Why do committed Christian clients seek counselling with Christian therapists?

Abstract

Many religiously committed clients show concern to work on psychological problems with a professional who is similarly committed, and highly religious clients demonstrate resistance to engaging with professionals who are not. By exploring Christian clients’ constructions of their counselling experiences, the present study's aim was to understand something of the complexity behind such insistence, rather than leave it as a taken-for-granted aspect of a general therapist-client matching hypothesis. Adopting the view that Christians comprise a socio-cultural group, we employed discourse analytic techniques to explore the interpretative repertoires evident in transcript data from interviews with six Christian clients who had sought and received professional counselling from a counsellor who was a Christian. The ‘client discourse’ and the ‘Christian discourse’ and their component interpretative repertoires, are presented. We then discuss crucial issues for the Christian client by forming an intersection of the discourses and repertoires involved. Finally, acknowledging the small scale of this exploration, we highlight implications for further research and practice.

Keywords:

• therapist-client matching
• counselling
• religious commitment
• client experience
• discourse

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge with gratitude the help of the six research participants who willingly spoke so openly of their experiences.

Notes

Notes

1. In order to give due emphasis to the analysis of these narratives in the Results section of this paper, the Introduction and Method sections have been kept brief.

2. The first author was at the time a counselling psychology trainee. In the interests of transparency, it had been clarified with each participant that she herself affiliated to the Christian faith. This disclosure seemed to engender a greater openness to talk freely during data collection (an ‘insider’ researcher effect, Weller & Caballero, 2009, p. 29). In addition, West (2009) concludes his excellent account of the same issue by emphasising the importance of acknowledging and owning its interaction with data interpretation.

3. The full analysis is available in Greenidge (2011).

4. All participant names are fictitious.