Heath Lambert: I’m joined this week on the podcast by Sean Perron who is the Operations Director at the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors. He’s joining us this week because the last few weeks we have been dealing with your questions and answers on the podcast. We’ve received some feedback about some of the things that came up on those Q&A podcasts and I asked Sean to come and help me deal with that on this podcast. Sean, welcome back to the podcast. We’re glad you’re here.
Sean Perron: Thanks, Heath. A couple of weeks ago, we did two podcasts on Counseling Questions Part One and Counseling Questions Part Two, which our listeners can go access on the archives under Truth in Love under Resources on our website. And from those questions, you told a couple of stories about what was a counseling case that was difficult for you, and we received some feedback about people wanting to know how those cases ended and just to hear more about personal stories of people that you’ve ministered to. My question is a broad one, but I’d love to know what has been the most difficult counseling case that you’ve ever encountered?
Heath Lambert: The reason that question is a fascinating one is because I do get asked that question a fair amount of times when I’m traveling and speaking and interacting with people and people always want to know, “Hey, what was the hardest case you’ve ever done?” My answer to that is always the same. I’ll say here what I always say, but then I’ll respond in a way that I think will be more satisfying for your question and our listeners. The thing I always say is that in my experience you don’t deal with hard cases but hard people. There’s some spectrum of counseling difficulty in terms of what cases are hard and what cases are more easy. That’s absolutely the case. There’s some cases that require a lot more wisdom, a lot more insight, a lot more experience, and so that’s absolutely true. And yet, as true as it is, I would rather deal with somebody who’s been, let’s say, diagnosed with a really hard secular problem but wants to change than with somebody who has a fairly garden-variety problem but is blind to their difficulty. What that means is that the real issue in counseling isn’t the nature of the problem but is the nature of the person that you’re talking to. I have talked with people who are adulterers and they’ve been guilty of stealing money. I mean, I talked with one man who’d been looking at porn for over 40 years. That sounds like it is a really, really hard case. But as you’d talk to that man, he just was desperate for change that comes from Jesus, and he was just willing to do anything we told him to do in the process of counseling and even though he had a very extreme problem with pornography our counseling time together was fairly quick because he just changed so fast and had such a willing heart.
On the other hand, I’ve known people who have very mild problems, but they just won’t listen. They just won’t see their problem. That room in your heart where the trouble is, you can’t make the lights go on in that room for somebody. That is a gift of God’s grace. And you can say, “Hey.” I sat in my office one time with a counselee. It was me, two pastors, a set of parents, and a lay person with everybody going around saying, “This is what we’re seeing in your life, and you are destroying yourself.” And this person just kept saying, “I don’t get it. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Everybody that knew this person was saying, “You are in trouble, and you have to stop.” And they’re like, “Nope, I’m fine. I don’t see it.” This person was actually struggling with a fairly straightforward problem, but by the time you have somebody who just won’t and can’t see, it doesn’t matter how easy or complex the problem is, it is you just can’t get through, and so we need the Lord’s grace.
Having said that, I think the nature of your question is, “Okay, yes, but when we’re talking about a really, really hard case, what is it?” I would probably answer the question in two ways. On the one hand, there was a very extreme case that involved prostitution, that involved drug addiction, that involved alcohol addiction that involved a pattern of lies and poverty, and I worked with this counselee for a very long time, I don’t remember just now how long it was. And there were just so many layers to get through on the risk she had placed herself in because of the way she was living her life. She had trouble in all kinds of areas. At the church where I was at the time, I had to enlist the help of like five different people. And I was meeting with her with someone sitting in for a couple of hours every week dealing on the main problem and then she was meeting with five other people throughout the week dealing on other problems. And we just had a lot of difficulty making headway with that person. And finally, because of a number of things that just happened in her life in the Lord’s providence, she wound up going to an ACBC residential facility and really getting the kind of intense help that was really called for in her particular situation and in the Lord’s kindness she’d changed, and we’ve lost touch over the years but the last time I pinged in with her she was walking with the Lord and doing really well. But that was just a case with multiple layers and we had the people in the church who were helping her were getting discouraged by the lack of progress and so I’m on the one hand trying to help her and manage this massive intervention, but on the other hand I’m also trying to encourage the people that she’s meeting with to keep them instructed about what they need to do, to keep them encouraged about the steps they need to take. That was probably the hardest one just in terms of sheer case management.
I said I’d answer it in two ways. The other way I would answer it is with a married couple that I counseled some time back, and it was one of these things like what I was saying at the beginning. It was a very straightforward marriage counseling problem. In my book, marriage counseling is pretty easy when you take away adultery and you take away abuse. You put in either one of those or both of those and you’ve got all kinds of difficulties that you need to sort through, but this was a couple who was dealing with a straightforward marriage problem. It wasn’t adultery. It wasn’t abuse. And when I sat with them, I thought, ‘Two months, we’ll be done.’ And two years later, I was still counseling them. It was the longest to this day that I’ve ever counseled anybody was two years. And it wasn’t anything extreme, it’s just the progress was very, very slow. I would not put them in the category of people that just wouldn’t see, they just wouldn’t acknowledge that they had a problem, although, there were weeks and there were months when it’s like, “You’re not seeing this.”, just change was very, very slow and one of the things that made it a challenge for me is because it just had me re-evaluating everything. I mean, I’m sitting there, they came, and they presented their problem and it’s the kind of problem—most of my experience in counseling has been marriage counseling—I’ve talked with people about hundreds of times before and I knew exactly what I needed to do. I knew exactly what I needed to say. I knew the text I was going to go to in counseling to unpack the Scriptures. And they just threw me for a loop every single week. The Lord was changing them very, very slowly but the Lord was also changing me. And I needed to be reminded that I can’t just go into my bag of tricks that I’ve built up over the last several years and just throw out what’s worked with other people, but the Lord has to show up. The Lord has to do this thing. The Lord has to press the truth of the Bible down into their heart. The Lord has to open their eyes to the difficulties they’re experiencing and there’s nothing about me, the counselor, and my experience that is going to fix this thing. The Lord just has to do it. And the Lord did do it. The Lord did change them, and He is continuing to change them, but it took a lot of time, and it was slower than anything I’ve experienced. In that way, it was hard and complicated, but that doesn’t mean bad. It was actually really good.
Sean Perron: That reminds me of the book that you and Dr. Scott edited together, Counseling the Hard Cases. And in there, there are ten cases that range from anywhere from the chapter you wrote on postpartum depression to the chapter he wrote on borderline personality disorder, and in there I was shocked when I got to the end to see a case that was called Jennifer: An Apparently Hard Case, but it was an ordinary case that appeared to be hard but was actually ordinary.
Heath Lambert: Yeah.
Sean Perron: Your story reminded me that there is a range of folks like that that we can minister to. I think that your story is helpful.
Heath Lambert: And the thing I would just say to folks is whether it is a couple struggling with conflict or a couple struggling with adultery or a teenager caught in prostitution or a person who has been looking at pornography for 40 years. The important thing to remember is God gave us the Bible for all of that. And you can sit there and open up God’s Word and read it to people and teach it to people and pray it over people and use it to encourage people and the Word of God will be living and active, it will penetrate into their heart, and it will change them. Once you release the Word, it’s too late, it’s out. The prophet Isaiah quotes God saying, “I don’t send out my word and it returns void” (Isaiah 55:11). We have the Scriptures to equip us to say what we need to say when that person is talking to us, and we don’t know what to say God’s Word gives us what to say, and so we don’t need to be intimidated by the case we can be encouraged by the Word that we have from God.