Below in red are my Aunt Betty’s words to me during a spiritual direction session where I was stuck in frustration over a bad sports outcome.

Okay, hear what I say relative to where we are. I have the image of you sitting on the porch chewing Satan’s junk. Those kinds of images are going to help you give it up. I’m not saying this is the person you are. But I’m saying the part of you that opens the door, that is the part that looks like this. That’s what we’re looking for. Who’s the traitor inside? Who is sitting on the porch chewing your crud? Your adult has to set the boundaries, because your kid could take what we worked on and let Satan twist it around to throw you into discouragement. See how the game works? When it starts hitting you, your adult part can say, “Wait a minute now. I’m not buying that.” Okay, that part of me is starting to chew on the crud. That’s what the Lord wants you to learn from this. Where Satan doesn’t want you to recognize that. He tries to grab it and put it in, “See, despite all the prayer you do, this is blah blah blah. So, you go into discouragement and depression. So, it’s a choice. And where you make that choice, where you put your focus, that is key to whether there is transformation or la te da, more of the same.

You want people to know you’re talking about a part of them. The inner community image is a good way of working on your junk. But Satan would try to get you to say, “Betty’s saying that it is the whole of you. No, it’s not. Satan could work on them and throw it into the garbage can. It is like, “Oh, yeah, Sr. Betty is saying that’s the whole of you.” No, I’m not saying that’s the whole of you, but the part of you that opens the door. That’s what we’re working with today.

This is the way you say it is for purposes of working. Let’s fantasize like we have those parts of us that are like an inner community. Do you see what I’m doing? I’m not saying that you’re schizophrenic, that you are completely fragmented and you don’t have control of these parts. But for purposes of working, you want to fantasize, like these parts of you, are like an inner community. You have parts which are working with the Lord out doing great work, but you have parts which are opening the doors to the wrong stuff. So, once you get the person on board understanding that this is a good therapy working image. They might say, “I see where there are parts of me that I am not happy with in service of God. And yeah, like AM has this inner community, whereby she opens the door for discouraging thoughts. Well, I have this part that opens the door for something else.” See, they might have different parts of themselves they need to work with. But the image of the inner community is like a base on which you work. Because I have had clients when I first started out who would think I was talking about the whole of them. No. I’m not. We’re just working with this inner image of the betraying part of you. You’re trying to find out where that is and how it operates.

Do you have any parts of your “inner community” that need healing? Do you find yourself chewing on Satan’s junk?