Wrestling with my conscience and my ethics.

It looks like there is a lot more to this blogging thing than I realised. I gather there are whole sites dedicated to finding good blogs and a good blog is pretty important in its own way.

One site says a good blog updates daily and comments on whatever is “news” each day so I guess my blog is never going to make the grade on that score but I’m OK with that.

Sometimes I will comment on the “news” but most times I won’t even know what is making news and I doubt I can update daily or will even want to!

The idea that there are so many people searching for new blogs is pretty scary though.

My website is going to be a tough balancing act because I am neither fish nor fowl in some ways. I’m a fully qualified psychologist so I am well aware of what is expected of me along those lines. I’m also a born-again Christian and I am well aware of what is expected of me along those lines too.

The two are not at all compatible in some ways.

As a psychologist I know the answers to people’s problems have to come from within them or they are unlikely to stick. As a psychologist I simply don’t believe I can use the bible to bash people into heaven. I do not believe it is right, in any way, to try to make people see things my way. It’s disrespectful and unloving to try and impose my faith on other people. I believe people who come to me can be extremely vulnerable to suggestions and it isn’t fair to take advantage of them under such conditions. If I am to be brutally honest with myself I guess the truth is I have also been afraid of the consequences to me as a professional if I “came out” about my faith too. For all those reasons I have carefully kept my religious and professional life separate. Most people who meet me would not even know I am a Christian. I only tell the people who ask me outright if I believe.

On the other hand, as a Christian, I also know the answer to people’s problems is God and I should be doing everything in my power to make people aware of that. As one of God’s children I am supposed to be trying to rescue my brothers and sisters from hell. It is my “Christian duty” to let my light shine in the world, to use the word of God to bring sinners to repent and be saved. As a Christian I know about the biblical verse where God promises to spit out the lukewarm and I do worry he will judge me lukewarm and spit me out.

I have been worrying about this for a while now. How can I meet the obligations of both my passions? How can I be a good psychologist and uphold the ethics of my profession without being a bad Christian who keeps her “light” hidden? How can I be a good Christian who tells the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about her life without being a bad psychologist who puts vulnerable people at risk of being persuaded to believe something they may not want to believe?

My original idea was to take the middle road. Tell whatever truths will be acceptable to most other psychologists and keep the rest to myself.

Then I discovered people search for blogs. This blog should be getting zero attention because nobody has been told about it but people are already finding it. I also found out the diary I have kept for many years on another site is not under my control. The site that hosts it has claimed rights to use it any way they see fit. I have let my light shine pretty brightly in that diary because I thought it would never be linked to me. I was writing under the illusion I was, and would always be, anonymous.

Now it occurs to me to wonder what could happen if my site, or my blog, became big in some way. What if, somehow, the “anonymous” diaries became linked to me and my secrets were all exposed?

What if God does not want me to be lukewarm and is not planning to permit me to keep my light hidden?

It occurs to me that it would be better to expose myself than run the risk of someone else doing it for me.

I’m still searching for loopholes — for a way to fulfill my obligations to both my faith and my profession. I need to find a way to keep the light of my faith from getting me into trouble with my professional peers. I don’t know if there is a way to let my light shine as brightly as it should without causing my fitness to call myself a psychologist to be questioned.

I will try to find a way. If there is no way to have my cake and eat it too then I will have to make a choice I suppose. Permit myself to be labelled a “Jesus Freak” or hang on to my professional dignity and censor myself.

There is always the hope that very few people will ever come here and I will be just as anonymous here as I was on the diary site.