Islamically Integrated Psychotherapy

Uniting Faith and Professional Practice

Carrie York Al-Karam, Carrie York Al-Karam

• Publisher: Templeton Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781599475424
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Integrating the Islamic faith with modern psychotherapy is at the forefront of the spiritually integrated psychotherapy movement. To bring this work to wider attention and to promote its continuation, Dr. Carrie York Al-Karam has brought together the present volume of nine essays, each of which is written by a Muslim clinician who practices Islamically integrated psychotherapy (IIP)—a modern approach that unites the teachings, principles, and interventions of the faith with Western therapeutic approaches.

As delineated in the Introduction, IIP has emerged from a variety of domains including the psychology of religion and spirituality, multicultural psychology and counseling, transpersonal psychology, Muslim Mental Health, and Islamic Psychology. The individual chapters then describe a variety of ways IIP is practiced by Muslim clinicians in their service provision with Muslim clients.

The contributors discuss a wide range of topics, such as how Islam can be viewed as a system for psychological wellbeing, or a "science of the soul"; what marital counseling can look like from an Islamically-integrated perspective; Prophet Mohammed as a psycho-spiritual exemplar in a new approach called The HEART Method; the use of Quranic stories in family therapy; as well as using Islamic teachings when working with Muslim children and adolescents.

A description of the various approaches is supplemented with discussions of their theoretical underpinnings as well as research-based recommendations for advancing clinical application. What emerges is a vital resource for Muslim and non-Muslim clinicians alike as well as the lay Muslim reader wanting to know more about how the Islamic faith and psychotherapy are engaging with each other in a modern clinical context.

CHAPTER 1

An Islamic Theoretical Orientation to Psychotherapy

Abdallah Rothman, LPC

MUCH OF WHAT has been written on and explored with regards to the intersection of Islam and psychology tends to examine the Muslim experience and how psychotherapy can cater to this population. It has been more of a response to the increasing call for multicultural capacity building than it has been an exploration of psychology from the perspective of an Islamic worldview. This focus tends to result in studies of best practice in working with Muslim clients, which can be problematic given that the world’s population of Muslims consists of hundreds of different cultures (Kettani, 2010). Yet the desire for the field of psychology to understand how to work with Muslims and the palatable need for mental health services among many populations of Muslim people have given rise to a growing field of Muslim Mental Health. It may be that the most effective way to find common ground among this diverse population is to focus more on the Islamic orientation of these people rather than their relative identity as Muslims. However, there remains a dearth of collective understanding on how an Islamic worldview can be practically and effectively integrated into psychotherapy as well as a lack of understanding of how an Islamic orientation to psychology might also have something to offer to a broader range of people beyond those who identify as Muslim.

I am Muslim and I am a psychotherapist, but I do not consider what I do to be Muslim Mental Health primarily. While many of my clients are Muslim and I work with them on issues of mental health, this label does not accurately describe the focus of my work. My approach to psychology and mental health is based in the Islamic tradition, and Muslims thus tend to identify with it because it is a familiar framework to them. However, when I work with non-Muslim clients I do not change my fundamental orientation, nor do I shift the focus of the actual treatment goals. My goal is to help human beings attune to what works for optimizing their human experience.

I like to make a distinction between Muslim psychology and Islamic psychology. Muslim psychology focuses on how Muslims think and behave. It is primarily a culturally adapted approach to Western therapy that incorporates language, customs, and culturally relevant sentiments into the therapeutic process. This can be useful for many reasons, as it allows for psychotherapy to be more relevant to Muslim populations and to perhaps make such services palatable where they may otherwise be stigmatized as “Western,” “secular,” “un-Islamic,” or simply not culturally relevant. A great number of practitioners are Muslim and have studied psychology and therefore may be equipped to approach their work from within their cultural or religious viewpoint for the benefit of their Muslim clients. Far fewer practitioners have an understanding of how to approach psychotherapy from within an Islamic paradigm of psychology. Thus, this is the distinction between a Muslim psychologist and a Muslim who practices Islamic psychology.

In my understanding, Islamic psychology is an indigenous approach to the study and understanding of human psychology that is informed by the teaching and knowledge from the Quran and the Prophetic tradition (Haque, 1998; Utz, 2011). It is grounded in the ontological paradigm that is elucidated in the Islamic tradition, rather than the secular Western paradigm in which conventional psychology is rooted. Stemming from this, Islamic psychotherapy is an indigenous approach to mental health practice that is derived from Islamic traditions and practices. An Islamic psychology approach to therapy recognizes and engages the soul in the conceptualization of the self and often focuses on the heart rather than the mind as the center of the person. These are just some basic underpinnings that constitute an Islamic theoretical orientation.

As practitioners, when we are trained in theoretical orientations that are based in secular conceptualizations of the human condition that do not necessarily include a recognition of the existence of a higher power, much less any specific understanding of the person in relation to God, we are left to our own devices to incorporate these conceptions into our work with clients. While this may seem straightforward, it can wind up being a patched-together, integrative approach to therapy and not an overt theoretical orientation. What often happens as a result is that clinicians rely on the theoretical orientations in which they have been trained and that operate under a Western secular paradigm as the base of their therapeutic modalities. While many of the techniques, methods, and approaches have merit and offer useful tools for working with clients effectively, the theoretical underpinnings of such orientations are not necessarily aligned with the Islamic paradigm. This can be problematic in working with Muslim clients in that the therapist may be inadvertently guiding them in a direction other than the one defined in the Islamic tradition. What perhaps gets even less attention is the awareness of the possibility that conventional secular conceptualizations of the self may in fact be guiding people in general, not just Muslims, away from the most holistic and optimal way for personal transformation and healing.

Because there is often no clear understanding as to what exactly someone means when they refer to “Islamic psychology,” as well as there not being much of a history of the discipline to refer to, I will give a brief account of how my personal journey led me to this approach. I also discuss my experience and how it informs my own interpretation of how to approach an Islamic model of psychotherapy that I have learned from mentors in this emerging field and other teachers grounded in the Islamic tradition. One of the key aspects to my approach to Islamic psychotherapy involves my own deep inner work on myself. I will explain how much of my approach to working with clients stems from and is influenced by my submission to the same journey of self-reflection and self-development on which I am inviting my own clients to embark. I then discuss how this informs my practice, and I provide examples of what methods and techniques I use in my clinical work. I end the chapter with some recommendations for further avenues toward an Islamically integrated approach to psychotherapy.

Development of a Theoretical Orientation

Much of what conventional psychology has become is strictly about studying the brain, behavior, and attributes of the human being that are tangible and measurable—a realm of study that leaves very little room for something like the soul (Reed, 1997). Yet the concept of soul is literally embedded within the original concept of psychology, as the word itself means “study of the psyche.” When I first started studying psychology I was not Muslim, but I was fascinated by the idea of the development of the whole self, including the soul. For that reason I was intuitively drawn to humanistic psychology, a subfield that focuses on the whole person and the process of self-actualization, which is the process of working toward realization and maximization of potential (Schneider, Pierson, & Bugental, 2014). My grandfather Leonard Schneider, along with his teacher Abraham Maslow and colleague Fritz Perls, were some of the pioneers of humanistic psychology. In one of the last conversations I had with my grandfather before he died, he told me that he wished he would have paid more attention to religion and spiritual traditions and how they can be of great use within the therapeutic encounter for providing structure to people’s understanding of themselves and their own personal growth. I was intrigued by this notion and made it the focus of my investigation in my own study of psychology. I saw myself as continuing my grandfather’s work where he had left off.

In addition to my study of psychology, I was actively involved in the study of various religious traditions. I was as eclectic in my theoretical approach to psychology as I was in my theological approach to spirituality: I couldn’t bring myself to commit to just one path. In my early career, I often claimed to have an “eclectic” orientation, which in the field of psychotherapy is often seen as a cop-out. Similarly, with regard to spirituality and religion, I claimed to be spiritual but not religious. I studied and admired all religions and incorporated aspects of them into my own personal path but did not subscribe to a religion, or even perhaps the idea of religion. Like some who are turned off by or skeptical of conventional notions of God but consider themselves spiritual, my sense was that there was a universal power that connects all living things. Whereas some people tend to reject the idea of God in opposition to how God is portrayed, I was comfortable with the idea that there are many different ways to understand and relate to the spiritual, Divine Reality. My own feeling is that what I call God is in essence the same thing as what another may describe in other terms. Therefore, belief in God was never a question for me. I liked to quote Carl Jung (1977) in my answer to whether I believed in God by saying, “I do not believe, I know” (p. 429) To me, the existence of God was a given, and I believed that our task in this life is to become closer to God, which I interpreted as what self-actualization really was: God-consciousness. Essentially, my relationship to psychology was infused with my spiritual journey.

With the last words of my grandfather in my mind, coupled with my own experiences with religious spiritual devotion, I came to the acute realization that without a dedicated path I was hitting a glass ceiling in my own growth. I came to see that I could not advance further on my path of personal growth unless I committed to a path that disciplined me to allow for deeper transformation and expansion of consciousness by working through my psychological imbalances in a systematic and successive way. The eclectic approach to both a theoretical orientation to psychology as well as to a theological orientation to spirituality suffers from lack of structure and theoretical grounding that is situated within one paradigm. This can result in elusive, unclear stances that, in the realm of the unseen—the soul or psyche—can become limiting at best, if not dangerous. I eventually determined that in order to continue on my inner quest I needed to commit to a path. This was simultaneously true of my approach to psychotherapy and my personal spiritual discipline. Thus, my ultimate landing on a theoretical orientation to psychology is inextricably linked to my eventual embracing of a religious path. In fact, the two were one and the same.

Approaching Islam as Psychology, Psychology as Islam

In my search for a path that would primarily orient me toward spiritual self-development, I discovered a deeply intricate science to the conceptualization of the soul, and it was grounded in Islam. Given the way in which I came to embrace it, there is very little separation for me between Islam as a religion and psychology/psychotherapy as different disciplines that I am adapting or integrating with Islam. For me, the spiritual work and the psychological work are inextricably interconnected. I see Islam as a psychology and believe that psychology (the study of the psyche) can be realized fully through the Islamic tradition. I do not consider what I do as an integration of Islam into psychotherapy as much as I consider my practice of psychotherapy as a translation of concepts relating to the soul and to healing from the Islamic tradition into the language of psychology within a therapeutic process.

My training in Western psychotherapy gave me access to a wonderful tool kit of approaches to counseling clients—for example, techniques of engaging clients in self-reflection, skills of active listening, and therapeutic techniques that elicit clients to open up in order to gain access to their inner process and thus be better positioned to help guide them toward treatment goals. The treatment goals, however, in my approach to psychotherapy from an Islamic paradigm are different from the Western conceptualization of therapy and therefore need to be reoriented in order to use those techniques and skills in Islamic psychotherapy.

Unlike some Western approaches to therapy, my goal is not necessarily to get the client to where they want to be, as that is not as important as them wanting what is best for them. It says in the Quran, “You may hate a thing and it is good for you; and you may love a thing and it is bad for you. And Allah Knows, while you know not” (2:216). From an Islamic perspective, “Allah is the best of Planners” (8:30), and He is the One who knows what is best for us. So from this approach it is fundamentally a very different paradigm that determines what the goal of therapy is. To be clear, physical symptoms and severe mental illness often should be treated with medicine under supervision of an appropriate medical psychiatric practitioner. However, from an Islamic paradigm of psychology, most sicknesses of the heart and soul are seen as a result of the person being disconnected from God (Ghazali, 1986), while others are seen as challenges or tests that people need to go through in order to purify their soul, and may not in fact actually be curable or need to be fully eradicated Thus, an Islamic approach to psychotherapy can often help reframe clients’ struggles in light of spiritual growth, regardless of a client’s particular beliefs, and can often work well in tandem with medical interventions.

The Islamic tradition is a rich source within which healing and therapeutic techniques and interventions can be found. It is an exhaustive medicine cabinet of remedies for every ailment of the soul. My job as therapist is to be a creative pharmacist, choosing different combinations of Islamic soul medicine to fit the client’s current situation and need in a way that makes sense to his or her mind and heart. It is a process of translating wisdom from the Islamic tradition into practical deliverable action items that speak to the person where they are and for what they are currently struggling with. It is similar to what an Imam or a shaykh (spiritual guide) might do, but my emphasis is more on making it relevant to clients’ personal and emotional struggles and studying and understanding who they are and what will make sense to them rather than focusing primarily on the solution itself as an overarching truth. For this reason, it is important that the therapist have knowledge of relevant Islamic teachings in order to inform the treatment. They must know what Islam says about principles of the self and, for working with Muslim clients, have some basic knowledge of fard al ayn (individual religious obligations) as those are related to the remedies of the soul.

My Islamic theoretical orientation aims to understand a client’s situation from the viewpoint of the fitrah (natural disposition) of the human soul. Without projecting my religious beliefs onto them, which would be both unethical and un-Islamic, I can help clients reflect on what course of action is more congruent with their own internal moral compass, their own fitrah. When the solution to the problem really relies on a specific determination of what Islamic law says about it—for instance, in cases of marriage and divorce—this is where it is essential to have partnerships with Imams in the local community, as I do in my own practice, to consult on cases that require an Islamic fiqh perspective as appropriate according to the orientation of the client. I have also done the same in working with clients of different faiths by referring them to their own religious leaders. This gives an opportunity for therapists to educate Imams or other faith leaders on ideas of mental health and best counseling practice, which allows for an alliance that is an ideal model that I feel should be the exemplary goal for the developing field of Islamic psychology.

My Practice

My spiritual practice is central to my practice of psychotherapy. My own self-development work in my own life informs and is the primary mechanism I use in working with clients. I operate under the notion that God is the true healer and it is really only He that can guide a person and change their heart, a sentiment shared by many traditional healing philosophies (Kiev, 1964; Moodley & West, 2005). Since my job is to be a conduit for that connection to God, the best thing I can do to be an effective practitioner is to “get out of the way” (Duffy & Veltri, 1998). The more I can clean my own heart, the more God can give to the client what they need. I do this by constantly keeping up with my own jihad an nafs (struggle against the lower self) and thus modeling this for the client.

People tend to take guidance easiest from those who are living examples, as it is more relatable. The power in this is similar to the idea of transference in that people have a natural inclination or need to identify with another person and see him- or herself in that person as a reflection (Jung, 2013). I use my humanness as a tool for connecting with the client and being a reflect...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction: Carrie York Al-Karam, PhD
• Chapter 1: An Islamic Theoretical Orientation to Psychotherapy
• Chapter 2: Utilization of Islamic Principles in Marital Counseling
• Chapter 3: The HEART Method: Healthy Emotions Anchored in RasoolAllah’s Teachings: Cognitive Therapy Using Prophet Mohammed as a Psycho-Spiritual Exemplar
• Chapter 4: Conducting Spiritually Integrated Family Therapy with Muslim Clients Utilizing a Culturally Responsive Paradigm
• Chapter 5: Integrating Islamic Spirituality into Psychodynamic Therapy with Muslim Patients
• Chapter 6: Family Therapy and the Use of Quranic Stories
• Chapter 7: Outlining a Case Illustration of Traditional Islamically Integrated Psychotherapy
• Chapter 8: Marrying Islamic Principles with Western Psychotherapy for Children and Adolescents: Successes and Challenges
• Chapter 9: Integrating Duaa Arafa and Other Shiite Teachings into Psychotherapy
• About the Contributors
• Index