Therapy – A Means of Grace
Hey Friends! This month’s guest writer is my new friend, Mary-Ashley Seabrook Kurian, MA, PLPC, SEP-IT. Mary-Ashley is a somatic experience practitioner (SEP) who helps her clients understand that faith and therapy compliment each other, but also that therapy can actually help us grow and mature as Christians. I am confident you will find her contribution this month of great value. Don’t forget to pass it on to a friend and encourage them to be a part of this community.
Not so long ago, admitting you were in therapy was equivalent to shouting to the world, “I am really messed up and need big-time help.”
An article in a recent issue of The New York Times Magazine echoed this sentiment and described the perception of therapy in past as, “a rarefied recourse for the irredeemably neurotic.” The article noted that this stigma has lifted and evolved, now seeing therapy as “self-care…normalized as a routine, healthful commitment…”
This shift in attitudes toward therapy has also touched Christian circles; spaces where we all share a belief that God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit are the ultimate sources of help and wisdom. While holding to this belief, many local churches also have lists of reputed therapists to refer members to when certain issues require the training of a dedicated practitioner and more consistent care. This is in addition to continuing engagement with their church home.
As a result, more and more Christians are choosing to publicly acknowledge their commitment to both faith and therapy, even wearing shirts that read “Jesus and Therapy” or “Going to Therapy is Cool.” These changes have thankfully affected the mutual exclusivity that used to exist between being a Christian and going to therapy.
You might not need to be convinced about why or how the combination of faith in Jesus and therapy are complimentary, but if you’re like me, it’s helpful to reflect on the foundation of something even if you already believe in it. What makes therapy effective? And how does the experience of therapy actually help us to grow and mature as Christians?
Therapy in the Bible
Let’s first take a look at the meaning of the word “therapy” in the Bible. The word θεραπεία is defined as “service, care, or healing.” While some usages in the Bible don’t directly apply to our context, the original definition of this word lends itself to some modern-day insight. “Therapy” is, indeed, a service meant to offer care to people in a time of need and ultimately to contribute to improvement or healing. As a somatic therapist1, when I meet with clients for the first time, one of the things I tell them[1] is that their experience will feel like emotional-physical-therapy. Emotional physical therapy attunes to the body’s role in the presenting issues while also seeking to understand someone’s emotional disposition towards those issues. In practice, this kind of therapy strives to offer healing to a person’s systemic functioning: body, mind, and spirit (not just the mind). To receive this kind of care requires awareness, relationship, repetition, and the commitment of time for best results.
It’s through this collective lens on therapy that I want to begin to explore what makes therapy effective and how God uses it as He seeks to grow and shape us.
Awareness
Just as in physical therapy, there is usually an awareness of some sort of presenting ache, pain, or injury that causes people to consider that they might need help. The presenting symptoms that notify us that something is off emotionally, mentally, and spiritually can present as physical experiences (i.e. shortness of breath, sensations of constriction or throbbing/vibrating, or being in general pain). These these are possible manifestations of emotional discomfort, disturbance, or incomplete trauma responses. When we combine these warning signs with emotional symptoms (i.e. finding yourself becoming more reactive in certain situations, noticing a lack of motivation, energy, interest in things you used to enjoy, habitual anxiety, or a general feeling of stuck-ness), we have a decision to make about how to proceed.
It’s important to note that this awareness step isn’t devoid of God’s involvement. He uses His Holy Spirit to bring these emotional and physical symptoms (which also affect our spiritual life) to the forefront. He lovingly uses the Spirit to poke and prod us until, at the very least, we are forced to recognize we are doing nothing about issues we know we have and need relief from.
When I first reached out to start therapy, I fell more in the “ache” category of feeling a bit overstimulated in my campus ministry job with Reformed University Fellowship (RUF). I delighted in the students I was mentoring and had great support from my campus minister (my boss). But, as I ramped up my responsibilities, I found they were outpacing the fruit of my efforts to build friendships and be known outside of work. I needed someone who could enter into spaces I didn’t even realize I needed care in. I didn’t have those types of people yet as I was only just beginning to invest in people my own age in town and at my church. A year into the job, I attended RUF staff training and heard something that finally made me decide to go to therapy: self-awareness is a function of Christian maturity. It almost sounded like a challenge! Self-awareness is a quality I highly value and want to hone, so hearing that lit a fire underneath me to do something different and disrupt the situation I still found myself in. This was my choice point; my final poke to do something with the awareness God had allowed me to have.
“It’s impossible to be spiritually mature while remaining emotionally immature”
Relationships
While awareness is wonderful, it is worth nothing without action. Picking up the phone to call and see if the counselor I had been referred to had an opening was hard! I kept thinking, “Do I really need this?” I am so glad I ignored that voice and instead committed to the process. I never would have met Jenn, my first ever counselor (pictured below), had I not followed through with scheduling the first session. She was the one that taught me, “it’s normal that once you start therapy, things get worse before they get better.” It’s wisdom I share with clients today.
When you dare to kick up the dust of a situation you’ve let sit “peacefully” stagnant for a while, some sneezing, coughing, and general discomfort might ensue. The discomfort I felt in starting this new process that required acting on my awareness and being vulnerable was only able to be overcome because of the relationship I had with Jenn. Even early on, I felt that we had potential to connect well with each other and that it felt safe for her to guide, challenge, and teach me into growth and change. One thing she did that helped build our relationship was to read me excerpts from things (books, articles, poetry etc.) that she thought resonated with something I needed to hear or connected with subject matter we had been working on.
Extra-mile efforts like these and her overall kind and insightful disposition towards me in sessions grew my trust in her and in the therapy process. This was essential because trust and relationship are the most binding and animating pieces of the therapy process.
Why is this the case?
Because God is a God of relationship. He has made us to flourish within them. He uses the relationship between therapist and client to mirror the way we learn and change best: in connection with Him and others. Trust in the relationship provides safe passage for your awareness to be expanded and directed by the therapist all while having a shared hope for experiencing something better than what you’ve known. God will guide you to know whether there’s potential for relationship between you and a therapist. Give a therapist three swings/sessions (like baseball) to be able to decide whether they might be a good fit for you.
(Note: I think it’s a common misconception to fall into the idea that if you have good friends, family, a mentor or other important people in your life, that you do not need therapeutic support. These relationships can feel “therapeutic” but they also function best off of some degree of reciprocity The capacity of those relationships can change circumstantially, so it’s important to consider where support exists in a longer-term, consistent way. A place where the focus can be on you and the rules of reciprocity do not apply in the same way.
Repetition
So, we have awareness by the Spirit, we have acted on awareness and are building relationship with someone who can help…what now? What makes up the quantity of time someone participates in therapy? Like effective exercise to build our physical muscle, effective therapy requires reps. Reps of what? One of the things that needs repetition is the corrective experience of seeing our life through someone else’s eyes.
I will never forget when one of my therapists here in St. Louis began to cry as I told her something. The first time it happened, I had the impulse to feel bad that I had inadvertently made her cry, but I knew because of our relationship that she wasn’t looking for me to comfort her. Over time as this experience would repeat, I would notice that I could more deeply feel things and eventually release them when I saw tears well up in her eyes. It was the permission I needed to know that this thing was worth hurting about and her hurt for me was held in her tears. Her tears were not a means of bringing attention to herself. They were a reminder and symbol to me of 2nd Corinthians 1 when Paul writes to the church in Corinth and says,
“ Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God. For just as we share abundantly in the sufferings of Christ, so also our comfort abounds through Christ.”
My therapist modeled this for me. She showed me, over and over, the compassion she had first received in Christ even in moments when I didn’t know I needed an extra helping. She accepted and welcomed me where and how I was on any given day and was willing to be present with me through it. The repetition of this practice on a consistent basis has the power to change us and I know (and the science backs it up!) that God designed our brains, bodies, and spirits to heal from the repetition of corrective experiences.
Commitment of Time
So, we’ve got the awareness, we’re working on building the relationship, and we’re doing the reps, but this work requires a commitment of time to take effect. As I remind my clients, “it took a long time for you/this situation to become this way, so it would be quite reductive of us to expect it to be gone in four weeks.”
All healing, all recovery in this earthly realm, takes time unless God decides to work another way. Just as you’ll regress your recovery after a physical injury if you return to normal activities too quickly and act like nothing has happened, if you stop therapy too quickly with no plans for modification in handling the presenting “injury,” you can expect to find yourself right back where you started. The willingness to offer your commitment of time right from the outset creates a welcoming atmosphere for recovery.
So, to answer the original question, therapy is effective and helps us grow as Christians because its recipe is built on concepts that God is a big fan of: grace and restoration.
His grace is the vehicle for awareness through the wisdom of the Holy Spirit, it finds its expression in relationship, it offers opportunities for repetition of corrective experiences, and it helps us find the patience to offer our commitment of time to accomplish our intentions for therapy and in many other realms. What’s more, God’s heart so deeply champions for our restoration that before He permitted His son to die for our sins, He called him to perform miracles for three years. Miracles that restored people in mind, body, and spirit.
We are literally hardwired for healing and indwelt with the longing for it to come to pass. We inherit that (although imperfectly) from Jesus Himself. The idea that a therapist, a fellow human being susceptible to all the same things their clients are, could help us is preconditioned off of something very true for all of us: we need help to survive and thrive in a broken world. We have the assurance of the “already” in Christ’s promise of redemption, but we’re living in the “not yet” of this world and need some help from our peers as we’re in the in-between.
We have a sense, even in our darkest hour, that we are not made to be in sadness, depression, anxiety, confusion, numbness, or denial. God works through His creation – the intercommunication of our bodies, minds, and spirits – to keep us coming back to the truth that we are made for something more than living at an emotional poverty line and we find that truth’s fruition in Him and His promises.
The experience of therapy reminds us that, through the grace of God, healing is our destiny in Christ.
Food for Thought
Whether it’s considering how and why therapy has helped you or even if you’re considering encouraging a loved one to reach out for support, I encourage you to ask these questions in prayer and listen/observe as God brings answers:
What have you (God) been bringing into my awareness that needs more attention and/or my action?
Are there certain people/situations that keep trying to tell me something?
Am I open to the idea of trusting someone to be in relationship with me in this process if I consider taking action? (Therapy cannot exist in isolation! Keep your support team of friends, family, and mentors in place as they are the people living daily life with you in a way a therapist cannot. And maybe therapy isn’t the step you need to take. Maybe your first step is allowing a pre-existing relationship to deepen and be more active in your life.)
Am I willing to do the reps even when they hurt or seem to make things harder sometimes?
Can I give myself the gift and commitment of time in order to change/heal/recover?
Is this change something I am willing to prioritize above my discomfort, impatience, and keeping the status quo?
[1] Somatic Experiencing (SE) is the modality I am trained in. See Heather Gargis’ post from April for more information on SE and further explanation on the body’s role in healing and trauma recovery.
Mary-Ashley Seabrook Kurian, MA, PLPC, SEP-IT is originally from Memphis, Tennessee and attended college at Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas, Texas. After working with college students in Birmingham, Alabama for three years, she transitioned to St. Louis for graduate studies. She joined the Oasis team in 2020 after graduating with her Master of Arts in Counseling and Master of Divinity from Covenant Seminary and is currently in her Advanced level of training to become a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (SEP).
You can find out more about Mary-Ashley at http://oasisstlouis.com/mary-ashley_seabrook or send her an email at seabrook.maryashley@gmail.com.