Bridges Institute Continuing Education

Bridges Institute offers books, videos, and online courses to help mental health professionals enhance their knowledge and skills about religious and spiritual aspects of diversity and psychological treatment. We also provide information about high-quality continuing education resources offered by other organizations.

Handbook of Spiritually Integrated Psychotherapies

This book is available from the continuing education program of the American Psychological Association as one of their “book-based” CE credit offerings. APA Members can get a 20% discount on the CE credit and exam from November 1, 2025-January 31, 2026, using promocode 2026NEWIS. Click here to access the Handbook for CE credit on APA’s continuing education website.

Spirituality—our relationship with the sacred—is expressed through our beliefs, practices, emotions, values, and relationships. Spirituality can play a vital role in understanding the problems clients face and the solutions they seek in psychotherapy.

This volume brings together top scholars who show how therapists can ethically and competently integrate spiritual perspectives and interventions into their practices and thereby more effectively treat clients from diverse religious, spiritual, racial, and cultural backgrounds.

The chapters present research, clinical guidance, and case studies representing a wide variety of approaches and settings, including community mental health centers, private practice offices, hospitals and medical clinics, universities, and prisons.

Given the important role that spirituality plays in many people’s lives, this book will help practitioners bring attention, sensitivity, and evidence-based knowledge about the spiritual dimension into their psychotherapy practice.

Chapters

  • Chapter 1: Introduction: Bringing Spiritually Integrated Psychotherapies Into the Health Care Mainstream
  • Part I. General Approaches for Spiritually Integrated Psychotherapy
  • Chapter 2: Culturally Informed Therapy: An Intervention that Addresses the Psychological Needs of Religious Individuals of Diverse Identities
  • Chapter 3: Providing a Secure Base: Facilitating a Secure Attachment to God in Psychotherapy
  • Chapter 4: Relational Spirituality Model in Psychotherapy: Overview and Case Application
  • Chapter 5: Postsecular, Spiritually Integrated Gestalt Therapy
  • Chapter 6: Shaken to the Core: Understanding and Addressing Spiritual Struggles in Psychotherapy
  • Chapter 7: A Spiritually Inclusive Theistic Approach to Psychotherapy in Inpatient, Residential, and Outpatient Settings
  • Chapter 8: SPIRIT: Spiritual Psychotherapy for Inpatient, Residential, and Intensive Treatment
  • Chapter 9: Religiously Accommodative and Integrative Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy
  • Part II. Integrating Specific Spiritual Traditions into Psychotherapy
  • Chapter 10: Theoretical Foundations and Clinical Applications of Traditional Islamically Integrated Psychotherapy
  • Chapter 11: Gospel-Centered Integrative Framework for Therapy: Foundation, Description, Research Findings, and Application
  • Chapter 12: Gestalt Pastoral Care: An Opening to Grace
  • Chapter 13: Spiritually Integrated Psychotherapy Among Catholics: A Practice-Based International Investigation
  • Chapter 14: Jewish Forms of Spiritually Integrated Psychotherapy in Israel
  • Chapter 15: Sufi Psychology: A Heart-Centered Paradigm
  • Chapter 16: Christian-Based Spiritually Integrated Psychotherapy for East Asian Canadians and Findings From the CSPEARIT Study
  • Chapter 17: A Polynesian Perspective for Navigating the Spiritual Connections in Psychotherapy Practice
  • Part III. Spiritually Integrated Psychotherapy for Specific Patient Populations
  • Chapter 18: Spiritually Integrated Couple Therapy
  • Chapter 19: REACH Forgiveness in Couple, Group, and Individual Psychotherapy
  • Chapter 20: Search for Meaning: A Spiritually Integrated Approach for Treating Veterans with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder
  • Chapter 21: Spiritually Focused, Multiculturally Oriented Psychotherapy in the Criminal Justice Detention System
  • Part IV. Mainstreaming Spiritually Integrated Psychotherapies
  • Chapter 22: Training Opportunities and Resources for Spiritually Integrated Psychotherapists and Researchers

Reviews and Endorsements 

Helpful insights, and case study examples for those looking to integrate spiritual perspectives into their counseling in a competent and ethical way...Recommended.
—CHOICE, American Library Association (ALA)

Many therapists express a desire to move into a spiritually integrated treatment with clients but are unsure of the new territory, both in conceptualization and technique. This handbook presents a much-awaited clear, actionable guide for therapists. Cases and treatment approaches are drawn from clinical science as much as the wise experience of long-time spiritually integrated therapists. Increasingly, patients in deep suffering are looking to engage spiritually with their therapist. It’s time for us to embrace this expanded opportunity.
—Lisa Miller, PhD, Professor, Columbia University, New York, NY, and author of The Awakened Brain: The New Science of Spirituality and Our Quest for an Inspired Life

Authoritative, evidence-based, and a proven learning resource: What more could you ask for? I have no doubt that Handbook of Spiritually Integrated Psychotherapies will be the essential resource for educating the current and future generations of mental health professionals in integrating spiritual and religious issues in mental health practice.
—Len Sperry, MD, PhD, Professor, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL, and author of Spirituality in Clinical Practice: Theory and Practice of Spiritually Oriented Psychotherapy, Second Edition

In Handbook of Spiritually Integrated Psychotherapies, we get a state-of-the-art, comprehensive, engaging, and scholarly yet practical book on the important area of spiritually integrated psychotherapies. It highlights multiple faith traditions, patient populations, and techniques, and it is multicultural in focus. Most of the contributors are superstars in this area, so the reader is learning from those who have shaped the field as well. The book should be on the desk of every mental health professional who is engaged with spiritually and religiously informed psychotherapies and will surely become a classic in the field. I’m sure that my copy will be well-worn rather soon.
—Thomas G. Plante, PhD, ABPP, Augustin Cardinal Bea, S.J. University Professor, Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, CA, and Adjunct Clinical Professor, Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine, Palo Alto, CA