Counseling for Spiritually Empowered Wholeness

A Hope-Centered Approach

William M Clements, Howard Clinebell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781317972310
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Counseling for Spiritually Empowered Wholeness is an introduction to Wholeness Counseling (also called Growth Counseling), a whole-person approach to pastoral counseling, psychotherapy, and education as developed by Howard Clinebell. He begins the book by emphasizing how the role of healthy spirituality and reality-based hope is crucial to facilitate healing and growth in all dimensions of life. He encourages readers to apply the principles and methods in the book to their own growth and to develop their own growth-centered approaches--approaches that reflect their particular styles and personalities--to counseling, therapy, and education.This newly revised edition of Growth Counseling makes readily available an understanding of the Wholeness Counseling approach and its methods for both pastoral and secular counselors and professional and nonprofessional readers. Dr. Clinebell has a psychological understanding of the universal human need for healthy spirituality and, as he writes from this perspective, he opens doors for readers to distinguish healthy from unhealthy religion and provides them with methods to enhance their own spiritual health. Readers who desire to explore the Wholeness Counseling approach will find that Counseling for Spiritually Empowered Wholeness guides them through:

• insights and methods they can use to accelerate their personal and professional growth in each of the seven dimensions of life
• the roots in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures of this approach which helps readers grow and be healed
• the importance of playfulness to balance work in a healthy lifestyleThe primary target audience is theological seminary teachers and students, clergy in all denominations, members of congregations who work in the healing and helping professions, and laypersons interested in learning ways to enhance their own wholeness or being trained to serve on lay pastoral care teams. Others who will benefit from Counseling for Spiritually Empowered Wholeness include those in the counseling, healing, and teaching professions who wish to know more about a growth-oriented approach which includes a robust emphasis on the role of healthy spirituality for total well being.

Chapter 1

The Goals of Wholeness or Growth Counseling

Humankind will survive only through the commitment and involvement of individuals in their own and others’ growth and development as human beings. This means development of loving and caring relationships in which all members are as committed to the growth and happiness of others as they are to their own. Through commitment to personal growth individual human beings will also make their contribution to the growth and development–the evolution–of the whole species to become all that humankind can and is meant to be.

–Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, Death: The Final Stage of Growth (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1975), p. 165.

Several years ago, while resting on the beach after snorkeling in Hawaii, I noticed a man walking along slowly, holding an electronic gadget just above the sand. I struck up a conversation with him and discovered that his gadget was a metal detector, an “electronic treasure-finder.” He was using it to search for coins, wristwatches, and other valuable objects lost in the sand.

This “treasure-finder” struck me as a useful though imperfect image for depicting what effective growth-centered counselors, therapists, and teachers do. Our goal is to put treasure-finders into the hands of the persons with whom we work. Our purpose is to equip them to find their own buried treasures, the riches waiting to be developed in their inner lives and relationships.

Wholeness counseling is a spiritually empowered approach to the healing and helping processes that defines the goal as facilitating the maximum development of a person’s potentialities, at each life stage, in ways that contribute to the growth of others as well, and to the development of a society in which all persons will have an opportunity to use their full potentialities. Growth Counseling aims at helping people achieve liberation from their prisons of unlived life, unused assets, and wasted strengths. The counselor or therapist is a liberator, an enabler of a process by which people free themselves to live life more fully and significantly. Through this freeing experience people discover that happiness is a byproduct of actualizing their constructive potentials. Mental-physical-spiritual-relational health is the continuing movement toward living life more fully, joyfully, and productively. Wholeness is a growth journey, not the arrival at a fixed goal.

Human life is precious, much too precious to waste. To live at only a fraction of our potential aliveness and creativity is to waste much of our most valuable asset–life itself. Most of us sell ourselves short. We live by impoverished views of what is “normal” and “healthy.” We tend to see health as the absence of gross dysfunction rather than the presence of a full, rich quality of consciousness, creativity, and relationships. Most of us are only dimly aware of our own capacities. We limit our options and truncate our growth by the illusion that our drab existence is all that is possible for us. We miss many of the satisfactions of participating more fully in the creative processes of living and helping to heal our world.

Wholeness Counseling sees people as possessing a wealth of unlived life. Evidence from the human sciences suggests that most of us “normal” people probably use no more than 15 to 25 percent of our potential intelligence and creativity, of our capacities for living more zestfully and effectively and for living in ways that enhance society.¹ Those whose growth is deeply blocked (usually described as mentally and emotionally ill) use even a smaller fraction of their gifts.

Darkness is the absence of light, but light is more than the absence of darkness. Light is the presence of energy moving at certain frequencies. Similarly, Wholeness Counseling sees health as much more than the absence of gross physical, emotional, interpersonal, or spiritual illness. Health is the presence of positive, developing wholeness. It is the ongoing process of fulfilling one’s potentialities as they emerge and change in each life stage. Health, or better, wholeness is one’s unique lifelong journey of growth.

The good news is that we can become more than we have hoped. It is possible to develop more growthful relationships with ourselves, others, nature, and God. Within such relationships we can gradually discover and develop many of our unused strengths. Effective counseling, education, and psychotherapy utilize growthful relationships to enable people to do their growth work. The goal of these helping arts is liberation–from whatever is diminishing growth, liberation to increased competence, hope and joy, and liberation for the well-being of society.

The Seven Dimensions of Growth

It is important for the growth-oriented counselor or therapist to have a clear understanding of the seven interdependent dimensions within which growth can occur: in our minds and in our bodies, in our relationships with other people, in our work and play, with the biosphere, with the institutions that sustain us, and in the spiritual dimension of our lives. Growth in any of these dimensions stimulates and supports growth in the others. Diminished growth in one area retards growth in the others. The wholeness-oriented counselor seeks to help a person maximize and balance growth in all six facets. Fresh growth usually begins in one’s inner life or one’s relationships, though it may begin in other dimensions. Wherever it begins, growth will tend to spread to the other facets.

1. Inner Growth: Enlivening One’s Mind

The first dimension of our growth involves developing our many-faceted personality resources including our intellectual capacities. What are some directions of this inner growth? Growing persons are moving toward increasing acceptance of and openness to themselves and others; growing awareness of and respect for reality; increasing self-support and self-esteem; relationships of creative. interdependency; growing capacity to give and receive love; increasing intellectual competence and creativity; greater freshness of perception and richness of feelings (both joy and pain); a more aware, autonomous, and caring value system; a growing sense of affinity with the natural world and with humankind; a widening openness to newness and change; an increasing sense of at-home-ness in the universe; a greater frequency of moments of transcendence; a growing relationship with a loving higher Power; increasing androgynous wholeness; a growing aliveness and celebration of the good gift of life; an increasing playfulness and creativity, in spite of the losses in life; and a growing enjoyment of living in one’s present experience, enriched by the experiences of one’s past and by the sense of a hopeful future.²

By androgynous wholeness I mean a balanced development of one’s vulnerable, nurturing, feelingful side (inaccurately labeled the “feminine” side of the personality by Carl Jung) and one’s rational, assertive, analytic side (inaccurately labeled the “masculine” side). Most of us neglect developing fully one of these two sides of our personalities. Wholeness Counseling encourages people to nurture and integrate both sides, recognizing that they are complementary, equally valuable aspects of our full humanity as women or men.

The unused capacities of the human mind to learn, to think, and to create are enormous! On the basis of research in Russia, Ivan Yefremov declares, “If we were able to force our brain to work at only half its capacity, we could, without any difficulty whatever, learn forty languages, memorize a large … encyclopedia from cover to cover, and complete the required courses of dozens of colleges.”³ Few of us develop more than a small fraction of our capacity for intellectual competence and creativity. Lifelong, easily available, educational-growth opportunities in schools, churches, industries, social agencies, and clubs are needed to help us learn to develop and enjoy our unfolding intellectual assets.

Enriching our consciousness, the center from which we relate to other people and to the world, is crucial to enriching all other dimensions. I find that when my inner space feels dull and barren, I have little to give in my relationships. But when my inner life is lively and well nurtured my relationships improve dramatically. The enrichment of our consciousness involves becoming more alive and aware and more affirming of ourselves. Most of us need to discover that our real self is more lovable and capable, as well as more earthy and sometimes more obnoxious, than are the masks we wear to impress others and hide from ourselves. We need to learn how to value and care for ourselves, to enrich our “centers” in order to make them safe, strong, renewing places to be. We need to relate to other people and to the world out of this center, out of an inner wholeness in which our weaknesses and imperfections are accepted and transcended. All this is easier said than done. But it is possible! We can make our inner space a more lively place to be at home with ourselves.

Each person’s coming alive to herself or himself is as unique as that person’s fingerprints. I share the following experience of inner renewal because it’s one I know from the inside. In a ten-day Gestalt Therapy workshop, I struggled ineffectively for the first nine days to solve a long list of reality problems and hang-ups and to be more transparent and present in my relationships with other group members. In spite of my painful struggles, my inner heaviness and self-despair increased. The night before the last day of the workshop, I went to bed in a mood of defeat, convinced that I was hopelessly trapped in professional rigidity reinforced by middle age. I felt myself to be in a no-exit space.

During the night I had what I was sure was a “highly significant” dream. I went to the workshop session determined to work through the dream and achieve release from my feelings of entrapment. I began to describe the dream in the present tense (in good Gestalt Therapy fashion) but in a heavy detached tone. As I went on with my report about the dream, I suddenly saw that the therapist had put a small, colorful pillow on his head and was clowning with his eyes and face. This triggered a rapid series of feelings in me. I moved from surprise and anger at his apparent rejection of my “important” dream to an awareness of the humorous absurdity of what I was doing–making a federal case of everything including my dream. We were sitting on the floor, and as this awareness dawned, I collapsed on the floor in spasms of spontaneous laughter, laughter coming from my center. My playful inner child (who had been the most neglected part of my inner life) was released. He celebrated with gales of laughter. As my outward laughter gradually subsided, my inner laughter continued. I became aware of an inner lightness, of bouncy, dancing feelings that I had not experienced to that degree in years. I sensed that my intense drive to achieve liberation by using the dream and the whole workshop “properly” was precisely what was blocking my liberation! The reality problems and inner goals that were on my long “agenda,” no longer seemed urgent. They were no longer barriers that I had to surmount before I could allow myself to feel alive. I had the power to choose to be alive and free in that moment! I became aware that if I wait until I resolve all my hang-ups and solve all my mid-year problems, I’ll never get around to enjoying being alive! I can experience the joy and pain of being aware in the present moment (and only in this moment). That was and is, at this moment as I write, a freeing awareness.

I continued in the workshop session to chuckle inwardly about my absurd self-deadening. My sense of aliveness came to focus in an image. I could see and feel a tumbling, sunlit mountain stream within me. It was like a stream I remember hiking along during a backpack trip with our sons in the high Sierras. The stream in me seemed to dance with abandon as it frolicked down its rocky course. Perhaps the rocks symbolized my continuing hang-ups and problems. It was the movement over those rocks in the stream bed that produced the dancing of the water. I knew then that that mountain stream is a part of me, a precious part to which I can return in my inner awareness.

In the workshop group I felt open and in touch with others in a way that was light and new. A short time later, I received a phone call telling me that a dear friend of my wife’s family had died. My tears flowed more spontaneously than ever before in my adult life. Surprisingly, the sense of inner joy was still there. Somehow the joy and sorrow were strangely and closely linked. At the end of the workshop we said good-bye, not with words, but by moving joyously to lively music with a strong beat. I surprised myself with my freedom to enjoy moving spontaneously with others to a type of music I had not liked before that experience.

In the months since that experience, my awareness of the stream has come and gone and come again. A few days after the workshop, I was walking alone by the ocean. The dawning sun was sparkling on the surf. A line of a hymn I had enjoyed at a church youth camp came back to me: “Like your dancing waves in sunlight, make me glad and free.” I realized that my recent awakening was something like a transforming religious experience at that camp some thirty-five years ago. As I walked on the deserted beach, I came upon a solitary egret fishing in the surf for its breakfast. We communicated nonverbally for a few minutes. Then the bird took off and soared in a gentle arc to the right over the water and back to the beach. I felt my spirit soaring with that egret, free as a bird. I experienced the lightness and lift of new aliveness and hope.

I find that I can return to the laughing, playful child, the dancing mountain stream, the sparkling ocean waves, the soaring egret within me. Often, in my preoccupation with doing and with provingmyself, I lose touch with this liberating inner experience. It seems utterly lost. I feel sad, knowing that I have slipped back into the heaviness of my work addiction. But, on other occasions, I’m able to recover the inner aliveness. I do this in various ways–by moving to music (actual music or in my mind), by meditating and opening myself to the flow of life, by breathing more fully, or simply by chuckling inwardly at myself.

When I am in touch with my inner flow, my close relationships are more open and more satisfying. Writing and counseling and teaching are freer, more energizing experiences. In contrast to the many times I push myself to produce and do well, these activities are more productive and satisfying when I’m in touch with the inner stream of energy. It is clear that the inner stream of creativity is there potentially in all of us!

The inner liberation I experienced in that workshop was a gift, like grace. But how painful it was to become open enough to receive the gift. The nine days of struggle felt like a descent into hell. That descent was necessary to crack my shell of doing and open me to receive the gift of being. For me as a life-long workaholic, the healing-growthing gift came through laughter. My playful inner child was what broke through my inner closedness and let new life flow. The familiar words in the New Testament now have new meaning for me: “Unless you become like a little child.” I hope that my sharing of this experience brings back warm recollections of similar moments of enlivening in your life.

2. Inner Growth: Revitalizing One’s Body

The second dimension of growth involves revitalizing one’s body by increasing awareness and learning to enjoy mind-body wholeness. Jerry, a “successful” graduate student, put it well in a creative singlehood group: “I’ve been head-tripping for a long time and collecting a lot of goodies by it from the academic world. But I’ve felt like my body, my guts and heart and genitals, weren’t really ‘me.’ I’ve used them like they’re not really vital parts of me that I love and care about. My body has been protesting in all kinds of ways, but I’ve been ignoring the message!” He went on to describe his new awareness and positive feelings about his body. He concluded, “I can be the alive person I want to be only if I’m an alive body!”

By concentrating almost exclusively on enhancing our psyches, most traditional psychotherapies have perpetuated and even increased that alienation from our bodies which has contributed to the impoverishment of our psyches. Drawing on the neo-Reichian body therapies and the exciting insights from biofeedback about mind-body complementarity, Wholeness Counseling aims at being a whole-person somato-therapy as well as a psychotherapy.

Alienation from our bodies is a major cause of nonpotentializing particularly among us middle-class people. We middle-class males tend to overvalue our intellects and consider our feelings and our bodies alien and inferior. Our bodies are experienced as things to be used, not really our selves. Consequently we cut ourselves off from experiencing the full spectrum of our feelings and our senses. Food is gulped compulsively and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1. The Goals of Wholeness or Growth Counseling
• Chapter 2. The Working Principles of Wholeness Counseling
• Chapter 3. The Flow and Methods of Wholeness Counseling
• Chapter 4. Spiritual Growth–The Key to All Wholeness
• Chapter 5. Biblical and Theological Resources for Wholeness Counseling
• Chapter 6. Wholeness Counseling Through the Stages of Life
• Chapter 7. Summary and Conclusion: Developing Your Own Wholeness-Centered Approaches to Counseling and Therapy, Education, and Life Enhancement
• Notes
• Bibliography: For Further Exploration of Growth Counseling
• Index