IIC 6: A Call To Arms: Rise Up, Red-Blooded Catholics

Dr. Peter explores in depth mindsets and how to identify your own in a crisis, using an example from The Lord of the Rings. In this podcast, he will guide you through an exercise to help you begin to understand your own mindset in a crisis, in the service of building resiliency.

[00:00:01] Look, I’m gonna get right down to it. We are in a real crisis with this virus. You’ve seen the news. New York City’s hospitals are overwhelmed. All the infections, all the deaths, they’re accelerating exponentially. We’re facing shortages of some basic items. Supply chains are breaking down. We’ve never experienced anything like this in our lifetimes. And I believe that we’re in it for the long haul, ladies and gentlemen. So the bottom line is this. The Catholic Church now, now more than ever, needs heroes to rise up. The Church needs you to be an unsung hero in your vocation, a hero in your duties of state. Other souls need you to be clearheaded, calm, effective, thoughtful, patient, generous, and resilient. They don’t just need you to be a holy man or woman. They need you to be well formed on a human level, well integrated, soul, heart, body, mind. Other souls are looking to you for safety, for security, guidance, for direction. Are you up for that yet? Are you equipped to handle whatever may come? Welcome to the podcast Coronavirus Crisis Carpe Diem, where you and I rise up and embrace the possibilities and opportunities for spiritual and psychological growth in this time of crisis, all grounded in a Catholic worldview. This is episode six and it’s April 6th, 2020, and this episode is entitled A Call to Arms: Rise Up, Red Blooded Catholics. I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski with Souls and Hearts at soulsandhearts.com.

[00:01:44] Thank you for being here with me. So the stakes are high. Yes, there is life and death on the line. But there is more than just life and death. There is salvation and damnation for souls on the line. Our parishes are shuttered, we’ve lost the Mass, and many of us have lost access to confession unless we’re in danger of death. We’ve lost access to the Eucharist. Now, now is the time for red blooded Catholic men and women, drinking deeply of God’s grace, to rise to the challenges of these wild times. There has never been a better time for you to rise up and seize the day. So if you’re willing to take on this mission, this mission of rising up and shining like a beacon for others, I am here to guide you step by step. And this podcast is for you. I’m here to be with you and to walk you through an entire program of human psychological formation to help you triumph in the challenges you are facing, to overcome the stresses that confront you. I’m looking for probably less than 1% of Catholics. Those that really get that grace builds on nature, that the supernatural builds on the natural, and they know they have to work not just on their spiritual life, but also their psychological life.

[00:03:04] I’m looking for just a few Catholics, maybe 100 committed souls, maybe more, who want to join me in our online community at soulsandhearts.com, where we can mutually support each other in becoming unsung heroes in our daily lives, in our duties of state, in our vocation. I’m looking for red blooded Catholics who want to feast on the nourishing word of the Gospel as it is, and live it out to the max. I’m looking for Catholics who are tired of the limp wristed, narrow, timid, lukewarm, worldly approach to the faith that we see all around us. I’m looking for Catholics who are tired of spineless, risk averse approaches to the faith that masquerades as prudence. I want Catholics to join me who are ready to be creative, to think way outside the box, to find real solutions to real problems and who are willing to make great and small sacrifices, but who just need some guidance, who are looking for some guidance grounded in the perennial teachings of the Church. And not because we’re great. We’re not great. But because we want our Lord to live and act through us. If you seriously engage with what I offer you, my bet is that many of you will grow much more resilient and be much better equipped to carry out your mission to answer God’s call for you. So you might ask, who are you, Dr. Peter, to volunteer to lead us and why should we follow you? My whole career has been focused on bringing people closer to God and Mother Mary through shoring up their natural foundations.

[00:04:39] I almost left the field of psychology in graduate school because I was struggling with how to ground the practice of psychology in an authentic Catholic worldview. I have decades of experience now working with clients, helping them through crises of various kinds. And I have a wealth of information to share with you. My spirituality is essentially Carmelite, and I’m focused on removing psychological barriers to contemplative union with God. You can look up my bio on soulsandhearts.com but this is really not about me. It’s about you. If you really engage with what I have to offer you, you’ll know by the fruits. You’ll see whether this is helpful or not. So you might ask me, if I commit, how does this work? How are you going to do this? So we have this podcast. It comes out twice a week, Mondays and Fridays every week. You know, a lot of Catholic websites have shut down or they’ve been forced to reduce the frequency of their offerings. You know, it’s understandable because there’s all kinds of disruptions caused by this current virus crisis. So I get it. But we at Souls and Hearts, we, by the grace of God, have been able to ramp up our offerings and add resources so that we’re now providing new material 4 or 5 days per week.

[00:05:51] In each episode of this podcast, I’m going to share some inside information, the same kinds of information that has been helpful to me and helpful to my friends, and especially helpful to my clients. We don’t do psychotherapy in this podcast. We don’t do psychotherapy or counseling in any of the offerings at Souls and Hearts, but we do share much of the same kinds of information that we share with our clients. So there’s a teaching element. Often in the podcasts, there will also be an experiential part where I guide you through a process to understand yourself better. We did one in the last episode, episode five, on discovering more about your mindset when you were in your dark place. The experiential exercises in this podcast are where we learn by doing. I’m a real experiential learner. I love it when people learn by doing. So we’re big onto that in this podcast. So we have the educational information, we have the experiential exercises. What else do we have? We’re going to discuss the specific challenges that many people face in resiliency in crisis. What keeps them from seizing the day? And I’m going to give you specific guidance on how to overcome those challenges. You’ll see that at the end of this episode.  If you register for this podcast on the Coronavirus Crisis Carpe Diem page at soulsandhearts.com.

[00:07:11] You’ll also get a bonus email every Wednesday. That email is going to give you insider tips, sneak peeks at what’s coming up, and other resources. It’s really worth getting that email. Once we get enough people registered, I will start offering webinars for our registered listeners in our community in which we’ll have a lot more time to go much more in depth in a particular area, and we can be even more interactive. We’re also going to be working on getting a discussion group up on our Coronavirus Crisis Carpe Diem podcast page at soulsandhearts.com. We’re working on that right now. In the meantime, email me at crisis@soulsandhearts.com. crisis@soulsandhearts.com. I check that email several times a day. I’m very responsive to the people that have emailed me. Put your questions in there, your comments, discuss your successes, your struggles. I want to be there for you. And I want you to reach out to me so that I can actually know who you are and that we can be even closer together in this community. I also will make recommendations for reading from time to time. Nothing lengthy or academic, usually short passages, we’ll keep it really clear and to the point. I’m also working on a self-assessment instrument to help you identify your relative strengths and weaknesses in facing a crisis, and I’m planning to be able to give tailored recommendations.

[00:08:30] Again, it’s not psychotherapy, but a kind of guidance for how best to change and grow. We’re also working on community resources on our web pages, getting those discussion boards up that I mentioned before, so we can communicate and connect with each other on a more regular basis. So we have been discussing a healthy Catholic mindset. If you’re just joining us, make sure to check out episode four, where I discuss the four pillars of psychological resilience for Catholics in a crisis, and then go to episode five, where I dive deeper into the pillar of mindset. Now we’re running close to the end of our time today, so I’m going to cut to the recommendations for improving mindset. This first one, get rid of video games. No Fortnite, no Minecraft, no Angry Birds. I mean it. Cut that way back. Cut that out. If you are filling your sensory channels with lots of video games, you’re not going to find a deep union with God. Period. Full stop. And those of you who are honest about it will know that there’s unlikely to be great Catholic heroes that rise up in crises that also happened to play a lot of video games. It’s not going to happen. Second, no binging on TV. Catching up on three seasons of The Office or Downton Abbey.

[00:09:52] It’s the same thing as video games. What Catholic hero spends an hour or two per day watching TV or cat videos on YouTube? That stuff’s going to just going to drag you down and clog your mind. TV and video games are incompatible with a deep, contemplative life. They’re incompatible. They don’t go with recollection during a crisis. So those are two recommendations. But Dr. Peter, Dr. Peter, I connect with my family, I connect with my friends over video games and TV. That’s what we do. That’s what we talk about. Find a different way. Get creative. Look for other ways to connect with your family and friends. And if video games and TV are the only link that you have with your friends, ask yourself if you might not need different friends. No video games, no TV. So what instead, what can you do instead? One idea is to replace that TV and video games with reading. Right now, I happen to be reading the Ralph Moody series out loud to my children, and my wife Pam often sits in as well. The first one in the series is called Little Britches. It’s the story of adventures. It’s a real life story of the adventures of a young boy growing up in the early part of the 20th century. I do different voices for each of the characters and my kids love it.

[00:11:14] Everyone from my 15 year old down to my seven year old. In times of crisis, it’s really helpful to read epic adventures. It doesn’t have to be Homer’s Iliad or Odyssey. Those are great. But if that’s not your style, there’s other books that really show heroes in action. Discuss the books with others if you can. All right, sign up. Even if you’ve already signed up for something else on Souls and Hearts, you still have to sign up separately for this podcast email list, right? Go to soulsandhearts.com. Click on the box that has the sun rising over the earth. That’s the symbol for this podcast. And go ahead and register. That’ll get you on the list to get that Wednesday email. It’ll also get you on the list for upcoming webinars. And let others know about this podcast. Don’t forget that you can come to soulsandhearts.com and you can find the show notes as well if you want those. So also don’t forget to email me. I really want to hear from you. We have listeners from all over the world. Welcome, Spain. Welcome New Zealand. It’s good to have you with us. And that’s a wrap for today. Let’s invoke our patroness and our patron. Mother Mary, Undoer of Knots, pray for us. Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.