When Faith Becomes a Substitute for Healing

In many post-colonial societies, pain is spiritualized before it is ever understood.

Trauma is renamed a test.

Depression becomes a lack of faith.

Anxiety is framed as weakness.

And healing is postponed indefinitely.

Colonization did not only wound bodies and nations—it fractured psyches. It introduced violence so normalized that suffering became invisible. Generations were taught not to process pain, but to endure it. Not to examine trauma, but to sanctify it.

Faith became the language through which pain was explained—often because it was the only language permitted.

I grew up in a culture where prayer was the first response to crisis and often the last. Grief was spiritualized. Mental distress was moralized. To struggle silently was considered strength. To ask for help was quietly discouraged.

This was not cruelty. It was survival.

For communities shaped by enslavement, colonial violence, and political instability, faith offered structure in chaos. It gave meaning where none was offered. It provided hope when systems failed. But over time, faith also became a shield—one that protected people not only from despair, but from confronting its causes.

This is where the danger lies.

When trauma is interpreted exclusively through a spiritual lens, it becomes untouchable. Pain is no longer something to heal—it is something to accept. Psychological wounds are framed as destiny. Structural violence is absorbed into personal responsibility.

And the cycle continues.

Post-colonial societies carry layered trauma: historical, collective, and personal. These wounds do not disappear because they are prayed over. They persist in the body. They manifest in fear, mistrust, hyper-vigilance, and despair. They surface in cycles of violence, silence, and self-blame.

To name trauma is not to reject faith. It is to refuse neglect.

Mental health requires language—honest language. It requires the ability to say something happened to us, not just something is wrong with us. Colonization disrupted this language by teaching us that suffering was either deserved or divinely ordained.

Neither is true.

Decolonizing the mind means reclaiming the right to heal without shame. It means recognizing that therapy is not betrayal, that reflection is not rebellion, that emotional literacy is not weakness. It means allowing faith to coexist with accountability, compassion, and science—rather than replacing them.

There is no holiness in untreated trauma.

The refusal to address mental health has consequences. It shapes leadership. It distorts relationships. It hardens societies. When pain goes unexamined, it does not disappear—it reproduces itself.

Healing requires courage. The courage to sit with discomfort. The courage to question inherited explanations for suffering. The courage to admit that prayer alone cannot repair what history has broken.

Post-colonial liberation is incomplete without psychological freedom.

Until we make space for grief, rage, fear, and healing—without judgment or spiritual bypassing—we will continue to confuse endurance with strength and silence with resilience.

Faith may offer comfort.

But healing demands honesty.

And honesty, once embraced, becomes its own form of liberation.