Seeing Jesus Set People Free
Love Europe—Kiev, Ukraine I: Counseling Education
I always love teaching international graduate students in the area of intensive, time limited, couple’s therapy. Usually I fly into a country, pull out my laptop, teach, and fly home. This time, April 4–9 in Ukraine, was amazingly different!
First, a TV producer told me that they had never seen a national show on adultery prevention. He wasn’t sure how it would go over, but the next day, in shock, told me that it was really well received. It appears that adultery happens everywhere!
Second, a radio station interviewer, having told me the same thing, reassured me that we probably wouldn’t have many call-ins because Ukrainians are very conservative. Boy, was he ever wrong. I couldn’t answer all of the questions!
Third, the counseling this year was especially effective. I met with:
- A highly educated woman, abandoned with four children (one three months old), who never recognized her husband’s sexual addiction until we started reconstructing his behavior. We used the internet, standard assessment inventories and definitions of personality disorders to help her out of denial and to discard the lie that he had told her, “It is all your fault.”
- A young wife, married less than a year, who suffered from beatings from her Christian husband that required hospital emergency room care. In Ukraine, divorce, even for domestic violence, is not an option.
- A young husband, in ministry, whose wife berated him in front of their son, acted out with other men inappropriately, raged out of control, ruined his reputation with lies, but was terrified of him leaving her, had driven this poor man to despair. Again, with the help of the internet (and the translator), we were able to show him patterns that provided, not only relief for him, but a better understanding of what his wife needed and was experiencing.
I love being the bearer of Good News and seeing Jesus set people free!
Dave Carder
Counseling Pastor & Love Europe Ukraine I Team Member
