Working with the spiritual in counselling and psychotherapy

Abstract

If you like me, are from a religious background and have therefore had a ready-made language to discuss the spiritual dimension of human experience, you may have struggled to know how to work with the spiritual dimension of clients coming for therapy. Ethically, now, as counsellors we must consider spirituality in relation to diversity, as spirituality could be an element in our clients’ cultural experience. There may be no shared language or understanding to address this dimension and this is problematic. The separation of spirituality from religion has meant that there may be no shared understanding of what spirituality means. Consequently there may be as many definitions of spirituality as there are people (in terms of what spirituality means for individuals).