Therapy and faith in Jesus were never meant to compete for the same place in your life. Dieula Previlon, a minister who also works as a therapist, holds that God can heal a person directly and can heal a person through the slow, honest work of a counselor and a community. Seeking that help is an act of stewardship, not a lapse in trust. The church’s real mistake is treating the two as rivals, and people stay hurt longer when it does.
That answer may not erase the sting of what you have already heard. Maybe you mentioned counseling to someone at church and got a verse, a pause, or a suggestion to pray harder. Maybe nobody said anything, and you still came away believing that strong Christians do not need this kind of help. Either way, the question deserves an answer that takes your hesitation seriously.
The objection that sounds most faithful
The strongest case for “just Jesus” comes straight from the Gospels. Fields, who interviewed Previlon, raised the woman with the issue of blood. Mark’s account says she “had suffered many things of many physicians, and had spent all that she had, and was nothing bettered, but rather grew worse” (Mark 5:26). Then she touched Jesus’ garment and was healed. If that can happen, why bother with anything slower?
Previlon takes the miracle seriously. She says she believes in “the power of the healing touch of Jesus,” and she warns that highly educated people can forget instant healing is possible. That is a trained therapist speaking, and she means it.
The story is a narrative, though. It describes what Jesus did for one woman who had exhausted every human option. It does not command every sufferer to stop seeing physicians, and it does not promise that everyone who reaches for Jesus will be healed in that moment. What it shows is that Jesus can do what human help could not. Reading it as a ban on human help asks the passage to say more than it says.
Previlon puts the tension in her own words. She describes God as able to speak a word and heal, while also wanting a person to sit with a counselor, where “something will happen in the conversation.” Her instruction is short: “Hold both. Hold both and don’t let go.” Holding both means you can pray for sudden healing and still keep your appointment. It also means that if healing comes slowly, the slowness is not proof of God’s absence or your failure.
Where the shame comes from
Part of the sting comes from a belief that some questions are off limits. Previlon wrote her book Does God See Me? out of her own trauma and grief, including the death of her youngest brother. She says many believers carry the question in her title and keep it hidden, partly “because we’re afraid of what others will say about me being a Christian asking this question.” If a Christian fears asking God whether he sees her, it is no surprise she would fear telling her church she sees a therapist.
Underneath that fear sits an assumption: if Jesus is enough, any other help reveals distrust. It sounds devout. In practice it limits God to one way of working, and it treats the struggle itself as the sin.
Previlon’s own practice runs on a different assumption. Describing the healing work in her book, she says, “I don’t know how you can go about the healing journey without Jesus.” She has worked with traumatized women in places like Haiti and Congo, and she is candid that “my therapeutic strategies won’t be enough for these people.” Her conclusion: “I can’t leave them with just strategies. I gotta give them Jesus as well.” She treats the strategies as real and useful, and Jesus as the one they cannot replace. That corrects the Christian who calls therapy unspiritual and anyone who expects therapy to stand in for God.
Her method also speaks to people who have been rushed. Clients come to her expecting overnight healing, she says, and she slows them down. Her approach begins with care, tenderness, gentleness and grace, which she connects to the tenderness Jesus offers. Being hurried toward recovery, whether by “get over it” or by “pray it away,” runs against that.
A map, and the places maps do not reach
Fields offers a picture that helps: “I think the therapy can be a map to get you to Jesus.” A map is valuable in unfamiliar country, and refusing one is foolish. Still, the map points somewhere beyond itself.
Previlon agrees: “It’s not the end all be all.” Her reason is partly practical. Therapy costs money, and countless people, in the United States and far beyond it, will never sit in a weekly session. Fields draws out the theological stakes: “If we say that therapy is the only mode for healing, we’re saying that God doesn’t give healing to people without access. And that’s not true.” Previlon answers, “It is not true at all.”
This guards against an overcorrection. Swinging from “real Christians don’t need counseling” to “real healing requires counseling” shrinks God in a different direction. One view says he will not use trained people. The other says he cannot reach anyone without them.
Previlon’s clearest example is Haiti, where, she says, a person may never go to therapy but will heal through their church community. The point reaches beyond Haiti. Healing travels through relationships, and relationships are available to people who have no insurance and no clinic nearby. For a reader stung at church, this cuts two ways. The community that made you feel ashamed for seeking help is also meant to be one of the places help comes from.
What Scripture says about being helped by others
The Bible does not mention modern counseling, and pretending it does would be dishonest. It does speak to whether seeking wise people shows distrust. Proverbs 11:14 reads, “Where no counsel is, the people fall: but in the multitude of counsellors there is safety.” A proverb states how wisdom generally works rather than guaranteeing every case. Its direction is still plain: seeking counsel is wisdom.
James 5:16 moves the same way in a different setting: “Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed.” James writes to believers about prayer, sickness and sin within the church, not about therapy. The movement of the verse still matters. Healing comes as people become honest with one another.
Previlon makes nearly the same connection. “There’s something about confession,” she says, tying healing to a contrite spirit and good community. She also names what happens when those are missing: “Everyone’s in hiding. Everyone’s in isolation, and then shame takes root, and it just festers and runs wild.” Speaking as a clinician, she says therapists look for this from the first meeting: “If someone is in isolation, that’s a red flag for us.” The shame you were handed at church may be the very thing keeping your pain hidden, and Scripture gives you no reason to carry it alone.
When “I just need Jesus” becomes a hiding place
Previlon says something some readers will find uncomfortable: “Sometimes my Christian clients can be the hardest for me.” Her reason concerns control. Some arrive already sure what their healing should look like, and “they don’t want you to speak into it.” Her group practice begins by asking what a client means by Christian counseling, because some want only a verse or a prayer.
She turns to Psalm 46:10, “Be still, and know that I am God.” In the psalm, that word is spoken over a world in upheaval, calling people to stop striving and recognize who God is. Previlon applies it to the client gripping their own plan: stillness can mean loosening your hold long enough to hear what another person sees. That application goes beyond the psalm’s original setting, but it fits the release of control the psalm asks for.
Fields names why this is hard. “We want God to see us, but we don’t want people to see us.” She adds that “sometimes you need people just to see what you can’t.” For some believers, “I just need Jesus” is sincere trust. For others it has quietly become a way to avoid being known by anyone with skin on. That is worth asking honestly, ideally with someone who loves you.
Holding both, in an ordinary week
Fields describes her own therapy. Her therapist opens their sessions in prayer. She goes on a regular schedule and does the work, and the Lord is invited into the room. She says that combination has brought more wholeness and healing into her life. It is one person’s example, offered as a picture rather than a rule.
Your next step may look different. It might be finding a counselor and asking plainly how they approach faith. It might be telling one trusted friend what you have been hiding, or bringing your pastor into the picture alongside a clinician. If your pain has turned into thoughts of ending your life, please do not wait for any of this. Call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, today.
None of these steps guarantees how or when healing will come. Previlon is honest that healing is a journey requiring commitment, and some wounds are carried for a long season. Therapy is no formula, and prayer is no formula either.
Fields offered the sharpest way to see why the two belong together. Prayer, she said, is where you show God who you are. Therapy and community are where other people see you. Both are forms of the same thing: being seen. Her conclusion leaves no room for the old rivalry: “you can’t get healing unless God and people see you.” Asking for help, then, is no retreat from prayer. It is letting the second half of that sentence happen.