What is a Pastoral Counselor?

There’s a ton of good people out there wanting to help: social workers, chaplains, peer counselors, priests, pastors, and the rest. But not all supporters have sufficient training to help with all aspects of personal, spiritual, and mental struggles. The more trained and experienced your counselor is, the faster you can dig in and make progress.

Pastoral Counseling is understood as a ministry of a religious body. Candidates are ordained clergy or those who have the endorsement of their faith authority to serve in this special calling. However, the pastoral counselor, like a chaplain, is trained to support all people regardless of their faith background. And the client chooses to what degree religious faith is an element of their counseling. Pastoral counselors are trained to help clients develop a better understanding of humanity and healthier views of themselves, others, and God.

LEGAL PROTECTION

Clients of pastoral counselors have twice the legal protection usually offered by ‘client / therapist privilege’ law. As a therapist offering psychotherapy, a pastoral counselor must have the clients explicit permission to share information with anyone. As a clergyman, a pastoral counselor’s client is doubly protected by the additional ‘priest / penitent privilege’ wherein the pastoral counselor cannot be subpoenaed by any court to testify against the client.

People come to pastoral counselors for help with:

• Better understanding themselves, their lives, and their families

• Forming and maintaining healthy relationship

• Rising from depression

• Recovering from the betrayal, abuse, and neglect of childhood

• Finding more positive solutions when old solutions such as food, substances, and cutting, have become problematic

• Learning more positive ways of dealing with anger

• Dealing with loss and grief

• Exploring the meaning and power of forgiveness

• Discovering God’s purpose in their lives

ALIGNING THE BODY, SOUL, AND MIND

Contemporary humans face an existential threat that has never been seen to such an extent in all of human history. Studies demonstrate clearly that the level of stress the average person lives with daily in today’s society and culture qualified a person entrance into a mental hospital in the 1950s. Psychologists and sociologists agree that the sacrifices made by humanity in order to industrialize the world have come at a staggering cost. To put it bluntly, the majority of Americans no longer have a solid idea as to what a human being even is. And if we don’t understand our own nature, how do we make progress towards health?