Affirmation and Healing Within Spiritual Direction

By Cynthia Herman

ABSTRACT Key to the process of spiritual growth is the knowledge that human beings long for love. They desire to know their worth and value. This seeking leads to a desire for a relationship with God. In order to grow in faith to a deeper relationship with God, it is important to first have a strong sense of one's own worth as a basis for growth. This involves an accurate self-perception and a loving self-acceptance. Affirmation can help to develop a loving self-acceptance, where one can experience, feel, and see one's worth. Affirmation is a gift of love from one person to another, where one receives oneself as one experiences one's own goodness and dignity from the other and one learns one is lovable. Another key to spiritual growth is self-knowledge. Self-acceptance and self-knowledge are the beginning of the spiritual life. Developing emotional awareness leads to greater self-knowledge. Emotions need to be listened to and interpreted as part of the development of self-knowledge and self-acceptance. This emotional awareness is the beginning of understanding the negative patterns of behavior that comes out of one's woundedness. With the healing presence of Christ through prayer, one can experience God's love for them in one's woundedness and know that God dwells within and desires to transform and heal wounds with his love. This affirms one in one's worthiness, enabling one to be able to open to receive love and then return love. In spiritual direction, one seeks a relationship with God. It is a sacred time of growth, conversion, and transformation. It is a time when one looks at a relationship with self, others, and God. One is empowered by the grace of God to enter this process and continue the development of these relationships. The ministry of spiritual direction is called to be the sacred place where humanity in their fullness meets their God and accepts his mercy. When one surrenders to this grace, one is surrendering to love, mercy, and affirmation. One's self-image and relationship with others and God are touched and experienced in a new light.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: May 26, 2020
• ISBN: 9781645694717

Book preview

cover.jpg

Affirmation

and

Healing

Within

Spiritual

Direction

Dr. Cynthia T. Herman

ISBN 978-1-64569-470-0 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64569-471-7 (digital)

Copyright © 2019 by Dr. Cynthia T. Herman

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.

832 Park Avenue

Meadville, PA 16335

www.christianfaithpublishing.com

Printed in the United States of America

Dedication

I would like to dedicate this book to my family, my husband and best friend Art Herman Jr., and my loving daughters Kara and Kelly, and their beloved husbands and children.

Dr. Herman draws on a wonderful breadth of scholarship: searching scripture, spiritual experience, theology, psychological theory, psychotherapy practice, inner healing, all while keeping a clear, sustained focus on her central theme, love experienced through trusted affirmation, self-worth grown through one’s goodness being truly seen and valued. I recommend this work to all professional and volunteer caregivers, and most especially as an important part of any spiritual direction curriculum.

Douglas W. Schoeninger, PhD, Author and Clinical Psychologist

I found this book to be a wonderful comprehensive treatment of the role of healing in Spiritual Direction. It contains an excellent overview of the experts in the areas of psychology, spirituality, and theology. I came away from the author’s treatment of Spiritual Direction as if returning from a spiritual retreat.

Deacon Frank S. Lukovits

Spiritual Direction with Dr. Herman has changed my life. Her extraordinary insights are derived from a careful study of theology, spirituality, psychology, history, and traditions, woven together with a rigorous analysis of each. All this administered with a warm empathy drawn from her own deep experience of healing and divine mercy. She is a discerning student of the Great Physician, bringing me closer to knowing and experiencing God’s love in my life. I am so grateful for her consistently creative and incisive counsel.

Tanja

Cyndi’s calm presence, her capacity to listen, her intuition, and her knowledge of human emotion and Catholic theology, are all qualities that make her a gifted spiritual director. In her ministry, she draws on her research and study, and this has positively impacted my experience with her.

Mary

Spiritual Direction has opened my mind and heart to the love Jesus has for me, which in turn has brought about inner healing freeing me to love God, my neighbor and myself. I highly recommend Cyndi’s methods, as found in this book, because of the positive change it has made in my life.

Sally

Introduction

The ministry of spiritual direction offers an opportunity to develop one’s relationship with God. I claim that as we desire to grow in a relationship with God, developing self-knowledge gives us insight that potentially reveals core emotional wounds or brokenness that creates negative patterns of behavior. This awareness provides a basis for further spiritual growth. With growing awareness of our emotions, our sense of self-worth grows so we can begin to mend through focused prayers and healing grace, using affirmation as a tool to open us to this challenge by helping us to accept ourselves even in our faults and weaknesses. In this dissertation, I highlight the importance of integrating theology, psychology, and spirituality in the ministry of spiritual direction by examining how the concept of affirmation allows God’s healing grace into one’s life. Christian psychiatrist Dr. Conrad Baars defines affirmation as an experience of unselfish, unconditional, authentic love from another human being. ¹ The use of the concept of affirmation in the ministry of spiritual direction is based on the claim that human beings are seeking goodness. We are seeking love and a belief in ourselves as lovable. An interdisciplinary method will be used to examine Baars’s psychology, Thomistic theology, and contemporary approaches to the Christian spiritual direction exemplified by Evelyn and James Whitehead, David Benner, Kathleen Fischer, and William Barry, SJ. Baars’s psychology uses affirmation to help people become more aware of their self-worth by affirming their emotional lives and developing emotional awareness. The emotions need the guidance of reason in order to become virtuous, but virtue also requires the emotions. ² The Whiteheads apply Aquinas’s anthropology and Baars’s psychology of affirmation in their method of developing emotional awareness for the purpose of transforming our negative emotions and patterns of behavior, giving us greater freedom and joy in our lives. The spiritual direction visions of Kathleen Fischer and William Barry, SJ, exemplify the need to pay attention to our emotions as guides to transformation and the need to be present to another with a contemplative attitude embodying affirmation. By intertwining these voices, I will create a method of spiritual direction based on affirmation that can be used to help people discover God’s mercy and compassion in their lives, transforming painful emotions and empowering them with joy and creativity. This dissertation will use an interdisciplinary methodological approach to explore the integration of theology, psychology, and spirituality within the context of the ministry of spiritual direction by specifically examining the concept of affirmation according to the work of Dr. Conrad Baars as a foundation for this interdisciplinary method.

Baars’s contribution to this dissertation begins with the study of human emotional life. His work states that human suffering and pain stem from a lack of experiencing unconditional love.³ He developed a psychiatry based on Thomas Aquinas’s Christian anthropology, which teaches that a human person is an integration of emotions, intellect, and will and that humans seek love because humans were made to love and to be loved by a creator that is love.⁴

Baars asserts that affirmation is a necessary tool to assist the development of emotional maturity. He defines maturity as the ability to make loving choices in relationships with our self, others, and God while stating that maturity is reached when there is a balance among a person’s body, mind, emotions, and spiritual soul under the guidance of that person’s reason and will.⁵ This dissertation discusses how Baars’s concept of affirmation acts as a guide within the ministry of spiritual direction and can lead us to a deeper relationship with God and others.

Lombardo states that Aquinas claims that emotions play an important part of who we are as human beings.⁶ An awareness of emotions is a necessary precursor to choosing virtuous actions.⁷ Unlike the Stoics, philosophers of the Roman times, Aquinas of the thirteenth-century emphasizes the importance of emotions.⁸ The Stoics viewed emotions as errors that led to misery.⁹ The Stoics saw the world as a tragedy, believing in a higher reason that transcended their social world. Their goal was to move beyond their social world so emotions, as part of this world, were seen as pointless, bothersome attachments. In his book Thomas Aquinas on the Passions, Robert Miner contends that modern thinkers such as Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Hume, and Rousseau include the passions in their studies; and they even refer to Aquinas’s Treatise on the Passions.¹⁰ Miner admits that today we use the word emotions more than passions even though our modern discussion about emotions comes from the seventeenth century.¹¹ Recent talk about how emotions are understood draws from Aquinas’s work on the passions. In his book The Logic of Desire: Aquinas on Emotion, Nicholas Lombardo, OP, states that there has been a renewal of interest in psychology and Thomistic philosophy regarding the passions, intellect, and will in the twentieth century.¹² Lombardo argues that there is no dominant theory on emotions at this time in history.

Lombardo refers to Baars and Terruwe as pioneers in integrating Thomistic psychology and clinical practice.¹³ Lombardo emphasizes that the renewal of the psychology and philosophy of emotion welcomes the work of medieval thinkers. He states that Aquinas’s teaching on emotions is relevant for today as Christians work to integrate theology into pastoral counseling and psychology. Baars drew upon the idea of using Thomistic teaching on the passions in psychology from Father William A. Duynstee, CSsR, a professor at Catholic University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. In the late 1930s, he offered to Dutch Catholic psychiatrists, The Theory of Repression Judged from the Thomistic Standpoint. ¹⁴ Aquinas’s anthropology gives us the basis that Baars and the Whiteheads use with affirmation for guiding our emotions, with our reason and will, to move us out of negative patterns of behavior. This process will guide my spiritual direction model.

The Whiteheads reveal a method that helps individuals grow out of painful emotions and negative attitudes so that they can focus on joy. The first step is to become aware of the origin of feelings by giving names to emotions. This applies Aquinas’s integration of our emotions, reason, and will. Increased awareness can help in taming negative and painful emotions. The Whiteheads claim a painful emotion is a sign pointing to a greater good, such that sadness can turn to joy or peace replace fear. According to the Whiteheads, Taming enables us to embrace the emotion long enough to discern its message, long enough to evaluate its impact, long enough to use its energy to fuel the action required.¹⁵ It is surmised that living a happier life is more likely when negative emotions are indentified and freed.

My study of Christian anthropology comes from a healing perspective. The theological anthropology I am drawing from is based on Baars’s writings. Baars introduced the concept of affirmation into psychological literature in the United States after he read the work of Dutch psychiatrist Anna A. A. Terruwe, MD, whose study explores how a void of emotional attachment and lack of love can affect emotional life, as well as how the power of affirmation can heal the negative effects of an inadequate experience of love. Baars was also influenced by the concept of integrating psychotherapy and Thomistic psychology. A friend gave him a book by Terruwe, which described her theory of how to use Thomistic psychology with her clients.¹⁶ Baars united with Terruwe to translate her work into English and further integrate these two concepts. This culminated in a joint effort to author several books together. Father Jordan Aumann, OP, promoted Baars’s translations of Terruwe, introducing the doctrine of affirmation as it pertains to mystical theology in his courses at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome, Italy.¹⁷ Terruwe’s discoveries of truths about the psychological aspects of human love, how it is wounded, and the way to healing were acknowledged in 1969 in a private audience with Pope Paul VI, where he affirmed her healing ministry as a gift to the Church.¹⁸

Baars sought to restore the image of God in people by focusing upon the redemptive role of Christ for the Christian.¹⁹ He emphasized the healing ministry of Christ as an affirmer of wounded persons. Both Terruwe and Baars grounded their psychological observations on Thomas Aquinas’s metaphysics of love, which posits the causality of the good moving us to love.²⁰ Baars’s approach to the healing act of affirmation sought to balance the heart and mind and the affective and effective aspects of one’s nature. Baars taught that his healing ministry of affirmation is based on love as a source of its fruitfulness.²¹ This is further explored through the teachings of St. John, telling us that God is love (1 John 4:8), and St. Paul, stating that charity is the greatest of the theological virtues (1 Corinthians 13:3).

From a Christian anthropological perspective, our spiritual development is grounded in the theological claim that broken and wounded humanity is restored, transformed, renewed, and healed through the Christ event. The loss of grace in original sin leaves humanity wounded, but still intact according to Aquinas. Hope for restoration remains, especially the restoration of affectivity.²² Lombardo, OP, states that no matter how much chaos reigns in one’s heart, such as uncontrolled anger, humanity retains its basic character according to God’s design.²³ We are inclined toward the good.²⁴ Our transformation is a healing process that relies on the redemptive power of Christ through grace. Then as one [person’s] trespass led to condemnation for all…, so one [person’s] act of righteousness leads to acquittal and life for all… (Romans 5:18). In the ministry of spiritual direction, a theology of grace grounded in affirmation facilitates spiritual growth in a directee by focusing upon healing emotional wounds. Baars uses the concept of affirmation as a healing tool to give one a sense of worthiness, as created in the image and likeness of God. Baars’s concept of affirmation will inform my theological contextualization of spiritual direction.

This dissertation will analyze the human person in four chapters through the context of Christian anthropology. Briefly stated, the first chapter will expand upon the concept of affirmation. The next chapter will focus on the intellect, emotions, and will of the human person and examine how they function together as a whole. The third chapter will focus on the concept of healing of emotional wounds. The last chapter will examine the true self and false self and how trust effects healing while ultimately contributing to spiritual growth within the context of the ministry of spiritual direction. The paragraphs that follow offer expanded descriptions of each chapter.

The first chapter, The Healing Power of Affirmation, will examine the fact that human beings have a desire to know and sense their worthiness. The human need to assess personal value and love can lead to a desire for a relationship with God. From this perspective, a strong sense of individual worth may tie into establishing faith in a deeper relationship with God. Accurate self-perception and loving self-acceptance nourishes this relationship. Affirmation can help to develop a loving self-acceptance, where we can experience, feel, and see our worth. Affirmation as self-acceptance presents an understanding that personal value is not always derived from achievements. Love, as a quality of God, is healing. In the ministry of spiritual direction, the spiritual director can become the other that helps one to experience one’s worthiness by applying the concept of affirmation.

In the second chapter, The Integration and Function of Emotions, Intellect, and Will, I examine how emotions, intellect, and will work together impacting spirituality. This is supported by Baars’s development of Thomas Aquinas’s psychology of humanity’s emotional life, Evelyn and James Whitehead’s perspective on the spiritual aspects of emotions, and Art and Laraine Bennett’s view on healing emotional wounds. The Whiteheads and Bennetts both refer to Aquinas’s study of the human person. In the thirteenth century, Aquinas saw emotions as a healthy part of a person designed by God. Through the study of the human person, Aquinas teaches that emotions are designed to be used with the reason and will.²⁵ Emotions, reason, and will must coexist in a balanced manner in order to create a positive result. Awareness of what emotions are and how they work can help to facilitate this process. The categorization of emotions will be based on Baars’s reading of Aquinas.²⁶ This chapter will explore how knowledge of emotions can enable virtuous living. Spiritual direction can be a safe harbor where we can develop a greater awareness of our emotions.

In the third chapter, Emotions as Guides to Healing, I examine how emotional awareness uncovers patterns of behavior that can either hinder or help us on our journey to becoming more charitable and Christlike. This emotional awareness may lead to understanding the patterns of behavior originating with our woundedness. The Whiteheads claim that past traumas and wounds may cause us to react in ways that produce negative patterns of behavior. The image of self and a person’s image of God are mainly formed in childhood.²⁷ The experience of love in parenting relationships can influence emotional health. A distortion of love may lead to emotional deprivation, which can cause a lack of sense of self-worth, possibly leading to negative patterns of behavior. Spiritual direction can help us become aware of how our emotional life can be a powerful determining factor in making life choices that develop our character. Emotions are energies that move us, maybe to forgiveness, or perhaps bind us to feelings of revenge or the pain of a loss of a child, spouse, or job, resulting in an emotional life that is filled with negativity such as despair, self-pity, or sarcasm. By taking our hurt to God in prayer, we learn to let go of fear, grief, self-pity, or revenge, potentially becoming freer and peaceful.²⁸ The Whiteheads state that emotions can be transformed by harnessing them into positive behavior.²⁹

From the perspective of Christian anthropology and the human person’s emotional health, forgiveness plays an important role in healing. This dissertation will examine the role of emotions in healing as discussed by Baars. Baars draws upon the wisdom of Aquinas’s study of the human person’s emotions. Anger moves us to protect ourselves and to fight for ourselves. If we keep anger inside, we can become depressed or lose control, becoming violent. From the perspective of Baars and the Whiteheads, I discuss what to do with anger by not forgiving too soon without processing our emotions while learning how to use our reason and will to guide emotions when choosing to forgive. With this knowledge, a spiritual director can guide a person into deep healing and wholeness with Christ.

The fourth chapter, Trust as a Desire of the Heart, will look at the work of psychologist Douglas Schoeninger to examine trust as an aspect of healing love experienced in relationships. The concepts of true self and false self will be examined. Erik Erikson’s work on trust will also be examined in his book The Life Cycle Completed, as well as in the Matthew Linn ’s book Healing the Eight Stages of Life, which is based on Erikson’s theory of human development. Trust, as a specific quality in relationships, comes to us as gift. According to Schoeninger, humans are created with a desire for trust, and the basic needs for trust begin at conception.³⁰ Trust is rooted in our desire for a relationship. We are created for a relationship with God, who is trustworthy. Dysfunctional experiences of trust in the formative years can affect the ability to trust ourselves, others, and God. Accordingly, as a part of our journey in spiritual growth, our ability to trust can be related to our development of faith; so it is important to recognize if we have experienced any breakdown of trust in our lives. A loss of trust can be the result of abandonment, betrayal, negation, or violence, causing anxiety, anger, or bitterness.³¹ Healing is about building and restoring trust in relationships with self, others, and God, thereby changing negative patterns of behavior resulting from broken trust into more charitable or loving patterns.

Prayer can help heal broken trust, as discussed in Schoeninger’s Notes on Restoring Trust.³² One of several examples that I propose is to deepen our relationship with God through dialogue prayer. Dialogue prayer expresses our feelings to God while we listen for God’s response through feelings, thoughts, or events in the day. Trust in God develops through this prayer as we sense God’s presence.

The concluding chapter explains the practical application to current spiritual direction regarding what I have presented. This includes recommendations to spiritual directors on how to integrate these concepts in ministry. This dissertation presents a model of spiritual direction that sheds light into core emotional wounds that can create negative patterns of behavior. Affirmation is utilized to develop self-worth and awareness of emotions, thus developing self-knowledge and enabling us to mend through focused prayers and healing grace.

A spiritual director is called to be present to the directee with an affirming, contemplative attitude that conveys the active presence of Jesus. The spiritual director must have personally experienced authentic affirmation in order to effectively convey and communicate unconditional love. This enables the spiritual director to affirm the directee by exuding God’s merciful and forgiving love.

We cannot give what we do not have. Therefore, a spiritual director must practice self-care in order to effectively support a ministry using affirmation. This self-care is based on a spiritual formation that may involve the following: studying Scripture with meditation, practicing centering prayer or contemplation, doing worship and the sacraments, deepening intimacy with the Holy Spirit, being part of a supportive Christian community, and receiving ongoing spiritual direction or counseling. A spiritual director should be attentive to one’s own healing and self-awareness with a healthy balance between work and recreation. A spiritual director should seek and offer repentance and forgiveness in relationships with others and themselves.

A director can then help a directee to develop self-knowledge by becoming aware of emotions and woundedness that may be a basis for any negative patterns of behavior. This requires attentive prayerful listening that embodies affirmation so that emotions can be accurately named while exploring their relationship to the Spirit.³³ A trusting relationship is required to bring hidden, unacknowledged, or negative emotions to awareness. This can lead to breakthroughs in spiritual development. A spiritual director can help a directee to trace emotional memories by looking at one’s history of past events in one’s life that may reveal the basis of current feelings.³⁴ This information can help one become freer to be more loving and joyful. Using self-reflection to observe how thoughts impact feelings can be a helpful practice that promotes self-knowledge and healing.³⁵ This reveals any core beliefs that affect our thoughts, which can be prayerfully examined with a desire for change if needed. It is important to practice contemplation to develop the emotions of love, joy, and desire to correct overstimulation from fear and anxiety. It can be helpful for a directee to reflect on the concept that actions affect how we feel and that happiness can be a choice. Helpful healing prayers include engaging in dialogue prayer, remembering one’s salvation history, opening to God’s presence in moments of injury, identifying one’s wounds with the wounds of Jesus, and offering