Interior Integration for Catholics

What makes good spiritual direction?  What makes good spiritual directors?  And what gets in the way in spiritual direction?  To answers these questions, Fr. Boniface Hicks, joins us as continue our series on the integration of personal formation for Catholics. Fr. Boniface is a Benedictine monk and the Director of Spiritual Formation at St. Vincent Seminary as well as the Director of the Institute for Ministry Formation.  He is an accomplished retreat master, author of four books on the spiritual life, and a seasoned expert in what it takes to accompany others on their spiritual journeys.   We explore the formation that spiritual directors need, how you can recognize when something is lacking in your spiritual direction and the most common human formation challenges and deficits that Catholic spiritual directors are likely to encounter in themselves and in those they serve.  

What do the roots, trunk, branches, leaves, and apples of a tree have to do with your Catholic formation?  Find out how these, combined with sunlight, water, and soil, bring us an integrated understanding of personal formation grounded in a Catholic understanding of the human person, drawing from Church documents and the sciences of the natural world.  By looking at an apple tree, we can understand our own formation and where we need to change and grow much better – and not just as solitary trees, but together, in community, in a forest.  Join me, Dr. Peter Malinoski, as we learn how to flourish in love and for love, as Catholics journeying together.  

In this episode, we discuss how models help us more fully understand Catholic personal formation by showing distinctions and relationships among human formation, spiritual formation, intellectual formation, and pastoral formation. Next, we examine my new model that views formation through a mathematical lens. I explain each dimension of formation, likening them to a branch of mathematics, and draw from Pastores Dabo Vobis and other Church documents to illuminate the inter-dimensional relationships in personal formation. Finally, I tell a fictional story that illustrates how deficits in one domain of formation can negatively impact all the other dimensions of formation.  Check out the video on our Interior Integration for Catholics on YouTube at https://youtu.be/YDztbbNBBtk or on our IIC landing page at https://www.soulsandhearts.com/iic

In this episode, philosopher Matthew Walz, Ph.D. the Director of Intellectual Formation at Holy Trinity Seminary, explains the integration of the four pillars of formation laid out in Pope St. John Paul II's Pastores Dabo Vobis. We dive into why it is so important to integrate the four types of formation and whether there is a hierarchy or sequence among them. We then discuss Dr. Walz’s models of integrated formation first presented in his article, “Toward a Causal Account of Priestly Formation: A Reading of Pastores Dabo Vobis”, which can be found here: https://www.hprweb.com/2021/01/toward-a-causal-account-of-priestly-formation/. Dr. Walz explains how the four dimensions of formation — human formation, spiritual formation, intellectual formation, and pastoral formation — parallel Aristotle’s four causes, which are the material, formal, efficient, and final causes. The types of formation also parallel the “four loves”— love of self, love of God, love of truth, and love of neighbor. Finally, these four kinds of formation parallel the dimensions of Christ — Christ in His human nature and as priest, prophet, and king. We wrap up this episode by discussing what Dr. Walz means by “dimensional trespassing" in the process of formation.  

My guest, Dr. Gerry, answers questions from our live audience about his new book, Litanies of the Heart: Relieving Post-Traumatic Stress and Calming Anxiety Through Healing Our Parts. We begin by receiving some wonderful feedback for Dr. Gerry about his book. Then we dive into some questions our audience has for Dr. Gerry: 1) Can 58 years of rearranging my life to recycle the feelings of shame from being molested be resolved? 2) Can it be true that not all parts can know Jesus or not all parts can have a relationship with Him? 3) Are we naturally in self as children, before experiencing trauma? 4) In attachment terms, can misattunement happen pre-verbally, affecting access to your inmost self before you are able to express it? 5) How much culpability do we have for sinful behaviors driven by the unmet needs of parts who have good intentions? 6) What are the relationships among the inmost self, the intellect, and the will?

In this episode, I address a controversial clip from episode 79 of the Restore the Glory podcast, in which host Jake Khym provides an example of how he brings Jesus into his own parts work. I explain the potential issues I see with bringing God into human formation work. Then, I dive into the seven reasons why I initially focus on the natural realm: 1) Almost no one else focuses on human formation grounded in a Catholic understanding of the human person; 2) Human formation is the basis of all formation, according to St. John Paul II; 3) There is a huge wealth of information from secular sources that I can and should bring to the Church; 4) So many spiritual problems are spiritual consequences of human formation deficits; 5) My training and experience are in human formation, not spiritual formation; 6) Natural means are primarily used for the early development of infants, toddlers, and preschoolers; 7) Explicitly God-centric approaches are not optimal for every part in every person, and may even be harmful in some cases. 

My guest, Dr. Gerry Crete shares with us the inside story of his brand-new book, Litanies of the Heart: Relieving Post-Traumatic Stress and Calming Anxiety through Healing Our Parts. This book grounds IFS and parts in a Catholic understanding of the human person, showing how parts work is both Biblical and harmonizable with our Catholic faith. Because the intellectual experience doesn’t fully encapsulate the human experience, Dr. Gerry uses stories and vignettes in a way that connects with everyone, not just therapists. He invites all the outcast parts into relationships, making them feel safe enough to connect on a deep level with others and God.

Dr. Gerry also provides a glimpse of the writing and publishing process, the challenges and struggles he faced, as well as his moments of inspiration. We discuss a few favorite pages from the book, such as Dr. Gerry’s diagram of the soul and body overlapping in the heart, where all the parts are. 

In this episode, my guest, licensed marriage and family therapist Dr. Gerry Crete and I discuss how best to engage with borderline dynamics within your family. People with “borderline personalities” have surprisingly intense internal experiences that are rarely handled well by the people around them. Dr. Gerry suggests avoiding both expressing too much frustration and invalidation.  Instead, he recommends trying to view situations from their perspective and looking for the kernel of truth in their reactions. Acceptance of borderline emotions and perspectives can create the opening a person needs to engage more collaboratively.   Learn how to avoid one little dangerous word and use another, much better little word in conversation with those with borderline traits.  Dr. Gerry also responds to these questions (among others) from our live audience: 1) How do you deal with blazing rage and other extreme emotions? 2) How do you navigate narcissism and borderline within a marriage and the battle between the integrity needs of both? 3) How do you learn to love people with borderline tendencies? 4) Where is the balance between sacrificial love and self-care? 5) Will people with borderline ever be capable of developing an awareness of other people’s feelings and perspectives? 6) What is the healing and forgiveness process between a mother with borderline and her daughter? 7) How do you deal with the guilt, shame, and anxiety caused by borderline? 8) How do you stop the cycle of borderline tendencies from being passed from parent to child?

In this episode we explore in detail how Internal Family Systems can help with borderline dynamics.  We review the definitions of the innermost self and parts, the six attachment and six integrity needs, and we discuss the three major reasons why clients with BPD have been bruised and wounded by mental health professionals.  I review the seven tenets of Therapist-Focused Consultation (TFC) and then we walk with Tina from episode 127 as she begins IFS informed therapy, and how that therapy invites and includes all her parts, without the need for grounding exercises that suppress her exiles and firefighters.  This episode may be particularly helpful to Catholic therapists and counselors to not be afraid of or destabilized by those clients with borderline dynamics.  

(Please note that sound effects are used in this episode and may be triggering to parts.)

In this episode, I take you inside the experience of Tina, a 32-year-old Catholic woman with “borderline personality” and introduce you to seven of her parts and how they switch inside her.  These switches involve not only emotions, but all of Tina’s internal experience, so her parts are not merely transient mood states.  We review the IFS understanding of innermost self, exiled parts, manager parts, and firefighter parts.  And then we break down everything that happened in the restaurant in her conflict with her fiancé, Phillip, walking through each DSM-5 diagnostic criteria for BPD and seeing how her parts contributed to the symptom, getting to the “Why” of borderline behaviors.  

 In this episode, my guest Dr. Greg Bottaro of the CatholicPsych Institute shares with us the most important thing he wants us to remember about borderline personality dynamics, the things that Catholics and non-Catholics most often misunderstand about borderline presentations, and his takeaways about borderline "personalities."  We then open the floor to these questions from our live audience: 1) How do you stay in relationship with someone who is threatening to harm themselves, you, or other family members?  2) Are anger and anxiety typical coping mechanisms for those with borderline characteristics? 3)  I think I may have borderline personality with a strong strain of self-hatred.  What is the role of concupiscence and wounds in borderline personality?  4) How would a Catholic parent with a spouse with Borderline Personality Disorder characteristics navigate teaching or picking up the pieces with young children who witness severe emotional dysregulation on a regular basis without undermining the spouse or triangulating?  5)  Someone brought to my awareness that they see BPD characteristics in me.  How do I approach true authentic healing so that I don't wound others, while not falling into the trap of getting a formal diagnosis to justify my actions or over-spiritualizing, trying to pray it away or just go to confession?  6) How do I help my young adult son who is married to someone I suspect has BPD characteristics who is now cutting off communication with us and who is not taking care of himself and who has said he is in turmoil when his wife, my daughter-in-law, who seems controlling and needing lots of "space"? 

This episode focuses on the internal experience of borderline personality dynamics, what it feels like.  Next, I share how “borderline” is a relatively new diagnosis, and previously indicated a range of personality development, rather than a specific disorder. I then discuss the standard diagnostic criteria from the DSM-5 and the Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual, 2nd Ed., summarizing the symptoms in plain English. I explore the etiology or the origin of “borderline personality” and the underlying unmet attachment needs that fuel borderline dynamics. I describe different subtypes of borderline presentations and explore the types of partners to whom those with borderline dynamics are romantically attracted. From there, I describe five major treatment approaches and briefly discuss an outcome study. In closing, I review some suggestions for living with someone who presents with borderline characteristics.

In this special edition, I invite you to an experiential exercise to connect in a loving way with your parts who are  in any distress or suffering with the armed conflict between Hamas and Israel and the humanitarian tragedies that conflict has brought.  I do this experiential exercise along with you, working with my Adventurer part who has been burdened with fear and anxiety, especially around the conflict broadening out regionally in the Middle East and beyond.  Parts also have an opportunity, with your innermost self to question and challenge God about what is happening.  

In this episode, I invited licensed marriage and family therapist Dr. Gerry Crete and a live audience to discuss the best ways to relate with family members with narcissistic traits while still preserving one's own limits and dignity.  Dr. Gerry addressed the following: 1) Why is it important to prepare yourself for relating with someone with dominant narcissistic parts? 2) How can we recognize our own limitations and the fact that we cannot change another person by our own efforts? 3) How can we understand the positive intentions of others' narcissistic parts? 4) What should you do if you are flooded and agitated by a family member with narcissistic tendencies? 5) How should you communicate your limits and boundaries with such family members?  6) How can you distinguish between standing up and advocating for yourself an just being "oversensitive" or prideful? 7) Are idealizing and devaluing the primary signs of narcissism or is there a deeper key feature?  8) How does narcissism often play out in a family when an aged parent dies?  9) When is it necessary to temporarily disconnect or separate from the family because of narcissism in other members?  10) How do we maintain "radical acceptance" of others and still hold boundaries and protect ourselves?  11) What kind of IFS groups are available online?  12) How does a lack of empathy present differently in narcissism vs. autism?

In this episode, we review several definitions of gaslighting, discuss the tactics of gaslighting, explore the inner experience of both gaslighters and gaslightees, describe gaslighting in the workplace and with children, and list the four relationship dynamics of gaslighting.  Then we describe how gaslighting and being gaslighted connects to deep, unmet attachment and integrity needs.  We also address the special aspects of spiritual gaslighting with examples.  Finally, we cover how to assess whether you are being gaslighted, describe recovery from gaslighting and address gaslighting from an Internal Family Systems perspective.  

Today with our live audience, we start with 15 minutes of Q&A about narcissism addressing these questions: 1) Does acknowledging our own narcissism makes us more or less vulnerable to exploitation by another person? 2) Are children of parents with borderline personalities more likely to be attracted to narcissistic partners? 3)What is “healthy narcissism”?  Then from the 15-minute mark to the 50-minute mark, we engage in an experiential exercise together to encounter and connect with parts of ourselves with narcissistic features.  Afterward, we debrief and share our experiences addressing these topics and questions:  1) Can narcissistic approaches be helpful in certain situations or environments? 2)  Is narcissism the result of too much self-love or too little?  3) How can we get normal needs for affirmation met in non-narcissistic ways?  4) Why is it important to be gentle with narcissistic parts?  5) Why do narcissistic parts often sense themselves to be aged 2, 6, or 13?  6) Why is there such a “rush” or dopamine “high” when narcissistic parts receive the admiration and idealization that they seek?  

In this groundbreaking episode, Dr. Peter explains how to conceptualize narcissistic "personalities" and narcissistic reactions through the lens of Internal Family Systems.  Looking at narcissism through the lens of subsystems and parts is an entirely new paradigm that makes it easier to accept the reality the unmet attachment and integrity needs that fuel narcissistic positions and behaviors.  Through four case vignettes, Dr. Peter illustrates how both covert and overt narcissism look and function from a parts and systems perspective.  

In this episode, Catholic psychologist Peter Martin and I discuss narcissism with a live audience, covering the following questions: 1) What are two primary clinical approaches to treating individuals with narcissism; 2) How do we distinguish between boldness and narcissism; 3) How does one relate with a narcissistic spouse; 4) How do we work with narcissistic family members who don’t believe in God; 5) The importance of feeling cherished and treasured by God; 6) The relationship between narcissism and spiritual abuse in religious communities and organizations; 7) What makes it difficult for a person with narcissism to receive the love of God; 8) what are the different attachment styles associated with overt and covert narcissism; 9) How do children’s experiences of narcissism impact them in adulthood; 10) What are the effects of narcissistic parenting on children’s separation and individuation; and 11) How does one manage a contentious co-parenting relationship with an ex-spouse who is narcissistic?

In this episode, we examine different definitions of narcissism, we look at the markers and diagnostic criteria for narcissism, we examine the main beliefs, emotions, assumptions, and internal experiences that fuel narcissistic defenses (especially idealization and devaluation), we focus on relational patterns that narcissists have, and we look at how narcissists subjectively experience themselves.  I show how narcissistic defenses represent maladaptive ways of trying to get deep needs met, especially integrity needs.  We explore different kinds of narcissism, especially the different between overt and covert narcissism.  We then go into how to identify narcissistic behaviors and appropriate ways of responding, according to the secular experts.  Also, I issue you an invitation to a special opportunity.  Tonight, Monday, August 7, 2023, from 8:30 PM to 10:00 PM Eastern Time -- I will have Catholic Psychologist Peter Martin as a special guest and we will be discussing narcissism -- in this free Zoom meeting, for the first 30 minutes or so, Dr. Martin and I will have a conversation about narcissism, and then for the next hour, we open it up for questions.  Register by going to our Interior Integration for Catholics Landing page at soulsandhearts.com/iic.  At the top, there's a link to register for the Zoom meeting.  You can send me questions to [email protected] -- or leave me a VM at 317.567.9594 and I will play that voicemail on the air and Dr. Martin and I will answer you questions.  

Dr. Gerry Crete, Marion Moreland and Dr. Peter Malinoski discuss the relationship among parts and how your manager parts make up what is perceived to be your personality.  Dr. Peter offers a 25-minute experiential exercise to help you connect with your manager parts, the ones who make up your "personality."  Then we debrief, describe our experiences of the exercise and answer questions from our live audience.  

In this episode, Dr. Peter discusses five reasons why the conventional understanding of a single, homogeneous personality is insufficient to more fully understand your internal experience and how alternative conceptualizations of the human psyche that recognize internal multiplicity, parts, and systems are not only more helpful, but also harmonize with our Catholic Faith.   

Join Catholic IFS therapists Marion Moreland, Jody Garneau, and Dr. Peter Malinoski for an in-depth discussion of unburdening, informed by Internal Family Systems and grounded in a Catholic understanding of the human person.  We explore three kinds of burdens -- personal burdens, legacy burdens, and unattached burdens (the IFS equivalent of demons), we provide examples from our own lives, we emphasize the importance of felt safety and protection for all parts, and we discuss the role of attachment theory in unburdening.  In our Q&A with our live audience, we discuss how to approach "hiding parts" as well.  

Have you ever wondered what inner work with Internal Family Systems looks like with troubling sexual issues?  Join us as podcaster and coach Drew Boa reviews an unburdening of three of his parts from a sexual issue with Dr. Peter and other Christian therapists.

Join RCC Lead Navigator Marion Moreland and Dr. Peter for a demonstration of Internal Family Systems work around anger, followed by a Q&A where we discuss with our live audience member the topics of exiled anger, forgiveness, and legacy burdens.

In this episode, Dr. Peter takes close look at an alternative way to manage, work through, and let go of anger, informed by Internal Family Systems (IFS), and especially by the work of Jay Earley.  After a brief review of the major tenets of IFS, we discuss how to work through the different ways that manager parts, firefighter parts and exiled parts hold and manage anger.  We look at the functions of anger in the internal system and especially at the process, the steps of working through and resolving anger held by parts in different roles.  Then Dr. Peter discusses how parts of him hold and respond to anger in a particular subsystem of parts within his broader internal system.  

In this live experiential exercise, Dr. Peter leads listeners through an experiential exercise that explores why anger might feel important, necessary, even indispensable for parts.  We look at how anger can develop from parts feeling forced to choose between attachment needs and integrity needs being met.  Dr. Peter and the audience members shared a lively, personal debriefing and discussion of their experience of the exercise.   

(Please note that sound effects are used in this episode and may be triggering to parts.)

In this experiential exercise I invite you and your parts to approach Jesus in the psychological, emotional, relational, and bodily anguish He suffered in His humanity in the Garden of Gethsemane.  Which parts of you might avoid Jesus, turn away from Him in His suffering -- and why?  Here is an opportunity to gently learn more about how our parts react to Jesus and to gently connect with them in understanding and compassion.  

We explore the inner experience of Jesus and the psychological, emotional, relational, and bodily anguish He suffered in His humanity in the Garden of Gethsemane as the drama of of salvation history unfolded.  We also explored the reactions of the apostles Peter, James, and John to the experience of Jesus' agony.  

In this experiential exercise, we invite parts of us to share their stories of why they hold anger toward God.  Dr. Peter offers an invitation to parts to see if we can listen to those stories in an open, nonjudgmental way, understanding that there are always reasons for anger at God, reasons that stem from misunderstanding and misinterpretations of experiences.  Parts are angry more at their images of God -- their idols -- than at who God really is. Live audience participants share their experience in debriefing and Dr. Peter also answers questions.  

Summary:  Dr. Peter walks you through the four tracks or pathways Catholics commonly follow with their anger at God, tracks proposed by Michele Novotni and Randy Petersen in their 2001 book Angry with God, and elaborates on them extensively.  These four tracks are 1) Trust in God Track; 2) the Cover-Up Track; 3) the Wrestle with God Track; and 4) the Long-Distance / Disconnect Track.  We discuss how to better resolve anger issues with God through a wide variety of means with a focus on practical solutions.  Dr. Peter emphasizes the importance of God images, felt safety and protection, a sense of trust, the infused virtue of Faith, courage and fortitude, and the critical role of emotional co-regulation in working through anger at God.    

In this episode, informed by Internal Family Systems and grounded firmly in a Catholic worldview, Dr. Peter guides you to connect with your spiritual manager parts who protect you against your own anger at God, getting to know those parts' concerns about why anger at God is dangerous or unacceptable.  This is an important step in the journey to working through your anger at God.  We discuss how to work safely with your parts, with a spirit of cooperation and collaboration, not rushing.  Come join us on an adventure inside.  At the end, audience participants debrief, share their experiences with Dr. Peter and he answers questions.  

In this episode, Dr. Peter reviews the limitations of current Catholic resources on anger, and then reviews secular resources, including interpersonal neurobiology and the structural theory of dissociation.  We examine the role of the body in anger responses, and discuss more wholistic ways of working constructive with parts that experience anger, rather than trying to dismiss anger, suppress it or distract from it.  The entire transcript is available at https://www.soulsandhearts.com/iic.

1. Summary:  In this episode, Dr. Peter brings together what we have been learning about receiving love in the story of Susanna
2. Lead-in:  There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. When he reads a novel, he wants either his sense tormented or his spirits raised. He wants to be transported, instantly, either to mock damnation or a mock innocence.”  Catholic Novelist Flannery O'Connor
3. Intro.  
   1. I have been doing a lot of podcast lecturing.  Dense programming, lots of information.  Like Episode 99.  Not a bad thing.  But I want you to really take in what I'm offering at a bones level.  To possess it at the felt level, to be that familiar with it.  Not just head knowledge.  Whole self knowledge.  
   2. So I am going back to another way of learning, one I haven't emphasized enough.  Stories.  Today, I am going to tell you a story.  A story about receiving different kinds of love.  Why?
   3. Here's why.  In the words of Edward Miller tells us.  “Stories are our primary tools of learning and teaching, the repositories of our lore and legends. They bring order into our confusing world."
       
      1. Our primary tools for teaching and learning.  And it's true.  We teach our children in their earliest years through stories and experiences.  Not through lectures.  
   4. 
      
   5. I am Peter Malinoski, clinical psychologist, passionate Catholic, co-founder and president of Souls and Hearts and soulsandhearts.com, and I am very pleased to with you as  your host and guide in this Interior Integration for Catholics podcast, episode 101 to be your storyteller, to tell you a story.  This episode is titled A Story about Receiving Different Kinds of Love -- a story we can all related to.  
4. Prepping for the Story
    
   1. Ways to Listen
       
      1. Listen to the Story
   2.  
      1. Listening to yourself as you listen to the Story.  
         1. What is going on inside
         2. Listen to your own parts
             
            1. Can pause the audio
         3.  
            1. Reflective space
         4.  
            1. What are your noticing
         5.  
            1. What are you resonating with in the story, what is impacting you.?
         6.  
            1. What are you rejecting
         7.  
   3. 
      
      1. Parts -- Episode 71 A new and better way of understanding myself and others.  
   4. 
      
      1. Needs
          
         1. Primary Conditions for Secure Attachment
             
            1. Felt sense of safety and protection -- have to go through the valley of shame, fear, anger, grief
         2.  
            1. Feeling seen, heard, known and understood -- have to tolerating being in relationship, being present.  
         3. 
            
            1. Feeling comforted, soothed and reassured
         4.  
            1. Feeling cherished, treasured, delighted in
         5.  
            1. Feeling the other has your best interests at heart
         6.  
      2. 
         
         1. Integrity Needs
             
            1. My need to exist and survive 
         2. 
            
            1. My need to matter
         3.  
            1. My need to have agency
         4.  
            1. My need to be good
         5.  
            1. My need for mission and purpose in life
         6.  
      3. 
         
   5. 
      
      1. Resistance to Being Loved from IIC 99 
         1. Limited vision and lack of imagination, leading to a refusal to be transformed by God
         2. We don't understand God's love
         3. The Costs of Being Loved by God
         4. Poor God images
         5. Poor Self images -- Shame
         6. Refusal to be vulnerable, to be exposed, to be revealed to God. 
         7. Lack of courage.
         8. Anger at God -- rebellion
5. 
   
   1. Cautions -- could be evocative for you -- parts of you may really connect in various ways.  I want you to take care of your self and your parts as you listen to the story.  If you need a break, take a break.  
6. The Story -- Hero's Journey outline
    
   1. The Ordinary World
       
      1. Susanna -- 40 year old married mother of three -- 
         1. Brown hair, warm brown eyes, and easy smile, she laughs at your jokes -- the kind of person that you immediately felt comfortable with.  Open and engaging with other people, was well read, and could talk about your interests.  Socially adept, she coordinated making meals for local women who had babies.  Had a sense that she had suffered in her life and understood something about suffering.  And that was true
   2. 
      
      1. Life wasn't always easy for Susanna
          
         1. Grew up in Culpeper, VA, 75 miles west of Washington DC, oldest of four children, all girls.  Named Susan.  
      2. 
         
         1. Mother -- quiet, introverted - an interior designer turned homemaker.  
         2. Father -- extroverted, warm, gregarious high school teacher - taught algebra, geometry and trigonometry at Culpeper County High School  -- great sense of humor, gratifying, and a pretty easy grader, students loved him and he really liked being a popular teacher.  
            1. Strong sense that father had favorites among the daughters, and she wasn't one of them  
         3. When Susan was age 16, her mother divorced her father -- his affairs, excessive drinking
             
            1. Mother devastated.  Really wanted her daughter to understand.  Susanna was cold.  
         4. 
            
            1. Read the divorce decree "Irreconcilable differences"  And she was so angry
         5.  
            1. At an emotional level, Susan repudiated both Mom and Dad.  Not understanding, not wanting to understand.  
         6. 
            
            1. Decided to go by "Susanna" -- three reasons
                
               1. Devoted to the Chronicles of Narnia -- The last book of the series, The Last Battle.  Aslan says "Susan is no longer a friend of Narnia."  Given to nylons, lipstick, and party invitations -- she didn't seem serious  any more.  
            2. 
               
               1. Susan was her given name -- she wanted different name, but not too different
            3.  
               1. In the Bible, in Daniel chapter 13, Susanna was the beautiful, faithful wife of Joakim.  She refused to be blackmailed into adultery by two respectable men of high stature in the community, two judges, who just happened to have also be voyeurs, peeping-Toms.  Susanna preferred death by denunciation rather than compromise her moral principles, and was saved by a young boy, Daniel, whose clever cross-examination of the accusers revealed them to be liars.  Susanna was a real heroine in her eyes, someone to be emulated.  
            4. 
               
         7. 
            
         8. Shuttling back and forth between parents, who were drifting from the Faith. 
            1. Mom pursued an annulment got it, and remarried the summer after Susanna's graduation from high school.  Susanna refused to be in the bridal party, refused to go to the wedding. 
         9. Like many teenagers in this position, Susan rebelled.  But not by using alcohol, drugs or sex.  Susan rebelled by becoming more Catholic -- 
         10. Went to Christendom college, it was close, it w...

IIC 99 Why We Catholics Reject God's Love for Us and How to Embrace that Love

It is so common for Catholics (and others) to reject the love of God, to not let that love in.  Join Dr. Peter for this episode where we explore in depth the eight natural, human formation reasons why we refuse God's love. We also look at what Hell really is and why it really exists.  Through examples, quotes, and an exploration of Dr. Peter's own parts, listen to how this critical, central topic comes alive.  And then Dr. Peter presents the an action plan for accepting and embracing God's love. 

Transcript 

"It's very hard for most of us to tolerate being loved." That's psychiatrist and Harvard professor George Vaillant. The hardest thing about love for many of us Catholics, is to be loved--to tolerate being loved first. We can't love unless we take love in first. We can't generate love out of nothing on our own. We just don't have that power.

And the truth is, many Catholics make sacrifices great and small in their attempts to love others. Many Catholics go to great lengths to try to please God and to love their neighbor--very busy people, most parishes have a few of these always--volunteering, always working, always making things happen, St. Vincent de Paul, soup kitchens, corporal works of mercy, working so hard to live out the Gospel as they understand it, but it's all external. They are very out of touch with their internal lives. Their prayer lives are shallow and sketchy, and they're often really uncomfortable in their own skin. They will not tolerate silence, which is why they're always on the move--why they're always going, going, going.

The vast majority of us Catholics will not tolerate being loved deeply or fully by God. We shy away from receiving that love. We get so uncomfortable, we skirt around the edges of being loved. Or we allow love into us, but only so far--only so far. We set limits, we set boundaries, we won't let God's love permeate all of our being. We let the "acceptable parts" of us to be loved. Those parts that we allow in the shop window, those parts that we believe others will accept, those parts that we believe God likes. But to allow God to love all of you, including your nasty parts, your shameful parts, your disgusting parts, your hidden lepers, your sinful parts, those tax collector parts, those inner prostitutes and blasphemers, your Pharisee parts, the parts of you that are so lost and so isolated and so angry and hateful, those parts? Most of us will say "no way, no way does anyone get to see those parts if I can help it, let alone love those parts. Love those parts? That's crazy." How about your terrified parts, your desperate parts, your wounded, traumatized parts? The ones that no one seems to want? The parts of you that have been rejected by everybody, including yourself.

This podcast is for us Catholics who understand at least intellectually, that we have those parts. And that those parts need to be loved, and that those parts also need to be redeemed. Now for anyone out there who is saying, "Well, I don't think I have any parts like that, Dr. Peter, I don't have any problems being loved." Well, my response to that is one of two possibilities. Either you are 1) a very special person who has been freed from our fallen human condition, and you've achieved an extraordinary degree of perfection in the natural and spiritual realms, and if so, congratulations. You don't need this podcast. You don't need this episode. You are so far above the rest of us--I'm in awe of you. You don't need what I have to offer. That's the first possibility.

Second possibility? You don't know yourself very well. You are out of touch with yourself and your parts--you are disconnected inside. Unless you've reached a fair degree of sanctity, it is especially hard for you to tolerate being loved by God and our refusal to accept the love of God throughout all of us. That's the primary reason we don't love God back. That's also the primary reason we don't love our neighbor, and why we don't love ourselves. We won't be loved first.

God loved us first. It all starts with God's love, not our love. Heisman Trophy winner Tim Tebow in his book, 'Shaken' says, "We were created by love, in love and for love." And St. Paul, he tells us in Romans 5:8, "God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." God loved us first.

And the world does not know God. Christianity is the way to discover who God actually is--to discover who love actually is. 1 John 3:1, "See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are. The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know him." What I want you to remember, St. John in his first letter says, "We love because he first loved us." We love because God first loved us, and it's up to us to take that love in, to let that love come into every corner of our being. And that doesn't sound easy, and it's not as easy as it sounds.

I am Dr. Peter Malinoski, a.k.a. Dr. Peter, clinical psychologist, trauma therapist, podcaster, blogger, cofounder and president of Souls and Hearts--but most of all, I am a beloved little son of God, a passionate Catholic who wants to help you experience the height and depth and breadth and warmth and the light of the love of God, especially God, the Father and our primary mother, Mary. What I want for you more than anything else is that you enter into a deep, intimate, personal, loving relationship with the three persons of the Trinity and with our Lady. This is what this Interior Integration for Catholics podcast is all about. This is what Souls and Hearts is all about--all about shoring up the natural foundation for the spiritual life of intimacy with God, all about overcoming the natural human formation, deficits and obstacles to contemplative union with God our Father, and with our Lady, our Mother.

We are on an adventure of love together. Episode 94 of this podcast focused on the primacy of love in the Catholic life. Episode 95 focused on trauma's devastating impact on our capacity to love. Episode 96 discussed how trauma hardens us against being loved. Episode 97 discussed how trauma predisposes us to self-hatred and indifference to ourselves, a refusal to love ourselves. And Episode 98. the last episode was all about ordered self-love, how we need to love ourselves in an ordered way in order to love God and neighbor, to carry out the two great commandments.

Today, we are going to take a step back. We're going to look at the most critical prerequisite for loving God and others. We are going to discuss being loved first, accepting the love of God first before we try to love. This is absolutely essential. The most critical mistake that most Catholics make is to refuse the love of God. Let me say that again. The most critical mistake, the most devastating, catastrophic mistake that most Catholics make is to refuse to allow God's love to transform us entirely, to make us into new men and women.

Let's start out with the order of love. First thing--God leads with love. God makes the first move. He created us, he moves toward us. We who he created, we who have fallen from grace because of original sin. We don't make the first move. God does. He loved us first, and he continues to love us first, and our whole mission, our whole purpose is to respond to his love in love.

I want to read to you a brief passage from Shawn Mitchell. He wrote an article called 'We Love Because He First Loved Us', and he is with Those Catholic Men. You can find this online. Shawn Mitchell says, "We love because he first loved us. These words from the first letter of John beautifully and s...

Confusion and controversy abound in the Catholic Church about self-love.  Learn four ways to understand self-love, why we avoid self-love, the six reasons it is important to cultivate proper self-love, what is appropriate self-sacrifice, and receive two practical spiritual means for growing in proper self-love:  The Litany of Self-Love and also an entirely new way of examining your conscience.

IIC 98 Self Love -- What Catholics Need to Know

Today we are talking about self-love: the love of self. There is so much controversy, so much confusion about self-love among Catholics. Is self-love good and holy, or is self-love bad and dangerous? Is self-love necessary for loving others? Is self-love unavoidable? The answers from Catholic writers and thinkers and saints are all over the board with regard to self-love, with so many apparent contradictions that it can make your head spin. And the positions from different reputable Christian sources are extreme; their positions seem irreconcilable.

Here is just a sampling: St. Augustine said, "there can be only two basic loves...the love of God unto the forgetfulness of self or the love of self unto the forgetfulness and denial of God." St. Maximus the Confessor, "Flee from self-love, the mother of malice..." Thomas A Kempis, in the 'Imitation of Christ', "Know that self-love does you more harm than anything else in the world." Father Jean Nicholas Grou, Jesuit priest, "Self-love is the one source of all the illusions of the spiritual life. By its means, the devil exercises his deceits, leads souls astray, drags them sometimes to hell by the very road that seems to lead them to heaven." St. Thomas Aquinas says, "Inordinate self-love is the cause of every sin". And here's from Pope Francis from December 9th, 2015, "The movements of self-love, which make mercy foreign in the world, are so numerous that we often fail to recognize them as limitations and as sin." 'The Catechism of the Catholic Church', paragraph 1850, "...sin is thus 'love of oneself, even to contempt of God'". And St. Paul in 2 Timothy 3:1-5, said this, "But understand this that in the last days there will come times of stress. For men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, inhuman, implacable, slanderers, profligates, fierce, haters of good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, holding the form of religion but denying the power of it. Avoid such people."

Lovers of self. Now we also hear from St Thomas Aquinas that, "Self-love is in one way common to all, in another way proper to good men, in another, proper to evil men." Father, Jacques Philippe, in his book 'Called To Life', with his pastoral approach, says, "Love of God, love of neighbor and love of self grow together and sustain one another as they grow. If one is absent or neglected, the others will suffer. Like the legs of a tripod, all three are needed in order to stand, and each leans on the other." He also says, "Love travels along two paths that are inseparable in the end: love of God and love of neighbor. But as this text suggests, there is another aspect of charity--love of one's self. ("You shall love your neighbor as yourself"). This self-love is good and necessary. Not egoism that refers everything to "me", but the grace to live in peace with oneself, consent to be what one is, with one's talents and limitations." And the Bishop of Sioux Falls, Donald Edward DeGrood, said this, "We are called to love ourselves as God made us and loves us. It is sometimes difficult to know our inherent dignity, to receive God's love and live out of the truth of who we are. And just as God loves us and indeed rejoices and delights in us, so too are we call to rejoice and delight in who we are and who others are." And Catholic moral theologian, Michel Therrien, in a December 3, 2020 article in Denver Catholic said, "...the proper love of self is the foundation for knowing how to treat others."

Alright, so you might be asking me, "Dr. Peter, Which is it? Are we supposed to be loving ourselves or not loving ourselves?" Laura, an Australian Catholic writer, in her blogpost, 'Self-Love for Catholics: What is the Catholic teaching on loving yourself' says this, "Depending on who you ask, the idea of self-love can get some very different reactions. Even the Bible seems a little confused. On the one hand, Jesus calls us to love our neighbors as ourselves. On the other hand, St. Paul condemns those who are 'lovers of self'. I won't like to bag out the Bible but mixed messages much? There is no section in the catechism on self-love. There is no treatise entitled 'Loving Thyself' by St. Bernard or 'The Internal Positive Dialogues" of St. Catherine of Siena. There definitely aren't any ancient meditations on "How Awesome a Monk Am I Today!", or "Eighty Affirmations for the Doubting Deacon" from the Patristic Era. And if I'm honest, this is super frustrating. Maybe you found the same?"

Well, Laura, thank you for bringing this up. I find this whole body of Catholic literature on self-love both fascinating and frustrating at the same time and also so very important. We really need to sort this out because the stakes are so high. So rather than curse the darkness, here is my attempt to light a candle for you, to illuminate the best that I've found on this essential theme: Self-Love.

I am Dr. Peter Malinoski, clinical psychologist, passionate Catholic. And this is Interior Integration for Catholics. The Interior Integration for Catholics Podcast is all about bringing you the best of psychology and human formation and harmonizing it with the perennial truths of our Catholic faith. Each month we take the most important human formation issues head on. We don't shy away from the tough topics, and today we have a tough topic. How do we rightly understand self-love? What is self-love and how should we as Catholics understand it, given this whirlwind of confusion and controversy that has stretched back for centuries? This is episode 98, titled 'Self-Love--What Catholics Need to Know', and it's released on October 3, 2022.

We have been working through a series on trauma and wellbeing--we started that with episode 88. In the last episode, episode 97 titled: 'Unlove of Self: How Trauma Predisposes You to Self-Hatred and Indifference', we looked at the impact of trauma and how it contributes to us not loving ourselves.

Today, we're switching gears. We're looking at what it means to be in an ordered relationship with ourselves. Is self-love a part of right relating with ourselves? We are going to bring so much clarity to this topic today.

It is so good to be with you, thank you for listening in, thank you for being together with me once again. I'm glad you're here and I'm glad that together we're exploring what self-love really means.

Now, I want to do a little introduction here to this topic. About 20 years ago, a theologian friend of mine was encouraging me to get out more. I was pretty sheltered, I was in private practice. I wasn't doing any public speaking, but he was really impressed with some of the things that we were talking about in our conversations. At the time, I was sorting out the psychology thing, too. I was really trying to figure out how to practice as a psychologist and ground that practice of psychology in a Catholic understanding of the human person. I had a keen sense that after I die, on my day of particular judgment I will be responsible before the Lord for every word that I uttered to every client, for everything I taught or said or advised, and I was worried. I didn't want to lead anyone astray. I didn't want to lead my clients astray. And I knew that I was speculating, bec...

In this episode, we review the many ways we fail to love ourselves, through self-hatred and through indifference toward ourselves.  We discuss the ways that unlove for self manifests itself, contrasting a lack of love with ordered self-love through the lens of Bernard Brady's five characteristics of love.  We discuss the impact of a lack of self-love on your body.  I then invite you into an experiential exercise to get to know a part of you that is not loving either another part of you or your body.  

IIC 97 Unlove of Self

"Mourn not the dead that in the cool earth lie

dust unto dust

The calm, sweet earth that mothers all who die

As all men must;

Mourn not your captive comrades who must dwell

Too strong to strive

Within each steel-bound coffin of a cell,

Buried alive;

But rather mourn the apathetic throng

The cowed and the meek

Who see the world's great anguish and its wrong

And dare not speak!"

--Ralph Chaplain, Bars and Shadows

I am Dr. Peter Malinoski, clinical psychologist, passionate Catholic. This is the Interior Integration for Catholics podcast coming to you from the Souls and Hearts studio in Indianapolis, Indiana. This podcast is all about bringing you the best of psychology in human formation and harmonizing it with the perennial truths of our Catholic faith. In this Interior Integration for Catholics podcast, we take the most important human formation issues head on, without trepidation, without hesitation. We don't mince words. We directly address the most important concerns in the natural realm, the absolute central issues that we need to take on with all our energy and all our resources.

We have been working through a series on trauma and wellbeing. It started in Episode 88, and in the last episode, Episode 96, that one was called 'I Am a Rock How Trauma Hardens Us Against Being Loved', and that episode we discuss the impact of trauma on how we accept love from others, including God. In this episode, we're now going to address how trauma sets us up to refuse to love ourselves.

Welcome to episode 97 of Interior Integration for Catholics titled 'Unlove of Self: How Trauma Predisposes You to Self Hatred and Indifference'. It's released on September 5th, 2022. It is so good to be with you. Thank you for listening in and for being together with me once again. I am glad we are here and that we're exploring the great unlove of self.

The great unlove of self. Sort of like the uncola ads from 7-UP in the late 60s through the 70s, the 80s, even into the late 90s. Unlove of self. What do I mean by that? You might tell me that if I don't love myself, then I'm hating myself. All right, let's go with that. Let's explore self-hatred and self-loathing. Self-hatred. What is self-hatred? Self-hatred is hatred that's directed towards one's self rather than towards others. And there is an article titled 'Self-Loathing' by Jodi Clark. She's a licensed professional counselor at verywellmind.com where she says, 'Self-loathing or self-hatred is extreme criticism of one's self. It may feel as though nothing you do is good enough or that you are unworthy or undeserving of good things in life. Self-hate can feel like having a person following you around all day, every day, criticizing you and pointing out every flaw or shaming you for every mistake". Self-hatred, right? This is a critical thing.

Brennan Manning said, "In my experience, self-hatred is the dominant malaise, crippling Christians and stifling their growth in the Holy Spirit". Now, I'm not sure I agree with that. It depends on your definition of self-hatred. I'm more focused on shame and the fear of shame overwhelming the self. Those are such drivers of self-hatred. And you can see that in that in that definition that we just had from Jodi Clark, right. Undeserving of good things in life: criticizing you, pointing out every flaw, shaming you for every mistake. Shame, shame, shame. And Angel Plotner, the author of 'Who Am I?', Dissociative Identity Disorder survivor says, "Shame plays a huge part in why you hate who you are". Shame is so central. I'm going to invite you. I did a whole 13-episode series on shame episodes 37 to 49 of this podcast all about shame and trauma. So, so good to check that out if you haven't done it already.

Eric Hoffer said, "It is not the love of self, but the hatred of self, which is at the root of the troubles that afflict our world". And Basil Maturin says, "We never get to love by hate, least of all by self-hatred". So this whole topic of self-hatred, so important, so common, even when people don't realize it. Even when people don't realize it because so much self-hatred is unconscious. Laurie Diskin says "We cannot hate ourselves into a version of ourselves we can love". Self-hatred gets us nowhere. Self-hatred brings us to a grinding halt in human development and in spiritual development.

So let's talk about this. What do we mean when we're talking about self-hatred? The primary way that you hate yourself is for a part of you to hate another part of you. I'm talking about intra-psychic hatred. Hatred within you, for you, by you. This is self-hatred.

So I'm going to bring in an internal family system description of parts. Internal Family Systems is an approach to psychotherapy, and it holds that we are both a unity and a multiplicity. And in that multiplicity, we have parts. And parts are like separate, independently operating little personalities within us. Each part has its own unique, prominent needs, its own role in your life, its own emotions, body sensations, guiding beliefs, assumptions. Each part has its own typical thoughts, intentions, desires, attitudes, impulses, its own interpersonal style, its own worldview. Each part of you has a different attitude or position toward other parts of you, and each part of you has different beliefs and assumptions about your body. Robert Falconer calls these parts, "insiders". If you want to learn a lot more about Internal Family Systems, check out episode 71 of this podcast titled 'A New and Better Way of Understanding Myself and Others'. Parts are, in a nutshell, kind of like those little figures in the movie Inside Out. Remember anger and sadness and joy. They're these little personalities, like I said, within us. And every one of your parts has a very narrow and limited vision when that part is not in right relationship with your innermost self. Each of your parts usually has a strong agenda, something that they're trying to accomplish; some good that the part is seeking for you. And what happens when parts are not in right relationship with the self--if they're not working in a collaborative and cooperative way with your innermost self, is that they wind up polarizing with other parts. They wind up getting locked into conflict with other parts. And I gave some examples of polarization among parts in my most recent weekly reflection. That one was titled 'The Counterfeits of Self Giving', and that was published, that was sent out on August 31st, 2022. You can check that out at soulsandhearts.com/blog if you want to take a look at that and it discusses how parts get polarized around the idea of giving of self. And I talked about how a compliant surrenderer part can polarize with a feisty protector part within oneself. Or how a self-sacrificer part can polarize with a rebel part. So, I'm going to invite you to check that out, soulsandhearts.com/blog, go back to August 31st, 2022.

Now Bessel van der Kolk, in his excellent book 'The Body Keeps the Score', devotes all of chapter 17 to Internal Family Systems....

1. Summary:  Real love (agape) is given freely -- but it is not received freely in our fallen human condition.  Join me in this episode as we discuss the costs of opening our hearts to love\and the price of being loved fully, of being loved completely, in all of our parts.  We review why so many people refuse to be loved -- and we examine the psychological and human formation reasons for turning away from love.  Finally we discuss what we can do to get over our natural-level impediments to receiving love.  
2. Lead-in  
   1. I am a rock I am an island

I've built walls

A fortress deep and mighty

That none may penetrate

I have no need of friendship -- friendship causes pain

It's laughter and it's loving I disdain

I am a rock I am an island

1. I am a rock -- Paul Simon wrote it in 1965 and Simon and Garfunkel  Released it as a single in 1966, and it rose to #3 on the charts -- why because it resonated with people.  It was popular because it spoke out loud what many people's parts feel.   The desire to become a rock, the impulse to build the walls, to keep everyone out, to repudiate love and laughter, to not need anything or anyone.  
2.  Kate McGahan -- untitled poem 

I don't need anyone, I said.

Then you came

I need I need! 

I NEED YOU. 

I needed you.

What did you teach me?

Not to need you.

NOT TO NEED. -

1. I don't want to be in love, anymore. I just want to be left alone. And no, I am not depressed or something. No suicide is happening here... I am fine. Trust me. Sharmajiassamwale
2. So you want love.  But you also don't want love.  But you want love.  But you don't.  You do.  You don't.  You're conflicted.  How do you understand this conflict within you?  Can you and I understand this push-pull, this attraction - avoidance, this Yes and No within us more clearly.  Yes we can.  And we must.  Or we will wind up always skating along the edge of love, never really entering in.  And there are consequences for that -- and no one put it more succinctly than the English poet and playwright Robert Browning, who said: “Without love, our earth is a tomb”  
3. Intro
    
   1. We do want to be loved, but we don't.  Why?  Because we want the benefits of love, but we don't want the costs
4.  
   1. The Benefits
       
      1. To love and be loved is to feel the sun from both sides.  David Viscott
   2.  
      1. If you don't have that memory of being loved, you are condemned to search the world for something to fill you up. -- Michael Jackson
5. 
   
   1. The costs.  
      1. Real love is given freely, but it is not received freely in this fallen world.  
         1. Almost no one talks about the costs of being loved.  I find that so strange.  People don't think this way. 
         2. There are costs to receiving love, to accepting love, to allowing love in to our hearts.  
         3. It's painful to be loved in this fallen world.  
            1. this is not well understood by many people, especially those who are not in touch with trauma, or who haven't suffered as much as others 
               1. Bernard Brady's 2003 book "Christian Love: How Christians Through the Ages have Understood Love 
                  1. Second sentence of the book, in the preface:  "Loving seems entirely natural and being loved seems wonderfully good."
                  2. Not to many people
                  3. RCC member -- so glad you can discuss tolerating being loved.  

1. Real love -- Agape -- burns away things that are sinful within us -- it doesn't coexist with the vice within us.
    
   1. Bernard Brady: Christian Love, p. 16:  "…love transforms those who love and those who are loved."  
2. 
   
   1. Every true love and friendship is a story of unexpected transformation. If we are the same person before and after we loved, that means we haven't loved enough.”   ― Elif Shafak, The Forty Rules of Love
3. Change is scary
    
   1. “Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.”― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment 
4. 
   

1. Real love also purifies us from anything that is not morally wrote, but that is disordered or dysfunctional or imperfect
2. Real love is the greatest good.  And because it's the greatest good, it requires us to give up lesser goods.  Perceived good and actual goods.  
   1. Coping strategies, crutches that helped us in the past
   2. Analogy of the safe -- limited room, silver and gold. 
3. Vulnerability
4. I will lose what I have
5. I will lose to possibility of being loved in the future
6. I don't want to find out I am unlovable.  I can't bear that.   
7. Because for love to be real, for love to be agape means me allowing you to love all of me.  All my parts.  My entire being
    
   1. Not just the acceptable parts of me in the shop window, those that I allow others to see.  
8. 
   
9. The greatness of the adventure of loving can be intimidating
    
   1. Love, in some sense, is nothing other than an invitation to great joy and suffering, so they shy away from it.  Paul Catalanotto Refusal to love is also refusal to live  The Catholic Weekly
10.  
    1. Dietrich von Hildrebrand those who "wish to linger with small joys in the state of harmless happiness … in which they feel themselves to be master of the situation … lacking any element of surprise or adventure.
11.  
12. Let's go on this adventure of being loved and loving together.  I want you to come with me into the themes of this podcast.  I want you to really engage with what I'm presenting to you.  Not just listen like the Athenians listened to Paul about the resurrection of the dead.  Acts 17:32: Now when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some mocked; but others said, “We will hear you again about this.”  But they weren't really that interested.  Only a few of the Athenians joined him.  Stay with me in this Episode 96 of Interior Integration for Catholics, released on August 1, 2022, and titled "I Am a Rock: How Trauma Hardens us Against Being Loved" I am Dr. Peter Malinoski, clinical psychologist, passionate Catholic and I am very pleased that we can share and engage with this information.
     
    1. Why do I think being loved is so important?   First because receiving love is absolutely essential.  It is our starting point in the spiritual life.  And second, because most people will not realxly allow themselves to be loved. Psychiatrist and Harvard Professor George Valliant wrote:  It's very hard, for most of us to tolerate being loved.-- That's been my experience as well.  The vast majority of people have chosen to severely limit how much love they will let in, how much love they will tolerate.  
13. 
    
    1. You can't love unless you are willing to be loved.  
       1. 1 John 4:19:  We love because he first loved us  Look at the order here.  God loved us first.  We can't generate any love on our own.  We can reflect love, we can channel love, but we can't create love out of nothing like God can.  We have to cooperate in love and be open to love in order to love, in order to follow the two great com...

1. Summary:  In this episode, we focus on how unresolved trauma undermines and sabotages both our capacity and our inclination to love well.  We explore how unresolved trauma impacts each of the five characteristics of love -- compromising our ability to love in an affective (emotional), affirming, responsive, unitive and steadfast way.  We also dive into how so trauma pulls us to focus inward, and to protect ourselves, undercutting the vulnerability and willingness to engage that are required for deep love and we discuss hope for change.  
2. Lead-in
    
   1. They say love is blind, but it’s trauma that’s blind. Love sees what is.“ — Neil Strauss, The Truth: An Uncomfortable Book About Relationships
       
      1. And Neil Strauss is right on that.  Love connects with reality.  With God who is the ultimate realness, the ultimate being, the I AM.  
   2. 
      
      1. Trauma is blind and it blinds us.  That's what we are talking about today.  Trauma and its impact on live.  
   3. 
      
3. 
   
4. Intro:
    
   1. Dear listener, You and I are together in the adventure of this podcast, Interior Integration for Catholics, we are journeying together, and I am thankful to be with you.
5.  
   1. I am Dr. Peter Malinoski, clinical psychologist and passionate Catholic and together, Why are we here?  We are here together to bring you the best of psychology and human formation and harmonize it with the perennial truths of the Catholic Faith. So we can have the best of both.  That's why.  
   2. Today, we're going to take a broad perspective, a bird's-eye view of trauma's destructive consequences to our capacity to love.  What is the effect of trauma on our capacity and inclination to love?  That is the question for us to explore together today.  
   3. So welcome to episode 95,  of Interior Integration for Catholics, titled Trauma's Devastating Impact on our Capacity to Love, released on July 4, 2022, Independency Day in the USA,
   4. This podcast, Interior Integration for Catholics is part of our broader outreach, Souls and Hearts bringing the best of psychology grounded in a Catholic worldview to you and the rest of the world through our website soulsandhearts.com.  
   5. Review Trauma.  We are in the midst of  whole series of episodes on trauma.  So just a brief thumbnail review.  
      1. Started with Episode 88 Trauma: Defining and Understanding the Experience  Really important to understand the inner experience of trauma -- so you can recognize it in your own life and recognize it an empathetic and attuned way in others' loves.  Part of loving them.  
      2. Episode 89 Your Trauma, Your Body: Protection vs. Connection --  a current understanding of how large a role our bodies have in our experience of trauma.  Our bodies.  
      3. Episode 90:  Your Well-Being: The Secular Experts Speak  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 make us happy, from the 4th century BC to the present day.  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.  
      4. Episode 92:  Understanding and Healing your Mind through IPNB  neuropsychiatrist Dr. Dan Siegel's Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB) and what IPNB can show us about psychological health.  We review the triangle of well-being, the nature of secure attachments, and the basis for mental health from an IPNB perspective.  We examine the characteristics of a healthy mind and how it functions, and the two signs that reliable indicate all psychological symptoms and mental dysfunction.  We discuss the nine domains of integration
      5. Three inner experiential exercises in Episode 93
      6. Episode 94:  The Primacy of Love  In this episode, I discuss the central importance of love as the marker of well-being from a Catholic perspective -- our capacity to live out  the two great commandments.  We explore how love is the distinguishing characteristics of Christians, and we discussed Catholic theologian Bernard Brady's five attributes or characteristics of love -- how love is affective, affirming, responsive, unitive and steadfast.  We discuss what is commonly missing from philosophical and theological approaches to love, and we briefly touch in the death of love and distortions of love. 
      7. So check those out if you haven't already.  This 

1. Going to address love in general -- focusing on loving
    
   1. In future episodes, will review
       
      1. Tolerating being loved
          
         1. Brady quxote
      2.  
   2. 
      
      1. Ordered self-love
   3.  
2. 
   
3. The experience of trauma screws up our loves -- where we go to find good.  It screws up where we are seeking, how we seek to be loved and how we seek to love.  
   1. St. Augustine:  
      1. He lives in justice and sanctity who is an unprejudiced assessor of the intrinsic value of things.  He is a man who has an ordinate love: he neither loves what should not be loved nor fails to love what should be loved. On Christina Doctrine, I, 27
      2. We need ordered love.  Why -- Bernard Brady put it -- Because we become like what we love.  Whatever we embrace in our love, we become like that person or that thing.  
      3. As Augustine considered the dissipation of this youth, he wrote "I loved beautiful things of a lower order, and I was going down to the depths."   Confessions.  
   2. So much of the problem with disordered love  comes from misdirected seeking to get your attachment needs meet.  That's the problem. 
      1. We have legitimate attachment needs  Trauma strips away our sense of 
         1. A felt sense of Safety and security
         2. Feeling seen, heard, known and understood
         3. Feeling comforted, soothed, reassured
         4. Feeling cherished, treasured, delighted in
         5. Feel the other person wills my highest good.  
         6. All from Brown and Elliott 2016, Attachment disturbances in Adults
   3. Where do we find our safety and security?  In both the natural and spiritual realms, we find it in attachment security needs being met.
       
      1. Five primary attachment security needs (Brown and Elliott)
          
         1. A felt sense of safety and protection, a deep sense of security, felt in my bones
             
            1. It makes it so much easier to love when we feel safe and secure.   
         2. 
            
            1. "People want to be safe, and comfortable. If safety and comfort is to be found in guns, then they will take up guns—of their own accord, in their own need. And when safety and comfort are found in libraries, then the guns rust.“ — Algis Budrys American writer  Source: Some Will Not Die (1961), Chapter 6 (p. 122)
         3.  
      2. 
         
         1. Feeling seen, heard, known, and understood
      3.  
   4. 
      

I want, by understanding myself, to understand others.“ — Katherine Mansfield New Zealand author 1888 - 1923

1. Being comforted, soothed, and reassured
2. Feeling valued, cherished, treasured, delighted in
    
   1. You are my sunshine published by Jimmie Davis and Charles Mitchell on January 30, 1940
3.  

You are my sunshine

My only sunshine

You ...

1. Summary, In this episode, I discuss the central importance of love as the marker of well-being from a Catholic perspective -- our capacity to live out  the two great commandments.  We explore how love is the distinguishing characteristics of Christians, we detail the eight different kinds of love, and we discuss Catholic theologian Bernard Brady's five attributes or characteristics of love -- how love is affective, affirming, responsive, unitive and steadfast.  We discuss what is commonly missing from philosophical and theological approaches to love, and we briefly touch in the death of love and distortions of love.  
2. Lead-in
    
   1. I want to speak to you from my heart today.  I want to share with you heart to heart about what it most important to me.  And maybe what is most important to you.  I want to talk with you today about love.  Real love.  Fundamental Love. Radical love.  The real thing.  Not the counterfeits of love that you and I have pursued in our lives in one way or another -- the fakes loves we've mistaken for real love, or the lesser loves that we've tried to inflate into more than they could possibly be.
3.  
   1. I think love is not only the most essential experience in the whole world, it's also the most confusing for us.  Think about it.  What else has confused you more than love?  What has been more enduringly puzzling than love?  What has been more elusive for you?  What has been more enigmatic than love in your life?  What have you struggled with more than love?  
4. 
   
   1. Love -- the word is evocative.  The word is provocative, it stirs us up.  You parts react in so many different ways to the word love.  And so that's where we are going today.  Into the mystery of love.
5.  
6. Intro:
    
   1. Maybe you are feeling like you're just struggling to survive.  
      1. I want more for you than that.
7. 
   
   1. Maybe much of the time you feel like things are OK, maybe pretty good.
       
      1. I want more for you than that.
   2.  
8. 
   
   1. I want to share with you the very best of what I have with you on the central focus of well-being from a Catholic perspective.    
9. 
   
   1. Broad overview 
      1. Let's review a little.  In episode 88, we began a series on trauma with that piece Trauma: Defining and Understanding the Experience -- that one was a huge hit -- so many people interested in it, by far the most downloads of any episode.  
      2. In episode 89, called Your Trauma, Your Body: Protection vs. Connection -- we did a deep dive into the effects of trauma on the body, really understanding trauma from the perspective of Polyvagal theory by Steven Porges and Deb Dana.  
      3. From there, though, I really wanted to look at well-being -- how does secular psychology understand well-being -- 
         1. It's so important to understand what well-being is, what it looks like, how it feels.  So many people have never really experienced well being.  It's possible that you've never really experienced well-being.  
         2. So I started a subseries on well-being within the broader trauma series.  
      4. So shared with you the secular views of well being in Episodes 90 and 92 of this podcast
      5. We really dived into what the best of current psychological theorizing says about well-being
          
         1. Episode 90  Your Well-Being: The Secular Experts Speak
             
            1. DSM 5 -- which doesn't have a description of well being
         2.  
            1. PDM 2
         3.  
            1. Hedonic Well-being
         4.  
            1. Eudemonic Well-being
         5.  
            1. Freud's ideas of well-being
         6.  
            1. Contributions of Positive Psychology - pioneered by Martin Seligman
         7.  
            1. Polyvagal Theory -- Stephen Porges, Deb Dana
         8.  
            1. Internal Family Systems
         9.  
      6. 
         
         1. Episode 92 Understanding and Healing your Mind through IPNB
             
            1. Interpersonal Neurobiology -- Daniel Siegel -- a lot to say about the healthy mind, a sense of well-being.  Very well developed.  
         2. 
            
      7. 
         
         1. Episode 93 consisted of three experiential exercises
             
            1. The first on the ways in which you reject yourself or condemn yourself as a person
         2.  
            1. The second on protection vs. connection -- your internal reactions to your wounds.  That one was based off of polyvagal theory
         3.  
            1. The third was on exploring your own inner chaos and rigidity within -- based off of Daniel Siegel's Interpersonal Neurobiology and one point he makes is that all psychological symptoms can be thought in terms of rigidity and/or chaos.  Rigidity and chaos are signs of having lost a sense of well-being.  
         4. 
            
            1. I invite you to check those out if you haven't already, there's a lot of opportunities in those experiential exercises for you to do your inner work.  
         5. 
            
      8. 
         
      9. As you know, I am Dr. Peter Malinoski, clinical psychologist, passionate Catholic, and I am the voice of this podcast, Interior Integration for Catholics
          
         1. In this podcast, Interior Integration for Catholics, we take on the most important psychological questions.  We take the most important human formation issues head on, directly, without mincing words, without trepidation, without vacillation, without hesitation -- We are dealing with the most important concerns in the natural realm, the absolute central issues that we need to address with all of our energy and all of our resources.  
      10. 
          
          1. And up until now, the most important episodes I've done are numbers 37 to 49 -- that was the 13-episode series on shame.  Why?  Because shame is the major driver of so much emotional distress, so many identity issues, and so many psychological symptoms.  
      11. 
          
          1. But these new few episodes, these episodes on well-being from a Catholic perspective, informed first by the perennial wisdom of the Catholic Church, and then secondarily by the best of psychological science, theory, research and practice, these episodes on love, these are the most important.  Why?  Because, in two words, love heals.  Love restores.  Love makes new.  Love is our mission, love is our goal, love is the destiny we are called to.  
      12. 
          
          1. This is episode 94 of the Interior Integration for Catholics podcast, released on June 6, 2022 and it's titled Well-Being from a Catholic Perspective:  The Primacy of Love
      13.  
10. Love as the Center
     
    1. We were made in love and for love and to love.
        
       1. Prayer to God in the Litanies of the Heart: "Lord Jesus, You created me in love, for love. Bring me to a place of vulnerability within the safety of your loving arms."  Discussed the Litanies of the Heart with Dr. Gerry at length in Episode 91 of this podcast, a special episode all about the litanies of the heart.  
    2. 
       
       1. Inviting to the adventure of loving
           
          1. So many people are just surviving -- their vision is so reduced, they are not even looking to be loved or to love.  Maybe that's you, to some degree.  
       2. 
          
          1. They are not on the adventure -- the are jaded, disillusioned, tired, wounded by betrayal or abandonment, cautious now, skeptical, calculating when it c...

1. Summary:  In this episode I discuss the crucial role of the right kinds of corrective and healing experiences in our lives.  I then offer you three inner experiential exercises to help you understand three questions: 1) In what ways do you not love yourself (with a special focus on inner critics); 2) your inner tension between connection and protection; and 3) your internal battles with rigidity and chaos.
2. Lead in:  
   1. Experience.  
   2. I have been wanting for a long time to offer you some experiential exercises 
      1. In episodes 89, 90, and 92, I gave you a lot of conceptual information about polyvagal theory, about interpersonal neurobiology, some more about Internal family systems, but something has been missing
      2. And what's been missing, in my opinion, is the experiential part of this for us.  
         1. Julius Caesar "Experience is the teacher of all things"  De Bello Civilli
         2. John Stuart Mill:  There are many truths of which the full meaning cannot be realized until personal experience has brought it home.  -- On liberty
   3. Experience.  There is no substitute for experiential learning
       
      1. Otherwise it can stay all in the conceptual realm, all in your head, all in your mind.  
         1. Michael Smith:  The major problem is that we tend to live our life in our head, in our thoughts and stories, cut off from our actual experience.
   4. 
      
      1. What I want for you is much more than that.  I want you to be able to change for the better in the deepest ways.  
         1. And you can't think or study your way there
   5. 
      
      1. Not the same experiences over and over -- some people have that kind of life.  
         1. Rather, a capacity for experience -- the ability to take in, process, and integrate new experiences as part of your human formation.  
         2. George Bernard Shaw:  Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.
   6. 
      
   7. What holds us back?
       
      1. Many would say fear.  Fear of the unknown.  Fear of putting ourselves out there.  Fear keeps us from new experiences and for the corrective effects of new experiences.  And I think that's true.  But I don't think fear is the primary obstacle.  There's some thing deeper than fear that holds us back.
   8.  
      1. What is it that really holds us back from new experiences?  What goes deeper than our fear?  [Drum roll]
      2. Our Shame.  It is our shame that holds us back from new experiences and the healing that new experiences can bring to us.
      3. The fear is a secondary reaction.  We wouldn't have the fear if we didn't have the shame, the gnawing sense of inadequacy or not being good enough.  Too much shame makes us fragile, way to concerned about protecting ourselves
      4. And in the natural realm, it's shame that most often keeps us from taking in the love from God, from others, and from ourselves -- it's shame that generates our fear, the desire to protect our wounds, that shuts us off from ourselves and other people
          
         1. Shame generates fear -- fear fuels our self-protection and shuts down the openness to experience.  The shame to fear to self-protection progression builds walls around our hearts.  We see vulnerability as dangerous.
      5.  
         1. Brené Brown, Daring Greatly  Vulnerability is the core, the heart, the center, of meaningful human experiences.
      6.  
   9. Shame is so important, I spent 13 episodes of this podcast just on that one topic.  Those 13 episodes, episodes 37 to 49 on it
       
      1. Those episodes on shame are foundational -- they are the most fundamental episodes of this podcast.  So many of our problem go back to shame, and nearly all psychological dysfunction in the natural realm has its root and origin in shame.  
   10. 
       
       1. If you haven't listened to those episodes, or if it's been a long time, go back and listen to them.  
   11. 
       
   12. So now, in this episode, I am bringing to you the kinds of experiential exercises, the kind of experiential learning that can help you understand yourself so much better and get you started toward a more solid natural foundation for your spiritual life, much better human formation.
   13. And what I want for you most of all is for you to experience love.  To be able to receive love -- to receive love from others, from yourself, from God.  And to love.  To join those men and women who are on an adventure of love
        
       1. 1 John 4:18 There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.
   14.  
       1. How does it do that?  How does perfect love cast out fear -- does it just numb fear while leaving your shame intact?  No, I really don’t think that's how it works for me and you. 
   15. 
       
       1. Love is the antidote for shame.  Love cures shame.  Three kinds of love.  
          1. Love from God
          2. Love from others, including the saints, especially our Mother Mary
          3. Love from ourselves to ourselves.  
   16. 
       
   17. I invite you to join me on this great adventure of loving, especially in this episode, right now, this episode number 93 of this podcast, Interior Integration for Catholics, let us journey together
   18. I am Dr. Peter Malinoski, clinical psychologist and passionate Catholic and together, we can have the relational encounters we need to learn to be loved and to love.  
   19.  Interior Integration for Catholics is part of our broader outreach, Souls and Hearts.  Souls and Hearts brings you the best of psychology and human formation grounded in a Catholic understanding of the human person to you and the rest of the world through our website soulsandhearts.com
   20. We are continuing our series on how the best of secular psychological approaches define mental health, psychological well-being.  We started with Episode 89 on Polyvagal Theory and covered Positive Psychology, Psychodynamic Psychotherapy and Internal Family Systems in Episode 90.  
   21. Today's episode, number 93 is entitled "Three Experiential Exercisesx"  and it's released on May 2, 2022 and today, I am offering you
3. Three longer experiential exercises today, about 20 minutes each
    
   1. Informed by IFS -- can check out episode 71 of this podcast to find out more about IFS -- A new and better way of understanding yourself and others.  Great preparation for these exercises.  
      1. Grounded in a Catholic understanding of the human person
4. 
   
   1. Three experiential exercises
       
      1.  In what ways do you not love yourself? -- where are the gaps in your human formation?  What parts of you are going unloved by you? -- Episode 90 Your Well-being, the Secular experts speak
   2.  
      1. Your inner battle: Protection vs. Connection -- Episode 89 Your Trauma, Your Body: Protection vs. Connection
      2. Rigidity and Chaos -- episode 92 Understanding and Healing your Mind through IPNB
5. 
   
6. Overall guidelines for these exercises
    
   1. Cautions
       
      1. window of tolerance
          
         1. Upside -- Fight or flight, sympathetic activation
      2.  
         1. Downside -- Free response -- dorsal vagal activation, shutting down, numbing out, 
      3. 
         
   2. 
      
      1. don’t have to do this exercise, can stop at any time, reground yourself
   3.  

1. Summary:  In this episode, I invite you to explore and understand with me neuropsychiatrist Dr. Dan Siegel's Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB) and what IPNB can show us about psychological health.  We review the triangle of well-being, the nature of secure attachments, and the basis for mental health from an IPNB perspective.  We examine the characteristics of a healthy mind and how it functions, and the two signs that reliable indicate all psychological symptoms and mental dysfunction.  We discuss the nine domains of integration, mindsight, and the healthy mind platter, and I share my exchange with Dr. Siegel about whether and how IPNB can be integrated with Catholicism.  
2. Lead in:  Today I want to share with you an approach to understanding ourselves and guiding ourselves toward health that I am really excited about, that I think has great potential to help us in our human formation as Catholics.
    
   1. We are together in this great adventure, this podcast, Interior Integration for Catholics, we are journeying together, and I am honored to be able to spend this time with you.  
3. 
   
   1. I am Dr. Peter Malinoski, clinical psychologist and passionate Catholic and together, we are taking on the tough topics that matter to you.  
4. 
   
   1. We bring the best of psychology and human formation and harmonize it with the perennial truths of the Catholic Faith.   
5. 
   
   1. Interior Integration for Catholics is part of our broader outreach, Souls and Hearts bringing the best of psychology and human formation grounded in a Catholic understanding of the human person to you and the rest of the world through our website soulsandhearts.com
6.  
   1. We are continuing our series on how the best of secular psychological approaches define mental health, psychological well-being.  We started with Episode 89 on Polyvagal Theory and covered Positive Psychology, Psychodynamic Psychotherapy and Internal Family Systems in Episode 90.  
7. 
   
   1. Today's episode, number 92 is entitled "Understanding and Healing your Mind through IPNB"  and it's released on April 4, 2022.
8.  
   1. We are going to unpack what IPNB is, what is says about our human condition and I will share with you an exchange I recently had with neuropsychiatrist Dr. Dan Siegel, who brought this whole integrative framework into being, about whether IPNB can be reconciled with Catholicism.  
9. 
   
   1. Stay with me for a really interesting deep dive into this fascinating way of understanding ourselves and others.  
10. Interpersonal Neurobiology or IPNB
     
    1. Let's start by understanding what IPNB is.  Interpersonal neurobiology.  
11. 
    
    1. Breaking down the name interpersonal neurobiology
        
       1. Inter = between us, among us -- implies relationship.  Relational model.  
          1. Not just between you and me, but also between you and you -- inner relationships within you, inner relationships within me.  
    2. 
       
       1. Personal -- very relational.  
          1. Inter-personal and intrapersonal
          2. IPNB is all about the way my deep inner experiences connect with your inner experiences 
    3. 
       
       1. Neurobiology -- not just the field of neurobiology, but all the branches of scientifically studying how human development takes place and how we can promote well-being in our lives.  
          1. Neurobiology brings in all the embodied, physical dimension of our existence.  Our bodies, our brains, our whole nervous system and all of our embodied biology being, that what the neurobiology part refers to 
    4. 
       
       1. Interpersonal neuro-biology or IPNB -- works to be a wholistic approach to the human person.  
    5. 
       
    6. IPNB was developed in the 1990s by neuropsychiatrist Daniel J. Siegel who brought together more than 40 professionals, more than 40 experts from a wide range of scientific disciplines to discuss and demonstrate how the mind, brain, and relationships integrate to influence and change each other.  
    7. Questions that IPNB asks and addresses these questions, five questions standing out to me:
        
       1. What is the human mind?
    8.  
       1. How does the mind develop?
    9.  
       1. What does the human mind look like when it's doing really, really well, when it's functioning optimally?
    10.  
        1. How can we encourage, nurture and cultivate a healthy, strong mind?
    11.  
        1. How can we take what we've learned about the mind and find practical applications that make a real difference in our daily lives? 
           1. Guidance for how to live our lives
           2. Pointers for what may need to change in our thinking and behavior to help us live more fully.  
           3. Very practical -- not just academic ivory-tower, pie-in-the-sky speculation -- Daniel Siegel really wants IPNB to bring healing, growth and well-being to people.  I like that.  I'm into that. 
    12. 
        
    13. What IPNB is Not
         
        1. Not a therapy.  
           1. Not a way of doing therapy.  Rather, a way of understanding that can inform different schools of therapy. 
    14. 
        
        1. IPNB is not a discipline.  It's not a specific branch of knowledge. 
    15. 
        
    16. Rather, IPNB is a framework that draws on all the different disciplines with a rigorous and structured approach to studying things – not just science – They all have a place in the framework.
         
        1. It's a consilient framework:  
           1. Consilience:  E. O. Wilson  Assessing the universal findings discovered and recognized as real or true across fields and disciplines
    17. 
        
        1. The fields contributing to IPNB
            
           1. Anthropology
        2.  
           1. Art
        3.  
           1. Biology (developmental, evolution, genetics, zoology)
        4.  
           1. Chemistry
        5.  
           1. Cognitive Science
        6.  
           1. Computer Science
        7.  
           1. Contemplative Traditions
        8.  
           1. Developmental Psychopathology
        9.  
           1. Liberal Arts
        10.  
            1. Linguistics
        11.  
            1. Neuroscience
                
               1. Affective
            2.  
               1. Cognitive
            3.  
               1. Developmental
            4.  
               1. social
            5.  
        12. 
            
            1. Mathematics
        13.  
            1. Medicine
        14.  
            1. Mental Health
        15.  
            1. Music
        16.  
            1. Physics
        17.  
            1. Poetry
        18.  
            1. Psychiatry
        19.  
            1. Psychology
                
               1. Cognitive
            2.  
               1. developmental
            3.  
               1. Volutionary
            4.  
               1. Experimental
            5.  
               1. of religion
            6.  
               1. Social
            7.  
               1. attachment theory
            8.  
               1. memory
            9.  
        20. 
            
            1. Sociology
        21.  
            1. Systems Theory (chaos and complexity theory)
        22.  
    18. 
        
        1. All of these disciplines, all of these fields of inquiriy contribute to IPNB findings
    19.  
        1. IPNB also seeks a common language for these disciplines to be able to share and discuss about these big topics:<...

1. Summary:  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 make us happy, from the 4th century BC to the present day.  Arristipus, 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.  
2. Lead in
    
   1. In  June of 1991 I was really traumatized
       
      1. Just left a spiritually and psychologically abusive group and I was struggling
   2.  
      1. How could this have happened
   3.  
      1. I thought I was giving my life to God -- and then I find out the community I was in was like this -- 
   4. 
      
      1. Had to confront my own behaviors in the community -- manipulation, deception, betrayals of trust -- things like that.  
   5. 
      
      1. I knew I had to recover.  And so I went on a quest
   6.  
      1. I was still Catholic, I never lost my faith, but I felt really burned by the Catholic Church
   7.  
      1. I wanted to learn everything I could about social influence, about group dynamics, about psychological manipulation -- in part so 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. 
   8. 
      
      1. In short, I was on a quest to find out the best of what secular psychology had to offer.  
   9. 
      
      1. I would have gone to a Catholic Graduate 
   10. 
       
3. 
   
   1. What I was looking for
4.  
   1. What I found
5.  
6. Introduction
    
   1. Question may arise, "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, in the traditions of the Church, in the writings of the Church Fathers and the saints, and in magisterial teaching?  I thought this was a Catholic podcast here.  
      1. Let me ask you question in return then -- Let's say 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 and you're nauseous and you have diarrhea.  How would you react if I were to say to you: "Why are you considering consulting secular medical experts?  What need have you of doctors and a hospital?  Don't you have everything you need in Scripture, in the traditions of the Church, in the writings of the Church Fathers and the saints, and in magisterial teaching?  
         1. If I responded to you like that, you might think I'm a crackpot or that I believe in faith healing alone or that I just don't get what you are experiencing.
         2. Those are the symptoms of an appendicitis, and that infected appendix could burst 48-72 hours after your first symptoms.  If that happens, bacteria spread infection throughout your abdomen, and that is potentially life-threatening.  You would need surgery to remove the appendix and clean out your abdomen.  
      2. Remember that we are embodied beings -- we are composites of a soul and a body. The 17th Century Philosopher Rene Descartes' gave us a lot of great things, including analytic geometry,  but he was wrong splitting the body from the mind in his dualism.   Descartes' mind-body dualism, the idea that the body and the mind operate in separate spheres, and neither can be assimilated into the other which has been so influential in our modern era.
          
         1. In the last several years we are 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 minds is reciprocal -- each affects the other 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 brain chemistry.  It's not just our minds and it's not just our bodies and it's not just our souls -- it's all of those, all of what makes me who I am, body, mind, soul, spirit, all of it.  
      3. 
         
         1. And since Scripture, the Early Church Fathers, 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.  I just don't think it's reasonable to expect the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops or the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in the Vatican to be experts in these areas -- it's not their calling.  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 is unreasonable .  And it's just as unreasonable, in my opinion, to ignore the body and just try to work with the mind.  
      4. 
         
      5. 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 understanding well-being, and they are inspired to seek what can be known with good motivations, with good hearts and sharp minds to help and love others.   I am a Catholic with upper-case C, a big C and I am catholic with a lower-case C -- a little C.  Catholic with a little C.  According to my Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus, Third Edition, which I rely on for wordfinding, according to this 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 am Catholic with a big C and catholic with a small c.  
      6. And a final point about why I look to secular sources -- The Church herself encourages us to look to all branches of knowledge and glean what is best from them.  
         1. From the CCC, 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 it is 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 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."
         2. And from the Vatican II document, the Pastoral Constitution of the Church in the Modern World, paragraph 62 reads:  In pastoral care, sufficient use must be made not only of 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.
      7. Finally, I will say that considering the whole person -- Soul, spirit, mind and body -- all of the person is so much more helpful in the proc...

1. Summary:  Join Dr. Peter as he explains how trauma impacts our bodies, through the lens of polyvagal theory. Through quotes, examples, questions for reflection and experiential exercises, Dr. Peter walks you through a current understanding of how large a role our bodies have in our experience of trauma.  
2. Introduction
    
   1. I am Dr. Peter Malinoski, clinical psychologist, bringing to you, my listener the best of psychology and human formation and harmonizing it with our Catholic Faith
3.  
   1. This is the Interior Integration for Catholics podcast -- you are part of it, right here, right now and I am glad to be with you.  This podcast is part of our broader outreach, Souls and Hearts bringing the best of psychology grounded in a Catholic worldview to you and the rest of the world through our website soulsandhearts.com -- we have vibrant communities, we have courses, we have podcasts, we have blogs and shows, all kinds of resources at soulsandhearts.com, check it out.  
4. 
   
   1. Trauma.  Last month, we began a whole series of episodes on trauma -- such an important topic
       
      1. Quote from trauma therapist and research Peter Levine:  “Trauma is perhaps the most avoided, ignored, belittled, denied, misunderstood, and untreated cause of human suffering.” – Peter Levine
   2.  
5. 
   
   1. We started with an overview of the best of the secular understandings of trauma.  In that first episode in the series, number 88, we got into the definitions of trauma and attachment injuries, and we dived into the experience of trauma -- what trauma is like.  
6. 
   
   1. That sets us up for today's episode, number 89 -- Your Trauma, Your Body:  Protection vs. Connection.  Today, we are getting into the body's response to trauma, really focusing in on what happens in our nervous system.  What happens in the brain, what happens in our spinal cord and our nerves and throughout our bodies
       
      1. We will be especially tuning into our own nervous system.   
   2. 
      
7. 
   
   1. There's going to be some vocabulary here, I will help you with that. There will some big words, but I am going to walk you through the concepts and make them easier to understand. 
8. 
   
   1. In the past two decades we have learned so much about how trauma impacts the body -- the physiological effects of trauma 
      1. So what is physiological?  Physiology
          
         1. the branch of biology that deals with the normal functions of living organisms and their parts
             
            1. organ systems, individual organs, cells, and right down to the level of biomolecules
         2.  
            1. The parts within us carry out the chemical, electrical and physical functions within our bodies.  Our bodies are living systems
         3.  
      2. 
         
         1. Put simply, physiology is the study of how the human body works
      3.  
         1. Today we are looking at how trauma impacts physiology -- how trauma affects the workings of our body, especially in our nervous system.  
      4. 
         
9. 
   
   1. Lots of misconceptions out there.  
      1. Old way of understanding stress -- what I learned in graduate school.  Most prominent.  
         1. You were either stressed or not stressed
         2. fight or flight or rest and digest
         3. Stress on or stress off.  No nuance, very simple way of understanding
      2. Today, we are going to do much better than that, go much deeper than that.  
10. Review: Definition of Trauma 
    1. Integrated Listening Systems website:  Trauma is the response to a deeply distressing or disturbing event that overwhelms an individual’s ability to cope, causes feelings of helplessness, diminishes their sense of self and their ability to feel a full range of emotions and experiences.
    2. from Duros and Crowley 2014:  …what happens to a person where this is either too much too soon, too much too long, or not enough for too long.  
    3. From Stephen Porges:  Trauma is a chronic disruption of connectedness.  
11. Most clients come to therapy for one main reason.  One main, overarching reason.  They are dysregulated.  What does that mean?  They are poorly regulated.  
    1. Overwhelmed with emotion or on the other side, Emotional shutdowns, numbing out
    2. Can't control their thoughts, so distracted, intrusive thoughts, ruminations, racing thoughts, obsessions, disorientation, having a sense that their thoughts are no longer under control
    3. Impulses -- rising up
    4. Intrusive memories
    5. They are having trouble keeping it together
    6. High reactivity
    7. Mood swings
    8. Anger management issues
    9. Intense depression
    10. Feeling unreal, depersonalized, not myself, identity issues -- don't know who I am
    11. Feeling fragile, vulnerable, about to fall apart
    12. In one word, they come in to therapy because they can't manage their lives well anymore and they feel losing control and that makes them feel unsafe and scared.  
12. Polyvagal theory -- 
    1. Great discoveries in recent years about the vagus nerve.  
       1. The vagus nerve is responsible for the regulation of internal organ functions, such as digestion, heart rate, and respiratory rate, as well as vasomotor activity, and certain reflex actions, such as coughing, sneezing, swallowing, and vomiting
       2. 10th of 12 cranial nerves -- On Old Olympus Towering Top, a Finn and German Viewed Some Hops.  Memorizing the cranial nerves
       3. Longest nerve of the body, and the most complex, it branches into 11 different directions.  
       4. Responsible for slowing down all the organs from the next down to the colon.  Parasympathetic response -- slowing or shutting down.  
       5. Responsible
           
          1. Heart rate
       6.  
          1. Digestion
       7.  
          1. Breathing
       8.  
          1. Sweating
       9.  
          1. Motor functions for the muscles needed for swallowing and speech
       10.  
           1. Reflex actions, such as coughing, sneezing swallowing and vomiting
       11.  

1. Polyvagal theory was developed by Stephen xPorges -- Ph.D. in psychology over the last 20 years -- writes in an academic way.  
2. Relying heavily on the work of Deb Dana Licensed Clinical Social worker and a great writer and speaker - translates him so well
    
   1. Polyvagal exercises for Safety and connection -- introduction and first three chapters
3.  
   1. Polyvagal Theory and Trauma – Deb Dana  Nearly 2 hours, on YouTube
4.  
5. Deb asks this question:  What would it be like for you if your body could help you feel safe and secure, much more protected  when you start feeling scared?
6. Fundamental discovery:  Our nervous system is shaped by early experience and reshaped by ongoing experience -- there is connection between our nervous system and our experience.  
   1. Formation of connections and associations
   2. Reshaping -- changing the way our bodies respond to stress -- breaking the old patterns, fashioning new patterns deliberately
   3. Change is gradual
       
      1. Fleeting moments of peace --> more consistent sense of well-being, more resilience in the face of challenges, perceived threats, stress.  
   4. 
      
   5. Very much at a body level -- not ...

1. Summary: In this episode, we gain a deeper understanding of the experience of trauma, the impact of trauma. we clarify definitions of different aspects of trauma, various categories of trauma, the immediate and delayed signs and symptoms of trauma, and the effects of trauma.  Then I share an experiential exercise with you to help you discover potential areas that might be fruitful for future exploration of your own internal experience.  
2. Opening Dramatic Short
    
   1. Brief descriptions of the experience of trauma
3.  
   1. “Outside, the sun shines. Inside, there’s only darkness. The blackness is hard to describe, as it’s more than symptoms. It’s a nothing that becomes everything there is. And what one sees is only a fraction of the trauma inflicted.” 

― Justin Ordoñez

1. “My current life, I realized, was constructed around an absence; for all its richness I still felt as if the floors might give way, as if its core were only a covering of leaves, and I would slip through, falling endlessly, never to get my footing.” ― Esi Edugyan, Washington Black
2. “I wish I’d fallen softly. Light and graceful like a feather drifting slowly to the earth on a warm and dreamy summer’s day. I wish that I’d landed softly too. But there is nothing soft or graceful about that devastating moment when the worst has come to pass. The unavoidable truth is that it is hard, cold and brutal. All that you know to be true and good in life shatters in an instant. You feel like a delicate pottery bowl violently tossed from your place of rest, watching yourself crash and scatter across the hostile dark earth. The sound is deafening. Time stops. Inside, the quiet ache of shock and heartbreak slowly makes its grip known. They cut deep, these jagged edges of broken sherds. You gasp for air hungrily, yet somehow forget how to breathe.”― Jodi Sky Rogers
3. Introduction
    
   1. We are born into a not only a fallen world, but a traumatized world
4.  
   1. We not only share in a fallen human condition, but a traumatized condition.  
      1. “No matter what kind of childhood we’ve had, nobody escapes trauma while growing up.”― Kenny Weiss
      2. The Fall goes way back, before the world was even created, to the fall of the Lucifer, the light-bearer, the morning star and his angels -- and then the fallenness entered our world through original sin, the sin of Adam and Eve, and these are the original traumas, the fall of the angels and original sin.  
5. 
   
   1. You and I are together in the adventure of this podcast, Interior Integration for Catholics, we are journeying together, and I am thankful to be with you.
6.  
   1. I am Dr. Peter Malinoski, clinical psychologist and passionate Catholic and together, We bring the best of psychology and human formation and harmonize it with the perennial truths of the Catholic Faith. 
   2. This podcast, Interior Integration for Catholics is part of our broader outreach, Souls and Hearts bringing the best of psychology grounded in a Catholic worldview to you and the rest of the world through our website soulsandhearts.com.  
   3. Trauma.  We are just beginning a whole series of episodes on trauma.  You’ve been asking for this -- so many requests for us to address trauma head on.  It's such a tough topic and such an important topic, and we are taking on the tough and important topics that matter to you.
   4. Really important to understand the inner experience of trauma -- so you can recognize it in your own life and recognize it an empathetic and attuned way in others' loves.  Part of loving them.  
   5. Today, we're going to get an overview of the best of the secular understandings of trauma.  
      1. So much has changed since I entered graduate school in 1993 -- back then there was one seminal text on trauma, Judith Herman's Trauma and Recovery.  Now, especially in the last 10-15 years, there has been an upsurge of new, fresh and much better ways of understanding trauma.  
   6. Outline
       
      1. Impact of Trauma
   7.  
      1. Definitions of terms
          
         1. Definition of  trauma
      2.  
         1. Definition of Attachment injury
      3.  
         1. Definition of relational hurt
      4.  
         1. Definition of adverse experience. 
      5. 
         
   8. 
      
      1. Categories of Trauma 
   9. 
      
      1. Recognizing Trauma from the Reactions, signs and symptoms.  
   10. 
       
       1. Discuss commonly accepted effects of trauma
   11.  
       1. Go over the traumatic effects of what didn't happen, what was missing
   12.  
       1. Experiential exercise to help you identify areas of your internal experience that are impacted by trauma
   13.  
7. Impact of Trauma
    
   1. From the North Dakota Department of Human Services Fact Sheet
8.  

• People who have experienced trauma are:

◉ 15 times more likely to attempt suicide

◉ 4 times more likely to abuse alcohol

◉ 4 times more likely to develop a sexually transmitted disease 

◉ 4 times more likely to inject drugs

◉ 3 times more likely to use antidepressant medication

◉ 3 times more likely to be absent from work

◉ 3 times more likely to experience depression

◉ 3 times more likely to have serious job problems

◉ 2.5 times more likely to smoke

◉ 2 times more likely to develop chronic obstructive pulmonary 

disease (COPD)

◉ 2 times more likely to have serious financial problems

1. 16-minute TED MED talk from How childhood trauma affects health across a lifetime | Pediatrician Nadine Burke Harris  September 2014
2. Definitions of Trauma
    
   1. Lots of confusion
3.  
   1. Briere & Scott (2006) Principles of Trauma Therapy: people use the term trauma to refer to
       
      1.  either a traumatic experience or event
   2.  
      1. the resulting injury or stress, 
   3. 
      
      1. or the longer-term impacts and consequences 
   4. 
      
4. 
   
   1. American Psychological Association Website: Trauma is an emotional response to a terrible event like an accident, rape or natural disaster. Immediately after the event, shock and denial are typical. Longer term reactions include unpredictable emotions, flashbacks, strained relationships and even physical symptoms like headaches or nausea.
       
      1. Problem in emphasizing the emotional aspects. It's much more than that
   2.  
      1. Misses the overwhelming aspect.  
   3. 
      
      1. Does get the "response" part right.  
   4. 
      
5. 
   
   1. Integrated Listening Systems website:  Trauma is the response to a deeply distressing or disturbing event that overwhelms an individual’s ability to cope, causes feelings of helplessness, diminishes their sense of self and their ability to feel a full range of emotions and experiences.
6.  
   1. DSM-5  PTSD, Acute Stress Disorder.  Not going to address those here, not worth the time.
       
      1. Highly criticized by many professionals for being very limited and behind the curve, not recognizing the nuances and categories of trauma responses.  
   2. 
      
7. 
   
8. Attachment Injury 
   1. Definition: Dr. Sue John...

1. Summary: In this episode, we explore the conventional secular and the traditional spiritual ways of understanding scrupulosity, bringing in the experts to define scrupulosity, tells us the signs of being scrupulous, speculate on the causes of the trouble, discuss that standard remedies in the secular and spiritual realms.  Then I share with you my views on it, looking at scrupulosity through an Internal Family Systems lens, grounded in a Catholic worldview.   We discuss how parts have different God images and the role of shame and anger in the experience of scrupulosity.   
2. Description of Scrupulosity
    
   1. Suddenly my stomach tightens up, there’s a choking in my throat, and my torture begins. The bad thoughts come. . . . I want to drive them out, but they keep coming back. . . . It is terrible to be in a struggle like this! To have a head that goes around and around without my being able to stop it; to be a madman and still quite rational, for all that. . . . I am double. . . . at the very time that I am trying to plan what I want to do, another unwanted thought is in my mind. . . . Distracting me and always hindering me from doing what I want to do. 
3. 
   

--  Quoted in Albert Barbaste, “Scrupulosity and the Present Data of Psychiatry,” Theology

Digest, 1.3 (Autumn 1953) 182.

1. Fr. William Doyle: Around 1900  “My confessions were bad. My confessor does not understand me, he is mistaken in me, not believing that I could be so wicked. I have never had contrition. I am constantly committing sins against faith, against purity. I blaspheme interiorly. I rashly judge, even priests. The oftener I receive Holy Communion, the worse I become,”  Around 1900
2. My story just turned 19 -- terrible bout of scrupulosity.  
   1. Around sexuality
   2. Just started dating the first woman I might consider marrying
   3. Physical touching -- romantic contact How far was too far?
       
      1. Thoughts of sex with her -- plagued me.  
   4. 
      
      1. Do I break up with her?  How do I handle this?
   5.  
      1. What was sinful, what was not?  Was I on the road to hell?  Was I putting her on the road to hell?
   6.  
      1. I thought I was going crazy.  
   7. 
      
3. Review: I encourage you to review the last episode, number 86 -- Obsessions, Compulsions, OCD and IFS
    
   1. That episode went deep into obsessions and compulsions and  serves as a basis for today's episode.  
4. 
   
   1. Today's episode, number 87 is entitled Scrupulosity:  When OCD Gets Religion and it's released on December 6, 2021, St. Nick's Day. 
5. 
   
   1. I am Dr. Peter Malinoski, clinical psychologist and passionate Catholic and together, we are taking on the tough topics that matter to you.  
   2. We bring the best of psychology and human formation and harmonize it with the perennial truths of the Catholic Faith.   
   3. Interior Integration for Catholics is part of our broader outreach, Souls and Hearts bringing the best of psychology grounded in a Catholic worldview to you and the rest of the world through our website soulsandhearts.com
   4. Overview
       
      1. Start out with definitions of scrupulosity both from spiritual and secular sources, really want to wrap our minds around what scrupulosity is and the different types of scrupulosity. We will discuss the connection between scrupulosity and OCD -- discussion of OCD
   5.  
      1. We will then move to the signs of scrupulosity -- how can you tell when there is scrupulosity?
   6.  
      1. Then we will get into the internal experience of scrupulosity.  What is it like to experience intense scruples?  Had a taste in the intro, but we will get much more into that.  
   7. 
      
      1. We will discuss what religious and secular experts have to say about the causes of scrupulosity
   8.  
      1. Then what religious and secular experts have to say about the treatment of scrupulosity -- that most recommended therapy approach and the medications typically prescribed.  
   9. 
      
      1. After we've discussed the conventional secular and spiritual approaches to treating scrupulosity, I will how I think about scrupulosity, the root causes of scrupulosity, and how scrupulosity develops and how it can be treated.  I will give you an alternative view, grounded in a Catholic understanding of the human person and informed by Internal Family Systems thinking.  
   10. 
       
6. Definitions:  You know how important definitions are to me.  We really want to make sure we understand what we are talking about.  
   1. Scruple comes from the Latin word  scrupulum, 
      1. "small, sharp stone" -- like walking with a stone in your shoe.
      2. Ancient Roman weight of 1/24 of an ounce or 1.3 grams.    
      3. Something tiny, but that can cause a lot of discomfort.  
   2. Definitions from Spiritual Sources
       
      1. Fr. William Doyle, SJ.  Scruples and their Treatment  1897: Scrupulosity, in general, is an ill-founded fear of committing sin.
   3.  
      1. Fr. Hugh O'Donnell:   Scrupulosity may be defined as a habitual state of mind that, because of an unreasonable fear of sin, inclines a person to judge certain thoughts or actions sinful when they aren't or that they are more gravely wrong than they really are… Scrupulosity involves an emotional condition that interferes with the proper working of the mind and produces a judgement not in accordance with object truth, but with the emotion of fear. 
   4. 
      
      1. Fr. James Jackson, article "On Scrupulosity" 
         1. A very good definition
         2. Scrupulosity is an emotional condition, an ultra-sensitivity to sin, which produces excessive anxiety and fear from the thought of eternal damnation…This condition is a religious, moral and psychological state of anxiety, fear and indecision. It is coupled with extreme guilt, depression and fear of punishment from God. However, each person who suffers from it does so uniquely.
   5. 
      
      1. Fr. Marc Foley:  The Context of Holiness: Psychological and Spiritual Reflections on the Life of St. Therese of Lisieux
          
         1. Excellent, very psychologically informed study of the Little Flower
      2.  
         1. Not only the best psychological profile of St. Therese of Lisieux, but the best psychobiography of any saint from any author I've read.
      3.  
         1. A very in-depth look at her mother, St. Zelie as well and the limitations and lack of attunement in the Martin family
      4.  
         1. Highly recommended reading -- all of chapter 12 is on The Little Flower's scrupulosity.  
      5. 
         
         1. Scrupulosity is an extremely painful anxiety disorder. It consists of annoying fear that one is offended God or could offend God at any moment and that God will cast her into hell. To protect yourself from eternal damnation, the scrupulous person dissects every thought, motive, and action in order to ascertain if she has send. And since she is deathly afraid that she might have sent, the scrupulous person seeks absolute certitude that she hasn’t send in order to assuage her fears.
      6.  
   6. 
      
   7. Definitions from Secular Sources
       
      1. Timothy Sisemore, Catherine Barton, Mary Keeley From Richmont Graduate University   Scrupulosity is a "sin phobia." 
   8. 
      
      1. Jaimie Eckert, Scrupulosity Coach:  Scrupulosity is where...

1. Join Dr. Peter to go way below the surface and find the hidden meanings of obsessions, compulsions and OCD.  Through poetry and quotes, he invites you into the painful, distressing, fearful and misunderstood world of those who suffer from OCD.  He defines obsessions and compulsions, discusses the different types of each, and evaluates two conventional treatments and one alternative treatment for OCD.  Most importantly, he discusses the deepest natural causes of OCD, which are almost always disregarded in conventional treatment, which focuses primarily on the symptoms.  
2. Lead-in
    
   1. OCD is not a disease that bothers; it is a disease that tortures. - Author: J.J. Keeler
3.  
   1.  “It can look like still waters on the outside while a hurricane is swirling in your mind.” — Marcie Barber Phares
4.  
   1. Poetry or word picture (prayer of the scrupulous)

 Aditi Apr 2017

1. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.  OCD.  That is what we are addressing today. 
   1. Here is what OCD is like for Toni Neville -- she says:  “It’s like being controlled by a puppeteer. Every time you try and just walk away he pulls you back. Are you sure the stove is off and everything is unplugged? Back up we go. Are you sure your hands are as clean as they can get? Back ya go. Are you sure the doors are securely locked? Back down we go. How many people have touched this object? Wash your hands again.” 
2. Introduction
    
   1. We are together in this great adventure, this podcast, Interior Integration for Catholics, we are journeying together, and I am honored to be able to spend this time with you.  
3. 
   
   1. I am Dr. Peter Malinoski, clinical psychologist and passionate Catholic and together, we are taking on the tough topics that matter to you.  
4. 
   
   1. We bring the best of psychology and human formation and harmonize it with the perennial truths of the Catholic Faith.   
5. 
   
   1. Interior Integration for Catholics is part of our broader outreach, Souls and Hearts bringing the best of psychology grounded in a Catholic worldview to you and the rest of the world through our website soulsandhearts.com
6.  
   1. Today, we are getting into obsessions and compulsions -- a really deep dive into what's really going on with these experiences.  
      1. I know many of you were expecting me to discuss scrupulosity today -- And you know what?  I was expecting I would be discussing scrupulosity well, but in order to have that discussion of scrupulosity  be well-founded, we really need to get into understanding obsessions and compulsions first.  I have to bring you up to speed on obessions and compulsions before we get into scrupulosity, and there is a lot to know
7. 
   
   1. The questions we will be covering about obsessions and compulsions.
       
      1. What are Obsession and Compulsions? Getting into definitions.  
         1. Also What are the different types of obsessions and compulsions, the different forms that obsessions and compulsions can take
         2. What is the experience of OCD like?  From those who have suffered it.  
   2. 
      
      1. Who suffers from obsessions and compulsions -- how common are they?  Who is at risk?
   3.  
      1. Why do obsessions and compulsions start and why do they keep going?
   4.  
      1. How do we overcome obsessions and compulsions?  How do we resolve them?  
         1. What does the secular literature say are the best treatments"  -- Medication and a particular kind of therapy called Exposure and Response Prevention
         2. Alternatives  
         3. Can we find not just a descriptive diagnosis, but a proscriptive conceptualization that gives a direction for healing, resolving the obsessions and compulsions  Not just symptom management.
   5. 
      
8. 
   
9. Definitions
    
   1. Obsessions
       
      1. DSM-5: Obsessions are defined by (1) and (2):
          
         1. Recurrent and persistent thoughts, urges, or impulses that are experienced, at some time during the disturbance, as intrusive and unwanted, and that in most individuals cause marked anxiety or distress.
      2.  
         1. The individual attempts to ignore or suppress such thoughts, urges, or images, or to neutralize them with some other thought or action (i.e., by performing a compulsion).
      3.  
         1. Not pleasurable
      4.  
         1. Involuntary
             
            1. My compulsive thoughts aren't even thoughts, they're absolute certainties and obeying them isn't a choice. - Author: Paul Rudnick
         2.  
            1. To resist a compulsion with willpower alone is to hold back an avalanche by melting the snow with a candle. It just keeps coming and coming and coming. - Author: David Adam
         3.  
      5. 
         
         1. Individual works to neutralize the obsession with another thought or a compulsion.  
      6. 
         
   2. 
      
      1. From the International OCD Foundation:  Obsessions are thoughts, images or impulses that occur over and over again and feel outside of the person’s control. Individuals with OCD do not want to have these thoughts and find them disturbing. In most cases, people with OCD realize that these thoughts don’t make any sense.  Obsessions are typically accompanied by intense and uncomfortable feelings such as fear, disgust, doubt, or a feeling that things have to be done in a way that is “just right.” In the context of OCD, obsessions are time consuming and get in the way of important activities the person values. 
   3. 
      
      1. Common Obsessions
          
         1. Sources
             
            1. What is OCD? Article by the International OCD Foundation on their website
         2.  
            1. WebMD article How Do I Know if I Have OCD? By Danny Bonvissuto February 19. 2020
         3.  
            1. Northpointrecovery.com blog What Types of OCD Are There? Get the Breakdown Here by the Northpoint Staff from May 3, 2019
         4.  
            1. Article entitled Common Types of OCD: Subtypes, Their Symptoms and the Best Treatment by Patrick Carey dated July 6, 2021 on treatmyocd.com
         5.  
      2. 
         
         1. Contamination
             
            1. Body fluids --- blood, urine, saliva, feces -   I gave my baby niece a serious illness when I held her --  I'm sure I got a disease from using the public restroom.  
         2. 
            
            1. Germs for communicable diseases -- may be afraid to shake hands, worried about catching gonorrhea
         3.  
            1. Environmental contaminants -- radiation, asbestos
         4.  
            1. Household chemicals -- cleaners, solvents
         5.  
            1. Dirt
         6.  
            1. If you put the wrong foods in your body, you are contaminated and dirty and your stomach swells. Then the voice says, Why did you do that? Don't you know better? Ugly and wicked, you are disgusting to me. - Author: Bethany Pierce
         7.  
         8. Losing Control
             
            1. Giving in to an impulse to harm yourself --  I could jump in front of this bus right now.  
         9. 
            
            1. Fear of acting on an impulse to harm others -- what if I stabbed my child with this knife?
         10.  
             1. Fear of violent or horrific images in your mind 
         11. 
             
             1. Fear of shouting out insults or obscenities -- 
         12. 
             
             1. Fear of stealing things
         13. &nbsp...

1. Join me as we discover explore all the elements of perfectionism, from its root causes to its surface manifestations, through an Internal Family Systems lens, grounded in a Catholic world view.  Through poetry, quotes, research findings, personal examples and the current professional literature, I pull together many strands into a unified whole to help you deeply grasp the internal experience of perfectionism.
2. Intro
    
   1. The Quintessential Persona    Leanna Smith
3.  
   1. We are together in this great adventure, this podcast, Interior Integration for Catholics, we are journeying together, and I am honored to be able to spend this time with you.  
   2. I am Dr. Peter Malinoski, clinical psychologist and passionate Catholic and together, we are taking on the tough topics that matter to you.  
   3. We bring the best of psychology and human formation and harmonize it with the perennial truths of the Catholic Faith.   
   4. Interior Integration for Catholics is part of our broader outreach, Souls and Hearts bringing the best of psychology grounded in a Catholic worldview to you and the rest of the world through our website soulsandhearts.com
   5. Let's get into answering the questions -- the who, what, where, when, why, and how of perfectionism.  This is episode 85 of the Interior Integration for Catholics Podcast it's titled:  Perfectionism:  Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How
   6. Perfectionism -- a major, major problem for so many Catholics.   A major, major problem for so many of us.  Thomas Curran and Andrew Hill  2019 Psychological Bulletin Article:  Perfectionism Is Increasing Over Time: A Meta-Analysis of Birth Cohort Differences From 1989 to 2016
       
      1. reviewed dozens of studies from a 27 year timespan all using the same instrument  the Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale by Hewitt and Flett
   7.  
      1. 164 study samples comprising more than 41,000 college students in the US, Canada and Great Britain between 1989 and 2016
   8.  
      1. Results:  there is no doubt.  Perfectionism among college students is on the rise.  
         1. Between 1989 and 2016, 
            1. the scores for socially prescribed perfectionism —  or perceiving that other have excessive expectations of me — increased by 33%. 
            2. Other-oriented expectations — putting unrealistic expectations on others — went up 16%
            3. and self-oriented perfectionism — our irrational desire to be perfect — increased 10%
   9. 
      

1. The Who of Perfectionism -- the Parts
2. The What of Perfectionism -- What is it?  What are the different kinds of perfectionism, what are the elements?
3. Where Does Perfectionism Come From Within Us
4. When Does Perfectionism Get Activated?
5. Why Does Perfectionism Start and Why Does it Keep Going?
6. How Do We Overcome Perfectionism?  How do we resolve it?  Not just a descriptive diagnosis, but a proscriptive conceptualization that gives a direction for healing, resolving the perfectionism.  Not just symptom management, this is your cross nonsense.  There are real crosses that God gives us. Yes.  But those crosses fit well.  The crosses we impose upon ourselves do not fit well.  

1. What -- What is perfectionism?  You know that I want precise definitions when we dive into deep topics together.  I think it's ironic that there is a lot of unclear, sloppy thinking about perfectionism by perfectionists.  Shining a bright clear light on it.  
   1. Definition of Perfectionism
       
      1. Brene Brown:  The Gifts of Imperfection:  Perfectionism is a self-destructive and addictive belief system that fuels the primary thought: If I look perfect, live perfectly, and do everything perfectly, I can avoid or minimize painful feelings or shame, judgment and blame
   2.  
      1. Marc Foley O.C.D.  Editor of Story of a Soul: Study Edition  There is an unhealthy striving for perfection which psychologists call perfectionism. Perfectionism is the state of being driven to achieve a standard of perfection in an area of life that is fueled by either the fear of failure or the need for approval. This unhealthy striving is not the type of perfection to which God calls us.
   3.  
   4. So you may have perfectionistic parts that would like to challenge me on this.  Your perfectionistic parts may say to me
       
      1. So, Dr. Peter, Mr. Catholic Psychologist, you want us to have low standards, huh?  You think that would be better, for us to be lazy, to be weak, to take our ease, to relax, to give up the fight, to be mediocre, to be lukewarm, huh?  Is that what you are saying?  Didn't St. Jerome say:  Good, better, best, never let it rest, 'till your good is better, and your better's best
          
         1.  First off, let's start with your quote.  Often attributed to St. Jerome, but there's no evidence for it in his writings: 
            1. Fr. Horton addresses this alleged quote on his blog fauxtations.   September 26, 2016 post.  "Good, better, best: St. Jerome?"
                
               1. Oldest google books attribution is from 2009.  
            2. 
               
               1. 1904 Dictionary of Modern Proverbs
            3.  
               1. 1897 Christian Work: Illustrated Family Newspaper.  
            4. 
               
               1. Others attribute it to Tim Duncan, NBA all-star player, often considered the greatest power forward of all time.  
            5. 
               
            6. I want you to pursue excellence.  
      2. 
         
   5. 
      
      1. Perfectionism is not the same thing as striving for excellence or a commitment to self-improvement. There is a critical distinction between striving for excellence and perfectionism.   Let's discuss what perfectionism is not.   
   6. 
      
      1. Brene Brown:  Perfectionism is not self-improvement./ Perfectionism is, at it’s core, about trying to earn approval and acceptance  Most perfectionists were raised being praised for achievement and performance (grades, manners, rule-following, people-pleasing, appearance, sports). Somewhere along the way, we adopted this dangerous and debilitating belief system: I am what I accomplish and how well I accomplish it. Please. Perform. Perfect. Healthy striving is self-focused – How can I improve? Perfectionism – is other focused – What will they think?” End quote.  
         1. What will they think?
   7. 
      
      1. Brene Brown  Daring Greatly: How the Courage to be vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent and Lead:  “Perfectionism is not the same thing as striving for excellence. Perfectionism is not about healthy achievement and growth. Perfectionism is a defensive move. It’s the belief that if we do things perfectly and look perfect, we can minimize or avoid the pain of blame, judgment, and shame.” 
   8. 
      
   9. Agnes M. Stairs, Smith, Zapolski, Combs, and Settles:  Clarifying the construct of perfectionism Assessment 2012  732 people
       
      1. 15 different perfectionism measures -- Factor analytic modeling
   10.  
       1. Found nine different personality traits associated with perfectionism:  Need for Order, Need for Satisfaction of a Job Well Done, Details and Checking, Perfectionism toward Others, High Personal Standards, Black and White Thinking about Tasks, Perceived Pressure from Others, Dissatisfaction with Personal Performance, Reactivity to Mistakes.  
   11. 
       
       1. 9 personality trait...

1. In this episode, I lay out the whole mission and purpose of the Interior Integration for Catholics Podcast -- answering the six central questions so that you can make an informed decision about whether this podcast fits you and your needs.  Get the latest in my discernment about this podcast and the Resilient Catholics Community, where we are going.  
2. Lead in:  [cue Sundancer music] Who, What, Where, When, Why and How -- those are the six questions we're addressing today about this podcast.  
   1. Why those questions?  It's all about fit.  It's all about being clear about the target audience for this podcast and whether or not you fit.  I'm putting all my cards on the table, total transparency, so that you can make an informed decision about whether you want to engage with me or not.  
   2. So let's ask the questions.  Who is this Interior Integration for Catholics podcast for -- yes, it's for Catholics, but it's only for a small number of Catholics, maybe about 3700 Catholics in the world.  How did I get to that number -- stay with me for the calculations later in this episode.  
   3. What is this podcast all about -- what is the mission, what is the purpose of the podcast?  
   4. Where does this podcast focus?  Spoiler alert:  -- Deep inside you, but you'll have to stay tuned to find out more about that…
   5. When:  what is the new frequency and episode length for this podcast?
   6. Why:  Why should you listen?  I'm asking you for time, attention, concentration and effort -- why should you engage with this podcast at all?  I'll be fleshing out all the reasons
   7. How:  How do we make it all happen with you, for you and in you?  
   8. Find out the answer to all of these questions in this episode of Interior Integration for Catholics, number 84, The Who, What, Where, When, Why and How of the IIC Podcast [cue intro music]
3. Intro: Welcome to the podcast Interior Integration for Catholics, thank you for being here with me, I am honored to be here with you, and today we are discussing you and me and us and this podcast.  We are going to get all relational as we often do here.  Because this is a relational podcast.  I'm not just a talking head in podcastlandia, I'm a real person, you're a real person and I'm into real relationships.  
   1. I am clinical psychological Peter Malinoski and you are listening to the Interior Integration for Catholics podcast -- the IIC podcast for short).   Interior Integration for Catholics is part of our broader outreach Souls and Hearts bringing the best of psychology grounded in a Catholic worldview to you and the rest of the English-speaking Catholic world through our website soulsandhearts.com.  Check that out, soulsandhearts.com for so many great resources that bring psychology and Catholicism together in a way that is faithful to the truths of our Faith.  
   2. Let's get into answering the questions -- the who, what, where, when, why, and how of this podcast.  
4. Who is the IIC Podcast For?  It's for You.
    
   1. Ideal listener
       
      1. If you have it all together, if you're sky high on life, if you continually leap from one pinnacle of natural excellence to an even higher summit of human greatness, bounding upward, always with grace and precision and a laser focus on perfection -- good for you. I'm happy for you and in awe of you.   But you don't need this podcast.  
   2. 
      
      1. Let me put it this way.  This podcast is for the Catholic who admits he or she is hurting, struggling, a lost sheep, in need of help.
      2. This podcast is for you who are like me, who are very imperfect, wounded, harmed in various ways, who are confused and frustrated, who are weary, who are lonely, who are burdened in different ways.  
      3. It's for your parts.
          
         1. we are a unity but also a multiplicity.  We don't have a single, unified, homogenous, monolithic personality.   We have several or many parts, each one with its own personality.  This concept of parts of us is absolutely central to this podcast.  If this idea of parts does not appeal to you, you probably won't like these episodes.  I believe there were two major discoveries in psychology, one at the end of the 19th Century -- the discovery of the unconscious -- Freud popularized that.  And the other near the end of the 20th century -- the discovery of the multiplicity of self which Richard Schwartz popularized.  
      4. 
         
         1. Definition of part:  Separate, independently operating personalities within us, each with own unique prominent needs, roles in our lives, emotions, body sensations, guiding beliefs and assumptions, typical thoughts, intentions, desires, attitudes, impulses, interpersonal style, and world view.  Each part also has an image of God and sense of identity, who you are.  Robert Falconer calls them insiders.  You can also think of them as separate modes of operating if that is helpful.  
      5. 
         
         1. This podcast is especially for your inner outcasts, those parts of us that you reject -- inner lepers, inner tax collectors, inner Pharisees, inner critics, our inner prostitutes, the untouchables within us, our inner rebels, fugitives, inner vagabonds and bums, our inner abused children.  Our refugees, our inner imprisoned convicts the parts that don't get to see the light of day, the parts that may have never been loved by you or any other human being who walks the face of the earth.  
         2. As I've discussed in so many previous episodes, especially Episode 71: A New and Better Way of Understanding Myself and Others -- I firmly believe that the concept of a core self and these several or many parts helps us to make so much more sense of our experiences, helps to explain so much.  And as I laid out in Episode 73, Is IFS Really Catholic, I believe that with some modifications, IFS can be harmonized with our Catholic Faith.  
         3. St. Augustine, Confessions “My inner self was a house divided against itself.”  That's parts.  
         4. Romans 7:15  I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.
         5. It's not just about willpower
             
            1. Romans 7:18b  I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. 
         6. 
            
            1. This isn't about willpower -- Paul had amazing willpower.  It's not about the intellect.  Its about those two discoveries in psychology -- the unconscious and the fact that we have parts.  
         7. 
            
      6. Openness and receptivity to learning and growing.
      7. This podcast is for you, you, the one who deeply desires an intimate, personal relationship with God and with Mary, even if  you struggle with it\
      8. You who want to be able to come to God our Spiritual Father and Mary our Spiritual Mother with childlike trust and complete confidence
      9. Overcoming your natural-level impediments 
      10. Anything that compromises our capacity to relate and love in the natural realm will compromise our capacity to relate and love God and Mary.  Period.  Full stop.  
      11. Invested in own human formation, and is motivated to grow
           
          1. Psychologically-minded
      12.  
          1. Embraces the multiplicity/unity aspects of the human person and wants to relate better with self internally.  
      13. 
          
          1. Willing to tolerate some suffering -- it will cost you to really engage with these podcasts
              
             1. Attention and concentration
          2.  
             1. Experiential exercises
          3.  
      14. Wants to love se...

1. Join me for a deep exploration of the ways our parts process grief in healthy ways, the back-and-forth alternating between focusing on the loss and looking at restoration.  Guided by the work of IFS therapist and author Derek Scott and by using a dramatized example of loss with resulting grief, we will explore the internal interactions among our parts that lead to such a multifaceted experience of grief.  We also examine the two paths of grief that Catholics can choose.  
2. Lead-In
    
   1. Intro -- activation warning
       
      1. What you are about to hear is a fictional dramatization of a car accident and Brian Moreland's internal reactions -- the reactions of his parts - to that accident and its effects on him over time.  
   2. 
      
      1. Listen with care and prudence -- if you have unresolved trauma responses surround a car accident, please be thoughtful about whether or not to continue.
   3.  
3. 
   
   1. News Story:  [Insert News Intro music]:  
4. 
   

And now out to James Fieldler, our roving KDTT reporter, coming to us live from the scene of a terrible accident earlier this evening, a really difficult story that we have been following for you.  James – what do you have for us?

[background traffic and rain and truck backing]  Terry, I am here just off the shoulder of I-94 Westbound, about  four miles west of Miles City, near mile marker 142.  Earlier this evening, an eastbound Ford pickup crossed the median into oncoming westbound traffic, striking a Honda Odyssey minivan at full speed and sending it careening through the guardrail, and rolling down this shallow embankment.  

In that minivan were a 37-year old man, a  33 year old woman, and four children ranging from about 9 to two years old.  From this angle, you can see how damaged this minivan was, nearly crushed as they are winching it up onto the wrecker.  Montana State police have just confirmed this was a fatal accident, that one of the children, about five years old has died of massive head injuries.  The man and two of the children have been airlifted to St. Alexius Trauma Center in Bismarck, no word on their condition right now. 

That is tragic, James.  What do we know about the others, James?

Terry, we have some good news, too.  The woman was able to walk away from the wreck.  EMTs used the jaws of life to break open the back of the van and rescue the other two children, who have also been transported by ambulance to Bismarck.  The  45-year old driver the pickup was shaken up and was taken to Holy Rosary Hospital in Miles City, apparently with minor injuries.  No one else was in the truck.  

What do we know about the cause?

The investigation is ongoing. As you can see, driving conditions were also difficult –  the rain coming down here.  There is some question about driver fatigue in the driver of the truck.  No word yet on any charges that might be filed, but it’s likely.  A source told me that the pickup driver’s license had been revoked for a second DUI.  There is no official word yet on whether alcohol or drugs were involved in this crash.  

Thank you, James, and we will continue to follow this story for you.  Our hearts and thoughts go out to all those involved in the crash, we wish them a rapid recovery.  Now on to Jeff Springer with sports, and the surprising finish to the Griz’s matchup with the Idaho State Bengals.  Jeff, tell us what happened at Washington-Grizzly stadium today in the rain? [Cut to Intro Music

1. Intro
    
   1. We are together in this great adventure, this podcast, Interior Integration for Catholics, we are journeying together, and I am honored to be able to spend this time with you.  
2. 
   
   1. I am Dr. Peter Malinoski, clinical psychologist and passionate Catholic and together, we are taking on the tough topics that matter to you.  
3. 
   
   1. We bring the best of psychology and human formation and harmonize it with the perennial truths of the Catholic Faith.   
4. 
   
   1. Interior Integration for Catholics is part of our broader outreach, Souls and Hearts bringing the best of psychology grounded in a Catholic worldview to you and the rest of the world through our website soulsandhearts.com
5.  
   1. Today's episode, number 83 is entitled The Internal Dance of Healthy Grief and it's released on August 30, 2021
6.  
   1. Heard a reenacted story about Brian Moreland, and I’ll be bringing that story in throughout todays episode to add depth and examples to the concepts 
7. 
   
8. Review: I encourage you to review the last episode, number 82 -- the many faces of grief inside us. 
   1. That episode goes over what happens to our parts when we experience grief?
   2. The experiences I'm about to describe are not the parts themselves. 
      1. Definition of a part --  Separate, independently operating personalities within us, each with own unique prominent needs, roles in our lives, emotions, body sensations, guiding beliefs and assumptions, typical thoughts, intentions, desires, attitudes, impulses, interpersonal style, and world view.  Each part also has an image of God and also its own understanding of self.  
      2. More than just one factor 
         1. More than just one emotion, more than just one desire or impulse 
         2. Rather -- a whole constellation of these qualities that endure over time, even if the part is not in conscious awareness in the moment.  
9. Adapted Dual Process Model of Bereavement
    
   1. Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut originally the DPM in 1999 Death Studies article called The dual process model of coping with bereavement: rationale and description
10.  
    1. Derek Scott -- IFS Therapist, author and expert on grief adapted this model in his article Grief and IFS: Mapping the Terrain -- check that out at his website ifsca.ca
        
       1. two clusters of parts, two groups of parts.  
          1. one focused the loss -- looking back to the past, looking at what happened.
          2. One cluster of parts focused on  -- looking toward restoration -- looking to the future, managing the demands of life now.  
    2. 
       
       1. Let's expand on these two clusters.  
          1. one cluster is oriented towards the loss -- those are the parts that IFS Therapist and Author Derek Scott introduced to us in the last episode.  
             1. Focus on experiencing grief
                 
                1. Managers
                    
                   1. Disbelief
                2.  
                   1. Numbness
                3.  
                   1. Sadness
                4.  
                   1. Guilt
                5.  
                   1. Spiritual Bypassing
             2. 
                
                1. Exiles
                    
                   1. Depression
                2.  
                   1. Missing/yearning
                3.  
                   1. Protest (anger)
                4.  
                   1. Guilt
                5.  
                   1. Powerlessness/despair/resignation.  
                6. 
                   
                   1. Shame
             3. 
                
          2. the other cluster towards restoration -- These are new parts.  
             1. dealing with the new complexities in life for the bereaved that are occasioned by the loss
             2. Readjusting to the new reality -- conforms to Elisabeth Kubler Ross' stage of acceptance and Colin Parkes' phase of reorganization and recovery
             3. Activities
                 
                1. ...

1. Through a dramatic representation, quotes, and examples, I walk you through how six dimensions of what it means for you to love yourself and others.  By bringing in the pioneering work of IFS therapist Derek Scott, we will explore how different parts within you respond to grief and loss in so many different ways.  
2. Lead in:
    
   1. Lead-in Intro
3.  
   1. Letter
4.  
   1. Ron's reactions
5.  
6. Intro
    
   1. We are together in this great adventure, this podcast, Interior Integration for Catholics, we are journeying together, and I am honored to be able to spend this time with you.  
7. 
   
   1. I am Dr. Peter Malinoski, clinical psychologist and passionate Catholic and together, we are taking on the tough topics that matter to you.  
8. 
   
   1. We bring the best of psychology and human formation and harmonize it with the perennial truths of the Catholic Faith.   
9. 
   
   1. Interior Integration for Catholics is part of our broader outreach, Souls and Hearts bringing the best of psychology grounded in a Catholic worldview to you and the rest of the world through our website soulsandhearts.com
10.  
    1. Today's episode, number 82 is entitled "The Many Faces of Grief Inside Us  and it's released on August 23, 2021
11.  
    1. Heard a reenacted story about Ronald and Vivian Meerkamp, and I’ll be using that clip throughout todays episode to add depth and examples to the concepts 
12. 
    
    1. In the last episode, Episode 81, we broached There is so much misinformation out there about grief.  So many myths, so many misconceptions to clear up.  Why is that?  We're going to answer that question with the professional research, the best of psychological theory, with Scripture, with poetry, with examples and with quotes to help you understand the experience of grief -- your grief and the grief of others.  
13. 
    
    1. Why should we learn about grief?  Earl Grollman sums it up like this:
        
       1. Grief is not a disorder, a disease or a sign of weakness. It is an emotional, physical and spiritual necessity, the price you pay for love. The only cure for grief is to grieve.
    2.  
       1. If we love, we will grieve.  Part of loving well is grieving well.  
    3. 
       
       1. If we flee from grief, we will also flee from love.    You can't love without eventually grieving
    4.  
14. 
    
15. Last episode, I mentioned how our understanding of grief can be limited by assuming we have a single, homogenous monolithic personality. Today I'm going to share with you a much deeper and richer way to understand grief.
     
    1. From Episode 72 What Keeps You from Loving?  Is it Really Only Your Vices?  Discussion of Dimensions of Understanding Others or Ourselves.  -- We will get into that more today.  
       1. 0 Dimensions -- single point in space -- geometry, no dimensionality.  Personalizing it -- you are nothing to me.  
          1. No separate identity, not even really human, invisible -- the person doesn't exist for you.  
             1. “Love is not cold and what is cold is not love.” ― Marty Rubin 
             2. “Science may have found a cure for most evils; but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all -- the apathy of human beings.”― Helen Keller 
             3. “Indifference is more truly the opposite of love than hate is, for we can both love and hate the same person at the same time, but we cannot both love and be indifferent to the same person at the same time.” ― Peter Kreeft, Prayer For Beginners 
          2. Examples:
              
             1. Emotional detachment:  Ron -- fear of loss.  
          3. 
             
16. 
    

1. 1 Dimension -- line 
   1.  Only one quality -- very self-referential, the person in orbit around me and my needs.  
   2. Often only a functional dimension, or not meeting a function
       
      1. “That politicians
   3.  

who smiled at us and kissed our babies

blue eyes shining with triumph

well knew we were falling

into our graves

kicked by them

as they counted

our votes.”

― Alice Walker, Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart 

1. “What we do see depends mainly on what we look for. ... In the same field the farmer will notice the crop, the geologists the fossils, botanists the flowers, artists the colouring, sportsmen the cover for the game. Though we may all look at the same things, it does not all follow that we should see them.” ― John Lubbock, The Beauties of Nature and the Wonders of the World We Live in 
2. For Vivian:  In her pain and loneliness, part of her takes over reduces Ron to one dimension:  cold, distant, ignores me -- reduces Ron to one dimension -- in order to protect herself from him.  
3. For Ron blended with his angry part who is protecting him from agonizing pain from abandonment:  Vivian is a Betrayer -- She betrayed me, she is a traitor, a backstabber, she hurts me.  
4. Still very personalized, very self-referential
5. 2 Dimensions -- plane -- starts to be a little Less personal, less self-referential
    
   1. Cardboard Cutout-- person has a shape, not well understood.  
6. 
   
   1. Ron ignores me and is self absorbed.  But it's because of his job.  He shuts down emotions because of what he sees as a detective
       
      1. “It is a well-worn truth that cops grow callous, a cliché so tattered that it is even common on television. All cops face things every day that are so gruesome, brutal, and bizarre that no normal human being could deal with them on a daily basis and stay sane. And so they learn not to feel, to grow and maintain a poker-faced whimsy toward all the surprising things their fellow humans find to do to each other. All cops practice not-feeling, and it may be that Miami cops are better at it than others, since they have so many opportunities to learn.”  Jeff Lindsay, Dexter is Delicious
   2.  
7. 
   
   1. Vivian is a betrayer and a traitor.  But she's misguided -- she's reacting out of ignorance and emotion and because she doesn't understand me. 
8. 
   
9. 3 Dimensions -- taking into account much more of the person, providing a more complete snapshot of a moment in time
    
   1. Person has
       
      1. A whole internal world
   2.  
      1. Many dimensions
   3.  
      1. Many competing values at one time.
   4.  
      1. Needs -- attachment needs and integrity needs
   5.  
      1. Emotions
   6.  
      1. Belief.  
   7. 
      
      1. Thought
   8.  
      1. Intentions 
   9. 
      
      1. Desires
   10.  
       1. Attitudes
   11.  
       1. Impulses.
   12.  
       1. relationships
   13.  
       1. Maybe even multiple points of view inside at the same time.  
          1. With conflicts and polarizations inside --
   14. 
       
10. 
    
    1. Vivian is betraying me and harming me and she's misguided, reacting out of ignorance and emotion, but she also really loves our kids.  And she's good at her job. 
    2. Vivian has mixed reactions to me.  
11. 4 Dimensions -- out of basic geometry now and into physics.  The four dimension is physics...

1. If we love deeply, we're going to grieve deeply.  It's inevitable.  And it's that simple.  So together, let's understand and experience grief better in order to love better.  In this episode, I review the popular models of grief with their strengths and limitations, illustrating them through poetry, quotes, and evaluating them with the best of the psychological research. 
2. Lead-in:  We are going to start out with a simple truth.  We Catholics get close to people.  We get close to people
    
   1. We form deep, intimate bonds with our Parents, siblings, spouses, children, our friends -- all those we love.  
      1. Last weekend, I was at my grandson's baptism.  Tiny little guy, names William Peter.
      2. I'm not super sentimental, not one to just burst into intense emotion at the drop of a hat, but holding him and talking with him.  I could feel the bond developing.  He's really growing on me.  My first grandson.  William Peter.  I told myself I wasn't going to be one of those fawning grandfathers that shows the pictures around to everyone and prattles on about grandchildren, but here I am, bringing it up in a podcast episode.   I love that little guy.  I really do, I've been surprised at how quickly that all developed.  
      3. We form deep intimate bond with people.  
      4. And that's a great privilege, an honor, a sacred thing.  
         1. October 29, 2017 before the Angelus Prayer, Pope Francis
             
            1. Indeed, we were created to love and to be loved. God, who is Love, created us to make us participants in his life, to be loved by him and to love him, and with him, to love all other people. This is God’s “dream” for mankind.
         2.  
3. 
   
   1. But in this life there's a difficult side to that.  The realities that entered the world with original sin. 
   2. Inevitably, we lose at least some of these bonds, these connections -- in our fallen world, they are not permanent, they are temporary
       
      1. Parents die
   3.  
      1. Some experience a romantic breakup -- or a divorce
   4.  
      1. Estrangements, ties being cut
   5.  
   6. And we experience the loss of someone
   7. Jandy Nelson succinctly sums up the mystery when she writes “Grief and love are conjoined—you don’t get one without the other.” 
   8. My Constant Companion By Kelly Roper

Grief is my companion,

It takes me by the hand,

And walks along beside me

in a dark and barren land.

How long will this lonesome journey last,

How much more can my weary heart bear?

Since your death, I’ve been lost in the fog,

Too burdened with sorrow and care.

People tell me my sadness will fade,

And my tears will reach their end.

Grief and I must complete our journey,

And then maybe I’ll find happiness again.

1. Talking to Grief by Denise Levertov

Ah, Grief, I should not treat you

like a homeless dog

who comes to the back door

for a crust, for a meatless bone.

I should trust you.

I should coax you

into the house and give you

your own corner,

a worn mat to lie on,

your own water dish.

You think I don't know you've been living

under my porch.

You long for your real place to be readied

before winter comes. You need

your name,

your collar and tag. You need

the right to warn off intruders,

to consider

my house your own

and me your person

and yourself

1. “So it’s true, when all is said and done, grief is the price we pay for love.” ― E.A. Bucchianeri
2. And we pay on a sliding fee scale as Orson Scott Card tells us
    
   1. “Life is full of grief, to exactly the degree we allow ourselves to love other people.” 
3. 
   
4. Grief -- after five episodes on suicide, it seemed like the next topic.  Stay with me as we investigate grief…
5. Intro:
    
   1. Welcome to the podcast Interior Integration for Catholics, I am so glad you are hear with me for these moments together, thank you for spending the time.  As you know, I am Dr. Peter Malinoski, clinical psychologist and passionate Catholic you are listening to the Interior Integration for Catholics podcast, where we don't hesitate to take on the tough topics that matter to you.  We bring the best of psychology and human formation and harmonize it with the perennial truths of the Catholic Faith.   Interior Integration for Catholics is part of our broader outreach, Souls and Hearts bringing the best of psychology grounded in a Catholic worldview to you and the rest of the world through our website soulsandhearts.com
6.  
   1. Today's episode, number 81 is entitled "Grieving is the Price We Pay for Loving" and it's released on August 16, 2021
7.  
   1. We are broaching the big topic of grief.  We touched on it briefly way back in episode 15, but now we're getting into much more detail.  
8. 
   
   1. There is so much misinformation out there about grief.  So many myths, so many misconceptions to clear up.  Why is that?  We're going to answer that question with the professional research, the best of psychological theory, with Scripture, with poetry, with examples and with quotes to help you understand the experience of grief -- your grief and the grief of others.  
9. 
   
   1. Why should we learn about grief?  Earl Grollman sums it up like this:
       
      1. Grief is not a disorder, a disease or a sign of weakness. It is an emotional, physical and spiritual necessity, the price you pay for love. The only cure for grief is to grieve.
   2.  
      1. If we love, we will grieve.  Part of loving well is grieving well.  
      2. If we flee from grief, we will also flee from love.    You can't love without eventually grieving.  
      3. Our Lord modeled this for us:
          
         1. Isaiah 53:3 He was despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
      4.  
         1. John 11: 32-36 Then Mary, when she came where Jesus was and saw him, fell at his feet, saying to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” 33 When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled; 34 and he said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Lord, come and see.” 35 Jesus wept. 36 So the Jews said, “See how he loved him!” ]
      5.  
      6. Our Lady Modeled this for us.  Mary at Calvary looking up at her beloved Son, innocent, yet accused, mocked, reviled, slapped, spit upon, beaten, whipped. crowned with thorns, forced on death march, and then nailed to a cross, bleeding and dying.  His disciples save John had abandoned him, the people had turned against him. Flesh of her flesh, bone of her bone, but yet also Almighty God, the second person of the Trinity, Love Incarnate going through his grief.  
         1. What was her experience?  
         2. I can hear her asking, in the words of the Good Friday Reproaches, My people, what has he done to you?  How has he offended you? Answer me!
         3. Alice Von Hildebrand:  We gain a dolorous awareness that being as weak as we are, we cannot...

1. Through dramatic reenactments, experiential exercises and the best of available resources, Dr. Peter brings you critical information to help you better love those near you who are struggling with suicidal thoughts and impulses.  Learn how to be a much better first responder in these situations and to be a bridge to additional resources for your loved ones who are considering suicide.   
2. Lead-in:  Imagine a young man, a teenager you care about, one you really love, a family member or friend, or the son of a friend, comes to you, in distress, and he shares this with you -- listen closely as he tells you what's on his heart. [insert script].
    
   1. So now you have this upset, desperate man in front of you, who wants to be dead.  
      1. What do you do?  How do you handle this situation?  
      2. But before we go there, let's start with you.  We created a scenario to evoke what might come up in real life when your encounter a loved one who is suicidal.  
      3. What do you notice going on inside you right now? 
         1. What is happening in your body?
         2. Emotions?
         3. Assumptions or beliefs about yourself?
         4. Memories, desires, impulses.  
         5. Replay the last clip
         6. What are parts of you saying to you about you right now?
         7. Really pay attention to those messages
3. 
   
   1. I will make a bold claim here -- the number one thing you struggle with in being a first responder to a loved one with suicidal levels distress is [drum roll]  your own internal experience.   
4. 
   
   1. The problem you have is not so much inside the distressed loved one.
5.  
   1. The problem you have is inside of you, deep within you.
6.  
   1. You get wrapped up in our own fear, shame, guilt, anger, or your own sense of inadequacy.
7.  
   1. Did you feel any of that that in this example, confronted with this teenager in such distress, who feels so strongly the desire to die?
       
      1. Did you feel uncomfortable, on edge, uncertain?  Anxious?  Ineffective, inadequate?  Responsible, but not knowing what to do?  Did you experience any self-criticism?  Any of those experiences?
   2.  
      1. If so, you’ve come to the right place.  I can help with that.  [Insert Intro]
   3.  
8. 
   
9. Intro:
    
   1. Welcome to the podcast Interior Integration for Catholics, I like being together with you in this whole adventure, as we learn about suicide and what to do about it, all grounded in a Catholic worldview. I am Dr. Peter Malinoski,, passionate Catholic first and clinical psychologist as well, and you are listening to the Interior Integration for Catholics podcast.  Thank you for being here with me.  Interior Integration for Catholics is part of our broader outreach Souls and Hearts bringing the best of psychology grounded in a Catholic worldview to you and the rest of the world through our website soulsandhearts.com
10.  
    1. This is the fifth in our series on Suicide.
        
       1. In episode 76, we got into what the secular experts have to say about suicide.
    2.  
       1. In episode 77, we reviewed the suicides in Sacred Scripture, in the Bible.  
    3. 
       
       1. In episode 78, we sought to really understand the phenomenological worlds of those who kill themselves -- what happens inside?  How can we understand suicidal behaviors more clearly, dispelling myths and gripping on to the sense of desperation and the need for relief that drives so much suicidal behavior.
    4.  
       1. And in the last episode, number 79, we took a deep dive into the devastating impact of suicide on the parents, spouses, children, siblings, and friends who were left behind.
    5.  
    6. Today's episode, number 80 is entitled "How to Help a Loved One Who is Suicidal." 
    7. We are getting into the nitty-gritty of what do you do when someone you are close to is suicidal? 
    8. In short, how do you love someone who is so distressed, so desperate, that they are seriously considering killing themselves?
    9. First a brief caveat -- I can't, in a single podcast episode, train you to be a crisis intervention specialist.  That takes dedicated training.  But you know what?  Most people with these suicidal levels of distress don't seek out crisis intervention specialists or therapists or counselors first.  They go to the people they know.  They go to the people whom they hope and believe will love them.  They go to you.  What you'll learn today is for your own information, to help you understand what's going on and how best to act as a first responder and a bridge to long-lasting help that can heal.  
11. Love your neighbor as yourself.  Diliges proximum tuum tamquam teipsum. Inflection of dīligō (second-person singular future active indicative)  The second great commandment.  Love your neighbor as yourself. Diliges proximum  tuum.  Love is a verb, an action.  So what if our neighbor is the teenager from our lead in today?  How do we love a suicidal person?  How do we love her?
     
    1. Definition of Love -- Charity -- caritas.   
       1. Benevolence -- bonae voluntatis in Latin, good will.  
       2. Capacity
           
          1. Understanding the other
              
             1. Operating in the mode of the receiver
          2.  
             1. Dependent on us understanding ourselves
          3.  
             1. Mistaking what is coming from who
          4.  
             1. Unconsciousx
          5.  
       3. 
          
          1. Capacity to choose the good -- Freedom.
              
             1. Well-governed self
                 
                1. Regulated
             2.  
                1. Organized
             3.  
                1. Calm. Compassionate
             4.  
                1. Good human formation
             5.  
          2. 
             
       4. 
          
          1. Possessing virtues
       5.  
          1. Possessing the knowledge and expertise in a situation.  
       6. 
          
       7. Constancy.  
          1. Need peace and interior integration'
          2. Being vs. doing.
       8. CCC 1829 The fruits of charity are joy, peace, and mercy.  
12. 
    
    1. Loving all their parts
        
       1. Definition of parts
           
          1. Suicidal distress makes so much more sense if we understand each person not as a uniform, monolithic, homogenous, single personality, but rather as a dynamic system including a core self and parts.  That helps to explain so much, including shifts over time.  
       2. 
          
          1. Definition of Parts:  Separate, independently operating personalities within us, each with own unique prominent needs, roles in our lives, emotions, body sensations, guiding beliefs and assumptions, typical thoughts, intentions, desires, attitudes, impulses, interpersonal style, and world view.  Each part also has an image of God and also its own approach to sexuality.  Robert Falconer calls them insiders.  You can also think of them as separate modes of operating if that is helpful.  
             1. Not just transient mood states, but whole constellations of all these aspects.
          2. Unintegrated parts are not focused on loving others
          3. Unintegrated parts can be exiled
          4. Parts often have very different attitudes toward suicide.  
    2. 
       
13. 
    
    1. Blending
        
       1. What is the key word here?  Blending.  

1. Dr. Peter brings you inside the inner world of so many parents, spouses, children, and siblings of those who died by suicide.  Through an imagination exercise, research, quotes from family members, and the Internal Family Systems model of the person, he invites you to a deeper understanding of other others experience a loved one's suicide.  
2. Lead-in
    
   1. The world is full of ‘friends’ of suicide victims thinking ‘if I had only made that drive over there, I could have done something.’ —Darnell Lamont Walker  an artist; a writer, photographer, painter, and filmmaker.
3.  
   1. Ok, so we're continuing to discuss suicide here, we're taking on the tough topics
4.  
   1. And I want to start with a caution -- if you have lost a loved one to suicide, this episode may be really healing but it also may be really difficult.  If you are raw and struggling with a death, be really thoughtful about when and how you listen to this.  Pay attention to your window of tolerance and if it's too much right now, know that I respect that and I invite you to approach this topic in a way that is right for you, with help from a counselor, a spiritual director, a trusted friend, somebody you know.  
5. 
   
   1. Also, this imagination exercise will be hard to really get into if you're driving or engaged in other activities.  You can try it, but it's going to be really emotionally evocative for many people.  I suggest that you create a good space to engage with 
6. 
   
   1. Imagine looking through your front window and seeing a police cruiser pull up.   One uniformed police officer gets out and a woman in plainclothes and they slowly walk to your door.  They ring the doorbell.  You open the door.  The officer removes his hat and tucks it under his arm.  The man seems nervous and clears his throat.  The woman introduces herself and tells you she is the victims' assistance coordinator or something like that for your county.  She asks your name.  You give it.  She asks if they can come inside and talk with you.  "We have very difficult news for you," she says with sympathy in her brown eyes.  Your heart stops beating.  The officer looks away, he looks like he'd be anywhere else, rather than here with you.  You let them in, now only vaguely aware of your surroundings, the shape your living room is in right now.  
7. 
   
   1. From the couch, in a gentle, matter-of-fact and very calm manner , the victim service coordinator tells you that the one you so love, you so cherish in the world is dead.  She names the name.  Yes, it's verified.  Yes, there is no mistake.  How, how did this happen you ask.  The officer explains the details of the citizens' reports called in earlier in the day. He was the first law enforcement officer on the scene, got there just before the EMTs, he had photographed the body, taken notes, conducted the brief investigation.  His throat catches.  There are tears in his eyes.  He hates this part of the job.  He tells a few details of the suicide scene.  You need to know this, he says, I'm required to tell you.  The woman reaches out her professional hand to you, offering her version of compassion.  
8. 
   
   1. Observe what's going on inside you right now, as you enter into this scene in your imagination.  What is happening in your body, your thoughts, you emotions, your impulses, your desires? Let yourself enter into this experience
9.  
   1. The victims' assistance coordinator is discussing a few details "Things I have to tell you" she says.  Standard protocols in situations like this.  Something about confirming the identity in the morgue, something else about an autopsy.  Something about who you can lean on in your support network family and friends.  Something about how hard this all is to take in at once.  And there are some government forms to fill out.  And a very nicely designed brochure entitled "Surviving the Loss of a Loved One to Suicide" that you get to keep for handy reference.  Do you have any questions at this point she asks?  Yes, we are sure it's your loved one.  The identification was very clear, there is no mistake.  
10. 
    
    1. Stay with this experience for just a minute if you can without losing your grounding.
11.  
    1. See if you can just accept what's going on inside -- and acceptance doesn't necessarily mean endorsement -- see if you can accept what's going on inside and really experience it -- the feelings, the impulses, the assumptions, the thoughts, the beliefs, the implications, whatever is coming up.   
12. 
    
    1. Do you notice different parts within you?  Different modes of being, maybe different messages coming to you?
13.  
    1. You may just have experienced a taste, a sip of the cup that 300,000 parents, siblings, children and spouses of those who die by suicide experience each year in the US, and millions worldwide.  Hang on to what you learned about your reactions, keep it in mind as we dive deep into suicides devastating impact on those left behind.  [Cue Intro Music]
14.  
15. Opening
     
    1. Welcome to the podcast Interior Integration for Catholics, thank you for being here with me, it is good to be here with you, I am glad we are together as we face this difficult topic of suicide.  In episode I am clinical psychological Peter Malinoski and you are listening to the Interior Integration for Catholics podcast, where we take on the toughest topics, the most difficult and raw themes that many people want to avoid.  Interior Integration for Catholics is part of our broader outreach Souls and Hearts bringing the best of psychology grounded in a Catholic worldview to you and the rest of the world through our website soulsandhearts.com
16.  
    1. This is the fourth in our series on Suicide.
        
       1. In episode 76, we got into what the secular experts have to say about suicide.
    2.  
       1. In episode 77, we reviewed the suicides in Sacred Scripture, in the Bible.  
    3. 
       
       1. In the last episode, number 78, we sought to really understand the phenomenological worlds of those who kill themselves -- what happens inside?  How can we understand suicidal behaviors more clearly, dispelling myths and gripping on to the sense of desperation and the need for relief that drives so much suicidal behavior.
    4.  
       1. Today, in Episode 79, released on August 2, 2021 we will take a deep dive into the devastating impact of suicide on those left behind.  We'll go deep into the internal experience of the parents, spouses, children, siblings, and friends of those who killed themselves to see how they experienced suicide.  
    5. 
       
    6. Alison Wertheimer: A Special Scar: The Experiences of People Bereaved by Suicide said this: [Suicide] has often far-reaching repercussions for many others. It is rather like throwing a stone into a pond; the ripples spread and spread.  Now, Alison, with all due respect, I think you're totally wrong about that.  It's not just ripples from a stone in a pond. For the spouses, parents, children, siblings and friends who are left behind to deal with the impact of a suicide it's more like a tidal wave resulting from an underwater earthquake than ripples from a stone.  
    7.  Linda Lee Landon -- Author of Life after Suicide said this, which is much more on the money:  Suicide creates a monstrous emotional upsurge of sha...

1. Lead-in
    
   1. Almost no one understands suicide very well.  Almost no one.  
2. 
   
   1. Some of you might say -- but Dr. Peter, I've been really down and out.  I've been really suicidal.  I've been there.  I lived it.  
      1. Not gonna argue with you about having been suicidal. But having intense feelings, almost irresistible impulses toward suicide, constant suicidal thoughts
      2.  -- that doesn't mean you understand suicide.  Not at all.
3. 
   
   1. I don't think most people who have attempted suicide really understand their experience.  
4. 
   
   1. I don't think most therapists really understand suicide.    
5. 
   
   1. Why ?
6.  
   1. Because we're afraid to really enter into what is behind suicide.  We don't want to go there.  We're terrified of what lurks underneath.  We have parts of us that don't want to understand.  
      1.  Lauren Oliver, Delirium “Suicide. A sideways word, a word that people whisper and mutter and cough: a word that must be squeezed out behind cupped palms or murmured behind closed doors. It was only in dreams that I heard the word shouted, screamed."
7. 
   
   1. And I'll go further than that.  And it's not so much because we're afraid of what we'll find in another person, a friend or relative or colleague.  It's because we are terrified that finding the darkness inside of others will wake up our own sleeping giants of darkness.  The darkness inside us.  The terror inside us.  That's why we avoid, why we distract, why we skirt the edges of this topic. 
8. 
   
   1. Benjamin Franklin knew this:  Nine men in ten are would-be suicides   -Poor Richard's Almanack.  
9. 
   
   1. Freud popularized it in 1920 -- book the Pleasure Principle.   -- he discussed the death drive: the drive toward death and destruction, often expressed through behaviors such as aggression, repetition compulsion, and self-destructiveness.  Death drive or drives went by the name Thanatos -- the Greek god personified death.
       
      1. Caught a lot of flak for it, then and now.  Not really widely accepted.  I think he was on to something.  Something we don't want to think about others -- that they have drives toward self-destruction.  It's something that we don't want to admit about ourselves.  
   2. 
      
10. 
    
    1. If we are really honest with ourselves in looking at suicide
        
       1. we would realize, with John Bradford There but for the grace of God go I. We would give up our false presumptions about our own strength and our own natural resiliency.  
    2. 
       
       1. We would realize, with Shakespeare's Lord Chancellor in Henry VIII “We all are men, in our own natures frail, and capable of our flesh; few are angels.” ― Lord Chancellor William Shakespeare, Henry VIII 
    3. 
       
       1. We would understand Mahatma Ghandi when he said: “If I had no sense of humor, I would long ago have committed suicide.”
    4.  
       1. We would have a lot less judgement about the souls and experience of those who killed themselves.  Yes, the action of suicide is wrong, gravely wrong, and we'll discuss that in next week's episode.  We're not minimizing the gravity of the act -- I'm talking here about the phenomenological experience of those on the brink of self-destruction and why they are there.  
    5. 
       
       1. And we would understand something about the spiritual dimensions, the dark spiritual powers at work in suicide as well.   
    6. 
       
11. 
    
    1. I could be wrong about this, but I don't think you really have any accurate idea about suicide.  Suicide is one of the most misunderstood of human actions.  
       1. Because we want to avoid the churning darkness, the despair, the hopelessness, the alienation, the trauma within us, we don’t want to see it in others.  And if someone near is suicidal, we know, we know instinctively that he is tapping into his despair, his hopelessness, his alienation.  We know that our suicidal is really in the grip of her trauma and her isolation, and her excruciating pain.  
       2. And our natural response -- is to flee.  To get out of dodge.  To protect ourselves.  
          1. We rationalize it -- I'm not a professional, I'm not a counselor, I don't know what to do with all of this intensity
       3. Or we stay in there, we force ourselves to stay in relationship, feeling really inadequate, not wanting to go too deep, not wanting to screw it up -- and in our timidity and fear, we actually aren't very helpful. 
       4. OK --  I will grant you that you don't really know what to do.  
       5. And I get it that you're afraid -- maybe terrified.  OK.  
       6. This is a tough issue.  Suicide is a tough issue.  And tough issues are what we specialize in here.  [Cue music]
12. 
    
13. Intro
     
    1. Welcome to the podcast Interior Integration for Catholics, thank you for being here with me, thank you for making it through the lead in and not fleeing from this episode.  I'm glad you and I are in this together.  And it's going to be OK.  By God's grace, together we can handle, we can work with, we can work through this topic of suicide.  We'll do it together.  
14. 
    
    1. I am clinical psychological Peter Malinoski and you are listening to the Interior Integration for Catholics podcast, where we take on the toughest topics, the ones others don't want to touch, and we go really deep with them.  Why?  Not out of some kind of idle curiosity.  Not out of disorder curiosity, out of some kind of psychological voyeurism.  No.  We go there in this podcast because we are working on ourselves.  On our own human formation, shoring up the natural foundation for our spiritual lives, so that we can enter into loving union with God.  That's why.  It's about removing the psychological barriers you have to a much deeper intimacy with God the Father, Jesus the Son, the Holy Spirit, and the Blessed Virgin Mary, our Mother.
15.  
    1. In the last episode we looked at specific cases of suicide in Sacred Scripture.  This is episode number 78, released on July 26, 2021, entitled The Desperate Inner Experience of Suicidality.  We are going to enter into the phenomenological world of the suicidal person.  
16. 
    
17. Why?  Why do we do that?  Why do that?
     
    1. Two answers.  The second answer is for going into all of this depth on suicide is so that you and I can love.  
       1. So that we can love others who are struggling with this -- and there are so many. 
          1.  Franklin estimated 90%.  Nine men in ten are would-be suicides.  I think he's right, even though the vast majority of those don't even know there's a struggle going on inside them.  I think Benjamin Franklin knew about the latent potential in most people.
          2. Freud:  Thanatos.  The Death Drives.  Freud knew.  For all his faults and follies, Freud knew something about the depth of pain in people's souls.  The pain that lives in the unconscious.  Locked away, at least for a time.  Unnoticed, at least for a time.  
18. 
    
    1. The first answer:  Is so that we can be known and loved.  That we can accept others knowing us, and us knowing ourselves.  
       1. 1 John 4:19  We love, bec...

1. Storytime 
   1. I want to take you back, back in time to a hot June night in 1980 and tell you a story about that time. [cue sound effect] I’m 11 years old and I'm recovering from a third spinal surgery after two previous cervical fusions failed.  I’m feeling terrible.  I'm in a dark, cold hospital room in a university hospital, just out of post-op and back on the pediatric unit 104 miles from home, immobilized in a full body cast and halo brace, recovering from puking from the general anesthetic, afraid that this surgery failed like the other two.  My confidence in surgeons is at a low ebb.  The room smells of antiseptic and isolation.  
   2. Back in those unenlightened days, visiting hours were really limited, so my parents aren't there.  But I'm not alone.  My sick toddler roommate is lying face down in his crib, sobbing inconsolably.   No one comes for him.  “Nothing can be done for him -- this will pass,” the professionals had told me when I pressed the call button for him.   So I don’t bother with the call button anymore.  I can’t think of anything to do for him either.  I feel like he does.  We're both miserable.  I am in the darkest hour of my life to that point.  I'm beginning to wonder if the rest of my life will be a series of horrible, painful, failed surgeries, nighttime isolation and helplessness.  
   3. So what does little Petey Guy do at the point?  My aunt Marlene always used to call me Petey Guy when I was that age.  Petey Guy starts to sing.  Yes, that's right, I start singing.  Do you know what I was singing? 
      1. Was the 1959 Julie Andrews version of "My Favorite Things" from The Sound of Music?  No it wasn't.  
      2. The Beatles" 1969 classic "Here comes the Sun" by George Harrison?  It was not.  
      3. Was it the 1977 show tune "The Sun will Come out Tomorrow" from the musical Annie?  Nope.  Guess again.  
      4. Gloria Gaynor's smash hit in 1977 "I will survive"?  Wrong.  
      5. "Don't Stop" by Fleetwood Mac, also in 1977?  No.  
      6. How about "Don't Stop Believin" by Journey -- that was it, right.  Come on, people.  "Don't Stop Believin" came out in 1981.  We're in 1980. So chronologically, that wouldn't make sense.   
   4. No, I was singing a different song, a darker song than any of those,  a 1970 song with lyrics written by 14 year old Michael Altman, put to music by his father Robert Altman and sung by Johnny Mandel.  A song written for the 1970 movie MASH.  Some of you may be following this now.  I was singing a song called Suicide is Painless.  
   5. You're probably familiar with the tune.  After the surprise success of the movie, Robert Altman chose it to be the instrumental opening for the hugely popular MASH comedy-drama series that ran on CBS from 1972 to 1983.  So even though you know the tune, you might not be familiar with the gaunt, haunting, despairing lyrics.  Here's the opening stanza:
       
      1. Through early morning fog I see
   6.  

Visions of the things to be

The pains that are withheld for me

I realize and I can see

That suicide is painless

It brings on many changes

And I can take or leave it if I please

1. So a little backstory.  My Grandpa Roberts had a magnus chord organ 
   1. 1960's very popular, lots on the second hand market.  Chords press a button with left hand, keyboard with the right.  We had one too.  
   2. Grandpa Roberts had a songbook of popular tune to play on the Magnus Chord Organ --- including Suicide is Painless  
   3. I recognized the theme from MASH, and it was one of very few songs I learned to play on the Magnus Chord Organ, and I sang the lyrics as I played.  But they didn't particularly resonate with me until that post-surgical night in 1980, in the dark, sick, and alone with the crying toddler when my 11 year old heart was so burdened and breaking.  
2. Nobody noticed my singing about suicide in the night -- my toddler roommate didn't seem to care.  And it wasn't until almost 40 years later that I ever told anyone about it.  
3. Intro
    
   1. Welcome to the podcast Interior Integration for Catholics, thank you for being here with me.  
4. 
   
   1. I no longer go by "Petey Guy," I am better known as clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski
5.  
   1. The reason this Interior Integration for Catholics podcasts exists is to help you toward  loving God, neighbor and yourself in an ordered, healthy, holy way. -- It's about tolerating being loved, and about loving about living out the two great commandments to the hilt, with all of our being, it's about overcoming the natural obstacles to reaching more of our potential, both in the natural and the spiritual realms.  
6. 
   
   1. Because we take on the tough topics in this podcast, today we are getting into the difficult and complex topic of suicide/  Suicide.  Even the word can send shivers up the spine.  
7. 
   
   1. This episode is titled IIC 76  The Black of Suicide -- What Do the Secular Experts Say? and it's released on July 12, 2021 
8. 
   
9. Today we are looking at the best of current psychological and sociological research -- 
   1. Episode 73.  St. Augustine De Doctrina Christiana. Chapter 40   is a theological text on how to interpret and teach the Scriptures.
       
      1. Moreover, if those who are called philosophers, and especially the Platonists, have said anything that is true and in harmony with our faith, we are not only not to shrink from it, but to claim it for our own use.
   2.  
      1. all branches of heathen learning have not only false and superstitious fancies and heavy burdens of unnecessary toil, which we ought to abhor and avoid; but they contain also liberal instruction which is better adapted to the use of the truth, and some most excellent precepts of morality; and some truths in regard even to the worship of the One God are found among them. Now these are, so to speak, their gold and silver, which they did not create themselves, but dug out of the mines of God's providence which are everywhere scattered abroad
   3.  
   4. In future episode, we will bring in a lot more of the wisdom of the Catholic Church .
   5. And in future episodes, we will bring in more Internal Family Systems thinking about our parts and suicide, fascinating stuff there
   6. And in future episodes we will be discussing the impact of suicide on parents, spouses, siblings, children and friends who experienced suicide through the death of a loved one.  
   7. So we are at the beginning of a series of episodes on suicide.  This is a critical topic -- A 2017 Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey of 1000 American Adults finds that 55%  know someone who has committed suicide.
       
      1. One from my 8th grade graduating class
   8.  
      1. One for two classes behind me in high school  
   9. 
      

1. Let's do an etymological analysis of the word suicide -- you know how much I like to break down words on this podcast, so it's Time for Word Lore [cue sound effect] 
   1. Where does the English word Suicide come from?
   2. "deliberate killing of oneself," 1650s, from Modern Latin suicidium "suicide," from Latin sui "of oneself" (genitive of se "self") + -cidium "a killing," from caedere "to slay" or to strike oneself.  
2. How serious is suic...

1. And depression manifests itself in different ways depending on roles or functions that different parts
    
   1. Three major roles
       
      1. Exiles -- 
         1. most sensitive -- these exiles have been exploited, rejected, abandoned in external relationships
         2. They have suffered relational traumas or attachment injuries
         3. They hold the painful experiences that have been isolated from conscious awareness to protect the person from being overwhelmed with the intensity.
         4. They desperately want to be seen and known, to be safe and secure, to be comforted and soothed, to be cared for and loved
         5. They want rescue, redemption, healing
         6. And in the intensity of their needs and emotions, they threaten to take over and destabilize the person's whole being, the person's whole system -- they want to take over the raft to be seen and heard, to be known, to be understood.  But they can flood us with the intensity of their experience
         7. And that threatens to harm external relationships
         8. Burdens they carry:  Shame, dependency, worthlessness, Fear/Terror, Grief/Loss, Loneliness, Neediness, Pain, lack of meaning or purpose, a sense of being unloved and unlovable, inadequate, abandoned, 
            1. Depression.  Exiles are parts that step in to carry the burden of depression so that depression doesn't overwhelm our system and incapacitate us.  
            2. Protector parts exile the part burdened with depression -- toxic
            3. But these exiles want to be heard, seen, known, understood.  
            4. So they attempt to jailbreak, they want to get on the raft, they want to stop being submerged in the unconscious, under the water, they want to get on the raft, and the only way they know how to be accepted on the raft is to become king of the raft and overpower all the other parts.  Then, they hope to be seen and known and heard and accepted and loved 
            5. But because they blended, because they dominated, because they took over, there's no possibility to be in relationship inside with the self.  They are now able to scream their pain and distress, but it doesn't get them what they want.  
            6. When depressed exiles take over, they wind up shutting the system down
                
               1. Depressed mood  
            7. 
               
               1. Loss of interest/pleasure
            8.  
               1. Weight loss or gain  
            9. 
               
               1. Insomnia or hypersomnia 
            10. 
                
                1. Psychomotor agitation or retardation  
            11. 
                
                1. Fatigue  
            12. 
                
                1. Feeling worthless or excessive/inappropriate guilt N
            13.  
                1. Decreased concentration 
            14. 
                
                1. Thoughts of death/suicide:  
            15. 
                
            16. So exiles can bring the depression to the fore.  But that is not the only way we become depressed.  
   2. 
      
      1. Managers
          
         1. These are the proactive protector parts.  They work strategically, with forethought and planning to keep in control of situations and relationships to minimize the likelihood of you being hurt.  They work really hard to keep you safe.
      2.  
         1. controlling, striving, planning, caretaking, judging, 
      3. 
         
         1. Can be pessimistic, self-critical, very demanding.
      4.  
         1. Managers can use symptoms of depression to try to keep us safe
             
            1. Depressed mood  -- pessimism keep us from trying new thing and risking failure
         2.  
            1. Loss of interest/pleasure  -- keep us from enjoying a romantic relationship that might challenge us
            2. Weight loss or gain  -- keeping us obese, in the hope that we don't attract others' attention so that we won't be raped again.  
            3. Insomnia or hypersomnia -- protecting us from nightmares that exiles share when we sleep.  
            4. Psychomotor agitation or retardation   -- letting others know not to expect too much from us
            5. Fatigue  -- keeping us from lashing out or being aggressive with those that our exiles hate.  
            6. Decreased concentration -- keeping us from being promoted to management, so we don't have to handle the difficulties of having subordinates at work.  
   3. 
      
      1. Firefighters
          
         1. When exiles break through and threaten to take over the system, like in Inside Out, remember the parts and the control panel?  So when these exiles are about the break out, the firefighters leap into action.
      2.  
         1. It's an emergency situation, a crisis, like a fire raging in a house.
      3.  
         1. No concern for niceties, for propriety, for etiquette, for little details like that.  
      4. 
         
         1. Firefighter take bold, drastic actions to stifle, numb or distract from the intensity of the exile's experiences.  
      5. 
         
         1. Intense neediness and grief are overwhelming us!  Emergency actions -- battle stations!   Evasive maneuvers, Arm the torpedoes, Full speed ahead!
      6.  
         1. No concern for consequences -- don't you get it, we are in a crisis, 
      7. 
         
         1. All kinds of addictions -- alcohol use, binge eating, shopping, sleeping, dieting, excessive working or exercise, suicidal actions, self-harm, violence, dissociation, distractions, obsessions, compulsions, escapes into fantasy, and raging.  
      8. 
         
         1. Depression as a tool for firefighters
             
            1. Remember firefighters are always reacting to an exile breaking out.  
         2. 
            
            1. Depressed mood -- intense depression, feeling really really sad so that we don't feel the crushing emptiness inside than an exile carries.  Better to feel sadness than to feel a void of nothingness and to question whether or not I exist -- so there the firefighter is pursuing an integrity need of knowing that I exist, protecting against being swept away by the soul crushing nihilism of an exile burdened with a void, with the feeling of being nothing.  
         3. 
            
            1. Fatigue -- betting to spend 20 hours a day sleeping rather than cope with the overwhelming grief and loss of the death of a spouse.  
         4. 
            
            1. Suicide -- seen as the only viable release from the pain of an exile.  
         5. 
            
      9. 
         
   4. 
      
2. 
   

1. Parts are not their roles, they are not their functions, they are not their burdens.  All of these can change.  If parts are unburdened, they no longer have the whatever burden they originally carried.  Parts are not their burdens.  They can give those burdens up through unburdening.  Parts are not their roles or their functions either.  As the person's internal system becomes more integrated, parts begin to trust in the leadership of the core self more, parts become more collaborative and cooperative, parts find new, constructive, healthy roles in the system. 
2. Parts can hold their intensity.  
3. Poetry

“Depression” by Cara Delevingne

“Who am I? Who am I trying to be?

Not myself, anyone but myself.

Living in a fantasy to bury the reality,

Making myself the mystery,

A strong facade disguising the misery.

Empty, but beyond the point of emptiness,

I am lost.

I don’t need to be saved,

I need to be found.”

1. Intro:  It is good to be together, thank you for joining me today in this podcast episode
2. I want to take you back 40 years with me, more than 40 years, to 1981, and share with you an experience I had as a lad, share with you a story and images of that story that will help us understand the topic of today's podcast.  So, without any further delays, its Story Time with Dr. Peter 
   1. Its early July 1981, I'm 12 years old, really skinny, about 5 foot 5, 110 lbs, very nearsighted without my glasses swimming to the green raft with my swim buddy at Camp Onaway on the Waupaca Chain of Lakes, in central Wisconsin
   2. Taking on the challenge.  I'm the lowest form of life at Boys Brigade Camp 3, A first-year boy.  I'm a FLIC--  A FLIC is an acronym that stand for "Fat Little Ignorant Camper" the term of affection, a sweet, ironic endearment bestowed on us by our fearless camp leaders.  
   3. And I’m swimming out to the raft to test my mettle with the bigger boys.  The high schoolers. 
   4. The raft -- floating platform, 12 X 12, buoyed up by sealed 55 gallon drum, anchored in 12 feet of clear water and covered with green indoor-outdoor carpeting.  
   5. That is the place where the game "King of the Raft" was played by the camp 3 FLICs of all ages and body shapes.  
   6. The objective of King of the Raft was simple.  To be the only boy left standing on the raft, with all challengers in the water.  
   7. To do that, you want to push, pull, toss, hurl, lure or otherwise maneuver all the other boys off the raft.  A sparse game would have six boys, a real showdown might have 24, ranging in age from the youngest at 12 to highly muscled 17 year old incoming high school seniors with mustaches.  
   8. Very few rules and all of them were unwritten.  The primary one was no dragging another boy along on the raft, because that indoor/outdoor carpeting can tear the skin right off your back or chest very quickly, especially if the victim is struggling with all his might, as he should be, and as was the norm,  And no choking and no hitting or kicking anyone in the groin.  That was about it.  Otherwise it was a free for all, with shoving and pushing and lunging and clinging and teams of boys working together and alliances broken by Machiavellian tricks all for the great prize of being able to stand, alone, on the raft, with all your companions in the water and to beat your chest and yell with all your might at the top of your lungs, "I am the King of the Raft!"
   9. Now occasionally, a gargantuan 16 or 17 year old would dominate the raft and be obnoxious as king, and then two of the 20 or 30 something year old camp leaders would swim out to administer a form of camp justice and dethrone the obnoxious king by heaving him in a remarkable high trajectory to a watery landing many feet from the 144 square feet of green carpeted real estate. 
   10. Then the game changed.  Then it was get the leaders time and the game moved into another phase when all the fat little ignorant campers had a chance to take on the two leaders, and a battle royale ensued with the campers on one side and the leaders on the other.  
   11. I did this for seven summers.  From 1981 to 1987, five years as a camper and two years as a leader.  And I learned a lot of life lessons on the raft, both as a skinny, vanquished, frequently airborne FLIC and as king.  
   12. So I hope I was able to create a word picture for you, some images of what it was like on the raft at Camp Onaway on the Waupaca chain of lakes in the 1980s.  We going to come back to the images of king of the raft  later in the episode.  
3. Intro -- Welcome to Interior Integration for Catholics
    
   1. I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski and the reason this Interior Integration for Catholics podcasts exists is to help you toward  loving God, neighbor and yourself in an ordered, healthy, holy way. -- It's about tolerating being loved, and about loving.  This podcast and especially the Resilient Catholics Community is a training ground for overcoming your natural level impediments, your psychological obstacles to accepting love from God and others and loving God, neighbor and ourselves in the best ways possible.  It all about your human formation, all about shoring up your natural foundation for the spiritual life, all about training and equipping you to follow the two great commandments -- to love God with all your being, with every part of you, and to love your neighbor.  
4. 
   
   1.  This is Episode 74, 
5. 
   
   1. Released on June 28, 2021 and titled Internal Chaos and Blending vs. Internal Peace and Integration
6.  
7. Internal Chaos vs. Internal Peace
    
   1. Psychotherapist Peter Michealson describes how quote the unconscious mind of adults is buffeted by gale-force winds of emotional chaos that originated as an infantile effect decades earlier. Emotional associations from our distant past now buffet our life in incredible, mysterious, spectacular, and frequently painful and self-defeating ways.
8.  

Emotions percolate and circulate in our unconscious mind with some degree of chaos. We all know what it’s like to be happy one moment, sad the next, with no conscious input from us. We also know how hard it can be to regulate our desires, impulses, and emotional reactions. Both neuroscience and psychology have established that our brain struggles mightily and often unsuccessfully to limit the effects of irrationality. Often we try to apply common sense and reason to moderate unpleasant emotions or to curb self-defeating impulses. Yet our emotional side, with a life of its own, can often be impervious to rational entreaties.  End quote

1. Reimagine the raft battle
    
   1. But instead of generally good-hearted boys working on their developmental tasks of becoming men through struggling and wrestling with each other
2.  
   1. You have players that believe that they are locked in a life and death struggle, a deadly battle for supremacy. 
3. 
   
   1. Think of the raft battle now as a gladiatorial contest to the death -- or following the plots of the Death Race movie series -- Jason Statham, Frederick Koehler, Ian McShane.  Five movies.  
4. 
   
   1. That my dear listeners, is how it is inside of us for  most of us, whether we realize it or not. 
      1. The players are our parts, remember --  those Separate, independently operating personalities within us, each with own unique prominent needs, roles in our lives, emotions, body sensations, guiding beliefs and assumptions, typical thoughts, intentions, desires, attitudes, impulses, interpersonal style, and world view.  May seem to use like modes of operating
      2. Our systems may seem quiet in the moment -- maybe one of our manager parts has a really strong hold on the raft and is able to keep the others in the water, some of the submerged, drowning, in an attempt to hold on to some pseudo stability, and function in day to day life.  But the other parts are waiting and watching for an opportunity to leap on the raft, into conscious awareness and forcibly de-throne the blended part who was king of the raft.  
      3. But underneath, the other parts are waiting, watching. Looking for an opportunity to become the king of the raft, to drive the bus, to govern the system.  
5. 
   
6. Because of original sin, the sins of others, and our own personal sins, that's what it's like inside for almost everyone.
7. Blending
    
   1. What is the key word her...

1. Introduction
2. The Goals:  We Catholics are to love God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind.  
   1. With every fiber of our being, every last little bit of ourselves.  
   2. To love God in every internal experience -- every thought, emotion, body sensation, intention, impulse attitude, belief, assumption, every desire -- every internal experience oriented toward loving God. 
   3. Nothing within us oriented any other way.  That's the challenge, that's what that commandment means.   
3. Fr. Jacques Phillipe:  
   1. Searching for and Maintaining Peace  -- may be my most favorite book  
   2. In order that abandonment might be authentic and engender peace, it must be total.  Must put everything, without exception, into the hands of God, not seeking any longer to manage or” to save” ourselves by her own means: not in the material domain, nor the emotional, nor the spiritual.  We cannot divide human existence and the various sectors: certain sectors where it would be legitimate to surrender ourselves to God with confidence in others where, on the contrary, we feel we must manage exclusively on her own.  And one thing we know well: all reality that we have not surrendered to God, that we choose to manage by ourselves without giving carte blanche to God, will continue to make us more or less uneasy.  The measure of our interior piece will be that of our abandonment, consequently of our detachment.  Page 37
       
      1. No-go Zones.  Wikipedia A "no-go area" or "no-go zone" is a neighborhood or other geographic area where some or all outsiders either are physically prevented from entering or can enter only at risk.
   3.  
      1. God doesn't come in here.  Compartmentalization, lack of integration.  
         1. Recreational time -- not when I'm watching football, not when I'm playing poker, not when I'm gossiping with my friends.  
         2. Work life -- dog eat dog world, highly competitive business, sometimes we have to do things we're not proud of…
         3. Sex life -- caught between my partner and my beliefs
         4. My private attachments -- drinking, flirting, shopping -- whatever we are attached to.  
         5. Deep shame.  Deep rage.  Deep Sadness,  Deep fear.  Inner darkness.  
         6. Trauma Zones -- betrayal, abandonment, terror, --attempts to seal that all off, from everything and everyone in order to keep functioning, to keep on with daily activities.  
   4. 
      
4. Intro -- Welcome to Interior Integration for Catholics
    
   1. I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski and I am here to help guide you toward  loving God, neighbor and yourself in an ordered, healthy, holy way.
       
      1. And how do I do that?
          
         1. By focusing on your natural level impediments, your psychological obstacles to tolerated being loved and to loving God, neighbor and ourselves in the best ways possible
             
            1.  it's all about your human formation 
         2. 
            
            1. It's all about shoring up your natural foundation for the spiritual life 
         3. 
            
            1. So many of our spiritual problems are really rooted in our human formation, our natural foundation for the spiritual life
         4.  
      2. 
         
   2. 
      
5. 
   
   1. This is Episode 73, 
      1. Released on June 21, 2021 and titled  Is Internal Family Systems Really Catholic?
      2. I get this question a lot -- Internal Family Systems or IFS has exploded on the therapy scene, especially in the last 10 years and especially as a modality for working with trauma. 
         1. It makes sense -- we don't want anything to keep us from God.  
         2. Great contribution -- 
         3. Synthesis of two paradigms
             
            1. Plural mind -- we all contain many different parts
                
               1. A mind in conversation with itself denotes a non-unitary, relational mind
            2.  
               1. Internal dilemmas
            3.  
         4. 
            
            1. Systems thinking -- Dick was a therapist trained in family systems
                
               1. Bringing systems thinking inside is a tremendous advance for therapy
            2.  
               1. On a par with Freud's popularization of the unconscious.
            3.  
               1. God can reveal the glory of creation to people from all kinds of backgrounds
                   
                  1. Watson and Crick Discoverers of DNA -- very hostile toward Catholicism.  
               2. 
                  
            4. 
               
         5. 
            
            1. A core self, protected from harm rich in all kinds of naturally endowed resources.  
         6. 
            
      3. But Richard Schwartz -- raised in an atheistic home, culturally Jewish -- he writes in the forward of Jenna Riemersma's Book "Altogether You."  
         1. My father was a scientist who taught us that religion was at the root of many of the world's conflicts and slaughters .  I maintained a skepticism about anything spiritual until I began exploring my clients' inner terrains and encountered their self
         2. Phenomenological approach
             
            1. Definition Phenomenology is the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view .-- an approach that concentrates on the study of consciousness and the objects of direct experience.
         3.  
            1. Setting aside preconceived notions -- "privileging data over pride"
                
               1. p. 19 IFS Therapy 2nd ed.  We can enter the unconscious and interact with it directly, asking questions about the desires, distortions, and agendas of the inner system.  In response, our parts will answer clearly, take the client directly to crucial scenes from the past, and explain what is most important about their experience, removing the need for us to speculate, reframe, interpret, or instruct.  
            2. 
               
         4. 
            
      4. This podcast -- authentically Catholic 
6. Necessity for grounding our understanding of psychology and the human person in a Catholic anthropology
    
   1. Define Catholic anthropology  Wikipedia In the context of Christian theology, Christian anthropology is the study of the human ("anthropology") as it relates to God. It differs from the social science of anthropology, which primarily deals with the comparative study of the physical and social characteristics of humanity across times and places.
7.  
   1. I am responsible for my words and my teaching.  
      1. Scripture verse about teaching
          
         1. Woe to anyone who leads little ones astray
      2.  
      3. My day of particular judgement 
      4. What I teach and what I don't teach.  Omissions.  
      5. Catholic with a small c:  The word is from the Greek katholikos, universal, literally in respect of (kata) the whole (holos);
      6. St. Augustine De Doctrina Christiana. Cjapter 40   is a theological text on how to interpret and teach the Scriptures.
          
         1. Moreover, if those who are called philosophers, and especially the Platonists, have said anything that is true and in harmony with our faith, we are not only not to shrink from it, but to claim it for our own use.
      7.  
         1. all branches of heathen learning have not only false and superstitious fancies and heavy burdens of unnecessary toil, which we ought to abhor and avoid; but they contain also liberal instruction which is better adapted to the use of the truth, and some most excellent precepts of morality; and some truths in regard even to the w...

1. The Pitch -- Opening
    
   1. Set the Scene Two Great Commandments
       
      1. What is the whole point of your life? What is your mission and purpose? What is the most important thing for you to do?  Really think about that for a minute.  What is your ultimate goal on this planet as a Catholic man or woman?
   2.  
      1. All of us serious Catholics want to love God and neighbor.  
      2.  36 “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?” 37 And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. 38 This is the great and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. 40 On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.” Matthew 22:36-40
          
         1. Mitch and Sri CCSS  "Together, the two love Commandments sum up the Ten Commandments, three of which delineate our responsibilities toward God and seven of which concern our duties toward others."  
      3. 
         
      4. Luke 10:25-28  25 And behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test, saying, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” 26 He said to him, “What is written in the law? How do you read?” 27 And he answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul [being], and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” 28 And he said to him, “You have answered right; do this, and you will live.”
      5. Highest obligation of every person.  
      6. Romans 13:8-10  8 Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for he who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law. 9 The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery, You shall not kill, You shall not steal, You shall not covet,” and any other commandment, are summed up in this sentence, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” 10 Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.
2. 
   
3. The Hurdle -- a problem we're all facing.
    
   1. Simple, right?  But it's not that simple.  
      1. My Catholic Life  
4. 
   

With this statement, Jesus gives a complete summary of the moral law found in the Ten Commandments.  The first three Commandments reveal that we must love God above all and with all our might.  The last six Commandments reveal that we must love our neighbor.  The moral law of God is as simple as fulfilling these two more general commandments.

But is it all that simple?  Well, the answer is both “Yes” and “No.”  It’s simple in the sense that God’s will is not typically complex and difficult to comprehend.  Love is spelled out clearly in the Gospels and we are called to embrace a radical life of true love and charity.

However, it can be considered difficult in that we are not only called to love, we are called to love with all our being.  We must give of ourselves completely and without reserve.  This is radical and requires that we hold nothing back.

1. And that's the kicker -- to love God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind.  With all of us.
    
   1. Think about what that means.  
      1. Pablo Gadenz  CCSS Luke   "The idea is that the commandment to love God embraces every aspect of one's being."  
2. 
   
   1. Every fiber of our being, every last little bit of ourselves.  
3. 
   
   1. If we really think about this commandment -- what are the implications
       
      1. To love God in every internal experience -- every thought, emotion, body sensation, intention, impulse attitude, belief, assumption, every desire -- every internal phenomenological experience oriented toward loving God.  
   2. 
      
      1. That requires harmony inside.  
   3. 
      
      1. That requires interior integration for Catholics
          
         1. And Interior Integration for Catholics just happens to be the name of this podcast. 
      2. 
         
         1. And this whole podcast is all about helping to you to get so much closer to loving God and neighbor and yourself with your whole heart, your whole soul, your whole strength and your whole mind, with all of you -- and that is the whole mission of our online outreach Souls and Hearts at soulsandhearts.com
      3.  
   4. 
      
4. 
   
5. Intro -- Welcome to Interior Integration for Catholics
    
   1. I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski and I am here to help guide you toward  loving God, neighbor and yourself in an ordered, healthy, holy way.
       
      1. And how do I do that?
          
         1. By focusing on your natural level impediments, your psychological obstacles to tolerated being loved and to loving God, neighbor and ourselves in the best ways possible
      2.  
         1. That is the mission of this podcast -- it's all about your human formation and what you need  on the natural level going forward in your life.  
      3. 
         
         1. John the Baptist is the patron saint of this podcast because he prepared the way for the Lord.  
      4. 
         
         1. I'm here to help you get ready by shoring up your natural foundation for the spiritual life 
      5. 
         
   2. 
      
6. 
   
   1. This is Episode 72, entitled What Keeps You from Loving?  Is it Really Only Your Vices?  (Spoiler Alert:  No!)
   2. Chess analogy -- so the two great Commandments are both simple and complex -- like chess.  
      1. One Level -- Chess is a simple game -- the rules are really clear and can be learned in five minutes, and the trickiest part of the rules is castling -- rook/king switcheroo thing.  Or maybe the en passant pawn capture.  
      2. On another level, chess is complex -- people spend their professional lives learning to play.  Grandmasters learning into old age.   
7. Love Your Neighbor as yourself
    
   1. We are supposed to love ourselves
8.  
   1. Command is not to love our neighbor more than ourselves
       
      1. Not because Jesus is lax:  Mt. 5:48 You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
   2.  
9. 
   
   1. No one can love you in lieu of you.  
10. 
    
    1.  Doesn't make sense if you think of a person has having monolithic, homogeneous personality -- no space for relationship there.  
11. 
    
    1. In order to love ourselves other and God, we need interior peace.  
       1. Fr. Jacques Phillipe:  Searching For and Maintaining Peace
           
          1. It is of the greatest importance that we strive to acquire an interior peace, the peace of our hearts.  p. 5
       2.  
          1. The more our soul is peaceful and tranquil, the more God is reflected in it, the more His image expresses itself in us, the more His grace acts through us.  p. 5
       3.  
          1. Quoting St. Seraphim of Sarov "Acquire interior peace and a multitude will find its salvation through you.  p. 8
       4.  
          1. p.11 Very frequently, spiritual combat consists precisely in this:  defending one's peace of heart against the enemy who attempts to steal it from us. 
       5. 
          
          1. p. 12.  The first goal of spiritual combat, that toward which our efforts must above all else be...

1. Introduction 
   1. Very autobiographical today, I'm going to tell you a lot about me and the mistakes I've made and how those mistakes have brought me to do this episode.  
      1. I don't really like talking about myself -- not a lot of autobiographical material in previous episodes
      2. I especially don't like talking about myself all by myself in my little studio -- not being interviewed by a host -- the really Competent part of me thinks it's a little weird to be sharing details of my life and my struggles and my mistakes, not knowing who is listening because I haven't met most of you, those of you who are my listeners.  I've checked in with the different parts of me and they are all good with it, I have at least grudging acceptance of the idea.  
   2. I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski and I am here with you, to be your host and guide.  
   3. This podcast is called Interior Integration for Catholics, and it is part of Souls and Hearts
       
      1. our online outreach at soulsandhearts.com
   4.  
      1. which is all about shoring up our natural foundation for the Catholic spiritual life, all about overcoming psychological obstacles to being loved and to loving God and neighbor and ourselves.  We're getting into that much more deeply now.  
   5. 
      
   6. This is episode 71, released on June 7, 2021, entitled A New and Better Way of Understanding Myself and Others.  -- Beginning a brief series of episodes that takes the great insights of Internal Family Systems approaches to understanding the human person on a natural level, and reconciles them with the eternal truths of the Catholic faith.  
2. The Great Journey
    
   1. I could be considered "Highly successful" as a child and adolescent -- 4.0 GPA in High School, Valedictorian, Varsity letters in Track and Cross Country, I acted in high school musicals and plays, excelled in competitive solo-acting, was on the chess team, active in student government and I was a pretty good shot on the local pistol team --  I had a lot going for me.  I continued that success from Northwestern University, graduating with honors, traveling the world, living in Seville, Spain for a year, romping around Mexico one summer.  
3. 
   
   1. 1991 -- brought to my knees -- 22 years old, just left a high-demand group Catholic group -- strong sense of having been manipulated and used, exploited.   
      1. Trying to figure out my own experience -- what just happened?  Why so many contradictory thoughts and feelings?  What was going on.  
         1. Either I made a mistake in joining that group or I made a mistake in leaving it.  
         2. Existential crisis -- A leader of the group told me that the founder once said that "he wouldn't give a nickel for the soul of any son who abandons his vocation the group."  For the true believer, there was no viable way out.
         3. Common reason for getting into psychology - there's something to the meme.  
         4. My models were not sufficient.  I was not satisfied with superficial reasons
             
            1. For why I felt the ways I did
         5.  
            1. For why I thought the ways I thought
         6.  
            1. For why I acted the ways I did.  
         7. 
            
4. 
   
   1. In 1993, Began a Ph.D. program in clinical psychology -- the best that psychology had to offer.  
   2. The Hunt for a Unitary Personality
   3. We all want to understand ourselves
       
      1. 4 temperaments -- Encyclopedia Britannica:  Humoral theories:  2500 years ago.  Perhaps the oldest personality theory known is contained in the cosmological writings of the Greek philosopher and physiologist Empedocles and in related speculations of the physician Hippocrates. Empedocles’ cosmic elements—air (with its associated qualities, warm and moist), earth (cold and dry), fire (warm and dry), and water (cold and moist)—were related to health and corresponded (in the above order) to Hippocrates’ physical humours, which were associated with variations in temperament: blood (sanguine temperament), black bile (melancholic), yellow bile (choleric), and phlegm (phlegmatic). This theory, with its view that body chemistry determines temperament, has survived in some form for more than 2,500 years. According to these early theorists, emotional stability as well as general health depend on an appropriate balance among the four bodily humours; an excess of one may produce a particular bodily illness or an exaggerated personality trait. Thus, a person with an excess of blood would be expected to have a sanguine temperament—that is, to be optimistic, enthusiastic, and excitable. Too much black bile (dark blood perhaps mixed with other secretions) was believed to produce a melancholic temperament. An oversupply of yellow bile (secreted by the liver) would result in anger, irritability, and a “jaundiced” view of life. An abundance of phlegm (secreted in the respiratory passages) was alleged to make people stolid, apathetic, and undemonstrative.
   4.  

 | Humor  | Season  | Ages  | Element  | Organ  | Qualities  | Temperament
 | Blood  | spring  | infancy  | air | liver | warm and moist  | sanguine
| Yellow bile  | summer  | youth  | fire | gallbladder | warm and dry  | choleric
| Black bile  | autumn  | adulthood  | earth | spleen | cold and dry  | melancholic
| Phlegm  | winter  | old age  | water | brain/lungs | cold and moist  | phlegmatic

Art and Laraine Bennett.  The Temperament God Gave you.  

1. Freud 
2. Desire for unity 
3. Testing expert
    
   1. Layered Personalities, overlays -- trying to accommodate
4.  
   1. Personality is supposed to be stable
       
      1. Definition of personality
          
         1. Encyclopedia Britannica:   the study of personality focuses on classifying and explaining relatively stable human psychological characteristics.
      2.  
         1. VeryWellMind.com;  At its most basic, personality is the characteristic patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that make a person unique. It is believed that personality arises from within the individual and remains fairly consistent throughout life. 
      3. 
         
         1. But DSM-5, PDM -- Borderline Personality Disorder -- not stable
      4.  
   2. 
      
      1. We want predictability
5. 
   

1. In 2000 I was at a crossroad in life, about to finish my Ph.D. in clinical psychology and very much struggling to find a way to ground psychology in a Catholic ...

1. Intro:  
   1. This is it, this is the last episode in our 21 episode series on sexuality , our last episode of 14 in our subseries on sexuality in Catholic marriages, it has been a long run, thank you for being here
   2. We are finishing up with our metaphor of the canopied Catholic Marriage Bed 
      1. And today we'll be discussing the four bedposts, the canopy, and the bedskirt, bedspread and the shams with more examples.  
   3. I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski and I am here with you, to be your host and guide.  
   4. This podcast, Interior Integration for Catholics, is part of Souls and Hearts, our online outreach at soulsandhearts.com, which is all about shoring up our natural foundation for the Catholic spiritual life, all about overcoming psychological obstacles to being loved and to loving God and neighbor.
   5. In this podcast, we confront the tough questions we Catholics have in our day-to-day lives, we confront head on our struggles in the natural realm, the psychological difficulties that keep us from fully loving our Lord and our Lady in a deep, personal, intimate way. 
   6. This is episode 70, released on May 31, 2021, entitled Catholic Sex and the Four Pillars -- and the Dos and Don'ts of Sharing about your Sexual Life.
2. Review of the bed
    
   1. Review the bed -- remember this canopied marriage bed represents the sexual life of a married Catholic couple.  
      1. The floor -- The Presence of God and His Providence -- everything begins here.  This is the most fundamental piece of the whole metaphor.  We need to be in contact with "I AM" with God who is the source of all reality.  We can't forget that
      2. The four legs
          
         1. Leg 1 -- the husband's commitment to his own interior integration and his own human formation
      3.  
         1. Leg 2.  the wife's commitment to her own interior integration, her own human formation
      4.  
         1. Leg 3.  Understanding Attachment needs and integrity needs.  
      5. 
         
         1. Leg 4.  Internal Family Systems  -- Episode 60 --  How well do you really know your spouse?
      6.  
      7. The frame and the box spring -- the firm, unwavering commitment of the husband his marriage vows and the wife to her marriage vows -- separately.  Independently
      8. The mattress  Empathetic attunement -- covered that in episode 65, last episode 
      9.  Two pillows:  Self-acceptance and Spouse-acceptance -- this is what we are focusing on today.  
         1. Pillows support us, comfort us.  
         2. Great security with pillows
             
            1. Pam travels with her pillow -- learned this from her friend Cabrina -- comfort in having your own pillow
         3.  
            1. Comfort in being accepted by someone who knows you.  
         4. 
            
      10. Bottom Sheet:  sexual attraction, the intensity of sexual passion
      11. Top Sheet:  Communication between the spouses
      12. The blankets:  human warmth, emotional connection
      13. Covering today Four Bedposts -- imagine two spiral intertwined, like the double-helix structure of DNA -- these are the four pillars of Catholic resilience, going all the way back to episode 4 of this podcast  
          1. Mindset
          2. Heartset
          3. Bodyset
          4. Soulset
      14. Covering today: The canopy and the curtains -- to protect privacy and propriety or to hide dysfunction, exploitation, even abuse.  
      15. Covering today:  The sham, the bedspread, and the bedskirt -- Used to cover up the real bed, give an impression of the state of married life to the world.  
3. 
   
4. Bedposts Four Sets
    
   1. Bodyset, Mindset, Heartset and Soulset
5.  
   1. Double helix structure -- the husband's strand and the wife's strand interwoven, entwined together like the double-helix structure of DNA rising up overhead, looking down on the bed
6.  
   1. Dynamism of Sets -- not static -- our sets shift, they vary as a function of our parts and what is activated and not activated within us in a given moment. 
7. 
   
   1. Descriptions review from way back in Episode 4 
      1. Bodyset is how our body affects us, how our physical reactions impact us and our dispositions and inclinations.  
      2. Mindset is essentially a frame of mind.  Our mindset is the position of our intellect, and how we apply reason to our situation and our experiences. 
      3. Heartset is the dispositions or the orientation of our heart, the emotional and intuitive ways of our heart.  
      4. Soulset is essentially our attitude of soul.  It is the disposition of our spirit, or how our souls is oriented.  It can operate independently of mindset and heartset.  Our soulset reflects how we see God, and how we see ourselves in relationship with God, how we see God viewing us.  Our soulset very much depends on the virtues we have acquired, especially the virtues of faith, hope and charity.  Our soulset is also very dynamic, it can change rapidly
8. 
   
   1. A lot of your human formation is being aware of your own sets -- Bodyset, Mindset, Heartset and Soulset
9.  
   1. So much of your empathy for your spouse will involve reading your spouse's sets -- Bodyset, Mindset, Heartset and Soulset
       
      1. Will this legitimate sexual experience be good for your spouse's mind, heart, soul and body, right now, in these circumstances?  
         1. Where is she emotionally, relationally with you?  How is she doing physically right now, how is her soul?
   2. 
      
10. 
    
    1. Paying attention to common, repeated relational patterns or cycles that happen between you and your spouse. 
11. 
    
    1. Our parts have very different experiences of sexual intimacy
        
       1. Definition of parts:  Discussed this at length in episodes 60 and 61.  Parts:  Separate, independently operating personalities within us, each with own unique prominent needs, roles in our lives, emotions, body sensations, guiding beliefs and assumptions, typical thoughts, intentions, desires, attitudes, impulses, interpersonal style, and world view.  IFS therapist Robert Falconer calls parts "insiders."  Each part also has its own approach to sexuality.  
    2. 
       
       1. One part may be blended within you 
    3. 
       
       1. Your spouse may be blended in a part
    4.  
       1. Parts can switch -- episode 61 Fractured, Fragmented Sex in Catholic Marriages described how parts in a sexual encounter can switch rapidly.  
    5. 
       
12. 
    
    1. Bodyset is how our body affects us, how our physical reactions impact us and our dispositions and inclinations. We are embodied beings, body and soul composites.  Our physical bodies have a huge impact on us.  So our bodyset is the impact of our bodily states on us.   For example, if we are exhausted from a lack of sleep – that has an impact on us.  Obviously our bodyset is dynamic and can change as well.
        
       1. Understanding bodyset is so important in marriage because the bodies of the husband and wife are so united.  
    2. 
       
       1. Body has a huge impact on our relating.  
    3. 
       
       1. The bodies of the husband and wife
           
          1. Genesis 2:21-25   So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a ...

1. Opening Questions (connect to vignettes)
    
   1. Cindy wants to know, "Is oral sex okay in marriage? -- My husband every now and then likes it if I give him a blowjob, just for some variety in our sex life and he says there's no moral problem with that and it turns him on, but I'm not sure what I think and feel about that."    
2. 
   
   1. Barbara asks "In episode 61, in the story of Jeff and Joanne, you seemed to say that the husband's kissing of breasts was wrong, that it was disordered.  But I like it when my husband kisses my breasts during foreplay, and it really helps me to be sexually stimulated -- so is that off-limits in a Catholic marriage?"
3.  
   1. Bill raises the question "I really get turned on when my wife bites me, it helps me to have sex with her, I find I don't have to use Viagra then -- is that ok, or is it better for me to use the Viagra?  I don't want to not be able to have the fullness of sexual intimacy with her…"  
4. 
   
   1. The last two episodes brought up questions. 
      1. These were not the actual questions, but questions like them came up.
      2. Today we're going get into this more deeply -- and into how to think about the moral quality of sexual acts in Catholic marriage.  
5. Intro: Welcome to the podcast Interior Integration for Catholics
    
   1. In this podcast, we confront the tough questions we Catholics have in our day-to-day lives, we confront head on our struggles in the natural realm, the psychological difficulties that keep us from fully loving our Lord and our Lady in a deep, personal, intimate way. 
6. 
   
   1. This podcast helps you focus inward on your interior integration -- to help you bring together the different parts of yourself into unity and harmony with God.
7.  
   1. 'Together, we are on a journey toward deep transformation in our mindsets, our heartsets and our bodysets, a radical transformation at the core of our being so that our souls can one day enter into contemplative union with God. 
8. 
   
   1. I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski and I am here with you, to be your host and guide.  
9. 
   
   1. This podcast is part of Souls and Hearts, our online outreach at soulsandhearts.com, which is all about shoring up our natural foundation for the Catholic spiritual life, all about overcoming psychological obstacles to being loved and to loving God and neighbor
10.  
    1. This is episode 69, released on May 24, 2021 
11. 
    
    1. And it is titled:   Good and Bad Sex in Catholic Marriages: What are the Moral Limits? 
12. 
    
    1. How far is too far? That all depends on the direction you are going!
        
       1. Augustine -- evil as a privation of the good.  Evil is what happens when there is a vacuum because there isn't any good around.  
    2. 
       
       1. So if you are attempting to just avoid evil -- makes sure there's no evil in your sex life, you're trying to make a privation of the privation of good.  
    3. 
       
       1. It's much better to reorient and seek what is good, what is best, whatever that may mean for your sex life.  Even if you may have to give up some things from which you derive pleasure.  
    4. 
       
       1. Not to condemn the physical pleasure of sexual intimacy -- Not at all
           
          1. Bring that into an ordered hierarchy
       2.  
    5. Lot of confusion about the morality of different sexual expressions
        
       1. Lack of clear guidance on this, almost like a conspiracy of silence when it comes to really getting into specifics.  
    6. 
       
       1. Lot of terrible advice from all kinds of Catholic sources as well.  It may be well intentioned, but it causes harm.  
    7. 
       
       1. I could be making mistakes here too -- a lot of this is new territory and not well defined.  -- And to that end, I invite feedback, especially if I teach anything that is in error.  Please get in touch with me at [email protected] or at 317.567.9594 on Tuesdays and Thursdays between 4:30 PM and 5:30 PM Eastern time in conversations hours.  
          1. Citations -- Catechism, Church documents, Canon Law, Denzinger's Compendium, Ludwig Ott Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma
    8. 
       

Don't email me and tell me that a confessor you went to ten years ago said that anything goes sexually in your marriage and God doesn't mind at all as long as it all leads to vaginal intercourse in the end. That's not helpful.   

1. Learning to reflect and consider thoughtfully our sexual intimacy.
2. Ways of approaching sexual morality
    
   1. Some people want a list List of Dos and Don’ts
       
      1. List of approved sexual activities and a list of activities that are not approved.  
         1. Simple, easy to understand, doesn't require much reflection -- is the activity on the good list or the bad list?
         2. And there is a bad list -- actually, a pretty long one
             
            1. Acts that can never be ordered, never be oriented to procreation by their very nature
                
               1. Examples
                   
                  1. Anal sex -- anatomically, anal sex cannot lead to procreation.
               2.  
                  1. Oral sex performed by a wife on a husband in which he ejaculates
               3.  
                  1. Fetishes in which some body part becomes the focus of sexual interest, like feet or ears or navel or an external object like shoes or underwear
               4.  
            2. 
               
         3. 
            
            1. Acts that cannot ever be oriented to the bond of marriage because they are degrading to the human person
                
               1. Emphasis on "consenting adults"
                   
                  1. Issue of mutual hedonism.  -- very worldly
                      
                     1. Using the spouse for mutual masturbation
                  2.  
                     1. Using the spouse as a sex toy
                  3.  
               2. 
                  
            2. 
               
               1. Examples
                   
                  1. Impact Play -- spanking, flogging, paddling -- power and domination
               2.  
                  1. Bondage -- restraints, dominance and submission -- use of leather belts or handcuffs.
               3.  
                  1. Voyeurism -- watching porn together
               4.  
                  1. Roleplaying -- power dynamics -- teacher /student
               5.  
                  1. Erotic asphyxiation (EA) is the official term for breath play. From healthline.com  This type of sexual activity involves intentionally cutting off the air supply for you or your partner with choking, suffocating, and other acts.  People who are into breath play say it can heighten sexual arousal and make orgasms more intense.  But it isn’t without its risks — and lots of them. It can turn deadly if you don’t take the proper precautions.
               6.  
            3. 
               
         4. 
            
         5. Does not capture anything like the complexity
   2. 
      
3. 
   
   1. Catholic Understanding of the morality of human acts
       
      1. Check out with the catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraphs 1749 to 1761 for an excellent discussion of how to evaluate the morality of any given act, including sexual acts.  Very much worth reading
   2.  
      1. We are going to do a brief review of how to evaluate the morality of acts, specifically sexual acts
   3.  
      1. And I promise we won't get to technical or philosophical, will keep this clear
   4.  
      1. CCC 1750 The morality of human acts depends on: - the object chosen; - the end in...

IIC 67:  Catholic and UnCatholic Sex in Catholic Marriages

Saturday, May 8, 2021

10:27 AM

1. The Windup – our common ground, a quick summary of where we are today
    
   1. Let's get down to it.  
2. 
   
   1. Most of us Catholic married folk have deep desires within us for authentic, loving, joyful, intimate sexual sharing with our spouses
3.  
   1. We want to be loving our spouses, we want to make love to our spouses in ways that are healthy, ordered, and holy.
4.  
   1. We want to know our spouses and be known, to accept our spouses and be accepted, to be loved and to love.
5.  
   1. And at least intellectually, we know that God  wants that for us too.  
6. 
   
7. The Hurdle:  The shared problem
    
   1. Or at least, we all had those desires in the past.  Maybe we've given up on them.  Maybe we're discouraged, disheartened. So many Catholic spouses are.  It's common and it's tragic.  But it makes sense to me.  Why?
8.  
   1. Because Sexuality is usually the trickiest and most difficult part of the marriage relationship. Let me say that again.  
   2. We want  deep, loving, joyful, intimate sexual sharing with our spouses
   3. But often there's pressure, shame, guilt, anger, conflict, tension, frustration, disagreement, disharmony, sullenness, withdrawal, disconnection, feelings of helplessness, avoidance, resignation and dozens of other painful experiences.  
   4. We are wounded in a lot of different ways, and those attachment wound, those integrity wounds impact how Catholic spouses related to each other sexually.  
   5. Sex is the most sensitive barometer
   6. God wants Catholic couples not to just have sex -- animals can and do copulate
       
      1. but ordered, healthy sexual intimacy.  
   7. 
      
   8. Stakes are high.  Our Lady of Fatima on Sexual Sins  Jacinta later revealed that according to Our Lady, “The sins which cause most souls to go to hell are the sins of the flesh,” or sins against chastity.
   9. For many Catholic spouses, the sexual situation can seem impossible
       
      1. 28% of Catholic marriages end in divorce, and it's probably safe to say that the sexual intimacy isn't great in those relationships
   10.  
       1. Many, many others suffer from significant problems and issues in the sexual relationship.  
   11. 
       
       1. There is no other area of Catholic life so fraught with complexity, nuance, so sensitive to disorder and dysfunction in the married life.  Why?
   12.  
       1. Because sex is so often wrenched out of context
           
          1. Procreation
       2.  
          1. Union, the bond of the spouses
       3.  
          1. Catholic spouses often look to their sexual relationship to solve problems that do not originate there.  
             1. Misuse of sexuality in the service of trying to get deeper needs met -- attachment needs and integrity needs.  Episode 62
       4. 
          
   13. But you know what?  There are solutions.  There are ways out, even for spouses who are really jaded, really disheartened and discouraged.  And we are going to talk about those ways out, the promise of solutions.  We're going to talk about the Good News of Catholic sexual married life today.
        
       1. All things, all things work together for good for those who love the Lord.  Romans 8:28.  All things.  No exceptions.  All things, St. Paul tells us, there is no asterisk or footnote that excludes your particular sexual situation.  All things.  
          1. The caveat -- for those who love the Lord.  That means childlike trust, great confidence.  
   14. 
       
       1. So many Catholic couples could have such a better life of sexual intimacy.  That is so possible, even though it may not seem believable, because of a history of disappointment, false starts, and discouragement.
           
          1. If you feel like you're Charlie Brown and I'm Lucy, holding a football for you, about to yank it away when you try one more time… I get that.  Stay with me, listen a while longer, and see if you find some new ideas, new ways of looking at things.  I know it may be that you've been married 20, 30 years or more -- but some and see what I have to say.  
       2. 
          
   15. 
       
   16. I am clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski, your host and guide
        
       1. This is episode 67 of the weekly podcast Interior Integration for Catholics
   17.  
       1. And it is titled: Catholic and UnCatholic Sex in Catholic Marriages
   18.  
       1. Thank you for being here with me
   19.  
       1. Interior Integration for Catholics is part of our online outreach Souls and Hearts at soulsandhearts.com
           
          1. Which is all about your human formation, all about shoring up your natural foundation for a solid Catholic spiritual life
       2.  
          1. We are doing a whole series of episodes on Sexuality in Catholic Marriages
       3.  
   20. 
       
       1. We are using the image of a Catholic canopied marriage bed.
   21.  
       1. And today, we are focusing on the the Fitted Sheet, the top sheet and the blankets
           
          1. Fitted Sheet -- Eros, the sexual attraction, the intensity of sexual passion, the actual physical, sexual contact
       2.  
          1. Top Sheet -- Communication between the Catholic spouses
       3.  
          1. Blankets -- Heartfelt warmth and affection, the emotional connection.  
       4. 
          
   22. 
       
9. The Vision  -- The inspiring option, the way over the problem
    
   1. Four Major point -- Four central concepts.  
      1. The human and spiritual formation of the spouse influence the quality of their sexual experience. 
      2. Sex always happens in a relational context
      3. The relational context influences the quality of the sexual experience between the spouses
      4. Sexual intimacy is a great good, but there are time when it may not be best.  
      5. Repeat the four points.  
10. 
    
    1. The human and spiritual formation of the spouse influence the quality of their sexual experience.  
       1. Human formation of the husband and wife are two of the four legs of the bed.  
       2. Focusing in here again on interior integration -- how integrated are we in the sexual sphere
           
          1. That sexual integration is going to depend on our human formation -- and on all the aspect represented in the Catholic canopied marriage bed check out Episode 58.  
       3. 
          
          1. Another leg of the bed is understanding ourselves and our spouse from an Internal Family Systems perspective, which I think is so helpful.  
       4. 
          
       5. As living human being, we have a unity -- each human person is one
           
          1. But also each human person has parts.
       6.  
          1. within each person are separate collections thoughts, emotions, attitudes, impulses, desires, abilities, interests, relational styles, body sensations, and worldviews that are not just transient emotional states, but rather constitute discrete “parts,” subpersonalities or distinct modes of operating within the person’s larger internal system -- they seem like selves within us. 
       7. 
          
          1. Each part within us can phenomenologically seem like its own little person, with its own particular range of emotion, style of e...

1. Intro
    
   1. It is good to have you with us,
2.  
   1. Peter Malinoski, clinical psychologist
3.  
   1. Weekly Podcast Interior Integration for Catholics 
4. 
   
   1. Part of our Online outreach Souls and Hearts and soulsandhearts.com
5.  
   1. Which is all about your human formation, all about shoring up your natural foundation for a solid Catholic spiritual life.  
6. 
   
   1. Episode 66 Acceptance vs. Endorsement: A Critical Difference in Catholic Marriages.  
7. 
   
   1.  we are in the middle of a series on Sexuality in Catholic Marriages, but there is so much in here that is relevant about all kinds of close relationships.  
8. 
   
9. Where have we been?  Review the bed -- remember this canopied marriage bed represents the sexual life of a married Catholic couple.  
   1. The floor -- The Presence of God and His Providence -- everything begins here.  This is the most fundamental piece of the whole metaphor.  We need to be in contact with "I AM" with God who is the source of all reality.  We can't forget that
   2. The four legs
       
      1. Leg 1 -- the husband's commitment to his own interior integration and his own human formation
   3.  
      1. Leg 2.  the wife's commitment to her own interior integration, her own human formation
   4.  
      1. Leg 3.  Understanding Attachment needs and integrity needs.  
   5. 
      
      1. Leg 4.  Internal Family Systems  -- Episode 60 --  How well do you really know your spouse?
          
         1. In that episode, I made five bold assertions:
             
            1. You don't really know your spouse.  
         2. 
            
            1. Your spouse doesn't really know you.  
         3. 
            
            1. Your Father doesn't or didn't really know your mother
         4.  
            1. Your mother doesn't or didn't really know your father
         5.  
            1. And you don't really know you.  
         6. 
            
      2. 
         
         1. Gave evidence for those bold claims are likely, not going to repeat all that evidence here, you can go to Episode 60 and listen to them again.  
            1. For those of you listeners who are married:
                
               1. Can seem like spouse have such widely varying modes of operating
            2.  
               1. like they can be even different people when they are in these different modes of being. 
            3. 
               
               1. Remember what your spouse or someone close to you is like when they are different states -- like when they are really angry, or really sad, or really anxious or really happy.  How different they think, how their worldview changes in these different states.  
            4. 
               
               1. what we call parts:  Parts are constellations of emotions, body sensations, thoughts, feelings, impulses, assumptions about the world and so many other things.  
            5. 
               
               1. Internal Family Systems thinking help us to make sense of our own internal experience and others' internal experience, breaking us out of the model that we have just one monolithic, homogenous personality.  
            6. 
               
               1. That's what episodes 60 and 61 are all about
            7.  
            8. Surprising how not integrated the husband's internal object representations of his wife are -- surprising how unintegrated a wife's internal object representation of her husband can be.  How confused.  
               1. Definition time with Dr. Pete,  Definition of internal object -- Roots in Freud, really developed my Melanie Klein: Internal object refers to the mental representation that results from how we have taken others inside of us and viewed them.  Not necessarily similar to who the person actually is, it's how we construe the person to be, which depends heavily on our subjective experiences, including how we experience ourselves. 
               2. Two dimensional -- sometimes even one dimensional
                   
                  1. You are the person who is supposed to make me feel better about myself, help me avoid shame
               3.  
               4. Fragmented 
               5. How much husbands and wives don't see in and about each other.  
      3. 
         
   6. 
      

1. Three of these four legs are really helpful in accepting what the actual realities are inside your spouse.  
2. The fourth one is great to have, but it's not as essential.  It's the one that we sometimes require first, though
    
   1. Just tell me what's going on -- assumption that she knows what's going on.  90% unconscious.  
3. 
   
   1. Sometimes she just cant.  
4. 
   
5. The frame and the box spring -- the firm, unwavering commitment of the husband his marriage vows and the wife to her marriage vows -- separately.  Independently
6. The mattress  Empathetic attunement -- covered that in episode 65, last episode 
7.  Two pillows:  Self-acceptance and Spouse-acceptance -- this is what we are focusing on today.  
   1. Pillows support us, comfort us.  
   2. Great security with pillows
       
      1. Pam travels with her pillow -- learned this from her friend Cabrina -- comfort in having your own pillow
   3.  
      1. Comfort in being accepted by someone who knows you.  
   4. 
      
8. Bottom Sheet:  sexual attraction, the intensity of sexual passion
9. Top Sheet:  Communication between the spouses
10. The blankets:  human warmth, emotional connection
11. Four Bedposts -- imagine two spiral intertwined, like the double-helix structure of DNA
     
    1. Mindset
12.  
    1. Heartset
13.  
    1. Bodyset
14.  
    1. Soulset
15.  
16. The canopy and the curtains -- to protect privacy and propriety or to hide dysfunction, exploitation, even abuse.  
17. The sham, the bedspread, and the bedskirt -- Used to cover up the real bed, give an impression of the state of married life to the world.  
18. Lay of the land:  
    1. Loving -- three elements:  Benevolence, Capacity, Commitment/Consistency
    2. Not only do we not understand our spouses very well
    3. We also don't accept the realities about our spouses that we do understand 
    4. or the realities that we could understand if we allowed ourselves to see. But so often we parts that don't want us to see who our spouses really are.   Some of that is due to confusion between acceptance and endorsement.  
19. Acceptance vs. endorsement -- Definitions
     
    1. Acceptance -- acknowledging the reality of who I am in my entirety, all my parts with their burdens, all the roughness, the wounds, the disorder, the imperfections, all the baggage, all the "stuff."  It means admitting, conceding all the things that are really true about myself.  
20. 
    
    1.  acknowledging the reality who my spouse Pam is, in her entirety, in her complete being, with her parts, with her perspectives, with her virtues her vices.  Right at this moment
21.  
    1. Endorsement on the other hand.  means essentially approving or embracing as good some feature within myself or my spouse.  
       1. So husband can accept the idea that his wife is abusing painkillers without endorsing her misuse of pain medication.  
22. 
    
23. Why we struggle with accepting something about our spouse,...

1. Intro
    
   1. It is good to have you with us,
2.  
   1. Peter Malinoski, clinical psychologist
3.  
   1. Weekly Podcast Interior Integration for Catholics 
4. 
   
   1. Part of our Online outreach Souls and Hearts and soulsandhearts.com
5.  
   1. Episode 65  Why Catholic Spouses Find it Hard to Empathize with Each Other, Especially About Sex -- with Solutions.  -- we are in the middle of a series on Sexuality in Catholic Marriages, but don't worry if you are not married, there is so much for you in today's episode that applies to any close relationship.  
6. 
   
7. Definitions of Empathy:
    
   1. Daniel Siegel:  Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine.  Interpersonal Neurobiology. 
      1. Interpersonal Neurobiology
          
         1. Wikipedia: Interpersonal neurobiology (IPNB) or relational neurobiology is an interdisciplinary framework associated with human development and functioning. It was developed in the 1990s by Daniel J. Siegel who sought to bring together a wide range of scientific disciplines in demonstrating how the mind, brain, and relationships integrate to alter one another.
      2.  
      3. Dan Siegel's work is very accessible -- easier for non-professionals to understand, very available.  
      4. Five types of Empathy  -- Short YouTube Video  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdhMY_DNb1M  5 Levels.   There's an order to them.  
         1. Emotional Resonance or attunement
         2. Perspective Taking
         3. Cognitive Empathy
         4. Compassion -- Seigel calls it Empathetic Concern
         5. Empathetic Joy
      5. I am going to expand on his basic presentation.  
      6. Expanded definitions of empathy
          
         1. Emotional Resonance, attunement, empathic resonance -- receiver begins to feel what the sender is feeling.  You feel the feelings of the other person.  
            1. Attunement ‘is a kinesthetic and emotional sensing of others knowing their rhythm, affect and experience by metaphorically being in their skin, and going beyond empathy to create a two-person experience of unbroken feeling connectedness by providing a reciprocal affect and/or resonating response’. (Clinical psychologist Richard Erksine 1998).
            2. 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. Children need attunement to feel secure and to develop well, and throughout our lives we need attunement to feel close and connected."  Dan Siegel
            3. Moderation
                
               1. Emotional contagion.  This really can be overwhelming
                   
                  1. Experience of being sucked into the other's experience -- blending or fusing with the other with a loss of boundaries
               2.  
            4. 
               
      7. 
         
         1. Perspective Taking:  Let me put myself in the other's skin -- in the other shoes.   Not a fusion
             
            1. Capacity to enter into your spouse's internal world with your own mind to consider the other's experience
         2.  
            1. You remain separate from the other person.  
         3. 
            
      8. 
         
         1. Cognitive Empathy: -- a bit further  -- what does the experience mean for the person.  Memory, emotion, history influences the other.  Empathetic understanding.  
            1. So much of our suffering comes not from the facts of our situation, but from the meaning we make from those facts.  
      9. 
         
         1. Compassion:  Empathic Concern -- synonym for compassion.  I feel your pain, I want to reduce your suffering.
             
            1. You feel the suffering
         2.  
            1. Take the suffering in
         3.  
            1. Use of the imagination -- what could I do now to help you feel better.  
         4. 
            
            1. Be with the person -- doing flows from that being
         5.  
      10. 
          
          1. Empathic joy -- I get so excited about your success -- delighting in and with the other. 
             1. Joy in who the spouse is, not what the child does -- "delighting in the spouses very being 
             2. Wife believes in the husband's goodness -- the husband is precious, worth sacrificing for and vice versa.  
             3. Song of Songs -- Joy 1:4 We will exult and rejoice in you; we will extol your love more than wine  
      11. 
          
      12. Review
           
          1. Emotional Resonance or attunement
      13.  
          1. Perspective Taking
      14.  
          1. Cognitive Empathy
      15.  
          1. Compassion -- Seigel calls it Empathetic Concern
      16.  
          1. Empathetic Joy
      17.  
8. 
   
9. Empathy is the mattress on our Catholic Canopied Marriage bed, which I introduced in episode 58 -- working with that metaphor.  The mattress on a bed -- we want the mattress to be consistent and solid, firm and not lumpy.  
   1. The frame and box spring -- firm commitment between the husband and the wife, the upholding of the marriage vows Episode 64
       
      1. It's the charity.  Willing the highest good for one another -- sacrificial love
   2.  
   3. four legs of the bed.
       
      1. Leg 1 -- the husband's commitment to his own interior integration, his own human formation, his psychological health, his emotional wellbeing -- removing the beam from his own eye -- last episode. Episode 63
   4.  
      1. Leg 2.  the wife's commitment to her own interior integration, her own human formation, her own psychological health, her own emotional wellbeing -- her taking on her own personal responsibility for her natural life  last episode. Episode 63
      2. Leg 3.  Attachment Needs and Integrity Needs --  Episode 62,
      3. Leg 4.  Internal Family Systems approaches -- understanding deeply how the human person is both a unity and a multiplicity -- like an orchestra is a unity -- one orchestra, but also has within it multiplicity, multiple musicians -- check out Episodes 60 and 61
   5. The rock-solid floor in the bedroom is the Foundation -- The presence of God -- and an active belief in God's Providence
       
      1. This is the foundation
   6.  
      1. Childlike trust, absolute confidence
   7.  
      1. Reflects the reality of our existential dependence and God's paternal care, Mary's maternal care for us.  
   8. 
      
      1. So many Catholic try to solve their marriage issues without bringing in anything spiritual
   9.  
      1. Or they avoid any meeting between faith and sex.  
   10. 
       
10. Why we lack different kinds of empathy
     
    1. In General
        
       1. Lack of interior integration
    2.  
       1. Lack of benevolence -- good will.  Lack of seeking the good for our spouse and being willing to suffer for it
           
          1. Conditionality
              
             1. I'll work on it if my wife does X and Y
          2.  
             1. I'll start trying again if my husband stops behavior Z.  
          3. 
             
             1. Not what your vows say.  
          4. 
             
       2. 
          
          1. Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in their shoes. That way, you'll be a mile from them, and you'll have their shoes. Jack Handey.  
       3. 
          
    3. 
       
       1. Lack of consistency...

1. Intro
    
   1. It is good to have you with us,
2.  
   1. Peter Malinoski, clinical psychologist
3.  
   1. Interior Integration for Catholics 
4. 
   
   1. Part of our Online outreach Souls and Hearts and soulsandhearts.com
5.  
   1. Episode 64 released April 19, 2021
6.  
   1. Subtle Ways Catholics Cheat on their Spouses:  How and Why.
7.  
   1. Getting into natural level issues around our commitment, the covenant a husband and a wife make in a Catholic sacramental marriage.  
8. 
   
9. Brief Review -- Canopied Marriage Bed
    
   1. Description of each part of the bed -- symbolism of each part, what each part represents.  
      1.  The rock-solid floor in the bedroom is the Foundation -- The presence of God -- and an active belief in God's Providence
          
         1. This is the foundation
      2.  
         1. Childlike trust, absolute confidence
      3.  
         1. Reflects the reality of our existential dependence and God's paternal care, Mary's maternal care for us.  
      4. 
         
      5. Four legs -- now more in the natural realm
          
         1. Leg 1 -- the husband's commitment to his own interior integration, his own human formation, his psychological health, his emotional wellbeing -- removing the beam from his own eye -- last episode. Episode 63
      6.  
         1. Leg 2.  the wife's commitment to her own interior integration, her own human formation, her own psychological health, her own emotional wellbeing -- her taking on her own personal responsibility for her natural life  last episode. Episode 63
             
            1. Definition of Human Formation  Human formation is the lifelong process of natural development, aided by grace, by which a person integrates all aspects of his interior emotional, cognitive, relational, and bodily life, all of his natural faculties in an ordered way, conformed with right reason and natural law so that he is freed from natural impediments to trust God as His beloved child and to embrace God's love.  Then, in return, because he possesses himself, he can love God, neighbor and himself with all of his natural being in an ordered, intimate, personal, and mature way.
         2.  
            1. That is what we are focused on in this podcast.  Human formation:
                
               1. This podcast helps you focus inward on your interior integration -- to help you bring together the different parts of yourself into unity and harmony with God.
            2.  
               1. Together, we are on a journey toward deep transformation, a radical conversion at the core of our being so that our souls can one day enter into contemplative union with God.
            3.  
         3. 
            
      7. 
         
         1. Leg 3.  Attachment Needs and Integrity Needs --  Episode 62,
      8.  
         1. Leg 4.  Internal Family Systems approaches -- understanding deeply how the human person is both a unity and a multiplicity -- like an orchestra is a unity -- one orchestra, but also has within it multiplicity, multiple musicians -- check out Episodes 60 and 61
      9.  
      10. The Frame  and the Box Spring -- this holds the whole bed together and it represents the firm commitment between the husband and the wife, the upholding of the marriage vows,  
          1. We are focusing on this today.  The commitment, the vows of Catholic married life
          2. I promise to be true to you in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health. I will love you and honor you all the days of my life.  
          3. It's the charity.  Willing the highest good for one another
      11. The Mattress -- Empathetic attunement -- really knowing the spouse, really being able to enter into the phenomenological world of the spouse
      12. Bottom sheet fitted sheet -- sexual attraction, the intensity of sexual passion -- hinges on all that is underneath it.  Can't you just help us get the fire, the passion back into our love life.  
      13. Top Sheet -- communication between the Catholic spouses. 
      14. Two Pillows -- Acceptance of who the husband is right now -- Acceptance of who the wife is right now. Self-acceptance and Spouse acceptance   
      15. The blankets -- human warmth, emotional connection
      16. Four bedposts -- intertwined spirals, like a double helix --  Mindset, Heartset, Bodyset, Soulset  
      17. The Canopy and the curtains, which cover the bed and provide privacy -- for good or for ill.  
      18. The Shams, the bedspread and the bed skirts -- these cover up the bed, give a favorable and even a false impression to the world of what the bed is like, keep the real bed under wraps, as it were
10. 
    
11. Definition Marriage Commitment
     
    1. Commitment is essential
12.  
    1. Frame and box spring of the bed -- holds the whole structure of the bed together.  The commitment to loving the other person in the sacramental marriage covenant is vitally important
        
       1. No one else can do it for you.  Not even God.  
    2. 
       
13. 
    
    1. Definition of Marriage -- Fr. John Hardon, Modern Catholic Dictionary
14.  

MARRIAGE. As a natural institution, the lasting union of a man and a woman who agree to give and receive rights over each other for the performance of the act of generation and for the fostering of their mutual love.

The state of marriage implies four chief conditions: 

1.  there must be a union of opposite sexes; -- one man and one woman
2.  it is a permanent union until the death of either spouse;
    
   1. CCC 2382:  Between the baptized spouses, "a ratified and consummated marriage cannot be dissolved by any human power or for any reason other than death"   1983 CCL 1141
3.  
   1. Until Death  I will love you and honor you all the days of my life.
4.  
5. it is an exclusive union, so that extramarital acts are a violation of justice;
6. its permanence and exclusiveness are guaranteed by contract; mere living together, without mutually binding themselves to do so, is concubinage and not marriage.

Christ elevated marriage to a sacrament of the New Law. Christian spouses signify and partake of the mystery of that unity and fruitful love which exists between Christ and his Church, helping each other attain to holiness in their married life and in the rearing and education of their children.

1. Solemnified by Formal Vows
    
   1. Usually the only vow a Christian Layman or Laywoman will ever make
2.  
   1. CCC 2364:  Both spouses give themselves definitively and totally to one another.  They are no longer two; from now on they form one flesh.  The covenant they freely contracted imposes on the spouses the obligation to preserve it as unique and indissoluble.  
3. 
   
4. Originates in the will
    
   1.  I will love you and honor you all the days of my life  Love is an act of the will.  
5. 
   
   1. Not just a one-time event  I will love you and honor you all the days of my life.
6.  
   1. Ongoing willing, year to year, week to week, day to day, moment to moment
7.  
   1. But impacted by human formation and spiritual formation
8.  
   1. Supported in the natural realm by human formation, an awareness of attachment needs and integrity needs, an awareness of how complex w...

1. Intro:  I am clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski, and you are listening to the weekly podcast Interior Integration for Catholics
    
   1. Today in episode 63, we are discussing human formation -- what is it?  What do you mine it's missing for many people?
2.  
   1. Windup: I am going to start with a bold claim and a controversial claim.  
      1. For many, many Catholic adults in our day and age, in our culture, there is a much greater need to focus on human formation than on spiritual formation.
      2. Let me repeat that:  Many, many Catholic adults at this point in their lives need solid human formation more than they need spiritual formation.
          
         1. Serious Catholic adults.
      3.  
      4. Commitment to human formation is so important in the Catholic married sexual life that it composes two of the four legs of my model of a Catholic marriage bed.  
         1. The husband's commitment to human formation -- one leg
         2. The wife's commitment to human formation -- the other leg
         3. Another leg is really understanding attachment and integrity needs (episode 62)
         4. Another leg is a model the Internal family systems-informed model of the person with a self and with parts -- we are a unity and a multiplicity -- episodes 60 and 61. 
         5. The floor is the a deep, abiding, childlike trust in Mary our Spiritual Mother and God our Spiritual Father.  
         6. Building a whole bed here, starting in episode 58.  No need to review all of it now.   
      5. So many Catholics with lots of spiritual formation who have built their spiritual lives on a very, very unsound natural foundation, with mediocre or poor human formation. 
         1. So their spiritual lives are unstable.  
         2. Example of early client -- extreme example
             
            1. Mid 30's, very earnest Catholic, very sincere, distressed --  I have to help his wife understand the Faith.  Wife was Catholic, but a lot of tension between them about his spiritual practices.  
         3. 
            
            1. Danger of divorce -- wife: get to counseling or I'll divorce you 
         4. 
            
            1. Wife concerns?
                
               1. Spending three hours per day in Eucharistic Adoration
                   
                  1. Bringing their young children
               2.  
                  1. Our Lady of Lourdes
               3.  
            2. 
               
               1. No gainful employment
            3.  
               1. Wife feeling constantly criticized by his fraternal corrections, his attempts to help her become more holy.  
            4. 
               
         5. 
            
            1. Spiritual Problems?  No -- problems in the natural realm.  
               1. Blended with a part that is so driven by fear.  
               2. Part desperately trying to please an extremely demanding God and Mary -- trying to become holy, Pelagian efforts
               3. Lack of attunement to children -- alienated from them, they were becoming alienated from the faith
               4. Wedge in the marriage, wife thinks he's a religious nutcase.  
               5. He recognizes there are problems, wife needs to change
                   
                  1. Praying the Rosary
               6.  
                  1. Fatima Visionary Sr. Lucia:  There is no problem, I tell you, no matter how difficult it is, that we cannot resolve by the prayer of the Holy Rosary.
               7.  
         6. 
            
         7. Problems come from his distorted human formation.   
         8. Priest sex abuse scandal.  
            1. Can frame it all spiritually.  
               1. The priest who sexually abused children gave in to lust, it was a violation of the virtue of chastity, among other virtues.  Ok.  Hmmm.  So it was a spiritual problem, a failure, he gave into temptation.   No doubt there are spiritual dimensions to this, including a most grave and serious sin.  
               2. Or is a primary issue with his disordered sexual attraction to children and a real lack of impulse control --problems in the natural realm, a problem with his human formation.  That makes so much more sense to me as being primary.  
         9. Scrupulosity -- so often seen as a spiritual problem, but is one of the most frustrating issues for confessors and spiritual directors encounter -- so often it doesn't resolve with traditional spiritual means.
             
            1. Primarily in the natural realm.  Did a whole episode with Adam Cross The Catholic Therapist on human formation issues, the real issues in the natural realm that underlie scrupulosity.  
         10. 
             
      6. Serious Devastation -- original sin.  
         1. Effect on the human body -- death, illness, pain -- and now intensity of pain in childbirth, physical labor and toil to survive scratching out an existence from cursed ground.  
         2. Effect on the rest of our human formation
             
            1. Distrust of God
         3.  
            1. Fear
         4.  
            1. Anger
         5.  
            1. Loss of harmony
         6.  
            1. Really a kind of dis-integration -- in the world and inside of us.  
         7. 
            
      7. Grace perfects nature; it does not destroy it.  St. Thomas Aquinas
          
         1. We need to work with our human natures.  We need our human natures to be formed.  
      8. 
         
      9. Jesus discussed foundations
          
         1. Discussion of foundations in Scripture -- Matthew 7:24-27
             
            1. 24 “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. 25 And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. 26 And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. 27 And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.”
         2.  
      10. 
          
          1. Jesus as the cornerstone.
      11.  
      12. Algebra and arithmetic.  
      13. Hold up, we're getting ahead of ourselves here.  What is human formation?
3. 
   
4. Definitions
    
   1. Those who follow this Interior Integration for Catholic Podcast know that I am all about defining our terms.
       
      1. So much rests on a clear understanding of what we are discussing.
   2.  
      1. Human Formation, to be honest is a nebulous term.
          
         1. Used a lot in Catholic contexts -- primarily in seminary contexts.
      2.  
         1. A whole section is devoted to human formation in the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops document entitled "Program of Priestly Formation, Fifth Edition" which came out in 2006.  pages 29-42
             
            1. Longest and most complete discussion of human formation I could find in an official church document
         2.  
            1. 14 pages -- but no definition of human formation.  
               1. The foundation and center of all human formation is Jesus Christ, the word made flesh, paragraph 75
               2. Also in paragraph 75, we learn that "human formation is the 'necessary foundation' of priestly formation.  
               3. We learn that the goals of human formation is to foster growth so that a man can become 
                  1. A free person
                  2. Of solid moral character
                  3. Prudent and discerning
                  4. Invested in and capable of communion, of relating deeply with others
                  5. With Good communication skills
                  6.  Affective maturity - integration of feelings, thoughts and values
                  7. Who cares for his body
                  8. Who relates well with others
                  9. A good steward of material...

1. Intro:  This is Interior Integration for Catholics, it's great that you can join us, and today we are wrestling with the deep attachment needs and the deep integrity needs that Catholic spouses have. 
   1. In this life, we all have deep attachment needs and deep integrity needs
   2. We all struggle with deep attachment needs and deep integrity needs -- whether we realize it or not.  
   3. And some of those needs are unmet.  They cause us difficulties and suffering and tension in our important relationships
   4. Those unmet needs are part of being human in our fallen world.    
   5. How we choose to handle those attachment needs and integrity needs really determines how well our close relationships, especially our marriages go.  
      1. How the husband chooses to address his attachment needs and integrity needs will have a huge impact on his relationship with his wife
      2. How the wife chooses to address her attachment needs and her integrity needs will have a huge impact on her relationship with her husband.  
   6. Meeting these attachment needs and integrity needs well is foundational, essential for you to have a psychologically sound, a solid marriage relationship.  
   7. Today, in episode 62 of Interior Integration for Catholics, released on April 5, 2021, the sixth in our subseries on sexuality in Catholic marriages
       
      1. And it is titled:  Unmet Attachment Needs, Unmet Integrity Needs 
   8. 
      
      1. we won't just lay out all the definitions of our terms
          
         1. what are attachment needs, Dr. Peter?  
      2. 
         
         1. What are integrity needs? 
      3. 
         
   9. 
      
      1. We're not just going to discuss how these needs impact the rest of the marriage relationship
   10.  
       1. We're not just going to explore how sex in the Catholic marriage bed is impacted by these needs and our responses to them
   11.  
       1. No, wait, there's much more
   12.  
       1. We're going to also dive into how do you engage with these needs constructively -- how do we start on a course of action to really meet these needs.  So stay with me until the end and you will get really specific recommendations for setting up a personalized program to have your personal set of attachment needs and integrity needs met.  
   13. 
       
       1. This is such an important area that we are going to spend some time on it, more than just this one podcast.
   14.  
   15. I am Catholic psychologist Peter Malinoski, and I am bringing my 20 years of experience in the clinical trenches with real Catholics with real problems to bear on this question of attachment needs and integrity needs in this episode for you.  
   16. This podcast is part of Souls and Hearts, our online outreach -- check us out at soulsandhearts.com
        
       1. Souls and Hearts is all about shoring up our natural foundation for the Catholic spiritual life, all about overcoming psychological obstacles to being loved and to loving God and neighbor.
   17.  
2. Brief Review 
   1. Each episode stand on its own, no need to review if you don't want to, if you're just jumping in here that's great
   2. I do review from time to time because reviewing helps with spiral learning, with retaining things
   3. And because this podcast is programmatic, episodes build on each other, we're not just doing little isolated soundbites of information, odd, assorted nuggets.
   4. This is meant to be a program in your Catholic human formation to help you focus inward on your interior integration -- to help you bring together the different parts of yourself into unity and harmony in the natural realm
   5. So let's do a quick rewind here, just to catch you all up to date:
   6. [Insert review/rewind sound effect]
   7. I introduced the model of a Catholic Canopied Marriage Bed to represent the sexual life of a married Catholic couple in Episode 58.  
   8. The Catholic Canopied Married Bed has these interrelated parts
       
      1. The floor -- A deep abiding trust in the Presence of God and His Providence -- we started here in episode 59
   9.  
      1. The four legs -- these four supports hold up the Catholic marriage bed.  
         1. Leg 4.  Internal Family Systems Approaches to understanding myself and my spouse
             
            1. Covered this conceptually in episodes 60 and again with a story of a Catholic couples' problems in a sexual relationship in episode 61.
         2.  
         3. Leg 3.  Understanding my own and my spouse's attachment needs and integrity needs   -- this is what we are focus on today.
             
            1. In Episode 57 we discussed how the one main psychological reason why Catholic marriages fail is our response and reactions to deep unmet needs
         4.  
         5. Leg 2.  the wife's commitment to her own interior integration, her own human formation
         6. Leg 1.  the husband's commitment to his own interior integration and his own human formation
   10. 
       
       1. The frame and the box spring -- the firm, unwavering commitment of the husband his marriage vows and the wife to her marriage vows -- separately.  Independently
   11.  
       1. The mattress  Empathetic attunement
   12.  
       1.  Two pillows:  Self-acceptance and Spouse-acceptance 
   13. 
       
       1. Bottom Sheet, the fitted sheet:  sexual attraction, the intensity of sexual passion -- the eros
   14.  
       1. Top Sheet:  Communication between the spouses
   15.  
       1. The blankets:  human warmth, emotional connection
   16.  
       1. Four Bedposts 
          1. Mindset
          2. Heartset
          3. Bodyset
          4. Soulset
   17. 
       
       1. The canopy and the curtains -- to protect privacy and propriety or to hide dysfunction, exploitation, even abuse.  
   18. 
       
       1. The sham, the bedspread, and the bedskirt -- Used to cover up the real bed, give an impression of the state of married life to the world.  
   19. 
       
       1. All of these elements work together.  Dynamic model, which can change over time.  
   20. 
       
3. The Windup / the Hurdle -- What is our situation here?
    
   1. [Definition time sound effect]:  Definitions:  We all have attachment needs and we all have integrity needs
       
      1. Hard to find good summaries of these needs, hard to find good definitions, so here are my definitions.
   2.  
      1. Attachment needs = The needs that a child has for a deep and enduring emotional and relational bond with a caregiver, usually a parent, who provides a felt sense of closeness, security, understanding, reassurance in times of trouble, for affection and warmth, and a sense that someone really is looking out for my best interests.  
   3. 
      
      1. Integrity needs --  drawing from self-psychology here, Heinz Kohut  = The needs a child has for a sense of identity has the following features:
          
         1. A separate existence from others --  I exist in my own right, a separate person
      2.  
         1. Is bounded, has boundaries
      3.  
         1. is stable over time and across different situations
      4.  
         1. Self is regulated
      5.  
         1. Is integrated -- coherent interconnections inside between aspects of experience -- self-cohesion
      6.  
         1. Is active, with agency, can effectively function in the world

1. Intro: Welcome to the podcast Interior Integration for Catholics 
   1. Interior Integration for Catholics brings to you in each episode the best psychological information essential for your human formation, knowledge that is fundamental in shoring up the natural foundation for your Catholic spiritual life.  
   2. This podcast helps you focus inward on your interior integration -- to help you bring together the different parts of yourself into unity and harmony with God in the natural realm.
   3. In this podcast, we confront the tough internal questions we Catholics have in our day-to-day lives, we confront head-on our struggles in the natural realm, the psychological difficulties that keep us from fully loving our Lord and our Lady in a deep, personal, intimate way and living out our vocations, including our vocation to Catholic marriage which necessarily brings in both sexuality and religion.
   4. And we're dealing with sexuality and religion in this episode for two primary reasons: first to free you to love God our Father, Jesus our Brother, the Holy Spirit and Our Mother Mary more and more over time and 
   5. Second, to love you neighbor as yourself -- And who is your neighbor?  If you are married, your first neighbor, your closest neighbor, the neighbor toward whom you have the most responsibilities is your spouse.  Because of your marriage vows.  
   6. I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski and I am here with you, to be your host and guide.  
   7. This podcast is part of Souls and Hearts, our online outreach at soulsandhearts.com, which is all about shoring up our natural foundation for the Catholic spiritual life, all about overcoming psychological obstacles to being loved and to loving God and neighbor.
   8. We are celebrating our one year anniversary.  First podcast launched March 20, 2020
       
      1. Success
          
         1. The majority of podcasts don't make it to 14 episodes
      2.  
         1. Because of you
             
            1. Very niche audience
         2.  
            1. This one has risen to top 10% based on downloads
         3.  
            1. Tells me there is a hunger out there.   
         4. 
            
      3. 
         
   9. 
      
      1. Gratitude
   10.  
       1. Appreciation
   11.  
       1. Your support increases my motivation.  
   12. 
       
   13. This is episode 60, released on March 22, 2021
   14. And it is titled: How Well Do You Really Know Your Spouse?  
   15. This is the 12th episode in our series on sexuality, the fourth in our subseries on sexuality in Catholic marriages 
   16. Continuing with the model of a Catholic Canopied Marriage Bed to illuminate what happens sexually in Catholic marriages.  
   17. Episode 58 -- I provided you with the model of a Catholic canopied marriage bed.  
       1. Remember this canopied marriage bed represents the sexual life of a married Catholic couple.  
          1. The floor -- The Presence of God and His Providence -- we started here in the last episode, episode 59
          2. The four legs
              
             1. Leg 1 -- the husband's commitment to his own interior integration and his own human formation
          3.  
             1. Leg 2.  the wife's commitment to her own interior integration, her own human formation
          4.  
             1. Leg 3.  Understanding my own and my spouse's attachment needs and integrity needs   
          5. 
             
             1. Leg 4.  Internal Family Systems Approaches to understanding myself and my spouse
                 
                1. We are really exploring this leg first, in this podcast episode.  
             2. 
                
          6. 
             
          7. The frame and the box spring -- the firm, unwavering commitment of the husband his marriage vows and the wife to her marriage vows -- separately.  Independently
          8. The mattress  Empathetic attunement
          9.  Two pillows:  Self-acceptance and Spouse-acceptance 
          10. Bottom Sheet:  sexual attraction, the intensity of sexual passion
          11. Top Sheet:  Communication between the spouses
          12. The blankets:  human warmth, emotional connection
          13. Four Bedposts -- imagine two spiral intertwined, like the double-helix structure of DNA
               
              1. Mindset
          14.  
              1. Heartset
          15.  
              1. Bodyset
          16.  
              1. Soulset
          17.  
          18. The canopy and the curtains -- to protect privacy and propriety or to hide dysfunction, exploitation, even abuse.  
          19. The sham, the bedspread, and the bedskirt -- Used to cover up the real bed, give an impression of the state of married life to the world.  
       2. Review:  So we've only just begun with this metaphor.  Now starting in the next episode, we are going to walk step by step through all the elements of the Catholic marriage bed, through all the components of married Catholic sexual life.  We're going to cover all the bases slowly and thoroughly so that all components, all the pieces become clear. 
          1. We will look at what each part of the Catholic marriage bed looks like when it is healthy as well as what can go wrong with each part of the bed.  
          2. Just as important, how all the pieces of the marriage bed, healthy or unhealthy are related to each other, how they interconnect and how those elements of Catholic Married sexual life can change over time.  
   18. Over and over and over again, I have had Catholic couples in my office discussing their marital problems, their sexual problems.
   19. And over and over and over again, I come to the same conclusion -- Catholic couples who are married, 5, 15, 25, 40 years or more do not really know their spouses.  
       1. They know a lot about their spouses
           
          1. biographical details
       2.  
          1. They know a lot about behaviors their spouses do
       3.  
       4. But their internalized image of the spouse, their working model of the spouse is way off
           
          1. Very two dimensional
       5.  
          1. Very simplistic
       6.  
          1. Interpreted through our own filters and lenses
       7.  
       8. Lots of reasons for this and we'll get into them today.  
   20. So this episode is titled What You Don't Know About Your Spouse Can Hurt Both of You.  
   21. So get ready, prepare yourself for light bulbs to switch on and shine brightly as we explore new and much clearer ways of thinking about sexual life in Catholic marriages, grounded in the perennial teachings of the Catholic Church and informed by the best of psychology. 
2. The Windup / the Hurdle -- What is our situation here.
    
   1. Five Bold claims:
       
      1. You don't really know your spouse.  
   2. 
      
      1. Your spouse doesn't really know you.  
   3. 
      
      1. Your Father doesn't or didn't really know your mother
   4.  
      1. Your mother doesn't or didn't really know your father
   5.  
      1. And you don't really know you.  
   6. 
      
3. 
   
   1. Not just talking about troubled marriages here.  Not just talking about Catholic marriages in general.  I'm also talking about those Catholic marriages that you admire.  
4. 
   
   1. In these days, very few people really deeply enter into the phenomenological world of anyone -- anyone else or even oneself.  
5. 
   
   1. Bold claims.  Explain yourself, Dr. Peter.  I don't know ...

1. Intro: Welcome to the podcast Interior Integration for Catholics 
   1. Interior Integration for Catholics brings to you in each episode the best psychological information essential for your human formation, knowledge that is fundamental in shoring up the natural foundation for your Catholic spiritual life.  
   2. This podcast helps you focus inward on your interior integration -- to help you bring together the different parts of yourself into unity and harmony with God in the natural realm.
   3. In this podcast, we confront the tough internal questions we Catholics have in our day-to-day lives, we confront head-on our struggles in the natural realm, the psychological difficulties that keep us from fully loving our Lord and our Lady in a deep, personal, intimate way and living out our vocations, including our vocation to Catholic marriage which necessarily brings in both sexuality and religion.
   4. And we're dealing with sexuality and religion in this episode for two primary reasons: first to free you to love God our Father, Jesus our Brother, the Holy Spirit and Our Mother Mary more and more over time and 
   5. Second, to love you neighbor as yourself -- And who is your neighbor?  If you are married, your first neighbor, your closest neighbor, the neighbor toward whom you have the most responsibilities is your spouse.  Because of your marriage vows.  
   6. I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski and I am here with you, to be your host and guide.  
   7. This podcast is part of Souls and Hearts, our online outreach at soulsandhearts.com, which is all about shoring up our natural foundation for the Catholic spiritual life, all about overcoming psychological obstacles to being loved and to loving God and neighbor
   8. This is episode 59, released on March 15, 2021
   9. This is the 11th episode in our series on sexuality the second in our subseries on Catholic marriages 
   10. Now we are zeroing in on sexuality within Catholic marriages and we're going diagnose some extremely common relational problems between Catholic spouses that get expressed through how they relate sexually.  
   11. So this episode is titled Mystery, Covenant, Vocation, and Being "Submissive" in the Marriage Bed. So get ready, prepare yourself for light bulbs to switch on and shine brightly as we explore new and much clearer ways of thinking about sexual life in Catholic marriages, grounded in the perennial teachings of the Catholic Church and informed by the best of psychology. 
   12. I'm doing this subseries on sexuality within Catholic marriage because I want you to have ways out of the sexual traps that so many Catholic married couple find themselves in, the negative cycles, the problematic repeating patterns that are so frustrating, that cause so much conflict and that harm people, even Catholic spouses who want to do the right thing.   
   13. And even if you're not trapped, your marriage is sound, love is growing -- there is going to be so much in these episodes to deepen the understanding, the awareness, the empathy, the commitment, and the love.  
2. The lay of the land
    
   1. Podcast oriented toward Catholic serious about the faith
3.  
   1. But we are imperfect.   We forget who we are -- we forget that we are beloved children of God when we get blended with parts of us that are overcome with the intensity of emotions, passions 
4. 
   
   1. And Marriage is a huge challenge.  Catholic Scripture Scholar Peter Williamson:  Catholic Commentary on the Sacred Scriptures Ephesians Baker Academic p. 154  "Probably no element of human life arouses more longing and hope for happiness, yet yields as much pain and disappointment as marriage."  
5. 
   
   1. Conscious or unconscious assumptions:
       
      1. Sex is dirty.  God doesn't want us to have sex.  
   2. 
      
      1. But sex is also necessary
          
         1. I'm married
      2.  
         1. Procreation: Be fruitful and multiply
      3.  
   3. 
      
6. 
   
   1. Shame.  Episode 49
       
      1. Shame is at the center -- hard to talk about this because it is so personal and so intimate, and often so bound up with shame.  
         1. Sexuality not talked about, not discussed
         2. Sexuality part and parcel of our bodies, all about our bodies
         3. Catholics who are serious about their faith often have a propensity to start with self-judgement and self-condemnation, like at the end of a trial, without really understanding themselves well.
             
            1. Internal self-shaming
         4.  
         5. And all of this makes sense, makes sense, because almost all of us Catholic adults have sinned sexually.  
         6. So many unmet needs and coded messages being expressed through sexuality -- can seem like a minefield
         7. Often leads to avoiding God
         8. Model of suppression and condemnation. Out of conscious awareness, then it doesn't exist any more
         9. Lots of bad advice out there. 
   2. 
      
      1. So we try to go it alone and often that means without God
   3.  
7. 
   
8. Anthropological basis
    
   1. All practices of psychology are grounded in an anthropology
       
      1. Philosophy
   2.  
      1. Theology
   3.  
      1. Epistemology
   4.  
      1. Metaphysics
   5.  
      1. Logic
   6.  
9. 
   
   1. Feminist Psychology
10.  
    1. This episode -- more spiritual foundation.  I want you to understand where I am coming from.  
11. 
    
    1. Fundamental Need to Grip on to Romans 8:28
        
       1. High stakes table
    2.  
       1. Pain and disappointment
           
          1. Wanting spouse to be God -- Unmet needs, episode 57
       2.  
          1. The Vision -- Considering Parts in Marriage
              
             1. The real reasons why Catholic Sacramental Marriages Fail
                 
                1. Parts with unmet attachment needs.  Deep relational needs, often unconscious
             2.  
                1. Attachment needs -- held by parts
                    
                   1. Seen, Heard, Known, Understood
                2.  
                   1. Safety, Security
                3.  
                   1. Comforted, Soothed Reassured
                4.  
                   1. Cherished, Rejoiced in, Delighted in
                5.  
                   1. Willing the highest good
                6.  
             3. 
                
                1. Leads to self-absorption
                    
                   1. Definition of self-absorption  -- preoccupied with oneself or one’s own affairs, sometimes to the point of excluding others or the outside world.”  
                2. 
                   
                   1. Needs for God not being met  
                3. 
                   
                   1. Makes sense that people look for these needs to be met in marriage
                       
                      1. Marriage as the "last great hope"
                   2.  
                      1. Puts tremendous pressure on the marriage
                   3.  
                      1. Leads to utterly unrealistic expectations for the marriage -- spouse can't do anything right
                   4.  
                4. 
                   
                   1. Wanting the Spouse to be God.  
                5. 
                   
             4. 
                
                1. Parts taking over
                    
                   1. It's parts of us that are angry, disappointed, disillusioned that want to give up on marriages and give up on God. 
                2. 
                   
                   1. It's parts of us that  
                3. 
                   
             5. 
                
          2. 
             
       3. 
          
    3. 
       
12. 
    

1. Intro: Welcome to the podcast Interior Integration for Catholics 
   1. Interior Integration for Catholics brings to you in each episode the best psychological information essential for your human formation, knowledge that is fundamental in shoring up the natural foundation for your Catholic spiritual life.  
   2. Often said that if you want to start an argument, bring up sex, politics or religion.  Those are the tried and true, sure-fire ways to stoke disagreement among people.  
   3. This podcast helps you focus inward on your interior integration -- to help you bring together the different parts of yourself into unity and harmony with God -- so we're going to leave the politics and social justice questions and societal reform efforts and climate change and all those big-picture, macro-level, externally-focused topics out of our conversation, so that leaves us with sex and religion.  And we're going to take on both of them together because 
   4. In this podcast, we confront the tough internal questions we Catholics have in our day-to-day lives, we confront head-on our struggles in the natural realm, the psychological difficulties that keep us from fully loving our Lord and our Lady in a deep, personal, intimate way and living out our vocations, including our vocation to Catholic marriage which necessarily brings in both sexuality and religion.
   5. And we're dealing with sexuality and religion in this episode for two primary reasons: first to free you to love God our Father, Jesus our Brother, the Holy Spirit and Our Mother Mary more and more over time and 
   6. Second, to love you neighbor as yourself -- And who is your neighbor?  If you are married, your first neighbor, your closest neighbor, the neighbor toward whom you have the most responsibilities is your spouse.  Because of your marriage vows.  

I, Roger, take you, Sarah, to be my wife. I promise to be true to you in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health. I will love you and honor you all the days of my life. 

1. I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski and I am here with you, to be your host and guide.  
2. This podcast is part of Souls and Hearts, our online outreach at soulsandhearts.com, which is all about shoring up our natural foundation for the Catholic spiritual life, all about overcoming psychological obstacles to being loved and to loving God and neighbor
3. This is episode 58, released on March 8, 2021
4. This is the tenth episode in our series on sexuality the second in our subseries on Catholic marriages 
5. Way back in episode 50, the second one in this series on sexuality, we explored what a healthy, ordered, fully Catholic sexuality looks like.  
6. Now we are zeroing in on sexuality within Catholic marriages and we're going diagnose some extremely common relational problems between Catholic spouses that get expressed through how they relate sexually.  
7. So this episode is titled The Catholic Marriage Bed.  The Catholic Marriage Bed.
8. So get ready, prepare yourself for light bulbs to switch on and shine brightly as we explore new and much clearer ways of thinking about sexual life in Catholic marriages, grounded in the perennial teachings of the Catholic Church and informed by the best of psychology. 
9. I'm doing this subseries on sexuality within Catholic marriage because I want you to have ways out of the sexual traps that so many Catholic married couple find themselves in, the negative cycles, the problematic repeating patterns that are so frustrating, that cause so much conflict and that harm people, even Catholic spouses who want to do the right thing.   
10. And even if you're not trapped, your marriage is sound, love is growing -- there is going to be so much in these episodes to deepen the understanding, the awareness, the empathy, the commitment, and the love.  
11. So we are discussing the marriage bed.  I'm using the image of a canopy bed to illustrate all the psychological and relational aspects in the natural realm that go into a vibrant, life-giving Catholic married sexuality.  We're going to be painting a word picture, a conceptual diagram of a canopy bed, with all the pieces of that bed named, labels and defined, and show how all the parts of the bed are essential to a grounded, peaceful, harmonious shared sexual life in Catholic marriage.   
12. But first let's review the Lay of the Land, the Current Situation
     
    1. We are going to start with a broad overview here.  Key Words:  Confusion.  Lot of confusion about sexuality in our culture today
        
       1. Wider array of generally socially accepted sexual practices in our land than has ever existed before.  
          1. Internet has provided a forum to bring together people who practice all kinds of 
    2. 
       
       1. Greater amount of disagreement about what healthy sexual life looks like
    3.  
       1. Moving away from natural law
    4.  
       1. Things that were obvious even 20 years ago, even 10 years are not being questioned
           
          1. Can a man become a woman? -- now an open question being debated in our society
       2.  
          1. Can two men and a woman all be in the same marriage?  Can a woman marry a dolphin?  In 2006, British millionaire Sharon Tendler married a dolphin named Cinderella, at the Eilat Reef.
       3.  
    5. 
       
13. 
    
    1. Lot of Confusion about what a healthy, ordered  Catholic Sexuality should look like -- reviewed this in episode 50
        
       1. Opinions:  Survey data -- wide variety of opinions on sexual morality
           
          1. Pew 2014 Survey of more than 7200 Catholics, 57% Favor or Strongly Favor Same-sex Marriages 
       2. 
          
          1. Pew 2016 survey of 817 Catholics only 8% of Catholics believe using contraception is morally wrong.  41% believe its morally acceptable and 48% believe it's not a moral issue.
       3.  
          1. Pew 2019 Survey of 675 adult Catholics -- 62% of Catholic said that casual sex between consenting adults who are not in a committed relationship is always or sometimes acceptable.  Only 22% of Catholics said consensual casual sex never acceptable.  
       4. 
          
    2. 
       
       1. Wide Diversity of Sexual practices among Catholics
           
          1. Hard to find solid, recent data on this.  Talking to people you find out things. 
       2. 
          
          1. What about oral sex, role-play sex, mutual masturbation, viewing pornography together, using sex toys together, and going beyond into anal sex, fetishes of various kinds, bondage and the list goes on and on.  
       3. 
          
          1. Global sex toy market -- $34 billion  $4.50 for every man woman and child.  Tens of billions, estimates ranging up to $100 billion per year for porn.   
       4. 
          
    3. 
       
       1. But much more personally, for many Catholic spouses their sexual experiences in marriage are a great source of distress, pain, confusion  
          1. Internal conflicts about what is morally right and wrong
          2. Disagreements about sexual practices between Catholic spouses -- limited conflict resolutions'
          3. Inability for Catholic spouses to communicate about intimate sexual matters 
          4. Feeling devalued in the sexual aspects of the marital relationship
          5. Feeling used sexually, exploited, neglected.  
          6. High levels of dissatisfaction in the sexual relationship and intimacy more generally
          7. Not feeling seen, known, heard, understood, accepted as ...

The One Main Psychological Reason Why Catholic Marriages Fail

1. Intro: Welcome to the podcast Interior Integration for Catholics 
   1. Interior Integration for Catholics brings to you in each episode the best psychological information essential for your human formation, knowledge that is fundamental in shoring up the natural foundation for your Catholic spiritual life.  
   2. In this podcast, we confront the tough questions we Catholics have in our day-to-day lives, we confront head on our struggles in the natural realm, the psychological difficulties that keep us from fully loving our Lord and our Lady in a deep, personal, intimate way and living out our vocations. 
   3. And we deal with these difficult, demanding issues for one primary reason: to free you to love God our Father, Jesus our Brother, the Holy Spirit and Our Mother Mary more and more over time.  
   4. This podcast helps you focus inward on your interior integration -- to help you bring together the different parts of yourself into unity and harmony with God.
   5. Together, we are on a journey toward deep transformation, a radical conversion at the core of our being so that our souls can one day enter into contemplative union with God. 
   6. I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski and I am here with you, to be your host and guide.  
   7. This podcast is part of Souls and Hearts, our online outreach at soulsandhearts.com, which is all about shoring up our natural foundation for the Catholic spiritual life, all about overcoming psychological obstacles to being loved and to loving God and neighbor
   8. This is episode 57, released on March 1, 2021
   9. This is the ninth episode in our series on sexuality and in this episode, we are turning our attention to Catholic marriages -- such an important, essential topic for our day and age, Catholic marriages
   10. And we are going to start with the real, deeper, often hidden reasons why Catholic marriages fall apart
   11. So this episode is titled The One Main Psychological Reason Why Catholic Marriages Fail
   12. Get ready for the deep dive into new ways of thinking about Catholic marriages, from an informed psychological perspective. 
   13. Focusing on the psychological aspects here -- not the spiritual ones. 
       1. Not qualified to judge souls, make statements about their virtues or vices
       2. Not criticizing or condemning, but rather focusing on understanding with gentleness and compassion
       3. You catch more flies with honey than vinegar  
       4. Focus on the natural level.   
   14.  What about you, Dr. Peter -- what do you know about marriage?  Fair question.  25th year of marriage, one marriage, 7 children.  
2. Windup: The Current State of Catholic Marriages
    
   1. Definitions
       
      1. What is Catholic Marriage 
         1. Catholic Dictionary:  
   2. 
      
3. 
   

As a natural institution, the lasting union of a man and a woman who agree to give and receive rights over each other for the performance of the act of generation and for the fostering of their mutual love.

The state of marriage implies four chief conditions: 1. there must be a union of opposite sexes; it is therefore opposed to all forms of unnatural, homosexual behavior; 2. it is a permanent union until the death of either spouse; 3. it is an exclusive union, so that extramarital acts are a violation of justice; and 4. its permanence and exclusiveness are guaranteed by contract; mere living together, without mutually binding themselves to do so, is concubinage and not marriage.

Christ elevated marriage to a sacrament of the New Law. Christian spouses signify and partake of the mystery of that unity and fruitful love which exists between Christ and his Church, helping each other attain to holiness in their married life and in the rearing and education of their children. 

1. Emphasis on the Sacramental Aspect -- discussing sacramental marriages here.  
2. Covenant, goes far beyond a Contract - no fault divorce, temporary contract.  
3. What is fail?
    
   1. Broad Definition:  
      1. To prove deficient or lacking
      2. to perform ineffectively or inadequately
      3. to fall short of success or achievement in something expected, attempted, desired, or approved
      4. to leave something undone  
4. 
   
   1. One way that we could consider a marriage to fail is by divorce
       
      1. Stats
          
         1. 2014 Pew Research Survey of 885 Catholics 19% of those Catholic adults 18 years old were divorced or separated
      2.  
         1. Consistent with Georgetown's Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate
             
            1. About 20% or one in five Catholic adults have experienced divorce in their lifetimes 
         2. 
            
            1. About 36% of Americans who marry divorce at some point.  
         3. 
            
            1. 28% of Catholics who marry ever divorce -- lower than the general average
         4.  
      3. 
         
         1. Old canard that half of all Catholic marriage end in divorce -- not true.  More like a quarter.  
      4. 
         
         1. Still that's a lot -- 28%.  
      5. 
         
         1. And I don't think success in marriage is defined by not getting divorced
      6.  
         1. Not getting divorced by itself is not sufficient to call a marriage successful.  
      7. 
         
   2. 
      
5. 
   
   1. Abusive marriages held together by 
6. 
   
   1. Distant Roommates -- coolness, tolerating each other's existence
7.  
   1. Contrast with a life-giving marriage
8.  
9. Ways marriages fail
    
   1. Unilateral -- one spouse abandons the other
10.  
    1. Mutual -- each spouse abandons the other
11.  
    1. Distancing -- roommate model -- could be cordial or not
12.  
13. God's view of marriage
     
    1. Marriage as a covenant, not a contract  
       1. CCC 1603 God himself is the author of marriage.  The vocation to marriage is written in the very nature of man and woman as they came from the hand of the Creator.  
       2. Wedding at Cana -- Beginning of Jesus public life
       3. Life of Mary as Seen by the Mystics -- Jesus playing
14. 
    
15. Hurdle
     
    1. Marriage is Tough
        
       1. Reasons
           
          1. No one can hurt us, disappoint us, or get under our skin quite like a spouse. 
       2. 
          
          1. Hard to anticipate the difficulties.  The crosses.   
       3. 
          
    2. 
       
16. 
    
    1. Marriage Difficulties affect us all
17.  
    1. Even if we aren't married
        
       1. Considering our parents' marriage
    2.  
       1. Friends' marriages
    3.  
18. 
    
    1. Marriage as bedrock of society -- USCCB
        
       1. Aristotle wrote that the family is nature’s established association for the supply of mankind’s everyday wants. 
    2. 
       
       1. USCCB: Marriage is the bedrock of society.  
    3. 
       
19. 
    

Marriages benefit society by building and strengthening human relationships within the home

(among spouses and children) and beyond (involving relatives, neighbors, and communities). For

this reason, the family has long been understood as the fundamental unit of society, the

foundation f...

1. Intro: Welcome to the podcast Interior Integration for Catholics 
   1. Interior Integration for Catholics brings to you in each episode the best psychological information essential for your human formation, knowledge that is fundamental in shoring up the natural foundation for your Catholic spiritual life.  
   2. In this podcast, we confront the tough questions we Catholics have in our day-to-day lives, we confront head on our struggles in the natural realm, the psychological difficulties that keep us from fully loving our Lord and our Lady in a deep, personal, intimate way. 
   3. And we deal with these difficult, demanding issues for one primary reason: to free you to love God our Father, Jesus our Brother, the Holy Spirit and Our Mother Mary more and more over time.  
   4. This podcast helps you focus inward on your interior integration -- to help you bring together the different parts of yourself into unity and harmony with God.
   5. 'Together, we are on a journey toward deep transformation in our mindsets, our heartsets and our bodysets, a radical transformation at the core of our being so that our souls can one day enter into contemplative union with God. 
   6. I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski and I am here with you, to be your host and guide.  
   7. This podcast is part of Souls and Hearts, our online outreach at soulsandhearts.com, which is all about shoring up our natural foundation for the Catholic spiritual life, all about overcoming psychological obstacles to being loved and to loving God and neighbor
   8. This is episode 56, released on February 22, 2021
   9. This is the eighth episode in our series on sexuality and the second one on Pornography.  
   10. And it is titled: What is Essential for Catholics to Recover from Porn?
   11. And I am really happy to have Dr. Gerry Crete, past president of the Catholic Psychological Association and the CEO and co-founder of Souls and Hearts with me for this episode

1. Recognize that the fantasy involved in the pornography choices represent a dynamic that seeks to meet the unmet need
    
   1. Safety
2.  
   1. Attachment injuries
3.  
   1. Being seen
4.  
   1. Seeing others
5.  
   1. Connection
6.  
   1. Sense of “power” or agency
7.  
   1. Traumatic re-enactment
8.  
   1. The fantasy may provide a temporary answer to those needs while avoiding the pain
9.  
   1. Allow him to experience having his needs met in a healthy way
10.  
    1. What new information can you share with him
11.  
    1. What new role or position can the protector have now
12.  
    1. Recognize the courage it takes for the protector to seek a new role and embrace change
13.  
    1. Allow time to grieve the losses that pornography use has brought
        
       1. Recognize negative effects of pornography or other sexual acting out behavior in one’s life
    2.  
14. 
    
    1. Prepare to make reparations
        
       1. Wife/Family
    2.  
       1. Self
    3.  
       1. Others
    4.  
       1. God
    5.  
15. 
    
    1. Invite protector to grow and embrace freedom – recognize there will be a period of growth – it will need time and patience. Commit to being by his side
16.  
    1. What does it mean for the parts to be “in recovery”
        
       1. The self is present – better connections with others
    2.  
       1. Completing tasks with a sense of completion rather than trying to escape pain (life)
    3.  
       1. Ability to set goals and focus on them rather than obsession with momentary perceived needs
    4.  
       1. Willingness to receive feedback
    5.  
       1. Ability to recognize time rather than entering into a blackhole of time
    6.  
       1. Finds meaning in activities and relationships
    7.  
17. 
    

1. Intro: Welcome to the podcast Interior Integration for Catholics 
   1. Interior Integration for Catholics brings to you in each episode the best psychological information essential for your human formation, knowledge that is fundamental in shoring up the natural foundation for your Catholic spiritual life.  
   2. In this podcast, we confront the tough questions we Catholics have in our day-to-day lives, we confront head on our struggles in the natural realm, the psychological difficulties that keep us from fully loving our Lord and our Lady in a deep, personal, intimate way. 
   3. And we deal with these difficult, demanding issues for one primary reason: to free you to love God our Father, Jesus our Brother, the Holy Spirit and Our Mother Mary more and more over time.  
   4. This podcast helps you focus inward on your interior integration -- to help you bring together the different parts of yourself into unity and harmony with God.
   5. 'Together, we are on a journey toward deep transformation in our mindsets, our heartsets and our bodysets, a radical transformation at the core of our being so that our souls can one day enter into contemplative union with God. 
   6. I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski and I am here with you, to be your host and guide.  
   7. This podcast is part of Souls and Hearts, our online outreach at soulsandhearts.com, which is all about shoring up our natural foundation for the Catholic spiritual life, all about overcoming psychological obstacles to being loved and to loving God and neighbor
   8. This is episode 55, released on February 15, 2021
   9. This is the seventh episode in our series on sexuality and the fourth one on masturbation.  
   10. And it is titled: Why Catholics Use Pornography
2. Practical steps you can take to overcome a pornography problem. These are good but only go so far:
    
   1. Device management
3.  
   1. Accountability
4.  
   1. Support Group
5.  
   1. Therapy
6.  
7.  Inner Work: Here we get to the root of the problem and find lasting solutions
    
   1. Recognize that the pornography use has a negative effect on one’s life
       
      1. Marriage and family
   2.  
      1. Career
   3.  
      1. Downtime
   4.  
      1. Relationships
   5.  
      1. Spiritual life
   6.  
8. 
   
   1. Awareness that something must be done and that one needs to commit to change
9.  
   1. What part of me doesn’t want to change? It’s a “protector”
10.  
    1. Recognize that the part of you turning to pornography is a protector
11.  
    1. The protector doesn’t want the system to feel pain
12.  
    1. At some point the protector learned that pornography is an escape from pain
13.  
    1. The protector also learned that pornography can meet unmet needs
14.  
    1. Identify the positive intention of the “pornography” protector
15.  
    1. Identify what this protector really believes about why pornography is the only answer
16.  
    1. See this protector (unblend) and recognize his misguided but sincere intention
17.  
    1. If the protector is protecting an exile (the pain) then promise to attend to the exile
18.  
    1. Allow him to share with you his real unmet needs
19.  
    1. Recognize that the fantasy involved in the pornography choices represent a dynamic that seeks to meet the unmet need
        
       1. Safety
    2.  
       1. Attachment injuries
    3.  
       1. Being seen
    4.  
       1. Seeing others
    5.  
       1. Connection
    6.  
       1. Sense of “power” or agency
    7.  
       1. Traumatic re-enactment
    8.  
20.