Spiritual Direction or Counselling?

This question is often asked as though spiritual direction and counselling are competing or interchangeable practices. In reality, the relationship between them is more subtle and more fluid than a simple comparison allows. Over the years, as spiritual direction has increasingly entered dialogue with psychology, many practitioners have found themselves working at an attentive boundary between inner healing, meaning-making, and spiritual discernment. What follows is therefore not an attempt to draw hard lines, but to offer a helpful orientation — particularly for those wondering which kind of support may best serve them at a given moment in their journey.

So, are you wondering what the similarities and differences are between counselling or therapy, and spiritual direction?

Afterall, they do both use many of the same active listening skills in working with people. Both offer a safe and supportive space for the person to talk about their lives. Indeed, they both can cover very similar ground in that in spiritual direction the person can share anything from their life experience that is with them at this time, not just their prayer or sacramental life. For both there may also be a sense of 'wholeness' as being the aim of the process. However, at their heart, there are some important differences that may help you understand their nuances.

This table highlights some broad tendencies rather than absolute distinctions. In practice, there is often overlap, particularly in spiritually integrated or psychospiritual forms of counselling and in some contemporary approaches to spiritual direction.

Ultimately, for me, what I am aiming to do in spiritual direction is not help people solve their problems as such, but help them to notice, listen to and discern the movement of God within those experiences - tuning in to the 'still, small voice' within that is a loving guide.

In this way, it is about the person seeking to draw closer to God and learning to flourish right in the midst of life's challenges; the focus of spiritual direction being to foster a person's connection and responsiveness to God's work in their life. Problems may be addressed, and may indeed be what brings a person into spiritual direction, but they are not the focus of the relationship.

Neither is it an 'either or' choice between spiritual direction or counselling.

Indeed, some people may receive both at the same time if they are travelling through times where they need to work through and resolve specific issues with a counsellor or therapist. The counselling relationship tends by nature to be short term and centered around a specific problem. In contrast, the spiritual direction relationship may be either temporary or long term. The frequency of appointments may ebb and flow, but the spiritual director often remains a trusted long-term companion to the unfolding of the person's life.

A spiritual director or companion may also occasionally offer resources to support the person in their spiritual journey - different forms of prayer, spiritual writings, scripture, theological ideas, poems, sayings, meditations, books and so on, that directly relate to wherever the person finds themselves at that time. People are entirely free to take these up or not as they wish. Moments of prayer may also sometimes be encompassed within the spiritual direction session, if appropriate and welcomed, always tailored to the individual's preferred approach, and always only with their consent.

In my own work over the years, I have increasingly found that people often come not simply with problems to be solved or experiences to be explored, but with deeper questions of meaning, fragmentation, and spiritual orientation that sit beneath both psychological symptoms and religious language. This has drawn me towards a more depth-oriented approach to spiritual direction — one that remains rooted in spiritual discernment while being informed by psychological insight, symbolic language, and the dynamics of the unconscious.

So, different spiritual directors may work in different ways according to their background and training. My approach is rooted very much in the grounded realities of life, drawing on all my wide experience and study into spirituality, and seen through the lens of my understanding of working with the human psyche and spirit as a psychologist. This way of working has emerged for me through many years of living and practising within the dialogue between psychology and spirituality, where careful attention to the human psyche and openness to the movement of the Spirit are held together rather than separated. I am particularly aware in my approach of the psychological processes that underpin the spiritual journey as we engage with our chosen path.

If you would like to explore more about the practice and ethos of spiritual direction, you may find it helpful to read more about my approach to spiritual direction.