33 Being Open and Coping Well -- September 14, 2020

Episode 33. –  Being Open and Coping Well          September 14, 2020.

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 your host and guide, with Souls and Hearts at soulsandhearts.com.  Thank you for being here with me.  This is episode 33, released on September 14, 2020 and it is titled: Being Open and Coping Well

Today we’re going to explore openness in the natural realm.  And as a special bonus, we will explore closedness.  

Abierto Cerrado.  

Review: 

Episode 32:  Ways to increase trust, especially given the negative experiences.  0-24 months.  Exercise – popular.  Need more of that.  

Episode 31  The One Thing You Must Have to Be Resilient.  The one thing that you need, the one prerequisite.  Absolute childlike trust

There is one thing that separates those who are resilient from those who are not.   Childlike Trust (particularly in God’s goodness and his Providence for me in particular) separate those who are resilient from those who are not.  Absolute confidence in God.    

Episode 30: discussion of why we mistrust God so much, and it is because we are trying to be way too big.  Trying to make it on our own we don’t feel safe.  Trust is faith in action.  

We hate and fear the dependency required to be in a real relationship with God. 

Reciprocal relationship between openness and trust.  

Why do I bring in Non-Catholic ideas:   What makes me different.  Not closed to new ideas.  

Catholic with a small c  -- universal.

St. Augustine:  On Christian Doctrine (De Doctrina Christiana)  

CHAP. 40.—Whatever has been rightly said by the heathen we must appropriate to our uses. Paragraphs 60 and 61  

Branches of heathen learning … 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.

Not only natural learning, but we can learn truths regarding the worship of God. 

Freud.  How many times have I heard Freud being dismissed out of hand by Catholics because of his views on religion.  I get it.  Freud:  God as an illusion, we’re like infants who need a big, strong father to keep us safe and secure.  A big daddy in the sky.  

Religion had its uses to keep the unwashed masses subdued so that civilization could develop.  We needed something to help us restrain violent impulses and keep life on earth from turning into an episode from Jerry Springer.  But now we have reason and science.   Reason and Science.  

I travel in a lot of traditional Catholic circles, I attend the Latin Mass, love the beauty of the ancient Mass.  Not a lot of traditional Catholic psychologists.  Consulted nationwide, coming to Indianapolis, lot’s of suspicion.   Lots of rejection of psychology

But listen to what Freud is saying – we need a father.  We have an infantile need for a Father. He says it more clearly than a lot of Catholic speakers do – which Catholic media personalities have you heard really driving home the point that we are little, like todders, like infants in our need.  Freud found part of the Truth.  

Pope Francis.  Not to bash the pope.  Not about that in Souls and Hearts or this podcast or the RCCD community.  

September 8, 2017 New Yorker    The Pope’s Shrink and Catholicism’s Uneasy Relationship with Freud

Pope Francis Sought Psychoanalysis at 42,” the Times headline read. Other outlets treated the news more salaciously—“Pope Reveals,” “Pope Admits.” Some noted that the psychoanalyst in question was Jewish, or that she was a woman. Below the headlines, though, the stories were the same: a French sociologist named Dominique Wolton had published a book of interviews with the Pope, and, buried on page 385, amid discussions of the migrant crisis and the clash with Islam, America’s wars and Europe’s malaise, was the four-decade-old scoop that had made editors sit up. “I consulted a Jewish psychoanalyst,” Francis told Wolton. “For six months, I went to her home once a week to clarify certain things. She was very good. She was very professional as a doctor and a psychoanalyst, but she always knew her place.”

Almost immediately, the news drew venom from the Pope’s detractors. A writer for the Web site Novus Ordo Watch, a mouthpiece of the ultra-conservative Catholic fringe—its slogan is “Unmasking the Modernist Vatican II Church”—insisted that Francis’s treatment by a “female Jewish Freudian” was “a really big smoking gun,” incontrovertible evidence that his “mind is saturated with Jewish ideas.”

Jorge Mario Bergoglio appears to have undergone such an experience before he became Pope. When he started psychoanalysis, he was in the last year of his tenure as provincial superior of the Jesuits in Argentina, 1979. The military junta’s Dirty War was raging, and it had put Bergoglio to the test. “I made hundreds of errors,” Francis told an interviewer, in 2013. “Errors and sins.” He described the period as “a time of great interior crisis.” Lucky him that he found a therapist who, mostly with the acutely focussed and patently empathetic listening that characterizes a good analyst, could enable his return to wholeness. “She helped me a lot,” he told Wolton.

Biology we learned about the double helix structure of DNA.  Beautiful.

that James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the double-helix structure of DNA in 1953.  1962.  Nobel Prize

James Watson:  Very anti-Catholic.  Anti a lot of things.  Racism, anti-semitism.  .  

He also said that while he wished the races were equal, “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true.” Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

Infanticide   “If a child were not declared alive until 3 days after birth, then all parents could be allowed the choice only a few have under the present system. The doctor could allow the child to die if the parents so choose and save a lot of misery and suffering. I believe this view is the only rational, compassionate attitude to have.”

Raised Catholic, he later described himself as "an escapee from the Catholic religion."