“Psychology, Theology, & Spirituality in Christian Counseling’  by M.McMinn Book Review

Psychology, Theology, and spirituality in Christian Counseling  by Mark   McMinn is a textbook for counselors  and psychologists who use spiritual and religious approach during their sessions. The author gives deep insight into connections between religion, theology and psychology.  The book explains a lot of important issues about religion. In addition, it explains how to use religious themes during counseling sessions.

The book will be very useful for counselors, psychologists and psychiatrists.  It also can be interesting for all people who are interested in psychology and religion. The author discusses Christian teaching and then shows ways to apply it in everyday life.  The book teaches how to apply spiritual approach in secular world. It helps to make faith an integral part of everyday life and shows counselors how to give this experience to their clients.  Healing people is one of components of Christianity,  and the book shows  how to use this statement practically.  Sample cases give good example how to apply techniques and methods presented by the author.  The author creates a ready-to-use model which helps to combine psychology and religion.  The book is well-structured. The author also gives important explanations about the importance of personality of a Christian counselor.  He speaks about the necessity for the counselor to follow moral, ethical and religious norms and regulations he explains to his clients. The book also contains descriptions of healthy and unhealthy psychological states and such description is very useful because there are tricky states which are hard to explain and deal with. The author speaks about the importance of applying experience achieved during counseling sessions in everyday life. According to him using new scenarios and attitude to problems should be the  main indicators of a client’s progress.

My friend likes attending counseling sessions. She spends much time talking to counselor about her problems and offences which take part in her life. I have noticed that these sessions bring short-term relief but later my friend finds herself in same repeated situations.  My friend attends a secular psychologist and they never speak about religion and spirituality. My friend believes they perform a great job analyzing her past, her thoughts and feelings about other people. At the same time, I cannot see that her experience and perception of other people changes. She likes judging other people and blames them in all her misfortunes. She blames her parents, her teachers, her friends and boyfriends. She blames even weather sometimes. During counseling sessions, she complains on everything and together with counselor they try to analyze why people are unfair to my friend. As a result of such counseling my friend got perfect capacity to judge about motifs, desires and mistakes of other people.  At the same time, such capacity does not teach her to change her attitude to these people and circumstances. She still judges them and feels offended by them. I believe that her treatment lacks a spiritual component. She was not explained ideas of forgiving, tolerance, humbleness and obedience. Like Jesus said “ So if there is any encouragement in Christ, any comfort from love, any participation in the Spirit, any affection and sympathy, complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from rivalry or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus”  (.Philippians 2:1-11 ESV). I believe my friend’s counseling experience can be an example of psychological counseling which does not apply religious and spiritual aspects to the process of counseling. To my mind, such practice is not very successful. It is hard to judge about secular counseling in general, but in this separate case I can see that it has not very efficient results. These results become a perfect illustration of Mark   McMinn’s  thesis from his book Psychology, Theology, and Spirituality in Christian Counseling. In this book he states that  the most important thing for the counselor to help his clients apply new patterns of thinking and behavior in everyday life. These results could be the mean to make judgments about the effectiveness of counseling, because attitudes and outlook developed during counseling sessions should be transformed into realizations in everyday life situations.

I liked the book and think that it can be a good aid for counselors, psychologists and psychotherapists. It integrates two basic components which can help people to gain their emotional and mental health. These components are psychology and religion. Unfortunately, nowadays psychology became distanced from spirituality and religion. It became a set of techniques which study functioning of human ego. In reality, human creatures  cannot be narrowed to set of different mechanism which define the functioning of their ego. True healing cannot be achieved without spiritual component. I liked  the way the author combined psychological and religious approaches to counseling and believe that his findings, methods and approaches can become very helpful for a lot of counselors and psychologists who want to combine counseling and religious approach. The book contains practical advices, tips and examples which illustrate how to use information presented by the author during counseling sessions.  I think that the structure of the book is very convenient. It makes the book not only interesting and useful reading, but makes it also a useful guide which can be used in any cases during Christian counseling. I believe that the author investigates important and meaningful theme in his book. Christian counseling becomes more and more popular in the contemporary world and Mark   McMinn created a comprehensive and detailed guide for all specialists, who want to work, grow and develop in this direction. I like nearly everything in this book. The question which arises in my head after reading this book is a question about the difference between counseling and Christian counseling. These two types of counseling become so different that they can hardly be placed to same category. They are based on different principles, they use  different means and want to achieve different goals.  At this point approach, described by Mark McMinn can be hardly applied for secular counseling and I was reflecting about this gap. To my mind, this gap illustrates  not only differences in counseling approaches, but also gap in mentality of people.

The book became for me an inspiring and transformational reading. It contained big amount of practical information, but one thing impressed me the most. I became really impressed about author’s ideas about the personality of a counselor. McMinn’s  words about the importance of practical application of all moral ideas and religious doctrines proposed by the counselor made me reflect about my lifestyle, goals and attitudes. I want to put time and effort to become that kind of counselor who follows  norms and ideas he gives to his clients during counseling sessions. For this purpose  I would like to put time to the development of spiritual component. This can include both – expanding knowledge in the sphere of religion and spirituality and practical application of religious norms and doctrines in everyday life. I fully agree with the author that counselors or psychologists can help others only using his own experience and I would like to be able to help other people and should be ready for that.

 

References

McMinn, R. M. (2012). Psychology, Theology, and spirituality in Christian Counseling, Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.

The terms offer and acceptance. (2016, May 17). Retrieved from

[Accessed: March 29, 2024]

"The terms offer and acceptance." freeessays.club, 17 May 2016.

[Accessed: March 29, 2024]

freeessays.club (2016) The terms offer and acceptance [Online].
Available at:

[Accessed: March 29, 2024]

"The terms offer and acceptance." freeessays.club, 17 May 2016

[Accessed: March 29, 2024]

"The terms offer and acceptance." freeessays.club, 17 May 2016

[Accessed: March 29, 2024]

"The terms offer and acceptance." freeessays.club, 17 May 2016

[Accessed: March 29, 2024]

"The terms offer and acceptance." freeessays.club, 17 May 2016

[Accessed: March 29, 2024]
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