IIC 37: The Silent Killer Who Stalks You From Inside

Dr. Peter discusses the silent killer that makes vulnerability seem so dangerous:  Shame.

[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 the 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 our natural foundation for the spiritual life. Souls and Hearts and this podcast is all about overcoming psychological obstacles to being loved and to loving. Thank you for being here with me. This is episode 37 released on October 12th, 2020, and it is titled The Silent Killer Who Stalks You from Inside. I want to talk with you about the silent killer, the worst adversary I face clinically, the greatest rival, the greatest opponent to love and to life that I have ever met within another person or within myself. This one is a very stealthy, effective, and ruthless killer. It’s often hidden beneath the surface of consciousness and the murky waters deep below where we cannot see. But then at times it surfaces, powerful, moving. And maybe you think I’m being dramatic, but I’m not. I’ve seen it kill others, and I’ve been seriously wounded by it myself.

[00:02:01] This is a killer on the natural level and also on the spiritual level. This assassin slays not only hearts, minds, and bodies, but also souls. A very comprehensive murderer, very complete. This hitman does his work often slowly but very thoroughly. Who is this killer? High blood pressure? No. Stroke? No. Heart disease? No. Diabetes? No. Cancer? No. These can and do kill bodies, but as serious as they are, they are nowhere near as deadly to most people as our silent killer. Who is this killer? The devil? Satan? No. Not Satan. Satan cherishes this killer. Satan prizes the stealthy, sneaking, clandestine work that this killer does. But this killer is not Satan. No, it’s not Satan, because this killer lives within us in a way that demons ordinarily do not. This killer has a pass to roam within us, to move within our being. Satan doesn’t unless we are possessed. Extremely unlikely. Besides, Satan does not have permission to slay us or to harm us unless God permits it, at least with his passive will, at least with his permissive will, and then only for our greater good. Now here’s the thing. This killer seems meek and modest, but when it whispers its messages in our ear, it evokes in us fear, anxiety, depression, and efforts to do more and more. And it can also provoke us to anger, aggression, violence. Unchecked, this killer can bring us all the way to helplessness, hopelessness, despair, and even suicide.

[00:03:49] Now some of us try to numb ourselves to distract ourselves from this killer by using alcohol, drugs, food, binging on Netflix, hours of social media, masturbation, porn, shopping, compulsive exercise, gambling, surfing the web, video games, sleeping the day away, dissociating, and even cutting and burning our bodies, all in an attempt to get away from this killer. Who is this killer? It is absolutely vital for us to know. Is it guilt? No. Depression? No. Anxiety, fear, anger? No, no, no. Is it pride? No, it’s not pride. But this killer has a close and intimate relationship with pride. The killer feeds pride and is nourished in return by pride. Who is this killer? Take a moment. I want you really to think about it. We need to know this killer. We need to know its movements. We need to know how it works. We need to know how it functions. We need to know our adversary. And we will. Today we will be getting to know this silent killer. But not yet. We’ve got to look beyond this killer for a moment. There is one thing that disarms this killer. One thing. And that one thing is love. Real, authentic love. Charity. Love rescues us from this killer. It transforms us, and it makes us immune to the silent killer who then no longer has power over us. So let’s shift gears for a moment here and talk about love. Right? I go back to the two great commandments, Matthew chapter 22, verses 35 to 40. “And one of them, a lawyer, asked Jesus a question to test him. ‘Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the law?’ And Jesus said to him, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And the second is like it. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.'”

[00:06:25] So our Lord couldn’t be clearer. Our main job, our main task, our purpose in life, is to love God and to love our neighbor with all of ourselves, with all your heart, with all your mind, with all your soul. And back in those days, the heart covered not only the seat of the emotions and thinking, but also our bodies. Right? So he’s incorporating all four of those, body, mind, heart and soul. And we need to love our neighbor as ourself. Let’s think about that. We need to love our neighbor as ourself. Jesus doesn’t say that we need to love our neighbor more than ourselves, right? It could be implied. I wonder if that’s even possible. But we know that we need to love our neighbor as ourself, which implies, it’s very clear, we need to love ourselves. That means we need to be loved by ourselves. We need to love us. So I was reflecting on last week’s episode, Why We Flee from Real Love.

[00:07:27] Remember that? Episode 36. We flee from real love. We avoid real love. We discussed how fear and avoidance and anger get in the way. We talked about how real love burns, how it requires us to give up dysfunctional coping mechanisms. It can even require us to give up good things that are lesser than love, that love needs to displace in our lives. We discussed how how being open and receptive to real love creates vulnerability within us. But we didn’t discuss who or what causes our vulnerability to seem so dangerous to us. Who does that? Why does that happen? How does that happen? Well, that’s the silent killer raising its ugly head again. It’s our silent killer that makes vulnerability seem so perilous, so dangerous, so potentially catastrophic. The silent killer. We need to be loved in order to pass that love on. Remember last episode? Just a brief review. Nemo dat quod non habet. No one gives what they don’t have. You can’t give what you don’t have. And so if you’ve not taken love in, if you’ve not had that experience of being loved, if you’ve not been open and receptive to love, you’re not going to be able to reflect love back to God and love your God above all else. You’re not going to be able to love your neighbor. And if you haven’t taken love in, you’re not going to be able to love yourself either. We are called to love our neighbors, to be a channel of love for our brothers and sisters here on earth.

[00:09:17] So ultimately, what I want for you is to be able to love God so much better and to love your neighbor so much better. So I’m going to do a whole series of episodes in this podcast on loving God and a whole another series on how to love your neighbor. We’re going to focus on the psychological aspects that make this so much more difficult than it has to be. And that’s really what Souls and Hearts is all about. You know, at soulsandhearts.com, it’s all about grace, perfecting nature. Our patron saint is Saint John the Baptist. And why? Because he prepared the way for the Lord. We are all about human formation and psychological preparation for the spiritual life. That’s what Souls and Hearts is all about. But in order to love God better and in order to love our neighbor better, we need to be able to receive love better. We can’t flee from love and then expect that we’re going to be anything like proficient at loving others or loving God. Right? So before we get into those series about loving God and loving your neighbor, those two series of podcast episodes we’re going to do, we’re all going to do a whole series of episodes on receiving love. We’re going to do we’re going to have episodes on receiving love from God our Father.

[00:10:38] We’re going to have an episode on receiving love from Mary, our mother. We’re going to have an episode on receiving love from Jesus and from the Holy Spirit. Another episode on love from the Saints. An episode on loving ourselves in an ordered way, and an episode on receiving love from others. All right. So you kind of see that, we want to love God, we want to love our neighbor, but we don’t start there. That’s where so many people make the mistake. They hear the command and they want to rush right into it. They don’t do the prerequisite work. And for so many people, the limiting factor is how little they love themselves, how little love they take in from God. Which means that we have little love to give back to God. Then we need to know what the obstacles are, especially the psychological obstacles to receiving love. We need to know what stands in the way of us loving of us, giving of ourselves freely, not under compulsion, love not being extracted from us and us not being robbed. That’s not giving freely. We need to know what gets in the way of us giving freely. What makes it difficult for us to receive the love that we need to give to others? And that brings us back, face to face, with our silent killer. And now it’s time to identify this silent killer, the silent killer, the worst adversary that I face in my clinical work with clients, the greatest rival, the greatest opponent to love and to life that I have ever met within another person or within myself is:

[00:12:20] Shame. Shame is the silent killer. Shame is the assassin. Shame is the murderer. Shame is the most serious natural level problem that clients have that I think people have in general. We are going to be focusing the rest of this episode on really getting into really understanding, really gripping onto what shame is. Most people, when they begin to address this topic, have very fuzzy notions about shame. And in fact, I just spent some time. I deal with shame a lot, but I had to spend some time going into definitional issues. And you know what? I have not yet found an adequate definition for shame that covers all the bases that need to be covered. Part of this is because English has real limitations. It has a real restricted vocabulary when it comes to expressing the nuances of internal experience. It’s really important that we get this whole idea of what shame is straight. So we’re going to spend a lot of time on the definition of shame. Many of you have probably seen talks, TED talks or other talks by Brene Brown or read one of her books. Brene Brown is a research professor at the University of Houston. She’s done a really great job of bringing the topics of shame and vulnerability into the public square, making shame much more of a household word, introducing people to the concepts.

[00:13:58] And I think she’s brought a lot of relief to many, many people. She’s done an excellent job with that. And I want to give you her definition of shame as a starting point. So this is what she wrote in a blog in 2013. “I define shame as the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging. Something we’ve experienced, done, or failed to do makes us unworthy of connection.” Brene Brown, her definition of shame. An intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that I am flawed. I’m therefore unworthy of love. I don’t belong. It’s something that I’ve done, something that I’ve experienced, something that I’ve failed to do, that makes me unworthy to be in relationship anymore. That’s a great start. And it’s better than many of the definitions that are out there, but it’s still incomplete. You need to remember that Brene Brown is primarily a researcher. She’s also a licensed master social worker, and she has clinical experience. But I’m approaching this as a trauma therapist who really specializes in the work of shame. There are basically five components to shame. Shame is a primary emotion, but it’s also a bodily reaction, a physiological reaction. Third, it’s a signal, it carries a message. Fourth, it’s a judgment. And fifth, shame is a verb, it’s also an action.

[00:15:35] So five things. First, a primary emotion. Second, a bodily reaction. Third, a signal, a message. Fourth, a judgment. And fifth, it’s an action. Now, as I go through fleshing this out, I’m going to be drawing heavily from the work of Kathy Steele, Suzette Boon and Onno van der Hart. They wrote a book called Treating Trauma-Related Dissociation: A Practical, Integrative Approach. These writers are experts in complex trauma. They actually contributed mightily to the understanding of dissociation, the disconnects that happen within the person who has experienced trauma. Their structural theory of dissociation has been really helpful to me in trauma work. Let’s start with the first element here. Shame is a primary emotion. We’re really talking about heartset here. We’re really starting with the heart. Remember, we’re supposed to love our God with our whole heart. And it’s a primary emotion. That’s different than a secondary emotion. A primary emotion is an emotion that we feel first as a first response, an initial response to a situation. Primary emotions are unthinking. They’re instinctive. They’re automatic emotions that rise up in certain situations. So, for example, fear is a primary emotion. When we experience something that’s threatening, we have fear. We don’t have to think about it. Right? So if we’re out camping, you know, and we notice that, oh, by the fire pit at our campsite, there’s a huge black bear with big teeth that looks ferocious and is now coming at us in the tent.

[00:17:20] We don’t sit there and say, hmm, that’s interesting. I wonder what’s going on. Let me ponder. Ooh, this looks like a dangerous situation. And then feel fear. Oh no. We feel fear right away. It’s a primary emotion. And shame is a primary emotional response to a real or perceived abandonment, to a rejection, to something that implies the loss of a relationship. And not just any relationship, but a relationship that we sense, rightly or wrongly, that we need to survive. So the stakes are life and death with shame. Little children know that if they do not engage their caretakers, their parents, that they are existentially at risk, that they are in danger of death. So this idea of loss of relationship, way in our primitive emotional emotions, our primitive brain, our hindbrain, our reptilian brain, there’s a direct connection to this loss of relationship. And we need it to survive. It’s a survival instinct thing. So shame is a primary emotion. That’s the first thing, heartset. Second, shame is a bodily reaction. It’s a physiological response. It’s all mediated by the endocrine system in our bodies. This is all about bodyset, right? We had heartset with shame being a primary emotion. Now we’ve got bodyset. Our physiological defenses against shame are immediate. They’re unmediated by higher order thought processes. They’re automatic. And what happens is that shame takes us out of the window of tolerance. Well, what is the window of tolerance, Dr. Peter? Tell me about that.

[00:19:06] Well, the window of tolerance is the zone of arousal in which the person is able to function most effectively. So when you’re in your zone of tolerance, you’re going to be able to readily take in information. You can process that information. You can integrate that information more readily, make sense of it, turn it over in your mind. People who are in the window of tolerance feel emotions at moderate levels. They’re not overwhelmed with emotion and they’re not numbed out. You know, totally disconnected from emotions. Nope. They’re in that zone of tolerance. So you can respond to the demands of everyday life without too much difficulty. You can make good decisions. You can carry out your role responsibilities. You can do what you need to do, right? But when you get outside of that zone of tolerance, and there’s two ways that you can do that. You can get higher than your zone of tolerance. And that’s really getting amped up, revved up, intense, you know? That’s called hyper-arousal. That’s where our sympathetic nervous system revs us up, gets us into fight or flight mode. And that happens for some people in response to shame. That’s one shame response. And you can know that that’s happening because the heart starts racing, your breathing quickens, your pupils dilate, blood rushes to your arms and legs, your face can flush red, and basically, physiologically what’s happening is you’re being mobilized to defend yourself, to attack, or to run away.

[00:20:30] Fight or flight. Hyper-arousal. Sympathetic nervous system revs us up. You can see that we are like preparing for battle or for flight. One of the two. Right. That’s when we get above the zone of tolerance. That’s when we are no longer able to think as clearly. We’re now reacting in a much more automatic way and preparing for fight or flight. Hyper-arousal. Now, when we are in shame, when we are experiencing shame, there’s another way that this can break. That’s to go beneath the window of tolerance. And that is called hypo-arousal, hypo-arousal. And that’s when the parasympathetic nervous system shuts us down. It’s like a freeze response, like a deer in the headlights where we disengage socially. We want to disappear. We want to hide. We want to camouflage ourselves. We shut down, we numb out, we dissociate. And you can tell this, when people are doing this, because they lower their heads, they break off eye contact. You can see that there’s a tightening of the muscles in the core, almost like a curling up, like a hunching to protect vital organs. It’s almost like you’re making your body small, less visible. Some people, when they’re having this hyperarousal, the parasympathetic nervous activation, they feel like ice water is flowing through their veins. There’s this like cold, freezing sensation. Some people describe like a fluttering in the belly, right? Hypo-arousal. And this is this is a way of shutting down a way of like numbing out.

[00:22:13] It’s the freeze response, in the fight, flight or freeze triumvirate. In both of these cases, though, whether you’re hypo-aroused or whether you’re hyper-aroused, whether you’re in fight or flight or whether you’re in freeze, your body is registering high levels of stress. Your cortisol levels go up, your ActH levels rise. That’s a stress response. Third part of this. So we’ve covered how shame is a primary emotion. We’ve also covered how shame is a bodily reaction. So heartset, bodyset. Now we’re going to get into what shame is as a signal. What does it tell us? What is it trying to communicate to us? This often gets missed, that shame has a function. And actually, there’s an upside to shame. That’s often forgotten, right? Especially since shame has now come into modern discourse. It’s come into the public square. People are talking about it. The general idea is, shame is bad, right? There’s no reason that it should exist. This is an entire misconception, and it’s understandable in some sense because of how much trouble shame has caused people and how dysfunctional shame can be within us. But shame has a purpose. Shame is a signal that there is a lack of attunement, or an even more serious threat in one or more of our important relationships. It’s telling us, a shame response is telling us that there’s a threat, there’s something wrong, and it’s a particular kind of threat.

[00:23:53] It’s a threat of a loss of relationship, a loss of relational connection. So what happens when you’re having the shame response is that shame inhibits other emotions. It inhibits thoughts, it inhibits sensations, it inhibits beliefs, and it shuts down behaviors that are perceived as unacceptable to the powerful others who we need. It gets us to be really conservative, really inhibited. It ties us up, behaviorally, emotionally, cognitively. It ties us up so that we can make the best of what at least our bodies and minds are perceiving as a dangerous or difficult situation. Steele, Boone, and van der Hart refer to shame as a social threat detector. Shame alerts us to modify or avoid behaviors that will cause us to be rejected by those people who we desperately need. Now they take a social evolution perspective on this, and they get into how it sort of evolved, you know, because we’re social mammals and it helps us to survive in community groups and so on and so forth. That’s actually not all that interesting to me. But the bottom line is that there are boundaries of socially acceptable behavior that our shame, as a social threat detector, clues us into. And that helps us to adjust to the social demands of our community, of our family. Then we can be in our family with the best levels of closeness and distance that are possible.

[00:25:43] This develops pretty early in life. By 12 to 18 months or so, toddlers show signs of shame in response to misattunement or disapproval from their parents. So Mommy and Daddy’s reactions are helping guide the child through developmental milestones, and the child’s motivation to avoid shame is part of that, right? So the bottom line is that shame is a survival mechanism. It helps to save us from potential terrible consequences. It keeps us from being rejected by the people that we need, by the people that we need to love us, to care for us, until we can stand on our own two feet, and we don’t have such existential dependency on other human beings. Right. Shame can also save us from really terrible consequences in situations. Let me give you an example. A really common example. Many of you may have already experienced this. But how many times has a crying child upset a parent? Right? And the parent responds by saying, you’re crying, you’re crying, you’re crying about nothing. I’ll give you something to cry about. You keep that up, I’ll give you something to cry about. You know? And the child in that situation could have this real shame response. And what it’s going to do is it’s going to inhibit the crying. Remember, shame inhibits emotions. It inhibits cognitions. It inhibits beliefs. It inhibits attitudes. It inhibits behaviors. Right. So if that shame response stops that crying in that child, in that moment, it just saved that child a beating, right, from that really upset parent.

[00:27:35] Right? So we need our survival mechanisms because sometimes we’re going to be in situations that are going to demand that we have this kind of response. So some shame needs to be accepted. And you can kind of look at this on an extreme example, on the other end, right? Think about people who don’t seem to experience shame at all. Shameless people. Well, that’s hardly a compliment, right? And clinically, that’s really diagnostic of a particular type of personality, that is, psychopaths, sociopaths. Those are people for whom a shame response seems to be pretty minimal. Now I’m not sure I agree 100% with that. And I’ve got a much more nuanced view of sociopaths and psychopaths. But the general idea is that if you have like, silenced your shame response, that it’s going to make you a poor fit for living in ordinary human society. All right, so shame is a signal, right? So first one, shame is a primary emotion. Second one, shame is a physiological response. It’s a bodily response. Third one, shame is a signal, right? That’s part of mindset. It clues us in. Right. Now we’re moving on to shame as a judgment, right? This is also mindset. So we’re repeating mindset here. Shame is a judgment about who I really am from the perspective of a critical rejecting other, right? We look at ourselves through the eyes of critical, angry, or disappointed others, often a parent or a caregiver.

[00:29:19] And we internalize that point of view. We internalize that perspective of ourselves. We take it in. We incorporate it because we’re trying to figure out, when we’re 12 and 14 and 16 months old, who we are. And we pick that up from who cares for us. We get to know ourselves through the eyes of our parents, through the eyes of those who cared for us, right? We take it inside. And we repeat the message that we pick up, rightly or wrongly, from these important caregivers, from these parents. Right? And it might be something like, nobody cares about me. I’m a loser. I can’t do anything right. I should have never been born. Now, it doesn’t have to be malicious. There doesn’t have to be malice on the part of the parents. For example, if a 14 month old, you know, loses contact with his father because his father was called up on active duty and deployed in wartime, there’s a huge loss there, and the child may construe that as him having done something wrong, particularly if before that call up happened, you know, there was some kind of altercation between dad and that little boy, you know, the night before or something like that. He may attribute dad having to leave because of something he did. Right. So it doesn’t mean that the parent actually even has to have malice.

[00:30:41] It’s the way that the child construes these things, right? Right. But somehow we carry those messages with us, even after they no longer apply, even after we’re no longer little, even after we’ve grown up, these messages stay with us in this anachronistic way. Anyway, I have a client, for example, who’s second grade teacher sounds like an absolute train wreck. She sounded like an absolute train wreck. And even though this all happened many, many years ago, decades ago, even back in those days, the teacher was eventually removed because she was so terrifying to the children. And, you know, it was still an issue for this client even 50 years later because it was such a powerful experience. And it had never been worked through. So the problem is not that we have shame. The problem happens when shame becomes chronic, when it’s stuck in time, when it no longer corresponds to the current situation, when triggers in the present bring us back to the past, to unresolved traumas that generate shame even though we’re no longer in the same situation. Right? So it’s chronic shame, it’s dysfunctional shame. It’s disordered shame that actually needs to be reduced, titrated. It needs to be ordered. It needs to be regulated. Right? Chronic shame develops when a child, for example, has a sense of being rejected, of being unwanted, of being a burden. And so, when that child changes behaviors, when he tries to be acceptable in the eyes of his dad or the eyes of his mom and he’s still rejected, he can conclude that he’s just a bad kid, just a bad person, just a bad seed.

[00:32:34] The difficulty is in the way the parents and caregivers are responding. It’s not that the child is bad, but the child sees himself as a burden, as worthless, as unlovable or whatever, because he’s experiencing himself through the eyes of his parents or his caregivers. Child sees the parts of himself that are unacknowledged that seem unacceptable to the parents. The child feels ostracized or alternately feels invaded, right, feels invaded, feels intruded upon. And here’s where we get into soulset, is that those experiences are what we assume God is like, right? That brings in soulset. Remember the whole series we did on God images, you know, episodes 23 to 29, those God images, if you want to take them all the way back to their root, you’re going to find that they’re all generated by that silent killer, shame. All right, so we have four aspects of shame now. We have shame as a primary emotion. We have shame as a bodily response. We have shame as a signal. We have shame as a judgment. What’s left? Shame as an action. And what I mean by that is shaming, right? Shaming is an action that is intended to cause somebody else to feel inadequate, worthless, and unlovable, a loser for being or doing something that the shamer feels is wrong or undesirable.

[00:34:13] And the thing about shaming, you know, where you leverage this inadequacy, the sense of being worthless, where you really twist the heart and the body and the mind and the soul of another person. The thing about that is that it’s a really quick way to control somebody else, especially somebody that’s in a really dependent one-down situation. Little children are existentially dependent, and they will do almost anything to preserve their attachments to their parents. It’s a life and death situation. They don’t really have the cognitive powers to understand that there are child protective services, and they might get put into foster care, and it might work out and they might get adopted. No, no, no. They are existentially dependent. They’re going to do everything they can to try to be whatever they think their parents need them to be, so that they can get the emotional attunement, that they can get the attachment needs met. Same thing happens with teachers, with coaches, with instructors. There’s huge power over kids with shame. Comes out later in life with romantic partners, right? A lot of romantic partners are motivated by shame. They really want to make sure that they don’t lose the relationship. And it gives all kinds of levers and buttons for the other person to use to control the person. So five things, five aspects to shame.

[00:35:42] It’s a primary emotion. It is a bodily response. It is a signal. It is a judgment. And it is an action. So just a couple more things about qualities of shame. First, shame is hidden. Shame is hidden from others. We try to hide our shame from ourselves. We try to hide it from others. We try to hide it from God. It’s often hidden from the therapist in therapy. Shame is one of those things that clients do not want to bring into the therapy. And the more they value the therapist, the harder it is to bring the shame up. Because why? Because I might lose the therapeutic relationship. The therapist may come to see me as I see myself, as disgusting, as contemptible, as unlovable, as worthless, as inadequate, incomplete. A waste of human being. Yeah. And so what do what do people do when they’re struggling with shame? When they’re outside that optimal zone of emotional arousal? What do they do? Well, Nathanson, back in the early and mid 90s, talked about four defensive scripts that people use to avoid shame. First defensive script. Attack the self. That’s where I attack myself, right? And sometimes that was really effective in warding off feared attacks from other people if I attacked myself. It’s almost like fighting fire with fire, right? If I’m burning up my own house, right, then maybe my house won’t get burned by you, right? Second script. Attacking others first.

[00:37:30] This is the preemptive attack. This is, I’m going to attack you before you can attack me. And that could be physically. But often you’ll see it with sarcasm, cutting humor. You know, you’ll see it verbally. These verbal attacks, right? So that you are disabled, so that you can’t attack me, that you can’t activate my shame. Third, isolation. This is where we withdraw from others. We withdraw physically or we withdraw sort of emotionally, we withdraw into our own internal world. We don’t let other people in, like a turtle pulling in head and legs. Fourth. We avoid inner experiences, right? We do not get in touch with really what’s going on inside. And you will see this with really busy people sometimes, who are like really active. They’re busy taking care of things. They’re active in everything in the parish. They’ve got incredibly high energy levels, right? They are really outwardly focused. They’re busy loving other people, right? They’re busy taking care of other people, but it’s not really out of charity. It’s a defense. It’s a way of running away from their own shame, keeping just ahead of their own shame shadow, right? That’s why they’ve got to move so fast, because if they slowed down, that wave of shame would catch them and swamp them, right? So brief review. What have we learned from today? Shame is a primary emotion. It’s a bodily reaction. It’s a signal, it’s a judgment, and it’s an action.

[00:39:04] There’s not a simple definition. We don’t have a good word that captures that captures all of this, right? And, you know, that frankly, that’s enough conceptual stuff for today. We’re going to get a lot more into shame and how to work with it in the next several episodes. There’s a lot more to unpack. This was pretty conceptually heavy. There’s lots to understand here. And so, you know, if you want to listen to all that again, you’re welcome to. But within the Resilient Catholics Carpe Diem community, we’re also going to be doing a number of things. I’ll tell you about that in a minute. I have been getting great stories of how this podcast is changing lives and how the RCCD community, the Resilient Catholics Carpe Diem community is changing lives, stories of how this podcast has impacted you, how it’s helped you see things. I want you, if you’ve got a story like that, I want you to send it to me. Send it to me at crisis@soulsandhearts.com. If you’re in the RCCD community, you can PM it to me. You can private message me. Let me know if I can use them on the air because, I’ll tell you, sometimes your story, it’s just so meaningful to other people. If you want to talk to me about that, call me on my cell or text me (317) 567-9594. Now take a minute. I’m going to tell you about the RCCD community a little bit more.

[00:40:20] It brings together people who are really interested in growing more and more resilient, both in the natural realm and in the spiritual realm, Catholics who are seizing this day, this moment, as an opportunity for great growth. We’re bringing in concepts from Internal Family Systems. We’re bringing in guidance on how to work with your parts and your system to become more self-aware, to better love God, yourself, and others. Now there’s an upcoming Zoom meeting. We are going to be going through a guided meditation to help you locate a part of you that is struggling with shame, a part that feels unloved, a part that may feel unlovable, and to teach you how to reach out with care and gentleness to that part of you, how to work with parts of you that carry the burden of shame. So when is this? When is this happening? Wednesday, October 14th, 7:30 p.m. to 8:45 p.m. Eastern Time. That’s coming right up. It’s only two days from when this podcast is released, but that’s plenty of time for you to join the RCCD community and to get in on that call. We’re going to record the introduction. We’re going to record the meditation for this, so that RCCD members can also do that meditation on their own. They can have the instructions. We’re building a whole library of different kinds of exercises, different kinds of techniques, different kinds of meditations and things to help you deal with this kind of issue, these critical issues, in this case with the most serious killer, right? We’re actually dealing with that stuff.

[00:41:52] There’s another example. Office hours. This is again something that’s available to members of the Resilient Catholics Carpe Diem community. I’m going to begin. I’m trying this out. It’s a new thing. I’m going to hold an office hour from 7:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. on Wednesday, October 21st. If you’re in the RCCD community, come on in. We’re going to discuss the concepts of this podcast and the next one. It’s all going to be about shame. We’re going to have a lively Q&A. It’s a place to get conceptual questions asked and answered. We’re not going to be getting into your shame issues. This isn’t like a therapy session or anything like that. It’s not about like this particular thing, but it is a chance to really get greater clarity on the kinds of things that this podcast brings up for you the questions you have. Like, what do you mean, Dr. Peter, when you say this? Or can you give me an example of that? That’s what those things are all about. It’s to make it really personal. It’s to make it really real. It’s to make it really understandable for you. All right. RCCD community is a tremendous deal, at $25 a month. You know, there’s nothing else like that out there. I’m going to really encourage you to join before we close the community to new members on November 3rd, November 3rd, day after the election, we’re going to be shutting the community down because I’m doing a complete revamp of it.

[00:43:09] I’m going to try out a whole bunch of new things. I’m going to need some months to be able to do that. So the community is not going to open up again until sometime in 2021. I haven’t decided exactly when yet, but if you get in before November 3rd, you’re going to be part of all that growth, all that change, and have access to all those resources plus all kinds of other people like you that are really interested in working with this stuff. So I’m going to encourage you to go to Souls and Hearts, click on the tab at the top that says, “All Courses and Shows,” and register for the Resilient Catholics Carpe Diem community. Now I want to shout out to all you Catholic therapists, all you Catholic counselors out there that listen to this podcast, right? Are you seeking greater insight into yourself as a clinician and better self-care? Are you looking for new therapeutic skills to help your clients help themselves? If you’re looking for deep personal connections within a small group of other Catholic therapists who understand the unique demands of being a Catholic therapist? Well, I’ve got an option, I’ve got an option for you. I’ve got an option for you. I am leading some Catholic Internal Family Systems consultation groups.

[00:44:10] We’re going to get together every month for 90 minutes via Zoom in groups of eight. You’re going to be able to experience Internal Family Systems techniques through a variety of exercises that I will lead, all kinds of demonstrations. You’re going to work on your real issues as a therapist within your own internal system, within that holding environment of the group. So there’s also going to be interpersonal processing based on an IFS understanding of parts, but recast in accordance with our Catholic faith. We’ve had a really great response to this. 32 slots, 29 of them are already filled, but there are three spots left. Two are for the second Wednesday of the month, starting October 14th from 3:30 p.m. to 5:00 p m Eastern Time. You got to move quick on this if you want that. All right. You’ve got to move quick on this because it’s only two days from when this thing is released. We’ve also got one slot for the fourth Wednesday of the month. And that starts on October 28th from 3:30 p.m. to 5:00 PM Eastern time. If you’re interested in that, email me right away crisis@soulsandhearts.com, or let me know by phone (317) 567-9594. So thank you for all of that. I pray for all of you. I’m blessed to be in relationship with all of you. And 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.