Journal Article Review: Use of Prayer and Scripture in Cbt

Journal Article Review: Use of Prayer and Scripture in

Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy

Chad Ferrari

Liberty University

Summary

I chose to review that article by Siang-Yang Tan called “Use of prayer and scripture in cognitive behavior therapy.” Tan spends the first page or so setting up his paper and discusses the different waves or generations of behavior therapy. Tan mentions that the third wave of behavior therapy is “contexualistic” and includes ACT, MCBT, and DBT. He references Bishop et al, for a definition of mindfulness to further clarify his stance about the third wave therapies. The author points out that ACT and MCBT both have roots in spiritual and religious backgrounds including Christianity. Tan states that he will discuss the ethical use of Christian based prayer in CBT. The methods he uses are inner healing prayer, and the scripture or Bible. Tan has been a practicing CBT therapist for over 25 years, and during that time, he has come up with a method for using a faith based model for Christian CBT. His model includes eight key features or parts. Tan states that there is a continuum that can be formed with explicit and implicit integration at the ends as forms of integration to use Christian CBT. The rest of the article and the majority of it is spent explaining the process when used in sessions. Tan points out that even though a client may express that they want to use Christian based CBT, that in fact prayer and scripture are not used in every session. They are only used when appropriate.

The two techniques that Tan chooses to focus on are scripture and inner healing prayer. He goes on to express his seven steps to use inner healing prayer. They have been developed by him over his years of therapy, and seen the efficacy when used with the appropriate clients. Which brings me to a limitation that he mentions, inner healing prayer may not work on some of the more emotionally disturbed individuals.

The next big part of the article is used to...