Case data Summary of the case material as presented

1 Summary and the Pastoral Situation

The first case is brought by a 38-year-old wife: she experiences her 40-year-old husband as having become “spiritless” — nothing excites him, he shows no affection, he is constantly irritable, and he sees everything as pointless.

The situation is a burden on the whole family. The wider relatives react to it too (the husband's parents have scolded him, his younger brother says he's “always been like this,” and the wife's parents say they “saw it coming”). Their 20-year-old son is facing a choice of career path, but is constantly preoccupied with his father's helplessness; their 18-year-old daughter, after a recent breakup, is forever analyzing with her mother “what's going on with Dad.” The wife feels she has already tried everything — in vain.

On the working title. Here, “spiritless” does not mean a cruel, harsh man, but one who has become incapable of enthusiasm — someone who seems to have run out of joy in life and inner drive. It is the wife who turns to the pastoral counselor: she is the client, even though the “symptom” apparently belongs to the husband.

Transcript The edited text of the conversation; the speaker's name is shown at every turn

The Edited Transcript of the Conversation

Recording of the Conversation

Péter: We're talking about pastoral care cases, and I want to let our dear viewers and listeners know right away that you can send us cases too. If you sum up your story in a single page, and Mónika and Gábor both find it suitable and professionally interesting, then in time we'll bring it to the show — of course, with complete discretion, entirely anonymously.

The purpose of this conversation series is, on one hand, so that I myself can ask you questions personally, since these topics interest me enormously. On the other hand, we also want to offer real help to our viewers and listeners, because we're going through situations that could come up for any of us, in any family. If you've listened to our Eleven Podcast episode on remembering, you'll know that memories can surface at the most unexpected moments and end up helping us move forward.

For today's very first case, we've given a very telling working title: The Husband Who Became Spiritless. What does it actually mean to become spiritless? If the opposite of “spiritless” is “spirited,” how should we picture this dynamic? Mónika, tell us, how do you see it?

Mónika: That's an excellent opening, because when I first heard the title — and this opening case was specifically Gábor's idea — the same classic image immediately came to my mind too: that we'd be talking about the story of a cruel, harsh, cold, and sullen man.

But then, as we got deeper into it, it became clear that spiritlessness doesn't necessarily mean only harshness. In fact, in this context it certainly doesn't mean that — it much more describes a person who has become incapable of enthusiasm. A man who seems to have completely run out of motivation, inner drive, and joy in life.

Gábor: Well, we'll see exactly what the final takeaway of this situation is once we get into the concrete story. What I think is brilliant, and what gives our shared workshop its special flavor, is that here two professionals — a woman and a man — are talking with someone who asks us the kind of questions that we, as professionals, would never think to ask anymore. We tend to assume that everything in our field is already completely obvious and natural, when it's precisely your outside, layperson's questions that are the most exciting.

This is the spirit in which we'll work through the cases: it will be exciting to see how a female pastoral counselor reacts, and how a male pastoral counselor reacts, to the same human crisis.

Péter: We've already talked about this methodology here on the show before, and we'll link the segment on co-leadership for our viewers, which you also apply in practice in the pastoral counseling training at the Pentecostal Theological College. But since you've brought it up: why is it important to keep emphasizing, again and again, that this is specifically a pastoral role?

Mónika: Mostly because we need to draw a very sharp line between pastoral care and, for example, clinical or therapeutic work. What we present here on this show is fundamentally pastoral accompaniment, not psychotherapy.

Of course, one could argue for hours over the exact conceptual distinctions, but if I want to simplify it a great deal, we could say: psychotherapy has a reparative, curative function — that is, healing and restorative in the medical, clinical sense. Pastoral care, by contrast, is supportive in character.

Unfortunately, in everyday language people often wrongly tack on the word “just,” saying: “It's just pastoral care — if it's something serious, you need to see a real therapist.” In certain clinical cases, in certain pathologies, that is of course true. On the other hand, pastoral support can offer an enormous, irreplaceable plus compared to classical psychotherapy. Why? Because pastoral care looks at the person not only in the horizontal (social, psychological) dimension, but also brings in the vertical dimension: it takes the relationship between God and the human person as its basis and takes it seriously.

I believe that our transcendent connectedness is inseparably part of the striving toward wholeness and health. And I correct myself on the word “health,” because health in the theological sense is not at all the same as being clinically free of symptoms. Our ultimate goal is not for the client to be free of every existing symptom. We look at the whole person, who in their full reality is drawing near to God.

In fact, it is often precisely our difficulties, our losses, our crises, or our various psychological symptoms that become the inner driving force that sets off and supports our drawing near to God. These crises are not necessarily illnesses to be suppressed, but exclamation marks that call attention to deeper blockages in the soul. Well, I meant to be brief, so I'll hand over the floor.

Gábor: You meant to be brief, but you touched on a very important point. The Hungarian word egészség [“health”] is wonderful, because it contains the word egész [“whole”]. As you said, this doesn't simply mean being free of symptoms or physical healing — it's questionable whether perfect healing even exists in this world at all.

Pastoral psychology has a very beautiful definition of health. According to it, a healthy person is one who is able, through their own strength or with outside help, to attain their realistic desires, who is able to realize goals that are realistic for their current state, and who, at the end of their life, is able to say: “This was my life, and this is my death.” So for us, health is not a somatic category, not merely a bodily one.

Building on Mónika's thought, let me bring in a medical analogy: if someone is lying in the hospital in the surgical ward, it's almost certain that the surgeon will, in certain cases, call in the internist for a consultation. The relationship between pastoral care and psychotherapy is exactly like that. They are not enemies of one another, but mutually complementary forms of spiritual support that reflect on each other. Well, now we've explained, very properly and scientifically, what's what!

Péter: But it's also important that we clarify the framework at the start. If, in later cases, our listeners find themselves asking, “Well, why didn't the professionals go further here?” or “Why didn't they try this or that method?” — it may well be that exactly these professional boundaries of competence are the reason. So this clarification is very much in its place.

Mónika: Yes, and sorry, but this is also a completely separate, deliberate aim of ours here. Just as in our college training, we also want to draw attention in this show to where the boundaries of competence lie. It's important to be precise about what the goal of pastoral care is and what the goal of psychotherapy is — regardless of the fact that we don't practice or teach the latter. Drawing this boundary will remain a very important guiding standard throughout these conversations.

Gábor: And while we're on the subject of boundaries, there's one more very important thing that urgently needs clarifying, closer to home, within the church itself: pastoral care is not mission work...

Mónika: ...and it's not catechesis either — that is, religious instruction.

Gábor: Exactly! It is not the direct aim of pastoral care that, after the conversations, the client should be the first to sit down in a church pew the following Sunday. If that happens, it's a wonderful and welcome “side effect,” but it is not the primary goal. If someone's goal is conversion, let them do mission work — but let them not call it pastoral care.

In the same way, it is not my task, during pastoral care, to explain the mystery of the Holy Trinity to a suffering person. If someone wants to study dogmatics, let them go to religious instruction or to theology. It is terribly important that we fix this clear distinction firmly in place, because otherwise the result will be complete professional and human chaos.

Just think about it: the client comes to me because they are in crisis, because they are suffering right now. In that vulnerable state, they are least of all curious about what theological or theoretical constructions have been produced over the centuries about their problem. They need, then and there, to be understood, carried, and accompanied.

Péter: Let's look at the case within this framework we've just been discussing. I'll read out the summary, and after that we can go into the details.

The wife is 38 years old, and comes with the complaint that her husband has become completely “spiritless.” The man is 40, nothing excites him, he shows no affection, he is constantly on edge, irritable, and sees everything as pointless. The situation is already causing tension in the wider family: the husband's parents have already scolded him over his behavior, while his younger brother says he's actually always been like this. The wife's parents, for their part, said all along that this would happen.

Their children are suffering from the situation too: their 20-year-old son is right at the point of choosing a career, but doesn't know which way to go, and is constantly preoccupied with his father's helplessness and paralysis. Their 18-year-old daughter recently broke up with her partner, and now constantly consults with her mother, analyzing what might be going on with Dad. The wife feels she has already tried everything — her friends have confirmed this too — but every attempt of hers has proven futile.

Péter: This wife arrives at the pastoral counselor's. What's the very first question worth asking, from a professional point of view, about this situation?

Gábor: The very first question we ask in this situation — and which, as a matter of method, we recommend to every pastoral counselor — does not concern the client. The pastoral counselor first has to ask themselves, even before the woman walks through the door: “How am I, as a pastoral counselor, doing right at this moment?”

Mónika: That's right. Am I even able, right now, to connect with this topic with a clear, undivided attention?

Gábor: Exactly. To put it a bit humorously: did I get up on the wrong side of the bed that day, or the right side? What kind of form am I in today?

It could be that the pastor is receiving this woman between two funerals, or between two baptisms. Or perhaps they're preparing for a ministers' conference where they have to give a presentation on some weighty topic in church history. Or it could be that they have to go pick up their car from the mechanic that afternoon, and have just found out what a horrifying amount the repair is going to cost. What kind of form am I in today? This is the first filter. For this, they use a term borrowed from psychotherapy, but naturalized into Hungarian pastoral care by Endre Gyökösi: “scrubbing in.”

Though the term is a bit misleading, because what the pastoral counselor does here isn't washing something off themselves — it's an inner process of becoming aware, a process of consciously registering. What is it, from my own state, that I still need to take into account?

Mónika: Staying on this level: in our training, we often draw attention to the fact that holding boundaries is indispensable not only in relation to the neighboring disciplines or to theology, but also in relation to our own person.

This means I ask myself the question: am I personally able, right now, to deal with this woman and her family crisis? And if, in a given case, I feel that I am not — for whatever reason, whether it's my own personal involvement in the topic, or physical fatigue, or simply feeling unwell — then being able to say no is not abandoning the person I'm caring for. It is not failing in my ministry — on the contrary, in a given case it is exactly this that helps that person the most.

If I assess my limits and say that I'm going to refer this on, delegate it to another professional, then I have already given direction and helped. But there is an even more fundamental rule: without taking care of myself, I cannot responsibly take care of another person either.

So if I openly admit that “this topic isn't mine to handle right now,” or honestly signal that “I'm extremely tired at the moment, please come back at a later, fixed appointment,” that is not a lack of willingness to help — which in everyday language we tend to interpret pejoratively — but a sign of professional and human maturity.

Péter: Let's move on. So is this the inner self-reflection you mean?

Gábor: Whether that was clear? Of course, of course, absolutely! Let me give you a completely clear, concrete example: if my father died last week, then this week I am not going to hold pastoral conversations with people who are grieving. Instead, I will need pastoral care myself.

Why? Because in that state I would be unable to keep from projecting my own pain, my own unresolved issues, onto the other person's story. And that would badly limit their freedom. This is a clean instance of personal involvement. We are fully entitled — indeed obligated — to clarify this in ourselves! We are allowed to say to the person who comes to us: “Madam, this week my head and my soul are so full of other things that it wouldn't do our work any good if we talked now. Please, let's wait another week.” That's something we're allowed to say, isn't it? What do you think?

Péter: Well, in principle yes, if we have that inner freedom. But that's exactly the big question here: do we actually have that freedom within us? Do we dare say it openly? After all, there's someone standing in front of us who is desperately asking for help. And if I sense it right, given her situation, this matters a great deal to her right now — it's even urgent. What's more, she's open to it right now; this is precisely the moment when she needs us.

By the way, how can we know for certain that, because of our current state or because of the topic, we're not suited for a conversation right now? Because it can happen that it's not just this week I'm not ready — I might not be fit to talk about a certain topic for an entire year, because, say, it's right in the middle of the process that I realize I myself have a serious, unresolved block in this area too.

Gábor: Thank you very much, Péter — with that, you've just set me up for a huge one!

Let's look at the concrete case: a woman arrives. A 38-year-old wife comes in, and now I — playing my role — put myself in the position of the male pastoral counselor. She comes to me, a man, with what is a fairly “female” problem, so to speak. After all, her main complaint is that her husband is this way, that way, the other way...

What will I, as a man, be able to do with this situation? Wouldn't it be much clearer and more advantageous if I said: “Dear madam, this is fundamentally a through-and-through female problem — go to Mónika instead, as a woman she will understand your experiences quite differently”?

Mónika: ...or come straight to both of us!

Because, since we're on the subject of the theological foundations, God created the human being as man and woman, and man and woman together mirror the fullness of humanity. That's precisely why it's no accident that we're in the habit of working together in practice, in co-leadership. It can enrich one and the same pastoral conversation astonishingly, when we can respond to the client simultaneously, from both the female and the male aspect at once. Of course, in everyday congregational practice this isn't always feasible, but when it's possible, it's a brilliant thing.

In any case, the point is that whether this wife in our example turns to a female or a male helper will fundamentally influence the dynamics of the conversation. But I think we should finally dive into the case itself!

Gábor: Just one more remark for Péter, because I can see in your eyes that your mind is churning on this: “Fine, but then what does Gábor do if he's all alone at the parsonage and this woman just shows up?”

Yes, that's an absolutely real situation. One of the most important foundational pillars of the whole pastoral process and of conducting the conversation is naturalness and transparency.

Naturalness here means that, even as the sole male helper, I can say completely openly: “Madam, I will listen to you with the fullest attention, but you need to understand that I will only be able to respond to this situation as a man, because I am a man.” And you see, Péter, this side of things can also be incredibly useful for the wife! Because through the male pastoral counselor, she might understand her own husband's or her twenty-something son's inner, closed-off workings all the better. And the other half of the story — the deep female experiences — she can then discuss with Mónika, if needed.

Péter: Hm. Let's take a closer look at this systemic approach, then. In reality, right now we're only meeting one point, one person — the wife — in the conversation, but in previous episodes you've already talked a lot about the importance of the systemic approach. What do we see in this family if you look at this situation strictly from a systemic point of view?

Mónika: Well, for now we don't see too much yet, since we don't know every small detail of the story. That's exactly why, as we start talking with the wife, there's one thing we definitely won't do: we won't ask her “why”-type questions that point to linear, cause-and-effect connections. Not because searching for causes is in itself evil or wrong — that has its own place too.

Systemic questioning, however, focuses on how the given topic — what the client is now bringing in as a difficulty or a problem — functions within the system...

Gábor: ...that is, within the current family system.

Mónika: Exactly. The family is a complex system — although that too is a broad concept, since there's both the narrower and the wider family network — and what interests us is what interaction this problem has with the rest of the system's members, or indeed with the system as a whole. Or, put another way: what hidden function does it fulfill in the family's life?

One of the biggest advantages of this approach is that we entirely avoid cause-and-effect scapegoat-hunting, which never ends anyway, since one could always point back to the past or to earlier generations. The other enormous advantage is that if, as a pastoral counselor, I understand what function the given symptom — in this case the husband's “spiritlessness” — serves within this family matrix, then it can suddenly turn out that, at the level of the system, it has some strange “positive payoff” or stabilizing role. And from that point on, the situation becomes far more effectively and deeply treatable.

Gábor: That's right. We try to see the whole thing as one, while all along remaining aware that we can never see through the complete picture anyway. It's an impossible task: the human being and the community surrounding them are such a multilayered, complicated, complex phenomenon that we will always perceive only certain slices, certain partial aspects of it. We must never lie to ourselves that we know everything.

But there's one thing we absolutely examine at the systemic level in every single case: if the husband weren't “spiritless” right now, what on earth would this couple have to be dealing with instead? What real problem would they have to face? In other words: based on their age, what developmental life stage are they in, and what pressing, existential questions should they actually be dealing with right now? Because if they don't do the “homework” of their current life stage now, it will hit them like a ton of bricks ten or twenty years down the line.

Péter: So can we say that when clients come in to you with a specific problem, what you're essentially accompanying is a very general life situation, a life stage that follows a predictable pattern? One they're actually completely naturally in the middle of — in fact, it would be strange if these tensions didn't show up?

Gábor: Thank you, Péter! That's exactly right. I would put it this way: together with the client, their current life stage also always walks into the room, with its own completely natural, unavoidable crises. Just as Mónika says: physically, only one woman shows up for the pastoral conversation, but in reality at least ten other people come in with her. Her whole family sits there invisibly — her parents, her father-in-law, her mother-in-law, her children — along with how all of them relate to this problem, or how they are affected by it.

Péter: I see, but in this specific case, it seems like a relatively clear-cut situation, doesn't it? After all, it's not only the wife complaining alone — according to the story, the children fully agree with the diagnosis too, the wider family — the parents, the younger brother — also see the problem, and even her circle of friends has confirmed the wife in this. From the outside, this looks to me like a fairly clean, unambiguous case. If I'm guessing right, from the pastoral counselor's side it's already absolutely proven what the problem is, and from here on they “just” need to treat this specific symptom. Am I reading the situation correctly?

Mónika: In other words, by your logic, it's the father, the husband, who urgently needs “treating” or fixing. And you see, Péter, this is exactly where the story becomes professionally suspicious!

If we narrow the system down a bit to just the immediate family, the question immediately arises: what else should this family system actually be dealing with, if they weren't preoccupied, day and night, with the husband's so-called spiritlessness?

What are we hinting at with this? An extremely common phenomenon in the systemic approach is unconscious problem-manufacturing — or, if you like, problem-creation. Of course, this is never a conscious process! We manufacture a spectacular problem because there's another, far more painful or frightening reality that we don't want to, or don't dare to, face.

Let's think of a classic, textbook example: there's a school-age child who still wets the bed at night. Linear thinking says: the child needs to be taken to a doctor, needs to be fixed, needs to be repaired. But if we look at the family at the systemic level, it often turns out that this symptom fulfills a very important role: the parents' marriage is in fact already in ruins, but they are unable to deal with that crisis. As long as the child is “sick,” the parents join forces to rescue them, and that way they don't have to face the reality of their own relationship drama as a couple.

Gábor: And through this, strangely enough, the couple stays together! Because they gain a moratorium, a little reprieve from life, hoping that they'll only have to face the problems they've swept under the rug at some later point.

Mónika: That's right. This spectacular symptom — in this case, the husband's passivity — relieves the couple of the burden of their real, deeper conflict. That's exactly the sense in which I hinted, at the start, that at the level of the system, the problem can also have a kind of hidden, seemingly “positive” stabilizing function.

Gábor: By the way, this is a deeply biblical approach! It's a Jesus-like example of what we call, in our field, reframing. This dynamic can be caught at work in a great many of Jesus's stories. When he says, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone,” or when he brings up the parable of the speck and the log, Jesus immediately shifts the focus away from the scapegoat, the individual, onto the community and the larger context. He does not allow for simplistic, finger-pointing linearity.

But let's get back to what you asked, Péter: what would our first question be, as pastoral counselors?

A systemically minded pastoral counselor's very first question in this situation is: Why now, of all times?

Why didn't she come a week earlier, or a week later? Why didn't she walk through this door a month earlier, or a month later? Why did it become unbearable precisely now, on October 15th?

Mónika: Exactly. Because from the description of the story, it doesn't look at all like this is a sudden, acute crisis from the woman's point of view.

Gábor: Absolutely not! This is a thoroughly chronic, long-drawn-out phenomenon — even the younger brother said the man's “always been like this.” That's exactly why the question “Why now?” is so crucial.

Mónika: And with this question, we avoid probing into “So what happened to the husband, why is he like this?” We don't narrow the focus down to the individual level; instead, by raising “Why now?” we immediately bring the wife into the equation as well.

We look at the wife's current life situation, her everyday life. Because it can easily turn out that it's actually the wife who now has serious problems at work or existential problems of her own, which have unconsciously conditioned her to suddenly see her husband's spiritlessness as unbearable.

It's almost as if the woman were projecting her own inner burnout, her own incapacity for enthusiasm, onto the man (projection). We're obviously not questioning the husband's symptoms — there's surely some basis for the complaint. But the big question is: why did I notice this precisely now, and why did it become my top priority precisely now?

Often, if I put myself in the woman's shoes, this is because I myself have actually become “spiritless,” worn down, in my own life. Only, facing my own inner emptiness is rock-hard, painful work. It's much easier — and here we're talking again about unconscious displacement — to deal with “you need to be fixed quickly, because you're the one with the problem,” than to put myself on the scales.

Péter: If I understand correctly, then during the conversation a shift is going to happen — or more precisely, a shift has to happen — where the focus moves away from this presenting symptom (the husband's state) onto something else entirely.

But how can we do that as pastoral counselors? Is it even our job to force this through? And if it is, how can we do it well? Because I can imagine that if I were in the wife's position, I would arrive at the parsonage with a very strong, rock-solid sense of what the problem is. I've been living with this for months, the people around me have confirmed it too, I've turned it over in my mind endlessly, and when I can finally pour my heart out, I feel enormous relief.

And then maybe, after the third sentence, it suddenly starts to dawn on me, from the pastoral counselor's responses, that there's something else entirely I should be dealing with here — something I really don't want to deal with, though. I'm sure I'd feel enormous inner resistance at that point. I might even feel offended, or angry at the pastoral counselor: “Why are you grilling me — why don't you go fix my husband?!” How can this shift be managed well, tactfully? What tools do you have for that?

Mónika: Well, there are many ways to approach this, but whether we actually do it “well” in practice is something I would never dare claim in advance.

In every single pastoral conversation — and for every responsible pastoral counselor — there's a basic proposition: we have to be able to let go of the belief in perfection. If I believed that every one of my conversations would be a flawless professional masterpiece, that would amount to a kind of delusion of omnipotence on my part. But I am a fragmentary, incomplete human being — professionally too, and in every other human respect.

This means that as a pastoral counselor, I can and want to take responsibility for my own intentions, my words, and my actions. But not for how my words land, how they arrive in the other person's inner world — not for that anymore. I obviously have control over what I say and how I say it, over how I treat the person, but there's a point beyond which I no longer have any influence over how things work on the receiving end.

But what can be done so that this shift in focus can still happen organically, without inflicting wounds?

One of the most beautiful paradoxes of pastoral accompaniment:

We do not help the wife by agreeing with her that her husband is the scapegoat; we help her by giving her back control over, and responsibility for, her own life.

In our methodology, we have a few very subtle and deliberate tools for not breaking through this resistance (because pastoral care is not force), but for gently working around it or dissolving it:

Validation (emotional affirmation): We never start by questioning the wife's version of the truth. If we say to her, “Madam, I can see that you are endlessly exhausted, and that you are carrying an incredible burden in this family,” then she experiences this as having found an ally. We are not validating the diagnosis she brought with her, but her suffering. Once she feels safe, the walls of resistance start to loosen on their own.

Using circular questions: Instead of confronting her head-on with herself, we widen the circle. We might ask, for example: “What do you think — if your daughter were sitting here, how would she describe what she sees in you when you argue with Dad?” Or: “If your husband could talk about his tears, what would he say he misses most in you?” These questions imperceptibly shift her out of her rigid, linear position.

Mirroring back the helplessness: The wife arrives with the narrative that she has “already tried everything.” As a pastoral counselor, one can marvel at this: “Yes, I can see that you've put enormous energy into trying to change your husband, and that this huge effort still hasn't brought results. What does it feel like to live with this helplessness?” With this, the focus has already shifted away from fixing the husband, onto the wife's own inner, lived experience of helplessness.

Through these steps, we achieve that the client does not feel attacked, but instead feels that we are no longer viewing her as a victim of some external, unchangeable circumstance independent of her (the spiritless husband), but that she is getting back her own agency — the chance to start dealing with her own fate.

Péter: What happens during the conversation — whether the wife becomes upset or not — obviously isn't my responsibility. At least, it's within the realm of possibility that some strong emotion will surface.

Gábor: This brings us to the point that attitude, one's inner stance, is what matters most. I start from the premise that pastoral care is the care of a person's dignity, and that a person's dignity comes from their being made in the image of God. So completely regardless of what the current topic is, my task is to attend to their human dignity, to their being made in God's image.

My goal isn't that if she's ill, she gets better, or that if there's a marriage crisis, we climb out of the crisis — all of that will just be a welcome side effect. But how can I do this? By constantly and deliberately strengthening the relationship.

The greatest need and the greatest question for people today — this is what sociologists of religion say too, and not only them — is no longer sin, but recognition. Luther's question was still how to find a gracious God, how to reach him. Today's person's question, on the other hand, is: how do I find a God who accepts me, who recognizes me? In conducting a conversation, this means that I seize every available opportunity to give the client recognition. How do you do this while she's telling her story?

This woman arrives and tells us what her husband is like. Let's assume that right now she's telling it quite painfully. How can you give her recognition at a moment like this?

Mónika: For example, by putting into words how brave and how strong she is to have come here at all. Because she senses that she needs help with this issue, and that's not at all self-evident or obvious.

Gábor: Or by noting how well and precisely she's able to describe the situation that has developed.

Mónika: Or how sensitive she is, to notice at all when someone isn't spirited. In today's world, it's not such a given that we're this attentive to another person.

Gábor: Or I can give recognition from the angle of how she talks about her husband — who, from what we can see, isn't exactly easy to put up with right now.

Mónika: Giving recognition can be this simple, this everyday. But it only works if it's completely honest — that is, if it doesn't reflect some rehearsed, artificial attitude. As a pastoral counselor, I really have to be able to stand behind the idea that I can find something to recognize in almost anyone, and that I can express it too.

Péter: And what happens if it's exactly that artificiality that we end up sensing? Or if, as pastoral counselors, we simply can't find, can't see, a single point at this stage of the conversation where we could give honest recognition? I'm not saying there's no such value in the wife — I mean that we ourselves can't find it.

Gábor: Then the problem is with me — that's my own personal block. It's my problem, because theologically, a person is always at once sinner and redeemed. Alongside the black there is always the white as well, and alongside suffering there is always a moment of salvation history hidden too.

If I find myself in a situation like this, I make it open within the conversation, and put it something like this: “I don't know, but something is still missing for me in this story. You describe this situation so well, but so far I can only get as far as how impossible and difficult your husband is. I keep wondering — when is there an exception to this? When are you able to accept him just a little, even so?” Yes, that's roughly it.

Mónika: Also, giving recognition and building a human connection isn't a rule carved in stone. It may be that it simply doesn't work the first time, and only starts working the second time — this unfolds exactly the way any of our other human relationships do.

But after the first or second session, our professional identity has to be able to firmly accommodate this: sensing and deciding whether we are even able to work with this person at all. Or whether there's such a strong aversion, dislike, or perhaps insensitivity toward their problem in us that we end up thinking, “This isn't even that big a deal — why is she bothering me and wasting my time here?”

If we notice this inner dialogue in ourselves — and as pastoral counselors, we absolutely need to be able to notice at least this much — then we obviously have to decide accordingly whether to continue, or whether to refer the person on to someone else.

Gábor: In this situation, I'm still one step further back, and that's what connects me to the woman regardless. If what you asked about happens — that is, that I can't find anything likeable in her as a person — our relational foundation still remains, and it is nothing other than our shared suffering.

Gábor: She is suffering, and — because of my own helplessness at this point in the conversation — I am suffering too. And then I can even say this to her out loud, to help me along a little more: “Madam, this situation sounds so unbearable, the way you describe it. Is there really not a single ray of sunshine in it, ever?”

To this, the woman will probably say: “Oh, of course there is — just imagine, the other day he actually made me coffee when I got home.”

You see, Péter, with this one question I've already started loosening that diabolical, devilish formation in her head, that there's nothing but bad, bad, bad in this marriage. Yes, I acknowledge the difficulty, but with this method you can always bring a little positive to the surface too. And with that, we arrive at the next crucial step: the contract.

Péter: Contract! On the wife's side, the desire for a contract — or at least her expectation — might sound something like: “Help make my husband enthusiastic again!” How can we respond to this request? Can we, as pastoral counselors, enter into a contract like that?

Mónika: We don't contract on a symptom! So if the symptom here is that the husband is spiritless, then we don't enter into a contract with the wife that we're now going to “cure” her husband of his symptom.

Besides, it isn't even the husband sitting in the pastoral conversation — the person the case is about isn't the one who comes to us. But even if we project this onto the wife herself — for instance, in the form of how she can bear it, or what she can do for her husband so that he becomes less spiritless — I would still classify even that wish as part of the symptomatic functioning itself. We don't contract on that.

Gábor: We're looking for the problem that is really in the background. If I treat the presenting complaint merely as a symptom — a signal that something is wrong, but still only the tip of the iceberg — then I keep asking, keep being curious (very compassionately and tactfully curious), until it becomes clear what the real background here might be. Against what backdrop does this weariness appear?

And in this specific case, for example, that family matrix you read out at the beginning would come nicely into view: that the older boy doesn't know what career path to choose, the daughter is utterly devastated because she's just broken up with someone, and there's also something going on with the wife herself. Something has changed; there is some serious difficulty in her own life too.

Péter: So this isn't a localized drama where the man is to blame for everything.

Gábor: No, indeed! And the man's passivity, his paralysis, comes in extremely handy for the system right now. It's so convenient to point and say, “Dad's the impossible one” — heaven forbid it should turn out that actually it's the rest of us, the rest of the family, who need to change something very difficult about ourselves!

Mónika: Well, that's exactly what we were just talking about: that it's closer to home where something finally needs to be done. But the wife probably senses that looking at reality within herself is far harder than letting someone else's spiritlessness — in this case, the father's — come to the fore. So he becomes the declared source of the problem, his case becomes the great family drama.

Gábor: Let's take a fictional, but very lifelike example: what if the woman's mother recently became gravely, perhaps terminally, ill? The wife is standing under enormous pressure, and deep down, unconsciously, she is furious at her mother, because this illness comes at the worst possible time — the last thing she needed right now was to have to nurse her mother. Since she cannot express this anger toward her mother because of guilt, she pushes her husband's impossibility and weariness into the foreground instead. With this mechanism, she brilliantly protects her mother from her own anger.

But with this kind of compassionate, deep conduct of the conversation, we can get to the point where the wife herself finally says: “Actually, this illness is my real, terrible burden.” And from that point on, in the pastoral care we're no longer talking about the spiritless husband, but about how she herself can be relieved of the burden and carried through this crisis.

Mónika: And from here on, one can try to steer the direction of our joint work toward how other family members might be brought into the process, whether virtually or in actual fact.

Gábor: For example, so that they help and support her in caring for the grandmother, now that the real burden has come to light.

Mónika: That's right. How can we broaden and shift the perspective of this woman, who is, after all, sitting in the room with me alone, as a single person?

The shift of perspective is one of the fundamental, key factors of the systemic approach. We start from the premise that reality in itself is not necessarily what we see at first glance. We always perceive only a single slice of reality, and even of that we form a strongly subjective picture. It is an extremely important part of pastoral help if I can assist the client in finding as many viewpoints as possible, or in seeing her situation from as many sides as possible. That way, a completely different picture will come together for her.

In this specific case, the shift of perspective consists in the wife starting to see, from her initial starting point — that a single individual, the “spiritless husband,” has a problem — that in reality they are all caught up together in an entire family system.

Gábor: And I can take this systemic approach even further! For instance, I can ask her, as a closing question: “Madam, what do you think — what wedding gift should God have given the two of you at your wedding, so that you could solve this problem better now?”

This technique is the externalization of the problem — that is, placing it outside, embedding it in a completely different framework of meaning. This kind of questioning generally mobilizes the client very strongly, sets their inner creativity in motion, and helps them get closer to a solution.

Mónika: Let's sum up what we've covered so far, then!

We do not contract on a symptom.

Building connection comes first: In the first conversations, we place the emphasis mainly on building connection. We achieve this through what we call positive connotation, giving recognition. I simply try to connect with her humanly.

Short-term goal: We try to bring in the other family members even as early as the very first conversation. Although I'm physically talking with one person, at the systemic level several people still appear in the room.

The next step is the shift of perspective: through the various types of systemic questions, we then set the mobilization of resources in motion.

Gábor: And bringing the family members into the conversation doesn't mean at all that they would have to physically come to the parsonage too!

I can bring in the husband, for instance, by saying to the woman at the end of the conversation: “When you go home now, what will you tell your husband about having been here, and about what we talked about? Let's plan this out together a little!”

With this one question, I've already drawn the husband into the process. Because the wife starts thinking it through: “Well, I'd probably say this and that to him...” And then I can keep asking: “And what do you think your husband will say to that? How will he react? Is that what you want? Are you sure that's how you want to tell him?” And the reflection has already begun.

Mónika: This technique, on its own, already helps bring about a serious shift of perspective, since in answering, the wife inevitably has to put herself into her husband's role. But this kind of exercise can also be done in a much more complex way than this.

Péter: I'm thinking about how, without this shift of perspective, the situation isn't just hard or downright impossible to resolve — beyond a certain point, we ourselves actually become invested against resolving it. Because if this presenting symptom is solving another problem for me at the systemic level, why would I want to get rid of it? If I heal the symptom, I bring a far deeper, more painful problem to the surface.

Gábor: Exactly! And pastoral care helps with precisely this: to become aware of this hidden functioning and to accept it. So that I can say out loud: “Right now, this is how we're able to function, this is what we can do — and thank God we're doing it, because at least this way we're not falling apart!”

Of course I'm deliberately exaggerating and sharpening this now, but this can very much be the goal in the process: for the client to become aware that her current state isn't some inexplicable madness, but has a very logical reason behind it — a kind of hidden systemic payoff, if you like.

Péter: What can we realistically expect by the end of the first session? What goal can we, as pastoral counselors, set for ourselves — how far can we get, starting from such a difficult topic, within the first 50 minutes? You mentioned, Mónika, that connection is the most important thing.

Mónika: Yes, I do think that in the first 50 minutes, building the connection really is the most important thing. For me, the main goal is to express my recognition of the wife, my conversation partner, in a way that is credible, authentic, and congruent.

Because if I somehow manage to help her feel that she is completely accepted here — without any labeling or judgment, since pastoral care is neither catechesis nor moralizing — then the soul will truly begin to open for a deeper unfolding. And, quite pragmatically, for actually coming back to us for the next session at all. If we look strictly, narrowly, at just that very first fifty-minute conversation, that is my main goal.

Gábor: There's another very important factor contained within this goal, and I can only reinforce it: that I, as a pastoral counselor, take on hope in her place.

In other words, I close the conversation something like this: “Madam, I can see that this situation is extremely difficult right now, and terribly draining for you — you don't feel good in it at all. But I have a very strong impression that God's blessing will rest on the way you're handling this, and the way you're fighting for it. I'm certain you will find a way out — the two of you will find a way out together, as a couple.”

Mónika: This substitutionary faith and hope is an extremely important expression in our field. Sometimes I'm not even sure we usually give it the weight it deserves, even though it has enormous power.

It means that, as a pastoral counselor, I express to the other person: “I know and I see that right now, because of your pain, you can't believe, you're unable to trust in change” — and here it doesn't matter whether the object is the situation resolving, improving, or anything else — “so for now, I will believe in your place, I will trust in your place.”

This is a very special, deep form of the New Testament command known from “bear one another's burdens.” This attitude can hold a person in crisis together in an incredible way — but again, of course, only if, as a helper, I truly feel this honestly deep down, and am able to communicate it, to express it to them, in that spirit.

Gábor: I do this substitutionary hope in order to relieve her of that burden too. Because when someone is in a deep crisis, on top of their existing troubles a further bad conscience very often arrives as well, because “now I can't even manage to believe.”

When the client is in this much trouble, I take on this faith and hope — if you like — temporarily myself, lifting this pressure off her shoulders. Then I gently hand it back to her later, once she has grown a little stronger.

Mónika: Because if we don't do this, then as pastoral counselors we just load an even bigger burden onto her. For example, if we start moralizing and say to her: “Well, my dear, this crisis is happening because you haven't prayed enough, or because your relationship with the Lord isn't right.” At the end of conversations like that, it's unfortunately not a rare thing for the client to have arrived with one problem, and leave with two.

Péter: Hm. And how do we close this process off within ourselves? Let's say the first 50 minutes have run their course, the client has stepped out of the room. As pastoral counselors, what's the question or thought worth asking ourselves after the session, or bringing into our own inner reflection?

Mónika: Well, there's a lot we can weigh at a moment like this, but one of the most important things — to use a rather profane comparison — is that I examine within myself: how does this case taste to me? Exactly like with a dish of food.

Because beforehand, we always have some idea: there was a phone call, or a brief, informative exchange about why she wants to come to us. But that's one thing. It's an entirely different thing once we've spent an hour together, and she's unfolded more and more of her story. Whether, for the reasons already mentioned — say, dislike or an inner closing-off — I'm able to work with her at all, is something that becomes visible mostly right after this first 50 minutes. I might not see it perfectly right away, but this is one of the main points.

The question is whether I have the professional humility to say so, if something isn't working. We helpers tend to think about this exactly backwards: we believe that we have to be able to solve everything, because “we're in ministry.” For me, though, this kind of false omniscience isn't the sign of humility.

Gábor: This is an extremely important point, and I'd narrow the reflection down even further. At the end of the conversation, it's worth precisely picking out and putting into words for ourselves: what were we able to do in this situation, and what were we not?

For example: the wife was able to outline very well what the family situation is, and two very important, forward-looking ideas emerged about how things might move forward. At the same time, what will happen with her son and daughter, and how their problem will get resolved, is something we weren't able to address right now.

In other words, as a pastoral counselor I highlight what carries a blessing, what's already working right now — instead of staring at the holes in the Swiss cheese, at what's missing or not working.

And one last thing for the closing — although this was practically already contained in what we've said so far — at the end of the conversation, as a pastoral counselor I always give the client a short, differentiated summary of where we started from and where we got to in these 50 minutes.

Mónika: But this summary is still addressed to the person being cared for, right at the very end of the conversation. So you're not processing this afterward, on your own.

Gábor: Yes, exactly.

Mónika: You close this out together with her, still.

Gábor: By the way, there's also a quite special form of closing — we'll certainly talk about this in detail, separately, at some point in the future — which is deeply present in the classical pastoral tradition, in the path of Bible-based accompaniment: and that is the letter.

We already encounter the genre of the pastoral letter at every turn in the New Testament. This method is still fully available to us today, and it can be an excellent tool for the pastoral counselor to reaffirm the client afterward, once the conversation is over.

Hypotheses Provisional interpretations to be tested — not established facts

2 Systemic Hypotheses

A systemic hypothesis does not explain the state of a single family member. It describes the relational web that has formed around the symptom, and within which the symptom — however painful — has, up to now, also performed some function. That is why a hypothesis has to hold for the family as a whole. [1]

In this case, the family calls the symptom “spiritlessness”; the symptom-bearer is the husband, the client is the wife. Accordingly, the hypotheses do not explain the husband's state of mind, nor do they unmask the wife's “real problem” — instead, they describe the relational system within which the “spiritless husband” has become the family's shared topic.

2.1 Content Hypotheses

A Problem-Determined Communication System

A problem takes shape in a family in this way: someone discovers that “something isn't right here”; the discovery spreads through communication, explanations are born, the problem becomes fixed, and other problems are pushed into the background. [2] Every one of these steps can be recognized in this case. The wife discovered her husband's “spiritlessness”; the topic became a shared subject with the daughter, the son, her friends, and both families of origin; ready-made explanations were produced (“he's always been like this,” “we said so all along”); and the wife has “already tried everything” — that is, in the family's eyes, the problem has become fixed as unsolvable.

Hypothesis: the “spiritless husband” has become the family's organizing topic. Everyone talks about the husband, and, going by the account, no one talks with the husband. The more his condition gets analyzed, the more he slips into the role of a person being observed, “in need of treatment”; the more he withdraws from that role, the more analysis is produced about him. The circle sustains itself: the family's well-meaning concern is itself part of the very pattern it wants to end.

Life-Cycle Transition: The Children Leaving the Nest

The family is entering the stage of the children “leaving the nest”: the son is twenty, the daughter eighteen. [3] This transition calls for new rules: the parents need to rediscover one another as a couple, and the children need to be able to set out on their own. A block arises when the family tries to live by the old rules even in the new stage.

Hypothesis: the shared worry surrounding the husband “keeps everyone home.” Instead of choosing his own career path, the son is preoccupied with his father's paralysis — meaning he doesn't have to set out yet. The daughter processes her post-breakup pain together with her mother, in conversations about her father, and so stays close to her mother. And the couple doesn't have to face the question of who the two of them will be once the children have left. Read this way, the symptom grants the whole family a moratorium, a reprieve, before a frightening transition: if the husband weren't “spiritless” right now, the couple would have to deal with the “homework” of their own life stage.

The Symptom as the Family's Cohesive Force

Every pattern of behavior can gain meaning once we recognize its real context; the meaning of a behavior is to be sought from the standpoint of maintaining and preserving the system. [4]

Hypothesis: concern for “Dad” is currently the topic that holds the family together. They have a shared worry, and this creates closeness — between mother and daughter, father and son, and even between the two families of origin. If the husband became “spirited” again starting tomorrow, the family would also have to lose this connecting topic, and other, harder-to-voice questions would move to the forefront: the couple's relationship, the children's separation, the wife's own life. So the symptom does not only burden — it also protects.

Triangles: Mother–Daughter–Father and Father–Son

In triangles, Satir observed that the third person can alternately be an outside observer, a participant, or excluded; difficulty begins when someone becomes stuck for a long time in the same position. [5]

Hypothesis: the alliance between mother and daughter (“constantly analyzing with her mother what's going on with Dad”) routes marital communication through the daughter. The daughter takes care of her mother, the mother takes care of her daughter, and the husband is left outside the conversation that is about him. The daughter can thus become the confidante of her parents' marriage, a partly parentified child. [6] The son stands in a different triangle: he is loyal to his father, and cannot step out onto his own path as long as his father is “stuck.” Both triangles also mean mutual relief from burden: whoever is preoccupied with Dad doesn't have to deal with their own pain, their own decisions, or their own marriage.

“Why Now, of All Times?” — The Context Hypothesis

According to the account, the phenomenon is chronic: the younger brother says the man has “always been like this.” The systemically minded pastoral counselor's first question is therefore why it became unbearable precisely now.

Hypothesis: something has changed in the wife's own life situation. This could be the children's imminent departure, her own exhaustion, strain at work or in the wider family, or an accumulation of crises hitting all at once. [7] The husband's condition is the point at which this change has become speakable within the family. The sentence “my husband is spiritless” can thus also be the carrier of the wife's own need: what is hard to talk about in one's own name can be talked about in her husband's name. The pastoral counselor does not unmask this as “projection,” but asks about it in such a way that the wife's own life is also given a place in the conversation.

The Wider Family as an Audience

The husband's parents scolded him, his younger brother says he's always been like this, and the wife's parents “said so all along.”

Hypothesis: the couple's difficulty has also become a stage for the old loyalties of two families of origin. The husband's family partly blames him, partly excuses him (“that's just his nature”); the wife's family sees in it a confirmation of their own earlier reservations. The wife's complaint may thus unwittingly also express loyalty to her own parents, and the husband's silence may also be a response to the judgments coming from his own family. All these opinions bring not more orientation, but more judgment, between the couple.

“Spiritlessness” as the Family's Shared Spiritual Question

Behind every question of life lies a question of faith, and behind every question of faith lies a question of life. [8] In Hungarian, the words for “spirited” (lelkes) and “spiritless” (lelketlen) point back to lélek, “soul” or “spirit,” and to the animating force that comes from it; the working title of this case is thus at once psychological and spiritual.

Hypothesis: it is not only the husband who has “run out of spirit” — the family's communication has too. The family's conversations are about the husband, but not with him; “spiritlessness” also describes the state of the family's relationships. When a life stage draws to a close, the family has to newly articulate what gives meaning, joy, and hope to their shared life. As long as the question appears as the husband's “fault,” the family's shared ultimate question — what are we together for, once the children have gone? — remains unspoken.

A Hypothesis Put in a Metaphor

A hypothesis put into a metaphor often has the effect of an aha moment for the family. [9] In this case, for example, it might sound like this: “It's as if the whole family were sitting in a waiting room, and everyone were waiting for Dad to wake up. Everyone is watching, everyone would help — and as long as they're waiting, no one has to board their own train.”

2.2 Working-Method Hypotheses

Working-method hypotheses formulate what is worth trying so that the situation moves in a good direction. [10]

Putting things in (systemic) order. As a first step, it's worth reviewing together with the wife everything that is present around the “spiritlessness”: the children's transition, the couple's relationship, the relatives' opinions, the wife's own burden. Having an overview can give back the feeling of control over the crisis.

Family pastoral care without the family. The pastoral counselor talks with a single client, but “brings” the others into the room too, through circular questions. This way, the wife can also look at the situation through her husband's, her daughter's, and her son's eyes.

Working on the pattern of attention, not on the husband. The joint work is not aimed at “curing” the husband of his symptom, but at what the wife can do differently in organizing the family's attention.

Recognition and substitutionary hope. The exhausted woman who has “tried everything” first needs connection, recognition, and a presence that carries hope in her place for a while.

Alongside the story of suffering, a story of salvation. Next to the “with us there's only bad” story, searching for exceptions, sustaining experiences, and the sources of faith can open up a new thread: what has held this family together so far?

Farewell and blessing. Farewell is a central element of every transition between life stages. The children's setting out, and the couple's new stage, can also be given a ritual, blessing form.

Small, reversible steps. Even a single small change in behavior can dislodge the fixed circle. The wife chooses the step herself, and can withdraw it at any time.

Becoming aware of the ambivalence. It's worth examining what the payoff of the current balance is, and what would become harder for whom if the husband became “spirited” again starting tomorrow. The pastoral counselor can carefully dislodge the accustomed balance, so that a new, more viable order can find its place. [11]

The possibility of inviting the husband. If the wife wishes it, and the husband freely says yes, a later joint conversation is also possible. This, however, is not a precondition for the work.

Connecting Joining, compliment, and positive connotation

3 Connecting: Joining, Compliment, and Positive Connotation

Relationship is the foundation of helping. Attunement (joining) means that the pastoral counselor tunes in to how the other person sees the world, other people, and God; this only creates connection if it springs from inner conviction, not from a rehearsed technique. Recognition always targets something concrete, experienced there and then. Positive connotation, in turn, shows that within what the client experiences as weakness or shame, strength and value are also hidden. [12] One of the deepest questions for people today is how to find a God who accepts and recognizes them; the pastoral counselor therefore seizes every opportunity to give recognition.

3.1 Joining — Attunement

Client: I don't know if I'm in the right place. It's not even me who has the problem — it's my husband.

Pastoral counselor: I'm glad you came. What I hear is that you're carrying a burden you've been bearing for a very long time already. We don't have to decide right now who the problem is with. Would you tell me what's happening at home?

Client: It's as if nothing makes him happy anymore. And I'm the one trying to keep everyone's spirits up.

Pastoral counselor: “Keeping everyone's spirits up” — that's very telling. Am I right in sensing that it matters a great deal to you that there be life in your family?

Client: Yes. I've even prayed about it, that God would change him. But nothing happened.

Pastoral counselor: Then you've brought this here too: not only your husband's silence, but the silence of your prayer as well. You're welcome to bring here whatever hasn't worked out in prayer too.

3.2 Compliment — Concrete Recognition

Client: I've already tried everything. My friends say so too — that there's nothing more I can do.

Pastoral counselor: You've described very precisely everything you've tried, and also how each person responded to it. From this I can also see how attentively you follow what's happening in your family — with your husband, your son, your daughter. It's not self-evident today for someone to notice this closely when another person isn't spirited.

Client: Only, none of it helped.

Pastoral counselor: Yes, that hurts. And yet, in spite of it, you came here so as not to carry this alone any further. That takes courage. The fact that you haven't set down your hope shows me a woman of strong faith.

3.3 Positive Connotation

Client: I'm ashamed of it, but sometimes I get so angry at him that I'd just like to leave him.

Pastoral counselor: Your anger also expresses how much this man and this relationship matter to you. An indifferent person doesn't get angry. Right now, this is the form your love is taking — a very tired form of it. And you dare to face this openly; you don't forbid yourself from feeling it. That is the admirable honesty of an adult, strong person.

Client: It also wears me out that my daughter is constantly analyzing her father with me.

Pastoral counselor: What I hear is that your daughter is standing by you right now, even in the middle of her own pain. That shows how close the two of you are, and maybe also how much she too fears for the family.

Client: I can't even pray the way I used to anymore. I just complain to God.

Pastoral counselor: Someone who complains to God is still talking to him. You haven't stopped. Perhaps your complaint is your most honest prayer right now — and that is no small thing.

Goals and Contract Short-term goals, contract, and agreements

4 Short-Term Goals, Contract, and Agreements

4.1 Short-Term Goals

Taking up help is the free decision of the person in need. Jesus, too, asks the sufferer, “Do you want to be healed?” (John 5:6) — he asks for a mandate to help. [13] Short-term goals therefore start from the client's own request; they are simple, understandable, and realistic.

At the first meeting, the wife arrives more as someone complaining: she describes her difficulties at length, and expects the solution to come from her husband changing. [14] The pastoral counselor doesn't need to rush her; connection and recognition create the possibility that, by the next session, she will already be arriving as someone seeking help, with a request of her own. Differentiating expectations is a tool for this. [15]

Pastoral counselor: What would need to happen here today for you to be able to say this was a good conversation?

Client: That you tell me what to do about my husband.

Pastoral counselor: I understand. And what's the smallest thing that would need to happen here today for you not to feel this hour was wasted — even if your husband is exactly the same tonight?

Client: That I don't feel like I'm alone with this. Not before other people, and not before God either.

Pastoral counselor: And how would you notice that this has already happened, even a little?

The short-term goals of accompaniment in this case:

Connection and acceptance. The wife experiences a judgment-free space, and leaves with an experience that makes her feel ready to come back.

Sorting out the problem. The threads around the “spiritlessness” are separated out and put into order.

Finding her own request. Alongside the wish for her husband to change, the wife's own request — one achievable today — takes its place.

Observing the pattern of attention. The wife notices who talks about “Dad,” when, and with whom — and what goes unspoken in the meantime.

An exception and a small step. Recalling at least one moment that worked, and one small, triable change chosen by the wife.

Carrying hope and faith. Alongside the pastoral counselor's hope-carrying presence, the wife's hopelessness, complaint, and dryness in prayer can also be voiced.

4.2 Contract

We do not contract on a symptom: the goal of the joint work is not to eliminate the husband's “spiritlessness.” [16] The husband is not present, and it was not he who asked for help. Even the goal of “what the wife should do for her husband so he becomes less spiritless” would still belong to the symptomatic functioning. The contract concerns what sustains the symptom within the system, and where the client who is present can take action herself.

Pastoral counselor: I can see that a lot of things are intertwined here: your husband's condition, the changes ahead for the children, the relatives' opinions, and your own exhaustion. I suggest we first put these in order, and start where something can move most easily — and where you yourself can take action. I can't change your husband, and that isn't my task either. What I can help with is for you to be able to be present in this situation differently. Does that work for you?

Client: I was hoping we'd be talking about my husband.

Pastoral counselor: We will, about him too. Just not as a problem to be solved, but as someone who is part of your life. What would you like the next four or five sessions to be good for, for you?

Client: To have my strength back. And for it not to be all about Dad at home, all the time.

Pastoral counselor: Then let's agree on this: we'll talk about your strength, and about where your family's attention goes.

4.3 Agreements

Agreements give the client and the pastoral counselor a secure framework, and in chaotic situations they can already have a beneficial effect on their own. [17] In this case, they concern the following:

Framework. Four to five sessions, fifty minutes each, with a joint review at the end of the process; what to do if an appointment has to be missed.

Confidentiality and the congregational role. What is said in the conversation does not go before the congregation or the relatives, and the pastoral counselor does not bring it up in other community settings. What the pastor learns as a pastoral counselor, he does not use in his role as a leader. [18]

Scripture, prayer, blessing. They discuss whether the wife wants a biblical text, shared prayer, or a blessing to have a place in the conversations, and in what form. Offering these always rests on the client's consent and form of devotion. [19]

Keeping each other informed. What the wife tells others at home about the conversation, and to whom. The pastoral counselor can help with this too (“What will you tell your husband about having been here?”).

The possible invitation of the husband. Only at the wife's request, and only if the husband freely says yes.

Homework. Taken on voluntarily, and discussed at the next session even if it wasn't possible to carry out.

Pastoral counselor: Would you like us to close our conversations with prayer?

Client: I don't know. I couldn't do it out loud right now.

Pastoral counselor: You don't have to. If you'd like, I can say a short blessing, and you can just listen. And if not, that's fine too.

School-Based Analysis Two family therapy perspectives

5 The Case from the Perspective of Two Family Therapy Schools

5.1 Strategic Therapy (Haley)

Jay Haley starts from the premise that the persistence of problems is often caused by the very attempts at a solution that were poorly chosen. The symptom can signal that the family is trying to preserve its balance in an unfavorable way, or has become stuck in a life-cycle transition. The strategic helper precisely observes “who does what, when,” sets a clear goal, draws up a plan, and always keeps another route in reserve. He attends to the present; he does not interpret symptoms, but reframes the meaning of behaviors, encourages, and tries to reduce guilt. [20] In a pastoral setting, tasks are offered as suggestions that the client may decline.

Applying Life-Cycle Theory

The family is entering the “leaving the nest” stage, but is still functioning by the rules of the previous stage: the parents' attention is directed at keeping the family together, and the children's attention at the troubles at home.

Pastoral counselor: If I'm counting right, your son is twenty and your daughter eighteen. Both of them could soon be setting out on their own. What will happen then, with just the two of you at home?

Client: I haven't even thought about that yet. Right now everything revolves around my husband.

Pastoral counselor: Maybe that's exactly why you don't need to think about it yet, right now. If you brought this new period before God, what would you ask for in it — for yourself, and for the two of you?

Client: That we don't become strangers to each other once the children are gone.

Pastoral counselor: That's a very precise request. What would be the one topic you'd like to start talking with him about, just the two of you, even now?

Observing “Who Does What, When?”

The strategic helper does not ask why the husband is the way he is, but how the problem actually unfolds in practice.

Pastoral counselor: Let's recall an evening from yesterday. What happened when he got home?

Client: He sat down in front of the TV, didn't say anything.

Pastoral counselor: And what did you do?

Client: I asked him what was wrong. He said nothing. So I went to my daughter and told her.

Pastoral counselor: And what did your daughter do?

Client: She said, there Dad goes again. Then we talked about him for an hour.

Pastoral counselor: And what did your husband see of this?

Client: I suppose he heard that we were talking about us... I mean, about him.

The “Bad Strategy”: Solution Attempts So Far

The well-meaning attempts at a solution made so far also play a part in a problem's persistence. The wife's attempts to encourage him, to question him, to bring in the relatives, at the same time also reinforce the “spiritless husband” role.

Pastoral counselor: If we counted up how many different ways you've already tried to cheer him up, how many would we get to?

Client: Loads. Activities, conversations, prayer, and of course his parents scolded him too.

Pastoral counselor: What do you think your husband experiences from all this?

Client: That everyone's preoccupied with him... and that everyone's dissatisfied with him.

Pastoral counselor: It may be that the more people try to shake him up, and the more enthusiastically they do it, the more he feels that he is the problem. What would happen if, for one week, no one tried to encourage him — and in your prayer, too, instead of asking for him to change, you simply placed him into God's hands?

A Concrete, Observable Goal

Strategic goal-setting is concrete and observable, and concerns the behavior of the client who is present, not the inner state of the absent husband.

Pastoral counselor: If, instead of “my husband should be spirited again,” we looked for a goal that you yourself could achieve in the next two weeks, what would it be?

Client: To not talk with my daughter about Dad every single evening.

Pastoral counselor: How would you notice that this has worked?

Client: If my daughter talked about her own things. About the breakup, about what's hurting her.

Directive Suggestion and an Alternative Plan

The strategic helper is active, gives tasks, but always prepares an alternative plan too. Directive work can also be non-shaming and express respect for the client.

Pastoral counselor: I have a suggestion, which you're free to turn down. Next week, each evening, talk with your daughter about Dad for at most ten minutes, in the kitchen, and then about something else. If that's too much, or it doesn't work, we'll choose a different route: for instance, you could simply observe who starts the conversations about Dad.

Client: Ten minutes? That won't be enough.

Pastoral counselor: Maybe. Let's observe what happens with the rest of the time. Perhaps there will be room in it for your daughter's own sadness too.

Highlighting the Symptom's Positive Side, and Restraint

The historical strategic school also worked with symptom prescription. In a pastoral setting, the husband is not present, so we do not prescribe his symptom. The paradoxical logic can be applied to the pattern of the client present and the family: to highlight the positive side of the symptom, and to restrain against change that is too fast. [21]

Pastoral counselor: As we've been talking, it also occurred to me that your husband's condition is doing the family a great service right now. It's holding you together. Everyone has one shared worry, and so no one has to deal with their own difficult questions — the choice of career, the breakup, what will become of the two of you alone. Thank God you're able to function this way right now, because at least you're not falling apart.

Client: I've never looked at it this way before.

Pastoral counselor: That's exactly why I wouldn't suggest you change anything quickly. Let's first look at what would become harder if your husband were spirited again starting tomorrow.

Dismantling Guilt, and Humor

The strategic helper encourages and eases guilt; humor helps with this too.

Client: Maybe I'm the bad wife, for us to have ended up here. Maybe this is what God is showing me too.

Pastoral counselor: A bad wife wouldn't spend months trying to please her husband. I see it more as you working overtime on family-mood duty — and even someone on duty is entitled to a day off. The day of rest wasn't my idea; it was the Creator's.

Pastoral-Psychological Implications

Open and closed systems. A family that closes in on itself finds renewal difficult. The same is true of the spiritual dimension: if a family cannot also look at itself from a higher vantage point, it misses out on the sustaining and renewing influences that can come from outside, from God. [22]

Directive: command or suggestion. Strategic task-giving also has a theological parallel: the tension between law and gospel, as Paul writes, “the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life” (2 Cor 3:6). A well-given directive does not take away the responsibility of the decision, but calls the person to a free and responsible choice. The Ten Commandments, too, can be read as signposts for a free life, as if every one of its sentences were preceded by the words: “if you want to be free...” [23]

Power as service. Haley wrote about turning powerlessness into power, and also analyzed Jesus's “power tactics.” Jesus gains authority precisely by renouncing his own power: “whoever wants to be first among you must be your servant” (Matt 20:26–27). In this light, the family's power balance (“who does everything revolve around?”) can be reordered: the power one is given is the responsible care of those entrusted to us. [24]

5.2 Satir's Experiential Approach

In Virginia Satir's humanistic view of the person, the human being is a creature capable of, and longing for, growth, and the symptom is the signal of a person who has been hurt. She places self-worth at the center of psychological and relational life, and sees it in interaction with the family's processes. In communication, she sees the expression of self-worth, and distinguishes first-order from second-order change, change from transformation. [25] Her theory is not denominational, but it is open toward the transcendent. [26]

View of the Person: The “Not-Just-Evil” Human Being

The label “spiritless” can easily turn into a judgment on the husband's character. In Satir's view of the person, the symptom is the way a hurt, wounded person expresses himself, and a human being is capable of growth.

Client: I don't think he'll ever change. That's just his nature.

Pastoral counselor: His brother says the same thing: that he's always been like this. And yet there was a time when you fell in love with this man, and said yes to him before God. What did you see in him then?

Client: That he was calm. That you could count on him.

Pastoral counselor: Maybe his silence now is a very tired form of that same calm man. What do you think could have worn him out this much?

Self-Worth — The “Pot” Metaphor

In Satir's pot metaphor, self-worth depends on how, and to what extent, we have influence over what can go into our “pot,” and what we keep in it. [27] Everyone's self-worth in this family is affected: the wife's, who has “failed” at encouraging him; the husband's, who is the object of everyone's dissatisfaction; the children's, who fear for their father.

Pastoral counselor: If we compared your self-worth to a pot, what has gone into it these past months?

Client: That I can't make him happy. That my parents said so. That surely I'm at fault too.

Pastoral counselor: And what's something that was already in there before, and is still there now, just pushed down to the bottom?

Client: That I'm a good mother. That a lot of people count on me.

Pastoral counselor: And what's at the very bottom of the pot, no one can put in and no one can take out: that you are God's beloved child. What would you like to take out of the pot that isn't really yours?

Communication Survival Stances

Satir describes four communication strategies under stress: placating, blaming, being super-reasonable, and distracting. These are not types of people, but stances taken up under stress; they become constricting only when one of them hardens into the sole pattern. [28] The pastoral counselor does not categorize the absent husband, but examines one concrete family conversation together with the wife.

Pastoral counselor: The last time you brought up your husband's low spirits, what tone did you say it in?

Client: Kindly, at first. Then, when he didn't answer, I ended up saying, “You're never happy about anything.”

Pastoral counselor: “Never” and “nothing” are words that can land as an accusation. And what did he do in response?

Client: He went quiet, and said I was exaggerating.

Pastoral counselor: It's as if you're asking more and more loudly, and he's defending himself more and more quietly. What was the request behind “you're never happy about anything”?

Client: That he'd notice me too.

Pastoral counselor: And if you told God the same thing, in what tone would you say it?

Client: Maybe the same way. “You never listen to me.”

The Five Freedoms

Satir's five inalienable freedoms: to see and hear what is here, instead of what should be, was, or will be; to say what one feels and thinks, instead of what one should; to feel what one feels, instead of what one ought; to ask for what one wants, instead of always waiting for permission; to take risks on one's own behalf, instead of choosing to be only “secure.” [29]

Pastoral counselor: According to Satir, everyone has the right to ask for what they need — you don't have to wait for permission. What's the one sentence you'd dare to say to your husband about what you need right now?

Client: That I'd like someone to ask me a question sometimes too. How I'm doing.

Pastoral counselor: When and how could you say this so that it lands as a request, not an accusation? And could you say the same thing to God, as a request too?

The Triangle: The Couple and the Third

If one position becomes permanent within a trio, a functional disturbance sets in.

Pastoral counselor: When you and your daughter are talking about Dad in the kitchen, where is your husband at that point?

Client: In the living room. Alone.

Pastoral counselor: And if I asked your daughter, what would she say — is this role good for her?

Client: Maybe she'd say it's exhausting, but that she can't leave me alone with this.

Pastoral counselor: What would you need to do so that your daughter could let go of this role for one evening — and deal with her own pain instead?

Change and Transformation: First- and Second-Order Change

The parents tried everything to get their adult son to move out; that was first-order change, and it remained unsuccessful. When they bought themselves an apartment and moved out instead, that was second-order change: instead of changing their son, they changed themselves. [30] In this case, the wife's attempts to encourage her husband are first-order changes. What leads toward second-order change is if, instead of “fixing” her husband, the wife begins to take care of her own life. In the language of religion, this kind of transformation is expressed by the images of conversion and rebirth: it is not a single trait that changes, but the whole of one's perspective and identity. [31]

Pastoral counselor: So far you've done everything to get your husband to change. What would happen if, for a while, you focused not on him, but on yourself? Say, took up again something you used to love?

Client: That would feel like giving up. Like being selfish.

Pastoral counselor: Or it would be like opening a different door for the family. The second half of the great commandment says: “love your neighbor as yourself.” What do you think your husband would notice first, if you started loving yourself too?

Spirituality in Satir

Satir understands spirituality as a deep dimension of being, which includes self-acceptance, finding one's self-worth, and knowing one's “inner resources.” [32]

Pastoral counselor: What has kept you alive these past months — inside? Something you drew strength from, when things were hard at home?

Client: My evening prayer. Although lately I just complain in it.

Pastoral counselor: The fact that you haven't stopped tells me that there's a source you still keep coming back to. A large share of the psalms are laments. Maybe you're exactly where you should be.

Pastoral-Psychological Implications

Self-worth and being made in the image of God. Satir's understanding of self-worth and of the human person fits well with pastoral care: a person's value comes from being a creature, and their dignity from being made in the image of God, and so it is not a function of achievement or success. [33]

“Spiritless” and “spirited” communication. Figuratively, we can speak of two kinds of communication: one is impoverished, unable to express the whole; the other is rich, “spirited.” The biblical image of perfectly successful understanding is Pentecost, when everyone hears the other in their own language. [34] The working title of this case can thus also be read as an image of the family's communication: it is not only the husband who has become “spiritless,” but also the family's conversations, which are about him, but not with him.

Communication stances in prayer. Stress stances can also function as “armor” in communication with God. In the prayer of a placating person who is always focused on others, there is little room even for themselves; of the command “love your neighbor as yourself,” they readily hear the “your neighbor” — but hardly the “as yourself” at all. [35]

Further Interventions Reframing, question types, and pastoral interventions

6 Further Systemic Interventions

6.1 Reframing

Reframing places the “other side” of a negative statement alongside the client's own view: it does not correct, but supplements. It rests on four premises: every behavior can gain meaning within its own context; every behavior has a positive function; the meaning of a behavior is to be sought from the standpoint of maintaining the system; and behind a behavior there can also be an ability, a developmental step, or a loyalty. [36] In a pastoral sense, reframing helps in recognizing a moment of salvation history within a story of suffering. It is a deeply biblical procedure: in the story of the woman caught in adultery (“let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone...,” John 8:7), or in the parable of the speck and the log (Matt 7:3–5), Jesus shifts the focus from the scapegoat onto the community and the larger context. Whoever reframes does so out of their own conviction: they offer a new perspective only if they themselves believe it is possible. Reframing is an offer that the client may decline; it does not excuse hurtful behavior. [37]

The “Spiritless” Husband — From the System's Side

Client: It's as if the spirit has drained out of him.

Pastoral counselor: Interesting: ever since this has been the case, almost every member of your family has been preoccupied with him — you, your daughter, your son, his parents, even his brother. It's as if your husband's condition has become the topic that connects everyone right now. I wonder what doesn't have to be talked about, as long as this remains the shared topic?

The Son Who Can't Decide — As Loyalty

Client: My son can't choose a career, his mind is constantly on his father.

Pastoral counselor: Maybe your son isn't leaving his father's side right now. He won't set out as long as he feels he's needed at home. This loyalty is a beautiful thing — only, it may be costing him too much. What do you think a good father would say to his son, if he knew his son wasn't setting out because of him?

“I've Already Tried Everything” — Trying as a Resource

Client: Nothing I do works.

Pastoral counselor: You've tried many different solutions, and that shows you don't give up easily. Maybe that's exactly why something quite unusual might help now: not starting one more thing, but stopping something. What do you think would be easiest for you to stop doing?

Irritability — As a Capacity

Client: He flies off the handle at everything.

Pastoral counselor: It seems there's still something that matters a great deal to him, something he can still protest about. Someone who has completely given up doesn't even get irritated anymore. I wonder what he might be protecting, when he reacts this way?

The Silent God and the Silent Husband

Client: Tell me, how can God let a marriage become this empty? I beg and beg, and it's no use. God just stays silent too. Just like my husband.

Pastoral counselor: That's a very hard experience: two silences at once. I'm curious what God would answer, if we started a conversation with him. Whom would we ask first: the Creator, who set your marriage in motion; the Redeemer, who knows what it is to be emptied out; or the Spirit, who intercedes for us even in our weakness?

Here, reframing changes the frame of reference: the silent God becomes a three-personed presence with whom a dialogue can begin. [38]

The Children Setting Out — Loss and Blessing

Client: I'm afraid that once the children leave, the house will be empty. Then there'll be nothing left connecting us.

Pastoral counselor: The children setting out really is a farewell. But it's also a sign that you've done your job well: you've raised children who are able to set out. So this farewell can also be a blessing at the same time — for them, and for the two of you.

“I'm Selfish If I Focus on Myself”

Client: If I paid attention to myself right now, that would be selfish. A Christian woman doesn't do that.

Pastoral counselor: The Bible says, “love your neighbor as yourself.” The “as yourself” isn't a loophole — it's a measure: someone who doesn't love themselves ends up loving others out of an exhausted well. Maybe it isn't selfishness, but obedience, if you pay attention to yourself now too.

6.2 Types of Systemic Questions

The types of questions (linear, strategic, reflexive, circular) can be chosen according to whether the pastoral counselor wants to gain orientation or encourage change, and whether they start from linear or circular premises. We name only one relation per question, the questions are adapted to the client's own language, and we leave enough time to process the answers. Questions build the relationship; they must not feel like an interrogation. [39]

Linear (Orienting) Question

It is useful when the pastoral counselor wants to find out how the client explains the problem. If it comes to dominate, it can create the impression of an interrogating judge.

Pastoral counselor: What do you think made your husband this way?

Client: I think his job drained the life out of him. Although his brother says he's always been like this.

Questions About the Definition of the Problem

Pastoral counselor: Who was it who first called this “spiritlessness”?

Pastoral counselor: What other title could you give to what's happening at home?

Pastoral counselor: If I could ask your husband, how would he name the problem?

Pastoral counselor: If you looked at this situation through God's eyes, what would you call it?

Strategic Question

It encourages trying out an alternative, indirectly or openly; it can create the impression of a teacher, so we use it carefully.

Pastoral counselor (indirect): What would happen if, tonight, you didn't ask him what's wrong, but just sat down beside him?

Pastoral counselor (direct): Would it help if, just once tonight, you weren't the one to start the conversation?

Pastoral counselor: I imagine you've already played out in your mind, many times, how you might talk to your husband about what's happening in your faith right now. Of the possibilities, which seems the most workable? And which do you consider hopeless from the start?

Reflexive Question

It mirrors back a resource that the pastoral counselor assumes is present in the client, and in this way “reminds” her of it.

Pastoral counselor: I'm certain that someone who follows her family's mood this precisely also has an idea of what would feel good to herself right now. What would that be?

Pastoral counselor: I'm certain that the way you argue with God is not only doubt, but also a passionate search for what God wants with your life. That points to a great deal of inner strength.

Circular Questions

They view the individual within the network of her family, and make relationships visible. This is the most important tool of “family pastoral care without the family.”

Pastoral counselor: What do you think your daughter sees in you, when the two of you talk about Dad?

Pastoral counselor: If your husband could talk about his silence, what would he say he misses most in you?

Pastoral counselor: What do you think — how does your son see how much you worry about his father?

Pastoral counselor: What would your daughter say to her father, if she knew her mother was also getting pastoral care?

Pastoral counselor: Who in the family would notice first, if you worried a little less?

Pastoral counselor: Who would it mean the most to, if your husband were spirited again — and for whom might it actually pose a problem?

Questions About the Circle of Those Affected, and the Effect on Relationships

Pastoral counselor: Besides you, who is affected the most by this situation? Who the least?

Pastoral counselor: Who in the family trusts the most that this will change? And who the least?

Pastoral counselor: How would your relationship with your daughter change, if Dad were no longer your shared topic?

A Question About Family Heritage

Client: Lately I keep reading this: “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.” I want to find comfort in it, but I can't.

Pastoral counselor: This seems to be a verse that's very dear to you. As if it were a valuable “family heirloom.” Who did you first hear it from?

Client: Now that you ask... from my mother. She had a hard time too, once.

Pastoral counselor: And if we asked your mother right now, what would she offer you from this verse?

Scaling Question

It makes a general statement concrete and measurable.

Pastoral counselor: On a scale of one to ten, where was your exhaustion when you walked in here, and where is it now?

Pastoral counselor: On a scale of one to ten, how satisfied are you with your marriage? And what do you think your husband would say?

Pastoral counselor: What would it take to move up even half a point?

Exception-Finding and Solution-Focused Questions

If there is an exception, then a piece of the solution already exists: there are moments when the trouble does not appear. The question is how these moments can be turned into habit. [40] In pastoral language: where, within the story of suffering, is there a moment of salvation history?

Pastoral counselor: Madam, this sounds so unbearable, the way you describe it. Is there really not a single ray of sunshine in it, ever?

Client: Oh, of course there is. The other day he made me coffee when I got home.

Pastoral counselor: What was different then? What did you do, before that happened?

Pastoral counselor: What would you like to preserve from your life right now, just as it is?

Miracle Question

Pastoral counselor: Suppose that tonight, while you sleep, a miracle happens, and the problem you came here with is gone by morning. What would be the first thing that would tell you the miracle had happened?

Pastoral counselor: Who in the family would notice first?

Pastoral counselor: What would you do first that morning? And after that?

Pastoral counselor: What would become easier because of this — and what might become harder — in your life?

Future-Oriented Question

Pastoral counselor: Suppose we're sitting here five years from now. The children have already moved out. What would you tell me about how the two of you got through this period? What would you say then — where was God in all of it?

6.3 Pastoral Interventions: Scripture, Prayer, Blessing

Scripture, prayer, and ritual in pastoral care are not decoration, but a relational form with power of its own, and so they call for careful judgment. Scripture is spoken when it connects to the client's own question, and does not close it off; prayer remains authentic only if it genuinely turns to God, rather than sounding like disguised advice aimed at the client; and a blessing expresses that the other person's acceptance rests not on their performance, but on God's goodness. [41]

Through God's Eyes

It can already change a great deal if the pastoral counselor helps the client imagine how God might look at her. [42]

Pastoral counselor: If God looked at you right now — not through your husband, not through your children, but straight at you — what do you think he would see?

Client: A tired woman. Who isn't good enough.

Pastoral counselor: And what if God weren't looking through the lens of “not good enough”? He, who knows how many evenings you've spent worrying about your family?

Client: Maybe that I'm trying very hard. And that I need him too.

The Pastoral Counselor's Prayer About the Client, in the Client's Presence

Pastoral counselor: If you allow me, I'll tell God what I've heard from you today, and you can just listen. If anything in it isn't right, you can correct me afterward.

Pastoral counselor (prayer): Lord, here before you sits a woman who has long kept spirits up in her family. She is tired, and worries for her husband, and for her children too. You know their silences. Give her strength to attend to herself as well, and give her family new words for one another. Amen.

Client: That felt good. I didn't think anyone would say it like that for me.

Substitutionary Faith and Hope at the Close of the Conversation

Pastoral counselor: Madam, I can see that this situation is extremely difficult and draining for you right now. But I have a very strong impression that God's blessing will rest on the way you're handling this, and on the way you're fighting for it. If you can't believe it right now, then for a while, I'll believe it in your place too.

Blessing

Pastoral counselor: If you'd like, I'll say a blessing as we part: The LORD bless you and keep you; the LORD make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you; the LORD lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace. (Num 6:24–26)

6.4 Transfer Question and Closing Intervention

The closing intervention is a concise, few-minute summary in the family's own language: it names what was discussed, highlights what was valuable and forward-looking, indicates what remains open, but does not open a new topic. The transfer question directs attention to what will happen after the conversation, so that the next step is a conscious one. [43] The pastoral counselor highlights what already carries a blessing, and does not stare at the holes in the Swiss cheese.

Pastoral counselor: Let me sum up what I think is most important from what we discussed today. You described very precisely how much you've done for your family. It became clear that the whole family is in motion around your husband's condition, and that you too need someone to ask how you're doing. An exception also came up: the coffee. And that a complaining prayer is still a prayer. What remains open is what will become of the two of you, once the children set out.

Pastoral counselor: What's waiting for you when you walk out of here? And what will you tell them at home about having been here? What do you think your husband will say to that?

Exercises The dialogues are edited learning examples, not new case data

7 Exercises with Dialogue Examples

Supervision Supervision considerations

8 Supervision Considerations

8.1 “How Does This Case Affect Me?” — Being Affected and Becoming Entangled

Every supervision session begins with: “how, in what way, does this case affect me?” [67] If the helper knows what is affecting them, and remains in charge of it, being affected is not an obstacle. We speak of entanglement when the helper is being steered by their own unprocessed experiences and prejudices without noticing it; at that point, the work has to be suspended. In this case, the helper might be touched by a “spiritless” period in their own marriage, by their own children setting out, by their own spiritual dryness, or by a vocational urge to “shake everyone up.” It is worth observing whether one's way of working changes because of this: whether one becomes more talkative, gives advice sooner, becomes excessively protective, or, conversely, distant. [68]

8.2 Scrubbing In

Even before the client arrives, the pastoral counselor asks themselves: what state am I in right now? Am I able to connect with this topic with a clear, undivided attention? Scrubbing in is an inner act of becoming aware, not a ritual “washing off.” Holding boundaries is indispensable in relation to our own person as well; saying no, or offering a later appointment, is not abandoning the client, but a sign of professional and human maturity. Without taking care of ourselves, we cannot responsibly take care of another person either.

8.3 The Danger of the “Diagnosing Coalition”

The wife, her daughter, her friends, and the relatives all agree that the husband is the one who needs “fixing.” If the pastoral counselor also falls in line with this, systemic oversight is lost, and the helper themselves becomes a member of the problem-determined communication system. Supervision examines whose side the helper is being pulled toward, and how they can also represent the perspectives of those who are not present. Even in the observer's position, the pastoral counselor is not an outsider: their questions, concepts, religious language, and role all shape what becomes speakable. [69]

8.4 The Female and the Male Pastoral Counselor

What can a male pastoral counselor do with a “rather female problem”? Each of us becomes a pastoral counselor together with our own sex; we can guess what a colleague of the other sex would attend to, but we cannot substitute for their perspective. That is why, wherever possible, it is worth having a male and a female pastoral counselor work together. [70] If God created humanity male and female, then pastoral care, too, should not separate what belongs together. [71] A helper working alone can, in the spirit of naturalness and transparency, say openly that they are responding as a man or as a woman, and can look for the missing viewpoint by mentally bringing in an “invisible colleague.” [72]

8.5 The Rescuer Urge, Over-Helping, and Omnipotence

Alongside the exhausted wife, an urge can arise in the helper to take over the task of “fixing” the family. Behind the rescuer urge there often lies the unbearability of the helper's own sense of powerlessness: at such moments, they decide and act in the other person's place. [73] Over-helping also injures the dignity of the person being helped, because it takes away from them what they could do themselves. According to a saying attributed to Ruth Cohn, the founder of theme-centered interaction: “to give less than the client needs is theft; to give more is murder.” [74] The pastoral counselor does not step into the role of the Redeemer; they have to be able to let go of the belief in perfection. They are responsible for their own intentions, words, and actions, but no longer for how these land in the other person.

8.6 When Nothing Can Be Found to Recognize

If the pastoral counselor cannot find a single point to give honest recognition to, they treat this as their own block. Theologically, a person is always at once sinner and redeemed; alongside suffering, a moment of salvation history is always hidden too. In such moments, the foundation of the relationship can be shared suffering: the client suffers, and the helper suffers too, from their own helplessness. They can even say this out loud, and can call on the client for help (“Is there really not a single ray of sunshine in it, ever?”). If, after the first few sessions, they notice a lasting aversion, dislike, or insensitivity in themselves, they have to decide whether to continue, or to refer the person on. [75]

8.7 The Pastoral Counselor's Image of God, Creed, and Spiritual Power

It is part of professional identity for the helper to know their own “pastoral creed” — that is, what pastoral care means to them. [76] The helper's own image of God is also present in their work: someone who has come to know God chiefly as demanding will not allow themselves uncertainty either; and someone who imagines a God who sorts everything out immediately may rush toward a solution even where sustained presence would be needed instead. [77] What the pastoral counselor says about God is easily heard by the client as the final word. If the helper cannot bear to carry the other person's doubts alongside them, and closes off the search with a sentence of the type “this is how God wants it,” they are abusing spiritual power. [78]

8.8 A Case Discussion with Oneself, and the Pastoral Counselor's Own Faith

If the helper gets stuck, they can treat the block as a signal, identify the “invisible colleague or family member” they have brought with them, and hold a case discussion with themselves. [79] After the first fifty minutes, it is worth asking, “how does this case taste to me?”, and putting into words what they were able to do, and what they were not. Supervision also asks: under stress, which of Satir's “armors” does the helper retreat into, and are they not carrying this in front of the client — even into their prayer? The pastoral counselor's work cannot do without their own living faith and life of prayer, without supervision, a mentor, and spiritual direction; this, too, is part of their responsibility toward their clients. [80]

8.9 Self-Care

Disregarding one's own boundaries is not following Christ, but disregarding the very way the Creator made the human being finite; the desire for omnipotence can lead to exhaustion, chronic stress, and eventually burnout. [81] Self-care is not a reward for tasks completed, but the regular tending of one's resources. [82] In a case like this one, where the client herself has become exhausted through a lack of self-care, the helper's own self-care is also a precondition for the credibility of the accompaniment.

Pastoral Psychology Pastoral-psychological analysis

9 Pastoral-Psychological Analysis

9.1 Behind Every Question of Life Lies a Question of Faith

Pastoral psychology looks at the human person in their bodily, psychological, relational, and spiritual wholeness. Following Anton Boisen, it holds that “behind every question of life lies a question of faith, and behind every question of faith lies a question of life,” and that the two can only be understood and accompanied together. [83] Alongside the horizontal, social, and psychological dimension, pastoral care also takes the vertical dimension seriously: it takes the relationship between God and the human person as its basis.

According to Tillich, what is indispensable for a person's existence becomes the object of “ultimate concern,” and this question breaks to the surface most of all in transitions; faith itself is the trusting embrace of this ultimate concern. [84] In this case, “spiritlessness” is at once a question of life — the family stands before a transition — and a question of faith: what gives enthusiasm, meaning, and hope, when a life stage draws to a close? Behind the wife's exhaustion and the husband's low spirits may lie the question the couple has not yet asked each other: what are we together for, once the children have gone?

Tillich sees human estrangement as three-directional: a person can become distant from themselves, from others, and from God, the ground of being. He calls it grace when a person can once again experience themselves as accepted. [85] All three directions can appear in this family's story: the wife has become distant from her own needs, the family members from one another, and the wife's prayer, too, feels like a “wall.” The pastoral relationship looks, in all three directions, for the small, fragmentary signs of reconciliation and reunion.

Pastoral counselor: If we applied the word “spiritlessness” not to your husband, but to your whole family, what would it mean?

Client: That there's no longer real joy in any of us. We just go through the motions.

Pastoral counselor: And if we think of the original meaning of “spirited” — that there is spirit in it — where might spirit come back into your family from?

Client: Maybe not from us. I can't manufacture it.

Pastoral counselor: You don't have to. At Pentecost, the disciples didn't manufacture it either.

9.2 Living for Something — Not Against Something

Christian thinking is often characterized by attention to lack: life becomes a struggle against fault. The biblical view of the person, by contrast, is open in three directions — toward ourselves, toward the other person, and toward God — and the great commandment lives not against something, but for something: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Matt 22:39). The second half of that sentence gives a warning: love for others reaches only as far as one is able to accept oneself with love too; self-love is thus not a luxury, but a condition for love, and it also protects against burnout. [86]

For months, the wife has been living “against spiritlessness”: all her strength is aimed at eliminating the deficit. The pastoral question is what, for what, she would like to live — for her marriage, for her children's path, for her own calling, for her relationship with God.

Pastoral counselor: If, starting tomorrow, you didn't have to fight against your husband's low spirits, but could live for something instead, what would that be?

Client: For our family. So that we'd want to be together again. And... for myself too.

Pastoral counselor: What would that mean, on just one day this week?

9.3 Dignity and Being Made in the Image of God

Whatever the conversation is about, the deepest goal of pastoral care is caring for a person's dignity, which springs from their being made in the image of God, and is therefore inalienable. [87] This theological claim is not a tool for producing wellbeing, and it does not require a suffering person to always feel valuable. Pastoral psychology therefore does not try to fix the feeling with a ready-made proposition, but looks for a relationship and a community in which acceptance can be experienced. [88]

In this case, this holds in two directions. The wife's dignity does not depend on whether she succeeds in “shaking up” her husband. And the husband's dignity does not depend on whether he is spirited: the label “spiritless,” in family talk, can easily suggest that a person without enthusiasm is worth less. The equal and equivalent standing of both sexes as made in the image of God is also the foundation of the couple's relationship: the relationship is stable when both partners recognize this equality and are also able to live it out, turning their differing family functions to each other's benefit, not against one another. [89]

9.4 “Good Enough,” and Fragmentariness

The concept of fragmentariness expresses that human life is finite, fragmentary, and unfinished; it contradicts the expectation that flawlessness would be the natural state. In believing circles, this is often joined by the thought that weakness is a sign of little faith. [90] The outlook of “good enough” has theological significance: it depends on one's view of the person, the world, and God, whether someone lives under the compulsion of perfection, or can accept in peace what is “good enough.” A life stage can also be dominated by the image Frielingsdorf calls the demonic “performance-god,” according to which God's love has to be earned. Jesus's saying — “No one is good except God alone” (Mark 10:18) — is liberating: reconciliation with life is not the reward for our own goodness, but the gift of God's goodness. [91]

Behind the wife's sentence “I've already tried everything,” a measuring rod like this may also stand: as if a good wife, and a good believer, ought to be capable of producing family happiness. Pastoral-psychological accompaniment opens toward “good enough”: it looks not for the perfect family, but for goals that are realistic given the actual state of things. A healthy person is one who, through their own strength or with outside help, is able to attain their realistic desires, and who, at the end of their life, can say: “This was my life.”

Pastoral counselor: What would a “good enough” wife be in this situation — not perfect, just good enough?

Client: One who doesn't abandon her husband, but doesn't die of it either.

Pastoral counselor: And a “good enough” believer?

Client: One who prays, even if all she can do is complain.

9.5 Image of God, Self-Image, and the Silent God

One's image of God cannot be derived directly from any single childhood experience, or from the image of one's parents; it can be transformed again and again at the turning points of life. Self-image and image of God shape one another reciprocally: the God we are able to receive depends on how we see ourselves, and how we see God feeds back into our self-esteem and our relationships. An emotionally alive image of God rarely changes merely under the influence of better arguments; it is shaped more by new experiences. A pastoral conversation, or a shared prayer, can also be such a new experience — if the old pressure or shame is not repeated within it. [92]

In times of suffering, the question “why does God allow this?” is usually not a theoretical debate, but a shaking of one's personal relationship with God: the God who once sustained us can come to seem distant, silent. The pastoral counselor does not need to answer this question quickly; it is better to make room for protest, complaint, and uncertainty. [93] If the wife experiences it as “God, too, just stays silent, like my husband,” the two silences can reinforce one another: the experience of marriage colors the image of God, and the image of God colors the marriage.

The saying “God's eye sees everything” can, in childhood, also give rise to fear and guilt. Yet the very same saying can also bring comfort: if God sees everything, then he also sees how hard I am trying to do good — even when it doesn't succeed. [94]

Pastoral counselor: You said God is like your husband: silent. What was God like, when you were a child?

Client: Strict. He saw everything.

Pastoral counselor: And if God sees everything, then he also sees how hard you're trying — even when it doesn't succeed. What do you think he'd say to how you've been keeping spirits up in your family for months now?

Client: I've never thought it through this way before. That he sees that too.

9.6 Prayer: Communication Types, Complaint, and Silence

Communication is relationship, and Watzlawick's axiom — “one cannot not communicate” — also holds for our relationship with God. The communication patterns taken up under stress can also function as “armor” in prayer: they protect in the short term, and constrict in the long term. Someone who prays in a placating way should watch that this does not slide into self-torment; someone who speaks to God in a blaming, demanding tone would do well to notice when and why they do so. Neither pattern is good or bad in itself. [95]

Different forms of prayer give voice to different experiences: petition to need and hope, thanksgiving to a good received, complaint to pain and anger, silence to what has no words. If someone does not dare complain to God because they feel it would be unbelief, then it is precisely religious language that is silencing their suffering. [96] Prayer is the “royal road” of self-knowledge and knowledge of God: in deep prayer, we not only come to know our desires, but they are also shaped by it — in Scharfenberg's words, prayer is “the educator of our desires.” [97] A promise carries weak prayer: “the Spirit helps us in our weakness... the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words” (Rom 8:26). A husband's silence, too, cannot automatically be judged as unbelief.

Pastoral counselor: How do you usually pray for your husband?

Client: That God would change him. That he'd give me back my old husband.

Pastoral counselor: And what if, just once, instead of asking for him to change, you simply told God what it's like to live beside him right now — as a complaint, without prettying it up?

Client: Am I allowed to do that?

Pastoral counselor: The psalmists prayed this way. And when words run out, silence can be a prayer too.

9.7 Changing — Spiritual Dryness, Doubt, and the “Dark Night of the Soul”

Religions describe great turning points with the images of conversion and rebirth; in psychological language, these are second-order changes, in which it is not this or that habit but a person's whole self-understanding that is transformed. Every development involves crisis. Many believers experience their prayer and religious practice becoming simpler, poorer; they often feel this as decline, and force the earlier forms, even though it may be that a deeper faith is precisely what is beginning. The mystical tradition calls the extreme, sometimes years-long form of this “the dark night of the soul” (St. John of the Cross). [98]

Doubt is not necessarily the opposite of faith. It interrupts our accustomed certainty, and that is hard, but it also gives us the chance to make the faith we were given truly our own. Accompaniment maintains a space in which question and faith, uncertainty and commitment, can coexist side by side. [99] In crisis, the task of pastoral accompaniment is often to first make room for loss, complaint, and anger; the treasures of the tradition of faith help only when they do not silence the pain, but make it bearable. [100]

Spiritual dryness and “spiritlessness” can thus also be read as a path of being emptied out — but only from the point of view of the person's own lived experience of it. In the husband's absence, it cannot be established that his weariness is a process of this kind, and this perspective does not lessen the wife's burden either. The wife's own dryness in prayer, however, can be addressed within this framework.

9.8 Individuation, Separation, and Blessing — The Children's Path

Theologically, the foundation of a person's independent path is that they were created in the image of God. In a pastoral-psychological reading, baptism vindicates, in advance, the separation that is to come: the child does not belong to the parent, but to God — the child is merely entrusted to the parents. It is therefore not the parents who decide who the child will become; their task is to discover what gifts and calling God has given the child, and to support them in this, for as long as they need it. [101] Separation is thus not a rupture, but a reordering of attachments and boundaries. [102]

The twenty-year-old son's choice of career, and the eighteen-year-old daughter's situation after her breakup, each carry independent significance in their own life stories. If the main subject of the family's conversations is understanding the father, these turning points can be pushed into the background. Love for one's parent does not require the young person to postpone their choice of career, or the processing of their loss, for an indefinite time. A blessing can be a ritual expression of this: whoever blesses recognizes the other as worthy of God's favor, and in giving the blessing, a parent can experience that their child is “in even better hands than their own.” [103] A blessing has a particular place at the turning points between life stages, and in crises, because it helps process feelings and accept the new situation.

Pastoral counselor: If your son felt that he could set out, because he isn't needed at home to “keep watch” over his father, what would the family lose — and what would it gain?

Client: We'd lose a helper. And we'd gain a son who's happy.

Pastoral counselor: Who do you think he needs to hear it from, that he's free to go?

Client: From me too. And from his father too.

9.9 Parentification, Loyalty, and the Outlook of the “Good Steward”

Every relational system also exercises power over its members. In biblical thinking, however, power is always power that has been received, and within the family everyone shares in it — man and woman, child and elder; the difference lies only in the tasks. The command “have dominion” in the creation story is better understood as careful stewardship: the responsible care of what has been entrusted to us. If this is upset, children can end up in loyalty conflicts, triangles, or parental roles, and this hinders their development. It is the pastoral counselor's task to recognize these patterns, and to help the family face the real questions still waiting to be resolved. [104]

The daughter, who analyzes her father as her mother's confidante, and the son, who keeps watch over his father's paralysis, are both carrying a burden that is not theirs. The pastoral question is not who is to blame for this, but how they can get their place back — as a child, and as a young adult.

9.10 Talents and Self-Care — Love Yourself

The parable of the talents (Matt 25:14–30) calls a person not to bury the gifts they have received, but to make them bear fruit. One of the pastoral counselor's tasks is to help each person unfold their own talents — not someone else's, but their own, boldly. [105] For months, the wife has been working at “putting her husband's talents to use.”

The threefold direction of the great commandment — God, neighbor, and ourselves — is also the ethical basis of equality and self-care: let us remain in debt to no one, not even to ourselves. Someone who allows themselves nothing good loses their autonomy; this is where the line between service and self-exploitation is drawn. The motto of helping can be: “I work in a way that is good for you and for me.” [106] Caring for one's own life is thus not a reward for successfully fixing the family, and it is not selfishness. At the same time, the instruction “take time for yourself” can, on its own, become yet another task; that is why we look for what can actually fit into the coming week, and with whose involvement.

Pastoral counselor: If God asked you about your talents, what would you be glad to report on?

Client: That I'm good at paying attention to others. That I hold the family together.

Pastoral counselor: And which of your talents has stayed buried lately?

Client: I used to sing in the choir. I loved that very much.

9.11 Boundaries, Rhythm, and the Day of Rest

In the pictorial language of the creation story, boundaries do not restrict life, but make it possible. Time, too, has its rhythm: day and night, the weekly day of rest, and the festivals; if we keep these holy, we protect life, and if we disregard them, we endanger life — today's burnout is, in part, a consequence of this loss of rhythm. Human capacities are finite, and accepting this is a renunciation of the desire for omnipotence: we are created in God's image, but we are not gods. [107]

Every one of the wife's evenings has turned into duty over the family's mood. The pastoral question is: where is her Sabbath? Not after the problems are solved, but now, in the midst of them.

Pastoral counselor: When was the last time you had a day when you didn't have to look after anyone?

Client: I don't even remember.

Pastoral counselor: The Creator rested on the seventh day — not because he was tired, but because the work was good. What would your weekly rest be?

9.12 Forgiveness as the Release of a Debt

Forgiveness is a deep spiritual process that cannot be produced by an act of will. The petition of the Lord's Prayer (Matt 6:12), in the Greek, speaks of releasing debts. From this it follows that it is not the pain of the injury that has to be erased, but that one can give up requiring the other to pay what they owe — respect, love. This is a conscious decision, and so it is easier than switching off a feeling on command; and it always concerns a given injury: tomorrow, one may have to begin again. [108] Forgiveness does not erase what happened, cannot be demanded at the injured party's expense, and reconciliation is a separate process. [109]

Grievances may have accumulated in the wife toward her husband (“he never asks how I'm doing”), toward her own parents (“we told you so”), and perhaps toward God too (“it's no use pleading”).

Pastoral counselor: What does your husband owe you — the thing you miss the most?

Client: Attention. A question.

Pastoral counselor: You don't have to forget this. But could you let go of collecting on it tonight?

Client: For tonight, maybe yes.

9.13 Transgenerational Inheritance and the Family's Salvation History

That the injuries of relationships have effects across generations was not discovered by modern psychology: the Old Testament already knows it. According to the Ten Commandments, the guilt of the fathers reaches to the third and fourth generation, while God's mercy reaches to the thousandth (Exod 20:5–6); this describes, in the language of Scripture, the movement of burdens and of restitution across generations. [110] One of the gifts of working through a family's history is recognizing its “family salvation history”: the burdens of the past lose their power when we also see what made deliverance possible, and what gifts accompanied the family as blessings. [111] Transgenerational influence is not a fated repetition; the inquiry looks for where a new possibility of choice opens up. [112]

The sentences “he's always been like this” and “we told you so” suggest fatedness. The pastoral question looks for what held earlier generations together in similar situations, and what from this can be passed on to the children.

9.14 The Story of Suffering and the Story of Salvation

Religion lives in narratives: whether a people remembers the suffering of slavery or the deliverance shapes its present. Pastoral care sets alongside the perspective that attends to illness and lack a perspective that looks for health and resources — alongside the story of suffering, the story of salvation. [113] Attention directed at exceptions is akin to the spiritual tradition's “discernment of thoughts” (diakrisis), and to the apostle Paul's encouragement: “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable” — let your thoughts dwell on these things (Phil 4:8). The tradition advises not suppressing bad thoughts, but replacing them with Scripture and prayer. [114] Pastoral care looks for what has held the client together in crises so far. [115]

The “diabolical” thought that “there's nothing but bad left in this marriage” literally tears apart (dia-ballein). Set against it, the memory of the coffee is the small moment of salvation history that carries a blessing.

9.15 Conformity or Conviction — The Maturing of Faith

According to Allport's distinction, extrinsic religiosity is primarily conformity to the community's rules, while intrinsic religiosity is a mature faith that takes on doubt as well. The latter bears life's contradictions better, because it trusts in a faithfulness beyond the human: God accepts the person together with their questions and conflicts. The pastoral counselor can support the path toward intrinsic faith, but it is not they who produce the growth: “God gave the growth” (1 Cor 3:6). [116] Little can be concluded about someone's inner functioning from the outer form of their religious practice: the same practice can spring from conviction or from fear. [117]

In this case, the norm that “a good Christian wife bears everything” may be functioning more as conformity, one that silences the wife's own needs. Pastoral accompaniment does not criticize the norm, but helps the wife articulate her own, inwardly held conviction of faith about what marital faithfulness, and responsibility toward herself, mean for her today.

9.16 Shame, Unrealistic Guilt, and Moralizing

Shame does not attach to a single act, but to the whole person (“I am bad”); whoever shames another exercises power, and this is especially destructive in a believing setting when it invokes God or the community's authority. [118] Unrealistic guilt places on a person a responsibility that is not theirs; it is dangerous when a believing community values the strength of guilt feelings as a sign of the depth of faith. [119] Moralizing brands as a moral failing what we should really understand first; spiritualizing, meanwhile, covers over the real relational situation with a religious explanation. [120]

If the pastoral counselor tells the client that her crisis exists because she hasn't prayed enough, or because her relationship with God isn't right, the client arrives with one problem and leaves with two. A pastoral stance, by contrast, does not pass judgment on either the wife or the husband. The wife's sentence, “maybe I'm the bad wife,” calls for clarifying responsibility: what her actual room for action was, and what is not her responsibility.

9.17 Joy, Gratitude, and Contentment

It's worth separating three concepts that are often blurred together: happiness, joy, and contentment are not the same thing. Joy is more a momentary, changeable experience; happiness is a broader fulfillment than that; and contentment comes together as the balance of a whole life. No one can be expected to have lasting joy, and Christian joy does not exclude complaint either. [121] If, in a family, these three condense into a single expectation, every low-spirited evening can become proof that the marriage has failed. Contentment is not the same as resignation; appreciation and the wish for change can coexist side by side. [122]

Gratitude is a response to what we have received as a gift, but it cannot be prescribed as a duty: in the book of Psalms, thanksgiving and complaint stand side by side, and neither cancels out the other. Gratitude helps when, even alongside naming what is bad, it keeps alive the connection to what sustains us; in fresh loss, however, it can easily feel like yet another expectation. [123] A possible question: “What do you still consider valuable in your relationship, and what, precisely because of that, would you like to find a different shape for?”

9.18 Hope, Substitutionary Faith, and Holy Saturday

Hope is more than optimism: it can remain even when the hoped-for turn of events is unlikely. [124] Christian hope rests not on human achievement, but on God's faithfulness and the promise of the resurrection, and so it does not cease even in times of failure. [125] Substitutionary faith and hope is a special form of “bear one another's burdens” (Gal 6:2): “I know and I see that right now, because of your pain, you can't believe... so for now, I will believe in your place.” This relieves the burden of the guilt of “I can't even manage to believe”; the pastoral counselor takes it on temporarily, and hands it back once the client has grown stronger.

The Easter story is the story of a crisis process par excellence: Maundy Thursday, the pain of Good Friday, the weariness of Holy Saturday, and the empty tomb, which has to be noticed. The pastoral counselor's own faith in God is what makes it possible to believe in a person — in crisis too, on Holy Saturday too, even in the loss of hope — and to help “roll away the stone.” [126] The wife's Holy Saturday weariness is thus not a lack of faith, but a stretch of a road. Substitutionary hope is an offer, not a takeover of the client's faith, and not a promise of the desired change.

Pastoral counselor: If you had to choose among the days of Easter, which one are you living in right now?

Client: Holy Saturday. It doesn't hurt as much anymore, it's just empty.

Pastoral counselor: On Holy Saturday, the disciples didn't believe either. And yet they were there together. For as long as it's hard for you, I'll believe in your place too, that Sunday is coming.

9.19 Comfort and Respect for Reality

To comfort is not the same as to reassure. Hurried encouragement, a pious cliché, or “every cloud has a silver lining” can suggest that the other person's pain cannot be borne. Real comfort acknowledges the loss, maintains the relationship, and offers a word, a prayer, or a ritual attuned to the other's own pace. [127] The pastoral counselor does not speak in place of the Holy Spirit, the Comforter: their word, their silence, and their prayer are authentic only when they leave room for God's presence, and for the other person's own experience. [128]

9.20 The Congregation as a Human System and a Resource

In Jewish-Christian faith, community and mutual reliance are fundamental, and helping is not the private business of one individual: even the good Samaritan entrusts the wounded man's further care to the innkeeper (Luke 10:34–35). [129] A congregation is not only a community of faith, but also a human system, with its own norms, informal hierarchies, and communication habits. [130] The value of congregational help is not shown by the quantity of spiritual advice given: a regular, discreet visit, or taking a burdensome task off someone's hands, can matter more. Diaconal attention begins with clarifying the actual need, and the community has no mandate to approach the husband merely because the wife has asked for help. [131]

9.21 The Pastoral Counselor as the “Image and Likeness” of God

In the pastoral relationship — fragmentarily, in a human way — the acceptance with which God accepts the suffering person has to become visible. In this sense, the pastoral counselor is the “image and likeness” of God: they show a little of God's acceptance to someone who cannot accept themselves, and their own being made in God's image addresses the other person's being made in God's image too. [132] The greatest question for people today is no longer sin, but recognition: how do I find a God who accepts and recognizes me? The pastoral counselor therefore seizes every available opportunity to give recognition. A conversation with a pastoral counselor who is also present as a representative of God can thus also be an indirect prayer. [133] God believes in humanity so much that he remains with us even in suffering and finitude — pastoral care serves this belief. [134]

Further Reflection Questions for further reflection

10 Questions for Further Reflection

Communication before God: In my own relationship with God, which of Satir's stances do I retreat into under stress — and do I dare speak to God congruently, honestly? [135]

Self-worth and being made in the image of God: What do I base my self-worth on — performance, others' recognition, or my inalienable being made in the image of God — and how does this filter into how I see the client? [136]

My own spiritual dryness: Have I noticed spiritual dryness, “spiritlessness,” in my own life of faith? Does it frighten me, or can I also look at it as a path of being emptied out? And how does this shape the way I listen to the husband's “spiritlessness”? [137]

A source alongside the story of suffering: Instead of the lack, do I look for “what is already working,” and, alongside listening to the story of suffering, for the signs of being sustained, of salvation history? [138]

A good-enough helper: Where does the image of the performance-god haunt my own ministry, and what would it mean for me to be a “good enough” pastoral counselor? [139]

The system and I: In whose name am I speaking, when I speak about a family? Whose voice is missing from the story I am hearing — and how can I represent them too? [140]

The pastoral counselor is a person too: How is my own faith, my own life of prayer, present — as a support, or as a blind spot — in the way I accompany this family? [141]

Notes and Source References for the Analysis

Hézser Gábor – Krasznay Mónika. 2026. A rendszerszemléletű családkonzultáció és család-lelkigondozás kézikönyve. Budapest: Harmat. ISBN 978-963-288-951-1.

Case data Summary of the case material as presented

1 Summary and the Pastoral Situation

A young family from the congregation comes up: the 28-year-old mother is at home with two small children (aged 3 and 5), while her husband has been working near Munich for a year and a half and comes home only every two weeks, for a few days.

They need the money (they would like to buy an apartment, and the parents cannot help), but the wife finds the separation harder and harder to bear. The situation is sharpened by the mother-in-law: ever since her son started working abroad, she has blamed her daughter-in-law for his absence (“you couldn't keep your husband by your side”), keeps insinuating things about her, and resorts to emotional blackmail whenever moving out together comes up.

The central dilemma: to go (after the husband, to Munich) or to stay — weighing both the children's interests and the conflicts of loyalty and mandate between the generations. It is the wife who turns to the pastoral counselor: she is the client.

Transcript The edited text of the conversation; the speaker's name is shown at every turn

The Edited Transcript of the Conversation

Recording of the Conversation

Péter: We are going to talk about another pastoral care case. We will discuss how it is worth approaching such a topic, or one like it, as a pastoral counselor. If you think it's a good idea, I would bring the situation in here, and then I'll be curious to hear your reactions.

Let's begin! A pastor sent in this case; he came across the problem in his own practice, and this is how he speaks about it:

In the congregation there is a young family with two small children, one 3 years old and one 5. The wife is 28; before the children were born she worked as an assistant for a dentist. Her husband is a skilled tradesman who has been commuting to work near Munich for a year and a half. He has settled in well there, is learning the language better and better, and is liked and respected at his workplace. He and his colleagues rent an apartment together. He comes home every two months — that is, every two weeks — and each time he can stay home for four or five days.

The wife has already visited him there with the children. Once it was when the roommates were on vacation and the apartment was empty. That was a lovely time, but the return home was very hard afterward, both for her and for the children. Another time, though, they stayed there all crammed into the husband's one room — for the wife that was simply unbearable. Now she is complaining to the pastor that she is finding this separation harder and harder to bear. But they badly need the money, because they want to buy an apartment, and her parents can't help them with that.

The wife thinks that now would be the best time for all of them to move to Germany. The little one could still go to kindergarten there, and the older one could start school there. At the same time, she is also terrified of such a big change, and of course of her lack of language skills.

The situation is made harder still by one serious problem: her mother-in-law. Earlier, before the husband left, they got along relatively well — though they were not fond of each other — the grandmother did criticize her daughter-in-law about this and that, but it was bearable, and she could be counted on when someone needed to watch the children. But since her son started working abroad, the mother-in-law's behavior has become unbearable. On the one hand, she blames her daughter-in-law for her son's absence, saying: “you couldn't keep your husband by your side.” On the other hand, she is constantly insinuating things: “you surely let him go so that you could carry on here with other men.” And when it comes up that the whole family would move away, the mother-in-law is mortally offended and turns to emotional blackmail: “Go on, then, I'll manage to die alone just fine.” This sentence shakes the husband to the core.

The woman's parents live at the other end of the country. They are not closed to the idea of moving; on the contrary, they would probably even travel out to them from time to time to spend time with the grandchildren. The pastor is completely at a loss in this situation, and feels he is being torn between two fires, two fronts.

Mónika: No wonder he's at a loss.

Gábor: It's no wonder, either, that he's torn between two fronts — if, that is, he is torn between only two fronts at present in this tangled story.

Mónika: I seized on the word “at a loss” in the description all of a sudden, because what immediately came to mind was that, as a pastoral counselor, it is actually not at all his task to give advice in this dilemma. The question is whether they are even expecting advice from him?

My other, very first professional question about the situation is this: who exactly asked him for help?

Gábor: Hm. That's a key question.

Mónika: Right?

Gábor: From the pastor's account and the text he sent in, it seems to me that it was the young wife who turned to him with her complaints.

Mónika: It may seem that I'm guessing the same, but...

Péter: She is the one who physically went to the pastor.

Mónika: That's right, at least she is the one who made the contact.

Gábor: And how good that she did! But do you see how incredibly complicated this case is?

There is not a single isolated problem, not a single question straining in the depths, but a whole series of problems. This is completely typical of every pastoral care situation, especially in a congregational context. Church members often pour all their troubles and woes out on the pastor all at once. How good that they can pour them out, because through the very act of putting them into words, a small bit of relief has already taken place!

But then the pastor has to decide right there, on the spot, what to do with this enormous bundle, and where to take hold of the story. What concrete threads and problems do you see in it, Mónika?

Mónika: Hm. Well, first of all, obviously, that very pressing problem: this young family is — at least temporarily — completely torn apart because the husband works abroad. That is so even though they meet relatively often, every two weeks. In everyday life they still live apart, which puts an enormous strain on the marriage.

Then I see the mother-in-law–daughter-in-law conflict, and in a very particular light at that: the question is to what extent the mother-in-law's reactions are connected to her own stuck points and life questions arising from her own natural life development. So there is a current situation — her son's work abroad and the tense relationship with his wife — but behind the mother-in-law, too, there is a natural life-course process, with its own problems of letting go or of loneliness. Here these threads slide completely over one another and pile up.

Gábor: Perhaps we should stop here for a moment, because you said something extremely important, which it is good to refer to directly. In pastoral care and crisis consultation, it is always very important to distinguish between so-called natural crises (normative crises) and current crises (situational crises).

Among the things you just listed, there are also crises arising from natural life-cycle transitions. Even if this man had happened to stay at home and were not working in Munich, it would still be worth looking at which of these family and relational crises would remain present in exactly the same way. Work abroad often only intensifies or makes visible what was already taking shape in the depths.

Mónika: That's right. On top of that, it doesn't make the situation any easier that here a very rational financial, livelihood question is pitted against deep, emotional-level needs. The husband goes abroad to work in order to create financial security, an apartment, a future for his family.

I bring this up because people have basic, primary needs that have to be met — if we recall Maslow's pyramid, we know that security and physical survival are the foundation, and only after that do our higher-order relational or self-actualization needs come into play. It is very hard to argue against the rational argument when a family says: to secure their financial footing, they now have to go abroad.

From the outside, of course, it would be easy to snap back, “fine, then let the husband move home, and let them live together in peace, more modestly.” But if they currently see this work abroad as the only solution for securing their physical and material needs, then as pastoral counselors it is not our place to argue with that. It is another matter that later in the process one could examine whether this really is the only way. But in the first phase, that is not our task.

One more thing comes to mind — I would raise it almost purely as information or as a question, to the pastor or to the young wife herself: hasn't the question of jealousy come up in your reading? Based on the description, didn't this thread strike you?

Péter: The mother-in-law really did voice something aloud, but we can't tell from the description whether this jealousy arose only in her head as a suspicion, or whether there is any basis in reality for it. How it turned out, and the wife's reaction, do not emerge from the pastor's account.

Gábor: Whether this is a concrete, real tension between the couple, or purely a malicious projection living in the mother-in-law's imagination, we truly don't know.

But look at what we are doing right now, first of all! First — before we even start thinking about what could be done here, how one could help in such a case — we try to clarify the tangled connections. We want to see what is going on in the background. Once we have that, we will be able to choose from the many threads one that we can start with, and for which we have our own professional possibilities, capacities, and tools.

You, Mónika, mentioned the concrete financial situation here: livelihood has to be provided for, they want to buy an apartment. That is such hard-nosed reality that it cannot be ignored. What else did we see?

Mónika: For my part — for now only as a suggestion — I brought in the couple-relationship thread: whether, because of the physical distance, jealousy appears between husband and wife.

Gábor: That's right, the quality of the couple relationship itself. The young wife even hints that she misses her husband terribly, and that this situation is becoming more and more unbearable for her.

Then there is the classic mother-in-law–daughter-in-law conflict as well, and of course we must not overlook what will happen with the children. It is obviously a very nice and advantageous prospect that if they move to Munich, they will go to kindergarten there, start school there, and learn a world language at a native level. But what serious disadvantages and losses might there be if they are suddenly uprooted from their familiar home environment? That, too, is an entirely separate complex of problems. I don't know whether you see anything else beyond this that comes up here?

Mónika: It is also not entirely clear to me from the text whether, for financial or other practical reasons, they can even afford for all of them to move out to the husband right now, or not.

Gábor: We don't know. It seems they depend on the husband gathering the money for the apartment out there, but at present that means the family is torn apart. And since among our pastoral norms and values one of the very first is always the protection and support of the unity of the family, with this situation we already find ourselves in a rather difficult, tense dilemma.

Péter: For me, it may be that something is missing from the story, or it simply wasn't stated in the description, but really the concrete question isn't named here. What was the point, the explicit request, with which the woman went to the pastor?

Mónika: That's exactly where I wanted to get to as well! After all, we can only begin to help along the need formulated by the client. It may be that later in the process we won't continue down that path, but to get started we need a relatively concrete, spoken question. Such an extremely complex, many-sided description of a situation — even if it implicitly, covertly contains a request for help — calls for this to become explicit, completely open.

Let's suppose her question is aimed at this: how can she endure the present situation? If the young wife was the one asking for help, then we can begin with her a distinctly resource-oriented, strengths-focused kind of work.

This means that, from a methodological point of view, it is fundamentally not our task as pastoral counselors to change the family's external life circumstances — after all, we cannot rewrite the husband's work or the mother-in-law's nature — but we can place very serious emphasis on what existing inner or outer resources this woman and the family have, with the help of which this difficult life situation would become easier to bear.

Gábor: Yes, but it is also true — and you surely know this from your own experience — that when everything piles up on a person at once, they are simply unable to set priorities. In such moments you don't have a single clear question. And as long as you have no question, that is the worst state.

Because that means everything is raging inside you at once; one thought hits the next, or else amplifies the next. If I have already reached the point where I am able to formulate one single concrete question, then I am already a huge step ahead.

I feel — though you, Mónika, as a woman, can surely sense this better — that this young wife is still at exactly the stage where she doesn't even know whether she's coming or going. She has no question yet; the waves have simply closed over her head.

Mónika: Yes, and related to that, I wanted to say that formulating the concrete question doesn't necessarily mean anything grand. That particular opening question can be as simple as: “Pastor, I have no idea what's going on with me, I just feel terrible in this situation!”

Because once she says that, we can start from that “I have no idea.” This is where we very much like to work with symbols, for example. You can ask her: “If you had to find an image or a symbol for this ‘I have no idea’ state, what would it be?” And the client immediately comes up with her images: the problems flood in, waves crash over her head, or a wall towers up before her like a mountain. And that inner image is something you can work with very well. So the goal at the first session is not for her to formulate her problem rationally, weighed out to the last gram, but still, to some degree I did miss this explicit starting point in the story.

Péter: One more thing struck me in the description: the question of the mother–son relationship. Because according to the story, the mother-in-law’s barbed remark — “just go, I can manage to die alone, too” — shook the husband most deeply of all.

Gábor: Indeed, the poor husband is caught squarely between two fires, two fronts! This is a classic, textbook triangle: a man gets squeezed between two women — his mother and his wife.

But coming back for a moment to what you said about the missing question: if we look at how such a case can be handled in practice, then the very first point of the pastoral process is that I come to an agreement with the woman. We make a contract about what we are looking for an answer to first. From among the many swirling problems, we set an order together, and, according to her own inner experience, we take hold of whatever is most in the foreground at the moment. And yes, sooner or later this triangle and the mother–son dynamic will inevitably appear among these threads as well.

Mónika: Conducting a conversation like this could be extremely interesting. Because if we start from the fact that the pastor is sitting in the room only with the wife, the systemic approach still makes it possible to draw the family members who are not physically present into the working process very effectively. This is one of the things we absolutely must do as helpers; sooner or later we have to get there.

Methodologically there is no need to go into detail now, but this can be done with inner images or with spatial techniques — for example, working with empty chairs, where we imagine who sits where, and the wife, moving over into the other person’s seat, tries to put into words what her husband or her mother-in-law would think and how she would answer.

The other possibility, though — and we cannot rule this out either — is that at a later stage the husband, the wife, and the mother-in-law can actually sit down together. If such a multi-party consultation takes place, then as pastoral counselors we have to pay attention to something extremely important and delicate: how we can represent the interests of every party equally.

In family therapy, in the methodology of Iván Böszörményi-Nagy’s contextual therapy, this is called multidirected partiality (or multidirected advocacy). It is very important to state this as a principle, because beginner helpers often confuse the matter: advocacy does not mean that I agree with the mother-in-law’s hurtful behavior or approve of what she does. It is simply that, in the space between them, everyone’s own condition, their own woundedness, and the life questions that concern them — the daughter-in-law’s, the husband’s, and the mother-in-law’s alike — gain legitimacy. As a helper, I acknowledge each of their truths and pains during the conversation, without our breaking the staff over anyone.

Péter: Maybe this came up only in me, but the way you have just brought this in, I think a certain expression may well have formed in some of our listeners as well. I would like to ask about it: as you were speaking about this, couldn’t it sound to someone like “aha, so what we’re doing here is simply looking for a compromise”?

Is it the same thing, or is it about something entirely different?

Gábor: A very good question, an extremely good question! No, this is not the same at all.

First of all, this advocacy means — if you’ll allow me to put it quite simply now, in “church language” — that I love everyone equally.

Let us look at this system: there is the mother-in-law, who at the moment is a rather strange, difficult figure; there is this young woman; there are the children — whom we have not really even looked at yet —; and there is the man. They are all in very different positions, and they play completely different roles in this drama. This multidirected advocacy that Mónika mentioned means, in my reading: how can I love every one of them, exactly as they are and in their own right? And am I able to send them the message: “yes, I am representing you, too, right now”?

Does this say something to you, Mónika?

Mónika: Absolutely. And if we think a little longer about this search for compromise: advocacy is a much earlier step.

This concept is, for now, purely about the pastoral counselor’s inner stance — about the many parallel ways of relating with which she turns toward the members of the family. Whether a compromise is later born out of this process, or how they arrive at a common denominator, is an entirely next, later phase.

Gábor: That’s very good, what you say. For a moment I completely identified with the pastoral counselor in the situation, I imagined myself in her place — and, frankly, it is not a good feeling at all to be there. At this moment I would probably rather be anywhere in the world than in her chair!

That is exactly why at this point I am wondering: what is my very first task as a pastoral counselor? To have solid ground under my own feet.

This family story is rather swampy, boggy terrain that we have to move across, and it is vital that at least I, the helper, have a secure base. What does this mean in practice? That I must see precisely which theological, which ethical, and which psychological questions I need to clarify within myself before I even begin the conversation in any depth. If I do not have these foundations in me, then I will become the plaything of the various emotions and influences coming from the family, a kind of ball for them. Is that understandable?

And since I begin my list with theology, I already see an incredibly difficult theological tension here. How does the Ten Commandments’ command “Honor your father and your mother!” collide, in this concrete story, with the creation verse saying that a man “leaves his father and mother” when he enters marriage?

Mónika: So, if our repertoire of problems had not been rich enough until now, we are quickly adding a new one.

Péter: Indeed we are — we are inviting not one but two divine commandments into the room right away.

Gábor: But do you understand that I need this myself, as a pastoral counselor? That in this enormous chaos I finally have some fixed, solid points of reference.

Péter: If you have now brought in these two, you have made the situation harder to the extent that it is as though one had to choose between two divine commands. Because as long as this is a purely pragmatic, practical question — whether we will somehow make ends meet or not, or whether we will hurt someone with our decision or not — that, too, is a very difficult matter, but if we bring in such a weighty dimension of faith and ethics as well, that is a completely different level.

Gábor: For me, for instance, the mother-in-law’s sentence is a little heartbreaking, when she says, “Well, fine, just go, I’ll die here alone.” If for a moment I leave the irony or the hurt feelings out of this sentence completely, then behind it a question dawns: how much obligation does the son have toward his mother, and what role?

At the same time, if I look from the husband’s point of view, the other side immediately comes in as well: “Yes, but that commandment is also given to me by the order of creation, that I leave my father and mother and hold fast to my wife, and the two of us become one flesh.” So what am I supposed to do now, which way should I turn?

Mónika: To be honest, at this point I get a little stuck on this line of thought. I don’t quite perceive the problem here.

I mean, I don’t perceive what the pastoral counselor’s role is beyond this in this phase. We see that there is a large heap of problems. This is a very complex situation, which we are neatly taking apart here in theory, layer by layer.

But then what does the helper do in practice? What do we expect of her — I mean, what does the client expect of her? It’s fine that the pastoral counselor can talk through, alone or even together with the wife, what deep implications, what theological or human aspects and perspectives the situation has... but how do we move beyond mere analysis?

Gábor: Creation — that is, becoming creative in the face of a paralyzing heap of problems — begins exactly where the biblical tohu va-vohu, the primeval chaos before creation, comes to an end.

Mónika: That is, we begin to create order out of chaos.

Gábor: That is exactly the task here in the first phase! How the story goes on from there in concrete terms, we cannot know yet, because the description does not let us see the continuation. But putting things in order is the first step.

Péter: I’m very curious what any of you would do with this situation if you experienced something similar in reality. With this inner professional experience of “fine, but what is my job now with this chaos?”

Mónika: If I am talking with the wife, the young woman, then as a helper I would try to formulate several aspects, different perspectives, together with her. As we said a moment ago: I would not expect her to pin down her difficulties with pinpoint precision right away, but we would try to drive in a few fixed stakes in this bog and set up an order of importance among them.

I would help her say sentences like these, for example: “This whole heap of problems has several aspects. One is that my husband and I are bickering more and more, because things have gotten to the point where the distance is now eating into our relationship. The other is that my relationship with my mother-in-law has completely deteriorated. The third is that my children are being torn emotionally in two directions...” And so on. Once we have laid down these stakes together, I would ask her: “Good, which of these do you feel is the most pressing right now, the most important, or which is the one you feel you want to deal with first?”

Because this is already the very first practical step toward beginning to cut a kind of cosmos, that is, order, out of this particular tohu va-vohu. For if she wants to embrace the whole thing at once, all that will come of it is complete confusion, anxiety, and muddle. Gradualness is important: we can deal meaningfully with only one thread at a time. Then, once we set out along that one, we will in any case look later at what connection and effect it has on the rest of the family system — because it will certainly have an effect.

Gábor: With what you’re saying, the essence comes out beautifully: in truth, “individual” pastoral care in the classical sense does not even exist. Every pastoral conversation is, at bottom, always family pastoral care.

Because in this case what it comes down to is that I have to talk separately with the young woman, but as a pastoral counselor I should also talk with the mother-in-law. I absolutely should talk with the husband, and it would not hurt at all if we paid a little attention to the children, too. Each of them has a separate topic and separate main questions, while at the same time they also have one huge, common topic: whether the family falls apart or not.

And if I may return for a moment to the theological tension — as a pastor and as a theologian — I would clarify it within myself this way: I have to accept that we live in a fallen, divided world. As a result, both I and the people involved have dual, mutually conflicting commitments. I can take on these obligations in both directions, but I cannot always, in every situation, fulfill them completely.

Péter, you asked earlier about compromise: if, as a helper, I strive only to find a solution in which everyone will be wholly and perfectly happy, that simply will not work. Instead I have to find a livable middle way — a “good enough” path — that we can live with, without having to lie to ourselves that it is the most perfect solution there is.

Mónika: When you say that all pastoral care is family pastoral care — even if not everyone is necessarily physically sitting there — you are completely right that everyone has some kind of family embeddedness. I would put it this way: all pastoral care must be systemic. That is the key. We have to turn away from that narrowed, linear approach, rigid in examining cause and effect, which looks only at “who is to blame” or “what triggered” the trouble. We have to see the system in its full dynamics.

Gábor: Very true. But tell me, how would you talk with the mother-in-law?

Mónika: Oh, wait a moment! Let’s act it out! Now I am the mother-in-law — and you are the pastoral counselor. How do you address me? How do you speak with me?

Gábor: First of all, I would very much make her feel that I deeply understand her situation, and I would acknowledge that this is an extremely difficult problem.

I would assure her that I see that, on the one hand, she wants what is best for her child, her son’s family. Obviously she knows that nest-building, an apartment, takes money, and that her son can currently earn that money not here but there, abroad. On the other hand, though, I would say out loud that she, as a mother, does have a right to her son, a right to a relationship with him.

I would not want to dissolve this tension cheaply. Rather, I would talk with her about how, unfortunately, it is part of our human existence that we cannot always find perfect solutions. There are always only paths — and Péter, you alluded to compromise a moment ago — in which both parties have to give something up. I would tell her that I, too, as a parent, can fully feel this with her, and that I see what a terrible inner tension it is causing in her right now. That would be my first step. What would you say to that, as the mother-in-law?

Mónika: (in the role of the mother-in-law) But Reverend! What kind of woman is that, what has my daughter-in-law turned into?! She let her husband go away... She just left everything behind! If she had taken better care of him, if she were a more decent, upright woman, she would have been able to make sure her husband stayed here with her!

Gábor: You know, your daughter-in-law misses her husband in exactly the same way you miss your son. Just differently.

That is a completely different relationship. A mother misses her son differently, but just as deeply, as a wife misses her husband. On top of that, the young woman misses not only her partner but also the father of her children right now. But you see, that is exactly what connects the two of you, what you have in common: both of you have a very serious, entirely legitimate sense of absence. You miss your son, she misses her husband. It's a terribly difficult situation, and in a situation like this it's completely understandable that, out of helplessness, a person's emotions sometimes flare up.

Mónika: (in the role of the mother-in-law) Well, Reverend, don't go on! That is exactly why I can't understand my daughter-in-law! After all, if — as you say yourself — she is connected to my son in more than one way, as his wife and as the father of her children, then why didn't she take better care of him?!

I have a suspicion that it's not really such a big problem for her that my son is working abroad... Just recently a repairman was here at the house. Well, Reverend, until now we never had to call a repairman to this house so often! You understand what I mean, don't you?

I don't want to make accusations, I'm not saying this for that reason, God forbid! But I'll be honest with you, it has crossed my mind. And now what am I supposed to do with this doubt? I wouldn't want to suspect my daughter-in-law without grounds, and I would never want any harm, any discord between the two of them... But this feeling is simply there inside me, gnawing away deep within. What can I do with this tormenting feeling? I can hardly confront her and ask her point-blank... And I certainly wouldn't want to approach my son with something like this and upset him out there!

Gábor: If you didn't have this feeling, if such a thought didn't come up in you... then what would you think about yourself? Let me put it another way...

Mónika: (in the role of the mother-in-law) There's no need to put it another way, Reverend, I understand.

Gábor: But still, allow me to say this: somewhere, a mother's task is to protect her son, her daughter, her children. In a crisis like this — regardless of whether there is any real basis for it or not — maternal instinct dictates that she move in a direction that serves protection.

Mónika: (in the role of the mother-in-law) Reverend, are you saying that really it's just about wanting to have my son closer to me? And since I can't ask this of him in such a concrete way, like “son, take care of me, come home,” I'm actually creating a secondary problem for myself, a suspicion like this?

Gábor: That's not quite what I meant. Rather, that you are reacting in a very natural and very true maternal way. Whether that reaction looks beautiful or less beautiful on the surface is another matter. But a mother is a mother precisely so that she protects her child — no matter how big or how old that child is.

Mónika: (in the role of the mother-in-law) But it's also possible, Reverend, that I'm not protecting my son with this at all, but myself... And besides, what else would I be occupied with here alone, if not this?

(Mónika smiles, and her body language and tone of voice change.)

Mónika: Well, sorry, I'm going to step out of the mother-in-law role for a moment. Thank you, Gábor, for bringing in this thread!

Because, incidentally, you had a really good opening question — even if in the end you didn't go in exactly that direction — which can be used fantastically well as a helper. Whenever anyone brings a difficulty, it is extremely worthwhile to look at it this way: if this problem didn't exist, what would the client actually be dealing with?

What other problem, perhaps a much deeper, more painful, or bigger one, is the complaint we put into words and bring into pastoral care carrying us away from? And before anyone misunderstands: this is not at all about the client's problem being a conscious ruse, a staged performance! For her, it is an entirely natural, absolutely sincerely meant and truly lived problem. We could also put it this way: it is an instinctive psychological self-defense reaction against inner emptiness or helplessness.

Gábor: Let's make it concrete, let's bring this fully to the surface here too! It is much easier and more bearable for me, as a mother-in-law, to brood over “who knows what women are like these days, what is my daughter-in-law doing behind our backs,” than to face the rock-hard reality that I am lonely and that I will die alone.

Mónika: Exactly, that's just what I mean! And this point connects beautifully back to where we started this whole conversation: that the story contains, at the same time, a current, crisis-like life situation — the distance caused by her son's work abroad — and, in the background, the mother-in-law's natural, normative crisis of old age as well.

At this age, after all, a person inevitably has to take stock, has to come to terms with her life, has to arrive at Erikson's ego integrity as opposed to despair. And for this elderly woman, that may currently be an extremely difficult, painful developmental task.

Péter: As I listen to the two of you, and as you unpack this deeper layer, a question came to my mind that has really started to occupy me as a pastoral counselor:

What would actually be solved if her son came home right now? What would that family life look like afterward?

Because if we listen carefully to the story, this family in its present form — with the two little children — has probably never lived for any length of time on the salary the husband could earn at home as a skilled worker. So let's put the question to the wife, or even to the mother-in-law: if her son packed up tomorrow and came home, what would their life together look like from the next day on?

Gábor: That is an excellent pastoral, follow-up intervention, Péter! Sitting with the mother-in-law, you can put it beautifully like this: “Look, madam, you are in an incredibly difficult situation. You love your son with all your heart, you would do anything for him, you look after him and protect him, and at the same time you see very clearly that if your son comes home now, they won't have an apartment. And you don't want to stand in the way of your son's making good, either. So you have ended up on a forced track, in a trap, in which a person suddenly really doesn't know which way to turn.”

Péter: But if we look at it rationally: would the mother-in-law really get more of her son if the young man came home, but had to work 12 hours a day here just to somehow support the family?

Gábor: What's more, would the mother-in-law feel better if, by forcing her son to come home, she prevented the young couple from buying their own apartment?

Mónika: What you're saying — that it's possible he would have to toil 12 hours a day here too, and physically she still wouldn't see more of him — is a completely rational argument. But I think that with women... I don't want to generalize now, I'm rather just speaking from my own experience, but perhaps this works a little differently. What suddenly occurred to me is that although, measured in time and hours, her son really wouldn't be with her any more, the very fact of physical closeness still gives a completely different sense of security.

If I know that my son isn't a thousand kilometers away, but, say, works only in the next town over, an inner experience comes out of that: “yes, I am getting more of him after all.” Because behind it there is the awareness that he is reachable sooner, faster, and more easily. Even if I only call him on the phone, or if on his way home he just stops by the door for five minutes... This kind of availability is by no means necessarily incidental for an elderly, lonely mother. Though never mind, this is just a small methodological side thread.

Péter: As a man, I'll be honest, I wouldn't understand this in that situation. With my brain, that's not what would come across to me. The math simply doesn't work out in this female approach — in fact, the rock-hard math is right here in front of us on the page. It may be that I'm once again just imagining myself into the situation, but in the son's role I would certainly say: “But Mom, looking at it pragmatically, if I come home, I wouldn't be with you any more anyway!”

Mónika: You see, that's exactly why I'm chiming in and bringing in this perspective! I think we can absolutely generalize this as a kind of female outlook, because here I'm talking about an inner feeling, a subjective impression. I can imagine that, seen through a woman's eyes, this situation also has such a deep aspect that strives for emotional security.

Gábor: Well, this is where our whole conversation becomes incredibly exciting! Do you notice how Péter reacts, and how I react? These are typical, classic male reactions. We would steer the pastoral conversation in exactly this pragmatic, rational, logical direction as well. Because for us men — since the world began — our job has been to provide for our cave-dwelling loved ones; we look at where the next mammoth is, and what will make dinner happen tomorrow too. We are wired for this kind of problem-solving.

And the way you react, Mónika, is once again the purely female side: the experience of connection, closeness, and availability.

Now we could fantasize a great deal about whether, for this mother-in-law in crisis, you would be the better pastoral counselor at the moment, or I. By “better” I naturally mean: whose tone, whose approach would be more beneficial, more fitting, and more natural given her current state?

Mónika: That really is a good question. I think both approaches would have their own particular advantage, and both could help her in a meaningful way, each at its own level.

Gábor: But for that, as a pastoral counselor, I would still have to add one more important thing as a reflection. I would have to say openly: “Madam, in this situation I can only react the way a man reacts. Your mother, your girlfriend, or your sister might bring in entirely different perspectives. I see this situation as a man, but I gladly offer you this way of seeing, because from it you can understand exactly how a man works and how he reacts in such a case.”

With this I make it clear that my perspective is important, but it is not THE Reaction, not the one and only truth that exists. It is good to build this kind of role clarification into every pastoral conversation of this depth: a man can only be present as a man, and a woman as a woman. Both sides are a value in their own right, but they do not replace one another; they complement each other.

Mónika: And we haven't really even talked yet about the web of loyalty conflicts!

The children suddenly came to my mind, but this is not only about them, it is about the husband himself as well. As we mentioned earlier, terribly heavy questions weigh on his shoulders: whom should I be loyal to? My wife or my mother? In this situation the children, too, may feel completely torn between the tensions of the adults.

Gábor: Indeed, and this loyalty conflict is rock-hard present in the mother-in-law herself as well! For her the dilemma lands like this: should I stand up for my own legitimate interests — namely that I fear loneliness and don't want to die alone — or should I keep my child's interest in view, and let him just toil away out there in peace, because that way they will finally have an apartment of their own and a normal life?

Mónika: All right, we can see the battle of loyalties on every side... But as pastoral counselors, where should we start from among the many threads, so that the client finally arrives at a kind of inner peace and receives the support she turned to us for?

Gábor: What is there to love in this mother-in-law?

Mónika: You mean, I'm not supposed to answer this here myself, but that in pastoral care this can be a concrete direction? That together with her we gather up what can be loved in her?

Gábor: Yes, exactly. I'm thinking about what closing intervention I would give, with what I would close a conversation like this with the mother-in-law. In pastoral care, the aim at the close is always to make the client aware of what is worthy of recognition before people and before God. That is, to strengthen her being made in the image of God, her fundamental human dignity.

How would you do this here, with what, as a female helper? Or should I start, as a man?

Mónika: Well, very simply: I myself would name the traits worthy of recognition in this mother-in-law. As she is, with a clear, authentic piece of feedback.

I could say to her, for example: “I see, madam, how important the unity of the family is to you, how important it is to you that the relationship between your son and your daughter-in-law works well, and I see what a good mother you are, who...” — and here, of course, I would phrase the end of the sentence depending on the concrete situation in the conversation. How would you make this concrete as a man?

Gábor: I would make it concrete somewhat like this: “Madam, you are a truly authentic and honest woman. You live out and own up to, at the same time, the two deep feelings that are straining within you now: your anxious maternal love and your responsibility toward yourself, your fear of loneliness. This duality leads to a very serious inner tension. But what I can respect in you in an extraordinary way is that you do not hide this tension under a bushel, but let it into our conversation.”

I can imagine that when we openly own up to such a difficult inner truth, the burden immediately becomes much more bearable than if we were to suppress it convulsively within ourselves.

Péter: Perhaps, by way of rounding off, at the end of our conversation it is worth asking one more question: what is it that the pastoral counselor should not do? What should we by no means commit in this complex, delicate situation?

I've thought of at least ten things since we started talking about this, but I'd rather not bring them up, because I'm afraid the conversation will go off in a completely different direction, or that I'll put you in the uncomfortable position of having to shoot down my ideas. So, what is it that we should absolutely not do?

Mónika: Stop doing this, Péter! Please, just ask it already, because now I'm really curious!

Péter: (laughs) All right, well, at least twenty ideas came to mind that perhaps haven't occurred to you yet. I was thinking, for example, about how the woman's parents — who would be part of the move, and would even gladly come over to look after the grandchildren — could help. I've never been to the Munich area myself, but if I'm guessing right, there are beautiful places out there, and if the grandmother likes to bathe in thermal baths or go hiking, I could bring that in as an example, to show what fantastic tourist opportunities there are for that!

Of course, I know that a point may come in the process where widening the options and looking for practical possibilities is an exciting task, but it's not at all certain that one should come out with this right at the very beginning, in the middle of the chaos. But I had about ten other ideas too, which I thought were very good...

Mónika: Well, that's exactly the point! That is, what the helper should not do, and what the helper should not necessarily say.

Gábor: Well, one of the most important general attitudinal basic requirements toward the pastoral counselor is this: under no circumstances should they get drawn into a rational debate or a speech for the defense!

They shouldn't start telling the mother-in-law: “Oh, but my dear lady, I know your daughter-in-law, she attends the congregation, she's a pure, thoroughly honest woman! Don't even think such ugliness about her!” This makes absolutely no sense. Just because the pastor says this, the mother-in-law will be exactly as suspicious as before. Because, as we played out and modeled a moment ago, the mother-in-law's suspicion has an entirely different, much deeper inner cause. This gnawing feeling is in fact completely independent of what the young woman does or doesn't do in everyday life.

Mónika: That's right! Besides, such a speech for the defense would immediately and gravely violate the principle of multidirectional partiality and advocacy.

If the pastor starts conspicuously defending the daughter-in-law, the mother-in-law will immediately feel that the pastoral counselor is not loyal to her, doesn't understand her, and rejects her pain. We must absolutely avoid sentences and gestures that could make any member of the system feel that they or their problem is of little importance, little recognized.

Let us say nothing that disputes the legitimacy of the client's lived experience. Our task is to make it possible for everyone to feel their own struggle, their own question, and their own wounds as fully validated — that is, psychologically valid and heard — in this difficult process.

Péter: What's more, this would be even a little stronger than if the pastoral counselor were simply to make a decision as an outside observer. If the helper gets drawn into the debate, it's as if he were deciding on his own authority which two of the three people to sacrifice for the benefit of the third.

As if he were saying to himself: “Well, all right, the mother-in-law deserves her fate, if she's going to go around voicing such foolish, malicious things. So the solution is that the young ones should just go to Munich and be happy, and Mom can stay at home in her loneliness, as best she can.”

Mónika: What's more! That's right.

Gábor: Thank you for this insight, because that is exactly the point. There is a very clear basic formula that, as pastoral counselors, we can always use to orient ourselves extremely well:

In this story, we are dealing with three suffering people.

At the moment there is no winning position here. Right now everyone is a loser to some degree; all three parties are suffering deeply. The mother-in-law suffers from loneliness and from the existential fears of aging, the wife suffers from having her family torn apart and being alone with the burdens, and the husband suffers from having to live 600-800 kilometers away from his wife and children.

If, as a helper, I don't try to comfort them with cheap advice, but am able to sit down beside them and truly take on and endure their suffering — well, that is real pastoral care.

This is precisely why pastoral care is not advice-giving in the sense of: “Now listen here, my dear, what you have to do now is, first, take this step, second, that one, and third, that other one.” No. Unfortunately, this work is bearing one another's burdens in the purest biblical sense, which is certainly not always an easy task.

Mónika: And as Gábor mentioned a moment ago, this is at the same time the care of human dignity that arises from being made in the image of God.

Whichever party I am thinking of, it is just as important to care for and preserve, throughout the process, the human dignity of the mother-in-law — who, seen from the outside, perhaps appears in a more unpleasant, less sympathetic role — as that of her young daughter-in-law, who perhaps, by our human feelings, complains with much greater right and more understandably.

Péter: And I'm wondering, Mónika, whether when you took on this role-play here in front of the microphone a moment ago and brought in this tense dialogue, it wasn't a little taste of that difficult, suffocating atmosphere they may be feeling in reality?

Even for us, here in the studio, how frightening and distressing it was to experience this stalemate for a single moment! So much so that you yourself felt almost immediately that you would most like to step out of the role quickly. But just think: they have no outside studio. They can't just jump out of it — they are in it, and this is where they live their everyday lives.

Mónika: This is what we call — let's say when we work with a group — the effect of the problem “brought in” to the group or to supervision on the group leader or the pastoral counselor. We often talk about this, and one of our most important methodological tools is to observe this continuously.

In fact, in the course of working through a case, the surest way to find out what the real, deeply hidden systemic problem is often to observe what emotional reaction sets off in the listeners who are hearing the case.

Péter: Hm.

Mónika: So the dynamic or tension among those listening to the case often mirrors what is going on in the family's inner system.

Gábor: In practice, this means that if, for example, there is aggression in the group that we perhaps don't notice while discussing the case, then there will be a break, we come out of the room, and suddenly the participants start quarreling with one another. And then afterwards we say: it's good that this happened, because now the tension that is actually in the story has finally “run out” of us.

The same is true in pastoral work: that was a very good question to round things off. If I want to understand and sense how my client feels, then the best basis for orientation is to try to sense how I feel in their company right now.

For example, the mother-in-law's story first made me angry — I felt the anger — and then, as we got deeper into it, this anger increasingly turned into sadness. And this sadness is just as present in the story as the passion is. In this conversation we have focused on the mother-in-law, but of course similar in-depth conversations would be needed with the young woman and the husband as well, so that their lived experiences, too, can come to the surface in the same way.

Mónika: This may be closely connected to what the pastoral counselor must not do. I would rather turn it in a more positive direction: our most important task is continuous, sharp self-reflection and monitoring of ourselves.

What I mean is that I must consciously take care not to bring my own ideas and my own impressions into the case, but try to remain as objective as possible. For example, it struck me right away in the description how pronounced the question of jealousy between the young people is — a typical difficulty of long-distance relationships. Although only the mother-in-law alludes to it suspiciously, for me as a pastoral counselor it could become a very strong point of focus. If I don't attend to self-reflection, I can easily steer the conversation in this direction. And with that, as the saying goes, I might “put a bug in her ear,” or needlessly “make the rabbit jump out of the bush” — it may be that this wasn't their real problem until now, but with my questioning we make it into one.

Gábor: As for Péter's question — what we should not do — this is exactly what I can say: let us not make the mistake of telling ourselves: “Right now I must stay strong here, and I must not be sad, because I am the helper, I am the expert, I am the source of strength.”

This is a huge trap. No, I am not a “mighty fortress,” but simply a human being whom the Lord has sent to them so that the mother-in-law (or the young woman) should not be left alone with her pain. If, as a pastoral counselor, I shut off my emotions, I shut off the path to genuine encounter as well. Our credibility lies not in our “strength,” but in our human presence.

Hypotheses Provisional interpretations to be tested — not established facts

2 Systemic Hypotheses

A systemic hypothesis does not explain the condition of a single family member, but describes the relational system in which the complaint arose and persists; in this system the symptom is also the solution to something. [1] In this case the complaint is multilayered: the young wife is finding the separation harder and harder to bear, the mother-in-law accuses, suspects, and emotionally blackmails, and the husband is torn between two fires. The hypotheses do not look for who is to blame — the daughter-in-law who “couldn't keep her husband by her side,” or the mother-in-law who is “unbearable” — but for how the family's present order keeps all three adults and the two children in balance.

2.1 Content Hypotheses

Distance as a Delicate Balance

The husband has been working near Munich for a year and a half, and comes home every two weeks for four or five days. The family experiences this as a financial necessity: they would like to buy an apartment, and the parents are unable to help.

Hypothesis: the present “half here, half there” state is not only a financial solution but also a relational balance. As long as the husband commutes, he does not have to decide between his wife and his mother: he leaves neither woman for good, and chooses neither for good. The question of “going or staying” may remain open also because openness spares everyone a painful decision. The wife's suffering is the price of this balance: she carries the everyday life, the children, the mother-in-law's accusations, and the absence.

Accumulated Crises: Three Life Stages at Once

Several natural crises are present in the family at the same time. The young couple is in the stage of having small children, when the balance between couple relationship and parenthood must be found, and the norms brought from the two families of origin must be harmonized. The mother-in-law is in a later stage: questions of letting go, aging, and loneliness occupy her. To these is added an acute crisis, the work abroad. [2]

Hypothesis: the work abroad did not create, but made visible and intensified the tensions that would have arisen from the life stages anyway: the son “leaves his father and mother,” the couple builds its own nest, the mother-in-law is left alone. If the husband worked at home, these questions would still have to be dealt with.

The Triangle: Mother, Son, and Wife

The husband is shaken to the core by his mother's sentence — “go on, then, I'll manage to die alone, too.” The man is squeezed between two women who both miss him: one as a mother, the other as a wife and as the children's father.

Hypothesis: the couple's conflict does not play out directly between the spouses, but through the mother-in-law. The shared question of the husband and wife — where and how to live together — is transformed into a dispute between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law. In this triangle, geographical distance can also be a refuge for the husband: he can stay outside the two women's struggle while remaining loyal to both.

Suspicion as Contact and Defense

The mother-in-law keeps casting suspicion on her daughter-in-law (“you surely let him go so that you could run around here with other men”). We don't know whether there is any basis in reality for this, and that is not the pastoral question anyway.

Hypothesis: for the mother-in-law, suspicion is at once contact and defense. As long as her daughter-in-law is “dangerous,” she is her son's protector, she has a task, and she does not have to face her own loneliness and letting go. Suspicion also sustains a negative reciprocity: mother-in-law and daughter-in-law mutually distrust each other, and the distrust connects them, just like a shared concern. [3]

The Generational Boundary and Dependence

The mother-in-law criticized her daughter-in-law before as well, but “could be counted on when someone had to look after the children.” So the young couple was practically dependent on the older generation's help, and this dependence also meant interference.

Hypothesis: the boundary between the young family and the older generation is permeable but unclarified. Help and criticism arrive in one package. With the husband's absence, the wife is functionally raising the children alone, and therefore may need the mother-in-law even more; the mother-in-law, in turn, “supervises” her son's family in his place. Buying an apartment thus becomes also a symbol of winning their own nest and their own boundary: the couple would be buying not only walls but also independence.

Two Families of Origin — Two Directions

The wife's parents live at the other end of the country and do not shut themselves off from the move; the husband's mother, however, experiences every plan to move as betrayal.

Hypothesis: the question of “going or staying” is also about which family of origin the young family is located close to, and at what distance. The two families of origin's different relationships to letting go represent two different loyalties within the couple as well: the wife's family stands for letting go, the husband's for holding on.

The Children as Bearers of the Future

The two kinds of visits — the beautiful days spent in the empty apartment and the crowded single room — also present two different visions of the future to the children. The homecomings and partings repeat every two weeks.

Hypothesis: in the adults' dispute, the children's interest has become a point of reference (“she could start school there,” “they would be torn out of their familiar surroundings”), while their own experience — the repeated farewells — receives little attention. The children may end up caught between family loyalties: they love their grandmother, they miss their father, and they sense their mother's tension.

The Mirroring of the Helping System

The pastor himself writes that he is at a loss and “torn between two fires, two fronts.”

Hypothesis: the pastor's feeling mirrors the state of the family system. Just as the husband feels squeezed between two women, the pastor feels squeezed between two parties. This is not a sign of the helper's inadequacy but information about the system: everyone in the family is in a position where, whatever they do, they hurt someone.

The Question of “Spiritual Dry Land”

For a torn family facing a decision, faith can be both sustaining and burdensome. The words “Honor your father and your mother” and “a man shall leave his father and mother” can collide with each other in the consciences of the family members.

Hypothesis: the family's shared, unspoken question is also what God wants in this situation. As long as this question lives in the family members as commandments pitted against each other, the decision feels like disloyalty in either direction. In this form, faith paralyzes rather than informs.

A Hypothesis Put in a Metaphor

“It is as if the family were standing in the middle of a bridge. On one bank the mother is waiting, on the other the job and the home. The husband shuttles back and forth in the middle of the bridge, the wife clings to the pillar with the children — and the bridge holds precisely because no one steps off it.”

2.2 Working-Method Hypotheses

Putting things in order. When “the waves are crashing over” someone, the first step in the chaos is to drive in a few stakes: to separate the strands and put them in sequence. Creation, too, begins with the end of tohu va-vohu, the unordered primeval chaos.

Helping the request to be voiced. The woman's complaints are many, but her request has not yet been formulated. Even “I have no idea what is wrong with me” can be a starting request; an image or a symbol can help to put it into words.

Family pastoral care without the family. The pastor is talking with the young wife, but with circular questions and an empty chair, the perspectives of the husband, the mother-in-law, and the children can be present as well.

Multidirected partiality. All three adults — the daughter-in-law, the husband, and the mother-in-law — are suffering people. The pastoral counselor acknowledges the truth and pain of each of them without passing judgment on anyone; this is not a compromise but the inner stance that precedes compromise. [4]

The pastor does not decide. The decision to “go or stay” belongs to the couple. The pastoral counselor helps with weighing the options, with voicing fears, and with making the decision bearable.

Resource orientation. The pastor cannot change the external circumstances — the husband's work, the mother-in-law's nature. He can look for the inner and outer resources that make the situation more bearable.

The possibility of separate conversations. If the parties request it, there can later be separate conversations with the husband and the mother-in-law as well, and possibly a joint meeting. This demands particular attention from the pastoral counselor: he must represent the interests of each party equally.

Rituals of farewell and arrival. For the partings that recur every two weeks, the family can also be given a ritual form that gives the children a sense of security.

Connecting Joining, compliment, and positive connotation

3 Connecting: Joining, Compliment, and Positive Connotation

Attunement means tuning in to the other person's image of the world, of the human being, and of God. Recognition refers to a concrete, directly experienced observation, while positive connotation shows that what the client experiences as weakness or shame can also hold value. [5] In the congregational setting it is especially valuable that parishioners can “pour out” their troubles on the pastor: the very act of putting them into words already brings a little relief.

3.1 Joining — Attunement

Client: Pastor, I have no idea what is wrong with me. I just feel terrible, absolutely terrible.

Pastoral counselor: It's good that you came, and good that you can say it like this. You don't have to put your thoughts in order right now. Tell me whatever comes to mind — we'll look for the order in it together.

Client: My husband is working abroad, I'm here with the two little ones, and my mother-in-law is… I don't even know where to begin.

Pastoral counselor: I hear it as if a great deal had come down on you all at once. If there were an image for how you feel right now, what would it be?

Client: As if the waves were crashing over my head.

Pastoral counselor: Then today let's look at where there is a rock you can stand on. Would you like us to place all of this before God at the beginning of our conversation, in a short prayer?

Client: Yes. I couldn't pray right now, but if you do…

Pastoral counselor: Lord, here before you is this young wife, and with her her whole family. You see the waves too. Give us a little solid ground now. Amen.

3.2 Compliment — Concrete Recognition

Client: I don't even know anymore what I'm doing right. The children cry when their father leaves, and I cry with them.

Pastoral counselor: For a year and a half you've been carrying the everyday life alone with two small children. You traveled out to their father with both of them, even though you knew how hard the way back would be. To me, that shows a very loving and very brave mother.

Client: Brave? Desperate, more like.

Pastoral counselor: Desperation and courage sometimes come from the same place. And the fact that you came now, and that you bring your own difficulty — you're not complaining about your husband or your mother-in-law, but about the fact that you can't cope — that takes honesty.

3.3 Positive Connotation

Client: I'm ashamed to say it, but sometimes I'm angry at my husband for leaving. Even though I know he does it for us.

Pastoral counselor: Your anger shows how much you miss him. If you didn't miss him, you wouldn't be angry. Right now your anger is one of the voices of your love.

Client: And I'm also ashamed that I no longer want to talk to my mother-in-law. A Christian daughter-in-law shouldn't be like that.

Pastoral counselor: I hear that until now you have tried to honor her, even despite her hurtful remarks. The fact that your strength has run out now does not show the weakness of your faith but how long you held out. Someone who didn't want to be a good daughter-in-law wouldn't be ashamed of not managing it.

Client: Sometimes I wish we were all already there, abroad, and I didn't have to decide anything.

Pastoral counselor: In that wish is how very much you want to be together with your husband. And also that the weight of the decision is too great for one person. You don't have to carry it alone.

Goals and Contract Short-term goals, contract, and agreements

4 Short-Term Goals, Contract, and Agreements

4.1 Short-Term Goals

Help can begin only along the lines of a need the client has formulated. If the request is not yet clear, the short-term goal is precisely that it be born. [6] Jesus, too, asks the sufferer, “Do you want to be healed?” (John 5:6); helping requires a mandate. [7]

Pastoral counselor: Before we begin anything: what is it that you would most like to receive help with today?

Client: That you tell me whether we should go or stay.

Pastoral counselor: I understand that you would like that. I cannot make this decision in your place — but I can help you see more clearly everything that speaks for one option and for the other, and what you are afraid of. If by the end of today's conversation you felt the waves crashing over you a little less, what would that mean?

Client: That I would know where to start.

The short-term goals of the accompaniment:

Connection and holding. The young wife experiences a judgment-free space in which her anger, her shame, and her fear can also be voiced.

Order in the chaos. A few “stakes” emerge together from the heap of problems, and a priority order forms among them.

Her own request. Instead of “tell me what to do,” the wife formulates what she is asking for help with now.

Making the actors' perspectives visible. The perspectives of the husband, the mother-in-law, and the children also appear in the conversation.

Resources. What has helped so far during the difficult weeks comes to light: relationships, the congregation, her parents, faith.

Making the decision bearable. The question of going or staying is not a task to be settled in a single day but a process that can be walked through together.

4.2 Contract

We do not contract on a symptom: the pastor cannot undertake to “set the mother-in-law straight,” bring the husband home, or decide on the move. [8] The contract concerns what the client who is present can shape, and for which she asks for pastoral help.

Pastoral counselor: If I understand correctly, there are many strands: your husband's absence, the children, your mother-in-law, the question of moving. I suggest that over the next sessions we take them up one by one, and always begin with the one that weighs on you most. I cannot change your mother-in-law, and I will not make the decision in your place. What I can do is help so that you don't carry this alone, and so that your decision — whichever it turns out to be — is born not out of fear but out of shared deliberation. Does that suit you?

Client: Yes. And if my husband is home, could he come too?

Pastoral counselor: Gladly. It may also be that at some point we talk the three of us together. We'll decide that together later.

4.3 Agreements

Agreements provide a secure frame, and in such a chaotic situation they can be beneficial in themselves. [9]

Frame. Four or five sessions every two weeks, if possible also at times when the husband is home; a joint look back at the end of the process.

Confidentiality. What is said in the conversation will not be brought before the mother-in-law or the congregation. If the pastor later speaks with the mother-in-law or the husband as well, he does so only with the wife's knowledge, and he does not pass on either one's confidence to the other. [10]

Scripture, prayer, blessing. They discuss whether the wife wants shared prayer, Scripture, or blessing, and in what form.

Involving other family members. A joint conversation can come about only if everyone takes part freely; in that case the pastor represents the interests of every party equally.

Protecting the children. The adults' conflicts are not discussed in front of the children or through the children.

Homework. It is taken on voluntarily, and it is discussed even when it did not work out.

Pastoral counselor: When your husband comes home, would you like the three of us to pray together once for your decision?

Client: I would very much like that. He doesn't usually talk about these things, but perhaps it would work that way.

School-Based Analysis Two family therapy perspectives

5 The Case from the Perspective of Two Family Therapy Schools

5.1 Multigenerational Approach

The multigenerational perspective understands psychological events through the interactions between generations. Helm Stierlin regards three questions as key: how family relationships help or hinder a person in becoming an autonomous individual; what the bonding is like — too close, rejecting, or balanced; and what mandates and expectations the older generation passes on, which accompany the young as provisions for the journey or as a burden. [11]

Relational Individuation

The young family's becoming independent is not their concern alone: every step they take rearranges the mother-in-law's life as well, and vice versa. When a child becomes independent, the parents too must become independent in a new way.

Pastoral counselor: If you moved away, what would change in your mother-in-law's life?

Client: She would be left alone. Her life was her son, ever since… always.

Pastoral counselor: And what would change in your husband's life if his mother learned to live without him as well?

Client: Perhaps he could finally pay attention to our family.

Pastoral counselor: It seems that all of you would move one step forward — only each of you would be hurt by something. Your mother-in-law, too, has to learn to be the mother of a grown son.

Positive and Negative Reciprocity

Healthy reciprocity rests on mutual recognition; negative reciprocity sustains uncertainty through mutual devaluation. [12] In the relationship between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, negative reciprocity currently dominates: accusation and suspicion, answered by hurt feelings and withdrawal.

Pastoral counselor: Do you remember a period when you and your mother-in-law got along well?

Client: Before my husband left, it was bearable, at least. She looked after the children, and sometimes she even praised my cooking.

Pastoral counselor: What were you doing then that made it work?

Client: I asked her what she would like. Sometimes I just told her how things were with the children.

Pastoral counselor: What do you think would be the smallest sign with which you could start this circle again now — not because she deserves it, but because it would be easier for you too?

Binding and Expelling

The relationship between generations is determined by the dynamics of holding on and letting go. Too strong a binding hinders autonomy; expulsion leaves a person alone. The word “separation” is misleading: we always belong to our family of origin, and even a broken relationship still connects us. The question is whether the relationship is transformed or torn apart. [13]

Pastoral counselor: Your mother-in-law said: “I'll manage to die on my own, too.” What do you think she wanted to achieve with that?

Client: For my husband to feel guilty.

Pastoral counselor: Possibly. And what do you think she is afraid of?

Client: That she will lose her son.

Pastoral counselor: What would help her experience her son's moving away not as a loss but as a change?

Client: If she knew that we won't forget her. That we call her, and that the children talk to her too.

Delegation and Tradition

The older generation sends the young into life with mandates, with delegations. These can be provisions for the journey, but they can also become a knapsack full of heavy stones. [14]

Pastoral counselor: With what “mandate” did your husband set out into life from his mother?

Client: To look after her. To be the one she can always count on.

Pastoral counselor: Then it may be that your husband is now trying to meet two mandates at once: to be a good son and to be a good husband. And what did you receive from home about where a wife's place is?

Client: My mother always said: “Your place is where your husband is.”

Pastoral counselor: Two very different provisions for the journey. It is understandable that the two are now colliding between you.

Secrets and Family Myths

Family secrets and myths may once have served a protective function; the consultation is not an investigation but a clarification of what function a secret or myth serves today. [15] The suspicion that “women these days” are “running around” while the husband is away can also work as a family or generational myth.

Pastoral counselor: Have you ever heard a story in your husband's family about someone being away from their family?

Client: Maybe his grandfather went off to work somewhere. They always only half-say something about that.

Pastoral counselor: It may be that your mother-in-law's suspicion isn't really about you at all, but about an old fear that your family carries. That doesn't make her words any less hurtful, but perhaps it makes them less personal.

Pastoral-Psychological Implications

Community and uniqueness. Scripture sees the human being in relationship — “it is not good for the man to be alone” (Gen 2:18) — while baptism declares that every person is unique, because God accepts each one as his own. [16]

The past that reaches “to the thousandth generation.” The biblical expression for generational influence is that the sin of the fathers reaches to the third and fourth generation, while God's mercy reaches to the thousandth. A young family inherits not only burdens but also blessing. [17]

Delegation and being made in God's image. If family assignments are too strong, they distort the young person's free development and prevent them from becoming the one God created them to be. [18]

Blessing. Blessing can be a spiritual form of acknowledging the otherness of the other and of remaining in relationship: the affirmation that the other may be who they are. [19]

5.2 Structural Approach

Salvador Minuchin sees family disorders as a breakdown of order. He holds two principles to be decisive: the natural ranking of the generations, and the requirement that the groups within the family — the grandparents, the parents, and the children — be separated by boundaries that protect but do not shut off. Blurred boundaries lead to a fused, “family-mass”-like way of functioning, while boundaries that are too rigid lead to isolation. The structural helper examines the boundaries, the functioning of the subsystems, and the alliances. [20]

The Marital Subsystem Across Distance

The marital subsystem is the core of the family. If the couple spends only a few days together every two weeks, protecting their relationship calls for particular awareness.

Pastoral counselor: When your husband comes home, how much time is there for the two of you — not for the children, not for the relatives, but for you?

Client: Almost none. He arrives, we go to my mother-in-law's, the children come, and he's already heading back.

Pastoral counselor: And if, the next time he comes home, you set aside one evening just for the two of you, what would have to be arranged for that?

Client: Somebody would have to look after the children. My mother-in-law used to do that.

Pastoral counselor: Interesting: the very same person who would help your relationship is the one who is hardest for you right now. Who else could you ask for help?

The Boundary Between Generations

From the structural perspective, the grandparent generation may help, but may not direct the life of the young family. Separating help from interference is one of the keys to clarifying the boundary.

Pastoral counselor: If we drew a line, where would your family begin, and where would your mother-in-law's?

Client: I don't know. With us, everything has always been shared.

Pastoral counselor: What is it that you're glad to ask her help with, and what is it that you wouldn't want her to have a say in?

Client: She can look after the children. But where we live, that's for us to decide.

Pastoral counselor: That is a very clear boundary. Who could say this to her — you or your husband?

Client: My husband, rather. She wouldn't accept it from me.

Hierarchy and the Husband's Place

Natural hierarchy means that in a young family the parents decide about their own life. The husband's place in this hierarchy is beside his wife, not between his mother and his wife.

Pastoral counselor: When your mother-in-law speaks in a hurt way about the move, where does your husband stand?

Client: In the middle. He tries to calm both of us.

Pastoral counselor: What do you think your mother-in-law would feel if your husband once clearly stood by your side, while still speaking to her with love?

Client: She'd be offended. But maybe she would finally know that it doesn't depend on me.

Pastoral counselor: It may be that a clear boundary would in the end bring peace to all three of you.

Coalitions

The structural helper pays attention when family members ally against one another. A mother–son coalition against the wife, or an alliance of the daughter-in-law with her own parents against the mother-in-law, can equally burden the young family.

Pastoral counselor: Who talks with whom when the move comes up?

Client: I talk with my mother, my husband with his mother. Hardly with each other.

Pastoral counselor: It's as if you were both running back to your own “home base.” What would happen if, just once, you spoke with each other first, and only afterward with your parents?

The Subsystems and the Children

The children's subsystem needs protection: the adults' conflicts are not their concern, but an order for partings and arrivals that has been worked out together can give them security.

Pastoral counselor: How do the children say goodbye to their father when he leaves?

Client: They cry. He leaves quickly so that it won't be so hard.

Pastoral counselor: What if the farewell had an order that the children also know — a hug, a sentence, a shared prayer — and the arrival did too?

An Open System: The Family and the Outside World

The family's relationship with the outside world — the workplace, the congregation, another country — is also a structural question: a family that is too closed becomes isolated, and one that is too open loses the sustaining inner space that holds it together.

Pastoral counselor: Who in the congregation or the neighborhood can you count on when you are alone with the children?

Client: There's a mom from the mother-and-baby group. But I don't want to burden anyone.

Pastoral counselor: She might be glad if you asked. Accepting help is also a kind of boundary: an acknowledgment that you don't have to do everything alone.

Pastoral-Psychological Implications

He leaves his father and mother. The structural school's concept of the boundary finds a biblical parallel: “a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh” (Gen 2:24). Leaving here means not a breaking away but a new hierarchy: the new family becomes the primary relational unit.

Hierarchy as service. Family order, authority, rules, and loyalty are good only when they serve the flourishing, dignity, and being made in God's image of the family members' lives. [21]

An open system. A family that shuts itself in has difficulty renewing itself. This is true in the sense of faith as well: it is a resource for a family if it can look at itself also from God's side, from a higher vantage point. [22]

Further Interventions Reframing, question types, and pastoral interventions

6 Further Systemic Interventions

6.1 Reframing

Reframing places the “other side” of a negative statement alongside what the client sees; it does not correct but supplements. Every behavior can acquire meaning in its own context, and behind it there may also stand a capacity, a developmental step, or loyalty. [23] In the pastoral sense, it helps in recognizing the story of salvation within the story of suffering.

The Mother-in-Law's Accusations — As the Language of Lack

Client: She says I wasn't able to keep my husband by my side.

Pastoral counselor: It seems she misses her son very much as well. It's just harder for her to say so, so she says it to you. You miss the same thing: you your husband, she her son. This shared lack could even connect the two of you.

The Suspicion — As Maternal Protection

Client: She even says that I must be seeing other men.

Pastoral counselor: That is very hurtful, and you don't have to accept it. At the same time, I also hear in it a mother trying to protect her son, even if with the wrong means. Someone who has no fear for anyone has no reason to be suspicious.

“I'll Die Alone” — As a Cry for Help

Client: That sentence completely crushed my husband.

Pastoral counselor: It's as if your mother-in-law were saying: “I'm afraid I'll be left on my own.” This can be heard not as blackmail but also as a request. If it is the request that is heard in it, it can be answered in a way that doesn't require you to stay at home because of it.

The Husband “Between Two Fires” — As Loyalty

Client: My husband doesn't stand up for me.

Pastoral counselor: I see him wanting to remain loyal to both of you. This is very hard for him right now, but the same loyalty that paralyzes him now is also the reason you chose him: he doesn't abandon those he loves.

The Distance — As a Sacrifice for the Family

Client: Sometimes I feel that money matters more to him than we do.

Pastoral counselor: It may be that he is away precisely because you matter to him. His absence is a wearying form of his love. That doesn't mean you aren't allowed to miss him.

The Inability to Decide — As Responsibility

Client: I can't decide. I'm always afraid I'll decide wrongly.

Pastoral counselor: Someone who weighs things this carefully is not frivolous. You think of everyone: the children, your husband, even your mother-in-law. Your hesitation is responsibility — only right now you feel responsible, alone, for far too many people.

The Two Commandments — As Two Blessings

Client: I was taught that you have to honor your parents. But also that a man leaves his father and mother. Now which one is true?

Pastoral counselor: Perhaps both — only in different ways. Honor doesn't mean that you have to live nearby, and leaving doesn't mean that love ceases. It may be that the two verses are not fighting against each other but protecting the same thing from two sides: the life of the young family and the dignity of the elderly mother.

6.2 Types of Systemic Questions

Questions can be chosen according to whether the pastoral counselor wants to orient or to encourage change; in a single question we name only one aspect, and we leave enough time for the answer. [24]

Linear (Orienting) Question

Pastoral counselor: Since when have you felt that you can't take it anymore?

Client: Since last winter. When the little one was sick and I was alone with her through the nights.

Questions About the Order of the Problems

Pastoral counselor: If we had to drive a few stakes into this swamp, what would they be?

Client: My husband's absence. My mother-in-law. The children. The move.

Pastoral counselor: Which one do you feel is the most pressing? And which would be the easiest to start with?

Circular Questions

Pastoral counselor: If your husband were sitting here now, what would he say he misses most?

Pastoral counselor: How do you think your mother-in-law tells her friends about what is happening in the family now?

Pastoral counselor: If we asked your older child, what would he or she say about what it's like when Dad leaves?

Pastoral counselor: Who would suffer most if you moved away? And who if you stayed?

Pastoral counselor: For whom would it be easiest if your husband came home? And for whom would it be hardest, financially or in some other way?

Hypothetical Question — If the Husband Came Home

Pastoral counselor: Suppose your husband packs up tomorrow and comes home. What would your life together look like from the day after?

Client: Well… we wouldn't have an apartment. He would have to work much more here for the same money.

Pastoral counselor: And would your mother-in-law get more of her son?

Client: Maybe not. But at least he'd be close.

Reflexive Question

Pastoral counselor: I'm sure that someone who has gone through so many months with two small children has already figured out a lot of things that help. What is it that has held you up so far?

Pastoral counselor: I'm sure there is something you can respect in your mother-in-law too — even now. What would that be?

Scaling Question

Pastoral counselor: On a scale from one to ten, how much do you want to move away right now? And how much are you afraid of it?

Pastoral counselor: What number do you think your husband would give to the same question?

Pastoral counselor: What would it take for your fear to go down by one notch?

Exception-Finding Question

Pastoral counselor: Was there a homecoming that went well? What was different then?

Client: When we went out to visit him in the empty apartment. It felt as if we were a real family.

Pastoral counselor: What was there in those few days that could also be created here at home?

Miracle Question

Pastoral counselor: Suppose a miracle happens tonight, and by morning everything that is now closing in over your head is resolved. What would you notice first?

Client: That I wake up calm. That I don't have to think about what my mother-in-law will say.

Pastoral counselor: And where would you wake up — at home or in Munich?

Client: I don't know… Maybe it doesn't even matter. We'd just be together.

Future-Oriented Question

Pastoral counselor: Imagine that ten years from now your children are grown. What would you like them to tell about this period? What did they learn from it about how decisions are made in a family?

6.3 Pastoral Interventions: Scripture, Prayer, Blessing

Scripture speaks when it connects with the client's question and does not close it off; prayer is authentic when it is truly addressed to God and is not a veiled piece of advice to the client. [25]

Ruth and Naomi

Client: My mother-in-law and I simply can't come to terms.

Pastoral counselor: There is a special story in the Bible about a mother-in-law and a daughter-in-law: Naomi and Ruth. Naomi also lost her husband and her sons in a foreign land, and she felt bitter — she said not to call her Naomi but Mara, that is, bitter. Ruth stayed with her all the same. What do you think might have helped them?

Client: That Ruth didn't leave her alone. But with us it's the other way around: I don't know whether I have to stay with her.

Pastoral counselor: That's true. I'm not asking whether you must do as Ruth did. I'm asking: what was behind Naomi's bitterness, and what helped her to be able to speak a blessing again in the end?

A Blessing for the Journey

Pastoral counselor: The psalm says: “The Lord will keep you from all harm; he will watch over your life. The Lord will watch over your coming and going, both now and forevermore.” (Ps 121:7–8) What do you think it would mean if your husband and the children said this together every time he sets out?

Client: That he isn't just leaving, that someone is watching over him while he's away.

Prayer for the Decision

Pastoral counselor (prayer): Lord, two roads lie before this family, and on both there is loss. We do not ask you to decide in their place, but give them wisdom and patience with one another. Hold the elderly mother as well in her fear, and watch over the children. Amen.

Substitutionary Hope

Pastoral counselor: Right now you feel that whatever you decide, someone will suffer. That may well be so. But my impression is that the way you think of everyone in this difficult situation carries God's blessing. If you cannot see a way out right now, then for a while I will believe on your behalf that there will be one.

6.4 Transfer Question and Closing Intervention

The closing intervention is a brief, differentiated summary: in the client's own language it names the themes, highlights the constructive elements and what still awaits resolution, and does not open a new conversation. [26]

Pastoral counselor: A great deal came up today: your husband's absence, the children's goodbyes, your mother-in-law's hurtful remarks, and the question of moving. You spoke very bravely, about your anger and your shame as well. We found a few pilings amid the waves, and now you know what you would like to begin with: making sure that the next time your husband comes home, the two of you have an evening alone together. The decision is still open, and it doesn't need to be made today.

Pastoral counselor: What will you tell your husband about today's conversation? And what do you think he will say to that?

Exercises The dialogues are edited learning examples, not new case data

7 Exercises with Dialogue Examples

Supervision Supervision considerations

8 Supervision Considerations

8.1 Perplexity as Information

The pastor is perplexed and torn between two fronts. What appears in the helper as a feeling may point to what the client does not say, or to a recurring relational pattern; this is an important signal, but not proof. [46] Supervision examines how far the pastor's feeling reflects the state of the family — the husband's being squeezed, the mother-in-law's despair, the wife's paralysis — and how far it reflects the pastor's own life story.

8.2 “How Does This Case Affect Me?” — Being Affected and Becoming Entangled

The first question in every supervision is: how does the case affect me? [47] The pastor may be touched by their own mother-in-law/daughter-in-law experience, by a child or relative working abroad, by the loneliness of their own elderly parent. The question is which character they identify with more easily, and from which one they find themselves growing distant.

8.3 The Test of Multidirectional Partiality

The greatest temptation is for the pastor to rush to the defense of the daughter-in-law (“I know your daughter-in-law, she's a decent woman!”). Such a defense violates the principle of multidirectional partiality, and the mother-in-law would experience it as the pastoral counselor not being loyal to her. [48] Multidirectional advocacy is not approval of hurtful behavior, but the acknowledgment that everyone has entitlements and wounds.

8.4 Let Us Not Rush Toward Solutions

In a complex situation the temptation is strong for the helper to flood the client with practical ideas (tourist attractions, a language course, a home loan). The time may come to widen the options too, but in the middle of chaos, ideas can become yet another burden. The client's life is not the realization of the helper's plan: she decides what to do and when. [49]

8.5 Firm Ground Under the Pastoral Counselor's Feet

Before the pastor goes deeper, they must clarify for themselves the theological, ethical, and psychological questions of the situation; otherwise they may become the “ball” of the emotions streaming from the family. The tension between the two commandments is such a question. In a fallen, divided world, everyone has dual commitments that pull against each other; these can be taken on, but they cannot always be fulfilled without remainder. Clarifying one's pastoral creed is part of professional identity. [50]

8.6 Don't Put a Bug in Her Ear

The question of jealousy can become a strong consideration in the pastoral counselor, even though in the description it appears only as the mother-in-law's suspicion. If the helper steers the conversation in this direction, they may create a problem that was not present before. Continuous self-reflection is one of the pastoral counselor's most important tasks. The observer is part of the situation: their questions shape what becomes sayable. [51]

8.7 The Male and the Female Pastoral Counselor

In the conversation it was clearly visible that the male participants would have steered the discussion toward the pragmatic, rational solution, and the female participant toward the experience of connection, closeness, and availability. Neither constellation is better in itself; what is worth watching is whether the gender of the helper and of the client makes it easier or harder to say certain things. [52] The same sentence — for example, “even when he comes home, he won't be there more for you” — can mean something different to a male and a female ear. [53] The pastoral counselor can say, naturally and transparently, that they are responding as a man or as a woman, and that the perspective of the other gender may complement their own. [54]

8.8 Not a “Mighty Fortress” — The Helper's Own Feelings

The trap: “I have to stay strong right now, I must not be sad, because I am the helper.” The pastoral counselor is not a mighty fortress, but a human being whom God has sent so that the other person will not be left alone with their pain. “A mighty fortress is our God” — not the helper. If they shut off their emotions, they shut off the way to the encounter. The religious ideal of service demands not unlimited strength, but responsible and communal help. [55]

8.9 A Case Discussion with Oneself

In the conversation, after the role-play, the participants experienced how suffocating the family's deadlock is: they would gladly have stepped out of the role. The family has no “studio” from which it could step out. The feelings and tensions that surface in a case discussion often mirror the family's inner dynamics. [56] The pastoral counselor's living relationship with God, prayer life, and supervisory support are the indispensable foundation of the work. [57]

Pastoral Psychology Pastoral-psychological analysis

9 Pastoral-Psychological Analysis

9.1 Behind Every Question of Life Lies a Question of Faith

One of the basic tenets of pastoral psychology, following Boisen, is: “Behind every question of life lies a question of faith, and behind every question of faith lies a question of life”; the two can be understood only together. [58] The question of “to go or to stay” is at once practical — housing, work, school, language — and a matter of faith: to whom are we faithful, what does God want, where is our home. According to Tillich, whatever is indispensable to a person's existence becomes the object of “ultimate concern,” and this surfaces most strongly in transitions. [59] This family's ultimate concern may sound like this: will we remain a family if we are scattered?

9.2 Two Commandments — in a Fallen, Divided World

“Honor your father and your mother” (Exod 20:12) and “a man leaves his father and mother” (Gen 2:24): in this family the two verses strain against each other. Pastoral thinking does not choose between them, but accepts that we live in a fallen, divided world in which we have dual, mutually straining commitments; these can be taken on, but they cannot always be fulfilled without remainder.

The Ten Commandments can also be read as signposts on the way of a free life, as if before each sentence were written: “if you want to be free…”. A command must be obeyed blindly, and thereby lifts the burden of decision; a recommendation, by contrast, counts on the adult person weighing things responsibly. In Paul's words: “the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life” (2 Cor 3:6). [60] Honoring one's parents thus does not mean that the young family must live next door to the mother-in-law, and leaving does not mean that the son renounces his mother. Even on the cross, Jesus provided for his mother (John 19:26–27) — and in the process completed his own road.

Pastoral counselor: What would it mean to you to honor your mother-in-law — while at the same time choosing your own family?

Client: That I don't speak badly of her to the children. That we call her every Sunday. That if she gets sick, we don't leave her alone.

Pastoral counselor: That is a great deal. Perhaps this is the honor — and not that you always live right next to her.

9.3 Ruth and Naomi — The Biblical Story of a Mother-in-Law and a Daughter-in-Law

The Book of Ruth is the only biblical book that is about the relationship of a mother-in-law and a daughter-in-law. Naomi moved with her husband and two sons to a foreign land, Moab, to make a living; there she lost her husband and her sons. In her bitterness she said: “Do not call me Naomi; call me Mara, for the Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me” (Ruth 1:20). Yet her daughter-in-law, Ruth, stayed with her: “Where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God” (Ruth 1:16).

The story is not a prescription for today's family, but a rich mirror. It shows that emigration and loss also bring the questions of faith to the surface; that behind a bitter mother-in-law there may stand grief and fear; and that the relationship of mother-in-law and daughter-in-law can become a blessing as well. At the end of the story Naomi takes her grandchild into her lap, and the neighbor women say that your daughter-in-law “is more to you than seven sons” (Ruth 4:15). The pastoral-psychological reading does not ask the daughter-in-law to be Ruth, but looks for what could help the mother-in-law to become Naomi again from Mara.

9.4 Going — Exodus, Abraham, and Being a Stranger

The Bible knows many stories in which people set out on a journey for the sake of a livelihood, a promise, or because of persecution: Abraham (“go from your country, your kindred, and your father's house,” Gen 12:1), Jacob's sons in Egypt, Naomi in Moab. Religion is narrative: what shapes the present of a people or a family is whether, in the story of the wandering, it remembers the loss or the deliverance, the preservation. [61]

One of the risks of moving is being a stranger: the lack of language, culture, and relationships. The biblical tradition places the stranger under God's special protection, and reminds Israel that it was itself once a stranger (Exod 22:20). For someone who is now afraid to stay, that fear is not unbelief: fear has a real object, and faith does not mean the absence of fear. [62] In the Book of Isaiah, God says: “Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth — do you not perceive it?” (Isa 43:19) One condition of growth is that we notice that something new has begun. [63]

Pastoral counselor: If you imagine living abroad with your family, what do you fear most?

Client: That I won't understand what they're saying. That my children will learn German sooner than I do, and I'll be the stranger in my own family.

Pastoral counselor: That is a very real fear. The Bible says that God watches over the stranger in a special way. Who do you think could be the first person there to take you in?

9.5 Decision and Discernment

The tradition of spiritual life speaks, in connection with decisions, of the “discernment of thoughts” (diakrisis): recognizing which thoughts come from a good source, which from a bad one, and which merely from ourselves. The tradition proposes not suppressing bad thoughts but replacing them with something good, with Scripture, with prayer, and this requires the support of an experienced companion. [64] In a decision, fear, guilt, and the expectations of others all find a voice; discernment helps the decision arise not from these, but from the family's own conviction.

Sentences that appeal to God carry a particular weight: if the pastor were to say “as God's will” that they should go or stay, the family would hear it as the final word, and this would take away from them the responsibility and freedom of the decision. [65] Respecting the freedom of decision, however, does not mean that the helper leaves them on their own: the helper can think through the consequences with them and stay with them in the uncertainty, but must not make their help dependent on what they decide. [66]

Pastoral counselor: When you think about moving away, what feeling stays in your heart — unrest or peace?

Client: Fear. But underneath it, something… like relief.

Pastoral counselor: And when you think about staying?

Client: A familiar calm. But underneath it, sadness.

Pastoral counselor: It is worth bringing these before God, and sharing them with your husband too. You don't have to decide today.

9.6 Transcendent Loyalty — Bearing Irresolvable Conflicts of Loyalty

Conflicts of loyalty are present for every character in this family: the husband is torn between his mother and his wife, the wife between her husband and her own security, the mother-in-law between her son's well-being and her own loneliness. An inner, mature religiosity can better bear the contradictions of life and the loyalty conflicts that cannot be resolved, because it believes in a “transcendent loyalty”: in the faithfulness of a divine power outside the human being, which accepts the person together with their dilemmas and conflicts. [67]

This theological thought is unburdening: family members do not have to be perfectly loyal to everyone, because there is someone who is faithful to them even in their dilemma. The path of faith leads from conformity toward personal conviction; the pastoral counselor does not press for this, because “God gives the growth” (1 Cor 3:6).

9.7 The Mother-in-Law's Dignity, Aging, and Loneliness

In the story the mother-in-law appears as an “unpleasant” character whose words hurt. For the pastoral counselor, however, her human dignity is just as important as that of the complaining daughter-in-law. The fundamental aim of pastoral care, regardless of the client's topic, is the care of the person's dignity, which derives from being made in the image of God. [68]

The mother-in-law is also living through a natural life-stage crisis: she faces the tasks of aging, of taking stock, and of ego integration, which carry the danger of despair. The turning points of the life cycle rearrange roles, boundaries, and relationships; yet old age is not only a series of losses, but also a time of experiences and new possibilities. [69] Behind suspicion and accusation there may lie a deeper reality: it is easier to think about what the daughter-in-law is doing behind our backs than to face the fact that I am lonely, and that I will die alone.

Böszörményi-Nagy asks the helper to see, even in the person who tries to get satisfaction from others for the wrongs done to them, the wounded human being — without forgetting their responsibility. According to Christian faith, God condemns the sin, not the person, and asks the same of us: “Do not judge, so that you may not be judged!” (Matt 7:1). [70]

Mother-in-law: But Reverend, what kind of woman is that? She let her husband go away!

Pastoral counselor: You know, your daughter-in-law misses her husband in exactly the same way you miss your son — only differently. You miss your son; she misses her husband and the father of her children. That absence is something you share.

Mother-in-law: What else would I be occupied with here on my own, if not this?

Pastoral counselor: That was a very honest sentence. I hear that you feel very alone. What I respect in you is that you dare to say out loud both your protective motherly love and your fear of loneliness. What do you think would help you now — not your son, not your daughter-in-law, but you?

9.8 Suspicion, Trust, and Shame

Suspicion — regardless of whether it has any basis in reality — is humiliating for the daughter-in-law. Shame concerns not an act but the whole person, and whoever shames someone exercises power — in a community of believers this wounds especially deeply. [71] Trust is not a state of calm but an expectation built on experienced relationships, one that also takes a risk; it cannot be demanded, but in the presence of a predictable, boundary-keeping person it can be rebuilt. [72]

The question of trust can also arise in the couple's relationship because of the distance. The pastoral counselor does not bring it in from outside; but if the wife or the husband raises it, the conversation also makes room, without judgment, for jealousy to be spoken. Jewish-Christian ethics places the striving for honesty at the center, but honesty does not mean a self-disclosure that loses all boundaries; the capacity for shame is the guardian of the dignity grounded in being made in the image of God. [73]

9.9 Being Torn Apart as Loss — Anticipatory Grief

The farewell that is repeated every two weeks is a recurring loss for the family members. One can grieve not only for the dead but also for a lost form of relationship, a shared everyday life. For a person setting out into a new situation, the images of Scripture can also be companions — the wandering in the wilderness, the exodus — and so can the blessing for the journey: “The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in, from this time on and forevermore” (Ps 121:8). [74] Whichever version — moving or staying — involves loss: in one it is the loss of home and the grandparents, in the other the loss of life together.

Families often try to avoid the pain of parting by separating quickly and quietly (“he's leaving quickly so that it won't be so hard”). From the pastoral point of view, giving form to a farewell does not increase the pain but makes it bearable. A good ritual does not cover up the loss but gives it a frame in which it can be lived through. [75]

9.10 The Children — Who “Know Something”

According to the church father Irenaeus, “the glory of God is the living human being,” and this shows itself more directly in children. Jesus rebukes those who want to send the children away, and blesses them (Mark 10:13–16). [76] The five-year-old and the three-year-old are not decision-makers, but they are affected: their experience — the farewells, the waiting, the absence of their grandmother and father — deserves attention in its own right. The pastoral counselor's question: how can the children's voice be present without their ending up in the middle of the adults' loyalty struggle?

9.11 Individuation and Blessing — The Mother-in-Law's Blessing on Her Son's Family

In a pastoral-psychological reading, baptism confirms in advance the later separation: the child does not belong to the parents but to God, and is only entrusted to the parents. The parents' task is therefore to support their child's own path for as long as the child needs it. [77] In the blessing, a parent can experience that their child is “in even better hands than their own,” and this makes letting go easier; in the spirit of mutuality, the child may also bless their parents. [78]

In a later joint conversation the question might arise: how could the mother-in-law bless her son's family, whether they set out or stay? And how could the son bless his mother, who will be left alone? In this situation the blessing can be the counterpoint to anger and blackmail: it does not say, “Go on then, I'll just die alone,” but rather: “Go in God's name, and I too will remain in God's hands.”

Mother-in-law: I don't know if I could say something like that.

Pastoral counselor: You don't have to now. But when the time comes, what would you say to your son as he sets out?

Mother-in-law: That he should take care of himself. That he should call. That God should bless him.

9.12 Power, Powerlessness, and the “Good Steward” Outlook

The mother-in-law's emotional blackmail is also the exercise of power by a powerless person: powerlessness turns into power. Power, however, is always received power, which everyone in the family — woman and man, child and elder — has received; what is differentiated is the sphere of responsibility. The “good steward” cares responsibly for those entrusted to them. [79] The pastoral question is not how the mother-in-law can be “defeated,” but how she can receive a real, non-blackmailing role: as a grandmother, as a praying parent, as the keeper of the family's memory.

9.13 Forgiveness as the Release of a Debt

The daughter-in-law carries grievances toward the mother-in-law, and the mother-in-law feels that her daughter-in-law has “taken” her son from her. Forgiveness is not the willed removal of a feeling but the letting go of what the other owes: renouncing the repayment of respect, trust, and love; and it always refers to a particular offense. [80] Forgiveness cannot be demanded at the expense of the one who was hurt, and reconciliation is a separate process. [81]

Pastoral counselor: What does your mother-in-law owe you?

Client: An apology. So that she would believe I'm not doing anything wrong.

Pastoral counselor: You don't have to forget that. But could you let go of expecting it from her right now? Not for her sake — but so that you don't have to live with this debt every day.

9.14 Bonding or Becoming Bound

One possible origin of the word religion is religare, to bind together. Both the over- and the under-functioning of attachment are familiar: excessive bondedness can lead to fanaticism, and the lack of attachment to a rootless, lonely religiosity; individuals, families, and communities must always seek the balance anew. [82] This holds for family attachment too: the mother-in-law inclines toward binding, the wife's parents toward letting go. The task of the young family is to develop an attachment that is not being put in chains but a safety net. [83]

9.15 Order in Chaos — Creation as Ordering

According to the symbolism of the creation story, separation is decisive in the first days, so that in the end an ordered unity, a cosmos, may be born; boundaries are not the enemies of life but its conditions. [84] In this case the first step of pastoral care is almost literally this: the tohu va-vohu, the ordering of chaos. Separating the problems, dealing with each “day” separately, is not a technical device but a creation-theological movement: out of chaos a livable order is born. In the face of a paralyzing heap of problems, creativity begins where the chaos ends.

9.16 Bearing One Another's Burdens — Three Suffering People

One of the basic formulas of the conversation: in this story there are three suffering people, and there is no winning position. The mother-in-law suffers from loneliness and aging, the wife from being torn apart and from the burdens, the husband from the distance and from being ground down between the two women. Pastoral care is not advice-giving but, in the purest biblical sense, bearing one another's burdens (Gal 6:2). A comforting presence does not deny the loss, does not break off the relationship, and does not hurry; Christian comfort is not greater because it has an answer for everything. [85]

9.17 The “Good Enough” Solution

If the helper looks for a solution in which everyone is completely happy, it will not work. One has to find a “good enough” path that can be lived with, without lying to ourselves that it is the most perfect solution. Whoever can appreciate the “good enough” makes peace with their creaturely fragmentariness, and is freed from the illusion of omnipotence and from the compulsion toward perfection that chokes life. [86] Accepting fragmentariness is not passivity but the distinction between what can be changed and what cannot. [87]

9.18 The Congregation as a Support System

The family is a “congregation's young family.” The congregation is a community of faith, but also a human system, in which norms and communication patterns shape the members' experience. [88] In more and more congregations there are families in which one of the parents works abroad. Diaconal attention can be concrete here: a mother-and-baby group, a sibling who takes on childcare, a prayer fellowship for those who are far away. Help is not humiliating when the person in need becomes not a project but a partner. [89] At the same time, the pastor must pay attention to multiple roles: the mother-in-law, the daughter-in-law, and the husband may all be members of the congregation, and confidentiality is particularly sensitive here. [90]

9.19 Hope and the Next Step

Hope is more than optimism: it can live even when a good outcome is uncertain. [91] A question about the future helps only if it is neither an interrogation nor a disguised piece of advice; and instead of the big solution, noticing even a small but real change can open up the future. [92] The family's next step is not the final decision, but an evening spent together as a couple, a prayer said together, a farewell ritual with the children.

9.20 The Pastoral Counselor as the “Image and Likeness” of God

The pastoral relationship strives to give an earthly, fragmentary sign of the unconditional acceptance with which God receives the suffering person. [93] In this case that means the pastor can accept at once the exhausted daughter-in-law, the husband ground down between two fires, and the accusing, lonely mother-in-law — the being made in the image of God of all three. The pastoral counselor is not a strong fortress; they are a human being whom God has sent so that no one is left alone with their pain. This is also the aim of the closing intervention: to make the client aware of what is worthy of recognition before human beings and before God.

Further Reflection Questions for further reflection

10 Questions for Further Reflection

Between two commandments: Where do I experience, in my own life, the tension between honoring parents and loyalty to my own family? How do I carry this duality before God? [94]

Multidirected partiality: Which character in this family would my heart be drawn to, and whom would I judge more easily? How could I love all three of them? [95]

Not a strong fortress: When do I try to appear strong as a helper, and what does the encounter lose because of it? [96]

Through male and female eyes: With what kind of “wiring” do I approach a dilemma like this — do I look for a solution, or for connection? What can I learn from the perspective of the other gender? [97]

Blessing and letting go: Whom should I let go of, and whom should I bless, so that I can walk my own path — or so that they can walk theirs? [98]

Being at a loss: What do I usually do with my own being at a loss — do I suppress it, or use it as information? [99]

Notes and Source References for the Analysis

Hézser Gábor – Krasznay Mónika. 2026. A rendszerszemléletű családkonzultáció és család-lelkigondozás kézikönyve. Budapest: Harmat. ISBN 978-963-288-951-1.

Case data Summary of the case material as presented

1 Summary and the Pastoral Situation

The case is brought by a hospital nurse about an 83-year-elderly woman, by her account terminally ill with cancer, who used to work as an accountant in a managerial position. The nurse reports severe pain that is not easing adequately; this does not mean that every possibility of pain relief has been exhausted. Day after day the patient asks: “Why won't they let me die?”

Her children, visiting her, respond with desperate encouragement and religious platitudes (“the good Lord will help,” “the good Lord knows when to take you home”) — and after the visits the elderly woman suffers even more. As a believer, she is by now uncertain even whether her life is in the hands of her Creator or in those of the “gods in white coats.” The grandchildren are teenagers.

The nurse who gives the account experiences considerable exhaustion and helplessness: she loves her vocation, but is less and less able to bear the strain, and asks: “Who will tell me what to do?” This calls for attention, but it is no substitute for assessing her condition. In the conversation she is the client; we know the situation of the patient and her family from her telling.

Transcript The edited text of the conversation; the speaker's name is shown at every turn

The Edited Transcript of the Conversation

Recording of the Conversation

Péter: Now we come to the discussion of a completely different case. It is different in several respects, although there may be common features. The case was shared with us by a nurse. Let's go through the story, and afterwards I'm curious to hear your thoughts through a pastoral counselor's eyes.

One of the returning patients on our ward is an 83-year-elderly woman, a former accountant who once worked in a managerial post. She is terminally ill with a tumor. Until now we managed to keep her pain under control, but unfortunately that is no longer the case. We do what we can, but it is hard to bear how little that is.

On the ward there is not a day when she doesn't ask the doctor, the nurse, anyone she talks to: “Why won't they let me die?” It's hard to respond to that, because I don't know the answer myself. But that is not the only hard thing. I shudder when I see her with her visitors. Her daughter and her son come, sometimes with a spouse. She can hardly complain to them before they start with the encouragement, the hoping. More than once I heard her daughter turning religious: “Don't be afraid, the good Lord always helps,” and that “the good Lord will know when He wants to take you home.” After the visits the elderly woman suffers even more; you can't help noticing it. Once she told me that she is a believer, that she and God had got along well until now, that she had been able to feel the world from up there, from above. Now she no longer knows whether her life is in the hands of her Creator or in those of the “gods in white coats.”

The grandchildren are big teenagers. I was on duty once when they came. They stayed only a short while. In the corridor the girl burst out: “What are these people doing to Grandma here? It's all inhuman. Isn't there a single normal person here who would understand?” The boy just stayed silent. Her children swear in the nurses' room at every visit how wonderful the doctors are, that she is in the best place here. They take her home, and soon the ambulance brings her back, and everything starts over. Sometimes I already think of leaving the profession, which I otherwise love with all my heart, but I can bear it less and less. Who will tell me what to do?

Gábor: Well, yes...

Mónika: Then it seems — in fact, it's clear — that the nurse who is sharing this is our client, and it is not the family or the grandmother that we have to provide pastoral care for right now.

Gábor: Definitely!

Mónika: I'm not saying that the family doesn't need it, or that work couldn't be done there too, if they wanted it. But here it is the nurse who formulates her own problem and asks for help with it. Although it is a question whether she is talking exclusively about her own problem.

Péter: That's a good question: there is a case within the case here — is the nurse the client, or is she the pastoral counselor who has some role in the story?

Mónika: That is also a point worth thinking further about, but if we start from the assumption that the nurse is the person receiving pastoral care, then her situation is that she has to face such dramatic cases. And at the end she asks, of course: “Who will tell me what to do?” We would need to make this more concrete: what does she mean? Is she asking for advice about this family situation as it was described, or about her own life situation, about the fact that she, too, finds it hard to bear all this? Or perhaps she is asking for help with how she could help this family? How did you understand it, Gábor?

Gábor: Before we touch any of it, let's try to grasp the whole context. There is a nurse, a dying elderly woman, her son, daughter, daughter-in-law, son-in-law, grandchildren — everyone is affected. The one presenting the case to us is the nurse. We see the picture through her glasses; her daughter or her son would probably tell it completely differently. To that extent I follow your thought, Mónika: the nurse is our informant here. She is the one reporting to us on the situation.

Mónika: The way she ends her account — “Sometimes I already think of leaving the profession, which I otherwise love with all my heart, and that is exactly why I can bear it less and less. Who will tell me what to do?” — clearly points, for me, to her own existential life situation. The question here is no longer only what should happen with the elderly woman, but how she herself, as a helper, can stay sound in spirit in this profession.

I think it is a good idea to divide this pastoral process with the nurse into two separate series of conversations, or at least into two clearly distinguishable foci. One is her commitment to her vocation and the risk of burnout that she is experiencing; the other is the concrete cluster of professional and ethical dilemmas that she is confronted with in this family situation — and presumably in many other similar situations.

The latter reaches far beyond this one case: this set of questions is about where the end of life lies, what it really means to “let someone die,” and what the “protection of life” means today in such a mechanized health care system. It may be that, in the end, these three questions melt into one enormous question.

Péter: So which pair of glasses should we put on first? It is very important that we not mix the levels, because then we get lost in the details.

Mónika: I suggest that we stay with what the nurse has laid before us: let's examine the case from her perspective, through her emotional burden.

Gábor: So let's look at the whole thing from the nurse's side. Part of the full picture is a painful ethical question — one that can at last be spoken aloud today, yet remains entirely unresolved socially and professionally: the matter of euthanasia and the dignity of dying.

We see that the woman feels precisely that her time has come — but today's health care “machinery” is often such that it is hard to die. Even when the person would already be ready for it. And the nurse works day after day in this tension: she sees the “omnipotence” in white coats, she sees the family's helpless hoping, and she feels the tormenting contrast stretched between the patient's inner knowing and the institutional protocols. This tension is what is tearing her apart. This is the point from which we should start in the pastoral care.

Péter: A short story by Móricz came to my mind — Tragedy — in which the old peasant, in the poor, starving village, decides that his time has come; they cook him a “last supper,” and he goes up into the mountains to die there, because he can no longer bear the burden. We see this there from the little boy's point of view: the child doesn't understand why his grandfather is getting such a fine dinner while everyone else is going hungry. There the family meets that dramatic necessity by which letting go becomes a kind of selfless act.

Gábor: Yes, there the driving force was a compelling economic reason, whereas here, in our case, the achievements of medicine and the family's anxiety are mixed together. There poverty was the “judge,” while here it is that modern technology has taken over control of life and death.

Mónika: But let's stay with the story of our nurse: here we don't know where the boundary lies. How can a dying person know today that their time has truly come? What is the point at which medicine no longer protects life, but merely prolongs the process of dying artificially?

This is a theologically exciting question as well: is the progress of science perhaps part of divine providence, pushing out the boundaries of human life, or is it already a kind of rebellion against the order of nature, when we keep someone alive “artificially” whose body would already let go?

Don't let us get tangled up in the endless ethical debate about euthanasia, because that would only distract attention from the suffering of our nurse. The protection of life is common ground, but in concrete dying this protection often tips over into the forced prolongation of the phase of dying. I once heard a striking, though thought-provoking statement: “Dying is no longer part of life, but of death.” If the doctor swore an oath to protect life, then is the forced stretching out of the stage of dying contrary to that oath?

Gábor: That is the key question! You see, the behavior of the son and the daughter — that convulsive, religious deflection — probably springs precisely from this inner struggle. If they tell themselves: “this is still life,” then they have to do everything, switch on every machine. But if they once dared to say: “this is already the process of death, which must be accompanied with reverence,” then perhaps they could let their mother go.

This is the nurse's dilemma too: she sees death, she sees the necessity of letting go, while the family expects the miracle from the “gods in white coats.” This duality is what makes her so helpless. Perhaps the first step of the pastoral work could be to relieve the nurse of the burden that she would have to solve this theological and ethical knot. She is “only” a human being who is present at another human being's dying. She doesn't have to defeat death; she has to stay beside the dying person.

Mónika: You're right, let's not get into deep, theoretical debates. Let's stay with the concrete, very human problem the nurse has described. Our most important observation is that the relatives actually do not want to acknowledge the dying. The “comforting” sentences, the hoping, the religious deflection all serve so that they themselves do not have to face the loss.

Yet a dying person needs to be able to take stock of their life, to talk about their funeral, about closure — this preparation is the last, very important part of their life. If those around them fend this off with a prohibition of the “we must not talk about this” kind, that is not comfort, but a form of emotional isolation.

Gábor: Exactly. And at this point our task splits in two. If I were the one to decide, I would much rather talk with the son and the daughter than with the nurse herself. Their task, after all, is letting go, while ours is “only” accompanying.

The content of the conversation with them would be: “What would you still like to say to your mother that you haven't said so far? What would you still like to hear from her?” If the clinging is this convulsive, there is a reason for it: the relationship is not yet finished, there is still something there to give and to receive. These are terribly hard but cathartic conversations, which can help them reach the point of letting go.

Mónika: By contrast, the nurse's situation is different. She can find something to hold onto in the concrete nursing tasks. In her professional role, in her job description, she can find a kind of “safety net.” She doesn't have to decide about life or death — her job is pain relief, physical care, ensuring cleanliness. This structure, this scope of duties, can be a kind of lifebuoy for her amid the inner struggles of the soul.

Gábor: Yes, the nurse is the “human bridge” between the two worlds. The family is still denying, the patient would already go, and she stands there between them and does her job. I think that in the pastoral conversation what we have to affirm for the nurse is that her presence is already, in itself, part of the “medicine.” That she doesn't deny but is there, takes the elderly woman's hand, and lets her live through her sadness — this is her professional and human greatness. She doesn't have to “solve” death; it is enough if she doesn't leave the dying woman alone with the lies forced on her by her family.

Mónika: That's right. The pastoral counselor's task here is to support the person within the nurse, who is struggling with her own helplessness. It is not the elderly woman who has to be “saved” from death, but the nurse who has to be saved from total professional burnout, by our acknowledging that what she does day after day — beyond the physical care, the quiet, nonjudgmental presence — is the greatest thing one human being can do for another in a borderline situation.

Gábor: But wait just a moment! Are you saying that the nurse's situation would be easier if the elderly woman had neither dog nor cat? If for fifty years she had lived entirely alone and no one visited her? Would that make it easier for her?

Mónika: In a certain sense, yes, I can imagine that.

Because then the nurse wouldn't have to wrestle with the additional tension that the visitors bring. She wouldn't have to watch the painful dynamic in which the relatives — out of love, but all the same — almost suppress the elderly woman's truth. The elderly woman suffers not only from physical pain but also from the immeasurable loneliness caused by the fact that she cannot confess even to her nearest and dearest: “I am already preparing to leave.”

Péter: That is exactly what the nurse wrote: “The elderly woman suffers even more after the visits.”

Mónika: That's right. The visit ends with the experience of “not being understood.” When the elderly woman tries to speak about her death, the family “stops her mouth” with religious or hopeful platitudes. For this woman it is as if her whole life, her whole being were being called into question, by their not allowing her to close her own story.

And here is the huge pastoral-care trap: we must not declare the family members “guilty.” They, too, have a right to their own denial, since they are still alive, and they still find it hard to let go of their loved one. This is a natural defense mechanism, though in this concrete situation a very painful one.

Gábor: You see that very well. Here the pastoral counselor takes on the role of a kind of “bridge”:

What we can help the nurse with is to see that it is not her job to “fix” the family, but to give the woman the genuine, honest presence that her family is precisely unable to give.

The nurse can stand by the elderly woman simply by letting her talk. If the woman says, “my heart aches,” the nurse should not say, “don't be afraid, God will help,” but rather, “I can see how hard this is for you right now.”

This non-judgmental validation (acknowledgment) is also what frees the nurse from the compulsion to “fix” the family. She will not be resolving the family's denial; she will simply be a safe island for the elderly woman, where she can finally say what she is not allowed to say to others.

Mónika: Exactly. With this the nurse also regains her professional dignity: she realizes that she is not powerless, because those few minutes of attentive listening to the elderly woman are worth more than ten visits where people talk about her death over her head.

Péter: This situation is so dramatic that it inevitably reminds me of Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich. What is so shattering about that novella is that the dying man screams in pain for days, while his family acts as if everything were fine and life were going on in its usual course. Although that is an acute, drastic process, the mechanism is the same: the silencing of pain behind the appearance of a “normal” life.

Gábor: Yes, that is exactly the key. If only the elderly woman, death, and the nurse were present, some kind of deep, quiet, shared peace could probably come about. It would be easier for the nurse, because she would not have to assist in the “everything will be fine” role-play dictated by the family.

Péter: But it is also worth noticing that perhaps the elderly woman is not entirely honest either. Maybe she, too, is “playing her part.” Maybe she doesn't even really try to say, “Children, this is slowly coming to an end,” because she also fears that if she says it, the family will withdraw even more or fall apart. And so a spiral of mutual, silent lying develops.

Gábor: That's an interesting point. There is a pastoral-psychological thesis: one of the most important tasks of old age is to “teach” one's children how to die. Just as at every developmental stage of our lives we set them an example — how to learn, how to grow up, how to stand one's ground — so our death, too, is one last parental “task of upbringing.” To show that departing is a natural part of life. Modern society, however, has eliminated this process entirely, and what is more, families often do not even draw on the help of the churches in this.

Gábor: Seen from here, our pastoral question concerning the nurse and the family could be this:

What is missing? What would the children need to receive from their mother in order to be able to let her go?

And the other way around: what does the elderly woman still want to “pass on,” what unfinished business does she have in her soul that is why they are still “keeping her here”?

They probably don't long for the physical body, but want to settle an unclosed spiritual account. Perhaps the elderly woman cannot yet ask for forgiveness, or has not yet heard from her children the words “thank you for my life.” If these accounts were settled, if she could hand on the “last parental provision for the journey,” then perhaps the family, too, would become capable of choosing a dignified letting go instead of a convulsive clinging.

Mónika: With this approach the nurse's task is transformed as well. She is no longer “just” caring for a suffering patient, but becomes a kind of guardian of a sacred space. If she understands it this way, then her powerlessness can turn into a kind of professional and spiritual mission: she is the one who can give both the family and the elderly woman permission to finally be honest with one another. She does not have to solve death, but she can help create the atmosphere in which letting go can finally happen. This can be an enormous, liberating realization for her.

Mónika: It may be that this “settling of accounts” is a typically male, pragmatic way of thinking — a somewhat bookkeeper-like, structured outlook that wants to put things in order. It struck me a little too, because if I were to ask the relatives as a pastoral counselor, “So, what do you still need to receive from your mother before you let her go?”, they would probably just look at me in bewilderment. Because this whole situation is not a logical equation but an enormous, intangible whirl of emotions.

They probably have no idea what they still want to “receive”; they only feel in their gut that “she can't go, I can't let her go.” That is an anxiety they don't know what to do with, and which cannot be arranged into rational lists.

Gábor: But I really like the way you took this further, Mónika, because here is the key to the solution: “making it smaller.” Yes, the “solution” is not finding the big, final answers, but the first, tiny step.

Mónika: Exactly. If I had the chance to talk with the family, I wouldn't question them about what they expect from the elderly woman, or when the time of the end has come. I would simply give them the task of enabling the elderly woman to speak.

That's all.

There is no need to over-plan, no need to “settle accounts.”

Today's task is only this: when you go in to see her, don't you do the talking, don't you be the ones encouraging her, but listen to her.

This “one-step” approach takes the burden of decision off them. They don't have to decide whether she is dying, they don't have to decide what they expect of her — they only need to know how to be there in silence, and how to pay attention to her. If they manage to take this simple “small step,” that alone can open the way toward letting go, without their having to untangle complicated psychological or theological knots. I could say the same to the nurse: “Just hold this space for them. Bring them together so that the elderly woman can finally speak.”

Gábor: And you see, right here lies the root of the nurse's biggest problem! What you just described, Mónika — bringing the parties together, coordinating an honest conversation, or holding this delicate emotional space — is no longer the nurse's role. That is the classic pastoral task.

In plain terms: in this situation the pastoral counselor is the postman.

With the dying, the pastoral counselor often has nothing else to do but sit down by the sickbed and ask: “What would you like, what shall I still tell your son?” Then he writes it down or remembers it. Afterward he goes out into the corridor to her daughter or son: “My dear, what else shall I tell your mother on your behalf?” If family members, because of paralyzing pain, anxiety, or being too close to it, are incapable of direct, face-to-face communication, then a postman is needed. And that is the pastoral counselor. But the nurse cannot be the postman, because her role and her task clearly assign her to the patient's physical care.

Mónika: That's right, her professional duty ties her to the sickbed.

Gábor: Exactly. It is not even her task; indeed, in a certain sense she cannot say or do such things with the family.

Mónika: I really like this postman metaphor, the way you capture it, because we truly give little thought to this in everyday life. This is a deadlock in which both sides can be completely understood, professionally and humanly alike.

One can understand the elderly person at the end of her life, who has an elemental need to finally say farewell, to take stock, and not to have her complaints swept aside with cheap, one-sided consolations.

On the other hand, one can just as perfectly understand the gut-level fear of the younger relatives: they adore their mother, and precisely because of that love they desperately try to keep the thought of the irrevocable end away from themselves.

When the two sides are so unable to understand each other, then a professional who functions as a postman is brilliant — say, a well-prepared hospital chaplain or institutional pastoral counselor. Since he is an outsider to the system, he is able to listen to both parties as equals, and to gently and safely mediate, to “carry back and forth” the messages, without the parties collapsing prematurely under direct confrontation.

If we can shed light on this for our nurse in a pastoral conversation, we lift an enormous boulder from her shoulders. She may realize that what she feels is not her own professional inadequacy, but simply that she has stepped beyond her own limits of competence. Hers is the medical and nursing assistance — and the “postman” role she urgently needs to delegate to the hospital chaplain.

Péter: Can I bring a question in here to you? Suppose we bring the hospital chaplain or the pastoral counselor into the story. My wife is a physician, a pediatrician — although she encounters exactly this kind of situation less often — but she brought in the point that a doctor can talk with the relatives, and indeed it is part of the job. But in such a situation the greatest difficulty is that, as a doctor, you may see exactly that the patient is dying, yet you cannot say with diagnostic certainty when he will die.

We simply do not have this exact knowledge. Yes, we see that the process is irreversible, but we cannot say whether it will happen within a week, a day, or hours. And this uncertainty is often not concrete enough for the family to be confronted with reality.

Gábor: And this uncertainty makes the situation even harder... or just as easily even worse.

Péter: Yes! And here comes my question: does the pastoral counselor perhaps have the possibility — since he does not stand on a professional, medical footing — to bring a more decisive, stronger confrontation to the family, if he is asked to, or if he finds himself in such a situation?

Mónika: I wouldn't think that at all, quite the contrary! Why would he be authorized to do so? If even a doctor, a professional working with facts, does not have the right or the certain knowledge to declare how much time the patient has left, then I would feel that a professional with an entirely different training, the pastoral counselor, has this competence even less.

I wouldn't even set out in that direction. When I alluded a moment ago to breaking the problem down into small tasks for today, this is exactly what I meant by it:

Neither as relatives, nor as pastoral counselors, nor as hospital staff is it our task to weigh or guess when the final hour will come.

We don't know this, and we don't need to know it. Our task is solely to do something with the reality that exists now, in this moment. And the reality of the moment is that here is a suffering elderly patient who, by her own inner experience, is already at the threshold, and wants to talk about it...

Mónika: ...so our task is that the elderly woman suffer less, and that we acknowledge her own inner state. I'm looking for the right technical term, it just won't come to me... so that we validate her. We acknowledge that she sees and experiences her situation exactly as she does. And if a consequence of this is that she has an inner need to say about herself that she is dying, then she should be able to do so.

If she wants to tell how she is preparing for dying — this is what I tend to experience more often with elderly patients — then let us listen. Completely regardless of the fact that, according to medical science, she may have much more time left than she senses or feels for herself. Let her say it! Our task is only this: to listen to the fact that today this is what she wants to talk about. I don't know whether the difference is perceptible?

Gábor: It is perceptible, of course. But let's go over to “Catholic” for a little while. What does a Catholic do in a situation like this?

Mónika: Well, if we're talking about a pastoral conversation, that can be Catholic just as well as Protestant, but there the minister...

Gábor: No, specifically: what does the Catholic priest do? He goes out to the hospital and brings the anointing of the sick — what used to be called extreme unction.

Mónika: Okay, with us Protestants there is communion at the sickbed... but this came out as if I didn't know what the priest does, when I only wanted to approach it from the pastoral care side, because I know that...

Mónika: A priest or a minister can do many things in such a situation, but...

Gábor: Incidentally, this is no longer a purely Catholic peculiarity today. Here with us in Germany, the Protestant churches have also completely taken over the anointing of the sick, in place of communion. Simply because for a terminally ill, dying patient communion often no longer works physically — he cannot swallow the bread or the wine.

The rite of anointing, however, is incredibly exciting. It occurred to me in connection with your question, Péter: I know a great many hospital chaplain colleagues who see in the anointing the expression of the royal dignity of the human being. It tells the dying person: “In your vulnerability, even among the tubes, you are a child of God, you are of royal dignity.”

But there is something more in this that deeply moves me: they often do this rite in such a way that if the very sick person is still able to move a little, then he himself anoints his relatives and the doctor as well.

Mónika: That is, we are talking about a ritualization that, regardless of denominational aspects, simply looking at its psychological significance, is brilliant. The power of the rite is that it connects the religious with the depth-psychological.

Gábor: Exactly what Péter was looking for a moment ago is happening: with the help of the rite we express the inexpressible. There, where words have already gone bankrupt, where rational speech would only end in quarrel or lies, symbol and gesture take over the word.

Péter: And I'm wondering about this particular case, where the elderly woman is passed back and forth again and again — taken home, the ambulance brings her back, taken home, the ambulance brings her back — if after the tenth such traumatic round a ritual like this were to happen even once, it would change everything. Even if not a single word were added to it, everyone in the room would feel that this admission is no longer the same as the others. Even if afterward she happens to be taken home again, and the whole process repeats three more times.

Gábor: That's exactly it! This is a caesura, a true milestone. Right there and then, something changes irrevocably in the space.

What grips me most about this, theologically and humanly, is the mutuality. This is not a one-way service in which the minister goes in and “dispenses” the sacrament to a passive patient. No. The patient becomes an active participant: they, too, give something to the relative, the doctor, the nurse. The blessing passes from hand to hand, just as when we pass the cup and the bread around at communion. It is this reciprocal gesture that brings the real turning point — on the emotional, spiritual, and psychological level alike.

Mónika: This approach really does nuance the picture. As you mentioned, in the Catholic tradition the anointing of the sick is a sacrament that has its own strictly fixed liturgical form.

However, its psychological and communal dimension — even beyond the strict religious framework — is extremely deep. When the patient receives this anointing, it is as if they were being laid into the shared palm of a vast, sustaining human community. In principle, according to its theological roots, the priest would administer this sacrament at the sickbed praying together with seven other people — and although in practice the priest today arrives alone, the whole human and spiritual community stands behind the rite. This gesture makes acceptance and grace visible and tangible, without our having to read complicated theological disputes into it now.

Gábor: And you know what's most exciting about this? If we look at its roots, at where this reversed rite came from — the one in which the dying person anoints others — it supposedly came about because someone remembered the ancient institution of the parental blessing.

According to tradition, the lives of the descendants somehow cannot be complete, cannot truly “function,” without the parental blessing. And applied to our case, this is astonishingly accurate:

In this hospital story, what really lies behind the children's desperate clinging is that they want to receive one last blessing from their mother.

They are waiting for some kind of spiritual provision for the journey, a confirmation or an absolution, without which they feel they would be unable to go on living their own lives. And the circle closes at the point where the parent, too, cannot depart in peace until she has passed this blessing on.

Modern pastoral psychology took up this pattern into the practice of anointing the sick. If we look at the situation from the pastoral counselor's perspective, the most important thing we have to ask ourselves is: What blessing, what final word is this son and this daughter still waiting for? And how can we help the elderly woman to give it to them before her death?

Mónika: And by the same token, the parent now necessarily needs the blessing of her children as well! This is practically the picture that emerges from the whole thing: the elderly woman is really waiting for her children to say, “Do acknowledge what I am, as I am, and as I feel right now.”

It doesn't matter how we label it. We could also put it as the woman pleading with them: “Give me your blessing, let me go!” So the elderly grandmother, too, is waiting for a blessing from her children — or perhaps it works in both directions?

Gábor: From every side, completely mutually.

Mónika: Because that is precisely the essence of a blessing: I bless the other, that is, I affirm them, I acknowledge them just where they are.

Gábor: Exactly, this is the inner content, not just the outward form.

Péter: As you were talking about this, and as I reread the nurse's lines, something else very important struck me. This expectation of the elderly woman is not directed only toward her family. To put it a bit profanely: she almost wanted to “order” this recognition from her surroundings.

Just look at what she says: “Now she doesn't know whether her life is in the hands of her Creator, or in those of the gods in white coats.” This is a cry for help toward the hospital machinery as well: “Finally give me something to hold on to, by which I can know where I belong, and whether I am still my own master!”

Gábor: That's very good, and an extremely important point! It clarifies something: the elderly woman needs to know to whom and where she belongs. When Mónika mentioned the sustaining community a moment ago, that is exactly what came to my mind too. It's a brilliant thought, I'm going to take it with me, and I'll always cite you, Mónika!

Mónika: One could even suggest a beautiful shared ritualization to the family, in which they give each other a blessing in both directions and let one another go.

Gábor: Okay, that's all well and good, but let's come back down to the ground of reality: what should the nurse do in this situation?

Mónika: Well, the nurse... Oh, I see, we can also understand her question quite concretely as asking how she herself should handle this whole tension. After all, now she is the one asking us.

Gábor: If we take the nurse's cry for help seriously, she states flat out that she feels helpless and has no idea what on earth to do. She asks: “Who will tell me what to do?”

Mónika: Well, we are in supervision right now, so let's tell her! Obviously, if we start from the premise that her question is about what to do, in her everyday work, with this specific, tension-filled family case, then we can suggest the following concrete steps to her:

What should the nurse do? | A practical guide through a pastoral counselor's eyes

1. Step out of the “problem-solver” role: First and foremost, she has to put down the transgenerational and theological burden of thinking that she should reconcile the family, or that she should make the children accept death. This is not within her competence.

2. Validate the elderly woman's feelings (be the safe island): When the elderly woman asks her, “Why won't they let me die?”, the nurse doesn't need to know the cosmic answer. It is enough if she says: “I can see how tired you already are, and how hard this uncertainty is for you.” In this way she gives the elderly woman the recognition (the blessing) that she is not getting from her family.

3. Deflect gently but firmly toward the visitors: When the family members in the nurses' room keep insisting that “she is in the best place here,” the nurse doesn't have to assist in the denial. She can say: “We do everything for her physical comfort and pain relief, but I can see that what your mother needs most right now is to be able to quietly tell you, during the visits, what is in her heart. Please let her speak.”

4. Bring in the “postman” (delegate the task): Since her job ties the nurse to the bedside, her task is to flag the situation to the institutional hospital chaplain or psychologist. That person is the one who, as a professional postman, could sit down with the family and with the elderly woman separately, to help them start the process of mutual blessing and letting go.

If the nurse understands that her task is dignified physical care and non-judgmental presence lasting a few minutes — and that untangling the knots of the soul is the pastoral counselor's work — then she can remain in the profession that she loves with all her heart.

Gábor: But does she even know what she is already doing right now?

For my part, I wouldn't go in the direction of giving her new tasks. My answer would be: notice and become aware of what it is that she is already doing at this very moment! Don't ask “what should I do,” but see your own valuable presence.

Just think: in this distorted, tense situation, the nurse is the only genuine person next to the patient. She doesn't have to play doctor, she isn't caught in the diagnostic and therapeutic compulsion that Péter's wife talked about. And she isn't caught in that cramped, guilt-ridden inability to let go in which the relatives find themselves.

She can be “just” a human being beside the bed. And in all likelihood the way she straightens the elderly woman's pillow, the few quiet words she exchanges with her, are the only real, pure human connection in this otherwise thoroughly inhuman situation.

Mónika: So you see her as the one who can fill the role of the “postman”?

Gábor: No, I don't mean functional mediation. I mean that, through her sheer, unembellished presence, she represents normality and humanity for the elderly woman.

Mónika: I see, and I don't want to object to that at all, quite the contrary! The most beautiful thing is if the nurse can preserve and live out this pure humanity even within her official professional role — the two fit perfectly well in one person.

At the same time, I have thought this question through further: “Who will tell me what to do?” We can indeed interpret this helplessness in more than one way. If the nurse feels an inner impulse to help more actively, I would support her in finding how she could create a kind of bridge, dialogue, or mediation between the family and the elderly woman.

She could be the one who gently brings into the picture everything we have been discussing here just now. She could show them what a blessing is, how they could bless one another, that is, mutually acknowledge and let go of one another. If the nurse becomes aware of her own key role, perhaps she will dare to risk such a conversation with the relatives.

Gábor: That's exactly why I say it! That's what the hospital chaplain is for, if there is one in the institution.

Mónika: That's right. The nurse can seek out the hospital chaplain and share this situation with him, or ask him to visit the family.

Gábor: Well, let her send the minister over, if he wouldn't find his way there on his own!

But I am still most deeply occupied by this thought of “being human.” In a hospital it is terribly hard for the patient to experience that they are still a human being. Because in the institutional machinery they are only a diagnosis: the tumor patient, the bed on the left in room five, the one who is about to be wheeled down to X-ray, and so on. And you know what the trap is? Even with the pastoral counselor, they may not feel purely human, because there they are the “soul,” with whom one is now obliged to talk about spiritual matters.

Once a nurse asked me a brilliant question: “Gábor, is there such a thing as pastoral bed-bathing?” I answered her: “Yes, there is. And perhaps true pastoral care begins right there.”

Péter: This pure presence...

Gábor: Because into that physical care, into the bathing, the nurse can bring something that neither the doctor nor the minister can. We have entirely different, more structured functions. She, on the other hand, has a completely natural, intimate, and tangible level of relationship with the patient.

Mónika: That is beautiful, but if we tell her this first — that she should be present as a human being during physical care — then we have to attach to it, very closely, the aspect of professional self-protection as well: she has to make sure she doesn't become too involved.

When the hospital system depersonalizes the patient and people talk about them as “the bed X in room X,” we tend to see that as purely negative. Yet this distancing has its own serious psychological protective function as well.

Popper Péter came to my mind — if I may refer to him — who taught this very vividly to future doctors: “Kids, you can't cut open Aunt Marika's belly. You can only cut open an anatomical formula.”

That is, a certain degree of professional depersonalization and distance is needed so that the helper does not collapse under the weight of daily suffering. If our nurse enters into such a deep, personal, existential relationship with every returning, dying patient, then she will inevitably and very quickly burn out — just as she wrote in her letter, that she is already thinking of leaving the profession. She has to find the balance between the humanity of “pastoral bed-bathing” and the safety net of the professional role.

Mónika: Exactly, precisely! Popper Péter said: “You can't operate on Aunt Marika. You can only cut open a belly.” This professional objectivity and distance is needed so that the doctor or the nurse can do their work.

That is why, if we advise the nurse to be deeply human and empathic during physical care, during the “pastoral bed-bathing,” then at the same time we must talk with her about self-care as well. She has to learn to draw boundaries: how to be present with her whole heart at the sickbed in such a way that afterward she doesn't carry the whole family's drama on her shoulders into her own home. If she becomes too involved, she will be worn down.

Gábor: But look at what the elderly woman gets from this kind of presence! If the nurse is capable of this pure, boundary-keeping, yet human presence, the elderly woman can finally feel: “Here is someone who unconditionally accepts my reality.”

Someone who doesn't want to hinder her in her experiences, doesn't want to belittle her pain with false comfort, but doesn't want to overreact to it either. The nurse is the professional who is able to take this situation as naturally as it truly is. Why? Because in the course of her vocation she has probably accompanied a good few hundred deaths to the end. It is precisely her experience that gives her the inner steadiness not to be frightened by dying, and to be able to stand beside the elderly woman as a natural, reassuring point of reference.

Mónika: That's the point! The nurse gives the greatest help by accepting what is here and now in the patient's life.

Regardless of what tomorrow's outcome will be, and of when the final hour comes. It is this non-judgmental, pure moment that frees the elderly woman, relieves the family, and ultimately gives the nurse back the meaning of her vocation: she does not have to defeat death, but to accompany the person until they reach the end of their road.

Hypotheses Provisional interpretations to be tested — not established facts

2 Systemic Hypotheses

In this case the hypotheses are not about a single family but about a wider system: the dying woman, her children and grandchildren, the hospital ward — and the nurse who tells the whole story and who is herself the client. A systemic hypothesis does not look for who is to blame for the dying being drawn out; it looks at how the solution attempts of the people involved interlock, and why helplessness has become the shared feeling of the whole system. [1]

2.1 Content Hypotheses

A System That Cannot Say Goodbye

Day after day the patient asks: “Why won't they let me die?” Her children respond with encouragement, hope, and religious phrases; after every visit they tell the staff at the nurses' station that their mother is “in the best place.” They take her home, and then the ambulance brings her back.

Hypothesis: the family and the institution together sustain a circle in which the farewell is continually postponed. The repeated taking home and bringing back spares everyone from having to say out loud: this is now the time for goodbye. The sentences “God will help” and “she's in the best place here” serve the same function: they narrate dying in the language of recovery. The patient's suffering in this system is not only physical: it also hurts her that she cannot tell the people closest to her where she is heading.

The Quiet Spiral of Mutual Sparing

It may well be that the patient does not tell her children directly what she tells the nurse either, because she fears they would collapse.

Hypothesis: the members of the family spare one another, and this sparing has hardened into silence. The children think they are protecting their mother when they hope; the mother thinks she is protecting her children when she complains only to the nurse. Silence born of love thus leaves everyone alone.

Open Accounts and the Awaited Blessing

The children's clinging is unusually strong: “every machine has to be switched on.” Behind such a desperate grasping there is often an unspoken relational task.

Hypothesis: the relationship between the mother and her children is not yet complete. There may be something the children still wish to hear — an acknowledgment, a forgiveness, a blessing — and something the mother wishes to hand on or say. As long as this does not happen, the children cannot let her go, and the mother cannot go in peace. The clinging is thus not a denial of the dying but a search for a provision for the journey that has not yet been received.

Between Two “Gods” — The Shaking of the Image of God

The patient has lived as a believer and “got along well” with God, but now she does not know whether her life is in the hands of her Creator or in those of the “gods in white coats.”

Hypothesis: the instruments of modern medicine have rearranged not only the body but also the woman's orientation in faith. As long as the machines decide how long her life lasts, her trust in the Creator and her own dignity become questionable as well. The question “why won't they let me die?” is thus at once a complaint, a search for God, and a reclaiming of sovereignty over her own life.

The Nurse as a “Bridge” and as an Overloaded Point

The nurse sees the patient's suffering, hears the family members' assurances, and feels the tension between the two. She is the only one to whom the woman honestly says what she feels.

Hypothesis: in the system the nurse has become the point where the unspoken truth gathers. Because the family does not hear the woman, the nurse carries the burden of the farewell in their place — which is why she feels she “can bear it less and less.” Her exhaustion is not merely personal weakness but a sign that she is performing a task that is not hers: alone, she carries the unspoken grief of an entire family.

The Question That Asks More

The nurse's letter ends like this: “Who will tell me what to do?” The question can refer at once to the elderly woman, to the family, and to her own vocation.

Hypothesis: behind “what should I do?” there is not only a methodological question but also a crisis of vocation: how can one love a profession wholeheartedly when it brings ever more helplessness? The nurse's question is also about whether there is someone who will give her the kind of accompaniment she offers the elderly woman.

The Grandchildren as the Honest Voice of the System

The granddaughter bursts out in the corridor: “What are they doing to Grandma here? The whole thing is inhuman!” The grandson stays silent.

Hypothesis: the teenage grandchildren are less bound by the family's rules of silence, which is why they say aloud what the adults do not dare to. The granddaughter's anger is the voice of the system's suppressed truth; the grandson's silence is perhaps the other face of the same thing. It can be a resource for the family if this voice is heard not as a scandal but as a signal.

The Metaphor

“It is as if the woman were standing on a platform with a suitcase in her hand. The train has already pulled in, and she would even board, but her family keeps helping her back onto the platform, because they have not yet said goodbye to her. And the nurse stands at the edge of the platform, holding the door alone.”

2.2 Working-Method Hypotheses

Clarifying the client. The client is the nurse. The pastoral work can run along two strands: one is her professional strain and the risk of burnout, the other is how she should relate to this particular family and ethical situation. It is worth deliberately keeping the two strands apart.

The goal is not to defeat death. It is worth relieving the nurse of the burden of having to resolve the theological and ethical questions of the end of life. Her task is presence and care, not the decision.

The limit of competence and the “postman.” Mediating between the family and the patient — “carrying messages back and forth” — is a pastoral task, not a nursing one. It is worth helping the nurse to flag this to the hospital chaplain or the palliative team.

Making existing value conscious. Instead of new tasks, it is worth first showing what the nurse is already doing: she is present, she does not deny, she listens.

Boundaries and self-care. Deep human presence can be sustained only if the nurse also uses the protective net of the professional role and does not take the family's drama home with her.

Ritual and blessing. The family's stuckness can be eased, in place of words, by a ritual form — the anointing of the sick, a blessing, a shared prayer — if the patient and the family wish it.

Pain relief. That the pain is not adequately eased does not mean that the palliative options are exhausted; reporting this to the nursing and medical team is a professional duty.

Connecting Joining, compliment, and positive connotation

3 Connecting: Joining, Compliment, and Positive Connotation

Here the relationship is formed with an exhausted helper. The pastoral counselor attunes to the way the nurse sees her profession, death, and — if this is important to her — God. The recognition is concrete: it is directed at what the pastoral counselor actually hears and sees. Positive connotation shows that there is value even in helplessness and exhaustion. [2]

3.1 Joining — Attunement

Client: I don't even know why I came. I just can't stand watching what is happening there anymore.

Pastoral counselor: It's good that you came. I hear that day after day you are witnessing things that are hard to carry alone. You don't have to tell it in an orderly way now. Start where it hurts most.

Client: The elderly woman asks every day: why won't they let me die? And I don't know what to say.

Pastoral counselor: That is a very hard question. Perhaps she is not even expecting an answer, but someone who does not run away from it. And you do not run away.

3.2 Compliment — Concrete Recognition

Client: All I can do is straighten her pillow and sometimes sit down beside her for a minute.

Pastoral counselor: Next to a dying person, that minute when someone sits down and is in no hurry means a great deal. You give her something that neither the machines nor the visitors can give her right now: honest presence. And it also struck me how precisely you notice what happens to the elderly woman after the visits. That is a great deal of attentiveness.

Client: Still, I feel it's too little.

Pastoral counselor: I understand. What would be enough, in your view? Perhaps that standard is too high for one person.

3.3 Positive Connotation

Client: Sometimes I'm angry at her children. Even though I know it hurts them too.

Pastoral counselor: Your anger shows how much you are on the elderly woman's side. You see what she would need, and it hurts that she does not get it. This anger is your loyalty to the patient.

Client: And I keep thinking about leaving the profession. Even though I love it.

Pastoral counselor: I hear that it is hard precisely because you love it. Someone who is indifferent does not think about leaving — they simply grow numb. You still feel. That is not a sign of failure, but of the fact that your heart is still in your work.

Client: I don't know how religious I am, but sometimes I catch myself praying for the elderly woman.

Pastoral counselor: Then you are accompanying her in a special way. You don't need to know how to pray. That you bring her before God in your heart already is prayer.

Goals and Contract Short-term goals, contract, and agreements

4 Short-Term Goals, Contract, and Agreements

4.1 Short-Term Goals

Clarifying the request is especially important here, because “Who will tell me what to do?” can cover several kinds of requests. [3] Helping requires a mandate: that the client herself formulates what she is asking help with. [4]

Pastoral counselor: You asked: who will tell me what to do. What does that refer to most — the elderly woman, her family, or how you can bear this work?

Client: All three. But most of all, how I can bear it.

Pastoral counselor: Then let's begin with you. If after today's conversation it were a little easier to go back to the ward, how would you notice?

Client: If I didn't feel that I have to solve everything.

The short-term goals of the accompaniment:

Relief of the burden. The nurse formulates what is her task and what is not.

Separating the two strands. The professional risk of burnout and the concrete case each receive separate attention.

Recognizing existing value. The nurse becomes aware of what she is already giving the patient.

Limit of competence. She plans whom she will inform about the situation, and how, in the hospital team and the hospital chaplain.

Self-care. At least one concrete step with which she can close off the work before she goes home.

Her own spiritual source. If she wishes, it comes up what sustains her inwardly in the nearness of death.

4.2 Contract

We do not contract for a symptom: the pastoral counselor cannot undertake to “fix” the family, nor to say when the patient's death will come. [5] The contract concerns the nurse's own request.

Pastoral counselor: I suggest that for a few sessions we talk about your burden: about what in your work is yours, and what you need to hand on to someone else. We will also deal with the elderly woman's situation, but in such a way that not everything weighs on you in the meantime. I cannot change the family from here, and neither can you. What I can help with is that you see your own place more clearly. Does that suit you?

Client: Yes. And I'd also like to know whether I can talk to the hospital chaplain.

Pastoral counselor: That is a very good idea. We will think that through as well.

4.3 Agreements

Framework. Three or four conversations, fitted to your shifts; if the patient dies during the process, time will be set aside for that too.

Confidentiality. The information shared in the conversation concerns the patient and the family as well; therefore only as much comes up as is necessary for the nurse's request, and nothing reaches the ward without her consent. [6]

Religious forms. The nurse may decide whether she wants prayer or a blessing at the end of the conversations.

Health protection. If the exhaustion turns into lasting hopelessness, sleep disturbance, or impaired functioning, the pastoral counselor will suggest involving a physician or a psychologist. [7]

Homework. Small, voluntarily undertaken steps, which they will discuss even if they did not succeed.

School-Based Analysis Two family therapy perspectives

5 The Case from the Perspective of Two Family Therapy Schools

5.1 Contextual Approach

In Iván Böszörményi-Nagy's view, the relationship of family members is governed by an invisible ledger: what they have received from one another and what they have given. If this balance is lastingly upset, disturbances arise. The ethical dimension of relationships — fairness, trust, and loyalty — is therefore just as real as the psychological one. The perfect family does not exist; “good enough” is the realistic goal. [8]

The Four Dimensions

The concept distinguishes four dimensions: that of unalterable facts (here the illness and age), that of the personal processing of the present, that of relationships, and that of relational ethics. Helping can do most in the second dimension, in the “here and now.” [9]

Pastoral counselor: What is it in this situation that no one can change anymore?

Client: That the elderly woman is dying. That she is in pain.

Pastoral counselor: And what is it that someone can still change today — whether you or the family?

Client: Whether she is listened to. Whether she is alone with her pain.

Pastoral counselor: Then that is where the room to maneuver is: not in death, but in what happens until then.

Multidirected Partiality

The helper is on everyone's side: the dying woman's, the children's, the grandchildren's, and the hospital staff's as well. This is not an approval of hurtful behavior but a recognition that everyone has legitimate needs and wounds. [10]

Client: I can't feel sorry for her daughter. She says such stupid things.

Pastoral counselor: I understand that it makes you angry. Let's try for a moment to look from her place: what does her daughter lose if her mother dies?

Client: Her mother. Perhaps the only person who always stood by her.

Pastoral counselor: It may be that the sentence “God will help” is her handhold in this fear. You don't have to agree with her — but perhaps it will become more understandable.

Loyalty and Invisible Bonds

Loyalty is the emotional and ethical bond that ties family members together. In this case the children's faithfulness appears in the form that they “do not give up” on their mother — not even when their mother would already be ready to depart.

Pastoral counselor: What do you think it would mean to her children if they said aloud: “Mom, you can get ready”?

Client: Maybe that they're abandoning her. That they're giving up on her.

Pastoral counselor: And yet it may be that the greatest loyalty would be exactly this: to hear what their mother is asking. Loyalty can point in two directions — toward holding on and toward letting go.

Entitlement and the Needs of the Dying

Everyone is entitled to what human dignity requires; the dying are entitled to be heard and to bring their story to a close. If this is not fulfilled, a person may fight for it even with desperate means.

Pastoral counselor: What is she entitled to right now — not medically, but humanly?

Client: To be able to say that she's afraid. To be able to talk about her funeral. Not to have to be strong.

Pastoral counselor: And from whom could she get this most easily?

Client: Right now, from me. But really it should be from her children.

The Ledger and the Farewell as Settling the Account

The family keeps track of who gave what and who received what. One task of a farewell is to close this balance: thanks, an apology, recognition, a blessing.

Pastoral counselor: If her children were to sit down in front of you one day, what would you ask them?

Client: What they would still like to say to their mother. And what they would still like to hear from her.

Pastoral counselor: That is a very precise question. It may not be your place to ask it — but now you know what the question is, and you can pass it on to the one whose task it is.

The Nurse's Own Balance

The contextual outlook applies to the helper as well: if someone gives more than she receives over a long period, she becomes exhausted, and the fairness of the relationship is damaged.

Pastoral counselor: What do you give to this woman, and what do you get back?

Client: I give my attention, my time, my heart. I get back… sometimes a squeeze of the hand.

Pastoral counselor: And where do you get back what is due to you — recognition, rest, a relationship that sustains you?

Client: I don't know. Nowhere, maybe.

Pastoral counselor: Then this too is part of our work: that your balance can also be evened out.

Pastoral-Psychological Implications

Sin as a relational disturbance. From a pastoral-psychological perspective, “sin” means the deterioration of relationships; the legal concepts of the contextual approach — fairness, entitlement, loyalty — take on an even wider meaning in biblical faith. [11]

Without judgment. The helper sees the wounded person, whose actions may be judged but whose person may not. According to biblical faith, God rejects the sin, not the sinner, and asks us too not to judge (Matt 7:1). This holds for the relatives as well, whose “religious platitudes” are born of fear. [12]

The “good enough” farewell. There is no perfect dying and no perfect farewell; accepting what is “good enough” is part of the fragmentary view of the human being. [13]

5.2 Narrative Approach

According to Michael White and David Epston, families live out of the stories they tell about themselves. A story is selective: it highlights certain events and leaves out others, and a dominant narrative can easily harden into “the” reality. The narrative helper works as a co-author: together with the client, she looks for the experiences, alongside the dominant story, that allow another, more livable story. Her tools are externalization, retelling, metaphors, and therapeutic letters. [14]

The Dominant Stories

In this system, several dominant stories live side by side. The family's: “Mom is in the best place, and God will help.” The patient's: “They won't let me die; the people in white coats decide about me.” The nurse's: “I'm helpless; I'll have to leave the profession.”

Pastoral counselor: If you were to give a title to your past few months, what would it be?

Client: “The Helpless Nurse.”

Pastoral counselor: And if she were to give a title to the same period?

Client: Maybe: “The One They Won't Let Go.”

Pastoral counselor: And her children?

Client: “The Fight for Our Mother.”

Pastoral counselor: Three stories about the same thing. None of them is a lie, but none of them is the whole truth.

Externalization: Helplessness

One tool of narrative work is to place the problem outside the person and to give it a name, so that the person and the problem become separate.

Pastoral counselor: If this helplessness had a shape, what would it look like?

Client: A big, gray wall around her bed.

Pastoral counselor: When is this wall stronger, and when is it weaker?

Client: It's strongest after visiting hours. When I'm alone with her and just hold her hand, it's as if it weren't even there.

Pastoral counselor: Then the wall is not all-powerful. There are moments when you step through it.

Unique Exceptions

The narrative outlook looks for those moments when the “rule” of the dominant story did not hold.

Pastoral counselor: Was there a day when you didn't feel helpless beside her?

Client: Once I was washing her, and meanwhile she told me about her youth, when she was an accountant and everyone came to her with questions. She even laughed.

Pastoral counselor: What were you doing then that made this possible?

Client: I wasn't in a hurry. And I asked questions.

Pastoral counselor: That is another story: the story of a nurse who, while washing a patient, gave a person her dignity back.

Retelling: The “Accountant” and “Royal Dignity”

The woman was once an accountant in a leading position: someone who kept track, put things in order, made decisions. In her present story she is vulnerable, someone about whom others decide.

Pastoral counselor: If we were to tell her whole life story, what words would come to mind about her?

Client: Precise. Strong. Someone everyone listened to.

Pastoral counselor: And how could something of this story be given back to her now? Even just by asking her what she would like?

Client: I could ask her how she would like her day to go. Even if only a little.

Pastoral counselor: That is giving dignity back: so that in the last chapter, too, she can be the author of her own story.

The Nurse's New Story

Narrative work can also address the nurse's self-understanding: alongside the story of the “helpless nurse,” another one can be formulated.

Pastoral counselor: If a colleague of yours were telling someone about you at this woman's bedside, what would she say?

Client: Maybe that I'm the only one who listens to her.

Pastoral counselor: How would your story sound if that were its title?

Client: “The One Who Didn't Run Away.”

Pastoral-Psychological Implications

Religion is narrative. What shapes the present of a community or a family is whether it keeps telling the story of suffering or the story of liberation. Read pastorally, narrative work helps one recognize the story of salvation alongside the story of suffering. [15]

The vertical dimension. Alongside the story of the person and the family, there is always a transcendent dimension as well: the question of how God sees this story. In this sense pastoral care is always systemic: the immanent and the transcendent context are present together. [16]

The last chapter. In Christian faith, the story of a life does not end with death but flows into God's story. For a dying person, the greatest dignity may be that this last chapter is not written by others in her place.

Further Interventions Reframing, question types, and pastoral interventions

6 Further Systemic Interventions

6.1 Reframing

Reframing places another possible reading of the situation alongside the client's view; it does not correct but supplements. Every behavior can become understandable in its own context, and loyalty, fear, or love may also stand behind it. [17] In the pastoral sense, reframing helps the story of salvation become visible within the story of suffering.

Helplessness — As a Form of Presence

Client: I'm helpless. There's nothing I can do.

Pastoral counselor: It may be that in the face of death we are all helpless. But in this helplessness you stay, and you don't run away. In the Garden of Gethsemane, too, Jesus did not ask his disciples to solve the situation, but to keep watch with him (Matt 26:38).

The Family Members' “Religious Platitudes” — As Fear

Client: Her daughter always says: God will help. That only makes her feel worse.

Pastoral counselor: It may be that her daughter is calming herself with this. Someone who clings to a sentence this tightly is very afraid. Perhaps she is speaking not to her mother but to her own fear.

Taking Her Home and Bringing Her Back — As Attachment

Client: They take her home, and then the ambulance brings her back again. It's madness.

Pastoral counselor: It's as if the children were saying again and again: “We're not letting go yet.” That is tiring, but it is one form of their love. Perhaps they can't say goodbye because they are still waiting for something.

“Why Won't They Let Her Die?” — As a Search for God

Client: I don't know what to answer to that question.

Pastoral counselor: It may be that this is not a question but a prayer. The psalms ask in just this way: “How long, Lord?” (Ps 13:1) You don't have to answer it — it is enough to be there when she says it.

The Thought of Leaving the Profession — As Self-Protection

Client: I'm thinking of quitting.

Pastoral counselor: This thought may be signaling that you are trying to protect yourself from a burden that is not yours alone. Before you decide, it's worth looking at which part of it could be handed over.

Hospital Depersonalization — As a Safety Net

Client: On the ward we talk about patients as “bed five.” It's terrible.

Pastoral counselor: Yes, that is painful. At the same time, this distance also protects the helpers, so that they don't break down. The question is how one can still remain human alongside it — and you have already found an answer to that, when you ask questions while washing her.

6.2 Types of Systemic Questions

Questions can be chosen according to whether the pastoral counselor wants to orient or to encourage change; each takes up only one aspect at a time, and leaves time for the answer. [18]

Linear (Orienting) Question

Pastoral counselor: Since when have you felt that you can bear it less and less?

Client: For the past six months. More dying patients, fewer colleagues.

Circular Questions

Pastoral counselor: How do you think she describes her days to her daughter — and how does she describe them to me?

Pastoral counselor: If her son were sitting here now, what would he say about why they keep bringing her back to the hospital?

Pastoral counselor: What do you think the granddaughter sees when she stands at her grandmother's bed, and what does the grandson see?

Pastoral counselor: Who on the ward would be the first to notice if you took a little less of this home with you?

Pastoral counselor: For whom would it be easiest if she were allowed to die — and for whom would it be hardest?

Strategic Question

Pastoral counselor: What would happen if, at the next visit, when her daughter talks about “God,” you quietly said just this much: “Your mother wanted to talk about her funeral today, too”?

Pastoral counselor: Would it help if you spoke to the hospital chaplain today?

Reflexive Question

Pastoral counselor: I'm sure that someone who has accompanied so many dying people has an inner knowledge of what helps near death. What is it?

Pastoral counselor: I'm sure you also know when you need to go home so that you can come back again tomorrow. What signals this to you?

Scaling Question

Pastoral counselor: On a scale from one to ten, how exhausted do you feel today? And a month ago?

Pastoral counselor: How much do you love your work right now, on the same scale?

Pastoral counselor: What would it take for the exhaustion to go down by one notch, while the love remains?

Exception-Finding Question

Pastoral counselor: When was the last time you had a shift after which you went home thinking, “I did good work today”?

Client: When a patient died peacefully and her family was there beside her.

Pastoral counselor: What was different then — in you, in the family, on the ward?

Miracle Question

Pastoral counselor: Suppose a miracle happens tonight, and tomorrow morning you walk into her room and this burden is no longer weighing on you. What would you notice first?

Client: That I'm not afraid to go in. That I'm not the only one who tells her the truth.

Future-Oriented Question

Pastoral counselor: Imagine that ten years from now you look back on this woman. What would you like to say about yourself, about how you were beside her?

6.3 Pastoral Interventions: Scripture, Prayer, Blessing, Ritual

Scripture, prayer, and ritual are forms in pastoral care that carry their own power; they help only if they fit the patient's faith, condition, and wishes, and if they do not close the question but make it bearable. [19]

The Anointing of the Sick and Mutual Blessing

The anointing of the sick — a sacrament in the Catholic tradition, and in Protestant settings an increasingly common pastoral ritual alongside communion at the sickbed — expresses the royal dignity of the dying person: even among tubes and machines, a child of God. According to the conversation, some hospital chaplains perform it in such a way that, if the patient is still able to move, she herself also anoints her relatives and the nurses. The ritual then revives the ancient tradition of the parental blessing: the blessing passes from hand to hand, and the dying person not only receives but also gives. The essence of the blessing is mutual recognition and letting go. The Letter of James regards prayer and anointing beside the sick person as the task of the elders of the congregation (Jas 5:14–15).

Pastoral counselor: What do you think, would she ask for such a ceremony?

Client: Maybe. She always said she was on good terms with God.

Pastoral counselor: Then it is worth asking her, and if she says yes, speaking to the hospital chaplain. It may be that even a single occasion like this will become a turning point — even if they take her home again afterward.

Simeon's Prayer

Pastoral counselor: There is a verse that many dying people like to hear: “Lord, now you let your servant depart in peace, according to your word, for my eyes have seen your salvation.” (Luke 2:29–30) What do you think the elderly woman would say if someone recited it to her?

Client: Maybe she'd feel relieved that someone says it out loud: it's all right to go.

The Pastoral Counselor's Prayer for the Nurse

Pastoral counselor (prayer): Lord, we thank you for this nurse, who is there day after day beside those who are setting out toward you. Grant that she does not carry the burden alone. Give her strength for her work, and peace when she goes home. Take the elderly woman into your hands too, and grant that her children may be able to let her go. Amen.

Substitutionary Faith

Pastoral counselor: Right now you feel that nothing helps. If the elderly woman can no longer trust that she is in God's hands, and you yourself don't know what to say to her, then perhaps it is enough if someone else — a pastor, a person who prays — believes in their place for a while.

6.4 Transfer Question and Closing Intervention

The closing intervention is a brief summary of the conversation in the client's own words: what was important today, what is valuable, what remains open, with no new topic. [20]

Pastoral counselor: Today we talked about how exhausting this case is for you, and that it is not your task to fix the family or to solve the question of death. What you are already giving came up: your presence, your questions while bathing her, the fact that you don't run away. What is still open: whom you will talk to tomorrow about the hospital chaplain, and how you will close your shift before you go home.

Pastoral counselor: What is the first thing you will do tomorrow when you walk into the elderly woman's room?

Exercises The dialogues are edited learning examples, not new case data

7 Exercises with Dialogue Examples

Supervision Supervision considerations

8 Supervision Considerations

8.1 A Case Within the Case — Who Is the Client?

In this situation it is easy to confuse the levels: the needs of the dying woman, the family, and the nurse are intertwined. The pastoral counselor's first task is to clarify that the client is the nurse, and that the contract is made at her request. The perspectives of the other players are present, but the counselor does not take charge of them. If the pastoral counselor begins to mend the dying woman's family, he or she takes over the very overburdened “fix-everything” role from which the counselor wants to help the nurse out.

8.2 Being Affected Close to Death

Every supervision begins with this: how does the case affect me? [40] End-of-life questions also touch the helper's own relationship to death, grief, parents, and faith. If the helper has recent grief, it is better not to take on such a conversation for a while. The question is whether it changes the way the helper works: does the helper hurry to reassure, avoid the word death, or become too absorbed in the patient's suffering? [41]

8.3 Where the Role Ends, Help Can Still Continue

It is not the nurse's task to mediate between the family and the patient; nor is it the pastoral counselor's task to give a medical prognosis or to “confront” the family with what even the doctor does not know for certain. Referral is not a failure but a responsible rearrangement of help: the hospital chaplain, the palliative team, the psychologist, and the doctor each fulfill a different task. [42]

8.4 Signs of Burnout and Professional Help

The nurse is thinking about leaving the profession. Burnout is not simple tiredness: it involves lasting exhaustion, emotional distancing, and a decrease in experienced effectiveness, and it is not identical with depression, although the two can overlap. If low mood permeates not only work but other areas of life as well, a doctor or psychologist must be brought in. [43] Burnout is not solely an individual weakness: work organization, staff shortages, and the lack of supervision also cause it. [44]

8.5 The Paradox of the Enthusiastic Helper

The danger of burnout threatens not only the indifferent but precisely the very committed helper, who takes on more than he or she can sustainably bear. The solution is not giving up commitment but transforming its form: the helper is responsible for the work, but does not own its result. [45]

8.6 “Pastoral Washing” and Professional Distance

In the conversation, two perspectives were placed side by side. According to the one, in physical care the nurse can give a kind of human closeness of which neither the doctor nor the pastor is capable. According to the other — alluding to Popper Péter's advice to medical students — without a certain professional distance the helper collapses. The two views do not exclude each other: the boundary protects not only the patient but the helper as well. [46] Compassion brings us close to the other, but does not make us identical with him or her. [47]

8.7 Do Not Pass Judgment on the Family

The pastoral trap is to declare the family members “at fault.” They too have a right to their own denial, because they are the ones who remain among the living, and they find it hard to let their mother go. Multidirected partiality is a test in supervision as well: whose side does the helper lean toward, and who is left out of the helper's compassion?

8.8 The Trap of the Euthanasia Debate

The participants in the conversation consciously avoided getting entangled in the ethical debate on euthanasia, because it would have drawn attention away from the nurse's suffering. The pastoral counselor is not the sole decision-maker in ethical questions concerning the end of life; the counselor can help the questions of dignity, suffering, free decision, and hope to be put into words, but the responsibility for legal, medical, and ethical decisions is not his or hers. [48]

8.9 Self-Care and the Helper's Faith

Disregarding one's boundaries is not following Christ, but disregarding the finitude of the created human being. [49] For the pastoral counselor and the nurse alike, a living relationship with God, prayer, supervision, and community can be a resource. The question is also how far the helper has come to terms with his or her own image of death and own hope: someone who does not face death himself or herself will find it hard to stay at the side of others who are dying.

Pastoral Psychology Pastoral-psychological analysis

9 Pastoral-Psychological Analysis

9.1 A Question of Life and Faith on the Threshold of Death

Boisen's thesis, “Behind every question of life lies a question of faith, and behind every question of faith lies a question of life,” is especially clear close to death. [50] The question “why won't they let me die?” is at once a medical, ethical, family, and faith question. According to Tillich, a person's ultimate concern breaks to the surface in transitions; death is the greatest transition, from the temporal toward the eternal. [51] In illness and existential crisis, the body, independence, family, and religious trust all begin to shake at once; the pastoral counselor's task is to separate these levels and at the same time to see how they affect one another, without renaming physical suffering as a spiritual crisis. [52]

9.2 Royal Dignity in Vulnerability

A person's dignity springs from being made in the image of God, and therefore does not depend on how healthy, independent, or useful the person is. [53] The dying woman, who once made decisions as a leader and created order, is now at the mercy of other people's decisions. The body changes, is injured, and ages; yet this fragmentariness does not diminish dignity, and createdness is not tied to an ideal bodily form or to performance. [54]

The rite of anointing of the sick expresses this dignity: in Scripture kings were anointed (1 Sam 16:13), and the name Christ also means exactly this: the Anointed One. Anointing the dying person conveys the message: “even among the tubes, you are a child of God.” In the hospital the patient easily becomes a diagnosis, a ward number; pastoral presence — and an attentive nursing gesture — can signal that the patient is still a person, not an object. [55]

Patient: I'm nothing anymore. Just a body that people push around.

Nurse: To me you are the lady who was the head accountant, the one everybody listened to. I'm still curious what you think.

9.3 The Body and “Pastoral Washing”

Our body is not our possession; rather, we ourselves are present in it. That is why illness, touch, and being dependent on other people's hands affect how we see ourselves, our relationships, and God. [56] The question raised in the conversation — “is there such a thing as pastoral washing?” — can be understood from this insight. The dying person's body can no longer dispose of itself; the nursing hand that washes it at once does professional work and gives human dignity. Jesus washed his disciples' feet (John 13:1–15): the humblest gesture of service became the deepest expression of love. In this light the nurse's work is not less than the pastor's, but different.

9.4 “Gods in White Coats” and the Creator

The woman does not know whether her life is in the hands of her Creator or in those of the “gods in white coats.” The psalmist prays thus: “My times are in your hand” (Ps 31:16). Modern medicine can also be a gift of providence that pushes back the limits of life; at the same time, the machinery easily takes over the place that the believer reserved for God. The temptation for a person to want total control even over death is a form of the desire for omnipotence; accepting limits, by contrast, is acknowledging that we were created in God's image, but not as gods. [57]

The protection of life is a common foundation; the question is whether at a given point the interventions protect life or only prolong the dying. The pastoral counselor does not decide this question, but can help ensure that the patient's own voice can also be heard in the decisions.

9.5 Theodicy and the Right to Lament

Behind “why won't they let me die?” there may also stand an unspoken question: “why doesn't God take me home?” In suffering, the question of theodicy is mostly not a theoretical debate but a shaking of the personal relationship with God; the pastoral counselor's task is not a quick answer but to make room for the lament. [58] Job's lament, the psalms' “how long, O Lord?”, and Jesus' cry on the cross (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”, Mark 15:34) show that lament is the language of faith, not of unbelief. If the patient does not dare to complain to God because she would regard that as unbelief, religious language itself silences her suffering. [59]

9.6 Spiritualizing and the Religious Cliché

Her daughter's sentences — “the good Lord always helps,” “the good Lord knows when he wants to take her home” — may be true in themselves, and yet they wound. Whoever spiritualizes covers over with a religious explanation what is actually happening in the relationships, and silences the one who would like to talk about her suffering. [60] Comfort is not the same as reassurance: hasty encouragement and the pious cliché can suggest that the other person's pain cannot be listened to. [61] Yet the pastoral counselor's non-judgmental stance applies to the daughter too: her religious sentences are handholds for her own fear.

9.7 Anticipatory Grief and Farewell

The family members are already grieving, even if they deny it. What helps with grief that arrives in advance is when the approaching death can be spoken of honestly, yet adapted to everyone's capacity to bear it. The dying person is saying farewell to her life, her relationships, and her hopes; this farewell is connected to the relatives' grief, but is different from it. A personal farewell, the settling of unresolved relationships, and the parental blessing — in Scripture, Jacob's blessing of his sons (Gen 49) — can find a place in this process. [62]

One task of old age is for the parent to “teach” her children how to die: as she once set an example for living, so now for farewell. Today's society, and often church practice as well, has pushed this task aside.

9.8 Blessing as Mutual Recognition and Letting Go

Blessing is the ritual expression of accepting and letting go of the other: I see the other as worthy of God's blessing, and he or she also considers me worthy of mediating God's blessing. A parental blessing expresses at once the acceptance of the child's otherness and the conviction that the child is “in even better hands than the parent's”; in the sense of mutuality, the child can also bless his or her parents. [63] In this case, behind the children's convulsive clinging there may be the blessing they are waiting for, and the mother is waiting for her children's blessing — the permission to let go. Mutual blessing can be the point at which both sides can let the other go.

9.9 Hope That Does Not Mean Recovery

Hope is more than optimism: it can live even when recovery can no longer be expected. [64] Christian hope rests not on human achievement but on God's faithfulness and the promise of the resurrection, and therefore is not tied to a scenario of recovery. [65] The family's “hope” in this case clings to recovery; the patient's hope is perhaps a peaceful homecoming. One task of pastoral work is that the two kinds of hope should not collide but make room for each other. “I am the resurrection and the life: whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live” (John 11:25).

9.10 Dying as Setting Out on a Journey — Simeon and Moses

The Bible repeatedly presents the moment before death as a farewell and a setting out on a journey. Simeon, after seeing the child Jesus, says: “Now, Lord, you let your servant depart… in peace” (Luke 2:29). Moses sees the promised land from Mount Nebo but does not enter it (Deut 34:1–5). These images show that the time before death can be a time of fulfillment and letting go, not only of suffering. Behind the dying woman's question “why won't they let me die?” perhaps stands precisely this longing: to be able to go in peace.

9.11 The Grandchildren's Truth

The teenage granddaughter's outburst — “the whole thing is inhuman!” — is the honest voice of the system. In children and young people Scripture often sees a knowledge that has vanished from adults; Jesus holds up children as the model (Mark 10:15). [66] At the same time, the grandchildren's grief deserves attention in its own right: as teenagers they already understand the finality of death, but they have their own questions and emotions. If someone listens to them, they too can find a place in their grandmother's farewell.

9.12 The Hospital as an Institution and the Place of Pastoral Care

Alongside the hospital's scientific, technical, and organizational logic, the person who has relationships, a life story, and faith is easily pushed into the background. Pastoral care is not the adversary of medicine but a reminder: behind the treatable illness there is always the person. [67] In hospice and palliative care recovery is no longer the goal, but care continues: besides relieving symptoms, farewell, reconciliation, the summing up of a life, and hope come to the foreground. [68] The nurse's case also shows that pastoral care must attend not only to patients and relatives but also to hospital staff.

9.13 The Pastoral Counselor as “Postman”

When family members, out of pain or fear, cannot speak directly with one another, the pastoral counselor can mediate as a “postman”: asking the dying person what she would still say to her children, and asking the children what they would still say to their mother. This is not the nurse's task, because her role binds her to the care of the patient. The pastoral counselor's position as an outsider — not part of the hospital hierarchy and not a member of the family — makes it possible to listen to both sides equally. The relatives also need accompaniment of their own, not only as supporters of the patient. [69]

9.14 Keeping Vigil with Her — The Theology of Presence

In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus asks his disciples: “remain here, and watch with me” (Matt 26:38). He does not ask them to save him, but to be with him. Beside the dying, this is the shared essence of pastoral care and nursing: it is not death that must be overcome, but the person who must be accompanied until they reach the end of their road. The pastoral relationship — and a nurse's quiet presence — can, fragmentarily and in a human way, be a sign of the acceptance with which God accepts the suffering person. [70]

9.15 The Helper's Finitude and the Theology of Service

The nurse's exhaustion also raises theological questions about helping service. The Christian ideal of service sustains many in persevering beside the suffering, but it can also become a justification for limitlessness if rest is branded selfishness and referral is branded unfaithfulness. The merciful Samaritan did what he could, then entrusted the wounded man to the innkeeper and continued on his way (Luke 10:34–35). [71] Over-helping endangers both the helper's spiritual health and the dignity of the one being helped; the line between service and self-exploitation must be drawn consciously. [72]

9.16 The Nurse's Own Faith and Hope

If the nurse is unsure of her own religiosity and yet “prays” for the elderly woman, that too is a spiritual experience. Spirituality is not necessarily tied to religious language; ultimate questions arise outside the church and beyond religious language as well. [73] Watzlawick's axiom — “one cannot not communicate” — holds true for the relationship with God as well: ultimate questions find a voice even in a person who considers themselves a non-believer. [74] The pastoral counselor respects this: she does not turn it into an occasion for mission, but if the nurse asks, she makes room for prayer and for hope.

Further Reflection Questions for further reflection

10 Questions for Further Reflection

My own image of death: How do I think about my own death, and how does this affect me when I hear a dying person ask, “why won't they let me die?” [75]

Religious platitudes: What “pious sentences” do I flee into when I cannot bear the other person's pain? [76]

Mail carrier or fixer of everything: Where do I overstep the boundary of my role because I cannot bear helplessness? To whom could I hand over what is not mine? [77]

Blessing: From whom did I expect, or do I still expect, a blessing — and to whom could I give one? [78]

Keeping watch: When was the last time I could simply stay beside someone, without a solution? What helped me in that? [79]

My own balance sheet: What do I give, and where do I receive in return? Who takes care of me when I accompany others in their dying? [80]

Notes and Source References for the Analysis

Hézser Gábor – Krasznay Mónika. 2026. A rendszerszemléletű családkonzultáció és család-lelkigondozás kézikönyve. Budapest: Harmat. ISBN 978-963-288-951-1.