Can prayer, rather than supporting us as we face life, become a way of avoiding reality? Psychologist **Marijana Grgić** addressed this question on the programme **“Hope That Heals,”** in a presentation published by Radio Mir Međugorje on October 7, 2026. She spoke about moments when pious words are used in place of conversation, professional help, setting boundaries or making a difficult decision.
She began by drawing a distinction between prayer itself and the way a person may use it: “I want to make this clear straight away: the problem is not prayer. Prayer is an encounter with God. It can give us peace, wisdom, courage and the strength to endure what we cannot change immediately.” The problem arises, she explains, when we expect prayer to replace what we ourselves are responsible for doing.
As an example, she cites the words “I have handed it over to God,” behind which an unwillingness to face the truth is sometimes concealed. She sees a similar pattern in asking for a miracle while refusing to see a doctor, praying for a relationship to change without expressing what hurts, or speaking of carrying one’s cross while actually allowing abuse. Such an approach, Grgić warns, is no longer healthy spirituality, but an escape from reality dressed up in pious words.
Her question, then, is not whether a person should pray, but whether prayer helps them face what they can and should do. “Prayer and action are not enemies. Prayer should equip us to act,” she says. It should not close our eyes to reality, but give us the strength to open them.
When prayer is expected to change everything, while we do nothing
Grgić says that in her counselling practice she meets women who approach spirituality as a kind of elixir or magic formula. She illustrates this expectation with an imagined tally of “364 fasts and 3,876 rosaries,” after which a husband is supposed to wake up one morning completely changed: stop drinking and being violent, start paying the bills, take responsibility for the family, and become a good husband and father.
The figures in this example illustrate the expectation; her criticism is not directed at fasting or the rosary. It is directed at trying to use prayer to avoid setting a necessary boundary, seeking necessary help or making a decision a person is afraid to make.
In an example from her counselling practice, she describes a woman who has endured her husband’s drunkenness, humiliation, violence and unpaid bills for years, while telling others that she is fine. In the church community, she may be praised for being patient, “carrying her cross” and saying nothing bad about her husband. The more she endures, the better a believer some people consider her.
Grgić questions this picture from the perspective of the children: What are they watching? Are they living in fear and learning that love means keeping silent while someone destroys the family? She says that women like this are often shocked when told that what calls for concrete action cannot be controlled through prayer. They had thought faith meant simply enduring, whereas Christian faith, the psychologist stresses, also involves reason, discernment and the gifts of counsel, fortitude and fear of the Lord.
Protecting the family does not mean concealing abuse
According to Grgić, faith does not ask a woman to conceal her husband’s alcoholism, pay his debts or assure others that everything is all right. Nor does it ask her to protect his reputation while the children are exposed to violence. “Protecting a child is not betraying one’s husband. Seeking professional help is not a lack of faith. Reporting violence is not an attack on the family,” she stresses.
She adds that this is not a call to publicly humiliate one’s husband or take revenge. It is about stopping the lies on his behalf, concealing the consequences of his behaviour and sustaining the pretence that everything is fine. In some circumstances, she sees seeking help and reporting violence as a way to protect the family and as a clear message that violence will no longer be hidden or tolerated.
She particularly warns that violence, especially against children, is not merely a private marital problem. In such a situation, it is necessary to protect the child, seek professional help and involve the relevant authorities.
She explicitly emphasises the woman’s safety: she should not confront the abuser alone if doing so could expose her to further danger. She needs support and a safety plan. Grgić therefore does not set prayer against protection and action, but sees it as support for the steps the situation requires.
What is spiritual bypassing?
Grgić uses the term **spiritual bypassing** to describe a pattern in which spiritual language and practices are used to sidestep real pain, unresolved trauma, personal responsibility or the need for change. It can sound very pious and still serve as a means of avoidance.
Instead of acknowledging anger, a person says, “A Christian must not get angry.” Instead of setting a boundary, they say, “I have to forgive.” They replace the need for psychological or medical help with the words, “God will heal it.” They conceal their fear of making a decision behind the words, “I am waiting for a sign.” In each of these examples, she explains, spiritual language can obscure a problem the person needs to face.
Grgić also warns that a feeling itself is not a sin. Anger can sometimes show that an important boundary has been crossed, fear can warn of danger, and sadness speaks of loss. In her understanding, emotions are not given to us so that we can silence them with pious phrases, but so that we can understand them and direct them responsibly towards life and positive change.
This distinction matters for forgiveness, too: the call to forgive should not become a reason to avoid setting a necessary boundary. Likewise, trust in God should not replace seeking help when it is needed.
Not every form of religious coping is the same
In her presentation, she discussed three research examples. The first, she said, was associated with the psychology of religion scholar **Kenneth Pargament** and his collaborators, who studied, as she described it, how people use faith during major life difficulties.
She names three different contexts: people affected by the bombing in Oklahoma City, students going through difficult life events, and older hospitalised people facing serious health problems. These were different experiences of trauma, loss, illness, fear and uncertainty. Grgić explains that the researchers were interested not only in whether participants were religious or how often they prayed, but in how they drew on faith when life was difficult.
According to Grgić’s account, the researchers developed the **Brief RCOPE**, a short religious coping questionnaire, and distinguished between positive and negative religious coping. The positive form includes seeking God’s closeness and spiritual support, forgiveness, finding meaning in a difficult experience, and working with God to solve problems.
Grgić sums up the difference through two perspectives on prayer. One is: “God, do everything for me.” The other is: “God, be with me, show me what I need to do, and give me the strength to do it.” In the latter approach, a person prays while also talking, making decisions, seeking help, going to the doctor, setting boundaries and accepting their share of responsibility.
In her account, negative religious coping includes feeling that God has abandoned or punished the person, anger at God, spiritual bitterness, conflicts with the religious community, and interpreting problems as the work of evil forces or as proof that God has no power to help.
Nevertheless, she emphasises that spiritual struggle itself is not a sin or proof that someone is a bad believer. A person who is suffering may be angry, confused and full of questions; she reminds us that such experiences appear in the Psalms and in Jesus’ cry from the cross. Her warning concerns becoming trapped for a long time in the belief that one has been punished or abandoned, or that one must take no action—something which, in her explanation, can make it harder to adapt.
According to the results Grgić cites, positive religious coping was more often associated with better adjustment, while negative spiritual struggles were associated with greater difficulties. She does not interpret these findings as a condemnation of faith, but as a warning that not every way of using it is equally healthy.
Faith can help a person find meaning, strength and hope, she stresses, but religious words can also serve to sustain fear, passivity and guilt. Her message is that healthy faith does not take away responsibility, but helps a person carry it.
Spirituality, avoidance and the limits of research
The second example she cites is a study by **Jesse Fox and Gabriela Picciotto from 2019**, conducted, according to her presentation, with **783 people from the general population**. It asked whether spirituality can sometimes serve as a way of avoiding psychological reality—that is, one’s own pain, acknowledging a problem, or taking a difficult and unpleasant step.
Grgić describes two forms of this behaviour that were examined. The first is psychological avoidance: a person feels sadness, fear, anger or hurt but does not allow themselves to acknowledge those feelings. Instead, they tell themselves they must not be angry, that they must only pray, that a true believer would not be sad, or that they must forgive everything straight away. Prayer then, she explains, is not a way of bringing one’s feelings before God, but of suppressing them.
The second form is spiritualising: explaining almost every problem in life exclusively in spiritual terms, without considering its psychological, health-related, family or social causes. As examples of this kind of oversimplification, Grgić cites interpreting anxiety solely as a lack of faith, depression as spiritual weakness, and marital problems solely as an attack by the evil one.
She also includes the expectation that a child’s developmental difficulties will be resolved through prayer, without a professional assessment. Her warning concerns excluding other important dimensions of a problem, not setting prayer against professional help.
According to Grgić’s account of the study, psychological avoidance and excessive spiritualising played a significant statistical mediating role in the relationship between spirituality and depression and anxiety, and particularly stress. She explicitly warns that **this result does not mean that spirituality causes depression or anxiety**.
She says the study was cross-sectional and based on participants’ self-reports, so it cannot establish what is cause and what is consequence. People who are already suffering may turn more towards certain forms of spirituality, just as it is possible that prolonged avoidance of reality sustains suffering. Grgić does not present these possibilities as a proven causal sequence, but as processes that may intertwine.
From this she draws a practical question: it is not enough to ask whether a person prays; we should ask what happens after prayer. Do they become freer, more responsible and better able to face life, or do they return, after brief relief, to the same situation and once again do nothing?
Prayer can bring calm, but she does not reduce its purpose to temporarily removing an uncomfortable feeling. It should help us see the truth more clearly and find the strength for the next step. That step, she says, may sometimes mean forgiveness or a conversation, sometimes a boundary, and sometimes going to a doctor, psychologist, social worker or another person able to offer concrete help.
Faith can support seeking help, but it can also make it harder
The third work Grgić presents is not a single study of one group of participants, but a **qualitative metasynthesis of 47 previously published studies** about women who survived intimate partner violence. According to the figures she cites, it covered the experiences of approximately **921 women**, including about **630 migrants**.
The studies were conducted mostly in the United States, but also in the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, Australia, Canada, Norway, Sweden and Taiwan. The authors, she explains, analysed women’s conversations and experiences to understand what made seeking help harder and what made it easier, rather than simply counting how many had sought help.
According to her account, the researchers identified **25 barriers and 14 factors** that facilitated the search for safety and support. The barriers included fear and shame, financial dependence, discrimination, insecure immigration status, distrust of institutions, concern for children, family pressure and fear of community judgment.
Religion and spirituality appeared on both sides. In nine of the studies analysed, faith helped women: prayer provided peace, hope and a sense that they were not alone, while a religious community could offer belonging, practical help and a way out of isolation. In thirteen studies, Grgić says, religion emerged as a barrier to seeking help.
Some women, she relates from the experiences presented, were told to be patient, pray more and preserve their marriage at all costs. Religious advice sometimes increased feelings of guilt and responsibility for an abusive partner’s behaviour. In this way, some found strength in faith to endure, but not permission to protect themselves.
Pressure to preserve the family, fear of bringing shame on the community, traditional expectations of women, and the belief that a good wife must keep silent and endure made it harder to report violence or leave a dangerous situation. Grgić stresses an important qualification: the work focused on women from ethnic minority and migrant communities, so its findings cannot simply be applied to every culture, religious community or woman.
A qualitative metasynthesis, she adds, does not show how common an experience is across the whole population. It identifies patterns that recurred in women’s experiences. For Grgić, this is a reminder of the responsibility of families, the Church and religious communities, which can be important places of support and protection.
A community can be the place where a woman hears for the first time: “You are not to blame. Violence is not your cross. Protecting yourself and your children is not a betrayal of God.” By contrast, messages that she should simply pray more, keep quiet, be obedient and endure may, she warns, unintentionally support the abuser instead of the person experiencing violence.
“Prayer and professional help are not rivals. Faith and protection are not opposites,” Grgić says. A person can believe in God and call the police; forgive and still set a boundary; pray for someone’s conversion and at the same time refuse to live with violence.
She therefore describes healthy spirituality as something that does not take away a person’s voice, but helps them speak the truth. In this understanding of faith, prayer does not negate the need for safety, help and responsibility.
Saints Monica and Rita are no justification for silence about abuse
Grgić also addressed the invocation of Saint Monica and Saint Rita when women are advised to keep praying and enduring. She warns that saints’ lives must not become a means of silencing an abused woman.
She notes that Saint Monica prayed for a long time for the conversion of her son, Saint Augustine, but that Church sources, according to her, do not confirm the often-repeated claim that she prayed for exactly 40 years. They speak of years of prayer and many tears. Nor does Grgić portray Monica as passive: she spoke with others, took action, accompanied her son and sought the counsel of Saint Ambrose.
Praying for an adult son who has left the faith, she stresses, is not the same as keeping silent while a husband abuses a woman or children. She also questions the oversimplified picture of Saint Rita’s husband. According to Grgić, the official website of Rita’s shrine warns that it is incorrect to portray him as an abusive and evil husband, as is often recounted. She therefore does not consider Saint Rita proof that a woman must remain in an abusive situation.
She does not consider messages such as “Saint Monica endured, so you should endure too” or “Saint Rita prayed, so you should keep quiet too” spiritual counsel, but rather a shifting of the burden from the abuser to the victim. Saints are examples of prayer, perseverance and forgiveness, but their lives are not a universal command for every woman to endure violence.
The biblical call: pray and take a step
Grgić also connects her message with biblical scenes. In the Book of Exodus, the Israelites stand before the Red Sea while Pharaoh’s army approaches from behind. In fear, they cry out to God, and God says to Moses: “Why are you crying out to me? Tell the Israelites to move on.”
She interprets this scene as a reminder that there is a time to cry out, but also a moment to take a step. Praying and asking God for help, she says, does not rule out using reason. We need to entrust to God what we cannot control, while taking responsibility for what we can do.
She sees the same relationship between prayer and reality in Jesus’ example in Gethsemane. Jesus prays in anguish, does not deny his fear and does not pretend that things are easy for him: “Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me.” After praying, Grgić reminds us, he rises and goes to meet what he must do. In her interpretation, prayer did not separate him from reality, but prepared him to enter into it.
She also cites the message of Saint James: “Faith without works is dead.” She does not interpret this as saying that we buy God’s grace through works, but that living faith bears fruit: it directs us towards truth, responsibility, protecting the vulnerable and concrete action.
Does prayer lead me towards the truth or away from it?
In the final part, Grgić offers questions to help identify spirituality as an escape. Have we prayed for the same change for years while refusing to do what is within our power? Do we call every boundary selfishness? Do we see going to a doctor or psychologist as a lack of faith? Do we say we have forgiven while actually allowing the same evil to happen again? Do we preserve the appearance of a good family while people live in fear behind closed doors?
She sees such patterns as a reason for honest self-examination: does prayer lead us towards the truth, or help us avoid it? Healthy spirituality, she emphasises, does not mean that we have to solve everything on our own.
It is possible to pray and go to the doctor, pray and talk to a psychologist, pray and set a boundary, report violence or make a difficult decision. Sometimes the answer to prayer, Grgić says, is not a miraculous change in another person, but the strength to get up ourselves, tell the truth, protect a child, seek help and take the step we have been putting off for years.
“Prayer is not an escape from responsibility. Prayer frees us from fear so that we can do what we are responsible for doing,” she concludes.
