IIC 25: Drill Sergeant Gods, Statue Gods, and Preoccupied Manager

Dr. Peter dives into three common problematic God images with their corresponding self images and how they develop, with stories to illustrate.

[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 Dr. Peter Malinoski, your host and guide with Souls and Hearts at soulsandhearts.com. Thank you for being with me. This is episode 25 released on July 20th, 2020, and it’s called Drill Sergeant Gods, Statue Gods, and Preoccupied Manager Gods, Oh My! We’re going to dive much more into these negative, problematic, heretical God images in this episode. And we’re going to explore in depth three particular God images. These are really common ones. I was in a text exchange with one of our listeners, Beth. And Beth said that she was having trouble figuring out like, what her God images really were. And so I’m just going to give some guidance to some that are fairly common, that I see very commonly in clinical practice and that in conversations with others are out there in abundance. But a quick review, we want to start with self images. All right. Self images are emotionally driven, intuitive, subjective. They vary a lot. They are how we feel ourselves to be in a particular moment. This is, you know, much more right brain.

[00:01:53] This is much more emotional. This is much more intuitive. It’s that sense of who we are. It’s what we might say when we have some intense emotion about ourselves. Self images. They harmonize with a corresponding God image. And what’s the God image? The God image is the emotional and subjective experience of God. It’s who I feel God to be in my bones, in my heart, in the moment. This may or may not correspond to who God actually is, and it may or may not correspond to who who I would profess God to be as a Catholic. So we’ve got these God images and we’ve got these self images and they go together. We also have the God concept, right? The God concept is what I profess about God. It’s my intellectual understanding of God. It’s based on what I’ve been taught. It’s based on what I’ve explored through reading, through study. I decide what my God concept is going to be. Generally speaking, that’s under the control of my will. And for Catholics, the God concept, if they conform to Orthodox Catholicism, is going to be largely reflected in the Creed and the Catechism, at least as they understand it. So we also have the self concept, and that’s what we intellectually believe about ourselves, and that’s who we profess ourselves to be. That’s our mental constructs of ourselves. And so that may be, as Catholics, we may believe in, in our heads, at least intellectually, that we are beloved children of God.

[00:03:31] So I’m going to bring up a book today. And this book was written more than 30 years ago. It came out in 1989. It’s called Mistaken Identity, and it’s by William and Kristi Gaultiere. They are two Christian psychotherapists. Actually I think Bill Gaultiere is a psychotherapist and Kristi Gaultiere is a marriage and family therapist. She’s a marriage and family therapist. And even though it’s 30 years old, it’s actually one of the most important books, in my opinion. And I’ve got a big library of God concept and God image books. It’s one of the most important that’s come out. And one of the things I really like about this book is that it actually describes 14 unloving God images. And Bill and Christy Gaultiere draw these from Corinthians, 1 Corinthians 13, and I’m just going to rattle these off these 14 God images, just give you a list of them. These are very commonly ones that they found in their practice. I actually find these in my practice as well, and they are as follows. Number one, preoccupied manager director God. Number two, statue God. Number three, robber God. It’s an interesting one. Number four, vain Pharisee God. Number five, elitist aristocrat God. Number six, pushy salesman God. Number seven, magic genie God. Number eight, demanding drill sergeant God. Number nine, out to get you police detective God. Number ten, unjust dictator God. Number 11, marshmallow God. Number 12, critical Scrooge, God. Number 13, party pooper God. And number 14, a heartbreaker God.

[00:05:32] Actually, for number 14, they had a different title, but I like heartbreaker God better, so I’m going with that. So today, what we’re going to do is we’re going to start getting into these specific God images in greater detail. We’re going to talk about also the corresponding self image that goes along with these God images. And I’m going to give you some vignettes so that you can actually see how this might play out in some fictional characters. So without any further ado, let’s go ahead and dive right into it. The preoccupied managing director God, what is this God image? When people are struggling with the preoccupied managing director God, how are they feeling God to be in this particular God image, right? Well, in this God image, God is very busy. He’s running the world, he’s running the universe, and he’s so busy that he can’t really take the initiative, time, or energy to relate with me. He’s too busy to connect with me now. God cares about me, but he’s overtaxed with the responsibilities that he has. He’s also kind of impatient. It’s hard to get his attention. And God wants to give everybody more, but he has limited resources and he has to allocate them carefully to those who most deserve those resources, so comfort and help might come to me from God if my situation is desperate enough.

[00:07:02] But he’s not particularly interested in the ordinary day to day cares and concerns that I struggle with. Now, one of the things that the Gaultieres do is they always put a Bible verse that corresponds to that particular negative God image. And so for this one, they use the opening of Psalm 13. “How long, O Lord, will you utterly forget me? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I carry sorrow in my soul, grief in my heart, day after day? How long will my enemy triumph over me?” So as we talked about, there’s always a self-image that goes along with the God image. The Gaultieres really broke ground on connecting those self images to God images. The self-image, when you have this preoccupied managing director God image activated, is going to say, I’m not important enough. I’m not worthy enough for God’s attention, for his care. I’m not important enough or worthy enough for him to be concerned about me. The problems, the cares, the concerns of my life are not significant enough to warrant his attention. God just can’t be bothered with my relatively minor concerns and difficulties. He’s got little bandwidth for me. There’s other people that have much bigger problems than I do. He doesn’t need to be saddled with my petty wishes and desires. He just lets me kind of move along, lets me sort of twist in the wind.

[00:08:43] I’m an unprofitable servant anyway, so God, as busy as he is, as preoccupied as he is, he just leaves me to my own devices. That’s how a person who’s struggling with a God image of the preoccupied manager director. That’s how the self is experienced. All right. So how does this particular God image develop? And this is where I start to bring in some attachment theory here, which wasn’t a huge thing for the Gaultieres. So we’re getting into a little bit of new space here. So in my experience, you see this kind of God image, over-parentified children of families that have harried, distressed parents. Often these parents are struggling with financial concerns, time pressures, limited resources. So children with a preoccupied managing director God image learn that they are rewarded for being “low maintenance.” They’re rewarded for not adding to their parents troubles by voicing concerns, by voicing problems, by sharing difficulties or trials that they’re experiencing. Instead, these children are praised for how independent, mature, and responsible they are. Now, from an attachment perspective, you’re going to see anxious preoccupied attachment styles. These individuals want intimacy and connection with God, but they feel they have to go without it because they just don’t matter enough. God is seen as good, but just not very accessible. And so if we look at the five conditions for secure attachment from Brown and Elliott, and we start to bring them in again, these individuals that struggle with this preoccupied manager director God, they don’t generally feel seen and known, not on an ongoing basis.

[00:10:48] And they don’t believe that God really cherishes them. God rather more often sees them as a burden or as another responsibility, another responsibility that taxes his resources. So now let’s take a look at how people who struggle with this particular God image and the self image that goes with it of the preoccupied manager director God, how do they handle the coronavirus crisis? What might they be struggling with in the present day, in the present age, with all of the things that we’ve got going on right now with the coronavirus? Well, this kind of God image is readily activated in our present day and age, because there are many people who just feel like God is not very present right now. Lots of responsibilities, lots of decisions, lots of stress going on right now in our culture. And they experience other people, such as supervisors or superiors, as having more responsibilities, having less patience and being more irritable, right? This could be aging parents as well that are more self-absorbed. There’s a loss of connection with these folks that they may look up to, and they also experience responsibilities piling on to them. Right. We’ve got all kinds of decisions that have to be made about what we’re going to do with our activities, and how are we going to manage our children, and are we going to go to this family reunion, or should we cancel the family reunion? And what about my Y membership and going to the gym? And is it okay to go to Mass? And if we do go to Mass, do we wear a mask or do we don’t wear a mask? And on and on and on.

[00:12:32] All kinds of decisions. We get conflicting feedback from politicians and medical experts and government leaders, and there just doesn’t seem to be answers, right? You can see how in that kind of an environment, a person could very much have a self-image where they’re just feeling unhelped that they’re just feeling like there’s nobody taking care of them, nobody watching over them, because God is just so busy with so many other things, right? So this is one of those situations in which the self-image can really lead to a particular God image, right? These things always are multidirectional in terms of their causal connections. But the God images feed off the self-images, the self-images feed off the God images. And so this is a really common one that we can experience within the coronavirus. All right, so let’s actually like tie this up, this particular God image, let’s tie this up in a story, right? So Paula, 17 years old, she’s the second oldest in a family of six. Father’s really preoccupied with his business right now because there’s a lot of setbacks because of the coronavirus.

[00:13:50] He’s not doing well financially with his business. Dad is self-absorbed also with some health issues. Mom is stressed. She started working a part time job and she’s still wanting to homeschool. Her older brother, only 19, he escaped the family to enlist in the Navy. And the third oldest in the family, this is her younger brother, 15 years old, he is now really acting out. He’s acting very rebellious. He doesn’t want to complete his schoolwork. He’s announced that he’s an atheist. He started experimenting with alcohol. Paula doesn’t feel like she can burden her mother with any of her issues, lest her mother become impatient and irritable and act in the role of a martyr. The three youngest children in the family are emotionally and relationally draining for mom, and she’s strenuously still trying to hold them to the same kind of academic standards that were in place before all of this coronavirus crisis hit. Paula has barely enough time to complete her studies to her mother’s exacting standards, and she’s essentially teaching herself from a boxed curriculum. Paula is trying to hold the family together, and she feels like she’s a fish in a puddle that’s slowly evaporating. Paula is trying to rely on herself, on her own resources. She’s trying to become more efficient. She’s trying to carry more of the load as the demands get higher.

[00:15:22] But she’s developing an increasingly intense anger toward God. But she’s not aware of this anger. She sees prayer as another responsibility, another thing to check off of her long daily to do list. And it’s based off a sense of duty. Her prayer is dry. She feels uncomfortable praying. She has a sense of not mattering much to God, of not being cared for by God. Now that she has lost some of the activities that she formerly enjoyed, like her ballroom dance classes, she is longing to escape like her older brother did, but she doesn’t feel safe enough to launch herself into the world. So you can see this particular God image of a preoccupied managing director God and its corresponding self image. Right? I’m not important enough. I’m not worthy of God’s attention. He doesn’t see me consistently. He doesn’t know me well. How that leads to a kind of fundamental sense of insecurity that undermines resilience, right? Paula is having trouble with some of this separation and individuation developmental work that it would take for her to successfully launch into a career, which is one of the tasks that 17-year-olds are gearing up for. So preoccupied managing director God images. God’s busy running the world. He doesn’t take the initiative, time, or energy to really relate with me. Maybe you know somebody that actually has a God image like that.

[00:17:06] Or maybe that’s something that you’ve struggled with at different points. It’s a very common one. I’m going to move on to another common God image. And this is the God image that the Gaultieres referred to as the statue God. And I just really think these titles are great. They really capture in just a short little phrase, the essence of what these God images are like. In the statue God, God is seen as remote, distant, unfeeling, disengaged. God leaves me to my own devices. He doesn’t help me when I’m in need. He’s millions of miles away on some distant quasar. He’s not moved by my cries or my pleas. Instead, I experience a stony, cold indifference. So unlike the preoccupied managing director God, that God has limited resources and is overtaxed. The statue God doesn’t care about me, right? It’s not that he’s just too busy, or that he’s got too many cares and concerns and limited resources. He just doesn’t care. I’m not going to get his attention no matter what happens to me and no matter what I do. So the Bible verse that the Gaultieres picked out for this one is from Job chapter 30 verse 20. “I cried to you, but you do not answer me. I stand, but you take no notice.” Right. Job, in the sufferings that he’s experiencing and inflicted upon him by Satan, feels this desolation.

[00:18:51] Feels God being millions of miles away. And in that moment, he’s giving voice to a statue God image. Right? This is not what he believes to be true in his God concept. It’s not what he professes, but he’s giving voice to what he’s experiencing in that emotional, in that intuitive, in that right brain, in that heartfelt experience. Right? Remember, those God images do not correspond necessarily at all to who God actually is. So this particular God image corresponds very nicely with the heresy of Deism. Sometimes these problematic God images have a clear, analogous heresy. Heresy of Deism is the belief in God’s existence, but sees God only in the role of creator, a creator who doesn’t intervene in the world. This is sometimes referred to as a watchmaker God, who set the universe in motion, but then just lets it run on its own. What happens to the self-image when we have a God image of the statue God? Well, I assume that God is not going to help me, that he’s unavailable, that he doesn’t want to help me, that he doesn’t see that as his job. I have to manage on my own. My needs, my wants are not important to God. He just doesn’t care. He’s not engaged. So I’m not going to try to engage emotionally with God because that would be fruitless. That would just be pointless. How does this God image of a statue God come to be? What are some possibilities in terms of attachment history? Well, let’s take a look at it.

[00:20:43] Children of parents who are so self-absorbed and wrapped up in their own concerns that they consistently offer little to their sons and daughters. That’s a breeding ground for a statue God image. Young children with a statue God image know that they need their parents, but they also know at some level that they will not have their needs met by their parents, or that they’re not likely to get their needs met by their parents. And as they grow older, they may reject their parents emotionally and distance themselves from their parents. They often have what’s called a dismissive avoidant attachment style. They desire not to have to depend on anyone and to not have anyone depend on them either. They don’t feel seen and known by God, right? That’s that first condition of secure attachment. And this is more consistent. This is more likely to occur when there is more significant disruptions in the personality systems of the parents, where there’s more impairment when there’s less of a capacity to empathetically attune to the children. And so how does this play out in our present day and age with the coronavirus? How does the coronavirus bring these things up or exacerbate these kinds of statue God images? Right. Well, people with a statue God image believe that a lot of times God is distant from all of us, right? And so people need to pull together to create a good society.

[00:22:27] In other words, we need to have the cooperation of people in order to establish a just, moral, healthy society. And people with statue God images are particularly concerned about societal norms breaking down because that’s where they find their security. They can actually be real Renaissance men and women. You know, we’re going to do it ourselves. We’re going to create our own society. And when societal norms are starting to break down, where there’s more polarization and less cooperation, and the effectiveness of government institutions seems poor, or when the effectiveness of international organizations such as the World Health Organization seems compromised, this is very hard to take. They likely feel more and more like they have to resolve their own difficulties on their own, and they feel more and more alienated from God. So let’s actually take a look at how this plays out in a vignette. All right, so this is 45 year old Darrel. And he just happens to be 17 year old Paula’s father. Right. So we did Paula’s vignette. She had the preoccupied managing director God image. Her father, actually, Darrel, actually has this statue God image. So Darrel is the father of six children. Paula was the second of the six, and he’s ruggedly independent. He prides himself on his individualism, his self-sufficiency.

[00:24:13] As this coronavirus crisis carries on and his business is struggling more and more, he’s having trouble sourcing different types of materials that he needs for his business. He’s having trouble with employees. He’s having trouble with supply chains. He’s having trouble with his customers. His wife is now finding him more and more unavailable, and he’s more and more intolerant of the natural needs of his children, because those normal needs of his children activate his own unmet needs for safety, security, and dependency. Being a beloved child of God is an alien concept for Darrell. He’s a man’s man, and his particular creed is that God helps those who help themselves. Well, what he means by this really is that you have to be your own God and help yourself. He engages in very little meditative or personal prayer because what’s the point? God is so distant and Darrell just doesn’t expect there to be much relational or emotional engagement with the statue God. He prays the family rosary daily. He goes to Sunday Mass. He believes that this sets a good example for his children, and that they need strong moral education to become good citizens in the world. He secretly believes that those who claim deep emotional connection with God are deceiving themselves. He’s particularly contemptuous of charismatic Catholics. Now he’s got some health concerns. He’s been diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, and this is really dragging him down. He’s got some physical limitations now.

[00:25:56] These are worrying him. They’re puncturing his self-sufficient image, and his business is no longer making enough to support the family. So the wife has gone back to work. If he stays on this unbending course with regard to his God image, a rigid guy like this is going to break. You can see how the statue God image does not allow for much resilience, at least not in a Catholic sense. He may be fairly resilient in the way that the world looks at resiliency, but there’s a limit to that, and he is rapidly approaching it. I believe God sometimes allows crises like the coronavirus crisis to unfold in ways to help break people like Darrel out of this rugged individualist, you know, Western Marlboro man. Self-sufficiency. Right. To really help him have a greater opportunity to recognize that his identity is really that of a beloved son of God, and that God really will take care of him. But sometimes that’s very difficult for people to accept. So we have Darrell with a statue God image. We have Paula with the preoccupied managing director God image. And that leaves the third God image that we’re going to explore today. And that is the demanding drill sergeant God. This is extremely common. And it’s almost always active if you’re dealing with things like scrupulosity. The demanding drill sergeant God image always wants more and more from me. I never give this God enough. He’s never satisfied with me.

[00:27:48] And if I don’t meet his expectations, he becomes frustrated and punitive. He has no tolerance for errors, weaknesses, or failures. He lacks mercy, gentleness, understanding, and compassion. As I mentioned before, sometimes there’s a heresy that corresponds to a particular God image. And in this case, I see the heresy of Pelagianism. And Pelagianism is the belief that our will can overcome the effects of original sin and still choose the good consistently without God’s help. I can earn the love of God. I can perfect myself. I can make myself worthy of God’s love. I can earn my salvation if I just try hard enough, if I just grow enough in the virtues, if I just apply myself and get over these final hurdles that are keeping me from the self-perfection that I so long to have. So what Bible verse did the Gaultieres choose in order to illustrate the demanding drill sergeant God image? It comes from Psalm 77. “Will the Lord spurn forever and never again be favorable? Has his steadfast love forever ceased? Are his promises at an end for all time? Has God forgotten to be gracious? Has he in anger shut up his compassion? And I say, it is my grief that the right hand of the Most High has changed.” There you see the plea of the psalmist, right? The plight of the psalmist, again expressing a God image of a demanding God.

[00:29:42] Not compassionate, not loving, steadfast love, questioning whether that steadfast love has ceased, the promises no longer holding, forgetting to be gracious. There’s this yearning to connect. But the demands of the God are too great, right? So what kind of self image goes along with the demanding drill sergeant God image? Well, there’s always a sense of inadequacy when there is a demanding drill sergeant God image activated. Now, the Gaultieres don’t get into this, but it’s really a shame-based self image, a sense of being defective, a sense of needing to be able to earn God’s love and never quite getting there. A sense of needing God’s respect, of being valued by God, but never being good enough for that. I must always be at my best. I must always achieve. I can’t make mistakes. If I take a break, I’m going to fall behind. I have to die to myself. And there’s this sense of exhaustion, the sense of being depleted, a sense of just having the life sucked out of you when you’re caught up in a God image like this. So what kind of attachment history gives rise to a demanding drill sergeant God image? So let’s take a look at parents who were attentive to a child. They noticed their child. They observe the child closely. They’re invested in the child. So this child is being seen, right. So the first condition of of attachment of secure attachment is being met.

[00:31:36] But the parents, or at least one of the parents, has very high standards for the child’s behavior. The parents was exacting with discipline and usually well intentioned, and the child saw the parents as right. The child tried hard to please his parents, believing that it’s the right thing to do. What kind of attachment style do we have? Generally, it’s anxious-avoidant, working really hard to please the parent. Sometimes the parents could be pleased, right? But there was a sense that this was temporary. There was little sense of being ontologically good, of being loved or valued because one was simply the parent’s son or daughter. There wasn’t a sense of just being the apple of mom’s eye, of just being loved and cherished because of who I was, not for what I did or what I achieved. Now, a lot of times when parents have these unrealistically high expectations and their standards are just too much for kids to try to meet, they’re actually driven, those standards in these parents, are driven by their own inadequacies, by their own sense of insecurities. So let’s take a look at how the coronavirus crisis can exacerbate a demanding drill sergeant God image. People with this kind of God image particularly struggle when situational stresses arise. They already have a sense of struggling and failing when times were not as difficult as they are now. And their self-imposed standards, they don’t readily yield or take into account the extenuating circumstances, even when external factors make their achievement goals much more difficult or even impossible to achieve.

[00:33:33] They don’t cut themselves much slack. Thus, they are likely to experience a greater sense of failure and possibly even despair at not measuring up to what what their demanding drill sergeant God image’s expectations are. They also look down at others who they don’t believe are struggling as hard as they are to achieve. And they can actually be, in a lot of ways, fairly critical of other people, in the same way that they are critical of themselves. All right, so a little vignette here. So remember Paula, 17 year old daughter. She’s got the managing director, the preoccupied managing director God image issue. Father was Darrell. He’s got the statue God image problem. And Paula’s 42 year old mother, Virginia. She has the demanding drill sergeant God image issue. Right? So she left an accounting firm after she got married, when she was pregnant with her first. And she really decided that she was going to be a model wife, a model mother. She had six children. She got involved with Regnum Christi. She was really going to live out everything that she was learning there in this kind of rigid way. So it didn’t fit very well with her own type of personality. Kind of exacerbated some of the issues that she was having. She had to homeschool them because, you know, that’s what God wanted.

[00:35:07] And she also had to volunteer a lot for Regnum Christi and for her parish, because that’s also something that God wanted. Now, if somebody in the parish asked her to do something, that really meant that she had to do it because that’s what God wanted. You know, God was speaking to her through these other people, and she had difficulty saying, no. She had difficulty with limits and boundaries, and she had this deep sense that God was just so unreasonably demanding. She tried so hard to carry out all of these things, sometimes only getting four hours of sleep in a night, just with all the responsibilities and the grading of all the assignments and all the homeschool papers and things that she was doing, and the co-ops and all the activities that the children were involved with and so forth. And now her husband is not feeling well because he’s struggling with the Crohn’s disease, and his business is failing and there’s not enough money coming in. How is she ever going to make it? So she’s taken on a very part time job for an accounting firm, doing some business tax preparation. And she is so tired. Husband is irritable, is unpleasant. She’s trying to earn the love of God, and she’s doing everything that she can think of and everything that she’s hearing. She just sees the possibility of pleasing God slipping away.

[00:36:36] She’s just feeling like it’s harder and harder to do that. And she’s further and further behind the eight ball. As that happens, she sees herself as more and more inadequate, more and more defective, more and more unworthy of the love of God, more and more of just a failure. And with her son’s rebelliousness and his proclamation that he is an atheist that just stabbed her to the heart because the one thing she wants for her children is that they grow to know and love God. Things just seem to be backfiring. Her oldest son in the military calls her once a month. She’s just feeling like a failure. You can see how this God image and the self image just can feed on themselves, right? Virginia doesn’t have a sense of being a beloved daughter of God. She has this assumption that she has to earn God’s love. So now that we’ve reviewed a number of these images, we’re going to do this exercise. And this is going to be a little familiar to you because it’s going to kind of build off of the exercises we’ve done in the last two podcast episodes. But now we’re going to practice loving others, and we’re going to practice working with some inferences about the God images of other people, right? This is a part of practicing loving others. So there are three components to loving another person.

[00:38:19] You have to have benevolence. That’s goodwill. You have to will the good for them and be willing to suffer to bring that goodwill about. The second one is competence. You have to know the other person, at least to a certain degree, you have to be able to carry out the kinds of things that would be helpful to that other person. And the third one is constancy. You actually have to be willing to stay with it, especially if you’re in a long-term relationship with that person. So I want you to think of someone close to you. This could be your spouse. This could be a child. This could be a sibling, a friend, a coworker, a parent, someone that you love. And I want you to think of that loved one when that loved one is in his or her dark place. When that person goes to his or her dark place, I want you to consider what kind of God image is activated for your loved one in that dark place. What kind of self-image also goes along with that problematic God image? So it’s kind of neat because if you know something about the God image, you can infer a lot about the self image, and if you know something about the self image, you can infer a lot about the God image, right? Because these two always complement each other. So I want you to put this possible God image and remember, hold this lightly.

[00:39:45] We’re not just going to assume that we’ve gripped on to the full truth about this person’s God image or their self image. Far from it, right? We’re going to hold it lightly, but put it into words. Put that self image of your loved one into words, to write these down the God image and the self image. Write these down. Speak it aloud. You can record it into your phone or something like that. But the point is to put it into words so that you can think about it and you can share about it. So when your loved one is in that dark place, you can be an example of light and life to that person. You can act in a way that doesn’t reinforce the negative God images, that doesn’t reinforce the negative self images, but rather you can gently shine a light and provide an entirely different example. You can allow Christ’s love to flow through you. You can allow yourself to be a conduit and show how God really sees that other person, because they may not be able to approach God very easily in that moment, but they might be able to receive God’s love through you. So that’s being light, that’s being salt for your loved ones, if you can enter into their inner worlds and understand how they see God in themselves when they are in their dark places.

[00:41:07] And that’s great practice for loving. All right. So I’m really interested in how that goes for you. Email me at crisis@soulsandhearts.com, or call me or text me at (317) 567-9594. I’m always interested to hear how these exercises go for you. Some of you have been doing the exercises from the last couple of from the last couple of episodes with with really fascinating results, learning a lot about yourself, which I love to hear. That’s what this is about. This is about your transformation. This isn’t just about hearing interesting conceptual material. This is actually about your transformation. It’s about your rising up in resilience in this time of crisis. So I’m really going to invite you to set aside some time and do these exercises. Don’t take very long. So, and then let me know where they go. If you’re in the RCCD community, if you’re in the Resilient Catholics Carpe Diem community, post it on our boards. Let the rest of the community members know how you’re doing with these things. And you can also ask for prayers if you’re struggling with a particular God image. All right, so now I have a question for you. I want to know if going through these God images has been helpful to you. And if they are, I’m going to read you the list of the remaining 11 from the Gaultier’s list and see if you would like me to which one of these you would like me to follow up with.

[00:42:27] All right, so there’s the robber God, the vain Pharisee God, the elitist aristocrat God, the pushy salesman God, the magic genie God, the out to get you police detective God, the unjust dictator God. I hope somebody wants to do that one. That one, yeah. The marshmallow god. Which is kind of an interesting one. The critical Scrooge God, the party pooper God, and the heartbreaker God. Let me know if any of those just rings a bell and you say to yourself when you hear that, I have got to hear a description of that one, Dr. Peter. Let me know. crisis@soulsandhearts.com. (317) 567-9594. You can get ahold of me. All right. I also want you to check out the Resilient Catholics Carpe Diem community if you haven’t done that already. You can check that out at soulsandhearts.com. It’s free for the first 30 days, $25 a month after that. If you have financial need, we are never going to turn away anybody just because of a financial situation. Just talk to me, email me, give me a call, let me know. We’ll work it out for you. We’ve got some big news about some events that are coming up. I am offering an open Zoom meeting to the RCCD members. That’s on Wednesday, July 22nd at 8:15 p.m., 8:15 in the evening Eastern Time on Wednesday.

[00:43:55] That’s July 22nd, and that is just open. We’re just going to have a conversation of whatever people want to talk about, right? We’re also going to record it. We’re going to put it back up on our website, in the RCCD exclusive content section for the RCCD members. So if you can’t make it, but you have a question you’d like me to address, send me an email or send me a text. We’ll get that question raised during that time. And we’re going to have another one too. This one is going to be our first morning meeting, during the week anyway. That’s going to be on Monday, July 27th at 9:30 a.m. It’s 9:30 in the morning, right? So 6:30 in the morning for you people out in the Pacific, on Pacific Time zone, you Californians, 6:30 in the morning, right? And that again, is just going to be another open forum. Just a question and answer. Just going to be an opportunity for us to hang out together, to get to know each other better, to ask some questions about anything under the sun that is about psychology and Catholicism, right? So like I said, email me questions or text me some questions if you can’t make it. And really looking forward to spending some time with you. And that will be a wrap for today. All right, so let’s invoke our patron and our patroness. Our Lady, our Mother, Undoer of Knots, pray for us. Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.