Experiences of Christian clients in secular psychotherapy: A qualitative investigation

According to several authors, many Christians are skeptical of psychology and fear that their religious beliefs will be misunderstood, unappreciated, ridiculed, or eroded in secular therapy (King, 1978). The purpose of the present discovery-oriented study was to understand Christian clients' phenomenological experiences in secular therapy.;Eleven Christians were interviewed in depth about the nature of their experiences with secular therapists. The narrative data were analyzed using the Consensual Qualitative Research method (Hill, Thompson, & Williams, 1997). The thematic results indicated that positive therapy experiences were facilitated by therapists' incorporation of clients' faith into therapy, openness to understanding clients' faith, and giving clients control over how much, when, and how to discuss their religious beliefs. Clients who were dissatisfied reported that their therapists expressed opposing religious views and avoided incorporation of their faith into therapy. Most participants who had negative experiences indicated that the therapists' mishandling of religious issues was only one of many reasons for their dissatisfaction. Regardless of the nature of their experiences, many participants reported feeling hesitant to discuss their faith due to uncertainty about their therapists' reaction.;The qualitative results were triangulated with participants' self-reports of their therapists' social influence characteristics on the Counseling Rating Form-Short (Corrigan & Schmidt, 1983) and perceptions of the therapeutic alliance, as measured by the Working Alliance Inventory-Short Form (Tracey & Kokotovic, 1989). Results were largely consistent with the narrative data. All but one therapist was seen as fairly expert, attractive, and trustworthy; the alliance scores were more sensitive to participants' evaluations of their therapy experience. That is, several participants rated their therapists favorably but had fairly low scores on the goals or tasks subscales of the WAI-S.;Implications for practice are provided, including the need for developing and assessing training programs to help therapists work effectively with the Christian population. Recommendations for future research are offered.