From Business Insider: https://www.businessinsider.com/mike-jo ... ic-2023-10
Apparently this Christian Temperament Therapy is based on Creation Therapy: https://biblicalcounseling.com/resource ... n-therapy/Kelly Johnson, the wife of the newly elected House speaker, ran a Christian counseling service that is affiliated with an organization that advocates against abortion and homosexuality and whose practices are built on the teachings of the Greek physician Hippocrates.
It is not clear if Kelly Johnson will continue her practice. Not long after Rep. Mike Johnson became House speaker last week, Kelly Johnson's website became inaccessible. Johnson, her husband of more than 24 years, rose overnight from a virtually obscure House lawmaker to the position that is second in line to the presidency. The couple is deeply religious; both Kelly and Mike Johnson previously worked with religious organizations and causes the religious right advocates for. Along with her counseling, Johnson is also listed as an advisor to the Louisiana Right for Life, an anti-abortion organization.
Kelly Johnson's website listed a specialty in Temperament counseling, a specialty that she received training for from an organization founded in the 1980s by a Christian couple. According to the materials the organization provides, the National Christian Counselor's Association is adamant that its offerings take place outside of more traditional state-licensed settings so that counselors and clients can be fully engaged through their faith.
"The state licensed professional counselor in certain states is forbidden to pray, read or refer to the Holy Scriptures, counsel against things such as homosexuality, abortion, etc," a catalog of the organization's offerings states. "Initiating such counsel could be considered unethical by the state."
The temperament-based approach breaks people down into five types: Melancholy, Choleric, Sanguine, Supine, and Phlegmatic. Richard and Phyllis Arno, who established a test to identify people's temperament, founded the National Christian Counselors Association in the early 1980s. They and their advocates prefer the term temperament over personalities as the term personality is characterized as a "mask" while temperaments are "inborn" and thus inherent to each individual regardless of outside influences such as parenting. Their work is largely based on Hippocrates' view that there were four temperaments.
This is not something I'm familiar with. I'm curious if this is in any way prevalent in Anabaptist circles.Creation Therapy is a form of Christian counseling popularized by Richard and Phyllis Arno. Creation Therapy is a therapeutic adaptation of Tim LaHaye’s temperament theory and is currently taught and practiced by the National Association of Christian Counselors and its affiliated ministries. This article demonstrates that despite being billed as a biblically derived form of soul care, Creation Therapy is predicated upon several unbiblical presuppositions and owing to these views, the resultant counseling methodology falls short of biblical soul care
