Counseling Religion

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As part of my educational experience at George Fox University, I have been challenged by several instructors to learn how to get to a place where I am comfortable talking about religion in sessions while simultaneously holding my personal values aside so the client doesn’t feel judged or criticized. I’ve been thinking about this lately because it is a real and, at times, difficult thing to do. Some questions that come up are as follows. 1) Can a counselor have a different belief system than a client and still be the right fit? 2) Can a counselor truly set aside their view of anything, let alone religion?

I would like to make a point of clarity for the sake of neutrality. I view religious perspective and the belief in any specific deity to be different things. For example, a person can believe in God and still have misconceptions about God. The misconceptions would be what I call religious perspective, while the fact that the person believes in God is their decision. As a counselor, I think it is very important to make this distinction. I believe it’s my duty to challenge religious perspective when it is causing dysfunction but I believe it is completely inappropriate to challenge someone’s belief in God. One of the great things about living and working in the United States of America is the fact that we have the right to peaceably assemble for religious purposes without persecution. Plus, who am I to judge someone else’s life as right or wrong. Being a counselor doesn’t give me the right to judge people. It gives me a platform to challenge inconsistencies in people’s lives. This applies even if the inconsistency is a client’s religious perspective.

Now we’ll take a closer look at the questions that came up earlier. The short answer to question one is yes. Many people believe that a counselor needs to have had their experience, in this case religion, in order to provide insight. I don’t agree with this thinking. In many cases similar thought can keep people in ruts that they otherwise might be able to find their way out. For example, it’s often seen as advantage to go to a marriage therapist who has experienced a long marriage. Though there are times where it is helpful to have the insight of someone experienced in marital endurance, the fact that they have stayed married doesn’t necessarily make them more qualified to handle any specific kind of marital issue. The same is true for religion in counseling. If you find a counselor who matches up with your religion and is still able to challenge your religious perspective then that’s great. Just remember, counseling should not be comfortable all the time. If it is comfortable all the time, you’re probably not progressing at a rate that you are capable of.

Question two is one of the hardest questions to answer from my perspective. The truth is, I don’t believe a counselor can be authentic in the relationship and set aside all their views. Nor do I think they should try to. In everyday life we set things aside in order to make other things possible. At times a counselor should and will do so. First and foremost, a counselor should feel like they can be in an authentic and professional relationship with the client. When it isn’t possible to set aside personal emotions in order to learn about the client’s struggles and successes, then it’s probably time for the counselor to seek consultation or to refer the client to a counselor better suited for their needs. For example, a client who was raped at one point in their life may, at some point, need to describe the rape in detail or draw the rape artistically in order to relive the experience and feel the empathy they didn’t feel from people shortly after the original trauma of the rape. If they are seeing a counselor who was also raped earlier in life and has not processed it at length, possibly in their own counseling, the counselor might re-experience their personal rape. This could be a problem for the client and for the counselor if the counselor is not very careful and attentive to their own care. So, I feel like I’ve talked around the question a little so I’ll try to make sure I’m blunt for those whom that works best for. I think a counselor can set aside their views on things and stay focused on the client’s reality. It requires purposeful attention by the counselor in order to do so and often times is very difficult because counselors are people too, which makes it easy to fall back into the trap of the idea that “it’s just who I am”. If I were to suggest a type of counselor to you, I would always suggest a counselor who strives to learn about themselves as well as their clients.