Finding A Forest Among Trees: Spirituality Hiding in Family Therapy Theories

Although many authors have written about a spiritual dimension that permeates everyone’s life, family therapists and training programs continue to ignore issues of spirituality. Much like the gender and cultural biases that exist within our theories of change, spiritual biases may exist in our family therapy theories. These spiritual biases, however, have not been as widely discussed as have the gender and cultural biases. The challenge for family therapists is to critically analyse basic tenets of these theories to discover the biases. This paper provides an analysis of three germinal family therapy theories to show the possible spiritual dimension and how this dimension influences the way we do therapy.