Love From Others, Love For Others

Are emotional health and spiritual health the same thing?

At first glance, it seems like there should be a clear line between them. Therapists, social workers, and psychiatrists work in the realm of emotional health — helping people regulate their nervous systems, manage their emotions, and make choices that serve their relationships. Pastors and spiritual leaders work in the realm of spiritual health — helping people find right relationship with God.

But the deeper you get into both disciplines, the more they overlap. Both require us to examine our hearts. Both ask us to identify what we’re actually feeling. Both call for a change in how we behave. And both, in the end, are pointing toward the same destination: lasting love. Because of this overlap, there’s often been real tension between those who do emotional health work and those who do spiritual health work — each side sometimes suspicious of the other’s territory.

So how are these two fields distinct, and how are they related? As a Christian marriage and family therapist, I’ve found one simple distinction clarifying: emotional health is being filled with love from others. Spiritual health is being filled with love for others.

These two things are deeply connected. As Christians, we believe we are able to love others because we were first loved by God: in his act of creating us, in his ongoing provision for us, and in his saving us through the person and work of Jesus Christ. Because of that connection, full spiritual health requires emotional health too. Love for others tends to flow out of a person who has genuinely received love from others.

This means pastors and spiritual leaders are responsible for both emotional health and spiritual health, even if they don’t always think of their work that way. One might try to argue that mental health practitioners are only responsible for the emotional side. But relationships happen in a dance — and if someone isn’t offering love to the people around them, they’re unlikely to be in a position to receive much love back. So I’d say both mental health practitioners and spiritual leaders are, in practice, doing both kinds of work. The real difference is a matter of emphasis.

A therapist tends to focus on making sure a person has what they need — enough love received — to regulate their emotions and make choices that serve their own wellbeing. A pastor or spiritual advisor tends to place that same emotional health into a larger context: relationship with God, and the call to let whatever health a person has flow outward, becoming a vessel of God’s love to others and to the world.

From a secular vantage point, these two emphases can look like they’re in tension — as if a person has to choose between focusing inward, on their own healing, or outward, toward loving others well. I don’t believe that’s true.

In the person and work of Jesus, we see someone fully filled with love from his Father — a love that overflows into love both for the Father and for the people he and the Father created. Jesus shows us we don’t have to choose. Fully receiving love and fully extending love aren’t competing projects. They’re the same life, lived in both directions at once.

If you feel that tension at work inside yourself, or inside your most important relationships, that’s not a sign something is wrong with you. It’s a good reason to reach out — to a therapist, to your pastor, or ideally, to both. Please avail yourself of both.