Can I Still Go to Church *and* See a Therapist? (Yes)
The questions circle in your mind: “Is seeking therapy showing a lack of faith? Should prayer be enough? Will a therapist respect my religious beliefs or try to change them? Can I really integrate professional mental health care with my spiritual life?” These aren’t small concerns—they touch on your deepest values and beliefs about healing, faith, and wholeness.
At Televero Health, we work with many clients who are people of faith—Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and those from many other spiritual traditions. They often come with these exact questions, wondering if they can honor both their faith commitments and their need for psychological support. If you’re wrestling with similar concerns, you’re not alone in this tension—and yes, it is absolutely possible to engage meaningfully with both church and therapy.
Understanding how faith and mental health care can complement rather than compete with each other can help you access the support you need while staying true to your spiritual values.
The False Dichotomy: Faith OR Therapy
The idea that one must choose between faith and therapy often stems from misunderstandings about both:
Misunderstanding about therapy: Some fear that therapy inherently promotes a secular worldview that dismisses or undermines religious faith. While some therapeutic approaches do have specific philosophical foundations, many therapists are respectful of religious perspectives and can work within a client’s belief system.
Misunderstanding about faith: Some religious communities inadvertently promote the idea that emotional or psychological struggles stem primarily from spiritual deficiency. This can create shame and hesitation about seeking additional support beyond religious resources.
In reality, faith and therapy can be seen as addressing different dimensions of human experience that operate in harmony rather than opposition:
Faith speaks to our spiritual nature, our relationship with the divine, our ultimate values and purpose, and our place in a larger story.
Therapy addresses how our minds process experiences, how our past shapes our present, how our brains and bodies respond to stress, and how we can develop healthier patterns of thinking, feeling, and relating.
At Televero Health, we believe these dimensions are complementary rather than contradictory. Many clients find that therapy actually enhances their spiritual life by removing psychological barriers to deeper faith, while their spiritual practices provide meaningful context and support for their therapeutic work.
Faith Traditions and Mental Health: A Historical Perspective
The perceived conflict between faith and mental health care is relatively recent in historical terms. Many religious traditions have long histories of addressing what we would now call psychological wellbeing:
Christian contemplative practices like the Examen and spiritual direction have included attention to emotions, thoughts, and patterns of behavior.
Jewish wisdom literature contains profound psychological insights about human nature, emotion, and relationship.
Islamic scholarship includes extensive writings on psychological wellbeing, with figures like Al-Ghazali addressing topics we would now recognize as mental health concerns.
Buddhist mindfulness practices, now incorporated into many therapeutic approaches, were developed specifically to address human suffering and promote psychological wellbeing.
Hindu traditions like yoga were created in part to bring harmony to body, mind, and spirit, recognizing their interconnection.
These traditions recognize that humans are complex beings with spiritual, psychological, social, and physical dimensions—all of which deserve attention and care.
Modern therapeutic approaches didn’t develop to replace these traditions, but to offer additional insights and tools for understanding and addressing human suffering. The most fruitful approach often integrates the wisdom of both.
The Both/And Approach: How Faith and Therapy Can Work Together
Rather than seeing faith and therapy as competitors, consider how they might complement each other in addressing different aspects of human experience:
Different tools for different needs: Just as you wouldn’t use prayer alone to treat a broken bone, you might need specific psychological tools for certain mental health challenges. Using both spiritual and therapeutic resources acknowledges the multifaceted nature of human needs.
Overlapping but distinct domains: While faith and therapy address some similar concerns (meaning, purpose, relationship, suffering), they approach these from different angles. These perspectives can enrich rather than contradict each other.
Integrated care: Many people of faith find ways to integrate their therapeutic work with their spiritual practices—bringing insights from therapy into their prayer life, and drawing on spiritual resources to support their psychological healing.
Holistic wellbeing: Most faith traditions emphasize care for the whole person, not just the spiritual dimension. Seeking appropriate care for mental health can be seen as good stewardship of the life you’ve been given.
This both/and approach doesn’t diminish either faith or therapy, but recognizes that both can play important roles in a comprehensive approach to wellbeing.
Finding a Therapist Who Respects Your Faith
One common concern for people of faith is whether a therapist will respect their religious beliefs. This is a valid consideration, as the therapeutic relationship works best when there’s mutual respect for the client’s values and worldview.
Consider these approaches to finding a therapist who will work well with your faith background:
Faith-based options: Some therapists specifically identify as faith-based or faith-informed, practicing from within a particular religious tradition. These therapists intentionally integrate spiritual perspectives with psychological approaches.
Culturally competent secular therapists: Many therapists without specific religious identification are nonetheless respectful of and knowledgeable about religious perspectives. They view a client’s faith as an important aspect of their identity and resource for healing, not as a problem to be solved.
Direct conversations: It’s completely appropriate to ask potential therapists about their approach to religious faith during an initial consultation. Questions might include:
- “How do you work with clients for whom religious faith is important?”
- “What experience do you have with clients from my faith tradition?”
- “How do you view the relationship between spiritual and psychological approaches to wellbeing?”
Referrals: Some religious communities maintain lists of therapists who have worked well with their members. Religious leaders, faith-based counseling centers, or fellow congregants might have recommendations.
At Televero Health, we believe the right therapeutic relationship should feel supportive of your whole identity, including your faith. You shouldn’t have to compartmentalize or set aside important aspects of who you are to engage in therapy.
When Faith Communities Discourage Therapy
Some people of faith face explicit or implicit pressure from their religious communities not to seek therapy. This pressure can take several forms:
Concern about secular influence: Fears that therapy will lead people away from their faith or introduce values contrary to religious teachings.
Sufficiency claims: Assertions that prayer, scripture, or pastoral counsel should be sufficient for all problems, with therapy presented as a lesser or faithless alternative.
Stigmatization of mental health challenges: Framing psychological struggles primarily as spiritual failures, character flaws, or even demonic influence rather than as health conditions.
Navigating these pressures requires wisdom and discernment. Consider these approaches:
Seek balanced perspectives: Many religious traditions contain diverse viewpoints on mental health care. Exploring these broader perspectives within your own faith tradition might provide helpful alternatives to more restrictive views.
Find supportive voices: Look for leaders or members within your faith community who have more integrated views of faith and mental health. Their support can be invaluable when facing judgment from others.
Set appropriate boundaries: While respecting the importance of your faith community, recognize that decisions about your health care are personal. You don’t need unanimous approval from your community to seek appropriate support.
Consider your overall wellbeing: Reflect on how current approaches to your mental health are working. If spiritual practices alone aren’t providing relief from significant distress, this may be a sign that additional support would be beneficial.
At Televero Health, we’ve worked with many clients navigating these complex dynamics within their faith communities. We understand the importance of finding approaches that allow you to honor both your faith commitments and your mental health needs.
Integrating Faith Into Your Therapeutic Journey
If you decide to pursue therapy as a person of faith, there are many ways to maintain integration between your spiritual life and your therapeutic work:
Communicate your values: Let your therapist know about the importance of your faith and any specific concerns you have about potential conflicts. This helps create a therapeutic approach that respects your spiritual framework.
Look for connections: Notice where therapeutic insights resonate with or complement teachings from your faith tradition. Many psychological concepts have parallels in religious wisdom.
Bring therapy insights to prayer: Consider including insights or questions that arise in therapy as topics for prayer or spiritual reflection, seeking divine guidance as you process therapeutic work.
Use spiritual practices as resources: Many spiritual practices—meditation, prayer, scripture reading, community worship—can support the work you do in therapy by providing comfort, perspective, and connection.
Consult trusted religious leaders: If questions arise about how therapeutic approaches align with your faith, consider discussing them with religious leaders you trust. Many are open to thoughtful conversation about these intersections.
Practice discernment: If specific therapeutic suggestions seem to conflict with your religious values, it’s appropriate to discuss this with your therapist and potentially seek adaptations that better align with your beliefs.
Integration doesn’t mean that every therapeutic concept must have an exact parallel in your faith tradition, or that your therapist must share your specific beliefs. Rather, it means finding ways for these different sources of wisdom to inform and enhance each other in your unique journey.
The Science and Spirit of Healing
Some faith communities express concern that psychological approaches to healing compete with or undermine spiritual understandings. But many theologians and religious thinkers suggest a different perspective:
Multiple channels of divine care: Many religious traditions teach that divine care comes through various means—including the knowledge and skills of helpers like physicians and therapists.
Created order: Theistic faiths generally hold that God created an orderly world with discoverable patterns. Scientific understanding of the mind, brain, and behavior can be seen as uncovering aspects of this created order.
Common grace: Some theological traditions speak of “common grace”—the idea that helpful insights can emerge from various sources, not only explicitly religious ones, as part of God’s provision for human needs.
Incarnational approach: Faith traditions that emphasize divine engagement with physical reality (like Christianity’s incarnation doctrine) often value approaches that address both spiritual and material aspects of human experience.
From these perspectives, psychological and spiritual approaches to healing aren’t competitors but partners in a holistic understanding of human flourishing. They address different but interconnected dimensions of what it means to be human.
At Televero Health, we respect the diversity of ways people integrate their faith and mental health care. We don’t presume to define exactly how this integration should look for each person, but rather support each individual in finding an approach that honors both their spiritual convictions and their psychological needs.
A Both/And Vision for Wholeness
Rather than seeing church and therapy as competing options, consider a vision of wholeness that embraces both:
Faith community provides: Spiritual guidance, communal support, transcendent perspective, moral framework, rituals and practices, connection to tradition.
Therapy provides: Specific skills for managing difficult emotions, insights into patterns shaped by past experiences, strategies for changing unhelpful thoughts and behaviors, space to process complex feelings.
Together, these resources can support a more complete approach to human flourishing than either could provide alone.
This integrated approach doesn’t dilute religious commitment or reduce faith to psychology. Instead, it recognizes that the Creator who shaped human beings as complex, multifaceted creatures might provide various forms of care for various dimensions of human need.
You can be both a faithful member of your religious community and a person who benefits from therapeutic support. These identities don’t conflict—they can complement and enrich each other, creating a more integrated approach to your overall wellbeing.
If you’ve been hesitating to explore therapy because of concerns about how it might affect your faith, we encourage you to consider whether a both/and approach might be possible—one that honors your spiritual commitments while also providing additional support for your mental and emotional wellbeing.
Ready to explore therapy that respects your faith? We’re here to support your whole self.