Science vs Spirituality | Beyond the Psychological Self
The Self is not the Source
While journaling about the slow, quiet work of learning to accept someone exactly as they are without making their limitations mean something about me, I found myself considering for the first time the possibility of writing a series of posts about the topic.
We’ve all experienced this kind of introspection as believers, and perhaps even just as human beings. We’ve all been in a place, in one connection or another, where we find ourselves evaluating whether we are truly yoked with someone, weighing what we see in them: how much more of something they embody than we do, or how much they lack in the very areas where we excel. I’ve been on a long journey of learning the nuance of this kind of acceptance and discernment, especially knowing in my heart that the particular connection I have struggled with but am learning so much from is one that God absolutely intended and brought together.
As I sat with my thoughts, the usual ones were there: the ache, the old reflex to take certain things personally, the opposite but equally heavy weight of feeling intimidated by the need to shrink myself so they could be more comfortable (because their inability to process what made them uncomfortable about me, my depth, was not a failure in them), the pressure of how to serve God and them through God, how to “get it right” because I am so spiritually aware of His purpose in this connection.
There was also the steady choice not to do anything at all, to either just attempt to ignore the imbalance between us or to just check out altogether and tell God, “Nah, thanks, but I’ll pass on this assignment and this lesson.” And then a deeper current moved through.
I love working for God, and I love serving others in the ways that I can, even when the 3D experience of both is difficult, because of the way it makes me feel inside. Being a servant is very much my soul’s truest purpose. As real and clear as that is to me, it’s hard to put into words, especially in a world where people look at anyone who so freely gives and serves others as someone who is, well, mad, off their rocker, or even a bit more than weird.
What serving others feels like within me is a kind of wholeness. It is a connectedness with God, as not just a Creator and Father but as a part of the core of who and what I am, and with who and what He has created. It is a settledness in my spirit that has nothing to do with whether the other person is meeting me halfway, and nothing, really, to do with my mind, my conditioning, or my mental health at all.
It’s not a form of neurosis, nor is it a form of unhealthy self-sacrifice. It is a literal need within my soul. I think most spiritual people will understand that feeling and the depth of the nuance of it.
I’ve sat with this many times over the years – sometimes while hurting, sometimes while doubting, and sometimes even when things have never felt easier or more in flow and right than ever before. But this morning, as I sat with the hard reality of my own psyche and Self, truly in flow with Source, the difference became clear. And that clarity was far bigger than just my own personal situation.
Perhaps it takes a particular depth of empathy, a specific anointing, and/or a specific level of consciousness above suffering to understand what I registered, but I have to be honest, and I say this as a trained psychologist: I believe that when a person is at that level of anointing, understanding, and evolution of consciousness, psychology has gotten it all wrong.
Psychology has plenty to say about people who, by default, over-give. It has even more to say about those who keep giving to those who never fill them, to those who never return even a drop of what is poured out. On one level psychology is right. Pouring from an empty self is destructive. It is codependency. It is a slow erasure of the person doing the pouring. That diagnosis has helped many people stop bleeding out in relationships that were never going to change.
But the diagnosis is incomplete. Sit for a moment with these questions, instead of what you (think) you know about the mind: What if the cup never truly goes empty? And what if the pouring is not coming from the self at all? What if it is coming from the Source, from God Himself – and He always replenishes?
What if it is not about what comes back to us through the actions or responses of other people, but through God Himself? What if it truly is a supernatural experience of love? And what if the reason for that, for those who are built that way, is the anointing itself – truly, His purpose and intention for those people who have the gift of true empathy and the depth of love that is capable of such assignments in the Spirit?
That single shift changes the entire ledger. That single shift brings into clarity that this is the true love of Christ, embodied in a human being. How can science be so entitled and full of itself that it seeks to undermine and pathologize such a precious truth?
It is important to understand the spirituality of Christ-like love. The person walking in it must be emotionally mature and healed enough within themselves to manage and balance their energy and their heart with the gifts of the Spirit and the armor of God. There are those on this planet who are more than capable of that depth of love and stewardship. And yet they are so often seen as too much, too needy, too soft, too stupid, or simply “not self-aware enough.”
Those who embody this kind of maturity are generally born empaths, and their lives have been filled with all the suffering necessary to learn, to grow, and to heal their core selves to this level. The reality is that for those people, through the most harrowing personal experiences of betrayal, grief, loss of self and others, and God-guided seasons in the wilderness, they have been refined by fire and reached the highest levels of self-awareness. And that is exactly how and why they can healthily function in the world and simultaneously serve God’s purpose for them as healers and empaths at all.
When we consider that reality and allow it to exist as it is, and as it does, suddenly a lot of what passes for “self-awareness” in our culture starts to look less like wisdom and more like refined selfishness.
As a society, we have become very skilled at protecting our emotional economy. People have become conditioned to quickly judge books by covers, to assume the intentions of others, to project our surface interpretations onto others before truly “meeting” them and often to be acutely defensive of anything that we do not understand. We have become less practiced at the older, harder kind of love that remains open even when it is not returned. We treat any continued openness as a failure of boundaries rather than a possible overflow from a different Source.
That does not mean that it is unhealthy when a person does practice that older, harder kind of love. Far from it. In fact, perhaps they are the most healthy and most balanced of us all.
There are still lines. “Do not cast your pearls before swine” is still wisdom. Boundaries are still crucially important. I have lived that tension for years – through caregiving, through betrayal by both those close to me and by the medical system as a whole, through seasons that required me to pull back hard in the physical and emotional realms for the sake of safety, while refusing to close the spirit. But those seasons are precisely what refined my anointing and the gifts of my heart, through sanctification.
That is not the absence of boundaries. That is the presence of a Source that does not run dry when people do. And this is the difference between codependent emptying and prophetic overflow.
Psychology can see the first clearly. It has almost no language for the second. And, on the opposite extreme, religion has sometimes demanded the second while ignoring the real damage of the first, turning people into spiritual doormats and calling it faithfulness. I deconstructed that version of religion for a reason. I did not abandon the reality of God or the call to love. I refused the dogma that would not let the whole person – body, mind, heart, and spirit—come into healthy integration.
Two things can be true at once.
You can protect your nervous system and still refuse to withhold love. You can honor what psychology has correctly observed about trauma and reciprocity and still recognize that the soul has a Source those frameworks cannot measure. You can reject both the therapeutic gospel of pure self-protection and the religious gospel of pure self-erasure.
That tension is where Scripture, lived experience, and philosophy meet. It is the place where a mature mind and heart learn to hold paradox without collapsing into either extreme. This series is about a former psychologist and spiritual empath walking that ground out loud – guided by God and by Scripture, starting from the quiet moment the insight landed, and moving outward from there.
I am writing this series because too many people who carry a genuine anointing for deep empathy and Christ-like love are being told by the culture – and even too often by the church – that something is wrong with them. They are pathologized for remaining open, labeled codependent for not cutting people off fast enough, or dismissed as naïve for believing love can still flow when reciprocity is absent.
I know what it is to hold both the training of psychology and the reality of the Spirit. I know the cost of the wilderness seasons that refine this kind of heart. And I know the quiet freedom that comes when you finally stop measuring the pour by what comes back and start measuring it by the Source it comes from.
This series is my way of saying out loud what I wish someone had said to me years ago: the model is incomplete, the love is real, and you are not broken for carrying it.
To those who read this series, I pray that you find some wisdom, some hope and encouragement, and some heart-felt guidance in it. To the friend who brought it all full circle, we are so very different – but that is the entirety of the lesson in itself, and what God has called me to share with the world through what you have given me the opportunity to further refine in myself:
We’re really not that different at all when we are open and receptive to the mirrors God gives us to hold up for each other.
And that is the key to all of this:
God’s mirror, in all of us, that we can all evolve and develop into a reflection from within us of the kind of love He commands us to freely but wisely give to the world around us.
Science vs Spirituality | Beyond the Psychological Self :
A series exploring the difference between codependent emptying and prophetic overflow—the place where psychology’s map ends and the love that comes from God begins.
“My grace is sufficient for you, for My power is made perfect in weakness.”
— 2 Corinthians 12:9