Divine Mercy University allows me to be myself.
I can study the effect of abortion on the family without fearing, that my professors are going to judge me for my pro life stance.
I love the fact that I am receiving an education that is grounded and rooted in Catholicism and Christianity, that as a clinician, helps me to view my client in their totality.
Divine Mercy's preparation was outstanding.
I didn't anticipate the personal transformation that would take place throughout the years that I've been here.
I personally benefit from mentorship with academic advisor and clinical supervisors.
What advice can we give?
Because now some of these lockdowns and rules of the schools prevent young people from from from leaving their dorm or leaving their home.
Mhmm.
Any advice for those folks?
Yeah.
That's a that's a challenging challenging question, challenging situation.
So what's interesting, one of our data collections we did over the last few years, we looked at role of social support, perception of social support, and, which is really strong predictor of, feeling less depressed if I have a perception of good social support.
Now during the pandemic, that might be challenging to live that out.
Right?
But it's also, I think, important to know that for the students to know themselves and for the screening, what we found, if somebody comes from an insecure attachment background, maybe difficult family background, comes from a background of not having had those secure, supportive relationship.
That that really affects the way they they view their social support options.
They might not see relationships as as supportive.
So now I I could imagine we don't have data on that yet.
In the pandemic, That would be even worse.
Right?
Because I'm not e I'm not even around people anymore.
If I already have that, thought of, well, probably relationships are not gonna help me as much, that never gets confirmed the other way because I'm around people.
Maybe I'm not around people gives me an excuse to withdraw even more because of COVID, and I'm supposed to be isolated anyway.
I noticed with my children during this, pandemic that they're obviously spending a lot of time on computers, but they're communicating with, people through the Internet, relatives, cousins, but also people they don't know, playing games and things like that.
And and they refer to these people as their friends.
And I sometimes think to myself, you know, what kind of friendship can you develop virtually?
What is there any kind of, understanding about the difference between, let's say, a a personal, face to face relationship versus these virtual relationships?
And, you know, what what are the the the the advantage or disadvantages of of of each?
How do they compare, contrast?
That's interesting.
I I'm not sure.
I think there's a growing body of literature.
And, I mean, the pandemic just started in March, so it'll be interesting in the next year or two and what we learn about the effects on depression, on emotional well-being.
What I was really interested in, in the research we did was, how does the role of faith and the walk with God play into this?
Right?
This this a concept that's been kind of developed in the research literature over the last few years.
It's called spiritual coping, and it really describes the ability to turn to God in times of stress.
And do I have a walk of faith that helps me turn to God in times of stress?
Or, in difficult times, do I have that cognition of God is punishing me, or he's not there for me?
And we found that that piece is a is a huge link in how students deal with stressors, difficulties, and how are they able to cope with it, either positively or not so positive.
Yeah.
And that's a great point.
What what role does faith play when someone who's really, say, clinically depressed, you know, from from a psychological clinical standpoint?
Do we need kind of both, obviously, faith is is is very important Mhmm.
In helping us, counter that.
But, also, do we also need therapy or or or counseling or just someone to talk to?
And because there's some people you may see two extremes out there.
You know, someone who just said, well, I just you know, that you just need to have faith and not be worried.
You know, Saint Paul talks about putting our anxieties in God's hands, and that should, I'm not sure he means that to be a cure all.
Right?
And that's not that we don't have human relationships, that help us.
How would you because the other extreme is just like, well, it's not really it's it's just, I'm good.
I'm good in my faith, but I I it's really just a a human issue here.
C demeanor needs a bit balanced.
And would you would you would you agree with that?
Is there, any kind of evidence or research that might support that?
Yeah.
I'm glad you brought that up.
So, obviously, somebody struggling with clinical levels of depression, very, very important to seek help, very important to be in treatment, to seek out counseling, somebody who is trained in working with somebody who struggles with depression.
So I would, say hugely important.
Right?
And and especially during the pandemic in this isolation, even more so important to have kinda mental health check-in, to make sure we're okay.
Right?
If we notice our thoughts going more and more in the negative, where the where the sad feelings kinda overtake most of the day, definitely warning signs to say, I need to reach out.
Mhmm.
What we were interested in is, you know and I think with that, just to follow-up, somebody who is in that will probably perceive God as less supportive, will be will have a hard time making use or having a positive role of faith because of the struggle with depression.
So I think thank you for bringing that up.
That's hugely important that we are not on our own thinking, I will just pray and I'll be good.
That we seek help.
Why do you think it's so hard for people to forgive and maybe sometimes it's easier to to hate?
As you said, you mentioned hatred.
Seems like, there's a lot of that out there in the world.
Well, yes.
I think, you know, hatred is something that has to be really seriously addressed.
And first, I wanna make some distinctions.
Mhmm.
Everybody gets angry often, for all kinds of reasons.
Anger by itself that's elicited from something in the environment is how we're made, and it's not a sin.
For example, screen it isn't that, you know, you do have to control it a little bit so you don't always blow up and cause your near and dear to get all disturbed.
But, it's not harmful per se.
And scripture is very clear about this.
It says, be angry but sin not, or it says, don't let the sun go down on your anger.
We're made so that we get angry over certain things that offend us and attack us and so forth.
So anger by itself is something that should go away as the sun goes down.
But hatred is different, and I'm only talking here about interpersonal hatred hatred of a person.
And hatred is cultivated anger.
If you have a scenario in your head about how you're gonna get revenge, you have hatred.
And if it's aimed at a person, that's interpersonal hatred.
Now you're gonna get back at them.
And interpersonal hatred is, I think, a long term psychological pathology, a long term harm to us psychologically.
But, of course, people seem to like it, don't they?
Yeah.
How do they what do they how do they cultivate it?
I mean, it seems, you know, I don't know.
Why why do you think that is?
People seem to like Well, well, look, I'll give you some of the short term.
Right.
But go ahead.
There are certain short term benefits from hatred.
That's why it it it's kept itself so strong.
Strong.
And, you know, interpersonal hatred and revenge is even the source of a lot of the greatest literature in history.
Revenge is everything from the Iliad to Star Wars.
So So we have to be aware of it as a major human condition.
Why don't we, you know, how do I hate thee?
Let me count the ways.
Doctor Vitts, what are the short and long term consequences of, of hatred and the inability to forgive?
I'll talk about the short term benefits of hatred first because that's why we that that that points out the problem.
Okay?
Okay.
If you hate something hate somebody, what benefits do you get?
Well, one, you get the benefit of the of the sick role.
You know?
Poor me.
I've been hurt, and I, you know, I hate this person.
And and, everybody you get self pity.
And the next thing you get from hatred is you often get friends who hate the same person.
Mhmm.
Now now they're not really friends, because friendship real friendship isn't based upon the fact that you have, the same person you hate.
Real friends are based on the same person you love or on the same activity you love.
It seems like it provides an energy.
Oh, you know, we you know, I was a kid growing up.
You know, I'm from Baltimore.
We hated the Yankees, you know, and Yeah.
Union.
You felt part of a group.
Is that what you mean?
Stuff like that?
Yeah.
That's part of a group.
Now it's not so bad when you're hating the Yankees.
You're not hating necessarily individuals personally.
Alright.
Well You know what I mean?
Yes.
But, you know, this is exactly what school spirit is about.
You all get together and hate the enemy for a weekend.
Right?
Right.
You hate the other team for a weekend, and then you forget it.
I'm not talking about that.
I'm talking where you have a real interpersonal hatred of some person, which is showing up a lot on our politics today, but on both sides of the Right.
Of the spectrum.
But that in you get the benefit of having other people who hate the same person.
You get, the self pity role of, you know, you you're a victim, and you get a certain feeling of energy from having the activated, the energy of hatred.
You you feel yourself being energized.
And finally, and this is the big short term benefit, you feel morally superior to that person.
Oh, boy.
Do you feel morally superior to your political enemies.
And, that makes you feel, you know, good.
So those are the short term benefits.
And you have to know about them in psychology because you then have to confront the person about what are the long term pathologies.
Because to hold on to interpersonal hatred for the long term is is extraordinarily harmful to the person, to you.
I'm not even talking about forgiveness now.
I'm just talking about if you allow yourself to be filled with hatred, it's gonna pickle you.
Now pickle is not a psychological term with much precision, but I think we all know what it is.
It turns you into this wizened, bitter, resentful individual.
But let's look at it more particularly.
For example, if you're take the person who likes the sick role, and they like to feel sorry for themselves because they've been hurt by this bad person.
Well, the sick role is just a way of excusing yourself for not having a life.
It's a way of saying, look, you can't I'm the adult child of an alcoholic parent.
You can't expect much from me.
And then you go to a to a, you know, a support group where you have a pity party, and each one tries to explain how their father or their mother was a worse parent than the other ones.
And that's why you're no good.
Well, your life is you can see that nothing positive is coming out of that.
You're wasting your life in a self pity role.
The next thing about hating and getting friends because you you each hate the same person, like, you know, your boyfriend drop, you know, drops you.
And so you call the the girlfriend he had before you, and you can both agree that the boyfriend is a is is a complete bastard or something like that.
But you're not gonna be made of you don't make friends with people who have the common enemy.
Friends are based upon something you you love in common.
Real friends love the same activities, love the same people, love the same sports, love the same food or whatever.
You know, real friends have something they love in common.
And somebody you hate in common, you can't trust that person.
You don't have anything in common but your hatred.
That's not a real friendship.
So you're giving up real friendships to have friends with people who have the same hatred.
And as far as the energy goes, well, look, what does the energy of revenge do?
It makes you incompetent in anything else.
You're just so filled with revenge that you're not doing anything constructive with all that energy.
We're gonna be talking, specifically about post traumatic stress disorder, and and that's a topic you hear a lot about today, especially with regards to the military soldiers.
But, from what I've learned, it it really goes far beyond that.
Can you can you talk about, you know, the the different causes of PTSD?
Well, PTSD comes about in a lot of different, realms.
Basically, it's an exposure to any type of trauma, that you have a a reactive sense of trying to, basically, trying to protect your life.
And it can come in a like I said, a variety of forms.
You are are exposed to trauma.
You hear stories, constant hearing of stories, about trauma.
So people that are firefighters or police officers or EMTs that are constantly seeing and hearing just gruesome stories are very susceptible to developing PTSD.
Sexual trauma, physical trauma such as child abuse or, any domestic violence.
So these are typical typical ways, but I've seen people who have experienced, say, a loss of, death, the death of a loved one, a very close loved one, and had just a a a such a severe reaction to it, that they developed symptoms of PTSD.
So, again, it's being exposed to a trauma in some way and then that reaction to it.
What, what would be some of those symptoms, doctor Keyes, if if we had family members who maybe we think something might not be right?
And, how would you detect that?
You know, I've always found it amazing how how God has made the complexity of who we are as people.
And it PTSD is really a protective reaction, if you will.
The the idea is that it it it protects us, from having, at least at the moment, to experience, just the the full range and the depth of, the trauma that we may be in.
For instance, in a, car accident, just the the severe amount of pain that people might go through from a car accident, it's like a a switch being, turned off.
And so they wake up in the hospital and they might have, say, amnesia.
They can't remember the accident.
But over time, they start getting what's called flashbacks.
In other words, little pieces of the accident start to filter in to our conscious thought.
Any type of intrusion like that, whether it's a flashback or what we call memory intrusion, where you just have a thought about something and you can't shake it.
And the thoughts are usually around what what has happened to us or pictures of what has happened to us.
So any type of memory intrusion, thought intrusion, like the flashback or the memory intrusion, sometimes it shows up in dreams.
Reaction to triggers, things that remind us of the trauma.
So we react to the trauma.
We we might get a smell of something that reminds us of what we went through.
And all of a sudden, we have just our our thoughts flood with the memory of what happened.
Maybe it's a taste.
Maybe, it it's usually, has to do with one of our senses.
So reacting or reacting to the triggers, one of the other symptoms tends to be we isolate.
We tend to, think that what do I do with this?
What's going on?
So we hibernate.
We don't go out.
We don't connect to people.
We withdraw.
Something that's called hyperarousal, where we're kind of, waiting for the next shoe to drop.
We're constantly on guard for safety.
And then the emotional volatility, that reacts with our mood, sometimes we're up, sometimes we're down.
We just don't have a handle on how volatile our emotions are.
And that's really the five main symptoms that go, that that sort of make the cluster of post traumatic stress disorder.
How would a therapist, begin to deal with something like that if it's identified and diagnosed?
It seems like, it's a complicated situation.
What what are some of the therapies that would, would alleviate those symptoms?
I think it's always a complicated situation when somebody has PTSD.
Back in the day when when it was first introduced, PTSD was the very first diagnosis that was introduced into our coding system based on outside symptoms.
Everything else up to that point had been biological.
And it came with another disorder called post traumatic stress disorder.
And post traumatic stress disorder and post traumatic, PTSD are, and acute stress, excuse me, are are basically the same diagnosis, if you will.
Acute stress is the first thirty days that you have the symptoms, and then anything after thirty days is called post traumatic stress disorder.
And to treat that, it's it's a combination, of a variety of things.
First of all, the bonding between the therapist and the client is essential.
So the rapport and the, the trust in the relationship has got to be there for, this to be effective.
And really from a wide variety of theories and techniques, the, the the main, treatment module right now is what we call exposure therapy.
Basically, we expose the person to the trauma that they have already experienced.
And we work systematically through the feelings and the emotions and the reactions to the trauma that they experienced.
It is a very long and painstakingly difficult process.
Today, however, we have a lot of new therapies that have come on the market.
Something like EMDR, eye movement desensitization reprocessing.
It's it's a very long name for a simple technique of, sort of getting the right brain and the left brains integrated together, to process what has happened in the trauma.
And it we have found that it speeds the therapy process up considerably.
So what used to take, say, three or four years to get well from, people are, recovering anywhere from, six to eighteen months.
So it it really has added a lot, although not everybody can use that technique.
It has a lot to do with the person.
It has a lot to do with how stable they are or how reactive they are.
And there are more therapies like that coming up, neurotherapy, for instance, where we work with brainwaves.
But the exposure techniques are are pretty much the the the solid ones that we have based almost everything else on.
Also, a lot of adjunctive therapies, things like art, music, movement, and dance are really nice adjunctive therapies to that go with this pretty well.
So it really depends on the client.
It really depends on their personality and how well they tolerate, the the intrusions and the reactions to the experiences that they've had as to whether or not they are capable of handling certain therapies that go very, very in-depth.