When I was younger, people used to pray for things all the time. They prayed for money. They prayed for money, love, happiness and health. They prayed for good things to happen and bad things to not happen. They (me, for sure) prayed for good weather, better Christmas presents, and my parents to not get divorced. Results were hit and miss. If your prayers were not answered, you were told:
- You prayed for the wrong thing
- You aren’t seeing the “bigger picture” of God’s plan
- You need to pray more
We also had a litany of proscribed Saints to pray to for specific issues like finding lost car keys, having a baby, or healing the sick.
I knew many families who went to church every Sunday. I often saw old ladies go to Mass every morning. I thought they were nuts. It was unimaginable to me to envision 7 days a week of that monotonous droning. A few of my friends from the luckiest families only had to go to church during major holidays (or never at all if they were heathens doomed to spend eternity in hell).
Now there’s a new religion that has taken over America – therapy. Specifically talk therapy. More specifically, never-ending talk therapy to get in touch with your feelings and make you feel like you are doing something while actually doing nothing to change your circumstances.
It occurred to me today, that therapy is just like praying (and going to church).
- It is facilitated by someone who is an ordained expert.
- You spend an hour a week (or more) performing rituals that you hope will solve your problems.
- Squishy, arbitrary, non-measurable results about your feelings is used to measure success.
- Participants have “faith” that not addressing their problems directly will result in solving their problems.
As I’ve written before, I have had therapy several times in my life and found it extremely helpful for working through problems that plagued me.
But every problem we discussed in therapy required me to take direct action on the problem. In fact, I made it my mission never to leave a therapy session without having a plan of action for that week.
- When I needed to repair my relationship with my absent father, those actions included reaching out him and making an effect to maintain ties.
- To be a better husband, I had to do things like stop making snide comments, dedicating more time and attention to my wife, and listening vs. talking.
- To lose weight I had to diet and exercise.
I won’t list the dozens of problems that therapy helped me fix. But I will say, no problem that I talked to my therapist about and took no action was ever resolved.
For those problems, I might as well just prayed.