I am not a stranger to counseling offices. Thankfully, I didn’t come from a family where therapy was considered embarrassing or taboo. Generally speaking, getting counseling in my family was, and is, considered to be a sign of health, not illness. Sometimes my mom was going. Sometimes it was my brother, or just my mom and stepfather. At other times my whole family would go and my brother and I would play with the toys in a nearby room, entering in intervals to answer key questions. I didn’t, and still don’t, think back at those hours as incredibly dysfunctional. In fact, I think it may have been one of the things that kept my family sane amidst what was otherwise considered to be some of the most chaotic days of our lives.
I now consider the fact that I took a long hiatus from therapy when I left home at 19 to be a mistake. The fact that I wouldn’t return at all again for almost 15 years proved to be an avoidable disaster. Thankfully, the encouragement of some wise mentors in my life encouraged me to seek out some professional help and, at age 34, I entered the office of a trusted counselor once again. After just one hour I returned to my lonely car in the parking lot and, in broad daylight, gripped my steering wheel and wept like a newborn child, for that is exactly what I felt like.
Today, I spend many hours a day sitting on the other side of the therapist’s couch. As an ordained pastor, I am the one asking the probing questions now. I dig for the sin beneath the sin; I seek out the reason for the anger, or the guilt, or the insecurity, or the feelings of abandonment. I am the one asking about relationships with dad, or mom, or the uncle who abused you. I am the one you might have trouble making eye contact with, the one you debate ever calling, or texting, or emailing. Mine is the door you stand in front of wondering if you should finally knock on it, or just walk past.
I write this today to let you know that if there is one thing I have learned about counseling after all these years spent on both sides of the conversation, it is this:
there is incredible power in telling your story to someone else. I can’t fully explain the mysteries of this phenomenon, but the reality is that when you take the time to share your deepest wounds, and someone takes the time to listen and acknowledge those wounds, freedom comes. When we recognize the humanity in one another, when we stop pretending that the most painful things that have happened to us, didn’t really happen, healing comes.
That is why, I believe, the Holy Spirit is referred to in the Scripture as “the counselor.” Since it is the role of the Spirit to “lead us into all truth” He is the one who has come to draw out those places where the light of day hasn’t passed for ages, and to call the lies exactly what they are. Somehow, in one of those great schemes of the evil one, the Christian community was duped into believing that counselors were a friend of the Devil instead of a gift from God. Many of us have been taught to believe that those with true faith, those with genuine knowledge of their salvation, would never need to make an appointment with a therapist. And yet, when scripture describes the one whose purpose it is to remind us of our true identity in Christ, or to free us from addiction, or to tell us truth instead of lies, or empower us to confront the evil we have been oppressed by, he chose the word counselor. Many of us are in desperate need of a counselor through which The Counselor can speak.
How many moral failures, congregational disasters, or national spectacles could have been averted if broken brothers and sisters could have learned before it was too late that one of the surest signs of Christian maturity was the ability to whisper one very simple, and profound word, “help.”
