If you don’t know that you are a billionaire, you might foolishly take out a loan from the local loan-shark to cover a $10,000 debt. This is the plight of the church. We fail to realize that we are billionaires (1 Cor. 3:21-22; Eph. 2:6; 1 Peter 2:9), and so we seek out loan-sharks. Failing to see that we already have everything we need in Him (2 Tim. 3:16-17; Col. 2:9-10), we compromise our inheritance by seeking unbiblical therapies and philosophies.
Even something as seemingly innocuous as behavioral therapy (BT) represents a betrayal of our inheritance. In a controlled and supportive setting, BT gradually and repeatedly confronts the fearful client with the object of his/her fears to “systematically desensitize” the client to these fears. If the client fears mice, then a mouse will gradually be introduced in a relaxed environment, until the client realizes that the mouse doesn’t present a real threat.
In a new and controversial variation of behaviorism, David H. Barlow subjects his clients to the full extent of their phobias at the outset without any systematic desensitization. For example, a client who feared reading his poetry before others was required to stand up before a hostile crowd of fellow patients staging all forms of threatening behavior.
Barlow is convinced that all the preliminaries such as relaxation techniques are unnecessary, and he has the statistics to prove it. He reckons his success rate to be “as high as 85%.” In a 12/2/03 New York Times Magazine article, Lauren Slater states that, through Barlow’s methods, one client “trained his own brain to believe (italics mine) in its strength.”
Behaviorism is, in its very essence, belief training. Nothing is accomplished apart from acquiring the belief that the client is stronger than the threat. Slater writes perceptively that:
Once people disarm their terror, once they realize they (italics mine) can survive it, then you have detoxified the problem and in some senses provided a cure (pgs 34-37).
Once they realize that they can survive the terror, they can confidently resume their life without the lurking threat that the phobia will reemerge and again take control. What’s the matter with that? From a Biblical perspective—everything! BT teaches two things: that the threat isn’t that great, and, whatever it might be, you can handle it. Sometimes the threat is not that great. Mice aren’t particularly threatening. However, when it comes to other things, we all have our limits. We can only endure so much depravation and frustration. We can only endure the loss of air, water, or food for a limited time. Likewise, we also have our limits when it comes to rejections and failures. BT teaches unwarranted and unbiblical self-confidence.
BT cannot succeed unless it increases the client’s self-confidence that he can now face situations that had been fearful or stressful. To put it another way, its success depends upon building the client’s self-esteem and self-trust. However, repeated studies have shown that there is a low correlation between these and positive outcomes. In a 2005 Psychology Today magazine, Dr. Robert Epstein claimed that the high therapeutic expectations based upon building self-esteem were unwarranted:
· “Hundreds of studies have failed to show that self-esteem training produces lasting positive results. To put this another way, merely feeling good about yourself doesn’t necessarily make you more effective. What’s more, recent studies suggest that self-esteem training may be harmful — that it leads many students to overestimate their abilities, for example. One study even shows that people with high self-esteem are more likely to be violent or racist.”
Scientific American reported that teenagers "with high self-esteem are less inhibited, more willing to disregard risks and more prone to engage in sex" ("Exploding the Self-Esteem Myth," Jan. 2005; www.sciam.com, as quoted by www.pamweb.org).
Instead, God sends us trials, afflictions, and weaknesses to show us that we must trust in Him, and not in ourselves:
He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your fathers had known, to teach you that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord (Deut. 8:3).
We experience
brokenness, not to show us that we
can handle it, but rather, that God can:
For we do not want you to be unaware, brothers, of the affliction we experienced in Asia. For we were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead. He delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us. On him we have set our hope that he will deliver us again. (2 Corinthians 1:8–10).
The Bible promises a different route to mental freedom (John 8:31-32). Instead, we resort to loan-sharks and submit to an alien theology that places upon our shoulders the unbearable weight of trying to prove ourselves worthy of self-trust rather than God-trust.
But
should we compare BT to a loan shark? Perhaps instead we should be willing to receive
help from wherever? The loan shark can temporarily relieve your stress, but, in
the long run, there is a price to pay. What happens when we encounter the many
situations that we cannot successfully manage like the inevitable threats of
failures and aging? It is inevitable that self-confidence will begin to wither
along with our bodies.
While self-confidence is an engine that can take us to where we want to go,
this confidence is myopic. The engine eventually falters. Repeatedly, the Bible
warns us against self-trust:
Put not your trust in princes, in a son of man, in whom there is no salvation. When his breath departs, he returns to the earth; on that very day his plans perish. Blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the LORD his God, who made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, who keeps faith forever; (Psalm 146:3–6)
Reality will eventually overtake self-trust, and our engine will eventually find its resting place on a junk heap:
Thus says the LORD: “Cursed is the man who trusts in man and makes flesh his strength, whose heart turns away from the LORD. He is like a shrub in the desert, and shall not see any good come. He shall dwell in the parched places of the wilderness, in an uninhabited salt land.” (Jeremiah 17:5–6)
A paradigm is only as good as its ability to answer all the questions within its domain. The self-confidence paradigm falters in many areas. The biographies of the self-confident reveal that although they tend to be more likely to achieve their successes, their lives show little indication that they had been more fulfilled or had attained a greater degree of compassion than others. And then death comes knocking.
I am grateful that I have been given a resting place, which takes my attention away from my inadequate self and places it where it belongs – on a God who will never stop loving and caring for me.
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