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

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