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 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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