December 10, 2009 · 5:30 am

What is your reaction to 20 years of marriage?


Just heard a story-teller talking about his transformation from disregard of marriage to wanting to marry his longtime girlfriend. Looking back to the time when he thought marriage offered him nothing he said his private reaction to the question, “When are you two going to get married?” was something like this,

How come you never hear someone say, “ooh, I can’t wait to get a piece of that (meaning long-time monogamous relationships).” No, we only see them as portrayed as a ball and chain.

We all are aware of the negative connotations to monogamy in our current culture. This particular person couldn’t see any benefits and only drawbacks to marriage. It took a life-threatening crisis to bring him to another perspective.

Closing in on 20 years of marriage, I can attest that it isn’t glamorous but it is good. Marriage isn’t really about ecstasy (well, there IS some of that) it is about commitment. And commitment doesn’t give highs, it moderates the highs and the lows into something far more long-lasting pleasurable than a momentary mountaintop experience.

As I said in my recent talk on this topic, lust may begin a relationship, romance may continue it, but something more (unity, IMHO) provides the motivation to finish the race.

Leave a comment

Filed under love, marriage

Tagged as ,

December 9, 2009 · 5:26 am

The benefits of grading


Believe it or not, not all of grading is drudgery. It can be if you have to read 20 papers summarizing the same stuff. But, reading response papers actually teaches the professor. You learn what the students actually heard, you see connections even you failed to make, and more.

We faculty groan when we grade, but mostly because we want what the students already have–an end to the semester.

Leave a comment

Filed under Biblical Seminary, teaching counseling

Tagged as , ,

December 8, 2009 · 1:54 pm

End of semester thoughts


Looking at a stack of papers I need to grade and yet not feeling the energy to do so. Late night classes take more out of me than I care to admit. My physiology class ended with student presentations and a look at bipolar disorder. As we concluded the class, I asked them to remember that,

  1. Even with all the advances in neuroscience, we must humbly admit we still know little how we are fearfully and wonderfully made.
  2. It is good for counselors to keep learning about the body and at the same time hold what they know lightly. Tomorrow may bring evidence to the contrary
  3. Yet, what we know about the body can be helpful. We ought not to look down upon our ignorance but remember that doctors do not always explain or walk with patients
  4. There are great medical interventions available, but (and that but shouldn’t diminish what I said before it),
  5. Over and over we saw that the basics (maintaining balance in life, self-care, mindfulness) are so important to health, perspective, etc. No, they aren’t magic interventions. Yes, they pay-off over time rather than immediately.

On this last point I am pondering a bit and so let me be hyperbolic. Most people who come to see me for paid counseling come because they think (naively) I have some expertise that will shed light on their situation and a solution to their problems. They want me to do something. Why else pay that kind of money? And yet much of what I have to offer isn’t rocket science. Beyond a few fun techniques, what I have to offer is a listening ear, a willingness to walk with the other person in their travail, and encouragement to keep going back to the basics. Most people like the first two but balk at the last one. Why do we balk at going back to the basics? Two reasons: (1) we want something that will fix the problem NOW, and (2) we’ve tried the basics and they didn’t seem to work (see reason 1).

Examples of what I mean.

  • If you are a parent and you go to a counselor to deal with your young child’s behavior problem. More than likely, you will get some counselor telling you to use some reinforcement strategies. And what do many parents say? “I tried that and it didn’t work.” Chances are they did try it and either they didn’t keep at it or they didn’t realize they were doing something that reinforced the wrong thing, or they had a misguided view of what success should look like
  • A couple is struggling with fighting. They go to the counselor who encourages them to return to the basics of respectful talk. Usually, they will feel like they have already tried it–and it didn’t work. Chances are… You get the picture.

In physiology, we see that care for the body includes mindful meditation (My friend and former professor says a substitute word would be “watchfulness”) on the world as God sees it, developing and maintaining good circadian rhythms, watching food intake, exercise, maintaining healthy relationships and social supports. In every mental illness, these things are shown to decrease the severity of symptoms and delay relapse.

Here’s the problem: we forget the basics and because they don’t give immediate results, we go searching for other fast-acting mechanisms. For example, I want to feel safe. Instead of engaging in centering prayer over the long haul, I fall prey to the temptation to act in such a way to avoid all possible danger–thereby increasing my fears of danger.

If I don’t exercise (and I don’t much) I rarely get immediate feedback that my body is falling apart. If I don’t eat right, I don’t immediately gain 10 pounds. If I don’t pray, I don’t immediately get embittered. So, I assume that these basics aren’t all that important. Or, I know they are important but since they don’t pay off now, I don’t do them. I only do what demands I do it to avoid a crisis.

How do we stay on track with the basics? We need another person(s) willing to keep us on a short leash. As a kid I ran because I had a friend who was going to wonder where I was. As a doctoral student, I played basketball at 6 am because my peers would  ask me where I was. I lost some weight a couple of years ago because my wife and I worked together. Notice that the social accountability is a key facet to help us build the disciplines long enough to see that the pay off is more than can be delivered by an exciting new technique.

2 Comments

Filed under Biblical Seminary, christian counseling, christian psychology, Christianity, Cognitive biases, counseling, counseling science, counseling skills, Psychology, teaching counseling

Tagged as , , ,

December 5, 2009 · 12:36 pm

Great talk title!


I love great talk titles, ones that grab your attention and make you want to either listen in or burst out in laughter. While I’m not particularly good at coming up with unique titles, others are. This one arrived in my mailbox last week. It was on a flyer announcing a Continuing Ed program about attachment issues. The title,

What if you pooped in the potty…but no one cheered?

I burst right out laughing for some reason. This is one I wish I would have thought of and used! My 9 year old loved the humor as well. Then, he asked if we cheered his pooping. Of course we did and so I asked him if he would like us to continue doing so. For some reason he declined the offer.

Seriously, cheering developmental stages is a good thing, whether pooping in the potty or taking the wheel of the car for the first time. Seems we tend to fail to cheer when we should or we cheer everything and make cheering meaningless.

But what a great title!

3 Comments

Filed under Uncategorized

December 4, 2009 · 5:56 am

Prevention services for pastors?


Ran across a new set of stats about pastor health in the last few weeks. Nothing surprising, just more confirmation of the same story. A Cheryl Shireman reports on data from over a thousand pastors who attended 2 conferences. Some of her stats…

  • 57% of pastors would leave if they had a better place to go–including secular work
  • 77% report not having a good marriage
  • 72% felt they were unqualified or poorly trained by seminaries to lead the church or counsel others
  • Only 38% report personal devotions outside of sermon prep
  • 38% are divorced or going through one
  • 30% admitted a sexual encounter with a parishioner

Let’s assume that most pastors enter the ministry fit (false assumption!) for the trials and tribulations and spiritually mature. What can a church do to maintain that pastor’s health (and his/her family as well)? We surely don’t give them combat pay. While most get vacation and health benefits, few report getting ongoing discipleship or training beyond the annual preaching conference.

Here’s an idea I’ve surfaced here before. What if pastors were required to have a mentor? What if churches provided $1000 a year for use in preventative counseling or confidential spiritual direction? What if pastors had to complete a confidential “check-up” each year? On this last item, I suspect that I could provide an assessment (cheap, easy to complete questionnaires for pastor and spouse plus 3 hours of follow-up interview and goal setting) for under $400.

If these recommendations came before your congregation, what would the reaction be? Would there be resistance? Worry about expenses? Openness? I’m curious…

10 Comments

Filed under christian counseling, Christianity: Leaders and Leadership, church and culture, counseling, pastoral renewal, pastors and pastoring

Tagged as ,

December 3, 2009 · 4:42 pm

God in your own image….


Saw a bumper sticker on the way to work today that read,

I love God. It’s his fans I can’t stand

Then, I saw this quote by Anne Lamott  at work,

You can safely assume that you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.

Interesting timing…

1 Comment

Filed under Christianity, Great Quotes

Tagged as ,

December 2, 2009 · 10:58 am

How to fail after hitting it big


Had an interesting talk with my boys about how money and fame does not protect from one’s sins being found out–whether in this life or the next. We were talking about faithfulness and keeping promises and how it feels when someone violates that covenant, and how much more it hurts when that violation goes public.

Right after that, my friend Doug forwarded me a Christianity Today article on the recipe for failing. It is written by Gordon McDonald and is directed at church leaders, especially those who lead big churches. But, you could apply it to your own life. Read the story here, but in short, here is recipe:

1. “Hubris, born of success.” It is interesting how we allow success to lead to pride. Moses told the Israelites that when they got into the promised land and received houses and gardens they didn’t build, they should not become arrogant and say, “look at what I have” and thus forget the Lord.

2. “Undisciplined pursuit of more.” Whether we have little or lots, we always want more. And we find all sorts of creative ways to make our pursuit right and good.

3. “Denial of risk and peril.” The more we succeed the more temptation to give in to brazenness.

4. “Grasping for salvation.” I think this works for successful people as well as those who feel desperate to succeed (after all, you can never rest on your laurels). We look for the silver bullet, the hail Mary, the lotto ticket to the next level of fame.

5. “Capitulation to irrelevance or death.” Once you go too far, you know you can’t recover so you just keep going. Why is it that we find it so hard to repent, to admit, to acknowledge our sins? Because we cannot give up our pride. We sometimes choose character death rather than admit, to stop. I think this is also why people commit hid and runs. We know we will get caught but we keep trying to run because admitting seems like death (when it often contains redemption possibilities).

Notice that the real recipe needs only one ingredient–deception of self and other.

Lord, save us from our prideful, self-deceiving selves.

1 Comment

Filed under adultery, Christianity, Christianity: Leaders and Leadership, church and culture, deception, Repentance, self-deception

Tagged as , , , ,

December 1, 2009 · 12:04 pm

Chronic pain and the Christian faith


Last night’s Counseling & Physiology class covered the topic of chronic pain. There are a number of syndromes and disorders that cluster around pain as the presenting problem: Chronic Fatigue, Fibromyalgia, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, Rheumatoid Arthritis, Osteoarthritis, back pain, etc. Depending on which research study you read, some 9-17% of the population struggles with some form of chronic pain.

While these various forms of pain are quite different, there are some commonalities. Chronic and diffuse pain sufferers frequently experience some form of inflammation, fatigue, sleep disruption, negative mood, and poor memory (its hard to pay attention to new information when you are weighed down by pain). We don’t really know what causes what but we do know that these symptoms form a vicious cycle. If you don’t get restorative sleep, you experience more fatigue, you are more prone to negative thought patterns, your pain levels go up, memory goes down…and thus you don’t sleep well the next night, and so on. Researchers describe this vicious cycle in terms of “allostatic load”–the deleterious effects of chronic stress hormones without restorative sleep.

Because of the diffuse nature of pain (vs. focal) and the lack of obvious objective evidence of that pain (a big red spot, a swollen limb, etc.), chronic pain sufferers and their families struggle to understand whether or not the pain is real and what they are truly capable of doing. How do you measure pain levels? It’s pretty subjective! Thus, it encourages more “I should be able to…” thinking in all parties. Those not suffering chronic pain do more damage by implying that the person is just looking for attention, is just being lazy. Those suffering pain who either deny the pain and try to do too much or refuse to engage the world and withdraw from it do damage to themselves–real physical damage.

As with all physiological problems, one’s mood, one’s perceptions, one’s focus, one’s stress levels impact severity of the problem. While chronic pain is not just in one’s head, how one responds to chronic pain may help alleviate or elevate the pain sensations. Ironically, many pain sufferers resist counseling because they fear that others will believe that their symptoms are all in their head. Those who refuse to acknowledge the psychological factors in pain sensation and management miss out on important means to cope with the pain and to lower pain perceptions.

Chronic pain sufferers must accept the need to adjust their lifestyle to accommodate more rest. They must fight to get the best restorative sleep possible. These are probably their primary practical responses–even above medical treatments (and I’m not knocking medical treatments nor saying that just getting sleep will solve the problem).

One of the biggest challenges for pain sufferers is the matter of hope and faith. When we suffer problems, we often hope they will go away. And when they do not, or only get marginally better, it is easy to slide into despair. Despair usually is the result of things not going the way we hoped or expected they would. Part of dealing with chronic pain is grieving what is lost in order to accept–even enjoy–what strength and health we do have. Without hope, we lose what self-efficacy we once had, thus not doing the basic care-taking activities within our grasp. Interestingly, one of the clearest signs of this struggle is the massive dropouts in pain management research. Frequently, dropouts number about 50% in these studies. This means that before a study gets too far along many are dropping out because they assume the new treatment isn’t going work.

Faith is not that things will go my way right now but that God is in control, cares/protects me, and is working for my ultimate redemption–even when the opposite seems to be true. Faith is acting in a manner consistent with said assumptions even while grieving over real losses. Such faith enables us to be mindful of our thoughts so that we do not practice into beliefs counter to what we have come to know as true.

The chronic pain sufferer who grieves well (asks God for relief, stays in community with others, seeks relief through human means yet has an attitude of waiting on the Lord, and yet still willing to explore and confront hidden sin in self) begins to see that in the midst of the pain, God is there and providing momentary help. Such a person need not act as if the pain were nothing but will look for and rejoice in 5% improvement, 10% more comfort, etc, rather than demanding complete healing as the determinant as to whether God is present with them in their distress.

9 Comments

Filed under biblical counseling, christian counseling, christian psychology, Christianity, counseling, counseling science, Despair, Mindfulness, suffering

Tagged as , , ,

November 23, 2009 · 11:32 am

Measuring minor victories


One person’s victory is another person’s reminder of failure.

I put my socks on by myself this morning. A minor victory don’t you think? No, not for most of you. Normally–and that word is loaded–I put my socks on every morning without thinking about what I’m doing. However, I hurt my back on Friday afternoon and couldn’t move without help. It hurt to sit, stand, lie down, cough, sneeze or do anything at all. It is amazing how the lumbar muscles connect to just about every other muscle group.

With high doses of anti-inflammatory meds, muscle relaxants, and walking (yes, quite counter-intuitive), I was able to put on my socks by myself by Sunday.

Funny how something we do without thinking one day becomes a huge accomplishment the next day. What changed? My perspective and my standards. If my perspective and standards remain the same, then I don’t view putting on my socks as a minor victory but as sign of continuing failure.

What minor victories do you overlook in your life because your standards and perspective are based on a set of assumptions that no longer fit? What minor victories do you dismiss as meaningless because they don’t seem to make a dent in the progress toward your desired goal? Maybe you handle a difficult situation with grace but because it didn’t turn out well you deem your graciousness to be of little value. Maybe a family member gets up and goes to work despite crushing depression but because they do it without joy, you don’t see the minor victory. Maybe a couple fights without curses and put-downs. Is it yet another minor victory?

This is Thanksgiving week. Let us take special notice of God’s grace and power when we observe minor victories in ourselves and those around us–especially in those areas of chronic struggles.

2 Comments

Filed under christian counseling, Desires

Tagged as

November 20, 2009 · 1:40 pm

Edwin Friedman on the search for solutions…


Consider Edwin Friedman’s counsel to leaders in book, A Failure of Nerve (Seabury Books, 2007)

In the search for the solution to any problem, questions are always more important than answers because the way one frames the question, or the problem,  already predetermines the range of answers one can conceive in response. (p. 37)

Seems true for counselors as well. How a counselor begins the exploration of a client’s problem narrows the field of answers as to the problem and solutions. Now, assumptions are always present–especially in questions. So, asking questions doesn’t keep the field of view open unless one is willing to ask questions not normally conceived. It is difficult to remember to ask questions that run counter to our initial hypotheses. And yet such questions are necessary if we are going to counsel actual individuals and not mere figments of our imaginations.

2 Comments

Filed under counseling, counseling skills, Great Quotes

Tagged as , , , ,