Religion and Theology

The world is usually full of discord as a result of God cursing man and the ground in Genesis 3 14-24, and anyone living on the face of this planet has to contend with a variety of issues, most of which they cannot find solutions for. This creates the need for them to reach out to seek a helping hand, which can assist in finding solutions to their problems (Clinton and Ron 2007, 18). Most of these people find themselves in offices of pastors, therapists and even psychologists, depending on whom they think is the right person to assist them best. Therapy can be in many forms, depending on the problem at hand, and these forms are family therapy, traditional psychotherapy, domestic violence therapy, sex abuse therapy, couples therapy in the form of pre-marital or post-marital therapy, substance abuse therapy, and even institutional therapy in the cases of schools, businesses, prisons and other institutions (Pichot and Dolan 2003, pp. 1-14). In the case of Christians facing dilemmas, they mostly go for their spiritual leaders, since the bible in Proverbs 305 says that every word of God is pure and holy He is a shield that protects those who put their trust in Him.

Solution Based Brief Pastoral Counseling
Pastoral Counseling is the care and support given by a spiritual leader to a person who has sought his assistance on an issue troubling them (Benner 2003, 11-14), and is aimed at solving the issue at hand, while at the same time nurturing the person to be able to win battles with such problems in future on their own. Pastoral counseling therefore involves a lot of concentration and care due to its delicateness since lack of enough care risks leaving his client more confused and disillusioned than they were before. Pastoral counseling comes in two main forms long-term pastoral counseling and short-term pastoral counseling.

Solution Based Brief Pastoral Counseling is where the pastoral counselor adopts a short-term model that involves a few sessions aimed at offering effective solutions to individual problems (Benner 2003, 19-26).  This kind of counseling assumes that by the end of the final session in the structural format of the counseling, the clients problem will have been solved, and that the client will adopt the instructions of the pastoral counselor in solving the problem. This helps to divulge all the necessary details of the problem to the counselor, for ease in strategy formulation and finding a lasting solution to the problem. The advantage of this method is that it can be used by pastoral counselors with limited resources or knowledge in counseling (Benner 2003, 42-45), and that it minimizes the chances of the client getting bored from a therapy that is likely to take too long. However, this model of counseling is not practical where a variety of issues are causing a common problem, or where the client finds difficulties in fulfilling the instructions from the pastoral counselor.

Solution Based Brief Therapy
Solution Based Brief Therapy is the type of therapy based on building solutions, instead of laying emphasis on solving of the problem. It focuses on the future desire of the client instead of the current problem he is trying to solve, and is mainly used to try and induce change in the clients behaviors and habits that may have resulted to the problem (Kollar 1997, 13-23). This kind of therapy is based on several assumptions on the part of the caregiver. Firstly, it is assumed that the small changes incorporated by the client will eventually cause a big change in his general functioning. Secondly, SFBT assumes that behavioral solutions to the clients need do exist or are in place. The other assumption that SFBT incorporates so that it can be effective is that the clients solutions to his problem does not have a direct relationship to any identified problem by the therapist or the client himself.  Lastly, this therapy method assumes that conversational skills needed by the therapist to ask the client to try solution-building for their problem is different from the conversational skill needed to diagnose and treat the problems of the client (Warner 2007, 22-34).

The main advantages of Solution Focused Brief Therapy is that the client gets to be the one providing solutions to his problem and that the client learns to let go off past failures and present misgivings to focus on a better future (Stone 1994, 12-15). On the other hand, it is disadvantageous in the sense that if a client sets a wrong strategy for the future as a corrective measure, then this would result into more ruin. Moreover, Solution Focused Brief Therapy does not have a guarantee that the client will change.

Positive Psychology
Positive psychology is a branch of psychology that endeavors to understand the conditions and emotions that facilitate the flourishing of people, groups or organizations. Such positive emotions like joy, contentment and optimism are claimed to have a grand reason in evolution, since they widen the scope of ideas, actions, creativity and exploration. Consequently, this increased scope of things creates durable personal resources like knowledge and social connections, which can help us considerably when we are laden with problems (Peterson 2006, p. 11-23).

Seligman 2002, pp. 5-19 says that happiness in life can be increased if we become more engaged in what we do, if we get more pleasure out of life, and by finding ways of making our lives feel more meaningful. He then continues to claim that for us to get more pleasure out of life, we need to savor every moment, build our memories, share with others, get absorbed fully into what we are doing, we be mindful, we sharpen our perceptions, we congratulate ourselves for our achievements and we avoid forming habits. Moreover, Seligman adds that we should nurture relationships, identify and use our strengths, find worthwhile experiences, be thankful, perform small acts of kindness, find a connection to a larger purpose and weigh our lives occasionally.

Positive psychology is advantageous in that it makes the client focus on his good side, thus making him gain an aura of confidence and self worth that makes them able to love their selves even better. It also helps the client to build better relationships through sharing and interacting with others, and by so doing they learn how to relate better with their problems as well as those of others. The weaknesses of positive psychology are that the client may become too indulged in focusing on his positive side that he may end up forgetting that he may forget how to deal with his negative side says Held 2002, pp. 965-991, and there is no guarantee that the client will be able to maintain focus on his positive traits.

Analysis and Comparison Positive Psychology and SBBPC
Positive psychology and Soul Based Brief Pastoral Counseling are both similar in the sense that they are both used to resolve the problems of the client by use of the short-term model of counseling by bringing a change of attitude and perception to the client, and making him focus on the future and disregard his earlier failures. Both these models try to make the client chose the path he wants to take with reference to his problems.

However, though these two models seem very similar, they differ considerably in many ways. One very major difference is in the context of what the two types of counseling deal with problems that are presented. While on one hand SBBPC entails the use of scripture, prayers, sacraments and biblical texts (McMinn 1996, p. 147), positive psychology may apply either a religious or secular perspective to solve their problems. Moreover, while on one hand SBBPC can only be conducted by a spiritual leader, positive psychology on the other hand is a practice that is open to anyone who can analyze the psychology of a person and offer assistance on their problems.

Though these issues arise, we can however not dispute the fact that positive psychology contributes immensely to SBBPC in many ways. According to Robert 1993, pp. 14-25, we can gather this from his view that pastoral counseling is not autonomous to the counseling field and thus there is no universal clarification for what is incorporated in SBBPC. He continues to say that positive psychology helps the client to find meaning in problems and therefore a pastoral counselor who is knowledge able in it will be able to efficiently build relationships with clients, thus helping them sort the problems with more ease and speed. Additionally, through the practice of change in behavior in positive psychology, a person tends to lie towards doing good deeds to others, which is one of the core values encouraged by SBBPC.

Conclusion
The principles underlying in both positive psychology and solution based brief pastoral counseling enable a person to live a life of fulfillment. Cloud (2004, pp. 6-117) says that there are several things a person needs to do in life. Cloud outlines these things as digging deep below the surface into our hearts and investing what we find there getting rid of the bad things within us out of our lives completely considering the future implications of our actions doing something to make things better regardless of who and what is the cause of the problem taking small steps at a time while not looking backwards moving away from what we hate so as to establish character giving back in better proportions than we received, being humble and making tough decisions based on principle rather than hoe others to react to the decision.

We can therefore say that putting this in mind, positive psychology and solution based brief pastoral counseling can be said to assist in making most of our lives right and righteous while at the same time giving us focus and solving our problems.