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.
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Notes -
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.
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