The Perceived Effectiveness of Christian and Secular Graduate Training Programs in Preparing Christian Psychologists to Deal With Experiences of Sexual Attraction

Most psychologists experience feelings of sexual attraction toward clients, and for some Christian therapists this situation can be further complicated by their tendency to deny such sexual attraction. How effective are graduate training programs in teaching Christian psychologists to manage feelings of sexual attraction in professional contexts? In this survey, 258 Christian psychologists answered questions regarding their graduate training. A positive training environment was related to healthy coping responses in managing feelings of sexual attraction, and graduates of explicitly Christian training programs reported greater satisfaction with training conditions than graduates of secular programs. Those involved in training professional psychologists should consider the general training environment in addition to specific course work about managing feelings of sexual attraction

Questioning the Slippery Slope : Ethical Beliefs and Behaviors of Private Office-Based and Church-Based Therapists

Counselors and other mental health professionals whose primary office is in a church building often face unique challenges in maintaining appropriate client-therapist boundaries. A sample of 497 Christian counselors responded to an 88-item survey of their ethical beliefs and behaviors. Of the respondents, 148 reported a church as their primary work setting and 162 reported a private office as their primary work setting. Survey results were factor analyzed, then church-based therapists were compared with private office-based therapists regarding their views of ethical behaviors. Although church-based therapists take greater liberties with multiple-role relationships than private office-based therapists, they appear similar with regard to other ethical beliefs and behaviors. Results suggest that churchbased therapists who take liberties in nonsexual multiple-role relationships are no more likely than other therapists to violate other ethical standards

Dinner Table Syndrome: A Phenomenological Study of Deaf Individuals’ Experiences with Inaccessible Communication

Conversations at the dinner table typically involve reciprocal and contingent turn-taking. This context typically includes multiple exchanges between family members, providing opportunities for rich conversations and opportunities for incidental learning. Deaf individuals who live in hearing non-signing homes often miss out on these exchanges, as typically hearing individuals use turn-taking rules that differ from those commonly used by deaf individuals. Hearing individuals’ turn-taking rules include use of auditory cues to get a turn and to cue others when a new speaker is beginning a turn. Given these mechanisms, hearing individuals frequently interrupt each other—even if they are signing. When deaf individuals attempt to obtain a turn, they are frequently lost in the ongoing dialogue. This experience, wherein deaf individuals are excluded from the flow of conversations at mealtime, is known as the dinner table syndrome. This study documents deaf adults’ retrospective experiences with dinner table syndrome growing up. Personal interviews and a focus group were used to explore how deaf adults experienced conversations during family dinner gatherings. A phenomenological approach was used for analysis. Developed themes include: Missing out on Communication and Language with Hearing Family Members, Access to Current News and Events, Conversational Belonging and Sense of Exclusion within the Family, and the Realization of Missing Out on Conversations. These themes revealed the essence of Loved, yet Disconnected. Results of this qualitative research study can help identify what happens when participants miss cues during dinner table conversations, leaving them out of the conversation

In God We Trust?

This story began with a question and grew in the answering, as did I, until it became a story more interested in the quest and the asking of the question than in the resolution or answer. That is not to say that this novel does not have a fairly standard beginning, middle and end. Instead, the uniqueness, if there is such a thing, emerges in the content of these parts, in the genres I used, and in the consistent voice of the central character that continually returns to the question. I wondered, (to use a phrase often times overused by Jenson, the main character in the most recent version of this story), why I was here. More precisely, I wondered what a person propelled by this question and the failure to find an answer, or at least an answer that provided any semblance of hope or self-confidence, would do when put into extraordinary circumstances. At what point would he abandon the question, or in this story, at what point would Jenson ultimately give up on his quest? Also, as a writer acutely aware that I write for a reader and not just for myself, I wondered at what point a reader would abandon a character like Jenson or a quest that didn’t have a clear end. These two themes—the questioning quest and the constant slipping away of answers—as well as my desire to create a character and world that were both familiar and yet epic in scale, forced me to write this story. What emerged has been a labor of love and obsession that shows the first person story of a character’s struggle to find his “belong’in place in the world.” This familiar motivation is overshadowed, though, by a more pressing goal—the first person account of a, possibly, unreliable narrator, failed parent and husband who must team up with his estranged wife to save his son. As Tolkien once said, “an author cannot of course remain wholly unaffected by his experience, but the ways in which a story-germ uses the soil of experience are extremely complex, and attempts to define the process are at best guesses from evidence inadequate and ambiguous.” What I can say, though, with absolute certainty is that this latest version of the story is a result of maturity and constant curiosity. As I have grown older the central character in the story has changed from a teenage boy fighting ogres and saving damsels in distress to a middle-aged man with phobias and faults battling some of the everyday problems we all encounter—how to deal with fear and feelings of inadequacy and how to rekindle love or talk with a girl. Of course, he still has to battle a strange being from a different dimension and figure out how to fix a secret, illegal scientific experiment so that he can save his son, who has been put into a coma because he has volunteered for an experiment that sent him to a different dimension. But the science and mystery and extraordinary circumstances don’t, or at least don’t always, overshadow the heart of the story. This is a man on a quest to find answers that may not exist, and the questioning quest will, undoubtedly, take him to the next dimension where he will have to find his son, figure out how to come back home, and perhaps…battle God