The Holy Spirit and Pastoral Counseling

It is perfectly appropriate for a pastoral counselor to suggest that God is present in counseling, offering redemptive hope that helps remove obstacles blocking the way to wholeness.

In some contexts, a pastoral counselor’s freedom to invoke God’s blessing through prayer is part of the counseling process. This is especially true in pastoral ministry, spiritual direction, and church-based counseling centers. On the other hand, there are contexts in which it is unwise to mention God in a personal way, such as the name of Christ.

Even so, there is a considerable range of opportunity where spirituality is welcomed covertly, if not overtly, and this may be where a significant number of the new generation of pastoral counselors find themselves.

The Spirit Moves Where The Spirit Wills

As a professor at a graduate school of psychology, I found myself in one of these places. While affiliated with a Christian denomination, the university reached out to students of all races and faiths, and pursued academic excellence within a context that celebrated and extended the spiritual and ethical ideals of the Christian faith.

Yet Christian witness or prayer was not acceptable in the classroom. I understood and accepted this. Nevertheless, some students knew of my relationship to Christ, and perhaps because of that saw me more as a pastoral counselor than a professional psychologist. Greg was such a student.

Following a class one afternoon, Greg called me aside in the hallway and said, “Dan, can we talk privately?”

“Sure,” I said. I opened the door to an empty classroom and we sat down in two desks. “What’s on your mind?”

“Well,” he said, looking suddenly unsure, “I just wanted to get something off my chest and you’re the one I’ve chosen.”

“I’m honored. Go ahead.”

“My life has fallen to pieces. Ever since elementary school, I had only one goal in life and it didn’t matter what it cost to get there.”

“That’s unusual clarity and single-mindedness. What was the goal?”

“To become a National Football League player. And finally, last spring, I was recruited.”

“That’s great news. Congratulations.”

Greg’s face turned to stone and he shook his head. “That’s when it happened,” he said. “I had a great spring training and a strong start to the season. But then I got hepatitis.” His eyes watered and voice broke. “They hospitalized me. My skin turned yellow.”

“I am so sorry,” I said.

“It gets worse. The doctor said there was permanent liver damage—that I could never play football again….”

We sat searching each others' eyes for a long minute. I let my face express the shock and sorrow I felt.

Finally, placing my hand over my heart, I said, “This is truly tragic. How have you possibly coped?”

“That’s just it,” he said. “I haven’t. I withdrew from my wife to the point where we hardly talk anymore. I withdrew from the players because it was excruciating to watch them working out. And I withdrew from God because I don’t believe he exists any more.”

Another silence.

Now I knew why Greg had chosen me. Paradoxically, he had sought out a person of faith in order to confess his loss of faith.

“Greg, I believe you of all people have every right to challenge God’s existence,” I said. “Do you care to share more about that?”

He nodded. “Yes. I always thought it was God calling me into professional football. I asked his help all the times I felt crushed by opposition or numb with pain. I thought he had big plans for me. And then when I finally became a pro and got my uniform and saw my name on the locker, he gave me hepatitis. What kind of God does that to a child he loves!”

I suddenly felt as helpless as Greg did. I had no answer for God. It would have seemed trite to quote a scripture or ask if he still attended church. At times like this I can wonder why I got into counseling in the first place. Some problems seem too profound to fix.

“So that’s why I came to you today,” said Greg, breaking through my internal anguish. “I want you to pray for me.”

My mind became a freight train: Oh-my-goodness-what-have-I-got-myself-into-I’m-not-supposed-to-witness-to-faith-in-Christ-here!

Fortunately another voice, a calmer one with a different message, whispered within me: Dan, it’s okay to offer a healing prayer when a person asks for spiritual help.

“All right, Greg,” I said. I bowed my head. “Dear Father, you’ve heard Greg pour out his pain and confusion today. All his hopes have been destroyed; all his dreams shattered. Can you please, in your brilliant capacity for resurrection, restore this young man to a life filled with meaning and fulfillment? I praise you and thank you in Jesus’ name, Amen.”

I looked up, but Greg still had his head in his hands.

“Greg,” I said gently. “Would you like to say a prayer too?”

He hesitated. Then he said, “Oh Lord, I am so sorry I have forsaken you. I never even said goodbye. I just tightened my heart and shut you out. Just like I shut out Marilyn. And all you both ever did was try to love me and help me through life. Please come back to me. Please don’t leave me all alone….”

My heart caught. I sat waiting for Greg to finish the prayer. But he didn’t, at least not that I could see. Instead, he began to tremble. I thought immediately, Oh no, I’ve done it now…I pushed this student over the edge…he’s having a panic attack.

The trembling increased and so did my heart rate, until Greg suddenly sat bolt upright and practically shouted, “I feel him, Dan. I feel God. He is right here with us!”

It took a moment for me to understand that this was no psychotic break, but a glorious visitation by the Mighty Counselor himself.

I watched as Greg looked upward, directly over my head, beaming like a child chucked under the chin—a six-foot-six two hundred and fifty pound young man being hugged and loved by his heavenly Father.

When we did finish up our impromptu session that day, I left campus appreciating more than ever that we are not alone as pastoral counselors. We are not left fending for ourselves with mere counseling theories and clinical techniques. The Holy Spirit moves where the Spirit wills, and that especially means moving where people are broken and needing one called alongside to help them, one like you or me and the Lord. 

Greg later told me that God had led him to become a football coach, a calling that he greatly enjoyed in service of his Lord and Savior. 

Emotional Healing in Pastoral Counseling

Working constructively with emotions is crucial to success in pastoral counseling because feelings are the energy of personality. They are literally like an artist’s color palette, from which the artist loads his brush to give life, hue, and nuance to a painting. If the artist keeps rinsing the brush between applications, the color will remain vivid and true. But if the artist doesn’t regularly clean the brush, paint from former brush strokes will accrue and turn the new applications muddy and dark.

So it is with feelings. During the course of counseling, from first to last session, you are seeking to offer the counselee ways to experience and express emotions that contribute to healthy living, and keep the heart cleansed from clogged-up feelings that would otherwise contaminate the canvas of perception.

What is the nature of clogged-up emotions? Human emotions are meant to flow through the body much like water down a river. Sometimes there is a lot of emotion and sometimes there is only a trickle, but what’s important here is that emotions are transitory psycho-physiological events involving the mid-brain and lower brain stem, but not the neocortex. In a word, emotions feel but don’t think. They reflect the more instinctual, subjective part of perception, the gut reaction to what’s going on between the environment and the organism in the here and now.

What, then, is the purpose of a feeling? The purpose is to discriminate between liking and disliking, needing and not needing, wanting and not wanting, coping and not coping. Feelings tell people about their own spontaneous interests, preferences, needs, and desires. Once a feeling has served its purpose, it recedes into the background of awareness.

Compass Therapy utilizes the catchall word “Heart” to point toward those inner states that most people experience as emanating from the area of the heart, stomach, and bowels. The Old Testament is full of anthropomorphic references to internal body organs that offer metaphors for how both God and people experience emotion.

Counselees understand immediately when you talk about matters of the heart. When you ask what a counselee is feeling, the person understands that you are inquiring about the most subjective, emotionally colored, and private part of their perception, a part oftentimes so private they can’t find words to express it or even know they are feeling it. 

Now here’s the secret of facilitating the awareness and discrimination of emotions in counselees. Don’t judge them! Remember that feelings are transitory physiological processes that need recognition and integration into the personality, not repression and exile to the unconscious.

Thus when a six-year-old boy says he feels like killing his older sister when she twists his wrist, he is experiencing anger and trying to express it so that the feeling will pass through him and dissipate. You don’t forbid him to ever speak this way again, but rather seek to expand his metaphors until he comes up with a more diplomatic expression of anger.

Your purpose entails expanding inner emotional states, so that counselees can become more comfortable with emotions in general, and more interested in understanding and defining them. 

Feeling and thinking can interact rhythmically here, the feeling providing the raw material of direct experience, the thinking providing an analysis of explanatory causes and effects that pertain to the feeling. By repeatedly helping counselees to slow down their communication enough to feel an emotion cleanly, label it accurately, and consider how best to express it, you are healing their emotions and knitting their personalities together.

This principle is so important that if you primarily listen to people’s feelings and help to clarify and transform them into meaningful expressions, you will heal a good many people. 

For case studies that connect emotional healing with treatment plans, see:

 COMPASS THERAPY: CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY IN ACTION

Why Use Compass Therapy in Christian Churches?

The use of Compass Therapy in churches equips a new generation of pastoral counselors with practical tools that bring together spiritual faith, psychological insight, a Christian personality theory, and the use of counseling techniques to engage and heal the brokenness in a counselee’s personality

and human nature.

But why, you may ask, use the word therapy at all? Doesn’t therapy imply a secular approach to counseling carried out by mental health professionals? The answer is that major contributions to pastoral counseling have arisen from psychoanalysis, Jungian therapy, Transactional Analysis, Gestalt therapy, Client-centered therapy, and Cognitive-behavioral therapy. What distinguishes them is generally a tradition of empirical research and clinical validity.

However, these methodologies stand outside the Christian tradition, and some of their assumptions flatly contradict orthodox Christian teachings. While elements of these approaches have been adapted for church use, it is often because no Christian equivalent exists. Pastors and parishioners have rightly complained from time to time that secular psychologies have undermined their trust in the Bible, the Trinity, and the Church.

In contradistinction, Compass Therapy has its origins in both scientific research and biblical Trinitarian theology. While hundreds of studies validate the growth psychology behind compass theory, the core assumption is that Jesus of Nazareth reveals God’s personality and interpersonal nature, a nature known as the Trinity, and becomes the standard against which personality health and dysfunction are discerned.

While it might seem to some that Jesus’ personality would have nothing to do with modern conceptions of personality, compass theory proposes the opposite: that Christ’s personality and behavior are readily understood through the contemporary lens of the Self Compass growth tool, the central working model of Compass Therapy that points the way to mental health while illuminating the personality disorders described in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).

I will deal with this application as it pertains to pastoral counseling and coaching in future posts. But for now I want to underscore that Compass Therapy signifies a counseling approach backed by empirical research and differentiated from other counseling theories by a Christian ontological foundation.

How to Handle Human Nature in Pastoral Counseling

While theologians may debate what constitutes human nature, the pastoral counselor needs a working model that brings x-ray vision for seeing into the counselee’s very being. Many theological debates have revolved around whether God created humans with a bipartite nature (body and soul) or a tripartite nature (spirit, mind, and body).  

However, the diverse ways in which the Bible refers to the human person include such varied elements as body, soul, spirit, mind, and heart.

Compass Therapy, with its interest in uniting polar opposites into compass-like wholes, employs the Human Nature Compass to bring together the Mind (cognition) and Heart (emotion), Body (biology) and Spirit (purpose) for a holistic understanding of human nature.

The Human Nature Compass is especially useful in pastoral counseling because it enables you to observe and engage a counselee’s whole being, while monitoring how each part is functioning in relation to the whole.

Mind stands for cognitive thinking. Heart expresses emotive feeling. Heart points to the emotions and passions that are the energy of personality. Body emphasizes the biology of anatomy and physiology, and the five senses. Spirit describes one's values and purpose, and potential for intimacy with God.

The core is the innermost dimension of the person that has the power of self-reflection, and bring humans the God-endowed capacity to say, “I am,” and the ability to make free-will choices.

The Human Nature Compass gives you the ability to discern a counselee's moment to moment functioning. If the counselee has a dead zone (a decommissioned component of human nature), or exaggerates another component (perhaps by thinking at the expense of feeling), you will notice this and start finding ways to help them discover their whole human nature, in itself a therapeutic thing to do.

If one of your sessions overly focuses on emotional catharsis, you will know to spend a portion of the next session on cognitive integration, since emotional release without cognitive meaning has little staying power in overall learning. If your counselee has repressed bodily awareness so as to be oblivious to muscle tension or shallow breathing, you’ll help them relax the body in order to live through it with greater zest. Or if your counselee has little or no prayer life, you will support their spiritual growth by encouraging open conversations with Christ and greater visceral trust in the Holy Spirit.

For more, see  

Pastoral Counseling & Coaching: Compass Therapy in Churches