Sacred Unraveling A Therapist's Guide to Helping Clients Navigate Religious and Spiritual Change

This book shows mental health professionals how to help clients deal with existential uncertainties and find meaning as they grapple with their religious and spiritual beliefs.

As more individuals leave organized religion, deconstruct long-held beliefs, or seek nonreligious spirituality, their existential and spiritual needs often surface in therapy, whether as a presenting concern or a deeper undercurrent. Clients turn to therapists, counselors, social workers, and other helping professionals, desperate for answers. Drawing from cutting-edge research and clinical wisdom, this book provides tools and guidelines for providing culturally competent spiritual care to help clients along their journeys of religious and spiritual change.

The authors introduce their existential distress, growth, and engagement (EDGE) model to help clients make sense of their religious/spiritual identities, develop new worldviews, adjust their morals and values, and cultivate meaningful social connections.

They explore the five existential realities that clients often struggle with when their faith is in crisis. These include freedom (the conflict between autonomy and responsibility); isolation caused by loss of community; identity, which includes lacking a clear narrative of one's life journey; death anxiety; and meaninglessness, both in the grand scheme of things and in one's day-to-day life.

Sara A. Showalter Van Tongeren, LCSW, is the founder of The Flourishing Collective, a telehealth practice oriented around the therapist-centered group consultation model. She works from a relationally oriented, existential positive psychology framework that is trauma and attachment focused, and she utilizes somatic healing through brainspotting. Sara received the city of Holland’s 2020 Social Justice Award for her role in helping pass its first nondiscrimination ordinance. Her book, The Courage to Suffer, introduced an existential positive psychology model of suffering, offering practical guidance for helping clients build meaning amid life’s greatest crises. Follow her work at saravantongeren.com and @theexistentialtherapist on Instagram.

Daryl R. Van Tongeren, PhD, is a psychology professor at Hope College and the director of the Frost Center for Social Science Research. His research focuses on the processes of leaving religion, summarized in his popular book, Done. His work has been covered in The New York Times and The Atlantic. He has won multiple awards and fellowships, including being named a rising star by the Association for Psychological Science and receiving early career awards from APA’s Society for the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality and the International Society for the Scientific of Existential Psychology. Follow his work at darylvantongeren.com. 

Introduction: An Existential Unsettling
Acknowledgments
Part I. Theoretical and Clinical Foundations
Chapter 1. An Existential Approach to Religion and Spirituality
Chapter 2. Four Kinds of Religious Change
Chapter 3. Existential Distress, Growth, and Engagement: The EDGE Model of Religious Change
Chapter 4. Diverse Spiritual Care as a Cultural Competency
Part II. Exploring the Existential Chasm
Chapter 5. The Tension of the Existential Chasm
Chapter 6. Confronting the Five Existential Realities
Part III. Life After Religious and Spiritual Change
Chapter 7. The Ripple Effect on Self and Identity
Chapter 8. Relational Changes and Challenges
References
Index
About the Authors

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