What is Pastoral Care and Counseling, and What is Not?
Rev. P. Joice Esther
Introduction
Every new historical period and place requires the church, which has been offering care, healing, and opportunities for growth, to develop new strategies for meeting the needs of troubled people. A wide avenue for healing and spiritual development in the church is provided through various pastoral care and counseling techniques. The inevitable characteristic that motivates and amplifies all acts of generosity into events with moral and spiritual significance is the pastoral tradition's guiding concept of caring. In light of this, a pastor or pastoral counselor is someone who embodies a deeply felt sense of solidarity with suffering people that transcends class and culture, yet who also maintains the distance necessary to support suffering people in their quest for a proper understanding of the significance of their afflictions. Pastoral care never restricts itself to those who are safe within the fold; rather, it entails risky expeditions into the wilderness in search of the afflicted and lost. The task is to join this dynamic movement as an active participant and contributor rather than as a passive bystander. This movement offers new solutions to the needs of individuals who are lying by the roads of Jericho, devoid of self-worth and battered by life's crises and disasters. Due to the widespread misconceptions about pastoral counseling in today's society, it is crucial to understand what constitutes pastoral care and counseling and what does not. This theme will be investigated below.
Definition and Understanding of Pastoral Care and Counseling
Considering the concept of care more broadly, the Oxford English Dictionary traces two basic views of care in the development of the English language. The first understanding involves the concept of anxiety; the second of solicitude. To care is to be anxious, troubled, and even to grieve, but it also means to be concerned with, to regard, and even to love, in the sense of care for the other rather than for oneself. Both meanings are important in understanding pastoral care.
In one of its meanings, care expresses the basic human concern with control and predictability. It is concerned with preserving the present and/or controlling the future. To be “careful” is to be anxious. It involves the restless waiting for the future to unfold. But care also has the meaning of solicitude and concern for the needs of the other, based not on the subjective needs of the caregiver but on the objective perception of the other’s needs. The classic image of the shepherd ever vigilant about the needs of the individual member of the flock while being concerned for the needs of the whole still usefully illustrates the meaning of care.
Martin Heidegger views care as “the basic constitutive phenomenon of human existence, and the clue to its interpretation. Care is what makes the human being human. If we do not care, we lose our humanity. Yet, our finitude and our temporality are what make care possible. We are limited by time and, therefore, challenged to care both for ourselves and for others in order to deal creatively with the limits that time imposes. Heidegger is reminding the pastoral carer that care is more than what we feel or think or do." It is constitutive of our being.
What is counseling?
Popular definitions of counseling are discussed below
1. Counseling is guidance, something that provides direction or advice as to a decision or course of action.
2. Counseling is a process where clients are helped in dealing with their personal and interpersonal conflicts by a third-party therapists.
3. Counseling is for helping the client resolve conscious conflicts with the focus on setting goals and problem solving. A wide variety of techniques may be used including verbal communication. Counselors assist the client to focus on constructive behaviors which will help the client reach specific goals. A counselor’s training background may be from a variety of fields, including education, health care and psychology.
4. Extensive one-to-one sessions carried out by specifically trained staff. The aim of such sessions is to reach an informed decision.
5. Counseling is a type of psychotherapy that helps people address and resolve their problems and work through their feelings.
6. Counseling can assist the person to identify their own personal resources and capabilities, which are sometimes lost or buried in times of confusion and anxiety. It may enable the person to see the circumstances afresh and with clarity so that the person can make the necessary changes that will help the person at a particular stage of life. The counselor will not make decisions or impose opinions but will respect individual needs. Throughout the process, the person will be encouraged, supported and empowered to look at her or himself from a different perspective. The aim is not only to help the person to cope with a current issues or crisis, but to do so in a way that produces learning for the future, so the person can feel more in charge of his/her life. Taking responsibility is an important part of this commitment.
7. The foundation of counseling is the relationship between the counselor and the counselee. As counseling progresses and trust is established, the counselee will actually use the relationship as a workplace, to resolve problems in life. Because the relationship with the counselor is so essential to the process, it is important to find a counselor to whom counselee feel connected, with whom he/she feels safe.
8. Counseling is a skill exercised by a trained counselor in an environment of trust and confidence to enable the client to explore problems and ventilate emotions so that the client fully realizes and acts upon aspects of change which is imbibed within the framework of his/her own environment.
What is good counseling?
1. Allowing a person to be in touch with his/her feelings and offering unconditional support to vent out.
2. The recognition of poor coping ability due to lack of skill development, which is due to poor developmental conditions.
3. The development of new skills and the application of old and new skills to improve both specific and general coping abilities.
Principles of Counseling
1. Only the person knows what it is that hurts or troubles, although it may be that the real reasons for a person’s anguish are tucked away out of the person’s immediate notice. The counselor will listen objectively and without judging or setting conditions. The journey is one of self-discovery, and the first step on it is learning to accept the self completely.
2. Counseling is rational and accessible. It is not some obscure, inexpressible, mystical process that only some people can grasp. It is a logical process that anyone can understand and follow. There is no reason for anything in a session to be irrational or mysterious. On the contrary, in good and effective counseling, every step should make complete sense to the counselor and the counselee.
3. It is important for the counselor to take an active role in trying on the ideas of each person. The most important proof that an interpretation or suggestion from either side of the room is correct is the reaction to it.
Benefits of counseling
1. People are accepted by the counselor for who they are.
2. It can offer a supportive, non-judgmental, and confidential setting in which one can explore any issue.
3. It can help to see issues more objectively
4. It can help to express feelings and come to terms with past experiences.
5. It can help build self-esteem and confidence.
6. It can help an individual to take control of his or her life and become more assertive.
7. It can improve communication.
8. It can help to become more realistic in setting goals.
9. It can provide insight and self-knowledge.
10. It can provide favorable conditions for shifts towards positive patterns of behavior: viewing issues differently, becoming calm and peaceful, having improved quality of relationships, becoming generally more effective, and finding life more meaningful and fulfilling.
What counseling is not:
1. Counseling is not a monologue; it is a dialogue.
2. It is not a teaching session.
3. Counseling is not soothing message only, although sometimes that’s part of it. There is nothing wrong with comforting and nurturing, but they are not, by themselves, counseling. Sometimes the process can even feel downright brutal.
4. Counseling is not advice-giving. The world is full of advice. Part of what brings to counseling is that person have become lost in that advice and can’t decide who is to heed. Moreover no other person can decide what is right for you. The goal is for the person to rediscover his or her own voice, own priorities, and the courage to act on them. A counselor’s job is to help clean off people’s glasses. And next time she/he won’t get so confused. Counselors cannot give prescriptions but they can certainly offer different perspectives.
5. No counselor will be right all the time. A counselor can tell the person what’s probably going on with the client, what seems to be happening, but it is only the client who can say if he/she is right.
6. Some people think that going to a counselor is like going to a car mechanic; they expect the therapist to diagnose a specific problem and fix it just as the mechanic puts in new parts and readjusts the carburetor. These clients expect something to happen to them. This is not the case. Don’t expect the counselor to have all the answers for all possible problems. Cherie Carter-Scott says, “All your answers lie inside of you. All you need to do is look, listen, and trust yourself. There is no outside source of wisdom that can give you the answers to any of your innermost questions; you alone are your wisest teacher. Deep inside, you already know all you need to know.” Counseling should empower the person to take charge of life and not make the person dependent on the counselor.
Pastoral Counseling: A Ministry of Availability and Introduction
Pastoral counseling in a parish or other setting that does not offer counseling as its primary ministry is a ministry of availability and introduction. Its essence is the pastor’s being there and helping persons to make connections with other carers.
Pastoral counseling is a ministry of the church or, perhaps more accurately, a dimension of the church’s unified ministry in the name of Christ. Although there are an increasing number of persons who specialize in the ministry of pastoral counseling, pastoral counseling is not itself a profession but a function performed by persons whose profession is ministry. The definition of a particular type of counseling as “pastoral” has more to do with the person and accountability of the counselor than with the methods adopted for the counseling. The primary criterion for determining that a method is pastoral is that it be consistent with what ministry is and that it be appropriately related to the need of the person seeking help.
A pastoral counselor is representative of an image of life and its meaning affirmed by her/his religious community. The pastoral counselor offers a relationship in which that understanding of life and faith can be explored. Pastoral counseling may be seen as a relationship empowered by a faith in a God who remembers us and who, through a remembering community, offers us the grace of remembering God’s love for us in Christ. Like the other less-structured types of pastoral care, pastoral counseling, at its best, employs elements of all three paradigms for pastoral care in its practice.
Pastoral Care and Counseling as Enlivening Vision
Counseling serves as a tool for ongoing renewal via reconciliation, assisting in the healing of estrangements from one's self, one's family, one's church, one's community, and one's vibrant, expanding relationship with God. It can open up fresh windows to consciousness, allowing us to once again see the wonder, tragedy, and suffering that surrounds us but was before obscured by our nervous, guilt-ridden self-concern.
Without enlivening vision, persons in ministry, like churches and nations, perish in the sense of losing their inner vitality. In our world of continuing change, pastoral care and counseling must be guided by an evolving vision. The growing edges of the field will change as the future unfolds. Pastoral care and counseling involve the utilization by persons in ministry of one-to-one or small group relationships to enable healing empowerment and growth to take place within individuals and their relationships.
A Significant Shift in Pastoral Counseling
The study of counseling is gaining great momentum. There were misunderstandings all around the field of counseling in the past. There are divergent beliefs and values regarding Christian counseling. There is a tremendous increase in the Christian ministers and Christian professionals flowing into metal health studies and practice today. The present decade is rightly called the age of “anxiety;” depression, anxiety disorders, addiction, struggles at an interpersonal level, and disintegration of families add to the mix. The hour of need is to have more Christian skilled helpers today.
Psychology, theology and counseling all have many similarities because all of them relate directly to the “person.” Especially in a country like India, where spirituality is sensed in every inch of day-to-day life, psychology and counseling cannot be relevant unless they are integrated with spiritual values. Western thinking emphasizes the capacity of the human being to solve his/her problems by his/herself, but a spiritual approach is more oriented toward the help of the ‘unseen’ in solving one’s problem.
Pastoral care is not just limited within the church and community of the called out; instead it is extended to the society at large. There are numerous situations within the church and outside the church that require pastoral care. In the endeavor to form an appropriate praxis-oriented theology of care, it is necessary to first lay the foundation of the discipline in the divinely inspired Scripture itself. The presence of a God who is active in the affairs of humanity is everywhere assumed. This God acts towards people and towards all of creation with loving kindness. The care of human beings for each other is therefore always within this larger context of God’s care for human beings and the entire world. In addition, biblical care is communal and corporate, not individualistic. For the ancient Hebrews the individual was never separate from the community; if one person suffered, the impact was felt throughout their community. Pastoral care, even of individuals who are suffering, is corporate.
Jesus practiced a holistic and inclusive method of pastoral care. In the Gospels, the images of Jesus used, such as the image of parent, shepherd, friend, etc., show even more clearly the pastoral concern of God for the whole person on the physical, social, and spiritual levels. The Gospels show Jesus healing relationships and pronouncing the forgiveness of sins. His ministry was inclusive, treating women with dignity and respect and reaching to those on the margins of his society. In many instances it is clear that Jesus’ care not only restored a person to physical health but also led to them being included again within the social and the worshiping community. Thus, pastoral care should not aim solely at deepening a person’s relationship with God, it should also help deepen relationships within the community. These two aspects are linked; one cannot really deepen a relationship with God without that also affecting one’s relationships with others; one needs both the horizontal and vertical dimensions. Pastoral care must be defined within the individualistic as well as community-based care and counseling. Pastoral care and counseling includes personal counseling, spiritual nurturing, group counseling, and community care.
A Pastor/counselor from India engaging in the art of helping has an advantage of going beyond empathy too. There is something called a culturally and socially determined set of respect and validation towards the elders and people in authority. That aspect of respect is an advantage of the Indian society. One must never forget the fact that culturally conscious caretakers have the capacity to welcome vast and diverse worldviews without negating their legitimacy.
The Indian society of the current times has a great consciousness concerning deep-rooted caste, communal, gender, and racial discrimination. The wound of dark days of oppression and subsequent fear of discrimination is always present in a vast majority of the people. Unless the counselors are willing to go beyond any chances of prejudice to the clients on the basis of their social and economic status, the counseling will not fetch a great result. Therefore, Indian counselors must make an extra effort to manage the conscience of any discrimination both from the part of the client as well as from the part of the counselor.
The judgmental and holier-than-thou attitude is the reason why many people prefer psychiatrists to ministers. Rollo May warned not to jump too quickly on moral implications of the problem. The nature of the pulpit sermon should convey more grace and acceptance than judgment. The message should gather people who are disgraced and inadequate and not send them away. Care for congregations ought to continue to be guided by the offering of a moral viewpoint on social issues that seeks to represent a particular faith perspective in the midst of a multi-faith world, asserting an identity that carefully responds to difference and diversity.
Pattision emphasizes the need for sociopolitical analysis in pastoral care, emphasizing the shared concern for human flourishing and well-being, and focusing on actual practice of increasing human flourishing in oppressive social locations. He is critical of the individualistic approach of pastoral care that fails to take into consideration the larger social realities of persons. Pastoral care and counseling need to expand its horizons by dealing with systemic, structural, and policy levels and challenge the lack of fairness and equity that results in human suffering. For him, “pastoral care should be open to the voices of the powerless on the margins, recognize its own implicit and explicit biases and adopt a preferential option toward the poor and the marginalized with a view to helping them attain their own liberation.”
Pastoral caregivers must recognize and own the extent to which the church is fused into oppressive structures. The identity of pastors and pastoral caregivers has been contaminated by oppressive values, including practical values. This calls for a personal as well as collective effort in bringing about changes in the structures. As envisioned by many pastoral theologians, the ministry of pastoral care and counseling needs to focus on liberating not only individuals and families, but also engage in transforming ideologies, systems, and structures to promote psychological health, well-being, equality, and justice.
Christian ministry emphasizes healing victims and transforming oppressive structures to promote wholeness and well-being. Pastoral theology aims to build a just community free from discrimination, ensuring dignity for all and emphasizing care and respect for all humans and creation. Loving God involves caring for the community, respecting the worth of all, and fostering the flourishing of all created in God's image. Respect the sanctity of life by making sure that everyone is respected, accepted, and protected.
Pastoral ministries, including care and counseling and psychotherapy, can be used as a mechanism for social change. Counseling and psychotherapies, together with pastorally-relevant contextual theology, can accomplish a great deal in transforming social structures and promoting social justice. Pastoral counselors and practitioners are in a unique position to transform oppressive structures and be agents of social justice by identifying the social cause of human suffering and work towards transforming it. In other words, pastoral care and counseling should be seen as ethics of care and justice. The ministry of pastoral care and counseling needs to assume prophetic ministry if it is to be relevant in the present-day context. A pastoral care and counseling paradigm emphasizes the following care values, deriving its basic insights from the psychotherapeutic model and liberation theology:
1. A pastoral care and counseling paradigm considers people as persons but not as objects.
2. It transfers the ownership of meanings of a person’s lived stories and experiences from the counselor to the person.
3. It takes both reason and emotion seriously.
4. It follows person-centered principles (empathy, congruence, and unconditional positive regard) in dealing with and understanding the issues faced by people.
5. It attempts to place the concerns of a person in a cultural context and challenges the existing oppressive power structures.
6. It affirms the assertiveness of a person and validates the experiences of a person.
7. It challenges pastoral care and counseling to move from coping to empowering through consciousness raising.
8. It moves toward maintaining egalitarian relationships.
9. Social change through advocacy for public policy is part of the pastoral care and counseling paradigm.
10. It advocates going beyond the intra-personal and interpersonal level and start addressing issues in the larger socio-cultural structures and systems where individuals are embedded.
Major themes in the liberation-growth model
The overarching goal of all pastoral care and counseling is to liberate, empower, and nurture wholeness centered in the Spirit. Methods of caring and counseling are important dimensions of this wholeness- enabling ministry. Spiritual and ethical wholeness is the heart of all human wholeness; spiritual formation and ethical guidance are core concerns in all pastoral care and counseling.
*Pastoral care and counseling seeks to utilize and integrate both psychological and theological insight regarding the human situation and the healing of persons.
*Pastoral care and counseling must be holistic, seeking to enable healing and growth in all dimensions of human wholeness. The model is systems-oriented, seeing the wholeness of persons as involving interaction among all their significant and interdependent relationships with persons, groups and institutions. Pastoral care of individuals and pastoral care of groups and of wider systems are equally essential.
*There are special opportunities for nurturing wholeness through pastoral care and counseling at each stage of the life journey.
*The pastoral care ministry, within the caring community of congregations, is both the empowering context and the foundation of the preparative ministry of pastoral counseling.
*Pastoral care is the shared ministry of the pastor and the whole congregation. Ordained ministers are like player-coaches who have the responsibility of enabling the mutual ministry of laypersons and also doing their own unique and valuable ministry of caring.
*Crises and losses in the lives of individuals and families, and social crises and transitions in the wider society, constitute the occasions within which most caring and counseling opportunities in general ministry occur. Therefore, short-term crisis intervention methods are indispensable for the effectiveness of this ministry.
*Pastoral care must liberate itself from its dominant middle-class, white male orientation and become more inclusive in its understanding, concern, and methods. It must become trans-cultural in its perspective, open to learning new ways of caring from and for the poor and powerless, ethnic minorities, women, and those in non-Western cultures. On a shrinking planet, our circle of consciousness, conscience, and caring must become global.
*Enabling people to increase the constructiveness of their behavior as well as their feelings, attitudes, and values is crucial in the helping process.
*Pastoral care and counseling should utilize the unique professional identity and role of ministers, including their positive authority and the socially-defined expectation that they will take the initiative in actively reaching out to offer help to those who need care and counseling.
*Right brain methods of healing and growth (intuitive, metaphoric, imaginative approaches) should be used more than in the past and integrated with left brain methods (analytical, rational, intentional, problem-solving approaches), if pastoral care and counseling are to become better instruments of whole-person transformation.
*To become more effective in liberating wholeness, pastoral care and counseling must understand wholeness for both men and women in androgynous ways that encourage growth far beyond traditional sex role stereotypes. The profound changes occurring in the identity of women in the last two decades open up exciting new possibilities for the liberation of both women and men to their full God-given potentialities. Pastoral care and counseling should be instruments of full human liberation.
*Pastoral counselors and therapists need to strengthen their conceptual base and methodologies by drawing on the newer systems and growth-oriented psychotherapies.
*Pastoral care can and should occur in all the diverse functions of ministry, including preaching, worship, and social action.
To be an effective growth-nurturer, ministers must continue to grow. To enliven, we must stay alive. To enable healing, we must be vulnerable enough to face and accept our own continuing need for healing. Thus, we become “wounded healers.” And this is the most challenging, difficult, and exciting part of being in ministry.
Sl. No | Pastoral Care Function | Historical Expressions | Contemporary Caring and Counseling Expressions |
1. | Healing | Anointing, exorcism, saints and relics, charismatic healers | Pastoral psychotherapy, spiritual healing, marriage counseling and therapy |
2. | Sustaining | Preserving, consoling, consolidating | Supportive care and counseling, crisis counseling, bereavement care and counseling |
3. | Guiding | Advice-giving, devil-craft, listening | Educative counseling, short-term decision making, confrontational counseling, spiritual direction |
s4. | Reconciling | Confession, forgiveness, discipline | Marriage counseling, existential counseling |
5. | Nurturing | Training new members in the Christian life, religious education | Educative counseling, growth groups, marriage and family enrichment, growth enabling care through developmental crises. |
6. | Liberating | Seeking temporary solutions for the problems. | Raising awareness about the sources and causes of oppression and domination in society. Elimination of oppression, breaking silence, working towards realization of fullness of life. |
7. | Empowering | Dealing with the problems based on the counselor's ability and strength. | Drawing out and building up of the hidden strength and resources within an individual. Giving access to information, awareness and financial and legal resources. |
8. | Redirection | Diverting a person from getting into/ facing problems.
| Learn and grow from the experience and prepare for the future. How to live life constructively by avoiding bitterness and pain which may help them learn to transform the painful experiences into an opportunity to learn and grow in their mental, emotional, spiritual, and interpersonal lives. Move towards ministry beyond the traditional functions. |
Conclusion
The ministry of pastoral care and counseling has social implications because Christians stand not only in relation to God, but also to one another. Christian ministry demands not only binding the wounds of the victims but also calls to confront and transform oppressive structures and systems that cause suffering and deprivation because of its historic concern for the wholeness and well-being of all persons. The task of pastoral theology is to build a just and harmonious community free from discrimination and injustices, where the weaker sections of the society are taken care of and the poor live with dignity leading towards the realization of God’s intended life for all humanity, where everyone lives life with dignity and in all its fullness. The theology of pastoral care has a critical role in emphasizing care and respect for all humans and creation. Pastoral theology needs to exhibit this communitarian care for everyone. To love God is to care for the community, respect the worth of all human beings and seek the flourishing of all humans created in God’s image. The ministry of care and counseling thus needs to work towards challenging and transforming the social and structural systems that deny people to experience the fullness of life. People need to experience liberation from all areas of life; only then will they experience the fullness of life based on the reign of God’s values.
