40 Rape, Incest, Shame, and Silence: A True Story Reexamined, Part 1

Nov 2, 2020

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Intro: Welcome to the podcast Coronavirus Crisis: Carpe Diem!, where by God’s grace, 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 and I am here with you, to be your host and guide. 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.
1. This is episode 40, released on November 2, 2020 -- we made it to forty together.
2. Thank you for being here with me.
3. Steep learning curve -- starting to find my groove now, not nearly as rough and awkward as when I started.
4. and it is the fourth episode in our series on shame.
5. and it is titled: Rape, Incest, Shame, and Silence: A True Story Reexamined, Part 1
6. This is the first of three or four highly experiential episodes -- these episodes are opportunities for experiential learning -- to learn a lot about yourself and your history.
7. Pushing the envelope of what is possible for learning from our experiences in an interactive podcast.
Review
1. Series on shame is vitally important.
  1. Most people can't define shame -- if we can't put what shame is into words adequate, we can't think about it clearly, we can't engage our intellect and our will
  2. Deficits even in experts' definitions -- they can be very incomplete -- even Brene Brown's definitions are incomplete
  3. Really critical to understand what shame and guilt are and what they cause, what they do to us. More than just natural life and death -- also spiritual life and death.
1. We have been really exercising our deductive reasoning skills so far in this series on shame.
  1. Deductive reasoning
    1. Start by understanding basic principles and general concepts
  2. 1. And reasoning from those, arrives at specific observations and conclusions
      1. Top down approach
    2. 1. Starting from the general, and getting down to specifics
  3. 1. Clarified definitions of shame and guilt -- really necessary
      1. Three episodes ago, in episode 37, we introduced shame as the silent killer who stalks us from within
        
        Defined shame -- I drew from many sources
      2. Conceptual exploration -- understanding a much more complete picture of shame as not only an emotion, but also a bodily response, a signal, a self-judgement and an action.
    2. 1. Two episodes ago in episode 38, I invited you to see the signs of shame in yourself and others, to recognize shame in ourselves and in others, becoming better able to detect it, because shame very often, almost always, remains hidden and unrecognized from what it really is.
    3. 1. Last episode, Episode 39 we discussed shame and guilt conceptually -- multifaceted aspects of guilt, three aspects -- guilt as a moral state, guilt as a legal state and guilt as an emotion.
        Comparing and contrasting shame and guilt -- conceptual distinctions
1. But a lot of us struggle to learn that way -- with deductive reasoning, staring with generalities and drawing specific conclusions from them. Seems so intellectual, so conceptual, it can be hard for some of us to see it --
  1. we need concrete examples, something we can see, feel, sense, something tangible that we can wrap our minds around.
  2. We need a story -- preferably a true story with real people who did real things, said real words, and who had real experiences. That kind of thing helps me understand the overarching principles.
  3. Stories and case histories help us with inductive reasoning -- going from the specifics of a real, given situation to general conclusions.
    1. Sometimes called bottom-up reasoning.
Our Plan with the Story
1. Today, we are going to start with a true story, a real story, chock-full of trauma, shame and guilt.
  1. And we will go through this story multiple times to really flesh it out.
  2. We will begin with the facts, the particulars, we will be getting into the details
  3. And from those specifics, we will work our way upward toward clarifying the general principles by studying them in a real-life context
  4. Can think of the principles we've learned about shame and guilt as the first broad strokes in a drawing, the outline of shame -- now we are going to bring in specifics, we will bring in details in color and this drawing will come alive in the story
  5. That is what we are doing today. We are start with a story. And eventually we will review what we have learned about shame and guilt, the conceptual ideas and we are going to put bring those concepts into this real-life situation.
1. Preparation
  1. So the last three episodes provide the conceptual foundation for understanding shame and guilt in the natural realm, in the psychological realm.
    1. If you haven't listened to them and you are a conceptual thinker, you like the principles and ideas first, I would encourage you to listen to Episodes 37, 38 and 39 -- lots of conceptual meat in them
    2. For those of you who learn through examples and stories, those three conceptual episodes may make a lot more sense once we work through this case history -- you can go back and listen top episodes 37, 38, 39 after hearing out this story, get a lot more out of those conceptual episodes the second time around.
1. What is our plan with this story -- delicate material, no surprises
  1. Brief go over some cautions about this story, how to listen prudently
2. 1. Next I will go through some training with you as to how to listen to this story to really engage with the story and apply it to your experience -- this is a really important part of your work, so I hope you'll tune into the section that is coming up on how to listen to this story.
3. 1. Then, I am going to introduce the main figures in the story -- today in this episode, number 40
4. 1. Next , in this episode, I will give a little bit of the context and the back story behind the story, things I was able to find out and pull together about the story.
5. 1. And in this episode, I will read the story as it was originally published -- this is in the public domain, it's fairly easy to find -- you can google it.
    1. The published version is quite short -- 4 paragraphs, about 680 words more or less, depending on the version
    2. While there is detail and substance, the story is not told in a particularly psychologically-minded way -- it's more like a news report focused on the facts -- the behaviors of the characters, not as focused on their internal experiences and their relational connections.