BP98
Today’s blog will consist of an assortment of responses to statements and questions about therapy from the perspective of a Christian who happens to be a psychologist. Some of these concerns have been addressed in previous posts but are pulled together under one roof here, so to speak. My comments will be brief instead of exhaustive–a place to start.
Should I go to therapy? Not necessarily. However, some individuals are wise to go to therapy because their lives are held hostage by debilitating symptoms like depression, anxiety, loneliness, suicidal ideation, miserable sleeping issues, obsessive thoughts, anger, mania, paranoia, personality disorders, addictions, eating disorders. Many don’t know how to do healthy relationships and find themselves alone most of the time—at least on the inside.
Other individuals whose needs are not so pronounced might go to therapy to have someone help them identify strengths, weaknesses, blind spots, poor coping skills, faulty defense mechanisms, and lies that Satan whispers into the ears of their hearts.
Just remember that if you are going to use insurance, your counselor will need to submit a billable diagnosis to the insurance company. Otherwise, you will need to pay out of pocket. Of course, besides therapists, there are pastors, mentors, spiritual advisors, and wise friends who could meet with you for no fee or for a lesser fee. Keep in mind that pastors usually don’t have a lot of extra time to do counseling nor are most of them trained to do deep therapeutic work.
Advantages to therapy: Sometimes therapy/counseling can be uniquely helpful because of the confidentiality, mirroring, and the one-way street. Confidentiality means you can share anything with your psychologist, and it will never go outside of the therapeutic relationship. Privacy is a promise from your professional counselor.
Mirroring means that counseling is a place where someone will listen to you and you alone and reflect back to you not only what you are saying but hopefully what you aren’t saying as well. A good counselor will listen to you and tell you what you are saying. If the therapist is merely repeating back to you what you said, they might say something like, “I hear you saying that your relationship with your parents produces a lot of anxiety for you.”
That’s well and good because we all want someone to listen to us. But counseling should give you more. If your counselor is listening at a deeper level, they might reflect back to you, “I think you’re anxious about your relationship with your father because you project your anger into him and then fear not only his anger but yours as well.”
The one-way street dynamic in counseling means that the therapist is there for you, you’re not there for him or her. It’s not a two-way street. You don’t have to take care of your listener in the counseling office. If you are used to being in co-dependent relationships where you’ve had to worry about offending the other person who is fragile or easily wounded, therapy represents a chance for you to freely talk about you, your heart, your emotions, your relationship with God, and even your anger toward the therapist without worrying how he or she will react.
If your therapist does get offended easily, I don’t think you’re with the right person.
When should I go to therapy? If in doubt, don’t put it off. Go. Remember, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I tell people that God gives us wake up calls or nudges our hearts to do something that will grow us to become more like him. If we don’t heed those calls or nudges, we might miss the boat, so to speak, on what God has for us. Never put off the Holy Spirit, the Counselor above all counselors.
Why doesn’t therapy work for me? It is important to find a counselor who is a good fit for you. Start with being wise in your selection process because it makes a huge difference if you feel like you must stay with someone who is not a good match.
However, if you feel like therapy is not progressing for you after seeing a number of different counselors and mentors, the common denominator may be you. By the guidance of the Holy Spirit, examine yourself to see if: you are resisting growth on some subconscious level; if you want someone to fix you instead of you having to do the work; or if you transfer anger or stubbornness from the relationship with your father, for example, onto your counselor and end up passive-aggressively refusing to cooperate with your therapist as you did with your parent.
On occasion, I find myself doing all the work in therapy which tells me that the individual across from me either is resisting the journey of growth or he or she wants me to do the work for them. If either of these two dynamics are brought to the attention of the client, they are amazing fodder for growth. They are grist for the mill. They might even apply to the client’s relationship with God.
Why do people who need therapy the most tend to avoid it? First, a side note: everyone does not need to go to therapy. Everybody does need a mentor, however—if you are committed to growth, that is. Choose to be around an older (most often), wiser, godly man or woman who has been around the block many times and can assist you in your first go-around of life. Seek out a relationship like Timothy had with Paul.
Now back to the main point. Yes, there are individuals out there in the world or in the pew next to you who should be in therapy but are not. Why aren’t they in counseling besides financial hardship or due to the unavailability of a qualified therapist?
Some individuals are emotionally, spiritually, and relationally lazy. I don’t want to sound too negative here, but some people just don’t want to do anything that is difficult. That might include doing anything difficult like marriage, a challenging job, maintaining their yards or their vehicle, sleeping only as long as they need to as opposed to as long as they feel like it, being generous with their time and love, pursuing God with all their heart, or doing therapy.
Other people wish to avoid the pain of growth. It is easier to stand pat than to move forward. It is easier to float downriver on your inflatable duck with a cold beverage in your hand than to swim upstream. Growth requires hard work and the ability to contain the suffering that goes with self-awareness, feeling intense emotions like grief, rage, and hatred, moving toward people and loving them, and submitting to God’s loving authority.
Remember what we’ve said before at DTFL? There is always going to be pain in life. Yes, there will be pain and suffering associated with growth but there will be even more long-term pain that comes with choosing to stay the same. Since there will always be suffering, choose the suffering that comes with growth.
Also, if you’re not married and would like to be someday, be aware right now that if you choose not to grow, the odds are very high that you will end up with someone who also has chosen not to grow. Not a good forecast for the future. You’ll become one flesh in the sight of the Lord only to pool your spiritual, emotional, and relational immaturity and struggles for the rest of your lives.
So, choose to grow. Your future children will thank you. If you decide to stay on your rubber ducky, your teenagers will one day painfully expose your lack of maturity. And you might hate them for it.
As noted in other posts, another more unsettling reason people avoid counseling is because they are living in darkness and do not want that darkness to be exposed by light.
John 3:19ff says, And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God.
If you’re reading this post, you’re probably not a hater of the light. However, be sure that you are not hiding any secret affection from God because these affections will distance you from God and others around you.
Must I dig up the past in my counseling journey? Thorough counseling does investigate the past and it does examine the impact of the family of origin including the maturity, coping skills, and relational capacity of the parents. Your past can have a profound impact on you as a child since it is the incubator you grew up in. Some people are too quick to minimize the past. They emphasize forgiving the dysfunctional people in the family but sometimes minimize the resultant pain and suffering of the adult child.
Be willing to examine the past not to be a victim but to understand. The only way to avoid repeating the past is to be aware of it.
Mind you, while healthy therapy listens for what happened in your younger years when everything is magnified x10, it does not build a house in the past and ask you to move into it. It does not seek to blame the parents or other individuals who impacted your childhood. Never.
Rather, the primary aim of therapy is to clean the inside of your cup and to grow you, not to point the finger at others. Healthy therapy seeks to expose dark things in the client/patient/counselee such as sin, poor coping skills, the counterproductive habits of moving away from others or moving against others, encouraging instead the habit of moving toward others (if it is safe).
Even though others may have sinned against you, your response to all that occurred in your childhood is focus number one. Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you ~ Matthew 7:1-2
Some individuals avoid looking inside like the plague. They cannot tolerate seeing any faults in themselves and so must see many faults in others. One reason for avoiding the light that will expose their hearts are their evil works as mentioned in John. Another related reason is that they were shamed and reminded of their badness so often as a child that as adults they attempt to avoid any type of correction because it all feels like shame to them.
These individuals (Scott Peck refers to them as The People of the Lie) desperately need to look inside their hearts or they will continue to hide their hearts in dark dungeons and project their badness onto others (just as their parents did). Some children feel so crushed by generational shame and badness that they ultimately believe that their only escape is suicide.
Should I be selective about what therapist I meet with? Yes, for sure. There are those who say that you simply need to find a professional therapist who is well-trained and good at what they do. I agree that, of course, it is wise to find a professionally trained counselor. However, I believe Christians looking for a therapist need to take a more nuanced approach. If nothing else because studies have shown that clients tend to adopt the values of their therapists.
Internalizing a therapist’s values is not a big surprise when you consider that some people see their counselor for years and share parts of their hearts with him or her that they will not expose to anyone else.
Also, as I have mentioned before, therapy for Christians can very much be a sanctification process such as we see in 2 Corinthians 3:18: And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.
Will I replace God with my therapist? That’s a relevant question. Sometimes clients will idealize their therapist because he or she is consistently present, values them (ideally loves them as God’s created child), and might seem wise and strong. Some patients will idealize their therapist because they never had a strong parent they looked up to and so are still hungry for someone to look up to, relax with, trust, and even receive healthy correction from. I don’t believe the idealization of the therapist (or pastor, mentor) is unhealthy unless it turns into idol worship or poor boundaries on the part of the patient and/or the therapist who is so hungry for being seen and respected that the client’s positive attention feeds something young in them.
What might therapy do for me and how long will it take? Good question. Some individuals who have not been able to develop the foundational infrastructure of a self due to abuse, neglect, abandonment, or psychological annihilation stemming from intergenerational issues such as shame or projected evil may be in therapy for five to ten years. These people grew up in such primitive family systems that they were never able to grow a cohesive self but devoted all their energy to survival.
These clients may lack a basic sense of identity and require a safe, compassionate therapist to discover and unearth their identity from the rubble of childhood.
Other individuals in therapy have adequately developed infrastructure components such as impulse control, self-comforting skills, ability to delay gratification, good planning and judgment, healthy defenses and basic boundaries, as well as the ability to trust others and to discriminate between those who are trustworthy and those who are not.
These clients will not need to focus on building infrastructure but may need to identify false arguments and beliefs in their souls that interfere with their trust and intimacy with Jesus. They may need to tweak coping skills or learn healthier ways to fight the battle between separation and intimacy. They may need to grow in forgiveness, patience, identifying idols in their lives, and learning how to love others for who they are instead of what they do for them.
What if I can’t afford to go to therapy? Instead, ask, can I afford not to go to therapy, or to a spiritual director, or to a mentor. Spend the money, invest the time. We spend money and invest time on what our hearts value.
Should I see a master’s level or doctoral level therapist? I don’t think it matters that much as long as you find the right person who seeks to point you to Jesus, has compassion on your heart, and understands how growth occurs. The only advantage of seeing a doctor of psychology is that she or he probably has additional training and might have more knowledge to understand what is not functioning in your soul.
When am I done with therapy? You will know when you get to that place with the help of your counselor and certainly with the wisdom given by the Holy Spirit. Don’t terminate treatment too early and don’t hang on too long if you are off the runway and in the air.
Is therapy about removing pain and unwanted symptoms? Maybe, maybe not. Sometimes we are so quick to be done with our painful symptoms (even by ingesting medications) that we do not first hear what they are saying to us. Before you seek the removal of your suffering, listen to what God might be telling you through it.
Should I take medications? Medications won’t heal you. In fact, they can numb you to emotions that might be helpful for you to grow. Yes, if you are suicidal, not sleeping, feeling beside yourself with anxiety, talk to an MD or psychiatrist about meds. Try to see them as short-term interventions. They might give you more band width, but they are typically not the ultimate fix. Grow in your soul and do not settle for brain alteration through meds.
Turning the Titanic: I often tell clients that two years in therapy may very well help turn the Titanic of their lives at least 45 degrees. In other words, a 45-degree turn applied to the next fifty years of life could mean that they will not spend their days dodging icebergs in the North Atlantic but anchoring near the sandy shores of Myrtle Beach.The hard work of growth always yields some type of fruit.
Should you ever depend on your therapist? Some people will never really need their therapist. They have already learned basic trust in their childhood and do not need their counselor for the infrastructure building discussed above. Other individuals who missed basic presence, predictability, and comfort when they were young may need to depend on their therapist for a season. Sometimes, clients may even learn to trust God more deeply if they are first able to trust someone with skin on.
View therapy in the light of eternity. For Christians, therapy, like godliness, is not simply for this lifetime. The growth you do now even through counseling will stretch into eternity. See your psycho-spiritual-relational growth as the development of your soul. Pray for God to make you more like Christ during your therapy journey. Find a psychologist who will pray for you every time you meet.
Don’t settle for simply feeling better. Make your aim to become a loving, mature, selfless servant who is not derailed by a need to self-protect at all costs through defensiveness and/or withdrawal.
Therapy is for the teachable.
Jesus is the wild card. Even if you were born fallen, grew up in a family of origin that suffered from generational dysfunction at a high level, experienced bodily ills, moved many times when you were young, were abused physically, sexually verbally, emotionally, or spiritually, and were frequently bullied by peers, there is all the hope in the universe for you.
If you come to Him and choose His yoke, He will grow you. Jesus appeared not only to save you from sin and death but to take your broken human soul and repair it from the inside out, day by day, moment by moment. He moves into the house of your heart and restores it for His purposes and for your joy.
Counseling, therapy, mentoring, spiritual directing, deep discipling—whatever you want to call it or whatever path you choose to take—if done under the guidance of the Spirit and in obedience to God, will grow you. Ultimately, it will destroy every stronghold, coping skill, and habit that interferes with your ability to fulfill the two great commandments.
After all, our lives on this planet are all about loving God and loving others as we love ourselves. Choose all the paths of growth that will optimize your ability to love as Jesus does.
Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light ~ Matthew 11:28-30
Because they hated knowledge and did not choose the fear of the LORD, would have none of my counsel and despised all my reproof, therefore they shall eat the fruit of their way, and have their fill of their own devices. For the simple are killed by their turning away, and the complacency of fools destroys them; but whoever listens to me will dwell secure and will be at ease, without dread of disaster ~ Proverbs 1:29-33