Does Faith-Integrated Therapy Help? What the Research Says
If faith is important to you, you may wonder whether it belongs in therapy. Can you talk about your relationship with God alongside anxiety, grief, relationship struggles, or questions about your worth?
A 2024 study by Currier and colleagues offers insight into what happens when spirituality is included in psychotherapy. The researchers found that clients receiving spiritually integrated psychotherapy experienced reduced psychological distress. They also found that spiritual struggles were connected with how clients progressed through treatment.
I recorded a brief video explaining the findings. You can watch it below.
What is spiritually integrated psychotherapy?
Spiritually integrated psychotherapy makes room for a client’s religious or spiritual identity within the therapeutic process. Depending on the client’s beliefs and preferences, this might include exploring spiritual questions, discussing how faith relates to a difficult experience, or considering the client’s relationship with God.
In this study, researchers tracked interventions such as spiritual assessment, exploring religious questions and doubts, discussing virtues, and encouraging acceptance of divine love.
These conversations can involve both the support people find in faith and the struggles they experience within it.
What did the study find?
The researchers examined information from 1,227 clients receiving care from 164 practitioners across 37 settings, focusing on the first 12 weeks of treatment.
On average, clients experienced a significant reduction in psychological distress, with the sharpest improvements occurring during the first month.
The study also found a relationship between spiritual and psychological distress. Clients who began therapy with greater spiritual distress tended to experience greater psychological distress and a slower pattern of psychological improvement.
As spiritual distress improved, psychological distress tended to improve as well.
Certain spiritual interventions were associated with patterns of change. Spiritual assessment was linked with early reductions in distress, while interventions such as exploring religious questions and doubts were associated with aspects of a steadier improvement pattern.
Why do spiritual struggles matter?
Faith can be a source of comfort, belonging, and hope. It can also be an area where people experience uncertainty, guilt, disappointment, or disconnection.
Someone may believe God loves them while feeling distant from Him. They may have questions about suffering or feel that their experiences are difficult to reconcile with their beliefs.
The study’s findings suggest that these struggles deserve attention when they are relevant to the client. Psychological symptoms and spiritual distress may be connected, and they may improve at different rates. In fact, spiritual distress showed less improvement than psychological symptoms in this study.
For me, this reinforces the importance of understanding a person’s experience of faith, rather than assuming that knowing their religious affiliation tells me what I need to know.
Does this prove that spiritual interventions caused improvement?
The study found associations. It could not establish that spiritual interventions caused the improvements or provided additional benefits beyond psychotherapy alone.
Because the researchers observed routine care without a comparison group, several aspects of treatment could have contributed to the changes.
The findings also may not apply equally to everyone. Approximately three quarters of participants identified as Christian, and more than three quarters identified as White. The authors acknowledged the need for research with more diverse populations.
What might this mean for your therapy experience?
If faith is meaningful to you, it is reasonable to discuss how you would like it included in therapy. You might want space to explore questions about God, the ways faith supports you, or the spiritual struggles that accompany what you are facing.
At Restorative Solutions, faith integration begins with understanding your beliefs, preferences, and experiences. Those conversations can be part of the work of restoring connection with God, yourself, and others.
Watch the video above for a quick overview of the research.
Jennifer Coulter, LCSW, LMFT, is the founder of Restorative Solutions, a faith-integrated therapy practice in Louisville, Kentucky.
Reference
Currier, J. M., McDermott, R. C., Sanders, P., Barkham, M., Owen, J., Saxon, D., & Richards, P. S. (2024). Practice-based evidence for spiritually integrated psychotherapies: Examining trajectories of psychological and spiritual distress. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 71(4), 291–303.