The Divine Therapist: Misusing God for our Mental Health
I don’t think it’s any surprise that for the most part, when we pray, we don’t really hear back. I can’t count the number of times I’ve prayed out into the universe and been crushed by the silence that followed. When we read through scriptures full of angels and miracles and divine agents, it can be deeply disheartening to turn back to our daily lives which are noticeably angel free (presuming you don’t live a very different kind if life than I do).
Still, despite this silence, we persist in prayer. We pray because we it brings silence, because it centers us, be it helps us feel a little more in control. There’s not end to proper ways and reasons to pray, but there are also plenty of bad ones. And one of those ways is using God as your divine therapist.
There is nothing wrong with therapy. I see a therapist myself and am enrolled in a masters program to become a therapist for others in the future. My problem does not lie with therapy or with seeking out others for assistance with mental health. My problem lies in the use of the unseen as a solution to mental health. Numerous times in my life, particularly when dealing with evangelical types, I have encountered people who held the firm belief that Christians who experienced depression or anxiety were simply not faithful enough. I’ve even met those who believed grieving after the passing of a loved one seemed to point at a lack of belief in God and salvation. And most recently, I interacted with a woman at an Episcopal Church event who swore that she was deeply depressed until she turned to Jesus, in whom she found immediate relief from her depression.
If your faith truly does bring you a sense of purpose and happiness and helps you break out of a depression, then that’s awesome. Whatever works, I suppose. But I don’t buy that faith alone can solve someone’s mental health struggles, and I think a belief in the mystical healing powers of faith comes with a whole host of dangerous side effects - first among them being that those who use faith as their mental health solution will be less likely to seek out actual help from certified professionals. And that’s aside from the fact that teaching a doctrine of faith as medicine perpetuates a belief within the minds of those that struggle that they are actually broken or bad in some way, or that their faith simply isn’t strong enough. It raises the question of why your depression hasn’t been cured by faith while someone else’s has, which does little more than make your condition worse over time through an inundation of guilt and shame.
But what do I mean when I reference the “Divine Therapist”? I mean primarily three things: God as a mirror, God as a validator, and God as a personal fixer.
“God as a mirror” means the use of God as a reflection of your own psyche, and is one of the main concerns with using God as a therapist. When we speak to God, we are speaking aloud to ourselves, and there is no surefire way to ensure that whatever you get back from God isn’t just you speaking to yourself. In fact, if you ask me, all communication “from God” is just us talking to ourselves. God is not a being. God is being. There is no reason to believe that God speaks, especially not in the way we do. And there is certainly no reason to believe that God conveys information we otherwise would not have access to directly into our minds. There simply is no evidence that such things occur. So, we must assume that whatever we get “from God”, we are actually just getting from ourselves. We must be aware of this, and we must temper it.
“God as a validator” is related to “God as a mirror”. In this circumstances, we find that God affirms the things that we already think are true. Naturally, I can already imagine the responses of those who argue that the Bible (or other texts) is full of commandments from God that go against what we would actually want. In this circumstance, a voice from God telling you to do something you don’t want to do would seem to go against this validator concept. But I would say that it doesn’t. Very few of us ever arrive at a concept of God that we create for ourselves in a vacuum. In fact, I would go so far as to so that no one in the history of humanity has arrived at a concept of God in a vacuum. We are all being fed different concepts and learning how to piece them together, and the majority of us simply go with the understandings of our religious leadership. In these instances, the validation is not in the form of what you want but in the form of what you believe to be true based off what you have been taught. Either way, the God you hear is validating your already-held beliefs. You are not actually receiving outside counsel, but rather regurgitating your beliefs and feelings back to yourself.
“God as a personal fixer” is the use of God as a quick fix. Rather than go to a doctor, I will pray. Rather than pay for treatments for my disabled son, I’m going to go to a faith healer. Rather than face my troubles, I will ask God to take them away. Far too often, we use God as our easy solution to all manner of life’s problems, but the reality is that this isn’t helpful to us. We must learn to handle our situations on our own or with the help of actual, tangible community. We cannot simply defer to a divine handyman and hope that He fixes it all for us.
Now, this is not to say that I think it is impossible to listen to God. I do think it is entirely possible for us to find ourselves in moments of stillness or silence wherein we might feel ourselves being moved by something we cannot explain. I believe that in moments of reflection and contemplative prayer, it is possible to get intuitive glances into the heart of unity and compassion, but I do not believe that any of these can be conveyed through terminology such as “God told me” or “God said”. And, of course, all of this must be filtered through the spiritual communities and texts that we consider authoritative, regardless what that means for you.
God can heal and God can transform, but I believe this happens in ways far too subtle for us to ever truly understand. And more than anything else, the modus operandi of God is to change us from within rather than shaping the world outside of us. But still this does not mean we should neglect mental health assistance from trained professionals. Sometimes, your brain just will not handle serotonin correctly. That’s okay. It’s why we invented SSRIs. And sometimes you will experience great trauma. That’s okay. That’s why there are loving and caring people out there who want to talk to you to help you through it.
God is not a therapist. God is reality itself. For your mental health, you need a human ear. And for your soul, you need the silence of God.
