by Ann Maree Goudzwaard
A particularly fruitful exercise in the practice of biblical counseling is data gathering. The Personal Data Inventory helps counselors discover basic information about the counselee and the nature of their problem. Counselors can refer back to the PDI from time to time in order to glean a fuller understanding of their counselee’s problems. However, one of the best data tools available to a counselor in the process of counseling is the circumstance journal. This is not a free-flowing stream of consciousness kind of journal to catalogue feelings. Rather, the circumstance journal is an account of a situation that leads the counselee to further investigate their typical responses. I find that the experiences counselees encounter between our visits provide valuable information. This data can help lead us toward the process of change.
The idea isn’t mine. Plenty of seasoned biblical counselors have a version that works best for them. My process looks something like this:
Instruct the counselee to record a couple of sentences about a circumstance in which they became upset, angry, cried, argued, or became defensive. This is not an all-inclusive list of “upsets” that may occur in their world. However, their responses at these
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