Pastoral Counseling involves, in addition to skills and practices of professional counseling, a sensitivity to, and appreciation for your faith and spirituality. In addition, it involves a pastoral counselor’s awareness of, and fidelity to, their own spirituality, and to finding the healing spiritual intersection between client’s and counselor’s.

Your faith might be informed by any one of the world’s religions or by a faith of your creation. As a pastoral counselor, I want to know what your faith means you. Does your faith help you grow, heal, love others and yourself? Or, does your faith lead you to self-condemnation and self-loathing?

Brother Michael Gallagher, of the Benedictine Holy Cross Monastery, has defined spirituality as a Grace with which we choose to cooperate. Spirituality presupposes a numinous reality (God, Holy Spirit, Divine Spark, Higher Power, Ground of being, etc.) and how we respond to it. Your spirituality might take the form of occasional to daily meditation and prayer; occasional to daily worship rituals; occasional to regular study and reflection; occasional to regular acts of service to others. It might take the form of a 12-step program, it might take the form of following a monastic rule like The Rule of Saint Benedict. But it only counts as spirituality if we cooperate with it.

All of this is to say that, in addition to all traditional practices of professional counseling, pastoral counseling strives to help people discover the life giving and healing dimensions of their spirituality, and help them find ways to cooperate with it.