Psychological Healing
in the Catholic Mystic Tradition

Psychotherapy
in the Catholic Mystic Tradition

Not as man sees does God see, because man sees the appearance but the LORD looks into the heart.

—1 Samuel 16:7

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Introduction | Psychotherapy | Spiritual Direction | Summary: When You Feel Stuck

 
HE ONLY true psychotherapy in the Catholic mystic tradition is prayer and fasting ^[1] combined with a sincere study of the faith. It’s that simple. If only we did exactly what Christ told us to do—to turn away from the satisfactions of the world so as to pray constantly and live chaste and humble lives filled with loving sacrifices for the salvation of other souls—we would be spiritually and mentally healthy.

Many individuals through the ages have found healing for their emotional pain in this way. But such healing requires total surrender to God. It’s all or nothing.

Psychotherapy requires that you take up relentless, persistent prayer to God (and to the saints and angels for their intercession) that you will grow in holiness, and, at the same time, you must force yourself to maintain a calm trust in God’s protection and guidance despite your fears of admitting your own helplessness and despite your impatience with things not happening as quickly as you want.

It’s a sad truth that in today’s world, despite our prayers and confessions, many Catholics do not live lives completely ordered to the commands of Christ. We are afraid of making the total surrender to Him that Christ asked us to make. Despite our best conscious intentions we constantly encounter psychological obstructions that hold us back from living holy lives.

Accordingly, many individuals today need psychotherapy to help them overcome the unconscious resistances to doing the very things they know consciously they should be doing.

 
Psychotherapy

Psychotherapy (often referred to colloquially as “therapy”) has as its objective—even when informed by the Catholic faith—the resolution of psychological conflicts that produce psychiatric symptoms.

These symptoms are created by hidden emotional resentments, beginning in childhood and continuing throughout life. These resentments can so erode your confidence and self-esteem with feelings of anger, victimization, self-blame, and self-punishment that they affect not only your mental health but also your social health and spiritual health.

In fact, individuals caught up in their unconscious defenses don’t really desire to serve God. Deep in their hearts they use the name of God only as an excuse to serve their own pride.

And why is this? Well, you may not want to admit this to yourself, but all of us have dark and hateful thoughts and imaginings that we keep shrouded in secrecy and don’t want to reveal to anyone, especially not to a psychologist. How many times have you said to yourself, “If people knew what I was really like, they would never want anything to do with me”? But the more you try to hide the truth of your life from others, the more you hide it from yourself, and the more you fall into pride—the pride of doing everything your way.

Psychotherapy Techniques

Now, many various psychotherapy theories and techniques have been developed since the early 1900s when Sigmund Freud formulated the concept of psychoanalysis. All of these techniques have one basic objective: to help us do the things we would like to do, but, by ourselves, cannot manage to do.

Some of these techniques are based in conscious, rational thought processes.

•	Cognitive-Behavioral techniques, for example, focus specifically on changing thoughts and behaviors. Note that vocal prayer is the pre-eminent form of Cognitive-Behavioral therapy.
•	Teaching and reasoning are also forms of psychotherapy. Note that this has been a preferred method of Christian psychotherapy, beginning with Christ Himself, continuing with the Apostles, and fully exemplified by men such as St. Thomas Aquinas, whose work is often recalled by modern Catholics in their practice of psychotherapy, and St. Ignatius of Loyola in his Spiritual Exercises.

Still, some persons develop such deep resistance to changing their lives for the good that psychotherapy must reach deep into their unconscious minds, well past their conscious thoughts.

•	Guided Imagery helps you visualize things that could or might happen so that you can achieve them or avoid them in the future. Note that St. Ignatius of Loyola anticipated this concept in his Spiritual Exercises.
•	Mental Prayer (or contemplative prayer) calls upon unconscious mental processes to allow profound inspiration by the Holy Spirit. Note that Catholic mystics through the ages have had much to say about this.
•	Dreams can be interpreted to help you understand emotional elements of your life that you have not yet recognized consciously. Note that the Book of Daniel provides a practical example of this, while the Book of Sirach (34:5) warns us that dreams are not meant to be taken as predictions of actual future events.

Putting It Into Practice

Therefore, in the form of psychotherapy I practice, and as I describe on this website, you can be guided—through the sacraments, vocal and mental prayer, fasting, study, and the insight resulting from the psychotherapeutic relationship—into understanding the roots of your unconscious conflicts and defenses; you can learn to identify the events of life that have wounded you and to understand the emotions surrounding those events.

That is, it’s not enough just to “know” intellectually what happened—it is important to feel the pain and then be able to identify and “name” the emotions associated with your pain.

This process happens through your speaking with your psychotherapist so as to interpret unconscious connections through spontaneous associations to your intellectual memories and through other techniques, such as dream interpretation.

Eventually, you can recover a full awareness of your emotional life that in childhood you learned to suppress as a psychological defense.

 
The Reason for Emotional Awareness

Some persons will say that they want nothing to do with “touchy-feeley psychology” and will insist that their lives are quite fine without it. Those who say this, however, have usually experienced family dysfunctions such as alcoholism, or emotional, physical, or sexual abuse. In an environment of lying, broken promises, arguing, and violence, they grew to fear emotions as something dangerous.

Nevertheless, in order to live a true Christian lifestyle, everyone, male and female, needs to be able to manage his or her internal emotional reactions to external events, so as to remain always in a place of Christian purity of heart. Two common “emotional traps” illustrate this.

1.

Let’s say that someone says something critical to you. Your immediate reaction, based upon learned behavior from childhood, will be to defend yourself. That can provoke more criticism, and more arguing, until you get so exasperated that you start saying hateful and vengeful things—and right there you have abandoned purity of heart and fallen into sin. This all happens because interpersonal conflicts result from failed emotional communication.

2.

Let’s say you’re on your way home from work and suddenly you feel a temptation to stop at a bar and drink—to use drugs—to shoplift—to stop at a strip club—to get a “massage” from a prostitute—to masturbate. So right there you have abandoned purity of heart and fallen into sin. This all happens because behind every temptation is an emotional reaction to some event that has shaken your self-confidence.

Emotional awareness, therefore, is a psychological tool that provides protection from sin. Interpersonal conflicts result from failed emotional communication. Temptations do not just appear out of nowhere; behind every temptation is an emotional reaction to some event that has shaken your self-confidence. It is impossible to stay in the place of Christian purity of heart if you fail to understand your emotional reactions to the events around you.

Thus through psychotherapy you can learn to respond to every moment of the present with a complete understanding of the emotions involved—and this understanding gives you the ability to respond honestly and appropriately to the situation.

For example, if someone says something that hurts you, you can say to yourself, “OK. I’m feeling helpless and abandoned.” In the midst of these feelings, you can recognize how you responded defensively to similar feelings as a child. Then you can choose an appropriate, non-defensive, mature, and psychologically honest response to your current feelings. But if you haven’t done your psychological work, instead of naming your feelings you will just feel a vague yucky inadequacy and then get angry or go off and drown the yuck with food or drugs or some other dysfunctional behavior. The sad thing is that when you drown the yuck, right along with it you drown the possibility of forgiveness.

 
Spiritual Direction

Spiritual direction seeks to, well, direct a person in ways that bring him or her closer to living a holy lifestyle.

In spiritual direction you learn to surrender yourself to total trust in God so that, no matter what happens to you, you can bring the pain before God and ask for the strength and courage to deal, in imitation of Christ, with what needs to be done in any moment.

Because of deep psychological conflicts, however, many persons find it difficult to make a total surrender to God, and they discover that education and reasoning do little to overcome their resistances. In this case, techniques of psychotherapy (see above) must be used to understand and overcome the fear that puts up an obstacle to the spiritual purgation necessary for living a holy lifestyle.

 
Summary: When You Feel Stuck

People often tell me that they feel stuck and unable to make any spiritual progress, and they ask me what to do.
 

Learn to Pray Properly

Well, first of all, pray. But be careful here. Don’t pray for specific things to happen or for material objects; instead, pray for God to inspire you and give you guidance, and pray for the wisdom and courage to perceive and carry out that guidance.

Moreover, don’t expect that God will tap you on the shoulder and say, “Hey [N]! This is what I want you to do.” God’s answer to your prayers will come though ordinary daily events. It will be up to you to open your heart to believing that ordinary events—under the influence of constant prayer—can help guide you. For everything that happens (especially for tribulations and distress), say to yourself, “What is this telling me about what I need to learn about myself and how I need to change?”

One really good prayer is the following prayer of my own. (It really works, because I used it during my conversion.)

O HOLY SPIRIT, take me as Your disciple. Guide me; illuminate me; sanctify me. Show me what is holy, and I will pursue it. Show me what is unholy, and I will turn from it. Command me, and with Your grace I will obey. Lead me, then, into the fullness of Your Truth and Wisdom. Amen.

Available as a prayer card

 
Practice Fasting and Sacrifice

Second, as a way to back up your prayers with fasting/sacrifice, follow the Spiritual Counsels on this website.
 

Hidden Anger

Third, if you find that you have difficulty praying and keeping the counsels, then consider that your stuckness could be a form of anger, directed at others, especially your parents. That is, you may be unconsciously creating a disability so as to send yourself to hell to prove to others that they have failed you. In this case, you may need psychotherapy to resolve this problem.

Notes.

1. Fasting does not refer only to abstaining on certain days from the attractions of certain foods. We must also “fast” constantly from the spiritually unhealthy attractions of the social world around us. Similarly, prayer does not mean simply saying a Rosary and going to Mass. We must pray constantly from the heart, with every breath, that God will guide us, teach us, inspire us, and give us courage to see through our own self-deceptions and overcome the repugnance of total surrender to Him.

Anger & Forgiveness	Healing	Psychology from the Heart
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