Telling the Truth to Troubled People by William Backus

Author:William Backus [William Backus]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780871238115
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group

Anxiety will be reduced as this process is repeated.

You may also choose to model things the counselee might say to others when the counselee might benefit from truthful confrontation and is fearful of it. How to ask others to do things, how to accept compliments, how to decline when others ask. These and other interpersonal tactics may be modeled where the counselee fears doing them.

BEYOND THE SCOPE OF THIS BOOK

Some of the most commonly used clinical treatments for anxiety are beyond the scope of this manual. The counselor who wishes to learn them might obtain more information and supervised instruction from a psychologist in clinical practice. A brief description of these procedures follows, but is insufficient as a basis for practicing them.

Systematic desensitization has an excellent track record. This is a method of presenting to a relaxed person a graded series of scenes to be rehearsed in the imagination. The scenes all share the capacity to arouse anxiety and they have been put together by counselor and counselee in order based on the amount of distress the separate scenes elicit. The easiest are presented first, and are repeated in imagination until the counselee stops feeling anxious. Then more difficult scenes are imagined. The process continues over perhaps fifteen to twenty treatment sessions or more until the entire “hierarchy” has been completed.

Implosion, another way of exposing counselees to their feared situations, is done by presenting the very worst anxiety-arousing situation possible for the counselee to envision, and keeping the counselee’s attention on it until the anxiety dissipates.

Both systematic desensitization and implosion can sometimes be done in vivo, that is, by exposing the counselee in actuality to situations he fears. An example: taking a counselee with height phobia to the top floor of a high building and just staying until the level of his anxiety drops from high to low.

DOING THE TRUTH

In the work of overcoming anxiety the counselee and the counselor will discover that the scriptural teaching that the truth is to be done, not merely understood, is true to life.

Misbeliefs in anxiety must be corrected and changed, but this will not occur as a purely intellectual exercise. The counselee must actually do the thing he fears; expose himself to the anxiety, if need be. And, like the dog in the shock box, he will learn at a “gut” level that there is little or nothing to fear. His anxiety will extinguish.

The counselor should see his work as that of getting the counselee to identify and change his misbeliefs connected to anxiety. A part of this can be done through dialogue and argument. Usually, just enough change can be wrought this way to prime the pump. Just enough truth may get through to enable the counselee to go out and do the thing feared. When this is successful, more truth will be apprehended. Experience itself will work with the counselor, the Holy Spirit, and the Word to create in the counselee a new awareness of the truth that he need not fear anything, even fear itself.

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