Relationship Counselling

As persons made in the image of the Triune God we are relational beings. The quality of our relationships has a direct bearing on our personal wellbeing. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu once said, “A person is a person only through other persons.” Within a family there are multiple relationships – spouse to spouse, parent to parent, parent to child, sibling to sibling, as well as multiple extended family relationships involving grandparents, in-laws, uncles and aunts, cousins, nephews and nieces. Add to these the complexities of prior relationships, remarriage, de facto relationships, merged families, adopted families, same-sex relationships and cross-cultural relationships, and one begins to appreciate the huge range of contexts in which personal and family relationships function, often very positively, but sometimes problematically. Relationship difficulties can cause huge emotional wounds which, if left unattended, can lead to all kinds of dysfunctional and destructive behaviour. Examples are not hard to come by: The teenager who rebels against parental expectations; the bitter and vindictive divorcee; the high achieving workaholic whose life is dominated by his father’s angry denouncement, “You’ll never amount to anything”; the abandoned child who, as an adult, seems unable to commit to a long-term relationship; and so on.

Given the extent of emotional baggage that we carry as human beings, we should not underestimate the therapeutic value of prayer and worship as vehicles for the Gospel assurances of forgiveness and healing. Nor should we underestimate the restorative value of being part of a faith community that places healing and reconciliation at the heart of its life together. The person who is in Christ is not to be regarded as a victim of circumstance or to be defined in relation to their past, but rather to be regarded as a child of God and to be defined in terms of what God desires for them.

Relationship counselling, from a Christian perspective, should bear in mind this sort of interpretive framework. It will encourage a process of reflection (“What are the key events and experiences that have a bearing on my situation, and what have been their effects?”), interpretation (“How might I interpret these events and experiences biblically and theologically, as well as personally?”) and discernment (“What might the Spirit be saying in the midst of all this?”).

Here is an example of how this might work in practice. During the course of a pastoral conversation, the person you are seeing discloses that they’ve always had a problematic relationship with their father. You encourage some reflection on this, and discover that at the heart of the matter is a drinking problem that the father appears to have had, and which manifested itself in a number of ways in the home, impacting significantly upon the husband-wife and father-child relationships. After a period of further reflection on these family dynamics and their effects, you introduce Matthew 23:9 into the conversation, and ask, “How might you interpret your experience of relating to your father in the light of this instruction by Jesus to call no man on earth your father, for you have one Father – the one in heaven?” Further conversation leads to a conclusion that, in Christ, we discover the true and full meaning of fatherhood by relying not on our own flawed (and often hurtful) experience, but rather on the One whom Jesus called Abba, Father. And what might the Spirit be saying in the midst of all this? Perhaps as we learn to rest in the fatherhood of God, so we are able to put our human experiences of fatherhood into perspective, and even come to a point of forgiving the failures of our earthly fathers.