A Conceptual Framework

There are significant parallels between counseling, discipling, and parenting.  Although my job primarily calls me to disciple younger women I find that I daily practice counseling and I occasionally wonder if I've (perhaps wrongly?) wandering into the land of parenting as well.  As I consider, Lord willing, the ministry of Christian counseling for my future I have sought a greater understanding of counseling.  Parenting will come with time, again, if the Lord wills, but within this topic there is no rush. 

As I have read and discussed the topic of counseling I have gleaned a great depth of knowledge from David Powlison.  In Powlison's book Seeing With New Eyes he elaborates upon the conceptual - a view of people and problems - in the first book of his series addressing Biblical counseling.  Powlison writes:

Concepts are the first and defining ingredient in any system of counseling.  Every theory defines its version of human nature and the dynamics of human motivation.  Every theory defines or assumes an ideal of human functioning by which problems and named and solutions prescribed: right and wrong, value and stigma, true and false, good and bad, sound and defective, healthy and pathological, solution and problem.

One cannot begin the process of counseling without first narrating through and defining their understanding of mankind.  As Powlison notes, "part of knowing any person well is learning what he or she typically lives for - the pattern of desires."  A great deal of counseling and discipling begins with understanding their desires!  "But naming what you want is the easy part.  The harder part is this: how should you now interpret what you've identified?"  Being able so ask questions, listen, and understand a person is only the first step in counseling (initiating intentionally helpful conversations), but we must be guided by God and good teaching as we tackle interpretation.  Our interpretation will have everything to do with our conceptual framework of human nature and motivation.  And only once desires are correctly interpreted can one move towards transformation, reconciliation, and healing.

As I counsel, disciple, and perhaps parent I seek to invite people to an inner transformation of mind, heart, motive, will, identity, and emotions.  Without a clear goal I am left to the dangerous vulnerability of leading younger women towards haphazard and directionless transformation.  Therefore, my conceptual framework is of most importance as I minister to younger women.

A last word from Powlison:

Souls are curred, but they also sicken in new ways.  Souls always need more curring.  In the counseling context, you often witness such ambiguities.  The positive effects of good, true, and beautiful counsel coexist - uneasily, you hope - with the negative effective of counsel that is bad, untrue, and deformed.  

Let us who shepherd and counsel do it well!

Seeing With New Eyes by David Powlison

Seeing With New Eyes
Counseling and the Human Condition Through the Lens of Scripture

David Powlison is an expert in both practicing and teaching counseling through the lens of Scripture. Biblical counseling is foundationally different than secular psychology because of how it deals with concepts, methods, institutions, and apologetics. In this book, Seeing with New Eyes, Powlison digs through the concepts that define ideals of human functioning. (This is the first book of a series that later unfolds methodological and institutional aspects, and lastly the apologetic component.) Powlison teaches “The Bible’s truth competes head-to-head with other models… Instead of defining change as an intra-psychic, psychosocial, or biological process of ‘healing’ or ‘growth’, we define change as turning to a Personal whom we trust, fear, obey, and seek to please. Instead of letting the goal of ‘health’ cue our system to a medical metaphor, we set the goal of being transformed into the likeness of this Person with whom we live in relationship.” Although I found the style of Powlison’s writing difficult to get through, he shares a goldmine of wisdom until the very last chapter. My natural (naturally flawed) thought-process was challenged as Powlison pinpointed the deception of our desires – and the great need for our feelings to be checked and reinterpreted! He emphasizes that “sin emerges from within the person” while secular psychology often blames our parents, environment, biology, etc for our current problems. Powlison writes:

The fact that a pattern of craving became established many years before – even that it was forged in a particular context, perhaps influenced by bad models or by experiences of being sinned against – only describes what happened. For example, past rejections do not cause a craving to be accepted by other any more than current rejections cause that craving. The occasions of a lust are never its cause. Temptations and sufferings do push our buttons, but they don’t create those buttons. That brings hope for change in the present by the grace of God.

What a shattering counter-point to our natural and prideful blame-shifting! As sufferers and sinners we can’t hope to find victory until we understand correctly when and where our sin comes from! Powlison also walks though psychological definitions for human functions, and concludes:

But the Bible never views human problems as ontological but as relational or ethical at their cores. Problems exist between man and God and between man and man. That our psychs are unhinged – or futile, darkened, alienated, ignorant, hardened, deceived, and desire-ridden, as Ephesians 4 puts it – does not mean our problems are at their core psychological. The disorientation that manifests itself in our psychic life is only symptomatic of an interpersonal disorientation: our alienation from God.

I was further challenged by Powlison’s description of a counselor’s role in the curing of souls, how we love others, and how all of this fits within the trends of psychiatry. His chapters seemed disjointed, and I started reading this book so long ago I don’t remember the beginning, but the way I see people has foundationally changed in a Biblical and insightful way. In the conversation about psychology and theology, Powlison can’t be overlooked.