Counseling Theory Compatible with Christian Worldview

Abstract

Counseling is the specialized way of helping individuals overcome their problems. Traditional counseling and psychology focuses on the mind and body of the individual and largely ignores the soul of the individual. This is where the need for counseling according to a Christian worldview becomes more profound. Even though both types of counseling help the individual overcome the problems at the end of the day, Christian counseling focuses on all the aspects of a human being, i.e. the mind, body and the soul. This paper tries to develop a counseling theory that is based on the integration of theology and compatible psychological techniques and skills to help individuals in terms of mind, soul, and body.

Any counseling theory needs to have philosophical assumption about what constitutes human behavior, a healthy human being and abnormal human behavior. The personality can be considered as having and developed in the form of two circles. The inner circle consists of the heart, mind, soul and body of an individual. The outer circle, on the other hand, consists of the temporal systems, that include family, friends, society, church etc, and the supernatural system, i.e. God, angels, Satan and demons. According to this personality model, every individual is unique and has different personality characteristics. A healthy human being is one, who has no hole or malfunctioning in any of the elements of the inner and outer circle. Abnormal behavior can occur when there is any malfunction in the elements of the inner and outer circles of human personality. This can also be explained with the help of the psychosocial (mind), sociocultural (temporal systems), biological (body) and spiritual (soul) models of abnormalities. For psychotherapy, the focus should be on the integration of traditional psychotherapy and theology. For psychotherapy purposes, an individual can be seen as the image of God in three ways suggested by theologists. These are the functional (the mind and behavior), structural (rational and moral nature of humans) and the relational (relationships) views. With regard to this concept, first functional techniques from the functional school of psychology can be used. This can be followed by structural interventions taken from cognitive behavior theories and then relational interventions from psychodynamics can be used.

Counseling Theory Compatible with Christian Worldview

Introduction

Spirituality and religion are significant and unique facets of human existence.

Among those supporting such a statement stands Abraham Maslow (1962) who suggests that "the human being needs a framework of values, a philosophy of life, a religion or religion-surrogate to live by and understand by, in about the same sense he needs sunlight, calcium and love" (p.206). Similarly, Viktor Frankl (1963) identifies spiritual conflict and the feeling of meaninglessness as the root cause of clinical pathology. And Albert Einstein acknowledges the essentialness of the spiritual in his statement "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind" (Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, 2001, p. 290).

Although spirituality and religion are often seen in a similar light, they are usually defined quite ...