Brief Psychotherapy and Spirituality

The overarching theme of this book is that spiritually-oriented psychotherapy is entirely consistent with brief psychotherapeutic relationships. In advancing this claim, I first present an overview of contemporary spirituality and the brief psychotherapy movement. I later seek to describe the subtle but powerful connections that exist between certain approaches to brief therapy and the experience commonly referred to as cosmic consciousness. Before beginning a deliberate description of what I call Brief Spiritual Psychotherapy (BSP), I describe the experience of cosmic consciousness from the perspectives of Christian doctrine, Eastern philosophy and transpersonal psychology. Throughout I attempt to show how it is that these bodies of thought lay the conceptual groundwork in our day for the practice of therapy that is based upon a spiritual outlook. I follow this preparation with a discussion of the specifics of BSP, using the elements that are inherently involved in any psychotherapy - view of the client, view of the problem, role of the therapist, and theory of change -as orienting structure.