Transcript
Hello and welcome to the Being Human podcast. This is episode number 200 and I have something to share with you today. I wasn’t sure if I was going to have permission to share today’s episode, but I did just get permission just in time to release this episode as our 200th episode. I’m really excited about it. I wasn’t exactly sure how to recognize such a milestone. And this is really a kind of a grueling task to put out a podcast.
And we’ve done it weekly, having a new episode released every single week for, for the last 200 weeks, which is a feat that would be absolutely impossible for me alone if it wasn’t for such an amazing team of people working in the background, pushing me to get my, my episodes recorded and then doing all the editing and uploading and producing. So thank you to the team, thank you to all of you, my wonderful, beautiful people who are hungry for a deeper understanding of being human.
And this episode today also culminates in a lot of emphasis we’ve been placing on a development of understanding of gender, man and woman, a Catholic proposal for something beautiful. When it comes to the reason why God made us as he did the work of John Paul 2 and how he is central to a psychological method or any approach to the work of accompaniment that aims to help people from a Catholic approach and or just having a Catholic worldview on who people are really as what this is all about.
So I’m sharing with you today the audio from a keynote that I delivered at Franciscan University. And thanks to the graciousness of their people at Franciscan, we are able to share this with you now. It’s from a conference from a couple weeks ago on man and woman. And so I’m talking here about the complementarity of the feminine and the masculine genius. I give a clear, articulated philosophical definition of what it is to think about the masculine or the feminine genius and a lot more.
I give anecdotal evidence to back these things up. I talk a little bit about my experience, kinds of things that come up in marital therapy, sort of a way to think about what’s going on with the kids these days and the rest of us. And so I really hope you enjoy this. I’m really grateful for your support over the last couple of years. Please email me doctorgregatholicsych.com if you’ve got suggestions, ideas for future episodes, things you want to see happen in this podcast and otherwise, I’d love to hear from you.
Just if there’s certain episodes that have really blessed you or things that have made a mark in your life or if there’s things you didn’t like too, you could always share that with me. I just love hearing from you guys. So anyway, keep us in your prayers to another 200 episodes and I’m praying for you. God bless.
Collaborative Gift and receptivity of genius
Thank you to Father Dave, to Dr. Hildebrand, to Dr. Savage. Along with my colleagues and esteemed students and guests, I’ve been asked to talk about real life. I’ve been bursting at the seams to present these ideas for a decade. And typically I find my outlet in a podcast, a little plug. It’s called the Being Human Podcast, if anyone’s interested. But there I have unlimited time, and here I do not.
So I’ve written my comments for today, and we’ll be going quickly through some fairly dense material. I’ll be happy to email anyone in my notes if you’d like them afterwards. In real life, we see both the beauty and the conflict between men and women every day. The differences between men and women are clear as we’ve been unpacking. But it’s a cosmic tragedy that we even have to spend time at a conference like this building support to prove the difference between man and woman.
Coming up with arguments and proofs for getting us back to the starting point of Genesis is exhausting, though I don’t think I speak only for myself that in this process we are learning many deeper dimensions of what we might have taken for granted before. My proposal is that there might be even more for us to gain from the recent sociological curve balls. While we’re all convinced at the metaphysical, biological, psychological and spiritual difference of man and woman, maybe we haven’t gone far enough and what we can discover.
I’m reminded of the framework I originally came to understand about the theology of the body. To put it succinctly, the culture of the 18th and 19th century Repressed sexuality as postmodern relativism took root, then metastasized to the pop culture of the sexual revolution. Wojty was genius in responding to Pope Paul VI’s call for a deeper explanation to back up. Humanae vitae was a coherent and sophisticated catechesis on the highest purpose and interpretation of our sexuality, something far greater than any of the hippies even knew was possible.
He brilliantly integrated his foundation onto mystic metaphysics with the language of the day phenomenology and proposed an interpretation of sexuality that illuminated not only how good it is, but how the deepest desires of our heart, mind and body point us towards mystical union and sanctification. As a consequence, not only did the ruling against oral contraception make more sense, but we all benefited from a real theological development of our conceptualization of man and woman as imagodei.
Here we are again, only this time we are not challenged with the retrospectively easy question of how we act according regarding contraception, but literally who we are. I firmly believe with the intercession of St. John Paul II, this moment in history will be a moment of renewal and reform as we propose an explanation to the world of who man is and who woman is, but not without also renewing our own sense of our own manhood and our own womanhood.
The first question is, do we need a renewal of our own understanding? Sadly, I’ve met many people who currently don’t think we even needed a renewal of our conceptualization of sexuality and relationship introduced by the theology of the body. So I anticipate some may reject the notion that we, the faithful, those at a conference like this, could stand to grow any further in our sense of being a man or a woman.
Let’s suspend that judgment for a while, though, and let’s see if there’s not more for us to learn. I would suggest that we do all need a reform in our understanding of our gender and more importantly, God’s purpose for it. Since Deborah has gathered together such a wonderful group of brilliant thought leaders to help us understand our distinctions, I’ll add to the comments that help us take the next step in understanding why God made us different, to make this as real life as possible.
This will hopefully inspire you to think not only about the other people who need to hear this proposal, but whether God might be inviting you and me to reflect on these ideas within our own lives. If we step back a few decades before the differences were in question, pop psych abounded with explanations on how to navigate these differences. Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, and other books attempted to protect us from killing each other in the battle of the sexes.
The connotation is that even though we are built to be at each other’s throats, somehow if we learn to play by better rules, we can learn to live with each other and maybe even resolve conflicts for long enough to further our species, hopefully when the fertility cycle lines up. Understanding the way the other sex worked was the main focus of this pop psychology. Yet it begins from the premise that we are forever destined to be suspicious and fearful of each other, as I’ve outlined in the little book I printed out for everybody.
This is a draft. If you haven’t grabbed it, it’s at the back of the room and this is something I love to get your feedback on. And my email is on the back. Our disposition of distrust goes back to the garden. It is the consequence of the fall and as Cardinal Ratzinger writes, it causes us to lose access to the face of God. This is in one of the most important letters that anybody here needs to read to understand gender and our genius.
It’s called A Letter to Bishops of the Church on the Collaboration of Man and Woman in the Church. My suggestion is that in many ways we are all in some ways still stuck in the same epoch of suspicion, and it is still keeping us from accessing the face of God. We have a natural tendency to psychologically interpret almost everything self referentially. We process what we perceive, what we think, what we feel, and what we believe through the lens of what does this mean to me?
JP2 teaches us that this is subjectivity, but our subjectivity is temporarily immersed in the near constant disorientation of our concupiscence when we think about what we see in the other, and the other is not only another person, but the other kind of person. We have twice the reason to remain suspect. But we must remember that according to JP2, human life is by its nature co educational and its dignity, as well as its balance depend on every moment of history and every place of geographic longitude and latitude on who she shall be for him and he for her.
In many of the conversations about sexuality and gender I hear today in the Catholic and Christian communities, it seems that the idea of the feminine genius, the masculine genius, and gender roles in relationships are continuing. A Hermeneutic of Suspicion in my little book I propose a definition of these geniuses which can help us to bring in a new epoch of relational dynamics between man and woman, while concurrently offering a proposal to the world that answers why a man is a man and a woman is a woman.
For the sake of time, I’ll let you read it for yourself to see the full development of my argument, but also for the sake of this lecture, I’ll give the answers from the back of the book. Here’s a summary of my definition. The feminine genius or masculine genius refers to a set of characteristics that women or men respectively have primary access to as revealed in their anatomy and physiology, centered around their capacity for motherhood or fatherhood.
These characteristics are generally centered around the capacity to bring new human life into the world in an inward or outward manner, as new persons are formed either inside the woman’s body, marked by a characteristic of proximity, and outside the man’s body marked by a characteristic of distance. These characteristics should be derived directly from a biological understanding of the person as male and female, with capacity for fatherhood or motherhood, since it’s the body that makes visible the invisible.
As the book outlines, this is a novel approach because, following Cardinal Ratzinger, who labels Mary’s feminine genius in his letter as fundamentally human values, I don’t define the qualities of each genius themselves as a delineation of each gender. Men are in need of the feminine genius of their wives, not just to live with and be added to, but to be formed by its characteristics. Likewise, women are in need of the masculine genius of their husbands, not just to live with and be added to, but to be formed by its characteristics.
This is why Sister Prudence Allen critiques Edith Stein’s idea of complementarity as fractional and proposes integral instead. Reflect on this observation with me for a minute. So many times in session, I’ve heard a male patient say about his wife, if she were a man, she’d understand. Or when a woman says about her husband, if he were a woman, he’d understand. By the way, when I say in session, that’s really just code for things that typically happen in my own marriage and my own family life.
This is a typical disposition that I am gently suggesting that we all may hold within ourselves on some level. It’s an easy thought pattern to fall into. But let’s look more closely at Ratzinger’s teaching. He says in his letter concerning the characteristics of the feminine genius, that is only because women are more immediately attuned to these values that they are the reminder and the privileged sign of such values.
In the final analysis, every human being, man or woman, is destined to be for the other. In this perspective, that which is called femininity is more than simply an attribute of the female sex. The word designates indeed the fundamental human capacity to live for the other. And because of the other, this is remarkably important for Catholics to deepen their appreciation of everything we end up saying about the feminine genius has to be something we can see developing in man.
As Deborah ended with in her comments last night, if you were there last night, she said at the end, it’s because of her husband that she’s a better woman, and because of her, her husband is a better man, a better father, a better husband. This is not the result of some sterile proximity in which man and woman superficially learn from each other, or call each other out, or push each other to become better.
As Dr. Federico pointed out this morning, it’s the very person who is given to the other, received by the other and transformed by each other in the mutual reciprocity of self. G I receive my wife’s gift of herself to me, and her femininity makes me a better man precisely because I receive it. When we receive gifts, they become ours. When we give gifts, they become the others. If men don’t become receptive in the way women are being formed by their primary biological place in the conjugal act, that image of receptivity, then they can’t be fully formed as persons through the act.
Here is the telos of complementarity, and I think we missed the mark when we don’t start from the end. Anything else we have to say about the differences, geniuses, characteristics or values should all be pointing us towards this ultimate question. How does a particular reality of difference open up the possibility for each man and woman to become a better version by receiving these characteristics from the other? This giving and receiving, in practical terms, represents a movement towards naked, without shame.
In other words, entering even more freely into the type of relationship in which the differences of the other are not held in suspicion, not protected against, but reverenced with awe and excitement at the possibility of transformation and growth. This means that men should be excited to become more like women and spend time receiving these lessons from the women in their life. And women should be excited to become more like men and spend time receiving these lessons from the men in their life.
Now, if this causes some interior discomfort, to frame it like this, your discomfort might represent a latent vulnerability within our human social structure that only recently has fully emerged. The acceptance of child mutilation or even just the allowance of furries is abhorrent. Yet we’ve been building towards this for centuries. If we were really solidified in our intrinsic identity as man or woman, it would not be uncomfortable to consider how we might become more like the other.
God made us different for a reason, and that reason is for us to become better versions of ourselves by receiving and incorporating that which we don’t already have on our own. With that framework, we can now look at some more practical ways that this is typically difficult. For starters, we have to realize just how deep these differences go. Through a psychological lens, we can learn much more about the interior experience of man and woman.
The very way a man or woman experiences the room they’re Sitting in is different. That’s right. Look around. The person near you who is the opposite sex is having right now an entirely different experience in this room. No man will ever know what the world feels like to a woman, and no woman will ever know what it feels like to experience the world as a man. Men, through spatial awareness and cognitive processing, have a totally different sense of being in the room, while women locate themselves and navigate based on proximity to particular points and experience less of a spatial wholeness to the room.
I like to think that maybe a woman’s neurology is built differently because of her womb in the capacity for bearing children. She’s been given a body by God to actually become a room. So if we don’t even sit in the room and feel the space around us the same way, how are we supposed to trust each other’s perception of mannerisms, facial expressions, tones of voice, or remembered details?
Yet we are different and built to experience almost every part of our lives with these fundamental differences, without the why. This almost seems like a cruel joke, that we’re meant to coexist and even live together. When a man is driving somewhere late at night and gets lost, how is he supposed to trust the goodness of his wife’s disposition that says that they should stop and ask for directions?
How is she supposed to trust her husband’s disposition that they don’t need to? There are deep neurological patterns at work in these moments. But in times of stress, neither is particularly excited about learning how to be a better version of myself through the formation of the other. This is why marriage is a path towards sanctification. It goes through the cross and follows the path Christ has opened up to us, to heaven.
But like the rich young man, it means we have to be willing to give up our riches. Marriage is a vocation of holiness because men and women are called to subject one another to each other out of love. Not seeking to be first with our own individual proclivities and perspectives, but instead letting ourselves receive and be formed by the other. Not seeking to be served, but to serve.
So when the husband turns to his wife with patience, with deep listening, to understand her perspective about stopping for directions, this is love. When the wife turns to her husband, doesn’t use a lot of words, which is an act of love in itself, but acknowledges his desire to figure it out himself, this is also love. Here’s another example and we’ll go deeper into the brain science with this one.
What about the age old stereotype of a man and woman missing each other when a Woman is expressing a problem and the man rushes in to fix it. If you’ve seen the nail in the head video from YouTube from like 20 years ago, the woman has a nail sticking out of her head. She’s trying to talk about her pain with her husband. Her husband is trying to tell her to take the nail out of his head.
Her head. As the woman explains the pain in her head, she’s looking for empathy. The man grows in frustration as he tries to convince her she needs to take the actual nail out of your forehead. Empathy, which according to the American Psychological association, is understanding a person from their frame of reference rather than one’s own or vicariously experiencing that person’s feelings, perceptions and thoughts, is a human value found in the feminine genius as a derivative of being oriented towards persons.
Remember, this doesn’t mean only women have empathy. It means that women have a biological proclivity towards it and are therefore a privileged sign. It also means that men are called to grow in this human value through relationships with women who represent this sign for him. We see this happening in the brain. The experience of empathy involves a relationship between two neural networks in the brain, in both men and women, which are activated very differently in each.
First, we talk about the mirror neuron system, the mns, which allows a person to make one’s own the perceived inner experience of another person through external observations. The second important system to understand though, is called the temporal parietal junction, the tpj. And this system increases anxiety when a problem is perceived and the anxiety doesn’t decrease until a solution is found. For women, when anxiety is increased, reciprocation of another person’s mirror neurons helps to reduce her anxiety.
This happens through facial cues, through tone of voice, and if a distressed woman hears her distress being mirrored by another person, her physiological distress decreases. When a woman’s MNS is activated, her TPJ is actually suppressed and there is no problem solving activity observed. There’s simply mirroring. Now here’s the really cruel joke part. For a man, the exact opposite happens. A man’s MNS will activate his TPJ and it suppresses his mirror neurons.
So what is a man to do? When he sees the woman he loves in distress, his mirror neurons turn off. His brain is telling him to relieve his own anxiety, triggered by the realization that something’s wrong by fixing a problem. This is the opposite of what a woman wants. Now, if we were animals, this would be the end of a sad breakup story. Instead, as if God knew what he was doing when he made us we can have conversations about our inner experience and learn from each other what is going on through communication.
We grow in communion because we start to figure out over time what each person thinks, feels and desires. We can grow by mastering our biological impulses, reverencing them in each other, and developing real intimacy. I teach men that the fix to their problem they are trying to solve is usually empathy itself. This is typically mind blowing for men when they first hear it. Growing sometimes is painful when they come around though, by surrendering their way of thinking, they let the motivation triggered by their temporal parietal junction actually turn back towards activating their mirror neurons and they can then express real empathy.
Unsurprisingly, this decreases his wife’s anxiety and they feel more connected and at peace. Any other practical problem they have to solve then will be easier since they’re working together as friends instead of at odds with each other as enemies. One important point I like to make for couples to help kind of kick start a little goodwill and affection in the situation, is that a man’s TPJ is not activated at just any time he sees someone in distress.
Men are biologically built to ignore other people’s distress and really, as has been noted, really other people in general, unless they pose a potential threat. For a man’s TPJ to be activated, it means his mirror neuron system was activated first by a person he cares about. It turns out that men actually have faster mirror neuron response time than women. When perceiving a loved one in distress, a man’s MNS is activated and then deactivated by the tpj.
Before a woman’s MNS even gets triggered in the first place. I’ll ask a wife how many of the problems of the other women in her husband’s life does he try to fix? Is he offering advice about clothing choices, ways to respond to texts, or ways to fix the mother child rupture in regard to his sister or his aunt or for his neighbor? Probably not. A man grows in virtue by learning to redirect his need to fix back to empathy.
Many relationships between men and women have deeply benefited from unpacking this brain distinction in light of the common misunderstanding that the man tries to fix the problem because he just doesn’t care. And while the man is learning to develop the value of empathy, the woman can develop greater patience and understanding and the knowledge that she isn’t being intentionally ignored or hurt by understanding these differences, different biological dynamics, men learn how to better fix the problem, and women learn how to better connect A woman’s proclivity towards the characteristic of empathy can be received by a man and he can subsequently develop his ability to feel deep empathy.
This is a simple example of a man becoming a better man by receiving and integrating the feminine genius of a woman. Likewise, when women are given a frame in which it’s okay to let go of other people’s feelings or boundaries that make it healthier to be in relationship, they have a deep capacity to keep a healthy perspective around those proper boundaries while maintaining a connecting, concurrent sense. A female boss who has to fire somebody can ultimately be an even better boss because she’s naturally attuned to doing it with compassion than the man who simply remains detached and uncaring when.
When he has to fire someone. All right, let’s look at cognition. Looking through the lens of cognitive neurophysiology, which is simply the way our brains are wired to think, we find further evidence that women are built differently than men. These differences reveal important insights to the feminine genius and its relation to motherhood, which necessitates the capacity for a close relationship around the developing baby in the womb. An overly simplified binary paradigm is that women’s brains have more connection between the left and right hemisphere, and men’s brains have more connection between the front and back.
Carl Stern’s important work. Thank you, Deborah, for bringing that up, called Flight from Woman, expounds on the various characteristic manifestations of this phenomenon, as well as the importance of reverencing and elevating our appreciation of the feminine disposition. The increased connectivity between left and right hemisphere leads to greater intuition and less differentiation in awareness of the source of knowledge. Stern coins this term transrational to distinguish the female brain’s cognitive system from the male’s more rational system.
This paradigm I particularly like as it corrects the derogatory habit of juxtaposing rational to irrational. Transrational instead points to an advanced system of intuition, which is at least as important, if not more important, than rational thought in certain situations. In his book, Stern quotes Ida Stein in pointing out this gift of intuition. She says, women’s strength is the intuitive grasp of the living concrete, especially of the personal element.
She has the special gift of making herself at home in the inner world of others. Comparing intuition to rational thought, he explains, it is an interior knowledge not achieved by breaking up and disassembling, but by union and incorporation. Essentially, there is so much communication happening within the brain of a woman between various inputs that it’s often impossible for her to distinguish a single point of introduction of an idea the experience is one of just knowing, without knowing how one knows.
This is what we call intuition. The ability to not intuit a multitude of data inputs at the same time to formulate an insight or conclusion and actually makes the male brain better fit for compartmentalization, dissection and separation. This is the hallmark of the rational dimension of cognition and certainly represents a characteristic of the masculine genius, which again, women also learn apart from their biological proclivity. These cognitive differences can be traced back to motherhood and fatherhood as moms need transrational intuition to know the needs of their preverbal, non rationally communicating children.
Men who are disposed outwards need compartmentalization and separation. Men and women can typically relate to conflict and tension around these two very different systems of thinking. The typical conflict in session. Okay, also with my wife and I goes something like this. You’re being really stubborn. Why can’t you budge on this? I would totally concede if only you could just tell me how you know what you’re saying is true.
I don’t know. I don’t know how I know. I just know. Well, that argument is invalid. You’re invalid. This is not a conflict about any particularly important point. It’s an argument between two ways of knowing. The typical masculine way of rational thought versus the typically feminine way of intuitive thought. This is also a physiological foundation to understand the head and heart paradigm of man and woman. Again, yes, we have these biological proclivities, but we are both made to grow in the characteristics of the other.
When we had our first baby, my wife knew exactly why the baby was crying, while I had to go through a 12 point checklist to figure it out. Now, seven kids later, I’m pretty good at intuiting a baby’s need without thinking too much about it. Most of us, when given the chance to let down our protective fig leaves, find so much consolation, peace and healing and understanding the co imagery in our respective geniuses.
In this light, contrary to Western bias, it’s not better nor worse to know with rational thought or transrational intuitive thought. In fact, according to Einstein, as quoted by Stern, the intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift. These are simply two different ways of knowing which emerge from different sets of brain neuroanatomy.
Men and women become better versions of themselves by learning from the other how to develop the manner of thinking that they are not more immediately biologically attuned to. Stern writes that human knowledge seems to have the greatest chance to arrive at truth when the two methods find a perfect balance, and that the two forms of knowledge must be harmoniously combined to form an undistorted view of reality. Here he prophetically points us towards the purpose of complementarity.
And I might add, this seems to be a good way to understand the solution that John Paul II offered philosophically with his personalism to the distrust and the divide between a sort of strict kind of Thomism and phenomenology. And both need to come to understand each other in this deeper way. This is truly integrated complementarity and my proposal for how to understand genius. While women have the proclivity and biological attunement for intuition, which makes them a privileged sign of this characteristic of being human, men learn how to be intuitive.
While men have the proclivity and biological attunement for rationality, which makes them a privileged sign of this characteristic of being human, women learn how to be rational. These formative lessons in humanity begin from the moment of conception as male and female born into a family with a mom and dad who begin the formative process without the influence of the complementary genius. Each characteristic, in this case the way of thinking, becomes a liability to human development.
A person can be too rational without learning how to be intuitive, and a person can be too intuitive without learning how to be rational. Through mutual self gift, men and women become better. Ratzinger alludes to the distortion of unfeminized masculinity in his letter when he says that without women humanity would be closed in self sufficiency, dreams of power and drama of violence. This is what testosterone fueled compartmentalization and distance looks like without the complementary feminine genius forming it to become more human.
Likewise, St. John Paul II said that the woman must take care that her sensitivity does not succumb to the temptations to possessive selfishness and must put it at the surface of authentic love. On these conditions she gives of her best everywhere, adding a touch of generosity, tenderness and a joy of life. An orientation towards others could lead to possessive selfishness, the opposite of generosity, tenderness and joy. We can see here that what this orientation, without the complementary masculine genius forming it to become more human could look like.
Too much proximity without the complementary distance is a bad thing. We can now see this dynamic in the need of one another, played out even more specifically in the bedroom. As has been pointed out, the male orientation to the physical and the female orientation to the emotional are real phenomena, but also need to be processed through the lens of teleological complementarity. It’s not enough for husbands to simply learn what their wives need to enjoy a pleasant, intimate experience, the old adage that foreplay for the evening begins at the dishwasher in the morning.
Nor is it enough for wives to learn how deeply ingrained physical attraction is for the male brain and body. These rudimentary distinctions also leave men and women feeling like, hey, I want that other thing too. Even this dichotomy between love and respect that we’ve been talking about a little bit last night, Father Dave said as we’re wrapping up, and somebody said, I respect you, and Father Dave said, oh, I want to be loved.
There is a sacramental genius to our intimacy. Matrimony itself is not complete until it is consummated, meaning the body ratifies what the words have vowed. The body makes visible the invisible. Two different bodies with two different set of primary needs makes visible the starting point of the primordial sacrament. Beginning there with trustful surrender and reverence for one another. Each conjugal moment of interaction within the marriage provides the fertile ground for conversion and sanctification.
Physical intimacy often causes emotional needs, concerns, fears, desires, and memories to surface that require deeper communication. Deeper emotional connection often leads to the desire for physical intimacy. When couples learn to see each other’s natural attunement as a gift, they more fully participate in the grace that’s available through the sacrament of matrimony. In the Catechism number 1641, it talks about the grace of matrimony by reason. In their state of life, Christian spouses have their own special gifts.
This grace, proper to the sacrament of matrimony, is intended to perfect the couple’s love and to strengthen their indissoluble unity. By this grace, they help one another attain holiness in their married life and in welcoming and educating their children. And this grace is spelled out in the next paragraph, 1642. Christ gives them the strength to take up their crosses and to follow him, to rise after they have fallen, to forgive one another, to bear one another’s burdens, and to be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ.
When married couples have sex, there is a renewal of marital vows and a refreshment of matrimonial grace. This doesn’t happen solely because of the biochemical pathways related to the conjugal act, though it doesn’t not happen because of them. Testosterone, oxytocin, etc. Things we’ve been talking about. There is a deep synergy between the masculine and feminine genius within the marital act itself, with the end being union, holiness, and happiness as persons.
When men and women learn to appreciate the full reciprocity of each other to the point of actually receiving more than the body of the other in the act, they are transformed by the mind and the heart of the other as well. Man and woman are both in the position of receptivity and both in the position of gift. Thank you, Dr. Waldstein, for your comments earlier on that when men and women don’t have as their end the receptivity of the other’s full gift, receptivity of grace is also limited, and it is more difficult to take up the cross, more difficult to rise after falling, more difficult to forgive one another, more difficult to bear one another’s burdens.
These are the things that show up in marital therapy every day, and more difficult to be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ. This is the rotten fruit of remaining separate from and suspicious, leery or tired of the other’s emotional or physical primary attunement and the loss of access to God’s face that Ratzinger pointed us to. All right, so I realize that many of my comments have been metaphysical and theological, which may seem odd as I’ve been invited to speak as a psychologist with observations on real life.
I’m sorry if I’ve gotten too far afield, but we’ve gotten to one of these extreme inflection points in history where ideas are manifesting in the most obvious of real life. Ten years ago, parents wanted me to talk about how they can man, oh, sorry. Ten years ago, parents wanted me to present on what to do with cell phones. Today they totally bypass their kids and want me to talk about how they can manage their own distress.
One possibility for this is that the kids are so far beyond perceivable help that parents aren’t even asking how anymore. From where I sit, Covid amplified whatever crisis was brewing, and now all the alarms should be going off. We need an action plan quickly. Even though we’re talking about sex and gender here, comments have already been made pointing to the next wave of chaos of transhumanism. What I see in various degrees across the spectrum is people who are losing a grip on what it means to be human.
As JP reminded us over and over again, everything comes down to what it means to be a person. And as he also pointed out in various ways, that being a person means means being in relationship. Philosophical nuances aside, in real life, relationship is not accidental. When babies are removed from other humans after they’re born, they die. The unity of life within a Person cannot be preserved without relationship.
Relationships are like oxygen for the human person. And we’ve been slowly asphyxiated since 2012. We can see this in kids, and I hear about this every week. Ten years ago, the concerns about screen time developed into eight years ago, concerns about anxiety and depression. Then Covid people woke up to the dangers of social isolation. We had a brief reprieve and hoped for a return to some kind of normal.
But it quickly became clear that the situation is far worse than it was before. Anxiety and depression morphed into higher rates of panic disorder, self harm and and suicidality. Now I hear regular reports of an increase of seizure disorders in the classroom. I was just talking about this on Monday in Houston at a conference for Catholic educators and Sister Johanna was there and she let me know the next day when she got back.
Three students that day had seizure disorders. Our kids are so detached from their repressed psychological distress that some of them can’t even feel it anymore psychologically. They’re instead expressing symptoms with pure somatization. They are becoming lost in a sea of non humanity. Meanwhile, they’re listening to and absorbing ideas that are so distorted and untethered that they’re not being led back to humanity. And honestly, even in Catholic context, there are pop influencers introducing these ideas based on their own personal interpretations or saying things kind of flippantly without realizing the gravity of their level of influence.
I grew up with media influencers ranging from Howard Stern to Rush Limbaugh, and people had their favorites. But our families, our neighborhoods provided the normalizing buffer to maintain common ground so that we could all get along with each other. Without that buffer, a single podcast episode has the power to disrupt entire communities. So I want to end on a note of hope. JP2 reminds us that love is the answer to the problem of human existence.
It’s the only force that can unite individuals and nations and transform society. The hope is that the choice to love is already ours. We are the solution to the problem in every act of self surrendering love. Thank you.