Currents of Faith: Open and Unfolding Reflections

I counseled for forty-two years, beginning in 1957, when I was appointed a half-time instructor in the MSU Student Counseling Center. During my career, I counseled in the university, church and community, the latter in Wenatchee for thirty years. I knew a few things before I met process theology.

Early on, I was intrigued by psychological testing and became accomplished in using testing batteries to assist students in their choice of college major and future career. I took courses in test construction and knew the intricacies of how to construct questions and test their reliability and validity. I was amused that the content of any question was not as important as whether or not one group of people answered it in a different way than another group, whether it discriminated between two professions. The test was designed to do just that, tell you if your interests were more like accountants or teachers, your personality more like manic-depressives or hypochondriacs.

To acquaint myself with a given test or inventory, I would administer it to myself, often learning new facets of my personality. I found they were quite reliable, giving a similar answer each time. Darn! I was obsessive-compulsive in personality and always came out having the interests of ministers. I became a member of the National Vocational Guidance Association as an identity for the kind of professional I was.

Even more, I enjoyed psychotherapy in which I could explore the life space of students and help them feel more at home in their own skin. Most importantly I knew how to actively listen and respect the speaker, which were basic to whatever issue a student brought to my office.

I did not yet know a world view which would explain what happens outside the counseling office. This would come after I arrived at the School of Theology. This vision challenged me to integrate my faith with my profession. I could not live in compartments. God could not be an after thought or an add-on to my psychological thinking about a client. God had to be central and integral to all that I did in my profession.

I did most of my thinking about theology and counseling in Wenatchee. Earlier when I was serving as pastor of a church I did not have the leisure of such reflection. Although I was in private practice in the community, people knew that I was an ordained minister and frequently sought me out for that reason. I could engage in a dance between my two loves, ministry and counseling.

My thinking came in fits and starts rather than a smooth road. I noted earlier that I began with picturing the center of creativity as “King Arthur’s Roundtable.” It was a start. I knew that I could not use the technical language of actual entity, occasion of experience or center of creativity with my clients. I had learned early on that counseling calls for the use of third grade language spoken in very short sentences. The image had not only to be simple it must also be helpful. I came up with “Committee Members.” This worked for awhile. I soon saw the inadequacy of thinking in terms of parts of a person as enduring and unchanging. This would not do.

I finally landed on the image of “Committee Meeting.” This portrayed the simplicity that someone would be there and they were there to deal with an agenda. Aha! This was general enough and still true to my theology. There are people in the Wenatchee valley who even today speak to me about their committee meetings. The image is simple but it is also complex. I came to the conclusion that the simplest is complex. It is both. One cannot take away either quality.

Thinking in this way could only happen in the twentieth century when events were proposed as the basic reality rather than little round enduring atoms in some combination. I knew my image had to be a happening, an occurrence, an event, not a thing. Committee meeting could work. It could meet that qualification.

I already knew there were parts of the human psyche. I knew about Sigmund Freud’s id, ego, and superego, Eric Berne’s parent, adult and child, Roberto Assagioli’s sub-personalities, Carl Jung’s extroverts and introverts, and Frederick Perle’s ego and alter-ego of Gestalt therapy. The psychological theorists saw facets, divisions, and aspects rather than a single unitary person. None directly addressed the creative activity of God in humans, although this may have been intimated. Nor did they think of the parts of a person as actual events in the individual’s life from an earlier time, events in which God participated. My theology does. I am indebted to Dr. Delwin Brown for his concept of “contextual creativity.” Whatever the context, a person creates oneself. In any time, location, or circumstances, a boy or girl will become someone. At times the situation leaves few options—run, give up, or fight—and the result is a limited or fractured person in that moment. The best one could do. I speak of these events in shorthand, committee members attending later committee meetings.

I like this illustration of a committee meeting during which a variety of members speak:
At lunchtime a person approaches a cafeteria line and must confront the desserts, among them a piece of her favorite pie. In the moments of experience which follow, the committee meetings occur. The eager eater shouts with glee, the nutritionist groans with travail, the jogger begins to calculate the time required to run off the calories, the bookkeeper considers the amount of money in her purse, the historian reviews what was eaten at breakfast and the prognosticator considers what is proposed for dinner.

Will the person create herself into a disciplined dieter or a spontaneous eater in these particular committee meetings? While the outcome is difficult to predict, we can know for certain that the person will define herself in some way before she slides her tray to the main courses. And we will know that God has been offering proposals for each of these moments and that one can often identify God’s possibilities when she uses the subjunctive mood. In other words, the person speaks of what she “ought” or “should” do.

Becoming is the watchword for every committee meeting. The focus is upon the possible, the might be, the could be. The present is making something out of the older givens and the new proposal for that moment. There is a bubbling, incubating, ruminating, reflecting quality about each meeting. The qualities of meetings may be as varied as the real-life committees most adults have attended, which exhibit harmonious agreement, friendly compromise, tense standoff, autocratic intimidation, utter stalemate, rubber-stamp, divided house, yelling match, or mob scene. Always a conclusion is reached, even if it is to do the “same old thing” or to “put off the decision” once again.
 
The voices of committee members are frequently heard embedded in the language of clients: “Lazy” squares off with “drill instructor.” “Just do it” opposes “try and make me.” “Romantic,” “mother,” and “grocery-checker” vie for energy. “Escape” wrestles with “being responsible.” “Marriage vow” stands in judgment of “I want out.”

While I would speak of the committee meeting when it became evident in my client’s language, I would be thinking of it myself from the very beginning of our conversation. I would fashion myself as a late comer pulling up a chair and sitting down in the circle. These would be my internal questions: Who is here? What are they proposing? How loudly, strongly and adamantly are proposals made? Is the proposing committee member aware of the others present? Are there opposing voices with radically different suggestions? Thereby, are there strong disagreements? Who is obviously missing? Is there variety among the voices? How long have members been there? Who is new and perhaps disruptive? Who is old and has seniority? Are things moving along or is there an impasse? Who is hurting? Who is being ignored? Who do they want to get rid of?

I did not have to worry about finding the voices. Usually persons entered my office because they were in an unbreakable impasse or an unbearable conflict. In the process of counseling I would become listener, friend, guide, proposer and cheerleader depending upon the stage of our relationship.

From the simple image of a committee I developed a number of specific strategies, usually called “interventions” in the counseling profession. I drew them from a cosmology and theology intending to explain everything in the universe and applied them to my office at C3 in the Pacific Professional Building on Mission Street. The strategies follow, each concluded by a short illustration.

I promote awareness of the committee members who are present in a client by listening in for the relationships which that person describes. If that client spends most of our hour talking about her pain at the ending of a personal relationship, I may say, “You are really hurting about the loss of a cherished friend.”

I and my client paint a vision-dream-ideal of who he or she wishes to be as early in the counseling process as possible. Creating such a picture will either offer permission to the persons to walk right into it or will “flush out of the bushes” those committee members who have differing goals. The so-called ambushers or saboteurs are identified and brought into the conversation, with the hope that they may have an even better, though surprising, vision to offer. Either result is productive. “So, you’re saying that you want to be more honest with others instead of so pleasing.”

I develop understanding of and appreciation for those committee members who are presently disliked, hated, repulsive or alien to the client by entering their viewpoint as completely as possible. I usually heard my client say to himself, “You are just a “liar and sneak” To which I would respond: “I’m curious to know more about that lying and sneaky part that you can’t stand.”

I encourage a new name for a committee member who was given a degrading label in the past, by re-entering past situations and carefully reviewing those committee meetings. I had done this in my review of the birth of the “coward” within me. “Let’s look carefully at how you decided that you were a sissy after running away from that fight.”

I become especially curious about a committee member within a client who continually says, “Don’t.” I ask if my client recognizes whose voice is speaking: mother, father, older sibling, or oneself. I know that whoever is mentioned, the present message is expressed also in my client’s voice. We explore to see how the voice is usually followed by the rebel, the compliant follower, or the sneaky one.

Neither the commanding nor the responding voices are attractive or desirable. Frequently I find that beneath the “don’t” was originally a protective voice, one concerned about my client’s safety and well being. I want to get beneath the command to the feelings of caring and concern both for the speaker and the one to whom spoken. Often there emerges a clarity that the speaker could not bear to have their beloved harmed, just as he or she did not want the beloved to endure such harm. “May I speak to ‘don’t’ for a moment?” If, yes, “I wonder, when you said “don’t” to him what you wanted for James.”
“And I wonder what you needed for yourself.”

I will never agree to attempt to get rid of a committee member. Often I hear, when a client knew that I used hypnosis, “Doc, could you put me in a trance and just cut this part out of me?” I recall “contextual creativity.” I know that this part was once an historical person, an answer to a difficult situation. My reply would be some variation of this theme. “I am able to offer to explore with you how that part you hate began and work with you to transform that part.”

I seek a harmony, a unity with diversity, within present committee meetings of a client by promoting dialogue between previously divided or unknown committee members. I refer to the qualities of “just, participatory and sustainable,” proposed by the World Council of Churches for global society. “I wonder what the over-eater and the scolder might say to one another.”

I encourage the awakening and empowering of committee members who have been sleeping or sitting shyly and fearfully in the background. I do so by offering a safe environment for diversity, differences and inconsistencies. “When you said that you felt a little annoyed at him, I think I may have heard a new voice speaking.”

I facilitate the creation of a new committee member when there is need for such a voice so that the client may be effective in today’s activities. This is done by mutually searching for models from that person’s past or by turning to history, novels, TV, or imagination. “Sounds to me like you need a new soft voice inside you.”

I invite the creation of a future committee member, who a client wishes and wills to be. To have such an image allows the client to see how her present decisions and actions will affect that future “I.” “I wonder how the plans you are considering today will affect the future ‘you’.?”

I practice planning for a day, weekend, or some future event with the client by calling upon the total committee, not merely listening to those loud voices who have dominated before. “I wonder how your day might go if you listened to all parts of you.”

I promote an appreciation in the client for the complexity of being human by both experiencing and reflecting upon that person’s committee meetings. “Life sure isn’t simple, with all its tugs and pulls.”

I encourage hope in the client by offering a model in which each committee meeting is free within natural limits to create itself. The past, genetic inheritance, habits and personality all loom large in any new meeting, but there is also freedom among those givens. Each new meeting offers the possibility of a new decision. “There’s a big difference between your saying that you have no willpower and saying you’ve overeaten most of your life.”

I listen for the lures of God in each committee meeting of a client, being alert to feelings, thoughts, symbols, images, and dreams which appear to persuade toward beauty, harmony, joy, intensity, complexity and love. As I noted earlier, I also listen for the oughts and shoulds, the subjunctive mood of the verb. Most often I find that God is imbedded within another voice rather than distinct, yet some clients acknowledged early that they were struggling with the divine. “Sounds like that idea just won’t leave you alone until you do something about it.”

I operate from a model of change which includes both acceptance and celebration, but not criticism. When committee meetings occur in an old “business as usual” style, this behavior is accepted knowing that they represent the more established and powerful way for that client. Naturally such repetitions will be present and powerful in the process of counseling. “I think we both recognize the familiar in what you did.” When meetings reveal new voices and actions, celebration with the client is the mode, knowing that this is the new seedling just breaking through the soil with potential to grow into something strong and enduring. “Wow, I see something new in you. Congratulations!”

In addition to becoming acquainted with the committee members, I watch carefully and explore how my client makes decisions. I observe the committee in action. I may or may not verbalize these questions which I asked myself. “How do you deal with tough choices?” “What steps do you go through when you are at an important crossroad in your life?” “How do you usually go about making big life decisions?”

These are choice-points such as deciding whom to marry, choosing a college, selecting a job, buying a car, dealing with an infatuation, deciding whether or not to have children, or deciding when to retire. Usually in normal conversations with my client I would learn about these major decisions and more importantly how he or she faced them. I know that such momentous decisions are more than one simple committee meeting and represent a long train of such meetings over time, yet they give clues about the committee process.

I hear about such committee meetings. “I just can’t ever make up my mind.” “I always get into this big fight with myself.” “Well, you just do what you gotta do.” “I wait ‘til the last minute and see how I feel about it.” “I just know in my heart what’s right for me.” “I do it and always end up having regrets later.” “I simply ask what Jesus would do and do it.” “I write down the pros and cons and go with the longest list.” “I follow the old saying ‘let your conscience be your guide.’” “I go full steam ahead without thinking much, then pretty soon I trip myself.” “It’s always a wrestling match between what I want to do and what I should do.” “I end up asking someone else what to do.” “My folks instilled in me a pretty good set of rules.” Within the vernacular of these illustrations are some significantly different processes. They show how the committee works—or does not work!

Every adequate theory of personality and psychotherapy must grapple with a vision of wholeness and health and create its own goal of counseling. I came to understand health as committees with members who can get along with one another while dealing seriously with becoming more whole and beautiful. Health is the complexity of having many intense relationships, while proceeding with varying degrees of harmony toward the highest forms of beauty.

Health is not being stuck in an impasse, relating only by denying a host of diverse members, or following blindly a single dominant voice from the past. Nor is it that one voice wins today and another takes command and reverses the decision tomorrow. It is rather a wide diversity which blends and shapes into unity. Health means that you have rich committee meetings which work and an abundance of intense relationships.

Such intense relationships include an awareness of and empathy with persons, ideas, animals, birds, trees, mountains, and streams. Empathy is to feel for, honor, respect and be in community with all these entities. To quote Dr. Albert Schweitzer, empathy is to have “reverence for life.”

Health is the quality of passionately questing for beauty—not just for oneself, but for all of creation. I have found that the degree of intensity, eros, and passion one experiences in relationships may be a measure of the degree of health present. I affirm that God is central in counseling in that God is the deepest source of beauty in every event everywhere. Thus, God is central in every committee meeting of a client in counseling.

The word “God” may or may not have been spoken in sessions with a given client. It was their choice. I could talk about the client’s humanistic values or his or her relationship with God. I have already noted that I seek God in the language of the client through the subjunctive form of the verb. Oughts and shoulds caught my attention. Yet I knew clearly that those feelings can come from sources other than God. Freud would speak of the power of the super-ego. We obsessive-compulsive persons know that power well. I listened carefully to the wishing, yearning, longing and desiring being expressed. I listened for the tugs, nips, pulls and lures described. Again these may come from many sources.

Because of knowing the many sources, I developed some measures that may point in the direction of whisperings of God. Does the lure involve a challenge with a risk to the client? Does it include some degree of intensity, harmony, diversity, joy, beauty and love? Does it expand the empathy of the client toward all of life? Does it call the client to entertain future possibilities of whom they might become in the future rather than repeat living in the land of the past imprisoned by who they have been?

I have been focusing upon the ways my theology informed how I related to my clients, but my faith also affected how I spoke to myself during the counseling hour. The most prominent message to myself was that while I was with my client at most one hour a week, God was with that person “24/7,” every waking and sleeping hour of every day. Affirming this, allowed me to sleep at night, rather than being filled with anxiety worrying about what might happen to my client or what he or she might do. I did not have a simplistic idea of “God will take care of you,” for I knew better. I lived with a realism, for in the four decades of my career I had three clients suicide. Mine was a realistic understanding that God was intimately present with my client graciously offering invitations toward health and beauty.

I was also open to the whisperings of God during a counseling session. I would listen openly to both my client and to insights from the divine. Often an image or a word would come to me, seemingly out of nowhere, which would capture the heart of what my client was saying. This experience occurred too often for me to write it off as simply chance. As I was open, I would receive.

I have been describing my experiences with individuals and myself, but there were also many times when more than one person was in my office, couples, friends, or families. I discovered an effective and fun method of working with them which also fit with my theology. Usually persons I saw were facing conflict, they could not see eye to eye.
On those occasions I would follow the technique developed by Dr. Thomas Gordon in Parent Effectiveness Training

If differing on an issue, I would ask each person if he or she would be willing to seek a solution acceptable to all concerned. If an answer was, Yes, we proceeded to put into words the needs that each person brought to this issue and place them with a colored marker on a white board. Fights are usually caused by conflicts between solutions, so it is important to begin with the needs which underlie the solutions. When each person had stated his or her needs, I would ask each to look at the others’ needs. Did they want any further clarification of the needs or did they find any needs which they considered silly, ridiculous, or stupid? If each understood and considered all needs plausible, we moved on to the creative task.

I asked all to enter into a process of proposing solutions which they thought would meet all of the needs written on the board. Usually many would come forth and were placed on the white board in a different color than the needs. No comments, corrections or criticisms were allowed as these solutions were spoken and recorded. When no further solutions came forth, I asked all persons to state if a given solution was acceptable to them. If that solution was not acceptable to any person it was crossed off the list. Only when all parties found a particular solution acceptable to them would it remain on the board. If several were acceptable, then we engaged in creating a grand solution from them.

I found this process engaging, creative, and fun. I found it highly consistent with the way in which God participates in our decisions. If God is truly present in every moment, then it is so with thinking and clarifying one’s needs, and with the development of solutions which meet all needs. God feels with all persons present, so to search for encompassing solutions is exactly what God does in every moment: proposing possibilities which are the most beautiful and enhancing to the person and to all creation. I did feel that God was smiling as these persons engaged in finding what was best for all, not simply for one or another of those gathered. Whether with couples or families, I loved to engage them in this process.

During my counseling career I began to develop a measure of relationships. I retained my early intrigue with psychological testing. The problem that I had with so many inventories is that they seek the abnormal. They seem to ask: What questions can we devise which separate the normal from the abnormal, and distinguish between different forms of abnormality? Those inventories are useful and I used them many times. Yet, they simply did not fit the vast majority of clients in my practice. Usually I was dealing with normal persons facing tough situations, not persons with a serious personality disorder or who were psychotic. I wanted measures that would help me to grasp the personality, the web of relationships, the committee meetings,  which composed this person. I wanted a measure of normal persons who are nonetheless quite different from one another. I was of the mind that we could help people if we knew to whom and with what they were related.

In the beginning of my development of such an inventory, I raised the following questions: With whom or what has the client been relating? How long has the client been relating? To what degree is the client aware of the relationship? Which feelings does the client usually have toward the other? How intensely does the client feel? What does the client expect will usually happen in the relationship?

A cluster or constellation of relationships would emerge from answers to these questions. Simply the number of relationships a client reports would have meaning, to say nothing of the variety of relationships and their differing intensities. A person who lives with her dog, watches sitcoms on TV, and never buys a newspaper because of all the bad news carried in the headlines is surely markedly different from the person who relates to adult children, writes frequently to her friends, belongs to several social groups, and reads the latest bestsellers. Number, variety, awareness, feelings, intensity, and expectancies of relationships could yield a multi-dimensional constellation of the personhood of a client. Problem areas and gaps would become visible as well as strengths and resources. Committee meetings would be seen.

I will not finish this inventory of relationships. I sincerely hope that someone else will. I think that person would make a wonderful contribution to counseling techniques informed by theology!

I have expressed a hope. I also feel sadness and anger about the present state of the counseling profession. It began with my discord with insurance carriers. Most have become enamored of short-term behavioral therapy, which I translate: “Get ‘em back on the job as soon as possible!” Corporations are shaping counseling. As in so many areas the employer makes the decision. In this case it is for which services it will pay. I simply resent the corporate world telling me as a professional what I should do if services for my client are to be reimbursed. It was with great consternation that I talked with their representatives or filled out forms requesting counseling for a client. How, oh how, do I fit my understanding of counseling into their small boxes on the form?

I had to twist and turn to translate my goals of counseling and their need for “observable, behavioral outcomes.” I did so, both retaining my integrity, and meeting my clients’ needs for insurance coverage. Most clients simply could not have afforded counseling services without the aid of employer funded insurance.

I will stand on my soapbox and cry out for counseling which values depth, meaning and transformation rather than quickly solving the immediate problem so that the individual will be back at work. I speak for counseling which works to help persons know how to solve problems rather than finding an answer to a particular problem. I lament the state of the counseling profession today and hope fervently that it will be transformed by the vision of deeply grounded counseling theory, especially that which is informed by theology.

Enough sadness, lamenting and anger! I loved counseling and found that theology provided a depth and meaning which I needed to stay excited and stimulated in my profession. I was challenged and pleased to integrate my profession with a new vision.

For a more detailed description of my vision of counseling, you may turn to Robert Brizee, “Process Relational Psychotherapy: Creatively Transforming Relationships.” Process Studies: Vol 29.1 Spring-Summer 2000, p151 – 167.