Counseling
Providing Christ-Centered, Biblically-Grounded, Grace-Based, and Trauma-Informed counseling to those in need.
We define counseling as an attempt to love someone wisely by engaging in an intentional conversation through which we seek to know the person and understand their struggle from a biblical perspective in order to respond with compassion, speak the truth with grace, and help them take wise steps to address their suffering and sin.
We live in a broken world. This is evidenced by the suffering we see or experience each day. We struggle in our understanding who we are. We struggle to navigate our relationships. We struggle to make sense of our circumstances. And we struggle in our knowledge and experience of God.
This part of the world has seen great atrocities. The experience of trauma seems to permeate every corner. The words of Diane Langberg come to mind: “If we think carefully about the extensive natural disasters in our time such as earthquakes, hurricanes and tsunamis and combine those victims with the many manmade disasters – the violent inner cities, wars, genocides, trafficking, rapes, and child abuse we would have a staggering number. I believe that if we would stop and look out on suffering humanity we would begin to realize that trauma is perhaps the greatest mission field of the 21st century.”
Our goal is to provide counseling that is Christ-centered, biblically-grounded, grace-based, and trauma-informed. We want to speak hope into the broken places.
Our counseling services are offered to anyone regardless of their background or way of life. No one is immune to life’s struggles. We live in the same broken world and experience the same heartaches. We are more alike than we are different. Our desire is to meet people where they are and offer wise and compassionate counseling. We want to help connect the riches of Christ to the realities of life by showing how God’s Word speaks into our suffering, our sin, and our confusion and gives real comfort, lasting change, and practical clarity for our lives. We don’t have to suffer in silence. We don’t have to walk alone.
Our Counseling Philosophy
We align ourselves with the Christian Counseling & Educational Foundation’s (CCEF) model of care. We believe that life works best when we take to heart the words of God and seek to apply them. There are many different counseling modalities. We do not adhere to any particular model exclusively. The care we give largely depends on the individual’s needs. Our goal is to know you as a person, understand your struggle, speak wisely and compassionately, and help you take the necessary steps of change. Counseling theories inform how we understand people, how we seek to care for them, and what we hope to accomplish. Every counseling model has values that determine what they say or do not say. The values that we hold to are shaped by our faith in God. We believe that he is our creator and he has revealed the best path that promotes human flourishing. He reveals what it truly means to be human. Because we are embodied souls and situationally and relationally embedded our counsel is holistic. We acknowledge the complexity of human experience. We are spiritual and physical beings. We are a mixture of dignity and depravity, beauty and brokenness. We are individual personalities but live in the context of relationships. We are victims of sin and perpetrators of sin. We are impacted by the forces around us and we impact the world we live in. Because we take the whole person seriously we don’t try to offer easy answers. We we approach each individual knowing that they are a unique image bearer of God and are a part of a bigger system made up of their environment, relationships, spiritual forces, and physical conditions. Therefore, our counseling could include resolving past issues, addressing trauma, changing cognitive distortions, emotional regulation, seeking medical attention, learning relational skills, reading scripture, developing healthy routines, prayer, teaching coping skills, repentance, faith, love, pycho-social-spiritual education, exposing idols, and so on. In the end, we desire to help people grow in personal awareness, relational health, circumstantial perspective, and spiritual maturity as they come to know that their individual and collective stories are embedded in a larger story of redemption and hope. We do all of this with great humility
Counseling Values
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Our counseling begins with God. He is the ultimate reality that orients us to what is true and good. God’s word is rich in its understanding of who we are and how we operate. We look to God’s word to inform us concerning our care for others. It provides us with the grid through which to evaluate, understand, and address information, problems, and people. It puts us in the right context with the right description. As people of the Book, we desire to honor God’s revealed word and strive to subject all things under it. We want God’s word to be our interpretive lens to everything in such a way that everything changes from black-and-white to Technicolor. We also believe in God’s common grace to all humanity and scripture guides us in how we apply this common grace in counseling. Therefore we can learn from those outside the Christian faith and seek to be clinically informed as much as possible. As we engage other forms of therapies we are constantly learning, critiquing, reinterpreting, evaluating, discarding, converting, and applying those observations, techniques, and explanations in order to bring them into subjection to God’s Word. We approach this endeavor with much humility and a willingness to learn from, be challenged by, question, and consider other views of care.
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The universe was created in a way that centers around its creator. Therefore, to understand our purpose and to experience human flourishing we must have God at the center of our lives. Everything comes from him and everything is do be done with him in mind. The God of the Bible has spoken to us through his word and through his Son and revealed a glorious story of redemption. It is this story—a story where in which he is the center—that we are invited into. It is undeniably true that if we center our lives around our story it will wither up for not having a larger purpose to be embedded into. Therefore, we seek to we point people to a person, Jesus, and not a program. We need the Savior, not a system of self-salvation. We need someone who has the ability and the intention to change us and change us for the better.
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The Gospel of grace is our hope. In this life we need more than what this life can offer us. We need more than practical steps and helpful techniques. We need more than a list of rules or good examples. Change is not simply accomplished by trying harder or believing more. It is fundamentally connected to God’s grace—a grace that melts our hearts and reshapes them into something new and beautiful. Because the gospel is the good news about all that Jesus is and all that Jesus has done, it applies to our entire life, not just our conversion. We never outgrow our need for Jesus, and therefore we never outgrow our need for the message of grace that is presented in the gospel. Because the gospel assures us that we are God’s beloved children, united to Christ, it motivates and sustains us to wholeheartedly pursue a life of mission and mercy. This gospel of grace is at the heart of every counseling conversation. As counselors we, too, drink deeply from this life-giving grace. We seek to take it to heart before we attempt to export it to others. We recognize our inherent weaknesses and look to the sovereign God who has chosen to use vessels of clay as means to accomplish his purposes and to display his treasure.
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To say that we are trauma informed is one way of saying that we take suffering very seriously. Our world is broken in so many ways and we are victim to that. Trauma is a specific form of suffering that impacts us in profound ways. It affects our view of life, God, self, and others. It impacts us physically, relationally, spiritually, and personally. It fragments us. In understanding the complexity of trauma we seek to be informed by clinicians who specialize in this area while at the same time mining God’s word for his wisdom. The road to healing is often slow and hard. But we have a God who speaks into our trauma and names the evils within and and the evils without. We have a God who entered into our broken world and was broken by it. Jesus himself was the victim of trauma. He experienced relational betrayal, torture, shameful exposure, and a brutal murder. However, none of these things had the last word. He rose from the dead and conquered mankind’s greatest enemies. Jesus knows what it means to suffer and he is able and willing to meet us in our sin and sorrow and offer us comfort, hope, and change.
Come, ye sinners, poor and wretched, Weak and wounded, sick and sore; Jesus, ready, stands to save you, Full of pity, joined with power. He is able, He is able; He is willing; doubt no more.
Come ye needy, come, and welcome, God's free bounty glorify; True belief and true repentance, Every grace that brings you nigh. Without money, without money Come to Jesus Christ and buy.
Come, ye weary, heavy laden, Bruised and broken by the fall; If you tarry 'til you're better, You will never come at all. Not the righteous, not the righteous; Sinners Jesus came to call.
Joseph Hart