Affirmation within a Transcendent Reality of Love

Authentic human encounter must include matters of the heart to encompass the full holistic reality of the person. The Catholic psychiatrist Conrad Baars positioned affirmation-based therapy as a clinical treatment for the human need for affirmation. However, attempting to treat matters of the heart in a clinical sense often brings much misunderstanding and error. Counselors and other helping professionals are prone to deal with the subjective nature of a person sentimentally and without reverence for the full objective reality of the person. The purpose of this article is to address issues that emerge in applying affirmation as a clinical technique, and to offer an alternative non-clinical formative approach that allows access to the immaterial and transcendent reality of the person. Four central issues and their remedies are explored: (a) competition between objectivity and subjectivity, (b) the denial of free will, (c) creating a unilateral process that requires another person to act first, and (d) attachment to the counselor. This discussion draws from the metaphysical concept of being as a gift and our free response to be a gift for others. Through this understanding, it is possible to view affirmation as a bilateral process rather than a unilateral one that first requires action from another person. Specific applications are provided to show how formative, non-clinical, human encounters can guide another to a bilateral loving relationship with God as the fullest source of life and affirmation.