Cardia Counseling Center specializes in integrating healing prayer into a traditional counseling model. What is “healing prayer”? Essentially, it is a process of utilizing traditional Christian prayer to address psychological wounds within the soul.

How is our therapy different from a traditional counseling session?
At Cardia, we are dedicated to discerning what therapy can heal and what only God can heal. We use traditional therapy to help people understand their history, wounds, and how it has affected the way they relate to others today. But each therapist is always listening for those moments where leading a person into the presence of the Lord will bring a deeper and more complete healing.

The main focus of healing prayer is to facilitate the client’s ability to enter into God’s healing presence. The counselor acts as a teacher and facilitator, guiding the client to hear God’s voice, in order to address the issues that prevent the client from experiencing meaningful and intimate relationships.

The Therapist’s Role:
Every therapist is aware of those precious “holy moments” where a client is in position to experience deep healing. At some point in their professional development, a therapist begins to recognize this and shape the counseling session to lead a person to this time and place. Every Christian therapist must consider the following: are these “holy moments” in a therapeutic sense only, or is the presence of the Holy Spirit urging us to do more? At Cardia, we are interested in cultivating not only our therapeutic intuition but using that same capacity to listen to the Lord in our sessions.

How this model was developed.
As a young therapist, I saw how traditional therapy was very good at diagnosing what exactly was wrong in broken relationships and what experiences lead to dysfunctional behavior. I did notice, however, that profound, deep, and lasting healing was more elusive. During my early years as a therapist, I was fortunate to experience (through observation, study, and receiving) healing prayer through a local church that sponsored an extensive healing care/healing prayer program. I slowly began to integrate forms of healing care/healing prayer, based upon Christian theology, into my counseling practice. As I did so, I found clients receiving a deeper and more profound healing as well as release from dysfunctional patterns and feelings. Clients seem to move from a place of maintaining health by means of constant vigilance and awareness (white-knuckling it) to a place of staying healthy by receiving God’s healing presence through the modes of listening prayer and traditional counseling.

The “How To” of Healing Prayer:
At Cardia, a part of our mission is to assist the many gifted and highly skilled clinicians to bridge the gap between psychology and practical theology. In effect, to lead clients to that healing that only Jesus can provide.

A clinician who wishes to learn about and integrate the powerful healing this model provides must learn to listen to the words the Lord wants to whisper to them and to their client’s heart. Through consultation, training and supervision, special care is given to cultivating the therapists’ own ability to listen. Additionally, we give practical instruction on the when, where and how of integrating prayer into the counseling session. This includes application to issues such as same-sex attraction, gender identity, codependency, addictions, anxiety and depression.

Prayer as a Therapeutic Tool:
Recently, utilizing prayer in treatment has been the focus of clinical discussion and research. We recommend the following to you for additional information.

Archibald D. Hart Ph.D., former Dean of the Graduate School of Psychology at Fuller Theological Seminary asserts that “Christian counseling is only ‘Christian’ to the extent that it collaborates with God in the healing process.” (Christian Counseling Today, 2003 Vol. 11 No.4)

Siang-Yang Tan Ph.D., professor of Psychology at the Graduate School of Psychology, Fuller Theological Seminary and senior pastor of First Evangelical Church, Glendale, CA, calls Inner Healing Prayer a “distinctively Christian intervention and specific example of prayer as a spiritual and religious resource that can be used in counseling or psychotherapy in explicit integration.” (Christian Counseling Today, 2003 Vol. 11 No.4)

Terry Wardle, professor of Church Planting and Spiritual Formation at Ashland Theological Seminary states that we must know when “horizontal conversation must surrender to the vertical.” He further states that “It is the responsibility of the caregiver to instruct people regarding how and when to make this shift (into prayer). At this point the caregiver is there to help position the person to actually speak to the Lord, experience his love, and receive his healing touch.” (Healing Care, Healing Prayer, New Leaf Books, 2001).