What are some the reasons given in the text for counselors and other mental health professionals ‘ hesitation or neglect to integrate religion and spirituality into their practice according to your text?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Three obvious reasons are given for counselors’ reluctance or failure to work with spiritual or religious oriented client issues: lack of competency, inadequate or no training on spiritual/religious clients, and personal spiritual/religious experiences. Although the multicultural movement has been gathering momentum for some time now, it is only recently that the counseling profession has actually brought emphasis to and required multicultural competency as part of licensure. As a result, a significant number of practicing professionals are not competent to work with diverse populations, including spirituality/religious-oriented clients. Because multicultural competency requirements in counseling professions is mostly recent, graduate training programs failed to include multiculturalism in their curriculum. Consequently, counselor trainees from most graduate programs did not have the opportunity to receive specific training on religious and spiritual diversity and other areas of multiculturalism. Another reason for counselors’ failure to integrate spirituality and religion into their practices is their personal experience. For example, counselors who have had negative experiences or feelings about religion and spirituality may be less inclined to integrate religion/spirituality into their practice. Such counselors may have difficulty interacting with their spiritual/religious-oriented clients and have negative attitudes toward religion and spirituality as a whole. Counselors who have unresolved spiritual and religious issues have an ethical responsibility to resolve those issues to ensure clinical competence as required by the ACA ethical requirement that counselors must be multiculturally competent in providing services to clients. The American Counseling Association (ACA) 2014 Code of Ethics, Standard C.2.d. dictates that, “Counselors continually monitor their effectiveness as professionals and take steps to improve when necessary. Counselors take responsible steps to seek peer supervision to evaluate their efficacy as counselors”