Toward A Spiritual Psychotherapy

Toward a Spiritual Psychotherapy collects a series of lectures presented by psychologist Hunter Beaumont over a 10-year period. Covering such themes as relationships, family, healing, grief, mourning, and death, the book features case stories that demonstrate clients’ healing experiences. Practicing in Germany for the past 30 years, Hunter Beaumont has had the unique experience of working with World War II and Holocaust survivors and their descendants. Through this work he discovered that healing requires attending to the soul, a process he describes as an “inner ‘felt sense’ and common, everyday dimension of experience.” Demonstrating how therapists can integrate this more spiritual approach into their practices, Beaumont highlights the particular successes of the innovative family constellations therapy. Developed by German psychologist Bert Hellinger and expanded by Beaumont and others, this therapy takes place in a group setting, with group members standing in for family members or others involved in the client’s problem. A crucial part of Beaumont’s spiritual psychotherapy practice, this method has helped many of his clients release and resolve profound tensions, and offers hope to readers recovering from trauma or PTSD, or simply trying to navigate life’s difficulties.

How can we connect the spiritual realizations of Buddhism with the psychological insights of the West? In Toward a Psychology of Awakening John Welwood addresses this question with comprehensiveness and depth. Along the way he shows how meditative awareness can help us develop more dynamic and vital relationships and how psychotherapy can help us embody spiritual realization more fully in everyday life. Welwood's psychology of awakening brings together the three major dimensions of human experience: personal, interpersonal, and suprapersonal, in one overall framework of understanding and practice.

Toward a Spiritual Psychotherapy collects a series of lectures presented by psychologist Hunter Beaumont over a 10-year period. Covering such themes as relationships, family, healing, grief, mourning, and death, the book features case stories that demonstrate clients’ healing experiences. Practicing in Germany for the past 30 years, Hunter Beaumont has had the unique experience of working with World War II and Holocaust survivors and their descendants. Through this work he discovered that healing requires attending to the soul, a process he describes as an “inner ‘felt sense’ and common, everyday dimension of experience.” Demonstrating how therapists can integrate this more spiritual approach into their practices, Beaumont highlights the particular successes of the innovative family constellations therapy. Developed by German psychologist Bert Hellinger and expanded by Beaumont and others, this therapy takes place in a group setting, with group members standing in for family members or others involved in the client’s problem. A crucial part of Beaumont’s spiritual psychotherapy practice, this method has helped many of his clients release and resolve profound tensions, and offers hope to readers recovering from trauma or PTSD, or simply trying to navigate life’s difficulties.

There is currently a burgeoning interest in the relationship between the Western psychotherapeutic and Buddhist meditative traditions among therapists, researchers, and spiritual seekers. Psychotherapy and Buddhism initiates a conversation between these two modern methods of achieving greater self-understanding and peace of mind. Dr. Jeffrey B. Rubin explores how they might be combined to better serve patients in therapy and adherents to a spiritual way of life. He examines the strengths and limitations of each tradition through three contexts: the nature of self, conception of ideal health, and process of achieving optimal health. The volume features the first two cases of Buddhists in psychoanalytic treatment.

This book explores how Western European psychotherapists, interviewed between 2016 and 2019, understand spirituality and how they address spiritual matters in clinical sessions.By studying a purposive sample of 15 Clinicians from Spain, England, Switzerland, Greece, Norway and Denmark, it was found that these shared similar views about spirituality, understood as dynamic, fluid and independent from religion. The interviewed psychotherapists showed great variation in their psychotherapy trainings, theoretical background and spiritual stances. However, the participants' rich narratives illustrate that independently from their personal and professional background they all approached spiritual matters from a client centered, humanistic perspective. Spirituality was often addressed heuristically, integrating different approaches in a creative manner through an array of interventions. Differences in the participants' religious and cultural background did not appear to determine the clinicians' views and approaches. Recommendations for practice are discussed, stressing the relevance of implementing a non-materialistic scientific paradigm that acknowledges different personal experiences, as a source of spiritual knowledge. The importance of keeping a non-judgmental perspective and the need to acknowledge views and practices of those considering themselves as spiritual but not religious are also highlighted.Different audiences may find this book relevant, for instance psychotherapists and those in charge of psychotherapy training programs wishing to integrate a spiritual perspective in clinical work independent from religious doctrines. Likewise, those interested in historical perspectives about the traditional exclusion of spirituality from clinical work as well as the current re-integration of non- dogmatic, fluid spiritual perspectives may find relevant information. The theoretical discussions and methodological explanations could be of interest for those considering to implement thematic analysis or to pursue qualitative studies from a collaborative and reflexive stance.

The current interest in spirituality has intensified the quest to incorporate spirituality in non-sectarian therapy. Spiritual Care and Therapy is a hands-on, up-to-date clinical guide that addresses this concern. Peter VanKatwyk explores spiritual care, from pastoral traditions to essential psychotherapies, in individual, couple, and family therapy, offering integrative perspectives. Therapy vignettes from multiple perspectives are included, as well as a wealth of diagrams and maps. His unique perspective of different helping relationships is an approach that celebrates diversity and promotes the flexibility of multiple uses of self and their respective styles of care. Part 1 describes common and pluralistic meanings of spirituality, locating spiritual care both in the ordinary experience of daily life and in professional practice. Part 2 focuses on the essentials of caring, posed in the three questions of what to know (therapy models), what to say (communication roles) and what to be (uses of self). These three core areas converge in the book’s central framework of the helping style inventory (helping relationships). Part 3 maps the contexts of care: the person situated in family and society, moving through time in rites of passage that congest when impacted by crisis and loss. Finally, Part 4 presents the actual process of clinical education, first through a model of supervision and second, through a research methodology designed for the study of spirituality and health care. Perfect as a text in either education or academic programs, this book will be of interest to all helping professionals who value an integrative and holistic approach to spiritual care and therapy.

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.

2020 American Board & Academy of Psychoanalysis (ABAPsa) book award winner! If, when a patient enters therapy, there is an underlying yearning to discover a deeper sense of meaning or purpose, how might a therapist rise to such a challenge? As both Carl Jung and Wilfred Bion observed, the patient may be seeking something that has a spiritual as well as psychotherapeutic dimension. Presented in two parts, The Search for Meaning in Psychotherapy is a profound inquiry into the contemplative, mystical and apophatic dimensions of psychoanalysis. What are some of the qualities that may inspire processes of growth, healing and transformation in a patient? Part One, The Listening Cure: Psychotherapy as Spiritual Practice, considers the confluence between psychotherapy, spirituality, mysticism, meditation and contemplation. The book explores qualities such as presence, awareness, attention, mindfulness, calm abiding, reverie, patience, compassion, insight and wisdom, as well as showing how they may be enhanced by meditative and spiritual practice. Part Two, A Ray of Divine Darkness: Psychotherapy and the Apophatic Way, explores the relevance of apophatic mysticism to psychoanalysis, particularly showing its inspiration through the work of Wilfred Bion. Paradoxically using language to unsay itself, the apophatic points towards absolute reality as ineffable and unnameable. So too, Bion observed, psychoanalysis requires the ability to dwell in mystery awaiting intimations of ultimate truth, O, which cannot be known, only realised. Pickering reflects on the works of key apophatic mystics including Dionysius, Meister Eckhart and St John of the Cross; Buddhist teachings on meditation; Śūnyatā and Dzogchen; and Lévinas’ ethics of alterity. The Search for Meaning in Psychotherapy will be of great interest to both trainees and accomplished practitioners in psychoanalysis, analytical psychology, psychotherapy and counselling, as well as scholars of religious studies, those in religious orders, spiritual directors, priests and meditation teachers.