Growth in Self-giving

[excerpt from an interview in the National Catholic Register, October 11-17, 2009 issue]

Dr. Rick Fitzgibbons has practiced psychiatry for more than 30 years. As director of the Institute for Marital Healing near Philadelphia, Fitzgibbons specializes in helping married couples heal their relationships.

His work extends beyond marital problems, however; he helps priests, religious orders and seminarians deal with the challenges of celibate life, and his patients also include singles and children.

Appointed as a consultant to the Vatican Congregation for the Clergy last December, Fitzgibbons shows a remarkable humility in spite of his accomplishments — humility apparently rooted in his own conviction that his success comes from following the teachings of the Church, particularly the writings of John Paul II on the human person, marriage and family. He spoke with Register correspondent Robert Kumpel.

What kind of work are you doing to promote traditional marriage?
We try to help couples understand that self-giving is the essence of marital love, and then we attempt to uncover their weaknesses and work to resolve them. We relate that if they want a happy marriage they need to have a healthy personality. Our approach is in the field of positive psychology, which focuses upon growth in virtues to strengthen the personality and to resolve emotional pain. Instead of just rehashing the past, we recommend the use of virtues to help people deal with their emotional conflicts.

I notice you use the term “virtue.” A lot of your writings also focus on forgiveness. Those terms are from a different lexicon than you’ll hear from most mental-health professionals.
There is a great deal of wisdom in learning the benefits of using virtues in addressing the human passions (by exercising virtues). Positive psychology is basically revisiting Western civilization’s major approaches to address character weaknesses. This is the approach we take with marital healing. If you want a healthy marriage, then work on having a healthy personality. So how does one get a healthy personality? A spouse can maintain a healthy personality by daily growth in virtues, which diminish the role of selfishness and emotional conflicts.

Unfortunately, much harm has been done to marriage over the past 40 years by mental-health professionals encouraging couples to always express their passions and to look out for No. 1. You obtain a healthy personality by learning how to control your passions. This was one of Christianity’s gifts to the world, but it has been lost by mental-health professionals who say, “Oh no! You’ve got to express your passions or you’ll be a neurotic.”

Can you comment on the role of faith in your work?
Many people have areas of intense emotional pain — of sadness, anger, mistrust and anxiety and weaknesses in confidence or selfishness from childhood, adolescence or young adult life that limit their marriages, priesthood and religious life. In John Paul II’s words, “They are prisoners of their past.” Medication and psychotherapy is insufficient in healing these deep wounds. However, as in the treatment of addictive disorders, if you bring in a spiritual component into the process, remarkable healings can occur. The mental-health field needs to recognize that the increasingly serious emotional wounds we are dealing with in our culture are so profound that without a spiritual component, recovery and healing are unlikely to occur.