IIC 27: Robber Gods, Aristocrat Gods and Marshmallow Gods

In this episode, Dr. Peter discusses the malleability or changeability of God images, and dives into the Robber God image, the Elite Aristocrat God Image, and the Marshmallow God image.

[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 27, released on August 3rd, 2020, and the title is Robber Gods, Aristocrat Gods, and Marshmallow Gods. Now, for those of you who are new to the podcast, first of all, a very hearty welcome to you. I’m glad you’re joining us. I want you to know that each episode can stand alone, and I will provide you with the background you need to know to understand what we’re talking about. However, if you want more of a conceptual background for God images, I’m really going to encourage you to check out episodes 22, 23, and 24. There’s a lot of information in there that unpacks the concept of the God images, but for now, we’re going to do a brief review. We’re going to circle back around and just ask and answer that question. What are God images? My God image is my experiential sense of God. It’s how my heart sees God. It’s what my feelings tell me about God.

[00:01:43] My God image is very subjective. It doesn’t necessarily follow what I know about God in my head. My God image is formed out of the relational experiences I’ve had. 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 what’s important to remember is that your God images are not necessarily what you profess to believe with your intellect and your will. Rather, God images are the unfiltered, spontaneous, uncensored, gut felt sense of who God is in the moment. Similarly, self images, self images are much more driven by emotion. They’re much more intuitive, they’re much more subjective. They vary a lot more from moment to moment than the self concept, right. The self concept is what we believe ourselves to be with our intellect. It’s what we choose to believe about ourselves. But these self-images are who I feel myself to be in a given moment. My self-image, in a given moment, is who my passions are telling me that I am in that moment. So self images go along with God images and they impact each other. And the last two episodes, in episodes 25 and 26, we looked at a total of six different negative God images originally identified by Christian psychotherapists Bill and Kristi Gaultiere in their 1989 book Mistaken Identities. Those were the drill sergeant God, the statue God, the preoccupied managing director God, the unjust dictator God, the vain Pharisee God, and the critical Scrooge God.

[00:03:25] Those were the ones that we’ve already covered. Now, I do want you to know that I’m going beyond Bill and Kristi Gaultiere’s initial conceptualizations, and I’m adding much more in these podcast episodes. So most of what I’m adding is derived from my clinical experience. But, you know, it also comes from my own experience in my own journey with God. So I want you to know that I’m just adding a lot of new material. But I do think the Gaultieres initial pioneering work really deserves to be credited. Let’s go to listener questions. Love to hear from you guys. Keep those questions coming in. Ryan from Texas has this question. After identifying problematic God images in my own life, I want to know how deterministic God images are. Are they imprinted from childhood or do they change with time? And what do we do to make our God images align with the loving and caring God we profess to know in our God concept? Great question, Ryan. Let’s get into that briefly right now, and I’ll say much more about it in future podcast episodes. I also very much want to do a much more in-depth course at Souls and Hearts on God images. And in that course, I’m really going to focus on how to respond to them and also how to bring them into greater harmony with who God really is. That’s one measure of mental health, when our God images reflect the reality of our loving and caring God.

[00:04:48] So if you’re interested in a course like that, let me know. Once I have 25 people that would commit to a much more in-depth course and would be willing to pay for it, I could begin to set aside time to create it. Right? Those of you that are in the RCCD community, you’ll get a discount. Don’t worry, I’m going to take care of you. If you’re interested in that, call me at (317) 567-9594 or text me or email me at crisis@soulsandhearts.com and let me know and I’ll put you on the waiting list. I’ll put you on the list of people that are interested in this God Images course. Let’s get back to Ryan’s question. Initially, God images are formed in us from our very first days, our very earliest moments. As infants, we are learning about the world, and nonverbal assumptions are being formed in us by our experiences. So I want you to imagine an infant. I’m going to call him baby Joe. Now, baby Joe, he’s got an attuned, psychologically healthy mother who can really enter into baby Joe’s experience. The mother is able to intuit what baby Joe needs. She’s able to meet those needs in a loving, competent way. This baby has a deep sense of being seen and known. This baby has security, safety, and all of those are the first two conditions of secure attachment.

[00:06:07] This sets the baby up to have a greater sense of safety and security, a greater sense of being seen and known by loving God. It’s going to help his God image. Now let’s contrast baby Joe’s experience with another baby who I’m going to call baby Tom. Now, baby Tom, his father recently divorced his mother. Baby Tom’s mother is stressed out. She’s having to reenter the workforce. She feels a deep sense of shame, a deep sense of abandonment. She’s struggling with depression and anxiety. She’s just trying to hold it together. Unconsciously, baby Tom’s mother also blames baby Tom for driving away her husband. This is going to have a huge impact on baby Tom’s sense of being seen and known, of being safe and secure. And that’s going to impact baby Tom’s God images. So it’s clear that baby Joe and baby Tom are going to have different starting points with regard to their God images. The impact of parents’ ways of relating with children is difficult to underestimate when it comes to the generation of children’s God images. Parents have a huge impact on children’s God images. Nevertheless, and this is really important, there is another factor that has an even greater impact on what the ultimate God images are. And that, my dear listeners, is our own experience of the actual living God. The God images that are formed in us beyond our control when we were little will change over time if we bring ourselves into contact with who God really is.

[00:07:40] Now, the reason that so many God images seem to be so sticky, that they seem to hang around so much, is because they have not yet been corrected by God. Now how can that happen? Well, sometimes God delays correcting those images in order to draw us into a deeper relationship with him. Other times, though, and what I think is actually really, really common, is that we refuse to allow God into our lives in a way that would help us to see him and know him as he really is. We default to our negative God images. We don’t invite or allow him into our lives, and there are reasons for that, and we’re going to get into those reasons in future episodes. But for now, Ryan, I want you and the rest of the listeners to know that the way we engage with the living God as he is, the way that we allow him into our lives, into relationship with us, that is going to have much more of an impact on our God images over time than our original upbringing. So God images can and should change over time as we deepen in the spiritual life, as we deepen in our relationship with God. Our God images will conform more and more to our God concept, which will also conform more and more to who God really is. Okay with that, let’s dive into three God images that we are reviewing today.

[00:09:01] And these are the robber God, the elite aristocrat God and the marshmallow God. Just love these names. These are all from Bill and Kristi Gaultiere, elaborated by me. The robber God. Okay, the robber God robs me of good things. He prevents me from having good things. He prevents me from having good fortune. He seems jealous when I succeed. He is like a wet blanket, a God who spoils things that I enjoy. God is like a thief who snatches cherished possessions and relationships out of my hands. He deprives me even of the things that I need. All of this under the pretext of making a better Christian out of me and helping me love him more. This God, in my bones, feels unjust, stingy, and jealous. So what Bible verses do we have? Well, the Gaultieres provide us some verses from Psalm 88. I expand them a little bit. Here are the verses. Verses 4 to 8. “I am reckoned among those who go down to the pit. I am a man who has no strength, like one forsaken among the dead, like the slain that lie in the grave, like those whom thou dost remember no more, for they are cut off from thy hand. Thou hast put me in the depths of the pit, in the regions dark and deep. Thy wrath lies heavy on me, and thou dost overwhelm me with all thy waves. Thou hast caused my companions to shun me. Thou hast made me a thing of horror to them.”

[00:10:35] All right. So you can see in this Bible verse what the psalmist is experiencing, the loss of strength, the loss of relationship with God, feelings of imprisonment, like being in a dark, deep pit, the loss of companionship, the loss of friendship, the loss of my respectable curated image to others. It’s all in that Psalm. You can see, you can see in the experience of the psalmist, God robbing him of these things, right? So what happens with the self-image of somebody that has a robber God image that is activated? Well, because my robber God image doesn’t really want me to have good things, things that I enjoy, I’ve got to hang on to all that I can lay my hands on. I have to sneak pleasures and enjoyment because God doesn’t believe they’re good for me. I’m conflicted about whether I’m worth having good things. I feel insecure. I feel that my grasp is tenuous on the things that I treasure. I have to be very careful with this robber God to not overstep so that he won’t take any more good things from me. This leads to a lot of spiritual frustration and hiding from God. I’m expecting losses. I consciously or unconsciously blame God for my losses. I wonder, consciously or unconsciously, if this robber God enjoys taking things away from me. I have difficulty giving cheerfully, because so much feels just stolen from me without my consent.

[00:11:58] Lent is often miserable for individuals with prominent robber God images. There is very little concept of redemptive suffering. Suffering seems meaningless unless it is somehow satisfying to God. One client of mine many years ago described having a target on his back, a target that attracted God’s attention, leading God to take away any good things that he was able to achieve. Anger tends to be really prominent in folks that have this robber God image. And others may experience individuals with a prominent robber God image as having a chip on their shoulder. So what happens with the attachment history? What kind of relationship experiences do people with robber God images generally have? Well, frequently the attachment history may be characterized by grief due to losses that have never been adequately resolved. The attachment history may also feature parents who were jealous of their child’s talents, jealous of their possessions or relationships or other goods that the children have, and who put themselves in competition with their own children. These parents were too enmeshed with their children to be able to celebrate their children’s accomplishments. Rather, their children’s achievements make the parent feel inadequate or insecure. Thus, parents may work subtly and unconsciously to undermine their children’s successes so that they can feel less inadequate, so that they can feel better about themselves. This God image can also be present when a child loses a parent in some way to death or divorce, or to chronic health problems, or to mental health issues.

[00:13:29] It can be very confusing to a child why God would allow such losses to occur. The child whose mother died could say, since he’s all powerful and all knowing, he must have wanted me to be robbed of my mother. He must have wanted my father to drown his grief in vodka. So this God image can also emerge when a child is victimized by cliques at school, or by bullies who cut them down to size, who steal their money or food, or who are jealous and undermining of the friendships they formed. All right. What about the coronavirus? How does that impact the robber God image? Well, I think many of us can see how the coronavirus crisis might exacerbate a robber God image. Many good things have been taken away from us in this crisis. Losses can range from life to health to income to employment to relationships. We can lose relationships due to death, but relationships can also be compromised by social distancing, lockdowns, and disagreements about how to respond to the coronavirus. Like, for example, this whole mask issue is highly polarized. It’s coming in between people, right? Friends no longer agree about the masks or not masks and why we should wear masks or why we shouldn’t. There can also be questions about why. Why did God send us the virus anyways? He just trying to strip me down again to make me survive with just the bare minimum.

[00:14:48] Like a slave owner who gives his slave just enough to survive but not to thrive. So you can see how the coronavirus can exacerbate a robber God image. Well, let’s go ahead and take this to a vignette. We’ll take this to a little story. David was born in 1948 into a relatively healthy, close knit, Catholic working class family. He grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, surrounded by relatives and good relationships. At age 19, he was about to be drafted, so he decided to preempt that and enlist in the Marines. He went through boot camp, and in late 1967 he was ordered to Vietnam. There he saw combat and was drawn into some horrible atrocities against civilians in the 1969 Tet Offensive as a new marine. His world was turned upside down. He knows he was changed. During the Tet Offensive, he was wounded by mortar fire, which caused extensive damage to his right leg and some disfigurement to his face. He also lost two of his closest buddies. David’s leg never fully recovered, and he walked with a limp for the rest of his days. The woman he loved back in the U.S. rejected him upon his return, having found another boyfriend. He struggled with flashbacks and night terrors. He saw God as robbing him of all the good things that he had had previously in his life. He found it hard to relate with his family anymore. Actually, he felt like he had no home anymore, that he didn’t fit in anymore with his parents and his siblings.

[00:16:15] He had a strong sense that only other Vietnam vets understood his experience, so he never talked about his time in Vietnam unless he was drinking with old comrades in arms. His return to civilian society was slow, operating in fits and starts with many gains and losses, and he never seemed to get ahead. He blamed this on God. David saw God as stealing from him, his happiness, his peace, his joy, the woman he loved, his buddies on the battlefield, and his integrity. David had a robber God image. And this is an example of a God image that developed later in life after childhood. David eventually married, but he remained self-absorbed, silently struggling with internal conflicts over guilt, shame, rage, and fear. Others experienced him as cool, detached, and generally very self-controlled, very proper in his demeanor most of the time. His war buddies kidded David and told him that when he wasn’t drinking, David seemed like a 19th century English butler. David concluded that God didn’t want him to have good things, that God wanted him to suffer for the sins and crimes that he had committed. David clung to cigarettes, bourbon, sports, and movies as a way to distract himself and cope. Eventually, he was very closed off from his wife and his children and spent most of his time alone. It wasn’t until his children were grown and gone that he actually sought help.

[00:17:39] David benefited from some specific trauma treatments, including EMDR, that helped break him out of his downward spiral. And he is just now, late in his life, in his 70s, praying again and beginning to make sense of his experiences, bringing those experiences for the first time in decades back to God. Okay, so there we have the robber God. Now let’s move on to the elitist aristocrat God. Now this God considers himself to be too lofty, too good, too perfect to connect with the likes of someone like me. This God has a superior attitude. He doesn’t seem to need me or to care about me. He operates in an entirely different plane up in the sky, apart from mere mortals like me. God just isn’t there for me. He has his favorites, the ones who are more like him, the Christians of higher stature, of greater importance than me. I’m not one of his favorites. I get the cold shoulder from God. So how about the Bible verse, right? This is also from Psalm 88, verses 9 and 13 to 14. It reflects the elitist aristocrat God. “Every day I call upon thee, O Lord, I spread out my hands to thee. But I, oh Lord, I cry to thee in the morning my prayer comes before thee. O Lord, why dost thou cast me off?” You can see that the psalmist is crying out to God, but feeling cast off, ignored, the prayers seemingly disregarded.

[00:19:12] And maybe there’s a part of you that can resonate with these feelings, feelings of being disregarded or being set aside by God. All right, so what is the self-image of somebody that is struggling with an elitist, aristocratic God image? Well, if I’m struggling with the self-image like that, I feel like I was born under an ill-fated star. I was born on the wrong side of the tracks. God doesn’t associate with low class people like me. He doesn’t even notice me. I’m too far beneath them. He just ignores me. On the rare occasions when he does notice me, he puts me down. When I pray, my words just get lost in the void. He is not there to hear my prayers. I’m excluded from the circles of the people he favors. I get the crumbs under the table like the dogs. I’m not good enough to be in God’s good graces. God doesn’t need me for anything. He doesn’t really want me in his sight. And if he knows me, he knows me from afar and he doesn’t really like what he sees. All right. What kind of attachment history might lead to an elitist aristocrat God image? Well, the elitist aristocrat God image can emerge when a child feels very distant from his or her parents. The child’s parents may be very self-absorbed, caught up in their own social or professional images, the way that they are seen by the world. A child may accurately or inaccurately assume that he or she is not mom or dad’s favorite one.

[00:20:35] Children like this are sometimes grown by their parents rather than raised by their parents. An elite aristocrat God image can form when a daughter experiences her mother and father as all caught up in professional work, with the family always playing second fiddle to the importance the parents place on their occupations. Perhaps the child’s parents are caught up in Keeping Up with the Joneses. The experience is not so much of rejection by God as never being accepted by God in the first place. Let’s take a look at how this plays out with the coronavirus now. Well, the coronavirus has caused significant distress for many Christians with this particular elite aristocrat God image. It’s easy for many people to imagine that God is not interested in their sufferings. He’s not involved or invested in their trials and miseries, that God has basically left them to their own devices out of God’s sense of superiority. God does not deign to stoop down and help me, a lowly one, in my time of need. He helps others to have access to greater resources, others who he favors can adapt and adjust with minimal inconvenience to all the demands of the coronavirus. But the impact of the coronavirus on me is severe and more evidence of God’s disregard for me. All right, so let’s look at how this may play out in a vignette, in a story. So let’s consider Michael.

[00:22:00] Michael is David’s oldest son. Michael was born five years after David, his father, returned from Vietnam. And David never really bonded with Michael. His son Michael grew up realizing that his relationship with his father was not like the relationships that other boys in the neighborhood had with their fathers. Their fathers played with them, their fathers came to the baseball games and the basketball games. And many of their fathers were warm and engaging. It was Michael’s friend Tim, Tim’s father, who taught Michael how to throw, how to catch, how to hit, how to field. David’s mother was preoccupied with caring for her husband, but Tim’s father saw Michael in a way that Michael’s own father didn’t. He was kind of a surrogate father in some ways to Michael. So in the logic that youngsters use to sort these things out, Michael assumed that his father’s distance, reserve, and aloofness were his fault. Michael assumed that he was to blame for his father’s distance, his reserve, for his appearing like a 19th century English butler. Michael desperately tried to get his father’s attention, but to no avail. Dad seemed like an elite aristocrat, very proper, very distant, very uninterested in Michael. Michael unconsciously imported that image and transferred it to God. Michael saw himself as unworthy of his father’s attention, not good enough to be noticed by his father. This wounded self-image led him to conclude that God also saw him that way. Michael struggled with a deep sense of inadequacy and shame about not being good enough, and he vowed never to treat others that way.

[00:23:38] So even though he felt himself fairly distant from God, he tried to be warm and caring in his relationships as he grew up, to be the exact opposite of his father, especially with his own children. All right, so there we have the elite aristocrat God. And we’re going to move on to the marshmallow God. Now, this God image is very nice. God is nice, but he’s also either weak or incompetent. People with a marshmallow God image see God as very soft and quite passive. When others harm me or persecute me, God doesn’t safeguard me. He doesn’t advocate for me. He doesn’t defend me. He doesn’t protect me. He just wants me to take it and turn the other cheek, because God doesn’t want conflict. God wants to be liked, and he is likely to follow those who dominate him. This is a God that can be dominated by people. All right, so what a Bible verse did the Gaultieres come up with for this? Well, it’s from Psalm 13, verses 1 to 2. “How long, O Lord? Wilt thou forget me forever? How long wilt thou hide thy face from me? How long must I bear pain in my soul and have sorrow in my heart all the day? How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?” So you can see there that God is not felt to be protecting the psalmist, rather letting the enemy exalt over him.

[00:25:11] I found another Bible verse that I liked better from Psalm 25. So I thought I’d put it in because, you know, this is my podcast and I can do that. So this is the one I like. “To thee, O Lord, I lift up my soul. O my God, in thee I trust. Let me not be put to shame. Let not my enemies exalt over me.” Right? So here’s a plea to God. But it sort of seems like it might be to a God that might not protect me from my enemies. Right? So there might be a little hint of a God image in there, like a marshmallow God image. Okay, so like, what kind of self image, what kind of self-image do we have when we have a marshmallow God image? Well, when others take advantage of me, God believes it would be wrong for me to stand up for myself. I should be passive like God is. If I set limits and boundaries on others’ behaviors, that wouldn’t be good. It would be wrong for me to move away from my dependency. Since I’m helpless, I need to stay away from danger. I need to avoid and hide from trouble as best I can. So this is one where there’s a lot of fleeing, a lot of hiding, and a lot of taking it and absorbing it rather than setting limits and boundaries.

[00:26:21] Well, what kind of attachment history goes along with this marshmallow God image? Right? Well, when this God image forms in children, those children often have parents who are friendly and warm, but who have not adequately protected their children. They may have resisted recognizing or intervening when their children were being harmed, and they may have avoided recognizing it or intervening out of a sense of fear of offending others. For example, they may not have advocated for a child who is being unfairly singled out and harassed by a teacher or a coach. The child may have seen his parents be pushed around or dominated by more powerful others, to the detriment of the whole family. Now, sometimes this God image develops when parents are overprotective and they communicate to the child that he or she is weak, helpless, and dependent, and that’s how it should be. The child can then form the idea that this is how God wants them to be as well. We must be nice and we must be like God, so God must be nice. All right. How does this play out in the era of the coronavirus? Let’s look at that. Well, in the coronavirus era, God may seem passive, just letting things unfold without any divine intervention. We may have parts of us that feel that God is not up to the challenge of helping us through the coronavirus. We may have a sense that our bishops and priests have not helped us through the crisis, and they may have even made our lives more difficult by unnecessarily blocking access to churches, by unnecessarily restricting our access to the sacraments, even going beyond the restrictions that were required by government decrees.

[00:27:57] We may have gotten the message from our civic and church leaders that we are naive children that would have unnecessarily risked our own lives and the lives of others if we had been able to attend Mass, that we could not make appropriate judgments. And so these leaders needed to protect us from ourselves. We may also have parts of us that feel that God is not up to the task of administering justice to those criminals who really need it. God may seem to be very nice and soft to those who undermine the church from within, wayward bishops and cardinals, priests and others. The much maligned fire and brimstone from previous centuries may seem wholly absent to us now. It may appear in this coronavirus era that God does not seem to set limits on anyone lying, cheating, fraud, all kinds of misbehavior go unchecked in our government and in our culture, and this can exacerbate a marshmallow God image. It can lead to that question, who’s minding the store, God? Who is actually watching over all of us? So let’s go to a story. Michael married and he had two children of his own, and he worked really hard to be caring and gratifying to everybody. Unconsciously, Michael equated firmness with coldness.

[00:29:14] Indeed, Michael had difficulty setting boundaries and limits with others, as he was so conditioned to want others to like him. So when his oldest son, Daniel, went off to school, and when Daniel experienced bullying on the bus, he tried to help his son understand the bully’s point of view and to understand why the bus driver did not intervene. What Michael didn’t do is that he didn’t advocate for little Daniel in a way that would have been helpful to him. When Daniel had a Little League coach that rode him mercilessly, calling him names and mocking him in front of the other boys, his father did not stand up for him. Michael was more invested in maintaining a good relationship with the coach and trying to win him over to treating Daniel better through those means. Daniel’s experience of his father, though, was that that his father was nice, warm, gregarious, but powerless in the face of conflict. As a seven-year-old, Daniel generally saw his father as a good man, but he assumed that God must be like his father. This also fit his experience, because no one advocated for him when he was persecuted by authority figures. All right, so those are the three God images for today. The robber God, the elite aristocrat God and the marshmallow God. We’ve already covered a lot in this podcast episode, so I don’t have time to go into how these three God images are commonly generated in children who were sexually abused.

[00:30:41] I actually see this a lot. These three God images come up when there is a history of sexual abuse, particularly sexual abuse in the family of origin. Abuse and neglect have really harmful effects on God images, as you may imagine. And so I’m going to do a little bonus episode just for the members of the Resilient Catholics Carpe Diem community. That’s the community that grew up around this podcast. So this premium episode is going to be on sexual abuse and these three particular God images. Now, this particular episode, this bonus episode may be a little more intense for people. So it may be better to do it just in the community. Bonus episodes are one of the benefits of becoming a member. I really am going to encourage you again. Go to soulsandhearts.com. Click on the “All Courses and Shows” tab and register for the Resilient Catholics Carpe Diem community. It’s free for the first 30 days, $25 per month after that. These memberships to the community, that’s what makes this podcast possible. The RCCD members, through their $25 per month, offset the costs of producing this podcast and also help pay for the overhead, for the Souls and Hearts website. Now, other benefits for RCCD members include the PDFs I reprinted of the God Image questionnaire by Bill Gaultiere. Bill Gaultiere has given us permission to reformat that and to reprint it in our community section.

[00:32:05] Check that out. It can help you determine what your God images are. It’s a 28 item questionnaire that reviews these 14 God images that we’re covering in these current episodes of the podcast. One more thing is that we are having an RCCD community meeting this Friday, August 7th from 7:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Eastern Time. We’re going to be discussing any questions you have about God images and self images. Bring those questions to us. That is going to be a non-recorded meeting. We’re not going to record that one so that people can be more open, more free to say whatever they want, knowing that it’s not going to be watched later. It’s also a way for us to build relationships and connections within the community. And finally, our members now have access to our Mighty Networks app, which allows us to connect much more easily. It’s a really great it’s actually very easy to private message, to form little groups, to post things, to comment on things. It’s rapidly becoming the central hub for the community. Community members can email me at crisis@soulsandhearts.com. We’ll get you set up with that. It’s by invitation. And with that, we’ll go to our patroness and our patron, and we’ll wrap it for today. Our Lady, our Mother, Undoer of Knots, pray for us. Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.