God Is Not Your Therapist

Faith, at its core, is the audacity to hold something as true without empirical evidence.

Love operates the same way. We cannot weigh it in grams or trap it in a microscope slide, yet we build lives around its presence OR its absence. We interpret its gestures, debate its authenticity, and sometimes wither under its misapplications.

Love, like divinity, is a mirror: it reflects back what we believe we deserve.

And so it is with God.

Whether we name this sacred force Allah, Yahweh, the Universe, or simply "the ground of all being," our relationship with it is shaped by perception. Some see a vengeful judge; others, an inexhaustible well of compassion. Some demand proofs; others find holiness in the mere fact that gravity holds us close to the earth, or that a hummingbird’s wings know their own mathematics. Faith, like love, is not a monolith. It is a language. One we speak in dialects as varied as our wounds and our wonders.

But here is what faith is not: a substitute for the messy, necessary work of healing in the presence of another human being.

For generations, marginalized and entitled communities alike have been handed a dangerous mantra: Take your pain to God and nowhere else. Pray away the depression. Fast through the anxiety. Cast the trauma onto some celestial pyre and wait for ash to become redemption. And while I have knelt at the altar of prayer’s solace, while I believe in the alchemy of sacred dialogue, I also know this: God is not your therapist.

Therapy is not prayer. Prayer is a solo flight; therapy is a tandem parachute. One is a whisper into the void; the other is a voice echoing back, “I hear you. I see you. This wound is not your fault.”

Therapy hands you tools: cognitive reframes, nervous system regulation, the language to rewrite the stories that calcify in your bones. Prayer, no matter how fervent, does not teach you how to set boundaries with your abusive parent. Meditation, no matter how transcendent, cannot diagnose the ADHD that makes your world feel like a broken kaleidoscope.

Magical thinking thrives in this gap. Churches (and gurus, and influencers) often peddle it….sometimes innocently, sometimes not. Just believe harder. Just surrender deeper. But belief does not rewire a traumatized amygdala. Surrender does not reparent your inner child. And when faith communities stigmatize therapy, what they’re really endorsing is silence. Secrets. The rotting of wounds in dark places.

This is not a condemnation of faith. It is a love letter to the wholeness you deserve.

If God is a creator, then She gave us neurons that fire in the safety of attunement. If the Universe is intelligent, then It crafted the vagus nerve to calm when another human says, Me too.

If Love is real, then it surely lives in the courage to sit across from someone and say, I am not okay…and have them answer, Let’s fix that together.


So whether you’re devout, skeptical, or aching in the in-between: God is not your therapist. And that is good news. Because therapy is holy too.


Doc Rain