Some Thoughts
on Larry Crabb’s Counselling Model
This is a completely
non-critical amalgam of thoughts culled from (and inspired by) various Larry
Crabb books: Understanding
People, The Marriage Builder, Encouragement and Finding God.
I am a bit of a fan of
Crabb’s. I think, contra the
Westminster boys (Powlinson, Welch etc),
he’s extremely hard-core on sin and this is because he
deals with ‘longings’. I think
any half-sympathetic reading of Crabb (especialy anything written in the
last 15 years) will see that his intention in focusing on longings is to
expose just how sinfully perverted these really are. His desire to go ‘beneath the
waterline’ is not a capitulation to a Freudian subconscious but a
legitimate fear of Pharisaism. We
mustn’t simply clean the outside of the cup!! Crabb takes this more seriously than anyone I know or have
read.
Things I like about
Crabb more than other evangelical counsellors I’ve come across:
- Our thirsts are acknowledged and taken to
God, not for the sake of getting our ‘love tanks’ filled but as the
barometer of our deceitful, sinful hearts
- Sin is defined relationally – sin is our
self-protective styles of manipulating God and others.
- Therefore, niceness can be wicked! Moralism can never fool Crabb.
- The difficulty of disentangling ourselves
from idols is acknowledged
- The solution is always Christ’s return –
not others treating me better and not even my own repentance! The answer is always Christ and
it’s always future.
- Therefore a hopeful brokenness is
always at the heart of Crabb’s notion of maturity.
- Not legalistic – maturity is always
considered relationally.
- Intensity – Crabb takes the cross
seriously. If Jesus had to
shed His blood, your sin must be outrageously serious and run very
deep! If the Son of God had
to suffer and die, this world must be outrageously fallen and
sick! People come with
serious problems, they want serious acknowledgement of the
seriousness of life.
I compare Crabb to Jay
Adams (another evangelical who is much more behavioural) here.
Some of this is basically me ‘going off on one’. Think of it as a Midrash rather than a
commentary!
Some of these aren’t even complete sentences – it’s just a
mind-splurge, but I’ve tried to make it flow. Hope it’s useful.
Creation
We were created – To love and trust Christ
To
feel His love and rest in it
To
live forever with Him in a restored creation
=> we have deep
longings for relationship.
These longings cannot
be fulfilled by anything other than the infinite love of Christ
BUT
Fall
We are determined to
reject Christ – SIN
AND to try to make
life work without Him – SINS
We therefore commit to
deep seated strategies to fulfill our longings without Christ
[NB: These strategies
may not be at the forefront of our conscious thinking, and there may be
all sorts of unchosen elements bound up in these strategies, but there
are also fundamental choices that you are making in the midst of it. It may take some time, outside input,
painful introspection and honest prayer to uncover these choices and the
(often unconscious) strategies of our minds – but we must not say that we
are bound to sin in these ways.
We have been freed from the bondage to sin (Romans 5&6). Our slavery is not to circumstances
but to sin. Therefore there will
always be some chosen elements in ourselves to address, and to address first.
Therefore we must work very hard to uncover the choices we are making
that lead us into sin – more on that later.]
From the time we are
born we scream in terror. ‘What if my needs won’t be met? What if I don’t get the love I need?’
We distrust everyone but at the same time we demand from them security,
love and acceptance because we are built for that.
[Jeremiah 2:13] We reject Christ and His streams of
living water and we dig our own cisterns – broken cisterns that cannot
hold water.
For a while, stealing
water from each other’s cisterns does
feel like we’re getting our fill.
BUT people will always
fail us. If we need relationships
of (infinite) love to feel ok, then any human shadow will not be
enough. When we were made for
streams of living water, broken cisterns don’t quite measure up. We invest in people and demand from
them the love that we’ve rejected in Christ and, inevitably, they fail us.
(NB: This generally happens quite early in life. Even the best of
parents with the best of intentions will disappoint us and often make us
despair of ever finding the love we crave).
In time we realize the
brokenness of these cisterns and we feel incredible pain – loneliness,
terror and rage. This is the
awfulness of life lived without hope and without God in the world. (Eph
2). I am alone in a cold
indifferent universe with no-one to depend on but myself. And the curse is that I need people.
I need people, but
they let me down, so I hate them.
And ultimately I hate God who clearly cannot be trusted or I
wouldn’t be in such a mess.
It is this combination
that leads to the same old progression in people, expressed in hundreds
of different personality types:- “I doubt God” => “I need you” =>
then you fail me, so => “I hate you”
See three bottom floors of the diagram as you work your way up
from the foundation of “I doubt God”:
Our Fallen Personality Structure
HERE’S HOW “If I do this, Self centered
relating
I’ll feel safer”
I WILL SURVIVE “I’ll find some way Arrogant determination
to get what I want”
I HATE ME “Something’s
wrong
with
me, that’s why Poor
self-image
people fail me.”
I HATE YOU “You failed me” Interpersonal
conflict
I NEED YOU “You better come Demanding dependence
through
for me.”
I DOUBT GOD “He doesn’t look
good Terror and rage.
to
me.”
Since we feel such
pain we conclude that surely trusting (God or people) is not the right answer. So we plump for its opposite – control. If we can’t trust others to provide
what we need then we need to be pro-active in manipulating them to give
us what we demand. We need to get
control.
So we look to
something within our own sphere of influence as the cause of pain (not of
course our sinful rejection of Christ).
So we move from “I doubt God” => “I need you” => “I hate you”
to “I hate ME” – we blame ourselves
for the disappointments we feel because then at least we avoid the
conclusion that our fate is out of our control. (We love control!
Naturally – it’s the opposite of trust)
We hit on something manageable
within our personality. Perhaps –
“people don’t like me because I’m ugly” OR “my parents never gave me the
attention I craved because I wasn’t successful.” Here we’ve moved to “I hate me” but we
generally don’t stay there very long, we soon develop a plan of action to
regain control. So we say “I must
alter my appearance – I will get thin.”
Or – “I must achieve – I will become a workaholic.” So we’ve chosen a survival tactic (NB:
chosen – even if we
don’t feel like it’s a choice!).
In “I will survive”, we look to manipulate others to provide the
affirmation we crave more than oxygen.
And as we hit on the “Here’s how” we have put the cherry on our
fallen personality – one built expressly on the premise that God is not
trustworthy to provide for us. We
have dug for ourselves faulty cisterns because our goal has been to
reject Christ and His streams of living water. Our pursuit after this goal can be all consuming and it is
marked by its obsession with control.
“God cannot be trusted to provide my deepest needs – I must go
after them myself.”
From the earliest time
that the world strikes us as uncaring and untrustworthy we begin to erect
these strategies to avoid pain.
These, over time, can become incredibly elaborate.
We become shy or brash
or motherly or sarcastic or genial or whatever.
(NB: even the
‘sacrificial people-pleaser’ is utterly caught up in this – they are
controlling the environment in their own way to seek significance – not
resting in Christ (Martha vs Mary)).
So we now have quite a
sophisticated system of goals and strategies with which to negotiate this
painful world. And there are as
many approaches as there are people.
Our aims though are the same – we want to maximize our sense of
worth while avoiding the painful business of actually relating to one another. After all it’s relationships that we have pinned our hopes
to, and it’s relationships that have failed us.
BUT – and when it
comes it is a big BUT:- however sophisticated these strategies are, they
are all an attempt to dig broken
cisterns that cannot hold the water we thirst after.
Our goals will
be blocked – not least because there are 6 billion other fallen
people going after the same few drops of water. Blocked goals will make us very angry. And eventually the goal of pursuing
life outside of Christ will be frustrated. It is then that a goal we are committed
to becomes one we give up on.
And when you give up on the very thing you have invested your
whole life in – you fall flat in utter hopelessness.
=> DEPRESSION
How to resolve?
We MUST give up on all
such manipulative goals.
We must give up on the
search for life outside Christ
We must repent!
There’s only one
proper goal to have. It’s what
Jesus tells some goal-hungry Jews in John 6:29
The [singular] work of God is this: to believe in the One He has
sent
We are to focus our
thirsty souls on Christ alone. He
is to be our One object of hope, praise, affection, and trust. Trusting (with ever greater love and knowledge)
in Jesus is the one goal that God the Father has given us.
And this goal can never
be frustrated
When we make something/someone
else our goal
a) we are committing idolatry and offending our
God
b) we give that something/someone the power of God over us – they
can destroy us
So, if my goal
(what I live for) is to have everyone else read the Bible the way I do
then that is a goal that can and will be frustrated. In time I will give up on the very
thing I am investing my life in.
I must repent of this as a goal and instead focus on Christ – the
one work of God is this, to believe in the One He has sent.’ This one work, this one goal can never
be frustrated – in all circumstances (and especially in times of sin and
suffering!) I can turn to Him.
So the problem with
everything is sin. And the answer
is always – repent. Even when
someone else seems in the wrong and they’re hurting you more than you
think you can bear – there is always something you can repent of.
Most obviously in such a situation you can (must) repent of your
goal of finding final significance in this human relationship.
You can always repent
because sin, at its heart, is about not trusting Christ. (John 16:9) And
it’s clear that we don’t trust Him when a) our fear of men leads us to
design a whole personality structure to avoid this pain or b) our
engagement with men destroys us because our identity is bound up in
gaining affirmation from them. We
must repent of any goal that is not focused on Christ – knowing Him more,
enjoying His victory and His love, drawing closer to Him. And we must step out from our safe
control mechanisms and engage with people without fear or pretense or
reservation.
It will hurt and be
incredibly scary, but we must learn that Christ is enough. We’ll never learn that from behind the
thick walls of manipulation and control that we erect. We must engage in the messy and
painful work of properly relating to one another – putting our hearts on
the line, giving until we don’t think we can give another calorie of
effort and facing the terrifying prospect of rejection (a fate that so
scares us we have built an entire personality around avoiding it). Only then will we begin to see that
Christ IS enough – that His love is precious and liberating and compelling
and that it is the fuel to keep going.
(1 John – we love because He first loved us. That is the pattern in the Bible –
secure in the love of God, we can go out and love others).
(NB: It is fine to have ‘recognition in the workplace’ or ‘my wife
to show me more affection’ etc as desires. These are things we might legitimately
want to happen to us. And we’ll
pray for them. And we’ll be glad if they happen. But they must not become our goal because any goal that can be
blocked (and all such relational goals can be blocked) is an illegitimate
goal. But in all circumstances
loving Christ and knowing His love is possible. AND this goal is the purpose of life! Col 3:4; Phil
1:21)
We must pray that God would reveal to us by His Spirit those areas
of life where we are not trusting in Christ. We must uproot all those goals we’re committing to that are
illegitimate, knowing that then all we’re left with is Christ and aware
that this will sorely test us as to whether we believe that He is enough.
And maybe right now you feel like He isn’t. And/or maybe you do step out and renounce the idols in your life and He still
doesn’t seem like enough (yet) – but now you are treading the path of
obedience. If you know something
of Christ and if you are moved by the Spirit to seek after Him you will
in time reflect the character of the Psalmist – ‘As the deer pants for
the water, so my soul longs after You.’ (Ps 42:1). Maybe you’ll have to wait months or
years but Christ promised
that those who come to Him as thirsty souls, who have renounced the
broken cisterns they once trusted in, they will find streams of living water in Him.
But it all boils down to the foundational question – do you trust
Christ? If you do then you will
go after Him and no idol will be too gripping that you won’t want to
topple it.
Perhaps identify your idols by asking the question: How would you
finish this sentence ‘I’ll just be ok if….’ ‘The one thing I need right now is…’ ‘The thing I fear
losing most is…’
We must prayerfully and ruthlessly repent of all such idols NOT
because that makes us better people but because these things block our
relationship with Christ. The
awfulness of sin is NOT to find I’m not as moral as I thought. Nor is it
that others now think less of me. (How often ‘sorrow for sin’ is actually
just this!) But no, the awfulness
of sin is your forfeiting of the grace that could be (and fundamentally is)
yours (Jonah 2:8). You have been
slaking your thirst on salt when you could have been drinking living
waters. You have developed a
taste for poison and shrunk your appetite for the Bread of Life. You have been attempting to do the
impossible – to serve both God and Mammon, Christ and Belial. It cannot be done, and therefore it
must not be done. We therefore
turn from idols.
Again it’s worth repeating – simply turning from idols, giving up
on sinful patterns of behaviour, is not virtuous in itself. It is done in order to return to the
LORD. That is the goal
Now you do not find Christ because you are moral enough for
Him. You find Him because He has
found you. Christ has laid hold
of us in incarnation, lived our life for us, died our death for us, risen
to life for us and now sits in heaven as our Priest and Brother on our
behalf. Simply to look to Him –
our exalted Lamb, our loving King, our all-sufficient Saviour – is to
know that ‘I am safe. I am
secure. I am loved. I am accepted by the Father.’ Things are fundamentally ok –
infinitely more than ok – because of Him. To see this is to know the value of Christ. And when you see Him as precious, you
will see the worthlessness of the idols you have been trusting in. None of them cancelled your sin. None of them can defeat death. None of them have raised you up to the
right hand of the Majesty on high.
To look at Christ is to immediately relativise all your little,
tawdry gods.
So finding Him means a turning from idols (illegitimate
goals) and a re-placement of your trust.
‘My life used to be hidden in work or human opinion or that
relationship, but once again I have set my heart and mind on the reality
above where Christ is seated. He
is my life.’ (Col 3:1-4) I say to my old goal ‘You are not my god’ and I
say to Christ ‘You are my life.
Apart from you I am nothing, have nothing, can do nothing.’
And now that you have set your heart and mind above and beyond
yourself you are living the way Christ intended. Your loving of God will be tied
inextricably to your loving of neighbour (Matt 22:34-40) – for you are
living outside yourself. You have
renounced your sinful demand to be filled by others and now, secure in
Christ, you are free to serve others. You have been freed from manipulation
for ministry. And it will
hurt as you put your heart on the line and many reject you – but that
will drive you back all the more to cling to Christ and to experience the
truth that His grace IS sufficient for you.
You cannot do ministry when
you are committed to manipulation. And we, as fallen human
beings, are Very into manipulation.
Therefore we must learn to topple our fallen personality
structure.
So how do I topple my fallen
personality structure?
(From ‘Finding God’, p120)
HERE’S HOW “If I do this, Self centered
relating
I’ll feel safer”
I WILL SURVIVE “I’ll find some way Arrogant determination
to get what I want”
I HATE ME “Something’s
wrong
with
me, that’s why Poor
self-image
people fail me.”
I HATE YOU “You failed me” Interpersonal
conflict
I NEED YOU “You better come Demanding dependence
through
for me.”
I DOUBT GOD “He doesn’t look
good Terror and rage.
to
me.”
Digging beneath the
surface of ourselves we work from the top down of our fallen
structure. This structure can be
bracketed into three main categories:-
The top two floors
(“Here’s how” and “I will survive”) represent the ways we relate to
others. This is my approach to relationships (learned over years of
strategizing to manipulate others) and can be termed my present story.
The middle three
floors (“I hate me”, “I hate you” and “I need you”) represent our
internal strategies of handling pain.
This is my inside story.
The foundation (“I
doubt God”) represents my attitude towards God. This is my deepest
story.
To disrupt this fallen
structure we must tell our stories honestly.
We must face our present story. We must tell openly of how we relate
to people. What are our goals in
inter-personal interactions, what are our strategies? (NB: they will be wicked, at least partly!) How do we manipulate people? What do we want from them? Even the most seemingly altruistic
approach to someone will have sinister motives. What are you after?
How do your actions go towards your goal of gaining love from
other people or diminishing the pain of interacting?
On the positive side,
we must also ask: ‘What have we to offer other people?’ ‘How can we be used to minister to
people’s deepest needs?’ We must
catch a vision for how we can climb out of our sinful facades and reach
into other people’s lives with love.
What ways has God gifted us to bring healing and encouragement to
others?
We must also face our inside story. We have to be honest about how other
people have affected us – especially how they have caused us pain. This means uncovering past trauma, in
particular childhood pain. Dr
John Gray (“Men are from Mars…”) has a 90:10 rule. He says that in any hurt, generally
only 10% is about the current situation, 90% is down to past trauma which
the current situation reminds you of.
For this reason, early pain is the most significant. This is why psychologists are famous
for asking ‘Tell me about your mother.’
Our relationship with our parents is absolutely fundamental. With
all the best will in the world (and more often without) our parents will
have caused us wounds which have been knocked and widened and aggravated
ever since (remember the 90:10 rule) and which have been foundational in
the formation of our fallen personality structure.
We must tell the story
of our childhood hurts: Describe
5 occasions in your childhood where you were disappointed. How did you respond? Discuss the people in your family –
how you characterize them (perhaps take an imaginary trip around your
childhood home and describe the scene).
What did these people provide?
What did you want them to provide but never got? Were there situations where you were
let down terribly? What did you
learn from these? How did you get
on at school? How did you cope
with rejection? Which 5 people in
your life have had the biggest impact and why? Fundamentally what do you think you need from people? What goes on inside you when you don’t
get it? What do you want people
to say/think of you? What do you
fear they actually say/think?
We all have hurts that
go very deep. In our rejection of
God we all are left with terror and rage if only we'd admit to it. Human relationships can provide some
relief, but when they fail we feel incredible hurt. Our inside story will reveal all sorts
of disappointments, fears and anger.
And in response to them we reject the path of repentance and faith
and we determine to make life work without Him. We erect patterns of behaviour designed to minimise such
pain. We recoil from the pain of
engagement in (certain types of) relationships and invest in fallen
strategies.
When we admit to these
pains we can at least see where so much of our sinful motivations come
from. And as we expose them we
can mourn them as losses (rather than grasp at regaining them or atoning
for them etc). When we bring
these pains to the surface we become honest about our pain - rather than
false bravado or manipulative pity.
As we admit to them, we must let them go: "My dad didn’t give me the love I
wanted. And he never will. And that sucks - but there's nothing I
can do about that now. And the
other authority figures in my life are NOT my dad - recoiling from them
makes no sense as a response to my familial pain.' Admit the hurt, mourn the loss, repent
of the sinful strategies you've designed to dull it, take it to Christ
and move on. This is the honest
approach to relational hurt - to admit you feel pain - to admit that it
is so great you cannot handle it yourself and to take it to Christ. Our sinful patterns begin when we
suppress our hurts and take it upon our selves to make up for them.
We must admit of this
inner story not to dwell on our pain ('woe is me!') nor to wallow in self
or sin. We expose these
strategies because we’re trying to uncover how desperately wicked our
hearts really are. The pain might
be terrible at times but the way we tend to handle it is horrific - we
doubt Christ and trust in ourselves.
Our inner stories will be marked by gross pride and selfishness.
We are all whitewashed
tombs with often seemingly virtuous ways of packaging our manipulative
strategies (sins). Above the
waterline we may look great, but as with icebergs, our sin is 90% below
the waterline. This means a) we
need to work hard at uncovering our ‘below the waterline’ sin and b) we
need to root out the sinful choices that go to produce our ‘above the
waterline’ sins which we often claim we are bound to commit.
(Remember: All sin is chosen – that’s why we have to work hard at
uncovering the often unconscious choices we make (which are really just
strategies for manipulation and pain reduction)).
The motivation for
telling this story is to expose how sinful we are (=> REPENTANCE) and
to show how needy we are for love and affirmation and to drive us back to
the only true source of this – Christ (=> FAITH).
NOTE: We must not stop
here – simply unearthing our sinful interpersonal strategies and our
manipulative inner workings has not addressed the fundamental problem –
that we doubt God! [Jeremiah
2:13] We have rejected Christ’s
streams of living water – that is why we have gone about digging such
ridiculous and faulty cisterns.
Therefore, we Must
tell our deepest story and
unearth our real doubts about God.
We must be honest that all sin is unbelief. I lie because I want to tell a good
story. I want to tell a good
story because I am desperate for people to like me. I am desperate for people to like me
(over and above any concern for godliness) because I don’t believe I am
sufficiently loved by God. I am
not secure in Jesus. I really
don’t think Christ is enough so I sinfully go after life outside
Him. If we acknowledge that all
sin is unbelief and if we see how sinful we are (and by now we should be
unbearably aware of it) we must now, if we’re honest, see how much we
actually doubt God.
Although we’re
Christians, although we spend our lives telling people we trust Christ –
in so many ways we don’t. In so
many ways we are desperately fearful about whether He’s really good. We don’t actually think He’s
trustworthy (or we’d trust Him!).
We must tell our deepest story about our doubting God because we
do – every single sin we commit points to it! And only by exposing them and bringing them into the
daylight can we see how ridiculous they are. It’s only when I say out loud “I don’t think God can be
trusted to provide for me financially this year” that we fully realize how
ridiculous and wicked our unbelief is.
So we ought to fess up:
‘Did you really believe that God was there with you for all those
years when your father was molesting you?’ ‘Do you really believe He is good?' 'Or did you think He was helpless?’
‘Do you actually think Christ is trustworthy when your mother is dying of
cancer?’ ‘When your spiritual
life runs completely dry, do you really believe that God wants to draw
near to you?’ ‘One billion people have never heard the gospel – do you
think God is loving?’
We must expose all
our sinful thoughts about God.
And we must pray them.
Anger at God – He can handle. Anger about God addressed to others is grumbling (a
terrible sin in the bible). The
Psalms are all about taking anger to God. Your anger at God can be spoken in the
2nd person: ‘I am mad at You…’ The Psalms are full of this
kind of thing. Grumbling is when
you voice your anger about God in the 3rd person. The former is encouraged in
Scripture. The latter is a great
sin. To pretend we don’t have anger
towards God is to pretend that we are sinless. More than this, it keeps our sinful dissatisfaction with
God at a subterannean level which is virtually impossible to deal
with. To bring these feelings to the
surface in pre-critical outpourings of prayer exposes our deepest
longings, our deepest hurts and our deepest wickedness. This is where the deepest work of God
can happen.
Telling our stories to
one another in a community of love and trust is what true encouragement
and accountability is about. We
must disrupt and entice. We must disrupt one another’s manipulative strategies –
therefore we must be straight with each other about sin. We must point out each other's sinful
motives behind their behaviour and be humble as they point out ours. At the same time we must entice one
another towards godly ways of relating and pray together that we’d
renounce the old self and put on the new.
And from the
foundation of “I believe God”, together we start building a godly personality structure:
The Godly Structure
HERE’S HOW “Doing this
reflects my Wise and
Other-centred
confidence in God’s style of relating
goodness.”
I WILL OBEY “I can’t do it perfectly Humble co-operation and joy
but I’ll do what’s right”
I JUDGE ME “When I fail to
love you, Repentance and
rest
I’m
wrong.”
I ACCEPT YOU “I don’t need you to
be Intimacy
different.”
I LOVE YOU “I want to give
something Freedom from
dependence
to you.”
I BELIEVE GOD “All things work
together Quietness
for
good because God is Trust
good.” Worship
In all of this, the
number one thing is NOT to solve
our problems. God is not the balm
for our latest psychological disorder – He is the loving Creator who deserves
all our praise and worship. My
fundamental problem is not low-self esteem, nor is it my codependent
relationships or my eating disorder.
My real problem is sin and the answer is to repent and believe
Christ. Our problems are to be
used to seek after Jesus. Through
the thorns in our flesh (NOT in spite of them!!) we realize that He is
enough. We do not put off
praising God while we deal with this impediment to worship. Rather
worship is His means of growing through this pain. Christ has ordained this suffering for our good. This is all
happening so that we can know Him better.
Once we acknowledge
this then whether I am healed of this or that becomes of such secondary
concern. What we want is Christ!
Well fantastic because we can have Him.
We can’t always have a successful career, or loving parents, or a
thriving ministry or children, or a great marriage, or acknowledgement of
our gifts. We can always have Christ.
But He is not a
second-best or a safety, in case your other idols fail you. Let us therefore seek Him. And when we do ‘the water I give him
will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.’ (John
4:14)
For a comparison between Crabb and a
more behaviourist evangelical, Jay Adams, click here
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