58 The Catholic Marriage Bed

Intro: Welcome to the podcast Interior Integration for Catholics Interior Integration for Catholics brings to you in each episode the best psychological information essential for your human formation, knowledge that is fundamental in shoring up the natural foundation for your Catholic spiritual life.  Often said that if you want to start an argument, bring up sex, politics or religion.  Those are the tried and true, sure-fire ways to stoke disagreement among people.  This podcast helps you focus inward on your interior integration -- to help you bring together the different parts of yourself into unity and harmony with God -- so we're going to leave the politics and social justice questions and societal reform efforts and climate change and all those big-picture, macro-level, externally-focused topics out of our conversation, so that leaves us with sex and religion.  And we're going to take on both of them together because In this podcast, we confront the tough internal questions we Catholics have in our day-to-day lives, we confront head-on our struggles in the natural realm, the psychological difficulties that keep us from fully loving our Lord and our Lady in a deep, personal, intimate way and living out our vocations, including our vocation to Catholic marriage which necessarily brings in both sexuality and religion.And we're dealing with sexuality and religion in this episode for two primary reasons: first to free you to love God our Father, Jesus our Brother, the Holy Spirit and Our Mother Mary more and more over time and Second, to love you neighbor as yourself -- And who is your neighbor?  If you are married, your first neighbor, your closest neighbor, the neighbor toward whom you have the most responsibilities is your spouse.  Because of your marriage vows.  

I, Roger, take you, Sarah, to be my wife. I promise to be true to you in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health. I will love you and honor you all the days of my life. 

I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski and I am here with you, to be your host and guide.  This podcast is part of Souls and Hearts, our online outreach at soulsandhearts.com, which is all about shoring up our natural foundation for the Catholic spiritual life, all about overcoming psychological obstacles to being loved and to loving God and neighborThis is episode 58, released on March 8, 2021This is the tenth episode in our series on sexuality the second in our subseries on Catholic marriages Way back in episode 50, the second one in this series on sexuality, we explored what a healthy, ordered, fully Catholic sexuality looks like.  Now we are zeroing in on sexuality within Catholic marriages and we're going diagnose some extremely common relational problems between Catholic spouses that get expressed through how they relate sexually.  So this episode is titled The Catholic Marriage Bed.  The Catholic Marriage Bed.So get ready, prepare yourself for light bulbs to switch on and shine brightly as we explore new and much clearer ways of thinking about sexual life in Catholic marriages, grounded in the perennial teachings of the Catholic Church and informed by the best of psychology. I'm doing this subseries on sexuality within Catholic marriage because I want you to have ways out of the sexual traps that so many Catholic married couple find themselves in, the negative cycles, the problematic repeating patterns that are so frustrating, that cause so much conflict and that harm people, even Catholic spouses who want to do the right thing.   And even if you're not trapped, your marriage is sound, love is growing -- there is going to be so much in these episodes to deepen the understanding, the awareness, the empathy, the commitment, and the love.  So we are discussing the marriage bed.  I'm using the image of a canopy bed to illustrate all the psychological and relational aspects in the natural realm that go into a vibrant, life-giving Catholic married sexuality.  We're going to be painting a word picture, a conceptual diagram of a canopy bed, with all the pieces of that bed named, labels and defined, and show how all the parts of the bed are essential to a grounded, peaceful, harmonious shared sexual life in Catholic marriage.   But first let's review the Lay of the Land, the Current Situation
 We are going to start with a broad overview here.  Key Words:  Confusion.  Lot of confusion about sexuality in our culture today
 Wider array of generally socially accepted sexual practices in our land than has ever existed before.  Internet has provided a forum to bring together people who practice all kinds of 
Greater amount of disagreement about what healthy sexual life looks like Moving away from natural law Things that were obvious even 20 years ago, even 10 years are not being questioned
 Can a man become a woman? -- now an open question being debated in our society Can two men and a woman all be in the same marriage?  Can a woman marry a dolphin?  In 2006, British millionaire Sharon Tendler married a dolphin named Cinderella, at the Eilat Reef. 

Lot of Confusion about what a healthy, ordered  Catholic Sexuality should look like -- reviewed this in episode 50
 Opinions:  Survey data -- wide variety of opinions on sexual morality
 Pew 2014 Survey of more than 7200 Catholics, 57% Favor or Strongly Favor Same-sex Marriages 
Pew 2016 survey of 817 Catholics only 8% of Catholics believe using contraception is morally wrong.  41% believe its morally acceptable and 48% believe it's not a moral issue. Pew 2019 Survey of 675 adult Catholics -- 62% of Catholic said that casual sex between consenting adults who are not in a committed relationship is always or sometimes acceptable.  Only 22% of Catholics said consensual casual sex never acceptable.  

Wide Diversity of Sexual practices among Catholics
 Hard to find solid, recent data on this.  Talking to people you find out things. 
What about oral sex, role-play sex, mutual masturbation, viewing pornography together, using sex toys together, and going beyond into anal sex, fetishes of various kinds, bondage and the list goes on and on.  
Global sex toy market -- $34 billion  $4.50 for every man woman and child.  Tens of billions, estimates ranging up to $100 billion per year for porn.   

But much more personally, for many Catholic spouses their sexual experiences in marriage are a great source of distress, pain, confusion  Internal conflicts about what is morally right and wrongDisagreements about sexual practices between Catholic spouses -- limited conflict resolutions'Inability for Catholic spouses to communicate about intimate sexual matters Feeling devalued in the sexual aspects of the marital relationshipFeeling used sexually, exploited, neglected.  High levels of dissatisfaction in the sexual relationship and intimacy more generallyNot feeling seen, known, heard, understood, accepted as ...