Toward an Integrative Model of Psychospiritual Therapy: Bringing Spirituality and Psychotherapy Together

The Disconnect Between Psychology and Spirituality

My journey to becoming a psychospiritual supervisor-educator has taken me on a pilgrimage that first began as an ordained Mennonite pastor with a Masters of Divinity degree, then a trained spiritual director, then a certified psychospiritual therapist with the Canadian Association of Spiritual Care (CASC), and finally now a supervisor-educator with CASC. Throughout this journey, I have found that it is not an easy process to integrate spirituality with psychology. I entered psychospiritual therapy training in 2001 hoping to take my spiritual direction skills to a deeper level. Instead I found myself learning many psychotherapy modalities but I was still mystified as to how the dynamics of psychotherapy connected to the dynamics of spirituality. It wasn’t until I became a student of the Diamond Approach in 2006 that I began to discover how spirituality and psychology could be integrated fully.

In recent years, my psychospiritual students have noted a similar disconnect between their spirituality and psychotherapy education. Their Masters program requires taking both theology and psychotherapy courses but they found little integration between the dynamics of spirit and the insights of psychotherapy. It is like theology and psychotherapy are in different silos that talk to each other from their respective corners, but rarely come together.

Let me share a model that I have developed and now teach my students which helps them integrate psychology and spirituality in such a way that psychospiritual therapy can be seen as a form of spiritual practice.

The Two Natures of the Human Soul

While the word “psychology” literally means the “study of the soul”, the word “soul” is not currently a common term within psychology or psychotherapy. And yet, within spirituality, the term soul is foundational. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines soul as “the immaterial essence, animating principle, or actuating cause of an individual life,” “the spiritual principle embodied in human beings, all rational and spiritual beings, or the universe” (Merriam-Webster, n.d.). When contrasted to the notion of spirit, soul has a more embodied sense to it where it is described as “the seat of human personality, intellect, will, and emotions, regarded as an entity that survives the body after death” (The Free Dictionary, n.d.). Seen in this way, the human soul could be seen as a container of the spiritual animating essence within every person that becomes evident in a person’s thoughts, feelings, motivations, and actions.

Within many religious traditions, this human soul is often described as having two natures, a divine nature and a fallen nature. Within Western religions like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the divine nature is described as “humans being made in the image of God” in their common scriptures (Gen 1: 27). In contrast, these Western religions see human sin tied to the sinful or fallen nature of human beings. Similarly, in Eastern religions like Buddhism, they teach how humans have something similar to a divine nature, what Buddhists call our “buddha nature,” that is, the potential to become buddhas (Chinese Buddhist Encyclopedia, 2018). While Buddhism does not associate sin with a deity, it does tie sin to what could be called humanity’s fallen nature, that is, “the evil elements that defile the mind and have a bad effect on the psyche making it difficult to attain the stage of enlightenment” (Chattopadhyay, 2017). When humans express qualities of spirit like love, truth, grace, strength, joy, and compassion, they are living from their divine nature. When people live from their fallen nature, these spiritual energies become distorted resulting in experiences like rage, hatred, guilt, shame, indifference, judgmentalism, weakness, distrust, and depression.

While psychology does not discuss these two contrasting natures, it does discuss psychic structures. “Psychic structure defines the dominant organization of an individual's mind, manner of establishing relationships, and way of dealing with conflicts” (Jeanneau, n.d.). One of the major building blocks of psychic structures are object relations. Almaas (2002: 168), codeveloper of the Diamond Approach, stated:

An object relation is a psychic structure consisting of a self-image, an image of the other, and the feeling that connects them. These units, established early in life, are the building blocks of the ego and the psychic determinants of most personality patterns.

If the human ego is a psychic structure that develops in the human soul, that means that the original nature of the soul must have been spaciousness, a soul free of structure. While the spacious nature of the soul has not been typically embraced much by Western psychology, it is a foundational aspect of Eastern psychology where the essential nature of the soul is emptiness. In his psycho-spiritual work integrating Eastern and Western psychology, Wellwood (1977) claimed that “Buddhist psychology, in contrast to traditional Western psychology, recognizes the deeper, primordial spaciousness underlying the various conditioned forms of affective space, because of its rootedness in meditation practice” (p. 105).

This means psychologically that the human soul has two natures to it, an unstructured spacious nature, what the Diamond Approach describes as the essential nature of the soul, and a structured egoic nature, often simply described as “ego.” One can begin to see how the divine and fallen natures of the soul taught in religious systems can now be mapped onto the spacious and structured aspects of the soul described within psychology.

The Emergent Nature of the Spacious Soul

Since Western psychology pays little attention to the spacious nature of the human soul, there is little written about it, and yet this spacious nature correlates to the realm of spirit for religious systems. To fill this void in Western psychology, I have looked to the Diamond Approach, a sacred psychology built on Western and Eastern mysticisms and psychologies.

When humans are experiencing the spacious, essential nature of their soul, they will experience spirit emerging, what the Diamond Approach describes as being or essence. The Diamond Approach teaches that being has five common characteristics. They include a deep sense of awareness where people feel they are present to everything in their awareness (Almaas, 2002, p. 32). Another characteristic of being is that of unity, a sense that everything is part of a whole (Almaas, 2002, p. 33). Being is always dynamic, constantly undergoing change and transformation. This dynamic nature of the soul allows people to experience the different qualities of essence or being like truth, love, compassion, strength, value, joy, power, etc. (Almaas, 2002, p. 34). Furthermore, being is always spacious, unstructured, and open to whatever wants to emerge (Almaas, 2002, p. 35). Finally, there is a sense of knowingness to being, where people are able to know and describe what they are experiencing (Almaas, 2002, p. 36). All of these characteristics of being arise out of the human experience of being. They are emergent in the sense that they arise into human awareness; they are not dynamics that humans consciously create through any form of their own effort. People may join with these dynamics and allow them to deepen or be expressed through their thinking, spoken words or deeds, but they cannot create them.

Unfortunately, instead of experiencing the dynamic emergent nature of spirit in their soul, people often experience instead the many egoic structures that compose their personality within their soul. These psychic structures arise quite early in people’s life, often in response to painful experiences during their formative years within their childhood holding environment that is, the nurturing experience they had with their parents or primary caregivers. Attachment theory developed by John Bowlby (1969/1982), and object relations theory, a field within psychoanalysis (Fritscher, 2019), both support this early developmental view of psychic structures. As these psychic structures begin to shape almost every aspect of their experience, people confuse this structured personality with who they really are, their essential identity of being. As this happens, the emergent nature of their soul falls into the background and people find themselves struggling with the negative experiences caused or contained by the egoic structures within their soul.

In comparison to this spacious emergent side of the soul, the structured part of the soul is very different. Instead of a deep awareness and presence to their experiences, when humans live from the structured part of their soul, they are often unconscious of their behaviors and the experiences behind them. For example, within emotional focused therapy, couples and individuals are often oblivious to the unhelpful structured cycle they find themselves living in their relationships (Johnson, 2020, p. 22). Instead of unity, connection and intimacy, people living from their structured soul struggle with isolation, disconnection, and fragmentation of self. Within narrative therapy, when people are living out their dominant narrative, they find themselves disconnected often from others and from the longings of their deeper self (Dulwichcentre, 2017, para. 19). In contrast to the dynamic flow of the human soul, people find themselves attached and identified to the structured part of their soul that causes their life experience to become very fixed and unchangeable. In cognitive therapy, one of the goals is to help people notice the rigid connections they have between their beliefs and their behaviors (Greenberger & Padesky, 2016, p. 18), and thus their mind has lost its dynamic nature. With the rise of psychic structures that are closed and rigid, the human soul loses touch with its spacious nature. In solution focused therapy, the goal is to help people notice the rigid patterns they find themselves living, but then look for exceptions to this internal law, places in their life where openness and spaciousness is already happening, allowing new experiences to manifest (Ackerman, 2020, para. 17). Finally, when people find themselves living from the structured part of their soul, they find themselves often confused by their experiences, a place of not knowing themselves, not able to find language for their experiences, for many aspects of their experience is outside their awareness. This is the goal of Rogerian psychotherapy, where therapists, through a caring therapeutic relationship with their clients, “put[s] emphasis on the person coming to form an appropriate understanding of their world and themselves” (McLeod, 2019, para. 17).

When the human soul is understood as having two natures—an essential divine nature that is emergent and dynamic, and an egoic structured nature which people often become attached to and mistake as the basis of their identity—the purpose of psychotherapy, as seen through a spiritual lens, becomes evident. The goal of psychospiritual therapy, as I have come to understand it, is to help people detach from the egoic structures of their soul so that the dynamics of the essential nature of their soul can interact with and eventually transform these psychic structures.

The Key Role of the Therapeutic Relationship

How do we, as psychospiritual therapists, support our clients’ work of detachment and disidentification?

Research has shown that one factor, more than any other, is associated with successful treatment in psychotherapy, namely the quality of the therapeutic relationship between the therapist and the patient. Knobloch-Fedders (2008) reported:

“A little over half of the beneficial effects of therapy accounted for in previous research are linked to the quality of the alliance,” according to Dr. Adam Horvath, a professor at Simon Frasier University and a leading expert in research on the patient-therapist relationship (para. 5).

As previously noted, psychological issues have their roots in the structured part of a client’s soul, but what causes these psychic structures to exist? When we are in touch with the essential nature of our soul where we are experiencing being, we are in a place of surrender, free of any resistance to what we are experiencing. We are simply able to be with whatever is arising in our experience whether it is positive or negative. Here, there are no psychic structures. In contrast, psychic structures arise in the human soul due to contractions. Almaas describes this contraction process in this way:

You will find out from your own experience that holding, tension, and contraction are simply the resistance to the experience or the perception of a certain state or a certain truth or feeling. When you say no, there is a contraction that is a form of resistance. What else could it be? So any state of non-surrender is a contraction, a tension, a grasping. It can take many forms and be experienced at many depths. It can be hard, like armor, so that you aren’t even aware of it most of the time, or it can be softer, like a defensive attitude or resistance, or it can be dullness, non-seeing, and confusion. But at the deepest level, there is always contraction when you are rejecting something in your experience. And the contraction restricts the flow of energy. It creates a barrier that separates you from the experience that you’re saying no to. (1990/2004, p. 174)

These psychic structures remain in our client’s souls/bodies until our client enters into relationships that allow them to hold these psychic structures in a different way, a way that allows these contractions within these psychic structures to soften. This is the purpose of Rogerian and all person-centred therapies. When a client experiences the three conditions of Rogerian therapy, a therapist who is empathic and understanding; a therapist who is authentic, genuine, self-aware, and understands their client (congruency); and a therapist who shows compassionate unconditional positive regard to all of their experiences (Hopper, 2018, para. 6), then transformation begins to happen.

The reason these transforming experiences occur is because of the two-sided nature of the soul, one part being contracted, the other part being spacious and unstructured. When a client experiences being held well by their therapist, the client begins to hold themselves and their experiences in the same way. They begin to hold themselves with self empathy and understanding, with self-awareness and authenticity, and with compassionate positive self-regard. When a client starts to hold themselves in this more gracious way, the contractions within their soul begin to soften and release. By simply having their experiences held well by their therapist, a client can experience new corrective emotional experiences and insights that result from contractions softening within their soul.

When this happens, the client’s sense of awareness is no longer attached and lost within the experience of their psychic structures. With the support of their psychotherapist, they now begin to have moments when they are able to be aware of these difficult emotional experiences in a gracious, non-judgemental way. This gracious shift opens up the possibility for certain techniques within psychotherapeutic modalities to become forms of spiritual practice that lead to many more corrective emotional moments and insights. When the client and psychotherapist lean toward a spiritual orientation, these times are often experienced as sacred encounters and instances of divine revelation.

Psychotherapeutic Modalities as Spiritual Practices

The human soul, in the beginning of human life, is spacious, free of any psychic structures from our life experiences. Due to the challenges of life and how these negative experiences were held by a person’s family of origin, coping patterns involving our thoughts, feelings, and actions became organized forming psychic structures in our soul. Another aspect of the human soul is awareness. When this centre of awareness becomes attached to aspects of our structured soul, we often lose our self-awareness, and find ourselves operating unconsciously, oblivious to how our coping patterns are determining our experiences. From a spiritual perspective, the purpose of psychotherapy is to help clients dis-identify from their psychic structures, that is, help them move their centre of awareness from their attachment to a psychic structure to the spacious part of their soul.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Above attempts to illustrate what the human soul looks like.

While the quality of the therapeutic relationship plays a key role in effective psychotherapy, once a gracious trusting alliance has formed between the client and the psychotherapist, therapeutic modalities begin to play an important part. The use of these modalities can be seen as spiritual practices for they help a client detach from their psychic structures and become more centred in the spacious part of their soul. This allows spiritual emergence and psychological healing to occur. When I function from my role as pastor, I have come to see this process of detachment and spiritual emergence as the reason why such spiritual practices as prayer and religious ritual are effective.

Let us look at four different psychotherapeutic modalities that I teach to my psychospiritual therapy students to see how each of them could be seen as a spiritual practice: emotionally focused therapy, solution focused therapy, narrative therapy and focus-oriented therapy.

Conclusion

In this article, I have outlined a psychospiritual framework that shows how spirituality and psychotherapy can be integrated into a seamless form of psychospiritual therapy. The key to this integration is noticing how the divine and fallen natures of humanity found within religious systems can be mapped onto the spacious and structured parts of the soul as understood within Western and Eastern schools of psychology. Once this connection is made, it becomes evident how many of the techniques found within different psychotherapy models are actually a form of spiritual practice, a practice that helps the client disidentify or detach from their problematic psychic structure. As this detachment occurs, a client becomes aware of insights or corrective emotional experiences that emerge from the spaciousness of their soul, experiences that would be seen as divine revelation or sacred transformative moments within spirituality or religion.

With the increasing interest and desire to address our clients’ issues in a way that includes spirituality, there is a growing need in developing a spiritual model of psychotherapy. My hope is that this integrative model of spirituality and psychology may be one way of addressing this need within our culture.