IIC 54: Masturbation Recovery Stories

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. Interior Integration for Catholics brings 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 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. That is, to free you 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’re on a journey towards deep transformation in our mindsets, our heartsets, and our bodysets, a radical transformation at the core of our being, so that our souls one day can 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 the natural foundation for the Catholic spiritual life, all about overcoming psychological obstacles to being loved and to loving God and neighbor. This is episode 54.

[00:01:45] It’s released on February 8th, 2021, and it’s the sixth episode in our series on sexuality. It’s the fourth one on masturbation and it’s titled Masturbation Recovery Stories. We’re following up on our last three episodes, numbers 51, 52, and 53, which have all been about masturbation. The top ten reasons why Catholic men masturbate, the ten common mistakes that men make as they try to recover from masturbation and live chaste lives, and the 20 remedies for those ten common mistakes. 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 deepest needs and desires. So today we’re pulling all that conceptual information together and we’re going to do three things. First, we’ll briefly review the ten common mistakes men make. We talked about those in episode 51. We’ll review the 20 remedies for those mistakes that we went through in episodes 52 and 53. Then we’ll discuss how to make an individualized recovery plan from masturbation. That includes some general overarching principles. And then third, we’ll pull together all that information into the stories of Richard and Luis, who we introduced in episode 51. We’re going to review their histories, look at the mistakes they made in trying to free themselves from masturbation, discuss how they made individualized plans for recovery, and how they ultimately broke free from that trap. Okay, so let’s start. We’re just going to go through these quick. Ten common mistakes that Catholics make in breaking free from masturbation.

[00:03:18] We covered these in episode 51. But first, considering masturbation as the primary problem. We got to go deeper. We got to understand that that’s a symptom and we need to get to the root causes. Number two, pursuing compartmentalization or fragmentation instead of interior integration. We don’t want to just shunt this off as just some sort of isolated problem. We want to understand it in the context of the whole of our being. Third mistake, going it alone. Fourth mistake, using only spiritual means and neglecting the natural means. Mistake number five, having a power spirituality or a macho spirituality. Number six, having a passive spirituality. Number seven, having the wrong motivations, the wrong why for the change. Number eight, shaming themselves for failures. Number nine, the all or nothing trap. And number ten, failing to see the struggle with masturbation as a gift. We’re not saying the masturbation is a gift. We’re saying that the struggle. There’s something God wants us to learn from that struggle. And there would be some work that we wouldn’t do if it just magically went away. So those are the ten common mistakes. We’re going to briefly review the 20 remedies. I’m just going to run through the list. You want to find out more about these, you got to listen to episodes 52 and 53. First one, commit to finding the real reason for the masturbation, the underlying reason, with God’s help.

[00:04:45] Second, bring God or Mary or a saint or your guardian angel into that search for the underlying causes. Three, committing to interior integration, that is, an interior acceptance of all your parts, all your desires, all your impulses, all your thoughts, all your memories as real, as part of reality, instead of denying them, suppressing them, repressing them, or somehow pretending that they don’t exist. Number four, find a confidant with whom you can check in daily. And I mean daily. That means every day, not just regularly, but daily. Number five, get to confession. Address the spiritual dimensions of this. Talk about it with a spiritual director or confessor. Number six, working towards an intimate relationship with God. Number seven, having time with friends and being deliberate about that, friends that help pull you up to a higher level. Number eight, seeking out a therapist, especially a Catholic therapist, ideal if that therapist has some understanding of parts. Number nine, sexaholics anonymous or other groups. Number ten, online groups like the Resilient Catholic Community. Number eleven, embracing the parts that carry our powerlessness, smallness, and neediness. We need those parts. They are essential for us to be small enough to approach God. Number twelve, a focus on humility through the litany of humility and the litany of trust. Number thirteen, entering into relationship with God as a little child. Let the little children come to me. Saint Therese of Lisieux is excellent in helping people do this. Number fourteen, the Serenity Prayer, praying it every day, listening to the responses from that.

[00:06:20] Number fifteen, committing to doing what you can, even if it seems like very little. Number sixteen, exploring and discussing our motives with our trusted person, asking that person how he or she sees our motives. Number seventeen, bringing those motives to prayer. Number eighteen, working with our internal critic in trying to understand why that critic might be shaming us or might be so harsh with us. Number nineteen, perseverance. And number twenty, the big one, seeking to see how the struggle with masturbation is a gift. Okay, so that can all sound overwhelming. It’s like, Dr. Peter, what are we going to do? I mean, just so much there, how do we set up an individualized plan for ourselves? Again, I can’t lay out a plan for you because we’re not in an individual relationship. And this is a podcast that goes out to a general audience. But there are some overarching principles that I’m going to offer to you to help you do this with your trusted person. So the first overarching principle is to work out your plan with someone you trust, someone you sense is competent to help you. That’s the first thing. Not to go it alone, right? Otherwise, you’re repeating mistake number three, which is to go it alone. We don’t want that. We want you to talk it out with that person at length, the whys and wherefores of each component you’re considering building into your plan.

[00:07:42] So that’s the first overarching principle. Working out your plan with someone you trust. Second overarching principle is to write down your plan. It becomes so much clearer when you write it down. Write it down. That’s really important. Third overarching principle, to take what is helpful for you and keep it in your plan and discard things that are not helpful to you. You’re going to need to be flexible with this. There’s going to be some trial and error as you try on different components of this plan to see what helps you over time. The fourth overarching principle is to build up your plan over time. This may take some time, so we’re going to see what happens over time, the general trajectory that you’re on over time. Once you consolidate a part of your plan, you can add another part, but we don’t want it to become overly burdensome. Fifth, overarching principle, adherence to the plan is your target, right? We want to adhere to the plan. That’s much more certain than just having periods of abstinence from masturbation. We want to stay working with the plan because there can be periods of abstinence from masturbation. We don’t really, you might not understand why they come. It just might have been a real low stress period, something like that. The greater security is an adherence to that plan. So we are going to get into some stories of how two characters, two fictional characters recovered from masturbation.

[00:09:17] Before I do that though, I just want to review some things about how I understand the multiplicity of the human person. I’m drawing heavily from Internal Family Systems by Richard Schwartz. Internal Family Systems believes that we have a self and we have parts. And the self is defined in IFS as the seat of consciousness, and the self governs us, at least ideally. And the self is this active inner leader, and when the self is in charge, it can accept and love the parts and it can help the parts heal. However, the self can be overwhelmed by parts of us. The self is really associated with the intellect and the will. Those are the faculties to which the self is oriented. Right. The parts though, are these separate, seemingly independent little personalities within us, each with its own range of emotion, its style of expression, its abilities, its desires, and its views of the world. You might think of these parts as modes of operating phenomenologically. They can seem fairly separate, but they don’t have a separate intellect and will. They can get forced into extreme roles because of attachment injuries, relational traumas. And there’s three roles that parts can be in. The first is that parts can be exiles. These exiles were exploited, rejected. They were abandoned in external relationships. They want care, love. They want to be rescued. They want to be redeemed. They carry burdens.

[00:10:48] These burdens could be shame, anger, pain, loss, grief, sadness, loneliness. There can be all kinds of things that are held by these parts so that they don’t overwhelm the system. When these exiles break out, they threaten the whole stability of the system and they activate protectors. Managers are the strategic protectors that work to control the environment, and they are proactive. They’re focused on keeping things calm, keeping things running, keeping things working. Firefighters, though, they come out when exiles are overwhelming the person or threatening to overwhelm the person with the intensity of their experience. And so these firefighters stifle, anesthetize, and distract from the intensity of the feelings of the exiles. And firefighters don’t have any concern for consequences. They can binge eat, they can use drugs and alcohol. They can get into sexual risk taking. There’s all kinds of things that firefighters do because they are desperately focused on just the present moment and calming the system down so that it doesn’t spin out of control. Parts can take over a person like in the movie Inside Out, when the little red figure anger took over the control panel. It’s kind of like that when a part takes over the self. All right, so let’s get into these stories. Now, I do want to say that again, these are fictional. These are composites. These aren’t actual people, but they are also realistic. We’re going to simplify them a bit and discuss three parts in each of these characters.

[00:12:28] Usually there are somewhere between 10 and 20 parts. In certain cases, you can get up to 30 parts. But we’re going to start with Richard. Now, some of you may remember from episode 51 when we just briefly introduced Richard. I’m going to go into much more detail today. Richard’s 48 years old. He grew up nominally Catholic, came from a troubled home. His mother was really stressed after he was born. Richard was the oldest, the first child. Mom was not really able to engage with him consistently, had some postpartum depression. Mom had just a lot of difficulties herself. She wasn’t well regulated to begin with. She was unprepared for the demands of motherhood. And mom had parts that both resented her husband and her son, Richard, and also resented the loss of her career. Richard’s parents divorced when he was in his teenage years. This was extremely difficult for him, a real loss. Nobody really understood the pain that he was going through. And in fact, this is when his system became more fragmented. He didn’t really understand a lot of what was going on inside of him. So he started to masturbate. He also started to look at pornography. It was a way for him to connect with other guys in high school on the basketball team. He dated a lot of girls that were brunettes with brown eyes, very similar to his mother, and the type of pornography that he was attracted to were women in their mid to late 30s, little heavier than the typical models.

[00:14:04] He wanted to read stories about their lives. He wanted to fantasize about how he could meet their needs and how they would be devoted to him, how they would never leave him. That was a critical thing for Richard. He never wanted to be left again. He wanted somebody to know him, to see him to be committed with him, to stay with him. He dated a lot of girls again, most of them brunettes with dark eyes, had lots of sexual relationships in late high school, college, and eventually settled down with and married a woman named Linda, a very pretty woman, but she had a lot of dependency issues. The big, attractive feature that Richard was only vaguely aware of was just how committed and crazy she was about him, and how convinced he was that she would never leave him because he did not want a repetition of abandonment. That was really, really important to him. They’ve been married 22 years. They have four kids. Richard goes to Mass regularly. He wants to raise his kids right. But he’s struggled with porn and masturbation for more than 30 years. All right. So that’s sort of a summary of his history. But let’s go deeper. Let’s get into his parts. Richard, when he began his recovery from masturbation, wasn’t in touch with his parts at all, never thought about it in terms of parts and so forth.

[00:15:20] So we’re just going to take this dive in with the understanding that Richard wasn’t aware of it in this way until he had done some of his own work. So the first part was a manager that he referred to as church man. Now, this manager had a strong moral compass who constantly evaluated Richard’s behavior and was very critical. And the reason for the name church man was that this was sort of a takeoff from the Saturday Night Live church lady from the late 80s. Richard was old enough to remember that particular character. And church man, this part of him, this manager, had a really negative God image, a demanding drill sergeant God image who was never satisfied with Richard. This part was afraid of God. This part was afraid of the demands for perfection that it felt God was placing on Richard. So church man really pushed Richard hard to be good enough to earn God’s love. The prayer from this part was mostly rote. It was duty-based. There was not much of a relational connection with God. The assumption was that once Richard does enough, God might heal him from his sinful ways out of a sense of judgment because God would then owe him the healing because Richard was able to earn it. That was the assumption of church man. So church man really just wants God not to harm Richard and to be satisfied with the heroic efforts that it’s trying to make.

[00:16:48] Church man sees Richard’s other parts as undermining the self-improvement efforts and placing Richard at risk of God’s permanent rejection and disgust. The fear that church man has is that if Richard doesn’t keep trying and growing, God will reject him permanently. And his good intention, church man’s good intention, is to motivate Richard to adhere exactly to the rules of the Catholic faith and to become worthy of God’s acceptance. So one of the things that church man is absolutely insistent on is that there be no affairs and no connections to other women, so as not to repeat what mom did, because he doesn’t want that to hurt anybody else. Church man’s got some great qualities. He makes very few mistakes at work. He’s got a lot of control, but he badgers Richard. He controls him, cajoles him, uses carrot and stick, can be really hard on Richard, shames him and cuts him down. And church man wants to be the only part. He wants to suppress the other parts because he doesn’t trust them. A lot of harm has been done by church man, because church man is unaware of how demoralizing he can be to other parts, the crushing burden of shame that he can create when he is so critical, the way he treats Richard, the way basically, you know, you might say Richard is treating himself, and he can also be harsh and demoralizing to other people.

[00:18:15] Richard could be critical to his subordinates at work. He seems cold and rude to women at work. The talk in the break room among the women is that he might be chauvinistic because of how aloof and cold he was. Church man also leads Richard to be somewhat distant from his daughters. Okay, so that’s church man. Another part within Richard is needy boy. And needy boy is an exiled part that is very insecure and really burdened with unmet needs for maternal care. So remember, mom was really stressed when Richard was born, not able to engage consistently, not able to give that ongoing safety and security that infants need. Richard didn’t feel safe and secure. He didn’t feel seen and known by his mother very well. And it was needy boy that carried the pain of the loss. Needy boy carried that burden so that that neediness, that loss, that grief about not having it would not overwhelm his whole system and he could continue to function. But needy boy also carried this idea that that Richard wasn’t good enough, that he wasn’t lovable enough to gain God’s attention. He felt that God was like this elite aristocrat, that God didn’t need him, God doesn’t know him. God feels like he’s just too good for Richard and God is just really remote. And needy boy’s sense was that he was starving emotionally, that he was dying relationally, and that he needed to connect and be cared for, or he would actually no longer exist.

[00:19:55] So needy boy was not able to regulate emotions very well and was mostly suppressed by church man. Church man hated needy boy, needy boy was unpredictable, needy boy was an emotionally intense. Church man and needy boy were polarized. That means that they were locked in this sort of combat. Most of the time, church man was able to keep needy boy from breaking free. But that took a lot of energy. That exhausted church man. That was just really, really hard for him to do. And sometimes needy boy would threaten to break out. He’d find a way to wiggle through. And that’s when distractor would come up. Distractor was a firefighter part, and his great fear was being utterly overwhelmed by the intensity of needy boy’s pain. And so when church man wasn’t able to contain needy boy, distractor leapt in to protect Richard’s system from the intensity of needy boy’s needs, his grief, his sense of pain, his distress. And that distractor part used pornography as a primary way of distracting and diverting needy boy to a mom-like image. You know, in the pornography, distractor could offer something that seemed like it might be redemption. It calmed things down and there was masturbation to distract from needy boy’s pain. This protector, though, distractor, also was in conflict with church man, because church man hated the masturbation. Now the distractor, he doesn’t think much about God. His God image is more like a statue God, remote, distant. No real connection there between that part of Richard and God as a loving father.

[00:21:42] Okay, so of the top ten reasons why Catholic men masturbate, we find that Richard has loneliness. That’s the number one. Number two, insecurity. And number three, anger at his wife. Remember, his wife was pretty dependent. She was also bitter and disappointed in the marriage. And there was a lot of sort of passive aggressive expressions of her dissatisfaction with Richard, which contributed also to a sense of shame. It also contributed to needy boy’s increasing distress, because there was less and less hope that his wife would be able to meet his deep unmet needs for maternal care and love, which had been the fantasy that needy boy had held when they originally married. All right. So Richard, like I said, has been trying for more than 30 years, had been trying for more than 30 years to break out of masturbation. He made a number of the top ten common mistakes. He tried to go it alone. He tried to use only spiritual means. He tried to use a power spirituality, which was all focused on building virtues. He shamed the self, primarily through church man, and he did not see his struggle with masturbation as a gift. All right, so what happened with Richard? What can we say about Richard’s recovery? Well, what happened? As is often the case, Richard came across a relationship that could help him.

[00:23:13] He went to confession with the new associate pastor at his church. The associate pastor asked him questions in confession that started to get Richard thinking. The associate pastor recommended that Richard discuss this at greater length with him if he wanted to. So they agreed to meet at the rectory for just 15 minutes. There was just an exchange back and forth. And Richard came away from that, feeling not at all shamed by the associate pastor, very understanding, very connected, very helpful to him. The associate pastor really recommended that Richard not go it alone, that these efforts that he was making were noble and that they pleased God, but they weren’t enough because he was trying to do too much by his own strength. And so he also recommended that Richard get some help in the natural realm, right? So the pastor was sensitive enough to recognize some of Richard’s common mistakes, his going it alone, using only the spiritual means, and having this power spirituality or this macho spirituality. The associate pastor also recommended that Richard just begin to pray consistently. So with that beginning, Richard didn’t act right away, but he mulled over the idea of possibly getting into therapy, maybe getting into some kind of group, although the fear of that was really, really high. That was something that church man really didn’t want. He considered a sexaholics anonymous group, decided against that, considered going into individual therapy, decided against that, but he did decide to begin discussing it with a friend of his from work who was a recovering alcoholic. And that friend, David, recommended that they talk every day.

[00:25:05] And so that was sort of the beginning for him. And in that context of talking every day, and it was only a few minutes at work, and then they would email back and forth on Saturdays, just checking in. And this is something that David was really familiar with, having been a sponsor for other people in recovery from drugs and alcohol. There was just a sense that Richard began to have that somebody cared about him. Now, this friend was not Catholic. This friend was a mainline Protestant from a mainline Protestant denomination. But they were able to form this bond. And Richard began to find that he could tell David more and more. And David didn’t reject him. And in fact, it brought him closer. That gave Richard the confidence that he might actually be able to join a 12 step group. And David offered to go with him. And so the two of them went. And to his surprise, not only did Richard not find it shaming, but he found that he actually began to enjoy it, that there was something about the connection with men that were struggling with similar things, different stories, different histories, different ways that problems were manifesting themselves, but a way to connect. And so that happened. He also committed to going back to confession, and he went for some spiritual counsel to that associate pastor, about every six weeks or so.

[00:26:31] And again, there was a relationship developing there. Through the 12 step group, Richard started to pray the Serenity Prayer. He began to offer up little things. There was some reading that was helpful to him that he could take to prayer. He began to understand that there were things that went back to his childhood, things that were about the fear of being abandoned. That started to dawn on him, but it was very, very gradual. He decided to go on a retreat sponsored by a healing ministry that just created spaces for him to enter in to this more deeply. And he started to see the pain that his needy boy was carrying. He didn’t think about it in terms of parts. That wasn’t the way that he really responded, but he was able to recognize that this went a lot, lot deeper than he ever imagined. He began to be less harsh on himself, as he had a sense that God might actually be like David rather than like his father or like his mother. And so that just continued. His prayer began to increase. And it wasn’t that he stopped masturbating or using porn. It wasn’t like just a, you know, sort of quick transition. It took time. It took a lot of time. He began to focus on humility, began to read some of the writings of Saint Faustina, which he really resonated with.

[00:28:09] He found himself taking on more of a leadership role in his 12 step group. He decided to enter in to psychotherapy at that point, recognizing that there were things that he really needed to have happen there. He worked with a therapist who was a depth therapist, but was not particularly parts-focused, but they still were able to get to these deep conflicts that he had. He was able to see what was going on there, and to make his prayer much more specific and relational about getting those needs met. And he was able to develop a relationship with the Blessed Virgin Mary. That was really, really critical, to be able to enter into an intimate relationship where over time, she was able to heal the wounds that he had received from his natural mother. He did some EMDR around those traumatic memories, which was particularly helpful to him. He continued with his 12 step group, continued with confession, continued his relationship with David on a daily basis, continued with his prayer. And over the course of four years was able to achieve sustained abstinence from masturbation. Other things in his life improved as well, including his relationship with Linda. They did some marital therapy after a while. She still held a lot of bitterness, but it wasn’t as destabilizing to him because he wasn’t looking to her to meet these deep unmet needs for affection, nurturance, and love.

[00:29:46] Because of his relationships with God the Father and Mary our Mother. All right, well, let’s go to our second character, Luis. Remember, Luis is a seminarian. He’s in second theology. He’s a deep devotion to God. His parents are married, but his dad’s distant, mom thinks dad’s a little autistic maybe, not really emotionally attuned. And the critical thing about Luis’s history is that he had this very close and enmeshed relationship with mom. So let’s kind of talk a little bit about Luis’s parts. So his primary manager part is known as the moral theologian. This is an intellectual part that’s very much concerned with right and wrong, very concerned with appropriate behavior. This moral theologian within Luis is a deep admirer of Saint Thomas Aquinas. The angelic doctor is his hero. But the moral theologian is very distrustful of emotions, impulses, and desires, and seeks this high degree of self-control, this kind of top-down control. The moral theologian makes careful distinctions between first and second moral acts, because he’s always looking at the moral valences of things. His God image is not one of the types that Bill and Christie Gaultiere have discussed in their book, Mistaken Identity, that I discussed in that whole series of God images in episodes 23 to 29. The moral theologian sees God as very fair, very just, but the relationship is very transactional. The moral theologian has a highly intellectualized view of relating with God. He’s very suspicious of anything having to do with emotions.

[00:31:27] For example, the whole charismatic movement just seems strange. And he dislikes most contemporary liturgical music and praise and worship songs as being overly sentimental, overly emotional. The moral theologian likes to pray via lectio divina. The moral theologian appreciates the aesthetics of good liturgy. He loves to reflect on the beauty and order of Catholic teaching. There’s no interest in romantic relationships for the moral theologian. He finds his safety in his friendships with other Orthodox seminarians and with the faculty that are Orthodox at his seminary. But he hates all the heretical or perceived heretical elements he hears in his classes or reads about in pastoral theology. The moral theologian relates through a meeting of the minds. He’s cordial with others, but he scans relationships to see if they might negatively impact his search for truth. Now, this moral theologian is very preoccupied with Luis’s masturbation. This is the one area that is disordered in Luis’s life. It’s the one thing that the moral theologian thinks needs to be straightened out. It’s the only area of grave matter that Luis engages in, and it really is offensive to the moral theologian that his self-control is broken repeatedly in this area. So the masturbation is very confusing for Luis’s internal moral theologian. It almost seems to the moral theologian, like there’s some kind of altered state of consciousness that happens. Moral theologian hates that sense of losing control, and he’s come to hate aspects of his sexuality.

[00:33:01] There’s some actual desires rising up in the moral theologian that he could become somewhat asexual. That would simplify matters. All right. So that’s the moral theologian. That’s the typical mode of operating that Luis is in. There’s another part we’re going to talk about called little husband. And little husband is a little boy who carries the burden of deep unmet needs for mom’s love and care. This was the part that mom used when there was this emotional incest. Because mom was in this unhappy marriage, she sought to get her relational needs met by Luis. And little husband was the part of Luis that mom’s parts exploited in an attempt to feel better about herself and to get her own needs met. So when Luis was a little boy and as he grew up, his little husband part learned that if he listened to mom’s problems, if he reassured mom, if he affirmed mom, if he joined mom in criticizing dad as a poor husband and father, then Luis would get mom’s attention and she would show him affection. If little husband felt the same way mom did, if little husband mirrored her, if little husband fused with mom, mom would reward Luis with affirmation and sometimes she went over the top, covering his face with kisses and hugging him close and weeping and telling him how much he meant to her and how important he was to her and how much she needed him, which was actually kind of frightening to him to see her so regressed.

[00:34:29] But Luis couldn’t break away from mom or risk losing almost all of his emotional connections, given that his father was distant and there were no really other significant emotional relationships in his life when he was growing up. So little husband saw himself as his mother’s support, her emotional refuge, her caregiver, her protector in a sense, her “little husband.” And little husband was the part of Luis that felt like he existed to serve his mother’s needs. So little husband saw God as needy, right? He sort of projected the image of mom onto God. So he saw God as needy, kind of emotionally unbalanced, prone to rages, but also prone to overwhelming, intense displays of affection. So little husband had this magic genie god image, and we talked about that in the series on God images. Little husband felt like he had to give God whatever he wanted in order to get the affection, even if that meant violations of boundaries and violations of his own dignity. Little husband is the part of Luis that does not want to displease mom, doesn’t want to be unfaithful to her, doesn’t want to fail to meet her needs. And this part also recognizes the sacrifices that mom is making by allowing him to go to seminary. So little husband does not have interests in other romantic relationships because of how focused he is on becoming what mom needs him to be in order to get the limited emotional nurturance that he can get from mom.

[00:36:09] All right, so there’s a third part that we’re going to discuss in Luis, and that is his gladiator part. This is also an exiled part, but this part is carrying all kinds of rebellion and anger, rage towards mom. It’s also rebellious against authority because this part has felt enslaved by other parts within Luis that were subservient to mom. All right, so gladiator hates mom’s invasiveness, hates her intrusiveness. This part actually hates mom and feels like mom has stolen his identity. Now, this part has carried that burden of anger and rebellion for a long time, but has been extremely threatening to other parts in Luis’s system, so is almost always suppressed, repressed, denied, shunted out of conscious awareness, and exiled. So this part is again another exile. The moral theologian suppresses him because of the danger that the gladiator represents when the gladiator acts out. Gladiator is willing to take huge risks because he experiences life as just a series of oppressions. And as a slave, he feels that life is hardly worth living. Gladiator has this robber god image that God just takes good things away and just burdens and just dumps on him. But there’s also a lot of fear of God, a fear of God especially fusing with him.

[00:37:44] The self image for the gladiator, what it thinks about is just getting all the good things that it can get while it can get them. Right. So this is the part that actually masturbates. This is the part that when the moral theologian is exhausted, is spent, and it can sort of break into conscious awareness, acts out in various ways against God. So of the top ten reasons why Catholic men masturbate, for Luis, it’s the loneliness, the loneliness, the lack of relational connection that little husband carries. It’s the cry for help that little husband is making. It’s the anger at God that the gladiator experiences. And the gladiator is also regulating distance from God. He’s very afraid that God is going to fuse with him emotionally, just like mom did. And so he’s actually trying to help Luis by sinning in order to prevent being overwhelmed by God, prevent being totally swept away by God like a tsunami. He’s really struggling to make sure that there’s a separate identity, that they’re not lost in some sort of existential void by being overtaken by God. And so that’s when that happens. Sometimes when Luis is feeling closer to God, the closer the moral theologian feels toward God, the better things seem to be going, the more concerned the gladiator becomes because of his fear of fusion with God. Because fusion with God would mean the loss of his separate identity, and that would mean an existential annihilation.

[00:39:23] It would mean a kind of death. So, Luis, in trying to get out of his habit of masturbation, made some common mistakes, right? He made the mistake that masturbation was his primary problem. He made the mistake of compartmentalization, that is sort of fragmenting off the masturbation behaviors, as though it’s some separate phenomenon that just exists on its own and isn’t connected to his deeper needs, his deeper issues. He made mistakes around the why for the change. His motives were centered on some self-perfection that the moral theologian was pursuing rather than in order to become closer to God relationally. He shamed himself. He got into the all or nothing trap, which was something the moral theologian, again, was very sensitive to, and he also did not see the struggle as a gift. So, similar to all seminarians and diocesan seminarians in the U.S., Luis had to undergo a psychological evaluation to check out whether or not he was able to go to seminary. And his psychologist, Dr. Glafodorwaloden, he had pointed out some of the issues that were going on within Luis at the time that he made his admission to major seminary. Dr. Glafodorwaloden just was able to tell Luis and his formators that, yes, there was this really kind of overcontrolled hostility that was manifesting on the MMPI and also was evident in the Rorschach. He was able to determine that there were some deep unmet needs for affection, nurturance, and love.

[00:41:04] There was a lot of conflict around relationships with mother figures that particularly came out in his drawings and also on the Rorschach. And so there were some ways that Luis was clued in because in his diocese, which was an excellent idea, the results of those seminarian evaluations were shared with the candidates. And so he had some ideas there. And Dr. Glafodorwaloden had also recommended that he begin individual psychotherapy. Now, he did not that wasn’t mandated by any of his formators or anything like that. So for the first couple years of seminary, Luis didn’t follow that recommendation. But as he got closer and closer to his diaconate ordination, this became more and more troubling to his moral theologian that he was still masturbating. This was grave matter. How could he become ordained to the diaconate and still have this problem? Now, some of his formators sort of pooh-poohed the masturbation. It’s very common. Many people struggle with this. Many, many priests struggle with this. It’s, you know, it’s something that is out there. It’s part of the culture. It’s part of our fallen world, sort of in some ways minimizing it. And this was unacceptable to the moral theologian. The moral theologian was very set on resolving this, but it was going about it by intensifying the efforts that it had done before, which is what parts do. They intensify the efforts they had done before that aren’t successful, because parts really can’t heal other parts.

[00:42:35] That’s one of the precepts of IFS. We really need the self to get involved, right? The seat of consciousness. And that self is also the one that’s better able to govern the system. So when you see people that are in high conflict, like what was going on in Luis, like what was going on in Richard, usually there’s some occlusion of the self. The self really isn’t very present because it’s being overwhelmed by the intensity of the parts. Luis was able to get into therapy then. It was something that his seminary was very open to, something that his diocese was willing to pay for. And so he began working with an IFS therapist, Dr. Mick Marty. And Dr. Mick Marty was able to work with Lewis in a really effective way to unpack and map these parts and other parts that were in Lewis’s system. It really helped Lewis get into touch quickly with what was going on inside himself and these deep unmet needs for affection, nurturance, and love, but also this intense fear of fusion with God, this intense desire to be separate but still near, to be in a reasonable, healthy, good maternal relationship. And again, this is where the Blessed Virgin Mary is very important with these mother wounds. It’s so hard for me to state adequately how important our Lady is, especially in her role as our spiritual mother, our primary mother. But he began to actually bring that out.

[00:44:09] Now, that wasn’t super emphasized by his therapist who didn’t have a particularly strong Marian devotion. But that was something that Luis picked up on and was able to implement himself. He also got involved in an Exodus 90 group with some other seminarians, where he had not only the support of the group on a weekly basis, but was checking in specifically about this with his anchor. He was able to work first with his moral theologian, who was open enough to some of these other approaches and to unblending, so that Luis’s self could govern the system. There was a commitment there inside of Luis to be able to find the real reasons. He began to spend more time with friends and sort of loosen up. People started to see him as being kinder, more gentle, less driven, less perfectionistic. His Exodus 90 group made it through the 90 days. There wasn’t some magical healing that happened. It wasn’t like Luis just gave up all masturbation in those 90 days. But he made a lot of progress in terms of becoming more established in his spiritual plan of life. He began to give up the emphasis on that power spirituality and virtue building that had been one of the mainstays of the moral theologian, became more open to really relational approaches, had a lot of trouble with Saint Therese of Lisieux, but could resonate with Saint Teresa of Avila and some of her ways of connecting, developed actually a relationship in prayer with her.

[00:45:42] He committed to doing what he could, you know, and sometimes he fell, but he committed to his plan. He stayed with it. He focused on the plan and didn’t worry as much about how many days, you know, since the last masturbation and all of that. That wasn’t his focus. It was on really strengthening his relationship with God and really healing on that natural level. His therapist was also really helpful to him in being able to accept him. He could see himself more and more through his therapist’s eyes, which were not very judgmental. He had one formator in the seminary that was really supportive of him as well. He decided to take a pastoral year to do some more of this work and to discern, for the first time, in some ways, with enough freedom to be able to not go to seminary, because part of going to seminary was to make sure that he never dated anyone, and that he would always be mom’s primary male attachment. That’s the little husband part continuing to play out that role. So you can see there were a lot of elements working on this. And grace was also operating in his life. He continued to spend that hour a day in Eucharistic adoration while he was on that pastoral year, and he began to realize that long periods of time were going by and that he only masturbated when he was really, really stressed, maybe every three months, something like that, every six months.

[00:47:10] And it was becoming less and less appealing. He also did some real work with his exiles in his IFS therapy that helped them to heal. So the desire was dropping, and it eventually became an empty symptom that he was able to give up. Okay, so if this is interesting to you, if these stories are interesting to you, I’m going to invite you to learn more about how parts have God images and how that all works. You can mark your calendars. February 19th, 2021 from 10 a.m. to 1:15 Eastern Time. I’ve been invited to do a live webinar for the Catholic Psychotherapy Association entitled Why Do I Avoid God? An Internal Family Systems-Informed Approach to Parts’ Negative God Images. And here we get into how different parts see God. All kinds of experiential work in that webinar. It’s open to the public. You don’t have to be a therapist, or you don’t have to be a priest or a spiritual director or something like that. It’s open to the public. For more information, you can go to catholicpsychotherapy.org/events. Feedback. Let me know how these episodes are landing with you. Some of you already have. Let me know. You can get in touch with me on my cell at (317) 567-9594, or my email at crisis@soulsandhearts.com. We’ve got the Resilient Catholics Community. That community is all about transformation. It’s all about preparing the way for love in our souls.

[00:48:31] It’s about being together as Catholics, on a journey, on a mission, to really enter into that personal, intimate relationship with Jesus Christ as our brother, the Holy Spirit who is love himself. And of course, our spiritual parents, God the Father and Mary our Mother. It’s all about sharing our experiences on that journey, on that mission. There’s a waiting list to get in. soulsandhearts.com/rccd. You’ll get information before the general public does. Those on the waiting list, thank you for your patience. We’re still working on reopening that community. It’ll be late spring. All right. So there’ll be a premium podcast that comes out for the Resilient Catholics Community members, and also the members of our therapist community, the Interior Therapist Community, those that are interested in IFS. Those premium podcasts are always come out on Tuesdays one day later. So this one’s going to release on February 9th. And it is called Listening with Parts for Parts. We’re really going to be inviting our own parts to help us listen to the parts of others. We’ve got our second Wednesday Zoom meeting coming up, at 7:30 p.m. to 8:45 p.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday, February 10th. That’s in the Resilient Catholics Community. It’s all about seeing our sufferings, our trials, our problems, our crosses as gifts, and how our parts so often reject the whole idea that our crosses are gifts.

[00:49:57] One of the things that Luis was really able to figure out was how his issues with sexuality that his moral theologian thought were his only problem, were just a way to understand what his real needs were at a much deeper level. If he were able to just eliminate the masturbation magically, you know, kind of instantly, he never would have gotten to those deeper needs. So he was grateful for the struggle in retrospect, because of how much the struggle helped him deepen his relationship with God as his spiritual father and with Mary as his spiritual mother. Also, you can subscribe to this podcast. Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Amazon, subscribe. You know, I don’t really know how to subscribe even yet because I’m not really on any of those platforms, but subscribe anyway because you know how to do it, right. You probably know how to do it, even if I don’t know how to do it. You can also, like I said, reach out to me, let me know, (317) 567-9594, crisis@soulsandhearts.com. Next week in episode 55, I’m really excited to have Dr. Gerry Crete. Dr. Gerry and I co-founded Souls and Hearts. He’s an expert in working with pornography, and we’re going to begin the first of a two part series on pornography within this broader series on sexuality. And so with that, we’ll invoke our patroness and our patron. Our Lady, our Mother, Untier of Knots, pray for us. Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.