Religion and spirituality

Abstract

Many clients highly value religious and spiritual (R/S) commitments, and many psychotherapists have accommodated secular treatments to R/S perspectives. We meta-analyzed 51 samples from 46 studies (N = 3,290) that examined the outcomes of religious accommodative therapies and nonreligious spirituality therapies. Comparisons on psychological and spiritual outcomes were made to a control condition, an alternate treatment, or a subset of those studies that used a dismantling design (similar in theory and duration of treatment, but including religious contents). Patients in R/S psychotherapies showed greater improvement than those in alternate secular psychotherapies both on psychological (d =.26) and on spiritual (d = .41) outcomes. Religiously accommodated treatments outperformed dismantling-design alternative treatments on spiritual (d = .33) but not on psychological outcomes. Clinical examples are provided and therapeutic practices are recommended.