Five Domains of the Person: A Map for Healing

Post # 3 - Soul Change Model Series

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. —Mark 12:30

One of the most common questions Christian therapists ask is: How do I actually integrate faith into therapy without forcing it, or fragmenting the person?

The Soul Change Model answers this by offering a biblical and clinical framework that views people as whole, integrated beings. Not simply minds with thoughts, but souls with stories. Wounded not just in one place, but in many.

At the heart of the Soul Change Model is what we call the Five Domains of the Person:

• Cognitive

• Emotional

• Relational

• Physical

• Spiritual

These domains give us a map—a way of seeing where healing is needed and how the Holy Spirit might be inviting restoration.

1. Cognitive Domain: Reframing Thought Through Truth

The cognitive domain includes beliefs, thoughts, and mental schemas. This is where much of traditional therapy tends to focus, particularly CBT and its variants.

As Christian therapists, we affirm the value of helping clients identify distorted thinking, unhelpful narratives, and false beliefs. But we also know that transformation doesn’t happen through logic alone. That’s why, in the Soul Change Model, we seek not only to challenge lies, but to replace them with gospel truth—truth that is not only rational, but relational.

As McMinn (1996) points out, “Christian therapy must go beyond insight to transformation through the power of biblical truth.”

Thoughts matter. But they must be rooted in something deeper than mental technique—they must be rooted in the reality of God’s Word.

2. Emotional Domain: Naming and Holding Emotion with Compassion

The emotional domain focuses on affective experience: sadness, fear, anger, joy, shame, and hope.

Many clients have been taught to suppress or fear their emotions, especially in Christian contexts where “negative” emotions may be spiritualized away or viewed as signs of weakness or sin.

But the Psalms give us a different picture. Scripture is emotionally honest. It invites us to bring our whole selves—tears, fury, despair, and praise—before a God who listens.

In Soul Change, the therapeutic space becomes a place where clients can safely experience and name emotions. As Langberg (2015) emphasizes, naming pain is part of redeeming pain. Therapists don’t rush to fix, but rather hold space with compassion, bearing witness to suffering and inviting the Spirit to meet the client in it.

3. Relational Domain: Rebuilding Connection and Trust

Wounding often happens in relationship, and so does healing.

The relational domain addresses attachment patterns, interpersonal dynamics, boundaries, and trust. When clients present with symptoms like anxiety, depression, or trauma responses, there’s often a relational story beneath the surface: abandonment, betrayal, neglect, control, or enmeshment.

As Christian therapists, we understand that we are created in and for relationship, first with God, then with others. Johnson (2010) reminds us that Christian psychology must reflect the Trinitarian nature of human identity—created for communion, marred by sin, and redeemed in relationship.

In the Soul Change Model, the therapeutic relationship becomes a sacred space where clients can experience consistent, attuned presence—perhaps for the first time. From that place, relational healing can ripple outward.

4. Physical Domain: Attending to the Body Where Trauma Lingers

The physical domain involves the body, not just in terms of medical health, but as a storehouse of emotional and spiritual experience.

We now know from trauma research that the body remembers what the mind forgets. Clients may carry chronic tension, somatic flashbacks, numbness, or dysregulation without fully understanding why. Insight alone doesn’t bring relief—because the wound is embodied.

Curt Thompson (2010) writes that “we come to know ourselves only as we are known in embodied relationship with others.” This includes paying attention to breath, posture, voice, and movement.

In Soul Change, therapists are trained to help clients tune into the body as a source of information—and as a place where the Spirit might be inviting release, grounding, and peace.

5. Spiritual Domain: Restoring Identity and Intimacy with God

Finally, and most centrally, we come to the spiritual domain. This is not a layer added on top—it’s the core from which everything flows.

The spiritual domain includes the client’s view of God, prayer life, sense of purpose, moral beliefs, shame narratives, spiritual wounds, and longing for communion with the Divine.

When clients carry distorted images of God—as distant, punitive, or disinterested—it profoundly impacts every other domain. Likewise, when spiritual trauma or church-related wounds are present, these often remain unaddressed in secular therapy settings.

The Soul Change Model makes space for this level of healing. Not by prescribing religion, but by inviting spiritual restoration. Crabb (1997) once wrote that true change happens when a person learns to see God differently—and to rest in being seen by Him.

Through prayerful presence, spiritual reflection, and Holy Spirit discernment, the therapist becomes not just a guide, but a co-counselor with God in the process of soul repair.

Healing Happens at the Intersections

These five domains are not compartments—they’re interconnected.

A client with a panic disorder may need cognitive restructuring (cognitive), grounding practices (physical), emotional validation (emotional), secure relational bonds (relational), and reassurance of God’s nearness (spiritual).

Ignoring one domain limits the healing available in the others.

The Soul Change Model encourages therapists to listen deeply across all five areas, asking:

• Where is the client hurting?

• Where is the Holy Spirit moving?

• Where is the next invitation to healing?

When we treat the whole person, we join God in His redemptive work—restoring what has been broken and reconnecting what has been fragmented.

Reflection

• Which of these domains are you most comfortable working with in your counseling practice? Which do you tend to avoid?

  
  

• Where in your own life have you experienced healing in more than one of these areas at the same time?

References

Crabb, L. (1997). Connecting: Healing for ourselves and our relationships. Word Publishing. 

Johnson, E. L. (2010). Foundations for soul care: A Christian psychology proposal. IVP

Academic. 

Langberg, D. (2015). Suffering and the heart of God: How trauma destroys and Christ

restores. New Growth Press. 

McMinn, M. R. (1996). Psychology, theology, and spirituality in Christian counseling. Tyndale

House. 

Thompson, C. (2010). Anatomy of the soul: Surprising connections between neuroscience

and spiritual practices that can transform your life and relationships. Tyndale

Momentum.