IIC 65: Why Catholic Spouses Find It Hard to Empathize with Each Other, Especially About Sex — with Solutions

Join Dr. Peter as he reviews the five kinds of empathy according to Dan Siegel, and considers the challenges and the ways forward for Catholic spouses to increase mutual empathy, including in their sexual intimacy.

[00:00:12] I am excited to have you with me for yet another episode of Interior Integration for Catholics, a weekly podcast that is part of our online outreach at Souls and Hearts, soulsandhearts.com. This is episode 65, Why Catholic Spouses Find It Hard to Empathize with Each Other, Especially About Sex, with Solutions. As many of you know, we are in the middle of a series on sexuality within Catholic marriages. But don’t worry if you’re not married. There is so much in today’s episode that applies to any close relationship. All right, so let’s get started. Let’s talk about empathy. It’s a word that’s used a lot. And within psychology, within the field of mental health, within the field of positive psychology, about flourishing, coaching, it’s used in a lot of different ways. There’s a lot of meaning associated to empathy, and there’s even some contradictory definitions. So I want to talk about empathy from the point of view from an interpersonal neurobiologist by the name of Daniel Siegel. He’s a clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine. What is interpersonal neurobiology? Well, let’s define that first. Sometimes it’s known as relational biology. It is an interdisciplinary framework associated with human development and functioning. It’s all about human formation, human development, human functioning. And it was developed, starting in the 1990s, by Daniel Siegel, who wanted to bring together all of the different disciplines to demonstrate how the mind, the brain, and the relationships integrate to mutually influence and mutually affect one another.

[00:02:02] He wants to see how these different disciplines can contribute in a united, integrated way to promote well-being for all people on a natural level. His work is very accessible. I very much like Dan Siegel and his work. It’s easy for non professionals to understand and it’s very available. For example, you can check out on YouTube, Dan Siegel, Five Types of Empathy or Five Kinds of Empathy. It’ll pull up this six-minute video. Some of the definitions that I’m using come from that video. But I’m going to expand a lot more on them because this question of empathy is so critical for us to learn how to love our spouses as Catholics. It’s absolutely central to learning how to love your neighbor. We are Catholic, both with a capital C and a small c. That small c catholic means universal. We’re going to pull in in this podcast things that are helpful from all areas of inquiry, from all scientific disciplines, from all kinds of sources. So I’m excited to be with you. What is empathy? What are the five types of empathy? Well, the first is emotional resonance or attunement. The second, perspective taking. The third, cognitive empathy. The fourth is compassion, which Dan Siegel also calls empathetic concern. And the fifth one is empathetic joy. So we’ve got emotional resonance or attunement, perspective taking, cognitive empathy, compassion, also known as empathetic concern, and empathetic joy. Let’s expand his basic presentation.

[00:03:53] Remember that video I referred to is only six minutes long. We’re going to go into it in a lot more detail, and we’re also going to ground it in a Catholic understanding of the human person, in a Catholic anthropology, in a Catholic worldview. Emotional resonance, that’s the first kind of empathy that Dan Siegel talks about. What is it? Attunement. This is where the receiver begins to feel what the sender is feeling. You feel the feelings of the other person you sense because you’re resonating, kind of like a tuning fork, right? If you take a tuning fork, let’s say that’s tuned to A, and you hold it up to another tuning fork that’s also tuned to A, and you ding one of them, so it’s dinging, the other one will begin to resonate, right? That’s what we’re talking about. Clinical psychologist Richard Erskine in 1998 described this attunement as, “a kinesthetic and emotional sensing of others, knowing their rhythm, their affect, their experience by metaphorically being in their skin to create a two-person experience of unbroken feeling connectedness by providing a reciprocal affect and/or a resonating response.” It’s a little complicated of a definition, but basically what it means is, we’re together in the feeling. Dan Siegel says that, “When we attune with others, we allow our own internal state to shift, to come to resonate with the inner world of another. This resonance is at the heart of the important sense of feeling felt that emerges in close relationships.

[00:05:38] Children need attunement to feel secure and to develop well. And throughout our lives, we need attunement to feel close and connected.” Okay, that’s a quote from Dan Siegel. What we’re talking about here is sharing the unrefined, unprocessed experience of the emotion. Now, an important caveat here, that this is best done in moderation, or we can wind up with what Richard Schwartz and Martha Sweezy call emotional contagion. Right. If we get sucked into the fullness of someone else’s uncontained experience, we blend or fused with them, we have this loss of boundaries. We’re sucked into the intensity of the unregulated emotion. Well, we can be lost with them. It’s sort of like when a lifeguard swims out to help someone who’s drowning. They approach the person from the back so that the person doesn’t engulf them in their panic and both go down and drowned. We want to make sure that we are setting some limits and boundaries around that. And that’s just the first kind of empathy. That’s the emotional resonance. It is good to take a sip of the other person’s experience, to be able to know at a bones level what they’re experiencing, but we want to be careful about how much of that we take in. So that’s emotional resonance. Second kind of empathy, perspective taking. Now this is when I put myself in the other person’s shoes. It’s not the fusion.

[00:07:15] It’s not the shared experience of the intensity of their emotion or their desire or their impulses or whatever’s going on in their inner world. But it’s going in with our own mind and with the capacity to understand and consider the other person’s experience. We’re remaining separate with this perspective taking. We’re looking at the world through the other person’s eyes. That’s perspective taking. That’s looking at the world through the other person’s eyes. That’s the second one. So we have emotional resonance or attunement, and then we have perspective taking. What’s the third one? Cognitive empathy. Alright, here we go further. Now we’re not just resonating with the experience, again, to a moderate degree, maintaining boundaries. We’re not just taking the other person’s perspective, but we are understanding what the other person’s experience means for that person. Right. Now we’re looking at more than just the experience, but we’re looking at how that experience interacts with that person’s history, their relational history, their emotional history, their experience loadings, the things that have formed them. We’re trying to understand that experience in the context of that person’s human experience, in the context of that person’s specific human formation. So this is really working on that empathetic understanding. So much of our suffering comes not from the facts of our situation, but from the meaning we make from those facts, from the inferences that we make from those facts, from how we construe our experience. If I have a pain in my side, and I think to myself, oh, I must have eaten something that doesn’t settle well, I’m going to make a different meaning than if I think, oh my goodness, I think my appendix just ruptured.

[00:09:23] You can see that the exact same experience, construed in two different ways, can create a different level of anxiety, a different level of stress, a different level of suffering. So when we’re entering into this cognitive empathy, we’re not just trying to understand the experience of the other person as in perspective taking, but we’re going beyond that to really trying to understand how they construe their experience, how they understand what they’re going through in the moment. Next one is compassion. This is also known as empathetic concern. This is where we feel the other person’s pain. But now we’re motivated to reduce the other person’s suffering if that’s best for the person. We feel the suffering, we take the suffering in, but we’re able to use our imagination to consider what I can do to help? What would help the other person in this situation? How can I be with the person? And then any doing that might come from that would come from the being with. Really important to be with the person, because a lot of times we can’t make it all right. That’s just simply beyond our power. But how can we be with in a way that is comforting in some way to that person? Even our Lord needed this.

[00:10:48] Remember when the angel came and ministered to him in the Garden of Gethsemane during his Passion. Being with. All right. So we have emotional resonance or attunement, perspective taking, that’s the second one. Third one, cognitive empathy, fourth one, compassion. And the fifth one is empathetic joy. This is the one that Dan Siegel says mostly gets forgotten. And I entirely agree with that. This is where I get really excited about your success. I delight with you and in you. And that joy is not about what you’ve done, but it’s about who you are. So when this is happening between Catholic spouses, the spouses are delighting in the very being of each other. The wife believes and celebrates the husband’s goodness. The husband is precious. He’s worth sacrificing for. The husband believes in the wife’s goodness, in her beauty. He cherishes her and loves her and rejoices in her being, in her presence. For she is very, very good. You can see some of this in the Song of Songs. If you look at chapter one verse four, “We will exalt and rejoice in you. We will extoll your love more than wine.” And that whole book of the Song of Songs is just full of images that reflect this empathetic joy. So we have those five kinds of empathy. Emotional resonance or attunement, perspective taking, cognitive empathy, compassion or empathetic concern, and empathetic joy. Now we have been working with this metaphor of the Catholic canopied marriage bed.

[00:12:37] We started that in episode 58, and we’ve been building this bed from the ground up. The floor is the rock solid foundation. That’s the presence of God. That’s an active belief in God’s providence, this child-like trust, this absolute confidence. This reflects the reality of our existential dependance on God’s paternal care, on Mary’s maternal care. So many Catholics try to solve their marriage issues without bringing in anything spiritual. They go about it in a purely secular way. Their manager parts are out there studying, reading, getting self-help books, arranging therapy appointments. But there’s not a reliance on God’s providence. Sometimes for Catholic married spouses, there’s this entire disconnect between sex and anything spiritual. It’s like two domains that have no overlap. We want to remember that everything is founded on that ultimate reality that God exists, that he is our Father, that he loves and cherishes us as his beloved sons and daughters. Then there’s the four legs. Leg number one, the husband’s commitment to his own interior integration, his commitment to his own human formation, his psychological health, his emotional well-being, removing the beam from his own eye, leg one. Leg two, exactly the same thing for the wife, her commitment to her interior integration, her human formation, her own psychological health, her well-being. We talked about that in episode 63. Third leg is really understanding attachment needs and integrity needs, and how powerfully those needs, and our attempts to meet those needs, drive our internal experience and our behavior.

[00:14:19] It’s incredibly powerful. So to be aware of those attachment needs and integrity needs, many of which are not allowed into conscious awareness many times. So we have to be open and receptive to what’s going on within us in terms of these deep needs. That’s the third leg. The fourth leg on the bed is Internal Family Systems approaches, understanding deeply how the human person is both a unity and a multiplicity. Like an orchestra, it’s a unity, right? An orchestra is one, but within it, it has this multiplicity. It has the conductor and all the musicians. And you can check out episode 60 and 61 of this podcast to get much more into how do we understand that as foundational in the natural understanding of a Catholic sacramental marriage? From there, we have the frame and the box spring. And that frame and box spring represent the firm commitment between the husband and the wife, the upholding of the marriage vows. That’s what holds the mattress, right. The mattress is this empathy that I’m talking about now in episode 65. We want that mattress to be consistent, solid, firm, and not lumpy. Right? So we’re going to be talking about, how do we strengthen our empathetic connection with our spouses? How do we do that? How do Catholic husbands and wives do that? Well, let’s first talk about why we lack these five different kinds of empathy.

[00:15:48] Let’s get into what the problems are before we get into the solutions. So I’m going to talk about why Catholic husbands and wives lack empathy in general. These cut across the five different kinds of empathy. These are the overarching reasons. So the first one I’m going to argue is a lack of interior integration. That again is the focus of this podcast. It’s the focus of Souls and Hearts. This is so critically important. If we are fragmented inside, if we don’t understand ourselves, if we are disconnected, if we don’t understand our own experience, it’s going to be very difficult for us to be able to understand or to love anyone else. That’s all in the natural level. Second one, lack of benevolence. This is a lack of good will. If we are not seeking the good for our spouse, if we’re not willing to suffer to bring that good about, we are going to be compromised in our capacity for empathetic connection. That can be expressed through this conditionality. I’ll work on empathetically understanding my wife as long as my wife does X and Y. Or if the wife says, I’ll start trying again if my husband stops behavior Z, whatever he’s doing, that’s like being really disruptive to the marriage. That’s not what the vows say. There is nothing conditional about the vows. The vows are not reciprocal. They are not about, you scratch my back, I’ll scratch your back. You carry out your end of the deal.

[00:17:16] I’ll carry out my end of the deal. They’re not a contract like that. It is a solemn vow to love, honor, and cherish our spouses. Right. But so many times we neglect that. Brings up that underappreciated philosopher from the late 1990s, early 2000s, some of you may remember him. Jack Handey, he had this great quote, “Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you’ll be a mile away and you’ll have their shoes.” That was an old Saturday Night Live thing. We often are like that. We want to criticize. We want to focus on the negative aspects of our spouses. A third thing that gets in the way. So the first thing, a lack of interior integration. Second thing, a lack of benevolence. The third thing is a lack of consistency. Lots of times husbands and wives give up on each other. They say, you know, my spouse is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. You know, kind of the sense, I just can’t understand my spouse, with kudos to Winston Churchill, who originally quoted that about Russia in 1939. We don’t understand our spouses, or we are swept up in our own dysregulation because our own integration is not going very well. We get swept away by the intensity of our passions, or we get sucked into our own concupiscence, and we don’t stay with consistent efforts to empathetically connect with our spouses.

[00:18:58] That’s the third thing. The fourth thing is we’re not good at it, so we don’t want to do it, right. To be empathetically connected is really complex. It’s demanding. It’s a hard road. This is so much of what I do as a clinical psychologist. This is so much of what I’ve been practicing for 20 years. It is difficult, this empathetic connection, this empathetic understanding, these five types of empathy. We don’t like to be faced with our limitations. We have parts that very much want to feel competent, parts that want to know that we did a good job. You know, I was sucked into playing FreeCell earlier this month on the computer. That’s a solitaire game. You know, I was really good at it. I got very fast. It was very clear when I did a good job. You can move up, you get, you know, cheering from the sound effects and all of that. I was really good at it. You can see it. My wife likes to solve Sudoku puzzles. When Pam does that, it’s very clear when she gets the right answer. And there’s a sense of satisfaction with that. You know, it’s hard to engage in these deeper, much more important issues because oftentimes there’s not clear markers if we’re doing it well or not. And so there’s parts of us that really don’t like that. So we don’t practice. But it takes deliberate practice. It takes time that we deliberately set aside in order to understand our spouses more deeply, in order to connect with them empathetically.

[00:20:25] It’s not going to happen just by chance. So the fifth thing, the fifth general reason why we have trouble with empathy is we have parts that don’t want to give up illusions about our spouses. These idealizations. I have my spouse on a pedestal. She was supposed to care for me. She’s supposed to love me. She’s supposed to complete me. She’s supposed to meet my needs, rescue me, redeem me, prove that I’m lovable, whatever my underlying needs, whatever my hopes and dreams were, all that can come crashing down, because your spouse is a human being in a fallen world who is wounded in many ways psychologically, because of the effects of original sin, the sins of others, and our own personal sins. There’s going to be problems in her human formation. There are going to be problems in a husband’s human formation. This is not going to be like a Hallmark movie. We’re dealing with real, gritty, difficult, human, messy relationships here. And the more important something is, the less precise it is, the less tidy it’s going to be. So those are the general reasons why we lack different kinds of empathy. But now let’s go through the five different types of empathy and talk about the specific impediments to each one that Catholic spouses have. Within each of these five kinds of empathy, there’s going to be two categories.

[00:21:52] One category is I can’t empathize, and the other category is I won’t empathize. Now let’s talk about I can’t. Sometimes there are real physical limitations to the capacity for empathetic attunement. For example, there may be a brain injury, there may be dementia. There’s possibly some conditions like, for example, on the autistic spectrum, that can interfere with recognizing others needs, right? These are biological. They’re really not psychological. It’s different than a wife who says, my husband can’t understand me because he’s a narcissist. Well, he may very well have parts that are narcissistic. Most of us do. Those parts may be dominant almost all the time, but that’s not all of your husband. So that’s different. That gets into sort of the dynamism of ability, right? Sometimes we can’t empathize in a moment because we’re dysregulated. I’m in fight or flight mode. I’m in a freeze mode. I’m too angry. I’m all blended with my parts. I’m carried away by my passions. But that’s not how I always am. This other part of it is I won’t. And that’s also dynamic. Sometimes it means I won’t right now, but I might reconsider, right? Like the son who initially said, I won’t go out into the vineyard and work, but later on decides to go. So that willingness can also be very dynamic. And we want to recognize that that dynamism exists within us. We’re not just in a static state.

[00:23:32] Another thing that can happen is that we have these misattributions. Our Lord said, remove the beam from your own eyes so you can see clearly to remove the speck in your brother’s eye. When we’re not integrated, when we don’t know ourselves very well, there is very likely going to be misattributions. There’s going to be confusion about what is my dynamic and what is my spouse’s dynamic. And so this idea of, you know, pointing, you know, we point a finger at somebody, we’ve got three fingers pointing back at us. The very things that we’re most critical of in other people are the very same things that we won’t tolerate existing within us, that we don’t accept about ourselves. And we’re likely to push those into the unconscious. Our manager parts are likely to exile that with parts of us that don’t get to see the light of day very often. One of the ways you can measure this is through how much does a person externalize responsibility for the conflict in the marriage? Is it all the spouse’s fault, right? That degree of externalization is very diagnostic. A lot of times spouses will agree about that. One spouse is an externalizer and the other spouse is an internalizer. And there’s a kind of pseudo-homeostasis, a kind of quasi-stability that happens with that. But it’s not stable because it’s not grounded in actually what’s going on. Usually there’s contributions from both spouses in good measure when there is conflict.

[00:25:02] All right. Other things why we lack emotional resonance, why we lack attunement, why we lack this first kind of empathy. Distractions, busyness, but also this activation of my own experience in my parts. This happens when my manager parts won’t accept or embrace in my spouse what I reject in myself. That’s because I’m afraid of those unacceptable things within me. These could be emotions like anger or disappointment or despair. They could be desires. They could be attitudes, intentions, impulses that leads to this kind of self-absorption. I’m not in a place where I can really enter into your world, because I am not well regulated inside, because I lack that integration. And that is driven by fear. What is in my spouse can be very, very upsetting to me. Let me give examples of the kinds of things that Catholic spouses fear finding in each other. The first one is disappointment in the spouse. Part of my spouse may have had high hopes that I will meet her needs, her daddy needs, her mommy needs, her God needs, her security needs, her mission and purpose and meaning needs, all kinds of attachment needs, all kinds of integrity needs. We discussed all those needs in great detail in episode 62. Understanding those needs is one of the legs of the marriage bed, right? It’s one of those things that that commitment and the rest of the bed is supported on, and those needs are often really unrealistic.

[00:26:30] They are not the kinds of needs that a spouse can actually meet. And so the demands from these parts are actually impossible and unrealistic. That can activate parts of me that want to please, that want to make everything all right. And I just feel this deep sense of failure, the shame, this helplessness, this disappointment in myself. Because, you know what? I’m not meeting my spouse’s needs. We don’t want to see how disappointed our spouses are in us sometimes, so we don’t want to go there. Second thing we fear is despair, right? If I’m entering into my spouse’s world and part of her is despairing, what do I do? I don’t want to be married to someone who is despairing. And I might lose track that that’s only a part of her. It’s really critical. It often doesn’t seem like a part, because sometimes a part just takes over an entire person’s system and just runs it, right, drives the bus so that everything looks like that. There doesn’t seem to be any internal conflict or ambivalence about it, because that part has such firm control in that moment, but it’s still only a part. That part is really working hard not to let any other parts of the person have their say, any other opinions to be expressed, any other ways of feeling to be expressed. That one part is pushing its agenda. It’s driving for its mission. And that’s not the whole story.

[00:27:52] The third, and this is really common. This is one of those things that’s really hard. And that is when there’s rage or hatred toward me. Many, many Catholic spouses have parts that hate the other spouse. I’m going to say that again because it’s really important. Many, many Catholic spouses have parts that hate the other spouse. Husbands have parts that hate their wives. Wives have parts that hate their husbands. Again, this is located only in a part, only in a portion of the person. It’s not the entire person. There’s the entire emotional experience, the entire relational experience of the spouse is much broader than just the hatred. But when that hatred is concentrated in the part, and when it begins to come up, it can be very frightening for a spouse. These parts that hate the spouse are often buried by protector parts. And when that happens, they’re very prone to act out in passive aggressive ways, or sometimes they explode intermittently. Divorcing spouses, for example, often really do hate each other, and that can be increased when there’s this enmeshment or codependency that keeps the pressure on because there’s this enmeshment or this need for each other, but there’s no way to resolve the negative feelings, the irritability, the annoyances that come up in married life. There’s also a fear of overwhelm. Remember how I talked about emotional contagion, right, back in the definition. I don’t want to be sucked into my wife’s intense experience.

[00:29:32] I don’t want to be drawn into my husband’s anger and rage because I don’t want to be like that. I hate that. So there’s this fear of being overwhelmed by whatever my spouse’s intensity activates in me. There’s also a fear of a counter reaction, right? If I start to resonate, if I start to really feel what my spouse is feeling, I may have other parts that rush in and blend with me in order to overcome that. And then there might be this polarization that happens between the spouses and arguments break out, and there’s all kinds of conflict. Some of that can be protective of the marriage because I don’t want to fight with my spouse anymore. Some of that can be protective of the children, again, in the short run. Let’s dampen this down. Let’s calm it down. I know we’re not resolving it, but let’s at least not have open warfare break out. And in the short run, that actually can be adaptive, right? We don’t want there to be open warfare between husbands and wives in front of the kids. But if the underlying issues are not being addressed in a more helpful way, in a more enduring way, that’s not going to be a long-term solution. So there can be this unspoken, unthought agreement “not to go there.” But the question again is, will we ever go there? Will we ever go there in a way that allows us to work through this stuff without it being so flammable? What gets in the way of perspective taking? Now remember, that’s the second type of empathy.

[00:31:01] Perspective taking is the capacity to enter into your spouse’s internal world with your own mind, to consider your spouse’s experience. Well, what gets in the way of that? Well, we have our own needs. If we have parts that carry needs that are not taken care of, if we have parts that are starving, for example, it’s going to be very difficult for us to be able to provide for our spouse’s needs. I call that the starving waiter syndrome. It’s very hard for a waiter who is starving to be joyful and pleasant and serve other people food. Right. This is that leg of the bed that deals with those attachment and integrity needs. If that’s missing, if it’s short, if it’s otherwise compromised, that leads to instability in the whole marriage system. Also, that has to do with our human formation. That’s two other legs, the wife’s human formation and the husband’s human formation. Also, our defenses and coping strategies can compromise our capacity to take perspective. For example, we might have strong transferences. We might be reacting to our spouse the same way we did to our mother or to some other important figure in our life. Our old issues can be revivified. Then that begins to take us out of a place of natural recollection and require us to focus inward again in self-absorption.

[00:32:17] So again, we abandon the effort to understand what’s going on in our spouse. We retreat back within our own walls. So the third kind is cognitive empathy. Now what does the experience mean for the person? What’s their meaning making? How are they construing their experience? Well, a lot of times we don’t construe our own experience very well or very accurately. So it’s very hard to do that for somebody else. You can’t give what you don’t have. And so again, that becomes a human formation issue. And sometimes we don’t know because we don’t take the time, we don’t explore, we don’t seek. We feel like if we can’t figure it out right away, we’re inadequate. We just don’t know how to do this relationship thing. Let’s just sort of continue on with the old coping ways that we’ve cobbled together through the years. Let’s just keep the status quo going, can be sort of the attitude between spouses. Well, what about compassion? What gets in the way of Catholic spouses living out compassion, right? This is where you want to reduce the other person’s suffering, but for charitable reasons. Not just because the spouse’s suffering happens to be uncomfortable to you, and you want it to go away because of what it’s stirring up within you. One of the big obstacles here for Catholic spouses is how they construe suffering. Can suffering be redemptive? Can you willingly share your spouse’s cross if he or she lets you? So many people, including Catholics, really operate from a de facto hedonistic position.

[00:33:49] Hedonism is a philosophical system in which you try to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. So many times we fall into that, again because of our concupiscence, because of the influence of the world around us. We move to that kind of position. We don’t embrace our cross. Fr. Justin Wang has this laid out in a mathematical formula. I just kind of, I love this, right? He says, “Our capacity to suffer = our capacity to love = our capacity for joy.” Right? Again, it doesn’t mean that we necessarily always have to be suffering. That’s not what it says. It doesn’t say our suffering equals our love equals our joy. It’s our capacity to suffer. We’re not always called upon to suffer in our relationships with our spouses. Sometimes we are, sometimes we’re not. It depends on the situation. So many people, though, they have a knee jerk response to suffering. Suffering, bad. Suffering equals I’m in trouble. Suffering equals this is not good. Instead of our capacity for suffering equaling our capacity to love. The fifth kind of empathy, empathetic joy. Now, just a little word picture here. You know Eeyore in Winnie the Pooh? You know how down he is, how melancholic? He makes some really pathetic efforts to be joyful for other people. But you can tell they don’t flow from the fullness of his being.

[00:35:21] They sound very incomplete. They sound hollow. And so Eeyore’s attempts to be joyful for others fall flat. Why? Because he’s not experiencing that within himself. This goes back to our own human formation. This goes back to our own spiritual formation. This goes back to our own childlike trust, our own absolute confidence in the love of God. You are not going to get that primarily from your marriage, folks. There are way too many high expectations for what the spouse should be able to provide us in terms of that sense of security and well-being. I can’t say that enough. We want to remember that when we go into a marriage, it is because we are to make a gift of ourselves, not because we’re supposed to receive something from the other person. That’s not the right perspective. And so few spouses really grip on to that in an experiential way, day in, day out, in a consistent way. We need to be actively working on ourselves, and there are ways to do that. Well, what happens when we bring all of this into the sexual arena, when we bring all of this into the sexual intimacy between Catholic spouses? Well, what happens when there’s not emotional resonance or attunement, the first kind of empathy? There’s not a resonating. I don’t know how many times I’ve been told by spouses, “My spouse has no idea what sex is like for me.” No idea. Now, I’m not there. I don’t know.

[00:36:48] I don’t understand what’s exactly going on with the spouse, but I hear that over and over and over again. And it’s believable to me, because a lot of times sex is a very self-absorbed activity. People are looking for sex to get their own needs met, not because they’re giving a gift of themselves, body, soul, mind, and heart, to the other person. And so many times, Catholic couples are not talking about their sexual intimacy. It’s like you don’t go there. It’s verboten. Right. You don’t talk about it. It’s embarrassing. It brings up too much shame. And so they’re busy enacting things because they’re not talking about them. They’re busy enacting all kinds of things, all kinds of disappointment, all kinds of hostility, all kinds of withdrawal, all kinds of things that are being played out behaviorally, because these things are not being put into words, they’re not being shared. What about perspective taking? Putting myself in the other person’s shoes. Again, concupiscence. Sex can be very selfish. I want an experience for me. I want my needs met. This gets away from our vow to love and cherish and honor and care for our spouses. Cognitive empathy, so many times we don’t think about what sex might mean for the other person, because sometimes it’s super important to one of the spouses, right. To start messing with, this may mean that all kinds of conflict comes up. That may mean that we have to interact in a very different way.

[00:38:10] It may mean that we have to change our model, and that may mean that there might not be sex, at least for a period of time. Sometimes this becomes very difficult when couples are postpartum, for example, and there are medical reasons or physical reasons why the sexual union is contraindicated, right? We come up against that sometimes, like, oh, no. This is an opportunity to work through some things. But oftentimes people are put their heads down and sort of gut it out rather than see it as an opportunity. Compassion, right, this empathetic concern. Are we willing to make sacrifices for each other in the Catholic sacramental marriage bed? That’s not going to happen if we’re blended with a part that needs something from sex, that needs something from sex to be my way to meet my needs. I know of couples where husbands have demanded sex twice a day, every day, regardless of what the wife wanted or needed. That’s really not not attuned. That’s really not attuned. There’s some kind of pressure driving that need, and it’s not going to be met through the sexual intimacy. It’s something else, I would assume. What about empathetic joy? Is there a joy in the mutual giving of the spouses? You know, there are spouses for whom the sexual relating is joyful, where it is really about both of them giving to each other. But you know what? I think that’s relatively rare.

[00:39:49] I think there’s a lot of sex out there that’s fairly mediocre, to be honest with you. It may not be abusive or exploitative, but it’s not really well-connected. And I think, again, that goes back to human formation. It goes back to the deficits in our interior integration. So what are the solutions? How do we make this whole situation better? Now, first of all, let’s look at our motives, right? If your motive is to have better sex, right, in order to have more physical pleasure and less fighting with the spouses, well, that’s back to hedonism, right? Increasing your pleasure and reducing your pain. We want to be doing this out of love. So let’s really be working first on purifying our motives. So look at the five types of empathy for your own parts, in your own inner world first. Flight attendants always say that in the unlikely event of cabin depressurization, oxygen masks will drop from the overhead compartments. Secure your own mask first before attempting to help others. We need to actually focus on our own stuff, right, lest we start attributing our own stuff to other people, and seeing the reflection of the beam in our own eye, in the speck in our brother’s eye. Can I accept all of what’s within me, all of the deficits in my human formation. Am I checking in with my parts? Am I doing my daily work in human formation? If you get to know your parts, you can begin to ask them, what percentage of this reaction to my spouse is really about my spouse and how much of it is about me?

[00:41:26] And if you’re in touch with different parts, you’re going to get answers to those questions. You’ll get to figure out how much of it is your old stuff that’s never been adequately resolved. What are my parts’ attitudes about sex? Where do those attitudes within me come from? What sexual experiences have I not resolved? There’s often a lot of unresolved baggage from previous sexual experiences that it gets brought into marriages. So action item number one, to create time for you to go inside, for you to work with your parts, time for your own human formation, for your own interior integration, time every day. Again, we’re relying on God to meet these needs, right? Our spouses are always going to fail us in important ways. God allows that to happen so that we don’t make gods and goddesses of our spouses, so that we rely on him. So we want to ask the question within that. Where are the real gaps in my empathy for my spouse? Which of those five kinds of empathy do I struggle with and why? Again, five minutes each day to consider and make notes about your spouse and about your spouse’s parts and common modes of operating. Right? So you do this for yourself first. We’re going to be working on ourselves first. But then we’re going to be thinking about what’s going on with my spouse.

[00:42:49] What’s happening? Can I enter into my spouse’s internal world? Can I work on perspective taking? Can I work on cognitive empathy? Can I work on compassion? What’s getting in the way of those things? Five minutes a day to do that? How much time do you spend on Netflix? How much time do you spend on video games, on TV, on shopping, on social media and surfing the web, on YouTube videos? Solitaire for me, right. FreeCell, right, my issue from earlier this month. What can we give up in order to do just that five minutes? So that’s action item number two. Action item number one, time to go inside and recognize what’s going on within your own system around empathy. What parts are you not empathetic with inside yourself? Second area, what’s going on in your wife or husband’s internal world, right? Or, you know, this again applies to everybody, or it could be another person that you want to try to love better. What are they struggling with? Making a deliberate effort, because seek and ye shall find. We have that on the divine authority of our Lord Jesus Christ. So not a bad thing to spend five minutes a day on that. Third is to talk with your spouse, to open the conversation. And you know what? It’s probably going to be awkward. Yeah. You know, you’re probably not going to find all the right words.

[00:44:09] Probably not going to be really smooth and polished when you start to do this. The more important something is, the less precise we’re going to be about it. So don’t start with sex if that’s a really emotionally and relationally fraught issue, right? Start with something easier. Build up to it. Again, regular time with your spouse. A lot of couples don’t even spend ten minutes a day in deep and meaningful communication, right? If you’re having a hard time with that, if that just seems like it’s more than you can do, bring in another person to help, right? That may be to help you in individual therapy. It might be someone that can help you, a therapist that can help you in marital therapy. We’ve got A Catholic’s Guide to Choosing a Therapist as a free video course on Souls and hearts at soulsandhearts.com. You can go there. All the ins and outs of finding a therapist. If you feel like you need somebody to help you with that. You may also work with a relationships coach or with a pastor or somebody else that’s trusted that you feel like can be helpful to you. But eventually you want to get to that conversation with our spouses about sex. It often can be done. Sometimes a spouse is just dug in. They’re not going to talk about it ever. All right, well, then there may be some real preparatory work that we have to do around praying for them and offering up sacrifices for them.

[00:45:30] So the fourth thing, human formation. Get on the waiting list for the Resilient Catholics Community, soulsandhearts.com/rcc, soulsandhearts.com/rcc. The waiting list. We are opening up the community to new members on June 1st. The community will be open from June 1st to June 30th. After that, we’re going to close it again until December. We only bring in new members in June and December. And that community is full of people who really love this podcast, who are committed to transformation, who are committed to their human formation. We are together as Catholics on this pilgrimage, on this mission to be transformed on a human level, to shore up the natural foundations, so that we can really enter into an intimate, personal relationship with Jesus Christ, our brother, the Holy Spirit who is Love himself, and our spiritual parents, God our Father and Mother Mary. We also do this so that we can love our neighbor, especially our spouses. So, as I said, the community is reopening on June 1st. I am assembling our Initial Measures Kit. This is a collection of instruments, of measures, that our members take, so that we can give personalized attention, so that we can create your own personal human formation plan. We’ve got a workbook with exercises. We’ve got our premium podcasts that come out weekly.

[00:46:49] We’ve got our personal human connections. Everybody that’s going to be in the RCC is going to have a companion. We have not implemented this yet, but it’s in the works. That’s going to be happening, where each person in the RCC has another member of the RCC, their companion. Those companions check in with each other daily. Then there’s also a weekly small group meeting. That’s a meeting with your company. There are all these companions in companies that are on this pilgrimage towards human formation in the RCC. It’s not therapy in the RCC. It’s not counseling, but it’s a great addition. We’re asking for about 20 to 25 minutes per day of your time where we can really structure in a personal way what you need for human formation, because admittedly, it can be very difficult to do it on your own. It’s $99 a month. There are many more details at soulsandhearts.com/rcc. And if you are in the RCC right now, I want to remind you, we have our second Wednesday Zoom meetings on May 12th. That’s from 730 to 8:45 p.m. Eastern Time. We will be continuing to discuss human formation and sexuality in relationships in that. Our experiential exercise is coming out tomorrow, and that’s the premium podcast for RCC members. We’re going to be talking about my history with empathy. For those of you Catholic therapists that are in the Interior Therapist Community, we’ve got an experiential exercise for you about empathy with your clients.

[00:48:21] What are my growing edges? That’s going to be an exercise for you therapists to find out what kinds of issues are going on with you empathizing appropriately with your clients. Also, I want to be in touch with you, my listeners. So I have set up conversation hours for you. You can reach me on my cell phone, (317) 567-9594, Wednesday, April 29th from 515 to 6:15 p.m. Eastern Time. I’m going to be there, by the phone, waiting for your call. Feel free to call me. (317) 567-9594. Also, starting on May 4th, on all Tuesdays and Thursdays from 4:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. Eastern time, again, I’m going to be on my phone. I will call you back if I happen to be on the call with somebody else. Know that I do want to communicate. I do want to talk with you. We’re finding ways to make that happen. So with that, it has been a pleasure to be with you. Thank you for being here with me. I really encourage you to pray for me and to pray for the listeners of this podcast, to pray for the Resilient Catholic Community, to pray for our therapists in the Interior Therapist Community that are learning how to do this kind of therapy from an IFS-informed perspective. And I also want you to seriously consider whether either of these communities might be a good fit for you. And with that, let’s invoke our patroness and our patron. Our Lady, our Mother, Untier of Knots, pray for us. Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.