Spirituality in Psychotherapy

How do spiritual issues manifest in psychotherapy?

Why might therapists benefit from exploring personal cosmologies and spiritual bias, and how does this relate to cultural sensitivity? Can therapists effectively support clients who are experiencing spiritual emergence, emergencies, and related mental health issues?

In this 4 week course:

We’ll explore the diverse facets of spiritual life and innate spiritual dynamics that underly psychotherapeutic processes, challenges, and breakthroughs.

Overview:

Therapists often express a desire and hesitation to welcome spirituality into psychotherapy. This uncertainty is often due to the limited exposure to contemporary research on psychospiritual issues within the context of clinical training. Relatively recent historical factors have guided the field of psychology to view therapy as a mostly secular, atheist, or agnostic space. What often comes as a surprise is that therapists hold specific skillsets that make them uniquely suited to engage in ethical, sensitive, and values-enhancing psychospiritual care. Approaching these issues with cultural humility and a willingness to welcome diverse spiritual worldviews can often help therapists and clients engage more meaningfully in healing work.

As organized religion and new-age (and old-age) practices evolve over time, the definition of spirituality has become increasingly broad. Historically, spirituality was associated with organized religion, and it has also been described as including but transcending religious practice. Spirituality today may look like traditional religious rites and rituals, such as visiting a church or temple. For some, spirituality may also include practices such as yoga, meditation, tarot, astrology, herbalism, and a connection with nature. Spiritual pathways contain diverse cosmologies, some of which can deepen the therapeutic process in a culturally appreciative rather than appropriative way. Mindfulness and buddhism-informed principles have become central to 3rd wave therapies including some CBTs, ACT, and DBT, which are gold standard treatments for common mental health experiences such as depression, anxiety, and PTSD.

Spiritual development can catalyze or co-occur with mental illness. Clients need therapists who can effectively explore spiritual experiences, beliefs, practices, and processes that commonly interact with therapy goals. To do this, therapists must first explore their implicit belief systems or world views. Engaging in spiritual competence training can enhance clinical care by: (1) fine-tuning assessment and differential diagnosis in ways that honor complex cultural experiences; this addresses the tendency for therapists to be somewhat pollyannaish or to pathologize certain spiritual perspectives and phenomena, (2) optimizing spiritual factors in evidence-based treatment (e.g. exploring values-consistent, and non-life affirming, spiritual beliefs and practices; welcoming spiritually-supportive languaging, metaphors, and skillsets), and lastly (3) by entering the spiritual world of our client, we can more intimately understand how they make sense of life, how they process normative or harrowing life experiences (or not), and how they nourish their sense of meaning, agency, and community (or not). This experience has the potential to deepen the therapeutic relationship, which research has shown is the primary mechanism in positive therapy outcomes across treatment modalities.

In the multi-crisis reality we face today, most therapists and clients are grappling with the ongoing legacies of sexism, racism, classism, able-ism, homophobia, xenophobia, and so on. These issues are amplified by the pressing context of ecological destruction, political polarization, and growing social inequity - all of which fuel the mental health crisis. Despite the chaos, we can still (and arguably must) foster the innate human capacity for developing a spiritual core, an intrinsic values system that fundamentally seeks interconnection and common humanity, and builds bridges between different worlds. Perhaps it is from this emergent space that we can collectively re-imagine and co-create, a truly sustainable mental health.

Topics in this 4-part journey:

1. What does cross-cultural research reveal about spiritual life and mental health?

2. Why does spirituality naturally manifest in therapy as issues, barriers, and strengths? Does therapist spirituality matter?

3. How can we integrate clients’ spiritual beliefs, experiences, practices, and processes into therapy in culturally-sensitive ways?