Counselling is increasingly accepted in our society, to the point that choosing to see a counsellor is no longer seen as strange or implying anything particularly negative about ourselves.
As a counsellor myself, I must declare an interest in this growing acceptability and demand for counselling! However, as I'm also a Christian, I want to highlight a significant side effect of this trend which is probably unintended and certainly little considered in our secular society.
In seeking counselling there is an implicit assumption that the roots of many problems - anxiety, depression, relationship problems, to name but a few - reside in the realm of psychology, emotions or identity. Hence, seeking counselling is an appropriate way to address such issues.
So what? Where's the problem?
We are very likely blind to the prevailing Western and secular world-view that sees such issues as psychological rather than spiritual. Another view is that anxiety and depression are very natural responses when we lose touch with God and live in a de-personalising materialistic society.
Counsellors intend to offer a 'safe and neutral space' where people can say what they really feel, whatever is on their heart. However, in reality there are usually strict and unspoken limits to this space: "come here if you accept the world-view that such issues are emotional or psychological in nature; spiritual issues are not invited except as an aside".
A natural retort would be that if you want to talk about spiritual issues, then go and see a chaplain, minister, priest or other religious leader. But this implies that these two realms have little overlap and so can be neatly divided up and allocated to different 'specialists'.
Yet, to the person of faith, we cannot meaningfully talk about identity without focusing on the identity God has given us, or about our purpose or direction without including our God-given purpose, or about our relationships without considering how God has made us relational beings. There is no realm of human experience that does not involve God.
You may consider such statements strange or even extreme. But, if so, that simply tells us something about how these world-views collide. And this is not just a problem for a small minority of clients - the great majority of the inhabitants of planet Earth hold to one set of spiritual beliefs or another!
A spiritual world-view goes further, to questioning whether mental health problems may have not just biological or psychological roots, but may also be symptoms of spiritual dis-ease. If a client talks to their counsellor about being depressed, do we enquire into their prayer-life? If a client talks about body image, do we ask about their understanding of being made in the image of God?
While counsellors do their best to understand the diversity of gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation, we have barely even considered our own spiritual biases and the impact these have on our clients - often denying their reality and imposing a Western secular psychological world-view.
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