Dr Greg Bottaro Keynote
Biography
Dr. Greg Bottaro is a Catholic psychologist, founder of the CatholicPsych Institute and creator of the CatholicPsych Model of Applied Personalism (CPMAP). Before he was married, he was a Franciscan Friar for 4 years under the mentorship of Fr. Benedict Groeschel. He's now married with 7 kids under 11.
Transcript
The keynote will introduce a Catholic approach to addressing pornography, highlighting the importance of viewing the person through the lens of St. John Paul 2's Personalism integrated with a Bio-Psycho-Social-Spiritual approach. This approach contrasts sharply with the utilitarian philosophy of sexuality, which reduces people to mere objects of pleasure. The talk will challenge current models of self and happiness, emphasizing the need to reorient desires according to Christ's example of self-gift. It will reveal how human flourishing requires overcoming disordered desires and healing wounds buried in cycles of shame and isolation to move towards a Catholic ideal of relationship, community, and true connection.
It is a great pleasure to be here. I have been sharing a lot of the beauty and the joy of this country with my two kids so I'm just so grateful for your hospitality, and it's wonderful to encounter the church so alive in this part of the world. I had no experience of Australia besides 2018. I was here for the Renaissance of marriage conference, and I got just a little taste, and I thought if I come back, I must bring my kids, and I have to spend more time exploring more of what's going on here. So, it's been just a wonderful experience and we're wrapping up our 3-week tour here today with sort of a grand finale.
Now what I do in my work at home is integrate the faith with psychology. I don't have a lot of time to get into my whole background and story, you can find that online. I have a podcast called the Being Human podcast and so if you're interested you can explore a lot more but I've got this incredible task of distilling down for you the core of what we do and integrating faith, reason and science, specifically the science of psychology in less than a half hour.
So, I'm going to endeavor to do tha,t and let's see if you can hold me to task. I want to give you something today to start us off that will be kind of like a decoder ring for the rest of the day. If we have the right lens to see all the various dimensions of what's important in this topic of how we got here? The problem of pornography, more importantly what the solutions might look look like, then we collectively with the brain power, and the spirit power and the heart in this room and the faith. Can certainly, not only tackle but surmount and bring people even closer to holiness with this problem.
It's through the Cross that we have the resurrection and it's through the trials that God allows, that we have greater joy on the other side of these crosses. We cannot forget that God allows this to happen. He's allowed the world to be where it is today and it's not like the devil can thwart God.
So, it's our job like detectives to look for what he's leading us to, what he's inviting us to. And if we have hope and faith and that he's already won then it frees us up to have creativity and curiosity to sort of enter into this adventure. Not to belittle the pain and suffering that's obviously included with this topic, but it really is an adventure for us to find the glory on the other side of this darkness.
So I'm going to give you a decoder ring and the purpose of today is to kind of come together and we're going to wrap up the end of the day with the sort of vision setting, big picture thinking. I want you to use this decoder ring throughout the day and think about what you're hearing through the lens that I'm about to give you.
So I'm going to now integrate faith and psychology in under 27 minutes and it's something that we do in our certification program on a much bigger scale, we actually certify people through this model. I'm going to share with you a little titbit of what that is and I'm not talking about the certification, so come find me afterwards or separately if you do want to learn more about the actual work that we do. Essentially I want to give you it's a 5,4,3 model.
So, this is going to be interactive it's everybody put up a five and then put up and then you're going to do four and then we're going to do three. Okay I'm going to give you five things, or these three different things, first is five features.
Everybody say "features" okay five features of relationship. Relationship is the key to everything. It's going to be the simple diagnosis that we're going to look through at everything else we are hearing about today.
Five features of relationship is that:
- We are made in the image of God.
God is a trinity. He is three in one he is the communio, we're made in his image so that means we have relationship in the way we're made. - The second of five features is that we are formed in relationship, so we're made in relationship in the image of God, we are formed in relationship, this happens because we are here in time and space, we are born as little babies and then we have psychosexual spiritual development that goes through our whole lifespan. We are being formed in the relationships that we are embedded within in our families and in our peer groups and our communities.
So we're Made in relationship the image of God, We are formed in relationship in our families then the third feature of five is that
- We are wounded in relationships.
The family is called the school of love it's meant to be the place that we learn who we are, our identity is taught to us, and what is our identity? We are made in the image of God. God is love what is love? Love consists in this, that we are loved first, this is what a little baby is meant to be learning in the school of love, that is the family, which is the formation in relationship of identity.
So, we're made image of God, we are formed in relationship. We are wounded in relationship because none of that school is perfect.
So, every single one of us in this room, myself included, we all suffer concupiscence. It means the way we parent is going to be flawed. It means the way we are parented has been flawed. It's the reason why we actually all need a Savior. We connect the between the psychological and the spiritual so there's an actual psychological consequence to concupiscence, to original sin, we all need a Savior.
So that wounding is happening in family life, in growing up we are being taught certain things that are not true about how we are. When as a parent if I get selfish, if I am impatient if I'm a little cranky because I've got some jet-lag and I take it out on my kids. I am lying to them about who they are. I'm a bad teacher in those moments. We all do that and that's been done to us, so we are miseducated in our schools of love that's how we are wounded in relationship.
So first: We are made in relationship, second formed in relationship, third we are wounded in relationship, but praise God the fourth feature is that we are healed through relationship.
He built this into to our very being that as we are in Communio with each other, we grow closer to God who is truth goodness and Beauty. As we behave and act and feel and are engaging with each other in ways that are good and true and beautiful.
So, every act of charity, every act of patience, every act of kindness that is filled with the life of Christ as we are loving each other, we are actually healing those wounds that came from our own backgrounds.
There can be very simple manifestations of this and very long profound drawn out manifestations of this, but every encounter is pregnant with the possibility for healing to happen and the echoes of every moment of encounter between two people ripple for eternity. So, we're made, formed, wounded, healed in relationship and finally the fifth feature of relationship is that we are destined for relationship.
It is our actual purpose that we are made in the image of God to be returned to complete total union with God, full gift of self and receptivity of who God is in that Divine Union. Divinization that we are called to become one with God. This is the end of every human person whether they know it or not so this is not just for Catholics this is for every human person. So where are we at now?
What are the five features? 1. Made in the image of God, 2. Formed in relationship, 3. Wounded in a relationship, 4. Healed in a relationship, 5. Destined for relationship.
Okay that's the first part of the Decoder ring that's the five now I'll get to the four.
We're going to go to this really quickly because this is super philosophical. This is not going to be everybody's cup of tea but just to plant a little seed here. So, do we know what the four causes are? Now this is really interesting if you think about the four causes of a person we can actually see relationship at the core of the four causes so we have the efficient cause which is God, then we have our formal cause, we're made in relationship and we have the material cause which is actually also immaterial when we're talking about a person or body and spirit. Then we have our final cause which is to be returned to relationship.
If you're not familiar with those definitions efficient means what got the thing going with the actual initiation of a thing. So, God created us and then we have the form of the cause it's like what's the form of the thing that we're talking about? This is all very super philosophical Aristotelian basic philosophy but the form of what we are, we are made in relationship in the image of God who is the Trinity and then the material cause is like what the thing is made out of, so the wooden floor the material cause is the is the wood, well a person is made of body and spirit and even in that we see the relational dynamics. This is really important as well because the Psychology comes into play through the body and there's this very deep unity between body and spirit, so much so I mean we are all suffering from what's called cartesian dualism. The error that we are separate in our body and spirit. How many of us think that when we die our bodies go down into the grave and decompose and our spirits finally free from the jail house of this body rises into heaven, so that we can float in the air on clouds and play harps.
This is like our cultural sense of ourselves, that we are these spirits trapped in bodies, a ghost and a machine type idea. This is just a flat-out error, this is actually a heresy, and it actually is cosmologically, metaphysically, utterly impossible. Our body and spirit are so deeply united which is why we can't say conversion is a spiritual thing, but it has nothing to do with the body, the psyche.
Our conversions are psychological and the things that are blocking us from our conversion is psychological. Especially things that have to do with pornography or any kind of addiction.
Then the final cause we talked about is the end of who we are our purpose our telos is to be in union with God.
So, relationship shows up in the four causes in those manners. So, we have our five features: we are made in image of God with relationship, we are formed, wounded, healed and destined for relationship now we can see that the four causes all share and show relationship.
And finally, the three types of relationship and this is relationship within self. Relationship with others, and Relationship with God.
So, I'm throwing a lot at you, but this is the basic decoder ring for how to understand this day.
As you're listening to different talks and different ideas and hearing about different programs, different initiatives. I want you to really think deeply and reflect on how relationship is showing up and what we are doing and can do about the problem of pornography.
To say that the three types of relationships we have relationship with self might be a little confusing at first. How is self a relationship? But this is what most of psychology is about. Most of our theory and our theoretic orientations and our techniques for helping people we're really looking at how a person engages within themself within themselves. So, it actually does make sense. Now that you have a blueprint for how we're actually imprinted with relationship (because we're made in the image of God) then it becomes again part of this curiosity this exploration, How do we find the trinitarian dimension of God inside of each one of us individually?
There's going to be Communio inside of each one of us. If you think about what the science does, the world of psychology, or even our cultural understanding of self and the person, I think this is something that's really missing. I think that it's very easy to fall into the trap for this to be missing from the programs we develop and the ways that we think about battling the problem of pornography and addiction.
We think about the human person as this isolated individual in a vacuum and we can study the person. How does their brain work? How does their psyche work? What are these theoretical sort of orientations around a person? We think about the cognitive faculties or the affective faculties, or how does a person affected by trauma? When we approach these problems that are manifesting, we think of solutions about the person, the individual, we are missing an entire other dimension of what it means to be a person. We cannot understand a person outside of relationship.
It's like understanding God outside of thinking about a trinity. Now there is the reality of the unity of God and there is the reality of being made in the image of God and having a component of a dimension of unity. So, it is true to think about a person as a unity but as most things Catholic there's always this sense of mystery, which is a really easy way to get out of having all the answers. But we have a mystery of the trinity in each one of us. So the relational dimension of our humanity has to be reverenced, sought after, included in any type of proposal for how we solve anything or grow or flourish or anything that we are endeavouring to do. So that's where we can see here we bring all these pieces together, and we know something the world doesn't know.
We know how important relationship is and so that's how we can look inside of ourselves to find to look for elements of relationship. So self, and then others, relationship with others, that's a little bit more obvious and at the basic sort of root of a lot of the problems that we experience. We are wounded in relationships but also healed in relationship, we have relationships with others, ultimately everything is ordered towards our relationship with God.
We are called to be like God. In the way that we love each other; to follow Christ. He showed us how to love each other in our humanity, and so this is how we enter into these three types of relationships.
So, we want to keep all of those in mind today as we're exploring all of these different ideas and opportunities. So, we can go a little bit deeper here and to just give you a foretaste at least for the morning block here.
We have in this blueprint of the human person something that Saint John Paul ll gave us that and part of my mission in this world for my life is to be a missionary of Saint John Paul ll and to proclaim him as the most important psychologist of the last 150 years.
Saint John Paul ll gave us the actual blueprint of the human person. Which is what anybody trying to help other people should probably be starting with. But the problem with Saint John Paul ll is that he didn't know how to make his thought and brilliance accessible to most of us. So, it takes probably 10 years of study to decipher one book from Saint John Paul ll. So, some people are tasked with the vocation to spend those 10 years breaking down some of these things and that's what I've been doing specifically through the lens of psychology. So, there's so much that he has given us and one of the most important basic building blocks of a blueprint is his understanding of the unconscious.
What he says is that we have this this unconscious world, and he borrowed from psychological theory science. He was very engaged with the world around him, but our history gets locked up into our unconscious. Then it forms motivation and thoughts and feelings that affect our will and the decisions that we make. Or at least the behaviours that we engage in. What he would say is in order for a human to be truly free we have to have conscious access to the content that is motivating our behaviours. He says that there is a dynamism of content within the unconscious. It wants to be free, it wants to be seen in the conscious, it wants to be illuminated by the light of conscious awareness.
Yet we have these protective mechanisms by God's design, that keep threatening and disorienting and uncomfortable truths buried, in the unconscious.
He says well look at what happens if somebody sleeping or somebody's very sick, or if somebody is maybe intoxicated or has some kind of chemical interaction. We see that content from the unconscious starts to come up, which is why we have dreams and nightmares and why if we don't have a lot of sleep things start to come up in our minds that we didn't expect. This is real content from our life and it's actually the answer why we can't do the things we want to do, and we do the things we don't want to do.
Saint John Paul ll answered Saint Paul's cry for help. In understanding this dynamism within this blueprint of the unconscious through a threshold and conscious awareness and he tasks us he says this is a quote from St John Paul ll. The primary task of morality and education, probably something we're all here to do something with. "The primary task of morality and education is to help uncover content buried in the unconscious and bring it to the light of conscious awareness."
I mean if there's not a clarion call vocation to psychologists embedded within the same Saint John Paul ll to work then then I don't know what to call that. This is amazing what he names, because it's when we have conscious awareness of the things that are in our life that we have true human freedom. Saint John Paul ll's philosophy when he talks about Freedom. Human Action is free this is what we're made for this is what we're called to.
But we're ignorant and blind to so many of the things that are happening inside of us. Why do we have the personalities that we have? The behaviours that we have? Why do we feel we have to act a certain way in a certain situation? All of these things are part of what's locked in the unconscious.
But the more that we do this work things come and they emerge. So, this is going to make sense of some things like a shame cycle. You're going to hear Shawn talk about this, where we are locking ourselves into cycles of bad behaviours that we blame ourselves for and then we have shame, and then we have loneliness and then it cycles back again. But what's happening with the shame cycle is that it's a distraction, when we get stuck in the cycle, if I just go to confession again, or if I if I just try harder or if I just white knuckle it, if I take more cold showers. Somehow, we're going to fix the problem. But this whole thing is coming from dimensions within us that actually are happier with the fact that we're distracted by the cycle of rising and falling, because we don't have to deal with the actual pain and suffering from trauma that's even deeper in our unconscious. So, we want to actually see that we are all actually subject to these kinds of cycles and at the end of the day Saint John Paul ll teaches us the personalistic norm. Which is that a person is to be loved, not to be used, you know so we can just sort of clobber people over the head with that, because pornography is using people right? Well Saint John Paul ll says… or the gospel says… well we're actually all doing this, we all use people we all use each other.
This is a heavy realization we're all guilty, but the beauty is we're all guilty and Jesus came for all of us. And the reason why this is such an important insight to hold on to, especially when it comes to pornography, is because and or any addiction, is that the shame is the opposite of communion.
Shame rips us away from communion, but because we have the pain of shame it teaches us that we're made for communion. So how do we actually combat this problem? With communion. This is why unity is the antidote to shame.
This is why we have to realize before we engage with anybody who's having any kind of problem, we are all in the same boat, we all use people in different ways, on a spectrum, some more are extreme than others, but we're all in the same boat and those differences are minuscule and actually incontestable, compared to the love and perfection of God that we're actually all called to live in Christ.
This is an insight from Saint Therese in her Story of a Soul, she was praying for the conversion of a murderer and she knew her prayers were going to affect his conversion. at the last moment before this guy was put to death he asked for a cross, he was an atheist, he asked for a cross to kiss from the priest before he was hung or beheaded but she knew it was because of her prayers. And she said I'm going to sit at his table in Heaven we are the same. It and it there's like no difference between a saint who never committed a mortal sin and a murderer who was executed. So, if we realize we're all in the same boat then we are entering into the unity that is the antidote to the shame. So we have to think about how do we actually enter into the relationships with all people? And ultimately then we can see that God is calling us to this Unity with him. So we'll hear from Father David about reconciliation, and about the love of God, and how if we can enter into God's mercy and really receive his love, it sort of corrects all of the wounds that we've already been talking about.
Remember we are wounded in relationship in all those different ways that we are miseducated about love. But this is the great thing, this is the beautiful hope about education and miseducation. If you're miseducated about something doesn't mean that the source of Truth is distorted.
So, if you go to school and you learn something that's incorrect any then then you go to a new school and you learn the truth. It's like these things can be corrected but this is what happens in the school of love, the school of love the family is temporary, it's a way that children who don't have the spiritual maturity to enter into adult relationship with God have a chance to start to begin the process of learning who they are, and how to have the ultimate relationship. It's not the source of the ultimate relationship, parents are like Gods, but parents aren't God. So, the beautiful thing is God's here with us so even if we are miseducated God is actually here inviting us back into this relationship, teaching us who we really are, it's not that we love, it's that he loves us first.
It's not that you do everything right and then you can have a relationship with Him. He's ready to pour it out all the time, forgiving us, drawing us in, letting it be the foundation of who we are, you are loved into existence. But I screwed up. You're still loved into existence, it's okay that you screwed up. I'm here to love you still. That was never in question and so we enter deeper into reconciliation with God through forgiveness, through his divine mercy and that restores our hope, that restores our trust and that gives us the ability to then look at ourselves with courage and ultimately what we can do here full circle is when we are we are grounded in the love of God, and we are grounded in let's just say love, because not everybody whom we serve even knows who God is. So that's okay God is love.
So if we are grounded in love, that means we know what it is to be loved, that means now we're safe. So, all those traumas the shame, the cycles, the distractions, that are keeping us from going deeper into our unconscious and uncovering what is really going on inside of us, now they're not so threatening anymore. Now we don't need those defence mechanisms to operate because as if they're saving our life. When we are loved in existence it doesn't matter anymore and when we get really sophisticated and mature about it and we learn who Christ is we actually don't even have to be afraid of death because he even conquered that.
He's taking care of every problem, when we can consciously rely on that truth, we can then go deeper into our unconscious. Then we can find all the ways that we are blocking ourselves from our real pain. At the end of the day what we find out is none of us wants to use each other. We are made for love out of love we are made to love and so we are going to have ways in which we will reclaim our true identity when we are filled with and embedded on a foundation of safety. So, this can get really practical, because there are ways that we have these desires very deep in our unconscious that are being misdirected.
We long for communion, we long for a connection, we are getting misdirected in the ways that we're seeking these things out, and then we're getting distracted from the traumas where we don't believe we're actually capable of this in the first place. But we can go there, we can discover those wounds, we can be healed in those wounds in the light of real love, and we can understand that relationship is the key to understanding everything else. So, there is no program, there's no solution that's going to be one fits all, it's actually relationship and it's going to be you and me forming relationship that actually solves this problem. It's going to be love that actually solves the problem. God bless you.
Three main points from this talk:
Integration of Faith and Psychology: Dr Bottaro emphasizes the importance of integrating faith with psychological principles to address issues like pornography. Proposing a model that highlights relationships—how we are made in the image of God, formed in relationships, wounded in relationships, healed through relationships, and ultimately destined for relationship with God.
The Role of Relationships: Relationships are central to human experience. The talk outlines three types of relationships: with oneself, with others, and with God. Each relationship is crucial for personal growth and healing, and the speaker argues that true understanding of oneself cannot occur outside the context of relationships.
Healing Through Communion: The speaker highlights that shame, often linked to behaviours like addiction, disrupts communion with others and God. They suggest that the antidote to shame is unity and communion and emphasizes the need for love and acceptance in healing, stating that understanding our shared humanity can foster deeper connections and facilitate recovery from psychological wounds.
