Psychology Religious and Spiritual Aspect

Since it became an autonomous discipline, psychology has branched off into several areas of investigation, and there is no unified definition of the topic. According to Schultz and Schultz (2016), psychology can be traced back to the fifth century BC, when philosophers studied themes such as memory, learning, motivation, thought, perception, and deviant behavior. Schultz and Schultz (2016) address the significant changes that have transpired since then. According to Schultz and Schultz (2016), psychology has seen significant change in the last 200 years.  And today focusses on answering the question regarding human nature from a biological and physical science point of view. Alternatively, Myers (2007) defines psychology as the science of behavior of mental processes. However, researchers and theorists cannot agree on one specific perspective or general definition. Many religions believe in the soul and ensuing behavioral, emotional, and mental processes of both the seen and unseen aspects influence psychology. Nevertheless, Western psychology does not, on the whole, embrace elements of the human experience that cannot be seen. An example of the seen and unseen correlation would be the Buddhist; they pray with their eyes closed and meditate for hours. Muslims, on the other hand, pray with their eyes opened, even though it would be easier to pray with their eyes closed. As a Muslim, the fundamental principle of Islam is that it teaches us to connect with the unseen (God) while reminding us not to disconnect ourselves from this world entirely. In fact, even our prophet, Mohammed, will shorten his prayer if he hears a baby crying, so there has to be a balance. Islam further teaches that humans are not spiritual beings in the expense of the world. This paper presents a detailed description of the spiritual and religious perspectives on psychology, mental health, and well-being.

Psychology and Well-Being

There are many differences between what gets taught at school about modern psychology and what I, for example, was raised to believe about my well-being. The basic research in neuroscience and cognitive psychology begins with the assumption that human beings are flawed and have to be fixed. Humans are messed up and have to be un-messed up, either by pills, cognitive, or clinical psychology. For example, Islam begins with the premise that children are born in the state of ‘oneness,’ or “fitra,” which means that they have an innate sense of God.

Muslims believe that every child is born of fitra, then his or her parents convert them to their religion. Another aspect of psychology and well-being is corruption. If corruption practice gets passed to individuals, such people will eventually get rewarded. In other words, there is something great about a human being. It is in the nature of human experience that people will always want things that they cannot have or do, despite Allah giving people the capacity to control their desires.

Self and Soul

In an Islamic perspective, it is a revelation from the creator that becomes the primary and most fundamental source of understanding. Ashy (1999) describes the basic principle of Islamic psychology as the religious principle, which is the belief that health and illness must be understood in the context of religious conceptualization.

Another theory is the philosophical principle, which is defined in three parts. The first part is the happening, which means the universe and humans are always changing and there is no eternal state. The second part is logic and imagination, which focuses on the theory that the human ability to imagine is limited, but just because an individual cannot picture or imagine something does not mean it cannot be proven right. There exist several scientific facts that have been proven, that human minds cannot visually comprehend, such as traveling faster than the sound speed. The third and last part is the moral aspect virtue or morality, which forms the basis of human happiness. Virtue consists of two factors, Social and Psychological. Social factors include justice, balance, and moderation while psychological factors include wisdom and courage, moderation, and desires.

According to Ashy (1999), there exist two branches of the body from an Islamic perspective. The first branch is the artificial body, which is created in the Self, and the second one is the natural body, which is not created. For the Self to exist, it needs the body, and therefore the body also needs the Self for its guidance. Therefore, the foundations of the self and body cannot be separated. The second significant finding of Ashy’s research is the function of the self. According to Ashy (1999), the conclusion of Muslim scientists is that the self cannot be seen or imagined. The self’s functions appear in human behavior and biology. Additionally, Muslim scientists believe that the self is not fragmented and does not consist of parts, but only of different functions. Thus, the self is unified but performs different functions.

In a different perspective, Schultz and Schultz (2016) describe a person’s sense of self as consisting of three components. The first component is the material self, which consists of the body, family, and home. The second is the social self, which is how people present themselves, and lastly the spiritual self, which consists of a person’s inner subjective being. Additionally, Myers (2007) refers to the body and the brain as constituting the mind since the brain does what is in mind. According to Myers (2007), if all the organs of an individual were transplanted, he or she, to a great extent, would still be the same person, unless one of those organs was the brain. A great hypothetical example given by Myers is whether a dead person would still exist if the brain got preserved moments before his or her death and kept floating alive in a tank of cerebral fluid (Myers, 2007).

Additionally, Grubbs, Wilt, Stauner, Exline, & Pargament (2016) looked at a similar concept of understanding the self-form in a religious perspective to help manage a person’s well-being. The authors looked into the self in three different sections, the psychological enlightenment, self-esteem, and self-compassion. Grubbs, et al., (2016) describe self-esteem as an adaptive concept and the ability to see the self in a positive light. They describe self-compassion as viewing the self in gentle and merciful terms, even in the stir of seeming failures. They also describe psychological enlightenment as a transcendent form of psychology. The authors conducted a study of 3964 undergraduate students from three different universities in the United States and used multiple measures to assess the three sections of the self. The authors observed that the longitudinal and cross-sectional examination of the used different samples got replicated, and they found that, over time, some aspects of personality emerged as direct predictors of struggle above and beyond the influence of baseline struggles (Grubbs, et al., 2016).

Another group of researchers, Frederick, Purrington, & Dunbar (2016), also hypothesized that there should be a relationship between differential of self, religious coping, and positive and negative affect. Their study included 194 participants, who got interviewed. Frederick, Purrington, & Dunbar (2016) ultimately thought that the differential of self, was a method of understanding one’s emotional experience, and perhaps facilitating the respondent’s use of a more collaborative religious coping style to manage such an experience. According to the result of the study conducted by Frederick, Purrington, & Dunbar (2016), individuals with high levels of differentiation of self, who seemingly view God as complementing them through disputes, can control their experiences and cope with a positive approach. Such individuals can tolerate more challenging experiences so as to determine the best way to cope with a given situation or circumstance (Frederick, Purrington & Dunbar, 2016).

Haque (2004) refers to Ghazali’s findings, on his description of human nature centered on discovering the ”self.“ According to Ghazali, the self’s ultimate purpose is to cause misery and happiness for fulfilling body’s needs. The self also has both motor and sensory movements. Ghazali further describes the motor as having two different factors. The first factor is a propensity, which also branches off into two components. The first component is anger, which is indignation revenge while the second is appetite, which is the hunger of the soul and the thirst for sexual craving. The second factor of individual’s motors is the impulses, which refer to a person’s muscles, nerves, and tissues, whose mains purpose is to fulfill the propensities needs. The soul requires a spiritual connection to its source, the creator, just as the body needs food and water to survive. Without such vital nourishment, the soul will suffer anxiety, depression, and despair. In fact, most people who experience various mental health problems suffer from ailments of the soul, not the mind.

Guilt, Mental Health, and Well-Being

Guilt and Religion

Haque (2004) has written about major contributions of prominent early Muslim scholars to psychology and outlines their adoption to the western theories. The writings of early Muslim scholars such as Al-Kindi, Rhazes Al-Razi, Ibn-Sina, Ghazali and Ibn-Arabi form part of the philosophical literature that existed between the year 800 to1240, on which Haque (2004) based his writing. Haque, (2004) talks about the first Muslim philosophers’ writings in the 800s and describes Al-Kindi as the father of Islamic philosophy. Al-Kindi described sorrow as a spiritual grief caused by loss of loved ones or personal belongings, or by failure to attain what one lusts after. Al-Kindi concluded that if causes of pain are describable, then cures can be found. According to Al-Kindi, Sorrow is not within people; individuals bring it upon themselves.

Haque (2004) also discusses functions of the soul, and intellectual operations in humans, as well as the negative emotion, called guilt. According to Haque (2004), people feel guilty when they have done something wrong. Besides, humans are created with an innate sense of good, going back with the fitra, the natural predisposition of doing the right thing. When people violate the spiritual programming created by Allah inside everyone, a cruelty mechanism called guilt gets formed inside them. From the religious perspective, such a phenomenon is considered a gift from a higher being, and violating it implies breaking the soul. According to Haque (2004), Guilt serves as a motivational function, and there is no difference, in principle, between the Western (psychological) perspective and the spiritual perspective.

In 2005, Lindsey conducted a study to support the idea that guilt motivates and encourages prosocial behaviors, and serves as an action to reduce such feelings. In her research, Lindsey (2005) brought 146 undergraduate students in the lab to read an assigned message (participants did not read the message if they got assigned to the control group). The questionnaire served to measure empathetic concern and assess anticipated guilt. The measurement got based on a 7-point scale (one (1) representing ”very strongly disagree“ while seven (7) representing ”very strongly agree”). The study outcomes suggested the expression that if guilt produces an unpleasant emotional state and people seek relief from such distress, they will get motivated to perform an action that increases a positive effect so as to reduce the feeling of guilt.

Another study conducted in 2007, by researchers Amodio, Devine and Harmon-Jones also gives a great demonstration of the effect guilt can have on an individual. The study tested two different hypotheses. The first assumption was that there is an initial motivation when one becomes aware of having committed a social transgression, while the second assumption was that an increase of motivation occurs when an individual gets an opportunity to engage in behavior so as to repair his or her transgression. Amodio, Devine, & Harmon-Jones (2007) conducted their study with 47 White American psychology students, and after providing consent, subjects got fitted with an electrode cap for recording. Next, subjects got informed they would view a series of faces while their brain waves got recorded. The feedback collected from the study conducted by Amodio, Devine, & Harmon-Jones (2007) indicated that the participants responded negatively towards the black faces. Additionally, the subjects reported significantly increased guilt, and the growth of guilt was larger than the changes in any other emotion. However, the results were in agreement with hypothesis made by the researchers.

Mental Health and Religion

The topic of mental illness is extensive and requires a book of its own. However, this paper covers some of its main points. There exist probably more than one-hundred different types of mental illnesses within the brackets of depression and anxiety. Some diseases relating to mental illness can be debilitating to the extent that the affected individuals may attempt to end their lives due to the associated anguish and suffering. Depression is often a response to the past or current loss, while anxiety is, generally, a reaction to the threat of future loss.

The condition of the soul and the various spiritual levels attained by people affect their thoughts, feelings, and behavior. Haque, (2004) argues that Islamic concept of mental health is that man processes both body and soul. The human soul is primarily responsible for human behavior. Besides, according to Haque (2004), the human soul has two different levels. The first level is the spirit, which consists of intellect and reasoning while the second level is the heart, which refers to the cognitive faculty in humans (intellect and wisdom). Happiness in Islam relates to the present world, as well as hereafter. Additionally, corruption of the fitra, based on one’s violation (personal and self-neglect of their religion) causes mental health problems. According to Haque (2004), Islam takes a two-pronged preventative approach to preventing humans from sacrificing their mental health: Building positive qualities and avoiding negative qualities. Primarily, any treatment in Islam leads towards building a strong faith in the client and reinforcing fitra.

Other perspectives of mental health include those from different religions such as Ismail, Christianity, and Judaism, all of which display a similar viewpoint in their attempt to clarify life and the detachment of the human condition through the exploitation of rituals, mythical narratives, and beliefs (Leavey, Loewenthal & King, 2016). In 2016, Leavey, Loewenthal, and King conducted a qualitative study involving a semi-structured face-to-face interview that lasted about 60 to 180 minutes. The sample contained 19 Christians, 6 Rabbis, and 8 Imams. The first cluster or dimension that got mentioned as a casual attribution of mental illness was the biomedical dimension. According to Leavey, Loewenthal & King (2016, p.1611), mental illness is a ”chemical imbalance in the body affecting the brain.”

In the study, one of the Rabbi’s suggested another biomedical explanation of mental illness as a shock and trauma condition resulting from chemical and organic causes. Myers (2007) also writes about a medical model that is very similar to the findings by Leavey, Loewenthal, and King. The medical model is, basically, a concept that describes psychological disorders as having physical causes that can get diagnosed and treated in hospitals. Myers (2007) gives the example of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) which gets manifested as an arousal of the brain. According to Myers (2007), OCD requires the control of impulse and habitual behaviors. Specifically, practices like hand-washing people with OCD can elevate activity in specific areas of the brain, thereby worsening the condition OCD (Myers, 2007).

Another dimension of mental illness introduced in the 2016 study by Leavey, Loewenthal, and King was the personal life dimension, which involves relationship problems, isolation and work stress. The main finding regarding personal life dimension, according to the interviews conducted by Leavey, Loewenthal, and King, was that it is characterized by vulnerability and inability to cope with the pressure of particular stressors, a phenomenon considered an important factor in mental illnesses.

Another important assumption made in the study conducted by Leavey, Loewenthal & King (2016) was that the creation of distress in an individual’s life could aggravate crisis in their faith. Besides, provoking catastrophe and someone’s beliefs can influence the occurrence of mental related illnesses. The concept created by Leavey, Loewenthal, & King (2016) is, to a large extent, similar to that of Myers (2007). Stress, according to Myers (2007), is not just a stimulus or a response, but a process through which people appraise and cope with environmental threats and challenges. Myers gives an example by portraying how experiencing severe or prolonged stress can harm humans. His example is that a child who responds psychologically to child abuse can be at risk of suffering chronic diseases such as posttraumatic stress.

The last dimension Leavey, Loewenthal, & King (2016) considered in their study was structural stress, which includes social and economic deficits such poverty, unemployment or poor housing. The conclusion made from the study interviews was that no consensus existed among the clergy regarding the contribution of poverty in the occurrence of mental illness (Leavey, Loewenthal and King, 2016, p. 1613). The authors’ explanation for such findings is that the differences between the wealthy and the poor are primarily related to tolerance level, stigma, access to services, as well as sources of coping in different societies (Leavey, Loewenthal & King 2016). However, my personal notion of why such findings may be untrue relates to my belief in the afterlife. According to my thoughts, people who believe in the afterlife realize that they cannot take their wealth with them from one life to the next. The only thing that they will carry over is their actions, whether they are moral or sinful. Therefore, my assumption is that the mental state of a person is independent on how or where a person lives.

A different set of authors, Russinova & Cash (2007), found out that individuals who consider themselves as spiritual and religious, generally, experience less psychological distress. The authors define religion and spirituality as two different terms. According to Russinova & Cash (2007), religion refers to an organized system of beliefs and rituals that help smoothen the progress of understanding to the heavenly and the community, while Spirituality relates to a personal means of achieving answers to the fundamental question about life. The two authors conducted a study involving 40 participants with severe mental illnesses. The first part of the study entailed a survey sent out by mail, while the second phase involved the collection of data through a telephone interview that lasted between 45 to 60 minutes. Russinova and Cash’s (2007) paper presented empirical findings regarding the specific meaning that religious and spiritual concepts had for individuals with severe mental disorders. Additionally, the study findings highlighted the importance of self-perception of religion on the ways persons with serious mental illness understand religion and spirituality.

The relationship between mental illness and religion also has a connection with guilt. In an alternative article, the authors, Faiver, O’Brien, and Ingersoll (2000), discuss religion and its relationship with guilt and mental health. According to Faiver, O’Brien, & Ingersoll (2000), guilt is the place where religion and psychology meet, and it refers to a self-reproach and regret, for one’s behavior as if one had dishonored an important moral belief. Additionally, the authors describe mental health as a state of stability that allows one to grow while preserving contact with consensual reliability. Guilt serves to maintain or untie such contact with consensual certainty. The review by Faiver, O’Brien, and Ingersolls (2000) suggests that by better understanding some of the dynamics of guilt and its relationship to religion and mental health, counselors can better encounter the needs of those clients to whom such concepts are significant.

Indeed, research has shown that spirituality and religious involvements play an essential role in determining the state of one’s mental health and well-being, and also play a crucial part in promoting and supporting recovery efforts. In 2004, Yangarber-Hicks conducted a study involving 151 participants to determine whether certain approaches to religious problem-solving are indeed more efficacious in encouraging individuals psychological functioning. Several tests got performed to elaborate on the findings, using the procedure as follows: mini-mental state test, brief cognitive screening measures, demographic questionnaire, religious problem-solving scale, personal vision of recovery questionnaire, and the Ohio mental health outcome survey.

The Participants of the study were rewarded with twenty dollars for their time and effort if they completed all the tests. After obtaining the results, a correlation analysis got conducted, and positive relations appeared between religious variables and involvements in recovery-related activates, as well as between religious association and empowerment (Yangarber-Hicks, 2004). In overall, Yangarber-Hicks’s (2004) findings provided groundwork information on the nature of religious and spiritual beliefs, as well as their coping strategies and involvement in recovery and functioning level in the population of several mentally ill persons. It appears that coping strategies that involve Godly explanation depend on active pursuit or retrieval, and an empowered stance.

Well-Being and Religion

Religious coping is an alternative form of seeing things, and every person should receive such treatment as part of any form of therapy. Many positive factors apply to religious involvement, and people do not have to be extreme believers or followers to be able to connect religion with their well-being. Even just being involved with the religious community, either through social sanction or a form of therapy, is a form of connecting religion with one’s well-being.

According to Griffith, Myers, and Compton (2016) community religious groups and other faith-based organizations often share a similar psychiatric commitment to compassion and succor for individuals with mental health disorders. Some of the most important points that Griffith, Myers, and Compton touch on, are that community religious groups can provide protective environments that facilitate good health care for both mental and psychical well-being. Additionally, religious groups in communities can combat the loneliness and social isolation problems that some community members may face. I agree with the authors’ conclusion that a greater understating is necessary regarding how religious groups can best provide positive emotions, promote self-care and health behaviors, as well as protect the society to enhance people’s well-being (Griffith, Myers, & Compton, 2016).

Haque (2004) addressed how secularization has grossly neglected the moral and spiritual phenomena within man, leaving it up to the individual to practice religion. Haque also believed secularization of the social sciences led to the development of theories’ that are deterministic and leave little or no room for human psychology. According to theorists Delaney, Miller and Bisonó (2013), psychology lost first its soul and then its mind, and gradually returned to the study of cognition. The theorists designed the new survey to compare the personal religiosity and spirituality of psychologists with data from Bergin and Jensen (1990) with the general US population. Delaney, Miller, and Bisonó conducted a 24-item survey that took 5 to 10 minutes to complete. The sample got drawn from the APA membership register, and they interviewed 109 women and 149 men between the ages of 36 to 90 years.

The survey had three major findings. The first was that Psychologists in the study were significantly less likely to have attended church, synagogue or mosque within the last seven days. The second finding was that 48% of psychologists surveyed described religion as unimportant in their lives as compared to 82% of them, who arrived a positive relationship between religion, mental health, and well-being. The third finding was that the APA members appeared to be less religious than the population they served. Delaney, Miller, and Bisonó, therefore, concluded that, when comparing APA members to the general population, the psychologists are two times more likely to have no religion, three times more likely to say it is unimportant, and five times more likely to deny belief in God.

Personally, I think that society needs to turn things around and educate all views of psychology. The modern era tends to neglect huge adversities and outlook the religious and spiritual beliefs of humans, which brings up the question of how one becomes spiritual. Oman, et al., (2009) conducted a study of 1010 college student from California, Connecticut, and Tennessee. Their study focused on the explanation of conceptual framework. They argued that bandura’s social cognitive model could be effectively applied in understanding and practicing spirituality. In 2009, Oman, et al., designed a cross-section survey which later got administered to the college students.

The survey’s topics included spirituality, religion, health behaviors, coping, and emotional issues. However, the primary focus of their research was to center the attention on the influence of models from different social environments, and the perceived impact on other life tasks of learning from spiritual models (Oman, et al., 2009). The study concluded with refereeing to the learning’s from spiritual models and acknowledging its importance to spiritual growth, by highlighting all the major faith traditions and interventions in various established areas like pastoral psychology, together with emerging fields such as health and spirituality (Oman, et al., 2009).

Another form of spiritual modeling got studied by Oman and Thoresen in 2003. The model can be taught through learning or observation. The goal of Oman and Thoresen’s (2003) study was to create a wise person and to recognize the spiritual involvement of learning through a social cognitive process, about which a great deal is already known. The relationships with spiritual models may determine how people engage themselves in a variety of organizational and non-organizational religious practices. Oman and Thoresen believed that the concepts of spiritual modeling and observational spiritual learning hold a strong assurance for maximizing the practical significance of religion and spirituality for strengthening various secular associations such as health care and education. They found that Spiritual modeling processes appear to powerfully influence many social phenomena that reflect, in part, a collective search for the sanctification of the world. Clearly, much basic knowledge is necessary for the development of a spiritual modeling perspective and facilitation of its optimal integration into psychology, health, and education.

Hamdan addressed Another form of cognitive reconstruction of spirituality in 2008. Hamdan (2008) studied an Islamic therapeutic process. His initial phase involved getting attentive to the automatic thoughts of the clients and discussing with the clients that Allah has a plan and purpose for everything. Like with any other religion, they had similar beliefs regarding their hiring being. Hamdan started to notice, in his observational study, that clients may experience and can believe that their Lord prefers punishing a person for sins committed. However, that is when the reconstruction would take place, in a cognitive approach, and the patient would be guided to understand that Allah cares for his creations (Hamdan, 2008).

The understanding that the purpose in life is to work for the afterlife was also a huge concept in Hamdan’s theory. The discussion about life as being temporary can be helpful in solving problems of hopelessness and maladaptive behaviors. Hamdan (2008) explained that patients were encouraged to recognize ideal religious values and adapt them in their thoughts, actions, and emotion. The ideal values, therefore, form a key factor that is essential for therapeutic success.

An article authored by Haque, Khan, Keshavarzi, & Rothman (2016) gives a summary of everything discussed above. The authors collectively received 37-research articles and six (6) books and came up with five (5) themes. The first theme was the unification of Western psychological models with Islamic beliefs and practices. The second theme was historical accounts of Islamic psychology; the third theme was the emergence of theoretical models and frameworks of Islamic psychology. The fourth theme was the development of intervention and techniques, while the fifth were the development of scales and assessment tools. Haque, Khan, Keshavarzi and Rothman (2016) discovered that within the last few decades, much attention appears to have been directed to the role of religion and clinical practice, meaning that spiritual lifestyle is becoming therapeutic, as well as a source of treatment and healing. They also believed in the study results that religiously oriented therapies have a positive impact on treatment.

Conclusion

I do believe that the religious and spiritual frameworks of psychology exist, but they tend to fade following the manner in which the society is transitioning to the secular form and the moderation of research. I feel that they are getting pushed out of the spotlight because the majority of the work and research conducted on such subject is qualitative in nature, and limits the issues covered. That, therefore, makes it very easy to criticize the religious and spiritual perspectives of psychology. People need facts, and it is hard to provide facts for something that is mystical or transcendent. It is, therefore, hard to convince someone to believe in something that cannot be empirically and statically proven. That is why I believe that the religious and spiritual aspects have been pushed out of the modern outlooks of psychology.

Reference

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Ashy, M. (1999). Health and Illness from an Islamic Perspective. Journal of Religion and Health, 38(3), 241-257. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/27511376

Delaney, H. D., Miller, W. R., & Bisonó, A. M. (2013). Religiosity and spirituality among psychologists: A survey of clinician members of the American Psychological Association. Spirituality In Clinical Practice, 1(S), 95-106. doi:10.1037/2326.4500.1.S.95

Faiver, C. M., O’Brien, E. M., & Ingersoll, R. E. (2000). Religion, guilt, and mental health. Journal Of Counseling & Development, 78(2), 155-161. doi:10.1002/j.1556-6676.2000.tb02573.x

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Griffith, J. L., Myers, N., & Compton, M. T. (2016). How can community religious groups aid recovery for individuals with psychotic illnesses?. Community Mental Health Journal, 52(7), 775-780. doi:10.1007/s10597-015-9974-1

Grubbs, J. B., Wilt, J., Stauner, N., Exline, J. J., & Pargament, K. I. (2016). Self, struggle, and soul: Linking personality, self-concept, and religious/spiritual struggle. Personality And Individual Differences, 101144-152. doi:10.1016/j.paid.2016.05.365

Hamdan, A. (2008). Cognitive restructuring: An Islamic perspective. Journal Of Muslim Mental Health, 3(1), 99-116.

Haque, A. (2004). Psychology from an Islamic Perspective: Contributions of Early Muslim scholars and challenges to contemporary Muslim psychologists. Journal of Religion and Health, 43(4), 357-377. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/27512819

Haque, A. (2004). Reli...