For many, making spirituality part of their counseling journey seems irrelevant or unimportant. This in part, may be because the concept of spirituality itself is frequently misunderstood.
False Assumptions
Spirituality is often mistaken for formal, organized belief systems alone. While some find spirituality through organized faith, it can be found in many other ways.
Spirituality and psychology have somehow come to be viewed as mutually exclusive in many mental health approaches. People see psychology as belonging to science and spirituality as belonging to faith communities. This distinction, though, is deeply unfortunate. Human beings are so much more than what can be understood through science alone. Including spirituality in therapy offers a more holistic and inclusive approach to treatment.
Take a Chance
Instead of banishing spirituality from the therapist’s office, consider adding it to your mental health tool kit. By making it a part of your counseling sessions, you will build an even deeper sense of self-knowledge. You’ll create a broader perspective of your unique situation. Those who have made it part of their therapy can attest to the wisdom it has helped them find.
Freedom and Acceptance
Spirituality offers countless benefits in your journey toward healing. It adds an underlying foundation of direction to your sessions with your counselor.
By opening yourself up to the possibility that something bigger than what you can see or understand is at work in the universe, you set powerful forces in motion. These forces include the ability to let go, find profound acceptance and peace, hone skills to build healthier relationships, and secure lasting self-empowerment.
Spirituality allows you to accept where you are at this moment in your life. And to recognize a new path for relief.
Indeed, realizations may be exactly what your counselor hopes you will find. When you are struggling, spirituality can help you see that you are exactly where you are right now for a reason. The challenges you’re enduring are teaching you exactly what you are supposed to be learning. They point you somewhere helpful and hopeful.
When you accept this idea, you are able to relinquish some of your past pain and current hang-ups. You can make room in your counseling sessions to examine the lessons you’re being taught in your life.
Relationships
Many counselors know their clients ache for healthier relationships more than anything else. Allowing spirituality in the counselor’s office will help you loosen false, unhealthy, and codependent ways of thinking about your connections to others.
Via spiritual means, you can acknowledge that you are unable to control anyone else’s decisions or path. You can pray for them or wish peace and positivity for them, but you can’t change them or their choices. This concept is enormously freeing.
Moreover, this realization helps you learn to focus on what you can control in relationships: yourself. When you decide to stop trying to control someone else, you can find a new, healthy focus on your own needs and wants. You can become more self- aware and internally truthful. You can learn to stop blaming them or yourself and focus on changing what you can. This is beneficial both to you and to those you love.
Meaning and Purpose
When you allow spirituality to become part of your appointments, you open the door to finding deeper meaning and purpose. Not only in your sessions but in your life. You may begin to see how all aspects of your life have been working together to help you move toward growth and maturity. Your therapist is able to help you explore and understand this broader connection is at play.
As humans, we do contain deeper mysteries within ourselves than can be explained by the science of psychology alone. The beauty of spirituality is that it is not just another modality. Instead, it is treatment for the soul that under arches all modalities. It acknowledges that the soul needs attention and offers wisdom both inside and outside your counseling sessions.
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Read more about the role of spirituality counseling, how it can benefit you, and connect you to others. Let’s explore further together too. Please contact my office for an appointment. I’d be happy to talk with you!