TRAINING PROGRAM FOR RELIGIOUS PROFESSIONALS

DIRECTOR: Rev. GARY L. HELLMAN, M.DIV.

Educational Philosophy

• The Center for Spirituality and Psychotherapy (CSP) provides a unique intellectual environment for the integration of the candidate's personal spiritual path in the practice of pastoral counseling.
• CSP seeks the integration of the student's spirituality and emotional maturity in the context of the larger community of pastoral care and counseling.
• CSP encourages the full exploration and integration of each person's spiritual path, theological frames of reference, traditions and scriptures in the context of respect for differences.
• CSP creates an educational environment for the recognition and appreciation of the diverse spiritual disciplines and traditions that are a part of our world's cultural heritage.
• Following the long established philosophy of NIP, the training curriculums of CSP are represented by various schools of thought, pastoral perspectives and practices and are open to all the varieties of religious experience.

Educational Goals and Outcomes
Graduation from the Training Program for Religious Professionals will equip the religious professional with a variety of new and/or enhanced professional skills. These include:

• Comprehensive skills in the care and referral of individuals seeking pastoral counseling as defined in standards of the American Association of Pastoral Counselors (AAPC).
• Enhanced ability to utilize the depth of a personal spiritual practice as a source of healing wisdom.
• Enhanced emotional maturity to ensure that attitudes and feelings will not harm another during provision of care.
• Fulfillment of all prerequisite requirements for candidates to achieve "Member" or "Fellow" level in the AAPC upon approval of AAPC.

Pastoral Experience During Training:

Each candidate of the CSP-Religious Professionals Track will maintain a "caseload" of pastoral counseling at an approved service center of the AAPC appropriate to the candidate's level of training.

Supervision
Candidates will be in continuous supervision during the years of training. Supervision is a weekly, year round activity and usually breaks during the month of August only. Each candidate is responsible for supervisory fees, which are paid directly to the supervisor. Supervision is provided at the rate of $45 per session. During the years of training candidates will work with no less than three and no more than six supervisors.

Admission Requirements

• A master's degree, M.A., M.Div., STM, or an equivalent in the field of pastoral care and counseling from an accedited institution.
• At least five years of seasoned professional work in the field of pastoral care, counseling and/or ministry.

Application Process
Application for admission to CSP/RPT 20000 may be made at any time of the year prior to the deadline. The deadline for Fall 2000 matriculation is May 1, 2000. Applications must be mailed together with a $50.00 non-refundable fee. Official transcripts of previous academic and professional training at institutions of higher education are to be forwarded to:

Religious Professionals Training Program
Rev. Gary L. Hellman, M.Div. Director
Center for Spirituality and Psychotherapy of the National Institute for the Psychotherapies
330 West 58th Street, Suite 200
NY, NY 10019

or, for more information, call (212)582-1566
or Email CSPofNIP@optonline.net

Applicants will then be called for a personal interview. In cases where either personality or philosophy of the applicant does not seem to be concordant with the aims of the training program, CSP reserves the right of refusal of the applicant.

Pastoral Counseling Internships:

Pastoral Counseling Internships may be available through the Psychotherapy & Spirituality Institute and its pastoral-counseling network of centers under the auspices of the Foundation for Religious and Mental Health, Inc. Clinical internships at other pastoral counseling organizations may be developed for credit as a limited number of internships will be available at each accredited institution.

Personal Pastoral Counseling:

Personal Spiritual Practice and Development:

Candidates will be participants in the development of and extension of their personal spiritual practice. These will be organized and developed throughout the course of their candidacy. Presentations growing out of the experience of the candidate's spiritual "path" and "journey" will be evolved as a part of the "Spiritual Growth Group" and will be one of the most important developmental tasks of the candidacy.

Registration and Fees:

A one-time non-refundable registration fee of $50.00 must accompany all applications for admission. Each course will be $320 per semester. Each semester includes four courses. $1,280 per semester is the cost for full-time students. Class size is limited to 15 candidates per year.

All costs associated with the Independent Study Program, supervision and personal pastoral counseling are additional to the course costs and may vary for each candidate.

Curriculum:

First Year

Fall

Pastoral Counseling Theory I
Introduction to Pastoral Counseling

This core course in theory will set the framework for the subsequent sequence of theory courses. It will survey the history of pastoral counseling as a profession and trace the commonalities and differences with psychology in theorizing about human nature. It will provide a way of thinking about science, theology, and values, and look at philosophies of knowing and truth. And it will present models of human nature and concepts of development, pathology, and motivation that will be used in the courses that follow to survey theories pastoral counselors find useful in working with clients.
Once this groundwork is laid, the first theory, Freudian drive theory, will be studied.

Spring

Pastoral Counseling Theory II
Ego Psychology and The Interpersonalists

Continuing the survey, this course will read in ego psychology (Hartmann, Anna Freud, Mahler, Jacobsen, Kernberg) and the interpersonalist school (Sullivan, Thompson, Fromm, Levinson, Wolstein).

Fall and Spring

Pastoral Counseling Praxis I & II

A year long course in counseling practice, introducing students to the basic supportive-expressive skills of empathic listening and responding. It will cover aspects of initial assessment and goal setting in collaboration with the client, and take up issues and concepts of forming an alliance, defense and resistance, transference-countertransference, interpretation, relationship, mutuality, asymmetry, and comparative views of change and growth, focussing on the beginning and early phases of counseling. Working in the faith community, referrals, and the differences in roles and the problems of dual relationships and boundaries will also be addressed.

Fall

Human Growth and Development I

This course will provide an overview of development and developmental issues from the standpoint of how they relate to pastoral counseling with adults. Critical moments in intrapsychic and interpersonal development will be studied via readings in theory and research, lecture, and discussion. Selected topics in cognitive, emotional, social, and moral development including attachment, separation-individuation, language, fantasy and play, affect, sexuality and gender, sense of self and other, and moral behavior will be addressed.

Spring

Human Growth and Development II

This course will survey abnormal psychology or failures in development that lead to problems in living in order to aid in evaluation and assessment. Disorders of anxiety, depression, personality, psychosis, schizophrenia, and psychosomatic and behavioral disorders will be covered. The framework for the course will be grounded in the overarching consideration of the criteria for and problems in defining and classifying such manifestations and concepts of health and illness, normal and abnormal. Religious experiences will receive special consideration.

Fall and Spring

Spiritual Growth Group I & II

This course will be a facilitated experiential group designed and conducted as a "peer group" for the professional and spiritual growth of each student. Developing pastoral counseling as a specialization of ministry requires the development of emotional and interpersonal maturity. Exploration of issues, feelings, and attitudes about the program and in response to diversity issues among all participants will be a vital part of the affective development of the student. The spiritual growth group will be designed to build group cohesion throughout the training cycle and facilitate sensitive responses to the wide range of cultural, religious and spiritual perspectives designed into the program.

Winter, January

Independent Study

This course develops the student's spirituality through an independent study program. In consultation with the advisor each student will organize a course of study to increase awareness and experiential depth in the student's personal spirituality. Each student will prepare a brief paper discussing the importance of this short course of study. Examples would include the deepening of one's religious and or spiritual orientation through a dedicated course of study, experience, with an action and reflection paper. This course may be focused among all traditional pastoral theological topics, ascetical theology, social action or ethics or any of the western or non-western practices of meditation and prayer.

Second Year

Fall

Pastoral Counseling Theory III
Object Relations

This course will look at the British object relations school (Klein, Bion, Fairbairn, Winnicott) and its manifestation in the contemporary relational paradigm.

Spring

Pastoral Counseling Theory IV
Jung, Neo-Jungians, Transpersonal Psychology

This will be a course in Jung and his archetypal views of the psyche and current Jungian thinking. It will also survey those writing out of a transpersonal paradigm.

Fall

Pastoral Counseling Praxis III
Transference/Countertransference

This course continues in an advanced way to look at the middle and ending phases of the counseling process in terms of theories of change and counseling interventions. Using the concepts of transference and countertransference and readings that trace their historical evolution it explores a variety of ways to understand how a counselor can participate in the relationship. In turn, that role will be differentiated from the role of a religious representative to a faith community.

Spring

Pastoral Counseling Praxis IV
Psychology of Religion

Starting from an anti-reductionistic premise that science and religion as disciplines are not in conflict, this course will focus on what psychology and religion have to offer one another. It will explore the methodologies and value assumptions of each in looking at the human condition, the history of how psychology has viewed religion as an asset or liability (readings will include Freud, James, Jung, Winnicott, Rizzutto, Meissner, Allport, Maslow, and others). The course will survey various Eastern and Western views of human nature in its meaning and purpose. Practical aspects will include the diagnosis and assessment of belief as coping or pathology, including stages in faith development, the structure and function of belief, how to treat truth claims and values in counseling, and contrasting definitions of therapeutic aims.

Fall and Spring

Spiritual Growth Group III & IV

This course will be a continuation of the first year group. A different leader will lead the group in this second year. The course will expose the students to a new leadership style and enhance elements of group process to deepen interpersonal experience of competencies needed in the wide range of pastoral settings. Although this is not a course to teach group theory is nevertheless a course designed to facilitate the growth of group process understanding.

Winter, January

Independent Study

This second course continues the development of the student's spirituality through an independent study program. In consultation with the advisor each student will organize a course of study to increase awareness and experiential depth in the student's personal spirituality. Each student will prepare a substantive paper discussing the importance of this second year's course of study with reflection upon the integration of the student's own spiritual orientation and its use in his professional role of pastoral counseling.

Third Year

Fall

Pastoral Counseling Theory V

This course will look at the writings of Kohut and the contemporary school of Self-Psychology, and the Intersubjective paradigm. It will also survey non-psychodynamic theories of Existential-humanism and Cognitive-behaviorism.

Spring

Pastoral Counseling Theory VI
Integrative Seminar

This is the culminating course of the theory sequence, which will have two purposes. It will be a comparative course, contrasting the theories studied with respect to their models of human nature, of change, and of therapeutic aims and interventions to achieve it. Secondly, it will address the overarching issues raised in the first course of epistemology, ontology, and values in psychological and theological theories with a view to dialogue.

Fall

Pastoral Counseling Praxis V

This course will explore dreams and altered states in consciousness, and the use of religious and spiritual practices as counseling interventions, including relaxation, visualization, prayer, meditation, and concepts like hope, forgiveness, surrender, and other contemporary models that interface between psychotherapy and spirituality.

Spring

Pastoral Counseling Praxis VI

This will be an integrating seminar that will bring together all the praxis courses under the overarching question of what it means to practice pastoral counseling in a multi-cultural, multi-faith context.

Fall

Human Growth and Development III

This is an advanced in-depth look at selected disorders most likely to be encountered in pastoral care. Anxiety, depression, substance abuse, post-traumatic stress disorder, sexual orientation, and gender identity issues will be reviewed using readings, case material, and discussion.

Fall and Spring

Spiritual Growth Group

This course will be a continuation of the group process course with special emphasis upon the issues of closure and integration of cognitive and affective elements of the training cycle. Issues of separation from the group, of graduation from the program and post program professional and spiritual development will be developed as they arise in the process.

Winter

Independent Study

This third course continues the development of the student's spirituality through a final independent study program. In consultation with the advisor each student will organize a third course of study to integrate awareness and experience in the student's personal spirituality. Each student will use this course to aid in an overall integration project discussing the overall three years with reflection upon the integration of the student's own spiritual orientation and its use in his professional role of pastoral counseling.

Spring

Final Project

This course is a final integration project of the training program. Students will develop a substantial and overall "thesis", focusing upon the integration of theory and practice of pastoral counseling. This project is not a research paper, but brings together the student's own views of psychological and spiritual development as used in the professional practice of pastoral counseling.

Faculty of CSP Religious Professionals Track

Diane Burhenne, Ph.D.
Henry Grayson, Ph.D., Co-Director of CSP
Rev. Robert Gunn, Ph.D.
Rev. Gary Hellman, M.Div., Director of Training Program for Religious Professionals of CSP
Robert Kuisis, Ph.D.
Kenneth Porter, M.D.
Ms. Mary Ragan, CSW
Robert E. Svenson, D. Min.
Joan Thorne, Ph.D.