ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on God image because it aligns closer to the individual’s relational experience with the divine. It explains counseling interventions that help men utilize their relationship with God as a strength to overcome challenges or to alleviate distress from a conflictual relationship with God. Understanding the points of integration provide a therapeutic target to offer more tailored interventions. Men’s difficulty with putting words to their relationship with the divine mirrors the challenge of measuring the construct in scientific studies with typical psychological tools. The chapter provides direction on how the terms that are most closely associated with a relationship with God and can be clinically relevant with men may be assessed and integrated into a clinical conceptualization. It presents two typical pathways in treatment: strength-based and remedial approaches. The strength-based approach draws from similar approaches with men and is applied specifically to their relationship with God.
