Spirituality: the Heart of Therapy

Journal of Family Psychotherapy ISSN: 0897-5353 (Print) 1540-4080 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/wjfp20 Spirituality The Heart of Therapy Harry J. Aponte To cite this article: Harry J. Aponte (2002) Spirituality, Journal of Family Psychotherapy, 13:1-2, 13-27, DOI: 10.1300/J085v13n01_02 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1300/J085v13n01_02 Published online: 12 Oct 2008. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 533 View related articles Citing articles: 15 View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=wjfp20 SPIRITUALITY AND THEORY Spirituality: The Heart of Therapy Harry J. Aponte SUMMARY. Today’s society speaks with conflicting voices about values, morality, and faith–in a word, about spirituality. Consequently, therapists are having to consider with their clients the values and morality upon which to base the therapy, and having to aid clients in utilizing their belief systems and faith communities to help themselves. Spirituality is treated here in terms that are inclusive, applying both to secular and religious spirituality. We suggest three general ways in which spirituality enhances the power of therapy. The first relates to making moral choices the heart of issues clients present. The second involves assisting clients in becoming emotionally and spiritually grounded. The third has to do with including spiritually enriched resources among people’s options for solutions. [Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-HAWORTH. E-mail address: <getinfo@haworthpressinc.com> Website: <http://www.HaworthPress.com> © 2002 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.] Theresa Romeo-Aponte contributed to the development of this paper. [Haworth co-indexing entry note]: “Spirituality: The Heart of Therapy.” Aponte, Harry J. Co-published simultaneously in Journal of Family Psychotherapy (The Haworth Press, Inc.) Vol. 13, No. 1/2, 2002, pp. 13-27; and: Spirituality and Family Therapy (ed: Thomas D. Carlson, and Martin J. Erickson) The Haworth Press, Inc., 2002, pp. 13-27. Single or multiple copies of this article are available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service [1-800-HAWORTH, 9:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. (EST). E-mail address: getinfo@haworthpressinc.com]. © 2002 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved. 13 14 SPIRITUALITY AND FAMILY THERAPY KEYWORDS. Spirituality, family therapy, morality, values In an era of intense interest in and controversy about values in our society, spirituality has moved into the forefront of therapy. What stands out about how we deal with spirituality in therapy today is that we consciously attend to and talk about it. Therapy has always been practiced within the framework of a society’s values and its structure. Contemporary society, however, is particularly uneasy and contentious about its values. The civic leaders and parents of yesterday spoke with a more or less single voice. Society now speaks with many and conflicting voices about values and morality. It is a society that has evolved from valuing consensus to esteeming individual difference and choice. From expecting people to cooperate and be interdependent, contemporary society looks for people to be self reliant and learn to decide for themselves. Clients now come to therapy asking questions about the appropriateness of their thinking and the morality of their choices (Aponte, 1994, pp. 168-185). They are having to ask questions that were not questions in past generations, for example, about the connection between sex and commitment (Wilson, 1993, pp. 230-237), about abortion as contraception (Hoge, 1996, p. 37), about suicide as a solution to declining “quality of life” in terminal illness (Peck, 1997). Therapists working with adolescents are forever dealing with questions about the dangers and potential consequences of sex outside of marriage. Therapists working in hospice increasingly confront issues related to the purpose and meaning of pain, illness, and death. New science and new attitudes toward sex, love and babies have added heretofore unheard of issues and challenges to therapy. Therapists are having to assess people’s values behind their clinical issues, and to determine within themselves and with their clients values and morality upon which to base their therapy. These developments drive today’s debates and exploration about values and spirituality among therapists. With this radical change of attitude towards values, morality and spirituality in the real of therapy, clinicians now hardly pretend to be value neutral as they were expected to be yesteryear. Whether because of their schools of therapy or because of their personal values, therapists everyday introduce their philosophies and values into the therapy they do (Aponte, February, 1998). They may speak from a feminist perspective (Goldner, 1993) and advocate a politically determined ideal by which to judge a healthy marriage, such as equality and sameness of power between marital partners. From a postmodern perspective (Becvar, Spirituality and Theory 15 1997) they may emphasize a subjective spin on experience over an objective reality, creating greater room for difference and disagreement about moral issues among family members. A Christian therapist (Bardill, 1997) may present definite moral standards as the basis for assessing right behavior, setting a single moral pennant around which to set the goals of therapy. From their professional training, political affiliations, and personal belief systems, therapists bring their idiosyncratic opinions about the link between morality and psychological health into their work. All therapists hold their own personal opinions about what makes for better living, whether it is about the benefits and drawbacks of punishing children, staying and escaping a difficult marriage, or the usefulness and dangers of religion for our mental health. Therapists vary in their ideas not only about how good values contribute to good mental health and felicitous relationships. They also come with differing thoughts about whether spirituality in the form of prayer and worship ritual may serve as proper and effective resources for healing for their clients (Tan, 1996). Clients themselves challenge therapists with their own views about values and spirituality. Clients’ issues, by their very nature, bear some degree of moral, value or spiritual valence. Therapists react overtly or subliminally to the spirituality of clients and their issues with their own endorsements, disapprovals or recommendations. The media promulgates the new moral and ethical dilemmas that eventually creep into the agenda of our therapy. 20/20 only recently interviewed a man who spoke of his intention to clone his aging mother. How is that for a solution to the pain of separation from a parent? We already face questions of donor sperm where the male cannot produce healthy sperm. New scientific possibilities present novel potential forms of extra-marital conception. We read about moral and legal dilemmas for therapists today that have to do with greater public acceptance of non-traditional life styles. Child welfare workers are embroiled in controversies about adoptions by gay couples. Suicide is publicly debated and dramatized into ever greater acceptability. Therapists working with terminal AIDS patients are likely to face requests for assistance to terminate life through various forms of suicide. The trivialization of extra-marital sex in the media presents therapists who counsel marital couples with an amorphous social environment for addressing how seriously to treat the occurrence of a sexual liaison outside of a marriage. The media presents an ambiguous morality that influences society’s moral sense, and leaves therapists to figure out for themselves the moral standards by which to advise clients about what is appropriate and healthy. 16 SPIRITUALITY AND FAMILY THERAPY WHAT IS SPIRITUALITY IN THERAPY? In this paper we are using a treatment of spirituality that is inclusive, that is, a definition that can apply both to secular and religious spirituality, that has validity and usefulness whether or not it includes formal organization, doctrine, ritual or God. Spirituality is a universal dimension of life that lends a meaning to our existence, sets a moral standard for living, and assumes some sense of moral connection among people at the very heart of our humanity. Some spirituality is based on ethics and philosophy. Other spirituality sees its source and end in the supernatural realm of a deity, and is most often expressed in formal religion. Both forms speak to morality, meaning, and the nature of the individual’s relationship to the world, whether or not it is supernatural. This definition of spirituality has certain implications for a therapy that would be sensitive to the spiritual in the lives of clients. It supposes that to gain a fuller understanding of clients, therapists consider not only the family history and psychological dynamics of client issues, but also the world view and moral contexts of their struggles. In the pursuit of solutions, therapists also consider spirituality as a potential resource for support and direction. Whatever difficulties clients face, therapists who are spiritually sensitive themselves bring a philosophy of life and moral perspective to bear on their interpretation and view of the hurts and conflicts clients present in therapy. The meaning and purpose therapists bring to clients’ issues set the course of the therapy. For example, infidelity in marriage can be viewed simply as acting out on an unsatisfactory relationship that needs psychological repair. However, it can also be seen as an opportunity for a couple to reach more deeply within their relationship for a love that is both emotional and spiritual to build something more meaningful over the failings of the past. A patient’s depression because of a chronically debilitating illness can be treated simply as grief over the loss of vitality, or as a chance to turn a frenetic pursuit of “success” into a more contemplative spiritually purposed life. A spiritual perspective also implies that there are moral components to the issues people present. Morality connotes standards of behavior that distinguish good from bad. Staying with the question of infidelity, sexual betrayal in marriage can be treated simply as a sign of a breakdown in the emotional bonds between marital partners, or can also be viewed as a violation of a moral obligation that is integral to the commitment of marriage. In the latter instance, the moral implication is that whatever the emotional problems contributed to the betrayal, the nature Spirituality and Theory 17 of the commitment calls for some form of remorse, apology, and repair that reaches for a love fortified by a spiritual bond that transcends the human failings and trials of the marital relationship. Morality adds a contractual component to the emotional relationship. The concept of morality also necessitates the consideration of free will, the ability to make a moral choice. Ensconced somewhere in the heart of what people may need to do in order to achieve the desired change or solution of a problem is a moral decision that goes beyond feelings. In the infidelity example, the straying husband may have to decide whether to endeavor to give up the extra-marital relationship in his heart, not just in his behavior, and the wife whether to forgive to the point of reopening her heart to her husband. Such decisions form the moral foundation upon which the work of emotional repair is begun. Spirituality also implies that the issues of clients take place within a context of the ties among people that lend a social meaning to life. In other words, people and their problems exist in the context of relationships. However personal an issue may be, its existence and solution touch on the lives of others. These ties, with all of their social and moral implications, exist at the levels of marriage, family and community. They may also be viewed as potentially transcending everyday relationships, entering the realm of the spiritual world of publicly celebrated church ritual, or the prayerful relationship with their God. In this sense an individual’s act of infidelity has profound implications about betrayal not just of another individual but also to the institutions of marriage, family and community-living social entities. An act of marital infidelity also has its own implications for the religious person’s relationship to a faith. Spirituality is also a possible resource for healing. Spirituality lends added options for solutions to clients’ struggles. As a source of meaning, it signifies ways of thinking about the human experience that offers answers to difficult conundrums of life. Spirituality gives meaning and provides motivation to remain committed to love in the face of that very human every-partner’s flaws. Spirituality gives purpose and significance to the passage of a loved one’s death, giving significance to that earthly separation. Moreover, spirituality offers a well articulated and consistent morality that can serve as a self defining stabilizer and guide to people in a morally murky and inconstant world. A married couple torn apart emotionally by infidelity may discover clarity of perspective and direction for the choices confronting them in the moral principles of their religious beliefs. Spirituality also provides a sense of belonging and very personal support for people who feel alone and not understood 18 SPIRITUALITY AND FAMILY THERAPY in the alienation of a betrayal. They experience support and nurturance in the comradery of a faith community, and may view God, however they relate to the deity, as a source of strength and love in a lonely time. In other words, spirituality represents a whole other dimension to life that gives another level of meaning, morality and community to the search for solutions in therapy. It can provide hope in despair, motivation in discouragement, clarity in confusion, strength in weakness, and companionship in loneliness. HOW THERAPISTS CAN WORK WITH SPIRITUALITY There are three general ways in which spirituality enhances the power of therapy. The first relates to making moral choices the heart of issues clients present. The second involves helping clients become grounded, that is, taking control of the solutions of their problems from within their own inner beliefs and motives. The third has to do with adding spiritually enriched resources to people’s recourses. These resources support the transcendent bonds, especially of love, that people have to other humanity and the supernatural. These general principles of a spiritually sensitive therapy translate into specific interventions for specific issues. When it comes to solving specific issues, the basic steps are: 1. Identify the key decisions vis-a-vis the focal issue that are necessary for people to begin turning their lives around; 2. Set the value platform that is to serve as the moral standard upon which these decisions are to be made; 3. Place the decisions within the key relationships in people’s lives, from human to divine, that will support their critical life-changing choices. Identifying key moral judgments vis-a-vis clients’ specific issues implies that whatever people contend with, they always have a free will choice, with at least “a residue of freedom” (Frankl, 1967, p. 67). For example, a lonely, divorced woman in her seventies, after repeated “slips” in her outpatient therapy, wants to try yet one more time to lick her alcoholism without entering a residential drug and alcohol rehabilitation program. Confronting her weakness to the addiction will take great moral courage. A determination to enter the rehab center will not solve the alcoholism, but will overcome the immediate hurdle to her recovery. Of course, there will be other decisions to make at each stage of Spirituality and Theory 19 the trek on the road to recovery. Identifying that key personal decision at each stage allows clients to take charge of that step of their transformation. A family as a whole as well as each individual member come up against the challenge of key choices that determine whether they move ahead on the road to change and growth. Setting the value platform for that decision simply means helping clients determine the philosophy and the particular moral values within which they will make the choices that are key to changing their lives. The woman dependent on alcohol would have to acknowledge that her addiction is wrong for whatever reasons her morality supports. She has to decide on the kind of obligation she owes herself and her family to stop the drinking. She also considers her philosophy about the importance of depending upon others, including her God, for help when contending with her flaws. Placing that decision in the context of relevant human and/or spiritual relationships implies electing how to engage in the solution with others who are affected by the the person’s difficulty. For the woman addicted to alcohol, this may mean as a first step not only admitting the problem to herself and her therapist, but also to her family. From the point of view of therapy, the most critical aspect of this decision making process is including those who can help a person make and carry out the determination to change. With addictions, Alcoholics Anonymous recognizes that people cannot solve problems alone. AA builds into its structure the need to reach out to others in the program, but also to God “as we understand him” for the support and help to change. All these steps in the process of trying to solve specific issues add a spiritual element to therapy whatever the therapeutic model employed. Spirituality affixes a dimension to therapy that lends people a new source of empowerment to people’s efforts to make life-changing choices when feeling emotionally embattled. Spirituality supplies meaning and motivation to their efforts to change, and a connection with others, natural or supernatural, who can help in the loneliness of the human struggle (Aponte, 1999). The Spirituality of Therapists: The Person of the Therapist Of course, an essential element to working with the spiritual as integral to therapy is the spirituality of the therapist. Therapists can exercise their ability to recognize spirituality in the life struggles of their clients, only if aware of the place of spirituality in their own lives. This is the same reasoning that expects therapists to know their own psychology 20 SPIRITUALITY AND FAMILY THERAPY and families of origin in order to relate to the psychology of their clients and to their families (Aponte & Winter, 2000). The relevant question here is what it means for clinicians to connect to their own spirituality in ways that enhance their performance as therapists. The overarching issue for therapists when it comes to their spirituality is the extent to which they are knowledgeable about the spiritual in their own lives. Spirituality is inherent in the human struggle of everyman/woman. The act of reaching for remedies in times of turmoil and hardship speaks to people’s looking for a better life. In that struggle to improve and change is ensconced people’s search for meaning and purpose, morality, and a link to another who will serve as caring companion and helper. Spirituality is part of everybody’s life, be it a secular or religious spirituality. Therapists who do not consider the legitimacy of a spiritual perspective, or who are personally at war with their own spirituality, or who do not tolerate spirituality alien to their own, limit their ability to see and relate to the spirituality of their clients. All therapists must know themselves with their unique history along with current dynamics of their lives, be able to access this self awareness within the context of conducting therapy, and develop the skills to actively and purposefully utilize themselves in the interest of relating to clients and their stories. Their knowledge of self, access to their inner self, and mastery of their psychological forces are essential to therapists’ ability to understand clients, relate empathically to them, and utilize their life experience and life forces to impact the lives of their clients. There is a spiritual dimension to all aspects of their use of self. For therapists to know themselves signifies that they can identify the key personal struggles of their lives, specifically places within their psychology that are vulnerable and habitually cause them difficulty. This includes insight into the history that led to these difficulties, and how their particular vulnerabilities present them with challenges today. To complete this perspective on their key human struggles, therapists would need to be conscious of how and to what degree they are engaging with these personal issues of theirs. They would need to have an understanding of the nature and process they use to meet the daily challenge of their individual issues. The spiritual dimension of their unique themes encompasses the choices they face around their issues, the values they hold in making these decisions, and where they go outside of themselves for support and guidance, including their faiths and deity. For therapists to be able to access their own story and emotional life in the context of doing therapy means that while relating to clients and their themes, they allow to come to the surface and track the thoughts, Spirituality and Theory 21 memories and emotions aroused about their own related themes. They aim to “know” their clients through their own pain and struggle with life, including of course the moral and spiritual dimensions of the battle. To the extent these therapists are grounded in their contention with their own difficulties, they will discover the ability to feel, remember and think about these struggles without being flooded with memories and emotions. They will be able to connect to their own issues without losing a sense of the boundaries between their issues and those of their clients. For therapists to have the skills to use themselves actively and purposefully in their roles as clinicians means that they can more effectively engage the relationship with clients in strategically therapeutic ways, as well as more empathically understand and address issues with clients. The judicious personal integration of their spirituality with their professional role enables them to use aspects of themselves to relate to the spiritual in their clients’ stories without having to impose their own values or religious convictions on their clients. They can afford the personal closeness to the client necessary to understand and impact the client without infringing upon the boundaries of the client, and not allowing their own boundaries to be trespassed. A Case Example To give this discussion of spirituality in therapy a human face, the following account of a session with a family represents one type of therapeutic interaction that touches on spirituality. This is a young African American couple who volunteered to be interviewed for a workshop. They did not participate as patients, but were asked to present on some family issue they would like to discuss with a therapist and get some feedback. They offered a dilemma about teaching their young son, Perry, to be assertive, even ready to defend himself physically, just as they were teaching him the principles of peace as learned from Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and the New Testament. Behind this discussion of principle also lay the social milieu and psychological dynamics of the parents who grew up in very different circumstances. Father took for granted his African American identity, while mother had to strive for hers. Moreover, the father, because of his early life experience with his own relatively absent, hard working father, was strongly motivated to be both a positive influence and loving parent to his children. Both parents wanted to reconcile the apparently contradictory principles of peace seeking, with the survival instinct, especially of a minority in America, to be ready to stand up for one’s self. Moreover, from an emotional 22 SPIRITUALITY AND FAMILY THERAPY standpoint mother had little trouble being tough with the kids, but father did. The interviewer hoped to give them something they could take home that would draw on their strengths as individual parents as well as a couple. At the beginning of the session, the father put the paradox of the principles in the context that most concerned them–of raising an African American son in America, while wanting their son to conduct himself according to their strongly held Christian beliefs. Father: We have a five-year-old son and two-and-a-half year old little girl, and in August our little boy will be going to kindergarten, and I think there is a little bit of . . . anxiety that we face about sending him off to school . . . Raising an African American male child in America is, I think, another major fact of concern. In light of the fact that we are looking into a private Christian school setting, and more than likely he will be one of only a few African American children in the classroom, that is important to us. And at home we definitely teach not only Christian values, but pride and respect and honor for where we have come from in the past. And so it is, there is an anxiety that we deal with concerning that and him. Mother: Well, I think Ben basically summed up how I feel. Also in discussing my anxiety, it is a probably a lot stronger than Ben’s . . . Ben was taught his African heritage compared to where I wasn’t. I grew up in a predominantly white environment, starting all the way from elementary school all the way through high school, college . . . Therapist: Why do you emphasize male? Father: There is a lower expectation of all kinds that society has placed on African American men . . . We want to teach our children to live with and converse with all types of people. A lot of times we find that the doors of opportunity in America especially tend to not swing open as wide for black men. It is something that I’ve experienced over the last eight or nine years of being a business person. Therapist: How do you see the challenge for yourself? You know. It is one thing to know what it is you want to accomplish. But, it’s another thing to know . . . [as a parent] “I can’t go to school with Perry. I can’t sit next to him or behind him. How do I do this?” Spirituality and Theory 23 Father: Exactly. Mother: I think I have to add that my anxiety has calmed some from when we were here for the weekend at a family life marriage counseling . . . In [a] session they dealt with raising our children in a Christian environment, raising our children according to God’s plan. When I got finished with that session, it eased my anxiety a lot because I got the tools that I needed to help calm the anxiety . . . Therapist: There are going to be a couple of things that you are going to be dealing with. One is that you [mother and father] are . . . different people. Mother: Yes, that is true, but because I am the mother and Ben is the father, . . . that just makes us totally different. Therapist: I believe it is important to be able to say, “Okay, where are we going to find our particular difficulties?” . . . Peculiar to us. Here the therapist was looking for the differences in their approaches to their children based not so much on their religious values, which were virtually identical, but on the differences of their life experiences, including gender. All the while, the therapist was tracking their stories with his own experience as a Puerto Rican raised in New York’s Harlem and South Bronx while also attending the Irish Catholic Schools his mother enrolled him in because of her wish for him to absorb values different from what he would learn in the streets. The therapist’s early enthrallment with boxing resonated with the story the father goes on to tell. Father: I remember when there was a period when Perry was about two years old, and we had him in day care . . . When I got him to the top of the stairs to take his coat off, two of the other kids came up to him and one of the children pushed on him, and the other kid, which one of them was smaller than Perry, started just kind of pounding on his head . . . He [Perry] began to cry . . . I was upset because he didn’t defend himself. And so that afternoon, I stopped by my parents’ home, and I picked up my little projector . . . with a lot of reel to reel films of Joe Louis and Muhammad Ali . . . I told Perry . . . now this is what you call “dukes up.” And we started watching the films, and I said, “You see how the guy is fighting, he is defending himself?” And so after that I would kind of get rough with him and we would kind of wrestle around . . . I’m kind of 24 SPIRITUALITY AND FAMILY THERAPY concerned about him letting people take advantage of him, letting people pick on him. I’ve never been a big fighter type. I’ve always considered myself a peacemaker type of person. And I have talked my way out of many situations. Therapist: This is a fascinating topic that you are bringing up because it raises so many issues . . . Society teaches you two things that don’t particularly come together . . . Father: The only way that I can retaliate against evil, against aggression, is kindness. It is a principle that Mahatma Ghandi and Dr. King took from his learning, but it is [also] a biblical principle . . . However, I think it is important that growing up as a young person you have to understand you have to know how to protect yourself . . . And so it is important I think that our children, Perry and Laura, understand that there is a measure of physical confrontation. Mother: Perry wants to please. Now Laura is the challenge because she is fire on two legs . . . She is a fighter. Therapist: The question is, how are you going to bring out that part of him [the fighter] without sacrificing your values. Father: I try to, we spend a lot of time, Perry and I. We engage a lot physically. We wrestle. We play football . . . So we engage in that type of fashion. He [also] attends bible study. I teach bible study for the young people’s department at my church. He is right there with me . . . [In a recent incident Perry] broke down crying . . . when [the teacher] didn’t want to listen to him, and she didn’t want him to help and he was a little hurt. Mother: Which we handle totally different . . . Ben handles that that way. And when Perry came in and Ben told me about the incident . . . I started to talk about it, and I said, “Who are you?” He said, “Perry King,” and I said, “Say your name again.” He said “Perry King.” I said, “Don’t cry, Perry King,” and he just got stronger, and stronger, and stronger with it and we talked and I explained to him that it doesn’t matter if someone laughs at you as long as you feel comfortable and confident with knowing who you are. Maybe you were not chosen to be the helper this time, but at least you know that you can help. . . . He’s like, Spirituality and Theory 25 “You are right, mommy. I can do it. I can.” So I let Ben handle it the way he wanted to, and then when it was Perry and I . . . We have different styles . . . He will give in, and I will not. Therapist: You have different styles, and are just going to deal with [your] kids in different ways. Mother: What I’m tuning into is part of what I am feeling for Ben, is . . . to know when to assert yourself naturally, and not to be so easy going that you let too many things go by. Because people often misinterpret easygoing for weakness. Father: Sure, which is something that I deal with personally. That’s how a lot of times as a manager, as a business owner, a lot of my employees mistake my kindness or my easygoingness as weakness. And they end up finding themselves on the outside [fired] . . . Therapist: Your strength is a quiet strength . . . I don’t know if you take that same strength home with Perry and Laura . . . Father: I think what happens [is that] I wish I could have spent more time with my father . . . so [it’s] important for me when my children see me at home, I want them to see first of all a man that loves God, man that loves his wife, and a man that loves them . . . Therapist: This is the one thing that I think might be worth taking home with you, that you have a strength about you, a toughness about you that is so much a part of you that you don’t have to make a big deal of it. But that you are talking about raising your son to be this strong man who is proud of himself, that he needs to experience both sides of his father, the loving soft, generous part of him and also the strong part of him . . . It’s different kind of toughness that you [two] have. And I think both the toughness that you [father] have and the toughness that you [mother] have, both [are] important, and one cannot substitute for the other . . . Thank you for coming. The therapist concluded that the best gift he could offer this father was to place his accommodating nature in a light where both parents could see the quiet strength that was there. It brought together both ideals of his being a man of peace, while also showing him to be a strong 26 SPIRITUALITY AND FAMILY THERAPY man of principle. In his business, he expected his employees to follow orders. He would not argue. However, when they gave him a hard time, he would fire them. At the same time, the mother had a lively and assertive personality, and had no trouble being the disciplinarian at home. She also had some definite ideas about how to teach her son pride in himself that seemed to be getting some results. The therapist chose to draw out the value of both styles of the parents, even if different. This was a loving couple who were disposed to be supportive of each other and who tried diligently to find ways of working out their differences without hurting the relationship. In many ways this couple typified the family of today. As parents, they want to raise their children by their values. Yet, today’s society presents them with contradictions they cannot ignore. Parents who ask therapists for guidance with the care of their children contend with conflicting values within themselves, between each other, and with society. Layered over their emotional life and relationship dynamics are the difficult value choices that family, church and society presents. Their priorities and life principles are at the very heart of their personal identity and sense of self worth, and at the core of what defines the values they hope will shape their children’s personality. In today’s world, therapists cannot deal with the character formation and emotional development of children without also dealing with the values and spirituality of the family. CONCLUSION Spirituality is the heart of therapy, addressing the transcendent bonds to human and supernatural resources, along with the moral values and ideals undergirding the decisions that determine the course of people’s solutions. This is a materialistic and secular society in which there is a growing thirst for values and meaning beyond money, power, and personal gratification. In our contemporary society therapists find themselves having to raise and draw out questions about spirituality in relation to clients’ efforts to solve life’s problems. They are more frequently reaching out to the spiritual resources in people’s lives, including assistance from their faith communities. Therapists are challenged to become knowledgeable and skillful about values, morality, and religion, and learn to listen to and speak to spirituality as integral to their clients’ lives. Spirituality and Theory 27 REFERENCES Aponte, H. J. (1994). Bread & spirit: Therapy with the new poor. 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