Responding well to Spiritual Abuse: practice implications for counselling and psychotherapy

Abstract

This paper presents the findings of a survey exploring people’s understandings and experiences of Spiritual Abuse (SA) in a Christian faith context. The online survey was completed by 1591 individuals from the UK, 1002 of whom identified as having experienced SA. Inclusion criteria were: membership of the Christian faith, being or having been, a Church attender or member of a Christian organisation and to have heard of the term SA. Participants detailed the features of an effective response to disclosures of SA and many of these are directly relevant to counselling and psychotherapy practice. Additionally, the research findings echo repeated calls in previous research for the necessity to include discussions of religion and faith in initial training and continuing professional development for counsellors and psychotherapists. Finally, the paper suggests a next step would be the establishment of a network of counsellors with training and knowledge about SA.