All posts by Jay Nickel

Blog, Counseling, Spirituality

Pastoral Counseling

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Pastoral Counseling involves, in addition to skills and practices of professional counseling, a sensitivity to, and appreciation for your faith and spirituality. In addition, it involves a pastoral counselor’s awareness of, and fidelity to, their own spirituality, and to finding the healing spiritual intersection between client’s and counselor’s.

Your faith might be informed by any one of the world’s religions or by a faith of your creation. As a pastoral counselor, I want to know what your faith means you. Does your faith help you grow, heal, love others and yourself? Or, does your faith lead you to self-condemnation and self-loathing?

Brother Michael Gallagher, of the Benedictine Holy Cross Monastery, has defined spirituality as a Grace with which we choose to cooperate. Spirituality presupposes a numinous reality (God, Holy Spirit, Divine Spark, Higher Power, Ground of being, etc.) and how we respond to it. Your spirituality might take the form of occasional to daily meditation and prayer; occasional to daily worship rituals; occasional to regular study and reflection; occasional to regular acts of service to others. It might take the form of a 12-step program, it might take the form of following a monastic rule like The Rule of Saint Benedict. But it only counts as spirituality if we cooperate with it.

All of this is to say that, in addition to all traditional practices of professional counseling, pastoral counseling strives to help people discover the life giving and healing dimensions of their spirituality, and help them find ways to cooperate with it.

Testimonials

Testimonial

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“Jay Nickel helped me recall what happened in a stressful situation through his use of hypnotherapy. His wise, faith- centered counsel along with prayer relieved my anxiety and helped me move forward in the face of great loss. His kindness and understanding eased my concerns allowing me to move through the therapy and onto a bright new horizon with faith-based answers to questions I may face in the future. I feel comforted by the fact that he will be there if I should need his help again.”

Client review submitted on Square 2/15/2022

Blog, Uncategorized

No God but God

I just finished reading Resa Aslan’s  No God but God.  He provides a comprehensive and compassionate overview of the history and development of Islam: from the Prophet’s biography; the Prophet’s creation of an egalitarian, pluralistic, and compassionate community (the Ullama in Medina), this history of the community trying to figure out how continue faithful to the Prophet’s teaching and example; the intellectual and cultural strains within the community that have led to many streams of Islam, and an overview of the three larges strains of Islam, the Sunni, Shi’ite, and Sufi. He examines the various experiments in negotiating the boundaries between the religious and political leadership of the community, and the tensions between Traditionalist, Modernest, and Reformist branches of intellectual thought and development.

Resa Alsan’s critical thinking, articulate language, powerful scholarship, and compassionate understanding help me not only have a better understanding of one of the worlds largest religions, but also to understand myself better as a Christian, a product of Western Civilization, and an American. To read the history and struggles of Islam, to compare and contrast those struggles and development with the history of Christianity and understanding the profound integration and importance of religion in United States’ “secular” government and hence to give up some of the fear engendered by phrases like “Islamic State” we hear in our fear mongering media.

Blog, Counseling

Brief Therapy: Effective and Cost Effective

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My goal is to provide you value for your time and money. I start to address your concerns right away. In the words of my Brief Therapy professor, Dr. Jim Bentley, PhD., “I go for the cure in the first session. Sometimes it works!” Of course he was being playful, using words like ‘cure’ but I take his meaning seriously: people come to therapy to get help changing and we can work in ways to help that change happen quickly.

My approach is a form of brief therapy. You get value for your therapy dollars by having your concerns addressed quickly and in a few sessions. You will hear me start by saying “What do you want to address today?” We address what needs to be addressed and we address it in the here and now. We develop and shared agreement on the goal. The sessions include some education, some experiencing, and probably some laughter.

This article by Robert Taibbi L.C.S.W., gives good advice on how to get the most value from your time in brief therapy

Making the Most of Brief Therapy by by Robert Taibbi L.C.S.W.

Blog, Counseling, Spirituality

Naming the Powers

I’m hesitant to use ‘Satan’, ‘Demon’, or ‘Powers’ type language when formulating an understanding the root cause of issues be they spiritual, emotional, or relational. I find that thinking in those terms leads me either to feelings of helplessness or it leads me to adopt a combat and struggle mentality instead of a mentality of compassion and love.

I like Walter Wink’s understanding of ‘Satan’ and ‘The Powers’ as the fallen spirituality at the heart of our institutional and human systems that lead us to use power, coercion, and violence to get what we want or need.

Name-calling is a form of violence. When I call something ‘demonic’ I practice the violence of name-calling. I think it is the subtle and clever nature of evil to tempt us to use its own tools of power, coercion, and violence to confront it. When I indulge in the violence of labeling something as ‘demonic’ I am in the thrall of the very same fallen spirituality that I want to confront. I fall to this temptation when I am frightened by the destructive potentials I see in the person or system.

Having said all that, I recognize that when we ‘name’ our fears [demons] that have control over us, they often lose much of their power. But we need to name them specifically and with compassion, not condemnation. When we name our vulnerable places, our shame, our fears of disconnection; incompetence; loneliness; helplessness; hopelessness; then we start to take away their ‘demonic’ power over us and start to claim our healthy desires and initiate the process of healing.

When I start such name-calling I am indulging in lazy-mindedness and avoiding the work of understanding motivation and needs of the person or system I’m labeling (be it me or a client).

When I start such name-calling, I am indulging in the blame-game and abandoning responsibility to work towards the redemption of the person, system, or situation.

I subscribe to Walter Wink’s formulation:

  • The Powers are created by God [and hence good].
  • The Powers are fallen.
  • The Powers are in need of redemption.

When I adopt this point of view, I can let go of a little of my fear, I can ask the object of my fears such questions as:

  • What wholesome purpose are you working towards or what wholesome desire is driving you?
  • If all things are Gift, in what way are you a Gift to me?
  • How can I best respond to you with Love?

In the therapy process some of the process is making friends with those parts of our selves we don’t like or are frightened by. Those parts may be the feelings of helplessness and hopelessness, or those parts that are frightened or those parts that are in pain. To make friends with our hurting parts is to ask them:

  • How they are working to protect us?
  • How did they grow so strong?
  • What is their wholesome desire for us?
  • What do they want/need?

In these ways, we are working to redeem those fallen and death dealing parts of ourselves, to respond to them with love and healing.

Blog, Counseling

10 Things to do when someone you know may be suicidal

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SAVE | Someone You Know Is Suicidal.

  1. Let them know you are concerned
    • “When you say ‘sometimes I just want to end it all’ I take it seriously”
    • “You seem especially (down, angry, withdrawn, sad, …) lately and I’m concerned”
  2. Ask them if they are suicidal. Be direct, avoid euphemisms.
    • “Are you thinking about killing yourself?”
  3. Explore their thoughts and plans
    • “Have you thought about how you might kill yourself?”
    • “Do you actually have the [gun, pills, rope, …] available?
    • “How likely are you to act on these thoughts?”
  4. Decide how dangerous the suicidal threat stands
    • Emergency: they have a concrete plan, access to the plan, and feel likely to act
    • Urgent: concrete plan, but don’t have access to plan, or don’t feel like acting on it now
    • Important: vague plan, no access, credibly affirm they won’t act on thoughts
    • There is no unimportant threat
  5. Take action to reduce the threat
    • If the threat level is Emergency
      • take them to hospital emergency room, or
      • call 911 (ask for mental health officer if your community has them)
    • If threat level is Urgent
      • ask for commitment to not act on plan without calling and talking to someone (you, suicide hotline, pastor, emergency room, therapist)
      • reduce lethality of plan
        • remove guns, pills, alcohol, …
        • arrange for them to not be alone
      • commit to helping them find professional support
    • If the threat level is Important
      • commit to helping them find professional support (MD, psychiatrist, mental health therapist)
      • follow through till they get help
  6. Acknowledge the reality and depth of their pain
  7. Affirm your care and concern
  8. Affirm that things can get better
  9. Commit to follow-up
  10. Follow-up
Counseling

Family of Choice

“Stay connected with your support network” is a key item in the list of self-care advice therapists give people struggling with depression. The others are:

  1. take your medications as prescribed
  2. get 30-40 minutes of exercise daily,
  3. eat healthy,
  4. get enough rest,
  5. call for help if you are at risk of hurting yourself.

I want to talk about  the idea of ‘Family of Choice’ that I hope is part of your support network. By definition, we all have a ‘Family of Origin’, the family into which we were born and/or raised. Most of us grew up knowing at least the immediate members of our Family of Origin our parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts and uncles. In our modern families, the family of origin often includes step-parents and siblings as well. Out of all our relationships in the world, often our family of origin is the most familiar to us. Here is a diagram describing the typical experience of someone who knows their family of origin and has a wide range of relationships beyond their immediate family:

Known Family of Origin
Known Family of Origin

In some situations, for instance people brought up and lost in a foster care system, might not know their family of origin or their family of origin is the foster care system:

Unknown Family of Origin
Unknown Family of Origin

In some isolating situations, someone may have very few relationships outside their family of origin:

Isolated family from society
Family Isolated from Society

Now let me talk about a ‘family of choice.’ We don’t have any choice in our family of origin, it is what it is. Sometimes our family or origin is destructive and dangerous to our mental, emotional, and sometimes physical well-being. Sometimes, as mentioned above, we don’t even know our family of origin. But we can look for and include people in our lives with the qualities of character and behavior to help us find safety, connection, and growth. A family of choice, might be 5-7 people with the following qualities of character:

  • Listening: they have the capacity to listen and really hear what we have to say.
  • Respect boundaries: they take ownership of their own thoughts, feelings, behaviors and attitudes and allow us to own our ours.
  • Confidentiality: they do not betray confidences
  • Honesty: they can give us accurate feedback when we ask for it.
  • Accountability: when they make a mistake, they acknowledge it and work to do better.
  • Loving: they have our best interests at heart

Of course, to build such a family of choice, we need to reciprocate with the same qualities ourselves. If we are lucky, some but not all of our family of choices members might be part of our family of origin:

Family of Choice
Family of Choice includes some Family of Origin

But if nobody in our family of origin qualifies, if none of them help us feel safe, secure, and connected, there is no law that we have to include them in our circle of family of choice:

Family of Choice disconnected from Family of Origin
Family of Choice separate from Family of Origin

Who do you include in your family of choice? Who do you want to or need to add? Can you tell them you want them as a family of choice member? If you can, they are probably a good candidate.