How Psychology and Spirituality are Two Sides of the Same Coin

Our psychology forms our spirituality, and our spirituality forms our psychology.

Many years ago, in my past life as a Jesuit, our formation was called psycho-spiritual. The concept here is that we begin with who we are, where we are, what we’ve gone through. And it is this person — this whole person — that offers himself up in service to God. This is important to understand, because we enter into relationship — any relationship in fact, not just our relationship with God— inevitably bringing with us our past selves. And if this past self is wounded and hurt, and largely unaware that we are wounded and hurt, we will inevitably bring this into our present relationship. Hurt people hurt people.

The series How I Met Your Mother shows this in a very graphic way:

And so things like our image of God, how we react, how we respond, how we treat other people, the quality of our service — are all informed by and come from our psychology – formed as we were growing up, formed as we came into our own, formed by our histories and informing our potential to be who we can be.

It is important to understand all these because our ultimate goal in our service and our spirituality, is FREEDOM. And not being aware of the mindsets that we bring, the blindspots that we have, the automatic things we act on makes our freedom less. We become shackled by our past without even knowing it.

We are not what happened to us. We are what we are holding on to.

Nancia Movidi