For many Christians, finding a therapist isn’t simply a matter of finding someone who treats anxiety, trauma, depression, relationship problems, or whatever brought them to counseling. There is another question that can feel just as important: Will my therapist understand and respect my faith?
Perhaps your Christian beliefs are central to how you understand yourself, your relationships, your decisions, and the way you make sense of difficult experiences.
You don’t necessarily need every therapy session to become a Bible study. But you also don’t want to feel that you have to leave an important part of yourself in the parking lot before you walk into the counseling office.
Some people worry that a therapist will dismiss their beliefs. Others have had experiences where faith was treated as irrelevant—or even as part of the problem.
And some people have experienced the opposite: they sought help in a Christian setting and received plenty of spiritual advice but very little actual counseling.
There can be room for both. Professional counseling and Christian faith do not have to compete with one another.
When Christian counseling is something you want, your faith can become an important part of understanding what you’re experiencing and deciding how you want to move forward.
What Does Christian Counseling Actually Mean?
There isn’t one universal definition of Christian counseling. Different therapists and organizations use the term differently, which is one reason it’s worth asking what someone means when they say they provide it. What you do not want is someone who claims to be “sympathetic to” or “accepting of” your faith. You want someone who shares it.
At TADAS Counseling, Christian counseling doesn’t mean that every client receives explicitly Christian counseling. We work with people from many backgrounds, and we don’t impose religious beliefs on anyone. But when a client tells us that their Christian faith is important to them and they want it incorporated into counseling, we do.
Faith may influence how you think about marriage. Forgiveness. Boundaries. Parenting. Responsibility. Grief. Identity. Relationships. Purpose. Hope. Difficult decisions.
Those beliefs may be deeply connected to the issue that brought you into counseling in the first place. Why would we ignore or pretend they aren’t there?
What About Prayer in Christian Counseling?
Prayer can certainly have a place in Christian counseling when a client wants it. A counselor may pray with you, incorporate Scripture, or make room to discuss your prayer life and relationship with God as part of the therapeutic process.
But Christian counseling is still counseling.
A therapy appointment isn’t intended to become primarily a prayer meeting or prayer session. When you’re receiving professional mental health treatment—and particularly when insurance is paying for that treatment—the purpose of the appointment is to address the clinical concerns that brought you to therapy.
That doesn’t push faith out of the room. It simply recognizes that prayer and therapy serve different, although complementary, purposes.
If you’re looking for extended prayer, group prayer, Bible study, pastoral support, or other forms of spiritual community, a Christian counselor can also guide you identify places where those needs can be met. Your church, pastor, prayer group, or other Christian community may provide something valuable that psychotherapy isn’t designed to replace.
Christian counseling can include prayer without turning therapy into a prayer meeting.
The goal is not to separate your faith from your mental health care. It’s to allow your faith to be genuinely incorporated into professional counseling while still providing the therapeutic work you came to receive.
Christian Counseling Shouldn’t Take Away Your Voice
There is an important distinction between incorporating faith into counseling and having someone else make your decisions for you.
Sometimes people come into counseling facing very difficult choices. Should I stay in this relationship? Should I leave? Should I forgive this person? Should I reconcile? How much responsibility do I have for someone else? Am I allowed to set this boundary?
When we’re overwhelmed, it can be tempting to ask: “Just tell me what to do.” But that’s not the counselor’s job.
A counselor shouldn’t take over responsibility for your life. Instead, counseling can help you slow the situation down and look at it more clearly. What are your options? What are you afraid will happen? Why are you afraid it will happen? Are you safe? What patterns from your past may be affecting how you’re seeing the situation? Are you making this decision primarily from fear, guilt, anger, obligation, or pressure? What are the possible consequences of the choices in front of you? What do you actually believe?
And when you’ve specifically asked for Christian counseling: How does your faith inform this decision? What principles from Scripture are relevant to what you’re facing?
Those questions can absolutely belong in the counseling room. But ultimately, you have to own your choice. You are the person who will live with the decision. No counselor should tell you what to do—ever.
A Counselor Should Guide the Process, Not Run Your Life
This is true whether counseling is Christian or not.
Good counseling isn’t intended to make you increasingly dependent upon your therapist. If every time you encounter a difficult situation you think, “I can’t decide anything until I ask my counselor what I should do,” something important may be missing.
Counseling should help you develop your own ability to think through difficult situations. To recognize patterns. To understand your emotional reactions. To identify your values and priorities. To consider consequences. To distinguish between what belongs to you and what belongs to someone else. To make thoughtful decisions. And then to take responsibility for those decisions.
For a Christian client, faith and Scripture may be significant part of that process. The counselor can walk beside you while you work through it. But the counselor shouldn’t take the steering wheel.
What About Counseling Through My Church?
Churches can be wonderful sources of support. A pastor, ministry leader, mentor, or trusted member of your church community may provide prayer, encouragement, spiritual guidance, practical help, and a place to turn during difficult seasons. Those relationships can be enormously valuable.
But spiritual counsel and professional mental health counseling aren’t necessarily the same thing. Someone serving in a counseling or pastoral role within a church may or may not have formal clinical training in mental health. That doesn’t diminish the value of what they are trained and equipped to provide. It simply means it’s important to understand what kind of help you’re receiving.
A licensed professional counselor has graduate-level clinical education and supervised experience in areas such as assessment, human development, counseling methods, ethics, mental health conditions, and therapeutic relationships. Depending upon the clinician, they may also have additional training in trauma, couples counseling, anxiety, ADHD, nervous-system regulation, or particular therapeutic approaches.
A pastor or church leader brings a different kind of preparation and role. Sometimes what a person needs most is pastoral care. Sometimes what they need is professional counseling. And sometimes both can be valuable at the same time.
The important thing is not to assume they’re interchangeable simply because both involve talking with someone about difficult parts of life.
Scripture Can Be Part of Counseling Without Becoming a Weapon
This distinction matters. Scripture can provide comfort, wisdom, guidance, direction, hope, and a framework through which a Christian client understands life. But it should not be used as a baseball bat to hit you. Simply quoting a Bible verse at someone isn’t necessarily counseling.
Consider someone struggling with anxiety. Telling them some version of “The Bible says not to worry” may be completely consistent with Scripture. I’ve heard it said there are 365 of these—one for every day of the year!
But the person probably already knows they’re worrying. They may desperately want to stop. The more useful questions may be: Why is their nervous system staying on alert? What is keeping the anxiety going? What happened that taught their mind or body to anticipate danger? What skills could help them respond differently?
Their faith can be part of that work without being used to shame them for having the struggle in the first place.
The same applies to trauma, grief, depression, relationship problems, and other emotional difficulties.
Faith doesn’t require us to pretend that the human mind and nervous system don’t exist. After all, God created them!
Faith and Trauma Can Become Complicated
Trauma can affect almost every area of life, beginning with someone’s relationship with God and then—with themself. A person may intellectually believe that God is loving while having enormous difficulty trusting anyone. They may believe in grace while being extraordinarily harsh with themselves. They may believe they’re forgiven while carrying tremendous shame. They may believe they’re safe now while their nervous system continues responding as though danger is nearby.
Sometimes people become ashamed of those contradictions. They think: If my faith were stronger, I wouldn’t feel this way. But trauma isn’t simply a theological misunderstanding. Experiences affect the brain and nervous system. Understanding those effects doesn’t diminish faith. It can help explain why someone may sincerely believe one thing while their body continues reacting as though something very different is true.
That gives us somewhere to begin.
Christian Counseling Doesn’t Mean Avoiding Difficult Questions
Respecting someone’s faith also doesn’t mean the therapist simply agrees with everything the client says. Counseling should still involve thoughtful questions.
Sometimes we discover that what someone believes Christianity requires of them may actually be something they learned from family, culture, a particular relationship, or another person’s interpretation. For example: Does forgiveness mean you have to allow someone continued access to your life? Does loving someone mean tolerating harmful behavior? Does setting a boundary mean you’re being selfish? Are you responsible for keeping everyone around you happy? Does reconciliation require pretending something didn’t happen?
Those are significant questions.
Christian counseling can provide room to explore them carefully rather than reducing complex situations to simple slogans.
Forgiveness and Reconciliation Aren’t Always the Same Thing
This is particularly important when people have been hurt. Christians sometimes feel enormous pressure around forgiveness. Forgiveness can be a deeply meaningful part of healing.
But forgiveness doesn’t mean saying something didn’t happen. It doesn’t mean saying the harm didn’t matter. It doesn’t mean refusing to learn from another person’s behavior. And it doesn’t necessarily mean that person should have the same access to your life that they once had.
Reconciliation involves relationship.
Relationships require trust. And rebuilding trust generally requires something significant from both people.
You can work through forgiveness while still making wise decisions based upon someone’s demonstrated character and behavior.
Faith and healthy boundaries don’t have to be enemies.
You Still Matter
People who are deeply committed to caring for others can sometimes lose themselves in the process. Christian clients may struggle particularly with this when sacrifice, service, forgiveness, or putting others first have become disconnected from healthy boundaries.
One of the simplest concepts I use frequently in counseling is: I matter too.
Not: I matter more than everyone else.
And certainly not: Only my needs matter.
Simply: I matter too. Your needs matter. Your safety matters. Your health matters. Your emotional well-being matters.
There will certainly be times when love asks us to sacrifice for another person. But sacrifice isn’t the same thing as erasing yourself.
Sometimes learning to say “I matter too” is an important part of developing healthier relationships—with other people and with yourself.
Can I Talk About God in Therapy?
Yes. If your faith matters to you, you should be able to talk about it. You should be able to talk about prayer. Scripture. Doubt. Anger. Forgiveness. Church experiences. Questions about God. The ways your faith has helped you survive difficult experiences.
And even the ways painful experiences have complicated your faith. A therapist who provides Christian counseling shouldn’t be frightened by those conversations. Nor should you have to translate your beliefs into secular language before you’re allowed to discuss them. You should remain the person who determines how much faith is incorporated into your counseling.
It’s your therapy.
What Should I Ask When Looking for a Christian Counselor?
By law and ethics, Christian counseling can only be part of therapy when the client requests it. If Christian counseling matters to you, it’s reasonable to ask about it before beginning therapy. You might ask how the therapist incorporates faith into counseling. Ask whether they’re comfortable discussing Scripture, how much they know and how long they have walked the faith life. Ask direct questions.
Ask how they approach difficult decisions. Listen carefully to the answer.
You aren’t simply looking for someone who uses the word Christian on a website. You’re looking for someone who knows the Word and will respect your faith while also providing competent professional counseling.
Those are not mutually exclusive.
A Final Thought
You shouldn’t have to choose between receiving professional mental health care and having an important part of your identity respected.
For some people, faith will rarely come up in counseling. For others, it will be woven throughout the work. Both are appropriate when that’s what the client wants.
Christian counseling should never mean someone else takes control of your decisions. Scripture is not quoted to push you, but to help you make your own decisions.
It shouldn’t mean every emotional struggle is reduced to a spiritual problem. And it shouldn’t mean difficult psychological or relationship issues are answered with a Bible verse and sent on their way.
It can mean something much richer. A place where your faith is welcome. Where Scripture can be part of the conversation. Where the mind and nervous system are taken seriously. Where difficult questions can be explored rather than avoided. And where someone walks beside you as you learn to understand yourself, consider your choices, and decide how you want to move forward.
Your counselor can help you through that process.
But your life—and ultimately your choices—remain yours.
Continued Learning
Why Do I Feel Responsible for Everyone Else’s Happiness? If caring for others has gradually turned into responsibility for their feelings, choices, or well-being, this article explores where that pattern may come from and why “I matter too” can be such an important concept.
Why Can’t I Save Someone I Love? Loving someone doesn’t always mean rescuing them from their choices or consequences. This article explores the difficult line between helping and taking responsibility for another person’s life.
Focus on the Family Counselor Referral Network TADAS Counseling participates in the Focus on the Family Christian Counselor Referral Network, which helps individuals and families connect with licensed mental health professionals who are able to incorporate Christian faith into counseling.
Ready to Take the Next Step?
If you’re looking for professional counseling where your Christian faith can be welcomed and incorporated into the work when you want it to be, we’d be glad to talk with you.
At TADAS Counseling, Christian counseling is available upon request. We can work with both the concerns that brought you to therapy and the faith and values that help shape how you understand your life.
Schedule your complimentary consultation today and find out whether TADAS Counseling may be a good fit for you.
Click here to book your complimentary consultation
Janet Schryer Donahue, MA, LPC, NCC, ADHD-CCSP
TADAS Counseling
Working with both the mind and the nervous system.
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