I Pray While You Process

When someone finds my practice, they almost always pause on the same two words: faith-based.

And I get it. It’s everywhere now. It can mean a verse in an email signature. It can mean a Jesus fish on a business card. It can mean almost nothing at all. So the question underneath the pause is fair, and I want to answer it honestly: is it a label, or is it real?

Let me show you what it actually looks like.

Before You Ever Walk In

I pray for you before I meet you.

When your name comes across my schedule, before the intake, before I know your story, before you’ve decided whether you trust me, I pray for you by name. I ask God to go ahead of you into that first session. I ask Him to soften the part of you that’s bracing. I ask that the room would feel safe before you can explain to yourself why it does.

You don’t see this part. You’re not supposed to. But it’s the first thing that happens in your care, and it happens every single time.

While You Process

EMDR is strange and holy work. If you’ve done it, you know, we’re not sitting and talking through your problem the way you might imagine therapy looks. You’re following a rhythm, left and right, and your brain starts doing something on its own that you didn’t tell it to do. Memories surface. Connections form. Things move that have been stuck for years.

And here’s what I’m doing while that happens.

I’m watching you clinically, tracking your SUDs, noticing where you get stuck, ready with a gentle interweave if your processing loops or stalls. That’s the training. That’s real, and it matters, and I take it seriously. I spent much time learning how to hold this protocol well so that you could feel safe enough to go where you need to go.

But I’m also praying. Quietly, while the bilateral stimulation runs, I’m asking the Holy Spirit to lead your mind and your spirit to the places that need healing. The ones you’d never think to bring up. The ones I can’t see. Because I can’t. I can guide the protocol, but I cannot reach inside you and put my finger on the wound that’s been quietly aching since you were nine years old. Only He knows where that is. So I ask Him to take you there. And over and over, in that room, I’ve watched Him do it.

The Part I Need You to Hear

I have clinical training. I have training and supervision that genuinely help people heal. I believe in this work down to my bones, or I wouldn’t have built my whole practice around it.

And none of it makes me the healer.

This is the thing I most want you to understand about how I work, because I think it’s the thing that gets lost. People come to therapy hoping the clinician will fix them, that if they just find someone skilled enough, someone with the right letters after their name, the right method, the right insight, then the pain will finally be solved like a math problem. And I understand that hope. I’ve felt it myself, sitting in the client chair.

But healing has never once worked that way for me, and I won’t pretend it works that way for you.

I can’t force healing. I can’t reach into your nervous system and reset it by sheer skill. I can’t make a memory stop hurting because I’m good at my job. If healing were a matter of credentials, I’d have a much easier job, and honestly, a lot more pride than would be good for me. The training tells me how to hold the space and where to gently guide. It does not give me the power to do the actual mending. That power was never mine to hold.

He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds. 

Psalm 147:3

That’s not my job description. That’s His. I hold the space, I hold the protocol, I hold you, but the binding up of the wound is the work of the One who made you. I’m just close enough to witness it happen, which is its own kind of gift I’ll never get over.

I Lean on Him for My Own Healing First

Here’s why I can say all of this with such certainty: I’m not speaking as someone standing on the far side of healing, looking back. I’m still in it.

I have sat in the client’s chair. I’ve felt what it is to have something surface that I didn’t know was still there. And I am still, today, leaning on Jesus to refine me, to keep healing the parts of me that are tender, to keep growing the patience and the gentleness and the trust that I don’t naturally have enough of. My own life is a long, ongoing work, and the One doing that work in me is not just a method or a framework. It’s Him.

So when I tell you I believe Jesus is your healer, I’m not handing you a slogan I keep at a professional distance. I’m telling you what I have staked my own wholeness on. I trust Him with the parts of me I can’t fix. How could I offer you anything less? I believe the same God who is patiently refining me is more invested in your healing than I could ever be, and I’ve been doing this long enough to be deeply invested.

He is called Jehovah Rapha, the Lord who heals you. Not the Lord who heals the impressive people, or the ones who suffered enough to qualify, or the ones who have the right words. The Lord who heals you. By His wounds we are healed, not by mine, not by my methods alone, by His.

So, Is It Real?

Yes. It’s real, and it’s specific, and it costs me something.

It means I believe your healing is not ultimately in my hands, which keeps me humble on the days I wish I were more powerful than I am. It means I pray for you when you’re not in the room and you’ll never know. It means I do the clinical work with everything I’ve got and I refuse to take credit for the miracle when it comes, because I’ve watched too many of them arrive to mistake them for my own doing.

I’ll bring everything I’ve been trained to bring. I’ll bring all of it. But I’ll be honest with you about the rest: the deepest healing in that room is not something I manufacture. It’s something I get to witness, the same way I’m still witnessing it in my own life.

A miracle happened in my life. It just took time.

I’d love to be in the room when yours does, too.

If you’ve been wondering what it would be like to do this kind of work, clinically sound, deeply prayed-over, I’d love to talk with you. Click the contact button to reach out for a free consultation, and let’s see if this is the next step toward your healing.