Counseling and the Resolution of Religious and Spiritual Struggles : A Common Factors Approach

This book delves into the critical question of how counseling can help individuals navigate and resolve these struggles. It prioritizes the true experts in this domain—the strugglers themselves—and provides an in-depth examination of their experiences.

Using the rich, methodological approach of hermeneutic phenomenology, the author collaborates with participants to explore their lived experiences of the therapeutic relationship and the therapist’s way-of-being. By incorporating a common factors lens, the book offers insights into how therapists can engage with clients in a way that fosters an alliance capable of addressing religious and spiritual (r/s) struggles and promoting growth. The book provides readers with a deep understanding of the r/s struggle resolution process, identifies how these findings advance the field, and encourages practitioners to adopt the common factors meta-model to work competently in this area. It also examines how counseling can help individuals resolve r/s struggles, identifying how and when faith-related questions emerge due to the failure of religious coping strategies. It introduces to the religious coping literature the pathway toward decline, delineates the process of how participants experience disconnection from God, self, and others, and puts forward three movements of the resolving process.

Offering a new attempt to dissect this complex issue through the lens of common factors research, it will appeal to researchers, counselor educators, and post-graduate students with interests in religion and spirituality. This book is a significant contribution to the discourse on spiritual struggle and the role of counseling in addressing it.