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When God Feels Far Away:Understanding a Crisis of Faith and How to Find Your Way Through It
- Shakira O'Garro
- 2 days ago
- 15 min read
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You used to pray with ease, but now the words won't come, and you would rather climb back into bed. You used to feel held by your faith during the hard seasons, but lately it seems like God has gone quiet. Or maybe you are the one who has gone quiet, because you are not sure what to say anymore, you are not sure what you believe, and you are questioning everything that felt true like God being good all the time. You might even be angry with God. If any of this sounds familiar, you are not alone.
A crisis of faith is one of the most disorienting experiences a person can go through, precisely because faith is not just a belief system but an extension of yourself and how you understand the world. For many people, particularly those for whom Christianity is thier faith background, their suffering, and their place in the world are shaken during times of difficulty and pain.
This post is for you if you have been searching for language to describe what you are going through. If you have typed things like "why does God feel so far away," "I am angry at God," "questioning my faith," or "I can't hear from God anymore" into a search bar at 2 a.m., wondering if something is wrong with you. Something is not wrong with you and what you are experiencing has a name, a history, and a path through.
What Is a Crisis of Faith?
Theologically, a crisis of faith refers to a period in which the beliefs, practices, or relationship with God that once anchored a person's life become sources of doubt, confusion, or pain rather than comfort. It is not simply asking a hard question about Scripture or wrestling with a theological concept. It is bigger and more personal than that, it is a destabilization of the inner spiritual life.
Christian mystics and contemplatives have long recognized this experience. Saint John of the Cross called it "the dark night of the soul" — a stripping away of felt spiritual consolation that, far from being divine abandonment, is often a profound movement toward deeper union with God. Thomas Merton wrote about it extensively. The Psalms (all 150 of them) are saturated with it. David did not write "my God, my God, why have you forsaken me" once and move on. He returned to that place again and again, and Scripture preserved every word of it.
The clinical and pastoral literature tells us that faith crises are not marginal events in the life of faith. Research published in journals including Psychology of Religion and Spirituality consistently shows that spiritual struggle — including doubting God's love, feeling abandoned by God, or questioning one's beliefs — is extremely common among Christians at every stage of life and every level of theological maturity. It does not indicate weakness. It indicates that you are fully human and that your faith has depth enough to be shaken.
"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish?" — Psalm 22:1 (NIV)
Is Doubting God a Sin?
This is one of the questions I hear most often because the question itself carries shame. Let me be clear: doubt is not the opposite of faith. Hebrews 11, often called the "faith hall of fame," celebrates people like Abraham, who doubted and laughed at God's promise. Thomas, who declared he would not believe until he touched Jesus's wounds, was not rebuked for his honesty (Jesus met him exactly where he was). Job demanded an audience with God in the middle of his suffering and was ultimately vindicated. The book of Lamentations is an entire liturgy of grief, confusion, and questioning addressed directly to God.
The theological tradition that claims doubt is sinful misreads the whole arc of Scripture. Doubt becomes a problem only when it goes unanswered, shoved into the dark, and left to metastasize in silence, shame, and isolation. Bringing it into the light, whether through prayer, community, or counseling, is one of the bravest things you can do to restore your faith.
"Doubt is not the enemy of faith. Silence and shame are."
Signs You May Be Experiencing a Crisis of Faith
Not everyone who is in the middle of a faith crisis recognizes it as such. Sometimes it looks like general burnout or depression. Sometimes it presents as anger with no clear object. Here are some of the most common signs and it is worth noting that these can overlap significantly with symptoms of depression, anxiety, grief, and trauma, which is exactly why integrated care matters.
1. You feel spiritually numb or empty
Prayer used to feel like something. Now it feels like speaking into a void. Worship services that once moved you leave you unmoved. You go through the motions because you do not know what else to do, but the aliveness you once felt is simply gone.
2. You are angry at God and ashamed of it
Anger at God is more common than most churches make room for, and the shame surrounding it keeps people isolated. If something happened, a loss, a diagnosis, a betrayal, a prayer that went completely unanswered, and you are furious. All of our feelings provide us with key information. And anger with God often means you believed God would do something to help but when that loved one died or you got the cancer diagnosis anyway it feels like a major betrayal.
3. You are avoiding church, Scripture, or faith community
Avoidance is one of the most telling signs that something deeper is happening. If being around your faith community, opening your Bible, or listening to worship music produces dread, irritation, or grief rather than connection, your nervous system may be communicating something important about unprocessed pain in your spiritual life.
4. Suffering has made God's goodness feel impossible to believe
Theodicy, or the question of why a good God allows suffering, is not a casual theological debate when you are living inside the suffering. Chronic illness, loss, medical trauma, racial violence, the death of someone you loved, these are real-life experiences, not case studies. When your lived experience and your theology feel irreconcilable, something has to give. A crisis of faith is often the moment when that collision can no longer be ignored.
5. You have lost your sense of purpose or calling
For people of faith, vocation and spiritual identity are often deeply intertwined. When the faith starts to fracture, meaning-making can fracture alongside it. You might find yourself asking not just "where is God?" but "who am I without this?" — which is a profound and important question that deserves a real answer.
6. You are questioning beliefs you once held with certainty
Sometimes this is described as "deconstruction" — a reexamination of theological convictions, church teaching, or religious practice that was previously unquestioned. This process is not inherently destructive; many people find that what comes out the other side is a more grounded, honest, and resilient faith. But the process itself can feel like freefall.
7. You feel spiritually alone even in a room full of believers
There is a particular loneliness in sitting in a congregation while internally feeling like you do not belong there anymore — or wondering if anyone else in the building is asking the same questions you are. Spiritual isolation is one of the most painful features of a faith crisis and one of the clearest signals that community and professional support are needed.
8. Experiences of spiritual or religious harm are surfacing
For some, a crisis of faith is inseparable from the experience of religious trauma, shame-based theology, authoritarian leadership, spiritual manipulation, or communities where doubt was punished rather than held. If your spiritual pain has roots in religious harm, that intersection of trauma and faith requires specific, careful clinical attention.
What Causes a Crisis of Faith?
Crises of faith rarely appear out of nowhere. They tend to arrive through one of several pathways, often in combination.
Grief is one of the most common. Loss of a loved one, a relationship, a pregnancy, a health diagnosis, a version of your own life you had planned can shatter the frameworks we use to make sense of the world, including our theological ones. When the God who was supposed to protect, heal, or intervene did not show up the way we expected, grief and faith become entangled in ways that neither prayer alone nor therapy alone can always address.
Chronic illness and medical trauma are underrecognized triggers. For people living with conditions like endometriosis, autoimmune disease, or chronic pain (conditions that are often dismissed, misdiagnosed, or minimized by medical systems), the experience of suffering that does not resolve raises profound theological questions. Where is God in a body that will not stop hurting? Why has healing not come? What does it mean to trust a God whose goodness is proclaimed from a pulpit while you are sitting in that pew in pain?
The experience of being dismissed, disbelieved, or undertreated by medical systems (which BIPOC women experience at disproportionate rates) adds another layer. Medical gaslighting is its own form of trauma, and it can bleed into spiritual life in ways that deserve careful, integrated clinical attention.
Moral injury or the deep wound that occurs when a person witnesses or is part of something that violates their moral and spiritual values can crack faith open in a different way. This might look like confronting the racism within a beloved institution, witnessing church leadership protect abusers, or participating in a system that causes harm. When the community or institution that was supposed to embody God's love fails catastrophically, the faith that was intertwined with it can feel contaminated.
A clinical note worth naming
Spiritual struggle is bidirectionally related to mental health. Research shows that a crisis of faith can worsen symptoms of depression, anxiety, and PTSD — and conversely, that untreated depression, anxiety, or trauma can manifest as spiritual disconnection. This is why integrated care, which addresses mental health and spiritual wellbeing together, is not a nice-to-have. For many people, it is the missing piece.
Faith and Mental Health: A Relationship Worth Taking Seriously
The research on spirituality and mental health is unambiguous. A 2020 meta-analysis published in JAMA Psychiatry found that religious and spiritual practices are consistently associated with lower rates of depression, reduced suicidality, greater psychological resilience, and better physical health outcomes. Spiritual wellbeing is not separate from mental health but it is woven through it.
This means that when the spiritual life is in crisis, the whole person is affected. Sleep, motivation, relationships, identity, the body's stress response — all of it gets pulled into the vortex. The idea that a crisis of faith is "just a spiritual problem" and therefore outside the scope of mental health care is clinically inaccurate and, frankly, pastorally insufficient on its own.
It also means that therapy that ignores the spiritual dimension of a client's life is leaving something essential on the table. A therapist who responds to a client's faith crisis by minimizing their theology, pathologizing their belief, or simply redirecting to CBT worksheets is missing the entire person sitting across from them. The spiritual wound needs to be part of the clinical picture.
How Counseling Can Help You Heal During & After a Crisis of Faith
Faith-integrated counseling is not the same as pastoral counseling. It is not Bible study or spiritual direction, though those things have their place. It is professional mental health care delivered by a licensed clinician who holds your faith, and your doubt, with the same curiosity, respect, and clinical rigor that they bring to every other dimension of your life.
Processing the grief and anger
One of the most important things therapy can offer is a place where your anger at God does not have to be managed, minimized, or redirected. Anger is a grief emotion. It means something was important and something went wrong. Sitting with that honestly (without rushing to resolution or easy theological answers) is often what allows you to process and begin to move forward.
EMDR for spiritual wounds & crisis of faith
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is an evidence-based treatment with decades of research behind it, and it can be profoundly effective for the kind of spiritual pain that is stored in the body and the implicit memory system. And you know what this feels like: the visceral dread of prayer, the somatic shutdown in worship spaces, the intrusive memories of religious harm or spiritual abandonment. EMDR does not require you to talk through every detail of what happened. It works at the level where the wound actually lives, in the body and mind.
Reconstructing meaning with ACT
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) offers tools for identifying core values and committed action even in the presence of profound uncertainty. For people in the middle of a faith deconstruction, ACT can be a lifeline — a way to keep living with integrity and meaning while the larger theological questions remain open. You do not have to have all the answers before you can start to rebuild.
Building a new, sturdier relationship with God
Many people come out of a crisis of faith with something they did not have going in: a faith that has been honest. A faith that has survived the dark, that does not need easy answers or performative certainty. That kind of faith is quieter and less Instagram-friendly, but it tends to hold. Therapy can be part of the process of getting there not by providing theological resolution, but by clearing enough of the emotional and psychological debris so that the spiritual work can actually happen.
"When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you." — Isaiah 43:2 (NIV)
Finding a Therapist Who Understands Your Faith
Not every therapist is equipped to do this work well. Some are actively skeptical of religious faith. Others have good intentions but no real framework for holding the complexity of a serious faith crisis — particularly when it intersects with trauma, chronic illness, racial identity, or religious harm. Finding a clinician who gets it changes everything.
When you are looking for a faith-integrated therapist, some questions worth asking: Does this clinician view spirituality as a legitimate dimension of health? Are they familiar with religious trauma as a clinical category? Do they have training in trauma-informed approaches that can address somatic, emotional, and spiritual dimensions together? And perhaps most importantly, do they hold your faith with respect, even if it is not their own?
If you are a BIPOC woman navigating a faith crisis alongside chronic illness, medical trauma, or the exhaustion of living inside systems that were not built for you, the cultural dimension of your spiritual life matters too. Your faith did not develop in a vacuum. It developed in a cultural context, a family context, a community context; good therapy holds all of that.
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You Don't Have to Navigate This Alone
At Cheerful Heart Mental Health Counseling, your faith is not something to be fixed or managed out of. It is central to who you are and how you heal. Whether you are doubting God, angry at God, or simply trying to find your way back to something that once felt real, we hold space for all of it.
Serving clients in White Plains, NY and via telehealth throughout New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and California.
→ Book a free consultation with us here
Trauma-informed · Faith-integrated · Culturally responsive care
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Frequently Asked Questions
These are the questions we hear most often from people who are in the middle of a faith crisis — and from people who love someone who is.
Q: What exactly is a crisis of faith?
A crisis of faith is a period of deep spiritual doubt, disillusionment, or disconnection from God or your religious beliefs. It can be triggered by grief, trauma, chronic illness, moral injury, or life experiences that feel inconsistent with your understanding of who God is and how God works. A crisis of faith is not a sign of spiritual failure or weak character. It is often a sign that your faith has been real enough, and honest enough, to be shaken. Many people who come out on the other side describe their faith as deeper and more integrated than it was before.
Q: Is it a sin to doubt God or be angry at God?
No. Theologically and clinically, this is one of the most important clarifications I can offer. Doubt is not the opposite of faith — it is woven into virtually every major figure in Scripture. Abraham laughed at God's promise. Thomas refused to believe without evidence. Job demanded an answer. The Psalms are full of raw, unfiltered anguish directed at God. Anger at God is not evidence that your faith is broken. It is often evidence that your relationship with God has been real enough to disappoint you. A relationship in which you cannot be honest is not intimacy — and God is large enough to hold your anger without being diminished by it.
Q: What are the most common signs that I am in a crisis of faith?
Common signs include: feeling spiritually numb or empty when you used to feel engaged, persistent anger toward God that you may be ashamed of, avoidance of prayer, Scripture, worship, or faith community, feeling like God is silent or absent, losing your sense of purpose or calling, actively questioning beliefs you once held with certainty, and feeling profoundly alone even among other believers. These signs often overlap significantly with depression, anxiety, and grief, which is one reason integrated mental health care is so important.
Q: Can chronic illness or medical trauma cause a crisis of faith?
Absolutely, and this connection is far more common than most churches or even most therapists acknowledge. When your body becomes a site of ongoing suffering — especially in conditions like endometriosis, chronic pain, autoimmune illness, or reproductive health trauma — it raises unavoidable theological questions. Where is God in this? Why hasn't healing come? What does it mean to trust a God described as good when your lived experience feels like anything but? The experience of being dismissed, disbelieved, or undertreated by medical systems (which BIPOC women experience at disproportionate rates) adds another layer. Medical gaslighting is its own form of trauma, and it can bleed into spiritual life in ways that deserve careful, integrated clinical attention.
Q: What is the difference between a crisis of faith and religious trauma?
A crisis of faith is a broad category that describes a period of spiritual doubt or disconnection. It may or may not have roots in harmful religious experiences. Religious trauma specifically refers to psychological harm caused by religious environments, authority figures, or teachings, including spiritual abuse, shame-based theology, purity culture harm, high-control or coercive religious communities, or the weaponization of Scripture against a person's identity or wellbeing. Both can be addressed in therapy, but they require different clinical approaches.
Q: Can therapy really help with something as personal as a crisis of faith?
Yes — when it is the right kind of therapy. Faith-integrated counseling creates space where your spiritual life is treated as central to who you are, not a footnote or a symptom to be managed. A therapist with both clinical training and genuine respect for the faith dimension of human experience can help you process the grief, anger, and confusion underlying your spiritual crisis in ways that prayer or pastoral care alone may not reach. Good faith-integrated therapy does not replace your pastor, your church community, or your spiritual director. It complements them. Think of it as one important part of a larger ecology of healing.
Q: What therapeutic approaches are most effective for a crisis of faith?
At Cheerful Heart, we draw on several evidence-based modalities that work particularly well in this area. EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is especially powerful for processing spiritual wounds held in the body such as the visceral fear of prayer, the shutdown response in worship spaces, or intrusive memories associated with religious harm. ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) helps clients live meaningfully even amid unresolved theological questions, grounding them in core values while larger questions remain open. Prolonged Exposure may also be relevant when a faith crisis is rooted in trauma. All of these approaches are delivered through a trauma-informed, culturally responsive, and faith-integrated lens.
Q: Do I have to be a Christian to work with Cheerful Heart?
No. Cheerful Heart welcomes clients across the spectrum of religious belief and practice — including those whose relationship with faith is complicated, evolving, or in active deconstruction. You do not need to have a clean theological position or a resolved relationship with God to begin the work. What we offer is a space where whatever role spirituality plays in your life (large or small, certain or shaken) is treated with respect rather than skepticism.
Q: Why does it matter to find a therapist who understands my faith?
Research consistently shows that spiritual wellbeing is a core dimension of mental health, not a peripheral one. A therapist who is dismissive of or unfamiliar with your faith can create an additional layer of harm. This is particularly true when your spiritual life is already fragile. Finding a clinician who takes your faith seriously, engages with Scripture and theology without flinching, and holds your beliefs with respect rather than skepticism is the difference between surface-level coping and the kind of healing that actually gets to the root.
Q: Does Cheerful Heart Mental Health Counseling offer telehealth sessions?
Yes. Cheerful Heart offers telehealth services to clients in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and California. In-person sessions are available at our White Plains, New York office at 30 Glenn Street, Suite 205. We offer a free consultation to help you determine whether our approach is the right fit for what you are navigating.
Q: What if I am in a faith crisis and also dealing with depression, anxiety, or trauma?
This is actually the norm rather than the exception. Spiritual struggle and mental health symptoms are bidirectionally related — each can worsen the other, and healing in one area often supports healing in the other. The fact that you are carrying both does not make you too complicated to treat. It makes integrated, holistic care even more essential. Cheerful Heart specializes in exactly this kind of complex, layered presentation — the place where spiritual pain, trauma, chronic illness, and identity all meet. You do not have to choose which part of yourself to bring to the table.
If you're anything like me, you love a summary or an infographic to explain concepts; so if there are lingering questions or youw ant to see a summary of what you just read here is an infographic below for you. Save this post and revist it when you need to remember what a crisis of faith is and how to heal.
