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I haven’t blogged in years (if I consider what I did years ago as blogging!) and have decided to give it another go in 2012. I hope to encourage healthy discussion about the interaction between Christianity and psychology, and later on, my other interest, the Chinese people! So here goes…

As a clinical psychologist who is also a Christian, I get asked a lot by friends for a recommendation for a Christian psychologist. Given that I am not doing private practice at this point in time (I work for a public hospital clinic) and that even if I were I can’t have as a client anyone that I know (that would be a ‘dual relationship’ which can impair objectivity and/or judgement of the psychologist), I try and find someone for them to refer to (although I don’t know a great deal of psychologists who are Christian so let me know if you are one!). Though technically, all clinical psychologists should be sensitive to a clients’ religious background and it shouldn’t matter that much whether they are Christian or not. Besides, the clinician’s particular branch of ‘Christianity’ may differ to yours.

Whether or not someone is seen by a Christian or non-Christian psychologist, I think the important thing is that one is able to understand how their particular problem affects, or is contributed to by, one’s religious beliefs - whether a clinician helps in that process, or you piece together the connections yourself (through talking with your pastor, friends, family). What matters is that therapy is delivered in a religiously sensitive way. It may contribute a lot or none at all. Of course, if you have a sense that your particular problem is intricately linked to your attitudes towards ‘grace’ or some other Christian doctrine or idea, then it’s probably a good idea to speak to someone who knows what you’re talking about.

If you’re thinking about seeking help, also remember…

1. Psychological therapy is not a substitute for God

Just because a Christian goes to see a psychologist, does not mean that they stop trusting in God. Going to see a psychologist doesn’t mean you’ve given up on the ’spiritual’ and traded it for the ’secular’. Like other physical problems such as having the flu, chronic health problems, or cancer, where God works through doctors, medications to heal a person physically, God can work through counsellors / psychologists to heal a person emotionally / psychologically. We can trust God AND actively seek help. Like any other stressor in life, such as having upcoming exams where we can ask God for a favourable outcome but also study hard at the same time, we can pray for emotional healing but also put into practice what the psychologist has taught in each session.

2. Struggling with a psychological problem does not mean you are a ‘weak’ Christian

Some well meaning people can advise those with emotional problems such as depression and anxiety to ‘pray more’ and ‘trust in God more’, which can come across as implying that those who are struggling don’t do it enough (they may well be). Those struggling with these issues may feel like they are not as strong as others who on the surface, seem to be happy all the time.

The predominant explanation behind ‘why you feel the way you do’ is that unhelpful beliefs and attitudes triggered off by current events and developed throughout the years (particularly when you were a child) are responsible for why you are feeling the way you do. You’ve also learnt various ways of dealing with problems, and over the years have learnt ways to cope (can be positive or negative). For example, you might have a deep seated belief that ‘I’m not good enough as a person’ which makes you feel down, and you cope with that belief by working really hard to achieve in life. A friend of yours may have a similar belief and emotion, but cope with it by consuming alcohol.

We all have different beliefs and attitudes with varying levels of ‘helpfulness’, but for some, under certain circumstances, unhelpful beliefs have been triggered and have led to their current problem. These problems can feel like a ‘test’ for your faith, as it questions the things that you know about God, yourself, the world, others; and what you experience in the world can seem to contradict what you have read in the bible. So, this does not mean you are a weak Christian, put simply, a normal person going through a hard time and struggling to cope with it due to what kinds of beliefs and coping strategies and predominated so far in life.

I hope to write more again soon, so let me know if there is anything you want me to write about!

This was a triumph.
I’m making a note here:
HUGE SUCCESS.
It’s hard to overstate my satisfaction.
[from "Still Alive", Portal]

Given the date and content of the previous post, I thought the title of this one is somewhat appropriate…

Anyway, in the five months since that post, Joyce and I got married, went to New Zealand on our honeymoon, moved into our new place and have started to settle down at our new place.

For some photos from the wedding taken by Jenny, go to her website and follow these instructions:

1. Click on either the FLASH or HTML portfolio link.
2. Click on CLIENTS down the bottom.
3. Enter as password: “wdkj090328″ (colour) or “wdkj090328bw” (black & whites)

For some photos from the honeymoon, I wouldn’t hold my breath because I haven’t really gotten around to going through them yet… requires more emotional and mental juice than I have spare at the moment.  Hopefully they’ll be done in the next few weeks.

On another note, I’ve finally signed up for World of Warcraft.  It’s great to while the hours away between the time when Joyce sleeps (she sleeps early) and when I actually feel sleepy.  It requires virtually no mental activity (at least not at my n00b level anyway), and provides just enough stimulus to not be boring.  Great for zonking out after a tiring day at work.

One thing that I’ve found interesting is that the Auction Houses in the game are a fairly close analogue to real life markets.  At the end of the day, you’re faced with the big question “How much is this worth?” (pricing).  I’ve had my account for about four weeks, and really only started paying attention to the AH for about a week or so.  I’ve written an addon to mine the AH data for analysis and so far in the 3-4 days that I’ve been “trading”, I’ve made about 300g.  Not bad for about 15 mins each day on the AH… could just be beginner’s luck

Another thing I find amusing is the almost Pavlovian “ding! grats” response.  For those who aren’t familiar, whenever someone gains a new level, they shout out “ding!” and almost always you’ll get a bunch of people who reply with “grats”.  I think I’ll try an experiment where one weekend I’ll just march into an AH (where I believe it’s impossible to level up) and just yell out “ding!” just to see what responses I get…

It’s kinda funny how time really flies when you’re having fun (or in my case, having a looming unmoveable deadline that’s quickly approaching).  I just realised that the last post that I put up was in November last year, even though I can distinctly remember writing it not too long ago… so a very belated Happy New Year shout to all you readers out there.

Anyway, thanks to an inadvertent over-consumption of caffeine during the evening, it’s now almost 2am and I’m still sitting here unable to sleep, so I’m sorting out some wedding stuff.  I’ve written some Perl/LaTeX bits and pieces to auto-generate the placecards, and the order-of-service contents.  All that’s left now is to actually get the content finalised and then it’s off to the printers.

Five weeks left and counting…

I didn’t go house hunting on Saturday… decided to go through my entire 17 GB backlog of photos in one huge sitting and do the whole cull/post-process thing.  After many hours of gimping, and several thousand photos later, I emerged relatively unscathed with the following galleries:

Grace and Chris’ Wedding

MKC 2008

Melbourne Trip

CCC Combined Houseparty 2008

Susie’s Graduation

City B&W Night Shoot

Joyce’s M Clin Psych Graduation

Peter and Winnie’s Wedding

Muso Retreat 2008

James and Bertie’s Wedding

RICE Regenerate 2008

RICE Rally 2008

Engage 2008

KT and Erica’s Wedding

Things have been pretty busy since the last post — wedding planning has stepped up a notch (i.e. we’re actually doing something now), and I’m still pretty much spending every Saturday popping into assorted open-house inspections.

Anyway, I never thought I’d come across one of these, but for one of the properties, I found this Special Condition in the contract:

The Vendor discloses that there may have occurred within or upon the property the most extreme human and/or other obscenities the Purchaser can imagine. Without limiting the scope and meaning of “obscenities”, they may include extreme acts in violation of the criminal and other law, acts of sacrilege, Satanism, hedonism, acts in abuse of culture or custom and acts calculated or likely to induce disgust, dread, horror, repugnance and/or revulsion on any scale in good men and women.  The purchaser acknowledges that it is a matter for his due diligence to exercise his own imagination for the purpose of this Special Condition.

I wonder what happened…

I recently came across this article that outlined an experiment performed by the Psychology Department of North Carolina State University.

In a nutshell, the participants were asked to watch something that mimiced loading of medical websites, and were asked questions about these sites.  Thrown in for good measure were some fake popups, and the researchers were really only interested in how the participants would respond to these popups.

Now, I haven’t actually read the full experiment and its findings, so I can only go by what the article says.  Apparently, the conclusion was that users are still clueless to popups because they’d click on them even when they’re fake.  I’ll let you read the article yourself for the gory details.

I wonder whether the researchers considered the fact that people probably cared less about malware on public university computers, than their own.  It’d be interesting to repeat the experiment, but the participants were required to view the websites on their own computer.  Would they expect to see the same “idiocy” rate?

Wow I haven’t written in such a long time. Wedding stuff is going well, it’s funny how photography was the first thing we discussed! We’ve got the deposit down for the venues (St. John’s Anglican Cathedral in Parramatta, Regal Restaurant), the ‘all-important’ wedding gown (Maggie Sotero, it was on sale! $898 :D), pre-marital retreat, and I’m looking to finalise flowers, bombonniere, invites, bridesmaid dresses this month! Not to mention getting the gift registry done. It was a huge relief to find out the other day that Myer has FINALLY got their act together with the gift registry such that you don’t have to write down every single barcode manually anymore! Phew…

There have also been other things to prepare for such as for a place to live in. Hopefully when Keith’s work releases their hold on him he will have time to look into getting us a loan. But most importantly, these past few months have been a good time to think about marriage itself, and not just the wedding. The wedding is just one day and sure, it’s an important day but I believe that one should also prepare adequately for the challenges of marriage.

From doing the pre-marital marriage inventory, Keith and I have found that our ‘growth areas’ aka weaknesses are conflict resolution, communication and something else I can’t remember. It’s been really helpful to sit down and formally think through things with an older, wiser and impartial third party. I’m thankful to God that Keith and I have many strengths together: marriage expectations, relationship roles, spiritual beliefs and leisure activities. It’s going to be interesting in our next session discussing the contribution of our family of origin into our relationship.

Please pray for us as we prepare not just for our wedding, but also for a lifetime together of commitment, love and service to one another and to our Lord. Over the months God has really hit it home that I can do nothing apart from the work of the Holy Spirit. So please pray that we would love and follow Jesus and allow the richness of that to overflow into our love for one another.

Well, it looks like the date for the wedding is set — March 28th, 2009.  I guess we should start making some efforts preparing for the big day, since there’s only eight-ish months left…

Anyway, Joyce and I recently met up with the minister who will be conducting the ceremony.  He seems like a very nice guy, and full of wisdom — he reassured us that after being in the business of marrying people for 37 years, he can run the day with his eyes closed.

One of the things that he mentioned was regarding the part where he would ask the ceremony attendees “… if anybody has any legal reasons as to why these two should not be married, please speak now or forever hold your peace.”

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Tags: wedding

I wonder how much attention transit officers pay when examining tickets.  I got approached by one this evening on my way home from work — he asked that I show him my ticket, and I gladly obliged.  I pulled out my ticket and showed it to him, he looked at it for a few seconds, nodded, then proceeded on to the next guy.

Now, this all sounds pretty normal.  However, the only problem was, I pulled out a ticket that expired a while ago by mistake.  (I really should get rid of these old tickets from my wallet…)

If the whole purpose of a revenue protection officer is to protect revenue, then these guys arn’t exactly doing a very satisfactory job.  I’ve seen plenty of times when people just walk through the barriers without a ticket, sometimes in the view of such officers and other station staff, who don’t seem to care much about it and continue chatting with their friends.

In a sense, I don’t blame them. Having read an article on SMH regarding the powers (or rather, the lack thereof) of transport officers, it must be somewhat difficult for them to do anything considering the offender has the right to walk away without being detained (and since I’m not a lawyer, I’ll just assume the article is factually correct).

Which then begs the question:  why have revenue protection officers that don’t actually have the necessary powers to do their job?