As Easter approaches, Christians contemplate the Passion of Christ and ponder on what the love of God might mean for us fallen human beings. It is a term not often heard today outside a religious setting, but it used to signify a plea for understanding, for mercy, a desperate cry - "Oh, for the love of God!"
But what do we, in fact, mean by "the love of God"? As a counsellor, I have asked myself whether it's identical with the idea of "Unconditional Positive Regard". And can we experience the love of God in this life?
Carl Rogers coined the term "Unconditional Positive Regard" (UPR) to describe the state of respect, acceptance, benevolence and goodwill which he believed counsellors must exhibit towards clients if therapy is to be successful.
It can happen only when the counsellor puts aside all his or her preconceptions and simply listens, with total acceptance, to whatever the client says. There must be neither fear, disgust, nor rejection, if the client is to speak freely.
Some time ago I wrote a post on the way that counselling - at the very highest level of practice - is identical to the Work idea of "external considering". It is actually a form of self-remembering. The counsellor, while remaining fully aware of her own psychological processes, is completely open to, and aware of, what the client is communicating. This double attention is difficult to achieve and takes years of training and experience.
When practiced with awareness and coupled with empathy and the counsellor's own willingness to be honest about her reactions to what the client is saying, UPR is almost magical in its effects.
Let me give you two case histories when UPR proved crucial to healing, and you will see what I mean.
The first is of an 82-year-old lady (I use that term deliberately, as Emily was a well-brought-up, well-spoken, beautifully-dressed and extremely polite person). She had been referred to me by her doctor, who in turn had been contacted by the local magistrate.
Emily (of course, this is not her real name) had been caught in the act of shoplifting an expensive bottle of perfume from the most upmarket store in her home town. Instead of sending her to jail or sentencing her to do community work, neither of which would have been appropriate or helped her at all, the magistrate recommended she receive counselling through her doctor's surgery, and this was how she came to be sitting in front of me one sunny morning, a lace handkerchief pressed to her weeping eyes.
During that first session Emily hardly spoke except to express remorse and shame. How could she have done it, she repeatedly asked herself. How terrible that she should have ended up in court! What would her mother have said! Or her children! How could look them in the face! And so on, for the full fifty minutes that constitute a counselling hour.
At the end, she made another appointment for the following week. And that followed a similar pattern, with prolonged weeping and remorseful reflections, until I began to wonder whether anything worthwhile was possible. All the time, I gave Emily my full attention. I noticed my own concern and compassion for her, and expressed these feelings to her in gentle tones so as not to disrupt her inner flow, but letting her know that I was fully there for her, completely on her side, not judging her but seeking to understand.
It was not until the third session that Emily began to talk about what had happened. She had stolen the perfume on her birthday. She was now alone in life, having been married but then widowed, and living far from both her children. Although they had sent birthday cards, she had received no presents, and she felt lonely and unloved. And, as always happened on her birthday, she had begun to experience sad, unsettling memories of her own unloving mother.
Now that she was totally at ease in my presence, Emily confided that she felt her mother had never loved her. And - from what she said - it seemed to be true. Emily's mother had done little but criticize and belittle her daughter and treat her as a thorough nuisance in the lives of herself and Emily's father. They had not wanted a child, Emily said, and her mother had wished that she could have a miscarriage. If abortion had been legal then, Emily would never have been born.
Knowing little of real love at home, Emily predictably married as early as she could to get away from her unkind parents. Just as predictably, she chose an unloving, cold, detached husband. Her husband did want children, and treated Emily as a combination of breeding cow and housekeeper. His death brought Emily some release, but she remained distant from her own children and basically alone.
The theft, she realized with gradual understanding, had been her "cry for help". She had symbolically stolen the love she so much needed from her mother and her husband, both now dead. Perfume symbolized femininity to Emily, as well as a gift, and she had never felt validated as a woman, a daughter or a mother. She therefore stole the gift she had longed for so much in order to comfort herself and feel loved, but it left her guilt-ridden, hollow, ashamed.
Therapy began when she saw the real nature of her situation, and healing followed fairly swiftly after she had faced these sad truths. I was able to reassure Emily that her mother had been mentally ill, and this lifted a burden from Emily's shoulders. She had felt that her mother had not loved her because she - Emily - was unlovable. Children always blame themselves for a parent's failures in regard to themselves, and Emily had simply suffered her way through life feeling unlovable and undeserving.
Of course, there was much sadness at this realization, but also hope. When she left my care, after eight more sessions, she was a different person - lighter, happier, more self-aware. She had not been loved, but she could now love herself and give affection and time to others. She joined a coffee club at her local church and began volunteering at a charity shop. The later years of her life were far happier than her childhood and earlier adulthood had been.
The other case study I want to present to you is that of a much younger woman. In her early thirties, Shelley had married six months previously and had come to me distraught because she had discovered her husband was spending huge sums of money on sex-chat lines. Of course, it was not so much the money that troubled her but the act of rejection that these phone calls implied. If her husband loved her, why did he need to do this? Was she at fault? What could she do?
It was only after several sessions skating over the surface of her life and gradually establishing trust that Shelley began to open her heart to me. And what she disclosed was horrible. It emerged that she had been sexually abused by her own grandfather, from the ages of four until seven, when the grandfather was placed in a care home. She had never told anyone of this. Fear and shame had dogged her life ever since and she had chosen as a husband someone who confirmed her own sense of worthlessness.
Floods of tears accompanied this memory. The worst part was when she remembered the actual abuse, of course, and the feelings of dread she still experienced when she passed the street where the grandfather used to live.
Again, children blame themselves for the evil deeds that are done to them, and Shelley thought she herself must have somehow been at fault. Of course, this is quite absurd, but to the child it makes a kind of sense. Other children escape abuse, therefore there must be something wrong with a child who becomes a victim.
Much of the remaining therapy was devoted to rebuilding Shelley's self-esteem. By the end of our time together she had come to see that she had chosen someone who sexually abused her, just as her grandfather did, because this was the only kind of intimate relationship she had ever known.
When she came for a follow-up session, I was very glad to see that she had initiated a divorce and started a local group for incest survivors. She, too, was a changed person.
Shelley told me that she had tried to get counselling when she was younger, but had never felt able to tell the counsellor what had actually happened and therefore no healing ever took place. With me, she said, she knew that I would not judge or criticize her, and felt she could trust me with the terrible truth.
Here, I believe, is the effect of showing another person Unconditional Positive Regard. Or, as we may otherwise call it, simply love. For it is a kind of love that the counsellor shows the client, based not on their own respective personal qualities but simply on the act of witnessing another's pain. The counsellor is both an active and passive witness. She is active in the sense that she reacts with the client's own pain, sharing it and going through the terrible experience with her, and passive in the way she does not condemn the client, nor does she try to limit the client's disclosures.
There can be no limits to what is shared in the counselling office, nothing that cannot be disclosed. And with the living through of old traumas in the presence of a loving witness, healing begins.
It is not too far-fetched to call this form of witnessing an example of the love of God.
Why? Because the counsellor does not create the love that is mediated in her office. The love comes through her, not from her. The love comes from the Source of all Love, God Himself.
If a counsellor does not believe in God, that makes no difference to the process. She may name it differently, talking about the human healing situation, or the absence of judgement. But to me, it most certainly is a kind of love, and it is the only way that real healing can occur. And I know that it does not come from me, but flows through me, from a higher source altogether; from what we call in the Work, Conscious Humanity, the head of whom is Jesus.
Of course, that love is subtly different from that which we experience with friends or family, and from what we feel for our spouse. Hopefully we neither judge nor condemn the people we love in our daily lives, but we do make demands on them, fulfill their own needs, and share our joys and sorrows with them.
When we love a client in this way of healing, we know that part of that love is to let them go at the end of it, to avoid creating a dependence that would be harmful to the client. There have been many clients whose company I've missed, many that I've wanted to follow up and to find out what has been going on in their lives. Yet I cannot do so. That would be violating their boundaries, and I have no right to hear any more from them. Indeed, I have a duty to discourage them if they should seem to be getting dependent on me in any way.
In this, it differs from the love of God. God always wants to hear from us, He is present in our lives at every instant, whether or not we acknowledge Him, and He never lets us go. But it is similar in the way that God never forces Himself on us, never demands that we listen to Him. He leaves us free to make that choice.
I don't press my religious views on my clients, because that too would violate a boundary and could prevent them from fully trusting me. But I usually wear a cross, and generally have a small cross or rosary, or perhaps an icon, on the wall of my office, along with other art works. If the client asks me about my faith, I'm happy to answer.
The rest is God's work.
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