Exploring the Unconscious Mind and Addressing Challenges of Masturbation in the Catholic Church

1. Intro: Welcome to the podcast Interior Integration for Catholics -- the podcast formerly known as Coronavirus Crisis: Carpe Diem!  
   1. Interior Integration for Catholics brings to you each week the best psychological information essential for your human formation, knowledge that is so fundamental in shoring up the natural foundation for your Catholic spiritual life.  
   2. In this podcast, we ask and answer the tough questions about the real problems we Catholics have in our day-to-day lives, 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. In order to free you to love God the Father, Jesus, the Holy Spirit and Our Mother Mary, I help to you focus inward on your interior integration -- to help you bring together the different parts of yourself into unity and harmony with God's truth, goodness and beauty
   4. Together, we are looking for a deep transformation in our mindsets, our heartsets and our bodysets, a radical transformation at the core of our being so that our souls unite with God and we can rise to the challenges and opportunities He provides us.   
   5. I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski and I am here with you, to be your host and guide.  
   6. 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
   7. This is episode 51, released on January 18, 2021
   8. This is the third episode in our series on sexuality. 
   9. and it is titled: Top 10 Reasons Why Catholic Men Masturbate.
   10. And maybe some of you think you know why Catholic Men masturbate.  
   11. But maybe, just maybe some of you are not satisfied with the simple, surface answers.  Maybe some of you suspect that there are psychological reasons may be a lot deeper than the common explanations would suggest.  
   12. I'm here to say that I think there is so much more going on with masturbation than what may be available in conscious awareness.  I've been a psychologist since 2001 and in the last 20 years, I've had the opportunity to explore the reasons for masturbation in the lives of many, many Catholic men.  
       1. Top ten reasons that Catholic men give for why they masturbate  -- but wait, there's more
       2. Top ten deeper reasons why they really masturbate
   13. So if you are interested in getting a much more complete answers, answers that plumb the depths of our psyches stay tuned.  
   14. Why not women?  Fair question.  I've seen far more Catholic men actively struggling with this than Catholic women -- and I'm going off my clinical experience.  Masturbation is a great concern for some women.  I just know less about it in the lives of women. 
       1. Many of the points are likely to be equally valid for women as for men.  
       2. Valuable for women to understand why Catholic men masturbate.  
   15. Parents, be mindful of how much of this you may want your young children to hear.  
2. Definitions
    
   1. Important to define our terms and be clear about the concepts 
      1. Confucius:  The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper names
      2. APA Dictionary of Psychology:  n. manipulation of one’s own genital organs, typically the penis or clitoris, for purposes of sexual gratification. The act is usually accompanied by sexual fantasies or erotic literature, pictures, or videos. Masturbation may also include the use of mechanical devices (e.g., a vibrator) or self-stimulation of other organs, such as the anus or nipples. 
      3. Objections:  overdone sense of propriety --  
         1. Victorian age -- women not able to be examined
         2. Coded language, often poorly understood
         3. Often driven by a sense of shame -- a desire to hide. 
         4. Victorian Age characterized by a lot of sexual acting out.  Lots of it.   
         5. "Self-abuse"  
         6. Fear of talking about masturbation will increase the likelihood of masturbating.  
            1. Depends on the context.  
            2. In a clinical context, no.  
      4. Rebuttal -- if we can put our experiences into language and share them verbally
          
         1. Much better able to engage our intellect
             
            1. Fr. John Hardon -- his 1981 book "The Catholic Catechism": in addressing masturbation P. 355:  More than ever, the Church is becoming aware of the need for probing beneath the surface of not only what a person is doing by why he is doing it.  Impulses and tendencies that well up from the subconscious (or unconscious) are seen as contributing to overt actions that reflect the behavioral pattern of the environment, even while they contradict the deepest values in which a person believes. 
         2. 
            
            1. Experiences no longer pre-verbal -- chaos of emotions, body sensations, images, sensory experiences, desires, impulses -- we need to be able to name them, or they remain shadowy, dark, ominous
         3.  
      5. 
         
         1. And our will -- we are less likely to act out on them 
      6. 
         
         1. less likely to sin
      7.  
         1. Contradicts a commonly held notion - that if we ignore, suppress, repress, avoid a problem it will go away
             
            1. Sin thrives in the darkness
         2.  
      8. 
         
3. 
   
   1. Secular Psychology Views on Masturbation
       
      1. Joe Kort, Ph.D.  2020 Article in Psychology Today:  Masturbation is Sexual Health.
   2.  
4. 
   

And yet here we are in 2020 and talking about masturbation is still taboo in most of society. And that’s a shame, literally and figuratively, because masturbation is still widely considered shameful, and because for most people it’s a healthy and normal activity. There is actually a term these days for those who prefer masturbation over other forms of sex: solosexual.

1. World has radically different views from the Catholic Church on sexuality.  
2. Mine is a minority opinion -- you can write me off as fringey if you want.  
3. Catholic teaching on Masturbation
    
   1. CCC  
4. 
   

 2351 Lust is disordered desire for or inordinate enjoyment of sexual pleasure. Sexual pleasure is morally disordered when sought for itself, isolated from its procreative and unitive purposes.

2352 By masturbation is to be understood the deliberate stimulation of the genital organs in order to derive sexual pleasure. "Both the Magisterium of the Church, in the course of a constant tradition, and the moral sense of the faithful have been in no doubt and have firmly maintained that masturbation is an intrinsically and gravely disordered action.""The deliberate use of the sexual faculty, for whatever reason, outside of marriage is essentially contrary to its purpose." For here sexual pleasure is sought outside of "the sexual relationship which is demanded by the moral order and in which the total meaning of mutual self-giving and human procreation in the context of true love is achieved."139

1. Is Masturbation a Mortal Sin?
    
   1. CCC  1857 For a sin to be mortal, three conditions must together be met: "Mortal sin is sin whose object is grave matter and which is also committed with full knowledge and deliberate consent."131
2.  
   1. Grave matter -- Grave ...