My Christian path and my abuse recovery work have often been at odds, over the “f-word:” Faith.

I say that, to illustrate the unique challenges that come when a Christian, in this case, me, locks antlers with the secular tools of healing, via therapy and recovery work. Inner child stuff, exploration of options and life choices, and viewing oneself as more than just a Christian woman can all lead to some bumpy nights, where we need to fasten our seatbelts.

And we need to realize there is no Bette Davis character of Margo Channing/ “All About Eve” movie guided tour for the pleasure of doing so.

Big, spiritual-human- being-wearing- underwear- being- pulled- up moments. And, I found out during my personal experience, there’s often a lot of ping-ponging between the two: the spiritual and the secular therapeutic paths. Managing the inner child and the self-denying, in favor the bigger picture spiritual tendencies are not about the smooth ride. Speed bumps are EVERYWHERE.

All while trying, the entire time, to be loved, to be an individual, and to be healed.

This is your friendly warning.

The sticky wicket of the situation often centers on the faith issue. Looking that squarely in the eyes, encountering the proverbial Kodiak bear who hasn’t eaten in a few days, can make us realize just how powerful, misunderstood, and potentially harmful the faith word and the magical thinking concepts can become as we try to heal from the issues of life, while in therapy.

About Faith:

“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”

Hebrews 11:1

Faith.

Seeing things that are not there.

Sure. No problem reconciling that with good mental health.

Within many a religious context, there is a pressure to practice blind, total obedience to faith, while embracing how we see no evidence, whatsoever, of what we are praying, wishing, hoping, and crying for.

Our spirituality and our faith, it can be asserted, often demands that we forsake fact and evidence, over that invisible substance of the “not yet.” Refusal or inability to enthusiastically be able to do that can get us labeled as weak, heretics, “Doubting Thomas’s,” and, of course, your favorite and mine, “not good enough.”

Yay, lots of healing and life- thriving to be found there.

We can further be pressured, especially if we are hurt by abuse and struggles to “pick a side.”

We are pressured to believe and live that “all we need is God,” whatever that God means to and for us.

“God or bust,” perhaps.

We want the Divine? Then we need to reject therapy. Besides, God will heal us, without all of that shrink stuff.

All we need is the Lord.

Uh-huh.

About Magical Thinking:

“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”

Hebrews 11:1

Of course, therapy, with the concept of addressing magical thinking, is a fun walk in the park, also. Here, we have the poo-pooing of our inner child believing in harmful, psychological Santa Claus’s. It’s highly discouraged that we believe that our childhood yearnings will come true. We, as the mature and logical adults we currently are, need to realize and embrace the radical acceptance of the painful here and now.

No, we will not get the unconditional love of Mommy and Daddy.

No, we will not get a do-over of our childhoods or the memories attached to them.

No, the traumas and the abuses of our younger years will not be eradicated or undone.

We are encouraged to integrate the imperfection, the pain, the disappointment, the grief, and the loss, in the name of healing.

And sometimes, we are encouraged to not do with this work without the influence of a Deity.

“God is dead.” Huh. Worked for Nietzsche, right?

Magical thinking, after all, gets a bad reputation. It is representative of the toxic hope, the codependency, and the unrealistic expectations that keep us mired in unhealthy patterns and systems. We need to get real and accept what is, not what we yearn for. The harsh, imperfect state of life, of our lives… and the world. The harshness of imperfect people, like our families of origin. No room for fairytale dreams to come true, through the toxic hope, a/k/a, the toxic faith, of wanting the desires of our inner child selves to come magically true.

And we live happily ever after.

Yeah, therapy often slaughters that simplistic notion.

But, If we About Faith…

“So we are always of good courage… we walk by faith, not by sight.”

2 Corinthians 5:6-7

Here we are, back at the dilemma. Believing what we cannot see.

But more than that. We walk towards this faith, invest hope, time, love, energy into this faith, as we’re taking our stroll.

Faith encourages us to look beyond the here and now. And that can be dicey, let’s be honest.

At least, it was dicey for me. My spiritual path recommended I trust in what I could not see. So, what, exactly, did that mean? Give any abusive people multiple chances to redeem themselves and/or continue to be intermittently toxic?

How was that going to go? How was that going to speed up my healing process?

How was I going to reconcile the deep longings and needs of my needy inner child, in the face of cold, hard reality?

Where was there room for miracles and the Divine, when I’m simply trying to stay safe and survive?

I still wanted to believe in miracles. I wanted to believe in love, especially concerning the people that I loved, as well as believing in those who claimed to love me.

What am I supposed to do with those harsh challenges?

About Magical Thinking:

“So we are always of good courage… we walk by faith, not by sight.”

2 Corinthians 5:6-7

Well, I ping-ponged back into my secular therapy. Not because I believed I needed to negate my faith, but because I needed to preserve it… safely. No easy feat here. Through thought stopping. Challenging the thoughts. Challenging the fears, or the “negative, unduly catastrophic, faith.”

My secular therapy threw me a curveball. As I have been about my healing process, I assumed that the challenging and stopping of my thoughts would immediately require that I banish the spiritual perspective. I could not, I reasoned, have both at the same time, and be healthy at the same time. Something had to give.

But my challenged thoughts and thought stopping, instead, dealt more with my version of my negative faith, and less to do with ancient scriptures themselves.

Who/what told me that I needed to be punished and mistreated? Did scripture do that?

Or was it, instead, the inaccurate, harmful, disordered instructions of the fallible people and the systems which may or may not have had agendas to control me?

Whatever the deeper and more complicated answers may have been, it was still within my power and responsibility to now take charge of my healing. Someone or something else may have caused the damage. But what am I going to do NOW?

What would I believe about my faith, my right to healing, and my worth? All were spiritual, regardless of the secular counseling I was involved in.

About Faith:

 “…if you have faith like a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move, and nothing will be impossible for you.”

Matthew 17:20

And that leads me back to still more ping-ponging on the matter. (I never said this was a straight, linear line to healing). In the many scriptures that address Christian faith, this one stands out and dispels the fallacy that faith is passive in nature. It is not.

Faith, passive, twiddling thumbs, waiting on “someday my Prince will come.” You and I are NOT Snow White!

“For as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also.”

James 2:26

This is beyond waiting for a Divine Savior. This deals with utilizing the provisions we, as human beings, are Divinely equipped with, even while we are imperfect screw ups, missing the point and the mark.

And we are capable- and accountable- to do that. It has more to do with willingness. Are we willing?

What I needed to face about my own spiritual path, was that I had to address and correct any passivity I had, in the name of faith. And that means I needed to add some action to whatever belief I had. Waiting and twiddling holy thumbs would only go so far.

Actions can speak louder than words. And, if I insisted on weakly saying, “Move, Mountain,” while not believing the best health for myself doing so, I would be extremely limited with what I’d experience in my life.

But wait.

My life, my issues, and my faith were not solved in that one fell swoop. There was more to be done.

About Magical Thinking:

 “…if you have faith like a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move, and nothing will be impossible for you.”

Matthew 17:20

Well, well, well, we’re back here, at my therapy again, dealing with the spiritual within the secular.

For much like the recognition I realized I needed to put (secular) action to my (spiritual) faith/lip service, conversely, within my therapy, I also needed to allow for the unconditional and the unexpected to exist around the rigid performance and results-oriented pressures I placed upon myself.

There also needed to be room for doable hope. Even hope in the potential for miracles or unexpected, wonderful occurrences to occur.

I needed to employ, at least, part-time, my inner child to believe optimistically when my inner cynic wanted to slash and burn everything.

Ah, moderation. Part faith, part acceptance of what is.

Faith and Magical Thinking:

So, where am I now?

Well, to quote Stealers Wheel’s song’s lyrics…

“Here I am, stuck in the middle with you.”

I say that, not to be trite or cliché, but to proclaim the uneasy, messy, and ongoing struggle of this healing thing, in and out of spiritual and secular realities. I am trying to heal as a person of faith, even when that faith has been influenced by lies, toxicity, harmful fairytales assertions, and, of course, my own human fallibility.

And all of that, as trite and cliché as it sounds, will not go away.

I also struggle, as trite and as cliché as it may be, to not throw the Baby Jesus out with the bathwater as I endeavor to “practically” heal, employing methods that go beyond scripture and showing up in a “place of worship” structure. That’s not for the faint of heart either. I need to hang on, however challenging it is to do so, to some remnant of childlike faith and/or magical thinking, trying to reframe it in as healthy of a life experience as I can.

So, yes, Faith and Magical thinking: I need them both, to a certain degree.

If I have learned anything bumping along this bumpy night, without the Pleasure of Bette Davis’ character, Margo’s company, it is that this issue is not black and white, like the film, “All About Eve.”

I would like to be more the insightful, wizened sage, with Eureka thoughts. Nope, still, often times, only a hot mess in current day circumstances, possibly bordering on identity crisis.

But what takes some of the edge off from said bordering identity crisis is recognizing faith and magical thinking are both more nuanced than we give them credit for being. Faith is not necessarily always healthy, pure, and innocent. Magical thinking is not always toxic hope. It’s not one-way good or bad regarding either. Both are complicated, potentially abusive, harmful, disordered, life-affirming, joyful, and necessary for the human animal’s survival.

It is my messy, subjective, in-process, personal belief that we need BOTH. We need to examine, correct, implement, and derive meaning about what BOTH mean to and for us.

Bumpy. Uneasy. Imperfect. Painful. But necessary.

Maybe, in a few years, I’ll feel radically different about that. But, from where I am now, an ongoing individual, I am co-existing with them both.

There’s value is doing so. I don’t believe, whether it’s of the faith variety, or of the magical thinking variety, that will change any time soon.

So, in the meantime, I say to you, “Have fun, and good health, believing!”

Copyright © 2021 by Sheryle Cruse