Although many will say that prayer can be a source of strength for those experiencing sadness, some prayers may do more harm than good when you are feeling vulnerable.
When experiencing emotional distress, the words you choose to express yourself with are vital to your emotional health. Prayers that create feelings of guilt, fear, and helplessness may not provide the support needed to heal from emotional pain.
The use of prayer should encourage compassion, safety, and grounding; therefore, it is best to avoid certain types of prayers for a period of time and/or reframe the way you think and speak about them when you are experiencing sadness.
1. Prayers That Ask For Punishment
Praying for punishment for your mistakes can increase your emotional pain. Sadness makes you feel vulnerable; you should not be asking for punishment for making mistakes because this only creates shame, not healing.
Prayers for punishment create feelings of unworthiness and self-blame, and during periods of sadness, compassion should be your guide.
When you turn your emotions into punishments, you make it harder for yourself to recover from feeling sadness and will not recover quickly; therefore, in those times of emotional struggle, your prayers should provide you with love, comfort, support, and understanding.
Compassion is a much greater tool for finding clarity than self-punishment.
2. Prayers That Beg For Worth
When you pray for worthiness, it implies that you aren’t good enough just as you are, and when you’re in a place of sadness, it can feel pretty heavy.
Inadvertently, these prayers can reinforce your low self-esteem. You don’t have to earn your worth during the times of sadness. Instead, you need to be reassured that your worth wouldn’t come as a condition or requirement.
Praying for worth makes it feel like healing is a long way off. Praying should serve as a reminder of your inherent worth, not as a challenge to it.
3. Prayers That Focus Only On Suffering
If you only pray about your pain, then you become trapped emotionally. While it’s good to be honest in prayer, the continual praying about pain will keep your nervous system overstimulated and overwhelmed.
Naming pain repeatedly without hope will exacerbate the feeling of sadness when it’s at its peak. Prayers focused on despair may feel like a relief for a moment, but they will leave you feeling drained in the long run.
Therefore, we must find balance. To acknowledge pain is the first step to healing, but prayer should provide safety, rest, or illumination so that sorrow does not become the focus.
4. Prayers That Demand Immediate Answers
Asking for clarity in prayer can lead to disrespect. Sadness creates unclear perception; anticipating an answer before stabilizing will create anxiety.
When a person feels emotional, silence can be experienced as being ignored. The prayer will eventually lead to disappointment instead of creating comfort or reassurance.
The best type of prayer to use during times of sorrow is a prayer that is more relaxed than a prayer that applies pressure. Patience will help develop trust, not the need for immediacy.
5. Prayers That Compare You To Others
Focusing on others’ happiness in prayer can isolate you. When you compare yourself to others, your sadness is magnified. Feelings of neglect or injustice will continue with prayers focusing more on others than on the way you’ve been living your life.
Personal pain is not to compete against someone else’s pain or happiness. Rather, you should focus your prayers on your own feelings during your time of sadness.
Healing comes from being with yourself, not by comparing yourself to others, because you never know what those people are going through.
6. Prayers That Suppress Emotion
Instant prayers to remove sadness diminish your chance of feeling the sadness and thus diminish your ability to heal from it. Denying a person’s emotional reality prevents them from healing.
It creates a false hope and will likely cause the sadness to come back again later.
It gives the performer of the prayer an illusion of having a safe place to feel their emotions, rather than using the prayer to help them create that safe place that is genuine, and to feel their sadness.
7. Prayers That Ask You To Be Strong
Prayers asking for strength often feel heavy when you’re feeling drained. The language of strength casually dismisses vulnerability, especially in times of sadness.
The prayer puts pressure on us to be able to show resilience. Prayers should allow some level of rest and softness.
Through prayer, strength will come back naturally once the burden dissipates. To force oneself to be “strong” too soon only prevents healing from taking place.
8. Prayers That Blame Yourself
Praying about personal mistakes can make people even sadder. Self-blame adds to the emotional distress when we are feeling down. Those prayers suggest we should suffer for our faults.
To heal, we need to understand ourselves rather than accuse ourselves. Sadness can come from many factors. By blaming ourselves, we make the pain simpler, but we do not help ourselves heal.
Prayer should provide insight and forgiveness; it should not bring condemnation. Compassion heals much better than blame does.
9. Prayers That Fear Abandonment
Prayer requests that express fear of abandonment can reinforce anxiety. Sadness amplifies abandonment fear; such prayers may increase anxiety rather than provide comfort, because they send a message that God only loves us conditionally or that you are a fragile entity.
Prayer should provide comfort and support instead of causing anxiety to increase.
When praying during times of sadness, prayer should help build trust by focusing on safety rather than the fear of abandonment.
10. Prayers That Dismiss Your Pain
Sadness isn’t a sign of weakness or lack of faith, and a prayer is your place to receive support from God.
When sadness is prayed over and labeled a failure, it takes away from a person having already been through a bad situation and makes them feel invalidated.
Sadness does not make someone spiritually deficient or weak; when someone dismisses another’s sadness, it leads to a sense of alienation and lack of support.
Instead, prayer should be a way to acknowledge pain without judgment and allow healing to start by respecting emotional pain. Compassion for oneself brings a person true peace.
Born and raised in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Ever since I was a little girl, my imagination knew no bounds. I remember vividly how I’d scribble down short stories, each page bursting with adventures and characters conjured up from the whimsy of my mind. These stories weren’t just for me; they were my way of connecting with my friends, offering them a slice of my fantasy world during our playtimes. The joy and excitement on their faces as we dived into my fictional realms motivated me to keep writing. This early passion for storytelling naturally evolved into my pursuit of writing, turning a childhood hobby into a fulfilling career.