Psychological Healing
in the Roman Catholic Mystic Tradition

The Psychology of Motivation

 
Acknowledgment and Regret | Forced to Act | Psychological Motivation | Pushed by the Drive | Pulled by Desire | A Psychological-Spiritual Hitch: The Desire of the Other | Understanding Hidden Needs | Triggers for Impulses | Desire for the Holy

 
O LIVE a holy life, we must acknowledge that certain behaviors are wrong and we must regret doing those things.

Now, for many persons, this combination of acknowledgment and regret is sufficient to change their behavior. Once they know what is right, they do it, and once they know what is wrong, they stop doing it. It’s that simple, because the change is motivated by their love of God.

Some individuals, however, persist in doing things even though they know they are wrong, and, surprisingly as it might sound, even though they don’t want to do them. In these cases, something more than acknowledgment and regret is required. Understanding is required.

 
Forced to Act

To begin to explain what this understanding might entail, let’s consider the curious statement that you can persist in doing something even though you don’t want to do it. In some way, that sounds ridiculous, right? If you don’t want to do something, then why would you do it?

Well, consider what would happen if you encountered a robber. The thief puts a gun to your head and says, “Give me your money or I will kill you.” Even though you don’t want to give him your money, you do it anyway, for fear of the consequences of refusing. Therefore, we can say that someone might do something he doesn’t want to do simply because he is forced to do it.

 
Psychological Motivation

Now, “being forced to do something” doesn’t have to be taken in just the literal sense of coercion under threat of punishment. It can also be understood in a psychological sense—and this leads us to the psychological concept of motivation. To comprehend this concept, let’s use a practical example.

Imagine that you are a child with a small wagon. To move—that is, to motivate—the wagon, you have two choices: you can get behind it and push it or you can stand in front of it and pull it. In this example, pushing and pulling are literal, physical actions. To get to the psychological aspects of the example, we can describe pushing as the psychological concept of drive and pulling as the psychological concept of desire.

 
Pushed by the Drive

In psychology, then, a drive, refers to that which pushes us into satisfying our needs. We have drives for acquiring food, for finding shelter, for reproduction, and even for staying alive. That’s why, when a thief puts a gun to your head you will most likely give him your money: you have a drive that pushes you to stay alive. A drive, therefore, is a powerful human reality that can force us to do something we really don’t want to do.

Have you ever had a dream in which you are a passenger in a car while someone else is driving? That’s an unconscious way for you to realize that, in terms of your current behavior, you are being pushed—that is, driven—by some hidden emotional issue. The dream may not tell you exactly what the issue is, but it does give you the clue that, just as you can be driven like a passenger in a car, so your life is being driven by some need outside your conscious awareness. Finding out what that “need” might be is the conscious task of interpreting that dream.

 
Pulled by Desire

As powerful as a drive might be, however, it can be overridden by desire. Remember how I said above that changing our behavior can be motivated by the love of God? Well, that’s an example of desire. God’s love can pull us forward into itself because we desire to enter into that love. That’s the psychological meaning of the psalm that says, “As the deer longs for streams of water, so my soul longs for you, O God” (Psalm 42:2).

Consider, for example the story of Saint Maria Goretti, whose desire for purity and chastity allowed her to override her drive to stay alive: rather than capitulate to a rapist, she allowed herself to be killed. This example alone shows us the sheer power of desire, even over a fundamental human drive.

 
A Psychological-Spiritual Hitch:
The Desire of the Other

Now, the original source of all desire is God. God, in His unfathomable love for us, gave us the ability to desire Him as the source of all our good.

But the world, in its state of Original Sin, desires sin, not God. And so every individual, through the “desire of the Other,” is surrounded by the unconscious influence of a world given over to self-serving narcissism by which “feeling good” replaces the discipline of seeking all good in God.

The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan taught that the unconscious—a side-effect, so to speak, of our use of language—is primarily governed by “the Other.” And by “the Other” he meant the social world around us.

Therefore, as long as we have not purged ourselves of psychological attachment to the world, we will desire the things of the world more than we will desire God. We will remain enslaved to the desire of the Other and our spiritual life will stagnate.

 

An Example   Some person’s lives are plagued by stuckness, self-sabotage, and a lack of success. Now, where does this desire for self-destruction “come from”? Well, consider a woman, newly married to a man who turns out to be irresponsible, and now despairingly pregnant with a child she doesn’t want. Right in the womb that developing fetus will be “infected” psychologically with the belief that “It would be better if you were dead.” Or maybe a woman is too emotionally immature to attend to an infant’s needs. As that infant struggles with the dark terror of its neglect, it will be “infected” psychologically with the belief that “It would be better if you were dead.” Or maybe the child is a living “accident,” the unanticipated result of raw sexual pleasure stripped of any responsibility to reproduction. As that child struggles with lonely isolation, it will be “infected” psychologically with the belief that “It would be better if you were dead.” However it may originate—in the womb, as an infant, throughout childhood—the child’s unconscious desire will be to destroy itself in fulfillment of the rejection it feels from its parents. And that desire will persist even into adulthood, where it will wreak its own secret havoc, unless it is recognized and healed.

 
And so, to live a holy life, we need to detach ourselves from slavery to the world’s desire and turn back to a pure and ardent desire for God alone.

This, then, leads us to what you might do to overcome your unwanted behavior.

 
Understanding Hidden Needs
and Misdirected Desires

I said before that understanding is required. Understanding of what? Well, now that we have defined the terms, we can say that you might endeavor to understand what is driving you. Endeavor to understand the hidden needs that motivate you to do sinful things.

Most likely, as a child, you did not receive healthy nurturance and guidance from your parents, and so, as an adult, you could now be starved, so to speak, for emotional experiences such as attention, respect, admiration, soothing and so on. Your current sinful behavior carries with it a yearning to fulfill these hidden needs, but your current sinful behavior is not an authentic fulfillment of what is really missing.

In more psychological language, we can say that you have sinful impulses, which are desires created unconsciously in the hope of fulfilling the needs that are driving you.

Note that in her writings, Saint Teresa of Avila also spoke about impulses. She used the word impulse, however, in a very specific theological sense. For her, an impulse was not a psychological urge to do something; rather, it was a sudden, overwhelming, divinely inspired feeling of love.

Sinful impulses, then, are misdirected desires; that is, instead of desiring the true fulfillment of all needs in divine love, we deceive ourselves into desiring the partial fulfillment of needs through sinful behavior.

 
Triggers for Impulses

To understand the hidden needs that are pushing you into sinful behaviors, then, it will be important to examine very carefully the psychological experiences that occur before—i.e., that “trigger”—those behaviors. Rather than merely act on an impulse, teach yourself to recognize the subtle mental images, thoughts, and feelings that occur to you just before an impulse.

•	Learn to recognize those images as soon as they occur. Notice how they manifest in your particular circumstances. Are they a matter of your being overwhelmed with obligations, without proper guidance and assistance, so that you feel weary and lonely? Are they a matter of your being obstructed and hindered by others, so that you feel insulted and neglected? Are they a matter of your own inner confusion and lack of confidence (which often result from some lack in your father), so that you feel frustrated and stuck? Or are they a matter of something else?
•	Put the feelings into language; that is, consciously explain to yourself how these feelings connect to similar feelings from your childhood. Remember the actual childhood events that precipitated the feelings and describe them in detail.
•	Whatever the circumstances that trigger your feelings, remind yourself not to take it personally. For example, even if a store clerk is rude to you, and even though you may feel that the rudeness is directed at you personally, struggle to remember that all rudeness is a sin inflicted on Christ, not on you directly. Yes, the insult passes through you, and it cuts deeply as it passes, but the fuming rage you feel (and the violent tantrum you are in danger of throwing) is really a reaction to the times when your parents wounded you with their failures to perceive your childhood needs. And even then, your parents didn’t neglect you because you “deserved” it; they neglected you because their parents neglected them, and they never did their personal work of healing.
•	After you have identified the real pain tormenting you, do not try to push it away—i.e., to “get rid of it.” Moreover, do not merely tolerate it stoically. Rather, endeavor to endure it as Christ Himself endured His pain: for the desire of love. For the desire of love, all needs are fulfilled: for the desire of love, we make sacrifices for the sake of our neighbors’ salvation, and for the desire of love we work out our own salvation. For the desire of love, suffering is given meaning.

This is hard work, and you may need a psychologist to help you. But the point is that all the mental images, thoughts, and feelings that occur to you just before an impulse carry profound clues as to what your needs really are.

Note that certain forms of meditation, such as in Buddhism, tell you to let your mental images, thoughts, and feelings pass before you without your taking any interest in them. But Christian meditation is different. In Christ you are called to notice and embrace those mental experiences so that you can understand and redeem them.

 
Desire for the Holy

To do this work of mental examination, it will be necessary to nurture a state of mind that is receptive to understanding. That is, do anything it takes to increase your desire for the holy. But—and see if you can follow this logic now—you can’t push yourself into increasing your desire for the holy. Do you see? Only desire itself can increase your desire. So what do you do? Well, you do what it takes to remove whatever in your life obstructs your desire for the holy. Because ordinary distractions of the world such as TV, video games, sports, newspapers, magazines, and so on completely block any experience of the holy, endeavor to begin a lifestyle of detachment from the sinful world around you.

So even if your sinful impulses are about sex, alcohol, or anger, for example, and you keep falling back into them, pare away everything else in your life that does not nurture a holy lifestyle. Aside from your need to work for a living, focus your attention on prayer, confession, Mass attendance (daily if possible), holy reading, and mental examination, and follow the spiritual counsels on this website.

Do this and the Holy Spirit will guide you into a place where all human needs are filled to abundance and desire for the holy is overflowing.