IIC 177: Christopher West on IFS and TOB – A Powerful Combo for Sexual Healing

Christopher West has recently embraced IFS and parts work because of Dr. Gerry Crete’s book, Litanies of the Heart.  Dr. West shares the impact of IFS in his life, seeing it as a “missing piece,” a key to internalizing and living out the powerful message of St. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body.  In this episode, Dr. West, Dr. Gerry, and Dr. Peter invite you into their rollicking, wide ranging, and deep conversation about “marrying” TOB and IFS — and how the TOB/IFS union brings guidance and light in redeeming eros, healing from trauma, growing in interior integration, living chastely, and loving our parts that experience lustful desires and impulses.   For the full video experience with Beth West’s painting of eros, the crumpled painting analogy, and all our visuals, gestures, and graphics, and for conversation and sharing in the comments section, check us out on our YouTube channel here:  www.youtube.com/@InteriorIntegration4Catholics

[00:00:00] Dr. Peter: And God saw everything that he had made and behold, it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning, a sixth day.” Genesis 1:31, after the creation of Adam and Eve. And 1 Corinthians 6:19 St. Paul tells us, “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God?” A temple of the Holy Spirit. And in the fourth century, St. Gregory of Nyssa. “The body is not opposed to the soul. Together, they constitute a living being made in the image of God.” And the great 20th century Catholic theologian, Romano Guardini said, “Man does not have a body. He is bodily.” And he says. “To be human is to be called to holiness in the very concreteness of our bodily existence.”

[00:01:18] Dr. Peter: And Edith Stein, St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross says, “Every human person is a unity of body and soul. And this unity is the ground of the person’s vocation to love and to be loved.” So Edith Stein, she’s connecting the body to love. She’s connecting our bodies to loving and being loved. And Mother Teresa picks it up. “Love is not just words. Love must be lived. And the body is the place where love becomes service.” The body is the place where love becomes service. Pope Benedict 16th says, “The body speaks and it is our task to learn its language. It speaks the truth of love, which is inscribed in it by the Creator.” He goes on to say, “the human body is a gift that carries the message of love.” We see this intimate connection between the body and love.

[00:02:28] Dr. Peter: And now we’re gonna get into a bit of the Theology of the Body. Pope Benedict XVI, “The Theology of the Body reveals the greatness of the vocation to love.” And as Cardinal Ratzinger, he said, “With the Theology of the Body, the Holy Father,” that’s Pope John Paul II, “has offered the church a new theological anthropology, one capable of responding to the challenges of our age.” Peter Kreeft. “The Theology of the Body is the Church’s answer to the great heresy of our time, the sexual revolution.” And again, Mother Teresa of Calcutta. “John Paul’s teaching on the human body and on pure love is a great light in a world that has forgotten the beauty of God’s gift.”

[00:03:24] Dr. Peter: So let’s get into the Theology of the Body today and why? Why? The body is a good in and of itself, but also because of the relationship between our bodies and love. This podcast exists to help you receive love, to accept love, and to be able to love God back, to be able to love your neighbor, for you to be able to love yourself. And so Christopher West, Theology of the Body. Many of you, most of you have heard of him. William May, one of my favorite authors, by the way, a professor at the John Paul II Institute said, “No one in my opinion has thought more deeply about John Paul II’s mind opening Theology of the Body than has Christopher West. He surely does explain the Theology of the Body accurately, clearly, and in such a way that any intelligent person can understand.” And Dr. Michael Waldstein, professor of theology at Franciscan University of Steubenville said “West has pioneered the task of finding the right language to explain the Theology of the Body.”

[00:04:44] Dr. Peter: And in this episode, we’re gonna connect three things: the Theology of the Body, parts and systems thinking, IFS, and love. So let’s do it. 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. So glad to be with you. I’m a clinical psychologist, trauma therapist, a podcaster, a writer, the co-founder and president of Souls and Hearts, but most of all, most of all, I’m a beloved little son of God, God, my Father, a passionate Catholic who wants to help you to taste and see the height and depth and the breadth and the warmth and the light of the love of God, especially God your Father, especially embracing that identity as being a beloved son or daughter of God, and also a beloved son or daughter of Mary. These are your spiritual parents, your primary parents.

[00:05:58] Dr. Peter: I am here to help you embrace your identity as a beloved little child of God and Mary, embodied, in a body. And all this year, in 2025, all this year, we are doing a deep dive into Internal Family Systems, that’s IFS, parts work, and Catholicism. We’re bringing in the insights from IFS developed by Dr. Richard Swartz, other parts and systems models, we’re harmonizing them with the truths of the Catholic faith. Why? To help you live out the three great loves in the two great commandments: to love God, your neighbor and yourself.

[00:06:36] Dr. Peter: That is what this is all about. And this is episode 177 titled, Theology of the Body, Love, and IFS with Christopher West. Now many of you know Dr. Gerry Crete. He’s a licensed marriage and family therapist in Atlanta, Georgia. He’s the founder and owner of Transfiguration Counseling. We co-founded Souls and Hearts together in 2019. It’s been going strong now six years, and he’s the author of the book, Litanies of the Heart. Published in 2024 by Sophia Press. He’s a leading Catholic thinker, a synthesizer in this whole area of Catholic parts work. He’s a dear friend and Dr. Gerry has been getting to know Dr. Christopher West over the last few years. And so with all of that, it is so good to be back here together with you, Gerry. Welcome. 

[00:07:25] Dr. Gerry: Great. Thank you. Good to see you, Peter. 

[00:07:28] Dr. Peter: And it is such an honor. When I found out that Christopher West was interested in parts and systems thinking, when I found out that that’s something that really resonated with him, I was like saying to Dr. Gerry, we have got to have him on this podcast if he’s willing. He has a passion for the sacramentality of beauty. He’s so interested in how finite beauty points to infinite beauty. And this has led to a prolific career as a Catholic theologian, author, a lecturer across the globe, devoted to helping others see and encounter the divine mystery as it is revealed in and through our physical world, especially the human body.

[00:08:13] Dr. Peter: Dr. West serves as president of the Theology of the Body Institute near Philadelphia. He’s a professor of theological anthropology in its jointly sponsored master’s program with Pontifex University. His work has been featured in the New York Times, on ABC News, Fox News, MSNBC, and in countless Catholic and evangelical media outlets. He’s been married to Wendy since 1995. They delight in their five children and four grandchildren, and it is a blessing, it’s an honor. With a big heart, I wanna welcome you to our podcast, Dr. Christopher West. 

[00:08:49] Dr. Christopher West: Thank you, Peter. It’s very good to be with you and with you, Gerry, and your audience, of course. That’s who we’re talking to. 

[00:08:57] Dr. Peter: Well, this has been something that the audience has been waiting for, so it’s, it is just an amazing thing to be able to have you with us. So I just, you know what, you two have developed a relationship over the last year or two. I am just really curious about this whole possibility of the integration of parts and systems thinking on the one hand, and Theology of the Body on the other. And so, I’m just gonna turn it over to you, Gerry, like where have you been going with this? I’m just really curious. 

[00:09:28] Dr. Gerry: Well, although I’ve spent some time over the last 10 years reading this particular book, which is Man and Woman He Created Them that has, you know, John Paul’s, you know, addresses. In the last year I had the pleasure of attending Theology of the Body 1, the first course, and now recently Love and Responsibility. And I’ve really enjoyed how Christopher, how you have brought it to life. I mean, you just make it come to life. It can be dense reading and difficult, you know, to get through at times and you just bring it home. And I’ve really enjoyed your courses, so thank you so much. 

[00:10:00] Dr. Christopher West: You’re welcome, Gerry. Everybody who tries to read John Paul II directly, runs into a similar problem, like this is some dense stuff, like thick concrete. And I, since I first discovered John Paul II over three decades ago, I had a particular gift, I would say, to understand him and translate it into language, language, images, stories, art, that communicates the message in a way that resonates with human hearts. And I think that’s our particular charism at the Theology of the Body Institute.

[00:10:36] Dr. Gerry: Yeah. Well, you do a beautiful job and I’m just going to jump right in ’cause I really wanna get into how Theology of the Body and parts work come together. And the number one thing that leaped out at me when I did the Theology of the Body 1 course was this beautiful drawing that your daughter Beth made, I think it’s called The three Choices of Eros, right. And you go back to that over and over and really bring it to life, to make it, you know, make sense. And all I could see in this diagram was parts.

[00:11:11] Dr. Christopher West: Ha. 

[00:11:12] Dr. Gerry: So I, you know, but Christopher, could you say something about that diagram? 

[00:11:17] Dr. Christopher West: Sure, sure. I’m reminded Gerry, in your response to that painting of what Thomas Aquinas says, that “the message is received in the mode of the receiver.” So you’re a parts guy, right? You’re an Internal Family Systems therapist, so you’re going to receive what I’m teaching in that mode, and I think it’s a very fitting mode. So I learned from John Paul II, this was 32 years ago, in 1993, I first read Theology of the Body. I’m a 24-year-old man, and for the very first time in my life I hear that the passion, the yearning, the cry of my heart, the ache I had felt since I was a little kid, for some kind of happiness, for some kind of fulfillment, that this was good. And it had a name. And the church here borrows her language from the Greeks and calls this yearning, this cry of our hearts for everything true, for everything good, for everything beautiful. It’s called eros. 

[00:12:20] Dr. Christopher West: Now, when I was first hearing that language as a 24-year-old young man, I had some baptism I had to go through with that word because, in my mind, I connect the word eros from the Greek language with our English word erotic, and at the time the word erotic and the whole erotic realm, when I was in my early twenties, this was synonymous with the pornographic realm in my mind. And John Paul II kept saying, no, no, eros is good. Eros is part of God’s original creation. And we mustn’t confuse the Greek word eros with another Greek word porneia, which is the distortion of the erotic realm, the twisting of the erotic realm, the profaning of the erotic realm.

[00:13:09] Dr. Christopher West: And I didn’t know it at the time, but I was learning here a very important principle of Catholic cosmology. And it is this: the devil doesn’t have his own clay. And by that we mean, everything God creates is good, right? There’s no evil world. There’s no evil that exists as something apart from the good world God created. The enemy gets his hands on God’s good clay. God looked at everything he made and said, behold, it is very good. The enemy gets his hand on that good clay, and he twists it. He distorts it. That’s pornea, right? Pornea is the distortion of the erotic realm.

[00:13:56] Dr. Christopher West: Well, Christ comes into the world, this is what I learned from John Paul II, Christ comes into the world not to redeem us from the erotic realm, not to redeem us from the body and sexuality. Christ offers us the redemption of the body and sexuality. Christ offers us the redemption of eros. And so here’s an analogy I’ve come up with. This is my way of putting John Paul’s dense theology into layman’s terms. I like to say, God gave us eros, this cry of our heart for love, for union, for joy, for the true, the good, the beautiful. God gave us eros to be like the fuel of a rocket that has the power to launch us to the stars, to the infinite realm.

[00:14:49] Dr. Christopher West: Problem is there’s an enemy who doesn’t want us to reach the stars. And his goal, and this is what happened with original sin, his goal is to invert those rocket engines, right? And what happens if you set off a rocket with inverted engines? You’re gonna crash and burn. And a lot of us have know exactly what that means. What I learned from John Paul II and what changed my life, and when I understood this, I realized I would spend the rest of my life studying his teaching and sharing it with the world, ’cause I knew this was the answer to the crisis of our times. What I learned from John Paul II is that Christ came into the world not to condemn those with inverted engines. He came into the world to redirect our rocket engines to the stars.

[00:15:35] Dr. Christopher West: And so there are three choices we have here with erotic desire. Most people think there are only two, indulge it or repress it. And if those are the only two options, well, the repress option appears to be more holy. Right? But John Paul II would say, if this is the way we practice chastity only as the suppression of our erotic desires into the subconscious, he says they await the opportunity of explosion. Right, if you repress that energy, it’s going to explode in all manner of disorder.

[00:16:14] Dr. Christopher West: There’s another way to see, there’s another way to think. Indulge and repress are not the only two options. We can open our passions to the power of redemption, and that’s that third choice where our passions get redirected towards the stars, so to speak. So those are the three choices with eros. Indulge, that’s the guy on the bottom. He’s aiming his passions at all the finite pleasures of the world. The guy on the left there, he’s just holding all that energy in. He’s repressing it. But the guy in the top right corner, he’s learning by God’s grace to redirect that desire towards what he really desires. And now we loop back to Saint Augustine. “You’ve made us for yourself, O Lord. And our hearts are restless until we rest in you.” That restlessness, John Paul II says, that creative yearning and restlessness defines our humanity as men and women made in the image and likeness of God. 

[00:17:21] Dr. Gerry: Wow. Thank you. I mean, that’s brilliant. I love that. You know, at one point I heard you say that the guy in the bottom, the indulgent one, was half right. And the other one who represses is half right. That there’s a good in each. 

[00:17:35] Dr. Christopher West: There’s a good in each and there’s an error in each. That’s right. 

[00:17:39] Dr. Gerry: Yeah. because that’s where I kind of come at it from a parts perspective, like looking at, okay, if I’m working with someone and they’re mostly repressing, then I tend to see it as a part that is, you know, just pushing away all of their desires, you know, natural desires and so on. And like you said, it will eventually come back to, you know, it can’t go anywhere. Right. I don’t know if you could say more about the half right for both of them. 

[00:18:03] Dr. Christopher West: Sure. So clearly the person who’s containing that passion is half right, because we can’t simply follow our passions, in our fallen humanity, that is, we can’t simply follow our fallen disordered passions where they want to lead us because they will lead us to all manner of indulgence, sinful indulgence, in the finite pleasures of the world. But the error here creeps in when we condemn passion itself. And now we are falling for the Manichaean heresy, where we give the devil his own clay, right? And we may think the body is bad because of its passions. We may think sexuality is bad because of its passions. We may think sexual desire itself is bad because it’s disordered. That’s the way we experience it. But that is the Manichaean error.

[00:19:01] Dr. Christopher West: What is Manichaeism? Manichaeism is an ancient dualistic heresy. It ruptures the body and the soul, and it basically says, spirit good, body bad. I’m gonna live a spiritual life divorced from the physical world, and that’s my path to holiness. This is a serious error, and it is death dealing. Indeed, the very name for the separation of body and soul is death. Christ came into the world to give us life and life to the full. And so I like to quote the Catechism here that says, “Chastity is the integration of the spiritual and the physical within the human person.” It’s the integration of spirituality and sexuality. And people who have a Manichaean view, who believe sexuality is inherently evil, would say, how can you possibly integrate sexuality and spirituality if sexuality is evil? Well, you can’t, if it’s evil, you can’t, and you shouldn’t if it’s evil. But what do we mean by evil?

[00:20:14] Dr. Christopher West: And here I’ll give you a visual. Gerry, you are familiar with this. Peter, you might not be familiar with this. But here’s my favorite visual of all time. Pardon me. I should have had this ready, but I want everyone to imagine here, the viewers will know what I’m doing. I’ll explain for those who are listening. I’m holding up just a yellow piece of paper from a legal pad. And I want, Gerry and Peter, I want you to imagine this is a painting of man and woman, just as God created us to be, naked without shame. It’s the most beautiful painting we could possibly imagine. God looked at everything he made and said, behold, it is very good. And we, male and female, naked without shame, we are at the crown of that goodness.

[00:21:02] Dr. Christopher West: And what we learn throughout Scripture, and this is what John Paul II unfolds so beautifully in his Theology of the Body, is that this painting is an icon. It’s an icon of the inner life of God. Because God himself, while God is not sexual, of course, God is pure spirit in the life of the Trinity. God is not sexual, but he is in, a purely divine and spiritual way, he is an eternal exchange of life-giving love. And we as male and female, in our sexuality — “male and female he created them, and he blessed them and he said, be fertile — we are an icon in the created order of the eternal life-giving love of the Trinity.

[00:21:52] Dr. Christopher West: And this is why the enemy hates this painting. He hates it with all his diabolical fury. And so here’s what happened with the original sin. This painting became terribly, terribly distorted and crumpled up, if you will. And for those who are listening in if you didn’t hear me crumpling the paper, that’s what I just did. I just crumpled it all up. This is an accurate image of our fallen humanity. Well, here’s the Manichaean error. The Manichaean error, it looks at this crumpled up picture of things and says, well, that’s trash. Throw it away. But here from an authentic Catholic perspective, we’re failing to recognize what evil is. Evil is the distortion of a good, so if you simply throw that crumpled painting away, guess what you’ve thrown away? You’ve thrown away the original good that is still in there, right?

[00:22:53] Dr. Christopher West: Christ comes into the world not inviting us to our redemption from the body and sexuality. We’re not meant to throw this away. We are meant to invite the Lord into this crumpled mess of our broken lives so that he can uncrumple the painting. And this is what John Paul II invites us to in his Theology of the Body. And for those listening, I’ve just uncrumpled that painting so that we can see again, the original beauty of our creation as male and female. This is the journey. And John Paul II tells us that the Manichaean approach that throws that painting away might be, and in fact, he says, may always be a loophole to avoid the requirements of the Gospel. It is the requirement of the Gospel that all of us go through a painful purification process where we are restored to our original splendor as male and female. The Catechism says “Christ came into the world to restore creation to the purity of its origins.” And if we throw the crumpled painting away, that’s a loophole to avoid that requirement of inner purification. 

[00:24:16] Dr. Peter: So I’m gonna jump in here because this idea of Manichaeism is really resonant with how we think about parts, because parts that are not in right relationship with the innermost self, each of them have a God image that is heretical. One of them I see all the time is Manichaeism. There’s also Jansenism, there’s a lot of Deism, you know, from a lot of parts, you know, where people feel like God is so distant and so forth. But inevitably, if there is a lack of integration in the human person, if parts are not in right relationship, either they’re blended and have taken over, you know, taken over with the passions that they’re experiencing, or if they’re exiled, you are gonna see these heresies of all different kinds coming up and whichever parts seem to be running the person’s life, driving the bus, those are gonna be the ones that are so powerful. I think of these parts as holding material heresies because it’s not necessarily owned by the innermost self of the person, but a part, you know, that is not in right relationship. I see so many Manichaean parts that have so many conflicts with regard to the body, and especially about sexuality. Early on in my practice, I learned that a person’s sexual functioning is the most sensitive barometer to their integration. 

[00:25:35] Dr. Christopher West: Yes, yes. Thank you for saying that, Peter. Thank you for saying that. That resonates deeply with me and is in nice synergy with what John Paul II once said. He was asked, why was he talking about sexuality all the time in his lectures at the University of Lublin, and it was a general ethics class, and he was always bringing up the topic of sexuality and somebody challenged him on why are you always talking about this? And he said, “because disordered sexuality is the main obstacle to spirituality.” And I think in your language you would say it’s a, how did you say it? It’s a barometer to lack of integration of our parts? 

[00:26:15] Dr. Peter: Mm-hmm. Yeah. The most sensitive barometer to a lack of integration, which is entirely in agreement with the Catechism, which we were talking about in the last episode with Elizabeth Galanti. And that’s, again, going back to your intro, you know, it’s all coming together.

[00:26:28] Dr. Gerry: But what strikes me though, is the crumpling of the paper and the uncrumpling though, is the how, right? Because when it comes to Internal Family Systems, parts work, there’s this element of connecting the inmost self with parts and to allow an unburdening process. So the unburdening the Manichaean beliefs or whatnot like that, my sexuality is bad, or my body is bad, or you know, these different beliefs and thoughts, that there’s a process to let them go and be freed from them. And I’m curious how, Christopher, you see that jiving with, you know, TOB and what St. John Paul II says. 

[00:27:06] Dr. Christopher West: Yeah, well, reading Litanies of the Heart, Gerry, which I found so, so helpful. You were giving me a language to understand the invitation that I’ve been holding out to my students for over 30 years. I didn’t have that parts language until very recently, but you gave me an understanding that it’s not that the person in his or her inmost self is a heretic. It’s rather that some wounded part of that person has believed lies about who God is and or who I am. And that’s a much more hopeful perspective than to say, you are a heretic, right? No, part of me, part of me has believed a lie. And this brings us back to those three choices. And if we could bring that image up again, we can recognize that the person on the left who’s holding it all in, where he’s right, is that where he believes the truth is that I can’t just follow this disordered passion and expect it will bring me happiness. That is true, but there’s another part of that person that’s believing a lie that the solution is therefore to repress and hold back passion because it is bad. That’s falling for the Manichaean heresy, and part of that person is believing that Manichaean lie. If we go down to the person on the bottom.

[00:28:36] Dr. Gerry: Can I ask, can I throw one thing in there? Because from that trauma, I love what you’re saying. And from the trauma perspective, the reason the person represses may be a survival instinct. 

[00:28:47] Dr. Christopher West: Yes. Yes.

[00:28:48] Dr. Gerry: In other words, if they were sexually abused or they were in, you know, something was inflicted on them, then repression becomes the only way they know how to survive that. So the healing and the redemption is realizing, no, that’s not what God intended. 

[00:29:05] Dr. Christopher West: I would say almost certainly it’s a survival mechanism.

[00:29:11] Dr. Peter: Yeah. And going back to what you said before, psychoanalytic thinkers talk about the revenge of the repressed. Like you can, it’s like trying to hold, it’s like trying to hold a beach ball underwater. 

[00:29:22] Dr. Christopher West: Yes. A great image. 

[00:29:22] Dr. Peter: Like you can do it for a while. But I mean, ultimately there is so much energy there, so much power, and it’s actually a good thing. I think there’s a kind of teleology even behind that drives this up towards the surface to be dealt with. Like, what a tragedy, if we could successfully repress or suppress it forever. Right? Like, whoa.

[00:29:42] Dr. Christopher West: Yes, you’re exactly right, Peter. It would be a tragedy. And I’ve seen a major step in healing in my students when they come to terms with the fact, exactly what you said, it’s a tragedy if I could repress it. So the flip of that is, thank God I can’t. Because I have to continue to face this and, find a healthy way to face it. So that brings us to the guy on the bottom who is half right in realizing I can’t just hold this in my whole life. But he is wrong in believing that indulging it in a disordered way is going to bring him happiness. Right. 

[00:30:26] Dr. Gerry: In IFS terms, that’s like a firefighter, right? Like that’s the addict who is like going, I can’t deal with pain, I can’t deal with what’s going on. I have to find a way to either numb that out or just escape it in some way. 

[00:30:40] Dr. Christopher West: Correct, correct. And so, he too, as you would say, he has good intentions, but he doesn’t have the whole picture. And life will teach that person the hard way. And I can speak to both experiences and most of us can, because most of us just flip flop between these two. I can speak to the pain of both experiences. And I have lots of images to talk about these three approaches. I call repression, the starvation diet gospel. I call the guy on the bottom. I call that the fast food gospel where I’m just in it for the quick hit of pleasure. And I call the guy on the top, that’s the banquet, right? That’s the invitation to the wedding feast. 

[00:31:22] Dr. Christopher West: We could also say the guy on the left is the stoic, the guy on the bottom is the addict, and the guy on the top is the aspiring mystic. That’s another way to look at it. And we’re all called to that aspiring mystic. And by that I mean learning how to aim our desire for love, for union, for intimacy, for pleasure, for joy, for happiness, for fulfillment, at that which truly supplies it. And that which truly supplies it, “you’ve made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until we rest in you.” Pleasure in this life is either going to be sacramental or sacrilegious. And the guy on the bottom, his pleasure is sacrilegious, the guy on the top, his pleasure is sacramental. And the guy on the left, well, he’s fallen for all kinds of errors, that pleasure itself is bad, it’s Jansenism as you said, Peter, it’s Manichaeism, it’s Gnosticism, it’s all kinds of other -isms that the Catholic Church has repeatedly condemned.

[00:32:27] Dr. Peter: Well, and let’s just go back for a minute to the two great commandments. Let’s go to the first great commandment: to love the Lord your God with your whole heart.

[00:32:36] Dr. Christopher West:  Whole heart. 

[00:32:38] Dr. Peter: And he leads, Jesus leads with the heart. This includes our emotions, our desires. This includes everything. The commandment isn’t, you shall love the Lord thy God with the faculties of your intellect and your will. That’s it. You know, and the rest of it we don’t have to worry about.

[00:32:53] Dr. Christopher West: Peter, you are singing ma tune. We are smoking the same pipe. Yes, it is critical that we give the Lord, we direct to the Lord our whole heart, all of its passions, all of its memories, all of its understanding, all of its wounds, all of its loves. We open that to the Lord. To put a visual to it, we come to the Lord in our crumpled mess and we let him love us right here. That’s the beginning. We let him love us in our broken humanity. And a lot of us, myself included, have believed a lie that I’m not lovable here. 

[00:33:33] Dr. Peter: Right. 

[00:33:34] Dr. Christopher West: I’m not lovable here. So we spend our lives repressing all of that and putting on religious masks to earn love. And this is to miss entirely the good news of the Gospel, which, while we were still sinners, God sent his Son in love for us while we were still crumpled up and messed up. He loves us right there to discover. That is to discover why we call Christianity good news.

[00:34:03] Dr. Gerry: Mm-hmm. You know, Christopher, I spent a bit of time recently in Theology of the Body section or chapter 46.

[00:34:10] Dr. Christopher West: Yes. 

[00:34:11] Dr. Gerry: And where he really gets into, you know, the adultery in your heart and he kind of turns that around. I thought it was. Of course. Brilliant. But it really, to me spoke to this sense of like the inner Nietzsche, the inner Marx, the inner Freud, that we all might have. And I thought that was just so interesting how he laid that out and that the answer was the heart. But it was a heart that was awakened, an awakened heart. So when I was reading that, I was going, oh my goodness, that’s your mystic. But it’s also, in IFS terms, the inmost self. It’s this core spiritual center, the Imago Dei. And it’s where the great grace and love, eros, from God himself, can flow through us if we’re open. 

[00:34:54] Dr. Christopher West: And here John Paul II’s term here for the guy who’s repressing and the guy who’s indulging in a disordered way, he calls both, the master of suspicion, right? And he borrows this term from Paul Ricœur. And the master of suspicion is so bound by lust in his own heart that he thinks, this is the only experience of sexual desire is a lustful desire. The difference between the two is that the one says, well that can’t be right, therefore I should repress it all. And the other celebrates the lust and says, go ahead, indulge it.

[00:35:32] Dr. Christopher West: The aspiring mystic, or, in IFS terms, to live from our inner self, is to live in communion with Christ in our inmost self, to live in communion with the indwelling Trinity in our inmost self, and allow the power of the Paschal mystery to bless our whole Internal Family System and teach everyone in the Internal Family System how to get along, how to love each other, and how to direct passion and yearning and desire towards that which truly satisfies so. So right here, I think we’re at the crux of where Theology of the Body and Internal Family Systems are beautiful bedfellows.

[00:36:22] Dr. Peter: I wanna just extend an invitation to all of our viewers, all of our listeners, especially to your manager parts, especially to your spiritual managers to take this in. To really take this in and to recognize that when we are fragmented, parts have less access to the faculty of imagination. And what I’m hoping is that some of you are starting to see this, like that parts are starting to see what, you know, you Christopher, what you Gerry, are discussing here, that there is a whole realm that is mind-blowing in its implications, that what you have experienced is not the entirety of the story. Spiritual managers, managers in general tend to seek the best of what they’ve already experienced. They assume that the range of their experience is all there is, especially when there’s a lot of blending, especially when there’s fragmentation in the system. But what you’re talking about is like moving this into an entirely different dimension. This is bigger than, you know, in the Wizard of Oz when, you know, the color came in to the scene. It’s a bigger shift than that,

[00:37:32] Dr. Christopher West: It’s bigger than walking through the wardrobe in Narnia. 

[00:37:37] Dr. Gerry: Well. But I think what’s powerful and you mentioned masters of suspicion, right? And this idea that, oh, I’m so bad and everything is so bad. Yet deep within us is actually this access to the Trinity, ultimately. But it’s access that brings love and it brings love to our entire system. And in return, led by our own deep spiritual center, our own inmost self, our entire system, united in harmony, turns to God. And that brings me anyway into communion with Theology of the Body. ‘Cause it’s a spousal relationship, right? It speaks to the spousal relationship where the whole person, the whole heart, when I say heart, I think the inmost self and all the parts together, turn to God in a return reaction of love, of desiring for that unity.

[00:38:29] Dr. Christopher West: Yes, this is what we’re made for. I’m reminded of what John Paul II says in his document, Novo Millennial Innuente, which was At the Dawn of the New Millennium, where he outlined a pastoral plan for the Church in the new millennium, right? And we’re only 25 years in here. So we got a long way to go. What he said was, “We have a duty, a duty, to show the modern world the depths to which the relationship with Christ can lead.” And what he said after that was, “It leads through various painful purifications, what the saints call the dark nights, through various painful purifications to the ineffable joy, the ineffable joy of what the mystical tradition calls nuptial union with Love Eternal.” And he says, among the many shining examples here, how can we forget John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila? 

[00:39:39] Dr. Christopher West: So this is John Paul II saying, we have a duty to show the world what that passion is, what that yearning is, what that cry of the heart is, what that ache inside is. It’s a yearning for spousal union with the living God and prayer. Here I’m quoting Pope Benedict XVI. He says, “when the Christian prays,” and I would add whether he knows it or not, “when the Christian prays, he’s seeking nuptial union with the Lord.” And that’s the inmost self. And I love your sense of that as the heart and all of the parts together, learning how to open like a flower to the warmth and love and light of the sun. And liturgy properly understood is precisely this. Why does the Church traditionally pray her liturgy ad orientem, towards the land of the rising sun? Well, it’s revealed in Psalm 19. Because the sun comes forth like a bridegroom from his tent and nothing is concealed from the burning heat of the bridegroom, from the love of the bridegroom.

[00:40:58] Dr. Christopher West: Well, who are we in the liturgy? We are the Church. We are the bride. And the priest is not turning his back to the people. The priest is leading the bride on pilgrimage to the coming of the bridegroom. What is the liturgy? When we pray ad orientem, this makes more sense. The liturgy is the orientation of eros towards the coming of the bridegroom. It’s the orientation of the inmost self. What does the priest say? Lift up your hearts, and what do we say? We lift them up to the Lord. This is the moment in the liturgy where the bride is meant to be opening her heart to the consummation of the marriage that is about to take place through what John Paul II calls the sacrament of the bridegroom and the bride, which is the Eucharist. Liturgy lived well, entered into with our hearts, if we were really lifting up our hearts, we’re entering into the consummation of this union, sacramentally, which is the integration of all of our parts, because they are learning, the person in an integral way with all of his or her parts, is learning to open from that inmost self to the bridegroom. And what happens? Holy Communion.

[00:42:17] Dr. Gerry: I love it. Absolutely love it. That’s beautiful. Here’s something I want to sort of bring up is that is amazing and I am like in heaven hearing that. I love that. But I know that even as a human, as much as I love that, I’m into that, I may go to your course, or I may listen to that, or I may read this stuff, and then two days later there’s some part of me that has sort of rejected it, you know, in one way or another. That there’s parts of me that need to be evangelized and need to hear that and be loved. And there’s a tool, like with our parts work approach, like there’s a tool to be able to address those and not exile those parts of our system. Because we can all get excited with the Gospel message, right? But there might be parts that don’t, for some reason, maybe because of our woundedness or whatnot.

[00:43:10] Dr. Peter: I think some of this is that, and I wanna get to this because I think it’s one of the things that keeps people away from the Gospel message and especially keeps certain types of parts away, and that is there’s a cost to receiving this love. I think people want what I call Hallmark movie love. Parts want Hallmark movie love where everything’s easy, you know, and the love just comes freely. And you don’t have to change at all. You know, and there’s, you know, hot cocoa, and cinnamon and what. 

[00:43:44] Dr. Gerry: Christopher. Just to make sure we’re clear, Christopher does not show Hallmark videos on his course. He does, he shows some pretty hard stuff. 

[00:43:55] Dr. Peter: And I’m glad to hear that. I wasn’t suspecting you of that. I wasn’t a master of suspicion in that way, Christopher. But yeah, I mean, I think sometimes parts confuse pain, confuse hurt with harm. That if I’m being hurt. And there’s this painful process we’ve been talking about, a purification, of the dark nights, of detachment from, you know, creaturely goods or worldly goods. And these parts are often really young phenomenologically and they’re not making a distinction between that which hurts and that which harms. And so that can be a real stumbling block because there’s not a frame of reference that this actually is loving. 

[00:44:40] Dr. Peter: And I remember being six years old, for example, and needing a surgery and not really understanding what all was going on. And it seemed horrible, even though, you know, there was a lot of love in that, you know. It’s like I didn’t have a frame of reference to understand why I was alone in a hospital bed. What was happening here? So one of the things I think we forget, or we don’t keep track of is that some of these parts are just really, really, phenomenologically really young, and there’s so much they don’t know. There’s so much that they don’t understand. And it can lead us to have maybe a softening toward them, some patience, you know, some appreciation for, you know, how they’re interpreting their experience, you know, and so forth. So, I don’t know if there’s something in Theology of the Body on that, or if there’s something that, you know, that connects to in TOB. 

[00:45:23] Dr. Gerry: I’m gonna quote something and then I’ll leave it to Christopher to answer that. TOB 48. “It should nonetheless be said that the inner man is called.” Inner man. I love that. “Called by Christ to reach a more mature and complete evaluation that allows him to distinguish and judge the various movements of his own heart.” And now that’s a very technical, philosophical way to put it, but I see that, when I read that, I was thinking, that’s the inmost self, the ideal parent, the mature complete, that’s able to look at the heart and go, oh, this part of me is a hurting kid. This part of me is in need of an unburdening. And makes that evaluation and is able to then do something in that interiority, in that inner space, that will hopefully bring those parts into a loving relationship, with the self, essentially in God.

[00:46:21] Dr. Christopher West: Amen. And an operative term that John Paul II uses is tenderness, and he applies this in a particular way to the marriage bed. And he says, for a wife to make herself as vulnerable as the marital act requires, demands a profound level of tenderness on behalf of the husband. And when the husband shows that level of tenderness to his wife, he says, this is an act of Christian virtue, to show that tenderness that allows a woman to feel safe so that she can open up. But that is also a very long pilgrimage for the man to go on to get to the place of understanding what John Paul II calls the inner world of the woman, which is a world so different from his own. Right, tenderness becomes the bridge from his inner world to her inner world.

[00:47:24] Dr. Christopher West: Well, we can apply the same in our spousal relationship with the Lord, and in the relationship of all of our parts. When the inmost self who is in union with Jesus is tender with those wounded parts, those wounded parts learn how to trust and open. But I’m speaking from my own experience here because I don’t live from my inmost self as much as I would like to, and I get another part of me who’s interacting with another part of me in a, shall we say much less than tender way. And when I have one part of acting with another part of me in a much less than tender way, sometimes in a domineering way, sometimes in a way that rejects that other part, sometimes in a way that tells that other part to shut up and go away. That part is gonna shut up and go away. That part is not gonna learn how to open up. So I need to live from my inmost self where I am in union with Christ. And if I am, I will be tender towards those wounded parts, and that tenderness will allow those parts to open up. 

[00:48:41] Dr. Peter: I am thinking about the contrast between some rigid Catholics and rigid Catholic men especially. I kind of think of this approach as like Hector, the marital debt collector, you know, where they’re coming in for what they’re owed from their wife, you know? And it’s not, it’s very different than this. And I think we can take that approach inside with the way that parts deal with each other, you need to give me this, or you need to stop this, or whatever, you know, and so I think there’s these parallels between our external relationships of intimacy, right, ideally and our internal relationships.

[00:49:20] Dr. Christopher West: Yes. And I’m thinking, to put a Scripture to it, St. Paul says, “He who loves his wife, loves himself. Conversely, he who is not tender with his wife, will not be tender with himself.” I have been through a painful journey here in learning to listen to my wife’s heart and discover ways that I have not honored her heart, not been tender with her heart. And through very good spiritual direction, I have learned that precisely in the ways that I have not been tender towards my wife’s heart, I have not been tender towards my own.

[00:50:06] Dr. Christopher West: And here we can recognize what John Paul II says, that all of us are bride in relation to the Lord. John Paul II says that woman is the model and the archetype of the whole human race. She reveals to each of us, whether we are male or female, what it means to be human. Because what it means to be human is to open to receive God’s love, conceive God’s love, and bear it forth. Well, that’s the theology of a woman’s body. Woman’s body is the sacrament, if you will, of the human heart’s relationship to God. And if I am lacking tenderness towards my wife, if I am domineering towards my wife, I love, what did you say, Hector, the debt collector? 

[00:50:57] Dr. Peter: Hector, the marital debt collector. Yeah, yeah. 

[00:51:00] Dr. Christopher West: Hector, the marital debt collector. Can I use that one, Peter? I love that. 

[00:51:02] Dr. Peter: Oh yeah, absolutely. 

[00:51:03] Dr. Christopher West: All right, I’ll credit you. But man, I love that ’cause that just captures something that I’m dealing with pastorally speaking all the time in my work, where men, and this is exactly where John Paul II goes in his work, Love and Responsibility, that men are often in their demands, if I live out as Hector, the marital debt collector, I will brutalize my wife’s heart. And that is an indication, if I am being brutal towards my wife’s heart, guess what? I’m being brutal towards my own heart. And it’s called to be open and vulnerable before the Lord. That’s just spiritual math. If we understand the theology of our bodies. 

[00:51:45] Dr. Peter: And this is also St. Thomas Aquinas who says that the way we love ourselves is the radix et forma, the root and form of the way we will love others. He says, the way that we love ourselves is the template by which we will love others. And so, yeah, it goes back to that idea that St. Maximus talks about, macrocosm microcosm, like this is going on inside of ourselves. And we’re playing out this drama which exists within ourselves in our external relationships as well. There’s no way to insulate our external relationships from the disorder that’s within us, even if we try really hard.

[00:52:25] Dr. Christopher West: I just, I want to throw you an affirmation here, Gerry. That one of the beautiful lights that your book provided, Litanies of the Heart, was the section on the Kingdom of God is Within, where you see all of the characters of the Gospel. I have within me the Pharisee. I have within me the tax collector, I have within me the prostitute, I have within me the prodigal son, I have within me the older brother, I have within me the father who welcomes him home. I have within me the priest who turns away from the wounded person on the side of the road. I also have the good Samaritan within me. And all of those characters need to be loved, need to find integration, and need to find that it’s safe to be where we are and who we are because we’re loved right there. And that’s the journey towards that inner integration. That’s also the journey towards chastity. So I just wanted to say thank you, Gerry, for that light. You connected very beautifully for me, Scripture and Internal Family Systems, right there. 

[00:53:31] Dr. Gerry: I love it. Thank you so much. And I was kind of gonna go there kind of, and exactly where, well, I was gonna quote, it’s funny, you sent me a message a while back last year saying, Hey, Gerry, were you aware of this passage in the Catechism? Which is, “Indeed, it is through chastity that we are gathered together and led back to the unity from which we were fragmented into multiplicity.” And then I said, oh, that sounds great. And then you came back to me later and said, Gerry, you cite that in your book. And had to go back and I did. And I had to go back and look for it, I did find it. It was, at least, it was a footnote.

[00:54:10] Dr. Peter: That’s 2340, right? That’s 2340. 

[00:54:14] Dr. Gerry: Yeah. Yeah. So I don’t know. I’d love to unpack that and unpack a little bit how chastity is the virtue of integration. ‘Cause I’m starting to get it, but I’m not there yet a hundred percent. I would’ve thought humility, but now I’m realizing that’s not the case. Even though humility is such an important virtue. 

[00:54:32] Dr. Christopher West: Of course, all the virtues are interrelated. I might approach it from this angle. What is the fruit of chastity between a man and a woman? It’s holy communion, holy life-giving communion, which is a rediscovery of what John Paul II calls the original virginal value of man. Okay, what’s he getting at? When we hear the word virgin, we think, oh, you didn’t have sex. That’s part of it. But virginal in this broader sense means integrated, unruptured, unfractured, untouched by sin, right? That’s virginal in a much broader sense. And it is only, when we understand virginity here as the integrity of the person, where all the parts are integrated, that’s virginity in the broad sense of the term. Unchaste behavior will always fracture that integrity, right? So Saint Augustine says, you lose your virginity if you masturbate, because that is a fracturing behavior, right? Only a rigorous or legalist would say you only lose your virginity if you insert your genitals into this other person’s genitals, right? No, no. You lose your virginity whenever you behave in a fracturing way. And lust always fractures the person into a multitude of parts.

[00:56:18] Dr. Christopher West: Conversely, chaste love reintegrates, the person reintegrates the couple. So chastity not only leads to integral love between a man and a woman, it leads to the reintegration of my own humanity. And in this sense, John Paul II says that a married couple who are open to the Holy Spirit in their union and are allowing mercy to bring about this inner healing, what we’re calling integration here, they are not losing their virginity in the marital act if it is truly a holy, that is, chaste, marital act. They are rediscovering their original virginal value. Why? Because authentic marital love is redemptive. And what is redemption? Redemption is reintegration. It is reintegration of my own fractured humanity. It is reintegration of the relationship of man and woman. It is reintegration of my relationship with the rest of creation, and it is reintegration in my relationship with the Lord. So JPII speaks of four original unities that were fractured: the unity of God and man, the unity within each human being. That would be the parts. The unity of man and woman, and the unity of man with all of creation. Chastity is the virtue that reintegrates all of those fractures. And this is why the Catechism says, it’s one of my favorite lines in the Catechism. “Chastity is a promise of immortality.”

[00:58:04] Dr. Gerry: Hmm. Okay. That’s mind blowing. I love everything you just said there, and I absolutely love it. It’s mind blowing. And I want to get the transcript and I wanna sit with it and I want to unpack it more and more. And of course, it’s all in John Paul’s readings, which are so dense. I wonder, like for most people this is gonna be radical. Like this is gonna be mind bending to even get your mind around. 

[00:58:34] Dr. Christopher West: It will be mind straightening if I may say so, because currently, our minds are bent. This will be mind aligning. This will align our humanity with reality. And because we are bent out of shape, this goes back to the point Peter was making, to get bent back into shape is going to be painful. I’ll share an experience I had some years ago. I was going through a very painful inner purification, which always involves some reintegration of the parts, to use IFS language. And it was so painful, I was fuming mad at God. Why do I have to go through this? This is too painful. I want to say no. I want to say no because it’s too painful. And right in that place of complaining to the Lord, which was an honest prayer, I had a memory, just immediate memory of being on a fishing trip with my father when I was maybe 11 or 12 years old.

[00:59:41] Dr. Christopher West: And I had hooked a fish and was reeling it in. And the fish had swallowed the hook and the hook was way down in the fish. And my dad immediately grabbed that fish very firmly, got a pair of needle nose pliers from the tackle box and dove into that fish’s mouth to get the hook out from down in its gut. And the fish was like making this excruciatingly painful fish groan. I can’t even like, and blood was coming out of its gills. And I’m a sensitive 11-year-old kid. And I say to my dad, dad, dad, dad, you’re hurting the fish. You’re hurting the fish. And he turns to me and looks at me very firmly and he says, I have to do it to save it. I have to do it to set him free. And he went right back to his business and he got the hook out and he threw the fish back in the water and the fish just scurried away. And my heart was at peace.

[01:00:38] Dr. Christopher West: But it’s rather obvious why that memory came to me, right? We have all swallowed the hook of the enemy. We’ve swallowed it, it’s way down in our gut. And the Father out of love for each and every one of us has to go down in there and get that hook out to set us free. And it’s going to hurt. But we come over time as we’ve experienced those painful purifications, we see the beautiful fruit of it. We live in some measure of newness of life. And we can look back and say, that is the good fruit of my going through that purification so that the next time the Lord goes in there to get another hook outta there, we can more readily, let us hope and pray. I’m a big whiner, so I still whine and complain, but I do learn, and I say, okay Lord, I know it’s gonna be painful, but I’m going to say yes. I’m going to say yes because I know this is your love, and I know it’s gonna bear good fruit.

[01:01:49] Dr. Gerry: Thank you for that. That’s so wonderful. And you know, I do a lot of work with addiction, trauma and addiction, right. And so when I think about breaking free of an addiction, whatever it might be, there’s just such a painful process. And yet if a person, say they stop drinking or say they stop looking at porn or something, there’s usually a period where a person just feels so free, right? Where they can’t even imagine the enslavement that they were in before. And then of course though, for some reason we go back to it. Usually there’s a back and forth. I guess that is the, you know, those different choices we were talking about earlier. But we kind of know in our heart, we have this memory of, I was free and yet something keeps pulling me back in. So when I was hearing you say that, it’s difficult for people because there’s that painful process of getting the hook out before you actually are free. And a lot of people just, that’s hard, and people will sometimes just go back to the hook almost, which is sad. 

[01:02:57] Dr. Peter: Well, there’s a comfort in the familiarity of the dysfunction we know. And this idea that change within happens at a systemic level. It’s not just that a part changes, but that the whole system within needs to change. You know, and that’s one of the beautiful things about IFS is that it’s not just about parts. I mean, it’s a wonderful thing to have this idea of multiplicity and that we have these parts. But these parts are in relationship, in the system of relationships. And if we can love them in that system, and we can understand how that system’s operating and the goods that these parts are seeking, even if those goods are only perceived goods, not actual goods or real goods, but they’re only perceived goods, then we’re not just white knuckling it and saying, no more porn. You know, we’re saying this is how you can actually get the good that you’re seeking and way more than the good that you’re seeking, but in an ordered holy way. 

[01:04:00] Dr. Christopher West: Yes, yes. 

[01:04:02] Dr. Peter: Because I see so much of the effort, the will, you know, the will being just like, okay, we’re just gonna overcome this with the will. We’re just gonna white knuckle it, that’s how we’re gonna, you know, achieve virtue.

[01:04:13] Dr. Gerry: But with that example of porn and the person experiences some freedom for a period of time, but then they experience the pain, like an exile, let’s say, the pain of loneliness or, that’s was a big one, boredom for some or whatever. But let’s just say pain of loneliness, the brain or whatever, the mind, that part is like, oh, if I go back to the porn, I won’t feel lonely for a moment. And that becomes the draw, right? And so the answer in a way is still that unburdening, because the unburdening is letting go of the lie that maybe I’m not worthy, but I’m not lovable or I can only feel connected if I turn to this particular behavior. And so unpacking that, and breaking that out and letting go of that burden is such a powerful experience, but it has to be experienced. It can’t just be thought about, like, you can’t just like think, oh yeah, that’s insightful and that makes sense to me because Christopher and Peter and Gerry were talking about it today. And I’ll do that. No, it has to be like, felt, right, in an actual experience. Okay.

[01:05:18] Dr. Christopher West: I am calling to mind now, something a mentor of mine said to me years ago, he was a close friend of John Paul II, his name’s Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete. He said, “every temptation comes down to one temptation. And it’s the temptation to believe that the satisfaction of the deepest desires of my heart is totally up to me.” If I believe that, I will take satisfaction into my own hands. And that’s exactly what sin is. John Paul II, in his Theology of the Body, he describes original sin as the doubting of the gift. We don’t believe God wants to give us the satisfaction of the deepest desire of our heart. So we grasp at it. We take that satisfaction into our own hands because we’ve doubted the gift.

[01:06:15] Dr. Christopher West: A good starting point to crawl out of that temptation for me has been, what’s the temptation? There’s my idol. There’s my God substitute. I want to aim my yearning right there, and I want to take that satisfaction into my own hands. Even though I know intellectually it’s not ultimately what I want. I’m in a hard place right now, and it’s going to give me, I know it’s going to give me some semblance of satisfaction, and I want it. I want it. I’m in that place a lot as a human being as we all are. A Scripture that has saved me, that has pulled me out is, it’s one of the psalms, I forget, but it’s this: “I treasure your promise in my heart, O Lord, lest I sin against you. I treasure your promise in my heart, O Lord, lest I sin against you.” What’s your promise? Your promise is, “come to me, all you who are hungry, come to me, all you who are thirsty, and I will satisfy.”

[01:07:17] Dr. Christopher West: So I call it staying in the ache, where I am not gonna grasp at some semblance of satisfaction. I’m going to stay in the ache and plant my flag of faith, that the Lord’s promises are true, that heaven is real, that the eternal wedding feast is real, that there is a banquet that corresponds to my hunger, and I’m going to place my faith in it. And there are times where there are tangible experiences of faith where the Lord shows up in that prayer and consoles me, just like angels came to the Lord when he was tempted. This is a real experience we can have and we log it away phenomenologically that the Lord is real and his promises are real. And he does come to us in ways that give us a little glimmer of the ultimate satisfaction we desire because he’s a loving God and he meets us where we are. But we have to stay in the ache. 

[01:08:26] Dr. Peter: I am reminded of how these parts are young, and I sometimes think about them as knowing these things or having an experience of them, but they’re kinda like Curious George, and they forget, you know? And if these neural networks in the brain are not well established, you can have that initial experience. But if it’s not sort of the habitual way that the neural pathways work in your brain, it can be very difficult to hold onto that, especially when stresses rise up. Well, I’m really excited that you’re on this journey, Christopher, and that you’re willing to, after 30 years, bring in this entirely different dimension to it. You know, this parts and systems thinking, IFS stuff and all of that, that you’ve resonated with Gerry’s book. That’s really, really great. 

[01:09:09] Dr. Christopher West: Yeah. I am convinced that one of the reasons the Lord tapped me to do this work is because of how desperately I need it. Desperately need it. Wounded pup here who’s in need of grace every day of my life as every human being is. I’m always looking for the kind of practical application of the theology to the interior life, because if it just stays stuck in the head, we’re in trouble, man. We’re in trouble.

[01:09:47] Dr. Gerry: Yeah, I love that you see that. ‘Cause I feel like there’s a how here. IFS provides a how to reach these, whereas otherwise you’re hearing it and you might agree with it and love it, various parts do, your innermost self does, but then you have other parts that are like, eh, we’re not up for that. And unless that’s addressed and cared for, a person won’t move forward.

[01:10:12] Dr. Peter: So as we kind of bring this to a close, as we’re sort of coming towards the end of this episode, I’m just curious, Gerry, in the minutes we have left, what would you like to bring out? You know, and what would you like to ask Christopher? Or Christopher, what would you like to ask Gerry about this intersection between Theology of the Body and parts?

[01:10:34] Dr. Christopher West: I’ll let Gerry go, but I do have some thoughts.

[01:10:38] Dr. Gerry: Yeah. I mean, I just, I love the theory, right? I think the actual, you know, Theology of the Body is like super rich and it brings together Scripture and it brings together, you know, the sort of theological like underpinning and then I think, Christopher, in your courses and that, you try to bring it home to the heart. And that’s unbelievable. I love it. And I think that there’s also just a piece that’s a how, the practical steps. And that might be where a parts work approach can help to kind of like bring it into action in the interior life as opposed to just, you know, person being moved by it and wanting it. So I don’t know. I’m not saying that you don’t provide some how in there ’cause you do. But this is a very particular tool to get there. 

[01:11:29] Dr. Christopher West: Yeah. I’m so interested in your work because I see the deep deep need, as I paint this vision of what it means to be human and who God is and who we are. Inevitably, people’s stuff comes up and we’re always looking, at the Theology of the Body Institute, for resources for our students to be able, not just to understand this vision, but to live it. And the practical help that comes from Internal Family Systems, I find beautifully, as I said earlier, they’re beautiful bedfellows, Theology of the Body and Internal Family Systems. 

[01:12:12] Dr. Christopher West: I mean, hello, what is Theology of the Body all about? It’s showing us that we’re made for spousal union and fruitfulness, regardless of your particular state in life, that’s just a truth of the human being. This is why we call a priest father. He marries the church and bears numerous spiritual children. This is why we call Mother Teresa, Mother Teresa. She married Christ and born numerous spiritual children. So that watermark is part of just human experience, the need for union and fertility. It’s just written, it’s literally written into our bodies. But to live that out in a fractured world, we need very practical help. And Internal Family Systems, I see it as the application to that theology in a kind of outer sense to our inner world, so that the parts of us can learn how to be reconciled and live in communion and bear good fruit.

[01:13:10] Dr. Christopher West: So, yeah, I couldn’t be more pleased with the discovery of your book, Gerry. I did know of Internal Family Systems some years ago, and somebody had recommended a book written by a Protestant on it, connecting Christianity with this whole approach. And I thought it was good, it wasn’t great and it left a lot of questions for me. But I came away from reading your book, Gerry, with just a sense of, this works, this is integrated, this holds together, in a way that is sound and beautiful and very practical. I’ve seen the fruit of it in my life. I’ve seen the fruit of it in my wife’s life, ’cause we read this book together and we would stay up at night talking about it and what are you learning and what am I learning? And yeah, so I just wanna say thank you for what you’re doing, because it’s so important.

[01:14:07] Dr. Peter: What a blessing. 

[01:14:08] Dr. Gerry: I’m honored by that. Yeah, what a blessing. 

[01:14:10] Dr. Peter: What a blessing. What a blessing. And so, you know, as we kind of bring this home, again, I just want to thank you for all these decades of work, Christopher, you know, kinda really being an early voice in the wilderness because we’re about the same age. I remember being in my mid twenties, early twenties.

[01:14:28] Dr. Gerry: We are all 1969 guys.

[01:14:31] Dr. Christopher West: Oh.

[01:14:31] Dr. Peter: We were all born in 1969. 

[01:14:33] Dr. Gerry: We were all born in 1969. Before I forget, I do want to plug Christopher’s book, Eating the Sunrise. That’s your most recent book, right? And I haven’t read it thoroughly, but what I love about it is I see your movement into that sort of a bit more of a mystical theology kind of space. And I’ve been moving in that space. The book I’m currently working on, you know, as a follow up to Litanies, really does try to incorporate, you know, this deep wisdom of the mystics throughout the 2000 year history of our church. And if Buddhism tries to do it with mindfulness, I wanna blow it away with Catholicism, right? And so I love what you were doing with this. 

[01:15:13] Dr. Christopher West: Thank you. Gerry, may I be so bold as to ask you to share with your listeners why you think they should consider attending a course at the Theology of the Body Institute, either our five day in-person format, you’ve come to two of those. But we also offer these courses online. So yeah, I’d love just to hear your experience of those courses and why your listeners should consider it. 

[01:15:39] Dr. Gerry: Yeah, absolutely. You know, even as someone like me who does a lot of reading and like eats some of this up, for me, going on the in-person retreat, course.

[01:15:51] Dr. Christopher West: It’s a retreat, it’s a course. We call it a re-course or a cour-treat.

[01:15:56] Dr. Gerry: So not only did it get me in touch with the documents in a deeper way, and I love your study guides. I love the organization of that. That does a lot of good for certain parts of my mind. And I love the way that there’s an intellectual component for sure. I love the way that you bring it to the heart, just with your music, with the videos, with everything, with your stories, your personal vulnerability, all of that comes together to create an experience that I think is very powerful. Plus you have daily Mass every day, you have priests available to hear confessions. You have the liturgy of the hours being prayed, and you have a relic of St. John Paul II’s blood. So to me, like I could live there, like it was so wonderful. Thank you.

[01:16:43] Dr. Christopher West: Well, please come back. We offer a total of 12 courses and if people want to get a master’s degree, they can continue with Pontifex University. We have a working relationship with them for a master’s, so if anyone’s interested, you can learn more at theologyofthebody.com. 

[01:17:00] Dr. Peter: And we’re gonna put links in the description, the YouTube description for this so you can get directly there. And yeah, this has been amazing guys. Thank you. And thank you again so much. And it is such a lovely thing to see how these different approaches kind of come together and intersect, and, you know, in a sense like, complete or fulfill or expand on each other maybe is a better word. So it’s been a pleasure to have this time with you. 

[01:17:27] Dr. Christopher West: It really is a vision of the body of Christ when you see other parts of the body and what they’re doing and how they work together with other parts of the body. It’s a beautiful, beautiful vision of how beautiful the body of Christ is when it works together.

[01:17:44] Dr. Peter: Okay, so some announcements. You can find out so much more about Christopher West on his YouTube channel, which is at Theology of the Body Institute. Links are in the description, and you can also find the Theology of the Body Institute at tobinstitute.org. There are so many courses, certification programs, and as I mentioned in the intro, he partnered with Pontifex University for a Master’s of Sacred Arts degree in Theology of the Body and the New Evangelization. He’s got his own podcast, Ask Christopher West. We’ve got the YouTube link. You can also find that wherever you listen to podcasts. His 2007 book, Theology of the Body Explained: A Commentary on John Paul II’s Man and Woman He Created Them, has been famous. He’s also got a revision of his original book, Good News About Sex and Marriage, that’s been updated in 2024. 

[01:18:37] Dr. Peter: Alright, so join us. Dr. Gerry is coming back. Dr. Peter Martin will be returning. I will be here live on Zoom on the evening of Thursday, December 4th from 8:00 PM to 9:30 PM Eastern time. That’s in 2025 for a special discussion, Q&A, about any of the material in episodes 171 to 177 of the IIC podcast. We will be going over Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, Vatican II, the Catechism of the Catholic Church., And the Theology of the Body, all in their connection with IFS, all in their connection with Catholicism and Parts work. Registration is free. It’s required though, and the link to register is in the description of this episode. Like this episode, subscribe to our IIC podcast. Join the conversation on our channel at Interior Integration 4 Catholics. Interior integration 4 Catholics.

[01:19:35] Dr. Peter: Please share this podcast episode with your friends if you liked it. We’ve got some online workshops for those new to IFS, formators, right. These are Catholic formators. There’s gonna be a Zoom workshop on Tuesday, January 13th, 2026 from 1:00 PM to 2:30 PM Eastern Time, where we walk through IFS for Catholic therapists, coaches, spiritual directors, and others who accompany individuals in their personal formation. There’s more information in the description where you can check it out at soulsandhearts.com/fff. 

[01:20:08] Dr. Peter: Also Catholic parts work in human formation, we’ve got another webinar that’ll be on June 10th, 2026 at 8:00 PM. Check that out. And our FFF retreat, Formation for Formators retreat, the theme is gonna be authentic being and authentic relating. This helps Catholic formators focus on you finding and loving your own parts, you loving you, and also encountering parts you may not have found yet. It’s gonna be August 10th to the 13th, 2026 in Bloomington, Indiana. More details at soulsandhearts.com/fff.

[01:20:43] Dr. Peter: Also our sister podcast. Don’t forget. Scripture for your Inner Outcasts. It’s a daily podcast. It’s designed to reach out to your exiles, the parts of you that really need to hear the good news of our Lord Jesus Christ, especially often about the body. A lot of times parts are exiled because of issues around the body. We reach out to those most marginalized and rejected members within us, right? And so we take this good news, we take this light of the Gospel to our inner lost sheep, our inner prodigals, our inner lepers, the lame, the deaf, the blind parts, our inner tax collectors, our inner prostitutes, all those parts deemed unworthy to be in relationship with God, right. So you can pick up that Scripture for your Inner Outcasts on YouTube or wherever you listen to podcasts. And just hope to be able to invite you into that.

[01:21:39] Dr. Peter: And then just wanna let you know that I have conversation hours every Tuesday and Thursday from 4:30 PM to 5:30 PM Eastern time. You can call me on my cell phone, 317-567-9594. It’s available to you, like I said, any Tuesday, any Thursday, 10 minutes or so, about the length of the conversation. I can’t do any clinical consultations or do any assessments or anything like that, but we can talk about these podcasts, we can talk about the reflections. We can talk about all the resources that we offer you at Souls and Hearts. Well, and with that, let’s go ahead and bring this to a close by invoking our patroness and our patrons. Our Lady, our Mother, Untier of Knots, pray for us. St. Joseph, pray for us. St. John the Baptist, pray for us.