Psychological Healing
in the Roman Catholic Mystic Tradition

True Love
True Wisdom
True Healing . . .

Thoughts and Sayings about the Psychology of Spiritual Healing

THIS WEBSITE, along with A Guide to Psychology and its Practice, has so much information on it that a person could spend hours reading all the various web pages.

Therefore, I have started to collect here many short sayings and thoughts from both websites to provide an overview of the entire work.

Click on the initial letter of the quote to go to the web page from which the quote originates.

 
Anger | Competition | Culture | Despair | Depression | Evil | Family | Fear | Forgiveness | Hate | Healing | Honesty | Hope | Humility | Identity | Love | Peace | Prayer | Romance and Eroticism | Self-sabotage | Sin | Spirituality | Spiritual Purgation | Suffering | Suicide | Trauma | The Unconscious | Victimization

 
Anger

The truth is, anger may be a “natural”—that is, a commonly occurring—social reaction to hurt and insult, but being natural doesn’t make it good for us. Sure, “natural” foods are commonly advertised as being healthy and good for us. But poisons, for example, are also natural, and poisons, by definition, are deadly.
     And so there are far better ways to cope with hurt and insult than with anger, because anger itself acts like a poison in your own heart that ultimately degrades the quality of your own life as much as it hurts the life of another person.

In essence, your outbursts of rage paradoxically hide your inner feelings of vulnerability, so you never recognize the hurt you’re feeling that triggers your hostile reaction. All the bitterness and hostility is a big puff of smoke, an emotional fraud. It hardens your heart toward others so that you can seal off your own emotional pain.

You need to realize that any damage that was ever done to you has in turn led you to damage others. Those who are hated learn to hate; those who are abused learn, if not to abuse, at least to hold on to anger, a lack of trust, and an unconscious desire for revenge.

Yes, we can even direct our anger at things. If a tool breaks right in the middle of an important task, leaving us feeling frustrated and helpless, we will smash the tool onto the floor and curse it. We “know” that damaging the tool won’t fix anything, so why do we act with such aggression? Well, in “hurting” the tool—whether symbolically (with curses) or physically—we receive the satisfaction of feeling more powerful than something else. It’s as if we are thinking, in our unconscious logic, “My plans have been frustrated, and my pride has been injured, but if I can damage something—anything—then look how powerful I am!”

Our culture teaches us by example—despite its common sentimental claims about the value of peace—that insult merits immediate revenge. Thus, many persons blindly follow the path of violence—and in so doing, they “get angry” to avoid feeling the hurt that holds the acknowledgment of their own vulnerability.

It’s ironic, then, that a healthy response to feelings of hurt and insult actually leads to compassion and peace, while the suppression of emotions, in trying to protect the surface peace, only leads to a psychological undercurrent of suspicion and cruelty. That’s why people who become social “doormats” and let others walk all over them, rather than admit that they feel hurt about anything, usually have quite a lot of resentment and “dirt” underneath their appearance of welcome.

Those who know true love act with confidence, straightforwardness, and honesty, whereas those who present themselves as nice are often merely hiding the depths of their anger behind a show of smiling appeasement.

Most people are narcissistically preoccupied with their immediate desires and have little, if any, altruistic awareness of anyone else around them. Psychologically, this behavior allows you to “feel good” about yourself while stepping on someone else; based in a fear of love, it leads you away from true love and compassion, and it sends you right into all the predicaments of self-indulgence.

Instead of taking all insults personally, you can realize that every insult derives from that universal tendency in human nature toward selfish, inconsiderate behavior. Given this ugly reality, no cache of guns or bombs or witty insults or curses can be sufficient to eradicate its evil effects from the world, so revenge becomes futile. The only sane response to insult is deep sorrow for all of humanity and compassion for the misguided person who gets caught up in the “popular” way of behaving.

Note that the ability to pray for those who hurt you depends on your being able to distance yourself from a secular world that literally feeds upon hostility and disobedience—anger on anger, hatred on hatred, lawsuit on lawsuit, weapon on weapon, death on death—enslaving you to a subversive lust for anger and revenge.
     The more that you are able to desire the holy, rather than desire physical, worldly pleasures, and the more that you can pray constantly, rather than fill your head with worldly entertainment, the more progress you will make in overcoming your unconscious slavery to anger and revenge, and the more progress you will make in overcoming your superstitious attempts to wash away your hidden anger.

Some individuals from dysfunctional families are often drawn to religious life—or quasi-religious life (i.e., secular religious orders)—because they think that obedience is easy. But, really, obedience for them is not an act of love, it’s an act of spite, a mere psychological defense. “All right. So you’re going to treat me miserably? Well, I’ll show you! I’ll take everything you can dish out and I’ll take it without a murmur. So there!” But, Oh! Just wait. Slowly the frustration builds, and then the anger erupts! It all goes to prove the point that you can’t carry your cross if you are carrying resentment.

Just try telling someone that he or she is lacking in faith. If anger and bitterness immediately erupt, it only proves the point that faith is really lacking.

How many persons say “Jesus, I trust in You!” as a rote part of their prayers? And how many of these same persons fly into a panic when some difficulty or trial afflicts them? Immediately, they want to get satisfaction, get back at the person who hurt them, or just get anything in compensation. And in so doing they completely forget what Christianity is all about: taking up your cross in imitation of Christ.

 
Competition

Theological writers have been saying for ages that each person must fight the spiritual battle in his own heart, without regard for what others do. If you’re always comparing yourself to others—whether at work or in recreation—you will either be feeling inferior and jealous or superior and proud. Only when you stop concerning yourself with what others are doing can you be truly humble.

Imagine playing ping-pong without hitting the ball back, so that the other person can accumulate all the points he wants. Imagine playing bridge without doing anything to obstruct the other players in claiming all the points they want. Imagine two teams of men joyfully walking from one end of a field to the other, helping each other to accumulate all the touchdowns they want. In the eyes of the world, it would be boring, wouldn’t it? Well, in the eyes of the world, Christianity is boring. That’s why the Roman Empire made a sport out of killing Christians: it made Christianity into something exciting.

So what does a person learn from childhood experiences other than that this is a world of competition, strife, and conflict, geared toward the survival of the “fittest”—or in today’s world, the meanest—in which honesty and compassion are foolish weakness?

It cannot be said more simply or more clearly: Competition is fundamentally opposed to love.

 
Culture

In the last two thousand years we’ve come a long way. The modern secular quest for cultural diversity has been distorted into such a neurotic obsession with being “open” and “accepting” that we are terrified of being labeled “judgmental.” If we dare to speak the truth about sin, we are called “condescending” and “arrogant.”
     And so, in our fear of persecution, we accept anything—even sin itself—as our Christian duty. Think about that. The world has seduced us into crucifying Christ in his own name.

In a permissive, self-indulgent society, there is less and less use for self-discipline and self-restraint. When anything goes, nothing means anything, and all paths lead nowhere. And right in the middle of nowhere you are sure to find anxiety, depression, and distress.

In this modern world, much of our society has lost its sense of soul. In the collective desire for diversity it’s all too easy to misunderstand life by confusing the fraud of acceptance with the truth of tolerance, the fraud of pride with the truth of holiness, and the fraud of sensuality with the truth of love.

When Truth becomes diversity, we have schism and protest. When BELIEF collapses into relativism, we need academics to offer clever interpretations of the rubble. And where, then, does that leave FAITH? That’s what Jesus asked. “But when the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on earth?” (Luke 18:8).

So there you are, like a sheep without a shepherd, free to pursue your own self-interests—and vulnerable to the self-interest of any wolf that happens along.

Religious education has, more often than not, fallen into the hands of those who dissent from the true faith. Religious educators, seduced by the social world around them, like the ancient Hebrews embracing the idols and abominations of the heathen lands around them, now place their “faith” in the diversity of secular values derived from humanistic psychology. And all the while the bishops, like shepherds terrified of the wolves, stand by helplessly and turn the other way.
     So I will say it plainly, and yet with tears and sadness: If you think that being a good Christian means going to church on Sunday and enjoying yourself the rest of the time, and if you’re not willing to spend more time in prayer and reading spiritual texts than watching TV and chatting on your cell phone, you’re in serious trouble.

What is the difference between a liberal and a conservative? A conservative—a true conservative—seeks to conserve respect for the divine mystery of Christ’s Incarnation and Passion that is behind every liturgical action of the Catholic Church. A liberal defiles this divine mystery by reducing Faith to mere human convenience and sentimentality. Therefore, call yourself what you will, but only a true conservative can be a Christian.

It is startling to realize that the two most powerful diseases of the modern age—cancer (unrestrained reproduction of certain cells) and AIDS (indiscriminate destruction of the body by its own immune system)—should be such potent metaphors: our social “dis-ease” is that of irresponsible growth and a lack of discrimination.

The fact is, in many of our attempts to enjoy ourselves we end up stepping all over other persons. In seeking wealth we envy and compete with our neighbors, we exploit and deceive the underprivileged, and we pollute our God-given environment. In seeking entertainment we encourage an industry that seduces our entire culture with frivolity, vanity, and pride. In seeking sexual pleasure we spread emotional wounds, physical disease, lust, infidelity, divorce, pornography, and prostitution, along with unwanted pregnancies, abortion, foster care horrors, and child abuse. In seeking excitement we create addictions and brew a criminal underground to distribute the materials of addiction. In seeking happiness we’re like the eye of a hurricane, seemingly calm and peaceful, yet blind to the storm spreading chaos all around us.

Anyone who claims that being a Christian in today’s world is “easy” has sadly failed to understand a basic point about Christianity: the world hates true Christianity because Christ places restrictions on the world’s narcissistic self-enjoyment.

Psychology can teach us, therefore, not only that our social world is a “fraud” but also that it is possible to recognize and heal the pain we feel as children when we experience the world’s fraud. It can teach us to speak about those childhood wounds rather than keep them as dark secrets hidden away within ourselves, wrapped in victim anger. It can teach us to let go of bitterness and hatred and to show compassion and love for those secrets, in the hope of healing them, rather than killing them. If those secrets are not healed they become our unconscious enemies—and we become terrorists in a battle against our own pain.

Maybe “stress” isn’t any “thing” at all. Maybe it’s just a descriptive term that our culture uses to normalize unconscious anger, a fear of love, a lack of forgiveness, a desperate clinging to a vain identity, and an absence of a spiritual life. Maybe “stress” is just a convenient myth to shift responsibility for life away from ourselves and onto something so vague that everyone can love to hate it.

Just remember that many persons caught up in addictions, such as alcoholism, will, while in a state of intoxication, claim that they are doing nothing harmful to their lives. It’s only when they get into a sober state of mind that they can perceive how close to death and total destruction they really were. And so it is in the spiritual realm. When you’re caught up in all the attractions of the world it’s literally impossible to see how close to spiritual ruin you really are.

When the Roman Empire collapsed as a result of barbarian invasions and the destruction of Rome, all of the technological expertise of the Roman culture was lost as well. In the following centuries, the Dark Ages of Western Europe were dark because of the loss of secular learning. But there was no loss of faith. In fact, during the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church provided western culture with its only light, its only source of human dignity and hope.
     Today, we are awash in technology. We are so overly dependent on trust in gadgets—and the glorification of the self that they buttress—that most persons have lost any sense of trust in God. And so we are on the brink of a new Dark Age—a spiritual Dark Age of ingratitude, insolence, and atheism, lost in its own spiritual blindness.

It’s not that the television, movies, music, and games of our culture are necessarily evil in themselves—though in some cases they are—but that our attraction to them can draw us away from the good and the peaceful and push us onto the very threshold of the door to malevolence and death.

After all, what, in all its blindness, does human culture tend to value? Well, look at politics, sports, and entertainment and you will see an insatiable thirst for wealth, glamor, power, competition, and revenge. So is it any wonder that to show us true love, and to bypass all human illusions, God came to us in poverty, simplicity, weakness, and gentleness?

 
Depression

To the “Other,” you (and all of us, for that matter) are just an object to be manipulated to satisfy someone else. It’s a losing game to try to make the “Other” love you. It’s a losing game to make the “Other” say you’re special. Sure, you can try to do all the right things, like drink the right brand of cola, eat at the right fast-food place, wear the right jeans, expose all the right pieces of flesh, pierce and tattoo yourself in the right places, use the right lingo, work for the right company—but once you slip up, then it’s the garbage can for you.

I’m not trying to tell you here that no one feels affection for you. You can argue all you want that your mother and father care about you somehow, and I won’t object, because on some level they do care about you. The real point is that many persons who claim to care about you also give indications, through behaviors and things they say and think, that their affection for you is mixed with resentment. Thus, instead of teaching you how to love by the example of true love, they “infect” you emotionally with a fear of love. It’s not pretty to see this directly, so that’s why you have defenses that blind you to it. But it’s real. At the core, that’s where suicidal feelings originate. Not that anyone is necessarily literally wishing you to die, but that the feeling of resentment that they project can get so strong that you end up feeling like garbage. And from there it is only one small step to make yourself garbage.

In depression there is nothing but darkness, yet it is not seen as darkness or recognized as darkness. Blind to divine reality, this darkness seems to be the only reality. “For it is impossible to perceive one’s darknesses without the divine light focusing on them.”

The irony about depression is that it actually disavows your deepest pain and tries to hide it all with a thick smokescreen of victimization and self-loathing. But if you listen to your pain and vulnerability you give yourself the respect and recognition that you can’t get from the world, and you take the first step toward your own healing.

Why does anger get turned toward the self? It might happen out of a perception that you could have done something to protect yourself from being so vulnerable to loss, and, having failed to do it, you feel deserving of condemnation. It could be that someone from your past treated you like an object for his or her own pleasure and you come to believe that you are nothing but garbage. It could be that the person responsible for the hurt in the first place was someone loved, and it might feel too psychologically risky to feel anger for such a person. After all, the person might withdraw “love” in retaliation. Or it might happen that the hurt was caused by some trauma or disaster, and, though you might blame God, if you’re at all religious, you can’t allow yourself to feel angry with God—so you blame yourself while secretly hating God.
     So there you are, trapped in self-hatred, a lonely victim, stuck in “anger turned inwards,” right in the middle of depression.

From a Christian perspective, the root of anxiety is a lack of trust in God’s providence, such that, when facing the unknown, you worry endlessly about how to “figure it out” on your own. The root of depression is a lack of trust in God’s justice, such that when encountering any hurt or insult you fall into a desire to take matters into your own hands to get revenge, but, feeling helpless to overpower others, you turn your anger onto yourself as unconscious self-blame.

 
Despair

Consider how you were conceived. How we all were conceived. Through the passion of our parents, sperm and egg came together to form a beginning embryo. Notice well: an embryo. To your parents, at your conception, you were not “you.” You were not a “special” person. No, nothing of the sort. Whoever you are, whatever you think you are, however you want to be seen in this world—none of this mattered to your parents. All they knew was the passion of their desire.
   It may have been the desire for nothing more than the physical pleasure of the moment, of which conception was—to use the terminology of scientific medicine—just a “side effect.” Or it may have been the fully-planned desire to have a baby. But, again, note well: a baby. If your parents wanted a baby, they knew—and wanted—nothing of you as a person; they just wanted “a baby.”
   To the sexual operation which created you, therefore, you—despite all your longing for a special identity—are nothing but a remainder.
   And herein lies all the desperation that life is heir to, because, once born, each child will spend the remainder of its life hiding this unwanted reality from itself.
   We will waste our lives seducing our despair.

There are no social or political organizations you can join, nations to which you can avow citizenship, cultures in which you can take pride, languages you can speak, or identifications in which you can dress yourself that have the power to free you from this shadowy despair.

It’s an awkward and uncomfortable place to be. And so we all devote considerable energy to overcoming the feeling of “not knowing.” We might seek out intellectual knowledge through formal education. We might engage in scientific research. We might join country clubs, gangs, cults, cliques, or any other social organization that purports to offer some secret “knowledge.” We might search through myriads of pornographic images hoping for the special privilege of seeing what is usually kept hidden. We might seek out “carnal knowledge” through the body of another person and attempt to locate the psychological agony of our bodily mystery in the pleasure—or pain—of the other. Or we might create our own fantasy worlds—with thoughts and images of eroticism, heroism, revenge, or destruction—in which we can “figure it out” on our own so as to possess the power and recognition we so desperately crave.
   Nevertheless, all the “knowledge” in the world is nothing but a thin veil that hangs over the dark anguish of helplessly “not knowing.” Standing before the veil, suspecting the secret truth of our “not knowing,” we feel confused, disgusted, weak, useless, and deceived.

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.

If you choose to believe it, each of us has a soul that, by the grace of pure, selfless love, is unique. And it does mean something—not to the social world, but to love itself. And so, despite death and despair, we have the choice of rebirth, a new “birth” not structured in vain self-satisfaction but in humble emptiness of self.

The concept of rebirth has been a part of religion for ages. It even entered into psychology through Carl Jung’s research into religion and alchemy. But the problem with Jung’s ideas—and with his followers such as Joseph Campbell—is that no matter which path to psychological “rebirth” is pointed out, no matter which myth is laid out on the table with all the other myths, they are all nothing but human signifiers, each one as empty as the one lying next to it.
     All these myths make one grave mistake: they hold out the lie that you can find value in life by seeking it through your own psychology.

True rebirth demands something more than psychology. It demands “death.” Death of all self-importance, death of all we “think” we are, death of all pride in our illusory identities. It is the death described so well through the ages by religious mystics such as Saint John of the Cross. It is the death of all attempts to seduce your despair.

 
Evil

Evil is simply the refusal to serve God. This is what caused the fall of Lucifer along with all the angels who followed him. Unwilling to submit to God’s authority, evil makes self-interest, at the expense of others, into its own god.
     Therefore, you are vulnerable to the influence of Satan—once called Lucifer, the angel of light, and now known as the devil—in proportion to the extent that you are influenced by unconscious psychological defenses. These defenses serve essentially to protect your pride and ego in the face of family dysfunction and hypocrisy and, commonly because of your anger at the failures of your father, these defenses often seek the unconscious satisfaction of undermining all paternal authority—including the Church and, ultimately, God Himself.

The easiest opening the devil can follow into your heart is the path opened by your desire to get revenge for injuries inflicted on you. Because this desire is often unconscious, rather than conscious, especially in regard to childhood traumas, you might even say that you are certain that you don’t want revenge on anyone. But unconsciously you do desire revenge—and any of those behaviors that “the devil made me do” are the evidence.
     So, do you need an exorcism? Well, actually, you can “exorcise” yourself simply by creating an environment within your “house” that is boring to the devil. It’s like when a neighbor always comes to your house and helps himself to the soda or beer in your refrigerator. You can put an end to the mooching just by not keeping soda or beer in the fridge.
     Therefore, in regard to the devil, don’t keep “revenge” in your house. That is, purge from your house anything that breeds on revenge: sports, television, politics, newspapers, video games, and so on. Even though these things are accepted hook, line, and sinker by our secular culture—and even by those who claim to be Christian—they have no spiritual value and are just breeding grounds for the desire to get revenge on others. The same for addictions (smoking, drinking, drugs, gambling, eroticism); these things breed revenge because by hurting yourself you hurt your parents (and God).

Think of chaos and filth, therefore, as aspects of the demonic, whereas cleanliness and order are aspects of the holy. If you respect your environment as an aspect of a holy life, you will be pained to see dirt and disorder anywhere.
     Although your mother was a meticulous housekeeper, she certainly wasn’t holy, or she wouldn’t have abused you. You know she was a hypocrite, and that angers you. You want to throw her cleanliness back in her face so that you can get the satisfaction of showing her what a fraud she was. Therefore, your allowing dirt to accumulate in your (her) house is the expression of anger. The dirt symbolizes your hatred for her.
     But allowing this disorder is like unconsciously punishing God because of the hurt your mother caused you. Nothing will ever be resolved this way. Revenge does not heal anything—it only adds to the dirt. Revenge is just another stroke of the whip on Christ’s back, more spittle on His face, another kick in His stomach. Allow yourself, therefore, to see the dirt—the dirt of your hatred—and then, through prayer, fasting, and forgiveness, clean up the evil mess.

 
Family

All of us have experienced the delight of being fed and protected when we were helpless infants. In fact, if we don’t experience it, we die. And the delight of this early infantile experience, which makes no demands on us and leaves us free simply to enjoy it, is at the root of our adult yearnings for a “utopia” in which all of our needs are taken care of effortlessly.
     But to function responsibly as an adult, a child must pass beyond this care-free infantile state of dependence. If this task fails, the child will remain neurotically dependent on maternal protection and will be afflicted with doubts and anxieties about assuming personal responsibility in the world. Moreover, the child’s talents will either remain buried in fear or will be expressed largely through an unconscious grandiosity. And, in its most severe manifestations, alcoholism and drug addictions can develop in adolescence and adulthood, because all addictions have their roots in a desire to escape the demands of personal responsibilities and return to an idyllic feeling of care-free bliss.

A child will more-or-less “trust” a nurturing mother. This sort of trust, though, is a necessary part of mother-infant bonding for the sake of the infant’s physical survival.
     Real trust requires that the child grow to depend on and respect the father, a person different from the mother from whom the child originated; that is, the father is a different body and a different gender from the mother. The father—and only a father—can therefore teach the child to enter the world and encounter difference confidently. But, to be a successful teacher, the father must teach this from the place of his own faith and obedience. In other words, the father must live from his heart by the rules he teaches to his children. In this way the children can learn to trust him through his own integrity. Otherwise, the children will see him for a hypocrite and will disavow—openly or secretly—everything he represents.

Now, considering all of this about the role of a father, look about you and see how many fathers fail miserably in their responsibilities. How many fathers are absent from the family because they were nothing more than sperm donors in a moment of lust? How many fathers are absent from the family because of divorce? How many fathers are absent from the family because their adultery draws them away to another woman? How many fathers are absent from the family because they are emotionally insensitive to their children’s needs? How many fathers are absent from the family because they are preoccupied with work or sports? How many fathers are absent from the family because they are preoccupied with their own pride and arrogance? How many fathers are absent from the family because of alcoholism? How many fathers are absent from the family because of illness? How many fathers are absent from the family because a woman decided she didn’t need a man to have a child? It can go on and on. And it does.
     And the sad thing is that when a father is absent—whether physically or emotionally—his lack causes a lack in the children. Lacking understanding of how the world works, lacking trust in others, and lacking trust in themselves, children—whether they be boys or girls—become lost, insecure, and confused. They lack confidence. They lack real faith. They lack a spiritually meaningful future. They lack life. All because their fathers were lacking.

Consider, for a moment, the way a dysfunctional father treats his family. Instead of being a good father—sympathetic, loving toward others, compassionate, humble, and always returning a blessing for insult (see 1 Peter 3:8)—he will, overtly or subtly, wear down his wife and children with criticism and faultfinding. He will play “mind games” with them, denying their feelings even as he smiles at them.
     In his selfishness, he denies his children’s reality. That denial will wound the children deeply. But, because the children can’t just go find another father, and because they lack the psychological capacity to understand the games that are being played with their minds, the pain will be driven down into their unconscious, forcing them to defend themselves internally and intellectually. They will teach themselves to suppress their true feelings. They will view the world with cynicism. And the residue of that defensiveness will continue even into adulthood to affect all of their interpersonal relationships.
     This continuing dynamic will be seen especially in the way these adults now treat their own children.
     Maybe you are one of these adults.

“But wait,” you say, “I have no issues with my father. We got along well together. My mother was the cruel one.” In that case, don’t be deceived by sentimentality. Yes, you have to resolve a lot of anger at your mother—and, in addition to that, you will find considerable unconscious anger at your father: for being too physically ill, too mentally ill, or just too weak or cowardly to stop your mother’s abuse.

It’s always easiest to medicate the “Identified Patient” and then forget about the rest of the family. It would be far better, and more clinically appropriate, to ask some specific—and painful—questions about how the child’s symptoms may be reflecting parental conflicts and family anxiety.

You have to look carefully at your own life and stop blaming others. If you are not satisfied with your life, it’s probably because you are not living up to your inner potential or are in one way or another betraying your life values. This can be a hard lesson to learn, but be honest—an adulterous sexual affair that defiles the sacrament of Holy Matrimony, for example, is just a perverted attempt to avoid the real problem: yourself.

Any attempt to “control” the thoughts or behavior of another person is just an unconscious attempt to control—rather than face up to and heal—your own “ugly” inner life. And until you have made peace with yourself, you will never be able to live in peace with anyone else. So in this world you can’t change anyone but yourself. Then, it can be hoped, your example might influence others to change themselves.
     This is how it works in life, and this is how it works in a family.

Although some people claim differently, domestic violence is not so much a political problem rooted in “male domination of women” as it is a psychological problem rooted in an unwillingness to take responsibility for one’s own life. Granted, there are some persons—male and female—who are so filled with frustration and anger that they will attack anyone—including children, and pets—without provocation. But just as often there is provocation, and violence becomes a sly family dance. There are even some people so good at subtle provocation that they always come off looking like innocent victims. It’s a dirty business overall.

The beginning of the solution to all family problems is to realize that just as plants can’t grow in chalky soil unless you add to the soil whatever is needed to make it healthy, so children—and husbands and wives—can’t grow unless you give them whatever support and encouragement they need to become independent and responsible. No one can grow in the “chalky soil” of pre-existing desires and expectations. And what a child or spouse needs might not be what you had expected—or wanted.

Lacking touch and emotional spontaneity in their families, many children don’t even know how to recognize their own emotional experiences. They repress their emotions, they suffer psychosomatic illnesses, and they confuse a need for simple physical affection with sexual desire.

As strange as it might seem, a permissive parent who fails to administer discipline actually causes a child to fear punishment and to associate it with irrational violence. These fears can become so strong that the child actually engages in violence as an unconscious plea to be punished for an unspoken, aching sense of guilt for other acts that were never justly punished.

The truth of the matter is that a life unprepared to die—or unprepared for the death of someone close—is not much of a life in the first place. It’s a life whose first impulse is denial. It’s a life just waiting to be slapped in the face with trauma. In contrast, some of the saints lived lives of perfect joy and peace because they lived as if they were dying in every moment.
     So, to have a family life that is truly intimate, learn to talk about death. Learn to ask “What would you do if . . . ?” questions. Learn to walk out the door with the awareness that you might not come back. Because it might be the last thing you ever do.

Children need help putting complex emotions into words. By listening carefully to the child’s concerns, parents can help the child distinguish anger from fear from anxiety from vulnerability from frustration from sadness and so on. Of course, you, the adult, are perfectly capable of sorting out your own emotions, aren’t you? Aren’t you?

Parents who become overly protective of a child after a tragedy only instill a sense of paranoia in the child. If a child is kidnapped in your city, bolting the doors, keeping the drapes closed, and refusing to let your child out of the house only cause additional trauma in your child.

Bad things happen, yes, but far more good things happen each day. Thousands of airplanes take off and land every day without incident. Hundreds of millions of children go about their lives every day without getting hit by cars, abducted, or shot at. Teach your child to trust in the good, not to fear the bad.

Why do bad things happen?” Parents often freeze when a child asks this question—or they offer a cynical answer that reflects their own bitterness. Here’s the best and simplest answer of all: God is love, and God created the world to share that love with us. But love can’t be commanded; if we are to love, we must love by our own free will, and that means we must have the capacity to not love. Therefore, God gave us free will, and with it came the freedom both to love and also to reject love and do evil. So the more you see evil around you, the more you should be reminded to love from your own heart.

When seeking out my help in the face of some sort of family crisis, parents often admit to me that they have hidden the truth from their children. Then they quickly add, “I was trying to protect them.”
     Well, you cannot protect children by hiding anything from them. You can protect them only by teaching them to trust in God’s protection.

The adolescent process can be relatively easy and smooth if parents learn how to communicate effectively with their children right from the beginning. After all, if parents are sufficiently committed to their own moral beliefs—if they have any—they can encourage their children to learn about and discuss those beliefs as they grow up, and there won’t be so much for the children to challenge in adolescence.

Sadly enough, most adolescent “acting out” derives from the fact that many parents’ values aren’t really grounded in a deep devotion to something greater than themselves, such as religious faith. And so the adolescent in effect says, “Your values are all a fraud. They’re arbitrary. So why should I do what you say? It’s not fair. I’ll do what I want because my desires are just as valid as any of yours.”

Simply stated, adolescents feel worthless because their parents’ lives are valueless—that is, without meaningful, spiritual values. And communication fails because the family is governed by a fear of love.
     In a similar way, much of adolescent “acting out” (which technically means communicating behaviorally rather than verbally) is an unconscious attempt to prove to the parents that they are full of you-know-what.

It’s a great sadness that most parents do not teach their children how to love. Love is hard work, and most parents shrink from that work. When children do something wrong, for example, it’s far easier to tell the children they will go to hell if they misbehave than to show them consistently, by example, that all behavior should be inspired by love for God. And so the children grow up being afraid of hell and understanding nothing about true love.

When children aren’t taught the “language” of honest emotional encounter within their families, children tend to seek out “natural” ways—that is, physical, bodily ways—to derive attention and satisfaction from the world, such as through food, drugs, or sexuality. And so we have a world filled with addictions, eating disorders (anorexia, bulimia, and obesity), and perversions (immodesty, pornography, prostitution, piercings and tattoos, and, in general, lifestyles defiant of chastity).

It all starts when parents fail to raise children in an atmosphere of devout holiness, and fail to teach them to love and to fear God and to trust always in His guidance and protection. Lacking clear guidance—and often suffering outright abuse—the children become conflicted about faith itself. They might accept “faith” intellectually, but it means nothing to them in any practical sense. Instead of learning to sacrifice themselves for Christ, children inadvertently learn, through parental game-playing and manipulation, to seize whatever satisfaction they can get from the world.
     And so, claiming to value peace and love, your parents actually sought out pride, self-advancement, and aggression. In the midst of this hypocrisy, then, and in your failure to learn to trust in an unseen God, you essentially learned to believe only in what you can see. Instead of taking God seriously, you end up taking God for granted.

Christians have become accustomed to take the Faith for granted. They have come to believe that they can coast into Heaven. They have grown morally lax, and they have grown lax in teaching their children. They have become lukewarm. And Christ knew it would happen. Now we are paying the price.
     Will we repent? The devil is brainwashing our children right under our noses because, in our laziness, we have opened the door to him. Will we close the door?
     Yes, will we close the door? That’s a good question, because to close the door requires a huge spiritual battle and tremendous work. To close the door means that Christian parents must be involved in the education of their children.

 
Fear

Now, some practitioners of psychology—especially those under the influence of managed care—will do nothing but fix “broken bones.” But if you are willing to get to the cause of the problem, and if your psychologist knows his or her job, then it is inevitable that you will encounter in the psychotherapy the deep secrets and dark, ugly terrors of your psyche. In fact, a client once said to me that the truth is not just ugly but is “worse than humiliating.” And at this point the whole psychotherapy is put to the test. Many clients will run from psychotherapy in fear and terminate prematurely. But the real challenge at this point is to explore in the psychotherapy the very reasons for being afraid of it.

Why are there so many lives headed for the garbage dump? Fear. Fear of the hard work of going to psychotherapy to clean themselves off. Fear of letting go of the dirt, because it’s all they know, for, even if it’s dirt, at least it’s comfortable.

Fear keeps alcoholics drinking, addicts addicted, and wretched sinners stuck in sin like quicksand. In fearing the darkness of the human psyche you never get to feel the true joy of real light, because, after all, the light of truth illuminates the dark and shows the darkness for what it is. So there you are, in full irony: in your fear of the dark, you end up fearing love itself.

Every child will suffer some form of emotional misunderstanding in his or her family. If this misunderstanding is damaging enough—for example, if the parents are emotionally distant, hypocritical, or abusive—the child can adopt either of two variations of a powerful defensive belief:
     “I don’t deserve to be cared for.”
     “It’s wrong to want anyone to care for me.”
     With these beliefs in place, the child effectively pushes love out of his or her life. Left unhealed, these beliefs will remain in the unconscious even into adulthood. Fear of love will persist, and God Himself—who is love—will be feared as well.

Many of us think we trust in Christ. Nevertheless, behind our pious thoughts—and for some persons, religious habits—we hide a private treasury of fears and phobias and anxiety and addictions that block us from living a genuinely holy life. Yet if we really believed that Christ is really present, there would be no grudges, no jealousies, no phobias and anxiety disorders, and no addictions.

We are all weak, broken creatures, and we will always feel afraid of something. Vulnerability is a fact of human existence; every day brings new challenges that loom in front of us, and, because we cannot foretell the future, it’s simply impossible not to feel afraid of something.
     Still, in spite of all the fear we feel, we don’t have to get caught in trying to protect ourselves with our own hands and our own wits. We do not have to let fear possess us. In other words, we don’t have to be afraid.
     When Christ said, “Do not be afraid” He did not mean that we should never feel afraid. He meant that fear should not become our being because our being should be His being, and that, when we encounter frightening situations, we should trust in Him and, and, rather than take matters into our own hands, we should look only to His protection.

What is it everyone fears? We’re all afraid that if we really change our lives and witness the truth, our families will reject us. We’re afraid that our husbands or wives will divorce us and we will lose a nice, comfortable life. We’re afraid that our co-workers and friends will criticize us. We’re afraid that our social prestige will suffer. We’re afraid that our careers will be threatened. In short, we’re afraid of what we might lose.
     And, in being afraid of what we might lose, we place ourselves at risk of losing everything nevertheless.

 
Forgiveness

I’ve seen individuals, for example, who have lost a family member because of a crime. The survivors’ anger and desire for revenge poison their entire beings. They so focus on what they’ve lost, and what they wanted the dead person to be, and do, for them, that they completely miss the opportunity they’ve been given to learn about real love.
     Instead, they seem to believe that hatred, even to the point of capital punishment, will satisfy their thirst for vengeance and will somehow bring them healing.
     So, with hardened hearts and stiff lips, they say, “I’ll never forgive.”
     And the sad thing is that in wishing to send someone to hell they end up sending themselves there as well.

Seeking revenge or wishing harm to another will, at the minimum, deplete your strength and prevent your wounds from healing. In the worst case, the cold hunger for revenge will make you into a victimizer yourself. Lacking forgiveness, you and your victimizer will be locked together in the hell of eternal revenge.

A common problem with persons caught up in unconscious anger at their parents is that they will try to deny their unpleasant feelings by saying, “But my parents tried their best to be good parents. I have no right to be angry with them.”
     The truth, however, is that even parents who do their best always cause some emotional hurt to their children, even if it’s unintentional. Even if your best friend steps on your foot, it still hurts, right? The therapeutic task is to admit all of your childhood hurt, not to blame your parents, but to allow the light of honesty to heal the wounds.
     Ironically, then, in finally admitting all that anyone has done to hurt you, in recognizing what you are really feeling, and in then being able to forgive that person—of everything—you discover real love.

And that’s the point about perspective. Although some persons are truly selfish and inconsiderate, sometimes a person is simply distracted or confused, not maliciously trying to get in your way. Looking at the “other side” is called empathy, and it can go a long way to calming yourself down, keeping the peace, and fostering simple courtesy.

Pushing the pain into your unconscious . . . only makes forgiveness impossible because, as unconscious anger, the dark wish to harm the person who hurt you remains alive but out of sight.
     And, with your animosity kept out of sight, it’s all too easy to present yourself as a “nice” person when, deep inside, you really remain an angry victim.

The popular advice to “forgive and forget” completely misses the point. Forgetting, in psychological language, is called repression. When something is repressed, it just lingers in the dark shadows of the unconscious, along with all the emotions associated with it. And as long as those emotions, such as anger, are brewing secretly in the unconscious, genuine forgiveness remains impossible.

To forgive is simply to stop wishing for revenge or to stop wanting to see the other person suffer in some way. But forgiveness is not blind. Because trust has been violated you cannot just forget what happened or else the same thing might happen again. There’s a saying that unless we remember history we will be condemned to repeat it. So let’s face it—even though you might forgive a person who has betrayed your trust, your trust in that person has been crushed.
     Trust can be repaired only by time through a gradual process of rebuilding. You have to get to “know” the person all over again. The sad thing is that through what you learn you may have to accept the fact that the other person can never be trusted again. On the other hand, if the other person is truly repentant and wants to make a full confession and do penance, the desire to do so will be all that is necessary to nourish a new growth of trust between the two of you.

Remember that whatever anyone does to you is done to Christ Himself. When you are mocked, Christ is mocked; when you are cheated, Christ is cheated; when you are obstructed, Christ is obstructed. Every sin inflicted on anyone is inflicted on Christ, and Christ alone has the power to administer true justice for all injury. So put your wounds in His hands and trust in His justice.

All of this points to two facts about the psychology of forgiveness: if you cannot let go of your desire for vengeance, you will never find true healing, and you can never be truly healed if you try to force someone else to pay for the cost of your healing.

Forgiveness comes from sorrow. Not sorrow for anything you have done, but sorrow for the very fact that everyone, including yourself, has the same ugly capacity to inflict harm on others, wittingly or unwittingly. Notice the words I just said: including yourself. This is where everyone gets stuck, even your siblings, because it’s easy enough to see that your mother was hurtful, but to admit that you have the same human capacity for hurt is just too distasteful. In fact, anyone who has been victimized has a human urge to receive compensation, and for you to admit that you and the victimizer are no different from each other—at the human level—is quite terrifying, for it jeopardizes some of that claim to compensation.

How many persons say “Jesus, I trust in You!” as a rote part of their prayers? And how many of these same persons fly into a panic when some difficulty or trial afflicts them? Immediately, they want to get satisfaction, get back at the person who hurt them, or just get anything in compensation. And in so doing they completely forget what Christianity is all about: taking up your cross in imitation of Christ.

In psychology there is an axiom that anxiety and relaxation cannot both exist in a person at the same time; this fact has become the empirical basis for systematic desensitization, a procedure for treating phobias. The spiritual realm has a similar axiom: you cannot hate a person and pray for him at the same time. And so, if you train yourself to pray for the repentance and conversion of anyone who insults or offends you, then it becomes impossible to hate that person—and all of your primitive rage therefore dissolves.

So remember that if anyone has ever hurt you, you don’t find forgiveness, you give it.
     If you have ever hurt others, all you can do is feel sorrow for your behavior; in sorrow, you can apologize, and you can make amends, but whether or not others forgive you is their choice.
     And if you have hurt yourself? Well, it’s a self-deception to believe that you can forgive yourself. Even though self-destructive and self-sabotaging behavior may seem to be anger at the self, at its core it is an expression of anger at someone else, because of what that person did to you or failed to do for you. It’s as if you amplify the effects of the original injury and throw your dysfunction back into the face of the one who hurt you, in an attempt to force him to see how much he hurt you. It may be unpleasant to admit it, but, in all truth, you use your disability unconsciously as a subtle form of revenge, which is itself a form of hate. For the original wound to heal, you must set aside your personal desire for satisfaction, and forgive, not yourself, but the person who hurt you in the first place.

The religious concept of “praying for your enemies” can therefore be expressed psychologically as simply hoping that the person who injured you will ultimately recognize his or her destructive behavior and repent it—as opposed to your wishing for that person’s destruction. Saint Teresa of Avila once had a vision of hell; the place was so horrifying, she said, that she wouldn’t wish it on her worst enemies. Think about that.

Continue to the next topic . . .

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