Episode Details

Episode 24.  God Images and Self Images

July 13, 2020

Intro: Welcome to the podcast Coronavirus Crisis:  Carpe Diem, where you and I rise up and embrace the possibilities and opportunities for spiritual and psychological growth in this time of crisis, all grounded in a Catholic worldview.   We are going beyond mere resilience, to rising up to the challenges of this pandemic and becoming even healthier in the natural and the spiritual realms than we were before.  I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski your host and guide, with Souls and Hearts at soulsandhearts.com.  Thank you for being here with me.  This is episode 24,  released on July 13, 2020 and it’s called God Images and Self Images. 

Today we’re going to consolidate some of our learning to date, spiraling back to a few key concepts and then bringing those key concepts to life in a story.  You may remember Richard and Susan from Episodes 17 and 19 when we were doing a three-episode series on grief – you long-time listeners that were with us six to eight weeks ago may remember.  And you may have forgotten.   No worries.  Don’t worry if you don’t remember.  We are going to review all the key concepts briefly here and I’ll catch you all up on the doings of Susan and Richard, as we begin this fifth installment on Catholic resilience.  We’re also going to take a close, in-depth look at the negative God images that Richard and Susan struggle with, and how those God images impact how they feel about themselves and each other.  Now if you are just joining us, Richard and Susan are made up – I created these characters to illustrate the concepts we’re discussing, buy they are realistic, and have issues common in our lives.  

I said were going to review what a God image is, so let’s just go over that again briefly.

My God image is my emotional and subjective experience of God, who I feel God to be in the moment.  May or may not correspond to who God really is.  

Initially my God images are shaped by the relationship that I have with my parents.  This is my experiential sense how my feelings and how my heart interpret God.  My God images are heavily influenced by psychological factors, and different God images can be activated at different times, depending on my emotional states and what psychological mode I am in at a given time.  

God images are always formed experientially.  God images flow from our relational experiences and how we construe and make sense of those images when we are very young. 

My God images can be and usually are radically different than my God concept.

My God concept   What I profess about God.  It is my more intellectual understanding of God, based on what one has been taught, but also based on what I have explored through reading.  I decide to believe in my God concept.  Reflected in the Creed, expanded in the Catechism, formal teaching.  

This distinction between God image and God concept is so critical, I really want you to grip onto it, to really understand it a deep level. I hope you can really digest to the difference, not just at a conceptual level, but at a much deeper level in you, and hang onto it for the rest of your lives. I mean that. Remember the causal chain that we discussed last time?

Letting ourselves be taken in by our bad God images leads us to lose confidence in God, which in turn causes us to become much less resilient.  

Allowing our problematic, heretical God images to dominate us, to exert influence on us in subtle but powerful ways.   In the last episode, Episode 23, we discussed how the greatest sin against the First Commandment among us serious Catholics is defaulting to our negative God images, and letting them rule us, not resisting their pull on us, letting them draw us away from God.  

The more we give into our negative, heretical God images, the more they