Jesse Jones, LPCC
Counseling Durango, Colorado

Deep down, all counseling is spiritual, but not all counselors acknowledge that. 1) Spiritual counseling integrates spiritual or religious aspects of your life and considers your spiritual well-being throughout the counseling process.

  The spiritual impact of counseling is tied to the transformation that happens during counseling, but usually, counseling that originates from the medical model doesn’t focus on that impact. 2) Spiritual counseling is intentional about helping you create conditions for deep transformation and healing.

  While most modern counseling is humanistic in that it focuses on the individual to some extent, that focus is on a spectrum. 3) Spiritual counseling is person-centered, intentionally nurturing a greater connection to your intuition and working to expand your sense of self.

Many people on a spiritual path, myself included, are afraid that counseling won’t make space for their spiritual wellness. This research (1) compared spiritually integrated counseling with conventional counseling. They were similar in effectiveness across the board, except for one area: spiritually integrated counseling increased spiritual wellness in participants above and beyond conventional counseling. 
(1) Captari, L. E., Hook, J. N., Hoyt, W. T., Davis, D. E., McElroy‐Heltzel, S. E., & Worthington, E. L. (2018). Integrating clients’ religion and spirituality within psychotherapy: A comprehensive meta‐analysis. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 74(11), 1938–1951. https://doi.org/10.1002/jclp.22681

Somatic counseling is body-based psychotherapy. For decades we’ve known that our thoughts, emotions, state of mind, and perceptions are closely interwoven with our physical body. A clear conceptual understanding of the relationship between our mind and body is just taking a bit longer to spread through our culture.

Think about it this way: how much does your mental state change when you get hangry? Or when you lose an hour of sleep to a neighbor’s dog? When we examine the myriad of subtle ways that our bodies influence our minds, we realize there can be no clear distinction between one and the other. We know that the body stores trauma and memory, our gut affects our cognition so much that some people call it our second brain, and something as simple as stretching can cause a dramatic release of emotion.

  Somatic counseling reconnects our awareness of emotions and thoughts with their corresponding bodily sensations. This integration expands our ability to navigate and interpret our intuition.