I am back from four days of schooling in required courses to renew my mental health license. As I noted in earlier Café social media sites, there is a state convention of mental health workers in Florida every year at this time, and in my case, I took seven different courses over four days [the first one was an all-day affair.] Some courses were better than others, but all of them touched some nerve in my own life, in its totality, and coupled with that, the possibilities for ministry and spirituality in my Church.
Some kids grow up with the desire to be a priest. I grew up with the desire to be a priest and a counselor. My interest in mental health goes a long way back, though we didn’t call it “mental health” back then. When I was a little kid who played Mass at home, I somehow crafted a confessional out of my closet. [I never asked my siblings to be “practice penitents, of course.] I used to go to real confession on Saturday nights when only adults would confess, and I couldn’t help but notice that some individuals held up the line and spent five to ten minutes with the priest in the confessional. Impatient as I was, I gradually caught on that people were getting important advice about their problems, personal and spiritual, though I didn’t make the overlap connection till later. In the early 1970’s, in the major seminary, I worked weekends giving youth retreats for high schools and CCD programs inside the DC Beltway. So, my first ventures into ministerial counseling began with teenagers and their world. I was only 22 when I began that work, and I remember my first counselee. I was awful, too busy offering bromides when I should have been listening. Fortunately, my theology school did offer an elective called “Diagnostic Planning and Thinking,” the closest thing we had to pastoral counseling instruction. My teacher was amazing; she helped me to think and feel what it’s like to ask for help. She signed off on a for-credit project whereby I would pretend to be seeking help for my imaginary seventeen-year-old girlfriend who was pregnant, from all the public social agencies in and around Washington, D.C., and to compare how I was treated and the services available at each agency. Surprisingly, only one agency took offense with me after learning I was a student, and I got my A+ for the course. [One of very few that semester.] When I had been ordained ten years, I was getting professionally restless and decided on a lark to take a summer school course at Rollins College’s School of Education and Counseling with an eye toward earning a master’s degree in counseling. The summer course was good, I could afford to go after the degree, and I was getting intellectually restless. As it turned out, I went to school at night and during summers for four years and graduated in 1988. During those four years I was able to concentrate on research in trauma or PTSD and the pathology of child abuse; the first major Catholic clerical abuse cases in the U.S. become public in 1985 while I was in school. When I left the active priestly ministry in 1994, I was able to get a series of therapist positions in both the public and private sector as well as teach basic psychology at a community college before establishing my own practice. I finally retired in 2020 when Covid struck, though I keep my license current. Nowadays I am grateful in my late seventies to have the opportunity to look back on a lifetime of experience with both the Church and the mental health discipline and explore how the principles of human healing can enrich our sacramental life and faith formation, and vice versa. The theory and delivery of mental health services has changed a great deal in the past century, evolving from Freud’s almost daily probes into the subconscious. The name of Freud was never mentioned during the four days of clinical classes I attended last week. Sadly, neither were the names of two giants in modern psychotherapy, Carkhuff and Berenson, whose bellwether principles of the practitioner-patient relationship were drilled into us in the 1980’s. The therapist’s creed: that the practitioner be empathetic, transparent, authentic, and motivated by unconditional positive regard. [The better-known Carl Rogers was an evangelist for this model as well.] C&B’s principles read like the beatitudes, as ideals for therapists to examine their consciences each day. And, like the beatitudes, these qualities require challenging work to maintain. The Catholic Church banned the exercise of Freudian psychoanalysis until 1961, probably because of Freud’s theories on sexuality and development. However, laypeople and priests were able to adopt many of the early principles into more well-rounded understanding which embraced the Catholic Church's rich academic and philosophical tradition. Among the leaders in this movement was Father Thomas Verner Moore (1877–1969). A good case in point: the Church has no objection that I know to Erik Erikson’s theory of eight stages of human development, or other developmental theories, which hold that normally we progress through age-appropriate challenges throughout life. Erikson held that it was necessary to finish the business of one stage before progressing to the next. His fifth stage [ages 12-18] ought to be required reading for any church minister working with teens and young adults. He describes this stage as the flux “between the morality learned by the child, and the ethics to be developed by the adult.” Erikson wrote this in the 1950’s, and his stages have been subjected to critical peer review and updated, as they should. Erikson’s [and others’] stages of development are a good example of what happens when Church ministry is not familiar with the findings of legitimate science, in this case the gritty business of youth ministry when adolescents and young adults are balancing new freedoms of thought and actions with the ethics and expectations of their “tribe.’” I think if Erikson were alive today, he might lower the bottom age of step five. Reliable research from Catholic institutions such as St. Mary’s Press and CARA/ Georgetown indicate that many young people begin their process of disengagement from the Church around thirteen, and some as low as age ten. By chance, do any of you follow social media involving parish Confirmation programs? All is not well with the “fill the gas tank for life” instructional mode of catechetics where Confirmation is concerned. We, in numerous ways, have a role in the ministry of nurturing a life of faith of our younger members, but the social sciences tell us that an individual must do his or her own heavy lifting, too, in coming to grips with the faith community of their origin. Looking at another aspect of developmental stages in Catholic life, C&B’s emphasis upon “unconditional positive regard” comes into play in this fifth stage, too [as it does in others]. A thirteen-year-old who has some exposure to Catholicism, at least to the degree that the parents haul him into the “Confirmation classes” by his ear, deserves a forum to put forth his ideas and reactions to the Church he knows. Like his Erikson cohort, he needs a representative and interested cluster of individuals, particularly his peers, to evaluate how his impressions resonate with theirs, which is why group experience is so helpful here. But he also needs to know that the old codgers in the Church, like me, are in his corner, too. Unconditional positive regard. If he says, “I only go to Mass because my mother makes me,” I would share with him that I feel that way too, sometimes. “So why do you go?” “Because I love my wife to death, and it makes her happy that I go with her. I also receive communion, and when I eat the sacred host, I say the same prayer every week, ‘Jesus, I believe. Help my unbelief.’” Initiation is a beginning, not a retirement dinner. When a young person hears the mature and the senior Catholics admit that that we, too, sometimes question “the whole church thing,” but we plow along as best we can, we have leveled the playing field with our transparency and welcomed the young into our community. A good case in point: the famous English writer and convert Evelyn Waugh reportedly admitted to someone that he was an awful human being, “but think how terrible I would be if I hadn’t converted to Roman Catholicism.” We will pick up this stream again soon. Mental health at its best is an imitation of “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” In our conduct and respect for everyone, of every age and every “canonical standing” in the Church, we are a classless society in Christ. Next in this series: “Can we drop the term “fallen aways?”
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