Practice What We Preach

In the introduction it was suggested that when people think of religion, they are interacting with symbolic pictures of religious ideas and orientations that are transferred through everyday discourses being voiced in society. The findings indicated that a particular challenge for religious practitioners was negotiating therapeutic relationships that lay outside prevailing social and professional discourses of what working with religious issues means. All participants reported that

grappling with the meaning of religious dilemmas in re-attunement was a central

preoccupation when navigating their way out of misattunement, as portrayed in the following examples.

Participants spoke of needing to be aware of perceptions of the meaning of being

religious. The category the meaning of being religious encapsulated both personal

and social meanings. The meaning of being religious could impact significantly upon the experience of being attuned and misattuned, either emotionally, or in terms of professional identity perceptions. P8, a transpersonal therapist, suggested that the

personal meaning of religion could impact greatly upon one’s way of working with

religious topics:

“It’s very difficult not to bring yourself into the room in that way… being somebody who is spiritual… I might see the person and their personality but my belief system is that each of us have a soul and so actually I’m communicating with many layers of that person.” (P8: 411-415)

For example, drawing from their own faith practices, P2 and P4 make interesting observations that how a client relates to God, is how they relate to the world and can also influence their symptoms:

“I suppose there’s just that stance with your clients that you are not the expert… so how she views God is all information about how she views the world and how that plays into her symptoms and her experiences and talking and asking questions will encourage her to think about that and maybe to find another perspective.” (P2: 222-

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225)

“I’ve actually done a bit of research on people’s image of God is very similar to parental images…so increasingly I’ve viewed the spiritual area as one of the areas where you can really get into the sense of what motivates somebody, what they’re about." (P4: 25-29)

Instead of viewing religious issues as a stand-alone area in people's lives, these participants suggest that as a psychological counsellor it is more helpful to view clients’ spirituality and psychological problems as bi-directional, one influencing the other. This seems like a relevant comment for this research, as it could, also, be an underlying reason why psychological practitioners, more broadly, are reluctant to engage with religious issues in their clinical work (Clinton & Straub, 2014).

P13, a Jewish practitioner, monitors the “secondary issues” that could arise when someone’s faith is tested through suffering:

“Even if they’re coming to complain about God and about Judaism– I try and fully understand what it is that they’re contending with…If the person does believe in God, and therefore is not looking at this that it’s just chance that it happened, that there’s some greater good, or something greater coming out of this, it means that they can love God or they can be angry at God, but they can’t be indifferent. So it actually raises the secondary issue.” (P13: 176-181)

The findings indicate that the practitioner’s therapeutic modality plays a role in the type of interventions used to work with religious material. From his own experience, P4, for example, points to useful psychotherapeutic concepts, such as the “felt sense” (Mearns & Cooper, 2005) that can be especially effective when working with religious beliefs:

“I find in humanistic psychotherapy, the felt sense, to be a very useful idea, because it’s that sense of… all the time we’re feeling things inside that we haven’t put into words. And quite often therapy moves on at the point where I say to the guy who is doing odd tantric, occultic, spiritual practices – I find it quite oppressive, that’s the moment where contact is made and things happen.” (P4: 483-487)

In light of this observation, throughout the interviews when participants were asked about their views on past and present incorporation of spirituality and religion in

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training curricula, there were opposing standpoints. For example, P5 and P6 felt strongly that this was not necessary:

“I think I swim against your tide there – what else would prepare you for that which isn’t covered in clinical or counselling training?” (P5: 621-650)

“The problem is, as soon as you start treating this as a training issue I think actually it propagates the problem. Because what you’re saying is people with religious faith are different to anybody else you see in the clinic, which I entirely disagree with…they have the skills and something else is stopping them, maybe ideas of difference or offending, but I certainly don’t think a two day workshop on diversity would be helping them.” (P6: 587-629)

All the other participants voiced emphatically that there is a glaring gap on training programmes, summed up in the following quotation from P8:

“There is huge room for improvement…I’ve had clients say I haven’t been able to talk to somebody about it, or it’s pathologized…if we don’t have that discussion about how to at least create a space or allow a space for our clients to talk openly about these things, we’re doing a huge injustice to them. It’s arrogance if we think that we can deal with that without – what other issues in our training do we think we can deal with with clients without doing any training on it?” (P8: 116-125)

Picking up on the theme of the meaning of religion, P2, in an animated tone, reflects on the usefulness of mental health professionals discussing how language is used in the context of showing respect to others who have a different view of the world, with regard to religious issues:

“In that discussion I said actually I feel like we all operate under a belief system and if somebody doesn’t believe in God that’s a belief system… and one of the social workers there was really offended by that, “I don’t have a faith, it’s not a faith, and I thought actually that’s a useful discussion for us to think about how we use language, how we do respect or disrespect people who have a different way of looking at the world from us. Do we have a sense as a broad profession of mental health professionals that this is a normative way of looking at the world and then if you add faith into that then you become somebody, you’ve kind of moved off the norm, so there’s this like baseline.” (P2: 623-633)

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P11 adds her voice to this dialogue, issuing this firm reminder to untroubled practitioners:

“It’s important to apply things to yourself as well, not just teach other people to do it, as we do, as psychologists.” (P11: 453-454)

The thought-provoking, often deeply stirring experiences shared by participants in this study, suggested that closing the gap in understanding was a task of staying in

steadfast hold with the client. Engaging with religious issues could involve the

experience of clanging therapeutic impasses, stepping out of hold and onto toes, the discomfort of which could vibrate in one’s inner being. It could also, however, lead to unchained reflexivity and emancipation from rigid professional and theoretical frameworks, permitting new ways of seeing the spiritual self and being with the client. The inseparable nature of mind, body and soul, in the experience of deep religious attunement in psychological therapy, was highlighted in this captivating, final quotation by P10:

“And he [the client] said I can’t describe what just happened, I can’t put words to it…And I said, no I’m not so sure I can either. It’s either before words or beyond words…and I said maybe we don’t need to understand it, maybe we just need to accept it and allow that it was and it was beautiful and that was okay. Powerful and beautiful.” (P10:198-210)