Interior Integration for Catholics

Episode 24. God Images and Self Images

July 13, 2020

Intro: Welcome to the podcast Coronavirus Crisis: Carpe Diem, where you and I rise up and embrace the possibilities and opportunities for spiritual and psychological growth in this time of crisis, all grounded in a Catholic worldview. We are going beyond mere resilience, to rising up to the challenges of this pandemic and becoming even healthier in the natural and the spiritual realms than we were before. I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski your host and guide, with Souls and Hearts at soulsandhearts.com. Thank you for being here with me. This is episode 24, released on July 13, 2020 and it’s called God Images and Self Images.

Today we’re going to consolidate some of our learning to date, spiraling back to a few key concepts and then bringing those key concepts to life in a story. You may remember Richard and Susan from Episodes 17 and 19 when we were doing a three-episode series on grief – you long-time listeners that were with us six to eight weeks ago may remember. And you may have forgotten. No worries. Don’t worry if you don’t remember. We are going to review all the key concepts briefly here and I’ll catch you all up on the doings of Susan and Richard, as we begin this fifth installment on Catholic resilience. We’re also going to take a close, in-depth look at the negative God images that Richard and Susan struggle with, and how those God images impact how they feel about themselves and each other. Now if you are just joining us, Richard and Susan are made up – I created these characters to illustrate the concepts we’re discussing, buy they are realistic, and have issues common in our lives.

I said were going to review what a God image is, so let’s just go over that again briefly.

My God image is my emotional and subjective experience of God, who I feel God to be in the moment. May or may not correspond to who God really is.

Initially my God images are shaped by the relationship that I have with my parents. This is my experiential sense how my feelings and how my heart interpret God. My God images are heavily influenced by psychological factors, and different God images can be activated at different times, depending on my emotional states and what psychological mode I am in at a given time.

God images are always formed experientially. God images flow from our relational experiences and how we construe and make sense of those images when we are very young.

My God images can be and usually are radically different than my God concept.

My God concept What I profess about God. It is my more intellectual understanding of God, based on what one has been taught, but also based on what I have explored through reading. I decide to believe in my God concept. Reflected in the Creed, expanded in the Catechism, formal teaching.

This distinction between God image and God concept is so critical, I really want you to grip onto it, to really understand it a deep level. I hope you can really digest to the difference, not just at a conceptual level, but at a much deeper level in you, and hang onto it for the rest of your lives. I mean that. Remember the causal chain that we discussed last time?

Letting ourselves be taken in by our bad God images leads us to lose confidence in God, which in turn causes us to become much less resilient.

Allowing our problematic, heretical God images to dominate us, to exert influence on us in subtle but powerful ways. In the last episode, Episode 23, we discussed how the greatest sin against the First Commandment among us serious Catholics is defaulting to our negative God images, and letting them rule us, not resisting their pull on us, letting them draw us away from God.

The more we give into our negative, heretical God images, the more they color our God concepts, leading us to entertain doubts in our intellect about God’s love, his power, his mercy, his goodness. And once we abandon our God concept to the notions of our heretical God images, we are headed for major trouble.

Richard and Susan from Episodes 17 and 19 on Grief. We’re going to take a close look at Susan’s God images throughout her life to date in more detail, and in order to do that, we have to go back 100 years, and some generations.

Susan’s father Pawel-- Born 1919 in Pittsburgh to Polish immigrant parents, Pawel’s mother died shortly after he was born from Spanish influenza. Youngest of three brothers. Grew up in the 1920s with his father and two older brothers. No sisters, no experience of mother, no stepmother – some extended family but not really close. Pawel’s father (Susan’s grandfather) was a wheelwright, making wagon wheels. At age 10, Al experienced the stock market crash and the Great Depression, hard times, unemployment, and a rough house, with some alcoholism. So Pawel grew up in difficult economic circumstances, completed 8th...

Episode 30. How Small and Childlike are We Supposed to Be? -- August 24, 2020.

Intro: Welcome to the podcast Coronavirus Crisis: Carpe Diem!, where you and I rise up and embrace the possibilities and opportunities for spiritual and psychological growth in this time of crisis, all grounded in a Catholic worldview. We are going beyond mere resilience, to rising up to the challenges of this pandemic and becoming even healthier in the natural and the spiritual realms than we were before. I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski your host and guide, with Souls and Hearts at soulsandhearts.com. Thank you for being here with me.

Let’s jump right in with this critical, central question. Why is it that we have such a hard time trusting God? Why is it that our confidence in God is so inconsistent, why is it that we are so fickle? Why is it so hard for us to have the absolute confidence in God that He merits, that he deserves from us? That’s what we will be addressing in episode 30 of Coronavirus Crisis: Carpe Diem!, released on August 24, 2020 from the Souls and Hearts studio in Indianapolis.

The title for today’s episode is How Small and Childlike are we Supposed to Be? We’re going to get into the psychological side of this question of childlike trust in particular. There are other sides to the question – the spiritual side, the moral side – we’ll address those sides in passing. But what is so often neglected, so often denied, so often ignored, and thus so unknown and unavailable to so many Catholics – what we really need so badly -- is a realistic, accurate understanding of the psychological factors, the factors in the natural realm that get in the way of us trusting our God and our Lady.

We’ve certainly touched on some of these factors before, so let’s review for a moment, let’s go back to take a look at what we’ve developed in previous episodes. So here is the causal chain as we’ve described it so far:

We have distorted God images in our bones, we have distorted God images in the emotional, intuitive parts of us. The trouble happens when we give in to those God images, we let them dominate us, we let them take over, we default to them, and we act in accord with those false God images. Then, our self-image deteriorates. Meanwhile, we drift away from God or even flee from him. All the while, we are losing our peace, joy, well-being. When that gets bad enough, we become symptomatic – anxious, depressed, apathetic, hopeless, panicky, obsessive, whatever our symptoms are.

So let’s back up one more link in the causal chain and ask the question: What’s the main psychological reason we don’t resist our problematic God images? I’m again talking psychological reasons here, not just spiritual reasons like having a particular vice.

Psychologically, we lose track of who God really is. We don’t God clearly in those moments, and we waver, we are tempted to doubt, we are inclined to fall again into our destructive patterns, whatever those are for us. We are lured by our false God images into ways of thinking, feeling, desiring and acting that are harmful to us and to others.

Why Do We Mistrust God and Mary So Much ? I’ll give you the answer. It’s because we are too grown up. We are trying to be way too big. Actively mistrusting – fearing. Or just not considering God at all.

That what we are like when we act big.

We know this. We know the Bible verses. We’ve heard them. But do we really get what they are saying?

Matthew 18

1. At that time the disciples came to Jesus, saying, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?”

2 And calling to him a child (RSV, NAB), “little child” (DR) (ESV)he put him in the midst of them,

3 and said, “Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

4 Whoever humbles himself like this child, he is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.

5 “Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me;

6 but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin,[a] it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened round his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea.

1 In illa hora accesserunt discipuli ad Iesum dicentes: “ Quis putas maior est in regno caelorum? ”.
2 Et advocans parvulum, statuit eum in medio eorum
3 et dixit: “ Amen dico vobis: Nisi conversi fueritis et efiiciamini sicut parvuli, non intrabitis in regnum caelorum.
4 Quicumque ergo humiliaverit se sicut parvulus iste, hic est maior in regno caelorum.
5 Et, qui susceperit unum parvulum talem in nomine meo, me suscipit.
6 Qui autem scandalizaverit unum de pusillis istis, qui in me credunt, expedit ei, ut suspendatur mola asinaria in collo eius et demergatur ...

Episode 23. Sinning, God Images, and Resilience

July 6, 2020

Intro: Welcome to the podcast Coronavirus Crisis: Carpe Diem, where you and I rise up and embrace the possibilities and opportunities for spiritual and psychological growth in this time of crisis, all grounded in a Catholic worldview. We are going beyond mere resilience, to rising up to the challenges of this pandemic and becoming even healthier in the natural and the spiritual realms than we were before. I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski your host and guide, with Souls and Hearts at soulsandhearts.com. Thank you for being here with me. This is episode 23, released on July 6, 2020 and it’s called Sinning, God Images, and Resilience.

I am really excited to be with you today, we have a great episode coming up, where we will be bringing together all the conceptual information from the last three sessions and seeing how it all works together in real life, in real situations, real adversity and real hardship, all from a Catholic worldview.

Let’s start with a brief review, spiraling back to the critical concepts that we have been studying about resilience from a Catholic perspective. If you are new to the podcast, first of all welcome, I’m glad you’re here. All you need to know conceptually we will cover in the next few minutes or so. You can review the last three episodes, episodes 20, 21 and 22 if you want to get into more detail about the concepts in this brief review.

Let’s start with the definition of Catholic resilience – you will see how it is really different from secular understandings of resilience. For our purposes, I’m defining Catholic resilience as “the process of accepting and embracing adversity, trials, stresses and suffering as crosses. Catholic resilience sees these crosses as gifts from our loving, attuned God, gifts to transform us, to make us holy, to help us be better able to love and to be loved than we ever were before, and to ultimately bring us into loving union with Him.

That is what I want for you. For you to transform your suffering into a means of making you holier, more peaceful, and more joyful. Not to take away any necessary suffering from you – not to take away the crosses God has given you. I am here to help you reduce, to eliminate your psychological impediments to not only accepting those crosses but embracing them, and transforming your suffering into the means of your salvation. You have to be resilient to do that, and not as the world sees resilience, but resilience firmly grounded in a Catholic understanding.

Remember how we need a deep and abiding confidence in God, especially in God’s Providence in order to be resilient? That resilience is an effect – it’s a consequence of the deep, abiding confidence in God, especially in God’s Providential care and love for us. If you have the deep, abiding confidence in God and His providential love for you, you specifically, you will be resilient. Repeat.

Remember also how the main psychological reason why we don’t have that deep abiding confidence in God is because we don’t know him as He truly is. We have problematic God images. Our God images fluctuate, they can be as unstable as water. These are the subjective, emotionally-driven ways we construe God in the moment. These are automatic, spontaneously emerging, and they are not necessary consented to by the will.

These God images stand in contrast to our God concept, which is the representation of God that we profess, that we intellectually endorse, that we have come to believe intellectually through reading, studying, discerning. It is the representation of God that we endorse and describe when others ask us who God is.

When our problematic, inaccurate, heretical God images get activated, they compromise our whatever confidence have in God, whatever childlike trust we have in God. So here’s the key causal chain:

Bad God images lead to lack of confidence in God, which leads to a loss of resilience.

And psychological factors contribute to these bad God images. Here’s the idea. Think about al little child. 12 months old or 18 months old, looking at his father. To that toddler, his father seems like a God – really huge – probably 10 times his weight, more than twice his height, so much stronger than he is, able to do so much more in the world. That toddler, as he comes into awareness about God, is going to transfer his experience of his parents and other caregivers into his God images.

Here’s an important point for you to know as you wrap your mind around God images. God images are always formed experientially. God images flow from our relational experiences and how we construe and make sense of those images when we are very young. And that’s critical – we shape our first God images in the first two years of our lives. Those first two years of life have huge impact on the formation of our initial God images. And that make...

Episode 22. The Core of Catholic Resilience

June 29, 2020

Intro: Welcome to the podcast Coronavirus Crisis: Carpe Diem, where you and I rise up and embrace the possibilities and opportunities for spiritual and psychological growth in this time of crisis, all grounded in a Catholic worldview. We are going beyond mere resilience, to rising up to the challenges of this pandemic and becoming even healthier in the natural and the spiritual realms than we were before. I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski your host and guide, with Souls and Hearts at soulsandhearts.com. Thank you for being here with me. This is episode 22, and it’s called The Core of Catholic Resilience.

Today we are going to the core of Catholic resilience, we are going to discover what drives resilience in the saints. We are discussing the one central theme that is absolutely essential for the kind of resilience that transcends this natural world, that incorporates not just our natural gifts, but grace as well. The saints are the most resilient people who ever walked the face of the earth. What is the secret of the resilience of the saints? That’s the question we are focusing on today. What is the secret of the super resilience of the saints, the secret that allows them to rise up again when they fall under the weight of adversity, of persecution, of their own failings, weakness and sins? We are getting to that in just a moment.

I am a believer in spiral learning, especially for this podcast and for the online learning at Souls and Hearts. So what is spiral learning? Guess what! It’s definition time with Dr. Peter. [cue sound effect]

In a spiral learning approach, the basic facts of a subject are learned, without worrying much about the details. Just the main, plain concept. As learning progresses, more and more details are introduced. These new details are related to the basic concepts which are reemphasized many times to help enter them into long-term memory.

Repeat. That’s spiral learning. Homeschoolers might recognize that from the way Saxon math works or the way some other programs teach.

Why spiral learning. I really want you to integrate what you learn in these podcasts into the whole of your being – not just have them go in one ear and out the other, but for you to really grip on to them, really hold them, even when times are tough, even when you are in a dark place, even when emotions run high.

My self-defense instructor James Yeager, in a fighting pistol course I took several years ago taught the class that “The only things you really possess are those things you can carry with you at a dead run.” He was referring to gear, including weapons mindset – he is really big on mindset, having your head right in crisis situations, and worked with his students to integrate his teachings throughout their whole beings, to have the right responses come up habitually, automatically, reflexively. I want that for you. So in these podcasts, we’re nourishing the mind, we’re focusing on the concepts, we’re starting there. The experiential work will help with the rest of the integration into your heartset, your soulset and your bodyset.

Since we are already on a hard road together in the Christian life. I want to make the learning about Catholic resilience and growing in resilience as easy as possible for you.

So we will spiral upward, coming back to the main themes in the podcast over and over again with new details, new data points, lots of examples, and of course, stories. As a psychologist and educator, I want this to be really easy for you to take in. Another benefit of that approach is that each podcast episode can stand alone – you can just pick this up the middle of this series on resilience can get the background you need for the topic of the episode. I’m really thinking about you when I put these together.

So let’s briefly review what we’ve learned in this series on Catholic resilience.

In episode 20, two weeks ago, we discussed the 10 factors of resilience offered by the secular experts. These were the ten essential aspects of resilience as summarized by Southwick and Charney, two writer for a general audience on resilience whom I respect. In episode 21 last week we got into the three major ways that secular understandings of resilience are lacking from a Catholic perspective, three important mistakes that secular professionals make in understanding resilience, the things that they miss because of their non-Catholic worldviews. If you have the time, you can check those two episodes out if you haven’t already, they help to put today’s episode into context, but suffice it to say for today, that Catholic resilience is very different than a secular understanding of resilience.

In the last episode, I offered a definition of Catholic resilience, comparing secular understandings of resilience to a Catholic understanding of resilience. So now...

Internal Family Systems is extremely popular not only as a therapy model, but as a way of making sense of our inner experience. IFS does not have specifically Catholic origins. But can there be a way of understanding parts work and systems thinking and harmonizing them with an authentically Catholic understanding of the human person? Dr. Christian Amalu, Dr. Peter Martin, Dr. Gerry Crete, and Dr. Peter Malinoski explore that question in these next episodes, starting with Sacred Scripture. What evidence can be found in the Bible to support the major tenets of IFS? How might IFS be understood through a Catholic lens? Join us for a tour of Scripture to answer these questions, with an experiential exercise as well.