Psychology Book Review: McMinn Assignment
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McMinnChapter7and8.docxPsychology, Theology, and Spirituality in Christian Counseling
McMinn, M. R. (2012). Psychology, Theology, and Spirituality in Christian Counseling. Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.. https://mbsdirect.vitalsource.com/books/9781414349237
Chapter 7 Forgiveness
written with Katheryn Rhoads Meek
If the human body were not capable of repairing itself, by the time we reached adulthood, each of us would be an ugly mass of abrasions, bruises, incisions, and infections. Fortunately, each mosquito bite, scrape, and injury is healed by a sophisticated physiological repair system that restores us to health.
Similarly, if there were no way to repair injured interpersonal relationships, each of us would have a long list of enemies. People on the list would include both those who have treated us poorly and those we have hurt with insensitive words and actions. Fortunately, as with our physical bodies, we have been graciously granted an interpersonal healing mechanism so that we do not have to develop such a list. Forgiveness is God’s gift, modeled perfectly in the work of Jesus Christ and reflected dimly but frequently in human interactions.
But there is an important difference. Physiological healing is autonomic and effortless; our body does the work in the background of consciousness. Interpersonal healing, in contrast, usually requires deliberate work, conscious effort, and often extraordinary courage. The work of forgiveness is arduous and difficult, and counselors are often called on for help.
What If This Happened?
Ms. Hurt sees a counselor to help her deal with consequences of childhood sexual abuse. After a strong therapeutic relationship has been built, she offers her counselor some of her memories, horrific stories of being forced to have sexual intercourse during her early teenage years. Her abuser, an uncle, still lives in the same town and desires to have a relationship with Ms. Hurt. Ms. Hurt has had no contact with him for three years.
Counselors encounter many clients like Ms. Hurt and face a number of complex questions related to situations like these. Should Ms. Hurt be encouraged to forgive her uncle? Should her anger be encouraged? Is reconciliation an appropriate goal for Ms. Hurt and her uncle? Should Ms. Hurt seek civil or criminal restitution, or should she at least ask that her uncle pay for counseling?
This case illustrates the difficult questions surrounding the concept of forgiveness in Christian counseling. The questions are so complex and the permutations of possible counseling situations so numerous that no simple answers can be offered in a brief chapter such as this. Rather, my goal is to raise pertinent issues and make recommendations for Christian counselors to consider so that each unique counseling situation can be carefully evaluated in a psychologically and spiritually sensitive manner.
Before discussing the nature of forgiveness in Christian counseling, it is important to distinguish forgiveness from several impostors and related concepts. First, forgiving is sometimes confused with excusing. Concluding that “it wasn’t that big a deal” is not the same as forgiveness. Excusing is casual and routine, but forgiveness requires sustained effort, usually over a long period of time. Any form of interpersonal forgiveness that is portrayed as quick and easy cannot be true forgiveness, though it is also true that forgiveness becomes easier with practice and spiritual development.
Second, forgiveness is sometimes confused with denial or passive acceptance. Remaining silent and refusing to confront in the presence of an offense is not the same as forgiving. Passive acceptance emphasizes keeping peace at any cost, even if silent resentments are harbored for years; whereas forgiveness first involves recognizing and grieving over the damage that has been done, then choosing to release the negative emotions associated with the offender.
Third, forgiveness is not self-blame. Forgiving another does not require us to accept responsibility for what went wrong. At times we may share responsibility for the problem, and at other times we may not. In either case, forgiveness is possible.
Fourth, forgiveness is not always associated with remorse and repentance on the part of the offending party. At times, people have successfully forgiven those who refuse to accept responsibility for their actions.
Fifth, forgiveness and reconciliation are not the same. Though reconciliation requires forgiveness, forgiveness does not always require reconciliation. At times, it is right to forgive yet unwise to enter back into a relationship with one who lacks remorse and is likely to offend again.
A clear understanding of forgiveness is an essential starting point for Christian counselors. We can begin to understand forgiveness by looking at the three foundations considered throughout this book: psychology, theology, and spirituality.
Foundations
Psychology
Not many years ago it seemed that the psychological community had almost completely ignored the topic of forgiveness. Psychologists worked every day to help heal fragmented relationships and mend wounds from the past, yet they rarely discussed forgiveness with their clients. Between 1980 and 1984, psychology journals published only thirty-two articles related to forgiveness. Things have changed rapidly over the past decade, however, and now forgiveness is a burgeoning topic of discussion and debate within the field of psychology. Between 1990 and 1994, psychology journals published ninety articles related to forgiveness, almost a 300 percent increase from the same period in the previous decade.
Psychologists have strong and varying opinions about the place of forgiveness in psychology. There are at least three perspectives. First, some psychologists are opposed to any use of forgiveness in therapy.281 Second, some see forgiveness as beneficial because it promotes the mental health of the forgiver. Here, forgiveness is essentially reduced to a clinical technique aimed at providing the client with relief from the often destructive consequences of relational struggles—consequences such as anger, bitterness, and resentment.282 Third, some counselors consider forgiveness to be an extension of Christian duty.283 Some in this third group also fit in the second group. That is, they see forgiveness as a response of obedience to God with personally beneficial consequences.
Because of the limited scope of this chapter, we will consider only these three perspectives. However, it is important to note that these categories do not adequately capture the entire forgiveness literature in psychology. Many other professionals have written about different aspects of forgiveness: granting and seeking forgiveness;284 distinguishing forgiveness from other constructs;285 developing methods of measuring interpersonal forgiveness;286 the relationship between psychological theory and forgiveness;287 the emotional process required for authentic forgiveness;288 and ways to use forgiveness in counseling practice.289
Opposition to Forgiveness in Therapy
Although the gist of the forgiveness literature tends to focus on its power as a therapeutic technique, several authors either completely reject it or put rigid boundaries on its use. Psychodynamic therapist Alice Miller globally writes against the pursuit of any form of either forgiveness or reconciliation. In her book Banished Knowledge, she rebukes her colleagues who advocate forgiveness and makes every attempt to distance herself from them.290 Miller believes that forgiveness is detrimental to patients and is almost always done out of a false sense of moral obligation.
Other authors address problems with forgiveness in discussing sexual abuse. Ellen Bass and Laura Davis devote a section of their best-selling book, The Courage to Heal, to the topic of forgiveness. They maintain that it is necessary for sexual abuse victims to forgive only themselves, never the perpetrators. The authors say to those who have religious convictions about forgiveness, “If you have strong religious ties, particularly Christian ones, you may feel it is your sacred duty to forgive. This just isn’t true. If there is such a thing as divine forgiveness, it’s God’s job, not yours.”291 Bass and Davis argue that it is both “insulting” and “minimizing” to encourage an abuse victim to forgive an abuser.292
Returning to the example at the beginning of this chapter, if Ms. Hurt were to see a counselor who opposes forgiveness, she would be encouraged to explore her pain, grasp her anger, grieve her losses, and move ahead with her life. Forgiveness would never be discussed unless Ms. Hurt brought it up, and then the discussion might be quickly discouraged.
Forgiveness as a Clinical Technique
If Ms. Hurt saw a different counselor, one who encouraged her to work toward forgiveness, the counseling goals might be quite different. Ms. Hurt’s counselor might help her release her feelings of bitterness and anger and ultimately forgive her uncle. Why? Because it will help Ms. Hurt feel better. Just as the abuse in her past has done her great harm, so the bitterness and resentment in the present continue to hurt her each day. By letting go of her resentment, she may help herself feel better.
Similarly, couples in conflict may function better after they forgive one another. Worthington and DiBlasio advocate “mutual forgiveness” in couples therapy.293 These are good uses of forgiveness, but they sometimes result in an unfortunate separation of forgiveness and religion.
Those who use forgiveness in counseling because it helps people feel better often acknowledge the religious meaning of forgiveness, then attempt to separate forgiveness from its religious ties in order to incorporate it into their clinical work with both Christian and non-Christian clients. For example, Donald Hope advocates forgiveness as an effective tool with abuse victims. He portrays the healing benefits of forgiveness by describing a counseling case where a man, after becoming involved in an evangelical church group, forgave his alcoholic father for years of heartache, trauma, and abuse. After forgiving his father under the direction of a minister, dramatic changes took place in him: his current relationships improved; he became a more active and loving parent; and he thought less critically of himself.294 Hope connects this moving transformation to the one act of forgiveness, failing to consider the possible life-changing effects of this man’s new religious faith. Perhaps what prompted this client’s act of forgiveness was a deep awareness of his own failings and need for forgiveness and mercy. His experience of grace might naturally have led him to adopt a humble attitude toward himself and others. His newly discovered Christian belief system may have caused this one act of forgiveness to produce the emotionally beneficial consequences.
Forgiveness, in its theological and spiritual context, is profound, life giving, and transforming. When we remove the religious context and think of forgiveness only as a clinical technique, we risk losing the essence of forgiveness. The Human Development Study Group, devoted to understanding forgiveness in psychology, warns: “A definition that exclusively emphasizes forgiveness as the reduction of negative emotions may lead clients away from resentment or hatred, but into a cold neutrality that is not forgiveness.”295 Forgiveness finds life and meaning in Christianity, but when the faith structure is removed, it can easily degenerate into this state of cold neutrality.
Forgiveness as a Christian Duty
A third approach to forgiveness is to view it as an obligation for those who desire to live a Christian life. If Ms. Hurt’s counselor embraced this perspective, the therapist might instruct Ms. Hurt that she has been forgiven by God and that her Christian obligation is to forgive her abuser. Her counselor recognizes that forgiveness may take time, honest exploration of her feelings of anger, and grief over what she has lost because of the abuse; but ultimately she has a duty to forgive.
Jared Pingleton suggests that therapists recognize and attempt to cultivate in clients an understanding of three essential elements of the forgiveness process: “(a) forgiveness can only be received from God if given to others, (b) forgiveness can only be given to others if received from self, and (c) forgiveness can only be given to self if received from God.”296 This model demonstrates that the ability to bestow forgiveness on self and others is inextricably linked to the ability to receive it from God.
Cultivating in our clients an awareness of the Christian duty to forgive requires balance. On one hand, if we resort to didactic techniques or attempt to rush the process of forgiveness, we risk interfering with the insight process and may communicate a lack of empathy or understanding. Though both counselors and clients have a Christian duty to forgive others, it is not usually effective for counselors to forcefully communicate this duty to clients. On the other hand, if we never introduce the concept of forgiveness, many clients will not think of it on their own. Contemporary society has been even more saturated with popular psychology than with Christian tradition, and forgiveness is often overlooked by those who have been taught to nurse their anger and attribute their weaknesses to past mistreatment.
Thus, the challenge facing Christian counselors is to introduce the concept of forgiveness without being forceful or simplistic. There is a forgiveness that involves intellect and another that also involves emotional release. If we are too directive in our counseling, we may produce only intellectualized forgiveness. If we avoid the topic altogether, neither type of forgiveness may occur. How can we produce a forgiveness that starts with the mind and also engages emotions?
Toward an Integrated Perspective of Forgiveness
In 1994, Michael McCullough and Everett Worthington, Jr., reviewed the forgiveness literature and concluded that “theological, philosophical, and psychological understandings of forgiveness have not been well integrated.”297 They went on to hypothesize that using forgiveness in a therapeutic context has the capacity for tremendous spiritual implications that potentially lead to beneficial psychological consequences as well. In order to realize the potential for forgiveness in Christian counseling, each counselor needs to work personally on the integration task that McCullough and Worthington call us to consider—a task that requires finding value in each of the three perspectives described here as well as carefully considering the theological and spiritual meanings of forgiveness.
At first glance, it may appear that Christian counselors have nothing to learn from those outspoken therapists who want nothing to do with forgiveness. A closer look may reveal some legitimate concerns in their perspectives. When counselors become strident in advocating forgiveness, they may elicit approval seeking in their clients. Because these clients want to please their counselors, they may go through the intellectual motions of forgiveness without gaining the insight and emotional release that accompany true forgiveness. Though their counselors may be satisfied that these clients have forgiven past offenses, the clients themselves may leave counseling less certain about what was accomplished, feeling confused, coerced, or misunderstood. Similarly, because forgiveness is often confused with reconciliation, even bringing up the topic of forgiveness may elicit fear of further harm in some, especially if their offenders have expressed no remorse. These clients may assume their counselors are suggesting that they should reconcile and enter into a relationship with their offenders, an assumption that may quickly generate feelings of shame and fear.
Like those who oppose forgiveness in counseling, those who view forgiveness as a clinical technique have also made important contributions that must be considered in an integrated view of forgiveness. For counseling to be useful, it must ultimately be practical, affecting the lives of those involved. Teaching specific skills of forgiveness can help make counseling practical by helping people repair damaged relationships.
Similarly, seeing forgiveness as Christian duty has value. At times we all need to be reminded of what we ought to do as a way to combat what we want to do. Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote that “the call to follow Christ always means a call to share the work of forgiving men their sins. Forgiveness is the Christlike suffering which it is the Christian’s duty to bear.”298 Though retaining anger and resentment builds strong walls of protection, our Christian values require us to tear down those walls and make ourselves vulnerable in forgiving others, even those who have hurt us. Forgiveness is not a natural act; it is a supernatural one. We learn forgiveness through Christ, then attempt to exercise it in our relationships with others.
Thus, we find value in all three perspectives: those who oppose forgiveness in counseling, those who use forgiveness as a clinical technique, and those who see forgiveness as a theological duty. Integrating these perspectives into a useful counseling style is a difficult task. Fortunately, we can find significant help by looking at theological and spiritual perspectives on forgiveness.
Christian Theology
Throughout the Old Testament and the New Testament, the Scriptures present a salvation story in which God continually redeems a wayward people, to offer them a relationship that is possible only through forgiveness.299 It is exclusively through God’s forgiveness that humanity heals. Without God’s forgiveness, people remain in a broken and isolated state; with God’s forgiveness they receive new life.
The sacrificial death of Jesus is the ultimate act of forgiveness. He was abused and ridiculed. Finally his blood was “poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins” (Matt. 26:28). His sacrificial death, in substitution for sinful humanity, appeased God’s wrath against sin and brought peace.
But a Christian view of forgiveness does not stop with Jesus hanging on a cross; the New Testament instructs us to forgive one another as God has forgiven us. In one of several similar passages, the apostle Paul instructs, “Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you” (Eph. 4:32). Paul’s instructions imply a Christian duty to forgive one another, but they also suggest a way of life that exudes forgiveness. We are to be tender, kind, forgiving. Forgiveness is a quality of Christian character, not just an act of the will.
This subtle distinction between forgiveness as an act of the will and forgiveness as a reflection of character is illustrated in the following two examples.
Example 1
In the context of Christian counseling, Ms. Hurt recognizes she has an obligation to forgive her uncle and decides to give it a try. After spending ample time understanding her anger and grieving the losses of the past, she begins to pray each day for her uncle, asking God to release her from the anger and bitterness she feels. Over time, God answers her requests, and soon she can think of her uncle without feeling burdened with bitterness.
These are healthy changes for Ms. Hurt—changes that were initiated by her sense of Christian duty and prompted by her counselor. As good and as promising as these changes are, an alternative approach might work even better.
Example 2
During Christian counseling, Ms. Hurt works through her feelings of anger and her grief over the type of childhood and adulthood she will never experience. She also works to understand herself better and begins to acknowledge her faults and weaknesses in the context of her safe counseling relationship. As she recognizes her own vulnerabilities and weaknesses, she gives up trying to earn God’s love and begins learning how to rest in God’s love. In time, her anger gives way to tenderness, her resentment to kindness. Soon she realizes that she is less bitter toward her uncle. She senses an inner urge to forgive. Ms. Hurt works each day to release her pain, to rest in God’s love, to confess her shortcomings, and to forgive those who have hurt her, including her uncle.
Though the differences between these two examples are subtle, the second illustrates forgiveness as a reflection of insight and character transformation rather than as an act of willpower. As we acknowledge our own predilection toward wrongdoing and how we are undeservedly and regularly forgiven, we can learn to respond in the same forgiving manner toward others. Forgiveness is humble submission to the one who continuously forgives us.
Thus, a Christian understanding of forgiveness begins with a recognition of the depravity inherent in humanity. I agree with Erickson that “our approach to the problems of society will . . . be governed by our view of sin.”300 If sin is ubiquitous, affecting every person, then we are all an active part of the human problem. As we comprehend human weakness and propensity for evil, both in their wider historical context and in our own individual lives, we recognize our need both to give and to receive forgiveness. With a mature understanding of our own sin and God’s mercy, we are increasingly able to see ourselves as we view the wrongdoing of others. This is not to suggest that forgiveness is easy but that forgiveness is facilitated by empathy and humility. Lewis Smedes describes this phenomenon in Forgive and Forget: “With a little time, and a little more insight, we begin to see both ourselves and our enemies in humbler profiles. We are not really as innocent as we felt when we were first hurt. And we do not usually have a gigantic monster to forgive; we have a weak, needy, and somewhat stupid human being. When you see your enemy and yourself in the weakness and silliness of the humanity you share, you will make the miracle of forgiving a little easier.”301
Spirituality
Forgiveness, then, is an act of compassion that comes from one person’s identifying with another. It suggests that two people are equally fallible, one responding to the offense of the other in loving identification. Saint Francis of Assisi, a thirteenth-century monk, wrote of the personal lesson in humility to be gleaned from another person’s offense. “Whom are we to count as our ‘friends’? All those whose unjust actions and words cause us all manner of grief and trial. . . . How can I suggest that you should greatly love such people? For this reason: Their evil actions draw out and display to us our own evil responses—anger, gossip, slander, hatred and the like. Then we see our sin for what it is. And only then can we repent and forsake it.”302
Healing comes as we see ourselves in those who hurt us. We come face-to-face with our own sin and can turn to God for cleansing. This type of insight and humility enables us to forgive. Forgiveness becomes an act of empathy, with one person saying to the other, “I may not have done exactly what you did, but I am also capable of doing evil. Just as I need forgiveness, so I forgive you.”
When Peter asked Jesus if he should forgive one who sins against him as many as seven times, Jesus answered, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times” (Matt. 18:22). He went on to tell a story of a king who called in a slave to settle an account. The slave owed the king an unimaginable amount of money, more than could ever be repaid with a lifetime’s wages. The slave could not repay, so the king ordered him sold. When the slave begged for mercy, the king, in his mercy, forgave the debt. After leaving the king’s presence, the forgiven slave went and found a fellow slave who owed him a small amount of money, grabbed him by the throat, and insisted on immediate payment. When the king heard of this, he called the first slave back, exclaiming, “You wicked slave! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?” The king handed the slave over to the torturer. After telling this disturbing story, Jesus announced: “So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart” (Matt. 18:35).
Refusing to forgive another is placing ourselves above that person, as if we are in a state of moral superiority. Thomas à Kempis warned: “Count not thyself better than others, lest perchance thou appear worse in the sight of God, who knoweth what is in man.”303 As abhorrent as we may find the actions of sexual abusers, murderers, rapists, thieves, and psychopaths, we must acknowledge that we are all sinners whose only hope for redemption is found in a forgiving and gracious God.
Recognizing our condition as sinners places us in a position of humility before God and one another. Only from this position of humility can we fully understand forgiveness. The apostle Paul described this in his letter to the Colossian Christians: “As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony” (Col. 3:12-14).
In summary, Christian counselors who sensitively integrate psychological, theological, and spiritual perspectives on forgiveness are distinguished by several characteristics:
1. They recognize the potential damage of introducing forgiveness as a therapeutic goal too early in the treatment relationship.
2. They value techniques that emphasize forgiveness while recognizing that forgiveness requires inner transformation as well as behavioral change.
3. They recognize a Christian duty to forgive but do not use that duty to coerce or manipulate clients.
4. They remember that forgiveness was not invented by counselors or psychologists but by God, who chose to redeem humanity through the sacrificial work of Jesus Christ.
5. They see a connection between sin, confession, and forgiveness, understanding that forgiveness properly flows out of humble self-awareness and gratitude to a forgiving God.
Psychological and Spiritual Health
Let us imagine that Ms. Hurt is cloned into four identical clients, each of whom sees a different Christian therapist for counseling. Each therapist helps Ms. Hurt, but each goes about it in a different way.
Counselor A
Counselor A is a behavioral psychologist. She listens intently to Ms. Hurt’s story of abuse, expresses empathy and concern, and works with Ms. Hurt to formulate a treatment plan that will help her function better in her daily life. As part of the treatment plan, counselor A teaches Ms. Hurt progressive relaxation and coping imagery. With practice, Ms. Hurt eventually learns to relax all the muscles in her body while imagining an interaction with her uncle. She sees herself acting assertively, setting appropriate boundaries, and telling her uncle how much damage the abuse has caused her. After imagining the interaction in the safety of a counseling session, she meets with her uncle and has a similar interaction in real life. Counseling continues, and Ms. Hurt continues her relaxation and imagination exercises. Eventually, she imagines forgiving her uncle, letting go of all the anger and bitterness, and looking to the future rather than the past. Her uncle never expresses remorse directly to her, and she never tells him of her choice to forgive. But she feels relief and peace after counseling.
Counselor B
Counselor B sees Ms. Hurt and approaches the problem from a different theoretical perspective. Counselor B is a psychodynamically oriented psychiatrist who helps Ms. Hurt explore and uncover the emotional conflicts of her childhood. Early in therapy, Ms. Hurt discusses her memories of being sexually abused by her uncle. Counselor B listens intently and works to maintain enough warmth to communicate empathy yet enough distance to allow Ms. Hurt to experience her conflictual feelings. Counselor B puts no time pressure on Ms. Hurt, allowing her to explore and express feelings at her own pace. She begins feeling better. Eventually, after many months of successful treatment, Ms. Hurt brings up the topic of forgiveness. She has brought up the topic before, but only as a means of controlling her inner rage. This time is different. Counselor B realizes that Ms. Hurt is ready to consider forgiving her uncle.
Counselor C
Counselor C is a biblical counselor. He listens carefully to Ms. Hurt’s story, builds a good therapeutic relationship based on mutual respect, then begins to take a leadership role in the counseling process. He explains to Ms. Hurt that her wounds are deep and that her emotions are natural. He also explains that natural responses are not always helpful. The goal of counseling will be to help her respond to God’s prompting rather than to the inner instincts of anger and bitterness. She will hear God’s prompting through Scripture and prayer—the tools counselor C plans to use in counseling. Together, counselor C and Ms. Hurt explore the meaning and consequences of sin, the importance of forgiveness and repentance, and the essence of focusing on the future rather than the past. Ms. Hurt grows spiritually and emotionally, and she ultimately forgives her uncle.
Counselor D
Counselor D is a cognitive therapist who helps people change their thoughts and beliefs in order to manage their emotions better. Because counselor D is a good listener and a caring person, she establishes good rapport with Ms. Hurt almost immediately. They begin exploring Ms. Hurt’s beliefs and assumptions. Ms. Hurt emerged from her childhood believing that she is responsible for the actions of others. For years she has quietly blamed herself for being abused, believing that if she had been quieter or had dressed differently, then her uncle would have left her alone. She and her counselor look carefully at this belief until Ms. Hurt decides her belief is incorrect and acknowledges that her uncle is responsible for his choices. This cognitive change helps Ms. Hurt feel less depressed, but she becomes intensely angry. Her new belief is that her uncle is a terrible and awful person who should be punished and humiliated. This belief also subsides with continued therapy as Ms. Hurt begins to recognize how confused and lonely her uncle feels. The ache of past abuse will always be with her, but she decides to release her rage and choose forgiveness.
Fortunately, our four clients have seen good therapists. Each counselor has helped Ms. Hurt work through the tragedy of abuse and come to a point where she is willing to forgive her uncle. Each has taken a different theoretical route, but all the routes have been successful. Because of their different approaches to counseling, each of these therapists brings a unique set of strengths and weaknesses to the counseling work—qualities that affect the way forgiveness is perceived and handled in counseling. These strengths and weaknesses will be considered in the context of the familiar questions considered in previous chapters.
Will This Help Establish a Healthy Sense of Self?
Counselor A
One strength of counselor A’s approach is the increasing sense of self-efficacy that Ms. Hurt develops as counseling progresses. She learns to express her feelings forthrightly and assertively, even to the point of confronting her uncle. Before counseling, she was locked in the grips of shame and self-doubt. After counseling, she confidently expresses her feelings and opinions.
A potential weakness with behavioral approaches to forgiveness is the assumption that negative emotions can be changed by standard behavioral procedures such as the reciprocal-inhibition procedures used by counselor A. It may be that Ms. Hurt, because of her early life trauma, does not respond to treatment in the same ways as those who have not been abused. Most of us find it relieving to give up our negative emotions and forgive another. But the abuse victim has learned to associate giving up with being hurt. When she gives up her rights, someone takes advantage of her. So treatment might not go as quickly or as neatly as suggested in the brief vignette with counselor A and Ms. Hurt.
Before forgiveness techniques can be therapeutic, several prerequisites should be met: Ms. Hurt fully understands the extent of her injuries due to sexual abuse; she moves beyond her tendency toward self-blame; she honestly experiences appropriate anger toward her abuser; she feels empowered to set boundaries that keep her from being abused again; and she has a complex understanding of the abuser rather than a stereotyped and simplified view of him.304 Many of these changes normally occur in the context of a trusting therapeutic relationship and cannot be rushed with behavioral techniques.
Counselor B
Counselor B designs his treatment specifically to help Ms. Hurt develop a more robust sense of self. Individuation, the capacity to see oneself as an individual rather than as a symbiotic extension of another, is the goal of many psychodynamic therapies. By giving Ms. Hurt time and freedom to explore her inner feelings and conflicts, counselor B helps her individuate. Once she is comfortable with herself, she is in a better position to genuinely forgive her abuser.
Unfortunately, many psychodynamic therapists stop at the individuation stage and do not continue on to consider forgiveness. The topic of forgiveness is viewed suspiciously, ignored, or criticized by many psychodynamic therapists.
Counselor C
Whereas some psychodynamic therapists may never get around to considering forgiveness with Ms. Hurt, that problem will not occur with biblical counselors. One advantage of counselor C’s approach is its directness with regard to forgiveness. Counselor C helps Ms. Hurt see herself and her abuser as God sees them—needy, broken people searching for spiritual and interpersonal reconciliation.
A potential disadvantage to this approach is that the counselor might unwittingly step into the role of a dominant leader that preys on Ms. Hurt’s need to please others. Even when Ms. Hurt reports feeling better and making good progress, it may be little more than her shame-based efforts to please her counselor. Clients who believe they must forgive in order to please a therapist or to fulfill a spiritual obligation have difficulty gaining the necessary insight for true forgiveness. This can lead to words and behaviors that reflect denial more than forgiveness, with the client choosing conflict-avoidance over direct and honest communication. David Augsburger warns, “Forgiveness happens as past resentments are owned, not disowned; are recognized, not repressed; are released, not retained; and are woven into new bonding relationships with others.”305
Counselor D
Counselor D, a cognitive therapist, helps Ms. Hurt establish a healthy sense of self by considering her beliefs and assumptions and helping her revise them. In the process of learning metacognition (the ability to think about her thoughts) she discovers that she has some personal control over her feelings, that she is not destined to respond out of shame or approval seeking. From this, she develops a healthy sense of autonomy and individuation.
Unfortunately, some cognitive therapists minimize the importance of emotions and focus on logic almost exclusively. For these counselors and their clients, forgiveness is reduced to an intellectual exercise that might best be described as pseudoforgiveness.306 Authentic forgiveness is an emotionally intense process, and overly intellectualized forms of therapy tend to skip over important parts of the forgiveness process.307
Will This Help Establish a Healthy Sense of Need?
Counselor A
Establishing a healthy awareness of one’s need for God and others requires delicate balance. We might assume that recognizing our need is simply a matter of thinking less of ourselves, but for those who are already caught in the grips of shame, thinking less of themselves is not helpful. Just as teaching a codependent person that he or she needs others is futile at best and destructive at worst, so many need to feel more confident in themselves and their abilities before they are able to see their need for God and others. This is counselor A’s approach: helping Ms. Hurt feel better about herself, more confident in her coping abilities, and more in control of her life. Once she has more confidence in herself, then she can begin to understand her need for others.
The risk is that counselor A will help Ms. Hurt feel strong, that her symptoms will improve, and that counseling will stop before she reaches a point of humble identification with her abuser. If a clinician employs behavioral forgiveness techniques without understanding the Christian theological foundation for forgiveness, the client may miss significant opportunities for insight and self-awareness.308 This theologically deprived type of forgiving can create a mind-set of superiority in the forgiver, as if the client believes, “I will forgive you because I live on a higher plane than you, and I refuse to let you drag me down to your level.”
Counselor B
Though I am not a psychodynamic therapist, I am convinced that psychodynamic theory is the best available option for helping clients confront their need for God and others. While counselors A, C, and D are helping “patch up” Ms. Hurt with behavioral, cognitive, and spiritual techniques, counselor B is helping her stare intently at her deepest feelings of pain, loneliness, and isolation. Counselor B believes Ms. Hurt will grow only as she honestly looks at all aspects of herself, including the parts she has spent years avoiding. She will leave therapy recognizing her weaknesses as well as her strengths and will see her need for God and others.
Despite the cautious attitudes about forgiveness among psychodynamic counselors, a healthy understanding of forgiveness fits naturally into this model of therapy. Once we recognize our inner loneliness and longing for community, as well as our propensity toward selfishness and egocentrism, then we are ready to reach out to other imperfect humans with gestures of forgiveness and compassion. We best understand and experience forgiveness from this posture of humble identification with others.
Counselor C
After establishing rapport, counselor C confronts Ms. Hurt with her need right away. Fortunately, counselor C helps Ms. Hurt find hope for her spiritual and emotional needs through Scripture and prayer. She sets her mind on the future and forgives her uncle for the past.
The risk counselor C introduces is that Ms. Hurt is not yet strong enough to face her state of need. Those overwhelmed with burdens of shame need to find ways to understand their shame before they are capable of seeing their shortcomings and faults accurately. Rather than producing a healthy state of humility, counselor C may be unwittingly encouraging an unhealthy state of humiliation that only deepens the shame of his client.309
Counselor D
Before counseling with counselor D, Ms. Hurt believed that she was responsible for her childhood abuse. In the process of examining and evaluating her beliefs and assumptions, she grew to realize that her uncle was responsible and she was not. This discovery helped liberate her from years of depression.
Even the best changes sometimes have unwanted side effects. Because Ms. Hurt learned in counseling to attribute events of the past to external causes (her uncle) rather than internal (herself), she may continue to use her new attributional style and resist any notion that she has faults. Rather than accepting responsibility for the ongoing struggles of life, she may settle comfortably into the victim role and attribute her problems to the villains who have caused them. Counselor D needs to watch for this tendency and help her find a middle ground where she can make either internal or external attributions, depending on the circumstances involved.
Will This Help Establish a Healing Relationship?
Counselor A assumes that the active ingredients in her work with Ms. Hurt are the behavioral techniques used to teach new coping skills. She sees the relationship as an important mechanism for transfusing these techniques.
Counselor B sees the relationship itself as the active ingredient. Ms. Hurt will learn to be caring toward herself by observing and interacting with a caring therapist. Her capacity to see herself accurately, and thus to forgive, requires insights that can be generated only in the context of a healthy relationship.
Counselor C sees God’s Word as the active ingredient in change. The counseling relationship is important because it is the vehicle through which Ms. Hurt will be exposed to Christian principles, Scripture, and prayer.
Counselor D sees the counseling relationship as one important way to counter Ms. Hurt’s faulty assumptions. In addition to the techniques of cognitive therapy, she uses a caring therapeutic relationship to help Ms. Hurt feel valued and worthwhile.
Though each counselor places slightly different emphasis on the therapeutic relationship, it is important to all of them. I suspect the counseling relationship is the common factor that makes each form of therapy effective.310 Forgiveness is not so much a skill that is taught as it is a worldview that is caught.
A good counselor helps a client recognize a past offense, making sure that the client does not excuse, condone, or dismiss the offense. The therapist then walks the client through periods of anger, grief, and loneliness. The client learns to trust again by relying on the therapist to legitimize the undeserved anguish and by seeing that the therapist will not leave the client in an unresolved state of bitterness and anger. Clinicians are already teaching forgiveness, consciously or not, when they treat their clients in this way. One psychologist put it this way: “Perhaps it is this experience of being valued in the present despite obvious shortcomings and failures in the past that provokes clients into forgiving their pasts, developing a more forgiving attitude in the present, releasing judgments and grievances, and thus creating more options for the future.”311
Facing the Challenges
Challenge 1: Moving from Two Areas of Competence to Three
If the capacity to forgive is a character quality requiring humble identification with an offender and if the treatment relationship is an important ingredient in change, then counselors should evaluate their own capacity to forgive and humbly identify with their clients. For many counselors this necessitates a conceptual shift that requires us to give up much of our sense of power and importance, as illustrated in the following three examples.
First, humble identification requires us to see our clients as similar to ourselves. Therapists who have sought counseling themselves are familiar with the struggle of taking on the client role. We want to think of ourselves as better adjusted, healthier, more spiritual than our clients, so we often resist getting personal therapy. When circumstances force us into personal therapy, we can no longer maintain the myths of superiority. We, like our Christian clients, are pilgrims along a spiritual path—pilgrims who fail frequently and are often stunned by the pain and difficulty of life.
A second example is found in dealing with angry clients. Good therapists draw out emotions in counseling, and those emotions usually spill over their proper boundaries and are directed at the counselor. Thus, virtually all effective counselors deal frequently with their clients’ anger.
What If This Happened?
Joe is working to forgive his absent father, whom he rarely saw during his childhood years. After spending several sessions discussing his father, he looks his counselor in the eye and blurts out: “You’re just like him. You sit there and don’t say anything. You’re probably not even listening. What, are you thinking about your golf game this afternoon?”
Which response should the counselor choose?
Response 1: “I am listening to you, not thinking about golf.”
Response 2: “These are painful feelings for you—as if you are here but not here. And you’ve had these feelings before.”
Response 3: “I don’t appreciate those accusations. They are not true, and you are out of place to suggest they are.”
Joe and his counselor have talked about the goal of forgiveness, but now the counselor has an opportunity for something much better than talking about forgiveness. The counselor can embody the quality of forgiveness by humbly identifying with Joe. The second response, obviously the best, is nondefensive and encourages Joe to explore his feelings while modeling interpersonal humility.
Third, humble identification with clients requires counselors to monitor their own self-talk during counseling sessions. At times, the stressful work of counseling causes us to be cynical. Even when we are kind in our overt responses, we sometimes think critical or harsh thoughts about our clients. Humble identification involves a willingness to release our own frustrations and disappointments about a counseling session and to remain prayerfully supportive of our clients in our thoughts as well as our words. A counselor’s spiritual life is routinely tested in the counseling office and is evident in the inner experiences and attitudes of the counselor.
Challenge 2: Blurred Personal-Professional Distinctions
In counseling, our professional activities are transacted at a personal level. These interactions reflect more than business practices; they also reflect our capacity for humility, forgiveness, and setting appropriate boundaries.
For instance, dealing with missed counseling appointments is often a matter of professional policy, established by a group of counselors sharing office space. However, implementing the policy is more than a business decision and is usually at the personal discretion of the counselor.
What If This Happened?
On a particularly bad day, a counselor has two consecutive missed appointments. The first, Mr. Greggs, has never missed an appointment before. He calls two hours later from a hotel room across the country, apologizing that he neglected to check his personal schedule before going on a brief business trip. The second, Mr. Thom, has missed three of the last seven sessions.
Instances like these two provide counselors with personal opportunities to model what forgiveness is and is not. Although the counselor has the right, according to the stated office policy, to charge Mr. Greggs for his missed appointment, choosing not to charge communicates a personal willingness to forgive. The counselor may recognize that she also forgets things occasionally, and in humble identification with her client, she chooses to forgive the missed appointment. This is the essence of forgiveness: choosing to identify with Mr. Greggs, then releasing him from the rightful consequences of his actions.
The situation with Mr. Thom is different. His counselor has already demonstrated a willingness to forgive, not charging him for his first two missed appointments. But Mr. Thom appears unaware or unconcerned about the consequences of his continued irresponsibility. Forgiving is not the same as excusing, overlooking, or condoning. The counselor is concerned that Mr. Thom is taking advantage of her forgiving spirit. This is analogous to what Dietrich Bonhoeffer calls “cheap grace,” misunderstanding God’s forgiveness as justification for self-centered living. Bonhoeffer describes cheap grace as “the deadly enemy of the church.”312 Something similar to cheap grace seems to be a detriment for Mr. Thom, who has difficulty maintaining stable employment, remaining committed in relationships, and following through on financial responsibilities. Because of her concern that Mr. Thom learn to respect her boundaries and his responsibilities, the counselor chooses to charge for the missed session. In both cases the counselor makes a personal choice regarding professional policy.
Counselors often have opportunities to live out the essence of forgiveness, but it requires carefully balancing a forgiving spirit with a commitment to justice and personal responsibility. If we lean too far in one direction, we become harsh and unforgiving in our professional manner and policies, making it difficult to model a forgiving spirit for our clients, many of whom are working to forgive others. If we lean too far in the other direction, we risk being naive and gullible, and we unwittingly model excusing or condoning rather than true forgiveness.313
Challenge 3: Expanded Definitions of Training
As with other topics considered in this book, learning how to handle forgiveness in the counseling office is not typically included in graduate school curricula.314 In spite of this, forgiveness is one of the most frequently used religious interventions among Christian counselors. Members of the Christian Association for Psychological Studies (CAPS) report using concepts of forgiveness with more than half their clients.315 This probably means that most Christian counselors use on-the-job-training to learn the best ways to implement forgiveness in their counseling work.
Counselors who find successful ways to implement forgiveness in their counseling sometimes report their ideas in journals and books. For example, Everett Worthington, Jr., and Frederick DiBlasio reported their idea of a specific forgiveness session in their work with couples.316 Both spouses prepare for the session several weeks in advance, concentrating on their own errors and need for forgiveness. In the forgiveness session, each confesses wrongdoing and seeks forgiveness from the other. Worthington and DiBlasio illustrate the technique with a case example. Several others have also reported their forgiveness counseling methods in writing, an investment that helps other counselors in their work.317
In addition to reading what other counselors do, counselors can grow in their ability to use forgiveness in counseling as they grow spiritually. The idea of forgiveness seems strange and foreign to those who have not experienced God’s forgiveness. But for those who know God’s grace, forgiveness is a vital part of spiritual maturity. To model forgiveness to our clients and to understand forgiveness in our own lives, we must first understand how much we have been forgiven.
Perhaps the best training for forgiveness in our personal and professional lives is found in the spiritual discipline of confession. Honest confession brings us to that place of humility where we understand how much we need forgiveness and how much we have been forgiven. Without confession, we minimize our faults and sometimes even feel smug about our capacity to forgive others. Those who understand forgiveness the best have stared intently at their sin, cried out to God in their need, and been amazed at the miracle of God’s grace.
The discipline of confession brings counselors to a point of personal humility. Though counselors do not bring their confessions to the counseling office, they do bring their humility, a quality that promotes trust and rapport and safety in counseling relationships and makes clients willing to confess their needs and struggles. Forgiveness and counseling go together well when the counseling office is a safe place for clients to confess their struggles, bitterness, troubling emotions, and nagging sins. Confession promotes humility, and humility promotes interpersonal forgiveness.
Challenge 4: Confronting Dominant Views of Mental Health
Though religious counselors discuss forgiveness with their clients more frequently than nonreligious counselors, dominant views of mental health appear to be shifting toward greater acceptance of forgiveness regardless of the counselor’s religious orientation.318 Several important articles about forgiveness have been published in Psychotherapy, a journal published by a division of the American Psychological Association (APA). A number of therapists are writing about the benefits of forgiveness, though they are not themselves religious. This is good news! Or is it?
The current trend in the psychological literature is to abandon the religious significance of forgiveness so that it might be more acceptable to nonreligious clients and therapists. Unfortunately, this sometimes results in subtle but important changes in one’s understanding of forgiveness. In Christian tradition, forgiveness is extended from one person to another out of gratitude for God’s forgiveness. In contemporary psychology, forgiveness is often a way for the forgiver to feel better, an unloading of emotional baggage. One psychotherapist describes forgiveness as a logical decision: “To opt for a forgiving attitude is to see that while on the level of immediate experience there is some catharsis in venting feelings of anger and vengeance, to hold on to these feelings and fantasies, to cathect them with energy, over the long term is self-defeating.”319
To the secular psychotherapist, forgiveness may be logical, but to the Christian, forgiveness is not logical at all. Forgiveness originates in the surprise of history: the incredible, stunning, miraculous act of a divine Savior hanging on a cross and dying for sinful humans. All Christian virtue, including the capacity to forgive, emanates from this illogical event. Edwin Zackrison, a theologian, describes this well: “Just as nothing in us motivates God to forgive, so nothing in others motivates us to forgive. Such an attitude can only be born in the heart of one who has experienced such forgiveness.”320
One form of forgiveness, the type that is becoming popular in counseling, is based on logic and self-protection: “I will forgive you because I refuse to let your offenses hurt me anymore.” The other, the type we see in Christianity, is based on personal insight and humble identification: “I will forgive you because I also have been forgiven of much.” Though we call both forgiveness, they are different enough to warrant different names.
Challenge 5: Establishing a Scientific Base
Before we can study forgiveness well, we need precise ways to measure forgiveness. Several researchers have been working on ways to measure forgiveness, most of them interested in whether or not people are willing to seek and grant interpersonal forgiveness.321 Given the variety of perspectives that are found in the mental health field, it may be equally important to know why some people are willing to forgive.
Katheryn Rhoads Meek, a doctoral student at Wheaton College, is developing a scale to assess why some people choose to forgive. The Reasons for Forgiveness Scale, which must be administered by computer, first gives respondents scenarios in which interpersonal forgiveness is one possible response. The scenarios are adapted from the Willingness to Forgive scale that was developed and described by Hebl and Enright.322 Those respondents who choose forgiveness as their response are then asked why they would forgive. Respondents rate each of the following motives on a four-point scale, ranging from not at all important to extremely important.
Reasons for Forgiveness Scale
1. Forgiveness helps me get on with my life. Otherwise I would think about it all the time.
2. I want to keep peace in our relationship.
3. I understand why he/she did it (going through a rough time, personal issues, etc.).
4. I’ve done bad things too and have been forgiven.
5. I love this person.
6. It’s not that big a deal.
7. If I had behaved differently, it wouldn’t have happened.
8. Forgiveness is the right thing to do.
Some of these motives reflect self-blame, excusing, or condoning more than forgiveness. Some reflect self-serving reasons for forgiveness, and others reflect humble identification. An initial reliability study has provided promising support for the Reasons for Forgiveness Scale, and additional studies are being planned. Understanding various motives for forgiveness may help other researchers design helpful studies in the future.
If Christians understand forgiveness differently from others in the mental health field, it seems reasonable to expect that forgiveness in Christian counseling may take a different form and have results that are different from the way forgiveness is used in other forms of counseling. To date, no research comparing Christian and non-Christian forms of forgiveness has been reported. The Reasons for Forgiveness Scale is an important step in this direction.
Challenge 6: Defining Relevant Ethical Standards
Counselors have an ethical obligation to provide cost-effective services for their clients. Short treatment protocols are preferred by insurance companies and by most people seeking help. This creates an ethical tension for counselors interested in forgiveness.
On one hand, if counselors hurry their work, especially work related to forgiveness, they may settle for a superficial, intellectualized form of forgiveness rather than one based on deep understanding. I remember helping one client write a letter of forgiveness to a parent; then several months later she began to uncover repressed memories of sexual abuse by the same parent. She was not ready to forgive fully because she had not yet fully understood what she was forgiving. Hurried forgiveness carries the risk of being shallow and temporary.
On the other hand, if therapists wait until clients bring up the topic of forgiveness, therapy may take longer than necessary. Some clients seem to flourish in the patient role, especially if they are encouraged to see themselves as victims. Some clients will even unconsciously fabricate “repressed” memories in order to maintain the comfort of the counseling relationship. In these cases, the counselor must gently nudge the client toward forgiveness. Striking a balance between patience and goal directedness is a challenging part of forgiveness counseling.
A related ethical challenge comes in recognizing that not all clients have the emotional ability to forgive, at least not until significant emotional growth occurs. Often those who have the most to forgive, because they have been victimized as young children, are vulnerable to the phenomenon of splitting. With splitting, they neatly divide the world into two groups: the good people and the bad people. Good people can do no wrong, and bad people can do no right. Those prone to splitting find forgiveness virtually impossible.323 If a counselor pushes forgiveness onto a client prone to splitting, the counselor ends up being viewed as bad and the client terminates counseling. Thus, a competent counseling approach requires helping these clients grow beyond their primitive defenses before attempting to work on forgiveness.
Summary
Forgiveness is an increasingly popular topic among counselors. Although this is an encouraging trend, it is important to remember that a Christian understanding of forgiveness may differ from the ways others understand forgiveness. When forgiveness techniques are used in Christian counseling, they should be considered in the context of self-awareness, empathy, humility, and insight, and not just as a way for a client to experience emotional relief. Our capacity to forgive one another depends, at least to some extent, on our capacity to understand both our need for forgiveness and God’s gracious gift of forgiveness. This type of healing brings a person into a deeper relationship with God and others.
Upon Reflection
Since this book was first published, an incredible pace of activity has ensued in the scientific study of forgiveness. Major grant programs have been established, more than a thousand studies have been published in the scientific literature, and the topic has found its way into major media coverage as well. One of the world’s foremost experts on the science of forgiveness is a committed Christian, Dr. Everett Worthington. His work is thoughtful, scientifically rigorous, and always worth reading.
I am delighted with this flurry of scientific activity on the topic of forgiveness, but still I am reminded of the questions Katheryn Meek and I asked in this chapter back in 1996 about secularizing forgiveness (see challenge #4). Forgiveness is a good thing, whether offered in the name of Christ or not, but I question whether it is the same thing if it is not offered in the name of Christ. In this update I will focus on a distinctively Christian view of forgiveness, including a discussion of forgiveness and empathy, and prayer and forgiveness.
Forgiveness and Empathy
If I forgive someone who hurts me, that is a good thing for me. I feel less burdened by anger, a lightness returns to my step, and my overall health is likely to improve.324 These are all good outcomes for forgiveness, and they offer justification for forgiveness-based counseling. But from a Christian perspective, the motive goes deeper, summarized by the apostle Paul’s instructions to Christians in Rome: “Accept each other just as Christ has accepted you so that God will be given glory” (Romans 15:7, NLT). How has Christ accepted us? With amazing love and compassion, with grace and forgiveness. And so we are called to extend this same sort of acceptance to one another, not merely so that our personal health will be better, but because doing so will bring glory to God. This sort of forgiveness requires us to see that we are all very much the same—all fragile and broken by our sinful state, all wounded by our own past choices and by the choices of others, and all yearning for love. From this place of Christian empathy, we can offer forgiveness to one another because we have been forgiven so much.
You may be sensing a theme, as I also discussed empathy in the chapter 5 update. The longer I have done this work of Christian counseling, the more convinced I am that empathy is essential. Beyond counseling, I also think empathy is critically important in how we live in Christian community. We often talk about counselors being empathic, but it is also important to consider our clients’ ability to be empathic. Katheryn Meek and I refer to this as “humble identification” in this chapter (see challenge #1). To explore this further, and from a contemporary perspective, let’s return for a moment to the counseling example I offered in the chapter 5 update:
Client: I don’t know if I can ever forgive her. It’s been two years since the divorce, but I still wake up at night in this panicked state, thinking I’ve had a nightmare, only to realize that it really happened. She really left.
In the chapter 5 update we considered how a Christian doctrine of sin might help the counselor experience empathy for this client, but notice that the client himself may also have a need for greater empathy. Yes, his wife left him, and this truly is a terrible and sinful thing. But notice how externally focused the client remains, even two years after she left. His unforgiveness is almost certainly related to being stuck, perhaps obsessively so, in blaming his former wife.
If you have been in a counseling situation such as this one, you recognize the dilemma. This client has experienced tremendous pain, and probably injustice, too. To suggest that the client should be empathic toward his offender may trivialize his pain, and yet forgiveness is important, both for the sake of the Kingdom of God and to help this traumatized man move on with his life.
Everett Worthington has suggested a five-step-process model of forgiveness, with empathy for the offender being the second step.325 Process models have proven highly effective in counseling interventions.326 Worthington’s model, known as the REACH model, involves (R) recalling the hurt, (E) empathizing with the offender, offering the (A) altruistic gift of forgiveness, (C) committing to forgive, and (H) holding on to the commitment. Notice in this model that it is important to give our clients ample room to experience the pain of an offense before trying to move on to empathy. Otherwise forgiveness is cheapened into denial, Christian platitude, or both. But this client has spent two years recalling his hurt, so what is the counselor to do?
Moving a client toward empathy is typically best as a gentle nudge rather than as a forceful suggestion. Consider the following possible responses that a counselor might make:
Option 1: Yes, she did a terrible thing to you. I see why you can never forgive her.
Option 2: I think it’s time that you move forward toward forgiveness.
Option 3: This has been a long journey for you. I wonder what the next step will look like.
Option 1 is an expression of empathy from the counselor toward the client, but it is not the best option because it perpetuates the client’s belief that forgiveness is impossible. Option 2 is better, though many clients would feel pressured or cornered by such a comment. Though intended to move the client forward toward a place of greater empathy and forgiveness, it communicates little empathy from the counselor to the client. Option 3 does both, modeling empathy on the part of the counselor while gently reminding the client that he has more work to do.
At some point in a future session the counselor may help the client move toward a commitment to forgive, but for now the most-important step forward involves building empathy. Effective counseling naturally leads to self-understanding, and that should lead to empathy toward others. While it is true that the client is deeply wounded by his wife’s choice to leave, he may eventually come to a point of recognizing that he was not the easiest person to be with. Perhaps his anger and impulsiveness made marriage difficult. His struggles with pornography made her feel unwanted and taken for granted. The more clearly the client sees himself, the more he will understand why others think and act as they do when they are with him. Though greater self-understanding does not excuse his wife’s choice to leave the marriage, it may at least help him understand why she might have chosen to do such a thing. Eventually he may take stock of his own moral failings and recognize that he is also capable of hurting others with his choices. As the client grows in self-awareness, his empathy grows too, and so does his ability to forgive.
Prayer and Forgiveness
With all the attention given to forgiveness over the past two decades, it is surprising that almost no studies have considered the relationship between prayer and forgiveness. Perhaps this reflects what Katheryn and I wrote about in 1996, that secularizing forgiveness might result in a different construct than what Christians mean by forgiveness. When some doctoral students and I asked one hundred Christians how they went about forgiving a significant interpersonal offense, half of them spontaneously mentioned prayer without our even telling them that we were studying the role of prayer in forgiveness.327 Prayer just rolled off their tongues—it was the obvious way they went about forgiving. Yet almost no one is studying how prayer promotes forgiveness.
Right in the middle of the most famous Christian prayer are the words, “Forgive us our sins, as we have forgiven those who sin against us” (Matthew 6:12). I’m thankful that more Christians are starting to attend to this. Dr. Steve Sandage at Bethel Seminary has published a couple of studies on prayer and forgiveness, and one of my doctoral students, Sarah Vasiliauskas, just defended a fascinating dissertation on the topic—a study that we are now submitting for publication.
Sarah recruited a sample of 411 students at Christian colleges throughout the country, and then selected the 241 who reported experiencing a highly significant personal offense. She randomly assigned participants to one of three groups. The first group received daily devotionals via e-mail about ways prayer can promote forgiveness. The second group also received daily devotionals, but they were not about forgiveness. The third group, a control group, received no e-mails. At the beginning of the study, and again at the end of the study, participants completed various questionnaires. Members of the first two groups reported increased forgiveness at the end of the study, but only the first group—those in the prayer intervention—reported enhanced empathy toward their offenders. Given the importance of empathy in forgiveness, this is an important finding.
Prayer takes our eyes off ourselves and allows us to align our hearts—and our vision—with God’s. Not surprisingly, becoming less preoccupied with ourselves promotes empathy for others. “The common thread between empathy and forgiveness is the other-centered focus rather than the self-centered focus.”328 Our strivings toward both empathy and forgiveness require us to turn our eyes from ourselves and our personal hurt to the experience and life of the other. This can be such an overwhelming goal for those who have been deeply hurt and struggle to forgive. How blessed we are to have the gift of prayer, which allows us to commune with God, to become aware of our own fallenness and wrongdoings in relation to God, and to be reminded of our shared humanity with those who have wounded us. For those with deep wounds, this work will occur over many years and will ultimately lead to renewed compassion, understanding, empathy, and forgiveness.
As beautiful as I find this connection between prayer and forgiveness, it is still no easy matter to decide how prayer is best used in Christian counseling (see chapter 3). From a Christian theological perspective, we understand that as our clients spend time with God in prayer, they are drawn closer to the heart of God. Our clients’ capacity and propensity for mending their relationships and pursuing healthy relational qualities increase when they are spending time with God. Still, prayer in counseling can be easily misused. Referring to the unforgiving client discussed earlier, what if the counselor said this?
Counselor: This has been a long journey for you. Let’s take a few moments now and pray together about what God has for you next.
This may turn out to be a lovely intervention. Perhaps in a few moments of quiet, prayerful reflection, the client may move closer toward the forgiving heart of Christ. Led by the Holy Spirit, a Christian counselor ought to remain open to moments of prayer in counseling. That said, a prayer intervention such as this one might also hinder both godliness and forgiveness. Perhaps the client will perceive this as forceful or coercive on the part of the counselor. Sitting with eyes closed, the client may be thinking more about the counselor than about God: What am I supposed to be thinking or saying? Prayer in session requires great discernment and sensitivity on the part of the counselor.
For those who are cautious about praying aloud routinely in session, as I am, here is an alternative: what if we help our clients view counseling as prayer? Through gentle words, strategic moments of silence, references to the clients’ spiritual journey, and an attitude of respect and grace, counselors can communicate the sacred nature of the fifty-minute hour. The experience of seeing self in relation to God pulls the believer to an other-focused perspective that may, in turn, draw the client toward another perspective on life, essentially God’s perspective. In this sense, therapy, like prayer in Sarah’s study, helps our clients become more attuned to the other and more aware of God’s presence.
There may also be times to suggest that our clients spend time in prayer outside of sessions. Returning to the previous example, the counselor might say something like this at the end of the session:
Counselor: Let’s try something this week, and then we’ll talk about it next week when we meet. When you wake up in that panicked state, take a moment to lie prayerfully in God’s presence. You may have some things to say to God, and that’s fine, but be sure to lie still enough to listen. Just breathe, be still, rest in God’s presence. Then we’ll discuss it next time we talk.
A homework assignment such as this might introduce the benefits of prayer—benefits that include but extend far beyond forgiveness—without introducing the risk of coercion or miscommunication that sometimes occurs with in-session prayer. Still, there may be times where in-session prayer is the right choice. As Christian counselors we need to be people of godly discernment, astutely aware of how our clients experience us, and open to the promptings of the Holy Spirit.
Final Thoughts
As each of us journeys toward wholeness, and as we help clients on their journeys, we find that unforgiveness and forgiveness are entwined in our spiritual pilgrimage and our relationship with God. Forgiveness is far more than a clinical technique. Forgiveness emerges from a lifestyle, a way of being. If we have fostered compassion and empathy through life experience, spiritual disciplines, and theological reflection, we are more open to forgiving others even when the offense is great. To whatever extent counseling models and promotes empathy, it also opens the possibility of forgiveness.
Acknowledgment
Sarah L. Vasiliauskas helped me write this update. Sarah moved from Portland to Portland (Maine to Oregon) to do her doctoral work at George Fox, where she has been a vital part of my research team. In addition to being an outstanding clinician, she has provided notable material through her dissertation research, described in this update, helping us understand the importance of prayer in forgiveness.
Additional Reading
Everett L. Worthington Jr., Forgiving and Reconciling: Bridges to Wholeness and Hope (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2003).
Bibliography
Lawler, Kathleen A., Jarred W. Younger, Rachel L. Piferi, Rebecca L. Jobe, Kimberley A. Edmondson, and Warren H. Jones. “The Unique Effects of Forgiveness on Health: An Exploration of Pathways.” Journal of Behavioral Medicine 28 (2005): 157–167.
Lundahl, Brad W., Mary Jane Taylor, Ryan Stevenson, and K. Daniel Roberts. “Process-Based Forgiveness Interventions: A Meta-Analytic Review.” Research on Social Work Practice 18 (2008): 465–478.
McMinn, Mark R., Heath Fervida, Keith A. Louwerse, Jennifer L. Pop, Ryan D. Thompson, Bobby L. Trihub, and Susan McLeod-Harrison. “Forgiveness and Prayer.” Journal of Psychology and Christianity 27 (2008): 101–109.
Welton, Gary L., Peter C. Hill, and Kevin S. Seybold. “Forgiveness in the Trenches: Empathy, Perspective Taking, and Anger.” Journal of Psychology and Christianity 27 (2008): 168–177.
Worthington, Everett L., Jr. Forgiving and Reconciling: Bridges to Wholeness and Hope. Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2003.
8 Redemption
Throughout this book I have referred to religious interventions in Christian counseling, but I have rarely discussed how they might be applied in working with those who are not Christians. For example, non-Christian clients will have an understanding of sin and confession that is different from that of Christian clients. Forgiveness may seem unnecessary to those who have not experienced the bliss of Christ’s grace. Praying routinely with non-Christian clients might raise the clients’ defenses and suspicions. So what, if anything, is distinct about Christian counseling when working with those who are not Christians?
Furthermore, some Christian clients come to counseling with problems that have little to do with their religious values or beliefs. Just as their non-Christian counterparts do, Christian counselors may use systematic desensitization to treat phobias, cognitive restructuring to treat dysthymia, and schema-oriented treatments for personality disorders. Does Christian counseling for these clients look different from other forms of counseling? Other than specifically religious interventions, as described in previous chapters, I suggest there are two distinctive elements of Christian counseling: identification and a redemptive worldview. These two distinctives cut across all client problems and religious values.
The first is simple: Christian counselors identify themselves as Christians. If religious values affect the process and outcome of counseling, as we believe they do, then we ought to fully inform those seeking our services of our Christian values.329 I include the following statement as part of a longer informed-consent form that all clients read and sign before beginning treatment:
An Example of Informed Consent Regarding Religious Values
I will use a form of cognitive therapy. We will carefully examine your personal history and current circumstances in order to find and revise faulty thinking patterns and beliefs that contribute to your symptoms. Both your personal values and mine will affect the ways your beliefs are evaluated. Thus, it is important that you know something about my values and that you are free to question me about my value assumptions at any time. I believe many biological, psychosocial, and emotional factors contribute to psychological problems. As a Christian psychologist, I believe that some psychological problems result from the evil embedded in human nature and in our culture. People often experience problems as a result of being hurt by others (past or present), making poor choices, undervaluing things that are truly important, and overvaluing things that are unimportant. It is not essential that you share my Christian beliefs, but you have the right to know my value assumptions and are free to discuss them with me at any time.
In addition to providing opportunity for informed consent, a statement such as this opens an opportunity for Christian truth to be incarnated in the therapy relationship. If the relationship with the therapist is healing and inviting, then the client may come to think of Christianity as healing and inviting. Though evangelism leading to spiritual conversion is rarely a part of counseling, a healthy Christian-counseling relationship often encourages clients to explore religious values and faith during and after counseling. Furthermore, an overt statement about the counselor’s Christian values makes spirituality and religion a legitimate topic for the client to discuss. Often clients will not discuss their religious beliefs if they are unsure of their counselor’s values.
The second distinction of Christian counseling that applies to all clients and all counseling situations is our understanding of redemption, the topic of this final chapter. The central experience of a Christian’s life is a redemptive relationship with Jesus Christ—a relationship that transforms our understanding of human encounters, including those in the counseling office.
Redemption means the act of buying back, or recovering by paying a price. For example, not many years ago people collected green stamps that could be redeemed for merchandise. These stamps, worthless on their own, were given value with their purchasing power. In the spiritual and interpersonal realms, redemption means that humans, broken and battered by life’s trials, have value and meaning restored to their lives.
Only God offers eternal redemption. Humans confess their sin and find forgiveness, hope, and meaning in God’s grace. Though spiritual redemption is the most important type of redemption to find, humans are also able to offer a form of interpersonal redemption to one another. This human-to-human redemption is a common part of Christian mercy and Christian counseling.
For the purposes of this chapter, a redemptive worldview in counseling is defined as a set of beliefs, values, and assumptions that cause us not only to reflect humbly and gratefully on how God is drawing us out of our captivity to sin but also to motivate us to help restore others to hope and wholeness. Notice that spiritual redemption and human redemption are closely related. When we are redeemed by Christ, rescued from our self-destructive and futile ways, we become more interested in living out our faith in redemptive relationships with others. We are God’s hands and feet in a world that needs to be rescued from the pervasive effects of human depravity. Some people believe that human acts of redemption will ultimately improve the world and bring God’s kingdom to earth. Others believe that human acts of redemption are important insofar as they point others toward a redemptive relationship with God. In either case, the redemptive nature of the counseling relationship is a practical way of responding to God’s transforming mercy.
What If This Happened?
Dawn Trodden is in counseling with Ms. Hope, a lay counselor in a church-based ministry. Dawn has had a hard life. She was abused as a child, was abandoned in her first marriage, and has bounced from job to job over the last several years. Dawn has complicated her life with some bad choices, including promiscuity and alcohol abuse. She came for counseling feeling depressed and hopeless.
Ms. Hope is a caring Christian counselor who listens well and cares deeply for her clients. She likes Dawn and feels confident that Dawn will eventually begin feeling better and making better decisions.
Dawn cannot explain it, but she often feels a foreign sense of optimism and energy after leaving her counseling sessions. For the first time in her life she feels understood and valued. Shame is loosening its grip on her life because of the counseling relationship. Ms. Hope is spending time and energy buying Dawn back from the dehumanizing forces of her past.
Redemption is found not primarily in counseling techniques but in the nature of a caring counseling relationship. Thus, learning to be a redemptive counselor requires more than learning a set of skills that can be taught in a classroom or listed in a book. Rather, the capacity to engage in redemptive counseling relationships comes with psychological, theological, and spiritual insight and growth.
Foundations
Psychology
Redemptive psychotherapy relationships can be viewed from a number of psychological perspectives, depending on one’s theoretical preferences. Though human acts of redemption can be viewed as an important part of psychotherapy within any theoretical framework, we will consider these three: object-relations, Adlerian, and cognitive therapy.
Object Relations
From an object-relations perspective, our capacity to see value in ourselves depends on how others have treated us in the past. Some, like Ms. Trodden in the previous example, come to counseling without ever knowing a redemptive human relationship based on grace and acceptance.
Object-relations theorists believe that we internalize roles from early life relationships and carry them with us by treating ourselves and others the same ways we have been treated and have responded.330 An abused child, such as Ms. Dawn Trodden, internalizes the role of abuser from interactions with her abusive parent and may grow up to abuse herself or others. She also internalizes the role of victim and may frequently cast herself or others in a victim role as an adult. For clients like Dawn, a therapy relationship built on trust and respect is radically new and initially difficult to accept, but the relationship is ultimately transforming.
People with a number of relatively healthy relationships in their past are able to affirm, encourage, and love themselves; they have learned these skills by being affirmed, encouraged, and loved by others. Sadly, some have not had access to healthy relationships and therefore have not learned appropriate ways of caring for themselves. For these clients, the nature of the therapeutic relationship is paramount. As they learn to find grace and acceptance from their counselor, they also learn to be nicer to themselves.331 They are learning a new skill from a therapist, then applying it to their self-image. This is the essence of good counseling and of human redemption, buying back people’s dignity by investing in their lives, treating them with respect and affirmation.
Counselors serve as “transitional objects,” providing a temporary relationship that helps clients gain insight and relate better to others in relationships that are more permanent than counseling relationships. In this sense, Christian counselors help their clients understand God by demonstrating redemption. This is not to say we teach redemption as a professor teaches a class or a pastor teaches a congregation, but we live out a redemptive relationship in the counseling office.
Adlerian Psychology
Alfred Adler postulated that humans are consumed with a drive toward selfishness and superiority because they are plagued with an underlying sense of weakness and inferiority. The goal of therapy is to help clients gain insight into feelings of inferiority, be freed from futile methods of seeking dominance and superiority, and adopt a more empathetic, altruistic style of life. Adler described this capacity for empathy and altruism as “social interest.”
Adler wrote about successfully treating a schizophrenic patient. For the first three months, the patient was silent in treatment. Adler kept meeting him week after week. After the silence broke, the patient abruptly raised his hand to hit Adler. Adler did not defend himself. On another occasion, the patient smashed a window during a session. Adler helped him bandage his bleeding hand, maintaining a kind and friendly attitude. The patient improved, and Adler asked him why treatment was successful. He responded, “That is quite simple. I had lost all courage to live. In our consultations I found it again.”332 This patient was redeemed from schizophrenia through a counseling relationship with Adler.
Adlerian psychotherapists attempt to bring people back from a life of selfish ambition by displaying social interest in the therapy relationship. This is analogous to the Christian concepts of redemption and grace: the goal of counseling is redemption, and the mechanism for change is grace.333 Grace requires the counselor to be unconditionally kind and nonauthoritarian, freeing the client to break the bonds of shame and inferiority. Empowering grace is redemptive.
Cognitive Therapy
Recent developments in cognitive therapy have affirmed the importance of a redemptive therapeutic relationship. Though some counselors still practice cognitive therapy as an exercise in logic and argument, most contemporary cognitive therapists recognize the importance of the therapeutic alliance.334
Cognitive therapists want to change the underlying beliefs of their clients. For example, let us imagine that Ms. Trodden has the belief that she will ultimately be rejected by everyone. This belief shapes her feelings and specific thoughts in any relationship, including her relationship with her counselor, Ms. Hope. Because she believes she will be rejected, Dawn tries pushing Ms. Hope away at several points during counseling. In the fifth session Dawn explodes in anger, screaming that she will never come back for another session. She misses the eighth session entirely, hoping her counselor will call to see where she was. In the twentieth session she tries to manipulate Ms. Hope into loaning her money. All these efforts are tests to see if her belief is correct: Will my counselor reject me?
How successful will it be for Ms. Hope to try to dissuade Dawn of her rejection belief with logic alone? It will not be successful because Dawn did not arrive at her belief with logic; it was the product of deep emotional scars and childhood losses that occurred before she was capable of adult logic. Her beliefs will be changed the same way they were established—through relationships.
Contemporary cognitive therapists assess clients’ beliefs and assumptions and then deliberately live out roles that defy those assumptions. To clients who believe they must be perfect to be loved, the cognitive therapist is nonchalant when the client shows up ten minutes late for an appointment and may even see it as a sign of progress. To clients who believe they are worthless and unimportant, the cognitive therapist is unusually attentive and affirming. To clients who believe they must maintain control at all costs, the cognitive therapist is assertive and bold. In each case the nature of the therapeutic relationship is specifically chosen to be redemptive for the specific client with a specific set of dysfunctional beliefs.
Caveats
Two warnings are in order. First, although discussing redemptive therapeutic relationships creates a pleasant picture of counseling, we must be careful not to become overconfident or arrogant in our role of living out redemption. Many of the abuses of counseling occur when counselors begin confusing themselves with God. We are human and can offer nothing of eternal significance without God. Second, counselors are people too and come into the counseling office with their own damage from past relationships. For example, a national survey of clinical and counseling psychologists revealed that two-thirds of the women and one-third of the men had been abused physically or sexually.335 Those who have not been sexually or physically abused have faced other problems that affect their abilities to perceive others accurately and treat them with respect and kindness. Even counselors who have gone through prolonged personal therapy continue to have blind spots; we are all affected by personal and universal sin. This suggests that counselors cannot model redemption perfectly. We need to keep looking beyond ourselves to understand redemption.
Redemptive Funnel
In Scripture we see what we might call a redemptive funnel, as shown in figure 6. Near the beginning of the Old Testament, redemption is a general concept, but by the end of the New Testament it has become quite specific and focused.336 In the general sense, we see God redeeming people from various types of corporate and personal distress, including slavery, poverty, plague, and oppression. In most cases, God provided this type of general redemption through other humans. For example, God raised up Moses to redeem the Hebrews from a life of slavery. God used Rahab to redeem the life of two of Joshua’s spies (Josh. 2); then God used Joshua to redeem Rahab’s life (Josh. 6). As the Old Testament progresses, we see increasing emphasis on God redeeming people from sin, calling them out of a life of darkness and self-deception into a life of obedience and faithfulness. David, king of Israel and psalmist, proclaimed, “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and do not forget all his benefits—who forgives all your iniquity, who heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the Pit, who crowns you with steadfast love and mercy, who satisfies you with good as long as you live so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s” (Ps. 103:2-5, italics added). This type of redemption comes directly from God—only God heals our diseases and offers full forgiveness for sins.
In the New Testament, redemption becomes even more specific as it is personified in Jesus Christ. Jesus paid the ransom for human sin and thereby redeemed us. “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree’—in order that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles, so that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith” (Gal. 3:13-14).
The climax of Scripture is seen in the ending point of this redemptive funnel: God redeemed us through the sacrificial work of Jesus. Redemption through Christ is the central theme of a Christian’s spiritual life, delivering us from the curse of eternal death and freeing us to live an abundant life in Christ. The apostle Paul described redemption vividly: “You were dead through the trespasses and sins. . . . But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ” (Eph. 2:1, 4-5).
Seeing Both Ends of the Funnel
Recognizing Christ’s redemption is essential for Christian faith, but it is also important to remember both ends of this redemptive process. Throughout history God has used humans as ambassadors of redemption. The narrative of Scripture tells an important story of God’s sustaining a nation through both divine and human acts of provision and grace.
The story of every Christian ought to be similar. The climax of our individual lives is found in the redemptive work of Christ, but as we look on our personal histories, we see much more. It is not just that God saved all humanity from sin two thousand years ago and then stopped acting redemptively. God continually redeems people from poverty, isolation, loneliness, emptiness, depression, alienation, and sin. These general acts of redemption are showered on us as we see God working through circumstances and other people to sustain us through difficult times and times of prosperity. God is with us.337
Humans are often God’s agents for this general type of redemption. Of course, we can never provide redemption at the narrow end of the funnel, where Christ redeems us from our sins, but when redemption is seen as freeing people from hardships, humans can participate with God. As each of us recalls God’s sustaining, redemptive work in our lives, we recall people—those who have given an encouraging word, an exhortation, an act of kindness at strategic moments. God is doing the redeeming, but he often works through people. Recognizing God’s sustaining and redeeming presence, seen through relationships with others, encourages us to be agents of redemption in a needy world.
The tragedy of the split between social-gospel Christians and fundamentalist Christians early in the twentieth century is that one group seemed determined to view only one end of the funnel, insisting that the redemptive work of Christ deserves our exclusive attention, while the other group seemed equally determined to view only the other end of the funnel, often equating salvation with human acts of kindness. In Scripture we see both ends of this funnel. Redemption culminates in the work of Christ; it is the only way to God. Yet Christ’s redemption calls us to action in the world around us.
Both ends of the funnel are essential. A decade before the fundamentalism–social gospel split, J. Stuart Holden, author of Redeeming Vision, preached that “the Gospel of Christ is the gospel of action. It not only calls upon men to believe a statement but also to follow a Saviour. Its genius is not adherence to a plan but obedience to a Man. It emphasizes doings rather than doctrines, and offers a creed only as the foundation of a character.”338
John Wesley saw religious affections as the common denominator between God’s act of redemption in Christ and human acts of mercy and kindness.339 When we understand that Christ died to redeem us from sin, our affections are turned toward God in loving appreciation. Old ways of thinking are burst apart as we see God’s kindness and grace. These same affections also engage us in the world around us as we are led to acts of mercy.
In the eighteenth century, Jonathan Edwards observed, “A person who has a knowledge of doctrine and theology only—without religious affection—has never engaged in true religion.”340 What is true religion? “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world” (James 1:27).
Once we understand the flow of God’s redemption through history, culminating in the work of Christ, and once we let this understanding saturate our affections and passions, we also recognize that the process of redemption calls us to redemptive relationships with others.
Spirituality
It is clear from the preceding section that the theological meaning of redemption is multifaceted. Redemption is at once a historical reality culminating in Christ’s atoning work, a personal event that occurs at the moment of salvation, and a lifelong process of spiritual growth leading to personal piety and social action. Though all of these are essential parts of redemption, the disciplines of spiritual formation are primarily focused on the process of redemption and purification to which Christ calls us. It is not that we become more redeemed as we grow spiritually but that we become more aware of our Redeemer, more deeply burdened by the persistent sins that visit us, more passionate about finding his will, and more comfortable in granting him control of our circumstances. With time, we see that Christ continually redeems us, delivering us again and again from our foolish ways and drawing us to himself.
Redemption and Spiritual Disciplines
Several of the spiritual disciplines serve to remind us of God’s ongoing redemption. Meditation brings us back to the feet of our Savior after we have wandered away, chasing the demands and attractions of the day. It is often useful to meditate on God’s grace through our personal histories. We can all recall times of being stuck in painful circumstances when, perhaps in the depths of our despair, God graciously provided a way of escape. Fasting can be used as a metaphor of our need for God. With each sensation of hunger or each impulse to eat, we remember that we are people with a deep need for intimacy with God, just as we need food. Reading the spiritual classics allows us to see God’s methods of redeeming others who have gone before us. In corporate worship, we gather to encourage one another along the path of redemption, sharing our common weaknesses and celebrating our gracious Savior. With confession, we name our sins, weaknesses, and vulnerabilities as we plead with God to continue transforming us. With each of these disciplines we are brought back to Christ, redeemed from our waywardness.
Redemption and Humility
Redemption is closely related to confession and forgiveness, discussed in the two preceding chapters. Richard Foster refers to the doctrine of redemption as the “ground upon which we can know that confession and forgiveness are realities that transform us.”341 In the chapters on confession and forgiveness, I emphasized the role of personal humility. Humility is also an important part of understanding redemption.
Humans are lost if left to their own resources, and that is bad enough. But to make matters worse, many people are confident that they are not lost. When I am in a strange city and want to disregard my wife’s suggestion that I stop for directions, I assure her that I know where I am going, that I can make it on my own. Of course, I do not find my way until I admit my need and ask for help. No one can be ransomed from lostness before recognizing his or her need. The posture of redemption is one of humility. Like stopping at a service station for directions, we must fall on our face before God and admit we are lost.
Another analogy of our need for humility is found in the rat laboratory. Animal researchers have located in rodent brains a “hot spot” that provides a pleasurable physiological stimulus. If rats have an electrode inserted in the hot spot, they will spend all day pressing the bar that delivers the pleasurable sensation. They ignore food, water, and hygiene in their pursuit of pleasure. In the same way, the pleasures of sin usurp our affections and attention and naturally draw us toward that which is pleasurable but ultimately futile and harmful. We need to be redeemed, bought back from our propensity toward pleasure seeking and drawn closer to Christ, who sees our deepest needs even while we are preoccupied with our urgent desires.
Andrew Murray describes humility as the “secret, the hidden root of thy redemption.” He goes on to instruct, “Sink down into it deeper day by day.”342 We go deeper into a life of humility and redemption by practicing the disciplines that remind us of our inclination toward sin and our need for God.
From these discussions of the psychology, theology, and spirituality of redemption, several important conclusions can be derived:
1. Spiritual redemption can be found only in Christ, who provided the ransom to free us from our captivity to sin. In this sense, redemption is a one-time work fulfilled in Christ’s atonement.
2. Spiritual redemption is also a process whereby God draws us closer and saves us from addiction to the pleasures of sin. This process of redemption both requires and produces humility as we recognize our desperate need for a gracious God.
3. God not only redeems us spiritually but also delivers us from many perils and hardships, often through the kindness of others.
4. As God’s redemption transforms our affections, we are motivated to be God’s agents of redemption, helping those in need find hope and relief from trials.
5. Counseling provides opportunities to be redemptive agents in a fallen and needy world.
6. A redemptive worldview in counseling calls us not necessarily to specific techniques or theoretical frameworks but to counseling relationships that reflect the grace and kindness we understand through God’s redemptive love.
Psychological and Spiritual Health
In an address entitled “Psychotherapy and Redemption,” given at the American Psychological Association (APA) meetings in 1990, Hendrika Vande Kemp, a psychologist at Fuller Theological Seminary, illustrated the many challenges of redemptive psychotherapy with a fascinating case study.343 Her client, whom she called Deborah, was raised by a violent, abusive father and an emotionally aloof mother. Deborah recalled being sexually assaulted twice during her adolescent years, once by a boy she was dating and once by a middle-aged exhibitionist. Yet her mother told her she had only imagined both incidents. These contradictory experiences confused Deborah and later caused her to question the validity of other experiences.
Deborah married a man much like her father—abusive and aggressive. After raping her on the second night of their marriage, an act that resulted in both emotional and physical damage, the man caused four years of sexual and emotional conflict. Eventually he insisted that Deborah get psychological treatment. The marriage ended soon thereafter.
By the time Deborah reached a counselor, she was a troubled woman with symptoms of various personality disorders, an eating disorder, depression, confused thinking, and suicidal desires. It would be nice if the story ended happily with a counselor helping her overcome these various symptoms. Unfortunately, she bounced from therapist to therapist, with two of her counselors damaging her more by sexually exploiting her. By the time Deborah came to Dr. Vande Kemp’s attention, she had seen six different therapists.
Dr. Vande Kemp became acquainted with Deborah in two ways: she supervised a practicum student who provided therapy for Deborah, and she sometimes had direct contact with Deborah through her consultative role. Both Dr. Vande Kemp and the practicum student supported Deborah through the difficult and arduous process of filing ethics charges against a former therapist. Deborah developed with Dr. Vande Kemp a strong bond, which she expressed appropriately through several thank-you notes and cards.
When Deborah was attacked while jogging and the hospital staff did not want her to return home alone, she called Dr. Vande Kemp. With some discomfort about the therapeutic boundary issues, Dr. Vande Kemp allowed Deborah to stay with her for a short time, then made sure that Deborah and her therapist worked through whatever confusion this stirred up for Deborah.
Some time later Deborah’s emotional health improved, she moved out of town and married again, and had children. She appeared content in her role as a mother and sent holiday greeting cards to Dr. Vande Kemp each year. In one card she mentioned that she had been diagnosed with breast cancer. At the time of Dr. Vande Kemp’s APA address, Deborah’s second husband had left her. She was living with a family that had “adopted” her, and she was about to die. Despite the tragic ending, this case study illustrates several important components of a redemptive counseling relationship.
Will This Help Establish a Healthy Sense of Self?
Through relationships with Dr. Vande Kemp and her practicum student, Deborah developed a stronger, more accurate sense of herself. In this sense, her counseling was redemptive, drawing her out of a state of helpless victimization to one of empowerment. The greatest evidence for this change is seen in her willingness to bring charges against a former therapist who had sexually exploited her.
Deborah learned early in life that her proper role was one of compliance and conformity. She tried to prevent her father’s violent outbursts by not “rocking the boat.” She married a man very similar to her father and again tried to cope by losing her own identity. Two therapists took advantage of her desire to comply and had sexual relationships with her in the guise of helping her. One therapist left the state before Deborah was strong enough to bring charges. After several months of therapy with Dr. Vande Kemp’s student, Deborah was strong enough to bring charges against the second therapist.
How did Deborah move from being passive and overly compliant to being empowered to stand for justice? Through a redemptive counseling relationship. Vande Kemp observed that redemption often involves reconnection, binding together the fragments of a shattered life into a recovered sense of self. Redemption occurred not by the counselor’s insisting that Deborah seek justice but by helping Deborah reconnect her feelings with reality, by binding her up until she was strong enough to make a good decision on her own.
Notice that a strong sense of self does not necessarily produce selfishness. Ultimately Deborah decided to seek justice because she did not want other women to be hurt as she had been hurt. Her own experience with redemption caused her to reach out redemptively to others.
Will This Help Establish a Healthy Sense of Need?
In one sense, Deborah was overwhelmed with her need even before counseling with Dr. Vande Kemp’s student. She had attempted suicide twenty times, seen six different therapists, and viewed herself as wretched and worthless. She knew a great deal about need but not much about a healthy sense of need.
As she became stronger in the context of therapy, she learned to approach need in a healthier way, as revealed in her call to Dr. Vande Kemp from the hospital. Earlier in Deborah’s life, she had coped with need by clinging to aggressive and demanding men, by trying to find symbiotic relationships with dominating people, or by suicide attempts. When she called Dr. Vande Kemp from the hospital, she was reaching out to someone who had proven herself to be caring and nurturing. It was a healthy response to need.
This shows the interconnectedness of self, need, and healing relationships. If Deborah had not developed a stronger sense of self in counseling or if there had not been a healing bond between the two of them, she would not have taken the risk of calling Dr. Vande Kemp.
What If This Happened?
Both counselor A and counselor B are convinced that contemporary American society places too great an emphasis on individuality and self-sufficiency. They both believe that many of their clients need to develop a more accurate understanding of interdependency, including an awareness of their need for others.
Counselor A addresses this in the first counseling session. She often says something like this: “Counseling is an interaction between people. If I am going to help you, it will be because you recognize you need me. We can’t do everything on our own. We all need help sometimes.”
Counselor B approaches need differently. In the first session, she commonly asks, “Tell me how it feels for you to be here today.” She listens carefully to the client’s response but does not discuss the idea of need any further unless the client invites the discussion.
I prefer counselor B’s approach because it gives the counseling relationship time to develop. Eventually there may be overt discussions of need in counseling but only after the therapeutic relationship is established and the client has developed a strong enough sense of self to speak assertively about need. Counselor A seems to be inviting excessive dependence, which may cause the client to be either clingy or wary. A healthy awareness of need is best established in conjunction with a healthy sense of self in the context of a safe relationship.
Will This Help Establish a Healing Relationship?
Redemptive counseling is relationally sensitive counseling. It cannot be reduced to a set of clinical techniques. It was the character of the therapist and the supervisor, as well as their relationships with Deborah, that provided Deborah with redemption and hope. In her APA address, Vande Kemp emphasized that the redemptive therapist affirms a client’s longing for salvation. The counselor becomes a conduit for distributing God’s grace.
Redemptive Christian counselors value their opportunities to be ministers of God’s grace to others. They see character—not their own natural character, but the character that God is producing and renewing in their lives—as the greatest tool they offer in counseling.
Though the relational aspects of counseling carry great healing power, we should be realistic about their limitations. Often the people who need redemptive relationships the most are also the ones who are most resistant to entering into such a relationship and who gain the least from it when they do enter in. For instance, a recent study of sexually abused Christian women demonstrated that childhood sexual abuse interferes with adult capacity to feel loved and accepted by God and others.344 Even Deborah, after doing well in therapy, continued to have relational problems. She married and divorced a second time and unwisely conformed to her husband’s demands that she not get medical treatment for breast cancer.
The sobering reality is that we cannot completely transform our clients, even with the best counseling relationships. The best we can hope for is that we initiate a spark in the process of redemption—a spark that produces the warmth of feeling loved and illuminates a future where all human liabilities will be set aside and redemption will be fully accomplished.
Facing the Challenges
Challenge 1: Moving from Two Areas of Competence to Three
The methods of psychology and theology are steeped in intellectual and rational traditions. Psychological theories are developed by carefully observing human behavior, formulating specific hypotheses, testing these hypotheses with double-blind studies, and then revising the theories accordingly. Similarly, Christian theological perspectives are shaped by a careful analysis of Scripture in light of other academic disciplines such as philosophy, history, and anthropology. We need the academic contributions of psychology and theology in order to be effective Christian counselors, but we also need to understand spirituality.
The methods of spirituality are different. Although one can study spiritual formation from academic perspectives, the primary value of Christian spirituality is experiential. We look to God for daily sustenance, not because we can prove God with a double-blind study or because of the ontological or teleological arguments that God exists, but because we have met God personally and have become people of faith. It is precisely this amorphous, experiential nature of spirituality that often raises our suspicions and concerns about spiritual formation. It all seems so boundless, so infinitely prone to human distortion. We need theological boundaries in order to maintain orthodox and scripturally sound views of redemption, yet we also need the experiential depth of a personal spiritual journey.
The capacity for Christians to integrate a redemptive worldview into their counseling work is both facilitated and limited by their faith experience.
What If This Happened?
What if the prevailing values of mental health professionals were to change suddenly and everyone became interested in redemption as part of the counseling process? Training programs would start offering courses in redemptive therapy. Clinical supervisors would teach supervisees how to implement redemption in their clinical work. A few new doctoral programs would spring up, each offering degrees in redemptive psychotherapy. Continuing education workshops, Yellow Pages advertisements, and national conventions all would point toward redemption.
I create this far-fetched scenario to ask a question: Who would be best prepared to offer counseling services in this new mental health environment? Christians would be. We have reflected deeply on redemption, and more important we have experienced profound redemption in the spiritual realm. No amount of classroom experience or continuing education could provide the same background that we have learned experientially.
This illustrates how spiritual experience prepares Christian counselors to think redemptively in the counseling office. Redemption in counseling is not a technique learned in the classroom but a worldview that wells up in those who walk close to Christ and then spills over into every relationship, including those in the counseling office. Of course, if we accept this premise, then we must also acknowledge that the extent to which we incorporate a redemptive worldview in our counseling work is limited by the depth of our spiritual experience with redemption.
Desiring a redemptive worldview calls us to the spiritual journey and bids us to draw closer to our Redeemer.
Challenge 2: Blurred Personal-Professional Distinctions
When Sigmund Freud infused psychoanalysis with his passion for scientific objectivity, he cast the therapist as a value-free professional observer of the patient. Though many of Freud’s ideas have withstood the challenges of the past century, this one has not. Far from being an objective observer, the therapist is an active agent in a therapeutic transaction. A counselor is both professional and personal; the roles cannot be neatly divided.
What If This Happened?
Pastor Karing has seen Stormy Ann Dempty for several sessions, helping Ms. Dempty deal with anger control, feelings of sadness, and spiritual apathy. On the fourth session, Ms. Dempty looks questioningly at Pastor Karing and asks, “What kinds of things do you do to keep your spiritual vision going?” Pastor Karing hears two voices in his head.
Voice 1 (a deeply resonant, professional voice): She is trying to get me to cross over into a personal relationship that might cloud my objectivity, add to transference and countertransference difficulties, and displace her responsibility for change onto me. I should simply respond by saying, “The question is more interesting than any answer I might give. I’m wondering what it might mean that you ask that.”
Voice 2 (a tentative, personal voice): This may be a good opportunity to share with Stormy some of my methods of meditating and praying from Scripture. She may find them as helpful as I have.
Neither of Pastor Karing’s two options are clearly right or clearly wrong. He may be correct that Ms. Dempty’s request for information could improperly confuse the counseling roles. He may also be correct that a specific personal disclosure regarding devotional techniques could be helpful to Ms. Dempty. The important point is that he feels inner conflict, as he should. The boundaries between professional and personal are difficult to define for those with a redemptive worldview.
The same observation could be made for Dr. Vande Kemp’s decision to allow Deborah to stay at her home for several days. Though I am impressed with her decision, I am more impressed with the inner conflict she felt in making the decision. If it were an easy decision in either direction, then either her understanding of professional ethics or her capacity for a redemptive worldview would have to be questioned.
Challenge 3: Expanded Definitions of Training
Though I have emphasized the importance of personal spiritual training throughout this book and this chapter, it is important to remember that most forms of Christian counseling require both professional and personal training. It would be a mistake, for example, to assume that redemption through Christ is sufficient to make one competent in dealing with the variety of situations faced by professional counselors.
A careless attitude toward professional training might lead one to the conclusion that counselors with redemptive worldviews are nice people who spend an hour every week being nice to each of their clients. This is no more accurate than saying God redeems us by being nice to us. God understands us perfectly, so the process of redemption looks different for each person and each situation. At times we experience God’s wrath and justice. At times God is merciful and kind. Sometimes God seems distant and hard to find. During each of these times, God is trying to purify our faith and deliver us from the snares of self-deception and evil.345
Similarly, effective counselors are warm and affirming at times, assertive and confrontive at other times, and occasionally distant and aloof. Any of these strategies can be effective or damaging, depending on the circumstances of counseling. Because we are not God, we are prone to imperfect judgments, misunderstandings about our clients, and self-serving biases. This calls all counselors to a place of humility and reminds us of the importance of good training, ongoing consultation and supervision, high ethical standards, and reliance on the Holy Spirit’s guidance as we navigate the murky waters of counseling.
Challenge 4: Confronting Dominant Views of Mental Health
At the beginning of this chapter I suggested two distinctions of Christian counselors: we identify ourselves as Christians, and we maintain a redemptive worldview in our counseling work. Both of these distinctions conflict with dominant assumptions of mental health.
Most counselors, regardless of their personal religious orientation, see themselves as sensitive to the varying religious values of their clients. Such sensitivity has recently been mandated for psychologists by the APA.346 Although this is generally good news for religious clients, it reduces the perceived need for counselors to describe their personal religious values. Because counselors perceive themselves to be sensitive to a wide range of religious values, they do not see a need to be explicit about their personal beliefs.
If sensitivity to religious beliefs means not ridiculing or undermining a client’s beliefs, then it is probably true that most counselors are sensitive to religious differences and there is little need to disclose personal religious values. But if religious beliefs transform the way we see human problems and provide insights for the way those problems are treated, then the personal religious values of the counselor are relevant to treatment and are important to identify. Even if other counselors are not doing so, Christian counselors who believe their values affect the way they counsel can demonstrate a commitment to ethical excellence by disclosing their personal religious values to new clients.
A redemptive worldview in Christian counseling also challenges recent mental health traditions that emphasize redemption from within oneself. Contemporary counseling theory emphasizes personal freedom through cleaning out psychic conflicts, changing irrational beliefs, modifying ineffective behavior patterns, and finding self-fulfillment. All these interventions can be useful in various situations, but they tend to overvalue individualism and self-discovery. The Christian message of redemption, a vital part of counseling theory until the twentieth century, calls us to redemption in relation to others.347 Most important, we are called out of our sinful ways to community with God and into caring community with one another. Christian counselors emerge from this caring community to live out their redemptive worldview in a variety of vocational and professional contexts.
In his book Redemptive Intimacy, philosopher Dick Westley describes the redemptive nature of Christian communities: “As Church, we form a counter culture to our world, but a counter culture of a most ironic sort. We seek not to coerce and badger our neighbors, but to live our lives of intimacy in trusting openness to them, always hoping that they may see in us something of the ‘parable of God’ and finally get the point of it all.”348
Challenge 5: Establishing a Scientific Base
As psychotherapy and counseling-outcome research has progressed, there has been increasing interest in the common factors that all forms of therapy share. Many hundreds of studies have looked at the level of specific counseling interventions, as illustrated in figure 7, and the general conclusion is that “no psychotherapy is superior to any other, although all are superior to no treatment.”349 Weinberger has recently suggested it is time to focus on the five common factors listed in figure 7, all of which he believes are “eminently measurable.”350
Common-factors research is important as the next step in understanding the mystery of the counseling process, yet I suspect there may be another level of inquiry that lies ahead. Could it be that the character and worldview of the counselor have a meaningful impact on the common factors? Testing this assertion poses monumental scientific challenges because of measurement problems. Although several good scales for common factors already exist, there are no good ways to measure concepts as difficult to grasp as character. And how do we get beyond traditional attitude measures to assess a counselor’s worldview, such as the redemptive worldview described here? These preliminary measurement tasks will have to be addressed before the relationship between character and common factors can be systematically evaluated.
Challenge 6: Defining Relevant Ethical Standards
At the heart of counseling ethics are two key principles: do good, and do no harm. Though the nuances are complex and the implications numerous, if counselors could consistently abide by these two standards, there would be few ethics violations.
These same two principles form the ethical foundation for a redemptive worldview in counseling. Clients often come to us feeling oppressed by the forces of evil in the world, tired of the struggle for inner and interpersonal peace. They are feeling vulnerable and weak, and they are looking to a counselor for help and hope. It is their vulnerability that makes it so important that we value doing good and not harm.
At times, the redemptive counselor takes risks, but not excessive risks. It was risky for Dr. Vande Kemp to allow Deborah to stay in her home for several days while recovering from being attacked. I, along with many counselors, feel an immediate and automatic sense of discomfort with such an arrangement, assuming that this type of multiple-role relationship with a supervisee’s client pushes ethical boundaries and may result in harm to the client. Yet it may have been this risky act of compassion that most clearly communicated God’s grace to Deborah. Vande Kemp was careful to note that therapists must maintain ethical boundaries and recognize their own limits and vulnerabilities. I am convinced that Dr. Vande Kemp would not have invited Deborah to stay at her home if she had been the therapist rather than the supervisor or if she had any feelings other than altruistic compassion for Deborah. Deborah’s early therapists also crossed ethical boundaries, but with impure motives, and they ended up harming Deborah. Some risk, for the sake of redemption, is wise. Excessive risk without carefully considering our personal vulnerabilities and the ethical implications of our actions can harm those we are claiming to help.
When Deborah first came for counseling, she was beaten down by past relationships and oppressed by her view of herself and her future. Two therapists took Deborah in her vulnerable state, pretended they were doing good, then did harm by sexually exploiting her. One therapist, a Christian with a commitment to a redemptive worldview, did good, empowering Deborah to make better decisions and reach out for help.
Summary
The problem with sin is that it separates us from God; the wonder of redemption is that we are brought back into relationship with God. This is living truth that ushers us into a rich spiritual life of communion with Christ. Christian counselors with a redemptive worldview respond to others with humility because they recognize that from which they have been redeemed, with compassion because they experience God’s grace, and with gratitude because of God’s sustaining presence.
Discussing redemption in counseling is a fitting conclusion for this book because redemption is a rich and complex topic requiring an understanding of the other topics considered: Scripture, sin, confession, forgiveness, and prayer. Christians learn about redemption by understanding the general and specific themes of Scripture. Scripture describes a redemptive God, longing to draw people out of the grips of sin and rebellion to the bliss of fellowship with the divine. Picture Jesus, surrounded by cynical Pharisees, proclaiming these words of redemption, mingled with sorrow and frustration: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” (Matt. 23:37). Understanding sin gives meaning to redemption. Those who deny sin see no need for spiritual redemption—“I’m okay; you’re okay.” A Christian view of sin forces us beyond popular psychology to a point of understanding our need to be ransomed from the forces of evil that pervade our world. With confession, we acknowledge our sin and our need for help. Graciously, God grants forgiveness as we experience the wonder of being redeemed, bought back from captivity to sin to an abundant life in Christ. Once we experience redemption, especially as we allow it to seep into our affections, our understanding of prayer can never be the same. Prayer ushers us to the throne of a gracious God who brings us out of slavery to human folly and into a land of spiritual abundance. This God is to be honored and praised and served in work and every part of life.
Upon Reflection
Writing is unforgiving. Don’t get me wrong—I am happy to be a writer and have reveled in its challenges and rewards over the years. But once published, words cannot be taken back.
In writing the update to this book, I have been pleased and surprised with how few words I would take back fifteen years later. But in this redemption chapter there are both some words I would like to take back and some I would like to add. My understanding of the redemptive presence of God in our world has grown bigger with each passing year.
The words I would like to retract surround figure 6 and my description of what I called a redemptive funnel. I implied that the New Testament is about Christ and the Old Testament is about other things. From today’s vantage point, I see that this is wrong. All Scripture—Old and New Testaments—is a narrative about Jesus, the Christ. The Old Testament tells a story of a just and redemptive God who continuously pursues broken and wayward humanity. It is a story about a God who will not give up, one who pursues and loves and redeems despite human rebellion. Then after four hundred years of waiting (the time between the Old and New Testaments), the curtain opens to reveal the climax of the story. This God who relentlessly pursues us becomes human—flesh and blood is born in a cave or cow stall and laid in a manger—and lives among us. God comes to us. The whole Bible, then, is a story of Jesus because Jesus reveals who God is and always has been.
Redemption and the Incarnation
When I wrote the chapter in 1996 I tended to look at atonement in a particular way, as most evangelicals do, known as the penal-substitution perspective: God’s justice demands payment. Somebody has to pay for our sin, so Jesus does with his death on the cross. From this viewpoint, redemption occurs in a cosmic courtroom, with Christ taking the death penalty that humanity deserves. There is biblical support for this position, especially in the Pauline epistles, but there is also biblical support for other ways of considering the atonement. While we ought not be dismissive of the penal-substitution view, I have come to appreciate other views as well.
Eastern Orthodox Christianity takes an incarnational view of the atonement. To understand this view, we must leave the courtroom and go to a manger in Bethlehem, where the most remarkable thing happened. God showed up, not in a chariot with a sword and an attitude, but as a baby, swaddled and meek. The Incarnation reveals the greatest surprise of all time. The eternal God humbles himself and becomes flesh and blood, walking among us, sharing in our struggles, becoming vulnerable, because vulnerability precedes intimacy. The death and resurrection of Christ are the culmination of this great surprise and reveal the depth of God’s redemptive grace. And even now Christ, who understands our weakness, continues to reconcile us to God (see Colossians 1:15-22).
There are many other views of atonement—moral exemplar, recapitulation, Christus Victor, ransom, and so on. I won’t try to summarize them in this brief update. My point in stirring these waters is simply to note that the penal-substitution view so commonly held by evangelical Christians—and vividly promoted by films such as The Passion of the Christ—is not the only perspective on how God saves us. And if we allow ourselves to take a more encompassing view of atonement, we may also begin seeing God’s redemptive presence in surprising and refreshing ways.
Think about the implications of the incarnational perspective: Immanuel, God is with us. What a stark contrast to animism, which conflates the natural world with supernatural forces, and to dualism, which keeps the numinous distant and removed from the evil of the natural world. In Christianity, God exists apart from the natural world but still chooses to enter in, to be among us, to sweat and bleed and labor alongside us, to participate in our struggles while showing us a way to finding healing and hope.
Ponder this for a moment, and consider the implications for what Christian counselors do. Having been transformed by the redemptive presence of Christ in our lives, we strive to do what Jesus did—to enter into the complex, messy places of life, to be with others in their struggles and darkness, to offer healing and hope in the midst of their pain. Our work emulates the work of Christ, the eternal Word, who became human and made his dwelling among us. We need to keep things straight because we are not Christ, because we are not redeeming the world. But we are ambassadors of Christ. We follow the example of Jesus while humbly acknowledging that we fall far short of the standard Jesus set.
I often hear people ask what integration looks like in a counseling session, which often seems to be a question about when to pray or read Scripture. These are fine things to consider, but more and more I am convinced that Christian counseling is integrative by its very nature if a counselor is mindful of the redemptive presence of Christ. Even if we go through a session, or a series of sessions, without praying or using Scripture, we are doing something profoundly scriptural, and profoundly prayerful. We are sitting with people in their time of great need, and in doing so, we are remembering the redemptive presence of Christ in our fallen world.
The Gritty Reality of Redemption
“God so loved the world . . .” (John 3:16). In the 1996 chapter, above, I wrote repeatedly about the spiritual nature of redemption. I don’t regret this, because indeed redemption affects our spiritual lives deeply. But more needs to be said. With the Incarnation, God addressed not only our spiritual state but also the physicality of the world. God so loved the cosmos—the entire world, including all its materiality—that he gave his only Son. Again, this drama cannot be limited to a courtroom where our spiritual destiny is being determined. This is a drama that unfolds in fields of Galilee, with grain, olive and fig trees, a baptism in the River Jordan, loaves and fishes, expensive perfume, a lopped-off ear, long spiked nails, spurting blood, a burial cave, and a heavy displaced stone all being part of the story. In Christianity we see materiality and spirituality intermingled. God cares about our souls, but he also cares about our hunger and our health, and for the birds that sing in the morning and the earthworms that keep soil fertile, and for the oak trees that soar from that fertile soil toward the sun above.
For centuries Christians have fought against Gnosticism—the persistent heresy that suggests spiritual knowledge is the only thing God cares about. The apostle Paul addressed it in his letters (see his letter to the Colossians, for example), and leaders of the faith have been resisting it ever since. What follows is a caricature of a Christian counselor.
Josh has recently finished a degree in counseling and starts working as a Christian counselor in a local church. When people come with various struggles, he points them toward the hope they have in Jesus and encourages them to focus on the truth of eternity rather than the hindrances of this temporary earthly existence. “Get things right with Jesus,” Josh says, and the rest will be easy.
This seems unlikely because most Gnostics don’t find their way into the counseling profession. But this caricature of Josh-the-Counselor illustrates how Gnosticism might look in a counseling office. Gnostics would reduce God’s redemptive presence to spiritual knowledge, but a full-body Christianity insists on more.
This can make for gritty, unsanitary experiences in counseling because it means we encourage people to tell the whole story and not just reflect on spiritual matters and Christian ideals. It means entering into our clients’ stories, sitting with them in the messy places of life without resorting to Christian platitudes because, after all, that is the example Christ set.
Journeying through Brokenness and Pain
Sometimes we may be tempted to rush our clients toward healing before learning to sit still and notice the depth of pain they are bringing before us. The result may be a sort of short-circuited spiritual platitude that doesn’t address the depth of suffering involved in living in a fallen world. This world, however, is painful and will continue to be. While we as therapists may become familiar with hearing stories of pain, we need to remember that our clients may be unfamiliar with getting their pain out on the table. As they humble themselves to offer us the gift of vulnerability, may we see this as a precious gateway into their souls and treat them with gentleness, caring, and the longsuffering of Christ, who shows us what it means to wait patiently for the proper time.
There is no way around pain on the road to redemption. As we enter into the experience of our clients and gently lead them through their pain, we can trust God to ultimately bless their honesty and courage. We do not seek premature “healing” in the lives of our clients; we do not seek pious lip service. We want the real deal for our clients.
The psalmists demonstrated a willingness to bring to God all of themselves, including their angry, sad, and wounded souls. One psalmist poured out these words: “How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and every day have sorrow in my heart?” (Psalm 13:1-2, NIV). To what extent do we allow similar expressions from our clients? If we find ourselves brushing over the raw vulnerability and pain that clients bring, it is time to slow down and remember the power of being with. A listening ear and a steady presence can be just what clients need in a world that often misunderstands and devalues pain. Christ suffered pain, even death on a cross, and through him we see the greatest example of beauty that can be born out of pain. What work of grace and redemption might God have in store for those who will face, and eventually surrender to, their own suffering?
Bible scholars have referred to certain psalms as the psalms of lament. These psalms wholeheartedly express anguish and pain. However, a number of these songs end with proclamations of renewed strength. When we least expect it, out of the soil of suffering, hope springs forth—radiant and new. As we journey with our clients through their sorrows, we often find that pain, brokenness, and anger seem to dissipate naturally after given the space to simply be. By mindfully and empathically attuning to our clients, we offer them the gift of presence, the gift of fellowshipping in their suffering. This gift offers permission for our clients to “be with” themselves, even as we are with them, and as God is with us.
Final Thoughts
The main theme of this update has been an incarnational perspective on redemption, which involves honestly confronting human struggles while still finding Christ in the midst of them. This view of redemption has the power to deeply affect the way we sit with our clients.
In the 1996 version, when describing challenge #5 (Establishing a Scientific Base), I mentioned the need for more science on the character and worldview of the counselor. Though this research has still not been done, it is interesting to note the recent work of Jeb Brown, Bruce Wampold, and others who have found that certain psychotherapists are simply more effective than others, regardless of their theoretical persuasions and the types of problems their clients face.351 Though these researchers have not looked at issues of faith, worldview, or character, it is striking to see that effective counseling is not merely an issue of what theory or technique one uses. It also has something to do with the unique character of the counselor. I suspect part of this is one’s capacity to sit as a person of grace in the untidy places of a client’s life.
May we be people of uncommon mercy, helping others find their way through complicated places. This is what Christ has done for us, and still does with his sustaining redemptive presence in our world. Christians in the Eastern Orthodox tradition often recite the Jesus Prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” These are similar to the words of the tax collector in Luke 18, whom Jesus contrasted with the self-righteous religious leader, and they are words that found their way into the Egyptian desert in the fourth century as the desert fathers and mothers tried to find their way in Christ. They are words repeated every day, often hundreds of times a day, by Orthodox believers around the world. And they are words that can help us in our Protestant and Roman Catholic traditions as well, reminding us of the truth of all Scripture: that Jesus reveals the redemptive purposes of God—redemption that resounds through all the ages and reaches into the most complicated places of life.
Acknowledgment
Thanks to Kimberly N. Snow for helping me with this chapter update. Kim is nearing the end of her doctoral work at George Fox University, where she has been a valuable member of my research team. Her dissertation involved an innovative look at lament as a way of drawing closer to God.
Additional Reading
Daniel L. Migliore, Faith Seeking Understanding: An Introduction to Christian Theology, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004).
Bibliography
Brown, G. S. (Jeb), Michael J. Lambert, Edward R. Jones, and Takuya Minami. “Identifying Highly Effective Psychotherapists in a Managed Care Environment.” The American Journal of Managed Care 11 (2005): 513–520.
Wampold, Bruce. “Not a Scintilla of Evidence to Support Empirically Supported Treatments as More Effective than Other Treatments.” In Evidence-Based Practices in Mental Health, edited by John C. Norcross, Larry E. Beutler, and Ronald F. Levant, 299–307. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 2006.
Conclusion
The Multitasking Counselor
This book began in 1996 by considering Jill, a depressed woman looking through the Yellow Pages for a spiritually sensitive counselor. Much has changed since then, including the relevance of the Yellow Pages, and much has remained the same. Jill’s task of selecting a Christian counselor is both important and difficult. It is important because her values and perspectives will change as a result of counseling. It is difficult because she is looking for a rare counselor capable of considering three domains of reality simultaneously.
If her counselor understands the psychological world but ignores the theological and spiritual, Jill’s deep longings for God may never be understood and valued in the counseling process. If her counselor emphasizes the spiritual life but overlooks psychology and theology, Jill may be led in a futile search inward—looking desperately for an inner child or an inner guide or an inner light but avoiding the true self-understanding that comes from humbly loving a sovereign God. If her counselor emphasizes theology alone, Jill may leave counseling with a stronger sense of what she ought to do but feel powerless as to how she should make necessary changes.
Throughout this book I have suggested three essential categories that must be considered simultaneously: psychology, theology, and spirituality. From a psychological perspective, effective counselors are able to participate fully in a treatment relationship while simultaneously stepping outside the relationship to view the problems of the client and the nature of the counseling relationship from a more objective vantage point. At the same time, as counselors empathize and reflect emotions within the counseling relationship, they are also evaluating and assessing from outside the counseling relationship—noticing voice tone, nonverbal gestures, facial expressions, and styles of relating. Mastering this type of psychological awareness requires excellent training, cultural sensitivity, and supervised experience. But there is more.
Effective Christian counselors also consider theological perspectives at the same time that they engage in the various psychological tasks of counseling. Historical and systematic theology, biblical understanding, and Christian tradition are all valued and considered essential components of counseling. These tasks require a basic working knowledge of the Bible, Christian history, and theological systems. I have emphasized theology in this update because it seems to be less emphasized in Christian counseling than it was when the original edition of this book came out in 1996.
But there is still more. Christian counseling involves an understanding of the spiritual life of the client. How are the client’s problems related to spiritual development? When is a problem simply a behavioral habit to be eliminated or reshaped, and when is a problem a reflection of deep, inner yearnings for intimacy with God and others? How can a treatment relationship be crafted to foster qualities of humility and insight? When, if ever, should prayer or Scripture memory be used in counseling or prescribed to a client? These are the types of questions that Christian counselors regularly encounter. Training for spiritual sensitivity may begin in the classroom or by reading spiritual classics, but it must continue in the private lives of counselors. The spiritual disciplines help us understand God’s grace and our own fallenness and give us opportunities to glean fragments of wisdom from our omniscient God.
May God guide each of us to the deep, still waters of life, where we find hope, courage, humility, compassion, and peace.
