There are people and there are people. When you begin to counsel you will discover that then, in addition, there are people!
It is amazing when you begin to learn of all of the possible ways in which one can get himself tangled up in troubles that are so unnecessary—if the believer (who ought to know better)—had only followed biblical principles.
It’s not all deceiving, as the title suggests. Marriage issues, child training issues, church relationship issues, you name it! They can become so convoluted that you wonder how people ever got into such problems, let alone how you are going to get them out of them, but you finally do!
How?
Well, usually after repentance, if necessary, you go back and trace through the way in which the thread became tangled, untying knot after knot. You send your counselee back to confess and make restitution, perhaps, you get the church that should have ( but didn’t) get involved in discipline, you help him develop new biblical ways of handling interpersonal relations, you instruct him in the proper interpretation of Scripture that he has been using wrongly to justify his sin, you strongly urge him to begin to study rather than merely read his Bible (and get him started on it), you insist that he do his homework rather than dawdling over it, you . . .
On and on it goes. That’s a part of counseling—like it or not. And most of it’s a struggle until the breakthrough session takes place (for details on this see my Critical Stages in Biblical Counseling—stage #2 has to do with breakthroughs). After that, the previous almost adversarial relationship turns into a coaching one. But getting to that place isn’t easy—remember that if you are thinking of doing counseling.