Faith as a Therapeutic Companion: Instructing Counselling Students on the Import of Religion/La Foi Comme Compagne De la Thérapie : Instruire Les éTudiants En Counseling De L'importance De la Religion

The muzzling of faith in most counselling curricula is a direct by-product of the acrimonious relationship between psychology and religion. religion and spirituality elicit deep feelings in people and because they speak to people's deepest values, practicing psychologists must be careful to approach these processes with knowledge, sensitivity, and care (Pargament, 2013, para. 8). This environment, void of neutrality and defined by strong and passionate opinions, presents unique and challenging dynamics for students who are in the midst of reconciling their personal and professional realities.Care and sensitivity extended to religious clients has been the exception rather than the rule, and their absence was germinated not in the offices of practicing therapists but in the classroom, where instructors frequently present religious beliefs as a therapeutic afterthought. Although psychoanalytic theory does not garner much airtime in counselling programs, the root cause of this dismissive stance toward the impact of religious beliefs in training programs can be traced to a fundamental misinterpretation around a simple question posed by Freud (1927/1961): Wherein lies the peculiar value of religious ideals? (p. 21). I take the stance that Freud was not precluding the value of religion in psychotherapeutic training and practice, but rather was critical of passive, reactive, and regressive theological systems. For educators, this critical engagement is an integral part of any effective pedagogy.Thus, in a fresh context, Freud's (1927/1961) premature closure of the religious question can become a point of debate and self-reflection for students to evaluate their respective views about religion as a therapeutic companion. My experience is that even the most adamant atheists in a counselling cohort are willing to expand the embedded reality of faith in cultural and existential landscapes to the assessments and interventions of counselling. This reality was emphasized by Fromm (1955), who noted that every human being is innately religious in the wider sense of not being able to extract oneself from systems of meaning while also remaining sane.RELIGION AS ACTIVITY VERSUS OBJECTUnderlying the fallacies I address in this article is the core principle of religion as an activity. The majority of counselling programs continue to introduce students to a paradigm of religious life that is archaic, static, and removed from the relevance of daily life. No matter how innovative and accommodating a curriculum might be, instructing religious traditions as static objects undermines any subjective inroads that might be made. When religion enters the counselling classroom as an activity, students are better able to integrate religion and spirituality into their professional evolution. This creates a fluid space for the ineffable mysteries of faith to encounter the unique learning styles of counselling students, a space emphasized by Huxley (1945) as a continuum, a spectrum for meaning otherwise not captured by conventional syntax.Instructionally, the clinical ramifications of this shift are instantaneous. When a student is presented with the historical and contemporary facts about a religion, two very important reference points are established that define the curricular experience. The first involves the reciprocal relationship between a student's sense of self and the religious framework provided. Because the nature of religion automatically incorporates the ontology of the learner, a significant and overlooked consequence develops in which a narrow presentation of religious reality equates to an equally myopic sense of self. The second reference point around the objectified vision of religion involves self-awareness of counselling students projecting their own unexamined and hidden agendas onto their religious clients, making the curricular responsibility of emphasizing student self-awareness all the more important. …

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