How do spiritually identified clients experience the relationship between their spiritual beliefs and the therapeutic process?
M.A. in Religious Studies Thesis Project Summary of Lorraine Moffat Baughman | l.baughman@hji.edu
Abstract
This study explores how clients who identify as spiritual experience the connection between their spiritual beliefs and the therapeutic process. Using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), the research is based on in-depth interviews with thirteen participants from two spiritually committed groups: Unificationists and Christians. The findings suggest that spirituality functions not as a marginal aspect of identity but as a central interpretive framework through which distress, responsibility, and personal change are understood. Participants described counselling more as a space for meaning-making, reflection, and reorganising internal experience rather than primarily focusing on symptom reduction. In both groups, the therapeutic relationship was experienced as particularly important, with relational safety influenced by the extent to which spiritual beliefs were received. While similarities emerged, differences were also evident in how distress was interpreted, with Christian participants more likely to frame difficulties in moral or theological terms, and Unificationist participants more likely to emphasise development, growth and integration. Overall, the findings suggest that counselling does not replace spiritual frameworks but may provide a relational context where spiritual and psychological understandings can be explored and integrated. The study highlights the importance of therapists engaging sensitively with clients’ spiritual worldviews in effective therapeutic practice.
Introduction
The study features participants with spiritual orientations who, at various points in their lives, have engaged in therapy or counselling. It explores how they understand and experience the relationship between their religious or spiritual beliefs and the therapeutic process. For some people, religion and spirituality are not merely an addition to life but a ‘way of being’ and a crucial framework through which they interpret identity, change, challenge, and distress. Throughout the study, the term spirituality is used in an inclusive sense to embrace the interwoven dimensions of a single lived reality, encompassing both personal spiritual experience and institutionally grounded religious faith, recognising that, for many participants, these are not easily separated. While religion provides a communal framework of doctrine and tradition, spirituality may be understood as the individual, subjective, experiential inquiry into the sacred – a kind of personalised inner journey.
This research examines how the participants’ beliefs influenced their decisions to seek counselling, how they experienced it, and the meanings they attributed to any therapeutic change.
This current study emerged from an initial exploration of these counselling dynamics within a clearly defined faith tradition, involving participants who identified as Christian. It became evident that while some themes appeared rooted in Christian doctrinal frameworks, others pointed to a broader process of spiritual meaning-making. It seemed to focus more on what it is like to be a person whose identity is deeply shaped by a consistent religious or spiritual worldview. To determine whether these patterns were more widely shared across other structured spiritual perspectives, a second group, consisting of Unificationist participants, was invited.
The participants in both groups engaged with a variety of counselling practitioners and therapeutic approaches, including Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), Person- Centred Therapy (PCT), Integrative Therapy, Couples’ Therapy, EMDR, Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), Spiritual and Faith-based Counselling, and Group Therapy. All secular practitioners operated within professional clinical frameworks in their respective countries. Among the faith-based and pastoral counsellors, most held professionally recognised qualifications, except in three cases – all involving Unificationist participants – where counselling was provided in an informal spiritual care setting. These participants also consulted secular counsellors at other times. The breadth of therapeutic experience itself is part of what the study explores.
While Christian participants often represent a more mainstream perspective, Unificationists offer a distinct, often marginalised outlook. Therefore, to explore the research themes more deeply, a group of participants from the Unificationist tradition was deemed a promising approach. Examining the groups together provided an opportunity to explore how clients of any spiritual worldview might negotiate, conceal or integrate their beliefs within a predominantly secular therapeutic setting.
This facilitated a deeper exploration of how spirituality influences the therapeutic experience, without transforming the study into a comparison of hypothesis-testing designs. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) was selected for its emphasis on lived experience and its commitment to understanding how individuals interpret significant life events. Its idiographic and interpretive approach makes it especially well-suited to examining how clients perceive and integrate their spiritual identities in therapy. In accordance with IPA methodology, the Unificationist group was analysed as a distinct, homogeneous group, using the same procedures as those used for the Christian group. Patterns of convergence and divergence were only explored during within-group analysis, allowing for a cautious, interpretative dialogue between groups.
Research Design and Approach
The study employed a qualitative research design using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). The main research question guiding the study was:
How do spiritually identified clients experience the relationship between their spiritual beliefs and the therapeutic process?
As the researcher, I approached this question from a critical realist perspective. I believe participants’ experiences are real and meaningful, but I recognise that access to them is always mediated by language, culture, and interpretation. In line with IPA’s hermeneutic principles, I also acknowledge the double hermeneutic: participants make sense of their own experiences, and I, as the researcher, interpret their sense-making. Therefore, in this study, knowledge is viewed as interpretative and co-constructed rather than objective or detached.
This stance is particularly fitting given the subject matter. Spirituality is seldom experienced as mere abstract belief; it is lived, relational, and woven into social worlds. An interpretative approach enabled me, as a researcher, to attend to the texture and nuances of participants’ accounts without confining them to predefined categories.
Summary of Results
The findings from both groups emphasise the deeply connected relationship between spirituality and the counselling experience for spiritually committed clients. Among both Unificationist and Christian participants, faith acted as a key framework for understanding distress, responsibility, healing, growth, and personal change. Although the two groups expressed their experiences through slightly different spiritual narratives, participants consistently described counselling as a space where psychological struggles and spiritual meaning could be explored together rather than separately. As a result, the themes presented here illuminate how counselling was experienced within the participants’ lived spiritual worlds – worlds shaped by belief, relationship with God, moral reflection, and the search for personal understanding.
Suggestions for Future Research
The findings of this study highlight several areas that warrant further investigation. Future research could explore the experiences of clients with strong spiritual commitments from a wider range of religious and cultural backgrounds to understand how different spiritual traditions influence the therapeutic process. Comparative studies involving various faiths may provide further insights into how specific theological frameworks shape clients’ interpretations of distress and their expectations of counselling.
Further research could also examine counsellors’ perspectives on working with spiritually dedicated clients. Understanding how therapists perceive and interpret spiritual issues within the therapeutic relationship might help develop training methods that better prepare counsellors to manage spiritual diversity in clinical settings.
Another key area for future research is exploring the role of spirituality in enduring therapeutic change. Participants in the current study often described counselling as a catalyst for ongoing reflection and spiritual growth. Longitudinal studies could provide a deeper understanding of how these processes develop over time and how therapeutic experiences influence individuals’ spiritual lives in the long term.
Finally, further qualitative research could enhance the understanding of how clients manage potential conflicts between psychological and spiritual frameworks when interpreting their experiences. Such work might contribute to a more nuanced view of how counselling can support individuals in integrating these different aspects of meaning.
The theological dimensions discussed in this study indicate a particularly valuable research agenda. Future research could explore how specific theological constructs – such as contrasting frameworks of shame, guilt, differing understandings of the self in relation to the divine, or distinct eschatological orientations – influence clients’ experiences of counselling across Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and other faith traditions. Such comparative work would advance beyond simple categories of ‘religious’ or ‘spiritual’ clients towards a more theologically informed understanding of how doctrine and lived belief interact with the therapeutic process. Attachment-informed approaches could effectively examine the internal relational templates that various images of God create for clients, and how these shape alliance formation, disclosure, and therapeutic change. This study indicates that theology is not peripheral to counselling research, but rather it could be one of its most underused resources.
Concluding Reflections
This study set out to explore how spiritually committed clients experience the relationship between their beliefs and the therapeutic process. What it discovered was something both simpler and more meaningful than that initial framing suggested: for these participants, there was no clear separation between the spiritual and the psychological from the start. Spirituality was not just a variable to measure, a background factor to note, or a sensitivity to manage. Instead, it served as a medium through which suffering was felt, meaning was created, help was sought, and healing – when it happened – was recognised and integrated into life.
The therapeutic relationship became the crucible where all of this was negotiated. When therapists approached the spiritual worlds their clients inhabited with genuine curiosity, steadiness, and respect, something opened. When they did not – even subtly or unintentionally – something quietly closed.
But this study also points to something more. The differences seen between the two groups of participants were not simply cultural or stylistic. They were theological. How a person views the Fall, the nature of God, the meaning of shame, the purpose of suffering, and the shape of the community they belong to – these are not just incidental features of a client’s background. They are part of the ‘architecture of the self’ that enters the counselling room.
Counselling research has, for too long, viewed spirituality merely as a dimension to be accommodated. This issue is experienced even more acutely by clients whose beliefs lie outside the mainstream – those whose faith communities are regarded with suspicion, misunderstood as coercive, or whose spiritual experiences are quietly pathologised rather than respectfully explored. Even the limited accommodation offered has not always been consistently reliable. For these clients, the counselling room has sometimes mirrored the marginalisation they face in broader society: a space where their most central and meaning- creating aspects of identity are treated, at best, as peripheral, and at worst, as symptoms. This study proposes a more ambitious approach: that theology deserves a genuine place at the research table – not as doctrine to be evaluated, but as a living framework influencing human experience in ways that are clinically, relationally, and personally significant.
To genuinely care for the whole person, the therapist must be willing to fully enter their entire world. This study is an invitation to everyone to do precisely that.