Show Notes
Episode 33. – Being Open and Coping Well September 14, 2020.
Intro: Welcome to the podcast Coronavirus Crisis: Carpe Diem!, where by God’s grace, you and I rise up and embrace the possibilities and opportunities for spiritual and psychological growth in this time of crisis, all grounded in a Catholic worldview. We are going beyond mere resilience, to rising up to the challenges of this pandemic and becoming even healthier in the natural and the spiritual realms than we were before. I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski your host and guide, with Souls and Hearts at soulsandhearts.com. Thank you for being here with me. This is episode 33, released on September 14, 2020 and it is titled: Being Open and Coping Well
Today we’re going to explore openness in the natural realm. And as a special bonus, we will explore closedness.
Abierto Cerrado.
Review:
Episode 32: Ways to increase trust, especially given the negative experiences. 0-24 months. Exercise – popular. Need more of that.
Episode 31 The One Thing You Must Have to Be Resilient. The one thing that you need, the one prerequisite. Absolute childlike trust
There is one thing that separates those who are resilient from those who are not. Childlike Trust (particularly in God’s goodness and his Providence for me in particular) separate those who are resilient from those who are not. Absolute confidence in God.
Episode 30: discussion of why we mistrust God so much, and it is because we are trying to be way too big. Trying to make it on our own we don’t feel safe. Trust is faith in action.
We hate and fear the dependency required to be in a real relationship with God.
Reciprocal relationship between openness and trust.
Why do I bring in Non-Catholic ideas: What makes me different. Not closed to new ideas.
Catholic with a small c -- universal.
St. Augustine: On Christian Doctrine (De Doctrina Christiana)
CHAP. 40.—Whatever has been rightly said by the heathen we must appropriate to our uses. Paragraphs 60 and 61
Branches of heathen learning … contain also liberal instruction which is better adapted to the use of the truth, and some most excellent precepts of morality; and some truths in regard even to the worship of the One God are found among them.
Not only natural learning, but we can learn truths regarding the worship of God.
Freud. How many times have I heard Freud being dismissed out of hand by Catholics because of his views on religion. I get it. Freud: God as an illusion, we’re like infants who need a big, strong father to keep us safe and secure. A big daddy in the sky.
Religion had its uses to keep the unwashed masses subdued so that civilization could develop. We needed something to help us restrain violent impulses and keep life on earth from turning into an episode from Jerry Springer. But now we have reason and science. Reason and Science.
I travel in a lot of traditional Catholic circles, I attend the Latin Mass, love the beauty of the ancient Mass. Not a lot of traditional Catholic psychologists. Consulted nationwide, coming to Indianapolis, lot’s of suspicion. Lots of rejection of psychology
But listen to what Freud is saying – we need a father. We have an infantile need for a Father. He says it more clearly than a lot of Catholic speakers do – which Catholic media personalities have you heard really driving home the point that we are little, like todders, like infants in our need. Freud found part of the Truth.
Pope Francis. Not to bash the pope. Not about that in Souls and Hearts or this podcast or the RCCD community.
September 8, 2017 New Yorker The Pope’s Shrink and Catholicism’s Uneasy Relationship with Freud
Pope Francis Sought Psychoanalysis at 42,” the
Times headline read. Other outlets treated the news more salaciously—“Pope Reveals,” “Pope Admits.” Some noted that the psychoanalyst in question was Jewish, or that she was a woman. Below the headlines, though, the stories were the same: a French sociologist named Dominique Wolton had published
a book of interviews with the Pope, and, buried on page 385, amid discussions of the migrant crisis and the clash with Islam, America’s wars and Europe’s malaise, was the four-decade-old scoop that had made editors sit up. “I consulted a Jewish psychoanalyst,” Francis told Wolton. “For six months, I went to her home once a week to clarify certain things. She was very good. She was very professional as a doctor and a psychoanalyst, but she always knew her place.”
Almost immediately, the news drew venom from the Pope’s detractors. A writer for the Web site Novus Ordo Watch, a mouthpiece of the ultra-conservative Catholic fringe—its slogan is “Unmasking the Modernist Vatican II Church”—insisted that Francis’s treatment by a “female Jewish Freudian” was “a really big smoking gun,” incontrovertible evidence that his “mind is saturated with Jewish ideas.”
Jorge Mario Bergoglio appears to have undergone such an experience before he became Pope. When he started psychoanalysis, he was in the last year of his tenure as provincial superior of the Jesuits in Argentina, 1979. The military junta’s
Dirty War was raging, and it had
put Bergoglio to the test. “I made hundreds of errors,” Francis told an interviewer, in 2013. “Errors and sins.” He described the period as “a time of great interior crisis.” Lucky him that he found a therapist who, mostly with the acutely focussed and patently empathetic listening that characterizes a good analyst, could enable his return to wholeness. “She helped me a lot,” he told Wolton.
Biology we learned about the double helix structure of DNA. Beautiful.
that James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the double-helix structure of DNA in 1953. 1962. Nobel Prize
James Watson: Very anti-Catholic. Anti a lot of things. Racism, anti-semitism. .
He also said that while he wished the races were equal, “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true.” Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Infanticide “If a child were not declared alive until 3 days after birth, then all parents could be allowed the choice only a few have under the present system. The doctor could allow the child to die if the parents so choose and save a lot of misery and suffering. I believe this view is the only rational, compassionate attitude to have.”
Raised Catholic, he later described himself as "an escapee from the Catholic religion."
Watson said, "The luckiest thing that ever happened to me was that my father didn't believe in God."
In like manner, 1978, Pacific News Service. Dr. Francis Crick, who received the Nobel Prize along with Watson said:
“No new-born infant should be declared human until it has passed certain tests regarding its genetic endowment and that if it fails these tests it forfeits the right to live.”
Summer 2004 New Atlantis
In this, as in much of his work, Crick was driven by a profound and fiery atheism, and saw himself combating an almost medieval mindset on the part of religious communities in America and Europe. Back in 1960, he had accepted a position at Churchill College, Cambridge on the condition that the (then new) college would not build a chapel for its faculty and students. A few years later, a donor offered a large sum of money to the college for the construction of a chapel, and when the faculty voted to accept the donation, Crick resigned. In explaining his work in neuroscience, Crick described his project as standing in opposition to Catholic doctrine — or at least his vastly oversimplified and caricatured understanding of it.
IPF protocol in Episode 32. Helpful to some – some said it was weird, New Agey. I don’t use it.
Secular Definition of Openness
I have to. Treatment for bulimia in the early Church Fathers. Treatments for complex trauma in the writings of the doctors of the Church.
NEO-Personality Inventory -- 3 Big Five.
Neuroticism
Extraversion
Openness
Agreeableness
Conscientiousness
open individuals are curious about both the inner and outer worlds, they have experientially rich lives compared to closed individuals. Lack of conventionality, willingness to question authority, prepared to consider new ethical, social, and political ideas.
O1 Openness to Fantasy: vivid imagination, active fantasy life, daydreaming as not only an escape, but a way of creating an interesting inner world for themselves.
O2 Openness to Aesthetics: a deep appreciation for art and beauty, moved by poetry, absorbed in music, intrigued by art.
O3 Openness to Feelings: receptivity to my own inner feelings and emotions, and consideration of emotion is important in life. Deeper emotional states, more differentiated emotional states, feeling emotions more keenly.
O4 Openness to Actions: willingness to try different activities, to go new places, it eats unusual foods. Preference for novelty and variety over familiarity and routine. May change hobbies
O5 Openness to Ideas: intellectual curiosity, pursuing intellectual interests for their own sake. Willingness to consider new, unconventional ideas. Liking philosophical arguments.
O6 Openness to Values: willingness to re-examine and reevaluate social, political, and religious values. Close individuals accept authority and honor tradition. Opposite of dogmatism.
Big Five Inventory
Security and Attachment are prerequisites for openness. Awe, wonder come after. Heaven Hell and six foot spoons.
Openness in different aspects –
Mind (understanding of the Faith Isaiah 55),
Heart (emotions, intuitions, the ways of the heart), Ezekiel
11:19 “And I will give them one heart, and a new spirit I will put within them. I will remove the heart of stone from their flesh and give them a heart of flesh.”
Body (bodily sensations)
Soul – religious experiences, charismatics, not my vision – Passion of the Christ. Next episode – receptivity. We’re going to take all this into the realm of the spiritual.
Closedness. CBT, meds, playing it safe. Talent buried. Fear. Rigidity in some therapists. Am I being a good therapist. A Catholic enough therapist. Self-focus rather than focus on the client
When to be open, when to be closed. Adam and Eve needed to be closed.
Problematic openness.
Adam and Eve
NEO-PI3 manual “Openness may sound healthier or more mature to many psychologists, but the value of openness or closeness depends on the requirements of the situation, and both open and closed individuals perform useful functions in society.”
The walrus and the Carpenter. Lewis Carrol and the plight of the overly open oysters. Opened and eaten. Only one old oyster was left.
Tragic story of Division 36, Kugelman’s Psychology and Catholicism Mass apostasy.
Exercise – just a taste.
Premium Bonus Podcast. Openness Exercise (discussion to follow). Guided imagery.
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Fascinating Discussion of Episode 32
September 18.
November 3.