IIC 21: How Secular Experts Get Resilience Wrong

Dr. Peter discusses the three major problems in how secular experts define and understand resilience.  He also shows how a Catholic understanding of resilience is so different from a the secular ways of conceptualizing resilience.  He addresses how a plan to grow in resilience has to be tailored to the person’s levels of human and spiritual formation and describes the five psychological tasks we need to accomplish to have a secure attachment to God.

[00:00:12] Welcome to the podcast Coronavirus Crisis Carpe Diem, where you and I rise up and embrace the possibilities and opportunities for spiritual and psychological growth in this time of crisis, all grounded in a Catholic worldview. We are going beyond mere resilience to rising up to the challenges of this pandemic and becoming even healthier in the natural and the spiritual realms than we were before. I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski, your host and guide with Souls and Hearts at soulsandhearts.com. Thank you for being here with me. This is episode 21, and it’s called Catholic Resilience: Where the Secular Experts Get Resilience Wrong. It’s released on June 22nd, 2020. In our last episode, we started a deep dive into resilience by looking at secular conceptualizations, secular conceptualizations of resilience. We discussed how in the secular world, resilience is about adapting yourself to life’s demands. It’s about handling the challenges, handling the curveballs that life throws at you with poise, with confidence. It’s about getting back to previous levels of functioning and adaptation. It’s about getting up as many times as you’re knocked down, as many times as you’re knocked down by dangers, by misfortunes. It’s about journeying on under the load of troubles and difficulties that life brings us. It’s about not succumbing to failure, not collapsing under stress, not being destabilized by hardships and tough situations. All right. That was sort of it. We’ll get into the formal definition again, just to refresh all of you on what the secular experts say that resilience is. The American Psychological Association defines resilience as the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats, or significant sources of stress such as family and relationship problems, serious health problems, or workplace and financial stressors.

[00:02:17] It means bouncing back from difficult experiences. You know, we talked about this before. That’s what the last episode was all about. Like when that racket ball gets hit, it gets squashed, and then it regains its shape as it zings away. So those secular definitions, those definitions from secular experts on resilience, they sound reasonable enough, right? I mean, it’s American Psychological Association. You know, it’s the professionals speaking here, you know. And in fact, there is a lot of good in that definition. There’s a lot of good that Catholics can draw from. In considering resilience, though, we as believing practicing Catholics need to rework the secular notions that get ingrained in us by our culture. And that’s what I’m here to help you do. I am here to challenge notions commonly held by Catholics that are actually not grounded in Catholicism. Okay. And to that end, I find three major problems in this secular definition of resilience. Three problems. And we’re going to cover them now. First problem. Secular mental health professionals look to their clients’ personal resources, their clients talents, their skills, their gifts. The secular clinicians will work primarily with those assets and strengths that they can find in their clients. Secular clinicians think about how their clients can have greater autonomy, greater agency.

[00:03:54] They think about how their clients can be better able to access their assets, their strengths, to better adapt to the world. Most of them will also assess the social support that their clients can access from their close relationships. They’re going to look at social support as well. There’s nothing wrong with that insofar as it goes. Insofar as it goes. The issue is it doesn’t go far enough. As Catholics, we’re not supposed to rely primarily on ourselves. We’re not supposed to be independent, rugged individualists, and we’re not supposed to rely primarily on our close relationships, either, because all other people have their flaws. They’re going to disappoint us. Here’s the bottom line. We’re supposed to rely primarily on God, on his love, on his mercy, on his power, on his constancy. And while more and more secular clinicians are open to bringing in their clients’ spirituality to help their clients become resilient, it’s not the top thing on their list. Spiritual resources made Southwick and Charney’s top ten list of resilience factors. We talked about that in the last episode, but not until number four. And it got in there a little bit in number ten. From a Catholic perspective, God is absolutely primary in resilience. And this is the biggest problem of secular-based psychologies in general, not just with regard to resiliency, but in general, right? The neglect of the reality of God. The neglect of the reality of God. And then all the realities that flow from that, like who we are in relationship to God.

[00:05:41] So we need to not only understand with our minds who we are and who God is, we also need to involve our souls, our hearts, and our bodies. And that’s not easy. There are lots and lots of psychological obstacles to seeing God as He really is, to seeing his love, to seeing his mercy, to seeing his power, to seeing his constancy. That’s what I’m here to help you with. I’m here to help you get over those psychological obstacles to seeing God as He really is. You can check out my other podcast, Be With the Word through Souls and Hearts for Trinity Sunday. In episode 29, we get into all the issues where unconscious God images get in the way. And so if you’re really interested in finding out more about how unconscious God images get in the way and harm us spiritually, I’d really recommend that episode, episode 29 from Trinity Sunday. That’s what we do here at Souls and Hearts. We ground psychology in an authentic Catholic anthropology and authentic Catholic worldview. Now, today, we’re not going to get into all those solutions for Catholics to become more resilient. Be patient, be patient. I promise you, that’s coming up in future episodes, and especially in the workshops and the experiential work that we do and the Resilient Catholics Carpe Diem community. I want you to become much more resilient.

[00:07:07] And we’re starting with understanding the conceptual landscape first. All right. So that covers the first problem that secular clinicians have in guiding others to resiliency, not giving God his primary role. Here’s the second problem of secular approaches to resilience. Most mental health professionals work to minimize suffering and maximize one’s enjoyment of life. They misunderstand suffering. Most assume, either unconsciously or consciously, that suffering is to be avoided and minimized, that suffering is bad. We don’t want it. They want their clients to feel better. They want their clients to enjoy life more. They want their clients to avoid getting hurt. They want their clients to be able to pursue their own dreams, to follow their own paths in life, to be able to make their own meaning out of life. They don’t use this word, but I’m curious about if you can guess which philosophical system argues for maximizing enjoyment and minimizing suffering as the best way to live. Which philosophical system emphasizes maximizing enjoyment and minimizing suffering? Well, dear listeners, the word for that belief system is hedonism. Hedonism. And hedonism has always been really popular because in our fallen human condition, hedonism makes sense to our deep passions. We naturally want to avoid pain. We naturally want to pursue pleasure. It’s a very worldly way of looking at meaning and purpose in life. So here’s the bottom line for the second problem. Most mental health professionals don’t understand the meaning of the cross. They don’t understand the importance of redemptive suffering.

[00:09:04] And hey, it’s understandable. It’s not easy to grasp deeply the meaning of the cross. There’s a lot of ways that people, even Catholics, even faithful, devout Catholics, there’s a lot of ways that we get the meaning of the cross wrong. The meaning of the cross is not intuitive. It’s not intuitive to the vast majority of us. It’s not available. That meaning the meaning of the cross is not available to unaided human reason. We need divine revelation to understand the meaning of the cross and and to understand why that cross is a gift. It’s a gift. But it’s a gift that almost everyone rejects. Remember, Saint Paul tells us that the cross is a stumbling block, that it’s a folly. Christ’s cross was seen by the Jews of his day as disgraceful, as shameful, as a sign that he was cursed by God. To the Greeks of the day, who were focused on the cycles of time, on order, on harmony, on beauty, the crucifixion was a jarring, discordant event, and the resurrection that followed? Simply hard to believe. But “all things work together for good for those who love the Lord.” Romans 8:28. And that’s the signature verse of this whole podcast. All things, all things work together for good for those who love the Lord. Therefore, all things can be gifts if we love the Lord. If we are loving the Lord, we can receive our sufferings as gifts, as crosses that will bring us to salvation to the joys of eternal life.

[00:10:49] Now this can be extremely difficult to do without grace. It’s impossible to deeply understand, accept, and embrace our sufferings as gifts. But we’re going to suffer one way or another in this life, and we can suffer as stoics, or we can suffer as rebels, or we can suffer as Christians. The choice is difficult, but we can choose to bring redemption into suffering. And that’s part of what my job is to help you bring redemption into your suffering. We’re going to be focusing on that. We’re going to be working on that in future episodes. For now, we’re outlining the conceptual base. So the second mistake that secular mental health professionals make about resilience is in understanding suffering wrongly. Now, as we go through the next several episodes on different aspects of resilience, we’re going to look at suffering from a Catholic perspective. We’re going to value the redemptive aspect of suffering. We’re going to pick up our crosses. We are not going to be naive about suffering, though. Oh, no. We’re not going to minimize it. We’re not going to deny it. If you are a faithful, practicing Catholic, you are, by definition, on a hard road. We have that straight from our Lord Jesus Christ. We as Catholics, trying to live out the faith are on a hard road. So straight from Matthew 7, verse 14. “For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.”

[00:12:27] Those who find it are few. It’s a hard road. There’s suffering on it. But there’s also, and this is really important to remember when we are in our dark places. Yes, there is suffering, but there is also a deep, abiding peace and joy along with that suffering. Catholic saints are no strangers to suffering. They don’t avoid it. They embrace it. Why? Because they recognize the cross. They recognize the redemptive value of suffering. So this issue of understanding suffering properly is really, really important in discussing resilience from a Catholic perspective. It’s the second major way that a Catholic understanding of resilience differs from that secular understanding of resilience. Okay. So here’s the third problem. The third mistake that secular experts make when they discuss resilience. Secular approaches to resilience focus on returning to previous levels of functioning. They’re focused on bouncing back like that racket ball to the previous state, before we were struck by whatever adversity came along our way, getting back to where we were before the trouble began. That’s the point of secular approaches to resilience. But for a Catholic, that’s not good enough. I don’t want you to merely get back to previous levels of functioning after you’ve suffered some adversity. I want you to go way beyond your previous levels of functioning. The cross isn’t just about getting back to the old status quo. It’s about breaking through to a whole new way of being, a way of being that was not possible without the cross.

[00:14:24] A whole new way of loving. A whole new way of being loved. While secular approaches recognize the value of being challenged in order to grow. For the Catholic, the trials, the adversities, the traumas, the tragedies of this life are gifts to help us not just get back to where we were, but to bring us to a whole new plane of existence, to sanctity, to holiness. There is no holiness in this life without suffering. That’s why in the lead in to these episodes, I talk about going beyond mere resilience, rising up and becoming even healthier in the natural and spiritual realms than we were before. So in summary, from a Catholic perspective, there are three major problems with the ways that secular clinicians approach resilience. The first problem is that secular clinicians focus on the client, relying on the client’s resources primarily, and then on his or her close relationships. Secondarily, no focus on God. Our all loving, all powerful God is left out of that primary role. Our loving Father shuffled off to the periphery, vaguely included somehow in the functionality of spirituality for the client. In secular approaches to resilience, “spirituality” is useful in helping the client pursue his or her own agenda to becoming self-actualized, but it’s very unclear as to how that works, because who knows what spirituality the client may have. The second problem is that secular clinicians misunderstand suffering without divine revelation.

[00:16:09] There is no way to understand the redemptive value of suffering or know that the cross is our way to heaven. Third problem, secular clinicians focus on bouncing back to previous levels of functioning. These clinicians focus on restoring the client to how he or she was before the adversity. But Catholics, we don’t go up on the cross of suffering just to come back down again and be as we were before. We are to be transformed by the cross and break through to a whole new way of being, to holiness, to sanctity. All right, so now you may be asking, Dr. Peter, you’ve been rather critical of secular definitions of resilience. How about giving us a Catholic definition of resilience? All right. Well, since you asked, here we go. It’s definition time with Dr. Peter. So here is my definition of Catholic resilience. And I made this up just for you. I made this up. Took a fair amount of thinking and scratching my noggin to come up with this for you. But I got something that I’m relatively happy with. We may modify this as we go along, but this is my working definition for Catholic resilience right now. Catholic resilience is the process of accepting and embracing adversity, trauma, trials, stresses and sufferings as crosses. Catholic resilience sees these crosses as gifts from our loving, attuned God, gifts to transform us, to make us holy, and to help us be better able to love and be loved than we ever were before, and to ultimately bring us into loving union with him.

[00:18:06] Let me go over that again, because it’s a big mouthful. Catholic resilience is the process of accepting and embracing adversity, trauma trials, stresses, and suffering as crosses. Catholic resilience sees these crosses as gifts from our loving, attuned God, gifts to transform us, to make us holy, to help us be better able to love and to be loved than we ever were before, and to ultimately bring us into loving union with him. All right. So one more thing here. The way you develop resilience depends on where you are in your human formation and where you are in your spiritual life. Growing in Catholic resilience is not a one size fits all process. It really has to be tailored to the human and spiritual formation that you already have. I don’t know how many clients I have had through the years who have imitated saints’ penances and their ascetical practices in the hope of growing in the spiritual life. They weren’t ready for those practices. It was like trying to do trigonometry without understanding arithmetic. We have to choose means. We have to choose processes to grow in resilience that fit us where we are now. There’s another reason why it’s not easy to just pick up a book on resilience and follow the instructions and have it work. You see a lot of used books on resilience on the internet.

[00:19:41] The used book market in resilience is booming. And it makes sense, right? You wouldn’t just go out and pick out a suit randomly from a rack and try to wear it. We need a program of growing in resilience that fits us. We need that tailoring. So as we move forward, we’re going to consider where in the spiritual life you are, using the seven mansions of the interior castle, as laid out by Saint Teresa of Avila, with a special emphasis on the first three mansions. Why the first three mansions? Well, the first three mansions are where the vast majority of Catholics who are serious about the spiritual life are. And they also correspond to the purgative way. Right? That’s the first step in the spiritual life. And that’s where almost everybody is. We will address the kinds of practices that foster resilience in the rest of the mansions, corresponding to the illuminative and the unitive ways as well. We’ll cover those, but more briefly. We’re also going to look at what psychological tasks remain incomplete for you and your attachment to God. Because if there is one thing that I have seen over and over and over again in client after client, if there’s one predictor of getting better, it is, is the person growing in their attachment to God? Their psychological, their emotional connection to God, their relational connection to God. How is their attachment to God coming along? And there are so many psychological factors that impact our relationship with God.

[00:21:31] It’s not just going on in the spiritual realm, people. So many times I run across so many people that want to treat this as though it is somehow totally disconnected from their psychology. And it isn’t. It’s intimately connected to our psychology. The way we relate has so much to do with what we’ve learned experientially growing up and what we’ve kept from that, what we’ve retained from that, the kinds of assumptions that we made that do not hold with regard to God because of who he is. So we need to look at five attachment-related tasks and really dive into these in future episodes, because there is no Catholic resiliency without them. The five attachment tasks are, number one, feeling seen and known by God, right? This is not just some intellectual exercise. This is some gut sense of feeling seen and known by God, a knowing at a heart level that we’re seen and known by God. Number two, feeling safe and secure with God. This is far more rare than is generally assumed. Generally people may say, yeah, I feel safe. I feel secure with God when things are going generally well, but you check that out with them when they’re in their dark place, feeling safe and secure with God. Far less likely. So we want that sense of safety and that sense of security with God to permeate us in such a way that it doesn’t get shaken when peace as the world gives peace is taken away from us, when we are struggling with resiliency in the face of some adversity. Right?

[00:23:25] We’ve got to take a close look at our feelings of safety and security with God. Number three, having a sense of being comforted and reassured by God. Now here’s where we start getting some head scratching, comforted by God, reassured by God. So many people have so much fear of God that these don’t even enter their minds. And in fact, sometimes it’s really hard to work with folks along the lines of comfort and reassurance by God. I often start with Our Lady, or one of the saints, Saint Joseph often, sometimes guardian angels. But that sense of being able to be comforted, being able to be reassured by God, is something that is absolutely critical to, I would argue, psychological health in general, but definitely specifically with resilience. Number four, having a deep sense that God cherishes you, that he rejoices in you, and that he delights in you. Whoa. That God cherishes me, rejoices in me, that he delights in me. For many, many people, these are really foreign concepts. Very unusual experiences if they happen at all. We need to be able to overcome the psychological obstacles that have been formed in us, to be able to have a sense of that, though. When you look at the saints, their lives, they have a sense and it may not be at an affective or feeling level all the time, that this doesn’t deny that there are dark nights of the soul or dark night of sense, right, where we’re not having a lot of emotional resonance.

[00:25:24] This isn’t just happening in the heartset. This isn’t just happening in the heart. This is a sense, a deep sense, it’s fortified by faith, but it isn’t just existing in the realm of the intellect. And the fifth, you need to know at a deep level that God wills what is best for you, that God wills what is best for you. So if you are experiencing a trial, adversity, a trauma, that God is only permitting that to happen for your highest good, he’s only permitting that to happen because he’s going to draw some great good from it. Again, though, if you love him. If you separate from him, if you detach, if you disconnect from him, there’s nothing more he can do. He can call you back. But he respects our free will. And this is the great tragedy that I see over and over and over again in our world is people totally misunderstanding suffering. This goes back to the second point where secular experts get resiliency wrong is then the meaning of suffering. Knowing at a deep level that God wills what is best for you. And many times, maybe most times, we won’t be able to pinpoint it exactly with our intellects. It’s not a question of knowledge.

[00:27:01] It’s not a question of understanding. It’s a question of confidence. It’s a question of trust. All right, so those five attachment tasks, feeling seen and known by God, feeling safe and secure with God, a sense of being comforted and reassured by God, having a sense that God cherishes you, rejoices in you, delights in you, and knowing at a deep level that no matter what’s happening, God wills what is best for you in that experience. All right, so we’re going to be covering those five things. We’re also going to be crossing over and addressing the four major sets. Remember those four major sets, those four major pillars of resilience that we talked about in a previous episode, bodyset, mindset, heartset and soulset. So we’re not going to be just talking about one aspect of this. We’re going to be trying to bring this into the entire being of you, your entire being. We’re going to try to bring this into your entire being, because so often people just deal with this stuff in their heads as though it’s merely an intellectual exercise, as though it’s a problem to be solved, like an algebra problem. And that is not how it works, people. It really isn’t. We cannot leave out the other aspects that make us uniquely human, such as our emotional experience. Okay, I’m working really hard to put together a whole program for you on Catholic Resilience. I’m going to be laying out the conceptual and intellectual aspects in these podcast episodes, and those are free for all of you.

[00:28:48] I will also be bringing in some experiential exercises into these episodes, so that they are designed for you to be able to benefit just from the podcast alone. So if you’re a casual listener and you’re finding benefit in these and you know you’re really enjoying them, but you don’t want to go further than just listening to the podcasts, that’s great. You’re welcome to do that. This is here for you. For that, we’re going to be weaving in a lot of stories to help illustrate in detail all these concepts as well. Didn’t do that a lot today. Didn’t do that a lot in the last episode because they were kind of conceptual, foundational ones. But we’re going to be bringing in the stories a lot more to make these concepts easier to understand, easier to relate to, easier to connect with. I want to make this as easy as possible because we are on a hard road. We are on a hard road as Christians, as I said before, and I don’t want to make it any harder. I want to make it easier right now. For those of you though, who really do want to go deeper. I’m also putting together a series of workshops for the RCCD community for small group work on increasing Catholic resilience. And in these we focus both on the natural and on the spiritual realms.

[00:30:03] We focus both on natural growth and formation and on spiritual growth and formation. And in those workshops, we’re going to have the time and space to do a lot more experiential work. And that experiential work will include increasing insight and awareness to underlying psychological obstacles, to resilience. It’s going to allow opportunities to try out various exercises and techniques in real time, to see which of them are most helpful to you. Because remember, we want to tailor things to you. We don’t want it to just be a one-way interaction. You know, we want there to be this give and take in these workshops and in these small group experiences. And we’re also going to be sharing experiences and supporting each other. We’re going to be working together as a community of like-minded Catholics who are on this quest for greater resiliency together, right? We’re going to be working together in the communion of saints. I’m also gathering together the best current measures of psychological resilience, the secular measures, because there’s value in them. I’m going to be using those. And I’m working also on another instrument to assess the factors of Catholic resilience. I have to develop that. And that’s for those of you that would like to do some self-assessment or who may even want some professional resilience coaching in a small group or possibly even individually, if we can get that set up. All that’s going to be coming up in the next weeks and months.

[00:31:27] But you have to be a part of the community to take advantage of those benefits. Remember, it’s free for the first 30 days and after that it’s $25 a month, which is really a bargain for all that we offer you there. You can see our previous workshops on grief and on stress management there. Now check it out. It’s the way that you can really support this podcast, which survives by Our Lady’s intercession and by the grace of God, but also by your prayers and your membership. Memberships are the only financial means of support that this podcast has right now. So if you value what I’m offering you, if you found value in these podcasts, I really encourage you to go check it out. Go to soulsandhearts.com and register for the RCCD community. There’s no risk. There’s no obligation. So if it’s not for you, you haven’t lost anything but a little time and effort. I want to thank the 17 members of the RCCD community who are currently in there. These are the founding members of the RCCD community. Kathleen, Jonathan, Jane. Bridget, Joyce, Diane, Jeff, our two Elizabeths, John, Joni, Margaret, Sylvia, Pansorn, Julie, Martha, and Karen. Thank you. These are courageous people on the journey with me, and I am very honored to be in relationship with them and to be getting to know them.

[00:32:49] On Saturday, June 27th at 11:00 AM Eastern Time, I will be hosting a listening meeting for the RCC members. I want to listen to what you need from this podcast and from the workshops and the assessment measures, and the small group meetings, and the individual resilience coaching and all that stuff, all that stuff solidly grounded in Catholicism. I’m working to tailor this whole program to your needs as we do this pioneering work together. So I hope you’ll join us. I hope all the current members of our of our community can join us and also new members. So sign up, soulsandhearts.com. Go to the Resilient Catholics Carpe Diem community. You’ll find on our discussion boards information about how to register. If you have any questions, ever, email me at crisis@soulsandhearts.com. Call me (317) 567-9594. I will definitely be responsive to you guys. I care about you. I’m making a lot of sacrifices to be able to make this available to you. Really want to be connected. I really have a strong conviction that this is what I’m supposed to be doing, getting outside my office, bringing the information, bringing the exercises, bringing the experience, bringing the good news that yes, people can do this too, in our community over the internet. All right, so now let’s wrap it for today. Thank you again for being with me. Keep me in your prayers. You are in mine. And we will invoke our patroness and our patron. Our Mother, Undoer of Knots, pray for us. Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.