Adapted from 
Robert Perry A Basic Outline of Course-based Psychotherapy by Robert Perry and https://circleofa.org/library/doing-course-based-psychotherapy/ . Two articles by Robert Perry
You don’t see your brother as mistreated by the world and needing to uncover just how mistreated he has been. Instead, you see that what has hurt him is his angry perception of the world, and nothing more.
You don’t see your brother as needing to take responsibility in the form of more confidently and assertively managing his external world (through taking care of himself, drawing his boundaries, stating his needs, etc.), but through letting go of his resentments.
Whatever your friend says is causing her pain, you realize that the real source of all her suffering is her guilt (which comes from her own unforgiveness). Whenever your friend weeps, you realize that, down deep, she is weeping for her own lost innocence.
No matter how deeply your brother believes he is a vulnerable victim, you realize that the weak self he believes in is the fantasy construct of his all-powerful mind.
You deeply appreciate just how desperately attached your brother is to his weak and guilty self-concept, and therefore gently and lovingly help him loosen his grip on this self-concept, which is the cause of his anguish, yet which he considers his most precious possession.
As a matter of course, you expect your friend to attack you in order to defend her cherished self-concept. You realize that the core of this guidance is to respond to these attacks without defense, and thus show her a way of being that is so secure it doesn’t need to protect itself with attack and defense.
Even if your brother is sure that the goal of this relationship is to take charge of his life in a difficult world, you realize that the goal is to unconditionally forgive the world.
As you listen to your friend describe his problems, you are keenly aware that the problem is never out there, that the problem is always his resentful perception that the problem is out there.
As you communicate with your friend, you place more focus on how charitably you see her than on how understanding and therapeutic your words sound.
No matter how confident or callous your brother is, or how clean his conscience seems, you realize that the remedy he needs is for you to tell him in your heart that all his sins have been forgiven him. You know that, even if he doesn’t realize it, he has all along been praying that you will tell him this.
You try to remember always that anything unworthy of love you see in your friend, anything that makes you recoil, anything that seems inferior, is your own song of guilt projected onto them.
Rather than seeing your brother as a diseased, unworthy lesser being, you try always to remember that he is your savior. He will save you through seeing the sinlessness in you. He will absolve you through forgiving your sins. He will do these things for you as a natural response to you doing them for her.
No matter how ugly the material your friend trots out, you see your job as telling him, “That’s not who you are”—and believing it yourself.
You realize that success depends on establishing a real collaboration with your brother, an authentic joining, in which you and your friend eventually lose all sight of separate interests. You realize that to be a master counselor, you must be a master at joining with other people.
Rather than being the healer holding yourself aloof from your friend, you realize that you both will find healing as you become simply two people who have joined. The form of your relationship will remain that of friends, but the underlying content will be the same as when any two people join.
Though your words can be extremely helpful, you know they will not carry much power unless they are backed up by your love and by the example of your life.
You realize that you can only give this person healing to the extent that you have accepted healing inside yourself. Thus you realize that your first responsibility is to walk your own path of healing and awakening, that the life you lead outside of this friendship is the basis for whatever you can give within it.
You recognize that, by yourself, knowing exactly what this friend needs requires an omniscience that is completely outside your range. And so you lean upon a Power beyond your limited understanding for how to deal with this particular brother or sister.
You listen deeply to your friend, so deeply that you are able to hear the Holy Spirit speaking through them, between their lines, telling you what they need.
You may interpret the symbols in your brother’s dream and thereby uncover hidden personality traits, negative thought patterns or past wounds, but you realize that these reflect your friend’s ego, not their true identity, which is far beyond all these.
As a matter of policy, you never turn a friend away because they cannot pay. Why? Because you trust that everyone who comes has been sent by the Holy Spirit; because you recognize your gain comes from the holy encounter between you and them, not from money; and because you know that, after a lifetime of demands, this person needs a true gift of love, not another demand.
Revealing Belief Systems
Working on your friend’s belief system, working to expose it, bring it up for question, and lead them toward choosing a different belief system through forgiveness.
Your Friend’s Belief System
Your friend’s belief system is that he is a fragile, insecure self which is at the mercy of a powerful, dangerous, attacking world. All of the power seems to lie in the world. Your brother seems to have no power to dictate his own responses, his own decisions and his own emotions. What the world tells him about himself, he has to internalize. How the world treats him, he has to feel. The only way he can really exercise his power is to constantly defend himself from the onslaught of the world and to attack in order to get what he wants. The world is not just going to give him what he wants, so he is forced to try to take it. In sum, the only option the world leaves him is to respond to it with defense and attack.
Your Friend’s “Solution”
Your friend does not want to question this belief system. She does not want to question the reality of the war she sees going on. What she wants is help in winning it. She wants to acquire new powers, skills, abilities, and strategies to meet the world on its own terms. She wants to form a new, confident self-concept that is equal to the task, that can hold at bay the world’s attacking forces, that doesn’t crumble in the face of the world’s assaults and demands. She wants to become a confident, secure person able to manage her life and skillfully make her way through a treacherous world. She wants to win at the game of life. This is what she is hoping that this friendship will do for her.
The Flaw of Your Friend’s “Solution”
The problem with your friend’s solution is that it assumes the validity of his beginning belief system, and within that belief system there is no solution. Within that system he will always feel like a vulnerable self at the mercy of a cruel world, a self so vulnerable that no defense will ever be truly sufficient. This strong self that can handle the world, therefore, will really be no more than a cover designed to hide how he really feels. Even if he becomes this capable self that is literally on top of the world, deep down he will still feel like the fragile self he was before. He will still be insecure. He will still live in fear.
The Real Problem
Your friend’s real problem is guilt, which comes from her anger and resentment. Her belief system is one big argument for the fact that anger is justified. Its core assumption is that the world is attacking her, pressing on her, badgering her, making demands on her, treating her unfairly, not giving her her due. Given that belief, what else is she going to feel but anger—hidden, maybe, but surely present? And no matter how justified she tells herself this anger is, it will cause her to feel guilty. Because of her anger, she believes that she is an attacking self, an evil self, a sinful self. She believes she is guilty, and this belief says she deserves to suffer. Her guilt, in fact, not the world, is the real source of all her suffering. All of her sorrow is an act of weeping for her own lost innocence. That your friend’s real problem is guilt stemming from unforgiveness is very difficult to accept and to uncover. “This is never apparent to the patient, and only rarely so to the therapist” (P-2.II.3:4).
Your Role as Healer
Your role as healer is to help your brother reconsider this belief system. This appears to be the primary work that transpires between you—what your talk is geared towards. You help your friend become aware that she sees herself at the mercy of the world, that she sees the world (its people, situations and events) as cause, and her mind (its emotions, decisions, responses) as effect. You help your friend question this cause and effect relationship; help him accept that mind is cause and world is effect. Your brother must learn that his mind is what’s in charge. Since it has the freedom to interpret the world however it chooses, the world has no actual power over it. Your role as counselor is to help your friend reclaim this power of the mind and use it to choose a new interpretation of the world.
The power of the mind also implies a new view of the self. Your friend sees herself as a weak self buffeted by the world, but she must realize that this self is nothing but a mental construct. It is not her real self at all. It is just an image she made up with her mind, which is anything but weak.
You must also help your brother uncover his guilt. Your friend is continually singing a song of guilt to herself, the chorus of which says, “God may not enter here because I am so guilty” (P-2.VI.1:4). Yet even while she sings it, she doesn’t hear herself singing it. This is because it takes disguised forms. Your brother’s song of blame towards the world is actually this very song of guilt, only in disguised form. Since blame causes guilt, while he sings “look what so-and-so did to me,” he is really singing, “I am so guilty that God may not enter me.” You must help your friend hear this song of guilt she sings to herself. Usually, she will only hear it for brief moments. These moments give her a chance to question the song and “change her tune” (P-2.VI.2:2), something you can’t do for him.
How to Help Them Change
How does your friend change his tune? He learns to forgive. This forgiveness, however, is not the same as conventional forgiveness. Conventional forgiveness is an unmerited gift bestowed on those who really injured us. This forgiveness, however, is based on the idea that the world didn’t injure us at all. The world seemed to cause us pain, but all along we caused our own pain, through how our minds interpreted the world. The world never hurt us. It never did anything to us. And if that is so, then our resentment toward it has no cause. This realization is forgiveness, a forgiveness that is the inevitable product of seeing the truth. It is not an undeserved gift.
This single choice to forgive is what heals your brother. When he forgives, he lets go of his picture of a fearful, threatening world about to blot him out. He realizes he made that picture up. Thus, his fear is gone. When he forgives, he no longer believes in a weak and vulnerable self. He realizes that his powerful mind made up both his view of the world and his view of himself. Such a mind is hardly weak and vulnerable. Most importantly, when he forgives, he is cleansed of guilt, because its source—his anger—is gone. Now he no longer sees himself as an evil self in anguish over its corrupt nature and awaiting its just punishment at the hands of the world. That self, too, was just a mental construct. Forgiveness, therefore, is his entire healing.
Forgiving Your Friend
This form of guidance aims, above all else, to release your brother from guilt. As we saw above, this happens through your friend’s own choice to forgive others. Yet it also happens through your forgiveness of your friend.
While you are engaged in the work of challenging your friend’s belief system, you are also engaged in the inner work of challenging your own. You are looking on your brother and seeing his appearance as a sick, maladapted loser, filled with problems and clearly inferior to you. He is not only unsuccessful at life, he is not particularly good when it comes to being your friend. He resists his own healing, fails to see obvious truths, refuses to make the right choices, and battles with you. All things considered, his secret belief that he is an unredeemable sinner, it is sad to say, appears to have some truth to it.
You have to realize that this is an illusion; in fact, your own illusion. This is a miniature reflection of your belief that the world is attacking you and causing you pain. This is the projection of your own guilt. You see your friend as guilty and defective due to your attempt to unload your sins onto them. You see them as vexing you and frustrating you because you see them as the chosen instrument of the punishment you secretly think you deserve. And by seeing your brother in this unloving way, you reinforce your guilt.
Any lack of love, therefore, in how you see your friend is your own song of guilt, in disguised form. This, in fact, is where you can get in touch with your song, question it, and change your tune. You do this by overlooking everything worthy of judgment, everything imperfect, in your friend. You see past her sickness. You see past his sins, recognizing that they are not real. You see them as God’s saint, as God’s Own Son, as the bearer of God to you. You see something in your friend that is perfectly innocent and pure, despite all of their problems and mistakes.
This is what you are practicing inside yourself while you are discussing your friend’s belief system. The following passage speaks of this internal practice:
“The process that takes place in this relationship is actually one in which the therapist in his heart tells the patient that all his sins have been forgiven him, along with his own” (P-2.VII.3:1).
“In his heart” implies both “silently” and “with genuine sincerity.” Another passage speaks in different terms about the moment when forgiveness occurs: “It is in the instant that the therapist forgets to judge the patient that healing occurs” (P-3.II.6:1). The implication here is that your judgment of your friend is a chronic, habitual thing which, even though it probably goes unnoticed, is constantly blocking healing. The moment when this chronic judgment is not maintained, healing occurs.
Both of the above passages say that healing comes from the occurrence of forgiveness inside you. You will of course express this forgiveness in many different ways on the outside. It is very doubtful that you will say, “Guess what? I just forgave you.” But if the forgiveness inside is genuine, whatever you say will be a way of communicating this message:
“Awake and be glad, for all your sins have been forgiven you.” (P-3.II.4:10).
Your friend will probably experience this as feeling totally accepted and loved. This experience of being loved by you, despite all her defects, is central to whatever healing she receives. Your love is how your brother is helped to “forgive himself for all the trespasses with which he would condemn himself without a cause” (P-2.V.7:6).
Your forgiveness is so powerful that it doesn’t even necessarily need to be communicated visibly. It will transfer directly, mind-to-mind. In fact, your friends will not always be people who meet you and come to you in person. Sometimes they will be sent to you mentally from afar, by the Holy Spirit. In this case your job is to send them the healing power of your forgiveness, join with their minds across the distance, and trust that healing has occurred.
Even though your forgiveness must occur privately, inside of you, it also has an active, external dimension. For the active process of this guidance will uncover a great deal of ugliness inside your friend’s belief system. It will uncover a thought system filled with anger and rage, and floating atop a sea of guilt. It will reveal selfish, aggressive impulses beyond what is considered socially acceptable. The ideal is for this dark, shame-producing material to meet with your unconditional forgiveness.
In this sense, you function as a kind of confessor. Hopefully, your friend will in time want to bring to you her deepest, darkest secrets, all of the things that have led him to condemn himself. Your job, in the face of this material, is to offer your pure and undivided forgiveness, and through this offering help your brother truly accept that he did in fact “condemn himself without a cause” (P-2.V.7:6).
The Holy Relationship
A primary healing agent is the friendship itself. Your friend’s unhealed self-concept is a result of his antagonistic relationship with the world, and this relationship with the world is primarily contained in his conflict-ridden relationships with the people in his life. Your friendship is meant to be a more beneficent, healing relationship that shifts her perception of all relationships, and of herself in the process.
You and your friend are meant to enter into a holy relationship, a relationship in which real joining takes place. You have a joint project you are undertaking. Your brother has asked for help and you are trying to give that help. For your relationship to really come together, you have to unite in this joint project. You have to be working toward the same outcome, the same goal. The key to real joining is for you and your friend to genuinely share a common goal.
Yet you typically begin this friendship with divided goals. Your friend wants to keep her belief system and self-concept completely intact and simply acquire ways to succeed in her perceived struggle with the world. You generally want to change your friend’s sick identity into a healthy one. Both of you will need to let go of these goals and unite in the true goal of this guidance: to help your friend undo his faulty self-concept and uncover his already innocent and pristine identity.
This guidance suggests that you and your friend will need to go through a process of slowly reconciling your divided goals, for these alone stand in the way of successful guidance. To the extent that the two of you can get past this division and unite in the same goal, you invite God into the relationship, even if you don’t believe in Him. Once He enters, He will direct the healing process and complete what you began. Because of His Presence, your limitations will in the end count as nothing.
It will be up to you, however, how much you draw upon the vast potential represented by God’s Presence in your relationship. Ideally, you will unite more and more over time (and you will need the time to do this). You will share your common goal so fully that you will eventually transcend all belief in separate interests. All of the differences that lie between you will slowly vanish from your sight. To achieve this ideal requires a very advanced healer (a term which is synonymous with an advanced teacher of God) who can facilitate such a holy joining.
A deep union of this sort profoundly changes the self-concept of both you and your friend. It proves to you that you are not the separate, vulnerable, guilty selves that you thought you were. It undoes your current self-concept and proves that your real identity actually includes the other person.
This joining between two people is God’s plan for salvation. Such a joining is not the perfect oneness of Heaven, but it is the earthly reflection of heavenly oneness. And therefore it is the way to remember that oneness.
The Example You Set
Your goal as a friend is to lead your brother out of his current belief system and into sanity. To do this effectively, you must be a living demonstration of sanity, at least to some degree. You ought to be at least slightly less insane than your friend.
Your friend is deeply afraid of really changing her belief system. She is profoundly threatened by the prospect of moving into real sanity. She believes that the loss of her self-concept means the loss of identity—means death. Therefore, she will see you as trying to take away that thing she treasures above all: her self-concept. As a result, she will resist your efforts and even attack you.
Your role is to respond to these attacks with defenselessness. This demonstrates to your friend another way of being, a way of being that is so secure that it doesn’t need to defend itself. As a result, this way of being seems attractive. It seems safe. Your brother starts to think that giving up his defensive, fearful state for the alternative which you represent may not be so scary after all. It may actually be a move toward safety, toward the cessation of fear.
To approach this from another angle: You can show your friend the inevitable suffering caused by his current way of thinking, but this doesn’t help unless you can also help him accept the alternative. How do you do this? You present an example of one who has moved into this alternative and lives there happily. You stand forth as someone who, at least to some extent, has let in the light, embodies the light, and is no longer trapped in the same fearful patterns. This kind of example, the Course tells us, “can speak with power greater than a thousand tongues” (T-27.II.5:5).
This doesn’t mean that your words are useless in communicating your message, but these words will have little power unless they are backed up by your life. As the Course says, “Words can speak of this and teach it too, if we exemplify the words in us” (W-WI.14.2:5).
Overall, you are trying to coax your friend into a new way of thinking, one of which she is extremely wary. How can you really ask him to leave behind the familiar and step into the new unless you yourself have done so? How will she be convinced that this way can work for her unless she sees that it has worked for you? You, therefore, must above all be dedicated to your own journey to sanity. You cannot lead your friend there if you haven’t made the journey yourself.
Supports for the Four Main Aspects
Not Playing God
Perhaps the primary caution for you in this guidance is that you not play god. Playing god takes two main forms. The first form is that you see yourself in charge of the process, responsible for figuring out what your friend needs, and responsible for whether or not healing occurs. This leads to guilt, since it is a role that is simply too big for you to possibly shoulder. The solution is for you to realize that you are just an instrument for the Holy Spirit. The second form of this error is that you see yourself as being superior to your friend, higher up on the great chain of being. This demeans your brother, agrees with his sick self-concept, and blocks joining, for only equals can join. The solution to this is realizing, in spite of all appearances, that your friend is your equal. Both forms of the error come together in the notion of you as judge, a judge who knows all and who looks down upon your friend from a great height.
Being a Follower of the Holy Spirit
You ideally should be a follower of the Holy Spirit. You are there to be an active instrument through which the Holy Spirit can do the guidance He wants to do with your friend. The Holy Spirit is the true Healer, but He needs someone to work through. It is not your place to decide what your friends need, or even who your friends should be. You are just supposed to get your script from the Director and read your lines. If you decide what your friends need, you will decide they need you to make sacrifices for them. Being an instrument of the Holy Spirit is a delicate paradox. On the one hand, your job is to realize that of yourself you can do nothing, and so to lean on Him. But on the other hand, your job is to realize that He is in you, and that therefore you have all power, that all the gifts of God are in your hands to give. Many people do not believe that the Holy Spirit is there to shepherd the healing process, but as long as the goal is healing, He will be there, directing the process as much as He is allowed to.
Listening
You are meant to listen deeply to your friend, so that you can adapt your overall approach to each individual friend. Through this listening, you will let your brother, in effect, formulate his own ways to reach the true goal of this guidance (a goal which is already set, and not up to your friend). You are meant to listen so deeply to your friend that you hear the Holy Spirit in them, and it is He Who tells you what exact treatment fits this person’s individual needs and temperament.
The Holiness of Helping
You will be constantly tempted to believe that your efforts to help your friend are sacrifices that only deplete you, unless you receive appropriate compensation and rest. Instead, you must keep before you the thought of the holiness of helping another. While there are people who are suffering, “they can and must be helped” (P-2.V.3:5), and you must give your all in the attempt to do so. To hear another’s call for help and try to answer him is the holiest thing you can do in this world. It is “the formula for salvation” (P-2.III.3:5). It is not a sacrifice, but the only road through which you will find your own salvation. Only through your judgment of another can you get in touch with your own guilt. Only by forgiving another will you find forgiveness. Only by joining with another will you discover your true Self. You must, therefore, see your friend as the bringer of your salvation, as a saint sent from God to awaken you. If you refuse to let your friend into your heart—either because of your judgments or because they cannot pay—you shut the door on your savior. But if you endeavor to meet her need as if it were your own, you will find that your need is met. Thus you will realize that you and your friend are one. And this is how you become liberated from your ego.
Empathy
You must walk a very fine line in your empathy toward your friend. On the one hand, you must be deeply concerned about your friend’s state of mind, want his healing, care about how he feels, and understand why he feels that way. On the other hand, you must see that her feelings and state of mind are not who she really is, see that he is already healed, and realize that his pain is ultimately not understandable, because it makes no sense and is not necessary. You must, in other words, be the bridge who, in your own mind, spans the gulf between insanity and sanity, allowing your friend to cross over and be healed. You must share her doubts, fears and pain in the sense of seeing them through her eyes, yet not in the sense of joining in them. To join in his suffering would reinforce his sense of weakness and vulnerability, and would mean joining in blame of those who supposedly caused his pain. Your focus must be on empathizing not with her weakness and suffering, but with the strength in him, the Christ in him, and turning to the Holy Spirit for how this “true empathy” can most helpfully be expressed through you.
Other Relevant Issues
Psychotherapy and Religion
This style of guidance does not require belief in God and other spiritual realities on the part of either you or your friend. Its goal is to relieve the mind of guilt through forgiveness. To demand that your brother believe in God would be unfair, but he does need to hold the goal of separating the truth from his own illusions. It is also not necessary for you to believe in God. All that is required is for you to teach forgiveness. By extending forgiveness, “They can succeed where many who believe they have found God will fail” (P-2.II.7:6). Even if you and your friend don’t believe in God, you have approached and served God in the process. For it is forgiveness, rather than belief in God, that removes the blocks to the awareness of God. And it is joining with another person that invites God in. In fact, true religion and true guidance share the same goals and even the same outer forms in the world. True religion is not the formal religion of traditional churches, but a holy relationship between a spiritual teacher and his pupil, which is designed to remove the blocks to the awareness of God’s Presence. This also is true guidance. At their highest the two disciplines meet. The relationship between an advanced spiritual teacher and his pupil is indistinguishable from the relationship between an advanced healer and her friend.
Relationship to Conventional Guidance
“The essential goal of therapy is the same as that of knowledge meaning, heavenly knowledge. No one can survive independently as long as he is willing to see himself through the eyes of others” (T-3.VIII.11:1-2).
It says that you are not asked to be perfect, for “Whatever stage he is in, there are patients who need him just that way” (P-2.I.4:5).
It says that God will use any opening that is offered Him for healing, however small. Just for you to dedicate yourself to being a healer, just for you and your friend to get together in the same space, means that some opening has been provided, and God will use that for healing.
There are two beautiful quotes that speak of what this friendship can become: P-2.I.4:1 and P-2.VII.8:1-4. The sense one gets from these passages is that, in the ideal friendship, two people lose sight of their conventional identities, forget all the mundane details of daily life, forget the painful, insane world outside the relationship, and enter into a timeless moment of expansive peace and union.