I have a friend called Helen who is the best counselling psychologist I have ever met. She is incredibly insightful and has a wonderful way with words. She also has a great ability to put herself into another person’s situation, and to understand it. I’ve never met anyone who can turn a situation around simply by asking questions, rather than by giving advice.

 

The first person I ever counselled was a woman called Gerda. She had grown up in Germany and now was a lonely little old lady living South Africa. She wore her hair in an old-fashioned beehive held together with lashings of hairspray and, believe it or not, blue-rinsed. She was suffering from depression. I had counselled her for quite a while, mainly using a cognitive technique that I had recently learnt. I shudder now to think how little idea I had of what I was doing.

 

One night, Helen came to supper with us. Afterwards we were going to see the movie “Gandhi,” and I was really looking forward to it. Just as we were finishing supper, the phone rang. It was Gerda. She was desperate and said she was about to take her own life. My heart sank for two reasons – first, it was the first suicide-call I had ever taken, and second, I really didn’t want to miss the movie. But we had to respond. Helen offered to come with me, and once we got there, she took over. She never tried to talk Gerda out of anything, she simply asked questions about how Gerda was feeling and about the wisdom of committing suicide. And, just with her questions, she coaxed Gerda into thinking rationally. The more Gerda realised that Helen understood exactly what she was feeling, the calmer she became. That night, I saw for the first time the incredible power of perceptive empathy, and I began to understand the words from Isaiah, “The Sovereign LORD has given me an ear to listen like one being instructed.” Within half an hour Gerda agreed that we could leave, and promised that she would not try to take her life that night. All we missed of the movie was the opening titles.

 

But the biggest lesson that Helen ever taught me was in connection with a woman named  Christina Stavros.

 

Christina was pretty in a worn-faced sort of way. She was Italian, or  her parents were Italian, but she had been living in South Africa for a long time. She was a single mother raising a boy of about 12 years old. Unknown to me, she was having considerable psychological difficulties and was in therapy with Helen.

​

Christina attended my Bible study group. We always made a habit at the end of the evening of encouraging people to share what was happening in their lives, and, generally, people were quite open and honest. At one point Christina told us how her family were putting a lot of pressure on her and kept telling her how to bring up her son. I made some (I thought) sympathetic comment about Italian families having very close ties with each other.

 

Then she stopped coming to Bible Study, and after a few weeks I heard second-hand that she was furious with me. She was telling people that I had insulted her Italian background and her family. It really churns me up when I know that somebody is angry with me, and I will generally go to try to sort it out. And so I found myself knocking on Christina’s door. She opened the door rather grudgingly with a very cold look on her face. We moved into the sitting room, but she did not ask me to sit down. So we held the whole conversation standing up. I tried to explain myself and how I had been misunderstood and had not intended any criticism of Italians or her family. Her face just remained cold and closed. I knew I was not getting anywhere when her Maltese poodle (not my favourite animal) lifted his leg and piddled on my shoe. He obviously picked up the vibe from his mistress. I think myself-control at not kicking the dog through the lounge window was praiseworthy.

 

And so I left.

 

Sometime later, Helen took time to come and see me. What she said to me (without any taint of criticism) changed my whole way of viewing other people, and radically changed my approach to the ministry. She basically said the following:

 

“Christina is a very fragile person. She has a very poorly developed sense of self, and has very weak inner structures. But she is managing to hold together the difficult tasks of earning a living and bringing up a child single-handedly. At the moment she is using her anger against you as a crutch. It somehow gives her strength if she can be angry with someone that she actually perceives to be strong. You contain, you carry her anger for her. It enables her not to be in the wrong. She’s not in strong enough position at the moment to deal with the real source of all the anger within her. You can go to her and convince her that you were not in the wrong, and that your intentions were extremely good. But if you did that, and took away her crutch, she might collapse. And then who would look after her son? It’s actually quite a Christ-like thing for you to accept her anger onto yourself, like the stripes of Christ across your back.”

 

And so I took Helen’s advice, and made no further effort to put things right with Christina. I was simply pleasant to her if I saw her, which was not often. I was never able to repair our relationship, and before too much longer I moved to another church and lost touch with her.

 

I have no idea how her story ended.