Dear Souls and Hearts Members,

Demons are real.  We have it on the authority of scripture.  St. Peter tells us,

Be sober, be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. (1 Peter 8:5)

And St. Paul tells us in Ephesians 6:12

For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood; but against principalities and power, against the rulers of the world of this darkness, against the spirits of wickedness in the high places.

And the reality of...

Dear Souls and Hearts Members,

Our Lord commanded us in Luke 10:27,  “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.”  To love your neighbor as your self.  What does that mean?  What are the elements of loving my neighbor?

In simple, layman’s language, I think there are three elements to loving another person: benevolence, capacity, and constancy...

Dear Souls and Hearts Members,

Trauma.  And our bodies.  That’s what I dive into in this month’s Interior Integration for Catholics Podcast, Episode 89 entitled: Your Trauma, Your Body: Protection vs. Connection.  The episode is 80 minutes long, chock full of essential information about how psychological trauma impacts your body.

Secular psychologists argue that we have two major drives – to survive and to bond with other people.  But our bodies, at a...

Dear Souls and Hearts Community Members,

Last week in our weekly email we discussed how we avoid silence.  Today, we are getting into how we avoid suffering. But what is suffering?  And how is it different from pain, especially mental pain? 

I take on those questions in a 41-minute premium podcast episode for the Catholic members of our Interior Therapist Community – and as I was planning that episode, I really wanted to include all of you in the broader Souls and Hearts...

Dear Souls and Hearts Members,

Today, I wanted to discuss the problem of silence, the crisis of silence, perhaps the terror of silence…for you.

Our modern culture abhors silence.  It treats silence as a vacuum – the absence of good, as though it were evil.  And our modern culture has taken the most exquisite form of distraction, of noise, of internal and external stimuli to the highest level of development ever seen in the history of humankind.

In other words, as a...

Dear Souls and Hearts Community Members

In this Christmas season, there is a great focus on gifts – retailers invest millions of dollars in advertising, product manufacturers try to convince you that someone in your life needs this or that gadget.  Service providers work to convince you that what they offer is just what you, or your spouse or parents or children or friend need to be happier, healthier, or better in some way.  Gifts.  But what about the giving, and more...

Dear Souls and Hearts Community Members,

So what is “Catholic” therapy or counseling?  Is there such a thing?

Some might argue that a therapy is Catholic if the therapist is Catholic.  But that is far from necessarily being true. 

Others might claim that a therapy is Catholic if the therapist and client pray before the session.  Hmmm.  I don’t think so. That's not enough. 

Some people might claim that therapy can’t be Catholic, any more...

Dear Souls and Hearts Community Members,

If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.  G.K Chesterton, 1910

I can’t think of any endeavor in which Chesterton’s famous quote is more important or true than prayer.  Prayer.

Prayer.  What does that word bring up for you when you read it.  Take a minute in your busy day right now and stop.  You have a minute.  Prayer. What spontaneously comes up in you, in your body, in your emotions, in your...

Dear Souls and Hearts Community Members,

Happy Feast of the Immaculate Conception to you all!  This is the day we celebrate our Lady, our Mother, the Immaculate.  She is is spiritual mother, our primary mother.  And I have special devotion to her as the mother of all of our Souls and Hearts members, especially in that she heals mother wounds, the inevitable emotional and relational injuries that happen to us over time in our fallen world from our imperfect mother figures.

On...

By Peter Malinoski, Ph.D.

I don’t trust myself.

Have you said, “I don’t trust myself” to yourself?  If you haven’t, it’s a pretty good bet that you know someone who has.  Depending on our impulses, temptations and circumstances, we might not trust ourselves in our speech, our drinking behaviors, our humor, our eating patterns, our internet use, or in the grocery store.   That can be a whole range of situations in which we don’t...