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Psychological Healing
in the Catholic Mystic Tradition

Questions and Answers

What if we don’t feel happy all of the time and what if we don’t want to spend money? Should we feel guilty about that, like we are not helping our country? If we all prayed instead of spending money and being happy all of the time, what would happen to the country then?

 
You ask a question that can be answered through reference to the psychological experience of child sexual abuse. Just as a child, during the course of the abuse, can be “brainwashed” to feel guilty for not desiring the sexual acts by which the abuser maintains his (or her) identity, so we all are “brainwashed” by society at large in this country to feel guilty if we don’t desire the materialism that maintains the country in its heathen identity: the pursuit of happiness. And so, just as the child feels sorry for the adult who will “suffer in loneliness” if the child doesn’t satisfy him (or her), so we can end up feeling sorry for the country that will “suffer” if we don’t spend our “happiness” money.

The point here is that in Christian teaching both materialism (when it degenerates into any of the seven deadly sins: pride, wrath, envy, lust, greed, gluttony, and sloth) and child abuse are grave sins; so it’s odd, isn’t it, that the society around us can essentially make us feel guilty if we don’t want to sin. And it does this precisely by selfishly playing upon our fear that our existence depends on its happy existence, thereby leading us, like a wolf in sheep’s clothing, away from any trust in God.

  

Many are those who say the words, “Jesus, I trust in You!” Yet often these persons do not really trust in God, they merely enjoy the idea of trusting in God.

  

Nevertheless, at least some Christians today continue to venerate the martyrs, who remind us that remaining faithful to a life in Christ is more valuable than anything of this world which defiles Christ. I’m just not sure whether it was more painful for the martyrs in their own times to have had to watch pagans defiling Christ, or for the true faithful now to see so-called Christians defiling Christ today in the name of “Christian” acceptance of anything.

 

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Where Catholic therapy (Catholic psychotherapy) is explained according to Catholic psychology in the tradition of the Catholic mystics.