Clarity in Psychological Healing: A Conversation with Professor Elizabeth Mancuso

January 20, 2022 | Hannah Turner BK ‘23+1

image description: an overhead shot of five people holding hands and praying.

This piece was written at the Veritas Forum 2021, an annual writing program offered by the Augustine Collective. Students from various universities work with writing coaches to write articles about virtue in the sciences or social sciences.

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Life is inherent to our being. While rich with opportunities for great love, life is also rich with the possibility of great hurt. In this life, it is natural for people to distinguish such experiences as good or bad—often honoring one and desiring to stray from the other. This is exemplified in interpersonal relationships, from those between  husband and wife to between two children at school. Society today seems to concentrate on the moments of great love but encourages passing by great hurt as quickly as possible. There is no time spent validating feelings, or addressing the why behind negative sentiments—especially for men. The field of psychology, however, recognizes the nuance in these situations while maintaining the importance of attending to problems that may arise. 

Professor Elizabeth Mancuso, who teaches Psychology at Pepperdine University, has analyzed various ways of grappling with the aforementioned problems. Primarily, Mancuso focuses on the less-studied method of religious coping—with both its positive and negative outcomes. She was most surprised by a study of divorcees who tried to address their hurt by utilizing religious coping to lead them to forgiveness. These people turned to God to help them forgive either themselves, their ex, or even God Himself. If people worked on this forgiveness at the time of the divorce and were not still practicing forgiveness a year later, then they had better outcomes. However, if people were working to forgive with regard to the same situation both then and a year later, they had worse outcomes in terms of depression, anxiety, and relationship with their ex. 

“Religious coping can be really helpful if it helps a person reach some kind of resolution. But, when a person is constantly still relying on religious coping over time it could be a sign that nothing is getting resolved,” Mancuso explained to me in a recent interview. This idea, Mancuso expounded, is not necessarily true of all situations, because some people going through a divorce might have a more difficult relationship. In this complexity, however, one can see a solution being offered through religion through a psychological lens. These everyday applications, as seen in cases such as divorce, raise the questions of why the intersection of these two areas is not studied more, and whether religious coping can be truly viable.

Focusing on the study of psychology and religion, Mancuso has been looking at these questions since before her 2008 divorce forgiveness study. Specifically, as a psychologist, Mancuso has been interested in how religious coping can help one address various issues. In order to understand how religious coping works, looking at the varying levels of spirituality that one can have is an informative starting point. Ken Pargament—a leading researcher in this field, and whom Mancuso studied under––designed a spiritual flow chart to picture these levels while incorporating religious coping. One could go from having no faith to an encounter leading to faith, followed by experiencing some sort of stressor; using religion to cope could then lead to either strengthening or falling out of faith. Mancuso also observed that, “When people are left in their natural lives, some of these things just resolve on their own through people’s encounters and life experiences. Sometimes they get worse…. ‘In the wild,’ if you look at it that way, it could go in all different directions.” If coping is needed or used, then it often has an effect on one’s mental health, both positively and negatively. This is because one might have a spiritual struggle that is affecting them negatively and tries to add positive religious coping to solve any problems arising from that struggle. 

Thus, religious coping is very different from other methods of coping—such as meditation—that a psychologist might suggest. If someone who was not religious decided to use religious coping as a final, desperate measure, without authentic faith, it most likely would lead to worse outcomes. On this question, Mancuso recalled a study of people going through a medical stressor who tried to rely on religious coping. The study found that already religious people would benefit from the coping, but those who were not religious would not benefit. Nonetheless, there is not an abundance of studies on this question. It is difficult to say that this outcome is true in all cases, but it suggests the need for authentic faith in order for religious coping to help. Mancuso commented that, “if you’re trying to use religion in a way that is not authentic to you then it is not going to give you the same outcomes if you are doing something that is genuine to you and your faith.” Instead, she said that religious coping is different because it must be “part of an ongoing faith system that is rich and complex.”

Seeing how this experience varies between people might mean that labeling religious coping as good or bad is not possible. Similar to most things, religious coping is more complicated than that binary. “From a clinical perspective,” Mancuso says, “for mental health professionals… we see that these positive religious coping mechanisms are helpful to people, but it doesn’t mean you can use them… artificially.” She gave the example that a medical professional, who knows their client, would not recommend journaling or meditation as a coping mechanism to people who need physical activity to focus their thinking. In the same way, Mancuso says a good psychologist would not recommend prayer to someone who is not seeking to be religious. 

In some cases, people who are religious might not even benefit from religious coping. When studying this, Mancuso eventually found that that was because, “when people were relying on their religion to cope, it was because they had so much to cope with.” There is overwhelming evidence that religious coping works best for religious people when adhered to over time, and so psychologists must study people over time as well. This adherence is best achieved when people address their struggles clinically in either one-on-one or group therapy. Mancuso developed an intervention program while she was in graduate school for people with spiritual struggles specifically. This program is nine sessions—once a week for nine weeks—and focuses on common issues of faith and related stigmas that often arise. Speaking of this program, Mancuso observed that “having group support, time to reflect, and read about spiritual exemplars—realizing that Mother Teresa had many dark nights of the soul—can be really helpful” for people. It is important to note that not everyone knows about, or has access to these groups or a counselor who deals with spiritual issues.

This very personalized approach that psychology often demands is clearly evident concerning religious coping and its success. Combine this with the underdeveloped field of psychology and religion and many misunderstandings result. Mancuso explained that most topical areas in psychology have a standard textbook, but there are not any for the intersection of psychology and religion. There are no central themes that people study, and instead, people look over the various research that others did in the past. This was mainly because of the strong bias in the early psychology community against religious affiliations. Now, however, there has been a big shift as “the American Psychological Association… has come to acknowledge religion and spirituality as diversity factors for humans,” notes Mancuso. This historical change is giving psychologists the opportunity to be ”competent in working with people who come from all of these different backgrounds and diversity factors,” comments Mancuso, who agrees this will help a lot in the field.

A shift in the field of psychology is good news for Mancuso, who has put a lot of effort into studying what people previously deemed as unimportant. Clearly, researchers like her have helped to elucidate the need for a new perspective. In our experiences of life, one thing that remains consistently shared is that we can not understand everything. Thus, it is important that people can understand what religious coping might mean for them. The research that has been done by people like Mancuso has made this safe space more available for those struggling across the country. Recently, Mancuso has been studying virtues such as intellectual humility, gratitude, and forgiveness more in-depth as related to both psychology and religion. In the past year, she has also turned to how well-being is affected by social media. It is clear that her work has been necessary for the field of psychology and will continue to allow more people the space to understand themselves and overcome various struggles through the intersection of psychology and religion.