Religion And Spirituality In Counseling Essay

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Counselor’s background in regards to religion and spirituality Incorporating religion and spirituality into counseling from a counselor’s perspective can be intimidating. According to the authors Gladding and Newsome (2014) counselors avoid incorporating religion and spirituality into counseling due to the fear of “violating ethical guidelines by imposing personal values on clients” (Gladding & Newsome, 2014 p. 174). To address the issues related to incorporating religion and spirituality in counseling, the Association for Spiritual, Ethical and Religious Values in Counseling (ASERVIC) developed a list of six competencies to assist professionals. These six competencies are Culture and Worldview, Counselor self-awareness, Human and Spiritual …show more content…

38). Several methods have been considered to incorporate religion and spirituality into counseling. These methods include three methods discussed by the authors Walker et al., the explicit integration, implicit integration and intrapersonal integration, and the tree-ring technique discussed by Ybañez-Llorente & …show more content…

The tree-ring technique is a “process for examining clients’ spiritual conflicts; allowing the client to be the expert and the counselor adopts a not-knowing stance” (Ybañez-Llorente & Smelser, 2014, p. 35). The not-knowing stance means that the therapist does not assume to know about the clients’ situation and allows the client to say what he or she has to say (Ybañez-Llorente & Smelser, 2014). The therapist learns from the client and not from preselecting what he or she wants to hear (Ybañez-Llorente & Smelser, 2014). The tree-ring technique has six levels to allow for ease of assessing and including clients’ spirituality in counseling sessions. The six levels are as

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