Paradoxical Man

The Cause and Cure of Human Struggle

His expression when he first saw Eve confirms that he most certainly noticed her anatomy, and judged that it was a “good” thing, which indicates that the couple was fully capable of judging one another but also indicates that they interpreted things initially only as “positive.” Unfortunately, all of that changed. Studies conducted on monkeys help us to understand why.

The Brain Structure Known as the Amygdala

Researchers have found that when the amygdala section of a monkey’s brain has been removed, it deactivates the monkey’s fear control center. Monkeys without an amygdala show no apparent need to protect themselves which enables them to approach new or novel situations without fear. This seems to be the way Adam and Eve first behaved when with God and with each other’s nakedness. While this in no way intends to promote an evolutionary view that implies that human beings are distant relatives of the monkey, the fact is that they do share the same Creator and have similar anatomical structures. Researchers have also found that the human amygdala functions the same way as it does in most other vertebrates, including monkeys. The amygdala basically acts as a “detector.”[1] Some call it the brain’s “watchdog”[2] which is always looking for things that are out of the ordinary and which may pose some threat or danger to the creature.

By working in concert with the hippocampus, the left amygdala cross-references previously recorded hurts and injuries that are stored in the hippocampus in order to detect whether a new situation needs an instinctive response to self-protect or not.[3] If so, it reflexively overrides a person’s conscious-will by hijacking the prefrontal cortex and activating a fear response in the limbic part of the brain with either an instinctive fight, flight or freeze response so that a person can immediately respond to a perceived threat without first having to identify the threat or think about how to respond.[4] Once activated, most people have a brief moment (one-sixteenth of a second to be precise)[5] in which to either act on the threat or consciously deactivate the response as invalid.

Before the left amygdala was genetically activated in Adam and Eve, they would NOT have been able to detect dangerous harm nor would any harmful events have been recorded in the hippocampus even if they did experience some injury or loss. Why? If the amygdala is not active, then nothing of harm can be detected which means that nothing will be sent to the hippocampus to be recorded. Likewise, if the hippocampus has no harmful events stored in its memory banks, then the amygdala has nothing to base the activation of a fear response on. The job of the hippocampus then, which is often referred to as the “elephant,” is to never forget. Larger and more active in women, it maintains a storehouse of memories in order to protect humans from placing themselves in similarly harmful situations like any that have been previously experienced.[6] While the job of the hippocampus is to never forget, it can only remember something sent to it. In one sense, English philosopher, John Locke was correct in his belief that an infant’s mind is a Tabula rasa (blank slate).[7]

When born, an infant’s hippocampus is indeed a blank slate ready to record painful and pleasurable experiences for later reference. What John Locke was missing, and which made John Watson (1878-1958) also partially correct, was the scientific advancement by a neuroscientist named Paul D. MacLean (1913-2007) who defined the function of the limbic system in 1970 after it had been discovered in the early 1950's.[8] Since children are born with a limbic system, that means they have biological structures already in place that are capable of processing pleasurable and painful experiences. In this manner, McLean’s discovery helped to support Watson’s argument that it was learning that determined what children will be and that it was not completely predetermined. Sometime later, B. F. Skinner (1904 -1990) came up with the idea of Operant Conditioning, in which he found that it was the consequences of a behavior that determined whether a behavior would be repeated in the future or not. Skinner showed that two kinds of consequences were especially influential. A Reinforcement is a consequence that increases the future likelihood of the behavior that it follows.[9] Of course, those are based on whether a person’s consequences are considered “good” or bad.” From this information, we can say that learning requires: an ability to process novel experiences; storage and retrieval of past experiences; and the ability to compare positive and negative outcomes. Even at birth, children have these capabilities and are ripe for solving and recording a storehouse of paradoxical challenges and of being able to recall, add and process their knowledge and learning as well as judge the consequences. In all reality, it is both biology and experience that determine what children will become. Scientists had once hoped to answer the Nature vs. Nurture paradox by identifying whether heredity or environment was the cause of a particular aspect of development, which would determine the kind of person you are.[10] As for pre-Fall Adam and Eve, their hippocampus never recorded any injury or harm. The Apostle Paul may have been referencing this pre-Fall condition in his letter to the Romans.

Romans 5:13 states, “To be sure, sin was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not charged against anyone’s account where there is no law.” What Paul may be alluding to by saying that “sin was in the world before the law was given” is the idea that the relationship Adam and Eve had, may have included sin before it was considered sin. In other words, they may have experienced personal injury or loss of some kind at the hands of one or the other, but because there was no perception of harm, that would have left them without any recognition that it was hurtful or sinful. There are two possible questions that come to mind in reference to this. Was that because God (acting as Patriarch) had not yet given the law (besides the one to not eat the fruit) that would have condemned their sinful acts, or was it because Adam and Eve could not yet detect sin or injury due to an inactive left amygdala?

Only when badness is detected and becomes evident, does a rule of law need to be instituted to curtail it. You see it all the time in the business world. Some employee takes advantage of their freedom and management responds with a knee-jerk reaction that puts a stop to it by making a new rule or policy against what one employee did. All other employees then lose a little more freedom because of it. When harmful things are not detected, then there is no need for any rules to regulate badness. Consequently, without the ability to detect injury or some personal loss at the hands of someone else, humans would also not render the injurious behavior as sinful nor would they condemn it.

Just the fact that Adam and Eve disobeyed God by eating the fruit demonstrates that they were not yet able to detect harm, otherwise they might not have eaten the fruit, especially if the hippocampus part of their brains had not previously recorded anything harmful about eating fruit. As an example, I recall as a child eating too many (yummy) ham salad sandwiches and then getting sick and vomiting. My hippocampus recorded that for me, and yet today I am unsure about eating a ham salad sandwich. Conversely, without recalling any negative consequences of any kind, Adam and Eve had no way of preventing themselves from eating the fruit except from being told not to do so. Since modern man does know what death means, he would not have the same excuse, or plea of ignorance, that Adam and Eve actually had. Because they had not been duped by a talking serpent before, their left amygdala would not have detected the potential for injury, nor would talking serpents be remembered as hurtful. Without any prior information about him, they would not have learned that they could not trust him.

To reiterate, when there is no law to regulate a certain behavior, there is also no sin associated with it, and when injury cannot be detected either, then there is also no sin―even though actual harm or loss may have been present in both scenarios. While Romans 5:13 describes how sin is connected with law and law-making, verses 14-18 of that same chapter raise a different topic. More specifically, how Adam’s sin became a problem that has subsequently affected all of his children including you and I.

Through a process known as epigenetics, Adam‘s original biological problem of having an inactive left amygdala or watchdog, resulted in the spiritual problem of disobeying God, which was turned back into a biological problem. Briefly, epigenetics is a fairly new but growing field within mainstream science that examines the effects of how parents react to their psychosocial and physical environments in a way that switches “on” or “off” gene expressions that transmit changes to offspring through a rearranged DNA.[11] In other words, according to epigenetic principles, your spirituality, drug addiction or love for the beach can be partially transmitted to your children as instincts through the genes you provide.[12] In the same way, Paul is telling us in Romans 5:14-18 that Adam and Eve transferred an active left amygdala to their children which became a biological problem for their offspring. For Adam and Eve, the spiritual consequences of disobedience, was triggered by the biological cause of eating the fruit. This happened when latent genes were activated environmentally. A prime example is found in the disorder PKU.

PKU or phenylketonuria, is a rare disorder that affects 1 in 15,000 children who are born each year with a potential for it.[13] It is a disorder in which infants are born without an ability to produce an important liver enzyme that converts the protein phenylalanine into amino acids instead of allowing it to accumulate to harmful levels. Phenylalanine is found in such common foods as dairy products, bread, diet soda, and fish. When phenylalanine is unable to be converted, its toxic effect damages a person’s nervous system which can result in severe mental retardation.[14] & [15] Science has discovered however, that while a person may have the genetic predisposition for PKU, it need not turn into that disorder. Even though a pair of recessive alleles may be inherited from both parents at birth, their presence does not mean that the child will develop this disorder. In order for it to manifest itself, the child with PKU must eat something containing phenylalanine. As long as the regimen of abstaining from phenylalanine foods is maintained, mental retardation is avoided. Thus, even though a child may have a genetic potential for PKU, it can only become mentally retarded after having ingested phenylalanine. Otherwise it will have normal intelligence when that substance is avoided in the diet.[16]

The same was true for Adam and Eve. As long as they abstained from eating the fruit, they would not have acquired the biological disorder of an active left amygdala that God did not want them to have. The existence of PKU demonstrates to us that the things we ingest can have huge impacts on the way our brain functions. And through epigenetics, the resulting changes can reorganize the DNA passed onto future offspring for multi-generational effects. With drug epidemics that began in the 1970's, this may well explain the cause of Autism and does explain how Adam’s spiritual problem was converted back into a biological problem. Why? Because their children inherited it genetically from them. It is quite evident that when God created humans, He anticipated Adam’s spiritual problem and made the pair with a potential for alternate realities, genetic contingencies if you will, that would only be activated under certain circumstances. These contingencies when activated would implement a different psychological disposition than what Adam and Eve first experienced. Genes require activation in order to “express” their instructions to the cell, and normally, changes to those instructions occur due to teratogens like toxins, malnutrition, stress and viruses.[17] In the case of Adam and Eve, those genetic changes happened simply by touching and eating a “real” not metaphorical fruit. In addition to activation of the dormant left amygdala, another alternate reality was put into Adam and Eve which was the blessing of death even though that was not God’s intention for them in the beginning. While this statement may seem odd to you―that I would suggest that death could be a blessing―you did read that correctly. Yes, death can be a blessing and many people wish for it frequently because of an active left amygdala.

God lovingly attached death to the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil so that if Adam and Eve chose to eat of it, He could mercifully end their suffering some day. It was something He preprogrammed into their genetic code so that upon eating that fruit and gaining the ability to distinguish between good and evil, their lives would not have to endure forever. Pastor Daniel Lepley writes in his book On Our Origins that “There are worse things than physically dying.”[18] It is not too hard to imagine the various kinds of living hell and torment that someone may have to live through in an abusive relationship or an Auschwitz experience. John describes in Revelation 9:6 how people of the end times, who do not have God’s seal of salvation, “will seek death but will not find it; they will long to die, but death will evade them.” Living day after day in torment or even torture can make someone despise their very life. Having inherited the ability to detect harm can make for a miserable existence, or at the very least, a high degree of daily stress. God originally created man with an inactive left amygdala so that mankind would not know evil but when he did come to detect it, God created the amygdala to produce cortisol. Known colloquially as the “stress hormone” cortisol production is what begins in a person—the process of physically dying. On some level, cortisol should actually be renamed the “death hormone.” That is an opposite concept of the other tree mentioned in the garden. It was because of the ensuing psychological stress caused by the activation of the left amygdala that the Tree of Life had to be removed from the garden. It had to be taken away in order to prevent people from experiencing Hell on earth which would consist of never ending torment if they were forced to live that way eternally. In this way death is a blessing from God and a welcome visitor who brings much needed relief from emotional and psychological suffering. If this were not true, then people would never choose suicide. John claims in Revelation 12:11, that those who are destined to be saved are those “that did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death.” While death is designed to bring an end to emotional and psychological suffering, when it is not an option, emotional and psychological trauma leads to health problems, which is the bodies way of physically hastening the end of psychological suffering.

It has been estimated that somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of all medical visits to physicians are somehow stress related.[19], [20], [21] & [22] Major illnesses like coronary heart disease, asthma, diabetes, allergies, rheumatoid arthritis, ulcers, migraine headaches and cancer have been conclusively linked to psychological stress,[23] & [24] not to mention the fact that heart disease just happens to be the number one cause of death for both men and women.[25] Unfortunately, most stress related psychological difficulties are never formally diagnosed by primary care physicians nor are these patients referred for mental health treatment.[26] & [27] It has been only in the last 30 years or so that a holistic view of medicine has begun to involve an awareness of the interaction between the social, psychological, and physical symptoms that result from psychological distress.[28] & [29] Because of the free-will choices of Adam and Eve to eat a fruit that contained a substance that changed them, it has also forever resulted in biological changes to the functioning of every other human after them, and to a life filled with stress that eventually leads to biological death.

Evolutionary scientists agree with what the Bible teaches on this subject, in that, they readily acknowledge that the amygdala has not always been active in the human brain. A bias toward evolutionary theory causes them to conclude however, that its function has evolved over eons due to a world that is becoming increasingly dangerous. Christian thinkers know however, that the right amygdala has worked from the very beginning and that change in the left amygdala happened virtually instantaneously just as the Bible indicates. And, similar to the process involved in PKU, the brains of Adam and Eve were changed by the substance that they ingested. Furthermore, the substance was so potent that merely touching it would have yielded the same results much like what we are discovering about Fentanyl. Rather than losing intelligence as is the case with PKU, Adam and Eve gained a psychological capability that God never wanted them to have. It is that inherited psychological corrupted-ness,[30] mentioned in Romans 5:18, that has been imputed to all humans. As an aside, much of the information you have just learned would not be made known except for the Biblical account of Adam and Eve. We truly needed both sets of information (including science) to draw these conclusions about who man really is. Without this scientific data early theologians came to err.

In contradiction to Augustine who first suggested the idea of original sin in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, followed by the adoption of the idea by Martin Luther and John Calvin later, humans did not inherit the actual guilt of Adam and Eve’s sin, but instead inherited a genetic nature from them that now has a propensity for detecting the sin of others and for sinning. King David recognized this in himself where in Psalm 51:5 (NIV) he states “Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me.” That does not mean that David had sinned but that he recognized in himself a propensity toward sin which is based on judging or choosing between what is thought to be “good” over that which is perceived to be “evil.” While the Scriptures tell us definitively what “good” versus “evil” truly is, because of how the fruit forever changed human thinking, people have gained a subjective ability to make those self-determinations of good and evil due to a fully active amygdala that was never supposed to detect evil.

In this way the serpent was correct, Adam and Eve did become more like God. Man became able to condemn things by gaining the ability to call them evil. In Genesis 3:3-4 Moses quotes the serpent as he spoke to the woman by saying “You will not certainly die, for God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” He was also correct to imply to Adam and Eve that God was withholding knowledge from them. While the serpent implied that this knowledge was something good, in reality it was actually something horrible for them. The serpent’s innuendo was accurate only to the extent that God withheld the knowledge of evil because He did not want them to be like He was in that way. Also interesting to note is how the serpent appealed to their capability to see and desire that which was “good”. They were not really being tempted to gain the ability to know what “good” was. They already had that capability. What they were gaining was really an ability to see and know “evil” and to be able to distinguish it from “good”. In some ways the serpent was tempting them to know HIM and according to John 10:10 to know the progenitor of evil.

What they ultimately gained was an ability to make negative judgments and to become judgmental and critical of each other, which is precisely why they had to hide from each other. They supposed that because they could judge—they were now being judged. Eve saw Adam and noticing that her breasts were larger than his and that she did not have a penis must have found herself inferior to him. Conversely, Adam supposed that because his breasts were smaller and that he an extra appendage that he also must have been inferior to Eve. Not only could they judge each other, but they now had the capability for self judgment casting the supposed opinions of others onto themselves. Paul acknowledges the problem of constant negative judgment in 1 Corinthians 2:15 where he states that the person of God will make judgments about everything but will himself not be subject to judgment. Paul of course refers to Christ who will eliminate the need for the Christian, to be judged. Unfortunately judgment of each other was what Adam and Eve gained and was not at all what Eve thought she was getting from the fruit.

The problem with gaining this new capability, of distinguishing goodness from badness, was that Adam and Eve did not gain the God-like omniscience (that should have accompanied it) which would have made their judgments truly perfect. Instead, people would now make condemning judgments of each other based on partial information, speculation and a general lack of understanding of the motives behind the behaviors they see. Only God truly knows a person’s heart and what thoughts are in their mind (cf. 1Kings 8:39). Adam and Eve, as well as every other human being after them, would have to make guesses about that. Hence, Hosea’s statement of 4:8a, “my people are destroyed from lack of knowledge” is a perfect summation of the consequences for this new human condition. Adam and Eve, as well as their offspring, would be doomed to making unnecessary negative judgments of everything without first having all of the information to do so accurately. The first couple’s pre-Fall innocent naivety would have made them unaware of either harm they had done or of being harmed, but now they would have full cognizance of it.

In modern terms, the McNaughton Rule of law in establishing sanity in court cases, states that persons are not responsible if they did not know the nature and extent of their actions or if they cannot distinguish that what they did was wrong according to social norms.[31] This is similar to the concept regarding the difference between the Age of Ignorant Bliss and an Age of Accountability for children, which pre-Fall Adam and Eve had not yet achieved until they ate the fruit. An interesting question here is whether the insane (who do not know right from wrong), are really the abnormal among us, or are we, who post-Fall have the ability to distinguish between these two concepts? Perhaps like nudists they are an artifact from a prehistoric time or a sign to us that we should judge our own critical judging of others? Certainly the Bible tells us to be cautious about doing that.

As for judging, it is this inherited capability of making subjective distinctions between goodness and badness that creates in us, a “sin-nature,” which is evident even from birth.[32] Understanding the cries of infants in every hospital maternity ward, Christian Psychologist Jim Cofield has observed, “I (along with every other baby) figured out good and bad before I had a capacity for doctrinal declarations.”[33] He points out that even infants can discern how coldness, hunger, wetness and a lack of physical closeness with mother are not “good” things. No one has to teach them how to make those judgments. They are born with that capability. Pastor Chuck DeGroat, Ph.D., and Professor of Pastoral Care at Western Theological Seminary, summarizes what happened to all of us in this way, “The Bible begins in a Garden—with original goodness—and we cannot edit the story to begin at Genesis 3 and the Fall. Ours is a story that [now] sees both the best and worst of people.”[34] Because Adam and Eve ate the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, we can now tell when we have been harmed by another person, and our hippocampus never lets us forget it.

Works Cited:

[1] The human amygdala: an evolved system for relevance detection, D. Sander; J. Grafman and T. Zalla, Reviews in the neurosciences, 14(4) (pp. 303-16). 2003. Retrieved 01/21/2016 from: https://search.yahoo.com/yhs/search;_ylt=A0LEVis6LqFWuVIALqwPxQt.;_ylc=X1MDMjExNDcwMDU1OQRfcgMyBGZyA3lmcC10LTkwMARncHJpZAMzVmE5UERpQ1FWLjRPY3hmSHNZaDVBBG5fcnNsdAMwBG5fc3VnZwMwBG9yaWdpbgNzZWFyY2gueWFob28uY29tBHBvcwMwBHBxc3RyAwRwcXN0cmwDBHFzdHJsAzMxBHF1ZXJ5A2V2b2x1dGlvbiBvZiB0aGUgaHVtYW4gYW15Z2RhbGEEdF9zdG1wAzE0NTM0MDM4MTY-?p=evolution+of+the+human+amygdala&fr2=sb-top-search&hspart=att&hsimp=yhs-att_001&type=att_pc_homerun_portal.

[2] Why Men Never Remember and Women Never Forget, Marianne J. Legato, United States: Rodale, Inc., 2005. (p. 162).

[3] The human amygdala: an evolved system for relevance detection, D. Sander; J. Grafman and T. Zalla, Reviews in the neurosciences, 14(4) (pp. 303-16). 2003. Retrieved 01/21/2016 from: https://search.yahoo.com/yhs/search;_ylt=A0LEVis6LqFWuVIALqwPxQt.;_ylc=X1MDMjExNDcwMDU1OQRfcgMyBGZyA3lmcC10LTkwMARncHJpZAMzVmE5UERpQ1FWLjRPY3hmSHNZaDVBBG5fcnNsdAMwBG5fc3VnZwMwBG9yaWdpbgNzZWFyY2gueWFob28uY29tBHBvcwMwBHBxc3RyAwRwcXN0cmwDBHFzdHJsAzMxBHF1ZXJ5A2V2b2x1dGlvbiBvZiB0aGUgaHVtYW4gYW15Z2RhbGEEdF9zdG1wAzE0NTM0MDM4MTY-?p=evolution+of+the+human+amygdala&fr2=sb-top-search&hspart=att&hsimp=yhs-att_001&type=att_pc_homerun_portal.

[4] Why Men Never Remember and Women Never Forget, Marianne J. Legato, United States: Rodale, Inc., 2005. (pp. 161-162).

[5] Healing The Brain: Neurological Insights Into Emotional Reactivity and Relational Conflict, Beverly Rodgers & Tom Rodgers, Forest: Christian Counseling Connection, Volume 19, Issue 4, American Association of Christian Counselors, 2014. (p. 8).

[6] The Female Brain, Louann Brizendine, M.D., Broadway books, New York, 2006.

[7] Human Development: A Lifespan View, 2nd edition, Robert V. Kail & John C. Cavanaugh, 2000, United States: Wadsworth. (p.19).

[8] The Scientific Contributions of Paul D. MacLean (1913–2007), John D. Newman and James C. Harris, The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, Volume 197, Number 1, January 2009. Retrieved 05/18/2016 from: http://udn.nichd.nih.gov/pdf/MacLean%20tribute.pdf.

[9] Human Development: A Lifespan View, 2nd edition, Robert V. Kail & John C. Cavanaugh, 2000, United States: Wadsworth. (p.19).

[10] Human Development: A Lifespan View, 2nd edition, Robert V. Kail & John C. Cavanaugh, 2000, United States: Wadsworth. (p.5).

[11] The Faith Factor in Mental Healthcare, Harold Koenig, Christian Counseling Today, Volume 18, No. 4, Forest: American Association of Christian Counselors, 2012. (p. 25).

[12] Brains, Addiction, and Conversion, Tim Jennings, August 30, 2016, American Association of Christian Counselors, Retrieved 01/20/2017 from: http://www.aacc.net/2016/08/30/brains-addiction-and-conversion-2/

[13] Phenylketonuria: Screening and Management, National Institutes of Health, Consensus Development Conference Statement, October 16-18, 2000, National Institutes of Health, 2000. Retrieved 02/23/2016 from: https://consensus.nih.gov/2000/2000phenylketonuria113html.htm.

[14] Prefrontal cortex deficits in children treated early and continuously for PKU, A. Diamond, M. B. Prevor, G. Callender and D. P. Druin, Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 62, 4 (Serial No. 252), 1997. (n. p.). In R. Kail, and J. Cavanaugh (Eds.) Human Development: A Life Span View, 2nd Ed., Belmont: Wadsworth Thomson Learning, 2000. (p.51).

[15] Genetics: Human aspects, 2nd Ed., A. P. Mange and E. J. Mange, Sunderland: Sinhauer Associates, 1990. (n. p.). In R. Kail, and J. Cavanaugh (Eds.) Human Development: A Life Span View, 2nd Ed., Belmont: Wadsworth Thomson Learning, 2000. (p.51).

[16] Human Development: A Lifespan View, 2nd edition, Robert V. Kail & John C. Cavanaugh, 2000, United States: Wadsworth. (p.51).

[17] www.dnalc.org., Ed., Michael R. Lyles, Genetically Informed Decision Making, Christian Counseling Today, Volume 21, No. 1, American Association of Christian Counselors, Forest Virginia, 2010, (p. 64).

[18] On Our Origins, Daniel J. Lepley, Bloomington: WestBow Press, 2013. (p. 124).

[19] Somatization Disorder, G. Asaad, 2000. In M. Hersen and M. Biaggio (Eds.) Effective brief therapies: A clinician’s guide (pp. 179-190). San Diego: Academic Press. In Gary Groth-Marnat (Ed.) Handbook of Psychological Assessment,4th Ed., Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2003. (pp. 39-40).

[20] Medically unexplained symptoms in primary care, W. J. Katon and E. A. Walker, Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 591998, (pp. 15-21). In Gary Groth-Marnat (Ed.) Handbook of Psychological Assessment,4th Ed., Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2003. (pp. 39-40).

[21] Treatment of Somatization in primary care, C. C. McLeod, M. A. Budd, & D. C. McClelland, General Hospital Psychiatry, 19, 1997. (pp. 251-258). In Gary Groth-Marnat (Ed.) Handbook of Psychological Assessment,4th Ed., Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2003. (pp. 39-40).

[22] The management of stress and anxiety in medical disorders, D. Mostofsky and D. H. Barlow, Needham Heights: Allyn & Bacon, 2000. In Gary Groth-Marnat (Ed.) Handbook of Psychological Assessment,4th Ed., Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2003. (pp. 39-40).

[23] Professional psychologists in general health care settings; A review of the financial efficacy of direct treatment interventions, G. Groth-Marnat and G. Edkins, Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, 27, 1996. (pp. 161-174). In Gary Groth-Marnat (Ed.) Handbook of Psychological Assessment,4th Ed., Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2003. (pp. 39-40).

[24] Moving Behavioral medicine to the front line: A model for the integration of behavioral and medical science in primary care, S. D. Pruit, J. C. Klapow, J. E. Epping-Jordan, and T. R. Dresselhaus, Professional psychology: Research and Practice, 29, 1999. (pp. 230-236). In Gary Groth-Marnat (Ed.) Handbook of Psychological Assessment,4th Ed., Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2003. (pp. 39-40).

[25] Heart Disease Facts, CDC, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Retrieved 05/17/2016 from: http://www.cdc.gov/heartdisease/facts.htm

[26] Introduction, American Journal of Managed Care, 5, 1999. (pp. S764-S766). In Gary Groth-Marnat (Ed.) Handbook of Psychological Assessment,4th Ed., Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2003. (pp. 39-40).

[27] The management of stress and anxiety in medical disorders, D. Mostofsky and D. H. Barlow, Needham Heights: Allyn & Bacon, 2000. In Gary Groth-Marnat (Ed.) Handbook of Psychological Assessment,4th Ed., Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2003. (pp. 39-40).

[28] Moving Behavioral medicine to the front line: A model for the integration of behavioral and medical science in primary care, S. D. Pruit, J. C. Klapow, J. E. Epping-Jordan, and T. R. Dresselhaus, Professional psychology: Research and Practice, 29, 1999. (pp. 230-236). In Gary Groth-Marnat (Ed.) Handbook of Psychological Assessment,4th Ed., Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2003. (pp. 39-40).

[29] Testing the biopsychosocial model: The ultimate challenge facing behavioral medicine? G. E. Schwartz, Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 50, 1982. (pp. 1040-1053). In Gary Groth-Marnat (Ed.) Handbook of Psychological Assessment,4th Ed., Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2003. (pp. 39-40).

[30] The Doctrine of Grace: Course Outline, Jack Cottrell, Cincinnati: Cincinnati Christian University Press, 1999. (pp.60-61).

[31] Handbook of Psychological Assessment,4th Ed., Gary Groth-Marnat, Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2003. (p. 43).

[32] It should be noted, based on Romans 5, that there is no Biblical law against infants wanting basic care. Even though a person’s sin-nature leads them toward self-centeredness even from birth, not all selfishness is sinful. It is not wrong to feed and clothe oneself even though those are highly self-centered activities. Therefore, a child’s self-centeredness is not counted as sinful acts that would result in condemnation.

[33] Christian Psych Notes: From The Society For Christian Psychology: Square One, Jim Cofield, Christian Counseling Connection, Volume 17 Issue 3, Forest: American Association of Christian Counselors, 2010. (p. 7).

[34] Dignity Beneath the Depravity: A Source of Hope when Counselors Feel Hopeless, Chuck DeGroat, Christian Counseling Connection, Volume 19, Issue 4, Forest: American Association of Christian Counselors, 2014. (p. 7).

Theo-PsychoNeurology Page

Mikel Kelly, MA, LMHC

Introducing:

The Vortex Model 

“Whether we call them challenges, crises, or conflicts, the trek to adulthood is difficult because the path is strewn with obstacles.” And, “Each life takes on a myriad of twists and turns.”

 — Developmental Psychologists Robert 

Kail & John Cavanaugh[1]

Vortex Model of Development

MAP:

Vortex Model Home

Mental Health and the Church

Paradox Defined

Transformational Levels

Milestones of Development

Theo-PsychoNeurology

Values Formation

Mankind's Sin-Nature

The Root of Pathology:

The Root of Spiritual Pathology

The Root of Cosmological Pathology

The Root of Physiological Pathology

The Root of Relational Pathology

THE Universal Paradox

Wounded Spirit Syndrome

Solving Paradoxes

Redeeming Paradoxical Man

US-40

Heading Quote:

[1] Human Development: A Lifespan View, 2nd edition, Robert V. Kail & John C. Cavanaugh, 2000, United States, Wadsworth. (p. 18).

Milestone Age Markers

Adapted from: Human Development: A Lifespan View, 2nd Edition, Robert V. Kail & John C. Cavanaugh, United States, Wadsworth, 2000, (p.3).