The Top 10 Reasons Why Catholic Men Masturbate

Intro: Welcome to the podcast Interior Integration for Catholics -- the podcast formerly known as Coronavirus Crisis: Carpe Diem!  
Interior Integration for Catholics brings to you each week the best psychological information essential for your human formation, knowledge that is so fundamental in shoring up the natural foundation for your Catholic spiritual life.  
In this podcast, we ask and answer the tough questions about the real problems we Catholics have in our day-to-day lives, 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. 
In order to free you to love God the Father, Jesus, the Holy Spirit and Our Mother Mary, I help to you focus inward on your interior integration -- to help you bring together the different parts of yourself into unity and harmony with God's truth, goodness and beauty
Together, we are looking for a deep transformation in our mindsets, our heartsets and our bodysets, a radical transformation at the core of our being so that our souls unite with God and we can rise to the challenges and opportunities He provides us.   
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 neighbor
This is episode 51, released on January 18, 2021
This is the third episode in our series on sexuality. 
and it is titled: Top 10 Reasons Why Catholic Men Masturbate.
And maybe some of you think you know why Catholic Men masturbate.  
But maybe, just maybe some of you are not satisfied with the simple, surface answers.  Maybe some of you suspect that there are psychological reasons may be a lot deeper than the common explanations would suggest.  
I'm here to say that I think there is so much more going on with masturbation than what may be available in conscious awareness.  I've been a psychologist since 2001 and in the last 20 years, I've had the opportunity to explore the reasons for masturbation in the lives of many, many Catholic men.  
Top ten reasons that Catholic men give for why they masturbate  -- but wait, there's more
Top ten deeper reasons why they really masturbate

So if you are interested in getting a much more complete answers, answers that plumb the depths of our psyches stay tuned.  
Why not women?  Fair question.  I've seen far more Catholic men actively struggling with this than Catholic women -- and I'm going off my clinical experience.  Masturbation is a great concern for some women.  I just know less about it in the lives of women. 
Many of the points are likely to be equally valid for women as for men.  
Valuable for women to understand why Catholic men masturbate.  

Parents, be mindful of how much of this you may want your young children to hear.  

Definitions
 Important to define our terms and be clear about the concepts 
Confucius:  The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper names
APA Dictionary of Psychology:  n. manipulation of one’s own genital organs, typically the penis or clitoris, for purposes of sexual gratification. The act is usually accompanied by sexual fantasies or erotic literature, pictures, or videos. Masturbation may also include the use of mechanical devices (e.g., a vibrator) or self-stimulation of other organs, such as the anus or nipples. 
Objections:  overdone sense of propriety --  
Victorian age -- women not able to be examined
Coded language, often poorly understood
Often driven by a sense of shame -- a desire to hide. 
Victorian Age characterized by a lot of sexual acting out.  Lots of it.   
"Self-abuse"  
Fear of talking about masturbation will increase the likelihood of masturbating.  
Depends on the context.  
In a clinical context, no.  

Rebuttal -- if we can put our experiences into language and share them verbally
 
Much better able to engage our intellect
 Fr. John Hardon -- his 1981 book "The Catholic Catechism": in addressing masturbation P. 355:  More than ever, the Church is becoming aware of the need for probing beneath the surface of not only what a person is doing by why he is doing it.  Impulses and tendencies that well up from the subconscious (or unconscious) are seen as contributing to overt actions that reflect the behavioral pattern of the environment, even while they contradict the deepest values in which a person believes. 

Experiences no longer pre-verbal -- chaos of emotions, body sensations, images, sensory experiences, desires, impulses -- we need to be able to name them, or they remain shadowy, dark, ominous

 

And our will -- we are less likely to act out on them 

less likely to sin

 
Contradicts a commonly held notion - that if we ignore, suppress, repress, avoid a problem it will go away
 Sin thrives in the darkness

 

Secular Psychology Views on Masturbation
 Joe Kort, Ph.D.  2020 Article in Psychology Today:  Masturbation is Sexual Health.

 

And yet here we are in 2020 and talking about masturbation is still taboo in most of society. And that’s a shame, literally and figuratively, because masturbation is still widely considered shameful, and because for most people it’s a healthy and normal activity. There is actually a term these days for those who prefer masturbation over other forms of sex: solosexual.

World has radically different views from the Catholic Church on sexuality.  
Mine is a minority opinion -- you can write me off as fringey if you want.  
Catholic teaching on Masturbation
 CCC  

 2351 Lust is disordered desire for or inordinate enjoyment of sexual pleasure. Sexual pleasure is morally disordered when sought for itself, isolated from its procreative and unitive purposes.

 

2352 By masturbation is to be understood the deliberate stimulation of the genital organs in order to derive sexual pleasure. "Both the Magisterium of the Church, in the course of a constant tradition, and the moral sense of the faithful have been in no doubt and have firmly maintained that masturbation is an intrinsically and gravely disordered action.""The deliberate use of the sexual faculty, for whatever reason, outside of marriage is essentially contrary to its purpose." For here sexual pleasure is sought outside of "the sexual relationship which is demanded by the moral order and in which the total meaning of mutual self-giving and human procreation in the context of true love is achieved."139

 

Is Masturbation a Mortal Sin?
 CCC  1857 For a sin to be mortal, three conditions must together be met: "Mortal sin is sin whose object is grave matter and which is also committed with full knowledge and deliberate consent."131

 
Grave matter -- Grave matter, full knowledge and deliberate consent
 2352   Referring to masturbation CCC 2352 goes on…To form an equitable judgment about the subjects' moral responsibility and to guide pastoral action, one must take into account the affective immaturity, force of acquired habit, conditions of anxiety or other psychological or social factors that lessen, if not even reduce to a minimum, moral culpability. 

Spiritual directors and confessors  

Force of acquired habit, affective immaturity or other mitigating factors -- in some ways a much more significant structural problem -- lack of integration.  

It can be really hard to have the humility in accepting Church teaching on this one.  
Why is it a problem on a natural level
 Freud -- wrote of the "disease of masturbation" -- and even though he asserted that children were sexual beings, he documented his concerns about the effects of masturbation on adolescent sexual development.  

CS Lewis, 1956 letter to a close friend  

"For me the real evil of masturbation would be that it takes an appetite which, in lawful use, leads the individual out of himself to complete his own personality in that of another and turns it back; sends the man back into the prison of himself, there to keep a harem of brides.  And this harem, once admitted, works against his ever getting out and really uniting with a real woman.  For the harem is:  always accessible, always subservient, calls for no sacrifices or adjustments, and can be endowed with erotic and psychological attractions which no real woman can rival.  Among those shadowy brides he is: always adored, always the perfect love, no demand is made of his unselfishness, no mortification ever imposed on his vanity.  In the end, they become merely the medium through which he increasingly adores himself."  (Lewis 1956, p. 168) – Letter to a close friend

Dead end -- not really a solution -- closed to procreation and closed to loving the spouse.  Huge insult to the spouse.  
Shaming effect. Wife: I'm not good enough -- very activating,
Most reasons given below, the spouse is not the cause.  
Still, great shame attaches.  I'm not good enough.  

Self-absorption -- CS Lewis quote above.  Contrast it with Woody Allen:  ‘Don’t knock masturbation,’ Woody Allen famously quipped: ‘It’s sex with someone I love.’  
How big of an issue is it?
 
Stats
 Actions  
1992 National Health and Social Life Survey  61% of Men masturbate
2010 Article in Journal of Sexual Medicine -- 
In last month 69% of 25-29 y.o. men, nearly 2/3 of men 18-49
> 80% of men 18-49 in last year

TENGA 2018 Global Self-Pleasure Report -- 92% of American Men masturbate.  

Souls and Hearts informal surveys of Priests -- porn and masturbation.  Sexual issues

 

Understanding Why men Masturbate
 Start with compassionate attempts to understand.  Know what we are dealing with.  
Shaming parts beating up the man
Very sensitive to any additional shame.  

Reasons men give for why they masturbate - FOTW in my office, in my Catholic practice over the last 20 years.  
Lust, I just want pleasure
I'm weak, I lack willpower.  
To de-stress, calm down, unwind, relax, To fall asleep  -- burned out
It's a habit, I do it out of habit
Anger
Boredom
Wife/girlfriend is frigid, cold, sexually distant, withholding -man's gotta do what a man's gotta do.  
Preventing acting out with girlfriend
Because I'm bad.
The devil made me do it -- temptation 
Another common response.  I don't know why --  I don't want to.
 Often scared, really uncomfortable with a feeling of loss of control

 Romans 7:15: I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.

 

Issues with these explanations
 Looking at the surface behaviors and only the immediate context of the masturbation

 
Lack of awareness, lack of access to much of their internal psychological and emotional lives
 Not recognizing deeper needs, deep intentions.  

Masturbation as a symptom -- later in the causal chain.
 Also a problem in and of itself -- Fever of 107.  

Review of Parts -- IFS perspective
 Multiplicity and Unity of Self

 Really helpful for understanding why Catholic men do what they don't want to do.  

Discussion of Parts
 within each person are separate, identifiable and enduring constellations of thoughts, emotions, attitudes, impulses, desires, abilities, interests, relational styles, body sensations, and worldviews that are not just transient emotional states, but rather constitute discrete “parts,” subpersonalities or distinct modes of operating within the person’s larger internal system. 

Like little persons within us, each with its own particular range of emotion, style of expression, abilities, desires views of the world. 
Modes of operating
Subpersonalities
Orchestra model
Focus is on integration.  

Get forced into extreme roles -- attachment injuries and relational traumas
Three roles
 Exiles -- 
most sensitive -- become injured or outraged by important other in the family or social world.  Threatens the system, external relationships
Exploited, rejected, abandoned in external relationships
Want care and love, rescue, redemption

shame.  Need for redemption 

Managers
 Protective, strategic, controlling environment, keep things safe

 Obsessions. Compulsions, reclusiveness, passivity, numbing. Panic attacks, somatic complaints, depressive episodes, hypervigiliance.

 

Firefighters
 Stifle, anesthetize, distract from feelings of exiles

 No concern for consequences

 Binge eating, drug/alcohol use, dissociation, sexual risk taking, cutting

 

Parts can take over the person
 Like in Pixar Movie Inside Out -- anger taking over the control panel of the main character Riley

 We call it blending.  

Intentions of parts -- always good, but the means they choose can be very harmful, maladaptive.

 

Look at sexual fantasies and the pornography that often goes with it
 
Will have Dr. Gerry Crete on in Episode 53, in two weeks to discuss pornography
 Can be separated

 

Conscious sexual fantasies -- often very difficult to talk about because of shame

 Unconscious sexual fantasies -- repressed with the part, but still active, still having an effect 

Looking at sexual history.  

Deeper reasons  -- focusing on psychological here -- not the spiritual.  Vice exists, sinfulness exists, lust exists.  We are looking at the natural foundation.  
Loneliness:  Yearning for intimate connection but with control  -- CS Lewis quote
Insecurity or a sense of a lack of safety -- fears of abandonment  
Difficulty with real relationships -- current or possible
Self-soothing.  

Cry for help -- from parts exiled in the unconscious -- using a symptom that they know will attract attention. Single symptom presentation (see next episode)

Anger at God -- retaliation.  
Regulating distance from God -- getting too close
 Fear of fusion

 Cycle -- self sabotage

 Fearing the next spiritual level -- the perceived demands.  God image stuff. 

Perfect sin -- doesn't hurt anybody else
 Not true 

Anger at wife
 Revenge -- unconscious anger -- not meeting my needs for a mother or a God.  

Acting out

 Begging for help from the wife -- maladaptive way

 Controlling sex life -- if you don't have sex with me, I'll do this.  May not be conscious

 
Effects of sexual abuse
 Connection with abuser -- hanging on to relational connection

 
Deep, existential lack of Safety -- self soothing.  
Testing reality, grounding
 I feel so dead inside. 

Primitive level Feeling something, anything

 Serves the same cutting -- bleeding proves that I am alive, even though I feel no life within me.  Numbness.  Hypoarousal.  

Temptation -- devils go after the most isolated, most lonely parts, carrying burdens.  

Follow the stories of:
 
Richard:
 48 years old, 

Grew up nominally Catholic, but in a troubled, broken home, parents divorced when he was 15, lots of conflict in the home growing up, parents dissatisfied,  because his mother had an affair and it shattered his father when it was revealed.  

Masturbated since his teenage years, high school locker room, Playboy magazines going around in 1987 right around the time that he parents were battling each other in high conflict and he had to try to care for his younger siblings.   Really wanted to be included, be one of the guys on the basketball team.  The other players really reveled in Richard joining them In viewing porn and in their conversations about their sexual exploits, as Richard had been considered a stuck up snob.  

Tried to stop masturbating at various times in his life, furtive sensed it was wrong, knew enough about Church teaching.  Fantasies of different women, women who were in their mid 30s.  Brunette women with dark eyes, women with curves, a little heavier than the typical playboy centerfolds.  Wanted to read the stories about their lives, what they needed, and fantasize about how he could meet their needs and then they would be devoted to him and highly committed.  

Dated a lot of girls, most of them brunettes with dark eyes, lots of sexual relationships

 Then married Linda, a very pretty woman with a lot of dependency issues who was crazy about him.  

Sex before marriage was really sensual.  After marriage, not so much.  Richard felt burdened by his wife's dependency and passive resentment.  

Married 22 years, four kids, regular Mass-goer, wanted to raise his kids right.  Continued with porn and masturbation, always when he was alone with deep, often unacknowledged feelings of shame and inadequacy and fears of being abandoned again.  

Deeper causes
 
Fears of abandonment, insecurity rising up again -- unresolved from mom's erratic behavior
 Exiled part -- needing a mom, lonely, needy -- rises up

 
In the past, gotten him into bad relationships -- terrible endings.  Must avoid that
 Firefighter leaps in with porn -- keeps him from looking for an affair, attempt to distract from the loneliness, neediness, pain, weakness.  Hyperarousal, attempt to flee from the intensity of the exiled part's experience

 

Manager -- internal critic condemns himself.  Did it again.  

Loneliness

 Anger at wife

 

Luis
 Seminarian 

Deep devotion to God

 Parents married, Dad distant, mom thinks he's a little autistic, not emotionally attuned

 
Very close enmeshed relationship with Mom
 Part of the reason for going to seminary -- no other men, can be mom's one and only

 Experiences close relationships as fusion -- blending together.

 

Wrap up
 Now that we have identified the issues around masturbation and its causes much more accurately and in greater detail, in the next episode, we'll get into how to overcome masturbation

 Follow the stories of Richard and Luis -- what happens with them. 

Welcoming the Interior Therapist Community to Souls and Hearts -- this community of 32 therapists working with me on their human formation and learning  IFS principles.  This had been in my private practice, Secure Foundations, but Dr. Gerry and I agreed that it would be great to bring it under the umbrella of Souls and Hearts.   That community is currently closed to new therapists, but we will be reopening in just a few weeks -- all kinds of opportunities there, if you are a therapist, and we do a bonus podcast for them on clinical assessment around masturbation, how to approach understanding masturbation in your clients.  If you're a Catholic clinician who is interested, get in touch with me on my cell at 317.567.9594 or my email at [email protected] 

February 19, 2021 -- 10 AM to 1:15 PM Eastern time.  I have been invited to do a webinar for the Catholic Psychotherapy Association entitled "Why Do I Avoid God?  An Internal Family Systems-Informed Approach to Parts' Negative God Images"  Here we get into how different parts see God.  Lots of experiential work.  For information and registration go to catholicpsychotherapy.org/events

 
We have the Resilient Catholic community.  That community is about transformation, about preparing the way for love in our souls. It's about being together as Catholics on a journey, on a mission to really enter into an intimate personal relationship with Jesus Christ our brother, the Holy Spirit who is Love Himself and with our spiritual parents, God the Father and Mary our Mother.  It's about sharing our experiences in that journey on that mission.
 Get on the waiting list  soulsandhearts.com/rccd so you will get information before the general public does.  Those on the waiting list -- thank you for your patience, hoping to reopen the community in April.  

Will do a bonus podcast -- community members --   experiential exercise, a Parts Roundtable about Masturbation -- Those bonus podcasts come out on Tuesday, one day later, so this one will release on January 19. 

Office hours for the RC community on Wednesday, January 27 from 9:15 to 10:15 AM Eastern time.  Register on our app.   

Can start by sharing these podcast -- spotify, apple podcasts, google play, amazon.  Share it on social media -- buttons are on our website at soulsandhearts.com/coronavirus-crisis  -- get your word out there, with your personal recommendation -- how these episodes have helped you.  Share them, let others know 

You can reach out to me at 317.567.9594 or at [email protected] 

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