IIC 42: Practice Deep Listening: Understanding King David’s Shame

Dr. Peter teaches three levels of listening with an invitation to practice those listening skills in hearing the story of King David’s youth and adult life, along with an introduction to conception from Internal Family Systems thinking by Richard Schwartz.

[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 Catholic spiritual life, all about overcoming psychological obstacles to being loved and to loving. This is episode 42 and it’s released on November 16th, 2020. Thank you for being here with me. And this is our sixth episode in our series on shame. It is titled Practicing Deep Listening: Understanding King David’s Shame. We’re really going to go into in much more depth how to listen. This episode is like a mini course in different levels of listening and how to perfect that. So I’m really excited to bring that to you. But first, I want to discuss something that’s really important for being able to listen at the deepest levels. I am an Internal Family Systems therapist. I have completed Levels 1, 2, and 3 training of IFS, as it’s called, Internal Family Systems, which was developed by Richard Schwartz. He was a family therapist that came up with this particular model of therapy by working with people and really exploring their phenomenological worlds.

[00:02:09] And as part of this, he discovered that people have parts. He became convinced, through working primarily with folks that had eating disorders, that people have parts. And what are parts? Parts are discrete, separate, independently functioning, autonomous mental systems. So a part is like a little sub-personality. Or you can think of it as a mode of operating. And each of these modes of operating or each of these personalities has its own range of emotion, its own style of expression, its own set of abilities, its own desires, its own views of the world. And what Richard Schwarz says, within Internal Family Systems, is that a human being’s psyche is like an orchestra. It is both one. It is unitary, like an orchestra is one, but it’s also multiple, just like an orchestra has a conductor and an orchestra has musicians. Right. So there is this sense of there being a whole made up of parts. The focus of this kind of therapy in Internal Family Systems is on integration. It’s about bringing the parts in to connection with each other and with the self. The self is like the conductor of the orchestra, and each individual part is like an individual musician within an orchestra. Now, what happens when there are attachment injuries and relational traumas is that parts get forced into extreme roles.

[00:03:54] Parts get taken out of their natural roles and put into extreme roles. And all of this is part of Internal Family Systems. And there are some modifications that I make to this in order to be able to conform it to a Catholic worldview, to a Catholic anthropology. I’m super excited because we’re going to get into parts and multiplicity and this model of self much more in January when we reopen the community to new members. We’re going to actually have a course in this as part of the community. So you can learn much more about it. But I’m going to give you some of the bare bones of it right now so that you can use it to deepen your capacity to listen, both to listen to yourself and to listen to other people. So we have these parts. These parts are like little subpersonalities within us. Some people are familiar with this because of like inner child work, John Bradshaw stuff from the 80s, 90s, you know, the idea that within us we have this little child. Many people are familiar, for example, with an inner critic that constantly rides us in the attempt to try to make us perform better. Many people are familiar with parts from the movie Inside Out, the Pixar film, in which the main character, Riley, had five emotions that interacted within her. Those are rough equivalents of parts. Now, these parts of us, they fall into three major roles.

[00:05:34] One role is to be exiled. This happens to the most sensitive parts when they become injured or outraged, and they wind up carrying burdens, burdens of shame, burdens of anger, burdens of depression or hopelessness, other kinds of burdens. These parts were the ones that endured exploitation, rejection, or abandonment by other people in external relationships. And these parts need and want care, love, rescue, and redemption. It’s really interesting because Richard Schwartz is not a Christian, but he talks about how these parts need redemption. They need to be redeemed by somebody. And so one of the very typical, most burdensome things that these exiles can carry is shame. Shame. And that’s what we’ve been focusing on in this whole series over the last six episodes, parts that carry shame. And that’s what we’re going to be looking at in the life of King David, going back to his childhood. So exiles, they’re the most sensitive parts. They’ve been the ones to carry the brunt of exploitation, rejection, and abandonment. They need love and care, rescue and redemption. But because they have such intense feelings, because they have such intense desires, because they threaten to overwhelm the person’s system and take them out of the window of tolerance, because they threaten this destabilization, other parts come in to suppress them, to banish them, to try to move them away from consciousness. They take these parts right into the unconscious and essentially try to lock them up, restrain them, constrict them so that the person doesn’t get overwhelmed by the intensity of the emotions and the desires and the impulses.

[00:07:45] So there are manager parts. That’s the second major category of roles that parts have. These are protective parts, they’re strategic parts. They work on controlling the environment and keeping things safe. There are very focused on maintaining safety, on regulating the system. And they will use a variety of different coping mechanisms to be able to do that. This includes numbing out, passivity, withdrawing, obsessing, or ruminating about things, can involve somatic complaints, can involve hypervigilance, ways that parts, often maladaptively, but still under the effort of trying to keep things safe, so that a person can function in day to day life. Then there are also firefighter parts. So we’ve talked about the exiled parts that carry the burdens of shame and despair and hopelessness and rage, that are very sensitive parts that want to break through into conscious awareness in order to be seen, in order to be heard, so that they can be addressed, so that they can be redeemed. And then you have the managers that are trying to manage the day to day functions, and that also serve to suppress the exiled parts that carry those intense burdens. But there’s also firefighters. And these firefighters, they stifle, anesthetize, or distract from the intense feelings of the exiles when the controls put in place by the manager parts have become compromised in some way. And firefighters don’t have any concern for the consequences.

[00:09:30] They are working in this red alert type of mode, where they are doing whatever they can to try to protect against the intensity of the exiles’ experience. So that can include binge-eating, drug and alcohol use, dissociation, sexual risk taking, cutting, all kinds of activities that are designed to distract from the intensity of the pain that the exiles are carrying. As we discussed, parts can take over a person, like in the movie Inside Out, where, for example, the angry part takes over the control panel of the main character Riley. And in IFS, Internal Family Systems. We call that blending. What is that blending? Well, in order to talk about blending, I’ve got to talk a little bit about the IFS concept of the self. IFS defines the self as the seat of consciousness, the seat of consciousness. The self can be overwhelmed or occluded by parts. In other words, parts can blend with the self and basically take the self out of commission. Parts can take over the role of conducting the orchestra, and when they do that, they don’t do a very good job. But when the self can accept and love the parts, those parts can transform back into who they were designed to be, who they were meant to be. So the self is like this active inner leader. This is much more than mindfulness. Mindfulness is about awareness of what’s going on within oneself.

[00:11:16] Richard Schwartz emphasizes how in IFS, the self is not passive. The self is not some kind of just passive observer watching what’s going on. But the self actually has this role of directing and leading the self, like the orchestra conductor has. Parts can find a relationship with the self very reassuring. But to reap the benefits of that relationship, they have to unblend from the self and they have to notice the self. They actually have to be in relationship with the self. And this can be very frightening. This can be very challenging for parts. In this model, what I really like about it is that it gives us a mechanism, it gives us an understanding, it gives us a conceptualization that allows us to make sense of what it means for the Christian man or woman to love himself or to love herself. It gives us a framework for being able to understand ordered self love. There are other things about the model that I really like that I won’t get into as much today, but I will be getting into more in January, and that includes how it’s very open to spiritual realities, actually including angels and demons. It’s the only psychotherapeutic orientation that I know of, it’s the only theoretical orientation that I know of, that’s open to angels and devils, really. What is this self like? Well, when a person is recollected, when they are, in IFS terms, in self, I’m going to be talking about recollection as being in self, recollection on a natural level.

[00:13:03] There are these qualities that emerge in a person. The person is curious, compassionate, calm, confident, courageous, has a sense of clarity, is creative, and is connected in relationship. There’s also this kindness. But as I noted before, the self can easily be occluded or obscured or hidden by protective parts who take over in response to fear, anger, shame, hopelessness. And the general state for most people is to be quite blended, quite un-recollected. And that leads to a lot of self-absorption because there’s all this kind of inner tension, inner turmoil, inner strife that compromises our capacity to really enter into others’ phenomenological worlds and to be able to see what they are experiencing. And so the reason I’m bringing all this up today is because it’s directly related to our topic of listening. Listening is something that’s so important, and I spend a lot of time on that, working with my graduate students on how to learn to listen. We brought up listening in episode 41, in the last episode. I’m going to actually go into it in a lot more detail, and I’m going to talk about three levels of listening. Now, I took the names from a book by Laura Whitworth, Henry Kimsey-House, Phillip Sandahl, and John Whitmore, which came out in 1998 called Co-Active Coaching: New Skills for Coaching People Towards Success in Work and Life. But I am expanding mightily on their original concept.

[00:14:53] So we’re going to talk about three levels of listening. The first level, listening to, or what we might call level one listening. So listening to something, listening to someone else. The second one, listening for. And that’s level two listening. So you’re listening for things and we’ll talk about what those are. And then level three, listening with. That’s level three listening. And listening to goes back to that very basic listening. And this is primarily listening with your mind, mindset. It’s often called active listening. It’s about listening carefully to what the other person says. You grasp the content of their speech. This requires attention, concentration. It requires you to be available to take in what the other person is saying. The focus is on the other person. It’s not on internal stuff that’s going on inside me. We’re not distracted by our own self-focus. Listening to, or level one listening. And I will say that many, many people really struggle with this because there’s so much internal noise that it’s very hard to actually muster the attention and concentration that’s necessary to really listen to another person. That’s listening to. All right. So the second level of listening, listening for. This is much rarer and it’s characteristic of very good therapists. Very good therapists will be able to listen for on a fairly consistent basis. This is listening that’s in search of something. It’s a kind of listening that fills in the gaps in the other person’s big picture.

[00:16:50] It’s listening for what is beyond and behind the words. Now we hold these speculations lightly because they are speculations. But we’re mapping out in a much bigger way what the person is telling us. We’re not just staying with the facts and the content from the level one listening. We’re listening to what the other person does not say. We’re listening with the third ear. And the third ear is a concept introduced by psychoanalyst Theodor Reik in his 1983 book, I think it was titled Listening with the Third Ear. And that refers to this special kind of listening, listening for the deeper layers of meaning in order to grip onto, in order to grasp, what the person has not said outright. It’s really about understanding the emotional and psychological underpinnings that another person is conveying, but not directly. It’s being able to read between the lines. So when we’re listening for, what are we actually listening for? Well, we’re listening for, in a word, the person’s experience. We’re trying to understand the person’s experience. And trying to understand the other person’s experience in ways that they may not even understand because they’re so close to their own experience, because they’re so blended with their parts, because there’s blind spots that have come in because of the intensity of their experience. So what are we listening for in this level two listening? We’re listening to really grip on to the other person’s experience.

[00:18:38] And that includes understanding their emotions, their intentions, their thoughts, their desires, their attitudes towards the world. You know, is the glass half empty or half full? That’s a really common one. We’re trying to understand and listen for their impulses. We’re listening for their worldview in the moment that they’re sharing with us. Like how are they seeing the world in that moment? What is their working model of the world? What are their assumptions about life? What are their assumptions about the cosmos? What are their assumptions about God and religion? What are their values? How do they see their purpose in life? And then I listen also for how do they see themselves? What is their identity in this moment? How are they seeing themselves? How are they defining themselves? Especially around shame, especially around those feelings of worthlessness, inadequacy, unlovability, however that person experiences shame. That’s what I think is at the core, at the very bottom of all disorder in the natural realm. So we’re listening not just to the words as we would in listening to. That’s the level one listening. We’re listening for both the words and all of this other context. Now, back in the early 1970s, in 1971, Albert Mehrabian, who is a professor emeritus at UCLA now, made a big splash because he made the argument in his book that 93% of all communication is non-verbal. And that was the book Silent Messages, came out in 1971. And then there was a second edition that came out in 1980.

[00:20:40] But he argued that, based off of his research, 38% of communication was through the tone, inflection, and volume of the speech. 38% of communication was about the voice in which the words were conveyed. And then the other 55% was through the body language, glance patterns, facial expressions, including microexpressions, posture, fidgeting, head movements, hand gestures, all that stuff. The body language accounted for more than 50% of all the communication. And this is all summarized in his 1971, 1980 book Silent Messages. And it was primarily based on one word communication. So if you actually dial down into the actual research, he would actually look at people’s reactions and how they interpreted single word recordings. So that brought up some challenges. Philip Jaffé debated about whether it was really 93% or whether it was less than that. And it is a difficult thing to quantify. But the point, the takeaway point is that a lot of the meaning is not just in the words, but it’s in the context in which those words exist. Now, this listening is easier to begin when we’re actually dealing with a text, right? It’s easier to do that because we’re not in immediate relationship with King David, for example. And so this is actually a great place to begin to hone our listening skills. It’s also an opportunity for us to practice our imaginations, right? Because remember, what we’re doing in this level two listening is that we are filling in the gaps in this person’s big picture.

[00:22:37] We’re sketching out how they see the cosmos and how they see themselves in it. And so we need to be able to use the faculty of imagination, what Aristotle called fantasia, right? And the imagination is a faculty in humans and most other animals, which produces, stores, and recalls the images used in a variety of cognitive activities, including those which motivate and guide action. And this is from Aristotle’s book De Anima, book three, chapter three, paragraphs 429. So the focus here is on understanding and entering into the other person’s perspective. We need to be able to use our imagination, and we need to be free enough to be able to do that. If we’re caught in our own self-absorbed internal struggle, we can’t do it very well. We’re not evaluating the merits of that other person’s perspective. We’re not getting caught up in the judging of that perspective. We’re not comparing it to what we think objective reality is. We’re not looking to right wrongs. We’re not looking for justice. We’re not asking deep existential questions about how such a terrible thing could have happened to that person. We’re not trying to find the objective truth, like reporters or investigative journalists or police detectives. We’re not busy working on formulating advice or trying to be helpful in some sort of direct, solution-focused way. We’re not looking to impress the person with how much we understood them.

[00:24:14] We’re setting all of that aside to be with the person in level two listening and take that person’s perspective in, to be able to see the world through that other person’s eyes. It’s about really entering into their phenomenological experience. That’s level two listening. But it gets so much deeper than that in level three. Now, when I’m talking about level three listening, I’m not talking about what Laura Whitworth and her colleagues meant. I’m going way beyond that, going way beyond what their book addressed. This is about listening with your whole self, not just with your ears, not just with your mind, but listening with your entire being. That includes not only your mindset, but your heartset, your bodyset and your soulset. All of those are involved heart, mind, soul, and body, in this kind of listening, which is very rare and it’s characteristic of great therapists. The best therapists have this. When you’re listening to your own parts, much of the work that I do in consultation, I have 32 Catholic therapists that are right now learning about how to do IFS from a Catholic perspective, and the focus on working with those therapists is on their human formation. It’s really on helping them get in touch with their own systems, with their own parts, so that they can be free, not only to be able to enter into somebody else’s phenomenological world, but to also listen to what their own parts are telling them as they listen to another person, as they listen for another person’s parts.

[00:26:11] Right. So when we’re listening with in the way that I conceptualize this, we’re listening with the other person. We’re listening to our own parts, listening to their parts with both systems in relationship. So, for example, in order to do this, you have to be well within your window of tolerance. Right? That’s understandable, if you think about a therapy situation. If a therapist is exiting their window of tolerance, if they’re getting outside of their optimal zone of arousal because they’re feeling really threatened by the client, for example, feeling really overwhelmed, maybe with a sense of helplessness about the intensity of the client’s affect, the intensity of the client’s emotional expression, that’s going to be very difficult then for the therapist to be able to connect with the client. We want to be able to also connect with what some people call intuition, but which I refer to more as the knowledge that our parts have because of their specific roles within our systems. Right. So we’re going to be able to really listen in to our own emotions, our own impulses, our own intentions, our own spontaneously arising thoughts. We’re going to be able to attend to images that pop up or memories that come up, or body sensations. One of the ways I first learned about this was I was aware in therapy of songs that would come to my mind when I was with clients that were telling me something about not only my experience of the client, but the client’s experience of me.

[00:27:51] And I found out that actually has a name, within the practice of psychotherapy. It’s called the internal jukebox. And it’s been known for decades that that can be a really helpful way of understanding the clinician, understanding his own experience in order to be able to better understand what’s going on in the client. So we’re paying attention to the sayings that come up, all those internal experiences, those gut sense, that gut sense. This is my stuff, this is my experience, but it’s informing me about what’s going on in the interpersonal field, right? In the series of relationships between myself and my parts and the other person’s self and their parts. So when we’re listening with, we’re also noticing the shifts in the messaging that come along with the shifts that are going on in the relationship. We’re paying attention to these subtle shifts, all in the service of, what does the other person need? What do they need? We’re using the self as an instrument, and we’re tuning that instrument into a frequency that the other person is communicating on, almost like dialing in a radio, a radio tuner. So there’s curiosity with this. Why am I reacting this way? Why did this just happen within me? And when you can listen at that level, your capacity to love another person becomes greatly enhanced.

[00:29:35] That’s why we’re talking about this. So that’s level three listening, listening with your whole self, listening with your heart, with your body, with your mind, and with your soul, paying attention to what’s resonating and not resonating within you. And the reason why it’s so important for people to know ourselves, right? Remember that old mandate from Socrates, right? Know thyself. And we also hear this reflected in Jesus, right, in the Gospel. Remove the beam from your own eye so that you can see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye. You can understand that of course, in terms of vices, you can understand that in terms of the moral life, but you can also understand that in terms of the natural realm, in terms of the emotional life or the psychological life. So we’re going to listen now to David’s childhood, and we’re going to listen to how that impacts him in his adulthood. And again, as I mentioned in the last episode, there could be all kinds of historical mistakes here. Admittedly, much of what I’m pulling together here is speculative. I believe it to be accurate, but there’s no way to prove a lot of it. And there is, like I said, some speculation here. The important thing is to not get everything right. The important thing here is to practice the capacity to enter into another’s phenomenological world and to be able to understand what’s happening there. So we’re going to be listening at these three levels.

[00:31:17] And you are, I am inviting you to listen at whatever level you can. And we’re going to continue to grow in that listening. So episode 41, the last episode, I proposed the argument that Jesse did not know that David was his son until it was revealed by the prophet Samuel coming to anoint the next king of Israel. David was raised in the household of Jesse as the illegitimate son of Nitzavet whose father was unknown. And David’s brothers originally wanted to kill their mother by stoning her because they believed she had committed adultery. And that, of course, would have also killed the unborn baby David within her womb. Jesse intervened out of love for his wife or his former wife, depending on how you look at it. But from the time of his birth onward, Nitzavet’s son David was treated by his brothers as a disgrace, as a social outcast, as a person worth nothing. And, you know, this gets around. The other townspeople noted the conduct of his brothers. The rest of the community likely assumed that young David was a treacherous sinner, full of all kinds of wrongdoing, full of all kinds of evil in his soul. Otherwise, why would he have been so rejected? So some part of David bore the pain of shame. He was shamed in spades. He was rejected. He was ridiculed. He was condemned. He was misunderstood. And a part of him carried the burden of all of that, carried the experience of all of that.

[00:33:12] Not all of him carried it, because otherwise it would have been impossible for him to function. But a part of him carried that, and that part was generally kept in the unconscious. Why was it buried in the unconscious by his protector parts? So that he would not be overwhelmed by the shame. So parts step in to take on the burden. One of David’s sensitive parts gathered all the shame and did its best to quarantine it, to contain it, to hold it so that it didn’t have to be held by all of him, just by this one part of him. And we can see that shame being spoken for in Psalm 69. And I won’t read the whole Psalm again, but I’ll highlight some parts of it. We read the whole Psalm in the last episode, but I’m going to highlight some parts of this. What I’m going to stress is that David also trusted in the Lord. We’re complex beings, us human persons. We’re complex beings. We carry all kinds of things that go on within us. Here is David speaking again. And according to the Jewish tradition, this was about his youth and adolescence. “Save me, O God, for the waters have come up to my neck. I sink in the deep mire where there is no foothold. I have come into deep waters and the flood sweeps over me.” All right, so he’s speaking metaphorically.

[00:34:53] He’s not actually being drownded in physical water or mire or, you know, deep waters. What is he being overwhelmed with? He’s being overwhelmed with his experience. His exiled parts have broken to the surface, and they are showing what the intensity of their burdens are. So he is dealing with his shame. We’ll get to that in a minute because he talks about that also in Psalm 22. He’s come into deep waters, but he is also relying on God. He’s turning to God. He’s not totally overwhelmed and taken over by his exiled parts. He’s struggling. He’s weary with crying. His throat is parched. He says this in verse three. “My eyes grow dim with waiting for my God.” So he’s holding out, right? You can see his efforts to hold out in spite of the intensity of his suffering. And he’s feeling it in his body, right? The parched throat, the dim eyes, the weary with crying, right. And now what does he say? “More in number than the hairs of my head are those who hate me without cause.” He’s being hated. And I would argue by his brothers and the townspeople. “Mighty are those who would destroy me.” Remember, his brothers wanted to kill him when he was in the womb, right, along with their mother. “Mighty are those who would destroy me, who attack me with lies.” A lot of this stuff was made up.

[00:36:40] There was this strong sense within certain strands of Jewish tradition that David was a scapegoat. He says in verse four, “What I did not steal must I now restore?” When something went missing in the community, yep. It was probably David. David probably did it. You know, he’s that kind of kid. “For it is for thy sake that I have borne reproach, that a shame has covered my face. I have become a stranger to my brethren, an alien to my mother’s sons.” You notice he doesn’t say his father’s sons. He says his mother’s sons. Right. Without a father to rely on here in earthly life, David turned to God. And I really do believe that God poured out incredible graces on David, which he does, which God does, when people are in these difficult situations, when they are deprived of a reasonable upbringing. So here we get into heartset, right? “Insults have broken my heart so that I am in despair. I looked for pity, but there was none. For comforters, but I found none. They gave me poison for food and for my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink.” Are you listening to this? At what level can you take this in? At what level can you enter in to David’s experience as he sings this in Psalm 69. “Insults have broken my heart so that I am in despair. I looked for pity, but there was none. For comforters, but I found none.” But yet, here’s what he says.

[00:38:30] “But I am afflicted and in pain. Let thy salvation, O God, set me on high. I will praise the name of God with a song. I will magnify him with thanksgiving. For the Lord hears the needy and does not despise his own that are in bonds.” You know, he’s describing his experience as of being in bondage. And that can be an external experience. You know, if somebody external is holding us in bondage, but can also be an internal experience where we feel like we’re captive, we’re held in bondage of some kind internally. That’s a system level thing where parts of us are holding other parts of us in bondage. In Psalm 22, also written by David, this is the Psalm that begins, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Why art thou so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning? But I am a worm, and no man, scorned by men and despised by the people.” Can you hear the shame, the experience of shame? To compare oneself to a worm, right. And no man, not even a human being. This part of David does not even recognize him as a human being, but rather as a worm. Now, some people can, you know, somehow minimize this and and discard it by saying, well, you know, this is sort of Jewish hyperbole. He’s speaking metaphorically. Blah, blah, blah. Listen to the words, though. Listen to what the words and see if you can enter into that experience.

[00:40:18] Now, if this is too difficult for you because it captures some of your own stuff, it activates some of your own stuff, then be paying attention to that, right? If you, when you hear that word worm, wham and it hits you in some way, that’s telling you something about you, listen to that. Listen to what’s going on within you. But David’s confidence also expresses itself in this psalm. “Yet thou art he who took me from the womb. Thou didst keep me safe upon my mother’s breasts. Upon thee was I cast from my birth. And since my mother bore me, thou hast been my God.” Right? David’s recognizing here that God protected him in the womb, right, and kept him safe with his mother. Now there’s no mention of father here, right? Again, consistent with the hypothesis that I’m floating, with the speculation that Jesse did not know that David was his son and consequently didn’t protect him, didn’t raise him as a son, raised him as sort of an appendage to the household, a sort of disgraceful illegitimate son of his former wife. You can hear the bodyset in these lines in Psalm 22. “I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint. My heart is like wax. It is melted within my breast. My strength is dried up like a potsherd and my tongue cleaves to my jaws. Thou dost lay me in the dust of death.”

[00:41:57] How’s the listening going with that? You know, you can play that over again if you really want to enter into it. And then at the end of the psalm, David again affirms the glory of God, right, praises God and affirms that he knows that God will hear him and listen to him. Okay. So in 1 Samuel 16, verses 14 to 23, Saul is tormented by an evil spirit because Saul has disobeyed God, he’s departed from the way of the Lord, and he’s looking for somebody to help him by playing good music. And David is skillful in playing the lyre. He’s recognized for that. He’s known to be a man of valor, prudent in speech, a man of good presence. He’s brought into Saul’s court. Saul loved him greatly. David became Saul’s armor bearer, and he refreshes Saul. And he’s in Saul’s service when we get to chapter 17 of 1 Samuel, and he’s still like oscillating between the court of Saul and also tending to his father’s sheep. He’s kind of got two jobs there, going back and forth. He’s busy killing lions and bears in protecting his father’s sheep. And when he is sent by his father to bring some supplies to his three older brothers who are in Saul’s army, he hears Goliath breathing threats and ridiculing the Israelites. Goliath’s been doing this for weeks. Even then, Eliab, his oldest brother, hates him. “Eliab’s anger was kindled against David and he said, ‘Why have you come down? And with whom have you left those few sheep in the wilderness? I know your presumption and the evil of your heart, for you have come down to see the battle.'”

[00:43:59] He’s basically accusing David of being derelict in his duty, abandoning the family’s sheep, and just being really curious about the upcoming battle with the Philistines. And David said, what have I done now? You know, we know the story. David kills Goliath. He’s praised by the people. The women are singing. Saul gets jealous, looks for ways to kill him, throws two spears at him and tries to get him killed by the Philistines at the head of his army. But David has military victory after military victory, success in all his undertakings. That’s what the Scripture says in verse 14. “For the Lord was with him. And when Saul saw that he had great success, he stood in awe of him. But all of Israel and Judah loved David, for he went out and came in before them.” There’s lots of evidence that God loved David. If you go back to David’s name, what does it mean in Hebrew? Well, it means beloved. He had three anointings. He was anointed in Bethlehem as a shepherd boy in 1 Samuel 16. That was the first anointing. Then he was anointed as king over Judah at age 27. That’s in 2 Samuel chapter two. Then he was anointed as king over all of Israel at age 30.

[00:45:23] This is in 2 Samuel chapter five. And in 1 Samuel 13:14, Saul is told, “But now your kingdom will not continue, because the Lord has sought out a man after his own heart. And the Lord has appointed him to be ruler over his people because you have not kept what the Lord commanded you.” So here we have God calling David a man after his own heart. We know that David worshiped God. There were 73 psalms attributed to David’s authorship. David appointed certain Levites to play the harp, the lyre, the cymbals, and to blow trumpets to worship the Lord at all times before the ark. That’s in 1 Chronicles 16. He strongly desired to build a permanent temple for God, a glorious temple for God, because here he was living in a palace made of cedar, while the ark was in a tent, and he was going to build God a temple. But Nathan prevented that because it wasn’t what God’s will was. The final thing was that most of the 42 kings who ruled Judah or Israel at one point or another turned to idolatry. Most of them, the majority of them. But David never did. Right? We actually read in 1 Kings 11:4, when Solomon was old, his wives turned away his heart after other gods, and his heart was not wholly true to the Lord his God, as was the heart of David, his father. So that’s telling us, long after David was dead, that David never worshiped foreign gods.

[00:47:07] All right. Well, let’s talk about the downfall of David. What was David’s weakness? Well, it’s often said that sins of the flesh was David’s weakness. Let’s go back to listening. Parts of David are seeking to make up for a sense of something that’s missing, something that’s inadequate. Right. And we know that David was polygamous. He had seven wives that were named in Scripture, plus another bunch of wives that weren’t specifically named in Scripture. We know he had at least ten concubines and probably a lot more. And this goes against the command in Deuteronomy 17:17, where Moses says that, “The future king of Israel shall not multiply wives for himself, lest his heart turn away, nor shall he greatly multiply for himself silver or gold.” So there was this command in Deuteronomy not to multiply wives, but we know that there were, you know, dozens of wives and concubines that David had. And I think this was because David was looking for something, something that was missing in him. And when he turned his focus away from the living God providing for his needs, he got in trouble. This is what happened with Bathsheba. This is the story in 2 Samuel 11:11. “And in the spring of the year, the time when kings go forth to battle, David sent Joab and his servants with him, and all Israel. And they ravaged the Ammonites and besieged Rabbah.

[00:48:43] But David remained at Jerusalem.” Okay, so first mistake. He’s not out there where he’s supposed to be as king of the Israelites, leading his people into battle. And that’s where he saw Bathsheba, right? And he asked who she was, right? So now he’s giving in to this curiosity. This part is taking over, looking at her as the one that can meet his needs, the one that can complete him, the one that can give him what he needs to be whole, to overcome the sense of inadequacy, the sense of, I think, shame, the sense of being not worthy enough. Somehow she has the answer. So he sends messengers, she comes in, they have an adulterous relationship and she conceives a baby. She sends a message back to David, I am with child. Listen, listen, enter into the story here. Bathsheba is now pregnant. David’s going to try to cover his tracks. He summons Uriah back to the palace. Uriah was up at the front battling the Ammonites. When Uriah arrived, David tries to send him home so that when the baby is born, everybody will assume that it was just Uriah’s son, not David’s. But Uriah was a man of honor, and he refused. As long as his troops were toughing it out on the battlefield, he refused to have the comforts of home. He was going to sleep on the floor in the palace. David couldn’t make him go home. So David had him killed.

[00:50:24] He sent Uriah’s death warrant in a sealed envelope back with Uriah to Joab, the general, basically putting Uriah on the front lines and then commanding the troops to withdraw, leaving Uriah in an undefended and untenable position that would lead to his death. Then in 2 Samuel 12, Nathan comes back to David and says this. “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, ‘I anointed you king over Israel. I delivered you out of the hand of Saul. I gave you your master’s house and your master’s wives into your bosom, and gave you the house of Israel and Judah. And if this were too little, I would add to you as much more. Why have you despised the word of the Lord to do what is evil in his sight? You have smitten Uriah the Hittite with the sword, and have taken his wife to be your wife, and have slain him with the sword of the Ammonites. Now therefore, the sword shall never depart from your house, because you have despised me, and have taken the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be your wife.’ Thus says the Lord, ‘Behold, I will raise up evil against you out of your own house, and I will take your wives before your eyes and give them to your neighbor. And he shall lie with your wives in the sight of the sun. For you did it secretly. But I will do this thing before all Israel and before the sun.’

[00:51:50] David said to Nathan, ‘I have sinned against the Lord.’ And Nathan said to David, ‘The Lord also has put away your sin. You shall not die. Nevertheless, because by this deed you have utterly scorned the Lord, the child that is born to you shall die.'” Just take that in. I mean, not a bad time to stop. Maybe pick this up. 2 Samuel 12. Read it. Really enter into the characters. It’s given to us in Scripture. It’s not just the words on the page, but it’s all of the story, right? Listening at those three levels. Listening to, listening for, listening with. I think David had a deep sense of shame, a fundamental sense of inadequacy, that he looked to be met by women. He was looking to different women to have his needs met, woman after woman after woman after woman after woman. That’s how you get seven wives. That’s how you get ten concubines. And that’s at a minimum. He may have had 4 or 5 times that number. David may never have been really known by anybody other than God and maybe his mother in his father’s house. And then he rockets to stardom, right? He’s idealized people. Women are singing his praises, right? Saul has killed his thousands, but David has killed tens of thousands. Well, at that point, he’d only killed one, right? He had just killed Goliath. That’s going back to when he was an adolescent. You know, his mother was the one that loved him.

[00:53:26] It’s natural that David would look for love in the arms of women, I think. Right. When he was recollected, when David was focused, when he had the good before his eyes, when he was looking to God to have his needs met, then he acted in benevolent ways, and he was pleasing to God. But his parts need redemption, just like all of our parts need redemption. There’s this inclination to drift away from God. David drifted away from his responsibility of being with his soldiers, which put him in a near occasion of sin, to be oogling the neighbor women from the roof of the palace, you know, brought in the wives, brought in concubines, brought in Bathsheba. There’s this lust and shame cycle where he was overwhelmed and overtaken by a part. Right. Now, we’re at the point where we can assess David and his silence in this whole terrible situation with the rape of his daughter, Tamar. Right. We’re now at the point where in the next episode, we’re going to go back to where we were in episode 40. We’re going to go back and listen at these three levels to that whole story again, to be able to understand the experience of the major characters: Absalom, Amnon, Tamar, and David. We’re going to look at those four in particular. We’ll also look at some of the other more minor characters in that story as well. Again, really wanting to listen with that third ear, listening also to what’s happening within us.

[00:55:13] Fortunately, the story of David ended well. He’s honored as a saint in the Catholic Church. He’s listed in the Roman Martyrology on December 29th. You can actually look that up. Historically, his feast day was celebrated on December 29th. He made it to heaven, as imperfect as he was. So there is redemption. There was redemption for David and all of his parts. And so what am I going to ask you to do? I’m going to ask you to practice this listening and see how far you can go. I’m going to ask you to practice listening to another person, really listening to your spouse, for example. Spouses have this way of activating all kinds of stuff within us, by the way. You know, so this active listening, this listening to, this listening for, and this listening with, this can be much more difficult with a spouse than it might be with other people because of the history and because of the baggage that has accrued within the relationship. So see how far you can go. Just be deliberate and intentional about it. You can listen to the first part of this podcast again, if you want to review what that active listening sounds like, what those different levels of listening are. Now that might be too much, right? Sometimes listening to anybody else is overly activating for people who have a history of trauma. So then I’m going to suggest that you go back and read, read 2 Samuel 11, read 2 Samuel 12.

[00:56:42] See what you can understand between the lines. You might practice this on thinking about Bathsheba’s experience. We know little about her. I did not get into her experience a lot in this podcast. We know that she mourned her husband’s death. All right. I’m going to also invite you to share this podcast. There’s somebody you know that could really benefit from this, if you take some time and think about it. So I’m going to invite you to share it, let people know, email your friend, call them up, text your friend, share it on social media. We’ve got buttons on our website at soulsandhearts.com/coronavirus-crisis. Get the word out there. You can also get on the waiting list to rejoin our community. I’m super excited about the community overhaul that I’m doing. We are going to have, starting in 2021, just an amazing program. I am really, really blessed to be able to bring this to you. The community that we have here, the Resilient Catholics Carpe Diem community, is pivoting to be much more about Internal Family Systems. And the first thing we’re going to do when the community reopens is to have a real course on what that is, so that you can understand that better. Because I have found that to be so helpful in helping people not only have integration in the natural realm, but it has been so helpful for people to understand themselves, for understanding other people, for being able to love themselves, for being able to love other people, and to really shoring up the natural foundation for the spiritual life.

[00:58:21] So get on the waiting list, soulsandhearts.com/rccd. You’ll know immediately when we’re reopening that community and you can get back in. We had a great discussion on trauma, shame, and spirituality on November 11th. If you’re in the RCCD community, that audio recording is online now, it’s up on our app and you can listen to that. On Friday, November 28th from 4:00 PM to 5:15 PM EST, we’re going to have office hours for RCCD members, right? That’s the day after Thanksgiving. A lot of you will be available. 4:00 to 5:15 on Friday, November 28th. There will be a sign up for the RCCD members. We’re going to talk about whatever you want to talk about that’s been coming up for you in the podcasts. Open questions. And if you can’t make it, we will record it so that you can hear all of what’s discussed afterwards. Feel free to send in your questions to me for that discussion if you’re in the RCCD community. It’s just one of the many benefits that you have in being an RCCD member. And with that, we’ll invoke our patroness and our patron. Our Lady, our Mother, Untier of Knots, pray for us. Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.