Summary

In this groundbreaking episode, Dr. Peter explains how to conceptualize narcissistic "personalities" and narcissistic reactions through the lens of Internal Family Systems. Looking at narcissism through the lens of subsystems and parts is an entirely new paradigm that makes it easier to accept the reality the unmet attachment and integrity needs that fuel narcissistic positions and behaviors. Through four case vignettes, Dr. Peter illustrates how both covert and overt narcissism look and function from a parts and systems perspective.

Summary

In this episode, Catholic psychologist Peter Martin and I discuss narcissism with a live audience, covering the following questions: 1) What are two primary clinical approaches to treating individuals with narcissism; 2) How do we distinguish between boldness and narcissism; 3) How does one relate with a narcissistic spouse; 4) How do we work with narcissistic family members who don’t believe in God; 5) The importance of feeling cherished and treasured by God; 6) The relationship between narcissism and spiritual abuse in religious communities and organizations; 7) What makes it difficult for a person with narcissism to receive the love of God; 8) what are the different attachment styles associated with overt and covert narcissism; 9) How do children’s experiences of narcissism impact them in adulthood; 10) What are the effects of narcissistic parenting on children’s separation and individuation; and 11) How does one manage a contentious co-parenting relationship with an ex-spouse who is narcissistic?

Summary

In this episode, we examine different definitions of narcissism, we look at the markers and diagnostic criteria for narcissism, we examine the main beliefs, emotions, assumptions, and internal experiences that fuel narcissistic defenses (especially idealization and devaluation), we focus on relational patterns that narcissists have, and we look at how narcissists subjectively experience themselves.  I show how narcissistic defenses represent maladaptive ways of trying to get deep needs met, especially integrity needs.  We explore different kinds of narcissism, especially the different between over and covert narcissism.  We then go into how to identify narcissistic behaviors and appropriate ways of responding, according to the secular experts.  Also, I issue you an invitation to a special opportunity.  Tonight, Monday, August 7, 2023, from 8:30 PM to 10:00 PM Eastern Time -- I will have Catholic Psychologist Peter Martin as a special guest and we will be discussing narcissism -- in this free Zoom meeting, for the first 30 minutes or so, Dr. Martin and I will have a conversation about narcissism, and then for the next hour, we open it up for questions.  Register by going to our Interior Integration for Catholics Landing page at soulsandhearts.com/iic.  At the top, there's a link to register for the Zoom meeting.  You can send me questions to [email protected] -- or leave me a VM at 317.567.9594 and I will play that voicemail on the air and Dr. Martin and I will answer you questions.  

Summary

Dr. Gerry Crete, Marion Moreland and Dr. Peter Malinoski discuss the relationship among parts and how your manager parts make up what is perceived to be your personality. Dr. Peter offers a 25-minute experiential exercise to help you connect with your manager parts, the ones who make up your "personality." Then we debrief, describe our experiences of the exercise and answer questions from our live audience.

Summary

In this episode, Dr. Peter discusses five reasons why the conventional understanding of a single, homogeneous personality is insufficient to more fully understand your internal experience and how alternative conceptualizations of the human psyche that recognize internal multiplicity, parts, and systems are not only more helpful, but also harmonize with our Catholic Faith. 

Transcript

[00:00:01] When I was but a wee psychologist, I was very deeply committed to understanding others. To be invited into their phenomenological worlds, to know them deeply, to be with them. I'm still committed to those things. But when I was a fledgling psychologist, personality theory seemed to offer an excellent way to foster that connection and that knowing and that being with. So, I became a dedicated student of personality, and I took that role as a student of personality very seriously. I studied hard. I spent 20 years of my career specializing in personality assessment. Eventually I became an expert. I researched and used the best personality tests. I specialized in writing top-notch psychological reports. I did psychological assessments for seminarian candidates, candidates for the religious life, I did fitness-for-duty evaluations for the Federal Aviation Administration, and rose up as a contractor for the FAA. I taught personality assessment to clinical psychology graduate students and the local doctoral program in clinical psychology. I taught those students who worked for me in my practice. I was really invested in better understanding others by more deeply understanding their personalities. Occasionally, I testified in court proceedings as an expert witness based on my psychological assessment work. I was a professional member of the Society for Personality Assessment. I even developed my own projective instrument to help assess the spiritual and religious dimensions of personality. And in the end, after all of this, after 20 years, I came to believe that the standard psychological concept of a single personality lacks the power to adequately describe identity and inner experience.

[00:02:21] I abandoned the idea of a single personality. Now, I believe that the idea of a single personality, a homogeneous personality, is not enough. It's insufficient. It's lacking. It's incomplete. It's deficient. And today, in this episode, Episode 116 of the Interior Integration for Catholics podcast, I am going to give you the why. Why I consider the concept of a single uniform personality to be too little for me and too little for you. Stay with me as we walk through how I came to that conclusion. It is so good to be with you. I am Dr. Peter Malinoski, also known as Dr. Peter. I am your host and guide in this Interior Integration for Catholics podcast. It is so good for us to be together. I am a clinical psychologist, a trauma therapist, a podcaster, a blogger, and the co-founder and president of Souls and Hearts, but most of all, most importantly, I am a beloved little son of God, a passionate Catholic who wants to help you taste and see the goodness of the Lord, to taste and see the height and depth and breadth and warmth and the light of the love of God, especially the love of God, our Father, and Mary, our Mother, our spiritual parents, our primary parents. I am here to help you embrace your identity as a beloved little child of God and Mary, that is what this podcast is all about. That is what I want for you, and to bring this about, to live out our mission, I bring you new ways of understanding yourself, fresh conceptualizations informed by the best of human formation resources and psychology, and always grounded in the authoritative teachings of the Catholic Church.

This is episode 116. It's titled Why a Single Personality is Not Enough. This episode is released on July 3rd, 2023, and I am so glad that you are with me so that we can explore this topic together now. I'm just going to invite you to take what is helpful to you. So when you think about yourself, if you see your personality as uniform, single and consistent over time, and that seems to be most helpful to you. OK. I'm not going to try to take that away from you. Go with that. So many people when they take the Myers-Briggs type indicator, which is pretty big in Catholic circles, they'll come around and tell me, Hey, Dr. Peter, I am an INTJ or an ENTP or whatever the little four-letter code is, because the description that went with that was so relevant to them, it helped them understand themselves. Sometimes these personality types, sometimes these personality styles are a critical starting point, a place for you to begin to understand yourself. And I laud your efforts towards self-understanding. You would not be listening to this episode, you would not be spending time on this podcast if you didn't want to understand yourself and others better.

[00:05:59] I just want to make the point that people resonate with different resources for understanding themselves and understanding others at different times, and it's just an invitation to consider some alternatives to that standard conventional model of a single personality, that model that dominates our culture in this particular moment in history. So you know that definitions are really important to me. We need to know what we're talking about. We need to have a shared language to understand the concepts that we're addressing. And when we come to personality, the words that Pope Pius the 12th stated in his 1958 address titled Applied Psychology that he gave to the 13th Congress of the International Association of Applied Psychology. Those words hold true today, as they did more than six decades ago. Pope Pius the 12th said, “The expression personality is found today almost everywhere, but with different meanings. It is, in fact sufficient to glance through the abundant bibliography on the subject to realize that many of the concepts regarding the psychic structure of man are expressed in technical terms, which in every case preserve the same fundamental meaning. Yet several elements of the human psyche are still badly described and have not yet been given an adequate definition. The terminology ‘personality’ is one of them in scientific psychology as in applied psychology.”

Well, Pope Pius the 12th, you and I, we share this, this demand, this need to define our terms. I just so appreciate him saying that so clearly. In 1958 and six and a half decades later, we still face the same problem with this poorly defined definition of personality. So I've started noodling around with Chat GPT. So in preparing for this podcast episode, I typed in a request for Chat GPT to give me definitions of personality from the major personality researchers, the major personality theorists. And so what I'm going to provide for you now is a recounting of what came out of GPT. I was actually shocked, really surprised at how accurate and concise these 1- or 2-line definitions of personality from each of these major resource researchers are. And I'm providing them to you so you can see the ways that different researchers, the ways that different theorists emphasize different things when it comes to personality.

So let's start with Sigmund Freud. According to Sigmund Freud, personality is composed of three parts: the id, the ego and the superego. Personality represents the dynamic interactions among these three components and their influence on an individual's behavior.

Carl Jung. Personality is characterized by individual differences in how people perceive and interact with the world. It includes both conscious and unconscious aspects and is composed of various archetypes and psychological functions.

Gordon Allport. Personality is the dynamic organization within an individual of those psychophysical systems that determine their unique adjustments to the environment. It emphasizes the individual's unique qualities and personal dispositions.

[00:09:45] Albert Bandura. Personality is the result of reciprocal interactions between cognitive, behavioral and environmental factors. It emphasizes the importance of social learning and self-efficacy in shaping personality.

Raymond Cattell, who was actually one of my favorite personality theorists. Personality is a combination of surface traits and source traits. Surface traits are observable characteristics, while source traits are underlying factors that drive behavior and give rise to the surface traits.

Hans Eysenck: Personality is determined by three major dimensions: extraversion versus introversion, neuroticism versus emotional stability, and psychoticism. These dimensions reflect biologically based personality traits.

David McClelland: Personality is a set of learned motives and needs that drive behavior. See, he's bringing in needs now, which I really like. It emphasizes the importance of specific needs such as achievement, affiliation, and power in shaping personality.

Karen Horney. Personality is shaped by an individual's early experiences, particularly in terms of relationships and social interactions. She really focused on early relational experiences, especially with caregivers. Personality focuses on the impact of interpersonal dynamics.

George Kelly. Personality is a system of personal constructs that individuals use to interpret and predict events. Personality highlights the roles of cognitive processes.

According to personality researcher Theodore Millon, another favorite of mine, personality is a complex and dynamic system that comprises a set of enduring patterns of thoughts, emotions and behaviors that differentiate individuals from one another.

I'm going to add one more here. Walter Mischel, who said that personality is the typical behavioral patterns, including emotions and thoughts that characterize a person's adaptation to the events of life.

[00:12:00] Now we can see how these different theorists and researchers emphasize different aspects of personality and how they don't all agree. There's like wildly varying definitions of what researchers and theorists think is important when we describe personality. Nevertheless, we can look to some of our major diagnostic classification systems to see how they distill out the nature of personality. So the DSM-5, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual number 5, this is the fifth edition defines personality as composed of “enduring patterns of perceiving, relating to, and thinking about the environment and oneself.” And the Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual, second edition, captures the essence of that general definition as well when it says, “We define personality as a relatively stable way of thinking, feeling, behaving and relating to others.” So we're seeing some convergence here, at least on these main ideas. One, that personality develops in the individual over years, but we're not born with a personality. A lot of theorists will talk about being born with a temperament that goes back 2400 years all the way back to Hippocrates. But personality is different. It includes temperament, but it's not determined by temperament. It's not determined by genetics -- education, socialization and life experiences all play a role in forming personality, and those temperamental and genetic factors are also involved. The personality influences behavior, and that while personality can change over time, personality is also relatively consistent and enduring across time and across different situations.

[00:14:08] And there is an appeal to the single homogeneous model of personality. The idea that we have one personality. Personality theory provides us a lens through which we can understand ourselves and others better. I remember when I first read Nancy McWilliam’s book Psychoanalytic Diagnosis in the 1990s how that book, which focused on personality styles, how that book opened my eyes, how that book opened my imagination to being able to understand myself and others better. It was really helpful. And so often when I shared concepts about personality with my clients or with friends or with acquaintances, and I presented how an understanding of personality might help explain and contextualize thoughts and feelings and attitudes and beliefs, and especially impulses and desires. The insights would start flowing and people would be amazed. It was like the lights went on. To have a good theory of personality was so helpful. I remember one client of mine who I recommended that book. This particular client was pretty psychologically sophisticated. That client read that book, Psychoanalytic Diagnosis by Nancy McWilliams, and he said, “This is a book about loving other people.” He saw how understanding personality could help him to love others. Personality theory also helps us to predict behaviors that helps us to forecast what we are going to do or what others are going to do in different situations. It allows us to anticipate potential outcomes, and that's a very valuable thing for a clinical psychologist working with clients.

[00:15:54] Now, even Stephanie Tobin and Rosanna Guadagno found that there were personality correlates that predicted podcast listening behaviors in their 2022 article titled Why People Listen Motivations and Outcomes of Podcast Listening. They collected data from 306 adults from 12 countries, and they found that the personality characteristic of openness to experience correlated positively with podcast listening and related to that was the need for cognition. In other words, they were finding that those who listened to podcasts have stronger informational needs. Those are the ones that are more desirous of knowing. Makes sense, especially for a podcast like this. This isn't primarily about entertainment. This is about learning important things. Also, interestingly, the personality characteristic of neuroticism correlated negatively with podcast listening. So participants who were higher in neuroticism were less likely to have listened to a podcast episode. They also found positive associations between extraversion and social engagement with podcasts and between agreeableness and parasocial relationships with one's favorite podcast host. And I hope, I hope I am your favorite podcast host. But there's a sense of connection that can come with being with listening to a podcast. I was also impressed, I was also glad to see in this study that there were some things that differentiated podcast listening from social media use. You find that greater social media use tends to be associated with higher neuroticism? Also, participants in this study who were higher in the need to belong were less likely to have listened to a podcast.

[00:18:14] All right. That was counter to what they expected. Higher need to belong, less likely to listen to a podcast. So those two factors differentiate podcast listening from social media use, which is great because I don't want this podcast to somehow look like TikTok or Instagram or Twitter or Snapchat or any social media platform.

So, I've talked about some of the benefits here of understanding personality, the single homogeneous personality model. But I want to talk about five problems that I ran into, five difficulties with this single homogeneous model of personality. Number one. The failure to capture the complexity, dynamism, and identity nuances within the human psyche. Number two. Understanding personality styles is insufficient to guide us toward health. Number three. Personality labels are often used to judge and condemn others. Number four. Personality styles are unable to describe one's relationship with one's self very well. And number five. The single homogeneous model of personality can hold us back in our relationship with God and Mary. Those five those five concerns. So let's go through these one by one.

The first one, the failure to capture the complexity, dynamism, and identity nuances within the human psyche. Now, I would often see when I was doing psychological testing, I would often see how different psychological instruments would seem to reflect different sides or aspects of a person's personality in ways that were difficult to reconcile. There were different things coming up in different tests.

[00:20:17] And I was noticing how the patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting, how the impulses and desires that a person was revealing in the psychological assessment, how different those were in the same person across time and in different situations, especially in different relational contexts. So I was trying to make sense of this. I was trying to capture this in my reports, and I would write descriptions like, Mr. X's personality structure is best described as having a hysterical core, which is very nearly completely submerged by his obsessive facade with prominent paranoid defenses, or Mrs. Y's personality is centered on unmet dependency needs, which she responds to by manifesting both depressive and masochistic traits, frequently utilizing avoidant defenses to self protect. There are all these ways where I was trying to bring together all these different personality qualities, these different characteristics of different personalities into some kind of intelligible, overarching, single homogeneous personality. And it wasn't working very well.

Now, in some ways, the traditional diagnostic systems recognize this problem, at least implicitly. According to the DSM-5. Borderline personality disorder is characterized by, quote, a pervasive pattern of instability in interpersonal relationships, self-image and affects and marked impulsivity beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts, end quote. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait a minute here. So here we have a personality disorder that is described by a pervasive pattern of instability. These personality descriptors, these understandings of the single homogeneous personality are supposed to be enduring over time and across situations.

[00:22:25] It's supposed to be varying so much, but here we have a personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, that negates the central quality of personality, and that is consistency over time. It's basically saying the consistency in BPD and bipolar personality disorder is its inconsistency. That's unsatisfying to me conceptually. That's really unsatisfying and problematic. When we think of personality, we think of enduring patterns, of perceiving, relating to, and thinking about the environment and oneself. Actor Ross Lynch in a U.S. Weekly article interview in 2017, was discussing playing the role of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. And he said, “People often only see one side to someone's personality, but there are levels.” 

I was attracted to psychoanalyst and self-psychologist Heinz Kohut's idea about how the psyche could be conceptualized as consisting of three major elements. Kohut talked about how there was a grandiose self. This was the part of the personality that invests in being admired, esteemed, and valued and cherished by others. And then he had this other part of the personality, which was the internalized representations of others, particularly the parents. These are the idealized attitudes, values, and other aspects in the parents, or at least in the perception of the parents, that the that the person would like to internalize and hold on to. And then there was the self, the core of the person, the “authentic” me. And the self or the core of the person develops through empathetic attunement and mirroring provided by caring others.

[00:24:21] And that's according to Kohut. So I like that. I like that more than what Freud was offering with the ID ego and the superego and the drive theory that undergirded that. But I was still troubled by this lack of identity. There wasn't a sense of what the subjective identity of the person was like being described in most models of personality. There is also. No mention of spirituality. Not a lot of sort of integration of religious experience. These models of personality were no longer satisfying. They just seemed too thin, too superficial. And I want to emphasize how important it is that we get the natural level issues right. Now on May 3rd, 2022 -- this is right after the draft of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, his brief, his draft overturning Roe versus Wade that was leaked. And President Joe Biden said, “Roe says what all basic mainstream religions have historically concluded, that the existence of a human life and being is a question. Is it at the moment of conception? Is it at six months? Is it six weeks? Is it quickening like Aquinas argued?” Many of us have heard different politicians, often Catholic politicians invoke Aquinas to deny the personhood of an unborn baby. And there was an article in Catholic Answers called What did Saint Thomas Aquinas Believe About Ensoulment? And the question is, did Aquinas say a baby had no soul until 40 days for a boy or 80 days for a girl after conception? So abortion is okay before those times?

[00:26:51] And the answer, according to Catholic Answers, is “This is only half true. Aquinas did say an unborn baby receives a soul 40 or 80 days after conception, depending on gender. But he also said abortion is a violation of natural law and is always wrong, no matter when a soul may be infused into the developing child's body. The 40/80 day view was based on the writings of Aristotle, who said that a child becomes human at formation, the point at which it first has a human form. That is when it looks human, he said. This was 40 days for boys and 80 days for girls, and probably this distinction was based on the point at which genitals could be observed on miscarried children. Keep in mind that fetal embryology was a restricted science. All observations could only be made by the naked eye. The microscope belonged in the microscope being in the distant future. Aquinas accepted the idea of formation, which he said occurs when a child receives a soul. But since abortion violates natural law, whether or not the child has a soul. Aquinas thought that abortion was always gravely wrong.”

The point I'm trying to make here is that because Thomas Aquinas was relying and understandably so on an outdated, inaccurate Aristotelian model of biology, because he got this and this developmental aspect wrong, it had spiritual consequences.

[00:28:19] It has consequences that redound to the present day. And this isn't justifying any politicians twisting of Aquinas and selecting from Aquinas things that they will use in a very -- what would be the word -- tricky, devious manner to try to lead Catholics astray on this particular issue. It's not to justify any of that. It's not to say that that's OK. It's just that we want to get the natural level stuff right.

There's another example in the unconscious. Most people think that Freud really was the one that brought the unconscious into the public sphere in 1915. Freud wrote about the unconscious in a structured essay titled The Unconscious that came out in 1915, but he had been writing about the unconscious for more than a decade before that. Lancelot Law Whyte's 1960 book, The Unconscious Before Freud provides a history of the unconscious prior to Freud. And Whyte says, “The general conception of unconscious mental processes was conceivable in post-Cartesian Europe around 1700. It was topical around 1800 and fashionable around 1870 to 1880. It cannot be disputed that by 1870 to 1880 the general conception of the unconscious mind was a European commonplace and that many special applications of this general idea had been vigorously discussed for several decades.”

Now historians debate the nature of the relationship between the Catholic Church and psychology. The book, Psychology and Catholicism Contested Boundaries by Robert Kugelmann is an excellent introduction to this fascinating field.

[00:30:24] I struggled to find anything in the official church documents prior to 1952 that dealt with the unconscious. There were references to the unconscious, but that usually meant just something out of awareness or something that was forgotten or something that was neglected. It wasn't there wasn't really a treatment of the unconscious until the 1950s. So according to Whyte, we had the unconscious coming into discussion in 1700 becoming topical around 1800 and fashionable around 1870 to 1880. It wasn't for another 70 plus years that we in the Catholic Church started to deal significantly with the unconscious.

1952. In his address, the moral limits of medical research and treatment was given on September 14th, 1952, by Pope Pius XII to the First International Congress on the Histopathology of the Nervous System, he starts to address the unconscious. I'm not going to get into all of that right now. But in 1953, he gives an address. Pope Pius XII gives an address to the Fifth International Congress on Psychotherapy and Clinical Psychology, and he endorses the concept of the unconscious. It's the first time or maybe the second time all happening in the early 1950s that the church is now saying, yes, the unconscious exists.

Pope Pius XII says “Science affirms that recent observations have brought to light the hidden layers of the psychic structure of man and tries to understand the meaning of these discoveries, to interpret them and to render them capable of use. People speak of dynamisms and determinisms and mechanisms hidden in the depths of the soul, endowed with imminent laws whence are derived certain modes of acting. Undoubtedly, these begin to operate within the subconscious or the unconscious, but they also penetrate into the realms of the conscience and determine it. People claim to have devised methods that have been tried and recognized as adequate to scrutinize the mystery of the depths of the soul, to elucidate them and put them back on the right road when they are exercising a harmful influence.”

He goes on to say in 1958 that “Even the dynamisms of the unconscious and of the subconscious are not irresistible. There are still great possibilities for mastering them, particularly for the normal subject.” My point in all of this is to say we don't want to be behind the times. Sometimes by 20 years or 50 years or 100 years, when it comes to evaluating this natural level phenomena, from a Catholic perspective, we don't want to be just caught in old, outmoded, outdated understandings of what's happening in the natural realm. And this happens to this day. I don't know how many people I have had come to me and their understanding of their psyche is really based on the four temperaments, largely as Hippocrates laid them out in the fourth century BC. Really can't we have some development beyond that? Can't we go beyond that? I'll talk about that more as we come to the end.

[00:34:14] So let's move on to my second concern. About the single homogeneous uniform personality being insufficient. The second one is that understanding personality styles is insufficient to guide us toward health. What do I mean by that? Well, modern conceptualizations of personality styles were based are based originally on personality disorders, the extreme dysfunctional and maladaptive enduring patterns, the far end of the continuum where things get really rigid and really locked down. So the far end of the spectrum is the personality disorder. And the near end of the spectrum is the personality style. And so all of the personality styles have this flavor of being disordered if you listen to the list. Of personality styles. They're all based on the list of personality disorders. So you have depressive, hypomanic, masochistic, dependent, counter dependent, anxious, avoidant or phobic. The obsessive compulsive. The schizoid, the romanticizing the hysteric or histrionic. The narcissistic, the paranoid, the psychopathic, the sadistic and the borderline. Those are from the Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual second edition. Those all sound problematic and they all sound problematic because they are problematic. So here's a thought experiment, right? Which “personality” of those would you like to have? What personality according to this list -- what personality style did Jesus have as the perfect man? Depressive, hypomanic, masochistic dependent, counter dependent. Anxious. Avoidant. Obsessive compulsive. Schizoid. Romanticizing. Hysteric. Narcissistic. Paranoid, psychopathic, sadistic. Borderline. None of those fit. None of those fit. What about the Blessed Virgin Mary? There's a problem when we take the personality style from the end of the continuum, the disorder and try to generalize it.

[00:36:49] There's not a way that that guides us toward health except in a negative way. Like not that we don't want to be those things. The only discussion of a “healthy personality” inn either of these diagnostic systems, the Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual-2 or the DSM-5, the only discussion of a healthy personality is on page 20 of the PDM-2, which emphasizes the flexibility that someone with a healthy personality has the capacity to adapt. All right. So we want that flexibility. We want to be able to have a wide array of adaptive responses. But that doesn't tell us anything about an enduring, consistent pattern of thinking and feeling and relating and so on. So you can think of these personality styles. In the PDM-2 and the DSM-5 as describing a lack of something, something missing in the human person. You might think of it as a part or parts that are being suppressed. I think of personality really as the characteristics of the parts of the person who composed the primary management team of that person. What is seen on the surface, the qualities of the parts that are in charge and handling the day-to-day operations. That's what I think most people mean by personality. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. There's so much more going on that's often being suppressed, that's not being allowed to be shared.

[00:38:30] That's not being allowed, that's not allowed to be seen, heard, known or understood by others, not allowed to be experienced in relationship. We have very partial presentations of the fullness of our being. And when we strip away so much of the rest of us, what's left is what's often called our personality. We want to get this right. We want to understand this on a natural level. Pope John Paul II, in his encyclical Veritatis Splendor, referred to the Catholic Church as an “expert in humanity” an expert in humanity. And St. Pope John Paul II was quoting Saint Pope Paul VI addressed to the United Nations on October 4th, 1965, when Paul VI, described the Catholic Church's role as a “expert in humanity.” And Pope Benedict XVI used the exact same phrase to describe the Catholic Church in his January 1st, 2010 message for the celebration of the World Day of Peace. The church is an “expert in humanity.” Well, we need to live up to that. We need to live up to that. We can't just say it. And if we're going to be an expert in humanity, then we better be an expert in the human aspects of humanity, not just the spiritual aspects. We need to be an experts in the natural level as well as the spiritual level if we're going to be in the church.

[00:40:06] Because frankly, I think lots and lots and lots of people are leaving the Church because of human formation issues, natural issues, things that the Church has not clearly identified, things that the Church is behind the times on. Like it was with the unconscious getting around to that in 1952 after it had been around for 100 years, discussed widely topical according to Whyte. People leave the Church, in my opinion, when they feel like their attachment needs are not getting met and their integrity needs are not getting met. They don't believe that the church has answers to their immediate problems, to their deep issues, many of which are going on in the natural realm. The Church doesn't provide a felt sense of safety and protection for them. They don't feel seen, heard, known and understood. They don't feel comforted, soothed and reassured. They don't feel cherished, treasured and delighted in. They don't feel cherished, treasured and delighted in. They don't feel like the church has their best interests at heart and they don't feel like the church helps them with their need to exist and survive. The need to matter. The need to have agency. The need to be good. The need for mission and purpose in life. Some leave the church definitively with a clean, clear break. Others leave the church passively drifting away. We need to be able to see, hear and understand others with compassion and reassurance. I often think about what are the psychological works of mercy.

[00:41:46] And we have the corporal works of mercy, which have to do with the body. And we have the spiritual works of mercy that have to do with the soul. What about the psychological works of mercy that have to do with all this other human formation stuff in the natural realm? More than three decades ago. On March 25th, 1992, Pope Saint John Paul II released an apostolic exhortation titled Pastores Dabo Vobis. Translated, “I Will give You Shepherds,” which was the seminal document that provided guidance for the formation of seminarians and priests, and Pastor Dabo Vobis identified four major areas of priestly formation. Number one, human formation, number two, spiritual formation, number three, intellectual formation, and number four, pastoral formation.

Now, note the order of those four pillars of formation. Human formation is listed first. Why did Pope John Paul the second do that? Why did he put human formation first? Because according to Pope Saint John Paul II, quote, human formation is the basis. Of all priestly formation. That's from Pastores Dabo Vobis. Paragraph 43. He quotes the 12th Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops, emphasizing that “The whole work of priestly formation would be deprived of its necessary foundation if it lacked a suitable human formation.” Human formation is the necessary foundation for spiritual formation. That's what Pope Saint John Paul II is telling us. This human formation stuff is critically, critically important for our spiritual lives. Also for our intellectual formation, also for our pastoral formation, then this isn't just for priests.

[00:43:41] This particular document, Pastores Dabo Vobis, had to do with the formation of priests, but the human formation being the foundation for the rest of the formation is true for lay people and for religious as well. It's really important that we get this right. I want us in the Catholic Church to live up to being experts in humanity.

Well, let's move on to the third concern I have, and that is personality labels are often used to judge and condemn others. Now, I think it's really important that we be able to put concepts into words, to be able to describe the psyches of people and that we don't always have to be nice about it. We don't always have to like create safe spaces and make sure that we never say anything that's critical of anybody. But. And Nancy McWilliams in her book Psychoanalytic Diagnosis, which I mentioned before, describes five interrelated advantages of using diagnostic labels, including labels for personality styles. And one is it's useful for treatment planning. Two, its prognostic implications. Number three, there's a contribution to protecting consumers of mental health services, for it enables the therapist to convey empathy and five the role in reducing the likelihood of treatment flight. And I would I would argue also that diagnostic labels and classifications can help clinicians to discuss clients’ internal experiences in a shorthand form. There's a language that goes with it that allows mental health professionals to communicate with each other and so on.

[00:45:22] So. There can be some benefit in using such labels to understand some of the negative dynamics within one's spouse, especially if it's early in the journey of understanding problematic marital dynamics. But what I find is that often such labels are used to denigrate, judge, and condemn one's spouse. This is just an example to justify failing to love the spouse even from afar. Like the diagnostic label can become a club to beat another person with. And to her credit, Nancy McWilliams recognizes the different ways in which diagnostic labels, including personality styles, can be used pejoratively. She quotes Paul Wachtel as saying that diagnosis as saying that diagnoses are quotes are “insults with a fancy pedigree.” And every week I get emails or phone calls from a distressed wife or husband summing up his or her spouse as narcissistic or borderline or paranoid or some other, you know, some other 1 or 2 word diagnostic statement in a very reductionistic way. And I discussed this kind of lack of empathy in episode 65 of Interior Integration for Catholics titled “Why Catholic Spouses Find It Hard to Empathize with Each Other, Especially about Sex with Solutions.” And also in episode 66 of this podcast, “Acceptance versus Endorsement, a Critical Difference in Catholic Marriages.” So that's the the third concern.

The fourth one is that personality styles are unable to describe one's identity and in particular, one's relationship with oneself. Our Lord commanded us to love your neighbor as yourself. That's the second great commandment. Luke 10:27. And it implies that we are to love ourselves, which means that we are to have a relationship with ourselves. But noticeably lacking in the definitions of personality that I gave you before is a discussion of the person's felt sense of identity, the deep assumptions about one's own being and how do we relate with ourselves? How do we connect with ourselves? How do we love ourselves? How can you have a relationship with yourself if you understand yourself as a single, homogeneous, monolithic personality? How can you do that? It's impossible. There's no potential for internal relatedness within yourself if you just have a single homogeneous personality.

And actually, when I looked into this in depth, there's very little Catholic commentary that specifically addresses what it means for us to love ourselves in an ordered way. There just seems to be an assumption that we simply do love ourselves. It's just assumed that we love ourselves. But from my more than 20 years as a psychologist, I can say that it would be highly erroneous to assume to assume that most people just love themselves naturally. Not in an ordered way anyway. Over the years, I've known many people, many, many people who in various ways have failed to love themselves. In fact, I think most people, including most Catholics, fail in many ways to love themselves, appropriately, properly, in an ordered way.

[00:48:44] In many ways, I fail to love myself. So let's do another little thought experiment. I'm going to invite you. I'm going to ask you this question. If you loved yourself. Well, if you loved yourself perfectly, would you sin? If you had really good ordered self-love, would you sin? No, you wouldn't. Sinning is the worst possible thing you can do to yourself. That's because sin separates you from God and from others, harming or even destroying relationships. But we do sin. The just man sins seven times a day according to scripture. So. How do we explain the experience of multiplicity within ourselves if we just have this single homogeneous personality? Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his Confessions, which he wrote in the late 18th century, he wrote, “There are times when I am so unlike myself that I might be taken for some one else of an entirely opposite character.” He’s describing that multiplicity. He's describing that multiplicity. And let's take this forward a couple hundred years to Bob Dylan, who in 2007, in his book Dylan on Dylan The Essential Interviews, he said, “I changed during the course of the day. I wake and I'm one person. And when I go to sleep, I know for certain I'm somebody else.” How do we account for that with our concepts of personality? Unless we're just going to go around and call everybody borderline personality disorder, which would then somehow account for the instability of personality by negating the definition of personality.

[00:50:50] So I've got real concerns about this way of understanding oneself because of the importance. Of us. Needing to love ourselves. That's part of the second great commandment. This is not some sort of minor, you know, disposable, culturally conditioned, no longer applicable dietary restriction in the book of Deuteronomy or Numbers or something like that. This is like central – the second great commandment, the law and the prophets hang on these two commandments – it's a big deal.

And that leads me to my last my last concern about the single homogeneous model of personality. And that is that the single homogeneous model of personality can hold us back in our personal relationship with God and Mary. Here. It's so much easier to bring in this idea that we have parts and I discuss an alternative model to the single homogeneous model of personality in episode 71 of this podcast. A new and better way of understanding myself and others. I lay it out. I talk about internal family systems. I think it's so much more helpful if I'm feeling anger at God. To not attribute that to a single homogeneous personality where it would have to be all of me that's angry at God. But to understand that that could be just a part of me. Not all of me. Many other parts not feeling the same way toward God.

Can you see how that makes it easier to approach God? Or if I'm in a conflict with my wife, Pam, you know, and I've got a deep sense of disappointment, for example, but I can locate that in just a part of me rather than having to say that that's all of me that has that experience of disappointment. Or frustration or whatever. It's a much more nuanced and I would argue, phenomenologically accurate way of understanding ourselves. That can help our relationships. That can help us to love. Our neighbor that can help us to love God, to carry out those two great commandments, which is what this podcast is all about. It's about forming those deep, personal, intimate relationships. We are called to love. We are called to be loved and we are called to love. And we're called to love with our whole hearts. What does that mean? If you have a single homogenous personality. How do you understand that? Why would he have to tell us our whole heart? Well, I think that these parts models I think that these parts models help to explain what our internal experience is in a way that facilitates love. I want to light a candle rather than just curse the darkness, right? These parts, these separate independently operating personalities within us, each with its own unique, prominent needs and roles in our lives emotions, body sensations, guiding beliefs and assumptions, typical thoughts, intentions and desires, attitudes. Impulses. Interpersonal style. Their own worldviews, their own coping styles and defenses. Each part has an image of God we can call these modes of operating, if that's helpful.

[00:54:46] Alain de Botton said, “The largest part of what we call personality is determined by how we've opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness.” I would say parts of us that carry the anxiety and sadness, the burdens of anxiety and sadness are being defended against by the parts that are trying to keep us safe from that, that are trying to keep us from being flooded. Now, all the effort that I spent in those two decades to understand, “personality” has not been wasted. I really believe that parts have personalities, depending on how you use the word, how you define things, but that parts have enduring. Patterns of behavior, that parts have persistent ways of interacting if parts are not in right relationship with the self. They tend to get rigid in the way that they operate. And it's the switching of the parts that explains, quote, borderline personality disorder. It's when different parts have blended and taken over your system, like the little figures in Inside Out, the Pixar film. It's when different parts in succession take over, that you get that instability, that you get that unpredictability that characterizes “borderline personality disorder.” You can understand that far better from a parts perspective than you can from a conventional model of personality. There have been many new models of understanding the internal experience of people, especially trauma survivors, that have moved away from the traditional understandings of a single personality.

[00:56:42] These include Developmental Needs Meeting Strategies, Ego State Therapy, the Structural Theory of Dissociation, Somatic Experiencing, Schema Therapy, parts psychology and certain forms of EMDR, especially Sandra Paulsen's work and of course, my favorite Internal Family Systems. All o

f these models conceptualize us as having parts or sub-personalities or modes of operating, emphasizing that there is both a multiplicity within us and a unity within us both a multiplicity within you and a unity within you. You are one person, but with several or many parts. Just like an orchestra is one entity that is composed of many musicians, plus a conductor. And as I mentioned before, when most people describe a distinct, stable, homogeneous single personality, I wonder if they're really describing just their most prominent parts. The management team of parts that handles the demands of day-to-day life.

And let's look at the examples from the Saints. Do they really reveal a tidy and and homogeneous personality? Saint Paul puzzled about his internal experience in Romans 7:15-19 when he writes, I do not understand my own actions for what I do, for I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now, if I do what I don't know, if I do what I do not want, I agree. The law is good. So then it is no longer I that do it. But sin which dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells within me that is in my flesh. 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 is what I do.

You can see the conflict there. Right. And he is creating a model of personality, if you will, that includes the flesh. He is creating that multiplicity in his description. He is describing a multiplicity within himself. We can frame that in terms of parts. And one of the things that Internal Family Systems is that parts are always seeking a perceived good. That's an assumption and that's an assumption that correlates with what Saint Thomas Aquinas says, that we are seeking a perceived good even when we sin. Saint Teresa of Avila in the Way of Perfection in chapter 19 said, “There are some souls and minds so scattered that they are like wild horses. No one can stop now. They're running here now. They're always restless. And if the rider is skillful, there is not always a danger, just sometimes. But even though this life is in no danger, he is not free from some dishonor in mounting the wild horse. And there is always some hardship. This restlessness is either caused by the soul's nature or permitted by God.” She is talking about the intensity inside.

Other examples, kind of staying with the horse theme – Martin Luther King Jr and his work Loving Your Enemies from November of 1957 said, “Personality is like a charioteer with two headstrong horses, each wanting to go in different directions.” You can see that multiplicity. And Maggie Stiefvater in her book The Raven Boys said, “Gansey had always felt as if there were two of him, the Gansey who was in control, able to handle any situation, able to talk to anyone. [That's the manager part, I would say.] And then the other more fragile Gansey, strung out and unsure, embarrassingly, embarrassingly earnest and driven by naive longing.” 

Again, our lived experience, our phenomenology, we sense this multiplicity inside. It comes up over and over and over again in literature, in art. And I want to go back to Pope Pius XII in 1958. His address to the 13th Congress of the International Association of Applied Psychology, where he says, “We define personality as ‘the psychosomatic unity of man insofar as it is determined and governed by the soul.’ This definition refers, first of all, to the personality as a unity, because it is considered as a whole of which the parts, though preserving their specific characteristics are not separated but are organically linked between themselves. That is why psychology can take equally into consideration the psychic faculties and their functions separately from the point of view of their individual structure and their imminent laws, as well as from the point of view of their organic whole.”

So Pope Pius XII is actually using some parts language here. He's emphasizing the unity in personality. But also, he is implying this multiplicity, these different faculties and depending on how you conceptualize the psyche. Depending on how you work in those faculties. And we're doing some work on that right now in the Interior Therapist Community to try to flesh out what does this look like metaphysically? What does this look like philosophically? Depending on how you do that, you can have great consistency here with what Pope Pius XII is offering us.

I'm super excited about this and I'm just going to invite you to think about parts working together in collaborative and cooperative ways. And now I'm going to invite you into a thought experiment. I'm going to invite you just for a little while to imagine all of your parts working together in collaborative and cooperative ways, coming together in an internal unity, in a recollection, in an integrated way, working together in collaborative and cooperative ways under the leadership and guidance of your innermost self. What would that be like? How would that be different than what you experience now? Let's talk about some advantages of parts work. More specifically, I really believe that parts work helps us to understand what we do and why we do it. It helps so much. There's so many advantages of understanding ourselves in terms of a parts and an innermost self and a system.

[01:03:48] This internal system of parts in relationship with each other and the innermost self, parts relating with other people, their parts, their parts, our parts interacting in various ways, polarizing, aligning makes so much more sense than trying to understand relationships with other people as being between two conventional, homogeneous single personalities. These conceptualizations from Internal Family Systems and these other ways of understanding ourselves as both a unity and a multiplicity helps us to understand what's going on in the unconscious. The parts of us that are not allowed to be seen, heard, known, and understood by our managers. Parts work helps us to understand all of the activity inside the conflict. Sometimes the chaos, the disagreement, the polarizations.

And there's this great quote from LM Montgomery in Anne of Green Gables, where she has Anne say, “There's such a lot of different Anne's in me. I sometimes think that is why I'm such a troublesome person. If I was just the one, Anne, it would be ever so much more comfortable. But then it wouldn't be half so interesting.” Just love that quote from Anne of Green Gables. Parts work. Systems thinking unity in the multiplicity helps us to understand our internal conflicts. Polarizations among parts and Terry Pratchett – in his 1991 fantasy novel, Reaper Man, said, “Where there is personality, there is discord.” I thought that was an interesting quote, recognizing that even if he were referring to it as a single homogeneous personality, there's still discord, There's still conflict.

[01:05:53] Only part of me is experiencing a illicit sexual desire. Makes it so much easier than to believe that all of me is experiencing that illicit sexual desire. Only part of me is angry at God. Not all of me is angry at God. Makes it so much easier to tolerate. The kinds of things that we are going to have to deal with sooner or later, the kinds of things that are disordered within us. I think that purgatory is not only a place of atonement for sin. This is speculative Malinoski theology here. Speculative Malinoski eschatology. I think purgatory is a place where we are going to have to resolve anything that's disordered within us, even in the natural realm. Because nothing imperfect enters into heaven. We can't have those disordered desires and impulses and all of that. And we can't bring that into into, into, into heaven. We can't bear to have that and see God face-to-face. So, part of the reason why I want to work on this stuff now is to save us from having to do it later.

Pope Pius XII in 1958, had some reservations about addressing what was in the unconscious, and partly that was because of what the state of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis really was at that time. There was a lot of emphasis on getting it all out and these intense cathartic reactions and a lot of flooding. We don't do it that way anymore. I totally understand what Pope Pius XII was reacting to when he had his concerns about addressing what was going on in the unconscious, given the state of the science in 1958. We have much better ways of working with our parts instead of working with the intensity of their affect, of their emotion, of their desires. We can work with the part. It's not just some sort of a random epiphenomenon of consciousness or unconsciousness that we're dealing with. These are parts. Parts with personalities.

I think eventually the concept of the single personality will wind up in the dustbin of history. I really do. I think it's going to go the way of the buggy whip just because it's not useful anymore, because we have better ways of understanding internal experience. Can we discover? Are we willing to have the courage? Are we willing to accept the graces? Are we willing to engage and to, by God's grace, learn more about ourselves. Can we bring our soul and our heart into the deep, personal, intimate relationship with God in the three persons of the Trinity, with Jesus, with the Holy Spirit, with God, our Father, and with Mary, our mother, our spiritual parents, our primary parents. Can we embrace that identity? That we've been gifted. Can we embrace that identity across all of us? Across every fiber of our being? I find that allowing that concept of the single homogenous personality to just let that go and to understand that we do have a unity.

[01:09:47] But we also have a multiplicity that that helps to create the natural human formation foundation for us to be able to love God with our whole being. Can we overcome fear? With trust in God. Can we overcome fear with love? 1 John 4:18 – “There is no fear in love. But perfect love casts out fear.” Can we be on the vanguard? Can we be the tip of the spear? Can you come with me in this? Because the more Catholics get this, the more Catholics that focus on their human formation in a very deliberate way that are doing this work, that are grappling with these concepts, the better it's going to be for our church, the better it's going to be for all of us that are on this pilgrimage toward heaven. Or do we have to stay with? An understanding of our internal experience based on the temperaments from Hippocrates from 2400 years ago. Vatican II. The document Gaudium et Spes says, “In pastoral care, sufficient use must be made not only of theological principles, but also of the findings of the secular sciences, especially of psychology and sociology, so that the faithful may be brought to a more adequate and mature life of faith.” That's what I want for you A more adequate and mature life of faith. I want I would actually frame it differently than that.

[01:11:35] I want you to have a deep, personal, intimate relationship with God, our Father and with Mary, our mother, with the Holy Spirit. With Jesus. I don't think it's reasonable to expect the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops or the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in the Vatican to be experts in this area. Though so much of this is informed by the secular sciences, I don't want to have to reinvent the wheel. I'm going to grab that stuff. It's not the calling of the bishops to become expert psychologists. I just don't think we're going to find effective treatments for bulimia by just consulting the writings of the Early Church Fathers or in Saint Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica. I think that's unreasonable. Think we need to really be focusing. On what pope John Paul II said in Pastores Dabo Vobis about human formation being the basis of all other formation.

From the Catechism, paragraph 159. “Though faith is above reason, there can never be any real discrepancy between faith and reason, since the same God who reveals mysteries and infuses faith has bestowed the light of reason on the human mind. God cannot deny Himself, nor can truth ever contradict truth. Consequently, methodological research in all branches of knowledge, provided it is carried out in a truly scientific manner and does not override moral laws can never conflict with the faith because the things of the world and the things of faith derive from the same God. The humble and persevering investigator of the secrets of nature is being led, as it were, by the hand of God in spite of Himself. For it is God, the conserver, of all things, who made them what they are.”

Can we trust that? Can we trust? That if we step out of the old conventional models, the old conventional psychology of personality, if we step outside of that, that God will correct us if we get led astray? Can we trust in that? Saint Augustine in De Doctrina Christiana Book II, Chapter 40, he said. “Moreover, if those who are called philosophers, and especially the Platonists have said anything that is true and in harmony with our faith, we are not only not to shrink from it, but to claim it for our own use. All branches of heathen learning have not only false and superstitious fancies and heavy burdens of unnecessary toil, which we ought to abhor and avoid, but they contain also liberal instruction, which is better adapted to the use of 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. Now these are, so to speak, their gold and silver, which they did not create themselves.” You can learn so much more about internal family systems, you can learn more about parts and Episode 71 of this podcast titled A New and Better Way of Understanding Myself and Others.

[01:14:43] And also, if you're interested in more of the sort of theological aspects of this, go to episode 73, which is titled Is Internal Family Systems really Catholic? At Souls and Hearts, we are on the leading edge of this human formation stuff. The leading edge. We cannot do it by ourselves, though. We are supported by you. Because you pray for us. We pray for you. You pray for us. This whole endeavor is fueled by prayer. I'm going to invite you to check out our resources page, which is at Souls and hearts.com/toc. Stands for Table of Contents. Put it in lowercase because our website's a little finicky about uppercase and lowercase. Put it in. Put it in there to see soulsandhearts.com/toc alphabetical listing of everything that we have. Almost everything we have in alphabetical order.

Now I made a mistake and put out some communications. The resilient Catholics community was supposed to close on June 30th for this next cohort, but I made a mistake and put something out there that had a different date in there. So we are going to continue to take some more applications to the RCC for the Saint Edward, the Confessor cohort for the next few days just to allow folks that read that to not feel like they're being shut out. We have had about 95 people that have already applied. We cannot take more than 108. So we have a little bit of room left.

[01:16:23] If you're interested in that, go to our landing page. Resilient Catholics Community. You can Google that or you can go to soulsandhearts.com/rcc. A lot of information about that. This is the primary place where I give. The pioneers, really the pioneers in this area where we come together. And I provide a lot of experiential exercises, a lot more material. I can go in far greater depth than I can in a podcast if these human formation concepts, if parts work, the systems thinking, multiplicity, unity, all of that makes sense to you if you resonate with experiential exercises that we've done in previous episodes, check out the RCC. Check it out. Just take a look. It's about a two-and-a-half-month discernment process. So if you apply, there's lots of time to sort through. Whether the RCC is a good fit for you, we take that really seriously. If you're a therapist, you might consider also the interior therapist community that is all about the human formation of the Catholic therapists, soulsandhearts.com/itc. We will be forming new Foundations Experiential Groups in September. Get on the waiting list. Go to soulsandhearts.com/itc. Get yourself on the interest list. Send us that little form so we know to look out for you.

Conversation hours with me every Tuesday and Thursday, 4:30 PM Eastern time to 5:30 PM Eastern Time. (317) 567-9594. Don't hesitate to give me a call. Let me know what you're what you're reacting to, what your thoughts are about this podcast or about the weekly Reflections, but make sure you're getting those too. We just have been experiencing how we can understand. Parts in the luminous mysteries. In the gospel accounts that cover those events that's been provided by Souls and Hearts CEO and co-founder Dr. Gerry Crete. It's an excellent series. And over the next few months, we're going to be going into the individual personality disorders and personality styles. I'm going to be talking about all of these personality disorders and personality styles, what they mean, how we can understand them, and then how we can understand them from a parts perspective, from an Internal Family Systems perspective. That's going to take us several months to get through these because there's so much a part of our lexicon, there's so much a part of our language. The default to the single homogeneous model of personality, this conventional model of personality. And I'm going to provide you with the intellectual foundation to be able to break out of that if you choose to. All right. So with that, we're going to wrap it for today. Really appreciate you spending the time listening to this. Thank you for being here. Thank you for being on the pilgrimage in this podcast with us. And with that, we'll invoke our patroness and our patron, Our Lady, our mother. Untier of knots. Pray for us. Saint John the Baptist. Pray for us.

Summary

Join Catholic IFS therapists Marion Moreland, Jody Garneau, and Dr. Peter Malinoski for an in-depth discussion of unburdening, informed by Internal Family Systems and grounded in a Catholic understanding of the human person. We explore three kinds of burdens -- personal burdens, legacy burdens, and unattached burdens (the IFS equivalent of demons), we provide examples from our own lives, we emphasize the importance of felt safety and protection for all parts, and we discuss the role of attachment theory in unburdening. In our Q&A with our live audience, we discuss how to approach "hiding parts" as well.

Summary

Have you ever wondered what inner work with Internal Family Systems looks like with troubling sexual issues? Join us as podcaster and coach Drew Boa reviews an unburdening of three of his parts from a sexual issue with Dr. Peter and other Christian therapists.

Summary

Join RCC Lead Navigator Marion Moreland and Dr. Peter for a demonstration of Internal Family Systems work around anger, followed by a Q&A where we discuss with our live audience member the topics of exiled anger, forgiveness, and legacy burdens. 

In this episode, Dr. Peter takes close look at an alternative way to manage, work through, and let go of anger, informed by Internal Family Systems (IFS), and especially by the work of Jay Earley. After a brief review of the major tenets of IFS, we discuss how to work through the different ways that manager parts, firefighter parts and exiled parts hold and manage anger. We look at the functions of anger in the internal system and especially at the process, the steps of working through and resolving anger held by parts in different roles. Then Dr. Peter discusses how parts of him hold and respond to anger in a particular subsystem of parts within his broader internal system. 

Summary:

In this live experiential exercise, Dr. Peter leads listeners through an experiential exercise that explores why anger might feel important, necessary, even indispensable for parts. We look at how anger can develop from parts feeling forced to choose between attachment needs and integrity needs being met. Dr. Peter and the audience members shared a lively, personal debriefing and discussion of their experience of the exercise. 

Transcription:

Dr. Peter: Okay, well it is a pleasure to be with you. It is so good to be with you today. I'm Dr. Peter Malinoski. I'm a clinical psychologist. I'm a passionate Catholic. And this is episode 111 of 'Interior Integration for Catholics.' Now, originally this was going to be episode 110. There were some numbering issues that came up because during Holy Week, I just had to put out an experiential exercise for Holy Week about Our Lord's psychological anguish, his psychological agony in the garden. And so if there are some confusion about numbering, if some people are expecting this to be number 110, that's okay. This is number 111 because we had that extra one that came out last Wednesday.

In this podcast, we take on the most important questions and the most difficult questions about our human formation. And we're really not just about getting to the head, we're also about getting to the heart. It's not just intellectual information, it's not just conceptual information, analytical processing--we really want to get to the whole of the human person, and we focus on human formation. That's really important--we focus on human formation. And so what we are doing here is focusing in on the natural level obstacles of what keeps us from being able to connect with our Lord and Our Lady in a deep, intimate, personal relationship. So that's what this podcast is all about.

This episode in particular is an experiential exercise. It allows us to really get inside of our systems, inside of our interior lives, and to connect with the parts of us that are having some kind of difficulty, some kind of obstacle with anger. We're continuing our series--those of you that have followed the podcast for a while may know that this is the sixth in a series of six experiential exercises that are coming out on the third Monday of the month. So this is the last one in that series. It's been a great journey; I've really enjoyed being with you; I'm so glad to see so many people with us tonight that have joined us live.

So as we discuss these experiential exercises, there's a few things that I always want to bring up. First is that these topics around anger, this can be difficult material, especially when it gets into anger at God or especially when it gets into anger at somebody that we hold dear, somebody that we're close to. We want to make sure that we are staying in our window of tolerance. What I mean by that window of tolerance is that zone in which we can take in new information, that zone where we can connect. If we exit that window of tolerance to the upside, we move into hyperarousal--that's the fight or flight response. And that means that we begin to shut down or if we exit the window of tolerance to the downside, that's the freeze response--that's the dorsal vagal response. And again, we close ourselves off to new information. We close ourselves off to the possibility of connecting with others, including God. And so you don't have to do this exercise, you can stop at any time if it's not helping you. If it's not working for you, you can reground yourself. We don't want to steamroll any internal objections from any of our parts about doing the exercise. We want to really respect the dignity of each part of us and if you are listening to this in the recording, you really need the time and the space and the privacy to do this experiential exercise. It's not something that you can do very well while you're driving or you're cooking or cleaning or exercising or anything like that--you really want to be able to set aside dedicated time for this.

So I'm going to invite you to take what's useful to you. You're free to go your own direction if you would like. And again, if you're listening to this as a recording, you can press pause and take as much time as you need to do whatever work you need to do with your parts inside. Really trust that there is a way for this to be fruitful for you. It's often helpful to have pens and paper, to be able to write things down that are helpful--like in a journal or to map things out. You're always welcome to move around. Your body position is up to you--whatever works for you, whatever's comfortable. Eyes open, eyes closed, that's okay.

We're going to be focusing in, in just a moment on a trailhead, a trailhead about anger. But we're going to approach it from the opposite direction as we have in previous experiential exercises. So if you go back to episodes 104, 106, 108, we're going to be looking at this from a different point of view today. Sometimes that different perspective really helps to shed light on what's happening inside. I'm going to start with some opposites of anger. We're actually going to start on the other side of the coin. We're going to look at some antonyms or opposites of anger. And I'm just going to invite you to see if you have any negative reactions to the words that I'm about to offer you. All of these words are considered antonyms or opposites of anger. And when a part of us holds onto anger or when it feels a need to be angry, it might not so much be because of the anger, but what's on the other side--the flip side, the opposite side.

So I'm just going to invite you to notice what's going on in your body right now. Just to get a sense of your internal bodily state before we begin. What's happening in or around your body? To just kind of assess where you are with the different parts of your body. What's going on in your head right now--just noticing any physical sensations, any bodily sensations in your head. Noticing anything that's going on behind your eyes, in your cheeks, in your jaw around your ears, at the back of your head--I'm just inviting you to really notice.

And then I'm going to invite you to notice what's happening in your shoulders, your neck. I'm not trying to change anything--we're just paying attention.

What's happening in your arms...your upper arms, elbows, forearms...is there anything that draws your attention in your arms? Or anything going on in your hands?

Anything happening in your chest or in your your back as we work our way down? Around your heart, your lungs, your stomach. I invite you to pay attention to your breathing--just notice what's happening with your breathing right now.

Your abdomen, your lower back, your hips. Just anything that you're noticing in those sensations.

In your groin, your upper legs, your thighs, your knees, your lower legs, you calves, your shins, your ankles, your feet. And I'm just going to invite you to remember just what might seem most significant in terms of body sensations. The one or two, maybe three sensations in your body that are most prominent or noticeable to you.

And then I'm going to invite you to pay attention to any changes in your body that might occur. As I share with you a list of words. These are the antonyms or the opposites of anger.

And it's possible that you'll notice some sort of shift in the body. And if you do, I'm going to invite you to pay attention to that word where that happens the most prominently or the most obviously. Now if you're noticing some other shift in your inner states, if you're noticing a memory pop up or if you're noticing a desire come up or a strong belief or some other inner experience--pay attention to that. We're looking for what are called trailheads, and these are the signals from our parts that try to communicate something to us, usually some kind of distress. You can write down the word if it's helpful to you where you notice a shift. And we're going to call any word that you react to internally your target word. Okay.

Calm.

Cheer.

Comfort.

Delight.

Happiness.

Joy.

Attraction.

Love.

Peace.

Contentment.

Pleasure.

Enjoyment.

Pleasantness.

Warmth.

Affection.

Alright, so I'm just going to invite you again to notice which of those words had the biggest internal reaction--calm, cheer, comfort, delight, happiness, joy, attraction, love, peace, contentment, pleasure, agreeability (I don't think I said that one before), enjoyment, pleasantness, connection, warmth. Which of those words caused the biggest reaction? That's going to be your target word.

And now, for this next step, I'm going to invite you, with a big open heart, to see if you can be curious about why there was a reaction to that word. And that reaction might not have been huge. It might not have been something earth shattering or groundbreaking or something that really rattled you or anything like that. It could be subtle, but just to be able to tune into that word and to be curious about why there might have been a reaction to that word especially with that word being an antonym or an opposite to anger. I'm just wondering if there's a message in that reaction inside--in that trailhead--to your target word. And if it would be okay for parts to share with you, you as your innermost self, what's significant about that word in their story. If it would be okay for a part of you to share the story around your target word. Calm, cheer, happiness, joy, peace--whatever it was, and also about anger. There could very well be something significant.

Can we just hear that story? And if it's helpful to write down what you're picking up. Just be really open to learning what might be going on that hasn't been integrated yet, that you haven't been able to hear yet.

If it's helpful, you can check in with the body sensation that changed. You can say, "hey, look, what does this shift in my stomach want me to know?" It might be difficult to identify the part right away, but you can focus in on the body sensation, or on the memory, or on the shift inside, the song that came up in your head or whatever it was. "What is it you want me to know about that target word?"

And if it's relevant, about that target word's relationship with anger.

Dr. Peter: We're going to ask parts not to flood you with their intensity--it's a safety thing. Ask parts not to overwhelm you with distress or with emotions. You want to be separate but near you, as your innermost self, and your parts.

There's some negativity here, some criticism of your reactions inside, just see if those concerned protector parts can soften and relax back--if they can give you some space so that you, as your innermost self, can connect in a way that's separate but near to your target part, to the one that may have some concerns about anger or about these words that are antonyms or opposites of anger.

It's amazing how many things can be disconnected inside, how many things might not come into our awareness--that's especially true with anger. Any of the members of the emotional family of anger.

Can we have a lot of space to just hear and accept where a part of us may be with anger or with any of these opposites. And accepting where a part is does not mean endorsing that part's impulses or desires or their attitudes. Does it mean endorsing or embracing or encouraging any of those inner experiences, but it means that we say, "yes, it's real, it exists within me." Even if it might be misdirected or even if it might be disordered in some way, can we accept that that's real, that it exists within us?

And I'm just curious about how old this reaction is--how far back does it go in your life--to what age? When does that story begin?

And how might that target word be related to shame, or grief, or despair, or maybe to injustice.

Dr. Peter: And what would it mean if you were to experience calm or cheer or comfort or delight or happiness or joy or attraction or love or peace or contentment or pleasure or agreeableness or enjoyment or pleasantness or connection or warmth if some part of you is still angry?

Dr. Peter: And can you have a sense of compassion for parts that are struggling with anger or with some of these opposites of anger? Is it okay to be with them?

And as we draw to a close, as we come to the end of this experiential exercise, a lot of gratitude for your parts, a lot of appreciation for the good things that they've sought for you, the ways that they've tried to protect you, and appreciation for your parts as being fearfully and wonderfully made by God. I'm going to invite you to check in with your parts about what they might like you to speak for them--if there are things that they would like to share in our debriefing, in our sharing time after this experiential exercise. There'll be an opportunity to speak for your parts, to share the experience inside.

Dr. Peter: And to know that this doesn't have to be the end of connecting inside around these themes. This doesn't have to be a one off experience--there's a possibility of working with these parts around anger and the opposites in the future.

Dr. Peter: So I'm going to invite you to all, as it feels right and good to return to our meeting. Turn your cameras back on, if you wish.

Dr. Peter: And as we make that transition, as you come back, I'm just going to make a couple of announcements. First of all, conversation hours will be Tuesdays and Thursdays generally, from 4:30 PM to 5:30 PM. However, I want everyone to know that because I will be traveling, I will not be in on Thursday the 20 of April, or the following Tuesday, which is the 25 of April. So the 20 and 25 of April, we won't be having conversation hours, but we will on the other Tuesdays and Thursdays from 4:30 PM to 5:30 PM EST on my cell phone, 317-567-9594. You're welcome to call me during conversation hours about any theme that is in this podcast, Interior Integration for Catholics or in the weekly reflections that I write. Right now, we are in the middle of a series on human formation, and so that's popular to be able to talk about now--human formation or any of the podcast episodes from Interior Integration for Catholics. If you call, it's usually about ten minutes, maybe fifteen minutes that we limit it at. And just be aware that it's not about clinical consultations. I can't provide clinical services when you call. You can reach me by email as well at [email protected]. I ask that you keep the emails brief, keep them short, maybe 100 words, 200 words. I get a lot of email--it makes it hard if I'm reading through 3-5 pages of emails, so I just ask you to keep those short.

I mentioned the weekly reflections from Souls and Hearts. You can read those at soulsandhearts.com/blog--that's our archive, but it's even better to get them in your email inbox every Wednesday. If you go to soulsandhearts.com, our main page, you click on the blue box that says "Get the Weekly Email Reflections from Dr. Peter," then they'll go right to your email inbox every Wednesday.

Dr. Peter: For those of you that really resonate with these kinds of experiential exercises, know that our interest list for the Resilient Catholic Community, we are currently finding out who might be interested in joining us for our new cohort--our fifth cohort--and we'll be taking new applications from June 1 to June 30 of 2024. We open up the RCC to new members every June and December. So we'll be starting that programing for the June cohort in September.

And I just wanted to mention one more thing, especially for our listeners who are single Catholic women aged 35+, on April 24-28, 2023, Ann-Marie Klobe will be hosting another Ready for Love Retreat. She is going to give you five straight days of really excellent speakers--there's a lineup of more than 20 speakers. I'm involved with it. There's going to be conversion stories, there's going to be a path to holiness, there's going to be a quest for love. I'm going to be addressing this intense topic of anger at God about single status. Anne Marie and I had a really great interview about that, so that's going to be available as well. So I am personally inviting my Interior Integration for Catholics listeners to join that retreat. You can find the sign up on our podcast landing page. Go to soulsandhearts.com/iic and you can get a free registration for the retreat there. I hope many of you can do that.

You can also find the links in the Weekly Reflections from April 12 and April 19. If you're registered with souls and hearts, those go directly to your email inbox or you can find them at soulsandhearts.com//blog.

Dr. Peter: Finally, for those of you that are interested, Doctor Jerry and I will be at the Catholic Psychotherapy Association annual conference in California from April 20-22, 2023. We will also be online and I am doing a breakout workshop with Jodi Garneau titled 'The Integrated Catholic Therapist: A Compassionate Approach to Sexual Concerns using IFS.' And that will be on April 21, 2023 in the afternoon on the West Coast. There's also a virtual option for the conference which you can check out at catholicpsychotherapy.org--that's the Catholic Psychotherapy Association.

Dr. Peter: And so at this point, now that we've gotten through all that housekeeping, I just want to open it up to anyone who might like to share something of their experience. You can put up a virtual hand or you can put up a real hand and then Marian will unmute you and we can begin to connect. And if you prefer to send something to me in the chat box, if you prefer to be anonymous, we can address questions or anything about your experience that that you'd like to share.

Dr. Peter: It's really good to see so many members of the RCC with us tonight and others that have been connected with us.

Dr. Peter: Anything that seemed significant?

Yes. Do share, Marianne.

Marianne: "Okay, I guess I just realized that anger can be self-defensive. That was really what came out of that, and it gave me an opportunity to not be so upset about getting angry, but seeing that it has a purpose or has had a purpose in the past."

Dr. Peter: Yeah. To protect and defend--that is one of the primary purposes; one of the primary reasons why parts of us get angry. Yeah. That's such a great insight. And you said that that was new for you--that was kind of a new thought. Yeah. Excellent. Thank you, Marianne.

Dr. Peter: Yes, Mary Kay.

May Kay: "The word that you missed, 'agreeable', just brought in a lot of, memories of thinking that's completely what I wanted to be was agreeable. And just over the years how maybe it's good to be flexible and agreeable, but sometimes that can be overdone. And so it hit home--where probably that overdone part was really showing up at times being too agreeable I guess. So that's the word that kind of stuck out."

Dr. Peter: Well, I'm so glad we caught that word on the second time around, because it wasn't in the original list, but it obviously caught something. Yeah, an internal polarization between a felt need to be agreeable and some other things inside that are really important.

Mary Kay: "Yeah, because you think it's the point of connection is just go along with it. And at some point it becomes almost a problem, right? Being too agreeable and kind of losing yourself in that process."

Dr. Peter: Well, yeah, because there can be attachment needs that one part is seeking by being agreeable, holding onto relationships--but there could be integrity needs that are not getting met in that agreeableness. And I'm not saying that's what's happening for you, but that is a very common dilemma between attachment and integrity. And some important people in our lives have parts that create us having to have a choice. We can either choose to be in relationship or we can choose individual integrity. But somehow it's not possible to have both in those relationships.

Mary Kay: "Exactly. Yeah. And the frustration that comes from that because like you said, you need both, right?"

Dr. Peter: And that can breed anger, right? When parts sense that there's an integrity loss, that can build up anger. But boy, that can be hard for parts that really want to be agreeable, right? So yeah.

Mary Kay: "Yeah, exactly."

Dr. Peter: Thank you for that, Mary Kay.

Mary Kay: "You're welcome."

Yeah, Christina.

Christina: "Hi. Thank you, Peter. It's the first time I've done this, but I was getting some images and words that were coming back with some of the antonyms, and the really stronger ones came around attraction and love. And then I also heard affection at the end instead of connection, which is interesting because I saw like a 3 to 4 year old, you know, really sweet child there. But the attraction and love--which is really significant--what came back is this dangerous betrayal and then cruelty. And there was just like a throat tightening. And, you know, then the other thing that comes back--and I'm aware of some of these things and why this is so--but it's also just this awareness of this great grief that underlies that. So the grief sitting on top of the anger, it's almost like a suppressed depression, like a tremendous grief that's like from a sort of a depressed suppression of anger and the rage around. Lots of things around that--and it comes back from because I was just listening to things...I don't want to get too like involved, but I was listening to things on the Restore the Glory podcast, and the thing that really struck me were those interior states, right? Because I'm aware of some of them and there's one that like really kicked into this that just made all those pieces come together, which I called the introspect, which is a function of interior observation, that's a gatekeeper function that sends information out to various more or less healthy, different, you know--some of them are like manager, or and another one might be like a one who gets things done and sets things up. There's just there's a few of them--I don't know them all, but there's a few of them, and so this is like the introspect who is like identifying and more clearly seeing the combination of those things because obviously anger and fear are all together in that. And as we look at that attraction, love, danger, betrayal and cruelty combination, I can feel that my chest tightening and my lungs tightening at the same time."

Dr. Peter: So you're noticing those bodily markers, right? That is so important, Christina, to be able to localize that in the body, because there are certain things that happen that are not so easily put into words, especially by parts of us that are really young. And so there may be these communications through the body. And you're making another set of connections here between the emotion of anger and then experiences, right--betrayal, for example. And between the emotion of anger and other emotions--this intense grief that you were talking about and the rage. And so as we create a space inside where there can be acceptance of whatever's there, it invites clarity, and it invites us to be able to understand more deeply how these things are related.

Dr. Peter: That's just a beautiful piece of interior work that you were sharing with us. It's o important to be able to connect inside.

Christina: "Thank you."

Dr. Peter: Thank you. Thank you for being willing to share that with us.

So we have another another comment here: "My keywords were happiness--unattainable, warmth--numb and attraction--disordered. I have a protector part that says we are supposed to be angry. If we are happy, we are not working hard enough. She wants to intellectualize suffering and trials, and I think that there's another part that is very afraid of disappointment or maybe loneliness, but she doesn't want to be reached by me. I also feel similar to Christina--there are layers, a layer of anxiety on top of the sadness, which is all on top of the anger."

Okay, so there is so much to unpack here. This is such a great comment. I really appreciate it. A protector part that says we are supposed to be angry--if we are happy, we are not working hard enough. I see this a lot. I see these kinds of dynamics a lot. That's why it's important to try to get into what does it mean? What would it mean if we had happiness? Well, that would mean that I'm not working hard enough--that's where a part's coming from for this particular participant. And so then it starts to make sense. It's not that the part doesn't want the person to be happy, it's what the happiness would symbolize; what that happiness would mean. And so often we don't take the time to really understand that. You know, this part of of of this participant wants to intellectualize suffering and trials, and thinks that there is another part that is very afraid of disappointment or maybe loneliness, but she doesn't want to be reached by me. So there are other parts involved in this. So often anger is a way of protecting against loneliness or powerlessness or sadness. It's a way of not being engulfed by some other emotion or experience. And it's not that parts of us that carry anger want to be angry, per se--most of them don't want the anger just for the sake of the anger, but they want it for some kind of benefit that seems to come with the anger, like being powerful, like being strong, like not being taken advantage of, like not being exploited. And so with this particular participant, you know, this idea of being disappointed or lonely--and then the layers again, this is a theme that's come up tonight--a layer of anxiety on top of a layer of sadness, which is all on top of a layer of anger. So you can see these layers can be in different orders. Depression or grief can suppress anger, anger could also suppress depression and grief. The order can vary a lot. There was a Catholic psychiatrist by the name of Conrad Baars, who described in a lot of detail how one emotion can suppress another emotion. Now, I would think about this as one part, carrying an emotion, can suppress another part carrying a different emotion. So think about it a little differently, but the idea is essentially the same: that there are these battles going on inside of us that are full of different emotions and experiences and desires and impulses, where there are parts that are not accepting each other, not accepting the experience of each other, and if we can really calm things down, if we can see if our protector parts can let the innermost self lead and guide the system, then that opens the door to parts being able to work collaboratively and cooperatively under the leadership and guidance of the innermost self.

So thank you. Thank you for for sharing that with us--definitely appreciate the need for anonymity. Definitely want to honor that.

Dr. Peter: So a request for further resources when attachments are used against integrity. Okay, so what kind of resources are available when somebody has experienced an important relationship--a necessary relationship that is pitted attachment or relationship, on the one hand, against integrity--what do you do in those situations? I sometimes get requests for books on this kind of thing because this is so experiential, usually books reach the conceptual or the intellectual and not so much the experiential. So one thing I would recommend as far as resources would be to go back through episodes 100, 102, 104, 106 and 108. The last ones of those are all about anger, and that's often where you'll find the violations against integrity needs. Remember that anger is the ordered emotional response to injustice or perceived injustice, and when that injustice is inflicted against oneself, that's against the integrity at least of a part, or at least it's perceived as a violation of integrity against a part. And so anger is often a really good clue to being able to detect where things are as far as integrity goes, or at least where parts are experiencing integrity wounds. There is an IFS lead therapist or lead trainer by the name of Mike Elkin that basically says that all of the major issues are moral issues. Anything that we get excited about or that we get angry about--especially the things that we get angry about--they're always moral issues. And I think he's definitely right about that.

So we can open this up to anybody else that has things that they might like to share or debrief, you know, speaking for their parts about this experiential exercise. But we can also take up other things that folks would like to be able to address on the topic of anger.

Dr. Peter: Linda? Yes.

Linda: "You have stirred up a whole pot full of stuff. As soon as I heard happiness, I automatically went into anger because I didn't use to ever be able to have happiness. But then ran into this part that's like angry at me because this part wants to be happy. This part remembers being happy, this part is angry at me because my anger keeps this part from being happy. And...I don't know, the more I sit and listen to you and let these things run around inside me, the more I just have all kinds of anger being stirred up and I'm not real sure what to do with it."

Dr. Peter: Yeah, yeah. Let's talk about that because when we begin to allow awareness of what's happening inside of us, it can be disconcerting, especially to our manager parts. It can feel hard to put the genie back in the bottle, you know, once it's out. And so one of the things that I really do recommend is that--if it's possible--to have somebody to personally accompany you on the journey, you know, to go with you. So an IFS informed therapist or a coach, some spiritual directors have got some IFS training--so that would be one thing. The other thing, though, is to continue to work with your parts and ask them not to overwhelm you with the intensity of their experience. To be able to engage in a way that's cooperative and collaborative. You know, because we don't want there to be such intensity inside that it overwhelms your capacity to function in a day to day basis. You know, that's not ideal, that's not the best way to go about this at all. And sometimes parts just are desperate, you know, or sometimes they feel like this is their only opportunity to be heard. But if they know that there is a plan to be able to work with them in a sustainable way, it gets so much easier. Does that make sense?

Linda: "Yeah, it does. I've just--the last couple of years, I've done a lot of interior healing kind of work and, without calling them parts, I have come into contact with all of these parts. And so they have some reality or some knowledge of the fact that they can be heard. And this whole IFS stuff just strikes me as an actual way to allow all of that to happen. I don't know. It just makes so much sense. And it makes all those parts feel like this is doable."

Dr. Peter: Yes. And that's one of the reasons why I'm so attracted to approaches that are informed by Internal Family Systems, or by parts work more generally, is that there is a way to. make sense of the internal experience--there's a way to make sense of the internal conflicts, the polarizations, there's a way to make sense of conflicting desires. And I sometimes use this imagery of a ship. And let's just imagine a ship that's that's been damaged. It's sinking. And there are two parts that are in a lifeboat. And one part is very much taking in all kinds of water and supplies, food, rations. And that part is busy filling up the lifeboat with that food and with that water. And the other part is busy throwing all that food and water overboard. And they actually have both they both have the same goal--they both have the goal of surviving. But one part has experienced being shipwrecked without food and water, and it's definitely not going to go through that again. And the other part has experienced being shipwrecked and having the lifeboat that it was in turn over because it was overloaded--so it experienced being in the water with the sharks. So they have very different experiences and they have very different agendas about what it means to be safe. One is very focused on making sure there's enough food and water, the other is making sure that the lifeboat's going to float. And they don't have the breadth of experience or vision that they could have, if they were much more integrated and connected to the innermost self. They don't have that that perspective. And so parts are trying really hard. And it's not that the part that's throwing the food and water overboard is not wanting parts to eat or to drink. And it's not that the part that's loading up the boat wants it to overturn, it's just that that wasn't part of their experience. They weren't the one to bear the brunt of those negative consequences. So if we can bring our parts together with their experiences and their perspectives, if we can bring them into the fold in a way that's much more integrated and that's much more collaborative and cooperative and led and guided by your innermost self, then all of those perspectives can be heard and all of the needs can be met in a far more effective way than if parts are working at cross-purposes to one another.

"That's helpful in the thought that--right now my parts feel like they are at cross totally and it's never going to get resolved. But maybe we can see a way that eventually we can come together."

Dr. Peter: And the parts on their own can't see it, even though they even though they really have good intentions, even though they're trying really hard, they can't see it. They need that perspective of the innermost self. And so sometimes that means that we need to get some outside perspective on board, you know, just to help with that unblending, to help with parts being able to work more collaboratively and cooperatively together. So yeah. Thank you.

Speaker6: "Thank you."

Dr. Peter: There's time, maybe for 1 or 2 more if there are others that would like to share something or that have a question. Yes, Madeleine.

Madeleine: "If there's somebody else who has a question, let them go, because I always kind of speak up."

Dr. Peter: Well, it has been a blessing to have you on these episodes, Madeleine. But yeah, let's honor that. There's a part of Madeleine that really wants to create space for anyone else. If there are others that might like to say something or submit something on the chat.

Dr. Peter: Oh, I'm seeing more messages having come through. "Will you be doing any more of these exercises? They are so helpful." So the short answer is eventually yes. You know, we decided to do a series of six just to see how it landed, and it's been well received. But I like to shake things up and have some new ideas for what we might do, especially for this third Monday of the month podcast. So I definitely want to to be thoughtful about that. I know people really like the experiential exercises. Again, if you resonate with them, I'm just going to invite folks to consider the Resilient Catholics Community. You can go to soulsandhearts.com/RCC and check that out. But yeah, definitely we'll be doing more experiential exercises and I really do like the live interaction and so we definitely will be doing some more live interaction things as well.

And then another one--"A part of me doesn't think she should have any anger at all. I don't know my parts well enough, but I try to be happy at all times. I don't allow anger to reveal itself much at all. Does it seem that this part might be in exile?"

Dr. Peter: So a lot to unpack here--a part of me doesn't think she should have any anger at all. There is so much of that that I see on a regular basis. Parts that are afraid that anger is dangerous. Even feeling anger is dangerous--it's going to be dangerous to my relationships, it's going to be dangerous in my interactions with other people, and so it's not safe to feel angry. That is so common. And so there can be a part, a protector part, that suppresses the anger--that exiles the anger. And so, yeah, it is very common for anger to both be a protector and an exile at the same time. So the anger may be defending against the part with the anger--may be defending against grief or against shame or against a sense of loneliness or a sense of despair. So there's the angry reaction, that's an attempt to ward off that intensity, but the anger is too much for some other parts, so another part comes in and suppresses the anger. So the anger is suppressing the grief or the shame, and then the anger gets suppressed by a manager part that says, "we can't have this, we can't have you be angry because it's not going to be tolerated by those people, those relationships that we need." So that is very, very common. And then one of the themes in the movie 'Inside Out' was this part, Joy, that wanted to be happy all the time. That was one of the major themes of the movie. And in that particular situation, Joy was busy trying to exile sadness. Actually, there was a little scene where she drew this little circle on the ground and sadness was supposed to stay in that little circle. And so, yeah, there are parts of us that think that what would be best for us is to be happy all the time. But that's not realistic. This is a vale of tears, you know, we we hear in scripture--there are going to be times where we're sad. There are times when Jesus was sad. So yeah, there are parts that don't want anger to come up or don't want sadness to come up because often they've learned that what other people want, important people want, what they want from me is for me to be happy. And so there is this kind of happy exterior, but it hides so much realness inside, real things going on inside that are much more painful. So yeah, there's a lot of exiles that can come out of that kind of a dynamic.

Dr. Peter: I know we're a little over time. People are welcome to go, but I just--Madeline, I can't hear from you. So, you know, if you'd be willing to unmute yourself and share, that would be great.

Madeleine: "It's nothing groundbreaking, but it was a helpful exercise for me because even though I sort of knew it intellectually, because of, you know, the work we've been doing in the RCC, but I saw the connection very, very clearly of the, you know, my target word and then the anger and, you know, so all it was crystal clear, which was helpful. The other thing that was helpful for me was when you talked about attachment needs vs. integrity needs, maybe that should have been obvious--it's not anything I thought about, though, but it really makes sense of parts' experience where one has been pitted against the other. So that--I would never have thought of that myself. So that was really helpful to sort of understanding, you know, another way of understanding experience. And you know, I can say, Dr. Peter that like a few weeks ago because of where we were in the RCC, you know, anger just became a huge thing for me. I didn't ever know--I mean, I knew I had anger--but I didn't know I had specific anger at God. And it was so big for me. And so I just thought of that when it was Linda talking, because, you know, I was so grateful. First of all, I have a therapist. Secondly, I have the RCC and the community. So I wasn't dealing with that on my own. I don't know what I would have done because I wouldn't have known where to go with it, you know, but I was able to navigate it and now I can just see it for what it is. This anger is there, I can accept it, and so it was so helpful for me, you know, just corroborating what you said about having somebody to accompany you, you know, to kind of work through that."

Dr. Peter: Well, beautiful, beautiful. Thank you for sharing that.

Dr. Peter: Episode 62 of this podcast is titled 'Unmet Attachment Needs and Unmet Integrity Needs,' and so we do review those, but I don't know how much I get into that about the polarization or the hobbesian dilemma that we can be exposed to by those who are near to us, you know, by the parts of them that somehow seem to force that kind of a choice. And so that's a huge dilemma for a child, ideally what we want for children and for adults is to be able to have relationships that foster both attachment and integrity--both secure attachment and a healthy way that fosters internal integrity. And that that be able to be shared across parts. So but so often because of our parents' wounds, or because of the wounds of others--teachers, coaches, pastors, whatever. Yeah, there's parts that somehow neglect one or both of those.

And just a quick comment here: "This really helped me feel better that my anger can come from wanting to be in alignment with others. I want everyone to understand what it means to love thy neighbor."

Dr. Peter: Yeah, I mean, if we begin to understand the motivations of our parts, we're going to see that those motives are good. And so much of the trouble comes from parts having limited vision. Our anger can come from wanting to be in alignment with with others. Yeah. From frustration that we don't have the kind of relational connection we would want to have. It could be all kinds of good motivations. There are all kinds of good motivations that can fuel anger. Anger in itself is not a sin. The emotion of anger. Our Lord was angry when he was cleansing the temple of the money changers. Our Lord was angry at the Pharisees. Our Lord was angry at his own apostles from time to time. There is such a thing as a just anger. Anger becomes sinful when it becomes harbored and nurtured and fed, you know, then it can become one of the deadly sins. So there can be a lot of confusion about anger within our parts. And so to be able to hear the story that each part of us has around anger or whatever other emotion or desire or attitude or belief or assumption, it has--so helpful for that part of us to not feel alone. And I think that's part of what's so essential in us loving ourselves. Our Lord commanded us in the second great commandment to love your neighbor as yourself. If we can love these parts of us that are angry, if we can love these parts of us that are carrying the anger or that are using anger protectively, if we can hear those stories, we can help those parts seek the goods that they want for us, but in a more adaptive way, in a way that's healthier, in a way that's less likely to lead us into sin or into trouble.

So I want to thank you all for being here. I'm super excited to be able to have spent some time with you tonight and so glad for the good human formation work you were doing tonight. It builds up the entire mystical body of Christ. It benefits each one of us when you do your internal work. So thank you for that.

And with that, as is kind of our tradition, I'll invite you to all unmute yourselves. Our Lady, Our Mother, Untier of Knots, pray for us. St. John the Baptist, pray for us.

In this experiential exercise I invite you and your parts to approach Jesus in the psychological, emotional, relational, and bodily anguish He suffered in His humanity in the Garden of Gethsemane. Which parts of you might avoid Jesus, turn away from Him in His suffering -- and why? Here is an opportunity to gently learn more about how our parts react to Jesus and to gently connect with them in understanding and compassion. 

We explore the inner experience of Jesus and the psychological, emotional, relational, and bodily anguish He suffered in His humanity in the Garden of Gethsemane as the drama of of salvation history unfolded. We also explored the reactions of the apostles Peter, James, and John to the experience of Jesus' agony. 

IIC 109 Jesus’ Psychological Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane

Gethsemane

The Lord is in the garden, weeping — 
prostrate, anguished — all alone.
Not far away His friends are sleeping,
using pillows made of stone.
 
There in the darkness, time is fleeting — 
racing toward His destiny.
His weary voice is heard repeating,
Father, take this cup from Me.
 
More fervently the Lord is pleading — 
mouthing words without a sound.
From sorrow, He has started bleeding
crimson droplets on the ground.
 
Disciples — one by one — awaken.
Jesus tells them as they stand,
The Son of Man will soon be taken.
Rise, the hour is at hand.
 
Bright torches in the distance — nearing;
shouts and voices pierce the night.
Then Judas walks into the clearing — 
soldiers to his left and right.
 
To Judas and the crowd behind him
Jesus asks, Whom do you seek?
All eyes await the sign to bind Him — 
Judas kisses Jesus’ cheek.
 
A glint of steel — a blade is wheeling — 
Peter cuts off someone’s ear.
A call for peace — a touch of healing,
Jesus’ friends run off in fear.
 
Surrounded by the priests and soldiers — 
centered in His Father’s will.
The world’s weight upon His shoulders — 
stretched out on Golgotha's hill.

The poem titled Gethsemane, by poet Robert Hawkins at TheHawksquill.com, used by permission. 

Intro

Welcome to the Interior Integration for Catholics podcast; I am Dr. Peter Malinoski, passionate Catholic, clinical psychologist, bringing to you the best of human formation resources grounded in a Catholic understanding of the human person.  I am very pleased to share with you a special edition of the Interior Integration for Catholics podcast for Holy Week, this is episode 109 titled “Jesus’ Psychological Agony in the Garden.

Interior Integration for Catholics is part of our broader outreach, Souls and Hearts, at Souls and Hearts.com, which is all about overcoming the psychological and human formation issues that keep us from a deep, personal, intimate relationship with God, our spiritual Father, Mary, our spiritual mother, Jesus, our brother and Savior and the Holy Spirit who sustains us. Today we are going to get to know Jesus much better, especially in those moments in the Garden of Gethsemane.

Much has been written about Jesus’ physical wounds in his passion – the beating, the 39 lashes, the carrying of the cross, the crucifixion itself. Much less has been explored and understood about the psychological aspects of that suffering – the emotional and relational aspects of that suffering. So, Jesus’ psychological distress and suffering has been very underappreciated.

Even less understood, even less appreciated are the apostles’ inner experiences of what happened in the Garden of Gethsemane. This is a huge omission, and our lack of understanding and appreciation keep us from knowing our Lord even more deeply, they keep us from a loving our Lord even more deeply.

I want to walk you through the events in the Garden of Gethsemane as recounted in the four gospels.

To set the stage, I invite you to think about how when we consider the passion, we generally come nowhere near to appreciating the full inner experience of our Lord Jesus Christ, what he suffered for us. We become quasi-Docetists.

Docetism is a second century heresy that taught that Jesus only appeared to have a body; he was in not truly incarnate. He just seemed to have a body.  He was like a ghost. By denying the incarnate reality of Jesus’ body, Docetists essentially deny Jesus’ human nature.  Jesus was true God and true Man.  Many Gnostics believed this heresy and St. Ignatius of Antioch, St. Irenaeus, and St. Hippolytus refuted it soundly and it was condemned that the Council of Chalcedon in 451 A.D.

In Hebrews chapter four, verse 15, we are told, “For we have not a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted, as we are, yet without sinning.”

The Vatican II document Gaudium et Spes, paragraph 22 describes Jesus this way:  By his Incarnation the Son of God has united himself in some fashion with every man. He worked with human hands, he thought with a human mind, acted by human choice, and loved with a human heart. Born of the Virgin Mary, he has truly been made one of us, like us in all things except sin (GS 22).

Pope St. John Paul II in his General Audience from February 3, 1988 elaborated on this passage: Today we shall pay particular attention to this last statement which brings us to the heart of Jesus' psychological life. He truly experienced human feelings of joy, sadness, anger, wonder and love.  And Pope John Paul II cited many examples in the Gospels to reflect all those human experiences, including others – amazement, admiration, disappointment, frustration.  Jesus got tired and needed sleep (sometimes during storms while boating), he got thirsty, he touched others and was touched by others.

In other words, Jesus really is true man. And when he went through the passion, when he went through the struggles and the Garden of Gethsemane, he did so in the fullness of that humanity; as an embodied man, with all the psychology of a man, with all the emotions of a man, with all the distress of a man, with all the inner experiences of a man.

As Vatican II tells us, he has truly been made one of us, like us in all things except sin.  So not only is Jesus a man, but he is the perfect man, the sinless man, the exemplar of what it means to be a man. For 30 years in his family home he worked on his human formation first as a boy, then as a man. Immediately after recounting the story of finding the 12-year-old Jesus in the temple, Luke tells us in chapter 2, verse 52 most likely on the authority of Mary, that Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature, and in favor with God and man.  In his humanity, as a boy and a man, Jesus increased in wisdom and statue.  In His humanity, Jesus grew up – not only physically, but also in acquiring knowledge and experience through the natural use of us human faculties, through His senses and His imagination, just like we do. Remember, He was like us in all things but sin.  And later in Hebrews 5:8 we read that, “Although He was a Son, He learned obedience through what he suffered.”  In His human nature, he learned obedience. He was like us in all things but sin.

At the outset, then, I want to give you a brief primer on human stress responses. If we're going to understand what our Lord and His apostles went through in the Garden of Gethsemane from a psychological perspective, we need to understand stress responses in human beings.

Stress responses

So let's talk about two stress responses. The first stress is sympathetic arousal. And the second one is the dorsal vagal response.

Let’s start with sympathetic arousal. What is that? When our sympathetic nervous system is activated, we are all about survival that's familiar to us as being in the fight or flight mode.

In the fight mode, the human body is mobilized for aggressive action. We have very high levels of energy in this state. We have an adrenaline rush. The Klaxons are going off. We're rushing to battle stations. There's not a lot of relationality. When you are in fight mode, you breathe faster, your heart rate rises, your heart pounds hard in your chest. Blood pressure rises. You sweat, it's hard to think, you can feel overwhelmed, There's a potential for rage. We disconnect from others; again there is no time or space or energy for connecting in relationships.  We are outside our window of tolerance.

In the flight mode, we are hypervigilant, on high alert., there is no sense of security, we act like a hunted animal.  Our pupils are letting in more light, looking and listening for danger. There is no sense of safety; rather there is sense of impending danger. There is a potential for panic, for disorganized fleeing. We make desperate efforts to escape from the perceived danger. We disconnect from others; again, there is no time or space or energy for connecting in relationships.  Because we are outside her window of tolerance, we cannot learn new things.

Fight or flight is not a sustainable state because your adrenaline is up, your cortisone is up, your body cannot take it for long periods of time. Your heart could not stand it. And in that space, when you are in that sympathetic arousal fight or flight, your capacity for complex, flexible reasoning is very much reduced.  Confusion predominates.

Can you imagine playing a good game of chess on your smartphone when you're in fight or flight mode? You know, like when you're running away from a tiger or facing three assailants in a dark alley?   Could you make good moves on the chessboard? No. So that is a brief summary of sympathetic arousal fight or flight mode.

But there's another stress response that people often don't recognize, and that's the dorsal vagal response or the freeze response. And all of this is from Polyvagal Theory by Stephen Porges. I really like the way that Deb Dana presents it. But just to give you a little background, if you want to learn more in the dorsal vagal response, this follows, this follows the sympathetic arousal. This is the freeze response. This is where we collapse into a kind of lifelessness. The dorsal vagal system takes over within us and shuts us down. This is the freeze response. Everything goes offline. Almost all of our brain goes offline and we shift into conservation mode. We do this like instinctually it's a response to what seems inescapable. We numb out, we disconnect, we dissociate, we space out. We feel disconnected from the present, like we're untethered or floating. There's fogginess, fuzziness, collapse. We can feel really alone. Lost, unreachable, invisible. We can lose our sense of identity. Safety and hope seem to be lost. We can lose consciousness altogether. There's this intense lethargy often feel really lethargic like you're heavily sedated, this feeling of being stuck or frozen. And there also can be this deep despondency, this great sorrow that overwhelms us.

It can be dark and silent and cold inside. Like I'm a rock, like I'm an island. This is all about protection, self-protection. And this is what happens sometimes when you see animals playing dead, like playing possum. There's just a loss of nearly all cognitive and relational abilities here. We can't listen to others very well. We can't share very well. We have very little agency. We can't focus. And the story, the narrative inside is one of despair, a message that the world is cold, empty, uninhabitable, messages that I'm unlovable, invisible, lost and alone.

And so those are the two stress responses in a nutshell, the sympathetic response, which is the fight or flight response, the dorsal vagal response, which is the freeze response. And so now with that little bit of background, I want to walk you through what I imagine happened inside of Jesus and His apostles in the Garden of Gethsemane.

Now cautions here. There's possibilities that you could have parts that get activated, that there could be some triggering going on here. And so I want you to be really mindful of what's happening inside you, with your parts, as we dive into the experience of our Lord and his humanity and the experiences of the apostles and their humanity.

So if you find that you need to take a break, if you find that you are  leaving your window of tolerance, that you're moving into that fight or flight mode going into hyperarousal, that's that sympathetic nervous system activation. Then let's take a break, shut it down, you know, reground yourself. Or if you find that you're dropping into hypo arousal, exiting your zone of tolerance to the downside, where you're getting into that freeze response, you're numbing out, beginning to dissociate things like that.  Then we also want to titrate that. We want to regulate that.  It's a good thing to shut down this podcast episode for a while. Let yourself regroup. Okay? We want to be honoring our humanity and our human capacity to take these things in, 

So I'm going to be using the Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition for Scripture passages in this episode. And I'm going to be focusing on Matthew Chapter 26 Mark Chapter 14, Luke chapter 22 and John chapter 18. Those are the accounts of the Garden of Gethsemane and what happened there in the Gospels.

Let’s just start with a little bit of background on Gethsemane from the Hebrew got shemanim, which means oil press, which suggests that the Garden of Gethsemane was a grove of olive trees in which there was an oil press.

And that's significant because in my opinion, this moment, in the Garden of Gethsemane, this is the scene of the greatest drama ever, Gethsemane. This was the key moment in all of human history, the moment when Jesus decided irrevocably to give Himself up to the most terrible, agonizing suffering in order to redeem us from our sins. All our human existence turned on this decision of our Lord in his humanity in the Garden of Gethsemane. It's that significant.  It’s that important.  And let's go back.

Let's go back for a minute to original sin. Remember original sin? Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil ruptured our relationship with God. That all happened in a garden. That all happened in the Garden of Eden. When we lost our relationship with God. We lost that harmony with God. We lost that harmony with each other. We lost the harmony within ourselves that all happen in a garden. The Garden of Eden, the Garden of Gethsemane, which I believe for all intents and purposes, was the start of the passion. That was the place when Jesus committed himself to carrying out all of what his father asked him to do in order to save us. That was the decision point when Jesus embraced it all and accepted it all at such a great cost, such a great psychological cost. And Curtis Mitch and Edward Sri, two biblical scholars and theologians, they said, quote, It is no exaggeration to say that this is the defining moment of Jesus earthly life”  It all came down to the decision Jesus made in the Garden of Gethsemane”

Let’s walk through the sequence of events in the garden from the very beginning in the synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke.  Jesus gives his disciples the command to pray. He says, Sit here while I go yonder and pray. Luke gets more specific right off the bat. Luke quotes Jesus saying, Pray that you may not enter into temptation. And then Jesus goes off and prays. He's modeling the prayer.

It's interesting,  Jesus does not ask the disciples to pray for Him. He commands them to pray for themselves and to pray specifically that they do not enter into temptation. That's going to be really significant in just a little bit because there's real implications as to whether they prayed or didn't pray.

Now, side note here, there is no mention of Satan's presence in the Garden of Gethsemane in any of the gospel accounts. Many people just assume Satan was there. And that may be in part because of the impact of Mel Gibson's 2000 film, The Passion of the Christ, with Rosalinda Celentano acting in the role of an unforgettably creepy and scary Satan. But Mel Gibson or no Mel Gibson, it's also a reasonable assumption to assume Satan was lurking in the garden, near at hand, especially with Jesus command to his to his apostles that they pray that they don't enter into temptation.  It makes a lot of sense that Satan was present.

So let's just speak a little bit about temptations, because this is an area that I deal with a lot as a clinical psychologist. Remember that Saint Thomas Aquinas teaches us that grace perfects nature. It doesn't destroy it. In my experience, when clients of mine or others that I've worked with in various ways, when they experience external temptations, ones that might have a demonic influence to them, those external temptations focus on the weakest links in the person's natural human formation. The weakest links in our natural human formation tend to be where Satan, where the demons focus. Satan and the demons look for weak spots within our human natures, within our human formation and try to exploit those weaknesses in our parts.

Definition of parts:   Separate, independently operating personalities within us, each with own unique prominent needs, roles in our lives, emotions, body sensations, guiding beliefs and assumptions, typical thoughts, intentions, desires, attitudes, impulses, interpersonal style, and world view.  Each part also has an image of God.  Parts who are not in right relationship with our innermost self have a very limited vision and understanding.

The parts of us that we reject within ourselves. Demons want to connect with those parts of us, the parts of us that we condemn that we deny. The demons want to accept those parts and relate with those parts of us that we reject in ourselves. Satan and the demons use our shame against us, for example.

And so what I'm saying here is let's not separate the natural realm and the spiritual realm when we're addressing this question of temptation. Temptation is not just a spiritual thing. Discalced Carmelite Abbott Marc Foley writes that "One…misconception is that the spiritual life is an encapsulated sphere, cloistered from the realities of daily living….we have only one life composed of various dimensions.  Our emotional life, intellectual life, social life, work life, sex life, spiritual life are simple ways of speaking of the different facets of our one life.  (p. 1, The Context of Holiness: Psychological and Spiritual Reflections on the Life of St. Therese of Lisieux ). We have one life.  Just one life.  We don't have a spiritual life that is separate from our emotional life.  We have one life.  If we are tempted, that affects our whole life, not just the spiritual side of us.

Now, I also make a distinction between impulses and temptations. Impulses are what some people call inner temptations. Impulses are things that arise in us. They are desires toward something that isn't good for us, but they come from within our humanity, from our parts, not from the devils. I think of temptations as coming from outside of us. Coming from demons.

The apostles Peter, James, and John

St. Matthew describes how Jesus took Peter, James, and John aside with Him in the garden.  From a psychological perspective, what were these men like?

Remember Peter?  Peter, who could be dominated by parts that were bold and impetuous, self-confident and courageous, but also inconsistent, hardheaded and prone to insist on his own ideas, even to the point of contradicting Jesus. Peter was outgoing, prone to intense emotions, and a man with the natural capability of inspiring other men to follow his leadership.

And James and John – Like Peter, they were fishermen from Galilee, accustomed to hard labor and hard circumstances.  remember not only were these two brothers and sons of Zebedee, they were the Boanerges, the Sons of Thunder, likely due to their intense, powerful, rough-hewn characters.  They never backed down from a fight.  They has firefighter parts who were quick to anger, willing to call fire from heaven on those who didn’t accept Jesus’ message.  They has ambitious and grandiose parts who coveted the honor of sitting at Jesus’ right and left hand in the kingdom of his glory.  In their self-assurance, their parts assumed they could drink the cup of suffering that Jesus would drink.

So in this moment, at the beginning, Jesus was asking his Apostles to prepare for what was about to happen, to ask for the virtues of Faith, of perseverance, of fortitude to seek to be strengthened by God the Father.  Jesus’ admonition to pray may have reminded the Apostles of when Jesus taught them to pray, giving them the Our Father. The Our Father.  Jesus said, When you pray, say our father who art in heaven, and then obviously the rest of the prayer, Jesus  wanted His apostles to enter into a relationship with God as their Father. This was really, really clear and really startling, the intimacy of the relationship that we are to have. So that's what He's commanded his apostles to do.  And in my opinion, it's pretty clear that they didn't do it.  They didn’t pray enough.  And we'll talk about that in just a little bit.

The sorrow and the distress

Taking with him Peter, James and John, Matthew tells us Jesus began to be sorrowful and troubled. And he said to them, My soul is very sorrowful, even to death. Remain here and watch with me. Mark, tells us that Jesus was greatly distressed and troubled and repeated, My soul is very sorrowful, even to death.

And if you go down into the Greek here, if you look at the Greek words to describe the intensity of this psychological experience, Mary Healy brings this up in her Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture from Mark. She says that these verbs, these Greek verbs are so forceful, they imply anguish, alarm. It's hard to put into words the intensity of the suffering that our Lord is experiencing here. He is distraught in his humanity. This is not some kind of Jewish hyperbole, exaggeration, you know, creative license and poetic language. And no, he is sorrowful, even unto death. The crushing weight of sorrow. Sorrow for every sin, every sin, large and small, from spitballs in seventh grade to genocides, sins committed by every man, every woman, and every child in the entire history of the world and the entire future history of the world. Every sin – And Jesus was sorrowful unto death. That implies a dorsal vagal shutdown. That's how I look at that.

You know, think about the intensity of carrying all the sins of every single man, woman, and child throughout all of human history in the entire future of the world. That includes that time when you pulled that girl's hair in third grade. You remember that,  That includes all those harsh words to your siblings and all the times you fought in the car on those long car trips. You remember that. And all of the things that you've done in your adulthood that divided you from other people and that impaired or harmed or even severed your relationship with God. All of that and all of the sins of every human being.

The crushing weight of Jesus’ sorrow for all those sins is beyond imagining. Watch with me. Jesus asked his disciples to watch with him. Let's take a look at what happened to Jesus’ posture in the Garden of Gethsemane. The usual way to pray for Jews was to stand. You prayed standing on your feet when you addressed God. But in Luke 22, it says that. Jesus knelt down. And the way that I interpret this was that Jesus sank to his knees. He sank to his knees. And then Mark goes further. He says, Jesus fell to the ground and Matthew goes even further, Jesus fell on his face. A prostrate position. Fell on his face, with Jesus’ face not even turned to the side. This is a very uncomfortable position. His face on the ground prostrate. And what that position means is that Jesus is so burdened, nearly completely overcome, lacking vitality, lacking the power to rise.

This is a position of distress, of exhaustion, of extreme physical weakness, of duress. The sins of the world, crushing him, bearing him down. The anticipation of his suffering, weighing on him because he was seeing what it would take in order to carry out his father's command. What it would take for the redemption of your soul, what it would take for the redemption of my soul. And the souls of everyone else. And he prayed. And what did he pray? According to Mark. Abba, Father. Abba. Daddy. All things are possible to thee. Remove this cup from me.  Remove this cup from me. The cup of suffering. Praying this on his face on the ground. The intensity of the suffering. And then Luke the physician, he adds a gruesome detail that's not included in the other gospels. He adds that there was sweat like great drops of blood. Falling down upon the ground. Great drops of blood falling down upon the ground. Well, this is a medical condition called Hemitohidrosis, or sometimes hemitadrosis, or hemidrosis or hemitadrosis.  I'm going to call it hematidrosis. That's a condition in which the capillary blood vessels that feed the sweat glands, that's when those little blood vessels rupture and it causes blood to exude through the sweat glands. It happens under conditions of extreme physical or emotional stress. There's lots of documented cases of this.

But you know, what's interesting is you begin to look at that medical literature. And I've spent a fair amount of time looking at the medical literature on Hematidrosis. Almost always there's like this like pink sheen on the face or on the hands. That's not what Luke is talking about. Luke is talking about great drops of blood falling down upon the ground. That's what the sweat looked like. And that happens when you are in sympathetic arousal. Because again, remember what happens there is your heart races,  Your blood pressure rises. The blood pressure became so great within our Lord that it burst his blood vessels in his skin. His precious blood flowed into his sweat glands and then his blood flowed out Him, falling in great drops, to the ground him.

Now this is my own speculative Malinoski theology here, but I think this bloody, rolling sweat is another wound for Jesus, the unrecognized wound.  The first wound of his passion, that didn’t get counted among our Lord's five wounds – you know, the five wounds, the nail wounds in his hands and feet and the spear wound in his side. I think this hematidrosis is the first of the wounds of the passion – the first wound that drew blood.  That first wound came from inside Jesus, from his inner experience, his inner distress.  The Jesus’ internal distress was just so great that it forced his precious blood from his sacred body. Think about that. The intensity of that psychological distress.

There is nothing in our suffering that we experience that our Lord doesn't know from his own personal experience. Anything that at least does not stem from sin because he's like us in all things but sin. An angel came from heaven strengthening him. And Saint Luke tells us, being in an agony, he prayed more earnestly. He prayed more earnestly. So in spite of the way that his body is reacting, he is still engaged with his Father.  He is still connected with his Father.  He hasn’t retreated or withdrawn into a protective mode.

I can't imagine being able to hold on to that and not dropping in to some numbed out, dissociated place. But our Lord stayed with it.  He had dedicated his life to his human formation, he had grown in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man, he had learned obedience through previous sufferings.

And Jesus took for himself the same advice that He had given to His apostles. He was prepared. The apostles were not prepared. He was prepared for this temptation. This moment where he is bleeding from his face, from his hands, when he is, when his heart is racing, when he is so crushed by the intensity of the suffering. This this more than anything else in the psychological realm, proves his humanity. This was a man. Jesus was a man. The Docetists were totally wrong.  Jesus was truly a man. He was truly human in his suffering.

And because he had the same attachment needs and the same integrity needs as any man or woman, God sent an angel to comfort him.  Luke tells us, And there appeared to him an angel from heaven, strengthening him.  That angel wasn’t strengthening Jesus in his divinity. Jesus’ divinity did not need strengthening. That angel was there to strengthen Jesus in his humanity. That angel was sent by God to help Jesus, when no one else was there to help them. And I think that it was to help with the attachment needs and the integrity needs that each of us have – the need to have a felt sense of safety and security, the need to be seen and known, the need to be reassured, and comforted, and other needs.

What was going on with his Apostles at this time. Let's go back. Remember, our Lord had commanded Peter, James, and John to watch and pray that they not enter into temptation. Indeed, the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak our Lord says in Luke. He goes back to them and he says, Why do you sleep? Rise and pray that you enter not into temptation. Matthew and Mark talk about how the apostles’ eyes were heavy with sleep.

And sometimes the apostles get criticized in the Garden of Gethsemane for being sleepy. For being fatigued.  With the implication of being lazy, of being slackers, of being out of touch with what’s going on, totally clueless about what’s happening inside Jesus.  There's a sort of implicit criticism in our Lord's words to Simon Peter. He says, Simon, are you asleep? Could you not watch could you not watch one hour watch and pray that you may not enter into temptation? Right.

But I don't think that this was just laziness. Our Lord never said it was laziness.  I think looking at this as just laziness or just fatigue is a total mischaracterization. And the idea that the apostles didn't know what was going on -- I think that's also a gross misunderstanding. I think parts of the disciples knew exactly what was going on and couldn't bear it. They couldn’t take it.  They weren't prepared. The disciples saw the blood flowing, dripping from our Lord's face in his hands. They saw him shuddering,  They saw him staggering under the weight of the burden of the sins of the world. They saw him sink to his knees and the fall face down on the ground. And Luke the physician tells us that the disciples were, quote, sleeping for sorrow, end quote.

Not sleeping out of laziness or fatigue, but sleeping for sorrow. Again, powerful Greek words here going back to that dorsal vagal shutdown. They couldn't handle it. The dropped into a freeze response.  They didn't follow our Lord's command to pray sufficiently. They weren't strengthened by God’s grace enough to stay present under these extremely dire circumstances.

These self-confident and brash apostles, Peter the Bold and the Sons of Thunder relied on their own human strength and they couldn't bear it. They shut down. They shut down. They collapsed into a dorsal vagal shutdown response under the pressure.

Remember disconnection, numbing out, conservation mode, fuzziness, collapse, loss of identity, loss of consciousness all together.  All that happens in a dorsal vagal shutdown response because the situation is so desperate, so extreme.  They don't know that there's anything they can do. They forget what our Lord told them. Their systems are going offline. Their brains are shutting down. And the storyline is one of despair.

They put so much trust and the power of Jesus. They had seen the miracles – healing the lame, giving sight to the blind, even raising the dead.  They saw Jesus command demons and the demons obeying.  Jesus calmed the storm on the sea of Galilee.  Jesus was the Son of God.  He was the I AM.  He had outwitted his enemies at every turn, he was so clever and powerful and confident.  He had just returned to Jerusalem in glory, in a triumphant procession, riding on a donkey.  So many Israelites thought Jesus was the Messiah, the Savior, the one who could free them from the yoke of Roman imperialism and restore them to their land, their heritage.  And now, in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus looks like a shaking, trembling, staggering bloody wreck, in great distress.  Peter, James and John don't understand what's going on. How can this be?  They're confused. It's not making sense. This is not what they were expecting. This is not what Peter imagined he would have as the rock, the foundation of Jesus’ Church, this is not what James and John bargained for when they sought to sit at his right and left hand in the kingdom.  What was happening?

Remember our Lord was focused on loving the disciples. He was trying to prepare them. He ordered them three times to pray and to resist temptation. He understands the weakness of their flesh. He's gentle with them in spite of the agony that he's going through. Three times, our Lord prayed that the cup of suffering may be taken from him. Three times He affirms that he accepts the cup of suffering from his father. And it's in that third affirmation. It's in that third affirmation that he says yes and he triumphs. “Father, if thou art willing, remove this cup from me; nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.”  That was the moment. That was the defining moment. That's when he won. The battle within his humanity.

Because in that, yes, to his Father, in the consent of his human will, every part of his humanness joining in the assent, his inner victory, Jesus accepted everything that was going to happen. The rest of the passion was just executing against what he already accepted. He won his battle within in the Garden of Gethsemane. And yes, that implied the cross. And yes, the cross was absolutely essential. But the battle was won in the Garden of Gethsemane.

Now he comes back to the apostles. Now he is ready.  Now his human body is in a ventral vagal state.  Now he has connectedness, relationality, flexibility, resilience, the ability to attune deeply to others in the present moment, he can engage all of his brain completely his faculties are all immediately available to him again, the time of acute crisis has passed. Jesus’ body has calmed down, his body is back in the window of tolerance.  He can bring others goodness, and peace, and joy and a depth of love the world has never seen from a man.

And now is the moment when Judas shows up with the authorities with those who would arrest him.

John 18:3 So Judas, procuring a band of soldiers and some officers from the chief priests and the Pharisees, went there with lanterns and torches and weapons.  The soldiers were Romans, and the officers were from the temple guard. Let’s take a look at this word “band” that the RSVCE uses as a translation.  When I think of a band, I think of maybe three, four, five guys, maybe a maximum of 10 guys.  But the Greek word used is spira, and spira directly translates to a military cohort, and the actual size of a Roman military cohort is 300 to 600 soldiers.  If you look at more literal translations of the Gospels, like the NASB and a few others, you find spira translated as “cohort,” In an article titled, How Many Soldiers Does It Take To Arrest One Man?, Rick Renner writes: Matthew 26:47 says it was "a great multitude" of soldiers, using the Greek words ochlos polus to indicate that it was a huge multitude of armed men. Mark 14:43 calls it "a great multitude," using the Greek word ochlos, indicating that it was a massive crowd. Luke 22:47 also uses the word ochlos to indicate the band of soldiers that came that night was enormous.

This was a major military operation.  We know the Roman soldiers and the officers of the chief priest and pharisees carried torches and lanterns and weapons.  This was a demonstration of shock and awe, designed to signal that resistance was futile in the face of such a large force, professional soldiers in full armor, armed and ready if Jesus was in fight mode.  The lanterns and torches would aid in the manhunt if Jesus tried to escape in flight mode.

Jesus comes back in full control, full command of the situation, in his body in a ventral vagal state.  How does he respond to the cohort, how does he react to the officers and the great show of force.  Judas kisses him, the sign of betrayal.  And how does Jesus greet Judas? Does he condemn Judas? No.  Jesus reaches out to Judas. He calls Judas by name. He says Judas. And he also refers to him as friend.

Jesus is fully self-possessed. His body is in a ventral vagal state. He is calm, connected, compassionate, with clarity and courage and confidence.  He can reach out in love to the one who betrayed and condemned him. To reach out to him and love and in hope still offering. That connection, still offering the friendship to Judas.  Jesus knew all that was about to befall him. He had gone through it all moments before in his agony in the garden and he had chosen it with the entirety of his being, with complete interior integration.

It's Jesus who is in charge of the situation, who commands the scene.  In John, he asks the authorities, Whom do you seek? And they answered him, Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus said to them, I am He. And when he said to them, “I am he,” they drew back and fell to the ground. That was a theophany. A visible manifestation of God to humankind. I AM. There Jesus was. Fullness of his humanity and fullness of his divinity.  All the soldiers and officers are leveled to the ground.

And Jesus is the one who's giving commands. He asks again, Who do you seek? And they said, Jesus of Nazareth. And Jesus answered, I told you I am He. So if you seek me, let these men go. Do you notice who is in charge here? Who is in command of the situation? It is our Lord.

Let these men go. The apostle John, eyewitness to all these events,  writes that  this was to fulfill the word which he had spoken of those whom thou gavest me. I lost not one. Jesus is calling the shots.

Jesus heals the high priest's servant. Malchus severed by Peter, who has recovered from his dorsal vagal shutdown freeze response and is back in a sympathetic hyperarousal fight mode, ready to take on the entire Roman cohort.   

Jesus is doing miracles in a place where there was a very little faith at that time. Very little faith but his own. And he's teaching Peter and the other disciples, showing them by lived example the need for the cup of suffering and the passion and the cross, admonishing them not to get in the way of his sacrificial gift of self by wielding swords. Jesus was ready. Jesus was prepared. Jesus had won the battle within. And then all the apostles, run off in fear, in flight mode.

But in those moments in dealing with Judas, with the love and the compassion and in the power of his presence. He's truly God. The Garden of Gethsemane. For me at an experiential level is the greatest proof of Jesus Hypostatic union that he was both true God and true man. Such humanity, Such fragility. Such neediness. In his prayer, on his face, on the ground. And such power. Such perfection. Such love as he encounters Judas and the authorities.

Now my.podcast Interior Integration for Catholics. It's all about overcoming the natural level impediments to a deep and abiding relationship with our Lord and our Lady. And I wanted to mention that you can connect with that podcast on any of the major podcast players Spotify, Apple, Podcasts, Google Play, all of them. You can also go to our website Soulsandhearts.com/icc for Interior Integration for Catholics to check out a  a few episodes that are relevant to what we talked about today.

A special note – I am including a bonus experiential exercise on Wednesday, April 5, Spy Wednesday – that will be episode 110, titled Being with Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane.  This is really all about helping you and your parts accompany Jesus in his suffering, and checking out within you the human formation blocks that keep you from connecting more deeply with our Lord in his suffering.  That would be a great one to listen to on Holy Thursday evening.

To learn more about stress responses, check out Episode 89, which is called Your Trauma, Your Body Protection Versus Connection. There's a lot more about Polyvagal theory and our stress responses in that episode. If you want to learn about Internal Family Systems, which is more about like the parts within us.

Episode 71 A New and Better Way of Understanding Myself and Others to understand Internal Family Systems and parts better.  There I talk about my own parts. Ten parts of me.

There's also episode 73, which is titled Is Internal Family Systems Really Catholic, where we look at how to harmonize internal family systems with a Catholic understanding of the human person.

Episode 37 of the Interior Integration for Catholics podcast launches a 13-episode series on shame.  Shame is such a critical driver of so much human decision-making and distress.

And as part of that episode, episode 37, we get into how Satan seeks to use our shame against us.

If you want to learn more about how I understand internal experience of Judas, and the role shame played in his life and decisions, check out Episode 46. Shame and Tragedy Judas Iscariot and You. That would be a great one to listen to on Wednesday of Holy Week, traditionally called Spy Wednesday,

And this is one of my favorite episodes. Episode 47 Shame and Redemption. Saint Peter and You, Saint Peter, my namesake. I have so much in common, so many characteristics in common with Saint Peter. And so in episode 47we really get into his internal experience of his relationship with our Lord.

And then Episode 48, titled Saint Dismas, Shame and Repentance -- all about Saint Dismas, who is the good thief. All of these are relevant in our days here of Holy Week as we come up into Easter.  All these episodes that I'm sharing with you focus on the central role of shame and how much shame drives the impulses within us that are harmful to our relationship with God, to our relationship with others, and to our relationship with ourselves.

But the Interior Integration for Catholics podcast is just a small part of Souls and Hearts. Souls and Hearts at soulsandhearts.com. That's our online outreach to bring the best of psychological and human formation resources to you. That's our little corner of the vineyard: Human Formation. And we have podcasts, courses, shows, blogs. I do a weekly email reflection. There's all kinds of resources, all about preparing the way for the Lord in our human formation. That's why Saint John the Baptist is our patron. He prepared the way for the Lord. So I'm going to invite you to check all of that out at Soulsandhearts.com, it’s all free at soulsandhearts.com.

And remember again, an invitation to get in touch with me about the themes and contents of these podcast episodes and my weekly reflections.  Please remember that I don’t do crisis interventions or provide clinical services during these conversation hours – I can’t do that, I’m not licensed as a psychologist outside of the state of Indiana, so I’m not going to get into your personal history and symptoms and your mental health issues.  For crisis situations, call the Catholic crisis hotline at the Upper Room at 1-888-808-8724 that line is staffed 24/7 or go to their website at catholichotline.org.

Also, every week I get a dozen or more requests if I can do therapy – I am totally booked, and I only take on new clients very rarely, and all of those clients live in Indiana where I am licensed.  If you need help finding a therapist, check out our free 90-minute video course titled A Catholics’ Guide to Choosing a Therapist. under the courses tab and Soulsandhearts.com.  It has all our tips and recommendations.

But if you want to discuss the content of these podcast episodes or the weekly reflections, feel free to call me on my cell any Tuesday and Thursday, 4:30 to 5:30 p.m. Eastern time. (317) 567-9594. I won’t be doing conversation hours during Holy Week, but I will start again on Easter Week.  My phone number -- email me at [email protected]. But do keep the emails short if you're going to email me. It's hard sometimes to get emails that are, you know, two, three, four pages long. Keep the emails short. You'll be much more likely to get a more rapid response.

I want to thank you for your attention for being with me today on this journey.

Please spread the word about our Souls and Hearts resources, including this episode of Interior Integration for Catholics – please let those who might benefit know about it – our best marketing is word-of-mouth. And finally, please pray for us at Souls and Hearts. Prayer is what fuels our entire enterprise. Know that we are praying for you as well.

And with that, we will invoke our patron and our patroness,

Our Lady. Our mother. Untier of knots. Pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist. Pray for us.

In this experiential exercise, we invite parts of us to share their stories of why they hold anger toward God. Dr. Peter offers an invitation to parts to see if we can listen to those stories in an open, nonjudgmental way, understanding that there are always reasons for anger at God, reasons that stem from misunderstanding and misinterpretations of experiences. Parts are angry more at their images of God -- their idols -- than at who God really is. Live audience participants share their experience in debriefing and Dr. Peter also answers questions. 

Summary: Dr. Peter walks you through the four tracks or pathways Catholics commonly follow with their anger at God, tracks proposed by Michele Novotni and Randy Petersen in their 2001 book Angry with God, and elaborates on them extensively. These four tracks are 1) Trust in God Track; 2) the Cover-Up Track; 3) the Wrestle with God Track; and 4) the Long-Distance / Disconnect Track. We discuss how to better resolve anger issues with God through a wide variety of means with a focus on practical solutions. Dr. Peter emphasizes the importance of God images, felt safety and protection, a sense of trust, the infused virtue of Faith, courage and fortitude, and the critical role of emotional co-regulation in working through anger at God. 

In this episode, informed by Internal Family Systems and grounded firmly in a Catholic worldview, Dr. Peter guides you to connect with your spiritual manager parts who protect you against your own anger at God, getting to know those parts' concerns about why anger at God is dangerous or unacceptable. This is an important step in the journey to working through your anger at God. We discuss how to work safely with your parts, with a spirit of cooperation and collaboration, not rushing. Come join us on an adventure inside. At the end, audience participants debrief, share their experiences with Dr. Peter and he answers questions. 

In this episode, we explore: 1) How anger at God is far more common and intense that you realize; 2) Why you need to work through your anger at God; 3) Your hidden reasons for your anger at God; 4) Why your anger at God is so frequently banished to your unconscious; 5) 16 defense mechanisms that drive your anger at God outside of your awareness; 6) How your anger at God is so often overpowered by your fear of God; and 7) The signs and symptoms of your unacknowledged anger at God. 

Works Cited in Episode 105: How You Hide From Your Anger at God

Books:

Pierre Wolff May I Hate God (Paulist Press 1979)

Randy Petersen Angry With God (Piñon Press 2001)

Bert Ghezzi The Angry Christian (Paraclete Press 2018)

Tommy Tighe St. Dymphna’s Playbook

James Russell Lowell The Biglow Papers

William and Kristi Gaultiere Mistaken Identity (Fleming H Revell Co 1989)

Psychologist Bio:

Michele Novotni

Articles:

Pastor John Starke No, It Is Not a Sin to Be Angry With God

Catholic-Daily-Reflections.com The Burden of Anger (June 10, 2021)

William R. Bloomfield Overcoming the Deadly Sin of Anger

Dr. Saul McLeod 10 Defense Mechanisms: What Are They and How They Help Us Cope

American Psychological Association Dictionary of Psychology

Conrad Baars Institute What Is Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder?

Podcast Episodes From Interior Integration for Catholics:

Episodes 23-29 God Images

Episode 86 Obsessions, Compulsions, OCD, and Internal Family Systems

Episode 87 When OCD Gets Religion

Episode 106 God in the Hands of Angry Sinners

Weekly Reflections:

September 14, 2022 Distorted God Images Catholics Hold

January 4, 2023 The Secret Psychological Reasons We Fail to Make Time for Prayer

January 11, 2023 Distraction and Prayer: Satan Symptoms, or Something Else?

January 18, 2023 Distractions in Prayer: When Our Parts Cry for Help

January 25, 2023 Distracted Prayers: Hidden Reasons for Avoiding God

In Episode 104, in an experiential exercise, a guided reflection, Dr. Peter guides you in helping your parts who struggle with anger and also parts who work to protect you against your anger. Come join us on an adventure inside, where we work to overcome the human formation obstacles to our interior integration. At the end, audience participants share their experiences with Dr. Peter and he answers questions. 

In this episode, Dr. Peter reviews the limitations of current Catholic resources on anger, and then reviews secular resources, including interpersonal neurobiology and the structural theory of dissociation. We examine the role of the body in anger responses, and discuss more wholistic ways of working constructive with parts that experience anger, rather than trying to dismiss anger, suppress it or distract from it.

Transcription

IIC 103 Anger and your Body

"I was angry with my friend; I told my wrath, my wrath did end. I was angry with my foe: I told it not, my wrath did grow", William Blake, from 'A Poison Tree'.

We've all experienced anger, we've all experienced angry people. We know that anger can be a serious problem. Global data suggests that it's getting worse. A Gallup world poll from 2021--people from 140 countries were polled, asked the question, "did you experience the following feelings a lot of the day yesterday? How about anger?" 17% of US respondents agreed. 26% of women worldwide said "yes, I have experienced anger a lot of the day yesterday". That was up from 20% ten years ago. It was 20% of men who agreed with that--and that's flat from ten years ago.

And the thing is that great harm can come from anger--not just for the people that are the focus of the anger, but also for those who are angry. Mark Twain said, "Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured." And from 'The Catechism of the Catholic Church', paragraph 2302, "By recalling the commandment, 'you shall not kill', our Lord asked for peace of heart and denounced murderous anger and hatred as immoral. Anger is a desire for revenge. 'To desire revenge in order to do evil to someone who should be punished is illicit', but it is praiseworthy to impose restitution 'to correct vices and maintain justice.' If anger reaches the point of a deliberate desire to kill or seriously wound a neighbor, it is gravely against charity; it is a mortal sin." The Lord says, "everyone who was angry with his brother shall be liable to judgment." Everyone who was angry with his brother shall be liable to judgment. And who hasn't been angry with his brother--including Jesus himself?

So we have to unpack this. There is so much misunderstanding about anger in the Catholic world. So much of the way that Catholics have approached anger has been limited, misinformed, and misguided. Furthermore, when I think about why the Catholic Church in the US, and Canada, and Europe, Australia, the entire Western world, the entire English speaking world, there are so many reasons why we are hemorrhaging members.

Brandon Vogt in his article 'New Stats on Why Young People leave the church--he was the one that wrote this book, 'How to Draw Your Child Back to the Church'. He presented some statistics: Diocese of Springfield Exit Surveys (2014), 68% of those who left the Catholic Church said their spiritual needs were not met. 67% also indicated that they lost interest in the Church over time. I think one critical factor is that cradle Catholics, especially young Catholics, do not believe that the Church can help them with their problems. Let me say that again. I think that one critical factor for why so many Catholics leave the church, especially young Catholics, is because they do not believe that the church can help them with their problems.

Only 7% of millennials raised Catholic still actively practice their faith today. And by that we mean going to weekly Mass, praying a few times each week, and assert that their faith is extremely or very important to them. Only 7% of millennials have kept the faith. And for every person that joins the Catholic Church, for every convert to the Catholic faith, we lose 6.5 Catholics. We get one coming in, we get 6.5 leaving.

I think if young people--and people in general, if they believed that the Church really had the answers to the deepest questions in their heart, if they knew that the Church had the answers, they wouldn't be leaving. But I believe that the Catholic Church doesn't seem relevant to them because she doesn't seem like she has the answers to the real issues they face. 10% of American adults are former Catholics. 10%--that's one in ten of us in the US, former Catholics. And nearly half of those who fall away from the church become 'nones'. What I mean by that is no religious affiliation. Another quarter become Evangelical Christians. 79% of former Catholics leave the church before the age of 23. 50% of millennials raised Catholic, no longer even identify as Catholic today, so only 7% are really active in their faith--weekly mass attendance, praying a few times a week, and only half of those millennials raised Catholic still identify as Catholics.

Why? I think it has to do with topics like our topic today, topics like anger. I think that we are failing to do a good job in meeting the needs that Catholics have today, and especially their human formation needs.

I am Dr. Peter Malinoski, a.k.a. Dr. Peter, clinical psychologist, trauma therapist, podcaster, blogger, cofounder and president of Souls and Hearts--but most of all, I am a beloved little Son of God, a passionate Catholic, and one who wants to help you to taste and see the goodness of the Lord, to taste and see the height and depth and breadth and warmth and the light of the love of God, especially the love of God, the Father, and Mary our mother, our spiritual parents, our primary parents. To really absorb--to really take in your identity as a little child of God your father and Mary your mother. I want you to enter much more deeply into an intimate, personal, loving relationship with the three persons of the Trinity and with our Lady. That is what this podcast, Interior Integration for Catholics is all about, that is what Souls and Hearts is all about--all about shoring up the natural foundation for the spiritual life of intimacy with God, all about overcoming the natural human formation deficits and obstacles to contemplative union with God, our Father. That's what I want for you. We are on an adventure of love together. And one thing, one major, big, huge thing that gets in the way of receiving the love of God and Mary is anger. Anger. And anger is also a huge obstacle to being able to love God, to love Mary in return, and to love our neighbor, also to love ourselves. This is episode 103 of Interior Integration for Catholics, released on January 2nd, 2023. Happy New Year. As I mentioned, Interior Integration for Catholics is part of Souls and Hearts--our online outreach. Check us out at soulsandhearts.com.

Anger. Alright, let's get into it. Anger. Anger--one of the seven deadly sins. One of the lethal vices that can kill your soul, anger. There is so much confusion about anger. There's an article at catholicdailyreflections.com called 'The Burden of Anger'. It was it was published on June 10th, 2021, and it says, "The first level of sin is simply to be 'angry' interiorly. The sin of anger is an interior attitude of disgust toward another. Jesus says that the consequence of having anger toward another is that you will be 'liable to judgment.'"

Alright, so here we've already started with the confusion--the first level of sin, according to these authors, they're anonymous, the first level of sin is simply to be angry, interiorly, right. So that can lead to a lot of confusion about whether the emotion of anger is sinful or not. They qualify it a bit here because they say that anger is an interior attitude of disgust. So that starts to bring in the will, but you wouldn't necessarily see that at first blush. That's one of the reasons why we really need to unpack what's going on here in anger--anger as a spontaneous emotion rising up outside of the direct purview of the will--that is not sinful. It's what we do with the anger that carries the moral weight.

Now, I want to say that a lot of what I'm discussing, especially when I get into my personal recommendations about how to deal with anger, I could be wrong. I want to start by simply, in humility saying I could be wrong. And if I'm saying something that seems like it contradicts what we know to be true by divine revelation--if it seems to contradict dogma or doctrine, I want you to reach out and tell me. I want you to email me at [email protected]. You can call me or text me on my cell, 317-567-9594. I really want to be open to correction, really want to make sure that as we deal with what's actually not really been done before, a real integration of the best of secular psychology, trauma, energy, neuroscience, all of the fields that are now contributing to a deeper understanding of how the human person, how the human body reacts to trauma, and what kinds of physiology goes on behind the emotion of anger. As we bring all that together, there could be some things that are off. So I just want you to know that I'm really open to hearing about this.

I'm going to start by reviewing the offerings from five Catholic writers on anger. The most popular book I could find was a book called 'Overcoming Sinful Anger' by Father T.G. Morrow. It has 303 Amazon reviews, mostly positive. It reached #16 on the list of best sellers, in Catholic Theology, was put out by Sophia Press in 2015. And I don't think it's very good. I hate to say that, alright, but I think we also have to be frank and honest in evaluating these things. And I'll tell you why--it's not just going to be some sort of blatant condemnation. And there are good things in the book as well--we'll try to highlight those. But I can't recommend it.

First off, Father Morrow admits that he doesn't understand why people get angry. He says on page nine, "We've all encountered people who explode when they feel angry. It baffles me how often the sort of anger rears its ugly head in marriages--even in allegedly Christian marriages." The tone of some of what Father Morrow writes is pretty condemnatory, I think, and not helpful to people who are really struggling with anger. You know, 'allegedly Christian marriages', that lands hard with me. He also says, "I am often surprised to discover Christians who pray ardently, who received the sacraments regularly, who attend mass daily, and yet have an anger problem." Well, that doesn't surprise me at all. I don't find that surprising one bit.

First of all, one concern I have is that Father Morrow presumes that there's a homogeneous, single, unified, integrated personality. If that were true, you wouldn't have these disconnects, but because of the effects of trauma, because of the effects of how that disintegrates us inside, how that disconnects us inside, we can be operating in very different modes in different moments, even changing rapidly from moment to moment because of that lack of unity inside--because that lack of integration. It's easy to explain why somebody who goes to Church every day to daily Mass, prays at a holy hour every day, prays the litany of humility every day, why that person could lose their composure, could explode in anger even ten minutes after getting home. Because if we understand what's going on in terms of parts, if we understand in terms of what's going on inside, as they're being these these separate entities inside that have different characteristics and that have access to the different faculties, will, and memory and so forth, and that operate within us, it's not that hard to understand.

Father Morrow, when he looks at what causes anger, I think he's pretty simplistic. He says, "Why do people explode in anger? There are many reasons, but I think the top three are power and control, a refusal to take responsibility, and habit". That's on page 13.

I think he's got a very simplistic view of psychology and no consideration of neurology and trauma allergy. So a lot of confusion about the causal chain in anger--where anger fits in a sequence of events. I also sense that in so many Catholic writers, including Father Morrow, there's a lack of genuine interest in what's actually causing the anger. It's just assumed that it's vice. It's just assumed that it's wrong. It's just assumed that it's irrational, and their anger is essentially just something to be gotten rid of. Not much consideration for the unconscious and for unconscious anger.

Father Morrow does acknowledge that suppressing anger is problematic, but there's still an assumption that if I'm not feeling anger, it's not there. There's a disconnect. He's also very focused on the will, and will training. There's some real naïve assumptions about how the will can overcome just about anything. "Just keep trying! Keep at it!". And there is something to that, there is something to perseverance--no doubt about that. But there are naïve assumptions about what people can do when they are overcome and they are outside their window of tolerance in a state of sympathetic nervous system arousal.

St. Paul gives us an example. He says in Romans 7:15, "I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing that I hate."

The other thing that I believe that that Father Morrow does, and that other writers do is called spiritual bypassing.

John Welwood, who was an American clinical psychologist, psychotherapist, teacher, and author, he was known for integrating psychological and spiritual concepts. He coined the term 'spiritual bypassing', and it means using "spiritual ideas, words and practices to sidestep or avoid personal, emotional, 'unfinished business', to shore up a shaky sense of self, or to belittle basic needs, feelings, psychological wounds and developmental tasks."

Blogger Rose Hahn, she stated in her blog post, 'Spiritual Bypassing: What It Is & How To Avoid It', she said, "Bypassing occurs when spiritual ideals get elevated to the realm of absolute truth in such a way that our real, lived experience is somehow denied. Rather than doing the work of healing deep wounds, we may use these ideals to deny, devalue, or avoid meeting our more human needs--such as emotional bonding, love, and esteem. In other words, rather than risk opening ourselves to real human connection, and possibly get hurt, we adopt a more enlightened, spiritual way of relating to the world that doesn't rely on human relationships."

Using spiritual words, spiritual means, spiritual concepts to alter, whitewash or to put a bandaid on significant psychological or emotional problems in the natural realm. We are talking about human formation problems here. Bypassing the natural realm, going directly to the spiritual realm--essentially saying 'you shouldn't feel this way'. And Father Morrow implies that several times in his book that you should not feel this way--labeling emotions as irrational.

As a clinical psychologist, when I work with somebody and unpack what's going on there, the emotions always make sense. If you get to the level of where that emotion is being generated from, it makes sense. Now, it might not always correspond to an accurate perception of reality. I suppose, in that sense, you could call it "irrational". But parts that are struggling with these emotions are often very young--they don't have a mature understanding because when they got locked in to carrying the the burden of anger or the burden of shame or the burden of grief or whatever, they were very, very young. Often the person had not reached the age of reason. And there's this way that trauma freezes us in the past if it's unresolved.

Father Morrow promises, "I will offer some ideas which I consider quite novel, on how to avoid angry explosions." He's focused very much on angry explosions--he repeats that over and over again. I'm much more interested in not just starting at that level and avoiding some sort of behavioral manifestation of it that's extreme. I want to go way upstream, I want to deal with this at the source, not right at the end.

So he's got a bunch of tips and some of them are really quite good, some of them are thoughtful, this book isn't all bad, and if a book like this is helpful to you, by all means, use it. I'm not trying to take something away from anybody if it's helpful to them. So if you've read the book, you found it really helpful, great. But some of the things that he also recommends I just don't think are going to cut it.

For example, 'if you struggle with an anger problem, write on an index card all the negatives of continuing your anger and read that list several times a day'. Most of the time when people are exploding with anger, they're disconnected from their from their frontal cortex. They do not have the capacity to be able to engage their rational processes very readily.

What we need to do instead of using very head-based cognitive approaches, is increase a sense of safety and a sense of protection. And deal with what's causing the anger because there's something underneath that anger--anger so often, and I'll talk about this more in a little bit, anger is so often a defense against overwhelming grief, it's a defense against fear, and most of all, it's a defense against shame.

If you want to address the anger problem, you need to get to the shame--that is so common. And it's interesting because in none of these Catholic authors that I'm going to discuss--Father Morrow never brings up shame. It's not one of the three things that he believes really fuels anger, but I think that's the #1 thing--that's the father or the grandfather of anger. It could be the father of anger in the sense that the anger can defend against the direct experience of shame, or it could be the grandfather of anger because the shame might lead to this deep sense of grief. And it may be the grief that the anger is defending against. So we want to understand what the causal connections are, and there seems to be this very--I don't know how to describe it--this great disinterest, this great lack of interest in understanding what's really going on, phenomenologically, what's really happening within a person. It's just like, 'stop the anger'--working very much at the surface.

So, Father Morrow, "take time to calm down and figure out why you're angry". One of the tactics recommended is to count to ten before deciding what to do, he recommends saying a short prayer, he recommends using humor--which is a good recommendation. He's got this offering your angry feeling as a sacrifice is not suppressing it, but it is doing something with it. Yeah, it could be spiritually bypassing with it that offer it up stuff when it comes to anger is often spiritual bypassing. Not always, but usually what's going on is that some part that's got a legitimate concern that's got something that it really needs to be resolved, that needs attention, that needs love within us, is just getting steamrolled by Catholic moral parts that want it to shut up and stop causing problems inside. There's this sort of power spirituality that just sort of grinds these parts up and try to get them to be silent--imprison them within, and their needs never get addressed. And then there's not a sense of peace. There's not a sense of well-being. There might be a white-knuckling it, and being able to contain the anger or the grief or whatever the intensity is, the anxiety, for a while. But there isn't a sense of really being grounded with it.

So Father Morrow brings in some of the things--"thanking God, praising God"--in chapter seven, talks about "considering your future". He says "one key way to change your behaviors is to work out in your mind what your life will be if you don't change your angry behavior". Well, this can just increase anxiety, because if a person was able to figure it out with that kind of advice, he would have done it already. Most people who have a lot of anger understand, at least at some level--they might not have a full appreciation of it, but they understand at some level that it's harmful.

So I don't think there's a lot new here. Let's go to Father Joseph Esper. He wrote this book, 'Saintly Solutions to Life's Common Problems'. It's got 99 reviews on Amazon, it's a number 138 in Roman Catholic books. The first chapter in it is on anger. And he quotes St. Thomas of Villanova says, "Dismiss all anger and look into yourself a little." Again, this is just this lack of curiosity. "Just dismiss the anger. Just banish the anger." You sometimes hear this still in some sectors of the Church, right. "Cast out the spirit of anger!" Again, very little depth here, very little appreciation or understanding of what the underlying causes of anger are. The quotes from the saints don't seem to be particularly helpful to me. He does have some advice, like 'rehearse possible responses and evaluate which ones might help you'. So there's some a few good things in here at a really behavioral level, though.

And if there's going to be deep change, it's not going to be because these different practices were just put into place without there being some sort of structural shift inside. I'd like to be much more deliberate about that.

Tommy Tighe wrote a book called 'St. Dymphna's Playbook: A Catholic Guide to Finding Mental and Emotional Well-Being'. It was in 2021, it hit number 57 in Christian Pastoral Counseling, it's got 66 reviews on Amazon, mostly positive. And he doesn't ever discuss anger in the book at all. Book on finding mental and emotional well-being doesn't really discuss anger.

He discusses irritability, but he sees irritability as a symptom of depression. He discusses resentment, but he discusses that as a problem in relationships. And again, no discussion of shame at all, which is, again, I think, so critical--I spent episodes 37-49, 13 episodes addressing shame. I think it's 11 or 12 hours that I spend on the importance of the centrality of shame as generating so many of the things that we call 'psychological disorders', what we call psychological disorders--so often that is just the symptom clusters of underlying deeper problems, especially about shame.

So he sees depression as the primary problem and the depression fueling irritability. But I mean, a lot of times it goes the other way around. You know, for example, anger turned inward can lead to depression. So there's a lot of other ways that depression and anger can be related--that grief and anger can be related other than what Tommy Tighe offers us. And he's got some, you know, he's got some good recommendations. He talks about going for a walk, taking time to meditate, watching or reading something that lightens the mood. There's a lot of distraction recommendations that are in these Catholic, that are in these Catholic sources, you know, 'get your mind on something else'. Well, again, that may help in the short term to not lose your emotional containment and lash out at people, but that's not going to get to the deep underlying causes of whatever that anger is for you.

He does have some exercises that are kind of neat about drawing out your emotions on paper, examining what was really behind your emotional response, things like that, but he assumes that depression causes anxiety. He says, "then, after a really brief introspective process, we can catch that the real reason for our irritability is our depressed mood, and we can interject coping skills for depression to stave off irritability." Okay, so I got problems with this, right.

First of all, I don't agree that--as I said before, I don't agree that the causal chain has to be depression first and irritation second. It can go a lot of different ways. And in fact, I see depression and anger as both being caused by shame. So we're missing the main point here, I think. And then there's again, this idea that we just want to stave off the irritability. Can't we get curious about that? Can't we have an understanding of why that's there? Like what might be the injustice or the perceived injustice that generates the anger? Can we be willing to go into ourselves? Can we care about ourselves? Can we love ourselves enough to listen to ourselves about that? You don't see that in these Catholic authors.

They do ask the question, you know, "Okay, what's really going on?" But the way they guide you doesn't seem to me to get to the deepest levels. He's got some steps in a process--he talks about visualizing yourself from the perspective of a compassionate observer, which I think is a really good suggestion--I like that one a lot. And it goes a little bit beyond some of the other authors that we're talking about. He talks about noticing from the outside which feelings are upsetting you and how they're reflected in you. He does try to get at a kind of self-relating when he talks about trying to let the warm feeling of compassion and desire to help arise within you, for you to help yourself. And he does say that you can say to yourself, 'It's understandable that you feel this way. You're experiencing a natural reaction to depressing thoughts'. I wouldn't...I don't like that because, again, he presumes that depression is what's causing the irritability.

Now, that was his experience; he talks about his experience, but his experience isn't the same as everybody else's. And he talks about active listening. And he says, "to fend off resentment, we have to communicate what things are important to us and why". And again, you can spend your life fending off resentment if you're dealing with it only late in the causal chain, but if you go way upstream, there is so much anger that can be resolved, so much rage that can be resolved so that it doesn't trouble you all the time like that. So there we have Tommy Tighe's 'St. Dymphna's Playbook: A Catholic Guide to Finding Mental and Emotional wellbeing.

Rhonda Chevrin, she is the author of over 60 books concerning Catholic thought, practice and spirituality--she's Catholic, author, international speaker, professor of philosophy, EWTN, she's a media personality, gets on the air quite a bit. She wrote a book called 'Taming the Lion Within: 5 Steps from Anger to Peace'. And again, it's the same kind of thing as these other books. She does make some recommendations: to move your muscles to exercise, humor is your best friend, avoid exceptionality--she means by that not having to be exceptional; accept that you can be average in some things, put your own mental health first, recognizing that other people are not doing it to you--they may just be doing it. For example, if somebody cuts you off on the freeway, not to take it personally, things like that. Emphasis on forgiveness, really standard Catholic stuff. It's just another repetition of all these other things. There's nothing in there about shame, nothing about the causal chain, nothing about neurology, nothing about trauma allergy. It's actually not that well-informed.

Father Spitzer, the Jesuit, who I have a lot of respect for, brilliant mind--he didn't write a book on this, but he did a brief interview called 'Angry with God? Here's Father Spitzer's Advice on How to Overcome Anger'. And he says that God understands your anger, but don't dwell on it. He says, 'Don't go there. Don't go to your anger at God. Don't dwell on your anger at God'. He has this three step process that he recommends in this YouTube clip, 'Angry with God', he says, "Stop comparing yourself to the way you once were, stop comparing yourself to others, and stop having expectations for your suffering'. And he says, "offer it up and kind of stop the questioning".

I'm like, "No! No!". As much as I appreciate so much of the brilliance of Father Spitzer in some of his other things, again, he's drawing heavily on his own experience of blindness and progressive blindness. But I think a lot of that is really problematic advice, especially for people who have experienced trauma. It's very invalidating. It's not at all interested in the suffering that one is experiencing. And I agree, we don't want to wallow in self-pity, but that's not what I'm going to be recommending.

And then a variety of different writers will give examples from the Saints. Meg Hunter-Kilmer. She published in Aleteia on September 28, 2017, 'What We Probably Don't Know About St. Jerome is Just What We Need to Know'. And she said, for example, St. Jerome was known to carry about a stone that he would hit himself with, every time he lost his temper.

And I'm just like, 'when writers put this sort of stuff in, are they thinking that we should do this? Are they thinking that that's like a good idea?' It's just because a lot of times what gets quoted about the saints with anger, with other things, are these really idiosyncratic things that I'm not sure are that advisable.

So I want to say that again, if these kinds of Catholic resources are helpful to you, I don't want to put up roadblocks. They might be helpful to many people--lots of positive amazon reviews for many of these books, for example. But I think there's a very simplistic view of psychology, no consideration of neurology, trauma, allergy, all these other fields that I want to bring in. There's confusion about the causal chain of anger, where anger fits in a causal chain in a sequence of events--its a relationship to shame, especially. There seems to be little genuine interest in the anger, in the experience of anger, in the phenomenology of anger. Anger is seen instead as something essentially to be gotten rid of because it's dangerous, because it's bad. Even though they might say that there is such a thing as a just anger--because there is. St. Thomas Aquinas addresses this. And what they really don't understand, not one of them is that anger has a protective function, that it protects us. It protects us against shame, it protects us against grief. Not one of those sources connects anger to shame. And that's the primary connection we need to understand if we want to resolve anger and not just try to shoo it away, just try to dispense with it. Just try to get it to try to deflect it or whatever.

Alright, well, let's get into some definitions of anger. Let's get into some definitions on anger. Now, it's interesting because if you go all the way back to the earliest discussions in the western world about anger, you're going to go back to Aristotle in his book 'Rhetoric', where he defined anger as, "a belief that we or our friends have been unfairly slighted, which causes in us both painful feelings and a desire or impulse for revenge." And the theme of a revenge in anger was picked up in the 1907 Catholic Encyclopedia, which defined anger as "the desire of vengeance". The desire of vengeance. And then it gets into the moral quality of that vengeance. It says its ethical rating depends on the quality of the vengeance and the quantity of the passion. When these are in conformity with the prescriptions of balanced reason, anger is not a sin. It is rather a praiseworthy thing and justifiable with a proper zeal.

Anger becomes sinful when it is sought to wreak vengeance upon one who has not deserved it, or to a greater extent than it has been deserved, or in conflict with the dispositions of the law or from an improper motive. So again, they're looking--both Aristotle and the Catholic Encyclopedia from 1907, are looking at anger as more than an emotion. They're looking at it as an impulse, as a desire, as as more than just a spontaneous emotion. The 'Catechism of the Catholic Church', paragraph 2302 says, "By recalling the commandment, 'You shall not kill', the Lord asked for peace of heart and denounced murderous anger and hatred as immoral. Anger is a desire for revenge." Alright, so that's really critical. That when the Church looks at anger as a capital sin--as one of the seven deadly sins, it's not just the spontaneous emotion of anger. It's this nurturing of anger. It's this harboring of anger. It's this feeding of our anger in terms of what's happening inside of us, in terms of our thoughts, our fantasies, things like that--what we're going with, how we're letting that passion of anger drive our will. The will has to be involved for there to be objective moral guilt.

However, there does not need to be this correlation between the emotion of anger and a desire for vengeance. Aggression or vengeance and anger--they don't have to go together. There's been a lot of research in psychology to tease out anger and aggression and those differences. And this is acknowledged even in Scripture, right? St. Paul, Ephesians 4:26 he says, "Be angry, but do not sin. Do not let the sun go down on your anger." Be angry, but do not sin. So there doesn't have to be sin going along with the experience of anger, with the emotion of anger.

The APA, the American Psychological Dictionary of Psychology, says that anger is, "an emotion characterized by tension and hostility arising from frustration, real or imagined injury by another or perceived injustice. It can manifest itself in behaviors designed to remove the object of the anger, for example, determined action or behaviors designed merely to express the emotion (e.g. swearing). Anger is distinct from, but a significant activator of aggression, which is behavior intended to harm someone or something. Despite their mutually influential relationship, anger is neither necessary nor sufficient for aggression to occur."

I want to spend a little bit more just on some of the benefits of anger. In a chapter called 'The Neurobiology of RAGE and Anger & Psychiatric Implications with a Focus on Depression', by Daniel Guerral, Valentina Colonnello and Jack Panksepp, they write, "As a basic emotion, anger emerges early in life and has a unique adaptive function in motivating, organizing, and regulating behavior. No other emotion can match the consistency and vigor of anger in mobilizing high-level energy and sustaining goal-directed activity. Anger serves a variety of regulatory functions in physiological and psychological processes related to self-defense, as well as to interpersonal and societal behaviors. Through socialization processes, it plays an important role in the development of personality and individual differences in responding to environmental challenges, which can be more or less adaptive." So let's go back and break this down a little bit. 'Anger emerges early in life and has a unique adaptive function in motivating, organizing and regulating behavior.' Anger fuels right action if it's ordered within a person. When our Lord cleansed the temple from the money changers, his anger fueled that action. It didn't control him, but it provided him that high level energy that Guerral, Colonnello and Panksepp were talking about. And that's why we don't want to just shoo our anger away. That's why we don't want to just stave it off (as Tommy Tigue was talking about), or get rid of it. We want that to be integrated into us. That's why we call this podcast 'Interior Integration for Catholics'. We do not want to lose our anger. We do not want to somehow excise that from who we are. We need our anger to be fully human, but we need it to be ordered.

The difficulty I have with the five Catholic sources I cited is that there's not a lot of interest in integrating that anger, and understanding how it could be ordered within us. Aristotle in his Nichomachean Ethics said, "It is easy to fly into a passion--anybody can do that--but to be angry with the right person in the right context and at the right time and with the right object in the right way--that is not easy and it is not everyone who can do it." Aristotle recognized that it's easy for anger to become disordered. It's much harder for anger to be ordered.

The 'Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 1767 says "In themselves passions are neither good nor evil", and anger is a passion. Passions are morally qualified only to the extent that they effectively engage, reason and will. It belongs to the perfection of the moral or human good that the passions be governed by reason. And that's what I want for you. That's really what I want for you, which is why I want to engage with the anger in a way that's really constructive, and I want to get to the roots of what it is so that it doesn't constantly gnaw at you. Because all of this suppression and distraction and denial and staving off and all of these things do not resolve that anger--and that anger can be resolved. It's going to have to be resolved, either here on Earth or in purgatory, because if anger is disordered, it's not going to be able to go into heaven with you.

'The Catholic-Christian Meta-Model of the Person' which was put out by Divine Mercy University faculty Paul Vitz, William Nordlinger and Paul Craig Titus, page 294, says, "To remain in the virtuous middle ground requires being disposed to a righteous anger that will stand up to injustice, and to use a good measure of anger in ways that are corrective of the evil, preventive of further injustice, and indicative of a balance to mean between extremes." Alright so, again, these professionals, (two of them are therapists, one is a philosopher) they're recognizing how important it is for anger to be ordered and not just to be eliminated, right? We want that anger to be in the right middle ground. They write, "Emotions are viewed as informing people about their cares and concerns. To prepare the body for action, directing our thoughts to ways that will appropriately address the issues at hand. Emotions can signal and manipulate other people in ways that suit that person's emotional needs. Being disconnected from emotional experience, therefore, means being cut off from adaptive information." Some people really want an angerectomy, an angerectomy, just excising the anger--"Just take my anger away! Just take my anger away, Lord!" Asking to live without anger, but they would again not have the fullness of the human experience.

Alright so I am going to get into some real secular sources here because I think there's so much more helpful than what we've already covered. And the question may arise--"Dr. Peter, as you already noted, anger's been recognized for a long time, it goes all the way back to Aristotle, way before that in sacred scripture, you emphasized that your Catholic psychologist. So why are you even looking at these secular sources like the American Psychological Association?" There's a lot about anger in the scripture and the early church fathers, a lot in the saints about anger and the spiritual life. Well, I'll start by quoting Discalced Carmelite Abbot Marc Foley in his excellent book, 'The Context of Holiness: Psychological and Spiritual Reflections on the Life of St. Therese of Lisieux', he said, "One...misconception is that the spiritual life is an encapsulated sphere, cloistered from the realities of daily living...we have only one life composed of various dimensions. Our emotional life, intellectual life, social life, work life, sex life, spiritual life are simple ways of speaking of the different facets of our one life." We have one life. That's what Discalced Carmelite Abbot Marc Foley is telling us. We have one life. We don't have a spiritual life that is separate from our emotional life. We have one life. If we're angry, that affects our whole life--all the aspects of our life.

And the Church herself encourages us to look at all branches of knowledge and glean what is best from them in order to live our one life better. From the 'Catechism of the Catholic Church', paragraph 159, "Though faith is above reason, there can never be any real discrepancy between faith and reason. Since the same God who reveals mysteries and infuses faith has bestowed the light of reason on the human mind, God cannot deny himself, nor can any truth contradict truth. Consequently, methodical research in all branches of knowledge provided is carried out in a truly scientific manner and does not override moral laws, can never conflict with the faith, because the things of the world and the things of faith derive from the same God. The humble and persevering investigator of the secrets of nature is being led, as it were, by the hand of God, in spite of himself, for it is God, the conserver of all things, who made them what they are." And from the Vatican II document the 'Pastoral Constitution of the Church in the Modern World', paragraph 62, it reads, "In pastoral care, sufficient use must be made not only of theological principles, but also of the findings of the secular sciences, especially of psychology and sociology, so that the faithful may be brought to a more adequate and mature life of faith."

We're supposed to be taking advantage of what's going on in psychology. And here's another point: I want you to remember that we are embodied beings. We are composites of a soul and a body. We have a body. And so often writers about the internal life, Catholic writers about the internal life, the psychological life, seem to neglect the importance of the body. There's this sort of idea that Descartes' mind-body dualism really is for real. The idea that the mind and the body operate in these separate spheres disconnected from one another. No, we have one life.

And in the last several years, we're realizing how much of our mental experience, our psychological well-being is linked in various ways to our neurobiology--the way that our nervous system functions. And the relationship between our embodied brain and our minds and our emotional states--that's so important. Our emotional states, our behaviors, they affect brain chemistry. It's not just our mind, it's not just our body, it's not just our soul--it's all of those.

And since scripture, the early Church fathers, the Catechism and so on, they're silent about neurobiology, neurochemistry, neurophysiology, so many areas that impact our minds and our well-being, that as a Catholic psychologist, I'm going to look wherever I can find what I need to help people. I don't expect that bishops and priests are going to be experts on this. I don't expect that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is going to be able to lay out all these things. No, that's my job. And also, I'm going to argue that if you're struggling with these things, it's your job. It's your job, too. That's part of why I'm here for you, is to bring you these things.

St. John of the Cross in his prologue to his book, 'Ascent of Mt. Carmel', said, "I will not rely on experience or science, but I will not neglect whatever possible use I can make of them." So he's recognizing that experience might not be a faithful guide, we can misinterpret our experience, that science can't answer the deepest questions that are the proper realm of theology and philosophy, but he's still going to make use of them.

Father Abbot Marc Foley said in his book 'The Context of Holiness', "As St. Thomas wrote of St. Augustine's use of Platonic philosophy in the Summa 'Whenever Augustine, who was imbued with the doctrines of the Platonists, found in their teaching anything consistent with the faith, he adopted it. And those things which he found contrary to the faith he amended.'" And St. Thomas himself drew so much on Aristotle's thought. He brought Aristotle so much into his writings, brought it into his body of work.

I want to be doing the same thing for you. Drawing from the best of what's out there in the secular world, harmonizing with what we know to be true by divine revelation. Absolutely faithful to what the Catholic Church has taught through the centuries. But bringing in these new ideas, these new concepts, these new findings to support you as you seek their deep and intimate personal relationship with God our Father, with Mary, our Mother. That's what floats my boat.

So let's start talking about biological processes and anger. This is from an article by Heidi Crockett titled 'Anger Management with Interpersonal Neurobiology'. I talked a lot about interpersonal neurobiology in episode 92 of this podcast, which was titled 'Understanding and Healing Your Mind through IPNB'. "In interpersonal neurobiology, anger as an emotion is viewed from the perspective of cognitive neuroscience. And cognitive neuroscience states that cognition and emotion are dynamically combined with physical arousal. When anger is induced as an emotion in humans, it can unconsciously affect physiological and neural resources. Affective states of anger are subsequently expressed in the brain as well as the body, and these neural and physiological changes can influence the cognitive processes. Many studies and resources have been expended on studying the emotions of happiness, sadness and fear which align with psychopathological states of hypomania, depression and anxiety." So we got to remember that this is so much about our body and so much about the electrical activity in our brain and in our nervous system.

Kathy Steele, Suzette Boone, and Onno van der Hart, in their book 'Treating Trauma-Related Dissociation: A Practical, Integrative Approach' said, "Anger is an affect derived from the activation of the sympathetic nervous system, geared to energize the body for maximum effort to fend off perceived danger. Psychologically, anger protects from awareness of vulnerability and lack of control, and therefore from shame." See, they get it. Steele, Boone, and van der Hart, they get how much anger is about shame. They continue, "And fight mode, we are all primed to perceive cues of danger rather than cues of safety and relational connection. In such a heightened state of arousal, it is easy to misunderstand the intentions of others." So they are bringing in the body. Steele, Boone, van der Hart. Anger is an affect; it's an emotion derived from the activation of the sympathetic nervous system. So they are looking at anger as an emotion that is caused by the sympathetic nervous system activation. It starts first in the body for them. It doesn't exist in some sort of rarefied air in our mind-- it starts in the body.

And what is the function of the anger? Why is it perceived at some level within us as a good, as something helpful? It's designed to protect us. And that's what we really need to understand about anger. If you can peel back the anger of a 6'4", 250 pound guy that's raging, you are going to find fear or grief or shame. Those are the primary things that his anger is defending him against. And I think it's so problematic if we don't understand that, because then we can just collapse it into vice. We can just say, "Oh, see, he's being evil!" We can label him, we can condemn him, we can judge his soul. Now, this is not to say that when that 6'4", 250 pound guy is raging, that there's no harm. Absolutely not. We do not want to deny the impact of other's anger, especially on children. Especially on children. It can be absolutely traumatic and devastating to kids to experience their parents uncontained and uncontrolled anger--we're going to talk about that, but I think it's so important to understand that when somebody is in the grip of anger. That that's a young part. I'm going to talk about that more when I get into some of their work a little bit further down. But it's not what it looks like. And it can be so surprising, for example, for wives of an angry husband to realize how scared that husband is, or how much grief that husband has, and especially how ashamed that husband is.

Well, let's get into a little bit more of the neurobiology of this. I'm going to be drawing from an article called 'A Critical Period for Experience-Dependent Development of the Feelings of Safety During Early Infancy: A Polyvagal Perspective on Anger and Psychometric Tools to Assess Perceived Safety'. Wow, that's really long. That was in the Frontiers of Integrative Neuroscience in July 2022.

So a brief primer here on some neurology. Don't worry, I'll keep it simple. But going back to high school biology, or if you had an anatomy course, we've got neurons--these are our brain cells, and neurons are specialized cells that communicate. They send and receive signals in the brain and the nervous system. And some of these neurons have these axons. The axons are like the wire in the neuron, right? And some of those have a membrane or a sheath around the axon, kind of like the insulation on a wire. And some of them don't. That insulation or that sheath we call myelination. So myelinated axons are insulated and unmyelinated axons are uninsulated. Now if you've got a myelinated axon, it fires much more rapidly. And what we're finding is that if there has been a lot of safety, a lot of secure attachment in the first year of life, that you are going to see a lot more myelination of axons in brain cells as an adult. So if there's been this presence of safety in that critical first year of life, we're going to have that ventral vagal complex able to have much greater impact on reducing the sympathetic nervous system arousal, on reducing that fight or flight response. The ventral vagal complex is able to have a much greater impact on calming you down. There's a greater capacity for self-regulation. It goes back to that first year of life. Did you feel safe? Did you feel protected? Did you feel like things were alright? Was mom a secure base? Was dad present in a way that was loving and caring and instilled a sense of safety for you? If you didn't, your wires are stripped. There's not as much myelination. And that leads to a lot less cardio inhibitory activity. In other words, the ventral vagal complex cannot slow down your heart. It doesn't have as great of an impact to help you snap out of, or help you calm down out of those fight responses, or out of those flight responses. That's where the anger is--it's in the fight response. This is not all under the purview of your will. There's this fantasy in a lot of Catholic circles that we can just control all of this by the sheer power of our will--"We just have to will it!"

In fact, Rhonda Chervin, who I mentioned--that book, 'Taming the Lion Within: 5 Steps from Anger to Peace'. Her primary mentor with regard to overcoming anger was Abraham Low and the book that she recommended was published in 1950, and it was called 'Mental Health Through Will Training'. There's only one being who has the power to just will something and for it to be done, and that is God. I think a lot of this will training grossly overestimates what people can do, at least in the moment. There's ways that we can, by working toward greater integration, by having a better sense of what's going on inside of ourselves, having more collaboration and cooperation among the different parts of ourselves that we can really extend our access to our will in ways that allow us to be much more virtuous. Some of that's happening in the natural realm, it's not just all in the supernatural realm, but this idea that you can just will it and this will training is the way to go--that was really popular and the first part of the 20th century among Catholic clinicians, and it turned out to not actually work like that. So get a lot of concerns about that. I am far from convinced that will training is going to overcome unmyelinated axons in your neurons, for example. But you know what? There is such a thing as neuroplasticity. We can actually get some of those axons myelinated if we go back to that sense of security and protection, if we have secure attachments.

When we're compromised that way, when we have adverse childhood experiences, that dampens our ventral vagal complex activity. And so therefore, we're not able to inhibit the sympathetic nervous system as readily. We're not going to be able to calm down that anger as readily. And the big ACE studies, adverse childhood experience studies, young children exposed to five or more significant adverse experiences in the first three years of childhood face a 76% likelihood of having one or more delays in language, emotional or brain development. It affects brain development. These adverse childhood experiences compromise brain development. And we found that as the number of traumatic events experienced during childhood increases, the risk for health problems also increases, including uncontrollable anger. They actually assess that. An article by Donna Jackson Nakazawa at acestoohigh.com called '7 Ways Childhood Adversity Changes a Child's Brain', focused on this brain connectivity, she said, "Dr. Ryan Herringa, neuropsychiatrist and assistant professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin, found that children and teens who'd experienced chronic childhood adversity showed weaker neural connections between the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus. Girls also displayed weaker connections between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala. The prefrontal-cortex-amygdala relationship plays an essential role in determining how emotionally reactive we're likely to be to the things that happen to us in our day-to-day life and how likely we are to perceive these events as stressful or dangerous." So these adverse childhood events can weaken the connection between our prefrontal cortex, which is where all that higher level cognition goes, which is where all that thinking happens--all that considering that Father Morrow was recommending. All that's happening in the prefrontal cortex, but if you don't have a good connection between that and your amygdala, if you don't have a good connection between that and the limbic system of your brain, which is a more primitive area of your brain, it's not going to help you, not in the moment.

But we can rewire the brain. We can actually myelinate these axons--there's neuroplasticity. That's the kind of approach that I think we need to be taking. That's much more than count to ten and all that stuff that might be helpful in the moment. I'm not diminishing the importance of that in the moment, but that's a band-aid. That's something to help you get through a particular moment. I want there to be real healing at depth.

There was a study by Olga Klimecki, David Sander, and Patrick Vuilleumier in scientific reports in 2018 called 'Distinct Brain Areas Involved in Anger Versus Punishment During Social Interactions'. They took 25 men, put them in an fMRI. They induced anger using an inequality game. It was designed--the game was designed to be unfair, and they were assessing what areas of the brain lit up when these men experienced anger, especially when the face of the other person, the unfair person in the game was presented to them--what lit up. What you see is that there were activations in the amygdala. That's a part of the brain that's so intimately connected to anger. There was also increased activation in the SDS, which is the superior temporal sulcus and the fusiform gyrus. Those are both related to facial recognition. So we would expect those to light up. But yes, the anger lit up. So we're seeing that there are definite brain correlates for these things.

There's a lot more about the neurobiology of this that I could get into, but the big point, the reason I brought up what I did is because I want you to understand that this is not just about your will, it's not just about your mind, it's not about mind over matter. There is an intimate connection with the body that we need to be considering if we want to take our anger seriously. We want to go deeper than what is typically offered us in Catholic circles about how to manage anger.

So let's start talking about the 'why' of chronic anger. I want to get into this in a more focused way. I'm drawing heavily from the work of Kathy Steele, Suzette Boon, Onno van der Hart, their book 'Treating Trauma-Related Dissociation: A Practical, Integrative Approach'. And again, anger is the primary emotion of the fight defense, they tell us. When parts of you become stuck in this defense, anger becomes chronic. Thus, the first intervention is safety. Really important--the first intervention is safety. When people are acting out in anger, what they're communicating in a really paradoxical and counterproductive way is that they need safety. And what happens, of course, is that when people act out in angry ways, they don't get safety. But that's what actually part of them is seeking.

They go on to say that there are several reasons why anger and hostility become chronic. That happens when people are severely invalidated, when they're ignored, when they're unheard, when they're betrayed--that kind of thing leads to anger and hostility becoming chronic. When that happens over extended periods of time while the person is helpless to stop it, that's enough to generate enormous rage in anyone as part of the naturally occurring fight defense.

Second, as children, patients often had little to no help in learning how to regulate and appropriately express normal anger, much less how to cope with it. So often there was poor modeling. Mom and dad didn't handle their anger very well. They write "Often it was unacceptable for many patients to express any kind of anger as children, while the adults around them were uncontained and highly destructive with their anger. Others had no limits set on their angry behavior." I've seen that over and over and over again, that there was no way for a child to appropriately express anger to the parent that the parent would accept. So the child learned that the anger was bad and they stuffed it down--they suppressed it; they denied it.

These parts of us that are angry are so often feared, and they're avoided internally by other parts of us, particularly those managers that function in daily life. What's at the bottom of this, they say, is, "Angry parts have a deep shame and are highly defended against the strong belief that they are very bad. Their defense is reinforced by the shame of patients that such parts of them even exist. These parts of the patient are terrified of attachment to the therapist and the relationship is dangerous, mainly because they are afraid that the therapist will never accept them." That's how central the shame is here. That's what drives the anger.

The anger doesn't have to be a part of the fight response. It can be a secondary emotion that protects the patient from feelings of sadness, extreme powerlessness, shame, guilt, or loss. And I would also add grief to their list.

So what these angry parts have done is they've developed strategies to try to help them get what they need. Those could be controlling punitive strategies in which they get angry with others in order to try to get what they need, or it could be controlling caregiving strategies so then they punish themselves for being angry or having needs as a way to try to have those needs met.

And there's another way that rage or anger becomes fixed within a person, especially when they've been a victim of abuse. And that is expressed when they write this, "Finally, the rage of the perpetrator is often an embodied experience from which patients cannot yet escape without sufficient realization and further integration. Some dissociative parts imitate perpetrators internally, repeating the family dynamics from the past with other parts and are rather literal way." This is on page 333. So in other words, there's a protective function to having a part take on the role of the perpetrator of abuse, because if a part of a little child takes on the role of the perpetrator of abuse, they can anticipate what that perpetrator might say or do, and that can have a protective function. But what happens is those parts that take on that role of the perpetrator of abuse, they get stuck like a fly in amber--perpetrating and perpetrating sometimes decades after the actual perpetrator is dead. We re-enact those family dynamics within. That's why Richard Schwartz--he called his model 'Internal Family Systems', because we internalize these family members. Parts take on the role of significant family members in our lives. That's what Steele, Boon, and van der Hart are also saying. They have a parts model--it's based off the structural theory of dissociation. It's a different than IFS, but there's a lot of overlap and similarities, and they have done the best work on understanding anger internally in a way that can be effectively worked with, I think. That's my opinion.

They write that "getting the anger out is not really useful, as the problem is that the patient needs to learn how to effectively express anger verbally rather than physically, and in socially appropriate and contained ways, so that the patient can be heard by others. It is less the fact that patients express anger, but how they do so and whether that expression allows them to remain grounded in the present, to retain important relationships, and to avoid being self destructive." So they make this point that expression of anger is not necessarily therapeutic in itself. It's not this cathartic, psychodynamic approach where you just got to let it all hang out, all that primal screaming and all that stuff. No. It's important that the patient learn to experience and express anger in appropriate ways within the window of tolerance, right. Within a way that's safe and appropriate.

So how do we work with our angry parts? Well, we want to begin to understand these parts much more deeply. It is so important for you as your innermost self to connect with your angry parts in a way that allows for secure attachment for these parts of you that carry anger, that are burdened with anger, to know that they can trust you. That they can be heard, that they can be seen, that they can be known in a way that's safe and protected. So we need to take the time to understand the functions of anger, the roles of our angry parts. And that can be hard for our managers because those angry parts can seem like troublemakers. That's what these authors are telling us. But we want to encourage our parts to accept and understand and listen to angry parts instead of just avoiding them, instead of just brushing them off--kind of this advice that we were hearing from some of our Catholic authors.

We want to see if parts all feel the same way as the angry part. Can parts listen to and accept angry parts and their perspectives? Will the angry part be willing to listen to other perspectives from other parts? Can we invite parts to watch and listen if possible? We want parts to work collaboratively, to work cooperatively. We want there to be this integration.

Now, there sometimes has to be limits set with the angry part. Hopefully the innermost self can do that. The angry part and all parts need to learn that healthy relationships do not have to include humiliation. It's really, really important. It doesn't have to include suppression, silencing all the kinds of things that were done to the little person, that were done to the little child by others. When you have a perpetrator imitating part inside, the function of that perpetrator part according to Steele, Boon and van der Hart is, 1) "to protect the patient against threats of the perpetrator, which continue to be experienced as real in the present", 2) "to defend the patient against unbearable realizations of being helpless and powerless as a child", 3) "To re-enact traumatic memories from the perspective of the perpetrator as mentalized by the child", 4) "to serve as a defense against shame through attacking the patient and avoiding the inner experiences of shame", and 5) "to provide an outlet for the patient's disowned sadistic and punitive tendencies", and 6) "to hold unbearable traumatic memories". That's all wrapped up in this for so many people.

Boon, Steele and van der Hart say, "Dissociative parts of a person that are stuck in anger may experience the feeling of anger is vehement and overwhelming, often without words." That's so important. So much of this is preverbal. It was put into you, it was formed into you before you had the capacity for speech, before you could symbolize things in language, before you could symbolize your experience and language way before you had access to reason, way before the age of seven. A lot of this stuff was happening before you were one. We need to have the sense of safety to be able to begin to put these things in words, which is why all of these statements about irrational anger, and thinking about your anger, and reflecting on it all--it's not going to work with something that you haven't even put into words. That's a way too heady. That's a way to intellectual. It's way too verbal for these parts.

Boon, Steele and van der Hart say, "Dissociative parts may have irresistible urges to act aggressively and have great difficulty thinking and reflecting on their feelings before acting. Angry parts have not learned how to experience or express anger in helpful ways. There are two types of angry dissociative parts. The first are parts that are stuck in a defensive fight mode, ready to protect you. Their anger at original injustices may be legitimate and naturally accompanies a tendency to strike out and fight, which is an essential survival strategy. However, such parts have become stuck in anger, unable to experience much else. They really perceive threat and ill-will everywhere and they react with anger and aggression as their only option of response. Although these parts of you might not yet realize it, anger is often a protection against the vulnerable feelings of shame, fear, hurt, despair, powerlessness, and loss." And then the second type of angry part is that perpetrator imitating part that I was talking about before.

So their tips for coping with anger, one, to recognize how to make distinctions among the many gradations of anger. Empathize with your angry parts, recognizing they have limited coping skills, limited vision, that they've been shunned by other parts left alone with their fear, shame, hurt, isolation. When you begin to feel some compassion toward these parts, they can begin to have a more secure attachment with you as the innermost self. It's going to require some unblending. We want to recognize that these angry parts also have strengths that they could use in more positive ways. We really want to be curious about what's going on with the anger about the phenomenological experience. We want to try to be creative and have healthy, non-verbal ways of expressing anger, giving parts ways to communicate that through drawing, through through movement, through other ways. We want to be able to listen to each part of ourselves and how we might help that part with anger. These can be these conversations inside with different parts of us about anger, how to express it.

We also want to be able to capitalize on the positive strength and energy of anger, right? That it can be appropriately assertive like we were talking about before, that it can help us to set clear boundaries, to confront wrongs in the world. And there are different ways that we can titrate the anger inside. We can contract with parts to share only a little bit of the anger, not to overwhelm us with anger, that kind of thing.

In my parts, my feisty part is the one that has carried anger for me for decades. Part of the reason I don't resonate with what Tommy Tighe was talking about is that I don't experience a lot of depression. That's not a very strong experience for me--sadness and depression--I experience a lot more anger, so it's really hard for me to resonate with the idea that anger comes as a function of me being depressed. I don't think that's true for many people. But my feisty part, that part really defends against shame--the shame that my Melancholio part carries. That's a very, very clear protective role that my feisty part has. So that's an example of how this can work. You know, and for a long time, I was not in touch with my shame. For a long time, I was not in touch with shame--I was in touch with the anger, but not with the shame. And I did try to work with the anger. I talked about that with my spiritual director and my confessor, brought it up in therapy dealing with my anger; gotta get to the shame.

Now, it could also be for you, grief. Or it could be fear. But then, if it's grief and fear, I'd want to know what the grief is about. I'd want to know what the fear is a fear of. My feisty part--I didn't experience a lot of anxiety either because if my feisty part got large and in charge, it could it could suppress anxiety as well. It didn't allow my fear to be heard either.

If you have to have a book to try to help you with anger, I would probably recommend the book by June Hunt, she's a Protestant therapist. In 2017, she wrote a book called 'Dealing with Anger', and it's okay. Again, I think it's really hard to address these things in a book, because the parts of us that read books are all engaged with that prefrontal cortex, and if that's not well connected to your amygdala, if those axons are not well myelinated, it's going to be hard to make the connections by reading and studying your way to some sort of progress. We actually have to get into the lived experience. We have to get that felt sense of safety. We have to have that secure attachment--that has to be relational.

That's the kind of thing that we do in our experiential exercises in this podcast--so we've started this series of experiential exercises to help you get in touch with your own experience, to help you be in relationship with yourself. So mark your calendars. The next live experience of this Interior Integration Podcast will be on Friday, January 13, 2023, from 2:00 PM to 3:00 PM EST. We're going to do that on zoom; it's going to be all about working with your anger. We're going to go way beyond what books can do for you in terms of just connecting with the intellectual level. We're going to be in inviting you into a deeper relationship with yourself about anger through a guided reflection. Click the link to register. Those have gone out in our emailed Wednesday Reflections. You can get the link on the IIC landing page as well. You can go to soulsandhearts.com/iic. It also was sent out on December 28th, 2022. You can go to our archive of those weekly reflections and click on 'From Rejecting to Embracing Aging', it's in that post. And also you can sign up for these weekly reflections. Go to soulsandhearts.com, go to our home page, click on 'Get the Weekly Reflection from Dr. Peter', it'll be in that one that comes out this Wednesday and next Wednesday as well. So you can get that link in a lot of ways. You can also reach out to me [email protected]'s my email address. Conversation hours are every Tuesday and Thursday from 4:30 PM to 5:30 PM EST. You can reach me for a private conversation on my cell phone: 317-567-9594. We usually have 10 minutes, maybe 15 minutes, and it's not therapy--we don't do therapy at 'Souls and Hearts'--I don't do therapy in conversation hours, but we can have a conversation about what your questions are about these podcasts or the weekly reflections. Love to be able to connect with you.

And then there's the Resilient Catholics Community. That is where we bring all of this together in a much more focused way. If this stuff makes sense to you, if you want to get in touch with your parts around anger, or around grief, or loss, or sadness, or fear, this is a way that you can do it. Why? It's not therapy, but therapy doesn't have a monopoly on human formation. There are lots of ways that we can work to bring about that cooperation and collaboration inside, to bring about that integration. I bring the best of all those resources into the Resilient Catholics Community. Check that out, soulsandhearts.com/rcc. Now, we just closed the registration for the December 2022 cohort. You can get on the waiting list, though, for the June 2023 cohort will reopen in June and you can check that out, get to know your own parts, get to love your own parts. If you get on the waiting list, we sometimes do need to fast track a few people because we're filling out the rest of the companies, and so sometimes we will get in touch to fill out some companies for the December cohort, which is going to start in March. Otherwise you can join the June 2023 cohort, which will start in September 2023 with the actual meeting.

So with all of that, I want to thank you for listening to all of this. I want to thank you for entertaining these ideas. I want to thank you for going deeper, for not just staying at the surface or at the behavioral level. I really appreciate those that listened to the podcast. I pray for you. I ask you to pray for me. And with that, we will wrap it by invoking our patroness and our patron, Our Lady, Our Mother, Untier of Knots, pray for us. St. John the Baptist, pray for us.

In Episode 102, Dr. Peter guides a live audience to helping their parts get the love they need in an experiential exercise, especially the parts that may have been unnoticed or even neglected. Come join us on an adventure inside, where we work to overcome the human formation obstacles to embracing God's love for us. At the end, audience participants share their experiences with Dr. Peter and he answers questions. 

In this episode, Dr. Peter brings together what we have been learning about receiving love in the story of Susanna. 

In our 100th episode, we celebrate by going inside in an experiential exercise. Recorded before a live audience, Dr. Peter guides you through an experiential exercise to help you connect with parts of you that resist God's love. We create a space where you can much more deeply understand the negative, distorted God images that some of your parts may have -- mistaken ways they see God, and how those misunderstandings came about. With gentleness, kindness, and love for your parts, your parts might be ready for your innermost self to be a bridge between them and God and Mother Mary. Come join us on an adventure inside, where we work to overcome the human formation obstacles to embracing God's love for us. At the end, audience participants share their experiences with Dr. Peter and he answers questions. 

Transcript

[00:00:11] Okay, so I am Dr. Peter Malinoski, clinical psychologist, passionate Catholic, and I am the voice of this podcast, Interior Integration for Catholics, part of our outreach of Souls and Hearts at soulsandhearts.com. In this podcast, Interior Integration for Catholics, we take on the most important questions, the most difficult questions about our human formation--clearly, directly, honestly, we overcome obstacles and hindrances in the natural realm to being loved and to loving, all as part of us becoming more integrated, more resilient so that we can love our God, our neighbor, and ourselves as the Lord directs us in the two great commandments.

[00:00:57] And so let us travel together on this road of salvation. Let us travel this narrow path to union with God in heaven. That's what we are all about in this podcast. This is our 100th episode, of the Interior Integration podcast, 100 episodes, and you made it all possible. Today we have a live audience with us. There's scores of our listeners to come together live, in the present moment, in a special way, and we are celebrating this milestone together to approach God and to approach our Lady to allow them to love us even more deeply, to help us embrace their love for us.

[00:01:35] So as many of you know, I've decided to weave in an extra podcast each month starting this month. The first Monday of the month will be our standard IIC podcast, a long form solo cast episode where I present new ways of understanding the human person, bringing the best of human formation, psychology, psychiatry, neurology, other fields--harmonizing all that with what we know to be true by divine revelation in our Catholic faith. This podcast, Interior Integration for Catholics is unapologetically Catholic.

[00:02:07] So, episodes out on the first Monday of the month--those are going to be great to listen to while you're driving or while you're exercising or cleaning out your closets or the garage or multitasking in other ways. Those will be the odd numbered episodes. But what's new is this third Monday's episode. Every month on the third Monday for the next six months, you'll get a bonus experiential exercise to help you get more deeply in touch with your own inner being--with your own parts. And this is going to take more attention. It's going to take the presence of your whole being. So no driving, no operating heavy machinery, no eating lunch, no scrubbing the bathroom during the experiential exercises, okay. I've worked in these experiential exercises in the past. You can see them, for example, in episode 93 and at certain points in other episodes. So there's a clear distinction between the more conceptual material in the odd numbered episodes and the experiential exercises in the even numbered episodes.

[00:03:04] So I'm really happy to have you all here. Thank you for being in this human formation journey together with me. And now we'll get into more of the exercise. So a couple of cautions to begin with, this topic of being loved by God--it can bring up a lot of intensity for some of our parts; a lot of emotion. We can move into leaving our window of tolerance to the upside--a fight or flight response, sympathetic activation revving up. Or we could leave our window of tolerance to the downside that's getting into that freeze response where there's dorsal vagal activation, shutting down, numbing out. So if you notice that that's happening, go ahead and take a break, reground yourself, and you don't have to do this exercise--you can stop at any time. If it's not for you, that's okay. We don't want to steamroll any internal objections that you might be experiencing. Pay attention to the to those voices within from your parts. I'm going to be bringing in God from a Catholic perspective, which may activate some parts in some people, and so we want you to have the time and the space and the privacy to be able to do this.

[00:04:15] Again, these are experiential exercises--these are guided meditations, this is not therapy, this is not counseling. We don't provide any clinical services from Souls and Hearts. And so we're not trying to resolve unmetabolized trauma here, we're not trying to run and fix yourself. What we really are doing is trying to understand, trying to connect with our parts inside. So as we begin, I'm going to invite you to take what's useful to you. If I offer you something that's not helpful, let it go. You don't have to do it. If you find that you're really engaged in something really important and deep and you find you're not listening to me anymore, that's great. Work with yourself in a way that's deep, if you find yourself doing that. And you know, if you're listening to this as a recording outside of our live experience, I encourage you to know that you're free to pause the audio, to really settle in and do extended work and restart that audio when it feels like it's best. If you have pens and paper to write down things, that can be helpful like a journal or to map out things, that can be helpful too. And as you do this, I'm really going to encourage you to be physically comfortable. You can move around, you can close your eyes, you can shut your cameras off if that's helpful to you, whatever is most useful to you.

[00:05:39] And a lot of gentleness with yourself as we begin this. There's a moment here for you really to care for yourself. Luke 10:27, "Love your neighbor as yourself." We are supposed to love ourselves in an ordered way, and that means loving the parts of yourself that are in need--really taking care of them, being compassionate.

[00:06:03] These parts, they're like separate, independently operating little personalities within us. Each part has its own unique, prominent needs and roles in our lives, its own prominent emotions, body sensations, guiding beliefs and assumptions, typical thoughts, typical intentions and desires, interpersonal style, a whole way of looking at the world, a whole worldview. And each part of us also has an image of God--some way that it understands God.

[00:06:43] Now, if you get distracted, that's okay. That's really common. If you can refocus, great. But if not, that's okay too. Focus in on the distraction--maybe you can get curious about why a part of you may feel the need to distract you.

[00:07:04] So I'm just going to invite you to notice now what's happening in a moment. I'm going to say a little three word phrase, and I'm going to invite you to see how that three word phrase, those three words, land in your system. And so I'm just going to invite you to really notice what's going on in your body right now--what's happening in your body, around your body. You notice if there's any muscle tension, any headache, any stomach pain, fatigue, tingling, warmth, coolness, whatever is going on in your body. Just want you to get a sense of what's happening with your body now as a baseline.

[00:08:15] Okay, and here are the three words. God loves you. God loves you.

[00:08:45] And what I'm curious about is what did you notice in your body when those three words landed? If you noticed a shift somewhere in your body, I'm going to invite you to focus in on that part of your body, because there might be a message there from some part of you that has something that it wants to say about the love of God--being loved by God, taking in the love of God, there may be a story or a message in that bodily reaction. We call that a trailhead. A trailhead is where there's an experience inside that is a communication from a part--could be a communication of distress, it often is--and so I'm wondering if you can be with that body experience and really listen in, if you can be curious about what might not yet be spoken, but exist in your body.

[00:10:14] Can you listen to the message by listening in to that body sensation? Can you sense what the message is?

[00:10:47] Now, maybe you had an image or a visual image or a memory come up or some other experience inside--you can go with that too if that seems more prominent or it's much more, you know, much more obvious. But whatever you're experiencing, see if it can lead you to that part and what that part believes about God loving you.

[00:11:40] And you might be getting into contact with that part. Can you sense that part? Can you look at that part of you? Is there some sort of visual representation of it? You as the innermost self.

[00:12:10] And if you notice any negative emotions toward that part, any criticism, maybe the parts that are critical of that part can give you some space. Maybe parts would relax back so that more of your innermost self can be present now. With the big open heart, we're going to ask that none of your parts flood you with their intensity--that's a safety thing. We don't want parts to take you over and overwhelm you if they are experiencing a lot of intensity. We're looking for you as the innermost self to be separate but near to this part of you that's connected to that body sensation, so that you can have a relationship with that part.

[00:14:06] Can you sense that little part of you? Maybe it's becoming more apparent. You can ask the part how old it is. Some parts of us can be very, very young phenomenologically, even pre-verbal. But to see if you can accept that part, really listen to that part, what it wants to share with you. What it wants you to know.

[00:14:54] How does that part see God?

[00:15:20] How does that part make sense of God's love?

[00:15:30] And again, in listening to the part, we're not endorsing its beliefs, we're not adopting its positions. Any part that is separated from the self or any part that's not in right relationship with your innermost self is going to have a distorted God image. It's inevitable. And one way, the best way to be able to overcome those is for those parts to be seen, heard, known and understood in love.

[00:16:25] If it's okay, can we hear what that part feels about God and God's love?

[00:17:00] What about thoughts or assumptions or beliefs that this part has? We can ask other parts not to censor those beliefs, just so that we can understand how parts have made sense of their experience. They have very limited vision, but if they can become more connected to the self, it opens up all kinds of possibilities for it being different.

[00:17:57] What kinds of impulses or desires does this part have regarding, receiving or embracing the love of God? Impulses to hesitate, to refuse, to rebel, to flee, whatever those may be, can we understand those? Can you hear them as part of the story?

[00:18:57] And I'm just going to invite you to see, sometimes this happens--sometimes there's a concerned protector part, trying to speak for your target part, like a spokes-part who wants to interpret the parts experience. And let's just see if that concerned protector part can soften and relax back and let the target part speak for itself.

[00:19:29] What does this part need from you? From you, the innermost self. Maybe there's a need for felt safety and protection. Maybe a need for feeling seen, heard, known and understood. Maybe a part needs to be comforted or soothed by you, reassured, or to feel cherished and treasured.

[00:20:36] What does this part need from you? Let's just listen in and see if this part of you can connect at just a little deeper level, if that's okay.

[00:21:31] Maybe that part doesn't understand God very well. Maybe he hasn't had much connection with God. Maybe he has never felt God's love.

[00:22:20] Maybe there's concerns about the costs of being loved by God, the way that might change things inside.

[00:22:52] Maybe a part is trying to keep you safe from God because it sees God as dangerous or harmful--distorted God images.

[00:23:22] Maybe there's a sense that you as a person aren't worthy of God's love. Issues with shame.

[00:23:46] There could be difficulties with vulnerability, a sense of being exposed, being revealed to God if you accept God's love.

[00:24:09] Maybe there's a lot of fear of God.

[00:24:31] Maybe there's a lot of anger at God, a desire to rebel against God, a sense that God's been mistreating a part of you. Can we hear those concerns?

[00:25:11] And if you are in a good place, if you are in a space where you can really feel compassion for your part that's struggling with God's love, if you are in a place where you can feel connected to that part, where there's genuine interest and curiosity, you have a big open heart, clarity is coming in, there's courage, there's confidence, a sense of creativity, a sense of connection with that part. If you have that, then you might check to see if that part wants to know about God from you, about God's love, from you. If it wants to hear something different than its felt experience--the way its made sense of its experience.

[00:26:24] I mean, it's possible if your part's open for you to be the bridge between that part and God. If it's okay with your other parts, and that's a big 'if' because parts may be really, really concerned. If we've got parts that are really concerned about God coming in here, we want to honor that, we want to be careful, we don't want to steamroll parts. We want to work with the cooperation and collaboration of parts. But if your parts are okay with it, might they be interested in you being the bridge to God--you as the innermost self.

[00:27:23] And if so, to God the Father, or to Jesus, or to the Holy Spirit, you can pick one, if that sounds good. And if you pick Jesus, you can also pick what age. I have a part who's about five years old, who loves to be with Jesus when Jesus was eight years old. So if that's helpful, some parts find it to be much less threatening to be with Jesus as a baby. There's different ways that you can connect with God.

[00:28:03] And maybe that's too much for a lot of people it might be too much, but there could be a way they might connect with Mary. Mary as our Mother, or maybe Mary as a friend, as a young girl. Or with another saint, or maybe with a guardian angel.

[00:28:39] It's an opportunity to learn more about what God's love is actually like.

[00:28:53] And you can also regulate how close to allow God to get to the part, because that can be really frightening for parts. Remember, it might be a whole new relationship. But we really don't want to rush. It's really important that there be a sense of safety and protection. If there's not, I'm going to invite you to let this part of the exercise go. Just see if you can stay with your parts and not worry about connecting with God right away--they might need to really build trust with you as the innermost self first. And if you're really blended, that's okay. That's okay. Work with those parts that are blended with you. See what their concerns are about this whole God issue. For many people, this is really, really new. It's really different.

[00:30:20] I'm just inviting you to see if it's okay. We're not going to be in this exercise much longer, just so parts know. But might they be able to see God or to see Mary or your Angel, or another saint, through your eyes? Totally different when seen through the eyes of your innermost self.

[00:31:17] What are you noticing in that part?

[00:31:36] How is that part doing now?

[00:31:52] Can that part sense that you are with him or her--with that little part, present, caring, curious where you are with compassion, connectedness and calm.

[00:32:33] Now I'm going to invite you to write down, if you want to, what you what you learned, what was helpful. Sometimes it can be really a good thing to give your parts a voice on paper. You can always do this exercise again. It'll be available as episode 100--we'll have it up on our website. You can do this exercise again with a different part.

[00:33:04] And a lot of gratitude for all your parts. All the parts have good intentions. All parts are trying to help. This doesn't have to be the end of connecting with your parts. This doesn't have to be a one off experience. You can check in with those parts again. You can reach out to them again. You know, there are various ways--it's a lot of what we do in the Resilient Catholics community. You don't have to be alone in doing this internal work. That's the reason why the Resilient Catholics community exists. If this kind of exercise is helpful to you, we have almost 100 of these kinds of exercises in the Resilient Catholics community already. There's 120 Catholics like you already on board.

[00:34:00] And as we wind up this exercise, I'm just going to invite you to be able to make that transition to come back. And if you can stay in touch with your parts, great. Some people have trouble with that, but to be really grateful for the space.

[00:34:29] You're welcome to get in touch with me if you have interests about this. Conversation hours every Tuesday and Thursday from 4:30 PM to 5:30 PM EST, but not November 24--that's Thanksgiving; I won't be answering calls then. You can also reach out to me at [email protected], that's my email. I'm much I'm much quicker to respond to phone calls than I am to email. I've got some email that's backed up--I will be getting to as much of that as I can, but I'm really excited about the RCC, the Resilient Catholics community. I really feel like it's an opportunity for us to be on a pilgrimage together, to get to know our own parts, and to come to love them, and to help them accept love and to be part of loving in a much more wholehearted way.

[00:35:18] So that's the end of the exercise. And I know we've got some time just to be able to field questions. I do want to let everybody know we are being recorded--we are planning to post the recordings and so forth, so you will be on the regular podcast if you speak up. So if you want to ask, then [00:35:41] Marion can [00:35:41] definitely get your voice on here, but you can also let us know through the chat if you prefer to be anonymous with what you wanted to share about your experience. I invite you to check it out with parts to make sure that you're not overexposing any of your parts and we can just open a discussion together.

[00:36:07] "Dr. Peter, you already had a question earlier about whether your notes would be available on soulsandhearts.com."

[00:36:17] The notes like from this presentation, like the outline?

[00:36:21] "Yes"

[00:36:21] Yeah, I will post the outline that I was following as well.

[00:36:29] And let's see here--some people were saying that literally nothing seems to be happening. No bodily changes--comfortable and relaxed. You know, that can happen sometimes. Sometimes we don't have a lot of reaction right away. So I would just stay with it--if you stay with yourself long enough in your parts, something will happen. Something will happen. So just a lot of patience with that.

[00:37:08] Here's a question--"What do you do if you're not at all sure that yourself actually has the understanding of the part needs?" And I would say, look, it's okay. Let's just see what happens when you do approach that part with some compassion and with some love. You know, from an Internal Family Systems perspective, the self has an innate capacity to to love the parts, to be attuned and I found that to be true--I think we have some inherent capacities, God-given capacities. Sometimes those are constrained, they're occluded by other parts. St. Teresa of Avila has this image of the soul as like a crystal that's occluded, that's got, you know, dirt or grime on it--if you clean that off, it can shine through. So if parts can give you the space, I've not ever seen it fail that there can be a real attunement from the self to the part.

[00:38:19] "Is it important to notice if the Father is not the one the baby is not comfortable with, but Jesus is?" Yeah, it's really important. We can relate with any of the three Persons of the Trinity, and sometimes it's so much easier for a part to connect to one Person of the Trinity than with another. And when you're starting out with this, I'd say let the part connect with the person of the Trinity who is the least threatening, the one that they're most drawn to. Because the Trinity is one in three.

[00:38:58] "What if your part has a fear of baby Jesus?" Well, at that point I wouldn't try to do some sort of exposure therapy, counterphobic type of thing or something like that--absolutely not. What I would do is see if the part would be more comfortable with Jesus at another age, or with another Person of the Trinity, or with Mother Mary, or maybe with a saint. For example there are some people who have experienced a lot of bodily trauma, betrayal trauma, other types of trauma, and they have a very difficult time relating with any embodied spiritual figure, any saint or Jesus because of his body. That seems really dangerous to them. So sometimes we start with the guardian angel because the guardian angel doesn't have a physical body, so there can't be any bodily harm like that.

[00:39:52] Can a part be a five year old version of yourself? Absolutely. A lot of parts are very young.

[00:40:01] And then, "I like bringing in the saints--I feel this to be comforting, like St. Faustina and St. John Paul II." Absolutely. You know, we are all one body. If you are working with somebody as a spiritual confidant who is in the Church triumphant in heaven, that person is part of the body of Christ. We're all one body.

[00:40:29] Someone asked, "How long does it take to normally have a real conversation with a part? I'm in touch, but haven't been able to talk with any part." Well, you know, I think of that as what St. Francis of Assisi said. He said, you know, 'preach the gospel, use words if necessary.' I'm not so concerned about conversation as I am about connection, you know, because some parts might be pre-verbal. They don't really have a lot of access to language, but they need to be held or they need to look at you. And as they get more integrated, as they come into a deeper connection and relationship with you as the innermost self, they'll have a greater capacity to put things into words, you know, so they'll be able to access parts of the brain that foster expressive and receptive language and so forth. Those neural pathways are starting to become more established. So, yeah.

[00:41:26] I got a question; "how about a mystical interaction such as the Transfiguration?" That's a little hard to answer in one sense, because it depends on whether you're trying to form a relationship with an event or whether you're trying to form a relationship with the person. So what I would be thinking about if you're in a scene from the Gospels or in a scene from Scripture, is 'can there be a personal connection?' Here's what I really want to get at: that these God images that parts have can only be corrected by experiencing love. That's what's curative. The love is what's curative, and if they can experience that from you first--you, the innermost self loving the part, that's very ordered. St. Thomas Aquinas is all about that. St. Thomas Aquinas argues that you have to love you first. That's where the first love is, before you can love anybody else. And you, as the innermost self, can help that part also receive God's love not only through you, but through other people, through the saints, through our Lady, and then can facilitate that relationship with God himself. So this isn't about some sort of narcissistic [00:42:50] navel gazing. [00:42:50] "I'm okay, you're okay." You know, psychological day spa stuff. This is really more about like you actually being able to embrace the love of God, because then things change. There's really two ways that God images change--one is the experience of God as he is in his love, and the second is faith--the supernatural virtue of faith. But so many parts don't have faith--we didn't talk a lot about this in this in this exercise, but sometimes parts can connect with the faith of the self--that infused virtue, the faith, and can connect with that too. I tend to work more on the side of parts actually coming into contact with the living God and seeing that he's not who those parts made God out to be. He's different.

[00:43:47] So we have a question here, "is it better to start learning to love and to be loved by myself before I try to love and be loved by God? If God is too scary, even for myself?" You know what? If love is authentic, it has its origin and root in God. So I look at what's the easiest way for a part to take in the love of God. What's the easiest way for the part to take in the love of God if it's from the self, okay. Ideally it starts with our parents--ideally we learn something of the love of God from mom and dad, but moms and dads always fail in some way, unless you happen to be in the Holy Family, unless you were raised 2000 years ago in Nazareth--and you weren't, there's going to be failures there. And the reason I think God allows those failures is because he plans to make up for them with being our Father, with our Lady, being our Mother. God our Father and Mary our Mother, those are our primary parents. Your earthly parents are secondary parents. God our Father, Mary our Mother, those are your primary parents. And so any deficits in the parenting that you got from your earthly parents, God intended to make up for. He's got a plan for that. And the greater the deficits, the more that he will make up for it in his providence.

[00:45:24] But I'm curious if somebody's willing to ask a question out loud. I mean, we've had a lot come through the chat, but I'm wondering if there's somebody that would like to put their hand up and get on here live with me. No pressure though.

[00:45:40] Let's see..."can a part of you heal a mother wound?" Well, here's the thing: a part cannot heal another part. Not on its own. I do believe there's some healing that can happen when the love of God comes through the self. So when the self loves a part, I think healing can happen. But so often parts are trying to help other parts, parts operating independently of the self, and that doesn't work. And you can see that when parts have agendas, they're trying really, really hard to make it all right, but without the connection to the innermost self, I don't think parts have the capacity to really love another part. That's why St. Thomas Aquinas was so big on internal integration, on unity. I talked about that in some of the weekly reflections from October 2022 that are on our blog at soulsandhearts.com/blog--those are the weekly reflections I send out. I've focused on those in October--how Thomistic this is. But that unity is really important for being able to be in union with each other.

[00:47:15] As far as a part hurting another part, we had a question about that--absolutely, parts can hurt other parts. Absolutely. Parts can hurt other parts. Parts can hurt other parts in our own systems, and often do, and parts can also hurt parts in other people.

[00:47:37] "We have a question."

[00:47:38] Great, well, let's go with that.

[00:47:41] "Okay, well, here you got a live one, so I'll go for it. So what is it you want? What do you want to ask? Do you want me to tell you what my experience was or what?"

[00:47:55] Yeah. If you'd like to share what your experience was, we'd love to hear it. If you have a question, you know, it's really kind of an open forum here. So whatever seems to be helpful.

[00:48:04] "Okay, so what would I felt was I felt that physical sensation in my jaw, which I hadn't noticed before. And when you said, you know, 'God loves you,' there was just this, the thought came in my head, 'Oh, but it's not emotional.' It was really kind of a negative thing, and I am aware that when I think of God the Father, I think of him very far off and, you know, not happy. I remember there was a one time, mostly mad, mostly sad, I don't know. And then when you asked like, 'what part of you is feeling that' or whatever, I just sensed a kind of like a little plastic doll, not even like very lifelike. And I know that was me, and then you meant you said something about let that part of you connect with kind of like the real you, the real self. And that's where I felt a huge like cavern of light and love, and that little one could get closer to that, but really wanted to move away from God who just seemed dark and angry. So that little part feeling comfortable with, I guess, me, and then when you asked about can you bring that part to to God and which person of God--I already knew, I can be the bridge to bring that little part to Jesus who took that--then it was like I put a baby in Jesus's arms, and it was no longer a doll, it was a little baby. And they did fine and I was there. So that's the whole thing that I went through during that guided reflection."

[00:50:08] And if, if I can ask, did you notice changes in your body, like in your jaw?

[00:50:13] "Yes, that went away that really not. And I was not grinding my teeth, it was just like I felt that--and then as soon as that self came, you said kind of like the compassionate heart filled. Then I noticed that that was gone. The jaw thing was gone."

[00:50:30] So that might be like a tell or a trailhead for you, to notice your jaw. Because sometimes--I actually have the same thing. I have two parts that lock up my jaw. When I'm when I'm not in in a good place, when I'm when I'm not centered or I'm not recollected, so that's a really familiar sensation for me. And then such beautiful work. Yeah, remember that it's hard for us to come into relationship with God. Even when Moses came down from Mount Sinai, after having conversed with God, he wore a veil over his face--just the reflected glory of God was too much for the Israelites. And so to remember that we sometimes have to like allow parts to experience the love of God mediated in some way--through the through the innermost self, through other people, through the saints, you know, So yeah, you were, you know, you were in a place where you could help that part of you experience God in the way that that little part of you could best receive it, does that make sense?

[00:51:40] "Yeah, and there was also a part of me that was my conscious mind saying, 'but that isn't what God--I know that that's probably not what the Father's like, but you have this false image, right?"

[00:51:55] Yeah. We often will have parts of us that are like that have gotten better catechesis, you know? But they're still not connected emotionally. And I have had a part like that defaults to a God who's got a sort of sterile charity--kind of a cold kind of charity. You know, he created me, sustains me, keeps me in life, but you know, it's more than that. Can we come into contact with a God who cherishes us, who delights in us? It's not that kind of, like, distant stuff, but we. We don't know that yet, experientially, and we don't know it yet enough by faith. Such beautiful work. Thank you for sharing that with us.

[00:52:46] We have a couple more questions. I'm going to unmute whoever is J. H. J.

[00:52:54] "It's me. I'm Joseph. Good evening from United Kingdom, Dr. Peter. And hello, everybody taking part, God bless you all. I'm very interested in your work and the work on parts, and I picked up on the word mediation or mediate--perhaps God mediates through another person, and I wonder if we could explore that for a little while, please?"

[00:53:20] Sure. Sure.

[00:53:22] "Thank you."

[00:53:22] So we know that our Lord Jesus Christ is the mediator between God and man, right? So he is the primary mediator. Some people have said, 'shouldn't the parts just connect with Jesus?' And I've done some consultation work with evangelical Christians who are therapists who try to connect parts directly with Jesus. And, you know, one thing that that I would say is that there is this core center of us--it's alluded to in Vatican II, the secret sanctuary, the core of our being, and God respects that. There's got to be some organizing principle within us that can help lead and guide all of us--all parts of our being. Remember, in the great commandment, our Lord says to love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, right. Not just the acceptable parts of us or the bits of us, but the whole of us, and so I see that the self as having the capacity to be able to organize, and to be able to help the parts work collaboratively, and to be the bridge or the mediator between our Lord and the parts. Because again, I don't think God wants to just come in and intrude and invade. There's too much respect for our dignity, too much respect for our boundaries, our personhood, to do that. So that's in a nutshell what I would say.

[00:54:56] "Thank you, Dr. Peter."

[00:54:58] You bet.

[00:55:01] Debbie: "Hi."

[00:55:08] Hello, welcome!

[00:55:09] "This is really the first time I sensed anything. I haven't seen any part, but just now sensed light that was, I think myself reacted with surprise. I didn't know if I was imagining that. Prior to that, I think I felt a sense of warmth, and I didn't sense anything negative. That's pretty much it!"

[00:56:01] Debbie, did you notice any changes in your body with the warmth or the light? Did you notice any shifts inside at a body sensation level?

[00:56:11] "No."

[00:56:12] Okay, you know, it's interesting--as you were talking, the Bible verse that came to mind is, I think from Isaiah, you know, "the people that have walked in darkness have seen a great light." I think a lot of times so many parts of us have not been included in the spiritual life. A lot of times the spiritual life in serious Catholics is governed by one or two or maybe three religious parts, spiritual parts. So it can be really surprising when other parts somehow come into contact with something of love or something of God. I mean, it can be really eye opening. And so it's not unusual for there to be surprise at there being a sense of light or a sense of warmth.

[00:57:09] "Thank you."

[00:57:10] Thank you for that.

[00:57:12] Katharina: "When you're asking for body sensation, I was looking for like pain, but the only thing I felt was just this joy. But it was like, really in my center of my chest sort of, and I was really surprised. It's like, 'oh, okay!' And I think what I'm curious about is maybe if you could speak of--what I, what I heard was that he is captivated by our brokenness. And I was like, 'oh, what does that mean?' Because there's a certain integrity that's desired, right? Like that we want to become whole and we want to have this unity inside, but then to hear that, like there's this sort of captivation, and this sort of beauty in our brokenness that he finds--it's like, it's like not just going to the lepers or the prostitutes, but actually having this desire for that what we know to be ugly, but that it's attractive. Does that...?"

[00:58:51] The hardest--in the spiritual life--I was talking with Peter Martin, psychologist, Dr. Peter Martin. The hardest of the the attachment needs  in the spiritual life for so many people is the sense of feeling cherished or treasured by God. And the reason oftentimes people don't feel cherished or treasured by God is there's so much shame, there's so much hiding, so the idea that even in our brokenness, God could love us. Even in our woundedness, God loves us. In fact, our woundedness moves him, right? I mean, we're in need. That's why our Lord came to the earth, right? You know, to save us so. So to begin to experience something of joy, sometimes that's a whole new experience for a part. To experience joy of God, to be delighted in by God, to actually feel that. So thank you for sharing that with us.

[01:00:13] "Thank you."

[01:00:14] And our last hand raised at this moment is Tim.

[01:00:20] "Hi there, Dr. Peter Malinoski."

[01:00:23] It's good to be with you, Tim.

[01:00:26] "So I have trouble focusing on the parts. Like it seems that as soon as I get a grasp on maybe accessing that part--maybe it's ADHD or I'm not sure what it is, but I lose it very quickly and kind of like start exploring, you know, other things. So I don't get a whole lot of feelings or like a good attachment. And I guess in my vision, you know, as things progress and getting better at this, that that attachment will be more longer lasting and probably more rewarding. So, your thoughts."

[01:01:22] Well, let me ask this, okay, and you don't have to answer this, Tim. I'm not trying to fish for an answer, but one thing I get curious about is--these distractions, I mean, maybe they're biologically based, maybe there's a neurological issue, but often what I find is that it's a part. It's a distracting part. It's a part that's really worried about what might happen if you were allowed to focus on some particular thing, you know. So one possibility might be to explore that--is there a part of you that really is concerned about you being able to focus on what was coming up in the the experiential exercise. You know, so much of attention issues, really, you know, some of that is biological, some of that may be may have to do with neurochemical regulation, neurological patterns, and things like that--but a lot of it in my experience is really parts. You know, parts that are really concerned. Firefighter parts that come up to try to protect you from things getting too heavy or from you connecting with other parts. So that's another possibility that we usually consider when we're thinking about the multiplicity of self and parts.

[01:02:58] "Could there be a part that easily gets frustrated with something you're struggling with, trying to understand or trying to figure out? And so there's a part that's like, 'yeah, that's just--it's too frustrating and we're out of here.'"

[01:03:15] Absolutely. Absolutely, and there's always reasons for what parts do. Even when parts are doing something that's pretty maladaptive, you know, that could be really harmful physically, morally, spiritually, there's still a good intention behind the impulse or the desire. And so what I what I try to do, in working with my own parts and working with, you know, in working with the exercises in the RCC with my own clients is to kind of get at what is the good intention. What is the good that the part is seeking for you? And can we find that good somewhere else? Is there another way that we can actually have the benefit without it being harmful?

[01:04:08] "Thank you."

[01:04:11] Well, I want to thank everyone for being here. I know we had some technical issues--I apologize for that. This is a new, you know, technology that we're trying to use. And, you know, things go wrong. But so many of you were able to make it and I'm really heartened by this and super excited. This will come out on Monday morning on the 21st of November as episode 100 of the IIC podcast. We'll also put it up on our websites, and also if you're in the Interior Therapist community or the Resilient Catholics community, you'll get it in there as well.

[01:04:51] So much gratitude for you--thank you for being here. You really are the ones that have made it possible for us to get to 100 episodes. I'm really surprised by that in a number of ways, so thank you for that.

[01:05:11] And I'm going to invite you to unmute and we'll do the closing invocations together, if you'd like to.

[01:05:22] Our Lady, our Mother, Untyer of knots, pray for us. St John the Baptist, pray for us.

It is so common for Catholics (and others) to reject the love of God, to not let that love in. Join Dr. Peter for this episode where we explore in depth the eight natural, human formation reasons why we refuse God's love. We also look at what Hell really is and why it really exists. Through examples, quotes, and an exploration of Dr. Peter's own parts, listen to how this critical, central topic comes alive. And then Dr. Peter presents the an action plan for accepting and embracing God's love. 

IIC 99 Why We Catholics Reject God's Love for Us and How to Embrace that Love

Transcript

"It's very hard for most of us to tolerate being loved." That's psychiatrist and Harvard professor George Vaillant. The hardest thing about love for many of us Catholics, is to be loved--to tolerate being loved first. We can't love unless we take love in first. We can't generate love out of nothing on our own. We just don't have that power.

And the truth is, many Catholics make sacrifices great and small in their attempts to love others. Many Catholics go to great lengths to try to please God and to love their neighbor--very busy people, most parishes have a few of these always--volunteering, always working, always making things happen, St. Vincent de Paul, soup kitchens, corporal works of mercy, working so hard to live out the Gospel as they understand it, but it's all external. They are very out of touch with their internal lives. Their prayer lives are shallow and sketchy, and they're often really uncomfortable in their own skin. They will not tolerate silence, which is why they're always on the move--why they're always going, going, going.

The vast majority of us Catholics will not tolerate being loved deeply or fully by God. We shy away from receiving that love. We get so uncomfortable, we skirt around the edges of being loved. Or we allow love into us, but only so far--only so far. We set limits, we set boundaries, we won't let God's love permeate all of our being. We let the "acceptable parts" of us to be loved. Those parts that we allow in the shop window, those parts that we believe others will accept, those parts that we believe God likes. But to allow God to love all of you, including your nasty parts, your shameful parts, your disgusting parts, your hidden lepers, your sinful parts, those tax collector parts, those inner prostitutes and blasphemers, your Pharisee parts, the parts of you that are so lost and so isolated and so angry and hateful, those parts? Most of us will say "no way, no way does anyone get to see those parts if I can help it, let alone love those parts. Love those parts? That's crazy." How about your terrified parts, your desperate parts, your wounded, traumatized parts? The ones that no one seems to want? The parts of you that have been rejected by everybody, including yourself.

This podcast is for us Catholics who understand at least intellectually, that we have those parts. And that those parts need to be loved, and that those parts also need to be redeemed. Now for anyone out there who is saying, "Well, I don't think I have any parts like that, Dr. Peter, I don't have any problems being loved." Well, my response to that is one of two possibilities. Either you are 1) a very special person who has been freed from our fallen human condition, and you've achieved an extraordinary degree of perfection in the natural and spiritual realms, and if so, congratulations. You don't need this podcast. You don't need this episode. You are so far above the rest of us--I'm in awe of you. You don't need what I have to offer. That's the first possibility.

Second possibility? You don't know yourself very well. You are out of touch with yourself and your parts--you are disconnected inside. Unless you've reached a fair degree of sanctity, it is especially hard for you to tolerate being loved by God and our refusal to accept the love of God throughout all of us. That's the primary reason we don't love God back. That's also the primary reason we don't love our neighbor, and why we don't love ourselves. We won't be loved first.

God loved us first. It all starts with God's love, not our love. Heisman Trophy winner Tim Tebow in his book, 'Shaken' says, "We were created by love, in love and for love." And St. Paul, he tells us in Romans 5:8, "God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." God loved us first.

And the world does not know God. Christianity is the way to discover who God actually is--to discover who love actually is. 1 John 3:1, "See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are. The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know him." What I want you to remember, St. John in his first letter says, "We love because he first loved us." We love because God first loved us, and it's up to us to take that love in, to let that love come into every corner of our being. And that doesn't sound easy, and it's not as easy as it sounds.

I am Dr. Peter Malinoski, a.k.a. Dr. Peter, clinical psychologist, trauma therapist, podcaster, blogger, cofounder and president of Souls and Hearts--but most of all, I am a beloved little son of God, a passionate Catholic who wants to help you experience the height and depth and breadth and warmth and the light of the love of God, especially God, the Father and our primary mother, Mary. What I want for you more than anything else is that you enter into a deep, intimate, personal, loving relationship with the three persons of the Trinity and with our Lady. This is what this Interior Integration for Catholics podcast is all about. This is what Souls and Hearts is all about--all about shoring up the natural foundation for the spiritual life of intimacy with God, all about overcoming the natural human formation, deficits and obstacles to contemplative union with God our Father, and with our Lady, our Mother.

We are on an adventure of love together. Episode 94 of this podcast focused on the primacy of love in the Catholic life. Episode 95 focused on trauma's devastating impact on our capacity to love. Episode 96 discussed how trauma hardens us against being loved. Episode 97 discussed how trauma predisposes us to self-hatred and indifference to ourselves, a refusal to love ourselves. And Episode 98. the last episode was all about ordered self-love, how we need to love ourselves in an ordered way in order to love God and neighbor, to carry out the two great commandments.

Today, we are going to take a step back. We're going to look at the most critical prerequisite for loving God and others. We are going to discuss being loved first, accepting the love of God first before we try to love. This is absolutely essential. The most critical mistake that most Catholics make is to refuse the love of God. Let me say that again. The most critical mistake, the most devastating, catastrophic mistake that most Catholics make is to refuse to allow God's love to transform us entirely, to make us into new men and women.

Let's start out with the order of love. First thing--God leads with love. God makes the first move. He created us, he moves toward us. We who he created, we who have fallen from grace because of original sin. We don't make the first move. God does. He loved us first, and he continues to love us first, and our whole mission, our whole purpose is to respond to his love in love.

I want to read to you a brief passage from Shawn Mitchell. He wrote an article called 'We Love Because He First Loved Us', and he is with Those Catholic Men. You can find this online. Shawn Mitchell says, "We love because he first loved us. These words from the first letter of John beautifully and succinctly sum up the origin and end of the Christian life--which in a word, is love. 'Being Christian,' said Benedict XVI "is...the encounter with an event, a person which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction." That 'encounter' is our experience of God 'first loving us'. The 'new horizon' that it opens up, the 'decisive direction' that it gives to our lives, is love--our love of God and our neighbor because of His prior love of us. To participate in that endless exchange of love is what it means to be a Christian. It is the center from which all other aspects of the Christian life emanate. I fear that a significant number of Catholic men missed this point in regards something other than love as the central point of being a follower of Christ."

Love is central. This is what Sean Mitchell said so clearly in that article. Love is what Christianity is all about. Love is what Catholicism specifically is all about. It's not about the building of virtues primarily, it's not about self-perfection, it's not about stopping masturbating, it's not about giving up whatever other vice you might have. It is about entering into a loving relationship as you are in your imperfections right now. Right now. Not at some point in the future after you've achieved a certain amount of sanctity because you're not going to achieve a certain amount of sanctity or perfection without entering into that relationship, without receiving the love of God first.

Sean Mitchell goes on to say, "What I did not include from Benedict's quote above is what he says being Christian is not. It is not, he says, "the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea". To state that more generally, being Christian isn't primarily about my will or my intellect or what I do with them--that is making 'ethical choices' and assenting to 'lofty ideas'. Rather, it is first and foremost about my heart, my whole person in all its mystery, and what has been done to it by God. Is it not the case, though, that so many of us fail to understand this? If we're honest with ourselves, I think we would have to admit that it is, that we ourselves are among those men who place something other than love at (or at least close to) the center of our Christian life...even if we don't realize it."

The Jesuit Edward Vacek, in his book 'Love, Human and Divine: The Heart of Christian Ethics' lays out the sequence of love. The sequence of love has seven parts to it. The first one, God affirms us. The second, God receives us.

Alright, so the first one is all about God. It's all about God. God affirms us. The second one, God receives us. We have to allow ourselves to be received. So now we're coming into that. We allow God to receive us, and in the third step, we accept God's love, the fourth step, we affirm God, fifth God forms community with us. Sixth, we cooperate with God and loving God in the world, and finally, the seventh one, we grow in limited co-responsibility with God.

This was all screwed up by the trauma of original sin. Adam and Eve, garden of Eden, Genesis 3. They eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge and good and evil. And they're off into the bushes, hiding, bickering amongst themselves, terrified. God--what was his response? God comes looking for them. God seeks out Adam and Eve; he seeks them out as they're hiding, as they're fleeing from him in their shame and their confusion and their bitterness. All in that trauma of original sin. God calls out to them, "Where are you?" he says.

Think about the gentleness there. God knows exactly where they are. He knows every hair on their head. He knows every molecule in their bodies. He knows their GPS coordinates to 10,000 digits. He doesn't need for them to tell him where they are. He's letting them know he's coming. That's the gentleness. He calls out to them. And he doesn't curse Adam and Eve. He curses the serpent, he curses the ground, but he doesn't curse Adam and Eve. He provides clothing for them to help them with their shame.

And a lot of people don't realize this, but he protects them from eating of the tree of life. Banishing them from the garden was an act of love. Genesis 3:22-24, "Then the Lord God said, 'Behold, the man has become like one of us knowing good and evil. And now, lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat and live forever"--therefore, the Lord God sent him forth from the Garden of Eden to till the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a flaming sword, which turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life." God, in banishing Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, was making sure that they would not be separated from him forever.

St. Ephrem, the Syrian, in his commentary on Genesis, explains, "God did this lest this life-giving gift that they would receive through the tree of life become misery, and thus bring worse evil upon them than what they had already obtained from the tree of knowledge. From the latter tree they obtained temporal pains, whereas the former tree would have made those pains eternal. From the letter they obtained to death, which would have cast off from them the bonds of their pains. The former tree, however, would have caused them to live as if buried alive, leaving them to be tortured eternally by their pains." All of what happened in Genesis 3 in God's interaction with Adam and Eve, was born of love--came from his love for them, even though they didn't understand it.

The basic problem with us entering into this sequence of love is that we don't tolerate enough contact with God to allow him to affirm us, to allow him to receive us, for us to understand him in a radically different way.

And what kind of love is God's love for us? God himself tells us, Jeremiah 31:3, "I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore, I have continued my faithfulness to you." Isaiah 54:10, "For the mountains may depart and the hills be removed, but my steadfast love shall not depart from you, and my covenant of peace shall not be removed, says the Lord, who has compassion on you." And how steadfast is God's love? Deuteronomy 7:9 tells us, "Know therefore, that the Lord your God is God, the faithful God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments to a thousand generations." Psalm 86:5, "For thou, O Lord, art good and forgiving--abounding in steadfast love to all who call on thee."

Now God requires a response from us. Psalm 86:5, "O Lord, thou art good and forgiving, abounding in steadfast love to all who call on thee." We have to call on him. We have to respond to the love that God gives us. And we can only respond to the love that God gives us, if we take that love in and not just in some shallow, superficial way, not just in some intellectual way, not in some cold, sterile, abstract way. We need to allow it to permeate our entire being.

That is what this episode is all about. This is episode 99 of the podcast Interior Integration for Catholics, released on November 7th, 2022, and it's titled 'Why We Catholics Reject God's Love for Us and How to Embrace that Love'.

From the 'Catechism of the Catholic Church' paragraph 221, "But St. John goes even further when he affirms that 'God is love'; God's very being is love. By sending his only Son and the Spirit of Love in the fullness of time, God has revealed his innermost secret: God himself is an eternal exchange of love, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and he has destined us to share in that exchange." Catechism, paragraph 221. We are called to take him up on that. That is our mission, that is our purpose on earth, to enter into that eternal exchange of love among the three persons of the Trinity.

How do we know that we are loved by God? Well, I think there are two ways. 1) We know by faith, and 2) we know by lived experience. What are we talking about when we talk about faith? Let's define our terms. The 'Catechism of the Catholic Church', paragraph 153, "When St. Peter confessed that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God, Jesus declared to him that this revelation did not come from, 'flesh and blood', but from 'my Father, who was in heaven'. Faith is a gift of God, a supernatural virtue infused by him. 'Before this faith can be exercised, man must have the grace of God to move and assist him; he must have the interior helps of the Holy Spirit, who moves the heart and converts it to God, who opens the eyes of the mind and makes it easy for all to accept and believe the truth." Faith. Faith is an infused virtue that helps us to know who God is. Faith.

Second thing, the lived experience of the relationship with God. I'm going to use an example from St Paul here, from his 2 Timothy, 1:12, "But I am not ashamed, for I know whom I have believed, and I am sure that he is able to guard until that day what has been entrusted to me." You can feel the love of God in consolations. Part of the beauty and the wonder and the magic of consolations is that we can feel in our lived experience the love of God. That's what makes a consolation a consolation. We can feel the love of God.

But here's the thing--we don't want to engineer emotional experiences of closeness with God, we don't want to try to manipulate our feelings, we don't want to try to somehow engineer a subjective experience. I have a lot of concern about Catholic youth events. These hyper emotional, noisy places using sophisticated psychological techniques of influence to generate contrived emotional experiences in young people. Hyping them up, getting them out of their window of tolerance. This is not a peaceful place where the voice of the Holy Spirit can really be heard. I think so much of how we evangelize our young people is so misguided, because that doesn't last, and some of that, a lot of that I don't think is even real. I don't think it's God acting at all. There's so much of what can be explained at those things has to do with people getting hyped up--techniques of influence. It's actually not that much different than an Amway convention sometimes.

So we don't want to rely on our subjective experience of the lived relationship with God, because that subjective experience of connection with God can vary way too much. Dietrich von Hildebrand writes, "Our confidence in God must be independent of whether we experience his nearness, whether we sense the enlivening touch of grace, whether we feel ourselves being born on the wings of his love." That's so important, and it's really important coming from a phenomenologist, right?

We need to temper what we believe about God, and not have it just be reliant on our personal experience, because that is unreliable as a guide. It just is. Let me give you an extreme example. Mother Teresa in 1957, she confided to her spiritual director, "In the darkness...Lord, my God, who am I that you should forsake me? The child of your love--and now become as the most hated one. The one--you have thrown away as unwanted--unloved. I call, I cling, I want, and there is no one to answer...where I try to raise my thoughts to heaven, there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives and hurt my very soul. Love--the word--it brings nothing. I am told God lives in me--and yet the reality of darkness and coldness and emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul."

David Scott in Chapter 17 of his book, 'The Love That Made Mother Teresa'. He wrote, "For more than fifty years, following her initial visions and locations, Mother Teresa was wrapped in a dark, pitiless silence. She only once more heard the voice of God, and she believed the doors of heaven had been closed and bolted against her. The more she longed for some sign of his presence, the more empty and desolate she became." Extreme example here, people. This is an extreme example. This was an extraordinary person called to incredible heights of sanctity--God chose to not console her in order that her faith grow and that she gain even greater merit than if he had given her the consolations that she desired. She had the faith to persevere, which is what made her so great. Her capacity to hold onto God's love by faith and to receive it into her, even when she couldn't feel it. Even when she couldn't feel it.

Now I want to switch gears. Now I want to talk about needs. Now, in the weekly reflection that I wrote on September 26th titled: 'The Top Ten Needs That Fuel Modern Day Idol Worship'--that's sitting in your email box, if you've registered with Souls and Hearts. I send these weekly reflections out every week on Wednesdays. I do keep an archive of them at soulsandhearts.com/blog. They go up there later when we get around to posting them.

But in that particular weekly reflection, 'The Top Ten Needs That Fuel Modern Day Idol Worship', I talk about the integrity needs. This is my summary of what I think we need from an integrity standpoint. The need to exist--the need to survive. That's the first one. The second one, I need to matter--I need to matter in the cosmos. Third, I need to have agency--I need to be able to exercise my will. Fourth, I need to be good--I need to have a sense of goodness within me. And the fifth, I need to have a mission and purpose in life. Five integrity needs.

Also five attachment needs. These are the primary tasks of secure attachment, according to Brown and Elliott. This is a felt sense of safety and protection. This is feeling seen, heard, known and understood--that's the second one. Third one, feeling comforted, soothed, and reassured. Fourth, feeling cherished, treasured, and delighted in. Fifth, feeling that the other has your best interests at heart.

There is so much resistance to God's love, and to explain that I'm going to weave in these integrity needs and these attachment needs. I have eight major reasons why we resist God's love. Eight major reasons why we resist God's love. And they're all interrelated. 1) our limited vision; our lack of imagination, leading to a refusal to be transformed by God, 2) we don't understand God's love, 3) the costs of being loved by God, 4) poor God images, 5) poor self images, especially self images dominated by shame, 6) the refusal to be vulnerable, to be exposed, to be revealed to God, 7) a lack of courage, and 8) anger at God with rebellion.

Let's go through these again. Limited vision; lack of imagination--that's number one. 2) we don't understand God's love, 3) the costs of being loved by God, 4) poor God images, 5) poor self images, 6) the refusal to be vulnerable, 7) lack of courage, 8) anger at God that fuels rebellion.

Let's go through these one at a time. Limited vision; lack of imagination. We won't even understand this on any kind of intellectual level. Von Hildebrand talks about how we can have an unhealthy satisfaction in far more limited spiritual goals than what God calls us. We settle for something really limited. According to von Hildebrand, the vision of most Catholics is way too small--our sights are set way too low. We're satisfied with way too little in the spiritual life. We are like chickens pecking at the ground when we are called to soar like eagles. What would that look like?

Well, if someone is content with merely getting over a sin, merely overcoming a vice, working on developing this virtue or that virtue--that's way too small. Some Catholics, many serious Catholics, actually pursue the spiritual life basically as a self-improvement project, and they're satisfied with small incremental gains. I talked about this in the weekly reflection from October 26, 2022, 'Why we resist change--and especially radical transformation'.

This is captured in a book by Ransom Riggs titled 'Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children', where his character, Jacob Portman, says, "One day my mother sat me down and explained that I couldn't become an explorer because everything in the world had already been discovered." Keep it small. Keep your vision on the ground. Eyes down, eyes downcast. Don't gaze heavenward.

And Paul Catalanotto, in an article in the Catholic Weekly called 'Refusal to Love is Also a Refusal to Live' said, "Love, in some sense, is nothing other than an invitation to great joy and suffering, so they shy away from it." We see this. We see this in John 6. Our Lord has just given himself body, blood, soul and divinity--he's talking about the Eucharist, and what was the reaction? Let's pick it up in 6:41, "The Jews then murmured at him because he said, 'I am the bread which came down from heaven.' They said, 'Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How does he now say "I have come down from heaven?"'" And then 6:60-66, "Many of his disciples, when they heard it, said 'this is a hard saying; who can listen to it?' And after this, many of his disciples drew back and no longer went about with him." They would not open their imaginations. They had limited vision they would not trust what our Lord was telling them. They were not humble enough to acknowledge that they couldn't see as God sees. And so they left him, to their peril. That's the first one--limited vision; lack of imagination.

Second one, we don't understand God's love. Isaiah 55:8-9. What does God tell Isaiah? "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, and neither are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts." I want to give you some understanding of this, because when we think about ourselves in terms of parts, these parts can be really, really young. And there was an article on Proverbs31.org by Sharon Janes called 'When Love Hurts'. She put it out on April 17, 2018. 'When Love Hurts'. I'm going to do a little dramatization of that article.

"Mommy! Mommy! Don't let them hurt me!"

My son, Steven, was about three years old when he contracted a severe case of the flu. His slumped body snuggled listlessly like an old, worn rag doll. When I carried him into the medical clinic, the doctor quickly diagnosed dehydration and immediately sent us to the hospital. My heart ripped apart as the nurses strapped my little boy onto a table and began placing IVs in his tiny arms.

"Mommy, Mommy, make them stop! They're hurting me."

"No, honey, they're going to make you all better."

"Mommy, help me!" Stephen cried, I cried, the nurses cried. I could only imagine what was going through Stephen's little mind. "Why are these people hurting me? Why does it mommy make them stop? She must not love me. She's not protecting me. If she loved me, she wouldn't let them do this to me. She must not care about me."

Standing in the corner watching my little boy cry. I wondered if that's how God feels when I'm going through a painful situation. That's for my ultimate good. I cried out, "God, why are you letting this happen? Don't you love me? Don't you care about what's happening to me? Why don't you make it stop?"

And thanks to my nine-year-old daughter Lucy, for again helping me out with the voice over so much appreciate her being here. You can see how Steven little, three-year-old Steven, how he's struggling with these integrity needs and attachment needs in the situation with the IVs. His very need to exist feels threatened. "I might be injured. I might die. They're poking things into me." These IVs. He also has no sense of being protected--that's an attachment need. That's the first primary attachment need, a felt sense of safety and protection. In fact, Steven feels just the opposite. The little child, he was being protected, but he didn't understand. He didn't feel protected even though if he didn't get those fluids in his system, he actually could die of dehydration. There wasn't a felt sense of being comforted and soothed. The child was not open to it. The third primary condition of secure attachment. There was no felt sense of support for as highest good, the fifth condition of secure attachment. Parts of us are very young, like this three-year-old. They do not understand.

And so many of us have a poor view of anything that frustrates us. We've had bad experiences of being disciplined, of not having been disciplined out of love, but rather being disciplined out of anger or inconvenience or frustration by our caregivers, by our fathers, by our mothers. Hebrews 12:11 addresses this very point. It reads, "For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant; later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it." Freud even recognized this. He talked about how we needed to be both gratified and frustrated in order to grow. That's the second--the second of the eight reasons why we resist God's love. First one, limited vision, lack of imagination. Second, we don't understand God's love.

This third one--the costs of being loved by God. This is huge. This is really huge. Now, real love, whether you call it agape or charity, real love is always given freely. And most of us understand that much, at least intellectually. But real love is never received freely in this fallen world. There are costs to allowing real love into our lives. And there has been very little discussion in Catholic circles about the costs of being loved by God. I find that so strange. So many Catholics don't think this way. It's though Catholics are dominated by parts that believed that being loved by God is one of two things. It either should be really easy and delightful and peaceful, like being the lead character in a Hallmark movie or being a lead character in a romance novel where the love is easy, it just comes naturally--this kind of emotional junk food that just nourishes illusions. And if it's not like that, and it's not going to be like that, not for very long anyway. When it's not like that, these folks conclude that God isn't loving them. They conclude that they're excluded from his love because they have these idealized, distorted ideas of what God's love would be like. This is God as Santa Claus rather than as a loving father. The second way that people consider being loved by God is that being loved by God is terrible. This echoes of Hebrews 10:31, "It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God." Now, when the author of Hebrews wrote that he was talking about God punishing evildoers, not those who had embraced his love, but I think sometimes people think that being loved by God essentially means being raped by God, being sucked dry by God, being exhausted by God, being used by God, being exploited by God. What happens when we receive the love of God into our being is that that real love burns away anything that is sinful within us. The love of God in our souls--in our bodies, burns away any vice. And not only that, real love also purifies us from anything that is not morally wrong, but that is disordered, or dysfunctional, or imperfect.

So real love burns away things that are merely disordered--like feelings. We can have, for example, anger at God, and anger at God is always disordered because anger is the proper emotional response to injustice, and God is never unjust with us. But if we begin to really allow the love of God into us, we're going to have to give up our anger at God. And maybe there have been parts of us that have organized our lives around being angry at God. We've built whole narratives around that.

The other thing is that real love is the greatest good. It's greater than all other goods. Real love is God himself. God is love, St. John tells us. And because love is the greatest good, it can require us to give up lesser goods--both perceived goods and actual goods. This includes the coping strategies, the crutches that have helped us in the past. This includes the different ways that we found and navigate the world in trying to survive. 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." There are so many times in Scripture where love is described as being refined in fire. Isaiah 48:10, "Behold, I have refined you, but not as silver; I have tried you in the furnace of affliction", and not because God is some kind of sadist, but because he knows we need to be purified. Zechariah 13:9, "And I will put this third into the fire and refine them as one refines silver, and test them as gold as 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.'" So what specifically goes into that crucible? What specifically is refined in the fire? Well, we know from Proverbs 17:3, the crucible is for silver, the furnace is for gold, and the Lord tests hearts. Job. Job was a just man. Job made mistakes. But Job knew more about God than anybody walking the face of the earth in his day. And Job said, "But he knows the way that I take; when he has tried me, I shall come out as gold." Refined. Refined as gold.

But can you see the costs? The costs. The costs are immediate. The costs are up front. The benefit of that refining is in the future and we can have parts that if they are not infused with faith, if they are not connected with the truths that that God gives us, if we're not open to that virtue of faith, that helps us to believe that we described in paragraph 153 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, we're not going to make it.

And when you are in the crucible, when you are in the purifying furnace, which all of us will be if we are trying to grow in love for God. All of us will be there. We're going to be questioning if we don't have that faith, we're going to be questioning, we're going to be questioning around integrity needs--like is this furnace going to burn me up? Am I going to cease to exist? It's God going to burden me with more than I can handle? Do I even matter to God? Right. This is another integrity need. Do I matter to God or am I just disposable, expendable? I mean, does God even believe that I'm good? Why would he be treating me this way if I were not bad? That was the way that Job's friends interpreted it, right? Job's friends. His three friends trying to get him to fess up, trying to get him to admit to some sin that wasn't true. Job resisted that.

What about attachment needs felt safety and protection? It's hard to feel safe, it's hard to feel protected if you are in the crucible, if you are in the furnace. Again, we need faith. We need to believe that there is something bigger than this. We cannot just take a three-year-old's perspective. We can't just go with the parts of us that interpret the world like Stephen was doing with his IVs. That's the third one. The costs of being loved by God--those costs are real.

Now, it is the most amazing bargain ever to pay those costs for what you get. There is no better investment that you could ever make. But I think we have to acknowledge that those costs are real.

The fourth--poor God images. Alright, I'm just going to lay it out here. We do not understand God very well. We really don't know who he is, and because we don't really know who he is, we have this lack of confidence in God. I'm going to talk about God images--what are God images? God images are my emotional and subjective experiences of God, who I feel God to be in the moment, which may or may not correspond to who God really is. God images: what I feel about God in my bones, my experiential sense of how my feelings and how my heart are interpreting God.

Now, each part of me that is not in right relationship with my innermost self has a distorted God image. These God images are often unconscious--you've got multiple God images, as many God images as you have parts that are not in right relationship with the self. And initially those God images are shaped by the relationship you had with your parents. They're heavily influenced by psychological and developmental factors. Different God images can be activated at different times depending on your emotional states, what psychological mode you're in at a given time, what part of you is blended and driving your bus at any given moment. The thing to remember about God images is that they are always formed experientially--they flow from our relational experiences and they also are constructed from how we make sense of those images when we're very young. My God image can be radically different than my God concept. The God concept is what I profess about God. It's my intellectual understanding of God. It's based on what I've been taught, but also what I've explored through reading. I decide to believe in my God image. And for Catholics, the God image is reflected in the Creed, it's expanded in the catechism, it's there in the formal teachings of the Church. We refuse Mother Angelica's bit of advice. Mother Angelica says, "Allow people to love you as they must love you, not as you want them to love you. Even God does not love us as we wish him to. Learning to love is learning to accept love as it comes." We have to accept love as it comes.

Some people are really concerned about opening themselves to greater love because they're afraid they'll lose the relationship with God if they push the envelope. And you know what? You are going to lose the relationship you have with God if you push the envelope--if you push the envelope, if you really deepen, it's going to be entirely different. It's going to be so much deeper and richer. I did a seven episode series on God images in this podcast from episodes 23-29. Check those out. Really talk about attachment needs in God images in those episodes. So that is the fourth major reason why we resist being loved.

First one--limited vision. Second--we don't understand God's love. Third is the cost of being loved by God and the fourth--poor God images.

Let's go on to poor self-images. Self-images are these emotionally driven, intuitive, subjective ways that we feel about ourselves moment to moment. It's what we know about ourselves in this unarticulated, unspoken, pre-verbal way. It's who we believe ourselves to be at a very primitive level, formed into us again by our experiences and how we've made sense of those experiences. Self-images are not who we describe ourselves to be in our intellectual considered way. It's not what we give sanction to as our understanding of ourselves when we describe ourselves as being a beloved son of God or beloved daughter of God, it's who we feel ourselves to be in the moment. Each part of you who is not in right relationship with your innermost self, in addition to having a distorted God image, has a distorted self-image.

And when you get down deep, when you are able to within your own system or if you have enough access to somebody else's system, you usually find some part that's dominated by shame. And there is no better description that I've ever found about how parts that are burdened with shame can feel about themselves then this sermon given by Pastor Jonathan Edwards in the 1740s, which he titled 'Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God', and Pastor Jonathan Edwards tells us, "The God that holds you over the pit of Hell, much is what holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and has dreadfully provoked; his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire. You are ten thousand times so abominable in his eyes, as the most hateful and venomous serpent is in ours." And he goes on for pages and pages, thousands of words, all this terrible stuff with not leavened by any beloved child of God. Just it's like the perfect description of how so many parts that are exiled believe God looks at them. It was a terrible disservice to mankind here that Pastor Jonathan Edwards rendered. That's what leads us to hide from God. If we really believe that that is who we are, of course we're going to hide from God.

We don't want to find out that we are unlovable. We don't want to find out that we are actually unloved by God, because if we are unloved by God, we are unlovable. We can't bear that. That really hits on integrity needs, right? Especially the need to be good, the need to matter--if we are this disgusting spider, this loathsome insect worthy of just nothing, just being cast into the fire, and if we're seen as this dreadful person by God, how are we going to ever receive love from somebody like that? So many fears come out of that because of our self-image. You can check out episode 24 of this podcast, which is all about God images and self-images--I talk more about self-images there, but we actually need to have a sense of being loved by God. So many people, going back to the first one, lack the imagination. What they're trying to do is be tolerated by God. The idea of being delighted in by God, which is the fourth of the primary conditions for secure attachment, having a felt sense of being cherished and treasured and delighted in well, they're not thinking about that at all. They've got their sights set way too low--they're just trying to be tolerated by God.

You know all this business about, like God not letting people into heaven, but our Lady, letting them sneak in through the backdoor--All of that's crazy. That's crazy talk. There's no there's no conflict between our Lord and our Lady that way. I can understand if people could have a sense that Mother Mary could love them, but God doesn't, and then I would invite them to deepen the relationship with Mother Mary and let Mother Mary help you understand who God really is. Poor self-images. Such a huge thing. That's the fifth one.

Now the sixth one--the refusal to be vulnerable, to be exposed, to be revealed to God. If love is going to be real, and if I'm going to be open to being loved to the to the degree that I'm called, that means I'm going to allow God to love all of me. All of me, all of my parts, my entire being, not just the acceptable parts of me that I put in the shop window, those parts that I allow others to see. Oh, no, it's got to be all of me--which requires a fair amount of vulnerability. The fears of being hurt again, fears of betrayal, fears of abandonment can lead us to, again, want to hide, to protect ourselves. This goes to that integrity need to survive. If I am vulnerable one more time, if I open myself up to God, is he going to be like this person who almost killed me emotionally? Is he going to be like the one who abused me? Is he going to be like the one who neglected me? Is he going to be like the one who forgot about me? We generalize in our God images--we generalize, we project onto God what we've experienced by others in authority, by others that we've actually have lived experiences with. We project all that onto God. That's the sixth, the refusal to be vulnerable. We want to survive. Can we survive being loved by God? And so many parts conclude, no, we can't. And that keeps us from entering into relationship with God.

Seventh Reason--the lack of courage. I mentioned this in episode 96 'Philophobia--The Fear of Love'. All of us have parts that fear real love. There's a comfort in the familiarity of the dysfunction we know. We like things being predictable--change is scary. Erica Jong wrote, "I have accepted fear as a part of life--specifically the fear of change...I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says: turn back." Alright, we're going to have parts--they're trying to help us, they have good intentions, they want us to survive. They say "turn back".

Nelson Mandela, he said, "I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear." There is a huge difference between fearlessness and courage. I wrote an article about that for 'Outlook Magazine', which is an IFS magazine, Internal Family Systems Institute magazine. Fearlessness is not courage. The one who is fearless is just disconnected from his fear. Maureen Brady and her book 'Beyond Survival: A Writing History for Healing Childhood Sexual Abuse', said, "For change to occur in us, we must be willing to enter the wilderness of the unknown and to wander an unfamiliar territory, directionless and often in darkness...We do not need to keep every little thing under control. In fact, we find ourselves only by allowing some falling apart to happen." This is what so many people are doing in the spiritual life. It's like you've got a Rubik's Cube and they're able to solve one side of it. So one side of it is all one color, and that's the side that they face outward toward God and toward other people. But there's no way to actually solve the Rubik's Cube without destroying that one side. And in fact, those particular squares only look like they're in the right place, because when you look at what's going on in the other faces of those little cubes, it's not right at all. There actually has to be considerable reorganization of that Rubik's Cube. So many people will not enter into what we are called to--into that everlasting exchange of love among the three Persons of the Trinity, to the gloriousness of our calling because of fear--because they allow themselves to be dominated by fear. That's the seventh, the seventh of the main reasons for resisting the love of God.

First one--limited vision; lack of imagination. Second one--we don't understand God's love. Third one--the costs of being loved by God. Fourth--poor God images. Fifth--poor self-images, including shame. Sixth--the refusal to be vulnerable. Seventh--the lack of courage.

The eighth one--anger at God, leading to rebellion. Why? Well, this goes back to the fourth reason, which is the the poor God images--the distorted God images. Anger at God is always disordered, but it's not sinful. If it's spontaneous, if it's a spontaneous first reaction, we don't endorse it, we don't sanction it with the will, we don't elaborate a whole way of living around it--then it's not sinful. What matters is what we do with that anger at God. So many people basically say to God, "Who do you expect me to believe? The Church, the Scriptures. The Magisterium. The lives of the saints. Who do you expect me to believe? Those or my own eyes? My own lived experience. Because my own lived experience is that you don't love me. My own lived experience is that you have abandoned me, you have betrayed me. You have left me to twist in the wind." This is what people say to God. Most people have parts that feel this way, and the reason they have parts that feel this way is because those parts are exiled with those beliefs so that they don't take over the whole person. Other parts are like, "Hey, we can't hear that. We can't have that. God's not going to tolerate that. Let's stuff that away." And so the parts--the parts that feel like God is perpetrated, injustice upon them, betrayal, abandonment, whatever they get, they get buried deep, right, because if we let that stuff up (this is what the protector parts say), if we let that stuff up, God's going to smite us. That stuff cannot be allowed into our conscious awareness, and there's this whole huge repression of that stuff. I want to love the Lord my God, with my whole heart. That means all of our parts. That means working through this stuff. If you don't work through it here on earth. This is speculative Malinoski eschatology. If you don't work through this on earth, nothing disordered is going to get into heaven. I think so much time in purgatory is spent working through these unresolved disordered emotions--disordered desires, impulses, stuff that isn't necessarily sinful. It's what you do with it. One of the worst things to do with it is to suppress it, because then you can't even think about it, you can't engage the will, you can't engage the intellect. It's suppressed--it's outside of conscious awareness. It can't connect, we can't connect those faculties anymore, and that's where you get acting out. You get the revenge of the repressed. And so much of what goes on in that revenge of the repressed is rebellion against God. That's part of why we don't pray. That's part of why we don't get to Mass on Thursdays, because that's what we'd like to do. We sleep in so all kinds of parts acting out in various ways. That's the eighth anger at God, rebellion against him.

Eight ways that we resist God's love. Eight ways that we refuse to be loved by God--refuse to take it in. Limited vision--we don't understand, costs of being loved by God, poor God images, poor self-images, the refusal to be vulnerable, the lack of courage and anger, unresolved anger at God leading to rebellion.

Now, I've been talking about parts, many of you know what I mean when I'm talking about parts. But I do want to review just a little bit so that before we go on to this next section, people have got it refreshed. If you're really interested in finding out more about parts, episode 71--really an important episode, a new and better way of understanding myself and others. Check that out. Interior Integration for Catholics, episode 71, 'A New and Better Way of Understanding Myself and Others'.

Parts are separate, independently operating little personalities within us. That's one way to think about them phenomenologically. Each part has its own unique, prominent needs, its role in our life, its emotions, its body sensations, guiding beliefs and assumptions, its own typical thoughts and intentions, its own desires, its own attitudes and impulses and interpersonal style, its own worldview. Each part is an image of God, each part has an image of self, and when those parts are not integrated, when they are not under the leadership and guidance of my innermost self, there's all kinds of problems receiving the love of God.

So let me just back up a minute and talk about this innermost self. What am I talking about? When I talk about the innermost self, I'm talking about the core of the person--the center of the person. This is who we sense ourselves to be in our best moments. When our core, when our self is free, when we're unblended with any parts--the self is really who should govern our being. When St. Thomas talks about self-governance, it's this self that I'm talking about that really should be leading and guiding, not any of the parts. Now in episode 71, I went through and described my ten parts, my ten parts--my good boy part, my evaluator part, formerly the critic, my melancholia parts, my adventurer part, my feisty part, which is formally my angry part, my challenger part who was my rebel, my lover part, my collaborator part which was formerly my competent part, that's the one that ran my system most of the time, my guardian part, which was also formerly my intimidator part and my creative part.

Every one of these parts, if they are disconnected from me, is going to have a distorted God image. My good boy part, if he's driving my bus--he's not connected with God. He has this tight code that I need to follow: God is distant, God is demanding, God doesn't particularly care about my sufferings and my trials. He just wants me to get it done. That's what happens with my God image. And I've got to leap to that standard, and I've got to hit that standard, or I will be rejected by God and he won't love me.

My evaluator part--when that part is separated from God, it goes back to that role of being my inner critic, riding me, berating me, driving me. It's really kind of painful. It's really actually quite painful. And this has to do with the shame that my melancholia part has when that part's disconnected from God. That's the part that carries shame for me. "You're not good enough". There are so many efforts to be good enough. Some of my high levels of production in my life have been driven by shame, by an effort to be good enough to be loved by God. If I do enough podcast episodes, if I write enough weekly reflections, if I stretch myself with enough clients, if I lay myself out in trying to love my children, if I burn out, if I become exhausted, if I'm consumed, if I'm curled up on the side of the road, then maybe God will love me.

This goes back to my childhood history. This is a very, very clear--where this came from in my own developmental history. The way that I construed how I would be lovable, driven so much by the shame of my melancholia part. And then the response is from my feisty part. This is my angry part. This is the one that is willing to give the finger to everybody, right. And this part got really suppressed by my good boy part because this feisty part would not hesitate to take on God. That part doesn't feel like it's got anything to lose. This part, this feisty part, when it's really disconnected from my core self. It doesn't want to be in heaven with God. The last place it wants to be is in heaven with God staring into the eyes of this God that so betrayed and abandoned him. Absolutely not. No way in hell. This part would say, when it's disconnected from God that it would rather be apart from God than in relationship with him. Which would mean choosing hell. Actually, what my feisty part really wants when it's really worked up is to be in limbo, to be in a place of natural happiness where there is no God because it doesn't really want to be with Satan, doesn't really want to be down there, but it can't abide this idea of being in God when it is isolated, when it's not in right relationship with my innermost self. And that anger fuels two things, two other parts. One is my guardian part, formally my intimidator part, and the other is my challenger part, that's my rebel. When my challenger part moves back into that rebel role, that part opens me up to all kinds of sinning. Sin driven by anger, sin driven by the fact that this isn't a God worth worshipping. Guardian part, my intimidator part--this is the one that's willing to go hand to hand with God. This is the one, this is the part of me if I allow it to take over, it can dominate attorneys and courtrooms. This is the part of me that chases dogs. This part actually likes it when dogs chase me because it can take over and it can turn the tables on the dog. I've even chased pitbulls away when that part takes over with the intensity of the anger from my feisty part, right, which is a defense against the shame, which is a defense against the intensity of the shame held by my melancholia part.

My creative part generally has more of a positive relationship with God, identifies with God as creator, likes to do creative things, understands that, yeah, we create together, so that one doesn't have as many issues with God, but it can also get kind of manic--really rev me up. And when it really revs me up with a lot of excitement or euphoria, then I get close to the touches of the Holy Spirit. I can't discern what the Holy Spirit would want me to do because it's just too busy inside, there's just too much energy. I'm too wired.

My lover part that is a part of me that when it's disconnected from God, is going to look for God in all the wrong places. It's going to look for surrogates for God. Other relationships. This is the part that led me on a decades long search for a guru that I could sit with under the banyan tree who would impart wisdom to me as a loving parent figure.

When these parts are all in right relationship, though, when there's harmony, when there's collaboration, they see God as my innermost self sees God. Much more oriented towards who God actually is. When there's fragmentation inside of me, when there's fracturing inside of me, whichever part tends to dominate, that's who I start to really feel and act, as though God exists if I'm not resisting that.

So let's talk about consequences if we don't do this human formation work--if we don't address these reasons why we resist the love of God, if we refuse to be loved by God.

First point here is that nothing can separate us from God's love. Romans 8:38-39, St. Paul, "For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ, Jesus, our Lord." What does that mean? Nothing. Nothing can separate you from the love of God. Not trauma, not even demons. Nothing can separate you from the love of God.

With one exception. The one exception--you. Only you can separate you from the love of God. Only you have the power to do that by refusing to let the love of God come into you. That is what sin is. It is separating ourselves from God. Sin is damaging our relationship with God, sin is withdrawing from God, sin is breaking that relationship, and that happens. Jesus wept over Jerusalem in Luke 19:41-44 that reads, "And when he drew near and saw the city he wept over it, saying, 'Would that even today you knew the things that make for peace! But now they are hid from your eyes. For the days shall come upon you when your enemies will cast up a bank about you and surround you and hem you in on every side and dash you to the ground, you and your children within you, and they will not leave one stone upon another; because you did not know the time of your visitation.'" It's not that God would not protect Jerusalem. It's that God could not protect the Israelites, not without violating their freedom, not without forcing himself upon them.

And now for the most haunting words in all of scripture, Matthew 7:13-14. Our Lord says, "Enter by the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is easy, that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard, that leads to life, and those that find it are few." This has been so ignored in the 20th and 21st centuries. I'm amazed that so many Catholics, so many people familiar with scripture can somehow imagine and think their way to believing that hell doesn't exist. I believe hell exists, because I've seen it. No, I'm not talking about like one of the Fatima children where I've been granted a vision of hell. But I have seen in deep, painful detail what happens in my own life when I've separated myself from God, but also in the lives of so many people who have privileged me by inviting me into their worlds. We need to understand what hell is.

Pope John Paul, the second in a 1999 audience, said, "God did not create hell. Hell is not a punishment imposed externally by God, but a development of premises already set by people in this life." There's an edition of the 'Catechism of the Catholic Church', it was edited by Archbishop Rino Fisichella in 2019, and was put out by our Sunday Visitor, and it's got great commentary in the back of it--I really enjoy that book. And Louis Ladaria, he says, quote, "To be precise, God did not make hell. His free creatures make it, inasmuch as they separate themselves from him. Nor does God send anyone to hell; it is the damned one who separates himself and does not want to enter into the Father's house. God, Saint Irenaeus said, does not really look to punish the damned, but as they are deprived of all good things, it is the penalty that pursues them." "A similar idea in St. Augustine, God abandons the sinner to his evil, he does not, properly speaking, give evil to anyone. Because of this, and despite what is said sometimes, we need to insist on the fact that hell does not say anything against the goodness of God."

Popular authors even get this. Dean Koontz in his 'Book of Counted Sorrows', says, "We make hell real, we stoke its fires. And in its flames, our hope expires." The Catechism, paragraph 1037, "God predestined no one to go to hell; for this, a willful turning away from God (a mortal sin) is necessary, and persistence in it until the end. In the Eucharistic liturgy and in the daily prayers of our faithful, the church implores the mercy of God who does not want 'any to perish, but all to come to repentance.'" God is not trying to catch us, not sitting there with his hand on the trap door to hell, to send people there.

Father Edward McIlmail, in his article, 'Ask a Priest: If God Loves Us So Much, Why Does Hell Exist', he gives this analogy--he says, "Imagine you are on a ship that is searching for survivors from a sunken ocean liner. You see a passenger struggling in the waves behind you. You throw a lifeline to him, but he refuses to grab it. You beg him to take hold of the lifeline, but he ignores your plea. Eventually, he sinks below the waves and drowns. Does his drowning indicate that you were indifferent? When you begged him to grab the lifeline, were you displaying hate? Was this drowning your fault? The answer to all these questions is: no. The person in the water, for whatever reason, refused your help. His drowning was the consequence." Hell is the consequence--it's not something that God wills for us, but because he respects our freedom and because we have the capacity to turn away from him, to go with these eight reasons why we resist his love, because we have that freedom, hell has to exist.

Here's the really, really important thing. It doesn't matter why we flee from God in the final analysis. It doesn't matter why we flee from his love. If we flee from his love and we persist in that flight--if we continue to reject his love, he will not force himself on us. He can't, because he is love. And love doesn't invade, love doesn't intrude, love doesn't dominate. If we persist in refusing to love, if we close ourselves off to love, we will have the consequences, and we'll have them in this life.

What is hell like? Well, hell is isolation. It's utter alienation. Tekla Babyak, in his 2018 article called 'Dante, Liszt and the Alienated Agony of Hell', writes, "Dante Alighieri's Inferno portrays hell as an alienated realm in which doomed spirits must spend eternally in isolation and regret." And John Ciardi in his notes on Canto 32 of 'The Inferno', writes about the deepest level of hell, the ninth circle. "The treachery of these souls were denials of love, which is God and of all human warmth. Only the remorseless dead center of the ice will serve to express their natures. As they denied God's love, so are they furthest removed from the light and warmth of his Son. As they denied all human ties. So they are bound only by the unyielding ice." The deepest level of hell is ice.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer in 'Life Together' wrote, "Sin demands to have a man by himself. It withdraws him from the community. The more isolated a person is, the more destructive will be the power of sin over him, and the more deeply he becomes involved in it, and the more disastrous his isolation." And what does this sound like? Well there was a character, Melody Brooks, in Sharon Draper's book 'Out of My Mind'. The character said, "It's like I live in a cage with no door and no key. And I have no way to tell someone how to get me out." Sue Johnson, therapist, writer, in her book 'Hold Me Tight', said "Isolation and the potential loss of loving connection is coded by the human brain into a primal panic response."

In my work with my clients, in my private practice, and also in my relationships with the therapists in the Interior Therapist Community and with all the members of the resilient Catholic community that I lead in Souls and Hearts, we talk about the God images that parts have. I have seen so many times the agony--the incredible suffering of alienation from those who have turned away from God. Parts of them still desperately clinging to the Catholic faith. Parts of them, though, dominating them, totally alienated from God. That's where I've seen the most abominable, the most terrible suffering. That's where I've seen the most terrible suffering--the most heart-rending, gut-wrenching suffering is from those who will not accept the love of God.

And for those that will--for those that are open to it, and maybe not immediately from God directly--maybe that's too much, maybe not from our lady directly, maybe through the therapy, maybe through the relationship with someone else that can somehow seem more tangible, seem more real to them. Sometimes people need to experience the love of God--most times, I would say, people need to experience the love of God through another Christian--through another Catholic. And experiencing the love of God through another Catholic can invite parts to believe that maybe, just maybe, love exists for them. It might invite parts to question the certainty that they have in their distorted, terrible God images. It might invite parts to engage the possibility that maybe, maybe, maybe God could love all the parts, all of me, that my whole being could still be a beloved son or daughter of God.

So what are we to do? What are we to do? The first thing--I'm going to start with, the spiritual stuff, is to pray: to set aside the time to pray. There are plenty of aides to praying--I really like the book. 'Personal Prayer: A Guide for Receiving the Father's Love' by Father Thomas Acklin, by Father Boniface Hicks--really practical suggestions in there about how to pray. Very wise, very good grasp of psychology that those two Benedictine monks and spiritual directors have. I found 'Fire Within' by Father Thomas Dubay--that was what launched my prayer life decades ago.

The first letter of St John. That is amazing. Take that to Lectio Divina. And if you're not doing Lectio Divina, I would really hope that you would. There's an online article called 'Lectio Divina: A Guide What It Is & How It Helps Prayer Life' by Dan Burke, it's at spiritualdirection.com, you can check that out. Also, Father Jacques Philippe in his book 'Called To Life' has a really excellent, succinct appendix on Lectio Divina. So Father Jack Philippe--'Called to Life', check out the appendix. There's also a section on Lectio Divina in Father Jacques Philippe's book, 'Thirsting for Prayer', it's titled 'Meditating on Scripture'. He calls it Lectio Divina in the body, but the title of the section is called 'Meditating on Scripture'. That's also really, really good. I'm going to just advise the Nike Model to pray. The 'just do it', set aside the perfection, the desire to do prayer well--when you start praying, you're not going to pray well, you're going to pray badly. The most important things in this life, we either do badly or we don't do at all. St. Teresa of Avila says "he who neglects mental prayer, needs not a devil to carry him to hell, but he brings himself there with his own hands." St. John of the Cross, "Without the aid of mental prayer, the soul cannot triumph over the forces of the devil." Prayer. Engaging in a particular type of prayer, interpersonal prayer, real prayer, coming to God as a little child, a parvulo, a little itty bitty child. "Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them. For the Kingdom of God is made up of such as these."

Second thing--do your human formation work. Let's not make excuses about that. Any problem, any difficulties you have in your relationships in the natural realm here on earth, you are going to bring into your spiritual relationships. This is one of the reasons why people do not like relational spirituality--they don't feel competent at it. They've got real issues in their relationships and they bring that into their relationship with God, they bring that into the relationship with our Lady. Somehow they expect that it shouldn't have an effect there, but it's part of who they are.

Interior integration. I'm going to I talk about this at length in my weekly reflection from October 12 2022. Why is interior integration crucial for union with God? I get into St. Thomas Aquinas. What he says about that, you can check that out, soulsandhearts.com/blog, October 12, 2022, scroll down, you'll find it.

Get to know your parts. So many times our parts do not want us to enter into relationship with God because they do not understand who God is. They're like Stephen--they want to run away from the nurses with the IVs. They want to run away from life-saving treatment because they do not understand. We need humility, we need to trust. We need to pray for that, pray for the faith to ground our relationship with God, not to serve as some sort of supplement, not to rely on just our own personal experience and how we construe that experience, because that's so subjective can be so wrong. Pray for faith, do your human formation work, get into therapy or counseling, especially Internal Family Systems therapy with a therapist who is Catholic, or who at least respects your Catholic faith and will not underline it or undermine it.

Now, I'm going to give you something else too. On November 21, I'm going to put out an experiential exercise as a bonus podcast. I'm playing with the idea of breaking apart the main sort of like lecture thing that I do in these podcasts and putting the experiential exercises in a second episode. That way you don't have to pause it if you're driving or working out to do the experiential exercise, you know that the experiential exercise is going to require a different space.

The other thing, because I'm so passionate about this human formation stuff, I want to bring it to the world. I wanted to bring it to as many people as I can--that's why I founded the Resilient Catholics Community. You do not have to be alone in doing this human formation work, and it doesn't require therapy or counseling. Therapy and counseling do not have a monopoly on human formation work. We've needed to get out of some pretty narrow boxes, and that's what the members of the Resilient Catholics Community are doing. They are breaking out of their boxes and they are pioneers. They are really trendsetters and finding out how do we foster human formation in new ways. We do it together. We do it on a pilgrimage. We are in relationship with each other. It's an excellent way to get to know your parts. I've brought together the best human formation resources, the best psychological resources outside of therapy, outside of counseling, concentrated them into a whole program, 44 weekly meetings, company meetings, in small groups where we work through these things together. Daily connections with your companion on the journey, in your company, in your cohort, in the broader Resilient Catholics Community. If you resonate with this podcast, if this makes sense to you, if parts make sense to you, if this moves your heart, if you resonate with those experience exercises, if you have a sense that this is one way that you could really benefit from, sign up on the waiting list, go to soulsandhearts.com/RCC, get on the waiting list. November 10, I'm sending out the first orientation email for the group that's applying, starting on December 1. December 1, we reopen the community to new applications. We do that twice a year in December and June. If you have questions about whether it might be for you, go to our landing page, soulsandhearts.com/RCC, read through the materials, listen to the videos or watch the videos. Got lots of questions and answers--lots of information there. If you still have questions, call me up. Office hours, Tuesdays and Thursdays, 4:30-5:30 p.m. EST, 317-567-9594, private conversation 10 to 15 minutes--I'll just give that time to you. Or you can email me [email protected].

Pray for me, put the word out, let people know about our offerings at Souls and Hearts. This podcast, the weekly reflections. Sign up for those--you can get those weekly reflections in your email box. Go to soulsandhearts.com main page. Click on the button that says 'Get the Weekly Reflections From Dr. Peter In Your Email'. You can also see the archive at soulsandhearts.com/blog. You can check those out if that stuff resonates with you. Do some discernment, see if you might be called to join us in the Resilient Catholics Community.

And with that, we'll wrap it. We'll invoke our patroness and our patron, our Lady, our Mother, Untier of Knots, pray for us. St. John the Baptist, pray for us.

Confusion and controversy abound in the Catholic Church about self-love. Learn four ways to understand self-love, why we avoid self-love, the six reasons it is important to cultivate proper self-love, what is appropriate self-sacrifice, and receive two practical spiritual means for growing in proper self-love: The Litany of Self-Love and also an entirely new way of examining your conscience. 

IIC 98 Self Love -- What Catholics Need to Know

Today we are talking about self-love: the love of self. There is so much controversy, so much confusion about self-love among Catholics. Is self-love good and holy, or is self-love bad and dangerous? Is self-love necessary for loving others? Is self-love unavoidable? The answers from Catholic writers and thinkers and saints are all over the board with regard to self-love, with so many apparent contradictions that it can make your head spin. And the positions from different reputable Christian sources are extreme; their positions seem irreconcilable.

Here is just a sampling: St. Augustine said, "there can be only two basic loves...the love of God unto the forgetfulness of self or the love of self unto the forgetfulness and denial of God." St. Maximus the Confessor, "Flee from self-love, the mother of malice..." Thomas A Kempis, in the 'Imitation of Christ', "Know that self-love does you more harm than anything else in the world." Father Jean Nicholas Grou, Jesuit priest, "Self-love is the one source of all the illusions of the spiritual life. By its means, the devil exercises his deceits, leads souls astray, drags them sometimes to hell by the very road that seems to lead them to heaven." St. Thomas Aquinas says, "Inordinate self-love is the cause of every sin". And here's from Pope Francis from December 9th, 2015, "The movements of self-love, which make mercy foreign in the world, are so numerous that we often fail to recognize them as limitations and as sin." 'The Catechism of the Catholic Church', paragraph 1850, "...sin is thus 'love of oneself, even to contempt of God'". And St. Paul in 2 Timothy 3:1-5, said this, "But understand this that in the last days there will come times of stress. For men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, inhuman, implacable, slanderers, profligates, fierce, haters of good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, holding the form of religion but denying the power of it. Avoid such people."

Lovers of self. Now we also hear from St Thomas Aquinas that, "Self-love is in one way common to all, in another way proper to good men, in another, proper to evil men." Father, Jacques Philippe, in his book 'Called To Life', with his pastoral approach, says, "Love of God, love of neighbor and love of self grow together and sustain one another as they grow. If one is absent or neglected, the others will suffer. Like the legs of a tripod, all three are needed in order to stand, and each leans on the other." He also says, "Love travels along two paths that are inseparable in the end: love of God and love of neighbor. But as this text suggests, there is another aspect of charity--love of one's self. ("You shall love your neighbor as yourself"). This self-love is good and necessary. Not egoism that refers everything to "me", but the grace to live in peace with oneself, consent to be what one is, with one's talents and limitations." And the Bishop of Sioux Falls, Donald Edward DeGrood, said this, "We are called to love ourselves as God made us and loves us. It is sometimes difficult to know our inherent dignity, to receive God's love and live out of the truth of who we are. And just as God loves us and indeed rejoices and delights in us, so too are we call to rejoice and delight in who we are and who others are." And Catholic moral theologian, Michel Therrien, in a December 3, 2020 article in Denver Catholic said, "...the proper love of self is the foundation for knowing how to treat others."

Alright, so you might be asking me, "Dr. Peter, Which is it? Are we supposed to be loving ourselves or not loving ourselves?" Laura, an Australian Catholic writer, in her blogpost, 'Self-Love for Catholics: What is the Catholic teaching on loving yourself' says this, "Depending on who you ask, the idea of self-love can get some very different reactions. Even the Bible seems a little confused. On the one hand, Jesus calls us to love our neighbors as ourselves. On the other hand, St. Paul condemns those who are 'lovers of self'. I won't like to bag out the Bible but mixed messages much? There is no section in the catechism on self-love. There is no treatise entitled 'Loving Thyself' by St. Bernard or 'The Internal Positive Dialogues" of St. Catherine of Siena. There definitely aren't any ancient meditations on "How Awesome a Monk Am I Today!", or "Eighty Affirmations for the Doubting Deacon" from the Patristic Era. And if I'm honest, this is super frustrating. Maybe you found the same?"

Well, Laura, thank you for bringing this up. I find this whole body of Catholic literature on self-love both fascinating and frustrating at the same time and also so very important. We really need to sort this out because the stakes are so high. So rather than curse the darkness, here is my attempt to light a candle for you, to illuminate the best that I've found on this essential theme: Self-Love.

I am Dr. Peter Malinoski, clinical psychologist, passionate Catholic. And this is Interior Integration for Catholics. The Interior Integration for Catholics Podcast is all about bringing you the best of psychology and human formation and harmonizing it with the perennial truths of our Catholic faith. Each month we take the most important human formation issues head on. We don't shy away from the tough topics, and today we have a tough topic. How do we rightly understand self-love? What is self-love and how should we as Catholics understand it, given this whirlwind of confusion and controversy that has stretched back for centuries? This is episode 98, titled 'Self-Love--What Catholics Need to Know', and it's released on October 3, 2022.

We have been working through a series on trauma and wellbeing--we started that with episode 88. In the last episode, episode 97 titled: 'Unlove of Self: How Trauma Predisposes You to Self-Hatred and Indifference', we looked at the impact of trauma and how it contributes to us not loving ourselves.

Today, we're switching gears. We're looking at what it means to be in an ordered relationship with ourselves. Is self-love a part of right relating with ourselves? We are going to bring so much clarity to this topic today.

It is so good to be with you, thank you for listening in, thank you for being together with me once again. I'm glad you're here and I'm glad that together we're exploring what self-love really means.

Now, I want to do a little introduction here to this topic. About 20 years ago, a theologian friend of mine was encouraging me to get out more. I was pretty sheltered, I was in private practice. I wasn't doing any public speaking, but he was really impressed with some of the things that we were talking about in our conversations. At the time, I was sorting out the psychology thing, too. I was really trying to figure out how to practice as a psychologist and ground that practice of psychology in a Catholic understanding of the human person. I had a keen sense that after I die, on my day of particular judgment I will be responsible before the Lord for every word that I uttered to every client, for everything I taught or said or advised, and I was worried. I didn't want to lead anyone astray. I didn't want to lead my clients astray. And I knew that I was speculating, because frankly, there wasn't a lot out there about how you grounded the practice of psychology and a Catholic anthropology.

Matthew 18:6 rang in my ears. "Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea." I was like, alright, I don't want to lead anyone to sin. And so, I was pretty quiet--didn't want to get out there. Plus, I was starting a family and I wanted a simple, contemplative life. I wanted a life of prayer as much as was compatible with my duties of state as a husband and a father.

Alright, fast forward 20 years. Now, I have to share. I have a strong sense of a call to be much more public, to be much more vocal. I still am committed to a deep life of prayer, I'm still strongly committed to my wife, Pam, and to my children. But now four of my seven children are grown and gone. And I still know that I'm responsible for every word that I utter in this podcast, every word I write in my weekly reflections. The last thing I want for you is for me to lead you astray. That's the last thing I want. But I also don't want to be like the servant that buried his master's talent out of fear. I also now realize that I'm responsible for the words that I don't say--for the gifts that I don't share with you, for the topics I don't bring to you. But I want to do all of this from an absolutely Catholic position. An unapologetically Catholic, completely Catholic worldview. 2 Timothy 4:2-4, St. Paul says, "preach the word, be urgent in season and out of season. Convince, rebuke and exhort. Be unfailing in patience and in teaching. For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own likings, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander into myths." And if there is ever a topic where people reject sound teaching and with itching years, heap up teachers to suit their own likings, that topic has got to be self-love. Self-love is it.

Now you need to know that when I take on these really tough topics, especially a topic like self-love, where so many great souls have been in disagreement, I could be wrong about some of the things that I tell you. I could be teaching something in error. That's entirely possible. I need to be straight up with you about that. I'm not trying to deceive anybody. I'm saying what I think is the truth. But I am very open to fraternal corrections. I'm very open to collegial corrections. And so if you hear something that I'm saying in one of these podcasts or that I write in one of my weekly reflections, and it's wrong, I want you to get in touch with me and let me know; and then give me a source--quote me something from the Catholic Catechism or something from some other authoritative Catholic source of teaching. If you have access to Ludwig Ott's Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma or Denzinger--give me something encyclical, give me something where you're showing me what I say contradicts the truths of the faith, because I really want to be correct in this. So with that said, let's move on.

There is so much avoidance of discussing this topic of self-love. Why? Well, the first reason is because there's so much confusion about self-love. Gene Outka, a Catholic Philosopher who wrote a book on 'Agape', said this, "To say anything very useful about a phrase as generally ambiguous as 'self-love' may well be impossible. For it serves as a classic example of the difficulty already noted: a single word or phrase may shuttle back and forth between distinct experiences in different and sometimes rival concepts." John Lippitt in his article, 'True Self-Love and True Self-Sacrifice' said, "Yet self-love and self-sacrifice are notorious problems in Christian thought, and the tradition is littered with apparently incompatible claims about them." Gene Outka said, "Hence, frequently 'self-love' has several meanings which have to be clarified before one can determine the nature and extent of substantive as contrasted with verbal disagreements." He's going to be really helpful to us in a little bit, Gene Outka, in determining the different types of self-love. Oliver O'Donovan in 'The Problem of Self-Love in St. Augustine' said, "Mutually incompatible assertions about self-love jostle one another and demand to be reconciled. And Augustine himself refuses to undertake this task for us. There is no 'theory of self-love' articulated in his pages. He rarely tells us what he means by the phrase, and when he does, he is misleading." It's really interesting because Oliver O'Donovan argues that St. Augustine was sort of all over the board with his approaches to self-love, and he wasn't very systemic in the way that he treated the topic.

So, for example, these are three quotes from St. Augustine that Oliver O'Donovan put side by side to show us how different even this doctor of the church was in approaching the topic. Quote one: "The primal destruction of man was self-love." The primal destruction of man was self-love. Quote two: "There is no one who does not love himself; but one must search for the right love and avoid the warped." Quote three: "Indeed, you did not love yourself when you did not love the God who made you."

Alright, so in the first quote, we were taught that self-love is destructive--that it destroys man. And in the third quote, that we didn't love ourselves when we didn't love God.

Some of this may also be just limitations in the English language. For example, we've got this one word; 'love', and then we put self in front of it, 'self-love', and it can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. We don't have a wide vocabulary to describe this concept of love.

So I think one reason why there's an avoidance of discussing self-love is because there's just so much confusion about the topic. How many times in the last 10 or 20 years have you heard a homily or a sermon on self-love?

I also think there's a lot of avoidance on the personal level. There's an often a de facto rejection of the concept of self-love by individual Catholics as being just selfishness. Sara Swisher writes, "Many Catholics are raised with the notion that they must serve others without regard for themselves. In order to be a 'true' Catholic, one must deny oneself, and love and care for others."

A lot of times self-love is not discussed--you don't hear about it. So there can be an assumption that self-love is not an important topic. Self-love is sometimes condemned as 'weird'. Self-love is something that those New-Agers are into, along with crystals and karma and reincarnation. Yes, self-love is sort of in that wheelhouse. Self-love is in that kind of category.

And another thing is that it's difficult for us to love ourselves. Father Jack Philippe wrote in his book 'Called To Life', "People today have great difficulty loving themselves--the proliferation of pop psychological books and personal development and the acquisition of self-esteem are symptoms of that." Finally, St. John Chrysostom, in his homily on 2 Thessalonians, said, "There are many things that distract us from love." There are many things that distract us from love--including this question of self-love.

Then also there are certain types of spiritualities that actually don't really focus that much on love, especially self-love. I refer to this one kind of spirituality as a power spirituality or a macho spirituality, that really focuses on the development of virtue and self-perfection--not so much on love. That may be appealing, especially to men; there's a focus on fasting, on cold showers, on becoming like a spiritual special forces warrior. This kind of power spirituality is not particularly relational. It's much more focused on behaviors, on stopping the sinning--whatever the sinning is for that person. And it's not as much focused on loving, including a proper ordered love of self.

Finally, I don't want to omit the importance of shame. So many Catholics are carrying so much shame, and some don't even know it. Shame resists ordered self-love and shame promotes disordered self-love. And you can check out episodes 37-49 of this podcast for a 13 episode series on shame. It's vitally, vitally important that we understand what shame is.

So, let's get into definitions of self-love, because some of the disagreement about self-love is really semantic differences. It's just differences in how we're defining this nebulous, ambiguous term 'self-love', and some of it is more substantive disagreements.

This is where Gene Outka's book 'Agape' is going to be helpful to us. He has four value judgments of self-love--basically four ways that people look at self-love.

One, as wholly nefarious--that it's just bad. Self-love is bad. That's the first one. Second, is to look at self-love as normal, reasonable and prudent. The third way is to look at self-love as justified derivatively from other regard. What that means is self-love is okay, because we need to love ourselves in order to be able to provide other good things to other people. We're not really going to look at it as a good in itself, but it has a utilitarian value--if we love ourselves, then we can love others better. And then the fourth one is to look at self-love as a definite obligation, independent of loving others. So those are the four.

So let's start with self-love as wholly nefarious. Now Outka, he says, that "the single word which best connotes those attitudes and actions characteristic of nefarious self-love is--acquisitiveness." Basically when self-love is being condemned, it's usually because of this quality of acquisitiveness. The person is just trying to satisfy himself or herself, and in that effort is trying to find some state or some possession that is satisfying personally, and that that goal of acquisitiveness dominantly pervades every relation with others. People know that a person is just in relationship to try to get what they want. Bernard Brady says, "Sinners love their sensitive nature at the expense of their rational nature. They love their physical self, thinking it is their essential nature. Their love is misdirected." Okay, so what Brady is telling us is that the love is misdirected. There is self-love in this nefarious way of looking at it, but it's because that love is disordered. Sinners, when they are acting out of nefarious self-love or disordered self-love is they are loving just their sensitive natures--they're just loving their bodies, they're loving their concupiscence desires. And Anthony Flood writes that, "Through wicked love of self, a person seeks the bodily pleasures and material goods at the expense of the goods perfective of his properly personal nature. Wicked or disordered love of self perverts natural self-love away from the full spectrum of goods perfective of human nature, including interpersonal unions toward a more restricted set of goods willed solely for oneself. Through this disordered manner of willing, wicked self-love constitutes the root of all sin." Remember St. Thomas Aquinas said that inordinate self-love constitutes the root of all sin. Here we're seeing it. It's selfishness, essentially--it's pursuing something just because I want it, not because it helps me to enter into a deeper relationship with God, not because it helps me to enter into deeper relationship with anybody else, not because it helps me to love anybody else, but just because I want it. That's destructive, that's disordered, that's the wicked self love. Okay, so one can see why there would be such condemnations by St. Maximus, for example, "flee from self-love, the mother of malice", Thomas A Kempis, "know that self-love does you more harm than anything else in the world." That's entirely consistent with this thomistic understanding that inordinate self love constitutes the root of all sin. St. Thomas writes that in the Summa.

Alright, so that's one way of understanding self-love. And that's maybe the most commonly understood way--as sort of self-love as nefarious; self-love as equivalent to selfishness.

But let's go on to the second one--self-love as normal, reasonable, and prudent. So I'm going to walk you through what Gene Outka has to say, and I'll try to translate this philosophical writing into something a little more understandable. But let's just grapple with the quote first. Jeanne also writes, "The second value judgment is that self-love is normal, reasonable, prudent: it is not especially praiseworthy, but not necessarily blameworthy. One encounters here a relatively straightforward assumption. People do not need just in general to be urged toward concern about their own welfare; we have plenty of attachment to that and of an immediate and unreflective kind. Thus our pursuit of it does not involve moral merit or virtue. Considered in itself it is not an obligation. At most one may call it normal, reasonable, and prudent. On the other hand one need not disparage it altogether." So what Gene Outka is saying here is that--yeah, of course we love ourselves. That's normal. That's natural. We don't need to be urged to be concerned about our own welfare. We have plenty of attachment to that. But it's not inherently sinful for us to be concerned about our welfare. Outka says, "Such an assumption, I think, stands behind one very common interpretation of the 'as yourself' clause in the second great commandment, namely, 'you shall love your neighbor as yourself'". So what he's saying there is--yes, of course, we love ourselves. Everybody knows that, we have an attachment to ourselves and we should love other people like that. Rudolf Bultmann says, "It is stupid...to say that...justifiable self-love a necessary standard of self-respect must precede love of neighbor, since the command runs, 'love your neighbor as yourself'. Self-love is thus presupposed. Yes, it is indeed presupposed, but not as something which man needs to learn, which must be expressly required of him. It is the attitude of the natural man which must be overcome." Alright, so basically this interpretation of the second great commandment is that--yeah, of course we love ourselves, everybody loves themselves; that's the standard of reference by which we should love other people. We should have the same degree of concern for other people as we do ourselves. Loving ourselves is not a virtue, but it shouldn't be condemned either. That's the second way of understanding self-love.

The third way is that self-love is justified derivatively. Let's unpack this a little bit more. This is where we should take care of ourselves; we should actually proactively love ourselves and take care of ourselves because we need to in order to love others. So Outka says "Those who treat self-love as not especially praiseworthy in itself sometimes allow for the deliberate concern about the agent's own welfare, as long as this can be derived from other regard." Alright, so in other words, if I need to take care of myself in some way so that I can take care of others, then self-love is justified as a derivative of loving somebody else. W. G. Maclagan says, "There can be a disciplinary value for others in not permitting them to treat our happiness with indifference. Not only have we no obligation to make ourselves, as it were, 'everybody's doormat'; we have something of an obligation not to do so. Nor is the reason for this adequately given in the form that others considered separately as individuals will be better men and women if they learn to respect interests not their own, though that is true enough. Inseparable from this is the further fact that the realization of a good community, which is the moral concern of us all, is impossible in any other terms." Okay, so let's unpack that. Basically, what Maclagan is saying is that, you know what? Sometimes it's important not to let others treat us badly because that's bad for them. We might be putting them in a near occasion of sin for example, if we allow them to exploit us. And so we protect our own self-interest; we love ourselves, but we do that because we're trying to love them.

In other words, you know, we don't want to be everybody's doormat. We have sometimes an obligation not to let other people wipe feet on us because that's bad for them, but even more that's bad for the community. That's a bad norm to establish in the Christian community. Outka, says, "Another sort of case, already alluded to, which seems to justify the agents asserting his interest at the expense of another's, is one where the interest of third parties are at stake and a sacrifice of his interest would constitute an unjust betrayal of theirs." So this is where, for example, a mother may go in and have a chronic health issue treated so that she could better take care of her children. And that might inconvenience her husband--if she's got to go away and she's got to have a procedure done and spend three or four days in the hospital--that may inconvenience her husband, but she's doing that because there are these third parties, these children, that need her to be taking care of herself, that need her to be to be loving herself. So the focus here is not on the intrinsic good that the mother is seeking for herself in her recovery. It's really the derivative value that's important because it it leads to a good for those third party--for those children.

And finally, Outka says, "The agent may also be obligated to look after his own welfare: negatively, in order not to burden others and then positively in order to most effectively further their good." So this is where someone might love themselves by taking care of themselves so that they don't cause somebody else more trouble. So that they don't unnecessarily burden others, or so that they are able to further others' good. So, a dad that exercises so that he can play ball with his kids, you know--that he can get out on the basketball court and play with them, again is this idea that self-love is justified derivatively.

That's different than the fourth value judgment of self-love, and that's where self-love is a definitive obligation. In this form of self-love, self-love is seen as something that is good for the person to do for his or her own sake. It's not contingent on what it means for somebody else. In other words, if somebody is loving one's self, there is a good just intrinsic in that love. It doesn't depend on what the effect of that love is for anybody else.

Outka writes that, "self-love as self-respect may refer to laudable attitudes and actions, not all of which can be either encompassed under prudence or linked necessarily with a benefit to others." Father Jacques Philippe, in his book called 'Called to Life', said, "Love of God requires the love of self. Not to accept myself as I am means not recognizing God's love for me. And loving me after all, God is not loving some ideal being, the person I 'ought to be' or 'would like to be'. He takes me just as I am, and I cannot fully welcome this love without accepting myself. Pride, perfectionism and the fear of rejection are among the obstacles to that." So just to be clear, I am very clearly in the fourth camp, along with St. Thomas Aquinas, I believe that self-love is a definite obligation. It's something that is good in and of itself--that it is good for you to love you, even if it doesn't have an immediate benefit for someone else.

What are the reasons that self-love is important? Why should we be discussing it? Why should we focus on it? The first one--we are going to love ourselves one way or another. We're either going to love ourselves in an ordered way, or we're going to love ourselves in a disordered way. We're going to love ourselves in a proper way, or we're going to love ourselves in a wicked way. And so let's figure out how to love ourselves in a good way. Second thing, self-love is an antidote to selfishness. Third, self-love brings peace. It helps us with an interior sense of peace. Fourth thing, self-love is essential to loving God. Fifth thing, self-love is essential to loving others. Sixth thing, there are consequences for not loving the self in an ordered way.

So let's start with the first one. We are going to love ourselves in one way or another. Either we're going to love ourselves in a proper, ordered way, or we're going to love ourselves in a disordered way. The question isn't whether you will love yourself. The question is how you will love yourself. Will it be in a nefarious, disordered way or will it be in a reasonably prudent way, or will you justify self-love in a pragmatic, utilitarian sense, because it benefits somebody else, or will you see self-love as valuable, important and essential to loving God and your neighbor?

Anthony Flood in his book 'The Metaphysical Foundations of Love', said, "All actions, both good and sinful, proceed from the will. The basic act of the will is to love, and all actions are motivated by love. Thus, sinful acts will necessarily be motivated by love, must be caused by disordered love." So what kind of self-love will we have? The Dominican father, Paul A. Duffner, in his article 'Two Kinds of Self-Love' says, "So we have the rightly ordered love of self which God commanded, and the inordinate love of self to which we are all inclined by reason of our human nature. The whole of the Christian life is a struggle to overcome the latter in order to attain the former." So what Father Duffer is saying--the whole of the Christian life is a struggle to overcome inordinate love of self.

And how do we do that and why do we do that? We do that in order to have a rightly ordered love of self. And again, not just for its own sake, even though it is a good in and of itself, but because a rightly ordered love of self opens up the door to being able to love our neighbor and ourself. That's very, very clear in St. Thomas Aquinas in the Summa.

Secondly, ordered self-love or proper self-love is an antidote to selfishness. Anthony Flood says, "Love of others in general and friendship in particular, for Aquinas, derives from a more basic source--namely a person's love of self. A person does and should love himself more than he loves other human beings. Aquinas is not endorsing selfishness and self-preoccupation. In fact...proper self-love functions as the antidote to selfishness and self-preoccupation." When we are ordered inside--when we are secure inside, when we love ourselves, we are so much more free to get outside of ourselves. We don't have to be so self-absorbed if things are quiet and peaceful inside. The other part of this is that no one can love you in lieu of you. You can't delegate the responsibility for self-love to somebody else. No one else can make up that love for you, not even God, because you are called to love you. And we all know of cases in which somebody was loved by God, by other people, but did not love himself. And you can see what kind of tragic results can happen from that. Ordered self-love, proper self love is an antidote to selfishness. It allows us--it frees us to be able to get outside of ourselves--to turn away from ourselves, to be able to enter into others phenomenological worlds.

The third reason is this sense of peace. Anthony Flood writes, "The roots of benevolence and beneficence and self-love concern willing and seeking true goods that enhance both one's nature and the integrity of one's interior life. Thus, the activity of self-governance itself derives from self-love. In friendship, delight and concord relate to the affective dimensions of the experience of the other. In terms of self-love, they relate to the affect dimension of the experience of one's self." Here's the money quote, "A noticeable absence of inner strife or discord, and in its place, the presence of a consoling interior piece mark the inner heart of a person with a well-ordered love of self." When you have a well-ordered love of self, there is interior integration, there is a sense of peace, there is a sense of calm inside. And I want that peace for you. So ordered self-love leads us to that interior piece. And you can see that theme in Father Jacques Philippe's book, 'Searching For and Maintaining Peace'--excellent book. He's talking about interior integration. He's talking about us being able to relate to ourselves, to accept ourselves.

The fourth reason that ordered self-love is important is that self-love is essential for loving God. So I'm quoting from Eleanor Stump. Her book, 'Wandering in Darkness: Narrative and the Problem of Suffering". She says, "On Aquinas' views, for every person, internal integration is necessary for the real good of that person, and the ultimate real good is union with God...So, on Aquinas account, love of one's self is in fact necessary for any love of another, including God. A perfect love of God, therefore, cannot compete with the love of one's self. A perfect love of God requires love of one's self." So here we're getting into Aquinas' thought that love of oneself is a prerequisite for being able to love God.

Anthony Flood, in his review of Aquinas' view of self-love says, "A person cannot love God without self-love, but the love of God ought always to be greater than one's love of self." And Sarah Swisher from her pastoral experience says, "Rediscovering the love of self allows for movement to love both God and others more fully."

The next point I want to bring up is that ordered self-love is essential for loving others. Father Jacques Philippe, in his book 'Called To Life', writes, "Love toward others is also supported by love of self. If I do not accept myself as I am, it will eventually be reflected in resentment and conflict. Many conflicts with others are projections of conflicts within ourselves: I refuse to put up with the feelings of others because I do not accept my own. If I am not at peace with myself, I make others pay for my unhappiness." And I'll just say--this is so true. This is where I like Father Jacques Phillip so much is because he has a real pastoral sense. He's not busy citing the Church Fathers and Thomas Aquinas all that much in his writings, but man, does he really nail it. It very much converges with what I see clinically.

Anthony Flood writes, "The ways in which an individual seeks good for himself becomes the model, a template for how he loves other persons--'we do unto them as we do unto ourselves'". So in other words, the way that we relate to ourselves becomes our model, our template for relating to other people. That's really, really important, and I see this all the time. Anything that we reject in ourselves, we will reject in another person. Let me say that over again. Any experience that you reject in yourself, you will reject in another person.

Let me give you an example of this. A number of years ago, my oldest son had just learned how to drive. He spun out on I-465 on black ice; my wife went to pick him up. The car was perfectly drivable, but he was just really shaken up. This is a while ago, and at that time I wasn't tolerating my own fear very well. I didn't like fear within me, and because I rejected fear within me, because I suppress that, because I denied it, because I wasn't able to love myself as a fearful person, and because I confused having courage with being fearless, I wasn't able to connect with my son in his fear because I rejected fear within me, because I wouldn't love the part of me that carried fear. I was not able to be present for him in his fear. I rejected his fear. And we do that all the time. You can see this in the classic example--many of you have witnessed this or you've heard about it, seen it in movies--when a father gets angry with an upset child. Father is there with a toddler or a preschooler and he says, "stop crying. If you don't stop crying, I'll give you something to cry about". Well, what's often going on in those situations is that the father is not accepting the neediness within himself. He doesn't accept that he sometimes feels like that little child. Sometimes he may feel like he wants to cry or to be held or to have needs, and because he's rejected that within himself, he can't accept it in the little child. Why? Because it's activating his own needs. It's activating his own needs, and those seem so threatening to him that they're going to overwhelm him. So what does he do? He shuts it down in the child. He shuts it down in the other person I tried to shut the fear down in my son and tell him things like, "well, come on, buck up. Just do it". You know--you've just got to man up. Not helpful. Not helpful. So anything that we reject in ourselves, we're going to reject in other persons. We need to be able to love ourselves and the things that are within us. That doesn't mean that we endorse everything within us; that doesn't mean that we embrace everything that's within us--because obviously we have concupiscence and things like that, but that we accept that it exists. Father Jacques Philippe is very big on that--accepting what is real within us. So Anthony Flood, "the ways in which an individual seeks to do good for himself becomes the model, the template for how he loves other persons--we do unto them as we do unto ourselves." And if we're not very good at loving ourselves, we're not going to be very good at loving other people. That's just how it is. That's just how it is.

Anthony Flood writes, "union between two persons derives from unity. Two persons seek a union between them that approximates each one's substantial unity. However, union can never reach the intensity afforded by unity itself. Moreover, the love of self, as the most basic activity arising from substantial unity must be appropriately cultivated to allow both for a pleasant interior life and the possibility of true friendships with others...the more a person develops the appropriate level of self, the more he will be capable of and desire to love others appropriately." Alright, that's pretty dense. Let's unpack that. You have to understand that Aquinas makes a distinction between 'unity' and 'union'. Union is between two persons. Unity is the way that he describes integration within one person. And he says basically that if you don't have unity within yourself, you can't really have union with another person. Your level of unity--or your integration, within yourself, sets an upper bound on how connected, how united, how in union you could be with another person. The more that you are able to develop this unity within, the greater your capacity to be able to connect with others in union--the better you're going to be able to love another person. So if you are really fragmented, if you are really disconnected inside, that's going to have a negative repercussion; that's going to have a negative effect on your capacity to connect with another person.

Now, there can be a lot of merit in somebody who's fairly fragmented, loving to the best of their ability, and some people who are more integrated may choose not to love very much. So there's another variable in here when it comes to actually looking at merit. I'm not going to get into all of that, but I don't want folks to go away from this saying, "Oh, no, I've got a lot of internal disconnects, I've got a lot of fragmentation. I'm not able to love other people." No, no, no, no, no, no. There's always a way that you can love, and there's great merit in us loving to the degree that we can. And the more that we love others and the more that we love God, the more that we love ourselves, the more capable we'll be of loving God and others--it's a great adventure of being able to love. And yes, we're going to be bad at it. I'd be very suspicious of somebody who said, "Yes, I've reached the pinnacle of being able to love others and to being able to love God. And of course, I love myself very much." That last part, I would believe, but more in a nefarious way, right. This is something that we are going to continually be challenged by--this challenge of loving. That's the great big challenge of our lives. It's to love God, love our neighbor and love ourselves.

I focus on this theme of really loving yourself with therapists, actually a lot. When therapists become destabilized by a client, when therapists are agitated, when they lose their peace, it is never about what the client is doing. Something is getting tapped within the therapist--some unresolved issue is being tapped within the therapist, and the client is merely opening a portal to that in some way. But it's not what the client's actually doing. It's something that pre-exists within the therapist. When therapists are losing their peace, when they're becoming agitated, it's tapping into something within the therapist, something that's unresolved, something that's unloved, something that the therapist is having difficulty handling in his or her own life, something within the therapist that the therapist is having trouble loving. And so most conventional supervision, most conventional consultation focuses on the client--what the client needs to do, how the client needs to change, the resistance and the client, the defenses of the client-- client, client, client, client.

That's not how I do consultation. I focus on the therapist. If the therapist is losing a sense of peace, if the therapist is being destabilized, there's something going on within the therapist that needs to be addressed. It's not being primarily generated by the client. Now, that doesn't mean that clients can't do terrible things to therapists-- they can cause therapists pain, just like people can cause Jesus pain, right, when he was walking the face of the earth, but he didn't lose his peace over that. Losing your peace is a different thing than experiencing suffering because one is aware of the self-destructive actions that a person is doing.

So I have a webinar on the Catholic Psychotherapy Association website called 'Of Beams and Specks: Therapist-Focused Consultation' that describes how we do that. That's also what I'm doing in the Interior Therapist Community--is working with Catholic therapists to address their own stuff--to actually work on their own human formation. And you know what? That's actually not that easy. A lot of times therapists are very used to looking for the difficulties in other people, right. We need to remove the beam from our own eye. We, as therapists need to be really examining what's going on within us. If we lose our peace, if we are becoming destabilized in some way.

Alright, so the sixth reason why dealing with this self-love is important--is the consequences of not loving the self in an ordered way. There are consequences, and this I talked a lot about this when I dealt with shame and episodes 37 to 49. I also dealt with this in the last episode, Episode 97 'Unlove of Self'. What's the consequence for our bodies, for example.

Anthony Flood says, "For Aquinas, a prideful, improper self-love constitutes the root of all sin. In effect, through improper self-love, a person attempts to forsake his relational identity for one of imminence. Selfishness, self-preoccupation, and self-concern become the norm through pride. However, since this goes against one's true metaphysical identity, the net result is sorrow and self-isolation." In other words, if we don't love the self in ordered way, we get miserable. And think about people who have not loved themselves. I'm just going to appeal to your personal experience--when you have come across somebody that is not loving himself or herself. Is there a joy in that? Is there peace in that? No, there is not. No, there's not. Okay, so Micole Amalu wrote a paper in graduate school called 'The Necessity of Loving Oneself: Healthy Boundaries in the Virtue of Charity' and in reflecting on the virtue of love, in summarizing the literature on love, she's basically said there were five essential elements.

One is the inclination of the heart, two is the action of the will, three is the evidence of its fruits, four is the sacrifice of self, and five is an orientation toward God. If it's a real love, there's going to be a particular inclination of the heart, there's going to be an action of the will, there's going to be evidence of good fruits, there's going to be self-sacrifice. And--I'm not sure about that one, actually. I think sometimes there is, but not necessarily everything is sacrificial, so I'm not entirely convinced of that one. And then the fifth one, an orientation toward God. And she goes through those in that paper--about how those apply to the self. And she concludes that all of those can be evident in self-love. In other words, self-love is real love. That's what she concludes.

It's an interesting paper, but let's talk a little bit about that fourth one, the sacrifice of self. There has been a lot of ink spilled over the last two millennia about the importance of self-sacrifice. And so, in fact, some writers make self-sacrifice basically the central component of Christian self-love. And that's understandable because if we look at Our Savior on the Cross, what do we see? We see self-sacrifice, literally self-sacrifice.

But sometimes that can be taken to an extreme. Outka, in his book, 'Agape', in page 288, said something I think is very important to listen to, and that is that "self-sacrifice must always be purposive in promoting the welfare of others and never simply expressive of something resident in the agent." So this is more philosopher speak here. I get it. He's basically saying self-sacrifice must promote the welfare of another person, alright. And it can't just be something weird within oneself, right? So somebody that does something that seems self-sacrificial, but it's because of something that's very disordered within himself or herself.

An extreme example would be somebody in a psychotic episode who does this really dramatic, self-sacrificial act, but it's not grounded in what anybody else needs--that's actually a problem. That's not real self-sacrifice in terms of love, in terms of loving another.

Micole Amalu, in her paper, wrote, "The view that one should at all time sacrifice one's needs for others without thought is faulty, since love must be directed toward the good. It is prudent to use judgment to consider if sacrifice is the best. Self effacement the complete neglect of self to serve others is not the call of Jesus, nor is it authentically loving towards others or oneself. The call is to consider the good of others first, not to deny that one has needs to." She writes, "...self-sacrifice can never be at odds with one's spiritual needs and relationship with God." Sara Swisher writes that "...self-sacrifice can be taken to the extreme in a negative and detrimental way." And this is absolutely true. This is absolutely true.

I want to talk a little bit about my clinical experience of the kind of part that dominates certain Catholics, and that is a self-sacrificing part. And this is a common definition that I give for self-sacrificing parts, a self-sacrificer is a part who focuses excessively on meeting the needs of others, even at the expense of your own dignity and well-being. The most common reasons are--to prevent causing pain to others, to avoid guilt from feeling selfish, or to maintain the connection with others perceived as in need. This impulse often results from your self-sacrificer's acute sensitivity to the pain and needs of others. This parts inclination can lead to a sense that your own needs are not being adequately met, and to resentment toward those for whom you care and sacrifice, and it can fuel the grievances of an angry part. When you look at this self-sacrificing behavior, you will often find--if you unpack it, if you get deep enough, you will find that there is an implicit hope in the self-sacrificing. It's not done out of some pure kind of charity. There's a hope that if I do these heroic sacrifices, that God will take care of me, or that the other person will take care of me. There's a sort of implicit quid pro quo that the person is going for here, that they may not even be aware of in consciousness. So we want to be really thoughtful about our self-sacrificing behaviors. Are they really oriented toward the good? Sometimes people dominated by self-sacrificing parts get into enabling relationships with other people who take advantage of their self-sacrificial tendencies and exploit them. That is not a good thing, right. So we need to be weighing all of these things in the balance and seeing--are my behaviors bringing me closer to God, are they bringing the other person closer to God, are they really loving?

Bernard Brady says that "self-sacrifice is a required element of love, but not all self-sacrifice is love." He's absolutely right about that. And he goes further and says, "We have a moral obligation not to relate to another person in a way that is truly destructive of ourselves as persons." And that can happen. There can be ways that people sacrifice that are quite destructive of their identity as a person. So Bernard Brady says that "love includes sacrifice, but love is not fully defined by sacrifice." Brady says that "a dominant feature of agape is a readiness and a willingness to subordinate the fulfillment of my needs so as to be able to help the other fulfill her needs. This subordination may, in extreme conditions, call for my life, but it can never demand that I violate my deepest values and my fundamental relationship to God." It's really important.

Sarah Swisher in her Pastoral Synthesis project, which was published (it's online) a part of a master's thesis at Loyola Marymount University in 2013. She describes how she was trying so hard to give of herself in her work, in her graduate program, and in her volunteer ministry work, that she pushed herself beyond reasonable limits. And she writes, "One week before I began my second year in the graduate program at alum you, I walked out of urgent care with a brace on my right wrist. I was just informed that I developed a form of tendinitis, as a result of the way I worked at my job. In the fall semester of 2011, I struggled to keep up with my job, my classes, the additional ministries that I was involved in throughout the archdiocese. I could no longer work at the same pace as prior to my injury, and therefore I felt less productive and more of a burden to people around me. I had come to the realization that in trying to please others, I had stopped taking care of and loving myself. I overworked myself and claimed that I was, 'too busy' to set aside any personal time for myself." And she has recognized that this is a common thing in ministry workers.

She has this great quote--I just love it, "Overwork is a learned skill disguised as a selfless act of putting others first." There are a number of things that masquerade as charity, but they are not charity, right.

So, I like this quote from Frederick Buechner. He says, "...Love yourself as your neighbor. Love yourself not in some egocentric, self-serving sense, but love yourself in a way like you love your friends, in the sense of taking care of yourself, nourishing yourself, and trying to understand and comfort and strengthen yourself."

Alright, so let's have a call to action here. Let's talk about what we can do. Micole Amalu, remember she was the DMU graduate student that I had quoted from her paper. She has written this litany of self-love. You can find it if you just do an internet search, 'litany of self-love'. It's at thefaceofmercy.org. The Mission of the Face of Mercy--this is Micole Amalu's ministry--is to provide mental health advocacy and education within the church, in order to encourage her to love better as we strive to be 'merciful like the Father'. And I met Micole and her husband, Christian Amalu, at the last Catholic Psychotherapy Association meeting, really enjoyed our time together and our conversations--very supportive of her work. And in this area of self-love, this is really a unique prayer. I don't know of any other prayer that focuses on self-love like this one does. Remember, love/charity is an infused virtue. We have to ask for it. And this litany is a great way to pray for greater self-love and to pray about self-love. It can be a really illuminating experience. I've prayed it myself. Highly recommend it. Check it out--Litany of Self-Love, thefaceofmercy.org.

Alright, now I'm going to talk about the examination of conscience--the general examination of conscience. That's the examination of conscience that's done at the end of the day. Now, typical examinations of conscience tend to focus on the Ten Commandments, the Decalogue. The first three Commandments focus on loving God, second seven commandments focus on the love of neighbor. There's a lot of cataloging and counting sins. Did I break any of the commandments, did I violate the rules?

I'm going to invite an alternative way of doing your general examination of conscience at the end of the day--and that is to frame the examination in terms of love. Of how did I love today and how did I not love today in these three areas. How did I love God today, and how did I not love God today? How did I love my neighbors today, and how did I not love my neighbor today? How did I love myself today in an ordered way; how did I love myself today in a disordered way? So basically kind of a grid of six things. How did I love God, how did I love my neighbor, how did I love myself in an ordered way, how did I not love God, how did I not love my neighbor, how did I love myself in a disordered way, not in an ordered way? Looking at it in terms of love relationships--because all of those commands are really about the two great Commandments, right? Loving God, loving your neighbor. So instead of going to the Decalogue, instead of going to the Ten Commandments, instead of going to the rules, instead of writing down the thing that you habitually sinned against, think about the relationships. That's ultimately what we're called to as relational beings, anyway--is a relationship. And don't forget to put down the good things, the ways that you actually did love. So many times we just focus on the negative.

St. Ignatius of Loyola, who was really the saint that advocated and came up with the examination of conscience in a lot of the forms that we use today, advocates for looking at the good--recognizing how grace is working within you, recognizing when there is a greater degree of the infused virtue of charity that allows you to love better and to give praise to God for that, not to take it in some sort of narcissistic sort of self-agitating way, but to be appreciative of that.

The other thing is to have this--not to have this as some sort of accounting of sins and sort of checking boxes, but to make it a conversation. Father Emile Neubert, in his book, 'My Ideal: Jesus Son of Mary', writes in such a way that Mary is telling us Mary is telling the reader this, "In the evening before going to bed, cast a glance back over the day to see what you will have to avoid or do in order to improve matters on the morrow...make this examination in the form of a conversation with Jesus and with me. In this manner you will succeed much better than if you make a dry enquiry into your spiritual work all by yourself. Tell us where you succeeded and where you failed; submit your resolutions to us and ask us to help you live the life of Jesus more fully."

So often people do their examinations of conscience and this really self-enclosed way. They're just doing their own evaluation of themselves--it's actually not involving God that much at all. Or Our Lady that much at all. That's what Father Emile Neubert is offering us. It's a way to enter into our examination of conscience in a conversational way--in a relational way, in a way that looks at this from the perspective of love.

And I'm going to say ask for light to see how you did love God, your neighbor, and yourself. Ask for light to see that. Ask for light to see the failures to love God, your neighbor, and yourself. Ask for the light--get into that dialogue and then wait for the response, wait for the light. Don't just ask it and move on--wait in that receptivity. Wait in that openness for a response. Listen to what the Lord will say. And then, to offer everything of who we are to God, including all of our shame, including all of our junk, including all our disorder, including all the stuff that's wrong inside. To be able to offer all of that in the confidence of a little child to Our Lord, to Our Lady.

We're going to make lots of mistakes. We're going to make lots of mistakes of commission. We need to keep trying and to do this more and more in relationship. And that will work.

Now, in the next episode--in episode 99, I'm going to get into many more specifics of the nitty gritty of how to love yourself better in the natural realm. I gave you some recommendations for spiritual practices today. The next episode we're going to be dealing with much more in the natural realm. I'm super excited about that, we're going to bring parts in--more of a multiplicity of self type of model because that is so helpful in actually learning to love ourselves. So I'll give you lots of examples about how you can love yourself in that next episode. I wanted to lay the groundwork today so that we can understand what ordered self-love really looks like--what we're looking for from the Church, from St. Thomas Aquinas especially, so that we've got that as a base to move on.

Alright, so, if you are a Catholic therapist and you want to really engage with this, if you really want to learn more about loving yourself and you want to do it through experiential exercises and you want to do it with other Catholic therapists, I am starting Foundations Experiential Groups in the Interior Therapist Community. Second and fourth Wednesdays from 1:30 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. EST beginning on October 12th, 2022. Join me. I will help you personally with this. I lead these groups--they're small, they're no more than nine. If you're a therapist or if you're a graduate student and you want some of this, let me know. Go to soulsandhearts.com/itc for 'Interior Therapist Community'--that's our landing page. And register--let us know you're out there, or you can send me an email [email protected]. You got to move quick though because those are filling up, and we're going to get started in just a little while.

We are in an exciting time. There's a new cohort that's onboarding right now for the Resilient Catholics Community. If you're interested as a Catholic, if you're a Catholic and you're interested in these kinds of issues, if you're interested in learning how to love yourself in a more ordered way, I've put together a whole program that's focused on that. How do you get to know yourself, how do you get to accept yourself, how do you get to care for yourself, how do you get to understand yourself better? All of it oriented toward you being able to love you so that opens the door to you being able to love your neighbor better and you being able to love God better. That's the Resilient Catholics Community. Check that out--soulsandhearts.com/rcc--that's our landing page. Get on the waiting list. We're going to start admitting new people in December. That's when you can go through the onboarding process for that.

If you are a single Catholic woman aged 35 or older, there is still time to get into Anne-Marie Klobe's Ready for Love Masterclass series. It's running from October 3-16. Lots of excellent speakers who are sharing their wisdom. They're opening their hearts to you, helping you in your state of life right now. Check that out. You can register by going back to one of my weekly reflections--there's links in the September 14th or September 21st 2022 weekly reflections. You can get those by going to soulsandhearts.com/blog, going to those reflections and clicking on the link.

One more thing--'Life Giving Wounds', great ministry. Souls and Hearts, we are active supporters of 'Life Giving Wounds'. 'Life Giving Wounds' supports the adult children of divorce or separation. They are doing their annual retreat. It's running from on Thursday evenings from 8:15 p.m. to 10 p.m. That's ongoing--it's already started, but you can still register for another day or two. That's going to run to November 10th. Excellent speakers. Check that out. It's really helpful for understanding the wound that was left by your parents' divorce or separation, even if that divorce or separation happened when you were an adult. Just because you were grown up doesn't mean that that doesn't really, really hurt. You're going to have advice concerning love and trust of others--an experience of Christ and experience of community with other people that have gone through their parents' divorce or their parents' separation that leads to greater understanding--leads to healing. Registration closes on Tuesday, October 4, 2022. So act quick on that.

Don't forget, you can reach out to me in conversation hours every Tuesday and Thursday 4:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. EST, 317-567-9594. That's my cell phone number--317-567-9594. Conversation hours every Tuesday and Thursday 4:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. EST. You can also email me [email protected], and let people know about this podcast. So many people do not know about this podcast that could benefit from it. Let them know. Maybe there's a person that you think like, "wow, this could really be helpful". If you were talking about this topic of self love, send them a link, share it on social media, let them know.

And thank you for being here. Thank you for making it through another really long podcast, one of these solo casts where Dr. Peter just goes on and on and on and on. Thank you for staying with me to the end. And with that, we will invoke our patrons and our patron, Our Lady, Our Mother. Untier of Knots, pray for us. St. John the Baptist, pray for us.

In this episode, we review the many ways we fail to love ourselves, through self-hatred and through indifference toward ourselves. We discuss the ways that unlove for self manifests itself, contrasting a lack of love with ordered self-love through the lens of Bernard Brady's five characteristics of love. We discuss the impact of a lack of self-love on your body. I then invite you into an experiential exercise to get to know a part of you that is not loving either another part of you or your body.  

IIC 97 Unlove of Self

"Mourn not the dead that in the cool earth lie

dust unto dust

The calm, sweet earth that mothers all who die

As all men must;

Mourn not your captive comrades who must dwell

Too strong to strive

Within each steel-bound coffin of a cell,

Buried alive;

But rather mourn the apathetic throng

The cowed and the meek

Who see the world's great anguish and its wrong

And dare not speak!"

--Ralph Chaplain, Bars and Shadows

I am Dr. Peter Malinoski, clinical psychologist, passionate Catholic. This is the Interior Integration for Catholics podcast coming to you from the Souls and Hearts studio in Indianapolis, Indiana. This podcast is all about bringing you the best of psychology in human formation and harmonizing it with the perennial truths of our Catholic faith. In this Interior Integration for Catholics podcast, we take the most important human formation issues head on, without trepidation, without hesitation. We don't mince words. We directly address the most important concerns in the natural realm, the absolute central issues that we need to take on with all our energy and all our resources.

We have been working through a series on trauma and wellbeing. It started in Episode 88, and in the last episode, Episode 96, that one was called 'I Am a Rock How Trauma Hardens Us Against Being Loved', and that episode we discuss the impact of trauma on how we accept love from others, including God. In this episode, we're now going to address how trauma sets us up to refuse to love ourselves.

Welcome to episode 97 of Interior Integration for Catholics titled 'Unlove of Self: How Trauma Predisposes You to Self Hatred and Indifference'. It's released on September 5th, 2022. It is so good to be with you. Thank you for listening in and for being together with me once again. I am glad we are here and that we're exploring the great unlove of self.

The great unlove of self. Sort of like the uncola ads from 7-UP in the late 60s through the 70s, the 80s, even into the late 90s. Unlove of self. What do I mean by that? You might tell me that if I don't love myself, then I'm hating myself. All right, let's go with that. Let's explore self-hatred and self-loathing. Self-hatred. What is self-hatred? Self-hatred is hatred that's directed towards one's self rather than towards others. And there is an article titled 'Self-Loathing' by Jodi Clark. She's a licensed professional counselor at verywellmind.com where she says, 'Self-loathing or self-hatred is extreme criticism of one's self. It may feel as though nothing you do is good enough or that you are unworthy or undeserving of good things in life. Self-hate can feel like having a person following you around all day, every day, criticizing you and pointing out every flaw or shaming you for every mistake". Self-hatred, right? This is a critical thing.

Brennan Manning said, "In my experience, self-hatred is the dominant malaise, crippling Christians and stifling their growth in the Holy Spirit". Now, I'm not sure I agree with that. It depends on your definition of self-hatred. I'm more focused on shame and the fear of shame overwhelming the self. Those are such drivers of self-hatred. And you can see that in that in that definition that we just had from Jodi Clark, right. Undeserving of good things in life: criticizing you, pointing out every flaw, shaming you for every mistake. Shame, shame, shame. And Angel Plotner, the author of 'Who Am I?', Dissociative Identity Disorder survivor says, "Shame plays a huge part in why you hate who you are". Shame is so central. I'm going to invite you. I did a whole 13-episode series on shame episodes 37 to 49 of this podcast all about shame and trauma. So, so good to check that out if you haven't done it already.

Eric Hoffer said, "It is not the love of self, but the hatred of self, which is at the root of the troubles that afflict our world". And Basil Maturin says, "We never get to love by hate, least of all by self-hatred". So this whole topic of self-hatred, so important, so common, even when people don't realize it. Even when people don't realize it because so much self-hatred is unconscious. Laurie Diskin says "We cannot hate ourselves into a version of ourselves we can love". Self-hatred gets us nowhere. Self-hatred brings us to a grinding halt in human development and in spiritual development.

So let's talk about this. What do we mean when we're talking about self-hatred? The primary way that you hate yourself is for a part of you to hate another part of you. I'm talking about intra-psychic hatred. Hatred within you, for you, by you. This is self-hatred.

So I'm going to bring in an internal family system description of parts. Internal Family Systems is an approach to psychotherapy, and it holds that we are both a unity and a multiplicity. And in that multiplicity, we have parts. And parts are like separate, independently operating little personalities within us. Each part has its own unique, prominent needs, its own role in your life, its own emotions, body sensations, guiding beliefs, assumptions. Each part has its own typical thoughts, intentions, desires, attitudes, impulses, its own interpersonal style, its own worldview. Each part of you has a different attitude or position toward other parts of you, and each part of you has different beliefs and assumptions about your body. Robert Falconer calls these parts, "insiders". If you want to learn a lot more about Internal Family Systems, check out episode 71 of this podcast titled 'A New and Better Way of Understanding Myself and Others'. Parts are, in a nutshell, kind of like those little figures in the movie Inside Out. Remember anger and sadness and joy. They're these little personalities, like I said, within us. And every one of your parts has a very narrow and limited vision when that part is not in right relationship with your innermost self. Each of your parts usually has a strong agenda, something that they're trying to accomplish; some good that the part is seeking for you. And what happens when parts are not in right relationship with the self--if they're not working in a collaborative and cooperative way with your innermost self, is that they wind up polarizing with other parts. They wind up getting locked into conflict with other parts. And I gave some examples of polarization among parts in my most recent weekly reflection. That one was titled 'The Counterfeits of Self Giving', and that was published, that was sent out on August 31st, 2022. You can check that out at soulsandhearts.com/blog if you want to take a look at that and it discusses how parts get polarized around the idea of giving of self. And I talked about how a compliant surrenderer part can polarize with a feisty protector part within oneself. Or how a self-sacrificer part can polarize with a rebel part. So, I'm going to invite you to check that out, soulsandhearts.com/blog, go back to August 31st, 2022.

Now Bessel van der Kolk, in his excellent book 'The Body Keeps the Score', devotes all of chapter 17 to Internal Family Systems. This is a really accessible book; I've recommended it before to so many non-clinicians. There are reasons why it has been the top selling book on trauma for the last seven years, running. A book like that comes out once in a generation. In 1992, it was Judith Herrmann's seminal book, 'Trauma and Recovery'. Twenty-three years later, in 2015, it was Bessel van der Kolk's 'Body Keeps the Score'.

To examine unlove, right, this concept of unlove. We're going to contrast unloving with loving. Now Bernard Brady in his 2003 book "Christian Love: How Christians through the Ages of Understood Love". He gives us five general characteristics of love of agape. He draws heavily from the work of Christian phenomenologists, and I introduced these five characteristics of love in episode 94; that's 'The Primacy of Love'. I expanded on those five characteristics of love in episode 95, which was called 'Trauma's Devastating Impact on our Capacity to Love'. Those five characteristics: love is affective or emotional, if you prefer that word. Love is affirming, love is responsive, love is unitive, and love is steadfast. Those are the five characteristics of love that Bernard Brady distilled from his historical review of how Christians have seen love through the ages. Love is affective, love is affirming, love is responsive, love is unitive, love is steadfast.

Alright, so now let's break down what happens when one part of you is hating another part of you, right. Love is affective. What that means is that love is emotional. Love rejoices in the beloved. And Protestant Theologian R.H. Niebuhr wrote in his 1977 book, "By love we mean at least these attitudes and actions rejoicing in the presence of the beloved, gratitude, reverence and loyalty toward him".

So there are many positive emotions that are associated with love. Love is more than an emotion, but it has this emotional component. It has this affective component. Often there's delight, bliss, happiness, a sense of fulfillment, warmth, appreciation.

But let's take a look at what hatred or loathing from one part to another part looks like. How do parts hate each other? Well, self-hatred is also affective. Self-hatred is also emotional, but it's affective or emotional in a very different way than ordered self-love is. And what you're going to find in self-hatred is two primary emotions: disgust and anger. One part holds disgust and anger toward another part. And when you have anger and disgust, and you bring those two together, you get contempt. You get contempt; contempt is anger plus disgust.

So let's, let's have an example here. Let's say that there's a fearful part of you that is very frightened of public speaking. It really doesn't like making presentations in front of other people. And now for your work, you are required to make an important presentation in front of your supervisors and more senior executives within your company. And so another part of you, your perfectionistic part, has led you to rehearse your presentation to the point where you have it almost memorized. Your last performance in front of your bedroom mirror was so good, it was just so good. But now, at showtime, in front of your audience, your fearful part locks you down. You find yourself stuttering and stammering, and then your inner critic gets activated; your inner critic is railing in hatred against your fearful part who is locking you down. That inner critic is saying things like this: "Why are you such a sniveling, frightened little coward? It's just a simple presentation, dumb ass. We've practiced it over and over. We have this down. Get yourself together. This is really important. And you are screwing it up for us. You're making us look bad. Who knows what will happen if we can't pull this off? Do you realize what the consequences are going to be?" And the more intense that your inner critic gets in its hateful attack on your fearful part, the more the fearful part freezes. And after the presentation ends, your inner critic continues to bash the fearful part, ruminating about how poor the presentation was, how it looked bad, how we didn't impress the vice president and so on. Love is affective; love is emotional. Hatred for self is also affective. It's also emotional, but it's very, very different. It's got that disgust, anger, contempt. That's the first quality. Love is affective. Self-hatred is also affective.

Let's go on to the second quality, the second characteristic of love from Bernard Brady. He says that love is affirming. Love says yes to the other, at the same time that love says yes to oneself. So in the way that we understand parts, this is an open hearted yes to all of our parts. Not just some parts, not just the "acceptable" parts of us. All parts are welcome. All parts are invited to the table. In self-hatred, though, one or more parts attack the unloved part and not just superficially. When they get hating, when those hating parts get hating, they go after the identity of the unloved part. The self-hating parts want to destroy the hating part, or at least banish the hating part from having a voice, from having a seat at the table. In our example, you can hear how that inner critic is trying to get rid of the fearful part, trying to drive that part away, trying to suppress that part with its fear. Now, typical self-hating thoughts may include, "I knew we would fail", "Why do I even try?", "I'm a loser", "No one wants to be around me", "Look at me screwing up again", "Why can't we just be normal?", "I hate myself". Those were from Jodi Clarke's verywellmind.com article.

And Richard Bach says, "The worst lies are the lies we tell ourselves. We live in denial of what we do, even what we think. And we do this because we are afraid". When other people affirm the person who is dominated by a self-hating part, the affirmation doesn't sink in. The affirmation doesn't work because the person is all caught up in the self-hatred and can't hear the affirmation. They can't take it in. Richey Edwards says, "People say to the mentally ill, 'you know, so many people think the world of you.' But when they don't like themselves, they don't notice anything. They don't care about what people think of them. When you hate yourself, whatever people say, it doesn't make sense. 'Why do they like me? Why do they care about me?' Because you don't care about yourself at all." Love is affirming and self-hatred is undercutting. It is devaluing.

Alright. So let's go to the third characteristic. Love is responsive. Bernard Brady talks about how love is an active response for the wellbeing of the other. It's about participating in promoting the highest good for the other, the highest potential for the other. How can I help you to flourish? How can I help you towards your highest good. But in self-hatred one or more parts tear down the hated part. There is responsiveness to the hated part, but it's not a positive responsiveness. Rather than attuning to the hated part, the hating parts seek to silence it and suppress it, without ever getting to know the hated part. They are not interested in the hated parts experience. Why the hated part thinks like it does or feels like it does, or why that hated part has the assumptions or beliefs that it does; no interest in that. In our example, the inner critic is responsive to the fear of the fearful part, but in a hateful way. It sees the fearful part as counterproductive, as threatening the well-being of the whole person because of the shame that could come from flubbing up the presentation. And so that inner critic feels justified in the bullying and heavy-handed approach that it takes toward that fearful part. Right. Love is responsive. Hatred is also responsive, but in this really negative way.

Fourth characteristic of love, according to Bernhard Brady, is that love is unitive. He writes, "The fruit of love is unity. Love unites. It is in the very nature of loving. To bring together." Hatred, on the other hand, divides. It polarizes within. And we see that; the fearful part and the inner critic are polarized. They are locked in combat. They have no common ground because of that hatred. Hatred fragments us within. It shatters the self. On the other hand, ordered self-love helps us to integrate all our parts, providing space for all parts to be seen, heard, known and loved. Love integrates parts, inviting them into a collaborative, cooperative relationship with your innermost self and with all the other parts. We give this internal unity a special name. I call it interior integration. That is what this podcast is all about: interior integration for Catholics. Love is unitive, and hatred divides. It polarizes within. That's the fourth characteristic, the unitive aspect of love.

The fifth is that love is steadfast. And steadfastness in self-love requires accepting all parts. We have to accept all parts for there to be resilience. Hatred contributes to the inner system of the self being brittle and fragile.

Now, I want to emphasize at this point that hatred doesn't generally come from our innermost self. That innermost self is the natural core of the person, the center of the person in the natural realm. This is who we sense ourselves to be in our best moments when our self is free, when it's unblinded, not dominated by any of our parts, when our innermost self governs our whole being as an active, compassionate leader. The innermost self is unharmed by trauma, it's unharmed by attachment injuries, by relational wounds, by negative life experiences. The Catholic Church doesn't teach John Calvin's concept of total depravity that we are sinful and morally corrupt through and through. The Catholic Church doesn't teach that we are snow covered dung heaps like Martin Luther taught. The Catholic Church shows us that we're still ontologically good; we are still made in the image and likeness of God, even after the fall of Adam and Eve, with original sin in the Garden of Eden. We're looking to be recollected; we want to have that innermost self govern all our parts, like the conductor of an orchestra leading all of the musicians; like the captain of a ship leading and governing all the sailors. And when we are recollected, when we are in self, we have those eight C's, the eight C's: calm, curiosity, compassion, confidence, courage, clarity, connectedness and creativity. And we also have a capacity for kindness. Now, there may be an exception here that hatred doesn't generally come from the innermost self. It's possible that if someone has committed the unforgivable sin, blaspheming against the Holy Spirit that the innermost self could hate. The catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 1864 says, "There are no limits to the mercy of God, but anyone who deliberately refuses to accept his mercy by repenting, rejects the forgiveness of his sins and the salvation offered by the Holy Spirit. Such hardness of heart can lead to final impediments and eternal loss." What happens when somebody blasphemed against the Holy Spirit is that there is this repudiation of life and love and truth and mercy and forgiveness. And that repudiation is irrevocable. There's hardness of heart. Committing of the unforgivable sin, refusing the love of God permanently. That's possible, or Jesus would not have warned against it. And when a person is in that place of having committed the unforgivable sin, they are like the walking dead. They're incapable of engaging with love any longer.

Let's shift now. Let's talk about what self-hatred means for our relationship with our bodies. Now, remember, we're body and soul composites. We are embodied beings. And another way for you to hate yourself, or maybe more specifically another way for a part of you to hate yourself is for that part to hate your body. Let's give some examples of what it looks like when someone is actively hating the body. I'm going to give you four extreme cases. First, Suicidal Acts, second, Body Dysmorphic Disorder, third, Body Integrity Identity Disorder, and fourth, Self-Harm, also called Self-Mutilation.

So let's talk about suicidal acts now. I did a whole series on suicide in this interior integration for Catholics podcast episodes 76-80. A suicidal part is usually desperately seeking relief from intense pain and distress, usually because some fundamental attachment need was not met, and I talked about those in episode 62, or some fundamental integrity need is not met, again, episode 62. There's something so painful and so wrong inside. It just feels intolerable. A part can be impelled; can generate impulses to kill the body. But it's not just for the sake of killing the body. It's again, usually because there's this desperate need for some kind of relief. That part is seeking a good. It's seeking a release. It's seeking some kind of respite from the pain and the distress. Now it's going about it, if it's impelling you toward suicide, it's going about it in an entirely maladaptive and problematic way. Nobody's justifying that, but one can understand that there's still a positive intention there.

Now in body dysmorphic disorder, we see that there are preoccupations with one's physical appearance. The person is preoccupied with one or more non-existent or very slight defects or flaws in their physical appearance. And that can lead to verbally abusing the body. This is where a part gets involved in body shaming. A part of you is calling your body fat or ugly, physically unattractive, calling your body out on all these perceived unattractive features--my eyes are too far apart, my lips are too thin, my skin is too bumpy, and what about that zit that just appeared? Right? Body shaming. That's the first part of body dysmorphic disorder. The second thing is that there are repetitive compulsive behaviors in response to the concerns about one's physical appearance. So constantly checking in the mirror, excessive grooming, picking at one skin, seeking reassurance, changing one's clothes, right. Repetitive behaviors. There also can be repetitive mental acts such as a part of you that's constantly comparing your appearance with that of other people. Getting on TikTok and looking at somebody else's body, which is so gorgeous and saying, "I'm just a pig". Ruminating about what others have said about your body, or what you think they might say about your body, what they're actually thinking about your body. And sometimes that's just all in the realm of fantasy, but for somebody with body dysmorphic disorder, there's a part that is just hammering them about the inadequacy of the body. So that's body dysmorphic disorder.

I want to talk about a relatively rare condition, a really extreme condition called body Integrity Identity Disorder or BIID it's really rare. It's not well studied. It's when there's this mismatch between someone's body image and the physical body. People who suffer from BIID have an intense desire to amputate a major limb, or sever the spinal cord in order to become paralyzed, or to become blind or deaf. They are so dissatisfied with their body they want to cut parts of it off or they don't believe that an arm is actually their arm. There's this, there's this total repudiation of some part of their body.

And then the fourth one is self-harm or self-mutilation. Now, when people get involved with intentional self-harm or self-mutilation, that is so not understood. So misunderstood by so many people. A lot of times self-mutilation is dismissed as something that only a "crazy person" would do. All right, let's try to make this a little more comprehensible, right. Let's first of all, remember that self-harm or self-mutilation is a symptom. It's something that a part of the person is doing to try to help. Let's talk about what forms that can take. These are common forms of self-harm or self-mutilation: cutting, burning or branding, scalding with hot water, picking at the skin, reopening wounds, severe scratching, carving the skin, trichotillomania, which is hair pulling, head banging, hitting one's self, biting oneself, poisoning oneself, deliberately starving oneself, and getting into fights. Those are all different ways that self-harm or self-mutilation can happen.

And what are the reasons for self-harm? Why do parts do this? There was a recent article published by Norwegian researcher Line Indrevoll Stänickel in the August 2021 Volume of Frontiers in Psychology. It was a qualitative study of 19 adolescent girls who were engaged in self-harm, and she found three super ordinate themes. These are three main reasons for self-harm in these research subjects, who engaged in some kind of self-mutilation. The first one, "I deserve pain." Second one, "I don't want to feel anything." The third one, "I'm harmed and no one cares." Those are the three things. Those were the three super ordinate themes. "I deserve pain", "I don't want to feel anything", "I'm harmed and no one cares". Clinicians have identified a number of different reasons for self-harm. I'm going to bring those together. So we've had one research study, but I'm just going to give you what a lot of clinicians who are working in this field see. Eight Reasons for Self-Harm.

First, there is a desire to release unbearable tension or to provide relief from overwhelming emotions. And there was an article on mind.org.uk with some quotes and there was a quote that said "at times self harm also silenced the chaos in my head, briefly pausing the repetitive flashbacks and the body memories." Right,so there can be a release from unbearable tension; there can be relief from overwhelming emotions with self-harm. That's number one.

Number two, a desire to regain control. People who self-harm can sometimes experience the sense of being back in control in that self-harm.

The third one is to fight depersonalization. Some people feel like they are no longer alive, or that they're dead. There's a quote from a client on mind.org.uk that said, "self-harm proved to me that I was real. I was alive". Sometimes when people cut, it's to see the blood flow from their limbs that proves that they're still alive. The blood flowing proves that they're still alive. They need to see that. That numbness can feel like death. The need to feel anything at all is our fourth one.

Fourth--Numbness can feel like death. There's a need to feel anything at all to pierce the numbness.

Fifth, people self-harm as a way of expressing self-hatred. They can feel the need to punish the self. Another client on mind.org.uk said, "I hated my body and blamed it for what I had been through, so I felt it needed punishing". And Marya Hornbacher, in her book 'Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia' said, "I wanted to kill the me underneath. The fact haunted my days and nights. When you realize you hate yourself so much, when you realize that you cannot stand who you are, and this deep spite has been the motivation behind your behavior for many years, your brain can't quite deal with it. It will try very hard to avoid that realization; it will try in a last-ditch effort to keep your remaining parts alive, to remake the rest of you. This is, I believe, different from the suicidal wish of those who are in so much pain that death feels like relief, different from the suicide I would later attempt, trying to escape that pain. This is a wish to murder yourself. The connotation of kill is too mild. This is a belief that you deserve slow torture, violent death". Right, that goes back to that first superordinate theme, that Line Indrevoll Stänickel in her qualitative study found--"I deserve pain". There can be another way that self-hatred plays in here, and that is to blame the body for others actions. For example, if your romantic partner broke up with you, you may have a part that blames your body for not being attractive enough. Or another example might be that a rape survivor has a part that hates her body because it believes that the body attracted the unwanted attention of the rapist. "The body is bad", "the body needs to be punished". That's the fifth self-hatred as a reason for self-harm.

The sixth is to express pain--to communicate or share the internal experience to others; to make visible what is felt within. This is where a part is desperately trying to signal what that part is experiencing, how desperate the internal circumstances are. This is that third superordinate theme from Line Indrevoll Stänickel's study, "I'm harmed and no one cares". It's trying to communicate.

The seventh reason for self-harm is a way to distract from some worse experience, perhaps terrible emotions inside, or intrusive thoughts. It's a way to distract the attention from something even worse than the physical self-harm. And that goes back to the second superordinate theme that Line Indrevoll Stänickel gave us, "I don't want to feel anything". At least, I don't want to feel what I'm feeling. That part is doing whatever it can; a lot of times it's a firefighter part that engages in self-harm behavior. Anything to distract, anything to move our attention away from the intensity of the experience.

And the last one is an interesting one. Number eight is an association with others who self-harm. So if your peer group is also self-harming, that can be another reason for self-harm. That could be some kind of bonding that happens in a peer group where self-harming is one of the group norms.

So five general characteristics of love from Bernard Brady. We're going to review those again--Love is affective, love is affirming, love is responsive, love is unitive, love is steadfast.

Let's look at how they contrast with some parts' hatred for the body. Remember, love is affective, love is emotional, but when parts are hating the body, then you have that disgust and anger. You have that contempt for the body. It could also be fueled by envy of other people's bodies. Love is affective; love is emotional; parts can hate the body.

Love is affirming. That was the second quality or characteristic of agape of love, according to Bernard Brady. But parts who are hating the body are devaluing the body: they're shaming the body, they're seeing the body as evil. This is the opposite of affirming. This is a De-facto Manicheanism. Manicheanism was the heresy that believed that all matter was evil, including our bodies, including our physical bodies. St. Augustine initially adhered to Manichaenism for a while, but after his conversion he strongly refuted it, because the body is actually good.

The third general characteristic of love from Bernard Brady. Love is responsive, and so authentic self-love; ordered self-love is responsive to the body's legitimate needs. But in self-hatred toward the body, bodily needs are often condemned. They're often disparaged.

Fourth: love is unitive. What can happen when one part is hating the body is that there's like this separation of the body from the part. There's this position that "I am not my body", "this is not my body". And again, that's fragmenting inside. That's disconnecting parts from the body.

And the fifth one is: love is steadfast. When we're hating our bodies, there is all kinds of internal tension about that. All kinds of conflict, polarizations and that kind of tension in the system is inherently unstable. There's no steadfastness.

Alright, so that's self-hatred. But you know what? Self-hatred isn't actually the most common, or even the most important form of failing to love the self. What? What are you saying? Self-hatred isn't the most common, or the most important form of failing to love the self. "Alright", you might be saying, "Dr. Peter, what is the most common and most important failure to love the self? What is the great sin against the self, if you will?" I'll sum it up in one word: indifference. The opposite of love is not hate. It is indifference. The opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference. This quote has been attributed to dozens of people. The earliest that we can find it in writing is from a prominent Austrian psychologist by the name of Wilhelm Steckel. In his book, 'The Beloved Ego: Foundations of the New Study of the Psyche'. It was published in 1921. The quote was expanded and made famous by Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel in a 1986 US News and World Report article where Elie Wiesel said, "The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. And the opposite of art is not ugliness. It's indifference. And the opposite of faith is not heresy. It's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death. It's indifference".

This indifference is so, so common. We can have parts that are so indifferent to other parts. We can be dominated by those parts and be so indifferent to ourselves and to others. David Mitchell said, "The world's default mode is basic indifference. It would like to care, but it's just got too much going on at the moment". Aristotle said, "Tolerance and apathy are the last virtues of a dying society". And W Somerset Maugham, the British playwright, novelist, and short story writer, said, "The tragedy of love is indifference". And then many of you will know Catholic philosopher, Peter Kraft. He wrote in his book 'Prayer for Beginners' that, "indifference is more truly the opposite of love than hate is, for we can both love and hate the same person at the same time, but we cannot both love and be indifferent to the same person at the same time".

So let's get into this idea of indifference. What does indifference mean? We're focusing on indifference to the self--indifference as a form of unlove and indifference to the self as a form of not loving the self. What does this mean? The biggest form of unlove is indifference. Indifference is an absence of interest in or concern about the emotional, social, spiritual, philosophical or physical life. It is not caring about oneself, disregarding oneself, abandoning oneself, not caring about oneself. Now you might say, "Wait a minute, Dr. Peter, I thought that's what we Catholics were called to do. Aren't we called to forget ourselves, deny ourselves, abandon ourselves?"

This kind of indifference is different. It's about being dead or numb to ourselves. It's an absence of good to ourselves. Evil is the absence of good. That's the privatio boni--the privation theory of evil. This idea was implicit in some of Plato's writings; he never stated it explicitly. Plotinus further developed the idea, and St. Augustine really refined it. That was such a brilliant exposition when he said in the 'City of God': "For evil has no positive nature, but the loss of good has received the name evil". Evil is the privation of good. Evil is the absence of good. And that's what indifference is. We start looking at indifference. We start to see that it is the opposite of these five general characteristics of love from Bernard Brady. Remember, love is affective, love is affirming, love is responsive, love is unitive, love is steadfast. Let's go through these. Love is affective, love is emotional, but indifference is apathetic. Apathy toward the parts, not feeling anything, not caring about them, not interested in them, parts pursuing their own agendas inside with little regard for the being of other parts. Brian Becker says, "trauma begins in terror, but it ends in apathy". And Kang Kijarro Nguyen says, "apathy is as dangerous, invisible and contagious as an asymptomatic virus carrier". Frank Sonnenberg sums it up very succinctly in "apathy is a silent killer". Love is affective. Love is emotional. Indifference is apathetic. It doesn't carry an affective valence. That's the first characteristic.

Second characteristic: love is affirming. "The stronger you cling to your armor of indifference, the more it strips you of your humanity." That's from Abhijit Naskar, 'No Foreigner Only Family'. Love is affirming. Indifference is not even recognizing that you exist. That happens when we are indifferent to ourselves. Parts do not recognize that other parts even exist. They may not even know they exist. They're not interested in other parts. They don't want those other parts at the table. They don't want to know. They don't want to hear. They prefer parts to be exiled, banished, to be not troubling.

Third characteristic of love. Love is responsive. But when there's indifference, Stephanie Roberts in her work, "Rushes from the River Disappointment, says, "there are people capable of eating popcorn at the movie of your agony". Parts can be unmoved by the suffering of other parts and really unaware of it within. Nina MacLaughlin in her work 'Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung' said, "His eyes they held the most and dangerous thing. They held the top of the sins: indifference. Indifference. A vacancy where human care should be." And again, I want to be clear that parts are not simply choosing to be indifferent. They're not choosing to be apathetic. They're not choosing to wear this armor of indifference. They're not choosing to be unresponsive. Ken Wytsma says, "We may not choose apathy, but when we choose anything other than love and empathetic justice, we get apathy by default." These parts that are indifferent do not have bad intentions, but they can be so blind about what other parts of us are experiencing. Our innermost self is far more capable of reaching out with care, with compassion, with genuine interest to other parts. But that self, that innermost self can become totally occluded by other parts. Other parts can so drive our bus.

Fourth characteristic of love. Love is unitive. But when parts are indifferent, we get fragmentation. John Andrews says, "Love is never fragmented. It is an inseparable whole which does not delight in bits and pieces." Love is steadfast, but again, polarizations inside lead to tension and instability.

Well, let's talk about what indifference to the self means to the body. What happens when parts are indifferent toward the body? Bessel van der Kolk says, "Traumatized people chronically feel unsafe within their bodies: the past is alive in the form of annoying interior discomforts. Their bodies are constantly bombarded by visceral warning signs and an attempt to control these processes, they often become expert at ignoring their gut feelings in a numbing awareness of what is played out inside. They learn to hide from themselves."

So let's look at some less extreme passive examples of indifference to the body. These are going to look different than the direct attacks on the body that we saw with self-hatred. Now we're dealing with parts that are indifferent to the body, parts that are driving the bus. And we've all done at least some of these at times, right.

First is problematic in eating or drinking. Too much caffeine; somebody's hooked on energy drinks or coffee. Misuse of alcohol, overeating too much sugar, too much junk food, eating to soothe oneself when upset (sometimes called emotional eating), eating when bored, skipping meals. These are ways of parts being indifferent to the body. Smoking, not exercising at all, getting too little physical activity, maybe too much exercise. Poor ergonomics in the way that your workstation is set up. Overdoing the screen time; 10 hours a day and the computer at work is hard on the eyes. Low activity levels, 9.3 hours of sitting per day is the national average. We spend more time sitting per day than we do sleeping. Allowing yourself to get really sunburned. Now, I am guilty of this. About every three years I get some roaring sunburn because I was not caring for myself. I wasn't; I was indifferent to my body. Other people get dehydrated, get exhausted, not using the bathroom when you need to. Making poor clothing choices, right. Not bundling up in the winter, right. The guy in the hoodie when it's 15 degrees out in wintertime, a woman wearing high heels when it's not a good choice of footwear. Misuse of the smartphone, using your smartphone in bed, poor sleep habits, going to bed too late, misuse of sex, not caring for your body in sexual situations, not getting the medical or dental care for your body that would be good and right. That could be ignoring a treatable condition, ignoring symptoms could be poor hygiene. These are all ways that parts can express indifference toward the body.

Right, the five general characteristics of love. Love is affective, right. That indifference to the body is not caring about the body; apathy toward the body; looking only at the utilitarian functionality of the body; seeing the body as a container or a vessel for your mind or soul or psyche. Not seeing that the body was made good. The body was made good. So there's this apathy toward the body, when we have this indifference.

Second thing love is affirming. This indifference to the body can mimic detachment. It could mimic poverty; it could mimic some kind of virtue. But it's not, because it isn't a healthy detachment. It's a disconnection.

Love is responsive. That's the third one. But there's a lack of awareness about the body when parts are indifferent toward the body and driving the bus. And an extreme form of this is called la belle indifference. The term la belle indifference is a French term which translates to "beautiful ignorance". And la belle indifference is defined as a paradoxical absence of psychological distress, despite having a serious medical illness or symptoms related to a health condition. So something's really, really wrong with the body, but the person is blissfully unaware of it. That's an extreme form. Less extreme form is just again, not being interested in your body, not paying attention.

Love is unitive, but when there is a part that is indifferent to your body, that part does not see your body really as part of you. It's disconnected from your body.

And then love is steadfast. Again, there's not consistent care for the body when there's indifference. St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 33:16-17 says, "Do you not know that you are God's temple and that God's spirit dwells in you? If anyone destroys God's temple, God will destroy him. For God's temple is holy. And that temple you are". Our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit dwells within every Catholic who is in a state of grace. And so we have an obligation to care for our bodies.

And now what I'd like to go to is an experiential exercise on this failure to love ourselves. So let's just start with some thoughtfulness here. We could be getting into some difficult material on how and why we don't love ourselves. And this is true for every single one of us. You are no exception. You have parts that do not love other parts of you. And so as we enter into this, I'm going to invite you to really pay attention to where you are in your window of tolerance. If you find that you are escalating, that you're moving into fight or flight, that you're getting into sympathetic activation and you're really revving up, or if you find that you're that you're falling into a freeze response, shutting down, numbing out, that's the dorsal vagal activation, it's the freeze response, I'm going to invite you to stop. To reground yourself, to discontinue the exercise. You don't have to do this exercise; you can stop at any time. We don't want to steamroll any parts of you that are concerned about doing an exercise around self unlove; not loving yourself. It's also good to do this exercise when you have the time and the space and the privacy. This is not something to do while you are driving or while you are working out or engaging in other activities that would require you to divide your attention. This is something that you really want to have special time and space and privacy for. Also, take what's useful to you from this exercise; feel free to go in your own direction if that seems best. You're also free to pause the audio and really settle in and do some extended work, if that seems helpful to you. You can have pens and paper and pencils to write down things that are helpful, like in a journal, or to map out things, to draw things, if that's helpful. And remember, always you can pause the recording at points when you would like to have more time to do your internal work. So as we do this, I just want to invite you to have a lot of gentleness with yourself. A lot of gentleness for yourself. There's a moment here for you really to care for yourself from your innermost self. Luke 10:27 "Love your neighbor as yourself". We're working on loving ourselves in an ordered way, and that means loving the parts of our self that are in need, with that care, and with that compassion. If you happen to get distracted, that's okay. That's common; you can just refocus. And if that doesn't seem possible, then I'm just going to invite you to focus in on that distraction because that's a part that's distracting you. See if we can get curious about why a part of you feels a need to distract you. Alright, so I'm going to invite you to just notice what's going on in your body, as we consider this idea of you having a part that doesn't love some other part. Some part that doesn't love some other part. Parts that are in conflict, parts that are polarized. Just noticing if you can see or feel or sense in your body some tension among two parts of you. Some conflict within you. There might be tension in some muscles somewhere in your body could be stomach pain or headache or fatigue. I'm just going to invite you to notice whatever is going on in your body that reflects some conflict or tension, maybe some hatred between parts or maybe some indifference. Maybe the experience is not a bodily experience. It could be a memory, or an image, or a thought or a belief, or maybe an intense emotion. Something that represents conflict between two parts. And that's what I'm going to call the target sensation. And I'm going to invite you to focus in on that target sensation--that inner experience that reflects some kind of conflict, some kind of tension, some aspect of you not loving you, some part of you not loving some other part of you. It could be some part of you not loving your body; that's another way. So focus in on that sensation, that inner experience, that target sensation that reflects that conflict between a part and the body or between two parts. And I'm going to invite you to focus in on the part that is not loving some other part of you, or maybe a part that's not loving your body. That's your target part. That's your target part. Your target part might be hating another part of you. Your target part might be indifferent toward another part of you. You might be trying to suppress or silence another part. And I'm wondering if we can be curious if you, in your innermost self, can be curious about what that is all about. Can you really notice that target part, that part that has some kind of unlove toward another part, either hatred or indifference. We're going to try to work with one part at a time. You can do this reflection, this guided exercise over again with multiple parts later. But let's see if your parts inside can agree to let you work with just one part that has hatred or indifference. We're going to ask that one part, that target part not to flood you with its intensity. It's a safety thing. We're going to ask that part not to overwhelm you, or to blend with you, or to take you over, but rather to look at you. Your innermost self. To see if you, as the innermost self and that part can have a relationship. We're looking for that target part to be separate but near toward to your innermost self. Separate but near. See if that part can give you space, and see if other parts of you are okay with you as the innermost self connecting with this target part--this part that carries unlove toward other parts in your system. We're going to slow things way down now. Really an opportunity to have a big open heart toward that target part, that part that carries unlove. See if it's okay for you to have a big open heart. There might be some other part that doesn't want that. That doesn't feel safe with that. That might not give you the space to have a big open heart. A lot of times parts don't realize that parts that are hating or parts that are not loving still have good intentions. They're still trying to help. They're trying to do what they know how to do, even though that could be really maladaptive or harmful, but there's still good intentions there. See if your protector parts will allow you, the innermost self, to connect with that target part that has the unlove. And if it's okay to move forward, just see that part or sense that part. However, that part may be becoming more apparent to you. And to really connect with that part and hear that part's story. How old is that part? Some parts of us may be phenomenologically, very, very young, even preverbal. Just ask that part how old he/she is. And I'm going to invite you to listen to what that target part wants to share with you. What does that part want you to know? What are that target part's good intentions? And what is the story that that target part wants you to know? There's a reason for why it does what it does. There's a reason for the unlove. If it's helpful to write down some of that story, you're welcome to do that. If it's helpful to pause for more time to work with this part, you're welcome to pause the recording. And I'm going to invite you to notice how you're feeling toward that target part with the unlove toward another part. How are you feeling toward that part? Is there compassion for that part? Is there curiosity, genuine interest in that part? Is there a desire to connect with that part? Is there a feeling of calm? You know, if any of those are missing or if there are any negative feelings toward that part, there's a concerned protector part that is unsure about you connecting with your target part. And I'm wondering if that's the case, if any concern protector parts could soften and relax back, so that you as the innermost self, can connect with your target part. Sometimes they'll just give you that space so that you, as the innermost self, can connect with that target part with the unlove. And if not, if parts are just way too concerned about that, too concerned about you focusing on the part with the unlove, that's the target part. If that isn't allowed by your protectors, then focus on a concerned protector part. Make that your target part. There's a reason why that doesn't feel safe enough right now. Really get interested in why that concern protector is not ready to let you connect with your target part with the unLove. And so just invite you to go back to your target part and let that target part tell you all about what it's experiencing--what it's experiencing toward the other part. The unloved part. And what kind of emotions are there. What kind of thoughts are there? How does this target part see the unloved part? What is the conflict with the unloved part all about? Why does that part have the impulses that it has? Why does it try to get you to do what it wants you to do? What fears does this target part have? If it stops doing what it's doing, what is it afraid would happen? What's the fear if it stops doing its job? And what does that conflict or polarization between your target part and the unloved part, what does that go back to? Is there something from the past that that conflict connects to--some other situation that your target part is aware of? And I'm just going to invite you to check and see if there's a concerned protector who is trying to speak for your target part like a spokespart, a part that's trying to interpret the part's experience. If that's the case, see if that concerned protector can soften, if that concern protector can relax back and let the target part speak for itself. See if that would be possible. How is that target part doing now? Are you noticing any changes in your body? Can your target part feel love from you? Does it have a sense of compassion from you? Of connectedness? Of curiosity, of calm? Is it okay for you to show gratitude and appreciation to your part? For what it's shared with you and how hard it's tried to help? Its good intentions. And a lot of appreciation from other parts for allowing you to have this space to connect in this way--just a lot of gratitude. Parts all have good intentions. They're all trying to help.

And if it's helpful, you can do this exercise again with a different part, or with the same part. This doesn't have to be the end of you connecting with your target part doesn't have to be a one-off experience. You can check in with that part again. Lot of appreciation for your parts; all your parts are good; all your parts are indispensable.

Alright. So thank you for engaging in that experiential exercise to the degree that was good and right for you. And now we are looking ahead. We are looking ahead. This whole episode, we spent time laying out the problem. What happens when there's self-hatred? What happens when there's indifference toward the self? What happens when there's unlove toward the self?

Next episode, episode 98, we're going to be getting much more into what does ordered self-love look like. Now that we've covered all the ways that we can fail to love ourselves, we are going to be leaning into what it means for us to be loving ourselves in an ordered way. It's going to be starting in the next episode. Episode 98 Father Jack Philippe, in his 2008 book, 'Called to Life', said: "This self-love is good and necessary, not egoism that refers everything to 'me,' but the grace to live in peace with one's self, to consent, to be what one is, with one's talents and limitations. Love of God, love of neighbor and love of self grow together and sustain one another as they grow. If one is absent or neglected the other two suffer. Like the legs of a tripod, all three are needed in order to stand and each leans on the others". I just love that image of the tripod. I think of it as a three legged stool. All three are necessary: love of God, love of neighbor and love of self. All three are necessary.

In the next episode, we're going to bring in some of the work of Dr. Mary Julian Ekman, who is a religious sister of Mercy, one of the RSM sisters. She did a doctoral dissertation on self-love. It's really, really interesting. She argues that St. Thomas Aquinas believes that self-love is the ground of human action, where the conscious choice to love self transforms self-love into self-friendship. Proper self-love is indispensable for perfecting the human person by making the soul more like God. That's really, really important. We'll also get some help from St. Augustine as we explore how disordered self-love regards the self as an end, but ordered self-love sees the self as a means to the proper end of love.

I've got some exciting news. Ann-Marie Klobe is going to be doing this online retreat for single Catholic women over 35 who are ready to connect deeper with their faith the saints, and to find a godly relationship. This is her 'Ready for Love' retreat. So many single Catholics are operating from a place of disconnection. Her goal is to restore their trust in God's plan for their life and help them feel like they have a purpose in the world and to provide training on topics such as the saints, forgiveness, beauty and trusting in God. They 'Ready for Love' retreat airs October 3-17, 2022. And Ann-Marie Klobe, she did an extended experiential exercise with me as part of this retreat. We recorded it and she discovered and explored some hidden reasons that could be obstacles for romantic intimacy. She did some really beautiful work, and she will share that work with the women who attend the retreat. Also, Ann-Marie and I are planning for me to do a 60 minute live Q&A for the 'Ready to Love' retreatants, where the women on the retreat can bring their questions to me about any ways that they reject themselves as persons, the ways in which they refuse to love themselves, what it would mean to be married, and about discovering their primary identity as a beloved daughter of God. The website for the retreat is not yet quite up at the time that I'm recording this, but you can go to Anne-Marie Klobe's website, which is www.anne-marieklobe.com that's www.anne-marieklobe.com. And I will also be letting you know more about the retreat; I'm going to provide links to it in the weekly reflections that I email out on September 14 and 21. And if you haven't been getting my weekly reflections in your email, sign up for them. Have them delivered to your email inbox every Wednesday. Go to soulsandhearts.com, click the box that says, "Get Dr. Peter's weekly reflection in your email inbox each Wednesday". Those weekly reflections are deep dives that I write each week about critical human formation topics, and those weekly reflections are the written companions to this podcast.

Also, I want to bring up the Resilient Catholics Community, the RCC. I am inviting you on an adventure of being loved and of loving. That's what the Resilient Catholics Community is all about. Check it out, soulsandhearts.com/RCC. The RCC is all about working through your human formation issues, the human formation issues that lead to all the unlove that you have for yourself, all that self-hatred, the indifference to the self, the failures to love yourself in an ordered way, so that you can love with all of your being, with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength, with every fiber of your being. It's about learning to be gentle but firm with yourself. It's all about integration. It's all about resilience, and it's about restoration. Recovering from being dominated by parts that are driven by shame, fear, anger, sadness, pessimism. Whatever your struggle is in the depths of your human formation. We do this work experientially. So many experiential exercises like the one that we did in this episode. So we work not just at the level of the head, but we also work in your heart. And we do the work step by step in a very clear programmatic way. Check it out, soulsandhearts.com/RCC. We open registration for new members every June and every December. I'm inviting you to join me and more than 100 other faithful Catholics on this pilgrimage to better human formation. Get on the waiting list for the cohort that begins in December 2020. Go to soulsandhearts.com/RCC. Sign up for the waiting list. Also, don't forget, you can always talk with me in conversation hours. Call my cell 317-567-9594, any Tuesday or Thursday from 4:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. EST for conversation hours. I don't do therapy during that time, I don't do counseling during that time, but I'm happy to talk with you about the topics that come up in the podcast or in the weekly reflections. And with that, it's a wrap for today, we'll invoke Our Patroness and Our Patron, Our Lady, Our Mother, Untier of Knots, pray for us. St. John the Baptist, pray for us.

Real love (agape) is given freely -- but it is not received freely in our fallen human condition. Join me in this episode as we discuss the costs of opening our hearts to love\and the price of being loved fully, of being loved completely, in all of our parts. We review why so many people refuse to be loved -- and we examine the psychological and human formation reasons for turning away from love. Finally we discuss what we can do to get over our natural-level impediments to receiving love.  

In this episode, we focus on how unresolved trauma undermines and sabotages both our capacity and our inclination to love well. We explore how unresolved trauma impacts each of the five characteristics of love -- compromising our ability to love in an affective (emotional), affirming, responsive, unitive and steadfast way. We also dive into how so trauma pulls us to focus inward, and to protect ourselves, undercutting the vulnerability and willingness to engage that are required for deep love and we discuss hope for change. 

In this episode, I discuss the central importance of love as the marker of well-being from a Catholic perspective -- our capacity to live out the two great commandments. We explore how love is the distinguishing characteristic of Christians, we detail the eight different kinds of love, and we discuss Catholic theologian Bernard Brady's five attributes or characteristics of love -- how love is affective, affirming, responsive, unitive, and steadfast. We discuss what is commonly missing from philosophical and theological approaches to love, and we briefly touch on the death of love and distortions of love. 

In this episode I discuss the crucial role of the right kinds of corrective and healing experiences in our lives. I then offer you three inner experiential exercises to help you understand three questions: 1) In what ways do you not love yourself (with a special focus on inner critics); 2) your inner tension between connection and protection; and 3) your internal battles with rigidity and chaos. 

In this episode, I invite you to explore and understand with me neuropsychiatrist Dr. Dan Siegel's Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB) and what IPNB can show us about psychological health. We review the triangle of well-being, the nature of secure attachments, and the basis for mental health from an IPNB perspective. We examine the characteristics of a healthy mind and how it functions, and the two signs that reliable indicate all psychological symptoms and mental dysfunction. We discuss the nine domains of integration, mindsight, and the healthy mind platter. I also share my exchange with Dr. Siegel about whether and how IPNB can be integrated with Catholicism.  

We discuss the brand new release of Souls and Hearts' Litanies of the Heart. These prayers were composed to be very attuned to the needs of closed hearts, fearful hearts, and wounded hearts, bringing in the best of psychological science around how we trust, how we connect and how we form bonds with others in our humanness -- all to help us better develop a deep, personal relationship with our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Join us as we discuss the origin of the Litanies, their development, and recommendations for praying them in a way that suits your particular needs. 

Join us as we review how philosophers and modern secular psychologists understand mental health and well-being. In this episode, we look at the attempts to define what makes us happy, from the 4th century BC to the present day. We cover the thinking of Aristippus, Aristotle, Descartes, Freud, Seligman, Porges, Schwartz, and two diagnostic systems. We take a special look at how positive psychology and Internal Family Systems see well-being. 

Join Dr. Peter as he explains how trauma impacts our bodies, through the lens of polyvagal theory. Through quotes, examples, questions for reflection and experiential exercises, Dr. Peter walks you through a current understanding of how large a role our bodies have in our experience of trauma. 

In this episode, we gain a deeper understanding of the experience of trauma, the impact of trauma. we clarify definitions of different aspects of trauma, various categories of trauma, the immediate and delayed signs and symptoms of trauma, and the effects of trauma. Then I share an experiential exercise with you to help you discover potential areas that might be fruitful for future exploration of your own internal experience. 

In this episode, we explore the conventional secular and the traditional spiritual ways of understanding scrupulosity, bringing in the experts to define scrupulosity, tells us the signs of being scrupulous, speculate on the causes of the trouble, discuss that standard remedies in the secular and spiritual realms. Then I share with you my views on it, looking at scrupulosity through an Internal Family Systems lens, grounded in a Catholic worldview. We discuss how parts have different God images and the role of shame and anger in the experience of scrupulosity. 

Join Dr. Peter to go way below the surface and find the hidden meanings of obsessions, compulsions and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD). Through poetry and quotes, he invites you into the painful, distressing, fearful and misunderstood world of those who suffer from OCD. He defines obsessions and compulsions, discusses the different types of each, and evaluates two conventional treatments and one alternative treatment for OCD. Most importantly, he discusses the deepest natural causes of OCD, which are almost always disregarded in conventional treatment, which focuses primarily on the symptoms. 

Join me as we discover explore all the elements of perfectionism, from its root causes to its surface manifestations, through an Internal Family Systems lens, grounded in a Catholic world view. Through poetry, quotes, research findings, personal examples and the current professional literature, I pull together many strands into a unified whole to help you deeply grasp the internal experience of perfectionism. 

In this episode, I lay out the whole mission and purpose of the Interior Integration for Catholics Podcast -- answering the six central questions so that you can make an informed decision about whether this podcast fits you and your needs. Get the latest in my discernment about this podcast and the Resilient Catholics Community, where we are going. 

Join me for a deep exploration of the ways our parts process grief in healthy ways, the back-and-forth alternating between focusing on the loss and looking at restoration. Guided by the work of IFS therapist and author Derek Scott and by using a dramatized story of loss with resulting grief, we will explore the internal interactions among our parts that lead to such a multifaceted experience of grief. We also examine the two paths of grief that Catholics can choose. 

Through a dramatic representation, quotes, and examples, I walk you through how six dimensions of what it means for you to love yourself and others. By bringing in the pioneering work of IFS therapist Derek Scott, we will explore how different parts within you respond to grief and loss in so many different ways. 

If we love deeply, we're going to grieve deeply. It's inevitable. And it's that simple. So together, let's understand and experience grief better in order to love better. In this episode, I review the popular models of grief with their strengths and limitations, illustrating them through poetry, quotes, and evaluating them with the best of the psychological research. 

Through dramatic reenactments, experiential exercises and the best of available resources, Dr. Peter brings you critical information to help you better love those near you who are struggling with suicidal thoughts and impulses. Learn how to be a much better first responder in these situations and to be a bridge to additional resources for your loved ones who are considering suicide. 

Dr. Peter brings you inside the inner world of so many parents, spouses, children, and siblings of those who died by suicide. Through an imagination exercise, research, quotes from family members, and the Internal Family Systems model of the person, he invites you to a deeper understanding of other others experience a loved one's suicide. 

Through poetry, stories, quotes, theory, research and clinical experience, Dr. Peter invites you into the dire, terrible world of suicidality.  He makes the case that almost no one, including therapists and those who have attempted suicide understand suicide very well.  And he brings in perspectives from Internal Family Systems to clarify how different parts of us have different beliefs, attitudes, feelings and desires about suicide, leading to inner conflict and turmoil.

Dr. Peter walks with you through what Sacred Scripture has to teach us about suicide, exploring the major episodes of suicide in the Bible from a historical and psychological perspective, grounded in a Catholic worldview. 

Through stories and examples, Dr. Peter reviews the best of secular approaches to understanding suicide. He discusses suicide statistics, the different kinds of suicide, the risk factors for suicide, the warning signs for suicide and myths about suicide. He covers the "reaction trio" and then the deep roots of suicide, the first causes

Join Dr. Peter as he describes how Internal Family Systems informed thinking can help you understand yourself and others so much better than the common understanding of a unified, homogeneous personality.  Understanding yourself and other better is critical to being able to love yourself and others and God in more ordered and healthy ways.  Dr. Peter gives examples from his own life and his own parts in his system and also leads an experiential exercise to help you connect with your parts. 

Through stories, poetry, many examples, and an experiential exercise, Dr. Peter invites you inside yourself to much more deeply understand what it means to be blended vs. integrated, and the implications of blending vs. integration in loving yourself and others all in the service of having a much deeper sense of peace and well-being. 

Join Dr. Peter in a deep look at how Internal Family Systems approaches to therapy and to human formation are consistent and inconsistent with the perennial teachings of the Catholic Church. We explore the multiplicity and unity of the human psyche, the role of the core self, the nature of "parts" and the question of sin in this episode. 

Dr. Peter goes right to the core of the Catholic life, our mission to love God and love neighbor and how those depend on us loving ourselves in an ordered way.  He discusses seven levels with six dimensions of understanding others, ranging along a continuum of developmental maturity and closes with an experiential exercise to help you discover why you lack interior peace. 

Join Dr. Peter as he describes how Internal Family Systems informed thinking can help you understand yourself and others so much better than the common understanding of a unified, homogeneous personality.  Understanding yourself and other better is critical to being able to love yourself and others and God in more ordered and healthy ways.  Dr. Peter gives examples from his own life and his own parts in his system and also leads an experiential exercise to help you connect with your parts.