Models of Psycho-Spiritual Care: Responding to the Spiritual Needs of Our Contemporaries

Abstract

Spiritual development has been an important issue in the lives of many people since the dawn of humanity. In order to achieve their goal of greater spiritual maturity, they often asked help from a person they considered to be more spiritually advanced than themselves. With the beginnings of Christianity, this human propensity became even more pronounced and formalized, taking the shape of spiritual guidance in some form, which, over periods of both growth and decline, has recently come to resurgence in popularity. Today, there are also a significant number of people who seek professional help from therapists in resolving psychological issues and who, at the same time, would also like to use their personal spiritual resources to help them reach healing. Thus, a grow-ing need for spiritually integrated psychological counseling has arisen. These developments require a better understanding of both the spiritual processes and the manner of helping people grow spiritually through the door of psychological counseling in some form. This article is a survey of the literature that presents a broad range of models to meet spiritual needs of modern people. Presenting such a variety of approaches is an attempt to widen the scope of what is offered as therapeutic assistance for spiritually sensitive individuals. In the conclusion, the author proposes new modalities for the inclusion of spiritual content in the counseling process.

Keywords

• spiritual direction
• pastoral counseling
• spirituality
• psychotherapy
• integration