24 God Images and Self Images

07/13/20 • 43 min

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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 24. God Images and Self Images

July 13, 2020

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.

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.

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.

Previous Episode

23 Sinning, God Images and Resilience

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...

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25 Drill Sergeant Gods, Statue Gods, and Preoccupied Manager Gods, Oh My… July 20, 2020

Episode 25. Drill Sergeant Gods, Statue Gods, and Preoccupied Manager Gods, Oh My...

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 25, released on July 20, 2020 and it’s called Drill Sergeant Gods, Statue Gods, and Preoccupied Manager Gods, Oh My...

Self-concept: This what we intellectually believe about ourselves, who we profess ourselves to be, what we understand about ourselves, our mental construct of ourselves. The self-concept of a practicing Catholic, for example, may include being a beloved child of God. There’s a link between God concepts and Self-concepts – they go together, they harmonize. Loving Shepherd, little sheep.

Self-images on the other hand, are much more emotionally driven, much more intuitive, subjective, and they vary a lot more from moment to moment. These go together with God images – they impact each other

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.

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.

So in the text exchange with a listener who I will call Beth, because that’s her name, Beth told me that she was having a hard time figuring out her own God images. So I thought I would bring in the best resource

Mistaken Identity William and Kristi Gaultiere 1989 Fleming H. Revell -- 3 decades ago.

14 Unloving God images – drawn from I Corinthians 13, 4-7.

Preoccupied manager director God

Statue God

Robber God

Vain Pharisee God

Elitist aristocrat God

Pushy salesman God

Magic Genie God

Demanding drill sergeant God

Outtogetcha Police Detective God

Unjust dictator God

Marshmallow God

Critical Scrooge God

Party-pooper God

Heartbreaker God

Preoccupied Managing Director God: God is busy running the world, but God doesn’t take the initiative, time, or energy to really relate with me, to connect with me. God cares about me, but he is overtaxed. He is impatient, it is hard to get His attention. God may want to give more to everyone, but He has limited resources and has to allocate them carefully, to those who most deserve them. Comfort and help might come if I my situation is desperate enough.

Bible verse: Psalm 13 opening: How long, Lord? Will you utterly forget me? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I carry sorrow in my soul, grief in my heart day after day? How long will my enemy triumph over me?

Self-image: I am not important enough, not worthy enough for God’s attention, for his care, for him to be concerned about me. The problems, cares, and concerns of my life are not significant enough to warrant his attention. God can’t be disturbed with my relatively minor concerns and difficulties. God has little bandwidth for me, doesn’t need to be saddled with my petty wishes and desired. Twisting in the wind. I am an unprofitable servant, so God leaves me to my own devices.

Attachment History – over-parentified children of families with harried, distressed parents, often with financial concerns and time pressure. Children with a Preoccupied Managing Director God image learn that they are rewarded for being “low-maintenance” and not adding to their parents’ troubles by voicing their concerns. Praised for how independent, mature, and responsible they are. Anxious-preoccupied attachment style – they want intimacy, connection with God, but they feel th...