Why do committed Christian clients seek counselling with Christian therapists?

Abstract

Many religiously committed clients show concern to work on psychological problems with a professional who is similarly committed, and highly religious clients demonstrate resistance to engaging with professionals who are not. By exploring Christian clients’ constructions of their counselling experiences, the present study's aim was to understand something of the complexity behind such insistence, rather than leave it as a taken-for-granted aspect of a general therapist-client matching hypothesis. Adopting the view that Christians comprise a socio-cultural group, we employed discourse analytic techniques to explore the interpretative repertoires evident in transcript data from interviews with six Christian clients who had sought and received professional counselling from a counsellor who was a Christian. The ‘client discourse’ and the ‘Christian discourse’ and their component interpretative repertoires, are presented. We then discuss crucial issues for the Christian client by forming an intersection of the discourses and repertoires involved. Finally, acknowledging the small scale of this exploration, we highlight implications for further research and practice.

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