Why “Just Pray About It” Wasn’t Enough and What Actually Helps
You prayed. You fasted. You confessed. You served. You memorized the verses about fear and tried to believe them hard enough.
You did everything you were told to do when anxiety or depression showed up and it still didn’t go away.
So you probably also received the other message, the quieter one underneath: that the problem must be you. Your faith wasn’t strong enough. You weren’t surrendered enough. You weren’t healed because you didn’t deserve to be healed yet.
I want to say this as clearly as I can: that message was wrong and carrying it has cost you enough.
Why Religious Communities Often Fail People With Anxiety and Depression
This isn’t an indictment of all faith, but in many high-control religious environments, mental health struggles are treated as spiritual failures – evidence of weak faith, unconfessed sin, or insufficient surrender to God.
The prescribed solutions like prayer, scripture, pastoral or bishop counsel, or accountability can offer real comfort for some people in some circumstances, but they’re not treatment for anxiety or depression. They don’t address the nervous system, they don’t process trauma, and in high-control environments, they can actually deepen shame by implying that the person who isn’t getting better simply isn’t trying hard enough.
For many women and LGBTQ+ adults raised in these communities, seeking professional mental health support was discouraged, stigmatized, or outright forbidden. Therapy was secular or worldly, antidepressants were a sign of lack of faith, and the "right answer was always more prayer.
By the time many of my clients find their way to therapy, they’ve been suffering for years (sometimes decades) while carrying the added weight of believing the suffering was their fault.
What Your Anxiety and Depression Are Actually Telling You
Anxiety and depression are not moral failures or spiritual deficiencies, they’re signals – often from a nervous system that has been under sustained stress for a very long time.
For women and LGBTQ+ adults who grew up in high-control religion, that stress often came from:
The chronic vigilance of trying to be good enough, pure enough, faithful enough
Suppressing your own thoughts, feelings, desires, and doubts because they were dangerous or shameful
Living in a community where love and belonging were conditional on compliance
Carrying spiritual terror– genuine fear of hell, divine abandonment, or eternal consequences
Losing yourself so completely in the role of good daughter, faithful wife, devoted member, that you stopped knowing who you were outside of it
Your nervous system responded to all of that the only way it knew how: numbing out, bracing itself, or sounding alarms.
That is not weakness. That is a body doing its job.
What Actually Helps
Healing from anxiety and depression rooted in religious experience requires more than symptom management, it requires going back to the root. In my practice, I work with individuals using approaches that address the whole person, not just the symptoms:
EMDR to process the specific memories, experiences, and internalized messages that are driving anxiety and depression at the level of the nervous system
Internal Family Systems (IFS) to compassionately understand the parts of you that are anxious, shutdown, or critical — and what they’ve been protecting you from
Relational Psychodynamic Therapy to explore how your early religious environment shaped your sense of self, your relationship with your emotions, and your capacity for self-compassion
Nervous system regulation to help your body finally learn that it is safe to relax, to feel, to take up space
This is not about rejecting faith or spirituality. Some of my clients rebuild a spiritual life that feels authentic and life-giving. Others don’t, and that’s equally valid. My role is not to guide you toward any particular outcome, it’s to help you heal.
You Were Never the Problem
One of the most profound shifts I witness in my clients is the moment they stop believing the anxiety or depression means something is fundamentally wrong with them, and start understanding it as a completely sensible response to what they lived through. That shift doesn’t happen overnight, but it is possible, and it changes everything.
You were not failed by your faith because you weren’t faithful enough. You were failed by a system that was not equipped, and in some cases, not willing, to actually help you heal. You deserve care that is and that’s exactly what I’m here to offer.
You’ve tried every spiritual solution. You deserve to try something that actually works.
I work with women and gender-nonconforming adults in Arizona and Washington navigating anxiety, depression, and the wounds that high-control religion can leave behind. I’d love to connect.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kelsey Laulainen (she/her) is a licensed psychotherapist specializing in anxiety, depression, and religious trauma for women and gender-nonconforming adults in Arizona and Washington. She brings both clinical expertise and lived experience to this work. Learn more about Kelsey here.
