Why Hating Your Worst Self Is Making Everything Worse | Dr. Peter Malinoski

[00:00:00] Speaker A: You know, it can be really hard to figure out what's going on inside of you. It's almost like there are multiple you's running around in different directions. We're talking with Dr. Peter Malinowski about how to take all that is you and integrate it. If you're hearing me thinking, what does that even mean? Today's episode is for you to live more focused with more peace, with greater joy, with greater interior freedom. Buckle up. It's going to be an awesome show on the Chris Stefanick show today. Welcome to the Chris Stefanick Show. We are here for you every week to give you the tools and inspiration you need to live your everyday life with joy, even when life feels a little bit crazy. I want to thank our missionaries of joy, the people who have jumped off the sidelines who are saying this doesn't only inspire me. I want to make it happen. Click below this video to become a missionary Joy with your monthly gift. This episode is sponsored in part by ewtn. You can catch this and so much more on ewtn. Streaming link is below in the show notes. And don't forget to sign up for the daily anchor. Let us inspire you every day, dude. It's what we do. Just let us do it. It's free. There are no strings attached. Become part of the 140,000 people. Getting an email in your inbox to lift you up and get you focused every day. We're with an email that takes like two minutes to read. Let's dive in. Dr. Peter, we love you. It's good to have you, man. [00:01:29] Speaker B: It is good to be back here, Chris. Thanks for having me back. [00:01:31] Speaker A: It's always great. Okay, let's cut straight to it. The number one sign of psychological well being that no one's talking about is, [00:01:42] Speaker B: is the drum roll. I'm gonna say it's interior integration. Yeah, interior integration. And it was talked about a long time ago, originally by Socrates and then again by Plato and then again by Aristotle. But we've lost a sense of it now. It's coming back. Actually, we're not talking about it nearly enough in Christian circles, but it's being talked about like in interpersonal neurobiology where Dan Siegel, for example, is talking about the importance of integration. You know who made a huge point of it too, in between Socrates and Dan Siegel was St. Thomas Aquinas. So there are points where this has come up, but it's more essential than ever to be talking about this integration inside now. [00:02:37] Speaker A: So what the heck is it? [00:02:38] Speaker B: Okay, so it is a state of being. So let me frame it that way. It's not an achievement that you have like a trophy that you can put on your inner trophy case. It's a state of being in which you are connected with and aware of your identity and all of the things that kind of go with that, including your emotions, your thoughts, your beliefs, your assumptions. It has a lot to do with how much you can access inside to see how connected the different aspects of yourself are and how well do they work together. In other words, how seamlessly do the different parts of you and your different faculties and the different aspects of your humanity, your body, your mind, your soul. I would say different parts within you. How are they working together or not? [00:03:37] Speaker A: Where did Kiwanis talk about that? Because some people are probably listening, thinking, this sounds like very much cutting edge or modern or postmodern psychology. How did Kiwanis bring this up? [00:03:47] Speaker B: So he brings it up in part two of book two of the Summa, and he talks about it. He doesn't use. Well, it depends on how you translate it. Different translators will translate him different ways. Some will translate it as unity, and some will translate it as integration. And what he means by that is, how one are you? [00:04:09] Speaker A: That's cool. [00:04:09] Speaker B: All right. How together are you? And one of the things that's come out of the trauma literature over the last 30 years is how fragmenting trauma is. Okay. And we understand that in some ways, like if we look at somebody who's struggling with acute symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder, ptsd, you can see there's a fragmentation. There's things not connecting anymore. There's like these memories that are coming back, and they're as real as real. It feels like it's happening again. Right. There's a revivification, and so there's a disconnect from time. There's a disconnect from the actual current situation. There's a sort of being drawn back into the past. So this integration also covers things like time. Do I know who I am over time? Do I know where I am over time? And so I think the number one sort of indicator of mental health, of psychological well being, of flourishing, really, is how integrated I am. It's not necessarily the most important thing, but it's like the canary in the coal mine, if you will. It's the thing that's going to begin to show up. You know, this disintegration is going to begin to show up when things are disordered inside. Wow. So it's a marker, is what I'm saying. Does that make sense. It's not just. And in a sense, it's an effect of. So Plato would say ordered living. Socrates and Plato would say that Aristotle would emphasize virtue. So would Plato. It's a result of a virtuous life. But we go way beyond what they could talk about in, you know, in the Republic or in Nicomachean ethics. We're. [00:05:54] Speaker A: We're looking. [00:05:55] Speaker B: We're looking through the lens of what we've discovered by trial and error and helping people recover from devastating traumatic experiences. So it's bringing in a whole new angle now. [00:06:06] Speaker A: Yeah. And this is something that I think we draw lines that maybe God doesn't draw between grace and nature, between becoming psychologically healed and the life of virtue and a life of holiness. And we have all these little categories. Right. And I think we get near to the Lord and he's just saying, I just want you to be whole. Holy One, do you agree? I mean, you're in the business of natural psychology and healing. Right. But it seems like you see the union, the seamless union of all this, don't you? [00:06:39] Speaker B: Yes, I do make some distinctions because I think some distinctions are helpful, but we don't want to overemphasize those distinctions. [00:06:46] Speaker A: So what are you distinction. [00:06:47] Speaker B: I do believe that there's a difference between the natural realm and the supernatural realm. Right. Between the natural realm and the spiritual realm. So I do. And that's partly important professionally because I want to continue to work in the natural realm because I'm not trained as a spiritual director. I'm not a member of the clergy. I don't have any special training in those sorts of areas. But I am grounding the work that I do in human formation and a Catholic understanding of the human person and a Catholic worldview. And that's really important because the assumptions that go into the way that you practice psychology, for example, are going to have a huge impact on what that psychology is oriented to. In other words, psychology is dependent. The practice of psychology is always dependent on philosophy, theology, and especially metaphysics. That's really important how you understand these things in the natural realm. So what I do is I take the best of what's out there and wherever I can find it. I'm very much following in the steps of St. Augustine and St. Aquinas on the St. Thomas Aquinas, in being really an omnivore of all of this stuff and then bringing it in and saying, how can we draw the best of it and how can we harmonize it with. With what we know to be True by divine revelation. [00:08:08] Speaker A: Hey, friend. I want to invite you into something that's changing lives. Every single day, people all over the world are rediscovering their faith, finding real joy, and learning how to share the gospel with confidence. And guess what? These lives are forever being transformed because of our Missionaries of Joy, our incredible monthly supporters. Everything we do, the Chris Stefanick Show, Life changing video series like Living Joy, Rise, Fearless and Renewed, our live events, it all exists because of them. And I want to invite you to become part of this movement. When you become a missionary of Joy, you're not just donating. You're stepping into a mission that equips, inspires and empowers you to live the gospel in your everyday life and to help others do the same. And that's not all. As a missionary, Joy, you get exclusive access to all our video series and empowerment to share them in small groups with friends. You get exclusive early access to new releases. You get Monday motivation texts direct from me. And you get access to our daily anchor, daily inspiration to fuel your faith. Here's the truth. The world is desperate for joy. People are dying for me, and together we could bring them the hope of Jesus. The question isn't if you can make a difference, it's will you click the link below. Join the mission today. There's one other group that I think focused on this too was the Desert Fathers. They were very conscious of the internal dialogue and they saw the mix of the psychological and the spiritual in that and bringing all that, like 2 Corinthians 10, we take captive every thought, make it obedient to Christ, that over time the dark thoughts was replaced by maybe an overemphasis on the deadly sins, which are kind of a result of the dark thoughts that are going on in maybe the subconscious or what should be brought to light. Right. Where did we lose our way? I mean, why do people hear this and think, well, that's not Catholic thinking? And I say Desert Father, you say Aquinas. It's completely in line with this thinking of integration. How did we lose that? [00:10:25] Speaker B: So I think, what happens? So first of all, to say episode 167 of Interior Integration for Catholics actually goes to the early Church Fathers, including the Desert Fathers. [00:10:34] Speaker A: Oh, beautiful. [00:10:36] Speaker B: And we're harmonizing internal family systems with their thought. So we're actually showing how this goes all the way back. That's a modern. Internal family systems is a modern way of understanding the human person and making sense of your own internal experience by knowing that you have an innermost self in parts okay. So, you know, we're really into that because we think that so many of these modern approaches, they came out of whatever the experience or the interpretation of their originators, whatever that was. Right. And they weren't thinking about it in terms of terms of the richness of the Catholic tradition. So that's so important to us because we feel like we have the best of both worlds then, the old and the new. But where do we lose it? And I would say that we lost a lot in the modern era when Descartes separated the mind and the body, so that mind body dualism started to fragment the person. Okay. I would say that in the 20th century, when there became a lot of focus on personality, we lost a lot there because sort of ramroding or forcing or pigeonholing a person's experience into a single personality, I think is extremely limiting. [00:11:57] Speaker A: A defined personality. [00:12:00] Speaker B: Well, that's. That there is a. There is a. There's a debate about it, but it's sort of. It's a pattern of enduring thoughts, emotions, interpersonal styles. It's a pattern of ways of looking at the world that endures over time and is relatively consistent. Okay. So it's a way of sort of understanding in a more comprehensive way the traits of an individual and the way that these different dimensions of a person's internal experience and external behaviors. How do we make sense of that? There are some constellations that go together, but I would say that when most people are talking about personality, they're talking about what's on the external or what's in conscious awareness. And that's not anything like everything that's going on there. And so some of these definitions of personality really begin to break down when you get into things like borderline personality disorder, because borderline personality disorder is characterized by instability of personality. Well, how can you have a personality or a personality disorder where there isn't? That rejects the definition of personality. So I talk about this in a couple of my podcast episodes as well. So I don't actually believe that we have a single personality. I believe that what we have actually is a number of different parts which are like having little personalities within us. All right. [00:13:33] Speaker A: So that is cool and crazy. We're going to be like, crazy in an amazing sense. I want to circle back to that because that's got everything to do with reintegration. Right? [00:13:42] Speaker B: That's right. Because when a lot of times people present as having really only one style of interacting, they're not integrated. What's happened is that that aspect or that dimension of Themselves has suppressed the rest of themselves. So think about, like I had a relative who was. [00:14:02] Speaker A: It's like a one dimensional character in a movie. It's not believable. [00:14:04] Speaker B: That's right. That's right. So I have a relative who was a Marine Corps officer. And you know, he operated as though he were a Marine Corps officer in a lot of different dimensions of his life. [00:14:17] Speaker A: Wow. [00:14:18] Speaker B: You know, and that's hard in family life. [00:14:20] Speaker A: Wake up, kids, we're going to mass. [00:14:21] Speaker B: I mean, you know, and I do believe, and I saw it later in his life, a more, much more tender side of him coming out. You know, a much more, A much more gentle side of him coming out. And I think like so many people, I don't mean to particularly, you know, kind of point this out or condemn this family member, but like, like, yeah, there's different dimensions. And I, I'll give you an example. I, I had this for a long time in the environment that I grew up in, it was dangerous to show fear. It was dangerous to show fear. And because it was dangerous to show fear, it was dangerous to be afraid. So I was able to suppress parts of myself that, you know, that carried fear or carried anxiety. And I thought that I was brave and it was really adaptive in a lot of situations. Like, nothing ever freaked me out. I have actually never dropped into a freeze response. I've never experienced that personally. I've gone into fight or flight because that's what was overdeveloped in me. But when my son, for example, spun out on ice once and you know, he had a normal fear response, like I couldn't resonate with it because I didn't have access to that part of me. This is many years ago now. I didn't have access to the part of me that carried fear. And so I wanted to suppress the parts of me that were in front. Wanted to suppress his fear response because going back to the environment I was raised in, that would not have been safe. You were supposed to just tough it out. Men didn't feel fear. Right. And so it really limited the capacity I had to be able to connect with him when he was in a moment of need and when he was operating much more in a balanced way and reacting appropriately to the situation that he found himself in. And I was not. [00:16:11] Speaker A: You're showing by example right now what an integrated person looks like. The way you're examining yourself, you're calling up parts of you that like, well, that's not all that I am, but that's a part of me right There. When we lose sight of that, it confuses everything. I love the. The only place you see this language used in the catechism is around chastity. That chastity is a successful integration of your sexuality or sex drive or that whole part of you into your whole person. If you don't see it like that, then a kid might be struggling with purity or apply it to any area in life. You know, I have a daughter who's struggling with add. One of the greatest things I could tell her as a dad is, hey, that's not all you are. [00:16:58] Speaker B: Right? Right. [00:17:00] Speaker A: You are not the thing you're struggling with. Right. But it's beautiful language. We go so sideways when we forget that there are those parts of us. I want to really dive back into the family systems. But before that. [00:17:14] Speaker B: Well, let me say one thing about this. [00:17:16] Speaker A: Yeah, please. [00:17:16] Speaker B: There's a podcast episode I did that's really popular that is called the top 10 reasons why Catholic Men Masturbate. [00:17:24] Speaker A: Wow. [00:17:25] Speaker B: And I start off with the 10 reasons Catholic men give for why they masturbate. [00:17:30] Speaker A: Which episode is this in the podcast? [00:17:32] Speaker B: I don't remember. Off the phone. [00:17:34] Speaker A: We'll find it. We'll link to it, put it in the show notes. [00:17:36] Speaker B: But they're not related. They're not really. They don't overlap that much between the top 10 reasons that men give for. If you ask them, why do you masturbate? The 10 reasons that they give are not the actual 10 reasons. [00:17:47] Speaker A: Wow. So they don't know. [00:17:49] Speaker B: They don't know. I will give you an example of this really quickly. Really quickly. I've seen this over and over again. Some guys will masturbate, things will be going really well. They'll be having, like, a good faith life. Right. They'll be. They'll be, like, feeling like they're getting closer to God. Things are really improving. And then they relapse into masturbation and sometimes porn use. Right. And then they can't tell you why. Right. Because they're not aware of what's going on. Because there's not integration around that sexuality. Right. Like the catechism is talking about. But when you can actually be with them in this and, like, begin to explore it in a really gentle and more open way. I've seen this happen where guys masturbate because they're afraid of getting too close to God. They're afraid that now that things are getting better with God that, like, somehow things are going to shift. God's going to demand something of them that they're not willing to give that. And it's a way of setting a limit or a boundary with God. It's a way of not being. Or let's say they have a model of, of relating that is involved with fusion, right? Or blending, where you lose your identity. If you lose your identity into God, you're gone, there's nothing left. If the finite fuses with the infinite, the finite's gone. And even in the language of the Desert Fathers, they don't talk about fusion, they talk about union. Union implies two in relationship, right? Fusion implies the loss of self. Yeah, the loss of self. [00:19:28] Speaker A: That's Buddhism, that's not Christian. [00:19:30] Speaker B: So these guys are actually seeking a good, of preserving their identity, of surviving. And they don't even understand what's going on here. [00:19:42] Speaker A: Wow, that's amazing. [00:19:45] Speaker B: And once you begin to unpack that, then they can take that into their relationship with God. Then they can start to say to God and to connect with God around, will I lose myself in you? Will I be absorbed into you? And once they begin to relate with God and see that God wants them to have a separate identity, wants them to be in relationship, he doesn't want to just absorb them into the Borg, you know, or something like that, right? To use a Star Trek Next Generation reference. But to be in relationship and to walk with them, not to eat them, then that's a game changer right there. [00:20:26] Speaker A: It's a thing worth asking if someone has an area of sin that's persisting into their 40s and 50s that they just can't seem to kick instead of treating it just on the base level, that it's just about self control, dang it. And that's obviously part of it. But why is the temptation overwhelming that person's mind and heart and soul? It's probably something deeper need they don't even know. [00:20:51] Speaker B: And that's another reason in the 20th century why we lost the sense of multiplicity is because. [00:20:58] Speaker A: What does that mean, sense of multiplicity? [00:20:59] Speaker B: The sense of multiplicity is that we're not just a unity, we're also a multiplicity. So God is a unity and a multiplicity. God is one God and three persons. And those three persons interact. All right? So there's a unity and a multiplicity. We're made in the image and likeness of God. And so that means there's a unity and a multiplicity within us. And if you go to episodes 166, 67, 68, especially like 168, where we get into St. Maximus the Confessor, like he talks about how we're a whole inner cosmos. [00:21:33] Speaker A: Wow. [00:21:36] Speaker B: He calls us a microcosm and a macrocosm. And that stuff is mind blowing and fascinating. But for our purposes here, that means that we're not just a single homogenous entity, we're not just a monolith, but that there is a life that goes on within us and that there are relationships that we have within ourselves. And so what happened in the early 20th century is that in his efforts to combat Modernism, Pope Pius X, Saint Pont Pius X really emphasized how we had to be Thomistic in the way that we approached science broadly. And what that meant in psychology, the way it got translated by the neo Thomas of the time, who were rather narrow minded, was that psychology was really about will training. It was really about strengthening the will. And in that we overemphasize the single faculty within the person. The will is a faculty within the person. [00:22:32] Speaker A: Just white knuckling, man. [00:22:34] Speaker B: Just white knuckling it, man. And we know from Scripture that this doesn't work. And I'll give you an example. St. Paul, Romans 7:15. Why is it that I do that which I don't want to do? The evil that I abhor, that is what I do. And the good I desire, I do not do that. And it's not because Paul has a weak will. Of all the saints, Paul has a really strong will. There are other things going on that we have to appreciate. And so when we begin to understand ourselves as a system, right? That we're and the Holy and God in the Trinity is a system, right? The three persons and one God, that's a system. When we understand ourselves as a system reflecting that image and likeness, then things get so much easier to understand and [00:23:16] Speaker A: easier to deal with. [00:23:17] Speaker B: And easier to deal with. But when you have a system, the system has to be integrated. [00:23:21] Speaker A: Yeah, right. [00:23:22] Speaker B: If you're just a monolith, there's no need for integration. [00:23:25] Speaker A: No. You can go from the battle with your sin can feel like you're trying to lift a bench press £500 and then you take the right angle and suddenly you're benching £5. You know, you're attaching the right cables to the whole thing and it's whoa, that's just not as bad as I thought. That's powerful. How do you know? And again, I want to dive back into the family systems and defining all that. But how do you know when you're disintegrated and an image that comes to mind or a word that's very powerful, the word devil comes from diabolos. Right? Diabolos, which literally means. It's disintegration. It means to divide or to literally throw against. Right. That's where these words come from. I think I've. I've felt this at times in my life. Right. I've felt sad before or angry. And those things aren't necessarily disintegrated feelings. There's times when I feel just tweaked and I'm like, something just threw me off, man. Like, I don't even know how else to describe tweaked except to say, man, I'm tweaked. Like it's triggered whatever it might be. Right. [00:24:30] Speaker B: It's like when a poker player goes on tilt. When a poker player goes on tilt and they lose their focus and they're being driven by something and they play worse, you know? [00:24:40] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. How do I know when I'm acting out of disintegration? Could you. [00:24:44] Speaker B: Well, here's the problem. Tweaked for me, most of the time, you won't most of the time if you're really tweaked. [00:24:50] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:24:51] Speaker B: You don't have the capacity to observe it if you're really being dominated by a passion. If we go back to St. Thomas Aquinas, you don't know you are. You wouldn't think of it that way. That's just how it is. [00:25:06] Speaker A: Oh, dang. That's miserable, brother. I don't have a threshold for pain that's that high. So I usually know pretty fast that I'm sitting in my misery. Well, that's because I'm a wimp. [00:25:16] Speaker B: Well, but then you still have enough capacity to observe it, right? [00:25:19] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. So. [00:25:20] Speaker B: So sort of the signs of a lack of integration are when you don't even know. Well, that actually is when it's pretty severe. You don't even know. So, for example, if you are operating like a Marine Corps officer all the time, you may not realize that you're not integrated. Sometimes people who are functioning fairly well in their environments can be really not integrated. All right, so for example, going back to my not feeling fear, right. If I'm on a. If I'm on a bomb defusing squad in the military, it can be really helpful for me not to feel freer, to be totally disconnected from my fear. Could be really adaptive in that environment [00:26:06] Speaker A: you praised your whole career. Yeah. [00:26:08] Speaker B: And so. Or if I'm really dominated by obsessive needs, to never make mistakes that might help me as an accountant. [00:26:18] Speaker A: Wow. [00:26:18] Speaker B: Okay. So some of these things can be adaptive. In certain environments. And a person can get a lot of kudos for that. A lot of. Lot of, lot of reinforcement for those sorts of things. But the question is, how adaptable are you? How adaptable is that accountant when he is obsessive in his relationship with his wife, you know, or when he's obsessive about his 8th graders math homework? One of the things that I ask people that are really into personality is, what personality did Jesus have? [00:26:48] Speaker A: Huh? [00:26:49] Speaker B: They can never answer me. Because he was so adaptable, he was able to access the entirety of his humanity. And he can then be with the woman at the well in a very different way than he is with a rich young man in a very different way than he is with the Pharisees In a very different way than he is with Pilate. [00:27:11] Speaker A: Wow. [00:27:12] Speaker B: Because he's got access to the entirety of his humanity. All of his resources are integrated, and he has capacity to access them all. [00:27:23] Speaker A: Wow. I've heard him say he's all the temperaments. [00:27:25] Speaker B: He has all the temperaments. [00:27:26] Speaker A: Choleric, sanguine, male, Catholic. [00:27:28] Speaker B: I don't believe he's all the mergers. I don't believe in the temperaments, for example. I think that's a construct that's helpful for some people to understand that they're primary dominant parts. But the problem with it is that it neglects other parts that are not being seen. It doesn't go into the unconscious at all. And find that tender part of my relative who's a Marine Corps officer. Right. And so you have to appreciate that so much of our psychic life is unconscious. And some people make estimates that 90% of what motivates our behavior is outside of our conscious awareness. [00:28:08] Speaker A: Wow. [00:28:09] Speaker B: And I really believe that as a depth psychologist. So to just stay on the surface with what's in conscious awareness, that's just the stuff that is familiar and safe enough to be in our minds in a given moment. I'm really interested in what the real drivers are. And in order to do that, you got to go inside. [00:28:26] Speaker A: So since subconscious is, by definition subconscious, what do you do? [00:28:35] Speaker B: Well, most of the time, so there's kind of different levels of the unconscious. There are things that are in the unconscious, but if you went and looked for them, you would find them. [00:28:46] Speaker A: That is literally what the desert fathers did. Right. They went into this battlefield of the mind where they knew correctly. This isn't just psychological. Right. We're going to dive deep. But they had to literally go into the desert to be free of distraction for years and work on this. I don't have that. [00:29:05] Speaker B: Unfortunately, we don't. They had to do that because there are some natural level techniques that they didn't have access to that we have access to. [00:29:15] Speaker A: Okay. [00:29:16] Speaker B: We have a lot of advantages in the 21st century in order to be able to connect with what's going on inside ourselves. [00:29:24] Speaker A: How do I live in awareness of tapping into that part of life? [00:29:29] Speaker B: The first thing is to create time for it. I'm a huge fan of having a human formation plan of life in addition to a spiritual plan of life. So a spiritual plan of life. What I mean by that is those are the things you do every day and every week and every month and every year. So your spiritual formation plan of life means. Well, I do lectio divina in the morning and I. And I. And I do some meditative prayer and I pray the rosary. And then every week I go to mass on Sunday. And every month I do this like, you know, day of recollection thing over at the parish. And every year I go and retreat. And this is what my passion is. So you're tapping into like the thing that I'm all about, and that is overcoming the natural level obstacles, shoring up the natural foundation for the spiritual life. Because grace perfects nature. It has to have that nature to work with and natural level. And remember, grace perfects nature. It doesn't totally reconstruct nature. It's not meant to be supplanting nature, it's meant to be perfecting it. And the church has always taught that for natural level issues, you should be bringing in natural level means like if you're in a car accident and you've got arterial bleeding cause you've got a major laceration in your leg, you don't just pray the rosary, you get a tourniquet on that natural level and then [00:30:56] Speaker A: you pray the rosary. [00:30:56] Speaker B: And then you pray the rosary as you're going to the hospital to have that artery repaired. Right, right. And I argue that we need to be making so much better use of all of the advantages that are coming out in the non Catholic sources for human formation. And so, for example, there are some like, bilateral stimulation techniques where you kind of, where you can do some like, you know, tapping and stuff like that that really would have helped out the desert fathers because they connect into the neurology that they didn't understand. [00:31:35] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:31:36] Speaker B: So there are some things that they did, I would say, the hard way, using the resources that they had. And that because our situation, I think on a natural level is so much worse, we have some Additional benefits that God has given us to be able to overcome that. [00:31:52] Speaker A: My wife did EMDR for a while for past trauma, and it involved just the sensory. She's holding paddles that buzzed and there's little lights. [00:32:01] Speaker B: Well, and that's part of the fragmentation. The fragmentation's also at a bodily level because if you look at the brain scans, the live brain scans of trauma survivors when they're re experiencing the trauma, you'll see parts of their brain light up and be hyperactive and parts of the brain go dark. [00:32:16] Speaker A: Wow. [00:32:17] Speaker B: So this is again, where Descartes was wrong. We are integrated, bind and body, and we're seeing a correlation between psychological disintegration and a lack of integration in the brain. [00:32:33] Speaker A: Wow. I get why people go through life not wanting to go here. Because when I think of my wife's healing, I mean, she'd want to throw up after counseling, you know, like, she'd be smelling the smells. She'd be. She'd be there. But there's. Unless you go through it, you can't go around it, man. And now she's. She's integrated. She has these trauma memories that no longer trigger. [00:32:55] Speaker B: Right, right. [00:32:56] Speaker A: The trauma doesn't trigger. It's like, oh, just there it is. It's not. It's not all that I am. [00:32:59] Speaker B: Because it's an integrated memory now. It doesn't exist in its own encapsulation. The reason why people go through these revivifications of memories where it seems as real as real, and they're smelling the same smells and they're hearing the same sounds and they're seeing the same things is because that memory, that experience, was so overwhelming that it could not be integrated into the rest of what the person knew without totally incapacitating them. So it gets walled off into this bubble, in a sense, and then. But that still has a teleological pull, a pull towards being healed. Right. And so. So there are times where that comes in and floods again because there's a desire that we need to resolve this. There are some advances that have happened in especially the last 10 years to make therapy more gentle, because really, if you get outside of your window of tolerance when you are in therapy, it's hard to establish new neural networks. It's hard to really integrate when you are in a fight or flight or freeze modality. So just for those of you that are thinking about, you know, doing some. Some work on traumas you've experienced, it doesn't have to be overwhelming. And in fact, when I started out, because I've been in this field for a long time. When I started out, we had very little in terms of, like, modern trauma. We had, you know, Trauma and Recovery by Judith Herman. This came out in 1991, and that was it, like, when I started in the early 90s. But now there are ways to work with this that are much more titrated and are more effective, I think. [00:34:37] Speaker A: Now, aside from trauma, though, I mean, you have your EMDR stuff, and again, it's worth googling. And if you've been through trauma, find a good EMDR therapist. Right. To help detraumatize or detriggerize, however you want to say it. [00:34:52] Speaker B: I would say integrate. Integrate. Integrate. Yeah. I mean, so that's that the meaning? Because it's not just like, what happened, it's how you made sense of what happened. And the meaning of that is really important. [00:35:05] Speaker A: But aside from those more intense tools in counseling, just, you know, regular old guy living a regular day, driven by these subconscious forces and how I'm acting that are the sources of so many of my vices. [00:35:23] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:35:23] Speaker A: You know, how do I access those parts of me figuring, hey, what's going on in there? [00:35:28] Speaker B: So again, the first thing is to take time. [00:35:30] Speaker A: Take time. [00:35:31] Speaker B: And then if I take time, like, you mean, like. I mean, like, say slow down. So I'm like. I mean, like, set aside 10 minutes that you're going to focus on what's going on in your internal life. [00:35:43] Speaker A: Become aware and. [00:35:44] Speaker B: And just become aware. [00:35:45] Speaker A: Very Ignatian, too. Ignatian spirituality. [00:35:47] Speaker B: There you go. There you go. And the awareness. And then I would say the next step after awareness is to become connected. Like to say, oh, I've got a part of me that is really scared. And remember, I used that example, I would reject that part of me. But as I became more open to whatever my experience was, you know, to say, oh, there's a part of me, I didn't notice it, but I'm actually scared. And the reason why I'm so angry is that the anger is suppressing that fear. So when I would get angry, I would get angry in situations where people. Where other people would be afraid. And so then I began to, even in those situations, realize, oh, I'm angry. Maybe I'm afraid. [00:36:36] Speaker A: Wow. [00:36:37] Speaker B: And then like, so now I'm starting to be able to connect with a part of me that carries fear. And then these parts are coming more and more into conscious awareness because there's a sense that they could be accepted. They didn't have to be rejected. They don't have to be condemned. You know, I'm not attempting to do a partectomy, you know, where I'm just cutting off a part and trying to throw it away. I'm appreciating all of these parts as being fearfully and as. As being a part of my being fearfully and wonderfully made beautiful. And all of these parts could actually become more integrated and contribute to my flourishing. That was the huge thing, that was a huge shift that I made 15 years into my career, was to be able to understand, hey, we actually have parts. And it was because I was working with folks that had dissociative identity diagnoses where there was multiple personalities. And it was very clear, you know. And so I said, I have to figure out a way to work with this, because I was really trained in personality theory. I did a lot of personality assessment. I did it for the church, for seminarian evaluations and for fitness, for duty evaluations, for the government and stuff like that. And I was like, I can't. I have to have a way to understand this. And then when I began to understand, like, what was going on in ifs and got IFS training, which involves a lot of the therapist's own internal work, I realized, oh, man, I've got all these parts. And for me, what really made a difference was to have a big open heart to all these parts. Even parts of me that generated impulses toward doing things that were harmful within me or that damaged my relationships, and to realize they had good intentions. Wow. So that sort of, like, this part of these guys that I was working with that generated impulses towards masturbation, like they were trying to save them from being absorbed into God, like, if you understand that, then you can get to the root of the problem, because that is an existential crisis right there. And if you're just treating it as though I've got to stop masturbating, which is a religion I call anti masturbationism. There's a big religion out there. It masquerades as Catholicism, but it's really anti masturbationism, where the whole spiritual life is all about stopping masturbating. And first of all, let me say that I believe what the church teaches, that masturbation is grave matter. Let's not diminish that at all. But if you're only gonna white knuckle it and you're just gonna try to use willpower to overcome it, you're gonna have a very, very hard go of it. And if, for example, with these guys, once they realized that that's what the primary concern was. And they could connect with parts around that. You. And then they could begin to show these parts that no, here are all these examples where God does not want to absorb the other person. And even though there's some spiritual writing, you know, Saint Therese of the Zoo, who I love, will talk about like being a drop in the ocean, that freaks these parts out. Because if you're a drop in the ocean, you're gone. It's over. There's no individuality anymore. You know, she had a different way of looking at it. Right. That's not. That wasn't her concern. So then it can be like, I can let that go. I'm actually not under threat. [00:39:49] Speaker A: I love the language of the parts because hopefully giving people courage right now to deal with their stuff as they're listening. Because when you identify it as a part, it no longer is the all consuming thing, you know, it's not who [00:40:03] Speaker B: you are, it's just a part of you. And that's so liberating. It really is to say, you know, I have a part of me that I'll just make something up, but that hates my siblings, you know, because I think there's a lot of hatred among siblings, actually, to be honest with you. But it's in parts. And if I understand what that part's trying to do then and what it's trying to save me from, and those are good intentions, then we can begin in this integrated way like we were talking about. Jesus had. Like, we can access everything that we have. And that's going to give us so many more options than these little parts who often are phenomenologically very young. They experience themselves as very young. [00:40:45] Speaker A: Wow. Yeah. Let's dive more into this. You're the only person that I've met who has used that, the words about internal family systems. And I know you're not the only one. Right, right, right. But this isn't a hugely mainstream thing. [00:40:57] Speaker B: No, I mean, there's people. Not in the Catholic world for sure. [00:41:01] Speaker A: Probably not anywhere. Right. [00:41:02] Speaker B: It's still, it's growing in popularity. But yeah, you're right, it's a minority. It's a minority. [00:41:06] Speaker A: I mean, there's people who heard that initially. And what, what are you talking about? What are you like, let's define this a little more. What does this mean? What does it look like? [00:41:16] Speaker B: What does it look like? [00:41:17] Speaker A: Become aware of it going on inside of you. [00:41:19] Speaker B: So Richard Schwartz was a family therapist and he was working with families where a family member was really struggling with eating disorders. [00:41:27] Speaker A: Okay. [00:41:27] Speaker B: And what he saw was that when things improved in the actual family relationships, they didn't necessarily improve in the individuals. And he began to understand by working with these individuals that they had internalized family members. So even if dad changed and he's no longer the Marine Corps officer, and he's gotten gentler and he's gotten kinder and he's done a lot of his own work, there's a part of the daughter that has internalized and taken on the role of dad in that and to protect her. Right. Because if she has a part of her that comes down on her when she begins to color outside the lines that dad would accept, that's protective, that saves her from Dad's wrath. [00:42:15] Speaker A: All right? [00:42:15] Speaker B: But she's internalized it. And now that dad's changed and gotten better, this part of her hasn't. And so he was noticing those kinds of things. And so he realized that if you. If you ask a family member in an intense family dynamic to step back and give some space so that person could be heard, he started to do that with these parts, and he found that it worked. And so he built a whole theory on this of how we have these different parts. There's this multiplicity within us. He likens the inner. He likens us to a system that is both one and many. Kind of like an orchestra is one. One orchestra, but it's many in that it has these musicians. And so the whole idea around internal family systems is that we have different parts. They've taken on different extreme roles in response to injuries and traumas. They carry different burdens. And that what we are looking for here is not to get rid of parts or to silence them or to stuff them in the unconscious, but we want to help them to heal from the things that have wounded them. They carry the traumas. And if we can bring them in this integration where they're under the leadership and guidance of our innermost self, because we have an innermost self in addition to these parts. And the innermost self has these natural qualities to kind of lead and guide the system. But the innermost self can be occluded. It can be overpowered by the intensity of the parts. [00:43:53] Speaker A: Wow. [00:43:54] Speaker B: And so what this does is it actually gave me for the very first time. [00:43:58] Speaker A: So the parts can overcome the person. [00:44:00] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. And St. Thomas talks about this as sort of being dominated by the passions. Okay. There's sort of an equivalency there. But for the very first time, I had something that I could grip onto to Help follow the second great commandment to love your neighbor as yourself. Because I never understood, how do you love yourself? And I thought, well, I could take care of my body. [00:44:22] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:44:22] Speaker B: Or that would be loving myself. But that doesn't seem to be what he's getting at. Right. And so to love your neighbor as yourself, and this isn't just some sort of minor, sort of, you know, minor law in Leviticus that we don't follow anymore because we're not bound by the old covenant or whatever this is. Upon these two commandments, the entirety of the law and the prophets hang. Right. There's very little commentary, you know, Catholic commentary on what it means to love yourself. Right. And. But this, for the very first time, helped me to understand, okay, this is how I can love myself. I can actually care for these parts of myself. I can have a relationship within myself as God has a relationship within himself. And that relationship in God's self is a loving relationship. [00:45:12] Speaker A: Wow. [00:45:13] Speaker B: The relationship within myself could be loving, too. And then I started to understand that. Wow. St. Thomas Aquinas talks about this. He says that the way that you love your neighbor is going to be is the way that you love yourself. In other words, the way you love yourself is. He calls it the form and the root and the summa of the way you're going to love your neighbor. In other words, how you love yourself is the template for how you love others. And so this example of a failure to love my son when he was afraid, it reflected the way that I failed to love the parts of me that were afraid. [00:45:44] Speaker A: Wow. Wow. And so, so much of this comes down to examining your own spirit before God. Have a cup of tea with yourself. Be quiet. Review that day. Why wasn't I able to be there for my kid? What is it in me? [00:46:00] Speaker B: What is it in me? And this is. I mean, this is again, our Lord, remove the beam from your own eye before you try to remove the speck from your brother's eye. Cause the things that really bother us and other people are the things that bother us within ourselves. What's happening in the other person is simply activating something we don't like within ourselves. And that's where that whole thing, when you point your finger at the other, you have three fingers pointing back at you. There's a lot of truth in that. [00:46:27] Speaker A: And instead of crushing that part of yourself, asking, hey, what do you need there? [00:46:32] Speaker B: Yeah. Saying, how are you trying to help me? So with these guys that were masturbating, for example, because almost all my clients are Catholic and a lot of young Catholic men came in and were struggling with this. You can ask what does it do for you? What is the perceived good here? And once you have that, you have now a two prong attack. You don't just have the willful attempt to suppress in order to not masturbate. And sometimes you have to fight temptations. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying whatever, but you've got this whole other approach to say, oh, I'm afraid that I'm going to be absorbed by God. Can I begin to connect with God and help these parts of me realize that that's not how God wants, that's not what God wants for me. Because they don't know that. But that's what dad wanted. [00:47:26] Speaker A: To absorb my personality. [00:47:27] Speaker B: To absorb my personality. [00:47:28] Speaker A: So they start going into a sin thinking that's going to keep me from getting absorbed into the Father. [00:47:35] Speaker B: Wow. Sinning is a way of setting a boundary. We talked about boundaries before. Sinning is a way of setting. It's an inappropriate way of setting a boundary. It's a harmful way of setting a boundary. If the choice is perceived to be either I masturbate or I, I no longer exist because I've been absorbed into God, you're going to choose the masturbation. [00:47:59] Speaker A: The temptation at least is going to be 500 fold. [00:48:04] Speaker B: Yeah. Because at least you might be able to recover from that somehow. But once you're lost into God, you're gone. And people don't understand that this is the kind of stuff that motivates. Because some of these guys would ask me why am I doing this? I know I'm putting my eternal salvation at risk. I know that I'm risking like all kinds of hell. And that's somewhat debatable because they may have been really, their roles may have been vitiated or they may not have had all of the requirements for mortal sin. But you know, but I'm saying, look, you know what your parts are saying is that the thing you fear is what's going to happen if you don't. Wow. And so I think it's really worth it to do this. And that's what the reason I set up the resilient Catholics community, the souls and hearts is all about internal family systems and other parts and systems approaches. But understood through a Catholic lens harmonized with the Catholic faith. Because I've seen this over and over again. And you don't have to be in therapy to do this sort of stuff. Like you can, you can. And so we Set up whole programs to resent Catholic communities about that. You know, we've got a podcast, Interior Integration for Catholics. It's all about this sort of stuff. [00:49:13] Speaker A: Beautiful. [00:49:13] Speaker B: Why? Because we need. We need to be able to bring this to the Church. I'll give you an example of this. I mentioned this to you before when we were at lunch, and it's about the unconscious. So there's an author by the name of Lancelot law White. In 1960, he wrote a book called the Unconscious Before Freud. And what he did was he went back to look at how do people understand the unconscious before Freud started writing. And he said in 1700, the unconscious was conceivable in Europe. In the major centers of Europe, they were talking about things that were pretty clearly the unconscious. By 1800, it was topical. By 1880, it was fashionable to be talking about the unconscious. And it wasn't until 1952 that the Vatican ever mentioned the unconscious. So we're talking 250 years after it was conceivable, 150 years after it was topical. Three generations after it was fashionable, the Vatican, it was. Pope Paul XII finally mentioned the unconscious. [00:50:18] Speaker A: What, Paul vi? [00:50:19] Speaker B: No, Pope Pius xii. Pope Pius xii. Sorry, Pope Pius xii. He mentioned it in an address to some neurologists. And one of the things that's happened is that the Church has. Has only just begun to really seriously consider human formation and all of these natural level things. We've sort of like left it behind in a sense, or not really engaged with it. Pope John Paul II brought up human formation for the first time in his 1992 apostolic exhortation, Pastores Dabo Vobis. But what I'm all about is really understanding how so many spiritual problems are really spiritual consequences of human formation deficits. I'll give you an example. Like, I found that when I would work through the Father wounds with clients early in my career, they would now be able to relate with God as Father. They didn't do anything. They weren't doing anything on that. On the spiritual side, they just realized that they were having a transference to God as Father. They were seeing God as Father. They had brought in an image of God as Father. And if we begin to understand this in terms of our parts and have internal dialogue about this, it makes it even so much easier. Not that it's easy, right? It's still a hard road, but it makes it so much easier to recover and then to go beyond recovery and rehabilitation to flourishing, which is really what I want for people. [00:51:41] Speaker A: When you deal with these parts of you. Are you literally envisioning different versions of yourself? Like, for instance, Natalie's in counseling for therapy. She envisioned herself as a kid and going and hugging that kid, that part of her that felt abandoned in the trauma. Are you doing that on a daily basis? [00:51:57] Speaker B: I'm in touch with 12 parts of me. [00:51:59] Speaker A: Really? [00:52:00] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:52:00] Speaker A: So over. [00:52:01] Speaker B: And they all have names. [00:52:02] Speaker A: Hold on. Literal names. [00:52:04] Speaker B: Literal names, yeah. Yeah. So my innermost self, I call Petrus. All right. Which is Latin for Peter. And then. Yeah, my primary management team. These are the ones that handle a lot of my day to day. I have my collaborator. And this is my former. This is my former driving part. This is the part that was super focused on doing. This is the part that held the belief that if I did enough, I would be loved. [00:52:36] Speaker A: Wow. [00:52:37] Speaker B: Okay. So this is the part that is really trying to protect against a deep sense of inadequacy, of shame. [00:52:44] Speaker A: Your collaborator? [00:52:45] Speaker B: My collaborator part, formerly, like a driving part. Right. [00:52:49] Speaker A: Wow. [00:52:50] Speaker B: And then I have my evaluator, who is my inner critic. This part very much is about knowing things. The idea is if I know things, I'll be safe. Right. And so my collaborator part's reaching for omniscience. At least a localized omniscience. Wants to become omniscient. No, omnipotent. He's reaching for omnipotence because he's the doer. Right. My evaluator part is reaching for omniscience because he's the knower. He wants to know everything. Right. And then I have my good boy part, who is like my Catholic standard bearer. This is the one that's gonna determine what God wants and what God doesn't want. He's got the code of conduct that I have to conform myself to. And the interesting thing is he's never talked to God, like when I first came into contact. He doesn't know God. He only knows what God. What he imagines God want, what he imagine God wants. So it was really important for that good boy part of me to actually come into relationship with God and to experience God's gentleness and his mercy. Right. Rather than. Because, I mean, it just led to all kinds of things, you know, like the scrupulous bout that I experienced when I was in college that was driven by that, by that Catholic. By that good boy part, that Catholic standard bearer. And so now I have a way, like if I have like my conscience getting more sensitive, if I realize that I'm not recollected anymore, that I'm getting that I'm getting fragmented I'm going to know because I'm going to ramp up the doing. That's my collaborator part. I'm going to ramp up the knowing. Right. This is where I can get down rabbit holes on the Internet trying to figure everything out, especially if the geopolitical environment's pretty uncertain. Right. And then my good boy part is where I'm going to become good enough. It's a big Pelagian, big Pelagian part, the belief that if you are good enough, then God will love you. [00:54:40] Speaker A: You're a little inter Pelagius. [00:54:41] Speaker B: My little every part of me, and I believe this is true for everybody. That's. Every part that's not in right relationship with your innermost self is going to hold a material heresy about the nature of God and incorrect beliefs about the nature of self. Right. Because implicit in all of these three manager parts is the idea that I'm not good enough. I'm not good enough to earn the love of God. [00:55:05] Speaker A: Those parts aren't going to go away [00:55:07] Speaker B: unless you deal with. And I could do like a skills based training where I learned how to relax and I sit in the lotus position and breathe or whatever. Right. But that's not going to take away the underlying fundamental sense of inadequacy that's driving all of this. And so that's why skills based approaches can be useful for just learning some additional things to tune what needs to be done. But if you don't get at what the motivation is, that's driving it, you know? Yeah. So in episode 71 of the Interior Integration for Catholics podcast, I go into more depth about 10 of my parts. [00:55:48] Speaker A: This is just kind of blowing my mind, honestly. I mean, I'm aware of dynamics within myself and I reflect, but the only parts of me that I've named are the jerk Chris that you don't want to ever meet, the ungrateful jerk that I try to keep in line. But really instead of that, I should maybe take the approach of, you know, when that part of me starts to bubble up and take over. What do you need there, buddy? [00:56:14] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:56:15] Speaker A: Why is that taken over? [00:56:16] Speaker B: So can we believe that that part is fearfully and wonderfully made? Can we believe that that part is in a role that it doesn't want because it feels like it has to be there? [00:56:28] Speaker A: Wow. Wow. [00:56:29] Speaker B: That's a whole different thing. Because parts do not want these extreme roles. They do not. I would bet. [00:56:35] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:56:35] Speaker B: A lot of. A lot of money that your, quote, jerk part does not want to be a jerk. [00:56:42] Speaker A: Yeah. And it's probably five parts, actually. Probably that I'm reducing to one. [00:56:46] Speaker B: Jerk. Well, I mean, even, even if we're, Even if we're, you know, even if we're like bringing in any kind of multiplicity. Right. It can, it can really help. So even like when the inner child stuff came about back in the 80s 90s, like, and people could at least relate to themselves as a child, and it's just, you know, just the adult self and the child self, which would be a pretty simple model of multiplicity. You know, maybe reductionistic, but they're still relating happening now. There's still you loving you for the first time. So when your wife, when Natalie, you know, embraces herself as a little child, that's like, for real. That's like carrying out that second great commandment, the tail end of that second great commandment. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. And she would now be able to love others when they are caught up in a little child part of themselves. [00:57:37] Speaker A: Wow. That takes love yourself to a completely new level. It's not feel warm sentimental feelings toward yourself or even just take care of yourself, which is part of it. It's pay attention to what's going on inside of you and the parts of you that don't just need a smackdown. But maybe you need to be asked, hey, how you doing? So what are you trying to do? [00:58:00] Speaker B: In episode 98 of the Interior Integration of a Catholics podcast, it's titled what Catholics need to Know about Self Love. I go through the history of this because there are a lot of. There's a lot of confusion about language. First of all, let's acknowledge that, like what people mean. Cause some people believe that self love is really this narcissistic navel gazing where you just light your aromatherapy candles and tell yourself you're a good person. And, you know, and it's self absorbed and it doesn't involve anybody else. [00:58:28] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:58:29] Speaker B: You know, but if we understand what Plato and Aristotle and what Aquinas and I believe, what our Lord is telling us in that second great commandment, we need to love ourselves not just as an end in itself, even though persons are ends. Right. It's a good thing for us to be able to love ourselves. But that's, that's the battlefield, that's the arena where we're going to really learn how to love other people. [00:58:57] Speaker A: Wow. [00:58:58] Speaker B: So this isn't just something nice for ourselves. This is equipping ourselves to carry out the gospel message and to be able to love the most difficult and challenging parts of other people. [00:59:11] Speaker A: Well, I want to have you back to talk just about that one thing. [00:59:14] Speaker B: Yes, yes. We don't have to get into all [00:59:16] Speaker A: of that, but in order to do that. [00:59:18] Speaker B: In order to do that. In order to do that though, you have to be integrated. Like, in other words, you have to know yourself, pay attention to yourself, and you have to be able to possess yourself. [00:59:27] Speaker A: Yep. [00:59:28] Speaker B: So, you know, so some people don't even really have even a membrane around themselves. Going back to like the worst cases of fragmentation. And a lot of times people think that fragmentation is a function of sin. Right. And I agree with that. But I don't agree that it's always a function of personal sin. It's a function of original sin and its effects. It's a function of others sins and their effects. [00:59:56] Speaker A: I mean, a five year old with an alcoholic dad is fragmented. It's not because she sinned. [01:00:00] Speaker B: Right, Exactly. [01:00:01] Speaker A: It's her dad's sin. [01:00:02] Speaker B: Yeah. But it has an amazing impact. So I think when it comes to understanding how God sees us, he knows all of these things. And the background that you come from has a huge formative effect on you. And we don't tend to appreciate that because going back to Pius XII and the will training, what really matters is if you have the willpower to overcome it all. And that's just. And will is important, but it's not everything. And so I really love the way that God has used others, including a lot of non Catholics, a lot of non Christian thinkers who were willing to experiment with stuff. And because they were seriously engaged in a search for truth, they found some. [01:00:47] Speaker A: As you work on interior integration, paying attention to these parts of yourselves, asking what do you need? And bringing them under the management of Peter Petros. Right, Petrus. Yes, Petrus. Do all the parts of you get quieter and more subdued? Is that what happens at the end of that journey? [01:01:07] Speaker B: So. So how many kids do you have? [01:01:10] Speaker A: Six kids. [01:01:10] Speaker B: You have six kids? And how close in age are they? [01:01:13] Speaker A: 26 to 13. [01:01:15] Speaker B: Okay, so they're fairly close. [01:01:16] Speaker A: And five grandkids. [01:01:17] Speaker B: Okay, five grandkids. Whoo. All right, so I want you to imagine when you and Natalie have like been loving on those kids and have been really taking care of them, and you recognize their needs. What happens when they're little? We're talking like anywhere from a year old or younger up to, you know, 12 or something. [01:01:36] Speaker A: They glow. They shine. [01:01:37] Speaker B: They glow. They shine. [01:01:39] Speaker A: Frankly, they become easy. [01:01:40] Speaker B: They become easy. [01:01:41] Speaker A: So many times of a kid's being bad, it's cause their bucket's not full that's it. [01:01:45] Speaker B: That's exactly what happens inside. It's exactly what happens inside. [01:01:48] Speaker A: I thought it's great advice. [01:01:50] Speaker B: If you take care of them, kids don't act out unless there's a reason. [01:01:56] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:01:57] Speaker B: You know, and parts don't act out or don't have impulses. We want to be careful about not attributing too much of autonomy to these parts. Right. [01:02:08] Speaker A: Right. You don't have multiple personality disorder. [01:02:11] Speaker B: They're not separate persons inside. Right. But they don't generate impulses toward maladaptive things to harmful things. They don't generate desires for things that are sinful unless there's something wrong. You know. And if we really care for them. And this takes grace too. So now we're bringing in the spiritual dimensions of this. Right. If we're taking care of them, it is so much easier. Like, I'm able to do three times as much creative work as I was able to do five years ago. [01:02:45] Speaker A: Me too. [01:02:46] Speaker B: Yeah. And it's partly because there's some integration happening, I would say. Right. And. And things are being unlocked. Ifs is a constraint unless energy is [01:02:58] Speaker A: spinning off in the wrong direction. [01:02:59] Speaker B: That's right. Because what's happening is these parts have agendas they're trying to get. I often use this example of parts. So imagine an ocean liner going down and you've got two people in a lifeboat, and one person is busy loading on all kinds of water and food and supplies. Right. And the other person is busy throwing the water, food, and supplies overboard. Okay. All right. Imagine that they have the same goal. [01:03:26] Speaker A: Self sabotage. [01:03:27] Speaker B: They have the same goal actually, though. They want to survive. Right. The first person has been in a shipwreck before where there wasn't food and supplies in the boat. And they suffered hunger and thirst and so forth. And so they were never going to have that again. They made a vow. Never do that again. Right. I'm always going to have the supplies. The other person was in a lifeboat in a shipwreck before that was overloaded, capsized, and that person had to deal with the sharks. [01:03:55] Speaker A: Wow. [01:03:56] Speaker B: So they're operating off of what their experiences were. Right. Different parts have endured different experiences. And that's the fragmentation that happens in order to protect us. That's called the dissociation. That happens to protect us from being overwhelmed. Right. It's a way of sequestering or partitioning off some of these experiences. But when those two parts realize. Or those two. I'm gonna say two parts now, but those two people realize they have the same goal, how do we survive this? And if they can share each other's experience, if the one part can share with the other part, they're sharks. You know, if we. If we get this too full in tippy, they're sharks. And the other is saying if we don't take some food and water on will starve and will die of thirst and they can begin to work together. Right. And if they can get a captain in that boat that is like all of that, like, has all of our experience, or if the ocean liner doesn't sink in the first place, you know, it gets to be so much integration [01:04:55] Speaker A: brings the captain back. Really, really. Does that one part of you take over? [01:04:59] Speaker B: That's right. Because that. I do believe that this is God ordained. That God is each given us an innermost self that has intrinsic qualities that we don't have to learn that are actually just there, but that are occluded or covered up. [01:05:15] Speaker A: Would that be like your intellect and will, your soul, and these other parts, so to speak, are parts of your psyche? [01:05:21] Speaker B: I think of them. [01:05:22] Speaker A: How you metaphysically differentiate these things? [01:05:24] Speaker B: Yeah, I think the distinctions. I don't think of the parts as being the faculties, per se. All right, so the will, or the [01:05:32] Speaker A: innermost person would be the soul with the intellectual part of it. [01:05:35] Speaker B: Yeah. So the way that Jerry Crete lays this out in his excellent book Litanies of the Heart, which is the only book out there, and so it's just groundbreaking, seminal, that grounds ifs in a Catholic understanding of the human person. It's called Litanies of the Heart. He says that the innermost self is in the heart with the parts. So basically, the innermost self and the parts make up the heart. [01:06:04] Speaker A: Wow. [01:06:04] Speaker B: Okay. And it's different from the soul. The heart is actually within the soul, he would say. And he's got a diagram on page [01:06:13] Speaker A: 300 of his book, is the innermost self the soul that's there? [01:06:17] Speaker B: I wouldn't say that. And he doesn't say that either. He would say it's more analogous to the heart. [01:06:22] Speaker A: Okay, okay, got it. Okay. [01:06:24] Speaker B: So the innermost self, the way I think of it, is actually in the natural realm. It's going to go back to that natural realm. But I also believe that it's the conduit through which graces flow to the parts. And so God doesn't actually want to bypass your innermost self to get to your parts. Satan, on the other hand, in the very few cases where I think he was operative, he wants to approach those parts apart from the innermost self. Because he's the scatterer. Right. The diabolus. [01:06:59] Speaker A: The diabolus. [01:07:01] Speaker B: And I have had situations in which I think people actually have had demonic experiences. I remember one case in which there was. And most of the time when a person believes that there's a demon inside, it's just a part that's been demonized, condemned as a demon by other parts. So in one case, I was working with a woman who believed that she might be oppressed or possessed. A part came up. Or an entity I'll say came up. Right. That said, no, I am a demon. And I began to work with this and say, okay, why? Why do you think that you're a demon? And the parts said. Or the entity said, well, because the demon told me I was. And I said, okay, I said, tell me why you were interacting with the demon. And the part I believe was part. I know it was part. Said nobody else would talk to me. The demon was the only one that would talk to me. [01:08:06] Speaker A: Oh, dang. [01:08:08] Speaker B: Because this was a part of her that carried a lot of really kind of dark stuff from a bad trauma history. And the other parts of her had shunned it. [01:08:20] Speaker A: Wow. [01:08:20] Speaker B: And I think when we have this fragmentation, [01:08:25] Speaker A: you open yourself up to darkness. [01:08:27] Speaker B: I think you're more vulnerable. I think you're a lot more vulnerable because in actual cases of possession, which I think are very rare. [01:08:34] Speaker A: Okay, divide and conquer, though. [01:08:35] Speaker B: Yeah. I think the innermost. The demons are not gonna approach the innermost self. They're gonna approach the most alienated, isolated, the most rejected, condemned part of you. Part of you. [01:08:48] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. Like a nature show. The lion is always going for the outlier wildebeest. If they just stuck together, the wildebeest would crush the lions. Just crush em. [01:08:58] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:08:59] Speaker A: They're like 700 pounds of pure muscle and thousands of them just run over the lions, man. But they split. Split apart. [01:09:07] Speaker B: Split apart. Yeah. There's a dysfunction in their system. [01:09:11] Speaker A: Are these parts of you, are they you at different phases in life? And do they form because of splintering, difficult experiences? Or is that how this comes about? It's like, is one part of you. This is crystallized? 13 year old Peter, you know, is that how that works? Or are we just kind of born with there's different wings of me? [01:09:35] Speaker B: No. These are great questions. [01:09:38] Speaker A: It's fascinating, really. [01:09:39] Speaker B: Yeah. For a full length discussion of this, go to episodes 157, 158 and 159 of Interior Integration for Catholics. But we're definitely going to address it now. Richard Schwartz. When he originally conceptualized ifs, said he believed that all of the parts of a person were present at birth. Okay? And there's debate about this and we get into metaphysical questions, but I actually believe that that's true, that the number of parts that you're born with, or I would say conceived with, is actually a fixed number. Now, this flies in the face of a lot of the trauma specialists who were working with did, starting in the 1950s, 60s, dissociative identity disorder, multiple personality disorder in the 1950s and 1960s, who believe that these parts came into being or these alters or identities came into being as a function of trauma. What happens instead, I believe, is that the parts don't come into being in the face of trauma, but they take on either burdens and then are split off, or they take on extreme roles to protect when that trauma happens. So you start to see the parts sometimes more obviously, like in multiple personality disorder. It's very obvious a lot of times, not always, but a lot of times it is. And so what you're seeing is parts being ripped out of their natural sort of life, giving roles to being forced into these extreme positions to try to cope with something that was unimaginably horrible for the person at the time. And so they tend to be at the same age as when they were forced into those roles. So, for example, Natalie's little girl. I don't know the backstory of that, but something happened at about the age of five. If that was where it was. I can't remember if you said that. [01:11:42] Speaker A: It'd be junior high. [01:11:43] Speaker B: Junior high. Okay. So, yeah, it might be junior high. Right. And sometimes parts can present. Remember, these are the way parts present as how they see themselves. Right. So this part from my client presented as a demon, because that's how that part saw itself. And once we connected with that part, doesn't have to be a demon anymore. Was relieved to find out it wasn't. That a part can't turn into a demon, you know, like. But as. As parts realize this because they're now integrating and they have the benefit of the broader vision of the innermost self. And of all the other parts, their frame of reference becomes much broader. So now, like, a part of me, like my lover part, which is one of my exiles, was always out looking for love, right? Looking for love because that part was trying to fill a void that, you know, that was within. And once that part. And that part did not know that God loved him because that part had never prayed, that part had never been included My Catholic standard bearer didn't think that. So my good boy part didn't think that that part was good enough to be part of the spiritual life, you know, but once that part begins to come in and God's not going to go and bypass, like, my system to just go to that part, which is sometimes what people want, because he respects the fact that I have to give permission for that. You know that. And so once that starts to happen, man, it just totally opens up. And this is an example about where, you know, grace perfects nature. It doesn't supplant it. It doesn't take over and replace it, and that we need to be working with nature on nature's terms, with natural means, in addition to what can be helpful by grace. [01:13:35] Speaker A: Wow. Wow. This really brings up so many. So much to contemplate, not only for self awareness and growing spiritually, but just metaphysically. [01:13:47] Speaker B: Metaphysically, this is metaphysics. There is a great book called the Metaphysical Foundations of Love, and it's by a professor at North Dakota State University named Anthony Flood. And that book totally revolutionized the way that I understood the metaphysical foundations of the practice of psychology. It's one of the most influential books. And I showed it to six of my psychologist friends, and they, all of us were like, this is amazing. [01:14:19] Speaker A: Wow. [01:14:20] Speaker B: And we had him come and talk to us, and then he'll be on episode 170. He's on episode 171 of that podcast where he's bringing in Aquinas, and that this is not spiritual. This is metaphysical. Thomas is talking about these things in terms of their metaphysics, not in terms of the spiritual aspect of it. And so if we spiritualize it all the time, it's going to make it harder to work with. [01:14:43] Speaker A: People don't realize what a psychologist Thomas was. [01:14:46] Speaker B: He was amazing. [01:14:47] Speaker A: He wasn't just a theologian. It's incredible how he examined all the human experience. But so much of this, like, there's the soul and the heart. And when I start to ask questions about the heart and hear some of the answers, I realize, whoa, how little I've thought about what makes up the heart. [01:15:04] Speaker B: The heart. [01:15:05] Speaker A: I mean, this is. There's so much here that has yet to be explored. And this is. This is recent history of the church, in part revelation. The Sacred Heart of Jesus image, it's not that old and it's beautiful. The Lord's still revealing things to us, so we get the joy of discovery in each era in the church. Isn't it beautiful? And maybe we've overlooked the Heart. Because we. I don't know, there's a weird stoicism that's worked its way into Catholicism. [01:15:34] Speaker B: I think it's because we've emphasized the will. I think 20th century really emphasized the will. There have been some. Dietrich von Hildebrand was a huge phenomenologist who really emphasized the heart, but his work wasn't very well integrated with anybody else's work. Like, it really stood alone. It didn't integrate very well. And I want to make sure that the work I'm doing with this parts and systems thinking, which is, I think the unconscious, was the big discovery of the 20th century kind of coming into the Church. I think this parts and systems thinking is really the critical thing for the 21st century. And I don't want it to be 250 years or 150 years or three generations before we begin to understand this more deeply. And I really want it to come up. I mean, eventually the Church was forced to deal with the unconscious because it just became. By the 50s, everybody. I mean, my goodness, 50s, right. And no Catholic, now serious Catholic, denies the existence of the unconscious. And it's been corroborated by neurological studies and all kinds of things. I think this is the next big wave, which is this parts and systems thinking, this multiplicity and unity. And what we're doing is we're really establishing the metaphysical foundations within the tradition of the Church, going back to the Old Testament scripture, the early Church Fathers and. And then the saints. Some of these Saints were brilliant. St. Augustine was an amazing psychologist, and he talks about the divided heart. He talks about how his heart is divided, you know, and Jeremiah, more tortuous [01:17:06] Speaker A: than all else, is the human heart beyond remedy. Who can understand it? [01:17:10] Speaker B: Who can understand it? So I don't think this is the soul. This is not the soul. [01:17:14] Speaker A: That's fascinating. [01:17:15] Speaker B: This is the heart. [01:17:16] Speaker A: And yet the heart's. Here's. Here's the starting point to love yourself. The heart's beautiful. Not to be dismissed. I heard a beautiful Bishop Baron homily once where he said, you know, there's no feast day of the sacred intellect. There's the sacred heart of Jesus and the various passions and the guy who loved with an undying love, who wept over Jerusalem, who cleansed the temple, and all these things were just integrated into all those parts, so to speak, were all him. And they're all integrated and not something that he just tried to crush. Right. He used them in the right times. [01:17:50] Speaker B: That's right. [01:17:52] Speaker A: He could have said that the part of me that would Throw a table over is just bad and has to be destroyed. I mean, I would say that about myself. You got to be good. You got to just smack that part of yourself down. Lord didn't do that. He said, I'm going to take that out on the right day. [01:18:04] Speaker B: Yeah. And it's good that you sometimes throw a table, and it's good that he had that part. And it's good that I have a part that, you know, can function without fear. You know, like that's helpful. That's been helpful in a lot of crisis situations, you know, but again, that can't be the whole story. It can't be just that. And, you know, and my relative, there were really good things that came out of his military experience, and there was a way that he could structure and all that, you know, but. And, but he found later in life that there was more to himself than that. And that's a beautiful thing. [01:18:34] Speaker A: This has been profound. Thank you. You know, I started thinking, we're going to have a 30 to 40 minute conversation. Well, that's an absolute joke because there's no certain cans of worms. You don't just open and close in 30 minutes. And I think we just. Even after, what, hour, hour and a half, we still just opened the can of worms. So this is. It's gonna lead to a lot more digging. So thank you. [01:18:56] Speaker B: I am so grateful for you, Chris, to be open to this, you know, because it's radically different than the way that we typically think of ourselves. And so for you to have me on and to be engaged and interested in this, it just lights me up. [01:19:10] Speaker A: Oh, it's fascinating. [01:19:11] Speaker B: My parts are rejoicing and I have so much gratitude inside. [01:19:13] Speaker A: Really. [01:19:14] Speaker B: I mean, I can feel him, you know. [01:19:17] Speaker A: That's awesome, man. God bless you, brother. Thanks again. Love you, man. Hey, I love you guys. Thanks for watching. Hopefully this has blessed you and helped give you a lot to chew on next time you're sitting down with the Lord with your cup of tea. The Lord doesn't just want you to talk to him. He also wants you to examine yourself so that you know what you're giving to him when you offer yourself to Him. We'll see you next time.