Monthly Archives: April 2019

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I am a touchy feely person. I wasn’t always. When I was a child and early adolescent religion was more magic than faith to me. I was raised with idea that I was always being watched. Someone was always judging me and if I screwed up and made the least little mistake, I could be condemned. If I stayed on the right path I would be rewarded, but the path was very narrow and dangerous. Somehow I got the idea that if I wore enough medals and scapulars I could bypass this and be guaranteed a quick entrance to heaven. In grade school I would wear three or four scapulars at the same time. Then I would wear medals until they turned green because of cheap metal and my sweaty little adolescent body. I think what reminded me of this was a recent Mass where there was a lot of talk about sacred relics etc.

I recently read a column in the Washington Post about Christians need for physical objects. The author was interviewing the rector of Union Theological Seminary. He believes that Christians have a need for physical objects because God made his son a physical being. We need to be able to touch things. Interesting idea but I am not sure about this.

When I was growing up the idea of sin was ever present. There were venial sins, which were about minor transgressions involved with all of life. Even thinking about doing something wrong was a sin. Then there were mortal sins. These were bad things that could send you right to hell. They were about murder and other crimes, but an awful lot were about sex. I think back about this and think about how it affected me. For a very long time I was not comfortable being touched or hugged. As an adolescent I really didn’t even want my mother to hug me. I know this was normal for any adolescent male. However I just wasn’t comfortable with that level of contact from anyone.

It wasn’t difficult when I was dating or with my wife, but casual hugging with strangers was not OK. I remember hearing one of my early patients talking to another. She was asked if I hugged her at the end of sessions. She said, “No Jim isn’t the hugging type”. I would often be called to consult on the adolescent unit at the hospital re substance abuse. One time they were being taught how to give appropriate hugs to each other.  I had a lot of questions about this. Some one told me to read books and articles by Leo Buscaglia. He thought that people needed a number of hugs each day.

I think that another part of the process that helped me thru this was the birth of my sons. Infants and young children need this type of loving contact. As I progressed as a therapist I became more comfortable hugging patients if they asked. Sometimes I would offer a hug to provide additional support. I never did it for my own pleasure. However now I have begun to think about this again. The MeToo made us all aware of the harassment women have been subject too.  Joe Biden has recently been criticized for his contact with women in that he was violating their space. I recently saw a guy wearing a tee shirt with “I Don’t Hug” on it and maybe that is the answer. You have to be clear about what level of contact you are comfortable with. Sometimes people really give off clear warnings about their boundaries. Some others don’t and need to be asked what they are comfortable with. I know there is a lot of conflict in the field about this right now. I know a psychiatrist who won’t even shake hands with new patients.

A friend of mine who shared some of my views about hugging patients was fired because of hugging a patient who he had a long relationship with. The patient was very comfortable with this and most sessions ended like that. It was a purely platonic hug, but was now against policy. Sometimes political correctness interferes with what is really correct.

There are so many areas like this now. Relations between men and women have always been confusing. What was OK is now not. Years ago on the old Homicide TV show one of the main characters said “I remember when Co-dependent relationships were the way it was supposed to be!! “. Well no longer.

Perhaps modern technology can help. With my new car I get warning beeps if I begin to swerve from my lane, or if another car is to close. Maybe someone will develop a “Personal Boundary Alert” if you are violating someone’s space. It would be interesting see how people would respond to a loud siren going off when you tried to touch someone.

Right now I continue to question my own life about what is Ok and what isn’t.  I don’t know if I would use the word sin anymore except for big things that hurt other people. I still have to try and stay open and clarify my own boundaries. My wife says that she likes to know things. She has an insatiable curiosity about life. I have always said that my goal in life is clarity. I just want to understand. It was a lot easier in my 20s than it is in my 70s. It will probably get harder each year. I hope I can keep trying.

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No Religion has now overtaken Catholicism as the most popular religion. This was in the Wall Street Journal last week.  This an interesting fact as Holy Week begins. I don’t think many of the younger generations realize how important the Church was to us. Most of my extended family attended parochial schools. Most had at least some experience of being taught by nuns. When we were growing up it really was a badge of pride to be attending a Catholic school. We were so much better than the “publics”. When someone asked you where you lived, you didn’t tell them the neighborhood or town. You told them the parish you belonged to.

The religious holidays were really a part of life. There were individual ceremonies to mark your growth from baptism to first communion to confirmation. Every first Friday there was a special liturgy. There was a real honor to have the traveling statue of the Virgin Mary come to your house. The neighbors would come over and a group rosary would take place. If you moved into a new home, it was important to have the priest come over to bless the house. 1954 was designated as a “Marion “ year dedicated to the Virgin. In Chicago this was a very big deal. I remember there was a huge procession down Lake Shore Drive to Soldiers Field for a mass there.

There were also the religion classes where you had to memorize the Baltimore Catechism. There was no real room for argument about this. There   was right and there was wrong.

I think a lot of this started to change in the early 1960s.  A Vatican council was called to modernize the Church. Since then the Church has lost much of it’s power. The abuse scandals of the last 10-15 years have also hurt. However I think that as many of the people in my generation became better educated, we began to think for ourselves rather than have the clergy and religious do it for us.

This is both good and bad. The good is that we realize that our lives really are our responsibility. We need to take responsibility for the decisions we make and accept the consequences of those decisions. The bad is that we have lost some of our history.

We have now lived here for two years. When we moved we belonged to a fairly modern parish in Naperville. We enjoyed the liturgy there and the social activity. There seemed to be a real sense of community. Since we moved we have been attending the parish here. This diocese appears to be much more conservative. There are references to saints and relics and observances that were popular when I was in grade school. There is a definite effort to go back in time. I think that door is closed for me. I now question everything. I still go to Mass, but I now tend to fall asleep during the sermon. I told myself that this was because I had to listen to people professionally for so many years that it hard for me to listen to someone just talking.

The importance of some type of spiritual experience is still there for me. Now I question where it is and wonder if I can ever find it. It really is easy to criticize the Church. I can think of so many ways to do so. However I also realize that somewhere along the way I did lose something. I am not ready to discard everything and begin worshiping the sun or sacrificing virgins. I am not a total materialist. I just am not sure where the truth is.

The Old Testament and the New Testament often seem in opposition. The Jesus of the New Testament presents a loving, forgiving faith. The way this has been interpreted over the years is part of the problem. There is still an effort to say there is one right and many wrongs. I think there is a desire to go back to the memorization of the Baltimore Catechism.

I once had a very devout patient. He and his wife were members of an evangelical Church. They were very active in that Church. They didn’t trust society as a whole so they even home schooled their children. They were very unhappy yet they decided to stay together. The wife would verbalize that her husband was the leader of the family and she should subjugate herself to him. She would say this and yet continue to sabotage his relationship with their children on a regular basis. They would have sex because he wanted to and then she would try and make him feel guilty. Any recommendations or interventions I made almost had to be biblical according to their understanding of the bible.

I think I saw them five or six times. I recommended that they might be better working with their pastor or a Christian counselor. They didn’t want to change. I have often wondered what happened to them and what happened to their children. They could be very satisfied that they were bringing their children up in a religious home, but what message were they really giving. This is not just true of the Christian religions. I think any organized religion that insists on absolutes and negates individual responsibility creates the same difficulty.

There is a need in me and probably in all of us for some contact with a higher power whatever that might be. I don’t want to be like Diogenes and, rather than searching for an honest man, be continually searching for the true religion. I just want to have some belief that touches me and continues to help me heal.

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My father died when I was 20. I was asleep in my dorm room and a priest knocked on my door to tell me. He was very gentle and drove me to the hospital where my mother and sisters were waiting. I remember them asking me to go in to say goodbye. I walked in to see my father’s corpse.

I don’t think many of us picture our parent’s death. We think they will live forever just like we will. When Jacqueline Kennedy died there was an interview with her son where he said that you don’t really become an adult until your parents die. Over the years I have thought a lot about that. I don’t think that’s true. You become and adult when you become responsible for your life’s choices and the consequences that ensue.

I think before my father’s death my life was pretty well scripted out. I was in the seminary and it was my destiny to become the priest that my entire Irish extended family wanted. I don’t think I really thought much about it. I would see friends of mine leave the seminary and I felt sad at their loss. I didn’t think I would ever leave. I remember one of the chaplain priests that we had telling me that he thought I was just drifting without any real thought about the future.

After the funeral I went back and drifted some more. I finally decided to leave when I was a deacon, the last step before the priesthood. I was assigned to a parish that had three priests and was the bishop’s primary residence. It was a very busy place, but all thru the summer I was there, all I could think of was the incredible loneliness of the life. I remember telling my mother that I was going to leave. She was very supportive. It really wasn’t until recently that I found out how much she had cried when I left.

I moved back home for about eight months and then moved out with some friends. My decision to leave still haunted me. I really didn’t know what the future would hold. I began to date a very nice girl, but part of me felt guilty for doing that. I was not supposed to date. I even broke up with her because of this confusion that I felt.

I had let down not just my family, but also all my friends from the seminary and the entire Catholic Church. Thinking back on this time I don’t know how much of it was because of my self-centeredness, my immaturity, my naïveté about life, or the really limited and focused culture of the seminary. One day we were helping some friends move and I saw the girl I had been dating. We hadn’t seen each other for about four months. We began to talk and we went out to get a coke at a fast food restaurant and I proposed. I don’t think I had any real plans to do that, it really just happened. She said yes and we have been married for 46 years. After I asked her I couldn’t believe the words came out of my mouth, but they may have been the first real adult words I had ever spoken.

When do you become an adult? What does that really mean? I know that over the years I still at times wonder if I ever really grew up. Virginia Satir, one of the early pioneers of family therapy, wrote about this. She said that often when dealing with a difficult case she wondered when the real adult, the real therapist would come in the room.

This is not all negative. The importance of laughter, making jokes, and just playing is still part of my life. Adulthood is not always somber responsibility, but it is being responsible for the choices you make. I think there is always some event that triggers this. The event can be a death or something that no one else would even think important. It can be something tragic or something really trivial, but whatever it is, it is life changing. It might not even be recognizable until years later.

For many years after my father’s death I would have dreams that he was still alive. The dreams would be rather bizarre in that he came back and made everything right again. The dreams stopped after we got married. I don’t know if they were really encouraging me all along to take responsibility and make a life for myself. The past was over and couldn’t be redone. It was time to shape my own life.