Chapala Theological Seminary Counseling Situations

Bringing the Ten Steps to a Real Situation

The ten steps are the spine of every unit; the situation is the flesh on it.

The Situation

This course follows directly from Drakeford's Ten-Step Counseling Model. Where the first class teaches the ten steps in the abstract, this one takes those same steps and walks one real situation through them, start to finish — a deathbed, a failing marriage, a depression that will not lift. The steps are the spine; the situation is the flesh on it. Before we enter the first situation, this foundation unit does two things. First, it sets the ten steps back in front of us as the working frame of every unit that follows. Second, it places that biblical frame beside the main schools of secular counseling — surveyed in the Robbins notes — so that the student can see clearly what each secular approach noticed about human trouble, where it is useful, and where it must be refused. A pastor who has weighed these approaches is neither naive about them nor frightened of them; he keeps what is true and rejects what denies God or lifts responsibility off the human heart.

The Ten Steps, Applied

Step One · Stage 1

Determine the Time and the Place

Choose a time unhurried enough to truly listen and a place that is private yet safe. Privacy lets a person speak honestly; safety protects everyone in the room. The course's standing safeguard lives here: a pastor never counsels someone of the opposite gender in a closed office or a private home. In a crisis the setting is often fixed for you — a hospital, a kitchen table, a hallway — and then the step bends rather than breaks, as you will see at the deathbed, where the 'place' had been prepared long beforehand in an ordinary friendship.

Step Two · Stage 1

Listen — "Why Don't You Tell Me About It?"

Let the person speak before you speak. The first story is rarely the real one; the true burden surfaces only when he senses you are not in a hurry and not quick to judge. Listening is not passive — it is the hard work of attending to words, silences, and what is left unsaid. This is where the Rogerian lens described below has its strongest and most legitimate gift: empathy, reflection, and genuine regard. But the pastor listens in order to help, not merely to mirror; he will not stop at listening.

Step Three · Stage 1

Clarify the Situation — "Just What Do You Mean?"

Make sure you understand the real problem before you act on it. People often name one trouble and mean another — speaking of anger and meaning grief, speaking of a spouse and meaning fear. Gentle clarifying questions, asked without interrogation, keep the counselor from solving the wrong thing and wasting the trust that listening has just built. Clarifying also tells the counselor whether the matter is within his competence or whether it is already pointing toward referral, which is the subject of the final unit.

Step Four · Stage 1

Investigate Previous Counseling

Find out what help the person has already sought — pastors, professionals, family, or none at all. This keeps the counselor from repeating what has already failed and from contradicting sound advice the person is already following. It also reveals the boundary of pastoral competence: when a problem has medical, psychiatric, or legal weight beyond what a pastor can carry, this is the step where that becomes visible, and where the faithful response is to involve those trained to help rather than to press on alone.

Step Five · Stage 2

Responsibility — "Where Have You Failed?"

Gently help the person own his part in the trouble, for there is no real change without honest ownership. But this step carries a permanent warning: it is never applied to a victim, who bears no blame for what was done to him. Handled with care, responsibility opens the door to confession, repentance, and change; handled clumsily, it crushes or it blames the innocent. The counselor distinguishes the part a person can own from the part that was never his fault, and presses only on the first.

Step Six · Stage 2

Model the Role

Show in your own bearing the calm faith, patience, and steadiness you hope the person can take hold of. A counselor cannot give a peace he is not displaying or a hope he does not hold. Much of counseling is caught rather than taught: the anxious person borrows the counselor's calm, the bitter person is disarmed by his gentleness, the despairing person sees in him a steadiness that makes hope believable. This is why the counselor tends his own walk with God before he sits down with anyone else.

Step Seven · Stage 2

Review the Alternatives

Lay the real options before the person rather than dictating the one you prefer. Choices a counselee reaches himself are owned far more deeply than those imposed on him, and ownership is what carries a decision through the hard days that follow. The counselor is not silent or neutral — he brings Scripture and wisdom to bear — but he presents and persuades rather than commands, treating the person as a responsible adult who must answer to God for his own choices, not as a child to be managed.

Step Eight · Stage 2

Explore the Outcomes

Walk through where each alternative likely leads, honestly and without false promises. People in trouble often see only the next step; the counselor helps them look down each road far enough to choose with open eyes. He neither paints the obedient path as easy nor hides the cost of the destructive one. Exploring outcomes turns vague fear or wishful thinking into a clear-eyed view of consequences, so that the decision made in Step Seven is made in the light rather than the dark.

Step Nine · Stage 2

Supply Information

Bring Scripture and sound counsel to bear on the chosen path — the word of God applied to this real situation, not generic advice that would fit anyone and therefore helps no one. Here the counselor's knowledge of the Bible and of the problem at hand finally speaks plainly. This is also where the useful tool from a secular school may be picked up inside the step: a cognitive insight about guarding the thought, a behavioral plan for building a habit — always weighed against Scripture and never allowed to become the frame.

Step Ten · Stage 2

Provide Closure

End with prayer and a plan, and with the door left open for return. Closure is rarely a single clean stop; in most situations it begins ongoing care rather than ending it. The counselor sends the person out with a concrete next step, the assurance that he is not alone, and a clear way back. In the situations ahead — the dying, the abused, the depressed, the addicted — closure will almost always mean the start of a longer walk alongside the person, not a tidy conclusion.

Counseling Approaches Weighed by Scripture — from the Robbins Notes

Secular counseling has studied human trouble closely and noticed real things about it. A Christian counselor need not fear every observation a secular school makes, but neither may he swallow a school whole. He tests all things and holds fast what is good (1 Thessalonians 5:21), keeping what is true and refusing what denies God or lifts responsibility off the human heart. The Robbins notes — a survey of the major schools, compiled by Dawn Wipf and weighed against Scripture — make that sorting possible. The course's thesis is simple: Drakeford's ten steps are the biblical frame, and the genuinely useful tools from these schools are picked up inside the steps, never made the frame itself.

Reality Therapy (Glasser). Useful: it presses individual responsibility, focuses on the present and the future rather than endless excavation of the past, and grounds a person in love and self-worth (1 Corinthians 13:13). Caution: it can be too directive, and it tends to wave off emotion as if feelings did not matter — when to a hurting person they are a present fact.

Behavioral Modification (Wolpe, Skinner, Watson). Useful: it shows that real change of thought and action is possible and that good habits can be built (Romans 12:1–2; Hebrews 5:13–14), and it deals with the trouble that grips a person now. Caution: in its pure form it treats man as a puppet of his environment and lifts responsibility off him, when Scripture locates behavior in the heart.

Cognitive Therapy (Beck, with Ellis as the warning figure). Useful: it traces the chain from thought to feeling to word to act, and so hands a person a place to intervene — guard the thought (Philippians 4:8). Caution: in its secular form it can place man wholly in control with no reference to God; Ellis is the extreme, man at the center of the universe.

The Twelve-Step Movement (Alcoholics Anonymous). Useful: it begins with admitting powerlessness, leans on dependence and on making amends, and surrounds a person with honest fellowship — faint echoes of confession, humility, restitution, and the body of Christ. Caution: its 'higher power as you understand him' is left undefined; the gospel names the Power that the program leaves blank.

Transactional Analysis (Berne). Useful: it gives names to destructive patterns of interaction — the Parent, Adult, and Child in us, the repetitive 'games' people play — which can help a couple see what they keep doing to each other. Caution: it is descriptive only; it can excuse behavior as a 'script' and offers no gospel of forgiveness or call to love.

Psychoanalytic Therapy (Freud, Jung). Useful: it takes seriously that the past shapes the present, and that talking a wound out — catharsis — can be part of healing. Caution: it can turn the past into an excuse, and it offers no real remedy for guilt or shame; only the gospel does. This is material best handed to a trained professional rather than worked alone.

Rogerian / Person-Centered Therapy (Rogers). Useful: empathy, reflective listening, and genuine regard — the very gifts that strengthen Step Two and Step Three more than any technique. Caution: a purely non-directive stance can shortchange a person who needs concrete, loving guidance from Scripture. The pastor listens like Rogers but does not stop there.

Hypnotherapy and Guided Imagery. These mark the far edge. They reach for techniques that bypass the conscious will or drift toward the mystical, and they raise serious biblical and ethical concerns about who is in control of a person's mind. They are outside the pastor's lane; where a need calls for anything like them, it has left pastoral counseling and belongs to accountable, trained professionals — and even then is weighed warily against Scripture.

Each of these lenses returns in the situation it serves best: the Cognitive lens under Depression, Reality Therapy and Behavioral Modification under Anxiety and Fear, the Twelve-Step and habit material under Addiction, the Psychoanalytic insight under the Sexually Abused, Transactional Analysis under Marital Conflict, and Hypnotherapy and Imagery as the boundary marker in When to Refer. The frame, in every case, stays the same — the ten steps — and the tools are only ever tools.