HUNGARIAN PSYCHOTHERAPISTS’ EXPERIENCES OF THE COOPERATION WITH SPIRITUAL DIRECTORS AND PASTORAL COUNSELORS
HUNGARIAN PSYCHOTHERAPISTS’ EXPERIENCES OF THE COOPERATION WITH SPIRITUAL DIRECTORS AND PASTORAL COUNSELORS

A Qualitative Study

Summary/Abstract: There has been a constantly growing interest towards the themes of psychotherapy and spiritualityin the past decades. The questions and experiences concerning spirituality can come up and playan important role in the psychotherapeutic relationship. Often another helping relationship, spir -itual direction or pastoral counseling is already present in religious people’s life, before or at thetime of starting psychotherapy. In our research we tried to find answers to the question of how psychotherapistsapproach cooperation with spiritual directors and pastoral counselors, what attitudesand experiences they have in this regard. In the research semi-structured in-depth interviews werecarried out with 31 Hungarian psychotherapists, and they were analyzed with the method ofGrounded Theory. Four main categories evolved during the analysis of the interviews. In the firstmain category, where there is no cooperation between the helping professionals, codes refer to theattitudes, whether the psychotherapists would be open to cooperate, what professional consider -ations they would follow, and in what framework the cooperation could be realized. In the secondmain category the psychotherapist and the spiritual director work parallel with the patient, withoutcontacting each-other, in the third the psychotherapist is in contact with the spiritual director / pastoralcounselor, and in the fourth the psychotherapist evaluates the experiences of the cooperation.

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