Fallding (1979:23), too, stresses the need for criteria of spiritual well-being that are “trans-faith and trans-cultural” with Duke and Brown (1979) stressing that what may serve as a social indicator of spiritual well-being for one group may be inappropriate for another. An exam-ple of this is provided by Rosmarin (2003) who describes Jewish religious thought as suggesting that the presence of suffering may indicate high levels of spiritual well-being, conflicting with items in Ellison’s (1983) SWBS. In the Jewish faith, trust in God is related to spiritual well-being.
Finally, an awareness of the broader context of contested meaning and terminology – of a possible ongoing power struggle between secular and sacred “power knowledges” and of one’s positioning of self within this struggle through the verbal communication of research and practice – may be useful. We may believe ourselves to master language but, without critical reflection on signifiers and the socio-cultural matrix from which they emerge (White & Epston, 1990), language could rather be said to master us (Løvlie, 1992). And perhaps it does anyway with Derrida maintaining that we are “… written only as we write” (Cooper, 1989:494).