MINISTERS, PSYCHOLOGISTS AND PSYCHIATRISTS AS PSYCHOTHERAPISTS
Blog post description.
Psychotherapy is any process that enables us to change our minds, to go from conceptualizing ourselves as separated ego selves housed in bodies to seeing ourselves as part of the shared oneself and one mind that is the son of God.
In most societies it was the function of priests (Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hinduist, African religions’ priests) who enabled people to see things differently, from strictly secular to spiritual.
People have always understood that they can see their issues from this world’s perspective or entertain the possibility that there is a divine aspect to them.
Different religions have diverse ways of getting people to see things as they believe that God would have them see them. Christianity asks Christians to do what Jesus did, forgive those who harmed them.
I do know that the ego asks us to counterattack the person who attacked us. The ego defines us as our bodies and egos. Our egos and bodies are fragile and vulnerable. If you attack my ego and body, you can obviously kill me. Aware that you can destroy my ego and body, I feel fear of your attack and feel angry at your attack. I defend against your attacks.
Groups of people, and nations, have governments, police and military to defend them from our mutual attacks. Our world is a place of mutual attacks and defenses.
Defenses reinforce the belief that we are weak and vulnerable and that our lives are coterminous with the death of our bodies.
Aware that we are going to die, Christian ministers tell us to live morally and, hopefully, God will judge us as good persons and give us eternal lives in his heaven and dispatch bad people to his hell. So, most Christians fear God’s wrath. Christian ministers are therefore judgmental and moralistic.
A course in miracles tell us not to judge, or to make only one judgement, to see this world as a worthless, and meaningless dream and overlook it, for what is done in it has not been done.
There is no amount of judging this world as good or bad that will change it; we are born and will die. The book tells us to overlook the transient and ephemeral world to see the world of light forms and from there know us as formless spirit.
You can benefit from your religion’s ministers because each of us is at a certain level on our journey through space and time.
There are no accidents in our lives. We are who we are and are where we need to be. If you are satisfied being a Christian, be one. But if you find its rituals meaningless then you will look for something else. If you look for something else, you might find secular psychotherapists and they might help you.
From secular psychotherapy you might seek spiritual psychotherapists and, if they are led by the Holy Spirit, they will help you.
A good therapy asks us to forgive to be forgiven.
Therapists come in many forms, but good ones ask us to overlook the world to see the real world, happy dream, and heal our human relationships, transform them from special love relationships to Holy Relationships where we forgive each other and affirm the Christ in us, validate our one shared self and one shared mind.
SHOULD WE PAY PSYCHOTHERAPISTS?
We live in a capitalist society. Each of us needs money to pay for his material needs. The minister of God and the secular psychotherapist need money to buy their means of living on earth. Therefore, they must be paid.
It would be nice to say that therapists’ services ought to be free but in as much as therapists must pay their house rents, buy food, clothes, shelter and means of transportation they need money.
Therefore, if you go to church pay tithe to your church; as the Bible said, pay ten percent of your income to your church, not to your priest, but to the church and let the church decide how much they want to pay their priests.
If you are secular and go to a mental health professional (psychiatrists, psychologists) pay them what they charge, which depends on where you live at (in my region, today, it is about $120 per hour).
In this paper, I have provided you with information that the average priest or psychotherapist does not provide you, but I did so for free; this is not because I do not need money to live on but because folks get rewarded differently.
People do not value that for which they did not pay. Therefore, if you feel like you benefited from this piece, pay something for it. Gratitude makes the universe give you wealth, spiritual and material.
After UCLA College of Letters where I obtained PhD is Philosophy, Psychology and Religion I got a teaching job at the University. I felt uneasy teaching. I applied for a job in the mental health field; I got many offers and within two years was running the mental health center where I worked, supervising psychologists and psychiatrists who have been in that field for many decades.
Eventually, I felt bored by the job (of been executive director...I was barely thirty two years old when I was the executive director of the largest mental health agency in the city where I lived) and quit and tried doing other things.
Nothing I tried worked out for me. So, I did other executive director jobs but eventually wound up quitting and returning to college teaching until I felt that teaching is too easy for me; I felt unchallenged being a college professor (I filled my time writing on assorted subjects that interested me).
Eventually, I realized that I have a destiny and fate. My normal routine is to read until I go to sleep (although there is a huge TV in the house, I seldom watch it) and get up around 5 AM, think for a while, and then go to my computer and type the thoughts that I just had in my sleep.