IIC 179: Parts, Subjectivity, Values, and Morals

Catholic philosopher Dr. Andrea Messineo and moral theologian Fr. Thomas Berg guide us in moral reasoning from a parts perspective, grounded in Alasdair MacIntyre’s Thomistic thought. Join us as we romp through understanding the development of moral reasoning informed by IFS, “values clarification”, Winnicott’s object relations model, the importance of unblending and recollection for clarity in moral reasoning, the necessity of dependence on others, the proper use and the misuse of penance and mortification, how accepting a part does not mean endorsing that part’s impulses and desires, and so much more.

Fr. Thomas Berg’s books:

Hurting in the Church: A Way Forward for Wounded Catholics: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/hurting-in-the-church-fr-thomas-berg/1124597873

Choosing Forgiveness: Unleash the Power of God’s Grace: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/choosing-forgiveness-fr-thomas-berg/1140395384?ean=9781681926537

Dr. Andrea Messineo’s book “Alone in Church”: https://www.amazon.com/ALONE-CHURCH-Andrea-Messineo/dp/1732054290 Check out Dr.

Messineo’s website at Andreamessineolpcc.com

If you want to flourish in loving God, your neighbor, and yourself, with other Catholics in a structured program informed by Internal Family Systems and grounded in a Catholic worldview, check out the Resilient Catholics Community here: https://soulsandhearts.com/rcc and check out our informational video here: https://vimeo.com/1160648485/1d2c052338?fl=ip&fe=ec

New groups are forming for Catholic formators – counselors, coaches, spiritual directors, priests, and others who individually accompany others in their formation are welcome to join our Formation for Formators community. Details are here: https://soulsandhearts.com/fff

[00:00:00] Andrea Messineo: The world is not what we make it to be or what we believe it to be. It has reality apart from ourselves and we are invited to conform to that.

[00:00:13] Dr. Peter: That, that is one of the key takeaways from today as we continue to demonstrate how Internal Family Systems, IFS, can be grounded in a Catholic worldview with some modifications. So, so many Catholics who are interested in Internal Family Systems, who recognize the value of IFS, bring up moral questions. There’s a lot of trepidation out there. Can IFS really be Catholic? And sometimes there are spiritual manager parts who really wanna stay on the straight and narrow. And today we are exploring moral questions in Internal Family Systems with the help of philosopher and convert to Catholicism, Alasdair MacIntyre. He was on the forefront of Catholic ethics since the 1980s. He’s recently deceased. The importance of friendship, that’s what he talked about, the importance of friendship in the good life, the moral life, the importance of love relationships, his idea of people as dependent rational animals, his emphasis on the importance of community, right? All of this was an antidote to the subjectivism of our modern world. And so today we are taking on the topic of values clarification, the myth of a consensus on values, we’re taking on subjectivism. You know, that’s that idea of, well, it’s right for me, it’s true for me. As though external reality didn’t exist. And this, this can vary from part to part within us, how different parts see what’s right and true. And we have a sort of extreme example of this in Earnest Hemingway in his novel Death in the Afternoon. And he’s talking in this first person, so this is him talking, he says, “So far, about morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.” Nothing could be further from the truth. This is not what we believe as Catholics. But we need to be able to understand how subjectivism connects with our parts.

[00:02:35] Dr. Peter: Now, we Malinoskis, here on our homestead, we have kept bees for more than a decade. And there’s an old saying that if you ask three beekeepers a question, you’ll get five opinions, right? And some of these will contradict. It’s an example of parts, right? We need to examine how our consciences are formed, how parts contribute to moral reasoning, and in addition to discussing Alasdair MacIntyre today we’re gonna be bringing in St. Thomas Aquinas, Dietrich Von Hildebrand, and his brand of phenomenology, Steven Jensen, a Thomist, Donald Winnicott, who really was central in object relations theory and and his internal object relations. Which brings me to this idea from psychoanalyst Erich Fromm. He said, “Psychoanalysis is essentially a theory of unconscious strivings of resistance, of falsification of reality according to one’s subjective needs and expectations.” Eric Fromm is capitalizing here on how our parts, he wouldn’t necessarily have said our parts, but how our parts, fashion reality, falsify reality according to their needs and expectations. Historically, one of the measures of mental health is how well a person recognized and accepted reality. And we still see that today, even in the modern American Psychological Association Dictionary of Psychology, psychosis is defined as, “An abnormal mental state involving significant problems with reality testing.” 

[00:04:18] Dr. Peter: Connecting to reality though is more and more counter-cultural. This quote was attributed to psychologist and author Robert Anthony. “We insist that society should conform to our own subjective illusion of reality.” Insisting that society should conform to our own subjective illusion of reality. Why is this all important? Because we want to be grounded in reality. Because if we’re not, it’s gonna be very difficult to love. And so in this episode, we have so many illustrations for you. There’s so many layers of self-discovery. There is the importance of gaining the trust of our parts so that we can become more integrated, so that parts can broaden their perspectives. And why? There’s always four reasons. The first is, how can you tolerate being loved? Receiving real love, not counterfeits. How can you better tolerate being loved? Second, how can you love yourself in an ordered way? Third, how can you better love your neighbor? And fourth, how can you better love God? So let’s do this together. I am Dr. Peter Malinoski, also known as Dr. Peter. I am your host and guide in this Interior Integration for Catholics podcast. I’m so glad to be with you. Thank you for being here. I’m a clinical psychologist, a trauma therapist, a podcaster, writer, co-founder, and president of Souls and Hearts. But most of all, many of you have heard me say this many times, most of all, I’m a beloved little son of God, a passionate Catholic who wants to help you to taste and see the height and depth and breadth, and the warmth and the light of the love of God, especially, especially God, your father, but also Mary, your mother. These are your spiritual parents, your primary parents. I’m here to help you embrace your identity as a beloved little son, as a beloved little daughter of God and Mary. And so all last year, all of 2025, and most of this year, we are doing a deep dive into Internal Family Systems, IFS. We’re talking about parts work and we’re grounding it in Catholicism. We’re bringing in the insights from Internal Family Systems developed by Dr. Richard Schwartz. We’re bringing in other parts and systems models. We’re harmonizing them with the truths of the Catholic faith. And why? Again, because it goes back to helping you live out the three great loves and the two great commandments: to love God, to love your neighbor, to love yourself. That’s what we’re all about.

[00:06:59] Dr. Peter: And we’re focused on human formation here in Souls and Hearts, we’re focused on human formation in this podcast. That makes us different than many Catholic podcasts, many different Catholic outreaches. St. John Paul II described human formation as the basis of all formation. And author and therapist, Shannon L. Alder, said, “Before you call yourself a Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, or any other theology, learn to be human first.” Here we are learning to be human. We’re learning to be human in this IIC podcast at Souls and Hearts. We’re focused on the natural realm. We’re focused on metaphysics, we’re focused on anthropology. And this is episode 179, titled Parts, Subjectivity, Values, and Morals. It releases on February 2nd, 2026. And I’m so excited to introduce to you two new voices here on the Interior Integration for Catholics podcast for this episode. This is really, really good. I’m so excited.

[00:08:01] Dr. Peter: And as my co-host today, I am so honored to have Father Thomas Berg. Father Tom is a priest of the Archdiocese of New York. He’s a visiting professor at the McGrath Institute for Church Life at Notre Dame University. He earned his Ph.D. in philosophy from Rome’s Pontifical University, Regina Apostolorum in 1999. He served for 13 years as a professor of moral theology and a formation advisor at St. Joseph’s Seminary in Yonkers, New York. He’s a frequent public commentator on issues related to the Catholic Church. He has been published or quoted in the National Catholic Register, First Things, the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, the Washington Post, and most recently in Church Life Journal, and he’s the author of Hurting in the Church: A Way Forward for Wounded Catholics. He also co-authored, with Dr. Timothy Locke, Choosing Forgiveness: Unleash the Power of God’s Grace. And in the past several years, he has personally accompanied several survivors of abuse on their journey to healing. Father Thomas particularly concerned about spiritual abuse, especially in religious life. He was in the Legionary of Christ for 23 years, in the Legion, so this affected him personally and his work with survivors, with, with trauma, with learning trauma informed pastoral care, doing spiritual direction, all coincided with him taking a deeper dive into Internal Family Systems about three years ago. So with that, it is so good to have you with us, Father Tom.

[00:09:27] Fr. Tom: It is wonderful to be with you, Peter. Thanks so much for the invitation. This is great. 

[00:09:33] Dr. Peter: And as my guest expert today, it is wonderful to have Andrea Messineo with us. Andrea completed a Licentiate in Philosophy in 1994 with the Dominican Friars at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Angelicum in Rome in Italy. She worked for over a decade in the financial industry while completing a Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas. In 2008, she defended her dissertation on Incommensurable Worldviews in Alasdair MacIntyre. So we’re gonna be bringing a lot of that experience in today. And then she wanted to help others more directly. So she became licensed as a counselor, a therapist. She’s been in private practice for more than 14 years. She’s licensed in Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico, and is also approved as a telehealth provider in Florida. She completed her IFS Level One training in 2023, and she’s on the staff at Souls and Hearts. We are honored to have her with us here. And what a delight to have you with us, Andrea. It’s so good to have you. Thank you for being here.

[00:10:38] Andrea Messineo: Well, thank you so much Dr. Peter for this opportunity to talk with you and with Father Tom about a philosopher that I am particularly interested in and, I believe, was a colleague of Father Tom’s there at Notre Dame, Alasdair MacIntyre. 

[00:10:57] Dr. Peter: So what was he like? You knew him personally, Father Tom?

[00:11:03] Fr. Tom: I only met him once. And the impression when I met him was he was kind of notorious for having books and piles of paper in his office. But even the 45 minutes I got to spend with him was just, just very enriching. I mean, he’s a man who thought well about a lot of things and I enjoyed very much just being a student of his writing and benefiting from just, yeah. Especially, you know, I mean, he’s written on so many topics as Andrea knows. But a thinker who thinks well and carefully and really teaches others how to think. I think that’s the universal experience of most of his students.

[00:11:50] Andrea Messineo: Right. Exactly. And I too only met him once when he came and gave a colloquium at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. But yes, his passion for human formation was so evident and you know, our focus on him I think is so timely because, you know, he just passed away over Memorial Day weekend 2025 at the age of 96. And he has been in the forefront of Catholic ethics since the 1980s. He converted to Catholicism through his teaching of Thomas Aquinas to his students. And he brought Thomistic ethics into dialogue with contemporary thought in a way that is on their own terms, you know, contemporary thinkers own terms. And that was what drew me to focus on him. And I’m so excited to be able to meld his thought with Internal Family Systems, or at least attempt to.

[00:13:09] Dr. Peter: Well, it’s so exciting to be able to have both of you here today. And what would you want to lead off with or share with us about his thought, you know, human formation and then this whole idea of parts and systems thinking, through an IFS lens, but really grounded in a Catholic understanding of the human person. What does Alasdair MacIntyre have to offer us that seems special, unique, helpful?

[00:13:37] Andrea Messineo: Okay. Okay. Well, I wanna connect this back with the conversation in podcast episode 173 with Dr. Anthony Flood, where he was talking about the importance of friendship in the good life, the moral life, and how it’s so much a question of relationships. We relate to others as other selves in love. And that’s so integral to our progress in virtue. And I remember at one point, Dr. Peter, you asked Dr. Flood a very key question. You asked, well, can there be friendship between unequals, right, as between a parent and a baby? And just that perspective, I think, is really what MacIntyre is focusing on in Dependent Rational Animals, which is where I’m going to draw most of the content today. You know, because so many of our relationships, both external and internal, are between people and parts that are still in development, still in various phases of dependency and disability even, as we are or may be at various times in our life. And you know, I think that that contrast with ethical models that, you know, talk about moral actors as if we were already just fully formed and perfected, could, you know, relate to each other from a place of self all the time. That’s just not the case. So much of, you know, human formation is moving from, you know, one stage of development to another.

[00:15:37] Dr. Peter: Well, and there’s also a dynamism, I would think, in the moment. You know, like, I had a self-defense instructor say to me one time that the only things you really possess is that what you can carry at a dead run. And I always held onto that. And I think about training, for example, graduate students. There are times when the sea is really calm and the sun is shining, and you have capacities that you don’t have when the water’s rough, you know? It’s stormy out and it’s dark. And so there’s a developmental dimension to this. And then there’s also a dynamic in, you know, dimension to this. And I want to think about moral questions too from the perspective of, what are my capacities in this particular moment with the particular difficulties I’m facing right now, the stress levels, where am I in my window of tolerance, all of that. So I love how you’re bringing in this idea that we don’t live in some sort of rarefied air, you know, where we always have maximal capacity and it’s always readily available to us, full access to all our faculties and powers in the moment. 

[00:16:43] Andrea Messineo: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. It’s a process. Definitely. And let me try to frame this a bit in parts language, you know, overlapping with a Thomistic model. Most of my references to Thomistic ethics, I think this book is really helpful. It’s by a colleague at the University of St. Thomas, Steven Jensen, Living the Good Life. Jensen starts out talking about a very common way of conceptualizing ethics in modern society. And especially in psychological circles. It’s often referred to as values clarification, right? Where we just need to look inside, you know, see what are our true feelings and act on them. And that’s what’s right for us, right? What we feel inside as opposed to what others, family members, society puts pressure on us to do. And Jensen following Thomas kind of counters that and says, you know, if we consult our emotions or our parts that are carrying emotions to find out what our true values are, we will get multiple conflicting answers. One time I might have a part that really wants to follow rules so I won’t get caught or punished and another time I might have a part that really wants to pursue this secret, you know, indulgence. Also, there is no you know, really perspective from a part that doesn’t carry an influence or burden from, you know, past experience. So I think the past few episodes of this podcast have done a really great job in setting forth the alternative, you know, virtue ethics where reason or innermost self, you know, identifies the good that’s out there in the world and undertakes the task of guiding or directing the parts, the emotions, towards the fulfillment of that good. And I wanna say a little bit more about that. 

[00:19:02] Fr. Tom: I could just jump in. You know, just interesting how in MacIntyre’s thought too, and some listeners might be familiar with this, but that whole idea of values clarification, he kind of looks at that societally. And a big theme in MacIntyre is the interminability of moral disagreement and kind of the myth of a commonality of values or values consensus. And a great part of his thought is just pointing out that we can never quite get to that because the whole concept of values itself has become something so utterly subjective. And hence the need to kind of get beyond this, you know, values discourse, and look at something actually objective. And that’s where kind of turns us back to Aristotle, to the good, to the telos, to what a human fulfilling life is all about. Rather than kind of looking at all of these untethered conceptions, personalized conceptions of the good, which yeah, probably, you know, with every person are driven by different parts with different agendas.

[00:20:10] Andrea Messineo: Yeah. Yeah. I love that you brought that up, Father Tom. The notion of, we’ll say incommensurability, right? You know, what I am calling good in, you know, my conception is not the same thing. It’s like comparing apples and oranges, right? You know, to use parts language again, there can be a manager part that, you know, just assumes that, you know, what I see is as good is just the blanket view. And everyone, all other parts in the system should conform to that. And that’s kind of what MacIntyre calls encyclopedia, reference to the Encyclopedia Britannica, like you view from within a monoculture. And I can have a firefighter part that is like a master of suspicion, like we were talking about a few episodes ago, that looks at, well, what is the hidden agenda here? What am I, you know, being forced or manipulated into? I wanna rebel against that, right? So the good of the one part is not the same thing as the good that the other is tending to. But the third alternative, and this is where MacIntyre engages contemporary thought on. The third alternative is tradition, as you said, Father Tom, hearkening back to Aristotle and Thomas. And learning how to conform to the good that is out there, that is found in the world. And, as you said, this is a societal endeavor. This is a community endeavor because, and this is key for MacIntyre, we learn how to do this in the same way as apprentices learn a craft from a master. I find that to be just such a rich concept and one that’s novel, I think for, you know, many contemporary thinkers because we’re kind of taught to assume that whatever we find when we look inside, you know, that’s true for us, that’s good for us, and we don’t need any further learning or information. But we wouldn’t say that really about any other art or craft. When we’re at the beginning, we know, we realize that we need to receive learning.

[00:22:31] Fr. Tom: That’s right. In so much contemporary society, we’re kind of conceived of as these moral automatons who are autonomous and we craft for ourselves our conception of the good and therefore what we think is right. And so many misconceptions and deformation of conscience are just mirrored in that these days. If I believe this is right for me, it is therefore right for me, end of discussion. And the community is just expected to respect that. And there’s no sense of kind of this deep kind of thick sense of formation that goes on, that is at the heart of MacIntyre’s thought. And you know, that’s just something so glaringly empty from, or missing from much of moral consideration today, at least in the secular sphere.

[00:23:29] Andrea Messineo: Right, right. The process of moral education, moral formation, human formation, is brought out, you know, so beautifully in Dependent Rational Animals. I’ll, you know, maybe consider the idea of disability a bit later, but the initial stages of dependency that we all pass through. MacIntyre, you know, compares the human animal, the rational animal, to other higher animals that also, you know, in the early stages of life, receive care and guidance from elders in their groups. And he points out that, you know, human beings, unlike other animals, have to go through a stage in which they learn to distinguish what appears good to us from what is actually good, right? You know, dogs, cats, dolphins, they don’t have to. Their instincts are accurate. So the dependency that we find in this process is precisely this. We are dependent upon others to guide us from judging what is good only in part to what is in fact good and able to help us reach our goals.

[00:24:54] Dr. Peter: Well, and as a clinician, I see that when I accompany people that parts have limited vision when there’s not this interior integration and they have, yeah, distortions around what’s true or distortions around what’s good. I think there can be a pull in the broader IFS community sometimes to believe that each part has its own truth, if you will, when what each part actually has is a perspective. You know, it has a way of understanding or making sense out of experience that may or may not conform to what the external realities are. And so there can be this kind of subjectivism that comes in and, you know, it gets confusing too because when you’re thinking about different parts, like when happens when these subjective interpretations of experience conflict with each other, right?

[00:25:49] Dr. Peter: And one interesting thing about IFS is that, you know, for years and years and years, Richard Schwartz denied, you know, that there was a philosophical or anthropological basis to his work. He really minimized that it was very much based off of his experience and the experience of others that were kind of exploring this with him. And one of the beautiful things about the mission of Souls and Hearts is to ground this in an authentic Catholic understanding of the human person. And so we have the best of both, right? Rather than being caught by either our own parts’ subjective experiences and their interpretations of them, or frankly, by Richard Schwartz’s, you know, to be honest, right. And his interpretation of his experience. So, and there’s been a curious lack of curiosity in the broader IFS community to networking or to connecting IFS with philosophy, with theology, with anthropology. And so it’s a beautiful thing to be doing this work here. 

[00:26:48] Fr. Tom: Absolutely. And Peter, I think I speak for so many when, you know, just to express our, you know, gratitude for what you’ve all been doing in that. And it’s wonderful to be able to participate in this as well. I mean, my early work is in philosophy, even though now I’m doing more moral theology. But I mean, I am just continually fascinated by the connections as I discover them, even inwardly. Just the valid connections between the most basic principles of Catholic anthropology and what we kind understand through Internal Family Systems. This is work that needs to be done and that’s why I think this particular recent, you know, set of series that you’ve been doing is, it’s so important. 

[00:27:33] Dr. Peter: Yeah. Well, thank you for that. So, the human formation aspects of this, that MacIntyre really focused on. Yeah, just take us deeper into it. Andrea, what do you think, you know, so what’s the next thing we should know? Or if there’s something else that you need to feel like you need to broaden out or deepen or understand?

[00:27:53] Andrea Messineo: Yeah. I’d love to kind of take a deeper dive into the relationship between MacIntyre’s thought and Internal Family Systems because, you know, this is a connection that we’re kind of working on here. As far as I know, MacIntyre himself was not aware of IFS and he cited, as I’ll get to a minute, he cited another psychological model as the one that’s best able to accomplish this. But just, you know, in in general, you know, going from what we were saying about the transition from what seems good to us to what is actually good, what stands in the way often of doing that are adverse childhood experiences like the emotional attachment injuries, woundings, that we get along the way. Our moral choices become colored by defensive reactions of parts and their limited perspectives, as you were saying, Dr. Peter. And that greatly reduces the freedom that we have to choose rightly. MacIntyre writes, “The practical reasoners enter the adult world with relationships, experiences, attitudes, and capacities that they bring with them from childhood and adolescence, and that always to some significant and often to some very large degree, they are unable to discard and disown. And so what practical reasoners present to themselves as a desire for their own good or for the good may in fact be, and often enough is, some unacknowledged form of infantile desire, a type of desire that has been protected from criticism.” It’s really talking about the role of protector parts, that it’s not even safe for these traumatic experiences to come into awareness. And I think it’s very important for us, you know, doing this contemporary work of bringing Thomism into dialogue with IFS to accentuate that aspect of trauma.

[00:30:12] Andrea Messineo: I used to have a professor at the University of St. Thomas who would say our calling as Thomistic scholars is not just to be repeaters, not just to copy St. Thomas, as in, you know, relaying exactly what he said, but to add to it, you know, what we can see more clearly from our vantage point. And I think what that is, is a greater understanding of developmental trauma. And if I could just, you know, cite an incident from the life of Aquinas himself, it’s kind of well known in his biography that when he was a young man and when he was, you know, setting off to join the Dominicans, his mother, who was a Countess, I believe, locked him in a room for a year to dissuade him from that. She wanted him instead to be an abbot of a wealthy Benedictine monastery. Okay. So the way that this incident is generally interpreted in the literature, oh, well, this is a test. This was a trial of Thomas’s heroic virtue and he passed. Okay. But just, you know, transpose that into your contemporary life. If either of you were to tell me that your parent locked you in your room for a year to dissuade you from joining the priesthood or from, you know, getting married, going to university, and also, because this is also part of the incident, sent in a sex worker to try to dissuade you from that. I mean, the category that would come to mind is trauma, right? Yeah.

[00:31:57] Fr. Tom: I just have to say on the side, this is also, I have to believe that colored his whole interpretation of anger, St. Thomas has actually a lot of good things to say about anger. Anger works for him, you know, anger is the appropriate emotional response to many experiences of injustice. So, I just can’t help thinking that, you know.

[00:32:17] Andrea Messineo: Yeah, the red hot poker.

[00:32:20] Fr. Tom: Right.

[00:32:22] Andrea Messineo: So following on this theme you know, Jensen writes that, “Growing up in an abusive household is likely to develop a whole different set of emotional dispositions than growing up in a loving environment. Insofar as these emotional dispositions are not voluntary, we are not to blame for them. Aquinas may be more likely to emphasize the role of will in habit formation than we, who are ever aware of the influence of nature and environment. Yet we should still acknowledge the place of will.” And we’re kind of getting into speculative territory. This is a question that I was looking forward to posing to both of you. You know, I was talking earlier about how the rational, so the intellect chooses the good in itself and directs, you know, the will and the emotions towards that. I think if we were to speak in parts language, we often do not yet know what our innermost self knows or desires as good. I think we are almost always looking from the perspective of parts. Yeah.

[00:33:34] Dr. Peter: I’m fond of saying that I think the vast majority of people are very blended the vast majority of the time. And I think you’re right because the parts are so often driving the bus, you know, so that has an impact on the moral reasoning and the capacities of the innermost self are often unavailable in the system. But I jumped in on you there. Sorry, Andrea.

[00:33:56] Andrea Messineo: I was just kind of trying to tease that out because if that is in fact the case, I mean, we can see how the, you know, the psychological work dovetails with the ethical, the moral work of practical reasoning. Right. Because unless we are able to unblend, unless parts and self can unblend, you know, on the human level, then we will not be fully able to make those choices of the good in itself because we won’t be able to see it or to love it.

[00:34:39] Fr. Tom: Or to be able to distinguish between genuine forms of flourishing and counterfeit forms of flourishing of, you know, counterfeit goods, so to speak, or misguided. I mean, I also think that, you know, parts can definitely be attuned to things that are genuinely good, but so often in the wrong way at the wrong time, and then maybe in the wrong proportion. But I’m intrigued by this thought of the self not knowing. And it does certainly does take a lot of unblending over time and, Andrea, that speaks to me too, of just how the self is also dependent on those persons in the community who can inform, those sources of true information that can inform the self. I don’t know, I think that would be very much in line with, you know, MacIntyre’s thought because, and I think of this also in terms of conscience formation. Not that I want to switch onto that topic, but I’m just, you know, conscience formation will definitely require sound prudent, well-formed individuals who will help that individual form their conscience. 

[00:35:52] Dr. Peter: And that is a difference with IFS because, you know, until relatively recently, Richard Schwartz would say that the innermost self did not need to develop. You know, it had all of its capacities. And then he was starting to get challenged by some folks that were going back to, well, does an infant have an innermost self then? And is its capacities fully generated? So he’s modified that, saying it’s now, you know, also dependent on the development of the body. But I think there can be this impression that I get from the broader IFS community, where the innermost self is a kind of localized omniscience, you know, in a sense. It just knows and that it, you know, that at least in adults it no longer needs to develop. And I’m hearing a challenge to that. And there are even variations, you know, variability is in the ways that Catholics think about what the innermost self and its nature. But I’m curious about like the integration or the relationship between the innermost self and the community. And I think that’s where you were going with this, Andrea. 

[00:36:57] Andrea Messineo: Right, so many levels. The inner and the outer. I mean, and we’ve, you know, corresponded about this. You know, certainly I can attest from my own experience, at least, in dealing with the most burdened parts, that self does not in fact always know how to be with those parts. I mean, just, I got, got nothing here. You know, I take it to prayer, but, you know, that is a process, and your self often needs the input, the dialogue, back and forth with parts to get a fuller perspective. Often our parts are pointing towards the good. I don’t want to paint a too negative picture. You know, we need that storehouse of images and intuitions and responses in order to identify the good. And it’s not just done in a sterile intellectual environment, right? Thomas has a beautiful quote in the first part of the Summa, “The intellect dominates the appetite, not in a despotic way, not as a tyrant, but by a politic and royal power.” Right? And what he means by that is, it’s not a matter of the intellect and will saying, you know, this is what we’re going to do. And everyone else just fall in line, all the inner system. There’s a dialogue that happens. And as a politician, what does a politician do? It presents his arguments, persuades tries to win over differing factions to his or her side, because parts have the ability to resist. Yeah. So that’s on the inner, and I want to talk about, you know, on the outer, in what kinds of communities this sorts of dialogue can flourish. You know, both in groups and in the therapeutic setting. But I’m curious to see if there’s anything more on the inside.

[00:39:08] Fr. Tom: Well, no, thank you for that, Andrea. I am just intrigued by thinking about it more just, what the self actually needs to learn from the parts. The perspectives, I mean, this has just really been clicking for me personally in a couple of areas right now. And the self actually very much needs, even if the agendas that our parts have and the perspectives that parts have are very partial or they’re kind of trapped in a historical moment. Some of the insights that they can have are very valid and very necessary for the self. So I’m just intrigued by that.

[00:39:43] Andrea Messineo: Yeah. And very beautiful, very poignant, even poetic. I mean, I find in my own work as well as my work with clients you know, if any one of those parts, even the most burdened, even parts that are, you know, continually weeping or angry, if any one of those voices were lost, it would be a loss to the entire system.

[00:40:12] Dr. Peter: Mm-hmm.

[00:40:14] Fr. Tom: Peter, you have kind of a seafaring image of that, don’t you?

[00:40:17] Andrea Messineo: Oh, I think that’s, yeah. Dr. Peter’s image.

[00:40:20] Dr. Peter: Yes. I think of the innermost self as like the captain of a ship. That’s a common, you know, kind of analogy within IFS. And each of the parts, expanding that out, has a role, right? You’ve got helmsmen, you’ve got sail makers, you’ve got carpenters, you’ve got the cook, you’ve got, you know, all these different roles that it takes. And I think that’s why we’re called to love the Lord our God in the first great commandment with our whole heart, you know, and Gerry Crete, Dr. Gerry, in his book, Litanies of the Heart, locates all of the parts in the heart in his diagram. So if any of these parts is left out of the loving, just like if any of the instruments of a jazz band is left out, you know, there’s something, there’s a diminishment of the music. If we don’t have our trumpet, there’s something gonna be missing in that. That doesn’t mean that every instrument needs to be playing all the time. There can be times where the musicians are present, but quiet. But yeah, just to say on the inside community for a little bit, I’m reminded of this quote by Dietrich von Hildebrand, phenomenologist, in Transformation in Christ, and he said on page 226, he said, “By an act of our free personal center, we can either sanction or disavow our emotional attitudes.” So I’m thinking, you know, that’s emotions, attitudes, beliefs, impulses, desires of parts. You know, we can either sanction or disavow our emotional attitude, which involves a far reaching modification of the inmost nature of our attitudes. It goes on as an example, “A mood of malicious satisfaction, for instance, which we expressly disavow in our mind is decapitated, as it were. It is revoked and declared invalid and therefore deprived not only of its outward efficacy, but to a large degree, even of its intrinsic virulence.” And so he goes on to say, “A further distinction commands itself. It makes a considerable difference whether the personal sanction (that is the ultimate act of ascent or disapprobation relative to our spontaneous feeling) is issued isolatedly in any random event, as it were, or whether we expressly referred back to our permant and moral principles, our habitual basic intention. In the latter case, it has far more meaning and weight.” And so he’s kind of describing, in phenomenological terms, this tension between what I would say is parts and this free personal center, which would correspond more to the innermost self. The question that comes up for me is that, again, here it seems like Dietrich von Hildebrand assumes that that free personal center is fully developed. And I’m just curious, in our conversation as to whether MacIntyre would agree with that.

[00:43:02] Andrea Messineo: Yeah. I would say that it’s very much, for MacIntyre, a process. It is something that is learned and relearned, of course, in the case of trauma, right? Yeah. Because he talks about ways in which development can go awry. One way in which we can fail to make that passage from the apparent good to what is actually good, the way that he describes is if the expectations placed on us in childhood are such that we learn early on that we are not to seek our own good and fulfillment, but to please or placate a parent or a caregiver or some significant adult, right? If we’re put into that kind of situation or even, you know, as we were saying earlier, even Aquinas being confronted with the challenge to his vocation. Should he honor his mother and her wishes in that situation? Or should he remain faithful to his Dominican vocation? And there are, you know, all kinds of ways that that dynamic can be perpetuated through the back and forth of parts and there are ways in which we can become unburdened from that, when we do our inner work. We do our work in community, you know, having parts witnessed. I mean, I think that’s a large part of what we do in the RCC. I think the RCC is an example of those communities, of mutual giving and receiving that MacIntyre endorses, you know. And we can also do it in, you know, individual therapy. And, you know, Dr. Peter, if it’s okay, I want to be curious with you a moment because the model of therapy that MacIntyre cites as ideal for repairing attachment injuries of that sort is object relations, Winnicott’s model, right? It says that “what analysts,” meaning object relations analysts, “are sometimes able to provide for those whose early childhood experiences were defective is what good mothers and other caregiving adults do provide — the situation in which the child’s unqualified trust in such adults releases the creative, physical, and mental powers expressed in play.” So, I’m just curious because you are more familiar with object relations than I. I’d like to hear, you know, a bit of your perspective, you know, why he might be saying that, and what advantages you see as IFS having over that.

[00:46:09] Dr. Peter: Well, sure. I mean, after originally being trained in cognitive behavioral therapy and then doing some work in health and rehabilitation psychology, I had the good fortune to have a psychoanalyst who was really into object relations, to be able to consult with him and work under his supervision for seven years. And learned a lot about object relations and what, first of all appealed to object relations among the other different varieties of psychoanalytic thought was how relational it was. You know, that was really appealing to me. Object relations really focuses on relationships and it begins to take those relationships inside through this concept of internalized objects. Okay. And so in other words, within you, you have a representation of mom, an object relationist would say, you know, a representation of dad. And so there is this way of understanding the relationship that you have with these internalized objects or these object representations, these ways of understanding others. And it was really good at being able to, for example, spouses in conflict, you know, often the husband might be arguing with the wife from 10 years ago, you know, in a sense, because that’s the object representation that’s still there, you know, as opposed to who she is now. And the idea that, you know, these objects, representations leg behind the changes that the actual people are making.

[00:47:43] Dr. Peter: But it doesn’t emphasize nearly to the degree that IFS does, the multiplicity of self. There’s still more of a focus on the unity rather than the multiplicity in terms of the aspects. And it doesn’t have nearly the capacity, in my opinion, to describe one’s internal relationships among oneself. So in object relations, I continued to be dissatisfied with what was offered in terms of answering the question, how does one love oneself? Because to me that was really important. This idea that loving oneself was so elevated that it needed to be included in the second great commandment upon which the entirety of the law and prophets depend or hang. Like what does this really mean? And when I first was exposed to parts work, it was through EMDR and some ways that that was incorporating some parts. But then really needing to find a model that spoke to the capacity for one and provided like boots on the ground actual like guidance for how one loves oneself. That was what was so stunningly eye-opening for me with IFS. And you don’t get that in the same kind of way. The idea of Winnicott and the good enough mother and other people able to take on these functions and to provide, there was a lot of good in that, and I practiced that way for a while, but I think you get to it much more quickly, much more clearly, much more intuitively with the concepts that Internal Family Systems provides. So is that kind of getting at what you were asking?

[00:49:17] Andrea Messineo: Yeah. Yeah, that really helps a lot. I was kind of, I don’t know, maybe concerned by some of the references to the true self and the false self.

[00:49:27] Dr. Peter: Oh yeah. 

[00:49:28] Andrea Messineo: And that comes up a bit or you see echoes of it in spiritual literature. But anyway, you know, divesting ourselves of the false self, emphasizing the true self. I mean, we’re tending towards that, but we don’t want to exile parts in the process.

[00:49:46] Dr. Peter: Yeah, that is a concern. And I have had some thoughts about doing a podcast series or possibly a series of reflections on this, the problematic aspects of the false self, true self kind of thing. And Donald Wincott, as much as I admire him, you know, engages in that. And at the same time, on the Catholic side, Thomas Merton was as well. And I think that runs a risk of devaluing parts because of misperceptions or because of ways, impulses, desires are the things that are unhelpful or maladaptive or, you know, pull us toward immoral actions and so forth. I think what those parts need is to be integrated and to and in a sense to be introduced to the truths that the inmost self has more ready access to, and in a sense to be converted, right? This whole-hearted conversion, but not coercively. Right, not through suppression and not through denial, not through exiling them, because what that does is it just exacerbates polarizations, and it doesn’t lead to ultimately internal harmony because those parts don’t just disappear. They’re just forced underground. It’s sort of like going back to the ship analogy. You know, you have these, you know, overtax spiritual managers who have managed to seal the hatches for all the rebellious parts that are, you know, down below decks. But those parts down below decks in their mutiny and their desperation, they know how to cut the cables to the rudder so that the helm won’t answer, you know?

[00:51:14] Dr. Peter: And so it’s a radically different model for a lot of Catholics to move away from this, condemning of these aspects of self and promotion of these aspects of self, to move toward an integration of the entirety of self that’s oriented wholly and toward what’s good, true, and beautiful. And that’s really what we’re looking for. And that’s true not just on a psychological level, but I would ar argue it’s true on a bodily level. It’s true on the level of the neural pathways that develop in the brain, for example. So there are like physical correlates of all of this that also have to be considered, you know. Because so often there’s one neural pathway, or one set of neural pathways, is trying to suppress, you know, another one. But that other one has not been actually resolved. And so IFS provides a way to conceptualize that and to be able to work with it in a way that I think helps people along the road to sanctity, you know, through that human formation, which is the basis of all formation according to Pope John Paul II. But I’m just curious, you know, Father Tom, it looked like you had something that you know was forming.

[00:52:18] Fr. Tom: Sure. Well, I feel like I just have a great ringside seat to this wonderful conversation between two therapists, because I’m not a therapist. But I could not agree more that I think for a lot of Catholics coming into IFS, one of the really challenging things is that rather than there’s these parts of me that I need to get rid of or suppress or, you know, that somehow they have to be integrated. And that’s just, I find that just one of the most beautiful and challenging elements, of course, of IFS, but it’s really a revolutionary thought. Just circling back to the, you know, the idea of the development of the self, I just wanted to throw out, tell me if you would agree, both of you, but it just seemed, I just think in my own experience. So I think just the very capacity to unblend, and I think for anyone coming into IFS one kind of very eye-opening things is learning how to unblend and to discover, oh my goodness, I’ve had these parts that have been in the driver’s seat for such a long time or so frequently. Just that, that very unblending and kind of this discovery of self. I would argue that that is already a kind of a development, you know. And I think my personal experience, myself is always being informed. There’s so many of these aha moments, like, oh my gosh. Every time I realize that I’m blended, I’m learning something about my parts, but I’m also learning something about my self. So I think it just seems that the whole notion of the development of the self that happens on many levels, but a lot of it is, it’s kind of an education and it’s information and it’s discovering my parts and how to relate to them. And Andrea, yeah, I mean, going back to what you were saying. I think it’s very true also that we can have this kind of, self can feel just kind of very helpless at times. You know, I just don’t know what to do with this part, you know, with this, maybe an exile. But it just seems to me that there’s a constant learning experience going on for the self and that the self, I need the input, the information, the insights that are coming from my parts. So, just wanted to throw that out there.

[00:54:46] Andrea Messineo: Yeah, 100%. It is a very experiential process, and it is a very bodily or somatic process. I want to kind of bring in that aspect of integration, integrating, you know, mind and body. Right. That’s also part of this. You know, MacIntyre when he’s thinking of practices, when he’s thinking of traditions, he’s thinking of his childhood in Scotland where, you know, there were fishing and farming communes and how the elders of those communities pass on that lore to other, I mean, it’s very tangible. In the one time that I heard him speak in Houston, you know, shortly after the publication of Dependent Rational Animals, there was a question from the audience, you know, how do you, Professor MacIntyre, feel that the youth of today, the despairing suicidal youth can be helped? And he said, well, there are always the options of military service or work aboard an Alaskan fishing boat. Right? And that is an example of his dry wit of course. But what he meant by that, was those two, and similar endeavors, bring us back into connection with objective reality, right, with the idea that the world is not what we make it to be or what we believe it to be. It has reality apart from ourselves and we are invited to conform to that. It’s a very difficult process, but it’s an extremely rewarding process, going ever deeper in layers of self discovery that you were referring to, Father Tom. I often tell my clients, it’s a work that we get to do. We get to bring this good news to our clients, to those that we counsel, to their parts that are in darkness, that haven’t heard the good news. And you may ask, well, how haven’t they heard the good news? Because, you know, they’re all part of our systems and, you know, those of us who are believers, we have received the faith. But it’s not that they don’t know it, but they haven’t experienced it. They haven’t had that felt experience. So a rebel part, for example, she knows, but she doesn’t care, Because her role is to protect the system in a different way of getting some immediate pleasure. So I’m at a loss for words, for the beauty of what we get to do.

[00:57:44] Dr. Peter: Yeah. Dr. Peter Martin, you know, has this discussion of internal evangelization of parts, you know, and it’s not primarily intellectual. And going back to sort of, some of Sherry Weddell’s work, this idea, and she’s talking about this in terms of, you know, external relationships, that there’s often this need for pre-evangelization, which is based on trust. And trust in someone or something that’s Catholic, you know? And that provides the basis to begin to not just have an intellectual discussion, but to have an experience of what I would call love, you know, an experience of authentic love. And so Peter Martin, you know, draws that out in terms of this concept of internal evangelization. And it was one of the episodes in the one fifties, I can’t remember exactly which episode it was, but inner evangelization. And I think that is when parts can come to some experience of the good news of the gospel, because frankly, sometimes it just sounds like words to parts. It just sounds like concepts and it doesn’t seem like it’s got an immediate relational reality to it. And oftentimes they’re picking this up through spiritual managers who are oppressing them, you know, who are condemning them, who are being rough with them, manhandling them. And that’s why in this work, at least as a psychologist, I don’t immediately start with a Jesus centric approach because I don’t know where each part is in terms of that part’s image of Jesus, how that part understands Jesus. And I talk about that a lot in episode 131, On God’s Role in Your Human Formation, of this podcast especially when there’s been a spiritual trauma, especially when there’s been real neglect or even abuse by those that somehow represent God in some way. It can be extremely fraught with difficulties to start with an approach that immediately brings in religious figures. I think sometimes parts really need to develop that trust first. They really need to have a taste of what love is first before they can experience directly the author of Love.

[00:59:59] Fr. Tom: Amen. That just resonates so much. I mean, resonates personally. I always kind of have before me this image of, you know, the self and the Good Shepherd. At least that works for me. The gentle Shepherd who has to shepherd the parts. And yeah, I very much love that whole notion of this pre-evangelization of parts. So true.

[01:00:25] Andrea Messineo: And yeah, and witnessing, inviting each part to be fully heard and known and understood. That happens on the inside as well as the outside. When MacIntyre writes about the communities of mutual giving and receiving that practical moral reasoning happens in, he writes, “What each individual has.” And I just substitute the word part. “What each part has is a history that is particularly her or his own. And to invite an individual to make her or himself int intelligible to us, perhaps as a preliminary to justifying her or his actions or the extreme behaviors of parts, is to invite that individual to tell us as much of that history as is needed.” Right? So there’s so much space, there’s so much time to do this work. Once they are in relation to self, and as Dr. Peter said, they’ve started to experience that love, that reflection of the image of God that self gives to them, they just open up. They want to be heard. They want to be known by self. Yeah, it’s beautiful. So, I’m wondering if there’s time we can pass a bit, we talked about, you know, concepts of dependency and growth in development. We can talk a bit about the other concept that MacIntyre brings out of disability. Right. That’s a feature of these communities as well. What do we do in the case of individuals who are permanently disabled for one reason or another, that we don’t expect to become independent, practical, moral reasoners? I hadn’t thought so much about applying that conversation to inside, but we certainly could explore that. What, you know, does Ives tell us about parts that have been so wounded by life that the, their condition seems chronic. Right. MacIntyre says, “At least on the outside, the communities of moral inquiry must be evaluated on how they view disability because each one of us has been at one time and will again be dependent on others.” So we need to be able to trust in their just generosity. Right.

[01:03:20] Dr. Peter: Wow. Yeah.

[01:03:21] Andrea Messineo: And this is, yeah, this is kind of a different ideal than you know, Aristotle’s you know, great-souled or great-hearted men, right? That the prominent people in the community were the most able, the most developed, the most able to give. What do we do in the case of individuals that seem that they need to be receiving care.

[01:03:49] Dr. Peter: And it’s really important because in so often there is this emphasis on functionality. You know, this emphasis on productivity, you know, of being able to, you know, “contribute” in some, you know, readily identifiable way that’s valuable to society that’s recognized and secular society is valuable. And there can be, within that, a loss of the sense of the ontological goodness of the human person. And I think taken inside there can be a loss of the sense of the ontological goodness of each part of a person, because parts become confused with their burdens. You know, manager parts, you know, will look at a part not as a part, but as a problem, or as only their maladaptive desires or their problematic attitudes or beliefs. And so there can be this desire, going back to what we were talking about before, for essentially a part-ectomy, you know, that the part simply be chopped off and discarded, right, without understanding that that part is integral to their personhood. And then going back to some of the episodes on, for example St. Maximus the Confessor, the macrocosm, the microcosm. You know, like, I think how we look at these questions in these situations inside of us is going to impact the way that we look at things, you know, outside of us, right, in society and our culture. So, if we believe that parts of us are expendable or that are best to be removed, there can be this same sort of attitude toward others. You know, St. Thomas Aquinas talked about how the way we love ourselves or don’t love ourselves is the radix et forma, the root and form of the way that we love others and the template by which we love others. So I think a lot can be inferred about how we look at our own internal disabilities or parts that are struggling in various ways by the way that we look at the sort of the analogs writ large outside of ourselves.

[01:06:09] Andrea Messineo: Yeah. Yeah. I like that take very much, Dr. Peter.

[01:06:15] Fr. Tom: It is just making me think of, there’s so much in kind of traditional Catholic asceticism that favors the part-ectomy, you know, and we’re predisposed to that. Or the parts suppression or, what we need here is just more penance and more mortification. And I just think this is one of the most challenging and beautiful areas of, you know, where IFS kind of meets the world of Catholic asceticism and, you know, so how do we understand this? What does it mean, you know? Obviously we have parts that sometimes are just deeply burdened and can’t, you know, act out. We have to work at their integration. And that are problematic, you know, but we don’t want to internally treat them like problem children, right? So what does it mean to strive to grow in virtue to rightly order our behavior, and at the same time, to offer love and mercy to those parts of us that, yeah, just really may be so severely burdened and stuck, that you know, they’re disabled in a sense. It just, I, it’s just striking me that that’s quite a challenge and that that can be a very challenging place where, especially Catholics who are kind of looking at IFS, may not be sure just how to navigate that or what to do with that.

[01:07:41] Dr. Peter: You know, I find it really helpful for clients that I’m working with clinically in who are, who have experience raising children, you know, either their own or their nieces, nephews, you know, others, to think about these parts as like little children. And, you know, would we treat a two-and-a-half-year-old or a 3-year-old, you know, in the same way that we’re, you know, kind of treating a part of us that phenomenologically is presenting at that age, you know, for example, and is upset and burdened. At the same time, I think sometimes there can be concerns from serious Catholics about, Oh, so are you saying that sort of anything goes, we just accept anything And I think there’s a real important distinction between acceptance of a desire or an attitude or an impulse, and endorsement of that impulse, you know, or that desire or that attitude, you know. That there, again, there’s this sanctioning and disavowing that Von Hildebrand talks about. And so we can make those distinctions. And I find that to be quite pragmatic about it in a sense, nothing that I’ve tried has worked better, both in my own personal life and in working with others, accompanying others, than to love these parts. And I think it’s entirely consistent, with our Catholic faith, what Plato said in the Republic, that if a man loves a thing, that means he loves all of that thing. You know, that it, he doesn’t just pick and choose certain aspects of it. And so, there’s an integrity or an integral aspect of loving the entirety of that person, whether that’s ourselves or somebody else. And I found that it becomes so much easier to love similar parts in other people if we can love those parts within ourselves.

[01:09:32] Dr. Peter: And so I can certainly appreciate and resonate with, you know, concerns about, does this mean that we’re just abandoning, you know, moral principles and we’re just, you know, just loving on these parts and some sort of like 1970s kumbaya fest or something like that. But we also wanna make sure that it actually is love. It’s not just, you know, aggression and frustration hiding under the guise of tough love or something like that. Or a distorted understanding of asceticism.

[01:10:02] Dr. Peter: You know, and one of the doctors of the church that has some really unique insights into this is St. John of the Cross. If you read His Dark Night of the Soul, you’ll see that he, you know, he says that it’s common to have sexually intrusive thoughts, intrusive thoughts that are sexual, you know, when you are in the dark night, or to have blasphemous thoughts, you know, and he doesn’t take a polarizing approach to those in contrast to some other writers, there’s an acceptance that those exist and there’s no endorsement of the content of those. But I think we can now take it to the next level and see that parts may be active with those sorts of things. And they’re expressing something of their experience, or at least how they’ve interpreted their experience, often in very young ways.

[01:10:48] Dr. Peter: And if we can get curious about those messages without, you know, embracing the content, we can help those parts. And I think that opens the door to a lot of healing, not only for folks that are experiencing obsessions or compulsions or all other kinds of symptoms, you know, folks that are struggling with scrupulosity, but that are suffering with just about any type of psychological symptom, you know, understanding it as a way of a part trying to communicate distress. And parts are gonna do that in a way that get our attention, ’cause a symptom that doesn’t get one’s attention isn’t particularly valuable, you know, to a part. It doesn’t actually get the job done, if you will.

[01:11:26] Fr. Tom: Peter, I’m thinking, the image I have coming to mind, I’ve witnessed this many times as a celibate, I’ve never had to do this, but friends of mine with little children, right? So whether it’s in the store and the 3-year-old is throwing a tantrum, temper tantrum, and the way of handling it begins with getting down at the child’s level. And Mommy looks at Jimmy. And starts with Jimmy, I understand you’re not happy right now, right? So I validate what you’re feeling, okay? We’re not gonna be able to proceed this way, you know. So again, that just like, okay, I hear you. I see you, I understand you, I know you’re not happy, whatever that part might be expressing. 

[01:12:10] Dr. Peter: And communicating that I love you and that you’re valuable. Like it’s not just like, I need you to shut up because you’re embarrassing me. A lot of parental discipline is actually driven by the shame of parents actually. If you actually look at like, what happens in parental discipline, parents tend to discipline most harshly when the child has somehow touched on something that activates shame. And the, you know, sort of the anger and a whole bunch of other things are a reaction to that, to the parent trying to contain the external environment so that their internal environment does not become unstable. So, you know, so we wanna make sure that when we are engaging in discipline that it’s also fostering the self-governance in the long run of the child. And that’s something that, you know, that was such a major theme for St. Thomas Aquinas, and then, you know, it’s being expanded upon, which I’m really enjoying, by MacIntyre, ’cause I’ve not read MacIntyre. I just, full disclosure. I’ve actually been intimidated by MacIntyre’s work. I’m like, ah.

[01:13:14] Fr. Tom: That’s not an uncommon reaction to MacIntyre for the first time.

[01:13:18] Andrea Messineo: Oh, oh, yes. His style of writing. You could start off, you know, at the paragraph and by the end of the paragraph you realize that it’s been all one sentence.

[01:13:28] Fr. Tom: It’s all one sentence.

[01:13:30] Andrea Messineo: Yeah. With multiple compound phrases, and you have to look back and see, you know, to which subject the predicate refers. 

[01:13:38] Fr. Tom: He was not known for editing his own work that much. 

[01:13:42] Andrea Messineo: Yeah, yeah. But even, Dr. Peter, without having read him, you see how beautifully everything dovetails. You know, it’s just coming right back to the beginning. And I think that’s a sign that we’re on the right track in the work that we’re doing. I’m so excited. I mean, I’m coming away from this conversation with new trailheads to follow. I love the parallel that’s emerging between how we treat the dependent and disabled parts of ourselves internally and how we are towards others who are such in our communities and society. Because this, I mean, we would need a whole other episode to develop this, but, you know, this is one of my areas of interest, how the faith supports or challenges, you know, those with disability. And, you know, I think, you know, talking about, you know, the good that parts bring to us as well. This is kind of, you know, going off, this is a trailhead, as I said, you know, it’s important to keep in mind that, you know, a lot of our conceptions of disability are culturally conditioned. And that what passes for such in our time, you know, historically would’ve had a very different interpretation. In my book, Alone in Church, I reflect upon many instances of holy men and women who displayed what we would clearly describe as autistic traits today. But yet it contributed to and enhanced their holiness. And so yeah, thank you. Thank you both for that, that richness, that added layer.

[01:15:41] Dr. Peter: Well, as we kind of come to the end of our time today, we still have five, six minutes maybe. I’m just curious, like, what is really important to you? Each of you. If you’re willing to talk about this personally, about, you know, IFS, parts work, the coming together of a Thomistic understanding of the human person, kind of expressed by MacIntyre. You know, like how has this made a difference, maybe, we could put it like this, for you. That it’s not just fascinating ideas. You know, it’s not just, you know, kind of all going on in the realm of the mind. You know, I know for me that, and I mentioned, I alluded to this before, like I was mystified about the actual loving myself, you know. And yet I knew it was really important because if that’s how I’m supposed to love others, you know. A lot of my career has been to try to figure out the answer to that question. Like, how does one love oneself in an ordered way. And if you read Aristotle, Plato, we talked about this with Dr. Flood, you know, back in those earlier episodes, you know, there’s a sort of ideal that’s presented, but can we get to the how? And so what was lovely about this, for me, what was just mind blowing, is that, wow, I can have a dialogue within myself, you know, with different parts being subject and object. Like, wow. Like who knew? Who knew? And this was after I’d been steeped in object relations stuff. I was trying to find the edges of the most relational types of therapeutic modalities. And so what really brought this home for me was just my own experience. And like, wow, I can love myself better. And now that I can love myself better and I can accept these parts of myself, I can love others better. I can love my children better, I can love my wife better, I can love my neighbor better. And this is helping me along the road to sanctity. This is helping me along the road to salvation. It’s helping me with the human formation pieces that I did not know I had difficulties with or I did know I had difficulties with, but I didn’t know what to do about it. So yeah, to not have to condemn, or reject, or distance myself from the parts of other people that corresponded, that were counterparts to my own exiles, to the parts of me that my managers were exiling, like that was so huge for me. So I’m just curious if there’s something that, ’cause each of you have been drawn to IFS in various ways. If there’s something personal that you’d like to bring in about that, without pressing for anything or trying to overexpose any parts. Check with your systems, you know, check with your parts to make sure that it seems right and good to them to share this ’cause this is a public forum and so forth. But yeah, if there was something that your parts wanted you to speak for them on that, would love to hear it.

[01:18:30] Fr. Tom: Well, I could just jump in. I mean, I think there’s a multifaceted answer to that, but just one part of the answer I think is, for example, just piggybacking on what you shared, Peter, I have a very similar experience after, you know, many years of being in, you know, seminary formation and in the formation business, we often use the word integration. But my experience for many years was, what does that mean? It sounds nice, but what does it actually mean? And I think, you know, one of the tremendous values of IFS is just open up and making up this world of, well, this is what, on a deep dive, this is what integration really, really means. Again, especially kind of in a seminary formation context where, you know, obviously one of the huge challenges, even more so today, both for seminarians, for priests, but, you know, it’s the ongoing integration of sexuality, for example. You know, we talk about the Catholicism defines chastity in terms of integration, and I just think the tools of IFS just really give us a wonderful window into not just understanding, but also implementing. And just the whole richness of what it means to be doing the inner work and leaning into that work of knowing, understanding my parts, discovering them, and loving them. Anyway, that’s just one piece of what I could say about that.

[01:20:06] Dr. Peter: I love it. Thank you. Thank you, Father Tom.

[01:20:09] Andrea Messineo: Yeah. Yeah. Just beautiful. I wanna second, I guess, what both of you are seeing. You know, in my experience, discovering parts work has been a freeing experience. I had no idea before how the deficits in my human formation, in my, you know, self-to-parts connection were presenting obstacles to grace and progress in the spiritual realm. And it’s as if I was given wings, so to speak, and I see that in my own life and the life of my clients. And I’m able, thanks in great part to this work, to engage in these kinds of dialogues, in these kinds of giving and receiving. I was speaking for parts just before we started, you know, in the past, I would’ve been, you know, caught between the rock and a hard place of the internal critic part that was so afraid of saying the wrong thing and a part that would’ve frozen me up to prevent me from saying anything at all. And now I am, you know, offering continuing education seminars in this very topic to formators. I welcome anyone to contact me who is interested in continuing these conversations. So.

[01:21:46] Dr. Peter: Yeah, and I’ll encourage folks to check that out. Do you have a website or a way that you would like folks to contact you?

[01:21:52] Andrea Messineo: Yeah. Yeah. They can contact me through my website. It’s andreamessineolpcc.com. Or you can just email me at a.messineo@att.net. I’d love to start the conversation and anyone who’s able to get credits, CE, through NBCC. Yeah.

[01:22:15] Dr. Peter: Beautiful. And we’ll put those links in the description on our YouTube channel as well, or our YouTube description for this episode, along with a link to your book, Alone in Church. And yeah. And Father Tom, is there anything that you would like us to kind of know about that you’re up to that we could draw some attention to at this time?

[01:22:34] Fr. Tom: Well, just up to a lot of stuff. Continuing my own work in parts work and just trying to support people. And, in this, I have a number of spiritual directees who are doing parts work simultaneously. And one of the kind of personal projects I have gone is just kind of discovering this wonderful, enriching overlap between spiritual direction and IFS and parts work. That’s just a very fruitful thing. So thank you again for, you know, for this opportunity. This has just been really enriching.

[01:23:06] Dr. Peter: Well, I am glad, so glad that both of you are here and I am super excited for our next episode, episode 180, where we will all be rejoining, we’ll get the band back together and we will be exploring more of these topics around parts and moral questions, around the formation of moral conscience, around concupiscence, and all kinds of other types of things. So we will be able to continue that. Yeah, it’s great stuff. I mean, it’s really important stuff.

[01:23:39] Dr. Peter: So, if you liked this episode, give us a like. Go ahead to YouTube or whatever podcast platform you’re on, and like this episode, subscribe to the IIC podcast. Join our conversation on our YouTube channel at Interior Integration Numer 4 Catholics, Interior Integration 4 Catholics. Links to Father Tom Berg’s books are in our YouTube description and links to Andrea Messineo’s practice are there also, as well as her book Alone in Church. I want to tell you, the Resilient Catholics Community, it’s now open, it’s February. The RCC opens every February, June, and October. So the RCC is now open for new members. We are taking applications and that will happen until the end of February. So if you are a Catholic who sees how important structure is for your personal human formation, if you wanna shore up your natural human formation foundation for your spiritual life, if you wanna really get into your human formation arithmetic and really learn that arithmetic so you can do your spiritual formation algebra. And if you wanna bring in this parts and systems thinking, IFS, grounded in a Catholic understanding of the human person, consider the Resilient Catholics Community. The RCC offers you a structured program. There’s a community of like-minded Catholics. We meet in small groups. We’re flourishing and thriving as we journey toward loving God wholeheartedly, right. Loving God with all our parts, loving our neighbors as ourselves. Check it out, soulsandhearts.com/rcc. Hundreds of Catholics have found the RCC to be helpful in their human formation. And why? Because we’re not journeying alone. We’re going together. We’re bringing together the best of secular. And spiritual resources to help you experience what love is at a bones level across all your parts, right, so that every part of you can participate in that love. Check out more at our RCC landing page, soulsandhearts.com/rcc. Consider doing our 19 minute experiential exercise. That can help you discern whether it’s a good idea to apply to the RCC. There’s still, even if you apply, there’s a mutual discernment process on your end, on our end. That includes our PartsFinder Pro. That’s a set of 23 measures that helps you to come to understand 10 to 15 of your parts, managers, firefighters, exiles, how they relate to your innermost self, how they relate to each other. You’ll get feedback on your PartsFinder Pro, your PFP, through a six to seven page report, and there’s a 15 minute Zoom interview where we go over it with you, with the Souls and Hearts staff member. That’s all included in the $499 application fee. If you need financial assistance for that, contact Pam at office@soulsandhearts.com. 

[01:26:29] Dr. Peter: And I wanna also let you know that, for you Catholic formators. So we’re talking Catholic therapists, spiritual directors, priests, coaches, those who are professionally responsible for the formation of other Catholics. We have a number of offerings for you starting soon, right? We just had a free webinar on IFS Basics and a recording of that webinar is now available on our Formation for Formators landing page at soulsandhearts.com/fff. So we go over the basics there. We also go over the basics in this podcast in episodes 157, 158, and 159. We are in the final weeks of our registration for our spring foundational experiential groups. No IFS training is necessary for those. And, you know, those are led by IFS trained professionals. So there’s like professional accompaniment on these. I’m leading one and so is Bridget Adams. So is David Edwards. And there’s also several advanced groups that are available for IFS Level One trained individuals or for those who’ve already completed an FEG or maybe the Stepping Stones program. So I wanted to let you know about those. And if you have questions about any of this, you’re welcome to reach out to me. My email, crisis@soulsandhearts.com. You can also call me on my cell phone, (317) 567-9594. That’s my private cell phone number, especially on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 4:30 PM to 5:30 PM Eastern time during my conversation hours. We can have a conversation up to 10 minutes, maybe 12 or up to 15. And it is just so good for me to be able to talk with you. And with that, let’s draw 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.