In a recent study, 50 mission boards were contacted and over 300 first-term missionary appointees were asked to participate in research on the predictive validity of the Cross-Cultural Adaptability Inventory. The research took place in two phases: one before the missionaries left for their respective fields and the second after approximately six months on the field. Fifty missionaries agreed to participate in the study and met the qualifications for doing so. By the end of the second phase of the research, however, only 14 missionaries had completed the study with no missing inventories. This research note highlights both the importance of doing research among missionaries and the difficulties encountered in the process.
When people are exposed to, or involved in, traumatic occurrences, they are at risk for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) to follow in the wake. This involves more than psychological discomfort; it involves a host of physiological, mental, emotional, and spiritual sequelae. The results of trauma can be so debilitating that a missionary might be unable to continue to minister. The effects can last a lifetime. Given the relatively high level of risk for missionaries to experience critical incidents and the possible aftereffects, it is important for churches and mission boards to have an adequate and comprehensive approach to member care in ministering to missionaries when they encounter critical incidents. A comprehensive plan would include critical incident stress debriefing as soon as possible after an incident, one-to-one counseling-preferably with a therapist trained in eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR)-for those individuals experiencing complex PTSD, debriefing for the debriefers, and a post-critical incident seminar at least 3 months after the incident.
This article reports the findings of an outcome study done at ALONGSIDE, a counseling-focused retreat center that offers three-week intensive outpatient programs for Christian leaders, the majority of whom are missionaries. Repeated measures research utilized the Outcome Questionnaire - 45.2 (OQ-45.2) to explore whether or not clients participating in the three-week intensive outpatient program realized significant clinical progress and whether or not therapeutic gains were retained after the conclusion of the program. Missionaries and other Christian leaders took the inventory online a month before coming to ALONGSIDE, upon arrival, at the end of the three-week program, and three months after the program concluded. The results indicated that a month of time before arrival did not bring about a significant reduction in symptomatology among the 191 subjects, but three weeks of ALONGSIDE's intensive outpatient program resulted in significant clinical improvement which remained when the inventory was taken again three months post-program. This suggests that in a fairly short period of time, an intensive outpatient program consisting of psycho-education, group psychotherapy, and individual and/or marital counseling within a milieu of intentional Christian community can be a highly effective model for promoting enduring psychological healing.
Heinz Kohut posits three relational needs of the human person in order to become a cohesive self: mirroring, idealizing, and alter-ego. The first two are viewed theologically as pointing to the fragmenting effect of the Fall. The alter-ego need, on the other hand, is viewed theologically as the need for horizontal companionship, a need inherent in imaging a trinitarian God. In the Fall all three needs became frustrated, leaving the fallen person fragmented–-as pictured so well by Kohut's (1977) “Tragic Man”1: a person needing mirroring, idealizing, and alter-ego relationships to become the cohesive self that Kohut advances as the goal of therapy and which results from the outworking of God's grace in both human development and redemption. This article seeks to understand how Kohutian Tragic Man informs and is informed by biblical considerations of the creation, marring, and restoration of the imago Dei in humankind.
In Rosik's (2017) response to my previous article (Jensma, 2016), he indicates that I made an unfortunate comparison between his earlier study (Rosik, 2011) and the outcome study in my article. I agree that such a comparison would be “apples and oranges”—as he calls it—and inappropriate. However, such a comparison was not intended, although I can see how it might have been inferred. My article presented the findings of an outcome study done at ALONGSIDE, a center that offers an intensive outpatient program primarily for missionaries. My literature review brought Rosik's (2011) outcome study to the fore, and the results of my outcome study appeared to be inconsistent with one of the primary findings suggested by Rosik's study. Responsible scholarship required me to try to explain the apparent difference in findings, but this was not the point of the article, and the article was not intended to be a comparison between the two studies. Rosik's re-analysis of his data indicates that both studies in fact showed similar results at three-month follow-up, and my presentation of further data in this response indicates that the results of a one-year follow-up are similar to the results of the three-month follow-up, thus supporting the findings of the outcome study presented in my previous article.
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