Just_A_Guy

Another good article, from therapist Jeff Bennion: It is helpful for us to remember what therapists can do and what they can’t do. After all the ongoing abuses committed by the profession, after exposures of fraudulent research, and foundational studies retracted for failure to replicate, it is long past time we show a little intellectual humility in our “expert” pronouncements. It’s my job to help the client on the couch get better. It’s not my job as a therapist to tell “the Patriarchy,” or the Church, how they’re wrong and that its doctrines, beliefs, and practices must change. It’s also profoundly disempowering to tell our clients, as Helfer and others seem prone to do, that they don’t need to change, but that the rest of the world does. We do our best work when we help clients build resilience and deal with the world as it is. While both clients and therapists can be agents of change in the world at large, our own healing cannot be held hostage waiting for 16 million Latter-day Saints to agree with us, not to mention most of the non-western world.

I agree with much of what you say, but would perhaps offer a few responses/slight pushbacks: 1). By all means, read the full article. 2). I agree, and I think that’s why it’s so crucial that the dialogue you mention happen early in the treatment process. It seems many Church members are beginning their work with therapists who hold themselves out as “Mormon therapists”, in the belief that the therapist will hold to boundaries that the therapist in fact has no intention of holding (and may even actively hope to undermine). 3). I would expect this from a therapist who had a relatively superficial knowledge of or commitment to institutional Mormonism; but from someone holding themselves out as a “Mormon therapist” who understands their client wants to live their church’s principles (including that of daily *scripture* study)—I would expect some explorations about “gee, you say you want to life a traditional Church lifestyle and regular scripture reading is kind of a big deal in the Church. Let’s take a few weeks to work through why you’re so averse to scriptures generally; and in the meantime here’s some warm fluffy stuff in the Psalms that should let you keep your perceived covenants without triggering you too badly”. (FWIW, my wife did a few sessions with a therapist a couple years back and she actually suggested specific scriptural passages for my wife to study based on the nature of what my wife was coping with at the time.) I’d also, frankly, raise my eyebrows at a mental health professional who selectively recommends outright avoidance to cope with conflict. If a gay LDS teen comes to a therapist—LDS or otherwise—saying “I feel things in the high school locker room that for theological reasons I’d rather not feel”, I think we’d be hard-pressed to find a therapist who would say “well, at least for now, let’s find a way to keep you out of locker rooms”. Why is avoidance fine for dealing with situations the Church would consider virtuous, but inappropriate for dealing situations the Church would equate with temptation? 4). The million-dollar question, of course, is: to what end? If I wake up one day and think “gosh, where does Fether work? I want to do that job. Is that Fether’s wife? She’s quite attractive. Are those Fether’s kids? They are cute and well-behaved. And Fether’s home seems spacious, and his yard well-manicured, and I understand his bank account balance to be quite impressive.” And some therapist says “You know, JAG, have you considered the possibility that deep down you might just want to BE Fether?”—well, what then? Here, I think, is the limit of modern mental health practice; because its proscribed treatment depends not on any consistent version of morality or even on objective realities; but on social norms. In the case I describe, in 2021: a mental health practitioner is going to tell me I’ve got to get past my deep desire to be Fether—because Fether’s boss is not going to let me work at his job; his kids won’t let me pick them up from school; his wife won’t let me into their house; his bank teller won’t grant me access to their bank account. No matter how desperately I want it, no matter what genetic or psychological influences give rise to that deep-seated desire: the reality is that I am *not Fether*; society has no obligation to treat me as though I were Fether; and I’m just going to have to deal with that. But add a hundred years and changed social norms re parentage, monogamy, property rights—and a therapist may well say “you know what? Maybe Fether’s family should let JAG stay over a few nights and see if it works out. It’s the least they can do for poor JAG.” As to your siblings’s case (and I realize this is a tender subject and I hope I’m being sufficiently sensitive here) we have a society that has gravitated towards the idea that another kind of identity-based illusion—the notion that one’s “real” chromosomal makeup is different than what definitional biology actually dictates—has gained some currency; and so 5) I’d bet money (though perhaps not a lot of it) that your sibling’s therapist never once used the phrase “you are not a woman, and you have no right to compel anyone to accept you as something you aren’t” in any of their sessions; and your sibling came out of them with the idea that the only things that needed “curing” were the world in general and the Church in particular. That’s fine, for a therapist who doesn’t tout themselves as a “Mormon therapist” and doesn’t explicitly market their services to people who want to find fulfillment within the bounds of traditional Mormonism. But Cunningham is describing therapists who apparently *did* go out of their way to attract a clientele that had that expectation. 6) I would rather say that the roles of a therapist are a) to treat any identifiable pathologies/disorders; and b) to help a client to healthily attain the client’s own goals within the framework of the client’s own values. When we are talking about therapists who overtly advertise for LDS clients, I would add that: —If a “Mormon therapist” doesn’t know within the very first session that their client wants to stay in harmony with the Church’s teachings, they have failed their client. —If a Mormon therapist knows their client wants to stay in harmony with the Church’s teachings but encourages the client to flout those teachings anyways, then I would say the Mormon therapist is perpetrating spiritual and professional abuse. To the extent that the therapist is encouraging the client to abandon their value base, it may even be malpractice under applicable professional certification/licensing standards. —If the Mormon therapist is approaching each and every Mormon client with the mindset that “I’m going to lead you out of the Church unless you expressly and repeatedly tell me you want to stay in”—as a practical matter, it would be hard to impose a membership council for that; but I’d say the therapist absolutely deserved one.

Emma Woodhouse, LDS therapist—letting clients make up their own minds since 1815

From Christopher Cunningham, who used to publish articles at 3H: My informal survey asked respondents if their therapists ever made suggestions that they felt were outside the boundaries of the Church’s teachings. Of the 72 respondents who said that they chose a Latter-day Saint therapist specifically so they would not provide advice or treatment outside the boundaries of the gospel, over half of them (51%) said their therapist made recommendations they believed to be outside of gospel boundaries. https://publicsquaremag.org/health/are-latter-day-saint-therapists-meeting-their-clients-expectations/

Umm, what do these sources who have such inflexible notions of “gender”, have to say about our nation’s assistant “secretary of health” who has [had?] male genitalia and a Y chromosome passing himself off as a “woman”, wearing skirts and demanding we call him “Rachel” as while insisting that chemical castration of children is a medically necessary and appropriate procedure. Make up your minds, kids. Gender is either irrelevant, or it’s not.

I’d be interested in a reference for the Elder Packer business. I frankly have some problems with Quinn for the way he acted like he was a martyr to intellectual freedom when there were more prosaic issues underlying his excommunication; but it would probably be somewhat churlish of me to go into much more detail at a time like this . . .

Our temple (Mount Timp) went to 2-B in the last week or two. Within 48 hours their baptism appointments were booked through the end of June.

Quinn marched to his own drumbeat, for sure. I hope he finds peace.

I don’t know that I’d call it a “public health” issue. If we have a population of 100 blacks and 900 whites, and 200 vaccines to go around—from a statistical/epidemiological standpoint, I don’t know that it matters *which* 200 people get the vaccine. Any way you slice it, you’re going to wind up with 20% immunity. Now, I’d agree that it’s certainly an equitable issue if a disproportionate share of vaccines is consumed by folks of any race. But I would worry about a CDC that is so obsessive about reserving at least 10% of vaccine doses for the right group that significant quantities of the vaccine wind up going unused; or about a CDC-imposed regimen that says “yes, you are at this clinic and you are ill and the clinic has the cure sitting on the shelf, but they cannot give it to you because of the color of your skin”; or about a CDC that destroys whatever’s left of the market-based health care system that we have in favor of a command-style system that is less effective for most Americans than what preceded it. I’d like to see the CDC (and everyone, really) focus on genuinely improving the parts of the system that need it without wrecking the parts that are working well; rather than papering over the issues by trying to redistribute the suffering more “equitably”. But the latter approach tends to be much easier than the former, and my suspicion is that the CDC, and government in general, will tend to move primarily in that direction.

Godless, thanks for that link. I doubt we’d agree as to the remedy (and the degree to which some of the disparities are solely race-based or merely reflections of broader class differences); but the statistics in the article are troubling.

Always hang out with fat people . . . You may need them, later.

I love that LA City is now going to investigate Kroger for daring to close its deficit-running stores.

1. For bishops—I find that depends on me more than them. A bishop can do as much as I’m willing to let him do. 2. For judges—Umm . . . usually?

I go to bishops for healing, and to judges for justice.

“. . . He was told, ‘if you wish, It can catch you a fish— And then you’ll be ready for Lent’.”

1. I had never caught that before. I’d be inclined to take it literally in the absence of good reason to reject it. (Yes, I’m aware that Exodus only mentions Moses stretching out his arm; I see little reason why it couldn’t be both.) 2. I don’t know that Nephi is presuming to modify or supplement the Book of Exodus’s account here. Exodus itself is sufficiently vague as to Pharoah‘s own fate that DeMille’s The Ten Commandments had him surviving the debacle at the Red Sea. Whatever archaeology, literary analysis, or other scholarship has been able to divine or postulate about the crossing of the Red Sea or Pharoah’s fate, I don’t think the BoM really seeks to engage with that conversation (except, I suppose, that its narrative does seem incompatible with the “sea of reeds” business that secularists keep pushing).

Parliament read the story of Amalickiah in the Book of Mormon and decided it wasn’t a good idea to just let any schmuck who married a queen, become the king.

Smackdowns to both the hard left and the hard right; and comeuppance to me over my doom-and-gloomism regarding this country’s future . . .

. . . to be announced by a resurrected Porter Rockwell, I presume?

In D&C 17, the modifier about being “given to the brother of Jared on the mount” applies only to the Urim and Thummim (see Ether 3:23). The plates, breastplate, and sword were never possessed by the brother of Jared. Author Don Bradley has floated the possibility that the Sword of Laban may have originated with Joseph (son of Israel) and that the contents of the stone box Joseph Smith found paralleled the items kept in the Hebrew Ark of the Covenant; but that’s all (reasonably well-informed) speculation.

For the purposes of this particular section that conclusion would be misleading. This section is drawing a distinction between “angel” and “god”; but it’s more of a rhetorical distinction than a theological/definitional one. The point of verses 16-19 is that, amongst all who are ultimately redeemed by Jesus Christ, those who do not enter and keep the new and everlasting covenant of marriage (v 16) will be directed in the work of saving souls by (“ministering for”) those who do enter and keep that covenant. “Angel” in this context is simply a catch-all term to describe people who attained salvation but not exaltation. As blessed and holy as their final state is; they have neither spouse, nor continuation of seed, nor any thrones or dominions. But in other sections of scripture and LDS discourse, “angel” and “god” can be used interchangeably. We refer, for example, to “angels” like Moroni and Gabriel and Michael (the latter two of whom we equate respectively with Noah and Adam) without making any inference about their somehow having failed to attain eternal marriage or godhood; and indeed Adam is our liturgical archetype for the marital covenant itself. So, we can’t really develop a consistent, narrow, precise definition for the word “angel”; because the scriptures aren’t that consistent or precise linguistically.

The bolded portion, of course, is the key phrase; along with having values like self-sufficiency and free speech and rule of law and some measure of gender equality. It’s fine to come to America to make your fortune. But it’s a problem to come to America and expect someone else to make your fortune—or to give no thought about “fortune” at all beyond the fact that “la ayuda” is better to the north of the Rio Grande than it is to the south of it—or to get here and become a willing pawn of demagogues and race-baiters and crypto-Stalinists.

Unless you endorse a “heartland” model of the Book of Mormon, it’s difficult to equate “this land” in the BOM with “the 2021 territorial boundaries of the political construct known as the United States of America”. 3 Nephi 20-21 makes it clear that in the last days the descendants of the Lamanites will make life very unpleasant for the impenitent descendants of the Gentiles who migrated to the Western Hemisphere. I would agree that modern US border troubles and general ethnic tensions between Latino and non-Latino Americans are probably a part of that general phenomena. I’m not sure it’s accurate to suggest that they are one and the same thing, that the 2021 immigrants’ motives are fundamentally good or bad, or that God is irrevocably on the side of the immigrants (or “invaders”, if you will).

Good gravy, man. Are you, like, secretly enslaving Israelites or something? The Man Upstairs seems to have it in for your family this year . . .

In my view: We generally understand that the plan of salvation was primarily an instructional/rehabilitative exercise; it is becoming increasingly singular to me that we so often distill the Atonement down into terms of crime and punishment. To me, “Justice” isn’t just some abstract notion of behaviorally-linked credits and debits that attaches to a particular perpetrator and which officious third parties with a positive balance can breeze in and arbitrarily declare “paid in full”. “Justice”, in its fullest sense, has to do with the perpetrator’s reconciliation to the aggrieved parties, and to the God who healed the perpetrator’s victims and offers to heal the perpetrator himself. Where there is no reconciliation—repentance—there is no justice; no matter how deeply a third party may have voluntarily suffered on the perpetrator’s behalf. Christ, to my mind, absolutely did suffer for the sins of everyone whether they accept His offering or not—if He didn’t, then a damned soul might legitimately argue that “the fix was in” from the beginning and that they never really had a chance at salvation (it’s the same reason Adam and Eve had to be created in a perfect state and then voluntarily fall; rather than being created as fallen creatures from the get-go). But Christ’s suffering itself has no practical benefit for us unless or until it draws us to Him and we accept that suffering—“when thou shalt make His soul an offering for sin, He shall see His seed”. “It was done, and it was done for you,” Isaiah says—“so what are you gonna do about it?”