You Didn't Pray Hard Enough

Content warning: This essay describes lived experience with an eating disorder and religious trauma. It is part two in a four-part series on eating disorder recovery, religious trauma, and the slow work of separating God from shame. You can read part one, “Your Eating Disorder Wore Church Clothes,” here.

I write this as someone who remains faith-filled, while also telling the truth about the harm that can happen when eating disorders and mental illness are spiritualized instead of met with understanding, safety, or care. Please move gently as you read.

By the time the adults around me realized something was wrong, my eating disorder had already been praised in its early stages.

That’s one of the hardest truths to admit.

Before it looked frightening, it looked admirable.

Disciplined.

Committed.

Self-controlled.

Faithful, even.

When I skipped meals in the name of fasting, when I denied myself food with a kind of grim devotion, there was approval. I was trying to better myself, trying to become more disciplined, more “godly,” more in control of my appetites.

In a world where religion and diet culture had become tangled together, those things were read as virtue for a long time.

It was only when the outcomes became harder to ignore that concern finally stepped in.

When I became visibly unwell.

When the rules got too rigid.

When the body underneath all that “discipline” began to show the cost.

That was when the adults decided something needed to be done.

But even then, the response was not understanding.

It was control.

My family threatened to block my college financial aid if I didn’t get my act together.

The message was clear: fix this, or pay for it.

It startled me, yes. It scared me. But it did not wake me into healing.

It only woke me deeper into hiding.

That’s something people often don’t understand about eating disorders.

Pressure does not create honesty.

Threats do not create safety.

Fear does not create recovery.

It creates performance.

So I learned to perform.

I learned how to say enough of the right things to make adults feel reassured. I learned how to look compliant without actually letting go of anything. I learned how to survive inside systems that wanted visible improvement more than they wanted to understand what was actually happening inside me.

And because my family’s answer was the church, I was sent to counseling there.

That is where the irony deepened.

The same religious world that had handed me language for deprivation was now trying to rescue me from the consequences of the very thinking it had helped make holy.

I met with an older couple from the church counseling department. They were kind in the way people can be when they sincerely believe they are helping. Warm smiles. Gentle voices. Worksheets. Prayers. Certainty.

But they had no real understanding of eating disorders.

So they did what people often do when they don’t know how to sit with suffering: they reached for the framework they knew best and laid it over the top of me.

Their diagnosis, as best as I can remember it now, was not that I was starving.

Not that I was trapped.

Not that I was afraid.

Not that something deep in me was hurting and using food to speak.

It was that my faith wasn’t strong enough.

If I just prayed more.

If I just surrendered more.

If I just trusted God enough.

If I just stopped letting fear have so much power.

Then I could break free.

And when that didn’t work, the explanation shifted.

Maybe I had unconfessed sin.

Maybe there was something I was harboring that was keeping God distant, keeping healing from reaching me. Maybe the problem wasn’t just that I was afraid. Maybe the problem was that I was spiritually defective.

I can still see it.

Them laying hands on me in prayer.

Asking God to forgive what I could not even name.

Trying to cast light into places they assumed were dark with disobedience.

And there I sat — hungry, ashamed, dissociated — calculating what I had eaten that day and what I would allow myself later.

That is one of the things that still undoes me when I look back:

How little anyone understood the actual nature of what was happening.

A starved mind is not a mind that can reason its way to peace.

A terrified body is not soothed by being told to try harder at faith.

A person already drowning in shame does not heal by being handed more of it in holier language.

I filled out the worksheets.

I did the exercises.

I reflected on the questions they gave me.

I learned how to nod in the right places and offer the kinds of answers that sound spiritually mature.

But underneath all of it, my eating disorder remained untouched.

Maybe not untouched.

Maybe reinforced.

Because what those sessions taught me — whether anyone meant to teach it or not — was that my struggle made me further from God. That my inability to recover cleanly and quickly was evidence of some deeper failure in me. That if healing was not happening, the problem must be my lack of surrender, my lack of faith, my lack of righteousness.

That message did not set me free.

It fed the shame monster inside me ten times over.

I already believed I was failing.

Now I had spiritual language for why.

I was not just too hungry, too needy, too weak.

I was distant from God.

Harboring sin.

Falling short in ways that reached beyond food and body and down into my very soul.

How do you heal inside a system that keeps naming your wound as rebellion?

How do you find hope when the people trying to help you are still using the same categories that taught you hunger was holy in the first place?

That is the thing I wish more people understood about how religious trauma and eating disorders can become tangled.

The harm is not always loud.

Sometimes it sounds like concern.

Sometimes it sounds like prayer.

Sometimes it sounds like a gentle voice asking whether you have confessed everything to God.

Sometimes it sounds like people trying very hard to help, while completely missing the wound they are pressing on.

And I want to be fair here.

This is not an essay against faith or the Church itself. My faith still matters deeply to me. And part of that faithfulness, for me, includes telling the truth about the harm that can happen when eating disorders and mental illness are met with spiritual explanations instead of informed, compassionate care.

I can see now that many of the people involved likely had good intentions.

I don’t think they wanted to destroy me.

I think they wanted to save me the only way they knew how.

But good intentions do not cancel harmful impact.

And in my case, the impact was devastating.

Because instead of giving me language for grief, fear, control, and pain, I was given more reasons to distrust myself.

Instead of helping me feel less alone in my struggle, I was made to feel spiritually suspect within it.

Instead of being invited into safe, compassionate care, I was discipled deeper into self-surveillance.

I became even better at hiding.

Even better at saying the right things.

Even better at appearing compliant.

Even better at keeping the ugliest parts of my struggle tucked away where no one could touch them.

I did eventually leave that counseling room, but I carried its messages with me for years.

That if I were still struggling, there must be something wrong in my heart.

That God was disappointed in me.

That healing would come if only I could become more surrendered, more disciplined, more spiritually acceptable.

It would take me a long time to understand how deeply those messages had shaped me.

Longer still to see that what I needed was never more accusation dressed up as guidance.

I needed someone who knew how to sit beside suffering without trying to spiritualize it away.

I needed someone who could recognize an eating disorder as an eating disorder.

I needed safety.

Nuance.

Compassion.

Real care.

Not another reason to feel ashamed of being sick.

And maybe that is what I want to say most clearly now, especially to anyone who comes from faith communities that still do not know what to do with mental illness:

Not every struggle is a spiritual failure.

Not every wound is evidence of hidden sin.

Not every illness can be prayed away by trying harder, believing better, or surrendering more perfectly.

Sometimes a person is simply in pain.

Sometimes they are hungry and afraid and trapped inside a mind that has become dangerous to them.

Sometimes what they need is not course correction.

It is care.

It is one thing to be wounded by an eating disorder.

It is another thing entirely to be wounded by the people who thought they were helping you heal from it.

That is a grief all its own.

And it deserves to be named.

This essay is part two in a four-part series on eating disorder recovery, religious trauma, and the slow work of separating God from shame.

If this story touches something tender in you — if faith, shame, food, or worth have ever felt tangled together in your story — please move gently. Some wounds take time, language, and safe support to name.

And if you are a mother in eating disorder recovery carrying the complicated overlap of food, body shame, faith, motherhood, and repair, you are welcome here.

Lift the Shame is my free support space for mothers navigating the overlap of eating disorder recovery, food and body shame, and motherhood.

There’s room for you here.

[Join Lift the Shame]