ABSTRACT
EI therapy addresses entangled lives, and sometimes these lives are entangled by religiosity. In the case to follow, Louis Homan shows how the particular entanglement of fundamentalist Christianity can be addressed by EI therapeutic principles. While some would question the relevance of an existentially oriented approach to a traditionally religious client, Dr. Homan illustrates that, with a few modications, such an approach can be supremely relevant, and not appreciably dierent from equivalent work with secular clientele. As with secular clientele, the question for the religious client is to what degree is he polarized (compulsive about, overidentied with) his debilitating issue, and how best to help him become conscious of this polarization, so that he can forge new choices and new realizations about the direction of his life. In his work with “Kevin,” Dr. Homan shows convincingly that a religious and culturally sensitive existential-integrative approach helps disentangle lives — rst, by empathizing with the position of those lives; second, by mirroring the battle lines that are posed by those lives; and third, by facilitating direct immersion in the turning points of those lives, thereby methodically expanding consciousness (or in the case of Kevin, the God image).
