Counseling News from the Week of September 11, 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
“No man was ever wise by chance.”
Seneca the Younger, "Letters to Lucius"
"When you start a new trail equipped with courage, strength, and conviction, the only thing that can stop you is you."
Ruby Bridges
"It has always been easy to hate and destroy. To build and to cherish is much more difficult."
Queen Elizabeth II
“Some people regard discipline as a chore. For me, it is a kind of order that sets me free to fly.”
Julie Andrews
Fascinating Facts
Abraham Lincoln had Only About One Year of Formal Schooling
Although Abraham Lincoln was quite good with words, he only had about 10 months (approximately one year) of formal schooling and educated himself by reading books. He grew up in rural Kentucky and Indiana, where schools only happened when a teacher was available.
Click here to read the full article
Who Really Discovered America?
Although many of us were taught that Christopher Columbus discovered America, as this historical article points out, there were several other groups, some hundreds of years before Columbus and some thousands of years before Columbus, who came to America before him.
Click here to read the full article
Hidden ‘switch’ explains coffee’s healthy-aging benefits
Coffee has been linked to liver health, keeping one’s brain sharp, balancing your blood sugar, balancing the amount of visceral fat and muscle our body stores (important for maintaining good health and stamina) and other medical and psychological benefits. Until recently, scientists couldn’t explain why these benefits occurred. Recently researchers uncovered the possible reason why.
Click here to read the full article
OpenAI Says It Has Cracked One of Math’s ‘Millennium Problems’
This is from the New York Times so you probably won’t be able to read it without a subscription, so here’s a summary. OpenAI says it has cracked a collection of important unanswered math questions about fluid mechanics that mathematicians had previously been unable to solve.
Click here to read the full article
Counseling Articles
Are You Living Like the Gifts Have Ceased?
Christians are divided on whether the charismatic gifts ceased during or slightly after New Testament times. While most evangelicals continue to believe in other aspects of God’s continuing work in our lives, this author argues that many of them are living as functional cessationists, e.g. not praying as if God answers prayer, not praying for divine wisdom to work through problems, etc. Read the article and see what you think.
Click here to read the full article
Young Men Against the Individualist Ethic
This isn’t a title that immediately inspires interest, but if you are a counselor who works with young men, I encourage you to read it. If young men are solid Christians, they hopefully know that they can root their identity in Christ and his promises to them. But if they are not believers, there is much less they have to ground their identity in, and much greater opportunity to make their life decisions on something more transitory (and likely not fulfilling in the long run). If you work with young people, especially young men, I encourage you to read this article for an understanding of what their experiential life is like.
Click here to read the full article
Wendell Berry, Thanks for Calling Us Back Home
Probably most of us have not heard of Wendell Berry, who passed away on August 31, but this article introduces us to some of his thoughts. He is called “the prophet of the extraordinary beauty of the ordinary.” He reminds us of the beauty of many things that we ordinarily take for granted and do not pause to be grateful for, such as “Membership in a community. Marriage. Home. Friendship. Family ties. Physical place. Working with our hands. Sitting on the porch. Cultivating the earth. Belonging to one another.”
Two quotes from Berry found in the article: “I do not believe that there is anything better to do than to make one’s marriage and household, whether one is a man or a woman.”
And “What if they endured and suffered through so many years because, even failing each other, they loved each other?”
I think his writings remind us (and we could use it to remind our clients) of the extraordinary beauty all around us, and the many things we can be thankful for that we often take for granted and do not realize they are blessings.
Click here to read the full article
Hope for Girls: Resist Emotional Detachment, Believe in Real Love
Girls going through adolescence have long had to deal with insecurities, but Generation Z is being confronted with a new reality, a world that promises community, but under the surface is only a superficial rather than a genuine community. The author encourages young women about how to begin to develop that genuine community, and has a book which I imagine, describes this process further.
Click here to read the full article
Building a Family-first Digital Economy: New IFS Policy Brief
This title does not seem very inviting, but the content is worthwhile reading. The article makes the point that digital technology is causing us, both young men and women, but also older adults, to replace genuine relationships with counterfeit communities. But it also argues that corporations and consumers are co-producers of this material, and as parents in various countries are doing, limiting young people’s access to digital technologies such as smartphones and the internet in the hopes that their children will fill their time with healthier activities (e.g., sports and working and studying) and real relationships. The article describes the new Institute for Family Studies (IFS) policy statement that describes this policy in more detail.
Click here to read the full article
Do Premarital Sex Partners Still Reduce Marital Quality? An Update
This author has been studying premarital sex for many years. Premarital sex happened before the 1960s, but premarital sex partners usually eventually married each other. Then in the 60s and until COVID premarital sex with multiple partners, often not leading to marriage for many of them and with no intention of the sexual partner becoming a marriage partner, became a frequent pattern. Research in this period found that women with five or more premarital partners declined significantly in rating their marriages as “very happy.”
With COVID the number of sexual activities declined, and then post-COVID there has been a decline in premarital activities with partners (the amount of activity with clones is not addressed here).
The author indicates we now see a trend toward “promiscuity-lite,” where many couples occasionally have extramarital sexual relationships, but they are not continuously promiscuous. High promiscuity has been decreasing for men but increasing for women.
Promiscuity-lite does not seem to be affecting the number of men and women who rate their marriages as “very happy.” There appears to be a growing acceptance of promiscuity lite. [HV note: For many traditional individuals, sexual infidelity still causes major trauma for the partner. It also is grounds for a biblical divorce, but forgiveness is also a biblical option if the wandering partner repudiates the “promiscuity-lite” thinking and commits to being sexually faithful from that point on.]
For highly promiscuous men and women (20 or more lifetime partners), there seems to be a difference between men and women. For highly promiscuous men, this does not seem to affect the percentage of men who rate their marriages as “very happy.” For highly promiscuous women, this does seem to be more common in women in unhappy marriages. The article does not address whether marital unhappiness causes the high promiscuity, or high promiscuity makes the person less satisfied in their marriage (or whether guilt or some other factor may be causing this marital unhappiness). The author does include the caveat that these conclusions are based on limited data and that studies should be updated in the future.
Click here to read the full article
The Religious Freedom Showdown at a Nude Spa in Seattle
You may not be able to read this unless you have a subscription to Christianity Today, so I’ll summarize its primary points. This spa, which has been run for two generations by a Korean Christian family, does traditional Korean spa treatments, which include full-body massages in the nude and there are no towels or privacy screens. Only biological women have attended in the past. Now transgender males who have not medically transitioned are claiming that because they identify as females they should be allowed to use the showers and participate in all the other activities alongside biological women. The woke city of Seattle is backing the transgenders’ argument, but the Christian owners of the spa are refusing to let them attend on grounds that it violates their Christian beliefs. Only time will tell how the issue will be resolved.
Click here to read the full article
9 Ways to Reset Your Body Clock for Better Sleep
People with bipolar disorder are more prone than the average person to small changes in life (e.g. daylight-saving time, airline travel across time zones, body changes) may cause disruptions in their sleep patterns. Here are 9 suggestions offered by sleep experts. Most of these could help anyone who has difficulty sleeping, whether they have bipolar disorder.
Click here to read the full article
The brain health damage you can reverse in midlife
This is from a British newspaper, the Telegraph, which you can’t read without a subscription, so I’ll summarize its major points. The brain has neuroplasticity, the ability to repair itself. There are two kinds of neuroplasticity: structural, where the brain creates new neurons and neural connections, and functional, where new sections of the brain take over functions that were previously done be other sections (such as after stroke damage or trauma).
To reverse brain health damage that has occurred in midlife, do these things:
- 1. Stop drinking.
- 2. Get moving—exercising.
- 3. Learn something genuinely difficult.
- 4. Quit smoking.
- 5. Feed your brain by losing excess weight and starting something like the MIND diet, which combines elements of the Mediterranean and DASH diet.
- Click here to read the full article
‘Isn’t This the Carpenter?’
Christianity Today allows free access to one article per month for people who don’t have a subscription. Since this week we are honoring Labor Day this article seems appropriate.
Although Jesus spent nearly half his earthly life working as a carpenter we know hardly anything about those years. But his example and the rest of Scripture (God creating the universe in six creative periods and then resting, etc.) illustrates that God honors our earthly efforts. Some of us have felt God’s blessings on our work life throughout our lives, but some of our clients may view their work life in a very different way. This article reminds us to view our work life (even something as menial as being a toilet cleaner) as a gift that we can be thankful for and we can use to witness to God’s goodness.
Click here to read the full article
How Safe Are Tattoos?
This is from the New York Times so you won’t be able to read it without a subscription. About 50% of the population has gotten tattoos. Some people (it is estimated that between 12 and 50%) have immediate skin irritation and about 10% develop infections, but these usually are temporary. Because tattoos inject a small amount of heavy metals into the skin experts say it is impossible to conclude whether tattoos are harmful or not. I’m including this information because some of your clients (or your clients’ parents) may ask you this question.
Click here to read the full article
Journaling Can Change Your Brain—Here Are 4 Ways to Do It
One of my favorite bloggers, Makai Elias Calles, writes a brief article about ways that journaling can help all of us process the things that happen to us in life. Good reading!
Click here to read the full article
Is Porn Quietly Rewriting What Young People Think Sex Should Look Like?
This is an interesting 24-minute interview with Dr. Rena Malik, who is a medical doctor working with college-aged students, usually 18-22, who talks about the sexual questions that students come to her with. While most everyone is having less sex than people generally had in previous generations, it seems that a large percentage of young persons’ sexual behavior is influenced by what they see in porn.
She discusses the fact that 75% to 80% of women found that they were choked during sex, sometimes more than once in one sexual encounter, and that they were often afraid rather than enjoying the experience. They were frequently afraid of saying they didn’t like these things for fear of being labelled “square.”
And men were often doing unhealthy things to themselves (e.g., looksmaxing) to try to be more attractive to the opposite gender. And the relative anonymity of dating apps and desire to fit in results in people not being honest with each other so the behavior each sees in the other is designed to show what they believe is expected rather than a true expression of who they are.
If you work with Gen Z young secular men and women you may want to listen to this interview to understand what the experiential world of some of these young people is, and the challenges they face.
Click here to read the full article
Is Multitasking Bad for Your Brain?
Many people believe they can effectively multitask and get more done than if they focus on more than one task at a time. But what does research and cognitive science tell us?
Medical research and cognitive science conclude that the belief that one can effectively multitask is a myth. When we multitask our brains have less precise images of each task, so we make more mistakes. And the time it takes to switch from thinking about one task to thinking about the next means it takes us longer to complete everything. So give up the myth of multitasking and focus on completing one task at a time. (I think this article primarily is asking about multitasking with two cognitive projects at the same time. When a person has developed a behavioral habit that they can do without thinking, they may be able to use that time to think through a cognitive problem at the same time.)
Click here to read the full article
Have a wonderful weekend!
Henry Virkler