Overwhelming life experiences, such as physical and sexual abuse during childhood, have the potential to obliterate internal representations of a loving God. In this book the author explores the inter-relationship between severity of childhood traumatization and mental representations of God through a comprehensive review of psychodynamic literature and quantitative research methodology. The research findings of a study with forty seven women demonstrate the complexity of this subject and illustrate how the empirical truth of quantitative findings may or may not resonate with the metaphorical truth of psychodynamic models of traumatization. The author discusses the significance of these findings for clinicians and faith communities.

The Practice of Pastoral Care has become a popular seminary textbook for courses in pastoral care and a manual for clinical pastoral education. In it, Doehring encourages counselors to view their ministry through a trifocal lens that incorporates premodern, modern, and postmodern approaches to religious and psychological knowledge. Doehring describes the basic ingredients of a caregiving relationship, shows how to use the caregiver's life experience as a source of authority, and demonstrates how to develop the skill of listening and establishing the actual relationship. This new edition elaborates on and expands the author's previous work, adding an intercultural perspective that gives more attention to religious pluralism in the pastoral care setting. It offers a road map for using a step-by-step narrative, relational, embodied approach to spiritual care that respects the unique ways people live out their values and beliefs, especially in coping with stress, loss, and violence. Readers will be able to confidently and professionally offer pastoral care and counseling to members of their congregations or other places of ministry.

Clarifies how to distinguish between healthy therapeutic relationships and ones which have become abusive.

Carrie Doehring propose an approach to pastoral counseling that focuses on taking care of ourselves and those we minister to by monitoring power dynamics and relational boundaries in our relationships. When we monitor the power struggles within us, between us, in our communities and cultures, and the ways in which we are pulled to disengagement and merger, we will be able to prevent abuse and neglect. We will also be more likely to experience empowering, empathic moments in our relationships, and use these to "get our bearings."

Taking care by monitoring the interaction of power dynamics and relational boundaries is a theological task. It is one way of seeing our potential for sin and our capacity for violence. When empowering empathic moments come, we glimpse who God is: both the immanent God whose grace shines through our uniqueness and the uniqueness of our relationships, and the transcendent God who goes far beyond who we are.

Doehring uses case studies from the fiction of John Updike, Sinclair Ross, Toni Morrison, Iris Murdoch, and Margaret Atwood to reflect on power dynamics and relational boundaries in cases of clergy sexual misconduct, racism, and the dilemmas of faith in a post-modern context.