Is being Sexologist okay?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Question
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
What the church and other monogenist sects propose is simply biologically impossible.
Then you’re too invested in the arrogance of “must be right cause scientist said so”

Some of what scientists almost swore was true historically has been upside down.

On the basis of evolution, we only what we know mostly from digging in Africa. But some Asian anthropologists may tell you
their continent may hold a different story.
 
I would not recommend this career path. It’s fraught with problems, and very little reward. You will encounter so many sexual liberals trying to teach you things that contradict the faith. You will hear that masturbation is not a sin, that’s it’s healthy. Even if you found all the gems of truth, and dismissed all the nonsense, you would be hauled before a human rights tribunal if you tried to limit your practice to just Catholic married heterosexuals. Even if by chance, you got around this problem, you’d still be nosing into people’s private lives. I would under no circumstances recommend this career path.
 
Last edited:
As a general principle, I could see much use for someone, in that faithful Catholics and others who hold similar moral beliefs could also speak to and feel comfortable that their own moral beliefs are respected. Too often I have seen or heard the opposite problem from Christians seeking treatment for various ills - that refusing to engage in behaviors such as masturbation marked them as “repressed” or “uncooperative” to practitioners who accept such things, and that they couldn’t find someone willing to work with them under their moral framework.
 
I wonder what the content of counseling session would be with a Catholic Sexologist and a same sex couple. Would the sexologist be able to empathize with the couple?
 
As a general principle, I could see much use for someone, in that faithful Catholics and others who hold similar moral beliefs could also speak to and feel comfortable that their own moral beliefs are respected. Too often I have seen or heard the opposite problem from Christians seeking treatment for various ills - that refusing to engage in behaviors such as masturbation marked them as “repressed” or “uncooperative” to practitioners who accept such things, and that they couldn’t find someone willing to work with them under their moral framework.
It’s malpractice for a health/mental health practitioner to prescribe specific behaviors that the patient believes are immoral, just as it would be malpractice for a practitioner to tell a patient that he/she will go to hell if they masturbate.
 
It’s malpractice for a health/mental health practitioner to prescribe specific behaviors that the patient believes are immoral, just as it would be malpractice for a practitioner to tell a patient that he/she will go to hell if they masturbate.
More often what comes up, in my experience, is that the practitioner will want to “work on” the “hangup” the patient has.
 
40.png
frobert:
It’s malpractice for a health/mental health practitioner to prescribe specific behaviors that the patient believes are immoral, just as it would be malpractice for a practitioner to tell a patient that he/she will go to hell if they masturbate.
More often what comes up, in my experience, is that the practitioner will want to “work on” the “hangup” the patient has.
If you are saying good therapy is client-centered, I agree. I can imagine some behavioral sexologists suggesting sexual related exercises but that is walking a fine line between acceptable therapy and malpractice and it would definitely be malpractice if the patient says the behavior is against my religious beliefs.
 
Last edited:
If you are saying good therapy is client-centered, I agree. I can imagine some behavioral sexologists suggesting sexual related exercises but that is walking a fine line between acceptable therapy and malpractice and it would definitely be malpractice if the patient says the behavior is against my religious beliefs.
I haven’t personally dealt with sexologists, but I have dealt with therapists whose reaction to “this is against my religious beliefs” was to try to figure out what was going on with me psychologically that I held such a belief. More commonly I’ve also found some simply don’t know what to do - if they can’t do their usual approach because it’s against the patient’s religious beliefs they’ve just got nothing to offer.
 
This is why Catholics can’t have nice things. If we steer Catholics away from fields that might challenge their beliefs we won’t have Catholic nurses, physicians, psychiatrists, pharmacists, social workers, public school teachers, actors and other artists. A sexologist with positive exposure to TotB and other Catholic teaching would be a nice change.
 
In so many arenas, it is already very difficult for a Catholic to work. Can you work as a nurse? Maybe, but you better be prepared to talk of homosexual unions as if they are on par with God’s plan for men and women. You better advocate for birth control, and be okay with attending an abortion if no one else can, even if it goes against your beliefs.

Can you be a convenience store clerk and sell cigarettes? Not if you care about people you can’t. You’re contributing to their ill health.

Can you be a public school teacher? It will be very hard to go against the current mantras that all family structures are equally ideal. Now the hot topic is transgender students. Better make accommodations for that. Many children are allowed to live with this confusion and force everybody to play make believe.

One of the reasons I don’t join music ministry is because of the drums and guitars which sound horrible next to a beautiful piano and singers. However, like with so many things, if you hold up what is beautiful, somebody will criticize your analysis. They will say, but this guy from Africa loves to play the drum. He is happy. And the guitarist has been strumming the guitar since the 60’s. Who are you to tear them down? And therein lies the problem. They think they sound great.

Extrapolating my example to the world, you have a bunch of people in society who are happy divorcing, fornicating and whatnot, and you are basically telling them there is a better way. And guess what? They don’t agree, they don’t care, and they’re in the majority. So you can fight them or join them or try to run away from them all, which is what I do.
 
Last edited:
If you want to help people who have sexual problems, do it as a Nouthetic therapist. That is a therapy according to biblical principles. There is no school for Catholics for this, but I am looking into starting one, but knowing your faith, the bible, the teachings of the Catholic Church thoroughly will give you the foundation needed.
I wouldn’t recommend this at all. There may be issues with modern psychology, but I don’t think that means throwing it all out (which is what nouthetic counseling does). I’ve seen a lot of people say that kind of thing actually made their problems worse.
 
40.png
BroIgnatius:
If you want to help people who have sexual problems, do it as a Nouthetic therapist. That is a therapy according to biblical principles. There is no school for Catholics for this, but I am looking into starting one, but knowing your faith, the bible, the teachings of the Catholic Church thoroughly will give you the foundation needed.
I wouldn’t recommend this at all. There may be issues with modern psychology, but I don’t think that means throwing it all out (which is what nouthetic counseling does). I’ve seen a lot of people say that kind of thing actually made their problems worse.
Sorry, my friend, but you really do not know what you are talking about. The problem with secular counseling is that it includes practices that are contrary to the faith. For example, in secular sex counseling masturbation is encouraged. Patrick Carnes, the top dog in this field, even says that without masturbation a person cannot grow into a balanced adult.

Anytime anyone, including a traditional therapist or psychiatrist, uses biblical principles, that is Nouthetic counseling. One of the top psychiatrist in the country, Dr. Richard Gallagher, uses biblical principles, and one of the leading psychologist, Dr. Paul C. Vitz, of whom I am personally acquainted, uses biblical principles.

In fact, all Christian counselors who call themselves Christian counselors use biblical principle. These people may not use the term Nouthetic, but a rose by any other name is still a rose.

If biblical counseling made things worse for people, there can be only three possible reasons:
  1. the client was not open to the message of God and His truth
  2. the counselor held views he thinks are biblical but are not (many Protestants would be in this category)
  3. the counselor was not a good counselor
But, saying that biblical principles made things worse for people is to say that God made things worse for people. Nope. Not possible.

I have some 45 years experience as a counselor, and am in the planning stages of starting a school for people who wish to learn this is a concerted way. The only time I have seen biblical principled based counseling not work is when people did not want to change their lives to conform to the Christ-life. They wanted, rather, to do things their way, or not give up their favorite sin, and other reasons of that sort. Or when items 2 or 3 is true.

There is no biblical-based counselor I know who knows what they are doing that throws out the secular psychology baby with the bath water. And many of these people are traditionally trained therapist. Father Groeschel, whom I was personally acquainted, was one of those.

There is much that can inform us from the fields of psychology, psychiatry, medicine, sociology, and anthropology. And, as I mentioned there are many that come from the traditional mental health fields who incorporate biblical and faith based principles in their practices.

I am not sure what your qualifications are to “not recommend this”. Certainly, anecdotal information is inadequate to form any opinions.
 
Last edited:
There is no biblical-based counselor I know who knows what they are doing that throws out the secular psychology baby with the bath water. And many of these people are traditionally trained therapist. Father Groeschel, whom I was personally acquainted, was one of those.
I’d say 95% of Biblical-based counselors, if not more, that I have been familiar with do exactly that - the whole point of their practice is that they don’t use traditional psychiatry. I’ve also seen a lot of “Biblical-based counselors” who use the idea of sin to disparage mental illness and put blame and burdens on people that can’t manage. For example, when I was dealing with serious PTSD, telling me to “trust God” and “don’t be lazy” didn’t help. Because even though it may have looked like that was going on, I literally didn’t have the ability to do that - I couldn’t just motivate myself out of bed because I had a mental illness - but people using Biblical principles would say I had problems because I refused to give up my sin of laziness. It’s the mental health equivalent of people who take the idea of laying on of hands and anointing with oil as the full treatment for illness.
 
40.png
BroIgnatius:
There is no biblical-based counselor I know who knows what they are doing that throws out the secular psychology baby with the bath water. And many of these people are traditionally trained therapist. Father Groeschel, whom I was personally acquainted, was one of those.
I’d say 95% of Biblical-based counselors, if not more, that I have been familiar with do exactly that - the whole point of their practice is that they don’t use traditional psychiatry. I’ve also seen a lot of “Biblical-based counselors” who use the idea of sin to disparage mental illness and put blame and burdens on people that can’t manage. For example, when I was dealing with serious PTSD, telling me to “trust God” and “don’t be lazy” didn’t help. Because even though it may have looked like that was going on, I literally didn’t have the ability to do that - I couldn’t just motivate myself out of bed because I had a mental illness - but people using Biblical principles would say I had problems because I refused to give up my sin of laziness. It’s the mental health equivalent of people who take the idea of laying on of hands and anointing with oil as the full treatment for illness.
Again, not true to the whole. I am sorry for your personal experiences, but your personal experiences cannot be applied to the whole.

You experience appears to fall under reasons 2 or 3 for why there are problems.

A proper counselors would have referred you to a psychiatrist if you had a mental illness.

And your 95% figure is ridiculous. “I’ve also seen a lot” oh. how many? 2, 5, 10 out of the tens of thousands of counselors out there?

Again, your entire perception of this is not accurate to the whole.
 
Last edited:
If we had to take a statistical sampling in order to make any conclusion most of us would never be able to make decisions.

You suggested training in Biblical (Nouethic) counseling instead of getting proper psychology training. That’s what I’m objecting to - that would be throwing out psychology because if OP followed your advice they would have no training in proper psychology and the psychological reasons for sexual issues.
 
If we had to take a statistical sampling in order to make any conclusion most of us would never be able to make decisions.

You suggested training in Biblical (Nouethic) counseling instead of getting proper psychology training. That’s what I’m objecting to - that would be throwing out psychology because if OP followed your advice they would have no training in proper psychology and the psychological reasons for sexual issues.
Again, with the rash judgments. I have done no such thing as to throw out traditional psychological training or practice, and have mentioned several Ph.D. psychologist as an example. Again and Again, do not allow your personal experience to cloud the issue.
 
Again, with the rash judgments. I have done no such thing as to throw out traditional psychological training or practice, and have mentioned several Ph.D. psychologist as an example. Again and Again, do not allow your personal experience to cloud the issue.
I’m allowing the part where you said “don’t study being a sexologist” to cloud my judgement. How can you practice helping people with sexual issues in a way that uses modern psychology, without studying sexology? Unless you have access to some rare personal training, that’s not how that works.

If you’re using real psychology, you’re a sexologist., even if you’re a Christian one.
 
Last edited:
40.png
BroIgnatius:
Again, with the rash judgments. I have done no such thing as to throw out traditional psychological training or practice, and have mentioned several Ph.D. psychologist as an example. Again and Again, do not allow your personal experience to cloud the issue.
I’m allowing the part where you said “don’t study being a sexologist” to cloud my judgement. How can you practice helping people with sexual issues in a way that uses modern psychology, without studying sexology? Unless you have access to some rare personal training, that’s not how that works.
Sir, do not know what a sexologist does. Nearly all counseling about sexual issues are NOT done by a sexologists, but by mental health people, which sexologists are not. Sexologist are researchers who use methods and promote solutions that are considered mortal sin in the Catholic Church.

And I received some training for the number two experts in the world. So, I am familiar with this. A psychologist who offers help in sexual issues, is not ipso facto a sexologist. Again, you are really speaking to issues to which you have no knowledge
 
Last edited:
40.png
BroIgnatius:
If you want to help people who have sexual problems, do it as a Nouthetic therapist. That is a therapy according to biblical principles. There is no school for Catholics for this, but I am looking into starting one, but knowing your faith, the bible, the teachings of the Catholic Church thoroughly will give you the foundation needed.
I wouldn’t recommend this at all. There may be issues with modern psychology, but I don’t think that means throwing it all out (which is what nouthetic counseling does). I’ve seen a lot of people say that kind of thing actually made their problems worse.
It makes their problems worse because the center of the therapy is somewhere else and not on the patient. In many cases the patient’s wishes, fears, hopes, etc are never considered. It’s like the hackneyed phrase, if the only tool you have is a hammer then everything looks like a nail.
 
I do this sort of counseling on an individual basis and through the Catholic Support Group for Sexual Addiction Recovery. We were the first such group on the Internet and have helped directly 1000s of people since our beginning in 1998, and 100,000s indirectly through our material.
I tied going to the cited website CSGSAR – Saint-Mike.org, but nd got this msg:
Your connection is not secure

The owner of www.saint-mike.org has configured their website improperly. To protect your information from being stolen, Firefox has not connected to this website.
 
Last edited:
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top