We will never force you to discuss spiritual issues in therapy, nor we will assume that you want to do so. Most insurance companies contract with mental health professionals to provide evidence based assessment and treatment methods in their contracts. However, if you want to discuss spiritual issues as part of your treatment, or incorporate your spirituality into treatment, let us know during your initial intake.
Dr. Walker is a Christian. He graduated from an APA-accredited psychology program housed in Fuller Theological Seminary. He has a master of arts degree in theology. He has published extensively in this area prior to working in private practice full time. When requested, we provide psychotherapy that involves an integration of psychology and faith. One way to think about this conceptually is that therapy is essentially a “marriage” of psychology and faith in which each discipline offers its unique viewpoint while helping you.
We do not offer therapy that is exclusively dependent on faith. We would not, for example, provide therapy in which you came to session and only prayed, or came to session and we only read the Bible together. We value those spiritual practices. However, our approach to integrating faith into therapy, when requested, typically involves incorporating spiritual interventions such as prayer or referencing Scripture into secular evidence based practices. We believe there are several advantages to this approach to what we call the integration of faith and psychotherapy.
- Most importantly, we want to encourage you as you seek to live out your faith in your life
- Second, for some problem areas there is an emerging research base that using spiritual practices in therapy can be helpful to people of faith
- Third, this approach is also reasonably defensive to insurance companies because it incorporates your spirituality into evidence based treatments that most insurance companies dictate are used when providing therapy