IIC 24: God Images and Self Images

In this episode we examine God images, God concepts, self images and self concepts throughout the life of Susan, from early childhood all the way through middle age, drawing from her experience to more clearly identify how these images and concepts interact.

[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 24, released on July 13th, 2020, and it’s called God Images and Self Images. Today we’re going to consolidate some of the learning that we’ve gone through to date, spiraling back to a few key concepts, and then really bringing those concepts to life in a story. Some of you may remember Richard and Susan from episodes 17 and 19, when we were doing a three episode series on grief. You longtime listeners that were with us 6 or 8 weeks ago, that you may remember — and you may have forgotten. That’s okay. No worries. Don’t worry. If you don’t remember, we’re going to review all the key concepts that we need briefly here, and I’ll catch you up on the doings of Susan and Richard as we begin this fifth installment on Catholic resilience. We’re also going to take a close, in-depth look at the negative God images that Susan struggles with and how those God images came about, and how they impact how Susan has felt about herself at different points in her life.

[00:01:59] Now, if you’re just joining us, Richard and Susan are made up people. I created these characters to illustrate the concepts that we’re discussing, but they are realistic and they have issues that are common to many people’s lives. Let’s go back and review a few of the key concepts. The first one is God image. Let’s just go over that again briefly as we spiral back, just so we get these really deeply ingrained in our awareness. Now, my God images are my emotional and subjective experiences of God, who I feel God to be in the moment. These may or may not correspond to who God actually is. My God images are shaped by the relationship initially I have with my parents. This is the experiential sense of how my feelings and how my heart interpret who God is. God images are heavily influenced by psychological factors and different God images can be activated at different times depending on my emotional states and what psychological mode I am in at any given time. So these God images are fluid, they’re dynamic, they change depending on what place I’m in at the moment. One thing to remember about God images is that they are always formed experientially. God images always flow from our relational experiences and how we construe and make sense of those experiences from the time we’re very young, right up until the present day.

[00:03:39] My God images can be and usually are very different than my God concept. All right, so my God concept, that’s an entirely different thing, right? My God concept is what I profess about God. It is my intellectual understanding of God, based on what I’ve been taught, based on what I’ve explored through reading, through study, through catechesis. I decide to believe my God concept. You know, my God images, they come up spontaneously. I don’t have as much direct control over them in the moment, but my God concept is what I choose to believe about God. And for Orthodox Catholics, significant elements of their God concepts are reflected in the Creed, expanded in the Catechism, and so on. This distinction, this distinction between God images and God concepts is so critical. I really want you to grip on to it, to really understand it at a deep level. I hope you can really digest the difference, not just at a conceptual level, but I want you to be able to hang on to this distinction for the rest of your lives. I mean that. Remember the causal chain that we discussed last time? This is the causal chain: letting ourselves be taken in by bad God images and giving those God images undue weight, allowing those God images to influence our God concept. That leads us to lose confidence in God, which in turn causes us to be much less resilient, much less capable of handling the trials, the difficulties, the challenges of life.

[00:05:37] Allowing our problematic God images to dominate us, to exert influence on us in subtle and powerful ways, is what we were discussing in the last episode, episode 23. We discussed in that episode how the greatest sin against the first commandment among us serious Catholics is defaulting to our negative God images, letting those negative, heretical God images rule us, not resisting their pull on us, letting them draw us away from God. The more we give in to our negative, heretical God images, the more that they color our God concepts, leading us to entertain doubts in our intellect about God’s love, his power, his mercy, and his goodness. And once that starts to happen, we can start choosing with our will to believe that God is not who he has revealed himself to be, but rather distant, cold, uncaring, unloving, lacking in power, lacking in goodness, any of those things that color and distort how we understand God. Once we abandon our God concept to the notions of our heretical God images, we’re headed for major trouble. So now we’re really going to focus in on God concepts and God images with Susan. We’re going to look at Susan’s God images and her God concept throughout her life, from when she was little, right up until the present day in detail. And in order to do that, we actually have to go back 100 years.

[00:07:23] We have to go back some generations. You’ll see why in just a minute. That may sound odd. Why do we have to go back 100 years, Dr. Peter? You’ll see why. Hang with me. So Susan’s father’s name was Pavel. He was born in 1919 in Pittsburgh to Polish immigrant parents. Here’s the thing. Pavel’s mother, this is Susan’s grandmother. Pavel’s mother died shortly after he was born from the Spanish influenza. Pavel was the youngest of three brothers, and so he grew up in the 1920s with his father and his two older brothers, no sisters. He had very little experience of his mother and no conscious memories, obviously, because he was just an infant when she died. No stepmother. There was some extended family, but he didn’t have a lot of close relationships with women. Pavel’s father was a wheelwright. He made wagon wheels, buggy wheels, that kind of thing. At age ten, Pavel experienced the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression. There was hard times, unemployment for his father. It was a rough house that he grew up in, some alcoholism. He grew up in a difficult place, circumstances. He was able to complete the eighth grade and he went to work as a printer’s apprentice for several years. In 1942, he enlisted in the infantry and fought in France against the Nazi armies. He had some experiences of combat, actually a fair amount of combat.

[00:09:09] In 1945, he returned with some shell shock, as they talked about, in those days, trauma. What we would now talk about is PTSD. He wasn’t able to talk about his war experiences. In 1951, six years after the war ended, 32 year old Pavel married Maya. Maya was an 18 year old Polish immigrant who had come to the US shortly after World War II ended. Pavel had known Maya’s family for years, and he had seen her grow up from age about 13 or 14 to 18. Maya was devoted to Pavel. She was very social, very outgoing, but she had her own history of unresolved war trauma from the German invasion of Poland when she was just a little girl in the late 30s. Pavel and Maya had four children. They had three boys and then they had Zuzanna. Zuzanna is Polish for Susan, right? And so Zuzanna was the youngest of the four, and she was born in 1960. Life for the family was pretty good in the 1950s and 1960s. By that time, Pavel had been promoted to being a master printer in the shop. He had a high school education. He was funny. He was affectionate. He was a great storyteller. Susan was the youngest. As I had said, she was the only girl in the family with her three older brothers. And everybody said that she was her mother’s daughter. Very similar to mom Maya in so many ways, both physically in the way she looked, and also in her personality, which was warm, affectionate, social, outgoing. And Pavel gave his beloved little daughter all kinds of affection, warmth, all kinds of attention when she was a baby and a toddler.

[00:11:11] And throughout her grade school years, he read to her. He was like the coolest dad because he would even go to tea parties with her dolls. Not altogether usual in the Polish community in Pittsburgh at the time. So in those days when when Susan was a young girl, she found it easy to pray. Her first communion was a joyful time. She remembered feeling close to God in a number of occasions. Her religious practice was generally, generally pretty good. It was typical for young kids in the Catholic grade schools in those times to go to confession regularly. So she did. But when she turned 14 in 1974, the relationship with Pavel, her father, became much more difficult. She noticed it coming on slowly throughout her 14th year when she was reaching puberty. When she reached puberty, her father withdrew emotionally. He seemed to reject her hugs and kisses. He told her that those were things that little girls did and that, “Zuzanna, you’re a big girl now,” he would say. Zuzanna told him that he had always said that she would be his little girl, and she didn’t understand when he did not say anything in response. He had tears in his eyes.

[00:12:44] He turned away. He’d leave her and watch TV in his den. Susan’s heart ached for her father. She tried to reconnect with him, but he just seemed distant. She tried for four years, all through high school. She’d look at photo albums that Maya had very deliberately and carefully kept. How happy dad was when he was with her, beaming, smiling, throwing her up in the air, catching her up until the age of 14. Maya, for her part, didn’t understand the difficulties that Pavel and Susan were having. When she went away to college, at age 18, she rejected him. She went her own way. She began looking for the love that she needed from her father from older boyfriends who were physically affectionate. In 1980, when Susan was now 20 years old, her father, aged 61, died unexpectedly of a heart attack. It broke Susan’s heart. She was overwhelmed with grief. She was overwhelmed with guilt about having rejected him, guilt over the conflicts that she had had with him, over her coldness, over her distance from him. So now the images that she had of God were much more difficult. She had felt abandoned and alone. She felt that God was so distant. She felt that she had done something wrong. And every one of her boyfriends in college, those 3 or 4 men, had hurt her, had disappointed her, and ultimately had left her and abandoned her.

[00:14:52] She had this deep sense of being abandoned. She had this deep sense of being unwanted, and she had a deep sense of it being her fault. She initially had blamed her father, but then had moved to the position that it was her, that was something about her. So we can see at this point, 1980, 20 years old, father just unexpectedly died. God images for Susan that were problematic had to do with God feeling far away, God not wanting her, God not invested in her, God not listening to her, and feeling rejected and disappointed, and in a sense, really unwanted by God. These were really prominent. And with Susan’s really relationally focused temperament, her sanguine temperament, the intensity of the emotions that also went with that, she reacted. So now very conflicted in terms of her God images, she had drifted away from the faith from the time that she was 18 and no longer in the supportive environment of her extended Catholic community in Pittsburgh. Here’s the thing that Susan never understood. So now we’re going to look at this through the eyes of her father, Pavel. Remember that Pavel lost his mother at a very early age. He was raised in an all male household. No stepmother, no sisters, no close family members that were women. He had married, when he was 32, a much younger woman that really looked up to him and was very deferential to him.

[00:17:06] Pavel did not have the experience of intimacy and closeness in a non-sexual relationship with women. So while by nature he was warm and kind and funny, when Zuzanna turned 14 and again remember, she looked exactly like her mother, exactly like Maya when Pavel first saw her. This led to all kinds of internal conflicts, all kinds of complications within Pavel. He already had some difficulties with a lack of integration inside because of trauma from having lost his mother at a very early age, complicated by the traumas that he experienced on the battlefields in France. And he noticed, he noticed the edges or the hints of disordered sexual desires for his daughter. And this absolutely terrified him and disgusted him. He couldn’t actually bring himself to admit that those things were there, or that they even might be there. And so his withdrawal from his daughter was really driven by his unresolved emotional, psychological baggage. Maya was unaware of what was going on here at a conscious level, although she may have had some concerns about competition for her husband’s affection with with Zuzanna. So what happened was, is that Susan, Zuzanna blamed herself for her father’s distancing, when in fact, it really was about his unresolved conflicts. He wanted to make sure that under no circumstances did he ever act out in any appropriate way. And this was only in like half-formed thoughts that never even were given articulation because he couldn’t bear the idea of himself even having such thoughts.

[00:19:24] But the consequences of his attempting to protect himself and his daughter were such that she felt isolated. She felt alone. Well, let’s follow on with what happened then, right. You can see how Susan’s God images were so impacted by the different ways that she was experiencing her father, and that when he died in 1980 and the possibility of a reconciliation on earth was no longer available, there was so much conflict for Susan. There didn’t seem to be a way for her to resolve it with her father. And those issues were carried over into her relationship with God as Father. Remember that her God concept by now was thoroughly imbued with many of the elements of her God image. She wasn’t sure whether she would have called herself Catholic. She would clearly state that she was raised Catholic. But in the heady environment of college in the late 70s and early 80s, all kinds of different ideas were coming in by the more left-leaning faculty who didn’t really support more traditional understandings of religious belief and practice. So let’s follow on. Let’s continue with Susan as she moves through the the rest of the years of her life till the present day. After investing in her career, graduating from college and investing in her career as a professional translator in English and Italian, and committing to traveling and living around the world, drinking deeply of the goods and the offerings that the world had to make to her, she eventually found the man that she would marry.

[00:21:41] She married in 1992 at 32 years of age. She married Richard. Richard was emotionally reserved, doesn’t talk about his feelings easily, has trouble naming them. Remember that Richard is a cradle Catholic who attends Sunday Mass. He’s not that invested in religion. He was an engineer who had made his way into middle management, and had been working as an engineer through those years. The couple had three sons. Those sons were born in 1993, 1995 and 1997. When she learned she was pregnant with her first son, with their first child, Susan began to reinvest in her faith. She began to come back and take it seriously. She was feeling a sense of emptiness in her life, even though she felt like she had a good marriage at that time. There was just something missing. She knew that she couldn’t go on living the way she did, and that she was now taking on the responsibility of family life. So she began to look back into Catholicism. She was able to connect with a local parish priest who really did take her under her wing, and in some ways, was able to provide some of the connection that she was missing from her father during her adolescence and adult life. She began to pray again on a more regular basis.

[00:23:21] And even though there was a fair amount of conflict in her spiritual life, her husband supported her. They had been married in the Catholic Church, and he was willing to go with her to Mass on Sundays. A major issue happened in the year 2000 when she was pregnant with a daughter. She very much wanted a baby daughter, and at 24 weeks of age, though, that daughter was lost to miscarriage. This led to a whole lot of recriminations against God, anger at God, feeling in her God image that God had tricked her, that he had set her up for a fall, that he was cruel, that he was sadistic, that he played with her in a way that was mean because she had prayed so much. And the priest had made a mistake. He had told her that he thought that the baby was going to make it, that that’s what he had gotten in his prayer about the situation. So she also felt like he was now unreliable. There was a lot of a lot of angst about that, and she couldn’t make sense of it. And Richard wasn’t particularly helpful. Richard was pleased to have the three sons that he already had. He felt like there was enough children and so forth. So she again felt very alone with this. She did have a relationship with with her mother, but her mother couldn’t find ways to help her make sense of it.

[00:25:05] Being of a much more uncomplicated perspective, gave her some, you know, advice to just pray about it and that things would work out fine. Fast forwarding to today, in July of 2020. Now her sons have grown up. Susan has been troubled about the physical and emotional distance in her marriage over the last 25 years. And if you remember from episode 19, she’s discovered that her husband has been using pornography. Originally, she had assumed that her husband just wasn’t that interested in physical intimacy. Maybe he had low testosterone, you know, over the years, maybe he was just super focused on work, other things. Maybe, maybe it was some sort of health-related problem, maybe a prostate problem, because Richard hated to go to the doctor. He wouldn’t get things checked out. And so when she discovered that he was looking at pornography on his computer, in his den, all kinds of self image issues came up for Susan, all kinds of body image issues. The idea of, he doesn’t want me. He hasn’t wanted me for 25 years. These were the things that Susan was hearing inside of herself. All right. This was complicated, too, because her mother had just died from COVID-related illnesses in her nursing home, as you might remember. And this activated all kinds of psychological issues, really leading Susan into a time of crisis.

[00:26:57] So what’s happening now is that the unresolved God image issues of having lost her little baby daughter 20 years earlier were being reactivated. They had never been really resolved, but now they were coming back to the surface. Why am I chained to this man that doesn’t love me and hasn’t loved me for 25 years? Why have I been saddled with this body, that at some level she knew, put a block between her and her father? That wasn’t very conscious for her, but she knew that somehow it had to do with her body. A body that she was now looking at with suspicion, with distrust. She was also dealing with health concerns of her own, right, 60 years old, seeing herself at risk, having gone through the painful death that her mother experienced, and having been alienated and distanced from her because she was not allowed in to her mother’s nursing home because of fears of more contagion. So what’s happening now with Susan’s God image? Right? Unresolved God images are coming back up. Unresolved images that went all the way back to when she was 14, all the way back to when there was those initial issues that began to creep into her relationship with her father. The idea of being abandoned, of being rejected, of God deciding he didn’t love her anymore. Now, she may not have put it in those kind of words, because oftentimes these God images are not well articulated.

[00:28:41] It activated all kinds of issues about how she saw herself. So let’s move on to some new definitions here. We’ve got some new ideas that we want to begin to talk about in addition to God image and God concept. Today we’re going to talk about two parallel ideas, two parallel definitions. These are the these are self-concept and self-image. The self-concept is parallel to the God concept, and the self-image is a parallel to the God image. All right. So let’s dive into this. We’re starting to expand this out. So this is some new information. The self-concept is what we intellectually believe about ourselves, who we profess ourselves to be, how we understand ourselves, what our mental constructs are of ourselves, right? So part of the self-concept of a practicing Catholic, for example, may include, at least at this intellectual level, being a beloved child of God. So you can see there’s a link here between God concepts and self concepts. They go together, they harmonize. So if in your God concept, God is a loving shepherd, right, then you’re going to be the sheep, the sheep that he loves and that he cares for, and that he lays down his life for. Self concepts and God concepts interact and they have reciprocal causal effects. They impact each other, they move together. And that makes sense. Self images, on the other hand, are much more emotionally driven. They’re much more intuitive, they’re much more subjective, and they vary a lot more from moment to moment.

[00:30:43] We also tend to have more of these self images typically than we have of our self concept. Self images can flow from God images. They conform to God images. Oftentimes in those cases, God is the reference point, or rather our image of God is our reference point. Not ourselves. Right? In spite of the enlightenment’s attempts to make the individual human being be the measure of all things, we still naturally look outside ourselves to define ourselves. We naturally look outside of ourselves to take the measure of ourselves. But self images are not just influenced by God images. Self images also impact and have an effect on God images. And that’s what happened, that’s what happened for Susan when she was 14. And when she was 14, her dad was pulling away. She couldn’t understand why. She felt abandoned by her father because in fact, she was. In fact, and it needs to be said, she was abandoned by her father in an emotional way and even in a physical way, and in a way that she had no idea of what the actual causes for it were. She had no way to explain this or discuss it with her father he wasn’t able to connect with her on it, and her mother wasn’t able to buffer it or give her an adequate explanation either. So her sense of being alone, isolated, abandoned, betrayed, that was how she felt about herself.

[00:32:34] I am the one who was abandoned. I’m the one who was betrayed. And she generalized that into her God image, right? She began to believe that since she felt this way, she was this way. And God got included in that in her God image. Right? God also abandoned me. If God were near, I wouldn’t feel this way. This is sort of the reasoning that she was going through. And being a particularly intuitive right brain person, she was very much prone to be drawn by her emotions. And gradually those God images, they took over what the nuns had taught her in her Catholic grade school. Gradually, she took on more and more elements of her God images into her God concept that was reinforced by the secular, humanistic understanding that her college professors provided for her very readily. And she took in a mish-mash of things into her God concept and just drifted away from God almost entirely in terms of seeking regular contact. It wasn’t true that God abandoned Susan, but it felt that way. And in response, Susan moved away from God, which compounded her troubles. Now, when she began to come back into contact with God when she was pregnant with her first child, things got better. She was able to really kind of establish a prayer routine. She had some support from Valerie, her friend who could be with her and who could explain things to her.

[00:34:33] She took an interest in some of the activities that were going on in her parish, and things became better up to a certain point. She kind of hit a plateau. And then, when she discovered that her husband had been using pornography, this revivified a lot of and re-energized a lot of these negative God images around abandonment, betrayal, around being lied to. And again, brought her into an open conflict. Right on the surface, right? Right in her conscious awareness. So it was in her mind as well as in her heart. And so she’s struggling with that now. She’s also struggling with why she couldn’t be with her mother when her mother was dying. So we can see that Susan’s self concept had gone through some transitions, right, heavily influenced by her self image, heavily influenced by her series of self images. Self-images impact God images and God images impact self images. God concepts can be influenced by God images and God images can be influenced by God concepts as well. And then obviously our God concepts can be impacted by our self concepts, and our self concepts can be influenced by our God concepts. So all of these things interact in ways that are fairly complex and often outside of conscious awareness. So when we start to unpack these God images, we find out so many things about the beliefs we have about ourselves.

[00:36:38] It’s hard to believe, for example, that you are really seen and known by God, right, the first condition of secure attachment, really being seen and known by God, if you believe that God is a million miles away. It’s hard to believe in the fourth condition for secure attachment, that God rejoices in you, cherishes you, and delights in you, if you feel like he’s just betrayed you. So, you know, the self image is one of being the abandoned child. So these things all work together and they’re all heavily impacted by the important, by the significant relationships that we have. That’s what I really want you to know. In the last episode, in episode 23, I offered you an exercise in which you would really write down what your God image was when you were in your dark place, right? When you’re in your dark place, it’s going to evoke the sense of some kind of image of God, some kind of God image. And now what I’m going to ask you to do is to write down how you feel yourself to be when you’re in that dark place, right? And you’re going to see that it’s going to make sense because it’s going to be consistent with how you see God. That’s almost always the case. So really looking at how you feel yourself to be, what your intuition says, what your subjectivity says. We’re not interested in your self concept in this.

[00:38:13] We’re really looking at what kind of subjective self image might be creeping in. That again, may be very, very far from what we know to be true by faith. It’s really important for you to know what that is, because it’s going to be in that negative, heretical self image that you’re likely to have your struggles. It’s also in that negative self image that you’re likely to experience temptations. Because remember, grace perfects nature, right? And so in the spiritual life, whatever is unstable, whatever is vulnerable in the natural realm, for example, in self image, that’s an entry point, a temptation point, a weak point that might be exploited for different types of temptations. And I’m not talking about demonic oppression. I’m certainly not talking about demonic possession. I’m talking about the ordinary, everyday temptations, whether those arise from within us just because of our own impulses or whether those might originate in the spiritual world. So that’s the task this time. Sit down. Go back to thinking about how you see God when you’re in that particular dark place, and then add to that how you see yourself. What are the adjectives, the descriptive words you use to describe yourself when you’re in that place? All right. So last Friday, on July 10th, we had a Zoom meeting for the Resilient Catholics Carpe Diem community. That’s the community that that bonds around these podcast episodes.

[00:40:06] We were able to gather and discuss God images together. That is now up on our website in the section of exclusive content for RCCD members, so that if you couldn’t make that meeting, you can see the discussion, all 80 minutes of it or so as we got into those things. I’m really amazed at what’s happening in our community. We are becoming the go to place where people are connecting on these deep issues. So if this podcast episode really resonates with you, if you really want to know more about God images, if you really want to know about self images, God concepts, self concepts, and where we’re going to be going in the future, because there’s other concepts that we’re going to be gradually introducing here to make this more nuanced, to make it more complex. But we’re going to do it gradually so that you can hang onto it as you come with us. But if you really want to grip on to these things and you want to be in relationship with other people that are also really interested in these things, our community is the very best place that I know of for you to be able to do that. So I’m going to invite you, if you feel called to check it out, it’s free for 30 days, go to soulsandhearts.com. Go to the Resilient Catholics Carpe Diem community. Click on that, free for 30 days.

[00:41:27] You can check it out. You can see our different workshops. You can see this last discussion we had on God images. We’re all wounded in various ways. Sometimes people say, I don’t know. I don’t know if I’m far enough along in the spiritual life. I don’t know, maybe I’m too screwed up to be able to be in a community like that. We’re all wounded. I want to tell you that we’re all wounded in various ways. We all have our struggles. And in this community, we’re getting real about our God images. We’re getting real about our self images and all the messiness and all the untidiness of the real issues that we face because we want real healing. It’s a place to really be able to talk about this, where we have a common language, where we have a common understanding. So check it out. Also, you’re always welcome to contact me. crisis@soulsandhearts.com. That’s my email address. My phone number, (317) 567-9594. Also, please keep me in your prayers. Keep this whole podcast in your prayers and all the people that listen to it and know that I am praying for you as well. All right. A pleasure and an honor to be able to be with you. Thank you for listening, and thank you for listening all the way to the end. You know, not everybody does that. So we’re going to invoke our patroness and our patron. Our Lady, Mother Mary, Undoer of Knots, pray for us. Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.