Tag: Solutions

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5 Ways to Become a Better Counselor

Being a counselor is part of life. Whomever we meet and wherever we go, we will find people with problems. We will talk about those problems. We will often try to help them find solutions. There are some people who do this as a full-time job, but almost everyone will be engaged with counseling on some level.

Because of this fact, it is a good idea for us to think a little bit more about how we give counsel. What are the methods that are the most helpful? When should we speak and when should we just listen? How do we listen well? How do we get people to open up? These are things we need to learn and which we can study and practice over a lifetime.

In my profession as a pastor, I do a lot of informal counseling. I listen to people’s problems, pray with them, and help them find solutions that will improve their lives. Because of that, I’ve tried how to counsel people from those who have done a lot of it. Here’s 5 ways I try to be a better counselor.

1. Build connection with people. When people feel accepted, loved, and safe, they are more ready to talk about their own story and listen to yours. There are specific things that we can do to help us connect with people.

Counselor Alan Loy McGinness explained what he learned from years of counseling about how to connect with people in his book The Friendship Factor. I recommend this book and his simple but important insights. Here’s a few from his list:

  • He recommends that if we see something good in someone that we say it.
  • Share things about yourself as well as encouraging others to share about themselves.
  • Find out what people enjoy and find ways to connect with that passion.

Doing these things can help us build a connection that is a context for helping others (and ourselves!).

2. Help people tell their story. When people have been through difficult things, they often have a story to tell but have not told it to many people. They may not have reflected deeply upon it. It just sits there as a sort of open wound. Continue reading “5 Ways to Become a Better Counselor”

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10 Quotes Reflecting on Christian Counseling

A few years back, in the process of working on my Doctor of Ministry, I read numerous books on Christian counseling. These were books on the theory of counseling and its application to specific issues. How do we engage and talk to people in such a way that helps people move forward to what God has called them to be? These are deep waters. Here are a few of my favorite quotes that I still reflect on with links to the books from which they came as I think about how to help myself and others move onward and upward, processing the past well, living well in the present, and having hope for the future.

1. “Tragedy always moves our story forward in a way that shalom could never accomplish” (Dan Allender, To Be Told, 44). My comment: think of the great stories of the heroes of the world and the faith. They experience great challenges, but they rise to meet them. This is one way to re-think the challenges and hurts we have faced in our own lives.

2. “It takes a lifetime to discover exactly how our past shapes our future so we can live wholeheartedly and passionately in the present, but we can begin. We can seize the present with greater insight and vision” (Dan Allender, The Healing Path, 185). My comment: I did a lot of reflecting on my past when I studied these books. Five years later, the insights continue to come and help me engage better in the present. Note: you can see some of the directions I explored with this here.

3. “[I]n this life we must recognize that we will inevitably experience disappointments, pain, and a lack of complete relational satisfaction. When we stop fighting this reality and become willing to accept it, we can be free to move into the world with a real sense of purpose and direction” (Harry Schaumburg, False Intimacy: Understanding the Struggle of Sexual Addiction, 99). My comment: this seems almost obvious when you say it, but how easily do we begin to think that we will avoid pain and disappointment? Happiness in this life will not be found by eliminating pain and disappointments but by finding a way to live with them. Continue reading “10 Quotes Reflecting on Christian Counseling”

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The Intractability of Racism: Niebuhr on Race Problems and Solutions

Introduction
When Reinhold Niebuhr considered the ordeals of school integration in the 1950s, he pointed to an important lesson: “This whole chapter in our national history is instructive because it reveals that the group pride of men is one of the most ineradicable of human weaknesses” (Christianity & Crisis XVI, October 1, 1956, p. 122). This intractability was all the more surprising because the Western tradition contained so many elements that would commend a universalist perspective on human nature. “Despite all traditions of human universalism inherited from Stoic, Prophetic, and Christian sources, Western man—in common with all men—remains an unregenerate tribalist” (Christianity & Crisis, XXIV, no. 12, July 6, 1964, p. 133). Niebuhr believed that events like Southern resistance to integration could demonstrate the “intractability” of race problems. However, Niebuhr also believed that an understanding of human nature, particularly as set forth in the Christian faith, could help illuminate why racial problems were so difficult and point toward real though imperfect solutions to the problems.

In Niebuhr’s thinking, there are four important aspects of human nature that can illuminate the intractability of the race problem: the created tendency to value those closest to us, the anxiety over their maintenance and survival, the excessive pride and overvaluing of our groups, and the aggravation of individual sinful tendencies in group dynamics.

Christian Faith and the Illumination of the Race Problem
The first element is a created tendency to value those closest to us. The Christian view of human beings is that they are not created evil but that they become evil by the misuse of created good. Thus, in all evils there is an element of good. Valuing our own countries and families is good. This is seen most obviously in the care that parents have for their children and their desire that they would live, survive, and thrive. Thus, the race problem is to some degree rooted in our nature as biological and ethnic beings.

What smacks up against our desire for the survival of our families or races is our tenuous and finite position. Other groups oppose ours. Disasters can overtake us. We are small, but we can to some degree see the whole. In other words, “man is a finite spirit, lacking identity with the whole, yet [he is] capable in some sense of envisaging the whole. . .” (The Nature & Destiny of Man [NDM 1], Vol. 1, p. 181). This includes potential pitfalls, struggles, and disasters. The gap between what we want to see happen and the many challenges to making it happen is anxiety. Continue reading “The Intractability of Racism: Niebuhr on Race Problems and Solutions”

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