Maybe You Shouldn’t Talk to Someone

People spend an unbelievable amount of money on psychotherapy, and these psychiatrists and psychologists do not free people from their passions. Few people today seek true healing….people do not notice that professional doctors cannot do for years what the Mother of God does at once if a person sincerely turns to Her.

—Martyr José Muñoz-Cortes of Montréal

Cognitive therapists, furthermore, use rationalism, empiricism, atomism, and pragmatism with all the intellectual rigor of their modern philosophical manifestations. When the church fathers employ these tools, they do so as acting under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit who subtly moves pure hearts who love Christ. This transforms these earth-born tools into interventions of heavenly wisdom that do far more than overcome a particular problem with thoughts, emotions, or behaviors. The fathers’ words re-align the soul to God even as a musician adjusts the strings of a harp in order to produce a soothing melody.

Bishop Alexis (Trader)
Ancient Christian Wisdom and Aaron Beck’s Cognitive Therapy: A Meeting of Minds p.260

THE MAGIC OF LOVE

The magic of personal love works miracles as this true story testifies:

Even one person’s intimate love can deeply heal another.  For example,Tom, a simple person without training in psychotherapy, worked as an orderly in a mental hospital.  One of the sickest patients in the hospital, a deeply psychotic woman, had been there for eighteen years.  She never spoke to anyone, or even looked in another’s eyes.  She sat alone all day in a rocking chair, rocking back and forth.  One day during his dinner break, Tom found another rocking chair, pulled it over, and rocked along beside her as he ate his dinner.  He returned the next day, and the next.  Tom worked only five days per week, but he asked for special permission to come in on his days off so he could rock with the psychotic woman.  Tom did this every day for six months.  Then one evening as he got up to leave, the woman said, “Good night.” 

It was the first time she had spoken in eighteen years.  After that, she began to get well.  Tom still came to rock with her every day, and eventually she was healed of her psychosis.*

*Healing the Eight Stages of Life.  M. Linn, S. Fabricant, D. Linn.  Paulist Press.  1988.

God and You: Person to Person
Anthony M. Coniaris

Therapy labels as sickness what might otherwise be judged as weak or willful actions; it thus equips the patient to fight (or resign himself to) the disease, instead of irrationally finding fault with himself. Inappropriately extended beyond the consulting room, however, therapeutic morality encourages a permanent suspension of the moral sense. There is a close connection, in turn, between the erosion of moral responsibility and the waning of the capacity for self-help—in the categories used by John R. Seeley, between the elimination of culpability and the elimination of competence. “What says ‘you are not guilty’ says also ‘you cannot help yourself.’ ” Therapy legitimates deviance as sickness, but it simultaneously pronounces the patient unfit to manage his own life and delivers him into the hands of a specialist.

―Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations

Leave all anxiety related forums and support groups. Leave them all. All of them. And when you leave them all, I want you to go ahead and look deeper into each and every one of them, and I want you to ask yourself the question of, ‘Is this helping me or is it just leading to me coping with something that I truly want to get rid of?’ It’s very important that you understand that there is a difference between healing and coping—coping means keeping around. If you want to cope with your health anxiety, you want to keep around the suffering. No, that’s not what we do here. We heal. In order to heal, we have to go beyond health anxiety.  We have to go beyond symptoms and effects and we have to focus on root causes. So leave all forums and support groups. Then, take a deeper look into each and every one of them and ask yourself, “Is this helping me or is this hurting me in the long run?”

—Dennis Simsek, HAP 50: Health Anxiety Do’s and Don’ts For Healing

In another work the same professor says: “The patristic tradition is neither a social philosophy nor an ethical system, nor is it religious dogmatism: it is a therapeutic treatment. In this respect it closely resembles medicine, especially psychiatry. The noetic faculty of the soul that prays unceasingly in the heart is a physiological instrument which everyone has and which requires healing. Neither philosophy nor any of the known positive or social sciences is capable of curing this instrument. That can only be done through the Fathers’ neptic and ascetic teaching. Therefore those who are not cured usually do not even know of the existence of this instrument.

Orthodox Psychotherapy, The Science of the Fathers
Metropolitan of Nafpaktos Ierotheos

For it is by the power of Christ that all healing occur and demons are expelled. The saints appeal to this power and manifest it by invoking the Name of Jesus, which is especially effective in combating demons and so can deliver men from insanity:

‘The Name of Jesus can still remove distractions from the minds of men (ekstasis dianoias), and expel demons, and also take away diseases,’ declares Origin, who also tells us:

And some give evidence of their having received through this faith a marvellous power by the cures which they perform, invoking no other name over those who need their help than that of the God of all things, and of Jesus, along with a mention of His history. For by these means we too have seen many persons freed from grevious ities, and from distractions of mind (ekstasis), and madness (mania), and countless other ills.

Mental Disorders & Spiritual Healing: Teachings from the Early Christian East 
Jean-Claude Larchet

The Life of St Theodosius provides us with an example of this. Some monks had turned from the right path by the practice of an aberrant and badly understood form of asceticism and above all in these efforts had placed their confidence in themselves rather than God. As a result they were overcome with psychic difficulties through the activity of Satan. St Theodosius welcomed them into his monastery to care for them. St Theodore of Petra provides us with a similar case:

A number of men in the mountains and in the caves had not led the struggle for a Christian life according to Christ, and, for having practiced a rash form of asceticism with great zeal, were pierced through by the sword of pride. They had attributed their ascetic activities to their own strength and had forgotten that our Lord had said: Without me, you can do nothing (John 15:5). Because of this wasting of the flesh, or having in some way fallen under the judgment of God which surpasses understanding, they were delivered up to Satan, and because of their deranged minds they could no longer control their thoughts.

Mental Disorders & Spiritual Healing: Teachings from the Early Christian East 
Jean-Claude Larchet