Giving Counsel

A Minister's Guidebook

Donald Capps

• Publisher: Chalice Press
• Year: 2001
• eBook ISBN: 9780827212558
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

For most ministers, pastoral counseling is a part of daily ministry, whether it is in an office counseling session or in a chance meeting with a parishioner outside the church. Whatever the setting, ministers are often called on to provide counsel and, by virtue of their calling and training, are expected to do so.

This "how-to" guide for seminary students and ministers explores the role of the minister as counselor and provides a method for giving counsel. Renowned pastoral care expert Donald Capps equips readers with basic knowledge and skills and helps them to create a framework to ensure that all conversations where counsel is given will be valuable and not harmful to the person involved. Using a "problem-resolving" approach, Capps leads readers through:
— How to Create a Listening Environment
— How to Construct a Conversation
— How to Think Systemically
— How to Interpret Stories
— How to Manage Boundaries
Giving Counsel is the perfect resource for seminary students and ministers of all faiths, whether you are beginning your study or looking for a single resource to serve your ministry.

1
How to Create a Listening Environment

In The Art of Pastoral Conversation (1981), Gaylord Noyce points out: “listening is hard work. It is far easier to translate a foreign language that we know into our own tongue than to translate our own into the foreign speech. Likewise, it is far easier to direct a conversation along the lines of our own thinking than to respond along the lines of thought and feeling and in accord with the assumptions of others. Sensitive, thoughtful listening makes it more possible” (p. 31).

“Preaching courses teach seminary students how to speak, while pastoral counseling courses teach them how to listen.” I have heard this said, and there is much truth in it. As this chapter unfolds, however, it will become clear that there is one very important similarity between preaching and pastoral counseling, and this is that both involve communication. The problem is that the communication skills developed for preaching do not work very well in counseling, which may help to explain the widely held perception (even if it exaggerates the point a bit) that the best preachers are often the worst counselors, and that the best counselors are often ineffective preachers.

This chapter will focus on the important role that listening plays in any situation in which a minister assumes the role of counselor. Some readers may feel that they do not need to read a chapter on “how to create a listening environment” because they are “natural listeners.” If there is a phenomenon known as the “natural reader”—the child of three or four years old who takes to reading with relative ease—surely there is also a category of persons who are “natural listeners.” This ability, in fact, may be an important reason why they were drawn to ministry as a profession, and why they are especially attracted to counseling. At the same time, I believe that reading about listening will, at the very least, help these “natural listeners” to identify what they are already doing that makes them effective listeners. It may also help them to see how their listening ability fits within the larger framework of a helping process.

Others are convinced that they will never become good listeners. To read about listening will merely make them feel more inadequate. While it may be risky to say this (as there are always exceptions), my experience has been that students who truly wanted to become better listeners have in fact become so. With rare exceptions, any student whose listening capacity has not improved as a result of taking a course in pastoral care and counseling was not really interested in becoming a good listener. Listening is a skill that can be taught, but not to an unreceptive learner. A sort of circularity, perhaps even a paradox, in this regard is that to become a listener, one must be able to listen to suggestions or advice about listening from someone else. Reading about listening is itself a form of listening. The reader can “talk back”—challenge or question what has been said—but such “talking back” will have much greater force if the reader has first listened to what the author has to say.

Of course, reading about effective listening and actually engaging in it as a counselor are two different things. What seems simple enough as we read about it may prove more difficult in practice. This gap between reading about effective listening and actually doing it should not be minimized. On the other hand, effective listening is something one can practice outside the counseling role. Since we communicate with many persons throughout the course of a normal day, we can practice effective listening in many natural contexts. When I was first introduced to the “client-centered” approach to counseling—an approach that places great emphasis on listening and reflecting what one hears—I tried it out at parties and other social gatherings. As I was driving home, my frequent reflection on the fact that I had learned a great deal about quite a number of persons—and had said virtually nothing about myself—confirmed the value of this approach. (I later discovered that persons who suffer from social phobia or anxiety often use this very “method” because they dislike being the center of attention; see Capps, 1998). Readers of this chapter may want to put its claims to a test. They might, for example, use the ideas presented here in talking with one friend and deliberately not use them—or even violate them—in a conversation with another friend, and then assess the two conversations. When engaging in the counseling role itself, one is not as free to experiment in this way.

I suggest, then, that reading about listening can benefit any reader except one who is simply not interested in becoming a better listener. (I have in mind here a lack of interest and not resistance, which, as James E. Dittes points out, is typically “a sign of vitality”; Dittes, 1967, p. 136ff.) Because this is a book on the minister as counselor, the listening that concerns us here is listening that occurs within the context or framework of a helping process. When we hear the term helping process, we are likely to think of a situation in which the minister is talking with a parishioner in her office about a personal problem. Most of the situations I will discuss in this book will be of this kind. The term also applies, however, to situations in which the minister is helping the budget committee decide between two options, or assisting the education committee in addressing the problem of a shortage of teachers, or counseling the chairperson of the music committee concerning his efforts to resolve a dispute between the organist and the choir director. It may also apply to a seminary professor who is counseling a doctoral student on how to get her dissertation proposal accepted by the faculty committee that reviews such proposals. The same listening skills that are effective in counseling an individual or couple on a personal matter are likely to be effective with these other situations. This is why Carl R. Rogers, one of the therapists who developed the listening methods that are so widely used by psychotherapists and counselors today, was often asked to speak to educators and managers and was even involved in an experiment with Catholic and Protestant youth of Northern Ireland who were brought together in a neutral site for mutual conversation.

In this chapter, I will be concerned with what we might view as an adult learning problem, the problem of how to learn to listen. My approach to this problem will not be instructional, much less didactic. I will not set forth a step-by-step model for learning to listen. Instead, I will address this adult learning problem through indirection, that is, by focusing on ways to create a listening environment, an environment conducive to listening. In taking this more indirect approach, I show, in effect, that I myself have been listening to educators who say that it is very difficult to teach if the environment is not conducive to learning. Similarly, it is difficult to become a good, effective listener if a listening environment has not been created. Once the environment is in place, the difficulty of listening is greatly reduced.

Of course, the word “environment” is a notoriously slippery term, and our politicians have taken full advantage of this fact when they have claimed to be “for the environment” or represented themselves as “the environmental candidate.” This slipperiness is reflected in the dictionary definition of environment as “all the conditions, circumstances, and influences surrounding, and affecting the development of, an organism or group of organisms.” The key word here, however, is “surrounding,” or that which encircles or encloses the organism in question. What are the conditions, circumstances, and influences that “surround” the act or process of listening? What are the conditions that inhibit listening from taking place? And what are the conditions that facilitate its occurrence? I will be concerned in this chapter with these surrounding factors. Then, in chapter 2, I will focus more narrowly on the communication process—the give-and-take between the person who provides a listening ear and the person (or persons) who have asked or expect to be listened to.

How Anxiety Inhibits Listening

What is listening? The dictionary defines it as “to make a conscious effort to hear; attend closely, so as to hear; to pay close attention.” This definition emphasizes that it is a conscious effort and that it involves being attentive. Conscious in this case means being intentional, or purposeful, while attention means the act of keeping one’s mind closely on something. Thus, listening has an intentional and an attentional aspect, and both are needed for true listening to occur. One might be very intentional—“I will make every effort to listen”—and yet be unable to attend to what is being said or communicated.

A person might not be able to attend to what is being said for many reasons. He may be so conscious of his intention to listen that he is unable to attend to what the other person is trying to communicate. We might call this the paradox of intentional listening. The more intentional one is, the greater the danger that one will not be attentional. Other reasons, however, have more to do with the anxieties that are evoked in oneself by what the other person is saying.

Erik H. Erikson (1963) makes a useful contrast between anxieties and fears. Fears, he says, “are states of apprehension which focus on isolated and recognizable dangers so that they may be judiciously appraised and realistically countered,” whereas anxieties “are diffuse states of tension which magnify and even cause the illusion of an outer danger, without pointing to appropriate avenues of defense or mastery” (pp. 406–7).

For someone who has not previously needed to be intentional about listening, the first few experiences of doing this may inherently produce anxiety. One of the goals of this book is that the reader will find intentional listening less inherently anxiety-producing because he has a good idea of what such listening entails. But anxieties are also evoked or created by the things another person says to us. The things that are said or communicated can make us anxious, producing a “diffuse state of tension” that magnifies or causes a sense of endangerment from which we are unable, at the moment at least, to defend ourselves. An obvious example is when we are verbally condemned, as when a parishioner says that she “completely disagrees” with the sermon, or when the senior minister calls the associate minister into his office and begins to list the “complaints” he has heard from a few church members about how she has been handling her youth ministry assignments. Even if the senior minister minimizes these complaints, stressing that the vast majority of the members are enthusiastic about the associate’s work with the youth, his use of the word “complaints” is likely to evoke anxiety, and the associate may have difficulty listening to the senior minister’s description of the complaints and his assurances that they represent the views of only a few members.

Or when a parishioner comes to the minister and says that he has learned something about the minister’s past that the minister had hoped her congregation would never learn about, she is very likely to have an initial response of anxiety, as she is faced with what appears to be a danger for which she has no appropriate defense. If she subsequently calms herself and says to her accuser, “This is something that happened a long time ago for which I have asked and received God’s forgiveness,” what appeared to be an experience of endangerment has become an opportunity to witness to the efficacy of the Christian faith. Initially, though, she feels anxious because she experiences an inability to defend herself.

Things said to a counselor can make the counselor anxious for various other reasons. They may be categorized as follows:

1. The subject matter itself produces anxiety. Certain topics that arise in the course of a conversation may make the minister feel uneasy, threatened, or endangered. Talk about death, marital conflicts, conflicts between siblings, or sexual topics may be threatening because they open up wounds from childhood or adolescence. A male parishioner describing a sexual relationship with another male may produce anxiety in a male minister who had an unwanted sexual encounter with a man when he was a teenager. Or a parishioner who says she is thinking seriously about committing suicide may produce anxiety in the minister because his mother committed suicide when he was a boy and he continues to feel that he was partly to blame even though he knows he was not. When anyone brings up the subject of suicide, this minister’s anxiety is raised, and he finds that he is unable to hear what is being said from that point on. All he can think about for the next several minutes is his experience of looking at his dead mother’s face as she lay in the casket and of asking her why she didn’t want to live anymore.

2. The subject matter produces anxiety when this particular person talks about it. Topics that may not ordinarily result in anxiety for the minister, but do so when a particular individual brings them up. For example, a male minister may not become anxious when other persons talk about sexual matters, but when a particular woman does so, he becomes anxious, perhaps because he finds her talking about it to be sexually arousing. Or a minister may ordinarily be able to listen to other persons’ expressions of anger, but finds herself anxious when a particular person talks in an angry voice because his way of expressing anger is very similar to how her father spoke angrily toward her when she was a child. Thus, even though the man being listened to is expressing anger toward someone else, she feels personally threatened, and reexperiences her inability to defend herself against a threat.

3. A particular person produces anxiety whatever the subject matter is. Some individuals make a minister feel anxious by their physical presence alone. The reasons for this may be self-evident. For example, whenever this person comes to a committee meeting, he can be counted on to insult another person, causing the other person to break out in tears, or leave the meeting altogether. Thus, the very appearance of this person raises the minister’s anxiety level, as she feels relatively defenseless, not knowing when the insults will occur, who they will be directed against, and what their repercussions will be. Other times, the reasons are less self-evident. The minister may not be aware, for example, that a particular person produces feelings in him that were evoked by his mother when he felt that she was trying to control him. When this person enters the room, the minister feels unaccountably trapped, like an animal, and looks about for some means of escape. When she speaks, he doesn’t hear much of what she has to say.

4. The anxiety is due to anticipatory dread. A minister may have difficulty listening to what the other person is saying because he is thinking about what he will need to do later in the conversation. For example, he may be aware that this parishioner will expect him to say a prayer at the end of the conversation, and he may be anxious about what he is going to say. Or a minister in the teaching profession may be dreading the fact that she will need to tell the student that his course work is quite poor. Knowing that he expects that she will have nothing but praise for his work makes this task especially difficult. Or a minister may be anxious about what her next move should be. Will she suggest another conversation together? Will she refer the other person to another professional, and, if so, to whom? Or he may be thinking about something else that he needs to do later in the day, such as a funeral he is dreading because he knows it will be an especially difficult one for the family involved. Or she may be thinking about the fact that her husband is going to undergo medical tests later in the day. If the previous cause of anxiety was more likely to be due to its associations with the past, this one has more to do with dread related to the future, causing one to be less than fully attentive to what is being said right now.

5. The anxiety is due to an inability to understand what the other person is saying. Here, the anxiety does not concern the subject matter or the person who is speaking, but the difficulty the hearer is having in understanding what is being said. The reason for the difficulty may be that the minister does not know much, if anything, about the topic of discussion or about how the person who is speaking about the topic appears to be viewing it. For example, the topic may have to do with a person’s feeling she is getting the runaround at a social agency. If the minister does not know anything about this agency or its procedures, he may feel that the conversation is simply beyond his ability to follow, and this absence of understanding may cause him to become anxious because his ignorance is self-evident to him, and will no doubt become obvious to the other person as well. Or a parishioner may be telling the minister about a situation involving her extended family and the minister may find that she cannot keep all the names and relations straight. She becomes anxious, afraid her effort to respond will be met with, “Oh, no, no, no, it wasn’t Ruthie who had the baby out of wedlock; it was Amy. Ruthie was the one who ran off with that sailor boy we all despised.” Or the other person may be discussing a medical procedure that he is about to undergo, and the minister realizes that if she knew more about the procedure, she would be able to understand much better the nature and degree of the other person’s anxiety. Although the minister is aware of the fact that one is not expected to know everything, this awareness may be ineffectual in combating the anxiety that her lack of understanding will be discovered and that she may be judged incompetent or even become the object of contempt.

Subjects in which one’s understanding may be challenged can be those involving technological developments about which one is uninformed or sociocultural experiences that are very different from one’s own. An older minister may simply not understand the slang or jargon of a younger person, while a younger minister may find an older person’s stories or anecdotes hard to understand because their sociocultural reference points no longer exist. Ways of speaking that are difficult to understand may be due to age, racial, regional, occupational, or sociocultural differences, so that listening to the other requires heightened attentiveness, which can be fatiguing or exhausting. When I was in Sweden some years ago, I was talking with the wife of a professor friend of mine. As our conversation continued, I became aware that talking with me was physically exhausting for her in that she was having to listen and talk in English. I suddenly realized that this conversation was far more demanding on her than it was on me even though I was doing more of the talking. It isn’t especially flattering to discover that one is hard for another to listen to, but it was an excellent illustration of Noyce’s point that listening is hard work.

6. The anxiety is due to one’s awareness of differing points of view. Here, the anxiety is not due to one’s difficulty in understanding what the other person is talking about, but to the fact that one understands only too well. How does one listen attentively when what is being said seems altogether wrongheaded, if not perverse? And how does one remain faithful to one’s own beliefs while listening to another person who is espousing opposing beliefs? The minister may feel threatened even though the other person is not saying anything negative about the minister. An especially threatening conversation is one in which the other person assumes—perhaps because the minister is a minister—that his viewpoint is shared by the minister. The other person may be attacking the views of someone else, assuming that the minister shares her distaste for these ideas, while in point of fact the minister is in agreement with the one being criticized. Should the minister say that he disagrees with the speaker, thus jeopardizing the helping process itself, or should he express his disagreement on the grounds that the process cannot really be helpful if he is not straightforward and honest? Topics that are most likely to engender anxiety are ones that concern theological and moral issues. Largely because of their seminary education, many ministers do not have the same theological views as many—perhaps most—of the persons they work with (parishioners, patients, etc.). This is often true of their views on moral issues as well. If these were merely “theoretical” differences, they might not be cause for anxiety, but many of these issues have practical consequences and are therefore integral to the helping process itself. A minister’s anxiety in such a case can range from not wanting her personal views to be found out to concern that she is not being faithful to her calling if she “goes along with” the other person’s beliefs and seemingly endorses their practical consequences.

7. The anxiety is due to the minister’s current emotional or psychological health. A minister may be suffering from depression, ap...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Also by Donald Capps
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 - How to Create a Listening Environment
• Chapter 2 - How to Construct a Conversation
• Chapter 3 - How to Think Systemically
• Chapter 4 - How to Interpret Stories
• Chapter 5 - How to Manage Boundaries
• A Final Word
• References
• Index