Clinical Pastoral Education Curriculum
The CPE training curriculum is designed to meet the College of Pastoral Supervision & Psychotherapy (CPSP) learning objectives and to facilitate the integration of theology and the social sciences in understanding the human experience.
Trainees are introduced to the following approaches to pastoral assessment:
- Narrative: This approach locates pastoral care at the interface of care and the human story.
- Family Systems: We assess the impact of the hospitalization upon the patient’s family. Who is it that is ill and how does this person’s illness bear upon the family and the health care decisions being made.
- Stages of Faith development: Examining the stages of faith development across the life span of the individual, exploring how the patient utilizes their religious beliefs
- Reframing: In what manner is the patient beginning to come to terms with their diagnosis and to integrate their experience of hospitalization with a view towards reengaging their life? In other words, the chaplain supports a re-envisioning of life’s possibilities.
UNIT 1:
Narrative: This approach locates pastoral care at the interface of care and the human story. In his book, At the Will of the Body, Arthur Frank writes about how sick people operate as storytellers. Topics of instruction include:
- Stories of Illness
- Above all else, know yourself. What is your story?
- Encountering the Dying Patient as a Living Human Being
- The Wounded Storyteller, Arthur Frank
- The Man in the Gray Slacks, Frederick Buechner
UNIT 2:
Family Systems: We assess the impact of the hospitalization upon the patient and their family. We encounter the patient as a person, and discover how this person’s illness influences the dynamics of the family and the health care decisions being made. Bowen family systems theory is a theory of human behavior that views the family as an emotional unit, and uses systems thinking to describe the complex interactions in the family unit.
Topics for this general introduction to family systems include:
- Thinking about Families as System
- Introduction to Family Systems Theory
- Triangulation
- The Genogram – A Family Snapshot
- Bowen Theory of Differentiation
- When Helping You is Hurting Me
UNIT 3:
Stages of Faith development: Examining the stages of faith development across the life span of the individual, exploring how the patient utilizes their religious beliefs. This is an introduction to James Fowler’s theory of six stages that people go through as their faith matures, based on the Piaget stages and Kohlberg stages.
Personality theorists to be explored include:
- Sigmund Freud
- Erik Erikson
- Carl Jung
- Karen Horney
- Erich Fromm
- Abraham Maslow
- Carl Rogers
- Victor Frankl
UNIT 4:
Reframing: In what manner is the patient beginning to come to terms with their diagnosis and to integrate their experience of hospitalization with a view towards reengaging their life? In other words, the chaplain supports a re-envisioning of life’s possibilities. In Donald Capps book, Reframing, he posits a concept of Mental Health whereby “Experience is formed, or “framed” by our perception of the events in our life. When we are able to “frame” the event in other ways we can respond to these experiences differently. Residents will be asked to explore different faith systems, both their own and others, in the group setting.