Dear Souls and Hearts Member,
Since Tuesday, November 5, I’ve been feeling ill with a bad cold, and it is quite unusual for me to be so under the weather. And I’m not good at being sick, I tend to handle it badly.
And I’m pretty sure I got sick because I was stressed and not handling stress that well. A lot of things were piling on – my parents were moving into assisted living, with all that entails; I was coming off some major travel and was planning to travel again; and, of course, there was the uncertainty the U.S. elections and their potential aftermath to stress me out.
[Just a note: we will return to our series on writing personal values statements in our next reflection on November 25, 2024. This is a little detour.]
I wasn’t alone in being stressed about the elections.
Three weeks ago, in the runup to the 2024 presidential election, the American Psychological Association released poll results from more than 3300 US adults indicating that:
- 69% cited the presidential election as a significant source of stress in their lives
- 77% are stressed about the future of the USA
- 82% are worried that people are basing their values and opinions on false or inaccurate information, aka “fake news”
That second point, about the future of the U.S., was also stressful for me. I had been up in Wisconsin, a battleground state, two weekends before, visiting my parents. I was stunned at the amount of partisan political advertising, often with personal attacks and dehumanizing vitriol. These words were bandied about to describe presidential candidates and their supporters:
- Lunatics
- Threat to the nation
- Threat to democracy
- Threat to freedom
- “It’s time to put [the other candidate] in a bullseye”
- “Very dangerous people”
- Disgraces
- Garbage
- “They are destroying the country”
- Misogynists
- Racists
One word kept coming to my mind. One word.
Polarization
Richard Schwartz and Martha Sweezy in their book Internal Family Systems Therapy (2nd Ed) define a polarization as:
“A state in which two members (or two groups) in the same system take opposing views and conflict or compete. They grow increasingly extreme out of fear of the other side taking over and can thereby obscure the Self of the system.” (p. 282)
A Psychology Today article from last week titled Healing the Wounds of Polarization by Steven Stosny, Ph.D. describes his personal experience of the increase in polarization in the U.S. over the last 50 years, describing how polarization has moved from the intellectual and policy realm to becoming much more emotional and personalized.
This infographic based on survey data from Statista Consumer Insights shows that political polarization is quite strong in the US at present, especially compared to other western nations, including Germany, France, and the UK.
In another manifestation, James Lo, assistant professor of political science at the USC statistically analyzed polarization in U.S. lawmakers and found that the U.S. Congress is more polarized now that at any time since the post-civil war 1870s.
But you probably don’t need experts or statistical analyses or surveys to tell you that polarization is increasing in our society. You can feel it.
And as society polarizes more, this passage from W. B. Yeats’s 1919 poem “The Second Coming” comes to mind:
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed…
My concern that “the center cannot hold…” in my country contributed to my stress. As did staying up way too late on Tuesday night to see the results roll in.
Fortunately, the vote tallies resulted in a margin that was too wide to be challenged, and concerns about post-election violence were not realized. Deo gratias.
What to do about polarizations?
Much ink is flowing now about how to reduce polarizations at a macro, societal level (see here, here, here, and here, for examples from just the last week).
But I think we need to look inside first, rather than outside.
As Dr. Stosny noted in his article:
I was a Vietnam War protestor in college in the late 1960s, another period of polarization, mostly between the young and old. Those were impassioned protests to be sure, but they were focused on policy choices, not infused with the hate for individuals and groups that we see now.
Stosny is keying in on the demonization and dehumanization of “the other side,” we are seeing in the conflicts now, taking it out of the realm of policy and making personal attacks.
This does not happen when we are recollected and living from our innermost self. In that state, we hold in mind that we are still to love even our enemies. A recollected Christian recognizes that those who differ (and even an enemy) are still made in the image and likeness of God.
As Christians need to focus on what leads us to treat others with contempt, that combination of anger and disgust which is the most corrosive to relationships. John Gottman of the Gottman Institute describes contempt as the worst of the four horsemen of conflict in relationships, fueling the worst interpersonal behaviors (see here for details).
Many of our external conflicts reflect our internal polarizations. St. James says this directly in chapter 4, verse 1 of his letter: What causes wars, and what causes fightings among you? Is it not your passions that are at war in your members?
In this verse, St. James makes a direct, causal connection – our passions at war within us cause the wars and fights among the members of the Christian community. It starts within the hearts of each of us.
So often, it starts with the contempt we have for parts of ourselves.
In their book, Schwartz and Sweezy describe the conditions that give rise to internal polarizations among parts in one person’s system:
“When parts become frozen in the past, take on burdens, and assume leadership, their internal relations shift from harmony to conflict. This is because one extreme generates another, as does the uneven distribution of resources, influence, and responsibilities in the system. The polarized parts continually confirm their negative assumptions about each other, with each part becoming more extreme to counter or defeat the other. Thus, in the absence of effective leadership, polarizations escalate.” (p. 40)
I argue that parts in conflict within us are also likely to polarize with parts of other people that are like their inner rivals. In other words, a person’s internal conflicts spread outward – parts are finding rival parts in other people and the battleground spreads from within to without, from one person to a relationship.
Examples of internal polarizations stretching outward
The drawing above illustrates this. The woman, let’s call her “Alicia,” in the middle has two parts in conflict – a severe inner critic who is condemning a lonely part of her who is perceived as being “too needy,” treating that part with contempt, as represented in her heart. These two parts of Alicia are polarized, but they have the same goal – for Alicia to be known and loved. The critic assumes that others will not love her if she is open and honest about her needs, and the lonely part feels frustrated and thwarted in her efforts to connect at a deep level and have the needs met.
Then, Alicia encounters her 10-year-old daughter Hailey, who is distressed about peer rejection in school. Alicia’s lonely part begins to resonate Hailey’s part with needs for peer acceptance and love, threatening to blend and overwhelm Alicia with its intense sadness and anxiety. To protect against this, Alicia’s inner critic steps up and impels Alicia to implicitly criticize Hailey for how she has managed some of her relationships, telling her she must be strong, not show so much weakness or she will make herself a target for peer rejection. Alicia’s inner critic attempts to silence Hailey’s part with needs so that Alicia’s own needs carried by her lonely part will not overwhelm Alicia. Alicia’s unresolved internal polarization has spread to her relationship with her daughter, leading to her silencing her daughter in a subtly shaming way.
If we look on the left side of the drawing, here we see an interaction between Alicia and her supervisor at work. After weeks of feeling unseen and unheard at work, Alicia’s lonely part breaks out from its confinement and takes over, leading Alicia to open up to her boss about her experience of being disregarded, but in an unmodulated, unregulated way, pouring out intensity. Her boss is taken aback, never having experienced Alicia this way, and many of his part feel threatened by the intensity of the needs Alicia is sharing. Some of his parts feel ashamed and very unsure about how to handle this relational interaction, and in response, his inner critic leaps to the fore, is to defensively criticized Alicia for coming on way to strong, “making a scene” in the office hallway, and commanding her to “pull yourself together.” Again, Alicia’s lonely part in an internal polarization with her inner critic has unwittingly activated a sense of inadequacy and shame in her boss, resulting in a polarization with her boss’ inner critic across the interpersonal field.
“Three fingers pointing back at you”
I’m sure that you’ve heard the saying, “When you point one finger, there are three fingers pointing back to you.” I think this is a way of stating that what we condemn in others are the very things we find most contemptible in ourselves, and therefore the very things we find threatening in our own systems.
This is why Jesus admonished us as Christians in Matthew 7:5, “You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.”
We need to recognize what is going on within ourselves, especially on the emotional level, so that we don’t externalize and hold others responsible for what is activated within ourselves. Others cannot make us lose our peace – parts of others can, however, activate parts of us that are not well integrated, parts of ourselves with burdens or extreme roles that agitate us.
The answer on a natural level: interior integration
But if we remain recollected, if we maintain a sense of interior integration, with our parts in right relationship with our innermost self, we won’t lose a sense of peace, we won’t become overwhelmed with agitation. We can and do still feel emotions, even very intense emotions, but without losing our balance or center.
And that is what I want for you. A deep interior integration, an inner unity where your parts are well-ordered, and under the leadership of your innermost self. That is what Souls and Hearts is all about.
- That natural interior integration provides a solid foundation in human formation for spiritual growth and development, as “grace perfects nature” according to St. Thomas Aquinas.
- That natural interior integration helps to quiet the cravings of parts, the passions at war within us because the attachment needs and integrity needs of parts then can be recognized and more easily met, heading off the wars and fighting among Christians that St. James called out in his letter (4:1, see above).
- That interior integration is a first step toward the unity of Christians in the mystical Body of Christ, a unity that our Lord prayed for with his whole Sacred Heart in John 17: 20-21 “I do not pray for these only, but also for those who believe in me through their word, 21 that they may all be one; even as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that thou hast sent me.”
Look inside yourself to find what you condemn in others
So I invite you to consider what you find most disagreeable, unsettling, or even contemptible in another and be open to the possibility that you might be calling out something that is much more within yourself than your neighbor, without even realizing it.
I invite you to realize that your neighbor is much more than the part or parts that are in front right now – that the parts of your neighbor in charge at this moment do not tell his or her whole story. Not all parts are partisan in any given polarization.
I encourage you not to reduce your neighbor down to just one or two dimensions, but rather appreciate that many parts are not being heard in your conflict.
I encourage you to trust in God’s Providence for your needs, and not to look to politicians and government officials, the “princes” of today’s age, for your security. As Psalm 146:3-4 reads:
Put not your trust in princes,
in a son of man, in whom there is no help.
When his breath departs, he returns to his earth;
on that very day his plans perish.
Rather, let’s look toward our real source of security, the One who deserves all our trust, our God who in providential love cares for every detail of our lives and meets every one of our needs.
And finally, I encourage you to do your own human formation work, to seriously commit to and engage in a human formation plan of life, to address these natural level issues that have so many relational and spiritual consequences, like the Resilient Catholics Community and the Formation for Formators Community in Souls and Hearts.
In doing so, you will be contributing to reducing polarizations and increasing peace not just within you, but throughout the world, consistent with the wishes expressed by Sy Miller and Jill Jackson Miller in their 1955 song “Let There Be Peace on Earth” (and let it begin with me).
A structured example of how to work with polarized parts is provided by IFS Coach Bill Tierney in this 58-minute video titled Working with Polarized Parts.
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For a structured, step-by-step human formation program that understands parts…
…check out the Resilient Catholics Community at our landing page. Our interest list for the St. Ignatius of Loyola cohort which will be registering and onboarding in February 2025 is now up and you can let us know you would like to find out more by filling out our short interest form.
Calling all Catholic formators – spiritual directors, priests, coaches, therapists, and anyone who professionally accompanies others
Work on your own human formation and decrease your internal and external polarizations in our Formation for Formators community. New Foundations Experiential Groups are starting to fill up, and advanced groups are now posted for those who have completed an FEG or equivalent. Find out so much more and register to save your seat at our FFF landing page.
Interior Integration for Catholics new episode released: The ARRR Prayer and Integrated Human Formation with Fr. John Horn
Episode 153 of the IIC podcast is now out. Here is the scoop:
“Lord, teach us to pray,” the apostles entreated Jesus. And He did. In this 73-minute episode (Video Audio), we explore the integration of personal formation in prayer, with a very concrete, step-by-step demonstration of the ARRR prayer, also known as the “pirate prayer” by Fr. John Horn, S.J., one of its originators. Join us as we discuss the progression from Acknowledging to Relating to Receiving to Responding in prayer using Zephaniah 3:14-17 as a starting point; and in addition, we bring in how this way of praying impacts the four dimensions of your personal formation: Human, Spiritual, Intellectual and Pastoral. Check it out!
Looking ahead, I am excited to let you know that Dr. Peter Martin will be joining me for the next two IIC podcast episodes, and after those air on November 18 and December 2, the final one in our series on the integration of personal formation will be a live recording with Dr. Martin and you, our audience on Thursday evening, December 12 from 8:00 to 9:30 PM. Come and ask questions and connect with us. I will be sending out a link to register in our next reflection in two weeks. So save that date!
The next values statement Zoom workshop will be on Monday, December 2, 2024
On Monday, December 2, 2024 from 8:00 PM to 9:00 PM Eastern time, I will lead our fourth values statement writing workshop, all about the nitty-gritty, step-by-step process of writing a values statement. If you are on my email list, I will send that link out tomorrow; if you are new to this series and you’d like to get on board with more than 120 other Catholics, email me at crisis@soulsandhearts.com and I will get you on the email list.
Here are recording from the previous workshops:
- Writing your Personal Vision Statement Guidance on writing a vision statement with examples.
- Values Workshop 1: What are values? How do we approach parts and values? How some values can and should change over time in dynamic ways, as we value both ends and means.
- Values Workshop 2: Aspirational values and natural values – how both are important. And how to identify and write your values.
- Values Workshop 3: On choosing your own personal values, connecting your values back to your vision, and I share the seven values in my personal values statement and we discuss the process of writing the values statement.
Did Dr. Gerry’s book Litanies of the Heart change your life? Tell him about it.
Shalom World, a Catholic web-based TV network has asked to interview Dr. Gerry about his book, Litanies of the Heart. As part of the show, the hosts would like to interview a reader who can describe the positive impact of the book, how it helped them for a few minutes via Skype. If you’d like to share your experience, reach out to Dr. Gerry directly at gerry.soulsandhearts [insert @ symbol here] gmail.com.
Pray for us
Please keep Souls and Hearts in your prayers, as we know at a deep level that we need your prayer support. Thank you, and know that I am praying for you as well.
Warm regards in Christ and His Mother,
Dr. Peter