The Nouthic Therapy Approach: The Goals Of Person-Centered Therapy

1. Person-Centered Therapy posits that mankind is good and trustworthy and has with himself an innate desire to self-actualize toward wholeness, in addition to a freedom of the will that is ultimate. While the goals of self-actualization seem to be a positive end, being that it is the non-objective one always loses sight of the target. We as believers live our lives knowing that we will be forced to give an account of our actions. The goal of the Christian self-actualization is Christ, not some ghostly target, no he has a name: Jesus. Person-Centered Therapy creates an idol of the self, one that is remedied by a Christian worldview.

2. Like the house in It 's a wonderful life that has all the windows knocked out of it, when spaces are not

The Nouthetic approach to counseling has at its core the worthy desire to submit all areas of life to the Word of God. This desire is a core belief for the Christian Integrationist, but the approach is very different. At its base Nouthetic counseling does not appreciate complexity: the complexity of life, wisdom, or the Word. It is necessary to appreciate that God has made man as biopneumapsychosocial being that needs more than proof texts to change and grow. The Nouthetic approach is not robust, but we as integrationists can seek to use some the true content that this branch of counseling creates: for the glory of

The purpose of the funnel is to submit all of our psychological thinking to the worldview that the Bible gives us. The Bible, its self, does not offer us an explicit, comprehensive approach to counseling. It does, however, offer us a robust filter that we can use to sort out false psychological approaches. The levels of the filter are theory, technique, theology. The questions to ask for theory are, do the philosophical perceptions in line with a Christian worldview. For techniques we need to not only consider if it is effective but if it will be truly perpetuation human flourishing. Lastly is to ask if the psychological idea matches our personal understand of Biblical theology or does the Word of God support this idea.

8. Like much thought in any field, the origins of Psychology was reactionary. There was an approach that was established and accepted, and then there was the pushback against the established thought that gave way to the new. The theories that were accepted were so because the zeitgeist of the time proved to be fertile soil for which the theory to be accepted. While this is where our discipline started, we are now in a time of eclecticism. Few people seek to fight for the purity of a certain theoretician, but we now instead seek to find the good from the cluster of theories and