Program Overview

The ACPE Spiritually Integrated Psychotherapy (SIP) Training Program is a multi-disciplinary, inter-spiritual, multi-racial community of persons gathered for education, connection, and formation in the work of spiritually integrated psychotherapy. It serves licensed and pre-licensed mental health professionals (i.e., counselors, social workers, marriage and family therapists, pastoral counselors, psychologists, psychiatrists, addiction specialists, and more), as well as graduate students in any of those disciplines, who seek to explore the ways spirituality, religion, and the search for meaning influence their own lives and the lives of their clients.

 The Program includes:

• A 15-hour Level 1 continuing education curriculum
• A 15-hour Level 2 continuing education curriculum 
• A post-curriculum certification process for those who want to integrate the learnings of this curriculum (20 hours of consultation with a SIP Trainer and a Certification Peer Consultation)
• SIP Communities of Practice where connection, learning, and professional formation continue beyond the certification process
• A Train the Trainer program to develop and support SIP Trainers

The SIP Program recognizes that high-quality therapists become high-quality therapists over time, in formative relationships with colleagues and mentors. In addition to teaching theory and skills foundational to spiritually integrated psychotherapy, the SIP Program emphasizes personal integration, development of professional identity, and growth in a distinctive way of being.

 ACPE’s SIP Program is an alignment with ACPE’s core values:

• Diversity and Inclusion
• Integrity
• Curiosity
• Process
• Service

Curriculum

The word psychotherapy means “care of the soul” (from the Greek psyche + therapeia). While the history of psychotherapy includes theorists and practitioners with a bias against spirituality and religion, there have always been those who found effective ways to include spiritual wisdom in psychotherapeutic work. In recent years, there has been an outpouring of research and instruction in spiritually integrated psychotherapy, and empirical evidence demonstrating the therapeutic efficacy of attending to clients’ spiritual beliefs and practices.

The ACPE SIP Curriculum draws upon diverse spiritual traditions and psychological research to provide practical, usable resources to help therapists integrate spirituality into their work. It teaches therapists how to elicit and make therapeutic use of their clients’ spiritual perspectives and how to make ethically appropriate use of their own spiritual perspectives.

Beginning January 1, 2023, the curriculum will consist of two levels of training, with each level including 5 3-hour continuing education courses.

The courses draw upon multiple modes of teaching and learning, including:

• interactive seminars;
• role plays;
• small group work; and
• case illustrations and case conceptualization.

Many of the 10 courses can be taught independently. However, the curriculum is most effective when taught in its entirety in a sequential manner. 

Level 1 Course Descriptions and Learning Objectives

Course 1.1 Description:

This course is for mental health professionals seeking an initial foundation in the theory and practice of Spiritually Integrated Psychotherapy. A large majority of persons in the United States identifies as spiritual or religious. Spirituality is embedded in their personal histories, presenting issues, personality styles, coping strategies, motivational system, and their core understandings of themselves, the world, and others. Understanding spirituality and how to engage it effectively and ethically is a critical skill for holistically-oriented therapists and other practitioners.

Spirituality is also part of the history of psychotherapy, having shaped the culture, the intellectual landscapes, and the practices of caregiving from which modern psychotherapy arose. Many widely accepted therapeutic understandings and protocols have their origins in spiritual traditions.This course offers a rationale for attending to spiritual and religious issues in psychotherapy, an understanding of spirituality and religion useful in working with a diverse population of patients, and a bio-psycho-social-spiritual understanding of human beings. It begins preparing therapists to recognize how they can ethically incorporate spirituality and religion in the work of psychotherapy and to conceptualize their clients’ needs and resources.

At the conclusion of Course 1.1, Foundations and Ethics of Spiritually Integrated Psychotherapy, participants will be able to:

1. Demonstrate the benefits of integrating spirituality and religion in psychotherapy when done well.
2. Define a holistic understanding of humans: bio-psycho-social-spiritual.
3. Recognize different models for integrating spirituality and religion in psychotherapy.
4. Summarize the ethical principles that guide how therapists integrate spirituality and religion in therapy.
5. Describe how therapists can ethically draw upon their own spirituality as a resource.

Course 1.2 Description:

Addressing spirituality in therapy does not require therapists to be spiritual experts or to have answers for every spiritual question. It does require that therapists have a willingness to talk with people about their spiritual lives with some level of skill and training.

What does a spiritual conversation sound like? And how does it begin? What qualities in the therapist are helpful in developing spiritual conversations towards therapeutic outcomes? How does a therapist respond to a client’s spiritual concerns, or ask about a client’s spirituality, without imposing the therapist’s own spiritual framework?

This course helps therapists to cultivate the capacities to use spiritual conversation in developing the therapeutic relationship and deepening the therapeutic process.

At the conclusion of Course 1.2, Developing Spiritual Conversations in Psychotherapy, participants will be able to:

1. Demonstrate spiritual conversations in therapy in a collaborative rather than directive manner.
2. Understand the difference between explicit and implicit spiritual language.
3. Recognize and respond to spiritual openings that clients offer.
4. Initiate spiritual conversations.

Course 1.3 Description:

The heart of all therapy is interventions, and the heart of spiritually integrated psychotherapy is interventions that address or draw upon the client’s spirituality. Before we can intervene in effective and ethical ways, however, we first need to learn more about who our client is, spiritually and otherwise.

What is important for therapists to know about our clients’ spiritual lives in order to intervene in constructive ways? How do we determine whether our clients’ spirituality is helping them or harming them? How do we decide what role, if any, spirituality will play in the therapy with a particular client? And how do we gather this information conversationally and relationally, rather than by use of a checklist?

This course teaches therapists a process for spiritual assessment.

At the conclusion of Course 1.3, Spiritual Assessment, participants will be able to:

1. Identify clients’ spiritual and religious resources.
2. Identify clients’ spiritual struggles.
3. Assess whether clients’ spirituality is helping or hurting.
4. Recognize “heart of the matter” spiritual issues affecting client’s well-being.5.Determine whether spirituality will be an explicit part of the therapy process.

Course 1.4 Description:

Interventions are the heart of psychotherapy. An intervention is anything the therapist does, verbally or non-verbally, to help strengthen the therapeutic alliance, increase the resiliency of the client’s nervous system, improve clients’ ability to be in healthy relationships, enhance their sense of meaning and purpose, and help them move towards their stated goals.

Interventions in spiritually integrated psychotherapy are grounded in spiritual assessment and tailored to fit the particular client. Spiritually integrated interventions are generally aimed at helping clients make use of positive spiritual resources or at navigating spiritual struggles.

This course teaches participants to help clients deepen connection with their unique spiritual resources and draw upon those resources for stabilization, resiliency, and change.

At the conclusion of Course 1.4, Spiritual Interventions: Working with Spiritual Resources, Part 1, participants will be able to:

1. Conduct spiritual assessment.
2. Help clients deepen existing spiritual resources. 
3. Help clients reconnect with forgotten spiritual resources.
4. Help clients develop new spiritual resources.

Course 1.5 Description:

While spirituality and religion are often sources of comfort, wisdom, and strength, struggle is also a significant part of the spiritual experience. Sometimes clients want to talk to talk explicitly about their spiritual struggle: how to recover a sense of faith, meaning, or purpose when life events have challenged their core beliefs and values; how to make difficult decisions that bring them into conflict with their personal beliefs or their religious community; what to do with their
anger at God or at organized religion.

With support, people living with spiritual struggles can experience significant growth and change. And without support, people living with spiritual struggles can experience the onset or intensification of physical and mental health issues. Therapists may feel hesitant to engage clients in conversation about spiritual struggles, but clients need support to navigate their struggles and may feel safer discussing them with a therapist than with someone in their religious
community.

This course teaches participants how to recognize spiritual struggles and how to help clients find their own path forward through struggle.

At the conclusion of Course 1.5, Spiritual Interventions: Working with Harmful Spirituality and Religion, participants will be able to:

1. Identify elements of harmful spirituality or religion.
2. Discuss how spirituality and religion become harmful.
3. Discuss strategies for countering the impact of harmful spirituality or religion.
4. Apply strategies for countering the impact of harmful spirituality or religion to a clinical example.

Level 2 Course Descriptions and Learning Objectives

Course 2.1 Description:

Interventions are the heart of psychotherapy. Interventions in spiritually integrated psychotherapy are grounded in spiritual assessment and tailored to fit the particular client. This course teaches a variety of spiritual interventions that make use of clients’ healthy spiritual resources. Participants are taught how to leverage both internal and external spiritual resources and resources that are both explicitly and implicitly spiritual. Seven common spiritual interventions – including use of sacred texts, nature, and music – are presented. Significant attention is given to how therapists can ethically incorporate meditation and prayer as spiritual interventions.

At the conclusion of Course 2.1, Spiritual Interventions: Working with Spiritual Resources, Part 2, participants will be able to:

1. Demonstrate the Spiritual Interventions in Four Dimensions rubric.
2. Identify explicit spiritual practices that can be integrated into psychotherapy.
3. Identify implicit spiritual practices that can be integrated into psychotherapy.
4. Incorporate spiritual interventions in therapeutic practice with beginning competence.

Course 2.2 Description:

While religion and spirituality are often sources of resilience, meaning, and healing, they can also have a harmful impact. Sometimes our client is the one being hurt by religion, and sometimes our client is the one using religion to harm others. In either case, therapists are challenged to mitigate the destructive impact of religion. Interventions with harmful religion and spirituality require considerable skill, respect, and patience.

This course teaches a theoretical understanding of harmful religion and therapeutic strategies for countering the impact of harmful religion.

At the conclusion of Course 2.2, Spiritual Interventions: Working with Spiritual Struggles, participants will be able to:

1. Recognize and describe spiritual struggles.
2. Identify spiritual struggles commonly encountered in psychotherapy.
3. Identify therapeutic strategies for addressing spiritual struggles in ethical and effective ways.
4. Apply therapeutic strategies for addressing spiritual struggles to a clinical example.

Course 2.3 Description:

Spiritually integrated psychotherapy seeks a generative balance between two realities: (1) the ethical imperative to maintain professional ethics and refrain from imposing one’s own personal religious beliefs and values on clients; and (2) the fact that practitioners are human beings who have religious and spiritual beliefs and values that shape who they are, how they live in the world, and inevitably, how they practice therapy.

This course helps practitioners learn ethically sound ways to use their personal spiritual perspectives as a resource for understanding their clients, their relationship with their clients, and what happens in the practice of therapy. It also helps participants explore and work with issues of spiritual countertransference.

At the conclusion of Course 2.3, Spirituality and Belief System of the Therapist, participants will be able to:

1. Recognize the connection between their spirituality and therapeutic presence.
2. Identify ways their spiritual beliefs impact how they understand clients, the therapeutic relationship, and therapeutic process.
3. Investigate areas of spiritual countertransference that may influence therapeutic process.
4. Identify personal examples of spiritual countertransference. 

Course 2.4 Description:

The term “case conceptualization” refers to therapists’ holistic understanding of their clients. A case conceptualization often includes descriptions of a client’s presenting issues, biopsycho-social factors that contextualize and deepen therapists’ understanding of the presenting issues, diagnostic impressions, and an anticipated path of treatment. A “spiritually integrated case conceptualization” adds attention to the spiritual dimension. It includes the therapist’s understanding of a client’s spiritual resources and spiritual struggles, as well as how the therapist recognizes their own spiritual perspectives influencing their work with the client.

At the Conclusion of Course 2.4, Spiritually Integrated Case Conceptualization, Part 1, participants will be able to:

1. Describe connections between spirituality and bio-psycho-social factors.
2. Recognize the “heart of the matter” spiritual issues implicit in clinical symptoms and client personality styles.
3. Name strategies to distinguish between spiritual issues and mental health issues.
4. Describe elements of a spiritually integrated case conceptualization.

Course 2.5 Description:

The term “case conceptualization” refers to therapists’ holistic understanding of their clients. A case conceptualization often includes descriptions of a client’s presenting issues, bio- psycho-social factors that contextualize and deepen therapists’ understanding of the presenting issues, diagnostic impressions, and an anticipated path of treatment. A
“spiritually integrated case conceptualization” adds attention to the spiritual dimension. It includes the therapist’s understanding of a client’s spiritual resources and spiritual struggles, as well as how the therapist recognizes their own spiritual perspectives influencing their work with the client.

This course builds on the instruction of the prior course and allows participants to practice creating a spiritually integrated case conceptualization of their own. Participants meet with instructors in small groups – learning how to give and receive professional spiritually integrated feedback about conceptualizations they have written. This course also describes ACPE’s ten spiritually integrated psychotherapy competencies and identifies skills and resources to support participants’ post-training learning and development.

At the conclusion of Course 2.5, Spiritually Integrated Case Conceptualization, Part 2, participants will be able to:

1. Describe elements that distinguish a spiritually integrated case conceptualization from a case conceptualization that does not include attention to spirituality
2. Identify ways their own spiritual perspectives can ethically inform case conceptualization and clinical practice
3. Describe core competencies of spiritually integrated psychotherapy
4. Identify skills for use in post-training spiritually-integrated professional development
5. Describe and demonstrate skills for giving/receiving spiritually integrated feedback according to professional best practices  

ACPE has been approved by NBCC as an Approved Continuing Education Provider, ACEP No. 7004. Programs that do not qualify for NBCC credit are clearly identified. ACPE is solely responsible for all aspects of the programs.

ACPE has been approved by CBMT as an Approved Provider for continuing education. For more information, please visit https://www.cbmt.org/.