Why Psychology?

I have successfully started my final semester in my undergrad career. SO STOKED!!! After four and a half years of school, I am ready for a break. My choice of major is psychology. No. I am not analyzing you. No. I don't have a career that I'm interested in, besides the career of a mom. No. I am not planning on going to grad school (as of now). So why major in psychology then if I don't plan on doing anything with it? Believe me... I have asked myself that question almost everyday since I declared my major. In the beginning I picked it because the major was short. I was almost a junior and still hadn't declared a major. I was enrolled in an introductory psychology course and found it to be enjoyable. So I pushed forward into the world of psychology. I've studied its history, how the brain works, different theories and therapies, written research papers, performed studies, studied gender differences, but even after all of that... I was still just doing it to graduate. This semester I am currently enrolled in a class that is called LDS Perspectives on Psychology. So tonight, I was reading the required reading for class this week and the article happened to be by a professor at BYU, whose writings tend to be my favorite. This article was entitled, "Restoration and the 'Turning of Things Upside Down": What is Required of an LDS Perspective". I would like to give you a somewhat lengthy post of some of the things Dr. Williams has to say.

"Shortly after the death of the ancient apostles, the presiding authority and the guiding revelation were lost from the earth. Mormons accept without question that theologians and thus religious traditions went wrong somewhere around the third of fourth centuries (or earlier) and that they have continued to be wrong throughout the night of apostasy until the Restoration. We might well ask, however, if while religionists went irrevocably wrong for fourteen hundred years, philosophers stayed on track and stayed right. Or, we might ask if scientists simply went on their own way discovering truth, even though the light of truth had gone out elsewhere. Are we to assume that only religion went wrong while science, philosophy, aesthetics, and moral theory went right (i.e., that only religious truth was compromised)? I submit that the effects of the apostasy were not confined merely to religion. Rather, since the Lord proclaimed that what was wrong with the religion of the nineteenth century was that it taught for doctrines the commandments of men, we must assume that those commandments---the philosophies and precepts compromising nineteenth-century theology---must also be wrong." (p. 5-6)

I had never considered that idea that the apostasy could be applicable to other areas besides religion... When the apostasy occurred after the death of Christ, the truth was taken from the earth. So how would it have been possible that areas such as science were finding "truths" when it wasn't on the earth to begin with? So why am I studying a science that is full of the truths of man, but not the truths of God? ... I finally found my answer. And I've been taught this answer since my days in primary. As Dr. Williams says:

"A few years ago at BYU, a group of intellectuals organized themselves and issued a sort of proclamation to the effect that (a) LDS bishops might profit from clinical training, and that (b) bishops as well as the Church, might be very useful in the therapeutic process. The implication was that bishops and the Church might serve as a support system to help people while the real change was produced by therapeutic intervention. It seems that, in the minds of many, it is not the gospel of Jesus Christ that heals; the gospel of Jesus Christ merely supplies us with a support system while the principles and practices of therapy-derived from the secular social sciences really make the change. The failure to believe that the gospel of Jesus Christ is the source of real healing of the human soul is a repudiation of the gospel itself... We can be entirely confident that ideas and therapeutic practices founded on revealed truth, no matter how unpopular they may be, will work infinitely better than other kinds of therapies not so grounded." (p. 7, 20)

I know now that I did not choose psychology for the purposes of finding a career.Choosing psychology as a major was meant to help strengthen my testimony of my Savior, Jesus Christ. It took my 23 years in life and 4 and a half of those years at school to tell me and help me know that Christ is the ultimate healer. There is no therapy, no procedure, no medicine that can heal the hurt, depression, anxiety, of an aching soul better than the healing hands of our Savior can. HE is the one whom we should turn to. When searching for help, we must search for truth. I love my savior, and I know that he loves each and every one of us, and is calling out for each of us to come to him, and feel peace and healing.

Williams, R. (1998). "Restoration and the 'turning of things upside down': What is required of an LDS perspective. AMCAP Journal, 23(1), (pp. 1-30).


(If you have any questions regarding The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and would like to know more, please visit www.mormon.org or www.lds.org)