IIC 10: Your Catholic Body and Crisis: Bodyset

We dive into what it means that your body is Catholic (as well as your soul), and how to understand what your body is telling you.  We discuss the importance of loving your body, and Dr. Peter walks you through an experiential exercise to help you connect with your body and discover what it needs you to know, making the unconscious conscious.

[00:00:00] Welcome to our podcast, Coronavirus Crisis Carpe Diem. Let us seize the day. This twice weekly podcast helps us to rise up. It helps us to embrace the possibilities and opportunities for spiritual and psychological growth in this time of crisis. And our podcast does this through being thoroughly grounded in a Catholic worldview. I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski with Souls and Hearts at soulsandhearts.com. It is great to be here with you. This is episode 10 and it’s April 20th, 2020, and this episode is entitled Your Catholic Body and the Crisis: Bodyset. Today we are focusing on the body, your Catholic body. Does that sound weird to you, that your body is Catholic? I bet it does sound weird to most of you. Why? Is your body not Catholic? Or maybe we never even think about our bodies being Catholic or not Catholic. Well, we’re going to get into that and all kinds of body-related issues in today’s episode. We’re in the middle of a program about building resilience in this crisis, so that we are ready to take advantage of the opportunities that God is giving us to grow. And that is, of course, to grow spiritually, but also to grow psychologically. Yes, to grow in the faith, of course, but also to grow in our human formation, that is, to grow in the natural realm. That’s what Souls and Hearts is all about. It’s removing the psychological impediments to being able to love and to be loved.

[00:01:53] That’s our whole purpose with Souls and Hearts. And that’s the purpose of this podcast as well. In episode 4 of this podcast. That was The Four Pillars of Resilience. We introduced those. And those were mindset, heartset, bodyset and soulset. That episode introduced the four major domains, the four major parts of us: heart, mind, body, soul. We need these four areas of our lives ordered so that we can be resilient and adapt well under stress. If you’re new to the podcast, you can listen to each episode on its own. Each episode can stand alone. That’s not a problem. But remember that they all hang together into this ongoing program to strengthen your resilience, to live out your duties of state, to live out your vocation. So this whole podcast is a program. We’re in the middle of a program to equip you to live out your life, to live out your life of service and love to other people. So if you have the time and interest, though, go back to episode 4. Listen through those and work your way up to this one. In episodes 5 and 6, we got into mindset. Our mindset is the position of our intellect and how we habitually apply reason to our situation and to our experiences, or how we don’t.

[00:03:13] In episode 7, we moved into heartset. And our heartset, just to review real quickly, that consists of the dispositions or the orientation of our heart. It’s the emotional and intuitive ways of our heart. We discuss the huge mistake of neglecting our emotions and the costs of that neglect, and how to get in touch with our emotions again. So that’s what we did in episode 7. In episode 8, we had a brief detour and we discussed reconciling psychology and Catholicism, and I shared some of my story about how I got into the field of psychology. In episode 9, we got back into heartset with another huge issue, and this is the experience of being overwhelmed by emotion. We talked about how to prevent being overwhelmed by emotion. And with that, we wrapped up our initial look at heartset. So now we’re continuing on and we’re working with a new pillar. Our bodies. Bodyset. How do our bodies impact our capacity to cope in a crisis? That’s the deep dive for today. And so just to review, what is bodyset again, Dr. Peter? Well, I’m glad you asked. Bodyset is how our body affects us, how our physical reactions impact us and our dispositions and our inclinations. We are embodied beings. We are composites of body and soul. So our physical bodies have a huge impact on us. The state of our body and our relationship with our body, that’s bodyset. So here’s the main message for today. We need to listen to our bodies and respond in love to our bodies.

[00:04:59] Well, what does that mean, Dr. Peter? We need to listen to our bodies. Aren’t we supposed to subjugate our bodies? Aren’t we supposed to control them? Keep our bodies from leading us into sin? You know, aren’t our bodies the flesh that Saint Paul condemns so often in his letters? Doesn’t Saint Paul say in Galatians 5:24, “And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires?” Or Romans 8:6, “To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the spirit is life and peace.” This business of loving our bodies sounds fishy, sounds dangerous, sounds not very Catholic. All right, we got to deal with those potential objections. Let me rewind a little bit and tell you a little bit more about my story. This isn’t going to take very long, but as as I mentioned in episode 8, I was pretty unimpressed with the clinical training I was getting in graduate school, and I was really uncertain about how to ground psychotherapy in a Catholic worldview. And that was so central to me. I never wanted to lead anyone astray, morally, spiritually, you know? I knew that at the end of my life, I was going to be judged on every word I said to every client and every therapy session in my day of particular judgment.

[00:06:21] And I was far from convinced that psychotherapy was really effective at all. So clinically, I made a shift. I moved into what’s called health and rehabilitation psychology. I could see benefit in health psychology. And in health and rehab psychology, what you do is things like help people with pain control. You help them manage medical conditions. There’s a lot of coping with traumatic bodily injuries or recovery from different kinds of accidents. There’s also a fair amount of habit control. That’s where you use psychology to help people deal with smoking cessation, help them quit smoking, or help them to lose weight, or to help people sleep better, helping people with all kinds of bodily issues. I could see the value in that. That didn’t seem morally problematic, right? To help people reduce their chronic pain symptoms by 30%. Things like that. But as I got into it more, it was all about symptom management and about habit control. And I was really interested in the meaning of the bodily symptoms. I was really interested in the meaning of the habits that were grounded in the body, that troubled people. So very early in my career as a psychologist, I had a woman who really wanted to give up smoking. She’d come to me specifically for that. And because I had had this background, I did that kind of work at the time. And as we got into like what smoking meant to her, it became clearer and clearer.

[00:07:47] And this wasn’t obvious to her at the beginning. But it was the only memory that was positive and connected that she had with her father. She had a terrible relationship with her father. Her father was abusive in a number of different ways. But when those two smoked together when she was an adolescent, she felt a sense of connection. She felt a sense of bond. She felt that her father loved her. And it was all wrapped up in smoking. In order for her to give up smoking, she’d have to give up that relationship, the memory of the relationship with her father. So you can see how this was all sort of wrapped together. I had another client very early in my career, again, who came in for nail biting. She really wanted to get over nail biting. Her nails were bitten to the quick and they were they were torn up and bloody. And I did the intake interview and I had an intuition, a clinical intuition. I said, I wonder how you’re doing with anger. And boom. That’s what grabbed her focus. We focused on anger for eight months. And, you know, it turned out that the nail biting in that situation, if you think about biting your nails, biting is a very aggressive human act. It’s a very aggressive act. And when one’s biting one’s nails, one’s biting oneself. Right.

[00:09:09] You’re biting your own body and that has meaning. The aggression is turned towards the self, the aggression of the biting is turned towards the self. And the nails, they’re actually dynamically and symbolically important, right? They are equivalents of claws. If you think about nails in an analog to the animal world, those are claws. So if you start to think about this symbolically, the person is biting off their own claws. Why? Well, in this particular case, it was because she was extremely afraid of expressing aggression toward other people. She was declawing herself to symbolically prevent herself from reaching out and slashing at other people. That sounds maybe far-fetched to a lot of people who don’t think psychologically or who aren’t particularly psychologically minded, who don’t look for symbolism in the way that we interact with our bodies. But she was taking the aggression that she had towards other people, directing it towards herself in such a way that she was disempowering herself from discharging that aggression towards others in a way that she felt was dangerous, in a way that she felt would lead her to lose significant relationships in her life. We worked on her anger for eight months. We never discussed her nails again, until the very last session, when she said, you know, a few months ago I stopped biting my nails. Never had a problem with that again. This had been a life-long issue for her. So I was really interested in how do we get to the roots of things, right? And this is my main message for you today.

[00:10:46] We need to listen to our bodies and we need to respond in love to them. We need to love ourselves in our bodies. Why? Our Lord commands it. Love your neighbor as yourself. Because we are body and soul composites, we’re not just to love our souls. We’re also to love our bodies. And lots of people hate their bodies, or they hate something about their bodies. The body gets a bad rap. Some of it may be because of that whole issue of the flesh and the way that Saint Paul comes across with the flesh, right? The many references to the flesh in the New Testament, especially, like I said, with Saint Paul, that can be really confusing to people who think that it means that Saint Paul is talking about the physical body. He’s not. He’s not. While the Scripture sometimes does refer to the flesh as the physical body, especially when it’s preceded by the definite article, the flesh, it usually means something more. Only rarely does the phrase the flesh refer only to the physical body. So what do we mean when we talk about the flesh then? Well, it refers to the part of us that is alienated from God. It’s the part of us that resists God that rebels against God.

[00:12:15] It’s the parts of us that are struggling to go our own way, that are infused with pride, that don’t want to have anything to do with God, that struggle with limits, that struggle with rules. There was a blog post by Monsignor Charles Pope last year in March that just lays this out beautifully. Basically, when Saint Paul is talking about the flesh, he’s not talking about the body. He’s talking about soulset. He’s talking about a position of the passions that can influence our soulset if we let it, right. He’s actually really much more in the realm of the soul than he is in the body, because he’s talking about these things that can exist in our soul, the rebelliousness, the pride, the refusal to accept God’s authority over us, things like that. So dealing with the body right now is particularly important, right? Because so many people are experiencing more physical bodily symptoms, right? And it makes sense, right? We’re under a lot of stress. There are so many things that are going on right now with this virus crisis, so many interlinked things that can stress us out. And so, the body often carries a lot of that stress. And it’s really important for us to recognize what our bodies are telling us. So let me use a few examples from my own experience, right? I’ve got a number of different bodily signs that clue me in to different experiences that are going on inside that I might not be consciously aware of.

[00:14:01] These are almost like tells in poker, right? A poker tell is when there’s some sort of indication that a poker player is giving off that reveals to another player what’s going on in his hand, right. There are these signs. There are these indicators that something’s going on. And if you can recognize your tells, if you can recognize your body’s tells, you are so far ahead of the game with understanding what might not be in conscious awareness at the present time. Because we can only have in conscious awareness a relatively small percentage of our internal psychological life. Most of what goes on in us is actually unconscious. We’ve got a limited capacity to process things in our conscious awareness with our intellects and our wills engaged. So for me, and this goes back to when I was a little kid, my knee bounces in certain situations. Boom boom boom boom boom boom boom. I remember being in the first grade at Saint Gabriel’s Catholic School in Neenah, Wisconsin, and we had desks that were all linked together, and I would move the whole row, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And when that happens, I know that I’ve got some kind of autonomic nervous system arousal. I’m revved up. And it could be because I’m nervous. It could be because I’m excited.

[00:15:19] It could be because I’m competitive. It happens when I’m competitive. I could be really engaged or engrossed or really interested in something. So it’s not a specific symptom. It doesn’t tell me exactly what’s going on, but it tells me that one of a number of different things could be going on. I’ve got a jaw clench, and I realized this as an adult when I was writing up seminarian assessment reports. These are for the guys that want to go off to seminary. And I noticed that when I was dealing with particular cases in which there was, you know, a fair amount of difficulties, challenges, I noticed that my jaw would get clenched. And as I explored that within myself, I realized it was because I didn’t want to say the things that I was finding out as I evaluated the case, as I was writing up the report. The things that I had to say but I didn’t want to say, and my jaw clenched because I didn’t want to think about this candidate with all of the issues that he was presenting with. I didn’t want to have to tell his vocations director, didn’t want to have to tell the seminary, I didn’t want to have to tell his bishop. But yeah, I did not want to be able to say those things or have to say those things.

[00:16:31] Third thing. Pain in my neck. Right up in my neck. Right around where the neck meets the shoulders. Kind of in a yoke pattern. When I feel burdened, I feel it there. And if there are stresses in the marriage, I feel it there. If there are stresses in my marriage. My wife and I have been married 23 years, great marriage, seven kids, love her dearly, but marriage is hard, people. I mean, if you’re not married, marriage is hard. A good marriage is hard. And so there are times when there’s some stresses in the marriage and I will feel it in my neck. Why? Because of the yoke of marriage, right? The pattern of the pain is in a yoke. And there are more of these kinds of things. So I’m going to encourage you to become aware of your body. Because if I feel that neck pain, I can ask myself, is there something going on in my marriage? We’re actually going to do an exercise now where you can listen in to your body, where you can communicate with your body, to find out what your body wants to tell you about what you’re experiencing. Because remember, so much of your experience is outside of your conscious awareness. In humility, we need to acknowledge that. That was something that psychodynamic therapists have been talking about for more than a century. It’s been confirmed by neurology and neurobiology and neurophysiology as well with the imaging studies and so forth.

[00:17:57] So we need and humility to realize that we don’t know what’s going on inside of us at all times. We need to be able to find out. We need to create a space to be able to hear it. This is, again, not therapy. We never do therapy on this podcast or with any of the activities in Souls and Hearts. And I am going to recommend that you do this in a quiet space. So if you’re in a place right now where you’re distracted, making dinner, working on the yard, whatever, it’d be good to create that space where you can really focus and close your eyes, things like that, for this next part. And as with all these experiential exercises, if at any point you feel uncomfortable, just feel free to stop. Use your inner sense to guide you. You don’t have to do these if you don’t want to. So it’s all optional. So I’m going to invite you to think of your body as Catholic, because it was baptized in your baptism as well, and because you are a body and soul composite, and your body is a gift from God. And anything that your body is experiencing, anything that your body is trying to tell you, is a gift from God. If we really believe that central verse, that’s the theme verse for this podcast, which is Romans 8:28.

[00:19:19] “All things work together for good for those who love the Lord.” All things. This includes all of your bodily symptoms. This includes all of the bodily disorder or dysfunction that you may be having, you know, disease, different kinds of injuries. All of that can work together for good for those who love the Lord. It’s an extraordinary claim. Sometimes it’s especially hard to believe when it happens in our body, right? But what I’m going to ask you to do is to have a big, open heart towards your body, to accept your body as it is right now. That doesn’t mean that you have to approve of everything in your body. It doesn’t mean that you’re endorsing everything. It just means that you’re accepting your body as it is, as a gift from God. Big open heart towards your body. A mindset of openness towards your body, openness to understanding what it is that’s going on in your body right now. So that’s the mindset, that’s the heartset, as we begin to approach the body. Right, mindset, open mind, accepting, curious, wanting to understand, open to new information, and an awareness that we don’t understand everything that’s going on in our bodies because we have an unconscious. Heartset, and that is a position of reaching out, caring, loving our bodies.

[00:20:57] Right? So that’s the prep. That’s the preparation. And we can breathe in slowly. And breathing in graces to help us understand our bodies. Now soulset’s coming in, right. Believing that our bodies are a gift from God. Breathing in. Breathing out. Breathing in. Breathing out. Just allowing yourself to be fully in the present. There’s nothing else you have to do. Right now, you’re focused on your body and that’s a good thing. And really noticing what’s going on in your body, noticing the sensations that you’re experiencing. The way your clothes feel on your body. Your feet touching the floor. How the chair is holding your body if you’re sitting. And I’m going to ask you to focus in on the most prominent body sensation, the most prominent thing that’s going on in your body right now. It’s really noticing with that openness, the curiosity, the acceptance, the desire to understand. And I’m going to invite you to ask that part of your body that’s having that sensation, what it wants you to know, what it wants you to understand. Just ask it. If that body part could speak, if it could tell you, what would it say? And it may be helpful to write that down. We’re going to wind this up. We’re going to wrap this up, this little exercise up. You can certainly spend more time with this in your own private reflection or in prayer.

[00:24:36] That’s also a really good way to do it. But to really get in touch with your body. A lot of the work I do is about that. I’m very big into body-based therapies because there’s so much that’s going on that’s outside of awareness. In fact, Diane in Maryland just emailed me a couple of days ago. She’s a listener in Maryland, Diane is. And she was talking about how she received excellent care from one of the therapists, one of the Catholic therapists in the Catholic Psychotherapy Association. That was all body-based. It was a somatic therapy. And she was so appreciative of that. Body-focused therapies can be extremely helpful. Now, a lot of people that are into the body can also operate from very different anthropologies than Catholic ones, right? They can have a very different worldview. So you have to take that into consideration as well. But I am really curious about what happened as you began to look at your body. What was it that your body was telling you? If you feel comfortable, email me that. Email me that at crisis@soulsandhearts.com. Give me a voicemail. Let me know what happened. If you prefer to leave me a voicemail at 317-567-9594. 317-567-9594. Leave me a voicemail about what happened in your experience. I’m fascinated to hear how people are coming into contact with their bodies in this bodyset.

[00:26:06] On Wednesday, I’m going to give you an update on me caring for my body. Right? One of the things I’ve got going on is a shoulder issue, and I have been neglecting that. So in response to, you know, what I need to do for my body in response to the demand that I love myself in my body, I’m going to start taking care of that shoulder. I went to a physical therapist. I’ve got some exercises to do. This happened about two, three weeks ago. I haven’t done any of them, right. So I am going to be with you on this, doing my own work on my body, because you guys are inspiring me to do that. And I don’t want to be up here talking about body stuff and not doing it on my own. So this is inspiring me to be accountable to you. And in the Wednesday email, the email I’m going to send out this Wednesday, I will give you an update on how that’s going for those of you that have registered at soulsandhearts.com, on the podcast web page, you guys will get that email. I’m also going to give you a book recommendation for those of you that really want to get into this, a really accessible book, my favorite book in this whole field, it’s not written by a Catholic author, but it’s written by an author that is really, I think, top-notch when it comes to understanding the body, especially with trauma.

[00:27:21] So you’ll get that if you sign up for the email as well. I want you also to let other people know, let other people know about this podcast. Let them know what we’ve got going on here if you think they would be a good fit for what we’re doing. We’re really working on building our community, trying to get those discussion boards up. We’ve got plans now for a webinar of some kind for our members, those that have registered with soulsandhearts.com, for this podcast. We’re going to do that. And I’m also going to invite you to just keep reaching out, letting me know what you think. I mean, is this podcast too long? I’ve been thinking, man, is this podcast too long? Are these episodes getting to be too long? Am I going on and on? Am I getting too far off script? Whatever. Let me know. Or are you loving it and just saying, yeah, just keep bringing it on. It’s not too long. I can handle this twice a week, you know, for this amount of time. So let me know that specifically that question. And if you do tell me a story, let me know if I can use it in a podcast like Diane in Maryland.

[00:28:22] She let me use this. We had a little exchange about it and she was like, yeah, put it out there. I want people to know, I want people to reach out to the Catholic Psychotherapy Association members because of the experience that she had with a great Catholic therapist that came from the CPA. So, you know, let me know if I can use your name. Let me know if I can use the state you’re from. You know, if you’ve got things that you want to share, I’d love to bring them up on the air. So, also, I’m not really sure whether to do another episode on bodyset before moving on to soulset. I just love talking about the body. This was a pretty long episode, so let me know if you want more on the body. I’m going to be putting together the pre-production on Wednesday. That’s the 22nd at about 8:00, and I’ll probably be taping this at about 10:00 a.m. So if you can get this out in the next couple of days, let me know if you want another one about bodyset. Reach out. Let me know. That would be great. Thank you for all of that. And it’s a wrap for today. Let’s invoke our patroness and our patron. Mother Mary, Undoer of Knots, pray for us. Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.