There is a particular quality that distinguishes certain people who dedicate themselves to transforming lives. They do not perform compassion or brandish their credentials, but instead seem to understand something fundamental about human potential that allows them to work with remarkable steadiness. Dr. Lawrence T. Force has this quality, though he would likely resist the observation. After thirty-five years working at the intersection of aging, disability, and the human mind, he has developed what might be called a practical philosophy: a way of thinking about care that is both deeply felt and rigorously systematic.
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Force's entry into psychology came through the side door of undergraduate curiosity. A single course opened something in him, a recognition that felt less like discovery and more like coming home. "I immediately felt this was a field and arena that I wanted to become involved in," he says, with the simplicity of someone describing an inevitability. What began as a pull toward something meaningful has evolved into something he now describes as an art, suggesting he sees his work as something that continues to grow and deepen rather than something he has mastered.
His first professional position placed him in charge of a medical model adult day care program for people with Alzheimer's disease. It was the kind of role that might have overwhelmed someone less suited to it. The work required him to witness, daily, the slow erasure of personality and memory, the particular cruelty of a disease that takes the self before it takes the body. But Force appears to have understood early what many practitioners learn only through painful experience: that the work is not primarily about fixing or saving, but about being present to another person's reality, however diminished or transformed.
From there, he moved to a psychiatric center serving adults with developmental disabilities, a population often overlooked, their lives lived largely out of public view. They were not the glamorous years of a career. They were, as he puts it simply, "days of challenge." But they were formative in ways that transcended professional development. Working with people whose minds worked differently than his own, Force was learning what it means to be human in ways most people never consider.
These clinical experiences became the foundation for his later academic work. As a Professor of Psychology and Director of the Center on Aging and DIS-Ability Policy at Mount Saint Mary College, Force has spent decades weaving together what he calls "theoretical knowledge base with applied lived-experiences." The phrasing is telling. He does not say he applies theory to practice, the conventional approach, but rather that he weaves them together, suggesting a more reciprocal relationship. Theory informs practice, but practice also interrogates and refines theory, creating a feedback loop that keeps both alive and evolving.
His entrepreneurial ventures reveal the same instinct to build bridges. AgePlan, the national training and advocacy organization he founded, emerged from his recognition that aging and disability are not merely clinical categories but social and political realities requiring systemic intervention. The ProActive Caring Program, which he developed through statewide grant funding, brings mindfulness-based stress reduction to people with intellectual disabilities and their caregivers. It is the kind of initiative that seems obvious in retrospect but required someone to first imagine that mindfulness practices might be precisely what marginalized populations need most.
Force has also established two nonprofit organizations: NOAAR, focused on addiction and recovery in adulthood, and The Force Recovery Foundation, dedicated to spinal cord recovery. The range of these initiatives suggests someone for whom the question "What can be done?" is both urgent and full of possibility. He is not content to work within existing structures; he builds new ones when the old prove inadequate.
In his private practice, he employs what he describes as short-term therapeutic intervention based on dimensional solution-based treatment and clinical hypnotherapy. The approach reflects his practical focus: he is interested in what works, in tangible relief, in helping people move from stuck places to new possibilities. His published work, spanning topics from caregiving to Alzheimer's disease to end-of-life care, demonstrates a willingness to engage with the full scope of human vulnerability, from chronic illness to mortality itself.
Yet for all his accomplishments, Force's advice to younger professionals is strikingly gentle. "Go easy on yourself," he tells them. "Take a look around. Be patient." It is counsel born of hard-won wisdom, an acknowledgment that career paths are rarely linear and that the populations one ends up serving are often not the ones initially imagined. "There may be people and populations that you haven't met yet," he says, "only to find out later on your career path these are individuals with whom you will work." It is an invitation to remain open, to resist premature closure, to allow one's professional identity to be shaped by encounter rather than be predetermined.
When asked what being a healthcare professional means to him, Force offers an answer that initially sounds simple but reveals complexity upon reflection. A healthcare professional, he says, is "someone who is driven by heart and empathy coupled with a knowledge-base of current research." The pairing is crucial. Heart without knowledge is sentimentality; knowledge without heart is merely technique. But he goes further, insisting on the importance of understanding technology, a recognition that contemporary care increasingly depends on digital infrastructure.
Then he offers what might be his deepest belief, delivered in the form of advice he gives students: "There are two things you need to bring when working with individuals and families: your heart and an understanding of technology. If you can only bring one thing, you bring your heart." It is a hierarchy of values that clarifies everything. Technology matters, research matters, institutional structures matter, but ultimately the encounter between one vulnerable human and another willing to be present to that vulnerability is the irreplaceable core of the work.
Looking toward the future of healthcare, Force sees the integration of compassion, drive, and ethics with technology as the necessary path forward. He is neither uncritically enthusiastic about technology nor resistant to it, but someone attempting to think clearly about how artificial intelligence and other emerging tools might expand rather than diminish the scope of care. "The presence and use of AI will help us lead the charge," he says, "as we bring more options and resources to individuals and families." It is a vision of technology in service of human flourishing, rather than human adaptation to technological demands.
After thirty-five years, Force continues to describe the practice of psychology as an evolving art, his professional identity still being shaped by clinical experience, academic inquiry, and the unpredictable encounters that define a life spent in service to others. He remains, fundamentally, someone for whom the question of how to live well across the entire lifespan, "regardless of age or ability," is not merely professional but existential. His work suggests that the answer lies not in overcoming vulnerability but in learning to be present with it, in ourselves and others, with both heart and the best tools we can find.