Paul Betito is a Registered Social Worker and Psychotherapist with a virtual and in-person private practice in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He has expertise in complex systems theory, psychoanalytic theories, cognitive therapies and the study of consciousness.
Paul Betito, Registered Social Worker and Psychotherapist
What is the most challenging part of your job?
The most challenging part of my job as a Registered Social Worker and psychotherapist is the ensuing fine-grain cognitive associationism. Knowing how to attribute people’s thoughts, behaviours, bodies and gestures, emotions, situations, experiences, disclosures, descriptions, statements and utterances in real-time to empirical and trustworthy concepts like the Freudian id, ego and superego and the Lacanian symbolic, real and imaginary, doing so while monitoring client or patient progress toward their goals (and the responsive progression of their symptomatic profiles), while at the same time ensuring dynamic continuity, receptivity, flexibility and the various aspects of the client or patient self-determination, is no trivial or laughing matter at all.
However, I would say that it is also tough to create acceptance for external loci or sources of reasoning such as cultural narratives that are base, destructive, derogatory and impoverished or lax, since these tend to permeate work with clients or patients whether we want them to or not. Having to accommodate recalcitrant ineptitude—as if in its stubbornness it were some apt worldly procuration or purveyance justly surmising me and the client or patient I am working with, somehow in necessary contrast with the work itself—as that dubious, inordinate, immoderate, largely anarchistic force behind human inequity and iniquity, negation, diminishment and subterfuge against our superior or knowledgeable volition and better judgments, is a very tall order indeed. I call it the interface of error, and coordinating our thoughts against it is the most arduous cerebellar (meaning balance-based) work we undertake as people every day.
What are the tenets and principles that guide you in your work as a social worker and psychotherapist?
Other than from the ethical, legal and professional registration coda underpinning my work and ensuring its integral subsistence and public value and consistency I have conceived a rather formidable array of personal, professional and executive guidelines for creating effective experiential resonance and to autonomously constrain feedback I obtain in my work.
This is, in fact, in itself a tenet: it is highly preferable to be diligent, introspective and conditional at the same time, that is, to employ a non-divisive cognitive policy for creating internal regulation or regulatory drive apart or separate from but informed by affect or emotion, purely fine motor or reflexive policies (e.g., eye movements, digit manipulation, etc.) and somatic demands, and you ought to do this as best you can in an ego-consonant way, that is, in a way entirely—not just resignedly, supposedly or plausibly—consistent with the incontrovertible factors of reality but also, more importantly, with your unique sense of being.
For instance, one of my rules knowing my ego is healthy or non-pathological is to prioritize it, to allow it to flourish where it recognizes possibility, to give it primacy within the course of particularly unilateral or self-centered affairs such that my learning is always effectual, deployable and as accurate as it can be to human judgment both when I am in the presence of others and when I am not. This also ensures that people including clients and patients i) understand that they know me—that they can include me—within their own reasoning and bounds of reason, ii) are able to assimilate what I do in logical ways, and iii) don’t feel unduly challenged in their mental faculties to constantly rationalize, repair, rectify and integrate who I am into new and existing cognitive schemas, reducing undue biased or fallacious cognitive load, creating greater distributive potential and, in my own, additional relational way, making healthier people.
Altogether, these rules are for the most part implicit rather than symbolic—felt, intuited and applied rather than written or spoken—and constitute a kind of reified Freudian superego for my personal-professional praxis.
Secondly, I strictly abide a bottom-up, governance-based management approach for my self-relevant and continuing education. I do not consider it particularly appropriate to follow purely contemporaneous matter, such as the most modern modality of psychotherapy, without understanding and gradually appreciating its irreducible roots, fixity and leverage found in supposedly outdated constructs, formulae and progenitors, a style I have found to have pan-disciplinary benefits.
Yet, in psychotherapy in particular, intuitive acumen or autonomous skillful implementation, which is entirely possible without historical-educative procedure per se, does often conceal knowledge or epistemology that, while encoded and formalized in past, present or future theory, has at its core the same fundamental impetus which my own approach mobilizes for its purposes, showing that it is not always the symbolic that counts the most, but rather a mix of actuality, experiential transfiguration and individual attributes.
For example, I do not think I could be as capable a cognitive and behavioural therapist if I did not squarely reconcile the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Alfred Adler and others; the libido, for one, is part of everything we do—as tend to be self-organization, sexual structures and superiority and inferiority complexes respectively—if not also in fact our most primitive and irrepressible causal nexus.
Thirdly, as far as I am concerned every person is necessarily or intractably instilled–or, in negative cases, immured—genetically, biologically and physiologically, making these categorical dimensions impossible to ignore if implicated professional capacities like reasoning, formulation and determination are to be astute, cogent and sound. However, genetic science, with its unfortunate relegation to specialist and typological medical archaism, its alternately overzealous or disinterested cohorts of myopic racist proselytes, and its facile and deplorable cultural remonstrations over the years, has obtained avoidance from its true functionalist roots and been, in certain ways, anathematized.
Hence, this brings about another crucial tenet of mine—creative development. I always strive to generate, create or fashion but also make possible fecund or multifarious premises, swarthy or significant landscapes of communication, when I work with others from which people might better repair ontological distances, create imperative self-knowledge and feel secure in their own potentials, without distracting from principal needs—in fact, by honing onto these deliberately, intentionally and naturally in the process of signification—and without diminishing the latent discharge potential of creative development more generally.
Lastly, I do my utmost to reckon a constant or perpetual process of intentional dipolar stabilization in my life, mainly between latent dimensions of my personality; especially, I try to be both highly open and easygoing, knowing that this affords possibility and reciprocity for others as well, while also being appropriately and proportionably methodical and disciplined. Openness to experience, such as regarding whether people share and understand our life values and philosophies, means also being able to eclipse or dispose of these under the right pretenses and circumstances.
Ultimately, juxtapositions like these make the most of our faculties of language production and comprehension, and I would not be who I am without formidable—and actual—language skills.
What tips do you have for psychotherapists, social workers, coaches and other entrepreneurial professionals in the people-centered disciplines?
Firstly, it is critical to pull or draw together the various influences in your life such that they can be conveyed or rendered linearly into the absolute coherence of your respective professional approach.
This informal principle is a very self-collected, cybernetic one, yet like all such informal but mechanistic principles its proper application can contribute immense value to areas or arenas of intention; contrariwise, it can prove erosive and de-substantializing if it is, in its various means, neglected or flouted.
Such influences are often conflicts, stress vectors, and abruptions or disruptions, since all of these are for the most part readily available to awareness and consciousness (for largely evolutionary reasons), but they are also your kinship status, your familial heritage, your romantic and intimate natures, your narrative memory, your mental faculties, your sources of pride and self-esteem. Uncombed, unkempt, or neglected ends at these largely linearly constrained boundaries of consciousness risk immersing potential opportunities in the wrong forms of libidinal, structural or institutional, or persuasive—and potentially inequitable—energies, since in their preponderant advection they aggregate, compel, incur and conflate at the upper bounds of your orientation to the future.
Secondly, I cannot stress enough the value of foundational studies and theories such as psychoanalysis. Such studies and theories can also be history, literature, anthropology and medieval medicine. Specifically, they make it possible for the brain to recruit greater or more pronounced neurological structures involving imprinting and patterning in which context is validated or sensible in profusion, meaning sensical in virtue of levels, layering and self-semblance or selfsameness. With more neurostructural recruitment comes better development of psychic complexes, and with these it becomes possible to be more helpfully gratuitous in practice knowing excess, particularly excess or excessive thought, tends to be alleviated by structural attrition.
For example, in my thinking during sessions with clients and patients, I am not eloping beyond the horizons of a self-possessed order of things, meaning on the one hand that I am guided and reckoned by my own ego but, on the other hand, that these studies and theories go so far in their ecumenical and abstract concentricity as to keep me grounded and centered on the person and not, for example, daydreaming or becoming frustrated, idly considering or cursorily treating information, or potentially being lazy about associationism that may be potentially helpful to the client or patient.
Thirdly, I strongly recommend that professional practices in fact meet practitioner interests in as many ways as possible. I make this recommendation because the cumulative mental or cognitive estimation of one’s practice elements, such as interior design, notetaking habits and availabilities, result in the instatement of greater affordances in vacuo, meaning ways of thinking that are just sufficiently displaced to become future creative developments for clients, patients and the practitioner(s) involved without being an overtaxation on mental resources in vivo.
What is a surprising discovery you have made in the course of your work?
I have found that people are surprisingly gifted at manipulating the phenomenology of their symptoms — example, how anxiety in addition to being based in fear and arousal is also both a visuomotor experience and a four-dimensional forcibility of ends—for purposive, salubrious, self-meaningful and unaffected or invulnerable ends, if only practitioners could be more deft, crafty, receptive and bold in their work and were better able to meet clients and patients at respective levels.
How important is education level for finding the right helping professional?
The short answer is, Not very!
Higher education, for the helping professions, is a discounted cost meaning that the cost of obtaining a Ph.D. or going from a Master’s Degree to a Ph.D. is proportional and compensated for in its own ways, sometimes negatively, due to i) years of study and institutional affiliation, ii) greater community specification as opposed to generalization (that is, of one’s belongingness becoming more dependent and less flexible over time), iii) the loss of experience or specific opportunities for gaining expertise, and iv) the intangible accumulations, repercussions and exceptional wear and tear due to intentional workload overexertion from high-quality, multipronged pursuit inherent to a higher degree.
Furthermore, certain trade-offs that come with very advanced education such as expectable loss of accessibility and higher session fees can be liable, loaded and even shocking, that is, they can be so much without safety and gravitas, without the putative leeway of gilded instruction and venerable genealogy, that over time they can cause serious dents in professional outcomes, which beyond a certain educational point due to ecological limits must become personal, such as risking clinician jadedness, hollowness, insincerity and even—very rarely, however—forms of reactive fear such as dismissiveness, selfishness and burnout. Moreover, the translation of skill from one echelon to another is more dependent on factors like the ego, resilience and metaphysical capabilities such as judgment and intuition, which interpret, assess, evaluate and attribute items of learning respectively. Lastly, it ought also to be understood that higher cost points for psychotherapy services, which are indiscriminately tied in with higher educational representation, are in direct contrast with the general propensity and founding ideology Sigmund Freud and others had in mind—and in practice. The founding fathers may have been, in their ways, outrageous beneficiaries and genealogically self-involved, but their practices in working diligently with the poor were far superior in most ways to our current assumptions.
Finally, it is helpful to recall that culturally we like to entrust vaunted and irreparable wisdom to elders, yogis, shamans, religious figures, leading figures and so on, meaning we know at a near-primordial level how to project and localize mental or cognitive complexes for the answers we are looking for onto people whose giftedness we take to be innate. That is to say, you can easily trust your instincts when you are selecting a person to work with.
Are you moved by your work?
I have been immensely moved by so very many interactions with people; even professional interaction, in fact, has distinct parameters for creating endurance for emotional expression, performativity and internalization, such as the utter privacy of the therapy context, which helps clarity, or the de-escalation function of crisis intervention, which doesn’t necessarily put safety before emotion. I would be remiss—if not at an absolute loss—if I did not cherish the meaning I have created with clients and patients, perhaps even above anything else in my work except for healing.
I have received a great deal of unsolicited, effusive or highly candid positive feedback over the years of inestimable value to ontology—to being—that has not only moved me beyond measure, but has also made my work persistent, indefatigable and sharp or intelligent and given me an earned and intelligible advantage in helping people feel understood.
Who and what are your inspirations?
The best personal development, the very best cultivation of invested spirit, stems directly from higher-order representation—fanciful, imaginary or otherwise.
I am inspired by Shakespeare, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Deleuze and Guattari, Immanuel Kant, Hegel, Merleau-Ponty, Husserl, Wittgenstein, Henri Bergson, Yaneer Bar-Yam, a complex systems scientist, and Marc Jeannerod, a French cognitive neuroscientist who with the former is perhaps the least known figure in this list. I am also inspired by the late David Foster Wallace, whose loss was highly troubling and problematic and whose voice rang true.
In addition to crediting my family, I credit having read the full works of Shakespeare with having prepared my self-subsisting symbolic reservoir of experiential countenance for psychotherapy work. Shakespeare sparked my rote consolidated memory into appertaining the realization that, by decoding and decocting his works, I could promulgate, exponentiate—and thereby train—my working memory in a very, very human but inimitable way.
Further, as a person who is involved in complex systems analysis I am inspired by the world, particularly by nature, in that dynamic interactionism being the contextual preface to analogical action is, hence, the true way to analytical mastery, not to mention a fervid and rapacious means of discovering cathection—a psychoanalytic term meaning investment of libido—together with élan vital, vital life force, in the world, in other words a way to ensure that nature never loses its yoke on me.
What are your top three best and worst book experiences?
My worst book experiences were Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs by Chuck Klosterman, Les Misérables by Victor Hugo and War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy.
My best book experiences are Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, Ulysses by James Joyce and Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller.
Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Youtube, or visit my website for more info!
