Ask the Christian Counselor

A psychiatric diagnosis can be heavy burden-for you or someone you love. These struggles can be life-dominating. But we know this: God is not silent when his people struggle. What does God say? Experienced counselor and best-selling author, Edward T. Welch helps you answer that crucial question by exploring how God's Word speaks in ways that can help you find wisdom, rest, and hope in Jesus, even with a psychiatric diagnosis. What do you do when you recognize yourself or someone you love in descriptions like "OCD," "bipolar disorder," "borderline personality disorder"? The DSM can give you a detailed description, but what next? We listen to God and to his people. I Have a Psychiatric Diagnosis will guide readers in listening to God who has compassion for those who are struggling in these painful ways. Listening to God in the Bible reshapes psychological descriptions and functions as a corrective lens that opens our eyes. As you listen to Scripture and God's people, you will understand the struggles of those with a psychiatric diagnosis better and will be able to receive and offer words of help and hope. Welch includes case studies on panic attacks, PTSD, depression, and narcissism to aid in practical application to your situation. I Have a Psychiatric Diagnosis is part of the Ask the Christian Counselor series. This series walks readers through their deepest and most profound questions. Each question is unpacked by an experienced counselor that gives readers the tools to understand their struggle and how the gospel brings hope and healing to the problem they are facing.

When pain and disappointment shrink our world to the size of what's troubling us, we can easily miss what's right in front of us-our God and his daily grace. Pastor and counselor Ste Casey reminds readers that although our worries, fears, and suffering can fill our mind's eye, the truth is that God is still watching, keeping, caring, hearing, and speaking to us. I Prayed and Nothing Changed will challenge you to be honest as you talk to God about your struggles in our messed-up world. Casey points readers to see all that God is doing, even when he seems distant, and encourages readers with specific ways we can see God at work in the silence.

Anyone who experiences a traumatic event feels confused, lost, out of control, unsure, and unsteady-disoriented. This kind of suffering leaves marks, sometimes on the body, always on the soul, and sometimes both. In I Have PTSD, Curtis Solomon helps both those who have suffered trauma, as well as their loved ones, to understand the physical, emotional, and spiritual effects of trauma, while offering gospel hope and practical ways to make that hope real in their lives. Trauma can come into our lives through any number of circumstances, but those circumstances do not derail the plans of God nor determine the trajectory for the rest of your life. God can and does utilize the most horrific suffering imaginable to accomplish his great plans for his people. - Practical, accessible, and concise guidance on PTSD, written by an experienced trauma expert and counselor. - Part of the Ask the Christian Counselor series, walking readers through their deepest and most profound questions. - Gives readers the tools to understand their struggle with PTSD and how the gospel brings hope and healing to post traumatic stress. - Compact format goes deeper than New Growth Press's popular minibooks without overwhelming the reader.

All marriages face seasons of distress and frustration-times when thanks to a variety of factors you don't feel as close as you once were. Bestselling author and longtime FamilyLife Today cohost Bob Lepine helps you work through the challenges that emerge in every marriage, causing couples to become isolated and alienated. He helps you make the adjustments necessary to build the kind of marriage God intends for you to have and encourages you back on the path to oneness. Lepine maps out this path to oneness by first helping you and your spouse uncover how your motivations and expectations about marriage, childhood hardship or family of origin issues, guilt, shame, or unaddressed relational wounds can impact a marriage relationship. Seeing marriage from God's point of view is the path to oneness. You will be able to trade blame, dissatisfaction, and disappointment for a stronger, richer, and more rewarding relationship. Each chapter ends with a simple assignment that will help you get on and stay on the path to oneness. There is hope for your marriage! God is on this journey with you! Build a Stronger Marriage is part of the Ask the Christian Counselor series. This series walks readers through their deepest and most profound questions. Each question is unpacked by an experienced counselor that gives readers the tools to understand their struggle and how the gospel brings hope and healing to the problem they are facing.

Everyone has a body image, and whether from society's influence or age-related changes, most people battle a negative one. In a world with confusing messages about the body and social media's promotion of unattainable standards for thinness or muscularity, it's difficult to think well about our bodies. Greer, a counselor and fitness trainer with a firsthand understanding of body image struggles, helps readers reject negative messages and embrace a biblical vision for thinking about our bodies. Because our bodies matter to God, it's important that his Word, not the world we live in, informs how we view our physical selves. Struggling with Body Image helps believers develop a biblical understanding of the body that is foundational for a God-honoring body image.

Do you get anxious when you have to make a decision? Do you overthink, overtalk, and overanalyze? When anxiety surrounds every decision, the result can be decision-making paralysis. Counselor Michael Gembola explores this common struggle and then points to the peace that comes from knowing God as your refuge and ever present help in trouble. Learning to trust God, even when the path is not clear, will give you courage to move forward one step at a time. When you're faced with decisions both big and small, God offers you something better than certainty and the absence of risk. He promises to be with you. And when you allow the Good Shepherd to lead, you will find that he uses times of decision-making to make you more peaceful and become a better steward of the opportunities in front of you. Anxious about Decisions will help you learn to approach decisions more confidently with a conscience shaped by God's Word and values shaped by God's heart. Learn to undertake decisions in the context of the community of believers and your identity as God's child. Anxious about Decisions is part of the Ask the Christian Counselor series. This series walks readers through their deepest and most profound questions. Each question is unpacked by an experienced counselor that gives readers the tools to understand their struggle and how the gospel brings hope and healing to the problem they are facing.

It is estimated that one out of three women and one in six men experience sexual abuse or assault by age eighteen, not including adult victims. If you are suffering from the disorienting and long-lasting effects of sexual trauma, you are not alone. The journey toward healing and renewal begins with seeking God, who not only sees your past and present suffering but also holds your future. After Sexual Trauma combines biblical insights with Cates's personal and counseling experience to offer a message of hope. Each chapter addresses common questions and struggles faced by those who have experienced sexual trauma, including understanding the initial shock and confusion, addressing self-blame, understanding how God views victims, discussing the physical, mental, and emotional effects, and finding healing and wholeness.

When life overwhelms, it's natural to try to get away. Escape holds a powerful allure amid hard times. In every season, a myriad of pressures, challenges, regrets, and disappointments plague our lives. These trials and tribulations often provoke us to cry, "I've got to get outta here!" Even though we have many good reasons for trying to escape, as Christians, we have even better reasons to depend courageously on our Savior in the ups and downs of life. Pastor Rush Witt helps us learn to bravely run to Christ instead of running away. I Want to Escape explores the reasons why we so often want to run and offers hope-filled direction to experience Jesus's grace and mercy to comfort us and lead us on a better path. You will learn to recognize the classic signs of escapism: denial, distraction, self-destruction, and thoughts of death and to instead take the path of courageous dependence on Jesus, who remains closer than a brother even when we're ready to run. At the very center of Christian courage stands not a principle or a system, but a Person who intimately knows each one of us. I Want to Escape is part of the Ask the Christian Counselor series. This series walks readers through their deepest and most profound questions. Each question is unpacked by an experienced counselor that gives readers the tools to understand their struggle and how the gospel brings hope and healing to the problem they are facing.

Parents often struggle with four deeply distressing emotions: fear, guilt, shame, and regret. Many parents feel resigned to the fact that these emotions will always just be a part of our experience. But Lauren Whitman, a counselor and mother, helps parents see Jesus's compassion and receive the comfort he offers them in their distress. While many resources help parents grow in how they parent, few help parents with addressing feelings about unrealistic expectations, perceived mistakes, and supposed failings. When Parents Feel Like Failures is an encouraging, grace-centered book that helps us see ourselves and the Lord more accurately.

The inability to say "no" can result in overcommitment, leaving us exhausted and even bitter toward those who make demands on our time and energy. Similarly, compromising our beliefs to keep a relationship can draw us away from who God has made us to be and what he has called us to do. In both cases, we need to be able to set wise boundaries, prioritizing pleasing God rather than pleasing others or even ourselves. In Do I Need Boundaries? counselor Jim Newheiser offers practical advice for setting appropriate boundaries in our relationships and uses real-life scenarios to teach how to manage difficult situations. He highlights how our struggles to set boundaries are often due to having the wrong motives and offers a Christ-centered alternative to popular cultural solutions. Do I Need Boundaries? is part of the Ask the Christian Counselor series, which walks readers through their deepest and most profound questions. Each question is unpacked by an experienced counselor and offers practical, accessible, and concise guidance on a specific issue the reader is facing. The compact format goes deeper than New Growth Press's popular minibooks without overwhelming the reader.

In a society that emphasizes the importance of good health, those living with constant pain, unending fatigue, depression, or a host of other never-ending physical and mental symptoms struggle to accept the providence of God in their illness and the limitations that illness brings. It's easy to become so consumed with the physical nature of your illness that you fail to see the most important impact is spiritual. Svensson knows from personal experience how hard it is to navigate the spiritual, emotional, and relational challenges that arise when living with an ongoing ailment. He shares what he's learned about God's comfort and care through his struggles. If you are navigating life with chronic illness, When the Hurt Won't Heal will help you find the path to growing in faith despite the pain, fear, or darkness you may be experiencing.

When someone is grieving, it can be hard to know what to say or do. We want to be helpful, not hurtful, but it's easy to go wrong. The good news is that we can learn to approach those who are grieving with the same compassion that Jesus shows us when we are grieving. It starts with humility and listening well and expands into practical support as the Spirit leads us. In Someone I Know Is Grieving, Edward T. Welch leans on his many years of counseling grieving people to help readers learn from their compassionate Savior how to respond to people's sadness and hard times without advice or trying to "fix it," but to instead hear their story, learn from others' experiences, and depend on the Spirit for wisdom for what to say and do. - Practical, accessible, spiritual guidance on responding with compassion to another person's troubles written by an experienced counselor. - Part of the Ask the Christian Counselor series, walking readers through their deepest and most profound questions. - Gives readers the tools to avoid common mistakes made in responding to grieving people and a wise and kind way forward that expresses the love of God. - Compact format goes deeper than New Growth Press's popular minibooks without overwhelming the reader.

The pressures and demands of life can leave us overwhelmed, discouraged, or burned out. Stress affects all of life, including physical, relational, and spiritual health. But God does not want us to white-knuckle our way through life-he intends for us to thrive as his beloved children, remembering his care and walking in his strength. Eliza offers readers the NEAR (notice, explore, address, remember) plan for stress management and a way forward to move from stress to hope. In I'm Stressed, she gives biblical and actionable direction on how to alleviate stress in ways that honor God, bless those around us, and help us to live in peace.

No one gets mad at God for something small. When we're angry with God, it is because we've faced something immensely hard. Anger is an often-overlooked part of grieving, and as such, is an appropriate response to profoundly painful events. Counselor Brad Hambrick provides a guided process to being honest with God about your pain to restore and deepen your relationship with him. While we are often prone to interpret our anger about intense suffering as being at God, this book is an invitation to process these intense emotions with God as a source of comfort who is sturdy enough to support these turbulent emotions. If you are struggling with deep grief that is accompanied with anger and confusion, Angry with God will be profoundly helpful in your journey. Hambrick will patiently walk you through the process of being honest with God (and others) about your pain. You will learn how to articulate your pain, alleviate the effects of this pain, contextualize your experience in light of the gospel, and begin to hope again. God is a good shepherd who is patient and willing to move at the pace of his sheep. God can be trusted in places that merit the name "the valley of the shadow of death." Angry with God is part of the Ask the Christian Counselor series. This series walks readers through their deepest and most profound questions. Each question is unpacked by an experienced counselor that gives readers the tools to understand their struggle and how the gospel brings hope and healing to the problem they are facing.

How should you respond to the devastating disappointments that adultery and other forms of betrayal have brought into your marriage? It's natural to feel a wide range of emotions, including anger, confusion, grief, sadness, jealousy, anxiety, embarrassment, and regret. The consequences of your spouse's sin cast wide effects on your relationship, family, and future. Counselor Robert D. Jones has walked with many couples in your situation and provides ten steps for moving forward from this betrayal with God-given hope. My Spouse Was Unfaithful provides biblical principles for handling this betrayal and confronting your spouse, and it offers a guide for working through a potential repentance and restoration process. While God doesn't promise restoration with your spouse, he does promise to be with you and help you-whether your spouse chooses to repent or not. God can use this experience to draw you closer to him and bring greater good to your life. - Practical, accessible, spiritual guidance on how to move forward from your spouse's betrayal with God-given hope. - Part of the Ask the Christian Counselor series, walking readers through their deepest and most profound questions. - Gives readers guidance in understanding so they can learn to lament and guard against bitterness, vengeance, and rash decisions. - Compact format goes deeper than New Growth Press's popular minibooks without overwhelming the reader.