Your Therapist Is Not God (but Neither Is God Your Therapist)

When I was sent to a mental institution during my freshman year of college, I found myself having to explain over and over again to interns in white coats with notepads in hand that I wasn’t depressed, nor was I “considering ending my life.” I attempted, in vain, to express that I felt spiritually lost, as they continued to scribble their notes on their pads, making me feel less like a person with genuine questions about life’s meaning and more like a specimen under a microscope.

This gaze of condescending pity was nothing new to me. The fact that I received it over and over again from friends, family members, teachers, and psychologists every time I asked overarching questions about truth, meaning, evil, and suffering was part of what made me tell my parents that I needed to “escape” from society in order to find “the answers.”

After what I felt to be a roller coaster of events and emotions, I began to understand that to be human is to have a multilayered existence: we are body, intellect, psyche, and spirit (or what some might refer to as the heart). And that in order to live freely and fully, one has to acknowledge each of these layers with their distinctions as well as their spaces of overlap.

Most acknowledge the importance of and distinction between our physical health and our capacity to process and understand information. It’s the confusion regarding our experience of emotions and feelings on one hand, and our yearning for ultimate truth, beauty, and goodness on the other that tends to get most of us in trouble. The pervasive tendency to collapse matters of the heart into that of the psyche, or vice versa, is what came to shape so much of my own journey … as well as the journeys of so many others I’ve met along the way.

Most students who learn about our nation’s ugly history of racism and prejudice are encouraged to foster the ideals of justice and equality, both in their day to day interactions with others as well as in a broader political sense. But after first learning about Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination when I was in third grade, my teacher’s prepackaged solution to such a grave injustice seemed inadequate for me.

I couldn’t shake off the desire to know why (aside from his racist sentiments) James Earl Ray would decide to murder someone who dedicated his life to goodness. Where exactly did the impulse to evil come from in the first place? Being told that we need to unlearn racism and create more just structures did little to resolve the impact these questions had on me. As I lay in bed that night, I began to weep over the horrors of evil and injustice that seemed to have no real solution.

As time went on, I began asking these kinds of questions about my own personal life. Much of my own personal dramas revolved around my experience going back and forth between my parents’ houses since they divorced when I was three years old. The tension between my father and I, who have drastically different communication styles from each other, led me to ask if I was fundamentally a lovable person. Our recurring heated arguments eventually brought him to decide that we needed to consult a third party in order to reach some kind of impasse. I’ll never cease to feel indebted to my dad’s therapist, who helped us to learn how to communicate better, which eventually enabled me to trust in my dad’s love for me.

And yet, this experience of reconciliation didn’t fully relieve the persistent question about my being lovable. Why did I continue to desire to be loved and affirmed, despite my mother, father, family, and friends making it clear that they loved me? And why was I capable of saying and doing selfish and even hurtful things—usually out of an attempt to try to grasp for more love, or to push people away for not giving me the affirmation I craved?

Whenever I asked these kinds of questions to the adults I trusted most, I received an answer along the lines of “there are no real answers to those kinds of big questions … and if there were, we could never really know them for sure,” or “you should stop worrying yourself over those things … you should just be yourself” or “be the best person you can be.” The problem was that I felt that this existential curiosity constituted an essential aspect of who I was. And that to cease to look for answers would be to stop “being my true self.”

My experience with therapists was perhaps the most degrading. From the time my parents sent me to my first therapist when I was four years old (in order to offset the damage done to me by their divorce), to my “breaking point” at eighteen, I had seen about seven different therapists. And it was that seventh one to whom I confided that I had hit a wall: I was unable to “find” the answers to my questions or come up with the solutions to my own shortcomings and moral failures. I needed a revelation from “beyond” … there had to be something or someone outside of me, outside of this realm that would take me the rest of the way on my journey.

“Get real, Stephen. You’re never going to find that breakthrough. There are no ‘revelations.’” And then the dreaded words: “You just have to learn to accept being yourself.” After being gaslighted again and again, I decided that I needed to make my great escape from a society where everyone and everything was determined to block me from finding what I knew I needed so desperately.

Upon my arrival in the psych ward—into which I had reluctantly agreed to allow my parents to check me in—I said a prayer to a god whose existence I was uncertain of but who I wishfully hoped would listen to me with pity. On the second day, I had an encounter with someone who was the first of a series of many more “lights” to come in what was until then a dark tunnel.

It’s worth noting that that psychiatrist I met with was not from the United States. His way of thinking about the psyche … and about life more generally, vastly differed from most of the therapists I had seen. When he prescribed me medication to stabilize my erratic thought patterns, he made it very clear that the medication (and that my sessions with him) would not erase my questions nor my desire for a higher truth. Rather, they would provide me the tools to think more clearly and continue my journey in a more coherent way.

Not much longer after leaving the psych ward, I enrolled in the philosophy course that my university required freshmen to take. For the first time, I met someone who asked the same kind of questions I did. Not only that, but the professor did so with gusto and a sense of delight. I asked to meet during her office hours, hoping that maybe she wouldn’t dismiss my questions or tell me to just “be myself.”

“Stephen, you’re not crazy for asking these questions,” she said with certainty and with a bit of bemusement as we sat across from each other in her office. “It’s just that God desires a deeper relationship with you,” she continued nonchalantly, as if this were a blatantly obvious fact. I began meeting with my octogenarian philosophy professor regularly, who eventually introduced me to other professors and students who wanted to seek answers to life’s big questions.

I went on to study the religions of the world and the history of ideas, in an attempt to understand my own questions, but also to make sense of why the culture I grew up in tended to relegate matters of the heart to the backburner, or to collapse them into the realm of psychology. One of the essential keys that helped me understand the major shifts in the ways Westerners conceive questions about truth, morality, and identity was Charles Taylor’s 700 page tome A Secular Age.

In it, the Canadian philosopher traces the shift from the age of “enchantment”—in which the earthly realm was charged with otherworldly spiritual forces that imbued daily life with a sense of meaning from beyond—to an age of “disenchantment”—where transcendent meaning is largely separate from the mundane … or even considered irrelevant or non-existent. In disenchanted societies, individuals generate meaning for themselves using their own reason and free will. The new cultural ideal born of disenchantment was tame, orderly, and prized self-sufficiency. There was a strong distrust of religious and cultural expressions that inspired superstition, “enthusiasm,” or “irrationality.”

Taylor goes on to cite Michel Foucault, whose 1961 book Madness and Civilization documents the shifting categorization of mental illness from the Middle Ages to the 20th century. Foucault sees a clear connection between the Enlightenment concept of “pure reason” and the medicalization of “madness.”

Mystics like Teresa of Avila, Angelina of Foligno, and (the patron saint of mental illness) Cristina the Astonishing—who may very well have dealt with forms of mental instability—were permitted in their cultural context to live meaningful vocations that became a source of inspiration from others. The dawn of rationalism, which allows little space for the integration of passionate or “magical” forms of thinking, can only deem such holy women’s proclivities worthy of a diagnosis of feminine hysteria or paranoid schizophrenia, without considering that in spite of their mental illness, they may have actually been onto something.

This rationalist worldview flourished in Protestant countries, especially so in northern Europe and eventually in the United States. While vestiges of an enchanted worldview may still exist in immigrant and ethnic urban pockets of the US, the country’s predominantly Anglo and assimilated suburbs are bastions of Taylorian disenchantment. There’s a reason why philosopher Mary Townsend calls suburbia “a breeding ground for nihilism.”

The landscape and arrangement of social interactions in suburbia foster predictability and safety. They sever us from the roots and traditions that precede us and shelter us from the forces of nature and the spiritual realm that don’t fit neatly into a cozy, bourgeois way of living. Is it any wonder that so many young people growing up in suburbia who aren’t afforded the tools to face life’s unpredictability nor the questions about greater cosmic truths suffer identity crises, anxiety disorders, and are prescribed antidepressants to “tranquilize” their discontent?

Part of my journey included attempting to undo the process of assimilation by tapping back into my Mediterranean culture, whose sense of reality was more in touch with the preeminence of gratuitous beauty and spiritual truth, death and evil, as well as a sense of life’s unpredictability and a taste for spontaneity.

After first visiting my family’s village on a small Greek island, I felt for the first time that I could breathe. The things that I was told in suburbia were unusual or problematic were seen as normal or simply “human” by my family members and their neighbors in the village. I could breathe even more deeply and freely during my semester abroad in southern Spain, where religion, history, art, and beauty was littered everywhere in the streets, and the lifestyle accounted for the needs and inclinations that I had gotten used to repressing.

In addition to figures past like the mystical saints, I found my story reflected in more contemporary figures. Take Princess Margaret, whose bohemian lifestyles, struggles with mental health, and spiritual search made her a black sheep to the “respectable” standards of the British royal family. Or Clara, the fictional protagonist of Elizabeth Spencer’s 1960 novella The Light in the Piazza, who suffered a cognitive impairment after an accident, leaving her, as a 26-year-old, at the functional level of a 6-year-old. Whereas she was treated as a pariah in her upper-middle-class WASP town in the South, she was treated like a human being and found friendship and romance to be much more accessible when traveling in Italy.

Cultures that have fallen victim to the disenchanted outlook are unsure of what to do with neurodivergent people like me whose proclivities make us more prone to calling into question the status quo and feeling the lack of enchantment more painfully. The same can be said of those who may not have diagnosable mental instabilities, but whose cultural sensibilities don’t overlap well with the WASP one, and are more prone to magical thinking and recognizing the spiritual charge woven into the fabric of everyday life.

As I interacted with communities beyond my sheltered suburban bubble, I found that while the more enchanted way of thinking in lower-income and especially immigrant neighborhoods afforded more openness to spirituality and cultural depth, it also brought with it a stigma toward mental health care and therapy. I saw this firsthand as a teacher in an inner-city school, where students who clearly were struggling with emotional or mental instability would bring home permission slips for their parents to sign so that they could meet regularly with a school psychologist.

It was often the case that parents would refuse to sign the forms, citing that they didn’t want their family to be seen as weak or as “not having it all together.” Other times, they were distrustful of the psychologist who, with their college education, might impart ideas and beliefs that are foreign to their own, or whose true intentions might not be as benevolent as they claim to be. Most of the parents who frowned upon their children seeing a therapist insisted that they just needed to pray or go to church more … or worse, that maybe God was punishing them for not going to church, or for their poor behavior.

Working with my students taught me to appreciate that while spiritual and existential questions that are wrapped up in psychological instability should not be dismissed, neither should the psychological dimension of our struggles be downplayed. It’s just as damaging to collapse matters of the psyche into those of the spirit.

Thus why parents, educators and authorities on matters psychological and spiritual ought to aim wholeheartedly to avoid this deadlock position that suffocates the multilayered design of being a human. The fact is, our therapists and psychiatrists are not God. But neither can God serve as our therapist. The sooner we accept this fact, the more we will be able to live more freely and fully human lives.

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Stephen G. Adubato lives in New York and hosts the Cracks in Postmodernity blog and podcast.