Kingsmead Centre in Singapore hosted a symposium on the Essentials of Psychospiritual Counselling on 17 August. The theme was taken from the famous French palaeontologist and spiritual writer, Fr Teilhard de Chardin SJ: “We are spiritual beings having a physical experience.” What does this have to say about our nature as human beings, especially when we seek counselling for our emotional hurts or wounds?
As counsellors, we must address not only the psychological/ emotional wounds but also the spiritual dimension, promoting holistic healing. It is important to have a good theoretical framework to guide our therapeutic intervention(s), such as the Biopsychosocial and Spiritual (BPSS) framework. Focusing only on the biopsychosocial dimension without attending to the spiritual can overlook an important resource for healing and resilience.
The symposium was well attended, with around 120 participants, including volunteer staff, packed in the Hall of Pilgrim. The keynote speakers—Dr Celine Wong, a child and adolescent psychiatrist and director of the Integrated Programme for the Management of Depressed Adolescents at the National University Health System, and Collin Wee FSC, a Lasallian brother and family therapist working for Hope House, which supports troubled youths, and myself as the in-house speaker—gave engaging presentations based on our clinical expertise and lived experiences. The lively presentations sparked numerous questions during the Q&A session.
The challenge in applying psychospiritual counselling lies in the counsellor’s spiritual competency, which depends on the willingness to acquire and apply the necessary knowledge and skills in sessions. Recent research shows that clients greatly appreciate and benefit from a psychospiritual approach. I personally feel that there is an urgent need to train more psychospiritually competent counsellors, who are prepared to draw both from their personal knowledge and experience of faith/spirituality and their training in psychospiritual counselling.
Our counsellors are interested in psychospirituality, and clients expect holistic healing of their emotional wounds. At Kingsmead Centre, we can offer a well-designed training and clinical supervision programme in psychospiritual counselling with our pool of expertise. We might also extend this programme to counsellors in the surrounding region of Sarawak, Sabah, Vietnam, Indonesia, Macau, and Hong Kong, from which some 30 participants attended the symposium online.
The evaluation showed that most participants found the symposium enjoyable and very helpful. I am grateful to the organising committee (Gaby Tan, Rebecca Loke, Geoffrey Cheok, Deirdre Loy, Isabel Leong, Rose Boon, Yeo Piah Choo, Sharon Chang, and Winnifred Lan), who worked tirelessly over the past months to ensure that things ran smoothly. Our hard work combined with God’s grace made the event a day to be remembered and cherished. A quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince comes to mind: “And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
Fr Charles Sim SJ holds a Master of Science in Family Therapy from the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College, London, where he completed his clinical training at King’s College Hospital and the Maudsley Psychiatric Hospital. He earned his doctorate in Couple and Family Therapy from the University of Minnesota, with additional specialised training at the Minuchin Family Centre, the Gottman Institute, and the Medical Family Therapy program at Rochester University. He is also the master trainer for the “Person-of-the-Therapist” (POTT) and “Marital First Responder” (MFR) workshops.