Abstract
The author reports on exploratory research involving an exercise in bringing together two practices, one spiritual and one therapeutic: Eastern Christian spirituality and cognitive-behavioral therapy. The theoretical view of illness and health in Eastern Christian spirituality is discussed in the framework of a clinical perspective. Applying the general clinical perspective of cognitive-behavioral therapy to Eastern Christian spirituality yields its implicit clinical view of spiritual illnesses, which are also called “passions.” The author discusses some implications of the psychospiritual approach, beginning with a comparison between the two practices and a discussion of the difficulties of such an interdisciplinary approach. In the second part of the study, dedicated to Evagrius Pontus’s approach and the ABCDE model of emotional disturbance, the author argues that both practices are interested in the person’s “well-being,” be it psychological or spiritual, and elaborates on techniques and methods to recover mental and spiritual “health.”
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Notes
The spiritual life can be circumscribed to certain subjective, individual experiences apart from certain specific and rigorously defined religious practices and experiences. The religious life is the life with/within the Holy Spirit, the third Person of the Holy Trinity in the Orthodox Christian conception. Spiritual life, as a very general connotation, manifests itself as the relationship between the person’s spirit and the impersonal universe.
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Buju, S. Clinical Approach of Spiritual Illnesses: Eastern Christian Spirituality and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Pastoral Psychol 68, 361–378 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-019-00874-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-019-00874-5