When God is Your Therapist

Sometimes the media does get it.

The NYT recently ran a guest editorial about how God functions in therapeutic ways within a church, specifically evangelical churches. The writer found that preachers tend to use techniques that mirror secular therapy. The full article can be found here: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/14/opinion/sunday/luhrmann-when-god-is-your-thera...

This side steps the whole world of pastoral counseling and spiritual direction. The first employees secular techniques within a religious context, and the second is a strange mixture of therapy and spiritual guidance.

>2 nathanielcampbell:: Did it ever occur to the NYT to consider that maybe what's going on is that secular therapy is borrowing time-honored techniques from spiritual counseling?

In my family therapy class I had to do a presentation on Narrative Therapy and started by saying it was basically a technique imported from the early church, and passed down over the centuries. (The point of narrative therapy is to tell the story, then find a way to reframe it, so you understand your life in new, and healthier ways.) I likened it to testimonies often given in churches, where people tell their stories, recount God's intervention, and then tell how their lives have changed.

I happen to be reading T. M. Luhrmann's book When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship With God.

She seems unaware of the long heritage of mysticism in the Catholic faith, which models the type of prayer described in the article and in her book.

So after 20 years of faith/therapy I shouldn't have serious mental health problems. Interesting hypothesis...

Define serious mental health issues.

There is a range. Mental illness is on one end of the spectrum. Schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, etc, need more than just therapy and/or faith. On the other end there are a myriad of minor disorders, which can easily be treated over time with therapy and/or appropriate faith practices.

>6 Arctic-Stranger:: "On the other end there are a myriad of minor disorders"

Which past generations usually called, "the human condition".

I don't actually know what my diagnosis is (by chance I have a meeting tomorrow to discuss it), but we're talking illness end of the spectrum.

I'd definitely make a distinction between therapy and faith. My therapist works from a purely secular perspective and I'm meeting up with a trusted Christian friend to pray over the stuff that comes up. Ideally I'd be able to get a therapist who could relate to my spiritual life, but not on the NHS. The difference in approach is mainly that the therapist sees benefit in just exposing faulty and damaged thinking, while my faith tells me I need to take those problems to God to be dealt with. Therapy only gets me half way there.

And of course, therapy is only part of the solution. I respond very well to drugs fortunately.

So do I;)

But if you dont know what is wrong, how do you know you are taking the right medicine?

>4 2wonderY: I agree, 2wonderY. The author seems unaware of much of the practice of spiritual direction within the Catholic Church, and probably elements of the Orthodox and higher Anglican Churches too.

>5 eclecticdodo:-8 I took a break from Sudan 20-odd years ago because I was completely burnt out and suffering to some degree from post-traumatic stress. I spent two years working each week separately with a psychotherapist and a spiritual director while doing my MA in Spirituality (which also included studying spiritual direction). Both were from the Catholic tradition. They knew each other quite well and, while for professional reasons they probably didn't discuss my case, they at least knew each other's methods and I kept them both informed, so they complemented each other. I found this combination of therapy and spiritual direction very useful, and it certainly helped me to get my act together and get back to work.

When I saw parishioners who presented psychological issues, I always asked if they were seeing a therapist, and if so, tried to make sure what we did complimented. In a few cases I could work with the therapist, but in most we just discussed what they did in therapy, and then took it to a different level.

In Susan Howatch's Church of England series Glamorous Powers etc, I was often struck how much the spiritual direction that the clergymen struggling with emotional issues were undergoing resembled psychotherapy. It was also interesting that later books showed these same clergymen often still struggling with much the same issues decades later.....

I get it, when

"...the church implicitly invited people to treat God like an actual therapist. In many evangelical churches, prayer is understood as a back-and-forth conversation with God — a daydream in which you talk with a wise, good, fatherly friend. Indeed, when congregants talk about their relationship with God, they often sound as if they think of God as some benign, complacent therapist who will listen to their concerns and help them to handle them..."

there is mental health. Obviously. Of course, many children have an invisible friend who they have conversations with when, ah, they are three or four.......

I find the intersection here very interesting, and prone to a lot of confusion, like:

1. Religious people who can't "faith, hope and love" themselves out of depression, and that adds to their sense of despair and failure.
2. Religious people with pre-modern conceptions of mental health—born of hostility to secular thinking—and berate those around them who can't "snap out of it," etc.
3. Non-religious people who underrate or even disparage the mental-health tools available to many believers in their faith.
4. Non-religious people who reduce faith-based approaches to unskilled psychological counseling.

etc.

>9 quicksiva: I'm presuming they do have a diagnosis for me, I just haven't been told what it is yet.
Besides, the meds treat the symptoms not the cause. The ones I'm on are used for a whole variety of conditions.

As someone who has faced depression since I was a teenager, I can relate to the pain caused by the "Just snap out of it". I can't express my relief when I learned (and finally accepted) that it is a medical condition and not a weakness.

I suppose when I was younger I could have sought spiritual or mental health counseling, but didn't because of the shame and stigma. Even today, I think a good therapist could help but it's too expensive even with medical insurance. I cope with a combination of my family doctor, medication, faith and philosophy. Again, just knowing it's a medical condition helps immensely.

IMO, the best combination would be therapy and a spiritual adviser. The therapist can deal with the medical issue. The spiritual adviser can help with getting through what you're going through. The two can be complementary.