Hey folks I wrote a blog post on therapy vs confession. If you want to see the images and stuff go to the substack link, otherwise putting all the text here cuz fk forcing people onto my blog. Hope you're having a good weekend.
People nowadays are always talking about how therapy is the new priesthood. Therapists are just secular priests, therapeutic work is the same as confession, etc etc. While I can understand where people are coming from, I want to tease apart the major differences I’ve found as someone who has done both a lot of therapy, and been blessed with the sacrament of holy confession.
Goals of Therapy vs Confession
What people often think of when they think about this is the traditional stereotypical role of a priest: you go into a little Catholic box that’s dark and has a little wooden screen. You’ve probably seen it in movies or TV shows. You confess all your deepest, darkest sins, etc., etc.
But for most people who don’t do confession anymore (at least in America, where a lot of modern culture and media is produced) most people aren’t going to confession. Even most Christians don’t really do it, as far as I know. Confession isn’t a huge thing in Protestant circles, and most American Christians are still Protestant. So you have this weird situation where the sacrament of holy confession has fallen out of the public consciousness quite a bit.
Therapy, at first glance, seems kind of like confession: you go into a room. Traditionally in psychoanalysis you don’t look at the psychoanalyst, right? Now it’s more common to have a face-to-face chat. You go through all your deepest, darkest secrets. You tell the therapist, and the therapist tries to help you with those deep, dark secrets, like the priest would as well.
But there are some major differences right from the start. First of all, when it comes to the actual rite, there’s a big difference in how you approach your quote-unquote “confessing” in therapy versus confession.
To start with, in confession (as someone who’s done holy confession a number of times and been blessed with that) it’s really a beautiful sacrament. The goal is to confess your sins. You’re going in there saying, “Okay, Father, I have sinned. I have made mistakes. I have done things that I knew were wrong and bad, and this is what they are.” You go in confessing sins (things you’re admitting to the Father are bad) and you ask for forgiveness. You ask for absolution from God, from Christ, the Holy Trinity, etc.
That’s a pretty important distinction because going in and saying, “Hey, I have sinned, I have made mistakes, I have offended God, I have been immoral” (however you want to put it) and asking for absolution and forgiveness is very different from what you’re doing in therapy.
In therapy, the goal is to go to your therapist and say, “Hey, I have some problems. I have mental health problems, interpersonal problems, and I want you to help me fix them.” You’re working together with the therapist. They call it the therapeutic relationship or whatever. But as the client and the therapist, you’re collaborating to solve problems that come up in your mind, your relationships, your job, etc.
While they may seem similar on the surface, these are extremely different things. When you go to confession and tell a priest, “Hey, I’ve sinned,” typically the priest isn’t sitting there hashing out with you how to fix it. That might happen a little, sometimes before or after, but the sacrament of confession is mainly the priest listening, maybe clarifying if something’s a sin worthy of confession, offering a bit of guidance, mostly just letting you confess, and then praying the prayers of holy confession to absolve you of your sin.
As opposed to therapy, where you go deep into it. In therapy the moral category isn’t as central. A therapist might say, “Oh no, that was bad, you shouldn’t have done that,” or “this person shouldn’t have done this,” but usually they have a much more problem-solving approach to interpersonal and mental issues.
So again to emphasize: the overall purpose, the telos, of confession versus therapy is very, very different.
The goal of confession is to absolve you of your sins. Holy confession has that power. This gets tricky depending on how much you believe Christian doctrine, of course? But as someone who’s done a lot of psychotherapy and also holy confession, I can tell you that even just experientially, phenomenologically, it feels extremely different.
In holy confession, you confess your sins. You tearfully tell your spiritual father the things you’re ashamed of, he puts his stole over your head, prays for you, and asks for and receives forgiveness and absolution. It’s beautiful. It’s an incredible experience.
You feel it in your heart and gut: the release of pressure, shame, and guilt. It’s divine.
I’ll add the caveat that you probably have to believe in God for this to work fully. The ritual and religious aspects have psychological effects even if you don’t believe, but if you don’t believe in God, it’s not nearly as impactful. I’ve never done holy confession without believing, so your mileage may vary.
With a therapist, you can have deep emotional experiences too. I’ve had sessions where I’ve gone deep into grief over losing loved ones, deep into childhood traumas, cried for 30 to 40 minutes. It’s meaningful and important to go through that and reach those difficult emotions.
But at the end of the day, it’s not as powerful as holy confession, at least in the moment. Therapy tends to work over far longer time periods, and it’s more of a knowledge-based process of learning and applying mental techniques. It’s in a different ballpark entirely.
Social Roles of Therapist vs Priest
Another important aspect of the distinction here is the different relationship you have with your therapist versus your priest. This gets confused a little in the modern era too. We’re not as tied into our church parishes as we used to be as Christians. I’m going to speak specifically here to priests of the Orthodox/Catholic and other high church groups.
As a client working with a therapist, it’s clear that you’re going to a professional you don’t have a personal connection with, who is “objective” about your situation, and who is using a rationalized set of techniques to help with your problems.
When you confess to a priest, that priest is your spiritual father (whom you literally call ‘father), and at least in the ideal parish situation, he’s someone who knows you well, who has seen you through difficulties and triumphs, and is a crucial part of your church community. You have a connection with him, and not just you: your loved ones, your spouse, your children, your parents, your friends and fellow parishioners, they all have a connection with this man too.
Therapy is by its nature very atomized, very individualistic: it’s you and a therapist talking about your problems. When you’re confessing to a priest, of course the seal of confession means he’ll never (or at least should never) discuss your sins with anyone else. (In my experience it doesn’t happen as much as people think. It’s very rare for priests to break the seal in Orthodox and Catholic churches.)
But you’re still telling your shameful secrets the leader of your community, a spiritual father who has relationships with you and the people around you. You’re inviting him to hear your deepest, darkest problems, sins, mistakes.
On the other hand, a therapist is never (or at least traditionally should never be) integrated into your community. There are many warnings for therapists in training about doing separate therapy with both a person and their spouse or children, for instance. There’s couples therapy and family therapy, but therapy cannot (and I don’t think should) replace the entire parish community. It can’t.
Perspective of a Therapist vs a Priest
So that’s how these two roles are different your perspective as a client or parishioner. But also, from the perspective of the therapist and the priest, the actual person doing the job has a distinct focus depending on the role.
For the priest, holy confession is a very important sacrament and a key part of their role, but it’s still a small part. The priest’s main job is to run the parish as an administrator, preach, pray the liturgy, lead the divine services, however many times a day or week.
So for a priest, hearing people’s deepest, darkest secrets and shames is something they do, and it’s very important. Holy confession is an incredibly beautiful sacrament, vital for healing, but it doesn’t happen every day for most priests, and it’s not what they spend most of their time on. Most of their time goes to leading the parish, the congregation, running the church.
Whereas for a therapist, probably 20 to 40 hours a week they’re hearing people’s shames, difficulties, and problems. So the therapist’s role is much more focused on that deep-dark-secret thing.
Ironically, I think that gives them a very different psychology. Priests in holy confession aren’t as focused on digging into every detail. “Oh, you feel this shame because of this childhood thing” or “maybe if you focus on it this way you won’t feel the shame.” The goal is to hear sins and absolve them.
For the therapist, the goal is to lean (ideally scientifically) into your inner neuroses, emotional issues, and solve them, or at least help you get back to functioning.
That gets to maybe the core distinction: a therapist’s job is to solve your problems and help you become a quote-unquote “functioning” person. The role of the priest in confession is to absolve you of your sins, via divine grace.
A therapist tends to see someone as a problem to be solved, in order to get them functional. A priest sees everyone as equally sinful, only ‘improving’ by the grace of God.
The Deeper Divide between Religion & Secular Technique
The lines between the emotional/mental/therapeutic world and the spiritual/religious world are notoriously blurry. There’s overlap and confusion.
If you talk to genuinely religious people who take faith seriously (and I think this holds for Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, etc.), they feel a real difference between psychotherapy and religious rites, rituals, and practices.
We could talk endlessly about why: whether there’s actual grace, or it’s psychological/ritualistic artifacts of our minds. But experientially, as the person actually going through them, you can tell that these two rituals are worlds apart.
I’m not sure why or how exactly, that’s a whole series of blog posts in itself.
Overall it’s easy to look at things with surface similarities and call them the same. We love to do it in the flattened modern world. But ultimately when it comes to therapy and confession, it’s just not true.
The purposes of the role, the experience of working with them, and the overall social context between a therapist and a priest have discrete, and crucial characteristics.
To be clear, both therapy and confession can be helpful and salutary. In general I’d pick holy confession if I had to choose one, but it’s a tight race for me.
Either way, I hope you come away from this article understanding a bit more about the differences, especially if you’ve never gotten the chance to confess your sings.
If you have objections, questions, or your own thoughts, feel free to leave a comment below.
Jump in the discussion.
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Notes -
One thing that I think is missing is a discussion of payment. A priest is not paid for confession, but a therapist is paid by you. That surely changes the relationship. Or maybe a comparison of therapy paid for by a third party vs first party.
Ahh yes excellent point. Dang I might have to do a 'highlights from the comments' on this one.
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Therapy I think is more often the modern replacement of the confidant in an age where deep friendship has been undermined by the demands of society than the secular replacement of confession. The most commonly treated mental illnesses (anxiety and depression) often have little to do with one's sins, but rather with the weakness and vulnerability of one's social bonds in their communities.
Yes it's extremely tragic that we no longer have close bonds, especially between men. Friends used to be some of the strongest social ties you had, and nowadays they are basically disposable.
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I love this topic. We often have the same pet interests. Some thoughts from the angle of psychology:
There is a big difference in what is being conditioned between confession and therapy. In confession, using the ideal subject as illustration, there is the experience of aversive stimuli (or punishment) until confession occurs. He has both the guilt of having caused serious harm, and the fear of a miserable future consequence that has a chance of transpiring at any moment (“like a thief in the night”). The commission of a bad action results in an immediate and strong “intrinsic” punishment in the subject, which is only removed upon confession. This means that confession is reinforced, and also the ambient environmental stimuli on the way to confession is reinforced, namely the Church and all of its unique cues, which takes on further positive valence and increases general “approach behavior”. Some bad action B is punished, and some confession behavior + stimuli C is reinforced. And what is it that comprises C? Approaching the Church, seeing the Church imagery, the scent and sound, engaging in the usual gestures and phrases, all of this will have trace reinforcement. But the strongest reinforcement is saved for examining, humbling, and admitting a fault or offense. This is pretty interesting, because while the commission of the action is punished, the awareness + expressing + forecasting + humbling of ourselves has reinforcement. The result of this is that a person is deterred from committing a fault, but not actually deterred from self-reflection and self-criticism, which will actually increase as it takes on positive valence.
In therapy, well, the conditioning is all muddled. Things aren’t clearly reinforced or punished. Attending therapy is enjoyable for a lot of people, as is talking about their problems. It’s enjoyable to sit in an interesting office and have a smart person hear us talk in a way where we don’t experience much aversion / punishment. The complaining about our predicaments is reinforced, whereas in Christianity too much complaining falls more into “venial sin” territory. It may be that self-exploration is actually punished in therapy, because when the subject does this he is introduced to new aversive stimuli by the therapist. The therapist has the difficult job of somehow making the patient averse to his bad actions without making him averse to therapy or making him averse to self-disclosure. This is hard, because there is no “Hell Belief” that the therapist can work to rescue from. It may be that complaining and bad behavior actually becomes reinforced because it promotes further therapy (an enjoyable activity). I think a therapist can convince a subject on the intrinsic damage of his action and to the relief that comes from corrective action, but this is harder when you’re not dealing with such a simplified and potent worldview as heaven vs hell, as you have to somehow persuade the subject to an objective valuation of human behavior.
In Christendom, confession is one part of an expansive plan to modify you for the better. And one of the modifications is that you pay less attention to social grievances. You should ideally be buffered against social stress because, among other reasons, it is a mark of honor and a rewarded act to receive all kinds of social injustices without complaint, like Christ. This means that when they inevitably happen to you, it’s not so catastrophic, but instead an expected part of one’s ultimately-rewarding journey:
If Christian modification is successful, there’s just not a lot to complain about, except to complain about one’s own evilness for the purposes of deterring us from said evilness. In its ideal form (which hardly exists today) every Christian has a solid Brotherhood within which they exult in stressful trials (Romans 5:3) and encourage each other’s endurance (James 1:9). This is optimal, because the social joys of conversation are a reward for stress-buffering behaviors and beliefs. When your focus is on enduring and improving and spiritual war and the spiritual “climb”, there shouldn’t be a lot of room for catastrophizing over stuff. I remember watching that Alex Honnold documentary — the guy who just climbed a skyscraper in Tapei to like millions of people yesterday, I guess, because why not — and he said that climbing eliminated the rumination he had over the death of his father. This is due to adrenaline and life-or-death stakes, but it’s also due to the Flow State which is proven to reduce rumination. Well the optimal flow state isn’t climbing skyscrapers, but somehow blending reward pursuit with righteousness, which I think the Christians of antiquity and the Middle Ages really tried to do for its gains in stress reduction.
Maybe my understanding of therapy is woefully off, but like, we’re at 11% of population going to therapy and increasing, I imagine for young urban professional liberals it’s maybe 25% (?), and there are 200,000 therapists in America? Doesn’t seem sustainable whatsoever. Seems like we had to find a more expedient solution here.
Huh, this is a great point that I hadn't thought of before. The infinite forgiveness mixed with a threat of punishment really does work well as both carrot and stick without losing too much on either side. It's a tricky balance though - I know many Christians who are too lax about divine punishment, and on the other side many who are too terrified and rigid about divine punishment.
Yes another interesting angle is definitely the fact that Christian confession has a much more explicit moral than therapy, whereas as you say in the therapeutic setting the morality and judgments are extremely muddled. Much of it coming down to the individual therapist.
Very true. On a side note, one of my favorite things about confession with my priest is that whenever I start to wander into talking about other people's sins in relation to my own, he quite firmly says that confession is about my sins, not theirs. It's a great corrective and focus to corrosive social issues. Not only are you encouraged not to focus on that, but you can trust that the priest is not hearing gossip about you from the confession of others.
Well, not just this but there is a huge and growing contingent of online 'coaches' and other unlicensed people who do something similar. I think there's room for it to grow. Sadly the quality of these coaches is about as good as the average therapist, if not worse. Then again they often have a spiritual component which I think helps. Either way, it's a fascinating social scene to be around. Lots of Buddhism and New Age mixed in the coaching as well. IME.
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Two experiences don't need to be identical in every way to be serving the same basic purpose and impulses. And you know there's the whole "you never step in the same river twice" thing, so it's always possible for motivated persons to say "No these two things really have important differences." For example, it is often said that sports games and sports fandom serve the same impulse as actual tribal warfare. You go to a special place, decked out in your tribe's colors, wearing scary facepaint and you scream and shout and exhort your tribe's warriors to smash the warriors from the other tribe. Obviously we could sit here all day and list differences between actual warfare and football, which of course are numerous and significant, but that doesn't mean that there isn't some real deep similarity here. I think the same could be said for confession and therapy. Of course the differences are numerous, but at a very basic level, you go to a special place you don't visit in every day life and you talk to a special person (not your brother, friend, wife or coworker) where you can let out your deepest, darkest secrets without fear of social consequences, and you come away being told that "it's okay to feel how you're feeling and it's all gonna be okay", although the exact path to being okay might be different (saying some number of prayers vs taking medication vs whatever).
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For me, there is one very very VERY big difference, the most important difference that basically makes therapy useless for me: confessions are confidential. Therapy is not - if they think you're at risk of self-harm, they are legally obligated to lock you up, making your life both 10x worse and inescapable. It's weird that centuries-old religious nuts understood the second-order cost of sacrificing confidentiality better than the modern "highly educated" psychological community.
I've tried just talking to ChatGPT, but it's generally too sycophantic (and I have a sneaking suspicion that there are traps in there to alert the authorities if I'm accidentally too honest, too).
Ahh man how did I miss this one?! Great points. Yeah a lot of folks are pointing out other areas of comparison which I like. The confidentiality is hugely important, making therapy useless for the forgiveness of really dark and serious crimes.
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From the perspective of someone who has engaged in neither therapy nor confession, confession seems more masculine than therapy. More resolution, less rumination. But I may be way off on that.
Nah I would agree from my experience. Though you could also say with therapy you're attacking the problem directly in a masculine way, whereas confession you're surrendering to God in a feminine way.
I don't know, but for me confession certainly feels more masculine.
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I'm someone who has neither gone to therapy nor confession, but the topic interests me because I'm confident that neither would do anything for me and yet everyone else seems confident in the reverse. The differences you've listed out were interesting to read about, but I would assume that the person who is claiming therapy is the new confession would say those are the superficial differences. The dodo bird verdict suggests that therapeutic methodology doesn't really matter as much as the "therapeutic relationship". My (perhaps flawed) interpretation of this result is that it just makes people feel better to talk about their problems and their feelings and for someone to tell them things are or can be okay. I've never understood this because it doesn't seem to have the same effect on me if I know the underlying problem is likely there unchanged. But this seems to be the fundamental connection between therapy, confession, even AI "therapy".
Yeah a sense of existential comfort, it's true. I'm wishing I had discussed the similarities more and done a bit more of a deep dive there. Oh well!
FWIW, I don't think therapy is that useful for people without serious emotional trauma/issues.
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How much confession is like therapy depends partly on what the specific priest is like. I've only seen a few, and some simply listen and pray, others offer advice, and at least one conducted something more like confessional therapy. The therapist style one was my favorite, he was a great homilist as well and a generally thoughtful person. He said that if he hadn't believed that Christianity was true, he would have become a Jungian therapist.
I haven't tried therapy, though, and don't know if I would have anything to say to a therapist if offered a free series of sessions. I tried asking an LLM to be a fake therapist, and am unsure whether it was helpful or not.
LLM therapy is very different imo. Probably about as good as a bad to mid therapist, but far worse than a skilled therapist.
That’s fair! I’ve only done holy confession with one priest so perhaps I am limited in my understanding at the moment. Interesting point.
That makes sense. I like about confession that it's assumed that all sins are serious enough to confess, whereas Abigail Shrier seems likely true that small psychological problems might become worse with therapy.
This is one of my favorite priests, talking about one of his favorite parables: https://youtube.com/watch?v=JN04LnmRfYs (but maybe I've posted this before?)
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I think that your distinctions between the two are very much correct on their face. Intuitively, there is something fundamentally different about the action, social consequences, and, as you say, telos of therapy and confession. I would agree that most people suggesting that "therapy is the new confession" are doing so as a rhetorical slight against the practice of therapy, or at least are pointing to it as a symptom of Western secularization. "See guys, see!? Secular people have to get confession from somewhere, it's just a part of human nature! Christianity has had right the whole time and therapy is just a cheap substitute for true spiritual healing!" While I disagree with those claims and the most common use cases of the comparison, I do think there is something to it. Namely, I think that therapy and confession, when practiced ideally, are quite distinct. However, therapy is often not practiced ideally, the follies of which share a resemblance to confession in some ways.
To start, you claim that the telos of therapy is to solve problems, gain personal insights, and ultimately emerge with different patterns of behavior. This is true for some schools of therapy, and not others. Psychoanalysis, as you mention, is particularly interested in digging deep into early-life experiences and determining the ways that those experiences have shaped our current relationship with reward, esteem, and love, among other emotions. Other therapeutic practices, however, are much less interested in this deep, insight-driven work. Many therapists, practicing "eclectically," lose sight of the original goals and aims of the modalities that they choose to incorporate, and instead consider therapy a place to hold an "emotionally validating space" for individuals. I am not knocking this practice on its own. It may very well be therapeutic in some cases. However, this results in a large number of people who go to therapy for extended periods of time and treading water. When a therapist is too passive and insufficiently investigative, individuals are not forced to confront that which they did not know going in to it. This is another difference between therapy and confession: the priest rarely "pulls" new information out of you. He accepts what you say on its face. A good therapist will prompt you to expound on your thinking and discover deeper elements of thoughts which may have seemed superficial. Bad therapists will not. And there are quite a few of those.
Okay, so where am I going with this whole comparison? Yes, some people go to therapy and pretty much end up using it to vent and receive the stamp of "your feelings are valid." My claim is that this sort of relationship is much more analagous to confession. Jacques Lacan, a notable French psychoanalyst and famed contrarian, devised the idea of the Big Other. The Big Other represents the collection of social norms, values, and beliefs that a person introjects into their psyche through passive exposure to social authorities. These authorities vary from person to person, but most people find themselves in the shadow of some Other. To simplify, it may be their parents, it may the reverberations of approval that come from thoughtful captialist consumption, it may be religious superstructures, and, most notably, it may be the therapist themselves. In this way, and particularly with a passive therapist, confession and therapy are more alike. An individual goes to a special, "sacred" place (the church or therapists office), speaks to someone with special authority (the priest or therapist), and walks away with a transformation of their guilty feelings. Good therapists are aware of this and strive not to make value judgments on what is told to them. Bad therapists maintain poor therapeutic boundaries and say too much, not knowing how their authority is impacting the person across the couch.
This may not immediately grok to you as an actively religious person. As you have sought out both activities, they maintain clear separation in your mind: confession is for spiritual salvation, therapy is for refinement of thinking and emotional processing. However, I think for purely secular individuals who have no such outlet, going to a "therapist" to get approval for their unsavory thoughts is about as close as it gets to spiritual healing. Who else in our culture has been granted the authority to look into the id and say "that is okay!" Who else in our culture prompts people to engage directly with the constraints of superego, other than perhaps parents? (see: transference) Anyway, I'll stop throwing jargon out there. The point is: for many, therapy is a place where they can report everything that they struggled with that week and be told that it's going to be okay. That they are okay.
The merits of this are uncertain. As I said, it may be therapeutic for some people. Unconditional positive regard is a foundational principle of therapeutic practice for a reason. However, I do believe that this sort of therapy causes many to lead uninvestigated lives. Consider: I feel bad about myself and my actions therefore I go to therapy where I receive validation and acceptance therefore I feel better about myself therefore nothing needs to change. At least confession prompts some examination of conscience.
All this to say: I agree with you. In an ideal world, confession and therapy would have minimal overlap in function. I just have doubts that we are in that world.
Yeah I have noticed this, and I think it can be good and helpful, when paired with an overall focus on psychoanalysis and resolving deep trauma. Psychoanalysts do this too, but only in order to serve the deeper goal of building the therapeutic relationship.
I'm a convert, was an atheist for most of my adult life. So I definitely understand. For me, strangely, therapy didn't really "work" until I became a Christian as well. But in general I do think that there's an important difference in that, as you say, therapy isn't explicitly trying to be a sacred space at all. Perhaps it's close to what a secular person gets out of transcendence, but I think it's somewhat piecemeal.
For instance, a secular communal liturgy might be something like sports. If therapy were more connected to sports, perhaps it would be a decent overall analogue for the church & the sacraments.
In terms of who else is able to peer into the id and make value judgments, I'd say the general progressive caste of academics and social justice theorists. They are sometimes associated with psychology but not often outright therapy.
Anyway I think we generally agree, perhaps I could have written in that there are similarities as well, because it's true!
Maybe I'm mixing you up with someone else, but I thought you alluded to being a teenager in other places?
Hah, no definitely not a teenager. Sometimes I think it would be nice to go back but it has been a while for me.
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