TPC Journal-Vol 9 Issue 3-FULL

The Professional Counselor | Volume 9, Issue 3 181 programming. Dempsey et al. suggested the following steps can make these efforts successful: awareness, assessment, seeking approval, church health fairs, mental health training, joining the community, conducting research, and inviting wisdom. Furthermore, many historically Black fraternities and sororities have created initiatives strategically targeted to increase education and awareness around Black men’s mental health. As these organizations often have significant ties to local churches, they serve as a great partner for counselors and professional organizations. It is vital that mental health professionals approach collaborations as mutually beneficial and growth- fostering (Jordan, 2010). That is, counselors need to be careful not to consider themselves experts, but to invite wisdom from church leaders (Dempsey et al., 2016). Participants in our study repeatedly talked about their pastors and the counseling they received from their church leaders. Although counselors are clinically trained through graduate courses and continuing education, they might consider seeking training from pastors on building rapport and relationships with African Americans. It is important to note that although licensed counselors have some commonalities in their training (e.g., CACREP standards) and must have graduate degrees, training and educational experiences among pastors vary greatly. Therefore, when forming collaborations, counselors should be aware that pastors can have varying levels of knowledge and experience related to mental health and counseling skills. Assessment of Religious Coping The Association for Spiritual, Ethical and Religious Values in Counseling competencies challenge counselors to consider religion and spirituality in their assessment procedures (Cashwell & Watts, 2010). Although religion and spirituality can be assessed informally or qualitatively through intake forms, the Brief RCOPE (Pargament et al., 2011; Pargament et al., 1998) provides counselors with a structured, quantitative scale. Our participants were more hesitant to volunteer information about harmful religious coping practices. However, this lack of admission did not mean they were not utilizing maladaptive practices. Researchers have noted the consequences of maladaptive religious coping (Pargament et al., 2011) on health. These considerations are especially important for African Americans as they are disproportionately represented in many physical illnesses (Singh et al., 2017). In using the Brief RCOPE scale, counselors can intercept religion as a barrier to help-seeking behaviors and in turn might promote positive religious coping strategies and significantly decrease delays in receiving mental health treatment as a result of negative religious coping (Chatters et al., 2008). Furthermore, the Brief RCOPE can serve as an important conversation starter for counselors to engage their clients about their religious coping patterns. Recommendations for Future Research There are many opportunities to increase our understanding of this phenomenon through future empirical investigations. Inquiries can be both qualitative and quantitative. Future researchers could replicate our qualitative study with an added emphasis on recruiting men to participate. African American men seek help less often than African American women (Sue & Sue, 2016). Therefore, future research studies should focus on the narratives of African American men in order to inform culturally relevant practices to recruit and retain this population for counseling services. Flynn et al. (2019) recommended that counseling researchers also consider diverse data types in addition to traditional interviews and focus groups. For example, researchers could ask participants to include songs that help articulate religious coping patterns; then, song lyrics could be analyzed for themes as well. Limitations It is important to consider our findings within the limitations of the study. First, all of the participants were women. Thus, it is unclear how gender could have impacted our results and how