What Is the Icebergology™ Model? Understanding Identity and Spiritual Formation Beneath the Surface

behavior change christian counseling formation icebergology™ spiritual formation

For most of my life, I was trying to fix the wrong thing.

I was a high-achieving, piano-playing, approval-seeking young man who had learned, by the time I was ten years old, to manage what was happening inside me by performing well on the outside. When panic disorder arrived uninvited at ten and didn't leave for seven years, I became very good at hiding it. Push harder. Practice more. Show up on time — early, even. Be excellent. Be useful. Be anything other than what I actually was, which was a frightened kid with no language for what was happening beneath the surface of his life.

I eventually recovered — twice, actually, and in very different ways. The first time was behavioral and psychological. A gifted professor diagnosed me, his colleague introduced me to biofeedback with progressive muscle relaxation, and over the course of one semester, seven years of panic disorder resolved. It was remarkable. It was also incomplete.

Because the stuff that had been driving my panic was still driving me. I just had better tools for managing it now.

The second recovery came years later, in a Walmart parking lot, with my wife and infant son in the car and a stranger I had just challenged to a fight walking away from me. I sat in the driver's seat, engine off, stunned. I was a licensed counselor. I helped people with this. And I had just let the rage I had been pressing down for two decades nearly put my family in danger.

That was the day I understood the difference between recovery and repentance. And it was the beginning of what would eventually become the Icebergology™ model.

The Problem With Behavior-First Change

Most of us, when we decide something needs to change, start at the top. The behavior is visible. The behavior is embarrassing or destructive or simply exhausting to live with. So we address the behavior — with willpower, with accountability, with better habits, with a new program.

And it works. For a while.

Then the behavior comes back. Or a different behavior replaces it. Or we manage the behavior well enough to function but remain, underneath, exactly as wounded and reactive as we've always been. We've addressed the symptom without touching the source.

This is not a failure of effort. It is a failure of diagnosis.

An iceberg is a useful image here — and not accidentally. When I was a twenty-year-old psychology student at a small Baptist university in Tennessee, I sat in a classroom and watched my professor draw Sigmund Freud's iceberg on the board. He labeled the three levels — id, ego, superego — and began to explain how our visible behaviors are driven by forces beneath conscious awareness.

I was frustrated. Not with Dr. Bouchillon, who was one of the finest men I've ever known. With Freud. We were good Baptists. Wasn't there a framework for understanding human beings that took seriously that we are made in the image of God, that we are spirits, and that something is happening in our hearts and minds that secular psychology wasn't accounting for?

I picked up my pen — a pen with an LED clock in the cap, which I carried because my anxiety made me obsessive about time — and I crossed out Freud's labels. I wrote body at the tip. Mind in the middle. Spirit at the base.

That was the beginning.

Nine Steps, One Direction

Over the next four decades of clinical and pastoral work — as a counselor, an adjunct instructor, a workshop leader, and as a person who needed the model himself — what started as a frustrated scribble in a classroom became the Icebergology™ framework.

It is built around nine steps, arranged like an iceberg, with a waterline dividing what is visible from what is not.

Above the waterline — what others see:

Step 1 — Reactive Behaviors. The tip of the iceberg. The behaviors that land us in trouble, in therapy, in our spouse's office, in our own sleepless nights. These are real and they matter. But they are symptoms, not sources.

Below the waterline — the hidden architecture of our inner life:

Step 2 — Distorted Thoughts. Beneath every reactive behavior is a thought pattern — a story we've been telling ourselves, often since childhood, about who we are, who God is, and whether the world is safe. These are the lies our fallen nature and wounds taught us.

Step 3 — Damaged Emotions. Beneath the distorted thoughts are the emotions that the wounds produced. Grief. Shame. Rage. Fear. These are not weaknesses. They are signals — information about where we've been hurt and what we've come to believe about ourselves as a result.

Step 4 — Disordered and Deceptive Desires. At the deepest reactive layer, there are two distinct forces. Disordered desires are the God-given needs for safety, love, belonging, and worth that have been deformed by what was done to us. Deceptive desires are what the sin nature produces — the pull toward self-sufficiency, control, and pleasure as a substitute for genuine intimacy. Both are real. Both must be named. And in Christ, we are not what we have done or what has been done to us. We can live victoriously with enthusiasm for how God works beyond our wildest imagination.

Step 5 — Surrender. The hinge. The turning point. This is where the iceberg model diverges from every secular framework it might otherwise resemble. The apostle Paul captured it in fifty-two words: "I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind." Surrender is not a technique. It is an act of worship. And transformation — real, durable, cellular-level transformation — flows from it, not before it.

Step 6 — Divine Desires. On the other side of surrender, the Holy Spirit begins to restore what was deformed. New desires emerge — not manufactured by effort but received from the One who indwells us. This is what it means to be born of the second Adam.

Step 7 — Healing Emotions. The emotional landscape begins to shift. Not the absence of pain, but the presence of Christ within it. Peace that, as Paul put it, surpasses understanding. This is not emotional management. It is emotional transformation.

Step 8 — Renewing Thoughts. The mind begins to take on new patterns — what Romans 12:2 calls the renewal of the mind. Distorted thoughts do not vanish overnight, but they begin to lose their authority as the truth of the gospel is applied, specifically and repeatedly, to each lie the wound once taught.

Step 9 — Responsive Behaviors. The visible tip of the iceberg on the right side. Not performed virtue but organic fruit — what the Spirit produces when the root system is healthy and the vine is tended. This is not the absence of struggle. It is the presence of someone who knows which nature they want to feed.

Two Natures, One Person

The Christian life is not a progression from the left side of this model to the right, completed at conversion or at some later crisis moment of commitment. It is a daily, sometimes hourly, navigation between two natures that coexist until the day we are finally and fully conformed to Christ.

On the left: Intimacy Disorder. Born of the first Adam. Human nature. Fragmented. Triggered by the Law. Suffering poorly. A life of medicating. The reality underneath: I can't.

On the right: Incarnational Intimacy. Born of the second Adam. Super Nature — not supernatural as an adjective but as a category, the life of Christ himself dwelling in us. Integrated. Released by Love. Suffering well. A life of meditating. The reality underneath: God already has completed me perfectly in Christ.

The war between these two natures is not a sign that something has gone wrong. It is the sign that something has gone right — that the Spirit has taken up residence and the formation process has begun. As Paul wrote to the Romans, this tension is not failure. It is sanctification in progress.

Formation is a direction, not a destination.

The Four Stages: Where Are You Right Now?

Before a person can work the nine steps, they need to know where they're standing. The Icebergology™ framework includes a diagnostic tool we call the Four Stages — a map, like the large directory at the entrance of a shopping mall, that answers the first and most important question: you are here.

The four stages are arranged across two axes — left (Intimacy Disorder) and right (Incarnational Intimacy) — with two expressions on each side. A person can be:

Reactive — operating from raw human nature, without a functional faith.

Religious — performing the forms of faith without the transformation. This is often the most dangerous place in the model, because the religious heart has enough Christianity to feel safe but not enough surrender to be changed. This was me for many years.

Responsive — a believer who is actively engaged in the formation process. Present to the Spirit's work. Willing to go beneath the surface.

Relational — a maturing believer whose formation has become integrated into how they love, work, suffer, and serve. Not perfect. Not finished. But increasingly whole.

Most people who come to the Icebergology™ framework — through the app, the journals, or a coaching relationship — are somewhere between Religious and Responsive. They know enough to be uncomfortable with where they are. They haven't yet found the tools to get below the waterline, and in most cases they are still attempting to become more like Christ solely on their own efforts, without a relational dependency on the Holy Spirit who comforts us into a loving conformity.

That is exactly what these journals and tools are designed to do.

An Invitation

I built this framework because I needed it. Seven years of panic disorder, two recoveries, and four decades of sitting with people in their most honest moments taught me that the behaviors we despise in ourselves are almost never the real problem. They are the surface expression of something much older, much deeper, and — with the right tools and the presence of Christ — much more reachable than we've been told.

The iceberg is a map. The journals are the path. The indwelling Spirit is the guide.

And formation, if you'll let it, is already underway.