Psychotherapy — Round 2
January 28th, 2008[Editor's note: this is the last post by our January 2008 guest blogger, Dr. Edward Welch (Westminster Seminary, Christian Counseling & Educational Foundation). In this post Ed shares his concern that in our search for counseling methodologies we may unintentionally separate counseling from the Gospel.]
I anticipated a few more comments from the 1/21/08 posting about psychotherapy. In it I professed my confusion about the prominence of psychotherapy within Christian counseling, and I suggested that there is no reason for the category to exist since Scripture already addresses the matters taken up by Christian psychotherapy. I proposed that the real issue is this: how do we access and apply Scripture on topics that don’t appear in a Bible concordance?
Here is an example of how psychotherapy sneaks into biblical practice. I spoke to a woman this week about panic attacks. At first glance, Scripture is silent on these problems, but, of course, when we really listen to someone describe panic attacks they are all about fear and its physical accompaniments. With fear as the issue, Scripture is a fathomless well. It seems to specialize in fear.
Now let’s say that we have found some wonderful teaching (e.g., Ps.56:3, Ps. 27, Ps. 46, 1 Pet.5:7) and we have linked that teaching to the benefits of the cross. So far so good, but let’s say that this woman is unmoved by it all. Now what?
Off we go to the internet and find volumes on panic attacks. We browse Barnes and Noble and find practical workbooks. Now we are on to something. The spiritual teaching of Scripture can be augmented, we think, or replaced, by the very practical steps in the panic literature.
What might be happening in this scenario is that we are unskilled in biblical application. Scripture doesn’t supply an exhaustive methodology for anything. If it did, such a manual would certainly take the fun out of ministry. Instead, we are given with the wonderful opportunity of making Scripture accessible and meaningful. We are equipped with life-changing truth and love, then we engage in the challenging task of putting this into a specific methodology. Along the way we glean methodological ideas from friends, panic workbooks, and anything else as they come to the service of progressive sanctification in a person’s life, but these methodological slivers (e.g., consider contributing factors, carry a paper bag) simply spawn creative ideas on how to apply the biblical material that we already have. The problem comes when we miss the connection between a few methodological ideas and our theological foundations. That is when psychotherapy appears, and, when that happens, our counseling becomes increasingly partitioned from the gospel.
Any thoughts?
January 28th, 2008 at 5:15 pm
I really like this perspective presented here. Reasons being: There is really no distinction between the secular and the spiritual. And I am going on a limb here to say that many secular works might have the hint of Truth in it, and we have to extract these gems of truths in the multitude of possible lies.
These gems of truth spawn the creative ideas that are of our creative God. Does this make sense or am I on the wide easy road?
January 28th, 2008 at 10:25 pm
Ed-
I think I understand your first post a bit better now; this one gives me better perspective on it. As I was reading this one, I was reminded of the definition of the gift of prophecy in a popular spiritual gifts assessment. Interestingly, they defined prophecy as “knowing how God’s word applies to a given situation.”
This seems to be what you’re talking about here, and I think it requires both specific/explicit knowledge of verses applying to the situation and general/implicit knowledge of what the entire scripture has to say as a whole on certain topics. (I find people like Oswald Chambers and John Eldredge to be helpful for developing the latter type of thinking).
As a therapist, though, I do find therapeutic techniques to be helpful in getting clients to a place where they are healing enough to be able to receive the Word and its teaching on their particular circumstances. I hope I’m not missing the connections you’re talking about above, but I realize that there’s always danger in not examinging my assumptions critically.
January 31st, 2008 at 7:23 am
I often find that Christians respond best when I do not start off with a Bible reference or Biblical principal. Sometimes I start by explaining how God made us or how events in our lives can impact us in ways that we need to uncover so that they do not have power over us anymore. In regards to the panic attacks, I typically explain it to my clients like this: Living creatures were made with a system that helps them become alert and then quickly react when there is danger. Before a conscious thought even comes, adrenaline drops into the bloodstream and the creature begins to react. If you look at all of the animals, you will see that they have three responses to fear. Some fight some freeze, some flee. Animals typically only do one of these, dependent on their strengths and weaknesses. Human beings have this same alert system. The difference is that we have a choice to fight, freeze, or flee. Because we can reason, we can decide the best reaction. We can also decide that we aren’t really in danger or we arent’ going to respond to particular things that we fear. However, the subconscious may start this process before we have time to think. Learning to pause before reacting allows us to choose our reaction. It would only be after an explanation such as this that I would begin to use scripture, etc. It is much easier to see how the same amazing system that God has given us for our good can be distorted into something that is not productive and may even be destructive. I must also say that it is important to help clients tap into this system of fear, as it may be the Holy Spirit’s way of telling us we are in danger. Sometimes people override this feeling. When they are asked later when they first thought something might be wrong, they often had a feeling way before they were robbed, raped, etc. There was a means to escape or a time to escape, but it passed because they were trying to be helpful or didn’t want to hurt someone’s feelings.
February 11th, 2008 at 3:12 am
Thanks Ed. I’ve so much appreciated the tone of your comments and questions. What a friend you are!
My only question back to you concerns the categorical distinction you make between psychotherapy on the one hand and then counseling and scriptural application on the other. It sounds as if the notion of psychotherapy you are using is intrinsically secular and independent of Scripture, something that Christian counselors opt for when Scriptural solutions are inadequate. I wonder if there’s another way to slice the pie, that between secular psychotherapy and Christian psychotherapy. The latter would be just as biblically-grounded as any other form of Christian people-helping, but it would operate at a more complex level of problem-solving than lay counseling or even pastoral counseling would, for example, and therefore would deal with problems like bipolar, severe personality disorders, and so on, but would do so with exactly the same kinds of biblical intuitions that you have shared with us in your blogs, concerning the role of fear, sin, and the cross of Christ, and would also be deeply antagonistic to secularism and its influence on such work.