Faith, Hope, and Therapy: Counseling with St. Paul

By Roger Grainger

As a parish minister and a chartered counseling psychologist, author Dr. Roger Grainger works in the secular world every day. His clients dont come to him for religious advice, so, despite his background as a Christian priest, he must talk to them in everyday language. Even so, many of the points he makes are relevant in both secular and faith-based contexts.

Faith, Hope, and Therapy: Counseling with St. Paul is based upon his work with a number of his clients. Among them are Andrea, a woman who is deeply unhappy because she doesnt know who she is; Dale, who feels he has no purpose in life; Mrs. Ingram, unable to handle bereavement; and Daniel, unable to live up to his fathers expectations. Each client has a unique story and the need for therapy to discover their true paths in life.

Grainger demonstrates how his faith was both informed and illuminated by these encounters. Even when his clients take him by surprise, he learns from them because he recognizes that only by acting as a real human being, with his own faults and foibles, and not as an impeccable professional clothed in a mantle of objectivity, can he truly be a professional. Through these stories, he seeks to offer models to anyone seeking to change his or her way of doing things.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Sep 28, 2011
• ISBN: 9781426995811

Roger Grainger

Roger Grainger is a sociologist of religion and a counseling psychologist. A doctor of divinity of London University, he is professor extraordinary in theology at North-West University, South Africa, and an honorary research fellow of University of Roehampton. Ordained into the Anglican Church in 1966, he retired from full-time hospital chaplaincy in order to concentrate on writing and research. His latest book is Ritual and Theatre (Austin Macauley 2014).

Book preview

Faith, Hope and Therapy

Counseling with St Paul

Roger Grainger

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© Copyright 2011 Roger Grainger.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

Printed in the United States of America.

ISBN: 978-1-4269-9583-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4269-9582-8 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4269-9581-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011916815

Trafford rev. 09/14/2011

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Contents

Introduction

1 Andrea

(Where am I? What am I? Who am I?)

2 Clive and Andrew

(Onward Christian soldiers…)

3 Softly, softly

(It stands to reason…)

4 Sophie

(Money can’t buy me love)

5 Messages

(Telling it slant)

6 Discerning spirits

(What’s going on here?)

7 Mrs Ingram

(You’re not listening…)

8 Stories

(It’s all in the past, isn’t it?)

Afterword

Notes

Bibliography

For Paul

Psychic awareness

Our task during this earthly life, one of physical embodiment or incarnation, is to grow into the fullness of our unique identity as given by God. Incarnation produces the separation necessary to enable each of us to develop our individual character. We are to learn lessons of self-control, selflessness and humility, to learn how to reason and to handle intuition, to master both emotion and intellect. Hopefully we develop good habits of honest thinking, sincere feeling, determined willing and responsive praying. Incarnation is for individuation. As Polonius said in Hamlet, This above all, to thine own self be true and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man (Act I sc. 3, 78—82)

An Anglican priest

Introduction

Counseling psychologists work in the secular world of everyday. People don’t come to them for religious advice. A Christian priest employed in a job like this has to learn to speak a different language. This doesn’t mean, however, that he has to say different things. In fact, there are ways in which psychotherapy deals with things which get in the way of the Gospel, bringing healing to people who never cross the threshold of a church.

This book is based on my experience as an Anglican priest and a psychotherapist in private practice. It attempts to show how the two approaches work together in the way I counsel people, as my deep love of St Paul’s Epistles undergirds the things I have learned as a counselor. It is a book for ordinary readers, whether or not they consider themselves to be religious. Most of my clients have no connection with formal religion; this is something which quite a few of them have unhappy memories of! For me, however, the truth revealed in Christ is strengthened by an understanding of the nature of psychological problems and the human need which they express; my aim is to encourage the experience of personal freedom. The book is based on the way different clients bring their own psychological problems, each one occupying his or her own spiritual space, and each having a unique story to tell. The book is about them more than about me, and its aim is to give examples of the way mission sometimes works best underground.

All the people mentioned in this book are real people but their stories have been heavily disguised.

Chapter 1 Andrea (Where am I? What am I? Who am I?) tries to answer the question, How may a Christian psychotherapist reach out to clients who believe God is irrelevant? Chapter 2 Clive and Andrew (Onward Christian Soldiers…) demonstrates two ways in which Church membership calls for a counseling awareness. Chapter 3 Softly, softly (It stands to reason…) explores the situation of someone seeking purely intellectual answers to questions about their purpose in life. Chapter 4 Sophie (Money can’t buy me Love) introduces the way in which a healing relationship was built up with someone suspicious of letting their feelings be seen; and this theme is continued in Chapter 5 Messages (Telling it slant). Chapter 6 Discerning Spirits (What’s going on here?) develops the idea of trying to find out what a troubled person is really saying. In Chapter 7 Mrs Ingram (You’re not listening…) the key theme of using stories comes into greater prominence in connection with bereavement. Chapter 8 Stories (It’s all in the past) is the final chapter, developing the theme of the previous one and giving examples of the way the healing of the emotions may open us to the Gospel.

This is not any kind of text-book. It is primarily aimed at church bookshops and bookstalls. Professional therapists, counselors and clergy are certainly catered for, as are church members involved in pastoral work, formal or informal, and indeed anyone interested in the interface between psychology and religion. Spiritual Directors should find it useful, too!

1 Andrea

(Where am I? What am I? Who am I?)

I don’t want to talk about God. He is irrelevant.

The trouble was, Andrea was irrelevant, too. At least, she thought she was. This was how she felt. She expressed herself forcibly, as she always did when she came to see me. When we first met she said that she was suffering from an interior dialogue, an anxious rehearsal of myself. If I was taken aback by the striking way she put it, I tried, as counselors do, not to show it too much. This first session consisted largely of my trying to discover what she was really anxious about. What had actually been happening, or happening to make things bad enough for her to feel in need of help? What I actually said was the kind of help I might be able to give you. As she had made clear at the beginning, she didn’t want to talk about anything religious. No, it was more personal than that. Certainly more pressing.

Andrea was deeply unhappy with herself, although judging by her appearance of self-confidence, the smartness of what she was wearing, the relaxed charm she found so easy to project, you would probably not have thought so. I didn’t, anyway, or not to begin with. She told me that during the last three or four years she had started various courses of further education—at least two, it may have been more—and then after a few weeks suddenly felt she couldn’t go on, and consequently dropped out: I just didn’t see the point. Looking back at this, she still didn’t see the point, and this was what was worrying her so much. Why, she asked me, did she feel like this? It was important to her to find the answer because she felt she was wasting valuable time not getting started on life in the way that her friends and contemporaries had succeeded in doing. She was wasting time; if she wasn’t careful she would miss the boat so that she never in fact caught up with her contemporaries who were busy doing the things they should be doing, the things expected of them, in fact.

Andrea was 23. Like most people of her age, she longed at the same time to belong and not belong to the world around her. At this stage in our relationship, on this first occasion, this was her main concern. At least this is what she said troubled her most. And it seemed quite straightforward to me. One expects people around that age to be unsure about choices which recently seemed in tune with what the person involved really wanted to do, to be suddenly reversed in the light of experience; it is, after all, a little early to distinguish one’s best chance of managing to cope satisfactorily with life when it is the first opportunity you may ever have had to do so.

But it went deeper than this, as it very often does. Andrea wasn’t able to make meaningful choices about herself—choices which would really mean something to herself—because she wasn’t really sure who Andrea was. She was something other people talked about, someone they were obviously aware of, and they likewise could be taken into account by Andrea, but where on earth was the missing dimension, the one able to hold those two things together? Where was her own awareness of her own reality? Where was Andrea forAndrea? I asked her this question, once we knew each other a little better, and she couldn’t answer me. She got upset trying to stand back from herself in order to look at herself.

It’s not that I can’t see anything there, she said, it’s that I don’t like what I do see. I asked her what she could possibly mean? How could she manage to do both things at once? See herself and at the same time, in her own eyes remain invisible. It’s quite simple, she said: I want people to see the ‘me’ which they want to see, and that doesn’t really leave much room for anything else.

The fact was that Andrea seemed to be devoting all her energies to carrying out other people’s specifications for herself, and this meant she couldn’t afford to waste any of her attention on herself. In her own eyes she existed to please other people. Surely that was a good thing, the very essence of unselfishness; and that is what she said when I pointed it out to her. However I also pointed out that pleasing others was the best way of avoiding censure. Perhaps self-effacement felt like the safest way as well as the most virtuous!

I don’t want to look at myself because I don’t like what I would see. I don’t like myself. I said I wasn’t surprised, because nature abhors a vacuum. Not surprisingly, she didn’t find that very funny. So—what was to be done? The situation appeared to both of us to be urgent, if not as yet actually critical. How could I help someone who wasn’t really there to be helped! At least this is how Andrea saw it. I know, because she said so.

At this point I remembered what the French philosopher Jacques Derrida said about a particular state of mind, the one which he said characterized the condition of Jewishness. To be a Jew, says Derrida, is to affirm affirmation.(1) Jews are people who believe in the future. They are people to whom a future has been promised. Jewishness is, therefore, to know who you are. I didn’t immediately see how this could help Andrea, who was certainly not Jewish however.

Nor, as she had been at pains to point out at the very beginning of our association, was she a Christian either. Andrea was not religious, and you’d better not try to convert me, or you won’t see my heels for dust. It was quite simple: if I talked about religion she wouldn’t come again. You can choose, she said. In fact, however, what the philosopher said was very relevant indeed. To believe in the future is to open yourself to all sorts of surprises, for the future unfolds. We can’t control it, although we work on the assumption that we can—which is why it never ceases to take us by surprise. The future is nothing if not surprising.

Certainly I didn’t expect to find myself suddenly reminded of the Damascus Road and what it was that transformed Saul into Paul in the most startling identity-change the Christian church has ever witnessed. Saul, as a Jew, was nurtured in hope, educated in promise—very different from Andrea’s generation—but the moment of recognition took place somewhere else altogether, beyond the reach of expectation. At this stage along the way nothing was available but response; understanding, explanation, even belief are all surrendered in exchange for life, for the new birth which was Paul.

This story strengthens my own faith; but it couldn’t help her yet. Common sense told me