Long-term Care
Archibald Hart
Long-term counseling gives me the unparalleled opportunity to witness firsthand the subtle yet powerful healing that God brings.
—Archibald Hart Long-term counseling can be long indeed. Take the case of an elderly woman who had been seeing me for eight and a half years. About twenty years earlier, she had been given the conservatorship of her wealthy, elderly parents. However, about a year into the conservatorship, her parents sued her, alleging that she was defrauding their estate. Naturally, she denied the accusation, and it didn't go anywhere in the courts. But shortly after, the daughter developed chronic pain. She felt pain in nearly every part of her body. She would have surgery for one problem only to discover the pain had moved elsewhere. After ten years of testing, research, and operations in a major research hospital, it was determined the problem was psychogenic. She was referred to me. So I employed the usual procedures: we tried biofeedback and relaxation training; we explored her early childhood. But nothing new was revealed, and the pain continued. After a few years of seemingly no progress, I suggested we break off therapy. But she insisted we continue. I tried again each year to break it off, but each year she insisted we continue. Then one day—about eight and a half years into counseling—she froze as a glimmer of truth shone momentarily into her consciousness. She realized that she had, in fact, stolen from her parent's estate. It was a classic case of repression: the thought that she could rob from her own parents was so unacceptable that she totally repressed the thought, and that had gotten converted into serious pain. Now I was confronted with a very emotionally disturbed person. She had learned something ...
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