Religiotherapy: A Panacea for Incorporating Religion and Spirituality in Counselling Relationship

Abstract

For majority of individuals, religion and spirituality are very important issues and guides all of their decisions throughout their lives. However, most counselling psychologists find it difficult to provide counselling to clients who comes with issues they consider religiously and spiritually unethical. Such issues often require integration of religious and psychological resources as part of the counselling process. Due to the ethical issues and challenges facing counsellors with respect to their religion and spirituality and that of clients', a proactive approach is what is needed at this time. Therefore, religiotherapy stands out to bridge the gap that has overtime created a lot of incredible heartache to all concerned in the counselling profession. Religiotherapy integrates client's faith and psychology to assist the genuinely motivated client(s) willing and ready to resolve their worries. The skills and conditions for the practice of religiotherapy were examined in this article. The article also demonstrates how researches and intervention programmes that incorporates religious resources and psychological techniques in therapy to assist individual(s) serves as theoretical and empirical evidence on the effectiveness of religiotherapy. Religiotherapy make the counselling process meaningful, flexible and respectful of diverse spiritual cum religious backgrounds of clients.