My understanding of personal and pastoral ethics and boundaries that guide the counseling process is deep influenced by Hands and Fehr’s work. Their emphasis on personal intimacy, interpersonal intimacy, and intimacy with God creates a big impact for me when I am still struggling in a question how a pastor or a lay person as a weak and wicked sinner has the ability to care for the other sinners.
According to Hands and Fehr, the possible “false self” is developed from our birth, childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, and into midadulthood. Thus, it is essential to develop genuine intimacy in early childhood; otherwise it will lead to dysfunction and maladaptive behaviors seeking pseudo-intimacy. A failure to develop genuine intimacy in early childhood may lead people to look for love in all the wrong places. These wrong places keep the inner child ever needy, ever empty, depressed, and a victim. These people are still seeking the nurturance they did not experience growing up. They still hunger for the intimacy that was not provided when they were children. Thus, they become seeking pseudo-intimacy.
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People whose children’s boundaries were turned into walls are less manifestly angry but more emotionally empty, dependent, and needy, tending toward behaviors designed to placate and please others. Under the deformation in these families, children suppress their fear, terror, anger, and hurt. The hurt and felt woundedness had to be kept secret. As a result, the children were left with guilt and shame, believing that they were in some way culpable, defective. The children develop a separation between their affective and cognitive capacities. This split is defensive and was necessary for survival sometimes. The dissociation separates feelings from thoughts, body from mind, and perceptions from