How My Faith Impacts My Clinical Work

I am grateful for God’s provision in my life in the form of Christian parents, a Church that provided for spiritual parenting, and a rural small-town upbringing that protected me from experiencing many of the more painful realities of this world. Yet, like all parents, although the Church was “good enough,” I came away with my own set of wounds. Along with the messages of justice, faithfulness, and holiness, I took away from my religious upbringing the quality of being judgmental, an emphasis on impression management, and more fear than freedom.

All of this was transformed over the past five years that I have spent in graduate school. During this time, I came to a new faith experience through mourning the losses of my life and entering into my disillusionment. God has painfully yet lovingly stripped from me my false self, and invited me to enter into a relationship with Him that is based on honesty and genuineness. My journey to accepting that I am God’s beloved has been a difficult and ongoing struggle to know my self so that I might be able to better know God. Because of my unbelief, I had my very name, “beloved” permanently tattooed on my physical body, so that the identity I struggle to daily accept cannot be denied.

This experience of God, as a lover of my true self, has been instrumental in how I view the context of therapy. Based on this understanding of God, therapy becomes a journey toward self-knowledge, health, and restored relationships for patients. Regardless of our respective belief systems, when I enter into a relationship with a patient, I bring my true and authentic self. I reflect who a patient is so that she can see and discover her true self. By understanding and knowing the self, a patient learns about the Creator through studying the creation. Balancing grace with truth, therapy is a place to ‘bind up the broken hearted and to set captives free.’ Because of my beliefs, therapy becomes a journey of faith where change is assumed, innovation is expected, and rebirth is welcomed. Rather than reacting out of fear, I rest in my identity in Christ, able to come alongside patients as they wrestle with and through the questions of life and God.

God also calls us to mirror His creativity. Beauty, art, and imagination are instrumental in this process of knowing and being known. These mediums are understood as coming from the Creator and as a means to better experience, express, and understand the various aspect of ourselves, others, and God. Thus, therapy also becomes a space where I encourage patients to explore creative means of knowing and engaging the self through art therapy, mindfulness, contemplative practices, or role play.

I appreciate that God equally values the individual self and the community of multiple selves in relationship. God, whose nature is relational, calls us to live in a community of people where individuals can bring their full selves in order to both know others and be known in such fullness. I strive to provide such an experience in the therapy room so that patients may go out and engage in healthier relationships, participating in the narrative that God is telling through scripture, history, and experience by fully engaging in their communities.