Stop Self-Diagnosing: Counseling Lessons From Pastor Kenny

Key takeaways

Labels are not diagnoses. Words picked up online can point to a real concern, but they are a poor substitute for someone trained to sit with you.
Look for the why. Behavior usually has a root, and advice without the root often does not last.
Context changes everything. Counseling stalls when people hold back the details that explain the problem.
Care within your calling. Helpers have different graces, and not every person is the right fit for every counselor.
Love needs learning. Premarital counseling teaches what love alone cannot supply.
Acceptance heals. For many people, a community that likes them as they are comes before any change.

A church that offers free counseling

On the Beyond the Letter podcast, host Adam Mesa sat down with Pastor Kenny Purdue, who heads the counseling department at their church. Adam described the program: a video curriculum, then in-person sessions, up to six depending on the situation, and referrals to professional therapists or psychologists when a case needs them. The church's counselors are Bible counselors, and Pastor Kenny said he personally screens every referral.

Adam shared that the church had met with around 860 people in the previous year. Pastor Kenny himself sees roughly 25 to 40 people a week, about 28 on average, on top of services, funerals and hospital visits. He has spent about 22 years running group classes and about the last 15 focused on pastoral counseling and care. Next month will mark 29 years in full-time ministry for him.

Counseling through many filters

Adam asked what has changed most in 15 years. Pastor Kenny said that back then, whatever a person's issue was, individual or relational, it stayed within that context. Social media has widened the influence and input. He sees people move from thing to thing on their phones, and many arrive with an expected outcome before they ever sit down.

Many now come self-diagnosed. Adam and Pastor Kenny listed the buzzwords: gaslighting, narcissistic, needing deliverance. Some people say ChatGPT told them what is wrong with their spouse or their child. Pastor Kenny said that makes today's counselor work harder: you have to reverse engineer what someone thinks the problem is, along with advice from everyone they consulted before you. Adam added that online research may spark someone to take a concern seriously, but a professional should help name it.

Pastor Kenny gave an example. A woman in a relationship headed toward marriage had researched and decided her boyfriend might be narcissistic. He told her he would not diagnose him. Two loving people who have not learned to communicate can say things that sound like gaslighting, he explained, and that does not make them that. She told him no one had said it to her that way before. He did not tell her to stay or leave. He cautioned her against labeling.

Finding the why

Asked what he does by second nature, Pastor Kenny gave one answer. As he put it, "There's always a why behind why a person is doing something or feeling something." He told a story on himself. His parents never bought flavored cereal, only corn flakes, while his cousins had Froot Loops and Captain Crunch. He promised himself his own kids would have every cereal they wanted. Yet when they opened the cupboard, he got angry and told them to hurry up and choose. He asked the Lord why, and heard that he resented not having had a choice himself.

He took the same question into the counseling room. When a husband came in after his wife, Pastor Kenny listened. The man told him, "pastor, I know I'm wrong, but until somebody listens to me, I'm not listening to anybody else." Pastor Kenny let him talk for twenty minutes. The next day the wife called to say her husband could not wait for the next session.

Without the why, he has found, telling someone to stop a behavior, or handing them a verse about it, often does not last. Adam agreed that using Scripture as barriers, with no real transformation behind it, becomes tough.

Why context is everything

Adam gave several examples of sessions that made no sense until a hidden detail came out. In one, forty minutes in, a wife shared that she had been molested from age eleven. Adam said he stopped the meeting and had the church pay for legitimate therapy, because that was outside his training. He told her husband he was asking her to change in a way she had not yet been healed of. They did one-on-one work for months, and nine months later the couple returned for marriage counseling.

In another case, a couple who seemed to hate each other revealed they had first married for citizenship. Others hid a previous marriage, or an affair that explained a spouse's controlling behavior. Adam's advice was direct: "You got to be able to talk about what's going on if you really want to get some help." He said that when someone does not gel with a counselor, they have often held something back, whether from shame or from wanting to look holy.

Caring within your calling

Adam asked how Pastor Kenny refreshes after so many sessions. He said, "I've learned to leave it here." He admitted there was a season when leaving it behind brought false guilt, as though he did not care. He learned he was caring, and also needed to go home to his family. He keeps outlets, first his Harley and a ride to Starbucks, now remote control airplanes. He also distinguishes calling from gifting. Gifting takes you far, he said, but calling carries you when you are tired.

Adam contrasted himself. Two counseling sessions leave him exhausted, while a three-hour walkthrough of a new building, down to the grout and door swings, gives him life. He is a visionary, and at the end of a session he wants to ask people whether they will actually do what was just discussed. Pastor Kenny said care has more than one shape, and people care within their callings and giftings.

When someone criticizes his work, Pastor Kenny reminds himself that sometimes he is not the right fit, sometimes he lacks the full picture, and sometimes he stayed in compassion mode when he needed to admonish. He keeps it in perspective: "These are God's sheep. They're not mines." If someone found help through another counselor, he said, that is fine, because he is part of a team.

Premarital counseling and acceptance

Adam asked what one thing would speed up growth for most people. For couples, Pastor Kenny named premarital counseling. He and his wife currently have fourteen couples in a seven-week premarital class. His reasoning: "love by itself will not keep you." Love minus learning to communicate, to accept the differences between men and women, to resolve conflict and to combine resources will not hold, he said, but love plus those things will. Adam tied the conversation to patience in 1 Corinthians 13:4.

For individuals, he said, the answer depends on context, including family of origin. If the context is low self-esteem, he wants to help build a community where the person is celebrated and accepted. He described his own struggle with an inferiority complex. Close friends who liked him for himself, and who called him out when he compared himself to others, helped him begin to like who God made him to be, with some things still to polish.

What this means for you

If you have been researching your marriage, your child or yourself online, a label may be a starting point, but it is not the finish. A question worth asking is whether you are bringing the real story to someone trained to help.

You might also ask what the why behind your own reaction is, as Pastor Kenny found with the cereal. And if you are helping others, consider where your grace lies, and where handing someone to another person is the kindest thing you can do.