Scripture for Your Inner Outcasts

Transcript

Speaker 1: Jesus said, I am the good Shepherd. A good shepherd lays down his life for his sheep.

Speaker 2: Welcome back to Scripture for your inner outcasts. Today is April 27th, 2026, Monday of the fourth week of Easter. Today we are joined by clinical psychologist Doctor Peter Malinowski, the co-founder and President of Souls and Hearts, and host of our sister podcast, Interior Integration for Catholics.

Speaker 1: John ten verse 11. This is in our gospel. Jesus said, I am the good shepherd. A good shepherd lays down his life for his sheep. And then just a few verses later, John ten verse 14, I am the good shepherd, and I know mine and mine know me. Okay, this is really interesting. I'm going to take you back to 1985. I'm a sophomore in high school. I'm at the boys Brigade and we watched this educational film called survival. And there are four survival scenes in there. One had this scene of hypothermia. It haunted me. It's haunted me for more than 40 years now. And in it, there is a hunter who made a whole series of mistakes and starts to suffer from hypothermia. And one of the symptoms of hypothermia is that you begin to hallucinate. You begin to get paranoid, your cognitive processes get way off. And in the end, this hunter was dying of hypothermia and hiding from his would be rescuers. He heard their voices. He thought they were demons. So he hid in the trunk of a tree like this, opening in a tree, and died just a few feet from where some of the searchers were looking for him. This is very graphic. It stayed with me a long time and it reminds me of how our parts can get really disoriented, can get very, very far off in terms of their understanding of who God is.

Speaker 1: God images are the emotional and subjective experiences of God that parts have. Who parts feel God to be in the moment. And these may not correspond at all to who God really is. This is what parts feel about God in their bones. This is the parts experiential sense how their young cognitive processes interpret God on the basis of their experience, usually of other authority figures, and they can often see God in very distorted ways. This includes managers. This includes firefighters. This includes the exiles. Right. I think this is the major way that we violate the first great commandment, which is to love the Lord thy God and have no strange gods before him. We don't usually, you know, dance around golden calves anymore, burn incense to Baal. Orthodox Catholics don't do that. But I think we hold on to these God images. Parts can be very resistant to letting go of these God images, and partly because they're familiar, there's a comfort in the familiarity of them. We need to let God be God and let God show us who he is.

Speaker 1: That means experiencing God. But in order to do that, integration helps so much, right? Parts coming together in right relationship with the innermost self, in that ordered hierarchy. And that includes all of our exiles. Doctor Peter Martin, clinical psychologist out of Lincoln, Nebraska, believes that our excels innately want God. They have a deep sense of who God might be. They yearn for God. They call out for him. And I think that's true of some exiles. I'm not sure it's true of all exiles, but it's often the protectors that are getting in the way because they don't trust that God will actually love these exiles. So that can be a barrier to integration. Let's make an effort all together. Inside exiles, we're going to need you not to overwhelm. We're going to need you to cooperate with the managers. And let's see what happens if we experiment a bit in our relationship with God, with parts. That way, parts can come to understand that Jesus really is the good Shepherd who lays down his life for his sheep. That way, parts can come to know that Jesus is the good Shepherd, and that parts can allow themselves to be in relationship with Jesus.

Speaker 2: Many of our parts carry distorted and untrue perceptions of who God is, and these are sometimes called God images. If you'd like to learn more about this concept, I'd recommend you check out our sister podcast, Interior Integration for Catholics, episodes 23 through 29, which is linked in the description of today's show.

Speaker 1: And with that, we'll draw this to a close by invoking our patron and center patrons our Lady, our mother, Untier of knots. Pray for us, Saint Joseph. Pray for us. Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.