By Eric L Johnson
During the month of January, I’ve been exploring the importance of the body, and the physical/psychological metaphor of the heart, in a biblical psychology as well as in Christian therapy and the Christian life. This week I want to share a theme from my story: how the center of my psychological orientation – both personal and professional – has shifted from my mind to my heart over my adulthood.
I was raised in a very nominally Christian home, by an angry, anxious mother and a workaholic, mostly absent father. So, I entered adolescence insecurely attached, unhappy, and longing for positive experiences (which I found initially in sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll) and later a life-philosophy that could compensate for and maybe repair the default setting of my mostly negative emotional life. I pursued this course increasingly ruthlessly throughout high school, reaching a crisis point when I got my girlfriend pregnant in our junior year, and we gave our child up for adoption. After that, my pursuit became more desperate and stressful, until, five months after graduation, I got hospitalized with a pain in my heart, the cause of which modern medicine could not identify. I floundered for the next few months, hoping to get better by attending some weekend retreats of a New-Age teacher and quasi-therapist. But afterwards I still felt empty and unmoored.
Then a high school friend introduced me to Jesus. The day after becoming a Christian, every shred of felt shame and guilt were gone; I remember it was like walking a foot off the ground. It, sadly, lasted only three days. But it powerfully signaled to me that this was different from everything else I had tried. My devotion time easily replaced my Transcendental Meditation time, and I devoured the Bible, eventually memorizing many chapters. The Holy Spirit fairly quickly got ahold of my behavior, and I had obviously entered a different world.
Within a year of my conversion, I enrolled in a Bible college, and found some solace in its rather rigid, sound-doctrine-and-legalistic-obedience ethos, in part, to escape my past. I am still grateful for the theology I received there, but it didn’t take long for my old self to learn the ropes and begin investing heavily in “mastering” the Bible and modern theological disputation, perhaps sensing that such “competence” could mask the pain, anger, and hurt I was carrying around, but wasn’t yet aware of. I’m also thankful for being exposed to Puritan devotional literature there, because of its strongly “experimental” (i.e., experiential) emphasis. However, I also resonated with its aggressive, somewhat angry opposition to sin and idolatry (and poor theology!), which further bolstered my disavowal of the pre-Christian part of my story and my teenage self.
The best outcome, however, was meeting my wife, Rebekah. We got married shortly after I graduated, and we did our best in those early years, but we had a lot of conflict, part of which was due to my continued use of theological disputation to win the argument (and reduce my insecurity and anxiety) – though deep down she knew there was something wrong in those “Christian” arguments. I did much the same with our two children, as they developed. Perhaps paradoxically, I maintained a strong, daily devotional time with Jesus throughout those years, and it was my greatest comfort, while I continued my education and eventually received a Ph.D., to teach psychology.
My psychological studies, at first, helped me win more arguments, but as the years wore on, I could see she was becoming more depressed, and I had to face the probability that I was hurting her more than helping. Our children were, by then, entering adolescence and their resistance to my fathering reinforced what I was learning from Becky: the inner conflicts I had received from my family-of-origin had not been resolved, along with my behavior, when I became a Christian. I began to realize that Christian conversion was lifelong and I needed Christ to bring a deeper healing to my heart wounds, and I began seeing a therapist, and I’ve been on that deeper, more holistic journey ever since.
In my late 30’s, I also read two books that helped me intellectually: Jonathan Edwards’ Religious Affections and A Kierkegaard Anthology by Robert Bretall. They both helped me see the value of emotions in the Christian life and, in very different ways, challenged my thick defenses. Around then I also read Leanne Payne’s The Healing Presence, which revolutionized my devotional life, convincing me that a biblically based imagination could promote deeper soul-healing. By the end of that decade, I began having some success counseling members of our local church.
After moving to a seminary to teach counseling, I became familiar with Emotion-Focused Therapy research and used Affect Phobia, by Leigh McCullough et al., for a textbook. In spite of their secular-humanistic assumptions, I came to realize they had a better, more practical grasp of some key details of human development in a fallen world, and I became persuaded that such creation-grace work could help Christians promote the redemptive-grace healing of the Christian heart. So, I started working on what I called a “carditive” model of Christian therapy, that focused especially on the psychological heart.
Over time, I also found that my own work with a therapist and my devotional time were intersecting. I was trusting him more in session and also better able to open up my soul to Jesus in devotions, feeling increasingly free to explore whatever came up in either setting. I was simultaneously feeling generally less ashamed and defensive, and therefore more aware of my trauma story and the soul-damage it had caused, including my “partial selves,” helping me understand how I sometimes showed up differently in my relationships. But “which [of these healings] “preceded and brought forth the other is not easy to discern;” progress in one dimension seemed to aid the rest. Most importantly, my wife and children were seeing a difference in how I related to them.
Then, shortly before COVID, a Muslim psychologist shared with me his interest in focusing on “heartfulness,” more than “mindfulness,” and a light bulb went off. Christianity is especially a religion of the heart, and I saw how God has been shaping me throughout my life and career to work on a psychology and therapy of the heart. During COVID, I studied the use of “heart” in the Bible and classic Christian literature, and I read a lot in phenomenological philosophy, McGilchrist’s “two-hemisphere” hypothesis, Robert Roberts on the emotions and the virtues, and Dietrich von Hildebrand and Peter Kreeft’s wonderful books on the heart. With the help of some others, I did some research on the psychological heart, interviewing Christians and collecting data on Twitter, and I gradually began to get some distance from the positivism, scientism, and cognitivism that I has influenced me since getting my doctorate at Michigan State University. Over the past three years, I’ve been considering how the fields of psychology and counseling/psychotherapy could be enhanced and reconfigured with classic Christianity’s better balance between objectivity and subjectivity and a programmatic study of the psychological heart and its therapeutic treatment, some of which shows up in our Christ-centered therapy training.
This is part 3 of 3 for this series.
Eric founded the Christian Psychology Institute a decade ago while serving in Christian higher education. Since retiring from Houston Christian University in May 2024, he has devoted himself to building CPI into a national hub for training, scholarship, and certification in Christ-Centered Therapy.
An accomplished author and editor, Eric is widely respected for his work at the intersection of theology and psychology. He brings over 25 years of pastoral counseling experience and is a frequent speaker at conferences and academic events.
Eric is married to Rebekah and cherishes time with their two children and three grandchildren. In his free time, he enjoys hiking and bike riding.
