Note: This post was written by a guest author, Justin Palmer, PhD. A good friend and supporter of Bless This Brain. His work is in the study of risk factors of neurocognitive disorders and age-related cognitive impairment is changing lives.
A recent poll suggests that about 1 in 5 Americans are diagnosed with some kind of mental health disorder. That statistic represents individuals with official diagnoses according to well-researched criteria, spanning a range of conditions, including generalized anxiety disorder, major depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and many more.
There is an even greater number of people who experience anxiety or depression symptoms that remain unaccounted for because they do not reach the level of a diagnosed disorder. For example, someone experiencing profound sadness for multiple days on end wouldn’t be diagnosed with major depressive disorder if it doesn’t last at least two weeks.
Nonetheless, these experiences can still have a substantial impact on someone’s quality of life and ability to accomplish life goals, such as holding a job, maintaining a relationship, or caring for friends and family.
Christians aren’t an exception to this. There isn’t a mental-health immunity bubble that surrounds us at the point of conversion. Christianity is not a vaccine for sadness, anxiousness, or a crummy Monday morning drive to work. The Holy Spirit doesn’t always ‘will’ us out of bed when our real struggles feel insurmountable. God hasn’t promised a panacea for the troubles of today. Yet, I find that this becomes the expectation of many faithful brothers and sisters. We say to ourselves, “I am a Christian; therefore, my problems should go away.”
And then they don’t.
I’ve witnessed a false narrative seeping into the Church that seeking professional help for mental health problems is anti-Christian, or at least not something we talk about between the hours of 9 and noon on Sunday mornings.
Christians struggling with anxiety or depression are then left feeling alone, isolated, and even questioning their faith. We feel that if we don’t walk into Church on a Sunday morning with a smile on our face, something is wrong, and even worse, others might notice.
We’ve heard it all before: “How can you feel sad when the joy of the Lord is our strength?” “If you feel anxious, you should just cast your cares onto him.” Even if these verses have been helpful for some, they have also been watered down into nothing more than common platitudes for others.
The thought of approaching a therapist can be equally isolating. Many believe (and have been taught) that seeking help from “secular” therapy means that we don’t trust God, that we didn’t pray the right thing, or read the right verses. Some may even say that non-Christian therapy is “conforming to the patterns of this world,” and we should instead press into “the renewal of our minds” (Romans 12). I see it differently.
The end of this negative stereotype results in a chasm between the struggling Christian and the therapy interventions that can bring about real change in someone’s life. The irony is that some of the most effective therapeutic tools have uncanny parallels to the teachings found within the Bible. My goal is to bridge that gap; to give Christians a better understanding of therapy; to show how it ultimately leads to the very heart of God. Let’s walk through a few key skills that are commonly used in therapy.
Thought Journal
One of the first skills we teach in therapy is to simply identify our thoughts. I can understand how it sounds at first glance. Some of us are WELL aware of the thoughts we have. However, most of us aren’t truly aware. Our thoughts, our actions, and our feelings all influence one another. This is one of the core tenets of a form of therapy called Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT).
Most often, I find that people are actually more aware of their feelings and body sensations rather than their thoughts. They can recall their heart pounding right before a big meeting; they remember feeling embarrassed after a mistake. It takes discipline to truly become aware of our thoughts.
This is actually reminiscent of 2 Corinthians 10:5, “We take every thought captive to make it obedient to Christ.”
Our thoughts are often not reality, even when they feel so true in the moment. Sometimes they are, but more often than not, our thoughts are not an accurate depiction of what’s going on. So, just as a scientist examines data, we must also examine the validity of our thoughts. How true are they? This starts with a therapy tool known as a thought journal.
We journal our thoughts to better evaluate them objectively. When we notice our feelings or body communicating something negative, there is usually a thought that goes with it. It’s our job to uncover those thoughts, literally take them captive. Yes, this doesn’t automatically fix the problem. But it’s the first step in therapy to start diagnosing where the problems lie.
Behavioral Activation
Those days that feel so overwhelming can be some of the most difficult to even get out of bed. Everyone gives us a long list of to-dos that we know will make us feel better: join us at small group tonight, go for a walk, come to church, read a book. Yet, even those things seem like climbing a mountain. We think to ourselves, “If only it were that simple. I’m just not motivated.”
We think motivation is a precursor to doing a behavior we want. We wait for it. But the secret with motivation is that it is actually a product of continuing to do the things that are meaningful to us. We got the order wrong, assuming I must be motivated before starting a task. But the reality is that motivation is a muscle that needs to be grown over time.
Only by continuing to participate in the activities that are the most meaningful to us will we then start to become motivated to do them on our own. Ecclesiastes 11:4 gives a similar warning, “Whoever watches the wind will not plant; whoever looks at the clouds will not reap.” We wait for the perfect conditions, for the positive feelings to return, before we move forward. But what if we did those things anyway?
Therapists recommend a tool called behavioral activation. It is a way we can get back to doing something, anything, that is meaningful to us, even when we don’t feel like it. Simply activating our bodies can help build momentum for continuing to do the things that are important to us. Our feelings will catch up.
Practically, this may not look like diving headfirst into everything we want to do. A marathon runner does not go out and run 20 miles on day 1 of their training. They run 1 mile. And then slowly build from there. The same is true for behavioral activation. We start small and build.
Negative Automatic Thoughts
“I am stupid”
“No one loves me”
“My life sucks”
These are some really common negative thoughts we might have. But there is another quality to these thoughts that we might not always consider—they are automatic. They just appear without our permission, sometimes without even our explicit awareness. These thoughts might pop up from time to time or may even be on a loop in the back of our mind for hours a day. These thoughts can feel so real and so true, and we might even have a mountain of evidence of why they are true.
The goal of CBT isn’t to change your thoughts. We can’t directly change them. Remember, they are often automatic. To illustrate the point, if I said, “don’t think about a pink elephant riding a unicycle,” it would be nearly impossible for this image not to come to mind. The point is we can’t control our thoughts, no matter how hard we try.
We tell ourselves, “Well, I’ll just think more positively, and then I’ll feel better.” How well has that worked? We can’t just flip a switch and start thinking more positively. If this worked, therapists would have been out of a job a long time ago.
As mentioned above, we need to discipline our thoughts—take them captive. After we identify them, we need to understand these thoughts for what they are…just thoughts. I’ve often jokingly told people that not every thought you think is true. Jeremiah 17:9 says it this way, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked, who can know it?”
The heart, in the Bible, is a common metaphor used to describe our thoughts and feelings. We take our thoughts and feelings to be a reflection of the truth. If I feel bad or if I think I’m inadequate, well, then, it must be true. Our hearts are not trustworthy, which means it does not do a good job at automatically orienting our minds towards Truth. This is a discipline that sometimes takes years to grasp. For now, are we willing to believe the possibility that every thought that floats into our heads may not be true?
Acceptance
Before we tackle this last one, I’m betting that some automatic thoughts about the word acceptance came to mind. Acceptance sometimes carries a connotation of simply moving on, burying what has happened to us, or we think acceptance is about being okay with the situation. Let me clarify from the start that this isn’t what acceptance means.
A therapist defines acceptance as acknowledging the situation, not shying away from describing both the hard and the redeemable, no matter how difficult the circumstances are. Many situations happen to us that we have little control over, and our first reaction is to push away those thoughts and feelings associated with them.
We try to avoid and run from them, rather than acknowledging their presence. No one likes negative emotions, but they are part of the human experience, and I think by allowing them to be a part of our experience, we can see God more clearly. Take the psalmists or the author of some of the minor prophets. There is a natural arc to processing and accepting difficult situations.
Psalms 13 illustrates it well:
“How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and day after day have sorrow in my heart? How long will my enemy triumph over me? Look on me and answer, Lord my God. Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death, and my enemy will say, “I have overcome him,” and my foes will rejoice when I fall. But I trust in your unfailing love; my heart rejoices in your salvation. I will sing the Lord’s praise, for he has been good to me”
David does not run or hide from his negative thoughts. He acknowledges them and allows them to be there. But he doesn’t stay there. His acknowledgment leads him into a greater depth with his God.
Habakkuk 3 describes something similar:
“Though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will be joyful in God my Savior.”
Acceptance of the bad circumstances doesn’t refute God’s love and presence, but can actually lead us closer to His heart through worship. Neither of these passages want us to avoid negative thoughts and feelings, which I think may be counterintuitive to what we believe the scriptures say on this matter. Rather, they urge us to hold onto our struggles and negative feelings lightly while we run after our Savior. Yes – even when the hard stuff doesn’t go away.
My goal in this short article is not to paint a rosy picture of the Christian walk. In fact, Jesus tells us we will have struggles. My goal is to demystify therapy and highlight that many of the skills taught in a session of therapy overlap with the sermons we hear on a weekly basis.
Many Christians have a knee-jerk reaction to secular therapeutic interventions (as if God himself is blissfully unaware of how to handle 21st-century struggles). My hope is that Christians can feel emboldened to walk into a psychologist’s office (Christian or non-Christian) without shame or fear, knowing that some of the most useful tools have been a part of God’s toolbelt all along.
Justin Palmer is a post-doctoral scholar. He earned his bachelor’s degree in psychology at Arizona State University and recently completed his PhD at the University of Arizona under the mentorship of Lee Ryan. This past year, he completed his clinical neuropsychology internship at the Louis Stokes VA in Cleveland. Broadly, his research goal is to better understand health and genetic risk factors of neurocognitive disorders and age-related cognitive impairment. More specifically, he is interested in pattern separation abilities in the aging brain using various MRI techniques.