Embracing The Couch: Therapy as a spiritual practice. (P.1)

Four ways therapy can be the most significant investment in your relationship with God.

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I will never forget crossing the parking lot to see a therapist for the first time.

It was Monday, November 18, 2019, and I was unraveling emotionally. At the time, I didn’t even understand why. All I knew was that the ways I had always coped, the way I had learned to function, weren’t working any longer. And the fact that I had been crying uncontrollably during a Disney movie a few night’s prior was sobering proof of this. So I can’t say I was excited to be there. But I was certain I needed to be. Yet, despite my certainty, I was sad, confused, and scared as I crossed that parking lot and took a seat on the couch for what would be the first of 139 sessions over four years.

Now, based on how much I was struggling emotionally, you may wonder why I waited so long to get help. And that’s a fair question. I have always been an advocate for therapy. There is a long history of mental illness within my own family, so therapy has been a regular part of my life through them. I also have many friends who have benefited greatly from their own experience in therapy. Furthermore, one of my best friends is a clinical psychologist. So I never intentionally avoided therapy. I was just entirely unaware that I needed it. I had suppressed a lifetime of grief so much that I genuinely thought I was fine…until it became obvious that I was not.

At this point, I can’t say whether or not I waited too long. All I can say is that I’m so thankful I went when I did because it changed almost everything for me.

As I reflect on my experience being in therapy, I can’t say I’m surprised at the impact it’s had on me emotionally. I had high hopes that it would help me work through my own wounds. In fact, had I not been confident it would be helpful, I never would have committed to it. So the fact that I have become more emotionally healthy doesn’t surprise me.

What I was not prepared for was the depth to which therapy would transform my relationship with God. I had no idea that therapy would be one of the most significant means by which God would meet my longing for deeper intimacy with Him. In short, it became an essential spiritual practice in my life because it opened up my prayer life in a way I had never experienced before.

So here’s what I want to do: I want to share four ways therapy proved to be such a significant investment in my relationship with God. And in doing so, I want to suggest that you consider if it might just be something God is inviting you to as well. I know how scary and humbling the idea of stepping into the therapeutic relationship can be.

So don’t stop reading.

Take a few breaths.

Know that God is never trying to rush us to places we aren’t ready to go.

And keep an open mind as you read.

Here are four ways therapy became a spiritual practice that opened up my prayer life:

ONE. Therapy welcomes you out of hiding.

Since chapter 3 of the Genesis story, humanity has been hiding. We hide from God, from one another, even from ourselves. And we hide because we live with such a felt sense of shame. We feel as though our only option is to hide. The act of hiding isolates us, but it also feels like it protects us.

The problem is, it doesn’t. Hiding hinders our relationship with God, others, and ourselves. It also does nothing to actually solve the problem of our shame. So we think we’re protecting ourselves, but in truth, hiding only feeds and further empowers our shame. As is often the case, the solution is counterintuitive. Healing lies in the very decision that shame discourages. Shame says, “If anyone really knew you - if they knew your thoughts and feelings, if they knew the things you’ve done and the things that have been done to you - they will reject you. So the safest thing you can do is hide.” But shame is a liar.

The truth is, shame knows that if it’s dragged out of hiding and into the light, it loses all its power. We see this in the Genesis story.

Adam and Eve chose to ignore God’s protective authority in their lives. They did the one thing He said not to do (Genesis 3:6). The immediate consequence was shame. As a result of that shame, they immediately covered their nakedness to hide from one another (Genesis 3:7). Then they heard God walking in the garden, and they chose to hide from Him (Genesis 3:8). God’s response to their hiding is critical. He called out, asking, “Where are you?” God was calling them out of hiding. He knew that hiding wouldn’t solve anything; it would only make matters worse.

This is the very invitation afforded to us by therapy.

We sit with another person who isn’t there to judge or condemn. Instead, their primary responsibility is to be an empathetic presence that welcomes us out of hiding. Learning to live openly with my therapist has helped me learn to better live openly with God, myself, and my community.

TWO. Therapy invites you to explore your inner world.

In Luke 6:45, Jesus says, “A good person produces good out of the good stored up in his heart. An evil person produces evil out of the evil stored up in his heart, for his mouth speaks from the overflow of the heart.” These verses are about more than where our speech comes from. The point is, everything that comes out of us comes from within. Which means we have to learn to be students of our own inner world.

The problem is, very few of us are taught to do so. Instead, it’s our outer world that is coached and criticized from earliest years onward. We are taught what to say and not to say. We are taught what to do and what not to do. We’re rarely taught to reflect on where any of this stems from. We’re not taught to tend to our hearts. But before anything else, Jesus cares about your heart. Because everything else about you flows from it. This means we have to be taught to tend to our hearts.

This is exactly what therapy teaches us to do. I swear that 90% of my experience in therapy was being asked "How do you feel about that?” or “How does that feel?” Now, obviously, that’s overly simplistic, but there’s some truth to it. Each week, I was being taught to explore my thinking and feelings. I was learning to tend to my heart.

By God’s grace, this immediately began to bleed into the way I prayed. Rather than only dumping my needs on God each morning, I began to explore my inner world with Him.

THREE. Therapy reveals hidden parts of your heart.

I remember the first question my therapist asked me. I sat down on the couch, and she asked why I had come to therapy. I said, “I’m here to explore if there’s a point at which mental resilience becomes emotional avoidance.” She said, “Okay, that’s a good question,” and asked me to tell her a bit about my own story. So I started to unpack the bullet points of my first few years of life.

I said, “My biological dad was unfaithful to my mom and then left us to build a new life with this other woman. So we moved to Northern California to be closer to my grandfather. But then he died by suicide by the time I was five.” As I paused to take a breath, she said, “That’s a lot.” To be honest, that comment didn’t particularly register for me, and I kept going.

I continued, “I got an ear infection around that same time. My mom took me to the ER to get looked at. She hit it off with the ER doctor, and they ended up getting married. He adopted my brother and me. He was a great dad, but we were also a blended family with plenty of mental illness at play.” I paused to take another breath, and she said, “That’s a lot.” Again, I brushed the comment aside and pushed ahead.

I explained that my new dad joined the Air Force, and we had to leave everyone we knew to move to South Dakota, then Virginia, and then back to South Dakota, all before high school. She interrupted one more time and said again, “That’s a lot.”

Finally, something clicked for me. For the first time in my life, I realized that I had been through a lot. See, I had never thought of my story as one experience. I just thought of these as separate events isolated from one another. And for some reason, that made them feel like they “weren’t that big of a deal.” But the truth was, I had a sea of grief inside of me of which I was entirely unaware. But from that first session on, therapy helped expose it.

Psalm 139:23 says, “Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my concerns.” Therapy became a primary way God answered this prayer. It also taught me to talk to God about the thoughts and feelings that existed inside of me apart from my awareness. Learning to pray like this further exposed even more inside of me that sat hidden from my awareness.

FOUR. Therapy teaches you to process your experience.

Early on in therapy, I learned that I moved through loss in my life the same way I moved through a book. When a chapter ended, I simply turned the page. I didn’t know how to grieve the loss. I didn’t know how to take stock of an experience I’d had and, more specifically, the way the experience impacted me. Let me give you one of many examples.

Two weeks before I left for college, I came home for a break in the middle of my double shift ripping tickets at the movie theater where I worked. When I walked in the door, my mom asked me to come sit down in the living room with her and my dad. This was never a good sign.

I sat down, and she informed me that my biological dad had written me a letter. When she first said his name, I had to ask who she was even talking about because it had been so long. 15 years, to be exact.

I remember opening the letter. It was written on a single sheet of yellow legal paper. It wasn’t long. It basically expressed a mediocre apology for never being part of my life and a hope that we could reconnect. The emotion that I remember feeling was anger. But I didn’t even sit with it long enough to realize that, in truth, I was really sad. I just turned the page. I didn’t write him back. After a few days, I didn’t even really think about it. I also didn’t talk about it. I just turned the page.

To be honest, I was in therapy for over a year before I even started talking to my therapist about all this. But the more she invited me to process the experience, the more I started to see how profoundly I’d been shaped by it all. This, in turn, led me to process it all with God as well.

Psalm 62:8 says, “Trust in him at all times, you people; pour out your hearts before him. God is our refuge.” Until I started therapy, I never really learned how to “pour out my heart” to God because I was so disconnected from it. When you’re too quick to “turn the page” on an experience, you ignore its effect on your life. But you can ignore something and still be impacted by it. In order for our souls to metabolize the experiences of our lives, we have to learn to process them with God. Apart from therapy, I’m not sure I would have learned how.

The Path To Relationship With God.

So here’s the thing…

I believe prayer is the path to a relationship with God. Things like attending church, living in community, developing healthy doctrine, and serving those around you are all essential parts of the life of faith. But you can do all those things and more and never have a relationship with God. This is why prayer is essential.

Communication is the way we build relationships. We listen and we express. That’s communication. And there is always a direct connection between the quality of our communication with another and the quality of our relationship with them. The same is true of God. Yet, often we never move beyond petition in our prayer lives. We treat God like some sort of cosmic waiter to whom we present all we want and need for the day. And what God intended to be a fraction of prayer has often become the sum.

This is why therapy was such a significant investment in my relationship with God. It opened me up to a fuller understanding of my experience and taught me to talk to Him about it.

This is getting a little long. I’ll share some more next week about some practical steps I took to position therapy as a spiritual practice in my life. For now, I want to invite you to reflect on your own relationship with God. Do you live in the open with Him? Do you explore your inner world with Him? Are you becoming more aware of the hidden parts of your heart with Him? Are you processing your full experience of life with Him?

If not, I wonder if therapy might be a next step for you. I’m confident it can lead to greater emotional health. But it also may just result in a deeper relationship with God than you’ve thought possible.