Crisis Counseling Patients Counsels Patients into Crises

The therapeutic professions are doing more harm than good.

I do not write this as a new convert to Scientology. I have no interest in dishing with Tom Cruise, who likes to jump on people's couches and scream about how much she loves a woman who has now just divorced him.

I am more concerned by the growing number of people whom I met who have sat in therapies, with counselors, with psychiatrists even (including truly yours truly)

I cannot believe that we are trying to get people to "fix their feelings." We need to fix our eyes on the Author and Finisher of Faith, Jesus Christ (Hebrews 12: 2).

I am convinced more and more that a great deal of this counseling stuff turns into job-protection for the practitioners who are just as dependent as the people whom they claim to help.

Only when I realized that nothing was getting better sitting in a psychiatrist's office, only when I learned that everyone of us as a deeper need than what we are thinking or feeling, that a heart change with a transformation of our lives from death to life, only then do we reign in life.

We cannot improve the body and the mind that we take with us when we enter the world. We cannot make this "flesh" better. Thy only way out of this body of death so that we may reign in life -- is to receive a new life.

"I want to start over!" many people lament when they look over the brokenness throughout their lives.

"I want to make everything better!" others meditate to themselves, reflecting on themselves and their failures.

We can do nothing of ourselves. We need Life and the more abundantly.

I still remember this one young lady, who had endured some terrible traumas in her life. She has gone through crisis counseling, and then she had become a crisis counselor herself. Yet every day she was still breathing out a sense of crisis and chaos in her life. She was not free at all from a damaging past.

Since when have we developed this devolved notion that we are defined by our experiences? The trend in this arrogantly ignorant modern world rests on the empty premise that each person decides his own way and defines himself. That naive notion falls away, crumbles in the face of a massive world, unpredictable and unwelcoming to many, in which our expectations do not come from within,  but infuse us from without. We did not make ourselves, and whatever life we wish to live, this life requires input and influence from outside of us. More than liberty, the stable identity of knowing and believing that we belong -- this need trumps all others.

If man is the final arbiter of his existence, he is prone to the shocks and discomfiting outcomes of a world in which the immensity of the many overwhelms. This rugged individualism has created a subtle yet stifling conformity, and as a result, we trust our feelings, we are defined by a fraught and fragile past, and thus we succumb to an identity of victims who will always be " in recovery".

Crisis counseling for patients can tend toward counseling patients into crisis. This is not the to live; I still recall the troubled young woman who had endured so much. Yet a life or reliving yesterday and excusing our todays because of what we had endured then, will only cripple today and bankrupt the glorious tomorrows which remain in store for us.