” And Jesus said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. 38 This is the great and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. 40 On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.”

b.      Main task is to love God and love our neighbor.  With all of ourselves.  All your heart, all your mind, all your soul.  All of us.  

c.       And we need to love our neighbor as ourself.  Think about that.  Love our neighbor as ourselves. 

                                                                                i.            Jesus doesn't say we need to love our neighbor more than ourselves -- it could be implied, but I wonder about whether that's possible.  

d.      So that means we need to be loved

                                                                                i.            Reflecting on last week's episode --  Why we flee from real love.  the capacity to receive love -- 

                                                                              ii.             We discussed fear, avoidance, anger 

                                                                            iii.            We went into how real love burns, it requires us to give up dysfunctional coping mechanisms

                                                                            iv.            It can require us to give up good things that are lesser than love.  

                                                    &n...

Episode 36: Why We Flee from Real Love        October 5, 2020.

Intro: Welcome to the podcast Coronavirus Crisis: Carpe Diem!, where by God’s grace, you and I rise up and embrace the possibilities and opportunities for spiritual and psychological growth in this time of crisis, all grounded in a Catholic worldview.   We are going beyond mere resilience, to rising up to the challenges of this pandemic and becoming even healthier in the natural and the spiritual realms than we were before.  I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski and I am here with you, to be your host and guide.  This podcast is part of Souls and Hearts, our online outreach at soulsandhearts.com, which is all about shoring up our natural foundation for the spiritual life, all about overcoming psychological obstacles to being love and to loving.  

Thank you for being here with me.  This is episode 36, released on October 5, 2020 and it is titled: Why We Flee from Real Love.  

1.      Getting right into it today, not reviewing, no listener questions, so buckle up.  This is a critically important topic

2.      Three main reasons.  Pain, fear and anger -- all rooted in misunderstanding and distortions.  

a.       We want to avoid all these things.  Natural instincts.  

                                                          i.            Freud's pleasure principle:  is the instinctive seeking of pleasure and avoiding of pain to satisfy biological and psychological needs.

3.      Tolerating being loved -- deliberate use of language

a.       No, I just want to be loved -- what they are saying is I just want to be emotionally gratified.  What we want

                                                          i.            Hallmark Card Commercials  

                                                       ii.            Hallmark Movies

                                                     iii.            Romance novels.  Easy love that just come naturally.    Emotional Junk food that nourishes illusions.  

b.      Easy to be loved when you are a baby-- natural openness and receptivity

c.       Negative experiences

d.      Fallen natures in a fallen world

                                                          i.            Slings and arrows -- attachment injuries, relational wounds

                                                       ii.            More significant trauma

                                                     iii.            Sense of vulnerability, it's not safe.  

1.      Fear

2.      Avoidance

3.      Adam and Eve in Genesis 3

                                                      iv.            We are familiar with the disorder, the dysfunction -- our ways of coping. 

e.       People who want to focus on loving, not being loved.  

                                                          i.            More "noble"

                                                       ii.            Focus is on the other

                                                     iii.            But so limited.  Doing good things for the other, not "being with."  

6.      Real love burns -- it hurts -- 

a.     Gratification and Frustration.  

b.     Perfection of God's love has an impact -- burning, purifying effect -- refining of silver and gold

                                                                            i.            1 Peter 1:7 so that the tested genuineness of your faith—more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire—may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.

                                                                         ii.            Isaiah 48:10 Behold, I have refined you, but not as silver; I have tried you in the furnace of affliction.  

                                                                       iii.            Zechariah 13:9 And I will put this third into the fire, and refine them as one refines silver, and test them as gold is tested. They will call upon my name, and I will answer them. I will say, ‘They are my people’; and they will say, ‘The Lord is my God.’” 

                                                                        iv.            Proverbs 17:3  The crucible is for silver, and the furnace is for gold, and the Lord tests hearts. 

                                      &...

Episode 35 Being Both Big and Small        September 28, 2020.

Intro: Welcome to the podcast Coronavirus Crisis: Carpe Diem!, where by God’s grace, you and I rise up and embrace the possibilities and opportunities for spiritual and psychological growth in this time of crisis, all grounded in a Catholic worldview.   We are going beyond mere resilience, to rising up to the challenges of this pandemic and becoming even healthier in the natural and the spiritual realms than we were before.  I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski and I am here with you to be your host and guide.  This podcast is part of our Souls and Hearts, our online outreach at soulsandhearts.com, which is all about shoring up our natural foundation for the spiritual life, all about overcoming psychological obstacles to being love and to loving.  

Thank you for being here with me.  This is episode 35, released on September 28, 2020 and it is titled: Being Both Big and Small.  

Ok, so it’s time for questions from our listeners from the last couple of sessions.  But only I got only one question from the last session in the Resilient Catholics Carpe Diem! community, and she essentially answered it so well herself in our RCCD discussion boards that I don’t have a lot to add.  So I am going to make up a question – from an imaginary listener who wants to remain anonymous, so I am going to call him Johnny Hind:    The good thing for a host about making up questions is that you can have them be exactly what you want them to be, and that’s what’s happening now.  

From Johnny Hind:  Dr. Peter, what about responsibility?  What about being grown up?  I’m confused about how, the challenges of this world, I’m supposed to be mature, wise, virtuous and so on.  That doesn’t sound like being a baby or a toddler.  I can’t just curl up in a corner suck my thumb and wait  for God and Mary to rock me to sleep all the time.  I have responsibilities!  How do I be both small, childlike, trusting and but also grow to the fullness of manhood or womanhood?  

Those are our questions for today.  

So for the last five episodes, numbers 30 to 34 we have been discussing being small, being like little children, going beyond just accepting our absolute dependency on God – but embracing it.  

following the words of our Lord Jesus Christ:  

Matthew 18 1-4  At that time the disciples came to Jesus, saying, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” And calling to him a child, he put him in the midst of them, and said, “Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself like this child, he is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.

Matthew 19 13-15  Then children were brought to him that he might lay his hands on them and pray. The disciples rebuked the people;  but Jesus said, “Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them; for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven.” And he laid his hands on them and went away.

Proverbs 3:5 Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not rely on your own insight.

John 15:4-5   Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me. 5 I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in me, and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.

1 Peter 2: 2-3 2 Like newborn infants, long for the pure, spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow into salvation—

Now we are going to look at the other side of the coin.  Maturity, Responsibility

St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 13:11 When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.

Ephesians 4:15  Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ

Sirach 15 Do not say: “It was God’s doing that I fell away,” for what he hates he does not do.  Do not say: “He himself has led me astray,” God in the beginning created human beings and made them subject to their own free choice. If you choose, you can keep the commandments; loyalty is doing the will of God. Set before you are fire and water; to whatever you choose, stretch out your hand.  Before everyone are life and death, whichever they choose will be given them.

CCC 1730-1738  Freedom and Responsibility. 

So here we have the two demands.  To be childlike and to be mature.  To be small and to be big.  These demands, to be small and big can become extremes.  And in the spiritual life, there are two heresies that reflect these two extremes:  Quietism and Pietism.  

Two extremes:  

Quietism  The Spanish theologian Miguel de Molinos developed Quietism.  From his writings, especially from his "Dux spiritualis" (Rome, 1675), sixty-eight propositions were extracted and condemned by Innocent XI in 1687 

Catholic Encyclopedia.  Quietism in the broadest sense is the doctrine which declares that man's highest perfection consists in a sort of psychological and spiritual self-annihilation.  and a consequent absorption of the soul into the Divine Essence even during the present life. In the state of "quietude" the mind is wholly inactive; it no longer thinks or wills on its own account, but remains passive while God acts within it. Quietism is thus generally speaking a sort of false or exaggerated mysticism.  

Passivity in therapy.  Psychopathology-ectomy.  Want a general anesthetic, and for me to remove all the dysfunction and problems while they rest.  With my psychotherapy scalpel.  You’re the doctor, you’re supposed to be able to do this.  

Pietism is a movement within the ranks of Protestantism, originating in the reaction against the highly intellectualize and reified Protestant theology of the seventeenth century, and aiming at the revival of devotion and practical Christianity. Its appearance in the German Lutheran Church, about 1670, is connected with the name of Philipp Jakob Spener – German Lutheran Theologian, Father of pietism.  

His sermons, in which he emphasized the necessity of a lively faith and the sanctification of daily life

It is primarily one’s own individual achievements, the way a man as an individual lives up to his religious duties and moral commandments, the way a woman imitates the "virtues" of Christ, that ensure them justification. Spiritual growth is an individual self-improvement project that minimizes the role of the Church, mystical body of Christ and all believers.  

In therapy, pietists have to do it all by themselves.  Unwilling to receive help. Suspicious of it.  Might reduce the magnitude of their own achievements,  They have to be captains of their own ships, bootstrappers.  

The quietist says, “Do nothing for yourself.”  God does it all.  I’m totally passive.  God takes all the action.  

The pietist says, “Do every...

Episode 34        Radical Receptivity       September 21, 2020.

Intro: Welcome to the podcast Coronavirus Crisis: Carpe Diem!, where by God’s grace, you and I rise up and embrace the possibilities and opportunities for spiritual and psychological growth in this time of crisis, all grounded in a Catholic worldview.   We are going beyond mere resilience, to rising up to the challenges of this pandemic and becoming even healthier in the natural and the spiritual realms than we were before.  I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski your host and guide, with Souls and Hearts at soulsandhearts.com.  Thank you for being here with me.  This is episode 34, released on September 21, 2020 and it is titled:. Radical Receptivity.  Radical spiritual receptivity.  We’ve been building up to this topic over the last few weeks, so before we get into radical receptivity, let’s just cast a glance back where we’ve been over the last few episodes:

In the last episode, episode 33, we explored openness in the natural realm

·         Because Grace perfects nature, we often start with the natural realm

·         looked at how psychologists define openness 

o   Openness as one of the big five personality traits

§  Along with neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness and conscientiousness

o   open individuals are curious about both the inner and outer worlds, they have experientially rich lives compared to closed individuals.  

o   Lack of conventionality, willingness to question authority, prepared to consider new ethical, social, and political ideas.

·         we looked at the six domains within openness:  

o   fantasy, aesthetics, feelings, actions, ideas, and values (repeat)

Today, we’re going to look at openness in the spiritual life, in the spiritual realm.  

Receptivity:

·         I often use the word receptivity to capture a sense of openness in relationship with God and Our Lady, our spiritual parents.  And not just openness – but more than openness.  

o   having the quality of receiving, taking in, or admitting.

o   able or quick to receive knowledge, ideas, etc.: a receptive mind.  Mindset

o   willing or inclined to receive suggestions, offers, etc., with favor: a receptive listener.  Mindset:

o   What about taking in relationship, connection – relational receptivity.  

o   Radical openness.  Toddler, infant – taking in almost everything he has.  

So in this episode, we’re going into radical openness in the spiritual life, what I am calling radical receptivity to emphasize how we need to take in to receive from God and our Mother Mary.  

Remember, the primary developmental task of the infant and toddler is to learn to trust.  We discussed this in episodes 30 and 31.  Our primary task is to learn to trust.  And remember that we’ve identified that the one essential thing for a Catholic to be resilient is that childlike trust, that absolute confidence in God. 

Psalm 22: Yet it was you who took me from the womb;
     you kept me safe on my mother’s breast.
 10 On you I was cast from my birth,
     and since my mother bore me you have been my God.
 11 Do not be far from me,
     for trouble is near
     and there is no one to help.

You kept me safe on my mother’s breast.  

 If we have that childlike trust, that absolute confidence in God, nothing stops us from being resilient.  We can fall down, and we can get up, because we have a deep awareness, in our bones, that we are deeply loved, cherished, that God and Mary delight in us.  But this childlike trust, this absolute confidence is the primary area where we fail.  

Listen to the way that St. Peter refers to us as Christians, as Catholics:

1 Peter 2: 2-3 2 Like newborn infants, long for the pure, spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow into salvation— 3 if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good.

Listen to St. Paul:  But we proved to be gentle among you, as a nursing mother tenderly cares for her own children.  1 Thessalonians 2:7

But I, brethren, could not address you as spiritual men, but as men of the flesh, as babes in Christ. I fed you with milk, not solid food; for you were not ready for it; and even yet you are not ready, for you are still of all the flesh. (1 Corinthians 3:1-3)

The Church, the Blessed Virgin Mary, and God’s tender care, like a mother.  

Isaiah 49  “Can a woman forget her nursing child,
     that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb?
 Even these may forget,
     yet I will not forget you.

Rejoice with Jerusalem, and be glad for her,

    all you who love her;

    rejoice with her in joy,

    all you who mourn over her;

    that you may suck and be satisfied

    with her consoling breasts;

    that you may drink deeply with delight

    from the abundance of her glory. (Isaiah 66:10-11)

As a clinician, I see this so much psychological baggage around trust, so many psychological impediments around this absolute confidence in God, and these stemmed from negative experiences we’ve had.  It doesn’t have to be abuse or neglect, can also be just the common attachment injuries that we sustain, believe us to be guarded, careful, and cautious.  We bring these into our relationship with God our father, and with Mary our mother.  And it’s not just in my clients, this is ubiquitous it’s everywhere it is in all of us.  

Isaiah 40:11 He shall feed his flock like a shepherd: he shall gather together the lambs with his arm, and shall take them up in his bosom, and he himself shall carry them that are with young.

28 Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”  Matthew 11:28

The only reason we don’t experience this is because we don’t let God in. Because we’re afraid, guarded, self-protective, and we don’t know.  

Review of how Mary is our primary Mother.  

Fr. Emil Neubert, my ideal: Jesus son of Mary, part one, chapter 4:

Mary is even more truly your mother then your earthly mother.…  She loves you – you, all imperfect and ungrateful as you are; she loves you with a love that surpasses in intensity and in purity the motherly love of all the mothers in the world.  Above all, she is more truly your mother because of the nature of the life which she has given you.

RCCD member Jonathan is putting together a book club in the RCCD community.  

O1 Openness to Fantasy: vivid imagination, active fantasy life, daydreaming as not only an escape, but a way of creating an interesting inner world for themselv...

Episode 33. –  Being Open and Coping Well          September 14, 2020.

Intro: Welcome to the podcast Coronavirus Crisis: Carpe Diem!, where by God’s grace, you and I rise up and embrace the possibilities and opportunities for spiritual and psychological growth in this time of crisis, all grounded in a Catholic worldview.   We are going beyond mere resilience, to rising up to the challenges of this pandemic and becoming even healthier in the natural and the spiritual realms than we were before.  I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski your host and guide, with Souls and Hearts at soulsandhearts.com.  Thank you for being here with me.  This is episode 33, released on September 14, 2020 and it is titled: Being Open and Coping Well

Today we’re going to explore openness in the natural realm.  And as a special bonus, we will explore closedness.  

Abierto Cerrado.  

Review: 

Episode 32:  Ways to increase trust, especially given the negative experiences.  0-24 months.  Exercise – popular.  Need more of that.  

Episode 31  The One Thing You Must Have to Be Resilient.  The one thing that you need, the one prerequisite.  Absolute childlike trust

There is one thing that separates those who are resilient from those who are not.   Childlike Trust (particularly in God’s goodness and his Providence for me in particular) separate those who are resilient from those who are not.  Absolute confidence in God.    

Episode 30: discussion of why we mistrust God so much, and it is because we are trying to be way too big.  Trying to make it on our own we don’t feel safe.  Trust is faith in action.  

We hate and fear the dependency required to be in a real relationship with God. 

Reciprocal relationship between openness and trust.  

Why do I bring in Non-Catholic ideas:   What makes me different.  Not closed to new ideas.  

Catholic with a small c  -- universal.

St. Augustine:  On Christian Doctrine (De Doctrina Christiana)  

CHAP. 40.—Whatever has been rightly said by the heathen we must appropriate to our uses. Paragraphs 60 and 61  

Branches of heathen learning … contain also liberal instruction which is better adapted to the use of the truth, and some most excellent precepts of morality; and some truths in regard even to the worship of the One God are found among them.

Not only natural learning, but we can learn truths regarding the worship of God. 

Freud.  How many times have I heard Freud being dismissed out of hand by Catholics because of his views on religion.  I get it.  Freud:  God as an illusion, we’re like infants who need a big, strong father to keep us safe and secure.  A big daddy in the sky.  

Religion had its uses to keep the unwashed masses subdued so that civilization could develop.  We needed something to help us restrain violent impulses and keep life on earth from turning into an episode from Jerry Springer.  But now we have reason and science.   Reason and Science.  

I travel in a lot of traditional Catholic circles, I attend the Latin Mass, love the beauty of the ancient Mass.  Not a lot of traditional Catholic psychologists.  Consulted nationwide, coming to Indianapolis, lot’s of suspicion.   Lots of rejection of psychology

But listen to what Freud is saying – we need a father.  We have an infantile need for a Father. He says it more clearly than a lot of Catholic speakers do – which Catholic media personalities have you heard really driving home the point that we are little, like todders, like infants in our need.  Freud found part of the Truth.  

Pope Francis.  Not to bash the pope.  Not about that in Souls and Hearts or this podcast or the RCCD community.  

September 8, 2017 New Yorker    The Pope’s Shrink and Catholicism’s Uneasy Relationship with Freud

Pope Francis Sought Psychoanalysis at 42,” the Times headline read. Other outlets treated the news more salaciously—“Pope Reveals,” “Pope Admits.” Some noted that the psychoanalyst in question was Jewish, or that she was a woman. Below the headlines, though, the stories were the same: a French sociologist named Dominique Wolton had published a book of interviews with the Pope, and, buried on page 385, amid discussions of the migrant crisis and the clash with Islam, America’s wars and Europe’s malaise, was the four-decade-old scoop that had made editors sit up. “I consulted a Jewish psychoanalyst,” Francis told Wolton. “For six months, I went to her home once a week to clarify certain things. She was very good. She was very professional as a doctor and a psychoanalyst, but she always knew her place.”

Almost immediately, the news drew venom from the Pope’s detractors. A writer for the Web site Novus Ordo Watch, a mouthpiece of the ultra-conservative Catholic fringe—its slogan is “Unmasking the Modernist Vatican II Church”—insisted that Francis’s treatment by a “female Jewish Freudian” was “a really big smoking gun,” incontrovertible evidence that his “mind is saturated with Jewish ideas.”

Jorge Mario Bergoglio appears to have undergone such an experience before he became Pope. When he started psychoanalysis, he was in the last year of his tenure as provincial superior of the Jesuits in Argentina, 1979. The military junta’s Dirty War was raging, and it had put Bergoglio to the test. “I made hundreds of errors,” Francis told an interviewer, in 2013. “Errors and sins.” He described the period as “a time of great interior crisis.” Lucky him that he found a therapist who, mostly with the acutely focussed and patently empathetic listening that characterizes a good analyst, could enable his return to wholeness. “She helped me a lot,” he told Wolton.

Biology we learned about the double helix structure of DNA.  Beautiful.

that James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the double-helix structure of DNA in 1953.  1962.  Nobel Prize

James Watson:  Very anti-Catholic.  Anti a lot of things.  Racism, anti-semitism.  .  

He also said that while he wished the races were equal, “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true.” Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

Infanticide   “If a child were not declared alive until 3 days after birth, then all parents could be allowed the choice only a few have under the present system. The doctor could allow the child to die if the parents so choose and save a lot of misery and suffering. I believe this view is the only rational, compassionate attitude to have.”

Raised Catholic, he later described himself as "an escapee from the Catholic religion." 

Episode 32. – Trauma, Trust, Treatment and Truth     September 7, 2020.

Intro: Welcome to the podcast Coronavirus Crisis: Carpe Diem!, where with God’s help you and I rise up and embrace the possibilities and opportunities for spiritual and psychological growth in this time of crisis, all grounded in a Catholic worldview.   We are going beyond mere resilience, to rising up to the challenges of this pandemic and becoming even healthier in the natural and the spiritual realms than we were before.  I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski your host and guide, with Souls and Hearts at soulsandhearts.com.  Thank you for being here with me.  This is episode 32, released on September 7, 2020 and it is titled: Trauma, Trust, Treatment and Truth.  Today is a deep dive into the effects of trauma and attachment wounds on Trust.  And then we will discuss how by God’s grace and with his help we can experience God as he is, not our distorted God images, rise out of the ashes of our experiences and our injuries.  

Very specific techniques to help.

Era of Coronavirus – call to trust God and Mary.  

Reviews 

Episode 30: discussion of why we mistrust God so much, and it is because we are trying to be way too big.  Trying to make it on our own we don’t feel safe.  

We hate and fear the dependency required to be in a real relationship with God. 

On my terms, on my conditions, within my vision, within my understanding.  We’re going to meet as equals.  We are going to be partners, like equally or almost equally yoked.  God is my co-pilot bumper sticker.  Becoming small so that God can be big.

Episode 31  The One Thing You Must Have to Be Resilient.  The one thing that you need, the one prerequisite.  Absolute childlike trust

There is one thing that separates those who are resilient from those who are not.   Childlike Trust (particularly in God’s goodness and his Providence for me in particular) separate those who are resilient from those who are not.  

In both those episodes, we look at the critical period from age 0 to 24 months, when the major developmental task is to resolve the conflict between trust and mistrust.  Almost every development will psychologist points to this as the critical developmental work in this stage of life.  

We also discussed how so much of the developmental work in this during the ages of 0 to 24 months is done not by the infants or the toddler, not by the little child, rather by the parents.  We don’t expect infants and toddlers to be listening to self-help tapes and engaging in self-improvement classes.   They are far from the age of reason.  So in this issues of trust, God and Mary do the main lifting.  We allow ourselves to be changed, to be formed.  

What little children, what infants and toddlers have is a great capacity for receptivity and a freedom from self-consciousness.  They have a natural humility.  They don’t worry about their self-image so much.  They are flexible.  They use their imaginations.  They don’t fear failing.  They don’t degrade themselves when they’re trying new things.  They can be learning to walk, falling down, and laughing at themselves.  They can make mistakes, they can try things out.

No one expects perfection from a little child.

Most therapies have focused on greater maturity, greater self-efficacy, being a more effective agent in the world, growing up.

List of therapies and their goals

These therapist have trouble when there is complex trauma, especially when that trauma goes back to the first two years of life.  Recent protocols developed.  Bootstrap therapies don’t work.  Very low success rates.  

1.      Focus on complex trauma –

2.      Complex trauma: 

a.         is usually interpersonal i.e. occurs between people usually people who know each other

b.        involves being or feeling trapped

c.        is often planned, extreme, ongoing and/or repeated

d.      often has more severe, persistent and cumulative impacts

e.        involves challenges with shame, trust, self-esteem, identity and regulating emotions.

f.        Results in different coping strategies. These include alcohol and drug use, self-harm, over- or under-eating, over-work etc.

                                                                          i.      emotional dysregulation

                                                                        ii.      changes in consciousness – dissociation

                                                                      iii.      negative self-perception – shame, inadequacy

                                                                      iv.      problems in relationships

                                                                        v.      distorted perceptions of others, including abusers

                                                                      vi.      loss of systems of meaning – losing my religion REM 1991

g.      affects emotional and physical health, wellbeing, relationships and daily functioning

3.       Complex trauma is trauma that occurs repeatedly and cumulatively, usually over a period of time and within specific relationships and contexts.” Examples include severe child abuse, domestic abuse, or multiple military deployments to dangerous locations.

Single incident trauma occurs with `one off’ events. It is commonly associated with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Single incident trauma can occur from a bushfire, flood, sexual or physical assault in adulthood, or from fighting in a war.

Dyadic resourcing is typically a five step process: 

1.       identifying a nurturing adult resource,

2.    &n...

Episode 31. -- The One Essential You Must Have to Be Resilient     August 31, 2020.

Intro: Welcome to the podcast Coronavirus Crisis: Carpe Diem!, where you and I rise up and embrace the possibilities and opportunities for spiritual and psychological growth in this time of crisis, all grounded in a Catholic worldview.   We are going beyond mere resilience, to rising up to the challenges of this pandemic and becoming even healthier in the natural and the spiritual realms than we were before.  I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski your host and guide, with Souls and Hearts at soulsandhearts.com.  Thank you for being here with me.  This is episode 31, released on August 31, 2020 and it is titled: The One Thing You Must Have to Be Resilient.  The one thing that you need, the one prerequisite.  Absolute childlike trust. Repeat.  Absolute confidence in God’s providence.  But to have that absolute confidence, you have to be like a infant or toddler, a parvulum if you’re a guy or a parvula if you’re a gal.    

Jesus told St. Faustina, “The graces of My mercy are drawn by means of one vessel only, and that is — trust. The more a soul trusts, the more it will receive. Souls that trust boundlessly are a great comfort to Me, because I pour all the treasures of My graces into them. I rejoice that they ask for much, because it is My desire to give much, very much. On the other hand, I am sad when souls ask for little, when they narrow their hearts”. (Diary 1578)  Saint Maria Faustina Kowalska

Freewheeling

1.      Up until the last episode Scripting – more like a formal presentation – some moments when I broke out and riffed.  

2.      Now much more natural, more conversational

a.       I like this better anyway, to be with you

b.      Getting used to not seeing you physically, but I can see you in my mind’s eye

3.      I’m learning to trust in this process, that God and our Lady will be present and guide me, I am working on being small with this and having fun with it, much more childlike way.

4.      That the episode doesn’t have to be perfect, and that it’s better to leave room for spontaneity and inspiration

5.      Saves time – 6-7 hours, a lot of it fretting about wording.  

a.       I can put the time back into the community in other ways.

6.      Thank you to the RCCD community members for the feedback – Jonathan, Martha, Ann, and John it  helps me with my growing edge to keep trying new things.  

Best Spiritual Reading Book Chapter Title ever --  Chapter 2 of Life of Union with Mary – Fr. Emile Neubert

Take Only what Applies to You”  

Review: spiral back to Episode 30 – Why do we have so much difficulty trusting God – it’s because we are too grown up.  We’re too big.  

Eric Erickson 1902-1994

1.      Emphasized social development rather than resolution of sexual issues

2.      Developmental Tasks that need to be resolved in each stage

3.      Birth to 18 month the main conflict and developmental task is trust vs. mistrust.

4.      This is the most important phase of life.  Shapes our view of the world, in addition to our personality.  

a.       Can I trust those who care for me, those who are near me?  

b.      Task is Hope – if this phase is adequately resolved, the result, Erickson said, is a sense of hope and confidence that relationships are beneficial, they are good.  A sense of personal competence.  

c.       If successful in this, the baby develops a sense of trust, which "forms the basis in the child for a sense of identity." Failure to develop this trust will result in a  deep pervasive fear and a sense that the world is inconsistent and unpredictable.

Parallel in attachment theory – John Bowlby 1907-1990 psychologist, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst  Infants and toddlers instinctively turn to their parents in distress unless there is disorder – what Bowlby and Ainsworth found.  

The formation of early healthy emotional connections to mother and father is central to identity development.  Relationships are crucial, and challenged Freuds ideas about the primacy of psychic energy.  Security is dependent on healthy relational bonds.  

Erickson and Bowlby said that the first and greatest challenge, the first and greatest task in the natural human development is to learn to trust, to be able to trust in relationship, it’s the foundation for all other development.  Gotta get that straight. 

I argue that the first and greatest task, the first and greatest challenge in the spiritual life is to trust God.  

There is one thing that separates those who are resilient from those who are not.   Childlike Trust (particularly in God’s goodness and his Providence for me in particular) separate those who are resilient from those who are not.  

We are resilient not because of our own efficacy, our own ability, our own strength, our own intelligence, our own resources, our own knowledge, our own skills, talents, money, possessions, but Catholic resilience depends on connecting to and sharing in the love and power and omniscience of God, sheltering under His wing.  And if we are spiritually small in our relationship with God, when we fall, it’s not that far to the ground. We won’t get hurt.  

Effects of the Fall – psychological devastation.  

However the infant and the toddler will always be disappointed and wounded by the parents, because mom is not perfect, and dad is not God.   Often this is totally unintentional.  

Paraphrased From Nancy McWilliams (2011) Psychoanalytic Diagnosis (second edition).  

Men may easily underestimate how intimidating they are to their young daughters; men’s bodies, faces, and voices are harsher than those of either of girls or their mothers, and they take some getting used to.  A father who is angry seems particularly formidable, perhaps especially to a sensitive girl.  If a man engages in tantrums, harsh criticism, erratic behavior, or sexual violation, he may be terrifying.  A doting father who also intimidates his little girl creates a kind of approach-avoidance conflict; he is an exciting but feared object.  If he seems to dominate his wife, as in a patriarchal family, the effect is magnified.  His daughter will learn that girls and women are less valued than boys and men.

Oldest daughter Grace, married earlier this month, “the practice child.”  Grace and me.   

There are parts of us that think we are going to be annihilated if we are small, if we are vulnerable again.  This is terrifying for us.  Think about the differential  6 foot tall and   1600 lbs, 12 ft. tall.   Able to lift a ton  worse than getting in the wrestling ring with Andrew the Giant.  

Episode 30. How Small and Childlike are We Supposed to Be? -- August 24, 2020.

Intro: Welcome to the podcast Coronavirus Crisis: Carpe Diem!, where you and I rise up and embrace the possibilities and opportunities for spiritual and psychological growth in this time of crisis, all grounded in a Catholic worldview.   We are going beyond mere resilience, to rising up to the challenges of this pandemic and becoming even healthier in the natural and the spiritual realms than we were before.  I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski your host and guide, with Souls and Hearts at soulsandhearts.com.  Thank you for being here with me.  

Let’s jump right in with this critical, central question.  Why is it that we have such a hard time trusting God?  Why is it that our confidence in God is so inconsistent, why is it that we are so fickle?  Why is it so hard for us to have the absolute confidence in God that He merits, that he deserves from us?  That’s what we will be addressing in episode 30 of Coronavirus Crisis: Carpe Diem!, released on August 24, 2020 from the Souls and Hearts studio in Indianapolis.  

The title for today’s episode is How Small and Childlike are we Supposed to Be?  We’re going to get into the psychological side of this question of childlike trust in particular.  There are other sides to the question – the spiritual side, the moral side – we’ll address those sides in passing.  But what is so often neglected, so often denied, so often ignored, and thus so unknown and unavailable to so many Catholics – what we really need so badly -- is a realistic, accurate understanding of the psychological factors, the factors in the natural realm that get in the way of us trusting our God and our Lady.  

We’ve certainly touched on some of these factors before, so let’s review for a moment, let’s go back to take a look at what we’ve developed in previous episodes.  So here is the causal chain as we’ve described it so far:

We have distorted God images in our bones, we have distorted God images in the emotional, intuitive parts of us.  The trouble happens when we give in to those God images, we let them dominate us, we let them take over, we default to them, and we act in accord with those false God images.   Then, our self-image deteriorates.  Meanwhile, we drift away from God or even flee from him.  All the while, we are losing our peace, joy, well-being.  When that gets bad enough, we become symptomatic – anxious, depressed, apathetic, hopeless, panicky, obsessive, whatever our symptoms are.  

So let’s back up one more link in the causal chain and ask the question:  What’s the main psychological reason we don’t resist our problematic God images?  I’m again talking psychological reasons here, not just spiritual reasons like having a particular vice.  

Psychologically, we lose track of who God really is.  We don’t God clearly in those moments, and we waver, we are tempted to doubt, we are inclined to fall again into our destructive patterns, whatever those are for us.  We are lured by our false God images into ways of thinking, feeling, desiring and acting that are harmful to us and to others.   

Why Do We Mistrust God and Mary So Much ?  I’ll give you the answer.  It’s because we are too grown up.  We are trying to be way too big.  Actively mistrusting – fearing.  Or just not considering God at all.  

That what we are like when we act big.

We know this.  We know the Bible verses.  We’ve heard them.  But do we really get what they are saying?     

Matthew 18 

1. At that time the disciples came to Jesus, saying, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” 

2 And calling to him a child (RSV, NAB), “little child” (DR) (ESV)he put him in the midst of them, 

3 and said, “Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. 

4 Whoever humbles himself like this child, he is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.  

5 “Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me; 

6 but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin,[a] it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened round his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea.

1 In illa hora accesserunt discipuli ad Iesum dicentes: “ Quis putas maior est in regno caelorum? ”. 
 2 Et advocans parvulum, statuit eum in medio eorum 
 3 et dixit: “ Amen dico vobis: Nisi conversi fueritis et efiiciamini sicut parvuli, non intrabitis in regnum caelorum. 
 4 Quicumque ergo humiliaverit se sicut parvulus iste, hic est maior in regno caelorum. 
 5 Et, qui susceperit unum parvulum talem in nomine meo, me suscipit.
 6 Qui autem scandalizaverit unum de pusillis istis, qui in me credunt, expedit ei, ut suspendatur mola asinaria in collo eius et demergatur in profundum maris.

very little, very small, tiny. petty, insignificant, Tiny.  Like babies.  Like sheep in their understanding.  

When we approach God:  like that.  When sent out as sheep among wolves Matthew 10:16 Wise (Shrewd) as serpents, simple as doves.  Harmless, plain, sincere, without guile.  

Without me you can do nothing.  

19 Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing; for whatever he does, that the Son does likewise. (John 5:19)

30 “I can do nothing on my own authority; as I hear, I judge; and my judgment is just, because I seek not my own will but the will of him who sent me.  (John 5:30)

Matthew 19

13 Then children were brought to him that he might lay his hands on them and pray. The disciples rebuked the people; 

14 but Jesus said, “Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them; for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven.” 

15 And he laid his hands on them and went away.

13 Tunc oblati sunt ei parvuli, ut manus eis imponeret et oraret; discipuli autem increpabant eis. 
 14 Iesus vero ait: “ Sinite parvulos et nolite eos prohibere ad me venire; talium est enim regnum caelorum ”. 
 15 Et cum imposuisset eis manus, abiit inde.

Parvulus:  Childhood.  But emphasis on infancy.  Little, slight, unimportant, very young, insufficient, indiscreet, not able to understand.   Diminutive of Parvus  -- small, little, ignorable, unimportant.   

A story of cousin Ryan.  3 or 4 years old. Dapper seersucker suit and matching cap.  Christmas morning – big deal on Mom’s side of the family.  I was young teenager.  Wanting to be a big man.  Ryan was playing.  

For St. Therese of Lisieux, everything is based on and flows from spiritual childhood asserts Fr. François Jamart in The Complete Spiritual Doctrine of S...

Episode 29. Magic Genie Gods and Party-Pooper Gods, August 17, 2020.

Intro: Welcome to the podcast Coronavirus Crisis:  Carpe Diem, where you and I rise up and embrace the possibilities and opportunities for spiritual and psychological growth in this time of crisis, all grounded in a Catholic worldview.   We are going beyond mere resilience, to rising up to the challenges of this pandemic and becoming even healthier in the natural and the spiritual realms than we were before.  I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski your host and guide, with Souls and Hearts at soulsandhearts.com.  Thank you for being here with me.  This is episode 29, released on August 17, 2020 and the title Magic Genie Gods and Party-Pooper Gods.  Hang in there with me today through this episode and at the end, I will be walking you through an exercise to help you identify your God images.  

Brief review:  let’s go back and review, what are God images again? 

My God image how my heart feels God to be in the moment.  My God image is who my emotions tell me that God in this present moment.  My God image is very subjective, often driven by factors that are outside of my awareness in the moment, it can be miles away from who I know God to be when the sun is shining and the birds are singing and all is well with me and the world. .  So it is critical to understand is that your God images are not necessarily who you profess God to be with your intellect and your will.  They are the subjective, unfiltered, spontaneous, passion-driven representations of God that can vary wildly, sometimes even from moment to moment.

Similarly, my self-image is who I feel myself to be in the present moment, it is who my passions are telling me that I am right this minute.  M self-images are much more driven by emotion, much more intuitive, subjective, and they also vary a lot more from moment to moment.  My self image in the moment fits with my God image in the moment.  Sometimes the self-image can drive the God-image, and sometimes the God image drives the self-image.  

If you want more about God images, check out episodes 22, 23, and 24 of this podcast where I go into the concepts in much more depth.  

Jessica from Texas has been intrigued by God images – she’s taking us another step with this question:  

How do God images affect our relationships and reactions to others?  Repeat.  This is a great question.  

We’ve discussed God images and self-images and how they differ from our God concept and our self-concepts.  Similarly, our God images and self-images impact how we see others in the moment.  

Let’s consider an example.  If I’m really struggling with an Elitist Aristocrat God image, where my passions are telling me in the moment that God doesn’t need me, he’s too good for me, he has other people that he prefers, others who are much more in his favor, upon whom he bestows his gifts, his graces, and his love, with little for me.  If that’s how I’m seeing God in my God image, and my self-image is that I’m left out, excluded, denied, and the private of good things from God, this God image and self-image combination is going to have an impact on how I see others.  For example, I might experience jealousy toward my brother Phil whom I consider to be in God’s favor.  I may resent Phil, and if I give into this image of him, I will treat Phil out of that jealousy, by holding back good things that I could give him because I feel my brother Phil is already getting so much from God.  Why should I give him anything – he already has so much and I get so little from God.  I need to keep what I have.  

Let’s take another example.  With his Elitist Aristocrat God image, 24-year-old Ian might feel inadequate around Tina in their Catholic Young Adult Group.  Ian sees God favoring Tina in so many ways.  Ian feels unworthy of being around Tina, and therefore he refuses to engage with her, in order to avoid an exacerbation of his sense of shame.  So even though Ian is romantically attracted to Tina, he doesn’t ask her out because of the inhibiting effect of his God image and the self-image that goes with that Elitist Aristocrat God image.  

God images and their corresponding self-images impact the way we see all aspects of our lives.  Our perceptions of reality are profoundly influenced by our God images and are self-images, and this extends not just to how we experience others, but it reaches to the furthest corners of our minds and impacts all our internal impressions, not only of God and self, but of everything.  Our God images and are self-images create filters that color our perceptions of everything that has happened, that is happening, and that will happen in our lives.  Many of these perceptions and impressions do not enter into our awareness, but they impact us just the same.

In fact, I argue that we build an implicit religion around each of our individual God images.  Let’s take this slow and easy, because this has some conceptual depth to it.  

The Catholic Dictionary defines religion as the moral virtue by which a person is disposed to render to God the worship and service he deserves.  [Repeat]

Each warped God image demands certain things from us and informs us about how he is to be worshipped and served.  For example, the Demanding Drill Sergeant God image always wants more and more, he wants me to always strive harder, to exhaust myself in prayer and service to others.  So in my religion to that God, I put in long hours of volunteering, I push others to do the same, and I treat both myself and others harshly.  The Vain Pharisee God image demands that I grovel before him, and humiliate myself in order to give him constant homage, and credit for all success.  Therefore, in my worship and service to the Vain Pharisee God I’m extremely stringent and down on myself, and I degrade myself in my prayer and cut myself down in my Bible study group.  The Outtogetcha Police Detective God image insist on perfection, and enjoys catching me in sins of commission.  Therefore, part of my religion is to be very conservative, to only take on what I feel I can do without any mistakes, so I avoid the messy business of relating to others in a deep way and stay on the periphery of my parish community.  

Sometimes we can infer our God image from the religion we seem to be practicing.  For example, if I notice I am not praying, what might that say about my recently activated God images?  

So Jessica, thank you for this question of  How do God images affect our relationships and reactions to others?  How we react to our God images and how we react to our self-images in the moment colors are perceptions of everything.

In the previous four episodes of the Coronavirus Crisis: Carpe Diem!  Podcast, we have covered twelve God images from Bill and Kristi Gaultiere’s 1989 book Mistaken Identities.  I’m adding much more color and background to these God imagers, to make them come even more alive for us Catholics in our present day with the challenges of the coronavirus.  With a little imagination, you can see how these God images impact everything if we let them, if we give into them.  There’s no corner of our lives no detail of our lives that will escape being affected when we default to our problemat...

Dr. Edward Sri, Catholic theologian co-founder of FOCUS shares with us the origin story, how young Catholic adults are starving for love and truth. He lays out how FOCUS forms their missionaries to live out the four dimensions of personal formation (human, spiritual, intellectual, and pastoral) in a “vision for life.” He offers a pyramid model for the integration of formation with human formation as the base, and he describes how open FOCUS is to bringing in other Catholic organizations, apostolates, and professionals to help in the formation of their missionaries and those they serve. And we discuss where FOCUS missionaries can turn when they recognize they need help. 

Episode 28.   Police Detective Gods, Pushy Salesman Gods, and Heartbreaker Gods – August 10, 2020

Intro: Welcome to the podcast Coronavirus Crisis:  Carpe Diem, where you and I rise up and embrace the possibilities and opportunities for spiritual and psychological growth in this time of crisis, all grounded in a Catholic worldview.   We are going beyond mere resilience, to rising up to the challenges of this pandemic and becoming even healthier in the natural and the spiritual realms than we were before.  I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski your host and guide, with Souls and Hearts at soulsandhearts.com.  Thank you for being here with me.  This is episode 28, released on August 10, 2020 and the title is Salesmen Gods, Police Detective Gods and Heartbreaker Gods.

So will cover three more God images today, the Outtogetcha Police Detective God, Pushy Salesman God, and Heartbreaker God.  In the previous three episodes, numbers 25, 26, 27, we covered a total of nine God images.

Brief review:  let’s just spiral back and review, what are God images again? 

My God image is my gut-felt sense of God -- it’s how my heart feels God to be in the moment.  My God image is who my emotions insist that God is right here, right now.  My God image is very subjective, it can be miles away from who I know God to be intellectually, who I profess God to be.  So it is critical to understand is that your God images are not necessarily who you profess God to be with your intellect in your will.  They are the subjective, unfiltered, spontaneous, passion-driven representations of God that can vary wildly, sometimes even from moment to moment.

Similarly, my self-image is who I feel myself to be in the present moment, it is who my passions are telling me that I am right this minute.  M self-images are much more driven by emotion, much more intuitive, subjective, and they also vary a lot more from moment to moment.  My self image in the moment complements my God image in the moment.  

That’s a brief review of God images and self-images, but if you want more of a conceptual background for God images, check out episodes 22, 23, and 24 where I much more in-depth explanation of them.

So what is the connection between problematic God images and resilience?  Because remember, we are in a sequence in this podcast that is all about resilience.  Here is where we get right down to it.  We need a deep and abiding confidence in God, especially in God’s Providence in order to be resilient.  That resilience is an effect – it’s a consequence of the deep, abiding confidence in God, especially in God’s Providential care for us, His love for us.  If you have a deep, abiding, childlike confidence in God and His providential love for you, for you specifically, you will be resilient.  Period.  Full Stop.  Let me say that again, this is absolutely critical to understand.  If you have a deep, abiding, childlike confidence in God and His providential love for you, for you specifically, you will be resilient.  

Let’s keep in mind how the main psychological reason why we don’t have that deep abiding confidence in God is because we don’t know Him as He truly is.  We have problematic God images.  We give into those problematic God images, we default to them, we let them dominate us.  And these distorted God images lie to us about who God is.  They whisper half-truths to us and they draw us away from the real God when we give in to them, when we don’t resist them.  

These distorted God images also lie to us about who we are, leading to distorted self-images.  Note please don’t misunderstand me.  There usually are at least some elements of truth even in the most distorted God images and the most warped self-images.  The messages from these distorted God-images and these inaccurate self images aren’t purely false.  The messages actually have some kernel of truth in them, which can make it confusing for us.  

So here is the causal chain:

We have distorted God images à we give in to those God images, we let them dominate us à our self-image deteriorates à we drift away from God or we flee from him à we lose peace, joy, well-being  à we become symptomatic – anxious, depressed, apathetic, hopeless, whatever our symptoms are.  

Too often, we tried to intervene at the end of the causal chain.  We want to intervene at the symptomatic level.  For example, we may take antidepressants to try to knock out our depressive symptoms.  Or we might use progressive muscle relaxation or guided imagery or grounding techniques to reduce our anxiety.  I’m not condemning these practices, they can be helpful for symptom management.  But no medication in the world is going to correct a dysfunctional, distorted God image on its own.  Have you ever heard of any psychotropic drug that in its slick advertising promises to improve your relationship with God?  

Symptom-focused approaches don’t get at the root causes of our psychological distress.  They can create some space with symptom relief for us to more effectively address the root causes, but symptom focused approaches don’t heal those root causes on their own.

It’s also important to note that just because we have anxiety or sadness doesn’t mean we have a distorted God image driving it.  Our Lord experienced intense grief.  He experienced anxiety in the garden of Gethsemane.  This was not a psychological disorder.  Our Lady was anxious when searching for 12-year-old Jesus in Jerusalem.  This was not because she had some kind of anxiety disorder or emotional dysfunction.  So it’s important to note that not all negative emotional experiences or all psychological distress are an effect of problematic God images.  

So we had a great meeting last Friday night there were 13 of us from the Resilient Catholics: Carpe Diem!  Community in that meeting for a question-and-answer session about God images.  It was an excellent discussion.  This message came through clearly: Dr. Peter, Dr. Peter, help us resolve are problematic God images help us to work through them help us to heal from these burdensome distorted God images that drag us down.  I get it.  I hear you.  I’m with you.  I am working on how to present solutions to you.  

I am going ask for little patience.  I have nearly 2 decades of experience helping people one-on-one to work through their God images, and while I have a lot left to learn, I do know some things about it.  I am still very much sorting through how best to address God images in a podcast format, and how best to assist people with their problematic God images in the RCCD community.  Together, we are going to go through some trial and error with that.  

Right now, we are really focused on identifying different types of God images.  Identification of God images is an essential prerequisite to actually doing the God image work.  So I’m excited that people want to work on their God images.  

I’ve started having people sign up on the interest list for a course on God images that would focus specifically on resolving them.  If you’re interested in getting on that list let me know at crisis@soulsandhearts.com or at...

Episode 27.   Robber Gods, Aristocrat Gods and Marshmallow Gods – August 3, 2020

Intro: Welcome to the podcast Coronavirus Crisis:  Carpe Diem, where you and I rise up and embrace the possibilities and opportunities for spiritual and psychological growth in this time of crisis, all grounded in a Catholic worldview.   We are going beyond mere resilience, to rising up to the challenges of this pandemic and becoming even healthier in the natural and the spiritual realms than we were before.  I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski your host and guide, with Souls and Hearts at soulsandhearts.com.  Thank you for being here with me.  This is episode 27, released on August 3, 2020 and the title is Robber Gods, Aristocrat Gods and Marshmallow Gods.

For those of you who are new to the podcast, first of all, a very hearty welcome to you, I’m glad you’re joining us.  I want you to know that each episode can stand alone, and I will provide you with the background you need to understand each episode.  However, if you want more of a conceptual background for God images, check out episodes 22, 23, and 24.    

Brief review:  let’s just circle back around and review, what are God images again? 

My God image is my experiential sense of God it’s how my heart sees God, what my feelings tell me about God.  My God image is very subjective, it doesn’t necessarily follow what I know about God in my head.  My God image is formed out of the relational experiences I’ve had.  Different God images can be activated at different times, depending on my emotional states and what psychological mode I am in at any given time.  So what’s important to remember is that your God images are not necessarily what you profess to believe with your intellect.  Rather, they are the unfiltered, spontaneous, uncensored, gut-felt sense of God in the moment.

Similarly, my self-images are much more driven by emotion, much more intuitive, subjective, and they vary a lot more from moment to moment.  My self-image is who I feel myself to be in a given moment, it is who my passions are telling me that I am in the moment.  Self-images go together with God images – they impact each other.  

In the last two episodes, episode 25 and 26, we looked at a total of six different negative God images originally identified by Christian psychotherapists Bill and Kristi Gaultiere in their 1989 book Mistaken Identities.  Those were the Drill Sergeant God, the Statue God, the preoccupied managing director God, Unjust Dictator God, the Vain Pharisee God, and the Critical Scrooge God.  

I do want you to know that I’m going beyond their initial conceptualizations and adding much more in these podcast episodes, most of it derived from my clinical experience and also my own experience in my journey with God.  So I just want you to know that I am adding a lot of new material, but I do think their initial pioneering work really deserves to be credited.

All right, so let’s go to listener questions.  Ryan from Texas has this question:

“After identifying problematic God images in my own life, I want to know how deterministic God images are.  Are they imprinted from childhood or do they change with time?  And what we do to make our God images align with the loving and caring God we profess to know in our God concept?”

Great question, Ryan.  Let’s get into that just briefly right now, and I will say much more about it in future podcast episodes.  I also very much want to do a much more in-depth course at Souls & Hearts on God images, particularly how to respond to them, and also how to bring them into greater harmony with who God really is.  

That’s one measure of mental health, is when our God images reflect the reality of our loving and caring God.  So if you are interested in a course like that, let me know.  Once I have 25 people that would be committed to a much more in-depth course, and would be willing to pay for it, I could begin to set aside the time to create it.  If you’re interested in that, call me or text me at 317-567-9594 or email me at crisis@soulsandhearts.com and let me know, and I put you on the list.  

So back to Ryan’s question Initially, God images are formed in us from our first days.  Even as infants, we are learning about the world and nonverbal assumptions are being formed in us.  Imagine an infants, I will call him baby Joe, who has an attuned, psychologically healthy mother who can really enter into the baby’s experience.  The mother is able to intuit what the baby needs, and meet those needs in a loving, competent way.  The baby has a sense of being seen and known, and also has safety and security, which are the first to conditions of secure attachment.  This sets the baby up to have a greater sense of safety and security, a greater sense of being seen and known by God.

Contrast that baby’s experience with another, who I will call baby Tom, whose father recently divorced his mother.  Baby Tom’s mother is stressed out, having to reenter the workforce, feeling a deep sense of shame and abandonment, and is struggling with depression and anxiety.  Unconsciously, baby Tom’s mother blames baby Tom for driving away her husband.  This is going to have a huge impact on baby Tom’s sense of being seen and known, of being safe and secure.

So it’s clear that baby Joe and baby Tom are going to have different starting points with regard to their God images.  The impact of parents’ ways of relating with children is difficult to underestimate when it comes to the generation of children’s God images.  Nevertheless, and this is very important, there is another factor that has an even greater impact on what the ultimate God images are.  And that, my dear listeners is what is our experience of the actual living God.  These God images that are formed in us beyond our control will change over time, if we bring ourselves into contact with God really is.  The reason that so many God images seem to be so sticky, they seem to hang around so much, is because they have not yet been corrected by God.  Sometimes God delays correcting these God images, to draw us into deeper relationship with him.  Other times though, we refuse to allow God into our lives in a way that would help us see and know who he really is.  We default to our negative God images and we don’t invite him into our lives.  And there are reasons for that, and will get into those in future episodes.  For now, Ryan, I want you and the rest of the listeners to know that the way we engage with the living God, as he is, the way we allow him into our lives into relationship with us – that is going to have much more of an impact on our God images over time than our original upbringing.

So our God images can and should change over time.  As we deepen in the spiritual life, as we deepen our relationship with God, our God images will conform more to our God concept, which will conform more to who God really is.

Ok, with that, let’s dive into the three God images we are reviewing today, these are the Robber God, the Elite Aristocrat God, and the Marshmallow God.  

Robber God:  This God robs me of good things, and prevents me from having good fortune. He...

Episode 26.  Dictator, Pharisee, and Scrooge God Images – July 27, 2020

Intro: Welcome to the podcast Coronavirus Crisis:  Carpe Diem, where you and I rise up and embrace the possibilities and opportunities for spiritual and psychological growth in this time of crisis, all grounded in a Catholic worldview.   We are going beyond mere resilience, to rising up to the challenges of this pandemic and becoming even healthier in the natural and the spiritual realms than we were before.  I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski your host and guide, with Souls and Hearts at soulsandhearts.com.  Thank you for being here with me.  This is episode 26,  released on July 27, 2020 and it’s called Dictator Gods, Pharisee Gods, and Scrooge Gods.

In the last episode, episode 25, we looked at three different negative God images proposed by Christian psychotherapists Bill and Kristi Gaultiere in their book Mistaken Identities, published in 1989.  Last week, I decided to reach out to the Gaultieres and let them know that we were discussing their book on this podcast so I emailed them.  Sometimes I do that.  I just reach out to people.  Who knows what will happen? 

And Sue, the representative from their ministry, their ministry is called Soul Shepherding – Sue got back to me – Sue got back to me and said “What a blessing to hear from you and to learn of the good work that you are doing for the Kingdom!  It was such an encouragement to hear that you are able to use our resources in your ministry.”  Isn’t that cool?  I think that’s cool.  

But wait, there’s more.  I made a request of the Gaultieres and their ministry for something I wanted to give to the member of the Resilient Catholics Carpe Diem Community  – I wanted their permission to be able to pass on something special to those of you those of you who have joined the RCCD community and they said yes. At the end of this episode, I will tell you what that something special is, so stay with me until the end, OK?.  Oooh, very exciting.  

In the last episode, I put the question out to you, my audience members – are you interested in this stuff?  Do you want me to cover more of these god images?  And if so, which ones?  I really want this podcast to be interactive, I want to hear from you.

Jane in Indiana emailed in, “I want you to do all the God images. They are fascinating!”  Now that is enthusiasm, thank you Jane. I just love it. I really want this podcast to not just be transformative, not just to make a big difference in your life, but to be interesting, no, not just interesting, but fascinating. 

Along with Jane in Indiana, I think this God image stuff is fascinating.  It’s also vitally important, not only for our spiritual well-being, but also our psychological well-being.  You can’t have abiding peace, a deep joy, or a solid sense of well-being if you are dominated by negative God images.  It’s just not possible to give in to wretched God images and be happy.  This is so vitally important, people, this God image issue, because how we respond to God images is really going to determine our peace and joy and well-being, both in the natural realm and in the supernatural realm.  Will we approach God?  Will we flee from Him?  Will we fight him?  Will we refuse to follow Him or even believe in him?  

So we have two ways we can overcome this issue.  One is to recognize our negative God images and respond to them in a positive way.  And in future episodes we will get into how to respond to negative God images.  I promise.  So the first way to handle negative God images is to recognize them and respond well.  The second way is to resolve them.  I mean it.  To actually resolve them, to heal them.  And we will discuss how to do that in future episode as well, and especially in the Resilient Catholics Carpe Diem community that has grown up around this podcast.  

In this episode, we’re going to review three more problematic God images described by Bill and Kristi Gaultiere’s book Mistaken Identities

Brief review:  let’s just circle back around and review, what are God images again? 

My God image is my emotional and subjective experience of God, who I feel God to be in the moment. This is my experiential sense how my feelings and how my heart interpret God.  My God images are heavily influenced by psychological factors, and different God images can be activated at different times, depending on my emotional states and what psychological mode I am in at a given time.  God images are always formed experientially.  God images flow from our relational experiences and how we construe and make sense of those images when we are very young. 

My God images can be and usually are radically different than my God concept.  God concept is what I profess about God, what I choose to believe about God, what I endorse about God.  Intellectual understanding.  

Self-images are much more driven, much more intuitive, subjective, and they vary a lot more from moment to moment.    Who I feel myself to be in a given moment, it is who my passions are telling me who I am.  Self-images go together with God images – they impact each other.  

If you haven’t already listened to episodes 22, 23, and 24 of this podcast, make sure you check them out, because they have lot more conceptual information and definitions of God images.  

So I had a question from a listener Martha in Indiana who wondered if it's usual to say 'yes' to many God images?  Martha is essentially asking if we can have more than one God image, can we have different God images at different times?

Now much of the God image literature seems to assume that there is one primary God image. And that makes sense, because often we are in our standard mode of operating. However, there is a greater awareness that, because we have multiple modes of operating, we also may have multiple God images. Sometimes we depart from our standard mode of operating.  Clinically, I have no doubt that each of us has several or even many God images.  So, my dear Martha, I absolutely believe that we have more than one God images.  

Over the past several years, I have identified in myself 11 different modes of operating.   I have 11 distinct and identifiable ways of being. I think of models of operating as like parts of me.  Kind of like in the Pixar movie Inside Out, where the main character Riley has different parts of her, each part having its primary emotion, like the red character was angry, the blue round character was sad and so on..

Each part of me has a mode of operating each part of me has characteristic feelings, desires, impulses, attitudes, and assumptions about the world. And each of my modes of operating has its own God image and its own self-image.  So I have 11 God images and 11 self-images.  

So do you see what you opened up with your question, Martha?  I wasn’t going to go into all of this yet, I wasn’t going to get into all this self-disclosure in this episode, but your question brought it up.  

So that’s important to know in and but I’m bringing that up now, because I really do want you to pay attent...

Episode 25.  Drill Sergeant Gods, Statue Gods, and Preoccupied Manager Gods, Oh My…

July 13, 2020

Intro: Welcome to the podcast Coronavirus Crisis:  Carpe Diem, where you and I rise up and embrace the possibilities and opportunities for spiritual and psychological growth in this time of crisis, all grounded in a Catholic worldview.   We are going beyond mere resilience, to rising up to the challenges of this pandemic and becoming even healthier in the natural and the spiritual realms than we were before.  I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski your host and guide, with Souls and Hearts at soulsandhearts.com.  Thank you for being here with me.  This is episode 25,  released on July 20, 2020 and it’s called Drill Sergeant Gods, Statue Gods, and Preoccupied Manager Gods, Oh My…

Self-concept: This what we intellectually believe about ourselves, who we profess ourselves to be, what we understand about ourselves, our mental construct of ourselves.  The self-concept of a practicing Catholic, for example, may include being a beloved child of God.  There’s a link between God concepts and Self-concepts – they go together, they harmonize.  Loving Shepherd, little sheep.  

Self-images on the other hand, are much more emotionally driven, much more intuitive, subjective, and they vary a lot more from moment to moment.    These go together with God images – they impact each other 

My God image is my emotional and subjective experience of God, who I feel God to be in the moment.  May or may not correspond to who God really is.  

Initially my God images are shaped by the relationship that I have with my parents.  This is my experiential sense how my feelings and how my heart interpret God.  My God images are heavily influenced by psychological factors, and different God images can be activated at different times, depending on my emotional states and what psychological mode I am in at a given time.  

God images are always formed experientially.  God images flow from our relational experiences and how we construe and make sense of those images when we are very young. 

My God images can be and usually are radically different than my God concept.

My God concept   What I profess about God.  It is my more intellectual understanding of God, based on what one has been taught, but also based on what I have explored through reading.  I decide to believe in my God concept.  Reflected in the Creed, expanded in the Catechism, formal teaching.  

So in the text exchange with a listener who I will call Beth, because that’s her name, Beth told me that she was having a hard time figuring out her own God images.  So I thought I would bring in the best resource

Mistaken Identity William and Kristi Gaultiere  1989 Fleming H. Revell  -- 3 decades ago. 

14 Unloving God images – drawn from I Corinthians 13, 4-7.  

Preoccupied manager director God

Statue God

Robber God

Vain Pharisee God

Elitist aristocrat God

Pushy salesman God

Magic Genie God

Demanding drill sergeant God

Outtogetcha Police Detective God

Unjust dictator God 

Marshmallow God

Critical Scrooge God

Party-pooper God

Heartbreaker God  

Preoccupied Managing Director God:  God is busy running the world, but God doesn’t take the initiative, time, or energy to really relate with me, to connect with me. God cares about me, but he is overtaxed.  He is impatient, it is hard to get His attention.  God may want to give more to everyone, but He has limited resources and has to allocate them carefully, to those who most deserve them.  Comfort and help might come if I my situation is desperate enough.  

Bible verse: Psalm 13 opening:  How long, Lord? Will you utterly forget me?  How long will you hide your face from me?  How long must I carry sorrow in my soul, grief in my heart day after day? How long will my enemy triumph over me?

Self-image: I am not important enough, not worthy enough for God’s attention, for his care, for him to be concerned about me. The problems, cares, and concerns of my life are not significant enough to warrant his attention. God can’t be disturbed with my relatively minor concerns and difficulties.  God has little bandwidth for me, doesn’t need to be saddled with my petty wishes and desired.  Twisting in the wind.  I am an unprofitable servant, so God leaves me to my own devices.  

Attachment History – over-parentified children of families with harried, distressed parents, often with financial concerns and time pressure. Children with a Preoccupied Managing Director God image learn that they are rewarded for being “low-maintenance” and not adding to their parents’ troubles by voicing their concerns.  Praised for how independent, mature, and responsible they are.  Anxious-preoccupied attachment style – they want intimacy, connection with God, but they feel that have to go without it, because they just don’t matter enough.  They generally don’t feel seen and known, and they don’t believe that God cherishes them – rather God sees them as a burden.  

Coronavirus Crisis:  Readily activated now – some are not feel much of God’s presence.  Lots more responsibilities, lots of decisions, lots of stress.  Others, such as supervisors, superiors have more responsibilities, show less patience, more irritability.  Aging parents, more self-absorbed.  Loss of connection.  Responsibilities piling on – decision fatigue – when to wear masks, what activities can we do, conflicting feedback from politicians, medical experts, government leaders.  No help in sight.  And you can see how 

Vignette:  Paula – 17 year old, second oldest child of a family of 6, father was preoccupied with his business, not doing well with the coronavirus, Mom is stressed, working a part-time job and still wanting to homeschool, and her father is self-absorbed with some health issues.  Her older brother escaped the household by enlisting in the Navy and the third oldest in the family, a 15 year old son,  is rebellious, acting out by not completing his schoolwork, announcing that he is an atheist, and experimenting with alcohol.  Paula doesn’t feel like she can burden her mother with any of her issues, lest she become impatient and irritable and act in the role of a martyr.  The 3 youngest children are emotionally and relationally draining for her mother who is strenuously trying to hold them to high standards.  Paula has barely enough time to complete her studies to her mother’s exacting principles, essentially teaching herself from a boxed curriculum. Paula’s is trying to hold her family together, and feels like she is a fish in a puddle that is evaporating.  She tries to rely on herself, but is developing and increasingly intense anger toward God and she is not aware of the anger.  Prayer – another responsibility, another thing to check off her list, based off a sense of duty.  Very dry, uncomfortable, sense of not mattering, not being cared for.  Now she has lost some activities she enjo...

Episode 24.  God Images and Self Images

July 13, 2020

Intro: Welcome to the podcast Coronavirus Crisis:  Carpe Diem, where you and I rise up and embrace the possibilities and opportunities for spiritual and psychological growth in this time of crisis, all grounded in a Catholic worldview.   We are going beyond mere resilience, to rising up to the challenges of this pandemic and becoming even healthier in the natural and the spiritual realms than we were before.  I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski your host and guide, with Souls and Hearts at soulsandhearts.com.  Thank you for being here with me.  This is episode 24,  released on July 13, 2020 and it’s called God Images and Self Images. 

Today we’re going to consolidate some of our learning to date, spiraling back to a few key concepts and then bringing those key concepts to life in a story.  You may remember Richard and Susan from Episodes 17 and 19 when we were doing a three-episode series on grief – you long-time listeners that were with us six to eight weeks ago may remember.  And you may have forgotten.   No worries.  Don’t worry if you don’t remember.  We are going to review all the key concepts briefly here and I’ll catch you all up on the doings of Susan and Richard, as we begin this fifth installment on Catholic resilience.  We’re also going to take a close, in-depth look at the negative God images that Richard and Susan struggle with, and how those God images impact how they feel about themselves and each other.  Now if you are just joining us, Richard and Susan are made up – I created these characters to illustrate the concepts we’re discussing, buy they are realistic, and have issues common in our lives.  

I said were going to review what a God image is, so let’s just go over that again briefly.

My God image is my emotional and subjective experience of God, who I feel God to be in the moment.  May or may not correspond to who God really is.  

Initially my God images are shaped by the relationship that I have with my parents.  This is my experiential sense how my feelings and how my heart interpret God.  My God images are heavily influenced by psychological factors, and different God images can be activated at different times, depending on my emotional states and what psychological mode I am in at a given time.  

God images are always formed experientially.  God images flow from our relational experiences and how we construe and make sense of those images when we are very young. 

My God images can be and usually are radically different than my God concept.

My God concept   What I profess about God.  It is my more intellectual understanding of God, based on what one has been taught, but also based on what I have explored through reading.  I decide to believe in my God concept.  Reflected in the Creed, expanded in the Catechism, formal teaching.  

This distinction between God image and God concept is so critical, I really want you to grip onto it, to really understand it a deep level. I hope you can really digest to the difference, not just at a conceptual level, but at a much deeper level in you, and hang onto it for the rest of your lives. I mean that. Remember the causal chain that we discussed last time?

Letting ourselves be taken in by our bad God images leads us to lose confidence in God, which in turn causes us to become much less resilient.  

Allowing our problematic, heretical God images to dominate us, to exert influence on us in subtle but powerful ways.   In the last episode, Episode 23, we discussed how the greatest sin against the First Commandment among us serious Catholics is defaulting to our negative God images, and letting them rule us, not resisting their pull on us, letting them draw us away from God.  

The more we give into our negative, heretical God images, the more they color our God concepts, leading us to entertain doubts in our intellect about God’s love, his power, his mercy, his goodness.  And once we abandon our God concept to the notions of our heretical God images, we are headed for major trouble.  

Richard and Susan from Episodes 17 and 19 on Grief.  We’re going to take a close look at Susan’s God images throughout her life to date in more detail, and in order to do that, we have to go back 100 years, and some generations.  

Susan’s father Pawel--  Born 1919 in Pittsburgh to Polish immigrant parents, Pawel’s mother died shortly after he was born from Spanish influenza.  Youngest of three brothers.  Grew up in the 1920s  with his father and two older brothers.  No sisters, no experience of mother, no stepmother – some extended family but not really close.   Pawel’s father (Susan’s grandfather)  was a wheelwright, making wagon wheels.  At age 10, Al experienced the stock market crash and the Great Depression, hard times, unemployment, and a rough house, with some alcoholism.  So Pawel grew up in difficult economic circumstances, completed 8th grade, went to work as a printer’s apprentice and then to war in 1942 and fought in the American infantry in France under Pershing.  

In 1945, return with some shellshock, not able to talk about war experiences.  In 1951 six years after the war ended, 32 year old Pawel married Maja, an 18 year old Polish immigrant who had US shortly after WWII ended.   He had known Maja’s family.  

Maja was devoted to Pawel, very social, very outgoing, but with a history of unresolved war trauma from the German invasion of Poland when she was a little girl in the late 1930’s.  Pawel and Maja had four children, three boys and then Zuzanna – which is Polish for Susan -- Zuzanna was the youngest of the four, born in 1960.  Life was good for the family in the 1950s and 1960s.  

Susan:

§  Susan’s Father the good days

·         Worked in a printing shop, a master printer, first shift

·         High school education, funny, affectionate, a great story teller

·         Susan was the youngest, and the only girl, three older brothers, everyone said she was her mother’s daughter, similar to Mom Maja  in so many ways, both physically and in her personality  

·         Dad gave her lots of warmth and affection as a baby and toddler and little girl, all through grade school – he read to her and was like the coolest dad, because he would come to her tea parties with her dolls – 

§  God image – Susan found it easy to pray – first communion, first confession.  Warmth toward God, sunny days.  Felt beloved.  

§  Susan’s Father – the difficult days

·         But when she turned 14, in 1974, it became a difficult relationship – she and her father did not see eye to eye.

o   When Susan reached puberty, Dad withdrew emotionally – seemed to reject her hugs and kisses, told her those were “things little girls did” and “Susan, you’re a big girl now”

o   She told him he had always said she’d be his little girl and didn’t understand when he said nothing in response

o   She didn’t understand the tears in his eyes or why he’d turn away, leave her and watch TV alone in his d...

Episode 23.   Sinning, God Images, and Resilience

July 6, 2020

Intro: Welcome to the podcast Coronavirus Crisis:  Carpe Diem, where you and I rise up and embrace the possibilities and opportunities for spiritual and psychological growth in this time of crisis, all grounded in a Catholic worldview.   We are going beyond mere resilience, to rising up to the challenges of this pandemic and becoming even healthier in the natural and the spiritual realms than we were before.  I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski your host and guide, with Souls and Hearts at soulsandhearts.com.  Thank you for being here with me.  This is episode 23,  released on July 6, 2020 and it’s called Sinning, God Images, and Resilience.

I am really excited to be with you today, we have a great episode coming up, where we will be bringing together all the conceptual information from the last three sessions and seeing how it all works together in real life, in real situations, real adversity and real hardship, all from a Catholic worldview.  

Let’s start with a brief review, spiraling back to the critical concepts that we have been studying about resilience from a Catholic perspective.  If you are new to the podcast, first of all welcome, I’m glad you’re here.  All you need to know conceptually we will cover in the next few minutes or so.  You can review the last three episodes, episodes 20, 21 and 22 if you want to get into more detail about the concepts in this brief review.  

Let’s start with the definition of Catholic resilience – you will see how it is really different from secular understandings of resilience.  For our purposes, I’m defining Catholic resilience as “the process of accepting and embracing adversity, trials, stresses and suffering as crosses.  Catholic resilience sees these crosses as gifts from our loving, attuned God, gifts to transform us, to make us holy, to help us be better able to love and to be loved than we ever were before, and to ultimately bring us into loving union with Him.   

That is what I want for you.  For you to transform your suffering into a means of making you holier, more peaceful, and more joyful.   Not to take away any necessary suffering from you – not to take away the crosses God has given you.  I am here to help you reduce, to eliminate your psychological impediments to not only accepting those crosses but embracing them, and transforming your suffering into the means of your salvation.  You have to be resilient to do that, and not as the world sees resilience, but resilience firmly grounded in a Catholic understanding.    

Remember how we need a deep and abiding confidence in God, especially in God’s Providence in order to be resilient?  That resilience is an effect – it’s a consequence of the deep, abiding confidence in God, especially in God’s Providential care and love for us.  If you have the deep, abiding confidence in God and His providential love for you, you specifically, you will be resilient.  Repeat. 

Remember also how the main psychological reason why we don’t have that deep abiding confidence in God is because we don’t know him as He truly is.  We have problematic God images.  Our God images fluctuate, they can be as unstable as water. These are the subjective, emotionally-driven ways we construe God in the moment.  These are automatic, spontaneously emerging, and they are not necessary consented to by the will.  

These God images stand in contrast to our God concept, which is the representation of God that we profess, that we intellectually endorse, that we have come to believe intellectually through reading, studying, discerning.  It is the representation of God that we endorse and describe when others ask us who God is. 

When our problematic, inaccurate, heretical God images get activated, they compromise our whatever confidence have in God, whatever childlike trust we have in God.  So here’s the key causal chain:

Bad God images lead to lack of confidence in God, which leads to a loss of resilience.  

And psychological factors contribute to these bad God images.  Here’s the idea. Think about al little child.  12 months old or 18 months old, looking at his father.  To that toddler, his father seems like a God – really huge – probably 10 times his weight, more than twice his height, so much stronger than he is, able to do so much more in the world.  That toddler, as he comes into awareness about God, is going to transfer his experience of his parents and other caregivers into his God images.  

Here’s an important point for you to know as you wrap your mind around God images.  God images are always formed experientially.  God images flow from our relational experiences and how we construe and make sense of those images when we are very young. And that’s critical – we shape our first God images in the first two years of our lives.  Those first two years of life have huge impact on the formation of our initial God images.  And that makes sense, because our first two years of life have a huge impact on how we experience and understand relationships generally.  Our experience of other important caregivers, especially parents, but also grandparents and others shape our psychological expectations of what God is like.  And often we are not aware of those expectations.  Our assumptions may be unknown to our intellects, to our conscious minds.    Simply put, our God images are often unconscious.  Our God images may be unconscious, but they still affect us, they still impact us and exercise influences on us.  We can choose to accept that we have these problematic God images and deal with them directly, or we can deny that they exist and try to shove them away, ignore them, suppress them, and drive them into the unconscious.  

Ok, now for a little speculative Malinoski theology.  Bur first, you need to know that I could be wrong about some of these concepts that I am discussing.  Now I’m really serious about this.  As a professional who has teaches publicly and speculates publicly about the intersection of psychological and Catholicism, I am acutely aware that I can be wrong about things.  If any of you listeners, particularly those who are well formed theologically and philosophically, detect that I am ever teaching anything that contradicts the Faith, I want you to tell me.  This is really pioneering work we are doing together.  For more than a decade, I didn’t teach this kind of thing publically.  I wasn’t sure about getting into God images and God concepts, for example.  What if I was wrong?  What if I started leading people astray?  How can I be sure that don’t make mistakes?  And then I realized I was making the bigger mistake of burying my talent, the mistake of omission.  I needed to become more resilient.  To become more resilient, I needed to have a deeper and more abiding confidence in God.  I need to know at a deep level that whatever public teaching I did wasn’t happening in a vacuum, with God millions of miles away, leaving me to my own devices, letting me persist in my errors.  No.  God is near.  God is minding me, minding this store.  And if I fell down, if I went astray, He would come looking for me, like the shepherd who lost one of 100 sheep and left the 99 behind to find the stray one.  

So here’s the thing.  We hear about the First Commandment still from time to time, right? ...

Episode 22.  The Core of Catholic Resilience

June 29, 2020

Intro: Welcome to the podcast Coronavirus Crisis:  Carpe Diem, where you and I rise up and embrace the possibilities and opportunities for spiritual and psychological growth in this time of crisis, all grounded in a Catholic worldview.   We are going beyond mere resilience, to rising up to the challenges of this pandemic and becoming even healthier in the natural and the spiritual realms than we were before.  I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski your host and guide, with Souls and Hearts at soulsandhearts.com.  Thank you for being here with me.  This is episode 22, and it’s called The Core of Catholic Resilience.  

Today we are going to the core of Catholic resilience, we are going to discover what drives resilience in the saints.  We are discussing the one central theme that is absolutely essential for the kind of resilience that transcends this natural world, that incorporates not just our natural gifts, but grace as well.  The saints are the most resilient people who ever walked the face of the earth.  What is the secret of the resilience of the saints?  That’s the question we are focusing on today.  What is the secret of the super resilience of the saints, the secret that allows them to rise up again when they fall under the weight of adversity, of persecution, of their own failings, weakness and sins?  We are getting to that in just a moment.  

I am a believer in spiral learning, especially for this podcast and for the online learning at Souls and Hearts.  So what is spiral learning?  Guess what!  It’s definition time with Dr. Peter. [cue sound effect]

In a spiral learning approach, the basic facts of a subject are learned, without worrying much about the details.  Just the main, plain concept.  As learning progresses, more and more details are introduced.  These new details are related to the basic concepts which are reemphasized many times to help enter them into long-term memory. 

Repeat.  That’s spiral learning.  Homeschoolers might recognize that from the way Saxon math works or the way some other programs teach.  

Why spiral learning.  I really want you to integrate what you learn in these podcasts into the whole of your being – not just have them go in one ear and out the other, but for you to really grip on to them, really hold them, even when times are tough, even when you are in a dark place, even when emotions run high.  

My self-defense instructor James Yeager, in a fighting pistol course I took several years ago taught the class that “The only things you really possess are those things you can carry with you at a dead run.”  He was referring to gear, including weapons mindset – he is really big on mindset, having your head right in crisis situations, and worked with his students to integrate his teachings throughout their whole beings, to have the right responses come up habitually, automatically, reflexively.  I want that for you.  So in these podcasts, we’re nourishing the mind, we’re focusing on the concepts, we’re starting there.  The experiential work will help with the rest of the integration into your heartset, your soulset and your bodyset.  

Since we are already on a hard road together in the Christian life.  I want to make the learning about Catholic resilience and growing in resilience as easy as possible for you.  

So we will spiral upward, coming back to the main themes in the podcast over and over again with new details, new data points, lots of examples, and of course, stories.  As a psychologist and educator, I want this to be really easy for you to take in.  Another benefit of that approach is that each podcast episode can stand alone – you can just pick this up the middle of this series on resilience can get the background you need for the topic of the episode.  I’m really thinking about you when I put these together.  

So let’s briefly review what we’ve learned in this series on Catholic resilience.  

In episode 20, two weeks ago, we discussed the 10 factors of resilience offered by the secular experts.  These were the ten essential aspects of resilience as summarized by Southwick and Charney, two writer for a general audience on resilience whom I respect.  In episode 21 last week we got into the three major ways that secular understandings of resilience are lacking from a Catholic perspective, three important mistakes that secular professionals make in understanding resilience, the things that they miss because of their non-Catholic worldviews.  If you have the time, you can check those two episodes out if you haven’t already, they help to put today’s episode into context, but suffice it to say for today, that Catholic resilience is very different than a secular understanding of resilience.

In the last episode, I offered a definition of Catholic resilience, comparing secular understandings of resilience to a Catholic understanding of resilience.  So now, just to get us all up to speed, let’s review that definition of Catholic resilience.  It’s definition time with Dr. Peter

Catholic resilience  “the process of accepting and embracing adversity, trauma, trials, stresses and suffering as crosses.  Catholic resilience sees these crosses as gifts from our loving, attuned God, gifts to transform us, to make us holy, to help us be better able to love and to be loved than we ever were before, and to ultimately bring us into loving union with Him.   

Today we are making a deep dive into the one essential requirement, the one prerequisite, the one necessary quality you have to have to be resilient as a Catholic.  All the other factors of Catholic resilience flow from this core, this central principle.  

Now you are asking, Dr. Peter, what is this core of resilience, this central principle of Catholic resilience?  I am glad you asked.  The core of Catholic resilience, the kind of holy resilience of the saint is…

Drum Role

A deep and abiding confidence in God, especially in God’s Providence.  

What I am saying is that resilience is an effect – it’s a consequence of the deep, abiding confidence in God, especially in God’s Providential care and love for us. .   Resilience flows from that confidence in God – confidence in God’s care and love for me, specifically.  So resilience is an effect of the spiritual life.  

OK.  Let’s break this down, to make sure we’re on the same page.  What do I mean by confidence in God?  

St. Thomas Aquinas defines it as confidence in God as “a hope, fortified by solid conviction.”  So confidence in God is Hope, but it is a hope fortified, not just an ordinary hope, which could be lost.  It is a higher level of hope, a hope fortified by solid conviction.  The difference between hope and confidence is only a matter of degree – they are the same, but confidence, because it is fortified by solid conviction, is hope supercharged, a super hope, as King David sang in Psalm 119 (118).  “In verba tua supersperavi” read the Latin.  Speravi is I have hoped – Supersperavi – I have hope to the highest level.  Typical translation  “I have hoped in thy word.”

Let’s look at solid conviction.  So solid.  What does that mean?  Firm, grounded, immovable, consistent.  Conviction  -- wh...

Episode 21.  Catholic Resilience – Where the Secular Experts Get Resilience Wrong.

June 22, 2020

Intro: Welcome to the podcast Coronavirus Crisis:  Carpe Diem, where you and I rise up and embrace the possibilities and opportunities for spiritual and psychological growth in this time of crisis, all grounded in a Catholic worldview.   We are going beyond mere resilience, to rising up to the challenges of this pandemic and becoming even healthier in the natural and the spiritual realms than we were before.  I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski your host and guide, with Souls and Hearts at soulsandhearts.com.  Thank you for being here with me.  This is episode 21, and it’s called Catholic Resilience – Where the Secular Experts Get Resilience Wrong 

In our last episode, we started a deep dive into resilience by looking at secular conceptualizations of resilience.  We discussed how in the secular world resilience is about adapting yourself to life’s demands, it’s about handling the challenges and curve balls that life throws at you with poise and confidence.  It’s about getting back to previous levels of functioning and adaptation.  It’s about getting up as many times as you are knocked down by dangers and misfortunes, it’s about journeying on under the load of troubles and difficulties that life brings us.  It’s about not succumbing to failure, not collapsing under stress, not being destabilized by hardships and tough situations.

The American Psychological Association defines resilience as “the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats or significant sources of stress— such as family and relationship problems, serious health problems or workplace and financial stressors. It means "bouncing back" from difficult experiences.”   You know, like a racquetball that gets hit, squashed, and then regains its shape.  {insert sound}

Seems reasonable enough, right?  I mean, it’s the American Psychological Association, you know, the professionals speaking here.  And in fact there’s a lot of good in that definition that we can draw from.  In considering resilience, though, we as believing, practicing Catholics need to rework the secular notions ingrained in us by our culture.  And that’s what I am here to help you do.  I am here to challenge notions commonly held by Catholics that are actually not grounded in Catholicism.

There are three major problems with the secular definition of resilience.

First problem:  Secular mental health professionals look to at their clients’ personal resources, their talents, their skills, their gifts.  The secular clinicians will work with primarily with those asset and strengths.  These clinicians think about how their clients can have greater autonomy, greater agency, be better able to access their assets and strengths to better adapt to the world.   Most of them will also assess the social support that their clients can access from their close relationships.  Nothing wrong with that, insofar as it goes.  Insofar as it goes.  But it doesn’t go far enough.  As Catholics, we’re not supposed to rely primarily on ourselves, we’re not supposed to be independent, rugged individualists.  And we’re not supposed to rely primarily on our close relationships either, because all other people have their flaws and they will disappoint us.  We’re supposed to rely primarily on God – on His love, His mercy, His power, His constancy.  And while more and more secular clinicians are open to bringing in their clients’ spirituality to help their clients become resilient, it’s not the top thing on the list.  Spiritual resources made Southwick and Charney’s top ten list of resilience factors, but not until number 4 and a little bit in number 10.  From a Catholic perspective, God is absolutely primary in resilience.  And this is the biggest problem of secular-based psychologies in general, not just with regard to resiliency. 

We need to not only understand with our minds who we are and who God is – we also need to involve our souls, our hearts, our bodies.  This is not easy.  There are lots and lots and lots of psychological obstacles to seeing God as He really is.  And I am here to help you do that.  We will go through this process together, harmonizing the best of psychology with a Catholic worldview as we go through all the factors of resilience.  That is what is unique about this podcast.  That is what is unique about Souls and Hearts.  We ground psychology in an authentic Catholic anthropology, an authentic Catholic worldview.  Now today we’re not going into all the solutions for Catholics to become more resilient.  Be patient, I promise you that is coming up in future episodes and especially in the workshops and experiential work that we do in the Resilient Catholics: Carpe Diem! Community.  I want you to become much more resilient, and we’re starting with understanding the conceptual landscape first.  All right, so that covers the first problem that secular clinicians have with guiding others to resiliency – not giving God His primary role.  

Here’s the second problem of secular approaches to resilience.  Most mental health professionals work to minimize suffering and maximize one’s enjoyment of life.  They misunderstand suffering.  Most assume either consciously or unconsciously that suffering is to be avoided, minimized, that it is bad.  They want their clients to feel better, to enjoy life more, to avoid getting hurt, to be able to pursue their own dreams and follow their own paths, to be able to make their own meaning out of life.  They don’t use this word, but which philosophical system argues for maximizing enjoyment and minimizing suffering as the best way?  Well, dear listeners, the word for the belief system that emphasizes maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain is hedonism.  Hedonism.  And hedonism has always been really popular because in our fallen human conditions, hedonism makes sense to our passions – we naturally want to avoid pain and we naturally want to pursue pleasure.  It’s a very worldly way of looking at meaning and purpose in life.  

Most mental health professionals don’t understand the meaning of the cross.  They don’t understand the importance of redemptive suffering.  And hey, it’s not easy to grasp deeply the meaning of the cross.  There’s a lot of ways that people, even Catholics, even faithful devout Catholics get the meaning of the Cross wrong.  The meaning of the cross is not intuitive to the vast majority of us, it’s not available to unaided human reason.  We need divine revelation to understand the meaning of the cross and why the cross is a gift that almost everybody rejects.  Remember that the cross is a stumbling block and a folly – Christ’s cross was seen by the Jews of his day as disgraceful, shameful, a sign that he was cursed by God.  To the Greeks of the day, focused the cycles of time, on order, on harmony, on beauty, the crucifixion was jarring, discordant event, and the resurrection hard to believe.    

But all things work together for good for those who love the Lord – Romans 8:28.  All things.  Therefore all things can be gifts.  If we are loving the Lord, we can receive our sufferings, as gifts, as our crosses that will bring us to salvation, to the joys of eternal life.  Now this can be extremely difficult to do.&...

Episode 20.  Resilience: Ten Factors

June 15, 2020

Intro: Welcome to the podcast Coronavirus Crisis:  Carpe Diem, where you and I rise up and embrace the possibilities and opportunities for spiritual and psychological growth in this time of crisis, all grounded in a Catholic worldview.   We are going beyond mere resiliency, to rising up to the challenges of this pandemic and becoming even healthier in the natural and the spiritual realms than we were before.  I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski your host and guide, with Souls and Hearts at soulsandhearts.com.  Thank you for being here with me.  This is episode 20, where we are starting a multi-episode deep dive into resilience and discuss 10 elements that constitute resilience as defined by the general literature.  Today we are going to define resilience and cover 10 primary resilience factors – from a secular perspective.  This is episode 20 entitled Resilience: Ten Factors and it is released on June 15, 2020.  In the next episodes were are going to get much more into how to develop greater resilience.  In the next episode, we are also going to get into a Catholic understanding of resilience that incorporates what we know to be true by our faith.  

But for today, we are starting with how secular psychology defines resilience.  We are looking at the elements that secular psychology states are the factors of resilience.  We want a solid conceptual base, we are being catholic with a small c here, meaning universal.  I’m drawing from many sources here, but there’s one book that stands out, one book that I’m using in particular for this episode, because of how it’s based in research and its simple, effective organization.  It includes insights from neuroscience research, and it has great illustrative stories, so it’s more than readable, it’s engaging.  The book is “Resilience: The Science of Mastering Life’s Greatest Challenges by Steven Southwick and Dennis Charney.  The book is now in its second edition and I like their structure and their emphasis on looking for research-based evidence, not just their personal experience.  

So what is resilience?  What does secular psychology mean by resilience?  Let’s define resilience.   It’s definition time.  [Cue sound effect]

The American Psychological Association defines resilience as “the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats or significant sources of stress— such as family and relationship problems, serious health problems or workplace and financial stressors. It means "bouncing back" from difficult experiences.” 

Let’s break that down.   In the secular world, resilience is about adapting yourself to life’s demands, it’s about handling the challenges and curve balls that life throws at you with poise.  It’s about recovering previous levels.  It’s about getting up as many times as you are knocked down by dangers and misfortunes, it’s about journeying on under the load of troubles and difficulties that life brings us.  It’s about not succumbing to failure, not collapsing under stress, not being destabilized by hardships and tough situations.

The word resilience derives from the present participle of the Latin verb resilire, meaning "to jump back" or "to recoil."

The concept of psychological resilience draws from physics.  In physics, resilience is the ability of an elastic material (such as rubber) to absorb energy when it is deformed by some agent and release that energy as it springs back to its original shape.  

Imagine a racquetball flying back to the player, [cue sound] who strikes the ball with the racquet, squeezing the ball, flattening the rubber.  The ball absorbs the energy of the swing and then in its resilience, it launches off the racquet, discharging all that energy as it flies away.  

What resilience is not:  Misconceptions that people have.  Being resilient does not mean you won’t struggle, suffer or experience adversity.  It also doesn’t mean that hardships and challenges don’t affect you.  It’s not stoicism and it’s not being numb or nonreactive.  It’s not about not having needs.  

Resilience is adapting well, regaining your shape after you’ve been knocked hard, just like that racquetball springing back into shape.  It’s not a fixed trait – it is something that can be learned, practiced, improved.  And that is what this series on resilience is all about – it’s about helping you become more resilient in the face of this coronavirus crisis, so you can be loved and you can love God and others.  

So what are the 10 factors of resilience, according to Southwick and Charney?  Let’s just list them, and then we will go into more depth on each one.  Remember, I am using their language here and keeping their focus on a general audience.  In future episodes, we are going to ground the concept of resilience in a Catholic worldview and we are going to really tweak these.  These will be in the show notes on our website, so you can find them there, no need to take notes.  Really listen in, take these in.  In future episodes in this sequence, we will get much more into how do you cultivate these factors, how do you bring them together.  Right now, we are pursuing understanding.  

1.      Optimism:  The Belief in a brighter future – that things will turn out well.   With enough hard work, I will succeed.  Can’t be a blind optimism – not a naïve optimism.  Looking on the bright side of life.  Dwell on the positive.  Glass half empty vs. half full.  

2.      Facing Fear:  Not avoiding fear.  Southwick and Charney are really talking about courage here.  Not just giving into fear.  Courage is not the absence of fear – it’s overcoming fear, it’s not letting fear master you.  But it’s not just the development of virtue.  There are test techniques that help with this and we will get into those techniques.  Facing fear with friends, colleagues and with spiritual support – general audience, but here is the spiritual entering in.  

3.      A Moral Compass, Ethics, and Altruism:  Doing What is Right  -- Southwick and Charney don’t have much patience or acceptance for moral relativism.  They advise having a moral compass and consulting it.  Getting outside yourself, not being self-absorbed.  Here they focus in on courage again.  Having a backbone.  They discuss how sometimes the choices are extremely difficult.  

4.      Religion and Spirituality: Drawing on Faith – really interesting in a book for general audience.  Especially helpful in fearing death. – This is not the end.  

5.      Social Support  -- can’t be isolated, can’t be alone.  We need to reach out.  Social support protects against physical and mental illness.  Social neuroscience.  

6.      Role Models:  We all need them.  We can’t raise ourselves.  We need mentor, guides to help us find our way.  Parents, other relatives, teachers, coaches, friends, colleagues, even children – our own or others.  People that show us the way.  Breaking out from the effects of negative role models, not imitating our parents or others clo...

Episode 19:  Healing from Losses, Healing with Grief

June 8, 2020

Intro: Welcome to the podcast Coronavirus Crisis:  Carpe Diem, where you and I rise up and embrace the possibilities and opportunities for spiritual and psychological growth in this time of crisis, all grounded in a Catholic worldview.   We are going beyond mere resiliency, to rising up to the challenges of this pandemic and becoming even healthier in the natural and the spiritual realms than we were before.  I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski your host and guide, with Souls and Hearts at soulsandhearts.com.  Thank you for being here with me.  This is episode 19, Healing from Losses, Healing with Grief, released on June 8, 2020.  And in this episode we really get into how do we heal?  How do we move through our losses and heal?

Story Time

Remember the story of Richard and Susan from Episode 17?  Let’s catch up with them and see how they are doing.  Now Richard and Susan have been married 28 years, and their three sons are 27, 25, and 23 years old, and all have moved out of the home and are very busy with their lives.  

Richard is 61 years old and is somewhat emotionally reserved – he was introverted, and didn’t talk a lot about feelings.  He is not that interested in religion, but usually attends Sunday Mass with Susan. He had risen in management at his international engineering firm, eventually leading a team of six in joint venture in artificial intelligence with a foreign company.   When that joint venture ended abruptly due to the other firm stealing intellectual property, and the coronavirus lockdowns happened, Richard was laid off.  With the worsening economic environment, it’s unlikely he will return to that position.  He is struggling with identity issues now, as he has been so invested in his work for so many years. After the layoff he initially kept himself busy with home projects and tinkering with go karts, but lately he has been much more withdrawn and spent much more time distracting himself on the internet, and also experimenting with day-trading stocks.  

Susan is 60, she is more extroverted, much more emotionally expressive with a wide circle of friends and acquaintances.  Susan is eagerly awaiting grandchildren now that her oldest son has married.  She had been hoping that with her husband home from work and their sons moved out, they would renew their relationship, but there is more distance than ever.  Susan has been troubled by the emotional distance in her marriage for the last 25 years, and doesn’t know what to do about it, and for several years there has been almost no physical closeness.  This is more acute for her now, that her social activities and connections have been curtailed by the social distancing restrictions.  

Twenty years ago, Susan experienced a real deepening of her faith and she began to practice it more seriously, with a regular prayer life an occasional daily Mass and regular confession.  She had a scare with breast cancer five years ago from which she recovered.  She continues to be in high demand as a professional translator in Spanish and Italian.   She has been deeply worried upon finding out two weeks that the first case of the coronavirus has been confirmed at her mother’s assisted living facility.  Now her 87 year old mother has shortness of breath, a fever, fatigue and a cough.  Now her mother’s health is failing rapidly as they wait for the results of a COVID-19 test.  Susan also recently discovered a pornographic pop up window on her husband’s home office desktop.   She asked her husband about it, but he said it was nothing.   

Quick review from episode 17, where we made clear some definitions.  

Loss: deprived of a real, tangible good.  Something good is taken from us – it can be the loss of an actual good, or a potential good.

Grief is our individual experience of loss –Grief is our reaction to the loss.  It’s our experience of the loss.  Psychological, physical, behavioral, emotional.   

Mourning is a public expression of our grief, it’s what we show to others.  Mourning is how we show our grief.  

For Richard

            Loss – loss of job, loss of income, loss of identity, confronting aging and physical decline (no more go-karting, too hard on the body)

            Grief – Six stages:  Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance, Making Meaning

expressed through increased activity initially, seeking distractions through focusing attention (excitement of day trading), seeking comfort in increased pornography use, emotional and physical withdrawal, numbing negative emotions

Mourning – façade of being unaffected, brushing off attempts at connection, consolation

For Susan:

            Loss – Loss of mother, loss of trust in her husband, loss of illusions about marriage

            Grief – Six stages:  Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance, Making Meaning

crying, sadness, anger at husband (sense of betrayal), body image issues (sexually undesirable) regret over lost time, “wasting her life” in the marriage, accepting her husband as he is and loving him anyway.  Concentration difficulties.  

            Mourning – sharing with friends, bereavement group, letter to Mom, writing poetry, prayer, reading, 

Helpful tips

1.       Remember that any loss that God permit is a gift.  He only permits losses to provide a greater good to the one who grieves.  We may not see that – we may only see it in a conceptual, intellectual way, and not feel it.  But our feelings do not dictate reality, and they don’t always reflect reality.  Romans 8:28.  All things work together for good, for those who love the Lord.  If we can conceptualize losses as gifts, we can look for the gift in spite of the grief, in spite of the pain.  

2.      Feel the pain of the grief.  Allow yourself to feel it.  Accept your emotions, whatever they are.  Don’t pack it away in amber.  This is what Richard originally tried to do – just wanted to move on with life, considered retirement, porn use to help him feel better, have a sense of control.  

a.       Allow the time for grief – packed schedule  -- Susan cut back her work schedule.  

b.      Allow for not understanding – when you are grieving you may not understand and that’s ok.  – relief comes not from understanding and knowing, but from confidence, trust, and relational connection.  Think of little kids.  

3.      Share the grief with someone you trust– a friend, friend, family member, counselor, confessor – talk about the losses.  Susan’s friend Valerie – listened to her.  

a.       Particularly important to share this grief in prayer.  With God.  With Mary, or with another saint.  Guardian angel.  Share it and listen.  

b.      Providential view.  We may not unde...

Jason Evert of the Chastity Project joins Dr. Gerry and me to discuss the integration of personal formation and chastity. We begin this episode with a brief experiential exercise to check out your spontaneous reactions, briefly discuss What the Catechism of the Catholic Church says about chastity and interior integration, and then Jason shares with us his decades of experience in working with youth. He shares with us how the concept of chastity needs to be rehabilitated and framed in the positive light of love. He shares stories of how young people have responded to the call to chastity in their own formation. He also discusses the importance of starting formation in chastity early, not just prior to marriage. And he shares the connection between chastity and joy. 

Episode 18:  Grief vs. Depression

Grief:

Intro: Welcome to the podcast Coronavirus Crisis:  Carpe Diem, where you and I rise up and embrace the possibilities and opportunities for spiritual and psychological growth in this time of crisis, all grounded in a Catholic worldview.   

Ok, so I know we’re now into some really heavy, difficult times in our country and in our world.  There’s lots of things going on – we have the pandemic, we have partial lockdowns and closures, we have major unemployment issues, nearly half of small businesses are in danger of shutting down permanently.  We have escalating tensions with Xi Jinping’s government in China and the possibility of the cold war with China turning hot.   We now have riots and looting over the tragic death of George Floyd while under arrest by a Minneapolis police officer, we have very flawed and contentious politicians battling with each other in petty ways in an election year, we have growing revelations of corruption by current and former government officials and bureaucrats. There is a growing lack of confidence in our government, our news media and in our secular and religious institutions.  

None of these factors changes the basic Gospel message.  None of them.  None of them can keep us from psychological and spiritual growth, unless we let ourselves be kept down.  We need to rise up, we need to go beyond mere resiliency, to become even healthier in the natural and the spiritual realms than we were before.  

I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski your host and guide, with Souls and Hearts at soulsandhearts.com.  Thank you for being here with me.  This is episode 18, entitled “Grief vs. Depression” released on June 1, 2020. 

Today, we’re going to really dive into the difference between grief and depression, and to illustrate the difference between grief and depression, we’ll be looking at five people from the Scriptures.

First, though, I want to offer a big Thank you to all the Resilient Catholics: Carpe Diem community members who came to our first ever Zoom meeting last Friday evening.  We had a great conversation on unacknowledged or hidden grief.  It was very good for us to get to know each other better and for us to connect and to be in relationship with one another.  Thank you for praying for me, and know that I am praying for you.  

So some of you may be asking, Dr. Peter, why, why is it important to know the difference between grief and depression – both of them feel bad, and we want to feel better.  So why bother with the difference?  

Normal Grief

Waves or intense pages of painful emotion associated with the loss, which gradually soften and diminish over time. 
Emptiness and loss – something is missing -- but also there are moments of happiness, joy.   
Self-esteem generally remains intact.  If there is self-criticism, it tends to be focused on perceived shortcomings about the loss (I should have visited my Mom more often before she died, I should have told her I loved her).
Relational connections remain intact.  Able to give and receive in relationships, and can be consoled.  
Ruminating on what or who was lost; Hope remains.  Since of life going on.  
Thoughts of death and dying focused on the lost person and perhaps reconnecting  with the loved one in heaven.  Some loss of desire to live on, but not overt wishes or impulses toward suicide. 
Distress, sadness activated by memories or reminders of the loss.   

Clinical Depression 

Sadness, distress experienced continually over time
Ongoing depressed mood with anhedonia – unable to enjoy good things
Feelings of inadequacy, worthlessness, with self-criticism.  Critical toward self, feelings of worthlessness, and self-loathing.  This is much more general.  May involve significant shame.  
Emotional withdrawal from others – perhaps with avoidance.  Could be a physical withdrawal as well.  Difficulty being consoled
Self-critical or pessimistic thoughts; tendency toward a loss of hope.  
Suicidal thoughts related to feelings of being unworthy of life, or of not wanting to live anymore.  Suicide considered an escape from unbearable pain with no other answers.  
Depressed mood is not tied to specific thoughts or preoccupations

Let's flesh this out with examples of grief vs. clinical depression from Scripture:

Abraham’s Grief

Genesis 23: Sarah’s Death and Burial

23 Sarah lived one hundred twenty-seven years; this was the length of Sarah’s life. 2 And Sarah died at Kiriath-arba (that is, Hebron) in the land of Canaan; and Abraham went in to mourn for Sarah and to weep for her. 3 Abraham rose up from beside his dead, and said to the Hittites, 4 “I am a stranger and an alien residing among you; give me property among you for a burying place, so that I may bury my dead out of my sight.”

David is one of the most expressive men in the Bible.  

David’s Grief:

2 Samuel 1

Saul and Jonathan, beloved and lovely!
     In life and in death they were not divided;
 they were swifter than eagles,
     they were stronger than lions.

24 O daughters of Israel, weep over Saul,
     who clothed you with crimson, in luxury,
     who put ornaments of gold on your apparel.

25 How the mighty have fallen
     in the midst of the battle!

Jonathan lies slain upon your high places.
 26     I am distressed for you, my brother Jonathan;
 greatly beloved were you to me;
     your love to me was wonderful,

David’s Depression

Psalm 38

O Lord, rebuke me not in thy anger,
     nor chasten me in thy wrath!
 2 For thy arrows have sunk into me,
     and thy hand has come down on me.

3 There is no soundness in my flesh
     because of thy indignation;
 there is no health in my bones
     because of my sin.
 4 For my iniquities have gone over my head;
     they weigh like a burden too heavy for me.

5 My wounds grow foul and fester
     because of my foolishness,
 6 I am utterly bowed down and prostrate;
     all the day I go about mourning.
 7 For my loins are filled with burning,
     and there is no soundness in my flesh.
 8 I am utterly spent and crushed;
     I groan because of the tumult of my heart.

13 But I am like a deaf man, I do not hear,
     like a dumb man who does not open his mouth.
 14 Yea, I am like a man who does not hear,
     and in whose mouth are no rebukes..

21 Do not forsake me, O Lord!
     O my God, be not far from me!
 22 Make haste to help me,
     O Lord, my salvation!

Elijah

Elijah God’s judgments and warnings to several Israelite kings, including the despotic Ahab and his formidable  wife, Jezebel.. 

Here, Elijah had a great victory over 450 of Baal's prophets on Mt. Carmel, however, he remained fearful of Jezebel's revenge.  He proved not only the power of...

Episode 17:  Loss, Grief, Mourning and Resilience – How do They Go Together?

Intro: Welcome to the podcast Coronavirus Crisis:  Carpe Diem, where you and I rise up and embrace the possibilities and opportunities for spiritual and psychological growth in this time of crisis, all grounded in a Catholic worldview.   We are going beyond mere resiliency, to rising up to the challenges of this pandemic and becoming even healthier in the natural and the spiritual realms than we were before.  I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski your host and guide, with Souls and Hearts at soulsandhearts.com.  Thank you for being here with me.  This is episode 17, released on May 25, 2020 entitled Loss, Grief, Mourning and Resilience – How do They Go Together?

Some of you have been in touch with me and asked for work on Grief, which we touched on in Episode 3 with the loss of the sacraments in the lockdown.  There’s been conversation about grief on the discussion boards in the Resilient Catholic: Carpe Diem Community space in Souls and Hearts, and now we are going to dive deep into this whole area of grief.  We are going to do two podcast episodes on grief and the coronavirus, and I will be doing one Zoom meeting for our members.  Seating is very limited for that, I’m only taking on 12 for that meeting at 7:30 PM eastern time on Friday, May 29, I saw one or maybe two open seats left, so check that out at Souls and Hearts.  Joining the community is free for the first 30 days, so come check it out at Souls and Hearts.com.  

Our thinking can be heavily impacted when we are experience intense emotions, so let’s really get some clarity, let’s shine some light on things now.  The first thing, really quickly, is to define a few terms around grief, loss, and mourning. Let’s get our vocabulary straight, because that really helps our thinking.   

We’re going to start with the concept of loss, loss – and that’s because loss comes before grief.  Loss always comes before grief.  Loss precedes grief.  So we’re going in order here, and starting with loss.  

There are two kinds of loss:  Actual Loss and what I call the Loss of Potential.  Actual loss and the loss of potential.    

Actual loss is the loss of a real, tangible good.  Something good is taken from us.  It could be death of a loved one, when we lose the relationship, with its intimacy, connection, the love.  It can also mean the actual loss of some part of us – our sense of hearing for example, or the 

Loss of Potential –  this is the loss of possibilities that we hoped for – something anticipated in the future.   a wedding that will never happen, children that will never be born, a promotion that will not come now, etc.  It also includes words that were never said, words that were never heard, stories that will never be finished.   Grieving at a funeral of family members – not of the actual loss of the abusive, alcoholic, philandering husband – not for the loss of the actual person.  But for the symbolic loss – no longer married, no longer the possibility of living happily ever after.  

Grief is our individual experience of loss – so remember, the loss is the good we no longer have. Grief is our reaction to the loss.  It’s our experience of the loss.  And that experience is emotional – sadness, anxiety, irritability we may feel mood swings -- or we may feel nothing apathy

Psychological – disbelief, impaired concentration and attention, flashbacks, ruminations, going over and over some memory of the person.   

Grief is also physical – for example when the tears flow, have intense fatigue, headaches, loss of appetite, trouble sleeping.   Grief is also expressed through behavior – the heavy sigh, when put our hands to our heads and groan or when we withdraw and sit alone in a dark room.   

The experience of grief varies a lot from person to person, situation to situation.  It can be painful, sometime exquisitely painful, horrendously painful, it may seem intolerable.  Sometimes it’s much more quiet.  It may also be bittersweet, or even have a sense of peace in it, such as when a loved one suffering from a terminal illness dies well.  There are different kinds of grief, and we’re going to get into that later in this podcast, but for now, let’s understand that grief is our individual experience of loss.  

And with grief comes mourning.  

Mourning is a public expression of our grief, it’s what we show to others.  Mourning is how we show our grief.  How we share our grief with others.  How we connect in grief.  Some of this is conditioned by our culture – 3 rifle volleys salutes for deceased veterans, funerals, eulogies, the chicken dinner in the parish hall after the Mass, tossing a handful of dirt on the grave.  

Review the above: 

            Actual Loss

            Loss of potential 

            Grief

            Mourning

So how can we really solidify our understanding of these definitions?  How can we make these concepts come alive?  Hmmm.  Let me think.  [Ding]  I’ve got it!  How about a story, to make all this come together for us?  I think that’s a great idea.  So it’s story time with Dr. Peter.  

Story Time:

Richard and Susan (not an actual case).  We’re going back in time 20 years, back to the early 2000s.  At that point, Richard and Susan had been married for eight years.  He was an engineer with an excellent job, highly successful and creative at work.  He really loved their three young sons, aged seven, five and three.  Susan was a professional translator in Spanish and Italian.   She had travelled and lived abroad before her marriage at age 32.  They had met through mutual friends, and both were nominally Catholic, attended Mass on Sundays and their sons were baptized, but it was not a central part of their lives.  Richard was somewhat emotionally reserved and kind of introverted didn’t talk a lot about feelings, and had always been into racing go-karts.  Now he was getting the oldest son into the hobby in a mini go kart and really enjoying that together. Susan was more extroverted, and maintained a lot of connections with her professional women friends, many of whom were younger than her and unmarried and still living in Italy and Spain. 

Susan really wanted a daughter, and had been going through some recent fertility issues, there were medical complication.  Richard felt he had enough kids, at least in his opinion.  But at age 40, after a deepening of her prayer life – she began to take her faith more seriously -- she conceived again, and the ultrasound indicated the baby was a girl.  She was so excited, and at 22 weeks everything was going well.  And then complications with the placenta started, and by 24 weeks the baby had died.  Susan miscarried her baby daughter and because of medical complications, also wound up with a hysterectomy.  

All right. So we have the story or at least the beginning of the story.  Let’s work with the story.

So what was the actual loss – remember the actual loss...

Coronavirus Crisis:  Carpe Diem

Episode 16:  Who Am I, Really?  Identity and Resiliency

May 18, 2020

Welcome to the podcast Coronavirus Crisis:  Carpe Diem, where you and I rise up and embrace the possibilities and opportunities for spiritual and psychological growth in this time of crisis, all grounded in a Catholic worldview.   We are going beyond mere resiliency, to rising up to the challenges of this pandemic and becoming even healthier in the natural and the spiritual realms than we were before.  I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski your host and guide, with Souls and Hearts at soulsandhearts.com.  Thank you for being here with me.  This is episode 16, released on May 18, 2020 entitled Who Am I, Really?  Identity and Resiliency

In the last episode, we discussed the main sign of psychological health.  I asked you to send in your thoughts about what is that main sign.  In the Resilient Catholics Carpe Diem community space at Souls and Hearts, which we launched a week ago, I was having a great exchange with Kathleen which spurred me on to some further consideration about integration, resiliency and especially identity.  Really want to thank you, Kathleen.  

Alright, I want to take you back with, way back to the beginning human history, come on with me to Genesis 3.  We’re picking it up in the middle of the story.  Adam and Eve have fallen to Satan’s temptation and eaten the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Let’s listen to the story but be thinking about the theme of identity – Who Adam and Eve were, and how they saw themselves.  That’s what I want you to keep in mind.  So put your listening ears on, and get ready -- It’s story time with Dr. Peter.

Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons.  And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man, and said to him, “Where are you?” And he said, “I heard the sound of thee in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.”

Here we see a radical shift in both who Adam and Eve really were – they had been in a state of grace and now they have fallen into sin.  Also, though, you have a radical shift in how Adam and Eve see themselves.  They hear God walking in the garden, gently calling out to them – and God, being all know, He knew exactly where they were.  In his gentleness, in His consideration for them, he didn’t want to startle them or disconcert them any more than they already were.  He was calling out to let them know He was coming. 

And their response – to be afraid, to hide from him.  Their identities were devastated.  Think about what just happened.  

Very difficult to underestimate the catastrophic psychological effects of the fall.  We get the physical effects of the fall, the effects of the fall on our bodies -- 

Subjective identity includes the experiences (and how we recall those experiences), the close relationships, and values that come together to form one’s subjective sense of self.  You might say subjective identity is who we feel ourselves to be, in the given moment.  For some that sense of identity is more consistent and stable, and for others, it may vary more from day to day.  

Conscious Subjective Identity  Who we profess ourselves to be.

Unconscious Subjective Identity – Parts of us that hold assumptions about us that are not available in conscious awareness.  There are moments when these unconscious assumptions break into conscious awareness – particularly when we are stressed, tired, overwhelmed.  These moments are when our regular defenses open up and some of what we keep out of awareness starts bubbling up.  

Example: Remember the Boasting Traveler from Aesop’s fable in the last episode  -  episode 15- you know, the one how bragged about how he made the most prodigious leap in the city of Rhodes?  That traveler was troubled with narcissism – deep sense of sense of inferiority, weakness, shame, and inadequacy.  These were not in conscious awareness – but those unconscious beliefs existed and they influenced and motivated his behavior to try to impress others.  But then the bystander punctured his puffed up presentation – challenged his boast and may have deflated him, brought him into contact with his own inadequacy, both real and felt.  

Another example of unconscious subjective assumptions about ourselves. Let’s look at  dependency.  Dependent people may not be in touch with their deep unconscious beliefs that they will only have their needs met if they are subordinated to more powerful others – they need the powerful other person to make them whole or complete.  

Every personality style every personality disorder has implications for our conscious and unconscious assessments of ourselves.  In a word, every personality style reflects assumptions about our identity.

So let’s break this concept of identity down into a more fine-grained analysis.  Come on with me as we go deeper into this.  

Objective identity is who we actually are.  How God knows us to be.  The reality of who we are.  This doesn’t depend at all on our opinion of ourselves.  This isn’t as much in fashion these days, the concept of objective reality.  Divine revelation, which doesn’t care much about current fads and fashions in secular psychology, though, Divine revelation teaches us a lot about who we are as human beings – objective reality from the One who is Truth.  

Subjectivism is the doctrine that "our own mental activity is the only unquestionable fact of our experience", instead of shared or communal, and that there is no external or objective truth.  My truth.  You have your truth and I have my truth.  And there is no objective truth.  

But reality has a way of hanging around – even in secular psychology.  So we still have the concepts of delusions and hallucinations—characteristic of departing from reality, breaking with reality.  

So those three elements – 

1.      Who we really are in the mind of God (objective reality)

2.      Who we profess ourselves to be

3.      What we unconsciously assume ourselves to be

Relate these back to Adam and Eve

Triangle of Pathology – 1:  who we really on in God’s eyes  2: Who we believe ourselves to be in our conscious awareness – this is who we profess ourselves to be – “I am a beloved child of God”.  3: The unconscious beliefs we hold about ourselves those that are outside of conscious awareness, but that still impact us.  

When those three points come together into a single point, we are grounded in reality.  The size and the shape of the triangle tell us something about how well adjusted we are.  

Exercise – go back and remember how you thought about yourself wh...