IIC 57: The One Main Psychological Reason Why Catholic Marriages Fail

Dr. Peter Malinoski review the surface reasons, the systemic reasons, the deeper reasons, and then the primary psychological reason why Catholic marriages fail and where to start in reversing the course of a failing marriage.

[00:00:12] Welcome to the podcast, Interior Integration for Catholics. 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, living out our vocations. And we deal with these difficult, demanding issues for one primary reason. And that reason 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. Together, we are on a journey toward deep transformation, a radical conversion 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 our natural foundation for the Catholic spiritual life. It’s all about overcoming psychological obstacles to being loved and to loving God and our neighbor.

[00:01:50] This is episode 57, released on March 1st, 2021, and it’s the ninth episode in our series on sexuality. In this episode, we are turning our attention to Catholic marriages. This is such an important, such an essential topic for our day and age. Catholic marriages. So we’re going to look at the one main underlying, deep, often hidden reason why Catholic marriages fall apart. So this episode is titled The One Main Psychological Reason Why Catholic Marriages Fail. So let’s get ready for a deep dive into new ways of thinking about Catholic marriages from an informed psychological perspective. Now, I want you to know that I’m focusing on the psychological aspects here. I’m not so much focusing on the spiritual aspects per se. That’s not what this podcast is about. I’m not qualified to judge souls. I’m not qualified to make statements about virtues and vices in any given person. I’m not about criticizing and condemning, but rather I’m focused on understanding with gentleness and compassion. You know, you catch a lot more flies with honey than with vinegar. My focus is on the natural level. All right, well, it’s a fair question if one of you or more of you were to say, all right, what about you, Dr. Peter? What do you know about marriage? It’s a fair question. You want to know about my personal experience? Well, I will tell you that I am now in my 25th year of marriage.

[00:03:14] We’re coming up, Pam and I are coming up on our silver anniversary. One marriage for each of us. And we have seven children. So this is not some sort of academic, abstract, highly conceptual presentation. I’ve also got experienced in the lived reality of marriage, the lived reality of family life in the trenches. All right, well, let’s start with some definitions. When I say Catholic marriage, what do I mean? All right. Well, this is from the Catholic Dictionary. I really love this online Catholic Dictionary. And it says, this is marriage. As a natural institution, the lasting union of a man and woman who agree to give and receive rights over each other for the performance of the act of generation and for the fostering of their mutual love. All right, so that means it’s about procreation and it’s about mutual love. The dictionary goes on, the state of marriage implies four chief conditions. There must be a union of opposite sexes. It is therefore opposed to all forms of unnatural homosexual behavior. Secondly, it’s a permanent union until the death of either spouse. Third, it’s an exclusive union so that extramarital acts are a violation of justice. And fourth, its permanence and exclusiveness are guaranteed by contract. Mere living together without mutually binding themselves to do so is concubinage and not marriage. Christ elevated marriage to a sacrament in the New Law. Christian spouses signify and partake of the mystery of that unity and fruitful love which exists between Christ and his Church, helping each other to attain to holiness in their married life and in the rearing and education of their children.

[00:05:00] All right, so when I’m talking about Catholic marriages and specifically about Catholic marriages failing, I’m talking about marriages that are actually sacramental. There’s an emphasis on the sacramental aspect. And I’m talking about a covenant. This goes far beyond the mere contract that a civil marriage entails, right. We’ve got a society where marriage is basically seen as a contract, a contract that can be nullified through no fault divorce if either spouse wants it. Okay, so we’ve got the definition of Catholic marriage down. What do I mean by fail? Right. This whole podcast is about why Catholic marriages fail. What do we mean by fail? All right, so let’s talk about what does fail mean, right? There’s a few elements to that definition, right. Fail can mean to prove deficient or lacking, to perform ineffectively or inadequately, to fall short of success or achievement in something expected, attempted, desired, or approved, or to leave something undone. All right. So one way that we could consider a Catholic marriage to fail is by divorce. So let’s just start with that. There’s other ways. We’re going to get to the other ways that Catholic marriages fail, even if there’s not divorce. But let’s just talk about divorce right now.

[00:06:20] In a 2014 Pew Research survey of 885 Catholics, 19% of Catholic adults 18 years or older were divorced or separated. So about 19% of adult Catholics, this was in 2014, were divorced or separated. And that’s really consistent with Georgetown’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate or CARA. What CARA found was that about 20%, or 1 in 5 Catholic adults have experienced divorce in their lifetimes. But here we get into some more interesting statistics. About 28% of Catholics who marry ever divorce, right? So there’s a 28% divorce rate based on CARA’s statistics, which were the best that I could readily find. They actually do a really good job. I was trained as an applied statistician, and figuring these things out isn’t quite so easy. That 28% of Catholics who marry and then divorce, that’s actually lower, significantly lower than the national average. National average is 36% of Americans who marry, divorce at some point. All right. So that belies the old canard that over half or half of all Catholic marriages end in divorce. That’s simply not true. It’s more like a quarter. It’s 28%. Still, that’s a lot. That’s still a lot of marriages that are ending in divorce. But it’s interesting that it’s better than the national average, which is 36%, ending in divorce. Now, I don’t think success in marriage is really defined by just not getting divorced. And not getting divorced by itself is not sufficient to call a marriage successful.

[00:08:05] You can have abusive marriages, for example, that are held together by codependency. You can have marriages where the spouses are like distant roommates. They may be cool towards each other, tolerate each other’s existence. I’ve heard of cases where they barely talk to each other, but for one reason or another, and it may be the commitment to stay together, those marriages continue on. But they would hardly be considered a successful marriage, right? Living out the vocation of marriage. So there’s kind of three ways that I see marriages fail. One is kind of a unilateral ending, right, of the marriage. And when I say ending of the marriage, I’m speaking loosely, right. If it’s an authentic Catholic marriage, if it’s a sacramental marriage, the only way it ends is by the death of one of the spouses. But those marriages breaking up or falling apart unilaterally ended is when one spouse abandons the other. One spouse wants to divorce, the other spouse doesn’t. Another way that they can fail, mutually, right? Each spouse leaves the other. And then the third is by this distancing, you know, this roommate model, this disconnection. We’re still married. There’s no civil divorce. But there’s just not a real connection there. All right. Well, what does God tell us about marriage? Marriage is a covenant. It goes way beyond the contract. It goes to this idea of covenant. And the Catechism, in paragraph 1603, tells us that God himself is the author of marriage.

[00:09:37] And the vocation of marriage is written in the very nature of man and woman as they came from the hand of the Creator. You know, it’s significant, and different commentators on Scripture and the Gospels have noted this for thousands of years now, in that our Lord’s first public miracle was at the wedding of Cana. And that was seen as a way of Jesus endorsing and embracing the beauty and the goodness of marriage. All right. But there’s an issue. Marriage is tough. Marriage is difficult. It can be a hard road, a really hard road. And part of that is because no one can hurt us, no one can disappoint us, no one can wound us, no one can get under our skin quite like a spouse. It’s really hard to anticipate all the difficulties, all the stresses, all the trials, all of the problems that can come up in married life. And marriage difficulties affect us all, even if we’re not married, even if we don’t have a vocation to marriage. You know, just take a look at your parents’ marriage if your parents were married, right? Friends’ marriages. So this whole issue of marriage is an absolutely important aspect for our culture. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops described marriage as the bedrock of society. And the USCCB wrote that, “Marriages benefit society by building and strengthening human relationships within the home among spouses and children, and beyond the home involving relatives, neighbors, and communities. And for this reason, the family has long been understood as the fundamental unit of society, the foundation from which religious, civic, and legal organizations naturally develop and flourish.”

[00:11:36] Right. Going all the way back to Aristotle. Aristotle wrote that the family is nature’s established association for the supply of mankind’s everyday wants. The background’s good. I’m glad we did that. But let’s get into why Catholic marriages fail. All right. So I’m going to start with the surface reasons. These are the reasons that are often given by spouses that are in difficult marriages. Right? These are often the ones that are obvious, that are more available to our conscious awareness. And they can consist, I think, unfortunately, of some simple pat answers. I want to give these to you though, so that you can hear them. They’re legitimate answers, right? But they tend to be more on the surface, right? They tend to be more of manifestations of the one deep underlying psychological reason that we’ll get to in a little bit. All right. So what are the surface reasons? One, disagreements about money, finances, or debt, spending, those kinds of things. Second, growing apart. Each of us making our own way. Different values. Different priorities in life. Third affairs, right. Adultery. Fourth, poor conflict resolution. Fifth, domestic abuse.

[00:12:55] It happens in Catholic families, too. Sixth, problems with the in-laws. Right. The in-laws not liking the marriage, causing difficulties and strife and dissension in the marriage. Seventh, the idea that I thought marriage would cure everything. This is not uncommon for spouses to believe that, once we get married, I will be able to cure the other spouse. I will be able to heal that other person. And there’s a kind of parallel to this within the sacramental aspect too. I’m taking this from Sherry Weddell, from her book Forming Intentional Disciples, where she writes that, “Passively receiving a sacrament is not enough. The grace we receive is directly related to the personal faith, spiritual expectancy, and hunger with which we approach the sacrament.” And Sherry Weddell had this really interesting argument. Now, she was primarily talking about the sacraments of initiation into the Church, Baptism and Confirmation. But it also applies to marriage, right? Sometimes there’s this idea that we will get these sacramental graces and that is going to make everything all right. There’s emotional reasons kind of on the surface that people give, right? We fell out of love. We’re no longer soulmates. Or it’s just not fun anymore. I’m not feeling it. So those are kind of surface reasons why people that people give for why marriages fail. But let’s go deeper than that. Let’s go to the next level. There’s going to be multiple levels to this.

[00:14:31] So let’s go to the next level. And the next level are what I call systemic reasons. These are focusing on systems issues in the relationship, in the family life, rather than focusing on the intrapsychic issues. Now, intrapsychic, what that means is basically inside my own psychology, inside my own psychological structure and dynamics. Systems approaches focus on the network of relationships between the husband and the wife and their broader social networks. And there are some advantages to systems thinking, to thinking systemically. You can take a look at those network of relationships. That’s important. Systemic thinking is really popular today. You hear a lot about it in terms of systemic racism, where they’re looking at structural issues in society. So the systemic reasons that people often give is, you know, something like this. It’s not him. It’s not me. It’s just us together. We’re just not a good match. We’re incompatible. We’re not meant for each other. We have irreconcilable differences. Right. We have poor communication. We’re just not attracted to each other anymore. And one of the sort of advantages of systemic thinking is that you don’t have to take any personal responsibility. The problem is systemic. It’s bigger than any one of us. So it needs to be addressed on a systemic basis. Right. In other words, we need to have external influences come in and change the system rather than focusing on what’s going on inside of me, in my own intrapsychic dynamics, in my own choices, in my own taking or not taking of responsibility as the case may be.

[00:16:25] And another problem of systemic thinking is that it can lead to a kind of helplessness because we need the other person to change, or we need the whole system to change, before I can be at peace, before I can have joy, before things can be all right, before I can be grounded. There has to be systemic change. All right. So that’s the second level. We have the surface reasons, and then we have the systemic reasons. Now I’m going to go to the next level, the third level. And these are deeper reasons, but they’re still not the deepest reason. So this is getting deeper, getting further back along the causal chain, but we’re not at the deepest reasons yet, psychologically. All right. So as you take a look at what’s out there on the internet about the more profound reasons why marriages fail, you’re going to find things like omissions. In the more thoughtful pieces that are written about this, you’ll see things like spouses not asking each other what they need. There’s going to be this lack of forgiveness and unwillingness to forgive between spouses. You’re going to see things like the loss of identity in the relationship, right? Sometimes that goes by codependency, drawing one’s identity from the spouse rather than having a separate identity.

[00:17:42] You’re going to see things on a deeper level about not having a shared mission, or a shared vision, or shared goals. Losing track of the friendship. A lack of flexibility. Those kinds of things. And you know, I would agree that those are closer to the one main underlying reason psychologically why Catholic marriages fail. But they’re not the primary reason. So let’s get into what I believe is the real primary underlying, often hidden, often unconscious reason why Catholic marriages fail. And that is deep unmet attachment needs, deep relational needs. These are often unconscious, they’re unmet, and how people respond to those needs. That’s what drives so much of the relational problems in Catholic marriages. All right. So let’s talk about what these fundamental attachment needs are. There’s basically five of these, five attachment needs. The first one is to be seen, heard, known, and understood. That’s first, right, seen, known, heard, and understood. The second one, a need to be safe and secure. Safety, security. Third one, I need to be comforted, soothed, and reassured. Fourth one, I need to be cherished. I need to be rejoiced in, that somebody rejoices in me and somebody delights in me. And the fifth one, to be able to believe that the other person wills my highest good, right, that they really are concerned about my highest good. Those are the five major attachment needs, according to Brown and Elliott.

[00:19:58] We’ve discussed those before in previous podcasts. And when those developmental needs are not met, then we go looking to have those needs met. And who does the looking? Well, I would argue that it’s parts of us, right? Because to have a deep awareness of the intensity of these needs can be really distracting, can be really disorienting, can make it hard to carry out the responsibilities of everyday life. And so what happens then is that there becomes this focus inward that parts have, parts of us have, on getting those needs met. Because there’s a deep sense that this is a life or death issue. This is a struggle for survival. If we don’t feel seen, heard, known, understood, if we don’t feel safe, if we don’t feel secure, if we can’t be comforted, if there’s no safety, if there’s no soothing, if there’s no reassurance, if there’s no one who loves us, we’re not cherished, we’re not delighted in, that’s a crisis. That’s a crisis on a psychological level. That’s a crisis on an emotional level. That’s a crisis on an existential level. So what I think is going on is far deeper than most of what kind of passes as the reasons for marriage is failing. It goes back to these fundamental needs that, for a lot of people, go back to infancy, for a lot of people go back to toddlerhood. And when they don’t get met, more and more energy is put towards getting those basic needs met.

[00:21:31] And this leads to self-absorption. This is a central concept in the way that I think about relational conflict. I think about self-absorption. And I define self-absorption, because remember we’re going to define our terms. We want to make sure that we’re very clear about what we’re talking about. Self-absorption is being preoccupied with oneself or one’s own affairs, one’s own needs, sometimes to the point of excluding others or the outside world. All right. That preoccupation with oneself, with one’s parts, with one’s own unmet needs. And I mean that to be morally neutral. All right. I distinguish self-absorption from selfishness. A lot of times people will, you know, get into this idea calling themselves selfish. They have parts that call themselves selfish or calling other people selfish. Selfish is different. Selfish is concerned excessively or exclusively with one’s self, seeking or concentrating on one’s own advantage, pleasure, or well-being without regard for others, really concerned about one’s welfare or interest, but having little or no concern for others, self-centered. Okay, so there’s an overlap there, but I really want to emphasize that I’m distilling out the moral quality from self-absorption. I’m not discussing self-absorption as a vice. I’m looking at it as a phenomenon that I’m observing, not entering into judgment over the person which comes in when you think of the other person as selfish. The conflicts that we have typically are between our parts within ourselves.

[00:23:16] That’s an internal conflict. Some of my parts and some of the other person’s parts. So when I think about like what causes harm in marriages, I’m always thinking about it in terms of parts of us. And I think the primary reason that these unmet attachment needs lead to marriages failing is that we put way too much pressure on the spouse to meet those needs, the needs for a mother, the needs for a father, the needs for God, the needs for our spiritual mother Mary. Marriage is often sort of the last great hope for those needs to be met, at least if we’re just looking in the natural realm, right? Because we’re not going to get reparented by anybody. We’re adults now. We’re not going back to our families of origin. Mom and Dad aren’t going to be able to give us what what we need. And so it’s natural for people to hold on to the idea that the spouse can meet those needs. And sometimes when we enter into marriage, we have parts that are so heavily invested in the belief that the spouse really can meet those needs. I’ve found somebody who can give me what I need, somebody who can complete me. Right? So there is this idea when people get into marriages, including Catholics, that the other person is finally going to meet those needs. Now, a lot of times that’s not very conscious because these needs may not be very evident.

[00:24:53] I am a firm believer that we have very limited self-awareness in our culture. Our culture doesn’t promote us really knowing ourselves, and therefore we really don’t know other people because we can’t really know other people if we don’t know ourselves very well. And there is so much going on behind the scenes when you look at the intensity of dating, the intensity of courtship, the intensity of engagement, right? There’s so much going on in that idealization. There’s so much going on in terms of perceptual distortions, warning signs not being seen, different types of realities being denied, because parts are so invested in the belief that this person can finally meet those needs, right? That’s what I think drives a lot of what brings people together in marriage, parts taking over and feeling like they can’t live without the other person. And it’s also parts of us that get angry, disappointed, or disillusioned with our spouses when needs don’t get met, when these impossible needs for Mommy and Daddy and God, when our spouse can’t meet those needs, that’s when you get a lot of disillusionment. You can get rage even, right, and even things like hatred building up. It’s a very, very common for parts of spouses to hate the spouse. Right? It’s just there. I think it’s there. It’s not all the spouse.

[00:26:30] That’s one of the reasons why I think parts work is so helpful in working through issues in marriages, is that it gives a model for understanding that when a spouse experiences something towards the other spouse, it’s not all of them, right? It’s not all of the spouse that hates the other spouse. It’s part of them that hates the other spouse. And there’s a reason for that. Usually it has to do with disappointment, with disillusionment, with needs not being met with unrealistic expectations. As we’ve seen the atomization of families, as we’ve had high levels of geographic mobility, as extended family systems are breaking down, as people are much more fluid in the way that they form their relationships, more and more pressure has been put on marriages because we don’t have those larger family units to fall back on, right, as well, to meet those relational needs. So we’ve got a couple of options here. One option is to focus on the other person’s deficits. And this is that external focus that I see so much. And Dr. Gerry is really different from me. He’s a licensed marriage and family therapist. He’s all about systems-based therapy, all about those communication patterns and everything that’s going on in the system of the marriage and in the family. I’m a depth psychologist. I’m much more intrapsychic. I’m much more about what’s going on inside each individual and believing that what happens there is what’s primary, and that’s what they bring to the relationship, right? There’s two very different, two very legitimate ways of looking at this.

[00:27:59] We learn a lot from each other, Dr. Gerry and I, and he’s gotten much more into intrapsychic stuff, an interest in Internal Family Systems. Because of Internal Family Systems, I’ve gotten much more interested in external systems, right, seeing a lot more there that I think is really, really valuable, systems nested within systems. It’s been very eye-opening for both of us to have the fruitful exchange in our friendship and in our collegiality and our working together for Souls and Hearts. So it’s been a really beautiful thing, really grateful that he has been a part of my life over the last few years. But I’m going to emphasize this work internally first. It’s very common when I work with couples that there’s a lot of finger pointing. There’s a lot of, you know, saying that the other person has to change or she’s got to start doing this before I’m going to change. He’s got to start doing this and so forth. And again, that leads to a kind of stalemate and helplessness because there’s so much disappointment, so much pain, so much hurt, so much getting activated too, rewounding the same old hurts that go back to far before the couple ever met each other, right, go back to their childhoods.

[00:29:09] I really firmly believe that a lot of the distress in marriages comes from unresolved relational and attachment wounds that go back to childhood. And if you can heal that, you can then be free, right? If we can heal, then we can focus on, what does it mean to love the other person? What does it mean to give to the other person? This is when marriage has become really successful is when you have two people whose needs are essentially met primarily by their relationship with God, and secondarily by a broader social network, that are not relying on the spouse to have, you know, so many needs met, that can appreciate the goods that come to them freely in marriage without having to demand that the spouse meet some of these really deep, impossible needs. It’s something that I see over and over and over again. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a distressed marriage where that’s not been the case. But we don’t tend to think about it that way. So what I’m going to say is, okay, let’s remove the beam from our own eye. When I work with troubled marriages, most of the time, to be honest with you, I’m working with only one of the spouses. A lot of times the other spouse isn’t going to cooperate, isn’t going to come in. They’re not going to do therapy work with a therapist, and still great work can be done.

[00:30:33] What we’re doing is we’re bringing our parts into awareness. We’re recognizing what those needs are. We’re loving our parts, the parts that carry the old wounds, the part that carries the pain, the suffering, the anger. We’re exploring how the dynamics with the spouse activate that stuff so that we’re not so easily triggered by our spouse, so that we can be grounded and we can have a sense of abiding peace and joy and well-being, even if our spouse happens to be really in a bad mood and a funk, acting out in some way or other, right? That way we’re not beholden, we’re not hostage to our spouse’s moods, right? Parts language and understanding parts is so helpful for being able to deal with the shame, with the anger, with the disappointment, with the insecurity that we brought into the marriage. That wasn’t there just because of the spouse. We brought it in, unacknowledged. That’s because we have fallen natures. You know, we live in a fallen world, right? So I’m really going to recommend that when you’re struggling with something in the marriage, to look at what it’s activating within you, to bring that vision back inside in order to resolve that pain, that stuff, that baggage that’s just not healed, right, to work through that, to free you to not need your spouse to be in some other role than your spouse, right? I believe that people can be in marriages, can be in very difficult marriages and have peace and joy and well-being, even if the spouse is not cooperating at all, because the graces flow in if you’re receptive to them.

[00:32:35] One person can make a marriage so much better unilaterally. That doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s peace and harmony and doves and rainbows and all of that between the two spouses. Sometimes spouses will hate spouses, you know, because they’re taken over by parts, right? And there’s not a whole lot that a spouse can do about it directly. Jesus experienced this, you know, in John 6, people left him. It wasn’t because he was caught up in a part that was angry at, you know, his followers and whatever. And he lambasted them and they reacted naturally by leaving. No, no, no. He was loving them in John 6, telling them about something very intimate in the Eucharist. They allowed themselves to be led by their passions out of relationship with him. But God understands every single thing that is going on in that relationship far better than you do, far better than your spouse does, far better than your marital therapist does. And he loves you. And so we need to do our part by trusting in that and by being willing to do that foundational work, not just in a spiritual level, not just praying. That’s really, really important.

[00:33:40] Don’t get me wrong. It’s really important to work on the spiritual dimensions of this. But what often gets neglected among serious Catholics who are in marriages with serious problems is the natural foundation for the marriage. And in that, what’s going on inside of me. And that’s what we have the most control over. All right. So if you want a good exposition of what a marriage should look like, I really like this papal encyclical On Christian Marriage by Pope Pius XI, came out in 1930. The Latin name, Casti Connubii. That’s a great thing to read if you want to wrap your mind around conceptually what happens in a marriage. The second thing is that, in the Catholic Catechism, paragraph 1601 to 1658 are all about marriage and what marriage should look like. And I’m really going to encourage you to take a look at those as well. All right. I’ve got some other answers for you, though. You know, we have the Resilient Catholics Community, and that community is all about transformation. It’s all about preparing the way for love in our souls. It’s about being together as Catholics, on a journey, on a mission, to really enter into that intimate, personal relationship with Jesus Christ, our brother, with the Holy Spirit who is Love himself and with our spiritual parents, God the Father and Mary our mother. And one of the reasons I’m so insistent on that is because if we enter into those deep relationships with the Trinity and with our Mother Mary, those needs get filled.

[00:35:11] And once those needs get filled, then we are in a much, much better position to be able to love ourselves, to be able to love our neighbor. Right? Love your neighbor as yourself. Otherwise, a lot of times we have what’s called the starving waiter syndrome, what I think of as the starving waiter syndrome. If one’s starving, it’s really hard to serve beautiful meals to other people, right? It’s really hard to be able to make sacrifices for other people if we feel like we’re dying inside, which is what I think goes on in these really troubled marriages. In really troubled marriages, there’s existential concerns, life and death types of things. That’s why you see the kinds of behaviors that seem desperate in a lot of cases. We’re going to talk more about that as we continue on in this series on sexuality and in this subseries on marriage. Now, next week in episode 58, I’m going to get much more into how the sexual relationship in the marriage is such a sensitive barometer to how the marriage is doing in terms of the relationship between the spouses. I really think that looking at what happens in the sexual aspects of the relationship is so illuminative. It exemplifies so much of what’s happening actually in the relational field and the relational dynamics between the husband and the wife.

[00:36:38] We didn’t talk a lot about sex today because I really wanted to devote to devote a whole episode on that. And that’s what we’re going to go to next week. All right. So I want you to think about getting on the waiting list for these Resilient Catholics Community. That’s at soulsandhearts.com/rcc. You’re going to get information before the general public does. And later this week, I’m going to be emailing everyone on that waiting list about a special event just for you, just for people on the waiting list, because some of you have been really patient. Some of you have been there since November, December, you know, and I know it’s taken longer to be able to get that community reopened. We’re implementing a lot of changes in there. And the other thing is that I’ve been spending a lot of time on the Interior Therapist Community. That’s the community for Catholic therapists. There’s been such a need, in part driven by this podcast, such a need for Catholic IFS-informed therapists. And right now we’ve got 32 that are in training with me and, you know, learning more experiential stuff in the Interior Therapist Community. All right. But going back to the Resilient Catholics Community, which is for the general Catholic public, right? We’re going to have our second Wednesday Zoom meeting, coming up from 7:30 to 8:45 p.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday, March 10th, 2021.

[00:38:05] And that’s going to be about parts, those internal parts of us, sex, and marriage. And also we’ve got a premium podcast for the RCC members. That’s all about your parts that have issues with marriage. We’re calling it Polarizations of Parts Around Marriage. So there’s going to be this experiential exercise for our Resilient Catholics Community members, that’s going to be in our podcast 57A. That’s going to come out on Tuesday, March 2nd. Those podcasts always come out a day later. For our Interior Therapists Community members, and so if you’re a therapist and you’re listening to this, I’m really strongly going to encourage you to go to soulsandhearts.com/itc, we are now reopening the community. We’ve got new Foundations Experiential Groups opening up. We also have a base membership, where you can just take advantage of all the different resources that are in that community. I don’t want to list them all here. It’s just would take too long. I’m also going to encourage you to subscribe to this podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google, Amazon, Interior Integration for Catholics. Let people know about what we’re doing. Such a great thing. And with that, it’s a wrap. I will invoke our patroness and our patron. Please pray along with me. Our Lady, our Mother, Untier of Knots, pray for us. Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.