What are the signs that counseling might be hurting more than helping? I suspect this problematic dynamic whenever someone insists on meeting but doesn’t do the homework I assign, whenever someone wants to continue meeting beyond the specified endpoint, or whenever meetings continue with no discernible progress in spiritual fruit. In any of these scenarios, I wonder if my counseling is hurting more than helping. How does the pastoral counselor avoid such confusion? I’m still learning how to answer this question. Here’s a few things I’ve begun doing.

In 2009, Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert published a profound book with a very simple thesis. In When Helping Hurts, the two authors argue that “when North American Christians do attempt to alleviate poverty, the methods used often do considerable harm to both the materially poor and the materially non-poor.” They wrote the book, in other words, to outline methods of poverty alleviation that help the poor in a long-lasting and sustainable way. They drew attention to the reality that many honest attempts to help exacerbate the problem, leaving people in a worsened condition than before.

I’ve noticed a similar dynamic in pastoral counseling. Multiple times in my counseling ministry, I’ve reached the conclusion that my counseling was having the opposite effect of what I intended. My efforts to make things better were really making things worse. Because I believe my experience is not uncommon, I want to share what I’ve learned about how this dynamic occurs and how counselors can avoid it.

In short, I begin to suspect that my counseling is hurting more than helping whenever I sense that the person I’m counseling might be viewing our meetings as therapy sessions. While therapy helps many people, I’m not qualified to serve in that role. Further, therapy and counseling have different goals, and confusing the two leads to false expectations that may severely limit counseling’s potential.

We live in a therapeutic culture in which the technical language of therapy commonly spills over into everyday language and shapes the way people interpret their lives. Terms like trauma and abuse are commonly used by nonprofessionals to describe mundane situations. Ads for therapy proliferate on podcasts and television, broadcasting a dominant message that therapy is normal for everyone and perhaps even necessary for thriving in this world.

In such a context, the role of pastoral counseling often gets confused with the role of the therapist. These two things, however, are not the same. Therapy involves working with a professional to explore emotions, thoughts, and behaviors toward the goal of overcoming trauma or managing depression and anxiety.

Read More