Integrating Faith and Psychology for Holistic Mental Health Healing - Dr. Greg Bottaro

About the Guest:

Dr. Greg Bottaro is a Catholic psychologist and the founder of the Catholic Psych Institute. Based in the United States, Dr. Bottaro integrates Catholic philosophy and theology with contemporary psychology to address mental health issues. He is passionate about aligning spiritual and scientific approaches to enrich lives affected by psychological struggles. Dr. Bottaro has extensively explored themes of happiness, suffering, and identity through both his institute and his podcast, "Being Human."

Key Takeaways:

• Integrating faith, science, and reason can create a comprehensive approach to mental health, offering deeper insights into human nature and behavior.
• Modern psychological challenges, such as the effects of social media, highlight the need for an inclusive philosophical foundation in mental health care.
• Developing a strong spiritual and philosophical identity is crucial in overcoming personal and societal challenges.
• Psychology can benefit from incorporating a spiritual dimension, as practitioners recognize their role as instruments of healing.
• Social initiatives to counteract negative technological impacts, like banning kids' access to social media, can support a healthier developmental environment.

Notable Quotes:

1. "All truth is derived from the same source of truth, and there's a unity to all truth." – Dr. Greg Bottaro
2. "If we had a philosophical foundation, we won't have to experiment first to see if something doesn't work." – Dr. Greg Bottaro
3. "We are accountable to the maker." – Natalie Moujalli
4. "Psychology is like the X-ray in the MRI. We get to see what's happening." – Monsignor Shorah
5. "The body makes the invisible visible." – Dr. Greg Bottaro

Resources:

• Catholic Psych Institute: www.catholicpsych.com
• Being Human Podcast: Explore more episodes and insights from Dr. Greg Bottaro.
• "Anxious Generation" by Jonathan Haidt: A book exploring the impact of screens and social media on today's youth.

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Transcript

0:00:04 - (Debbie Draby): Welcome to Finding Sanctuary, our shared conversations into how we think and feel and how we find peace and comfort in daily life. We get together with experts to chat about all things mental health, getting insights and understanding on the struggles of life. My name is Debbie Draby and I'm a psychologist and a proud Maronite woman and a mother of three children. And I'm passionate about bringing people together to share their stories, to support each other through life and all this beauty and all its pain.

0:00:32 - (Debbie Draby): I look forward to hearing from you in this podcast series as we engage in conversations around our shared experiences as a community. We love to hear what you think of the podcast, so please subscribe, share like and comment wherever you get your podcasts.

0:00:53 - (Natalie Moujalli): Well, hi guys, and thank you and welcome back to another episode of Finding Sanctuary in the Hills. Finding Sanctuary is an initiative of the Hill Sanctuary House which aims to achieve overall well on us by taking a holistic mind, body, soul approach to healing. In the past episodes, we've been looking at how physical health can impact our mental health and how nutritional health can do the same, and even looking at how financial stress impacts our mental health.

0:01:20 - (Natalie Moujalli): Today we're going to be looking a little bit more into how spiritual health can impact our mental health. And I'm so excited to introduce our special guests, Dr. Greg Bataro, who is a Catholic psychologist all the way from the US who is the founder of Catholic Psych Institute. Welcome, Greg.

0:01:39 - (Greg Bottaro): Thanks so much. It's awesome to be here with you guys.

0:01:41 - (Natalie Moujalli): Thank you for joining us. We also have Monsignor Shorah here with us again today. Dr. Greg Bataro works to integrate Catholic philosophy and theology with relevant psychology. Greg, can you tell us a little bit more about yourself?

0:01:54 - (Greg Bottaro): Yeah, sure. I've built Catholic Psych to help integrate faith, reason in science and in our world Today, there is sort of a bias towards keeping these things separate. By doing so, it's sort of proposing a premise that they can be separate or should be separate. And that's, that's one particular perspective which certainly we want to honor everybody's worldview and perspective to things. But I think there's a place to maybe consider how various dimensions of our humanity might be really coherent and consistent.

0:02:34 - (Greg Bottaro): And if, if, you know, somebody is of faith and they think about the spiritual life and spiritual things, well, that really shouldn't be separate from what we know to be true through the sciences. And I think that there's this false dichotomy often promoted. You know, are you for science or are you for religion? And it creates this tension between the two, that doesn't really help people in either camp really deepen their understanding of who we are or what this whole world and what this life is all about.

0:03:06 - (Greg Bottaro): You know, in my life, that was really, really present in upbringing and, you know, being raised in the Catholic faith, it was always this separate, compartmentalized thing. My family went through the tragedy of divorce and when I was going off to college and I didn't have a worldview or a philosophical sort of sense of who I was or what this world is all about to catch me as I suffered that, you know, kind of splintering apart of what I was raised with. I was raised Italian American, you know, very family oriented.

0:03:41 - (Greg Bottaro): Family is everything. And then my family was split apart. So it was like, who am I? What am I here for? What's the point of all this? And the faith that I was raised with wasn't strong enough or integrated enough into who I was and how I lived my life to give me those answers. Then I went on this journey to kind of figure it out. And I discovered a rediscovery of the Catholic faith sort of on a deeper level.

0:04:07 - (Greg Bottaro): And I realized that within that particular worldview, it gave me answers to how I might find happiness even with suffering in the world, even with tragedy, even with ruptures within families, that we have to still figure out how to be friends and repair these ruptures. Then I realized, well, if I hadn't been raised with enough of that integration, I bet there's a lot of other people that don't really know how to make sense of.

0:04:35 - (Greg Bottaro): Of how that kind of worldview can be meaningful for living a good life. And so then I wanted to spend my life bringing these worlds together. And so that's kind of the short story of how I ended up where I am today.

0:04:48 - (Natalie Moujalli): Yeah, I mean, it's an amazing story. And even hearing you refer to the tragedy of divorce like that, really giving weight to that experience, I think is very important. I think as time goes on, it's becoming more and more normalized and people aren't really putting a lot of weight on how traumatic those experiences can be for people and how it can change our identity a little bit and we have to kind of do a little bit more self rediscovery on who we are now when that structure falls apart or changes.

0:05:21 - (Greg Bottaro): Yeah, and this is again, sort of why science that's not grounded on a philosophical foundation can be misleading. I grew up in the 80s. My parents were struggling in their marriage in the 80s, the 90s, and in America and during the 80s, there was sort of the pop fad. Psychology would say, you know, it's better to get divorced. It's better for the kids by staying together and fighting and having so much conflict, it's actually worse for the kids than just parting ways.

0:06:20 - (Greg Bottaro): You know, the world of science and research and social sciences and sociology is always sort of trying to catch up with what, you know, we try these things and then did they work? Did they not work? You know, now sociology is coming out with. We have this hugely popular book here called the Anxious Generation. Jonathan Haidt wrote this book and, you know, it's like really clear evidence how bad screen addictions are and how bad screens are for kids and why are kids so depressed, anxious, and all these things are happening.

0:06:53 - (Greg Bottaro): Well, if we had a philosophical foundation to build our thoughts about what is good for humans on. We don't have to just experiment with things to figure out what works or what fails. We can have sort of a thread that leads us in that right direction. And so that's. That's ultimately what I'm trying to do, is build out models that go beyond science, but to include science. And we want to bring all these things together.

0:07:21 - (Natalie Moujalli): Yeah. Monsignor, do you have any thoughts on that?

0:07:23 - (Monsignor Shora): Yeah, I've sort of almost saw a bit of a trinity between the three. The faith, the reason, and the science that, you know, they've got some unique areas, yet they're united. The best is when they're united. And our Catholic faith, especially has united them. Like through the history of the Catholic Church, universities grew, education grew for people, and so much so, you know, study and science was promoted in many ways.

0:07:49 - (Monsignor Shora): We say that as Catholics, faith and reason. So, yeah, it's important rather than to have that separation, that dichotomy, which does lead to just anything goes in any way, people will jump around. Sometimes in counseling, you go to different psychologists and get different advice. They're not. They're not maybe even taking notice to what's. And being even dismissive of maybe what is the worldview this person has. And especially if It's a faith worldview, sometimes even maybe in a way, rubbishing it or dismissing it and not really realizing how. How great a strength that can be for the person, for their healing and their recovery.

0:08:28 - (Monsignor Shora): I've often felt in my work as a priest that, you know, when you say a bit of psychology, often cop bit of flack. Oh, you use psychology as if it's a little bit of a. No, no. I think it was Dr. Popcak, Catholic psychologist, he said, like psychology that's been learned is. It's almost like from the heavenly Father. It's like, you know, where he's showing us through the world. The Creator is showing us through the world. We're discovering how he's created it.

0:08:55 - (Monsignor Shora): He's revealing through creation about ourselves. And then we have, you know, the teaching, the truth, Jesus expressing it. I find that very affirming how Dr. Gregg's actually named the three together and put it so strongly in that way.

0:09:09 - (Greg Bottaro): It's really important that we keep these things together because all truth is derived from the same source of truth, and there's a unity to all truth. So, you know, this is where the birth of science came from. I mean, if you do the history and you go back to Francis Bacon, Francis Bacon was a Franciscan friar and, you know, he, you know, sort of helped birth the scientific method. And it was a manner of which.

0:09:34 - (Greg Bottaro): In which we give glory to God in his creation in the created universe. And it's sort of this rational approach to how do we make sense of the created world that we see us. It was never meant to be a way to disprove the existence of God or a replacement for God. It was quite the opposite. It was actually a way to give glory to God. And so there was never meant to be this dichotomy or division between faith and science.

0:10:01 - (Greg Bottaro): And yeah, in the Church, we have faith and reason. You know, John Paul II wrote fides at ratio, this beautiful articulation of two wings of the dove. And science is like the feathers of the dove. That's how I like to think about it. You know, it's like what fleshes out, colors out, gives substance to helping us really get a sense of things. And it's like, okay, how do you know what a human is? Well, we could talk about it philosophically, you know, and really abstractly. What are the faculties of the person kind of thing.

0:10:28 - (Greg Bottaro): We also know what Christ revealed to us about our humanity, what we're made for, how we can fall, how we can be saved. These are theological revelations. And then we have psychological, scientific observations. What does a person do in practice, in real life, in relationship, when certain stressors are applied, when certain motivations are applied, this helps us get an even deeper sort of fuller understanding of being human.

0:10:57 - (Greg Bottaro): They're all helping us get towards the one thing of what is a human. But they're all, they're all necessary. And as much as we are one being, we need all three pathways to understand ourselves as beings. So faith and science and reason, they all fit together.

0:11:16 - (Natalie Moujalli): Yeah, I love that. And I've heard you in, in the past in your being human podcast where you've referred to the fundamental blueprint of human beings. Can you tell us a bit more about.

0:11:26 - (Greg Bottaro): Yes, exactly. So if you sort of accept this premise and we believe that we're created and we're not just like accidentally here as a result of genetic evolution or whatever, and there's maybe even if it's just intelligent design or somehow we believe in the prime mover, the uncaused cause, somehow there's a design for who we are. Okay, well, it's like, how do we help fix when these beings get broken?

0:11:57 - (Greg Bottaro): You know, analogy that I like to use is if you have a car and it breaks down, how do you get your car fixed? Well, you need to take it to a mechanic. And the mechanic who doesn't know how the car is built in the first place is not going to really be very effective in helping you fix it. And we kind of forget about this when it comes to mental health. It's like, well, is there a place for a philosophical foundation for thinking about who a person is and how a person is built?

0:12:26 - (Greg Bottaro): If we have this philosophical blueprint, then we can go to the mechanic that knows how the car is made so that when the car is not operating correctly, then there's some standard which the brokenness is applied to. To know. Okay, it's supposed to work like this, but it's not. So therefore this part is broken. Let's see what we can do to fix it. Well, in the world of psychology and materialistic science, that doesn't accept a philosophical foundation.

0:12:55 - (Greg Bottaro): It's really just a matter of testing different theories. The scientific method alone is really inadequate to fully understand how a thing objectively is. And that's why science itself will never claim to have the fullness of truth of something. It's like, no, we are. It's a scientific method which means testing hypotheses, coming up with our best guess for now, Until a new experiment disproves this and proves the next thing and it's this constant iteration.

0:13:29 - (Greg Bottaro): Well, okay, that's, that's fair. There's a place for that. But is there, is there a possibility to do better than that? Could we also have a fundamental blueprint that we know we were created out of? And then we have a starting point and a standard that we can then, you know, measure everything else against? For people that do have that worldview and sort of think about ourselves as created, that means there's a creator.

0:13:55 - (Greg Bottaro): That means that there's some intelligence to this design. And so maybe it's worth exploring what went into building us as persons and how can we articulate that blueprint, which.

0:14:07 - (Natalie Moujalli): Sounds amazing, but such an overwhelming concept. Right. Because if we broaden the theory to that, where do you start?

0:14:16 - (Greg Bottaro): Yeah, it's really good. And that's where there's this interplay and this relationship of collaboration between science and reason and even faith, where it's like, what are the questions we need to answer? Why are people so starving today for happiness? You know, why are people so distraught? Why are there increases in anxiety and depression in our kids and the school systems? Why are, you know, increase in suicidality?

0:14:42 - (Greg Bottaro): Why are there people, whole cultures being forgotten? How do we interact together as humans? Like, these are really important questions. And it's like from that experience and then it's, we want to propose ideas, hypotheses, but then it's that questioning that causes us to go deeper. So we're not trying to necessarily, in the abstract, just write out the whole blueprint from scratch.

0:15:18 - (Greg Bottaro): Within the Catholic faith, there is a long history, 2000 year history, of a building up of this philosophical tradition, which again, I'm not saying everybody should just take it all wholesale, but at least it's a starting point. You know, it's like, well, there's been a lot of smart people thinking about this for a long time. And some of those people dedicated literally their entire lives, and some of them were celibate monks and hermits and people who had literally nothing else to do but think and pray and reflect and write and sort of come up with these blueprints.

0:15:54 - (Greg Bottaro): So, okay, that's a place to start. We're not reinventing the wheel here from scratch. And so then, you know, we look to that, we test that thought, we think about those theories and then we look at newer ideas, more contemporary approaches. That's why I love St. John Paul too, because he was a Brilliant philosopher on top of everything else. And he recognized the beauty and goodness of the human person.

0:16:19 - (Greg Bottaro): And then he figured out how to talk about who we are in contemporary language. And so that was a really good place to start. And what did he focus on? He focused on suffering, politics, he focused on love, you know, man and woman. What is it to be a woman? What is it to be a man? He was asking that question before Matt Walsh made a documentary about it. You know, we have this documentary, what is a woman? That was huge here.

0:16:43 - (Greg Bottaro): John Paul too was asking that question from the 50s. So okay, great, like let's go back to that. Let's see what makes sense and how we can build on what has come before us. Open to adaptability to where we are today, but not completely divorcing from the tradition that has brought us to where.

0:17:02 - (Natalie Moujalli): We are building on it for. For the prime focus of healing for people in a deeper and more long term way.

0:17:11 - (Greg Bottaro): Yes, exactly.

0:17:12 - (Natalie Moujalli): Monsignor, what do you see play out when you're dealing with the community in terms of psychology and spirituality? Do you see a welcome ness of the concept or division and how do you see it impact people?

0:17:26 - (Monsignor Shora): Yeah, look, I've seen it where people who've fallen away from their faith or been hurt in some ways by people in their family that's turned them away from faith, people hurt by the church, certain people in the church, even clergy. Yeah, I've seen where through psychology and maybe using the best of psychology and using that first to bring them in and with reason, leading them back into discovering the strength of faith and that blueprint that gives identity and gives that security so that they're not relying on, yeah. Their work or how they look or their friendship circle.

0:18:06 - (Monsignor Shora): They discover something a bit more secure in themselves that leads them to healing, leads them to purpose knowing they discover purpose in their life and to have better relationships with those around them. Not just seeing themselves as, you know, the summation of their behavior or their pain or even their sexuality, but to see something even deeper and bigger, you know, and you might say, well, how can something be deeper and bigger than say, sexuality, you know?

0:18:33 - (Greg Bottaro): Yeah.

0:18:33 - (Monsignor Shora): When the people realize, hang on, there is something deeper and bigger that we're led to with the gift of our faith. Yeah, it's amazing when people start to tap in and they get a touch of it, they start to research and start to reread and it then enhances and strengthens the psychological tools. I often said psychology, it's like the X ray in the mri. You know, we get to See what's happening. And then we have to come, you know, well, who's going to do the surgery? Who's going to do the work?

0:19:07 - (Monsignor Shora): And that comes back to the one who's behind the blueprint, who's designed us and given us, you know, healing, given us the. Especially through. For us as Catholics, through the sacraments, to find that healing.

0:19:19 - (Natalie Moujalli): So doing the deep work. Yeah, healing, it's not attractive.

0:19:24 - (Greg Bottaro): Right.

0:19:24 - (Natalie Moujalli): It's really hard, and it's really overwhelming to think about having to do that deep work. I like the analogy of the mri, you know, trying to identify before. Greg, I've heard you say before that the body makes the invisible visible.

0:19:37 - (Greg Bottaro): Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, that comes from John Paul, too. That's in the theology of the body. But it's a really great articulation of a framework to think about everything that's happening. You know, we've lost a sense, even as Catholics, we've lost a sense of what it means to be an integrated body and spirit. And we think that our spirit is over here, our body's over here. Our spirit is maybe trapped inside this body until we die. And then we shed these body suits, you know, and then we rise up into the heavens and enjoy, you know, sitting on a cloud, playing our harps or whatever.

0:20:07 - (Greg Bottaro): And it's like, no, we're. We're so integrated as one being. And so everything about our personhood is expressed through our bodies. And also our psychology is that overlap between the two. But the thing that's even deeper here with psychology, why this is so important. We are the instrument. The healing practitioner is the mri. And we as humans enter into relationship with each other. And the deep work is not just for the client or the patient. The deep work has to be for the practitioner.

0:20:40 - (Greg Bottaro): And what I find, something that we add to secular psychology is a kind of reverence for the work that's necessary to be somebody doing this work. And I think that there's lots of places in the church and in the secular world where this is not necessarily reverenced enough. I mean, I have a doctorate in clinical psychology, So I did 12 years of schooling before I had, you know, a degree that gave me the right to get a supervisor to have another, like, 5,000 hours of supervised practice.

0:21:14 - (Greg Bottaro): Okay. And that got me to the place where I could, like, start my own practice. And most of the time in professional secular mental health, people don't really pay too much attention to, like, ongoing professional development. You have CEUs, you have to get. You do ongoing education or whatever. But My experience has been we need a lot more than that if we really take this seriously. So in our institute, we have three to four hours a week of ongoing professional development and personal development.

0:21:44 - (Greg Bottaro): We do supervision. I was literally in two hours of supervision today myself. And I run, you know, a 35 employee company with 20 individual service providers. And I myself was in supervision for two hours today. That's because we reverence the human person and relationship in a way that I think the secular sciences don't necessarily have that same sense of dignity. And so, yeah, you can check the boxes, you know, as a professional, of course, everybody has to do their ongoing development and professional, you know, criteria.

0:22:18 - (Greg Bottaro): But I think we bring a whole nother level to the equation that has to do with this eternal dimension of who we are, the spiritual dimension of who we are. And if we take that self work seriously, you know, because we are the instruments helping other people do the deep work, it's like, yeah, if we have wounds, if we have imperfections in ourselves that are getting in the way, we have personalities, you know, we have certain things that we may not be aware of that enters into this privileged, honored, sacred profession, and it can take away from the healing that we're able to open up for other people.

0:22:54 - (Natalie Moujalli): I love using the word sacred to describe this. And I think that what you're saying is really special because even to a certain degree, you're even more accountable when you're doing work like this.

0:23:06 - (Greg Bottaro): Amen. Yes. That's the whole thing. We are more accountable because you're looking.

0:23:12 - (Natalie Moujalli): At it spiritually and psychologically and from this fundamental blueprint.

0:23:16 - (Greg Bottaro): Yes.

0:23:16 - (Natalie Moujalli): That it's like there's so much to be aware of.

0:23:20 - (Greg Bottaro): It's funny because we've had to, in certain ways, we've stepped outside the box of. Even in America, we have our licensed practices and the kinds of things that we're doing now. We offer what we call mentorship, and it's outside the box of clinical psychology. And people are like, whoa, you don't have the same safety and safeguards. It's like, I've got the final last judgment to think about.

0:23:45 - (Natalie Moujalli): Absolutely.

0:23:46 - (Greg Bottaro): Yeah. I want to be as ethical as the next secular psychologist, but I've got to be even more accountable. Just checking those ethical boxes is not even close to enough. You know, the apa, you know, for instance, says when it comes to having a romantic relationship with a client for a practitioner, it says you have to have three years, have to go by when the person has not been under your care in order to have you know, a romantic relationship with that, it's like three years.

0:24:15 - (Greg Bottaro): That's a preposterous. That's never okay. I don't care how many years it is like, because we understand the spiritual weight of having this kind of power differential. That's like the professional lingo, but it goes beyond even like what's happening in this one interaction. And there's a spiritual weight to somebody leading you, guiding you, almost like a parent towards truth and goodness and beauty. You would never conflate that with the kind of intimacy you're going to feel like. There's a kind of intimacy you have to be on guard to, always protecting that from somebody misunderstanding and being confused about what that really means for them.

0:24:55 - (Greg Bottaro): There's not a romantic relationship. That's an entirely different category. John Paul II gave us a framework and a way to understand the blueprint of romance. That's not what we're doing. And it will never be okay to cross those paths. So we have a whole different level of criteria that goes far beyond anything else that the secular world has to offer.

0:25:16 - (Natalie Moujalli): We're accountable to the maker.

0:25:18 - (Greg Bottaro): Amen.

0:25:19 - (Natalie Moujalli): Amen.

0:25:19 - (Greg Bottaro): That's right.

0:25:21 - (Natalie Moujalli): Greg, earlier you've brought up a couple of times about things that have been going on with the adolescents and the teens and social media and screen time and the rest of it. Yesterday I read an article about Australia being one of the first in the world to possibly ban social media for children under 16 years. What are your thoughts on that?

0:25:42 - (Greg Bottaro): Oh, praise God, that's amazing. We're finally coming around to the devastating effects of social media of a screen based childhood of putting kids in front of these screens. I developed a program called Catholic Mindfulness. And I teach people how to practically put into a manualized practice what we believe spiritually as abandonment to divine providence. Now the sort of backstory to that is that 10 years ago I was giving talks, being asked to come to speak to parent groups, parishes, diocese on what do we do about these phones.

0:26:19 - (Greg Bottaro): You know, our kids are on these phones, we can't get them off these phones. And I was saying 10 years ago, take the phones away from your kids. Absolutely. And parents laughed me out of these groups. Like I was not invited back to say, you know, give that message to the same group twice. And you know, I felt okay, like this is so, you know, sort of countercultural. Like I can't just keep going on and saying, stop doing this.

0:26:44 - (Greg Bottaro): So I thought about Catholic mindfulness. It's like the pro counter to the anti phone because what you're doing with mindfulness is you're plugging back into the present moment, which is the thing that the phones take you out of. And this is really unhealthy psychologically and spiritually and emotionally. So, you know, I developed Catholic mindfulness to say, hey, let's just come back to the present moment. Let's, you know, go outside and play, you know, pick up a book, feel the feelings, sit on your chair, feel what your senses feel like.

0:27:12 - (Greg Bottaro): Do mindful eating. Just taste. Spend five minutes just focusing on taste. You know, everybody sits at the table now with the phone. You're not even tasting the food you're eating. Well, thank God for Jonathan, his book the Anxious Generation, because now there's secular sociological evidence, and he's saying we have to take these phones away from the kids. And certainly before 14, even before 16, the phones themselves are completely disorienting to normal childhood and adolescent psychological development.

0:27:49 - (Greg Bottaro): Social media is another layer. On top of that, there's the phone themselves and then there's social media, and then there's pornography and, you know, increasing, you know, evil. But all of it needs to go. You know, I'm not really a big government kind of person, my in my personal politics, but if there's anything that the government could be useful for, let's mandate that, take this stuff away, give parents the strength and support they need.

0:29:49 - (Natalie Moujalli): Monsignor, do you see this play out a little bit in the community? An issue with the phones and social media and how that's impacting people with their mental health?

0:29:57 - (Monsignor Shora): Yeah, parents who say their kids are staying up late at night in their bedroom. The old story, the mobile phones under their sheets, becoming obsessed. And fomo, that fear of missing out. I've always got to be on the phone to see what's going on. And that becomes the world. Real live relationships and people don't know how to communicate or know the importance of. To expand a little bit on Greg's mindfulness that just to be present with each other, like around a table for dinner, you know, that used to be the great thing of family, you know, spending time together around the meal table. Now you could ask a lot of families how many meals a week might they have together? And it's, you know, they're so busy, you know, the phone's sort of taken them outwards and not to be present to each other to that.

0:30:45 - (Monsignor Shora): I've seen a play out in those ways, you know, where causing separation in families, obsession for teens, you know, with their friends. And it's the tool to keep in connection with friends and then also getting caught up in trouble, being misled, people preying on them. And to also the pornography addictions at very young ages.

0:31:08 - (Natalie Moujalli): Yeah, because they've got these devices in their hands that gives them access to the whole world just in their hot little hands, without any boundaries, you know, there's no boundary to stopping this from happening.

0:31:22 - (Greg Bottaro): Yeah, that's absolutely the problem. You're giving your kids the entire, you know, world history, pornography library of, of the, you know, universe. Put it in your pocket and, you know, on top of everything else. And so, yeah, it's brilliant. It's amazing that to have these resources, you know, the libraries that we have access to, the research, human knowledge is amazing, but. But it is the Pandora's box. And parents need the support to take it away from their kids to set those limits to protect their kids.

0:31:53 - (Greg Bottaro): You know, I think we're coming around to that. So, again, praise God, if that's something that's happening in Australia, that's a wonderful thing, in my opinion.

0:32:02 - (Natalie Moujalli): Yeah. So I think it's still very early stages. You know, hopefully it's something the process develops along the lines of that of nicotine and smoking. You know, when that first started, people didn't know how bad that was for them. Children, young adults. Adults were smoking really early, and then as time went on and research developed, they could see how bad this was for them as they grew older. So that policy and procedure changed around access to nicotine and smoking, and hopefully it's the same type of concept.

0:32:32 - (Greg Bottaro): Yeah, that's a great analogy. That's exactly what's happening.

0:32:35 - (Natalie Moujalli): Well, Greg, thank you so much for joining us today. We don't want to take too much more of your time.

0:32:39 - (Greg Bottaro): I really appreciate it. This is great. I really love what you guys have going on out there in Australia. And as an American, having just a taste of Aussie culture and Aussie faith. Yeah, I've just. I've just been really inspired. So thanks for having me on.

0:32:53 - (Natalie Moujalli): Thank you, monsieur. Any parting thoughts?

0:32:55 - (Monsignor Shora): Yeah, no. Just to thank Greg very much for your work, and it's so valuable, especially for me as a priest. Yeah. To see, you know, lay professionals. Yeah. Really finding that connection with faith, and it's very incarnational. And, yeah. You're supporting us in our mission. So really, really to thank you very much for that.

0:33:17 - (Greg Bottaro): Thank you. Yeah, my pleasure. That's. That's my mission and my vocation. And, yeah, if I can. If I can give a little plug. If people are interested in finding out more of our resources, we have the Being Human podcast. We just launched our 200th episode. We have a million downloads. In everything else that we offer@catholicsych.com you can find out more about what we do.

0:33:35 - (Natalie Moujalli): Awesome. So those details will be in the show notes and we will put the link to the Being Human podcast, which is an unbelievable listen. Thank you, Greg.

0:33:45 - (Greg Bottaro): All right, thank you so much. God bless you guys.

0:33:55 - (Debbie Draby): I hope this episode has helped you find sanctuary in this exciting journey of life. All of the resources we've mentioned in this episode are found in the podcast notes. If you need some assistance with any of the topics discussed in today's episode, then please Visit our website, HSHL.org au if you have any thoughts, comments, or ideas, please leave us a comment on Spotify. Alternatively, send us an email@adminshl.org

0:34:24 - (Debbie Draby): au you& your mental health matters to us, and we hope you get one step closer in finding sanctuary. Bye for now.