EVERYBODY NEEDS COUNSELING AND IT'S OKAY

Photo by Finn on Unsplash

Everybody needs counseling.

Everybody needs counseling. Not sure about that? Let me give you how I came to that conclusion. 2018 was a good year but it was a hard year. I know this sounds strange considering what has been happening in 2020. I’m sure in two more years I’ll write something about this year as well. Hindsight is better when you have some distance. 

In 2018 I was entering my third year as the Lead Pastor at Cornerstone. Before that I had been a worship pastor for 15 years. So even though I had very little experience as the Lead Pastor I had a lot of ideas and hopes. I had been working alongside a great group of people to be able to launch full kids programming during both of our worship services. I had been working with another group of great people getting ready to launch small groups. In addition, we had been discussing how to make it easier for people to volunteer and had decided to change our worship service times closer together instead of a gap in between for Sunday School.

It was both incredibly exciting as well as incredibly stressful. There were lots of extra meetings and lots of details to figure out. Anytime you are implementing major changes, there is a lot of extra communication that needs to take place as well. That way you don’t miss concerns or are able to address places you haven’t been clear about why the changes are being done. 

Well in January of that year we pulled the trigger on all three! New service times, new kids programming, and 4 small groups. That same January I was standing in the lobby speaking to someone and my jaw began to chatter slightly. I clenched my teeth a little and it stopped, but the moment I relaxed it came back. That freaked me out. 

I went to the doctor. They ran blood tests and found nothing. They gave me a diagnosis called benign tremor, which means you’re shaky but it’s not life threatening and we can’t figure it out. After another month of feeling like I would crawl out of my skin I went back to the doctor. They decided to send me to get an EKG of my heart to see if they could find anything. 

At this same time I had been gifted the opportunity to participate in a coaching network for church leaders to help them grow. I found myself in Las Vegas at the house of a great leader of a great church there, sitting around a fire pit with other great leaders. I felt lucky to be sitting there but I was way out of my league.

THE CONVERSATION THAT CHANGED MY MIND

Then the conversation of dealing with stress came up. Many of the leaders sitting there began to talk about the incredibly difficult situations they found themselves trying to navigate. One by one they talked about times and seasons that felt crushing and caused them a ton of anxiety. They’re all leading what look to be thriving and flourishing large churches and their congregations number over a thousand, some of them over thousands. Then many of them began to say things like…

WHEN I WAS IN COUNSELING, OR, LAST MONTH AS I TALKED TO MY COUNSELOR…

These guys are great leaders and great communicators. They are loving people well and their churches are reaching people. Yet, most admitted that they needed help to deal with the stress that comes from striving to be high capacity leaders who don’t want to fail and want to honor God. 

Suddenly, going to a counselor seemed like it wasn’t just for crazy people, but for normal people, and extraordinary people too! COUNSELING WAS FOR ALL PEOPLE!

That same weekend I got a call from my doctor saying my EKG on my heart came back normal. So I decided, maybe my shakiness wasn’t physical, maybe it was psychological.

MY EXPERIENCE WITH COUNSELING

When I got back I made an appointment to go see a local Christian Counselor. She asked me what brought me there and what I hoped to accomplish. I told her the same story I’m telling here. Then she asked me more about what was going on in my church. At the end of our first session together she suggested a book for me to read called the Anxiety Cure. 

Anxiety? Me? No! That’s not something I struggle with! Hmmmm.

As I read the book it became increasingly apparent that I did actually struggle with anxiety. My drive to achieve, to succeed, to be excellent, and to appear a certain way were causing me to wear myself out. My mind wouldn’t shut off and I was ignoring my emotions by constantly keeping myself busy.

For those who pay attention to the personality tool called the Enneagram, I am a 3. Threes are Achievers. Being an achiever in America is like being an alcoholic growing up in a bar, meaning it’s almost impossible to avoid the thing you struggle with. Achievers in America are rewarded for hard work and promoted for succeeding. Our internal unhealthiness is encouraged because we love accomplishment and accolades. Put an achiever in the church and slap the label of working for Jesus on what we do and you have a particularly nasty equation for burnout. I NEEDED COUNSELING!

HERE’S WHAT COUNSELING HELPED ME UNCOVER.

• What early experiences have shaped me towards the need to succeed?
  • How have I been shaped by my Dad and my Mom that I feel like I need to succeed?
  • What ways has the bible been used to overemphasize my responsibility or the need to earn what God freely gives?
• What painful experiences have I had in life that have caused me to fear failure and need success?
  • How have I been shaped by my divorce?
  • How has being fired shaped me?
• What expectations am I placing on myself and others that is impossible to live up to?
  • Not everyone will like everything about me or what I do.
  • I can’t stop everyone from getting angry or upset, and sometimes it has very little to do with me at all.
  • What is realistically possible with my time, talent, and resources and what is not.
• What fears are driving me?

These are just a few. Additionally, I have found that I was repeating patterns in my life over and over again. When I would get stressed, I would go into workaholic mode or veg out mode as a way of coping. I’d find myself working crazy hours and putting in overtime or I’d find myself binging Netflix shows, eating too many Reeses Peanut Butter Cups, and avoiding the office and phone calls. I’d not sleep enough, drink way too much caffeine, and then not be able to figure out why I was moody and unfocused.

Seeing a counselor has helped me see when my patterns start to emerge. It has given me insight into how to get to the bottom of what I’m struggling with in the moment. Counseling has given me tools for not just coping with stress but learning to avoid it proactively. My counselor helped me learn to sort through the internal dialogue that I have with myself to see what is helpful, true, and realistic. It has helped me learn to give myself a break and allow others to take responsibility for the decisions they make. I’ve learned how lack of sleep and dependance on caffeine lead to distorted thinking.  

I don’t have this all figured out, but within 3 months of counseling, I was able to wean myself off of beta blockers that managed the symptoms as I dealt with the cause. Since I started, I have only had a short week-long relapse of the shakes in the past two years. When I do start to struggle and slip into workaholic mode or veg out mode, I recognize it faster and instead of spending months there, I can escape faster. 
So if you’ve stuck with me this far, you may be thinking to yourself…

OBVIOUSLY YOU NEEDED COUNSELING, BUT WHY DO YOU THINK I DO?

Let me give you two major reasons. We are sinful human beings and were raised by sinful human beings. 

First, because we are sinful human beings, our natural tendency is towards idolatry. We take good things and turn them into ultimate things. Instead of trying to find our ultimate happiness and satisfaction in God, we try to find it through success  in school, work, sports, our significant other, our kids, our parents. God is too good to let us find our deepest satisfaction in anything other than Him so he allows our fake Gods to fail us. We fail tests, we lose games and jobs. Our kids and loved ones are just as broken and self-centered as we are and eventually let us down. A good Christian counselor is able to put their finger on our favorite idol and show us how we have made it the center of our lives. 

Secondly, we need counseling because we are raised by sinful human beings. No matter how good your parents were, they are not God and will have failed to meet our deepest needs while we were growing up. We are hardwired with the need to know that we are loved, significant, safe, and that we belong to a group. Every parent will fail to meet these needs perfectly. We may grow up with busy parents who seem distracted and not paying attention to us and so we don’t feel significant. Others may grow up in abusive situations and spend our lives seeing danger around every corner and have trouble trusting anyone. We may have had brothers and sisters who connected easily with one parent or the other and so we might not feel like we belonged.

These early experiences in our families have a tendency to create a subconscious operating system. We don’t even see it or realize that it is causing us to react to people and situations certain ways. We are either trying to get what we felt like we didn’t get or to avoid pain we’ve experienced in the past from happening in the future.

I see these patterns in my own life, and as a pastor, I see them in the lives of the people that I love and lead in my church. It breaks my heart to see people running circles and ending up in the same  place they have been before.

Some of these patterns are: 

• getting their feelings hurt over and over again
• always busy and stressed out
• a hard time trusting people or losing friends regularly
• quick to be offended or get angry
• using food, drugs, alcohol, pornography, or even thrill seeking to avoid feeling empty or unhappy
• seeing everyone else as broken and never apologizing

One  of the most frustrating scriptures to me was 2 Corinthians 5:17 that says “This means that anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; a new life has begun!” It’s a beautiful biblical truth, but I wondered, why does my life look so much like my old life then? Why do so many of us who call ourselves Christians still struggle with doing the things we did before we were Christians? I think it’s because our subconscious thinking has never been exposed. We need help transforming our mind! Most of us need someone who loves Jesus to help us unpack our stories and see where we have been hurt. We need help seeing how we have tried to meet our own deep needs for significance, love, and safety.

On the other hand, one of the most beautiful things that I have seen is someone realize they needed help and go to see a counselor and have their life changed. Through the help of a counselor that loves Jesus and is guided by the Holy Spirit, I have seen people break free from patterns that have plagued them for most of their lives. I have seen people begin to thrive in their understanding of their value to Jesus and start to have relationships spring to life in ways they never had before.

So here is a quick test to see if you need counseling!

1. Were you born?
2. Did you have someone who raised you?
3. Have you ever experienced pain?
4. Do you interact with any other human beings?

If you answered yes to any of the questions above (which should have been all of them) my suggestion would be to find a Christian counselor. So, what do you think?

Let me know of your experiences with Christian counseling in the comments!

In addition, if you are in the Springfield, IL area I would like to recommend two great places to look for counseling.

• Living Hope Counseling Center: I have personally gone here as well has had a number of friends who have as well and highly recommend them.
• Truth in Love Counseling: A good friend of mine is a counselor here and is very gifted and have begun recommending them as well.