Up on the blog today, the role of family counseling and formational prayer in an integrated care approach to healing.
Have you ever thought about how you came to be the person you are today?
Back in college, I took a relationship counseling course, which taught me a couple of things. The first thing I learned is that the person I am today was shaped by experiences with people throughout my life. My family relationships and the systems by which we lived all contributed to how I function today. The second thing I learned is that counselors are pretty amazing people. There are a lot of helpful things these trained and licensed practitioners can do to help us find inner healing.
Out of that course I’ve come to realize that you don’t know what you don’t know. What I mean is that, there are some things we go through that get packed away. Experiences and memories, both good and bad, just get folded into the fabric of our lives. We all carry baggage from the past, and for most of us it, it’s unessential.
It wears you down; plain and simple. Carrying around unnecessary baggage will always drain the life out of you. In fact, it sucks all the joy and leaves you in places of isolation and fear. Even worse is that you feel the pain but don’t know how to make it stop.
The process of healing can feel daunting, but with an integrated care plan there is hope for wholeness. There are many different assessments and tools that can help in this process. We learned about the Geneogram, in that relationship counseling course I took, which helps map out your family of origin. This is helpful because it gives a visual diagram of family relationships. Understanding and naming the status of our relationships can help articulate the context. When we do the hard work of looking back and studying the way things were it helps us to understand why things are the way they are.
Family counseling and formational prayer work hand in hand to dig through the baggage, unpack the trauma, and remove the roots. Traditional counseling is often seen as talk therapy, but as I’ve already stated, there are so many creative techniques in the counselor’s tool box.
The integrative care approach works to move you forward by looking back toward the family systems and experiences that have shaped the person you are today.
Join us today on The Pastor And The Counselor, as Pastor Ryan, and counselors Jon Burchard and Shannon Moyer talk about some of the creative ways used in family counseling and formational prayer (inner healing prayer).
PodcastWritten by Maureen Brown
Maureen Is our Worship and Communications Pastor. She has served New Life Community alongside Pastor Ryan for 19 years. She is passionate about Jesus and His Church, which is why she does what she does. Maureen has been leading worship, teaching, and mentoring her entire adult life. She graduated in 1996, from Emmanuel Bible College with a Bachelor of Religious Education in Professional Studies with a double minor in Christian Education and Music and then married Ryan—the love of her life. Maureen is a blogger so she brings a special set of gifts that are well used in the area of Communications here at NLC.