Spiritual Struggles and Psychological Distress among Urban Muslims: An Integrative Conceptual Model of Religious Coping, Attachment to God, and Self-Compassion
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24235/matsnawi.v1i1.631Keywords:
spiritual struggles, religious coping, attachment to God, self-compassion, urban MuslimAbstract
Modern urban life exposes Muslim individuals to multiple structural and symbolic pressures, including work competition, social mobility, economic uncertainty, digital visibility, public performances of piety, and repeated moral evaluation. Within this ecology of stress, religious experience does not function only as a source of meaning and resilience, but may also become a field of inner conflict expressed through spiritual struggles, such as tension in one’s relationship with God, moral conflict, religious doubt, interpersonal conflict within religious communities, and crisis of meaning. This paper employs an integrative conceptual review to synthesise key literature on spiritual struggles, religious coping, attachment to God, self-compassion, and psychological distress. Based on this synthesis, it proposes a conceptual model in which spiritual struggles are associated with psychological distress both directly and indirectly through negative religious coping. Attachment to God is positioned as a relational factor that shapes appraisal, emotional regulation, and coping tendencies, while self-compassion is proposed as a protective factor that may weaken the impact of moral struggle on distress. The paper formulates testable hypotheses for future empirical studies, particularly through structural equation modelling, and offers methodological recommendations for instrument adaptation in urban Muslim contexts. It also discusses preliminary clinical implications for religion-sensitive psychotherapy, especially the need to distinguish moral struggle from scrupulosity and to avoid reducing distress either to a lack of faith or to purely clinical symptoms. This framework helps move the psychology of religion beyond the general claim that “religion protects” towards a more precise understanding of the conditions under which religious experience may become either restorative or distressing.
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