What is Christian Counseling?

About Christian Counseling

You might be wondering how Christian counseling differs from regular counseling. 

There are four principles that we find in Christian counseling that differ from secular counseling.

The first of these principles is that Christian Counseling is bible-based. Now what do I mean by Bible based?  It means that we look to the Bible as a book containing endless wealth and wisdom about the human condition. The Bible is not only about our relationship with God but also provides great insight about how and why people behave as they do. There is a kind of biblical psychology that can be found within the books of the Bible. Every modern situation we can think of is reflected in this ancient book. Every psychological problem is demonstrated in the Bible. It’s an endless list. We can find stories that illustrate our very human psychology timelessly.

For example, the story of Adam and Eve is a marvelous representation of many of the problems we face today. It’s really all there; anxiety, depression, trauma, guilt, even bad temptations, all of which are very modern problems, all of which are found to be found in the early chapters of Genesis. And that is just the start.  

The anxiety we feel today for example was felt by both Adam and Eve.  What the Bible contains can be a marvelous example of how anxiety comes about; how anxiety is born if you will. There’s also the concept of depression in the Bible. Many times over even Jesus felt depressed and at times the apostles felt depressed. Then there’s trauma, of course. Trauma moves throughout the Bible and many of the biblical characters faced many traumatic situations, and we can learn from these things.  And because the Bible is the word of God, we have God’s advice on how to deal with things like anxiety, depression and trauma. We also learn from the mistakes some of the people in the Bible made.  The mistake of Herod: being his extreme narcissism thinking that he could control the fate of the world and end Christianity immediately as it started. And of course, you know of the depression of the Apostles when they thought their leader was gone. The word of God ultimately teaches us to have faith beyond learning.  As Hamlet said to his friend Horatio, the scholar: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,  Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” 

The second principle of Christian Counseling is that we are made in God’s image.  This of course means that we reflect God in various ways (not that we are God, but we reflect his image.) We Are Made In His Image.  This extends to various facets of our being; for example, there’s a reason he made us the way he did; there’s a reason why we have two eyes, why we have two legs, why we have a heart, why we have two lungs. There are also reasons why we respond to Nature the way we do. One of those reasons is the vagus nerve. This is not simply a theory, but rather it’s a physiological nerve that exists in all of us. There are two branches to the vagus nerve: the first branch, often considered the oldest branch, protects us in times of trouble. For example, if you accidentally touch a super-hot mug of coffee you’re going to withdraw from that touch within a fraction of a second. You are not even going to think about letting go of the mug of coffee because the vagus nerve kicks in and protects you from getting burned (before your mind even knows what is happening). Likewise, if a mosquito lands on you and you feel it start to bite you, you’re going to slap it and get rid of whatever it is that is attacking you. If it turns out that it is not a mosquito, maybe it’s a little piece of a leaf that you thought was a mosquito, you’re still going to slap at it and then react to what you just did. Maybe with a little laugh. Now if we were to encounter a wild animal such as a lion that just escaped from the local Zoo, for example, your vagus nerve is going to tell you that you have three choices: you can either fight the lion, you can run away which is the flight response, or you can freeze and hope the line runs away or goes away by itself. Fighting a lion and running from the lion are probably not great choices so your vagus nerve it’s going to urge you immediately to make the right choice which is probably to freeze when you feel your life is in imminent danger and there is no way out. It’s not even a thought-out response, it’s so fast because the response of the vagus nerve is trying to protect you.  God gave you the vagus nerve to protect your very self. It is even unconscious and automatic! What we’re going to discover in Christian Counseling is that sometimes the world that we live in can put a lot of stress on these God-given parts and we can get stuck in a response that was designed by god to protect us, but winds up causing us a lot of stress, trauma, anxiety and even depression because the world we live in stresses us too much. We can find ourselves surrounded by lying serpents, it seems. We want to get back to that pure state of Eden, or very close to it.

The other branch of the vagus nerve urges us to connect to ourselves, others, the world, and God. This is also central to our nature as human beings. Even a newborn baby knows implicitly that he or she must connect to the mother in order to survive. A baby does this primarily through his or her eyes that are connected to the mother’s gaze directly. There’s really no thought involved in this; it is literally a neurological response from the vagus nerve.  This connection is also an important part of our nature and it is when we are free to befriend this God-given ability to protect ourselves just enough that it frees us from being stuck in survival flight, fight or freeze mode that we are able to connect to ourselves, others and the world, and God. God gave us a body, created in his image, that is designed to develop the self by connecting to him and others. Think of that place of pure connection to God, yourself, others, and the world as being the garden of Eden. 

Now besides physiology and the wisdom of the Bible we also have evidence-based psychology. Evidence-based psychology is really theory put into practice and observed. For example, I use something called internal family systems in my counseling. Internal family systems, IFS for short, was developed by a marriage and family therapist who discovered that many of the problems we have in our relationships are also internalized in our own minds. It goes like this; suppose that when we were younger, we lived in a very stressful family situation. Because of that stress there are parts of us that we hid away in order to survive within that stressful family situation. 

For example, suppose as a child you had a love of animals. You bring home a stray cat and your mother is furious with you. She won’t allow the cat in the house and tells you that animals are dirty filthy creatures that only belong in the wild. In order to protect yourself from your mother’s wrath you take that part of yourself that loves animals and secretly wants to become a veterinarian and exile it away. You never show it (your caring nature towards animals) because your mother will respond with anger. You then develop strategies to protect yourself and manage that frustrated exiled part of your true self. It’s as if you take a piece of you and lock it in the basement. You might rationalize that your mother was right, or you might develop other tactics to soothe that exiled part of you, such as secretly visiting a neighbor’s house just to spend time with her cat. This dynamic is called Internal Family Systems, and we will explore it in detail throughout Christian Counseling. It is truly a remarkable way to view our psychology because it promises us understanding and healing. It also fits very well with the frame of Christian counseling because it considers our true self, that self that becomes whole by connecting to God, self, others, and the world.

The final principle of Christian Counseling is prayer. In Christian Counseling we use something called guided prayer which connects us to Jesus through a prayer focused on a particular problem. Guided Prayers are patterned after the Lord’s Prayer—the example that Jesus gave us for how to pray. With a guide you’ll move through a few minutes of prayer time, with space to reflect, surrender, and move towards healing and integrating the true self with the help of Jesus. With Guided Prayer you deepen your connection to Jesus who wants the best for you through personal understanding and integration with your true self that was often exiled years ago! It is almost as if we put Jesus in the therapist chair and it becomes our job to listen to that deep inner voice, that spring of wisdom that will guide us back to the place of integration and connectivity, that place that we call Eden.

Guided prayer is an occasion where we are guided to our innermost self and encounter or discover our yearnings for God, our desires to live in communion with others and our desires to love who we are because we can experience ourselves as a gift from God to us. Guided prayer is a time specifically dedicated to developing a loving relationship with God.