Counseling News from the Week of August 21, 2026
Explanation: Although I scan the Internet primarily for counseling articles, in the process I run across quotes and interesting facts that I sometimes include in these first two sections. If you’re just interested in the counseling articles, you can skip these first two sections and go directly to the section called Counseling Articles.
Interesting Quotes
“We show who we are by what we do.”
Jun Chou
“The value of a sentiment is the amount of sacrifice you are prepared to make for it.”
John Galsworthy, "Windows"
"Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it isn’t going away."
Elvis Presley
"If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."
George Orwel
“To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, remove things every day.”
Lao Tzu, "Tao Te Ching"
"Not taking a risk is a risk."
Robert Redford
"Laughter is our safety valve that's going to keep us going. Laughter puts years on your life."
Jerry Lewis
Fascinating Facts
Mark David Hall | Author, Did America Have a Christian Founding?
In his book Hall asserts that George Washington, 1789, established Thanksgiving Day and that only a minority of the Founders, were deists.
Hall gives much evidence that America’s founders were Christians, closer in their beliefs to modern theism than to modern deism, even though some historians have called them deists. For support of his assertion, he shows how the Constitution, the doctrine of the separation of powers, the recognition that slavery was wrong, religious liberty for all religions and for freedom to not believe in any religion, forbidding the establishment of any national Church all draw their foundation from the Bible.
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Is Flying in a Thunderstorm Dangerous?
Since thunderstorms are frequent during Florida summers, some people wonder whether it is safe to fly if the weather looks threatening. As this article indicates, pilots usually fly around thunderstorms, keeping 10 to 20 miles between themselves and storms, and modern planes are built to withstand lightning strikes. Most planes are struck by lightning twice a year with no damage. So fly when you need to.
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The skinniest house in the U.S. is a historic ‘spite house.’
The skinniest house in the U.S. is only 7.5 feet wide. It was built by a brickmaker (1) to spite carriage owners who would try to drive their carriages between his house and the next, scraping the paint on his home and (2) to discourage loiterers who would gather in the alley. Although it is only 7.5 feet wide, it is a functional house and one family lived in it for 25 years.
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Counseling Articles
Enhancing Women’s Sexual Pleasure by Understanding New Mapping of the Vagina
Understanding of the vagina has not been studied nearly as much as research into the penis until recently, but recent mapping of the vagina has revealed many things not previously widely known. For many years we thought the clitoris was a small nubbin of tissue at the front of the vagina, and much male pleasuring, many times for a lifetime, centered exclusively on it. But new 3D mapping shows that the clitoris has an extensive network of five sets of nerves that wrap around the vagina, so stimulation of the internal walls of the vagina may also bring sexual pleasure. This is probably why g-spot stimulation is also pleasurable, and for some women can also bring a different kind of orgasm, sometimes accompanied by “squirting,” which is not urine as some women fear, but an ejaculation of seminal fluid as with males. Some women like the g-spot and vaginal walls to be palpated, some prefer them to be massaged in a back-and-forth motion, and some like circular motions.
Because it is located so deep in the vagina, some of the deepest nerves may innervate the posterior fornix. Most men probably never realize it is there because it is at the very back of the vagina, but women whose husband’s look for it and stimulate it may find it produces extra pleasure.
Women who have had hysterectomies or vaginal reconstructive surgery may not have all these sensory locations left, but most couples will find that there are more sites of sexual enjoyment inside the vagina than they were previously aware of. And most couples will, or already have, discovered that spending time enhancing their partner’s sexual enjoyment ultimately increases their own as well. For those of you who work with couples, sharing this new information with couples can increase their sexual enjoyment of each other.
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When Ideology Divides Families, Can Broken Bonds Be Mended?
This article is about a trend that is occurring in some families. These are not families broken by physical or mental abuse, but by ideological differences.
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Bipolar Paranoia Symptoms: Signs, Examples, and When to Get Help
Paranoid symptoms can occur in several disorders, not just bipolar disorder, but it does occur with some regularity in manic and depressive episodes (however, it may also occur during hypomanic or rather stable times). This brief article by Tanya Hvilitizky, who has lived with bipolar disorder for a few decades, is a well-balanced article about the different disorders that can cause paranoia, and a good plan for how to deal with it when it appears.
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A Cautionary Nordic Tale: How Cohabitation Reform Reduced Marriage and Fertility in Finland
Finland tried to make it easier for cohabiting couples to have children and then separate if things did not go well, but instead their effort resulted in both reductions in marriage rates and reductions in fertility rates.
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From Coping to Compulsion: How Screens Shape Young Men's Lives
This research looked at how social media use, specifically on-line gambling, pornography use, and video games affected young men’s feelings of psychological healthiness versus demoralization and their feelings of loneliness. While these activities frequently began as means of helping young people cope with life, researchers found that involvement in on-line gambling, pornography use and video gaming eventually increased feelings of both demoralization and loneliness.
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Rule Number One for Dating: Is This Person Marriageable?
While in early dates young people may go out with someone else just to have fun, as they date longer, they tend to view potential dates from the perspective of whether the person is marriage material for them. And men and women generally have different things they view as most important.
For women, a “marriageable” man is someone who treats women well, doesn’t walk away from difficult arguments, is able to forgive, and can be a friend. For men, they were more likely to walk away from a woman if they handled arguments badly as a couple. But in what seems to contradict the previous sentence, they were also more likely than women to walk away from arguments.
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The Gender War is Real and Goes Far Beyond the Web
Although some men are becoming more involved fathers and some women are experiencing more flexibility in their work and lives, this author points out that for many other men and women, the gender war is still real and showing itself in multiple ways. If you work with young men or young women, I think you will find his insights will give you helpful information about their struggles.
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Finding My Voice: One Woman's Path to Healing from Sexual Abuse
This woman suffered emotional abuse from both her mother and her grandmother. Then, as a four-year-old, her mother’s boyfriend began sexually abusing her repeatedly. Later in childhood she experienced sexual abuse by a babysitter’s husband. Then as a young adult she was raped. She describes the effects these experiences had on her psyche and self-esteem.
She describes her experience in adulthood as she’s been in the process of healing (she still views herself in that process). But the fact that she identifies herself as a survivor is a testament to the ability of the human spirit to deal with even such a series of traumatic events.
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Desperate Housewives: Are Most Stay-at-Home Parents Depressed and Overmedicated?
Some popular articles suggest that stay-at-home mothers are depressed, desperate, and possibly overmedicated. While it is true that being at the home with young children is stressful, the research finds that in general stay-at-home mothers are less likely to depressed or suicidal than working mothers, less likely to use prescription or non-prescription drugs or drink wine than working women.
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Child Care Policy Should Serve Children, Not Just Adults
Several countries, states, and cities (e.g., New York) have politicians, including Democratic Socialist candidates, who advocate universal childcare for young children to allow mothers to work. While that approach does seem to have some advantages for adults (raising young children is stressful), what is the effect on young children?
What the research reveals is that children do best when they develop strong attachments with primary caregivers during the early years of life. When children spent 30 hours per week in typical childcare facilities rather than with primary caregivers they “had three times the rate of social-emotional difficulties, including lower social competence, higher externalizing behavior, and more conflict with teachers and peers. These effects persisted through elementary school, and by adolescence appeared as impulsivity, risk-taking, and substance use. They remained after controlling program quality, maternal education, family income, and child temperament. Strikingly, time in non-parental group care, maternal education, family income, and child temperament. Strikingly, time in non-parental group care predicted behavior problems more strongly than family income did.”
Some children do benefit from high-quality childcare, particularly those from low income, less stable family situations. But clearly, before we advocate universal childcare on a wider scale we need to pay attention to this research.
Much as we will miss the interesting debates former White House Press secretary Karoline Leavitt had with the press, this research says that she made the right choice for her children.
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Family Structure Is Key to Student Success
Many governmental and educational agencies only capture family data such as race, ethnicity, sex and poverty. But recent research finds that children raised in “intact” families (in which the biological or adoptive parents are together and married) are far more likely to thrive in school and life than are their peers from other households. We find that children in non-intact households—where children are living with stepfamilies, cohabitating parents, single parents, or foster or kin-based families such as in grandparent-led homes—are 13% less likely to receive A’s and B’s than those raised in an intact, married-parent home, 47% more likely to have their parents contacted for problems at school, and more than twice as likely to be depressed.”
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Demoralized But Not Defeated: What 2,000 Young Men Told IFS About Their Lives
In 2026 the Institute for Family Studies released the first results of their interviews with 2,000 young men. These results are too complex to summarize but are very important. I encourage you to read this article in its entirety.
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Advice for Recent Graduates Headed into Fall
This article contains some excellent advice for high school and college graduates heading into life after high school or college. Many graduates put their full energy and emphasis into developing a career, without having balanced attention to developing other parts of their lives, such as relationships (marriage and otherwise) and development of their spiritual lives.
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Top General Practitioner in Great Britain: I would ban the label ADHD’
This is from a British newspaper, the Telegraph, so you can’t read it without a subscription, so I’ll summarize its major points. Dr. Iona Heath, the former head of the former president of the Royal College of General Practitioners has said that despite the popular belief that people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder are “wired differently”, “there’s no evidence that the structure of the brain is any different in the people being diagnosed”.
The counterargument is that there’s no difference in the brains of people with depression, dyslexia, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder either, and yet those conditions surely exist.
Dr. Heath believes that ADHD is a social construct rather than a medical disorder, and she is against the practice of placing children on stimulants. Stimulants do in some cases change the child’s appetite and mood.
Some families are experimenting with a different solution such as stopping medication for several weeks, moving the child to a healthier diet by things like cutting out processed food, reducing their screen time and introducing more outdoor activities and yoga. In some cases these solutions appear to work, at least temporarily. In other cases the family decides to have the child go back on medication. The issue will continue to be debated. One solution might be to recognize that some children can be helped by these alternative approaches, and others may do best with medication.
This may be more of an issue in Great Britain than here in the U.S. Another article the next day said that many girls in Great Britain are self-diagnosing themselves with ADHD, going to doctors, getting a prescription for stimulants, and never filling those prescriptions.
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Detrans
A 20-minute video that tells the stories of several young people who were told by therapists, often after one short interview, that transitioning would solve all their problems. These young people did begin the transitioning process, discovered that it was not solving all their problems, and now have detransitioned back.
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The K-12 Techlash Moment
A few years ago many schools were embracing the idea of giving Chromebooks to every student. Now many schools and states are rethinking whether this was a good policy.
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How to Forgive Someone Who Isn’t Sorry
Christians know we are called to forgive. But how do we forgive someone who shows no signs that they’re sorry. Russell Moore has some wise counsel for people facing this that might be helpful to some of your clients.
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I hope you enjoyed these articles and have a nice weekend!
Henry Virkler