One of my biggest takeaways from attending Harvard Medical School's conference, Spirituality, Religion and Mental Health, this past March was a simple but powerful distinction: being spiritually aware is not the same as being spiritually competent.
As conversations about spirituality become more common in mental health, wellness, and social media, it's easy to assume that personal experience is enough to guide others. If something has been transformative in someone's own life, they may assume they're equipped to help someone else. They aren't.
Being spiritually aware means having a personal relationship with your beliefs and practices. Spiritual competency goes a step further.
It means having the education and training to integrate spirituality into work with others in an intentional, ethical, and informed way. That includes understanding diverse belief systems, recognizing how religion and spirituality can both support AND complicate mental health, and knowing when personal beliefs need to step aside.
Throughout the conference, presenters emphasized that spiritual competency isn't something someone automatically has because they're spiritual themselves. Like any area of clinical practice, it requires education, training, and ongoing skill development.
This distinction is foundational to my approach at Venus House. I believe spirituality can be a powerful tool for healing, meaning-making, and self-understanding. But being interested in a topic, exploring it personally, or finding it helpful in your own life does not make you equipped to bring it into someone else's healing.
Working with spirituality requires more than personal experience. It requires training, self-awareness, ethical consideration, and the ability to support beliefs and experiences that may look very different from your own.
Personal exploration is not the same as professional competency.