Jesus + Therapy

How to become three-dimensional followers of God

Photo by Nik Shuliahin 💛💙 on Unsplash

(A ten-minute read.)

I distinctly remember a conversation I had with a colleague during my first year of ministry, which was nearly 20 years ago (I know: I don’t look that old). This colleague and I had gone to college together and, despite not being from New England, he amazingly landed a position in a neighboring “district” of mine in Vermont.

During that one year we were pastoral neighbors, we’d get together to encourage each other, meeting at a halfway point at various eating establishments. And I’ll never forget what he told me one time as he was explaining some of the challenges he faced in his church.

“Seriously, Shawn,” he said, shaking his head, “everyone in my church needs therapy.”

I sort of chuckled a little as he said it, figuring he was just being funny. But then I quickly realized he wasn’t.

To be honest, I wasn’t sure what to make of his assessment. I certainly wasn’t tuned in to any sort of therapeutic thinking at the time, believing all a congregation needed was a correct understanding of God’s love in order to reach its full potential.

But, for some reason, his reflections really stuck with me—to the point where, nearly two decades later, even though I didn’t really even know anyone from his congregation, I now fully agree with him.

I don’t say this because his congregation was so dysfunctional—though I’m certain it was.

I say this for one simple reason: I believe everyone—everyone in his congregation, everyone in my congregation, everyone in every congregation, synagogue, mosque, or atheistic society—needs therapy.

We are, after all (going back to last week), not simply thinking things. We are also emotional things who have been the recipients of behaviors and actions that have seriously impacted the way we relate to others—behaviors and actions which, if unprocessed and not offloaded, always affect the way we treat others (almost always without realizing it).

More than thinking things

Over the last few years, I’ve become increasingly convinced that what many religious communities need is not more biblical knowledge, but more emotional knowledge.

This is one of the great challenges: it seems to me that many religious communities, and especially Christian communities of which I’m a part, are creating one-dimensional disciples—people who can rattle off a long string of Bible verses and theological arguments, but who have significant emotional and relational deficits.

We can thus convince people about the correctness of a particular idea in the Bible, and teach them how to share that with others—but if they don’t know how to relate to themselves or others in healthy ways, we’re probably just creating religious addicts.

Indeed, I encounter story after story, person after person, who, from all appearances, has a really firm theoretical grasp of God’s love, and yet nevertheless is significantly emotionally stunted.

I’ve heard many individuals rattle off verse after verse from the Bible and wax eloquent about the intricacies of theological minutiae. They are even, from what I’ve gleaned, spot on when it comes to the correct principles of the gospel (so far as I understand them), reeling them off with great conviction and clarity: we are not saved by what we do, they will resolutely affirm, but justified solely on the basis of what Christ has done.

And, just as significantly, they fully affirm, in theory, that we should treat others with unconditional love and acceptance.

And yet, you know what? There are many people like this who check all the religious and theological boxes, and yet are really challenging to be around because they’re incredibly impatient, judgmental, and self-righteous—failing to demonstrate the fruit of the Spirit Paul mentions in Galatians 5.

Sometimes, the emotional deficits are not as obvious and are more passive: there’s just a general lack of emotional availability or warmth, with conversations remaining shallow or focused on impersonal and trivial matters (my friend Jim has pointed out to me that one reason people like to argue so much about theology is that it helps them avoid having to confront and talk about what’s going on inside of them, keeping everything in their head and avoiding the shame and pain that lies beneath).

Or there’s that one person you know who talks incessantly and doesn’t let you ever get a word in.

I used to think that such challenges had one solution: the gospel. If people just understood God’s love better, they would magically overcome their relational deficits.

I remain convinced that that’s an important ingredient, of course.

But it’s not the only ingredient that is necessary in order for us to be whole persons—to attain to full spiritual maturity (what Christians would call “sanctification”).

As I mentioned last week, we are not simply thinking things. We are also physical things—for whom proper physical care is necessary.

And thus, we nourish our physical bodies with physical food and strengthen them through physical activity.

Just as significantly, we are emotional and psychological things, for whom emotional and psychological care is necessary. And just as we wouldn’t try to lose weight by memorizing Bible verses, neither will we reach optimal psychological health by quoting Bible verses or simply praying.

We need, in short, therapy.

An emotional revolution

From a Scriptural perspective, though I would stop short of arguing the Bible presents a fully-developed theory of “psychological man,” seeing as it was written thousands of years ago, I do think we see hints of it throughout its pages.

I think, for example, of what Jesus said when he was asked what the “greatest commandment” was. “You shall love the Lord your God,” he explained, “with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind” (Matthew 22:37).

Many people are quite familiar with this passage.

And yet, what was Jesus trying to communicate by pointing to these three specific ways of loving God—with the heart, with the soul, and with the mind?

Christianity, over the last 500 years, has done a great job of forming the mind—discipling people in the intellectual truths of the Bible.

But what about the other two ways?

It seems to me that these two ways—teaching people how to grow in their love for God with their “heart” and “soul”—is something that is seriously lacking.

It’s rather fascinating, actually, to note the Greek of the word “soul.” It’s the word psuche—from whence we get the English word, psyche. To be clear, it’s always dangerous to read our modern understanding of a word back into a biblical text, and there has been much debate as to what exactly the Greek word psuche means; but it does have some overlap with our modern understanding of psychological reality (note, by the way, how Jesus, just a few chapters later, when he was suffering in the Garden of Gethsemane, declared to his disciples that his psuche was “exceedingly sorrowful, even to the point of death” [Matthew 26:38]).

What I’m thus proposing is that if we’re going to be people who follow the greatest commandment—to love God with our entire being—then we must be people who fully develop our entire being, which includes our emotional and psychological selves.

Just as it should ever be our goal to grow intellectually and physically, thus bringing glory to God through these means, we should seek to mature emotionally and psychologically.

What I’m also proposing is that the world has collectively come to much greater understanding of how human psychology works. And as my brother-in-law, Cameron, once said to me: we’re in the midst of an “emotional revolution,” where people—many of whom have paid a lot of money and gone through a lot of training to—better understand what makes humans tick and how to grow emotionally and psychologically.

We have a much better understanding today of the nature of trauma, for example—and how it significantly effects the way we relate to and interact with each other.

Similarly, a lot of work has been done on attachment theory, and the ways in which how our parents related to us as children inevitably affects the way we relate to others—including our own children—when we get older.

Reading our Bibles and claiming God’s promises are good when it comes to these issues, but they don’t—and can’t—come close to addressing the totality of our needs (no more than reading the Bible can adequately explain how to make lasagna).

Just as God has blessed certain people with understanding how auto-mechanics work, and we thus go to them to fix our cars rather than to a pastor or a rabbi, so, too, God has blessed certain people with understanding how humans develop emotionally—and we must therefore go to them if we’re going to be multi-dimensional followers of God, enlarging our “capacity for feeling,” as one of my favorite authors, Ellen White, puts it.

In short, if we want to grow in our love for God in all facets of life, we must embrace therapy.

What does this look like?

I can just tell you that, for me, it meant literally seeing a therapist—which I did for 3-4 months back in 2021.

Honestly, if I could afford it, I’d see a therapist for the rest of my life.

It’s not because I have or had any “major” issues going on in my life—as though I’ve experienced significant trauma. But I just wanted to be proactive and be the best person I could be, growing as much as I can in all areas of life, recognizing we’ve all been treated in ways we shouldn’t have been treated (it’s called “sin”), which inevitably affects the way we treat others, no matter how many Bible verses we’ve memorized.

I won’t tell you that seeing a therapist was a magic wand. And I truthfully wish we could have gone deeper in some areas that remain unexplored.

But it was very healing—helping me to become (I trust) a kinder, more loving, more compassionate person (for example, I can tell you that I was struggling with resentment towards specific people before seeing the therapist—but, somehow, through it all, those resentments subsided).

To be clear, just as with any field, there are good therapists and bad therapists—and it may take a while to find someone you jive with. But it will be well worth it.

(This is also another topic, and one that is controversial for some, but I do not at all believe that a person of faith must only see a therapist of faith. If you truly understand the nature of therapy, and what makes for a good therapist, you will understand that good therapy doesn’t require any sort of religious commitments, just as good orthopedic care doesn’t require any sort of religious commitments. And, in fact, sometimes religion can get in the way of therapy if the therapist relies too much on religious platitudes in their care of you.)

Only therapy?

But perhaps you’re not sold on the need for therapy—and that’s OK. It’s a scary idea—and, besides, you might think, what’s the point in just digging up all those things that happened to you in the past? How does that even help?

I get that.

But if you’re at all open to the idea that you need to grow emotionally and psychologically, here are a few recommendations I’d make if you want to get your feet wet:

1. Find another person you trust who you can regularly talk to and process your own emotional life with—talking not only about impersonal matters that take place outside of you, but about what takes place inside of you—about what makes you happy, sad, scared, hopeless, joyful, fearful.

2. Read books that can help you become more emotionally and relationally aware. A few I’d recommend are Facing Codependence by Pia Mellody; A General Theory of Love by Thomas Lewis, Farí Amini, and Richard Lannon; The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk; or anything by Brené Brown (or watch this short TED Talk by her), John Bradshaw (the addiction expert, not the evangelist), or Harriet Lerner.

3. Attend Alcoholic Anonymous meetings, even if you don’t have any overt addictions (that you’re aware of).

4. Listen to “The Place We Find Ourselves” podcast (available here to stream in a web browser, or here on Apple podcasts).

The bottom line is that if we’re serious about becoming better people, of becoming—if we’re Christians—more like Jesus; about, in short, growing in sanctification—then we must grow in our emotional health.

It is not, I don’t believe, optional.

We can’t afford anymore to have religious people who know all the right information but who are seriously stunted emotionally and don’t know how to safely interact with other people because of their own emotional stuntedness and unprocessed trauma.

We must also create spaces as religious communities where people can not only be formed and discipled in the intellectual truths of the Bible, but where they can also share and process their stories of grief, loss, trauma, joy—and everything that’s going on inside of them.

It’s why the equation is simple: in order to fully disciple people, we must promote Jesus + therapy.

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Shawn is a pastor in Maine, whose life, ministry, and writing focus on incarnational expressions of faith. The author of four books and a columnist for Adventist Review, he is also a DPhil student at the University of Oxford (what they call a PhD), focusing on nineteenth-century American Christianity. You can follow him on Instagram and Twitter, and listen to his podcast Mission Lab.