Goals in Counseling For those Facing Human Crisis
1. Aim to help the counselees find the solution for their problems in Jesus Christ and the scriptures. All needs can be met through His power, His love, His provisions, His word, His promises, and His comforting Spirit. Without Jesus Christ there will be no lasting solution to any difficulty, regardless of its severity. We must begin by finding out the counselee’s present relationship with Jesus Christ. Is Thomas a Christian? Is he a committed Christian? Is he a growing Christian? How obedient to the scriptures is he? Is he able to discover the solutions to his problems through the scriptures? Is he habitually abiding in Christ through prayer, fellowship, witnessing, Bible study, and Christian service? By discovering where Thomas is at in relations with Christ a counselor will have important information in helping him solve his root problems.
2. Aim to understand the counselee’s situation from Biblical, cultural, social, emotional, historical, and experiential perspectives. Without an integrated appreciations for the many forces that are affecting the counselee’s troubles, you may overlook or bypass essential elements in the solving of his or her deeper problems. We need to discover what factors have influenced Thomas’s actions It could be that Thomas thinks he is a Christian, but he lacks a born-again experience through faith in Christ. This may explain his inability to see his reality in a correct perspective. Take an integrative approach to your diagnosis and counseling for holistic solutions to the counselees’ problems.
3. See if you can determine how the counselee has previously tried to solve the problem. By asking information, interpretative, probing, and empathetic questions you can better assess the processes and motives for the counselee’s previous actions. Many times the problem of counselees like Thomas lies more with his actions, attitudes, and perspectives than with the people around him. Nurture the counselee in His relationship with the liberating, empowering, healing, restoring, reviving, and directing Spirit of God. This is done through prayer, study of the scriptures, involvement with Spirit filled believers, and through the filling of the Holy Spirit. Teach your counselee like Thomas how to filled, controlled, directed, and constantly in communion with the Spirit of God.
4. Seek a wholistic style of restoration. Do not just assume that solving Thomas’ spiritual problems will eradicate his desires for vengeance. Thomas needs to experience healing in his relationships with God, the manager, his fellow workers, his nuclear family, his extended family, and his cultural-social peers. Counselors should aim at holistic development involving all the dimensions of Thomas’ life. Your counseling should include individual, small group, large group, recreational, educational, interactive, confrontational, exhortative, evangelistic, and consoling types of ministries. Eventually, Thomas needs to see how to grow up into all these aspects through Christ. Provide him with some exemplary Christian friends who can serve as role models for overcoming his vindictive attitudes.
Help the counselee assess the level of his or her growth and minister accordingly. Thomas is obviously at a very low level of Christian growth and commitment. He needs to be convinced of his need to grow in his love, humility, faith, obedience, and spiritual maturity before long lasting solutions can be found. The goal of counseling is never to foster long term dependencies on other human beings. Instead, great counselors facilitate the growth of dependence, trust, and reliance on Jesus Christ, His Spirit and His word.
Help other members of the church, the family, and elders share your counseling ministry. Thomas would most naturally relate and identify with other workers. If you can train Christian counselors who represent a whole range of social, educational, cultural, gender, age, occupational, and interest groups you will have accomplished much for the kingdom of God. Training people who can teach others also, (2 Tim. 2:2) provides a key to successful counseling ministries in every church. This enables you to multiply your counseling ministry through the work of the saints for the building up of the body of Christ. If Thomas knew several committed Christian friends he could relate his problems to, he would most likely be on his way to restoration with God and men.
5. Aim for preventative counseling more than restorative counseling ministries. Thomas could have saved himself and others lots of grief if he would have only had taken some preventative measures to avoid the traps of greed, theft, and bitterness. Wise counselors will help him seek alternative ways to supplement his income and care for his families’ needs. Thomas’ actions showed short sightedness in trying to solve a financial problems through deceptive means. The only way to remedy our suffering is through the will of God. "Trust and obey for there is no other way to be happy with Jesus", said the famous song-writer. Helping Thomas to memorize certain verses, relate his needs to other believers in a small prayer group, and calling on the body of Christ for financial assistance could have prevented a multiple of disasters from occurring.
6. Analyze the root causes of your counselee’s problems. Realize that most people give superficial causes for their problems as Thomas did. He thought that his problem came from a lack of money to cover some of his family’s expenses. However, the deeper root causes of the entire problem went far deeper. Probably, Thomas needed to believe God for His promises like Phil. 4:19 which says, "My God will supply all your needs according to His riches in glory through Christ Jesus!" Or Phil 4:13 which says, "I can do everything God asks me to do with the help of Christ who gives me the strength and power!" The root causes of most of our problems deal with our inability to believe, obey, and love the Lord with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength and our neighbors as ourselves. (Luke 10:27)
7. Use both right (Intuitive, Analogous, Emotional, Metaphorical, and Story-Imaging) and left (Logical, rational, analytical) brain approaches to counseling. Thomas needed to be led through rational reasons for trusting God rather than resorting to human deception. He needed to see how the objective truth of God’s word will always prevail over subjective feelings of underhanded intrigue. He needed to be given a list of the main reasons why his actions violated God and his employer’s trust. This will often follow the pattern of the apostle Paul’s style of counseling found in his letters to the churches.
On the other side of the issue, Thomas needed to have this approach balanced with a right brain process of counseling. This will model Christ’s problem solution style of counseling throughout the gospels. Thomas needed examples of others who have cheated God and have had to face the consequences in shame, disgrace, and deprivation. Thomas needed to hear testimonies of others who have successfully seen God come to their rescue during financial crisis. Help Thomas find friends who he can turn to in times of distress. Finding a balance between right and left brained approaches will vary from person to person and from culture to culture.
Wise counselors aim to provide their counselees with a variety of methods to solve their problems. Counselors should be equip with numerous questions, case studies, resources, materials, programs, contacts, friends, authorities, acquaintance with scriptural solutions, films, booklets, pamphlets, textbooks, courses, schools, classes, experts, physicians, homework assignments, organizations, and prayer groups that may provide alternative avenues of resolution to Thomas’ problems. Counselors must be secure enough to be able to refer their counselees to others who may be more suitable, insightful, or able to identify with the client’s particular problem.
Counselors need to be able to keep confidential information private. This is a vital part of developing a trusting reputation as a counselor. Some of the greatest damage has been done when counselors were unable or unwilling to keep information confidential. This will include keeping the counseling information from your wife, family members, or close friends unless the counselee gives you express permission to disclose confidential knowledge. People like Thomas often test the counselor before he is willing to share his deeper reasons for stealing. It may have something to do with the pressures he is facing from his culture and social situation. Perhaps Thomas’ relatives feel the need to offer as a live chicken sacrifice to appease the wrath of a special ancestor.
Aim to bring out both the counselee’s strengths and weaknesses. When you are able to build upon the counselee’s strong points in his personality, his background, culture, Biblical knowledge, or predisposition to the Lord, you can overcome many of his weaknesses. For example, if the counsellor is able to discover that Thomas is a strong willed driver with a Christian upbringing, this helps immensely. One might say, "Thomas, you have known what God wants you to do since you were a small boy. The scriptures remind us, ’If anyone knows what is right and fails to do it, to him it is sin. Anything without faith is sin.’ Why did you feel that you had to act the way you did?" This will help Thomas save face by allowing him to see that you acknowledge his good points, before confronting him with the problems at hand. Be sure that you are able to make a distinction between the sin and the sinner.
8. Help the counselee find short term and long term solutions to his or her problems. During times of emergency we all need people who can help us with immediate needs. However, many of life’s problems can be solved through resorting to the long-term solutions found in the scripture. Thomas, needed both short term and long term solutions. Short term emergency funds, advice, and personal counseling could have averted this disaster for Thomas and his family. Long term counseling will enable Thomas to develop patterns of saving, budgeting his finances, and leading his family to trust God for all their provisions- spiritual, physical, social, cultural, educational, emotional, and interpersonal.
Seek to lead the counselee into a caring community of trusting believers. If Thomas would have been well connected to a body of believers who really cared for him, many of his problems could have been averted. Thomas needed the fellowship of a growth group of men who study the scriptures together. Thomas needs the collectivistic support of others who can help take him through times of crisis. "We all need someone to lean on!" Eccl. 4:9-11 says, "Two are better than one for they have a good reward for their labor, but woe to him who is alone for he has not another to help him up."
Aim to help counselees increase the constructiveness of their behavior, attitudes, motives, feelings, and roles in their work. Supposing that Thomas saw the valuable contributions he could make to the Lord he might not have been tempted to steal. He would see the multiple benefits that serving the Lord has not only for this life, but also in the age to come. Thomas might have felt that his work did not really matter. He could have sensed a futility that led him to such a rash action. When counselors can show their counselees all the benefits, rewards, and successes that come through positive faith contributions, everything in life is seen in a new light. Paul promises in I Cor. 15:58, "Be steadfast, unmovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, for you know that your labor in not in vain in the Lord." God is stowing away special rewards in eternity for each action in love done in His name.
Counselors should seek to provide answers to the counselees’ family concerns as well as individual problem areas. Thomas might have felt the need to care for his family, feel strong, confident, and powerful enough to deal with opposition. His wife might have felt such strong feelings of insecurity that she could not rest until her ancestors’ anger was appeased. While the male side of Thomas’ family stressed the need for boldness, courage, and displays of power, the female side of the extended family was motivated by fear of loss and insecurity for their children. Both kinds of needs are legitimate, but Jesus meets these needs through His unique channels. Counselors need to find ways that women can counsel women and men can more adequately identify with male problems. Older women more effectively will relate to their age mates and younger males will best be matched with younger male counselors. (Titus 2:1-9)
9. Counselors need to balance progressive with traditional approaches in counseling. Where traditional approaches will stress yielding to God’s will, word, and authorities, the progressive approach will tend to emphasize one’s personal responsibility for growth in Christ. While the traditional mentality will insist on the need to conform to the traditional ways of dealing with problems, the progressive tactic will call for improved ways of solving problems in the light of new information. While the traditional counselors will teach truth in the generalized doctrinal format, the progressive will put more emphasis on a specialized approaches to each individual, situation, and subject. As the traditional counselor will respond better to cognitive solutions to problems emphasizing the correct knowledge needed for the right thinking, the progressive counselor will stress a holistic approach to problem solving based on an integration of many disciplines. Finally, in contrast to the traditional counselor approach to find one main solution, the progressive will encourage more freedom to think of synergistic ways of whole-grained teaching, counseling, and adapting through integrative experimentation.
