On Spirituality in My Work
How I hold these questions, and how I don't.
One of the questions people sometimes hesitate to ask when they're considering working with me is whether I will bring spirituality into their therapy, and if so, what that means. It's a reasonable question, and I want to answer it directly.
The short answer is that I do have a rich inner life, sustained over many years, and it informs how I see and what I'm sensitive to in the room. The longer answer is that I hold a particular ethical commitment about how this shows up in our work, and I want to describe it plainly before anything else.
Staying next to you
The fundamental stance I take as a therapist is that your values are the ground we work on, not mine. My role is to hold space for what matters to you, what you're drawn toward, what feels meaningful or important or sacred to you — not to introduce my own frameworks for what those things should be. This is true whether the territory we're in is religious, spiritual, philosophical, political, or simply personal.
What this means practically is that I stay next to you. If our work touches something you experience as spiritual or meaning-laden, I follow your lead. If it doesn't, we don't go there. If I ever take a step in that direction, it's because I can see that you are already walking there and the step extends your own movement rather than redirecting it.
This is not incidental to how I work. It's the ethical center of it. A therapist holds real power — the power of attention, of framing, of suggesting what might matter. Using that power to move someone toward a framework they didn't bring with them is, to my mind, an abuse of the role, even when the framework is one I believe in. The therapist's job is not to evangelize. It is to make space for the person in front of me to hear themselves more clearly.
What I mean by spirituality
I ask most clients, fairly early in our work together, about their spirituality. I always clarify that I'm using the word as a very wide umbrella, because "spirituality" gets used in a lot of different ways and I want to make sure we're not talking past each other.
What I mean by it is something like this: the dimension of your life that involves meaning, experience, or relationship that feels larger than your daily personal concerns. For some people, this is explicitly religious — a tradition, a community, a practice. For others, it's a felt sense of the sacred without a tradition attached. For others, it's experience in nature, or art, or music, or love, that has a quality of touching something bigger than the self. For others, it's ethical or philosophical — a sense of living in service to something that matters. For some people, the honest answer is that this dimension isn't particularly active or meaningful to them, and that's information too.
I'm asking because I want to know how you orient yourself in the world, what you consider significant, what sustains you, what you draw on in difficult moments, what you have a relationship with that exceeds the strictly personal. The answer might be obvious and central to your life. It might be complicated or conflicted. It might feel like a question you've been avoiding. It might feel irrelevant to why you're coming to therapy. All of those are useful answers.
I ask because this dimension, whatever shape it takes or doesn't take for you, is often involved in the material we'll be working with. Grief touches it. Meaning-making after rupture touches it. Questions of purpose and direction touch it. Sometimes trauma has left someone cut off from a sense of meaning they used to have, and part of what we're doing in therapy is slowly allowing that dimension to return on its own terms. I want to know the landscape before we walk into it.
Where I come from
For whatever it's worth to you, I've spent decades with these questions personally — through sustained contemplative practice, through training at a graduate institute that took depth, imagination, and meaning seriously as clinical domains, through my own life and losses and thinking. I don't come to this as a newcomer, and I don't hold it lightly.
This is part of why I can stay next to you rather than pulling you somewhere else. The territory is familiar to me, in my own way. I'm not reaching for something I don't understand, and I'm not uncomfortable when these questions arise. I also know, from my own path, how personal and specific this dimension is — how it doesn't transfer neatly from one person to another, and how much is lost when someone tries to impose their version of it on someone else's inner life.
What I bring is attention, care, and the willingness to sit with questions that don't have clean answers. What I don't bring is a framework for what your relationship to the larger-than-personal should look like. That's yours.