Reimagining God in Therapy

“I keep trying to change my eating habits,” says 35-year-old Lucy. “I know all this bingeing is bad for my health.”

She’s a lovely, articulate, soft-spoken, and extremely intelligent medical professional who’s once again expressing thoughts and feelings of self-loathing and shame during our therapy session. “I have a few days of success, then I feel guilty and start numbing again with food and mindless hours watching movies. I try not to take on so many extra shifts at work, but I can’t say no when people ask me to cover for them. At least while I’m working, I’m not eating.”

I invite her to pause, take a breath, bring her hands to her heart, and practice the simple rocking movement we’ve connected to self-compassion.

“I know I’m supposed to feel compassion for myself,” she responds, “but I hear my parents’ voices in my head telling me how ridiculous that sounds. I hear my church family telling me I’m in pain, not because of a lack of self-compassion, but because I’m betraying my commitment to Jesus. I’m supposed to put him first, not me. I shouldn’t complain. If anything, I should be doing more to help other people, so I don’t get so caught up in myself.”

It’s powerful for Lucy to circle back again and again to her religious beliefs. And she’s deeply loyal to the teachings of her church, having been warned throughout her life about the sin of questioning its precepts or God’s will.

As an observant Orthodox Jewish woman, I understand the role that religious beliefs, rituals, and traditions can play in providing identity, community, affiliation, stability, predictability, and comfort. As a trauma-informed therapist, I also understand that my clients’ religious experiences and observances—or lack of them—can exacerbate trauma and betrayal. Since she started therapy with me three years ago, Lucy’s had a healthy curiosity about my religion and seems comfortable with our differences. But she’s been reticent to get curious about anything connected to her own religious experiences.

Every attempt I’ve made to help her increase self-compassion and self-care while reducing inner criticism and perfectionism has been met with pushback connected to religious messaging. Interventions guiding her to reframe cognitions, ground in her body, and visualize her younger self have all been met with eyerolls, discomfort, and guilt. These go-to therapeutic strategies all seem to be ego-dystonic: incompatible with the dogmatic religious messaging of her upbringing.

Losing Yourself

Lucy had grown up in an insular, isolated religious community. She was pressured to “convert” others, even as a young child, and was encouraged to “lose herself” in service to the church. She was taught to abdicate personal needs and feelings, and went through life serving the church and Jesus without boundaries or limits. She was shamed and labeled “a sinner” if she deviated from the lifestyle she was expected to uphold.

Lucy was never told that God wanted her to thrive and be genuinely happy. Her purpose in life was to make God, Jesus, and others happy. Despite her loyalty to her parents, church family, and religious beliefs, it’s clear that following their rules has created a longstanding need to numb intense, unmetabolized feelings of rage, confusion, and disempowerment. As she’s become more depressed and exhausted by her perfectionistic worth ethic, and as her dissociative eating has spiraled out of control, church members have told her she needs to give more of herself to Jesus. And yet, religious observance, rituals, volunteer work, study groups, and liturgy have brought little comfort. In fact, these things have fueled feelings of failure.

During her therapy sessions, I often feel conflicted, as I want to communicate a genuine respect for her beliefs and practices. I never want Lucy to feel judged, nor do I want our religious differences to adversely impact our therapeutic relationship, which is, to her credit, remarkably strong. At the same time, as Lucy slowly, bravely, reveals more about her earliest childhood memories, it becomes clear that her religious experiences are connected to her subsequent struggles with self-destructive behavior, dissociation, and feelings of worthlessness.

We’ve both begun to realize that the frequent and secretive bingeing she’s engaged in throughout her life is a dissociative coping strategy, enhanced by excessive hours of watching movies or TV. These behaviors are the only viable manifestations of rebellion, individuation, distraction, and self-care that she’s allowed herself to have.

She’s never experienced the spiritual bliss she’s always hoped for, and continually blames herself for falling short and disappointing God. Therefore, it feels clinically necessary to create a safe, unconditional space for her to slowly re-evaluate some of the core religious teachings she grew up with. I know this is delicate work, but I’m still surprised by the level of anxiety and fear this initially triggers in her. She balks, physically pulling back, when I make even the smallest connection between her beliefs and her current struggles.

“You’re asking me to challenge the entire foundation of my life,” she says with a trembling voice, “You’re disregarding the fact those beliefs define who I am and the choices I’ve made for 35 years.”

“What if we don’t use words like challenge or disregard? What if you gave yourself permission to just be curious, to take a half-step back, and reflect on some of the beliefs you grew up with? At 35, you have an opportunity now that you didn’t have as a child—to decide for yourself which principles and practices still resonate for you and genuinely enhance your life, and to see if any of them no longer serve you. The goal isn’t to throw the baby out with the bathwater. And the choice will always be yours to make.”

“You don’t understand what you’re asking me to do. Do you have any idea what would happen to me if I did that?” she replies.

“What do you imagine would happen?” I ask gently.

“God would have me burn in Hell forever,” she answers, shaken and crying.

This is actually a breakthrough moment in our work, as I realize what really needs to be explored is her concept of God, and the terror it evokes. I’ve been focusing on issues related to what it’s costing her to maintain the standards her family and church have set for her. Although that’s all worth processing, it hadn’t occurred to me that her concept of God was driving her fears in powerful ways.

Whose Voice Tells You That?

At this point, I have to be mindful that while my religion encourages questioning—the myriad Rabbinic interpretations of many key concepts is an opportunity to learn, debate, and spiritually evolve—hers doesn’t. Blind obedience, acceptance, and service to others forged the “loving relationship” between a person of her faith and God. Lucy says her religious practices are designed to compensate for and hopefully overcome sin.

Over decades of clinical experience, I’ve come to see how people’s concept of God is often a direct reflection of their earliest, most important and formative relationships: the ones we have with our primary caretakers. I was blessed to have been raised by exceptionally loving and accepting parents, who always modeled and emphasized self-care, self-compassion, and self-worth. Therefore, I’ve always conceived of God as a force that embodies the ultimate in compassion and unconditional love.

Lucy imagines God to be an all-powerful, all-knowing force that’s punitive, judgmental, critical, shaming, and vindictive. Those adjectives are equally applicable to her parents, who constantly criticized her shortcomings and shamed her about her weight. If she holds to the belief that God is rigid, unforgiving, and cruel, she’ll never be able to question, re-evaluate, or redefine the ways in which she can celebrate and relate to herself. If taking care of herself is considered selfish and evokes God’s wrath, just like it did with her parents, then she’ll never be able to find joyful ways to feel whole in her religious identity.

It feels important to confront her internalized message that she’ll burn in Hell if she challenges any of her core religious beliefs. I ask her, “Whose voice tells you that?”

She seems confused. “My voice!”

“It’s become your voice,” I say, “but can we be curious about the possibility that it started as someone else’s voice?”

She seems startled and is quiet for several minutes. Then she says, “I think it’s my father’s voice, and I think it’s a message from God.”

Despite her loyalty to her parents, Lucy can see the parallel between the powerful image she holds of her parents, and her notion of God as punishing and vindictive.

The Hulk and Angels

Over time, we begin to juxtapose Lucy’s long-held childhood concept of God, with a revised, adult version that allows for more unconditional love and compassion. How? We draw. Lucy creates a series of paintings and collages that illustrate her earliest understanding of God as always enraged and disappointed. Then, she does a new series with warmer colors and words including, loving, forgiving, kind.

Lucy also works with a sand tray, juxtaposing objects like a huge dinosaur, hearts made of black glass, the Hulk, and a volcano (all representing her childhood concept of God) with objects that expand her concept and create a more loving version: pink hearts, an angel, a rainbow, a baby held by a loving parent, and a bouquet of plastic roses. The visual dichotomy is striking for her to see, and she’s moved to tears more than once in these exploratory sessions.

Lucy has always been disconnected from her body, hating it and feeling ashamed of it. As we use art modalities therapeutically, I repeatedly invite her to notice how the imagery lands physically. This reconnects her to sensations, and she slowly incorporates this burgeoning body-awareness into mindful eating, so she can learn to distinguish between actual hunger and anxiety. It also gives her important information about how the punitive imagery she grew up with impacted her physically—compared with compassionate imagery that facilitates a release of tension, upright posture, and an expanded chest that feels empowering.

Lucy loves to journal, and although she has documented many chapters in her life regarding her career, friendships, and whether she wants children, she’s never given herself permission to pose questions or capture thoughts in her journals about her religious beliefs. Now she composes written dialogues between herself and God and Jesus that include reassuring phrases like I’ll never abandon you, You are loved, and I’m here for you even if you question my teachings.

Although setting limits with church members and church obligations is challenging for Lucy, she begins to practice turning down small requests. She even starts to explore online church services, and gives herself permission to use Sunday as a day of rest and self-care, rather than helping congregants after services.

Lucy’s work with me continues to change and evolve. She’s still re-evaluating childhood messages she received growing up, some of which she now describes as “religious propaganda.” As she gives herself permission to create a new adult narrative, she reports feeling less depressed, less resentful, and more peaceful. Her dissociative eating has decreased dramatically, and her self-care habits have improved. At every step, a key question we explore together is, Are my new beliefs hindering or enhancing my sense of self-worth and inner peace? Her answer has become a guiding factor in her decision making.

And when we engage in these powerful and vulnerable conversations, Lucy often spontaneously brings her hands to her heart and gently rocks, recognizing that she deserves to bring comfort and self-compassion to her journey of healing.