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Safe from
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Helping
Survivors

Inspirations

What every Church Leader needs to know

In seeking Qualified help/training

It is so important to get the best help we can for survivors and this means getting qualified, often outside specialist counselling. We must empower the survivor to choose the help that is best for them, see "Help in finding the best person to talk to". Christian counsellors can be unqualified in this area and not recognised by any organisation or have inadequate supervision. They can be guilty of leading, leaking and leaning in their dealings with people.

• Leading - That is leading the counselling sessions, setting the agenda, suggesting their way of handling issues and even what the issue or problem is that the person is experiencing.
• Leaking - This is leaking their own problems and undealt with experiences over the person, thereby instead of helping the person see the issue with clarity, the counsellor brings their own agenda and brings confusion to the person.
• Leaning - With abuse the help needed is long term and the counsellor can end up leaning on the client rather than the reverse. We must be aware that the counsellor- client relationship is not mutual and the counsellor should not gain a dependence on the relationship.

Our task as church leaders is to get the best help we can and be the best help we can. This will only be achieved in the following three ways:-

1. TRAINING - Quality training is available and it is important to go to and take others in our home church to training events. Training should equip people to support the survivor rather than counsel. Training should be ongoing. Training should give us a clearly defined role.
2. TEAM - This is twofold; firstly this is a support team within the home church, so that the survivor has a support group whom they feel they can talk to about the problem and about life in general. The team should be informal but be aware of church policies and be made up of mature Christians. Secondly a support team of other churches for the church, a fraternal where issues and problems can be discussed. This is often a very useful avenue for training both discussionally and through people being invited to share and inform by the group.
3. NETWORK - Building a help network will be discussed more fully later but this is a resource network that you can commend people to for counselling, training, advice etc.

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