Addressing patients’ relationships with god in psychotherapy: Exploring psychodynamic therapy, depressive symptoms, and attachment to God.

Abstract

One’s perceived relationship with God can be understood as an attachment or object relation, and this relationship can have clinical relevance, such as for depressive conditions. We investigated changes in attachment to God among participants in a 3-month inpatient psychodynamic therapy program. We then linked changes in the God relation to changes in depressive symptoms (N = 56). Attachment behavior to God generally increased in the treatment period and remained relatively stable with only slight decreases at the 1-year follow-up (FU). Higher initial levels of attachment behavior to God were linked to higher baseline levels of depressive symptoms. Additionally, increases in attachment behavior to God predicted increases in depressive symptoms during the first phase of therapy and then reductions in depressive symptoms during the last period of treatment—at the end of treatment, depression symptoms had decreased considerably from baseline. Our findings suggest that the God relation can be addressed in terms of existing theories about human relations and knowledge about therapeutic processes. The trained therapist can potentially offer individuals suffering from pathological conditions that incorporate patients’ representations of God.