48-1 When Spirituality Meets Counseling: The Counselor's Perspective
| Ping-Hwa Chen | Lan-Hsin Fan | Shing-Ru Chan | Hsin-Yun Fan | ||
| National Taiwan Normal University | |||||
In the past twenty years, Western psychology research increasingly affirms that religion/spirituality can bring people transcending power and meaning in life. Counseling psychology research also supports the exploration of the client’s spirituality in counseling as beneficial and can bring about effective counseling outcomes. Some counselors in Taiwan also incorporate religion/spirituality into their counseling works. However, it rarely has been researched. The purpose of the present study was to explore the experiences of counselors who included religion/spirituality in their practice. Sixteen research participants with different religious/spiritual backgrounds participated in the study. Among them, four were Christians, four were Catholics, four were Buddhists, and four were New Age believers or individuals who integrated New Age with Buddhism. Semi-structured individual interviews were conducted for data collection. Thematic analysis was employed for data analysis. Themes that emerged from the data included: (a) counselor’s spiritual orientations, (b) the developmental process of incorporating spirituality into counseling, (c) the timing for incorporating spirituality into counseling, (d) using the spiritually incorporated counseling interventions, (e) positive outcomes of incorporating spirituality in counseling, (f) the meaning of being a counselor who incorporates spirituality in practice, and (g) the ethics of conducting spiritually incorporated counseling. Suggestions for future studies were discussed.
Keywords
spirituality、spiritually incorporated counseling
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