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There has been a growing body of work about how spiritual and religious interventions can be useful for marriage and family therapists. This paper will discuss the findings of five recent articles.
In the first article "Religion, Spirituality, and Marriage and Family Therapy: A Study of Family Therapists' Beliefs about the Appropriateness of Addressing Religious and Spiritual Issues in Therapy," Carlson et al. (2002) used AAMFT clinical members as their subjects. They received the names of 1200 randomly selected members and mailed surveys to 400 of them. Replies were received from 153, a response rate of 38%.
Three main areas were investigated in this study. They were: (1) the importance of spirituality and religion in the personal and professional lives of marriage and family therapists hereafter (MFT); (2) MFTs' feelings about the appropriateness of involving spirituality and religion in the context of therapy; and (3) the divergence (if at all), in MFTs' beliefs about the appropriateness of dealing with spiritual vs. religious topics in therapy.
This study indicated that MFTs felt that spirituality was a significant part of their professional lives. "The MFTs in this study indicated a strong interconnection between spirituality and marriage and family therapy as a discipline." (Carlson etal., 2002, p. 165).
A crucial finding has to do with the relationship between spiritual health and mental health. An impressive 95% of respondents believed that there is an important relationship between spirituality and mental health. And while 63% of the respondents state that they feel a course in spirituality should be offered as a part of MFT training, 76% had not received this type of training.
In an interesting twist, the authors state that while the great majority of respondents favor the use of spirituality and religion in therapy in theory, many MFTs do not do so in practice. This study suggests that lack of appropriate training programs may be the reason. The authors suggest that further research be done in this area.
In "A Systematic Review of Research on Religion in Six Primary Marriage and Family Journals: 1995-1999," Weaver et al. (2002) discovered that marriage and family journals published a greater proportion of their...