Proverbs: How to Build a Life: How to Choose a Counsellor?

Part of "Proverbs: How to Build a Life," Andy Rodgers picks up the second half of a two-part look at wise counsellors. Last week Grant Clark asked why we need trusted voices and who has permission to tell us something we do not want to hear. This week turns to the follow-on question: once we have discerned that someone is qualified to speak into our life, how do we get the most out of what they say. The message covers therapists, pastors, spiritual fathers and mothers, GC members, and friends.Andy opens by distinguishing two things that are often confused. Therapy is a practice: a trained professional with a set of skills, a licensed person helping a specific person with a specific problem, with ethics, accountability, and evidence based practices behind it. Therapy culture is something else. It is when the language of therapy and a therapeutic orientation become the way you engage every relationship in your life, and when organizations, schools, churches, and the political sphere all route their questions back to what feels good therapeutically rather than what is good. "How does that make you feel?" is an excellent question in a counselling room and a poor one for setting the economic direction of a nation or for asking what a passage of Scripture means.He is explicit that this is not an anti therapy message. Restored started a therapy centre, has subsidised thousands of dollars of therapy for people in the church who could not afford it, and runs the Restored Counselling Network. Good therapists using good practices are very helpful. A number of the people writing against therapy culture are themselves therapists.On reading for authorial intent rather than feeling, he points to Mark Twain, who prefaced a later edition of "Huckleberry Finn" by telling readers the book is not an allegory and asking them not to treat it as one. His English class spent fourteen weeks treating it as an allegory anyway. That is survivable with a novel. It is a real problem with Scripture, and a bigger one when the same instinct is used to determine what marriage is, what your identity is, and what is good and true and beautiful.## Four markers of therapy culture1) Concept creep. Precise language meant to help us see something clearly starts to mean more than it meant, and once it means everything it means nothing. Gaslighting comes from a 1938 play and describes a genuinely abusive man deliberately making his wife doubt her sanity. It is real and it is rare. It now gets used for ordinary cognitive dissonance. Andy walks through a recent scheduling mix up with a fellow pastor where he genuinely felt confused, and notes that memory is fallible and two people can remember the same event differently. Choosing the gaslighting reading would have turned a good friend into someone dangerous who had to be removed from his life. Choosing "maybe I forgot that" carried far less pressure and required villainising no one. The same creep has happened to abuse, to trauma, and to narcissism. Genuine narcissistic personality disorder runs around one percent, so it cannot be everyone's dad, just as borderline personality disorder cannot be everyone's mom. Naming everything as abuse diminishes our ability to help the people actually experiencing it.2) Boundaries become walls. Boundaries are a biblical idea: knowing where you stop and another person begins, holding your values, refusing to be manipulated. To be a Christian you have to have firm boundaries. But for many people boundaries have come to mean cutting out anyone who makes them uncomfortable, which is avoidance, and which most good therapists will tell you leaves you less mature because you never learn to handle difficult people or hard conversations. Seventy three percent of millennials have gone no contact with a close friend or family member in the last two years, half of those tied to their parents' politics. Disagreeing with your parents is normal. Cutting them off is new. Where there is genuine danger or a history of abuse the calculation is different, but the usual work is helping people figure out what they can realistically expect from a relationship and how to show up in it.3) Validation becomes authority. Being heard matters, but being heard is a means, not the end. It creates a space safe enough to look at what is hard to look at. If someone has to tell you that what you want is good, that will keep you from wisdom, because sometimes what you want is dumb. Andy is candid that he has plenty of dumb ideas himself and needs godly, loving, wise people alongside him for exactly that reason.4) Diagnosis becomes identity. Restored is not anti diagnosis. The DSM categories are genuinely useful for describing patterns of behaviour, understanding how someone relates to others, and explaining a tendency. They are never an excuse to hurt people or to continue in sin. Andy speaks openly about his own ADHD, the forgotten texts and missed medications, and the systems he has had to build to take responsibility for it. Most diagnoses people receive are not their fault, but to thrive and love people well they still have to do the work. God's standards do not decrease; some people simply need more help in a given area than the average person.The irony he draws out: something you went to in order to see clearly now makes the world look more threatening than before. Something you went to in order to protect your relationships has produced more isolation. Somewhere you went to be heard has made you unreachable.He notes the same dynamic can quietly reshape a GC, where groups drift into venting and status updates rather than asking what Scripture says and what Jesus is calling us to. It is fine to say a thing is hard. The question is whether the group helps you then go and do it.Two tests run underneath the whole message. If we are engaging counsel in a way that makes us more fragile rather than more resilient over the long term, something is wrong. And if we have adopted a worldview that makes us less open to insight we do not want to hear, it is keeping us from becoming wise.## We get the most out of the counsel we receive when we do five things1) Choose the right story2) Are discerning about who we let counsel us3) Engage honestly4) Work towards a goal5) Seek sanctification over validation## Choose the right storyThere are no neutral worldview people. Everyone speaking into your life is answering a set of questions whether or not they say so out loud: What is a person? What is a man, a woman, a mother, a father? What is parenting? What is marriage? What is sexuality and what is it for? What is actually wrong with us? How do people change, by insight, by empathy, by repentance, or by better tools? And what is the goal of a life, which decides the goal of counselling.The Bible says we are image bearers of God, made with inherent dignity, value, and worth, created to be known and loved. That is a different story from being a bag of chemicals and neurons colliding. Andy is careful that these are not simple either / ors. We are image bearers and we do have physical bodies that God chose for us. Scripture names three broad things that can be wrong: a fallen body in a fallen world, with real physiological realities; sin committed against us by others, which covers much of what people bring to therapy as wounding, shame, and pain, and which is not their fault; and our own sin, the lies we tell ourselves and the ways we try to live independently of God.He pushes back on starting the story at Genesis 3. God made us wonderful, beautiful, and glorious, and sin damaged it. One of the worst things about sin is that it diminishes the good person God created you to be. He is now restoring that, like a fine painting, over years and with patience.Repentance and clinical tools are not rivals. A tool can make repentance easier. Andy uses his own example: externalising what he cannot hold in his head helps him forget less and love his wife better. But the decision to get help in the first place is an issue of the will. Someone whose trauma triggers leave them in fight or flight is not at fault for being triggered, and may still need to deal with the thing they have been avoiding, because the people around them are still getting hurt even when the motive is not bad.The question that matters is what wins when two stories are mutually exclusive. When a view of the world conflicts with the Scriptures, the Scriptures need to win. He works this through cognitive behavioural therapy, the most used approach in talk therapy, whose core claim is that emotions and behaviours run downstream of thoughts. He agrees that is broadly true, finds CBT tools genuinely helpful, and notes that CBT ironically has the most in common with biblical counselling. But Scripture carries a category the therapeutic world often does not: we do not only have bad thoughts, we have bad desires upstream of our thoughts. James says our conflicts come from wanting something and not getting it."The tools are great. They're just not everything. There's not one tool that solves life. The only person who solves all of life is Jesus."## Be discerning about who you let counsel youCounsel in a person's heart is deep water, and a person of understanding draws it out. Good counsellors ask good questions and get beneath the surface.Does a therapist need to be a Christian? Andy says it depends on the issue, and that for some things it is close to vital. Marriage is his clearest example, because a counsellor is helping you understand the story you came from and the story you are building, and it helps enormously if they share a Christian understanding of marriage, sexuality, communication, and desire, even if they use plenty of clinical tools alongside it.Better is open reprimand than concealed love, and the wounds of a friend are trustworthy while the kisses of an enemy are excessive. Friends who only ever validate you are not evil, but they will not help you grow. If you talk about your marriage, do it in an honouring way, and be wary if your friends always take your side. You want someone willing to play devil's advocate and ask what you can do, since you are the only person who can do what you can do.Practical advice for choosing, drawing on Eliza Huie's "How to Get the Most Out of Your Counseling," a sixty page book he recommends. Most people do not know they are allowed to interview a counsellor about their modality, their approach, and their worldview. Questions worth asking:How do you integrate your faith and your work?What do you think is wrong with people?Do you ever talk about sin in the work that you do?Will you ever challenge me, even if I do not love it in the moment?What do you specialise in?Licensure tells you what someone is trained in. It tells you nothing about their worldview and nothing about their character. It is a good place to start, not a place to stop. Be wary of anyone who treats everything, the way some restaurants serve cheeseburgers, spaghetti, and sushi off one menu. Andy helped a friend look for OCD treatment and found that of the hundreds of providers listed who said they treated OCD, none listed ERP, the approach both the International OCD Foundation and the American Psychological Association name as the first line treatment. Claiming to treat OCD without it is like claiming to treat bacterial infections without antibiotics.## Engage honestlyThe one who conceals his sins will not prosper, but whoever confesses and renounces them will find mercy. Andy points out what the verse does not say. It does not say concealing is wicked. It says concealing does not work. If you want to lose weight without discussing what you eat, or want your knee treated without describing the pain, you will not get far.Two reasons we are not honest. The first is the fear of man, which Proverbs calls a snare, over against the fear of the Lord, which is the beginning of wisdom. The question is whether you are more aware of what a person thinks of you or what God thinks of you. He notes a related risk: keeping the same therapist for years with no goal, until they function as a friend your insurance covers, at which point you want them to like you and become less honest. The second reason is pride, wanting to be seen a particular way.He also distinguishes being authentic or transparent from being vulnerable. Plenty of people will tell you a great deal, sometimes more than they should about others, without ever being open to having any of it challenged. Vulnerability is being open to someone speaking into it. This cuts the other way too. Not everyone is owed your depths, and dumping ninety minutes of heavy material on a friend who did not ask for it is its own marker of therapy culture.## Work towards a goalThere is profit in all hard work, but endless talk leads only to poverty. A goal means direction rather than a deadline, and it lets a counsellor, pastor, or friend stay within their expertise. Andy cites a clinical psychiatrist who said that having a long term psychologist with no goal is having a bad friend you pay to be your friend.The arithmetic matters. You are awake roughly one hundred and twelve hours a week. A forty five minute session is well under one percent of your life and will not change it on its own. Implementing what you learn during the other ninety nine percent will. It is the personal trainer problem: the workouts do not do themselves.## Seek sanctification over validationA fool does not delight in understanding but only wants to show off his opinions. Wanting to be understood is human and God given. Wanting to change and become like Jesus is a supernatural work of the Spirit. The danger is letting "finding someone who gets me" become the destination of the journey rather than a stage in it, and then asking the church to function as a therapeutic community on those same terms.Andy makes the case that the church has an enormous amount to offer if we engage it rightly. There are people in the room who handle money well and would change your life if you had the humility to open your budget to them. There are people who have worked through hard things in their marriage who could mentor you without being your therapist. He cites Rebecca McLaughlin quoting a Harvard researcher that attending church weekly is "like a miracle drug," with measurable effects on depression, anxiety, self control, addiction, and burnout. Churches are also good places to work through attachment wounds, because good attachment work aims at being able to trust other people rather than depending on one safe person indefinitely, and because Scripture defines how we are allowed to treat one another, which is part of what makes a church safe.He closes on what he calls the most underrated thing, even among Christians: spending time with Jesus. He describes a retreat at a monastery with a group of people mostly in their sixties and seventies, including a retired psychiatric researcher, a doctor and psychiatrist, recently widowed and in real pain, and firmly pro therapy. After several hours of solitude she came back and said she thought she had saved five to ten thousand dollars of therapy in three hours, because it had all been resistance. She knew what she needed to do and did not want to do it."Jesus knows how to lovingly say, I love you, but we got to do this. And he took me by the hand and walked me to where I needed to go. He shepherded me."The flip side he wants to press: when someone says they need help with their marriage, ask whether they have prayed about it, whether they have spent any time asking the Lord how to treat their spouse differently, whether they have looked at what God's word says about parenting or marriage. You may well need tools to obey those commands in a healthy way. The question is whether you started with what God wants.The Spirit is the parakletos, the counsellor, the one who comes alongside, and he loves to give wisdom. James says God gives wisdom generously to those who ask without being double minded, and double minded means you have already made up your mind, so you are not actually open. You want someone to co-sign. You want validation, not revelation."Don't build a life where you protect yourself from hard things that can help you grow."Andy's closing prayer asks that Restored would become a humble people who can receive, and a contemplative people able to sit with an idea or a thought or a passage of Scripture and weigh it in God's presence, rather than running to social media or ChatGPT or a podcast or a friend. Clinical tools can help us do that, but those tools are a sail on a sailboat. We still need God's wind. And it asks that we would believe God's word is better for us than the word of any expert or of ourselves, that his word is not handcuffs but guardrails on a path, keeping us from going off the side of a mountain.Verses referenced:Genesis 3Proverbs 9:8Proverbs 9:10Proverbs 14:23Proverbs 18:2Proverbs 20:5Proverbs 27:5-6Proverbs 28:13Proverbs 29:25Romans 12:2Philippians 4:8James 1:5-8James 4:1-21 Peter 5:7