Counselling
My life has fallen into a few stages.
As a child, I lived in Box Hill when it was a Village. I then became Pastor to the Slums of Inner Melbourne for eight years. I was then a Country Parson and a Teacher at a One Teacher Bush School out at Jackson Creek in Western Victoria and then for thirteen years, I was a Suburban Minister in one of Australia’s largest suburban ministries.
And now, for more than 20 years I’ve been Superintendent in Sydney of Wesley Mission, Australia’s largest church ministry.
I’ve told you stories of people in each of these places.
Tonight I want you to come with me into the heart of the city.
One of the tasks I was looking forward to when I became Superintendent of Wesley Mission more than 23 years ago was providing some leadership in the field of counselling. Every city church has a huge load of people coming for counselling but Wesley Mission even more so. The Mission has always taken care for those people who are troubled, disabled, perplexed and confused, therefore the counselling load was high. But more than that a few years earlier Sir Alan Walker had founded LifeLine and therefore we had an enormous stream of people coming to be counselled and other people who needed to be trained as volunteer counsellors.
I had developed what we call the “Cheltenham Counselling Centre” in my suburban ministry in Melbourne and we brought together people with varying skills and backgrounds and training and established a one-on-one counselling service. I had also studied Psychology and had read very widely in the whole field of counselling and human psychology. I had undertaken some courses at the Cairnmiller Institute, a specialised institute for people who are going to undertake counselling.
I had been counselling boys that I had on probation and parole from the juvenile justice system in the slums of Melbourne. Many of them had very poor self-esteem levels and I had spent much time in helping them sort themselves out. When I was a country parson I had many people in the rural sector who did not have access to quality counselling or psychologists of any kind in the community and when it was heard that I was working in counselling and was the chaplain in the psychiatric hospital, many people came for counselling concerning their personal and emotional problems. In the thirteen years as a suburban minister in Cheltenham we had built up an extensive counselling programme with hundreds of people from the community finding their way to our doors seeking to be counselled from one or other of our competent staff. I discovered that from the very earliest days I had the capacity to listen, to analyse peoples’ problems and help them discover some answers. Because most ministers are compassionate people, those who came for counselling found that they were helped in an environment that they appreciated. And because we never charged people, there were many who were on very limited incomes for whom this was the only counselling they could afford.
The opportunity to work in oversight of the training of counsellors for LifeLine was a wonderful opportunity bringing together the experience of the previous twenty years. For the last 23 years I have spent almost every Tuesday Night training a counselling class of 60 – 80 young and enthusiastic trainees who were completing 24 weeks of serious training. Our trainers are mainly psychologists and psychiatrists although every week I open the counselling training by taking the theme for the night and then indicating how Christians can counsel with the insights of Jesus on that particular issue. Over the years I’ve had more than 2000 people in my counselling courses. At the start of the twenty first century I find that those coming for counselling are quite different from those who first came more than twenty years ago. In general they are younger, more highly educated, most having completed their degrees in psychology at university and most intending to give us a short term of two years only service. In the old days we had some very fine counsellors who served us faithfully year after year but these days most younger counsellors want to get the credit on their curriculum vitae and then get on with something else.
Apart from LifeLine I found it necessary over the years to establish a specialised financial counselling service, which we called CreditLine. Today it has grown with a very large full time staff and with centres all over Australia and is the largest financial counselling service in the nation.
In the early eighties I was having so many people come to us for whom English was a second language that we established Ethnic LifeLine in order to provide counselling in half a dozen different languages. Eventually we got to about twenty different languages and the programme was taken over by the state government who was now setting up an interpreter service.
We had YouthLine which was a specialised programme of training young people to counsel other young people. That work continues to this day although others would copy the programme and set up a specialised Kids Help Line.
One of our significant counselling service centres I established in 1985 was Wesley Gambling Counselling Service. This was a specialised counselling service to help gamblers who were finding the increased opportunities to gamble, because of the growing incidence of poker machines and casinos. We had enormous numbers of people coming for gambling counselling and that work continues unabated. Today Wesley Gambling Counselling Service is the largest in the nation. We are also responsible for providing advice to gambling organisations such as Star City Casino so that they can identify problem gamblers and so that there is a place to which they can be referred. All told my involvement in training people in counselling has become a major factor of my life and role as Superintendent of Wesley Mission.
What have I learned over the years concerning counselling?
For one thing, patience. I was troubled in the 1960’s that in order to help some people I had to have an extensive number of counselling sessions. Sometimes I saw a person twenty or thirty times and it was troubling me that I was spending too much time on an individual although the progress that individual was making made me realise that the continuance of the counselling sessions was vital. One day I was attending a series of lectures by Professor Frieda Fromm–Reichmann, an outstanding American psychotherapist. She was giving lectures on ‘The Principles of Intensive Psychotherapy.’ I thoroughly enjoyed that particular course and it opened my eyes in many ways enabling me to better counsel people who came to me. She was the daughter of Dr Eric Fromm, a German born social psychiatrist who like many other psychiatrists had travelled to the United States. He rejected Sigmund Freud’s theory that behaviour is influenced primarily by our instincts particularly our sex drive. Dr Fromm said our behaviour is influenced by sociological factors such as the social and cultural environment in which we grew. I had read his books such as “The Art Of Loving” and others and really felt that he was giving the great insights. His daughter was influenced by Dr Karl Menninger from Kansas whose work I’d also read. Consequently as I sat in her lectures on “The Principles Of Intensive Psychotherapy” I felt that I had discovered an approach that would help in my counselling.
After one session I raised with her the problem I was having with a certain man named Don. Don was an intelligent bright man married with three children with a good job. The problem was that he was an extreme procrastinator. He couldn’t make up his mind or move himself to do anything. The result was that his marriage was falling apart, his employers were threatening to sack him and his mental health was in a terrible situation. Don had come to see me about his problems. I had never met him previously. He told me that a well-known Melbourne psychiatrist Dr Gold had referred him to me as being someone able to help him. I had talked with Don for probably thirty sessions and felt that he was just enjoying my attention.
I kept giving him various tasks to undertake which he always completed satisfactorily. According to my understanding he should now be coming to a point of being able to make strong decisions for himself without procrastination. But that wasn’t happening. I spread the case before Professor Fromm-Reichmann and then asked her “How much time would you spend counselling a man with this problem?” Dr Fromm-Reichmann looked at me and said, “I do not believe I can help him under 200 hours of intensive psychotherapy.” That floored me. I would have to be a lot more patient if I was really going to help change the life of a person like Don. It also made me realise that I was not the person who should be spending 200 hours with one person while I was minister of one of the largest protestant churches in Australia and a church, which was growing on all fronts. It was a wrong use of my time to be giving so much time to one individual. Having learned the issues I saw my role should be to teach other people to provide the counselling to him. I would need to multiply myself if I was to be efficient in my use of time. In coming to Wesley Mission and being involved in weekly lecturing trainee counsellors I was fulfilling this wise use of time.
The second thing I had learned from counselling was the value of confrontation. Most of us in our counselling were brought up on the values of listening and reflecting upon what the client had to say. One of our hardest tasks was to teach our counsellors not to give advice which so many of them were always ready to do but instead to really listen to what the person had to say, to help them clarify the issues and enable them to come to some conclusions themselves. We believe that our clients would encode their feeling one way or another and that what we had to do was reflect back to them what they were saying in such a way that they could understand what it was that they really felt.
We followed the philosophy of Professor Carl Rogers. We trained our counsellors in the skills of listening and reflecting, paraphrasing and summarising. The primary role of a counsellor is to listen. By listening to what the client says we can help them sort through the complexity and confusion of their situation, understand their feelings and explore the options available with them so that they feel something useful has been done.
It was at this time that I was introduced to the American psychiatrist Dr Frederick Perls, and ‘Gestalt Therapy’. I was taught how to confront certain people with issues in their lives. Instead of merely reflecting what they thought, I would confront them with the issue so powerfully that they were shaken to their roots and their carefully built world of security was rattled. Professor Carl Rogers had said, “Listening, rightly done, is the most significant thing you can do for a person.” Now I learned that for some people, on a rare occasion, total confrontation with them about themselves and their situation was the only way to break down carefully erected walls that gave them security.
I realised that this was what Jesus was doing when he was talking with the woman at the well. She kept asking him questions about where to worship, and the difference between Jews and Samaritans. Jesus suddenly said to her “Call your husband and come here” the woman replied “I have no husband” then Jesus said with perception, “You are right when you say you have no husband because you have already had five husbands and the man you are living with is not your husband.” That really shook her! She opened up to Him in the most amazing way so that her whole life was completely changed through His incredible counselling skills.
Over the years on occasions I have needed to confront people with an accurate situation. I have found that this has shattered their carefully constructed defences and they saw themselves and their situations clearly for the first time. Confrontation rightly used can be the real means of helping heal a person.
A third value that I learnt was the influence of compulsion. I had met compulsive drinkers, compulsive gamblers, compulsive eaters, and compulsive dieters and with all of these you also meet compulsive liars. Breaking down that compulsion is often difficult. The famous Sydney psychologist Dr Lyn Barrow who did so much to help us understand how we can live more effective lives was the person who first helped me understand compulsion. It was out of learning from Dr Barrow that I developed our Wesley Gambling Counselling Services because gambling is one of the most compulsive habits that people can have, leading to stealing from their spouses, mothers, workmates and employers. Compulsive gamblers, compulsive liars and compulsive fools. Until the compulsion is treated there will be no healing.
The final thing I have learnt in counselling over the years has been the invidiousness of co-dependency. I think the first time I ever realised the significance of co-dependency was with a lady who was a member of my church in Cheltenham. Lydia was a courageous woman and joined in many of our activities despite the fact that people gradually came to understand that she was an abused wife. Her husband Morris was a brute of a husband who physically and sexually abused her, who kept money from her and would not allow her to join in many church activities. All the women knew Lydia and they pitied her greatly. In meetings people would pray for her and give her great encouragement. She always had a wistful look upon her face and people were moved greatly to support her. Some gave her money when she was short and others went and visited her with gifts during the daytime when Morris wasn’t around. Some diligent people prayed that God would somehow send a thunderbolt from heaven and strike Morris.
I had followed the pattern of my predecessor. I pitied Lydia greatly and went to visit her during the daytime and she constantly asked me to pray for her husband. We all thought Lydia a saint. This went on for years with nothing happening. We visited Lydia and prayed for her husband. Then one day after reflecting upon her situation I told Lydia that I was no longer going to come and visit her. What I intended to do was to pray for her earnestly that God would work a miracle in her heart. And instead of praying for Morris I intended to visit him at his work and speak to him during his lunch hour. I intended to visit him on a number of occasions and confront him with the way he treated Lydia. I was sick of Lydia being abused while we visited and supported her and all we did was pray for Morris. Now I was turning the situation around. I was going to pray for Lydia and I would go and confront Morris. She begged me not to visit him. She was frightened that he would blame her for the fact that I had visited him and he would then later take it out on her. It was a powerful argument but I was sure I was right.
I went and visited Morris at his work. He was surprised when someone called him from his office to see me just as lunch hour was beginning. I asked if I could eat lunch with him wherever he ate, at a bar of a pub if he went there for lunch or out of a paper bag. Whatever he did I would do but I wanted to have an hour talking with him. I was surprised. Morris seemed a fairly decent bloke. He readily agreed and we sat down together in the work canteen and I had a good hour-long chat. We spoke about Lydia and I was amazed to see how caring he seemed to be for her. However, I knew many men who were abusers, were also people who could put on a good story. Often after abuse they were most apologetic and sought forgiveness. So I wasn’t taken in by Morris’ good presentation to me.
The following Tuesday lunchtime I was again at his work and again spent an hour with him and the following week another hour. I gradually began to realise there were two sides to the story. In point of fact, Lydia enjoyed playing the part of the abused wife and receiving the consolation, attention and pity of all of the other women, and contrary to what we had been told, it didn’t seem as if Morris was in fact an abuser. Now having built the personal relationship with Morris I asked him if I could visit him one night at home together with Lydia.
Lydia was around to my home like a rocket as soon as she heard that I was going to visit her and Morris together one evening after tea.
Well I’ll let you guess what happened. But the fact was that Lydia was co-dependent upon Morris and she had built up a persona in the eyes of other people, which was not factual. She had enjoyed the attention, the pity and the support of other women. Morris actually deeply appreciated the visits and it enabled him to say a few things to Lydia that he wanted to say but could never get across. My visits continued until Morris made a commitment to Christ, was baptised and became a member of the church. Now Lydia was faced with an incredible problem. She had to change her attitudes! They were harder to change than Morris’ and I had to have long counselling sessions with her before she became the Christian that she should be.
One of the most exciting aspects of ministry is to spend time helping people make the most of themselves and becoming the people that God intended them to be. The only thing better than actually counselling people is the work of training counsellors who will be able to multiply our effectiveness in helping people grow. Today 2000 counsellors help people because of the lessons I have learned.
The city of Sydney would grow to be one of the world’s great cities and Wesley Mission would grow to be one of the world’s great churches and I was privileged to spend each day in the heart of both.