By William R. Clough, D.Min.
Training Director
Psychotherapy can be life-transforming. It can be one of the healthiest things you can do for yourself. But it can also be done badly, and bad therapy is harmful. So, choosing the right psychotherapist is serious business. One guideline for a good therapist is state licensure, that is, where the person is licensed as a Mental Health Counselor, Marriage and Family Therapist, or Clinical Social Worker. Psychotherapy is also a very personal experience; so getting along with, feeling comfortable with, and trusting the therapist is crucial, including agreement on the goals of therapy, the methods used to reach those goals, and respect for your personal worldview and values.
Since religion and, more recently, spirituality is important to the majority of Americans, many people want religiously informed, spiritually sensitive psychotherapy. One’s religion can be a huge comfort, provide healthy direction to life, and community support in times of trouble. On the other hand, not all religious and spiritual views are healthy, or at least understood by individuals in a healthy manner. Sometimes religious and views create family rifts or unhealthy behaviors.
It may be important to you to find a therapist who will respect how important your community, beliefs, and commitment are to you and is willing to deal with the complexities of support or challenge they provide. One of my deeply committed Christian friends sought psychotherapy for a major depression. Her first psychotherapist wasn’t hostile to her religion; she just treated it as irrelevant to the “real” problem. Having a very important perspective in her life dismissed felt to her like incomplete therapy, and she promptly sought out another therapist, one who would take her worldview seriously.
There are Christians who think that “secular” psychotherapists are skeptical of or hostile to religion and spirituality, but that need not be the case. To be sure, there have been people (Sigmund Freud being the usually cited example) with a negative view of religion, but recently all major psychotherapeutic organizations (American Counseling Association, American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, National Association of Social Workers, American Psychological Association) have come to include awareness of and respect for religious and spiritual issues in psychotherapy along with “cultural, individual, and role differences, including those based on age, gender, gender identity, race, ethnicity, culture, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, disability, language, and socioeconomic status” (American Psychological Association, Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct, General Principles, Principle E: Respect for People’s Rights and Dignity, https://www.apa.org/ethics/code) in proper treatment.
Unlicensed spiritual and religious counselors vary a lot in quality. Some are well-trained; some have no training in psychotherapy; some have very limited training in a narrow specialty.
The most desirable choice is a licensed mental health professional who follows state legal guidelines, a professional code of ethics, and is trained in dealing with spiritual and religious issues if they are germane to the goals of counseling. That is what Samaritan has, licensed psychotherapists with a deep respect for the power and importance of spiritual and religious issues in human lives and training in how to properly address those issues when needed, giving you the assurance that the counselor you choose will have the highest standards of competence, theological awareness, professionalism, accountability, and respect for you as an individual.