Counseling and Christian Belief

How individuals perceive their place in the world and their ability to deal with the wash of experience, as well as their status vis-à-vis other individuals, is of special concern to any psychotherapist. Such perceptions have relevance to religious experience because rationalization of the connection between self and other so frequently places the individual in the position of having to sort out his or her concept of God's role in human experience. Frequently how the individual deals with what could be called the problem of God, or connects with (or does not) God informs individual experience of the physical world and/or the common experience of human-ness. This is not to say that religion has a corner on explaining the tension between self and other or indeed between self and self; however, spiritual experience may be as relevant as "secular" psychological experience to the health and well-being of the individual organism.

Human nature, whether secular or spiritual, entails concerns about the individual's place in the scheme of existence. Spiritual experience in the Christian formulation is significant insofar as it finds conn

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all mankind to have salvation in heaven, can be interpreted as the highest and best expression of faith in the consequences to human destiny of embracing (and thereby conquering and resolving) the ultimate human anxiety, death. This line of thought is relevant to creating a model of psychotherapy that includes spirituality because it can be reformulated in terms of and integrated with established theories of psychotherapeutic treatment. At the core of person-centered therapy, for example, is Rogers's view that the therapist must become engaged in a "congruent," or authentic and evolving relationship with the client and assume an attitude toward the client of unconditional positive regard (Corey, 2000, pp. 205-207), while also having the expertise to "grasp the client's private world," reflecting it back to him/her in ways that may foster constructive change. These attributes of person-centered therapy are plainly other-directed, for in that discipline the therapist, like the Christian, is meant to function in terms of the needs of the other. If the Christian therapist begins with the premise that therapy is meant to help others, the person-centered discipline provides methods and techniques for providing that help. In existentia
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