An Integral Psychology Response to Helminiak's (2001) “Treating Spiritual Issues in Secular Psychotherapy”

Abstract

elminiak's (2001) "Treating Spiritual Issues in Secular Psychotherapy" is a noble effort to address some of the most perplexing issues of H psychology and psychotherapy today. In this work, he attempted to formulate a lucid and functional definition of spirituality. Building upon this definition, which he identified as humanistic in orientation, he presented a psychology of spirituality and offered a means by which it might be implemented in psychotherapy. We share Helminiak's desire to find a model of spiritual psychology that can guide mental health professionals in both their thinking and their practice, and we commend him for turning that desire into years of work aimed at developing a viable model.A noteworthy aspect of Helminiak's spiritual psychology is his admonition that therapists reinterpret or reject outright certain pathological aspects of clients' religious beliefs. We applaud Helminiak's courage in this regard. The mental health profession's need for criteria to critically evaluate clients' spiritual material cannot be overemphasized. A spiritual psychology that wades in a mire of pluralistic relativism and unreflective acceptance seems destined to drown, immobilized by internal contradiction and indecision. We agree with Helminiak that the current flood of cultural pluralism and relativism in academia and the culture at large, in which all value judgments are eschewed (except, with ironic inconsistency, the valuing of not valuing over valuing), is

A question of finding harmony: A grounded theory study of clinical psychologists' experience of addressing spiritual beliefs in therapy

“…These four precepts allow the expression of spirituality to comprise a considerable breadth of perspective and behaviour while simultaneously placing certain restrictions, such that attitudes including selfishness and solipsism are excluded. However, several objections have been raised about adopting such a model to represent spirituality (Marquis, Holden, & Warren, 2001; Watts, 2001), causing Helminiak (2001a) to conclude that ‘the attempt to coherently integrate psychology and spirituality … reveals that there are there are fundamental and deeply felt differences of opinion’ (p. 250).…”

Spirituality, Religion, and Globalization

“…Although the concept of spirituality dates back almost two thousand years to St. Paul, it is only in the past two decades or so that it has become a topic of systematic enquiry in the social science literature. During this time, there has been an active and vociferous debate on the nature of spirituality among scholars in management, psychology, religion, nursing, counseling, and pastoral care (Benjamin and Looby 1998;Marquis, Holden, and Warren 2001;Zinnbauer et al 1997). Confusion between the concepts of spirituality and religion is what mainly fuels this debate (Dialmy 2001;Moberg 2002;Zinnbauer, Pargament, and Scott 1999).…”

The Role of Spirituality in Formulating a Theory of the Psychology of Religion

“…Scientific research can hardly afford such ambiguity on a matter so central to the field. The extreme example of Wilber's position, which has become the paradigm in transpersonal psychology (Helminiak 2001a;1998, 213-92;Marquis, Holden, and Warren 2001), highlights the methodological problem in a psychological explanation of spirituality via appeal to God or God-substitutes.…”

“…In the name of psychological science, the SAI employs a personal and arguably gratuitous understanding of spirituality and an idiosyncratic conception of God to construct a measure of spiritual development that is supposedly appropriate for research, clinical practice, and ecclesiastical screening of ministerial candidates (Hall and Edwards 2002). In this case as in others (Dueck 2002;Marquis, Holden, and Warren 2001;Richards and Bergin 2005;Slife and Richards 2001;Tan 2002;, recent psychological openness to religion may be becoming an occasion for smuggling into psychological practice or protecting from criticism the specific Zygon belief-and-value systems of particular people and groups. The importation of God and then, necessarily, particular images of God into psychological constructs can hardly avoid such an outcome.…”

“…If religious believers and spiritual practitioners object that such an explanatory science of the spiritual does not do justice to their experiences or beliefs (Helminiak 2001a;Marquis, Holden, and Warren 2001;Slife and Richards 2001;Watts 2001), the scientific requirement must be to refine the theories, redo the research, and accurately and adequately explain the phenomena in question-but not necessarily to satisfy all the concerns of believers. It is not to be expected that scientific explanation will square with popular opinion.…”