When Faith Falters: Psychology, Scripture and the Path to Flourishing
- Feb 4
- 5 min read
Updated: Feb 11
Faith does not fail because people struggle. Scripture and psychology both show that struggle is often part of how faith is formed—through fragility, pauses, and the long work of healing that leads to real flourishing.
This post builds on Rethinking “Just Read the Bible,” exploring how psychology helps us understand the slow, relational work of healing that Scripture already assumes.
Jacqueline Sohn, PhD
Why Faith and Struggle Often Coexist
For much of my adult life, I felt confused about faith and struggle. I couldn’t quite understand why people with sincere faith — people who had known God in real and meaningful ways, including some I loved deeply — could fall so hard. Some entered seasons of profound suffering. Others slowly withdrew, drifted, or seemed to turn away from God altogether. What unsettled me most were the visible moments: the collapse, the unraveling, the long stretches that followed. I assumed struggle would appear along the way, but not what looked like total breakdowns or loss of faith. That didn’t fit with what I thought faith was meant to produce.
What I couldn’t see then was how narrowly I was looking. I was paying close attention to dramatic forms of struggle while overlooking quieter ones — especially my own. My questions were shaped by other people’s crises, with little awareness of the subtler ways my own life was marked by exhaustion, avoidance, and disordered priorities. Over time, both my personal experience and my work in applied research began to challenge that lens. I found myself returning to the same question from two directions: What actually supports and sustains human flourishing over the long term?
Scripture and psychology offered a surprisingly consistent answer.
What Scripture Assumes About Human Fragility
Scripture does not assume that faith produces uninterrupted progress. It assumes human fragility — fear, exhaustion, pride, missteps, and return. This is not treated as a failure of faith, but as a condition of being human.
Why Healing Is Rarely Linear
Psychology helps name what Scripture already assumes. When people are overwhelmed, ashamed, or frightened, the nervous system shifts toward protection rather than growth (Porges, 2011; van der Kolk, 2014). Withdrawal, numbing, defensiveness, and disappearance are not signs of indifference or rebellion; they are predictable responses when survival takes precedence over formation.
This reframed how I understood struggle. If fragility and protective responses are part of being human, then suffering will not always announce itself in obvious ways. And yet, we often respond as though it must. We are drawn to what is visible and urgent, assuming it is most in need of care, while quieter and more insidious struggles accumulate over time. These subtler forms of suffering shape belief, behaviour, and endurance just as deeply, but they require discernment to notice — especially when our attention is not rightly oriented.
Relationships over Rules
Scripture reflects this pattern. Again and again, God responds to collapse not by intensifying demands, but by attending to what has been depleted. Presence comes before instruction; care comes before correction. Psychological research echoes this truth. Across therapeutic approaches, the quality of the relationship is one of the strongest predictors of positive change — often more than any specific intervention (Wampold, 2015; Norcross & Lambert, 2018). Feeling seen, understood, and met with steadiness creates the conditions in which change becomes possible. Scripture assumes this when it places healing within relationship — with God and with others — rather than in isolation or self-discipline alone.
Pauses, Regression, and Return Are Part of Growth
Time, pauses, regression, and return are also central to healing. Lasting change is rarely linear or based on human-dictated timelines. People move forward, then stall. Old patterns resurface. Bearings are lost. These stretches can last far longer than we expect — or would choose. The biblical story leaves room for this kind of process, telling the truth about wandering, resistance, collapse, and return without rushing people toward resolution.
Recent research in psychotherapy and neuroscience reinforces this. Longitudinal studies of recovery and relapse in mental health consistently show that:
Pauses and regressions are normative: most people experience multiple cycles of progress and return before change stabilizes (e.g., Carey et al., 2021).
Sustained engagement predicts growth: consistent, long-term participation in supportive relationships or therapy correlates strongly with improved outcomes, more than short-term symptom reduction efforts alone (e.g., Cuijpers et al., 2020).
Meaning and integration matter: therapeutic approaches that prioritize meaning-making and identity over quick symptom control — such as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and narrative-based therapies — show durable effects even when surface symptoms fluctuate (e.g., Hayes et al., 2023).
These psychology findings align with Scripture’s illumination of faith and formation. Healing is sustained not by urgency or perfection, but by meaning — by what still feels worth moving toward over time (Frankl, 1959; Park, 2010).
Sitting with these realities changed me. I began to see that the long seasons of struggle I witnessed in others and even felt myself were not evidence that faith was lacking or had failed. Of course, when someone we love is struggling—or when we ourselves are—we want change to come quickly. We hope for a clear turning point, a fast and lasting resolution. No one wants to see regression. Setbacks can feel discouraging, confusing, and at times devastating, especially when they follow moments of hope or apparent progress.
But as I became more attentive to both Scripture and psychology, I began to understand that these patterns are not signs that something has gone wrong. They are often part of how healing unfolds. Growth rarely moves in a straight line. Pauses, returns, and even repeated struggles can signal that something deeper is being worked through, not that faith has been exhausted.
Being equipped with this understanding has helped me hold others—and myself—with more patience and kindness – although I still fail. Instead of interpreting struggle as failure, I am learning to see it as a common and even natural aspect of long-term healing. The journey is often slow, uneven, and far longer than we would choose. And yet, Scripture consistently reminds us that God is not unsettled by this pace. He is faithful across the long middle—present in the pauses, steady through the returns, and committed to the work of restoration even when progress feels fragile or incomplete in our limited view.
The SOJOURN Framework & the Integrative Core
The SOJOURN framework grew from holding these truths together — not as a formula or quick reassurance, but as a posture toward healing that is patient, relational, and honest about how change actually unfolds. SOJOURN assumes what both Scripture and contemporary psychology make clear: that growth is rarely linear, that regression is possible, and that return is often slow. It centres:
Presence, not pressure
Relationships, not self-dependency
Meaning, not urgency
Grace, not performance
At its core, SOJOURN reflects a shared conviction of Scripture and psychological research alike: healing is not accomplished by managing symptoms or forcing change. Loud struggles and quiet ones alike often point to deeper needs — wounds, losses, and disconnections that require sustained, attentive care. Flourishing unfolds over time, often unevenly and with detours, shaped by presence, relationship, meaning, and grace.
This is not an addition to Scripture. It is what reading Scripture well has been pointing toward all along.
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