Caring for God's People: Counseling and Christian Wholeness (Integrating Spirituality Into Pastoral Counseling)

Caring for God's People: Counseling and Christian Wholeness (Integrating Spirituality Into Pastoral Counseling) by Culbertson, Philip L.. paperback edition. ISBN: 9780800631871.

Culbertson has built his text around the ideal of Christian wholeness and maturitya healthy interconnectedness of self-within-community. The heart of the book lies in its presentation of the three schools of counseling theory that Culbertson finds most helpful: family systems theory, narrative counseling theory, and object relations theory. Each of these is explained in detail, and then applied to the most common and challenging of counseling situations: pre-marital counseling, marriage counseling, divorce counseling, counseling gay men and women, and grief counseling. Culbertson brings new sensitivities to the counseling scenea more nuanced grasp of gender, a new sense of families, issues of sexual orientation, a strong sense of the relationship of emotions to spirituality, an empathetic attitude, a pragmatic but professional mix of ancillary theories, and a sense of the relevance of the counselors own self-understanding.