Religious and spiritual issues: Family therapy approaches with military families coping with deployment

Abstract: Exploring religious and spiritual issues in family therapy has become more commonplace over the past decade (Walsh, Spiritual resources in family therapy, 2009), but understanding how religion and spirituality evolve within military families is unclear. Further, the stressors that family members face in the midst of a deployment are paramount, for which many individuals use a variety of coping skills. In this paper we explore these links further by reviewing the scant literature focused on military families and religious and spiritual coping. This literature review is followed by a description of strategies to understand family members’ religious and spiritual lives related to family functioning and military deployment. Finally, strategies to enhance family functioning through both an integration of secular, religious, and spiritual pathways in a family therapy setting are discussed.