Chapala Theological Seminary Biblical Counseling

About This Course and About John Drakeford

Before we begin, a brief word about the man whose work this course follows, and about how the units that follow are organized.

Who Was John Drakeford?

John W. Drakeford (1914–1996) was an Australian-born Baptist pastor, psychologist, and seminary professor who devoted his life to training Christian counselors. He served for many years as Professor of Psychology and Counseling at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, where he also directed the Marriage and Family Counseling Center. Drakeford was not primarily a clinician working with patients behind closed doors; he was a teacher of pastors, training men and women who would carry his methods into local churches and ordinary congregations all over the world.

Drakeford wrote prolifically, with books that bridged the academic counseling literature and the practical needs of the pastor in his study. Among his best-known works are Counseling for Church Leaders, People to People Therapy, Integrity Therapy, and The Awesome Power of the Listening Ear. He worked closely with O. Hobart Mowrer, whose Integrity Therapy framework — emphasizing honest confession of real moral failure as the path to wholeness — deeply shaped Drakeford's own thinking. Where many mid-twentieth-century counselors treated moral failure as illness, Drakeford insisted that moral failure was moral failure, and that the gospel had a far better answer to it than the therapeutic culture did.

Drakeford's reputation was built on his capacity to take dense psychological literature and turn it into something a pastor with no clinical training could actually use on a Tuesday afternoon when a couple walked into his office in crisis. He listened seriously to Freud, Rogers, Skinner, Berne, and the biblical counseling pioneers of his own generation. He kept what served the pastor's work; he set aside what conflicted with Scripture; and he built a method ordinary pastors could learn and practice.

The Ten-Step Model

Drakeford's distinctive contribution to pastoral counseling is the clear, teachable structure presented in this course. Ten steps walk the counselor from the very first moment of an encounter — establishing time and place — through listening, clarification, investigation of previous counseling, the assignment of responsibility, the modeling of right behavior, the review of alternatives, the exploration of likely outcomes, the supplying of needed information, and finally to provided closure. The steps are not a mechanical script; they are a disciplined sequence that orders the counselor's instincts and protects both counselor and counselee from the most common pastoral errors — speaking too soon, confronting before listening, lecturing before understanding, and leaving the counselee without concrete action.

Each step is a unit in this course. Each unit contains a teaching block, scriptural grounding, and an assessment that tests whether you have learned the material. Pastors trained in these ten steps have helped many thousands of people through marital trouble, family crisis, grief, vocational confusion, moral failure, addiction, and the ordinary discouragements of life. The model is durable. It is also bounded — Drakeford himself was clear that some problems require referral to specialists, and this course teaches that boundary too.

How the Course Is Organized

The course contains eleven units. The Foundation Unit is a module that sets Drakeford within the wider landscape of twentieth-century counseling so that you will know not only what the ten steps prescribe but why. Steps One through Ten present Drakeford's model in order, with each unit building on the preceding ones. The steps are designed to be learned in sequence; the work of Step Five is impossible without the listening discipline of Step Two, and the closure of Step Ten cannot be supplied unless the work of Steps One through Nine has actually been done.

Each unit has the same structure. A teaching block presents Drakeford's material with biblical and theological reflection. Scripture is cited from the Authorized (King James) Version in English and from the Reina-Valera Revisada 1960 in Spanish. After the teaching block comes an assessment. Certificate of Ministry students complete twenty multiple-choice questions per unit, with immediate feedback on each answer. Associate of Divinity students complete the same twenty multiple-choice questions; they also answer ten fill-in-the-blank questions per unit and need nine of them right. Certificate students may try the fill-in-the-blank questions for review; they do not count. Master of Theology and Master of Divinity students complete the same twenty multiple-choice questions plus ten short-answer items in which they must demonstrate working command of key concepts in their own words. Both sections require ninety percent to pass. Upon completion of all eleven units (and, on the M.Div. and Th.M. tracks, the textbook test), students receive a Certificate of Completion from Chapala Theological Seminary.

A word about what this course is not. It is not a replacement for clinical training, and it does not credential anyone to treat psychiatric conditions, addictions in their acute phase, or the consequences of serious abuse without the involvement of qualified specialists. It is a thorough preparation for the pastoral counseling that happens in the ordinary life of the local church — and that work, properly done, is some of the most important work any pastor will ever do.

The Landscape of Counseling — Where Drakeford Stands

Five streams shaped twentieth-century counseling. The pastor who knows them recognizes what he is hearing, knows what to keep, and knows why Drakeford's path is what it is.

Every counseling method has roots. Drakeford did not invent his ten steps in a vacuum. He sat at the intersection of five major streams that have shaped twentieth-century counseling, and he absorbed from each while rejecting elements of each. The pastor who understands this landscape will recognize what he is hearing when a counselee says, "My last therapist said…" or when he picks up a book at a conference. He will know what to keep, what to set down, and why Drakeford's path is what it is.

Five streams matter most: psychoanalysis (Freud), client-centered therapy (Rogers), behaviorism (Skinner), transactional analysis (Berne), and nouthetic counseling (Adams). Each one names something real about the human person. None of them, by itself, is the whole picture.

0.1 Psychoanalysis — The Buried Past (Freud)

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) is the father of modern psychotherapy. From a Vienna consulting room he developed the system that would dominate Western counseling for half a century, and against which most of what followed was a reaction.

Freud's key insight is that the past is alive. Childhood experiences — especially those involving the parents, sexuality, and unmet desire — leave residues in the unconscious mind. These residues do not lie quietly. They surface as anxiety, depression, compulsion, dreams, slips of the tongue, and unexplained symptoms. The counselee does not know why he behaves as he does because the cause is hidden from him.

The method follows the diagnosis. The analyst sits behind the patient on the couch and lets the patient free-associate — say whatever comes to mind without filter. Over many years, the buried material surfaces; the analyst interprets it; insight slowly accomplishes the cure. The doctrine is sometimes called insight therapy: if you know why you do what you do, you will stop doing it.

Freud's weakness is grave. He treats moral failure as illness. The man who lies, who is unfaithful, who steals, has not sinned — he is sick, driven by forces he cannot help. Treatment is medical, not moral. The cross of Christ has no role; the language of guilt is itself the symptom to be dissolved. O. Hobart Mowrer (whom we will meet under Integrity Therapy) spent his career arguing that Freud had reversed the diagnosis: the patient was not sick because he felt guilty; he felt guilty because he had done something genuinely wrong, and the cure was not to dissolve the guilt but to deal with what produced it.

What Christians can learn from Freud is real if limited. He took the past seriously. Patterns repeat. The wound of childhood does not vanish because we have grown up. The Bible itself shows generational sin running from David through Solomon through Rehoboam. A counselor who never asks about the counselee's family of origin is missing material.

What Drakeford takes: a respect for the past as part of the present. What Drakeford leaves: the medicalization of moral failure. Drakeford's counselee is not sick; he is responsible. His task is not endless excavation; it is confession, change, and obedience.

0.2 Client-Centered Therapy — The Mirror Held Up (Rogers)

Carl Rogers (1902–1987) was a Chicago counseling psychologist who, in mid-century, broke decisively with Freud. Where Freud had the analyst sit behind the patient and interpret, Rogers turned the chairs to face each other and refused to interpret. The counselor's job, Rogers said, is not to know the counselee's mind for him but to reflect his words back so cleanly that he can hear himself.

Rogers' key insight is that the counselee, given a safe space and an accepting listener, will move toward health on his own. The counselor provides three things: unconditional positive regard (acceptance regardless of what is disclosed), empathic understanding (entering the counselee's frame and seeing the world from inside it), and congruence (being a real human, not a performing professional). When these three are present, healing happens. Therapy is non-directive: the counselor does not advise, judge, or interpret. He listens, reflects, clarifies, and waits.

The method produced one of the most useful frameworks in pastoral counseling. Elias Porter, working out of the Rogerian school, identified five attitudes that lie behind every counselor response: evaluative, interpretive, supportive, probing, and understanding. Porter argued that the understanding response — which neither judges nor diagnoses nor reassures, but simply returns the counselee's experience in slightly clearer language — was the gold standard. Step Two of Drakeford's model relies on Porter's framework directly.

Rogers' weakness is also his foundation. His system rests on the assumption that the human person is fundamentally good, and given the right conditions will grow toward what is true and right. Christian theology cannot accept that. The human heart is "deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked" (Jeremiah 17:9). A counselee left entirely to himself, however warmly received, may grow in self-justification rather than in truth. There comes a point when the counselor must speak — not interpret in the Freudian sense, but say plainly, "What you are describing is not a misunderstanding; it is sin, and the way out is not through clearer self-knowledge but through repentance."

What Christians can learn from Rogers is enormous. He recovered listening. He gave the field the discipline of sitting with the counselee long enough actually to hear him. Most pastoral counseling failures are failures at this point: speaking too soon, advising before understanding, applying Scripture to a problem we have not yet seen. Rogers' contribution, by way of Porter, is the counselor's classical posture in the first half of any session.

What Drakeford takes: the discipline of listening, the priority of understanding, Porter's five attitudes. What Drakeford leaves: the assumption that listening alone will heal, and the doctrine of innate human goodness underneath it. Drakeford listens like Rogers in Step Two, and then in Step Five he does what Rogers will not — he asks the counselee, "Where have you failed?"

0.3 Behaviorism — What You Do Becomes Who You Are (Skinner)

B. F. Skinner (1904–1990), working at Harvard from the 1930s onward, gave the counseling field its most radical alternative. Where Freud went deep into the unconscious and Rogers went deep into feeling, Skinner refused to go inside at all. The inner life, he said, is unobservable and therefore unscientific. What can be observed is behavior. What can be measured is behavior. What can be changed is behavior. Everything else is speculation.

Skinner's key insight is the power of reinforcement. Behavior that is rewarded increases; behavior that is unrewarded extinguishes. A child praised for sharing shares more. A child whose tantrum is met with attention tantrums more. Therapy on this model is technical: identify the behavior to change, identify the reinforcers that maintain it, and rearrange the contingencies. Whole branches of behavior modification grew from this — token economies in institutions, systematic desensitization for phobias, applied behavior analysis for autism, the contracting methods used in addiction treatment.

The method's power is undeniable. It works. People do change when their environments change. The counselor who can help a counselee notice which behaviors are being reinforced — by his spouse, his coworkers, his own self-talk — has given him a real tool.

Behaviorism's weakness is the same as its strength. By refusing to talk about the inner life, it has no account of meaning, conscience, repentance, love, or worship. The Skinnerian counselor cannot say that an action is wrong; he can only say that it produces consequences the counselee may not want. A counselee whose behavior has been reshaped without any change of heart has been trained, not transformed.

What Christians can learn from Skinner is the principle of pinpointing. Vague intentions accomplish nothing. "I will be a better father" cannot be lived. "Tonight at supper I will ask each of my children one specific question and listen to the answer without checking my phone" can be lived. Drakeford's Step Six borrows pinpointing directly: the desired behavior must be named, specific, observable, and repeatable. "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might" (Ecclesiastes 9:10) is biblical specificity; behaviorism merely insists on it.

What Drakeford takes: pinpointing, the discipline of measurable behavior, the recognition that environment shapes action. What Drakeford leaves: the refusal to talk about the heart. Drakeford pinpoints behavior because the heart that is changing must show itself in observable conduct. Behaviorism stops at the conduct; Drakeford goes through it to the conscience.

0.4 Transactional Analysis — The Tapes Inside (Berne, Harris, James)

Eric Berne (1910–1970), a Canadian-American psychiatrist trained in psychoanalysis, broke with the Freudian school in the 1950s and developed a more accessible system he called Transactional Analysis. His popular books — Games People Play (1964) and Thomas Harris's I'm OK — You're OK (1967), followed by Muriel James's Born to Win (1971) — moved counseling concepts out of the consulting room and into the bookstores of ordinary readers. By 1970 TA was a household conversation. It has faded somewhat in the Western counseling field but remains influential in Asia and Latin America.

Berne's key insight is that every person operates from three ego states: Parent, Adult, and Child. The Parent state contains the recorded voices of authority figures — the rules, judgments, warnings, and comforts absorbed before age six. The Child state holds the feelings, impulses, and reactions of the small person we once were. The Adult state is the rational, present-tense self who handles facts and makes decisions. All three are useful in their place. Trouble comes when the wrong state takes over — when the Adult should be deciding but the Child is feeling, or when the Parent is judging where understanding is needed.

These ego states are stored, Berne said, like tapes in a recorder. When a present situation resembles a past one, the old tape begins to play. A husband hears his wife use a phrase his mother used, and the Child in him reacts to her as if she were his mother. He may not know why he is angry; he only knows that he is. The TA counselor helps the counselee identify which tape is playing and choose, as an Adult, whether to play it through or turn it off. The promising line, repeated often in the literature, is that telling oneself something twenty times begins to record over the old message — that the counselee who looks in the mirror and says, "I am a wonderful person, made in God's image, and I do not have to live under that old voice," is doing real work on his own tapes.

TA also taught the field a memorable framework for self-evaluation, the four life positions. "I'm OK — You're OK" is the healthy stance: I am uniquely gifted and so are you. "I'm OK — You're not OK" is arrogance: I am worthwhile, but you are not. "I'm not OK — You're OK" is depression: I am a failure, but you are successful. "I'm not OK — You're not OK" is despair: nothing is worth anything. Most life problems, the TA literature argued, can be traced to a life position adopted in childhood and never re-examined as an adult.

Then there are the games. Berne's Games People Play catalogued the small recurring scripts in which two people interact on the surface while pursuing a hidden payoff underneath. "Why don't you — yes but," in which one party offers solutions the other systematically rejects, with the payoff of the rejecter's confirmed helplessness. "If it weren't for you," in which one partner blames the other for limitations actually welcomed. "Kick me," in which one person provokes punishment to reinforce his sense of worthlessness. "Mine is better than yours." "Ain't it awful." The Christian psychiatrist Frank Minirth added "I'm more religious than you" for the church context. Naming the game, Berne argued, often ended it. The counselor who can gently say, "I notice we have been doing 'yes but' for fifteen minutes — what would happen if you actually tried one of these?" is offering the counselee an Adult exit from a Child's pattern.

Underneath the games lies the life script — a story the person has been writing about himself since childhood, with familiar themes (love, hate, revenge, jealousy) and a predictable ending. Script analysis brings the unconscious narrative into the open so the Adult can revise it.

TA's weakness is its theological thinness. The Parent-Adult-Child framework is descriptive, not redemptive. Awareness can rewrite a script, but only in the limited sense that any self-conscious person can choose differently. TA has no doctrine of regeneration, no Holy Spirit, no atoning blood. The "I'm OK" of the healthy life position rests, finally, on self-acceptance — which the gospel says is precisely not the ground on which a fallen human stands. We are not OK; we are forgiven, which is a different and stronger thing.

What Christians can learn from TA is substantial. The doctrine of original sin includes the recognition that we have been shaped by voices that were not God's voice — that the Parent tapes in our heads are sometimes truthful but often distortions, and that the work of sanctification includes letting Scripture record over the lies. Ephesians 4:22–24 — "put off concerning the former conversation the old man… and be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and… put on the new man" — is, in TA's language, replacing a corrupted script with a new one written by the Spirit.

The four life positions also map, with care, onto pastoral categories. "I'm OK — You're not OK" is pride. "I'm not OK — You're OK" is the depressed self-loathing that often masks despair of grace. "I'm not OK — You're not OK" is the cynicism of the abused or the long-discouraged. The counselor who recognizes a life position has a starting point for the gospel address that lifts the counselee out of it.

What Drakeford takes: the discipline of recognizing patterns the counselee cannot see in himself, the willingness to name a game gently as a clarifying move, the recognition that life scripts can be revised. What Drakeford leaves: the assumption that awareness alone is enough, and the "I'm OK" foundation that rests on self-acceptance rather than on Christ's acceptance of the sinner.

0.5 Nouthetic Counseling — Confront with Scripture (Adams)

Jay Adams (1929–2020), a Reformed pastor and seminary professor, published Competent to Counsel in 1970 and almost single-handedly launched the modern biblical counseling movement. Adams was reacting both to secular psychology (which he found unbiblical at its roots) and to pastoral counseling that he believed had become too Rogerian — too willing to listen, too slow to confront. His system has shaped large segments of American evangelicalism through the Christian Counseling and Educational Foundation (CCEF) and the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors (ACBC).

Adams's key insight comes from the Greek word noutheteō, which Paul uses in passages such as Romans 15:14 ("able also to admonish one another") and Colossians 1:28 ("admonishing every man"). The word means to confront with the goal of changing behavior. Adams argued that what counseling really is, biblically, is one believer confronting another with the Word of God for the purpose of behavior change. There is no neutral psychological space outside Scripture. Anxiety, depression, anger, marital trouble, and addictive behavior are not illnesses to be treated; they are sin-patterns to be repented of and exchanged for biblical patterns under the discipline of Scripture and the Holy Spirit.

The method is direct. The counselor listens long enough to identify the sin-pattern, then confronts. The counselee is taught what the Bible commands, given homework (read, memorize, do), and held accountable in the following sessions. The pace is brisk. Most nouthetic counseling is short-term by design — eight to twelve sessions rather than years. The counselee leaves with concrete behavioral commitments, not with self-understanding.

Nouthetic counseling's strength is its theological seriousness. Adams insisted, correctly, that the Bible has more to say about the human condition than any other book ever written, and that the pastor with an open Bible is not less competent to counsel a depressed believer than the psychologist with a Ph.D. He took repentance seriously. He took the sufficiency of Scripture seriously. He refused to treat the church's calling to soul care as a junior partnership with the clinic.

The weakness is in the proportion. Adams's early work tended to treat almost every counseling problem as a sin problem requiring confrontation, and to give insufficient attention to suffering that is not the counselee's fault — to abuse, to grief, to clinical depression with biological components, to the slow work of comforting Job rather than instructing him. The later biblical counseling movement (CCEF in particular, under writers like David Powlison) has refined the model considerably, distinguishing more carefully between sin to be confronted and suffering to be borne with. But the early nouthetic instinct toward swift confrontation could miss the long listening that Step Two requires.

What Drakeford and Adams share is more than what divides them. Both insist that the counselee is responsible, that change is possible, that the Bible is the counselor's primary text, and that the goal is not endless therapy but obedience to Christ. Both reject the medicalization of moral failure. Both believe that an ordinary believing pastor, properly trained, can do real soul work.

What Drakeford takes from the same well Adams drinks from: confidence in Scripture, expectation of change, brevity of treatment. What Drakeford does differently: he listens longer before he confronts. Step Two and Step Three precede Step Five for a reason. Drakeford's counselor earns the right to ask "Where have you failed?" by first hearing the whole story. Adams's classical instinct is to ask sooner. Both can be done biblically; the pastor must know what he is doing and why.

0.6 Where Drakeford Stands

Drakeford stands roughly here. He is closer to Adams than to Rogers in his doctrine of the person — sin is real, responsibility is real, change requires confession and obedience. He is closer to Rogers than to Adams in the discipline of his early sessions — listen long, understand deeply, do not confront until the counselee has been genuinely heard. He absorbs Skinner's pinpointing without becoming a behaviorist; he uses Berne's pattern-naming without buying TA's anthropology; he respects Freud's recognition that the past is alive without medicalizing the present.

The ten steps are not a neutral technique. They are a deliberately Christian integration. Step One frames the encounter. Steps Two through Four hear the counselee out fully. Step Five turns the conversation toward responsibility — the hinge that secular models cannot turn. Steps Six through Ten move toward action and closure. The shape of the model is the shape of Drakeford's settlement of the field: listen like Rogers in the first half, confront like Adams in the middle, build like Skinner in the second half, recognize patterns like Berne throughout, and let the Spirit do through Scripture what no method can manufacture.

The pastor who has studied this landscape will not be intimidated when a counselee says, "My therapist told me…" He will know what tradition the therapist was drinking from. He will know what to keep, what to question, and what to leave alone. He will know where Drakeford stands — and, more importantly, why.

Determine the Time and the Place

"How long do we have? Where can we meet?" — the architecture of every counseling encounter begins here.

1.1 The Counseling Frame

Before a single word of the counselee's story is spoken, two structural decisions shape everything that follows: when this conversation will happen and where it will take place. These are not preliminaries to clear away before the "real" counseling begins. They are counseling. The wisdom of Drakeford's first step is its insistence that the counselor establish the boundaries of the encounter before the encounter generates its own pressures. A counselor who plunges into the problem without first determining the time and the place will find himself either rushed beyond his ability to help, or trapped in a session that drifts because no one knows when it should end.

When a counselee approaches you, he will rarely give an honest estimate of how long he needs. People in distress habitually understate their need: "Could I bother you for just a minute?" or "This will only take a moment." Almost without exception, the matter that pressed them to seek help cannot actually be addressed in a minute. The first kindness you can do them is to refuse the false economy of their words and ask the truthful question yourself.

1.2 The Question of Time

"How much time do we have?" This is the first sentence the counselor should speak after the greeting. It accomplishes three things at once. First, it forces both parties to be honest about availability. The counselee may have thirty minutes before he must collect a child from school; you may have forty-five minutes before another commitment. Naming these constraints aloud removes a hidden tension that would otherwise contaminate the entire session. Second, the question signals that this conversation is bounded — it has a beginning and an end. Counselees who feel a session is open-ended often delay coming to the heart of the matter, sensing they have all evening to circle their pain. A clear time frame focuses the conversation. Third, the question gives you a legitimate close. When the time you agreed upon arrives, you can say without apology, "I see our time is about gone. Thank you for sharing with me."

A common error among inexperienced counselors is the belief that more time produces more help. It does not. Drakeford observed in his decades of practice that long sessions are usually the result of poor technique rather than genuine need. A focused thirty-minute session in which the counselor listens well, clarifies the real problem, and points toward an action plan does more for a troubled soul than three hours of meandering conversation. Some pastors have built reputations for counseling all night with the distressed. This is rarely a mark of dedication; more often it indicates that the counselor never learned to bring a session to closure, and that the counselee has learned that wandering keeps the helper engaged. The biblical counselor sets a frame and trusts God to work within it.

When the agreed time begins to expire and the work is genuinely incomplete, you may extend with full transparency: "If it is all right with you, we can take a few more minutes." Notice the counselee's permission is sought; you do not unilaterally extend. This preserves the dignity of the agreement and prevents the session from becoming an obligation the counselee cannot escape.

1.3 The Question of Place

"Where can we meet?" Place matters more than beginning counselors typically assume. The setting communicates before you speak. A pastor's study with a closed door communicates one set of expectations; a coffee shop booth communicates another; a hospital bedside communicates yet another. Drakeford's principle is that the ideal setting is a private situation in a semipublic place. Privacy is required because troubled people will not unburden themselves where they fear being overheard. Semipublic visibility is required because counseling alone with a person of the opposite sex behind a closed and opaque door creates conditions for both real and imagined impropriety.

Many seasoned pastors install a glass panel in the office door, or leave the door slightly ajar with a secretary working in an adjacent room. These are not paranoid measures; they are acts of pastoral wisdom that protect both counselor and counselee. The gospel that called you into this work also calls you to maintain a reputation above reproach (1 Tim 3:2). When that reputation is preserved by the architecture of your space, you do not have to defend it later by your word.

The arrangement of furniture inside the room carries its own message. Do not sit behind a desk. A desk is a piece of furniture designed to separate authority from petitioner, and although you may hold pastoral authority you do not want to communicate distance in this moment. Two chairs at a slight angle, not directly facing each other, with no obstruction between, is the classical counseling configuration. A small side table for tissues, a glass of water, a lamp giving warm light rather than overhead fluorescence — these details are not decorative niceties. They tell the counselee that someone prepared this place to receive him.

For some forms of counseling — what Drakeford called marketplace counseling — the place is wherever you find the person. A grandmother weeping in a grocery aisle, a teenager waiting in your car after youth group, a businessman on a park bench during his lunch break: these encounters do not permit a controlled setting. In such cases the principle is the same in spirit if not in form. You move toward the maximum privacy your circumstance allows, you protect the counselee from being overheard or interrupted, and you give them your full attention.

1.4 Pastoral Wisdom on the Frame

There is one further dimension of time and place that deserves explicit naming, because failure here has destroyed pastoral ministries: the pastor's relationship to his own household and his own state. A counselor who rises from arguing with his wife to receive a counselee at the door has chosen a poor time, even if the appointment was scheduled. A counselor who has not slept and is reaching for caffeine to stay alert has chosen a poor time. A counselor whose own household is in crisis must consider whether he is the right person for this particular hour. The biblical office of counselor (1 Chronicles 27:32 names Jonathan as "a counsellor, a wise man, and a scribe") implies a settled center from which counsel may flow. When the center is unsettled, the wise counselor refers, postpones, or briefly explains and asks for a different time.

Equally, a counselor must guard against the temptation to receive counselees at all hours under the guise of availability. Pastors who answer the phone at midnight habitually train their congregation to call at midnight habitually. Boundaries on time are an act of love both for the counselor's family and for the counselee, who needs a counselor whose mind is whole rather than exhausted.

When the time and the place have been settled, the counselor has built a vessel that can hold what is about to be poured into it. The grief, the rage, the confusion, the confession that will pour out in the next steps need a container. The container is what you build in Step One.

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

Two-thirds of every session belongs to the counselee's voice. The counselor's first work is silence.

2.1 The Theology of Listening

The counselee comes to you with a story. He may have rehearsed parts of it; other parts will be told for the first time. Most troubled people carry a sense of profound isolation — a settled belief that no one cares enough to attend to them. The first restoration the counselor offers is not advice, not Scripture, not solution. It is undivided attention. James 1:19 commands the believer to be "swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath." This sequence is not accidental. Hearing precedes speaking, and speaking precedes the strong feeling that, if it comes first, prevents the hearing from happening at all.

Drakeford's rule of thumb — and it is one of the most quoted of his rules — is that the counselor should spend two-thirds of the session listening. This is harder than it sounds. The trained pastor has answers. He carries Scripture in his bones, has heard a thousand variations on the problems before him, and feels physical pressure to begin teaching, exhorting, correcting. The discipline of Step Two is to suppress that pressure long enough for the counselee's actual story to emerge. The story you hear in the first ten minutes is rarely the story that needs counseling. The real story, the story buried under shame and confusion and protective layers, only emerges when the counselee senses that you are not in a hurry to fix him.

2.2 The Open Question

The session opens with an invitation: "Why don't you tell me about it?" or "Tell me what brings you here today." Note what these openings have in common: they are open-ended. They cannot be answered with yes or no. They make room for the counselee to begin where he chooses, at the pace he chooses, with the level of detail he chooses. Closed questions — "Are you having trouble at home?" — narrow the conversation prematurely and force the counselee to confirm or deny a frame the counselor has supplied.

As the counselee speaks, the counselor's verbal contribution should be minimal but encouraging: "Yes," "Go on," "Tell me more," "I understand you to be saying…" These short verbal cues — what one psychologist called the "Rogerian grunt" — communicate presence without redirecting the flow. Body language carries the heavier load: lean forward slightly, maintain warm eye contact without staring, nod at appropriate intervals, keep your hands open and visible rather than crossed.

2.3 Five Attitudes Behind a Response (Porter)

Elias Porter identified five basic attitudes that lie behind almost everything a counselor says. Awareness of these attitudes prevents the most common errors of Step Two. The first is evaluative: a response that signals judgment of right or wrong, appropriate or inappropriate. Counselees who hear evaluative responses too early stop telling the truth. The second is interpretive: a response that imposes the counselor's meaning on the counselee's experience ("What you really mean is…"). Used prematurely, this short-circuits the counselee's own discovery. The third is supportive: a response intended to soothe and reduce intensity ("It will be all right"). In crisis counseling some support is appropriate, but excessive reassurance teaches the counselee that you cannot bear his actual pain. The fourth is probing: a response that seeks more information ("How long has this been going on?"). Probing is useful in moderation, but if it dominates, the session becomes an interrogation. The fifth is understanding: a response that seeks to enter the counselee's frame and check that you have heard correctly ("So as you see it, your husband's promotion has actually made you feel more invisible?"). The understanding response is the gold standard of Step Two.

To these five Porter's interpreters add two more: confronting (which has its place but rarely in Step Two) and paraphrasing (a close cousin of understanding). The counselor who learns to deploy understanding and paraphrase as his primary moves, with sparing use of probing and almost no use of evaluating or interpreting, will find that counselees tell him things they have never told anyone.

2.4 The Sound of Silence

Haddon Robinson observed that silence is part of listening, not a gap to be filled. When a counselee pauses, resist the impulse to speak. Thirty seconds of silence will feel like five minutes to the inexperienced counselor; he will be tempted to rescue the silence with a question or a comment. Do not. The counselee is often closest to a breakthrough during a long pause, gathering courage to say the thing he came to say. If you fill the silence, he loses it.

Tears in counseling are also a form of speech. When a counselee weeps, do not rush to dry the tears with reassurance. Pass the tissue, wait, and ask gently when the moment has passed: "What were the tears about?" Sometimes tears come from grief, sometimes from anger, sometimes from a relief so deep the counselee did not know he was holding it. The patient counselor learns the difference. The hurried counselor never finds out.

2.5 The Body That Listens

Listening is not done with the ears alone. The counselee reads the counselor's body before he reads the counselor's words. A counselor who says "Go on" while glancing at his phone has not said "Go on" — he has said "I am partly here." The counselee will respond to what the body said, not what the mouth said, and will withdraw the deeper material he had been preparing to disclose.

The disciplines of bodily listening are simple but unnatural for many. Sit slightly forward, not slumped back. Make steady but soft eye contact — not a stare that interrogates, but a gaze that signals you are present. Let your face respond to what the counselee says, but do not perform expressions you do not feel; honest puzzlement is better than rehearsed concern. Keep your hands quiet. Do not check the clock; if you must, do so deliberately and aloud ("Let me see how we are doing on time"). The body confesses what the mouth disguises, and the counselee always hears the body first.

A useful self-test: at the end of the day, can you recall the counselee's clothing, posture, gestures, and the changes in his voice as he spoke? If you cannot, you were watching for an opening to speak rather than receiving what he gave. The counselee will have felt this even if he could not name it. Bodily listening is not a technique; it is the form love takes when one person sits with another in pain.

2.6 The Dangers of Listening

Listening sounds passive but is dangerous in ways the new counselor does not anticipate. The first danger is that the counselee's story will stir material in the counselor that the counselor has not yet faced. A man counseling another man on marital betrayal may discover his own marriage tightening at home that night. A woman counseling a young mother through postpartum depression may find her own old grief over a lost child rising unbidden. The Spirit can use these resonances to deepen empathy, but only if the counselor recognizes what is happening. The counselor who does not recognize it begins, subtly, to manage the counselee's story for the sake of his own peace. He steers away from the material that touches him too closely. He gives advice that is more for himself than for the one in front of him. The counselee, sensing the shift, withdraws.

The second danger is the temptation to enjoy being needed. A counselee in pain offers the counselor a position of importance the counselor's ordinary life does not provide. To be received with such trust, to hear secrets no one else hears, to be told that this conversation matters — these are pleasures, and pleasures corrupt. The counselor begins to extend sessions, to invite further disclosure than the case requires, to feel diminished when the counselee no longer needs him. Drakeford's two-thirds rule has a hidden ascetic function here: by disciplining the counselor toward silence, it disciplines him toward the recognition that the conversation is not for him.

The third danger is the slow erosion of the counselor's home life. Hours spent absorbing the heaviest material of others must be balanced by hours of restoration with God, with family, with rest. A counselor who finishes the workday emptied into his counselees and arrives at the dinner table with nothing left has loved the counselee at the expense of his wife and children — and that exchange is not, in the long run, a Christian act.

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

The presenting problem is rarely the real problem. Step Three is where you find out which is which.

3.1 Why Clarification Matters

After listening, the counselor faces a temptation to act on the first version of the story he has heard. Resist this. The story a counselee tells in the first ten or fifteen minutes is often a rehearsal — a version polished for public consumption, missing the elements that bring shame, fear, or confusion. The work of Step Three is to gently dig beneath the rehearsed version to the events, feelings, and meanings that actually generate the distress. Without this clarification, the counselor risks spending the entire session addressing a problem the counselee did not really come to discuss.

Drakeford illustrated this with the story of a man who told his pastor he would convert to Christianity if the pastor could only explain where Cain got his wife. The pastor was tempted to launch into a careful explanation of Genesis 4. Instead, he asked clarifying questions and discovered that the man's actual struggle was not theological at all: he was in an adulterous relationship with another man's wife, and his "Cain's wife" question was a deflection from the real moral crisis he could not name. Had the pastor solved the presenting problem, he would have missed the soul.

3.2 Three Things That Need Clarifying

There are three layers at which clarification typically operates. The first is words and phrases. A counselee may use language that makes perfect sense to him but is opaque to you. "Things just aren't right between us." Things meaning what? Communication? Sexual intimacy? Financial decisions? In-laws? You will not know unless you ask: "Just what do you mean by 'things aren't right'?" Or: "I'm not sure I follow. Tell me more about that." Counselees often use vague language because the precise language is too painful or too shameful to speak aloud. The patient request for clarity gives them permission to find more honest words.

The second layer is order of events. People in distress narrate poorly. They jump from yesterday to a memory from childhood to a phone call last week. This jumbled chronology often contains the key to the problem — the counselee has unconsciously linked events that the counselor must learn to see linked too. But you cannot work with the chronology until you can see it. "Could we go back? When did this start? What happened first?" These questions help both of you assemble a coherent timeline.

The third layer, and the most important, is the real problem. The presenting problem is the one the counselee names when he sits down. The real problem is often a layer or two beneath. A wife may present "marital communication" when the real problem is that she discovered her husband's pornography use six months ago and has not told him she knows. A teenager may present "stress at school" when the real problem is sexual abuse by an uncle. A pastor may present "burnout" when the real problem is loss of faith. The counselor learns to ask, after the presenting problem has been described: "I was wondering — could there be something else troubling you that hasn't come up yet?" This invitation, offered without pressure, often opens the door to what the counselee actually came to say.

3.3 When to Be Direct

Most of Step Three is gentle and non-directive. There are moments, however, when the counselee is hedging so substantially that gentleness has become evasion. In such cases the counselor may need to be direct: "Will you please explain just what your relationship has to do with your brother's sister-in-law?" or "I notice that every time we approach the subject of your father, you change the topic. Could we stay there a moment?" Directness in Step Three should be specific, non-accusatory, and always offered with the option for the counselee to decline.

A particular form of clarification involves what counselees call themselves. A counselee who repeatedly says "I'm just a wreck" or "I'm hopeless" is using language that needs examination. Where did this self-description come from? Whose voice is it really? Often the counselee is repeating language from a parent, a spouse, or a critical inner voice that has nothing to do with how God sees him. The counselor's clarification of self-naming language is one of the most healing moves in the whole ten-step process.

3.4 Suspending Judgment

The discipline that holds Step Three together is the suspension of judgment. Until you have clarified the situation, you do not know enough to evaluate it. A counselor who jumps to conclusions in Step Three almost always lands on the wrong conclusion, and once landed, finds it hard to revise. Wait. Ask one more question. Listen to one more layer. The wisdom literature counsels exactly this: "He that answereth a matter before he heareth it, it is folly and shame unto him" (Proverbs 18:13).

When the situation has been clarified — when you understand the words, the order of events, and the real problem rather than the presenting one — Step Three is complete. Sometimes this clarification takes ten minutes; sometimes it takes three sessions. Do not be in a hurry to leave it. Every step that follows depends on the accuracy of the picture you build here.

3.5 The Three Layers in Practice

Step Three clarifies three layers: the facts (what actually happened), the feelings (what the counselee felt about what happened), and the meaning (what the counselee made of it). Vague counselees collapse all three into a single statement. The phrase "My boss humiliated me at the meeting" is doing three jobs at once: asserting a fact (something happened at the meeting), naming an emotion (humiliation), and assigning a meaning (the boss intended harm). The counselor's task is to separate the layers gently.

Begin with facts. "Walk me through the meeting — who was there, what was being discussed, and what specifically did your boss say?" Often the recounted facts will already shift the picture. The boss did not call him a fool; the boss asked a sharp question in front of others. Sharp questions in front of others can humiliate, but they can also clarify, and the counselee's certainty about intent may not survive the actual words.

Then move to feelings — not "How did that make you feel?" which sounds clinical, but "When he said that, what was happening inside you?" The counselee may name humiliation first, but careful listening often reveals layers beneath: shame at being seen as incompetent, fear of being fired, anger at a long pattern, grief over a once-good working relationship. Each of these requires different counsel.

Finally, the meaning: "What did you conclude from that moment?" Now the counselee tells you what the experience meant — that his boss is against him, that his job is in danger, that he is a failure. Meanings can be true or false. The counselor cannot evaluate the meaning until he has separated it from the facts and the feelings. Clarification is what makes that separation possible.

3.6 The Counselor's Own Clarity

Clarification is two-sided. While the counselor works to clarify the counselee's situation, he must also remain clear about his own. A tired counselor distorts what he hears. A counselor who has fought with his wife that morning will project marital tension into a story that did not contain it. A counselor with a strong theological prejudgment will hear the data that confirms his prejudgment and miss the data that disconfirms it. The clarification of the counselee's situation is only as good as the counselor's clarity about his own state.

Drakeford recommended a brief discipline before each session: a moment of stillness, a short prayer, an honest acknowledgment of one's own preoccupations, and a deliberate setting of them aside for the duration of the conversation. If something is too heavy to set aside, the counselor must consider whether he is the right person for this particular hour, or whether the appointment should be rescheduled. The pastor who refuses to face his own state will inevitably project it onto every counselee he sees.

There is also a longer-term clarity the counselor owes himself. The pastor whose own marriage is in unaddressed conflict cannot do marital counseling well. The pastor whose own children are estranged from him cannot easily counsel a parent in similar grief. The pastor's continuing self-examination — with his wife, with a fellow pastor, with the Lord — is part of pastoral preparation, not separate from it. A counselor who has clarified his own situation is far less likely to confuse it with his counselee's.

Investigate Previous Counseling

"What other people have you talked to about this?" — what sounds like a simple question protects both counselor and counselee.

4.1 Why This Step Exists

At first glance, the question "What other people have you talked to about this?" appears almost rude — as if you are checking the counselee's loyalty or accusing him of shopping for help. It is neither. It is one of the most pastorally protective steps in the entire ten-step model, and the counselor who skips it does so at the peril of both himself and the counselee.

There are three distinct reasons to ask this question, and each justifies the awkwardness of asking it. The first is to determine the seriousness of the situation. A person who has spoken about a problem to no one, sought help from no one, and is now sitting in your office for the first time, is presenting a fresh wound. A person who has consulted three pastors, two professional counselors, his wife's sister, and a radio host before sitting in your office is presenting something different. The pattern of help-seeking tells you about the severity, the duration, and the counselee's relationship to authority.

The second reason is to identify what Drakeford called the "therapy gypsy" — the counselee who moves from helper to helper, never accepting any one perspective long enough for it to do its work. Therapy gypsies are not bad people; they are usually deeply wounded people whose pattern of shopping itself reflects an inability to trust. But the counselor who does not recognize the pattern will be drawn into it, will offer his best wisdom, and will watch the counselee leave to take that wisdom to the next pastor and complain that none of the helpers really understand. Recognizing the pattern allows you to address it directly: "I notice that you've spoken with quite a few people about this. I wonder what makes it hard to settle on one helper. Could we talk about that?"

4.2 When the Problem Is Beyond You

The third reason is the most important: this question reveals when the problem is beyond your competence. A counselee who has been seen by three psychiatrists, has been hospitalized twice, and is currently on multiple medications is not someone who simply needs another pastor's wisdom. He needs ongoing professional care, possibly coordinated with pastoral support, but not pastoral counseling as the primary modality. The honest counselor learns the limits of his own competence and refers when the situation calls for expertise he does not have.

Drakeford's list of categories that warrant referral rather than continued counseling is worth memorizing: significant or repeated suicide gestures (refer immediately); chronic alcoholism or substance abuse where medical detoxification may be needed; someone who wants only a passive role in his own healing; someone with an unrealistic fantasy of an omnipotent pastor who will magically solve everything; chronic psychiatric problems including psychosis or psychopathy; and someone currently seeing another counselor without that counselor's knowledge of this consultation. Each of these situations places demands on the counselor that exceed pastoral competence in most cases. To proceed without referral is to do harm in the name of help.

4.3 Spiritual Versus Professional Need

There is a category Drakeford handled with particular wisdom: the counselee who has been to many secular counselors but whose problem is fundamentally spiritual. A man who has been treated for depression for two years and shows no improvement may be wrestling with unconfessed sin, unforgiveness toward a parent, or a crisis of meaning that no medication can address. The pastor who recognizes this is offering something the secular counselor genuinely cannot: an understanding that the human being is not merely a psychological organism but a spiritual being created in the image of God, capable of guilt that requires absolution, capable of grief that requires hope.

Conversely, a counselee whose problem appears spiritual on the surface — "I can't pray anymore," "God feels distant" — may actually be suffering from clinical depression, hormonal imbalance, untreated grief, or chronic exhaustion. The wise counselor does not assume that every problem brought to a pastor is a pastoral problem. Sometimes the most pastoral act is to refer to a physician, a Christian therapist, or a specialist in trauma.

4.4 The Posture of Referral

When you must refer, refer well. A bad referral feels to the counselee like rejection — "Even the pastor won't help me." A good referral feels like care — "My pastor took my problem seriously enough to send me to someone who can really help." The difference lies almost entirely in your manner. Name the referral with confidence, not apology: "I think the help you need is more than I can give in this office, and I want you to have the best help available. I would like to refer you to Dr. Martinez, who is excellent with this kind of situation. I will continue to walk with you spiritually, and you and I can keep meeting if that helps. The professional help and the pastoral help work together."

A referral is not the end of pastoral care. It is the beginning of coordinated care. Stay in the counselee's life. Pray for him. Ask how the other appointments are going. Many a counselee has been saved as much by the pastor who walked alongside him through professional treatment as by the treatment itself.

4.5 When Not to Refer

If referral is sometimes pastoral wisdom, premature referral is sometimes pastoral cowardice. A pastor who refers every counselee with a hard problem has confused his office with a switchboard. The ordinary work of pastoral counseling — marital conflict, grief, financial worry, vocational decision, conviction over sin, family rupture, anxiety, ordinary discouragement — is competent pastoral territory. These are the matters Drakeford's ten steps were built for. Sending such counselees away because they are "too complex" is failure of nerve disguised as humility.

There are also categories where premature referral does specific harm. The counselee who comes seeking spiritual counsel about a moral failure does not need to be sent to a psychologist; he needs the pastor to walk him through repentance. The wife who comes to talk about a difficult marriage does not need a marital therapist before she has had even one pastoral conversation about her own contribution. The young man considering his calling needs the wisdom of an older believer, not a vocational counselor. To refer such counselees out of the room is to refuse the office to which the Lord called the pastor.

The right test is not "Is this hard?" but "Is this outside my competence, or am I outside my courage?" Some difficulties require referral; many require only that the pastor stay in the room and do the slow work that the office actually demands. The pastor who knows the difference is rare and valuable. The pastor who refers in fear is more common, and his congregation slowly learns not to bring him their real problems.

4.6 The Politics of Previous Counselors

Step Four often surfaces complicated material about counselors the counselee has seen before. He may speak well of some, badly of others, and ambivalently of most. He is watching to see what you will do with what he says. If you join him in disparaging his last counselor, you have taught him that pastors speak ill of one another behind their backs — and you have begun the relationship by demonstrating that you will eventually do the same of him. He may laugh with you in the moment, but he will be less open afterward.

The discipline is honor for absent helpers, even when their work was imperfect. "It sounds like Pastor Lopez tried hard. I wonder what you wish had been different." This redirects the conversation from blame onto useful material — what the counselee was looking for, what he did not receive — without joining in criticism. If the previous counselor genuinely did something harmful, the counselee will need that named, but you can name harm without contempt: "What you describe was a real failure on his part. I am sorry. That should not have happened."

Sometimes Step Four will reveal a deeper pattern: the counselee has consulted seven pastors, four therapists, and his uncle, and has left each one as soon as the conversation turned toward his own responsibility. This pattern, recognized gently, is itself a piece of pastoral material. "I notice that each of these helpers eventually said something similar to you, and you eventually left each one. I'm wondering whether the same thing will happen between you and me when I say what they said. Could we name that possibility now, so we are not surprised when it comes?" This is brave Step Four work that earlier steps rarely permit.

Responsibility — "Where Have You Failed?"

The shift from listening to action begins here. Drakeford called this the heart of Integrity Therapy.

5.1 The Pivot of the Model

Step Five is the hinge of the entire ten-step model. Steps One through Four belong to Stage One: identifying the problem. Step Five opens Stage Two: determining what to do about it. It is here that the counseling shifts from listening to acting, from receiving the story to working within it. And the door through which that shift happens is the question of responsibility.

Drakeford was clear that this question must come at the right moment. Asked too early, before the counselee has been heard and the problem clarified, "Where have you failed?" sounds like accusation and the counselee will close. Asked at the right moment — after Steps One through Four have been completed — the same question comes as an invitation to ownership and freedom. The counselee has been heard. The problem has been clarified. Previous helps have been investigated. The counselee now knows that you understand the situation. Now, and only now, is the question of responsibility ready to be asked.

5.2 The Theology of Personal Responsibility

Behind this step stands a particular theological conviction: that human beings are made in the image of God and are therefore responsible agents, not merely victims of circumstance. Modern therapeutic culture has trained an entire generation to locate the source of every problem outside the self — in parents, in society, in trauma, in brain chemistry. Each of these factors is real, and the wise counselor does not dismiss them. But none of them removes the moral agency of the person sitting in your office. To treat a counselee as if his problem were entirely the fault of others is to deny him the dignity of being a moral being. It is also to lock him in his suffering, because what others did to him cannot be changed, but what he himself does going forward is the only territory in which change is possible.

Mowrer and Drakeford developed Integrity Therapy in part as a corrective to this drift. Their conviction was that mental health and moral integrity are connected — that confession of one's own failure, where failure is genuine, is itself therapeutic. A counselee who has been treating his marriage as 100% his wife's fault is in psychological bondage as well as moral evasion. The day he says, "I have been part of this. I have failed in these specific ways," he begins to be free.

5.3 The 80/20 Principle

Most counselees come to your office convinced they are 100% in the right and the other party is 100% in the wrong. This is rarely true. Even in the most one-sided conflict — and yes, there are situations in which one party genuinely is innocent — there is almost always something the counselee himself has done, or failed to do, that contributed to the situation as it now stands. Drakeford taught his students to use what he called the 80/20 model with resistant counselees. "I understand that you feel your husband is mostly to blame. Suppose for a moment that he is 80% responsible. What would the remaining 20% — your part — look like?" This question is gentler than asking the counselee to admit equal blame, but it accomplishes the same opening. Once the 20% has been named, the counselee has crossed a line; he is no longer entirely innocent in his own account.

A genuinely powerful follow-up question is: "What would it be like to be married to you?" or "What would it be like to be your child?" These questions invite the counselee to imagine his own behavior from the other person's perspective. Many counselees have never done this. The exercise is itself a form of repentance — a turning of the head to see oneself as one's neighbor sees one.

5.4 The Exception of Genuine Innocence

A pastoral warning belongs here. There are situations in which the counselee is genuinely innocent. A child who was sexually abused did nothing to invite the abuse. A wife whose husband secretly siphoned the family savings is not 20% responsible for being deceived. A worker fired for refusing to participate in fraud is not partly to blame for the firing. The counselor who applies the 80/20 question rigidly to such cases will retraumatize the very people he is trying to help. Discernment is required.

In cases of genuine innocence, the counselor's task is different. Such counselees often carry false guilt — a feeling that they should have done something to prevent what happened. The counselor's work is not to find their 20%, but to release them from the false 100% they have placed on themselves. "What part do you think you played?" can still be asked, but the answer the counselor expects is not a confession of contribution but an exposure of the irrational guilt the counselee has been carrying. Then comes the assurance: "Nothing you could have done would have prevented this. You are not responsible for what was done to you."

The challenge of Step Five is the discernment to know which kind of counselee is in your office: the resistant one who needs to own his 20%, or the innocent one who needs release from a false 100%. Both need ministry. They need different ministries.

5.5 Behavior Before Feeling

Integrity Therapy carries one further conviction that flows from Step Five: behavior change precedes feeling change, not the other way around. Most counselees arrive believing that if they could just stop feeling angry, lonely, depressed, or afraid, then they could begin acting differently. Drakeford taught the reverse. Begin acting responsibly, and the feelings will follow. "If it is to be, it is up to me to do it." This is not a denial of feelings; it is a recognition that feelings are downstream of action far more often than action is downstream of feeling. Step Five names what the counselee has failed to do and prepares the ground for Step Six, where the counselor will model the kind of action that produces the kind of feeling the counselee is seeking.

Step 6 — Model the Role

"Show me how, and I can do it."

6.1 The Pivot Into Action

In Step Five the counselee has acknowledged what he has failed to do. He has named his contribution to the problem. The natural and immediate question that follows is, "What now? What does responsible behavior actually look like in my situation?" Step Six answers that question. The counselor stops talking about responsibility in the abstract and begins to embody it. He models the role. He shows, by example and by speech, what the next step looks like in the flesh. Drakeford insisted that talking about new behavior was rarely sufficient; the counselee needed to see it lived. The counselor who has been trained in Integrity Therapy does not stand outside the counselee's struggle as a clinician. He steps into it as a fellow human who has had to do the same kind of difficult thing himself.

6.2 Two Kinds of Modeling

Modeling happens in two ways during a counseling session. The first is self-disclosure: the counselor selectively shares his own struggle with the same kind of issue, and the steps he took toward responsible action. This is not a confessional, and it is not the counselor's session. It is a brief, deliberate window. "When my marriage went through this kind of cold place, I had to swallow my pride and go to my wife and say, 'I have been wrong.' It was the hardest sentence I ever spoke. But the door opened." The counselor models that admitting failure is survivable. Pride lies; it tells the counselee that admission is annihilation. The counselor's lived testimony refutes the lie. Drakeford and Mowrer were emphatic that the counselor must himself walk the integrity path before he asks the counselee to walk it.

The second kind of modeling is role-play. The counselor invites the counselee to act out the difficult conversation in the office before he attempts it in real life. "Pretend I am your son. Say to me what you intend to say tomorrow." The counselee speaks. The counselor responds as the son might. The counselee tries again. This rehearsal is not artificial; it is preparation. The man who must apologize to his employer, the wife who must speak honestly to her husband, the parent who must confront a child — each does better when the words have been formed once already in the safety of the counselor's office. Role-play surfaces the counselee's hidden fears, the words that catch in the throat, the postures that betray defensiveness. The counselor coaches.

6.3 Modeling Without Pretending Perfection

A common pastoral failure is the counselor who models from a pedestal. He speaks of responsible behavior as though he himself had never struggled with it. The counselee, sensing the distance, concludes that responsible behavior is for spiritual professionals and not for ordinary failing humans like himself. The Integrity Therapy counselor models from beside, not from above. He does not parade his sins; he does not turn the session into his own therapy. But he does, when wisdom dictates, acknowledge that he too is a fellow-struggler. Paul wrote, "Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended: but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark" (Phil 3:13–14). That is the apostolic posture. The counselor who can adopt it gives his counselee permission to be human and progressing rather than perfect and arrived.

6.4 Pinpointing Desired Behavior

Modeling requires precision. The behavior to be modeled cannot be vague. "Be a better husband" cannot be modeled. "Tomorrow morning, before you leave for work, ask your wife what she has on her mind today, and listen for sixty seconds without interrupting" — that can be modeled. The counselor helps the counselee pinpoint the specific, observable, repeatable behavior. The behavior modification literature calls this targeting. Drakeford absorbed it without becoming behaviorist; he insisted that pinpointing was simply biblical specificity. "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might" (Eccl 9:10). A hand cannot do "betterness." A hand can do a specific named act. The counselor and counselee together name it, the counselor models it, the counselee rehearses it, and the counselee leaves the office equipped not with a vague intention but with a concrete first step.

6.5 Christ as the Master Model

The Christian counselor who models the role is operating under the higher pattern of Christ Himself, who told His disciples, "I have given you an example, that ye should do as I have done to you" (John 13:15). Jesus did not merely instruct the disciples to wash one another's feet; He took the basin and the towel and modeled the role. He did not lecture about love; He laid down His life. The counselor who points his counselee toward Christ-shaped behavior must be willing, in some measure, to walk that pattern in front of the counselee. "Be ye followers of me, even as I also am of Christ" (1 Cor 11:1). Modeling is a Christ-pattern, not merely a technique. When the counselor models humility, forgiveness, patience, or honest speech, he is reproducing in miniature what Christ has done at full scale. The counselee, watching the counselor, is being trained to look past the counselor toward Christ.

6.6 When Modeling Fails

Modeling can go wrong in two equal and opposite ways. The first is modeling from a pedestal — the counselor presenting himself as one who has already mastered what he asks the counselee to do. "When I had this struggle, I prayed about it and the Lord delivered me immediately." Even when something like that is true, it lands on the counselee as a comparison he cannot match. The counselor's strength becomes the counselee's accusation. He concludes, silently, "This is for spiritual professionals, not for me." Pedestal modeling produces admirers, not disciples.

The second failure is the inverse: modeling that overshares one's own ongoing struggle. The counselor in his anxiety to seem accessible discloses too much, too soon, in too much detail. The counselee, who came carrying his own weight, ends up carrying the counselor's too. He may even shift into the helper role — "Pastor, I'll be praying for you." Subtle, but disastrous. The session has been inverted; the counselor is now being ministered to. Self-disclosure should be brief, deliberate, and pointed toward the counselee's need, not toward the counselor's catharsis.

The discipline between these two failures is one of proportion. Disclose enough that the counselee knows you have walked similar ground; do not disclose so much that he must walk yours alongside his own. The apostle Paul provides the calibration: "I have not yet attained" — he is still pressing on — "but this one thing I do" — he is going somewhere — "forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before" (Phil 3:13). The counselor models a pilgrim, neither arrived nor lost. The counselee can imitate a pilgrim. He cannot imitate a master.

6.7 Modeling for the Absent

Much of Step Six is rehearsal for a conversation the counselee will have with someone who is not in the room — a spouse, a parent, an estranged adult child, an employer. The counselor takes the role of the absent person, allowing the counselee to speak the words he needs to say while the words can still be revised. This is sacred work and easily abused, and it deserves careful technique.

First, the counselor should make the role-play explicit. "Let me be your father for a few minutes. I am going to respond the way you have told me he typically responds. You say to me what you intend to say to him on Saturday." Naming the frame keeps both parties oriented; without that frame, role-play drifts toward performance or sentimentality. Second, the counselor should resist the temptation to play the absent person as either monster or saint. Play him as the counselee has actually described him — irritable on Tuesdays, defensive when accused, softening when asked sincere questions. The counselee will be disarmed by a portrait he recognizes.

Third — and this is the discipline most often missed — the counselor should role-play more than one possible response from the absent party. "Let's say he hears you and weeps. What do you say next?" Then: "Let's say he gets angry and leaves the room. What do you say next?" Then: "Let's say he listens and changes the subject. What do you say next?" The counselee who has rehearsed three responses arrives at the actual conversation with three exits prepared, and is therefore not derailed by whichever one comes. Step Eight will later weigh outcomes formally; Step Six rehearses for them concretely.

Finally, debrief. "What was hardest in that role-play? What words came easily? Where did you freeze?" These questions surface what the counselee did not know about himself, and they sharpen the rehearsal for the next round. The counselee leaves the office not with a script — scripts always fail in real conversation — but with a tested vocabulary, tried words that have already been spoken aloud once and can therefore be spoken aloud again.