I suppose that the foundation of my counseling perspective is found in the work I have done in the Humanities throughout most of my career.  Not only does this add a faith-based perspective, but it also gives me a wider and more reasoned perspective on human experience and the development of self-consciousness, and philosophy and ethics provides me with a big picture of how human experience has developed and how goodness has been defined in the West.  I won’t bore you with the details (although if you email or call me, I would be more than happy to discuss them with you), but suffice it to say that my life experiences and my training in both the Humanities and the Counseling Sciences have given me a broad range of experiences and training to draw upon, all of which is important to my counseling practice.

It is interesting how their faith or their reaction to organized religion often comes into play during a counseling session whether a person is churched or not.  I remember discussing the possibility of such an occasion while taking courses at Capella University, and while some were comfortable with bringing up religion in the context of a counseling session, many were not.  Yet, religion often plays an important role in the development of our sense of self, whether it is a negative or positive one, and in the context of dealing with life’s issues, it is sometimes necessary to deal with one’s religious issues as well.  Because I have extensive training in religious studies, I have not found religious issues to be a problem.  I feel free to discuss them and provide my client ample opportunity to voice their concerns, regardless their faith perspective.  I think, therefore, that the experience I have had with faith based issues, both as a minister and as a professor, provides me a unique perspective in helping others address the issues that people, couples and families face in today’s difficult world.

All of this is to say, that I focus on family and couples counseling because I do not see people as merely individuals.  I see them as a part of a wider context and it is that context that must be understood if we are to appreciate the complex nature of their experience.  Also, because people are always a part of a larger “system,” we must understand the nature of that system making it necessary to work on changing the system if issues are to be adequately addressed.  This means that a family system will create a structure that assumes rules.  These rules will determine the nature of the family system and sometimes, it is these rules that are blocking successful family life.  If the rules are changed, then the family has greater chance of successfully living as a family.  This applies to couples as well as individuals.  So, my bias is that issues are most adequately dealt with when we are able to better appreciate the structural complexities of a family or a couple’s relationship.  By addressing these structures, we address the issues.

This is why I am Marriage and Family Therapist (MFT).  An MFT is more adequately prepared to address the complexity of family life, a marriage relationship, or the challenges that adolescence brings to the family unit.  The systems view utilized by family and marriage therapy provides a better understanding of blended families (families that are transformed by divorce or death) and the growing phenomenon of grandparents raising their grandchildren.  The systems view gives us a better appreciation of the frustration that parenting can bring as well as the frustration of being a child or a youth.  By working together with the system as a whole, solutions often present themselves and these rather quickly (the American Association of Family Therapy reports that on the average, families and couples find solutions to their problems in 12 sessions).