Psychology, Spirituality, and Healing Book

Psychology, Spirituality, And Healing

Book Review & Reflection

McMinn, M.R. (1996). Psychology, theology, and spirituality in Christian counseling.

Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House Publishers.

Christianity and psychology have long been regarded as inharmonious ideological systems. However, this book attempts to establish a connection between the roles of believing Christian and trained counselor and therapist. M.R. McMinn suggests that serving as a psychological counselor does not mean that a therapist must give up spiritual guidance, and he also acknowledges that a minister today must often come to grips with the psychological needs of a client who is coping with a crisis that threatens his or her mental health as well as his or her spiritual health. In fact, mental and spiritual health is intertwined. After all, the confessional existed long before psychoanalysis became fashionable, and today's twelve-step programs require the individual to surrender to a higher power to achieve full healing from the grip of addiction.

This ideal of surrender, either to God or to the Christian community as a whole, is one of the key notions of the book. Perhaps the most contemporary and relevant concept that emerges from the text is the ideal of interdependence, rather than independence. The notion of connection between families and the need for individuals to feel connected to a meaningful community and schema of values is one of the most convincing arguments of the text. If such a sentiment is crucial to psychological healing, how can the therapist put religion aside when discussing psychological issues with a client? For individuals to come together, for example, when a marriage is experiencing difficulty, both persons must acknowledge their mutual vulnerability and sinfulness, according to the author, and find a way to broach such differences. This can be seen in the example of a couple where one partner has cheated. The couple must look to attain a state of interdependence, acknowledge one another and their mutual imperfections rather than pass godlike judgment upon one another, and find mutually shared values to sustain their marriage. Rather than blaming one another, they must look within themselves and then reach outside themselves to create their marriage anew.

Personal Reflection

The need to merge spiritual counseling with psychological counseling is clear to anyone who has ever known someone enslaved to the addiction of drugs. At my high school, I knew an extremely intelligent boy from a troubled, broken home who begin to experiment with drugs. Although many of his friends were involved in drugs, his use of drugs as an outlet did not, it seemed to me, be purely in a desire to do what everyone else was doing. He justified his experimentation as a way of expanding his consciousness, of improving his creativity or mental sharpness (depending on what drug he was experimenting with at the moment) and of emulating great thinkers of the past who also experimented with drugs. Unfortunately, in seeking to be 'different,' Eric ended up on the same path as so many other drug addicts, and dropped out of school. I never found out what became of him afterwards.

Uniting psychology with spiritual guidance would be the ideal way, I believe, that Eric could have been reached. Eric had clear psychological problems that related to his difficult family situation. But there was also a clear, deep spiritual craving to relate his longings to a cause larger than himself, and to engage in some form of self-improvement. Eric had a good will and a curiosity about the questions that grip the minds of so many adolescents, like 'why am I here,' and 'what is the purpose of all of this?' But his energies needed to be directed into more productive channels than drugs. Also, Eric lacked a true sense of interdependence. He had been brought up in an insecure value system, so he experimented with his personal morality, much in the same way he experimented with drugs. He saw himself as different and removed from other people, and justified his use of drugs because he was not using drugs (he said) for the same reason as people who just wanted to get high to enjoy a part or feel buzzed. By becoming a part of a substance-free community that fulfilled his spiritual needs, Eric might have gained a positive sense of connection, rather than merely defining himself against other people. This desire for isolation, obviously, may have been rooted in a failure to trust other people that were the result of his difficult family upbringing, as he was the child of divorced parents, and a biological father who was an alcoholic.

Reflection

Although McMinn makes a compelling case for merging psychology with Christian counseling in a way that can lead to healing, there are many questions which arise regarding how individuals who are reared within a secular culture, and how they may react to a therapist bringing up the topic of religion. Also, because the culture of faith and the culture of psychology are often paired against one another in the contemporary consciousness, will believing fundamentalist Christians feel comfortable discussing intimate issues using the vocabulary of psychology?