We have to go back to December 2018, when I bought my first deck of tarot cards. I actually have no idea why I felt drawn to it in the first place. I didn’t grow up with any kind of religion or spirituality. Other than the slightly Christian school I went to, I’ve always been an agnostic/atheist person. Level-headed, too. The cards probably just looked pretty to me, and I probably saw people on the internet working with those cards, so I wanted to give it a shot as well.
Nothing special there, you could say. But looking back, all these years later, I can see how that decision ended up contributing to the worst mental health of my life and the most brutal months I’d ever experienced — three years after that moment.
I want to emphasize that I have nothing against religious or spiritual people. Not at all. But I do want to highlight that taking the spiritual path, as someone who already had questionable mental health (I had been an emetophobe since age 15), can sometimes backfire — massively.
Like I said, I had been an emetophobe since I was 15. Emetophobia is a life-altering fear of being sick (vomiting), or seeing somebody else be sick. And with that comes low self-esteem, high social anxiety, and a feeling of complete powerlessness in life, along with low coping skills. All of that applied to me. I grew up with a socially anxious, clean-freak mother who always tried to keep me from hurting myself or making a fool of myself. So it’s safe to say I grew up with little coping skills and felt self-conscious in many areas of my life.
So… what happens when we take a young woman with low self-esteem, social anxiety, and poor coping skills — someone who already struggles with her mental health — and we give her a deck of tarot cards?
At first, I was Thriving. Seriously. I was learning all kinds of new things about card reading, and I bought a bunch of pretty decks. But with these things, one belief often leads to another. So over the years, I also got into crystals and their supposed “healing powers.” I wore them as jewelry. I put them in my pockets. I put them under my pillow. I got into archangels, angel numbers, synchronicities, guardian angels, meditation, manifestation, The Secret, horoscopes, working with candles, colours, goddesses, the cycles of the moon. I even dabbled in religion for a moment (the Conversations With God type of religion).
And like I said, for a long while, it was fun. I felt great. My mental health was fine. I remember having the time of my life during the first lockdown — being stuck at home gave me all the time in the world to commit to my new lifestyle/hobby.
But that happiness wouldn’t last.
I remember it so clearly. It was somewhere in the autumn of 2020. I had a short while left at the internship I was doing. For my social work studies, I worked in a multidisciplinary team supporting elderly people with psychiatric and addiction issues — a job I actually enjoyed.
One normal day, during an early team meeting, I started to feel dizzy, faint, and a bit nauseous. Looking back, it makes complete sense: I never ate breakfast back then until around 11 a.m., but I did drink Red Bull and smoke a cigarette at 8 a.m., all while running on six hours of sleep (or less). So I excused myself, went outside, and smoked a bunch of cigarettes (very helpful). I used whatever I could to cope, because I was feeling extremely uncomfortable and unable to calm myself down. I spiraled into anxiety. ‘What if I throw up? I want this to end. What if this, what if that…’
Eventually I went home and slept it off.
Any other person — even a non-spiritual version of me — would’ve said: “That was uncomfortable, but I’m alright now. I’ll take better care of myself. Moving on.”
But that wasn’t me anymore.
This is the point I’ve been building toward: I had absolutely zero coping skills left. All the power I used to feel over my emotions, thoughts, decisions, and ability to tolerate uncomfortable feelings had disappeared. Because I had externalized all of it. I depended on God to make me feel good. On the oracle cards under my pillow. On the rose quartz in my pocket. On the guardian angel I believed was watching over me (I know — I was deep).
I had put all my power, belief, and strength outside of myself.
So when something difficult happened, I was left with nothing. Because perhaps deep down I already doubted that all of my newfound spiritual practices wouldn’t actually help me to feel better. That lack of belief in it, while depending on it, is of course a very bad recipe.
I blew the situation completely out of proportion — a clear sign of low coping skills — and from that day forward things went downhill fast. I started to feel faint, weak, physically “off” all the time. I fixated on those sensations, which made them worse, which created more anxiety. It quickly became a vicious cycle.
I remember telling a friend I wasn’t doing too well, that I felt anxious and just… off. But I said, “It’ll pass once I’m done with my internship and have some time off.”
My friend told me that probably wouldn’t be the case — and she was right.
Not having work to go to made everything worse. Before I knew it, I was anxious 24/7. It’s hard to describe to people who haven’t experienced feeling like that. It was like a constant sense of dread, every second of every day. I couldn’t eat properly. I didn’t want to leave my bed — my “safe space.” I wandered around my house like a ghost and only came out of my tomb (room) when my parents went to bed, so I could stay up until 5 in the morning and sleep until 2 in the afternoon. My legs felt like jelly, I constantly felt like I might faint or collapse, I dissociated a lot, I was scared I was going psychotic, I had intrusive thoughts, I hated myself, and I was incredibly lonely.
It was really, really tough.
But at the time, I hadn’t realised how much of this came from my external spiritual beliefs. Until one day, I knew I needed to do something — because nothing was going to change on its own.
So I bought The Thrive Programme Manual. I had already gone through the programme years earlier to overcome emetophobia, but I hadn’t done it properly, so it helped — but not enough to make me truly thrive. (If I had done it fully back then, I never would’ve taken the spiritual path in the first place.)
Then I got to chapter 3 and read about how spiritual beliefs can make you more external, more powerless, and lower your coping skills. And that is because when you have spiritual beliefs, you are almost always looking outside of yourself for help, which is what external thinking is. You depend on God/The Universes/fill in the blank to help you feel better. Or to fix a problem, to give you strength, to help you through something. Most people probably don’t have the belief they could do it themselves to begin with, and those who did, would soon stop believing that and start depending on a higher power too.
And that means that you start to believe less in your own skills to make things happen, which makes you feel more powerless. And you lower your ability to tolerate uncomfortable situations in life, which means you have fewer coping skills. The problem is that feeling powerless, not in control and having low coping skills is the recipe for poor mental health.
So when I read that chapter again— everything clicked into place. It was a light-bulb moment.
From that day forward, I never practiced anything spiritual again. I deleted all my horoscope apps. Over the coming months, I sold my 40 tarot decks. And the spiritual beliefs just burned themselves out. I didn’t put much effort into challenging them. But because I stopped exposing myself to that content, I slowly stopped believing in it — the same way flat-earthers stop believing the earth is flat if they stop feeding themselves that information.
Shortly after that light-bulb moment, I got a Thrive coach because I was struggling to do it all by myself. Realising what those spiritual beliefs had created and giving them up was only the beginning of my road to recovery of course, but it was a very important one. And after 3–4 months of hard, hard work, I got a new job. I started feeling like myself again. My anxiety was gone. My depression and emetophobia too.
And I’ve never looked back.
But I am not telling anyone to leave their spiritual beliefs behind.
I’m not saying you can’t be spiritual and thriving. Or that spirituality is the cause of all mental health issues. Some Thrive coaches are religious themselves. It’s all about how you do it — and the way I did it did not work in my favour.
But I do want to be a voice for the people for whom spirituality didn’t become a fun, beautiful path. In my opinion, taking the spiritual route is nice for people with good/decent mental health. But I do not believe it’s a good idea to use it as a way to overcome mental health issues. Same goes for meditation, mindfulness, journaling, and many other things — but that is a blog for another day.
In order to solve a problem that you have created because you feel powerless to do anything about it, the last thing you need is to believe in something outside of you to solve it for you. You need something grounded in reality. Something tangible, backed up by science. Something predictable, that is a huge reset button in your life that will empower you to make yourself feel better again. If I still had my spiritual beliefs, I’d thank God for The Thrive Programme every single day.
Written by Thrive Programme Coach Lisanne Prooij