Audio Transcript:

Prayer and Christian Counseling

Welcome to week six of counseling 56. This week’s focus is on prayer and Christian counseling. In this and the second lecture, we will look at specific ways that prayer is used in counseling and seek to understand how we can become a more prayerful people and how we can help connect our clients with God through prayer. A starting point for us is to focus on a working definition of prayer. As we might use in Christian counseling. There have been thousands of books written on prayer. And the Lord was approached by his disciples with a simple request. Teach us how to pray. Now, these men and watch Jesus raise people from the dead. They had watched him calm a raging sea and stormy weather. They had watched him multiply the bread and fish to feed a multitude. They had watched him heal lepers and the blind and drive out demons. But somehow they perceived that the real source of power in Jesus came from his prayer life. So they didn’t ask teachers to do Miracles. Teaches how to calm the weather. They said, teach us how to pray. And that is still our request today. That more and more on a daily basis, we might turn to Christ himself, has our teacher in prayer. Along the way. Many people have been used by Christ. Teach us about prayer in the life of prayer. St. Augustan was one of those great teachers. In summarizing much of his thinking and teaching about prayer, he said, true whole Prayer is nothing but love. He was cutting through the layers of discussion about techniques of prayer, about proper wording or posture, places or methods of prayer. To say that prayer is our connection with the love of God. Now there is a difference between the practice of prayer in the name of Jesus and human prayer fullness. Some of you may remember the days following the September 11th terrorist attacks. Churches in chapels were nearly full, even with people who claim to believe in nothing. But were there praying for relatives, friends, and loved ones who had yet to be found in the rubble of the World Trade Center destruction. There was a tremendous outpouring of human prayerful miss, an instinctive response in times of great crisis, an overwhelming need for a contact with something or someone greater than us. There was a strong desire for transcendent experience, for help from beyond. The Christian prayer is more specific than that. To pray as a Christian is to believe in the power of the name of Jesus. To pray as a Christian is to pray through Jesus. Thanks be to God that the only intercessor we have is Jesus himself, who was described has being at the right hand of the Father. He is always interceding for his people. Now there’s a great paradox and prayers we seek to define what it is. Prayer is both something we do and something we couldn’t possibly do it as a gift we receive. In church you’ve heard stories of believers who were called prayer warriors, or that they had the gift of prayer. That is an accurate way of speaking of a praying person. Some people do seem to have a special anointing, a special gift for prayer. The prayer, something that all Christians can do and are commanded to do. It is an activity that we can learn and that we can teach others to do. Prayer is a basic receptive attitude. That it is not what we say nowhere in our posture or any special words we use. But it is waiting on God, waiting to receive what he has for us. Also, prayer as a listening attitude. It is responding to the divine voice and call in our lives. Christian counseling always involves God, has the powerful third party and healing and change. So prayer is that ultimate therapeutic relationship in which we are connected to God in the work that we do. Dallas Willard summarize prayer by describing it as the way of the request he offers the biblically grounded inside. That prayer is really a matter of asking for what we need. Seek and you will find knock and the door will be opened to you. Now sum of Asked, if clients are paying for their therapy, should we pray with them? Main points out that the more appropriate question is, which forms of prayer should we use with which clients, and under what circumstances? As Christian counselors, we should pray as part of our work. The real questions revolve more around how should we pray? How should we draw our clients? And in what ways can prayer be use to open up the hearts of people so that the Holy Spirit might speak powerfully into their labs. Part of the training and supervision we receive should teach us ways to show appropriate caution so that we do not violate the empowerment client’s ability to self-direct or so that we do not attempt to draw people into praying in ways that are not appropriate to their level of spiritual development. What about if we’re dealing with non-believers? Do we still pray for them? Well, of course we do. But do we pray out loud with him in the session? Dewey pray silently. Do we pray outside of the counseling session? Those are just some of the questions you must wrestle with as a Christian counselor. On the next two slides are laid out a few points that compare the processes of Outside in change with inside-out change. For long-term transformational change in redemption. The inside-out process is key. This is not intended to dismiss or do away with the importance of therapeutic techniques that work from the outside in those are very important to help move clients towards inside-out change. When speaking of outside in change, people often go through what therapists referred to as dislocating experiences, such as the death of a loved one or a terrible tragedy. The counselor hopes to use a dislocating experience to create a moment in which a person might be teachable to use it as a way to break through the numbness in their life or to break habits that are causing problems. Another way people may go through outside in change is the idea of hitting bottom. You hear this term used in addiction circles, such as in the belief that an alcoholic will finally go to rehab or start getting involved with Alcoholics Anonymous when they can go no lower. But hitting rock bottom varies with each person. Sometimes it takes the loss of a job. Sometimes the bottom comes when a spouse has had enough and walks out, taking the children with them and leaving them alone. Or maybe the individual has been arrested for number of DUS and now has lost their driver’s license. Sometimes the bottom comes when family and friends confront the alcoholic in the form of an intervention. Interventions can be very useful because they are intended to create a bottom without all of the consequences that might happen later on. Change therapies are methods that are actively involved helping people to connect with our external pane so that they are more willing to change. The idea is that there is an internal balance that all of us have where we will continue doing the things we’re doing until they become so painful that the cost is too high to keep doing them. And then were willing to pay the cost to change. Sometimes you hear speakers talk about acting your way into feeling and thinking. This can be a powerful outside and type of change. Showing clients they can achieve the things they need, helping them to change their behavior. Recall that one of the nine dimensions of human functioning on the metamorphic grid is action or the behavior of a person. So often a starting point when we want to help people see some immediate results and begin to build motivation through those results is starting with their actions. We can do this by helping them through cognitive behavior therapy to identify troublesome behaviors. Now the remarkable thing is that as our behavior changes, our feelings and thinking can change to we feel that we now feel differently about ourselves. We now think in a clearer way, because we change some small actions. Sometimes outside in change also takes the form of what will it refers to as condemnation engineering. Meaning that in much of our lives we experience condemnation. That all around us. We find judgmental attitudes, guilt trips, nitpicking over every little thing. So we want to make sure that we do not do that to our clients. The one thing we can be sure of with every client we see that each of them is experienced some form of condemnation in their life. So we need to practice praying for them, as well as praying for ourselves that we would not have a condemning or judgmental attitude towards them. It can be a real professional challenge. When you see clients who have engaged in behavior that you’ve consider repellent. To be able to receive them with true hospitality, and to really be able to pray for them has an act of grace. However, you find that you cannot get past the sense of condemnation toward a client because of what they’ve done. The professional and ethical requirement is to refer that person to someone else. You are not required to counsel every person that walks through your door. Now there are two downsides to outside and change. One is if we misread our clients motivations, our efforts can come across as trying to force upon others good things. It is similar to the principal Jesus refers to when he talks about not casting your pearls before swine. What happens when you feed pearls to pigs? Well, it makes them sick because they can’t digest them. So you’ve not only lost your pearls. Now the pigs are sick. This is what happens when we force good things on people that they’re not ready yet to receive. The second is that we have to be careful to not be more motivated than our clients. Or we end up working harder than they do. And they still do not receive the change. When we went over the metamorphic grid. Remember that the meta theory behind it is a spiritual formation and so care model of healing. That is a model of healing based on an inside out change. This is where prayer works within the core self. Those areas of the person’s, we’ll their conscience, the awakening of the image of God and the Holy Spirit within that person. The power to be found in a changed heart through Jesus. One key area of the core self is the conscience, which is that area of our inner life in which we discern right from wrong. Now the problem is that true conviction must flow from the inside out. If we’re trying to make someone feel convicted with our words or trying to force outside in change. Than people make comments like, don’t preach at me, or you hypocrite, stop looking down on me. For true conviction to work. People must feel like it is coming from them. In the same way, conversion to faith in Christ is an act of the wheel of a person. It must flow from a person’s heart. Paul, writing about this in first Corinthians 12 says, no one says Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirit. He was acknowledging how the spirit of God alone works on the heart of a person to draw that person to the faith. So it is the work of the Holy Spirit, stirring up the image of God through which each of us are created. That really begins to move a person toward conviction and then conversion and toward the great purpose for which they were created. We help this inside-out change through prayer. Prayer is the divine request. And as a way for us to request a changed heart, we never demand, but are persistent and passionate about making our request known to God that He might change a person for their good, for his good, and for the good of the world. I hope this information has been useful. Continue to ponder the power of prayer in the lives of our clients.

Prayer for Psychological and Spiritual Health

Welcome to the second presentation of week six of counseling 5-6. Now, we will look more carefully at the therapeutic uses of prayer for psychological and spiritual health. We noted in the first segment that all Christian counselors are praying people. So our challenge is to discern the best ways to pray with. And for our clients. There’s the belief in a Trinitarian relationship in Christian counseling. This is the powerful truth. God is always the third party in what we do. It is God who provides all healing and who speaks through our prayers to connect with the client. So we acknowledge that all healing comes from God as we pray. Whether we are praying outside of sessions for clients, praying within counseling sessions, or using prayer as homework. Prayer is also an openness, an attitude of receptivity. Remember the previous lecture, that prayer is both a request and the ability to receive God’s answer to that request. Prayer is also discernment. Sometimes we can be so obsessed with rationality and thinking and logic that we often forget that there are other forms of discernment. People use forms of intuitional, an imaginative discernment. But God also provides Christians with prayerful discernment. Prayer can be a strong way to discern many aspects of life that elude our logical abilities. Willard writes that prayer is also an adventure from false certainty to true uncertainty. It sounds strange. Think for a moment about people you know, who have been absolutely positive about certain facts in their labs that turn out to be false or miss readings about what really happened. Or they have faith and a can’t miss stock or a business deal and end up losing their investment. But in prayer, we moved from those types of false certainties in the material life to the true uncertainties of the spiritual life. The paradox we have is that the greatest certainty we can have is faith in God, which is an uncertainty because we do not know all the details and timing in the way that God will choose to work. Prayer is intimacy with God and others. Theo found the recluse, developed a simple diagram many years ago. He drew in the sand a circle with lines running from the outside edge to a point in the center of the circle. Picture in your mind what a bicycle wheel looks like. He pointed out to his disciples that this diagram is the way in which our relationship with God works. As we move from our lives on the outside edge of the wheel. On one of the lines are spokes. Towards God as the hub and the center were drawn closer to other people, the other spokes on a wheel. You cannot move towards the hub in the center or God without moving closer to others. So as we develop intimacy with God, we also develop intimacy with other people. There are many ways this happens, but prayer is one of the most powerful ways for this to take place. Let’s review Mick Mans Map for counseling again, in which he focuses on helping clients to develop a healthy sense of self, a healthy sense of need, and a healthy openness to healing relationships. But now apply this map to prayer in counseling. When we’re focusing on a healthy sense of self and a client, we’re helping people to move beyond their self-absorption, to focus on God. People who are depressed or going through times of real self-doubt are often drawn into being self-absorbed, only able to see themselves in their situation. However, this is in essence, a negative form of pride. As proverbs 3.3.4 reminds us. God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble. To be humble is to turn our focus away from ourselves and look to God to provide force in ways that we cannot do so. Do you remember that phrase from an earlier lecture regarding nouns book, reaching out. When he talks about moving from illusion to prayer. Prayer helps each of us with our negative sense of self. By breaking through the illusions of our immortality. We have the solutions that we’re going to live forever or that we’re different from other people. Per helps us to see that r dependence in life is ultimately on God because He is the pathway to our authentic intimacy. Now there are some cautions Regarding prayer that we need to keep in mind in the healthy development of self. Our Golan counseling is not to make clients dependent on us, but to help them seek to become dependent on God. For instance, if we are the one who always praise and the counseling session, we may inadvertently create the image that we are the intercessor for the client. Creating dependency issues. We can also feed inferiority issues if we’re always praying. And the client feels second rate when they pray because of their lack of experience in praying out loud. This can also occur when we run into the paradox of trying to draw the client out in prayer. But it actually makes them more uncomfortable. And then they withdraw from us. Developing a healthy sense of need in individuals is enhanced through prayer. Another Therapeutic paradox is that in order to begin to heal, we have to become aware of our brokenness. We have to realize that the way we’ve been trying to help ourselves is never going to work. So we need a power greater than ourselves. We need God in our lives. Jesus used an example of this dynamic when he told the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector in the Book of Luke. Two men went up to the temple to pray. One a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood up and prayed about himself. God, I thank you that I’m not like other men, robbers, evildoers, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. Wow, fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get. But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, God have mercy on me, a center. I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home, justified before God, for everyone who exalts himself will be humbled. And he who humbles himself will be exalted. It is that kind of helplessness that can be found in true prayer. Helplessness and prayer is an openness to God. Also, as we pray, we begin to build a true and healthy self confidence based upon our confidence in God. Remember Jesus’s words in the seventh chapter of Matthew. Ask, and it will be given to you, seek and you will find knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks, receives he who seeks, finds, and to him who knocks, the door will be opened. We can have a powerful confidence in the reliability of God’s character. That when we have a need, God has an answer. Through prayer. We can help our clients to catch a vision that God has for their lives. We can help them move from their grandiosity and self-centeredness to catch the real vision that God has for them. Now the caution here is to help clients to avoid wallowing in their guilt and shame. It is imperative to work with them on issues of forgiveness. Both that a forgiving others and receiving forgiveness. It is also important to avoid the pitfall of magical thinking that if people would just pray in the right way, they will get what they want when they want it, on their timing and on their terms. As a final caution, it is quite easy to fall into using prayer as a motivational pep talk to help people feel momentarily better. And while prayer does help make us feel better, we need to help clients understand that the real purpose of prayer is to connect with God. Now let’s look at how prayer affects our healing relationships. When we pray in ways that are appropriate to a client’s level of development, it creates a healthier, more biblically accurate view of God. It also draws attention to god has the only agent of transformation. Remember that in an earlier presentation we spoke about inside-out change. We’ll specifically, prayer helps us to change our attitudes that are upward toward God. Attitudes that are outward towards other people, and attitudes that are inward towards ourselves. Cautions in this area are really a reminder about the dangers of dependency and concerns about breaching boundaries. Because prayer is an intimate activity. We also want to be very careful in terms of fiscal contact with clients when we pray. A final caution is that the focus of prayer should always fall on God, not the counselor. On the next several slides are a number of forms of prayer. But note that the order in which they are listed is very intentional. The list starts with forms of prayer that pose the least risk and moves to those forms that can have the most risk when used in counseling. Now what is meant by risk? Here we’re talking in terms of prayer, having a downside of the possibility of creating negative consequences, such as dependency or a fracturing the therapeutic relationship, or breaching a boundary or prayer used to bully clients. For example, if you have a client who’s not ready to pray and I deeply intense way. And yet you are insisting that they do so. This can be an unethical decision on your part. So let’s look at these forms of prayer. Certainly the counselor can pray outside of sessions for every client, and we don’t need their permission to pray for them. As a matter of fact, sometimes the client who would not understand and who would not give permission may be the one who most need prayer. Using this mode of prayer also allows us to intercede or pray for discernment about how to understand this client, how the Lord might want us to work with them. And we can also pray for ourselves that we get a deeper compassion. If we’re dealing with a client where we are struggling with a spirit of condemnation or feeling judgmental. We also have the ability to pray silently in the session. One of the great fears, usually for those who are new to counseling, is what to do with silence in a session. The tendency is to rush in and feel we have to say something. It is much better to let silence do its work to use that time to pray for your client. A third way is to use prayer has homework by encouraging them to meditate outside of the counseling sessions. We spoke about this earlier. And this can be a very helpful way of teaching people who are dealing with anxiety or despair or compulsion to learn how to meditate in a way that is not only physically and psychologically relaxing, but in a way that creates an open door to the heart for their lord. Meditation and imagery and the session is riskier. Yet another way to use prayer. It offers opportunities for the healing of emotions, for forgiveness to take place under the direction of the therapist. And as a way to specifically work with thought restructuring. Praying the Scriptures is a method of using the Bible to help clients claims specific promises. Bill confidence in the character of God. But we do need to teach them that God’s timing is not their timing. And the last form of prayer is intercessory prayer. In the session. Here’s where we pray specifically with a client for their healing, for the therapeutic relationship. And to ask God to be the one to change and to heal. I hope these presentations on prayer in counseling have been helpful to you. And I encourage you to review the slides again for more insights.