Spirituality and counseling in therapeutic practice

Spirituality, Counseling, And Psychology

It is difficult to marry two very different systems and try to use one to explain the other. Since religion, which some would say is synonymous with spirituality, is more a set of beliefs and faith-based practices and psychology, the study of the mind and mental processes, tries to be as scientific and reasonable as possible, it seems that one could not be effectively used to study the other. However, since psychology does examine human behavior and try make since of it from a mental standpoint, that would seem to be a reasonable basis for understanding at least the basics of religious belief. Many different attempts have been made to determine what religion (spirituality is from the point-of-view of psychology), and the two books discussed here are examples of some of the approaches that have been used. This paper compares the study of religion by psychologists in the books Integrating Spirituality into Multicultural Counseling by Fukuyama and Sevig (1999) with Invitation to the Psychology of Religion by Paloutzian (1996).

The first problem to overcome is the relative vagueness of religion. Almost anything can be called a religion, and they all have different practices, belief systems and structures. It is this difficulty that both authors try to overcome first. One author, after a long list of how different psychologists have defined the concept of religion, uses the definition of "religion at least includes the notion that it is a generalized, abstract orientation through which people see the world; it defines their reality, provides a sense of significance and receives their fundamental allegiance and commitment" (Paloutzian, 1996, 13). This is an attempt to encompass the whole of the word into a short, useful definition. The second author does not try to define the concept of religion as much as explain why counseling and spirituality are similar. Fukuyama and Sevig (1999) say that the crux of spirituality is that the person is "making meaning" out of their existence no matter what culture or religious tradition that they come from (12). As a matter of fact one of the major contrasts of the two books is how they look at spirituality/religion.

Multiculturalism is a concept in counseling, and psychology in general, that is trying to understand the person at a deeper level than they offer to the counselor initially. This is because much of what a person is comes from the culture that they identify with. A counselor needs to see deeper into the person's being so that they can effectively root out the true issue that is confronting the person. One goal of the multiculturalist approach is to understand enough about a culture, or be able to ask the correct questions about the culture, to gain a rapport with the consumer. Religion is a major function of a person's cultural makeup, and thus determines, to a great extent, how that person is going to react to stressors and events. This link between spirituality and multicultural counseling is what the authors are talking about in the book (Fukuyama & Sevig, 1999, 74). The other book has a similar outlook in one respect, admitting that religion is an important part of who someone who has religious beliefs is (Paloutzian, 1996, 21), but the approach is more clinical. Whereas Fukuyama and Sevig want to know the culture so that they can help an individual consumer with the issues they present, Paloutzian is more interested in how religion can be broken down into a single construct that can then be studied more readily and effectively. Both approaches are valuable though because psychology needs to understand both cultural motivations of individuals and how to study the religious variable for certain types of studies.