Crisis Counseling

This introductory session reframes the work as crisis comforting rather than counseling, warning against the trap of answering the question "why," as Job's three friends did. It defines loss, grief, and mourning, distinguishes predictable from unexpected loss, and sketches the profile of a comforter. Drawing on Isaiah 40:1 and 66:13, it names the comforter's three tasks: acknowledge the crisis, allow normal grief, and guide a healthy resolution.

Opening with the Good Samaritan of Luke 10:25-37, this lesson develops the profile of a comforter, cautioning that the letter of the law kills and that beating hurting people with Scripture only breeds condemnation. It examines five Greek words for compassion (oikteiro, splanchnizomai, sympatheo, eleeo, and one meaning simply to pity), then contrasts sympathy, illustrated by sympathetic vibration in physics, with empathy, urging comforters to engage both feelings and mind.

Framed around the goals of crisis counseling, this lesson insists the three steps, acknowledging the loss, allowing grief, and reaching resolution, must be taken in order. Using the harsh Duval Medical Center nurse as a negative example, it teaches that everything be wrapped in love, that terminally ill patients deserve the truth, and that counselors work through intermediaries. David's response to his dying child and Absalom's death illustrate healthy resolution and burying old dreams.

This session opens the first stage of grief, shock and denial. It explains that shock can strike the body, soul, or spirit, causing anything from a heart attack to blaming God, and recalls Job's wife urging him to curse God. Working from Webster's definitions, it treats denial as saying no, contradicting, disowning, and refusing to accept, illustrated by kept clothing and graveside avoidance, and by inviting the grieving to retell how they heard the news.

Continuing to the second stage, anger and questioning, this lesson builds an acrostic on ANGER, accusing, negative, gullible, error, and resentment leading to rejection, and links anger to Ephesians 4 giving place to the devil. It then examines five questions, why, how, when, what, and where, showing how Satan uses each to attack God's authority, control, love, purpose, and existence, countered with Scriptures such as 1 Corinthians 13.

This lesson addresses guilt, condensing survey responses into three cores, fear of punishment, worthlessness, and isolation, and tracing them to angry, shaming, or rejecting parental discipline. It distinguishes civil, theological, psychological, and constructive guilt, critiques the two extremes of humanistic self-exaltation (Jonathan Livingston Seagull) and "worthless worm" hymnody, and affirms from Scripture that we are special, fallen, and loved. Robert Schuller's Self-Love and the steps to know, be, enjoy, and express yourself close it.

Covering depression and rejection, the final stage of grief, this session clarifies when depression becomes sin and lists its physical and emotional symptoms and biochemical changes. It distinguishes reactive, neurotic, psychotic (manic), and endogenous depression, then walks the three phases, onset, middle, and recovery, prescribing alternative thinking, force-feeding activity and fellowship, and vigilance because suicide risk peaks during recovery, when a person regains just enough energy to act.

The closing lesson, titled reaching a healthy resolution, uses the early church's phoenix as a symbol of rebirth and Robert Schuller's stepping-stone-or-stumbling-block image. It teaches making a place for the crisis, then growing through rather than going through it via cognitive mastery: gathering facts, identifying devastated dreams, and forming new ones. Barometers of healing and the call to help others and reproduce fellow crisis counselors complete the course.