IIC 51: Top Ten Reasons Why Catholic Men Masturbate

Dr. Peter reviews the top 10 reasons Catholic men give to explain their masturbation and then describes 10 more reasons for masturbation that are not obvious to Catholic men.

[00:00:12] Welcome to the podcast Interior Integration for Catholics. Interior integration for Catholics brings to you each week the best psychological information, essential for your human formation, knowledge that is so fundamental in shoring up the natural foundation for your Catholic spiritual life. This podcast was formerly known as Coronavirus Crisis Carpe Diem. Now we’re asking and answering the tough questions about the real problems we Catholics have in our day-to-day lives, our struggles in the natural realm, the psychological difficulties that keep us from fully loving our Lord and Our Lady in a deep, personal, intimate way. In order to free you to love God the Father, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and our mother Mary, I help you to focus inward on your interior integration, to help you bring together the different parts of yourself into a unity and harmony with God’s truth, goodness, and beauty. Together, we’re looking for a deep transformation in our mindsets, our heartsets, our bodysets, a radical transformation at the core of our being, so that our souls can unite with God, and we can rise to the challenges and opportunities that he provides us. I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski, and I am here with you to be your host and guide through this process. 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 God and our neighbor.

[00:01:54] This is episode 51. It’s released on January 18th, 2021. This is the third episode in our series on sexuality, and it is titled The Top Ten Reasons Why Catholic Men Masturbate. Now, maybe some of you think you know why Catholic men masturbate, but maybe, just maybe, some of you are not satisfied with the typical simple surface answers. Maybe some of you suspect that there are psychological reasons that go a lot deeper than the common explanations of masturbation would suggest. I’m here to say that I think there is so much more going on with masturbation than what is available in conscious awareness. I’ve been a psychologist since 2001, and in the last 20 years, I’ve had the opportunity to explore the reasons for masturbation in the lives of many, many Catholic men. So we’re going to be looking at the top ten reasons that Catholic men give for why they masturbate. But wait, there’s more. We’re going to go far beyond just what Catholic men say the reasons are. We’re going to get to the deeper reasons that they don’t even realize are operative and driving so much around masturbation. So if you’re interested in getting much more complete answers, answers that plumb the depths of our psyches, stay tuned. This episode is for you. But first, why not women, Dr. Malinoski? Why aren’t you addressing women? That’s a fair question. So first off, I’ve seen a lot more Catholic men actively struggling with masturbation than I have with Catholic women.

[00:03:42] And I’m really depending and relying on my clinical experience for a lot of this. Masturbation is a great concern for some women. I totally get that. I just know a lot less about it. So I’m focusing in on men. Many of the points that I’m making, though, are likely to be equally valid for women as for men. And it’s really also valuable for women to understand why Catholic men masturbate. Parents, just a warning. Be mindful of how much of this you want your young children to hear. Okay. So definitions. Those of you that have been with me on this journey through these 51 episodes know that I am really particular about defining terms and being clear about the concepts. Confucius said that the beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper names, and that’s particularly important in the area of sexuality where things can get very muddled very quickly. The American Psychological Association’s Dictionary of Psychology defines masturbation as manipulation of one’s own genital organs, typically the penis or clitoris, for purposes of sexual gratification. The act is usually accompanied by sexual fantasies or erotic literature, picture, or videos. Masturbation may also include the use of mechanical devices, such as a vibrator or self-stimulation of other organs, such as the anus or nipples. All right, that’s how the American Psychological Association defines masturbation. Pretty clear definition. Why is it hard to talk about this? You know, there’s some times in Catholic clients’ overdeveloped sense of propriety, going back to the idea that perhaps talking about masturbation is going to increase the likelihood of masturbating.

[00:05:38] Sometimes it’s the idea that if we don’t talk about these things, maybe they’ll just go away. Sometimes there’s a concern about offending the sensitivities of other people, including clinicians. I’m going to remind everybody about the Victorian age, though. And there were a lot of women who died in the Victorian age from preventable medical conditions because they could not speak about their bodies in a clear language to their physicians. The physicians were all male back then, all men, because of the way the society was structured. And women had this very tight code of what could be said and what couldn’t be. And it led to a lot of communication difficulties, a lot of confusion that was very costly in a number of ways. So we want to make sure that we’re using clear language. Now, another another difficulty, of course, in talking about masturbation is a deep sense of shame and a desire to hide. So sometimes there can be parts of us that want to hide behind language and not be clear in the way that we communicate. And so we want to appreciate that parts could be really struggling with shame. If we can put our experiences into language and share them verbally, if we can share in words what’s going on within us, we are much better able to engage our intellect.

[00:07:11] If something remains non-verbal or if something remains pre-verbal, you know, it exists in this chaos of emotions or body sensations or images or sensory experiences or sort of undefined desires or subterranean impulses. If we can’t put words to those, we’re going to have difficulty engaging our intellect. We need to be able to name these experiences that are going on within us, or they remain shadowy, dark, and sometimes kind of ominous, kind of threatening. You know, Father John Hardon, in his 1981 book called The Catholic Catechism, when he was addressing masturbation on page 355, said, “More than ever, the church is becoming aware of the need for probing beneath the surface of not only what a person is doing, but why he is doing it. Impulses and tendencies that well up from the subconscious or the unconscious are seen as contributing to overt actions that reflect the behavioral patterns of the environment, even while they contradict the deepest values in which a person believes.” Here’s Father John Hardon in 1981, this is 40 years ago, discussing the need to go below the surface, into the unconscious, into the zones of the person’s psyche that are not immediately available to conscious awareness. And that is so important. He is so dead on with that. This is not just the purview of psychoanalysis. This is not just the purview of therapy. This is the purview of each and every one of us that are working on understanding and integrating our interior lives, bringing our parts together into a unified whole, which is what this podcast is all about.

[00:09:05] If we can talk about these experiences, if we can share them, if we can put them into words, if we can understand them, it helps our will to more effectively engage. And that decreases the likelihood that we are going to act out on a given emotion or impulse or desire in some way that would be contrary to the faith, in some way that would be damaging to our relationship with God, or damaging to our relationship with others, or damaging to our relationships inside of us, into our relationship with ourselves. This contradicts a commonly held notion by many Catholics that if we ignore, suppress, repress, or avoid a problem, or avoid difficulties, then they’ll go away, right? Sometimes we have a very primitive idea that if we cover our eyes, then it’s just going to not be there anymore. You know, one more thing is that sin thrives in darkness. You know, sunlight is the best disinfectant for these kinds of things. So I’m going to encourage you, as my listeners, to take a look at why it’s difficult to get into these nooks and crannies. You know, there’s reasons for that, but a lot of those reasons could be grounded in assumptions that are incorrect. All right. So where is secular psychology with regard to masturbation? Well, most of you know that we live in an environment post-sexual revolution.

[00:10:44] You know, 50 years after the sexual revolution That is extremely accepting of most kinds of sexual activity. Let me just give you an example. 2020 article in Psychology Today entitled, and I’m not making this up, Masturbation Is Sexual Health. This is by psychologist Joe Court. And here’s a quote. He says, “And yet here we are, in 2020, and talking about masturbation is still taboo in most of society. And that’s a shame, literally and figuratively, because masturbation is still widely considered shameful, and because for most people, it’s a healthy and normal activity. There’s actually a term these days for those who prefer masturbation over other forms of sex: solo sexual.” All right. So Psychology Today, mainstream magazine within our field of psychology, you know, it is not hard to see that the world has radically different views from our Catholic Church when it comes to sexuality. And so, you know, what I’m going to be presenting today is a minority opinion when you look at, you know, the general field of psychology. Well, what does the Catholic Church actually teach about masturbation? Well, let’s go to the relevant paragraph in the Catholic Catechism. Paragraph 2352. “By masturbation, it is to be understood the deliberate stimulation of the genital organs in order to derive sexual pleasure. Both the Magisterium of the Church, in the course of a constant tradition, and the moral sense of the faithful, have been in no doubt and have firmly maintained that masturbation is an intrinsically and gravely disordered action.

[00:12:41] The deliberate use of the sexual faculty, for whatever reason outside of marriage is essentially contrary to its purpose, for here sexual pleasure is sought outside of the sexual relationship, which is demanded by the moral order and in which the total meaning of mutual self-giving and human procreation in the context of true love is achieved.” All right. So there is no doubt about how strongly this is worded in the Catechism. Masturbation is an intrinsically and gravely disordered action. There is no doubt that’s what this paragraph says. And so that begs the next question. How serious is this? How serious is masturbation? The question often arises, is masturbation a mortal sin? Is it deadly? Well, the Catechism, paragraph 1857, says for a sin to be mortal, three conditions must together be met. You got to have all three. First one, mortal sin is sin whose object is grave matter, and which is also committed with full knowledge and deliberate consent. So three elements. You got to have grave matter, full knowledge, and deliberate consent. Those are the elements that go into making a sin mortal. The paragraph on masturbation addresses these questions about how sinful is it? How serious is it? Because in that final section, it says, to form an equitable judgment about the subject’s moral responsibility and to guide pastoral action, one must take into account the affective immaturity, the force of acquired habit, the conditions of anxiety or other psychological or social factors that lessen, if not even reduce to a minimum, moral culpability.

[00:14:36] All right. So what this paragraph essentially is saying is that the human person can be compromised. Right. And that compromise of the human person there, the psychological disorder, the problems in psychological structure, the types of, you know, internal distress that are going on, it also would include the effects of trauma and so on and so forth, can mitigate to some degree the culpability. Right. And so, spiritual directors and confessors have often told their directees or their penitents that, yes, it is mitigated. It may not be a mortal sin or it is not a mortal sin for you, given your particular circumstances. Those are judgments that require discernment. And often that’s true. The force of acquired habit, affective immaturity, other mitigating factors can impact this. But if that’s true, then you’ve got other problems, other problems that really need to be addressed. Right. I have seen some clients who are like, yeah, I masturbate. But you know, my spiritual director says, yeah, there’s a force of habit. And so it’s really not a mortal sin for me. And kind of a blasé attitude about like resolving that or resolving the mitigating factors that are severe enough to compromise the person’s intellect or will so that it’s no longer a mortal sin.

[00:16:13] And what are we really talking about? I mean, you know, the Catechism lays it out in terms of sin and, and so forth, but we’re really talking about something that’s keeping us from a relationship with God, something that’s keeping us from being able to unite with he who loves us with his immense, powerful love, with his amazing love. That’s what we’re losing when we’re choosing to masturbate, even if we’ve got these mitigating circumstances. So it can be really hard, especially in this day and age of so much sexual permissiveness in our culture, it can be really hard to have humility in accepting Church teaching on this. There’s an old saying, an old adage that goes, heresy begins below the belt. You know, it’s often the teachings on sexuality that the Church offers us, not imposes on us. It’s not like the Church imposes those teachings on us. The Church offers them to us. It’s a gift to us to help us deal with reality. Those teachings reflect the reality that we live in, and that doesn’t get changed because we’re 50 years beyond, you know, the sexual revolution of the late 60s and early 70s. But let’s talk about this from a natural level. Why is masturbation a problem on a natural level? This has been recognized by psychologists and psychiatrists for a long, long time. Even Freud, even though Freud was absolutely convinced of, you know, sexuality beginning in infancy. He wrote of the “disease of masturbation.”

[00:18:10] And Freud, even though he asserted that children were sexual beings, he documented his concerns about the effects of masturbation if it went on into adolescence. He was concerned about how masturbation would affect sexual development in teenagers. C.S. Lewis has this really great passage in a 1956 letter to a close friend, he said, “For me, the real evil of masturbation would be that it takes an appetite which, in lawful use, leads the the individual out of himself to complete his own personality in that of another, and turns it back. It sends the man back into the prison of himself, there to keep a harem of brides. And this harem, once admitted, works against his ever getting out and really uniting with a real woman. For the harem is always accessible, always subservient, calls for no sacrifices or adjustments, can be endowed with erotic and psychological attractions which no real woman can rival. And among those shadowy brides, he is always adored, always the perfect love, no demand is made of his unselfishness. No mortification is ever imposed on his vanity. In the end, they merely become the medium through which he increasingly adores himself.” Strong words from C.S. Lewis. And you know, as you know, C.S. Lewis was not a Catholic. He was an Anglican. So let’s break this down a little bit. Essentially, masturbation is a misuse of sexuality. It is a misuse of the gift of sex. It is sex ripped out of its original context, the context in which it’s ordered to being able to grow, to being able to love, to being able to connect, to being able to have an authentic intimacy that not only builds up the person, but also the spouse.

[00:20:22] It’s also a huge insult to the wife when a Catholic man masturbates. It’s got this incredibly powerful shaming effect, even if the wife isn’t talking about it, it’s often really there. I don’t know how many wives I’ve talked to who were really, really hurt by their husbands masturbation. The wife often thinks I’m not good enough. I’m not pretty enough. I’m not enough for my husband. He chooses to do this even when he knows that this is really hurtful to me. So great shame can attach for the wife. So let’s contrast what C.S. Lewis said with an attitude from a very worldly guy. Woody Allen quipped, “Don’t knock masturbation. It’s sex with someone I love.” Right, here there is so much hedonism when it comes to masturbation. It’s about pleasure. That’s what it sounds like on the surface. Now I’m going to argue that it actually isn’t. I’m going to argue that, you know, that’s actually a fairly shallow view of masturbation, that there’s a whole lot of other meaning that can attach to masturbation. But when, you know, we treat it casually and there’s so many jokes about it, you know, and so on and so forth.

[00:21:50] It’s treated in this very shallow, cavalier way. It diminishes it in terms of its actual significance and how harmful it is to us. All right. So how big of an issue is it? A few statistics. The 1992 National Health and Social Life Survey said that about 61% of men masturbate, at least fairly regularly. A 2010 article in the Journal of Sexual Medicine stated that, in the last month, 69% of 25 to 29 year old men in the US masturbated at least once, and nearly two thirds of men between the ages of 18 and 49 masturbate at least once a month. More than 80% of men in the age range of 18 to 49 reported masturbating in the last year. And then in the Tenga 2018 Global Self-Pleasure report, that came out that 92% of men masturbate at least occasionally. Souls and Hearts occasionally surveys priests and others to sort of figure out like, what’s the major thing that they’re concerned about, priests in particular, because, you know, they’re on the front lines in the confessionals, what kinds of things are being brought in. And always in the top, we have masturbation and pornography. Masturbation, pornography always come in at the top. That’s what priests are most concerned about in terms of working with their men who are penitents. All right. So let’s get into understanding why men masturbate, why Catholic men masturbate. And we’re going to start with compassionate attempts to understand.

[00:23:27] We need to know what we’re dealing with, not in the superficial. We’re not going to stop there. But we want to get into the depths of it. Oftentimes, the shaming parts of us beat us up about these kinds of things. They don’t want to allow a deeper exploration. It can be very sensitive to find out more about this from another person because of the burdens of shame that they already carry. So that’s why a podcast like this can be really helpful to know what kinds of common reasons are given. If you were a fly on the wall, in my office, in my Catholic practice over the last 20 years, these would be the kinds of things you would hear coming from the men who admit masturbating. So top ten list, in no particular order. One, lust. I just want pleasure. Number two, I’m weak, I lack willpower. Number three, I masturbate to de-stress, to calm down, to unwind, to relax, to fall asleep. Those kinds of things. Number four, it’s a habit. I do it out of habit. It’s a habit. Number five, anger. I masturbate when I’m angry. Number six, boredom. You’ll hear men say that. I masturbate when I’m bored. Number seven, my wife, or maybe my girlfriend is frigid, cold, sexually distant, withholding. A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. Something like that. Number eight, preventing acting out, often with a girlfriend, right. I masturbate so that my girlfriend and I, we won’t have sex.

[00:25:20] Number nine, I masturbate because I’m bad. Can you hear the echoes of shame in that? And number ten. Something along the lines of, the devil made me do it. I gave in to temptation, sort of external temptation. All right. Those are the top ten. Lust, weakness, de-stressing, it’s a habit, anger, boredom, wife is cold, frigid, I’m not going to have sex with my girlfriend, so I’m gonna masturbate, I masturbate because I’m bad, and the devil made me do it. Those are the ten most common responses. All right, there is one other common response, but it’s not really a reason that men give. Sometimes you hear this response, I don’t know why I do it. I don’t want to do it. I don’t know why I do it. I don’t understand myself. Right. And often the men are really scared. They’re really uncomfortable. They don’t like that loss of control, the feeling of not being in control of their responses. All right. Brings to mind Romans 7:15. I do not understand my actions, says Saint Paul, for I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. For some of these guys, that just nails it, dead on. I hate this, but I do it anyway and I don’t understand. And oftentimes they’ve tried a tremendous number of different things to get over it, used all kinds of spiritual means. Sometimes they come in and that’s the presenting complaint.

[00:26:56] That’s the presenting issue that they bring in. And it’s usually after a long battle using all kinds of spiritual means. And finally they’re coming in because the spiritual director or confessor recommended that they might want to take a look at this from a psychological perspective. Okay. I got issues with these simplistic explanations, though. I’m not satisfied with just attributing it to lust or weakness or a need to relax or a habit or anger or boredom or frigid girlfriends and wives. I’m not, you know, I’m not satisfied with the devil made me do it. I want to know, like, what’s going on at the beginning of the causal chain. All these explanations, they tend to look at surface behaviors. They look at the immediate context of the masturbation, and there’s a lack of awareness of what’s going on at a deeper level. There’s a lack of access to much of the internal and psychological and emotional lives, not recognizing deeper needs, not recognizing deeper intentions, not recognizing deeper motivations. I look at masturbation not only as a serious problem, but also as a symptom. It’s a symptom. It’s not the primary driving factor. Now, that’s not to say it’s not important, right? If you have a fever of 107 degrees, that’s a symptom. A fever is a symptom of some underlying illness or some underlying infection. But that fever of 107 can kill you, right? So I’m not saying that it’s not important because I’m saying it’s a symptom.

[00:28:28] I’m placing it in a different spot in the causal chain. A lot of people look at masturbation as the cause of their problems. And I look at masturbation not only as the cause of problems, because it certainly is, but it’s also the result of problems, right? And we want to go further upstream to see what’s generating it at the beginning, because if we can address those factors, if we can address those causes, we’re going to have a lot better success in terms of overcoming masturbation. All right. So we want to just step back a minute. And for those of you that are new to the podcast, because maybe this title grabbed your attention, maybe this is the first time that you’ve joined us. And if it is, welcome, we’re glad to have you. I am an Internal Family Systems therapist. And what that means is that I consider the human person to be both a unity and a multiplicity. What does that mean? What am I talking about? Well, we have a core self, you know, which is the center of our being. But we also have these parts, right? These parts are separate, identifiable, and enduring constellations of thoughts, emotions, attitudes, impulses, desires, abilities, interests, relational styles, body sensations, and worldviews. Right? So it’s like these little subpersonalities within us. And they’re not just transient states, but rather they’re these parts of us, these subpersonalities, these distinct modes of operating within us.

[00:30:08] Right? So they’re like little persons within us. And so the person is kind of like an orchestra in the sense that an orchestra is one, but it’s made up of many. There’s a conductor, which is like the core self, governing the entire system. And then there are the parts which are like the musicians. Now, the focus when you’re doing this kind of therapy, Internal Family Systems therapy, is on integration of what’s going on inside the person, right? Integration of the parts into the whole so that parts aren’t split off and operating independently, parts aren’t exiled, parts aren’t lost within the self, parts are connected in the way that God ordained it to be. So that there’s this internal order, internal harmony. That’s what we’re looking for. But when there are traumas, when there are relational wounds, when there are attachment injuries, parts get forced into extreme roles. So many of you have heard me talk about this before, but I’m going to just review it. There are three major roles that parts get forced into. And remember, parts are like little persons within us, right? The first are the exiles, and the exiles are the most sensitive parts. And they become injured or they become outraged by important people in our families and our social worlds. And these parts carry burdens. They carry an intensity about what happens that can threaten the person’s system and that can threaten external relationships. They were the ones that got exploited, rejected.

[00:31:55] They were the ones that were in front during abandonments or when there was neglect or abuse. These parts carry the burdens of shame and of need and of not having been loved, right. So there’s a strong need for redemption. And they want to be healed. They want to be loved. But because they have such intensity, protector parts bury them. They keep them away. They try to exile them, they try to force them out of conscious awareness so that their intensity doesn’t overwhelm the system and create havoc inside the person. And the protectors come in two kinds of categories. Managers are parts that are protective, but they’re also strategic. They focus on controlling the environment, and they work really hard to keep things safe. They manage our lives. They’re the ones that are really responsible. They’re the ones that handle a lot of the day-to-day responsibilities of life for us. And then our firefighter parts leap into action when an exiled part, with all its intensity, threatens to break into conscious awareness or has broken into conscious awareness. The job of the firefighter is to stifle, anesthetize, or distract from the intensity of the feelings of the exiles. And firefighters don’t have any concern for consequences. They don’t care about the long term because they’re coping with a crisis in the person’s system right now. They have to deal with the intensity of the despair or the intensity of the need or the intensity of the grief or whatever the intensity of the emotion is that an exiled part is carrying.

[00:33:48] And so that’s where you see binge eating. That’s where you see drug abuse. That’s where you see dissociation, that’s where you see sexual risk taking. That’s where you can see shoplifting or, you know, gambling, you know, problematic gambling. You can see all kinds of things happening in an attempt, a desperate attempt to calm things down and distract from the intensity of the pain. Often that’s where you’ll see masturbation as well. When you start to look at this in a deeper way, and you start to look at it in terms of parts, all of a sudden, the differences in modes of operating become much, much more explainable. They become much more comprehensible, why we do the things that we do, because it depends so much on which of our parts is activated in a given moment. Parts can take over a person, just like in the character Riley in the movie Inside Out. It’s a Pixar film. You can remember that little red figure, anger, taking over the control panel, and then all of a sudden, boom! The whole system of Riley is driven by the intensity of her angry part. We call that blending within Internal Family Systems. Right? So one thing to remember, and I think this is so important, is that the intentions of our parts are good. They want to help us.

[00:35:21] They want to bring about good for the system, but the means that they can use are often harmful or maladaptive. That’s why it’s so important for parts to be in touch with the self, to be under the governance of the self. Otherwise they can look like Saint Thomas Aquinas’s passions, you know, how he describes the passions, running amok, right? And us being governed by our passions rather than by our intellect and our will. Okay. So when we approach masturbation, we want to understand what’s going on in the context. What does it mean? What’s the good that’s being sought here? Right. And for this episode, I’m not going to be addressing a lot of pornography. We’re going to have Dr. Gerry Crete on here in episode 53 in two weeks to discuss pornography. We’re going to be looking at really masturbation because it doesn’t always go with pornography. Not only are we going to look at what’s going on in conscious awareness, but we’re going to want to see what’s going on in the parts that were not in touch with, because that drives so much of our behavior. That doesn’t necessarily control us, but it has an influence. It has an effect on us. Right, like Father John Hardon was saying. “Impulses and tendencies that well up from the subconscious or unconscious are seen as contributing to overt actions that reflect the behavioral patterns of the environment, even while they contradict the deepest values in which a person believes.”

[00:37:13] Now, there are a lot of Catholics, a lot of Catholic men, that do not like the idea of the unconscious, do not like the idea of parts, you know, running around in ways that we don’t see, in ways that we don’t readily comprehend. And when that happens, what that means is there’s a lack of interior integration. And what we’re focused on in this podcast and why it’s named what it is, Interior Integration for Catholics, is to be able to help understand how we can be more integrated. I gave you ten reasons that men typically give for why they masturbate. Now we’re going to get into the ten deeper reasons. Now, I want you to bear in mind that I’m focusing on the psychological realm here. I’m not really focusing on the spiritual realm. You know, I certainly do not deny that vice exists. Vice certainly exists. Sinfulness exists. Lust exists. All those things exist. I’m looking at the psychological reasons, not the spiritual reasons. I’m not a moral theologian. I’m not a confessor. I’m not a spiritual director. I don’t have the gift of, you know, understanding how the Holy Spirit’s moving people’s souls and kind of what their level of culpability and sinfulness and vice and all that is. What I’m an expert in is understanding the natural realm, the natural foundation. And because grace perfects nature, we really want to make sure that we start with this natural realm, to shore that up, to shore up the natural foundation so that it can be as solid as possible for us to stand on in the spiritual life.

[00:38:43] All right, so the top ten deeper reasons. Number one, loneliness, yearning for an intimate connection, but one in which we have control. And that came out in that C.S. Lewis quote where the the shadowy brides in our imaginary harem don’t demand anything from us. We don’t have to change. We want the intimate connection, but we don’t want the risk. We don’t want the vulnerability associated with the real relating that it would take to have that loneliness addressed. So that’s number one, loneliness. Number two, insecurity, a lack of safety. I mean, this could be fears of abandonment, for example, right? Where we don’t enter into real relationships with other people because of the pain of abandonment. Right. Difficulty with real relationships, either our current relationships or potential relationships that we could maybe get into if we weren’t already married. Right. This kind of self-soothing through the use of masturbation to address in a maladaptive way, a deep fundamental sense of insecurity. So number one, loneliness, number two, insecurity. Number three, a cry for help. Masturbation is sometimes generated by the exiles within us, because it is often a surefire way to get the attention of the person. If an exile breaks through with this intense sexual desire that’s very difficult to manage and the person’s will is overcome, right? The person allows the intensity to take over.

[00:40:34] There is a cry for help. The exile using a symptom that they know will attract attention. This can be very common in what I call single symptom presentations. This is where everything else is fine in the world. Everything else is fine in my life. If only I didn’t masturbate, everything would be great, right? When that happens, sometimes that symptom of masturbation carries on multiple layers of meaning that are going to have to be unpacked, that are going to have to be undone. Because everything that was problematic sort of got stuffed in this one closet behind the door of masturbation. Right. And so that becomes the way that so many psychological issues are expressed. So much psychological distress is expressed by both exiles and sometimes also firefighters. Number four, sometimes what’s at the root of masturbation is anger at God. Sometimes masturbation is a way to retaliate against God, against a God who is perceived to have been unjust. It’s a way of rejecting God. It’s a way of trying to punish God by removing ourselves from relationship. You know how little kids do that? They get irritated with their playmate and they say, I’m not going to be friends with you anymore. I’m not going to be friends with you. I hate you. Right. Now, often this anger at God is way too threatening to be in conscious awareness.

[00:42:10] It’s too much for other parts to tolerate. So the behavior separates the person from God, not just in some sort of imaginary way, but in a real way, right? To the degree that, you know, there is real culpability, real sin here, it separates us from God. And it’s a way of acting out anger because of a negative God image, because of a problematic God image that parts have. Number five, sometimes masturbation is a way to regulate distance from God because of a fear of God getting too close. There was a phenomenon I realized many, many years ago. It was puzzling to me at first, when things would be going really well in a young man’s life and, you know, things just getting better and better, getting closer and closer to God. And then for “no reason,” at least no reason that the client was aware of, they masturbate and then starts this whole kind of downward spiral, this way of feeling distant from God, the need to repair the relationship. And so as I began to explore that with clients, I began to realize that some clients have this way of relating through fusion. They have parts that believe that relationship is really fusion, right? It’s really a kind of blending between a part and the other person. And so sometimes what happens is that these other parts become terrified around being annihilated. Because if I, as a human being, fuse or blend with the infinite God, I’m going to be lost.

[00:43:56] I’m going to be annihilated. I’m going to be destroyed. I will no longer exist. So some parts, not knowing that God respects our boundaries, not knowing that God wants a relationship, you know, not knowing that it’s not like entering into the Borg, right, because they don’t have a good experience of God. They don’t have good God images. They don’t understand how God actually treats us with a lot of dignity and a lot of respect around our boundaries are fearing that we’re just getting too close. And so they react. Right. These are often firefighters. They react by masturbating in order to keep God at a distance, in order to save the person from annihilation. At least that’s the way they conceptualize it. That’s how they’re misconstruing what’s happening in the relationship. And masturbation is kind of the “perfect sin” for this because it “doesn’t hurt anybody else.” And it’s private and it doesn’t give scandal and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. None of that’s true. It’s not true that masturbation doesn’t hurt anybody else because we’re all connected in the mystical body of Christ, right? What happens in one of us impacts the entire body, you know, but often it’s seen as something that’s private and that doesn’t have an effect outside of the self. Right. So that’s the fifth. So we got loneliness, insecurity, cry for help, anger at God, and regulating distance from God so we don’t get annihilated.

[00:45:22] What’s number six? Number six, anger at the wife. Sometimes there’s a lot of unconscious anger at the wife, not meeting my demands for a mother, not meeting my demands for her to be God. All these incredibly intense needs that are unacknowledged that we don’t even know about, that we place on the wife when we get married or before we get married. And there’s a kind of acting out because she’s not a very good God, or she’s not a very good mother, right? She’s a human being with flaws and limitations and her own needs and so forth. So parts that had hoped in the intensity of the romance and the infatuation of the honeymoon period of the marriage in the, you know, in the dating relationship and the courting relationship, get disappointed. Then you can wind up with a kind of acting out. Often this is not at all in the conscious radar of the man. It also may be a way of begging for help from the wife. This is sort of related to that cry for help that we talked about in number three, right. A cry for help to the wife. Help me. But of course it’s maladaptive and it has the opposite effect in terms of often wives withdraw or they become angry themselves. Right. It can also be a way that men can consciously or unconsciously influence the sex life with their wives.

[00:46:42] Right? If you don’t have sex with me, I’m going to masturbate. You know, that would be sinful. Sometimes that’s been used almost like to extort sexual connections with the wife. Very difficult and problematic dynamic there in a number of ways. So that’s number six. Number seven. Sometimes it’s the effects of sexual abuse. Right. Now, this can get really complicated and it can frankly be really ugly, really, really ugly. You know, but sometimes in certain people’s lives, the deepest emotional connections that they had were with men that sexually abused them. And so male, you know, connection, male connection, male bonding, gets all wrapped up into this sexualized pattern. And so there can be a way of trying to hang on to relational connections with important others, if those important others sexually abused a person, say, by masturbating them. All right. That can happen. And that’s often really unclear, when individuals first start looking inside. Number eight. A deep existential lack of safety. We talked about self-soothing here. It’s a way for us to calm down, for us to re-connect with some sense of safety, because maybe there was a sense of safety associated with orgasm at some other point in the past, some kind of connection to the physiological experience, or maybe the endorphin release provides like a real intensity of at least in the moment, feeling okay, just for a few seconds or maybe a minute.

[00:48:42] Sometimes people are looking for that. And it’s a very, very basic primitive way of trying to achieve safety. Doesn’t work in the long run, doesn’t work for more than a minute, but some people seek it just to have a respite from what feels like a chronically dangerous situation. All right. So that’s number eight. So number one, loneliness. Number two, insecurity. Number three, cry for help. Number four, anger at God. Number five, regulating distance from God. Number six, anger at the wife. Number seven, effects of sexual abuse. Number eight, a deep existential lack of safety. Number nine, sometimes people masturbate in order to ground themselves in reality. Sometimes people feel so dead inside that they need to feel something. They need to feel anything just to know that they still exist, right? If this is the place that somebody is, they’re in a world of hurt, right? Because this serves the same kind of function as people who cut themselves. There are some people who cut themselves. They have firefighters that cut themselves in order to ward off a sense of being obliterated by numbness, or being annihilated in this sort of nihilistic way by their parts that are so overcome with despair. And so in seeing the blood, they know that they’re still alive. They can see the blood flow from their wrist, and that helps to snap them into the reality that they’re still alive.

[00:50:17] And similarly, ejaculation can like connect the person that they actually exist, that they actually have a body, that they’re actually still alive. This may sound really bizarre to people that have been nowhere near the thresholds of that kind of distress and despair, but that is a very real reason for masturbation as well. Number nine, that’s the testing reality. That’s the grounding. Number ten. This is the last one. Temptation. There is an impact from the spiritual world on our psyches, right? And demons go after the most isolated, the most lonely exiled parts, the parts that are the most distressed, that are most cut off, that are the most dissociated, that are the most disconnected. And so we’re not talking about cases of possession or even oppression here. We’re talking about just garden variety temptations. And those garden variety temptations tend to exacerbate, tend to be focused on parts of us that are most susceptible to being influenced. And those are the parts that are most distant from our core self, that are most distant from an ordered sense of being loved from ourselves, because they’re not connected with the self, they’re not connected really with the love of other people. They’re not really connected with the love of God either, which makes them prime targets because of their vulnerability to the evil one. Let’s follow a couple of stories here. Richard. All right. We’re going to bring in Richard. Richard, 48 years old, grew up in a nominally Catholic home, but it was a troubled, broken home.

[00:52:01] His parents divorced when he was 15, after lots of conflict over years, when he was growing up. Parents dissatisfied. And then it was discovered that his mother was having an affair. Just shattered his father, just shattered his father when that was revealed. So Richard, Richard really struggled in high school. And he started masturbating when he was 15 in the high school locker room, Playboy magazines, going around in basketball team. This is 1987, right around the time that his parents were going through this high conflict divorce. Richard was carrying the emotional burdens of his younger siblings as well, because his parents weren’t that available. He was a pretty tender-hearted, sensitive guy. He needed somebody to support him and who was available? The basketball team. He really wanted to be included. He wanted to be one of the guys on the team. He was a benchwarmer. He wasn’t one of the starting five. He needed to find something that would help him connect. And the other players really reveled in it when Richard joined them in viewing their pornographic magazines and in their conversations about their sexual exploits. You know, because Richard had been considered sort of a stuck-up snob. So that’s when his masturbation came in. There was a sense of being excited, sense of being included in a group, a sense of stability on the team.

[00:53:24] It wasn’t really stability, but it was what he felt he had at the time. He tried to stop masturbating at various times in his life. He was not one of these guys that was loud and proud about his masturbation. It was furtive. It felt dirty to him. He felt guilty, so he tried to stop. His fantasies were of different women, women mostly in their mid 30s, you know, late 30s, brunette women with dark eyes, women with curves, little heavier than the typical Playboy centerfolds. He was actually really interested in reading the stories about their lives. He wanted to know what they needed, what they wanted in relationships. He fantasized about how he could meet their needs, how he could connect with them, and how they would be devoted to him and highly committed. And so, as he grew into his college years, his early 20s, he dated a lot of girls. Most of them, pretty brunettes with dark eyes and curves, like his mother at the time of the divorce. He had lots of sexual relationships. And then he married Linda, a very pretty woman with a lot of dependency issues. And Linda was crazy about Richard. Sex before marriage was really sensual, really intense. And after the marriage, not so much. Right. Richard felt burdened by his wife’s dependency. He felt burdened by Linda’s passive resentment because Richard wasn’t living up to her highly idealized idea of what a husband should be.

[00:55:01] They’ve been married 22 years. They’ve got four kids. You know, Richard’s a regular Mass goer. He tried to raise his kids right. But he continued with porn and masturbation, and he only did it when he was alone, right. Often with these deep, unacknowledged feelings of shame, inadequacy, and the fears of being abandoned again. So that’s key, right? Fears of being abandoned again. Abandonment, insecurity rising up. That’s what you get when you get to the bottom of what’s going on with Richard’s masturbation. There’s unresolved issues, especially around abandonment, especially around security, from Mom’s erratic behavior, from her infidelity not only to Richard’s father, but to the whole family. Right? Because affairs affect the whole family. And so he has an exiled part that needs Mom. An exiled part that’s lonely, that’s needy, that has been shunted away, that the rest of Richard’s system has tried to protect him from, because of the intensity of the need. This part, when it rises up, is just so powerful that a firefighter comes in to try to distract from and anesthetize Richard to the pain of the mother wound. You know, the pain that his mother inflicted on him when she wounded him by leaving her husband. Right. So that firefighter leaps in with pornography because that’s what was available. That’s what seemed to give some temporary respite. That was what was associated with the basketball team back in high school. Right. Leaps in with the porn.

[00:56:46] And that also keeps him from looking to an affair. There’s another protector in here that doesn’t want Richard to repeat what his mother did. Right. That absolutely, under no circumstances, no affairs. Because Richard lived through how horrible that was. And he doesn’t want to have anything to do with that. So in order to ward off the temptations and the possibilities, the impulses to notice that cute little secretary at work, masturbation takes the place, right? It comes in there in order to deal with that loneliness, neediness, pain, and weakness. Right. Then, of course, there are parts. There’s an internal critic that so condemns Richard for his masturbation. There’s also a way that he’s acting out anger towards his wife, because there’s a part that had hoped that she would solve all of this. By being able to have sex with her, by being able to be in relationship with her, by being in this marriage with her, that it would make all of this mess go away, that it would resolve all of the issues that he has with his mother, all the issues that he had growing up, around intimacy, around safety, around security, around abandonment. Make all that go away. That’s how these parts think. They often think in these very childlike ways. So that’s the story of Richard. I want to tell you one more story before we wrap up. And that’s the story of Luis. Now, Luis is a seminarian.

[00:58:15] He’s got a deep devotion to God. He is in his second year of theology. His parents are married, but dad’s kind of distant. Mom thinks that dad’s a little autistic, not very emotionally attuned. And so Luis wound up being sort of the husband replacement, right, meeting mom’s emotional needs. Very close, very enmeshed relationship with mom. Right. Because dad’s not available. Mom needed somebody to rely on. And there was this kind of emotional incest between Luis and his mother. There was never anything physical that happened, but mother shared with Luis all of her troubles, her burdens, the things that she struggled with in the marriage when Luis was a teenager. The kinds of things that you really don’t burden a pre-teen or a teenager with. It’s just not appropriate. So part of the reason that Luis went to seminary, as we unpack this. And again, these are composites. These are not particular clients of mine. But as we unpack this, we start to realize that part of the reason for Luis going to the seminary was that there would be no other women in his life. His mother would continue to be the one and only, right. So Luis experiences these relationships as fusion, as a blending, little respect for boundaries. Right? And so Luis, he’s one of these guys that masturbates in order to regulate distance from God, from God getting too close because he has parts that are very sensitized to boundaries being violated.

[00:59:59] And these parts don’t know God very well and believe that God will be intrusive, that God will invade, and that God will take what he needs from Luis, just like mom did. Even though Luis cannot put any of this into words, that’s what’s going on, right? So when Luis starts to feel close to God and he starts to feel really connected with God, and he starts to feel some degree of security, it alarms these parts because they’re like, this isn’t safe, Luis. You need to get some distance. And so they activate and they become hyper-aroused. They go into a fight or flight mode. And that triggers some masturbation in order to divide, in order to drive a wedge between Luis and God. So that’s Luis’s story. We’re about to wrap up and and now that we’ve identified the issues around masturbation and its causes, we’ve gone into those much more deeply and in greater detail. In the next episode, we’re going to get into how to overcome masturbation. All right. We’re going to follow the stories of Richard and Luis. We’re going to continue because the stories haven’t ended. I’m going to continue with those stories. So you’ll be able to hear that in episode 52, which is going to come out on January 25th. You know, I want to welcome the Interior Therapist Community to Souls and Hearts. This is a community of 32 Catholic therapists who are working with me on their human formation and learning IFS principles.

[01:01:36] You know, this had been in my private practice, Secure Foundations. I’d been working with them through there, but Dr. Gerry and I have agreed that it would be great to bring that community under the umbrella of Souls and Hearts. That community is currently closed to new therapists, but we’re about to open it in just a couple of weeks, just a few weeks. We’re going to reopen it. And so there’s all kinds of opportunities. So if you’re a Catholic therapist and you’re interested in that, by all means get in touch with me on my cell at 317-567-9594 or email me at crisis@soulsandhearts.com. Would love to connect with you. There’s a lot of Catholic therapists that listen to this podcast. It’s really great to hear, and we really want to get you into a closer orbit. If you’re if that feels like it’s a good thing for you, there’s a special bonus podcast that I always do each week for those therapists. And on this week, it’s going to be on the clinical assessment of masturbation. It’s going to be on the clinical assessment of masturbation from an IFS perspective. We’re going to be talking about that also of interest to not only clinicians and therapists, but to the population in general. On February 19th, 2021, from 10 a.m. to 1:15 p.m. Eastern Time, I’ve been invited to do a webinar for the Catholic Psychotherapy Association entitled Why Do I Avoid God? An Internal Family Systems-Informed Approach to Parts’ Negative God Images.

[01:02:54] And here we get into how different parts see God and how to work with those in the clinical encounter. There’s going to be lots of experiential work and for a lot more information and registration, go to catholicpsychotherapy.org/events, and you will see it there. All right. We also have the Resilient Catholics Community. This is the community that grew up around this podcast. It’s all about transformation. It’s all about preparing the way for love in our souls. It’s about being together as Catholics, on the journey, on a mission to really enter into that intimate, personal relationship with Jesus Christ, our brother, the Holy Spirit, who is Love himself, and with our spiritual parents, God the Father and Mary our mother. That’s why we don’t want to be masturbating. That’s why we want to overcome these kinds of things that keep us from real relationship, from real intimacy. It’s not about following the rules that old guys in cassocks make. That’s not what it is at all. It’s about love. It’s about intimacy. It’s about real joy, about real peace. That’s what I want for you. All right. Now that community is closed right now. But it’s going to reopen either in April or in May. I know I keep pushing it back. There’s been a lot of work to get that up and running.

[01:04:03] Get on the waiting list though. Go to soulsandhearts.com/rccd. And you can get information that’ll be coming out as we move closer to reopening. There’s all kinds of new things that I’m building in, that I’m testing out right now with the current community members. For the current community members, there’s an experiential exercise, a parts roundtable exercise, about masturbation. So we’re going to be working with parts around the theme of masturbation in that bonus podcast, which is going to come out on Tuesday, January 19th, one day after this one releases. Office hours for the Resilient Catholics Community, on Wednesday, January 27th from 9:15 to 10:15 a.m. Eastern Time. Register on our app. I’d love to have you come. You can just drop in there. And I’m going to invite you to share these podcasts. Maybe there’s somebody you know that struggles with masturbation or struggles with sexual issues in general. Let them know. You know, we’re on Spotify, we’re on Apple Podcasts, we’re on Google Play, we’re on Amazon, share it on social media. And also don’t hesitate to reach out to me. (317) 567-9594. That’s my cell. crisis@soulsandhearts.com. That is my email address. Would love to hear from you. Let’s invoke our patroness and our patron. Our Lady, our Mother, Untier of Knots, pray for us. Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.