Can I tell you something I hear too often?
A woman sits down across from me, or logs on for our first session, and somewhere in the first few minutes she says it. Sometimes with a laugh, sometimes with tears, sometimes just quietly, like she’s been carrying the weight of it for a while:
“I feel like I should just be able to pray my way through this.”
And my heart breaks a little every time. Not because prayer isn’t powerful, it absolutely is. But because somewhere along the way, this beautiful, Jesus-loving girl got the message that needing more than prayer means her faith isn’t enough. That wanting therapy is somehow a sign she doesn’t trust God. That healing should look a certain way, and if it doesn’t, something is wrong with her.
So let’s talk about that today. Because I think it’s one of the most important conversations we can have.
The False Choice We Were Never Supposed to Make
Somewhere in Christian culture, a quiet lie started spreading. It sounds like this:
“If you really trusted God, you wouldn’t need therapy.”
Or this: “Just give it to Jesus. You don’t need to dig all that up.”
Or even this: “Therapy is worldly. The Word is enough.”
I understand where those ideas come from. They come from a genuine love of God and a genuine belief in His power. And listen, I share that belief completely. God is more than enough. He is the healer. Full stop.
But here’s what I also believe: God is not threatened by the tools He created.
He made the human brain. He designed the nervous system. He wired us for connection, for story, for processing, for meaning-making. He knit together every single neural pathway in your mind before you were born (Psalm 139:13). And when trauma, fear, or pain disrupts those pathways, when the past keeps showing up uninvited in your present, He is not sitting in heaven annoyed that you want help rewiring them.
He is the one who designed the brain’s ability to heal in the first place.
Psalm 147:3 Is Still True
“He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.” Psalm 147:3
Notice what that verse doesn’t say. It doesn’t say “He heals the brokenhearted who only used Scripture and never saw a professional.” It doesn’t say “He binds up wounds, but only the ones you brought to Him quietly and alone.”
He heals. He binds. He is the source of every good and perfect gift — including the gift of a trained, caring person sitting across from you helping you finally put words to what happened and begin to let it go.
When I sit with a client and we do EMDR together, watching her nervous system settle, watching her face soften as a memory that used to feel like a live wire finally loses its charge, I don’t see psychology and faith in competition. I see God doing exactly what He promised. He is binding up wounds. He is healing the brokenhearted. I just get to be in the room.
What EMDR Actually Is (And Why I Think God Is All Over It)
If you’re not familiar with EMDR, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, here’s the simple version: it’s a therapy approach that helps your brain finish processing memories and experiences that got stuck. When something traumatic or overwhelming happens, sometimes the brain doesn’t fully process it the way it does ordinary memories. It gets frozen. And that frozen memory keeps firing, showing up as anxiety, fear, flashbacks, or those deeply held beliefs like I’m not safe, I’m not enough, I’m too much, I’m unlovable.
EMDR uses bilateral stimulation (like guided eye movements or tapping) to help the brain finally do what it was designed to do: process, integrate, and file that experience away as the past — not the present.
Here’s why I think God is all over this: He created your brain with the capacity to heal. EMDR doesn’t manufacture healing from nowhere. It works with the design that was already there. We’re not adding something foreign. We’re removing the blockage so what God built can do its job.
And in session? We invite Him into it. We slow down. We ask what He has to say about the memory, about the belief, about who you really are. Some of the most sacred moments I have witnessed in my work have happened in an EMDR session, when a woman who has believed I am worthless her entire life finally, in her bones, feels something shift. That is not just neuroscience. That is the Holy Spirit moving.
For the Girl Who Feels Guilty for Wanting Help
If you’ve been sitting on the idea of therapy because some part of you feels like it means you’re failing at faith, I want to speak directly to you for a second.
Wanting help is not weakness. It is not faithlessness. It is not a sign that your relationship with God isn’t real or isn’t enough.
Jesus healed people. Over and over and over again in the Gospels, people came to Him broken, bleeding, blind, grieving, possessed, paralyzed, and He did not say “you should have prayed harder.” He met them. He touched them. He used mud and spit and pools of water and His own hands. He used means. He worked through the physical, the tangible, the practical.
You are allowed to be one of those people who comes to Him and says I need help. You are allowed to use the tools He has placed in your path. You are allowed to sit in a therapy room and work through what happened to you — and have that be one of the most faithful things you’ve ever done.
Healing is an act of stewardship. You are taking care of the person God made.
Jesus and Abi Are on the Same Team
A good Christian therapist isn’t competing with your faith. She’s working alongside it. She’s not asking you to leave Jesus at the door, she’s walking into the hard places with you and bringing Him along.
That’s what I try to do in every single session. My faith isn’t a footnote to my work. It’s the foundation of it. I believe healing is possible because I believe in a God who heals. I believe you are worth fighting for because I believe He says you are. I believe the past doesn’t get to define you because I believe what He says about your future.
Therapy and faith working together doesn’t look like half and half. It looks like whole — the clinical knowledge of how the brain heals, held inside the unshakeable truth that the God who made that brain is for you, not against you.
A Note Before You Go
If you’ve been waiting for a sign that it’s okay to reach out, this is it.
You don’t have to have it all figured out. You don’t have to be in crisis. You don’t have to be “bad enough” to deserve support. You just have to be someone who is ready to stop carrying this alone and start doing something about it.
God is not asking you to white-knuckle your way through your pain forever. He has made a way. Sometimes that way includes a therapist, bilateral stimulation, and the slow, holy work of letting old wounds finally heal.
You were made for freedom. And freedom is worth fighting for.
Abi is a Licensed Professional Counselor-Associate specializing in EMDR, CBT, and Christian counseling for teen girls and women ages 13 and up. She works with clients at Clear Mind Therapy & EMDR and is currently accepting new clients.
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