“May the God of peace himself sanctify you wholly, and may your spirit and soul and body be kept sound and blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. He who calls you is faithful, and he will do it.” 1 Thessalonians 5:23-24 RSV
Each of us is created by God to be whole, healthy, and fully alive. Jesus said, “I have come that you might have life and have it more abundantly.” John 10:10. Paul blessed the Thessalonians unto health, wholeness, and sanctification as complete human beings in every aspect of what makes up our humanity: Body, soul, and spirit. 1. our bodies, that they would be healed and operate harmoniously; 2. wholeness for our soul or psyche, our mind, heart, emotions, will, and relationships, and 3. That our spirit would be sanctified; that we would have our sins forgiven and forgive others. That we would be reconciled to God, know Him, love Him, and serve Him as faithful members of the Body of Christ, here on earth and forever together with Him and all the holy ones in Heaven: eternally sustained by the life of the Trinity. This is a magnificent blessing and vision for the most thorough healing of the whole human person, a vision that Meier Clinics is founded upon.
Paul Meier described the work of the Meier Clinic this way: “We integrate biblically-based Christian beliefs with psychological principles to treat the whole person – emotionally, physically, and spiritually.”
This vision for wholeness is also consistent with the Meier Clinics Statement of Faith: “We believe in the present ministry of the Holy Spirit by whose indwelling the Christian is enabled to live a godly life…We believe in the deity of our Lord Jesus Christ, in His virgin birth, in His sinless life, in His miracles, and in His vicarious and atoning death through His shed blood. We also believe in His bodily resurrection, in His ascension to the right hand of the Father, and in His personal return to earth someday to rule over the earth.” Jesus is the fullest, most glorious human person who ever lived. 2 Peter 1:3-4 tells us that our wholeness and sanctification comes from our sharing in Jesus’ divine life: “His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence, by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, that through these you may escape from the corruption that is in the world because of passion, and become partakers of the divine nature.” The Meier Clinics Statement of Faith adds: “Because Jesus truly became a human being, we believe that the whole human person is created to be sanctified, and so we uphold the sanctity of all human life, from conception to natural death.” That is why in our Clinic: “We believe that all psychological principles should be thoroughly evaluated through the grid of Scripture and that Scripture always holds the final authority.”
So our best practices embrace therapies that are congruent with the Scriptures and are intended to integrate all dimensions of the human person: our bodies, senses, minds, emotions, sexuality, relationships, ethnic and racial inheritance, gifts, and traumas, neurodiversity, mission in life, families and friendships, politics, and generational patterns. Our many clinicians utilize psychological principles and practices to affect the mind through Biblically-based cognitive behavioral therapy. We also offer psychoeducation, Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, Solution Focused Therapy, exposure/response prevention, and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. In addition to cognitive therapies that renew the mind, we provide psychological testing to guide our therapeutic interventions.
We practice therapies that aim to engage and heal the emotions given us by God to serve the truth in love, like Emotionally Focused Therapy, psychoanalytically based therapies, and Short Term Dynamic Psychotherapies.
We are aware of how trauma, sin, and organically based diseases can fragment the mind, and so our clinicians are trained in evidence-based therapies designed to heal trauma and dissociation, like Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), Brainspotting, Deep Brain Reorienting, ego state therapies, Internal Family Systems, and Art and Music Therapy.
Since our emotions are so integrated into our relationships, we offer a variety of relationship therapies, like Emotionally Focused Therapy for Couples, family systems therapies, Psychobiological Approach to Couples Therapy, the Developmental Model of Couples Therapy, and the Gottman Method of Couples Therapy.
The vision for wholeness includes the body because what affects the mind, emotions, and relationships are all manifested in and through the body. We address the body through mindfulness based somatic awareness therapies, neurofeedback, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, and Somatic Experiencing. We also offer medication management, nutritional counseling, sexual compulsion therapies, chemical dependency recovery counseling, chronic pain recovery counseling, and eating disorder counseling.
To accompany clients into the fullness of their healing, we treat the spiritual dimension of life by encouraging church attendance, personal and communal Bible studies, and other spiritual practices, like prayer, meditation, and retreat programs. We offer pastoral guidance, spiritual direction, and we coordinate our programs with local pastors and churches.
In summary, the human person is created by love and for love, in the image and likeness of God. Our body, soul, and spirit dimensions are a unity and whatever affects one affects the others. In cooperating with the healing and sanctifying activity of grace, the Christian-based counseling at the Meier Clinics utilizes a variety of somatic, cognitive, emotional, and spiritual approaches to restore wholeness and further the redemptive activity of God in the lives of people, cultures, and our nation.
