IIC 53: Breaking Free from Masturbation, Part 2

We cover six more mistakes Catholics make when trying to overcome masturbation, including the one big mistake that almost everyone makes.  We also cover ten more remedies for those mistakes, all grounded in a Catholic worldview.

[00:00:12] Welcome to the podcast, Interior Integration for Catholics, the podcast formerly known as Coronavirus Crisis Carpe Diem. Interior Integration for Catholics brings to you in each episode the best psychological information essential for your human formation, knowledge that is fundamental in shoring up the natural foundation for your Catholic spiritual life. In this podcast, we confront the tough questions we Catholics have in our day-to-day lives. We confront head-on 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. And we deal with these difficult, demanding issues for one primary reason: to free us to love God our Father, Jesus our brother, the Holy Spirit, and our Mother Mary more and more over time. This podcast helps you focus inward on your interior integration to help you bring together the different parts of yourself into unity and harmony with God. Together, we are on this journey toward deep transformation in our mindsets, our heartsets and our bodysets, a radical transformation at the core of our being, so that our souls can one day enter into contemplative union with God. I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski, and I am here with you to be your host and guide. This podcast is part of Souls and Hearts, our online outreach at soulsandhearts.com, which is all about shoring up that natural foundation for the Catholic spiritual life, all about overcoming psychological obstacles, to being loved and to loving God and neighbor.

[00:01:55] This is episode 53 and it’s released on February 1st, 2021. It’s the fifth episode in our series on sexuality and the third one on masturbation. It’s titled Breaking Free from Masturbation Part 2. We’re following up on our last episode, episode 52, which was Breaking Free from Masturbation Part 1. We’re getting into the answers for Catholics who experience masturbation as a dead end, as a failed promise, as an inadequate answer for their deeper needs and desires. And in this episode, we’re addressing six more mistakes that Catholics make in their attempts to overcome masturbation. We’re also going to get into ten more remedies for those additional six mistakes. And the last remedy is the most important one. It’s so important that I think of it as the “secret solution.” It’s the solution that so many people who struggle with masturbation rarely consider. And so we’re saving the best for last there. Now masturbation may not be your issue. You can take out masturbation and substitute any other sexual problem, fetishes, porn, sexting, sexual obsessions, compulsions, excessive sexual fantasies, whatever. And not only that, people are also finding that these episodes are helpful for getting to the root of any symptomatic behavior. Right? Binge eating, excessive shopping, video games, vegging out on Netflix, whatever. Right. It can be helpful for those as well. So just to review, in the last episode, I promised you a map, not a ride in a limousine or on a flying carpet to your destination.

[00:03:32] That’s not how the journey is going to go. We’re going to make this journey on foot one step at a time. It’s a map. It’s not an individualized treatment plan. This is not therapy. It’s not magic. You still have to make your own journey. But what we’re going to do in this episode is lay out the terrain to help you see what kinds of typical issues and mistakes people make when they’re trying to overcome masturbation. Some of you have been suffering for a long time, and it’s not uncommon for me to see people in my practice that have struggled with masturbation for 50 years or more. This is not always a simple issue to get over. I totally get that. God sees your efforts. He sees your good intentions. There are ways, especially with some of the things that have been developed in the realm of psychotherapy, some psychotherapeutic techniques and so forth. There are ways to get over this, to understand that it’s not just about the symptomatic behavior, but it’s about the root causes. We talked about that a lot in episode 51. Right? That’s where we talked about the top ten reasons why Catholic men masturbate. We get into like, what’s going on at the core. And that’s what we need to be focusing on. That’s what we need to be getting to.

[00:04:47] We don’t want to just deal with the surface symptomatic presentation. We want to get to what the real causes are. This podcast is all about interior integration. That is our overarching goal in the natural realm. That’s what we’re seeking in the natural realm. It’s to have all of our parts come together. So we need a way of understanding and modeling this interior integration and also interior fragmentation. I borrow heavily from Internal Family Systems approaches, I abbreviate that as IFS. That’s the abbreviation. And that was originated by Richard Schwartz. So I presented a brief overview of IFS in the last episode. I’m not going to repeat it here, but for those that may be joining us, just know that parts are like little personalities within us. Imagine a kid who’s considering taking a cookie from the cookie jar. One part of him wants to have the cookie. Another part of him wants to be good and not to have to struggle with the guilty conscience. And maybe another part doesn’t want to face mom’s anger if he gets caught, right. So there are different parts that are reacting in different ways to situations. And I believe that the way that we’re structured is both this multiplicity of parts with a core self, and then also a unity of the whole person. All right. So let’s do a quick, quick review of the last episode where we listed four primary mistakes. The first one, considering masturbation to be the primary problem.

[00:06:21] We got to go deeper, right. And we talked a lot about what that looked like in the last episode. Mistake number two, pursuing compartmentalization or fragmentation instead of interior integration. Okay, there’s a lot of long words. What what are we talking about here, Dr. Peter, what are we talking about? Well, compartmentalization is basically taking the whole issue of masturbation and trying to like, put it in its own little bubble, trying to just sort of shelve it, trying to shove it away. Just saying, I’m not dealing with that. I’m going to just kind of box that up and put that over there. Right. That leads to fragmentation inside. It leads us further away from interior integration. Third mistake is going it alone. That’s a huge one. We actually had a premium podcast for our Resilient Catholic Community members on why we go it alone. It was really popular in the community, heard some really good feedback from it. Going it alone is a really common mistake. And the fourth mistake we addressed in the last episode was using only the spiritual means, not looking at the natural level, spiritualizing everything, trying to take everything into the spiritual realm. And that’s not how these things generally resolve. Because grace perfects nature, we’re actually looking at difficulties in the natural realm as well as in the spiritual realm. Okay, so what are the next six? We got six more mistakes that we’re going to cover today.

[00:07:50] We got a lot to go through. I’m going to list those now. The first one is having a power spirituality or sometimes I call it a macho spirituality. Seven, a passive spirituality. That’s sort of the flip side. Eight is not addressing the why for the change. Right? Why do we want to give up masturbation? Right, issues around motivation. Mistake number eight, shaming the self for failures, for slips, for falls. Number nine, the all or nothing trap. We’ll get into that, and how all or nothing plays into this in a variety of different ways that keep us from actual recovery. And number ten, the biggest mistake, the one that almost everybody makes when they’re trying to get out of masturbation, but it’s something that’s absolutely essential, and I’m not going to tell you what it is right now. I’m going to invite you to stay tuned till the end where we get into it in detail. All right. So we’ve got those nine mistakes and we already covered the first ten remedies. We’re going to get into the second ten remedies. I’m not going to review the first ten remedies now in the interest of getting on with it. All right. So we’re going to get on with it now. Mistake number five, power spirituality, macho spirituality. Okay. So what am I talking about? Well, the slogan for the power spirituality is, God helps those who help themselves.

[00:09:27] God helps those who help themselves. Almost all of us have heard that at one point or another, right? My grandfather used that phrase a lot. My Grandpa Roberts loved that phrase. God helps those who help themselves. And it’s really interesting because 20 years ago, in February of 2000, George Barnard did a poll. He had this statement in the poll that said, “The Bible teaches that God helps those who help themselves.” And this was the results. 53% of Americans agreed strongly that this statement was in the Bible, and 22% agreed somewhat. So basically 75% of Americans said, yes, the Bible teaches God helps those who help themselves. Only 21% disagreed and 5% said they didn’t know. Now, when you get to looking at a little finer-grained analysis here, 81% of non born-again Christians. These are like the non-evangelical Christians, which would include Catholics, right? 81% agreed that the statement, God helps those who help themselves, could be found in the Bible. It’s not in there. That is not in the Bible. The saying is ancient. It goes back 2500 years to Greece. It was expressed in Aesop’s fable. Right now, Aesop was an extraordinarily ugly slave who, by his wit and intelligence, eventually gained his freedom and became a counselor to the rulers in Greece. He is believed to have lived between 620 and 564 BC, and his stories are probably much older than that, having been handed down through oral tradition for decades or centuries, even further in the past.

[00:11:09] Here’s the fable that really brings this up. A Wagoner was once driving a heavy load along a very muddy way. At last he came to a part of the road where the wheels sank halfway into the mire, and the more the horses pulled, the deeper sank the wheels. So the Wagoner threw down his whip and knelt down and prayed to Hercules the Strong, “O Hercules, help me in this, my hour of distress,” quoth he. But Hercules appeared to him and said, “Tut, man, don’t sprawl there. Get up and put your shoulder to the wheel. The gods help them that help themselves.” Right. With 75% of Americans and 81% of non born-again Christians believe is that statement, God helps those who help themselves, is in the Bible. It’s actually not biblical. The way it’s often used doesn’t capture the spirit of the Bible either, the spirit of our dependency. It focuses us on our willpower. It focuses us on our will training. Often we have a part that has a focus on building virtues, but not on deepening our relationship with Christ. And often the parts of us that really run with this, God helps those who help themselves. So what do we do? We start with ourselves. We say, okay, God will help me eventually, once I do this work.

[00:12:35] We start with ourselves, not with God. And that connects back to mistake number three, which we covered last time in the last session, which was going it alone. It’s easy to slip into relying on ourselves, going it alone, trying to become self-sufficient. And the fatal flaw of this power spirituality or this macho spirituality or this focus on self-improvement and virtue building, is that it doesn’t recognize our complete dependance on God. I got kind of sucked into this in high school a little bit. I remember coming across the book The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale, which encapsulates a lot of this kind of belief, right? That God helps those who help themselves. Let’s look at what Proverbs 28:26 says about this though. “He that trusteth in his own heart is a fool, but he that walketh wisely, he shall be saved.” Often there’s a part of us that’s reaching for omnipotence. There’s a part that does not want that utter dependance on God. Our Lord tells us in John 15:5, “Without me you can do nothing.” Without me you can do nothing. But I think the appeal of, God helps those who help themselves, the appeal of Aesop’s fable is that it resonates with certain parts of us that don’t want to believe that, that want to start with ourselves, that don’t want to start in relationship with God. All right.

[00:14:05] So what are the remedies? We’ve got three remedies for this mistake. Remedy number 11, because I’m picking up from, you know, where we left off with the numbering in the last episode. So remedy number 11, embracing the parts of us that carry our powerlessness, our smallness, our neediness. We need to be small. We need to be needy. We need to be powerless in order to really be childlike enough to enter the kingdom of God. We’ve got to be able to include the parts of us that are small. Now, those small parts have burdens of shame, despair, anger. Those burdens aren’t necessary. We can actually work with those parts to release those burdens. But the parts themselves are essential because they help us to be small, to have that sense of awe, to have that sense of wonder, right? We want them to be integrated into who we are as a person, so that we can be that childlike and approach God our Father. That’s remedy number 11, embracing those parts that are small, that are powerless, that are needy, that are childlike. Remedy number 12, focusing on humility. Right? Humility is the remedy for the power spirituality. This is really, really important. And I’m going to make a recommendation for two prayers, right? First of all, the Litany of Humility, Cardinal Mary Duval. Many of you are familiar with that. And also the Litany of Trust by Sister Faustina Maria Pia of the Sisters of Life.

[00:15:50] Remedy number 13. Again, here we’re talking about entering into the relationship with God as a little child. He says, “Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them.” And I’m going to really recommend the work of Saint Theresa of Lisieux here, especially chapter one of the book, Spiritual Childhood by Father Vernon Johnson. That whole chapter is on the fatherhood of God. It’s actually the best chapter. It’s the best writing I’ve seen that really captures how God is our Father, Abba, Pater, right? Our father, abba, our daddy, right? That’s really, really important. So he weaves in the writings of Saint Therese of Lisieux, along with Scripture passages that really bring into focus, into high relief, the paternity of God, the fatherhood of God, and our relationship with him as his children. The second I’m going to recommend is this book, My Ideal Jesus: Son of Mary, by Father Emile Neubert. Emile is his first name, Neubert, by Tan Books. It’s an excellent book for seeing Mary’s maternity. Right. In order to be a little child, in order to have the vulnerability of being a little child, we’re going to have to know that these spiritual parents, God our Father, Mary our Mother, are reliable. And sometimes we need to inform ourselves about who they really are. We need to feed our mindset. And these two books are really excellent for that. Also, if you want to get into more about how small and childlike we’re supposed to be, I just invite you to revisit episode 30 of this podcast.

[00:17:34] That episode is all about how small and childlike we are supposed to be. So that’s mistake number five, power spirituality or macho spirituality. Mistake number six is passive spirituality. And a lot of ways, this is the flip side of the power spirituality. Sometimes when that power spirituality fails, we relapse into the passive spirituality. And what does that look like? Well, the prayer of passive spirituality is something like, “O dear God, please lift the scourge of masturbation from me. I am helpless in its grip.” Now that recognizes the powerlessness and the smallness and the neediness that we all have. And that’s good. But usually what’s happening with the passive spirituality is that a different part takes over, a part that copes by collapsing and passively waiting for rescue. Or there can be a part that just gives up, you know, just accommodates the masturbation, just makes a place for it, essentially, kind of, probably saying welcomes it in is too strong, but at least gives it a grudging tolerance and acceptance in life, in my life. There’s sort of an expectation in the passive spirituality that God is going to do all the work. And that if there’s going to be recovery from masturbation, it’s going to be due to a miraculous intervention. In its extreme form, there’s more or less a fantasy of falling asleep one night and God coming down and performing a masturbation-ectomy, right.

[00:19:11] Which is essentially removing all desires and impulses toward masturbation, as though, you know, as though it were some kind of surgical operation that happens when you’re under anesthesia. Parts can wish for it to work out like that. Now, I don’t see in my reading of Scripture any psychological miracles. There’s lots of miraculous healings. There’s raising from the dead, but I don’t see any psychological miracles. Now, I could be wrong on this. And if one of you is out there or two of you are out there or more that find that there are psychological miracles, let me know what they are. But I don’t think there are psychological miracles in the Scripture, in the Gospels, because so much of what is psychological is held by the will, right? There’s reasons for why we hold on to our symptoms. There’s reasons why people hold on tightly to the function of masturbation. And this we go into a lot of detail in this in episode 51, when we get into what are the deeper problems. Masturbation is the symptom. It’s not the only problem. It’s not the primary problem. It’s a problem. But it’s not the only problem. It’s not the primary problem. And often our parts hold tightly to the function of the masturbation, and we can’t just have it removed from us without violating the dignity of our human personhood, without violating our freedom.

[00:20:41] We want to take a look at the example of Our Lady at the Annunciation, right? There was a great receptivity at the Annunciation. Our Lady did not make the incarnation happen in her, but she participated with it. Our Lady collaborates with God so that our Lord Jesus can be incarnate in her womb, right? This is how we need to be working with God. Not, I’m going to do it all by myself, which is the power spirituality, not God’s going to do it all by himself, which is the passive spirituality. But in this exchange where both the human being and God are in proper roles in proper relationship. All right, so let’s get to the remedy. We have two remedies for mistake number six, which is passive spirituality. The first is the Serenity Prayer. This was authored by Reinhold Niebuhr. Many people are familiar with it. The short version is, “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” All right. That’s the abbreviated version. Sometimes they take God out, right? Because sometimes God’s just got to be eliminated from everything. And so they’ll just say, “Grant me the serenity,” and they’ll put it up to the higher power or whatever. All right. So there’s a longer version that’s much more complete. I’m going to recite that for you here.

[00:22:06] “God, give us the grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, the courage to change the things which should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other. Living one day at a time, enjoying one moment at a time, accepting hardship as a pathway to peace, taking the sinful world as it is, not as I would have it, trusting that you will make all things right if I surrender to your will, so that I may be reasonably happy in this life and supremely happy with you forever in the next. Amen.” And that’s the full version, as 20th century Protestant theologian, thinker, and author Reinhold Niebuhr wrote it. And there’s a reason why this prayer is so important in 12 step programs. These are the programs that help people get over addictions, work through their addictions, right? Correcting the errors and excesses of the power spirituality and the passive spirituality. So remedy 14, pray the Serenity Prayer, and I recommend praying the long version. It’s easy to find on the internet. Remedy 15, commit to doing what you can, even if it seems like very little. Remember, we’re supposed to be little children. That goes back to, you know, the mistake number five. Right, where we get back into that power spirituality. We’re to be little children. And so little children, we can offer, as little children, we can offer very little.

[00:23:43] And God in his justice doesn’t demand more than that. Right? That’s not even getting into his mercy, just in God’s justice. He doesn’t demand more than what we, as little children, can offer him. But his mercy adds on to that. So that was a big point that Saint Therese of Lisieux has made. It can be very difficult for those that are invested in that power spirituality to grip on to. All right. So remedy 15, commit to doing what you can, even if it seems like very little. Mistake number seven, the why for the change, right? We need to get into motives here. Seeking and finding our motives. There are a lot of motives that on the surface, can look good, but actually can lead us away from our Lord. And these motives, they might not necessarily be bad in and of themselves, but when those motives are elevated above the two great commandments, they become problematic. Now, this is one of those things where understanding ourselves in terms of multiplicity, in terms of parts and a core self, can be really helpful because our motives vary by our parts. Parts have different motives for wanting to get over masturbation. Some parts have a motive for self-perfection, and if not self-perfection, well then at least becoming good enough to be loved by God. Right? Goes back to that mistake number five, that power spirituality, right? God helps those who help themselves through this Pelagian effort to become good enough to be loved by God, to be become good enough to receive his help.

[00:25:23] No, no, no, we can’t do it that way. It’s going to fail. We have to start with our Lord. Often we can’t see our own motives. We don’t recognize the motives that various parts have. We can have a lot of blind spots. So God wants us to improve our motives. And so remedy 16 is to really explore and discuss our motives for getting over masturbation with our trusted person, and to ask that person how he or she sees our motives. Right. Really getting an outside perspective on the motives of our parts to see if there’s some Phariseeism, right, to see if it’s like a lot about self-perfection, or about trying to earn the love of God, or about having to be self-sufficient or whatever those motives are. There can be a wide range. And when I break down the reasons why people want to get over masturbation, many of them are because of motives that aren’t oriented toward the two great commandments. Remedy number 17 is once you’ve explored and discussed those motives, once you flesh them out and in the process of exploring them and flushing them out, bring them to prayer. You can pray the prayer of Blind Bartimaeus to Jesus. Right. “Domine, Lord, that I may see.” Right. Blind Bartimaeus was begging our Lord for vision, right? This isn’t going to be physical sight for most of us.

[00:26:52] This is going to be an inward sight. It’s going to be a way of connecting with our parts to see those motivations. That’s taking it to the spiritual life. Obviously, in the natural realm, we want to be connecting with our parts as well. That’s mistake seven, having a hierarchy of motives that’s not oriented to the two great commandments. Mistake number eight is shaming the self for our failures. Now, we just did a whole series on shame. For those of you that missed that, it’s excellent. It’s episodes 37 to 49. In episodes 37 and 38, we get into definitions of shame as a verb. Shaming is a verb is one of the five ways of understanding the definition of shame. Now, shame can motivate, right? Most of us have a part of us that’s our internal critic. And it can use shame, it can use criticism and shaming to whip us into shape. And remember that shame is inhibiting, right? It can inhibit certain behaviors like masturbation in the short run. But there’s a real difference in the usefulness of shame for chronic actions, for habitual actions, versus single episodes that we’re being tempted with, or that we have an impulse toward in the moment. And when masturbation has become more chronic, when it’s become a habitual way of coping, when it’s a symptom that expresses all kinds of things going on at a much deeper level, shaming is generally not going to work.

[00:28:25] If it does work, being held in check by shame is going to be always unstable. You’re not going to get a good, grounded, successful recovery from masturbation if it’s primarily driven by shame. Remedy 18, then, is really working with our internal shaming critic, right? To understand the reasons why the critic is shaming us, the good that the critic is trying to obtain by shaming us, and then eventually helping that critic to integrate with the rest of our system, right, under the leadership of the core self. Often you’ll find that that critic is very young. It’s very fearful. It’s very overwhelmed with all the responsibilities that it’s taken on and its role of directing and guiding and critiquing the person. Right. That’s remedy 18 for mistake eight, which is shaming the self for failures, right? Mistake number nine, it’s the all or nothing trap, right? All or nothing, thinking all or nothing, judgment all or nothing, effort all or nothing, in so many different realms. We need to accept that sometimes we may fall and we need to rise after the falls as many times as it takes. And that means accepting our imperfections, accepting that our trajectories of recovery are not always going to be really smooth and linear. There can be all kinds of falls as long as there is as many risings as there are fallings. If you look at the saints’ descriptions of themselves, they don’t look at themselves in terms of this all or nothing.

[00:30:05] They don’t see themselves as just great and glorious figures that have reached the pinnacles of human perfection. They don’t look at it that way. All right, so what is the remedy for this all or nothing trap? This all or nothing thinking, this all or nothing judgment, the all or nothing effort. It’s perseverance. Right? And knowing deep in our bones that it’s part of our human condition that we fall, right. It’s normal to fall. We are fallen human beings in a fallen world. And I’m not saying that we have to fall. There’s all kinds of theological work that’s done around whether any sin is ever, you know, determined and it’s not. But in practice, we fall. It happens. The Scripture says the just man falls seven times a day. The just man. The just man falls seven times a day. Okay, so we need to get up every time. We’re going to be working on that perseverance, but we’re also going to be working with our mindsets to accept that sometimes we’re going to fall and that God can bring greater good out of those falls in his providential worldview. All right. So we have covered mistakes five, six, seven, eight, and nine today. We’re going to review those mistakes really, really briefly. Mistake number five is that power spirituality or that macho spirituality. Mistake number six, passive spirituality.

[00:31:31] Number seven, misunderstanding our motives for change and not understanding that we have many motives for change that correspond to our parts. Mistake number eight, shaming the self for failures. Mistake number nine, the all or nothing trap. All right, that leaves us with mistake number ten, the big one. So what is this mistake and what is the remedy for those mistakes? Well, without further ado, here it is. Mistake number ten, the big mistake is failing to see the struggle with masturbation as a gift. What? The struggle with masturbation is a gift, Dr. Peter? Is that what you’re trying to sell us? Is that what you’re peddling here? That’s what the big mistake is. Absolutely. The big mistake, the big one is failing to see the struggle with masturbation as a gift. Now, let me be very clear here. I’m not talking about the act of masturbation as a gift to anybody. I’m not talking about sinning as a gift. Right? The struggle is the gift. And anytime we have a struggle like that, anytime we have a trouble like that, anytime we have a cross like that, it’s a gift. Those crosses are gifts, but it is so hard for us to see it as a gift, even intellectually, even in our mindset, even when we’re clear on a whole bunch of other things, this can elude us. Romans 8:28. “We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.”

[00:33:17] There’s no exceptions. There’s no asterisk on that, Romans 8:28, that says, except for all the struggle around masturbation. That doesn’t work together for good for anybody. No. This cross is meant to lead you into deeper relationship with God. And many people who have overcome masturbation recognize that that struggle brought them closer to God in a way that nothing else could. These crosses, these struggles, these troubles are gifts from God to bring us into that deeper union with him. All right, so what is the remedy here for this mistake? It’s to seek for how the struggle with masturbation in your life is a gift. Again, not the sin itself, but the struggle, the battle around it. Many people never seek to understand their trials. They never look at their sufferings as a gift. And you can suffer as a rebel. Many people do. You can suffer and just fight and rail against it. That’s probably the most common response that we see in our culture today. You can also suffer as a stoic, just that stiff upper lip, you know, just taking it, you know. Again, that’s not seeing the suffering as a gift. Paul discovered this and he relates that in 2 Corinthians 12:7-10. “And to keep me from being too elated by the abundance of revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan, to harass me, to keep me from being too elated. Three times I besought the Lord about this, that it should leave me. But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ I will all the more gladly boast of my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”

[00:35:34] There is so much in this passage. Some people have speculated that this is actually about masturbation for Saint Paul. I’m not certain about that, but it was clear that something was troubling him. And in this passage, he tells us that there was a reason for it — to keep him from being too elated by the abundance of revelations. It was to help him be humble, to help him be small, to help him understand his weakness. Or somebody with the intensity of the choleric temperament that Saint Paul had could go spinning into Phariseeism. I mean, Paul was a Pharisee after all. He could be attracted to being greater than thou, right? So whatever his struggle was, and personally, I’m not convinced that it was masturbation. I think there are a lot of other explanations for this. So I want to make sure that we’re not just slapping that moniker too casually on Saint Paul. I think whatever it was, though, it was to help him become closer to God.

[00:36:37] It was so God could give him all that abundance of revelation. All right. So his struggle, again, it wasn’t any sinning that Paul was doing. It was the struggle. So this can be just a total paradigm shift for people to look at whatever you’re struggling with, whatever is troubling you, whatever is causing the distress, as a gift. And it’s a gift that is perfectly ordered. It is perfectly tailored to your situation to help you grow in the love of God. Now I can just hear some of the responses from parts in you, my listeners, right? I can’t believe that. I can’t accept that. If you knew, Dr. Peter, what I’m struggling with, you would not see it as a gift. You would see that that is utter and total. And then there might be some expletives in there, you know? And look, I get it. But you know what? That’s a part. That is a part. Because if that were true, then God actually wouldn’t be loving you. And if you want a theological explication of all of this, if you want to get into like all the whys and wherefores theologically about it, you can read a book called Trustful Surrender to Divine Providence by Father Jean Baptiste Saint-Jure and Saint Claude de la Colombière. It was put out, I think, by Tan Books as well. It’s easy to find. It’s just a little booklet, only 139 pages, very small, written in the 17th century.

[00:38:13] It’s an excellent, excellent exposition of how all of these trials and tribulations that we experience are actually specifically allowed. Now, God doesn’t will evil, right? And he gets into explanations about that. Doesn’t will it with his active will, but he allows it to happen because he can make greater good come from it. There’s another book that’s just excellent about this too, called Why Does God Permit Evil by Dom Bruno Webb. And he wrote this while in England, when the bombs were falling in World War II, when the Nazi bombs were falling. So these books are born out of the lived experience of their authors. That is often a very difficult transition for people to make, though. But here’s the thing. The difference between clients of mine in my clinical practice who get over their struggles with whatever they’re struggling with, who are able to recover, who are able to work on those underlying issues, if they can see them as a gift, that’s the best predictor of whether they’re going to get better or not. If they cannot see them as a gift, then you’re back to suffering as a stoic. You’re back to suffering as a rebel. Right? There’s no way to embrace the cross if you see the cross as something that God has just dumped on you because he doesn’t really care about you. Now, the other thing that makes this much more complicated is that different parts are going to have very, very different attitudes around whether our given struggle, our trouble is a gift.

[00:39:55] Right. A lot of them are going to be like, I can’t see it. We’ve got to work with those parts. And so we’re going to have some exercises about that for the members of the Resilient Catholics Community. I’ll talk about those in just a minute. But I want to tell you about where we’re going. In the next episode, we’re going to go back to the stories of Luis and Richard that we started in episode 51. Remember, Luis was a seminarian. He was in second theology, struggling with masturbation. Richard was the 48 year old married man, father of four. And now remember, both of these guys were struggling with masturbation. But as it turns out, for very different reasons. The symptoms were similar in some ways, but the underlying causes were different. And so we’re going to bring all the concepts from these last three episodes on masturbation together, and we’re going to flesh them out in the lives of these characters. So that’s going to really help to give an example, something that we can kind of wrap our minds around so that we don’t stay too abstract. We’re going to bring this down into the concrete lived reality of these characters in these stories. All right, so let me know how these episodes are landing with you.

[00:41:11] You know, let me know. I’m really interested. Get in touch with me on my cell at (317) 567-9594. Some of you have already done that. It’s been great to hear from you. Email me at crisis@soulsandhearts.com. We’re still small enough to where I can get back to everybody. February 19th, 2021. Just a quick reminder. 10 a.m. to 1:15 p.m. Eastern Time, I’m doing a webinar for the Catholic Psychotherapy Association. All are welcome to that. It’s called Why do I Avoid God? An Internal Family Systems-Informed Approach to Parts’ Negative God Images. You can check all that out at catholicpsychotherapy.org/events. Now we have the Resilient Catholics Community. That community is all about transformation. That community takes this podcast to a whole new level, because in that community, we can do all kinds of experiential exercises to help us to grow in the ways that we need to, to help us connect with our parts, to pursue that interior integration. It’s all about entering into a deeper, 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. We have all kinds of activities there. We have office hours, we have the premium podcasts, we have the social hours. There’s all kinds of things that are being developed there. We have polls and questions and lots of communication and private messaging and all of that.

[00:42:32] If you want to, get on the waiting list, soulsandhearts.com/rccd. You’ll get information before the general public does. Those on the waiting list, you know, we’re going to be opening up in May, April or May. I’m hoping April, probably looking more like May. We’re going to do a bonus podcast for the community members, which is an experiential exercise, on seeing my main trouble, whatever that struggle is, could be masturbation, it could be other things. And seeing that main trouble, that main struggle as a gift from God. What gets in the way of us seeing that trouble or that struggle as a gift from God? How are my protector parts reacting to that main struggle? How are they reacting to that main issue? How are they reacting to the idea of it being a gift? Some of them may have really strong reactions, think that’s absolutely preposterous, right. How can we help them? So that bonus or that premium podcast is going to come out on Tuesday, February 2nd, a day after this one is released. Now we have our second Wednesday Zoom meeting coming up from 7:30 p.m. to 8:45 p.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday, February 10th, for the Resilient Catholics Community members. It’s all about healthy sexuality and how parts are sexualized in certain kinds of experience. And then how that affects our sexual experiences and functioning later in life. These are very frank, open conversations.

[00:43:57] And so, you know, it’s something really where there’s a space to talk about these things freely for people that really want to be able to do that. And then we also record it and it’s available to the rest of the community, if you can’t happen to make it when it’s live streamed. Now, we’re also going to have a premium podcast for our Catholic therapists in the Interior Therapist Community in Souls and Hearts. There’s going to be more on how to help yourself and your clients unpack polarizations of parts around this kind of issue of accepting troubles as gifts. I’m really excited about the Interior Therapist Community reopening in March. We’re going to be having more experiential groups for the human formation of Catholic therapists from an IFS-informed perspective, more office hours, more discussions. We’re going to bring in some readings. It’s going to be really, really good. We’re going to continue working through the book that we’re reading together. And so that will be reopening for folks that might be interested in that. You can reach out to me at 317-567-9594 or at crisis@soulsandhearts.com, if you’re interested in that. Don’t forget about feedback, ideas, suggestions, want to hear all of that. And subscribe. I gotta remember to keep saying that. Subscribe to this podcast on your favorite podcast platform. You can leave comments on there as well. And 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.