IIC 40: Rape, Incest, Shame, and Silence: A True Story Reexamined, Part 1

Dr. Peter teaching three levels of listening to a real story of trauma with a focus on shame.  By exploring this story and your reactions to hearing it, you can learn about yourself and your experiences and also learn to better understand others, which helps you to love them.

[00:00:12] Welcome to the podcast Coronavirus Crisis Carpe Diem, where by God’s grace, 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, 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 Catholic spiritual life, all about overcoming obstacles to being loved and to loving. This is episode 40, released on November 2nd, 2020. We made it to episode 40 together, people. Thank you for being here with me. It has been a steep learning curve. I appreciate your patience as I’ve learned the trade. I am starting to find my groove now. I’m not nearly so rough and awkward as I was when I started, and I appreciate so many of you who have been so committed and so faithful for so many episodes. So thank you for that. This is the fourth episode in our ongoing series on shame, and it is titled Rape, Incest, Shame, and Silence: A True Story Reexamined Part 1. This is the first of 3 or 4 highly experimental episodes in our series on shame.

[00:01:56] These episodes are opportunities for experiential learning. It’s an opportunity for you to learn a lot about yourself, a lot about your history, a lot about things that you may not have a lot of conscious awareness of. I am really working on pushing the envelope of what is possible for learning from our experiences in this interactive podcast. That’s something that I feel very strongly about. It’s something that we’re doing in the Resilient Catholics Carpe Diem community. It’s something that we’re bringing into this podcast and to Souls and Hearts more broadly. This sense of how do we connect in deeper and deeper ways through the resources that we have online. So let’s review where we are today. We’re dealing with shame. This series on shame is vitally important. We talked about how most people can’t even define shame accurately. And if we can’t put what shame is into words, we won’t be able to think about it clearly. We can’t engage our intellect and our will in a deliberate and focused way. And this is tough stuff. Deficits exist even in experts’ definitions. These definitions can be very incomplete. Remember how in episode 38, I went over Brene Brown’s definition of shame and how she was missing certain critical dimensions of shame? It’s really important to understand much more fully what shame is, what guilt is, and what they cause, what they do to us, even if we’re not aware of them, even if we’re not aware of the consequences of shame and guilt in our lives.

[00:03:43] This is more than just about natural life and death. This is also about spiritual life and death. So this is of the highest importance. Those of you that have listened to episodes 37, 38, 39, we have really been exercising our deductive reasoning skills so far in this series on shame. And what do I mean, deductive reasoning? Well, we’ve started by really focusing on the basic principles and general concepts. We spent a lot of time on definitions. We spent a lot of time really looking at this in a high level, abstract way. And then starting with those general principles, we’ve worked downward to arrive at specific observations and conclusions. That’s a top down approach. That’s a deductive reasoning approach where you start from the general and then you work your way down to specifics. We clarified the definitions of shame and guilt. I define them. We did a conceptual exploration. We looked at how shame is much more than an emotion, but it’s also a bodily response, a physiological response. It’s a signal. It’s a self-judgment, and it’s also an action. Two episodes ago, in episode 38, I invited you to see the signs of shame in yourself and others, to recognize the manifestations of shame, the ones in ourselves and the ones in other people, to be better able to detect shame, because shame very often, almost always, remains hidden and unrecognized. It’s not seen for what it really is.

[00:05:26] And in the last episode, we discussed shame and guilt conceptually. We looked at multifaceted aspects of guilt, three aspects of guilt, really. Guilt is a moral state. Guilt is a legal state. And then guilt is an emotion. We compared and contrasted shame and guilt, and we really focused in on conceptual distinctions that are really important. But a lot of us really struggle to learn this way by deductive reasoning, where you start with a general and you draw specific conclusions by reasoning your way down to the specific. It can seem really intellectual. It can seem so conceptual. It can be hard for some of us to see it. So I have an alternative. We can use concrete examples. We can get into something we can see, feel, sense, something tangible that we can really wrap our minds around. We can get this word picture in our head. We can get a story, preferably a true story, with real people who did real things, who said real words, who had real experiences. That kind of thing helps me understand the overarching principles. Stories and case studies help us with inductive reasoning. And this is the bottom up approach. This is where you start with the specifics of a real given situation, and you work upward towards the general conclusions. That’s a bottom up reasoning or an inductive reasoning, because it’s so important, because it’s so critical not only to our natural lives, but our spiritual lives.

[00:07:06] We’re going to approach this whole topic of shame, not just from a deductive reasoning position, where we go from the top down, from the general to the specific, but we’re also going to look at it from the bottom up, inductive reasoning, from the specific to the general. We’re going to bring in the stories. We’re going to bring in the case histories. So how is this going to work? What is our plan? Well, today I am going to start with a true story. A real story chock full of trauma, shame, guilt, silence, power, vengeance, all kinds of elements, dysfunctional family dynamics, for sure. And we’re going to go through this story multiple times. We’re going to go through this story multiple times to flesh out all the facts, the particulars. We’re going to get deep into the details. And from these specifics, we’re going to work our way upward to clarifying the general principles of shame. And we’re going to get into a lot of stuff about guilt and trauma as well. But we’re going to work on shame by studying shame and its manifestations in this real life story, in this real life context. We can think about the principles we’ve learned about shame as the first broad strokes in a drawing. It’s like an outline of shame. But now we’re going to bring in the specifics.

[00:08:40] We’re going to bring in the details. That’s the color, that’s going to come alive. It’s the details that are going to come alive with this story. And that’s what we’re going to do today. We’re going to start with this story, and eventually we will review what we have learned about shame, what we’ve learned about guilt, what we’ve learned about trauma, the conceptual ideas. We’re going to bring those concepts into this real life situation. So for the last three episodes, we provided the conceptual foundation for understanding shame in the natural realm, in the psychological realm. And if you haven’t listened to those three episodes, 37, 38, 39 and if you are really a conceptual thinker, if you like to start with the principles, if you like to start with the big ideas first, I would really encourage you to go back and listen to those episodes 37, 38, and 39. There’s so much conceptual meat in them for you to really dig into. But for those of you who really learn better through examples, through stories, through concrete histories, these conceptual episodes may make a lot more sense once we work through this case history. You can go back and listen to episodes 37, 38, 39 after you hear the next few episodes, when we really get into this one story. You’ll get a lot more out of those conceptual episodes the second time around.

[00:10:07] What is our plan with this story? Well, first, there’s a lot of delicate material in here, so I don’t want there to be a lot of surprises for people. I’m going to go through some training with you as to how to listen to this story, to really engage, to really engage with the story and apply it to your own experience. This is a really important part of your work. So I hope you’ll tune into the section that’s coming up where I get into active listening, this kind of disciplined listening to this kind of story. So I’m going to teach you that. Then I’m going to introduce you to the main figures in the story. That’s all going to happen today in episode 40. Next, I’m also going to give you a little bit of the context and the backstory behind the story, things that I was able to find out and pull together about the story. And then in this episode, I will read you the story as it was originally published. This story is in the public domain. It’s fairly easy to find. You can Google it and find it. The published version is quite short. It’s only a four paragraphs, about 680 words, more or less, depending on the version of the story that you get. And while there is quite a bit of detail and substance in those four paragraphs, in those 680 words, the story is not told in a particularly psychologically-minded way.

[00:11:37] It’s more like a news report, focused on the facts. Just the facts, ma’am. The behaviors of the characters are listed in detail, but the story doesn’t focus on their internal experiences and their relational connections nearly as much as I would like to see. There’s not going to be time to do it in this episode, but in the next episode, I will go over the story again and I will fill in a lot of other details. So we’re going to take our time with the telling of this story. We’re going to bring out the details. There is so much more to this story than meets the eye in the published account. Together, we’re going to find that richer texture. We’re going to bring in a lot more of the connections. I will bring in the family history. Back in the day, this was a really well-known family, and there are other sources about this family than just the one published account. We’re going to get into the cultural context. These events didn’t happen last week. So we’re going to bring in what the current events were that were going on with this story and the attitudes and cultural factors. But most important though, as a psychologist, as a Catholic depth psychologist, I’m going to get into the internal experiences of the real people. I’m going to provide you a window into at least how I see their hearts, their minds, their bodies, all engaging in this really traumatic experience, and like what it means.

[00:13:17] I’m going to be making what I think are reasonable inferences. But remember, those inferences are going to be speculative, right? I’m going to be giving you my perspective as a Catholic psychologist on what happened in the hearts and minds and in the bodies, the souls, of these folks, of these characters in the story. In the next episodes, we’ll go through the five dimensions of shame for each of the characters in the story, all of whom have a very different experience of shame, all of whom express shame in very different ways. We’re going to go through Nathanson’s four defensive scripts for avoiding shame. Remember that from episode 37? He talked about, there are four ways that people react when they’re trying to avoid shame. That is, attacking the self, attacking others, isolating the self, and avoiding inner experience. We’re going to see how those play out with the characters in our story. The story will also be abridged for us to explore the spiritual dimensions of shame. We really haven’t gotten into the effects of shame on the spiritual life. I considered starting that in this podcast episode, but we really want to, we really want to grip on to what is going on with shame. We want to really understand it. We want it to be really ingrained.

[00:14:44] And so I really wanted to consolidate what you know through the story first. But as we get into the story, we’re going to talk about the many ways that shame sabotages our capacity to receive God’s love. It sabotages our ability to take in to receive the love of God, to receive his paternal care. We’re going to look at how shame compromises our capacity to love God back, and how it also undermines our relationships with our neighbors. So this story, the one I’m bringing to you today and that we’ll be working with for the next 3 or 4 episodes, it’s going to serve as a reference point for understanding shame in the spiritual life, as we continue through our series on shame. All right. So why should we do it this way? Why should we go through the work of understanding the experience of all these people in this story? Well, as difficult as it may be, if we can make sense of the story, if we can make sense of the experience of other people, especially around shame, then at least in some ways, it will help us to make sense of our own stories, of our own experiences of trauma and of shame. You know, it’s easier to understand the experience of abuse, the experience of trauma, the consequences of abuse, the consequences of trauma, when we look at it in someone else’s life. When we look at shame, especially in someone else’s life, it comes into clearer focus than we can see it in our own lives.

[00:16:27] From a distance, you can see how the dynamics of a violation, trauma, betrayal, and shame, you can see how those dynamics work. You can see them more clearly than when it’s in our own lives. Because remember, our own shame is hidden. It’s harder to recognize. So understanding the stories of these real people in this true story can help us understand and accept our experiences and help us come to love ourselves in a much more ordered way so that we can heal. So that we can heal. That’s what this is all about. Diving into these stories will also help us make sense of others’ stories of shame, the people around us. It will help us to accept and love them with greater compassion, with greater attunement. So this is all about helping ourselves and others along the road to salvation. It’s not just about healing in the natural realm, as important as that is. It’s also about helping us along the road to salvation, helping us be able to be in a closer relationship with God. Grace perfects nature, and apart from vice, apart from sin, in the natural realm, I know of nothing more disordered than shame. I know of nothing that harms the natural foundation in the spiritual life more than shame. And again, I’m not talking about sin here, right? That’s a whole separate ballgame.

[00:18:02] I’m talking about the kinds of experiences that are morally neutral, right, that disrupt our capacity to relate with with God. The number one, the biggest one, the numero uno, is shame. That’s why we’re spending so much time on this. That’s why this information is so critically important. Okay, so we’re getting closer to it now. Some cautions I want you to be thinking about. All right, in this story, there is an incestuous rape of a teenager. Now we’re not going to get graphic about the rape itself. There’s no need to get into the specific physical details of the rape. We’re not going to be gratuitous. We’re not going to be sensational about that. But when I bring out the emotional, relational, and psychological impact of that trauma, and it’s not just the rape, but it’s the betrayals, it’s the failures to protect, it’s the injustice, all that happens in the aftermath, that’s going to be intense. And for the teenager, the rape, as horrific as it was, the rape was not the worst part of the trauma. We need to really wrap our minds around that. We need to be able to grip on to that. So this can be difficult to take. And as I got into this story, it really impacted me last Thursday night as I was like doing some of the initial work to really put this story together, to put this podcast episode together.

[00:19:30] I was really wound up. I was awake for several hours in the night, just sort of reeling with the impact, because I was thinking about my own daughters, my own teenage daughters. And I was seeing this story through clinical eyes, not just the published account, but entering into the internal worlds of the characters. And that was really tough. That was really agitating for me. It’s even hard for me right now, right? I’m a seasoned clinician. I’ve seen a lot of really bad things go down. I’ve seen a lot of human wreckage, right, truly vicious and horrible things. And this story hit me hard. So it’s understandable that people would want to avoid this kind of material because it causes us to suffer. At the same time, though, we need to be real about these things. People who are traumatized, people who are burdened with shame, rape survivors, people who are confused, people who are lost, they need resources. These kinds of awful violations happen and they happen a lot. And we need to be able to talk about them. There is no neat and tidy way to talk about incest. There’s no neat and tidy way to talk about rape, sexual violence. It’s not a tidy topic. It’s difficult to talk about the aftermath, especially the experience of shame. But we don’t want to avoid these topics, even when avoiding them seems like it’s masquerading as propriety or something like that.

[00:21:03] We don’t want to, you know, we don’t want to offend anybody’s tender ears. We need to be able to talk about this. And we need to be able to put these things into a Catholic context. We need to be able to see them from a Catholic viewpoint. Because if we don’t, if we don’t as Catholics get into these things, if we don’t address sexual violence, rape, incest, family trauma, those who have suffered these traumas are going to experience being abandoned again. They’re going to experience being unheard, misunderstood, not known, again. And we can’t have that. We can’t have that. Because if they experience that, if people who have been harmed, if people who have been hurt, Catholics that have been hurt, do not feel like they have been heard, known, understood, if they are set aside, if they’re avoided, right, if we treat them like lepers or if we’re really awkward and so forth, they’re going to look for explanations and meaning-making from somewhere else. They’re going to look for some kind of comfort, some kind of meaning-making, some kind of way to cope with the experience from other sources that do not have the fullness of revealed truth. That’s really important. This is about people who need to be connected with on a human level. And part of that is them being able to continue to embrace the faith after something really bad has happened, after something evil has happened to them.

[00:22:48] Okay, so let’s be prudent in listening to the story. First of all, some of you know that my seven-year-old daughter, Lucy, is an avid listener to the podcasts. My ten-year-old son also listens in from time to time. They will not be listening to this podcast and the next 2 or 3. Just so you know. Anybody that, you know, is familiar with James and Lucy, they’re not listening in on these. I’m going to be talking with them about that. As important as it is to deal with these topics, we need to be thoughtful about where we are in our life journey. We need to be thoughtful about where we are in our healing. And this story may strike really close to home for some of you, especially if you’ve experienced sexual violence, especially if you’ve experienced betrayal, especially if you’ve experienced rupture within families, especially with your parents. You don’t have to listen to this story. You don’t have to listen to my analysis of it. Listen to it only if it’s good for you. And even for people that are psychologically well-integrated, this is painful stuff. So if there’s unresolved sexual trauma, this may not be a great time to listen to this. It may be a terrible time, if there’s unresolved incest, unresolved betrayal, unresolved abandonment issues, if there’s a lot of conflict with siblings.

[00:24:15] Pay attention. We’ll talk about how to pay attention, but pay attention to what you’re experiencing because I don’t want anybody to get overwhelmed by the story. If you listen, though, the story is going to move you in various ways. And I already mentioned the one night I got very little sleep because of how wound up I got about the story. I want to share with you now about three levels of listening to a story like this. Three levels of listening to a story like this. The first one is what we typically mean by listening to the story. It’s the ordinary sense of the word. The second level is listening to yourself. It’s listening to your own experience as you hear the story. And the third level is to listen to the inner experience of the characters in the story. We’re going to go through all of those in greater depth. Listening, the third one, listening, listening to the inner experience of the characters. And I will help you with that. So the first, I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this first level of listening. Basically, that’s just what everybody thinks of when they think of listening, right? You’re taking it in, you’re hearing it. You’re working to understand what the words mean. You’re putting together sentences. You’re gripping on to what is being conveyed. The second level, though, listening to yourself, this is really important.

[00:25:45] This is listening to yourself as you hear the story. Hearing about trauma can pull for unresolved trauma in you, right? The parts of you that carry trauma can begin to well up. And that can get kind of dicey. Especially if what you’re hearing in the story resonates with these parts. It can create a portal for those parts to break into conscious awareness, the parts that are burdened with different types of trauma-related effects, including shame. So hearing about shame can pull for unresolved shame in you to come to the surface. So I want us to be aware of that. How do we care for ourselves when we’re listening? This is part of the listening at that second level. We’re attuning to ourselves. So let’s get into the nitty gritty of this in greater detail. I’m going to invite you as you listen at the second level, right, this is listening to yourself, to listen especially to your body. This is part of bodyset, becoming aware of your bodyset. This is so important. And the first thing that I’m going to invite you to consider is, as you listen, are you in your window of tolerance? Now, do you remember way back in episode 37, and we reviewed it in episode 38, too, the window of tolerance is the zone of arousal in which you are able to function most effectively. Right. And you can leave this window of tolerance in two directions.

[00:27:23] You can get hyper-aroused where you go into fight or flight mode. The sympathetic nervous system revs up, it kicks in, and your heart starts to race, your breathing quickens, pupils dilate, blood rushes to your extremities, your face can turn red, and you’re getting ready to defend yourself. You’re getting ready to attack or you’re getting ready to run away. It’s the fight or flight response. So we want to be, you know, want to be noticing if we’re getting outside of our zone of optimal arousal, if we’re getting outside of our window of tolerance into hyper arousal. If we are, then we want to slow things way down. And we’ll talk about how to do that in a minute. The opposite is hypo-arousal. Remember, we talked about this in episodes 37 and 38 as well. This is the freeze response where you’re like a deer in the headlights, disengaged socially, you feel shutting down, we start to numb out, might dissociate, lower our head, brake off eye contact, feel ourselves curling up like in a ball, hunching to protect our vital organs. We might want to make ourselves look invisible, or at least smaller. And there might be that feeling of ice water running through your veins or fluttering in your belly. That’s hypo-arousal. That’s where the parasympathetic nervous system kicks in to shut us down. You might have some of these reactions as you listen to the story.

[00:28:46] Monitor how much to really pay attention to whether it seems like it may be spinning out of control. These body sensations are going to tell you very important things. There are things that you will not be aware of, things that are outside your conscious awareness that our bodies hold right? Our bodies hold intense, overwhelming experiences for us so that we are not flooded with them all the time. And Bessel van der Kolk does a great job of describing this in his number one best selling book on trauma called The Body Keeps the Score. So we’re listening to our emotions, we’re listening to our feelings, we’re listening to our body sensations. And I’m going to invite you to write them down. Write down your internal experiences as you listen to the story, as you listen to me retell the story in these various iterations. You can make notes. What parts of the story struck you? What elements of the story really caught your attention? What factors in the story brought up intense emotion? What moved your heart? What blew your mind? What rocked your body in some way? Right, note down the time markers of where this happened in the podcast, so you can go back to it if you want to. This is going to require some additional focus. So as we get into this material, it might be good to have some dedicated time to give it your full attention, right? This is hard to do while you’re driving, obviously, or while you’re exercising or while you’re cooking supper.

[00:30:18] Now, as I mentioned, I’m going to tell the story multiple times, each with increasing intensity. If you are readily activated or agitated in the first telling that I’m going to do today, that’s the published version, which I’m just going to read to you with the facts and the behaviors. That’s an important sign. I want you to pay attention to that, because it may mean that you’re really not ready to go into when I bring in some greater intensity. You can talk through this. If you’re in therapy, bring it to your therapist if you have this kind of reaction. You can have your therapist listen to these episodes as well. These topics are great for therapists to listen to, whether they’re Catholic or not. And I’m also going to invite you to process these story episodes with someone you trust, with a trusted friend or a family member. You can introduce them to the Coronavirus Crisis Carpe Diem podcast. It’d be great for them to listen to it anyway. If you notice that you are becoming overly agitated, leaving the the window of of tolerance, then by all means, stop the recording. Notice where you are. Pay attention to the room around you. Listen to the sounds around you.

[00:31:29] You know, feel your body. Walk around. Just get reoriented to the present moment. That should pass. The third level of listening, right? So the first level of listening is what we typically talk about as just listening. The second level was what I was just introducing you to, which is really listening to yourself, really listening to all your internal experience as you hear the story. The third level of listening is to listen to the characters. It’s to understand that these are real people, and it’s about building your capacity to understand them and enter into their internal worlds. That’s really going to stretch ourselves. That’s going to stretch our comfort zones. We don’t want to leave our window of tolerance, but if we’ve got our own house relatively in order, if we’re relatively calm, if we’re still grounded, even when we hear this difficult and painful story, and we can enter into the lives of the characters, if we can enter into their phenomenological worlds, if we can kind of experience or at least understand what they’re experiencing, that’s a huge advantage to being able to love somebody else. And that takes practice. It takes practice, but it also takes us being grounded first, because you can’t do that unless you’re grounded. You can’t do that unless you’re in your window of tolerance. And so that’s the third level is really about being in somebody else’s moccasins, really being in their experience, not that you’re experiencing everything they’re experiencing, because that would be destabilizing, but understanding what they’re experiencing, right? So three levels of listening, listening to the story, attuned to listening to yourself, and if you are able, compassionate listening to the other characters in the story.

[00:33:20] And some of them are going to be much easier to connect with, some of them are going to be much easier to be compassionate with, than others. So there’s also like a whole realm of ways that we can practice this, depending on which character in the story we’re actually addressing. So we are about to enter into the story. And I’m going to start by just introducing the characters. I’m going to introduce the cast that we’re going to be working with in this story over the next 3 or 4 podcast episodes. And the first character that I want to introduce is King David. King David, born about 1035 BC in Bethlehem, anointed at about age 10, maybe 12, in about 1025 BC. King David, who defeated Goliath when he was a teenager. King David, who became King of Judah in about 1000 BC and who solidified his empire several years later after a war that consolidated all of Israel together. King David, who in 980 BC commits adultery with Bathsheba and arranges for her husband Uriah to be killed on the battlefield. King David, who was rebuked by the prophet Nathan in December of 1980 BC.

[00:34:41] That’s just two years before our story begins. The prophet Nathan said, “The sword shall never depart from your house, and I will raise up adversity against you from your own house.” That was the prophecy from the prophet Nathan as a consequence of David’s adulterous relationship with Bathsheba and his arranging for the death of Bathsheba’s husband, Uriah. He’s the first character, King David. Second character, Prince Amnon. The name Amnon in Hebrew means faithful. Prince Amnon was born about 998 B.C. in Hebron. And when our story begins, he’s about 20 years old. He’s the oldest son of King David. He’s the son of King David and Ahinoam, David’s second wife. He’s the crown prince. He’s the one that is in line to take over the kingship. He has all the power and privileges associated with being the crown prince, and he’s the favorite son of King David. Prince Amnon, 20 years old, crown prince. The next character, Prince Absalom, Prince Absalom. Absalom means father of peace. He was born about 996 BC. He’s 18 years old when our story takes place. He’s the third son of King David by his wife, Maacah. He is the younger half brother of Amnon. There’s two years that separate them. Amnon is 20, Prince Absalom is 18. He’s the most handsome man in the kingdom, according to 2 Samuel. And he was praised for his beauty, especially for his hair. Prince Absalom.

[00:36:44] Our fourth character, Princess Tamar. Her name means palm tree, and the palm tree is a symbol of justice to the Israelites. She was born about 997 B.C. She’s 19 years old at the time of our story. Very beautiful. She’s the daughter of Maacah and King David, so she is a half sister to Amnon, the crown prince, through her father’s side, King David. But she is a full sister to Absalom. Absalom is younger by her than a year and they share the same parents. Princess Tamar is a virgin daughter of the king. She wears a robe with full sleeves as a symbol of her status in the royal household. This robe is called a ketonet. Princess Tamar. The fifth character in this story is Jonadab. Now Jonadab, that name means the Lord is noble in Hebrew. The Lord is noble. He is a cousin and a friend to Prince Amnon. He is about the same age as Prince Amnon. He is a nephew of King David. And Scripture says that he’s very crafty, very subtle. That’ll be an important point in the story. And then all great stories have a chorus. And actually we have two choruses here in this story. We have all of Prince Amnon’s servants, his retinue, that stayed with him at almost all times. And then we also have Princess Tamar’s handmaidens, her servants that serve her. They are also part of the story. The year is 978 B.C., just over 3000 years ago in Jerusalem.

[00:38:48] All right, so we ready for this active, attuned listening? Are we ready to engage with this story now? I’m going to really invite you to listen to the story. We talked about the three levels. The first level is just hearing the story. The second level, though, is really listening to yourself, listening to your body reactions, listening to your emotions, listening to your own thoughts, your memories, your attitudes, your beliefs that come up, that come bubbling up during the story, sayings that come up, images, memories. To the degree that it’s safe enough, to the degree that it’s secure enough, I’m going to encourage you to be open to really allow space for parts of you to be heard, to see what comes up if you’re accepting of what you aren’t always aware of. God knew before the beginning of time everything that you would experience in your life all the attachment injuries, all the relational wounds, all the traumas, everything that could cause shame. And he has remedies for it all. And you can ask yourself now, could this podcast episode be part of your healing? Could this exercise be part of your healing? Could God make use of this story and your listening of it to show you something? And if so, are you willing to hear it even if it’s difficult? So you have your paper and pencils at the ready? All right.

[00:40:15] Remember, you can always pause the episode to write down things. And remember, take what’s helpful from this. If you find yourself going into fight or flight, or if you find yourself going down into some kind of freeze response, stop the episode, take a break, reground, take a walk, engage in activity, reconnect with your surroundings. Okay. Got that. So I’m going to read this story slowly. It’s from 2 Samuel chapter 13, verses 1 to 22. “Now Absalom, David’s son, had a beautiful sister whose name was Tamar. And after a time, Amnon, David’s son, loved her. And Amnon was so tormented that he made himself ill because of his sister Tamar. For she was a virgin, and it seemed impossible to Amnon to do anything to her. But Amnon had a friend whose name was Jonadab, the son of Shimeah, David’s brother, and Jonadab was a very crafty man. And he said to him, ‘O son of the king, why are you so haggard, morning after morning? Will you not tell me?’ Amnon said to him, ‘I love Tamar, my brother Absalom’s sister.’ Jonadab said to him, ‘Lie down on your bed and pretend to be ill. And when your father comes to see you, say to him, ‘Let my sister Tamar come and give me bread to eat, and prepare the food in my sight, that I may see it, and eat it from her hand.” So Amnon lay down and pretended to be ill.

[00:42:31] And when the king came to see him, Amnon said to the king, ‘Pray let my sister Tamar come and make a couple of cakes in my sight, that I may eat from her hand.’ Then David sent home to Tamar, saying, ‘Go to your brother Amnon’s house and prepare food for him.’ So Tamar went to her brother Amnon’s house, where he was lying down, and she took dough and kneaded it, and made cakes in his sight, and baked the cakes. And she took the pan and emptied it out before him. But he refused to eat. And Amnon said, ‘Send out everyone from me.’ So everyone went out from him. Then Amnon said to Tamar, ‘Bring the food into the chamber, that I may eat from your hand.’ And Tamar took the cakes she had made, and brought them into the chamber to Amnon, her brother. But when she brought them near him to eat, he took hold of her and said to her, ‘Come, lie with me, my sister.’ And she answered him, ‘No, my brother, do not force me, for such a thing is not done in Israel. Do not do this wanton folly. As for me, where could I carry my shame? And as for you, you would be as one of the wanton fools in Israel. Now, therefore, I pray you, speak to the king, for he will not withhold me from you.’

[00:44:24] But he would not listen to her, and being stronger than she, he forced her and lay with her. Then Amnon hated her with a very great hatred, so that the hatred with which he hated her was greater than the love with which he had loved her. And Amnon said to her, ‘Arise, be gone.’ But she said to him, ‘No, my brother, for this wrong in sending me away is greater than the other which you did to me.’ But he would not listen to her. He called the young man who served him, and said, ‘Put this woman out of my presence and bolt the door after her.’ Now she was wearing a long robe with sleeves, for thus were the virgin daughters of the king clad of old. So his servant put her out and bolted the door after her, and Tamar put ashes on her head and rent the long robe which she wore, and she laid her hand on her head and went away, crying aloud as she went. And her brother Absalom said to her, ‘Has Amnon your brother been with you? Now hold your peace, my sister. He is your brother. Do not take this to heart.’ So Tamar dwelt, a desolate woman, in her brother Absalom’s house. When King David heard of all these things, he was very angry. But Absalom spoke to Amnon neither good nor bad, for Absalom hated Amnon because he had forced his sister Tamar.”

[00:46:24] And that’s the last that we hear of Tamar in the Scriptures. Let’s take a break now. Let’s sit with this for a minute. Let’s notice what’s happening within us. Take the time to really become aware, open to what this story brought up in you. If it seems good, jot down a few things that you’re experiencing. Feel free to pause it. Take as long as you need to really get out what you experienced as I read this story to you. Okay, now, as I promised you earlier in this episode, in the future, we’re going to take a much deeper dive into this story. We have all the preliminaries out of the way. We have all the conceptual stuff that we need from the previous three episodes. We’ve now introduced this story. We’ve gone through our first read of just the basic facts. In the next episode, I’m going to be walking you through this story with much more background. I’m going to be walking you through it with my particular perspective on it, through the eyes of a seasoned Catholic trauma psychologist. We’re going to go into it in far more depth, with much more detail. All right, so call to action. I’m going to really invite you to share this podcast. This podcast is on Spotify. It’s on Apple Podcasts, it’s on Google Play. It’s now on Amazon. Share it on social media. We’ve got buttons for sharing it.

[00:48:41] soulsandhearts.com/coronavirus-crisis. You can get there by just going to soulsandhearts.com. There are buttons there. Get the word out. Get your personal recommendations on this. Right. Talk about how these episodes have helped you with people that you think could benefit from them, right? Share them. Let others know. Discuss what you experienced in engaging with this story of Tamar with another person who has also listened to the podcast episode, right? If you can, that’s a wonderful thing to do. You’ve done it, somebody else has done it, to be able to come together. Again, assuming you trust the person, right? Don’t do this with just somebody you don’t know very well. Somebody that you trust. It’s great to be able to share those experiences. It takes it to a whole another level, a whole relational level. If you’re in the RCCD community, if you’re in the Resilient Catholics Carpe Diem community that’s grown up around this podcast, that’s also a great place to do this in. You can do it on the main boards if you want, or if you have somebody that you’ve connected with in the community, somebody that you feel like you have this good relationship with, well, then ask the person first, right? Don’t just send somebody a private message with all your stuff in it. Just check it out with them, see if that’s something that the other person would like to do.

[00:49:59] See if there’s some reciprocity there. And if it is good to do it that way, you can private message each other, right? If you’re listening to this episode as it just has come out, right, you have one more day to join the RCCD community, right? November 3rd, we’re temporarily suspending membership in the community because I am totally restructuring it. I’m putting together and implementing a whole new plan for all of 2021. It’s going to be amazing. I am so excited about it. I’ve been actually taking courses and getting real direction on online communities because like I said, I really want to push the envelope as far as how much we can do to help people in the natural realm, how much we can do to help people in the spiritual realm. Right? So you still have another day if you’re listening to this right away. And if not, we’re going to have a waiting list. You can go to soulsandhearts.com/rccd. And if you happen to get this in November or December, you can sign up for the waitlist for when the community reopens in 2021. I think we’re going to be doing that. I’m going to try to reopen the community in January. So I don’t want it to be too long that it’s closed. But I do need, like I said, I do need some time to really take it to the next level.

[00:51:18] We deal with the tough topics in the RCCD community. We deal with the tough topics on the podcast, but we take it to a whole new level in the RCCD community. You can work through these themes on your own or with a friend that’s also listening to the podcast. And you can apply these things to your life and that’s great. But it’s so much better and it’s so much more relational to do this with other Catholics who are doing the same kind of work on their own natural foundations, other like-minded Catholics in the Resilient Catholics Carpe Diem community. This podcast and this community is experientially unique because we draw from all kinds of fields. We draw from all kinds of techniques to help bring you transformative experiences that don’t require you to be in therapy. We have great discussions. We have real-life examples. There’s a lot of vulnerability on the discussion threads in the community. If you’re in psychotherapy or counseling, know that so many of our RCCD members also are. And this community works as an adjunct to the good clinical work that you’re doing in your therapy. If you’re not in therapy, there’s still a great opportunity to take advantage of resources and relationships and connections in the RCCD community, so you don’t have to do this all on your own.

[00:52:30] Now second Wednesdays, second Wednesdays, we always have a Zoom meeting. And so upcoming on Wednesday, November 11th from 7:30 p.m. to 8:45 p.m. Eastern Time, we’re going to have another Zoom meeting for members of the community. And we’re going to be discussing the story of Tamar. We’re going to be discussing trauma. We’re going to be discussing shame, all grounded in a Catholic perspective. So we’re going to be getting into the story in a new way, in a really relational way on that Zoom meeting. It’s going to be recorded. We’re also going to put that up, so that members that couldn’t make the livestream can check in with that later. It’s all part of the benefits you get of being in the RCCD community. So come and join us, soulsandhearts.com/rccd. If you don’t hit that November 3rd deadline, by all means get on the waiting list. Or if you’re listening to this in 2021, the community will be back open. So thank you again for being here. Thank you for doing this good work, for building up the body of Christ as you work on yourself as as you have these transformative experiences and work through your issues. You are helping the mystical body of Christ. And I thank every one of you that’s doing that because it benefits us all and it pleases our Lord Jesus Christ. So with that, let’s go to our patroness and our patron. Our Lady, our Mother, Untier of Knots, pray for us. Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.