Counselling and Religious and Spiritual Values: A Malaysian Study

Abstract

The developing interest which led to this research project started when I was employed as a counsellor and a counsellor educator in an Islamic faith-based academic institution in Malaysia. Within these positions, I noticed that my encounters with religious and spiritual values in counselling and teaching practice did not match with what I experienced in the counsellor education programme. This is perhaps due to the Malaysian counselling practices that had its history from Euro-American counselling models which emphasise the practice of objective and value-neutral stance. Within these models, counsellors’ conceptual and theoretical understandings of counselling were strongly shaped and developed. Therefore, the study draws on this history and questions the effects of this stance in Malaysian counselling practices. In particular, this study explores how Malaysian Muslim counsellors are positioned when religious and spiritual values intersect with their counselling knowledge. This study employed poststructuralist and social constructionist frameworks as its theoretical and methodological base. Positioning theory, deconstruction, power/knowledge, language, and the making of meaning are some of the approaches used in this study. As a mixed methods project, the study used a survey and interview conversations to generate research data. The survey was to gain general views about participants’ perceptions of the topic researched, and the interviews were to investigate the ways taken by counsellors in working with religious and spiritual values. Both quantitative and qualitative findings show that there are similar understandings among participants about the lack of training on how to address religious and spiritual values in counselling, and the gap that exists between counselling models, and religious practices. In qualitative findings, these participants reported that they have to find their own ways to weave both counselling and religious knowledges together in order to help clients. Hence, through this study, a religiously sensitive counselling approach that uses a value-investigating practice is suggested.