IIC 163: You Are One and Many: Unity, Multiplicity, and Internal Systems

[00:00:00] Dr. Peter: It is so good to be with you again, to be talking about a really critical development: systems thinking taken inside. That’s one of the two huge developments from internal family systems, and we have this quote from architect, designer, and author Harold Nelson. He says, “Systems thinking starts when you switch from looking at something to looking between things.” We’re not looking at just the elements of the system. We’re looking at the whole system in systems thinking. And American system scientist and lecturer at the MIT Sloan School for Management, Peter Senge says, “Systems thinking is a discipline for seeing holes. It is a framework for seeing inner relationships rather than just things for seeing patterns of change rather than static snapshots.” It’s looking at the forest, not just the individual trees. And social scientist, designer and entrepreneur, Leyla Acaroglu says, “Synthesis is about understanding the whole and the parts at the same time, along with the relationships and the connections that make up the dynamics of the whole. It’s not just the individual parts, it’s how those parts interrelate in a system.” And Frank Tyger, editorial cartoonist, columnist, and humorist says, “Listening to both sides of a story will convince you that there is more to a story than both sides.” I love that. There’s more to a story than both sides.

[00:01:45] Dr. Peter: And we need to understand how this actually works with our own parts. We just have been covering parts. We’ve been discussing how those parts operate within us. We’re gonna get into that in more detail. Writer and teacher, Donella H. Meadows in her book, Thinking in Systems: A Primer, says that “Hunger, poverty, environmental degradation, economic instability, unemployment, chronic disease, drug addiction, and war, for example, persist in spite of the analytical ability and the technical brilliance that have been directed toward eradicating them. No one deliberately creates those problems. Nobody wants them to persist, but they persist nonetheless. That is because they are intrinsically systems problems, undesirable behaviors characteristic of the symptom structures that produce them. They will yield only as we reclaim our intuition, stop casting blame, see the system as the source of its own problems, and find the courage and wisdom to restructure it.” Now think about that if we take that inside. She’s talking about external systems, she’s talking about the systems relationships among people, for example, separate persons. But this idea that there are systemic problems and that the system itself produces those problems, that’s something really important for us to consider in our internal system, among our parts.

[00:03:09] Dr. Peter: And then just one more quote before we get started on this, and this is from H. L. Mencken. He’s a controversial American essayist and journalist, known for his satire, his blunt assessment of cultural currents, and for his pithy sayings. He says, “For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” We are going to get into what the complexity actually is. We’re going to take these systems seriously because this is a question of thriving. This is a question of flourishing. This is a question of us coming together in interior integration. That’s the name of this podcast, interior integration for Catholics. And with that, let’s get into it.

[00:04:07] Dr. Peter: I’m Dr. Peter Malinoski, also known as Dr. Peter. I am your host and guide in this Interior Integration for Catholics podcast and I’m so glad to be with you. I’m a clinical psychologist, a trauma therapist, a podcaster, a writer, the co-founder and president of Souls and Hearts, but most of all, most of all, I am a beloved little son of God, a passionate Catholic who wants to help you to taste and see the height and depth and breadth and warmth and the light of the love of God, especially God, your father, but also Mary, your mother. These are your spiritual parents, your primary parents. So I’m here to help you embrace your identity as a beloved little child, a beloved little son or daughter of God and Mary. This is episode 163 of the Interior Integration for Catholics podcast, which is all about systems thinking, taken inside, understanding ourselves not as a monolith, not as a single unified personality, but as a system.

[00:05:03] Dr. Peter: And back by popular demand as my co-host today, Bridget Adams. Now, I did an extensive intro for Bridget in episode 159, so I’m just gonna hit some highlights here. Bridget is an IFS level one trained coach. She’s one of the last coaches to be able to receive IFS Institute training before they restricted that. So I’m so glad that you got that, Bridget, before that got shut down. She’s the member care coordinator for the Resilient Catholics Community, the RCC. She’s a facilitator for our foundations experiential groups in the Formation for Formators community, and she’s one of the very first members of Souls and Hearts, one of the very first members of the RCC. So it is so good, it is so good to have you with us, Bridget. 

[00:05:45] Bridget Adams: Thank you, Dr. Peter. It’s quite an honor to be here with you and Dr. Gerry.

[00:05:49] Dr. Peter: I’m so excited. I’m so excited to hear your thoughts, your insights, as we come together to discuss systems. I just, so looking forward to it. And many of you know Dr. Gerry. He is a licensed marriage and family therapist in Atlanta, Georgia. He’s got his doctorate in family therapy. And that’s important because family therapy is all about systems thinking. It’s really the primary place where you see systems thinking in the mental health world. And he’s got an extensive background in understanding systems. He’s the founder and owner of Transfiguration Counseling. He’s the former president of the Catholic Psychotherapy Association. He co-founded Souls and Hearts in 2019 with me, and he is the author of the book, the book, Litanies of the Heart, published in 2024 by Sophia Press. So it is so good. It is so good to have you with us again, Dr. Gerry. Welcome back. What an honor to be in your presence. 

[00:06:49] Dr. Gerry: Ah, it’s always fun to be here with you and Bridget. 

[00:06:54] Dr. Peter: I just wanna open this up. We don’t have a really structured program for this, but systems thinking, and even the nature of a system, is not something that necessarily comes super naturally to everybody. So I just thought we might kind of start out if you guys think it’s good, with what we might be talking about when we’re discussing systems. 

[00:07:18] Dr. Gerry: Yeah. Well, I would say this. Systems thinking like in terms of systems theory was developed in the 20th century in the way that we understand it and the way that we use it in marriage and family therapy and other therapeutic approaches that follow. Social work, for example, as a field, is pretty strongly influenced by systems theory, but so is other forms of psychological treatment. But it really started with this understanding that the human person exists in a larger system and multiple larger systems. What’s interesting, and as you will see later on, ironic, that systems theory emerged out of cybernetics, which is a sort of a field of understanding of how systems work like this on a mechanical level. It influenced computer operations and development of computers. But it really began with, in the industrial revolution, with this concept of a factory. And so there’s this idea that a factory is made up of all these different systems that are working together to produce something. So I remember as a kid, I think it was in Smiths Falls, Ontario, I don’t know if it’s still there, but there was a Hershey’s chocolate factory. And when you go in, you get a, as a kid, you go in, you get a tour, and everybody’s excited to get the chocolate at the end. But you see all the different ways in which the chocolate is created throughout the factory and all the different people that have different roles in different places. And of course then my mind goes to various TV shows. Like you see,the famous Lucy, I love Lucy episode. They’re trying to, and they have to eat all the chocolate ’cause it’s like coming too fast. Or Laverne Shirley, another one where they’re working in a beer, would you call it a factory? A brewery. And at the end, I think it’s your glove comes in on one of the beers at the end. Because the principle is that the system is complex and every part of it helps in the production of whatever the thing is. And so if you do something, if you affect one piece of the whole system, it will have an effect on the whole product. It will have an effect on everything. And so, these are mechanical, if you will, or even later, computers are organized around systems. And so the idea of systems theory. And especially when it comes to marriage and family therapy and working with families, is the idea that you don’t just focus on the person, the individual. Right. So it’s a real departure from psychoanalytics.

[00:09:53] Dr. Peter: Psychoanalytic stuff, which is how I was trained. I mean, that’s not a big part of psychoanalytic training really. Typically. Typically. I think there may be more foraging into that now, but yeah, back in the day, no, you looked at just the individual, this individual, and then you looked at that individual, what was going on inside of this person and what was going on inside of that person. But we didn’t focus as much on the inner relationships until we got into some more like object relations stuff. 

[00:10:20] Dr. Gerry: Right, right. So in a sense, family therapists, in most forms of systems theory thinking, don’t bother a whole lot, at least initially, with what’s going on inside the individual. We’re not gonna spend a lot of time just zooming in on that, like if you picture psychoanalytic, if you picture anybody’s imagining Freud or whatever, you’re sitting on a couch and you may not even see the therapist, right? The therapist is standing somehow behind you and you’re just exploring what’s going on in your unconscious mind and all that. This is not that at all. In fact, it was such a departure from looking inside and it was all about actually understanding the dynamics of the family. So if you had a situation where you had, a family came in and maybe the problem was one of the kids has bad behavior. You don’t zoom in on the kid and figure out what’s going on inside the kid. You look at what’s going on in the whole family system. How is the family being affected by outside forces? What is the dynamic within the family system? So if dad’s outta work and there’s stress on the family or mom has a certain kind of discipline behavior, or if grandma lives in the house too and she’s preferring one kid over another or something, there’s all these things going on.

[00:11:39] Dr. Gerry: And so when you change something in the system, positively, right? Then, let’s say Johnny, the kid in question, he’s the identified problem person in the system, right? And maybe he’s, I don’t know, setting things on fire. I don’t know, whatever he is doing. But you figure out what’s going on in the bigger system. Maybe it’s that Johnny needs some actual attention from dad, but dad’s preoccupied with this and he needs attention from mom. But mom’s preoccupied with something else. And you actually put a light on that and you get dad to refocus a bit on Johnny, maybe other siblings too. Mom changes her focus. You’re making a change in the system. Then you see Johnny’s behavior change. So it’s this idea that introducing negative things into the system negatively affects everyone in the system. And introducing positive things into the system positively affects the entire system. And so when you think that way, it opens up a lot of options that you might not have had if you’re just only looking at the individual.

[00:12:49] Dr. Peter: So Bridget, I’m gonna ask you to just in some ways in this moment, represent our audience, right? Because we’re not doing this live and they’re not immediately here. But as you hear what Dr. Gerry is saying, I’m just wondering what questions you might be able to resonate with, or that you might imagine someone listening to this, you know, our audience listening to this might be having at this point. If you could be willing to just explore what your parts might say, yeah, this is probably something that could be on the minds of our audience. 

[00:13:23] Bridget Adams: Well, one of the things that comes to mind is that systems thinking can really mean different things to different people. It can bring up things, whether they’ve experienced something, systems thinking in the workplace or systems thinking in school. And I guess one of the things I wanted to bring home is we’re talking about systems in particular because of IFS being internal family systems, right. So we’re widening out right now, but bringing it in a little bit later, right. 

[00:13:52] Dr. Gerry: Well, you mentioned other systems and so a systems thinker, so let’s just stick with the family therapist, is looking at how that family is operating as a system, but you’re also looking at the other systems that are impacting that system. So that could be the community itself. It could be the, you said like the workplace. So the dad is out of work, or if he’s working a job that you know, the employer, it’s very toxic or there’s just a lot of stress or whatever. That work system is impacting the family system, which ends up affecting Johnny. Or Johnny’s also part of a school, presumably. So if he’s going to a school, there’s things that are going on in the school system that are also affecting Johnny that he then brings into his family system. And then you’ve also got other layers too, like the church. So there’s things going on in the church system. That could be at a parish level, that could be at a diocesan level, that could be at a global church level, that are also affecting, possibly the community, possibly the family, and therefore Johnny. And then you even have things going on at a state level or at a national level. The nation might have struggles, maybe economic, political, wars, different things going on that might be also– zooming back in– affecting the community, affecting the family, affecting eventually Johnny. So we are impacted by multiple systems going on all at once. And so systems theory is at a minimum gaining an awareness of all that complexity that’s happening. And so you’re not only focused again on– I mean, it’s not like it’s ignored the inner person. But you’re asking questions about how that person, how that family is being affected by all those multiple systems.

[00:15:51] Bridget Adams: It makes so much sense. And it’s also a merciful way of looking at a problem or a complex situation.

[00:15:59] Dr. Gerry: Right, yeah. Because you gain some understanding, you gain some new understanding about what’s all going on that isn’t like somehow a moral problem for that individual. Even though if he’s burning things down, there may be a moral question going on. But you’re starting to understand why that might be happening and you’re realizing, ah, the question isn’t only how do I work with him to recognize what he’s doing is wrong, or something like that. But it’s actually, what can we do in the systems? How can we effect change?

[00:16:30] Dr. Peter: I wouldn’t have framed it this way at the time, but one of the reasons I did not wanna become a child psychologist and work with kids in individual therapy is that it just seemed insurmountable for parents who had identified the problem as being in the child, drop the child off for one hour a week and expect that it’s the child’s responsibility or my responsibility with the child to fix that without looking at the broader system, without there being systemic change, you know, and ideally motivated by the parents. It seemed like it was an awful lot of responsibility to be dropping on a child and on a therapist.

[00:17:06] Dr. Gerry: Yeah, no, that’s exactly accurate. So in a situation where I would get a parent calling up for therapy for their child, I always ask to see the parents first, and that might even turn into more than one session with the parents. And then if I am working individually with the child to some extent, I’m also always trying to bring the parents or possibly siblings or whoever else is in that immediate system. I want to bring them into the therapy because they’re relevant. In fact, how much work, certainly in talk therapy, how much can I possibly get done with just the child? He doesn’t even self-report very well, typically. So I get your feeling of why that would be a daunting task if you’re just approaching it from a intrapsychic perspective. 

[00:17:55] Dr. Peter: And when I saw adolescents, ’cause I would see from 14 up, assuming there was no pervasive developmental difficulties. What I started to do, and this is back when I did a lot of psychological testing, is, I would agree to do an assessment on the child as long as I would do an assessment on both parents. And the idea was that what was good for the gosling, was good for the goose, was good for the gander. And even though I wasn’t framing it in terms of systems thinking, because it was really alien to me, to be honest. It’s really a big hole in my training in grad school and so forth. But yeah, and then, I would go through the results of the assessment with the parents individually first and then with them as a couple. So I was trying to include them, from the very get-go. And what I found was that a lot of times the child or the adolescent, these were adolescents, were the most resistant at the beginning. But then once I laid out the plan,the adolescents were like the biggest cheerleaders of this. And oftentimes it was mom and dad that were like, you know, hesitant now because we were gonna also get into their stuff. it was an attempt, based on what I knew, to try to get into some of the systems work. But it wasn’t until I found out what internal family systems was that I really began to understand what family systems was. So I came at this sort of in the reverse order that Richard Schwartz went, because he was a family therapist. He was a systems guy.

[00:19:13] Dr. Gerry: Yes. I relate there with him. Now let me, I would like to throw something out here that I think might be interesting. Individualism, as a concept, is very modern. Freud, for example, and the whole psychoanalytic tradition comes out of a mindset of individualism. And really, you probably, I don’t know, probably trace it to the Enlightenment, this sort of concept of the individual and that the individual was somehow the be-all and end-all of his world. And so any kind of impingement on his or her freedom as an individual was somehow like a sin, right, was somehow like an affront. And so this sort of focus on that. And I’m not trying to say that the movement toward respecting human rights, for example, was wrong, I mean, obviously human rights are so important, embedded in our understanding. But this individualism is actually foreign to the Catholic tradition, in my opinion. So systems theory, and this is why I said initially it’s ironic that it came out of factories, industrial revolution, computers, because it’s actually essentially, I believe, systems theory is the most Catholic psychological approach one could have. You could argue with me on that. But I’m gonna propose that and to say that it’s so intrinsic in a sense to how God made us. 

[00:20:44] Dr. Gerry: And if you go back before, I don’t know, before the Enlightenment period, or possibly even before the Renaissance, even if you go back and you look at the ancient world, if you look at the medieval mind all the way up, like there was no concept truly, like there wasn’t the same concept of the individual. That it was, your identity as a human, as an individual in a sense, as a person, was not separated from your place in your family, from your place in the community, from your place in the church, from your place in the cosmos, from your place in heaven and earth. That you knew where you fit and how you fit into all these different layers in these systems. And so when you do read some of the ancient writers, it’s almost like you have to understand that or you’re not gonna exactly understand their perspective because we’re so influenced by our modern individualistic perspective. But in fact, there needs to be a recovery of the fact that we have this deep sense of belonging that the ancient and medieval man did not struggle with the same way. And in fact the modern man, because of the individualism that is kind of like taught or reinforced, like was left with an existential crisis. This is why we get existentialism that shows up. We get all this sort of postmodern, even stuff where we don’t even have any sense of who we are as embodied creatures, let alone as connected with anybody else. And so, we are left in this angst and this anxiety that’s cosmic. And the ancient man and even up to the medieval period, didn’t struggle with this problem. They knew where they fit in the world. They knew where they fit. And I’m not saying that all of our progress around human rights isn’t also valid and maybe could be brought together, but we need to rediscover how we fit in the universe and that it is essentially relational and it brings a deep sense of belonging when we are part of that. And that is Catholic. 

[00:23:10] Dr. Gerry: If you think about the Catholic perspective is about, even the word Catholic is about the whole, right? There’s the diversity around the world, but there’s a wholeness, W-H-O-L-E, a wholeness to the Catholic perspective that the word doesn’t just mean universal, like it has that connotation. It has a deeper connotation of wholeness and so there’s a deep sense of unity within this diversity. There’s a deep, deep sense of connectedness to all that, and that is in fact beautiful. So the view of the church, the view of the human person as he or she belongs in their internal world, I would say, but also their family, their community, their parish, and the universal church. And the cosmic order that God has created in all of the universe is beautiful. It’s like intricately connected, intricately designed. It is calling us to something that is marvelous. Some of these icons capture that sense and some of the Renaissance paintings do too, where you get these different layers of heaven and earth and you see the Virgin Mary holding the Christ Child in the middle, and you see the apostles, but then you see all the people underneath, and then you see all the angels and everything up top. So the icon that I’m trying to describe here, actually captures the beauty of the intricacy and complexity in all these different systems that beautifully appear. 

[00:24:53] Dr. Peter: Yeah. So we do have this icon. Let us see this, yes. Okay. 

[00:24:59] Dr. Gerry: So you see in this picture the Virgin holding Christ, in the center. You see all the people, which includes different regular people, I think to some extent. But you also see bishops, whenever they’re wearing these vestments, they’re bishops. And you could see some of the people are saints. I feel like that’s John the Baptist, but I’m not absolutely sure. But you see the different levels. Up here there’s angels and up here there’s, I’m thinking there are apostles, but I’m not absolutely sure. But this is heaven. And you even get the architecture in an icon of these buildings is like that image of heaven. And then there’s all these different people below. Anyhow, and the beauty of the Theotokos, Our Lady, is that she is the entry point where Christ, the Incarnation, comes into the world. So she’s the Panagia, she’s sort of like that connecting point in Christ himself, she’s holding the Christ Child, in this case, who’s the center, right, of the whole thing. So the Incarnation is a part of it because Christ as the Incarnation is the uniting of the material and the material world. It’s the uniting of the spiritual and uniting of heaven with the earth, with the material world. So all of that is captured. So this is multiple systems all in one icon, to make that point.

[00:26:31] Dr. Peter: Well, lovely. And thanks for describing it to us too, for those that are listening just on the audio or not picking up the video on YouTube, so thank you for that. I can see that in their mind’s eye. 

[00:26:40] Dr. Gerry: Well, how about if I just give you like some evidence for some of what I’m saying and I’ll go to right here, Vatican II and Lumen Gentium. So more recent, 1960s. But here’s what it says. “At all times, and in every race, anyone who fears God and does what is right has been acceptable to him. He has, however, willed to make men holy and save them not as individuals without any bond or link between them, but rather to make them into a people who might acknowledge him and serve him in holiness.” And that’s Lumen Gentium section 9. So we are, and it’s worth noting that mankind fell, it was a couple. Wasn’t an individual who fell, they fell as a system. 

[00:27:44] Dr. Peter: Wow. Like the system got way outta whack because of the introduction of sin into the system. 

[00:27:51] Dr. Gerry: And I know that a lot of, maybe more Protestant or even just modern Catholic or whatever type music and everything speaks of like, “Jesus loves me, yes, I know,” I am saved by Jesus. Like, there’s this sort of individual focus on salvation. But the reality is that Jesus didn’t save the individual on the cross per se. He saved the world. He did it for the whole world, whether the world, all of it, appropriates it is another question perhaps, but we as individuals have to appropriate it, but we are saved as a whole body, as a people. And we see that in the Old Testament. God is saving the Israelites as a people. And then Christ comes and saves all of mankind as a people. So really there’s no concept of individualism in that. I mean, yes, each human being is also making their own choices and there’s their own human growth. It’s not like that’s a ignored or not part of it at all. But the bigger picture is we are all together on a boat. We’re all on Noah’s Ark. We’re not on a bunch of little rafts out there, all by ourselves, hoping that we’ll make it together at some point. No,we’re together in this journey.

[00:29:06] Bridget Adams: You know, what that brings to mind is the reality that some people experience when they come into a Catholic church who have come from other traditions and experiencing a sense that people go to Mass and then they leave and there’s no hanging around outside to visit or getting to know new people. And I’ve experienced it myself in a new parish and like feeling okay, so great, we’re going to daily Mass. That’s awesome. And we’re checked into our spiritual life, but we’re also humans in bodies and we are a part of this parish or this Mass or this community together. So really wondering like, what’s missing, when it becomes such an individual experience. Does that make sense? 

[00:29:53] Dr. Gerry: No, makes total sense. What a great point. And I know I have to catch myself on that. And I’m somewhat introverted and I don’t like small talk. Like, this is not small talk. This is pretty heavy talk, right? So I get into it, but I know for some people it’s difficult, right? You have to go out yourself, even after church and have a donut or whatever, and a coffee, but you have to chat with people. But can we go beyond that into kind of developing relationships? I don’t know how easy it would be to be terribly connected to the church and never have any relationship with anybody that goes to the church. It’s almost, I feel like there is a temptation for some, for your faith to be this individual thing, even if it’s this deep profound mystical kind of thing. I know there’s some people called to eremitic life, like there are some rare people that are being called to be hermits, but in general, most of us are actually called to come a little outside of ourselves and rather than just simply a focus on my own personal holiness and my own personal prayer time and my own time away with God as if it’s separate from everybody.

[00:31:02] Dr. Gerry: Because when you think about it, none of us are baptized by ourselves. We don’t baptize ourselves. We’re brought into a community and the church really doesn’t want private baptisms by and large. They want it to be done with a community that is supporting and bringing them in, right? So baptism is not done alone and neither is the Eucharist. And there isn’t a better example of what I’m talking about in systems theory than the Eucharist, because when we receive communion, yes, there’s this element of it’s Christ, the person of Christ who’s entering the person of me. So there’s an individual element, but there’s also this element that we’re all receiving from one body. This idea that it’s all one, the symbolicness of one love. And so we are all one body together. We don’t go receive the Eucharist somehow all by ourselves. Like it would be wrong. If there is like a McDonald’s drive-through Eucharist and you could just drive through and get your own and drive away it. No, that’s not at all how it is. We actually have to come together, that in fact, in the receiving of communion that we receive, it’s happening in this collective. And what’s also amazing and so beautiful about the Eucharist is that when you or I go and receive the Eucharist, say on a Sunday morning, all these other Christians, not just your own parishes, united in sort of a certain unity in that moment, you’re uniting yourself to every other parish all around, not just in your diocese, but all around the globe. There’s just layers of systems that are working. 

[00:32:39] Dr. Peter: Yeah. They’re like nested. That’s the word I’ve heard sometimes, nested within each other. So like your parish is nested within your archdiocese is nested within the broader universal church. And so that’s also another thing, that they’re not just systems interacting like this, but they’re overlapping and they’re interconnected, and to begin to think about it in terms of the relationships and not just, you know, the constituent elements. I was thinking, as you were talking, that a people is not just the sum of the persons. Like a people is more than just the individual persons that constitute that group, yeah. 

[00:33:14] Dr. Gerry: Okay. So this is another point that I got excited about thinking about, and that is we are more than the sum of our parts. And the church is more than the sum of its individual members also. And so there’s a sense in which there’s a beauty in that. There’s a beauty in the human person being more than the sum of his or her parts. There’s a beauty in the church being more than the sum of its members and that there’s something greater in the system and that you can’t dissect it into the little discreet pieces and think you could reconstruct it. There’s something about the wholeness, the unity, the oneness, and the beauty of that oneness when all the parts come together into this harmony, the beauty of that harmony is powerful and amazing to behold. 

[00:34:17] Dr. Peter: Like a chord is more than the individual notes that make up that chord, perhaps musically, right? 

[00:34:24] Dr. Gerry: Yeah. And why the irony I said at the beginning of cybernetics and all of this being the inspiration for modern day systems theory is that, I heard this fellow, he’s an orthodox theologian, talk about this recently. I’m blanking out on his name, but he talked about the difference between a toaster and a cat. And I’m probably gonna butcher this, but whatever I’m gonna, what I took from it anyway, was the idea that you could like make a toaster, like you could take apart of toaster, you could bring a toaster together. If there was some kind of like manual for making a toaster, you could figure it out and get all the pieces and you would have a toaster, but you can’t do that with a cat. There’s something about the cat that is unique as a living being, with its own anima or however you wanna describe an animate soul, but it has a spirit of some kind and it’s this thing that can’t be broken down like a machine. And I think that’s true of the human being more so. The human being can’t be just broken down into pieces and reconstructed, like in Star Trek with the, when they’re beam dopper down. That isn’t actually how it works. and we can’t deconstruct ourselves and reconstruct ourselves into something different as we sometimes get in some gender ideologies.

[00:35:41] Dr. Gerry: We are actually a complex group of our bodies, like not even getting into internal family systems yet. Our bodies are this complex complexity of all these– respiratory system, reproductive system, and all these different systems that come together to create this whole human body. It’s unbelievably amazing and beautiful. And the Renaissance, especially in, you see the Da Vinci and Michelangelo and all that are sort of celebrating the physical body’s beauty. But then that is also reflected, of course, in the internal complexities. And we see that, and moving a little bit for a moment into internal family systems. We see that wow, the soul or the immaterial components of the human person, which includes parts, which includes an inmost self, which includes like will, and all that, is– oh my gosh, it’s beautiful as a whole. And dissected like a toaster, eh… doesn’t work. 

[00:36:42] Dr. Peter: Yeah. It was so interesting because in the February, 2025 edition of the magazine, First Things, there was a quote in there from George Orwell, from his essay, A Hanging. And this is where he was observing, a hanging, a convict. This was happening in Burma. And he noticed that the convict as he was walking toward the gallows, like stepped aside to avoid a puddle. And it just impacted Orwell, George Orwell, to see in that moment that this was an irreplaceable, irreducible unique human being that was more than the sum of his parts. And in fact, what he said in the essay was that we lost a world. He was referring to this person as a whole world. You know, and I thought to myself, oh wow, this really dovetails with what we’re talking about with the system, with each person being a system.

[00:37:46] Dr. Gerry: Okay, so this is gonna blow your mind ’cause I’m gonna connect this to St. Bonaventure right now. I feel like he was inspired, whether he knew it or not, I don’t know, by St. Maximus. St. Maximus, I could also quote here, but I’m gonna go with Bonaventure. In the work, the Soul’s Journey to God, he talks about the universe as having almost a character of some kind, like the universe itself, the large universe. And he says, “It should be noted that this world, which is called the macrocosm –he uses that word– enters our soul, which is called the smaller world, through the doors of the five senses.” And so in a way, what he’s saying is that there is this larger universe, a larger system made up of all sorts of things, and that it exists in some way within us, because we’re affected by the world we live in. We absorb the world we live in. And that becomes a part of our internal system as a result. And that gets paralleled with exactly what are we absorbing? And when we are absorbing a transfigured world, the work that Christ is doing to transfigure the universe. And this is coming more from Maximus, but still, when this universe is transfigured, this is the work of Christ, right? Yes, to effect salvation for an individual person and various individual peoples, but it’s actually all of creation and mankind is part of it. It is all meant to be transfigured into him. And when that is absorbed into the human person, then the macrocosm of Christ transfiguring the universe, becomes our internal world also being transfigured by Christ. 

[00:39:39] Dr. Gerry: And I know that sounds so metaphysical and so like out there and theoretical, but it is powerful to me. It’s like, wow, yeah. This is what we’re being called to. It’s a radical transformation. It’s beautiful. 

[00:39:52] Dr. Peter: It’s not just us one by one being pulled out of the muck and being brought up to heaven.

[00:39:57] Dr. Gerry: Yeah. Because if we are a temple of the Holy Spirit. Temple. A temple is not a one thing, like it’s a complex organism. Like the actual, if you were to look at the Jewish temple, I don’t know, there’s two, but I imagine all sorts of activity with the priests and the different people and the scribes and different readers and people worshiping and different things going on, and all of that world, it’s a little world is within us and at the core of that is the Holy Spirit.

[00:40:33] Dr. Peter: So you’re saying that when St. Paul tells us we are temples of the Holy Spirit, that it’s not just the bricks and mortar and the roof tiles and the foundation, it’s actually alive. It’s a complex system. That is really interesting to me. I have never thought about it that way before. 

[00:40:56] Dr. Gerry: Yes. And when Saint Augustine talks about the City of God, talking about a system, and you could take it there, it’s metaphors, but they’re metaphors that express a reality. And so, you could look at multiple metaphors that the saints and various people refer to that are in a world, but they’re never metaphors that are non-system. A kingdom within, Christ says the kingdom within, I think in Matthew. So a kingdom within, a kingdom is a system, a very complex system. The city of God. A city is a system. The temple is a system. All these images are systems, which imply to me that our interior world cannot be, like you were saying at the beginning, like it cannot be a monolith, it can’t be a one thing. It has to be a multiplicity. It has to. 

[00:41:57] Dr. Peter: So, Bridget, I’m so curious about what’s going on inside right now. I just would love it for you to share, you know, if you want to, what’s happening within your own system, as this conversation’s unfolding.

[00:42:08] Bridget Adams: I’m drawn back again to the person in the pew. Just the Catholic in the pew. And recognizing that– actually it was something that came out of one of our recent FEGs, where a person wanted to work with this realization that only part of him was showing up at his job. He didn’t have a sense of really flourishing at work, and he could understand that it was because he was really only allowing a part of his personality to be present. And one of the questions that was asked was, what would it look like if all of you showed up to work? And the person reflecting was like, that would be scary. And why would that be scary? Well, because I have a super eager, enthusiastic part that gets a little carried away with ideas. And so it’s like, well, why is that problematic? And then kinda tracing it through the system in his own life. Like, when did that become problematic? So why does this come to mind? Because as Dr. Gerry is talking about, like each individual having God within and being a part of the big picture, it’s also, each individual person in the body of Christ, in the whole world, throughout all time. Those of us living have an opportunity to regain or to unburden parts that have, kept us from being fully present in our jobs, in our families, in our relationships. So that’s where I was going with it. Like, it’s hard for people to be fully who they are. 

[00:43:41] Dr. Gerry: Yeah. And you know what, I think that it’s so interesting, your example about work is fascinating to me because I don’t know that it’s necessarily realistic to imagine that every part of the system is going to be present all the time. But the question might be more, is there self-leadership there, to be very IFS language? Is there a self, an inmost self, that is able to call upon different parts of the system as needed and maybe sometimes multiple parts at once, too, whatever. But for whatever is happening. And to have that awareness, inner self-awareness and that facility and connection with your own parts that you would naturally know, oh, I need to bring this part right now. I’m gonna pull ’em away to bring another part in now. And I’m gonna have this like facility. Because a good, like a king in a kingdom, right? If he’s benign and if he knows his people, he knows when, oh, this is the problem? We have an amazing whatever, healer over here in the kingdom that we are gonna call to help with this problem. He’s seeing the whole people in his kingdom and he’s going, I want the good of everyone. I know how to respond to these different things that might come up. 

[00:45:03] Dr. Gerry: And that’s Christ, right? Like, in his church. He knows his people, he knows all of our diversity and he knows when to bring whom and when. And we model that on some level. But what happens instead a lot of times, is we’re not, especially let’s say, going to work. We’re not that kind of self-aware. We’re not connected to our parts. And so a part just shows up reactively. So this or that situation at work, which may make it worse, right? The situation worse. And then we have to figure that out. So I think your example’s really interesting. And I think it’s more about self-leadership than all self, all parts of the system being available, or being present at once. 

[00:45:45] Dr. Peter: I’m thinking about like a jazz band, right? As a system. And the musicians are following the jazz band leader. They’re staying in the same key. They’re staying in the same meter. But not all of ’em are gonna play it all the time. There may even be just a time for a solo, for a riff, for there to be some improvisation, but yet within the broader parameters of what’s being sort of called forth. 

[00:46:06] Dr. Gerry: I think it’s worth quoting just, for the sake of bringing this together with Scripture. Like 1 Corinthians 12. “For just as the body is one and has many members and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For by one spirit we were all baptized into one body, Jews or Greeks, slaves or free, and all were made to drink of one Spirit.” I think we could reflect on that for a long time, but it speaks to a diversity and a union, right? The unity in the spirit, a unity in the baptism into one body, and yet this respect for all the members and all the parts. So I think that is true. Obviously the church, ’cause it’s literally what Paul is talking about, but it’s true in our internal world as well. 

[00:47:08] Bridget Adams: I really appreciate that Scripture verse being brought into this discussion and being able to really just kinda let it land. Just, I could see Dr. Peter just kind of soaking it up.

[00:47:19] Dr. Gerry: And I’m really thinking too about the sort of relationality of our faith and also the ways in which we grow individually as persons. I might personally have a tendency to be a bit of a hermit, and so I know that I need to be stretched sometimes. I need to be forced out of my hermitage into relationships. And I’m never gonna be like a person who has a hundred friends all at once, but I might have some deeper friendships and this and that, but I might in a way, need to be brought into greater awareness of the larger systems around me and how I’m connected to them. Some people, however, that don’t have that issue might need to be zoomed in on their individual inner worlds because they’re so focused on all the relationships and all the connections and all the people, right? So as humans, like we could lean one way or another, and I think our Lord is calling us to that balance, right?

[00:48:33] Dr. Gerry: Because I think some of the reactions, like even Dionysus the Arapagite, that I love, I think his stuff is great, but some of those mystics and desert fathers that I love so much did kind of go off on their own and focused on a spirituality that was very singular. And we see that a little in, even in some of the influence of Platonism, the Greek philosophy of Plato on the church, right? Because it has some great things to provide. Like the church can sanctify and understand some good things from Platonism, but there’s also some things that needs to be wary of. And one of those things is the disconnection of body and soul. But what can also happen is a disconnection from the body means you’re disconnecting from others, right? And we are actually meant to be in connection. 

[00:49:24] Dr. Gerry: But what’s cool, and I have another Scripture passage to support what I’m about to say, is that Christ ultimately is that linchpin. Like he is the one who connects us to each other. And I think when we’re connected to each other in some way outside of Christ, it isn’t as profound, it isn’t as deep. And the passage that I want to share is from John 15 and he says, I love this passage, by the way. “Abide in me and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches.” And he says you, there, it’s like all of us, not just one person. “He who abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, where apart from me, you can do nothing.” And so again, I love this. We could sit with that for a bit, but a few things hit me with that. And one is just, yeah, of course, we have to abide with Christ. He abides with us. So there’s a relationality right there, and that’s the foundation, the center, the core of our being is being united with Christ. But we’re also united to this vine with all these other branches. Like, I wouldn’t be talking right now about all this if it wasn’t for my friendship with Dr. Peter.

[00:50:59] Dr. Peter: Oh boy. 

[00:51:00] Dr. Gerry: No, but seriously, I’m happy doing other things. I might have been inspired by somebody else, but all by my little lonesome, I wouldn’t be here. Maybe that’s true of you too. I don’t know, Peter. 

[00:51:11] Dr. Peter: It’s amazing how, yeah, it’s amazing how this sort of started ’cause Souls and Hearts is a system. And I have been amazed at– I was just reflecting this morning and being grateful for your expertise in this area, Gerry. Because there’s no way I could get there, or maybe I could at some point, but I’d have to sacrifice so many other things. And I’m like celebrating and rejoicing in that you are really studying these things and you’re bringing ’em, in a very sort of concrete way to the podcast, to the people, to our listeners and to our viewers. And I was like, it’s such a relief to not have to do that. It’s being done in the body, right? But not every member has to be doing every activity.

[00:51:58] Dr. Gerry: But iron sharpens iron. Like we grow from each other. And by ourselves, hey, we might do some interesting things and be capable of this and that, but I think it would be really limited. And the more that we connect, like even in my practice over the year, like my counseling practice, like I’ve had to learn to give away activities and then Souls and Hearts, I know that’s happening too. And so, and because we can’t be this solo person. Like, I’m not gonna do payroll kind of thing. I can technically probably do, I was doing it for at one point, but it’s like, I really shouldn’t be and some guys can do that. And so, as part of this vine, I need to be in connection with other branches and we all need to be. Or we could switch analogies to the body of Christ ’cause that’s a better one, but St. Paul talks about the different parts of the body, but whichever way we go with it, we all amazing roles. 

[00:52:55] Dr. Peter: Yeah. And the lungs don’t have to produce insulin. It’s an amazing thing to not have to do that, because the pancreas is doing that.

[00:53:05] Dr. Gerry: How lovely when you can flourish as the part of the system that you are. 

[00:53:11] Dr. Peter: And you’re not supposed to flourish and you’re not supposed to thrive in isolation. I think that goes back to those points you were making about individualism, because I think somehow we have come to believe that we are supposed to be happy in and of ourselves, this strong cultural message that you need to rise up and you need to be able to find this within yourself, and you need to create your own happiness and you need to create your own place in the world. And then you’ll be happy. 

[00:53:38] Dr. Gerry: Well, essentially like, you know, study existentialism. I have read stuff by, you know, pure philosophers, in that tradition. Most of what I’ve read has been more the existentialism within therapeutic approaches, right? But the underlying message there is that you have to create your own meaning, which sounds sort of interesting in a certain respect, but when I think about some of the existential writings that I remember reading way back that I think are fascinating. One of them, Albert Camus for example, and The Stranger, had to read it in French. And this guy like wakes up one day and he’s at his mother’s funeral and he feels nothing. And he walks through his life throughout this book, The Stranger, and everything doesn’t have any meaning to him whatsoever. Everything in his life just seems absurd because there’s no anchor to his existence. And I don’t remember now how the book ends, to be honest, but I don’t think it ends in necessarily a positive way, but you’re just sort of left with this existential angst, I think, although I, who knows, maybe I’ll revisit it. But the same as like something like the Metamorphosis, like which is by Kafka, this guy wakes up and he is a giant bug, like a cockroach basically. And he is trying to deal with it and the absurdity that he is trying to figure out how to get to work. But he is actually been turned into a cockroach, which is just speaking to the absurdity of life. Like we are these cockroaches that kind of realize we’re cockroaches, but we’re still gonna act, like we’re gonna go about life normally, when life is actually absurd. So there’s no message at the end of that, these stories, truly, that is at all hopeful in my mind. Because at the end of the day, you have to, in existentialism, you have to create the meaning. Like what a job. I have to somehow come up with that, whereas God, in our tradition, in Christian tradition, God has given us our meaning. He made us beautifully and intricately and gives us our role, gives us a meaning. We are, like you said at the beginning, I am this beloved little child. We are given an identity and our job is to just figure that out a little bit, understand ourselves enough to know what he created and how we can express it. To me, I love that. And I’ve done things like even in doing Sherry Weddell’s charism program or doing the strengths training, I like Clifton strengths and all that, like all those exercises and different things we can do to get to know ourselves. Like it all kind of points to like, who am I that God made and how can I live that and stop trying to be something I’m not? And when we do that, wow. And we don’t do it alone. We’re part of the system to bring it back. 

[00:56:26] Bridget Adams: It feels like a good time to remember our audience and all those who are listening to this or watching it, and how it’s such a benefit to the whole world to have people who would take time to draw into some greater understanding of, what does it mean to be me, right? 

[00:56:47] Dr. Peter: Yeah. I’m thinking about like your Bridget-ness, and then to take that to another level to begin to think about you in terms of your parts . It’s not just a package. I think a lot of times when we look at another person, we have this reductionistic way of minimizing them to a function or to something in the relationship around me, sort of in orbit around me. Like the person that cut me off on the freeway is just a, and then fill in the epithet or whatever. But not appreciating like what’s actually going on, that that person is fearfully and wonderfully made. And what I find in my own personal relationships is that as I come into contact with the parts of other people, as I begin to engage with them, like on a system to system basis, there’s a richness that emerges in the relationship. I’m really blessed because Pam, my wife, we can talk in terms of systems, in terms of parts, about what’s going on in our relationship, and what’s happening from a part to part type of relationship. What parts of me are polarizing either within me or with parts of her, or what parts are aligning or what parts are fleeing, you know, what other parts are demanding to stay put, which explains so much of what’s going on with the conflicts inside, for example, or the difficulties. And what I find is that so much of the internal relational patterns of my own parts, those parts, if they’re not self-led, create those same dynamics outside of me, right? They draw other people into the same sort of patterns of relating. And one of the things about thinking about this in terms of systems and kinda starting with it internally is that, wow, this really sheds light on how I can better love other people and how I can better tolerate being loved by God and by other people.

[00:58:48] Dr. Gerry: I’m gonna throw something and it takes a slightly different edge, but we’re talking about systems theory. One thing that marriage and family therapists often do is a genogram. And a genogram is like a pictorial. So they’re drawing like, in genealogy you have a family tree, so they’re like drawing that. So when a person just shows up for therapy, even if it’s just an individual, most marriage and family therapists are gonna do a little genogram. So they’re drawing like who that person is and who they’re married to, what children they have, or what about their parents. And they’re noticing things like divorces or addictions and they’re noticing and there’s little scribbles that you make to identify this or that as you’re doing up the genogram. So they’re getting this as much as they can, they’re getting the picture of the family, but the larger family. And as far back as they go, sometimes grandparents, even great-grandparents, you get a little bit of a sense.

[00:59:42] Dr. Gerry: And I know that when I first did my genogram back when I was being trained. You’re being trained in this, they make you do it, right. And so I was doing my genogram and I recognized wow, like my parents were divorced, okay? And then I noticed my grandparents on my mother’s side were divorced. My grandparents on my father’s side, my grandmother died when the children were all small. I never knew her, but, so it wasn’t a divorce, but that didn’t last, and then he married somebody else. And then when I went to the next level, my great-grandparents on my mother’s side had separated. They didn’t divorce ’cause you didn’t back then. They separated. And then I think I noticed that somewhere else. Anyway, and then I looked at, so I noticed that my grandparents were divorced and they had nine kids. And I looked at all nine marriages ’cause I think everybody was married at least once and only two of those marriages lasted out of nine.

[01:00:44] Dr. Gerry: So what I started to notice that hit me was the cycle of marital breakdowns. Whether it was technical divorce or not. All of a sudden, like looking at the larger system, the history, generational history. I was able to go, wow, systemic effects, generational effects that are being passed down in some way or another. And how in a way, like the fact that I’ve been married over 30 years is a break in that cycle, right? It didn’t follow that pattern and it was I think very intentional, at least on my part. But when you’re looking at people and you are looking at their genograms, you learn about their systems and the systems they came out of. And whether that’s cultural things or whether that’s issues and struggles or war, issues related to war or issues related to people moving, like whatever it is that impacted is important and relevant that to understand what’s been going on in their systems. 

[01:01:46] Dr. Gerry: And when we link this to Scripture even, Christ’s genealogy was relevant enough that was like charted out in I think, Matthew and Luke, right? And it was relevant to say what was his system historically and this kind of thing. And we know that, and I’m just gonna do a quick quote here from Baruch, ’cause nobody quotes Baruch, but I’m gonna do it right now. Baruch 6: “Because of the sins which you have committed before God, you will be taken to Babylon.” Thank you very much. “As captives by Nebuchadnezzar, king of the Babylonians. Therefore, when you have come to Babylon, you will remain there for many years, for a long time, up to seven generations. After that, I will bring you away from there in peace.” So generational drama, generational choices, like they affect each person. We are affected by the choices our parents make and our grandparents make. We’re affected by that. We can deny it or we can ignore it and be just little individuals. Or we can own it and recognize it and be aware of it and do something different.

[01:03:01] Dr. Peter: Yeah. We’re not a tabular rasa. We’re not just a blank slate that just comes into the world, and there has been no influences and we can just make ourselves whatever we want to be. I think there’s something appealing for some people about that sort of existential idea of creating our own meaning, creating our own reality, you know, subjectivism, whatever I believe to be true is true, at least for me. But you know what? It begins to really disconnect. 

[01:03:28] Bridget Adams: It reminds me of an exercise that we did in the level one IFS training. It was really similar. And one of the fellow trainees had never really explored or understood an aspect of her life. It was something really simple, like looking out a window. And what she realized when she did that exercise of pulling in, like you were talking about, generational, but also cultural and also, so not just family members, but also, other things that impact a person in life and recognize that part of her life like had been completely shut down by parents who didn’t want her to go outside. But it never really occurred to her like, because it was her normal, but until she looked at it in terms of, what are the things that have impacted you and really intentionally looking at those factors. It can be really interesting what comes up. Things that we haven’t really taken the time to contemplate. What kind of an impact did X, Y, or Z have on why I am the way I am or how I show up in the world?

[01:04:33] Dr. Gerry: Yeah, I love that. And to be able to take some time and slow down. And probably those things, certain parts of ourselves are still carrying that. If they’re exiled, we’re not even very conscious of it. But when we slow down and we recognize it and notice it, care for it, we bring whatever is needed. Yeah, I love that. I’m also, ’cause I mentioned genealogies of Jesus and if you look at the genealogy of Jesus and who gets singled out in some of it. It’s a little shocking. It doesn’t hit us because we don’t know books. But even like Bathsheba or whatever being named, some of the people that are named were either super sinners in some way or another, or super rebels in some way or another. Maybe heroically, but unconventional. And so what I find beautiful about the genealogies of Jesus, and there’s two different ones, is that the point of it all is that God is here to save all of it, all of our histories. He’s there to sanctify all of our history. So we are not stuck in sin or generational sin. We’re not stuck there. We’re not forever doomed. We can bring his light to it and it can be transformed. So to me, the message is super hopeful. 

[01:05:57] Bridget Adams: Yeah. Speaking of hope and generational, I also like to look at not just generational burdens, but also generational gifts. That can be also very insightful to consider what’s come down in terms of gifts and not just in terms of problems or breaks or divorces and things, but also like what are the uniquely beautiful things that have come down to me from the generations before me. 

[01:06:27] Dr. Peter: I love that. Yeah. I was going back to two things. One that Daniel Siegel of interpersonal neurobiology talks about how when there is dysfunction in the system, it tends either toward rigidity or toward chaos. The system will either get really rigid, ,clamp down, or it’ll become chaotic. And contrasting that with what the qualities of a healthy system, according to Richard Swartz are. He describes it as being balanced and harmony and leadership and development, that the system continues to develop and that there’s the sense that the system is good for all of its members. All of the parts, if you’re thinking about an internal system or if the system is healthy, that’s good for all of the people in the family or the parish or the school. There’s that element of it too, that there’s that harmony, balance, that development and that sense of, yeah, that what’s good for one member of the system is good for the entire system.

[01:07:39] Dr. Peter: So I am just curious, Bridget, Dr. Gerry, there are, I know within family systems there’s a bunch of techniques and then I was thinking even about like group therapy and I was trained with some interpersonal process group stuff, which is systems based in some ways, even though he was actually an existentialist in terms of his worldview. What are some examples? We’re just gonna kind of rattle off some examples of like specifically systems focused techniques to try to, yeah, understand, my place in the system and even my internal systems. 

[01:08:19] Dr. Gerry: Yeah. Like I would, maybe I would just throw out, this one comes later, but emotionally focused couples therapy. Very well known, very powerful type of therapy, developed primarily by Sue Johnson and called EFT typically, but it combines aspects of attachment theory with systems theory and to work with couples. I happen to love role play and family sculptures and this kind of thing, where you get people to reenact or enact some dynamic with others. So there’s a multiple people and sometimes playing different roles and actually experience different dynamics, therapeutically. It’s so powerful. And Jacob Marino, who would’ve been contemporary, I think of Freud, and those guys was doing this kind of work way back when, he’s actually one of the founders of the group counseling that you mentioned. And so all these things kind of intersect, and then of course there’s just some greats, like Virginia Satir’s work is fantastic. And she talks about stances and different, it sort of relates a bit to parts and just this whole, Charles Whitfield, different people out there that go in different directions with family therapy and there’s a whole different, there’s Bo Bowen’s theories and there’s minutia. If you’re interested, you could look into this and you could find many models. 

[01:09:37] Dr. Peter: Right, I mean, the Gestalts tradition has the empty chair technique where you’re kind of communicating with another person in your family. And those sculpts, like I did those on my IFS trainings, where you’re representing the different parts of you with other people that you’re doing this with. It’s really powerful. So there’s just a lot of ways to look at this, not just at the level of individual parts, but what’s happening with those parts in relationship. And so even on the PFP reports, the PartsFinder Pro reports, we discuss the individual parts and their roles, but then there’s always a section about the relationships among parts. And that’s where some of the richest information on those reports comes in, where we’re describing the alignments and the polarizations and the subsystems, because we didn’t really talk much about that. But within even your own internal system, there are subsystems that get organized usually around an exile or two, and that include the protectors that protect that exile, protect against that exile. So taking this all inside is just a fascinating thing. 

[01:10:42] Dr. Gerry: Oh yeah. We could get into triangulation, for example. You said subsystems. Yeah, there’s a lot there. It’s a whole discipline. 

[01:10:50] Bridget Adams: And Dr. Peter, the program that Souls and Hearts offers, Formation for Formators. Those experiences are not just about understanding your own internal system, but also how is it relating in these relationships in life. 

[01:11:04] Dr. Peter: That’s why it’s such a community and small group based way of relating is because we want to understand not just how our system operates inside, but how does it interact with other people’s systems. And so much of it reflects back and forth. Like, if I can understand the way that parts of me, if they are dominating, if they’re blended, if they’re in charge, if they react to parts of other people very similarly to those similar kind of parts, those counterparts within me. So if I understand myself better, I understand my relationships with other people better. If I understand my relationships with other people better, I’m gonna understand my relationship with myself better. 

[01:11:39] Bridget Adams: Yeah. Watching people in the RCC and the Resilient Catholics Community have those light bulb moments where they realize, this person in my small group in my company is activating this part of me. And then it sheds light on something that had previously been very mysterious about why it was so hard to get along with X, Y, or Z. So really, it’s a blessing to the whole world. It’s a blessing to the whole world to be able to understand these kind of things. 

[01:12:06] Dr. Peter: What would each of you like to identify as your takeaway? If there’s one thing, one key thing, and I know we’ve covered a lot of ground, so it could be hard, but one key thing that you would like each of our audience members to remember from this episode, what would that one key takeaway be? 

[01:12:30] Bridget Adams: A key takeaway for me would be, just remembering that those people that I’m worshiping with are made up of parts and that we’re all there together in the system and just how beautiful each individual person is, even when they’re rubbing me the wrong way or seem to be doing something that’s bothering me. Really remembering how intricate each person is and I bring it in the church because sometimes that’s the hardest place to feel connected sometimes. 

[01:13:01] Dr. Gerry: Yeah. And so I would just say maybe that I love the concept that we are more than the sum of our parts. Yes, we’re an individual, but we’re not just an instrument. We don’t exist just to, like a factory, that is to produce something. So we’re not just human doers, right? And so there’s a beauty to our whole system and there’s a beauty to that system in itself as a human person. And there’s a beauty to that system when it’s in beautiful, intricate connection with others. And so there’s a beauty to our church. There’s a beauty to the body of Christ that we’re a part of. And even if we can be a hermit sometimes, like I can be, we can be reminded that we’re not alone, that we’re part of this beautiful tapestry, that we’re part of this beautiful, connected spiritual world, that Christ is busy transfiguring.

[01:14:04] Dr. Gerry: Another thing that I didn’t get to say that I would love to have said is that the Holy Trinity is the perfect system. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It’s perfect loving unity. God being one, God being, being pure being, pure act. There’s this plurality, based on love . And so Bonaventure says for what is supremely one, he’s the universal principle of all multiplicity. So somehow this oneness and this plurality can co-exist paradoxically, which is a little hard for us to grasp, and yet it’s supreme mutual intimacy is what St. Bonaventure says.

[01:14:54] Bridget Adams: I think we see that also in the Holy Family, right? 

[01:14:58] Dr. Gerry: Yeah. The Holy Family is a beautiful image of that, of the Trinity. Yeah. A human image of that. And then of course, each one of us in the image of God, we can really connect in with our inmost self and see that, that we also reflect that. Yeah, reflect that. These family that reflect that Holy Trinity. Wow. Very good. 

[01:15:22] Dr. Peter: So there’s an invitation here to know that you’re not alone, that you belong, which I consider to be the sixth primary condition of secure attachment. And that there is a place for you. And that place was created before time began. And that so much of this is not about creating that place, it’s not about establishing yourself in the world, but it’s about discovering it and embracing it and living it out. it’s already there for us as a gift. So thank you. 

[01:15:55] Dr. Peter: And as we roll into these announcements, just encourage you to comment on this episode in our YouTube comments. You can check that out at Interior Integration 4 Catholics, that’s Interior Integration 4 Catholics. That’s our channel name. Like, subscribe, get the word out. We really find that our best advocate is you. We found through trial and error, that personal recommendations of our Souls and Hearts offerings, including this Interior Integration for Catholics podcast are the very best way to connect more faithful Catholics with the human formation resources that they need. And if you resonated with this podcast episode, share it with one or two or more people you believe would benefit from it. 

[01:16:39] Dr. Peter: I am also gonna encourage you to check out our free courses at soulsandhearts.com/courses. We have a Catholic’s Guide to Choosing a Therapist. We have a Catholic’s Guide to Self-Help. We have a Catholic’s Guide to Helping a Loved One in Distress. And then I just again, want you to know about the Resilient Catholics Community. And that is really a system, right? And it’s a system that consists of other smaller systems, like how we gather together in our cohorts, which are like the incoming classes. And then our companies, which are the small groups that we meet in weekly. And then even within that, you have a system with your companion who you ideally are checking in with, multiple times per week. So yeah, there’s all of this learning that happens within the system of our communities. And Bridget, you’ve been a member of the Resilient Catholics Community from the very beginning. I’m just curious how you would tie it into what we’re talking about. You made a couple of references earlier, so I just thought maybe there would be a little bit more about that right now. 

[01:17:43] Bridget Adams: I would say that what Dr. Gerry was talking about earlier about this kind of leg of individualism that’s a part of our culture now, that being in the RCC is an anecdote for that. It really is a place to become connected, to begin to relate with others in a new way with more self leadership and with an understanding of how my parts are impacted and impacting the systems of others. So highly recommend. 

[01:18:16] Dr. Peter: Well, thank you for that. And then we also have the Formation for Formators Community. So if you are someone who accompanies others in formation on an individual level, so a priest, therapist, a counselor, a coach, a spiritual director, anyone who is involved with the formation of others. We really are focused on providing human formation for formators. That’s what we call it, the Formation for Formators Community. You can check that out at soulsandhearts.com/fff. 

[01:18:50] Dr. Peter: And we are also sponsoring a Come and See retreat from August 11th to the 14th, 2025. And that is in Bloomington, Indiana. And we will be working with formators in systems and small groups connecting you, helping you to connect with your own parts and your own system, helping you to connect with people there at the retreat. So I’m excited about that and really looking forward to that as well. We have new foundations experiential groups launching in September of 2025. Those launch every March and September. So I just encourage you to be able to check those resources out because it’s so important for you to be in touch with your own parts. It’s so important to be in touch with your own system. It helps so much when you are working with others if you have a real connection inside, if you have that interior integration.

[01:19:45] Dr. Peter: Now, as you may already know, I host conversation hours every Tuesday and Thursday from 4:30 PM to 5:30 PM Eastern Time on my cell phone, (317) 567-9594. These are private conversations, but I don’t do any clinical consultations or provide any clinical services, but it’s a chance for a 10 minute conversation about any of the themes in these podcast episodes or in the semi-monthly reflections that I write. We could talk about the Resilient Catholics Community or the Formation for Formators Community, anything that Souls and Hearts offers. I am also excited to announce that we have installed powerful search features throughout our website. So if you click on that magnifying glass icon in the upper right hand corner of any page, you can find what you need now much more easily. You can also check out our resource page where we put up just about everything we have at Souls and Hearts in alphabetical order by topic, and that’s at soulsandhearts.com/toc. And with that, let’s bring this to a close by invoking our patroness and our patrons. Our Lady, Our Mother, Untier of Knots, pray for us. St. Joseph, pray for us. St. John the Baptist, pray for us.