Interior Integration for Catholics

Episode 26.  Dictator, Pharisee, and Scrooge God Images – July 27, 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 26,  released on July 27, 2020 and it’s called Dictator Gods, Pharisee Gods, and Scrooge Gods. In the last episode, episode 25, we looked at three different negative God images proposed by Christian psychotherapists Bill and Kristi Gaultiere in their book Mistaken Identities, published in 1989.  Last week, I decided to reach out to the Gaultieres and let them know that we were discussing their book on this podcast so I emailed them.  Sometimes I do that.  I just reach out to people.  Who knows what will happen?  And Sue, the representative from their ministry, their ministry is called Soul Shepherding – Sue got back to me – Sue got back to me and said “What a blessing to hear from you and to learn of the good work that you are doing for the Kingdom!  It was such an encouragement to hear that you are able to use our resources in your ministry.”  Isn’t that cool?  I think that’s cool.   But wait, there’s more.  I made a request of the Gaultieres and their ministry for something I wanted to give to the member of the Resilient Catholics Carpe Diem Community  – I wanted their permission to be able to pass on something special to those of you those of you who have joined the RCCD community and they said yes. At the end of this episode, I will tell you what that something special is, so stay with me until the end, OK?.  Oooh, very exciting.   In the last episode, I put the question out to you, my audience members – are you interested in this stuff?  Do you want me to cover more of these god images?  And if so, which ones?  I really want this podcast to be interactive, I want to hear from you. Jane in Indiana emailed in, “I want you to do all the God images. They are fascinating!”  Now that is enthusiasm, thank you Jane. I just love it. I really want this podcast to not just be transformative, not just to make a big difference in your life, but to be interesting, no, not just interesting, but fascinating.  Along with Jane in Indiana, I think this God image stuff is fascinating.  It’s also vitally important, not only for our spiritual well-being, but also our psychological well-being.  You can’t have abiding peace, a deep joy, or a solid sense of well-being if you are dominated by negative God images.  It’s just not possible to give in to wretched God images and be happy.  This is so vitally important, people, this God image issue, because how we respond to God images is really going to determine our peace and joy and well-being, both in the natural realm and in the supernatural realm.  Will we approach God?  Will we flee from Him?  Will we fight him?  Will we refuse to follow Him or even believe in him?   So we have two ways we can overcome this issue.  One is to recognize our negative God images and respond to them in a positive way.  And in future episodes we will get into how to respond to negative God images.  I promise.  So the first way to handle negative God images is to recognize them and respond well.  The second way is to resolve them.  I mean it.  To actually resolve them, to heal them.  And we will discuss how to do that in future episode as well, and especially in the Resilient Catholics Carpe Diem community that has grown up around this podcast.   In this episode, we’re going to review three more problematic God images described by Bill and Kristi Gaultiere’s book Mistaken Identities Brief review:  let’s just circle back around and review, what are God images again?  My God image is my emotional and subjective experience of God, who I feel God to be in the moment. 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.  God concept is what I profess about God, what I choose to believe about God, what I endorse about God.  Intellectual understanding.   Self-images are much more driven, much more intuitive, subjective, and they vary a lot more from moment to moment.    Who I feel myself to be in a given moment, it is who my passions are telling me who I am.  Self-images go together with God images – they impact each other.   If you haven’t already listened to episodes 22, 23, and 24 of this podcast, make sure you check them out, because they have lot more conceptual information and definitions of God images.   So I had a question from a listener Martha in Indiana who wondered if it's usual to say 'yes' to many God images?  Martha is essentially asking if we can have more than one God image, can we have different God images at different times? Now much of the God image literature seems to assume that there is one primary God image. And that makes sense, because often we are in our standard mode of operating. However, there is a greater awareness that, because we have multiple modes of operating, we also may have multiple God images. Sometimes we depart from our standard mode of operating.  Clinically, I have no doubt that each of us has several or even many God images.  So, my dear Martha, I absolutely believe that we have more than one God images.   Over the past several years, I have identified in myself 11 different modes of operating.   I have 11 distinct and identifiable ways of being. I think of models of operating as like parts of me.  Kind of like in the Pixar movie Inside Out, where the main character Riley has different parts of her, each part having its primary emotion, like the red character was angry, the blue round character was sad and so on.. Each part of me has a mode of operating each part of me has characteristic feelings, desires, impulses, attitudes, and assumptions about the world. And each of my modes of operating has its own God image and its own self-image.  So I have 11 God images and 11 self-images.   So do you see what you opened up with your question, Martha?  I wasn’t going to go into all of this yet, I wasn’t going to get into all this self-disclosure in this episode, but your question brought it up.   So that’s important to know in and but I’m bringing that up now, because I really do want you to pay attent...

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.   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.   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 GodStatue GodRobber GodVain Pharisee GodElitist aristocrat GodPushy salesman GodMagic Genie GodDemanding drill sergeant GodOuttogetcha Police Detective GodUnjust dictator God Marshmallow GodCritical Scrooge GodParty-pooper GodHeartbreaker 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 that have to go without it, because they just don’t matter enough.  They generally don’t feel seen and known, and they don’t believe that God cherishes them – rather God sees them as a burden.   Coronavirus Crisis:  Readily activated now – some are not feel much of God’s presence.  Lots more responsibilities, lots of decisions, lots of stress.  Others, such as supervisors, superiors have more responsibilities, show less patience, more irritability.  Aging parents, more self-absorbed.  Loss of connection.  Responsibilities piling on – decision fatigue – when to wear masks, what activities can we do, conflicting feedback from politicians, medical experts, government leaders.  No help in sight.  And you can see how  Vignette:  Paula – 17 year old, second oldest child of a family of 6, father was preoccupied with his business, not doing well with the coronavirus, Mom is stressed, working a part-time job and still wanting to homeschool, and her father is self-absorbed with some health issues.  Her older brother escaped the household by enlisting in the Navy and the third oldest in the family, a 15 year old son,  is rebellious, acting out by not completing his schoolwork, announcing that he is an atheist, and experimenting with alcohol.  Paula doesn’t feel like she can burden her mother with any of her issues, lest she become impatient and irritable and act in the role of a martyr.  The 3 youngest children are emotionally and relationally draining for her mother who is strenuously trying to hold them to high standards.  Paula has barely enough time to complete her studies to her mother’s exacting principles, essentially teaching herself from a boxed curriculum. Paula’s is trying to hold her family together, and feels like she is a fish in a puddle that is evaporating.  She tries to rely on herself, but is developing and increasingly intense anger toward God and she is not aware of the anger.  Prayer – another responsibility, another thing to check off her list, based off a sense of duty.  Very dry, uncomfortable, sense of not mattering, not being cared for.  Now she has lost some activities she enjo...

Episode 24.  God Images and Self ImagesJuly 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 grade, went to work as a printer’s apprentice and then to war in 1942 and fought in the American infantry in France under Pershing.  In 1945, return with some shellshock, not able to talk about war experiences.  In 1951 six years after the war ended, 32 year old Pawel married Maja, an 18 year old Polish immigrant who had US shortly after WWII ended.   He had known Maja’s family.  Maja was devoted to Pawel, very social, very outgoing, but with a history of unresolved war trauma from the German invasion of Poland when she was a little girl in the late 1930’s.  Pawel and Maja had four children, three boys and then Zuzanna – which is Polish for Susan -- Zuzanna was the youngest of the four, born in 1960.  Life was good for the family in the 1950s and 1960s.   Susan:§  Susan’s Father the good days·         Worked in a printing shop, a master printer, first shift·         High school education, funny, affectionate, a great story teller·         Susan was the youngest, and the only girl, three older brothers, everyone said she was her mother’s daughter, similar to Mom Maja  in so many ways, both physically and in her personality  ·         Dad gave her lots of warmth and affection as a baby and toddler and little girl, all through grade school – he read to her and was like the coolest dad, because he would come to her tea parties with her dolls – §  God image – Susan found it easy to pray – first communion, first confession.  Warmth toward God, sunny days.  Felt beloved.  §  Susan’s Father – the difficult days·         But when she turned 14, in 1974, it became a difficult relationship – she and her father did not see eye to eye.o   When Susan reached puberty, Dad withdrew emotionally – seemed to reject her hugs and kisses, told her those were “things little girls did” and “Susan, you’re a big girl now”o   She told him he had always said she’d be his little girl and didn’t understand when he said nothing in responseo   She didn’t understand the tears in his eyes or why he’d turn away, leave her and watch TV alone in his d...

Episode 23.   Sinning, God Images, and ResilienceJuly 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 makes sense, because our first two years of life have a huge impact on how we experience and understand relationships generally.  Our experience of other important caregivers, especially parents, but also grandparents and others shape our psychological expectations of what God is like.  And often we are not aware of those expectations.  Our assumptions may be unknown to our intellects, to our conscious minds.    Simply put, our God images are often unconscious.  Our God images may be unconscious, but they still affect us, they still impact us and exercise influences on us.  We can choose to accept that we have these problematic God images and deal with them directly, or we can deny that they exist and try to shove them away, ignore them, suppress them, and drive them into the unconscious.  Ok, now for a little speculative Malinoski theology.  Bur first, you need to know that I could be wrong about some of these concepts that I am discussing.  Now I’m really serious about this.  As a professional who has teaches publicly and speculates publicly about the intersection of psychological and Catholicism, I am acutely aware that I can be wrong about things.  If any of you listeners, particularly those who are well formed theologically and philosophically, detect that I am ever teaching anything that contradicts the Faith, I want you to tell me.  This is really pioneering work we are doing together.  For more than a decade, I didn’t teach this kind of thing publically.  I wasn’t sure about getting into God images and God concepts, for example.  What if I was wrong?  What if I started leading people astray?  How can I be sure that don’t make mistakes?  And then I realized I was making the bigger mistake of burying my talent, the mistake of omission.  I needed to become more resilient.  To become more resilient, I needed to have a deeper and more abiding confidence in God.  I need to know at a deep level that whatever public teaching I did wasn’t happening in a vacuum, with God millions of miles away, leaving me to my own devices, letting me persist in my errors.  No.  God is near.  God is minding me, minding this store.  And if I fell down, if I went astray, He would come looking for me, like the shepherd who lost one of 100 sheep and left the 99 behind to find the stray one.  So here’s the thing.  We hear about the First Commandment still from time to time, right? ...

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, just to get us all up to speed, let’s review that definition of Catholic resilience.  It’s definition time with Dr. PeterCatholic resilience  “the process of accepting and embracing adversity, trauma, 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.   Today we are making a deep dive into the one essential requirement, the one prerequisite, the one necessary quality you have to have to be resilient as a Catholic.  All the other factors of Catholic resilience flow from this core, this central principle.  Now you are asking, Dr. Peter, what is this core of resilience, this central principle of Catholic resilience?  I am glad you asked.  The core of Catholic resilience, the kind of holy resilience of the saint is…Drum RoleA deep and abiding confidence in God, especially in God’s Providence.  What I am saying is 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. .   Resilience flows from that confidence in God – confidence in God’s care and love for me, specifically.  So resilience is an effect of the spiritual life.  OK.  Let’s break this down, to make sure we’re on the same page.  What do I mean by confidence in God?  St. Thomas Aquinas defines it as confidence in God as “a hope, fortified by solid conviction.”  So confidence in God is Hope, but it is a hope fortified, not just an ordinary hope, which could be lost.  It is a higher level of hope, a hope fortified by solid conviction.  The difference between hope and confidence is only a matter of degree – they are the same, but confidence, because it is fortified by solid conviction, is hope supercharged, a super hope, as King David sang in Psalm 119 (118).  “In verba tua supersperavi” read the Latin.  Speravi is I have hoped – Supersperavi – I have hope to the highest level.  Typical translation  “I have hoped in thy word.”Let’s look at solid conviction.  So solid.  What does that mean?  Firm, grounded, immovable, consistent.  Conviction  -- wh...

Episode 21.  Catholic Resilience – Where the Secular Experts Get Resilience Wrong. June 22, 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 21, and it’s called Catholic Resilience – Where the Secular Experts Get Resilience Wrong In our last episode, we started a deep dive into resilience by looking at secular conceptualizations of resilience.  We discussed how in the secular world resilience is about adapting yourself to life’s demands, it’s about handling the challenges and curve balls that life throws at you with poise and confidence.  It’s about getting back to previous levels of functioning and adaptation.  It’s about getting up as many times as you are knocked down by dangers and misfortunes, it’s about journeying on under the load of troubles and difficulties that life brings us.  It’s about not succumbing to failure, not collapsing under stress, not being destabilized by hardships and tough situations.The American Psychological Association defines resilience as “the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats or significant sources of stress— such as family and relationship problems, serious health problems or workplace and financial stressors. It means "bouncing back" from difficult experiences.”   You know, like a racquetball that gets hit, squashed, and then regains its shape.  {insert sound}Seems reasonable enough, right?  I mean, it’s the American Psychological Association, you know, the professionals speaking here.  And in fact there’s a lot of good in that definition that we can draw from.  In considering resilience, though, we as believing, practicing Catholics need to rework the secular notions ingrained in us by our culture.  And that’s what I am here to help you do.  I am here to challenge notions commonly held by Catholics that are actually not grounded in Catholicism.There are three major problems with the secular definition of resilience.First problem:  Secular mental health professionals look to at their clients’ personal resources, their talents, their skills, their gifts.  The secular clinicians will work with primarily with those asset and strengths.  These clinicians think about how their clients can have greater autonomy, greater agency, be better able to access their assets and strengths to better adapt to the world.   Most of them will also assess the social support that their clients can access from their close relationships.  Nothing wrong with that, insofar as it goes.  Insofar as it goes.  But it doesn’t go far enough.  As Catholics, we’re not supposed to rely primarily on ourselves, we’re not supposed to be independent, rugged individualists.  And we’re not supposed to rely primarily on our close relationships either, because all other people have their flaws and they will disappoint us.  We’re supposed to rely primarily on God – on His love, His mercy, His power, His constancy.  And while more and more secular clinicians are open to bringing in their clients’ spirituality to help their clients become resilient, it’s not the top thing on the list.  Spiritual resources made Southwick and Charney’s top ten list of resilience factors, but not until number 4 and a little bit in number 10.  From a Catholic perspective, God is absolutely primary in resilience.  And this is the biggest problem of secular-based psychologies in general, not just with regard to resiliency. We need to not only understand with our minds who we are and who God is – we also need to involve our souls, our hearts, our bodies.  This is not easy.  There are lots and lots and lots of psychological obstacles to seeing God as He really is.  And I am here to help you do that.  We will go through this process together, harmonizing the best of psychology with a Catholic worldview as we go through all the factors of resilience.  That is what is unique about this podcast.  That is what is unique about Souls and Hearts.  We ground psychology in an authentic Catholic anthropology, an authentic Catholic worldview.  Now today we’re not going into all the solutions for Catholics to become more resilient.  Be patient, I promise you that is coming up in future episodes and especially in the workshops and experiential work that we do in the Resilient Catholics: Carpe Diem! Community.  I want you to become much more resilient, and we’re starting with understanding the conceptual landscape first.  All right, so that covers the first problem that secular clinicians have with guiding others to resiliency – not giving God His primary role.  Here’s the second problem of secular approaches to resilience.  Most mental health professionals work to minimize suffering and maximize one’s enjoyment of life.  They misunderstand suffering.  Most assume either consciously or unconsciously that suffering is to be avoided, minimized, that it is bad.  They want their clients to feel better, to enjoy life more, to avoid getting hurt, to be able to pursue their own dreams and follow their own paths, to be able to make their own meaning out of life.  They don’t use this word, but which philosophical system argues for maximizing enjoyment and minimizing suffering as the best way?  Well, dear listeners, the word for the belief system that emphasizes maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain is hedonism.  Hedonism.  And hedonism has always been really popular because in our fallen human conditions, hedonism makes sense to our passions – we naturally want to avoid pain and we naturally want to pursue pleasure.  It’s a very worldly way of looking at meaning and purpose in life.  Most mental health professionals don’t understand the meaning of the cross.  They don’t understand the importance of redemptive suffering.  And hey, it’s not easy to grasp deeply the meaning of the cross.  There’s a lot of ways that people, even Catholics, even faithful devout Catholics get the meaning of the Cross wrong.  The meaning of the cross is not intuitive to the vast majority of us, it’s not available to unaided human reason.  We need divine revelation to understand the meaning of the cross and why the cross is a gift that almost everybody rejects.  Remember that the cross is a stumbling block and a folly – Christ’s cross was seen by the Jews of his day as disgraceful, shameful, a sign that he was cursed by God.  To the Greeks of the day, focused the cycles of time, on order, on harmony, on beauty, the crucifixion was jarring, discordant event, and the resurrection hard to believe.    But all things work together for good for those who love the Lord – Romans 8:28.  All things.  Therefore all things can be gifts.  If we are loving the Lord, we can receive our sufferings, as gifts, as our crosses that will bring us to salvation, to the joys of eternal life.  Now this can be extremely difficult to do.&...

Episode 20.  Resilience: Ten Factors June 15, 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 resiliency, 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 20, where we are starting a multi-episode deep dive into resilience and discuss 10 elements that constitute resilience as defined by the general literature.  Today we are going to define resilience and cover 10 primary resilience factors – from a secular perspective.  This is episode 20 entitled Resilience: Ten Factors and it is released on June 15, 2020.  In the next episodes were are going to get much more into how to develop greater resilience.  In the next episode, we are also going to get into a Catholic understanding of resilience that incorporates what we know to be true by our faith.  But for today, we are starting with how secular psychology defines resilience.  We are looking at the elements that secular psychology states are the factors of resilience.  We want a solid conceptual base, we are being catholic with a small c here, meaning universal.  I’m drawing from many sources here, but there’s one book that stands out, one book that I’m using in particular for this episode, because of how it’s based in research and its simple, effective organization.  It includes insights from neuroscience research, and it has great illustrative stories, so it’s more than readable, it’s engaging.  The book is “Resilience: The Science of Mastering Life’s Greatest Challenges by Steven Southwick and Dennis Charney.  The book is now in its second edition and I like their structure and their emphasis on looking for research-based evidence, not just their personal experience.  So what is resilience?  What does secular psychology mean by resilience?  Let’s define resilience.   It’s definition time.  [Cue sound effect]The American Psychological Association defines resilience as “the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats or significant sources of stress— such as family and relationship problems, serious health problems or workplace and financial stressors. It means "bouncing back" from difficult experiences.” Let’s break that down.   In the secular world, resilience is about adapting yourself to life’s demands, it’s about handling the challenges and curve balls that life throws at you with poise.  It’s about recovering previous levels.  It’s about getting up as many times as you are knocked down by dangers and misfortunes, it’s about journeying on under the load of troubles and difficulties that life brings us.  It’s about not succumbing to failure, not collapsing under stress, not being destabilized by hardships and tough situations.The word resilience derives from the present participle of the Latin verb resilire, meaning "to jump back" or "to recoil." The concept of psychological resilience draws from physics.  In physics, resilience is the ability of an elastic material (such as rubber) to absorb energy when it is deformed by some agent and release that energy as it springs back to its original shape.  Imagine a racquetball flying back to the player, [cue sound] who strikes the ball with the racquet, squeezing the ball, flattening the rubber.  The ball absorbs the energy of the swing and then in its resilience, it launches off the racquet, discharging all that energy as it flies away.  What resilience is not:  Misconceptions that people have.  Being resilient does not mean you won’t struggle, suffer or experience adversity.  It also doesn’t mean that hardships and challenges don’t affect you.  It’s not stoicism and it’s not being numb or nonreactive.  It’s not about not having needs.  Resilience is adapting well, regaining your shape after you’ve been knocked hard, just like that racquetball springing back into shape.  It’s not a fixed trait – it is something that can be learned, practiced, improved.  And that is what this series on resilience is all about – it’s about helping you become more resilient in the face of this coronavirus crisis, so you can be loved and you can love God and others.  So what are the 10 factors of resilience, according to Southwick and Charney?  Let’s just list them, and then we will go into more depth on each one.  Remember, I am using their language here and keeping their focus on a general audience.  In future episodes, we are going to ground the concept of resilience in a Catholic worldview and we are going to really tweak these.  These will be in the show notes on our website, so you can find them there, no need to take notes.  Really listen in, take these in.  In future episodes in this sequence, we will get much more into how do you cultivate these factors, how do you bring them together.  Right now, we are pursuing understanding.  1.      Optimism:  The Belief in a brighter future – that things will turn out well.   With enough hard work, I will succeed.  Can’t be a blind optimism – not a naïve optimism.  Looking on the bright side of life.  Dwell on the positive.  Glass half empty vs. half full.   2.      Facing Fear:  Not avoiding fear.  Southwick and Charney are really talking about courage here.  Not just giving into fear.  Courage is not the absence of fear – it’s overcoming fear, it’s not letting fear master you.  But it’s not just the development of virtue.  There are test techniques that help with this and we will get into those techniques.  Facing fear with friends, colleagues and with spiritual support – general audience, but here is the spiritual entering in.   3.      A Moral Compass, Ethics, and Altruism:  Doing What is Right  -- Southwick and Charney don’t have much patience or acceptance for moral relativism.  They advise having a moral compass and consulting it.  Getting outside yourself, not being self-absorbed.  Here they focus in on courage again.  Having a backbone.  They discuss how sometimes the choices are extremely difficult.    4.      Religion and Spirituality: Drawing on Faith – really interesting in a book for general audience.  Especially helpful in fearing death. – This is not the end.   5.      Social Support  -- can’t be isolated, can’t be alone.  We need to reach out.  Social support protects against physical and mental illness.  Social neuroscience.    6.      Role Models:  We all need them.  We can’t raise ourselves.  We need mentor, guides to help us find our way.  Parents, other relatives, teachers, coaches, friends, colleagues, even children – our own or others.  People that show us the way.  Breaking out from the effects of negative role models, not imitating our parents or others clo...

Episode 19:  Healing from Losses, Healing with GriefJune 8, 2020Intro: 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 resiliency, 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 19, Healing from Losses, Healing with Grief, released on June 8, 2020.  And in this episode we really get into how do we heal?  How do we move through our losses and heal?Story TimeRemember the story of Richard and Susan from Episode 17?  Let’s catch up with them and see how they are doing.  Now Richard and Susan have been married 28 years, and their three sons are 27, 25, and 23 years old, and all have moved out of the home and are very busy with their lives.  Richard is 61 years old and is somewhat emotionally reserved – he was introverted, and didn’t talk a lot about feelings.  He is not that interested in religion, but usually attends Sunday Mass with Susan. He had risen in management at his international engineering firm, eventually leading a team of six in joint venture in artificial intelligence with a foreign company.   When that joint venture ended abruptly due to the other firm stealing intellectual property, and the coronavirus lockdowns happened, Richard was laid off.  With the worsening economic environment, it’s unlikely he will return to that position.  He is struggling with identity issues now, as he has been so invested in his work for so many years. After the layoff he initially kept himself busy with home projects and tinkering with go karts, but lately he has been much more withdrawn and spent much more time distracting himself on the internet, and also experimenting with day-trading stocks.  Susan is 60, she is more extroverted, much more emotionally expressive with a wide circle of friends and acquaintances.  Susan is eagerly awaiting grandchildren now that her oldest son has married.  She had been hoping that with her husband home from work and their sons moved out, they would renew their relationship, but there is more distance than ever.  Susan has been troubled by the emotional distance in her marriage for the last 25 years, and doesn’t know what to do about it, and for several years there has been almost no physical closeness.  This is more acute for her now, that her social activities and connections have been curtailed by the social distancing restrictions.  Twenty years ago, Susan experienced a real deepening of her faith and she began to practice it more seriously, with a regular prayer life an occasional daily Mass and regular confession.  She had a scare with breast cancer five years ago from which she recovered.  She continues to be in high demand as a professional translator in Spanish and Italian.   She has been deeply worried upon finding out two weeks that the first case of the coronavirus has been confirmed at her mother’s assisted living facility.  Now her 87 year old mother has shortness of breath, a fever, fatigue and a cough.  Now her mother’s health is failing rapidly as they wait for the results of a COVID-19 test.  Susan also recently discovered a pornographic pop up window on her husband’s home office desktop.   She asked her husband about it, but he said it was nothing.    Quick review from episode 17, where we made clear some definitions.  Loss: deprived of a real, tangible good.  Something good is taken from us – it can be the loss of an actual good, or a potential good.Grief is our individual experience of loss –Grief is our reaction to the loss.  It’s our experience of the loss.  Psychological, physical, behavioral, emotional.   Mourning is a public expression of our grief, it’s what we show to others.  Mourning is how we show our grief.   For Richard            Loss – loss of job, loss of income, loss of identity, confronting aging and physical decline (no more go-karting, too hard on the body)            Grief – Six stages:  Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance, Making Meaningexpressed through increased activity initially, seeking distractions through focusing attention (excitement of day trading), seeking comfort in increased pornography use, emotional and physical withdrawal, numbing negative emotions            Mourning – façade of being unaffected, brushing off attempts at connection, consolation  For Susan:            Loss – Loss of mother, loss of trust in her husband, loss of illusions about marriage            Grief – Six stages:  Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance, Making Meaningcrying, sadness, anger at husband (sense of betrayal), body image issues (sexually undesirable) regret over lost time, “wasting her life” in the marriage, accepting her husband as he is and loving him anyway.  Concentration difficulties.              Mourning – sharing with friends, bereavement group, letter to Mom, writing poetry, prayer, reading,   Helpful tips 1.       Remember that any loss that God permit is a gift.  He only permits losses to provide a greater good to the one who grieves.  We may not see that – we may only see it in a conceptual, intellectual way, and not feel it.  But our feelings do not dictate reality, and they don’t always reflect reality.  Romans 8:28.  All things work together for good, for those who love the Lord.  If we can conceptualize losses as gifts, we can look for the gift in spite of the grief, in spite of the pain.  2.      Feel the pain of the grief.  Allow yourself to feel it.  Accept your emotions, whatever they are.  Don’t pack it away in amber.  This is what Richard originally tried to do – just wanted to move on with life, considered retirement, porn use to help him feel better, have a sense of control.  a.       Allow the time for grief – packed schedule  -- Susan cut back her work schedule.  b.      Allow for not understanding – when you are grieving you may not understand and that’s ok.  – relief comes not from understanding and knowing, but from confidence, trust, and relational connection.  Think of little kids.  3.      Share the grief with someone you trust– a friend, friend, family member, counselor, confessor – talk about the losses.  Susan’s friend Valerie – listened to her.  a.       Particularly important to share this grief in prayer.  With God.  With Mary, or with another saint.  Guardian angel.  Share it and listen.  b.      Providential view.  We may not unde...

Episode 18:  Grief vs. DepressionGrief: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.   Ok, so I know we’re now into some really heavy, difficult times in our country and in our world.  There’s lots of things going on – we have the pandemic, we have partial lockdowns and closures, we have major unemployment issues, nearly half of small businesses are in danger of shutting down permanently.  We have escalating tensions with Xi Jinping’s government in China and the possibility of the cold war with China turning hot.   We now have riots and looting over the tragic death of George Floyd while under arrest by a Minneapolis police officer, we have very flawed and contentious politicians battling with each other in petty ways in an election year, we have growing revelations of corruption by current and former government officials and bureaucrats. There is a growing lack of confidence in our government, our news media and in our secular and religious institutions.  None of these factors changes the basic Gospel message.  None of them.  None of them can keep us from psychological and spiritual growth, unless we let ourselves be kept down.  We need to rise up, we need to go beyond mere resiliency, to become 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 18, entitled “Grief vs. Depression” released on June 1, 2020. Today, we’re going to really dive into the difference between grief and depression, and to illustrate the difference between grief and depression, we’ll be looking at five people from the Scriptures.First, though, I want to offer a big Thank you to all the Resilient Catholics: Carpe Diem community members who came to our first ever Zoom meeting last Friday evening.  We had a great conversation on unacknowledged or hidden grief.  It was very good for us to get to know each other better and for us to connect and to be in relationship with one another.  Thank you for praying for me, and know that I am praying for you.  So some of you may be asking, Dr. Peter, why, why is it important to know the difference between grief and depression – both of them feel bad, and we want to feel better.  So why bother with the difference?  Normal GriefWaves or intense pages of painful emotion associated with the loss, which gradually soften and diminish over time. Emptiness and loss – something is missing -- but also there are moments of happiness, joy.   Self-esteem generally remains intact.  If there is self-criticism, it tends to be focused on perceived shortcomings about the loss (I should have visited my Mom more often before she died, I should have told her I loved her).Relational connections remain intact.  Able to give and receive in relationships, and can be consoled.  Ruminating on what or who was lost; Hope remains.  Since of life going on.  Thoughts of death and dying focused on the lost person and perhaps reconnecting  with the loved one in heaven.  Some loss of desire to live on, but not overt wishes or impulses toward suicide. Distress, sadness activated by memories or reminders of the loss.   Clinical Depression Sadness, distress experienced continually over timeOngoing depressed mood with anhedonia – unable to enjoy good thingsFeelings of inadequacy, worthlessness, with self-criticism.  Critical toward self, feelings of worthlessness, and self-loathing.  This is much more general.  May involve significant shame.  Emotional withdrawal from others – perhaps with avoidance.  Could be a physical withdrawal as well.  Difficulty being consoledSelf-critical or pessimistic thoughts; tendency toward a loss of hope.  Suicidal thoughts related to feelings of being unworthy of life, or of not wanting to live anymore.  Suicide considered an escape from unbearable pain with no other answers.  Depressed mood is not tied to specific thoughts or preoccupations Let's flesh this out with examples of grief vs. clinical depression from Scripture:Abraham’s GriefGenesis 23: Sarah’s Death and Burial23 Sarah lived one hundred twenty-seven years; this was the length of Sarah’s life. 2 And Sarah died at Kiriath-arba (that is, Hebron) in the land of Canaan; and Abraham went in to mourn for Sarah and to weep for her. 3 Abraham rose up from beside his dead, and said to the Hittites, 4 “I am a stranger and an alien residing among you; give me property among you for a burying place, so that I may bury my dead out of my sight.”David is one of the most expressive men in the Bible.   David’s Grief: 2 Samuel 1Saul and Jonathan, beloved and lovely!     In life and in death they were not divided; they were swifter than eagles,     they were stronger than lions.24 O daughters of Israel, weep over Saul,     who clothed you with crimson, in luxury,     who put ornaments of gold on your apparel.25 How the mighty have fallen     in the midst of the battle!Jonathan lies slain upon your high places. 26     I am distressed for you, my brother Jonathan; greatly beloved were you to me;     your love to me was wonderful,David’s Depression Psalm 38O Lord, rebuke me not in thy anger,     nor chasten me in thy wrath! 2 For thy arrows have sunk into me,     and thy hand has come down on me.3 There is no soundness in my flesh     because of thy indignation; there is no health in my bones     because of my sin. 4 For my iniquities have gone over my head;     they weigh like a burden too heavy for me.5 My wounds grow foul and fester     because of my foolishness, 6 I am utterly bowed down and prostrate;     all the day I go about mourning. 7 For my loins are filled with burning,     and there is no soundness in my flesh. 8 I am utterly spent and crushed;     I groan because of the tumult of my heart.13 But I am like a deaf man, I do not hear,     like a dumb man who does not open his mouth. 14 Yea, I am like a man who does not hear,     and in whose mouth are no rebukes..21 Do not forsake me, O Lord!     O my God, be not far from me! 22 Make haste to help me,     O Lord, my salvation! ElijahElijah God’s judgments and warnings to several Israelite kings, including the despotic Ahab and his formidable  wife, Jezebel.. Here, Elijah had a great victory over 450 of Baal's prophets on Mt. Carmel, however, he remained fearful of Jezebel's revenge.  He proved not only the power of...

Episode 17:  Loss, Grief, Mourning and Resilience – How do They Go Together?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 resiliency, 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 17, released on May 25, 2020 entitled Loss, Grief, Mourning and Resilience – How do They Go Together?Some of you have been in touch with me and asked for work on Grief, which we touched on in Episode 3 with the loss of the sacraments in the lockdown.  There’s been conversation about grief on the discussion boards in the Resilient Catholic: Carpe Diem Community space in Souls and Hearts, and now we are going to dive deep into this whole area of grief.  We are going to do two podcast episodes on grief and the coronavirus, and I will be doing one Zoom meeting for our members.  Seating is very limited for that, I’m only taking on 12 for that meeting at 7:30 PM eastern time on Friday, May 29, I saw one or maybe two open seats left, so check that out at Souls and Hearts.  Joining the community is free for the first 30 days, so come check it out at Souls and Hearts.com.   Our thinking can be heavily impacted when we are experience intense emotions, so let’s really get some clarity, let’s shine some light on things now.  The first thing, really quickly, is to define a few terms around grief, loss, and mourning. Let’s get our vocabulary straight, because that really helps our thinking.    We’re going to start with the concept of loss, loss – and that’s because loss comes before grief.  Loss always comes before grief.  Loss precedes grief.  So we’re going in order here, and starting with loss.  There are two kinds of loss:  Actual Loss and what I call the Loss of Potential.  Actual loss and the loss of potential.    Actual loss is the loss of a real, tangible good.  Something good is taken from us.  It could be death of a loved one, when we lose the relationship, with its intimacy, connection, the love.  It can also mean the actual loss of some part of us – our sense of hearing for example, or the Loss of Potential –  this is the loss of possibilities that we hoped for – something anticipated in the future.   a wedding that will never happen, children that will never be born, a promotion that will not come now, etc.  It also includes words that were never said, words that were never heard, stories that will never be finished.   Grieving at a funeral of family members – not of the actual loss of the abusive, alcoholic, philandering husband – not for the loss of the actual person.  But for the symbolic loss – no longer married, no longer the possibility of living happily ever after.  Grief is our individual experience of loss – so remember, the loss is the good we no longer have. Grief is our reaction to the loss.  It’s our experience of the loss.  And that experience is emotional – sadness, anxiety, irritability we may feel mood swings -- or we may feel nothing apathyPsychological – disbelief, impaired concentration and attention, flashbacks, ruminations, going over and over some memory of the person.   Grief is also physical – for example when the tears flow, have intense fatigue, headaches, loss of appetite, trouble sleeping.   Grief is also expressed through behavior – the heavy sigh, when put our hands to our heads and groan or when we withdraw and sit alone in a dark room.   The experience of grief varies a lot from person to person, situation to situation.  It can be painful, sometime exquisitely painful, horrendously painful, it may seem intolerable.  Sometimes it’s much more quiet.  It may also be bittersweet, or even have a sense of peace in it, such as when a loved one suffering from a terminal illness dies well.  There are different kinds of grief, and we’re going to get into that later in this podcast, but for now, let’s understand that grief is our individual experience of loss.  And with grief comes mourning.  Mourning is a public expression of our grief, it’s what we show to others.  Mourning is how we show our grief.  How we share our grief with others.  How we connect in grief.  Some of this is conditioned by our culture – 3 rifle volleys salutes for deceased veterans, funerals, eulogies, the chicken dinner in the parish hall after the Mass, tossing a handful of dirt on the grave.  Review the above:             Actual Loss            Loss of potential             Grief            MourningSo how can we really solidify our understanding of these definitions?  How can we make these concepts come alive?  Hmmm.  Let me think.  [Ding]  I’ve got it!  How about a story, to make all this come together for us?  I think that’s a great idea.  So it’s story time with Dr. Peter.  Story Time:Richard and Susan (not an actual case).  We’re going back in time 20 years, back to the early 2000s.  At that point, Richard and Susan had been married for eight years.  He was an engineer with an excellent job, highly successful and creative at work.  He really loved their three young sons, aged seven, five and three.  Susan was a professional translator in Spanish and Italian.   She had travelled and lived abroad before her marriage at age 32.  They had met through mutual friends, and both were nominally Catholic, attended Mass on Sundays and their sons were baptized, but it was not a central part of their lives.  Richard was somewhat emotionally reserved and kind of introverted didn’t talk a lot about feelings, and had always been into racing go-karts.  Now he was getting the oldest son into the hobby in a mini go kart and really enjoying that together. Susan was more extroverted, and maintained a lot of connections with her professional women friends, many of whom were younger than her and unmarried and still living in Italy and Spain. Susan really wanted a daughter, and had been going through some recent fertility issues, there were medical complication.  Richard felt he had enough kids, at least in his opinion.  But at age 40, after a deepening of her prayer life – she began to take her faith more seriously -- she conceived again, and the ultrasound indicated the baby was a girl.  She was so excited, and at 22 weeks everything was going well.  And then complications with the placenta started, and by 24 weeks the baby had died.  Susan miscarried her baby daughter and because of medical complications, also wound up with a hysterectomy.  All right. So we have the story or at least the beginning of the story.  Let’s work with the story.So what was the actual loss – remember the actual loss...