Many of us are drawn to the Church “as the deer thirsts for streams of water” (Ps 42:1), longing for the sweet relief she offers. We embrace her doctrines not only in their abstract truthfulness but in the tangible hope they offer—we believe (or at least have a strong intuition) that we can actually be transformed in the Church.
Yet, despite frequenting the Sacraments—even over many years—and fervent prayer, many feel disheartened that the areas of their life that bring them the most pain, sorrow, or shame haven’t seemed to be substantially transformed for the better. When people begin therapy at Wellspring Counseling & Coaching, my private therapy practice, I often hear them say something like this: Why is it that when I bring my pain and suffering to Christ my attitudes and behavior don’t change? They feel disheartened, confused, or worse, abandoned.
Have you been there? I know I have.
How can it be that living a faithful, Catholic life doesn’t seem to put us more at peace with ourselves and others?
In my experience, one of three issues is usually at play when this happens: 1) we misunderstand healing, 2) we’re not disposed to receive healing, or 3) we oversimplify our problem.
This is how I understand healing: being made free—free to love and to serve God and others. Healing, understood in this way, allows us to follow God’s call to have the interior freedom to give/receive love as he desires. Left unaddressed and unhealed, our various attempts to avoid and diminish distressing negative feelings, memories, thought patterns, or physical sensations, actually keep us from living this call.
We could say that there are actually two types of healing. The first involves the removal of suffering where unpleasant emotions, behaviors, or thought patterns causing suffering disappear. This is often what we envision when we think of healing.
There’s a second type of healing, however, where God doesn’t remove our suffering, but gives us the grace to endure it without letting it dominate our lives. St. Paul exemplifies this type of healing. He repeatedly asks the Lord to remove the thorn in his flesh, but God responds, “My grace is sufficient for you” (2 Cor 12:9). Paul’s discomfort isn’t removed, but he is freed to follow Christ without being consumed by his suffering. He doesn’t need to orchestrate his life to fix, remove, numb, or avoid his suffering. His suffering doesn’t dictate his actions; Christ’s love does. In this way, his wound becomes a sign of God’s strength and a source of life and hope for others.
So, when we are frustrated that we haven’t changed, it could be that we are focusing only on having our suffering taken away—on our unwanted feelings, memories, or behaviors.
Instead, the Lord may be offering us freedom like he did to Paul. He may be giving us the grace and interior freedom to love and serve him and others despite our suffering. In this way, Christ makes it possible for us to relate to our suffering differently. We don’t hyper-focus on removing our suffering; rather, we focus on loving God and others, allowing our wounds and suffering to be used by God.
Transformation requires God’s grace to touch the wounds that are causing our suffering.
Where do our wounds come from? Wounds often arise when we are not loved the way we were created to be loved or when we are obstructed from loving the way we were created to love.1
Most of us adopt strategies of self-protection and self-preservation in order to reduce or avoid suffering and protect our wounds from being touched. Our self-preservation strategies are so habitual that most of the time we’re not even aware of their self-protective function. It feels like it’s just… well, who we are.
When we approach God, even with a sincere desire for our life to be different than it is, we often (unknowingly) present ourselves to him while we are hiding behind our self-protection strategies. Yet God doesn’t force himself where we don’t allow him to be. He doesn’t go where he is not invited. So, we unwittingly impede his healing grace when we approach him with our defenses up.
Let me give you an example. If my wounds have left me feeling insignificant and unwanted, my self-protection strategy might be to show my value through hard work and success. It’s likely that I also am interacting with God through this mode of self-protection. For instance, I might work hard at prayer, successfully complete novenas, and volunteer at the parish, all without realizing what is motivating me is my need to prove to God how desirable I am and worthy of being healed.
So, to find the transformation we desire, it is important to identify the self-protection strategy that we’ve adopted to keep ourselves safe and secure. We must identify our self-preservation strategies and risk lowering them in Christ’s loving presence so that he can touch our wounds—offering us a corrective, loving experience, where love has been absent.
The transformation we desire in life most often requires addressing a problem holistically, addressing each aspect or facet of an issue. Our emotions, beliefs, psychology, morality, and spirituality don’t exist in neatly divided boxes, all functioning distinctly.
For example, let’s say I lack temperance with drinking alcohol, which has led to my being overweight, having high blood pressure, gout, frequent absences at work, and interpersonal problems with my family (especially when intoxicated). There are many facets to the issue I have with alcohol. While there is certainly a moral and spiritual dimension to my intemperance, for example, addressing the medical issues and the interpersonal concerns is crucially important. Additionally, just because I stop drinking alcohol doesn’t mean I know how to engage in healthy relationships or repair broken ones. Further, it’s also important to understand whether any psychological issues predisposed me to excessive drinking (e.g., abuse, trauma, low self-esteem, etc.). Addressing each facet of the issue in a holistic manner is more likely to produce long-term healing.
It is important not to over-spiritualize problems or turn psychological issues into spiritual issues so that they feel less overwhelming, scary, or uncomfortable (i.e., spiritual bypassing). For example, you can pray novenas and ask God to remove or transform your unhappiness or high stress levels, but, in reality, you may need to simply quit your job. God really does work in and through natural causes.
Although spiritual practices are good and can support and encourage us even with problems that don’t have spiritual origins, it is a mistake to focus solely on the spiritual domain and fail to care for a psychological or behavioral issue according to the natural order God has ordained.
In conclusion, if you find yourself praying and going to Mass, but feel that there is no change with regard to important struggles in your life, here are three things you can do right now to open yourself up to true healing and transformation:
Healing is hard work and difficult to do alone. This article may be the start of your desire for healing. Reading it may have made you aware of memories or struggles or issues you hadn’t realized were impacting your life as greatly as they are. Reaching out to someone who can help you with this journey to freedom—perhaps a good friend, men’s/women’s group, or a Catholic therapist—is a wise and crucial step no matter where you are on your way to healing and transformation in Christ.
Dr. Matt Breuninger is an associate professor of psychology at Franciscan University and the owner of Wellspring Counseling & Coaching. He’s passionate about helping people discover the compatibility between faith and psychology and finding freedom from past hurts. He is the author of Finding Freedom in Christ: Healing Life’s Hurts, and co-founder of KNOWN: Embraced by the Heart of the Father. Dr. Breuninger’s greatest accomplishment, however, is being husband to his wonderful wife and father to his awesome children.
1. I develop this in more detail in my book Finding Freedom in Christ.
