When you’re used to swimming in certain waters, sometimes you forget that water is wet.
One of the reasons I chose to go to Fuller Seminary’s School of Psychology was because of their emphasis on the integration of psychology with Christian theology– the latter being a mostly interdenominational perspective that I was familiar with from my first go around at seminary (Regent College) in the mid aughts. Now, to be fair, the psychological research coming from Fuller barely makes a blip on the radar of academic psychology. Despite the fact that Fuller has been accredited by the American Psychological Association since the ’60s, it is not a “top destination” for aspiring clinical psychologists or psychological researchers. But where they are world leaders is, from my perspective, their concern for taking your faith seriously and integrating it with what we’ve learned about human beings.
I had expected a more systematic approach from my professors at Fuller– more in the mold of “here’s how the kenosis of Christ meshes with client-centeredness”– but I was quickly disappointed when the message seemed to be, “here are the traditions undergirding both psychology and theology. Now, consider your own tradition and what you adhere to, and then make sense of it yourself.” If there’s one thing I’ve learned in grad school, it’s that spoon feeding is not on. The expectations are that you will develop critical thinking capacities that will serve you better than just memorizing information and performing manualized therapies. My younger self hated that lack of received clarity at first, but over time, I’ve come to see that as less a threat and more an invitation to expand and grow in my ability to think.
Back to the swimming analogy: the result of spending so much time engrossed with many clients who profess a Christian faith and are seeing a psychologist for their help is that I’ve taken for granted how what I offer by way of taking their faith seriously is actually quite rare, especially in the Lower Mainland. Not that I’m the “best” at it– what an inane thing to be the “best’ at– but even providing space for people to process their experiences of God, their churches, their [“religious”] families with someone who still calls himself a Christian (yes, even with all the baggage that comes with that label) is not easy to find.
But being so involved with a smallish part of Christendom sometimes makes me forget how seeing a counsellor is thought to be a threat to one’s faith. Although I can’t say “nothing could be further from the truth”, a good counsellor who respects your faith and helps you process what you want to keep and what you want to move on from won’t make you “give up your faith” entirely. The most likely outcome is that you’ll have a renewed perspective on why you’ve been doing what you’re doing, and why you want to keep doing it. (Notice that I did not say “believe”– belief is a tricky thing to discuss in clinical psychology, where we meet more than a few people with, uh, “different” beliefs.)
Not only will a good counsellor help you clarify your faith, the notion that seeing a counsellor is “against God’s will” is ignorant of how the field of psychology began and why it’s not so foreign to the development of the Christian faith as a whole.
I always tell people who, because of their faith, are skeptical of psychology as a field that I’m only doing what the Church has done for centuries. Before there was such a thing as “counselling”, priests and pastors were visited for their ability to listen and nurture people in their growth. And then, if we see the Church as being rooted in the soil prepared by our Jewish brethren, the idea of growing and maintaining a wisdom tradition and inquiring of teachers goes back millennia.
Where many still get it wrong is with their presumption that since Freud was an atheist, everything that comes from him (psychology?) is also anti-theist. And here, let me throw it down: “nothing could be further from the truth.”
Psychology is merely the application of scientific method towards the study of human beings in their motivations, cognitions, behaviours, and affects. Is it a “bulletproof” science like physics or chemistry? Not in the least! But even the “hard sciences” like those experience a degree of uncertainty at their higher levels (see: quantum physics and Schrodinger’s cat). So as a science, like any science, psychology is definitely inexact and imperfect. And as one who has studied academic psychology with all its pretensions of randomized/controlled double blind studies and statistical data milling, there’s still a lot of work for researchers to do (see: the Replication Crisis.)
Now, as humanity has gained incredible knowledge and understanding by way of constant inquiry through the past several millennia, an integration of psychology and theology is simply a recognition that psychology can offer some helpful ways of thinking about and dealing with how we’re feeling, thinking and behaving.
One consistent example is how psychology has emphasized how important our embodiment is for our well-being. Many theologians already know and argue this (the whole “embodied soul or ensouled bodies” phrase that is common to where I come from), but psychology operationalizes this concept. It has drawn connections between how what we do with our bodies matters to our “minds” (psyche? Can I use that word yet?). So very often, drawing on good psychological principle as well as concern that we are created beings with “dusty” bodies for a reason, some of the first things I encourage my clients to do is to get more/better sleep, get more/better exercise, and make themselves better food while laying off the alcohol and too much caffeine. Is that Christian? At its root, yes, it is a very Christian concern that we not abuse our bodies or the bodies of others. Why wouldn’t I encourage Christians and non-Christians alike to follow a more healthful way?
A question that sometimes comes up is how much my faith influences my work. I’m never too sure how to answer that, as my faith definitely influences my work in so far as being concerned for the well-being of others and helping them grow in their ability to love and be loved are bedrock concerns for God’s mission for humanity. And if clients tell me they have no faith background, faith as a topic will almost never come up– at least from my end. But my faith influences my work in another way: the reason I keep at the work I’m doing isn’t just because it’s a well-paying job with some prestige. I do what I do in the way I do it because I’m joining in what I think God is doing: binding up the brokenhearted, bringing down dividing walls, and making all things new.