When Your Faith Falls Apart — And Why That Might Be a Good Thing
Something shifts. Maybe gradually, maybe all at once. A belief you've held since childhood starts to feel hollow. A community that once felt like home begins to feel like a cage. Questions you used to be able to silence won't stay quiet anymore. And underneath it all, a disorienting feeling: what do I actually believe?
If you've been there — or if you're there right now — I want to offer you something most people in your life probably haven't: a framework for understanding what's happening, and a suggestion that it might be exactly what's supposed to be happening.
I recorded a short video on this topic if you'd prefer to watch rather than read — or come back to it after.
Two ways of thinking about spiritual development
There are two broad approaches to understanding how spirituality develops over a lifetime. Understanding both has changed how I work with people — and how I understand my own journey.
Stage-based approaches — like James Fowler's influential model of faith development — describe spirituality as a series of progressive stages, each more expansive and differentiated than the last. Early faith tends to be inherited, literal, and organized around belonging to a group and its beliefs. As people mature — through suffering, through meaningful encounters with difference, through what researchers call self-transcendent experiences — they tend to develop a more personal, more complex, and more durable spirituality. This progression isn't automatic. Without intentional inner work, significant suffering, or experiences that interrupt our ordinary way of seeing, most people remain at the stage of faith they inherited.
State-based approaches offer a different and complementary lens. Rather than a linear ladder, they describe spirituality as a dynamic, never fully settled oscillation between two fundamental orientations. Steven Sandage's model of dwelling and seeking captures this beautifully. Dwelling is the home base — the familiar, the practiced, the spirituality that grounds and sustains us. Seeking is the movement outward — the questioning, the expanding, the willingness to encounter what challenges our current framework. Healthy spiritual life involves both. We need a home to return to, and we need the courage to leave it.
These two frameworks are not in competition. They illuminate different dimensions of the same territory. Stage models help us understand the longer arc of spiritual maturity. State models help us understand the rhythm of ordinary spiritual life — the constant movement between stability and growth, between dwelling and seeking.
What this means for the person in crisis
Here's what I've come to believe after training at a seminary, becoming a spiritual director at a Benedictine monastery, and sitting with people in the middle of their own spiritual upheaval: deconstruction is not a failure. It's a developmental signal.
When a faith framework falters — when the beliefs that once organized your life stop making sense, when the community that once held you starts to feel suffocating, when the God you were taught about stops feeling real — it's usually not a sign that something has gone wrong. It's often a sign that something is trying to go right.
The framework that's falling apart is usually one that was given to you before you had the capacity to choose it. Childhood faith, by necessity, is borrowed. It belongs to our parents, our communities, our cultures. The developmental work of adulthood is to find out what we actually believe when we're the ones doing the believing — when faith becomes genuinely ours rather than inherited.
That process is disorienting. It's supposed to be. You're moving from one stage to a more expansive one. You're in the seeking position of the state model — which means your current dwelling isn't big enough anymore, and a larger one needs to be built.
Sandage's framework suggests something important here: the seeking state isn't a permanent exile from home. It's the process by which we find a deeper and more durable home. People who move through genuine spiritual struggle — who allow themselves to really question, really doubt, really sit with not-knowing — often arrive somewhere more alive, more honest, and more genuinely their own than where they started.
What counseling has to do with any of this
I studied counseling at a seminary because I believe spirituality matters — regardless of what faith tradition it's attached to, or whether it's attached to one at all. I trained as a spiritual director at a Benedictine monastery because I wanted the skills to walk with people from any background on the journey of spiritual development without imposing a destination.
And then I went through my own significant spiritual shift — one that had real psychological consequences, that sent me into spiritual direction and therapy, and that changed my life in ways I'm still integrating. I know what it's like to have the framework you've organized your life around stop working. I know the particular loneliness of spiritual confusion in a community that treats doubt as a problem to be fixed rather than a doorway to be entered.
I share this not because my story is what matters in the counseling room — it isn't — but because it shapes how I show up. I know how to join you in the doubts and deconstruction because I've been there. And I have no agenda about where you end up. My goal is to help you walk through the process in a way that feels authentic to you.
Counseling offers something specific to people navigating spiritual struggle: an unhurried, non-prescriptive space to stop, go inward, and think carefully about what life is actually about for you. Spirituality is one of the most fundamental ways human beings answer that question. But it has to be developed on your own terms — even if you take a lead from a teacher or tradition you find meaningful. It has to become genuinely yours.
What I've found in my work is that counseling can be a particularly good container for the seeking function. The safety of the therapeutic relationship — the consistency, the non-judgment, the freedom to say things you've never said out loud — creates conditions in which people can afford to expand. And that expansion, paradoxically, often leads not to the loss of faith but to a deeper and more durable engagement with it.
Spirituality as both medicine and wound
One more thing worth naming, because it doesn't get named enough: spirituality can be a genuine source of psychological health, and it can also be a source of real harm.
Research consistently identifies spiritual and religious life as a protective factor for mental wellbeing — associated with resilience, meaning-making, community, and a sense of being held by something larger than oneself. When spirituality functions this way, it's a resource worth exploring and integrating in the counseling process.
But spiritual communities and religious frameworks can also cause genuine psychological harm. Shame-based theology. Teachings that pathologize normal human experience. Communities that respond to doubt with pressure or exclusion. Leaders who exploit spiritual authority. These aren't rare edge cases. They're common enough that a significant number of people sitting across from me are carrying spiritual trauma alongside everything else.
Good counseling holds both of these realities. It doesn't assume that spirituality is harmful and needs to be deconstructed. It doesn't assume that spiritual community is healing and should be preserved. It starts with you — where you actually are, what has actually helped, what has actually hurt — and works from there.
If you're reading this because something is shifting
I want to tell you that sometimes confusion is the best place to be. It means something is changing, and life is asking you to adapt to a new state or stage of spiritual development. That growth is good and meaningful, even when it doesn't feel that way from the inside.
If you're looking for someone to help you process both the gifts and the wounds of your spiritual life — without an agenda about where you end up — I'd love to help.
I offer free 15-minute consultations for new clients. If you're in Colorado Springs or anywhere in Colorado, feel free to reach out.
Blaise Selby is a counselor in Colorado Springs, CO, specializing in depth-oriented individual therapy for adults.