Spiritual Presence In Psychotherapy

A Guide For Caregivers

David A. Steere

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781134865697
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy
• Index: Psychology

"The book is authoritative, well-reasoned, and abounds in wisdom. It accurately portrays the deepest meanings of both spiritual presence and psychotherapy and shows interactions. This is a pioneering volume, the first of its kind. It should be the standard text for years to come". -- Wayne E. Oates, Ph.D., Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus, University of Louisiana School of Medicine

In Spiritual Presence in Psychotherapy, David Steere recognizes the incorporation of this tradition -- referring to it as "spirituality" -- and presents a unique look at this heretofore neglected interface.

This book is written in response to the need observed by Dr. Steere, for caregivers who want to accommodate a spiritual dimension in their work. For this reason, psychotherapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, pastoral counselors, nurses -- all dealing with the responsibility of treating mental disorders and helping people change -- will find Spiritual Presence in Psychotherapy invaluable.

The first part of the text discusses the interfaces of psychotherapy and spirituality. Dr. Steere analyzes the deconstruction of mainstream religion and the rise of psychotherapy against a backdrop of what he calls "spiritual homelessness".

In the second part, seven models for spiritual presence in psychotherapy are described. These are: supernatural, expansive, empathic, developmental, sacred, crisis, and systemic. Then, in the final portion of the book, the focus moves to an integration of responsiveness to spiritual presence in effective and enduring caregiving.

In addition to the professionals who will find Spiritual Presence in Psychotherapy an important resource and reference, the bookwill also serve as a key textbook for graduate-level students of professional issues and ethics, as well as psychotherapy and spirituality.

I

Context and Perspective

1

Converging Concerns

Growing numbers of people are interested in two things: healing and spiritual fulfillment. More often than not, nowadays each comes to involve the other. We want healing in the broadest sense, not just of our emotional disorders. We want wellness, the absence of all kinds of illnesses that we now know are related to the level of stress we experience in our daily living, and the quality of relationships that sustain it. We want spiritual fulfillment, in a sense equally as broad. We want the pain of an inner emptiness filled with something that gives us a sense of purpose, meaning, and direction in our lives. We want an inner integrity and a style of living that brings health and healing, in and of itself, along with the other commitments it engenders.

Traditionally, psychotherapy is concerned with curing mental abnormalities or disorders. Emotional illness is treated through conversational and mental processes, using the human relationship as the principal means for healing—as opposed to medical and surgical procedures employed to heal our common physical ailments. Spirituality, on the other hand, has to do with conceiving of and expressing our relationship to God. Spiritual disciplines seek to bring our lives into concert with the will and purpose of the creator by establishing some viable form of contact with and relatedness to this divine being.

Today people who are searching for healing and spiritual fulfillment are constantly bumping into each other. The pathway chosen by persons following either of these courses continually intersects the other and eventually blends into a larger avenue along which both parties tend to move together in increasing numbers.

The Modern World

This has not always been the case. Once the fields of psychotherapy and the spiritual disciplines were viewed as entirely separate and distinct. In the modern world everyone knew their place. Psychotherapy was a secular discipline done by psychiatrists, psychologists, and others trained by them. It was based upon the scientific method in which theory and techniques are derived from concrete experimentation and empirical observation. All of its processes, including its results, may be subjected to verification through direct observation of what actually happens.

The spiritual disciplines, on the other hand, belonged within the religious institutions. They were based upon personal or corporate faith in and devotion to a supreme being. Spirituality was built upon the assumption that God was known only through some form of revelation or self-disclosure to people. By definition, this revelation came from a realm beyond ordinary life and was not subject to scientific verification or proof.

The result was little meeting or understanding between the two. Psychotherapists referred any religious question about the spiritual life to one’s minister, rabbi, or priest. Religious leaders, in turn, deferred basic questions about emotional health and illness to the mental health profession by referring their people and praying for them.

In the modern world being described, most of us learned to think in terms of the old YMCA triangle of body, mind, and spirit. The body was the domain of what Eric Berne called “real doctors.”¹ Psychiatrists and other psychotherapists dealt with the world of the mind, while the clergy addressed the realm of the spirit.

Pastoral counselors have always wandered back and forth as aliens in both the religious and psychotherapeutic establishments. Sometimes persons in the mainline church viewed them as having “left the ministry.” In the professional community, they became uneasy companions with psychiatrists and others in mental health who often viewed them suspiciously as poorly trained newcomers. So they did their work in a somewhat embattled position having to constantly prove their spiritual commitment to one group and their professional competence to the other. More often than not they ended up wrestling with their “pastoral identity” and with an everchanging answer to the question, “What do you do as a pastoral counselor that any good psychiatrist, psychologist, or social worker couldn’t do?”

Postmodern Mentality

At the close of the twentieth century, most of us are aware that we all live in what has been characterized as the postmodern world. Not many of us still believe in the myth of objective detachment or pure scientific inquiry as the cradle of truth or reality. We live in a world of people who are grouped together around shared assumptions that they construct for themselves and then proceed to live by, ignoring the assumptions of others. We also sense that all ideas are held and endure not by virtue of possessing all-encompassing truth but because of their political significance and their utility for those who gain power by holding them. And we know that, once one of us belongs to any professional community, our perceptions are continually shaped and restricted by the common practice we have been taught to perpetuate. We may not know the scholarly world has big names for the phenomena we sense, like social constructionism or deconstructivism, but we are increasingly unwilling to grant exclusive rights to the truth to anybody in the religious establishment, the medical establishment, or the psychotherapeutic establishment.

Informed consumers today are no longer willing to partition their lives according to the old body-mind—spirit triangle. Currently, the principal treatment for substance abuse begins with the spiritual assumptions of AA that we must turn our lives, which have become unmanageable, over to God. If we include the treatment of codependent relationships that develop around substance abuse and the often accompanying picture of physical and sexual abuse, then the intersection of psychotherapeutic and spiritual concerns swells to include a sizable proportion of current psychotherapy.

An increasing number of people are no longer willing to restrict their treatment of physical illnesses like cancer or the management of pain to purely medical approaches. Medical care is supplemented with nontraditional tools such as meditation and relaxation, music therapy, chanting, massage, nutrition, and fitness training. The human potential movement of the 1960s convinced many professionals like Gestalt therapists Erving and Miriam Polster that psychotherapy was too valuable an experience to be confined to the emotionally disturbed.² The pattern of the growth center survived in the use of therapeutic techniques to promote general health and wellness, reduce stress, and open the way for spiritual fulfillment, proceeding to incorporate methods of both Eastern and Western religious life. If we include the recent growth in small groups throughout the country, which some estimate to involve at least 40% of the American population, you have some sense of the broad intersection of psychotherapeutic concerns for emotional well-being and spiritual concerns for right relationships with creator and creation.³ This rising interest is clearly marked by the increase in workshops interrelating various phases of psychotherapy and spiritual concerns among conferences held by professional groups that include physicians, psychiatrists, psychologists, humanistic psychologists, and marriage and family therapists.

Holistic Thinking

All of this begs for some clarification of the relationship between psychotherapy and spirituality. Once distinct boundaries that carefully separated the two fields no longer exist. We can discern several phases in their collapse. By mid-century holistic understandings of our life as human beings necessitated a view of ourselves in which every part of our existence is inextricably connected to every other part. This meant that our wellbeing—physical, emotional, and spiritual—involved everything from the food we eat to the germs we come in contact with, the ideas in our heads to the relationships we maintain at home and at work, the quality of our sleep to the fitness of our exercise, the amount of stress produced in our daily life to our inner sense of relatedness to the universe. With an immune system and a state of mental health so intimately connected, a line could no longer be drawn between our bodies, our minds, and our spirits.

By this time, we had started to shift from viewing the relationship between psychotherapy and spirituality as separate and distinct to regard the two as mutually complementary. Once the conversation began, there was no stopping it. Any weapon would do to fight depression, any stick would do to beat the devil. Union Theological Seminary could establish a department of psychiatry and religion. Medical schools could establish chairs in medical ethics, religion, and theology. Pastoral counselors and pastoral psychotherapists could be licensed by the state alongside other mental health professionals.

With this thoroughgoing holistic view of life coming to dominate our thoughts about medicine, human nature, and the ecology of biological and social systems today, we are entering a third phase of constant convergence and continuing overlap between the fields of psychotherapy and spirituality. No one can seriously insist that pastoral counselors and pastoral psychotherapists have a monopoly on what is spiritual about psychotherapy. Countless lay persons trained from the paraprofessional to the most professional levels are in on the act.

Actually, we have always known this. There have always been people who described profound and moving personal changes they made in psychotherapy as spiritual experiences. Likewise, we have always known persons who have found particular spiritual experiences to be therapeutic both in a sense of emotional or physical healing and personal growth.

It is the thesis of this book that we are now ready to speak about and explore the spiritual dimensions of psychotherapy. What was once separate and distinct, then complementary, has become such a common possession of constantly overlapping experience that we may be able to identify some common ingredients or recurring patterns that are present in a wide range of psychotherapies and, if we permit everyone to get into the act, many of us may be able to get our act together in a new and better way.

Consumers and Providers

This guidebook is for persons who have a vested interest in understanding the spiritual dimensions of psychotherapy. Although it is written primarily for caregivers, the consumers are always in my mind. I think of a number of different groups. In the first place, there are my own clients—couples, families, and individuals—with whom I have worked to make changes. With many there have been profound experiences that we have shared together, moving experiences that we will not forget, yet often we could only talk about them piecemeal. We were so busy doing what we needed to do at the moment that there was not time to stop and discuss everything. There never is because to do so would unseat the process itself. It would be like interrupting the experience of falling in love with someone to take notes and reflect upon everything that is happening at this point or that.

Second, there are growing numbers of persons who are seeking relief from their emotional distress and healing in their basic relationships through spiritual means. They are people who want more than a simple cure of a symptom or relief from some kind of dysfunction. They are concerned with the meaning of their lives and how to integrate what is happening to them with some sense of larger purpose. They deserve to know what to look for and how to find it as clearly as we can tell them.

Third, there is that group of persons who want to evaluate different approaches to spiritual healing among therapists of various kinds from which they will make choices. Some persons bill themselves as “Christian psychotherapists” or “Christian counselors.” Others suggest the use of special spiritual disciplines within the course of psychotherapy to promote healing and well-being. For this group of consumers I hope the materials ahead will assist them in thinking through what they want and making more intelligent choices.

Finally, there are probably consumers out there who would like to evaluate what they are getting from their present therapy. Perhaps this guide can assist them in the task. It is quite possible that some readers could decide they are getting much more than they realized and come to a new appreciation of the depth of what is happening to them. It is also possible that others would like to ask for more than they are presently experiencing. Whatever the case, I hope this book will produce a more informed consuming public.

At the same time, the main purpose of this book is to stimulate thought among providers of psychotherapy about spiritual dimensions in their work. Among them are several groups. First there are a number of colleagues who are actively interested in the interface between the two fields as evidenced in the rising number of workshops, papers, and programs devoted to spirituality at meetings of their associations. Ill at ease with the limitations of self-contained scientific systems, they seek meaning beyond themselves in their work. This search for spiritual resources to enrich the quality of their own professional practice brings together pastoral counselors educated within the theological/spiritual commitments of the ordained ministry and lay persons both inside and outside the church. More often than not, whatever spiritual resources any of these persons have acquired do not translate easily into psychotherapeutic disciplines learned in other settings. This causes some to wonder if many pastors doing psychotherapy are turning their backs on their traditional methods of spiritual care and direction, selling their birthright for a mess of psychological pottage. Even the most seasoned pastoral counselors often struggle with identifying and claiming the spiritual dimensions of their own work.

There is a second group of caregivers that I think of as colleagues incognito. If we can no longer draw hard and fast boundaries between the disciplines of psychotherapy and spirituality, some psychotherapists are providers unaware. They have a sense of awe and wonder about their work at times. They have the experience of being moved by energies that seem larger than the system surrounding them and their clients. Naming and talking about such experiences have the potential to greatly enrich their practice.

A third group, by far the largest, are providers who have been on the periphery of such conversations and are no longer content to be bystanders. They represent a growing thirst for assembly, meeting, conversation, and unity among professionals of both the spiritual and the psychotherapeutic disciplines. The process, however, pr...