I present you with a messy observation that leaves things unpacked and unfinished.I am in the people business. More to the point, I am in the business of understanding people in order to help them. The longer I am in this business, however, the more I realise that I will never completely understand why some people do what they do. And that makes me affirm all the more the particular kind of psychotherapy that I practice. Essentially it is an observational process that allows me to simply watch and describe what I see taking place — to inquire in order to satisfy my clinical curiosity.

I present myself as a catalyst for the people in this way; I am with them and the way that I am with them allows them to see themselves as they have not been able to do previously. That, in turn, creates internal shifts in the ways they understand themselves. So, it’s not entirely necessary for me to understand them, as long as THEY understand themselves.

That’s when they make the creative adjustments in life that serve them best in their individual and specific situations and circumstances.

In being with people over the years, both in the ministry and in mental health work of various kinds, and also in organisational development and coaching, I have seen some odd behaviour, heard some surprising statements and observed some perplexing attitudes.

While working inpatient on a locked unit, there was the man who could only speak in garbled nonsense, the woman who thought I was her long-hated boyfriend, the man who drank his urine, and the woman who had many different personalities such that she was a community unto herself and held “committee meetings” with her various parts in order to decide what to do next in life.

While working in outpatient community mental health there was the mother and son who fought all the time because he organised by sight and needed all his belongings strewn across his bedroom floor in order to know where everything was, but she hated the clutter and would periodically clean everything up, leaving him exasperated because it seemed to him as if everything he cared about had suddenly gone out of existence.

There were the sex offenders with their blind spots about deviant arousal. There were the streams of kids with behaviour problems who had been told by various school officials, all of whom were not qualified to practise clinical psychology, that they had ADHD and needed medications.

There were the children who seemed to get better like miracles while we did non-directive play therapy. There were the parents who, at one time, had been obsessed with one another, could not stand to be apart, just had to have one another, but who, by the time I met the family, were locked into the process of divorce and protracted custody battle. They could not have been more destructive if they had purposefully and callously, deliberately chosen to destroy their children by involving them in the conflicts with their ex-spouses — hurting the children while all the time certain that they loved them.

Then there were the people in the church. I once visited a church in Portland, Oregon, and filled out a visitor’s card. Sure enough, the next week a couple of people showed up from that church. They wanted to talk and conduct an extended greeting. Now, all around the room where we sat down were bookcases filled with my books from seminary and being in the ministry for 13 years, but these people wanted to know if I “knew the Lord”.

I know what that means. I do know the Lord. I told them I did. Yet, they seemed to have a routine, a speech they needed to present. So, I watched them go through it. They wanted to tell me how Christianity was a relationship and not a religion, all the time bypassing the simple stuff of listening to me and forming a relationship with me.

You can’t take someone else to a place you haven’t been yourself, and you can’t conduct a ministry centred on a relationship if you can’t relate to people. As one of the writers of the New Testament said, “How can you say that you love God, whom you have not seen, if you don’t love human beings whom you have seen?”

Anyway, I’ve seen Christian people do horrible things to one another all the while thinking they were standing up for some Biblical truth. Somehow, I think God will have a talk with each of us who have done such things.

And so I come to the point that for some people one assumes, because of their education and position in life, that they will not behave badly. They will not do boneheaded, unprofessional things. Why? They are human like everyone else. Still, with people like lawyers, doctors, psychologist, psychiatrists, nurses, and other public servants who have had to prepare and who have had to go through years of supervised experience to get where they are, I expect more from them than I sometimes get. I sometimes find myself asking, “What were you thinking?”