Chris O’Rear, Director of the Pastoral Counseling Centers of Tennessee (Nashville) recently invited me to discuss my book, Building the Therapeutic Sanctuary with them. One question poised to me was particularly stimulating to my thinking. A man who has extensive experience in pastoral care, training groups, and significant experience as a pastoral counselor said, “You write that one requirement for becoming a good pastoral counselor is that one have a few years of personal therapy. I haven’t been in personal therapy. What do you think of that?”
The thoughts I shared with him are that there are two benefits of personal therapy that cannot be easily duplicated in any other way. One is that personal therapy accelerates maturation and wisdom significantly. It is a fascinating ride through some amazing internal landscape. With a good therapist, exploring the self and one’s vocational calling is like hiking the Sierra Nevada Mountains with the great explorer John Muir. You can see the mountains on your own, but think of what you would learn from Muir!
The other is that if you’ve ever made the initial call for therapeutic help, you will not forget how difficult and humbling that call is. Correlated to that humility is how liberating it is to cross the threshold from humiliation to humility. Therapy offers a lot more than just humility, but the humility inherent in the asking for help and the subsequent open confession might liberate us in ways little else can. At its best, therapy is a dramatic and unique experience of faith and grace. It keeps even the most expert therapist humble and thereby makes that therapist better.
A reason I thought of later is that personal therapy teaches us to ask a question that doesn’t come naturally to most of us: what’s my part in this relationship mess? That is a crucial question in what I believe is the second phase of therapy. The first phase in therapy is problem-solving. Most counselees can get a handle on their presenting problem in four to six sessions. Most stop at that point, and there’s nothing wrong with quitting therapy after solving a problem. Some, however, decide to explore more deeply. They begin to ask why they developed the problem in the first place. This investigation inevitably deepens the relationship with the therapist, and before long, the very problem they came in to solve will be recreated in the therapeutic relationship. Almost always, the relationship between the therapist and the counselee gets stuck. It is the therapist’s personal therapy experience that offers the best way out, for personal therapy encourages the therapist to investigate not just the counselee’s part in the impasse, but also to investigate his or her part in it.
Another way of understanding this is common with me. Sometimes I get totally infuriated with certain politicians. Because I created a new instinct within myself through personal therapy, I notice when I cross a line between valid criticism and over-determined rage. I stop myself and ask other questions than just “How can that politician be so outrageous?” I ask, “Am I upset about something else as well?” “Is the politician a personal scapegoat for some unresolved issue of my own?” As I sort out my stuff from the politician’s stuff, I sharpen not only my valid criticism of the politician, but also insight into my own life.
Pastoral counseling hinges on a willingness to ask the harder question: what’s my part, my hang-up, in these difficulties? This is the insight question—the insight quest—that helps our counselees search for deeper meanings, solutions, and relationships. It is a quest that is profoundly reinforced by personal therapy for the therapist.