Show Notes
Episode 21. Catholic Resilience – Where the Secular Experts Get Resilience Wrong.
June 22, 2020
Intro: Welcome to the podcast Coronavirus Crisis: Carpe Diem, where you and I rise up and embrace the possibilities and opportunities for spiritual and psychological growth in this time of crisis, all grounded in a Catholic worldview. We are going beyond mere resilience, to rising up to the challenges of this pandemic and becoming even healthier in the natural and the spiritual realms than we were before. I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski your host and guide, with Souls and Hearts at soulsandhearts.com. Thank you for being here with me. This is episode 21, and it’s called Catholic Resilience – Where the Secular Experts Get Resilience Wrong
In our last episode, we started a deep dive into resilience by looking at secular conceptualizations of resilience. We discussed how in the secular world resilience is about adapting yourself to life’s demands, it’s about handling the challenges and curve balls that life throws at you with poise and confidence. It’s about getting back to previous levels of functioning and adaptation. It’s about getting up as many times as you are knocked down by dangers and misfortunes, it’s about journeying on under the load of troubles and difficulties that life brings us. It’s about not succumbing to failure, not collapsing under stress, not being destabilized by hardships and tough situations.
The American Psychological Association defines resilience as “the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats or significant sources of stress— such as family and relationship problems, serious health problems or workplace and financial stressors. It means "bouncing back" from difficult experiences.” You know, like a racquetball that gets hit, squashed, and then regains its shape. {insert sound}
Seems reasonable enough, right? I mean, it’s the American Psychological Association, you know, the professionals speaking here. And in fact there’s a lot of good in that definition that we can draw from. In considering resilience, though, we as believing, practicing Catholics need to rework the secular notions ingrained in us by our culture. And that’s what I am here to help you do. I am here to challenge notions commonly held by Catholics that are actually not grounded in Catholicism.
There are three major problems with the secular definition of resilience.
First problem: Secular mental health professionals look to at their clients’ personal resources, their talents, their skills, their gifts. The secular clinicians will work with primarily with those asset and strengths. These clinicians think about how their clients can have greater autonomy, greater agency, be better able to access their assets and strengths to better adapt to the world. Most of them will also assess the social support that their clients can access from their close relationships. Nothing wrong with that, insofar as it goes. Insofar as it goes. But it doesn’t go far enough. As Catholics, we’re not supposed to rely primarily on ourselves, we’re not supposed to be independent, rugged individualists. And we’re not supposed to rely primarily on our close relationships either, because all other people have their flaws and they will disappoint us. We’re supposed to rely primarily on God – on His love, His mercy, His power, His constancy. And while more and more secular clinicians are open to bringing in their clients’ spirituality to help their clients become resilient, it’s not the top thing on the list. Spiritual resources made Southwick and Charney’s top ten list of resilience factors, but not until number 4 and a little bit in number 10. From a Catholic perspective, God is absolutely primary in resilience. And this is the biggest problem of secular-based psychologies in general, not just with regard to resiliency.
We need to not only understand with our minds who we are and who God is – we also need to involve our souls, our hearts, our bodies. This is not easy. There are lots and lots and lots of psychological obstacles to seeing God as He really is. And I am here to help you do that. We will go through this process together, harmonizing the best of psychology with a Catholic worldview as we go through all the factors of resilience. That is what is unique about this podcast. That is what is unique about Souls and Hearts. We ground psychology in an authentic Catholic anthropology, an authentic Catholic worldview. Now today we’re not going into all the solutions for Catholics to become more resilient. Be patient, I promise you that is coming up in future episodes and especially in the workshops and experiential work that we do in the Resilient Catholics: Carpe Diem! Community. I want you to become much more resilient, and we’re starting with understanding the conceptual landscape first. All right, so that covers the first problem that secular clinicians have with guiding others to resiliency – not giving God His primary role.
Here’s the second problem of secular approaches to resilience. Most mental health professionals work to minimize suffering and maximize one’s enjoyment of life. They misunderstand suffering. Most assume either consciously or unconsciously that suffering is to be avoided, minimized, that it is bad. They want their clients to feel better, to enjoy life more, to avoid getting hurt, to be able to pursue their own dreams and follow their own paths, to be able to make their own meaning out of life. They don’t use this word, but which philosophical system argues for maximizing enjoyment and minimizing suffering as the best way? Well, dear listeners, the word for the belief system that emphasizes maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain is hedonism. Hedonism. And hedonism has always been really popular because in our fallen human conditions, hedonism makes sense to our passions – we naturally want to avoid pain and we naturally want to pursue pleasure. It’s a very worldly way of looking at meaning and purpose in life.
Most mental health professionals don’t understand the meaning of the cross. They don’t understand the importance of redemptive suffering. And hey, it’s not easy to grasp deeply the meaning of the cross. There’s a lot of ways that people, even Catholics, even faithful devout Catholics get the meaning of the Cross wrong. The meaning of the cross is not intuitive to the vast majority of us, it’s not available to unaided human reason. We need divine revelation to understand the meaning of the cross and why the cross is a gift that almost everybody rejects. Remember that the cross is a stumbling block and a folly – Christ’s cross was seen by the Jews of his day as disgraceful, shameful, a sign that he was cursed by God. To the Greeks of the day, focused the cycles of time, on order, on harmony, on beauty, the crucifixion was jarring, discordant event, and the resurrection hard to believe.
But all things work together for good for those who love the Lord – Romans
8:28. All things. Therefore all things can be gifts. If we are loving the Lord, we can receive our sufferings, as gifts, as our crosses that will bring us to salvation, to the joys of eternal life. Now this can be extremely difficult to do. Without grace, it is impossible to deeply understand, accept, and embrace our sufferings as gifts. We are going to suffer, one way or another. We can suffer as stoics, or we can suffer as rebels, or we can suffer as Christians. The choice is difficult, but we can choose to bring the redemption into suffering. And I am going to help you with that in future episodes and workshops. For now, we are outlining the conceptual base. So the second mistake that secular mental health professionals make about resilience is understanding suffering wrongly.
As we go through the next several episodes on different aspects of resilience, we are going to look at suffering from a Catholic perspective. We’re going to value the redemptive aspect of suffering, we going to pick up our crosses. We are not going to be naïve about suffering though – we’re not minimizing suffering or denying it. If you are a faithful practicing Catholic, you are on a hard road. We have the straight from our Lord Jesus Christ. We are on a hard road.
Matthew
7:14 For the gate is narrow and the way is hard, that leads to life, and those who find it are few. It’s a hard road, there is suffering on it, but there is also deep, abiding peace and joy along with the suffering. Catholic Saints are no strangers to suffering. They don’t avoid it. They embrace it because they recognize the cross. So this issue of understanding suffering properly is really, really important in discussing resilience from a Catholic perspective.
Here’s the third problem. Secular approaches to resilience focus on returning to previous levels of functioning. Bouncing back, like that racquetball, to the previous state of being before we were struck. Getting back to where we were before the trouble began.
For a Catholic, that’s not good enough. I don’t want you to merely get back to previous levels of functioning. I want you to go way beyond them. The cross isn’t about just getting back to the old status quo. It’s about breaking through to a whole new way of being. A whole new way of loving and being loved. While secular approaches recognize the value of being challenged in order to grow, for the Catholic, the trials, the adversities, the traumas, the tragedies of this life are gifts to help us not just get back to where we were, but to bring us to a new plane of existence, to sanctity, to holiness. There is no holiness in this life without suffering. That why in the lead in to these episode, I talk about going “beyond mere resilience,” rising up “and becoming even healthier in the natural and the spiritual realms than we were before.”
So in summary, from a Catholic perspective, there are three major problems with the ways that secular clinicians approach resilience. The first problem is that secular clinicians focus on the client, relying on the client’s own resources primarily and then on his or her close relationships secondarily. Not on God. Our all-loving, all-powerful God is left out of that primary role. Our loving Father is shuffled off to the periphery, vaguely included somehow in the functionality of spirituality for the client. In secular approaches to resilience Quote Spirituality End quote is useful in helping the client pursue his or her own agenda to becoming self-actualized, but it’s very unclear as to how that works, because who knows what spirituality the client may have?
The second problem is that secular clinicians misunderstand suffering. Without Divine Revelation, there is no way to understand the redemptive value of suffering or know that the cross is our way to heaven.
Third problem. Secular clinicians focus on bouncing back to previous levels of functioning, These clinicians focus on restoring the client to how he or she was before the adversity. But Catholics don’t go up on the cross of suffering just to come back down again and be as we were before. We are to be transformed by the cross, and break through to a whole new way of being, to holiness, to sanctity.
All right, you may be asking so, Dr. Peter, give us a definition of Catholic resilience. All right, since you asked, here we go. It’s definition time, with Dr. Peter {cue sound effect}
Catholic resilience “the process of accepting and embracing adversity, trauma, trials, stresses and suffering as crosses. Catholic resilience sees these crosses as gifts from our loving, attuned God, gifts to transform us, to make us holy, to help us be better able to love and to be loved than we ever were before, and to ultimately bring us into loving union with Him.
Repeat the definition.
All right, so one more thing here. The way you develop resilience depends on where you are in our human formation, and where you are in the spiritual life. Growing in Catholic resilience is not a one-size-fits-all process. It really has to be tailored to the human and spiritual formation that you already have. I don’t know how many clients I have had through the years who have imitated saints’ penances and their ascetical practices in the hope of growing. They weren’t ready for those practices. It was like trying to do trigonometry without understanding arithmetic. That’s another why it’s not easy to just pick up a book on resilience and follow the instructions and have it work. You seed a lot of used books on resilience on the internet.
And that makes sense. You wouldn’t just go and pick out a suit randomly from a rack and try to wear it – we need a program of growing in resilience that fits us. We need that tailoring. So as we move forward, we’re going to consider where in the spiritual life you are, using the seven Mansions of the Interior Castle as laid out of St. Teresa of Avila, with a special emphasis on the first three mansions, which correspond to the purgative way, where the vast majority of Catholics are (if they are in the mansions at all). We will also address the kinds of practices that foster resilience in the rest of the mansions, corresponding to the illuminative and unitive ways as well.
We’re also going to look at what psychological tasks remain incomplete for you in your attachment to God. These are vitally important. We’re going to look at five attachment-related tasks and really dive into these in future episodes, because there is no Catholic resiliency without them. The five attachment tasks are:
1. Feeling seen and known by God
2. Feeling safe and secure with God
3. A sense of being comforted and reassured by God
4. Having a sense the God cherishes you, rejoices in you, and delights in you.
5. Knowing at a deep level that God wills what is best for you.
I am working really hard to put a whole program on Catholic resilience together for you. I will lay out the conceptual and intellectual aspects in these podcast episodes, free for all of you. I will also bring in some experiential exercises into these episodes, so they are designed for you to be able to benefit from the podcasts alone. We’re going to be weaving in a lot of stories to help illustrate in detail all the concepts as well, to make them much easier to understand and to relate to, to connect with.
For those that want to go deeper, I’m also putting together a series of workshops for the RCCD community for small group work on increasing Catholic resilience, focusing on both the natural and the spiritual growth and formation. Here we have the time and space to do a lot more experiential work, including
1. increasing insight and awareness to underlying psychological obstacles to resilience
2. trying out various exercises and techniques in real time to see which are most helpful
3. Sharing experiences and support with other like-minded Catholics who on also on this quest for greater resiliency.
I am also gathering together the best current measures of psychological resilience and working on developing one to assess the factors of Catholic resilience for those who would like to so some self-assessment, or who may even want some professional resilience coaching in a small group or even individually. All that will be coming up in the next weeks and months but you have to be a part of the RCCD community to take advantage of those benefits. It’s free for the first 30 days and $25 per month after that, which is really a bargain for all that we offer you there. You can see our previous workshops on grief and on stress management there now. Check it out, it’s the way you can support this podcast, which survives by our Lady’s intercession, and by the grace of God, but also by your prayers and your membership. Memberships are the only financial means of support this podcast has right now, so if you see value in what I’m offering you, I need your help. Go to soulsandhearts.com and register for the RCCD community. Check us out
here, go to soulsandhearts.com and register for the Resilient Catholics Carpe Diem Community, there no risk and no obligation, so if it’s not for you, you haven’t lost anything but a little time and effort. And I want to thank the seventeem members who have registered for our community. Kathleen, Jonathan, Jane, Bridget, Joyce, Diane, Jeff, our two Elizabeths, John, Joni, Margaret, Sylvia, Pansorn, Julie, Martha, and Karen. Thank you. You are courageous people on this journey with me. I am very proud of you and glad to be getting to know you.
On Saturday, June 27 at 11:00 AM Eastern time, I will be hosting a listening meeting for RCCD members. I want to listen to what you need from this podcast and from the workshops, the assessment measures, small group coaching meeting and individual resilience coaching, all solidly grounded in Catholicism. I working to tailor this whole program to your needs as we do this pioneering work together. So I hope you’ll join us. Souls and hearts.com.
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