Similarities of the Combined Treatment Approach

Any form of successful counselling requires a healing atmosphere that generates hope and growth in clients. Cognitive therapy is used most effectively in Christian counselling in the following ways (Probst, 1988):

1. Giving the patient a rationale for treatment procedures.
2. Changing clients self-awareness by challenging should’s, must’s, and ought’s. Cognitive therapy helps clients to be freed from unrealistic expectations by understanding and revising the unnecessary demands they place on themselves.
3. Teaching meta-cognition so patients can think about their thinking, to understand and control their thought processes, and to replace inflexible and destructive thoughts with adaptive ones.
4. The emphasis on truth rather than happiness. Critical thinking skills encourage clients to confront the truthfulness of their thoughts and beliefs in therapy.
5. To change client’s underlying beliefs about the world, to gain a new set of assumptions about themselves, others, and God. As long as effective treatment is designed which is sensitive to religious convictions there is no conflict between Cognitive Therapy and Christian counselling.

The Goals of Christian Counselling

The ultimate purpose of Christian counselling is to love God with all the heart, mind, and soul. The goal of the therapy ‘IS’ Christ. Compared to belief and schema modification, which is the goal of Cognitive-behavioural therapy, for the Christian the purpose of treatment is to reveal a new source of being for those who are “In Christ”.

Bringing Christian clients into their spiritual inheritance is the meaning of the therapy (“I labour until Christ be formed in you”, (Gal.4. 8))

Values are an inevitable and pervasive part of psychotherapy. By identifying the distortions in the patient’s process of interpreting and understanding religious principles and teaching and leading to behaviour associated with the faulty assumptions, alternative religious concepts can be examined and tested by life experience to leave the patient to choose consciously the beliefs by which he will live.