That’s a great way in, because when I first heard the title — and this opening case was Gábor’s idea — the same classic image sprang to my mind at once: that we’d be discussing a cruel, coarse, cold, sullen man.

Then, as we went deeper, it became clear that being dispirited doesn’t necessarily come down to harshness. In fact, here it almost certainly doesn’t mean that; it points instead to someone who has lost the capacity for enthusiasm — a man whose drive, inner momentum and zest for life seem to have run completely dry.

Mainly because pastoral care has to be kept quite distinct from, say, clinical or therapeutic work. What we’re offering on this programme is essentially pastoral accompaniment, not psychotherapy.

One could debate the precise conceptual boundaries for hours, but to put it simply: psychotherapy has a reparative, curative function — healing and restoring in the medical, clinical sense — whereas pastoral care is supportive in nature.

Unfortunately, everyday usage often tacks on a dismissive “just”: “This is just pastoral care; if it’s anything serious, you need to see a real therapist.” In certain clinical cases and pathologies that is true, of course. But pastoral support can also offer something immense and irreplaceable that classical psychotherapy cannot. Why? Because it sees the person not only in the horizontal (social, psychological) dimension but also brings in the vertical one: it takes the relationship between God and the human being as its foundation and treats it with full seriousness.

To my mind, our transcendent connection is an inseparable part of the striving for wholeness and health. And let me correct myself on that word “health”, because in the theological sense it is not at all the same as being clinically symptom-free. Our ultimate aim is not that the client should be rid of every last symptom. We look at the whole person, who in their true self is drawing closer to God.

In fact, it is often our very difficulties, losses, crises or assorted psychological symptoms that become the inner impetus which sets the approach to God in motion and carries it forward. Such crises aren’t necessarily illnesses to be suppressed, but exclamation marks pointing to deeper blockages in the soul. But I meant to keep this short — so I’ll hand over.

Yes — and forgive me, but this is a quite separate, deliberate aim of ours here as well. Just as in our college training, on this programme too we want to draw attention to where the limits of competence lie. It matters to be clear about what pastoral care is for and what psychotherapy is for — quite apart from the fact that we neither practise nor teach the latter. Drawing that line will be an important touchstone throughout these conversations.

...and it isn’t catechesis either — that is, religious instruction.

Exactly. Am I even capable, right now, of engaging with this subject with clear, undivided attention?

Staying on this level: in our training courses we often point out that keeping boundaries is essential not only in relation to the neighbouring disciplines or to theology, but also in relation to our own person.

That means asking myself: am I personally able, right now, to take on this woman and her family crisis? And if in a given case I feel that I’m not — for whatever reason, whether personal involvement with the theme, physical tiredness or simply feeling unwell — then being able to say no is not letting the person down. It isn’t a failure in my ministry; on the contrary, sometimes it is exactly what helps them most.

If I take stock of my limits and decide to refer this on, to delegate it to another professional, I’ve already given direction and helped. But there is an even more fundamental rule: unless I care for myself, I cannot responsibly care for anyone else either.

So if I acknowledge that “this isn’t my area right now”, or say honestly, “I’m extremely tired at the moment; please come back at a fixed, later time”, that is not a lack of willingness to help — which is how everyday speech tends, disparagingly, to read it — but a sign of professional and human maturity.

...or let her come straight to both of us!

Since we’re on theological foundations anyway: God created the human being male and female, and man and woman together mirror the fullness of what it is to be human. That’s precisely why it’s no accident that we like to work together in practice too, in co-leadership. It can enrich one and the same pastoral conversation astonishingly if we are able to respond to the client from the female and the male side at once, at the same moment. Granted, this isn’t always workable in ordinary congregational life, but where it’s possible, it is a wonderful thing.

In any case, the point is that whether the wife in our example turns to a female or a male helper will fundamentally shape the dynamic of the conversation. But I say we finally get into the case itself!

Well, for now we don’t see very 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 will not do: we won’t ask her linear, cause-and-effect “why” questions. Not because looking for causes is in itself wicked or wrong — that has its place too.

Systemic questioning, though, focuses on how the matter in hand — the one the client brings in now as a difficulty or a problem — works within the system...

Exactly. The family is a complex system — though even that is a broad notion, since there’s the narrower and the wider family web as well — and what interests us is how this problem interacts with the other members of the system, or with the system as a whole. And, further: what hidden function does it serve in the family’s life?

One of the greatest advantages of this approach is that it avoids cause-and-effect scapegoating altogether — which never ends anyway, since one could always point back at the past or at one’s ancestors. The other great advantage is that once I, as a counsellor, understand the function of a given symptom — here, the husband’s “dispiritedness” — within this family matrix, it may suddenly turn out that at the level of the system it has some strange “pay-off”, some stabilising role. And from that point on, the situation becomes far more effective and deeper to work with.

So by your logic it’s the father, the husband, who urgently needs to be “treated” or repaired. And you see, Péter — this is exactly where the story becomes suspect, professionally speaking!

If we narrow the system down a little, to the immediate family, the question arises straight away: what else would this family system have to be dealing with, if they weren’t preoccupied day and night with the husband’s so-called dispiritedness?

What are we getting at? In the systemic view, unconscious problem-manufacturing — or, if you like, problem-creation — is an extremely common phenomenon. It’s never a conscious process, of course! We manufacture a conspicuous problem precisely because there’s another, far more painful or frightening reality we don’t want, or don’t dare, to face.

Take a classic, textbook example: a school-age child who still wets the bed. Linear thinking says the child must be taken to a doctor, mended, fixed. But if we look at the family at the system level, it often turns out that this symptom serves a very important role: the parents’ marriage is in fact already in ruins, but they’re unable to face that crisis. As long as the child is ill, the parents pull together to rescue it — and that way they don’t have to look at the reality of the drama in their own relationship.

That’s right. This conspicuous symptom — here, the husband’s passivity — relieves the couple of their real, deeper conflict. That’s exactly the sense in which I said at the start that, at the level of the system, a problem can also have a kind of hidden, seemingly “positive” sustaining function.

Exactly. Because from the way the story is described, this doesn’t look at all like a sudden, acute crisis from the woman’s point of view.

And this question saves us from probing, “So what happened to her husband — why is he like this?” Instead of narrowing the focus to the individual (the individual level), the “Why now?” question immediately draws the wife into the picture as well.

We look at the wife’s present life situation, at her day-to-day life. Because it may well emerge that she is actually facing such serious problems of her own — at work or in life more broadly — that they have subconsciously primed her to suddenly find her husband’s dispiritedness unbearable.

It’s rather as if the woman were projecting her own inner burnout, her own incapacity for enthusiasm, onto the man (projection). We obviously don’t doubt the husband’s symptoms — the complaint surely has a basis. But the big question is why I noticed it precisely now, and why it became so central for me at just this moment.

Often, if I put myself in the woman’s shoes, it’s because I too have in fact grown “dispirited”, jaded, in my own life. Only, facing my own emptiness is hard, painful work. It’s far easier — and here, again, we’re talking about unconscious displacement — to busy myself with “you’re the one who needs fixing, quickly, because you’re the problem” than to hold myself up for examination.

Well, there are many ways to approach this — but whether we then do it “well” in practice is something I’d never presume to declare in advance.

In every single pastoral conversation — and for every responsible counsellor — there’s one basic principle: we have to be able to let go of any belief in perfection. If I thought that each of my conversations would be a flawless professional masterpiece, that would assume a kind of delusion of omnipotence on my part. But I’m a fragmentary, partial human being — professionally, and in every other human respect too.

What that means is that, as a counsellor, I can and will 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. 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 have no influence on how the receiving side responds.

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

One of the loveliest paradoxes of pastoral accompaniment:

We don’t help the wife by agreeing with her about her husband’s scapegoat role, but by giving her back control of, and responsibility for, her own life.

Our method has a few very subtle, deliberate tools not for breaking through this resistance (because pastoral care is not coercion) but for gently going around it or dissolving it:

Validation (emotional affirmation): We never begin by casting doubt on the wife’s case. If we say to her, “I can see how utterly exhausted you are, and what an extraordinary burden you’re carrying in this family”, she experiences it as finding an ally. We’re not validating the diagnosis she’s brought, but her suffering. Once she feels safe, the walls of resistance start to come down of their own accord.

Using circular questions: Rather than confronting her head-on with herself, we widen the circle. We might ask, for instance: “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 speak about his tears, what would he say he most misses in you?” Questions like these gently ease her out of her rigid, linear stance.

Reflecting the helplessness back: The wife arrives with the narrative that she “has already tried everything”. Here the counsellor can wonder aloud with her: “Yes — I can see how much energy you’ve poured into trying to change your husband, and yet all that effort has brought no result. What is it like to live with that helplessness?” With that, the focus has already moved from repairing the husband to the wife’s own, lived sense of helplessness.

These steps let the client feel not that we’re attacking her, but that at last we’re no longer seeing her as the victim of some external circumstance beyond her control (the dispirited husband) — that she’s getting her own agency back, the chance to start attending to her own life.

For instance, 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 — and that’s by no means something to take for granted.

Or how sensitive she is — that she even notices when someone has lost their spark. In today’s world it’s far from a given that we’d be this attentive to another person.

Giving recognition is as simple, as everyday as that. But it only works if it’s completely sincere — that is, if what comes through isn’t some rehearsed, contrived manner. As a counsellor I really do have to be able to stand behind it: that there’s almost nothing in another person I can’t find something to affirm, and that I can put it into words.

And giving recognition, building the human connection, isn’t a rule set in stone. It may not work at all the first time, only the second — it unfolds exactly like any other of our human relationships.

But by the first or second session, our professional identity really must have room for us to sense and decide: are we able to work with her at all? Or is there in us so strong a reserve, a dislike, perhaps an insensitivity to her problem, that we find ourselves thinking, “this isn’t such a weighty matter — why is she bothering me and wasting my time?”

If we catch this inner dialogue in ourselves — and as counsellors we must at least be able to catch this much — then we obviously have to decide accordingly whether to go on, or to refer her to someone else.

We don’t contract on a symptom! So if the symptom here is that the husband is dispirited, we won’t make a contract with the wife to “rid her partner of the symptom”.

In any case, it isn’t the husband sitting in the session; the person it’s all about isn’t the one who comes to us. But even if we turn it back onto the wife herself — say, in the form of how she copes, or what she can do for her husband to make him less dispirited — I’d count even that wish as part of the symptomatic pattern itself. We don’t contract on that.

Well, this is exactly what we were talking about: that we ought, at last, to do something closer to home. But the wife probably senses that facing reality in herself is far harder than letting the dispiritedness of someone outside her — in this case the father — take centre stage. So he becomes the designated source of the problem; his case becomes the great family drama.

And from there on, we can try to steer the line of our joint work toward how other family members might be brought into the process, whether virtually or in person?

That’s right. How can we widen and shift the perspective of this woman, who is, after all, sitting in the room with me on her own?

Shifting perspective is one of the fundamental, decisive elements of the systemic view. Our starting point is that reality is not necessarily what we take it to be at first sight. We only ever perceive a single slice of it — and even of that we form a strongly subjective picture. A hugely important part of pastoral help is being able to help the client find as many vantage points as possible, to see their situation from as many sides as they can. That way, a quite different picture comes together in them.

In this particular case, the shift of perspective consists in the wife moving from her initial premise — that a single individual, the “dispirited husband”, has a problem — to seeing that they are all, in fact, caught up together in a whole family system.

Let’s sum up, then, what we have so far!

We don’t contract on a symptom.

Building the connection comes first: In the early conversations we put the emphasis largely on building the connection. We do this through what we call valuing, giving recognition. I simply try to connect with her as one human being to another.

Short-term goal: Even in the very first conversation we try to bring in the other family members. Though I’m physically talking to one person, at the system level several people are present in the room.

The next step is the shift of perspective: and through the various types of systemic question we set the mobilising of resources in motion.

This technique already brings about a serious shift of perspective in itself, since in answering, the wife inevitably has to put herself in her husband’s shoes. But this kind of exercise can be done in a far more elaborate way still.

Yes — I do think the most important thing in those first fifty minutes really is building the connection. For me the chief aim is to convey my recognition of the wife, my conversation partner, credibly, authentically and congruently.

Because if I can somehow let her feel that she’s fully accepted here — without any labelling or judgement, since pastoral care is neither catechesis nor moralising — then the soul truly opens for deeper self-disclosure. And, in very practical terms, for her coming back to us at all next time. If we’re looking strictly at that very first fifty-minute conversation, this is my main goal.

This substitutionary faith and hope is an extremely important term in our field. We don’t always give it its due weight, and yet it has enormous power.

It means that, as the counsellor, I say to the other person: “I know and I can see that the pain is keeping you from believing right now, that you can’t trust in change just now” — and it makes no difference here whether what’s at stake is the situation resolving, improving, or anything else — “so for now I’ll believe in your place, I’ll trust in your place.”

This is a quite special, profound form of the New Testament command to “bear one another’s burdens”. This stance can hold a person in crisis extraordinarily well — but again, of course, only if, as a helper, I truly feel it sincerely deep down, and can communicate and convey it to them as such.

Because if we don’t, then as counsellors we only load an even heavier burden onto them — for instance by starting to moralise and telling them: “Well, my dear, this crisis is because you didn’t pray enough, or because your relationship with the Lord isn’t right.” It’s at the end of conversations like that that the sadly not uncommon thing happens: the client comes to us with one problem and ends up leaving with two.

Well, there’s a great deal we can weigh up at such a point, but one of the most important — to use a rather down-to-earth comparison — is to check within myself: how does this case taste? Just as one would with a dish of food.

Beforehand we always have some notion of things: there was a phone call to book, or a brief, informative exchange about why she wants to come at all. But that’s one thing. It’s quite another once we’ve spent an hour together and she’s unfolded as much of her story as she can. Whether — for the reasons mentioned, dislike or a certain guardedness — I’m able to work with her at all is something that shows most clearly precisely after this first fifty minutes. I may not see it perfectly straight away, but this is one of the main things.

The question is whether I have the professional humility to admit it when something isn’t working. We helpers tend to see it the other way round: we suppose we have to be able to solve everything, since we’re “on duty”. For me, though, that false omniscience is not the mark of humility.

But this summary is still addressed to the person in your care, at the very end of the conversation. So it’s not something you work through afterwards, on your own.

This you round off together with her.