Some Questions About Therapy image

Some Questions About Therapy

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This is a zinger of a post from Jake Meador on the relationship between therapy and pastoral ministry. He starts by asking some good questions:

1. Who needs therapy?
2. Is there anyone that does not need therapy?
3. Do people who do need therapy ever reach a point of not needing therapy?

Therapy can do a huge amount of good for people, and it has done within my immediate family and amongst my friends. And Jake is not objecting to therapy per se. “What I object to is the totalizing tendency in much therapeutic rhetoric which seems to run on the assumption that everyone needs therapy and you never stop needing therapy. My fear, in short, is that we have a growing contingent of more centrist, urbanite evangelicals who get their doctrine of sin and doctrine of salvation not from Scripture and the teachings of the church passed down to us over millennia, but from therapeutic categories and ways of imagining the human person.”

What is the problem with that? Well:

Within this model, Christianity is one crutch we can use to realize peace. But it doesn’t really define what “peace” is (or what anxiety is, for that matter) and it cannot really critique the therapeutic in any kind of real way. It can only accommodate it and support it.

This has the effect of rendering therapists the new priests and of making pastoral leadership and discipleship virtually impossible because any attempt to actually encourage people in Christian discipline can be dismissed as potentially abusive or indicative of narcissism in the pastor.

It also implicitly re-situates the church and the individual Christian disciple into a different sort of world. In this world, the church is a community that stands beneath the judgment of the mental health professional and the Christian disciple is simply someone who has found Christianity to be a helpful part of emotional health and self-actualization. But the engine driving the train isn’t Christianity; it’s emotional health, harm prevention, and self-actualization.

I think this idea of the “implicit world” is a very illuminating one. “Consider,” Jake continues: “You cannot have therapists and counselors and mental health practitioners and all the rest without graduate programs, health clinics, credentialing processes, pharmaceuticals, and so on. There is an entire social imaginary latent in the therapeutic which foregrounds the individual person, backgrounds communities, and centers the therapists office (and the pharmacy) as the place where we are made well.” Indeed there is.

If that wasn’t provocative enough, Will Willimon and Stanley Hauerwas are then brought into the conversation. I’ve added emphasis here:

Willimon: Lacking theological governance and guidance, pastors are tempted to give people encouragement to be even more self-concerned than they already are before they come to church. The trouble starts in seminary. There’s an overemphasis there on self-care, keeping sabbath, and finding emotional support, as if that’s the purpose of the church and its ministry. Better than self-care is responding to the call to care about what Christ cares about.

Hauerwas: That’s why I have little sympathy for clergy who present themselves as a member of the “helping professions.” Such pastors are using people in pain to legitimate their ministry. Pastoral care has become so important because it’s the last socially approved activity of pastors.

No doubt some people will take this as an attack on the therapeutic industry and all who sail in her, which is not Jake’s intention (and certainly not mine). In reality, it is simply a call for both therapists and pastors to take their rightful place, and for the latter not to be misled into thinking that their work is somehow a deferential subset of the former. The whole piece is well worth reading.

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