While therapy can be useful in learning how to cope with trauma, I think ultimately what’s needed is other human beings.

I think often times, someone needs to reach into our broken world and physically pull us out of it. They need to shake us and wake us out of the melancholic daze we walk around in after we’ve been hurt.

On Healing
Ruby

Both ancient monastics and cognitive therapists propose that people distrust their judgments and avoid critical thoughts. The fathers offer this advice so that the believer may become humble and enjoy the moral, spiritual, and eschatological benefits that humility brings. Cognitive therapists offer their advice because of two pragmatic considerations: people’s interpretations are frequently false, and critical thoughts are often based on cognitive distortions such as mind-reading.

Bishop Alexis (Trader)
Ancient Christian Wisdom and Aaron Beck’s Cognitive Therapy: A Meeting of Minds p.257

I often find myself unable to tolerate the cloying insincerity of certain therapists or the mechanical, clinical demeanor of others. A shrink is a vulture, and most shrinks have more problems than a significant chunk of their patients.

Bimbo Ubermensch

Applying medications to suppress symptoms caused by a spiritual infection in the soul, say holy physicians, will leave the soul blocked off, with no relief from what is producing the symptoms.

God’s Path to Sanity
Dee Pennock

To avoid entirely the benefits of medicine shows a contentious spirit. But there is no small danger of the mind falling into the error of supposing that every illness needs the aid of medicine.

…

Pain often alerts us to something wrong inside the body. And depression serves a similar purpose, say holy counselors. It’s frequently given or allowed by God, they say, to draw our attention to something threatening the health of our soul. Most depression, in persons not suffering severe loss or injury or other trauma, comes from specific spiritual disorders (discussed in the chapter “Esau’s Depression”). So the medical art, though it may be used to give temporary physical relief, is not the primary need here. Rather, the spiritual treatment prescribed by physicians of the soul is the one called for.

God’s Path to Sanity
Dee Pennock

With a mental disorder, it’s important to determine precisely whether it is an illness of the physical brain, requiring medical doctors, or an illness of the eternal soul, requiring spiritual physicians. To insure mental health for a person, one must know the difference between physical ills of the brain and spiritual ills of the soul. And must then follow the course of treatment prescribed by specialists in the appropriate field. At times, treatment may draw upon both sources, medical and spiritual. The medical always depends upon the spiritual, upon God; and the spiritual may sometimes want to draw upon the medical for temporary palliative relief, as when we use an anesthetic while undergoing surgery.

God’s Path to Sanity
Dee Pennock

People have called upon churches to take over the therapeutic counseling of persons with mental disabilities. But the churches have not always been able to do it. Why not? The irresistible lure of innovation, of inventing new ways to do things, has drawn them away from the perfect methodology of the great physicians of the soul. So they have lost hold of the exact symptomology and precise healing techniques given to these physicians of the soul and used by holy counselors since the beginning of Christianity. Modern churches have quite often resorted to secular psychology, which views the mind very differently from the way it is viewed by the prophets, apostles, and all the later physicians of the soul.

God’s Path to Sanity
Dee Pennock

You return again and again, reframing and finding new angles each time. But this repetition felt different; less like we were uncovering, and more like we were digging a hole.

…

Since leaving therapy, I have begun to see an excess of introspection not as a sign of high personal responsibility or desire to better oneself, but as a potential symptom of captivity (self-imposed or otherwise). If you are placed in a room with four white walls, your thoughts will turn inward because they have nowhere else to go. Solitary confinement is torture precisely because of this lack of stimuli (social, physical, intellectual).

…

A culture of excessive introspection is not a sign of collective or personal growth, but a sign of disconnection from the outside world and each other. And even more depressingly, we have accepted that this is good and moral and correct; we are lauded for living alone within four white walls, and lauded for the imagery and thoughts we produce under these conditions. 

A Culture of Introspective Captivity

Against Self-Analysis