Dear Souls and Hearts Member,
If you have serious difficulties with self-discipline, it’s going to be hard for you to discipline others, including children, well. Period. Full stop.
What is discipline?
But let’s back up a bit. What is discipline? There is often confusion about the word, and good definitions are critical.
First off, discipline is not punishment, even though many parents and others equate the two. Let me illustrate with a quote attributed to Aristotle: “Through self-discipline comes freedom.” OK. Now let’s just swap out discipline for punishment and see how the quote lands: “Through self-punishment comes freedom.” Hmmm… Somehow that seems different, right? Something is lost when we reduce discipline to punishment.
So what does it mean to discipline? If we take the verb back to its etymological roots, we find that it goes back the Latin work disciplina, meaning to instruct, train, and educate. The Latin is also the root of “disciple,” one who is being formed in learning.
So discipline is far broader in scope than punishment.
Discipline flowing from love
As Mike and Alicia Hernon (Catholic parents of 10 kids) so aptly describe in their excellent (and free) 12-page Messy Family’s Guide to Discipline, “Discipline is an act of love. God only asks of us what’s best for us, and our goal in disciplining should not be to make our life easier or to control our children, but to teach them how to live lives of goodness so they will ultimately be happy in this life and in the next.” [p. 5, emphasis in original].
And our authors in this series, Gary Chapman and Ross Campbell in chapter 8 (“Discipline and the Love Languages”) of their 2016 book, The 5 Love Languages of Children: The Secret to Loving Children Effectively write:
- To be effective in discipline, parents must keep the child’s emotional love tank filled with love. [p.126].
- Love looks out for the interests of another; so does discipline. So discipline is certainly an act of love. [p. 127]
- Nothing makes a child more desperate than a lack of love. [p. 130].
Punishment
The APA Dictionary of Psychology defines punishment “as a physically or psychologically painful, unwanted, or undesirable event or circumstance imposed as a penalty on an actual or perceived wrongdoer.”
The Catholic Dictionary defines punishment differently, bringing in the goals of punishment and putting punishment in context; thus, punishment is “Any ill suffered in consequence of wrongdoing. It has three functions, which ideally should be retributive as serving the offended person, corrective for the offender, and deterrent for the community at large. Punishment is retributive because it pays back the offender for his crime and re-establishes the balance of justice, which has been outraged. It is corrective when directed to improving the offender and rehabilitating him as a member of society. It is deterrent as a means of forestalling similar wrongdoing by others.”
Thus, punishment has an element of penalty associated with it, often with the goal of extinguishing and deterring undesirable behavior. Ideally, punishments are just, and provide for the atonement of wrongdoing. Ideally, punishments are corrective in that they invite the person to a better way of behaving. And, again, ideally, punishments serve as a warning to others to not engage in injurious or destructive acts that harm the broader society.
So Chapman and Campbell categorize punishment as one kind of discipline. They write: “Punishment is also one of these means [of discipline] and does have its place, but in many homes, punishment is greatly overused.” [pp. 125-126].
When discipline does not flow from love
Unfortunately, often parental discipline does not flow from love for the child; it does not keep the best interests and the highest good for the child front and center. Discipline can be and often is motivated by many other lesser, inferior desires and impulses within parents – anger, fear, shame, the drive to just silence the child, etc. That’s what usually fuels the inappropriate use of punishments.
How does this work? Here’s an example in a story.
Once, in another parish in another state, I saw five young children sitting perfectly still throughout the entire 70 minutes of Mass. To me, it was creepy. It was weird. It was not developmentally normal for toddlers and preschoolers to sit so still for so long. The children looked somewhat lifeless, shut down, standing, and sitting almost robotically.
After the Mass, the parents were complimented by other churchgoers for how well-behaved their children were. I was thinking about the cost of getting such behavior out of such little ones. I don’t know those parents’ souls; but I wondered if instead of the highest good of their children, they might be motivated by how their children’ behavior reflects on them. Might they be overly concerned about being judged negatively by others if their children acted out in Mass? Might they have an overweening vanity about “being good parents” if their children are so tightly controlled?
So often, parents don’t make clear distinctions between their own identities and their own children’s behavior. “If my child acts out, what will they think of me – they will think I am a ‘bad mom’ — or worse!” Shame gets activated in the parent. Parents too often discipline their children to control their behavior so that the parents don’t get overwhelmed with their own shame, insecurity, anxiety, or other unresolved internal experiences. Then discipline is being misused to regulate the parents’ own internal system by making sure the child does not activate the parent. The parent is (often unconsciously) seeking a lesser good of not getting overwhelmed by emotions, but at the cost of the child’s well-being.
Punishment in these situations is focused on extinguishing a perceived threat from the child, and this is very common in families with narcissistic parental dynamics (see episodes 118-123 of the Interior Integration for Catholics podcast for more on narcissism – here’s a downloadable PDF with links and descriptions of those episodes). It reverses the responsibilities of the child and parent – now the child is supposed to take care of the parent, conforming the behavior not the objective good, but rather in the service of keeping the parent’s internal system regulated.
These dynamics happen when there is a lack of good human formation in the parent, and parents who are too psychological fused or enmeshed with their children.
Self-governance, self-discipline, and self-love
In his 2003 dissertation, titled Self-governance in Aquinas and Pre-Modern Moral Philosophy, Catholic philosopher Anthony Flood describes the development of Western and Catholic understandings of self-government, going back to ancient philosophers, and with a special emphasis on Thomas Aquinas’ assertion that self-governance as underpinning morality and that obedience-based morality arose primarily after St. Thomas’ death, in the late middle ages.
In disciplining children, we seek to help them understand the why of moral reasoning, so that they are not merely obedient to their parents or conforming to a moral code, but rather actively ultimately, as they grow, children are oriented toward and seeking the good, true, and beautiful – pursuing a deep, personal, intimate relationship with the Persons of the Trinity. As NFL coach Bum Phillips said, “The only discipline that lasts is self-discipline.” We are teaching children to discipline themselves. As Mr. Rogers said: ”I think of discipline as the continual everyday process of helping a child learn self-discipline.”
Flood, in his excellent 2018 book The Metaphysical Foundations of Love writes that: “For Aquinas, self-governance issues forth from self-love, or, more precisely, it is simply a part of self-love. Actively willing and acquiring goods for oneself forms two of the essential properties of the love of self. Self-governance, then, becomes the chief means by which a person unites to others in love. In order for self-governance to manifest love rightly and consistently, a person must conform to the divine will.” [p. xiv]
Self-governance (dependent on self-discipline) is an effect of ordered self-love and is the “chief means” by which a person unites with others in love. That’s how important the development of self-discipline is. As Matthew Kelly has said: “Never believe a promise from a man or woman who has no discipline. They have broken a thousand promises to themselves, and they break their promise for you.”
And Flood specifically addresses how essential ordered self-love is for good parenting later in his book:
“…parents marked by proper self-love are much more likely to seek and obtain true goods for their children. Moreover, parents will be less likely to reduce their children to mere means for their own interests and happiness insofar as their love for their children will be the love of friendship versus the love of concupiscence—they will love their children for the children’s own sake. Last, the proper love of self, for reasons we will address in chapter 5, leads to the most sustainable self-governance and consistent love on behalf of one’s friends or, in this case, one’s own children. The proximity of children to each parent’s own unity inclines parents to great love. However, the possibility of acting on that inclination to develop a deep love still depends upon the condition of one’s love of self. Even in the context of one’s own children, self-love has priority over the love of others.” [pp. 31-32].
So we come back to how essential it is for a father to love himself, for a mother to love herself in an ordered way as a prerequisite for loving their children well, including loving them through good discipline.
Discipline and parts
Chapman and Campbell invite parents: “Before we are able to effectively discipline a child in love, we need to ask two questions: 1. How does a child love? 2. What does my child need when he misbehaves?” [p. 129].
Chapman and Campbell offer five ideas on how to manage your child’s behavior, which are:
- Making requests
- Issuing commands
- Gentle physical manipulation
- Punishment – needs to be fair.
- Behavior modification
Alicia and Mike Hernon in their Messy Family Project’s free Discipline Guide remind us that children make mistakes, and offer great suggestions on how to consider disciplining kids (I highly recommend it). More importantly, though, the Hernons offer a mindset about discipline – a position, a way of being, rather than just an instruction manual. And that is much more important, as parental doing flows from parental being. And that being is in relationship with the child. Excellent examples include episodes 101 and 272 of their Messy Family Podcast.
As the Hernons often say, “Rules without relationship breeds rebellion.” Why? Chapman and Campbell make it clear: “…a child must identify with her parents in order to accept their guidance without resentment, hostility, and obstructive, passive-aggressive behavior.” [p. 128]. In other words, kids must feel the authentic love from the parent to accept the discipline from the parent well.
Parenting from the innermost self
From an Internal Family Systems perspective, parenting is best when it is lead and guided by the innermost self. The innermost self is the core of the person, the center of the person. This is who we sense ourselves to be in our best moments, and when our self is free, and unblended with any of our parts, it governs our whole being as an active, compassionate leader. In IFS, the self is “seat of consciousness.”
This contrasts with being governed by a part – Parts feel like separate, independently operating personalities within us, each with own unique prominent needs, roles in our lives, emotions, body sensations, guiding beliefs and assumptions, typical thoughts, intentions, desires, attitudes, impulses, interpersonal style, and world view.
Here are some key points from a Souls and Hearts’ perspective, informed by Internal Family Systems:
- Only the innermost self can effectively govern the self with love, in love, out of love.
- Only the innermost self can lead all the parts to conform to God’ will.
- Blended manager parts govern the self out of fear or anger, and very narrow vision and agendas
- If a parent disciplines through a manager part, it will often be in a self-protective manner oriented toward regulating the parent’s self-system, not toward the good of the child.
So to summarize: For a parent to discipline children well, the parent must have self-discipline and good self-governance, which issues forth from ordered self-love. And I think it’s so much easier to understand, govern, and love oneself in an ordered way if we abandon the single, unitary, homogenous model of personality and embrace parts and systems thinking, as we do in Souls and Hearts. This concludes my series on Chapman and Campbell’s book, The 5 Love Languages of Children: The Secret to Loving Children Effectively
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Dr. Gerry on the air…
Check out a fascinating interview titled The Inmost Self with Dr. Gerry Crete did with Mother Natalia on the podcast “What God is Not.” Mother Natalia and Dr. Gerry discuss some of the concepts from his book, Litanies of the Heart, especially getting into the nature of the inner self, the different parts that make up ourselves, and how the parts can interact with each other and our inner self.
Dr. Gerry’s new series called “Parting Thoughts”
Check out Dr. Gerry’s movie and TV reviews that are relevant to parts and systems approaches – he has reviewed both Inside Out and Inside Out 2 on the Parting Thoughts archive – check it out! I am looking forward to seeing Inside Out 2 soon, in part because of Dr. Gerry’s review.
The Resilient Catholics Community
The RCC has closed registration for the current cohort, but you can check out our RCC landing page and get on the interest list for the October 2024 admission period. The RCC is the center of Souls and Hearts – our flagship community for all Catholic adults who hold fast to authoritative Church teaching as expressed in the Catechism of the Catholic Church and who are willing to commit to a year-long structured program, working in small companies and with a companion on a pilgrimage to much better human formation.
More than 500 have joined the adventure, the RCC pilgrimage to better human formation during the last few years. If you are seeking better self-governance and better self-discipline within your own system so that you can love others better and love God wholeheartedly, the RCC is an answer. Informed by Internal Family Systems and grounded in a Catholic anthropology, there is nothing else like the RCC in existence and so many RCC members have said how much the RCC has helping in their marriages and in their parenting.
Formation for Catholic formators
Catholic therapists, spiritual directors, coaches, and those who professionally accompany others individually — would you like a unique opportunity on your own human formation with other formation professionals in a facilitated small group?
We have an answer for you. A Foundations Experiential Group. These small groups offer you the opportunity to come to know, understand, and love your own parts, especially those parts that you are not in contact with – so that you can experience greater interior integration, more peace, and joy, and most importantly, a greater capacity to love God wholeheartedly and your neighbor much better.
These groups are focused on your personal human formation, informed by Internal Family Systems, and grounded in a Catholic understanding of the human person. We focus on your parts, your inner unity, your development, your integration. All in relationship together on a pilgrimage to much better human formation.
Interested?
- Find out more on our Formation for Formators landing page and on this downloadable PDF flyer.
- Fill out our short form here with the days and times for the FEGs starting in September 2024.
- Call Dr. Peter Malinoski at 317.567.9594 or email at crisis@soulsandhearts.com with any questions.
- Feel free to share this sheet and these links with others who might be interested.
Last call: Recollecting Your Parts for Reconciliation and the Eucharist – In-person event in Indy on July 17
Before the National Eucharistic Congress kicks off with the 7:00 PM Eucharistic Procession on July 17, Dr. Gerry and I are hosting a Souls and Hearts gathering for the pilgrims who can come early, and for those who are local, earlier in the afternoon, ending with a taco bar supper together.
Find all the details and register on our Souls and Hearts’ landing page – it would be great if you can join us in Indy on July 17 from 1:30 to 6:00 PM for the half-day workshop titled Recollecting Your Parts in Reconciliation and the Eucharist. You still have a little time left – registration closes on July 10. More than forty Souls and Hearts members have already committed to coming!
I will be presenting on the Sacrament of Penance and the difficulties our parts can have with Confession. Dr. Gerry will share on how to connect with our Lord more wholeheartedly, with all our parts in the Eucharist. Each presentation will be followed by a 20 to 30-minute experiential exercise.
My personal spiritual director, Fr. Terrance Chartier FFI, will be in the confessional from 3:15 onward to hear confessions, especially from those who might have struggled to approach the sacrament of Penance.
Pray for us…
As always, pray for us at Souls and Hearts, that our apostolate to you flow from the depths of our own interior lives, like a reservoir that is filled and overflowing. And we are praying for you.
Warm regards in Christ and His Mother,
Dr. Peter