Q: Are you a Christian counselor? A: No!
Dear Stephen,
Okay, so I confess, I Googled you. I was looking for a therapist and I liked your site, so I looked for other evidence of you on the Internet. Much to my surprise, I saw you on a blog for a church in Seattle. Are you a Christian counselor? I don’t mean any disrespect, but I am not interested in that.
–Looking for a Secular Perspective
Dear Secular,
I’m glad you asked! I’ve been wondering when someone would do a Google search on me and ask me this. I’m happy to tell you that no, I am not a Christian counselor. I am trained as a “systems” therapist (also known as a couple and family therapist), and though the university that trained me is affiliated with the Lutheran church, the therapy graduate program was fully and thoroughly non-sectarian. I have not been trained as a chaplain, spiritual director, or any other kind of religious counselor.
Having said all that, I do have a personal spiritual practice, and a religious orientation. Since it’s pretty much out in the open anyway, I think it’s time to say on my own website that I am an active Episcopalian at a progressive, affirming church in Seattle. We don’t do a political litmus test, but our church attracts fairly liberal—and highly open-minded—people. If you want to learn more, click here.
I’ve been fairly “closeted”—I suppose that’s the right word—about all this because the majority of my clients do not identify with any religious organization, and some have been harmed by churches who rejected them for being gay (or for other reasons). I never—ever!—take our therapy in a religious direction, with only one exception: if the client is asking her own religious or spiritual questions and wants to talk about them with me, I can help her wrestle with those questions using her own religious background as a starting point, and often enough I’ll know a fair amount about that background, at least in a general sense. (If she says, “I was raised Catholic,” I’ll have a very educated guess about what she means.) But even then, my training, and my temperament as a therapist, prevent me from falling into the role of a religious counselor. It is important that I do the work for which I was licensed.
I also keep the wisdom of my own tradition in mind. One Episcopal priest I know and respect said to me, “The church can be a great place to hide from God.” I think he meant that religious people can do all kinds of irreligious things—awful things!—or shrink from a truly ethical life, and rationalize it by going to church every week. And a Catholic priest I know and respect said to me, “If the Holy Spirit is only present inside the church, then we are all in very big trouble.” I think he meant that not only does the institutional church have plenty of problems, including the fact that it simply doesn’t work for the majority of human beings on this planet, but there is far too much beauty and creativity and wisdom beyond the church walls for anyone to fantasize that the church can somehow contain the Source of All Being that, in churches, goes by the name of God. I say all this because these are reasons why it’s quite easy for me to walk away from church language, church politics, and even church worldviews when I step into my counseling office.
So if you’re interested in receiving non-religious counseling, you really can get it from someone who has his own religious community. Just let me know!
