Why Admit I'm a Catholic Behavior Analyst?

Everyone Wants Integration

As with any profession, many of us experience a need to find our “camp” or “grouping” which helps us feel more at home and integrated within our field.  Often, this desire for a “home-base” takes the form of an association.  There are a number of associations among behavior analysts, including the Association for Behavior Analysis International (ABAI).  Notably, ABAI has many special interest groups.  At the time of this writing, there are none regarding integration of faith, spirituality, religion, or related topics.   However, the American Psychological Association has Division 36 (Psychology of Religion) which, interestingly enough, was begun by “a group of Catholic psychologists who felt marginalized by the profession on one side and their institutions on the other.”

Among the other behavior analytic associations, there are some that reflect how its members personally identify themselves, such as the Latino Association for Behavior Analysts (LABA) and Black Applied Behavior Analysts (BABA).  There is even a grassroots Association for Christians in Behavior Analysis.  

Why do clinicians of any discipline feel the need to create communities of people who identify similarly with themselves?  We all want what we do to be integrated with what we believe about ourselves and about the meaning of life as we understand it, and we want to do that in community.  As a Catholic behavior analyst, I desire the same integration, and at the end of this article, I plan to share how I hope to have this integration happen.  

A Little About Me

I’m a husband to my beautiful wife, a father of four beautiful children, a lifetime member of Youth Apostles, a behavior analyst, and most importantly, I’m a Catholic Christian.  I love Jesus and I believe and profess everything that the Catholic Church teaches in order to fall in deeper love with God.  That might be shocking for some people, including other Catholics.  

If you prefer a more shallow introduction, I love wood-working when I have free time (so almost never), guitar, reading, writing, leaving crossword puzzles half-finished, and listening to classical music, Gregorian chant, Lo-Fi, jazz, or some Swedish melodic death metal when I’m feeling nostalgic.  I currently practice in Virginia with a focus on early intervention for children with Autism.  I have been working with Autistic children, adolescents, and adults since 2011.

After board certification and licensure, I knew that I still had much to learn through experience – applying what I had learned in my Master’s classes to real cases – to real persons!  This focus on applying knowledge to actual cases was usually at the forefront of my mind as I was practicing.  In 2021, I was challenged at a more fundamental level by a Catholic psychologist, Dr. Greg Bottaro, founder of the Catholic Psych Institute.  Something he said greatly affected me while listening to one of the first recordings of his “Being Human” podcast.  He said,

“If you study human behavior, you are looking at an image of God.”

Having seen a fair number of challenging behaviors since I started working with significantly impacted individuals with Autism in 2011, I was scandalized a bit by what he said, but as he explained and I reflected more on the statement, I felt like a giant bridge had been erected between my mind and my heart.  As a Catholic behavior analyst, I truly believe that all of our behaviors are indicative of a deeper desire — even the behaviors that don’t seem to align with our personal values.  That doesn’t always make those behaviors somehow aligned to our values simultaneously, but it certainly helps us to have a greater self-awareness and self-acceptance – to love those parts of ourselves, which experience confusion, while becoming more of who we truly are in God’s eyes. 

Our deepest desires are revealed by behaviors which can bring us closer to our personal values (what we care about) and by behaviors which take us further away from our values.  As a Catholic, my belief is that those personal values can be grounded in ultimate values of love, truth, and responsible freedom.  These ultimate values are echoes of the deepest desires we have being made in the image and likeness of God.  Our deepest desires are to (1) affectively love God, others, and ourselves with our heart, (2) seek truth in reason with our intellect, and (3) to act in freedom from sin and for the good with our will.  

Dr. Bottaro’s words resonated so profoundly within my soul because I felt like I was given permission to integrate my faith into the clinical work that I do.  All of a sudden, my clients were not merely kids with problems to solve, but rather they were immortal, unrepeatable persons, who had agency — a free will.  I would say I was aware that they had a rich emotional life and that they had unique “rapport” with specific people, but now I could more clearly see their capacity for spiritual affections toward love and beauty and their capacity for relationships that were textured and complex, including the relationship they had to themselves.

Looking for a new philosophy

I never believed that I could control my clients, nor did I want to, yet I still found myself treating them like mathematical problems. 

If I just increase the reinforcer and reduce the response effort, all will go according to plan …

If I just teach the component skills, all will go according to plan …

If I just restructure the environment and increase my therapeutic rapport, all will go according to plan …

All too often, my clients have had a plan of their own.  Even within the mindset of influencing — not controlling —  I was subconsciously failing to give my clients more credit for making their own decisions for the better or worse regardless of how well I stacked the odds or tilted the scales.  

Even when acknowledging that my clients had values, the word values had become equated to rules, as in rule-governed behavior, rather than reverencing values as an extension of their ineffable personhood.  Our clients have the capacity to value-respond to what is objectively valuable, no matter how difficult it may be for them to actualize that capacity – a difficulty that we can often share personally.  Without appreciating this distinctly human (non-animal) capacity, I found myself then reducing their values to complex verbal behavior — and if it was verbal behavior, then I could treat it.  

Yet … I could see that behavior analysts and behavior technicians were doing amazing work and in some ways achieving similar or superior outcomes to what a person of faith could accomplish without a science of human behavior.  Clients experienced some healing in overcoming phobias and sensitivities.  Clients learned to trust adults and even peers when they had not before.  Clients learned to self-advocate, self-manage, and self-regulate.  They became more independent and interdependent.  Still, I felt that my radical behavioral perspective was so limited and reductionist.  I was missing important factors regarding my clients.  My functional behavior assessments always had an unwritten “X factor” for which I could not account but also could not disregard.  I liken my experience to having a plant (behavior analysis) that has survived and grown in a pot (a philosophy of radical behaviorism) but needing to be re-planted into a large garden bed (a philosophy of non-reductionist, integrated, and personal behaviorism) where it can flourish and grow even more.

The founder of behavior analysis, B.F. Skinner had subconsciously become not only my scientist but my philosopher.  Credit where credit is due – many people have been helped in thanks to Skinner, but I believe so many more could have been helped and so many could have experienced less suffering if we had adopted a more personalist philosophy.

What Dr. Bottaro said regarding human behavior put me on a journey over the following year during which I explored more of what my faith had to say about the person, not just theologically, but also philosophically, psychologically, and behaviorally.  I read through a description of Truth, Freedom, & Care (TFC) Theory from the founder of Youth Apostles, Divine Mercy University’s Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person (CCMMP), Dietrich Von Hildebrand’s The Heart, Fr. Benedict Groeschel’s Spiritual Passages: The Psychology of Spiritual Development, Peter Kreeft’s Wisdom of the Heart, and more Catholic literature as I insatiably sought after a firm ground upon which to stand.  

Anyone with substantial experience will tell you that behavior is only one dimension of the person.  We have multiple capacities and our behavioral capacity (e.g., to do more of that which is reinforced and less of that which is punished) is only a sliver of our complexity.  Not even the recent expansion of relational frame theory (RFT) and all of its insights can fully account for all phenomena regarding the person.  We are beautiful and we are messy.  We are created in an ordered way and we are mysterious at the same time.  We are irreducible to our behaviors, yet our behaviors are an “image of God.”  

Why not The Christian Behavior Analyst?

A word of gratitude: I have felt so supported by fellow Christian behavior analysts over the course of my time in the field.  I have experienced grace from God due in part to their prayers for me and their witness.  I love you dearly.

I do hope that there is someone who will take up the mantle of The Christian Behavior Analyst, but I did not feel like I could claim that title … not because I am a Catholic Christian, but because I find myself ill-equipped to speak on Protestant theology.  Also, if I were to write as a representative for all Christians, I would be facing the sad reality of how Christians are not united.  I don’t want our disunity to be the focus.  I want our unity in Christ to be the focus.  My intention is not to hotly debate with brothers and sisters in the Lord.  My intention is to passionately proclaim our common love for Jesus Christ Who teaches us to be the best behavior analyst, teacher, counselor, pastor, youth minister, nurse, doctor, etc. that we can be.  He is the Divine Physician and we are his “interns” in this life.  If this ends up being a communal meeting ground for not only Catholics but also other Christians and other faiths, then that is all the better!

Although I plan to focus more on basic Christian principles, I need the freedom to be authentically Catholic — to draw from the examples and advice of 2,000 years of the Catholic Church and to draw from my own personal experience.  Blessed Mary, St. Joseph, and all the Saints testify to the beautiful diversity of living in and for Christ.  Many Saints shed light on the nature and capacities of the person, including St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Bonaventure, St. Ignatius of Loyola, St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein), and St. John Paul II (Karol Wojtyla).  Catholic morality provides a framework for growing in virtues which perfect our nature.  The Sacraments give us grace (the life and love of God) to know, love, and serve God and others.  How could I separate my Catholic perspective of the human person while treating one of His precious little ones?

I hope to meet other Catholic behavior analysts in putting myself out there, including those who struggle to accept all that the Church teaches.  I know that they can bring something of their Catholic background and identity to their clinical work for the sake of helping their clients, as do so many other Christian behavior analysts I know.  I need Catholic behavior analysts and others in the field with whom I can dialogue in a unique way and I hope to be the same source of support for them.

I would wager that there are non-Catholics who want to know more about how to work with the Catholics in their lives whether they are co-workers, clients, or others – maybe even in their personal lives – but are unsure of how to navigate these relationships or what questions to ask.  If any of this sounds like you, please know that if you private message me, I can maintain confidentiality.  Religious beliefs are hard enough to talk about in a public forum.

So What is This?

Time will tell what “this” will turn into.  There are so many different directions in which I hope this goes, but below are some of the major topics I would like to discuss:

• Questions from readers and dialogue with one another

• Personal experiences from Catholic behavior analysts and other Christian behavior analysts

• Free will’s place in the equation of behavior

• Adopting personal behaviorism in place of radical behaviorism

• The role of emotions

• The centrality of relationships

• Prayers for clients 

• Catholic philosophy of being, personhood, and human dignity (SPOILER ALERT: we are commanded by Jesus to love God and to love each other as we love ourselves – Mt 22:38-39)

• Cultural competence working with Catholics whether they are co-workers or clients

• Applications of Acceptance and Commitment Training (ACTr) as Catholics and/or with Catholic clients

• Gospel meditations with a behavior-analytic lens

• Behavior analysis with a Gospel lens

• Psycho-spiritual development and why it should matter to a behavior analyst, especially those doing early intervention and working with children and adolescents

• How to be a behavior analyst integrated with one’s own faith

• How to be a better human more mindful of one’s own behavioral capacity

• How to integrate the Catholic faith and the best of behavior analysis in other fields such as education, counseling, spiritual direction, and youth ministry

Which of these sounds most interesting to you?  What is not on the list that you want to know more about?  Please reach out to me.  Regardless of your religious background, I would be honored to know you and dialogue with you.

May God bless you for reading (or even skimming) this far.

Sincerely,

The Catholic Behavior Analyst

If you liked this article, please consider sending $1 or more to my wife, Rachel.  Any donations go directly to her because she is the one who makes sacrifices for me to write.  You can Venmo her at @Rachel-Clem-2

Bio & Disclaimer: 

Joseph (Joey) Clem is a Catholic licensed behavior analyst in Virginia. He is a husband, father, and lifetime full member in Youth Apostles.  He works primarily with children diagnosed with Autism and volunteers in youth ministry.  This article does not constitute professional advice or services.  All opinions and commentary of the author are his own and are not endorsed by any governing bodies, licensing or certifying boards, companies, or any third-party.