You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist

Swell AI Transcript: 153. Greg Batarro - part 2.mp3
Dr. Greg Bottaro:
Somebody says, I think I might be born in the wrong body. Number one, approach with compassion. You're saying that your personal experience of who you are and your identity is literally in opposition to every single cell of your body, which we're supposed to be united to perfectly. And yet, in this case, this is a person who's directly in opposition to. So that's pretty bad. We start with compassion. But then we have to make sure that everything we're doing as medical professionals, as doctors, as healers, as experts who claim to have a way to help is to offer healing solve that can help. Which means to restore a person to who they really are. It means to say, okay, I know that your personhood can't possibly be in opposition to your body. There's no possible way. It's like saying water can be not wet. You can't have unwet water. It's a total logical fallacy. You must be some kind of therapist.

Stephanie Winn: As I announced at the beginning of last week's episode, number 152, I'm releasing part 1 and part 2 of my conversation with Dr. Greg Bitaro in reverse order. So what you're about to hear in episode 153 is actually the beginning of a conversation I had with Dr. Bitaro. Our conversation was unexpectedly interrupted that day due to a scheduling snafu, so the end is rather abrupt and unanticipated. But as you'll hear in today's conversation, this was the beginning of getting to know Dr. Bataro, his work, and his perspective on Catholic psychology. Throughout our conversation, we danced around the topic of the Catholic blueprint for the human psyche, but we didn't really get to that part in full until part two, which I released as part one. last week in episode 152. As I explained last week, I thought the discussion about the blueprint of the human psyche was really the heart of the issue and so I wanted to lead with that. That being said, we cover a lot of other interesting stuff about Catholic psychology today as well. So here is my first conversation with Dr. Brattaro released as part two, if that makes any sense. Please enjoy. My guest today is Dr. Greg Butaro. He is a Catholic psychologist, founder of the Catholic Psych Institute, and creator of the Catholic Psych Model of Applied Personalism, as well as the host of the Being Human podcast. Dr. Greg Butaro, welcome to You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist.

Dr. Greg Bottaro: Thank you so much. It's such a pleasure to be here with you.

Stephanie Winn: You were recommended by a listener of my podcast and it's taken several months to finally meet you. I'm really grateful for you to be here today. I think we have a lot to explore. I was sharing before we start recording that I'm not a Catholic myself, but that I do help people of all faiths and many of the people who come to me for guidance are Catholic. And I've found myself very drawn to questions of, you know, what is the Catholic vision of the human person and how might that inform how people of the Catholic faith go about approaching certain issues. So I think you are a really wonderful person to have to explore those issues. And I guess just one more thing I wanted to say to sort of front load the conversation is that With the journey that I've been on in terms of exploring ethics and psychology and culture and what are the conditions that make for human thriving, I find that a lot of it kind of comes back around to Catholic ethics in a very different way than the sense of Catholicism that I, or the image of Catholicism that I grew up with. So I feel like I've kind of come full circle. And I'm really curious to dive in with you today.

Dr. Greg Bottaro: Oh, that's really wonderful to hear that. And it's, yeah, it's something I stand really firmly on. And, you know, I think that we'll see what comes up in the conversation. But there's a lot of interpretation of what it means to be Catholic. I think culturally, that's a really loaded word. And people have a lot of trauma. People have a sense of the trauma that is filled with that word. And then there's also, you know, 2000 year old history of incredible beauty and culture and art. And in a lot of ways, really significant moments of civilization being saved by the Catholic Church. And so I really love what you're doing in your work. I think it's really profound to have stepped out into the breach with a shared sense of humanity and a shared sense of goodness in the center of humanity. Not necessarily resting on a sort of ideology, but just the experience of wanting to help people and seeing what's healthy and good for people and driving forward on that motivation. So Catholic or not, I definitely see us as co-workers in, as the Bible would say, co-workers in the vineyard. And there's a lot of work to be done here. So I'm very pleased and honored to be here as a guest and I'm happy to support the conversation however I can.

Stephanie Winn: Wonderful. So I don't know much about the history of Catholicism, and you said something really intriguing there. You said stories of civilization being saved by the Catholic Church. Any particular instances of this that you think are particularly interesting?

Dr. Greg Bottaro: Well, there are times that, you know, we think about the medieval times and we think sometimes about the dark ages, quote unquote, the so-called. And, you know, when there's massive shifts of politicization and culture and society and what happens is, you know, the sort of safeguarding of things like history and culture end up falling into the stewardship of, at least for the last 2,000 years, of the church. So during these Middle Ages, monasteries were forming and the monasteries were places where the monks would be the ones who were writing out scrolls or transcribing or writing down things like history or you know, just the sort of preservation of of things like language or even farming practices or things like that. So when there were massive plagues or invasions or, you know, really things, you know, whole cities were being burned down. we have a lot of history because of the work of the monks that were living this monastic life. Another thing I could point to would be, interestingly, which is a bit ironic now, the field of science itself. was really a religious endeavor. And, you know, now we're so used to thinking that there's this great divide between faith and science. But in the beginning, the idea of making sense of the observable world was initiated by religious people. who saw the beauty of God's creation in the world around us and wanted to give greater praise and glory to the creator in his created works. And so they set out to understand it with greater clarity. And so, you know, we have Francis Bacon, who, you know, was really the sort of grandfather of the scientific method. And we have even Darwin, Which is ironically, again, people think, oh, do we believe in evolution or are you one of those religious fanatics who doesn't believe in evolution? Actually, Darwin himself believed in the creator and saw the evolutionary theory as a way of making sense of how creation happened in the world. So there actually, any dichotomy between evolution versus creationism is completely fabricated. It's a postmodern fabrication. So it's been this sort of sense of the eternal and the desire for the eternal that has maintained a desire and a need to safeguard the things that are happening in the temporal. It only makes sense to hold what's happening in the temporal from age to age if that temporal is embedded within a larger eternal story. And so that's where the continuity is actually safeguarded. And a lot of that can be directly attributable to the Catholic Church.

Stephanie Winn: So you say that there's this false dichotomy based on a misunderstanding. And before we start recording, you said that part of the nature of your work is bringing together faith, reason, and science. Someone very close to me right now is grappling with their Catholic roots. And one of the sort of stumbling blocks in the pull towards going back to mass and such is the sense of everything being very literal. The sense that to, you know, accept communion, for example, that this means that I have to accept that this is literally the, you know, the blood and body of Christ. And there's just something that's, like, that feels like a sticking point there. You sound very… reasonable. How does your perspective bring together the faith and the science when it comes to things like that?

Dr. Greg Bottaro: Well, that's a really deep question, and that could take us hours away, but if, you know, I think the most basic Christian proposal is the most challenging, and it's that the tomb was empty after the third day. You know, Christ was crucified. He was killed. There's historical data. This is a historical event that was verified by numerous non-Christian, even anti-Christian sources in history. And we believe, we are a church that exists on the premise that Christ was killed. He actually was dead. And then three days later, the place where he rested, where he was laid dead, his dead body was laid down, was empty because his dead body no longer existed. That he conquered death itself. that he was fully human while being fully divine, and that he was fully actually killed in his humanity, and that he was raised from the dead. So I think if we really think about that idea, it's pretty shocking and it's really understandable why people have a hard time grappling with that. It's something that does take the gift of faith. You can't just reason yourself into believing that somebody could just be killed and then be alive three days later. And we need the powerful witness and testimony of witnesses to pass on by by the word, you know. But there there are historical accounts of this as well. So starting at that premise, it's like, OK, well, this seems to then justify everything else that he said, because people thought he was insane. And the scriptures are filled with stories of people thinking he's insane. Now, one of the things he said that sounded insane when he said it was, my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. And unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you will not have eternal life. This is in the scriptures. Now, we read that with modern ears and we think, like, of course he's being metaphorical, right? But wait a minute. In Scripture, it says the disciples then started to question him on this because it sounded absurd. And Jesus doubled down. In fact, he didn't say the part about you will not have eternal life. He didn't say that till the second time he repeated himself. So he says, yeah, you got to eat my flesh and drink my blood. And then they're like, what are you talking about? This is crazy. And then he goes, my flesh is your food and my blood is your drink. And unless you eat this food and drink this drink, you will not have eternal life. I'm paraphrasing here, but this is basically what happened. And then it says that day, many disciples walked away. So whatever he said and however he meant it and however he clarified and doubled down on was strong enough after all the miracles he had done, after all the things that he'd been teaching about love and beauty and all these things, that they had enough. This is too crazy for me. I'm out of here. I'm walking away. Now you read that and it's like, okay, that's pretty crazy. I get it. But then the tomb was empty. Like if this actually happened, We got to go back and reread everything else that he said and did because wait a minute, there's something here. There's something going on here. Maybe it's beyond what I can understand. Maybe it's beyond what I've made sense of already in my life. But if I'm going to go in on this, it seems to make sense to really go all in on this. So I think that's where, you know, for me personally, that's where I start. It's not necessarily where every conversation goes with every person I talk to about the faith. And it's, you know, we're having a conversation with your friend or close person by proxy here. So I don't know that necessarily would be where that conversation goes. But this is how I think about it in terms of Yeah, I can't make sense of an empty tomb. I can't make sense of eating flesh and blood. But that seems reasonable. If I accept one premise, then I would accept the other. Both are outside of my understanding. Secondly, I would say and then this is, again, not everybody's, you know, sort of turning point or what everybody actually thinks about. But there are so many examples of scientifically proven miracles that are astounding, and they're actually incredible. There are many times over the last 2000 years that priests holding up the bread, Catholic priests holding up the bread, where we do believe that this is actually transformed into the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Jesus Christ, transforms literally and visibly into flesh. and sometimes bleeding, and it's a bleeding host miracle. And those hosts have happened around the world over the last 2,000 years. They're still preserved. And so scientific studies have been done on those. They've discovered this is indeed human flesh. It's from the heart. they were able to tell by certain proteins that are released at the time of four-splint trauma that this heart tissue is from a man who has suffered incredible trauma at the time of death, or recently. And also, the blood type in every single Eucharistic miracle for the last 2,000 years is always the same. and around the world. And and they also just recently discovered evidence from the Shroud of Turin, which is the burial cloth that was laid over him in the tomb before he disappeared from the tomb. They found the burial cloth afterwards. And that's called the Shroud of Turin. And now they've done updated even the last couple of years. They've updated the scientific research on that with date testing. and they found that it has imprints from the same blood. It goes back to 2,000 years ago. The imprint that's on the shroud is completely unexplainable by any human means that's known to man. And it had to have, it was like a nuclear radioactive force that imprinted an image on the outside fibers of this cloth that miraculously has not disintegrated in 2,000 years. It's like crazy. You go, I could do this all day with you if you want. Hours upon hours of of these inscrutable, like atheist scientists that don't believe any of it have to acknowledge that, yeah, there's no explanation for what we're looking at. This is actually what's really here in our in our hands. So you put all the pieces together. And again, at the end of the day, faith, reason and science don't have to contradict each other.

Stephanie Winn: So setting aside for a moment, you know, miracles along the lines of what you described where bread becomes heart tissue with a certain blood type, right? Setting aside these really profound examples of, you know, stories I haven't personally looked into, just looking at the The part that you're saying sounds crazy, so you can't get there through reasoning, you can only get there through faith. I'm curious about your experiences of what inspires people to take that leap of faith who may not be coming from a place of faith. I guess I can give you some background on what draws me in that direction, which is that everything I know about sort of the structure and the guidance on life that the Catholic Church advises, to me, makes sense after a process of inquiry and exploration. Like, I come from a background of a lot of opportunities being open to me. I've talked a lot on this podcast about the sense of anomie or normlessness in society and how our field of psychotherapy is increasingly fractured because it's difficult for us to agree on what the ideal should be. Not that every single human being can live up in every way to an ideal, but I think we have to be able to at least point our compass in a certain direction. And as I've been on that process of inquiry, I think coming from my background as a therapist, you know, like, for example, in therapy, especially those coming from a more liberal background, there's a lot of interest in trauma and how do we help people with trauma and You know, if you go far enough in that direction, you want to know, well, how do we prevent trauma? How do we create the most optimal circumstances for the healthy upbringing of children? So when you start with any inquiry like that, for instance, you end up arriving at a much more conservative ethos. I think my experience, liberals are very concerned with trauma being the root of so many things. But if you ask, OK, well, how do we not create trauma? What conditions do you need to provide for a child to have a healthy upbringing? you will inevitably arrive at a conservative conclusion and in my experience the the Catholic vision of you know like sexual ethics and bioethics and like the Catholic framework makes sense And it lands much differently to me in midlife as someone who's been on this journey of exploring the human condition than it made when it was introduced to me as a young naive person as just all these rules and regulations and restrictions. It feels very, you know, punitive and condemning and limiting. So I think when, you know, for me, that's one of the draws that I'm like, maybe there's something to Catholicism. There seems to be an understanding of what is best for people, for example. And I like that there's a structure. I like that there are rituals and saints and things like that that draws me, right? But for me, it's that cognitive leap of faith where I'm going, You're asking me to consider that this is literally the body of Christ. That's the part I can't get over, but I'm curious for you about witnessing people in their journeys of embracing faith. What are the moments that make them feel like, I can wholeheartedly accept this and I want to take that leap of faith? Many of you listening to this show are concerned about an adolescent or young adult you care about who's caught up in the gender insanity and therefore at risk of medical self-destruction. I developed ROGD Repair as a resource for parents just like you. It's a self-paced online course and community that will teach you the psychology concept and communication tools the families I've consulted with have found most helpful in understanding and getting through to their children, even when they're adults. Visit ROGDRepair.com to learn more about the program and use promo code SUMTHERAPIST2025 at checkout to take 50% off your first month. That's ROGDRepair.com.

Dr. Greg Bottaro: Yeah, no, 100%. I think just to go back one second, I think it is really important to acknowledge the huge chasm between how we normally think rationally and then what's being presented to us. And if I'm going to make a claim that there should be no real contradiction between faith, reason, and science, I think it's really important to acknowledge the sort of the the what I would call the illusion of of a paradox or a false dichotomy. So, you know, I think I think just to note and just to mark this, that the the fundamental underlying rational premise would be it's, I think, supremely rational to to believe that there is more that I don't understand than there is that I can understand or that I do understand. So if I start there and then my inquiry gets me to a point that seems like a chasm that my reason can't jump, but everything else points to the fact that this may actually be true. The fact that my reason can't jump that gap doesn't mean it's irrational. Because that first premise was that there's probably things that I can't understand. And that was really my point about even the flesh of Christ. That ultimately is a mystery that can be accepted by faith. But I would say that it's actually more rational to accept the Christian proposals by faith than it is to accept the scientific proposal. which is an attempt to disprove or to prove a negative. It's like the scientific materialistic principle that there is no God. It's like, well, you can't prove a negative. And it's certainly not scientific to try to prove a negative. So it takes more faith to believe in science materialism's attempt to prove a negative than it does to actually just believe in what the faith is proposing to be, something to think about by faith. That seems more rational to me. But all that being said, what you're describing is essentially the core of all of our work. And maybe this is because you were coming at it from the psychotherapeutic perspective. What I talk about in my work in my podcast a lot is having a blueprint. And we say, well, if we're created, that means there's a creator. The creator knows how he made us. So that means he knows the blueprint of the human person. And this is another, again, crazy, I think, scandalous paradox. that the mental health profession is like the only helping profession, the only health profession that proposes to help an object of which it has no idea of a standardized ideal of the fundamental structure in which it exists. This is insane. So we have, you know, if you're a cardiologist, you know how a heart works. If you're an oncologist, you know how cancer works. If you like literally every other ology, there's a study of a thing that you know, the thing in which you're treating and studying. Mental health psychology is the only field where we say, well, what is a person? Well, we have as many divisions of the APA and as many different definitions of a person as there are therapists. We have whole classes in our education, which is simply a survey of theoretical orientations of different psychologists that have existed before us. Instead of studying what is a person, we say, what has every therapist of the last 150 years thought a person is? Let's just go through. You're like, wait a minute, this is insanity. So, yes, it's it's it's it's fractured. It's worse than fractured. It's it's I think a scandal and and it's a scam because people who are suffering assume if I go to the professional, the professional knows how I'm supposed to not be suffering. And then they're going to help me get healthy. And mental health is the place where that's not true unless you have somebody that's practicing from an underlying objective theoretical orientation that has an ideal idea, an image of a healthy human person. And this is what we get from Christianity, because we believe that God made us. We believe that he sent himself and his son into our form to show us how he made us. So there's a line from a Catholic document called an encyclical, which is a major church teaching document. And it's in Latin, it's called Gaudium et Spes. And it means, it says that, Jesus reveals man to himself and makes his calling clear. So it's Jesus is the perfection of the human person. He's the ideal. He shows us what the best version of humanity can look like. And he sets out the path for us to become the healthiest, happiest, most flourishing form of a human that we can be. And then the scripture is just simply filled with him meeting people in their suffering and struggling, inviting them to follow him so that they can become happy. And they find happiness so great that they're willing to literally lose their life to pursue it because they find out that the ideal is actually eternal and will bring us past the thing we're most afraid of, which is our own death. But actually, we're not made for death. We're made for life that's eternal. So we don't even have to be afraid of death anymore. And we can follow living this path, which is essentially following the blueprint of the human person that God is showing us. So every this is my proposal. This is the work I'm doing a Catholic psych. Every mental health therapist should be studying this blueprint. And even if I mean, it goes aside from like whether you have the faith to believe in Christianity, but like you said, the answers. they are actually reasonable. My parents, so I grew up nominally Catholic. My parents got divorced when I was a senior in high school. And I was old enough to sort of slip through the cracks and get out of the house. Nobody really knew how I was suffering so much. I was a disaster. I was raised in an Italian Catholic family. Family was everything. My whole foundation was built on family. And then my family split its foundation apart and fractured my identity. And then I read a book my freshman year of college called Love and Responsibility, and it was a philosophical work by St. John Paul II, a pope. And it was all about the ideal of marriage, what marriage is supposed to be between a man and a woman and in a manner that is till death do you part. And it's meant to be, it's not meant, divorce is not God's plan, all these different things. And it made sense of my suffering and it gave me the most beautiful ideal to look up to and to live for and to realize that's what I was missing, but that's what I was made for. And so in that same way, I came into my faith by realizing that there are these eminent, eminently reasonable explanations of how to live my humanity. And I want to sign up for that.

Stephanie Winn: Let's dive into this blueprint. I was nodding vigorously as you were talking, and I get the medical analogy. We know how many bones are in the standard human body and approximately the shape, size, and location of those bones. And you know, if someone has an extra toe, that doesn't mean that human beings have 11 toes. We have this argument in gender critical space about the fact that humans are sexually dimorphic, right? Just because someone has a disorder of sexual development doesn't mean that there are more than two sexes. Similarly, if you get blood drawn, the results will show you what is the standard range for anything that you're measuring. So we do know quite a bit, like you're saying, about how the human body is supposed to be shaped in every system of the body. And I get the analogy. I want to talk about that blueprint. And I want to talk about the crisis of normlessness as it pertains to this. And I was thinking about this last night. And what I was thinking is that looking back on all the therapy I had when I was younger, I cannot remember any therapist really identifying the fact that fatherlessness was the root of my problems. And it's so clear to me now in midlife. What made it clear was falling in love with a man who's a good father and healing my father wound through having a loyal partner and witnessing him being a present father to his children. That's what healed my father wound. And I'm still healing my father wound, but it really helps to have a responsible man as part of that. And looking back, like, it's so obvious the missing father was like the, you know, to use a medical analogy, it's like I was missing a bone in my body. You know? And I'm going to the doctor, like, why does everything hurt? And why can't I climb the stairs? And they're like, oh, that's really interesting. Tell me more. Everything hurts? You can't climb the stairs? It's a thing I can point to what's missing now. And it's very clear to me how that was at the root of so many disparate things that might on their surface not seem connected to that. But you have to have a blueprint for the optimal conditions for human thriving in order to be able to say, yep, in her life, here is one condition that was missing. And there's everything else we're looking at is downstream of that.

Dr. Greg Bottaro: Yes, amen. That's exactly how I'd look at it.

Stephanie Winn: And it makes me angry because I think if I'd had, and you know, partly it was my own choices, the cultural spheres that I was in at the time, the types of therapists I thought I wanted to see, I don't think I would have necessarily chosen a very conservative old school therapist who would have been like, you know what your problem is, young lady, it's that your father left. But I think the fact that our field largely operates from this premise that there's no right or wrong way to be, and no universal set of rules that's generally applicable to what most people need, I mean, it's doing a lot of damage because I think if someone had forced me to hone in on that and realize all my maladaptive coping mechanisms were reactions to fatherlessness, I think, like, maybe I could have had a different life. Maybe I'd be in a better place today. I'm happy with where I'm at, but, like, I can see that stuff now. So that's just one example. And I'm a therapist. I'm somebody who has expertise about the field. So I feel for people who are more vulnerable, who have no reason to know what they should or should not expect. So let's let's talk about that blueprint. Right. So the blueprint obviously includes family and marriage as the foundation for family. I guess we can't really talk about a human being devoid of the context of whether they're male or female, whether they're child or adults and how they relate with other human beings.

Dr. Greg Bottaro: Yeah, there's a there's a couple of main points. You know, I kind of feel like I want to make one point because we've we've kind of touched on a little bit here and there. But, you know, especially with this, like, Well, the perceived dichotomy between the sort of conservative and liberal positions, and then there's a lot of content, and obviously that I would agree with in terms of a conservative approach. I think one thing that sometimes is missing from a conservative approach, and especially from a religious approach, is the lack of compassion and a certain harshness. And I just want to name that too, because that's also not what Jesus modeled. And, you know, there's a story that I love to go back to from the scriptures about the woman at the well. And there was a woman who was known to have seven husbands, you know, and she would leave a man, marry somebody else, leave him, marry somebody else. And then she was kind of cast out. So she was forced to go to the well in the middle of the day, which is terrible. In the Middle East, it was a hot noonday sun. She was ostracized. She wasn't allowed to be part of the sort of in crowd with the other women. And Jesus tells his disciples he has to go meet somebody at the well and he leaves them to go meet her there. And also she's Samaritan, which, you know, in that time, culturally, like he as a Jew could not be talking to a Samaritan. and it was against their law. And so he meets her in the middle of the day and he starts to talk to her. And she's like, why are you talking to me? And he's like, can you give me some water? She's like, you're not even allowed to talk to me, nevermind drink from my cup. And he's like, if you knew who you were talking to, you would be asking me for water because I can give you the water that never runs dry. So he begins this conversation with her. But he meets her where she's at. He meets her where she is in her mess. And eventually he starts explaining. He goes, who's your husband? And then she's like, tells him, you know, who her current husband is. He goes, that's not your husband. She's like, you know me. And so it's through this conversation, he opens her up to what she's really looking for. So he knows the blueprint. He knows what she's made for. He knows why she's miserable. He knows what she's really longing for, which is actually even more than what marriage can give her. Because what we're all looking for is something eternal, not even what comes from this world, but what can only come from the next. But when we're seeking to have our eternal desires fulfilled by things that are limited and temporal, we'll never be satisfied and we'll always be looking for more here. So two points I'm making here, number one is, the conservatives and the religious who are not leading with compassion and meeting people where they're at, they're actually doing it wrong anyway. And I think that the world is suffering because of that. And so it's the job of good Christians who wanna actually share God's love to first meet people wherever they are, having the open conversation, not being judgmental, and recognizing that faith is a gift above all else and we've not earned it. But second to that, The idea of blueprint positions every conversation in this way. Now, here's the most fundamental point of blueprint. It's actually a philosophical principle. It has to do with the unity of our bodies and spirit. So the fact that a spiritual reality exists is a very real thing. The material world is not the only thing that exists. And we can prove this philosophically, even though the spiritual world is invisible. So you can't prove its existence scientifically. You also can't disprove its existence scientifically, because you can't disprove a negative. But we can philosophically reason out the existence of a spiritual world and then we can have spiritual identity of our personhood. And then it is a part of this Catholic blueprint that our body and spirit are actually unified as one thing. Our bodies are a manifestation of personhood in a physical plane. That is directly and intimately united to and tied to our spiritual manifestation of personhood which exists on the non-material spiritual plane. It becomes fundamentally really important for a whole lot of other consequences of philosophical consequences. Number one, obviously, we're either male or female and you're eternally male or female. You will exist in heaven forever as a male or a female. And then beyond that, everything that affects us personally as a person is affecting us spiritually and affecting us materially. So the things that are happening in our bodies affects our spirit. The things that happen in our spiritual life affect our bodies. And that that spiritual world is subject to is a member and participation of the world of objective truths of goodness, of beauty, of things that are bigger than us. And the way that we spiritually participate in this world of these abstract ideas of truth, goodness, and beauty directly affect what's going on in our bodies, especially in our minds, in our brains, in our psychology, our whole hormonal structure, the way that we feel, the way that we experience our life, and everything else that goes in it. So all of these very deep connections are part of this blueprint. And if we really understand, you know, somebody says, you know, I think I might be born in the wrong body. It's like, okay, well, number one, approach with compassion has to be the most important first rule. Meet a person where they are. If you feel like you're born in the wrong body, that's like, according to our metaphysics, is the worst, most traumatizing, excruciating experience a human can have. You're saying that your personal experience of who you are and your identity is literally in opposition to every single cell of your body, which we're supposed to be united to perfectly, and yet in this case, this is a person who's directly in opposition to. So that's pretty bad. Like we start with compassion, but then we have to make sure that everything we're doing is as medical professionals, as doctors, as healers, as experts who claim to have a way to help is to offer healing solve that can help, which means to restore a person to who they really are. It means to say, okay, I know because I have this blueprint that your personhood can't possibly be in opposition to your body. There's no possible way. It's like saying water can can be not wet. You can't have unwet water. You know, it's like that that doesn't it's just it's a it's a total logical fallacy. So. But this person feels like that they're different from their body. So, OK, how are we going to fix this? Then we get into sexual development. We understand identity development, psychosexual developmental phases, and we can go really deep into how a person comes to understand themselves in the first place and figure out maybe where things went wrong. But that would be an example of how we would use the blueprint and the work that we're doing.

Stephanie Winn: Do you have experience of working with people who say that, people who would in today's system be diagnosed with gender dysphoria and approaching them from that Catholic psychology perspective?

Dr. Greg Bottaro: Sure. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. People with yeah, people with with gender issues, you know, even people with same sex attraction who are, you know, not because of their belief system, they they they feel that, you know, they're they're at odds with. their sexual orientation and desires. And so we can approach all of these issues of sexual ethics, of identity, of personal vocation through this lens.

Stephanie Winn: I'm curious how people have responded, because in my experience, There's a lot of fragility. And my experience, yes, I worked with this population, but now, as I was explaining to you before I started recording, and as my listeners know, I'm not currently practicing psychotherapy. I retain an active license and could return to practice at any time, but I've chosen for the last year to focus on down-to-earth advice for parents who are worried about their adolescent and young adult children. And so that's what I focus on. So a lot of the work I do is taking in people's stories about their loved ones. And I see a lot of family dysfunction, a lot of fragility, and cluster B personality traits as part of the picture, as well as woke beliefs about social justice, which are reinforcing the you know, in psychology terms, the secondary gain, or what people are getting out of maintaining an identity and connection with being unwell. So it feels like a really sticky situation. And as I was also explaining before we started talking, or excuse me, before we started recording, I do work with some Catholic families where the parents are coming to me for advice, and they're children who are trans identified, also have a relationship with the Catholic faith. And I'm very curious how to help them including their faith, because I think like you've been saying, right, Catholicism offers a blueprint for the human being. And in those cases, although I'm not working with the youth directly, I'm working with the parents, I think about maybe the youth's openness to their faith is an opportunity or an invitation for their parents or other people of faith in their community to respond to some of these claims from that Catholic lens. And the way you did it was so clear, right? It's, well, that logically can't be true because you can't not be what you are, but that sounds like a really painful experience to feel. I'm just curious about where you experience the invitation to go deeper and to bring up the dissonance between someone's narrative that they've arrived at about the nature of their suffering and the narrative that faith would offer which might clash with their worldview.

Dr. Greg Bottaro: Yeah, great question. And I think I also have to offer a bit of a disclaimer because it's part of my answer. But if you know, I, I have grown the Catholic Psych Institute and now have a practice in which I have a number of other therapists who are doing most of the work. So that I myself as the executive and visionary of the company can do more podcasting and more speaking and writing and things like that. But there's a really important dimension of that specifically in this area in which I'm not personally currently working with. clients who are suffering in this way, because it would be really harmful to offer these perspectives from such an objective place with such a sort of blunt and, you know, objective sort of clarity, while also personally accompanying somebody who's who's working on these areas. Because if somebody like that heard me speaking in this way, this might be radically different than how I would be speaking with somebody at a certain step on their journey.

Stephanie Winn: That's the exact dilemma that I have.

Dr. Greg Bottaro: Yeah, and I think that needs to be stated. And so I really respect where you're at and what you're doing. And I just wanna say that a lot of the issues that come up from this Catholic blueprint, we would say that the experience of whatever the sexually related issue is, is very, very complex. And there's gonna be a constellation of factors that blend into what causes this from happening. one of which is usually relationship with parents. Now, I'll say it's not the only one. Most parents go through a phase of incredible guilt where they feel like it's all their fault or they wonder if it is or they're afraid that it is. And it's never all of the parents fault. However, it's never not connected in some way to family dynamics. either. So it's it's not nurture or nature, it's both. And it's also the nurture of childhood friendships and, you know, extended family relationships, other traumas that might have happened. I mean, and then there's there are, you know, biochemical, physiological predispositions for certain patterns and different things like that. So all that to say, it's incredibly messy and complex. And we always have to meet people where they're at and stay there for a really, for as long of a time as the person meets. Because what we're doing in the therapeutic work is giving what we call a corrective emotional experience, which comes from a psychodynamic perspective. We operate out of an interpersonal psychodynamic theoretical framework, which means relationship is the foundation of everything. Anything therapeutic that can happen happens embedded within a relationship. And so the therapist is providing a formative foundation of relationship that is going to heal ways in which the original foundation may have been in some way wounding. imperfect, flawed, or somehow not enough to buffer against the wounds that were coming from the outside, or ill-attuned, non-attuned parenting, or things like that. So we can't just repeat the same problem as therapists, especially when it's parents bringing their kids to us for therapy. It's like implicit in that reality is already the fact that This is not a person who brought themselves to therapy because they want to work on something. This is a parent who brought me in that there's probably a very rich history and very complex and which now we're colluding with the parents from the parents perspective of saying, OK, we're first of all, just judging the fact that you have something to fix that you might not even believe is wrong in the first place. And I'm somehow here to fix you at the level of identity. And that is really troublesome and problematic. So it's messy, it's beautiful work, because we get into the deepest facets of formation and attunement. And it often goes far deeper than what's happening on the level of sexual idea, desire, or identity. And usually it gets down into just validation of self, who I am as a person. Am I good? Am I loved? Am I made for love? You know, the ultimate path in this blueprint is that we're all made for an eternal communion with the divinity himself. Love itself, which is eternal. We're made to receive and give ourselves to love itself. When you realize that, it's like, do I have to make a sacrifice in terms of my sexual morality in this life as a human? That's nothing compared to eternity. And guess what? The Catholic view is that marriage is monogamous. We don't use contraception. We don't, you know, things like masturbation. That's not that's not morally licit. Like we also live a very restricted sexual life. And people might say, yeah, but at least you have a marriage, at least you have a wife, at least you have love. It's like. Love is bigger than marriage and we're made for love that's infinitely bigger than marriage. And there are so many ways to participate in love now. That steps into that eternal reality, even if it's not in this one particular path of marriage, depending on how deep somebody's. Disorientation really is. Sometimes we can't change that and that's fine. That doesn't mean a person is hopeless. It means we're going to find new ways and creative ways to tap into the deepest desires of that person's heart, which is not immediate and temporal sexual gratification. That's never leaving somebody satisfied. It's to plug into something that source is actually eternal. And that's actually possible.

Stephanie Winn: Thank you for listening to You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist. If you enjoyed this episode, kindly take a moment to rate, review, share, or comment on it using your platform of choice. And of course, please remember, podcasts are not therapy, and I'm not your therapist. Special thanks to Joey Pecoraro for this awesome theme song, Half Awake, and to Pods by Nick for production. For help navigating the impact of the gender craze on your family, be sure to check out my program for parents, ROGD Repair. Any resource you heard mentioned on this show, plus how to get in touch with me, can all be found in the notes and links below. Rain or shine, I hope you will step outside to breathe the air today. In the words of Max Ehrman, with all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.