IIC 49: The Secret Impact of our Shame on our Sexuality

In directness and clarity, we explore the common struggles that Catholics face in their sexuality, and how shame complicates the picture.  We discuss why it’s hard for Catholics to open up about their sexual struggles and how we can understand internal conflict around sexuality through and IFS-informed model of the person system made up of a core self and parts.

[00:00:12] Welcome to the podcast Resilient Catholics. This podcast was formerly known as Coronavirus Crisis Carpe Diem. That’s right. In this new year, in 2021, we have a new name. And it’s fitting because we have broadened our scope to do so much more to help you, to help you, our listeners, deal with the coronavirus crisis and other things that are stressful in your life. When this started out, we were really focused on the virus. We were really focused on coping skills and building resilience, letting you know that you weren’t alone. We were really focused on crisis management. This has stretched into a long crisis. And so it’s not just about making it through the coronavirus crisis anymore. Now it’s really about increasing resilience through transformation, through a radical transformation of self, overcoming anything that gets in the way of us loving God our Father and Mary our Mother, with the trust and dependance of a little child. We’re really focusing on resilience from a Catholic perspective, and there are great similarities and great differences in resilience, understood from a Catholic perspective and resilience understood from a secular perspective. And so we’re going to be looking at both. We’re going to be looking at both of those. So how do we increase resilience? We increase resilience through our human formation. And I’m going to have a lot more to say about this in the future. But for now, know that we are still all about rising up, embracing the possibilities and opportunities for spiritual and psychological growth, right now, in these days, in our lives, where we are, all grounded in a Catholic worldview.

[00:01:52] I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski, and I am excited to be here with you, to be your host and guide this podcast, Resilient Catholics. It’s part of Souls and Hearts, and that’s our online outreach at soulsandhearts.com, which is all about shoring up our natural foundation for the Catholic spiritual life. It’s all about overcoming psychological obstacles to being loved and to loving God and neighbor. So this is episode 49. It’s released on January 4th, 2021, and it is titled The Secret Impact of Our Shame on our Sexuality. We’re going to bring in shame. That’s what we’ve been covering. This is the 13th and final episode in our series on shame. We’re wrapping up that series. But don’t worry, we’re going to be coming back to shame over and over again in future episodes because of how central it is in our psychological structure, how central it is in our functioning. But now we’re bringing in sexuality. We’re starting a whole new series of episodes on sexuality, all about sexual topics. We’re going to spend time addressing sexuality. We’re going to look at many topics within it, including masturbation, pornography, adulterous affairs, premarital sex, asexuality, homosexuality, sexual trauma and its effects, all kinds of things that we’re going to be looking at. Things that are burning questions, that people need real answers to because they have real sexual problems.

[00:03:29] We’re going to be discussing those. And we’re going to get into this topic of sexuality in the same way we do with all the topics on this podcast. We start by assuming that what the Catholic Church has always infallibly taught to be true is indeed true. Period. Full stop. If the church has always taught it, we assume it to be true. We start from the theological, philosophical, and metaphysical base that the church gives us through divine revelation. And with that, then we bring in the best of what psychology has to offer. We harmonize the best of psychology with what we know to be true by divine revelation. We don’t try to reshape Catholicism to fit the latest and greatest woke ideas from the world about sexuality, for example, or about psychology more generally. So I’m going to be coming to you with that Catholic base, from that Catholic worldview. And you know what? This probably isn’t a surprise to you. That’s a minority position in psychology in this day and age. If you want to know what the latest trends and beliefs are in the secular psychological community, you can check out the guidelines that the American Psychological Association puts out on its website at apa.org. If that’s what you want, boy, you can have that in spades. It’s also all over the internet. But this podcast, this podcast, Resilient Catholics, this podcast is for those people who really want to understand psychology, harmonized with the perennial authentic teaching of the Catholic Church.

[00:05:02] And to that end, I invite feedback. You know, I’m in a speculative endeavor here. I am really trying to bring the best of psychology to a Catholic anthropology. And I may make some mistakes. So if I teach something that’s in error, please get in touch with me. crisis@soulsandhearts.com or at (317) 567-9594. It really helps me if you give me citations to like how what I said isn’t consistent with the Catholic faith. Now you don’t have to use Denzinger’s Compendium or Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma by Ludwig Ott, but it is really helpful if you give me something from the Catechism or something from Canon Law where you think I misspoke. Also, please don’t email me and tell me that your confessor told you ten years ago, when you were in confession, in a different town, that masturbation is normal and God doesn’t mind it at all. That’s not helpful. There’s plenty of stories like that out there. I’m looking for, when you’re trying to correct me in terms of error, when you’re looking to correct me in terms of error, to find something that actually exists within the doctrines of the Church. All right. So sexuality, such a huge complex issue. And it’s so confusing for so many people. You know, it’s one of the two most difficult topics for people to discuss in therapy. Sexuality. One of the two most difficult topics for people to discuss in therapy.

[00:06:25] What’s the other one? It’s my relationship with God, how I see God, all the personal or the lack of personal connection with Jesus, the lack of personal connection with God our Father, Mary our Mother. That’s also really sensitive. Sexuality is the other one. Sexuality is difficult and confusing to talk about for so many reasons, because shame is often at the center. It’s often at the center, but it may not be obvious. Because remember, one of the qualities of shame is that it loves to hide. It loves to keep things hidden, to keep things out of sight. It’s hard to talk about sexuality because it is so personal, because it’s so intimate, and it’s often so bound up with shame. So why is sexuality not so often talked about? Why is it not discussed among Catholics? Well, some of it is modeling from the parents. You know, parents sometimes didn’t give any formation of any kind around sexuality to their kids, right? Not even a birds and bees talk, right. So that’s something that gets modeled to us from our parents. It may get modeled to us from other people too, right, people that we’re close to. Often we have deep feelings of incompetence, of not knowing how to talk about it, not knowing what to talk about within sexuality, not understanding what’s going on with us sexually. There can be so much difficulty in just putting sexual experiences into words, and to just knowing how to share them with somebody else at all.

[00:07:54] There’s a lot of concern that people have about not knowing what’s normal and not normal, what’s morally acceptable and what’s not. There’s a lot of concern often about not wanting to make the listener uncomfortable. Right. Really dialing in to how the other person’s reacting and just having our radar really up to seeing if we’re starting to destabilize that person or make them uncomfortable. Does any of this sound familiar to you? I mean, are you resonating with this? You know what I’m talking about? Right, right. You know, we’re also not sure if the other person is going to respect our Catholic beliefs because people are all over the board, even within our Church, about what they believe to be okay with regards to sexuality. That’s why many clients reach out to Catholic therapists because of this fear. If I’m struggling with porn use or if I’m struggling with masturbation, will this therapist inwardly mock my beliefs or outwardly say that masturbation is normal and porn use can enhance one’s sexual experience? I don’t know how many clients have told me that previous therapists, non-Catholic therapists, or sometimes even unfortunately, Catholic therapists, have normalized these things and basically said that because they’re common, therefore they’re normal, right? Therefore, there’s no spiritual, there’s no moral problem with them. Now, the other side of this, the other edge of the sword here or the other side of the coin, is that many clients who do go to Catholic therapists may be very hesitant to share their sexual experiences for fear of being judged.

[00:09:31] If the client knows that their therapist is is Catholic, if they chose the therapist because he or she is Catholic, there can be parts of them that are really afraid of being judged if they share what’s really going on inside, if they really share the desires, if they really share the feelings, if they really share the memories, if they really share aspects of their sexual history. And you know what? There’s some grounds for that. There’s some grounds for clients being concerned about Catholic therapists being uncomfortable because some of them are. Sometimes Catholic therapists get uncomfortable with hearing certain sexual themes come up. They may feel undue pressure to make sure that some kind of change happens for the client. They may be overly concerned that somehow they’re, you know, bringing up something that might be sinful if they explore a client’s sexual history. Sometimes therapists don’t know what to do with certain types of sexual experiences, and they may signal to the client that it’s better “not to go there.” That’s another reason why some of this can be very difficult to talk about is, is there a receptive listener that’s going to be comfortable enough with the hearing of what you have to say. Another reason why sexuality is difficult and confusing is that sexuality is part and parcel of our bodies.

[00:10:56] It’s all about our bodies, right? Bessel van der Kolk’s book, it was a great book on trauma, The Body Keeps the Score. The body is where we tend to hide all kinds of unresolved psychological issues. And Catholics, especially ones that are more devout, ones that are more orthodox, they can hold some Manichean and Jansenist ideas about the body, right? Parts of them can believe that the body is bad or have really negative associations to the body. I’ve heard many clients tell me that they hate their bodies, right? Because of the associations they have to their bodies, to the role that bodies played in some kind of sexual encounters, maybe when they were really young, maybe when they were older. Catholics who are serious about the faith often have a propensity to start with self-judgment and self-condemnation, right? It’s like the end of a trial, right? You didn’t even get to discover all the evidence. You just went right to the judgment and the sentencing. Right. And you know what? In some ways it all makes sense because almost all of us as Catholics have sinned sexually in some way or other. But this internal self-shaming that I see so much shuts down the dialogue, shuts down the capacity to shine light in the dark corners of our psyches, to be able to understand really what happened. All right, a quick review of shame.

[00:12:35] What is shame again? Now, remember, this is the end of that whole series on shame. It’s the 13th episode, this one. You can go all the way back to episodes 37 and 38 for a full definition of shame, or at least as full as I could get it. And what is shame? Well, shame is five things. Shame is a primary emotion. Shame is a bodily reaction. Shame is a signal. Shame is a judgment. And shame is an action. So shame is an emotion, a bodily reaction, a signal, a judgment, and an action. So shame is a primary emotion. Remember, it’s one of the emotions that we feel first. It’s a first response to a situation, right? Shame is a signal. All right. This is one of the things that often gets missed. This is one of the functions of shame is to signal something to us. This is part of the upside of shame, why it exists. Shame is a signal that there’s a lack of attunement or even a more serious threat in one or more of our important relationships. It clues us in. It tells us, hey, something’s going on. I’m doing something that’s not acceptable to my community, or not acceptable to someone who’s really important to me, right? Somebody is not approving of what I’m doing. That’s what I’m talking about when I say shame is a signal. Shame is a bodily reaction. So here what we’re talking about is an automatic involuntary bodily response.

[00:14:09] We’re talking about blushing, you know, which is vasodilation in the face. We’re talking about going into fight or flight mode where your heart starts racing, your breathing quickens, pupils dilate, your blood’s rushing to arms and legs, your face flushes red. We’re starting to get ready to physiologically attack or to run away. Hypo-arousal is the other end of it. This is where we disengage. We shut down, we start tightening up, or we start almost curling up like a ball. We’ve got like, ice water in our veins. Right? That’s a shame response. It’s a bodily response. That’s what I’m talking about with shame as a bodily reaction. Right? Shame is a judgment. What is that? Well, that’s a criticism of myself, a very negative attitude towards myself. You know, where I tell myself that I’m no good, I’m a burden. You know, it’s something global, holistic. It’s not a specific criticism, but it’s a condemnation of who I am as a person. It’s not that I have a flaw. It is no, I am flawed. I am sometimes irrevocably flawed, or I’m bad, or I’m unworthy of being loved or something like that. That’s the judgment aspect of shame. And then shame is an action. And that’s easier to understand in the gerundial form. Shaming, right? Shaming is an action that’s intended to cause someone else to feel inadequate, worthless, unlovable, a loser, someone like that.

[00:15:41] We can shame others. We can also shame ourselves, right? Which is what I was talking about with shame as a judgment here. We get into acting on that. Here we get into the condemnation. Here we get into the global criticism. Right? The other thing about shame is that it’s hidden, right? It’s hidden from others. We try to hide things from ourselves. We hide things from God. Clients often hide things from their therapists. It hides in the unconscious, carried by parts of us that are exiled from conscious awareness. We treat them like lepers. And then the last thing here is that shame inhibits positive emotions. That’s something also, it’s really important. It has a way of putting the brakes on feeling anything positive. We’re going to approach this from a Catholic view of sexuality in which sexuality is ordered to what is good, true, and beautiful. And that is so different than what the world offers us. Sometimes even setting a standard, sometimes just even stating as a fact what the Catholic Church teaches about sexuality can lead to a tremendous reaction from people. Because what? It brings up shame. Because often what happens is that the person who’s experiencing the shame interprets their experience as having been shamed by whoever stated the standard. You know, for example, that the church expects that we wait until marriage to have sexual relations. And so, you know, if a person who hears that, who is cohabiting with their significant other, hears that, they can feel shame and assume that it came from a shaming act from somebody else.

[00:17:31] When really what’s happening is it’s coming from within them. Really because what’s happening is that shame is coming up within them because at some level, they know that there’s something disordered about that. This attitude can lead to this kind of cancel culture where one can’t even begin to discuss Catholic moral teaching on sexuality for fear of offending people, you know, for fear that they are going to experience shame. Well, in the divine order, sometimes we need to. Again, that’s where shame is a signal. It’s a cue that something may be wrong, that something may be dividing us from a relationship, perhaps the most important relationship, that between us and God. The other thing that makes this difficult is that there’s a model of suppression and condemnation in so many people. This is the idea that if I can take whatever’s making me uncomfortable in my psyche, and if I can stuff that into the unconscious, if I can get it out of conscious awareness, then it doesn’t exist anymore. Poof. It’s gone. It doesn’t exist anymore. If it’s not in conscious awareness, it doesn’t exist. Well, that is simply not true. Just because we stuff a polar bear into the closet in our home and we can’t see it anymore, doesn’t mean that there’s no polar bear still in the house.

[00:18:57] It means, actually, that we’re less equipped to be able to deal with that dangerous situation. So this model of suppression and condemnation, often it goes along with other very simplistic models, very simple ideas, that it’s just lust. This thing that I’m dealing with, it’s just lust and I just need to make it go away. And if it goes away, everything will be all right. I just need to stop having these thoughts. I just need to stop recalling these memories. You know, whatever it is, the person is, you know, concerned about within their experience of sexuality. But often what’s going on is that there is a signal here that something is amiss, that something’s not right in their life. Something needs to be resolved. It’s sort of like when a light comes up on the dashboard of your car, right, a warning light. People get really concerned about those warning lights, and sometimes they wish that the warning lights would just go out. But if we did pull the fuse, like in the old time cars, right, you could pull fuses and the dash lights would go out, it doesn’t resolve whatever the underlying engine problem was that caused the engine light to come on. Right. So sometimes these things are actually gifts because they clue us in to being able to understand what we need to deal with.

[00:20:25] One of the things that makes this whole area of sexuality also difficult is this external attribution. And I call this, it’s all about the demons, baby. Right. Now, don’t get me wrong, there is no doubt that there is such a thing as sexual temptation, right? But there are some people who want to believe that any kind of sexual experience that they don’t like going on inside of them is being caused by the demons, right? Sometimes you find this in folks that have very little psychological sophistication, right? So anything that’s ego-dystonic, anything that they don’t resonate as being good within them, has to be coming from somewhere else, right? And sometimes demons can actually exacerbate or even bring temptations to people. I wouldn’t say that that’s uncommon. But there’s also plenty of stuff that’s unresolved within people that demons do not have to be, you know, brought in to explain what’s going on. There’s natural explanations for it. There’s also a lot of bad advice out there about sexuality. There’s a lot of secular advice that’s based off of a primary orienting principle of satisfaction of our carnal desires, whatever they may be, as long as anyone else that’s involved is consenting freely. And, you know, that whole thing is guided by the spirit of our age. You know, it’s the offspring of the sexual revolution, if you will. So, you know, obviously there’s all kinds of secular advice that really is about hedonism.

[00:21:56] Then there is the so-called well-intentioned “Catholic” advice that doesn’t reflect what the Catholic Church really teaches. There’s some freelancing theologians and philosophers that have rejected the perennial teachings of the Catholic Church. They’ve created confusion among the faithful. There’s also priests and bishops who teach things that are contrary to the deposit of the faith that’s been handed down to us through the generations. And you know what? Part of the reason they teach that stuff is because there’s a huge appetite for it. There’s a huge appetite for these novel pseudo doctrines on sexuality. We have itching ears, so there’s a market for these kinds of things to be passed on. Bad advice can also come from advisors who aren’t comfortable in dealing with the sexual issues that the person has. They may be siloed in some kind of philosophical or theological ivory tower. I’ve read some of these sort of very high level philosophical abstractions about sexuality. And I think to myself, okay, so if this was 20 years ago, when I was dealing with a bunch of former sex workers, right? These are former prostitutes, former strippers that were coming to see me when I was early in my practice, how well would they resonate with this stuff? And the fact is, they wouldn’t resonate with it at all. And it really wasn’t helpful to me as a clinician. Right? So sometimes you get these siloed expositions that may be wonderful in some sense, philosophically and theologically, but they don’t work when you’re actually in the field.

[00:23:33] They’re not readily translatable into helping people that are coping with some kind of sexual problem right now. Also, sometimes people who are giving advice just don’t have experience. They really don’t know. And they’re stepping outside their area of competence. A third reason is that sometimes these advisors have their own personal issues. You know, sometimes something that’s going on amiss in their own sexuality is coloring the way that they’re advising. I mean, think about this. There are a lot of priests, people, that actually actively masturbate, right? And some of them are conflicted about it. Some of them are not. For many of them, it’s an unresolved long-standing problem. So how are they going to handle this in confession? There’s the potential for errors all over the place here because the priest isn’t well-ordered in this particular area in his life. There’s an area of being too indulgent or too lenient with it. There’s also an opposite area of being too harsh or too condemning. The sacrament obviously is still valid if the form is there and the intentionality is there, doesn’t depend on the idiosyncrasies of the priest as long as those basic factors are there, doesn’t depend on his human formation, which is a good thing, right? But the human formation aspects of that priest do enter into the kind of advice and counsel that’s often given in the confessional.

[00:24:54] All right. So another reason why this can be really confusing is because of definitional issues. All right. So I’m going to provide you with a broad definition of sexuality. And by sexuality in these podcasts, I mean, all those factors or elements within a person that are associated with sex. That’s what I’m saying. All right. So broad definition of sexuality, all those factors or elements within a person that are associated with sex. All right. So let’s look at this from our four sets. Right. We’ve got mindset, heartset, bodyset and soulset, right. So when we’re talking about sexuality and we’re thinking about it from the position of mindset, we’ll be thinking about the attitudes about sex, sexual thoughts, sexual fantasies, all the ways that sexual themes affect our intellectual selves, that affect us intellectually. All the ways, all the ways that sexual themes impact us in our minds. Heartset. Here we’re dealing with the way that sexual themes impact us emotionally. And we’re thinking about romance here. We’re talking about the relational factors as well. So emotions and relational factors in the heartset. Third, bodyset. Here we’re talking about the nitty gritty, right? The physical sensations. We’re talking about somatic reactions such as orgasm. We’re talking about bodily impulses. And we’re talking about everything related to reproduction on the natural level. And then the fourth, soulset.

[00:26:27] When we talk about soulset in terms of sexuality, we’re talking about beliefs, we’re talking about our conscience, we’re talking about all the spiritual aspects of this, we’re talking about the way that sex and sexual themes impact how we see God, our connection with God, our connection in the communion of saints. Right? So those four, mindset, heartset, bodyset, soulset, those all are impacted by sexual themes. And that all makes up sexuality. The last thing that we need to address is also, what are our actions? What are our actions and omissions, right? So there are so many contradictory internal messages, so many contradictory ideas inside one person, so many contradictory passions, emotions, desires, impulses, attitudes. There are internal battles that go on within Catholics around sexuality, which makes it such an important issue to address. There’s also so many sexual wounds and injuries, and these are often really, really deeply buried. Early on in my career as a psychologist, I realized that sexuality was the most sensitive barometer to detecting what kinds of issues are going on in a marriage as well. Sexuality can tell us so much about relationality, particularly in important relationships. Another reason why sexuality is such an important issue to address is that the stakes are very high. Our Lady of Fatima said to Saint Jacinta that more souls go to hell because of sins of the flesh than for any other reason. So, you know, this is one of those areas where if you look at, you know, where in the modern era are Catholics getting derailed from the Ten Commandments, really sexual issues are hugely prominent.

[00:28:25] They are huge and they are prominent. There’s lots of grave matter in the sexual arena. We’ve got pornography use, masturbation, artificial contraception, extramarital affairs, which is another way of saying adulterous affairs, premarital sex, which is another way of saying fornication and, you know, committing rape, committing incest. These are just the beginning. There’s all kinds of other ways that we can wind up in grave matter when it comes to sexual sin. So you might be asking, so how are you going to be any different, Dr. Peter, how are you going to be any different in this podcast than the things that I’ve looked at before, the things I’ve studied before, the best that I could find that’s out there in terms of, you know, Catholicism and sexuality, and understanding it from a psychologically, you know, nuanced and sophisticated way. How are you going to be any different? Well, I’m glad to be able to address that question. So first of all, I’m going to address the natural level aspects of human sexuality head on. There’s no skirting around the issues. We’re going to use clear direct language. So parents, be thoughtful about how much you want your young children to hear from this series of episodes, you know, given their level of development. Second thing, absolute fidelity to what the Catholic Church has historically taught, right? We talked about that before.

[00:29:47] I want to bring you things that are absolutely consistent with what the Catholic Church has already taught. But frankly, we’re going to be also breaking some new ground here, trying to bring in the best of psychology, the best of physiology, the best of neuroscience. And we do that to more deeply understand the truths of traditional Catholic teaching about sexuality. That’s why we do it. We’re going to be focusing on clarity within. We’re going to work with parts. We’re going to listen to the parts of us. We’re going to listen to ourselves. We’re going to listen to our own experience. We’re going to acknowledge the reality that we are so tempted to deny, that we’re so tempted to repress, that we’re so tempted to suppress, that we’re so tempted to ignore. We’re actually going to address this stuff much more directly. There’s an invitation to that. Now, this podcast isn’t about therapy. A lot of this is going to be setting you up to being able to address this more effectively in your own therapy, maybe get you thinking about going to therapy, if you haven’t done that, hopefully with a competent Catholic therapist, or to be at least able to bring this into prayer more, that kind of thing. We’re going to be making moral distinctions too, between what is morally wrong and what is disordered, but not morally wrong.

[00:31:10] And then what isn’t even disordered, right? Because there’s so much moral confusion in clients around sexuality. So much moral confusion, so much self-condemnation for things that aren’t sinful. And then sometimes not being aware that certain things actually are morally problematic. That can happen too. All right. So how are we going to do this? We’re going to do this through a discussion of parts. So if you’ve been a regular listener of this podcast, you know that there is a lot about Internal Family Systems therapy that I really, really like. Not all of it. There’s some problems with it, some ways that we need to adjust it in order to be consistent with a Catholic anthropology. But there’s so much in Internal Family Systems therapy that is just excellent. And one of the things that most attracts me to this particular therapy model is the discussion of parts. You know, that we are both one and multiple, right? Kind of like an orchestra. An orchestra is one, but it’s made up of individual parts, right? The musicians and the conductor. So parts are like these little persons within us. They’re discrete autonomous mental systems. They’ve got their own emotions, their own style of expressions, their own abilities, their own desires, their own views of the world. Parts are like little sub personalities within us. And they exist over time. They actually are continuous over time. You can actually locate and find them later. So they’re more than just one emotion.

[00:32:47] They’re more than one just habitual style of acting. They’re more than just one style of expression. They are these constellations of feelings, of body sensations, memories, of different types of relational styles, their own little personalities. The focus when you work with parts is on integration. It’s on bringing the parts together under the governance of the self. And you might think of this as, you know, bringing the passions, if you want to think about it from a Thomistic perspective, bringing the passions under the governance of the intellect and the will. The focus is on integration. And we believe within IFS, and IFS holds that each part has good intentions for us. It’s trying to pursue a good. Now I make the argument that each part has a different understanding of sexuality. Each part of us has a different understanding of sexuality, a different perspective of sexuality based on its experiences. Now, we discussed way back in episode 38 how each part has a God image. Each part has a way of understanding God. And those God images, if you want to learn more about those, you can go back to episodes 23 to 29 when we did a whole series on God images. What I’m arguing now, now in the podcast that we’ve introduced this concept of parts, is that each part has a God image. And similarly, each part has a different understanding and experience of sexuality. And those experiences and understandings of sexuality can be very distorted based on what that part’s experience was and how it made meaning from that experience.

[00:34:41] So just like a part’s God image, you know, that understanding of God can be very warped because of what that part experienced in relationship and how it made spiritual sense out of its experiences. Just like that, parts can be very much influenced by their experiences into coming up with some kind of distorted or warped perspective on sexuality. Parts get forced into extreme roles because of attachment injuries and their relational traumas. And there’s basically three roles that parts play within the psyche. And we covered these in episode 42, but I’m going to bring them up again briefly here. So exiles, managers, and firefighters. Those are the three roles that parts usually carry out. And exiles are the most sensitive. They become injured or outraged when different kinds of injuries happen or when traumas happen. And they can actually start to threaten the system. And they can also threaten external relationships with the intensity of their pain, with the intensity of their rage, with the intensity of their fear, with the intensity of their shame. These were the parts that were exploited, rejected, or abandoned in external relationships, including sexual relationships. These exiles want care and love. They want rescue. They want to be redeemed. And they can be motivated to do almost anything to be seen, to be heard, and to be cared for.

[00:36:09] They often carry heavy, heavy burdens of shame. They’ve often been hurt sexually. They often carry the burden of shame from negative sexual experiences. They often desire sexual experiences that are corrective in some way. They can reason, very primitively, that because they were hurt sexually, somehow the healing has to happen sexually. So they can look to somehow undo or to somehow redo their sexual experiences in some way. These are often very young parts, very childlike parts caught in the past, and they hold on to material that is really threatening and destabilizing to our systems. Right? Those are the exiles. Manager parts are usually the ones that are in charge on a day-to-day basis if the person is living a relatively stable life. These are very protective parts. They’re strategic. They’re very focused on controlling the environment in order to keep things safe. They really focus on keeping really destabilizing or really uncomfortable psychological material from bubbling up from the exiles. Right? So they are focused on suppressing the intensity that the exiles carry. They often guard against a revivification of sexual experiences. Right. They will do that because their soulset, you know, is worried about moral issues. Bodyset may be really worried about body integrity. Sometimes with really negative sexual experiences, you think of things like rape or incest, there’s this tremendous violation of the body, right? So managers are really invested in keeping those kinds of memories from being revivified, being brought into the present.

[00:37:55] These flashbacks. They want to keep a sense of being okay in the body, right? They also defend against heartset. They defend against emotional intensity. They defend against attachments, relational attachments that they think are problematic, that they have a sense are kind of dangerous. And they also have this mindset of wanting to keep a clear head. They don’t want to be overwhelmed by the intensity of the exiles. Those are the managers. Those are the ones that are trying to keep things going. They’re they’re overworked. Often they’re struggling to just kind of keep it together, right, and especially keeping the exiles from overwhelming. The third group are the firefighters. And these are really focused on distracting and anesthetizing the feelings of the exiles, right. So when exiles break through, when the exiles come up, in spite of the manager’s best efforts to keep them imprisoned in the unconscious, when those exiles break through, the firefighters leap into action. And firefighters, they don’t have concern for consequences. There you get, you know, things like binge eating, drug and alcohol use, dissociation, cutting, and you get a lot of sexual acting out from firefighters. Right. You know, for example, if an exile that is extremely despairing and there’s a risk of suicide, you know, there’s so much despair, there’s so much anguish. You know, it may lead to a person going out and having a one night stand. Right, just to distract from the intensity of the pain.

[00:39:33] Right. Because, you know, that one night stand, that brief sexual liaison somehow like distracted and kept the person from experiencing the depths of that despair. That’s not to argue that it’s okay. I mean, the ends don’t justify the means. But if we start to think about this in terms of parts, we can really get to an understanding of the kinds of questions that Saint Paul was asking in Romans 7. Right. Why is it that I do that which I hate? He’s asking that question. He doesn’t understand why he’s doing what he’s doing. And it’s not a question of willpower. Saint Paul had immense willpower. He was one of the saints who had the strongest willpower that I can imagine. Right. There was something going on in terms of parts, right? And if we’re not integrated, if we don’t understand what our parts are doing and how they’re interacting, we’re going to have difficulties governing our systems. So that’s what can happen. Parts can take over the person. And when our firefighters or when our exiles take us over, we’re at risk for sexual sin, we’re at risk for sexual sin. And when parts take over a person, it’s like in that movie Inside Out, that Pixar film, Inside Out, when the different emotions kind of were characterized, right. If one of them takes over the the control panel, everything is, you know, kind of seen and acted out through the lens of that particular part.

[00:41:05] We call that blending. And that explains why we often have radically inconsistent approaches to sexuality, right? When different parts blend with us in different moments, we’re going to have very different ways that we look at other people sexually, that we look at ourselves sexually, that we look at morality sexually. Thinking about things in terms of multiplicity also explains these internal polarizations, these polarizations that happen when different parts are locked into combat within a person, right? If you really believe in a single unitary, homogeneous personality, there wouldn’t be any reason for you to have a conversation inside because it should just be like one, right? But we’re not like that. We’re made in the image and likeness of God. God is three in one. He is both single and multiple. So are we. We’ve got the command from our Lord to love your neighbor as yourself. And that means that we’re supposed to love ourselves, which means that we have some kind of relationship with ourselves. You can’t have that if you’re a single homogeneous, you know, monolithic personality. It doesn’t work to think of you loving yourself. So this idea of thinking of ourselves as both one and several, one and multiple, helps us with that, right? So in addition to the parts, and there’s more on this in episode 42, we also have the self. When the self accepts and loves the parts, those parts, they transform.

[00:42:31] They come back to who they were meant to be. The self is this active inner leader. The self is meant to govern the system. And the parts can find the relationship with the self very reassuring, but they have to be in relationship. If they’re blended, if they’re fused with the self, right, there can’t be a relationship there. So the parts have to unblend and the self has to be able to take over that leadership role for there to be this integration, for there to be this recollection in the natural realm. There’s some intrinsic qualities of the self according to IFS. If a person is in self, if the self is really operative and leading the system, there’ll be calmness, there’ll be confidence, they’ll be curiosity, compassion, courage, clarity, creativity, and connectedness, right? And that’s where we want to be. We want to be in this place of natural recollection, when we approach issues around sexuality. The difficulty is that the self can easily be occluded or obscured or hidden by protective parts who take over, who blend with the self in response to fear, anger, or shame, especially shame. And so the general state for most people is to be very, very blended. I would argue that most people are blended almost all the time. And that leads to self-absorption. That leads to a real inward focus because there’s so much that’s going on that’s taking up so much energy inside that the people are not free to be able to connect with others, to enter into other’s internal worlds.

[00:44:10] All right. So a couple of examples. These are made up examples. They’re composites from clinical cases that I’ve had through the years. But they don’t describe a single one person. Okay, so let’s talk about a seminarian. I used to do a lot of seminarian evaluations, but a seminarian who was concerned about having some homosexual desires, some homosexual thoughts, some same-sex attraction. Right? And you get into the history and you find out that there was this uncle that he had. And this uncle was the most involved male relative that he had. This was the uncle that paid attention to him. This is the uncle that showed the boy affection, showed him caring, took him fishing, took him boating, listened to him. You know, this seminarian’s father was distant, right? This seminarian’s father’s was all wrapped up in work, didn’t really connect well with his son. And you know what? At some point, this uncle, maybe when the seminarian was 8 or 9 years old, started to molest him. Not long after that, let’s just say that the boy’s father found out. There was a huge reaction. The boy feared for his uncle’s life, feared that his father might kill the uncle. And this uncle was banned from the family’s life.

[00:45:18] And then it was never talked about again. Right. We don’t talk about it. It’s over. It’s done with. The boy probably will forget it. You know, we don’t need to do anything about this, right? Yeah, but there’s a part of that, boy, let’s say, that really needed the attention of a father figure, right? Really wants that kind of relational connection. And it’s all mixed up with this sexual stuff, right? Because of the sexual boundary violations, because of the incest that his uncle did. Right. So here you’ve got a part that now as an adult is attracted to, sexually attracted to older men, older men who remind the seminarian of his uncle. And there’s all this confusing sexuality around it. It’s all mixed in. And the part isn’t actually wanting sex with a man per se. That’s not the focus of this part. The part is trying to find what it needs to become a man. Especially a man not like dad, but a man who is both warm and strong, a man that’s emotionally connected and relational. And the only thing that it has to sort of reference that was this very complicated and difficult and distorted relationship with the uncle. All right. Well, if we just spend time in therapy, if I, as a therapist, just spend time aligning with manager parts of that seminarian to suppress the sexual desires.

[00:46:51] Just sort of pray the gay away, you know, just kind of get that out of mind, get it out of sight, it’s not going to resolve the human formation issue that’s at the root of this. It’s not going to solve the deficits that are in the life of this seminarian, right? So often, like seminarians, for example, they’re like, whoa, so I’m not all gay? Like it’s a relief to know that just one part of them has this particular sexual desire, this romantic attraction, or this sexual attraction to other men, whereas other parts of them have different attractions, right? It’s, you know, it could be mostly heterosexual, for example. So that’s a way of thinking about this in terms of parts. And it helps to focus us in to not changing the sexual orientation of the person, right. I see that actually as kind of late in the causal chain, but going back to the need that’s being expressed, going back to the need that the seminarian has for a father. Right. And then we can, once we identify that that’s what it’s about, then we can find much more appropriate ways for that need to be met, than by having brief sexual liaisons, for example, with other seminarians, you know, whatever. Right. This kind of stuff happens. I mean, if you’re a psychologist and you deal with church stuff, you’re going to run across this stuff all the time.

[00:48:26] All right. So second example, masturbation. We’re going to go into masturbation a lot more in a future episode. It’s actually going to be the focus of a future episode. But there’s lots of reasons for masturbation. A lot of times, managers just reduce it to lust. I masturbate because I give in to lust, or I masturbate because I give in to temptations. Well, rarely, if you, as a clinician, are willing to actually get into like, what’s going on with the masturbation, you ask about details and you actually try to understand what the experience of it is, you see that it’s about a whole lot of other things, a lot of them psychological. For example, there are times where men will masturbate when they start feeling closer to God, right? Because they have a part that’s terrified of God. It has a terrible God image. There’s a fear that we’re going to be consumed by God if we get too close. We’re going to be lost in God. We’re going to be like a drop of water falling into the ocean. We’re going to lose our identity. We’re going to be annihilated, right? And it’s better to masturbate. This is a firefighter coming in, right? Better to masturbate to get some distance from this terrible God. Because there’s a sense, you know, that if you sin, you actually separate, you get distance, right? And that will help us to survive.

[00:49:42] I mean, you can wind up getting in touch with parts that actually believe stuff like that. So that part, like all parts, has a good intention. It’s trying to do something really good for that client. It’s trying to preserve that client’s life, trying to keep that client from annihilation. But that’s not enough for an act to be ordered and morally good. The ends don’t justify the means. But if we know that’s what’s going on, then there’s ways that we can help that part. We can connect with that part. We can bring that part into the fold. That part’s like a lost sheep wandering around, subject to all kinds of dangers, right? Because it’s not in the fold. It’s not under the governance of the self. All right, so let’s remember what heals the shame. Real love heals the shame. What heals sexual injuries and traumas? Authentic love heals those sexual injuries and traumas. Grace heals those sexual injuries and traumas, right? There’s all kinds of things that can be helpful in therapy, but ultimately it’s love and it’s grace that heals those things. So the wounds, though, they have to come to light. This idea that time heals all wounds? It’s a ridiculous notion. Time does not heal all wounds. I actually really hate that little canard, that time heals all wounds. No. I have run across sexual wounds in clients that are more than 60 years old, and they’re just as fresh and as raw and as painful as the day they were inflicted on the client.

[00:51:13] So it’s like they’re frozen in time, like a fly in amber. We are looking to be able to connect with those experiences and to work through them. And there’s so much more now that we have. You know, I’ve been a psychologist for almost 20 years. So much more we have now in terms of being able to heal psychological injuries than we had 20 years ago, when I first started practice. It’s so much better now than it was back in the day. So you’re going to need help. I mean, nobody does this on their own. Obviously grace and love from God. But, you know, if this series on sexuality is like really hitting you in deep places, it may be time to consider a therapist, an individual therapist, someone that you can trust to get into with this stuff. It may be time to consider a 12 step program, especially with a sponsor where you can have a one-on-one relationship and be honest about what’s really going on inside. It’s really helpful to have one person who knows you well, and that includes the types of things that you struggle with sexually. All right. So next week we’re going to continue with this series on sexuality. We’ve got several more episodes kind of lined up. We have the Resilient Catholics Community.

[00:52:28] That community is about transformation. It’s about preparing the way for love in our souls. It’s about being together as Catholics on our journey. It’s about being together on this mission to really enter into an intimate, personal relationship with Jesus Christ as our brother, with the Holy Spirit who is love himself, and with our spiritual parents, God the Father and Mary our Mother. And you know what? Sexual stuff often gets all mixed up with God image stuff. Really, really common. So it’s another huge reason to work through sexual issues, not wait till purgatory, for example, to do that, right? But to do it here on earth. All right, so we’re going to do a bonus podcast for community members. That’s going to come out always on the Tuesday after. It’s always the day after. So this bonus podcast is going to come out on January 5th. We’ve got the second Wednesday Zoom meeting coming up on January 13th, 2021. It’s our first one of the year. It’ll be from 7:30 p.m. to 8:45 p.m. We’re going to be discussing shame and sexuality. I’m going to have some more things to share with community members and we’re going to have questions and discussion. Go ahead and register for that. That’s going to be up on our networking app, our private networking app. And then, you know, I’m going to just recommend that if you’re not on the waiting list, if you’re not ready to get into the community and you want to, go to soulsandhearts.com/rccd, and, you know, get on that waiting list. You’re going to get some information before the general public does about this.

[00:53:57] Those on the waiting list, I really thank you for your patience. I am going to be connecting with you. I’m going to be reaching out to you very soon. We’re hoping to reopen the community in March, possibly April, but hopefully March. I’m bringing together all kinds of programming together to make it a whole course in human formation, a whole course focused on transformation. All right. I’m also going to ask that you share this podcast. There’s somebody you know that could really benefit from a whole series on sexuality from an authentic Catholic position, really informed by the best of psychology, physiology, neuroscience. There’s somebody you know that you should be sharing with this. I’m going to ask you, reach out to that person, send them an email, share it on social media, let others know. Know that you can always reach out to me at (317) 567-9594. That’s my cell. Or you can email me at crisis@soulsandhearts.com. I’d love to hear from people. Love to hear from my listeners, what you want to hear about, what’s important to you. And with that, we’re going to call it a wrap. We’ll reach out to our patroness and our patron. Our Lady, our Mother, who understands us, who understands us deeply, even in the areas of shame, even in our sexuality. Our Lady, our Mother, Untier of Knots, pray for us. Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.