IIC 28: Police Detective Gods, Pushy Salesman Gods, and Heartbreaker Gods

In this episode, Dr. Peter Malinoski reviews three more problematic God images, how they develop, the self-images that go with them, and how they are exacerbated by the coronavirus crisis, 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 Peter Malinoski, your host and guide with Souls and Hearts at soulsandhearts.com. Thank you for being here with me. This is episode 28, released on August 10th, 2020, and the title is Police Detective Gods, Pushy Salesman Gods, and Heartbreaker Gods. So we’re gonna cover three more God images. Today we’re going to cover the out-to-get-you police detective God, the pushy salesman God, and that heartbreaker God. In the previous three episodes episodes, numbers 25, 26, and 27, we covered a total of nine God images, and we’re adding three more today. But first, let’s just spiral back and review for those who may be new. What are God images again? What are God images? My God image is my gut felt sense of God. It’s how my heart feels God to be in the moment. My God image is who my emotions insist that God is right here, right now. My God image is very subjective. It can be miles away from who I know God to be intellectually, from who I profess God to be. That’s my God concept, who I profess God to be, who I embrace God to be intellectually. That’s my God concept.

[00:02:00] We’re talking about God image here. So it’s critical to understand that your God images are not necessarily who you profess God to be with your intellect and your will. God images are the subjective, unfiltered, spontaneous, passion-driven representations of God. And they can vary wildly, sometimes even from second to second. Similarly, my self image, my self image, is who I feel myself to be in the present moment. It is who my passions are telling me that I am right this minute. My self images are much more driven by emotion, much more intuitive, much more subjective, much more right-brain driven. And they vary a lot from moment to moment, or they can vary a lot from moment to moment. My self image in the moment complements my God image in the moment. So that’s a brief review of God images and self images. And if you want a much more of a conceptual background for God images, check out episodes 22, 23, and 24, where I go much more in-depth in explaining them. So this whole series of episodes in the Coronavirus Crisis Carpe Diem podcast is all about resilience. So let’s go back and let’s talk about the connection between problematic God images and resilience. Because remember, this is where we get right down to it. We need a deep and abiding confidence in God, especially in God’s providence, in order to be resilient.

[00:03:28] Resilience is an effect. It’s a consequence of the deep, abiding confidence in God, especially in God’s care for us and his love for us. If you have a deep and abiding childlike confidence in God’s providential love for you, for you specifically, you will be resilient. Period. Full stop. Let me say that again. This is absolutely critical to understand. If you have a deep, abiding, childlike confidence in God, a confidence in his providential love for you, for you specifically, you will be resilient. Let’s keep in mind how the main psychological reason why we don’t have that deep, abiding confidence in God is because we don’t know Him as He truly is. We have problematic God images. We give in to those problematic God images. We default to them. We let them dominate us. And these distorted God images lie to us about who God really is. They whisper half truths to us and they draw us away from the real God when we give in to them, when we don’t resist them. These distorted God images also lie to us about who we are, leading to distorted self images. Now, please don’t misunderstand me. There usually are at least some elements of truth, even in the most distorted God images and the most warped self images. The messages from these distorted God images and these inaccurate self images usually isn’t purely false. The messages actually have some kind of kernel of truth in them, which can make it even more confusing for us.

[00:05:17] So this is the resilience causal chain. This is what it all goes back to. We have distorted God images. Then we give in to those distorted God images. We let them dominate us. Then our self-image deteriorates. We drift away from God and we flee from him. Then we lose our peace. We lose our joy. We lose our sense of well-being. And then at the end, we become symptomatic. We become anxious, depressed, apathetic, hopeless, whatever our symptoms are, right? Too often we try to intervene at the end of the causal chain. We want to intervene at the symptomatic level. For example, we may take antidepressants to try to knock out our depressive symptoms, or we might use progressive muscle relaxation or guided imagery or grounding techniques to reduce our anxiety. I’m not condemning these practices. They can be really helpful for symptom management. But no medication in the world is going to correct a dysfunctional, distorted God image on its own. Have you ever heard of any psychotropic drug that, in its slick advertising, promises to improve your relationship with God? It doesn’t happen. Symptom-focused approaches don’t get at the root causes of our psychological distress. They can create some space with symptom relief for us to more effectively address the root causes. But symptom-focused approaches on their own don’t heal these root causes. It’s also important to note that just because we have anxiety or sadness doesn’t mean we have a distorted God image driving it.

[00:07:00] Our Lord experienced intense sadness over the destruction of Jerusalem. Our Lord experienced anxiety in the Garden of Gethsemane. This was not a psychological disorder. Our Lady was anxious when she was searching for the 12-year-old Jesus in Jerusalem. This was not because she had an anxiety disorder or some kind of emotional dysfunction. So it’s really important to note that not all negative emotional experiences and not all psychological distress are effects of problematic God images. All right. So we had a great meeting last Friday night. There were 13 of us that got together from the Resilient Catholics Carpe Diem community for a question and answer session about God images. It was an excellent discussion. The message came through to me very clearly. Dr. Peter, Dr. Peter, help us resolve our problematic God images. Help us to work through them. Help us to heal from these burdensome, distorted God images that drag us down. I get it, I hear you, I’m with you. I am working on how to present solutions to you. I’m going to ask you for a little patience. I do have nearly two decades of experience helping people one-on-one to work through their God images, and while I have a lot left to learn, I do know some things about it. I am still, though, very much sorting out how to best address problematic God images in a podcast format, and how best to assist people with their problematic God images in the RCCD community.

[00:08:32] So together we’re going through some trial and error with that. I’m sorting that out, and we’re working through that in the RCCD community. Right now, in the podcast, we are still focused on identifying different types of problematic God images. Identification of these God images is an essential prerequisite to actually doing God image work. So I’m excited that people want to work on their God images. I am hearing loud and clear the desire to be able to have solutions to that, and I’m going to be putting that together in the next few weeks. Just beg for your patience. So stay with me. This preparatory work, though, is also really important. I’ve started to have people sign up on the interest list for a course on God images that would focus specifically on resolving them. So if you’re interested on getting on that list, let me know at my email crisis@soulsandhearts.com or text or call me at (317) 567-9594. If you’re already a member of the RCCD community, you can reach me by privately messaging me on our app. That’s actually the fastest way to get in touch with me. So if you’re in the RCCD community and you’re not on the app, please let me know. Email me, call me. We’d love to have you join us on that format because we’re moving most of our interactions onto the app from the website.

[00:09:49] If you are not yet a member of the RCCD community and you’ve been thinking about it. And I know, I know some of you have been thinking about it, take the leap. It’s free for the first 30 days, $25 per month after that. And there are a whole host of resources available to you there. Too many to list. Now go to Souls and Hearts, click on the tab that says All Courses and Shows. It’s up at the top and register for the Resilient Catholics Carpe Diem community. If you can’t find it, let me know and I’ll personally help you through the registration. The RCCD community brings together people like you, people that are really interested in growing more and more resilient, both in the natural realm and in the spiritual realm, and who are seizing this day, who are seizing this moment as an opportunity for great spiritual and psychological growth. And we’re doing it together in the RCCD community. We are growing together in relationship. Friendships are forming in the community, connections are being made. There’s a lot of sharing and support. And just ask yourself, could you use more support from like-minded Catholics? Could you could you benefit from more connection with people like you who are interested in psychology, Catholicism, resilience, and breaking free from whatever’s holding you back? Now, if you’ve got everything you need right now in that department, I’m happy for you.

[00:11:03] That’s great. Keep doing what you’re doing. But if you’re missing something, especially around a relational connections, then maybe, just maybe, our community may be a good fit for you. Try it out. See what you think. All right, all right. Enough with the marketing. Now we’re going to get back to the content. Today we are diving into three new problematic God images. The out-to-get-you police detective God, the pushy salesman God and the heartbreaker God. Bill and Kristi Gaultiere discussed these God images in their 1989 book Mistaken Identities. And so they came up with the original names. We are going into them in much more detail. I’m adding a lot of color. I’m adding a lot of background to make them come even more alive for Catholics in our present day with the challenges of the coronavirus. Okay, so we’re going to start with the out-to-get-you police detective God. This God is caught up in demanding perfection from me. It definitely sees me. This God definitely sees me. He watches me carefully. He’s looking for when I make mistakes and he holds my sins against me. He’s legalistic. His vigilance never ceases. He spies on me. I can feel his eyes on me. And this out-to-get-you police detective God loves to catch me in the exact moment of sinning. He never misses my smallest error. He never lets any imperfection go. And he tallies all of them, great and small, in his book.

[00:12:43] He is stingy with forgiveness. My offenses are never blotted out. No erasures are ever made in his book. He focuses on an exacting justice, carefully measured out. He wants to put me in the dock and condemn me, but he wants to do it in a way that is justified and ordered so that he can mete out punishment to me and be satisfied. Now, there is something of this God image, of this out-to-get-you police detective God image, in the Muppet characters Statler and Waldorf, who sit up in their balcony with negative running commentary about the rest of the cast, delighting in all the cast members mistakes. So what Bible verse did Bill and Kristi Gaultiere pick out for this out-to-get-you police detective God? Comes from the book of Job, chapter ten, verses 5 to 7. They read as follows. “Are your days like the days of a mortal? And are your years like a human lifetime that you seek for guilt in me and search after my sins, even though you know that I am not wicked, and that none can deliver me out of your hand?” So we see right here, Job is challenging this God image, right? He’s asking if God is like a man, right? If he seeks out guilt and searches after sins and tallies them up even though he knows Job is not wicked. What about the self image of somebody that struggles with an out-to-get-you police detective God image?

[00:14:19] Well when my out-to-get-you police detective God image is activated, I get very nervous about making mistakes. I become cautious. I don’t expect second chances. I don’t feel accepted if I’m imperfect. I’m constantly monitoring myself. I have difficulties being spontaneous. It’s easy for me to to slip into scrupulosity, to consider my imperfections as sins. I mistake my overly-demanding conscience as the voice of God. I may secretly believe that others are soft and morally lax, content with lukewarmness. I’m like a hamster on a wheel of moral perfection, striving towards faultlessness and perfect virtue. But I never make it, no matter how fast I make the wheels spin. I’m caught up in the heresy of Pelagianism, believing that I have to earn God’s love through a process of self-perfection, and I feel like God picks on me. Let’s talk about like attachment history for people with this God image. Individuals who develop an out-to-get-you police detective God image frequently were raised in homes where the parents were very invested in upright and proper moral behavior and in academic achievement, other forms of achievement and excellence. These parents often saw the children as extensions of themselves, and were preoccupied with how their children’s actions reflected on them. Parents like this often needed their children to behave well in order to feel better about themselves. Now, sometimes the opposite type of parenting can also generate an out-to-get-you police detective God image.

[00:15:55] When children have parents who are absent, who are disengaged, the children themselves can impose their own rigid moral codes on themselves, untempered by mature reasoning and unbuffered by compassion. If a child has to make up the rules themselves, they’ll often be harsh about it when there’s no alternative because there’s too little structure in the child’s life. Let’s take it on to the coronavirus crisis. What happens with folks that have an out-to-get-you police detective God image in these this day and age? Well, when things seem very difficult for me in the coronavirus era and my out-to-get-you police detective God image is activated, initially, I might run faster and faster on my hamster wheel, but then I’m going to become exhausted. And then I might start acting out in various ways. Bingeing on food, alcohol, movies, video games, shopping, pornography, all of those behaviors are not uncommon with this kind of God image. My attitude can become, if I’m going to be bad, I’m going to be bad. I can’t please God anyway. The harder I try, the further I fall behind. And God just keeps making it harder and harder for me with this stupid virus. Sometimes people with this out-to-get-you police detective God image can become more demanding of others when they are stressed by all the effects of the coronavirus.

[00:17:22] Thus, you might experience an uptick in criticism from a supervisor or a superior with this God image activated who is stressed in the current virus environment. All right. Let’s go to a vignette. We’re going to kind of flesh this out. We’re going to talk about Sarah. Sarah felt that she never measured up to her father’s expectations in grade school. When she brought home a 98% on a spelling test, Dad would grill her about the one word she missed, having her spell it repeatedly at supper. He always discussed how he had such high expectations for Sarah because he loved her, and he wanted what was best for her. Sarah’s father saw so much potential in Sarah. She could have the world if she just put her mind to it. Sarah was the oldest of five children. Academically, intellectually, she was the most gifted of all her siblings. Her father put together this demanding regimen designed to bring out the best in her. And when she protested, when little Sarah protested, when she pushed back, he told her how, when she was older, she would thank him for challenging her to be her best when she was a teenager. Sarah’s father read her diary. He snooped around. He would eavesdrop on her conversations. He had a way of ferreting information out of her friends and their parents. He held success tantalizingly just out of Sarah’s reach. When she won her high school sectionals in the 400m, her father didn’t celebrate her success.

[00:18:57] Rather, he immediately went to discussing the level of competition at regionals and her possibilities for making it to the state level. She feared making mistakes. Sarah didn’t expect to be accepted by others. When her boyfriend, Jason, in high school, was also critical of her, there was some comfort in that because it was familiar. Her father zeroed in on Jason’s imperfections, categorizing them and offering him suggestions for how he could improve himself. Neither Sarah nor her boyfriend Jason felt comfortable at her house. When Sarah wasn’t accepted into Swarthmore College, her father was furious. He demanded to see her essays again. He nitpicked at them even though he had reviewed them before she had submitted them. He harped on how she must have underperformed during the interview with admissions staff and he reviewed other ways in which she might not have measured up. Sarah had little connection with a merciful, compassionate God. She saw God as someone she always had to work hard to please, but would never succeed. Never succeed. She was very dominated by an out-to-get-you police detective God image. Having been raised Catholic primarily by her retiring and dominated mother, she said prayers, but they seemed really flat. They seemed fruitless. She received the sacraments and said the right things in CCD class in order to complete the program. But after confirmation, she left religion behind. She just wanted God to leave her alone, to just leave her in peace.

[00:20:26] So Sarah went off to Vassar for college, not far away from where her maternal grandparents lived in upstate New York. Even at college, though, she heard her father’s voice in her head with his incessant demands and criticism. She longed for relief from all this internal pressure. She knew she needed some kind of spirituality, but she didn’t know what she was looking for. All right. So that’s a wrap for the out-to-get-you police detective God. We’re going to move on to the second God image we’ll be discussing today. And that is the pushy salesman God. So the pushy salesman God, this God is ill-mannered. He’s demanding. He wants to force me to do things his way. He wants to shape me into the mold he has made for me, doesn’t really respect my boundaries or limits. He will try to subtly trick me with his glittering, dazzling smile and his veneer of friendliness. If that doesn’t work, he’s willing to force me to get what he wants from me. There’s no collaboration or cooperation with this God. It’s his way or the highway. The demand is all for conformity. And if I want to be a good Catholic, if I want to be in relationship with him, I’ve got to buy what he is selling. I’ve got to play the role he’s chosen for me. My desires, my opinions, my preferences, my ideas, my individuality, none of this makes any difference to the pushy salesman God.

[00:21:53] This is a God who takes advantage of my human weakness. He tries to manipulate me, and when that fails, he uses heavy-handed tactics to get what he wants from me. If I do what the pushy salesman God wants, sometimes I get rewards, but they’re meager and sometimes I’m not rewarded at all. He’s not a reliable God. All right, what about the Bible verse for the pushy salesman God? The Bible verse that the Gaultieres chose for this God image is from Job chapter 14, verses 19 to 20. They read as follows. “God, you destroy the hope of man. You forever overpower him and he departs. You change his appearance and send him away.” So here you can see that deep power differential, how God is forcing me, Job is feeling like God is forcing him, overpowering him, and then sending him away hopeless. There’s no sense of mutuality here, of collaboration. That’s what Job is feeling in the moment as he writes those poignant verses. What about the self-image of somebody that’s got this pushy salesman God image? All right. Well, when my pushy salesman God image is activated, I feel like I don’t have any value unless I’m dancing the steps that God has laid out for me. I feel used when I follow this pushy salesman God. I feel bereft and rejected if I don’t follow him. I can’t set any limits or boundaries with God. I have to be vigilant to keep him from manipulating me.

[00:23:27] It’s not safe to be close to him, but I can’t do without him. I am distrustful and suspicious of him. I have to keep one eye on him at all times because he’s a sneak. I wonder why he treats me this way. What’s wrong with me that I deserve such maltreatment? Maybe, maybe I really am worthless. Maybe I deserve being used and even abused by others. Many years ago, a client told me about a male exotic dancer who went by the moniker Moist Towelette. That was his stage name, Moist Towelette. Now that self-given name captures a real sense of being used and thrown away. It captures a sense of the self image that goes with the pushy salesman God image. What about the relational history, the attachment history of somebody with a pushy salesman God image? Well, not surprisingly, frequently the history of people with a pushy salesman God image is characterized by relationships in which more powerful others took advantage of the person, usually when the person was vulnerable because he or she was young or in difficult circumstances. Often, people with this God image are very ambivalent, very conflicted about whether to trust or not. Trusting others means that I have to give up my sense of integrity. Keeping my sense of integrity means that I have to give up relationship and be isolated, alone, and rejected. Often people with this God image have greater than average innate needs for relationship and connection.

[00:25:06] These are people who need people and they want to be in relationship. Issues around trust, safety and security are the most prominent. They do feel seen by powerful others, including God, but usually as objects of desire to be used and then discarded. Child sexual abuse can freely give rise to a pushy salesman God image, particularly if the abuser was frequently around and if the abuse went on over time. Often there was a mix of punishments and rewards that went with the experience of abuse. All right, let’s get into the coronavirus and how that might impact a pushy salesman God image. We’re bringing it right into the present day, into the coronavirus era. Right now, people are experiencing a sense of loss in many different areas. It’s not uncommon for this to be tied to an assumption that I have not been pleasing the pushy salesman God. Or alternatively, it may mean that I haven’t pleased him in my life. And so now I’m suffering the consequences. I just didn’t fit into his mold. Maybe I tried to and failed, or maybe I have just rejected him. Maybe the losses I’ve experienced have pushed me over the edge and I have had it. I am so over this pushy salesman God. I’d rather go it alone. All right, so let’s go to the vignette and we’re going to follow up with Sarah, where we left off. She’s in her freshman year at Vassar.

[00:26:32] She’s doing well academically, but she’s really stressed. After the first semester, her boyfriend Jason transferred to join her at Vassar to be closer to her. Jason had recently gotten into some esoteric New Age beliefs and was experimenting with “finding himself,” and is now interested in “exploring his sexual potential.” He began to push Sarah’s boundaries around physical intimacy. Initially, he wheedled and cajoled, joked and teased, but as she continued to resist, he stepped up the pressure. In high school, she always saw Jason as a refuge and as an alternative support figure to her father. However, she was really increasingly uncomfortable with the ways he was trying to manipulate her. Jason knew that Sarah had some dependency on him, and he was trying to exploit that to get what he wanted physically from her. He tried to cut her off from the friends she had made in her first semester, and some of those friends recognized the manipulative dynamics. One of them in particular, Aurora, a radical feminist, pointed out all the problems she saw in Sarah’s relationship with Jason. Aurora hated Jason and she viewed him with deep suspicion. And she was also kind of jealous of him. Sarah desperately wanted a relational connection with someone. Jason had seemed to offer that connection in high school, but now he seemed more and more focused on this physical contact. As the problems continued to mount with Jason, Sarah reconnected with some of her friends from the first semester.

[00:28:05] One of them, Emily, was involved with Campus Crusade for Christ and was warm and kind to her. Sarah tried to pray with Emily. Sarah experienced God now as still demanding, but in a different way. She felt that God still wanted her to conform to his desires, but now he seemed more greasy, more slick, and more manipulative. Emily encouraged Sarah to bring these impressions of God to God in prayer, and Emily prayed with Sarah. Emily was really patient with Sarah. She brought her into a Bible study where she had the support of other Christian college students. Jason sensed that his hold on Sarah was slipping away and he upped the pressure. One Friday night, after he had been drinking, he lashed out at her verbally and then physically. He slapped her. He tore at her blouse. This is the first time that Jason had been physically violent with Sarah, and Sarah was stunned, speechless. She froze. But right at that moment, Aurora knocked at the door and when Sarah opened it, Aurora immediately understood what was happening. She roared at Jason and pointed her pepper spray at him and Jason fled. Aurora put her arm around Sarah and comforted her as Sarah spilled out the whole story of what had just happened. In the days that followed, Sarah continued to pray with Emily and to work on her relationship with Jesus, and she realized how much her relationship with Jason had impacted how she saw God.

[00:29:34] Sarah saw how she believed that, at a core level, that God just wanted her to conform to whatever he wanted to have her meet his arbitrary demands, like Jason wanted her to meet his sexual demands. She appreciated how Aurora and Emily, both in their individual ways, had supported her, had helped her limit Jason’s intrusions, and she was also able to successfully break off the relationship with Jason. All right, so there’s the pushy salesman God. We’re going to move on now to the heartbreaker God. This God breaks promises to me. He raises my hopes high, and then he dashes them back down to the earth. He draws me in to trust him. And then when I need him and when I seek him, he is nowhere to be found. He ghosts me. I put my fragile self in his hands and he treats me casually, carelessly, thoughtlessly, and I get hurt, I get wounded. The Bible verse that the Gaultieres chose for the heartbreaker God is from Psalm 16 verse 10. “Have you not rejected us, O God? You do not go forth, O God, with our armies.” Can you hear the lament, the lament in which the psalmist feels like God has abandoned all of Israel, that God has broken his word and gone back on his promises to be with his chosen people always? Right, the self image. What’s the self image of the person who has a heartbreaker God image?

[00:31:13] Well, with this heartbreaker God image, I feel like Charlie Brown running up to the football. Right. The heartbreaker God is like Lucy who yanks the ball away at the last second, and I wind up on my back wondering why I ever trusted God again. Why does God treat me this way? Why does he not have mercy on me? Why does he not care for me? Am I not worth his consistent and unfailing care? Why will he not let me depend on him? Why does he break his promises? Why doesn’t he follow through? What’s wrong with me? Why am I an exception to his care and love for all people? Those are the kinds of questions you’ll see reflecting the self image of somebody with a heartbreaker God image. Well, let’s go into the attachment history. What’s going on with the relational history of someone with the heartbreaker God image? This heartbreaker God image can develop in childhood when I have experienced deep disappointments and intense grief, with little opportunity to process through the losses. This could happen, for example, to children whose parents divorce. In this situation, children are always aware at some level of the degree of conflict between their parents. They desperately yearn for their parents’ marriage to improve. They cling to any signs of hope, any indicator that things are getting better. So many children pray with great intensity for their quarreling parents, longing for peace and stability in their homes.

[00:32:43] They ride the emotional roller coaster up and down, up and down with all its gut-wrenching intensity. They hear that all things are possible with God, but in the end, it just feels like God breaks their hearts too. This heartbreaker God image can also emerge when parents die from illnesses or in war. It can happen when there is financial ruin. Heartbreaker God images are known to emerge during and after the breakup of romantic relationships, especially when the romantic partner ends the relationship unilaterally, or if there’s an affair. The heartbreaker God image can also develop later in life if a spouse is abandoned in her marriage, and especially if the divorce seemed to come out of the blue. What’s going on in the coronavirus era? During the era of the coronavirus, there is no shortage of losses in people’s lives. It’s the losses that are not seen through a providential lens that can activate a heartbreaker God image. Losses in the present can also trigger unresolved losses from the past, with all their unresolved emotional intensity. When the churches were shuttered and access to the sacraments was denied, many people described themselves as feeling heartbroken, and some may have wondered where God was. Why did he allow himself to be lost to us in the Mass, in the Eucharist and confession? The other thing is that this coronavirus thing, it is really stressing marriages. According to nolo.com, which provides free legal help, the search term divorce spiked up 32% from March to May of 2020 as the lockdowns initially took hold.

[00:34:28] So people are getting locked down in their houses, and we’re seeing a 32% increase from March to May of people typing in divorce in the search box to find out about their legal options. Now, if we take this back to 2019, from March to May of 2019, there was a decrease of 6% on nolo.com searches for help with divorce. We don’t have a lot of data coming in yet about actual divorces, in part because the courts have been shut down in a lot of places. The coronavirus, tension in marriages, domestic abuse, all kinds of problems because of the changes in routine and not being able to access typical coping mechanisms, big impact on the heartbreaker God image. So let’s continue with Sarah. We’re on a roll here with Sarah. She’s now in the second semester of her sophomore year at Vassar. Things have ended with Jason. She is continuing to deepen her relationships with Emily and with Aurora, these friendships. It troubles Sara that Emily and Aurora don’t get along. Emily is nice enough to Aurora, but Aurora seems to really dislike Emily and somehow seems to be in competition with her, not fully understanding what’s going on there. Sarah is continuing to develop her prayer life with Emily, really working on an intimate relationship with Jesus, and now she’s attending a non-denominational Christian church in town.

[00:35:51] While she finds some of the Campus Crusade coeds a little rigid and a little moralistic, she feels part of a community that, on the whole, feels wholesome and uplifting to her. Sarah also really likes spending time with Aurora. She finds Aurora kind of edgy, raw, witty, earthy. Aurora has a take-no-prisoners approach to life, and Sarah is attracted to her apparent strength. Now, one night, as the two of them were drinking in Aurora’s apartment, Aurora sat close to her and Aurora burst into tears, confessing to Sarah how much she loved her and how she had loved her since she first met her. Aurora told Sarah how much she wanted to spend the rest of her life with her, and how she yearned to be with her as much more than a friend. Aurora reached out to touch Sarah’s face. And then she saw Sarah’s expression. Sarah was shocked. It had never occurred in Sarah’s wildest dreams that Aurora might be romantically interested in her. Sarah jumped up. She backed away. She burst into tears, and she fled from the apartment while Aurora wailed in the foyer, begging Sarah not to go, not to leave, to stay and talk it out. Sarah was overwhelmed. Sarah was nearly overwhelmed with a sense of betrayal, with a sense of loss, and she experienced a major revivification of all the hurt and intrusion from her relationship with Jason. Sarah realized now that she had invested emotionally in Aurora and how she had been blindsided by her unwanted sexual advance.

[00:37:28] She felt a deep sense of betrayal, and she understood Aurora’s relationship with her in an entirely different light now, and she felt waves of sorrow, loss and uncertainty just wash over her. Sarah went to find Emily and she laid out the whole story. She was afraid that Emily might judge her or think that she had somehow led Aurora on, or that she might be same-sex attracted herself. Emily continued to be patient. She listened with a compassionate, gentle presence. She didn’t try to fix Sarah or give Sarah advice. Sarah realized in her prayer that she was now blaming God for the loss of her relationships with Jason and Aurora. And really not for those relationships, but for what she wanted those relationships to be, what she had idealized those relationships into. She was surprised at how emotionally entangled she had become with Aurora. Sarah was now struggling with a heartbreaker God image, as she had before. Emily encouraged Sarah to bring all this anger and disappointment she had in Jesus to Jesus. With Emily’s encouragement and presence, Sarah could be more real with Jesus. And one evening she laid it all out in great detail, recounting the stories of her experiences of Jason and Aurora to Jesus himself with all of her feelings. It took most of Emily’s large box of Kleenex for Sarah to get through all of it. It was messy, but Sarah was able to tell Jesus how she really felt about him, about the betrayal and the disappointment and the heartbreak and the losses.

[00:39:02] But when she did, when she shared all of that with Jesus, she felt a huge sense of relief and being able to put it all into words and being able to share it with her Lord. And in the midst of the pain, she began to feel a bit of peace. And both Emily and Sarah recognized that moment as a breakthrough in her journey with God. All right, there we have them. The three God images. We have the out-to-get-you police detective God, the pushy salesman God, and the heartbreaker God. And we’ve now seen how they can weave through the life of one person. So before I go, one final reminder, consider joining us in the RCCD community. Go to soulsandhearts.com. Check it out. Now I also need your feedback. Email me with feedback at crisis@soulsandhearts.com, or text or call me at (317) 567-9594. Or if you’re already in the RCCD community, put it up on the discussion boards. I want to hear from you. Let me have that feedback, positive feedback, negative feedback, and everything in between. All right. And with that, it’s a wrap. Let’s go ahead and invoke our patroness and our patron. Our Lady, our Mother, Untier of Knots, pray for us. Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.