If I Wasn't Afraid to Hurt Your Feelings, I'd Tell You (Counselor's Edition)
- Conscious Coore
- Jul 21
- 4 min read
Updated: Jul 24
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Everyone says trauma-informed spiritual care is important. And yet, it is incredibly absent from the spaces that need it the most — including the church.
How do I know? Besides it being a general consensus that churches have a history of doing harm, nearly every person who comes to me for trauma-informed spiritual care says they sought help first from a pastor, church leader, or biblical counselor.
Only 33% of them said that support truly addressed their deeper emotional or spiritual needs.
Even more—83%—said they felt dismissed, misunderstood, or spiritually bypassed. Many left still feeling unresolved or confused about their faith and identity.
With 10 years of experience in spiritual care and 5 years working at the intersection of mental health and faith with a trauma-informed approach, here are 4 things I'd say to you if I wasn't afraid to hurt your feelings.
People aren't looking for directions; they're looking for direction
The difference might seem subtle, but it’s significant.
Directions tell someone what to do. Direction helps someone orient themselves, find internal clarity, and access what they already know.
Christianity is full of directions. Often well-intended, even biblically grounded. But if you’re a Christian caregiver, you may be so used to giving people instructions that you miss the opportunity to help them find their orientation.
When you give someone direction, you actually reduce their dependence on your advice. On the contrary, if you can strike the balance of giving direction and supporting with orientation, your advice will land better when it’s an absolutely crucial moment for you to give it.
If they aren't asking you questions, they've tuned you out
Silence does not mean agreement.
In Christian counseling, it's easy to assume that no interruption means you're making a breakthrough. But in truth, you may have missed the opportunity to bring them to a place of resolve.
Many of us are used to edification that comes from a pulpit—a one-way conversation that people have consented to. But counseling and care require a different norm: responsiveness, curiosity, and space for dialogue.
The standard church architecturally supports this dynamic by design of the stage and microphones, only modified if the person on the stage comes down and establishes new norms for the space.
With that being said, if you think you're talking too much, you might be.
Giving a solution doesn't solve the problem
This one is closely related to point number 2, but with a little more of a gut check.
Beware: Finding what feels like the solution is easier than finding the actual conflict that a person has come to you with. Especially in Christian spaces, it’s easy to confuse finding a solution with resolving a conflict, but unless you’ve uncovered the actual core issue, the conflict beneath the surface, you might just be offering a great answer to the wrong question.
Pro tip: The better you get at uncovering the real conflict, the more relevant and applicable your solutions become.
There are flaws in your doctrine and you use them to counsel
I say this gently, but firmly: flawed doctrine doesn’t mean you’re disqualified from counseling—but it does increase the risk of causing harm.
That’s why humility is vital. We should never counsel from a place of absolute certainty or rigidity. Some of the deepest wisdom emerges when both counselor and client make space for Christ to reveal truth in real time.
Curiosity—toward the client’s beliefs and your own—is one of the most underused tools in spiritual care. Even if you don’t have questions, you can model what it looks like to wonder.
A curious client is more willfully open to wisdom, and therefore more likely to receive it and respond to it.
So What Now?
If any of this hit home, you’re not alone, and you don’t have to keep navigating it on your own either.
We’re starting a 12-session series inside the Safe and Sound community on August 10th, and we’ll be talking about this kind of stuff in real time: spiritual bypassing, trauma-informed doctrine, direction vs. directions, and how to hold space that actually helps.
If you’re already enrolled in the Trauma-Informed Spiritual Intervention® certification, you’re already in. Just mark your calendar for August 10th at 7pm EST
If you haven’t signed up for the course yet, get into the Safe and Sound group by August 10th so you don’t miss the full experience. This isn’t the kind of thing you want to jump into halfway through.
Enroll now: https://tisicertified.thinkific.com/
Skip the course and join the community: https://tisicertified.thinkific.com/products/communities/safeandsound
You're doing important work, and I’d love to do it alongside you.
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Conscious Coore is the founder of Flamingo Trauma Recovery, the creator of the Trauma-Informed Spiritual Intervention® framework, and author of Fundamentals of Trauma-Informed Spiritual Intervention. With a background in psychology, education, and inner healing ministry, she equips faith-aligned professionals to integrate clinical care and biblical wisdom for lasting transformation. Through her work with Jesus in the Marketplace, she highlights where Safe and Sound work is happening, even in spaces that often overlook the need for it.
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