A Long Journey and Time to Catch My Breath

Reflections on my years at Insight Counseling Centers & 

A Time for New Beginnings

(This entry is more of a personal reflection on my professional journey.  It is longer than many things I have written.  I wanted it to be shorter, but I wanted to honor the journey that has led me to the new beginnings I have entered this month.)

In December 1993 I had finished seminary with a sense of call to pastoral care and counseling. I did  some training as a hospital chaplain.  In 1995 I started a job as an alcohol and drug counselor in high school north of Nashville.  Also in 1995 my wife and I were in marriage counseling at the Brentwood office of the Pastoral Counseling Centers of Tennessee (PCCT) (Now Insight CounselingCenters).  I was not a great client, but over the next several months, I learned a lot about myself and I learned a lot about my wife.  As a couple we made tremendous progress and I loved the patient, caring, and thoughtful way our therapist had dealt with us – or more specifically with me.  As we were moving towards terminating our therapy, I asked my therapist one day in session, “If I wanted to do what you do, how would I do it?”  

My counselor told me of his own path towards becoming a pastoral psychotherapist and told me of a training program at Pastoral Counseling Centers that I could apply to.  I met with the Executive Director and prepared my materials.  I was interviewed later by the Executive Director, Jim Coffman, and training faculty member, Dick Bruehl.  I do not remember who else was there that day, but I remember those two.  The therapist I had seen, Bruce Vaughn, Dr.Jim Coffman, Dr. Dick Bruehl, along with Dr. Evon Flesberg, Dr. TomKnowles-Bagwell and others all became part of my training.  For two years I did clinical work at the Pastoral Counseling Centers, I had lectures and supervision by the faculty at PCCT.  These people challenged me personally in ways that made me learn about myself.  They challenged me professionally to become a better therapist with the clients I encountered.  I remember when I first sat in a room with these mentors on a Friday morning for case consultation and how intimidated I was by the quality and depth of the conversations.  I was sure that they had made a huge mistake by allowing me to enter the training program, but I also was amazed by the way that the group reflected on the theological themes of the clinical material presented and how they reflected psychologically on the religious material presented.  My life experience had been that I could not separate one part of myself from another and I could not talk about anything going on with me without reflecting on what it meant for my faith and my relationship with God.  Here I heard people doing this in a professional and profound way that was both inviting and amazing to me. 

In 1999, I was hired to the full-time staff of PCCT.  I served the organization as a site Coordinator for offices in Manchester, Tullahoma, and Franklin, Tennessee.  I later served as Clinical Director.  In 2004 I earned a Master of Marriage & Family Therapy, became a Fellow in the American Association of PastoralCounselors (AAPC), and was licensed in Tennessee as Clinical Pastoral Therapist.  In 2005, after Jim Coffman left the organization and again in 2007, I served as interim Co-Executive Director and focused on the clinical and training aspects of the work while my Co-Executive Director, Chrissa Jennings Walsh, focused on Finances and Development for the organization.  We had some very difficult years from 2007 to 2012.  By the end of 2012 the organization had stabilized financially and the staff that had been there through the difficulty had become a close and supportive family.  

At the end of 2012, Chrissa Jennings left PCCT and I moved into a position of sole Executive Director.  The organization hired a new Development Director.  I took on more of the administrative and financial roles that Chrissa had filled.  Somewhere in there I managed to become a Diplomate in AAPC, but there were new challenges as the organization was ready to move from surviving to thriving.  The Board of Directors undertook a process of strategic planning and adopted a new name (Insight Counseling).  The organization became more visible through events and programs that highlighted the services during Mental Health Awareness Month in May of 2016.   However, through all of this growth, there were many personal losses for me. 

We had lost some key therapists from the staff.  We had lost some long-time board members from the board of directors.  I had cut my own counseling to a minimal caseload.  Somewhere in those years between 2013 and 2016, I began to lose a sense of myself.  I did not feel as grounded in the work as I once had.  I was dealing with challenges I had not had to deal with in past years.  I began to tell people that I felt “off balance” and “insecure in my identity.”  This feeling of unrest grew in me until events in early 2016.  

 In early 2016, I attended two ordination services at my church.  One for Brandon Owen and one for ShannonMeadors.  I was surprised to find myself tearful through both of these services as I recalled my own ordination and the work of pastoral care and counseling to which I originally felt called.  I began to feel I wanted to just return to that work.  In June of 2016, I resigned as Executive Director at was then Insight Counseling Centers and in August I began work with the group practice of Sage Hill Counseling in Nashville.  The desire to embody the work of pastoral psychotherapy that I had been trained in has become of upmost importance for me.  Working at Sage Hill as a PastoralTherapist offers me the opportunity to focus on the counseling and care work that I had originally felt called to in seminary and later refined as I sat in our marriage counseling.  I have described this to people as a desire to return to “breath”.  Just as in mindfulness practice when a person becomes distracted by thoughts or surroundings, one might instruct them to just return to their focus on their breathing.  Pastoral Care and Counseling is the core of my professional identity.  I do not know what other opportunities might arise or where the work at Sage Hill might lead, but for now, I want to rest in my ministerial identity as a provider of pastoral care and counseling and just breathe for a while. 

Tennessee's New Counseling Law & Jesus

As has been reported in so many places this week, Governor Bill Haslam signed into law a Bill that willprotect psychotherapists from legal repercussions if they refuse service to any person based on their own strongly held principles.This bill was supposedly necessary because some Counseling professional organizations have re-written their codes of ethics to say that a counselor cannot refuse treatment to a client solely because of religious beliefs. (Oddly, the final version of this bill allowed for any "sincerely held principle" and not just religious belief - a distinction is potentially more concerning to me.)

I am going to admit that I have had some mixed feelings about this bill.  As a Pastoral Counselor who is a member of the American Association of Pastoral Counselors, my own code of ethics says that I will not discriminate in providing assistance to any person on the basis of “race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, health status, age, disabilities or national origin…However, it also says that if I am unable or “unwilling for appropriate reasons, to provide professional help or continue a professional relationship, every reasonable effort is made to arrange for continuation of treatment with another professional.”  In my mind, “an appropriate reason” might be that I am not trained to deal with a particular issue, but it might mean that a therapist cannot overcome strong personal feelings (positive or negative) for a client and can no longer provide objective care.  I would think that if I am convinced that it will affect my own faith walk to sit and provide care to a person who lives a life I don’t agree with, then perhaps I would want to refer them to another person.  It would seem like good care.  While this is how this bill is presented, I do not believe there are larger issues here.  

Some have argued that this puts a person in crisis at risk of abandonment.  (This Bill actually has a clause to say that you cannot refuse treatment to a person in crisis.)  Others have argued, myself included, that this law will hurt those in rural areas in particular because in many such places, there are fewer resources to which a person can be referred and there may be not be adequate help available.  Others have argued well about how the members of the LGBTQ community (among other groups) are already bullied and rejected and for a trusted therapist to reject the client once certain things may be revealed in session would be re-traumatizing.  Others have argued against this law on the basis of solid professional practice.  However, as I have reflected on this, I have come to a different reflection on this law that is grounded in my experience of being a Pastoral Counselor who seeks to embody the love of God for each person. 

Each time I agree to sit with a client, I am invited to share in the depth of that client’s story.  If I am doing my job well, the relationship deepens as more is revealed about the person in front of me.  Part of the healing for that person involves them feeling heard and understood as they share the twists and turns of hurts and struggles by someone who does not rush to make judgement, but allows the story to unfold.  As the story unfolds, we realize the vast number of experiences, thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and relationships that make up the person in front of us.  Hopefully we began to understand the human being in front us from inside the context of his or her own experience.  The ideal therapist maintains sufficient objectivity to help the person with us begin to find a new narrative.  This objective “being with” is not writing the new narrative – not telling a person what to do – but sitting with them and offering reflection and questions that allow the person to find new meaning. 

However, if I we reduce another person to one aspect of their personhood, that is prejudice.  If we make a decision to reject a person based on that one thing, that is discrimination.  Those who support the new law in Tennessee seem to be seeking a legal protection for doing this very thing on the basis of their religion.  It is for me, however, my religion that compels me to be the therapist I am.  I seek to be the kind of therapist that I am because I have experienced the love of God in a relationship like the one I described earlier.  When I look at the life of Jesus, I see a man who time and again, looked at a person and did not see the labels and categories that other people used to judge and divide, but saw the person inside the person – the person beyond the label.  Good therapy – secular or religious – should seek to embody this reality. We should not be seeking ways to legally reject people, but Godly ways to understand, love, and connect.

For 31 years, the staff of Insight Counseling Centers(Formerly the Pastoral Counseling Centers of Tennessee) has sought to meet each client where they are, to provide a sacred and caring space that allows for open self-reflection, and to help the person develop into who they understand God to be calling them to be.  We seek to understand our clients’ story from their inside out and to hold that story with respect and care.  We have always sought to embody a “Counseling Unconditionally” that mirrors our understanding of God’s love for us.  We will continue to do this.  You are welcome here.