Jesus does not like the F-word btw (or so I’ve been told…).

How ever believing in God, believing we are here for a dualistic reason, is not superstitious, it is normal. I would not trust my child in the hands of a genetic determinist who does not believe in free will, which is the position most atheist doctors take.

So fuck that.

I think it’s actually very lucky that such a blatant issue came up first.

Word.

The first thing I ask when I see a therapist/psychologist/counselor/psychiatrist is “Do you have any strong religious beliefs that influence your practice?” and if the answer is “yes” I’m out of there. I was sent to a Christian counselor for treatment by my parents when I began suffering from an eating disorder, and it was incredibly awful. I still considered myself a strong Christian at the time, and I was still horrified at his incompetent style – telling me that I needed to get closer to Jesus in order to get better, for instance.

Just a year and a half ago, well after I realized I didn’t believe in God anymore, I saw a different therapist for treatment (again, for the eating disorder) and found out at the second appointment that she held some crazy New Age beliefs, including the claim that she “healed” a patient with ALS by teaching her to love her body. I wish, in retrospect, that I’d been more specific when I explained that we “weren’t compatible” to her secretary. “She’s a complete loon and shouldn’t be set loose on mentally ill people” would have been more accurate.

Anyway, consider yourself lucky to have avoided this guy.

I disagree because that’s not going to weed out all the therapists who have a faith-based agenda to push. In my experience, you have to watch out for New Age-y therapists every bit as much as you have to watch out for the fundamentalist Christians. My husband recently quit a group therapy class because the ostensibly secular therapist wanted them to read “The Secret” and kept talking about, “how you have to believe in and draw your strength from something.”

A far better way of getting the therapist you want is to ask about their take on evidence-based medicine.

I don’t care what religion or spiritual woo-woo my doctor or therapist practices at home. I don’t really even care if they have a cross up on the wall in the office.

I do care that they don’t proselytize and I very much DO care whether the treatments they’re prescribing are backed by science.

My counselor had a degree from a seminary. I told her that if she twelve-stepped me or told me to surrender my problems to a higher power that I’d leave. She told me she’d “put on her secular hat” for me. She wasn’t so bad, actually, but I think at that time in my life it was too complicated even for her to handle.

Anyway, as other have suggested, psychologist is a protected term in most countries. To call yourself a psychologist you typically need to complete 6 or more years of study (masters level) and most psychologists are registered with a professional organisation eg APA in USA.

Psychologists are typically (universally, I hope) required to be familiar with the scientific method, research methods and statistics. Psychologists are required to, where available, administer treatments with established reliability and validity. It is considered unethical not to.

A counselor is not a psychologist. Counselors are typically trained to administer a certain therapy or type of therapy. They typically do not have the same scientific training that psychologists do. Counselors with degrees in the area should, however, also be administering evidence based therapies. If you elect to hire the services of a counselor (or any medical professional for that matter), you should check their credentials and enquire about what sort of approaches they use (most will cite something like cognitive-behaviour therapy).

Don’t psychologists have to read Freud. He had some strong opinions on religion and psychology.

Yes, much like how physicists have to understand Newton even though he turned out to be completely wrong.

The dust hasn’t entirely settled on this, but it turned out that Freudian psychoanalysis, which Freud believed would fill the important psychological roles that the religions of the past played, was just another quasi-religion in disguise. In retrospect, that should have been obvious at the time.

It’s the nature of pioneers that they are inevitably doomed to be wrong in some details. But we still recognise them for what they achieved, and in that respect, Freud was one of the greats.