IIC 36: Why We Flee From Real Love

We discuss the three main reasons we flee from real love, or charity, and the consequences of that, using examples from literature and original poetry.

[00:00:12] Welcome to the podcast Coronavirus Crisis Carpe Diem, where by God’s grace, 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 spiritual realms than we were before. I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski, and I am here with you to be your host and guide. This podcast is part of Souls and Hearts, our online outreach at soulsandhearts.com, which is all about shoring up the natural foundation for the spiritual life, all about overcoming psychological obstacles to being loved and to loving. Thank you for being here with me. This is episode 36, released on October 5th, 2020, and it is titled Why We Flee from Real Love. Why We Flee from Real Love. We’re going to get right into it today. We’re not going to review anything. We’re not taking listener questions. So buckle up. This is a critically important topic. Why do we flee from real love, from charity, from the love of God? Well, I’m going to just tell you flat out, there are three main reasons why we flee from real love: pain, fear, and anger. Pain, fear, and anger. And all of these are rooted in misunderstanding. All of these are rooted in perceptual distortions. We want to avoid pain, fear and anger.

[00:02:03] This is a natural instinct. Freud talked about this. He had this concept of the pleasure principle. The pleasure principle for Freud is the instinctive seeking of pleasure and avoiding of pain to satisfy biological and psychological needs. Basically, it’s the psychological analogy of the philosophical position of hedonism. Right now, I talk a lot about how we have to tolerate being loved, and that’s a deliberate use of language on my part. I use the word “tolerate” deliberately, and sometimes people don’t get it. Sometimes people are like, tolerate being loved. What does that mean? They often will say, I just want to be loved. There’s no problem tolerating, you just bring it on. I want to be loved. And what they’re often saying when they say that is that they want to be emotionally gratified, you know, like the love in Hallmark card commercials or Hallmark movies. The Hallmark channel is amazing at how they can manipulate emotions so that you can feel good when you watch a movie. It’s really remarkable. It’s sort of this kind of easy love that just comes naturally. The Hallmark channel is like romance novels, just sort of brought to life on the screen. It’s a kind of emotional junk food that nourishes illusions. It’s basically a love that doesn’t have any cost or sacrifice to it. It’s extremely satisfying, extremely gratifying, and it doesn’t demand very much from the people who are engaged in the relationships.

[00:03:49] When you are a baby, it’s actually easy to receive love. You have a natural openness. You have a natural receptivity. But then as life goes on, these negative experiences start to to happen, right? These slings and arrows, attachment injuries, relational wounds, because we have fallen natures, we live in a fallen world. Sometimes there’s more significant trauma, different kinds of deprivations, or different kinds of acts that happen that lead us to have difficulty and problems with trusting. This leads to a sense of vulnerability, an internal sense that certain things are not safe and that I need to protect myself. So that fear response starts to come in as infants, as toddlers begin to recognize that certain situations are dangerous. You have fear, you have avoidance. And you can see this again in Genesis 3. I often go back to Genesis 3, when Adam and Eve, after the sin in the Garden of Eden, withdraw from God, right? They’re afraid. They pull back. They’re angry. You can hear them bickering with each other. Fear, anger, and pain. So what you also see sometimes is that there are some people who want to focus on loving first, not being loved, not accepting love, not tolerating love. And here we get the cart before the horse. Because our Lord tells us, love your neighbor as yourself. Right? That implies that we’re supposed to love ourselves. But some people, they don’t want to go through the difficulty of tolerating being loved.

[00:05:32] They don’t want the vulnerability. They want to focus on loving. It seems more spiritual, it seems more advanced, it seems more noble. And the thing about it is that the focus is on the other person, right? But when you try to love without being loved, you’re going to wind up with real limitations. You might be doing good things for the other person, or doing good things unto the other person, but it’s going to be very difficult, if you don’t have a sense of being loved, for you to really be with that person in the way that they need. Real love burns. It hurts. It purifies us. Freud talked about how, in the development of little children, that there be both gratification and frustration. Problems happen. Neuroses, he said, develop when a child is overly gratified or when a child is overly frustrated. So there has to be this balance of gratification and frustration. And the Scripture is really clear about how God’s love has a burning, purifying effect. I am just going to talk about precious metals for a little bit here. I’m going to talk about the number of references to refining precious metals in Scripture. In 1 Peter 1:7, goes like this. “So that the tested genuineness of your faith, more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire, may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.”

[00:07:25] So Saint Peter is telling us that the genuineness of our faith is more precious than gold that perishes, that’s just temporal. Gold is eventually going to fade away with the rest of creation. We’re going to be tested by fire. Isaiah 48:10. We’re bringing in silver now. Isaiah speaking for God says, “Behold, I have refined you, but not as silver. I have tried you in the furnace of affliction.” Zechariah 13:9. “And I will put this third into the fire and refine them as one refines silver, and test them as gold is tested. They will call upon my name, and I will answer them. And I will say, ‘They are my people.’ And they will say, ‘The Lord is my God.'” So refining the Israelites as the silversmith refines silver. Proverbs 17:3. “The crucible is for silver, and the furnace is for gold, but the Lord tests hearts.” And why does he do that? Well, he’s helping us to change, to grow, to be purified, to remove the disorder, the dysfunction, the vice that resides in our hearts, in our souls. Job talks about this in chapter 23. “But he knows the way that I take. When he has tried me, I shall come out as gold.” And that purification is so important. It’s so important for us to no longer have this admixture of all this disorder, dysfunction, and vice. We don’t understand it, though.

[00:09:13] We really struggle with understanding it. Let me give you a really poignant example from clinical experience. In 1998 and 1999, I did my clinical internship at the University of Washington Medical School in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. And one of my rotations was on a burn unit. It was a burn unit that served three U.S. states and two Canadian provinces. It was a tertiary care unit, people with really severe burns. And one of the things that I observed was the occupational therapists and physical therapists working with people that had had extensive skin grafts, sometimes as much as 70, 80% of their bodies. And there would be children in there that would have gotten very serious burns. And the skin of children is thinner than that of adults. It burns readily. And when little kids had significant burns on their hands, for example, there were all kinds of stretching and different kinds of exercises they would have to do so that the skin grafts wouldn’t contract, which would lead them to have very limited mobility. In other words, they would wind up with their hands, for example, because the skin grafts on their fingers, if those tightened up, they wouldn’t be able to move their fingers. They would basically have immobile hands. And so the physical therapists and occupational therapists would move their fingers for them. And it was extremely painful for these little children.

[00:10:47] Really painful. And when you’re really small, two, three, four years old, you don’t understand what’s going on. It’s like that. We’re like those little children. We don’t understand what the physical therapist is doing when he’s moving our hands. But there’s a tremendous good to be had in it and a tremendous loss if we were just to go with our inclinations, which would be to protect and guard our hands, because then we would wind up with these claws. So God is like that. He loves us enough to take us through that process. And it’s our job to be small enough and trust enough for that to allow him to do it. Because when we’re adults, he won’t do it without our permission. He won’t enter into our hearts and cleanse them unless we welcome him. Fleeing from love ultimately leads us to hell. Ultimately, that’s where we wind up. And ultimately, it’s the only thing that leads us to hell. If we embrace love fully, we would not sin, because God is love, says Saint John. If we embrace love fully, we’re embracing God fully, and then sin becomes impossible. We wouldn’t even be attracted to it if we really knew who God was, and we really knew what he was doing and why. I’ve had a number of clients and other people to tell me about experiencing hell on earth. And I believe them, in a certain sense, in the sense that they’re discussing how painful their existence is.

[00:12:34] C.S. Lewis talked about how pain is God’s megaphone. It’s a way that he tries to reach us. It’s a way of indicating that something’s wrong, that we need to attend to something. It’s a symptom that grabs our attention, rivets our focus on resolving whatever the underlying issue is. Love is not what we think it is. We mistakenly assume that gratification is love. We misunderstand love. Loving has a really important prerequisite. This being loved is the prerequisite for loving. There’s an old Latin saying, nemo dat quod non habet. No one gives what they don’t have. And this has actually been enshrined in law. It’s called the nemo dat rule. It basically means that you cannot give what you don’t have. And in law, that means you can’t sell something that you don’t own. It protects the rightful owners of property from having their properties essentially stolen and sold. Every client, when they come into my office, when they have a particular struggle, when they’re wounded, when they have an affliction. Right? The ultimate cause of that was a lack of love, a lack of love. The ultimate cause of all disorder is sin, original sin and its effects, the sins of others and their effects, and our own personal sins and their effects. It’s the only thing that causes disorder. Sin is a lack of love, a moral evil, a failure to love. If you look at the two great commandments, to love God and love our neighbor, right? The two commandments, the two great commandments that our Lord gave us, what is the opposite of that? Like what would a failure of those two great commandments mean? What would it look like? Well, it would be an omission.

[00:14:36] An omission of love. A failure to love. Now Saint Augustine, in his Enchiridion, in chapter four, talks about how evil is a privation of good. It’s the lack of a good where a good should be, right? And he says this. “All of nature, therefore, is good since the creator of all nature is supremely good. But nature is not supremely and immutably good, as is the creator of it. Thus the good and created things can be diminished and augmented. For a good to be diminished is evil.” This was the great insight that led Saint Augustine out of Manichaeism, you know, which is this dualistic religion in which, you know, good and evil forces are sort of evenly balanced and in this continual struggle for supremacy in the world. But he saw that, no, it’s actually not a battle between light and darkness. The darkness doesn’t exist except as the absence of light. Right. Evil doesn’t exist except as a privation of good. The evils that we experience, ultimately, are privations of good, which means essentially a lack of love. So this leads us to why being loved is so important.

[00:16:07] Being loved is so important because real love restores us. It brings us back. It heals us. It fills us. It removes the privation of the good that creates the evil, that is, in essence, the evil. So we need to bring this love into our lives and into our hearts, into our souls, into our bodies, into our minds, into all of us, in order to heal. In two words, if I were to summarize this in two words, it is these two words: love heals. That is the essence of the clinical work that I do, and that is the essence of healing in general. Love heals. There isn’t anything else that heals. Love heals when we’re talking about emotional psychological wounds. I really thought about like examples of tolerating being loved. Where were these examples in literature? And the first one that I thought of was the Jack London story of White Fang. And in that story, White Fang was born wild, ultimately domesticated by Gray Beaver, a Native American, and sold to a terrible man called Beauty Smith, who taught him fighting, cage fighting with other dogs. And not only dogs, but lynx and and wolves and all kinds of creatures. Really screwed him up. Really screwed up White Fang. But he was rescued by the main character, Weedon Scott. And there’s a chapter in there called The Love Master. And it’s a remarkably written book in that it really enters into an anthropomorphized understanding of White Fang’s experience.

[00:18:20] Similarly, in literature, we have The Horse Whisperer. This is, a lot of you might be familiar with the Robert Redford movie that came out in 1998, where Robert Redford plays Buck Brannaman, who was the horse whisperer, who worked with horses that had been traumatized in various ways, were unmanageable, thought to be basically too far gone, too wild, too uncontrollable. And I thought about other examples from literature. There is, of course, Beauty and the Beast. It was a fairy tale written originally by the French novelist Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve and published in 1740. It went through a whole lot of different kinds of versions and screenplays and so forth. Most people are probably familiar with the Disney version, which came out in 1991. And then there’s obviously many of us have heard the story of the Refiner’s Fire. And I’ll just share that with you, in case you haven’t heard it. But a young man came upon a silversmith refining silver in his shop, and he was sitting in front of his fire. And the young man asked, “Why do you heat the silver?” And the refiner answered, “In order to make it pure, I have to remove all the impurities that make it worth less than it really is.” And the young man thought about this, and he thought about times of trial, times of tribulation that had purified him.

[00:20:02] He asked the silversmith, “Why do you sit while you work?” And the refiner said, “I have to watch the fire carefully. Too little heat and the impurities will not be removed. Too much heat and the precious metal will not set properly.” The young man reflected about this and considered the balance, the care, the attention that the silversmith paid to the beautiful silver and the refining fire. The presence, the being with, the attention. Then the young man asked the refiner, “How do you know when the silver is at the right temperature?” And the refiner smiled and said, “I know that the purification is complete when I can see my perfect reflection in the silver.” Right. We need to be reformed, reshaped, purified until the point where God’s reflection is perfectly captured in us, where we reflect the image of God perfectly. Well, I am very pleased to say that we have a guest in the studio again today. She requested a chance to just share some of her thoughts about the podcast, especially the last episode. And so I am very honored to introduce Lucy Malinoski, my daughter. Hello, Lucy. It’s good to have you with us on the show again today. How are you?

[00:21:39] Lucy: Good.

[00:21:40] Good, good. Now, you had something that you wanted to share with our audience, right? What is it that you want to share with our audience, Lucy?

[00:21:47] Lucy: Dad, you know, you were right when you said in your podcast that little Lucy would be rolling her eyes because I was rolling my eyes when I listened to your podcast.

[00:22:01] And which part of the podcast were you rolling your eyes at, little Lucy?

[00:22:06] Lucy: The part with the dad poem in it.

[00:22:11] The part with the dad poem in it, huh? So do you like it when I do poetry on these podcasts, Lucy, or not?

[00:22:18] Lucy: It’s okay. It usually, it’s just like your normal poetry, which isn’t that good.

[00:22:27] It’s like my normal poetry, which isn’t that good. Well, we’ll see. We’ll try some different poetry. Okay. I’ll let you know. Well, you’ll have to tell me what you think. Okay. Are there things that you really like about the podcasts, Lucy.

[00:22:44] Lucy: I don’t know. They’re just easy to listen to when nobody’s home.

[00:22:48] They’re easy to listen to when there’s nobody home? Okay. All right. Well, is there anything else you would like to say to all the people out there listening?

[00:22:55] Lucy: No.

[00:22:56] Okay. Thank you for being here with me, Lucy. You’re my Lucy.

[00:23:00] Lucy: You’re my daddy.

[00:23:01] And I love you, Lucy.

[00:23:02] Lucy: I love you, daddy.

[00:23:03] Bye bye. As I was thinking about literature that sort of captured this tension around being loved, I wasn’t finding exactly what I wanted. So when I can’t find what I want, I often think about just making it. So I actually have a Petrarchan sonnet that I composed to share with you. It’s in the standard form that good old time poetry was written in, but with a little more of a modern theme. And I like writing poetry that actually is to be recited, to be heard by the ear, because there’s a richness in the retelling, a richness, a resonance, a depth, in the telling of the poem, in the reciting of the poem, that’s not conveyed necessarily by the words on the page. And so here we go. This sonnet is She Who Was Abused. Her spiteful eyes, they scream, we swim in tears! You see how God has cursed and battered me? Yes. Speak again of grace and care that he poured out in me in childhood’s tragic years. You fool! Are you so blind as my death nears, to try again to love me, Pharisee? I’m wounded and ashamed and damned I’ll be, if I’ll get speared once more by hope, she sneers. In anguish, angry, and ashamed, she fled from one who loved her deep and sure, who stayed behind her, patient, silent. His heart bled. Respecting her will, choices she has made, still yet he seeks her. She now turns her head. At last their eyes meet, his calm, hers afraid. This poem was inspired by many clients and many others that I’ve talked to that have experienced significant, complex trauma in childhood, neglect, abuse.

[00:25:39] And we’re not just talking about the ordinary kinds of things that happen in just day to day life. We’re talking about severe, really heart-rending, heart-crushing things. And one of the things that I’m struck by is that in situations like this, the outcome can go either way. I’ve worked with people who decided, they made the decision to be loved again, in spite of the wounds, in spite of the pain, in spite of the fear, in spite of the anger, in spite of the bitterness. They made the decision to be open to being loved again. They made the decision to be receptive again, and I’ve seen others that refused, that said no, never. And they meant it, at least during the time that I worked with them. There’s a balance here. God preserves our freedom. And I understand, I hear the cries, I hear, how could this have happened? How could you, God, have let this happen? This was too terrible. This was too overwhelming. I was only 18 months old. I was only three years old when this happened. It didn’t make sense. And for many people, it doesn’t make sense now. And philosophers have discussed and debated over the problem of evil, the nature of evil, for millennia now. There’s a balance, though. There’s a space to choose to believe that God is good, to believe that he loved me, to believe that he didn’t actively will this harm to come to me. But he allowed it.

[00:27:38] And the reason he allowed it, there was really only one reason he allowed it, and that was for some greater good to come from it. And what happens in trauma is that imaginations get stunted. It’s hard to hold onto any sense of awe and wonder anymore. And so to believe that some greater good could come from it is often infuriating to people, to be honest. You have to be delicate about these things. You want to be careful not to come off as pollyannaish or simple or naive. It can be very offensive to people if they feel like you’re minimizing the degree of pain that they’ve gone through. But nevertheless, God is still good. I have had a number of people who have had parts that wanted to draw me in to agreeing that God was bad to them, to agreeing that God hated them, that God didn’t care about them. And there’s a choice about how we handle those impulses within us, how we handle those feelings. Are we going to still be open to God? Are we going to trust what we know to be true by divine revelation, by who God tells us he is? Or are we going to go with our own vision? Are we going to go with our own standards, our own measurements? This is the big question. And if you begin to trust, there’s this iterative dance. There’s this dance that goes back and forth, a fear of vulnerability, but a little bit of openness, a little bit of connection with God and then retreating, right.

[00:29:22] Getting to know God, getting to know by experience that he is not like what we experienced in the traumas that we had. That dance, that dance. That’s the critical dance for folks that are really struggling with terrible things that have happened to them in their lives. And there is no shortage of people who give in to their bitterness, to their anger, to their resentment, to their hatred, to being closed. In fact, it’s really, really common. But no matter why we flee from God, no matter why we reject him, the outcome is the same. He’s not going to invade us. He’ll follow us like he did in Genesis 3 when he sought out Adam and Eve in the Garden. He’ll follow us like in this poem, you know, patient, silent, bleeding for her, respecting her will though, respecting her limits, respecting her boundaries, and waiting for us. That’s the amazing thing that our God waits for us. He actually has reached out to serve us, to help us. He knew everything that was going to happen to us. He knew every trauma that was going to happen in our lives. He knew everything that was going to harm us. He has a plan for it. We need to hold onto that. We need to believe that, even when it’s hard. So moving onto a little bit of a brighter note, I am pleased to announce that we have a winner in our competition from the last podcast episode, Bridget of Bellingham, Washington, came up with the correct answer.

[00:31:22] She found the dad play on words in episode 35. Remember in episode 35 that we had an imaginary listener who wanted to remain anonymous, so he changed his name to Johnny Hind. Okay, so hind, one of the definitions of the word hind is a female deer. A female deer. Well, that’s a doe, right? So Johnny Hind translates to John Doe. John Doe wanted to remain anonymous, so he changed his name to Johnny Hind. That is the dad play on words. Bridget won the competition, so I will be sending her the commentary on the Gospel of Matthew by Curtis Mitch and Edward Sri. While we’re speaking about poetry — well, we weren’t really speaking about poetry, but I’m going to invite you to send me your poetry. Especially if it has to do with Catholicism and and psychology. We actually have a place on our website, our Souls and Hearts website, it’s our Journeys of the Soul section, where our Souls and Hearts members can post their stories. And so if you have poetry, especially poetry about your journey, poetry about your spiritual life, we’d love to have that. You can email that to me at crisis@soulsandhearts.com. You can call me or text me on my cell at (317) 567-9594. The Resilient Catholics Carpe Diem community grew up around this podcast, and it’s filled with people that are really interested in growing more and more resilient, both in the natural realm and in the psychological realm, people who are seizing the day, people who are seizing this moment as an opportunity for spiritual and psychological growth.

[00:33:14] We have been doing Zoom meetings, and our Zoom meeting from September 29th was very powerful for many people. We recorded the garden wall exercise. This is about being able to relate to God in a completely new way. It’s about opening up to being able to be loved by God. And so the introduction to that exercise and the exercise itself is posted in the RCCD community. It’s one of the many things that community members get access to for only $25 a month. Now we’re going to be closing our community membership on November 3rd. It’s going to be closed for several weeks, and that’s going to allow me some time to do some reorganization to get our programming straightened out for 2021, and to be able to make it even better for the people that are there. If you go to our landing page for the Resilient Catholics Carpe Diem community, there are five members who have talked about their experience up there. You should really check that out. You go to soulsandhearts.com/rccd for Resilient Catholics Carpe Diem. You can check out that landing page. I want to invite you there. I’d love to see you there. Reach out to me. Get in touch. Let us know how you’re doing. (317) 567-9594, crisis@soulsandhearts.com. Don’t be strangers. Come and join us. And now let’s invoke our patroness and our patron. Our Lady, our Mother, Undoer of Knots, pray for us. Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.