IIC 32: Trauma, Trust, Treatment, and Truth

Dr. Peter covers three secular treatment options for complex trauma that use parent figures.  He then describes how we can bring in the Blessed Virgin Mary to help us with trust issues.  He gives specific recommendations for increasing trust by praying differently to our Lady.

[00:00:12] Welcome to the podcast Coronavirus Crisis Carpe Diem, where with God’s help, you and I rise up to 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. I’m your host. I’m your guide with Souls and Hearts at soulsandhearts.com. Thank you for being here with me. This is episode 32, released on September 7th, 2020, and it is titled Trauma, Trust, Treatment, and Truth. Today, we’re going to make a deep dive into the effects of complex trauma, into the effects of attachment wounds. And we’re going to see how those things impact trust. And then we’re going to discuss how, by God’s grace and with his help, we can experience Him as he is, not just as our distorted God images picture him. We’re going to rise out of the ashes of our experiences and our injuries, and we’re going to experience him much more as he is. At the end of this episode, I’m going to give you some very specific techniques, some very specific instructions that will help you engage in a way that’s going to be more effective for you. You know, in this era of the coronavirus, I think one of the things that this is inviting us to, these situations that we find ourselves in with the virus itself and all of its effects.

[00:01:58] You know, how it affects our jobs, how it affects our kids, how it affects our relatives, our friends, how it affects our lives, our routines, all of that. It’s a call to trust. These things that are being stripped away from us, these things in which we have put our reliance, these things in which we have put our confidence, in which we have put our trust. When those are taken away from us, we’ve got a choice. We can look at those things and grieve their losses and feel resentment and feel like we’ve just been disadvantaged, or we can take advantage of the opportunity to deepen the relationship with our God and with our Lady, with our real parents. And that’s what I think this whole coronavirus thing is for so many people. It’s an invitation to trust. It’s incentivizing us trusting God, us trusting Mary, instead of trusting ourselves or trusting in our possessions or trusting in some other things that are lesser than God, in created things lesser than God. So let’s just kind of circle back and review what we’ve been covering in the last couple of episodes. Two episodes ago, we got into a discussion of why we trust God so little, why we mistrust him. Right? And it’s because we are trying to be way too big. We’re trying to make it on our own.

[00:03:21] We want to rely on our own resources. We don’t want to enter into that closeness with God because it doesn’t feel safe. You know, our heads tell us one thing. Our minds tell us one thing about, you know, what the Catechism says and what we believe to be true about the faith and about God. But it doesn’t feel that way sometimes. And you know what? We hate and we fear the dependency that’s required for us to be in a real relationship with God. Because when we’ve had that dependency in other situations, it hasn’t always gone well. Right? So there’s this assumption that we have in our bones that it’s not going to go well with God. We want to deal with God on our own terms. We want to deal with God, you know, within our own vision, within our own understanding. We want to meet, if not as equals, at least sort of on the same playing field. We want to be sort of equally or almost equally yoked. We want God to be our copilot. We want him to sit in that copilot seat, be there when we need him, have him watch us fly our own plane and do our own thing and be well-behaved, right? We want him to conform to our own desires and to our own ideas. We want to reduce God down to the level of our human vision. But God, in his graciousness and his goodness, is not going to allow us to do that.

[00:04:46] He’s not going to be in our pocket. He’s not going to conform himself to our narrow ideas, because what he’s got in store for us is so much better than we could possibly imagine. In episode 31, this was the last episode that came out last week, we talked about the one thing that you have to have to be resilient, the one thing you need, the one prerequisite. And it was all about childlike trust, that absolute confidence in God. We talked about how there’s one thing that separates those who are resilient from those who are not, and that is that childlike trust, specifically the trust in God’s goodness and in his providence for me, for me in particular, not just for everybody, not just in general, but for me in particular. Those that have that childlike trust, those that have that absolute confidence in God, nothing can hold them back. Nothing can keep them down. Those who don’t have it, there’s nothing that can actually replace it. So in both those episodes, we looked at the critical period from age 0 months to 24 months, when the major developmental task is to resolve the conflict between trusting and mistrusting. Almost every developmental psychologist points to this period of time, 0 to 24 months, as the critical time. It sets the stage for the rest of life, because so much is built on that foundation of trust, or so much is built on that foundation of mistrust or distrust.

[00:06:21] We discussed how so much of the developmental work in this period of 0 to 24 months is done not by the infant, not by the toddler, not by the little child, but rather by the parents. We don’t expect infants and toddlers to be listening to self-help tapes, or to be enrolling in self-improvement classes, or that kind of stuff. They are far from the age of reason, when they’re 0 to 24 months old. So in these issues of trust, God and Mary do the heavy lifting. When we’re working with that developmental material, around 0 to 24 months, when we’re dealing with that within us, we can’t just make it happen. You can’t just by the sheer force of will say, I am now going to have a deep, visceral experience of trust. That doesn’t mean that our will is unimportant. It’s very important. We need to collaborate with God, but we have to do it in a way where we allow God, we allow Mary into our lives to change us, to form us, to do the work themselves. And that’s where it gets a little sticky because we prefer to do it our way. We prefer to do it in a way that seems safe to us. Little children, though, infants, toddlers, they have a great capacity for receptivity. They have a great freedom from self-consciousness.

[00:07:42] They have a kind of natural humility. They don’t worry about their self-image so much. They’re flexible. They use their imaginations. They don’t have the fear of failure that adults do. They don’t degrade themselves when they’re trying new things. They’re learning to walk and they fall down and they laugh at themselves. They can make mistakes. They can try things out. No one expects perfection from a little child. No one expects perfection from a little child. Now, when we take a look at the therapies that are out there and what they focus on, we see that these therapies tend to focus on us growing up, having greater autonomy, greater self-efficacy, being a more effective agent in the world, being able to exercise our will, being able to access our potential to realize our talents, and so on and so forth. Let’s just go through a few of these therapies. We’ll see kind of what’s out there. So let’s start with client-centered therapy. Sometimes it’s called person-centered therapy or Rogerian therapy. It’s the therapy that Carl Rogers promulgated. Unconditional positive regard is what the therapist is supposed to have for the client. And it focuses on the client as much as possible, and it encourages the client to take control of his or her own destiny. Cognitive behavioral therapy. That looks at dysfunctional thinking, that leads to maladaptive behaviors and negative emotions. It focuses on the thoughts. It’s all about the person becoming more efficacious, not being held back by their own limited thinking. Psychoanalytic or psychodynamic therapy, focusing on unconscious feelings or thoughts.

[00:09:25] The impact of the past on the present. It’s the oldest type of psychotherapy. There’s lots of other ones. There’s acceptance and commitment therapy. That’s focused on mindfulness, and it helps people to have consistent values with some psychological flexibility. We got bibliotherapy that uses literature to improve mental health, collaborative therapy, compassion-focused therapy, conflict-resolution therapy, contemplative therapy, core process psychotherapy, dialectical behavioral therapy, ego state therapy. There’s lots of emotion, emotion-focused therapy, uses emotions as a source of healing and insight. It’s helpful for moderate depression, holistic therapy. There’s lots of them. I’m not even to the I’s yet. I’m only on the H’s, right? There’s lots and lots of therapies. But here’s the deal. It’s been found that very few therapies have been shown to be consistently effective when there are trust issues that go back to the first two years of life. When there are trust issues that go back to the first two years of life, these are often developed because trauma and specifically complex trauma is present that has short-circuited sort of natural development. So many of these therapies that I just mentioned are really about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. Fits very well with the American rugged individualism, right? This positive psychology, focus on the strengths. I’m going to make it, you know, that kind of thing.

[00:10:57] And there’s been relatively low success rates when you’re looking at complex trauma, especially when that complex trauma happens in the first two years of life. So what am I talking about with complex trauma? What does that mean? So complex trauma is interpersonal. It occurs between people, usually people that know each other. So it’s different than the kind of trauma that would be caused by a car accident or by a hurricane or something like that. It often involves being or feeling trapped. The traumatic experience is often planned by another person. It’s extreme and it’s ongoing or repeated. It has more severe, persistent, and much more cumulative impacts. It’s something that happens over and over again. And it brings up shame, this real sense of inadequacy, brings up trust issues, brings up problems with a sense of self-worth, brings up identity issues, questioning about who I really am if I’m being treated this way. And it brings up a lot of problems with emotional regulation, being able to be on an even keel, without your emotions spinning out of control. It results, complex trauma results in different kinds of strategies for coping. A lot of alcohol use, a lot of drug use, self-harm, emotional dysregulation. There can be changes in consciousness, dissociation, where you disconnect from the experience of being in the here and now. Negative self perceptions, a lot of shame, as I mentioned before, inadequacy, a lot of problems in relationship, particularly because the person has difficulty maintaining kind of consistency in the way that they approach the other person in relationship.

[00:12:38] There can be really distorted perceptions of others, including abusers, and there can be a loss of systems of meaning. Right. This is how we construe the world, you know, how we understand God. How we understand who I am in relationship to God. All of that can be really shaken up, especially when there is complex trauma with frequently the abuse, betrayal, the grounds for not trusting people who should be able to be trusted. All right. So complex trauma is trauma that occurs repeatedly and cumulatively, usually over a long enough period of time and within specific relationships, within specific contexts. And that can include child abuse, domestic abuse. It can involve different kinds of betrayals. It’s almost always a relational kind of trauma. That’s in contrast to single incident trauma. And those single incident traumas like, are these one-off events, right? It’s associated with uncomplicated post-traumatic stress disorder. That can happen from a fire, floods, a single sexual assault, or a single physical assault. It can happen because a person had combat experience, you know, in one or a very few number of occasions. So typically that’s what we’re talking about with single incident trauma. So over the last several years, there have been a number of different therapies that have tried to get at the trust issues involved in the disruptions of complex trauma, when it comes to relationships specifically, like I said, that trust.

[00:14:30] So how does that work? I’m going to discuss, I’m going to discuss three particular therapies that have looked at, especially the trust issues that either never got established in the first two years of life because the trauma was happening then, or where there has been such significant traumatic experiences that the work that was done in the first two years had become undone in some way. So the first one I’m going to talk about is dyadic resourcing. This was developed by Philip Manfield, who is an EMDR, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapist. And he was really working with people who had such terrible self images, just loathed themselves, couldn’t find anything good about themselves and who couldn’t find in their histories anyone who loved them, anyone to whom they could remember a positive relational connection. Those were the types of folks that he was working with, really highly traumatized people. And so he had what he called dyadic resourcing, which involved identifying a nurturing adult resource, right. And typically it wasn’t somebody that the client even knew, right. Or maybe they knew them only peripherally. He believed that it was just too much for the client in these situations to actually engage with them being cared for in their imagery, in the imagery of the therapy.

[00:16:04] So the client had to imagine somebody else being cared for. So he had all of this work going on in the client’s imagination, right? He would invite the client to think of other families with other children and just try to identify with the experiences of other children being loved. He would try then to make the parent, the mother, the father more real for the person, and then start to have the client imagine this imaginary father and mother caring for him or for her, right, for the client, to intensify the experience of that relationship, and then also to have the client experience not only being loved by the imaginary resource, but sort of stepping into the shoes of the imaginary resource and also loving. So sort of all this effort to be loved and to love with imaginary resource figures, right? The idea being that the client is accessing some aspect of strength within him or herself. And the reason for this is that if clients can’t access something within herself, this is the reasoning. This is how the reasoning goes. If the clients can’t access something within him or herself, he’s going to try to seek it in the therapist. And if the therapist tries to respond with meeting the developmental needs that the client has for a mother and a father, they’re going to burn out, right? And that’s why you see a lot of burnout within trauma therapists in particular.

[00:17:44] So the idea was, oh, I’m not going to be your parent. You’re going to be your parent. You’re going to imagine your parent. And by kind of rehearsing this and going through this, you can actually imagine your way into health. Brown and Elliott in 2017 in their book Attachment Disturbances in Adults Treatment for Comprehensive Repair, they came up with the Idealized Parent Figure protocol. And again, it differs from a traditional attachment-based treatments, and that the primary agent of change is the client’s relationship with his or her imagined attachment figures, rather than the relationship with the therapist. So what they’re saying is, it’s not so much the relationship with a therapist that’s healing. It’s the relationship with the imagined parents. So this is how it works, right? The Ideal Parent Figure protocol uses guided imagery to help participants change their attachment representations. Therapist encourages the client to imagine being with parent figures who were entirely constructed from their imagination. So during this IPF therapy, the therapist guides the client to vividly imagine himself or herself as a young child and, as a young child, connecting to and relating with the new set of parents. These are not the parents or caregivers that the that the client grew up with, but their completely imagined their parents, who are entirely fabricated in the imagination of the client. And these imagined parents are supposed to possess all the parental qualities that promote secure attachment.

[00:19:13] When, when as a client, you’re doing the IPF protocol, you’re to truly immerse yourself in this whole fantasy. It involves the five senses, physical sensations, in accordance with what is being imagined, like being in a really vivid dream. These parents, taking care of you, mother listening to you, father holding you, and importantly, the therapist helps participants to differentiate imagination from memory and make sure that the participants are not actually slipping back into their real memories, which are really negative, but really staying in the realm of imagination. I’ll give you a little sense of like what therapists tell their clients when they start to do this. All right. So this is kind of the opening of an IPF session. This is a script that the clinician would read to the client. And now we’re going to take a journey back, a journey back in time, a journey back in time to when you were a young child. So imagine now going back in time, back to when you were a young child. You can begin to imagine yourself as a young child and more and more feel yourself as a young child. More than just seeing yourself as a young child, more and more now you will actually feel yourself as a young child. And when you are feeling yourself as a young child, you can let me know with a slight nod of your head.

[00:20:38] Now, as a young child, imagine being with parents, but not the parents you grew up with in your family. Imagine now being with a different set of parents, parents who are ideally suited to you and to your nature. These parents are right there with you. They really know how to be with you, to help you feel so safe and secure. These parents really know how to be with you in all the ways that help you feel absolutely secure in the relationship with them. Now, if you’d like, you can incorporate positive aspects from experiences you’ve had, but imagine ideal fictional parents created entirely by your imagination, because you can change the imagination and keep changing it until you have it just right, with these parents having all the qualities that help you feel so safe and so secure in the relationship with them. These parents really know how to be with you in all the ways that you most need. Notice the ways that they are being with you right now. Notice how you feel as they’re with you in all the ways that you most need, and in all the ways that are so very right for you and for your well-being. So what’s going on here is the therapist brings to the client’s mind descriptions of all the specific qualities that these imagined parents possess, right? These parents have to protect the child. So there’s got to be safety and protection.

[00:22:06] The parents have to see and know the child and be attuned to the child’s emotional states. These parents calm and soothe the child. They reassure and comfort the child. They’re responsive when the child is upset and dysregulated. These imagined parents cherish the child. They rejoice in the very presence of the child. They delight in the little things that the child does, and they also encourage the child to attend to his or her own experience. And they encourage the child to explore the environment, which helps the child to develop. And they’re going to just be really willing the good for their child. All right. Now, do these things sound familiar at all? I mean, these specific parent qualities are based on attachment needs that, when met, are considered to promote secure attachment. And these are the five conditions of secure attachment that we reviewed in episode 23 of this podcast. That was titled Sinning, God Images, and Resilience. When I first heard about this, I heard about this from Dr. Peter Martin, clinical psychologist, friend of mine. It’s like, wow, you make all this up in your own head. The client is supposed to make up these ideal parent figures in their own imagination. And it just seemed like we were getting on the Mr. Rogers trolley to the land of make-believe. You know, it just felt like sort of a fake it til you make it thing, right? Well, there’s been the beginnings of some outcome research on this because I was kind of skeptical, like, does this really work? I mean, you just imagine these parents and then you are loved by them.

[00:23:41] And so there’s been a little pilot study, came out in 2017. It was peer reviewed in the European Journal, in the European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 17 French clients with complex PTSD. And it showed that there were pretty big effects, medium to large effect sizes in terms of a decrease in symptom severity and attachment traumatization. So there were increases in quality of life as well. And the eight-month follow up also showed outcome stability. So that’s like pretty impressive, although it was a very small study. So that’s the Idealized Parent protocol. I want to mention one more. And that is Laurel Parnell’s work. Laurel Parnell is a big name in trauma therapy, especially in EMDR circles. She wrote a book called Tapping In. And she said that basically within each of us is a hidden potential, a wellspring of untapped natural resources that we can use to heal our psychological wounds and help us better navigate the challenges we face in our lives. The problem is that these resources are too often buried, and we just don’t know how to access them. All right. So Laurel Parnell is saying, we have all the things we need to heal within us. We just need to get access to them, right? So as part of that, she says we need nurturing figures, right? She talks about how we need to find nurturing figures, protector figures, and inner wisdom figures within us.

[00:25:12] So we imagine these and they actually, in her presentation, exist, but they exist as untapped resources within us. We are like finding our inner guru, right? To lead us to health. In other words, there’s this sort of teleological idea that the pull to health and growth is within us. We just need to access it. It got disrupted by the trauma. And her tapping bilateral stimulation helps to resolve the obstacles to accessing that inner power. Right. So this is very positivistic. It’s very much like access your own stuff, access your own potential. And it’s interesting because she actually brings up the Blessed Virgin Mary and Jesus as nurturing figures, page 57. Right. She says, when she’s describing who can be nurturing figures, right. So she says figures from movies, TVs or books, historical figures or people from popular culture can be used as nurturing resources. Mr. Rogers, Mary Poppins, and the fairy godmother in Cinderella are examples of resources people have used. Spiritual figures can also be used as nurturers, including Mary, Jesus, a Native American elder, an angel, or one of the Buddhist goddesses like Kuan Yin or Tara. So here we have a secular psychologist, Laurel Parnell, who has, with her clients, used the Blessed Virgin Mary as a resource figure.

[00:26:45] But she’s not really thinking about it as in terms of like, who Mary really is. She’s using this sort of imagined representation, or she would say probably a real aspect of the person who sort of gets embodied as the Blessed Virgin Mary. All right. So these are three modern therapeutic approaches that all use mother and father figures. All right, for folks that have issues with trust in a deep sense of shame or inadequacy. All right. So here’s what I’m thinking. I’m a Catholic psychologist. I don’t need to believe that we have all the answers and all the resources within us. In fact, that’s not a Catholic position at all. That’s a position of de facto self-sufficiency, right? I mean, basically saying we’ve got everything we need within us, right? That’s very positivistic. That’s very humanistic. And it contradicts the fact that we need God, that we’re utterly dependent on God. So let me step back a minute. Two reasons I’m really attracted to Catholicism as a psychologist, sort of leaving the whole spiritual element aside, right? Just reasons I’m attracted to Catholicism, to the Catholic faith as a psychologist. One is that we have this God who’s 3 in 1. We have this relational God, we have God who is love, God who loves himself, right? Who like is this embodiment of love and who has the capacity to love himself. 3 in 1, right? You don’t get that with the God of Islam, right? The, you know, if you have a monolithic God, that’s just one, right? There’s no multiplicity there.

[00:28:36] There’s no different, you know, persons in one God, no three persons in one God, just one. There’s no possibility for that God to love himself, right? It wouldn’t make any sense. There can’t be any relationship if there’s just a solitary unity. Right? So that’s the first reason I’m attracted to Catholicism, is that there’s this 3 in 1. God is a relational God, right, who loves himself. Secondly, I’m really attracted to Catholicism because it’s the only religion that’s really got this family aspect to it. We have God as Father, which is huge, right. Now, that’s somewhat apparent in Judaism, right? You see God as Father in Judaism, it’s not as well developed as it is in Christianity, where it’s really emphasized. But, you know, and God is universal father, right. That’s one thing also about Christianity. It’s a universal religion. It’s for everybody, right? But the other thing about Christianity is that we got a mother. Not only do we have a father, but we’ve got a mother and we’ve got brothers and we’ve got sisters, and we’re all together in this mystical body of Christ. Right? So as a psychologist, seeing how much people need a father and a mother. It’s really interesting too, because in the IPF protocol from Brown and Elliott, they say you got to have a father and a mother.

[00:29:57] There wasn’t any of this business about two mothers, two fathers, you know, father and his new girlfriend. No, no, no. It’s a father and a mother. Right. And I’m attracted to Catholicism as a psychologist because we need our father and our mother. Right. But our primary father is not our earthly father, not our natural father. It’s God our father, and our primary mother is not the woman who gave birth to us in the natural realm. It is our the Blessed Virgin Mary, right? So as a psychologist interested in like repairing from family wounds, family trauma, to have a religion with a father and a mother, what you see is actually, you know, that some of these secular psychologists are sort of rediscovering these elements. They’re actually playing them out only as though they were in the mind of the client. But they’re reaching for that. They’re sort of moving that way. So let’s talk a little bit about an action item here. How do we, in practical terms, start dealing with these trust issues? How do we deal with these trust issues with God our Father? We just went through these, you know, 14 problematic God images in episodes 25 through 29. You know, all the terrible God images, the party pooper God and the statue God and the robber God and all these terrible God images, right? 

[00:31:35] And that’s the questions I’ve been getting from people in the Resilient Catholics Carpe Diem community. Like, when are we going to learn how to overcome these God images? Well, we’re going to start today. I’m actually going to start teaching you how we overcome these problematic God images. We’re going to start in this actual episode, right? Because we want to be able to access that truth, who God truly is. We want to overcome the trauma, develop the trust so that we can see who God truly is. Right? So I’m going to argue that for many of us, the fastest road to connecting with God the Father is to work with the Blessed Virgin Mary first. To work with the Blessed Virgin Mary first. Now, there may be some things here that don’t fit with you. Sometimes people have had actually pretty good relationships with their father and terrible relationships with their mother, and they can’t tolerate the issue of mother. And they feel a lot more comfortable with God as Father. Okay, go with that. Right. I’m going to encourage you to take what helps you, take what I offer you and choose what’s helpful. Leave the rest behind. Okay, so for many people, though, the experience of mother was more benign, right?

[00:32:52] And that makes sense in some ways because, you know, the ones that were the primary caregivers in that 0 to 24 months was often much more the mother than the father. There’s the nursing relationship, the feeding relationship, just the traditional childcare roles and so forth, often led people to have many of their developmental needs met more by mother than by father in the first couple of years. It’s not to say that fathers aren’t important. They obviously are very important, but they tend to figure more prominently once you get to 18, 24, 36, 48 months. So first practical tip, set aside time for the relationship with Mary. That’s the first thing is to carve out the time. And I mean, getting this into your planner, putting it on your to-do list, whatever way you organize. Setting aside consistent regular time. And that’s the critical thing here is the consistency and the regularity, not the length of time. I would far rather you spend three minutes in relationship with Mary every day of the week than to spend two hours in front of the Blessed Sacrament once a month, right? Daily. Every day. Right. We’re going to start very small because the important thing is to develop the habit of entering into relationship with Our Lady. Right? To start small, but to really have it be regular and think about the way that little infants, think about the way the toddlers relate. Do they tend to come into a room and gaze into the eyes of their mother for an hour? Typically not.

[00:34:33] And I’ll tell you, when I look at the trust issues that most of my clients have and that I think most people have, they’re pretty rough. There’s a lot of harm. There’s a lot of damage like we talked about, right, in terms of the psyche, the effects of original sin, the sins of others, our own personal sins. We got to start with the humility of little children, right? So it may mean praying one minute a day, one minute a day. Not that that’s where we want to end or that because we’re going to leap from that one minute to the pinnacles of sanctity in one single bound. But we want to start with something consistent every day, and we can build on that and it’s going to be gloriously imperfect. It’s going to be like a little kid praying, right. The little kid talking to their parents. They fumble around with the words, they don’t do it really clearly. But God understands, and especially Our Lady. We can connect with Our Lady understanding us being in that little place, right? It’s going to be gloriously imperfect. But she so cherishes it. Think about that, a mother whose little children never came to her in the past and now come to her for two minutes a day, three minutes a day.

[00:35:43] How wonderful is that? Think about it from her perspective for a minute. Okay, I’m going to make another recommendation. I really think that the best book out there that I’ve ever come across is My Ideal Jesus: Son of Mary by Father Emil Neubert. Little book, but very conversational. And it’s very much about who Mary is as our spiritual mother. There’s a lot of flaws in the book. I think there’s some things that aren’t helpful. At least there are things that are not helpful to me. Again, Father Emil Neubert was the one, who in his book, Union with Mary, said, take what’s helpful to you. He’s the one that has that great book chapter that says, you know, take only what applies to you, right? It’s the greatest book chapter ever. I talked about it in episode 30 or 31. I can’t remember, you know. Take only what applies to you. Find some line in that some image to meditate on. It’s also helpful to have a picture of Mary or a statue of Mary that you resonate with, not one that you think you’re supposed to resonate with, right? Like, I know a lot of people that really have a deep devotion to Our Lady of Czestochowa, right? And to this image, they’ve got it in their house or whatever. And I’m Polish and I look at that image and it doesn’t, I don’t like it.

[00:37:02] I don’t like that image. There’s, in fact, I’m very picky about Marian art. And there’s a lot of Marian art I don’t like. It looks all plasticky, looks like painted plaster. Doesn’t seem like relatable at all. I’ve got a few images that really help me. In fact, I’ve got an image right now, that I really like, by Tracy Christiansen, who happens to be an artist out in Seattle, a Catholic artist out in Seattle. It’s an image of Our Lady Undoer of Knots, who, as you know, she’s the patroness of Souls and Hearts. And so I’ve actually got that in front of me because I can relate with the way that that artist represents Our Lady. So find some Marian art that helps you to connect with her, right. Now in the prayer. This is really critical. You focus on Mary, not so much on you, right? Little kids are not so introspective, right? They’re not always focused on themselves and their pain and their hurt. You know, if they’ve had sort of a reasonable relationship, they can focus on the other person, right? So the focusing on you can come later, right? Then I’m going to really invite that you slow your breathing down. This is a way to just really slow your breathing down. I’m going to get into some more detail about this in the RCCD community when we do some more advanced work on prayer. But just to sort of let that breathing slow down. Breathing is one of those things, we’ve talked about it before.

[00:38:33] I think it was on Be with the Word a number of episodes back, but it’s the one aspect of your autonomic nervous system, which is kind of like your automatic nervous system, that you can control, right? And so when you start to breathe slowly, because you’re actively working on that, it tells your body that we don’t have to fight, we don’t have to flee. We can calm down. Right? So you’re sending a message to your whole system that it’s okay, right? So to breathe deeply in through your mouth, out through your nose, slowing that down. And then to accept what happens in that prayer time, just that it happens, right? To set aside all that evaluation, all that criticism. I’m not doing it well enough. I’m not feeling what I should be feeling. To set all that aside, whatever that is, whatever that critic in you says, just see if you can get a little space and, just like a little child, accept what’s happening. Right. There’s this quote. I’ve brought it up in this podcast before from Chesterton that I just love. And he said in his 1910 book, What’s Wrong with the World, he has this quote. “If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.” If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.

[00:39:51] This, for me, is a tremendous antidote to the desires for perfectionism that I experience, that many people experience. You probably experience it, right? Often we’ve been told, you know, if something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well. We have this impulse toward perfectionism, but the more important something is, the less precise we’re going to be able to do it, the less perfectly we’re going to be able to do it. So I have a son who is a precision machinist. He’s 18 years old. He can precision machine metal to 1/10,000 of an inch, right, microns. He’s really, really good at what he does, you know, but who would say like that I am very precise in the way that I love my wife, or I can love my children in a way that is just so, so excellent. So right on the money, right? That’s like creepy, right? Who says that they would love their wife precisely, that they would love their husband precisely? So the more important something is, the messier it’s going to be. It’s going to be untidy. So we really have to accept that in prayer, right, which is the most important thing we can be doing. You know, prayer being the lifting of our minds and hearts to God, right, entering into relationship with God. It’s going to be messy, right? So we’re going to accept whatever happens and we’re going to tell our Lady what we’re thinking, feeling, you know, what our impulses are, what our desires are.

[00:41:35] We’re just going to lay it all to her as best we can in the awkward sentences and the awkward words of children. Right. We’re going to confide to her whatever is going on in our hearts, whatever we know, all the confusion, all the pain, all of it, right? We’re going to give it all to her. And then we’re going to listen. We’re going to listen to what she says in response. This is tough for a lot of people because we get into what I call return address syndrome, right? That’s where, was that a message from Our Lady? Or was that just me making that up? You know, I don’t really want to listen to this because it could be like all conflated with my own issues, or it could be demonic or I could be mistaken. So I’m not going to listen to our Lady. I’m not going to listen to God. Right. It’s very common to hear that from people very unsettled by the whole idea that Our Lady might actually communicate back. Right. And how would you? So they look always at the return address on the message, right? And frankly, you know, I can’t tell you that this is a message from Our Lady or that this is from your angel, your guardian angel, or this came from the devil or whatever, right? It’s really hard to do this kind of discernment of spirits.

[00:42:53] I’ve not given that capacity as a psychologist in my training to make those distinctions, but I can say, let’s look at the message. Does the message conform to what we know to be true by divine revelation? If it is, then let’s go with it, because God knew that you were going to have that message at that time. And even if you’re misconstruing it in some way, if you’re actively trying to discern his will and to discern what he’s telling you, or to discern what Our Lady is telling you for God, it’s going to be all right. He’s not going to just leave you to twist in the wind. Right. So we want to listen. And then I’m going to encourage people to write down what they experience, right? So I have a whole lot of different colored pens and pencils. I have about like, I think it’s like 15 different writing instruments, I think 16 actually, 16 different colors, pencils, pens that I use when I do this sort of stuff. And the aqua-colored one, my aqua-colored fountain pen is what I use to write down what I hear our Lady saying to me. I have a really rich, regal purple one that I use for what I hear Jesus telling me. And then I write to them in black.

[00:44:06] Unless I’m feeling really grateful, in which I write in orange, I have all these different colors. People that know me know that I carry around this pencil case in a thigh pocket of my tactical pants. So we’re going to write that down. Remember Mary’s going to help you, right. She is going to help you work through all of this stuff. We need to create a space though where she can speak to us. We need to create a space for us to tell her what’s going on within us and a space to listen. So we’re going to go through the practical tips again, right? First thing, set aside time for relationship with Mary every day. Start small, but be really regular and consistent. Put it in your planner, put it on your to-do list or tie it to something that happens every day. You do it before you brush your teeth or right after lunch, or tie it somehow to some part of the day. Start small, two minutes, three minutes, if you’re not doing anything at all. And allow it to be gloriously imperfect. Second thing, I recommend My Ideal Jesus: Son of Mary. Take what’s helpful from that. Third thing, get yourself some Marian art. Justify the expense. You know, go ahead and spend that $0.65 on that holy card or, as I’ve done, you know, hundreds of dollars on different art books, trying to find images  that I really like that I could cut out with a razor knife or something.

[00:45:28] Focus on her and who she is in the prayer, right. And that’s what the art can help you with, right? Not who you are. That can come later. Fourth thing, breathe. You know, that helps you to regulate your autonomic nervous system and calm down. Five, accept whatever happens in that prayer. Just that it happened. That doesn’t mean you have to endorse it, or that you necessarily have to go with it, but accepting that it happened. Six, confiding in Our Lady, telling her your feelings, your thoughts, your body sensations, your impulses, your attitudes, your beliefs, whatever’s happening. Seven, listening to Our Lady, taking in what she’s telling us, really being open to it and then writing it down, right? Knowing that she’s going to help you. And we’re going to get into obstacles to this. You know, typical obstacles that people have. And I really want you to tell me what your obstacles are. If you do this, right, I want you to tell me what your obstacles are. Email me, crisis@soulsandhearts.com. Text me or call me, (317) 567-9594. If you are in the RCCD community, go ahead and PM me, private message me on our Mighty Networks app. Let me know how this is all going.

[00:46:51] I’m really interested in what you all are struggling with in your prayer life in this kind of exercise, right? And if something keeps coming up, I’m going to bring it up on the air. We’re going to work through it in the podcasts because I really want there to be change. I really want you to enter into that deep relationship with your mother, because she is there to heal whatever mother wounds you have. Right? So, all right, so if you’re already in the Resilient Catholics Carpe Diem community and you haven’t gotten on our app, I’ve been trying to email folks, saying, hey, come on over. Come join the app because that’s where all the action happens. That’s where we have the discussions about the podcasts. That’s where people introduce themselves. That’s where people are sharing their experiences. That’s where we’ve got polls going on. That’s where we post extra bonus podcasts, for example. And that’s where we discuss what goes on in our Zoom meetings. There’s all kinds of things that go on with that. Now, $25 a month. So it’s really cheap, less than a dollar a day. All kinds of things up there for that. So on Thursday, September 10th, from 7:30 to 8:45 p.m., we’re going to have a Zoom meeting for RCCD members. This is going to be a great thing because we’re going to talk about the first 24 months.

[00:48:13] We’re going to talk about Mary. We’re going to talk about overcoming these trust issues. We’re going to be getting into like how people are reacting to this kind of exercise, what’s getting in the way. So we’re getting into much more of the practical stuff now within the community. So that’s all part of the value that you get for your community membership. Really encouraging people to come on and join September 18th. That’s the last day that you get the free 30 days. After that, we’re cutting that off. You’re just going to have to pay the $25 a month. And we’re doing that just to tighten up the community. Sometime in late October, maybe sometime in early November, we’re going to close the community to new members for a few months, and that’s so that we can really get to know each other, dig in and be working. I don’t want to have a constant sort of revolving door. I want to get some cohorts together so that people can work together in groups. And I can also have some time to like, work with the folks that are involved already. So that’s going to happen as well. So without any further ado, then, let’s go ahead and invoke our patroness and our patron. Our Lady, our Mother, our primary mother. We’re going to come to you, Mother, these listeners, we’re coming. We’re going to come and find you. We’re going to create that time for you. We love you, our Mother, Untier of Knots, pray for us. Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.