Spiritual Practices for Emotional Healing: Implications for Training Trauma Therapists

Abstract

Abstract Mental health and well-being are important contributors to quality of life, productivity and life satisfaction. Spirituality is an important aspect of quality of life and hence, understanding spirituality, assessing spirituality and incorporating spirituality in psychotherapy are important issues for clinical psychologists in order to provide holistic and appropriate care. Professional ethics codes recognize the need to respect the beliefs and values associated with religion and spirituality in the course of psychotherapy. Spiritually oriented psychotherapeutic interventions have been considered to be especially indicated for individuals experiencing psychological trauma. Although the role of spirituality has been recognized in resilience and recovery, very little professional training is available for therapists to learn how to address religious-spiritual matters in therapy.Therapy training manuals and trained mentors are required to enable effective application of spiritually oriented psychotherapeutic interventions when they are indicated. Keywords: Spirituality; Emotional healing; Psychotherapy; Therapy training