Dr. Greg Bottaro - Interview with Matthew Kelly
Hi, I'm Matthew Kelly. I'm here with Greg Bottaro, founder and director of the CatholicPsych Institute. Greg, it's been a while, it's good to see you again. Thanks for coming to visit us again.
Greg Bottaro:
It's great to be here with you.
Matthew Kelly:
It's been a great partnership over the years, and we've done some amazing things together. I've got some very serious questions to get us started like, what is your favorite food?
Greg Bottaro:
I prefer a really good steak.
Matthew Kelly:
A really good steak?
Greg Bottaro:
Yeah, absolutely.
Matthew Kelly:
You're like an Italian guy.
Greg Bottaro:
I am an Italian guy.
Matthew Kelly:
What would your hundreds, thousands of years of ancestors turning over in their grave as you're like, "I'll take a steak."
Greg Bottaro:
It's true. I can't say I've had really good steak at Italy, but it's not the most amazing thing to do. But I do enjoy good steak.
Matthew Kelly:
Good, good, good. Second and very serious question, are you a coffee drinker?
Greg Bottaro:
Oh, I love coffee.
Matthew Kelly:
So there is some Italian there, right?
Greg Bottaro:
Yeah, there you go.
Matthew Kelly:
Italians do love their coffee.
Greg Bottaro:
Absolutely.
Matthew Kelly:
How much coffee do you drink?
Greg Bottaro:
I'm a little embarrassed to acknowledge that publicly. I probably have four or five espressos before noon, and then I'll have a coffee after lunch.
Matthew Kelly:
Excellent. Good, good, good. What about a favorite movie?
Greg Bottaro:
Ah, favorite movie, great question. Gosh, I have so many good ones. I'm totally drawing a blank right now.
Matthew Kelly:
That's okay. That's okay. It's been a while since we've sat down, what's going on in your life? What are you excited about? Update us a little.
Greg Bottaro:
Well, we have six kids, and my youngest is six months and we are just starting to settle in enough. We decided it's not crazy enough around here so let's get a dog, so last week we got a puppy. So we have six kids under eight, by the way, and now we have a puppy as well. So we've added that to the roster and it's amazing, we're having a lot of fun with it.
Matthew Kelly:
Boys or girls?
Greg Bottaro:
We have three boys and three girls.
Matthew Kelly:
Okay, very good. I hear you love building things.
Greg Bottaro:
That's true.
Matthew Kelly:
What do you like to build? And where did that love of building come from?
Greg Bottaro:
I grew up, my dad was always just tinkering, building, fixing, and we grew up in that environment. If it was something that you could fix or build yourself, then you just did it. And really took on a love for this with my wife. We were on a show, a little known fact, we were on an HGTV television show called Property Brothers. So we were on one of these TV shows where you renovate and fix up a property. And my wife and I caught a bug and we just loved it so much. So as soon as that crew left, we decided to add on another addition to that house. Then when we ran out of stuff to do on that little house, we sold it and we bought a bigger property that was abandoned for a year.
Greg Bottaro:
So we've spent the last year, we had something to do during quarantine, fixing up this new property, bring it back to life. Recently we moved to the outside as it started to warm up. So I cleared a big part of the yard, took down six huge trees, and then put in about a 3,000 square foot garden. So this is our latest project, building a bunch of raised planting boxes and then filling them and laying the whole thing out. Then we're going out and finding vegetables and flowers with the kids and figuring out how to plant it all out there. So that's been the biggest latest project.
Matthew Kelly:
All right. So you're the psychologist, all right? I'll lay that out there you are the psychologist, I am not the psychologist.
Greg Bottaro:
I feel like I'm about to get psychoanalyzed.
Matthew Kelly:
Six kids, the dog, the renovating the house, all of that sounds a little bit insane to me. And I'm just wondering what your professional opinion is as a psychologist.
Greg Bottaro:
Well, psychologists are notoriously good at ignoring our own psychopathology. So I actually don't have even beginning of an answer for you.
Matthew Kelly:
Other thing I hear about you is that you love sailing, used to sail.
Greg Bottaro:
Yes, definitely.
Matthew Kelly:
Don't get much of a chance anymore.
Greg Bottaro:
Yeah, that's true.
Matthew Kelly:
What did you love about sailing and what did it teach you about life?
Greg Bottaro:
Good question. I loved the raw power of nature and being really in tune with it and having to really respect it, but then realizing that by giving yourself over to it, with that respect and reverence, you can also go so much further and faster than anything you could do on your own. And so it became this exhilaration for me, and there's almost nothing more amazing as far as I can think of in nature in this created world than hiking out over the edge of a sailboat, holding nothing but that means sheet with your body flying over the water and hearing the rush and feeling the water slapping up. And that is just heaven to me. So what I learned there is to respect, to reverence the created order and to look for ways that it can help us to become better versions of ourselves.
Matthew Kelly:
So as a psychologist, one of the things I'm curious about in social settings, people inevitably ask, "What do you do?" When they learn that you're a psychologist, what reactions do you get?
Greg Bottaro:
Well, I do the best I can to hide the fact that I'm a psychologist in social settings. Usually I tell people I'm a painter or I'm an electrician. I say something that nobody's going to ask any follow-up questions to. But when people do know what I do, it's really hard. At first, people always assume that I can read their mind. So people are uncomfortable and nervous around me. I tell people all the time, "Listen, I only work when I'm getting paid. I'm not doing my job right now at this cocktail party, so don't worry about it." But then inevitably they want to open up and share, and it's this immediate access to people's interior life. And they're sharing their difficulties or their wounds or whatever else. Sometimes it's a lot to try to navigate when you're sipping on your cocktail and trying to talk about the sports, the Yankees or something else that's going on.
Matthew Kelly:
I can imagine, I can imagine. People come to therapy for all sorts of reasons. One thing I've often wondered is, do people sometimes come to therapy to avoid something rather than to face something?
Greg Bottaro:
Oh, wow. To avoid something, I think so. I think a lot of times people are surprised, if we really hang in there together, at what ends up coming up. And in most cases, what people end up working on in therapy is not what they came on the first day for. So a lot of times in that process, we can uncover things they might be avoiding actually needing to work on. And coming to therapy might just be their way of checking the box, they think they're doing everything they're supposed to do. I think unfortunately in a lot of therapeutic environments, the professional vault might go along with that and they might just get away with that. I know people have spun their wheels for years going to a therapist, but not really working on the deeper issues that need to be uncovered.
Matthew Kelly:
So if someone is thinking about seeing a therapist for the first time in their life, what advice would you have for them?
Greg Bottaro:
Find the right person. You're opening up your heart and your soul and the intimacy of your own interior life and likely your family life and all sorts of other areas to a stranger. And if you drive a nice car, you're going to find the mechanic that knows how to work on that car. if, you drive a piece of garbage car and you have a flat tire or something, maybe you don't care where you take it. But when you're taking your own interior life someplace to be worked on, it requires at least the same amount of effort in finding the right place. The way that we're built is so important when it comes to somebody fixing what might be broken. We need to have somebody who has a blueprint, an understanding of how we're built if they're going to offer some way of actually helping you. And that blueprint is what's missing in most of secular psychotherapy.
Matthew Kelly:
Is it because they've thrown God and spirituality away?
Greg Bottaro:
100%. Without that foundation, there's no grounding in which to really understand anything that we're observing through science. The science is so important, it's about measuring the observable world around us, testing it, proving hypotheses or no hypothesis, these things are important. But without that grounding on that foundation of our spiritual dimension, our eternal dimension, what we're made for, we won't be able to make sense of what we're observing. So these secular modalities are really just shooting in the dark trying to figure out how to make sense of what we're observing. And at the end of the day, if we don't have that spiritual blueprint, if we don't understand we're made in the image of God, that we're headed towards divine union with God, we're not going to be able to really make headway with what we're seeing.
Matthew Kelly:
So in economics, there's a theory, sunk cost bias, where someone buys something, it's no longer worth what they bought it for but they keep investing into it or keep holding onto it thinking that it will one day return to its previous value. Sometimes people will say, "Oh, yes, I've been seeing this therapist for three years or five years or longer." And you asked that person, "Okay, well, what is it about that relationship that works for you?" Or, "Do you feel like your therapist is a really good fit for you?" And they'll often say, "Actually, no. But I've been with her for so long or I've been with him for so long." So they've got this sunk cost bias. They have a sense that it's not really working, but this person knows all about their life, this person knows all about their family, knows the things they struggle with. So they're hesitant to make a shift-
Greg Bottaro:
Yeah, definitely.
Matthew Kelly:
... and move to a therapist who might be able to help them more effectively or in a deeper way. What would you say to that person?
Greg Bottaro:
It's really subtle and it's sometimes not as obvious even as realizing this isn't really going anywhere. Sometimes it feels like this is the best that I can get because that person only knows that one box that they've checked. So they don't even realize that they're missing out on something better. So sometimes I offer an outside perspective of some more objective criteria. if you're with somebody it's not just about... Everybody thinks rapport is important, it is very important, you have to have rapport, but being challenged is also very important. So if you have a therapist that you never feel challenged by, that's going to be a problem. Your therapist is not just your best friend, it's not the person to just always validate everything you do, there should be deep validation of who you are as a person. But then also there should be this momentum moving forward, there's a growth, there's a trajectory. And if you can't see that there's actually a growth and a trajectory happening, then it's probably time to take a step back and reevaluate.
Matthew Kelly:
So this challenging piece that you talk about is a part of every relationship. Whenever we're trying to help other people become the best version of themselves, that there should be challenge, there should be encouragement, there should be both of these things. How do you know how much you can challenge a patient?
Greg Bottaro:
To be totally honest, I don't always know. To be really honest, I make mistakes on that line, and it can be really difficult. So it's a little bit of a give and take in terms of putting myself out there, and then if I make a mistake, also having the humility to acknowledge it and even to apologize if necessary. But at the same time, you develop an insight, a little intuition into having a grounding and some rapport, like there's enough of a connection here. And I also know, based on my own heart's disposition. Because I really love my patients and I can tell what's going on with the relationship based on what's going on inside of me. As I'm growing in understanding of this person and growing in love with this person, I know that we're on solid ground.
Greg Bottaro:
I've had the experience of being more challenged to develop that sense of love within myself for certain patients. So I can also figure out like, "Okay, what's my stuff getting in the way here?" And I'll take that to my own work. I have my own therapy, I have my own colleagues that I go to for support. And then I'll like work on who does this person remind me of? Or what is coming up? What are my fears? What are my insecurities? And then once I move those blocks, then I come back and I can redevelop and try to regain that traction with the patient. So as that's happening, I have that internal compass that lets me know, all right, we're ready to take that next step because I'm ready to take that next step. I'm not going to lose the connection that I've developed or need to develop.
Matthew Kelly:
So you've got your life going on here and then you've got all the lives of your patients that you're intimately involved in. You come home at night, wife, kids, dog, what has having six children taught you about fatherhood?
Greg Bottaro:
Well, I'm still work in progress, still learning a lot. But one thing I realized from training in my doctorate and learning how to be a professional psychologist is how to let go of the things that are not my responsibility to hold on to. I think, I hope that I'm learning little by little how to do that with my kids as well. I pour my heart and soul into my kids, into my marriage, into those relationships as the most important in my life. And yet at the same time, at the end of the day, I can't be responsible ultimately for the decisions that they make. So in some small way, there's a connection there. I think it's a lot harder lesson to learn with family life. But as I continue along, realizing that ultimately God is the one who's responsible for this mess. And whatever we do to make the mess worse, he's definitely more capable than we are of cleaning it up. So just like with my patients, with my family, with my marriage, with everything else, I have to just put it back in his hands at the end of the day.
Matthew Kelly:
So what advice would you have for someone who's about to become a father for the first time?
Greg Bottaro:
Fatherhood for the first time is get on your knees. I think the most important lesson I've learned, and I'm learning still, again, is to be a son first and to understand the fatherhood of God is what gives direction to everything about our life. And the more that I learn, the more that I grow in my prayer life and my spirituality and my work and my family, it all comes back down to being children. I just keep thinking this over and over again, we're just children, we're just kids. We don't have any idea what we're actually doing. It's such a load of baloney that we think we're in control of this so we understand this. At the end of the day, we don't really know what we're doing. And if we can climb up into the father's lap and give it all to him at the end and let him take care of it, whatever part he wants to share with us in leading and fathering and building or controlling, it's going to be blessed because it's only in context with what he actually gives us.
Matthew Kelly:
So juxtaposed to that, what mistake do you see parents making all the time?
Greg Bottaro:
I forget what I just said. And then pretend, I fall into the illusion that I'm in control. And it's like, if the kids aren't following these rules, if dinnertime isn't totally orderly and peaceful, if X, Y, Z doesn't go as planned, I act as if my plan's not happening. I am not in control so I need to try to use anger or frustration or impatience to wrestle back control. And that's when I lose it, that's when whatever I built up is dissipated. It's like that's when it's gone and that's what needs to be repented of and reclaimed.
Matthew Kelly:
When you get into that space, are you aware you're in that space, you catch yourself in that space?
Greg Bottaro:
I've grown in that a lot. A lot of the work that I do professionally, thank God, is very deeply personal. And so it's one of the benefits of what I get to do, walking this walk with so many people. I learn so much for myself, and so I do benefit from that. I think I've grown a lot in that self-awareness. So I can't say that it means that I don't do it anymore or don't have those voices or don't have those parts of me, but I have awareness of those parts in a way that I never did before. And that does give me some sense of being able to step back from it.
Matthew Kelly:
Do you think that parents are more aware today of how their parenting impacts their children forever than they were 20 years ago, 50 years ago?
Greg Bottaro:
I'd like to say yes, but unfortunately, I think the content has just shifted. I don't think awareness has grown. I think we look back on 50 years ago and say, "How did parents not realize that they were doing this to their kids?" But I see the same exact dynamics happening today. I think parents 50 years ago, I can only assume, were just as well intentioned as parents today are. But what we understand content wise changes, but the dynamics of that interior life, of inner awareness, of being there to be a gift for others, those are the eternal truths that we all have to grow in, probably since the beginning of time, probably till the end of time. So I don't think that's really changed.
Matthew Kelly:
Well, what's something that parents are doing today that others will look back 50 years from now and say, "I can't believe parents were doing that 50 years ago?"
Greg Bottaro:
Technology. I think parents have swung the pendulum too far. Whereas before, maybe 50 years ago, there's too much strict harshness. And now I hear parents tell me all the time, "I can never take away Johnny's cell phone, iPad, tablet, whatever." Like, "Of course, I couldn't do that. They'll never be able to communicate with their friends, they'll never this, they'll never that, they'll hate me forever." That's ridiculous. I think once we understand the brain neurology, once we understand the addictions, once we understand the way that technology is warping our understanding of ourselves, of God, of relationship, that's going to be something that 50 years from now, people will look back and say, "I can't believe those parents from the 2000s that they let their kids do all that." So I think we're going to have to answer for that.
Matthew Kelly:
So parents, friends of mine have a 13 year old. They asked me recently what I thought about them giving their 13 year old a cell phone. I asked them to talk about it, I asked them what their opinions were, what their daughter was saying to them, and what her friend was saying to her and what other parents had shared with them as parents. They were approaching it thoughtfully, but you could tell they were really struggling with it. What it ultimately came down to was that all her friends had one. And I asked them, "Okay, let's imagine for a moment none of her friends had one, would you be the first parent to give your child a cell phone in this social group?" And they didn't like that. I think it brought some clarity that was maybe...
Matthew Kelly:
It's like sometimes you go to someone for advice and you want them to tell you what you want them to tell you. And they don't tell you that, so then you go to the next person, and then the next person and then the next person until someone tells you what you want to hear and then you say, "You're a very wise person. I'm really glad I sought your advice because you've told me exactly what I wanted to hear to begin with." So I think parents are in this dilemma. It seems parents struggle to do things that are counter-cultural. How do we encourage parents to have the wisdom, the inner strength, whatever it is it takes to make counter-cultural choices for themselves, and then to teach their children to do the same?
Greg Bottaro:
This is the answer that the parents are probably not looking for, but in order to be counter-cultural, you have to have a culture, and parents are lazy. I give into this myself sometimes too. So this is not pointing fingers, but this is just naming a thing what it is. And if we don't take a step back and have an intentionality to the way we live our life, then we are swept away with whatever else somebody else is deciding should be the way we live our life. Of course, that's not one person, that's a whole movement. And that might be guided by technology, big corporations, media, whatever it is. The point is, we all have the strength, the capacity, and the calling to create our own culture. But it takes intentionality.
Greg Bottaro:
It means we just have to decide at one point to say, "I'm going to take a step back, I'm going to pray and write a family mission statement. I'm going to decide what we stand for. I'm going to give my children something different not because I'm trying to react to culture, but because I'm trying to be procreative and actually create something good. And if it happens to be against something in culture, sure, we'll stand up against what's in culture. Maybe it'll be for some of the things in culture. But we're going to have a justification for why we're doing it."
Greg Bottaro:
If you have that justification, it's not a fight anymore. It means you've grounded yourself in who you believe your mission to be, and then it's easy. But it's impossible to tell a parent to fight against culture when you're not giving them somet