Dear Souls and Hearts Member,
Since 2017, author and business coach Scott Jeffrey has made a living out of helping people “discover” their personal values, helping hid clients to “figure out what they stand for.” He writes on his landing page that “Most people can intuit that values are important. But even when you know values are important, discovering your own isn’t necessarily straightforward…. It’s understandable. Few of us have any context for knowing our unique values, and most of us are disconnected from them.” He goes on to assert that “Knowing your values is like having a personal North Star guiding you to your best self.”
So are those statements true?
Let’s discuss it.
Scott Jeffrey’s assumption is that your values are necessarily good. His premise is that problems arise when you conform to other people’s values instead of your own. In his sales pitch he writes: “Do you know what’s most important to YOU? Not to your parents, your friends, or your coworkers, but to YOU. Start living YOUR real values today.”
Hmmm. I think he has this wrong.
I argue that you are already living your actual values, at least in each moment. And that’s the problem.
Period. Full stop.
Let me say this again. The problem is that you are already living your actual values. Because your values are so often disordered. And if you’ve starting living other people’s values, it’s because you valued making other people values your own. What you do actually reflects your actual values: How you spend your time. How you spend your money. What you daydream about. We sometimes try to disown our actions and the values that motivate them by saying “That wasn’t me,” (like in this eponymous Brandi Carlisle song) But it is me, at least a part of me.
We need to remember what a value is. A value is not synonymous with a virtue. Let’s recall the definition of value from Fr. John Hardon’s Catholic Dictionary – a value is:
“That which makes a thing desirable or considered worthwhile. Value stresses the subjective and relative aspect of the good over the objective and absolute character. It means not so much the inherent excellence of an object as how it stands in one’s personal estimation; not so much its built-in perfection as its comparative place in that scale of things called the hierarchy of values. The term value commends itself to subjectivist and relativist moral philosophies, in preference to the common good. Nevertheless, it is also acceptable to Christians provided it includes the notion of an objective moral standard.”
Because values “stress the subjective and relative aspect of the good over the objective and absolute character” they need not be virtuous at all – they may be vices. Anything that we have a disordered attachment to is a value, at least to one part of us.
For example, a man may place great value (manifestly) on being an attractive “Don Juan,” a womanizer, a “playa” who values having sex with a different partner each evening. In this man, there is a latent value, deeper and unacknowledged, of the need for a mother who loves him, unlike his natural mother – a need for the Blessed Virgin Mary to heal his mother wounds and deprivations, that is rejected, distorted, and transformed into insatiable sexual hunger.
Let’s take another example. An “involuntarily celibate” man may at the manifest level greatly value treating females with contempt and hostility to pay them back for feeling rejected by women and have the satisfaction of revenge; at the same time, at a deeper level, parts of him hold a latent value (outside of his awareness) to have the same daily sexcapades as the “Don Juan” mentioned above, with similar latent needs.
Part of the muddle of discussing values is the lack clarity in thinking about and conceptualizing values. In my last reflection, titled What Are Your Personal Values? I make some critical distinctions among different kinds of values, defining different types.
Most people are not aware of many of their actual values — I agree with Scott Jeffrey on that. Why? Let’s look at a second distinction I made in my last reflection, between manifest values and latent values.
Manifest values are the values we hold in our awareness – we recognize them and can think about them. Latent values, on the other hand, are in the unconscious, outside of our awareness.
Jeffrey, in his “Core Values Workshop” seems to be on the hunt for actual, latent values – those that his clients already possess, outside of conscious awareness. That’s why he focuses on discovering them. And he assumes that they are good and that you should follow them, as “your personal North Star.” But that is bad advice.
In our last reflection we discussed several ways to identify the actual values that you currently hold – both the manifest values (those on the surface, in your conscious awareness) and the deeper, latent values of which you might be unaware. Why? So that these actual values can come into the light of conscious awareness and be deliberately evaluated for their actual moral qualities. Catholics should not want unconscious, latent values motivating us without us being able to engage our intellects and wills.
The bottom line is that we need to choose our values. Consciously. Deliberately. Thoughtfully. Prayerfully. Through discernment. Not blindly follow the values we already have, because they may be disordered, maladaptive, and even sinful.
A nuance: actual values vs. aspirational values
In the last reflection, I made a distinction between these actual values (which may be ordered or disordered, wholesome or destructive) and aspirational values – these are the values that my innermost self aspires to hold, that I would like to have at the core of my being.
As a reminder, actual values are the values we hold right now – they can be morally good or evil, ordered or disordered. Aspirational values are those values we desire to have in the future. Aspirational values are values we cherish but do not yet possess, values we have not yet integrated into the way we live. As youngsters, our earliest values are actual values – these values are formed into us by others, starting before the age of reason and we didn’t choose them. Aspirational values in adults in contrast, can be deliberately chosen. Our efforts are oriented to making our aspirational values become our actual values. When they do, they become guardrails to keep us on course, making sure that the means we use to follow our vision are wholesome and good. Solid values also light our way, like the lanterns in the artwork above.
But there’s a catch even there, for as I noted earlier, even our aspirational values may not be virtuous, such as the involuntarily celibate man who aspires to effectively disparage and humiliate women instead of being so afraid of them or a dictator who treasures the idea of taking over neighboring nations and establishing an empire.
So as Catholics, we need to ensure that our aspirational values correspond to objective moral standards or we will get lost. Those objective moral standards are our real North Star.
A complicating factor — parts
Now I know I promised you last time that we’d get to the nuts and bolts of writing your personal values statement in this reflection, but it’s not yet time. We need to do some more conceptual work to get ready. And to be honest, I’ve found writing my own personal values statement much more difficult than I imagined – part of it may be my managers making it more complicated than it has to be, but also, I have been unsatisfied with the resources I’ve found to aid Catholics in writing personal values statements. So I am taking on the heavy conceptual lifting.
Much of the reason I’m dissatisfied with almost all of the literature on values statements is because the vast majority of those who think and write about values (including Scott Jeffrey) assume that each person has a single, homogenous, monolithic personality. And many of them do not even seem to appreciate that we have an unconscious, that so much of our psychological activity is outside our conscious awareness. This is part of our cultural conditioning, a facile assumption in the modern Western world, and I discuss it at length in Interior Integration for Catholics podcast episodes 116 Why a Single Personality is Not Enough and 117 Discover the Parts Who Make Up Your “Personality” as well as in the reflection from August 24, 2022 titled Why I Reject the Concept of “Personality”.
Each of the parts of us who is not in right relationship with our innermost self will have a different set of values, based on their experiences, how they make sense of their experiences, their agendas to meet attachment needs, and their integrity needs.
Ultimately, I believe that so much inner conflict and inner tension is about these competing and contradictory values – latent and manifest, actual and aspirational – among our unintegrated parts. We can sense this at an intuitive level – we often say and hear things like “Part of me wants to exercise tonight and another part of me just wants to veg out and watch Netflix.” The first part values self-care and physical fitness and the second part values rest and “recreation” by zoning out in front of the screen.
These internal, intrapsychic battles, with our own parts at war within our own systems over their competing values set us up for conflict with other people. Our own internal lack of peace and our own inner disorder, the battles among our own parts inside of us that spill out into our external relationships, as St. James tells us in chapter 4, verse 1 of his epistle: Those conflicts and disputes among you, where do they come from? Do they not come from your cravings that are at war within you? These cravings reflect the different values that different parts have. In Internal Family Systems workshops, I’ve heard senior IFS trainer Mike Elkin say that all interpersonal conflicts are caused by moral issues, and I think he’s right – those interpersonal conflicts are driven by the various moral sensibilities and differences in values among the parts of both parties, often expressed through intense desires or cravings.
And to add another layer to this, when we value or love the wrong sorts of things for ourselves, when we allow parts of us to dominate us with their own narrow agendas, valuing lesser goods over greater goods, that inevitably leads us to fail in loving others. Anthony Flood summarizing St. Thomas Aquinas’ position on this on page 22 of his excellent book The Metaphysical Foundations of Love:
The wicked person’s self-love predominantly loves [i.e., values] the inferior characteristics of himself at the expense of this full personal self as a rational being. He loves the wrong sorts of things, or at least, he loves things that, while good, are loved at the expense of higher goods. Thus, even under the best of circumstances, when a person attempts to will goods to another with the love of friendship, the goods in question will not be appropriate. He will gravitate toward the willing of goods perfective of the body material aspects of the other at the expense of those goods perfective of the other’s fully personal nature. Moreover, the tendency of pride prompts him to view other persons more and more as means for his use or pleasure instead of beings to be loved for their own sake.
What we value, what we love, what we consider to be “our precious” is vitally important. As God revealed to another Dominican Doctor of the Church, St. Catherine of Siena, in her The Dialogue, Chapter 60, p. 115, “Love transforms one into what one loves.”
Another complication: Blending with spiritual manager parts
In my experience, when Catholics deliberately choose values through a process of discernment, that generally happens with they are blended with a team of manager parts who direct spiritual beliefs and activities. Let’s consider a Catholic woman, in her 40s or 50s who has three prominent spiritual manager parts – a Catholic Standard Bearer (CSB), who holds her to high standards of belief, conduct, and thinking and is very invested in moral rectitude, greatly fearing being unacceptable to God and thus rejected; an Inner Critic (IC), who provides a near constant stream of negative feedback in an effort to make her live up to the standards of the CSB, and a Self-Sacrificer (SS) who deeply believes that the best way to try to get her needs met is to sacrifice herself and conform to the wishes of others and denying herself.
This kind of spiritual management team often comes up with a list of aspirational values that sound very holy and noble, very saintly and sublime but actually are not. And the aspirational values might totally neglect the needs carried by others parts of her. For example, this woman, motivated by her Self-Sacrificer might agree to everything her pastor asks her to do at the parish, fueled by the prompting of her Catholic Standard Bearer: meals after funerals, teaching religious education, serving on the finance council, etc. because “that’s what a good Catholic woman, striving for sanctity would do” according to these three spiritual managers who idealize priests and are prone to neglect her needs for limits and boundaries so that she could better carry out her primary duties of her state in life as a wife and mother.
Over the course of my career, I’ve met with many women and some men with this kind of spiritual management team who are trying to “die to self” – but that attempt fails because they don’t yet possess themselves. They lack the boundaries around the self and enough self-agency to freely give themselves. They frequently end up being exploited by others, and their “dying to self” is really a caricature of holiness, not the real thing — as others wipe their feet on them like doormats. Their spiritual manager teams are trying to do the algebra of the spiritual formation without a solid grounding in the arithmetic of human formation (see IIC episode 134 Looking at Integrated Personal Formation Through a Mathematical Lens for more depth on this metaphor). They are trying to eat the meat of the advanced spiritual life before they are ready; what they really need is milk (cf. 1 Corinthians 4).
The upshot of this is that the means we value must not only be good in themselves, but also be developmentally appropriate for where we are in in the human, spiritual, and intellectual dimensions of our personal formation. They must fit our current situation.
Valuing means and valuing ends
This brings up one more distinction to make in values – valuing means and valuing ends. Fr. John Hardon defines a means as:
That which is intended not for its own sake but for the sake of something else. A means always supposes an end or purpose; it is called a means because it lies between the agent and the end, and its use brings the agent to the goal or end. The same thing may be both means and end, in different respects, for it may be sought both for its own sake and for the sake of something better. This is called an intermediate end, and there may be a long series of such intermediate ends, as when a person wants A in order to get B, and B in order to get C, and so on.
Decades ago, when I was much younger, my Catholic Standard Bearer (my “Good Boy” part) and the rest of my managers, in pursuit of holiness, and reasoning on their own decided that what I needed was to pray the entire Divine Office every day. Why? Because the Divine Office is the official prayer of the Church, so it must be best. And I was going to pray it in Latin. Why? Because Latin is the official language of the Church, so it must be best.
And I prayed not the new revised Liturgy of the Hours, but rather the Divinum Officium because it was best to include all the hours that were dropped from the new form. And I prayed these hours at the prescribed time of the day. And it took about two hours. My spiritual managers reified the means of the Divine Office into an end. My young wife was unhappy with this, thought it was excessive, especially as it kept me from some of my duties of state. And many of my parts rebelled against this as well, impelling me to act out in rebellion.
I started spiritual direction with a holy and ancient Spanish priest who had endured great suffering and sacrifices in the Spanish civil war. My spiritual managers respected this priest. He was appalled at my rigid adherence to the Divinum Officium, recognized that I was making an idol out of it, and ordered me to stop praying it immediately in favor of a plan of life much more fitting for my state in life. And I realized that my spiritual managers were operating from their assumptions about what God was desiring from me – assumptions that were very distorted because of their warped images of God, and never corrected because these parts actually didn’t connect relationally with God in prayer, because prayer, was, well… reciting the Divinum Officium (in Latin).
The point of this story is to help recognize that not only do we value ends, but we value means. A personal vision statement describes the end we are seeking – our final, perfected state, as I discussed in the August 12, 2024 reflection titled Writing your personal vision statement as a Catholic. Our mission statement and our goals describe the means we will use to get to our envisioned end, as I described in the first reflection in our series:
These three distinct but related statements work together in an integrated way to answer the question – the vision statement is your guiding star, the glowing city on the hill to which you make your pilgrimage, setting the overarching destination. The mission statement lays out the specific path, giving guidance to the “how” of making the journey. And the values statement brings in what motivates and moves you, letting you know what to bring on the journey and what to leave behind.
So now we have some of the intellectual and conceptual material that will help us choose our aspirational values. Next time on September 23, 2024, we will get into some examples of different values statements from both secular and Catholic sources as we continue our journey of more deeply understanding values. Then, in the following reflection on October 7, I anticipate offering you the step-by-step guidelines on writing personal values statements.
To help you along with understanding values, check out the recording of our first values workshop from Friday, September 6, 2024 – here’s the video and audio. Such a great discussion, thank you to all who participated. Our next Zoom workshop will be oriented toward identifying both our actual values and determining our aspirational values. If you have reached out to me already at crisis@soulsandhearts.com, you should already have received the link via an email from me. If you’d like to get on board now, just email me and I will put you on the list.
###
Episode 148 of the IIC podcast released today, titled The Integration of Personal Formation at Franciscan University
Fr. Dave Pivonka TOR, president of Franciscan University joins me to discuss the integration of personal formation for college students in this 40-minute episode (video and audio). We address the danger of over-spiritualizing – spiritual bypassing – and how many of the struggles in the Church in the last 50 years are due to human formation deficits. Fr. Pivonka shares his insights about how transformation first happens interiorly, inside oneself – and then radiates outward to change the world. We discuss the difficulties that college students frequently face, the importance of community, concerns about pietism, and embracing our true identity. College students and their parents will not want to miss this episode. Please be sure to like and subscribe and to review us on Apple Podcasts as well – that helps us get the word out.
Dr. Peter on the air..
Check out Chris Stefanick’s recent episode Getting to the Root of Harmful Behaviors With a REAL Psychologist (video or audio) where he interviews me about narcissism inside each of us.
Also, check out the experiential exercise and demo I did with Joey Pontarelli on his podcast, Restored: Helping Children of Divorce in the episode titled An Exercise to Heal (video, audio)
Resilient Catholics Community
Figuring out your parts and the values they each hold on your own can be a formidable task. There are many online resources specifically focused on Internal Family Systems but there is only one Catholic community that is centered specifically on providing you with a structured, guided program grounded in a Catholic understanding of the human person: The Resilient Catholics Community.
The RCC is for those who seek interior integration at a very human level, in their human formation, their natural formation, those who are willing to shore up their natural foundations for their spiritual work, who are humble enough to really learn the human formation arithmetic so that they can do their spiritual formation algebra better.
As part of the application process, you will complete the PartsFinder Pro, recently revised, updated, with new norms based on nearly 500 Catholics who have already completed the PFP. The PFP helps you identify 9-15 of your parts, their relationships inside you, and their values; and the PFP is still only available to those who apply to the RCC.
Check out if the Resilient Catholics Community is right for you here – you can listen to our 19-minute guided reflection here to help discern about applying. And get on our interest list on our landing page – we are sending out regular informational updates to those who are considering joining us.
Pray for us…
As always, I ask you to pray for us. We are praying for you. Our whole enterprise at Souls and Hearts has to be grounded in prayer and lifted up to God and our Lady. Without God’s grace, we can do nothing. So please pray for us as part of your daily intentions.
Warm regards in Christ and His Mother,
Dr. Peter