Papers by Carrie Doehring
Journal of pastoral theology, Mar 3, 2024
In Building Resilient Communities Jan Holton explores how Christian and indigenous practices and ... more In Building Resilient Communities Jan Holton explores how Christian and indigenous practices and traditions of the Dinka community of Sudan have made the young Dinka men (the Lost Boys of Sudan) resilient, helping them “not only survive the atrocities of war but learn to thrive amidst adversity” (p. 2). She develops a thick description of their experiences, using psychological, theological, and cultural lenses to reflect upon her interviews in Sudan and at the Kakuma Refugee Camp, 50 kilometers south of Sudanese border in Kenya, where 75% of the 80,000 refugees are Sudanese. Using Kleinman’s injunction to understand illness contextually, she steps into the cultural and spiritual world of these Lost Boys. She wants to understand how they make sense of and cope with adversity and atrocity, as they flee from their homes, travel vast distances, survive in refugee camps, and settle in the United States. Using both communal contextual and intercultural approaches to understanding the ways they practice pastoral care, she highlights how their “startling concept of community . . . reflects their sense of deeply ingrained obligation toward the other” (p. 2). As she listens to their stories of how they care for each other, three themes emerge for her.
Reflective Practice: Formation and Supervision in Ministry, 2011
Pastoral Psychology, Apr 11, 2016
Moral stress arising from student debt is defined here as a psycho-spiritual stress response to t... more Moral stress arising from student debt is defined here as a psycho-spiritual stress response to the North American dream of achievement through individual hard work, which implicitly blames students for educational debt, exacerbating shame about aspects of their identity (their race, social class, gender, sexual orientation). A critical correlational method brings psychological research on moral stress, moral emotions, and religious struggles into dialogue with pastoral theologies of intersectionality and lived theologies of the North American dream in order to construct a compassion-based relational process of theological reflexivity fostering spiritually integrated financial resilience among students, staff, faculty, trustees, and denominational partners at theological schools.
Pastoral Psychology, May 16, 2017
Many theological students are in over their heads with student debt, as Association of Theologica... more Many theological students are in over their heads with student debt, as Association of Theological Schools surveys of graduates attest. The phobia-like nature of financial anxiety makes people ignore their financial stress, which is now the top stressor in the United States. Robert Kegan’s In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life is used to understand the financial anxiety generated by the ‘hidden curriculum’ of both our neoliberal market society and the North American academic dream that promises academic and financial success through hard work. In an innovative program at Iliff School of Theology, funded by a Lilly Economic Challenges Facing Future Ministers (ECFFM) grant, selected students in a self-care course used compassion-based spiritual practices to become more aware of their financial stress and avoidant coping in the hopes of facilitating more integrated, complex theologies of financial stress grounded in embodied and relational goodness. These students continued this theologically reflexive learning process in courses on financial literacy, leadership, and fundraising (initially for their own scholarships). At the end of their academic year, they demonstrated decreased guilt and shame and increased self-compassion about their student debt along with increased confidence and ability to successfully engage in scholarship fundraising activities.
American Psychological Association eBooks, 2013
Journal of Psychology and Theology, Mar 1, 2003
Drawing on psychological, theological, and cultural studies on suffering, Carrie Doehring encoura... more Drawing on psychological, theological, and cultural studies on suffering, Carrie Doehring encourages counselors to view their ministry through trifocal lenses and include approaches that are premodern (apprehending God through religious rituals), modern (consulting rational and empirical sources), and postmodern (acknowledging the contextual nature of knowledge). Utilizing
Pastoral Psychology, Dec 19, 2018
Pastoral Psychology, Apr 26, 2018
What is empathy, and why is it essential to intercultural spiritual care? I posit that intercultu... more What is empathy, and why is it essential to intercultural spiritual care? I posit that intercultural spiritual care requires theological empathy-the reflexive capacity to imagine how another's emotions generate a lived theology or orienting system that 'makes sense' given their family and cultural contexts. Can theological empathy be taught in distance learning? If so, how? What kind of outcome measures do we need to assess clinical and theological empathy in religious leaders and chaplains? I explore these questions by first drawing upon psychological research on empathy. I describe the shifting role of empathy within the goals of pastoral and spiritual care. I elaborate a definition of intercultural, spiritually oriented theological empathy that includes theological literacy and reflexivity and the use of spiritual practices in emotional regulation. I describe and illustrate how distance learning offers unique opportunities for modeling and assessing intercultural empathic skills in spiritual care.
American Psychological Association eBooks, 2022
Pastoral Psychology, Dec 19, 2018
How can body-centered spiritual practices help those experiencing traumatic grief? Research on tr... more How can body-centered spiritual practices help those experiencing traumatic grief? Research on trauma recovery using Porges's polyvagal theory demonstrates the central role of bodycentered practices in helping survivors experience safety before they can search for meanings. Research on religious coping and trauma emphasizes the search for meanings but does not pay as much attention to the role of spiritual practices. This article argues that spiritual practices revealing compassion and benevolence in embodied, relational, and transcendent ways help people in their search for meanings that are flexible, integrated, and complex enough to bear the weight of traumatic grief. The author illustrates this by describing the role of a spiritual practice in her grieving the death by suicide of her 27-year-old son. Listening to sacred choral music evoked grief and an embodied sense of being held within a relational web of love, which became a safe space to experience lament and religious struggles arising from her religiously multiple identity. The conclusion describes how intercultural, spiritually oriented care can help people find intrinsically meaningful body-aware spiritual practices that compassionately energize a collaborative search for meanings amidst traumatic grief.
Pastoral Psychology, Jan 18, 2013
This paper describes an online course on self care based on current research on clergy stress by ... more This paper describes an online course on self care based on current research on clergy stress by Francis et al. (Pastoral Sciences/Sciences Pastorales 24(2):101-120, 2005), motivation by Miller and Rollnick (2012), self compassion by Barnard and Curry (Pastoral Psychology 61(2):149-163, 2012), will power by Baumeister and Tierney (2011), and habits by Duhigg (2012). This practical theological learning experience connects body and spirit by integrating an authentic spirituality into one's daily experiences of coping with stress. Students shared Google document journals about implementing spiritual practices and a stress-relieving habit. Self reflection and peer support fostered a practical theological process of change in their lived theology of values, beliefs, and spiritual practices. Espoused values and beliefs were incorporated into spiritual and self care practices fostering compassion. This lived theology of compassion revealed and counteracted embedded values and beliefs, notably about God's judgment. Keywords Clergy. Burnout. Stress. Self care. Life values. Spiritual practices. Stress-relieving habits Ministry is a stressful vocation. Clergy are often first responders to crises experienced by people and families in their congregations and communities. These pastoral emergencies come on top of exacting weekly tasks of preparing sermons, planning and leading worship, and providing administrative, organizational, and educational leadership. Clergy are expected to be competent in a diverse range of skills and knowledge sets: as preachers, liturgists, educators, administrators, and pastoral caregivers. They are responsible for differentiating among these roles as well as managing boundaries, often in nebulous situations where social and professional roles blur. The high visibility of being religious leaders amplifies these distinctive occupational stresses. Clergy and their families live in a fishbowl. They are expected to be spiritually and emotionally healthy: always available and ready to serve the spiritual needs of their congregants. It's no wonder that ministry is emotionally exhausting, as recent research
Pastoral Psychology, May 19, 2018
How can spiritual care help veterans struggling with military moral injury? An evidence-based, in... more How can spiritual care help veterans struggling with military moral injury? An evidence-based, intercultural approach to spiritual care is proposed. Evidence-based care uses research on military moral injury and religious and spiritual struggles to understand when religious and spiritual practices, beliefs, and values are helping or harming veterans. Intercultural spiritual care recognizes the complex, distinctive ways veterans' values, beliefs, coping, and spiritual practices are shaped by interacting cultural systems, especially military training and cultures. Pastoral theologian Larry Graham's (Sacred Spaces: The E-Journal of the American Association of Pastoral Counselors 5, 146-171, 2017) writing on moral injury and lamentation is used to develop two spiritual care strategies: sharing anguish and interrogating suffering. Spiritual care begins with lamenting the shared anguish of moral injury using intrinsically meaningful spiritual practices to help veterans compassionately accept the emotions arising from moral injury so intensely felt in their bodies. The second strategy is sharing the lament of interrogating suffering through exploring values, beliefs, and coping arising from moral injury. A literary case study of a young female veteran based on Cara Hoffman's (2014) novel Be Safe, I Love You illustrates this evidence-based intercultural approach to spiritual care of military moral injury.
Claremont Press eBooks, Nov 15, 2019
The Journal of pastoral care, Mar 1, 1992
Proposes that feminist pastoral counseling brings into focus the patriarchal context which condit... more Proposes that feminist pastoral counseling brings into focus the patriarchal context which conditions much of life, including a great deal of traditional psychotherapeutic theory. Claims that empowerment and liberation ought to be the goals of pastoral counseling; and that the model of pastoral counseling proposed by Merle Jordan fits well a feminist perspective, one which treats seriously the unconscious dimensions of patriarchy—a patriarchy which has led to the violation of the sacred.
Pastoral Psychology, Apr 16, 2015
Resilience is an outcome of caregiving relationships that help people spiritually integrate moral... more Resilience is an outcome of caregiving relationships that help people spiritually integrate moral stress. Moral stress arises from lived theologies and spiritual orienting systems-patterns of values, beliefs, and ways of coping energized by shame, guilt, fear of causing harm, or self-disgust (some of the so-called negative moral emotions that cut people off from social support). Spiritual care compassionately brings to light these life-limiting lived theologies of shame and fear shaped by intersecting social systems of oppression like sexism, classism, and racism. Spiritual care helps people co-create intentional theologies that draw upon goodness, compassion, and love-moral emotions that connect them to the web of life. This interdisciplinary approach to moral stress draws upon the living stories of moral stress and resilience by feminist theologians Bonnie Miller-McLemore and Valerie Saiving.
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Papers by Carrie Doehring