Spirituality and Meaning-Making (2024)

Your clients may have a broad range of religious or spiritual beliefs, practices, and experiences. These reflect the great existential challenges of life and death: making meaning of our lives, connecting to a higher power, and engaging in experiences that inspire awe, hope, purpose, and service. However, mental and physical distress can challenge these beliefs, especially when illnesses become chronic or when people have tried many approaches yet had limited success.

As a clinician, how do you activate and supercharge meaning-making and empower your clients to find meaning and translate that into purpose and power? How do you engage these robust belief systems to activate profound psychobiological change? My approach to spirituality in the Brainbow Blueprint is that therapists must delve into each client’s spiritual beliefs and behaviors to understand their impact on the client’s mental and physical health outcomes.

Disentangling Belief Systems

Clinicians are increasingly challenged to help clients disentangle belief systems, often rooted in spiritual or religious ideas, that blur the lines between magical thinking and magic. While you should question outrageous beliefs that doubt the rational material universe, you should also recognize that there are unexplained forces—in psychology, this is called the study of the paranormal. The danger is the merging of an openness to truth with conspiracies and paranoia. While it is beyond the scope of this post to explore these questions in depth, it is beneficial to explore how your own beliefs can consciously and unconsciously affect your work with clients.

As we delve into the realms of spirituality and meaning-making in the context of integrative mental healthcare, let’s begin by defining some key terms:

Religious: Believing in a god or gods and following the practices of an organized religion.

Spiritual: Having a subjective experience of a sacred dimension. This also refers to the deepest values and meanings by which people live, often in a context separate from organized religious institutions.

Secular: Of or relating to the physical and not the spiritual world; not religious.

Agnostic: A person who does not have a definite belief about whether a god exists or believes that it is impossible for us to know this.

Atheist: A person who does not believe in the existence of a god or gods.

Transpersonal: Experiences beyond the personal that incorporate transcendent and spiritual experiences. The transpersonal can intersect altered states of consciousness, anomalous cognition, and consciousness practices like meditation and prayer, as well as the use of entheogenic substances (psychedelics).

Spirituality and religion can play an important role in helping people cope with overwhelming events, trauma, medical and health challenges, loss, and grief. However, spirituality and religion can also reflect belief systems that reinforce shame, cause shadow projection, and maintain prejudices. There are numerous survivors of abuse at the hands of spiritual leaders from all denominations; such abuse can be devastating and often leads to a loss of hope or faith in a practice that may have previously been sustaining. As integrative clinicians, it is essential to identify how we can (or cannot) help individuals explore their spiritual or religious practices in service to their health and well‑being.

Awe and Meaning-Making

Post-traumatic growth is possible after the experience of trauma, whether religious-based trauma or otherwise. Post-traumatic growth has elements of spiritual transformation; it is concerned with the ultimate questions about life’s meaning as it relates to the transcendent, and it leads to greater appreciation of life, changes in priorities, closer relationships with others, enhanced personal strengths, and identification of a path for one’s life. Post-traumatic growth is both a process and an outcome, and it may also speak to the idea of the wounded healer.

Awe is an important emotion for post-traumatic growth, as well as in exploring spirituality and meaning-making more generally. Awe includes feelings of reverence and wonder that are experienced alongside a sense of meaning, purpose, and connection to something vaster or greater than ourselves. Experiences of awe can ameliorate the day-to-day suffering that is part of depression and chronic illness. Awe can also serve as a kickstart for trauma recovery, self-care, and a sense of “can do.”

Awe can link nature with spirituality since it is often the experience of the natural world and its many wonders that help us gain perspective and move us forward. For example, one study found that veterans and at-risk youth had a 29 percent reduction in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms following a whitewater rafting experience (Anderson et al., 2018).

In fact, for 25 years, I developed and facilitated awe-inspiring nature immersion adventures for learning and healing purposes. These experiences had several goals: to teach clients new skills, to test their mettle in a profoundly different environment, to develop trust and cooperation, and to immerse the senses in the natural world. The activities included climbing mountains to find specific herbal medicines, riding on horseback, soaking in jungle waterfalls, diving among coral reefs, and canoeing in streams. The physical challenges, the stunning beauty of the natural world, and the use of “trust muscles” were inevitably transforming participants, each in the way they needed. They experienced both their capacity to change outcomes through their behaviors and their existential inability to control their lives fully.

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