IIC 154: Attachment and Learning How to Love with Dr. Peter Martin

Dr. Peter: [00:00:00] I am really excited because I have a very special guest with us on the podcast, Dr. Peter Martin, clinical psychologist, faithful Catholic, Level 1 trained IFS therapist and a dear friend of mine, but also most of all, a beloved little son of God, a beloved little son of God. And he is with us for episode 154, Attachment and Learning How to Love, here on the Interior Integration for Catholics podcast. And this is such a wonderful opportunity, I just gotta say, I have been friends with Peter. How long have we been friends? It’s been more than ten years. Yeah, it’s been a long time. And you know, this goes back to when you were an intern, right?

Dr. Peter Martin: [00:00:49] Yeah, I think it was my internship year, 07, 08, maybe? I think we met at Saint John’s University, Society of Catholic Social Scientists.

Dr. Peter: [00:00:57] Yep, yep, in New York, Queens, back in the day. So just a little bit of background here on this podcast. What we’re doing, the reason we’re having this episode, the reason we have this podcast, is to really help you to embrace your identity as a beloved little son or daughter of God. Really, that’s what it’s all about. It’s all about you embracing your identity as a beloved little son or daughter of God. And there are so many things that get in the way in our formation. Yes, in our intellectual formation, yes, in our spiritual formation, but also in our human formation, the basic human formation. And one of the reasons I’m so excited that Dr. Martin is with us today is because he’s an expert in that human formation. Dr. Martin is a licensed psychologist in the state of Nebraska. He’s the Internship Director of Integrated Training and Formation at Immaculate Heart of Mary Counseling Center. That’s in Lincoln, Nebraska, and this is the only Catholic APA-accredited internship site in the country. It’s located in Lincoln, where he is responsible for the psychological health and faith-integrated formation of doctoral psychologists, interns, and other clinical staff.

Dr. Peter: [00:02:20] He provided counseling services from 2012 to 2013 and in 2020 to seminarians at the Institute for Priestly Formation. That’s in the summer program in Omaha, Nebraska, and that was the program that Fr. John Horn was so involved with, he was in our last episode. He served on the executive board of the Catholic Psychotherapy Association from 2013 to 2016. He’s also served on the board of Witness to Love, marriage preparation and renewal ministry, since 2015, and helped them to develop their virtues-based and attachment-focused workshop and curriculum. So his areas of interest include supervising therapists in faith-integrated and trauma-informed treatments of psychological disorders, marital therapy, forgiveness therapy, treating attachment-focused implicit God image problems, and in the social scientific understanding of religious conversion. Dr. Martin and his wife Larissa have three rambunctious children. His family owns a 13-acre homestead that has chickens, turkeys, guineas, six Dexter cattle, and an Arabian horse named Lucy. So, without any more further ado, so good to have you here, Dr. Peter Martin.

Dr. Peter Martin: [00:03:26] Thank you, Dr. Malinoski. Yeah, it’s an honor to be here, too. You know, we’ve gone back so far and this human formation series has gone back quite a bit. And so it’s an honor to be here, especially considering all the people that preceded me. Thanks so much for having me.

Dr. Peter: [00:03:40] Well, it is a pleasure to have you to close all of this. And when, as I was thinking about how do we end this series on human formation, the last three episodes, you’re going to be like my key point man, to bring it all back together, to kind of tie up some loose ends and so forth. So, as we were discussing these episodes, I got really excited about that.

Dr. Peter Martin: [00:04:02] Yeah. Great to be here.

Dr. Peter: [00:04:03] So like, where do you want to start? Let’s just get going in it.

Dr. Peter Martin: [00:04:07] Yeah. As I’ve, because I’ve listened to pretty much all of the human formation series — in fact, some of them multiple times, just because they were so good. But the one thing that kind of stood out to me is, doing human formation well requires having all the formation domains in mind at the beginning. If you have a segregated or siloed human formation, then eventually that leads to disintegrated formation, which is the opposite of what we want. We want integration, and we need the truth about the broader, contextualized goal. So there are many forces that can pull us away from that. And so I wanted to kind of give an example. Dan Siegel has this great example where he says, if you just take hydrogen separate from oxygen and you look at the qualities, right, and how they function and so forth. And you think that you can just take those two separate kind of things and then know what it’s going to be like when they get together, it’s going to be a problem. Because water, H2O, has many different qualities and properties than those two separate molecules.

Dr. Peter: [00:05:10] Well, yeah, I mean, hydrogen and oxygen, both highly flammable, for one thing.

Dr. Peter Martin: [00:05:13] That’s a very good point.

Dr. Peter: [00:05:16] Whereas water, you know, we use that to put out fires, right. So it’s such an interesting, I’ve not heard him say that. And so, that is a fascinating. Yeah. In other words we’re talking about integration again. You know, we’re talking about integration.

Dr. Peter Martin: [00:05:28] It is. Hence the podcast name, exactly. Yeah, and I think that integration, Peter, I think that integration, it needs to be not just theo-centric, so not just God-focused, but specifically Christo-centric. It has to be with Christ at the center. And by using Christ at the center or having him at the center, it means Trinitarian-focused. And so why do I see that? Why do I say that? Because we know that Christ is the true man. So if we’re looking at human formation, he’s the exemplar of what a human being is. And the natural needs to be connected to the supernatural. We need to know all those components before we even take step one, in some ways, right. It’s really important to kind of go for that. Probably the most cited words from the Second Vatican Council’s documents comes from Gaudium et Spes, the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World. And it says that “the truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light. Christ fully reveals man to man himself and makes his supreme calling clear.” So he reveals us to us. That’s so important. So though he was fully divine, he’s also fully human, and he’s a divine person and the exemplar. So it’s not enough just to know Christ in His humanity. If we don’t know him, we don’t fully know ourselves and our humanity. To not know Christ, the God-man, is to not fully know others and their humanity, and to not know Christ, the divine person, is to not fully know God and our supreme calling to him. So the idea would be formation at the human level, at that human domain, needs to have a vision. It needs to have that kind of Christ-centered vision. And I love this Christo-centric quote from C.S. Lewis, one of my favorite authors. Probably the people listening, probably one of their favorite authors as well. He says, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen. Not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” Yeah, it sheds light on everything that we could not have had without it.

Dr. Peter: [00:07:32] So this idea, and I’ve been reading about this, you’ve been reading a little bit about this too. This idea that Christ as man — actually, this is the Franciscan thesis, right? This idea that he was going to come to Earth in the Incarnation one way or another. I mean, it wasn’t dependent on original sin, that he was going to come because we needed him to complete us, even in the Garden of Eden, even before the fall, prelapsarian, all of that, that he was going to take on our humanity. He did take on our humanity to show us the way, because he’s the way, the truth and the life.

Dr. Peter Martin: [00:08:09] That’s right. Yeah, I think, and I know there’s differences of opinion on that. I know some Thomistic circles may not agree with that statement entirely. But I think there’s a lot of wisdom to it. And I think that if he wants and he wills our highest good, if he wants our total human flourishing, it does require that supernatural. That is where we are most human, is when we have the supernatural graces. And that’s us being human beings at the highest level, ultimately in the beatific vision in heaven. And so with that kind of at the outset, that kind of changes things, than saying we’re just simply fancy apes or fancy monkeys, right? It changes what we focus on. It changes the way we work with them in formation and so forth.

Dr. Peter: [00:08:52] So why is human formation necessary at all? Why don’t we just jump right to spiritual formation?

Dr. Peter Martin: [00:08:58] The main reason, or one of the key reasons of why we need human formation, Peter, is because if we truly believe that grace informs, transforms, and perfects nature, if we really believe that. I think there’s a correlate there that grace informs, transforms, and perfects nurture. But if the pathway of grace is so crooked, let’s say that the human nature, so to speak, is crooked and whatever. If I’m trying to shine a light to the end of this tunnel, and there’s all kinds of crooked kind of corners and so forth, that light can’t get through. And so with human formation, the idea is to do kind of like what Saint John the Baptist — I know he’s a patron of Souls and Hearts — is to make those pathways straight. And so then there are fewer obstacles to that light being shined into the human person and transforming it. So that’s kind of the key. And that kind of gets us back to in some ways what brought us here. I know when I first spoke with you about this excellent series, you had told me to make sure I listened to this one podcast that you had done, and it looked at the real kind of underlying reasons why you wanted to focus on human formation so much.

Dr. Peter: [00:10:09] Is that 131, On God’s Role in Your Human Formation?

Dr. Peter Martin: [00:10:13] Yeah, I think that’s accurate. Exactly. So this kind of gets into, Peter, you started off, you said human formation is the basis of all formation according to St. John Paul II.

Dr. Peter: [00:10:22] That’s Pastores Dabo Vobis.

Dr. Peter Martin: [00:10:24] Exactly. Pastores Dabo Vobis. And one of the things you’ll read throughout, like in the church’s documents, I haven’t read the most recent one released by Pope Francis on integration and so forth. But one of the things you’ll see over and over is when it comes to human formation, you’ll hear this word, “affective maturity”. You’ll hear this over and over. And though human formation is more than simply affective maturity, right, it’s kind of the matter of the human person and how that operates, it is such an important piece. Now, affective maturity, you could say, is a person who’s able to respond in a calm, compassionate way, regardless of the situation. They can respond in a prudent way. So the right response to reality, ultimately. And one of the things that stands out to me about that, and we’ll get into attachment theory more later. But if we just get into internal family systems, they have a number of ways to kind of work with developing self-leadership. And I would say that one of the major outcomes would be affective maturity, if a person is truly self-led and integrated. But they have this, the first one, they’ll talk about externalization. So you take a part, have them draw on a piece of paper what this part looks like, okay, externalizing that part.

Dr. Peter Martin: [00:11:35] The second one would be more direct access, where the person speaks from a part. And they don’t say, “I have a part that’s angry.” They say, “I am angry.” But the go-to for Dick Schwartz would be insight-oriented. And that’s where I do the you-turn, and I notice a part, and I say, “I have an angry part.” So it’s kind of an insight-focused statement. Now, if we take that kind of focus, let’s expand that to the interpersonal domain. So that’s interpersonal. Now let’s expand it, because we know essential to the great commandment is love of neighbor. So take that and you’ll hear Dan Siegel use language like mindsight, which is basically that self-reflective capacity, knowing the parts, so to speak, inside of you, but also at the same time knowing the parts of another person and how they’re reacting and how that affects the relationship. If we take that and we take this idea that it should be Christo-centric, then what that opens the way for is the vision of Christ. So you could say, now I start to look at myself through the lens of Christ.

Dr. Peter Martin: [00:12:39] I start to look at you through the lens of Christ. I start to look at everything through the lens of Christ, and now I get to a deeper truth and a deeper reality. And it’s actually the humblest of realities to be able to focus on that Christo-centric vision. So then it’s Christ-sight and it’s Christ actualization. So now it starts to develop and it manifests in the way I live, the way I think, the way I feel. You know, I don’t really want my fallen nature actualized fully. You know, it’s like that could be problematic in a way. I want Christ to be actualized in me, in my unique gifts, my unique charisms, your unique gifts, your unique charisms, everybody’s gifts and charisms. That way, kind of like I think of the Gospel writers, you know, even though they wrote in different ways and you can tell their emphases might have been a little different. Christ actualized, or the Holy Spirit actualized through them as they wrote on paper or on papyrus, I guess. So Christ-sight is what we could have. We could have the Christ-choice, let’s say, but ultimately it comes from the Christ-heart, and that’s what we want to have actualized.

Dr. Peter: [00:13:43] So that image, I’m thinking now about the image I put in episode 134, which was the mathematical model, where, you know, there was like this block on the bottom, which was human formation. And then on top of that was spiritual formation in a block. And right next to that was the intellectual formation, and the sort of top layer was the pastoral formation. This is actually much more integrated. That was sort of a representation to try to understand, sort of like a progression. But yeah, we’re seeing this, Christ infused in all of these. It’s not just located in the spiritual formation, for example, or the pastoral formation, but also in the intellectual and in the human.

Dr. Peter Martin: [00:14:21] Absolutely, yeah. One way to think of that, what you’re saying. I’m glad you’re pointing that out. So, when they were developing, some of the listeners will know about the Catholic Christian Meta Model of the Person — that big, thick 700 page tome that’s put out by Divine Mercy University.

Dr. Peter: [00:14:34] You and I remember when it was like one page and then it was like 12 pages. And then it grew into this.

Dr. Peter Martin: [00:14:40] That’s right. It’s really been an awesome development. I really appreciate it. We use it a lot in our training program. But one of the things that stood out, they initially, as they were developing, at least from my recollection, they had those three kind of more theologically focused. So reason aided by faith and revelation. And that would be created, good, fallen, yet redeemed. But then the later ones, they basically said you could deduce from philosophical reasoning, or unaided by Christian revelation. The way they write it now is it’s Christian philosophical premises. It’s not as if it’s unaided by Christian kind of approaches, but it’s actually aided by it, because it can easily go astray. I’m thinking of Aristotle’s notion that, you know, an error in the beginning translates a thousandfold in the end. You want to make sure you’re on the right focus, the right path from the get-go. And that’s kind of where the Christo-centric focus is going to help provide.

Dr. Peter: [00:15:34] And we need that. I mean, that’s one place where we depart from Richard Schwartz’s approach, because he had this purely subjective, phenomenological approach that he advocated, where he was going in tabula rasa, blank slate, you know. And what you get as far as the sort of anthropological underpinnings of IFS is whatever his subjectivity informed him of. But we have an advantage because we actually have divine revelation. And so anything that we do on this podcast or in Souls and Hearts or you guys, you know, working over at Immaculate Heart of Mary Counseling Center, we’re harmonizing all of that to be firmly grounded in an authentically Catholic understanding of the human person.

Dr. Peter Martin: [00:16:14] Absolutely. And it’s a great point about Dick Schwartz, too. Even though he’s brilliant, his model is absolutely wonderful, in the applied setting especially, it’s so good. But theoretically, he still is projecting some of his stuff onto his model, and you can sense his aversion to the Christian themes. He says it. He’ll actually write about that in Introductions to a Christian IFS Model. So you can sense that there are parts that come up in certain areas.

Dr. Peter: [00:16:38] And he owns that, actually. Yeah, which is a beautiful thing. So that’s where I would say that we have such great advantages.

Dr. Peter Martin: [00:16:46] Correct. Yeah, it feels almost like we’re cheating. We have this wonderful kind of tradition of philosophy and theology that has helped to kind of guide us on the right path. I mean, when you have minds like Augustine and St. Thomas, like you’re doing quite well. And I oftentimes think about that too, Peter. One of the exchanges we’ll have in our program at Immaculate Heart is we’ll talk about what if instead of Sigmund Freud and B.F. Skinner, it was St. Augustine and Aquinas in the early part of the turn into the 20th century. How different would we be practicing psychology today? I think it would be very similar on many levels, but the emphases would be very different. I think the way we do treatment planning would be different. I think outcomes would be different. You know, so it wouldn’t just be a purely secular mental health improvement. It would be, that’s good to have mental health improved, but also is there a way to do spiritual growth as well throughout this. And so I think you can do both-and. But yeah, so Dick Schwartz, like any human being, projects their own stuff into their model.

Dr. Peter: [00:17:44] I think he might say there were lots of other people contributing and so on and so forth, but it does not have a premise to start from, apart from no premises to start from, you know. And yeah, all that subjectivity can be subtly influenced in a variety of different ways.

Dr. Peter Martin: [00:18:00] It definitely can. Yeah, I remember there was a reporter from Lincoln, Nebraska, which is where I live, and she had commented on something. She said, “There’s no doctrine like no doctrine.” We think that we’re purely open-minded, we’re not biased in any way, shape, or form. But we are. That’s the thing.

Dr. Peter: [00:18:18] Absolutely. So you are an expert in attachment theory?

Dr. Peter Martin: [00:18:22] I’ve read a few books.

Dr. Peter: [00:18:23] Now, all right, let me just tell you, he’s an expert in attachment theory. He was talking about attachment theory before most of us were really dialing into how important it was.

Dr. Peter Martin: [00:18:32] Yeah, I want to thank Paul Vitz for that too, just where I studied at Divine Mercy. I think part of the reason it kind of opened up things for me is because I love integration. I love comparing contrasting schools of thought. And I remember a comment he made about it. He said he thinks that attachment theory is the number one psychological construct that’s developed that can bridge the psychological and the theological sciences. And that has stood out to me. That really rang to me. And so that became a part of my dissertation. And now it’s like a passion of mine, as you know, and so great amount of credit to him for that. And I feel like it opens up many areas of thought, in particular human formation as we’re getting into today.

Dr. Peter: [00:19:14] Beautiful. Yeah, and when we bring in parts and systems thinking, you know, that just brings in a whole other dimension to it. Not just in relating, well, certainly relating internally, sort of the intrapsychic connecting with oneself and loving oneself. But then also, as you put it, right, the turn upward toward God, right, and the turn outward to our neighbor. So if we bring in attachment theory and we supplement that with this parts and systems thinking that IFS has done so much to do and others too — ego state therapy and, you know, the structural theory of dissociation, and DNMS, and there’s a lot of other parts-based theories that we’re bringing in. But yeah, that becomes really powerful. And why? Because it’s all about the two great commandments. Our whole religion is all about love. It’s about loving God, loving neighbor. And upon these two, the entirety of the law and the prophets hang.

Dr. Peter Martin: [00:20:05] Right. Yeah, I agree. And a lot of times in the Catholic circles you’ll hear, you know, love is not an emotion. It’s something you’ll hear over and over. Actually — I mean, truthfully, when we refer to love, it’s to choose to will the good of another. That’s really what we’re going for. But from a passion standpoint or an emotion standpoint, my understanding is that St. Thomas Aquinas considers love the highest of passions, the highest of emotions. So technically it’s both. And especially if we’re trying to become beings of love. And God, who is Love, now becomes incarnate and expresses his love through everything that he does, including the great sacrifice on the cross and so forth. Then we want all aspects of our faculties to be kind of going towards that and seeing what is the highest, most loving approach that we can take. So this is where the affective maturity kind of stuff we get back to full circle. And I find with attachment theory, and I think the short of it is this, if we were to kind of just delve into that a little bit. If we were to have a script for what secure attachment is, it looks something like this. Basically, I get distressed or I encounter a significant obstacle. My attachment system activates, at that point. And so what does that mean? It means mammals, non-human and human mammals, at that point, there’s something kind of wired in us to seek out an attachment figure.

Dr. Peter Martin: [00:21:28] The language is a stronger, wiser other. And if I can trust that that person will be there, and if I seek generally proximity to them, then what happens is eventually there’s a reset that happens. So my attachment system is deactivated, and now I can go and live life as if I had not been as distressed before. Now they call it, the behavioral exploration system kicks in. Why that’s so pivotal is, if I can do that, not only in terms of my relationships, let’s say with my children, as I’m their attachment figure, or my relationship with my wife, or my relationship with God, that means I can live a life of peace. And so much of the spiritual life is trying to help people, and human formation, as we know, is trying to help people maintain that peace, so much so that I love this kind of metaphor from Fr. De Caussade. He has this wonderful metaphor where he says, “Peace of soul is the principle of the spiritual life.” And then he says, and if something attacks that peace of soul, then we basically should stop everything we’re doing to regain that holy peace. And he uses the metaphor of fire. It’s as if a fire had broken out. And the first thing we do when a fire breaks out, like if a fire broke out right now, Peter, we would stop the recording and put the fire out. Even though I like doing this, I think we should probably put out the fire. And then return to what we were doing before. That’s how pivotal that is. And so to help people to have psychosomatic peace, spiritual peace, is really essential.

Dr. Peter: [00:23:07] Well, and it goes back to, it’s hard to develop in relationship, it’s hard to deepen in relationship, if you’re scared, if you’re anxious, if you’re agitated. And that’s why I love this word recollection so much. It’s sort of like if you’re not recollected, you know, then you can’t be fully present to the moment, to the person, to God.

Dr. Peter Martin: [00:23:30] No. And they’re starving for that. Like most people really want that presence, that intimacy. They haven’t gotten it very often, a lot of people, unfortunately. But yeah, they’re craving it just by nature. And so for us to provide that internal presence. So we’re aware of our parts, we’re aware of other people’s parts, we’re present to them. It’s such a healing kind of source of life. Definitely. One point that you had brought up in a previous talk, I keep forgetting the podcast number, but about how there’s a wealth of information from secular sources. Now, attachment theory, part of the reason I’m really drawn to it is I love science and data, as you know. One particular set of studies that kind of stands out to me, there’s a guy named Alan Sroufe, I think he’s at the University of Minnesota, might be an emeritus professor. But he began a longitudinal study about a year after I was born. I think it was like 1976. And they started a number of different places, but they had women who were pregnant. And they did adult attachment interviews, and basically they were looking at, how did they think back to their childhood and was it secure or insecure? Then after the baby was born, they did a strange situation procedure to see at about, let’s say, 18 months or so of age, to see how secure or insecurely attached they were. And the correspondence on the attachment security level of the mother when she was pregnant and the child at about age 18 months, was very high. And so the idea is like, that’s how that stuff gets passed down. Now, again, not just the mother by any means, but the mother does play an important role in that. There are other factors, the father, environment, you know. Nonetheless, it was a fascinating thing.

Dr. Peter Martin: [00:25:13] And that transformed the state of understanding developmental psychology, because they found that even with resilience. Alan Sroufe will say things, that resilience, he says, yes, it’s true that these are some people that are resilient. But he says, if you look back at their history and if you had studied them when they were an infant, chances are they probably had a more secure history than some of the others that aren’t resilient. So it seems to play a big role at an implicit level. You know, for those that are viewing, one of the things to think about with attachment is just this circle of security. And this will play out as we talk about human relationships and our formation, because human formation, in my estimation, is best done not only in an intrapsychic way, of course, but there’s these close dyadic relationships with a formator. Someone who, you know, is like an attachment figure. Maybe they can feel a little bit like a father figure. I’ve had a few of those in my life at key points, otherwise I probably wouldn’t be here right now with you. But they were really important for me to kind of stay on the path and to continue forward and remain secure. But the idea is that if you think of a circle and on the left are these hands. And they basically provide two major functions, let’s say. When a person is distressed, they can turn back on the lower part of the circle, turn back to the hands on the left side, and they can help the person to have their feelings organized, to help them make sense of their feelings, to help them feel safe and comforted, and all those good primary conditions of attachment security you’ve talked about. We talk about them a lot, because that is a paradigm I think about many times, pretty much most clients.

Dr. Peter Martin: [00:26:46] And then once they do that, once that’s done well, the reset happens and now they can go out and enjoy things. I want to tell one story about that. So I have a son. My oldest son, as you know, he had cancer when he was very young. I think he was doing chemotherapy about two weeks before his first birthday. So it was just a tragic thing to see from a parent’s standpoint and the poor little guy. But I remember just reading, trying to figure out how do I help him to calm down. Because you got all the medical trauma and you got all this other pain he’s going through. And, you know, he had more pain in the first few years of life than most of us have had the first ten or so. But anyway, one of the things that I remember reading is this guy Peter Levine. He says what parents oftentimes do wrong is they don’t spend enough time in the “safe haven position.” When their child is distressed, even at a young age, he says, we’ll look at their cues, their nonverbals. But then what happens is we kind of think they’re okay and we think they’re fine to be put down. But then we put them down and they want to get picked up again. And so he says what he recommends is, let the child determine when they’re ready to be put down. Because the idea is that they’ve come to us because they’re feeling unsafe, insecure, and now they turn to us. And if I hold him long enough, and I noticed this when I started doing this more this way, when I would hold him, then what happened is he would literally start to get bored with me. And being bored with me is a good thing.

Dr. Peter Martin: [00:28:12] So what would happen is his eyes started turning outward to the environment, and where is the toy, and where’s this and where’s that? So his attachment system had deactivated, his exploratory behavioral system, if you want to call it that, had activated. And now he wants to go play. Wonderful. That is kind of the beautiful thing. And that can happen thousands of times over the course of a child’s life or a person’s life. And so what does this look like? Because even when we’re saying like human formation doesn’t fully happen until at the age of reason, and you can start turning inward or whatever. Attachment theory would say, integration begins in that dyadic relationship. Now it’s already there because we’re made in God’s image and likeness, we have a self. But when it comes to that integration, human formation is really nurtured in that attachment relationship. That’s why when you see some things like people that have severe dissociative disorders, like dissociative identity disorder, which has been studied in 3 or 4 continents, it’s about 1% of the population walking around. What they say is that it’s less like they have like a shattered glass with lots of fragments. And there it is. But it used to be a full plate of glass or mirror. It’s almost like those pieces were never put together to begin with. And so it was already disintegrated, fragmented self, so to speak, and parts and so forth. But even though the self was there and it’s unified, it’s the image of God, but the way they experience their parts is very different than the rest of us. Now, Peter, you had another point. I’m just kind of going through the list here. I really liked your points. So many of the spiritual problems are spiritual consequences of human formation deficits. I like this point a lot, and this is something I know you’ve seen in your clinical work.

Dr. Peter: [00:29:54] Oh, yeah.

Dr. Peter Martin: [00:29:54] Theoretical. There’s a lot of information from the psychodynamic world, looking at God image, and how we project things onto God. The attachment literature began around 1990. So we’re looking at, you know, 34 years of attachment to God research. And one thing I mentioned, Paul Vitz, he wrote a book. It’s called Faith of the Fatherless. Great book, The Psychology of Atheism. And his position is that for all these kind of atheists that a lot of people have heard of, so it would be Nietzsche and Marx and Sartre and Freud, I think Skinner is in there, and a few others. He went through their biographical and autobiographical data, and what he found is pretty much across the board — he calls it a dysfunctional father hypothesis — that dad was either emotionally distant or physically distant or both and sometimes abusive. And what happens is that experience was a human formation deficit. And now this gets projected onto God, and now God becomes like this boss, like this annoying boss or this abusive figure that the person doesn’t want to be around. And so that is a clear cut example. Now again, not all atheism is that cut and dry. I’m not saying, there’s many more variables there, but I do think that’s an important variable in this discussion.

Dr. Peter: [00:31:07] And we kind of talk about that a lot in episodes 23 to 29 of the podcast, which is where we got into the 14 different God images. We went through on those very early in this podcast history. But yeah, absolutely. Because yeah, we generalize, we make God in the image and likeness in a sense of those authority figures that we know. And this is all unconscious. It’s not like you you sit down and you say, oh, I’m going to imagine that God is like this. It’s just sort of like baked in as part of the formational processes that happen before we are even able to think in any kind of mature way.

Dr. Peter Martin: [00:31:44] Absolutely. That’s some of your best work, by the way. I like that discussion. Yeah. Christopher Hitchens, he’s one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. So he’s along with like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and others. But anyway, he died recently, but he made this comment one time. And you can sense, like, how much his human history probably played a role in this statement. He was saying, “I can think of no worse of an interior North Korean celestial dictator than the way that you guys talk about God.” I don’t know, can you imagine if that’s the way you experience God, how painful that would be. He said, “He inundates your every thought. He knows your feelings. He knows your experiences.” It’s almost like he wanted God to just get away. Just get away from me. Chesterton says atheism is less of a denial of God and more of a defiance of him, in some cases. And you can see how this background. But when you talk to people that have a deep relationship with God, they don’t think of him as a North Korean dictator. Like it’s the opposite. He’s a totally loving, merciful Father who’s constantly accessible and present whenever they need him. It’s a very different experience, but connected to human formation. And so I wanted to give a little bit of a pictorial for the audience. Now, I first came across this actually, it was a discussion with you, is this idea that these three points of a triangle represent this kind of experience of God. So you have God at top. So let’s say personal, loving, merciful.

Dr. Peter: [00:33:08] So God as he is.

Dr. Peter Martin: [00:33:09] God as is, right, exactly. Who he is in himself. And then you have, with the human person on the lower points of the triangle, you have kind of more of the, if you want to call it the left brain-ish, kind of logical, verbal, you might just call it doctrinal, something you get out of the catechism, something you’d read in a theology text. Right, so very left brain. It’s more explicit than detailed. It’s more cognitive, more consciously aware.

Dr. Peter: [00:33:32] And that’s sometimes called the God concept. If you go back to, like, Ana-Maria Rizzuto and The Birth of the Living God, like she’s making that distinction between the God image and the God concept, although there’s a lot of variation in the language on this stuff. So you kind of have to really understand what the person means. So you’re calling that the explicit God image, I might call that the God concept. And that’s in contrast to the implicit God image, some people just call it the God image.

Dr. Peter Martin: [00:33:58] Exactly. Well stated. And some will just call it, they’ll compare it as doctrinal vs. experiential. Now, whether or not that covers all the bases, I don’t know. But yeah, implicit God image, more right brain-ish. And by the way, more right brain would be what some would call the seat of the unconscious. Right, attachment theorists would say more right brain experiences, social, emotional, implicit kind of things. So it’s more emotional, more non-conscious.

Dr. Peter: [00:34:21] It’s kind of like what you know in your bones. And that’s often not even available in conscious awareness. You know, whereas the more doctrinal or explicit or the God concept, that is what you choose to believe in a sense. It’s what you profess about God.

Dr. Peter Martin: [00:34:38] Yeah, exactly. And I think part of the reason you feel it in your bones is because I think it comes early. I think those experiences, we talked about how they had already been able to operationally define and assess for attachment types of security or insecurity, already at 18 months of age, right. So even before they could talk. So you already have something that they’re feeling in their body. There’s a certain sense of neuroceptive threat and fear are limited or a lot. And so this stuff, because so much of the infant’s life is connected to the mother and her responsiveness and the father and his responsiveness, it just makes sense that especially in Christianity, more so than other religions, but especially in Christianity, which is such a deeply personal relationship. It’s not like a distant figure or a distant force like in Buddhism or something. It would make sense that those attachment dynamics would be more active in projecting onto who God is. Now, what happens with many of our clients is you have this kind of a triangle, right? So one thing about the previous one is ultimately, we’d like the doctrinal and experiential to match on that point. So if we can get it up right at that top point of the triangle, that’d be awesome.

Dr. Peter: [00:35:50] All three are the same. God as he is. The doctrinal understanding, that’s some intellectual formation there, right? Like catechesis or whatever. Like we understand intellectually where God is and who he is. I mean, to the degree we can as finite human beings. But then we also feel it. It’s like in our bones, at that level.

Dr. Peter Martin: [00:36:10] Yeah, and I can’t remember if John Paul II, if he says subjective objectivity or is it objective subjectivity. One of those two. But they kiss. And ultimately the idea is, can we get it up to the very top point, all three at once?

Dr. Peter: [00:36:22] Does it all come together in one point?

Dr. Peter Martin: [00:36:24] Exactly. Yeah, that would be bliss. That might be beatific vision, perhaps, right. So probably not in this life. But one thing that you can do with this is take a look at what we see with our clients, for instance.

Dr. Peter: [00:36:36] So these are Catholic clients.

Dr. Peter Martin: [00:36:37] Let’s say Catholic clients. And what will happen is they have a pretty good doctrinal understanding, right. They’ve read, you know, they’ve taken a course in religion or they’ve studied the catechism or they’ve read some theological treatises or something. So their understanding of God is pretty much in accord with who God is, right? Very much kind of what orthodox Catholic teaching would give us.

Dr. Peter: [00:36:59] So that God concept or that explicit God image is tracking pretty closely.

Dr. Peter Martin: [00:37:04] Pretty close. Yeah, never perfectly in their own mind because they have their own biases and distortions and everything. But then what we see is their experiential is very far off, right. And so where God would be someone to love and to desire to be with always, some are terrified of him and want to escape him. Some clients have told me they would rather choose hell than be in heaven, because God is too terrifying and he’s too brutal because of the projections they have from their earthly father.

Dr. Peter: [00:37:32] I have said often that I think so many people, so many Catholics, want to go to Limbo because it’s a place of natural happiness where there is no god, right. You know, they don’t want to go to Hell. The beatific vision is, you know, where you come face to face with the living God. It’s terrifying. And so, yeah, they’re looking for some other option, right?

Dr. Peter Martin: [00:37:50] I agree. Yeah, it’s interesting too, when you when you ask them who they turn to for spiritual support. I think you had mentioned in a previous episode something about people that have like abuse histories or rape histories. They prefer kind of the non-bodily kind of spiritual intercessor, like an angel or the Holy Spirit, for instance, yeah. Because the body is just too scary, to think of Christ as an embodied person. So anyway, you see, the experiential can be very far off.

Dr. Peter: [00:38:18] So this triangle gets really skinny. If you’re watching on YouTube, you’ve got the image. If you’re among so many of our listeners who are listening, there’s this long skinny triangle. So the experiential is a point that’s way far away from who God actually is. And then the explicit God image or the God concept, which is, you know, our understanding of God in a cognitive left brain way.

Dr. Peter Martin: [00:38:39] That’s right. So then you have the next step, which is the pyramid. So now you’re putting in the behaviors, the religious behaviors or the coping behaviors and things like that. So you’ll have people that have a pretty good doctrinal understanding. But because of their experiences of God or implicit God image, let’s say, now this starts to bring up all kinds of fears and insecurities, and then they cope in unhealthy, ungodlike ways. And that also pushes them further away from God, and it continues to distort their views of God. I would assume it also distorts their doctrinal views of God, right. Eventually it can, very much so. There’s a notion, I think it was from Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange, a Dominican from early 20th century. I think he says, “If you do not behave the way you think, you will begin to think the way you behave, and then thinking ends.” Right, so then it’s just passions and impulses and stuff can kind of take over for some people. So yeah, but the idea would be we want to get all this in check so that our lives are at that point. We want to get as close to that top point where God would like us to be. And that, by the way, it’s not slavery in the way we commonly think of slavery. It’s entrustment, and it’s authentic peace and happiness.

Dr. Peter: [00:39:57] Yeah, and absolute confidence that God is good. I mean, that is something that so many parts in so many people do not believe. That’s something that they don’t have, because I think we have as many of these implicit God images as we have unrecollected parts. And they’re all heretical, actually. There’s material heresy in that. It’s not formal heresy, unless you embrace it with your innermost self. But that is a huge burden. And that’s not something you can study your way out of. That’s not something that you can intellectually approach. The only one that can really change that is God himself, in the actual experience of God himself. Now, that could be mediated through somebody else. I mean, oftentimes other people help us, and if we’re loved by someone, then parts might start opening up, you know, to that love. And ultimately all love comes from God anyway, whether we’re channeling it through this person or that person or from God directly himself. But yeah, I mean, this idea of, can we begin to taste the love of God through others that may be able to attune to us?

Dr. Peter Martin: [00:41:05] Yeah, absolutely. And again, that comes early.

Dr. Peter: [00:41:08] It’s better if it’s early. But you’re not lost if it doesn’t happen.

Dr. Peter Martin: [00:41:14] Yeah, because the idea is with attachment security or insecurity, it’s nurture, not nature. And in fact, in psychology too, the thing that you think a lot about when it comes to biological predispositions or nature, it’s temperament. And then when it comes to nurture, a lot of people go to more like attachment dynamics. So if this history, it has developed, you know, neural pathways over the course of time and fears and so forth. But those can be unmyelinated, so to speak. And then new myelinated circuitry can be developed through better relationships with God and spouse and neighbor, that kind of thing.

Dr. Peter: [00:41:47] But the critical thing about that, is that it’s all experiential. You cannot just passively expect that that’s going to change. You actually have to engage in relationship. 

Dr. Peter Martin: [00:41:58] That’s the key. Yeah, I’m glad you said that. It’s not just a passive receptivity. One of the things that I’ve seen with developing attachment trust, let’s say a basic implicit trust for an adult, is that you can’t just sit back and let them do all the work, let’s say. Right, just let the attachment figure take care of me, stronger, wiser other, thank you. It’s more like I need to do little things to kind of test out that trust, or to practice trust, see how it goes, process it either with them or with someone else that you trust, that kind of thing. But you want to be an active recipient, not a passive one. It’s very important.

Dr. Peter: [00:42:36] And that requires vulnerability. That requires like engagement, that requires tolerating being seen, heard, known and understood. And those are things that can be really frightening if there have been, you know, abandonment trauma, betrayal trauma, you know, other types of things, relational injuries, you know, attachment wounds.

Dr. Peter Martin: [00:42:56] It’s so true. Yeah. I feel like, let’s say someone says they want to grow in virtue. There’s a couple of different ways to do that or a lot of different ways. But let’s say they say, “God, just make me virtuous.” Right, so that could be a spiritual bypassing kind of thing. But really, what the person can claim or can ask would be more realistically, “God, can you provide me situations where I can practice this virtue, where I can strengthen this kind of core feature that I’m trying to develop.” And so it’s like it’s an active participation in preparing yourself for those kinds of things, ideally. You had also made a comment, so I want to go back to something else you had said about the importance of focusing on human formation. We had already gotten into this a little bit, but natural means are primarily used for early development of infants, toddlers and so forth, 100%. Yeah, the natural means is very much a focus. And the attachment theory model is kind of primal. And I mentioned that it applies to mammals, human and non-human mammals. So it is kind of primal there. And so even that language that you’ll hear of dependent rational animal, which is a kind of way of understanding the human person. I think from like polyvagal standpoint, it would be more like dependent, rational mammal.

Dr. Peter Martin: [00:44:10] It’s a particular kind of animal that relates to a caregiver very differently than, let’s say, a turtle, or a lizard or something, right? So it’s a very different kind of experience. And so you’ll start to see these kind of changes in the way that the, let’s say the infant, relates to a particular parent. So around, give or take, around the second half of the first year of life outside the womb, you’ll start to see a preference that the infant develops toward the dad or the mom, most often the mom. I actually remember this, by the way. I remember my oldest. I was excited and just, you know, playing with him, getting to know him and having a relationship with him. And then there came a time where, I think it was around seven months. I remember this kind of distinctly. He started kind of going toward my wife more than me, and that’s something I had to work with my parts on. It’s a natural process, right, but I had really enjoyed. But then all of a sudden, it felt a little bit to a part of me, like it was a rejection or something. Like, he’s an infant, you know?

Dr. Peter Martin: [00:45:06] So that’s something I had to work on in my human formation. One other thing. Bishop Barron has this really interesting take. He says when he’s evangelizing, he looks at the three transcendentals and he borrows this from Balthasar. But he says, lead with beauty. Lead with beauty. I think goodness is the next one. And then we’ll get to truth. That’s a hard one for people to swallow. Or maybe it’s like truth in morality or morality in truth, I can’t remember, but lead with beauty. And he has this example. He says the beauty of a mother’s smile catches the attention of the child. Later on, this child will grasp the goodness and the truth of that, right.

Dr. Peter Martin: [00:45:45] So there is a sense that there’s a kind of formation going on there, forming the child in beauty. And so the idea would be, these memories of the countenance of the mother, right. Is it the miserific face and really distressed and so forth? Or is it the beatific face that can be provided for this child in a time of distress? And the idea is that that starts to shape future expectations, the way that this person will grow up, the way they relate to another close person, the way they relate to God ultimately. And so that stuff is kind of ingrained. It’s now starting to skew or distort, depending on how insecure it is. And it becomes a complicated thing. It can be worked through, but it can be complicated in many ways. And so what happens is some psychodynamic theorists will say, like, in a marriage, if you have a strong negative reaction to something your spouse does, first off, it’s not the first time you had that reaction, and they call it a 90/10. You know, they say probably 90% of that reaction that you’re having with your spouse is not really about the interaction you’re having with them right then and there. It’s your life history, your wounds and your pains and your defense mechanisms and all that stuff leaking into the present moments. It’s your parts.

Dr. Peter: [00:47:00] I think that’s been verified too by a guy by the name of Pansket. I heard that, Dan Siegel was citing him in a talk I was watching, where, yeah, 90% of what’s going on is actually old stuff, and kind of 10% is what’s going on in the immediate moment. So yeah, it’s really critical to be able to grip on to what is ours in our history, what’s been wired into us, you know, what’s already embodied. It’s actually embodied, these neurological pathways are embodied. I think sometimes there’s a fantasy that we can, just by the sheer force of will, overcome everything, like at once, right. But in fact, we need to place ourselves into these relationships that can reform us in ways that introduce us to love, that introduce us to beauty, that introduces us to goodness.

Dr. Peter Martin: [00:47:50] Absolutely. Yeah, the reformation, I like that. And we’ll get into this a little bit later about things that could be done to even transform childhood memories and so forth. And one of the authors at the end of his article said, “It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.” And the idea is you can work with those memories. And it changes the bodily sensations and reactions. It changes the feelings, and it’s pretty remarkable what can be done with that.

Dr. Peter: [00:48:18] Well, it reminds me of the admonition of our Lord. “Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.” We are to become little children, and in fact, going back to what we opened with — identity — our primary identity is as a beloved little son or daughter of God. And that’s got to be throughout the entirety of our being. And so it’s not just about becoming, you know, more competent, more effective, you know, better functioning, you know, so forth. Like hitting some pinnacle of human abilities and capacities, it’s about becoming small enough to trust and to be loved and to enter into, dare I say it, a hierarchical or even patriarchal type of relationship. Patriarchal in the best sense of the word.

Dr. Peter Martin: [00:49:05] Right. Fatherly, exactly. I love that kind of image. The little daughter or son of God, the little child. I oftentimes think about even, you know, a toddler or something, really, really young. And especially when they do this kind of work, again, we’ll get into it more, but they initially kind of have the person think about age 3 to 5.

Dr. Peter: [00:49:26] Yeah. Well, in that statement, right, “Let the little children come to me.” The Latin is “parvulos,” little children, which is a diminutive of “parvos.” “Parvos” is the Latin for little child. So we’re like saying little, little child. You know, so it’s not a 10-year old.

Dr. Peter: [00:49:40] You know, we’re talking about toddlers. We’re talking about children that, you know, have the capacity to connect and to reach out like kids do, but young. But I totally get it. If people had really bad relationships, had bad experiences, or have unresolved trauma, they’re going to be protector parts that want to repudiate that, you know, that say, absolutely not. That was not safe then. It’s not safe now. We are never going back to that level of vulnerability. We’re not going to be harmed again. You know, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. All of that makes it very difficult to trust that God is actually a loving father.

Dr. Peter Martin: [00:50:16] Yeah, the little, little child, that statement you made about the Latin — that’s really intriguing to me. So I don’t have favorite children. I love my children equally. I do have favorite ages. I do like them all, you know, give or take. I think if they could all just be age five, you know, 4 or 5. But one of the things when I was thinking about the little children ages 3 to 5, so one of my sons is age five right now. He’s going to be turning six here real soon. Actually over the weekend. But one of the things I’ve noticed is in his development, when he was about four years old, he was about as transparent as transparent could be, right? The guises and the masks and the defenses and all that stuff hasn’t quite gotten too sophisticated at this point.

Dr. Peter Martin: [00:51:00] So it was really fascinating just to be around just kind of this free-spirited, open-hearted. And the other thing that stood out to me about him, he wanted me to know everything. He just wanted to tell me everything, my wife and I. You know, he drops a pencil on the floor. And that merits telling a parent, you know, just it’s exciting. Hey, there’s a leaf that just blew off a tree. Mom, guess what? So the idea is that that intense desire to be seen and known and to be connected in that stage, at that age, and that changes over time, as we know. But there’s something about that age. Their mental sophistication and cognitive ability is heightened enough that they can verbalize things better and so forth, but there’s not as much defensiveness, at least my experience with this anecdotally.

Dr. Peter: [00:51:45] Yeah, if there’s at least been reasonable secure connection. Yeah, good enough parenting, stuff like that.

Dr. Peter Martin: [00:51:52] Exactly. That’s a good distinction there. Yeah. There’s something about going at a very young age. Now you had another point that I liked. This one especially deserves some time. You said explicitly God-centric approaches are not optimal for every part in every person, and — this is the kicker — may even be harmful in some cases. So first, do no harm. And your idea would be if you go to certain persons of the Trinity or certain saints or whatever, that it can actually harm the person to do that spiritually. It could be harmful, retraumatizing even. Yeah, so I spent some time, because I agree with that. I agree, and there are a couple of examples. So if you think about hell, I think of an infant in hell. It would be a natural hell. It would be, they’re highly distressed. They’re terrified. Let’s say their neuroceptive threat is really going through the roof. And mom and dad are not around. That’s a natural hell for that baby. Let’s make that worse to kind of explain what hell could be. So the worst hell would be highly distressed baby crying, very insecure. Mom and dad are around, but the baby’s terrified of them. So some would say, hell, just conceptually, I don’t know how this works with dogma and theology. But some would say hell then could be more like high distress and fear. And God is there, like he’s present everywhere, different obviously, than in heaven and on earth and hell. But there’s still some presence of him. Obviously, if it exists, there’s still something of God there, right? And so the idea would be that’s what hell would be. And I’ve had some clients talk about their intense desire to get away from him at all costs, the farthest corner of hell, to stay away from him.

Dr. Peter Martin: [00:53:49] Whereas heaven is all the needs of all parts being met at the same time at the right time. St. Augustine says, “Heaven is where all of our good desires are fulfilled.” And that’s heaven. We’re satiated entirely. Let me give you an example. And this person has given me the okay to speak about this. I’m not going to give any identifying information. But later on in life, in their 50s, let’s say. What happened is they had a very difficult time with the Father. And I don’t know if I’ll get into all the details about some of the abuse history, because for the listeners. But let’s just say it was pretty bad, some of the worst stuff I’ve heard. And some of it was religious-based too, and so forth. Now, what happened, in this person’s mind, that intense experience of the father, and the father dominated so much of this person’s life, the whole family’s life. And in this person’s mind, God the Father is just like that. So there’s that projective kind of stuff going on. Now, the only thing is, if that’s true, if God is the abusive, malevolent narcissist or the psychopath or whatever, then what happens is he would be worse than the devil. And in her mind, she had studied theology, in her mind, he was worse than the devil. And the reason he was worse than the devil is because both of them were malevolent narcissists in her mind, but the difference is, is God is all-powerful. That changes everything. And so for her, even when she thought she was doing well, she thought she was maybe going to heaven or something. What would happen ultimately is at the end of her life, he would find a way to get her to go to hell, and he’d love it. And he would enjoy that and he’d love to torture her. So this is the kind of way she thought of him. And so the idea is that if she, to your point, it can be harmful to go to him in some cases.

Dr. Peter Martin: [00:55:36] When she would pray, if she went to the Father, because there were some spiritual directors and well-intentioned, didn’t know her trauma history. Go to the loving, merciful Father. She would try that. She couldn’t do it, right. It was too ingrained that he was a kind of a horrific psychopath or something. So what happened is she would go to him and she would get retraumatized. Her whole body would stiffen up. She would have flashbacks and memories of some of the events that happened to her early in life. So that would do harm to her, not because of who God is, but because of her experiences with father, with her father. After we went through probably six key memories of trauma with her dad, in her 50s, she’s just now able to say father in the Our Father. So she had basically removed the word father from all her prayers and so forth. Loves Jesus, but she had to find a way to segregate Jesus from being connected to the Father. So this kind of stuff can be very, very intense for people. And so you don’t want to just say everyone needs to go this pathway and go to this spiritual person for help and that kind of thing.

Dr. Peter: [00:56:39] Yeah, that’s episode 131, where I list the seven reasons why I don’t lead with an explicitly God-centric approach. You know, it reminds me of Sherry Weddell’s work of pre-evangelization. So when she talks about it, she’s talking about, you know, outside of oneself, right. She goes back to there has to be some kind of trust in someone or something that represents Christianity before you can begin the conversation about who God is. So in that case, to experience you as a benevolent man, you know, who cares about her and who is attuning to these experiences and to the distortions in human formation that resulted from them. Like that begins to have the taste of who God actually is. But yeah, if you start out with, you know, and this is sometimes done programmatically or almost like algorithmically, this is how we evangelize, you know, kind of thing. You know, we want to make sure that it’s tailored to the person that we’re actually trying to love.

Dr. Peter Martin: [00:57:48] Absolutely. No, 100%, I agree. I think with those kinds of reactivities, but it almost like it strains the mind and everything we read in spirituality to say, “Wait, you can’t go to the Father with some clients?” Now my goal is, that’s my end game. Love for them to be able to do it. And fortunately for this particular client, she found a spiritual director who was like the positive opposite of her dad too. Like, he was just very gentle, very warm, very kind. All those qualities that she really needed. One other thing, to your point, even Jesus, this is where it gets interesting. Not just Jesus, but baby Jesus, right? So there are people because of their childhood histories. I’m thinking of an individual who was terrified of infant Jesus, of baby Jesus. And what happened is when he thought of baby Jesus, you know, his body would get tense. He was a daily communicant, he’d go to Mass every single day, very devout Catholic. But the closest he could get to baby Jesus would be if Jesus was in the nativity scene, let’s say, you know, somewhere at the front of the church, he could not even step foot in the door of the church. He’d have to be like 50 yards away from the church to do that. So we don’t go there right away. But see, that’s the thing is, I will tell the listeners, like, today we went to Mass. And I got in late last night with a plane flight. You picked me up and so forth, and I made excuses to not go an hour early before Mass, to Adoration. 

Dr. Peter Martin: [00:59:18] And you went. And I remember walking into the church, and here you are front and center, right? So you’re front and center in the first pew, wanting to be as close as possible, right. And it’s a beautiful thing, that kind of proximity, that kind of love and intimacy there. Very much the antithesis of what this guy was experiencing. And so the idea would be, how do we work through that? For him, though, one thing that was fascinating is there was — I always forget his name. There’s a saint that’s in Canada. Oh, goodness. It’s not Fr. Solanus Casey. There’s a saint in Canada, if I said his name, known for being very gentle. And so for him, he really liked turning to him for support. That’s a great step toward Jesus. And so that’s the pathway he would take is to go that direction.

Dr. Peter Martin: [01:00:07] So it doesn’t have to be, even baby Jesus, there are some cases where like the infant Jesus of Prague. He’s got a very royal kind of look to him. He’s got the crown, right? Some people can’t stand that. They just don’t want to be around that at all. And so, you know, you go with it. One other thing. There was a woman who was a colleague of mine. She was working on a degree, I think it was a master’s degree in counseling. And there’s a class on addictions that she was taking. And so they asked people, clinicians that they knew and they would ask them to give one talk to their class about such and such. And so I did, of course, attachment and addictions. And I came in there knowing that a previous outside presenter had said she no longer does higher power in her 12-step work with clients. And here’s what I’m wondering what happened, is with some of the cases that had some parts that were addicted, they were terrified of Jesus, or they were terrified of God. And so their therapist or their sponsor says, keep going there, keep going there, as opposed to a different higher power. And in this case, it would be like a saint or an angel, where they would have felt safer.

Dr. Peter Martin: [01:01:11] And that’s where you can really unleash the power of not only the graces, but also that kind of underlying attachment security priming that goes with that as well. One of the things that, as we were talking about this about 4 or 5 years ago, it became more and more apparent, just the reactions that people would have. Not just to like Jesus, for instance, but just different representations of him. Divine Mercy Jesus vs. infant Jesus of Prague. And so what I did is I put together a list of about a hundred different persons of the Trinity, saints, and angels. I tried to incorporate male and female, you know, saints. I tried to incorporate different religious orders and things like that.

Dr. Peter: [01:01:52] So these are all what I would call spiritual confidants. Also might be called like spiritual resource figures or something like that in the trauma world. But these are all like actual persons that you could reach out to.

Dr. Peter Martin: [01:02:06] That’s right. Yeah, I’ve had a tough time figuring out what word I wanted to use to describe. I’ve kind of landed on spiritual intercessors or something, but I like confidants. Confidants is really good. But basically it’s a real person within the Catholic tradition. And then these are people that you can turn to during a time of distress, or a time of consolation, or if you’re just feeling unmotivated. And so I may or may not have to do that a lot, but all that to say with that on the front page. So you select the ones that you feel kind of safest, most connected to. And then on the front I have a list of different ways of conceptualizing them, because you can quantify your internal reactions to them. So I’m not measuring like the Holy Spirit. I’m not taking a yardstick, the Holy Spirit and say, hey, he’s 36 in.

Dr. Peter Martin: [01:02:51] But what you can do is you can basically measure what the spiritual encounter is like from below, from within the person’s psychological experience. And so there’s a couple of different ways you do that. Number one is the SUDS. So that’s the subjective units of distress scale, very common in psychology. I do a 0 to 10, ten is the most intense distress they’ve ever had, zero is not at all. And you can gauge, if I turn to this person, what is my number? Same thing with attachment. How much do I feel like I need to keep them at arm’s distance, vs. how much am I nervous that they will not be there for me in a time of need. You know, that they’ll reject me or abandon me or something. So there’s ways to kind of put numbers there, 0 to 10. Then they write up what their experience of this person is. And then eventually there’s, where did my reactions come from? Possibly from my history. What happened to me that led me to react to the all merciful Lord, as you know, kind of a tyrant or something like that? 

Dr. Peter: [01:03:46] And it can even be like physical characteristics, like Fr. Boniface Hicks and I were talking about how some people react to his beard. You know, because Uncle Billy had a beard, you know, or something, right? You know, and so it can be something as sort of immediate, like a physical characteristic. So this is, you’re talking about the Level of Attachment Security in Spiritual Relationships, or what you call the LASSR. And can we make this available to folks? Is this something that we can offer them?

Dr. Peter Martin: [01:04:14] Yeah. Open source. Yeah, I’d like everybody to have access to it. It’s in English. There was someone that translated into Spanish. And I can get you both versions.

Dr. Peter: [01:04:21] Okay, we will put them up in the description, the YouTube episode description for episode 154. You can find that on our channel, Interior Integration, the number 4, Catholics, Interior Integration 4 Catholics. So it’ll be like a downloadable PDF that we can put up there.

Dr. Peter Martin: [01:04:37] Excellent. That’d be great. I definitely want to make it accessible to everybody. So I appreciate that.

Dr. Peter: [01:04:41] And it’s something that you can take on your own? Or is it something that has to be administered by somebody else?

Dr. Peter Martin: [01:04:47] No, the only caveat I would have is that if there’s a severe kind of complex PTSD history with a lot of abuse or something, then getting into the metrics and measuring things with these intervals could be a little overwhelming for them. You might want to do that with your therapist. But I’d say for the majority of people, there’s user-friendly instructions and they can take it on their own. 

Dr. Peter: [01:05:05] I’ve seen this. I’ve not used it. I’ve actually like kind of checked it out. I think there’s a great potential for this for so many people to find actually on a part by part basis. Like because one part might really resonate with Our Lady as a young girl, another part might be all about Saint Benedict. A third part might be about the Holy Spirit. A fourth might really resonate with the guardian angel.

Dr. Peter Martin: [01:05:33] And to your point, I find exiles especially, of any of the categories of parts. Exiles, I’d say 95% to 99% of the exiles I work with, love to have a spiritual intercessor, for a Catholic person. They really do. Managers, that’s a little different story. They tend to be a little more dismissing and independent. But exiles tend to like it. So the idea would be, the attachment research on this, and just to go back, part of the reason this is important, obviously from a spiritual standpoint, it’s very important to do this. But from an attachment, what they call security priming standpoint, they do this fascinating bit of research. And what they do is they’ll take a person, they’ll look at their attachment patterns. Are they, you know, insecure dismissing, insecure preoccupied, insecure disorganized, or are they secure? And they’ll gauge that. And then what they’ll do is they’ll take subliminal prompts. So they’ll take this, they’ll put, let’s say for me, it’s grandma, I was a grandma guy. So let’s say they flash grandma, poof, right on the screen. And it’s subliminal. I’m not even really fully conscious of it. What they find is that if I have an insecure pattern in my life, from that point in that study, I will tend to respond to questions as if I’m secure. Wow. Just from a quick poof, just like that. Just on the screen.

Dr. Peter: [01:06:50] An exposure to a secure attachment figure.

Dr. Peter Martin: [01:06:52] That’s right. Sometimes they’ll do like a subliminal face. Sometimes they’ll just do the name of the person. Other times it’s fully conscious. You know, they’re aware of it, you know, that kind of thing. But what they’re finding is that this has sticking power. So the more that you do this, the longer the effect. So they found that in some research, it can be up to 30 days later by doing this repeated kind of recurring attachment security practice. So that’s the natural substrate, I think, of how this opens up the heart for the graces through our spiritual intercessors. So they’re doing studies on this now with cortisol release. So if I’m distressed and I have this attachment security prime, it decreases my cortisol. If I’m not distressed but I’m unmotivated, it will actually give me a little bit of a boost in cortisol, to get you going. And the other thing I’ve seen is that it’s kind of cool to share your joy with your attachment figure. And just one brief story. My daughter, she did Mary on the Mantle. My wife did Mary on the Mantle with her. This is a really cool kit with little cookies and stuff like that. But she carries Mary with her. She’s got a backpack and carries Mary around. It’s really beautiful to see, her and the doll. But what happened is she was telling me this, some kind of positive event in her life. And I said, “Hey, would you like to share that with Mary?” And she said, “Sure!” It wasn’t even a question, right. And so I said, “Okay, here’s what you can do. You can try it this way if you’d like.” And so she went back to the memory. She’s kind of feeling it in her body.

Dr. Peter Martin: [01:08:18] I said, “Okay, now invite Mary to be with you.” And so she did. And I just saw her face, her smile just started increasing. And then I asked her afterwards, I said, “How was that?” And she says, “100% better.” So this is when she was probably about age 4 or 5, wasn’t super old. It can be done with kids and so forth. One other thing, in addition to that, we have done some stuff with measurements. And I know you’ve done this as well. Kind of attachment to God the Father, separate from the Son, the Holy Spirit, and then Mary. And part of the thing that kind of got me interested in that was I had a kind of a high level Catholic in a particular diocese who I was seeing. And did that, did those sets of measures, and I was experimenting. God the Father was secure. Jesus and Mary were disorganized, unresolved. You usually see the inverse if anything, but that was fascinating. This is a person that prayed 4 or 5 times a day, had been doing it for years. But that underlying implicit attachment insecurity was still distorting her experience of these persons. And so really got me interested in that kind of approach. One other thing. There’s another handout I’ll do. The LASSR is for people that maybe have more amplified fears and more kind of struggles from their history. This one, called the Spiritual Support Worksheet 2nd Edition, is something I think really all of us could use. I know I think about it a lot, I use that. Whether you’re a monk or a lay person, right. And the idea is that there are these key conditions to attachment security. And so drawing from ideal parent figure from Brown and Elliott’s work, which I know you’re familiar with.

Dr. Peter Martin: [01:09:56] The five primary conditions. It just looks at these developmental needs. I can’t feel seen and known unless I feel safe enough to be seen and known. There’s an order to this. And so the idea is to think about which spiritual intercessors might fit those categories for you. Or it could just be one that does all of them. I generally like to have male and female, so at least one male and one female. Sometimes it takes a family, you know, more than that. But the idea would be have these individuals regularly. And if I feel scared, let’s say I have an exile that feels scared a lot, I go to a protector figure. If I’m feeling unseen, if I’m feeling kind of distressed, I can go to a nurturing figure. And so this kind of shows up on there. So it’s called the Spiritual Support Worksheet. And I can have that available too.

Dr. Peter: [01:10:40] Yeah, we’ll put that up on the description of the YouTube episode for 154. Check that out there. Yeah, because I have actually seen this too. You’ve shared it with me, a couple of years ago, I think I saw the first version, and then I saw the second version. And what’s great about these two things is that these are ways that people can engage on this without having to go to therapy, without having to be, you know, in a particular spiritual direction relationship. Not that we, you know, are advising against those things, but yeah, there’s like an empowerment here. So we’ll make those available in PDF formats. Yeah, because I think about this dynamically, right. It’s just not where I am right now, right. It’s the parts. Because parts can be in a variety of different places. And then even within that, they can be less integrated, more integrated, you know. And so there’s almost like the scale that they can go kind of up and down with regard to what the attachment need is right in the moment.

Dr. Peter Martin: [01:11:37] I like how you said that. Yeah, because I think parts, even if they’re generally, let’s say, more self-led, like an 8/10 on self-leadership, there will be times when distress hits that they’ll drop down to a four or something, because that can vary by the situation. Absolutely. One quick thing on that. I also have like icons for each of these. So I have like, St. Michael’s a good one for the protectors. And the delighters, I’m a Mother Teresa kind of person, I like the grandma kind of thing, but she’s the delighter. And so delight is one of those things that we probably have had the least growing up, unfortunately.

Dr. Peter: [01:12:08] Right, so that’s the fourth primary condition of secure attachment from Brown and Elliott is the sense of being delighted in, cherished, beloved, like that the eyes light up when they see me, kind of thing. And so a lot of people don’t have a lot of that in their life.

Dr. Peter Martin: [01:12:23] And it’s not because, they’re not being delighted in because of what they do, right. This is the thing with the delighters, right? It’s just because they’re there. You’re here, I delight in your being. That’s all it is. You don’t have to prove yourself. I just delight in you.

Dr. Peter: [01:12:35] It’s not something you earned. It’s because of your being.

Dr. Peter Martin: [01:12:39] And then one other thing, from that, one other thing that we’ve done or developed is, it’s called the Holy Trinity and Mary drawings. And so the Holy Trinity and Mary drawings are basically using those key figures. But it’s like draw a picture of yourself and each of the persons of the Trinity and Mary on the same page. And then we’ll look at it over the course of four drawings, and it changes over the course of time and looks at closeness and proximity. And so we’re going to try to, we’re doing that in all of our vocational assessments for priests, women’s, men’s religious, and just kind of seeing how that maps on to some of the self-report measures, like the Attachment to God inventory and things like that. So we’re doing that. But the idea is we’re going to try to measure that, ultimately, maybe in artificial intelligence, we might just kind of put it in there and it’ll be able to measure the proximity of the self to these figures changing over the course of time. A couple of things we’ve seen, I think it’s okay to say. A couple of things we’ve seen is that, no surprise, Mary and Jesus are closer to the self generally, than, let’s say, the Father is, and generally the self moves, but not the figures, in the different drawings. So it changes in terms of going further away depending on distress level and things like that, or getting closer. And so just a couple of initial things, but there’s ways we can gauge that. Yeah, so that’s kind of available.

Dr. Peter: [01:13:59] All right, well, we gotta bring this in. We got to land this. What would you, if there were one or two or maybe three, maybe two and a half points that you would really want somebody to remember from this podcast episode? What is it that you would want them to go away with and hold onto and remember?

Dr. Peter Martin: [01:14:17] It’s a good question, Peter. I think, I mean, the first thing is just the pivotal figure of Christ in even something like human formation. Human formation, as with all the other areas of formation, should be Christo-centric. So we might come with different conclusions than, let’s say, a person who’s trying to develop Jewish formation, for instance, like in the Jewish community or Islamic or something, because of who Christ is and what he means and so forth. So that would be the first thing. It needs to be Christo-centric. The second thing is very much what you emphasized in how spiritual problems are kind of rooted in the human formation. That even if you’ve had struggles with going to the Father, or going to Jesus the Son, or to the Holy Spirit, within the Catholic spiritual tradition, and I would say endorsed by attachment theory and so forth. There’s all kinds of options available to you. If you’re scared of men, find a female, like a saint, female saint. If you’re drawn to a particular spirituality, go to Carmelite or Franciscan and find someone there. But the idea is, once you find that person or persons, now become great friends. And the cool thing about great friends is that you can talk with them about everything. You can talk with them about your struggles with the Father, right? You can talk with them about the struggles with the Son, but the idea is find who that mentor, if you will, or intercessor is and really develop that relationship.

Dr. Peter: [01:15:45] All right. Well, this has been so great. So, you know, anything else you want us to know about what you’re up to, things that you want us to keep track of or anything like that?

Dr. Peter Martin: [01:15:55] Good question, thanks for asking. If people are interested, if you want to find me on the internet, go to the ImmaculateHeartCounseling.org. So it’s at the Immaculate Heart of Mary Counseling Center in Lincoln, Nebraska. We’ve got a lot of mental health videos. We have articles, mental health minutes, blog, other resources. We have a monthly 20 minute radio spot for Spirit Catholic Radio, which covers, I think, like Nebraska and some parts of Iowa and so forth. And so I’ll talk about God image and, you know, things like that, related. One other thing, too, there’s a project underway, just briefly. I spoke about it with you before, but it’s called the Psychospiritual Vocational Assessment Project, something very dear to my heart. I’ve often been interested in what we could do with all this wealth of data from the vocational assessments. These are some of the best measures in the world that have been developed over years, decades.

Dr. Peter: [01:16:47] These are for candidates for the priesthood or religious life?

Dr. Peter Martin: [01:16:49] Religious life, yep. And so like the Rorschach or the Minnesota Multiphasic Inventory and others. So if we could compile and aggregate all this data from different sites around the country, if not the world, develop some kind of a data bank or something like that, it would be fabulous because then we can have updates and new things related to the differences we’re seeing in candidates to the priesthood or religious life over the course of years. This would be a wonderful kind of feedback loop to formators and a source of great research potential. So that’s called the Psychospiritual Vocational Assessment Project, kind of heading it with a number of other psychologists. And so really trying to get that going. And so keep us in your prayers and we’ll see where we go.

Dr. Peter: [01:17:30] Yeah. And if people are interested in participating, they can reach out to you.

Dr. Peter Martin: [01:17:33] That’s right. Yeah, reach out to me. Go to ImmaculateHeartCounseling.org. And there’s a way to contact us and just kind of mention my name. You can reach me at my email. I’m happy to get emails, pmartin@ihmcounseling.org.

Dr. Peter: [01:17:49] Excellent. Well, I am also really excited because I have a particular devotion, particular, I don’t know what the right word would be, mission really, to work with Formators. You have been helping us out in the Interior Therapist Community, which is now part of our Formation for Formators Community. You are doing a Foundations Experiential Group right now and then starting again in March of 2025. We now have the registration up for these Foundations Experiential Groups, and also the advanced group that you’re doing, the Preparation for Transcendence group. These are very parts-based, grounded in a Catholic anthropology, understanding the human person. But really to help you get in touch with your own parts, for you to be able to do your own work in your own system, with your own parts as a formator. Again, bringing in all of these resources in a variety of different ways. So all the details are at our landing page for the Formation for Formators Community at soulsandhearts.com/fff, so be sure to check that out, if you are a formator, if you accompany any other people as a therapist, for example, as a coach, as a spiritual director, as a priest. Those groups will be starting up again in March. Availability is limited, but we are just starting to advertise those now, so I want you to check that out. The Preparation for Transcendence group, and you’ve done a number of these in the past for us, is that turn upward. So this is where we’re getting into what we were talking about as far as helping parts with their God images.

Dr. Peter: [01:19:24] A lot of the Preparation for Transcendence group is about that. It’s about doing the human formation work to shore up that natural foundation for a deep relationship with the three Persons of the Trinity, with Our Lady, with other saints across all our parts, so that no part’s left out, no part’s left behind. Because so many times the spiritual development seems like it pulls a person apart because some parts are on board, but other parts are left behind. And we’re looking for an integrated way of connecting so that we can love wholeheartedly. Right, loving with all of our parts, with all of our being, not with just the parts that our managers believe are acceptable or worthy of being in the shop window. Right, in the curated image that we try to present to God. So I really invite people to check those resources out. Again, we’ll have links to those in the YouTube description. You can find all of the stuff on our website also at soulsandhearts.com. My conversation hours, every Tuesday and Thursday from 4:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. Eastern time. You can reach me on my cell phone (317) 567-9594.

Dr. Peter: [01:20:27] And at the very center of Souls and Hearts is the Resilient Catholics Community. And that is our year-long, structured program in community for folks to be working with their parts on all of this stuff, a lot of attachment stuff in there. And again, it’s designed for you to be able to work through with others, with a companion, in a small company of 6 to 8 other people. You can check that out if you’re interested at soulsandhearts.com/rcc, and we have our waitlist up for our next cohort, which will start onboarding in February of 2025. If you get on the waitlist, though, we still may need some for our current cohort to fill out some companies. There may be a way to fast track you in, so just wanted to let you know about that. Check all that out, soulsandhearts.com/rcc. Well, this has been wonderful, looking forward to continuing with connecting with you in our next episode, which is 155. And let’s go ahead and close this by invoking our patroness and our patron. Our Lady, our Mother, Untier of Knots, pray for us. Saint Joseph, pray for us. Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Special thanks to the Human Formation Coalition, who provided the support to make this transcript available.