Does it Matter if My Therapist Isn't a Christian?

Maybe not

Photo by Fa Barboza on Unsplash

When I first saw a therapist, I carried a lot of guilt from false teaching which said that Christians who went to therapists and psychiatrists were relying on secular practices that would only encourage us in our sins. God wanted us to depend only on the Bible and biblical counselors. I had tried a biblical counselor. He was a kind man who rightly identified some areas of my life where I was not trusting in Christ’s finished work on the cross for my righteousness. I didn’t believe him at the time, but he was right. Unfortunately, he didn’t have the tools to address my OCD. For that I turned to “secular”-trained therapists, the first of whom happened to be Christian. I was very worried he would give me immoral advice, that he would just tell me not to worry about my scrupulosity and my ethical concerns because the important thing was to feel good or follow my heart or something. But of course, he didn’t. None of my therapists have. What I’ve learned, working with a variety of Christian and possibly Christian (they didn’t identify themselves) and almost-certainly-not Christian therapists is that good therapists will work with your value system. If you come to them and say that marital fidelity, honesty, piety, obedience to God, etc. are your values, they will work with those values to help you live accordingly. If they are a bad therapist, they will try to get you to change your values. In my experience, it is nice if you work with a Christian therapist. It matters more that you work with a good therapist. But it really depends on your situation and need. Whoever you work with, it’s good to supplement your work, when possible, with the counsel and encouragement of a spiritual counselor—a friend, elder, or pastor. As a whole, the mental health profession, in my experience, still struggles to properly integrate the physical, mental, social, and spiritual dimensions of mental health. And as a result, patients have to do their best to pull together an integrated plan for their own mental health recovery.