IIC 90: Your Well-Being: The Secular Experts Speak

Join us as we review how philosophers and modern secular psychologists understand mental health and well-being. In this episode, we look at the attempts to define what makes us happy, from the 4th century BC to the present day. We cover the thinking of Aristippus, Aristotle, Descartes, Freud, Seligman, Porges, Schwartz, and two diagnostic systems. We take a special look at how positive psychology and Internal Family Systems see well-being.

[00:00:00] In June of 1991, I was really down and out – I was traumatized. I was 22 years old, I had just left a spiritually and psychologically abusive group, I was struggling. I was wondering, ‘how could this have happened to me?’ I thought I was giving my life to God in this Catholic group. And then I found out that the community I was in was like this. I had to confront also my own behaviors in the community – manipulation, deception, betrayals of trust, things like that. I knew I had to recover. And so I went on a quest. I was still Catholic – I never lost my faith throughout all of this, by the grace of God, but I felt really burned by the Catholic Church and by her representatives. I wanted to learn everything I could about social influence, about group dynamics, about psychological manipulation, in part so that what happened before would never happen again, and also to tap into wisdom that I didn’t have access to in my very sheltered community. In short, I was on a quest to find out the best of what secular psychology had to offer. In those days, I still would have gone to a Catholic graduate program in clinical psychology if one existed, but that was long before the Institute for Psychological Sciences, that was long before Divine Mercy University – there wasn’t really anything available. So off I went to graduate school, looking for answers. And today I want to give you what I wish I would have found – what wasn’t available by and large, in 1991, when I was looking, but what has developed over the last 30 years. I want to share with you the best of what secular psychology has to offer in terms of human well-being, in terms of mental health.

[00:02:24] Now the question may arise – one of you might ask me, “Why, Dr. Peter, since you are a Catholic psychologist, why are you even looking at these secular sources? Why even bother with them? Don’t we have everything we need in Scripture and the traditions of the Church and the writings of the Church fathers and the saints in magisterial teaching? I thought this was a Catholic podcast here.” Well, let me ask you a question in return. Let’s say that you’re experiencing serious physical symptoms – something is wrong medically. You have intense abdominal pain right around your navel, your belly is starting to swell, you have a low grade fever, you’ve lost your appetite, you’re nauseous and you have diarrhea. How would I react if I were to say to you, “Well, why are you consulting secular medical experts? What need have you of a doctor and a hospital? Don’t you have everything you need in Scripture and the traditions of the Church and the writings of the Church fathers and the saints and in magisterial teaching?” If I responded to you like that, you might think I’m a crackpot, or that I still believe in faith healing alone, or that I just don’t get what you’re experiencing. Those are the symptoms of an appendicitis, and that infected appendix could burst 48 to 72 hours after your first symptoms. If that happens, bacteria spread infection throughout your abdomen, that’s potentially life-threatening. You need surgery to remove that appendix and clean out your abdomen.

[00:03:53] Now, remember, we are embodied beings – we are composites of a soul and a body. The famous 17th century philosopher René Descartes gave us a lot of great things, including analytic geometry, but he was wrong about splitting the body from the mind in his dualistic philosophy. Descartes’ mind-body dualism – the idea that the body and the mind operate in separate spheres and that neither can be assimilated into the other’s, which has been so influential in our modern era is wrong. Over the last several years, we’ve been realizing just how much of our mental life and our psychological well-being is linked in various ways to our neurobiology – the ways that our nervous systems function, and the relationship between our embodied brain and our mind is reciprocal; each affects the others in complex ways that we are just beginning to understand. In other words, brain chemistry affects our emotional states, and our emotional states and our behaviors affect our brain chemistry. It’s not just our minds, and it’s not just our bodies, and it’s not just our souls as though they were in isolation – it’s all of those who make me who I am – body, mind, spirit, soul, all of it!

[00:05:18] And since Scripture and the early Church fathers and the Catechism and so on are silent on neurobiology, neurochemistry, neurophysiology, and so many other areas that impact our minds and our well-being, as a Catholic psychologist, I am going to look elsewhere. I’m going to look into secular sources for how to help my clients, how to help myself, how to help others. I just don’t think it’s reasonable to expect that the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops or the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in the Vatican is going to be experts in these areas – it’s not their calling to be neurobiologists or neurochemists. I just don’t think anyone is going to find an effective treatment for bulimia by consulting the writings of the early church fathers or in St Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica. That’s just unreasonable. And it’s just as unreasonable, in my opinion, to ignore the body and just try to work with the mind when we’re pursuing psychological well-being, when we’re pursuing mental health.

[00:06:25] I also believe that God works through non-Catholics in many ways. Many non-Catholic researchers and clinicians and theorists are using the light of natural reason to discover important realities that help us understand our well-being. And they are inspired to seek what can be known with good motivations – they have good hearts, they have sharp minds to help and love others. I am a Catholic with an uppercase C – a big C, and I’m also a Catholic with a lowercase C – a little C, a Catholic with a little C. And according to my Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus Third Edition, which I rely on for word finding – this is a wonderful book; I use it for every podcast episode. According to my Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus, the synonyms for Catholic with a small C include the following terms: universal, diverse, broad-based, eclectic, comprehensive, all-encompassing, all-embracing and all-inclusive. That’s what Catholic with a small C means. So I’m Catholic with a big C, I’m also Catholic with a small C.

[00:07:38] And one final point about why I look to secular sources. The Church herself encourages me to look to all branches of knowledge and glean what is best from them. This is from the Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 159, “Though faith is above reason, there can never be any real discrepancy between faith and reason. Since the same God who reveals mysteries and infuses faith has bestowed the light of reason on the human mind, God cannot deny himself, nor can truth ever contradict truth. Consequently, methodical research in all branches of knowledge, provided that it’s carried out in a truly scientific manner and does not override moral laws, can never conflict with the faith, because the things of the world and the things of the faith derive from the same God. The humble and persevering investigator of the secrets of nature is being led, as it were, by the hand of God in spite of himself, for it is God, the conserver of all things, who made them what they are.” And even more to the point, we have this quote from the Vatican II document, the Pastoral Constitution of the Church in the modern world, paragraph 62, which reads as follows, “In pastoral care, sufficient use must be made not only of the theological principles, but also of the findings of the secular sciences, especially of psychology and sociology, so that the faithful may be brought to a more adequate and mature life of faith.” Alright, so we are called to use these other resources.

[00:09:17] And finally, I will say that considering the whole person – soul, spirit, mind, and body; when you consider all of the person, it is so much more helpful in the process of recovery than just splitting off the mind and working with it alone, or just trying to work with the mind and the soul, but not the body. So there are pragmatic considerations – there are practical aspects to this. I like to practice psychology in ways that actually work. The fruit that comes from considering the body and working with the body in psychotherapy, not just the mind, but the mind and the body and the soul, all of it together – that’s just so much better. So we want to work in an integrative way, and that’s what this podcast is about, Interior Integration for Catholics – that’s this podcast. This is episode 90, it’s released on March 7, 2022, and this episode is titled Your Well-Being – The Secular Experts Speak. I am clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski, your host and companion today. I’m also the president and co-founder of Souls and Hearts at soulsandhearts.com. Our mission at Souls and Hearts is to bring the best of psychology and human formation, grounded in a Catholic understanding of the human person to help wounded Catholics rise above our psychological issues, our human formation problems, those kinds of things that hold us back from embracing the love from Jesus, from the Holy Spirit, from God our Father, and from Mary our mother. And also to overcome those things that keep us from loving them back with our whole soul, with our whole hearts, with all our parts, with every fiber of our being.

[00:11:07] So let’s get on with it. Let’s get into what do the secular experts say about mental health, about psychological well-being. Let’s dive into it. And the natural place to start would be the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 5 – it’s about to come out with a text revision in a couple of months, we call it the DSM-5 for short. And this quote is from the American Psychiatric Association, which publishes the DSM-5. I want you to listen to how important this book is, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is the handbook used by health care professionals in the United States and much of the world as the authoritative guide to the diagnosis of mental disorders. DSM contains description, symptoms and other criteria for diagnosing mental disorders. It provides a common language for clinicians to communicate about their patients and establishes consistent and reliable diagnoses that can be used in the research of mental disorders. It also provides a common language for researchers to study the criteria for future potential revisions and to aid in the development of medications and other interventions.” So you would think, given that glowing description of its prowess and its authority, you would think that the DSM would tell us what psychological well-being is. You would think it would tell us what mental health is, because it’s all focused on psychological disorders, mental health disorders, right? But if you thought that, you’d be wrong. Nowhere in the nearly 1000 pages of this tome is there a definition of mental health or is there a description of psychological well-being. You can’t find it in there. There’s no definition of mental health, no description of psychological well-being. You get a definition of mental disorder, and a couple of descriptions of what is not a mental disorder, but that’s as far as it goes. The closest it gets is this – this is a quote from page 20 of the DSM, “A mental disorder is a syndrome characterized by clinically significant disturbance in an individual’s cognition, emotional regulation or behavior that reflects a dysfunction in the psychological, biological or developmental processes underlying mental functioning. Mental disorders are usually associated with significant distress in social, occupational, or other important activities, and expectable or culturally approved response to a common stressor or loss, such as the death of a loved one is not a mental disorder. Socially deviant behavior, for example, political, religious, or sexual, and conflicts that are primarily between the individual and society are not mental disorders, unless the deviance or conflict results from a dysfunction in the individual as described above.” Okay. No definition of what optimal functioning is. No definition of happiness or well-being or psychological health. Nothing like that in there. And that’s a real problem. How are we supposed to know what a psychological disorder is when we don’t know what psychological health should entail? Now, a Canadian blogger, author, and a Christian pastor by the name of Tim Challies, published a blog called, ‘Counterfeit Detection,’ in which he describes how Canadian federal agents are trained to detect counterfeit bills. They first get familiar, very familiar with real money, real bills. Those Canadian federal agents follow what John MacArthur wrote in his book, Reckless Faith. “Federal agents don’t learn to spot counterfeit money by studying the counterfeits. They study genuine bills until they mastered the look of the real thing. Then when they see the bogus money, they recognize it.” Only when these federal agents are deeply familiar with the real thing, can they spot the forgeries. So I argue we need a standard. We need to know what well-being looks like, so that we can use that standard as a reference point for contrasting anything which is out of order in our psyches.

[00:15:39] Now, we’re not going to get that reference point from the DSM, so let’s turn to history. Let’s go back in time to the philosophers of ancient Greece who wrote about well-being and let’s start there. Let’s see if we can find out from our secular sources what the good life is. What psychological well-being is, what mental health is. So I’m going to start with hedonic well-being. And basically, hedonic well-being is all about feeling good. And Aristippus, a Greek philosopher from the fourth century BC, argued that the primary and ultimate goal in life should be to maximize pleasure. Aristippus was all about maximizing pleasure and English philosophers Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century and Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century who crossed into the 19th century, they also embraced hedonic well-being. Well, let’s get into what this is. You know how big I am into definitions here. So let’s define hedonic well-being. Well, according to Ryan and Deci, in their 2001 article ‘On Happiness and Human Potentials: A Review of Research on Hedonic and Eudaimonic Well-Being,’ in the Annual Review of Psychology, they say that hedonic well-being “focuses on happiness and defines well-being in terms of pleasure attainment and pain avoidance.” How much pleasure can I get, and how much pain can I avoid? – Hedonic well-being. Now, ‘hedonic well-being’ – the word ‘hedonic’ comes from hedonism – that’s derived from the Greek word ‘hedone’ for pleasure. And it refers to several related theories – these are philosophical theories about what’s good for us. So let’s get into a little bit more of a definition of the philosophy underlying this. So this is from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “The term hedonism from the Greek word ‘hedone’ for pleasure, refers to several related theories about what is good for us, how we should behave, and what motivates us to behave in the way that we do. All hedonistic theories identify pleasure and pain as the only important elements of whatever phenomena they are designed to describe.” Alright, so maximizing pleasure, minimizing pain – that’s the driving focus from hedonic psychologists. Now we go back to Ryan and Deci and they say, “the predominant view among hedonic psychologists is that well-being consists of subjective happiness and concerns the experience of pleasure versus displeasure broadly construed to include all judgments about the good/bad elements of life. Happiness is thus not reducible to physical hedonism, for it can be derived from the attainment of goals or valued outcomes in varied realms.” Alright, so that’s important – they modified it. Pure sensual hedonists, those that just go with their impulses about what might feel good in the moment don’t tend to last very long in society – they get killed in bar fights, they get locked up in prison. There is very little evidence that just going for whatever you feel at any given moment is going to work out for long time enjoyment. Even those that are committed to maximizing pleasure recognize that that there has to be some impulse control from time to time. So a summary statement about hedonic well-being – maximize the pleasure, minimize the pain. And that makes sense to us, right? We all have some innate attraction to pleasure and some innate avoidance of pain. So that was the first one: hedonic well-being.

[00:19:32] We’re going to talk about Eudaimonic well-being now. Eudaimonic well-being – that comes from the Greek eudaimonikos which means ‘conducive to happiness’, or from eudaimonia ‘happiness’. Eu – ‘good’, daimon – ‘guardian’; the guardian of happiness. Eudaimonic well-being: all about producing happiness. In contrast to hedonic wellbeing’s focus on pleasure, we have eudaimonic well-being and eudaimonic well-being focuses on meaning and purpose in life. And we trace eudaimonic well-being back to the fourth century, to Aristotle – a contemporary of Aristippus, our hedonic philosopher. Aristotle argued in Nichomachean Ethics that the best things are the ones that perform their function to the highest degree. Now my son, John Malinoski – he just completed his senior thesis at Wyoming Catholic College titled ‘Into the Jung-le: Exploring How Modern Psychological Methodology Relates to and Transforms the Classical Understanding of Man’s Psyche,’ so he was doing this interrogative work between Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics and the work of Carl Jung. He wrote this passage which precisely describes how Aristotle saw well-being, and he uses this illustration of a squirrel. Then he describes what well-being is for a human person. I thought this was a really descriptive, so I’m just going to read you this quote.

[00:21:07] “Aristotle begins his quest for the happy man with one of these endoxa: the generally held, plausible truth that the best things are the ones who perform their function to the highest degree. It seems self-evident that we would judge the worth of a squirrel based on how fast that squirrel can run, how high it can leap, or how much food it can find. In other words, the best squirrel is the one that best fulfills its squirrel nature. Correspondingly, the best man must be the man who excels at being a man; he performs the function of man to the highest degree. While man has many functions which he shares in common with plants and animals – life, growth, sensation, and so on – he has one particular ability which is unique to him: the ability to reason. Since this higher faculty distinguishes and elevates man above the lesser beings below him, Aristotle claims that it must be the most important aspect of his soul, the characteristic function of man: ‘We posit the work of a human being as a certain life, and this is an activity of soul and actions accompanied by reason.’ Since ‘each thing is brought to completion well in accord with the work proper to it,’ it follows that ‘the human good becomes an activity of the soul in accord with virtue, and if there are several virtues, then in accord with the best and most complete one.’ This is Aristotle’s brief summation of the human good, or happiness. “In short, the truly virtuous man has ordered his soul to the fullest extent: not only are all his actions ordered toward reason and the good, but all his inclinations point him toward these properly ordered actions as well.” Okay, so basically, Aristotle argues that the happy man, the blessed man, the good man, is the one who fulfills his function as a man, which is to reason. And Gale and colleagues in the 2009 article in Journal of Personality says, “The eudaimonic perspective of well-being – based on Aristotle’s view that true happiness comes from doing what is worth doing – focuses on meaning and self-realization, and defines well-being largely in terms of ways of thought and behavior that provide fulfillment.” So eudaimonic well-being associated with Aristotle has to do with completing or fulfilling our function, living out what we’re called to: our destiny.

[00:24:05] Now let’s fast forward 2300 years to Freud. We’re going to go from the 4th century BC with Aristippus and Aristotle, we’re going to come to the 20th century AD, actually late 19th century AD to Freud. Now, a lot of people believe that Freud was really a hedonist. You know, that’s in part because of his pleasure principle. In Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of personality, the pleasure principle is that driving impulse of the id, the id being the most basic and primitive part of the personality, the id driven by instincts, the id buried deep in the unconscious. The pleasure principle describes how the id seeks immediate gratification of all its needs, all its wants, all its urges, seeking with force to satiate hunger, quench thirst, discharge anger, and experience sexual pleasure. That’s what the id is all about, according to Freudian thought. So, a lot of people say, “Okay, Freud: obviously hedonist,” but he actually wasn’t. He actually focused on love and work. He summarized in one pithy statement what a healthy man or woman should be able to do well. He said, “Love and work…work and love, that’s all there is. Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.” That was from his book, Civilization and Its Discontents. I think that was published in 1895. There’s a third element, though, that you have to consider when we’re talking about Freud’s idea of well-being, and that includes play. Freud believed and he taught that play was important. Play is a creative activity, play is an adaptive activity, and play is also a therapeutic activity because play generates pleasure through the release of tension, according to Freud. So to summarize Freud’s position on happiness, it’s the ability to love, work and play. But Freud had limits to what he believed psychoanalysis could do. In his 1895 book Studies on Hysteria, which he coauthored with Josef Breuer. He said, “But you will see for yourself that much has been gained if we succeed in turning your hysterical misery into common unhappiness. With a mental life that has been restored to health, you will be better armed against that unhappiness.” You know, Freud never promised that his psychoanalytic method would remove ‘common unhappiness.’ He taught that psychoanalysis had its limits.

[00:26:51] Which leads us to fast forward 100 years to the late 1990s and the advent of positive psychology. Positive psychology is not satisfied by just accepting common unhappiness as inevitable. Positive psychology posits that we can do something about that common unhappiness – we can make it better. So positive psychology is more ambitious in its goals and promises than Freud ever was. So positive psychology – what is it? Well, this is from Petersen in 2008, “positive psychology is the scientific study of what makes life worth living.” And then a little further on, “positive psychology is a scientific approach to studying human thoughts, feelings, and behavior, with a focus on strengths instead of weaknesses, building the good in life instead of repairing the bad, and taking the lives of average people up to ‘great’ instead of focusing solely on moving those who are struggling up to ‘normal.’ So positive psychology reversed the visual field. It focuses on human functioning and flourishing, rather than on human functioning and pathology. Flourishing is really the focus of positive psychology – that’s a critical word in positive psychology circles: flourishing. And there’s a focus on human flourishing in three primary domains. The first is to flourish intrapersonally. Intrapersonally, which means within one’s own person – that means we’re flourishing within our own being: biologically, emotionally, cognitively, ‘what’s happening within me?” Intrapersonally – that’s the first one. The second one is flourishing interpersonally. Interpersonally means in relationship with somebody else – that’s relational, it means in our personal relationships between me and some other person – interpersonally. And then the third one is flourishing collectively, and that means flourishing in our culture, in our society, in our institutions. It means flourishing globally – that collective idea of flourishing. So flourishing is the key word, and the focus in positive psychology is on flourishing intrapersonally – within myself, interpersonally – in my relationships with others and collectively.

[00:29:37] Martin Seligman brought positive psychology to great popularity in the late 1990s. He became the president of the American Psychological Association in 1998, and he used it as a bully pulpit to promote his positive psychology. Martin Seligman, in his 2002 book called Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment, he details four different forms of what he calls ‘the good life.’ Four different forms, four different ways of living well, four different kinds of well-being. And I really have a lot of respect for positive psychology in this particular area. because they’re trying to define what the standard is. They’re trying to give us what the authentic dollar bill looks like, so that we have something to compare the counterfeits to – we have something to compare the ones that are disfigured or disformed to trying to give us that standard. So, four different ways of living well, four kinds of well-being, and these are 1) the pleasant life, 2) the good life, 3) the meaningful life, and 4) the full life. We’re going to go through each of these, starting with the pleasant life. The pleasant life, according to Martin Seligman, is a simple life. He says that it’s “a life that successfully pursues the positive emotions about the present, past and future.” He also elaborates that, “The pleasant life is wrapped up in the successful pursuit of the positive feelings, supplemented by the skills of amplifying those emotions.” Wow. Who does that sound like, right? This takes us – you guessed it – this takes us right back to the hedonic well-being we discussed earlier, as originally posited by Aristippus, our Greek philosopher from the fourth century BC. All about the pursuit of good feelings; it’s all about maximizing positive emotions – that is what this first way of living well – this first type of well-being, the pleasant life, that’s what that’s all about, according to Martin Seligman. But fortunately, that’s not the only one.

[00:32:08] So let’s talk about the next one: the good life. Now the good life, according to our positive psychology pioneer Martin Seligman, the good life means “to use your signature strengths to obtain abundant gratification in the main realms of one’s life.” So in this good life, you are able to use your particular talents, your unique skills, your special strengths, being true to your own character, being true to your values, your virtues; the sense of ‘authenticity’ is very important in the good life. So, you know, on the one hand, we have the pleasant life, which is all about positive emotions, but now we also have the good life in which you have abundant gratifications by you being you, by you doing you, by you being authentic through using your signature qualities in the world. Seligman argues that the good life is not a permanent state – we are not always going to be able to use our special talents and qualities in a way that’s gratifying to us – rather, the good life has to be a process of ongoing growth, a process of development. It’s all about continuing to grow. Alright, so we have the pleasant life and we have the good life. That was the first two.

[00:33:24] Let’s move on to the meaningful life – ooh, what’s the meaningful life, according to Martin Seligman? Well, Martin Seligman describes this meaningful life as “using your signature strengths and virtues in the service of something much larger than you are.” So in this way of living well in the meaningful life, you have a strong bond to “something larger than yourself.” So in this way of well-being, in this third way of well-being, it’s up to each individual to figure out what that “something larger than yourself” is going to be. So at this point, we’ve covered three of the four kinds of well-being. We have the pleasant life, which is all about maximizing your pleasant emotions; we have the good life, which is all about using your signature strengths and virtues to be gratified; we have the third form, the meaningful life, in which we use our signature strengths and virtues in the service of something larger than us. This level of well-being – the meaningful life – brings us back to Aristotle and his eudaimonic well-being, which focuses on pursuing meaning and purpose in life, which focuses on fulfilling our destiny. Alright, so you can see that Seligman is bringing in both the hedonic and the eudaimonic ways of looking at well-being.

[00:34:45] And that leaves us with a fourth way, the full life. Seligman describes the full life as follows, “Finally, a full life consists in experiencing positive emotions about the past and future, savoring positive feelings from pleasures, deriving abundant gratification from your signature strengths, and using these strengths in the service of something larger to obtain meaning.” Alright, so what’s added to the first three ways of well-being in this fourth way, in this full life, is this concept of service. We’re not just acknowledging that there’s some kind of connection or bond with something larger than ourself, but that we’re going to serve that something larger than ourself. Kind of reminds me of Bob Dylan’s 1979 song “Gotta Serve Somebody.” In the full life, a man uses his strengths and abilities in the most optimized way to serve something, or, I would argue someone, larger than himself. In the full life, a woman gets outside herself and brings her talents and virtues to serve the greater good. In a way that shines. The full life, according to Martin Seligman, reflects optimal human functioning. Seligman thus is very Aristotelian in how he argues that a person has the best experience of life, the greatest sense of well-being, when that person is functioning optimally, bringing all the particular talents, skills, strengths and virtues that he or she has to bear in the service of the greater good – of something larger than himself or herself. Alright, so those are the four different forms of well-being: the pleasant life, the good life, the meaningful life and the full life. And you’ll notice that the full life encapsulates all of them, bringing in that last element of voluntary service to the greater good or voluntary service to something larger than ourselves. Now, those of you that are thinking along Catholic lines might have already substituted God in there, right? That wasn’t lost on some of his colleagues – some of the criticisms of positive psychology have come from psychologists and others who think that there’s too much religion getting sort of built into this. So Martin Seligman has taken some flak about that. But it is open to to being reconciled in various ways with a Catholic understanding of the human person.

[00:37:36] I really appreciate positive psychology’s efforts to refocus psychology on wholeness and wellness, not to just focus on illness and disorder and weakness and problems, but to focus psychology on wholeness and wellness. And Lindsay Oades and Lara Mossman in chapter two of their book, Well-Being, Recovery, and Mental Health, give us an A to Z list of the positive aspects that positive psychology focuses on. And I just thought I’d run through this real quick with you. “Altruism, accomplishment, appreciation of beauty and excellence, authenticity, best possible selves, character strengths, coaching, compassion, courage, coping, creativity, curiosity, emotional intelligence, empathy, flow, forgiveness, goal setting, gratitude, grit, happiness, hope, humor, kindness, leadership, love, meaning, meditation, mindfulness, motivation, optimism, performance, perseverance, positive emotions, positive relationships, post-traumatic growth, psychological capital, purpose, resilience, savoring, self-efficacy, self-regulation, spirituality, the good life, virtues, wisdom and zest. A to Z. So, what are the goals again? What was Martin Seligman looking to do with positive psychology? To increase human strength, to make people more productive, to nurture the genius and foster greater human potential. Martin Seligman called for research on human strength, on human virtues, and he asks the question, how do human beings flourish at the individual level, the community level and the societal level? Very influenced, I would argue, by positive philosophy, very influenced by the enlightenment, so there can be some issues there, but there’s an emphasis within positive psychology to look at and to measure – to actually study what kind of interventions actually work. And so here are different interventions that have been found in empirical research to improve levels of happiness and well-being.

[00:39:54] So the first one: best possible self. Writing about yourself at your best, remembering yourself at your best. Second one: forgiveness. And I find this really interesting that forgiveness is included here. Robert Enright has done a lot of research in this area, there’s a focus on letting go of anger, resentment and bitterness to those who have caused me pain. And there’s kind of three things that forgiveness approaches tend to focus on. First of all, getting a more balanced view of the offender. Second, reducing negative feelings toward the offender and possibly increasing compassion toward the offender. And third, relinquishing the right to punish the offender or to demand restitution. So those things help people to actually have a deeper sense of well-being. Third thing: increasing gratitude. And they have very specific protocols for this, and that includes finding things to be thankful for in your life, reflecting on your blessings, expressing gratitude in a variety of ways. Gratitude – that’s the expression of appreciation for what I have, and research shows many positive psychological benefits accrue to those who are deliberately practicing gratitude. So the fourth one: fostering optimism. And this is fostering that tendency to anticipate favorable outcomes. This is the idea that things are going to work out, the glass is half full, and the idea is that optimism can be learned; it can be practiced; it can be developed, and that when it is practiced and developed, people feel better.

[00:41:31] The fifth one: cultivating mindfulness and the definition from Kabat-Zinn of mindfulness in this context is “the awareness that emerges through paying attention on purpose in the present moment and nonjudgmentally to the unfolding of experience moment by moment.” Other things have also been measured, right? Listening to uplifting music three to four times a day – that has been shown to improve a sense of well-being, and then of course, there’s positive psychotherapy. Another intervention shown to be effective for increasing well-being is savoring. And Smith and colleagues in 2014 write that “savoring can be past-focused (reminiscing about positive experience), present-focused (savoring the moment) or future-focused (anticipating positive experiences yet to come). And then the final one is self-compassionate writing. And this is really being gentle with yourself in your journal or in your diary. Okay, so we have this best possible self, working on forgiveness, increasing gratitude, fostering optimism, cultivating mindfulness, listening to uplifting music, going to positive psychotherapy, savoring, and self-compassionate writing.

[00:42:54] Now I’m going to bring up another diagnostic system. I’ve mentioned this one before – this is the psychodynamic diagnostic manual, and this is a diagnostic system based on psychodynamic thinking. And here’s a quote from the back cover, “Now completely revised (over 90% new), this is the authoritative diagnostic manual grounded in psychodynamic clinical models and theories. Explicitly oriented toward case formulation and treatment planning. PDM-2 offers practitioners an empirically based, clinically useful alternative or supplement to the DSM and ICD categorical diagnoses.” And on page three of the Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual Two, the PDM-2, we get this quote,  “A clinically useful classification of mental disorders must begin with a concept of healthy psychology. Mental health is more than simply the absence of symptoms. Just as healthy cardiac functioning cannot be defined as an absence of chest pain, healthy mental functioning is more than the absence of observable symptoms of psychopathology.” And there we’re getting back to our example of having a standard, because the PDM-2 is based on a theory of human functioning, it’s based on an understanding of the human person; it can go a lot further in describing what healthy psychology looks like than the DSM-5, which purports to be atheoretical. So how does the PDM-2 do this? Well, there are three major axes, three major dimensions that the PDM looks at, trying to understand how a person is doing. The first axis is personality organization, the second is mental functioning, and the third is symptom patterns.

[00:44:56] So personality organization, this is called the P axis. It asks the question, what level of personality organization does the person have? Are they organized in the psychotic range, the borderline range, the neurotic range or the healthy range? So this is sort of an overall classification about what kind of personality organization is there, how much developmental maturity is there in the personality? So that’s the first part of it. And the second part of it asks the question what personality style or what personality pattern does a person have? And so there are all these descriptors, right? There’s depressive personality styles, hypomanic personality styles, masochistic ones, dependent ones, anxious-avoidant ones, obsessive-compulsive ones, schizoid ones, somatizating ones, hysteric and histrionic ones, narcissistic ones, paranoid ones, psychopathic ones, sadistic ones, borderline ones. Basically, the PDM-2 argues you’ve got one of these styles. And you could be in the healthy range, so you’ve got this and it sort of characterizes the particular form of your defenses and your thinking and your emotional regulation and your understanding of self and how you connect with others and so forth. So there’s this idea that there’s the overall level of personality organization and then the particular personality style that you have. So that’s the P axis. On the M axis – that’s the axis of mental functioning – that’s the overall description of mental functioning. That’s the capacities involved in psychological health or psychological pathology. That axis really looks at the inner mental life of the person. And then the S axis is the symptom pattern’s axis, which looks at emotional states, cognitive processes, bodily experiences, relational patterns. It looks at the person’s personal experience of his or her difficulties. And that one corresponds more to like the standard DSM or ICD diagnostic systems.

[00:47:07] Now within the Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual Two, there is a psychodiagnostic chart by Robert Gordon and Robert Bornstein – it’s downloadable and it really does start to get us into some descriptors of what healthy personality function looks like. So remember, on that P axis, there are basically four major categories: psychotic, borderline, neurotic, and healthy. Then it also looks into what are the different personality styles – that’s less important right now. But if you are in the healthy range, what does that mean? What does the PDM-2 tell us that somebody who’s functioning well looks like? So here we have a major diagnostic system that’s going to tell us – ooh! – that’s going to tell us what it looks like to be healthy. Ooh, that’s good, that’s good. Alright, so let’s take a look. So somebody in the healthy range of personality organization, according to the PDM-2 on the psychodiagnostic chart, is able to understand himself or herself in complex, stable, and accurate ways to be able to maintain intimate, stable, and satisfying relationships. To use more healthy defenses and coping strategies, such as anticipation, self-assertion, sublimation, suppression, altruism and humor. To appreciate, if not necessarily conform to, conventional notions of what is realistic. The life problems of somebody in the healthy personality organization range rarely get out of hand, and there is enough flexibility to accommodate challenging realities. So that’s the P axis.

[00:48:50] Now, on the M axis – what does somebody that’s looking healthy look like? Well, in their cognitive processes, they have the capacity to regulate their thinking, and their attention, and their learning well. They also have the capacity to communicate thoughts to others. As far as their emotional processes, they’re able to experience the full range of emotions and to regulate their emotions well. They’re able to understand their own emotions and they’re able to communicate their emotions to another person. Within this third area, identity – which deals with the question ‘who am I?’ – they have a capacity for differentiation. They have a solid sense of being psychologically separate from others, not fused with them, not enmeshed, not codependent, and also not just distant – they can be in relationship. They can regulate their self-esteem and they are aware of their internal experience. And in the fourth dimension: relationships; they have the capacity for relationships, and more than that, they have the capacity for intimacy. And then in the fifth domain: defenses and coping; they have impulse control – they can regulate their impulses, they don’t have to just act them out. They’re able to use effective coping strategies, they can use humor instead of extreme denial, they can adapt, they can reflect on how they deal with specific stressors going on in life right now, and they have resilience. They have resilience as a trait.

[00:50:29] Now you can check out episodes 20-23 of this podcast, because I did a four part series on resilience that might be of interest to you if you want to get into resilience more. The American Psychological Association defines resilience as “the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats or significant sources of stress such as family and relationship problems, serious health problems, or workplace and financial stressors. Resilience means bouncing back from difficult experiences.” And, also under defenses and coping, they cite just strength – psychological strength. The sixth area is self-awareness. So somebody in the healthy range of functioning has self-observing capacities; they are mindful, they are self aware, and they can direct themselves. And the last one is the capacity to construct and use internal standards and ideals – this also implies that a person in the healthy range of functioning has a sense of meaning and purpose in life. Within the last axis, the S axis, that again, doesn’t give us a lot of useful information because it primarily lists the severity of different psychological symptoms. And as the PDM 2 stated, it’s not just the absence of symptoms that determines whether their psychological health or not, but that’s the one that’s sort of tosses a bone to the DSM and to the international classification system, the ICD. I think we’re on the ICD 11 right now. Alright, so that’s pretty much all I want to say about the PDM. I diagnosed according to the PDM for many, many years, finding it vastly superior to the DSM. But I don’t use it as much anymore, and we can talk a little bit about why later.

[00:52:24] Let’s go on to Polyvagal theory. Now, we spent the last episode, episode 89, titled “Your Body, Your Trauma: Protection vs. Connection.” We spent that whole episode discussing Stephen Porges’ Polyvagal theory, and we were really focusing on Deb Dana’s book, Polyvagal Exercises for Safety and Connection, and she has this quote in there that that goes like this, “the ventral vagal system truly powers the journey to well-being.” Now, remember, the ventral vagal system corresponds to the ventral branch of the vagal nerve – and the ventral vagal system serves the social engagement system – remember – that’s the relational connection system. The ventral vagal nerve dampens the body’s regularly active state, and the ventral vagal nerve allows activation of the autonomic nervous system in a nuanced way that offers a different quality than just sympathetic activation. And that’s how you can become excited and celebrate your favorite sports team scoring again against their rivals without becoming overwhelmed by a fight or flight response. You can be aroused, you can be excited, and it can be good, right? Instead of going into a fight or flight response – that’s ventral vagal. So what is it like to be in a ventral vagal state? The ventral vagal state in Polyvagal theory is the positive state. And again, it’s not just the absence of being in sympathetic hyperarousal – when you’re in fight or flight. It’s not just the absence of being in a dorsal vagal hyperarousal – shut down or freeze state. It’s more than just those two systems being downregulated. When the ventral vagal system is being activated, there’s all kinds of positive properties.

[00:54:16] Alright, so let’s start talking about what it’s like to be in a ventral vagal state, because Polyvagal theory is all about getting into that ventral vagal state. So what kind of physical responses do we have when we’re in a ventral vagal state? We have reduced heart rate, we have steady breathing, we have relaxed digestion, we have the capacity for rest and recuperation, we have a sense of vitality, we have blood circulation that goes all the way to our extremities, and we have reductions in stress. What about psychological responses to being in this ventral vagal state? We have a sense of calm, a sense of being safe, a sense of feeling grounded, a sense of joy and mindfulness and an ability to be very much in the present moment. That’s kind of a psychological sense of what it’s like to be in that ventral vagal state. Well, what about our relational responses? What’s that like when we’re in a ventral vagal state? Well, in a ventral vagal state, we have a desire for connection with others, we have a genuine interest in others, there’s openness and receptivity in our relationships, there’s an acceptance of and an embracing of vulnerability, there’s empathy and compassion for others. Oxytocin is released and that and that stimulates social bonding when we’re in that ventral vagal state. We have the ability to be related to and to connect to others without anxiety.

[00:55:48] So this ventral vagal state, it changes the way we look and sound to others. For example, the tone and rhythm of my voice is more inviting when I am in a ventral vagal state than when I am in one of these sympathetic hyperarousal states where I’m in fight or flight, or when I’m in a dorsal vagal shutdown state a freeze response. And if you remember the story, the narrative, that goes on when somebody is in a ventral vagal state is that, “hey, I’m in a good place. I can be loved, I can love others, I can connect with others. There’s good in the world. Life is so worth living. I want to share joy and peace and even sorrow and challenges with other people. I want to be connected. It is a good world. I’m glad to be here.” That’s the narrative of somebody who’s in a ventral vagal state. So polyvagal theory is going to focus specifically on the regulation of your nervous system and assessing your well-being. The more you can be in a ventral vagal state, whether you are resting or excited, the better. And they can actually measure this by looking at the reactivity, looking at the patterns of neural firing in your nervous system. So for those therapists who use Polyvagal theory, there’s a focus on resetting the autonomic nervous system, helping in a bodily way, helping a person to get back to a ventral vagal state. So just quickly, we’re going to contrast that to the sympathetic fight or flight response and the dorsal vagal shut down response.

[00:57:24] So what does it look like when we’re not in that state? And we go into this in more detail in the last podcast episode, episode 89, but I’m just going to review it now. So let’s go to fight or flight, right? In fight or flight, we’re all about survival now. Physical responses. The body is mobilized for action. We’re ready to run, we’re going to make efforts to escape, there’s hypervigilance, the body goes on high alert, pupils dilating, letting in more light. There’s very high levels of energy in this state. There’s an adrenaline rush. Muscles get tense, blood pressure rises, heart rate accelerates, adrenaline releases, extra oxygen is circulated to the vital organs, digestion decreases and immune response is suppressed. Psychological responses, emotional overwhelm, usually worry, moving on to anxiety to fear, and then to panic or frustration to irritation, to anger, to rage. We can become confrontational. We can become aggressive in our relationships. We’re scanning for threats, and our capacity for complex, flexible reasoning is very much reduced. It leads to confusion. There’s no sense of safety. You start missing the signs of safety and misreading signs of safety. What about the relational responses? How are we in relationship when we’re in this fight or flight state? Well, there’s a sense of separation. There’s isolation from others. We feel cut off. No sense of relational connection anymore. The connection is sacrificed in order to seek greater protection, we can become disconnected from the self. We become disconnected from others. We become disconnected from our culture, from the world. We can become disconnected spiritually. You can’t really even see others except through the lens of are they safe or are they dangerous, and if we don’t feel safe, there’s no way we can provide a sense of safety for others. And what’s the story that goes on in the mind of someone who is in this sense of sympathetic hyper arousal, this fight or flight response? Well, the story is “The world is unsafe. People are dangerous. The world is scary. Things are falling apart.” That is, in a nutshell, what it’s like to be in that fight or flight response, that sympathetic nervous system arousal.

[00:59:32] Alright, so when that mobilization doesn’t bring resolution to the distress, then the autonomic nervous system takes the final step, then it goes to the last resort – that’s the freeze response. And when there’s a deep sense that my life is threatened and that sympathetic activation doesn’t resolve that perceived threat, then that dorsal vagal system kicks in – that’s the freeze response; that’s the collapse into dorsal vagal lifelessness. And what do we get in terms of physical responses in that dorsal vagal state? Well, we get a heart rate decreasing, slowing way down. Blood pressure drops. Body temperature decreases. Muscle tone goes flaccid. Breathing becomes shallow. The immune system drops. Pain thresholds increase. There’s greater pain tolerance because of endorphin releases that numb pain. There is an immobilization response where you can appear physically dead. Digestion, metabolism slow way down. You go into conservation mode like hibernating until the life threat passes. What’s the psychological response when we’re in this dorsal vagal shutdown? Sense of helplessness. Depression. Despondency. Lethargy. Numbing out. Disconnection. The thinking becomes very foggy. Fuzzy. Unclear. Cloudy. There’s dissociation, like spacing out, feeling disconnected from the present, like untethered, floating. Feeling trapped. Preparing for death. Feeling hopeless. Shutting down, becoming psychologically inert or paralyzed. And feeling a deep sense of shame. Well, what’s the relational response to being in this dorsal vagal shut down mode? Very isolated, can’t listen to others, don’t even notice others very well because of how shut down and self-absorbed you are in this state. Can’t share very well, can’t tolerate vulnerability, very little agency, can’t focus on others. And what’s the story that somebody tells? What’s the narrative for somebody who’s in this dorsal vagal shutdown? Well, it’s a story of despair – it’s a story of being unloved and unlovable. Invisible, lost, alone and in desperate straits about to die. Really a depressing story.

[01:02:48] So those are the three states: the ventral vagal state – which is the happy state, the good state, the sympathetic arousal state – fight or flight, and the dorsal vagal shut down state – the freeze response. Polyvagal theory is going to focus specifically on the regulation of your nervous system in assessing your well-being. If you are in sympathetic arousal, in that fight or flight mode, you’re focused on the perceived dangers around you and you’re focusing on self-protection and you’re going to sacrifice connection with others. If you’re in that dorsal vagal shutdown, the freeze response, you’re going to be hiding from the prospect of imminent death. You’re going to be shutting down going into that conservation mode. You’re going to be hoping to survive the perceived imminent lethal danger by becoming immobile. And so therapists informed by polyvagal therapy work on resetting that autonomic nervous system, helping us to get back into a ventral vagal state to leave the dorsal vagal shutdown state behind, to leave the sympathetic fight or flight state behind and get back to a peaceful bodily state. And so these therapists start with the body, not so much the mind. They really focus on the body. And so that’s a little summary of polyvagal theory.

[01:04:06] I want to talk about Internal Family Systems therapy next. Now this was developed by Richard Schwartz, and it was first described in the Internal Family Systems Therapy book, which was published originally in its first edition in 1995. And it brings systems thinking inside. It conceptualizes the human person as a living system, not just as a single unitary personality, but as a living system. Richard Schwartz is a family therapist who is trained in family systems work, and he recognized that the inner life of a person mirrored family life from a systems perspective. But before we go much further, let’s ask the question what is a system? Now I’m taking this definition from Ben Lutkevich at techtarget.com. He writes, “systems thinking is a holistic approach to analysis that focuses on the way that a system’s constituent parts interrelate and how systems work over time and within the context of larger systems. The systems thinking approach contrasts with traditional analysis, which studies systems by breaking them down into their separate elements.” So that can be kind of hard to take in. Basically, systems thinking is saying that the sum is greater than the whole of its parts. That’s another quote from Aristotle – “the sum is greater than the whole of its parts.” And so we need to understand how these different parts of us interact.

[01:05:46] Well-being, according to Internal Family Systems, is when the inner system of a person, when our inner system shows certain qualities. There are four qualities that our inner system needs to show to be in a good place – to have well-being. Those four are balance, harmony, leadership and development. And I’m taking this from Richard Schwartz’s book, Internal Family Systems Therapy, second edition. So balance. Balance is the degree of influence that each member of the system has on decision making, whether that influence is appropriate and whether the boundaries are balanced and appropriate within the system. So it’s all about boundaries – that balance is about boundaries. The second element: harmony. This is when an effort is made to find the role that each member desires and for which each member is best suited. With harmony, members of the system work together cooperatively, collaboratively, and the harmony of the system allows each member to find and pursue his own vision while fitting that vision into the broader vision of the system as a whole. So cooperation, collaboration, harmony within the system as opposed to infighting, polarizations, rebellion, all kinds of internal conflict.

[01:07:13] The third is that there’s leadership, and that one or more of the members of the system must have the ability and the respect from the other members to do the following jobs: to mediate polarizations or conflicts among members of the system, to facilitate the flow of information within the system, to ensure that all members of the system are protected and cared for and that they feel valued and encouraged to pursue their individual visions within the limits of the system’s needs. The fourth is to allocate resources, responsibilities and influence fairly. The fifth is to provide a broad perspective and a vision for the system as a whole. The sixth is to represent the system in interaction with other systems. And the seventh is to interpret feedback from other systems honestly. And that’s the qualities of a system with good leadership. One or more members of the system, they’ve got to be a leader and they’ve got to have the capacity to execute that role of leadership well, or the system will start to deteriorate. Then the fourth is development, and that is that the members of the system and the system itself can grow, that the skills and relationships needed to carry out the vision of the system and the vision of the individual members, that that can increase over time. That there can be development there, so that the system is growing and the individual members of the system are growing as well. So in the Internal Family Systems, in the IFS model of the person, a person is composed of a body plus parts plus self – that’s the internal system of a person. And this will be a review for many of you who have listened to this podcast and have heard me talk about an IFS informed understanding of the human person.

[01:09:08] But to review, the self is the core of the person, the center of the person. This is who we sense ourselves to be in our best moments when our self is free, when the self is unblended with any of our parts, when the self governs our whole being as an active, compassionate leader with a deep sense of recollection on the natural level. You can also experience being in self as an expansive state of mind. We want to be recollected. We want the self governing all our parts. We want the self to be the active inner leader of our system, like the conductor leading the musicians in an orchestra, the musicians being the parts or like the self being the captain leading and governing all the sailors on a ship. And when we are recollected, we have the eight Cs: calm, curiosity, compassion, confidence, courage, clarity, connectedness and creativity – those are the qualities of the self. And when the self is leading and guiding the system, we have these eight C qualities. Now, the parts in the system are separate, independently operating personalities within us, each with its own unique needs, with its own role in our lives, with its own emotions and body sensations and guiding beliefs and assumptions, and its own typical thoughts and intentions and desires and attitudes and impulses and interpersonal style and worldview. So these parts are like little independently operating personalities within us that are relatively complete. And they have their own life. They are members of the system that composes who we are.

[01:11:04] Now IFS has two ‘uns’ that I think are so important. The first is to be unblended. Now this is when a person is free to have the self lead and guide the system. No parts have come in, blended, and taken over – no part is driving the bus. And this is really great because if you are unblended, you have these qualities – calm, curiosity, compassion, confidence, courage, clarity, connectedness and creativity. You’re able to lead and guide your system, there’s balance in your system, there’s harmony in your system, and there’s a sense of development going on within your system. And even if there’s a lot that’s unresolved, let’s say there’s a lot of complex trauma that’s unresolved, if you are in self, you can still experience those eight C’s. You can still be with others in a way that’s really, really compassionate, really connected. And this is a wonderful thing for therapists because a lot of times therapists, we have our stuff, we have unresolved issues. Some therapists have complex trauma. It’s not random. Who becomes a therapist? A lot of times they’re just trying to work through something that’s in my own history, something like that. And so a therapist can have a lot of unresolved trauma, a lot of burdens. But if they’re unblended – if those parts are not clamoring, if they’re not taking over, if it’s not leading to self-absorption, if it’s not destabilizing their system, they can still be very present and be very effective therapists because they’re in a really good place. This would correspond to a ventral vagal state in polyvagal theory. And so that’s really great because it doesn’t mean that you have to work through and resolve everything first, right? Because that can take a lifetime. It means that the state that you’re in is really, really important – and that you have influence over; that you can effectively change if you know how to work with these different models of being embodied in a way that is regulating your autonomic nervous system. So that’s unblended. The other ‘un’ is unburdened. And this is when our parts are freed from their burdens. I’m not going to go into that a lot now, but that is the way that IFS works with trauma. It’s by unburdening the parts that carry the impact of trauma, letting them release that and let that go when the conditions are right.

[01:13:49] So I do want to mention before we close today, interpersonal neurobiology. This was pioneered by Daniel Siegel. Interpersonal neurobiology is not a separate discipline. It’s not something that you would have as an academic department within a university. Rather, interpersonal neurobiology or IPNB for short is an interdisciplinary framework. And that means that interpersonal neurobiology or IPNB draws from many different disciplines, many different approaches that each have their own individual and unique, rigorous style, their approach to studying phenomena relevant to well-being. I’m very into IPNB right now – I’m taking a master class with Daniel Siegel right now, and we’re going to get into interpersonal neurobiology and its views on mental health and well-being. In episode 92 of this podcast, I really want to dedicate a whole episode to this because interpersonal neurobiology has done an excellent job in defining its terms. That’s very dear to Dan Siegel. Many of you know that’s very dear to me, too. He actually gets into the definition of the mind in a way that nobody has ever done before. He gets into definitions of all kinds of phenomena in ways that are very clear. So I want to be able to really give interpersonal neurobiology its due. It’s one of these other secular approaches to understanding well-being, but I wanted to run through the rest of them in this in this particular episode.

[01:15:22] I want to let you know that if you really like these podcasts, you might also really like my weekly email broadcast every week on Wednesdays. Usually I send out a weekly email. There is always some significant content in that – it’s not fluff; I get into meat of things. It’s whatever I happen to be thinking about. If you’re not getting those register at soulsandhearts.com, get on our mailing list and if there’s any difficulties with that, let our business manager know admin@soulsandhearts.com – that’ll get you in touch with Patty, and she’ll take care of you. So a little view about what’s coming up. There’s going to be a special bonus Interior Integration for Catholics podcast that’s coming out on March 25 – that’s the Feast of the Annunciation. And we’re going to have an exciting announcement from Souls and Hearts. This is going to be about a major effort that we are involved in at Souls and Hearts. Dr. Gerry Crete, co-founder of Souls and Hearts, CEO of Souls and Hearts, is going to be joining me to discuss this exciting development with you. So tune in for all the new happenings at Souls and Hearts on March 25. We’ll release that. Also, a shout out to Catholic therapists and grad students. I will be doing a free Zoom webinar from 7:30-8:45 PM EST on Saturday, March 26, 2022 on Internal Family Systems and loving your neighbor. It’s all about how understanding myself and others from an IFS perspective can help us love one another. Any Catholic therapist or any grad student or any Catholic grad student in a mental health field is a welcome. It’s free to attend. Email our office manager Patty Ellenberger at admin@soulsandhearts.com for a registration link and we’ll get you in for that. It’d be great to see you there. That’s going to be really interactive, too. There’s going to be lots of time for questions and answers and so forth. So a lot about IFS, a lot about Catholic understanding of the human person, a lot about what it means to love our neighbor.

[01:17:43] Just to shout out Dr. Gerry’s Catholic Journeymen community has relaunched within Souls and Hearts. Men, you are welcome to join a group of faithful Catholic men seeking restoration, wholeness and integrity in areas of sexuality and relationship with God, self and others. Catholic Journeymen is a safe space for men to share, burdens, to receive support, and to be nourished by a distinctive program combining the best of behavioral health, behavioral health science and Catholic spirituality. Check that out at soulsandhearts.com/catholic-journeymen. Remember you’re a listener to this podcast and in that sense we’re together. You’re with me. I’m with you. You can call me on my cell any Tuesday or Thursday from 4:30-5:30 PM EST for regular conversation hours. I’ve set that time aside for you. (317) 567-9594 – that’s my cell. You can also email me at crisis@soulsandhearts.com. Here’s a reminder the waiting list is open for the Resilient Catholics Community at soulsandhearts.com/rcc for our June 2022 enrollment – so much information there. If you love this podcast, if you are really into what we do here, come join us in the Resilient Catholics Community. I lead that community. A lot of contact there, a lot of great things happening in that community. And with that, we’re going to wrap it for today by invoking our patroness and our patron. Our Lady, Our Mother, Untier of Knots, pray for us. St. John the Baptist, pray for us.