Solitude, Silence, and the Training of Psychotherapists: A Preliminary Study

The spiritual disciplines of silence and solitude have long been practiced within the contemplative Christian tradition as a means of character transformation and experiencing God. Do these disciplines affect the use of silence in psychotherapy for Christian clinicians in a graduate training program...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of psychology and theology
Authors: Vanmeter, Jeffrey B. (Author) ; McMinn, Mark R. (Author) ; Bissell, Leslie D. (Author) ; Kaur, Mahinder (Author) ; Pressley, Jana D. (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Sage Publishing 2001
In: Journal of psychology and theology
Year: 2001, Volume: 29, Issue: 1, Pages: 22-28
Online Access: Presumably Free Access
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Parallel Edition:Non-electronic
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Summary:The spiritual disciplines of silence and solitude have long been practiced within the contemplative Christian tradition as a means of character transformation and experiencing God. Do these disciplines affect the use of silence in psychotherapy for Christian clinicians in a graduate training program? Nineteen graduate students in clinical psychology were assigned to a wait-list control condition or a training program involving the disciplines of solitude and silence, and the groups were reversed after the first cohort completed the spiritual disciplines training. One group, which was coincidentally comprised of more introverted individuals, demonstrated a striking increase in the number of silent periods and total duration of silence during simulated psychotherapy sessions during the period of training. The other group, more extraverted in nature, did not show significant changes in therapeutic silence during the training. These results cause us to pose research questions regarding the interaction of personality characteristics and spiritual disciplines in training Christian psychotherapists.
ISSN:2328-1162
Contains:Enthalten in: Journal of psychology and theology
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1177/009164710102900103