Christine D’Clario Urges the Church to Embrace Therapy – But Says the Right Kind Matters

Michael Foust

Audio By Carbonatix

By Michael Foust, Crosswalk.com

An award-winning Christian singer is speaking candidly about her struggles with mental health, saying therapy played a key role in rescuing her from suicidal thoughts – and helping her rediscover hope and joy.

But that singer, Dove Award-winning artist Christine D’Clario, says it wasn’t just any therapy that helped her find healing.

“I recommend therapy wholeheartedly,” D’Clario told Crosswalk Headlines, before quickly adding that she only recommends therapy if it’s faith-based – or in her words, a “Spirit-filled anchored-in-the-Bible therapist who knows the Holy Spirit, who sits with Jesus daily” and who “leans on the Lord and not on their own understanding.”

“That is the key.”

D’Clario has won six Dove Awards in the Spanish language recorded category and has been nominated for two Latin Grammys, while drawing more monthly Spotify listeners (2 million) than many English-language artists on U.S. radio. Her fame, though, made it difficult when she developed severe postpartum depression some seven years ago and felt isolated, unsure where to turn.

She shares that journey in a new book, Healing in the Desert: Finding Your Voice on the Journey from Brokenness to Freedom (David C. Cook).

“One of my biggest and hardest symptoms was suicidal thoughts,” she said. “And so being a public figure – more so a public figure of faith, and struggling with thoughts of death and an unsound mind was something that I just couldn't reconcile. I was completely unaware that there were resources for people like me, that there were other people going through the same thing.

“What does a leader in faith do? Like – how do we confess? How do we reach out for help without the fear of maybe being shunned or being seen as a failure? So there was a very big struggle.”

Fortunately, D’Clario was surrounded by people who recognized her struggles and realized she needed help, placing her into trauma therapy that became the first step on her path to healing.

“It turns out that my postpartum depression was a blessing in disguise. It was the spear's head of a deeper healing that needed to happen from trauma from my childhood that was never resolved. I survived sexual abuse at five. I watched my dad's detriment to addiction until he passed away when I was six. I was uprooted from New York, where I was born, to a new country in Puerto Rico, and it was a snowball effect of complex trauma that I simply had just never dealt with.”

As she began to speak out about her struggles, she realized that there were many, many other Christians in the same position.

“I felt very convicted by the Lord that this wasn't a story [just] for me,” she said of her desire to write a book. “This was a story that was going to serve as a guide for many, many people.”

D’Clario, though, immediately faced opposition from roughly half of the churchgoing public, she said. Their reasons were many: You’ve opened the door to the enemy. You’re demonized. You don’t pray enough. You don’t go to church enough.

She understands that perspective, because it was common during her youth.

“The other half, though, was very encouraging to me,” she said.

D’Clario hopes that her story will help others realize they are not alone in their struggles.

“People were telling me, ‘I didn't know someone like you could go through something like that – and if you face that, then I'm not so wrong for suffering in the same way. And if you came out of it and you found your way through the desert, then that gives me hope.’”