Teruo Kobayashi was a fellow student at seminary. He was a Konkoyo priest, which meant he was a genetic descendent of Konko himself who had founded the religion, which was a conflation of Christianity and Shinto. Teruo could never understand pastoral counseling. He said that in his tradition, he went to a certain location in the temple and sat down on a cushion. Then troubled people came to him, brought him a gift and sat across from him to explain their problem. He would think about it a bit, tell the person what they ought to do, and then the person would go away to be obedient. This approach would only make sense to a conservative Fundamentalist Christian. A liberal, particularly from the UU or Ethical Culture traditions, would laugh. Defiantly.
Clinical Pastoral Care is a formal course, usually ten or twelve weeks long, in which prospective ministers are put in relationship with people in serious situations, as in prison or a hospital. They are asked to be useful to these people for part of the day and then the rest of the time they are asked to sit in a group and address what feelings arose in them. FEELINGS, not rules. And the point was to listen, which meant to open up enough for those feelings to be triggered. Then the group would address how to handle those feelings, which were often profound, often disconcerting, and always a challenge to any faith position that would cause a person to become a minister, even a free-thinking atheist hedonist anarchist. It was really about one’s identity while being in relationship to other people.
The point of doing this in a hospital or prison was that one couldn’t choose which people to help. It meant intimacy without sex. The chaplain does not crawl into the bed, no matter how much the counselee wants it. Luckily, very sick people don’t want it very much. It’s much more of a problem in a regular congregation.
There are two aspects that define this intimacy as professional. One is the time and situation limit. The chaplain doesn’t go home with the patient or prisoner. And the job IS a job that ends. The other is the requirement of confidentiality. In a CPE group confidentiality applies to the student chaplains, just as though they were attending AA meetings.
Not too long ago I got interested in what happened to my CPE group. It’s been thirty years now so I didn’t expect to upset many applecarts. There were six of us. I had my notes but discovered only one name. Thanks to google I now know that he did indeed achieve the primacy in his tradition that he wanted and he did pursue the issues that he wrestled with at the time, but as a professor, not as a minister. I don’t know what happened to the handsome boy with cancer of the testicles or the other handsome boy who was seduced by a priest on the first night of his student priesthood nor the sturdy and stoic young woman who found herself crying uncontrollably in the arms of a family that had just lost a member. You know what happened to me. The sixth student was pretty laid back -- he played in a bluegrass band. Our advisor left CPE.
Confidentiality has been a major issue for me. I know too much and too little at the same time. I have to guard others, but as many books and movies have illustrated, that might mean not making public something that would save them, respecting their right to decide what is known about their lives. It’s a kind of torture to see injustice based on ignorance, whether that is a stupidity of thinking or simple ignorance of facts. All a person can do is to stand by the accused and wait for the situation to change. But if that person begins to worry about intimate things told at unguarded moments, then the relationship may disintegrate.
The hardest persuasion is to assure the armored person who is guaranteeing rejection by not disclosing the truth that they can safely give it up. People can get invested in the stigma against them and accept that definition because it is a familiar and dependable source of identity. In truth, there is no guarantee that the “truth” can set anything free -- not people and not ideas.
Another curve ball that comes my way is that I have guarded some secrets for decades, only to discover that everyone already knew that and didn’t care very much. In small towns and church congregations, people know everything. Just about the time I left one congregation, someone finally let it slip that one of the members was suicidal -- had made repeated attempts while I was there. I had been friendly with this woman, stayed at her home overnight, found her cheerful and well-balanced. No one told me. She succeeded in killing herself after I left. She didn’t tell me because I was an authority figure and that meant she projected all sorts of fantasies about what I might do if I knew. I have no idea at all what I would have done.
Counseling is seen by many in the same terms as Teruo’s tradition: a big authority tells a little needy person what they need to know. Maybe even intervenes on their behalf. If there is NO big authority (God, minister, doctor or parent), then the little needy person will just have to figure it out on their own terms. A whole flowering of “Third Force” psych in the Seventies comes from acting on this assumption. The task of the counselor is NOT to tell the counselee anything -- just to listen and try to “become” the counselee in some sense. It helps if both are from something like the same background. Eugene Gendlin asserts that the second person doesn’t even need to be a counselor but merely a witness. They don’t even have to say mmm-hmmm at intervals. They can even be on the telephone. To some extent they can even be there as a known figure who is only imagined at the moment. (To find out more, what you want to google for is “Focusing.” There are YouTube vids.) Kids can do it for each other. A dog, maybe. (Forget cats.)
Outside of a professional relationship, it’s confusing to know what rules apply. It might reassure people to know that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking and reading about this issue of intimate confidentiality. Every time I’ve stepped a little out of the conventional line, there’s been trouble, whether I told too much or told too little. The whole society seems to be wrestling with this. I have a friend who does not want to KNOW who is gay and who is not gay. (She can’t hear me say that this is a binary distinction that’s not useful anyway. She thinks it’s like male and female, which she thinks are mutually exclusive. She bristles at the idea of me knowing better.)
But I’m a writer. That’s quite a different profession. When I wrote the bio of Bob Scriver, I didn’t tell everything I knew. Afterwards people came to tell me things I hadn’t known. Some of them made me cry. Bob himself never suspected anyone knew. Inevitably, someone who reads this will ask me what information made me cry. Forget it.
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