Good Prayer is Good Therapy

 My senior year of high school is probably the first time that my depression became a real issue. There was a small "perfect storm" of circumstances that really sucked for me. A few months before Prom, my girlfriend of two years broke up with me, via email. This was just before spring break. Around the same time, I had surgery on the big toe of my left foot. You don't realize how hard losing the use of a toe is for things like walking until it happens. I also had a bunk bed that I slept in, which I couldn't while I was healing. So, the week of spring break during my senior year of high school, I was bedridden, depressed, and alone, while my parents still went to work every day. It was awful. There was a book that I had, and read, that helped get me through that time. The Jesus I Never Knew by Philip Yancey. 

That was my first experience with Christian mysticism, the practice of really trying to experience God as directly as possible. As my experience with my depression would evolve over the years, so too would my experience with my Christian faith. I think it took me a few years to reread that book as an adult, but once I did, I picked up some more books written by Yancey. One of those books was called Prayer: Does It Make Any Difference? He explored all different kinds of traditions of prayer in that. Around that time, I was going to college and I had a couple of really good professors, a philosophy professor and an English professor, that helped me through things. My English professor at the time knew how rocky my marriage was, and suggested some reading to me. My Philosophy professor was just already familiar with centering prayer and had been sharing it with his classes. 

At some point, I got to the book Present Perfect: Finding God in the Now, by Gregory Boyd. That served as an intro to a long tradition of Christian mindfulness, which opened up works from mystics such as Frank Laubach, Brother Lawrence, and others. I eventually found The Path of Centering Prayer by David Frenette, which finally laid out a lot of the historical traditions of centering prayer for me. 

I bring a lot of this up, because I've had a parallel history on a mental health journey. As I've covered before, back in 2011, I tried to end my life. Since then, I have been on-again, off-again on depression medications, as well as in therapy and developing cognitive behavioral and mindfulness skills to cope with my depression. I have come a long way in that regard. It has been important to me to integrate my mental health journey into my spiritual journey. 

This may stem from exposure to conservative Christian bullshit growing up, too. Mindfulness, as practiced by secular mental health professionals, is derived from Zen Buddhist traditions. Transcendental meditations. There are groups in Evangelical Christianity that believe that any practice that had a start in other religions is, in short, a form of witchcraft. I'm not joking. They think that there are demonic forces that use things like meditation and yoga and Halloween and even Christmas to sneak their ways into your life and fuck you up. So, I pursued Christian traditions that would be harder for other Christians to refute. I guess I'm all about not throwing babies out with bathwater, and the sheer usefulness of mindfulness practices was too established when dealing with depression to let right-wing idiots dismiss it too easily. 

That being said, I've come to a few practices that I find very helpful in both my spiritual journey and my mental health journey. While I believe God answers prayer, I have no guarantee of it; but I do have evidence for the therapeutic benefits of the right kinds of prayer. Which has led me to an idea for a ministry that I think is easy enough and practical enough and helpful enough that some ought to implement it on a local church level. The Prayer Therapy Group.

At its core, the group is based off of structures utilized by Anonymous groups like Alcoholics Anonymous, and group therapy groups, all over the world. In groups like these, people are asked to open up and become vulnerable about some of their most humiliating and some of their most personal problems. To encourage this, they create a sense of safety and a sense of community. The first step of creating this security is the anonymity. Members are on a first name basis, and are expected never to share what happens inside the groups outside of them, never even to disclose the membership of those groups to nonmembers. The second layer of security is the policing of what's called "cross-talk" in anonymous groups. Members that choose to give their testimonies are expected to be able to do so without anyone else interrupting them or engaging with them directly. This helps reduce the amount of conflict and judgmentalism that moves in these groups. 

As for structure, that is also informed by both therapeutic effects and prayer traditions. Opening is a three minute session of mindfulness, practiced through centering prayer. This can either be the Sacred Word technique or the Sacred Breath technique. Then the group goes into a period of reflecting on things to be grateful for, expressing them to the group at large. There are gratitude practices in cognitive behavioral traditions of therapy that have been known to increase overall satisfaction in its practitioners. Then the group takes turns in expressing their hurts, their grievances, their needs, their "requests". Things they want to bring before God. This is most likely to resemble the events of typical therapy groups or Anonymous groups. After each volunteer shares, another is requested pray for that one at the end of the meeting, then is allowed to share their own issues. The first sharer is expected to pray for the last one. This cross-pollination of intercessory prayer has the effect of creating deeper lines of compassion among the participants. It is difficult to pray for a person in need and not be moved to help alleviate that need if one can. Then, after the time of intercession, perhaps a benediction of some sort, on the part of the group facilitator. 

Outside of the main groups, Anonymous groups also happen to have support structures that help their members progress with their healing. So, too, do group therapy groups, though those are typically different from Anonymous groups. Anonymous groups often pair the members up, one sponsor, one sponsored party. Therapy groups often orbit around one actually certified therapist, who then has individual sessions with each of the members in turn. Either one works for our purposes. One tool I highly recommend is the journal, in this case the prayer journal. There are a few common formats for something like this. One is to have a kind of table, with one side being "requests" one has of God, the other being things one is thankful for. The one I prefer is a series of letters, addressed to God. It feels more personal to me, but there is no real right way to do this. Writing things down, however, as well as talking through stuff with either a sponsor or a councilor can be very useful in cognitive behavioral traditions. 

Sometimes emotions are very big, overwhelmingly so. Depression and anxiety are known to be two types of emotions that are very big for many people. And when you encounter them, it can get hard to talk through your feelings. But putting labels on things does actually help keep things in a more manageable state. Recognizing the thoughts and feelings that are going through your head when you feel overwhelmed can help you fight those big feelings with other thoughts you intentionally put into your own mind, like affirmations. This is pretty much cognitive behavioral therapy in a nutshell, anyway, but also has strong ties to something the Christian tradition calls "taking captive every thought". The Apostle Paul talks about putting on the mindsets of Jesus, taking captive your thoughts, focusing on things that give you strength, how what goes into ones eyes, and what comes out of one's mouth, determines the health and wellness of the heart within. Putting in effort to control what you're exposed to, what your internal dialogue looks like, and how you use your words towards yourself and others, are all things that both Christianity and CBT have in common. 

I think that's it, for now. These practices have a lot of evidence suggesting they really help with emotional issues like anxiety, depression, and the like. The way the world is going, now? People can use every last bit of help they can to combat the overwhelming feelings that come with our dystopian reality. Creating community, creating a safe space for you to express yourself, and a place where you can process your darkest feelings and heal through them? Those are things I think any church could really use in its ministry arsenal.