The Body and Mind in the Battle
What mental anguish, spiritual warfare, and functional health can teach us about whole-person healing
There are seasons of suffering that refuse to stay in one category. We ask whether what we are experiencing is psychological, physiological, spiritual warfare, or grief, as though one explanation must cancel out the others. Sometimes several things are happening at once.
One of the mistakes we make in modern health care is reducing everything to physiology. Psychology can reduce everything to trauma, thought patterns, or nervous system dysregulation. And in Christian circles, we can reduce everything to spiritual warfare. But we are not three separate people. We are one person: body, soul and spirit. Severe suffering can reach all three.
Satan to me: “I Will Destroy You”
Apollyon battling Christian in John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress
In my early 20s, I had a dream in which Satan himself appeared and said, “I will destroy you.” He did not appear merely as a figure, but as black hatred itself, darkness condensed into a presence, with only the faintest contours of a being. He was like a black hole in the midst of life, trying to devour all life, all light.
The force of that darkness felt vast enough to consume the whole world in a single instant. And yet it could not.
Strong resistance against him was being continually held in existence by the creative power of God. The world remained because God willed it to remain. Life remained because God was sustaining it. And in that moment, the darkness appeared immense, but not sovereign.
When I came out of this dream, which I do not know if it was even a dream, I was sitting on my bed and the thought appeared in my mind: Read Revelation 9:11, so I did. “They have as king over them the angel of the bottomless pit; his name in Hebrew is Abad′don, and in Greek he is called Apol′lyon.”Then I freaked out bc Abaddon and Apollyon literally means Destroyer!
Since and before then he is trying very hard to keep his word.
I believe spiritual warfare is real. But I have also learned that spiritual warfare does not somehow happen outside the human body. Fear, grief, abandonment, sleplessness, years of uncertainty have physiology. The body carrying all of this is the same body through which we pray, think, discern, work, love and attempt to remain faithful. That is where spiritual warfare, mental anguish and functional health begin to intersect.
When Suffering Becomes a Whole-Person Event
My unwanted divorce unfolded over years. Mid Oct. 2020 till the end of 2021 was a complete turmoil and chaos when my husband suddenly left, and in 2021 papers were served. During this time for every week you I had 6 bad days and one so-so day. In 2022 and 2023 for every week I had 4 bad days, 1 better day and the rest could turn either way. In 2024 divorce papers were signed. You would think by 2026 I should be ‘fine’ and ‘on my way to something’ yet the most prevalent feeling I have is aloneness because I was not simply reacting to an event. I had been living inside prolonged stress which has not ended yet. The crisis had become an environment, something my body, emotions, mind and spiritual life had all been forced to adapt to over time.
These stages can occur simultaneously and not necessarily in that order.
Our culture is unrealistic about life after divorce. There is pressure from friends, family, therapists, preachers and faith circles to start new, to let go and to flourish again. But suffering does not obey somebody else's timetable, and it does not become meaningful simply because enough time has passed.
You can not speed up grief becasue you can not speed up suffering. You can not tell it to make sense. You can not declare it has meaning and purpose. You can not pray it with few Scriptures to make it right. You can not dismiss its thorns going deeper than the roots of your identity. You can not therapeutically anesthetize it. You can not religiously avoid facing it. You can not survive it by ruminating on it. You can not charismatically dismiss it. You can not mystically dark-night it. You can not pretend everything will be fine. You need to have your own Paschal transition with Gethsemane, Golgotha and a tomb before you will emerge.
And while all of this is happening in the soul, something is happening in the body too.
The Body Participates in Grief
One of the least understood dimensions of unwanted divorce is the grief of relationships you never expected to lose.
Not many people realize that severing of friendships, social groups, and entire communities due to relationship changes leads to a grief of relationships you never thought you'd lose. The marriage is not the only relationship that changes. Friendships change. Church relationships change. Family relationships change. Some people choose sides, others disappear, and some keep their distance because they do not know what to say or because the new situation makes them uncomfortable. Then you see how people who you already considered friends suddenly disappear because you are no longer seen as useful to them. So then you see how you were just a stepping stone for them to achieve something in their networks.
Wives demonstrated greater and more persistent physiological changes related to marital conflict than husbands. Divorce does not simply remove one relationship. It can dismantle an entire social world. And the body participates in that loss.
Prolonged stress can affect immune, endocrine, metabolic and autonomic function. So can loneliness, disrupted sleep, fear, uncertainty and the sustained experience of not feeling socially safe. Functional testing eventually gave me another vocabulary for understanding what prolonged suffering had been doing physiologically. The impact of chronic stress: Secretory Immunoglobulin A (SIgA) is a marker showing the state of immune system, mine in the first image, measured in the gut.
My low secretory IgA which shows immune resilience in he gut became one piece of a much larger picture. But this is where we have to be careful: a laboratory marker is not grief. Cortisol is not betrayal and inflammation is not abandonment. Nervous system dysregulation is not the loss of decades of shared history. A laboratory test does not tell you the story of a person. But the story a person has lived can leave physiological consequences. The soul affects the body, and the condition of the body can affect how much capacity we have to carry what is happening in the soul.
Mental Anguish Is Not Automatically Spiritual Warfare
This is where discernment becomes essential. Mental anguish is not automatically spiritual warfare. Spiritual warfare is not automatically mental distress. Physiological dysfunction is not automatically psychological weakness, and nervous system dysregulation is not a complete explanation for the human person.
There are spiritual realities that cannot be reduced to neurotransmitters and psychological wounds that cannot be prayed away by telling someone to have more faith. There are physiological burdens that cannot be corrected simply by changing our thoughts, no matter how great your affirmation sheet looks like.
Sometimes a person needs prayer, and sometimes they need sleep and sometimes they need to grieve, seek medical evaluation, go to therapy, eat regularly, receive functional support, repent, forgive, or simply have someone sitting beside without trying to fix anything. Often they needs several of these at once.
You Cannot Out-Supplement Grief
Functional health became important to me because it gave me tools for asking what prolonged stress was doing to the body. But functional health has limits too. You cannot out-supplement (although some supplements can help, especially natural ones) or out-lab-test grief. You cannot reduce a wounded heart to a stool analysis, a DUTCH test, a cortisol curve or a nutrient panel. Tests may show us where the body needs support and may help us correct deficiencies, stabilize blood sugar, improve sleep, support gut integrity and restore physiological resilience. But none of those things eliminate the need to mourn.
Healing from this kind of loss requires:
Acknowledging the grief of losing some friends and even whole networks from your community, not just the marriage.
Entering into a new normal of others treating you with suspicion and keeping their distance.
Restoring safe social bonds.
Even one or two trusted relationships can recalibrate stress responses and I had those close friends walking with me.
Integrating body-soul healing practices to support nervous system regulation, including brain to body and body to brain somatic practices.
Staying in the presence of God in the capacity that is real and raw as well as responding to His grace and recognizing His love.
Gentle functional interventions, to rebalance cortisol, heal gut integrity, restore nutrient sufficiency, and calm inflammation, but within a whole person healing framework, not just chasing numbers.
Spiritual Warfare Is Real. So Is Exhaustion.
A depleted body can make every battle harder. When you are exhausted, afraid, isolated and chronically stressed, despair, accusation, bitterness, fear and hopelessness can become much louder. So can the temptation to believe that abandonment by people means abandonment by God, or that years of suffering are evidence that God has forgotten you.
Recognizing physiological exhaustion does not deny spiritual warfare. It may actually help us discern it more clearly. Not every racing heart is demonic oppression and not every sleepless night is spiritual attack. Not every intrusive thought is a spiritual message and not every exhaustion is acedia. Not every human struggle can be reduced to nervous system dysregulation either.
The Christian answer cannot be that everything is spiritual. But neither can it be that everything is trauma, everything is nervous system dysregulation, or everything is metabolic dysfunction. All of these explanations become reductionistic when they attempt to explain the whole person.
We Love Powerful Jesus
There is also something functional health cannot fix: the Cross. We have become very sophisticated at talking about healing, regulating, processing, optimizing, recovering and restoring. These are good things. But Christian healing cannot become another sophisticated method of escaping suffering.
You can not avoid death before death. You can not escape it if you are Christ’s. On the cross or under is the only way. The whole universe of your heart crucified holds the space for the Unmovable Cause to silently convince you that you are as loved as The Pierced Son is.
We love powerful Jesus. We run from suffering Jesus. We don’t understand that the same power that raised Him also kept Him on the cross. Love.
That does not mean we glorify illness or refuse proper treatment, basking in suffering and escaping God’s hand. It does not mean we stop looking for physiological causes of symptoms, and it does not mean every suffering has to remain. It means healing is not synonymous with escape.
Some things need to be corrected or treated and some need to be grieved. Some things need to be resisted spiritually and some need to be forgiven or surrendered. And some things must be carried with Christ until they are transformed.
Mental anguish, spiritual warfare and functional health are therefore not three names for the same thing. They are distinct, but they can meet in the same human person.
And whole-person healing requires enough discernment to know the difference and enough humility to care for the whole.
