Speaking Pragmatically: Religious Discourse and Counseling Discourse in the Lives and Work of Counselors

The Value and Beauty of Faith in Life and in Counseling

All counselors interviewed for this study, without exception, affirmed the positive value of religious faith for their own lives and clinical practice. Additionally, all asserted the potential of religion or spirituality for enhancing the lives and mental health of their patients/clients and/or students.

Kiwi is a counselor educator and private practitioner who was raised in a highly homogeneous Catholic community in Northern Europe. She has since decisively distanced herself from the Church and the faith in which she was raised, but she acknowledged that, among several “takeaways” from her religious background, she still calls on St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes, when she must renounce control in a clinical or life situation. She also linked her experiences as a Catholic Christian with the values that contributed both to her career choice as a counselor and her approach to counseling practice, affirming that:

Another takeaway from my religious upbringing is that I really learned the importance of giving back, and that's a huge part of my practice now. I think we’re told to give and, how do you say this without sounding egotistical? But I don’t turn, I rarely turn people away who can’t pay or who need the help, especially if they’re in jail. (Kiwi, 144–148)

Faith practices can be long-lived and undergo change in their content or experiential quality. Santiago, a former school counselor and graduate student, stated that, unlike at other times in his life, he finds his Catholic Christian faith practices, like praying the rosary, are now “imbued with confidence in the strength of the Spirit” (248). Moreover, the faith that he first experienced through early pastoral relationships in the Church makes it feel natural and helpful for him to pray privately before counseling sessions, which he does regularly now that he is a counselor.

Santiago also alluded to the long and varied social justice history of the Catholic Church, expressing dismay at the discontinuity he sees in the counseling profession's understanding of social justice ideologies and their history: “[The] social justice concept [in the mental health professions] was very much steeped in Catholic social teaching, and people don’t know or care or want to know because it's what they’re making it now to be” (350–352).

Santiago pointed to the Church's long history of concern for the poor and oppressed, which traces its origin to the great medieval Catholic Scholastic theologian Thomas Aquinas, with theories about how humans should show mercy in all interpersonal relationships, and earlier (Walatka, 2016). That concern for the poor was also reflected in 19th- and 20th-century calls by the Church for more and more effective economic developmental efforts around the world (Lamberty, 2017). Twentieth-century liberation theology was another relatively recent flowering of social justice discourse in Catholic theology. The discourse of radical inclusivity in providing for all is also found in Catholic considerations of the just use and distribution of water and other resources (Ferm, 1986; Fitch, 2018). In some ways, then, as Santiago asserted, Catholic justice advocates and theologians delved deeper and took more risks in promoting positive social agendas and discourses than many counseling professionals realize.

Autonomy and Obedience

Despite its positive aspects, belonging to a faith community with an orthodox and detailed system of beliefs and teachings appeared to generate some tension in several of the interviewees, especially where Catholic teachings appear to conflict with counseling ethics. The counselors all found congruence between the two at many points; indeed, as discussed previously, the counselors identified many advantages to the knowledge and experience of Catholicism, Christianity, religion, and/or forms of spirituality for the practice of clinical counseling and, potentially, for all persons. However, each counselor also noted at least one area of divergence either between the two disciplines or of personal disagreement with one or another premise or principle. Each acknowledged experiencing, at one time or another, the need to face and address the divergence in some way.

Some counselors elected to disregard certain specific Catholic teachings, while still embracing and adhering to the broader values promoted by the tradition. This is the position of Joseph, a recently licensed counselor and a lifelong Catholic who flatly rejects the Catholic Church's teachings on abortion and same-sex marriage as simply “wrong and backwards” (191–192). Ingrid, too, is a lifelong Catholic and a 20-year veteran of school counseling. In her interview, she stated bluntly that she “just can’t swallow” (Ingrid, 91) some Catholic ideas such as the exclusion of women from ordination and the condemnation of same-sex love. Moreover, as a counselor, she embraces the principle of autonomy and believes it is her responsibility “to secure” (Ingrid, 196) students’ moral autonomy as part of her professional practice.

At the time of her interview, Lauren had less counseling experience than Ingrid did because she had not been fully licensed for as long. Her Catholic practice setting required that all its clinicians sign an agreement to accept and to uphold all parts of the Catholic Catechism (U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops, 1997). Like Ingrid, she saw many areas of congruence between professional counseling practice, goals, ethics, and her Catholic faith. However, she was troubled by the Catholic teachings on nonmajority sexual orientations:

Well, the one where I still kind of teeter totter a little bit, and then I feel like I need to do more research on that, is at least with the LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender] community. Because I know what it [the Catholic Catechism] says, but, basically like the rules of [the] Catholic Church, how the Catholic Church views homosexuality and seeing how some people view it versus myself. Like, I know people who are of that community. I’m thinking I can’t, I don’t want to, I mean, evangelizing is important but at the same time, I want to maintain a relationship with those people. (Lauren, 159–165)

Healing, Renewal, and the Call to Serve

In this study, each counselor acknowledged a spiritual dimension to the profession of counseling. While few of the counselors often speak directly with clients about religious matters, several described counseling as “doing God's work.” Mary, a school counselor, feels that she has been equipped by God with certain strengths and invited by God to enter the profession. She emphasized the voluntary nature of her assent: “I think [God] called me and invited me to do this. I don’t think he told me I had to. I think he said, ‘Here it is’” (Mary, 178–180).

Joseph believes his entry into the counseling profession was a sacred calling. He studied and planned on a career in a completely different field, but due to an acute, month-long episode caused by a chronic illness, from which he still suffers, crucial materials from his internship were lost. Later, he found himself drifting and dissatisfied in his work life until he became interested in mental health through an interest in criminal forensics. As he began studies in counseling, he recognized his own lifelong gifts as a listener and empathizer. As he acquired professional skills, he realized he was on the right path and that clinical counseling had indeed “turned out to be [his] calling” (Joseph, 136). The phenomena of encountering insurmountable difficulty on one path, followed by experiences of emptiness and discouragement, succeeded by the appearance of a completely unexpected, clear, and compelling leading—all constituted the sacred call to the profession for Joseph.

Like Joseph, Santiago experienced the shift from inside a gap in his life—in this case, an explicitly spiritual life gap rather than a career block. For Santiago, a health crisis and its sequelae led to his reaching out to a Catholic priest friend who helped him move through an experience he described as a casting out by Jesus (241–244). For Santiago, the process was directed by Jesus emerging and acting from within the darkness, isolation, and hopelessness of physical and spiritual dysfunction.

Lauren and Ann also drew connections between human experiences of affliction and healing in both clinical and Catholic Christian terms. As a clinician, Lauren expressed a belief that addiction to pornography can be compared to a state of possession as understood by the Catholic Church. Ann, clinical director of a detention center, talked about encountering inmates with psychotic symptoms who have, at times, used the Christian religious language of demonology. At those moments, she admitted being simultaneously aware of the inmates’ psychiatric disturbance and distress, along with her own visceral fear of the power of evil.

Many of the counselors experienced moments of illness or lack in their lives and those of clients understandable in both religious and counseling terms. As a clinician, Santiago understands that he was depressed and isolated and needed intervention and support after his health crisis, and at the same time, he believes he was saved, healed, and redeemed through the power of the trinitarian God of his faith. Lauren, Ann, Joseph, and the others likewise see their professional development in both professional and religious terms.

Relational/Inclusion/Evangelization Concerns

All the counselors affirmed the importance of relationships in various spheres of religious and counseling life, but each articulated particular relational discourses, and several described different strategies by which they achieved their relational goals. Ingrid and Kiley described experiencing connection to their family members through the Eucharist, while Mary described dispatching her grandfather's crucifix with two family members on military deployment and its role in helping her and her brothers feel more safely connected to each other.

For several of the counselors, relationships that work, in family, religious community, and counseling practice, are supported by participation in religious rituals, religious education, and perceiving connections to others, including relationships with counselees, through a religious lens:

You know, we have kids in bad situations. Our poverty rate is so, we have a very, very high poverty rate at the place that I work. And for me, how I go home and leave it is: I truly believe that God loves the children I work with more than I could ever imagine… I get to be God's hands in those moments that I’m there. And I know when I go home, God's still there loving them, so I believe that that helps in terms of burnout prevention, because I don’t have to carry them home with me. (Mary, 283–327)

Mary thus sees herself as partnering with a powerful and loving God in meeting the needs of her students. That loving partnership with the God of her tradition enables her to stay hopeful about ultimate outcomes for her students and to maintain her own energy and optimism while working in challenging circumstances.

In addition to the potential for burnout, professional relationships present other challenges for Catholic counselors, especially challenges related to questions of evangelization and inclusion. With respect to differing religious beliefs and practices within communities, for example, the fifth-century theologian Augustine (2012) encouraged virtuous Christians to challenge and rebuke their fellows. He saw their ongoing failure to do so as leading to their victimization by crime, natural disasters, and invasions, suggesting that God may have allowed this due to their failure to correct the moral failings of others.

Augustine's point of view was incorporated into the traditional Western Christian ideas about evangelization. It is obvious that rebuking others can (and did) threaten relationships and the cohesion of communities, yet Catholic Christians sometimes see such rebuking as a duty or as a way of expressing Christian love. Some of the counselors interviewed alluded to an apparent conflict between valuing relationships and their duty of evangelizing for the Church. Lauren, for instance, as mentioned previously, acknowledged the challenge of heeding the Catholic call to evangelize and rebuke sin, while also enacting the inclusive values of the counseling profession.

Naming a challenge deriving from concerns about preserving relationships and addressing certain religious teachings, Jane, a private practitioner who frequently works with children, expressed concern about hurting or alienating her Catholic family members if she shares her insights from her counseling experience in the light of common Catholic beliefs among the laity. She noted that it was her Catholic family who taught her about service to others and the Catholic faith that guided the formation of her value system. Jane nevertheless acknowledged sometimes wrestling with managing differing beliefs within important relationships:

I’ve got some family members that I’m really close with that are very strongly … like they go to pro-life rallies and do all this stuff. I oftentimes want to be like, “Yeah, but do you really understand the implications of what it means to tell someone, having your baby is the most important thing you do. No, raising your baby is the most important thing you do. … Yeah. It makes it hard because it's like people are so caught up in. “But the church says…” that they won’t even listen to “But I have experience. My life experience makes me not an expert, but more knowledgeable than you, and so can you at least hear my perspective?” (Jane, 404–413)

For these counselors, forming and maintaining relationships were critical in both their faith development and their development as counselors. Moreover, sometimes the perceived conflicts between Catholic and counseling discourses, although relatively few, are nevertheless experienced by some counselors as potentially threatening to personal and professional relationships. At times, Jane finds that being more authentic in disclosing her values could disrupt the therapeutic alliance:

So, there are times when I want to be like, “Quit doing that. You need to have a better standard for when you decide you’re going to have sex with someone. Your standard is not working for you.” Then, I have to pull back and be like, “But it's not my place to tell her that.” (Jane, 471–483)

Jane showed strong self-awareness and professional judgement in realizing that the urge to challenge a patient for having sex outside a committed relationship arises partly from her traditional, religiously transmitted set of values. Jane knows she must be careful to steer away from imposing those values, while at the same time addressing her client's dysfunctional behavior.

The Integrated Whole or “Bubble” of the Catholic Church and Its Mirrors in Counseling

Several of the counselors alluded to the far-reaching, diverse, and ordered Catholic community and identity. Moreover, in some of the interviews, the counselors linked the holistic nature of their religious paradigm with the seeking of a certain wholeness/completeness in their choice of counseling theories and interventions.

Kiwi described the undisrupted congruence and uniformity of all aspects of life during her childhood in Catholic Europe. While she eventually rejected much of the content of the Catholic religious tradition, she nevertheless later gravitated to the total clinical world of treatments such as dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), a protocol that posits a predictable, contained system of causes and effects, as with the repair of helicopter engines, which she had performed regularly in a previous career:

I can see how things work in my head, you know, wiring, how engine components go together and DBT. I think learning and memorizing it, using it for as long as I have, I can see the roadmap in my head, kind of like an electrical panel or the components of a motor. (Kiwi, 54–59)

DBT, developed by psychotherapist Marsha Linehan (2015), has been shown to assist persons with borderline personality disorder, posttraumatic stress disorder, and dysthymic disorder (persistent depressive disorder) in managing and regulating extreme emotional and dissociative states (Barrett et al., 2017; McKay et al., 2007; Wilks et al., 2016). It provides a complete package of interventions designed to install skills of tolerance of emotional distress, mindfulness practices, emotional self-regulation, and interpersonal interaction, offered within a model of dysregulation and regulation occurring within the immediate social and biological environments of an individual. Kiwi's analogy between the helicopter engine and DBT is apt, and both are evocative of the positives and negatives of the complete society and thought world of the Catholic community in which she once lived.

Ann pointed to how, within Catholic Christian culture, time, space, and relationships are all regulated and seen as part of a systemic whole. Ann, who, in addition to her clinical and administrative work, serves as an officer in the Army Reserves, spoke of the reassurance that comes from belonging to a complete social, psychological, and philosophical world:

Going to church and being a part of this family and being part of this community gave my family purpose, gave me purpose. It always seemed like we were looking for peace. We were looking for knowledge. We wanted confirmation that we’re on the right path, that we’re doing the right thing. (Ann, 139–142)

Corresponding to her comfort with functioning in the “bubble” of Catholicism is Ann's valuing of being part of a collaborative system of professionals—military, law enforcement, and clinical—all working together to improve mental health care in the corrections system:

With me being military, I know a bunch of the officers here. I had already been working with PD [the Police Department], so I knew the law enforcement side. Coming into it was just kind of a natural fit [to] watch the aspect of law enforcement and corrections and behavioral health all come together, and watch it grow has been so fulfilling for me. (Ann, 28–31, 64–67)

For some counselors, an emphasis on collaboration and the availability of a complete clinical treatment model, mirroring the total society Christianity built and transmitted by Catholics after Augustine (Johnson, 1987), leads to better counseling. Santiago might not disagree with this perspective, but, by contrast, he complained of what he sees as the overpromising of counseling theories. He feels the counseling profession may have adopted sometimes idiosyncratic, overpersonalized counseling theories and tried to use them as substitutes for a complete philosophy or theology:

Theories are taught, I believe, to students as a worldview, and I think they fall short. They don’t give a complete picture of what a worldview is. I think constructivism does. I think personalism does … A lot of [theorists] … say, “I’m going to figure life out for people based solely on my experiences, and it's going to be applicable to everybody.” … I had to think of these in terms of a worldview when I could see through their—their limitations. (Santiago, 407–421)

Jeremy, too, alluded to the integrated whole as he pointed to the predictable totality of the universe as a kind of work of art, offering a profound encouragement to faith:

Because when you look at things, you see order, you see order in the grand cosmos. … as you see how we’re finding more and more stars or finding more and more of God's, his signature, within the cosmos … and then you look down at the tiniest atoms. So, you have something happening really, really tiny and something really, really huge that are happening in synchronicity. When you open up and you dig beneath the surface, you see all these things. (Jeremy, 223–237)

Jeremy's perception of God's thought, creation, and ongoing presence in the universe is evocative of a kind of total, cosmic spirituality. The former Catholic priest, now Episcopalian, and theologian Matthew Fox (1984) labeled the presence of God within all physical phenomena as the theological construct panentheism. For Fox, as for Jeremy, God is present in and with all in the cosmos, at once transcendent and immanent, synchronizing the smallest and the largest phenomena accessible to human perception. In this conception, the cosmos itself, bearing God's signature, is the primary integrated whole or “bubble.”

Counseling Theories and Faith Traditions: Mirrors and Compatibilities

Several of the counselors interviewed acknowledged a preference for Carl Rogers’ person-centered psychotherapy theory. Moreover, in their interviews, this preference was linked thematically to their faith. Some seemed to reach for the language of this theory, for example, to express the importance for them of the relational respect they believe is promoted by their faith and which they have found, in turn, to be most effective for their counseling work. Ingrid stated directly her belief that Jesus, as depicted in the Christian Testament, interacted in person-centered ways with others. Santiago, too, alluded to personalism and person-centered therapy theory as paralleling Catholic teaching about the dignity and inherent value of human beings.

Jane also sees the two as compatible, and as a practitioner, she combines person-centered theory with play therapy in her work with children and young people from disadvantaged milieux.

Four counselors (Joseph, Lauren, Kiley, and Jeremy) mentioned existentialist theory as a useful framework for counseling that is compatible with their faith tradition. Joseph linked his interest in and use of existentialist counseling theory to his rich education in philosophy and theology at a Catholic university. He also acknowledged calling on existentialist thought in making sense of his personal experience of a lifelong, chronic illness that he knows may ultimately shorten his life. In psychotherapy, following the elaborations of Yalom and Frankl of the 20th-century philosophy of Sartre, Camus, and May, the existentialist model defines a therapeutic attitude that makes space for the exploration of meaning and the challenges of life dilemmas (Audi & Audi, 2015; Corsini & Wedding, 2011).

Kiley, who specialized in grief counseling for several years, prefers existential theory for her private practice work, and like Joseph, she noted its compatibility with her religious beliefs:

I think … it fits in with … making meaning in one's life. That's a big existential idea of, we have only this amount of time on earth, regardless of what people believe or don’t believe about the afterlife. That we all have a purpose in life and that when people feel the lack of purpose or lack of meaning that doubt creates lots of problems. (Kiley, 260– 263)

Parallels can thus be drawn between Christianity and existentialist theory. The Italian linguist and political activist Gramsci (2018) alluded to the necessity of an agnostic stance, suggestive of an existentialist position, in the modern world, linking it with Christianity:

Real will takes on the garments of an act of faith in a certain rationality of history and in a primitive and empirical form of impassioned finalism which appears in the role of a substitute for the Predestination or Providence of confessional religions. It should be emphasised, though, that a strong activity of the will is present … directly intervening in the “force of circumstance.” (p. 476)

Indeed, to offer a historical example of the thought to which Gramsci (2018) alluded, for the 16th-century Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury Cranmer, the unknowability of one's destiny was a given, a chilling reality that must be faced with faith. For Cranmer, and others of his time, even “baptism was … only a means of regeneration for those who were already elect; yet humanity must preserve a reverent agnosticism about who those might be, and hence all should be baptized” (MacCulloch, 1996, p. 428). Cranmer would have viewed this assertion as flowing from the doctrine of predestination, a prominent theological model debated throughout European Christendom in his lifetime. As philosophers and theologians, along with these interviewees, have seen, the existentialist stance thus allows for, or perhaps requires, taking a position starting from what is knowable and possible, both for faith life and for counseling practice; that is, awareness, choices, and actions.

Jeremy's primary theory for his practice is narrative therapy. Jeremy, who works in a Catholic counseling center, has a longstanding interest in “how our minds shape our reality” (Jeremy, 21) stemming from his attempts as a child to understand the causes of a relative's suicide attempt. Gripped by a fascination with the etiology of pathologies, he grasped early that the internal framing of life stories can promote healthy functioning or its opposite in individuals.

At one point in his interview, drawing connections between faith and counseling theory, Jeremy noted that he often alludes to parables in counseling sessions. In one example, he talked of working with those who had distanced in their relationship with God, stating, “[God] lets you go out there and learn your lesson and do your thing, but at the end of the day he's waiting for you to come back because it's only true love if you choose to come back. He didn’t make us robots” (Jeremy, 410–412). Here, he was making a point, alluding to the parable of the Prodigal Son, about the importance to him of forgiveness as part of his religious experience of relationships. Jeremy's life experiences and clinical work have reinforced for him the importance of awareness and an understanding of issues for supporting health and growth, best imparted through stories. Therefore, for Jeremy, the construction of narratives—in this setting, sometimes explicitly religious narratives—is crucial to his clinical effectiveness.