Spirituality As A Working Model In Brief Psychotherapy

Spirituality as a Working Model in Brief Psychotherapy is a practical book that describes easily applicable methods for use by nontheologically trained therapists. The focus is on brief psychotherapy, since long-term treatment is no longer possible for many individuals today living busy lives on a limited budget. The book is unique in its approach involving real-life encounters between patients and therapists with years of experience in both spirituality and psychotherapy. While there are other books in the field of spirituality and psychotherapy, they are written from a traditional Freudian-based philosophy and do not include practical, easily applicable methods for use when time is limited. Most assume a traditional longer commitment by both therapist and patient, which today is often unrealistic. The authors of this book come from multiple disciplines including pastoral counseling, psychology, psychiatry, medicine, social work, and theology. Major areas of presentation include: Spirituality as a Multidimensional Model for Psychotherapy; The Ubiquity of Spirituality; Dynamics of Faith: Understanding Religion and Spirituality; Spirituality and the Therapist; Counseling Body/Soul Persons; Energy of Change; Spiritual Competence in a Medical Setting; Rituals and Symbols in Brief Psychotherapy; Working through the Steps of Spiritual Development; and Ethics in Spiritually Based Psychotherapy. The primary audience for this text is students in all the human behavior fields, professional counselors, clergy, chaplains, as well as professionals already in practice looking for better ways to achieve real results using brief psychotherapy. Each of the 11 chapters contains many practical applications for therapists.

The overarching theme of this book is that spiritually-oriented psychotherapy is entirely consistent with brief psychotherapeutic relationships. In advancing this claim, I first present an overview of contemporary spirituality and the brief psychotherapy movement. I later seek to describe the subtle but powerful connections that exist between certain approaches to brief therapy and the experience commonly referred to as cosmic consciousness. Before beginning a deliberate description of what I call Brief Spiritual Psychotherapy (BSP), I describe the experience of cosmic consciousness from the perspectives of Christian doctrine, Eastern philosophy and transpersonal psychology. Throughout I attempt to show how it is that these bodies of thought lay the conceptual groundwork in our day for the practice of therapy that is based upon a spiritual outlook. I follow this preparation with a discussion of the specifics of BSP, using the elements that are inherently involved in any psychotherapy - view of the client, view of the problem, role of the therapist, and theory of change -as orienting structure.

From a leading researcher and practitioner, this volume provides an innovative framework for understanding the role of spirituality in people's lives and its relevance to the work done in psychotherapy. It offers fresh, practical ideas for creating a spiritual dialogue with clients, assessing spirituality as a part of their problems and solutions, and helping them draw on spiritual resources in times of stress. Written from a nonsectarian perspective, the book encompasses both traditional and nontraditional forms of spirituality. It is grounded in current findings from psychotherapy research and the psychology of religion, and includes a wealth of evocative case material.

Bringing Religion and Spirituality into Therapy provides a comprehensive and timely model for spirituality-integrated therapy which is truly pluralist and responsive to the ever-evolving World of religion/spirituality. This book presents an algorithmic, process-based model for organizing the abundance of theoretical and practical literature around how psychology, religion and spirituality interact in counseling. Building on a tripartite framework, the book discusses the practical implications of the model and shows how it can be used in the context of assessment and case formulation, research, clinical competence, and education, and the broad framework ties together many strands of scholarship into religion and spirituality in counseling across a number of disciplines. Chapters address the concerns of groups such as the unaffiliated, non-theists, and those with multiple spiritual influences. This approachable book is aimed at mental health students, practitioners, and educators. In it, readers are challenged to develop richer ways of understanding, being, and intervening when religion and spirituality are brought into therapy.

Here, the authors share specific strategies suggesting holistic and sound interventions to include religion and spirituality into counselling and social work practice.

Does my life have any deeper meaning? Does God really care about me? How can I find and follow my moral compass? What do I do when my faith is shaken to the core? Spiritual trials, doubts, or conflicts are often intertwined with mental health concerns, yet many psychotherapists feel ill equipped to discuss questions of faith. From pioneers in the psychology of religion and spirituality, this book combines state-of-the-art research, clinical insights, and vivid case illustrations. It guides clinicians to understand spiritual struggles as critical crossroads in life that can lead to brokenness and decline--or to greater wholeness and growth. Clinicians learn sensitive, culturally responsive ways to assess different types of spiritual struggles and help clients use them as springboards to change.

This book brings together the historically separate domains of mental health and spiritual awareness in a holistic framework called InnerView Guidance. Building on strength-based and solution-oriented approaches to therapy, the InnerView model offers a unique psychospiritual approach which can be applied in any of the helping professions. InnerView recognizes the individual’s need for internal cohesion between psychological growth and spiritual development. It is a principle-driven paradigm that foregrounds ‘soul work’ as a central evolutionary task. The book presents the core concepts and methodology involved in the alignment of ego with soul. Chapters explain the theoretical roots of the model, explore practical applications in therapeutic settings, and introduce InnerView as a rich synergy of psychotherapy and spiritual guidance. Taking an original and cutting-edge approach, this valuable text will be essential reading for scholars and students, as well as practitioners in the fields of psychotherapy, counselling, life coaching, social work, and spiritual care.

`Fascinating. There is much here that is controversial, thought provoking and very useful. It is encyclopaedic in its breadth and use of knowledge. [Like] rich food [it] needs to be taken in slowly, savouring every morsel!′ - Thresholds `[Spirituality] has been traditionally ′taboo′ within the counselling and psychotherapy profession. Denis Lines comes into this controversial scene with a rigorous-but-gentle, mystical-but-grounded, inspiring and thought-provoking voice.... The book is well written and presents the model in the context of other therapeutic modalities, which makes it interesting and useful for therapists from different backgrounds and practice settings. It could also be of use for those involved in religious education, pastoral care or anybody interested in the spiritual development of the self or the existential quest of humankind′ - Therapy Today ′This gentle, mystical, empirical and scholarly book is truly inspirational and it deserves the widest possible readership among therapists, religious educators and all those who care about the spiritual destiny of humankind′ - Professor Brian Thorne, Co-founder The Norwich Centre and Emeritus Professor of Counselling, University of East Anglia Spirituality in Counselling and Psychotherapy explores the idea that throughout the course of a therapeutic relationship between therapist and client, a spiritual level is reached by the two people involved. The author shows how this dimension can help clients who are living in an increasingly secular and faithless society to find some resolution with the issues they bring to therapy. By exploring different perspectives on religion and spirituality, the book provides therapists with the grounding they need to introduce spiritually-centred counselling into their practice. It describes the characteristics of spiritual counselling and covers practical considerations such as: " recognising indications from the client to move into a spiritual mode of therapy " exploring the ′self′ through spiritual work within the therapeutic process, and how this can lead to healing and growth " how to deal with doubt and scepticism over issues of spirituality. The book is illustrated throughout with transcripts and case studies to show how therapists can integrate the spiritual within their own approach to therapeutic work. It will be invaluable to all those who wish to explore this dimension in their work with clients.