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What Is Counseling?
The psychotherapeutic conception of counseling operates in a different universe from the pastoral conception. The human problems are the same, of course: broken, confused, distressed, distressing people who need help. How should we define the âtalking cureâ for the ills that beset us?
A therapistâs treatment typically means a private relationship confined to an appointed hour once a week. Like medicine or law, the mental health professions treat patients/clients on a fee-for-service basis. State licensure recognizes education and experience that presumably grant esoteric explanatory insight and exceptional interventive skills. Like medical professionals, mental health professionals present themselves as possessing objective scientific knowledge and offering value-neutral technical expertise. The ostensibly healthy treat the definedly sick. A clientâs difficulties and distress are susceptible to diagnosis in morally neutral categories: a DSM syndrome, dysfunction, or disorder.1
Therapeutic professionalism serves a distinct ethos. Clinical detachment intentionally avoids the mutuality of normal social existence: willing self-disclosure, âdual relationshipsâ that live outside the office as well as inside, the candid give-and-take of story, opinion, persuasion, and mutual influence. Professional reserve dictates that âthe therapist will not impose or otherwise induce his personal values on the patient. . . . The exploration and acquisition of more constructive and less neurotically determined values [is] conducted without ethical or moral pressure or suasions of any kind.â2 Psychotherapeutic faith roots in âthe assumption that in every human being there is a core selfhood that if allowed free and unconflicted expression would provide the basis for creative, adaptive, and productive living.â3 Religion is recognized as a factor that might be individually compelling for some clients, either a comforting resource or an aspect of pathology. But âGodâ has no objective significance or necessary relevance either in explanation or treatment of dysfunctional emotions, behaviors, and thoughts.
This constellation of assumptions and expectations expresses the professional self-image of the talking-cure professions. It shapes our cultureâs implicit belief that âpsychotherapy/counselingâ is essentially analogous to medical doctoring. But this complex of meanings profoundly misshapes assumptions of what counseling really is and ideally ought to be. Counseling per se is not like medical doctoring. It is pastoring. It is discipling. If we want to use the physician analogy, counseling is the âbedside mannerâ part of doctoring, not the medical part. It expresses the influence human beings have on one anotherâs thoughts, values, moods, expectancies, and choices. Counseling is not essentially a technical enterprise calling for technical expertise. It is a relational and pastoral enterprise engaging in care and cure of the soul. Both âpsycho-therapyâ and âpsych-iatryâ attempt pastoral work. They engage in âcare and cure of the soulâ as their etymologies accurately signify. Sigmund Freud rightly defined therapists as âsecular pastoral workers.â4
Personal factorsâwho you are, how you treat people, what you believeâare decisive in pastoral work. The key ingredients in pastoring another human being are love, wisdom, humility, integrity, mercy, authority, clarity, truthspeaking, courage, candor, curiosity, hope, sane humanity, wide experience, much patience, careful listening, responsive immediacy, and willingness to live with uncertainty about process and outcome. Therapists also know this, deep down, and say as much when they doff the professional persona.5 These are terrific personal qualities. They express nothing less than how the image of God lives in human flesh while going about the work of redeeming broken, confused, distressed, distressing people who need help. The mental health professions intuit well when they say that personal factors are the essential factors. But they serve in pastorates with no God and no church. They aim to restore straying, suffering, willful, dying human beings. But they consider Christ unnecessary to their pastoral work. As a matter of principle, they will not lead strugglers to the Savior of strays. You know better. But the secularized-medicalized definition of counseling powerfully intimidates pastors and laypersons alike. If the habits, instincts, outlook, and goals of therapeutic pastorates define counseling, then you had better not pretend or aspire to be a counselor. You need a different wayâa better wayâto understand counseling.
A Redefinition of Counseling
Consider four ways that you as a pastor must redefine counseling.
For starters, if the psychotherapeutic definition controls our vision, what pastor could ever provide the necessary care and cure of even thirty souls, let alone one hundred, five hundred, or five thousand souls? What pastor has time to get the presumably necessary secularized education? Having labored long toward your ordination by the church, who has time or inclination to labor for a second ordination by the mental health system? What pastor could ever invest so much time in one-to-one counseling? A pastor needs a very different vision for what counseling is and can be.
Second, what true pastor believes that the love of Christ and the will of God are value free? You will never say to anyone (except ironically), âYou are free to discover your own values, whatever works for you, whatever way of living with yourself and others brings you a sense of personal satisfaction.â God has chosen to impose his values on the entire universe. First Timothy 1:5 bluntly asserts nonnegotiable goals: âlove . . . from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith.â God insists on the supreme worth and glory of who he is and what he has done. God insists that self-centered people learn loveânot coping skills, not self-actualization, not meeting felt needs, not techniques of managing emotions or thought life, not fulfilling personal goals. Godâs morally charged categories heighten human responsibility. His willing mercy and sheer grace give the only real basis for true compassion and patience. He insists that we learn love by being loved, by learning Jesus: âIn this is love . . . that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sinsâ (1 John 4:10). On the last day, every knee bows to Godâs âvalues.â
The whole nature of ministry is to âimposeâ light into darkness, to induce sanity, to form Christâs life-nourishing values within us. Pastoral counseling openly brings âethical or moral suasionsâ as expressions of genuine love that considers the actual welfare of others. The conscious intentions of Christless counselors are kindly, but they do not consider the true welfare and needs of actual human beings. A pastor has a systematically brighter vision for what counseling is all about.
Third, what honest pastor would ever buy into the armâs-length professional reserve of the therapist?6 Ministry is self-disclosing by necessity and as a matter of principle. After all, we follow David, Jeremiah, Jesus, and Paul. Shouts of delight along with loud cries and groaning are part of the whole package. No real pastor can be clinically detached. The Paul who wrote 1 Thessalonians 2:7â12 is far too emotionally involved. Like Jesus, he cares too much to ever stand at armâs length from people and their troubles. If Jesus had entered into purely consultative, professional relationships, heâd have had to stop being a pastor. Pastoral self-disclosure is one part of wise love. It is not self-indulgent. It is neither impulsive venting nor exhibitionistic transparency nor a pontificating of private opinions. It includes proper reserve. But Christian openness is a different ball game from the ideal of dispassionate professionalism. Ministry expresses the honest emotional immediacy of team sports and contact sports. It is full-court basketball, not chess or poker.
How about you? Donât people know you in all sorts of other roles besides counselor?âproclaimer of words of life, friend at the dinner table, bedside visitor in the hospital, second-baseman on the softball team, mere man and leader who canât help but show how he faces financial pressure or handles interpersonal...
