Forgiveness Is Just The Beginning

By Jeffrey Steffon

Gerald had been in and out of prison most of his life. He was recently incarcerated for four years due to domestic violence and was recently released. He was extremely fearful that if another incident happened, he would go back to prison for the rest of his life. Through his whole life, he couldn't control his anger. One day, I asked, "Are you ready to get rid of that anger?" He said, "Yes." I led him through forgiving those who hurt him and inviting the Lord to heal the pain those people caused him. During that session, he experienced a tremendous weight lifting off from his shoulders and a deep peace. Since that day, he has been different. It has been one year, and he continues to be free from anger and stays peaceful. Through the principles and prayers in this book, you too can be free and receive the peace Gerald received.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Mar 19, 2019
• ISBN: 9781643493626

Book preview

1

Can God Get a Seat in a Therapy Office?

Just get over it. It’s been a long time. When are you going to let it go and be done with it? That’s what some people tell you to do when you are angry. Move on. Sounds like good advice, doesn’t it? I mean, who wants to live with anger and resentment in their life? Generally, people want to be happy, not sad and angry. So, what do we do? We try not to remember the anger, how we were hurt. We take that anger and repress it so it is not conscious. We try to forget about it or not think about it. But even if we shove it down, suppress it, or try to forget it, that anger and pain stays within us and somehow creeps back into our daily lives. For example, one Sunday at our church, there was a sermon about forgiveness. After the service, my wife spoke with an elderly man about the sermon, sharing with him, That is what we need to do: we need to forgive our family and friends. He replied, I will never forgive him for what he did. My wife asked, Who? He responded, My father. I will never forgive him for what he did to me. He just walked away. Wow, I thought. He is about seventy-eight years old, and his father died years ago. Why hold on to that anger? What is the purpose of that anger?

Like that elderly man, we may want to hold on to anger. I want that person to feel the pain that I feel! So we dig in our heels and refuse to forgive. We hold on to that anger, thinking, I’ll show them. I’ll teach them a lesson that they cannot do this to me. Think about that elderly man. What lesson was he teaching his father? What pain was he hoping his father would feel? His father would not feel anything. His father is already dead! So, who was this elderly man really hurting? He was only hurting himself. In his refusal to forgive, he was making the choice to hold on to this anger and pain for the rest of his life.

I remember one day after giving a presentation that an elderly woman came up to me and said, You are too young to know all this stuff. I instantly felt a surge of energy run through my body. Too young, I thought. I wanted to say, Lady, I am thirty-one years old, and I know what I am talking about! But I didn’t. I did not want to make a scene or attack her. I simply greeted the other people after the talk. When I returned home, I wondered, Where did that surge of energy come from? Why did I get so angry at what that woman said? As I thought and prayed, I remembered what I was told when I was a little boy. You are too young to go with your brothers. You are too young to understand. It was always You are too young.

That phrase stuck in my mind. Then I had a choice. Do I want to get rid of that pain of my younger years, or do I want to keep it there, bottled up? Do I want to be free, or bound? How could I be truly free? I could have reasoned that I was indeed too young to do some of the things that they were doing. Maybe that would have been enough. But I went deeper, because I wanted to be sure to have all that anger and hurt leave. I had to forgive. I had to forgive my parents and my older brothers. So, I sat down and sought the presence of God. Then I brought to mind the words and actions of my parents and brothers. I chose to forgive them in the name of Jesus. But that forgiveness was only the first step. It did not remove all the hurt that I experienced at that time. Forgiveness was only the first step in the process of being free from the anger and pain inside.

Well, couldn’t I have entered into psychological counseling to deal with that issue? Yes, I could have. Would counseling alone have assisted me in achieving peace regarding the hurt that I felt at that time in my life? Maybe. Was I just fooling myself in bringing that area of my life before the Lord? Is there a place in the counseling offices for prayer and spirituality?

In this present age, the world, especially the Western world, has evolved into a secular society. From this secular point of view God, religion, faith, and the resurrection of Jesus have little or nothing to do with psychology or psychiatry, or with the healing of any sort of human misery.¹ If our worldview is strictly secular (or humanistic), then there will not be a place for any belief in God. Does the science of psychology allow for a belief in God? If we follow the worldview of the secular Western society, the science of psychology should be able to solve or provide answers for any human difficulty.

There are three branches of psychology. One branch is psychobiology, which studies the brain and glandular system. A second branch is experimental psychology, which studies how human beings react, perceive, think, understand, or learn. Then there is clinical psychology, which treats suffering and psychologically disabled people to help them be free of their suffering and enable them to function in the world as adequately as possible.² The difference between experimental psychology and clinical psychology is in experimental psychology the experimenter asks the questions and the subject answers. In clinical psychology the suffering patient asks the questions, and the therapist tries to answer.³ Clinical psychology also is divided into five viewpoints. At the basis of these viewpoints is a philosophical belief about the universe and the human person.

In the medical-biological and behaviorist theories of psychology, most clinicians take for granted that the mind and personality are more or less reducible to the brain and physical organism, and that talk about God is meaningless. One is viewed as a machine and that in order for that machine to function properly, balance must be restored to a system that has become unbalanced. For example, what about a person who is depressed? These theories of psychology would state that the depression is due to a chemical imbalance, and if you supply the right chemicals to the person, they will be healed. While it is very important to understand the chemical reactions of the brain and provide a necessary chemical intervention help to bring a chemical balance to the brain, it is important to unearth the reason for the chemical imbalance. Human distress, grief, fear, and meaninglessness can create a chemical imbalance just as easily as a chemical imbalance can create the emotional difficulties. Human beings need love, creativity, and inner harmony, as well as some meaningful experience of transcendence, if they are to maintain a proper chemical balance as a living organism.⁴

Behaviorists believe that when one is born that their brain is a blank sheet of paper and our personality is learned. If this is so, then it can be unlearned. In a sense, we are programmed to have a certain set of responses by our experiences. If we learn to be neurotic or psychotic, then it can be unlearned. Behaviorism has taught people a lot about positive reinforcement which has tremendously helped many people. A purely behaviorist approach does not allow for a belief in a God, Who is the Creator and sustains the universe. The essential problem with both the behaviorist and the medical-biological points of view is that, having limited themselves to observable, objectively verifiable data, they slip unconsciously into maintaining that these are the only data.⁵ They leave out the human experiences of love, artistic expression, and religious experience.

Sigmund Freud believed that there could be physical causes of mental illness, but he posited that there was something else within the human being that could bring about mental difficulties. This was the unconscious, a part of the person that holds all that has happened to them in their lives. (The following description is not meant to be a thorough understanding of Sigmund Freud’s theory of personality. I am only sharing a few basic concepts.) The ego is that center of our conscious life. The ego helps to manage our lives. The id is the pleasure principle. The superego is a censor, which can be expressed as our conscience. The ego balances the drive of the id and the superego. Also, Freud was very pessimistic. For Freud, Religious belief is detrimental to mental health, a reliance on illusion.⁶

The humanistic point of view emphasizes the goodness in human beings. An important role of people is self-awareness and growing into one’s potential. They see the goodness in human beings, and they believe that if people are treated with unconditional care, concern, and empathy that they will move toward self-actualization and wholeness.⁷ This viewpoint has a very Christian tone, but essentially exalts the human person over God. In other words, the human person becomes God. For the humanist, their faith is in their own love, not in God’s love or in God’s salvation; most of them never raise the possibility of being lifted up by God out of human lostness.⁸ Paul Vitz, sharing about his teaching secular psychology at a university suggests,

"Abandonment of one’s religious background is reliably assumed to be a rational consequence of getting an education, particularly in graduate schools." He went on to say that when God is thus dismissed and the problem of evil avoided, we have not only humanistic psychology, but humanistic religion taught in state supported schools.⁹

Cognitive therapy would fall under the humanistic viewpoint.