Secular psychotherapy has
accomplished so much for those who seek its help. Yet in this, another of their
professional works, James Griffith, M.D., a psychiatrist and neurologist, and
Melissa Griffith, CNS, LMFT, a psychotherapist, persuasively demonstrate how
there is often a rich, powerful resource that remains untouched – the client’s
spirituality and/or religious life. Since ‘spirituality’ and ‘religion’ mean
different things to different people, the authors offer their own working
definitions. Spirituality is here understood to be “a commitment to choose, as
the primary context for understanding and acting, one’s relatedness with all
that is” (p.15). Spirituality is distinguished from but can tie into religion,
which they say “represents a cultural codification of important spiritual
metaphors, narratives, beliefs, rituals, social practices, and forms of community
among a particular people that provides methods for attain spirituality, most
often expressed in terms of a relationship with the God of that religion” (p.
17).

This fascinating and accessible
book offers the psychotherapist practical guidance in how to tap into what is
for many people an integral dimension of their lives – the spiritual and/or
religious. The therapist is encouraged to tap in by exploring a client’s use of
metaphor, stories, rituals, ceremonies, through exploring the client’s beliefs,
as well as how s/he relates to her or his community. A great strength of this
book is that the Griffiths provide detailed explorations of the therapeutic
value of each of these through their extensive sharing of client-therapist
interactions (with permission of the clients, confidentiality respected). This
affords the reader a wonderful opportunity to be the proverbial but invited fly
on the wall in order to learn many things. For example, just how might one
effectively but respectfully ease open the door to the client’s
spiritual/religious life? How might one gently, collaboratively explore with
the client the therapeutic possibilities of the metaphors, stories, and beliefs
revealed?

One question of particular
relevance to the potential reader is whether this kind of exploration of a
client’s spiritual and/or religious life best left to the religious profession.
While sometimes this may be so, this is arguably not so in many cases, as the
Griffiths explain and demonstrate. They explain that their method of
interaction with a client is collaborative, meaning that they share the power
within the client-therapist interaction such that each person learns from the
other for the ultimate benefit of the client. As is consistent with this
approach, then, the Griffiths do not attempt to encounter the sacred from the
vantage point of an expert in a particular religion. Rather, they approach this
avenue of exploration with a respectful openness to and curiosity about the
client’s particular spiritual experience and beliefs, the client’s sense of
what and how God is (not) relating to herself or himself. They describe the
core of their therapy as a “practice of wonder” (p.1). Their contribution to a
dialogue with a client is not to judge or correct the client’s sense of God and
religious belief, but to examine with the client how these areas are working in
her or his life, whether constructively or destructively. Significantly, the
authors devote a full chapter to how spirituality and/or religion can be
destructive in a client’s life. Of particular help in this regard is their
exploration of how the therapist might encounter what appears to be destructive
without trying to “correct” the client. Instead, the therapist offers to seek
with the client a way for the client to find an alternative, non-destructive
way to live in her or his spirituality and/or religion.

To help the reader with these many
sorts of issues, the authors provide sets of questions or strategies for
working with the spiritual and/or religious dimensions of the clients’ lives.
Frequently before and after one or more vignettes, the Griffiths discuss what
they will try or were trying to do and how it did or did not work. They tackle
the difficult challenges and questions, without suggesting that the answers are
yet clear. They explore and sometimes simply offer their own mistakes for
wherever might be learned. They offer this work as a beginning for
understanding and developing this approach to psychotherapy.

Very helpful for the reader of this
well researched and referenced book is its extensive bibliography and good
index. The authors also provide much background material to context what they
are doing in this book. Sometimes they provide lengthy but clear material. At
other times they provide just a brief passage sufficient for the needs of the
book but with in-text references for further research by the interested reader.
Their format is also helpful as they provide in bold print the topic of each
separate section, lengthy or brief, which allows the reader to see easily the
larger structure of the book as well as to return to particular passages later.

In conclusion, the form and
substance of the book combine to offer the psychotherapist valuable guidance
for expanding her or his therapeutic options by helping the therapist learn how
to help those clients who want to explore their own spiritual and/or religious
lives in the context of therapy. Finally, although I am a clinical ethicist
with some chaplaincy training and not a psychotherapist, I found this book
extremely enlightening, accessible, and thought provoking. My experience thus
suggests that there is a wider audience for this excellent work than its most
obvious audience, the psychotherapist.

©
2002 Linda A. Rankin

Linda
A. Rankin, Ph.D., Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine, Department of
Medicine, University of Tennessee Medical Center, Knoxville, TN, and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Department of
Philosophy, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN.

Categories: Psychotherapy, Ethics

Tags: Psychotherapy