The Holy Spirit and Counseling

One would think that much has been said through the years about the Holy Spirit’s role in counseling. However, as I think back, I can only recall a line or two on the subject. The apparent scarcity of content on this topic could be a result of my poor memory, so I searched a library database for “Holy Spirit and counseling”; 2,600 articles came up. It turned out that most of the articles on the list were included only because the words “Holy Spirit” showed up somewhere in the text of the article. Most of the articles were not about the Holy Spirit and counseling. I looked through a few hundred entries and found four articles that I thought might be useful. In the end, I set those four aside for another day. They were interesting, but I didn’t find anything in them specifically about the role of the Holy Spirit in counseling.

It seems we Christian counseling professor types have neglected to write about the Holy Spirit’s presence and role in the counseling we do. I suspect so few of us have addressed this topic because the Holy Spirit’s presence and role in our everyday living is not something we think about often, or at least not often enough. I must be honest and confess this to be true for me. This impacts my writing and my teaching. In my thirty years of teaching, I have taught very little about the Holy Spirit. I have talked about the Bible and counseling, and I have talked about prayer and counseling, but I have not talked about the Holy Spirit and counseling.

Where to begin?

We must begin with creation—in the beginning, when God made all created beings and things. God is unique, uncreated, and not located in the realm of created things. He is transcendent. Yet, he chose to be in relationship with all things, including us, and through his relationship with everyone and everything, he governs with providential care.

Enter the deceiving serpent. In a conversation—that interactive process that powerfully shapes relationships—the serpent asks Eve to choose whom she is going to trust, God or herself. Adam, who was with her, seems to be listening with a don’t-ask-me attitude.

Adam and Eve make their choice. They take things into their own hands, putting at risk trust in God and what he provides. Through their choice, they alter their relationship with God in a way they cannot reverse.

The Father’s response to Adam and Eve’s universe-changing choice is to actively seek conversation with them. He continues his relationship with Adam and Eve despite the violence they have done to that relationship. And God doesn’t stop. We see through the whole biblical story God’s continued pursuit of connection with humankind. God does not stop. He continues his loving pursuit now, in our lives, through the Holy Spirit’s never-ending interactive presence.

The Spirit’s Goal

Jesus told us the goal of the Spirit’s work: “These things I have spoken to you while I am still with you. But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you” (John 14:25–26).

Cognitively leaning people that we are, we might conclude from Jesus’s words that the teaching the Spirit does is a head-only project. That could lead us to believe that the Spirit is in the what-to-know business and our task is to remember what to know. If we fall into this trap, our help to others in the counseling room is limited to improving the content of their thinking. This approach can be attractive. It reduces the uncertainties we feel around our capacity to be helpful. We feel more confident that the help we are offering is what the person needs.

But this is deceptive. This approach, as attractive as it may be for us, steers us away from helping people with the intensity of their life challenges. People need most a companion who enters the depth of their stories, seeing from inside that story, so to be able to guide them to deeper understanding of themselves and their circumstances. Only then can they make wise choices in their lives.

The best guide helps the other person make better choices; he does not make choices for them.

The best position from which to guide the person is from the side. The content-focused approach, however, encourages us to position ourselves above the other. When we become the expert giving advice to another to help him or her make better choices, we are not helping that person grow. We are helping that person grow dependent on us.

Jesus said the Spirit “will teach you all things and will bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you” (John 14:26). Consider the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus addresses the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, and those persecuted for righteousness’ sake and on Jesus’s account. Jesus starts with issues of the heart. He teaches inside out, addressing heart and mind—the whole person. The Son of God himself does not position himself above others. He is not giving directions. He is asking for growth that cannot be humanly engineered. He is proposing growth that is not possible through improving our knowledge or through trying harder. The growth Jesus proposes is only possible if we are dependent on God.

The apostle Paul understood this inside-out approach. And he understood the source of the power that generates that kind of growth. He prays that God may grant the Ephesians “to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God” (Eph. 3:16–19). Amazingly, they now can comprehend the love of Christ which is beyond comprehension.

How is this possible? It starts with the Spirit’s work in a person’s inner being, and that work strengthens the person, not to rule over others, but to do all we do from a foundation of love.

The apostle concludes his prayer with a familiar benediction you have likely heard at the close of church services you have attended: “Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work in us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever” (Eph. 3:20–21).

Our great hope when we counsel is “the power at work in us.” The Spirit is at work in both the helper and the one seeking help.

The Spirit in the Counseling Room

How the Spirit’s present relationship works is mysterious, not entirely clear. Perhaps this is why so many of us writers about counseling have written so little about the work of the Spirit in counseling. We want to be clear, and we desire to be certain. We hope to lead toward correct understanding. We don’t want to get it wrong. We are, after all, cognitively leaning people writing to cognitively leaning people.

We find help in words from Jesus about the Spirit, words that put a pause on our hopes for predictability and clarity about how the Spirit works: “The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes” (John 3:8).

God does the work he wants to do in the way he wants to do it. He chooses to allow us to co-labor with him. We must not forget that we are not equal partners. We cannot control the process or the outcomes. And we do not decide when and how God the Holy Spirit shows up, proceeds in his work, or the role we play in it. We can only be attentive, then responsive; we can only be aware, then cooperate. We cannot initiate, then expect the Spirit to reciprocate; we cannot direct, then expect the Spirit to follow.

Led by the Spirit in the Counseling Room

To assist a person to grow requires a relationship marked by safe connection between two people. This connection occurs most fully when both the affective and cognitive parts of the people are at play in the relationship. There needs to be balance between the emotions and thoughts. This balance is more than equal contribution of each element. This balance is like the balance we maintain when we walk. Weight is shifted from the right leg to the left leg, from the left leg to the right leg, and so forth. A smooth gait results when the weight that is shifted is shifted equally and, because of adjustments to changes in climate and terrain, sometimes approximately. The balance that deepens conversation is made of reflection, which requires awareness of emotions and the meaning of things, and clear content, which is mostly thoughts.

These days we are not taught how to balance the meaning of things with the details of those things. Mostly it is an issue of trust. We trust information more than we trust emotions. One seems solid. The other seems flighty. One seems in charge. The other seems to wander. One seems obviously true. The other seems obviously confused. We feel safe when the details are clear. We seldom feel as safe when in pursuit of the meaning of things. Meaning seems too fluid to trust. In such a climate, it is difficult to imagine that mature functioning flows from the partnership of information and emotions.

There are two layers to human experience. One centers on words. Words differentiate and distinguish one thing from another and one person from another. Words provide structure. The other layer is wordless but there is communication, nonetheless. This communication is based on felt connection. This connection is reciprocal and mutual. Both persons know they are seeing the other and being seen by the other at the same time. In the seeing and being seen both experiences being known by the other. This wordless experience connects and joins each one to the other. The experience is unstructured, but it is more complete than differentiated structure allows.

The clearest picture of this wordless experiential connection is a mother and her infant child. In the dual deep attention to each other, what some call attunement, both child and mother are impacted. If you have ever observed moments like this between a mother and child, you have been impacted too. If a picture was taken of you with the mother-child pair, you might have been surprised by the peaceful smile on your face. Sometimes we are hesitant to speak fearing we might break the spell.

The majority of social scientists and laypersons believe this mother-child connection is reserved for the early months of a child’s life. When the child acquires words, the pair move on to a higher form of communication, leaving behind the immature language of gaze-in-awe. The assumption seems to be that the very close connection between mother and child was only necessary for survival. As the child become verbal and mobile, such close connection is left behind because survival is assured in other ways.

Those who study relationships disagree. They recognize that the wordless communication mode, what the majority calls primitive, operates our entire lives. Without sufficient attention to this layer of experience, people may be very competent, but the emotional portion of themselves has been muted. The person living with muted affect is a person living less humanly than the creator designed them to live.

How does God communicate with us? Specifically, any way he wants to communicate to us using anything he wants to use. Generally, God communicates to us through both the words and the wordless layers of our selves. Both are required if we are to know God loves us.

The songwriter might help us here. Dion DiMucci writes:

Do you walk the streets at night?
Try to stay beneath the light?
Do you sense it as you go?
Maybe you are not alone. . . .

Times when you can’t find the word,
It comes to you as if you heard.
Someone’s voice from long ago
Tells you what you need to know.

–“Angel in the Alleyways”
Dion DiMucci and Mike Aquilina (2001)

If you cannot recall moments like DiMucci describes, how do you know God is alive and real? Because the words of your theology tell you? That is not enough. That kind of belief will not hold when life turns harsh. That kind of belief will not help when your trusted friends betray you. The words-only foundation is not the full foundation God provides for you to be rooted and anchored.

I could not have written that previous paragraph a few years ago. I came to Covenant Seminary as a student in search of biblically grounded theology. And I found it here, and that changed my life and my walk with God for the better. In the course of time, God brought people into my life who showed me my need for more solid roots than biblically grounded theology alone could provide. And then, in that context, I entered a period of suffering that strained my sense of worth, usefulness, and hope. My personhood was at stake.

I purposely avoided talking about it to counselors I knew. I feared they would name some diagnosis with intent to help. I knew the diagnosis, and I knew it was merely the outside of my struggles. I assumed their diagnosing would be avoidance in joining me in my pain, and I could not face that increase in my isolation.

I was left alone with God and a particular question: Did God like me? There were no words that wielded enough power to put that question at rest. No words. And there were not feelings that could be named either. The thing that brought me back was this: God never went away. He always kept being right there in the midst of my struggle. He stood still when I yelled at him, when I cried out to him, and when I pushed him away. He would not yield.

That began a review of memories, things I have returned to from time to time my whole life. But this time it was different. In this review, the eyes of my heart were opened to see God’s gracious presence. He was always there. Never failed.

One result of this dive into the deep end is that my counseling changed. I found myself joining people in the suffering more easily. I found myself knowing their pain more clearly. I found questions to ask that sometimes were used to open their eyes to their deeper hard-to-name experience. Other times, I saw that my question was off the mark, but it was used anyway to open their own eyes. Or it was not used, and I could see my mistake, admit it, and in that honest context was used to move the other person in the direction they needed to go.

Coming through my dark struggle, led by the Spirit’s persistence, changed my way thinking. I learned, if I can put words to it, to expect God to show up, to be aware of it when he does, and to follow his lead.

Note: This article first appeared in the spring 2025 edition of Covenant magazine. Get your copy or subscribe to Covenant here.