Science vs Spirituality | Beyond the Psychological Self
Why I Left the Field
The Door That Opened
I did not leave the field of psychology because I stopped believing it had value. I left because life intervened, and then I chose not to return.
The immediate circumstances were tied to my father’s health and the season of caregiving that followed. That chapter required everything I had. When it eventually became possible to step back into the professional world I had trained for, I discovered I no longer wanted to. The reasons were deeper than logistics or timing.
What I Could No Longer Ignore
Psychology, at its best, offers real insight into the human mind, trauma, attachment, and the patterns that keep people stuck. I still respect that. What I could no longer accept was the quiet but persistent pressure within much of the field to treat the spiritual dimension of a person as either irrelevant or suspect.
Prayer, sustained intercession, the sense of being led by God, the experience of love that does not originate in the self – these were often viewed with suspicion. In some clinical frameworks they could be reinterpreted as magical thinking, avoidance, or even early signs of pathology. In more extreme cases they might be questioned as possible indicators of psychosis.
Introspection that turned toward God rather than solely toward the psychological self was frequently treated as less mature than purely secular self-examination. In fact, it was most often viewed as functionally dangerous. I had lived too much of the spiritual reality to agree.
The Limits of a Closed System
A framework that begins and ends with the human person will eventually struggle to make room for a Source beyond the person. When that framework becomes the primary lens through which we understand love, suffering, purpose, and healing, something essential gets edited out. That is the root failure of the closed system psychology and mental healthcare was becoming at the time I was active in it, and by the time my life and circumstances gave me the opportunity to opt back into it, it had been fully taken hostage by the institutional ideology of the forces that drive the American medical and mental health systems.
I had watched the language of new age health and self-awareness slowly replace older categories of faithfulness, obedience, and dependence on God. I saw people who carried genuine spiritual depth encouraged to view that depth as a problem to be managed rather than a gift to be stewarded. The field could speak with precision about depletion and boundaries. It had far less language for overflow that comes from beyond the self.
That incompleteness stopped being something I could work around. It was no longer a minor gap I could quietly compensate for in my own practice. It had become a fundamental conflict between the map the field required me to use and the reality I knew to be true. Continuing would have meant agreeing, at least in professional posture, to treat the deeper Source as optional or suspect. I was no longer willing to do that.
The Personal Cost of Returning
Returning would have required me to operate, at least publicly, inside a system that often pathologized the very realities that had sustained me through caregiving, grief, betrayal, and the long wilderness seasons that refined my own heart. I was not willing to do that.
This was not a rejection of psychology’s legitimate insights. It was a refusal to let those insights become the final authority over the whole of a human life. I had already seen what happened when the spiritual was forced to the margins. I had also seen what became possible when the spiritual was allowed to remain central while still honoring the real limits of the self.
Why This Belongs in the Series
This post is not primarily about my career. It is about the larger question the entire series is asking: What happens when the map we trust cannot account for the Source?
I left the field because I could no longer pretend the map was complete. The years since have only confirmed that decision. The psychological tools remain useful. They are not, however, sufficient. Love that is sustained by God rather than by the self will always look strange, and sometimes even unhealthy, to a framework that has no category for it. It remains far more important than it is allowed to be in the mainstream psychological narrative.
I am not interested in defending every spiritual claim people make. I am interested in protecting the possibility that some of what the field is quick to question may actually be the life of God moving through a person who has been refined enough to carry it. That possibility is worth more to me than a professional identity that required me to set it aside.
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