Should My Therapist Have the Same Spiritual Views as Me?
The short answer is no. You can do great work with a therapist that holds different spiritual views than you. In fact, it is unethical for a therapist to impose their religious views onto their client. Additionally, therapy sessions should be focused on the client, not the therapist, and the therapist’s personal beliefs SHOULD be irrelevant.
The long answer is more complicated, especially if you’re someone seeking therapy for issues related to religious deconstruction or religious trauma. I’d like to illustrate with my own personal story as a client in therapy.
When I first sought out therapy, my primary goal was to improve my self-esteem. This led me to working with a very compassionate therapist whom I absolutely adored. As someone raised in Evangelicalism, her constant compassion towards my humanity blew my mind. It was incredibly healing for me and taught me to start understanding and loving myself.
One of the many qualities I loved about this therapist was how genuine she was, and how willing she was to let me be my curious self and ask her questions about herself. She always answered my questions honestly, which I’m sure wasn’t always easy for her, and which I appreciated so much. Religion inevitably came up in our therapy sessions due to how much it had always tormented me psychologically. Due to her willingness to answer my questions, I soon found out that she was a Christian. However, she was a much more liberal and open-minded Christian than I had ever met. As someone raised in Fundamentalism, her less judgmental version of Christianity was eye-opening for me.
I only found out that this sweet therapist was a Christian because I asked. She never tried to impose her beliefs on me. However, eventually, a few of her honest answers to my questions ended up devastating me. I asked her point-blank one day if, as a Christian, she viewed me as having a Jesus-shaped hole in my heart that would never be fulfilled/satisfied until I accepted “Him” into my heart. She told me that yes, she did view me that way. Though maybe it shouldn’t have, this information shocked me and broke my heart a little. Because of her extremely compassionate, nonjudgmental attitude towards me, I hadn’t realized that she too (in addition to a lot of other Christians in my life) had been viewing me this way all along. I felt a little exposed and embarrassed for everything I had opened up to her about. Again, I would never have known this if I hadn’t asked her, and to this day I very much appreciate her honesty. But after hearing her true views about me and my “condition”, I never felt as safe with her or comfortable opening up to her as I had before. It felt like I was being pitied and looked down upon as a “lost soul” who could never truly be happy until I was “saved”.
Additionally, when I was telling her how much she was helping me to become stronger and more confident in my beliefs, this well-meaning therapist made a comment about how she didn’t mean to have helped steer me away from Christianity and that it would make her sad to know that I had lost my faith completely. Again, this was devastating for me to hear. I had started feeling so empowered, confident in, and proud of myself (literally because of her!) but when she didn’t validate or encourage me in my own critical thinking or the conclusions I had come to on my own, I yet again felt misunderstood and distrusted (as I had felt by other Christians for so long).
After this, it was hard for me to keep seeing this therapist regularly. I still adore her, and have gone back to her from time to time when I’ve been in need of her warm and life-changing compassion. But I’ve never felt as safe with her as I did before.
I’ve also since come to realize that as we clients age and grow and evolve, we may need therapists who specialize in different things at different points our lives. While it would be very frustrating to switch therapists often and have to keep starting over from scratch telling our life story over and over, I believe it can be beneficial to switch to new therapists periodically… who are better fits for what we are currently struggling with at each stage. Looking back, I feel that this kind Christian therapist was the perfect healer for me at that stage of my life. After working with her I became more confident in myself and my beliefs, which led me to realize that my intuition was doubting in the existence of a higher power entirely. This realization brought up a whole new set of fears and anxieties for me, and I then found myself actively seeking out an atheist therapist who could better help me face these existential concerns.
The bottom line is, the most important thing to consider when choosing a therapist is how much you trust and feel safe with them. Research shows that the client-clinician relationship (or “therapeutic alliance”) is the most important predictor of positive outcomes in treatment. While many therapists may be able to keep their religious beliefs from interfering with your treatment, some may not (EVEN if they don’t advertise themselves as a “Christian” therapist, etc.) Religious belief systems are so foundational and all-encompassing in the way that they shape people’s worldviews that it can be difficult for a religious therapist to separate their views from your reality.
If you are seeking treatment for religious trauma or deconstruction, don’t be afraid to ask your therapist what their personal views are, especially when it comes to spirituality or religion. If you don’t feel comfortable or get a good gut feeling based on the answer they provide, you should keep searching until you find a clinician who does feel safe to you.