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.

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.

"Spiritual and existential struggles tell a story about the quality of clients' lives, beyond what clinicians can learn from their mental health symptoms alone. This book presents the Relational Spirituality Model (RSM) of psychotherapy, a creative clinical process that engages existential themes to help people make sense of profound suffering or trauma. To promote healing and growth, practitioners using the RSM provide a secure and challenging therapeutic space, while guiding clients as they explore ways of relating to the sacred in their lives. In this model, therapeutic change is seen as an intense yet safe process of movement and tension between dwelling and seeking, stability and disruption. Assessment and intervention strategies focus on developmental systems-attachment, differentiation, and intersubjectivity-to restructure relationships with the self, others, and the sacred. In depth clinical case examples demonstrate how to respect diverse client perspectives on suffering and trauma, and apply the RSM in individual, couple, family, and group psychotherapy. Readers will find new ways of working within the spiritual, existential, religious, and theological concerns that infuse their clients' struggles and triumphs"--

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Spirituality is an important part of many clients’ lives. It can be a resource for stabilization, healing, and growth. It can also be the cause of struggle and even harm. More and more therapists—those who consider themselves spiritual and those who do not—recognize the value of addressing spirituality in therapy and increasing their skill for engaging it ethically and effectively. In this immensely practical book, Russell Siler Jones helps therapists feel more competent and confident about having spiritual conversations with clients. With a refreshing, down-to-earth style, he describes how to recognize the diverse explicit and implicit ways spirituality can appear in psychotherapy, how to assess the impact spirituality is having on clients, how to make interventions to maximize its healthy impact and lessen its unhealthy impact, and how therapists can draw upon their own spirituality in ethical and skillful ways. He includes extended case studies and clinical dialogue so readers can hear how spirituality becomes part of case conceptualization and what spiritual conversation actually sounds like in psychotherapy. Jones has been a therapist for nearly 30 years and has trained therapists in the use of spirituality for over a decade. He writes about a complex topic with an elegant simplicity and provides how-to advice in a way that encourages therapists to find their own way to apply it. Spirit in Session is a pragmatic guide that therapists will turn to again and again as they engage their clients in one of the most meaningful and consequential dimensions of human experience.

Trauma can impact people not only psychologically, socially, and physically, but spiritually as well. Recent clinical research has shown that psychotherapists working with traumatized clients can foster better outcomes if they exercise sensitivity to their clients' spiritual needs. This book addresses a wide range of different client presenting problems, with a specific focus on relational forms of trauma, such as sexual abuse, partner violence, and other familial forms of trauma. It includes case studies that highlight how to assess and help clients process these and other types of trauma, including war and natural disasters. The case studies illustrate multiple facets of spirituality rather than explaining it as merely a source of anxiety reduction, social connectedness, or control. Readers will learn how to differentiate between healthy and unhealthy forms of spirituality, and how to apply spiritually-oriented practices within their own setting, theoretical framework, and unique client populations. They will also learn how to work with the ethical challenges and dilemmas trauma treatment can pose to the therapist's competence and world view. Recent years have brought broader awareness and openness to talking about child abuse and other traumatic life events. Survivors of these events often experience spiritual struggles in the course of healing; likewise, in helping clients process trauma, therapists too may come to question why evil exists or why so many people suffer. This book offers practical and reassuring guidance for performing therapy in these situations.

As more people practice meditation, yoga, and participate in workshops for personal transformation, increasing numbers of them are having experiences related to spiritual awakening. The problem is they don't know the territory. An intense spiritual experience can seem overwhelming and scary and even be confused with going crazy. This practical book is the classic text, newly updated in 2006 (3rd edition), defining the problems that can arise when someone is disoriented by intense spiritual experiences. It is a valuable resource for anyone interested in spiritual experiences and their relationship to mental health and mental illness. It distinguishes the differences between various mental pathologies and indicators of spiritual awakening. It clearly describes the kind of care one needs in a spiritual emergency process and how the care is dramatically different than conventional psychiatric treatment. It traces the history of how signs of spiritual awakening have been perceived in the past. Graduate schools of psychology use this book as a text because it is such a clear statement about the nature of spiritual crises and appropriate treatment. However, it is written in a style that is also appropriate for any adult reader. The author, a transpersonal psychologist, has written five other books on spiritual healing and awakening. The title of the first edition of this book was "A Sourcebook for Helping People in Spiritual Emergency" and was published in 1988.

Mark McMinn and Clark Campbell present an integrative model of psychotherapy that is grounded in Christian biblical teaching and in a critical and constructive engagement with contemporary psychology. This foundational work integrates behavioral, cognitive, and interpersonal models of therapy within a Christian theological framework.

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.

Accepting relentless impermanence as the ground of human experience, Words from the Soul derives a spiritual psychology from the mystery and poignancy of time-passage itself. Drawing from Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Foucault, Dostoyevsky, Buddhism, kundalini yoga, and twenty-five years of clinical/mediation experience, the author's epigrammatic insights into our struggles with mortality, gratitude, apology, and forgiveness make this book relevant to psychotherapy and conflict resolution in a wide range of professional settings. In his exploration of the furthest-reaches of human development, Stuart Sovatsky reveals the deepest potentials of the ensouled body, transforming our views of language, sexuality, ecstatic spiritualities, and of the human life cycle.