IIC 15: The Main Sign of Psychological Health

We explore the main, essential sign of psychological health and Dr. Peter announces a great new development for the listeners.

[00:00:14] Welcome to the podcast Coronavirus Crisis Carpe Diem, where you and I rise up and embrace the possibilities and opportunities for spiritual and psychological growth during this pandemic, in this time of crisis, all grounded in a Catholic worldview. We are going beyond mere resiliency. We are going beyond just surviving. We are going beyond just maintaining our status quo. We are going beyond resiliency to rising up to the challenges of this pandemic and becoming even healthier in the natural and the spiritual realms healthier than we were before. That’s the whole point of this podcast. I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski, your host, your guide, and I am with Souls and Hearts at soulsandhearts.com. Thank you for being here with me. All right, so I have got some great news for you. I have some excellent news for our community here with the Coronavirus Crisis Carpe Diem podcast. And I will announce that at the end of this podcast. This great news that we’ve been waiting for. So stay tuned. Stay in, stay with us throughout the whole thing. We’ll be getting there shortly. This is episode 15. We’re releasing this on May 11th, 2020, and it’s entitled The Main Sign of Psychological Health. Now, in the previous 11 episodes, we have described and discussed the four pillars of resilience, mindset, heartset, bodyset and soulset. And now we’re getting into the really fascinating exploration of how these four pillars interact. We’re diving into our internal psychological lives to see how our psychological strengths and weaknesses impact our resiliency, and also how they impact our spiritual lives.

[00:02:09] Because as a Catholic psychologist, I’m really focused on how your psychological factors, how your psychological structures, how your psychological functioning, how your entire psychological life impacts how you accept love from God and how you love God in return. It all boils down to that. It all boils down to love. It all boils down to you and love. If what I do as a Catholic psychologist doesn’t at least help others to accept God’s love and to love God in return, then I am missing the point of the greatest commandment, and I take that extremely seriously. So what is the main sign of psychological health? What is it? All right, take a minute. Let’s consider it. What do you think the main distinguishing characteristic of mental health is? Let’s struggle with that a bit. In fact, some of you gutsier types might even be willing to stop the podcast at this point for a few minutes and write down your ideas before you listen further. Write them down. Email them to me, email them to me at crisis@soulsandhearts.com, or text them to me at (317) 567-9594. Let me know before you continue on what you think the main sign of psychological health is. I’d be really curious to to see what you guys think. I want to hear from you. So the answer to the question of what is the main sign of psychological health may not be what you think.

[00:03:49] Let’s explore this together. Now I promise you, I’m going to get to it, what that central, essential psychological characteristic is. Not only that. Today, I’m going to go over with you the disadvantages of not having that essential quality. I’m going to give you a bunch of examples of why that particular quality matters so much. And I’m also going to give you some guidance on how to overcome the deficits you have in that area. All today, all for you. So hang in there with me. We’re going to start with a story with a fable by Aesop, which will help to illustrate the point. I really want this to stick with you. So the examples are really important. So it’s story time with Dr. Peter. A man who had traveled in foreign lands boasted very much on returning to his own country of the many wonderful and heroic feats he had performed in the different places he had visited. Among other tales, he told his listeners that when he was at Rhodes, he had leaped to such a distance that no man of his day could leap anywhere near as far. The traveler claimed that there were, in Rhodes, many persons who saw his prodigious leap, and he could call them in as witnesses. The traveler firmly believed his own tale and was adamant about his abilities, and was convincing many of his listeners. One bystander, though, interrupted him and said, “Now, my good man, if this all be true, we have no need of witnesses in Rhodes. Let’s pretend that we are in Rhodes. Let us see you leap. Jump for us.”

[00:05:40] What kind of personality style do you think that boasting traveler demonstrates in this little vignette? What do you think? Dependent? Schizoid? Obsessive? Paranoid? Self-defeating? Hysterical? Psychopathic? Narcissistic? Depressive? Dissociative? What do you think? Some of you might say, Dr. Peter, you can’t definitively assign a personality style to an imagined character in a brief vignette. Oh, but I can, and I’m gonna do it right now. I see this character. I see this boasting traveler as narcissistic. Many, many of you may have guessed that. People with narcissistic styles work really hard to maintain a very fragile sense of self-worth by getting affirmation from outside themselves. But something very important is missing. They don’t have a deep sense of their essential goodness, their ontological goodness. They don’t know at a deep level that they are good because they exist. They don’t know that they are good because they’re made in the image and likeness of God at a deep level in their unconscious. They feel loveless and fraudulent and very frightened of their inner sense of inferiority, of their own sense of weakness, a deep sense of shame, a deep sense of inadequacy. They work really hard to keep this out of their conscious awareness by focusing on the admiration and the compliments that they seek out from others.

[00:07:18] But their efforts often backfire, and they wind up exactly where they don’t want to be. Exposed, ashamed, rejected, despised, alienated from others. Like the boasting traveler in the vignette, when the bystander called him out. Whenever there is psychological disorder, there are disconnects in the internal workings of the person. In the case of the traveler with his narcissism, his idealized image of himself as a great jumper is disconnected from his actual ability. He’s also disconnected from his deep needs, from his deep desires, which are buried in his unconscious. So wherever there is psychological disorder, there are disconnects from reality. Internal psychological elements are no longer interconnected. They’re split off, they’re fractured, and things start to break down. And we all have what I call a gut level or an intuitive sense of what it means to be psychologically healthy. You hear this in just casual, everyday language. When we describe, in everyday language, someone who is nosediving in his psychological functioning, we say, he’s breaking down, he’s falling apart. He’s losing it. Right. We’ve all heard those kinds of statements before. But on the other hand, when somebody we see as is psychologically well adjusted, we say that person has got it all together. He’s got his act together. He has all his ducks in a row. Right. So this brings us back to the question, what is the main sign of psychological health? The main sign of psychological health is: integration. The main sign of psychological health is internal integration.

[00:09:16] Having it all together. Let’s go deeper into that. What does that mean? What does being integrated look like? It means accepting things in us that we may not like. It means that we know ourselves. We’re aware of our internal experience. We haven’t banished it outside of our awareness. And in the way that I’m using these terms, when we accept what we really feel, when we accept what we really desire, when we accept that which we really have impulses toward or against, or when we accept our attitudes or our positions for or against certain things, that doesn’t mean that we endorse those positions or attitudes or desires. It means that we tolerate the reality that they exist in us. That doesn’t mean we embrace them, but we accept that they exist in us. These parts that we don’t like, these things that we don’t like in ourselves. So being integrated means that you’re aware and you accept your emotions, even the ones you don’t like, for example, anger, hatred, sadness, disappointment. Let’s just go with anger, right? It can be really hard to accept anger at our parents, or anger at our spouses, or anger at our children, because there are parts of us that may fear that that’s going to damage and ultimately rupture the relationship if it gets out of hand. Anger at God is one that’s almost always suppressed, repressed, or denied in some way. Being integrated means that you are aware and that you accept your thoughts, even the ones that you don’t like.

[00:11:10] That doesn’t mean that you endorse them as true, but that you accept that they exist. And this is really common with people that are very much in their heads. One of the things that you see with obsessive styles is that you’ll get these, what are called intrusive thoughts, that come up from the unconscious. They seem like they come out of nowhere and they often seem really distorted and really disturbing, but they reflect something that’s going on at a deeper level outside of conscious awareness of the person. Most of the time, when obsessive people have these thoughts, they start out by fighting them, by willing them not to exist, rather than trying to understand what they mean. Being integrated means that you’re aware of and that you accept your attitudes towards yourself, even the attitudes towards yourself that you don’t like. So, for example, if you have an attitude towards yourself that you’re worthless, in accepting that attitude, we don’t mean to say that you actually are worthless, far from it. But we at least accept the reality that somewhere in you, that attitude exists and that it needs to be owned and accepted in order to be worked with. What happens most of the time, though, is that people deny these things. They try to banish them. They imagine that if they could only get that out of their head, out of their conscious awareness, it no longer exists.

[00:12:44] But that’s a lie. That’s a dangerous lie. Because when we banish things from our conscious awareness, we send them into the unconscious where they work on us in ways that we do not understand. They’re no longer able to be addressed by the intellect and the will, and it increases the possibility that we’re going to enact them in some kind of harmful, destructive behavior against ourselves or against other people. Being integrated means that you are aware and that you accept your impulses, even the ones you don’t like impulses toward violence, sexual impulses, impulses toward blasphemy. We tend to shut these down. We tend to get rid of them. We want to get rid of them, but we just push them into the unconscious. And these are incredibly common. These are incredibly common. Being integrated means that you’re aware and you accept your body’s sensations, even the ones you don’t like. Sexual responses are very commonly ones that are rejected. We’re basically saying, I’m not physically attracted to that other person. And if we’re not aware that we are physically attracted to that other person, it actually sets us up for boundary violations. Because if that desire gets driven into the unconscious, we no longer can be aware of it. We no longer can monitor it. We no longer can use our intellect and our will as effectively. It’s more likely that there’s going to be some kind of boundary violation, some kind of enactment around an unacknowledged desire and unacknowledged attraction.

[00:14:24] So becoming integrated means taking these disowned, rejected, unconscious, conflicted aspects of the self and bringing them in, accepting them and bringing them in to our sense of who we are. In doing that, we can reduce our reliance on rigid coping mechanisms. We can become much more flexible, much more creative in how we work with these phenomena, and we become much more whole. When you think about perfect integration, we have perfect integration in our Lord Jesus Christ. We have perfect integration in our Lady, Mary, our mother. Integration is a critical part of their perfection. And when we look at the saints, what do they tell us about their internal lives, their interior lives? Well, many of them discuss with us how much they struggle with their interior lives. Some of them will talk about how wretched they are. It’s not that they are worse off than we are in terms of psychological disorder. Not at all. They’re aware of what’s going on inside them, and they are much more aware of the psychological disorder that’s going on within, within themselves than we are. Right. Because we’ve blocked it out, we’ve put it in the unconscious. They’re also much more, the saints are also much more reliant on God’s mercy. They trust God more, and they trust in God’s love, and they trust in God’s mercy, which allows them to see themselves as they actually are, to see themselves as loved by God, precious in his eyes, cherished by God, treasured by Our Lady.

[00:16:40] And in that, in that love, in that sense of being treasured and precious, they can also see their weaknesses, their imperfections. They can see their disorder, they can see their sinfulness, and they can be real with that in their relationship with God. And that’s what I want for you. That’s what I want for each one of us. For us to be with ourselves and for us to be in ourselves as we are. For us to accept ourselves as we are, even if others in our past did not accept us as we as we were. If the boasting traveler in Aesop’s fable could accept himself as he is, he wouldn’t have to puff himself up. He wouldn’t have to put himself at the mercy of the approval of the crowd. He’d be actually much less vulnerable than when his narcissism drives him to have that approval. Every personality disorder reflects a lack of integration. The way that a person’s system keeps the integration from happening changes from disorder to disorder. So the particular manifestations of how we are not integrated vary from personality disorder to personality disorder or personality style to personality style. And one of the ways to differentiate among personality styles is to look at what defense mechanisms are typically used. These are the coping strategies that people use to keep unpleasant realities out of their awareness. Part of us is basically saying, like Jack Nicholson to Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men, “You can’t handle the truth!”

[00:18:45] Right. That’s what’s going on when we suppress, repress, deny, or otherwise banish into the unconscious unpleasant realities about ourselves. What we want to do is to bring together all of the emotional aspects, all of the thoughts, all of the desires, all the body sensations, all the attitudes, all the impulses, all the psychological and all the physiological systems within a person to work in harmony under the direction of the intellect and the will. Saint Thomas Aquinas referred to this as governing the passions. I’ve put it in psychological language. He would describe it as governing the passions. That is integration. You can’t govern a passion by banishing it out of conscious awareness. An integrated man knows who he is, just like the saints. An integrated woman knows who she is, just like the saints and knows who she is in her totality, knows who she is as God sees her from his position of love, from his position of benevolence, from his position of cherishing her as the apple of his eye. There are many reasons why we are not integrated psychologically. It all goes back to the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve, the serpent, the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. With the Fall, psychological disorder came into the world along with the rest of disorder in the natural realm. So what does it mean if we’re not integrated? Well, we’re going to be out of touch with large sectors of ourselves.

[00:20:43] It’s going to compromise our ability to accept ourselves if we don’t even know who we are. It’s also going to make our relationships so much more difficult, because one of the things that we habitually do is when we see in somebody else that which we don’t accept in ourselves, we will also reject it in the other person. It’s one of the reasons why our Lord said, “Remove the beam from your own eye before you look at the speck in your brother’s eye.” You can understand that not just in terms of moral failings, but also in terms of psychological disorder. When we’re not integrated psychologically, we don’t know why we do the things that we do. Saint Paul talked about this. Why is it that I do the things that I don’t want to do? He struggled with that. Some unconscious factors were heavily impacting his behavior. God allowed those. Good was coming from those. And I would say that good is coming from even the disorder within us if we love the Lord. Remember the signature verse in Scripture for this podcast is Romans 8:28. “All things work together for good for those who love the Lord.” All things. One of the things that happens when you’re in, when you’re in a stressful situation, like we are with this pandemic and now we’re seven, eight weeks in, we’re now facing longer term effects. You know, we’ve got some adrenal fatigue going on here.

[00:22:29] We’ve got some of this wearing down. We understand more that we’re in a longer term situation. The fantasies of a V-shaped economic recovery are giving way to looking more at an L shaped or U-shaped recovery. Things have tended to pile up. We don’t have the energy that we had at the beginning of this to just plow through it. Stressful. So it begins to expose some of these things that otherwise we would not have seen. With stress in the external environment, our defense mechanisms may not hold as well. And some of this stuff’s going to come bubbling up. We’re going to see it. It doesn’t mean that we’re worse off than we were before. Actually, it’s a gift that this stuff comes bubbling up because we can begin to see it again, although it makes us really uncomfortable to think of ourselves as a guy with that kind of impulse, or a woman with that kind of desire, or an adolescent with that kind of thought, or a senior citizen with that kind of attitude. As we come into contact with this stuff, we’re going to need a deeper confidence in God, especially deeper confidence in God’s love. If we don’t do the integration, we’re going to miss out on ways that we can love others. It’s going to compromise our capacity to be able to bring ourselves as an instrument, as a conduit of God’s love. So that’s really the critical reason why. It’s not some sort of, you know, narcissistic, self-absorbed, navel gazing exercise so that you can feel better about yourself.

[00:24:25] That’s not what I’m trying to bring to you. I do hope that you feel better about yourselves, because you have a deep sense of your ontological goodness and being loved by God, not because of your own virtues or merits, but because you’re in touch with the deeper sense of being a child of God in a really tangible way that infuses not just, you know, some intellectual realms in your mind, not just the spiritual, but actually comes through your entire self, your psychological self, and your bodily self as well. That’s what I want for you. But here’s the exercise. We’re actually going to start by doing a little exercise that will help you figure out what you might be suppressing, what you might be driving into the unconscious about yourself. So here it is. I want you to think back over the last week, two weeks, maybe three weeks or four weeks, sometime in the last month, about something that you looked upon with contempt in another person, where you found yourself thinking uncharitable, judgmental thoughts. Where it brought up some kind of feeling of despising the other person. That’s what contempt is. It’s sort of a combination of disgust and anger, right? So something that disgusted you about another person, something that brought up anger, where you were tempted to point the finger and judge that person. Let’s take a minute and go back to that time.

[00:26:27] Remember what you felt. Remember what you thought. Remember how you experienced that? Maybe write it down. Because the things that we least tolerate, the things that we’re the most reactive to in ourselves, are the very same things that we least tolerate and that we are the most reactive to in other people. Because when we see it in other people, it activates something in us. It’s like a portal starting to open from the unconscious to the conscience. And that condemnation, that disgust, that anger, that despising, it’s a way to try to shove that back down within us. So when we see something that we really hate in somebody else, it doesn’t happen all the time. For example, there are things, of course, that got Christ angry about the Pharisees and, you know, he wasn’t experiencing, you know, that kind of thing within his system, right? So there are other reasons why you might experience anger or disappointment in somebody else, but contempt that’s really corrosive to relationships. That combination of anger and disgust. So that may give you a clue as to what you might not tolerate within you. And if it’s something that you pride yourself on not having, right. Like, for example, a man who is contemptuous of fear in another man in a dangerous situation, for example, who prides himself on never feeling fear, may actually be suppressing, repressing, denying fear within himself. Right. He may actually be totally, totally out of touch with the fear that he experiences.

[00:28:30] And that’s something that actually was the case for me. I really had low tolerance for fear, and I hated seeing fear in other men, partly because it activated parts of me that were fearful that I didn’t tolerate very well in my conscious awareness up until a few years ago. There’s that old saying that when you point a finger, three fingers point back at you. And so I’m just going to invite you to take that to your examination of conscience. Take that to your prayer, whatever that was, that you felt that contempt, disappointment, disgust, whatever it was toward the other person. Just see if there’s anything, if you created a space for a part of you that actually felt that way, if you created a space for that part to be heard. That would be an amazing step toward integration. Now, wouldn’t it be great if we had a place where we could all come together to share our experiences with these kinds of exercises? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could just be able to connect, to be able to discuss, to be able to communicate with each other, support each other, affirm each other, love each other? Well, guess what? It has come. Today we are releasing May 11th. We are releasing, we’re opening the gates, we’re opening the doors to the Resilient Catholics Carpe Diem community. That’s the community I’ve been promising you that’s going to grow up around this podcast.

[00:30:05] It’s starting today, May 11th, and until the end of June, if you register before the end of June. We’re going to give you 30 days of just free access. The main thing that’s opening up now is the discussion boards. We’re going to start discussing these episodes. We’re going to have a place where you can share what you’d like about what you’ve experienced. There’s going to be also ways that you guys can connect and get in touch with each other. So as this community grows, you can reach out to each other as well. We’re going to also be having a webinar in May. We’re going to discuss the date, the time we’re going to make sure that people can get there, where I can actually connect with you in real time. I am so looking forward to being able to have a discussion with you livestreamed. And that’s going to happen before the end of May, and that’s going to be a regular feature in this community. We’re going to come together. I’ll have a brief presentation, 20-25 minutes, and then we’re going to have 30-35 minutes for conversation, for questions and answers, to address all the things that we haven’t addressed in the podcasts or in the discussion boards. And there’s going to be other bonuses and perks that come up during the course of the month as well. So here’s how it works. Just go to soulsandhearts.com. That’s the main page.

[00:31:28] Scroll down. You’ll see the Resilient Catholics Carpe Diem offer there. It’s right in the middle of the page. Click on that. That’ll take you to a page where you can input your information, get your free 30-day trial up until the end of May, and then you’re in. You’re in. There’ll be some rules that we need you to follow. Take a look at that as you check out. I’m not going to get into all of them here, but it’s basically, you know, we’re going to treat each other with gentleness and kindness and respect. And then let’s get communicating. I’m going to be spending a lot of time on there this week. I’m looking forward to connecting with you on there, getting the conversations going, and I am super excited about it. So this is a big new step for us and we’ve got so many exciting new things in the works. Let other people know what’s going on with this podcast and with our new community, Resilient Catholics Carpe Diem. I want to thank everybody that made input into the community name. I decided to keep the podcast name the same. The community name, though, is going to be Resilient Catholics Carpe Diem. So I look forward to getting in touch with many of you as we roll on this week. Thank you again. It is so good to be with you. And with that, it’s a wrap. Let’s invoke our patroness and our patron. Our Mother, Undoer of Knots, pray for us. Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.