Do You Try To Live Your Life In Alignment With God, And Still, Nothing Seems To Be Working?
Do you find yourself more anxious and angry since COVID-19 became a familiar name? Does it feel like God doesn’t answer your prayers, and you want to know why? Do you meditate to calm your spirit but don’t see the change you seek?
Maybe you have strong faith but sometimes question why things don’t go as planned. Perhaps, as a Christian or spiritual seeker, you experience feelings that you’re ashamed of, and you have no idea where to turn. Or you may struggle with difficult experiences in your past and present and need something to anchor you more firmly.
Perhaps you’ve been able to successfully compartmentalize your life. From the outside looking in, things look picture perfect. You make time for a partner, family, friends, and/or kids, and you may attend Bible study and church services regularly. You juggle many responsibilities. But in doing so, you may feel like you’re one bad day away from dropping the ball. Something seems to be missing; yet, you just can’t pinpoint exactly what it is.
How can you find your center and be fulfilled? You can find fulfillment by refocusing the parts of your life with God as your spiritual center. Without a spiritual throughline that connects the various pieces of you, you run the risk of showing up less fully.
You might function “just fine,” right now, but imagine what a life in alignment with God could look like. It can be a life with a gentle guidance that eases emotional distress, relationship challenges, a difficult past. Christian counseling can help you find this guidance and live the life you want, with peace and with more contentment.
Many People Find The Courage To Seek Help
It’s human to feel at times like you’ve hit a wall. At some point, we’ve all failed to live up to the expectations we may have of ourselves--be it by way of stress, anxiety, mental health, work, family, past trauma, shame.
As Christians and spiritual seekers, we don’t always allow ourselves to feel the full weight of our humanness and acknowledge when we’re overwhelmed. We may feel embarrassed by emotions that we try to hide from ourselves. How could I ever admit to feeling angry, depressed, or afraid, we may think, I am a Christian, after all.
Yet, when we acknowledge our ability to be flawed, we can more easily access the power of God within us.
Christian counseling services can help clear the path to build a foundation that allows us to embody God’s presence in our day-to-day lives, melding the external things we value with the internal ones. We can serve our communities, cultivate a satisfying career, and nurture a fulfilling home life if we can let the Spirit of God breathe through our bodies to influence our external endeavors.
To do this, Bible study and church service can certainly help. But for lasting change, help from a Christian therapist will take what we know of spirituality and faith and add the brain science that can help you to unlock the fullness of your potential.
For a lot of people, asking for help can be difficult because of the stigma that surrounds mental health in many communities, including the Christian community. Many of us may also come from cultural backgrounds that look down on therapy. We’ve come to believe that asking for help dishonors the family and, to some, means you’re “crazy.” But asking for help is also courageous and wise.
Christian counseling can help you to live with the Holy Spirit at our core, victoriously weaving the disparate parts of your life together with the richness of God’s love.
Christian Counseling Can Help You Live In Spiritual Alignment And Access Your Full Potential
Many Christians think that challenges in life boil down to prayer, meditating, or reading spiritual books. The reality is that while these solutions can help, long-term progress can first happen when you recenter your life toward and with God. As Contemplative Christian Counselors, we recognize the benefits of therapy to help you find the inner strength to fulfill your potential and live life with conviction. Therapy gives you a safe space to grow in your faith.
For more than 20 years, we’ve offered a warm and non-judgmental environment in which we work with Christians but that is open to people of any faith. We also work with premarital couples preparing for marriage, helping them set a firmer foundation in God to guide their relationship.
In our sessions, we will pinpoint your most pressing challenges to see where we can focus our sessions. We ask that you bring your story, and we will bring our expertise. Together, we can work toward healing that can help you find alignment with the spirit of God within you.
To start, we have you fill out a client information form to identify your goals and what you hope to achieve with Christian counseling. In our first session, we will work to create a safe space and build rapport. Then, we can begin to target your main challenge and build a treatment plan, starting with four sessions.
Sessions can explore any number of topics and address challenges you may have at home, work, or in your relationship. For example, a common challenge for Christians that we can help to address will be how to process taboo emotions—such as sadness, shame, anger, fear, disgust, and despair—that we might be embarrassed to feel but are still a normal part of our expression as humans.
One of the tools we use in Christian psychotherapy to help you work through emotions to build strength and understanding is Immanuel Journaling. Immanuel means “God with us,” and draws from this meaning to see God in your life, whether something small, joyous, or painful. Plus, we’ll also look at how attachment theory impacts how we bond with God, ourselves, and others. As well as how we can tap into internal family systems to help us more openly accept God into our lives.
Throughout our counseling sessions, we will also use teachings from Life Model Works, based on the work of teachers Dr. Jim Wilder and Chris Chorsey. Life Model Works integrates tenants of Christianity and science to work with the God-given design of our bodies.
Feeling stuck doesn’t have to last forever. Christian counseling can be a solution to help you develop more faith in your life journey and feel the presence of God along the way.
But you may still have questions about Christian therapy...
Why do I need counseling if I have faith in God or a meditation practice?
It’s important to connect your goals with spiritual guidance or the focus that meditation can bring. Christian counseling allows you to focus on relating to yourself and others with the guidance of a professional who also understands the neuroscience and psychology behind your human form. We believe that humans make the most strides at the intersection of therapy and faith.
Seeking “therapy” means something is wrong with me.
Being vulnerable can be uncomfortable because it can put you in a position to be judged. And sometimes it isn’t someone else who judges you—you may judge yourself. But rather than seeing yourself in a negative light, consider that you are courageous for being vulnerable and getting help when you need it. Whether you seek help or not, the problem will be there. And you’ve already taken the first step to addressing it by being here.
Seeking therapy shows I’m not mentally strong in God.
You might feel ashamed seeking help outside of your church. This is a normal feeling when you’ve learned for so long to lean only on God for guidance — But as you desire to strengthen your connection to God, you are invited to recognize the wisdom in God’s people and community. Therapy will add the science that faith often doesn’t include. And together, both pieces of Christian psychotherapy can help you exist more firmly in the world while bolstering your connection to God as well.
Let Us Help You Connect To Your Spiritual Lifeline
If you’re ready to start living in alignment with God and experience a life with more peace and fulfillment, I invite you to schedule a free 10-minute phone consultation.
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