How do spiritually identified clients experience the relationship between their spiritual beliefs and the therapeutic process?

M.A. in Religious Studies Thesis Project Summary by Dr. Lorraine Moffat Baughman, CPsychol | l.baughman@hji.edu

Abstract

This study explores how clients who identify as spiritual experience the relationship between
their spiritual beliefs and the therapeutic process. Using Interpretative Phenomenological
Analysis (IPA), it draws on in-depth interviews with thirteen participants from two spiritually
committed groups: Unificationists (n=6) and Protestant Christians (n=7). Spirituality emerged
not as a marginal aspect of identity but as a central interpretive framework through which
distress, responsibility and personal change were understood. Participants described
counselling as a space for meaning-making rather than symptom reduction, and the
therapeutic relationship was consistently experienced as decisive, with relational safety
shaped by how spiritual beliefs were received. Christian participants more often framed
difficulty in moral or theological terms, whereas Unificationist participants emphasised
development and integration. Counselling did not replace spiritual frameworks but offered a
relational context in which spiritual and psychological understandings could be held together.

Introduction

For some people, religion and spirituality are not an addition to life but a way of being — the
framework through which identity, change, challenge and distress are understood. This study
examines how such beliefs influenced participants’ decisions to seek counselling, their
experiences of it, and the meanings they attributed to therapeutic change. Throughout, the
term spirituality is used inclusively, encompassing both personal spiritual experience and
institutionally grounded religious faith.

Participants from both Christian and Unificationist backgrounds were invited to take part to
explore how clients of any spiritual worldview might negotiate, conceal or integrate their
beliefs within a predominantly secular therapeutic setting.

Research Design and Approach

The study employed a qualitative design using IPA, guided by the question: How do
spiritually identified clients experience the relationship between their spiritual beliefs and the
therapeutic process?

I approached this from a critical realist perspective: participants’ experiences are real and
meaningful, yet access to them is always mediated by language, culture and interpretation. In
line with IPA’s hermeneutic principles, I acknowledge the double hermeneutic: participants
make sense of their experiences, and I, as the researcher, interpret their sense-making. Each

group was analysed separately as a homogeneous sample, with convergence and divergence
examined only after within-group analysis was complete.

Key Findings

Five master themes emerged among the Unificationist participants. Spirituality as a core
identity framed faith less as a belief system than as the medium through which life was
interpreted — “a living prayer,” as one participant put it. Counselling as meaning-making
rather than cure captured a consistent refusal to use the language of repair; therapy was
valued as a space where confusion could be spoken aloud and gradually reorganised.
Negotiating spiritual and psychological authority showed participants actively weighing
where truth and help lay. Healing through relational safety and attunement revealed how
finely calibrated that safety was: one participant described sensing a subtle wall after
disclosing her spiritual affiliation, uncertain whether the judgement was real, but certain that
something had closed. Integration as ongoing, self-directed becoming described what
endured beyond therapy — walking, writing, free prayer, small interruptions of rumination
— carried forward without continued reliance on the therapist.

Three master themes emerged among the Christian participants, each centred on the
relationship with God. Spiritual failure — “I have failed God” — framed distress as evidence
of personal inadequacy and the need for counselling as proof that faith alone had not sufficed.
Spiritual refinement — “I want to hone my faith and know myself” — cast therapy as an
extension of spiritual growth rather than a departure from it. Spiritual disillusionment —
“God has failed me” — described a theological rupture following bereavement, in which
counselling became the only space in which the question could be discussed at all.

Professional competence mattered more than shared belief. One of the study’s more
striking findings was that participants did not ultimately need a therapist who shared their
faith. Several actively sought a counsellor from within their own tradition, yet even they
emphasised that what mattered most was professional competence, emotional maturity,
curiosity and genuine respect for their spiritual worldview. Participants were correspondingly
critical of spiritual authority offered without adequate training — one dismissed “a course
done on a weekend” as preparation for serious distress. Shared belief without competence
was not experienced as safety.

The groups differed in where the sacred was most naturally encountered: Christian
participants often brought prayer into the session itself, whereas Unificationist participants
carried therapeutic insight outward into embodied daily practice.

Theological Reflections

The differences between the groups were not merely cultural or stylistic; they were
theological. For example, contrasting understandings of the Fall determine whether distress is

experienced as moral failure or as a stage in an ongoing restorative process. Differing
emphases on shame and guilt determine whether suffering is registered as behaviour to be
repaired or as evidence of an essential deficiency. Differing images of God — paternal
authority or a parental being whose nature is shimjung — shape the internal relational
template a client brings to disclosure. Differing structures of community and eschatologies
affect both the stakes of vulnerability and the temptation to resolve suffering into meaning
before it has been fully felt.

Suggestions for Future Research

These theological dimensions suggest a substantial and largely unexplored agenda:
comparative work across other faith traditions; attachment-style-informed research into the
relational templates that different images of God generate; and longitudinal study of how
therapeutic change unfolds within a spiritual life, for example.

Concluding Reflections

What this study found was both simpler and more significant than its initial framing
suggested: for these participants, there was no clear separation between the spiritual and the
psychological to begin with. Spirituality was not a variable to measure or a sensitivity to
manage. It was the medium through which suffering was felt, meaning was made, help was
sought, and healing — when it came — was recognised.

The therapeutic relationship became the crucible in which all of this was negotiated. When
therapists approached their clients’ spiritual worlds with genuine curiosity, steadiness and
respect, something opened. When they did not — even slightly or unintentionally —
something subtly closed.

For clients whose beliefs may lie outside the mainstream, the counselling room has
sometimes mirrored the marginalisation they encounter in wider society: a space where the
most meaning-creating aspects of identity are treated, at best, as peripheral and, at worst, as
symptoms. This study proposes something more ambitious — that theology deserves a
genuine place at the research table, not as doctrine to be evaluated but as a living framework
that shapes human experience in clinically, relationally and personally significant ways. To
genuinely care for the whole person, the therapist must be willing to enter the client’s whole
world.

About the Researcher

I am a BPS Chartered Counselling Psychologist practising in the UK, with a doctorate in
counselling psychology and master’s degrees in intercultural communication, psychology and
religious studies. I have been affiliated with the Unificationist tradition since 1978. My work
has consistently focused on what happens where meaning systems meet — first between Eastern and Western cultural logics, and now between theological and psychological
approaches to understanding distress.

What brings these different strands together is a simple concern: how people come to be who
they truly are, in relation to God, themselves, and their families and communities.