Teach Your Kids How to Handle Big Emotions the Catholic Way

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If you have kids, whether they’re toddlers or teens, you’re living with people whose emotions sometimes get away from them. And when that happens, guess who gets to wrangle the fallout?

Many parents use one of two strategies to handle those flare-ups. There’s the hands-off approach that lets kids “vent.” And then there’s the approach that’s all about “shutting it down.” Often, the direction we take is shaped by what happened in our own homes when we got loud, tearful, or angry.

But as hosts Dr. Greg Popcak and Lisa Popcak explained on a recent episode of the CatholicHŌM podcast, there’s a third, better way.

Unlike the “shut-it-down” or “let them vent” approaches, this approach draws on Catholic teaching about emotions to help coach kids in the skills they need to handle their emotions appropriately.

Harnessing the “Passions”

Drawing on St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Pope John Paul II, the Church teaches that our emotions are given to us by God in order to draw us to himself. Our emotions (or “passions,” as Aquinas and other theologians called them) are therefore fundamentally good. Thanks to original sin, though, the way we handle and express those emotions is often distorted and disordered.

The best thing we can do with our passions, then, is to bring them to God, asking him to teach us how to respond to them in ways that are healthy and holy, enabling us to become everything God created us to be. If we are angry, for example, we can take that anger to God and ask him to help us harness that anger to achieve something good. Similarly, if we are sad or disappointed, we can ask the Holy Spirit to help us explore how those emotions are calling us to holiness in a particular situation.

This basically positive view of our emotions is the starting point for the approach the Popcaks advocate.

“For the Catholic parent, the question isn’t do we let our children just vent all over the place or do we shut down their emotions,” Dr. Popcak said. “It’s, ‘How do we teach our children to . . . express those passions in ways that work for their good, the good of others, and really build a kingdom?’ And that’s obviously a little more complicated process than either just shutting it down or letting them vent.”

Five Steps for Helping Your Kids Manage Their Emotions

The process of coaching your kids how to handle big emotions has five basic steps, the Popcaks say. Here’s what to do.

1. Empathize

“We don’t have to permit the behavior, but we can empathize with the emotion,” Dr. Popcak said.

We all know how wonderful it is when somebody empathizes with us when we feel angry or sad; we want to begin by doing the same thing for our kids.

“My first step here is to say, I really see how angry you are or how sad you are or how frightened you are, whatever that emotion is: ‘I really get that,’” Lisa Popcak explained, “so our children know that they’re being seen and heard.”

2. Help your child calm down

Even as your kids are hopefully reassured by your empathizing with their emotions, empathy isn’t enough to help them figure out how to handle those emotions. Lisa Popcak described the thought process a child might go through like this: “Okay, thank you. I’m glad I’m heard. I’m glad I’m seen. I’m glad I’m loved, even though I’m feeling this particular thing. But now what do I do with this? Teach me. Disciple me. Help me to know what I can do with all this, because it’s a little scary to feel this way.”

This step is all about coaching your child to shift from “reactivity” to “receptivity,” terms that St. John Paul II used in his Theology of the Body lectures. As Dr. Popcak explained, reactivity means instinctively acting on our impulses and feelings, so that our emotions end up in charge. Receptivity means pausing long enough to bring the feeling to God and ask what he wants us to do with it. That pause lets us settle down and think clearly.

“So, receptivity is the space that I create between my emotional reaction and my physical response to that emotional reaction,” Dr. Popcak said. “And the more space I have between those two things, the more I’m able to really think and problem solve as opposed to just reacting. That receptivity is how we encounter God speaking to us through our feelings and telling us what he wants us to do with them.”

With a child under six, this step usually means holding him close and helping him breathe until his body settles.

“You’re downloading your (slower) heart rate and respiration and calmer thoughts into their bodies by holding them close,” Lisa Popcak explained. At the same time, you continue to empathize with them, basically talking them down.

Older children who have developed self-talk (the narrative conversation we have with ourselves in our minds) may need some space to calm down on their own—especially if they are angry at you.

3. Pray and discern.

Now, pray with your child. The prayer should be very simple and direct: “You know, Lord, my child is so upset about this chore situation. Help us to figure out what you want us to do with this now.” Here, you are inviting the Holy Spirit into the situation to help both of you figure out what’s going on and what needs to happen.

Then look for the message underneath the emotion: “What is the child trying to communicate through that feeling?” Dr. Popcak asks. “What is the intention behind that impulse, that feeling?” The answer to that question is the problem that needs to be solved in the next step.

Let’s say that your child really doesn’t want to pick up their bedroom floor. You might initially think the answer is obvious: he’s trying to communicate that he doesn’t want to pick up the room!

Don’t be satisfied with that initial, superficial answer. Dig deeper. Fear might be the culprit: if he spends 10 minutes picking up the bedroom, he won’t get to do something else he wants to do. Or the mess might seem overwhelmingly impossible; younger children often have difficulty breaking a large task down into simpler parts.

4. Solve the real problem.

Once you know the intention behind your child’s big emotions, you can look for a healthy or virtuous way to meet the need behind it: “So, you were saying you were fighting me on doing the chore because you were afraid you wouldn’t be able to do this other thing,” Dr. Popcak said by way of example. “Well, let’s make a plan for doing that after the chore.”

5. Repair the relationship.

If feelings were expressed badly, with yelling, name-calling, or hitting, something needs to be mended. Dr. Popcak says the child needs to show that she is sorry, that she loves the person she hurt, and that she can be counted on. For smaller offenses, a sincere apology or a hug may be enough. For bigger ones, she might volunteer to do a chore for her sibling or perform another act of service.

It’s critical that the act of repair has a clear relationship to the offense, Lisa Popcak said: “It’s not an assignment. It’s organic to what needs to happen to rebuild that trust and that relationship again.”

Calm Parent, Calm Kid

As Lisa Popcak likes to point out, it is important to come into this process with your own sense of calm. All too often, our kids’ outbursts trigger our own emotional flooding. We react to our own heightened emotions by trying to impose control externally before we’ve harnessed those emotions to a good end. Prayer and lots of practice (and some grace for not being perfect!) help make this whole process a more organic habit.

Children who grow up with this approach learn that no feeling is too big for God or for their parents. They discover that they can be understood, helped, and forgiven, and that even their hardest emotions can point toward something good. Parents get to practice the same things themselves: pausing, praying, and listening for what God wants them to do with whatever they are feeling.

The Popcaks walk through all five steps in more detail in episode 110 of the CatholicHŌM podcast. If you’re wondering how the framework applies to a particular problem in your family, bring your questions to the coaching section of the CatholicHŌM app or reach out to a pastoral counselor at CatholicCounselors.com.

Don’t Settle for a Small Life; Practice Magnanimity Instead

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The 2022 film Father Stu tells the true story of Stuart Long’s improbable journey to becoming a Catholic priest. After a hard childhood, he struggles with alcoholism as he restlessly pursues greatness, first as a boxer, then as an aspiring actor. He accepts baptism in the Catholic Church to win the heart of the woman he loves, but remains skeptical of God’s goodness.

After a near-death experience, he begins pursuing a deeper relationship with God. The journey unsettles him, though. While receiving confession one day, he complains that God is “[messing] with” him. “Another term for that,” says his beleaguered confessor, “is grace, God’s grace. It appears you are the recipient.”

For all of Stu’s shortcomings, he didn’t settle for a small life, but instead pursued greatness—even if he initially did so in the wrong places.

Later, that drive toward greatness would be refined into magnanimity, the virtue that propels us toward “greatness of soul.” And as Dr. Greg Popcak and Lisa Popcak explained on a recent episode of their radio show More2Life, magnanimity is the virtue that keeps us from settling for less than what God wants for us.

Why We Settle

Few of us would claim to have an all-around “great” life, and most of us can identify at least one part of our life that feels—well, not so great: a marriage that has gone flat, a job that stopped meaning much, a grown child you worry about, an aspiration that has gone unfulfilled.

As Christians, though, what matters is what we do next: Do we settle for the way things are, or do we make the changes that will lead to our best life?

All too often, the Popcaks say, we settle for the status quo out of fear or a lack of imagination or simply because it seems like the easier path.

“God calls us to live lives that reflect the greatness of God’s grace,” Lisa Popcak said. “And it can actually be sinful to live a small life rooted in a lack of courage, or small mindedness, or the idea that ‘that’s just the way it is.’ God wants more for us than we can even begin to want for ourselves.”

Sometimes, too, people mistakenly dress up their inclination to settle for the status quo as an act of humility. But neither humility nor self-denial are about accepting less than what God wants for us.

“Being humble doesn’t mean leading a powerless, limited, unfulfilling life of settling,” Dr. Greg said. “It means acknowledging that I don’t have the first clue how to live an abundant life…but simultaneously professing that with God’s grace, it will be done.”

Magnanimity: Pursuing Greatness

The restlessness that Stuart Long felt—and tried to satisfy in so many ways—comes from our God-given dignity.

“God built a longing into all of us, a longing for a love that doesn’t fail, for relationships that fulfill us, for a life that shows off God’s grace,” Lisa Popcak said. “That restlessness you feel when part of your life is stuck on ‘just okay’…is God saying, ‘I created you for more than this.’”

The virtue that drives us to seek more is magnanimity, which St. Thomas Aquinas defined as the virtue that disposes a person to undertake great things worthy of honor. It does this while avoiding, on one hand, presumption (attempting what exceeds one’s capacities), and on the other hand, pusillanimity (shrinking from the good one is capable of—a fancier word for “settling”).

“Magnanimity is the virtue of living a life that glorifies God, a life that really shows you at your best, that enables you to participate in relationships that witness to the power of God’s love in our lives,” Dr. Popcak explained. “In a sense, living in a way that glorifies God and asking God every day, Lord, teach me how to respond to this in a way that would really help me glorify you.”

Three Steps for Moving toward Magnanimity

Just as people sometimes confuse settling for less with the virtue of humility, people also sometimes get confused about the pursuit of greatness. Stuart Long, for example, initially sought greatness in the boxing ring, then in Hollywood, and then in a romantic relationship. None of those goals were necessarily bad, but he was pursuing them as an end in themselves, not out of true magnanimity.

Jacob Popcak, a pastoral counselor with CatholicCounselors.com, joined Lisa and Dr. Greg to share a process for discerning what, exactly, we ought to be striving toward as we pursue the greatness God wants for us.

“I don’t want to assume that just because I want a Cadillac automatically means that God desires a Cadillac for me,” he said. “I want to understand what in my desires is really calling me to God.”

Here’s the three-step process he suggests.

1. Write the desire at the top of the page

Put it in plain words: to meet someone you could marry, to find peace in the marriage you already have, to get a particular job.

2. Ask open-ended questions that uncover the real desire

From a calm, prayerful space, ask questions such as:

  • What would it say about me, or what would be true about me, if this desire came to pass?
  • What would change about how other people saw me?
  • What virtues do I imagine I’d have, or would need to have, for this to come to pass?

For example, if you really want a new Cadillac, your investigation of the deeper desire might reveal that you are proud of your success, and you want to enjoy that success and be reminded of the gratitude you have for God’s hand in your life. You might identify the virtues you would need to achieve this goal as hard work, prudence, or patience.

Those revelations might prompt you to dig even deeper. In any case, you are looking for the deeper emotional and psychological underpinning of the desire.

“We’re really sitting with the desire,’ Flores-Popcak said, “and we’re unwrapping it like a present that God wants to give us.”

3. Bring the deeper longing back to God

Once you can name what lies beneath the desire (to feel capable, to be known as someone who didn’t give up, to belong), hand it to God. Ask God: “But how do you want to fulfill the deeper, more vulnerable underpinnings of my desire for more that you’ve placed on my heart?”

Pursuing a Great Life

Later in the show, the Popcaks applied Jacob’s process to a situation that a listener named Joan asked about. Her older sister cut off the whole family sixteen years ago, and Joan still sends letters, emails, and the occasional text in the hope that they might reconnect. Joan asked whether that was wise.

Dr. Popcak affirmed her basic approach, but also named where she might be tempted to settle. “Where we start to settle in these situations,” he said, “is believing that this one person is the only person who can give us healing.”

He invited Joan to ask what a restored relationship would say about her (perhaps that she is a good person, or that she hasn’t given up on her sister) and to bring those needs to God: “If you can identify that and then bring those to God, then he can start to fulfill those deepest longings of your heart, even if your relationship with your sister never improves.”

Rather than waiting on a relationship she can’t control to be her only source of healing, this approach invites her to ask God, “What’s your plan for helping me to heal this part of my heart and to move forward and celebrate the life that you want me to have?”

For more help discerning the path to a great life, reach out to a pastoral counselor at CatholicCounselors.com.

Dr. Popcak’s book The Life God Wants You to Have also offers a faith-based plan for discovering the divine plan when human plans fail.

Worried about What Might Happen Tomorrow? Take These 3 Steps Toward a Calmer, Trusting Response

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Quick quiz: Would you rather…

  •       …be interviewed about your life on live national television?
  •       …hold a public meeting with a roomful of your angry constituents?
  •       …compete as an elite athlete for the ultimate prize in your sport?
  •       …represent your company during an IRS audit?

If your answer is a solid “none of the above,” that’s okay: most of us don’t have to worry about performing in such high-stakes situations. Still, the way people who face these situations on a regular basis handle stress and anxiety might teach something to the rest of us.

Enter Rachael Isaac, a pastoral counselor and mental performance coach at CatholicCounselors.com. Isaac directs the faith-based success and performance coaching program, where she works with Catholic athletes, performers, executives, and others who have to be at their best under pressure. She explained a simple three-step process for handling anxiety that she regularly uses with her clients.

When the Future Arrives Early

“Anxiety has a way of making a future problem feel like a present emergency,” Isaac told the Popcaks. “You’re imagining what could go wrong, what the other person might say, what happens if you fail or make a wrong choice.”

The result: We experience the stress of an event over and over again before anything has actually happened, putting our nervous system into overdrive and leaving us exhausted.

The key to breaking that cycle isn’t trying to make the anxiety disappear. Instead, Isaac advises her clients to “recenter” their feelings of anxiety so that instead of living in the stress of hypothetical future outcomes, they can ground themselves in the present, allowing them to respond more effectively.

She outlined three steps for doing that.

Three Steps for Recentering When You’re Stressed

1. Regulate the body first

Anxiety isn’t just a “mind thing”; it’s a body thing, too. When you experience anxiety, your heart rate and breathing speed up, your muscles tense up, and your body floods with stress hormones designed to help you deal with danger.

The problem is, that stress response is geared toward immediate physical danger, not some hypothetical future threat. It prepares your body to either flee, freeze, or fight—responses that don’t work well in most modern contexts.

“So before you try to reason your way out of anxiety, give your body some evidence that you’re safe enough to think,” Isaac said.

Slow your breathing, drop your shoulders, put your feet on the ground, and look around to notice where you actually are right now.

Your goal is to lower the intensity of your body’s stress response enough so that your rational “thinking brain” can come back online, taking control back from the fight-or-flight “reactionary” part of your brain.

2. Name what’s true, and move from “what if” to “even if”

“Anxiety really loves hypothetical situations,” Isaac told the Popcaks: What if I mess up? What if I fail? What if they’re upset with me? Left alone, those questions only escalate.

The most powerful shift we can make here is from “what if” to “even if,” Isaac said: Even if I mess up, I can take a deep breath and get back on track. Even if they’re upset with me, I can remain calm and present and work through the situation. Even if I fail, “I have X, Y, and Z ways to respond.”

Try this the next time your mind starts spinning. Write down your top “what ifs,” then finish each one with an “even if.” Those sentences should sound different from the catastrophic “what if” versions, giving the thinking part of your brain something solid to go on.

3. Identify what’s yours to do

Next, ask what you can actually do right now. You might prepare, pray, or rest, for instance.

Or you may conclude there is nothing more to do. That can be a useful insight, too, since anxiety often convinces us that worry is a useful form of preparation.

“It feels productive because our brain is working so hard,” Isaac explained. “But repeatedly imagining that worst case scenario doesn’t actually make us more prepared.”

Grace for the Moment You’re In

Jesus taught his disciples to let each day’s worries be enough for that day (Matthew 6:34). Instead of worrying about what might happen tomorrow, he told them to trust in God’s providential care.

“Trust doesn’t mean convincing ourselves that everything is going to turn out exactly the way that we want,” Isaac explained. “It means recognizing I’m responsible for my response; I’m not responsible for controlling the entire outcome. So I can prepare, I can discern, I can show up, I can make that next healthy choice.”

But there comes a point where we have to let go of what is beyond our control. Often, we want God to assure us that all of our doomsday scenarios are under control.

“But grace meets us in the moment when we actually need it,” she said. “Calm doesn’t always mean that the nerves disappear. Calm sometimes simply means, even if I’m feeling nervous, I can take that next faithful, healthy step and know that God is walking with me.”

For more help overcoming anxiety, check out Dr. Greg Popcak’s book Unworried: A Life Without Anxiety. And for one-on-one support, or to learn more about faith-based performance coaching, reach out to a pastoral counselor at CatholicCounselors.com.

Even Jesus Had Needs; Here’s How to Make Sure Yours Get Met

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It’s an unfortunate fact of life that mind reading isn’t a real thing. If it were, maybe we would get the help and support we need without having to say anything.

Until someone invents a mind-reading device, though, we’re going to have to speak up for our needs — and we shouldn’t be afraid of doing just that, says pastoral counselor Rachel Isaac.

Isaac, who directs the faith-based success and performance coaching at CatholicCounselors.com, works with clients — athletes, executives, parents, spouses — who are learning to speak up for what they need without feeling guilty about it.

“If we have a need and we’re feeling neglected in meeting that need, we tend to think that maybe if I’m quiet enough, or if I yell enough, the other person will get the hint,” Isaac said on a recent episode of the More2Life radio show. “But this approach just hurts our feelings, hurts our relationships, and creates more distance between us and the other person.”

What Do You Need?

When she is working with clients who are frustrated that their needs aren’t being met by the important people in their lives, Isaac begins by asking a simple question: What do you wish the other person would notice that you need?

That’s usually an easy question to answer: I wish my husband would help more. I wish my boss understood how much I’m carrying. I wish my kids appreciated everything I do. I just wish someone knew I needed a break.

Then comes the tougher question: Have you ever actually told them what you need?

“Usually the answer is no, because underneath is this fear that if I ask for what I need, people will think I’m selfish, or I’m weak, or I’m too much, or they’ll just reject me altogether,” Isaac explained.

In other words, we often fail to say what we need because it feels safer to stay quiet and hope someone notices than risk being told our needs don’t matter.

‘Even Jesus Had Needs’

Isaac’s answer to that fear is simple and rooted in Scripture: “Needs aren’t weaknesses,” she said. “They’re part of being human.”

Even Jesus had needs, Isaac pointed out. He withdrew to pray, he rested, and he accepted help carrying his cross. If needs weren’t a weakness in Christ, they aren’t a weakness in us.

To be clear, Isaac acknowledges that the fear that keeps many people silent — that if we name our needs, others will ignore or trivialize them — is a real possibility.

But the solution isn’t to stifle our needs. Rather, the solution is to find another way to ensure your basic needs are met.

“How will you respond to ensure that you’re taking yourself seriously, whether the other person is taking you seriously or not?” Isaac said. “I always remind people that confidence isn’t a feeling, it’s a practice. So every time you communicate a need respectfully, you’re teaching your brain, ‘I can take care of myself without abandoning other people.’ And even more importantly: ‘My worth doesn’t depend on keeping everyone else happy.’”

None of this is incompatible with a faithful Christian life. In fact, helping others learn how to live God’s love in our relationships is part of our mission as Christians.

Three Questions to Ask

Isaac offers a simple three-question framework for moving from a passive stance toward actively making your needs known.

  1. What do I need right now? Before you can ask for anything, you have to know what you’re actually asking for. Get specific. “I need help” is vague. “I need my spouse to take the kids Saturday morning so I can take a break” is something someone can actually respond to.
  2. Have I actually communicated that need? Hinting or beating around the bush doesn’t count. Instead, aim for stating your needs plainly, out loud, to the person who can do something about it.
  3. If that need continues to go unmet, what do I need to do next? This question isn’t aimed at punishing the other person. It’s about deciding, ahead of time, how you’ll take care of yourself if the other person continues to ignore your needs.

“Expressing your needs and setting boundaries isn’t selfish or unnecessary,” Isaac said. “They’re acts of stewardship — for yourself and for your relationships.”

Not Either-Or, but Both-And

Sometimes people shy away from stating what they need because doing so feels confrontational. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Reframing your ask as good stewardship of the relationship suggests a different approach.

As Dr. Greg Popcak pointed out during his conversation with Rachael Isaac, naming your needs isn’t about dismissing the other person’s needs. Instead, in a healthy relationship, it’s about working together to find a way to attend to one another’s needs.

Take a moment this week to ask yourself Isaac’s question: What are you hoping someone notices that you’ve never said out loud? Then consider actually saying it. You can also practice this and other important reflection questions daily with Rachael’s digital journal Not Me First, But Me Too. 

For more one-on-one help learning to voice your needs and set healthy boundaries, reach out to Rachel Isaac or another pastoral counselor at CatholicCounselors.com. You may also find Dr. Greg Popcak’s book God Help Me! These People Are Driving Me Nuts! Making Peace with Difficult People a helpful next step.

Feeling Stuck? Choose Curiosity over Caution

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Three years after his retirement, Michael still found himself at loose ends; most days he found himself on the couch, listening to the radio or praying a rosary, wondering whether this was all there was now.

That’s when he called into the More2Life radio show hosted by Dr. Greg and Lisa Popcak.

Michael’s situation is one that the Popcaks see on a regular basis: A job ends, a diagnosis arrives, a relationship changes, and suddenly we are facing a future we can’t picture, so we stop picturing it. We stay on the couch—not out of laziness, but because moving seems to require knowing where you’re headed.

Rachael Isaac, a pastoral counselor and mental performance specialist who directs the Success and Performance Coaching program at CatholicCounselors.com, told the Popcaks that the thing keeping most of us stuck isn’t the problem itself.

“When we’re dealing with stress, one of the biggest things that can cause that stress is the uncertainty that we have about the situation,” Isaac says. “That uncertainty just causes us to close in on ourselves, and we stop asking questions or exploring possibilities, and sometimes we even stop taking action altogether.”

Why Withdrawing Feels So Reasonable

There is nothing irrational about pulling back. Isaac points out that the reactive part of the brain is doing its job when it steers us away from anything uncertain. That self-protecting part of the brain interprets the unknown as a threat and nudges us toward caution.

The trouble is what it costs us: “While withdrawing often feels safe in the moment, it also leaves us feeling really trapped,” Isaac says. “The more we close ourselves off, the smaller our world becomes, and the less we can use the gifts and strengths that God’s given us.”

Curiosity Is the Opposite of Shutting Down

Surprisingly, Isaac says the alternative to fear and caution isn’t courage, but curiosity.

“One of the most effective ways that we can interrupt that cycle [of fear] is to become curious, because curiosity is the opposite of fear’s instinct to shut down,” she says. “When we’re curious, we naturally lean in instead of pulling away. We begin looking for information instead of just assuming the worst-case scenario.”

Curiosity moves the brain out of a threat-focused state and into a learning state. And when that shift happens, our questions change, too. Fear asks: What if this goes wrong? Curiosity asks: What can I learn here, and what am I not seeing yet? Those questions don’t make the uncertainty disappear; they just change our relationship with it.

Isaac points out that Scripture is full of people who stepped out boldly even though they didn’t have the full picture of what might happen. Peter had no idea what would happen when he stepped out of the boat, for example; Abraham didn’t know what would happen when he left his homeland; and the disciples certainly had no idea what to expect after the Resurrection.

Sometimes, God calls us to lean into curiosity in smaller ways. Lisa Popcak points to Jesus telling the disciples to cast their nets on the other side of the boat.

“That seems ridiculous,” she said, “even when we know what’s going to happen.” A few feet of water, and the nets came up full. Even “switching sides of the boat,” Lisa said, can open us up to new possibilities.

Three Questions to Ask When You Can’t See Ahead

If you’re facing uncertainty, don’t let fear shut you down. Isaac offers three questions to ask instead.

1. What is God trying to teach me through this?

This one reframes the whole situation. Uncertainty stops being evidence that something has gone wrong and starts being a place you are being invited into. “Sometimes uncertainty is simply just that place where God’s inviting us to grow,” Isaac says.

2. What strength has God already given me that I haven’t recognized yet?

Fear has a way of erasing our own history. Ask what you have already survived, what you are already good at, what people come to you for. The answer is almost always more than you would have guessed on your own.

3. What is one faithful step I can take today?

Remember, you don’t need to know the whole plan, just the next step.

When Michael asked what he should do with himself, the Popcaks didn’t tell him to carefully inventory his passions or create a spreadsheet of possibilities. Instead, they counseled him to call his parish, say he was available, and start saying yes to whatever came up.

Trusting in God’s Grace Allows Us to be Curious Rather Than Cautious

As Isaac points out, peace and that confidence doesn’t come from having every single answer — in other words, from trying to control things that we simply can’t control.

“It’s about trusting that with God’s grace we can take that next step, even before we know where that whole path leads yet,” she says. Like Abraham, like Peter, like Mary Magdalene outside the tomb, we can take the next step because we trust God to handle the details.

For Michael, that next step might be a simple one: calling the parish to see where he might plug in, then letting things unfold from there. What will it be for you?

For more help with fear, worry, and the anxiety that keeps you stuck, check out Dr. Popcak’s book Unworried: A Life Without Anxiety, or reach out to Rachael Isaac and the team of pastoral counselors at CatholicCounselors.com.

What Does the Theology of the Body Have to Do with Mental Health?

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Which is more important to your health, your mind or your body? How you or your health care provider answers that question has real implications for your well-being.

Most of us treat the body and mind as two separate entities, reaching for a pill for physical pain and going to therapy for emotional struggles. Inevitably, this divide leaves us feeling fragmented and poorly served by modern medicine.

But the Catholic Church has long insisted that body and mind are not competing entities, but are profoundly united. Spirit and matter “are not two natures united, but rather their union forms a single nature” (Catechism #365).

It’s a radically countercultural doctrine. For centuries, influential thinkers have pulled this unity apart. On one side, Plato and René Descartes treated the body as a sort of prison for the mind; early pioneers of psychology like Freud and Skinner followed suit by largely ignoring the body’s role in mental health. On the other side, materialist philosophers claimed that the human being is nothing more than a complex biological machine—a view that resurfaced when the discovery of psychiatric medications led many modern experts to reduce mental health to “chemical imbalances” in the brain.

In recent decades, modern science has come to recognize that mind and body are a single, deeply connected system. The Catholic Church has known this for centuries, and in the writings of Pope John Paul II, now known as the Theology of the Body, that ancient truth has been developed into a comprehensive framework for understanding the human person.

The Theology of the Body is foundational to the way the pastoral counselors at CatholicCounselors.com approach pastoral therapy. Here’s what it teaches and why it matters for your mental health.

A Roadmap for Human Wellness

When St. John Paul II became pope in 1978, he brought with him a manuscript he had been developing for years on what it means to be a human person. His starting point, as Dr. Popcak describes on the More2Life radio show, was this: if we took everything God has given us—creation, Scripture, salvation history, all of it—what universal principles could we discover about living a more abundant life and having healthier, holier relationships?

The answer became a comprehensive vision of the human person: what it means to be human, how we are wired for mental and emotional flourishing, and how we relate to one another. This vision became known as the Theology of the Body, and several of its insights speak directly to mental health.

Your Body is Speaking. Are You Listening?

One of TOB’s central claims is that our bodies are part of how God communicates his design for us. As Lisa Popcak explains on the show, drawing on St. Thomas Aquinas, God speaks to us through every cell of our bodies. Aquinas called this the Book of Nature—the idea that how God designed us, body, mind, and spirit, reveals his plan for how we are meant to live and relate to one another.

“Theology of the Body reminds us that biology is theology,” Dr. Popcak explains. “By prayerfully reflecting on the way God built our bodies and brains, we can discern important insights about what it takes to live a healthy, holy life.”

The human body offers numerous examples of this principle at work.

  • The face. The human face has roughly 43 muscles dedicated almost entirely to emotional expression—far more than almost any other animal. Humans are also unique among primates in having visible whites of the eyes, which allows others to track exactly where we are looking and what we are paying attention to. We are, literally, built to be
     “read” and to “read” others. The body reveals that we are made for mutual knowing.
  • Mirror neurons. God wired the human brain with mirror neurons—cells that fire when we observe another person’s emotional state, producing a similar feeling in ourselves. This is the neurological basis for empathy. We are designed not merely to observe others’ inner lives, but to share them.
  • Touch. Physical touch—a hand on a shoulder, a long hug from someone you trust—triggers the release of oxytocin, a hormone that reduces cortisol, lowers heart rate, and builds a sense of safety and trust. Research shows that holding someone’s hand during a stressful situation measurably reduces their physiological stress response. The body is designed to give and receive comfort through physical presence—another form of self-donation.
  • Secure attachment. When people feel securely connected to God and others, their nervous system operates in a calmer, more integrated state. The body’s social engagement system is literally activated by felt safety in relationship. Isolation, by contrast, keeps the nervous system in a low-grade state of vigilance and threat. This is why withdrawal from God and others doesn’t just feel painful—it physiologically disrupts our capacity to function well.
  • Anxiety. Brain science tells us that anxiety is not primarily a response to external problems, but acts as a warning signal that something is wrong in our connections to God and others. “Rather than being a direct response to problems,” Lisa Popcak explains, “anxiety is actually a sign that we feel disconnected from people—the people that God has placed in our life to support us. The key to regaining our peace is working to restore that sense of communion and connection.” When we feel anxious, the body is sending a message: go find safe, healthy people.

Physical symptoms like panic attacks, chronic tension, and persistent exhaustion follow the same logic. They are often the body making visible some dysfunction in the mind or spirit. Medication may help manage those symptoms, but lasting healing requires attending to the whole person.

We Are Wired for Communion

These five examples point toward one of TOB’s most practically important teachings: we are made for communion. Not just in the sense that other people are nice to have around, but in the deeper sense that we are literally strongest when connected to God and to one another—physically, neurologically, and spiritually designed to give and receive love.

As Dr. Popcak puts it, isolation doesn’t just leave us running low; it actively drains us. When problems cause us to withdraw from God and the people we love, our brains change in ways that make us feel powerless, overwhelmed, and alone.

This understanding that we are made for relationship shapes the Popcaks’ approach to specific problems. When a caller struggles with anxiety, for example, the conversation might move toward examining what connections in their life feel threatened or broken. Other times, when someone lacks the confidence to tackle a tough problem, the Popcaks urge the practice of receptivity, which Lisa explains as “the ability to listen to God in the moment so we’re not just relying on our own strength or our own instincts or even our own fears to guide us.”

Suffering is Not the End of the Story

Perhaps the deepest gift the Theology of the Body offers to people in pain is a way to understand their suffering.

As the Popcaks explain, every human story follows the pattern of the larger biblical story of God’s relationship with humanity.

  1. Chapter one is original man—who God created us to be before sin: “secure, whole, capable of loving and being loved totally without fear.”
  2. Chapter two is historical man—the wounded people we are now, “living in a fallen world, carrying the scars of sins committed against us and the sins and mistakes that we’ve made.”
  3. Chapter three is eschatological man—the people we are becoming, day by day, through God’s healing grace. Ultimately, we are destined to be fully restored and glorified in Christ.

The paschal mystery—Christ’s suffering, death, and Resurrection—blazed a path for us from chapter two to chapter three. Because Christ took on a human body, he did not suffer abstractly. He suffered physically and emotionally (body and mind): exhaustion, grief, betrayal, abandonment, and death. Human suffering does not have to be meaningless: God himself has walked this territory, and because he has, he can lead us through it.

“Even in the middle of difficult times,” Lisa says, “God wants to show us how to respond to what we’re going through in a way that helps us to become the people he created us to be, and to work for the good of those around us.”

It is tempting to think that our wounds, our struggles, and our bad habits define who we are. But the Theology of the Body insists otherwise.

“Our past may explain some things about us,” Dr. Popcak says, “but it’s grace that defines us.”

Body, Mind, and Spirit Working Together

Pastoral counseling rooted in the Theology of the Body doesn’t treat the body, mind, and spirit as separate departments. It understands them as interlocking dimensions of a single human experience. Tackling relational or personal problems means taking all three into account, and the Theology of the Body offers a framework for doing exactly that.

If you’d like to explore what that kind of integrated healing might look like in your own life, reach out to any of the pastoral counselors at CatholicCounselors.com.