Fear vs. Love

Much of what I do as Pastoral Counselor is help people manage their fear.  It is really amazing how much fear creeps into our lives (and I use “our” because I am not immune).  People can be paralyzed by their fears of being wrong or being “bad”.  We can live in fear that others will not like us.  We fear other’s judgment and we fear being hurt.  We fear being abandoned in relationships (or never being loved at all).  We can live in fear of losing our jobs and we can live in fear of another’s anger.  There are specific fears about closed spaces (been there, done that), spiders, other people and even the number 13.  We live with fears of flying and driving, which are mostly fears of crashing.  We all live with the knowledge that we will die some day and somehow must deal with at least some anxiety about when and how that will come to us. Some people fear death so much that they don’t ever let themselves live and others act as if they have no respect for death and continually challenge it. 

 

Some of these fears seem healthy.  Fear is a way of letting us know when we are in danger.  The difficulty is that too often, we are conditioned to feel fear that is out of proportion to the stimulus or feel fear when there is no real threat to us.  Trying to discern the real threats from the imagined threats is not an easy task.  The difficulty lies in the fact that there are some real threats in the world.  There are dangerous activities and dangerous places.  There are dangerous people and potentials for pain.  For example, there are some dangerous dogs, but not all dogs are dangerous.  Under the right circumstances all dogs might be dangerous sometime.  Just because we may have been bitten once by one dog does not mean that we must avoid all dogs forever, but that is exactly what some people do with dogs, situations, and people.  Sometimes just knowing that a “dogs have the capacity to bite” is sufficient for some to fear them.  There are others who know that dogs can bite, but assume their dog never would.

In a similar way, many people seem to try to avoid fears by doing anything, but facing their fears.  People try to medicate their fears with prescription and non-prescription drugs (I am not talking about those who are treated for anxiety as part of comprehensive plan to overcome the fears).  There are those that withdraw from the world or from other people because they don’t want to risk anything.  People have a tendency to draw the circles of safety farther and farther out from the potentially hurtful thing.  Using the analogy of the dogs, some people are not content to avoid some dogs, but they feel they must avoid all dogs and can even come to avoid any place where there might be a dog.  With each avoidance the person is trying to create the feeling of safety. 

I John 4:18 says that there is no fear in love and that perfect love casts out fear.  It makes sense to understand this in terms of our friendships and other relationships.  When we are loved unconditionally and when another loves us so much that they seek what is best for us, there is no room for fear.  People often confuse many other things for love, but there is NO fear in love.  However, there is another way to think about this as well.  When we approach ourselves with love and we allow the love of God to fill us, then fear is also cast out.  When we interact with the world around us, we do not fear what the other may do or what may happen because we are driven by the love that is in us.  We can better deal with our lives and difficulties, because we are not afraid to deal with difficult things; we can approach the world with confidence.  When love is present, fear cannot take hold.  A good process of pastoral psychotherapy seeks to help people develop this kind of approach to God, themselves, life, and the world.  I praythat you not just have life, but have it abundantly! 

Bears Will Be Bears

While a bear from the wild may be captured to live in a zoo or such place and a wild bear may be trained to ride a bike in the circus, for the most part, wild bears do what wild bears do.  Several years ago, while trying to emphasize a point about how to deal with some types of difficult people, I began to pick on bears.  I could have easily picked on some other animal, but the bears were an easy target.  I have sometimes heard horrible stories about how a bear somewhere had attacked an innocent hiker.  More frequently we hear stories of how a bear somewhere entered a campground and ate all the campers’ food.  Bears, being bears, do not judge the ethics of their actions.  If you get too close to a mama bear’s cub, she will attack to protect her baby.  If a bear is hungry, it will seek out food and eat whatever is most convenient.  The bear does not judge a camper’s goodness or badness.  The bear does not care how hard it was for the camper to haul the food to the camp site.   The bear is just doing what the bear does.  The first time that a bear eats a camper’s food, the camper may be angry with the bear, but once it has been established that bears are present and that bears will eat your food, one can hardly be angry with the bear if the bear does this again.  This is why campers often have to hang their food in trees or put their food in a boat on a lake away from the camp site.  Bears will do what bears do.  There is nothing that will make the bear change its behavior, so, the camper must change how he manages the camp site and the food.

Like the camper, many of us have people in our lives that do things that hurt or annoy us.  There are people that continually try to rob of the good things in our lives.  Our first instinct is to take these behaviors personally and wonder why we have been singled out.  We may feel anger at the person and may even make attempts to change their terrible ways.  However, if we begin to think of them as bears, we realize that these problematic people are not doing these things “to us” because they do these things to everyone; it is just their nature.  We do not have to take it personally because it is not personal.  The bear is just doing what bears do.  The bear’s behavior is not a judgment on us because the bear is not taking our value into account at all.  Just as campers must find ways to protect their food from the bear’s attacks, we must find ways to alter our ways when we encounter the “bears” in our lives.  There is not one universal way for dealing with “bears”.   Often the way we need to respond is dependent on our situation.  In some cases, doing whatever the equivalent of hanging our food in a tree is sufficient to protect us from the bear’s attack.  However, as some of clients have pointed out, there are times when the bears are so persistent that not camping in those areas at all may be necessary.  One client once heard me talk about the bears and told me that the “bears” in her life had completely ruined “camping” for her altogether.  In this metaphor, we must assume that not “camping” is not an option.  We cannot allow the actions of some bears to ruin our experience in the great outdoors.  We cannot let others rob us of the joy of living.  I know sometimes it feels like we should just avoid every situation where there might be bears, but the reality is that bears are everywhere.  (I saw a news story this week of bears wrestling in a backyard in Florida.  Who knew there were bears in Florida?).  We cannot change the bears, but we sure can change how we relate to them.  The bears in our lives can be crafty and sometimes can trick us into letting our guard down, but when we do, we must look at ourselves and how we were deceived and not at the bear because the deception may be in the “bear’s” nature.  If we are picking on bears, then I would say that we cannot avoid every single animal simply because there are bears in the world.  Not all animals act like the bears.  However, all the animals have their own way of relating.  Some of those animals can be quite docile and affectionate. 

Most of us have some “bears” in our lives.  Some bears live in our own homes with us and some are people at work, school, or church.  Sometimes figuring out the emotional equivalent of “hanging your food in a tree” can be tricky, but it can usually be done.  “Leaving the woods” or never “camping” are rarely the best options.   If you are having difficulty with a “bear” in your life, a good therapist might be helpful.  A good trustworthy friend can often be helpful as well.  Just remember that bears will be bears and you can learn to co-exist with them.  Happy Camping.

The Wild God

I first encountered this reading when I was in training 15 years ago.  I have kept a copy ever since.   I shared it this morning with the Executive Peer Circle Group I am a part of this year. 

The Wild God

From The Art of the Psychotherapist  

By

James F.T. Bugental, Ph.D.

They have said that God is dead, and it may be so, But I believe that the God who is dead is the god in the cage, the zoo god.  We thought to contain the zoo god by our definitions, our interpretations, our inventions of “divine laws.”  The god whom we captured and domesticated in our intellectual zoo of exotic concepts, that god has not thrived in captivity, and that god has died.

But the wild god, the god that cannot be captured by our wills or our intellects – the wild god who will not be domesticated – is alive and free as ever.  He moves in the wind.  She sings in the silences of the desert. It nourishes us in the sun.

The wild god is more than the god of evolution; the wild god breathes revolution as well. The zoo god could not take us by surprise; we visited him at our convenience and chiefly as children.  The zoo god could not upset the comfortable routines of our lives, and he seemed - until he died – to require little feeding with anything that mattered.

Not to be so trained is the wild god, who may overturn everything as he comes into our lives.  She may demand all we have as It devours our complacency and requires us to change violently, totally, frighteningly.

[Paul] Tillich called the wild god, “the God above god.”  The wild god is the god of mystery.  And mystery is a world too seldom found in psychological writing or psychotherapeutic discourses.  We deny mystery; we pretend it exists in the minds of children, authors, and mystics.  And we deceive and blind ourselves when we do so. 

The wild god comes upon us in ways we cannot predict and in forms we do not expect.  The wild god may come disguised as a frightened and withdrawn client who awaits release to show a rich, poetic creativity.  The wild god may be the client who baffles us, frustrates us, and forces us to think freshly about aspects of our work which had felt solid and dependable.  The wild god may work through our own restlessness and irritability to forces us to confront long-denied inner conflicts.  The wild god shakes the ground under our feet, obscures the path we follow, and makes us aware we dwell in cages that we have constructed and that we call “reality”…

If we seek the wild god, we must go out into the world, out into the dangers and opportunities, go without a map, without a compass, without enough food, protection, anything.  And as we seek the wild god, we may be captured by him.  For mystery comprehends us; we do not comprehend it. (pp. 272-274)

A Man to Admire: Dr. John Ishee

I learned this week that Dr. John Ishee died last Saturday, May 26.  This was very sad, but not unexpected news.  John had been a part-time counselor at the Pastoral Counseling Centers of Tennessee (PCCT)  for a couple of years after he retired as the Director of Pastoral Care at Cumberland Heights treatment center.   I had heard of John for years before I first met him.  I first met him personally when I went through the family program at Cumberland Heights while working for the Alcohol and Drug Council of Middle Tennessee.   I had read two of John’s books and was honored to finally meet him.  John was a kind and humble person.  He had an unassuming style, but was strong and courageous.   I wish I had known him better than I did, but what I knew made him a person to admire for me.  John had a passion for his work and he gave of himself to help those that he encountered.  In addition to the education and counseling he did at Cumberland Heights, he also lead their worship services in the chapel each Sunday morning.  Before Cumber Heights built their new “Chapel-torium”, the services in the old chapel had to be broadcast on closed-circuit T.V. to other rooms at Cumberland Heights that were used for overflow.  John not only talked about God’s grace, but he embodied it.  Even when talking about people or things that were difficult, John had a way of being loving and kind. 

John was a deep thinking, a thoughtful and caring person who embodied grace and love in his interactions with others.   He was the kind of person that when I spent time with him, I always came away feeling that I had so much room to grow.  However, after spending time with John, I never came away feeling bad about myself in any way because John embodied such a caring and encouraging spirit.  Each encounter with him was truly a breath of fresh air in an otherwise cluttered and stifling day. 

When John was preparing to retire from Cumberland Heights he approached me about working at PCCT.  Though John had training and 24 years of experience in Pastoral ministry and counseling, he was not a licensed counselor.  We agreed that he would come to work for PCCT part-time and we would provide him with supervision.  If he got the hours he needed for licensure before he was ready to retire again, then he could apply for a license, but if not, then he would be able to provide care for people legally.  Somehow, I had the feeling that those who were in supervision group with John would learn more from him than he would learn from the group, but John never said that.  John always talked about what a blessing it was to work with us and to be in the Supervision group.  That just seemed to reflect the genuine humility with which John lived his life. 

John left PCCT on medical leave about a year ago after being diagnosed with cancer.  I tried to keep up with him and called him from time to time.  Each time I called he would tell me of his latest treatments for cancer, but he also knew that he would probably not survive his illness.  I thought it was just like him to be thinking about how to care for others after he was gone.  He said that he wanted to be sure that gifts given in his honor would either go to the endowment fund at Cumberland Heights or the Pastoral Counseling Centers of Tennessee.  There many people that I can learn from in this world, but there have been just a few that I would want to emulate.  John Ishee was that kind of man for me.  He was a blessing to so many and he will be missed in this world.  I pray God’s peace and comfort for John’s wife, Myra, and the rest of his family.

Psychotherapy: Empathic Failures, Great & Small

There is no fun in psychiatry. If you try to get fun out of it, you pay a considerable price for your unjustifiable optimism. ~ Harry Stack Sullivan

            Despite the quote above, Harry Stack Sullivan seems to have a great deal of optimism about the human condition.  He does not believe that our emotional lives are fixed in the first few years of our lives, but created in every moment of our lives.  That is hopeful.  As a therapist, my goal is to enter into relationship with people, join them in that journey of their life, and hopefully help co-create a new reality.  There is nothing more meaningful and humbling than when this occurs.   Sullivan is also the person that points out that as therapists, part of the therapeutic process is recovering from a series of empathic failures on our part as we attempt to connect with our clients. 

            From the moment when the client enters our office for the first time, we attempt to get to know them and their situation.    We try to not overwhelm them by spending too much time on the intake paperwork.  We try to communicate our best understanding of what the client is dealing with and what he or she may be feeling.  In subsequent sessions, we sometimes forget small details of the client’s story and that may feel like a failure to the client who wants to be understood and remembered.  At times, we may presuppose a client is feeling one thing and not be attuned enough to them to realize that they feel something else.  These little failures on the part of the therapist can create small set-backs in the therapeutic process, but Sullivan suggests that the process of therapy is the recovery of the therapeutic relationship from such failures.  I am not an expert in Sullivan’s theory of Interpersonal Psychiatry, but I would imagine that when we begin to recover from such empathic failures in therapy, it helps us to be better equipped to deal with them outside of therapy and even be more tolerant when they occur.  Life is full of little disappointments and the ability to not define any relationship by those moments seems critical to the survival of relationships and authentic happiness.

            Then there are those OTHER moments.  From time to time, our emotional reactions or our misjudgments as therapists result in us having a huge lapse in empathy and completely missing our clients.  In 15 years of doing therapy, my experience has been that after my early years of training, these larger lapses in empathy were fairly rare.  When they occur, however, they often result in clients leaving therapy altogether.  This is one of the most difficult things to deal with as a therapist.  There are some therapists who tend to blame their clients for “lack of readiness to enter therapy” and there may be times when that is true, but as therapists we have to admit that sometimes we mess up.  I am not talking about the gross misuse of a client or horrible bending of the therapeutic boundaries, but the failure to connect with our clients in way that is meaningful. (The client may be fully justified in leaving, especially if the miss is egregious or happens a number of times.)  Many times these types of failures occur when we, as therapists, fail to keep our own emotions and relational “baggage” out of the therapy with another person.  Therapy is about the person in front of us and not about us.  A good therapist must have gone through some process (like their own therapy or another self-reflective experience) to maximize his or her ability to avoid these big empathic misses. 

            Each empathic miss, large or small, becomes an opportunity to learn.  It is a chance to learn more about our clients and more about ourselves.  The therapeutic process at its best is an interaction of two people for the benefit of one of them.  The therapeutic process is co-created by therapist and client and it is the therapist who needs to always be mindful of the process and tending to the client.  We are obviously not perfect at this.  Some are obviously better than others (and some are really bad), but the good therapist recognizes these failures, seeks supervision, does the hard work of introspection, and continues to seek to be better.  Our clients help us and help themselves when they realize that there is a process and that the process is co-created.  Conversation and connection create the holy space for both of us.

Tennessee Has Professional Standards for Pastoral Counselors

I have watched with sadness as the accusations have emerged against Bishop Joseph Walker at the Mt. Zion Baptist Church.  The veracity of these allegations will hopefully be proven in time, but Bishop Walker is not the first to be accused of such abuse of their position.  What makes this sad to me is that the majority of congregational leaders who seek to offer guidance and comfort to their parishioners do so with honor and integrity.  The religious leaders of all faiths seek to meet those in their care at a point of need with the resources of their experience, education, and faith training.  In many cases, these faith resources and the care of the Pastor, Priest, or Rabbi are sufficient to help the care recipient resolve their issues.  However, most religious leaders who have professional training have received only one or two classes in pastoral care and/or counseling.  When the problems that are presented to the congregational leader exceed his or her training, there are many mental health resources to which they may refer, however, Tennessee is one of a few states that has a specific license for Pastoral Counselors.  In Tennessee, these professionals are called Clinical Pastoral Therapists and like the majority of clergy in the congregation, these licensed men and women are trained in theology, church history, and biblical studies.  However, unlike many in the local congregation, these Pastoral Therapists have additional education, experience, and supervision that prepare them to deal with more advanced issues of mental illness, mood disorders, partner relationship problems, and other struggles.

 

Clinical Pastoral Therapists must have graduate level training in Theology, usually a Master of Divinity, and graduate level training in counseling or psychology. In addition to these degrees, Pastoral counselors licensed by the state or who have achieved Fellow level membership in the American Association of Pastoral Counselors (AAPC) have additional training in personal formation and clinical work as well as supervision of their clinical work equal to or greater than other mental health providers in Tennessee.  Many Pastoral Therapists in Tennessee are also ordained in their faith tradition.  These theologically trained mental health providers must abide by the ethical standards of their professional organization and must answer to the state of Tennessee for violations of their code of conduct.  Pastoral Therapists are also required to have annual continuing education and most operate with consultation available from peers or other mental health disciplines.  Those who practice in this way are not perfect and some have been accused of abusing their power, however, there are layers of legal and professional accountability that help prevent such abuses; accountability and guidelines that are sometimes absent for those providing counseling in local congregations.

Again, I would say that the majority of spiritual leaders offering care and counseling as part of their ministry in local congregations do so with honor and integrity.  Most people who need assistance would prefer to seek that assistance from someone who understands and respects their faith tradition, but those who are seeking help should also know the education and experience of the person that they approach for help.  They should not be afraid to ask about training, credentials, and license.  In Tennessee it is perfectly legal and acceptable for a member of the clergy to offer care and counseling as part of his or her role in the local congregation, but in those times when someone might desire a religious professional who has more training in counseling and relationships, I would recommend the services of Licensed Clinical Pastoral Therapist.