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90 Your Well-Being: The Secular Experts Speak

Episode 90 Published 4 years ago
Description
  1. Summary:  Join us as 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.  Arristipus, 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.  
  2. Lead in
     
    1. In  June of 1991 I was really traumatized
       
      1. Just left a spiritually and psychologically abusive group and I was struggling
    2.  
      1. How could this have happened
    3.  
      1. I thought I was giving my life to God -- and then I find out the community I was in was like this -- 

      1. Had to confront my own behaviors in the community -- manipulation, deception, betrayals of trust -- things like that.  

      1. I knew I had to recover.  And so I went on a quest
    6.  
      1. I was still Catholic, I never lost my faith, but I felt really burned by the Catholic Church
    7.  
      1. I wanted to learn everything I could about social influence, about group dynamics, about psychological manipulation -- in part so what happened before would never happen again, and also to tap into wisdom that I didn't have access to in my very sheltered community. 

      1. In short, I was on a quest to find out the best of what secular psychology had to offer.  

      1. I would have gone to a Catholic Graduate 


    1. What I was looking for
  4.  
    1. What I found
  5.  
  6. Introduction
     
    1. Question may arise, "Why Dr. Peter, since you are a Catholic psychologist, why are you even looking at these secular sources? Why even bother with them?  Don't we have everything we need in Scripture, in the traditions of the Church, in the writings of the Church Fathers and the saints, and in magisterial teaching?  I thought this was a Catholic podcast here.  
      1. Let me ask you question in return then -- Let's say you're experiencing serious physical symptoms -- something is wrong medically.  You have intense abdominal pain, right around your navel, your belly is starting to swell, you have a low-grade fever, you've lost your appetite and you're nauseous and you have diarrhea.  How would you react if I were to say to you: "Why are you considering consulting secular medical experts?  What need have you of doctors and a hospital?  Don't you have everything you need in Scripture, in the traditions of the Church, in the writings of the Church Fathers and the saints, and in magisterial teaching?  
        1. If I responded to you like that, you might think I'm a crackpot or that I believe in faith healing alone or that I just don't get what you are experiencing.
        2. Those are the symptoms of an appendicitis, and that infected appendix could burst 48-72 hours after your first symptoms.  If that happens, bacteria spread infection throughout your abdomen, and that is potentially life-threatening.  You would need surgery to remove the appendix and clean out your abdomen.  
      2. Remember that we are embodied beings -- we are composites of a soul and a body. The 17th Century Philosopher Rene Descartes' gave us a lot of great things, including analytic geometry,  but he was wrong splitting the body from the mind in his dualism.   Descartes' mind-body dualism, the idea that the body and the mind operate in separate spheres, and neither can be assimilated into the other which has been so influential in our modern era.
         
        1. In the last several years we are realizing just how much of our mental life and our psychological well-being is linked in various ways to our neurobiology -- the ways that our nervous systems function.  And the relations
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