You & Your Family

As I write this, Singapore is just coming out of its circuit breaker, a period of unprecedented measures of enforced social distancing. Even when the post-circuit breaker phase three ends, life as we know it will have changed. We have been told to be prepared for a “new normal”. What this may mean and how […]

Bearing in mind as I write that this article is scheduled to be published in June 2020, I am trying to visualise what our social environment then might be. I am not good at predictions—my dismal failure with investments attest to this—so let me stick to what I think I know better. When all the […]

Social distancing is one of the strongest tools available to slow down community transmission of the COVID-19 virus. People are not to gather in groups, all nonessential movement outside of one’s home is curtailed, and schools and workplaces, unless deemed essential, are closed. These measures were unheard of barely three months ago. Now, whole cities […]

  Amid the emerging global health crisis, an intense discussion may have gone unnoticed. Whilst the larger part of the scientific community were busy trying to understand how the novel coronavirus is spread or to develop a vaccine, others were trying to find a name for it. Finally, on 11 Feb 2020, the World Health […]

I occasionally experience a sense of déjà vu – my clients’ issues, circumstances and dilemmas appear similar and yet are not the same. I felt it recently when three siblings—working adults in their mid-twenties to early thirties—came to consult me. A family conflict had led to the two older daughters moving out of the family […]

As the elderly nursing home resident’s trust in the counselling intern grew, she candidly talked about wanting to die. She felt that having outlived her husband by almost half her life, she had no reason to go on living. She had lived a hard life and worked as a domestic servant to support her children. […]

When our former pastor and his wife invited my wife and me to go together to Chiang Mai, it was not for a mission trip or a spiritual retreat. Instead, we took long walks in gardens and parks, visited local markets and museums, ate delicious northern Thai food and even indulged in spa treatments. We […]

  A client I saw last week has been married for close to 30 years. Over the last decade, he has been painfully aware that he has fallen out of love with his wife. They do not engage in open conflicts but rather, a cold war has descended upon the marriage. But as he is […]

One of my roles in my job as counsellor is to be a clinical supervisor for counselling interns. As counsellors in training, they are given less complex cases to stretch their counselling “wings” by practising, under supervision but on real-life cases, the skills and techniques they have learnt in the classroom. These interns soon learn […]

Noting both the Old and New Testaments mention sexual sin, a client remarked, “Why is there so much sex in the Bible?” The Bible does talk about the dangers of sexual sin, sometimes mentioning it together with the command to be faithful to God. Both are a call to holiness. They speak about being true […]

On 17 March, the Straits Times reported a 30 per cent increase in child abuse cases in 2018 over the year before. Almost one in five of the cases involved sexual abuse. More recently, the newspapers covered the trial of a retired principal accused of molesting several students. Although reports of people in positions of […]

The other day, my client’s husband was taken aback when she said she was no longer sure that she wanted to give their marriage a second chance, as she doubted that he was really interested in rebuilding their marriage. He had agreed to counselling after being found out for infidelity. He dutifully came for each […]