A Christian Spirituality and Psychotherapy

A Gay Psychologist's Practice of Clinical Theology

York

• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781498274982
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della psicologia

This book describes a method of therapy based upon the Christian spirituality and psychotherapy perspective developed by Dr. Richard York. This clinical theology perspective is a phenomenological approach that integrates spiritual, theological, and psychological concepts and was developed in large part through York's own experience of being relieved of depression and anxiety through interweaving of psychotherapy, prayer and meditation, spiritual direction, and the relationship with his Indwelling Spirit. Because human beings are the products of relationships, York critiques approaches to psychology premised upon the subject/object epistemology of empirical science that study human behavior. He suggests instead that a relational-ontology research method offers an approach superior to that of standard psychotherapy and uses experience in relationship as the fundamental concept in this clinical theology. Because people are prone to hurt themselves and others, York also argues that standard approaches to psychology need to develop a psychology of sin and evil, including some form of a Higher Power, as essential parts of the spiritual aspect of psychotherapy. York critiques Christian theologians for developing theology that seldom uses empirical data and that is irrelevant to the process of helping people heal and grow. He criticizes those pastoral ministers who moralize with people instead of listening to them as well as those who preach more about sin and suffering than God's presence and saving grace through the forgiveness of sins. While he acknowledges that most of his perspective is not new, York does offer a unique contribution to the field of psychotherapy through the concept of the Indwelling Spirit. He describes how the Indwelling Spirit works in psychotherapy and the various techniques to access it. He further argues that his experience as a gay psychologist is an essential aspect of his method because in being healed through his experience with his Indwelling Spirit he was able to define this experience for use in psychotherapy, an insight used by very few straight therapists. York challenges the notion of how a gay man who worships God regularly, found healing through a relationship with Christ in the Holy Spirit of God, and developed the concept of the Indwelling Spirit for psychotherapy, could be considered objectively disordered and intrinsically evil by the Roman Catholic Magisterium. Furthermore, York describes a new principle of moral theology for sexual relationships based on love rather than procreation and suggests seven research hypotheses to study the phenomenon of the Indwelling Spirit and the love that is exhibited in both same-sex and opposite-sex relationships.

1

Critique of Psychology

My perspective is not a synthesis of knowledge: it is but one-way to the One who is the source of all knowledge and wisdom.

Brief History of the Relationship of Spirituality and Psychotherapy

Historically, there was little relationship between spirituality, morality, and psychotherapy in mainstream psychology and pastoral counseling. There was little evidence that these disciplines acknowledged that values or spirituality had anything to do with psychotherapy. In fact, these disciplines considered any kind of spirituality, morality, or theology anathema until relatively recently.

This anathema was the result of the divorce of psychology from the discipline of philosophy in order to make psychology more scientific. However, it was not a total mistake because psychology became freed from the tyranny of traditional theological dogma and philosophies that no longer helped people cope with daily living. This divorce occurred around the turn of the twentieth century. James Mark Baldwin (1982), a pioneer in this transition, developed a cognitive-developmental psychology called genetic epistemology.1 This freedom from philosophy allowed various schools of psychology to develop different theories and therapies that helped many people. Psychology became what philosophy once was, a discipline that united theory and praxis. Freud was one of the first to do this by establishing a theory of psychoanalysis with the goals of encouraging patients to love and work. Consequently, people were provided with the opportunity to free themselves of inherent shame and guilt related to their humanity or sexuality without becoming irresponsible, unloving, or uncaring. They did not have to believe they were evil or sinful just because they were sexual beings and in pain. Various schools of psychology since Freud have sought to relieve human suffering from shame, guilt, unworthiness, unloveability, selfishness, aggression, addictions, perfectionism, co-dependency, and self-criticism, while various psychotherapies have healed many people of unnecessary suffering or allowed them to cope with their lives better.

Even though Freud and others rejected spiritual or moral concepts in their theories and therapies, their goals of therapy definitely were, at least as I define those concepts. Freud’s goals for psychoanalysis were love and work. Bruno Bettelheim (1982) wrote an article in the New Yorker claiming that Freud’s theory was misunderstood as anti-spiritual because the English text of Freud’s theory translated the German words, Ich and Es, as Ego and Id, instead of I and It, which ignored the more spiritual meaning in the German. Other psychotherapy theories also had similar goals and concepts that can be described as spiritual and moral.

When I did the bibliographic research for presentations on spirituality and psychotherapy, I was working with sex offenders, raised issues of morality for me, but I assumed I would find few writings on spirituality, morality, and psychotherapy. To my surprise, in spite of the anti-spiritual attitude of psychology, many articles had been published about these issues from a variety of sources, even pastoral counseling, and some dating back to the 1960s. These publications described the essential elements of spirituality and greatly influenced the development of my perspective. Herbert Benson, MD and Bernie Siegel, MD have done much research and writing about healing medical conditions; Benson calls his approach “mindfulness,” and his group still conducts workshops on this subject. He also has done research that identifies how meditation affects the body. There are many articles and books about values and morality in psychotherapy (Holmes & Lindley, 1989; Kelly & Strupp, 1992; Kitwood, 1990; Mullan, 1991; Nelson, 1994; Nicholas, 1987; Patterson, 1989; Prest & Kelly, 1993; Saucer, 1991; Whitehead & Whitehead, 1994; Wicks & Parsons, 1993; Wood, 1987; Worthington, 1993, to list a few).

Leo Rangell (1967, 1971, 1986) and those who wrote to honor him (Blum, Weinshel, & Rodman, 1989) are most significant, because he was a psychoanalyst. He described the essential nature of valuing and moral judgments in personality development and later life and decried the traditional, amoral stance of many psychoanalysts in this country.

Robert Francher (1995) described psychotherapy as effective primarily because the culture accepts the principles of psychotherapy: healing through psychotherapy works in this country because the culture at large accepts it as healing; i.e., believes that it works. Hence healing is possible because it is a community activity, a reality that provided further justification for my “community of healing” concept.

Other authors have addressed the spiritual aspect of psychotherapy directly. Roberto Assagioli (1965) developed a psychology that described a spiritual aspect of the self, which he called the Higher Self. The Higher Self guides and teaches the person on his or her journey. Groups of people established training centers to teach this perspective in Italy and this country, some of which still exist. Calvin Turley (1971) wrote his dissertation on the integration of psychosynthesis and Swedenborgian theology, which he called Theotherapy. He interpreted the Higher Self concept as an indwelling presence that helps people to regain their birthright and get out of the hells in which they live each day. He helped people recognize their personal theologies as a self-esteem system of thoughts and feelings, like “I’m dumb,” “I’m incompetent, unworthy,” and the behavior that acts them out. The degree of low or high self-esteem and the type of self-messages determine how self-destructive the person is. This theory has formed the foundation of my concept of the Indwelling Spirit.

Scott Peck (1978), a psychiatrist and psychotherapist, described an approach that integrated psychotherapy and Christian spiritual journey. He assumed no distinction between spirit and mind or between the processes of achieving spiritual growth and mental growth. He assumed they are the same and that this process is an arduous and lifelong task. For a time, he led very popular workshops, some of which focused on teaching people to build healing communities. He also wrote about evil (Peck, 1983) in a work I will refer to later.

Irving Rosen, MD spent most of his professional life treating people from a spiritual perspective and promoting the spiritual aspect of psychotherapy through seminars and presentations. Rosen (1991, 1993a, 1993b) considers spirituality difficult to define because he believes that it contains disparate elements. His model uses a spectrum of consciousness moving from the body to the ego level; he considers the Whole Person, Witnessing Self, and Beyond Self as the realm of the spiritual. He describes treating anxiety states and the relation of psychiatry and religion as it relates to spirituality. He was trained as a psychoanalyst, but rejected psychoanalysis in the process of studying the religious worldview of the pastoral counselors who were his students at Boston State Hospital. He developed a spiritual perspective, whereas the pastoral counselors developed a psychoanalytic one.

In York (1987), I described a methodology to study bodyself-concept that defined both the spiritual and psychological aspects of bodyself-concept, and qualitative and quantitative data produced in a pilot research project. Even though my study used only a small sample, the factor analysis of the Q-sort did identify groups of people who had similar belief systems with obvious spiritual qualities. I defined the psychological aspect of bodyself-concept as the positive and negative attitudes people learn about their bodies that affect their self-image, and the spiritual aspect as the acceptance or rejection of their bodyself-image as it is over time.

Fritjof Capra, a physicist turned ecologist, was the first one to provide me with the concept of spirituality in terms of relationship. For Capra (1996, p. 7), the awareness of our connectedness with the cosmos is spiritual. This awareness makes our spirituality relational. He goes on to say that a paradigm shift is emerging that considers human beings to be a part of the web of life, not the center of it. He contends that since the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century, scientific facts were considered value free.

Although much of the detailed research may not depend explicitly on the scientist’s value system, the larger paradigm within which this research is pursued will never be value free. Scientists, therefore, are responsible for their research not only intellectually but also morally. Within the context of deep ecology, the view that values are inherent in all of living nature is grounded in the deep ecological, or spiritual, experience that nature and the self are one. (1996, pp. 11–12)

Capra also believes that ideas come from experience and are not derived from information, an insight that is an essential aspect of my own epistemology. (His insights are similar to Slife’s hidden paradigm of psychology, discussed later in this chapter.)

Paul Moore (1992) says that symptoms like addictions, depression, and anxiety are the soul seeking to be heard. He claims that psychotherapists have been too willing to encourage symptom and pain relief, thereby depriving people of the opportunity for real growth in wisdom and change, i.e., permanent change. He believes psychological problems are challenges that require soul-searching, not just symptom relief. He considers healing to be a process where grace emerges as the person surrenders to the process. His work echoes Ecker and Hulley’s (1996) symptom-based therapy. His “soul voice” is akin to my concept of the Indwelling Spirit working in psychotherapy.

Merle Jordan (1986) describes how we tend to idolize or idealize our parents and those who abused us when we were children. We internalize images of our parents and abusers, giving them ultimate authority over who we are and what we do. These images become our gods. He calls the attachment to these destructive internalized images the sin of idolatry, because these attachments violate the First Commandment: “Thou shalt not have other gods besides me” (Deut 5:7). The goal of psychotherapy is to free clients from their submission to these god-like, destructive, internalized images. His theory and psychotherapy method, based on Ecker and Hulley (1996), is the foundation of my perspective.

Bruce Ecker and Laurel Hulley (1996) describe their symptom-based therapy as different from solution-based therapy. Their approach assists clients to determine how they maintain their symptoms and what problem the symptom solves for them. Solution-based therapy attempts to find a way to stop the symptoms and gives suggestions on how to change the behavior—in other words, to solve the problem that clients face. Ecker and Hulley realized that clients resisted changing their behavior, and sought to find out why. Symptom-based therapy addresses the resistance to change, in other words, what keeps clients repeating their symptom. They use a form of questioning they call “radical inquiry,” which assists clients to experience the attachment to internalized images, which keeps them repeating behavior or feelings that they do not want. They help clients discover:

• What the symptom does for them.

• Why they value it so much.

• How the symptom is a successful solution for some problem instead of a failure.

• What would happen to them if they did not have the symptom?

Although Ecker and Hulley do not say there approach is spiritual, I will describe how the process of radical inquiry is spiritual because it involves the Indwelling Spirit. I will also describe various techniques to help clients answer the above questions based on Ecker and Jordan.2

All these publications and others were very helpful in the early development of my perspective, but I didn’t consider them representative of the views of the psychological establishment, such as the American Psychological Association (APA), or of pastoral counseling. So in my early writings I criticized psychology for the resistance to including spirituality as an aspect of human personality and psychotherapy, because my personal experience and reading taught me that spirituality was an essential part of me and all people. However, over the last ten years many psychotherapists have addressed the relationship between spirituality, human personality, and psychotherapy. In 1996, 1998, and 2000, there were conferences on the spiritual aspect of psychotherapy sponsored by the Danielson Institute, a pastoral counseling center at Boston University, to honor Dr. Merle Jordan. Around 1996, the Danielson Institute modified their training program in pastoral counseling to include explicit spiritual and theological issues. They also sponsored monthly seminars for clinicians from 2000 to 2002, which I attended. In 2003, the newsletter of the Religion and Psychology, Division 36 of the APA, had a number of articles on spirituality (Williamson, 2003). In 2003, Division 36 sponsored the first Mid-Year Research Conference on Religion and Spirituality at Loyola College in Maryland. Since 2003 there have been five conferences that presented research studies in spirituality, psychotherapy, and the psychology of religion, and the APA has published a number of books on spirituality and psychology.

So in general, there is now an acceptance that spirituality is a part of psychotherapy and human personality. Psychotherapists from all schools use psychotherapy to heal people and relieve their pain and suffering and I believe in the same goals. However, for me, psychotherapy is essentially a spiritual process, because it involves values and produces healthier relations with self and others that are accurately described as moral. I...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Critique of Psychology
• Chapter 2: A New Philosphical Basis for Psychology
• Chapter 3: My Christian Theistic Psychology
• Chapter 4: Critique of Christian Practice and Theology
• Chapter 5: The Clinical Theology of My Christian Spirituality and Psychotherapy Perspective
• Chapter 6: The Indwelling Spirit Concept
• Chapter 7: A Clinical Theology of Sexual Relationships
• Chapter 8: The Clinical Theological Practice of My Christian Spirituality and Psychotherapy Perspective
• Chapter 9: Summary
• Appendix A: Other References to God’s Faculties in the Psalms
• Appendix B: What Keeps Me Stuck in My Problem?
• References