Religion and Spirituality

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Recommended: Importance of culture in counselling procedures

There was a time when the area of spirituality and religion was without a doubt detached from the counseling practice. Lately there has been a rekindling of attention in religion and spirituality in provisions of therapy in the American culture. For the reason that spirituality and religious ideals can play a key element in human life and have been surmised as therapeutically pertinent, ethically suitable, and potentially momentous topics, these principles should be seen as an impending resource in the counseling of diverse client populations. Accordingly counselors have been recommended to take sincerely client’s religious and spiritual concerns. Religion and spirituality are often entrenched within the issues that clients convey in the counseling office; regrettably, the ethical principles of the vocation have yet to attend to unambiguous concerns that materialize as counselors make the endeavor to augment understanding and responsiveness to religious and spiritual issues in their work. The need for counselors to respect clients’ decorum, to promote positive development and maturity, to respect multiplicity in terms of religion and to attempt to comprehend the diverse cultural backgrounds of clients is addressed in the code of ethics. These responsibilities propose that counselors must regard religious and spiritual aspects of client’s welfare and may observe them as assets for endorsing remedial change.
The DSM- IV added “religious or spiritual problems” to its inventory of issues a client may perhaps convey in counseling, generating a need for counselors to have the required abilities to deal with clients suffering from religious or spiritual issues. Religion and spirituality debatably stand out as cultural and indiv...

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Works Cited

American Psychiatric Association. (1994). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders. (4th ed.). Washington, DC: Author.
APA. (2013). Ethical principles of psychologists and code of conduct. Retrieved from http://www/apa.org/ethics/code/index.aspx?item=2# Fisher, C.B. (2013). Decoding the ethics code: A practical guide for psychologists.
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc.
Piedmont, R.L. (2013). A short history of the psychology of religion and spirituality: Providing growth and meaning. Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, 5(1)1-4.
Doi:10.1037/a0030878
Schafer ,R., Handal, P., Brawer, P., and Ubinger, M. (2011). Training and education in religion and spirituality within apa- accredited clinical psychology programs: 8 years later. Journal of Religion and Health, 50(2), 223-239. Doi:10.1007/s10943-009-92728

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