Deepest Healing

What does a counsellor get faced with when a client comes to them? Whatever it is could be named, ‘the presenting problem.’

People seek help for a difficulty they can’t get round. In trying to sort it themselves and failing to do so, they face up to something wrong in themselves that is stopping them from being able to fix it.

As Christians they see the difficulty as God’s way of pinning them down so they’ll focus on this shortcoming in themselves that either hamstrings them in life, is in the way of their fellowshipping with the Lord and being Christian in their ways, and likely helped cause their situation in the first place.

So, whatever situation the client presents to the counsellor, the thing to be sorted out is them, not the circumstances or their behaviour that have become unbearable. And since the Lord would surely meet with them and deal with this area of their lives – and most Christians have their theology straight enough to understand this already – the real nub of the matter is their problem about opening up to Him for Him to get to work. In other words, the counsellor’s main job will be to field their resistances and defenses to the Lord and His love, so He can ‘have at them.’

People are loaded with such defenses.

And the real thing they can’t solve by themselves is overcoming their own resistances to Jesus. Their defenses against His love reaching them, are big ones. Much of their personality and stance in life is based on those very fortifications, which amount to personal strengths that ward off social threat and enable them to be left alone to manage their lives the way that feels good to them.

It makes the therapeutic task a minefield. Here the counsellor has someone who comes to them for help, and then puts up their defenses against the counsellor helping them to feel loved, accepted, settled, freed. Big achievers approach the sessions as a chance to achieve their healing and get back to being managerial, people who control others with uproar will no doubt cause uproar when they feel vulnerable, etc. People cling to their strengths and do not want to head toward their weaknesses, i.e., the place where they are out of control to Another Who wants to sort them out.

Progress runs along the lines of hitting up against their blocks to heart truths, and seeing to it they go through them. The whole while, they use those defenses to ward off having to go this route. It entails internal struggle, bravery, vulnerability, and often extreme contrariness. And just breaking down such walls does not effect cure. Getting their resistances down only opens the way for the love to get to them and for the real cure to begin.

The catch-22 paradox is this: feeling loved makes them feel safe enough to drop their defenses, but unless they drop their defenses they aren’t going to open up to the love. The bottom line is that God has to leap across their barriers from His side first. He delivers a load of love that makes forward movement safe and this gets the process underway. From then on additional quantities of love received will be the determining factor in how healed they get. The level of love received = level of healing. A truly healed person loves in the way Jesus died to enable them to love, and for that they need to be filled with His.

So, as a counsellor, a person’s eyes have to be on the love level within their client. True progress, as far as Christian counselling, and the Christian life for that matter, are concerned is according to how far they’ve come in being able to receive Christ’s love and to love back. Anything else is shallow, beside the point. Understanding, and accepting the truth about themselves, and disciplining their life, is not the cure for their inability to love right. All those things are mainly of the head, the second is of the heart. With God, what’s happening in the heart is everything.

Other systems that work toward mental health have other goals: behaviourists try to modify bad behaviour or sublimate it so that it can be managed and made socially acceptable; cognizant therapy tries to make clients aware of why they do or feel the troublesome things they do, and to take responsibility for changing those things themselves; psychoanalysis has the goal of reconciling people to the human condition as if it doesn’t so much need change as embracing.

Management tends to be the goal in these things, not heart cure, and certainly not more intimacy with Jesus and the Father. Someone once noted, “Psychiatrists take a neurotic and make them into a better educated neurotic.,” and this is what a lot of ministry results are too, educating their client into re- taking up the driver’s seat in their life according to new knowledge about themselves.

Behaviour will change, trespassing stop, capability will rise up, according to the sense of worth and security a person has. And both those things come directly from how loved and accepted they feel themselves to be. This ministry might even be termed the Love Ministry, because of that.

How does a counsellor watch someone’s love level? How do they arrange for the Lord to ambush a client? What goes on when He does?

The first answer entails knowing what a blocked person looks like. It isn’t so easy to see their blockages because those barriers pretty much look like their personality and what passes for a lot of usual behaviour in people. Your first lessons need to be in spotting their defenses and recognizing them for what they are. When you can do that you will be able to see beyond those things, which are often the biggest things about them personality-wise, to the progress the Lord is making in eliminating them.

In the next lesson we’ll lay out the span of human development and show the blocks and where they come in, and why. This is a basic template that will be referred to again and again in later lessons. In that lesson the reader ought to be able to recognize almost all the clients they’ve ever dealt with and any new ones who come through their door, according to their main defenses.

As per ‘the Lord’s ambush’, we would like to keep to our Action first/ Explanation later, approach, and will aim at supplying a real example and some video commentary, about this.

For now, we hope this has adjusted your sights to be fixed on perhaps a different goal than you may have had in mind for counselling, right from the start. That way we will all be going in the same direction and will arrive at the same end. Which is - Jesus.

Blessings!