What is Christian Counseling
posted: Nov. 18, 2022.

As our world is still reeling from a worldwide pandemic and societal shifts that have changed the landscape of our world, impacting our daily lives, mental-health issues continue rapidly escalating at alarming rates. A simple google search reveals a chatter of opinions promoted as “pop psychology” articles and resources that are not founded on research or clinical practice. In fact, there are so many opinions being espoused that many contradict one another.

We all know that we need to invest in our mental health – so we can be the best versions of ourselves – it’s just overwhelming to figure out where to start!

As our culture careens past common sense, led by people lacking identity and embracing confusion, our goal at Crawford Clinics is to provide empirically supported, excellent psychotherapy, that respects you and the morals, values, and beliefs that are important to you.

Especially after the hopelessness, isolation, and meaninglessness experienced during and since 2020, there has been a noteworthy surge of people integrating faith and spirituality to help provide a larger sense of meaning and purpose to life.

You are more than the sum of your thoughts, feelings, and life choices. You are not boring or one dimensional. You are multifaceted. You are here for a larger life purpose and there is something that comes alive inside of you when you get close to connecting with it. That is where Christian counseling can help you explore the fascinating dimensions to your personality, your faith and spirituality, and discovering your life purpose.

Christian counseling is an artform that comes with years of training and expertise as it is creating space to honor every part of you. Unfortunately, there are always outliers to every approach, including those who may have overly asserted their religious views or used an overly simplistic view to mental health. We hear of stories like those, and it grieves our hearts. We would like to apologize on behalf of any counselor who espoused a Christian counseling approach while not providing excellent, ethical, empirically supported psychotherapy or made you feel judged or felt that their religious views were being pushed on you. That is not the heart or intention of Christian counseling.

The purpose of Christian counseling is to provide excellent, ethical, psychotherapy that creates space for your spiritual journey to be included, as much or as little as you like, without worrying that your spiritual beliefs would be misunderstood, apathologized, or discredited. Part of ethical therapy is creating a context where all of you, including your faith/spirituality, is represented as a valuable part of you. However, too many clients have shared horror stories of counselors dishonoring their faith by pushing them toward goals and interventions that are starkly in contrast to their morals, values, and beliefs.

At Crawford Clinics, we are not here to push anything on you. Rather, we are here to create space for you to explore your mental health issues and relationship needs in a healthy supportive therapeutic relationship that honors where you, including your faith and spirituality journey, as a valid part of your human experience.

You do not need to be a Christian or a person of faith to feel safe, honored, and represented in your sessions at Crawford Clinics. Our highly trained professional therapists are here to meet you where you are and help craft treatment goals that meet your mental health needs in ways that are aligned with your personal beliefs and values, whatever those might be.

The added benefit of going to Christian counseling is that, if you would like to incorporate your faith/spirituality into your therapy, you know you are with safe therapists who are trained on how to do so ethically and seamlessly so you get to bring all of you to your sessions – without worrying about having to edit/censor yourself.

You are a multifaceted, brilliantly designed masterpiece and when you work with a Christian counselor at Crawford Clinics, you are meeting with an excellent therapist who believes you are inherently valuable, worthy of love, and that you have a purpose your life is designed to fulfill. Christian counseling is built upon the foundation of hope. Even when our clients feel hopeless, helpless, discouraged, angry, disillusioned, and even deconstructing what they thought they believed in, our therapists create space for you to be supported on your journey. Your therapist will intrinsically hold a frame girded in hope, vision, and a larger sense of meaning and purpose, that creates the structure that helps our clients re-emerge back into hope after seasons of depression, anxiety, grief and trauma.

Life can be dark and hard. Our therapists at Crawford Clinics are here to help restore light and hope that helps you embrace and celebrate all of the beautiful aspects of your human experience, including your faith and spirituality.