Abstract
This portfolio includes academic, clinical and research work submitted for the Practitioner’s Doctorate in Psychotherapeutic and Counselling Psychology. Initially, I will briefly describe what led me to counselling psychology. This narrative is important as it has affected my development as a Counselling Psychologist. In addition, I will illustrate the contents of the portfolio, link papers within each dossier and demonstrate the connections between the academic, clinical, research and personal development facets of my training. The research dossier contains a literature review, two qualitative pieces of research and a poster presented at the Conference of the Division of Counselling Psychology in May 2007. The literature review focused on whether spirituality and CBT are compatible. I chose this topic partly because I had a personal interest in spirituality. I practiced Hatha Yoga and mindfulness meditation which enriched my personal development. Furthermore, I was very interested in CBT. Its holistic focus appealed to me and I felt that spiritual issues could be integrated in some way with CBT. I was aware that my view was probably a controversial one as CBT is considered the most ‘scientific’ type of therapy. I decided to carry out a literature review on the compatibility of spirituality with CBT to explore the literature in this area. I then became interested in how CBT practitioners would view the integration of CBT and spirituality as I felt that their views of whether CBT and spirituality were at all compatible would be essential. Therefore, I chose to investigate clinical and counselling psychologists’ perceptions and experiences of combining spirituality and CBT using grounded theory analysis. The results from the first qualitative study were very interesting. Nevertheless, I felt that clients’ experiences needed to be also heard in order to have a more complete picture of whether and how, spiritual issues could be addressed in CBT. Consequently, the second qualitative study focused on an exploration of spiritual/religious clients’ experiences of CBT utilising grounded theory analysis.