95 Trauma’s Devastating Impact on our Capacity to Love

1. Summary:  In this episode, we focus on how unresolved trauma undermines and sabotages both our capacity and our inclination to love well.  We explore how unresolved trauma impacts each of the five characteristics of love -- compromising our ability to love in an affective (emotional), affirming, responsive, unitive and steadfast way.  We also dive into how so trauma pulls us to focus inward, and to protect ourselves, undercutting the vulnerability and willingness to engage that are required for deep love and we discuss hope for change.  
2. Lead-in
    
   1. They say love is blind, but it’s trauma that’s blind. Love sees what is.“ — Neil Strauss, The Truth: An Uncomfortable Book About Relationships
       
      1. And Neil Strauss is right on that.  Love connects with reality.  With God who is the ultimate realness, the ultimate being, the I AM.  
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      1. Trauma is blind and it blinds us.  That's what we are talking about today.  Trauma and its impact on live.  
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4. Intro:
    
   1. Dear listener, You and I are together in the adventure of this podcast, Interior Integration for Catholics, we are journeying together, and I am thankful to be with you.
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   1. I am Dr. Peter Malinoski, clinical psychologist and passionate Catholic and together, Why are we here?  We are here together to bring you the best of psychology and human formation and harmonize it with the perennial truths of the Catholic Faith. So we can have the best of both.  That's why.  
   2. Today, we're going to take a broad perspective, a bird's-eye view of trauma's destructive consequences to our capacity to love.  What is the effect of trauma on our capacity and inclination to love?  That is the question for us to explore together today.  
   3. So welcome to episode 95,  of Interior Integration for Catholics, titled Trauma's Devastating Impact on our Capacity to Love, released on July 4, 2022, Independency Day in the USA,
   4. This podcast, Interior Integration for Catholics is part of our broader outreach, Souls and Hearts bringing the best of psychology grounded in a Catholic worldview to you and the rest of the world through our website soulsandhearts.com.  
   5. Review Trauma.  We are in the midst of  whole series of episodes on trauma.  So just a brief thumbnail review.  
      1. Started with Episode 88 Trauma: Defining and Understanding the Experience  Really important to understand the inner experience of trauma -- so you can recognize it in your own life and recognize it an empathetic and attuned way in others' loves.  Part of loving them.  
      2. Episode 89 Your Trauma, Your Body: Protection vs. Connection --  a current understanding of how large a role our bodies have in our experience of trauma.  Our bodies.  
      3. Episode 90:  Your Well-Being: The Secular Experts Speak  we review how philosophers and modern secular psychologists understand mental health and well-being.  In this episode, we look at the attempts to define what make us happy, from the 4th century BC to the present day.  Aristippus, Aristotle, Descartes, Freud, Seligman, Porges, Schwartz, and two diagnostic systems.  We take a special look at how positive psychology and Internal Family Systems see well-being.  
      4. Episode 92:  Understanding and Healing your Mind through IPNB  neuropsychiatrist Dr. Dan Siegel's Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB) and what IPNB can show us about psychological health.  We review the triangle of well-being, the nature of secure attachments, and the basis for mental health from an IPNB perspective.  We examine the characteristics of a healthy mind and how it functions, and the two signs that reliable indicate all psychological symptoms and mental dysfunction.  We discuss the nine domains of integration
      5. Three inner experiential exercises in Episode 93
      6. Episode 94:  The Primacy of Love  In this episode, I discuss the central importance of love as the marker of well-being from a Catholic perspective -- our capacity to live out  the two great commandments.  We explore how love is the distinguishing characteristics of Christians, and we discussed Catholic theologian Bernard Brady's five attributes or characteristics of love -- how love is affective, affirming, responsive, unitive and steadfast.  We discuss what is commonly missing from philosophical and theological approaches to love, and we briefly touch in the death of love and distortions of love. 
      7. So check those out if you haven't already.  This 

 

1. Going to address love in general -- focusing on loving
    
   1. In future episodes, will review
       
      1. Tolerating being loved
          
         1. Brady quxote
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      1. Ordered self-love
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3. The experience of trauma screws up our loves -- where we go to find good.  It screws up where we are seeking, how we seek to be loved and how we seek to love.  
   1. St. Augustine:  
      1. He lives in justice and sanctity who is an unprejudiced assessor of the intrinsic value of things.  He is a man who has an ordinate love: he neither loves what should not be loved nor fails to love what should be loved. On Christina Doctrine, I, 27
      2. We need ordered love.  Why -- Bernard Brady put it -- Because we become like what we love.  Whatever we embrace in our love, we become like that person or that thing.  
      3. As Augustine considered the dissipation of this youth, he wrote "I loved beautiful things of a lower order, and I was going down to the depths."   Confessions.  
   2. So much of the problem with disordered love  comes from misdirected seeking to get your attachment needs meet.  That's the problem. 
      1. We have legitimate attachment needs  Trauma strips away our sense of 
         1. A felt sense of Safety and security
         2. Feeling seen, heard, known and understood
         3. Feeling comforted, soothed, reassured
         4. Feeling cherished, treasured, delighted in
         5. Feel the other person wills my highest good.  
         6. All from Brown and Elliott 2016, Attachment disturbances in Adults
   3. Where do we find our safety and security?  In both the natural and spiritual realms, we find it in attachment security needs being met.
       
      1. Five primary attachment security needs (Brown and Elliott)
          
         1. A felt sense of safety and protection, a deep sense of security, felt in my bones
             
            1. It makes it so much easier to love when we feel safe and secure.   
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            1. "People want to be safe, and comfortable. If safety and comfort is to be found in guns, then they will take up guns—of their own accord, in their own need. And when safety and comfort are found in libraries, then the guns rust.“ — Algis Budrys American writer  Source: Some Will Not Die (1961), Chapter 6 (p. 122)
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         1. Feeling seen, heard, known, and understood
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I want, by understanding myself, to understand others.“ — Katherine Mansfield New Zealand author 1888 - 1923

1. Being comforted, soothed, and reassured
2. Feeling valued, cherished, treasured, delighted in
    
   1. You are my sunshine published by Jimmie Davis and Charles Mitchell on January 30, 1940
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You are my sunshine

My only sunshine

You ...