The Spiritual Connection: Values, Faith, and Psychotherapy

The Spiritual Connection: Values, Faith, and Psychotherapy is about how we tap into and cooperate with the natural life-affirming power “wired into” every human being. It creates an awareness of how we all participate in the spiritual dimension of life. That awareness enables us to model and teach what we understand experientially. The book describes therapeutic theories and techniques used to facilitate emotional and spiritual growth and how they are based on the fundamental values underlying the healing power of all psychotherapy.

1. To identify how a psychotherapist can function with an awareness of the spiritual dimension of reality.

2. To identify three understandings of spirituality which help to clarify beliefs.

3. To describe the central importance of a spiritual connection with a client for healing to occur in psychotherapy.

4. To identify how values enhance or degrade an emotional/spiritual connection with clients.

5. To describe a method by which practitioners can model participation in the spiritual dimension.

6. To assess what sanctifies or pollutes the spiritual dimension.

7. To identify the fifteen values that provide a nurturing, accepting, safe environment for a client’s healing and growth to take place.

8. To discuss a perspective from which to see psychotherapy as encouraging and nurturing emotional/spiritual development.

9. To identify the three fundamental values required to support holistic personal and community growth and development.

10. To describe ways psychotherapists from varied theoretical frameworks embody and communicate those three fundamental values within their theory systems.

11. To discuss ways psychotherapists from different theoretical frameworks apply the three fundamental values through therapeutic techniques.

12. To discuss how to influence clients by affirming the three fundamental values in one’s own therapeutic work.

13. To identify ways the developmental belief “I have value” can be negated, creating serious emotional difficulties.

14. To describe the importance of believing the biological reality “I am a separate person.”

15. To describe how “separate and independent” is the best position from which to have an intimate relationship.

16. To discuss how acceptance of and affirmation of autonomy is essential to well being for both client and therapist.

17. To describe the importance of affirming each individual’s way of doing things as the best he or she can do at the time.

18. To describe how affirmation of each person’s way as “good enough for now” does not endorse what is dysfunctional, negative or destructive.

19. To describe how listening to and understanding the client with empathy is the healing foundation on which therapy is built.

20. To discuss how affirmation of the three fundamental values provides the foundation for practitioners to genuinely communicate those same values to clients, both verbally and nonverbally.

Total CE Credits: 20 CE Credits

Methods: Pre-test, Study guide, Posttest and Evaluation Q&A by phone or Email if needed

Benjamin B. Conley, M.Div., LMFT, a seasoned psychotherapist and marriage and family therapist, is also trained theologically (Vanderbilt Divinity School). He is able to bring to the discussion a deeply human understanding of the meaning of values in everyday living. Conley finished his initial clinical training as a psychotherapist in 1965 in a three-year residency at the Blanton-Peale Graduate Institute, a psychoanalytic and self-psychology oriented psychiatric clinic in New York City. He has had additional extensive training in Transactional Analysis, Gestalt Therapy, Bioenergetics, Hypnosis, Sex Therapy, Imago Relationship Therapy, and trauma work including Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. He now lives and practices therapy in Fort Lauderdale, FL. His website is http://www.anthospublishing.com.