37 Sermon Illustrations on Psychology

I want to share with you a perspective that I have come to understand that I think is very, very important. There is afoot today, basically fostered by the psychological movement within the Church, an effort to cause people to believe that the path to sanctification is backwards and not forward; that the process to spirituality and Christian growth and Christian development isn’t putting on the Lord Jesus Christ now, putting off sin, and living in the light of the future return of Christ: but the real key to sanctification is going backwards.

I was involved in a pastor’s conference — I’ve been involved in, I think, three or four of them in the last three or four weeks. In one of them, some pastors posed the issue to me that sanctification couldn’t begin unless people could get under the care of some counselor who could dig up the traumatic hidden things of the past; and only when a person was freed from these matters in the past could they get on with the present and the future.

My response to that was, “What verse does it say that in? Show me where. I will be more than happy to ascribe to that if you can show me in the Scripture.” And of course there is nothing in the Scripture, other than the statement by Paul, that says, “forgetting those things that are behind, I press forward.” There is nothing on the pages of Scripture anywhere that tells anyone that their spiritual future is dependent upon their past. It is dependent upon their present action with a view to the future, not their present action with a view to the past. Psychology may deal with the “old man” but it can’t deal with the “new man.” There is nothing to be benefited by going backwards and trying to uncover something in the past as somehow the key to unlocking the future. The key to unlocking the future for you is to act in the present, to put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and to make no provision for the flesh.

I hear people say, “But I come from a dysfunctional family.” Join the human race! I come from a dysfunctional family, I conduct a dysfunctional family, I am a dysfunctional human being, and so are you. I cannot function the way God made me to function. I cannot do what I am supposed to do. I do what I don’t want to do, and I don’t do what I want to do – I am dysfunctional! I was raised with dysfunctional people. I still live with dysfunctional people, and they live with a dysfunctional person. That’s the way it is if you are fallen.

You say, “But you don’t understand, I have hidden repressed trauma.” Let me talk about that for a moment. This is a major wave in Evangelical Christianity, to tell people that the present and the future is dependent upon uncovering repressed trauma from the past. This has come to me like a flood. Yesterday morning I was in Denver, Colorado, at a pastor’s conference, and I was having breakfast with a graduate of the Master’s Seminary. He said to me, “John, I have to ask you a question. I have been acquainted with a girl and she needs some help and I’m wondering how I can help her. She has just been going through counseling, and she just found out that her father molested her when she was a child. She doesn’t remember it, but it all came out in counseling.” This was yesterday.

Before I left for Denver, Pastor Arnold Ruby came into my office to say that we just got a phone call from someone in our church who is very concerned and wants to come in and talk to a pastor immediately, his wife’s been in counseling and she’s just found out she was molested by her father when she was a child. She doesn’t remember it but he needs to come in and learn how to deal with it Biblically.

That was a few days after I was, last Sunday, dedicating a church in Long Beach, in the afternoon, after I preached here. After that, a man came up to me, whom I have known for many years. I have known his family. I have known them to be godly people. He’s a man of about 70 years of age. His wife is a godly woman, highly esteemed and respected for years in the Christian community. [They are] wonderful, precious people, and he told me with a broken and shattered heart, his wife now in glory for 12 years, he said to me, “My daughter has just come and accused me of committing incest with her when she was young and they have destroyed our family.” I said, “Whatever brought that up? Why did they do that?” And he said, “She went to counseling and it all supposedly came out in counseling. It has destroyed our family. It is nothing but lies.” So that’s about three times in one week.

To add to that I picked up a newspaper which fascinates me no end. It was an article out of the Dallas newspaper in their “D Magazine”, which is sent out to a million people and they do some “cutting edge” journalism. And I only want you to focus on this to see the epidemic level of this kind of thinking. It’s a story of a girl who, in her early twenties, in the area of Dallas, tried to bring an indictment against her parents. She wanted to indict her parents. She said that her parents had abused her and she wanted something brought against them by the courts. Her father is a Baptist pastor, has been faithfully serving the Lord with his wife and she and her brother: two children. And they were raised in a very normal happy, positive, joyful family, and he served the Lord in pastoring Baptist churches for many, many years.

Now she had come into court and she was accusing him of some quite shocking things. Accusing the mother of abuse; accusing the brother of incest and molestation, accusing the father of molestation from the age of ten on. Said that her father got her pregnant at the age of fourteen. She bore a baby which the father offered on an altar to Satan. They had a Satanic altar in the home and they worshiped Satan. And she went on beyond that, to talk about cannibalism and other kinds of things that were going on supposedly in the home in the life of this Baptist pastor and this family which had so traumatized her life. The parents were absolutely devastated, absolutely shattered. Of course, he was thrust out of the ministry. Chaos reigned supreme in their lives from every possible direction.

According to “D Magazine” they brought the case into court, into a hearing. And in the process of trying to develop this thing and find out whether some charges should be brought against the family, they put the girl through all kinds of tests, all kinds of witnesses were brought. The upshot of it was, the court decided that at the end, that not one single word she said had any relationship to reality. Nothing she said was true. Medical tests on her indicated that she had never had a relationship with a man. Furthermore, people knew the family, lived in the home, intersected in that home because he was a small church pastor, and there was no such thing as a Satanic altar in the memory of anybody who had ever known them in all the years of their ministry. All the accusations turned out to be untrue.

Well, obviously, when this hit the public, down in Texas, it became a curiosity as to where in the world this girl got all this information if it really didn’t happen. Where did it all come from? Those are some pretty frightening things and it became apparent in the process that she seemed to believe they were really true. She wouldn’t speak to her parents. They are totally alienated to this very day. She is still dependent on a particular counselor. She will not look at her parents, cannot see her parents. That relationship has permanently been destroyed.

The people at “D Magazine” decided to look a little more deeply into this, and this is what they uncovered, according to the newspaper (I read the article and I may have a few of the details wrong from memory, but its going to be pretty close). This girl had a little bit of a weight problem, which is not uncommon in our day, in our society, and was feeling a little bit like she wouldn’t be able to find the right young man for marriage if she didn’t deal with it, and so someone suggested (apparently) that if she was feeling badly about this problem [she should] go to the Christian Counseling Clinic in Dallas and get some help. She went there and was assigned to a particular counselor. And this particular counselor began to counsel her and within about a few months, maybe six months, all of this came out, in this process of counseling. She didn’t remember any of it, but he brought it all out and the theory is (and this is Freudian Theory) that somehow if you have severe trauma in your past, you push it below the level of memory, and it becomes repressed. You don’t remember it consciously, you don’t think about it consciously, but somehow it’s down there in your “id” (as Freud liked to call it) and it’s messing up your whole life, even though you don’t consciously remember it. And if you are going to get on with life, it has to be regurgitated and you have to deal with it and so forth. And of course this is a wonderful ploy for people who don’t want any responsibility for being the way they are.

I remember flying on an airplane, and a stewardess sitting next to me “deadheading” somewhere, and she saw me reading the Bible, she said, “Are you a pastor?” And I said, “Yes.” She said, “Do you counsel?” And I said, “Sometimes.” She said, “I am in counseling now (she was not a Christian).” She said, “I just got the best news.” I said, “What?” She said, “I just found out my father molested me and abused me.” I said, “That’s good news?” She said, “Yes, because now I know why I am the way I am.”

If you want to dispossess yourself of any responsibility for being the way you are, which of course, is contrary to Biblical truth, then you can find somebody in your past that you can blame for the things that are in your life that you don’t like. And so this is a convenient kind of thing. Well, anyway, the girl went in and she got the counseling and within six months she brought this entire barrage of accusations involving Satan worship, cannibalism, molestation, pregnancy, just a horrendous list, and I haven’t even given you all of the list.

How did this happen? It turned out in court to be absolutely unsubstantiated and not true. But where did it come from? That was the curiosity. Well, they started in the investigation, went back and looked at the records of this particular counselor and found that this was the pattern in the majority of all the people he counseled, that they had Satanic involvement, occult involvement, molestation, and these kinds of things. In other words, if you go to that counselor, he’s going to find that in your background. Eventually the clinic became embarrassed by this and he was terminated. They went back further into his record with the Texas State Health Commission (he worked for the Mental Health Department of Texas), they found the very same pattern in the people he counseled there. And what you saw in this situation was a man creating false memories. And this is what is happening. You get vulnerable people, and I don’t say this in any way to slight women, but I have never heard of a man having this situation happen. It is vulnerable women, Paul even says, “In the latter times there will be women with weak will who will be led astray,” and one of the characteristics of last time days is going to be the loss of normal family love, and so we kind of expect to see this.

But anyway, they take this kind of a person, who is susceptible to suggestion from an authority figure and they begin, through a process, to create memories which displace responsibility for iniquity and sin and struggles in life, put it off on somebody else, [which] develops a hate pattern for other people, and alienates, and destroys, and devastates, and wipes out whole families. It’s a frightening, frightening thing. Absolutely frightening, and it is at an epidemic level today. It’s a frightening thing because of the power of suggestion.

“D Magazine” went a little further in the investigation and they decided to find out whether it is true that people can repress that kind of trauma. And so they contacted people with the psychological tests, those who can assess what people remember and what they don’t. And all the statistics they got indicated that every one of those kinds of experiences is precisely the kind of experience you could never forget no matter how you tried. You couldn’t repress it. You could never repress those things. If your father molested you and if incest went on from the age of ten to twenty one–you’re telling me you could forget that and think you were happy? And if you were involved in cannibalism with your own child–you could forget that?

Listen, you and I well know that we have all kinds of things in our minds that we would give anything if we could forget, but we can’t! And God has given us a memory for the purpose of reminding us how painful that was so we don’t do it anymore. What kind of restraint would we have if we could only remember good things? So it doesn’t even flesh out in terms of psychological testing. This is a very, very, serious matter.

I saw a book in the Christian bookstore, where I was recently, that said, “How to Heal Yourself From Your Birthmarks,” your psychological birthmarks. You’re born into the world and you’re all warped and wiped out because of what happened to you in your birth, and in your early childhood, and in your family, and this tears families to shreds. It is a frightening, frightening thing. It is not Biblical but it is rampant, absolutely rampant in Christian counseling today. What grieves me about this is the fact that I keep running into this all the time–all the time. I was asked that question this week in Denver, “Don’t you think that psychology is important in going back and digging up the past and getting those things healed, those hidden hurts and traumas, so that somebody can move on to be sanctified?” I said, “Are you saying basically that the Holy Spirit can sanctify you if you can find a good psychologist to get you ‘Jump Started’? Are you saying that somehow the Holy Spirit can’t deal with the present and the future until somebody else deals with the past?”

This is foreign to Scripture. It is destructive, because the only way you’ll ever be honestly dealing with your own sin is not to go in the past and have somebody create false memories, not to go into the past and find somebody to blame for your problem, but take responsibility for where you are and begin to act on the principles of what this text [Romans 13:11-14] says. It’s amazing how we can create memories. In that kind of a situation with people reinforcing, you can literally create something into a reality that isn’t real at all. This is devastating, because it doesn’t deal with a person’s life where they are, and it tears up families. It’s another false path to sanctification that ends up in pain and confusion and hurt, and accomplishes absolutely nothing.

If you want to get your Christian life together, don’t go back, leave that alone. You can’t fix it. Right? And don’t let somebody create phony memories of what you can’t remember. You start where you are.

Carl Rogers seeks emotional liberation through unconditional acceptance of others. It sounds like Christian love but is actually different. Empathy is not the same as sacrifice. Where Christians can learn from Rogers:

1. Acceptance and forgiveness.

Rogers puts too much emphasis on empathy and feelings. Whole aim

is to "accept yourself." There is no forgiveness because there is

nothing to forgive. Rogerian grace has no demands or responsibility.

2. Self-realization and self-centeredness.

Focus on self leads to selfishness, emphasis on "my needs." People in

church are motivated by this, hurts worship.

3. Becoming a person.

The Rogerian self has no substance. It leads to narcissism rather

than love of neighbor.

4. Self-growth.

People are supposed to be fully in touch with their feelings and

needs. Rogers loves human nature but distrusts culture and dogma.

These can only be "facilitators" to help us find our true self. Many

Christians are reading the Bible, without studying it, to see what it

says for that moment.

5. Becoming "congruent."

There is a gap between what we think ourselves to be and what we are.

Our values need to be "clarified." But they need to be clarified in

the light of an outside standard, God's Word, not just in our own

mind.

Christians like Rogers because although the gospel says that God is gracious, most of us do not experience this grace and acceptance in church life. This is where we can benefit from his teaching.

Some Christian therapists base their approach on secular theories. How can

you recognize counseling grounded in God's Word?

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Scott Rogers says that as he was driving down a Georgia back road in March 1994, he tuned to a Christian radio station and heard a representative of the Minirth-Meier/New Life Clinics (MMNLC), America's largest Christian psychiatric company, discussing child abuse and inviting listeners to call the company's toll-free phone number if they needed help.

The program, Rogers says, had a deep impact on him. "They were talking about my unresolved issues, and I impulsively pulled over and called," says the 27- year-old, citing his physical abuse as a child.

But instead of receiving comfort and encouragement, Rogers alleges he was pressured to seek costly inpatient treatment and then drawn into "62 days of hell" at the hands of social-service agencies investigating a report that he had confessed to abusing his own children. Although Rogers was eventually cleared of abuse charges, he has filed a malpractice suit against MMNLC.

The Rogers case is becoming a potent symbol within the Christian counseling field because of how it highlights one of the industry's most sensitive challenges: the balancing act between ministering to the needy and making a profit. It has taken on a larger life because two religious gadflies have made Rogers into a poster boy of sorts in their campaign against Christian psychiatry and counseling.

Milwaukee-based Christian radio show host Vic Eliason and Dallas-based chaplain Ray Hoekstra of International Prison Ministry have waged a long- running crusade against the growing Christian mental-health industry, especially against MMNLC, whose prestige and size-more than 600 employees in 25 inpatient units and 55 outpatient units-make it a sizable target.

"This whole industry is a multimillion-dollar racket," says Hoekstra, who has pressured broadcasters to drop the MMNLC program. Broadcaster Eliason, who had a 1993 run-in with MMNLC over his alleged unauthorized sale of MMNLC radio program tapes, declined an interview with Christianity Today, but is not new to controversy, having launched critical campaigns against other Christian leaders (ct, May 16, 1994, p. 38).

MMNLC President Stephen Arterburn inherited the Rogers conflict when his eight-year-old New Life clinic bought Minirth-Meier in 1994. But he defends the way the firm reacted to the Rogers case in that counselors are legally required to notify state officials in instances of suspected child abuse.

"We handled this matter in a textbook fashion," he says. "Our company isn't perfect," says Arterburn. "I was prepared for us to say we had made a mistake in this situation and make amends, but we did nothing wrong."

The case likely will go to trial next year. Arterburn says there was no profit motivation to have Rogers seek counseling, because its Atlanta facility, unlike other MMNLC clinics, is not-for-profit.

Arterburn says Rogers's pain actually has been prolonged by Eliason's crusade. He says, "This family is merely an instrument with someone who has an agenda and is not really concerned about their welfare or their recovery."

IMAGE OF GREED?

Industrywide, MMNLC is not the lone focus of criticism. Others have raised questions about the marketing methods of Christian mental health professionals.

"Our field is in a period of crisis," says Gary Collins, president of the American Association of Christian Counselors (AACC). "Some of the inpatient programs give an image of greed and make people feel that companies get people in a hospital and keep them there until their insurance runs out, and then they let them go."

There are other difficulties as well. The revolution in managed health care is having a profound effect on the ways counselors do business, forcing many to find quick-fix solutions to complicated psychological problems. Industry statistics show that the average length of stay for inpatients dipped to eight days in 1996, down from 30 days in 1990.

In addition, a few Christian psychiatrists and counselors open themselves for added criticism because of their involvement in the controversial areas of repressed memory treatment, healing touch, and hypnosis therapy for ritualistic abuse and multiple-personality disorders.

Yet, in spite of criticism and controversy, the Christian counseling business has experienced explosive growth. Arterburn reports that June 1996 has been the firm's biggest month ever, including 500 inpatient admissions, 7,600 outpatient clinic visits, and 8,200 conference attendees.

Ten-year-old Rapha, another major player in Christian mental health with 63 programs nationally, has doubled in size in the last 18 months. "While much of the Christian mental-health care has declined and been embroiled in controversy, Rapha has stuck to its basic message and seen tremendous growth," says Timothy Gilmour, Rapha spokesperson.

AACC's Collins says, "There's no more exciting time to be in this field." His organization's membership has swelled to 17,500, although not all are licensed counselors.

The rapid growth and the volatile mix of money and ministry, however, have caused disagreement in some quarters over goals. In January, Frank Minirth reached a separation agreement with MMNLC cofounder Paul Meier and Arterburn to leave the company and become sole proprietor of the Minirth Clinic, an outpatient clinic based in the same Richardson, Texas, building where Minirth and Meier opened their first clinic in 1976.

For now, the three men will continue to collaborate on writing and speaking projects. Minirth's departure has altered the company's radio programs. Minirth now hosts his own program on Dallas station KCBI, while Meier and Arterburn have added doctors Henry Cloud and John Townsend to their national program.

In announcing the separation, Minirth said, "Our focus will be on Jesus Christ. Our emphasis will also be on ministry. The ministry should always take priority over business."

THEOLOGY AND THERAPY

As the American appetite for self-improvement, self-esteem, and family values has grown, Christian counselors have been more than willing to serve up an enticing array of religiously themed books, music, seminars, and other products for a Christian audience.

Popularizers such as authors James Dobson, Tim LaHaye, and Larry Crabb convinced a whole generation of evangelicals that God cared about their psyches as well as their souls, opening the door for a marriage between theology and therapeutic thought. Today, Christian counseling is an expanding segment of America's $200 billion mental-health industry. It has provided urgently needed help to many believers for whom the traditions, rituals, and comforts of the church have been found inadequate in counteracting the stresses, anxieties, and isolation of modern life.

Christian therapists and counselors, in spite of their following among rank and file believers, have been subject to stern disapproval from some leading biblical scholars, church pastors, and theologians.

These analysts allege that Christian therapists are unbiblical in their counseling methods, that they undermine the local pastor's authority, and that they have unwittingly altered the Christian message away from confession of sin and the need for salvation toward the pursuit of self-actualization.

AACC President Collins sees three categories of those who disapprove:

CONCERNED. Reasoned critiques have come from evangelical thinkers such as Os Guinness and Paul C. Vitz, who acknowledge that Christian psychotherapy does some good but argue that it encourages idolatry and narcissism while shifting the emphasis from God's sovereignty to our own personal comfort and self-esteem.

"An ego-centered, 'let-me-feel-good' self-esteem can ignore our failures and need for God," writes Vitz, New York University psychology professor and author of Psychology as Religion (Eerdmans, 1994). "At its best, psychology is a stepping stone-we should use it to move on."

Collins says that while much of secular psychology rejects the Christian faith as meaningless or potentially harmful, Christian counselors show a respect for the reality of God's work in the lives of people.

CRITICS. John MacArthur, Jr.'s Our Sufficiency in Christ (Word, 1991) and Dave Hunt and T. A. McMahon's The Seduction of Christianity (Harvest House, 1985) charged that much of Christian psychology was really a false and heretical faith that runs counter to essential Christian beliefs. Likewise, Martin and Deidre Bobgan, the self- published authors of Prophets of Psychoheresy, a critique of James Dobson, and Twelve Steps to Destruction, say Christian counselors present a "man-centered gospel rather than a Christ-centered gospel."

Collins counters that therapy is a neutral technique that can be based either on Christian beliefs or on anti-Christian principles. Collins says biblically based counseling is an extension of traditional pastoral ministries of healing, sustaining, reconciling, and guiding.

CRUSADERS. MMNLC critics Eliason and Hoekstra focus generally on two areas, arguing that Christian counseling is opportunistic and motivated by money. Second, they allege that psychology and psychiatry are inherently unchristian in origin and intent. Collins says that Christian counseling professionals generally practice high standards and are meeting an important need for believers. He says most Christian mental-health professionals believe the practice of psychology or psychiatry can be firmly rooted in biblical truth.

Yet Collins admits the field has long-standing problems, many of them resulting from poor training. "There are a number of people who have graduate school training in psychology, but Sunday-school training in theology," he says. Training and continuing education are a primary focus of AACC efforts to improve the quality and professionalism of its members.

Another perennial criticism has revolved around Christians' efforts to integrate biblical principles with mainstream psychology's often antagonistic stance toward religious belief and practice. Critics complain that pragmatic approaches toward integration resemble a haphazard "take the best but leave the rest" approach that results in an odd patchwork of therapies and methods.

Recently, mainstream social observers have joined the chorus of critics. William J. Doherty's Soul Searching: Why Psychotherapy Must Promote Moral Responsibility (Basic Books, 1995) has hit a hot button with a nation of people tired of psychotherapy's perceived role in creating a subculture of victimology. "The crisis is over psychotherapy's ability to speak to the profound social and moral problems of the day," writes Doherty. "Are therapists making these problems worse by justifying the contemporary flight from personal responsibility, moral accountability, and participatory community?"

MARKET CHANGES

In the past few years, some of the biggest challenges to face the Christian counseling industry have resulted from revolutionary developments in the health-care industry.

Health maintenance organizations (HMO), which serve as the go-between for increasing numbers of American workers and health-care providers, emphasize "managed care" to keep costs under control. HMOs then pressure mental-health practitioners to shorten treatment plans and to discount their rates.

Responding to this challenge, for example, Rapha has modified its program for inpatient care from complete recovery to "stabilization," followed by extensive outpatient services, some linked to church support groups. But not everyone is jumping on the managed-care bandwagon. One counseling practice that decided not to deal with health maintenance organizations was Associated Psychological Services of Pasadena, California. The business, founded in 1971 by Neil Clark Warren, grew to 15 partners and clinicians by the early 1990s. It ceased operations in 1995 rather than deal with the constraints and paperwork of the HMO system.

"For a variety of reasons, we decided we didn't want to work with HMOs," says Clifford Penner, who was a partner in the firm. "Some HMOs offered to pay only half of our traditional fees. Some limited patients to five or ten visits unless a patient was suicidal or psychotic. Others required one hour to process paperwork for every four to five visits."

HMOs do not take into account the needs of the patients, according to Penner. "Problem-centered psychotherapy attacks specific problems like anorexia, drinking problems, or marriage problems, but it doesn't help people get to know themselves better or get in touch with their feelings like a more insight-centered therapy would," he says. "This problem-centered therapy parallels what's happening in a lot of the giant churches, where a need- oriented approach is about people wanting to get through the next week, not about looking at the deeper issues."

MMNLC's Arterburn says managed care is not the beginning of the end for Christian counseling. In fact, Arterburn says a growing number of companies, including the giant U.S. Behavioral Health Care, are allowing their Christian policy holders to get Christian psychotherapeutic care.

There is a growing awareness of the validity of what we do," says Arterburn. "We're seeing more and more managed care companies agree that Christians are entitled to Christian counseling."

But Christian counselors need not get on the managed-care bandwagon to stay in business. "Some of the more successful outpatient clinics we're affiliated with are being barraged by managed-care offers," he says. "But rather than signing up for managed care, they're focusing on increasing the hours their clinics are open, making their services more accessible, increasing their marketing, and adding specialty counselors."

WORKING WITHIN THE CHURCH

The AACC's Collins is enthusiastic about the increasing partnership between counselors and the church. "Counselors are working in congregations, where they're not only performing counseling but also training lay counselors and people helpers to be better able to bear one another's burdens," Collins says.

Rapha has a network of 3,500 churches in its RaphaCare program, which offers reduced fees to qualified church members. Also, Rapha's MinsterCare, a two- week residential program, helps pastors cope with stress and burnout.

One of the shining examples of these partnerships is the Midwest Christian Counseling Center in Kansas City, Missouri, which was founded in 1957 by Southern Baptist pastor Jay Lofton Hudson. Today, clinical director John Larson says the center maintains close ties with pastors and churches in the region.

One way the center's ten licensed psychologists help others is by donating counseling to people who need it but cannot afford it. Larson says the counselors donated 4,765 sessions in 1995, equaling $336,000 worth of billable hours or around 34 percent of their total counseling load.

But it does not stop there. The center also offers support groups and training for pastors, seminars on clergy sexual misconduct for church and ministry officials, seminars focusing on family and marital health, and counseling to the elderly and victims of sexual and physical abuse. It also runs a program, Street Psych, which trains urban pastors to identify and intervene in situations where there may be substance abuse, crime, violence, and family dysfunction.

Larson says counselors who can demonstrate a long-term commitment to serving their communities are in an excellent place to respond to society's growing hunger for psychotherapy with a spiritual dimension.

"There's a growing interest in spirituality, not necessarily Christian spirituality, but it is a more open approach and shows more respect for the particular faith perspectives people have." Larson says. "The profession is finally waking up to what some of us have seen for years and years. Ours is a distinctive specialty, and one that really speaks to a need that many people have."

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COPYRIGHT 1996, CHRISTIANITY TODAY, INC./CHRISTIANITY TODAY Magazine Vol. 40, No. 10, Page 76

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If you're like me, when you heard the news reports about the outrageous comments made by John Rocker, the pitcher for baseball's Atlanta Braves, you probably thought he should have his head examined. Well, little did you know that baseball officials Would take that suggestion literally.

During an interview with Sports Illustrated, Rocker openly insulted New York, Asian women, and immigrants, among others. His comments were so inflammatory and received so much attention that Major League Baseball had to act, so it ordered that he receive psychiatric evaluation.

Send him to a psychiatrist? Well, here we go again.

Sending Rocker to a shrink continues the trend that gave us the "abuse excuse" and the "Twinkie defense." What it boils down to is that something is responsible for people's bad actions - anything except the person who committed the act. People aren't responsible for the bad things they do - they come from dysfunctional families, or sucked their thumbs too long. It's today's psychobabble.

This case is an example of what psychiatrist Walter Reich of George Washington University calls "the transformation of bad into mad." Writing for Slate internet magazine, Reich describes it as the "inclination to see bad behavior in pathological rather than moral terms."

The problem is that in this modern age we've embraced a false worldview. We've jettisoned the doctrine of original sin and fallen for the lie that people are basically good. In truth, the only disorder responsible for bad behavior is the one we call sin. People don't do bad things because they're sick -- they do them because they are sinners.

If Baseball determines that Rocker's comments merit action, they should take it precisely because he was responsible for his words and his words bring disrepute to baseball and set a bad example for others.

But Major League Baseball will have some explaining to do if it does act. We would all have to ask why John Rocker is held to a higher standard than his boss, Ted Turner -- the Braves' owner. Remember, just last year Ted Turner made yet another of his highly inflammatory comments about a particular group. Not immigrants or any ethnic minority. No, Ted's target was Christians.

To hear Turner tell it, Christianity is irrational, and Christians are all "dummies." Not only that, but Turner has ridiculed the Pope, and made any number of other false characterizations of the Christian faith.

Mind you, I don't wish Mr. Turner any ill. Right now, he's going through a difficult separation from his wife, Jane Fonda -- who, if press reports can be believed, has become a born-again Christian. I might add that this astounding but wonderful news doesn't surprise me. Some years ago, Jane's then-husband, Tom Hayden, told me she was on a spiritual search and asked me to give her a copy of my book, Born Again, which I did.

So, as for the Rocker controversy, what's fair for the pitcher is fair for the owner -- let's see them held to the same standard. And that works in both directions, by the way. These men do not need therapy -- they need to face up to their responsibility. And that would not only be good for baseball, it'll be good for their souls.

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Copyright (c) 2000 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

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"Religion is nothing but a crutch." How often have we heard that sneer directed at the faithful?

The jibe reflects the teachings of Sigmund Freud -- that belief in God is nothing more than wish fulfillment, a projection of a childish need for security.

But now a psychologist is turning the tables on Freud's followers. It turns out that Freud's teachings were based not on psychoanalytical evidence, but on his personal hostility towards religion.

In his new book, Faith of the Fatherless, psychologist Paul Vitz describes Freud's theory that religious people suffer from unconscious and infantile needs. Freud's disciples have promoted this theory so successfully that today it's taught in many a college classroom.

But according to Vitz, Freud's "interpretation of religion is ... unsupported by psychoanalytic theory or clinical evidence." It's "not really a part of psychoanalysis -- and hence cannot claim support from psychoanalytic theory." Instead, Vitz writes, Freud's rejection of religion is "rooted in his personal predilections."

Surprisingly, Freud himself acknowledges this. He once wrote a friend that his views on religion "form no part of analytic theory. They are my personal views."

Nevertheless, Vitz writes, "Freud implies ... that he is very familiar with the psychology of belief in God." In reality, "Freud had very little psychoanalytic experience with patients who believed in God or were genuinely religious."

Why was Freud so hostile towards religion? Vitz's own research provides an answer. In a study of more than a dozen of the world's most influential atheists, including Freud, Vitz found that all had defective relationships with their fathers -- fathers who were weak, dead, abusive, or who abandoned their kids. Clearly, one's relationship with one's father has a tremendous impact on one's attitude toward God.

This finding is certainly true of Freud. He despised his father, a devout Jew who was a weak, passive man, unable to support his family. Moreover, Freud claimed his father was a sexual pervert. According to Vitz, in Freud's mind, his father's passivity and perversion was "clearly connected to Judaism and God."

Is it any wonder that in proposing the Oedipus complex, Freud places father hatred at the center of his psychology?

Ironically, Freud himself provides evidence that supports Vitz's theory. He once wrote that psychoanalysis "has shown us that the personal god is ... nothing but an exalted father" and claimed that this demonstrates why children lose their religious belief as soon as the father's authority breaks down.

According to Vitz, Freud is acknowledging that "a child's psychological representation of his father is intimately connected to his understanding of God." That "once a child ... is disappointed in or loses respect for his earthly father, belief in a heavenly father becomes impossible."

Freud's story illustrates the fact that for many an atheist, barriers to religious belief are not rational, based on empirical evidence. Instead, their atheism is based upon a non-rational need to reject God.

So when you hear those old stereotypes about religion being a crutch for people with infantile needs, be sure to set your friends and neighbors straight: It's atheists who engage in unconscious "wish fulfillment."

And that's a "crutch" that only the healing love of Christ can overcome.

___________________________

Copyright (c) 2000 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

*

The psychology instructor had just finished a lecture on mental health and was giving an oral test. Speaking specifically about manic depression, she asked, "How would you diagnose a patient who walks back and forth screaming at the top of his lungs one minute, then sits in a chair weeping uncontrollably the

next?" A young man in the rear raised his hand and answered, "A basketball coach?" Bits & Pieces, April 29, 1993, Page 22

Author Gary Inrig tells an amusing story of a man who complained to a psychiatrist about having an inferiority complex. The doctor listened patiently, then said, "The good news is, you don't have a complex. The bad news is, you are inferior!"

A study in which subjects were led to recall events that never took place suggests false memories can be easily created, according to a prominent U.S. psychologist.

By showing test subjects fake advertisements, Dr. Elizabeth Loftus duped them into believing they had met Bugs Bunny at Disneyland, even though Bugs is a Warner Brothers cartoon character and would never appear at the Disney theme park.

The study at the University of Washington was set up to investigate how people create memories, and the results reveal that the process is fragile and open to suggestion, said Jacquie Pickrell, a partner in the study.

Dr. Loftus and Ms. Pickrell, who is a doctoral student, will present their results on Sunday in Toronto to the American Psychological Association's annual meeting, where Dr. Loftus will receive the William James Fellow award for psychological research.

"The frightening thing about this study is that it suggests how easily a false memory can be created," Ms. Pickrell said.

Dr. Loftus and Ms. Pickrell divided 120 subjects into four groups under the pretense that they were to evaluate advertisements and answer questions about a trip to Disneyland.

The first group saw a Disneyland ad that mentioned no cartoon characters. The second saw the same ad but they sat in a room with a four-foot-tall cardboard figure of Bugs Bunny. The third group read a fake Disneyland ad with Bugs Bunny in it, and the fourth saw the fake ad as well as the cardboard rabbit.

Less than 10% of the first two groups reported having met Bugs Bunny, but 30% of the third group and 40% of the fourth group later reported that they either remembered meeting Bugs Bunny at Disneyland, or simply "knew" that they had.

"'Remember' means the people actually recall meeting and shaking hands with Bugs," Ms. Pickrell said. " 'Knowing' means they have no real memory, but are sure that it happened, just as they have no memory of having their umbilical cord being cut when they were born but know it happened."

The study stands firmly in one camp of the debate over repressed memories and whether they can be trusted once they are retrieved. In the 1990s, memories purportedly recovered in the course of therapy served as the basis for many charges of physical and sexual abuse.

Courts have become reluctant to trust victims' repressed memories of alleged crimes, since their retrieval under hypnosis is often guided by a therapist. Courts in Minnesota, California and New Hampshire have banned uncorroborated repressed memories as evidence.

George Franklin, a California man who spent six years in prison for the 1969 murder of a young girl, was the first person convicted in the United States on the basis of repressed memory evidence. He was freed after it was revealed that his daughter, whose memory of the attack led to his conviction, may have lied about having been hypnotized before the trial.

Dr. Loftus is an outspoken skeptic of recovered memories, and testified as an expert witness at Mr. Franklin's trial. She has written many articles describing "how exposure to misinformation induces memory distortion," and is the author of The Myth of Repressed Memory: False Memories and Allegations of Sexual Abuse.

Her latest study purports to show that recognizing the possibility of a memory, either on one's own or at the urging of a researcher or therapist, can lead to the belief that it is true.

"Someone saying, 'I know it could have happened,' is taking the first step of actually creating a memory," Ms. Pickrell said.

The study shows how "vulnerable and malleable" memory is, Ms. Pickrell said.

"We are interested in how people create their autobiographical references, or memory. Through this process they might be altering their own memories," Ms. Pickrell said. "Nostalgic advertising works in a similar manner. Hallmark, McDonald's and Disney have very effective nostalgic advertising that can change people's buying habits. You may not have had a great experience the last time you visited Disneyland or McDonald's, but the ads may be inadvertently creating the impression that they had a wonderful time and leaving viewers with that memory.

"If ads can get people to believe they had an experience they never had, that is pretty powerful," Ms. Pickrell said.

*

America's pharmaceutical companies, anxious to promote their wide array of behavior and mood-altering substances, have adopted the television commercial as an instant avenue to financial success. These attractive crutches, ballyhooed as sure answers to every unpleasant experience, have caught the instant attention of viewing audiences.

Our nation's efforts have been riveted on cleansing society of such illegal monsters as cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and L.S.D. After all, the terrifying consequences resulting from the use of these drugs fill our daily media news reports. Indeed, it seems that no family is immune from this international tragedy.

In our anxiety to cure this problem, whether by affixing blame and dispensing punishment or by treating its victims, we have conveniently overlooked the devastating effects of some of the medicines on the legal market. Legality does not remove the potential for abuse and the resulting serious injury or death. We are constantly reminded by professionals in white coats, "Don't do drugs; take your medicine!" While it is quite true that many medications may prove extremely useful under certain conditions, these same medicines, when not needed, may become inviting avenues for ultimate dependence and loss of physical, mental and spiritual control.

The current advertising crusade to promote the use of antidepressants such as Prozac is a classic example of the overkill. Similar strategies have been embraced by many legal peddlers who readily take advantage of the popular belief that there is some substance that will ease every bit of pain or obliterate every unhappy occurrence. We must understand that healing sometimes requires some hurt and that overcoming problems of life often requires strenuous struggles.

A warning to those who would fall prey to such advertising blitzes: Many states have reported in recent years more documented cases of those whose deaths were attributed to the abuse of antidepressants and such medicines than those whose demise was caused by either heroin or cocaine. To those whose current situations require such medications, we must remind you to seek at least two medical opinions before embarking on such a course, and please be careful to follow the instructions of your doctor and pharmacist. If you note any unusual side effect, notify your doctor immediately. Always utilize your God-given common sense.

Another major transgression against the public has been the over-prescription of medicines for those who have been diagnosed with deficit attention disorders. While these drugs have been helpful to children in some cases, in many other situations the prescription of such medicines has been a convenient method for control of the patient.

The lure of the popular tranquilizers, anti-anxiety medicines and barbiturates causes countless individuals to slide gradually into the misery of the addictive lifestyle without adequate warning. For some, the wakeup call is slow in coming. For others, rock bottom is too late!

The responsibility for this urgent dilemma, however, lies not with the medical community alone. We, the public, must change our present mindset that seeks the easy way out. Sometimes the capsule, pill or liquid will not provide rescue, but instead will enslave and destroy.

Our drug problem is much bigger than we once imagined!

--30-

Stone and Barber, of Durham, N.C., are coauthors of two books on alcohol and drug abuse, "Hope for the One Who Hurts" and "Hope for the One Who Cares," both available from LifeWay Christian Stores.

Lawyers for a man accused of taking part in a triple-murder had his defense all ready: They planned to say that twenty-two-year-old Darwin Godoy had a defective personality. He suffers from low self-esteem.

This is just another example of how deeply the self-esteem movement has infiltrated our culture. But according to a prominent psychologist, there's no real evidence that self-esteem, or lack thereof, has any such impact on behavior.

Paul Vitz is the distinguished author of the book Psychology as Religion: The Cult of Self-Worship. Low self-esteem, he says, has been blamed for everything from drug abuse, to teen pregnancy, to murder. Self-esteem programs have deeply infiltrated our schools, where educators believe that if they can just raise the self-esteem of our kids high enough, their problems will go away.

So, teachers tell students (over and over again) how important and special they are. And the curriculum reinforces this sugar-coated message. Students are told to say and write positive things about themselves. The only problem is, it doesn't work.

Self-esteem, Vitz says, is "a complex notion, defined and measured in many different and ambiguous ways." But no matter how you define it, the evidence does not support the idea that high self-esteem, by itself, benefits anything. In fact, psychologists often find that an inferiority complex is a much greater motivator for high achievement.

Gloria Steinem, for example, a high-achieving leader of the feminist movement, freely admits that she suffers from low self-esteem. But self-doubt didn't slow her down any more than it has slowed others who've achieved success.

And then there's the study that compared mathematical skills of children from different countries. As reported in the national media, the kids who ranked the highest -- the Koreans -- scored lowest in self-esteem, while the kids who scored highest in self-esteem -- the Americans -- ranked lowest in math skills. Clearly, all those self-esteem lessons didn't help the American kids add and subtract better.

The fact is, the best ways to raise self-esteem is through genuine accomplishment. That's because, according to Vitz, self-esteem is "primarily an emotional response to what we have done, and to what others have done to us." If you want to feel good about yourself, Vitz writes, then "Do good to others and accomplish something for yourself."

As Christians, we ought to have a high sense of self-worth, because we know God made us in his image, and sent his own Son to die in order to save us.

Worth, or self-respect is one thing, but the self-esteem movement is something altogether different. It promotes self-worship. It teaches that, unless we love ourselves, we will be unhappy. But this assumes, Vitz warns, that God will not love us as we need to be loved. It's a form of "practical atheism" -- and can lead to some sobering consequences. As Samuel Johnson once said, "He that overvalues himself will undervalue others, and he who undervalues others will suppress them."

We need to be wary of the phony praise choruses that come from the self-esteem movement. Remember, our talents and abilities come from God -- and it was Christ himself who taught us, "Blessed are the meek" [Matthew 5:5].

For further reference:

Vitz, Paul. Psychology as Religion: The Cult of Self-Worship. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1994.

Though a last-minute stay is possible, Timothy McVeigh is presently scheduled to be executed Monday. [He was.] Even if there is a stay, it will be a short-lived one. So, America will soon witness the first federal execution in decades.

There's no more difficult issue for many Americans than capital punishment. For most of my life, I opposed it. I thought the death penalty was wrong because it was too easy to make a mistake and execute an innocent person. As a lawyer, I knew the system was fallible.

Furthermore, case studies showed that it's no deterrent to crime: you could accomplish the same thing with "life in prison." If the state exacts blood for a capital offense, I thought, how could we then discourage violence among others?

Well, several years ago I visited death row in Menard, Illinois, and met John Wayne Gacy, who was convicted in 1978 for the grisly murders of at least thirty people, whom he'd buried beneath the crawl space of his Chicago home.

The first thing that shocked me was how ordinary Gacy looked -- like a school teacher or a businessman. The second thing was his utter defiance: He was demanding his rights, still insisting on his innocence, even though the evidence that convicted him was overwhelming.

I came away wondering if there weren't some cases where the only remedy that could produce justice was execution, and this sent me back to C. S. Lewis's classic essay, "The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment."

For years, modern psychology has argued that the criminal is not guilty of crime; he's just sick, and in need of therapy. Lewis argued, however, that this view strips man of his dignity: It says we're not free moral agents, responsible for our actions, but rather patients to be manipulated for the good of society.

Lewis wrote, "To be punished, however severely, because we have deserved it, because we 'ought to have known better,' is to be treated as a human person made in God's image." I realized that this went right to the heart of a central precept of Judeo-Christian belief.

The Scriptures teach that people are responsible for their own behavior. The object of justice is not to rehabilitate or create some new person, like scientists in a Viennese laboratory, but rather to balance the scales of justice. And sometimes the only way to do that is to give the offender his just desserts: capital punishment. I changed my views on the issue.

So, I have no difficulty whatsoever with the state carrying out its sentence in the McVeigh case. McVeigh committed a horrendous crime. He might have been misguided in his understanding of the social order, but there's absolutely no excuse for taking the lives of innocent people in such a senseless act of terrorism.

Just desserts, in some extreme cases, demand extreme punishment. And if there's ever a case where it was deserved, it's the Timothy McVeigh case.

Now, the state has no more serious obligation than to wield the sword to preserve order. It's a solemn occasion: 168 people died, and countless lives have been shattered. We ought not to be celebrating, or viewing political posturing or commercialism as we have seen in Terre Haute. We ought to be saddened that sin has led us to this point.

So as this sentence is carried out, remember that the execution of Timothy McVeigh isn't about therapy, or retribution, or getting even.

It's about justice and preserving the dignity of man.

_________________________

Copyright (c) 2001 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

*

After years of research, Selwyn Hughes believes he has found the biblical basis for why people behave the way the do.

"A unique design has gone into the construction of our beings," said the Wales native. "God made us to function in a certain way, and unless we understand God's signature on our personality, then we will never be able to understand why we do what we do."

Hughes said he is concerned that the contemporary church takes too simplistic an approach to dealing with problems. "When people in our churches have problems, what we try to do is take a text from the Bible and, like a Band-Aid, put it on something that requires radical spiritual surgery."

He called that the "evangelical disease" or "giving answers before you understand the problems."

Hughes said people are designed in five areas of functioning -- as physical beings, longing beings, thinking beings, choosing beings and feeling beings.

"When we understand those areas of functioning, then and only then can we understand how our problems arise."

First, because people are physical beings, Hughes believes it is important to determine whether psychological symptoms are the result of a physical problem.

If a doctor declares a person physically fit, the search continues, he said.

Hughes traces the lot of people's psychological problems back to the fall of Adam and Eve.

"We are longing to get back to what was lost in the Garden of Eden, and we will never really experience life to the fullest until we get back to the way God designed us."

Hughes believes Adam and Eve had it made before they took a bite out of the apple.

Before they sinned "they were standing on a stool in the Garden of Eden with three solid legs," he said.

"When Adam and Eve sinned, the legs of the stool broke beneath their feet and the result was, instead of security, they experienced insecurity; instead of self-worth, they experienced inferiority; and instead of significance, they experienced insignificance," he said.

Though they don't know it, all people are clamoring for a reconnection to God, Hughes said. The longings are merely expressed through the personality in worldly ways.

"Every one of us has an ache in our soul that only God can meet," he said. Hughes said he believes the biggest problem in marriages today is not "finances, communication or sex, but one person trying to get their need for security met in their partner and not God."

Psychological problems arise from these deep longings, he said, because people deny them, reduce them or redirect them.

"We deny them because to admit them exposes a dependency on someone or something else or a feeling of helplessness that we abhor. We reduce them to a level more human like the need for attention. Or we redirect them into other things like achievement, career, accomplishments."

Hughes said while people are also thinking beings, "the problem, of course, is we think incorrectly."

As choosing beings, he said, "When God made us, he did not make us like a machine or computer to be manipulated. He gave us a free will."

Fifth, Hughes said people are feeling beings. "Everyone experiences both negative and positive feelings, and some of the negative feelings can become incapacitating and hinder our daily functioning."

Negative emotions, he said, are the result of "frustrations we feel because we cannot reach the goal we need to reach to feel good about ourselves."

Hughes listed three groups of negative emotions and what he believes they signal:

-- Anger, frustration, resentment and irritation are the result of blocked goals. "Whenever a goal we foolishly believe we must meet to feel good about ourselves is blocked, these emotions occur."

-- Guilt or shame results from an unreachable goal. "When we believe, again foolishly, that we have to reach a certain goal to experience personal intactness, these emotions are manifested."

-- Anxiety and fear indicate uncertain goals. "We are uncertain that we can reach the goal and often this uncertainty reveals itself in a fear of failure."

In his book, Hughes guides people through the steps they need to take to re- establish or maintain a close relationship with God.

"Our problems can be resolved and overcome only when we decide to put Christ where he belongs, at the center," Hughes writes. "Christ must be master of our minds and he must be master of our wills."

*

Whether it's the Columbine shootings, September 11, or Hurricane Katrina, in the wake of the initial crisis, an army of grief counselors descends on the survivors. Is that a good thing? Probably not.

In their excellent book One Nation under Therapy, ethicist Christina Hoff Sommers and psychiatrist Sally Satel show how junk science has promoted the notion “that seemingly content and well-adjusted Americans — adults as well as children — are emotionally damaged.” They trace the history of what they call “therapism,” which “valorizes openness, emotional self-absorption and the sharing of feelings.”

This trend was popularized by twentieth-century psychologists like Abraham Maslow. He believed — though he had no scientific proof for it — that restraint was unhealthy and that “self-actualization” and high self-esteem were crucial to human development. It was Maslow who said, “I sometimes think that the world will either be saved by psychologists ... or it will not be saved at all.”

We see the fruits of that philosophy everywhere. From schools to talk shows, people are coached to focus on themselves and obsess about their own feelings — in short, to “save themselves” through psychology. No wonder that Jim Windolf, writing in the Wall Street Journal, said, “If you believe the statistics, 77 percent of America's adult population is a mess. And we haven't even thrown in alien abductees, road ragers or Internet addicts.”

As if it weren't enough to teach healthy people that they're emotionally crippled, therapism is most prevalent at disaster sites: Busloads of grief counselors shuttle in — who, the authors point out, are often underqualified. And they offer the wrong medicine.

Valid scientific studies show that self-absorption, or self-pity, is actually the worst possible way to respond to tragedy. Study participants who were told to focus on their emotions and express them aloud actually ended up more depressed than those who tried to distract themselves and find constructive ways to cope.

We have bought into the myth of “therapism” so completely that after every one of these disasters, these armies of “grief counselors” descend upon us. Well, the good news is that some folks are catching on. After Columbine and September 11, even members of the media saw the failure of the therapeutic model. The Washington Post's Jonathan Yardley wrote, “Surely there are few sights in the contemporary landscape more repellent than that of these leeches attaching themselves to the stunned, bewildered survivors of affliction, demanding that they give vent to their 'feelings.'“

As I reported in a “BreakPoint” at the time, kids at Columbine were ignoring grief counselors, but flooding the churches. Those kids understood. But the grief counselors, after all, are after clients. That's what keeps them paid. So after September 11, Sommers and Satel report, grief counselors literally walked the streets trying to recruit patients. One mental health center tried to hire someone to sit in a general practitioner's waiting room and ask every patient who came in if he or she was having problems dealing with September 11.

No wonder people are getting disgusted with in-your-face tactics and pop psychology. What these people do not need is more high pressure. What they really need is counseling from the Great Counselor.

________

Copyright (c) 2005 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

*

A recent cover of NEWSWEEK magazine jarred me. In bold type across the face of the magazine cover were these words: “Freud Is Not Dead.” Just being reminded of Sigmund Freud, the Viennese psychiatrist who redefined modern psychiatry and dismissed God as the figment of our imaginations, gave me cold chills. Here was the man whose influence has ushered in the age of therapy — excusing anyone's behavior because they sucked their thumb too long as a baby. He's also one of the great intellectual influences that led to the sexual revolution of the 1960s, for which we pay dearly to this day.

NEWSWEEK placed Freud on its cover to mark the 150th anniversary of his birth — May 6, 1856.

I was reminded how tragically true the NEWSWEEK banner headline is when I read an analysis of the decision made by the jurors in the Moussaoui terrorist trial. When asked for the mitigating factors in the case that caused them to give this terrorist a life sentence instead of execution, the top two factors cited by the jury were, first, Moussaoui had an “unstable early childhood and dysfunctional family” life, and, according to the NEW YORK TIMES, “a hostile relationship with his mother that led to his being placed in French orphanages.” And second, that Moussaoui's father had a violent temper and physically and emotionally abused his family.

No other reasons were cited by more than five jurors, but these two points were cited by nine of the twelve.

There you have it. Freud is not yet dead.

In the book HOW NOW SHALL WE LIVE?, written with Nancy Pearcey, I devoted several chapters to the consequence of the Freudian revolution, the development of the excuse mentality — the blame somebody else and refuse to take personal responsibility syndrome. What's really tragic about this is that I've seen it face-to-face as I've worked in hundreds and hundreds of prisons over the past thirty years. The thousands of Prison Fellowship volunteers encounter it every day: inmates justifying their behavior, excusing their crimes on the basis that they had an abusive childhood (at least, that's what they define it as).

Yet sociologists are scrambling all over themselves trying to find an explanation for America's soaring prison populations. When I got out of prison thirty years ago, there were approximately 230,000 people in prison in America. Today there are 2.3 million.

I believe crime is not caused by environment or poverty or race or any of the other factors sociologists for generations thought it was, but instead — as the latest scholarly studies show — it is caused by people making wrong moral decisions and the lack of moral training during the morally formative years. If that's so, the worst thing we can do is tell people that they are not responsible for their own behavior. What they need is a bracing dose of biblical realism — that we are fallen creatures and are responsible for our sins — not more of the Freudian excuse mentality.

This month we celebrate, if that's the correct word, the 150th anniversary of Freud's birth. And we saw him alive and well, sitting in the courtroom, when the jury decided to send Mr. Moussaoui off to life in prison instead of sending him to the executioner, not because of what he did or his knowledge of right and wrong — he was determined perfectly sane — but because of his lousy childhood.

________

Copyright (c) 2006 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

Psychologist Abraham Maslow first introduced his concept of a hierarchy of needs in his 1943 paper “A Theory of Human Motivation”1 and his subsequent book, Motivation and Personality.2 This hierarchy suggests that people are motivated to fulfill basic needs before moving on to other needs.

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is most often displayed as a pyramid. The lowest levels of the pyramid are made up of the most basic needs, while the more complex needs are located at the top of the pyramid. Needs at the bottom of the pyramid are basic physical requirements including the need for food, water, sleep and warmth. Once these lower-level needs have been met, people can move on to the next level of needs, which are for safety and security.

As people progress up the pyramid, needs become increasingly psychological and social. Soon, the need for love, friendship and intimacy become important. Further up the pyramid, the need for personal esteem and feelings of accomplishment take priority. Like Carl Rogers, Maslow emphasized the importance of self-actualization, which is a process of growing and developing as a person to achieve individual potential.

Types of Needs

Maslow believed that these needs are similar to instincts and play a major role in motivating behavior. Physiological, security, social, and esteem needs are deficiency needs (also known as D-needs), meaning that these needs arise due to deprivation. Satisfying these lower-level needs is important in order to avoid unpleasant feelings or consequences.

Maslow termed the highest-level of the pyramid as growth needs (also known as being needs or B-needs). Growth needs do not stem from a lack of something, but rather from a desire to grow as a person.

Five Levels of the Hierarchy of Needs

There are five different levels in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs:

1. Physiological Needs These include the most basic needs that are vital to survival, such as the need for water, air, food and sleep. Maslow believed that these needs are the most basic and instinctive needs in the hierarchy because all needs become secondary until these physiological needs are met.

2. Security Needs These include needs for safety and security. Security needs are important for survival, but they are not as demanding as the physiological needs. Examples of security needs include a desire for steady employment, health insurance, safe neighborhoods and shelter from the environment.

3. Social Needs These include needs for belonging, love and affection. Maslow considered these needs to be less basic than physiological and security needs. Relationships such as friendships, romantic attachments and families help fulfill this need for companionship and acceptance, as does involvement in social, community or religious groups.

4. Esteem Needs After the first three needs have been satisfied, esteem needs becomes increasingly important. These include the need for things that reflect on self-esteem, personal worth, social recognition and accomplishment.

5. Self-actualizing Needs This is the highest level of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Self-actualizing people are self-aware, concerned with personal growth, less concerned with the opinions of others and interested fulfilling their potential.

Anyone who’s ever been verbally bullied can tell you that the old saying “sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me” is nonsense. Words are powerful things. They can harm people. In fact, words can create whole categories that confuse men and women into a twisted understanding of their bodies and souls, and can even wreck their lives.

To be clear, I’m not talking about just insults. I’m talking about labels — the words we use to think about ourselves and the power they have to shape our lives, especially our sexual identities.

Just ask Jamie Shupe, who recently told his story in the Heritage Foundation’s Daily Signal. Shupe was America’s first legally-recognized “non-binary” person. In fact, his case opened up the non-binary status for people in eleven states and counting. His journey didn’t begin with reworking gender labels. Before he won the right to be known as non-binary, he claimed to be a transgender woman, writing about his experience in The New York Times and receiving rock-star treatment from the LGBT movement.

There was just one problem: Shupe wasn’t, in fact, a woman trapped in a man’s body or a genderless being. He was a victim of childhood sexual abuse and a veteran with PTSD. Now, after changing his mind and going back to living as a man, he admits that assuming new gender identities and fighting for their legal recognition was his way of trying to make a fresh start. The scary part is how, at every step, the medical community, state governments, and the news media legitimized his confusion.

As Shupe writes: “When a licensed medical doctor writes you a letter essentially stating that you were born in the wrong body and a government agency or court of law validates that delusion, you become damaged and confused ... The truth is that my sex change to non-binary was a medical and scientific fraud.”

I hope you’ll read Jamie Shupe’s sad but revealing story. It’s heartbreaking. And the saddest part of his story is that it exposes the new gender identities embraced by so many as artificial, harmful, and dehumanizing.

Of course, there have always been those who have experienced gender confusion, and who have dealt with their sexual attraction in ways that are at odds with our God-given purpose. What’s new today is the set of scripts that’s currently imposing these confusions on individuals: If you’re a little girl who plays with trucks, one script goes, you must really, deep down, be a boy. If you’re a young man who has trouble relating to others of your sex, you must really, on the inside, be a woman. And if you have a mix of both traits or just can’t decide, well then, there’s a new script for you, too. You’re “non-binary.”

In all of these cases, it is the words — the categories that our culture has made up and imposed on real people — that carry all the power. In the long run, the mismatch between these categories and the people on whom they’re imposed becomes painfully obvious.

Last year on BreakPoint, we highlighted a study that called transgender identification a “social contagion” among teenagers — in other words, it’s something many adopt because it’s what all the cool kids are doing. We also know that between 63 and 94 percent of minors who identify as transgender will later change their minds, or “desist” as it’s medically termed.

This research, and stories like Shupe’s, show how easily the new gender labels can consume a person’s identity while burying real trauma that needs treatment. Young people especially need to know that turning words such as “transgender” and “non-binary,” and even “gay” and “lesbian” into categories of identity is a practice younger than I am. Seriously, this just started yesterday. But now, they’re so often assigned as identity labels to anyone who fits an arbitrary set of stereotypes. As a result, they dominate lives and cause immeasurable damage.

That’s why refusing to accept these labels isn’t an act of hate, as we are told, but rather it’s an act of love. As Christians called to this confused cultural moment, we should be sensitive to people’s experiences, recognizing that trauma often plays a major role in gender confusion. At the same time we should be clear that trendy labels and identities aren’t the answer, and the best way to honor others’ humanity is to refuse to perpetrate this medical and scientific fraud against them.

________

RESOURCES

“I Was America’s First ‘Non-binary’ Person. It Was All a Sham,” by Jamie Shupe, Daily Signal, March 10, 2019; https://www.dailysignal.com/2019/03/10/i-was-americas-first-non-binary-person-it-was-all-a-sham.

“God and the Transgender Debate,” Andrew Walker, Good Book Company, 2017.

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Copyright (c) 2019 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

From the Buddha to modern gurus of self-help, there have been more than 100 exercises proposed which are alleged to increase lasting happiness, says Professor Martin Seligman.

In strange contrast, scientific investigation until recently thought none of these exercises would, as there was an unchangeable and biological “set point” for happiness. This suggested that our levels of happiness were largely pre-determined by our genes and our upbringing, varying slightly but always returning to our set point of happiness. It also explained the annoying fact that lottery winners eventually revert to their customarily curmudgeonliness and the rosier finding that paraplegics eventually return to almost the same happiness level they enjoyed before their accident.

I have spent more than 20 years testing the effects of various psychotherapies and drugs on depression. So when I became a positive psychologist, I first explored many of these exercises and then decided to test rigorously whether any of them really increased happiness.

I began by teaching positive psychology to undergraduates: each week I assigned an exercise along with more traditional readings. I do not think I ever heard the word “life-changing” more often in my 40 years of teaching.

POSITIVE FEEDBACK

Then I started teaching a six-month telephone course to 1,000 coaches, clinical psychologists, parents, and educators. Each week I would assign one exercise and the students would give it to their clients and carry it out themselves. Very encouraging testimonials flooded in, citing lasting relief from depression and increased well-being.

This is pretty far from science, however.

So I was ready to try the gold standard: random assignment, placebo controlled tests of each exercise, looking for lasting changes in well-being. We told people that we wanted to find out which interventions work to raise happiness and which are bogus.

About 500 people soon volunteered and each person received a battery of tests, one simple week-long web exercise (no human hands) and then was tested about their well-being repeatedly for the next six months.

Three exercises proved to be placebos and three worked well, producing lasting reductions in depression and lasting increases in happiness. The three that worked were “three blessings” - writing down three things that went well today and why; “the gratitude visit” - writing a gratitude testimonial and delivering it personally; and “using your signature strength in a new way” - taking the signature strength test and using your highest strength in a new way.

DECREASING DEPRESSION

We continue to test new exercises in this way, hoping to separate the wheat from the chaff. We looked at the effect on severe depression of doing just the first web exercise, three blessings.

In this uncontrolled study, 94% of severely depressed people became less depressed and 92% became happier, with an average symptom relief of a whopping 50% over only 15 days. This compares very favourably with anti-depressant medication and with psychotherapy.

We then packaged six exercises in a bundle and gave them to moderately depressed students in groups. Compared to a randomly assigned control, the exercises produced markedly lowered depression one year later.

The results seem even stronger in the hands of a good therapist: we gave three groups of unipolar depressed patients either medication, treatment as usual, or positive psychotherapy. This consists of 12 sessions in which the exercises are mixed with skilled psychotherapy. At the end of three months about 10% of the patients with medication or treatment as usual improved, versus 70% of the patients in positive psychotherapy. Depressive symptoms were substantially reduced and happiness markedly increased.

Overall then there is good evidence that several simple exercises increase happiness and decrease depression. The set point theory of well-being appears to be wrong.

While these exercises increase well being among relatively untroubled people, there is one surprising implication for serious depression: psychotherapy traditionally is where you go to talk about your troubles. The psychotherapy of the future may also be where you go to talk about positive emotion, your strengths and virtues, and how to build more meaning into your life.

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For more information on Positive Psychology, go to http://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/