Is Mental Health a Faith Healing Issue? Why Recovery and Resilience Are the Real Breakthrough
Is it a faith-healing breakthrough? It’s more than that.
Why spiritual breakthrough thinking leaves people feeling boxed in.
Understanding the breakthrough is in the mental health recovery, resilience, and flourishing (and what it is not).
Are mental health challenges a faith breakthrough, miracle cure, or healing issue, or about faith for a longer, lifetime journey?
Short answer: It’s not about the breakthrough, but rather the breakthroughs through the mental health recovery and resilience journey.
In my 30 years of ministry experience (stateside ministry and overseas missions), I’ve seen God do some impossible and incredible things; however, through my own personal/family lived experience and with others (Grace Alliance ministry work), it has mostly been more about a mental health recovery and resilience journey.
Along the journey, they experience many incredible breakthroughs that transform their lives and have even baffled the professionals involved (there is plenty of research showing this) — and I’ve got some great stories here, too! Isn’t that God being just as loving as an ultimate breakthrough healing?
1. Why spiritual faith-healing breakthrough thinking can be limiting and exhausting.
My encouragement is that we have to be careful about making mental health challenges purely a faith-healing breakthrough issue. This mindset will tend to oversimplify and overgeneralize the topic and make people and families living with mental health challenges feel boxed in with a few things.
Boxed-in with more confusion: This spiritual faith-healing breakthrough mentality subtly reinforces much of the confusing spiritual and self-stigmas they are already trying to work against the currents. I’ve written some helpful thoughts about these misperceptions in previous blog articles (spiritual stigma and God is not angry).
Despair-motivated spirituality: This spiritual faith-healing breakthrough mentality, with the stigma confusion, can lead to false perceptions of God, a false sense of hope, and false expectations and exhaustion. Thus, in despair, a breakthrough is desperately needed and naturally leads to unhealthy asceticism or extrinsic-motivated spirituality that tries to please and earn God’s grace and healing.
Boxed-in God with no broader beauty and wonder: This spiritual faith-healing breakthrough mentality (as noted above) then boxes in God into religious formulas and methods. What works incredibly for one person, completely frustrates another. Great therapists know the tools that work, but they adapt and tailor them uniquely to each one. I’ve done this in coaching, too.
Think about it like this. Think about the plants someone has in their house. Their plants don’t all require the same amount of water and sunlight - their care is different, all with the same goal — to flourish. God knows how to make you uniquely flourish, too.
The spiritual faith-healing breakthrough mindset (as noted above) tends to work within a transactional God mindset, which can exacerbate the mental health condition, increasing symptoms (or making the process longer, harder). I’ve coached and consulted many, gently helping them move beyond this type of thinking, and they start making huge progress.
With a broader lens of grace, let’s look at what the real breakthrough is about.
2. The miracle is often in the mental health recovery and resilience Journey.
No matter the mental health challenge with incredible pain, suffering, discouragement, and even loss, I've seen lives, couples, and families completely changed with growing mental health resilience that ended up with improved mental wellness and well-being:
Resilient mental health management that leads to decreasing difficult symptoms (anxiety, depression, mood instability, etc.)
Improved wellness (healthier lifestyles)
Resilient growth (above) leading to reducing medications (most remain on what's needed — wellness)
Rebuilding and renewing relationships (well-being)
Renewing life, a meaningful life-purpose (well-being)
Renewing meaningful spiritual life — faith (well-being)
This is what we call "mental health recovery,” and the research studies for our groups show these results.
3. What is mental health recovery and resilience (and what it’s not)?
Mental health recovery is not a cure (or trying to earn it from God); it’s about learning resiliency to thrive and flourish. The goal is not to achieve an absolute cure for the mental health condition.
While research shows that some people may no longer experience difficult symptoms or disruption from their mental health condition, it doesn’t mean they are cured, but rather they are still "thriving and flourishing" within it.
Integrating spirituality, a “psychologically safe” Christ-centered and Scripture-based practice with proven mental health tools, is known to provide more beneficial results, decrease the number and intensity of symptoms, and boost resilience. This spiritual approach is relational (belonging) more so than a performance (behavior). Belonging before behavior is a safe and healthy effort (grace made practical) — behavior before belonging exhausts people from trying to earn God’s grace (the wrong attitude).
“Grace is not opposed to effort, it is opposed to earning. Earning is an attitude. Effort is an action.” —Dallas Willard, The Great Omission (2006)
Mental health recovery and resilience are not a perfect achievement; they often include working through setbacks and losses (lamenting, grief). This is a more pastoral topic where I don’t have time/space to address, but as I mentioned above, working through setbacks and loss is more than just working through “behavior modifications,” but often more a “belonging modification” that leads to “overcoming.” Thus, setbacks and losses (lamenting properly) do not discount or disqualify them; it’s knowing how to see our First Love much brighter in them.
For example, as the apostle Paul writes in Romans 8:37-39, being “more than conquerors” (which means “habitually overcoming”) is within the context of the whole chapter, which shows a secure belonging (with and in God, Christ, Holy Spirit) without guilt or shame. It’s seeing (reframing) asecure and safe belonging where the Holy Spirit constantly affirms we are His children, not slaves. Thus, learning to live by the Spirit (aligned with our true identity-belonging life) “without condemnation” and a “God for us” belongingin suffering, groanings, and anything negative we might be up against. Oh, there’s so much more in this chapter! This is where grace builds healthy effort - from freedom, not earning it.
Mental health recovery and “trauma healing”* grow through new challenges (to thrive and flourish). Resilience is a skill we all learn through challenges that cause us to grow in and out (see Romans 5:1-5).
After learning and thriving with new resiliency skills, those skills may not have the same effect in new challenges. This doesn’t mean failure; it means adapting skills and new tools for ongoing growth (expanding resilience, personal growth, and wisdom-spiritual growth ).
All these effects help with any mental health difficulty or disorder, including trauma and PTSD. We have amazing results with our groups working in IDP centers (i.e., refugee camps) in war-torn environments. Without access to professional care (counselors/therapists, medications), after 10 weeks, the majority of the IDP trauma group participants experienced “trauma healing.”*
*” Trauma healing” —Clinically speaking, this means the participants had seven (7) or more trauma-related symptoms that met criteria for clinical PTSD, and, after 10 weeks (group), they had two (2) or fewer symptoms. You can read the research for yourself. Our Living Grace workbook was the core of the curriculum that the group used (and is free for everyone).
Mental health recovery is not achieving “happiness” but learning and discovering how to thrive and flourish in good and challenging times (meaningful lives). In a holistic, whole-health, whole-person approach, one learns to handle stress and challenges using resilience skills. These new resiliency tools and skills are used in both good and difficult times — helping one thrive and flourish in all seasons of life.
The focus is on how to create a meaningful life, even through challenging times, not achieve “happiness" (as this is a come-and-go, fleeting emotion).
*For simple and brief information about mental health recovery and resiliency principles — see this article I wrote (5 Keys to Flourishing in Mental Health).
We cover all these concepts through our workbooks, but more specifically through a structured process and course, the Thrive workbook (all for free). Thrive also has proven and published results utilized in mental health recovery coaching alongside therapeutic intervention (Thrive started before therapy and continued after the therapy ended).
Hopefully, all of the above can help broaden your perspective to see God being more relational and involved in the mental health journey … not a transactional push-button God when we need a breakthrough.
What do you think about all this? Leave a comment below!
Joe Padilla | Grace Alliance
