The Pastoral Counselor Needs Both Strength and Weakness

The Self Compass growth tool edifies a pastoral counselor’s life and personality as effectively as it does a counselee’s.

After becoming a psychologist, I unknowingly developed a glitch in my personality. I was so self-confident (Strength compass point) that I lacked humility and empathy toward my counselees (Weakness compass point). In other words, I had plenty of clinical skills as a therapist, but lacked the ability to identify with a counselee’s vulnerabilities. I wasn’t about to feel vulnerable, especially because I had spent too much time there in my growing up years. 

The Narcissistic Boaster

Looking back on that early part of my counseling career, I recognize that God was trying to wake me up, trying to give me clues that being too strong had become my greatest weakness, but I didn’t want to hear the message. Though I utilized healthy strength in accomplishing goals, a residue of the narcissistic Boaster pattern kept me self-absorbed and one step removed from other people’s pain—too success-oriented to empathize with others.

Several things happened that brought a compass awakening. There was an extended period of illness, a devastating financial reversal, and the death of my father. After taking off several months from counseling in order to put my life back together, the first few counselees I saw said they especially appreciated my empathy.

What? Empathy? From the Rock of Gibraltar who felt superior to almost everyone? Yet as I reflected on this new input, I had to agree that it was true. Somehow in the crucible of my suffering, God had balanced out my over-reliance upon Strength, helping me to develop a more authentic integration of healthy Weakness.

The Rhythm of Weakness and Strength

In terms of the Weakness and Strength polarity within your personality, there is a profound wisdom conveyed through Scripture but often lost in culture at large. The entry point for following Christ comes through weakness, not strength. Compass Therapy purposely uses the term “Weakness” to highlight the universality of human fallibility—conjoined with the truth that acknowledging one’s weaknesses leads to humility and empathy for others.

If you think about it, no one in the biblical narrative called upon God or followed Christ out of sheer human strength. Such strength creates the sense that one is fully capable of living one’s life without God’s help. But biblical characters, to the degree that they developed intimacy with God, uniformly confessed their weaknesses and acknowledged their sin and need.

As a pastoral counselor, you build upon this willingness to acknowledge your humanness and resist appearing infallible. In your personal and professional life, you maintain an ongoing dialogue with the Lord, based on your need for him to impart to you some of his own qualities as the Mighty Counselor. Yet even Christ lives out this polarity of Weakness and Strength. As the author of Hebrews points out, he makes perfect intercession for his brother and sister humans, since he himself has suffered and knows what it’s like to be human.

There are going to be times when you leave a particular counseling session feeling quite furious at the counselee for dumping anger on you, or for ignoring your advice and worsening their situation. You’ll want to tell God, “Sam is a total idiot! Why did you send him to me?”

It’s okay to have these feelings. Counselees can exasperate even the best of counselors. And some of their behaviors can really grate you. But at the end of the day you surrender this load to the Lord by “casting all your care upon Him, for He cares for you” (1 Pet 5:7). He will use this healthy Weakness to comfort you during the night and move in mysterious ways that help you the next day.

When it comes to the Strength compass point, most of us need some help because we don’t automatically enjoy a self-image as a competent and capable counselor. We develop this image over time as a consequence of receiving positive feedback from counselees, and from seeing our professional reputation grow in our church and community.

 

To increase your confidence in your pastoral counseling identity, say to yourself often enough for it to really register: “I appreciate my strengths, capabilities, and developing talents as a pastoral counselor.” This isn’t aimed at making you cocky, but at strengthening your enjoyment of this vocation and bolstering your spirits when the occasional session falls flat, or when an encounter with a hostile or judgmental counselee takes a piece out of you. 

Likewise the Weakness compass point lets you say to yourself, “I am a human being with clay feet, and I am not afraid to ask for help, make an appropriate apology, or experience my need for strengthening through prayer, relationships, and community.”

And when you get into the thick of a counseling session in which you have no earthly idea what to do next, just say, as Peter did when walking on water in the presence of high waves, “Help!” The Lord loves responding to his shepherds who are giving their lives to care for his sheep. 

Helping People Experience God's Love

I have helped many people yield to God's love. It isn't nearly as complicated as you might think. The two factors that have to be overcome include fear of the unknown and lack of knowledge about how much God desires to manifest himself in our lives.

I remember as a young boy I went to bed at night feeling deeply frightened after turning out the lights. I would see creepy shadows on the wall formed by streetlights, and imagine all types of weird monsters in the closet or under my bed. Finally my mother suggested a solution. She brought a black Bible into my room and laid it on my nightstand. "Here Dan," she said. "Now you know that God will be here with you in your room." Her technique and confidence, along with my new feeling of God's assurance won the day.

As a pastoral counselor you have countless opportunities to assure people of God's love for them. You can say, "God is going to help you through this current crisis because we are trusting in Him." Or, "I wonder what creative way the Lord will use to help you out this week."

When people express fear at the prospect of feeling God's presence, it is often because they connect it with ghost stories or the loss of control to an invisible force. Here is where people need to realize that in Jesus we see the face and hear the voice of Almighty God. From a child born in a manger, we hear the Lord of Creation speaking to us, usually gently through the voice of the Holy Spirit, about how we are to live and what we are to believe. Understanding that Christ is resurrected and that it's perfectly normal to hear his voice really helps people relax and recognize the Good Shepherd when He guides them.

If a person still doesn't feel comfortable with God, you may need to probe for areas of willful sin, where they are not really surrendering their lives to him, or where they are disobeying what Scripture teaches. A woman revealed to me in pastoral counseling something she had never told anyone: that a local physician had her visit his home each month to handle his sexual needs. For this he helped her out with her monthly condo payment. She had been benefiting from this arrangement for a year, and at first seemed shocked when I reframed it as prostitution. This went against her self-image as a very moral person in other regards. It took her a couple of months to part ways with the doctor, but a new peace of Christ came into her heart when she made the break.
 
Once you have helped a person deal with their reservations about growing in Jesus Christ, this opens up many opportunities for a closer walk with God. Since the Holy Spirit now lives within them, they can talk to God as they would a best friend, any time day or night. They can approach God boldly, as His much loved sons and daughters. "Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need" (Heb 4:16).

One day when President John Kennedy was in the Oval Office, a White House photographer caught little Jon-Jon, his three year old son, peeking out from under the desk, where he had been happily playing during a high level meeting.

But Kennedy acted like our Heavenly Father acts, making room for Jon-Jon in  his affairs of state. God loves us even more intensely. The Lord is never too busy to comfort us or give us a spiritual hug in the middle of the day.

Here are Scriptures that work well in pastoral counseling to drive this reality home:

"No power in the sky above or in the earth below—indeed, nothing in all creation will ever be able to separate us from the love of God that is revealed in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Romans 8:39).

"May you experience the love of Christ, though it is too great to understand fully. Then you will be made complete with all the fullness of life and power that comes from God" (Ephesians 3:19).

"For God has not given us a spirit of fear and timidity, but of power, love, and self-discipline" (2 Timothy 1:7).

Most of all, persons in pastoral counseling learn from you, the pastoral counselor, that God is really there, and that He loves them as you love them.

Healing Through The Human Nature Compass

The work of pastoral counseling shares elements of reconciling people to themselves, others, and God; imparting skill-sets for living effectively, and blessing them with good will and compassionate understanding. In the context of the Human Nature Compass, this therapeutic healing stimulates spiritual growth in counselees, in rhythm with cognitive clarification, emotional modulation, and physical relaxation.

MIND

Thinking is a cognitive event that occurs in the frontal lobe of the cerebral cortex. Persons can think thoughts with or without emotion or movement. In 1902 Auguste Rodin created a sculpture titled, “The Thinker.” By reading the body language, you can tell that the man is pensively meditating about some inner struggle.

This is how counselees look when they are inwardly absorbed, trying to sort out what to tell you. They’re not sure what is relevant to the current problem and what isn’t. That is why Freud developed the psychoanalytic dictum, “Say everything that comes into your mind, without censoring anything.” Beyond struggling to know what to disclose, counselees usually want to keep up a good front to convince us that they are, after all, good and capable human beings, despite their needs and vulnerabilities.

The pastoral counselor’s mind is also at work, in the form of providing new knowledge, suggesting interpretations for the counselee’s consideration, offering perspective on a problem, and developing periodic summaries that state what has been covered and what lies ahead.

Additionally, your counselee is thinking between sessions about how to apply new insights toward the solving of current problems. How well counselees can analytically reflect on their therapeutic experience defines the quality of their participation, and may well be the single most influential factor for a positive outcome in counseling.

HEART

Feelings reflect arousal of the limbic system deep inside the brain. Feelings possess psychological, physiological, and even spiritual dimensions. Part of effective counseling is helping people recognize when they are having a feeling, and learn to label it accurately.

Some perennial emotions that may need sorting out include the range between feeling joyful and sad, hopeful and despairing, elated and depressed, loving and angry, excited and numb, secure and anxious, confident and guilty, trusting and jealous, appreciative and resentful, serene and frustrated, interested and bored, intrigued and repulsed, ecstatic and agonized, proud and ashamed, reassured and terrified, or caring and indifferent.

E-motions represent physiological energy that is “in motion.” Emotions express the energy of personality and are always changing, like the flow of water in a river. It is when some inner conflict has dammed up the flow of feelings like a beaver dam that persons become mired in anxiety or depression. This accounts for the unconscious pressure that floods out in cathartic expression when the beaver dam is therapeutically removed.

In order to develop a healthy personality and fulfilling relationships, all counselees need practice not only in identifying their feelings, but also in thinking about them constructively, and expressing them diplomatically to others and to God.

BODY

The field of physiological psychology reveals that there are two different nervous systems in every person. The first is the central nervous system (CNS), which allows a person to stand up and walk, drink a glass of water, or open and close a door. The central nervous system connects skeleton with muscle, and is innervated through the sensorimotor band across the top of the cerebral cortex.

The second nervous system, though less conspicuous, is by far the most important one in counseling. This is the autonomic or “automatic” nervous system (ANS) where respiration, circulation, digestion, elimination, and systemic regulation occur, as well as the daily maintenance of every cell in the body. The ANS can be influenced in dramatic ways. For instance, a professor walks into her class and announces that she’s giving a surprise pop quiz that will account for one-fifth of the semester grade. Within microseconds, blood pressure shoots up, pulses quicken, hands clench, and a few students practically stop breathing.

It works the same in counseling, only you can use the ANS for beneficial results. With a few well-chosen words, or even a purposeful shift in your body language, you can easily influence your counselee’s attitude and bodily state. This week when a counselee starts manifesting anxiety, try relaxing your own body by letting your voice have resonance and breathing from your diaphragm, slowly and easily. Remember to let your hands melt into your lap. Watch how, before long, your counselee begins to relax, since you are giving such strong environmental signals that everything is okay. What is happening is that the direct communication of your “at-ease” body language becomes an unconscious suggestion that your counselee’s ANS translates into a physiological relaxation response.

This “stay and play” mode of the autonomic nervous system is the opposite of the “fight or flight” mode that the slightest hint of threat can trigger. So especially when you are offering a novel interpretation of a counselee’s behavior for consideration, or when you are exploring an emotionally-charged past memory, you’ll want to do so in a warm and relaxing way.

SPIRIT

When working with non-religious counselees, or counselees who adhere to the teaching of various world religions, human spirituality can be thought of as the realm of values, meaning, and ultimate concern that promotes serenity and truth.

Adherents of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, the New Age movement, and agnosticism reveal significant differentiation in their perception of spirituality. Nevertheless, a common theme often echoes Christ’s teaching to love God with your whole being and love your neighbor as yourself.

Or, if the person doesn’t believe in a theistic conception of God, surrendering to a Higher Power is valuable in order to find meaning beyond the autonomous self. And if a Higher Power is excluded from religious belief, then there is usually a quest for truth in terms of freedom from illusions and commitment to social justice.

Whatever the spiritual orientation of the counselee, the pastoral counselor can personally draw upon the unique message of Christian faith and doctrine that God is a loving Trinity, providing a platform for therapeutic helping that spiritually interfaces with Christ as mediator between God and persons, the Holy Spirit as Advocate or “One called alongside to help,” and God the Father Almighty, who together form the ontological foundation of human nature and hold the key to its fulfillment. For an in-depth exploration of this theme, I refer you to:

Trusting in the Trinity: 

Compass Psychotheology Applied

Setting Up a First Pastoral Counseling Session

Let’s speculate a little, for the purpose of enhancing empathy with counselees, about what goes on within a person before making a first contact with a pastoral counselor.

It’s awful when individuals feel bound up with a knotty life problem that won’t go away and doesn’t get better, no matter what efforts they make, no matter what advice they receive from trusted friends. The problem can even defy heartfelt prayer, a sense of helplessness accruing alongside inner anxiety.

It may be that a third child, unlike the first two who were calm and sociable, climbs the walls day and night, paying no attention to parental pleas or reprimands. Or it may be that sexual issues have come to haunt the marriage bed. Or what about a person who has recurring anxiety attacks and doesn’t know why?

Every counselee feels anguish. They would not contact you if pain and perplexity didn’t compel them. And once they are resolved to reach out, there is the added uncertainty about how you will respond to them.

Treatment fearfulness is commonly underestimated by counselors, but nevertheless acts as a genuine obstacle in seeking help. Further, men especially may have some culturally determined resistance to counseling because of the intimate sharing it requires.

Take heart, though. Research shows that counselees have a greater probability of experiencing healing in their area of need than do patients who seek a physician’s care. And generally speaking, the more anxious and distressed people are when they enter counseling, the more likely they will continue with it and the more benefit they will likely derive.

Keep in mind, too, that many people prefer seeing a counselor who is sensitive to spiritual values over one who is secular-minded. Fears and all, then, many hurting persons reach a point where they decide to pursue pastoral counseling, mustering the courage to make a first contact. They may know you from church, hear of your work from someone you’ve counseled, or find your site on the Internet.

In their moment of reaching out, a touch of hope stirs within them, a warranted hope, since God is encouraging them to make a counseling connection with you.

Now, for our part, what goes on inside us to prepare for a first session with a new counselee? Personally, I am helped by an open-ended prayer conversation that says to the Lord, “Please send me only those individuals that in your providence you want me to see, and please guide us from beginning to end.”

This steadies my confidence in God’s superintendence of my counseling practice, helping my unconscious to accept that the Lord is guiding people long before they see me, and will continue to help them long after our counseling is over. I want God’s multifaceted involvement in my counseling and coaching practice. After all, Christ is the one who originally called me to this profession!

Another way of preparing for new counselees is simply not scheduling more appointments than you can handle in a given week. This requires that you diplomatically saying “no” to a prospective counselee who would create an overload in your counseling practice: “I’m very sorry but my practice is full just now. Let me give you a few names of other counselors who might be able to see you.” This is hard for me, since I want to help every person who needs me, and, at a less mature level, I am flattered when people call upon my expertise. The tendency to overbook threatens the delicate balance of a healthy pastoral counseling practice. 

Seeing too many people—even one too many counselees—leaves us irritable or exhausted after a day of counseling. This in turn deprives spouses and children of rightful energy needed to nourish them. It doesn’t take long for a spouse to think, “My husband (or wife) cares more about taking care of other people than about me!” I suggest placing your spouse at the top of the list of those who need nurturing love. An intimate marriage deepens the reservoir of energy required for serving counselees effectively.

If you are single, this overload appears more as a secret depression: like being crushed under a heavy load that no one else knows about. Either way, you learn to place your physical and psychological wellbeing as a primary priority, recognizing that by showing this love for yourself, you’ll have energy to care for others.

In either case, watch out for the isolation that comes with over-exposure to counselees. Counter this isolation with the development of hobbies and social outings that keep you interested in life and rejuvenate your spirit. You want longevity and career fulfillment, not burnout. 

 I know. I've burned out twice in accruing 35,000 hours of counseling experience. Each time it took several months free from counseling to recover my health, identity, and sense of enjoyment of this challenging vocation. However, I'm happy to report that the older I've gotten, the more relaxed I've become in counseling, and the more joy in this calling I have come to experience. Even though it's still hard work!

How are you doing?