Confession In Professional Counseling

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A licensed professional counselor is ethically expected to provide the very best care possible to his or her clients and one way to accomplish this goal is by implementing a self-care regimen. Recognizing and affirming one’s own shortcomings is one step a counselor can take to ensure their clients receive top-quality therapy. For the Christian counselor, this means actively participating in the biblical mandate of confession. According to McMinn (2011), “Confession requires humility, and humility is not easy” (p.177), yet this Christ-like characteristic is necessary if a Christian counselor wishes to provide his or her clients with the restorative help found within the counseling session.
It should be noted that from a Christian perspective confession is not only the admittance of the sinful acts committed by the individual, but also a public declaration of one’s allegiance and loyalty to God. Failing to acknowledge the second half of the definition of confession opens the door for insincerity and disingenuousness on the counselor’s part. Moreover, removing God from the confessional equation is to remove the spiritual aspect of repentance and subsequent restoration of fellowship with God. Without professing God as the sovereign ruler of your life any sinful acts committed are reduced and diminished to mere misdeeds and transgressions …show more content…

The possibility exists that some of my clients will believe that “confession assumes [a] moral violation [only], and counseling assumes moral neutrality” (McMinn, 2011, p. 168). Hopefully, my modeling of the affirmation part of confession will deter my clients from this one-sided thinking “because …Christian counseling should not always be morally neutral…” (McMinn, 2011, p. 169). When clients seek my counseling they will know from the outset that “…as for me and

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