Theophostic

Theophostic Counseling was developed in the United States during the mid-1990s Ed Smith, a Baptist minister. After concerns about legal liabilities associated with offering counseling services, Smith later changed the name to Theophostic Prayer Ministry.

Its name comes from the Greek theo (God) and phostic (light), and it is often associated with the Christian Inner Healing Movement. Smith says people are being delivered from phobias, depressions, anxiety disorders, obsessive–compulsive disorders, dissociative personality disorders, attention deficit hyperactivity disorders, sexual addictions, eating disorders, post-traumatic stress disorders, and homosexuality through Theophostic principles. The name Theophostic is a registered trademark.

Few empirical evaluations of Theophostic Ministry are available, although Christian psychologist Fernando Garzon says that current case study and survey data has yielded clinically significant changes in client symptom levels, and high degrees of client and practitioner satisfaction.

Smith's definition of Theophostic Prayer Ministry is that "Theophostic is a ministry of helping emotionally wounded people to acknowledge and to identify the true source of their inner emotional pain and find lasting peace through receiving personalized truth directly from the Lord."

Smith lists fourteen basic principles of Theophostic Prayer Ministry,:

1. Our present situation is rarely the cause of our ongoing emotional pain.

2. Everything we presently know, feel or are mentally aware of has its roots in a first-time experience.

3. If we try to resolve our present conflicts without resolving our historical lie-based woundedness, we will find only temporary relief for our emotional pain. However, if we find renewal for our past, we can redeem our present.

4. Since many of the negative emotions we currently feel are reflections of the past, they provide opportunities for the wounds of our lives to be exposed and thus for renewal to occur.

5. To facilitate emotional renewal, we need to identify the three basic elements in the renewal process: (1) the present emotional pain, (2) the original memory container and (3) the original lie(s) implanted in the memory container.

6. People are in emotional bondage due to two basic factors, belief and choice. These two factors are rooted in the context of deception.

7. When we believe a lie, the outcome will often have much the same consequences as though it were true.

8. To be free of the lies we believe, we must identify and own the lies rather than suppress or deny we believe them before we can be free from them.

9. In the midst of our “darkness”, we must come to realize how utterly bound we are to the lie and how helpless we are to overcome its debilitating grip on our lives apart from God’s divine intervention.

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Wikipedia