Stephanie de Niese and Matthew MacDonald

Stephanie de Niese and Matthew MacDonald met during a talk at Melbourne’s Theology at the Pub, where their shared interest in integrating faith and mental health sparked an instant connection. Both are Catholic psychotherapists passionate about the transformative power of St John Paul II’s teachings on the Theology of the Body. Although they have different backgrounds and life experiences, their friendship and collaboration bring a unique blend of perspectives to their new ministry as part of the Truth Goodness Beauty Project.

Stephanie

I first met Matt last year at Theology at the Pub. I don’t often go, but it was about mental health in the Catholic world, and I thought, ‘Well, I’m a psychotherapist, so this intrigues me.’ As Matt started speaking about his work, I thought, ‘This is exactly how I practise.’

During the break, I said how nice it was to meet someone else who practises the way I do, integrating their faith. He’s finishing off his masters at the Cairnmillar Institute, and we worked out that he started the year after I had finished, so we’d just missed each other. From there, we just hit it off. We swapped business cards, like professionals do, then we met up and started exchanging our stories and experiences. It was a relief to know that I’m not the only one and don’t have to figure it out on my own.

I don’t have a theological background—I just love the faith and studying it and integrating it with my practice—so it was really nice to have someone to bounce ideas off.

I really admire the way Matt lives his faith. It’s not in your face; it’s just this really steady, sure, confident knowing of who he is and what he stands for.

Despite some obvious differences—he’s older and a man, and has a family, and I’m younger and single—we get along really well. I’m very excitable and energetic; Matt has a calm, steady presence. One thing we have in common is a genuine love for people and a desire to educate, not just listening and helping people with their problems but actually helping them grow. The way we both teach is also a bit more interactive. We want to get people’s feedback and have that dialogue.

Our relationship has shifted from new friends sharing common ground and common experiences to a deeper professional collaboration. I feel like he sees in me a potential that I had been too afraid to see initially or to step into. When he asked me if I would be open to presenting a workshop on Theology of the Body with him, I felt so honoured. It’s a different type of friendship. It’s rare to find someone who doesn’t just respect you professionally but genuinely wants to work alongside you, not for the sake of getting something out of you but because he believes we can accomplish something together that will really benefit people.

Working with him has taught me about trust. I’m sometimes hesitant to trust men in leadership roles, but he is a man who leads fairly and demonstrates to me who God is. I’ve learnt I’m not diminished by being led; I’m still treated equally and with respect.

Our goal is to show people very clearly there is a direct link between the psychological element and the spiritual element, and putting them together is going to be so much more transformative than just one or the other

I really admire the way Matt lives his faith. It’s not in your face; it’s just this really steady, sure, confident knowing of who he is and what he stands for. He’s a great example of being a professional in this field and having a strong Catholic faith and having a family, and how that all works together. I really admire the way he integrates it all and is so honest and human.

We’ve both learnt a lot through our own practice as psychotherapists, and we can see with a lot of the brokenness we work with and the wounds we heal on a psychological level, how correlated they are to our spiritual wounds. Our goal is to show people very clearly there is a direct link between the psychological element and the spiritual element, and putting them together is going to be so much more transformative than just one or the other, because we’re integrated, composite beings.

Our shared ministry, through the Truth Goodness Beauty Project, is to bring St John Paul II’s teachings on Theology of the Body to people and to guide everyone, but perhaps especially young adults, on how to engage in relationships and to know themselves and what God’s plan is for us. Our vision is to bring that to more and more people. We’re starting off with our one-day retreat at the end of November, and we’re already brainstorming where to go from there.

Matthew

I was giving a Theology at the Pub talk on mental health in the Christian life last year and Steph was there, sitting close to the front. She seemed incredibly interested in what I was talking about. Afterwards I realised she was so interested because she’s a psychotherapist and a lot of what I was talking about really resonated for her. So we realised we had the same professional interest.

I came from a background in theology to counselling and psychotherapy, whereas she started in counselling and psychotherapy and then developed an interest in the philosophical and theological part of it. Then, in conversation, we realised we’d studied at the same institute. She finished in 2020, so professionally she’s a few years ahead of me.

When I first met her, she just seemed very joyful. That was my first impression. She has a real positivity and effervescence about her, a vitality that I find quite endearing.

From a professional point of view, we are both interested in how you can integrate a Catholic understanding of the human person into clinical practice. You don’t get that in your clinical training. A lot of times, it’s pushed to one side or kept out. We’ve got a lot of clients who want it in, though, so we’re interested in the best way to do that. We have that interest in common.

It’s good to have a dad—an older, more experienced person—in the room, and it’s good to have her youthful vitality as well.

Our life experiences are the most obvious differences between us. I’ve been married for almost 25 years and have six children. Steph’s much younger and single. I have a masculine view of things. She has a feminine view of things. That’s part of what’s good about us working together: we have really different life experiences. I’m raising teenage and young adult children now, so I bring that perspective of a parent, whereas Steph’s still single and dating. There was no such thing as a dating app when I met my wife. It’s such a different world that young people are navigating. It’s not in my personal experience, so Steph can relate to young people now in a way that I can’t.

I’m sort of more like ‘Dad’. But it’s good to have a dad—an older, more experienced person—in the room, and it’s good to have her youthful vitality as well. The differences are precisely what drew the two of us together in this work—we offer different things. We have enough things that are the same and some really beneficial things that are different.

The project that we’re working on at the moment— the ‘Life and Love’ retreat—is the first thing we’ve actually worked on together.

After I did that Theology at the Pub talk, I started to plan a five-week course on St John Paul II’s book Love and Responsibility, and Steph came along to it. She was different from some of the others in that she had already read the book. She had a reasonably good grasp of the text, and she’d done some study through the Theology of the Body Institute in the US, so when it came to Q&A time, she had some really useful input.

When I was thinking of working on this current project, I thought I’d rather do it with somebody else. John Lennon and Paul McCartney were good musicians on their own, but they were extraordinary together. Things work better when you collaborate. Two people can read a passage of St John Paul II’s work and pull slightly different things out of it. It’s like reading the Bible: you’ll read it, and one thing will jump out to one person and something else will jump out to another person, so it’s good to have more than one perspective.

Steph and I are also different from most people in that we’re reading John Paul II through the lens of somebody who’s interested in counselling. We’re always thinking about the people we’re working with and how it applies to them, so we’ve got a concrete application for it.

Along with her energy and vitality, I admire Steph’s sheer practicality when it comes to technological things. She’s all over that in a way that I’m not.

John Paul II emphasised the thing we’re saying yes to; he does a really good job of highlighting the positive thing that we’re choosing.

The Love and Life workshop is something that I wanted to do, and I’ve invited her to come and be a part of it, but my sense is that it’s more equally collaborative. Because I did a master’s degree in theology, focusing on the thought of St John Paul II, I’ve probably got a more in-depth knowledge of it than Steph does. That said, Steph’s got more clinical experience than I’ve got.

So many people grow up in this culture thinking the Church says no to this and you can’t do that, and stop doing that as well. But John Paul II emphasised the thing we’re saying yes to; he does a really good job of highlighting the positive thing that we’re choosing. It helps young people make sense of why we do this. It gives a positive vision for why we would choose to be faithful to one person for life. That’s the message Steph and I want to convey in a really accessible, engaging way.