How Practicing Healthy Gratitude Can Help You Navigate Life’s Challenges

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“Just be grateful.” It seems like everyone is touting gratitude lately: Kelly Clarkson is “Thankful,” medical researchers say it’s good for you, and even the makers of home décor want us to be “Grateful,” in loopy, cursive writing. Later this month, most Catholics will undoubtedly hear a sermon on gratitude connected to the celebration of Thanksgiving.

But what if you aren’t feeling grateful? What if, in fact, you feel like you’re struggling to keep your head above the waves?

Gratitude Isn’t About Denying Real Problems

Rachael Isaac, a pastoral counselor at CatholicCounselors.com, runs into this a lot.

“One of the common misconceptions that I come across is, ‘Oh, I should just be grateful,’ meaning I should just be grateful and ignore my struggles,” Isaac explains. “But gratitude is not meant to invalidate our struggles. It’s a way to help us gain a better perspective on them.”

Rather than viewing gratitude as an either/or proposition—either we’re grateful or we’re acknowledging difficulties—Isaac advocates for a both/and approach.

“We have to acknowledge when bad things are bad,” she says. “That’s okay. We can acknowledge when hard things are hard. But then we can say, ‘Okay, what is also true? What also exists? What are the good things that are also happening in my life?’”

This balanced approach serves a practical purpose beyond mere positive thinking. As Isaac points out, “it allows me to break out of that all-or-nothing thinking, it allows me to see something other than the anxiety that I am experiencing due to the challenges that I’m facing.”

The Many Benefits of Gratitude

Humans are wired to give more of their attention to threats and challenges. That’s a useful trait if you’re battling a predator or figuring out how to stave off hunger or cold. But focusing too narrowly on your problems can actually be counterproductive: when your brain is on high alert, it may be more difficult to think through complex challenges that require a more nuanced solution than fight or flight.

Intentionally acknowledging the good as well as the challenge allows us to calm down and puts the brakes on the stress hormones flooding our brains. “And that allows us to bring that more solution-focused part of our brain online, so that we can think through our challenge,” Isaac says.

The past few decades have seen an explosion of research into the benefits of practicing gratitude, with researchers saying it can help improve sleep, cardiac health, social connections, mood, and problem-solving abilities, to name a few. The Bible recommends giving thanks to God as well, and spiritual masters have been pointing to the importance of gratitude for thousands of years.

But while the benefits of gratitude are well-attested, developing the practice takes time and intention.

“More often than not, it’s not a natural thing for people to do,” Isaac acknowledges. “At the end of our day, we kind of go through that litany of ‘didn’t get this done, I should have done this, I should have said this in that conversation.’ All these things are still on my to-do list that now I have to add on to tomorrow…

“That’s what we’re thinking about, and it requires some very conscious and intentional effort to say, ‘What went well today?’”

Practicing gratitude can be even more challenging for people who have feelings of low self-esteem or who suffer from religious scrupulosity, the sense that they can never be “good enough” to deserve God’s love and care.

The good news, Isaac says, is that the more we practice gratitude, the easier and more natural it becomes.

Three Tips for Effective Gratitude Practice

To help practice gratitude in a healthy way, Rachael Isaac offers her clients several practical tips.

First, be specific about what you are grateful for now, today. Yes, you “should” be grateful for your family, for the roof over your head, for your health. But reciting the same broad categories every day dilutes the power of gratitude. 

Second, set aside a few moments at the end of the day to practice gratitude, but also begin practicing it in the moment. For example: “You’re driving to the store, and the store is packed…and then you find a parking space really close to the door. And you take that moment to say, ‘Oh, thank you, Lord.’”

And third, write it down. Keeping a gratitude journal can actually be quite helpful. You’re more likely to stick with the practice if you have to sit down with a pen and paper, plus writing engages more areas of our brain so that our act of gratitude leaves a more lasting impression.

Here are a few questions Rachael Isaac suggests to make the above points practical and simple:

  •  What went well today?
  •  Where did I see beauty today? 
  •  What did I do well today?
  •  What blessings did I receive today (that parking spot, or kind words from a friend)?

A New View of Life

For clients who embrace this balanced approach to gratitude, the results can be profound. “People feel a lot more peaceful and a lot more hopeful,” Isaac reports. “Because again, it doesn’t make everything better, but it allows us to see that the good exists, too.”

This shift can be even more profound for people who feel they are not “good enough” to receive God’s blessings.

“It can really start to draw us into a closer and healthier relationship with God,” Isaac explains. “I’m not doubting his love for me anymore, I can see it all around me.”

The practice of gratitude, when approached with balance and intention, offers more than a temporary mood boost—it provides a pathway to deeper peace, stronger faith, a more nuanced understanding of our life, and more resources for creatively tackling our troubles and challenges.

If you are struggling with anxiety or negative thinking, reach out to Rachel Isaac or the other pastoral counselors at CatholicCounselors.com. And if you are ready to begin journaling, and cultivating a new mindset, take a look at A Beautiful Life: A Year of Monthly Journal Prompts for a Happier, Healthier, Holier Mindset.

Going On A Bear Hunt–Understanding The Relationship Between Prayer and Powerful Emotions

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Whether trauma, depression, anxiety, anger, or other strong feelings are causing us problems, turning to God in prayer is always a good idea. After all, God loves us and always wants to help us become more fully alive—more fully ourselves.

But in order to really benefit from prayer, we must “also learn how to pray,” as the Catechism of the Catholic Church says (#2650). It’s no wonder the Catechism spends more than three hundred paragraphs on the topic of how to pray.

When it comes to mental health, one trap that people sometimes fall into is treating prayer as a way to avoid the strong feelings that come with a crisis, according to Jacob Flores-Popcak, a pastoral counselor with CatholicCounselors.com.

“An unhealthy relationship to prayer says, ‘Help me climb up above this thing,’” Flores-Popcak said in a recent interview. Underlying that impulse is often the assumption that “spiritual things are higher than these base, awful, physical things like feelings.”

But the view that physical things—and by extension, our emotions—are to be shunned or avoided simply isn’t Catholic, Flores-Popcak said. In fact, this attempt to detach from embodied feelings is more in line with Buddhism or, within the Christian tradition, the old dualistic heresy known as Manichaeism.

The Christian tradition says that feelings are given to us by God for a reason, Popcak said: in fact, they are invitations to go deeper.

“There is no point at which any character, any person in scripture just prays a feeling away,” Flores-Popcak explained. On the contrary, the Bible is full of people who openly embraced their feelings. Jesus wept at the tomb of Lazarus, for example, and expressed his anxiety openly to his Father in the Garden of Gethsemane.

“Feelings are meant to help us bond with other people and they’re meant to help us get certain needs met,” Flores-Popcak explained. “So to pray away a feeling is to pray away an opportunity for connection, and it’s to pray away a need.”

He continued: “God gives us our needs, and God calls us to relationships. Both of those things are, at their core, godly things. If I’m trying to just get rid of that, it’s gonna end up feeling like I’m just repressing the feeling, and it’s just going to come raging back later.”

It’s like the children’s song, “Going on a Bear Hunt,” Flores-Popcak said, in which the hunters come to an insurmountable mountain that blocks the path forward: “The refrain of that song is, ‘Can’t go around it, can’t go over it—gotta go through it.’ We’ve gotta go into that tunnel, into that bear’s den.”

Similarly, prayer is not meant to help us go “over” or “around” our feelings of anguish, anxiety, or sadness. “Prayer is supposed to help me go deeper into it, to find the truth at the center of it, or even on the other side,” Flores-Popcak said. In the Catholic mystical tradition, every challenge is “an opportunity to go deeper into my knowledge of myself, deeper into my knowledge of Christ, and deeper in relationship with other people.”

What does this look like? Instead of trying to pray away your feelings, try praying with these questions:

  1. “Lord, what do you want me to learn from this feeling?”
  2. “How do you want me to respond to the need at the center of this feeling?”
  3. “How do you want me to grow closer to you and to the people around me as a result of experiencing this feeling?”

Such questions align with the example of spiritual masters such as St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Teresa of Avila, and others, all of whom advise that instead of running away from feelings we’d rather not be experiencing, we ought to plunge deeper into their depths, accompanied by Christ and supported by friends—so that we can emerge stronger and more connected to God, ourselves, and the people around us.

If you need help managing your mental health and want to do so in a way that draws on your Catholic faith, reach out to Jacob Flores-Popcak or any of the other Pastoral Counselors at CatholicCounselors.com.

Don’t Reject Your Anxiety; Nurture a Better Relationship With It Instead

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You think you want to get rid of your anxiety—after all, it takes over your brain and floods your body with stress hormones that don’t do much but make you miserable.

But do you really want to get rid of it? When push comes to shove, the idea of getting rid of your anxiety might just…well, make you anxious.

Jacob Flores-Popcak, a pastoral counselor with CatholicCounselors.com, often runs into this problem with new clients.

“Despite the fact that they are ostensibly coming to me for help decreasing their anxiety, they’ll often be very, very resistant to switching anything up,” Flores-Popcak said in a recent interview. The reason they often give? They can’t imagine how they could get along without their anxiety to keep them going.

“And so there becomes this horrible Catch-22 that people live with where they would really, really like to not be anxious anymore,” Flores-Popcak continued. “But when it comes right down to it, they don’t know how they’d get anything done, how they’d be in relationship with anybody, or how they’d keep themselves safe without anxiety to motivate them.”

When clients run into this roadblock, Flores-Popcak often invites them to reframe their thinking with a little help from the 2001 children’s movie Shrek.

Anxiety, the Overworked Sidekick

In the movie, an ogre named Shrek sets out on a quest, begrudgingly accompanied by an annoyingly talkative, overly helpful Donkey.

Anxiety, Jacob says, is like Donkey—or any number of other over-eager sidekicks from popular animated movies: “These sidekicks are always depicted as being very loving; they want what is best for the hero,” Flores-Popcak said. “But often, the ways that they attempt to help are kind of destructive. They mean well, but they are fallible and can get messy.”

On one hand, people suffering from constant anxiety may loathe this sidekick (much like Shrek trying to shake off Donkey in the early part of the movie). On the other hand, they rely on it for so much—getting out of bed in the morning, getting kids ready for school, managing household finances—that it can be difficult to imagine another mode for getting those things done. In this way, they can end up responding to their anxiety the way Shrek does later in the film, doing whatever Donkey tells him without questioning and suffering hijinks as a result.

“We often swing back and forth between treating anxiety as an antagonist in our story and then, on the other hand, doing whatever it tells us,” Flores-Popcak said. “But that attitude is really unfair to anxiety, poor little sidekick that he is, because guess what? He’s not a bad guy. He’s actually just like any of these other parts of me—another sidekick that’s trying to help me out. He has a job within me. For instance, if a bear is chasing me, anxiety can be a very helpful and effective survival mechanism. So anxiety certainly has its due place. But he can get overburdened.”

To put it in the language of faith, God gave us anxiety and all the physiological responses that come with it to help us out in certain situations. But habitually deploying anxiety to handle even the ordinary tasks of everyday life isn’t healthy, Flores-Popcak said.

The solution isn’t to fear and loathe our anxiety, he said, because when we do that, we’re really rejecting an essential, God-given part of ourselves. Rather, the better approach is to begin “re-assigning” the jobs that we habitually give to anxiety.

“To make progress in our experience of anxiety, we need to recognize that anxiety does not need to be my exclusive motivation for all those things,” he said. “I can wake up in the morning, and sure, I can feel anxious, and that can get me out of bed—or, I can wake up in the morning and I can challenge myself, ‘What would be a love-based reason for getting out of bed?’ And instead of just immediately giving into the kind of knee-jerk instinctual anxiety that hits me the second I open my eyes, let me take a deep breath and challenge myself to imagine a love-based reason to get out of bed in the morning.”

Similarly, when anxiety begins to assert its annoying self throughout the day (like Donkey’s constant chatter), consider pausing to take a deep breath, asking yourself: “Hey, what if I didn’t outsource this thing I’m worried about to my anxiety sidekick? What if I gave this concern to another part of me to handle? How would that feel different?”

Breaking the Habit of Anxiety

When people are reluctant to give up their anxiety because it’s the only way they know to get things done, reframing the situation in the way Flores-Popcak suggests can help overcome that mental roadblock.

But it’s no magic bullet, he said: “Just realizing, ‘Oh, huh, I can do all the things that I’m already doing, but for a love reason as opposed to a fear reason, and I won’t be anxious anymore’—no one’s going to hear that and just magically change.”

Instead, it takes time to build a new, healthier habit: slowing down enough to question the automatic anxiety response, then intentionally choosing a different response instead, and then actually carrying out that choice as an act of one’s will.

Someone has to make that choice over and over many times before it becomes habitual, Flores-Popcak said—a process that is often supported with other approaches during therapy.

But the effort is always worth it, he said, because it allows people to enter into a healthier relationship with themselves (including their “anxiety sidekick”) and with others. “It allows the actions that I take in regard to my co-workers, my friends, my kids, and my spouse to be more effective because they no longer feel that I’m coming at them with a giant fear gun,” he said. “Instead, I’m coming at them with a loving spirit.”

In the end, this allows us to arrive at the same point with our anxiety that Shrek arrives at in regards to Donkey: no longer resenting or repressing our “sidekick” as an unwanted intruder or antagonist, nor letting him control everything for us, but instead welcoming him as a well-intentioned sidekick who can be taken with a grain of salt.

For more about tackling anxiety, check out Unworried: A Life without Anxiety by Dr. Gregory Popcak. And for one-on-one pastoral counseling help from Jacob Flores-Popcak or another Catholic counselor, reach out at CatholicCounselors.com.

How ‘Virtue Discovery’ Can Change Your Life

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When a client first meets with Grant Freeman, LMHC, they’re usually very focused on the problem for which they sought counseling. After an initial assessment, though, Freeman pivots the conversation in a surprising direction: “Tell me about some things you think you do well.”

His clients often resist this new direction—they keep wanting to circle back to the problem, but Freeman keeps redirecting them toward developing a list of things they do “well.” Not perfectly, necessarily, but passably—things like getting up in the morning, getting dressed, helping someone out.

Ultimately, the goal is to discover the virtues that the client already possesses, even if they are only as small as a seed, so that he or she can use those virtues to help solve their problem.

“You don’t talk about your problems, and they go away,” Freeman said in a recent interview. “You have to do something different.” Virtues are, in a nutshell, “behaving effectively” in a given situation, he said. “And if we behave effectively, then we solve our problems.”

For example, let’s say that you are at your wits’ end with your thirteen-year-old child; she doesn’t follow through on what you ask her to do, she’s argumentative and sassy, and lately, you’ve been getting in lots of fights.

Freeman might help you develop a plan for improving your child’s behavior, but in order to implement that plan, you are going to need to change your own behavior—namely, the way you typically respond to her provocations.

The virtue discovery process might help you identify virtues you’re already practicing in other contexts that would be useful to apply to this particular problem: restraint, perseverance, and gentle-firmness, for example.

But virtues do much more than help people solve problems, Freeman said; they are also the key to living a joyful, fulfilled life.

 

A Life Devoted to Virtue

You might call Freeman a “virtue evangelist.” Shortly after graduating from college, he gave up a promising career in an import/export business so that he could devote his life to sharing the joys of the virtuous life.

It was the all-boys Catholic boarding school that he attended in high school that first introduced him to that way of life. He and his classmates didn’t have CD players, television, or even radio—but they had lots of fun.

“They let us play very wildly and run rambunctiously,” he said. “We got to have a lot of fun, but it was governed. You didn’t have too many opportunities for getting way off the rails.”

After a few twists and turns in his life, he eventually decided to make it his life mission to share the “gift” he had received from his boarding school. That’s when he traded his role at the import/export company for a new role as a religion teacher at a Catholic high school.

To his delight, his students were very receptive to his message “that the good life, the beautiful life, is the life that is the most ethical, and that any fun that wasn’t virtuous was missing the mark of genuine fun.”

Eventually, he wound up at the Pastoral Solutions Institute, where he leads clients through the virtue discovery process—not only to help solve their problems, but to help them live a more joyful, satisfying life.

 

Discovering and Nurturing Your Virtues

The virtue discovery process isn’t difficult or complicated, Freeman said.

A good place to start is to realize that, as someone made in the image of God, you already possess the seed of all the virtues. All you need to grow them is the light of the Holy Spirit and some good soil—preferably, some rich rotted manure, which Freeman equates with the challenges and hardships we face on a daily basis.

“The virtues are all in there, because we’re made in the image and likeness of God,” Freeman said. “And they grow because of God’s grace, but also because they’re demanded of us. Whatever situations we’re in, we’re invited to grow in them. Now, to begin with, we perform poorly, and we will need to do some corrective work, but by hook or by crook, virtues can take root.”

To help identify and reinforce those virtues, Freeman advises clients to engage in a daily virtue inventory. The process resembles a simplified version of the Ignatian Examen. Here are the steps:

  1. Ask for the Help of the Holy Spirit: “This is not a ‘pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps’ sort of process,” Freeman said. “We can’t do anything without grace.”

Your prayer may be very simple: “Lord, show me myself. When you look at me, what do you see? Tell me about myself. You know me better than I know me, so reveal me to myself.”

  1. Review the Day: Take a few minutes at the end of each day to reflect on what went well. Ideally, write it down in a journal. If you can’t think of anything, ask your spouse or children or a friend who has your best interests at heart.

 “Your children might say, ‘You made us a sandwich,’ or your spouse might say, ‘I’m really grateful that you went to work today and came home on time ready for dinner.’ It’s as simple as that.”

  1. Identify the Virtue: Name the virtue that enabled you to do well in those situations. For example, if you helped a colleague with a difficult task, recognize the virtue of generosity or friendliness. It’s not crucial that you identify the traditional name of the virtue, Freeman said. 
  2. Look Ahead: Consider the challenges you might face the next day and determine which virtues you will need to employ to navigate those challenges effectively.

    “Once you’ve identified the virtues, then you take a little look into tomorrow and see where you might intentionally use one of those virtues in a particular place, with a particular person, in a small way, so as to become more and more familiar with that virtue,” Freeman said. “So, I exercised restraint with my kids when they were annoying me today. Now, where am I going to use that tomorrow?”

Practicing this daily virtue discovery process helps to make you familiar with the tools at your disposal to best navigate life’s challenges and opportunities.

In college, Freeman wrestled with how hard it can be to live a virtuous life, and he is still working on it. While acknowledging that reality, he advises clients that it is well worth the effort.

“The Lord tells us that if you found a sturdy friend, if you found a treasure, do everything within your power to preserve it or possess it,” Freeman said. “And virtue— your own possession of the image and likeness of God—is the greatest treasure you could possibly ever fathom. So take care of it, strengthen it, shine it up, work it out. You know, don’t leave it in the garage; take it out for a spin.”

For personalized help with the virtue discovery process, reach out to Freeman or another pastoral counselor at CatholicCounselors.com.

After Trauma, EMDR Therapy Offers Hope for Healing

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“Lucy” is 62 years old, but she is still haunted by the physical and psychological abuse she experienced as a child. Although decades have passed, Lucy continues to experience anxiety, periods of deep depression, panic attacks, and other symptoms.

Most of us will experience a traumatic event at some point in our lives. The U.S. Center for PTSD defines trauma as “a shocking and dangerous event that you see or that happens to you” in which “you think that your life or others’ lives are in danger.” Anyone can experience trauma at any age, and for a wide variety of reasons: bullying at school, a car accident, or conflict with a spouse or acquaintance, for example.

Often, people are able to heal following traumatic events. But in some cases, for reasons that aren’t entirely understood, the traumatic memory gets “walled off,” making it difficult to process—and heal. In this case, the trauma can persist for years or even decades.

God Wants Our Healing

But that isn’t what God wants for us, says Dr. Mark Kolodziej, a certified traumatologist with the Pastoral Solutions Institute.

“God wants us all to enjoy our lives,” he said in a recent interview. He tells new patients who suffer from past traumas that whatever happened to them was not their fault, nor was it a punishment from God, nor do they need to carry the pain to be “good” Christians. “God doesn’t want us to be stuck in this negative place in our lives.”

With God’s help and a cooperative attitude, most individuals suffering from trauma do get better. But it doesn’t “just happen,” Kolodziej said. “Time doesn’t heal anything,” he said. “It’s what you do in that time that’s going to heal things.”

And with the advent of a relatively new type of therapy, healing can be achieved fairly quickly—sometimes, in just a few sessions, he said.

EMDR Therapy: Breaking Down Walls

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is a specialized form of cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) designed to help individuals process and heal from traumatic memories. Developed by Dr. Francine Shapiro in 1989, EMDR emerged from a theory that the brain processes and stores traumatic memories differently from normal memories. This difference can cause these memories to become walled off from the rest of the brain, leading to ongoing psychological and emotional distress.

During a traumatic event, the brain’s usual networking of memories and sensory experiences can go “offline,” leaving these memories unprocessed. This unprocessed trauma can manifest in various forms, such as anxiety, depression, PTSD, and other trauma-related conditions. The goal of EMDR is to help the brain reprocess these traumatic memories so that they no longer exert a harmful influence on a person’s life.

EMDR therapy does not require the patient to discuss the traumatic event in detail. Instead, the therapy leverages the brain’s capacity to reprocess memories through bilateral stimulation, most commonly achieved through guided eye movements, though other methods like tapping or auditory stimuli—first on one side of the body, then on the other—can also be used.

At the beginning of an EMDR session, Dr. Kolodziej asks the individual to identify a negative thought or emotion that is bothering them, such as anxiety or shame. Then he asks the person to complete a sentence associated with that negative feeling: “I am….”

“And the person will often say, ‘I am a loser,’ ‘I am afraid,’ ‘I am worthless.’ So that is your negative thought,” he said.

Then he asks the person to “float back” in their memory to the point in their life when those negative thoughts started, or to their worst instances. That’s the starting point for reprocessing the traumatic memory.

Next, he asks the person to identify a positive thought they would rather have associated with that feeling. “So right now your negative cognition is ‘I’m not worthwhile.’ ‘I’m a loser,’ right? So what would you like to change that to?” he said. “And they might say, ‘I have a lot to offer’ or ‘I am valuable’ or ‘I am strong.’ Okay, so that’s what you’d like to get to…. So now let’s let your brain work.”

This is where the “bilateral stimulation” comes in. For 20 to 30 seconds, the person follows Kolodziej’s finger without moving their head as he moves it across their field of vision, from left to right and back again several times. This stimulates the right side of the brain, then the left side of the brain, allowing it to more effectively reprocess the traumatic memory—breaking through the protective wall.

During bilateral stimulation, the person lets their thoughts flow in whatever direction seems best. The person might go into more detail about their trauma, or they might go to a completely different place. In either case, by bringing in new thoughts, “they’re reprocessing what happened and coming up with ways of being able to deal with it and cope with it,” Kolodziej said.

At the end of the bilateral stimulation, he asks the person what they are thinking or feeling. Then the whole process starts over again: naming the negative thought, the positive “replacement” thought, and the bilateral stimulation.

“They come up with another thought, and another thought, and another thought,” Kolodziej said. “I’ll have no idea where the thought process is gonna go, but what’s happening as they’re going from one thought to the next thought to the next thought, is they’re no longer stuck.”

‘Healing Can Absolutely Happen’

Over time, as the person’s brain continues to reprocess the memory, the emotional intensity associated with it diminishes. Kolodziej describes this as moving from the stage of having a “wound” to having a “scar”—a memory that no longer hijacks the present and is instead a part of the past.

EMDR is not the only way to address trauma; in certain situations, it may not even be the most appropriate method. But EMDR therapy has been widely embraced by mainstream health organizations, including the American Psychiatric Association (APA), the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, and the World Health Organization (WHO).

Whatever approach people take, Kolodziej said the most important step is to have hope that healing is possible. For those who doubt, Kolodziej offers a message of encouragement: “What if you could heal? What would that look like for you? There are so many people who have suffered like you and have found peace. With God at the helm, healing can absolutely happen.”

If you are dealing with the aftermath of a traumatic event, you can connect with Dr. Mark Kolodziej or Anne Brunette–who are both certified in EMDR–or another one of the licensed Catholic therapists at CatholicCounselors.com.

Why Your Faith Might Be Making You Anxious (And How to Fix It)

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Practicing religious faith isn’t just good for your spiritual life; it usually has physical and mental health benefits, too.

That conclusion has been the consensus of researchers for decades. When Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Brigham and Women’s Hospital reviewed hundreds of studies in 2022, for example, they found that people who participate in a religious community tend to live healthier, longer lives.

But researchers caution that religious faith and practice isn’t always beneficial in these ways. In fact, sometimes it can actually lead to greater anxiety and other mental health problems.

Such “toxic faith” is usually the result of extrinsic faith or insecure God-attachment, the Pastoral Solutions Institute’s Dr. Greg Popcak explains in his book Unworried: A Life Without Anxiety. Let’s focus on the issue of how extrinsic versus intrinsic faith can impact your mental health.

 

The Impact of Extrinsic Faith on Mental Health

Extrinsic faith, as defined by psychologist Gordon Allport, refers to religious or spiritual behavior primarily oriented towards achieving non-religious goals. These goals often include seeking parental or social acceptance, gaining approval, or achieving success in social status. The young adult who goes to church to satisfy her parents, the retiree who is involved mainly to socialize with friends, and the businessperson looking for social status or networking opportunities all exhibit extrinsic faith.

Intrinsic faith, on the other hand, is oriented towards helping a person live a more meaningful, integrated life.

“Extrinsic faith can be sincere in its way, but it is often a poor source of comfort because, unlike intrinsic faith, it is not intended to help you make more sense out of your life,” Dr. Popcak writes. “Rather, it is intended to get another person to give you something you do not feel you can claim for yourself, such as self-esteem, social or cultural identity, or professional success.”

When faith is just a means to an end, it can lead to anxiety and other psychological issues. Constantly trying to gain approval or acceptance from others through religious practices can be exhausting and unfulfilling.

Everyone goes through a phase where their faith is mostly extrinsic, either in childhood or as a newcomer to a faith community: during this initiation period, our practices and beliefs are given to us by others. But at some point, Dr. Popcak writes, each of us must decide whether our faith is a series of hoops we need to jump through to please others or the “source and summit” of our life (to borrow language from the Catechism of the Catholic Church).

 

Three Ways to Better Own Your Faith

Most people have many motivations for practicing their religion, some extrinsic and some intrinsic. But our overall goal should be to keep moving toward a more authentic “owned” faith, one that is a source of meaning, integration, transformation, and transcendence.

This journey begins with a conscious decision to seek a more personal, honest, open connection with God. If you feel the need for a more intrinsic faith, here are three practices to help you begin:

  1. Center Your Faith on Your Relationship with God: When you go to Mass, pray, or read scripture, do so with a genuine desire to connect with God. As the Catechism points out, our prayer and worship ought to lead us to a more intimate relationship with God. Don’t talk “at” God, but with God. Bring your whole self into your prayers, expressing your thoughts, fears, hopes, and gratitude sincerely. The Psalms are a good example of this sort of free-flowing, honest prayer.

  2. Seek Understanding: Spend time learning more about your faith through study and reflection. Learning about your faith can help you better integrate a more genuine faith into your lived practice, as opposed to just “going with the crowd.” Read books that deepen your understanding of spirituality and help you grow closer to God.

  3. Seek Spiritual Direction: A spiritual director or pastoral counselor can help you identify hidden assumptions, old hurts, and patterns of behavior that may be preventing you from growing close to God.

“The more your faith becomes intrinsic, the more you will be able to put aside your anxiety, sit at the feet of the Lord, and let your heart be still, knowing that he is God,” Dr. Popcak writes.

For more about this topic, see Chapter Five of Unworried: A Life Without Anxiety. And if you’d like more personal, one-on-one help with your faith life, reach out to a pastoral counselor at CatholicCounselors.com.