Political Unease as Spiritual Crisis

For all we hear about AI replacing therapists, demand for the human variety is actually rising—including from people booking their first-ever appointments. Many are showing up to the couch (or Zoom) not because of relationship trouble or childhood wounds—though these are ever-present—but because of the news.

According to Politico, sixty-five percent of Americans report politics as a significant source of stress. And while money, work, and health rank high on the list, these worries are increasingly inseparable from the one at the top of the heap: fear about the future of the nation.

Therapists are adapting. Many are specializing, holding staff meetings, and, as always, designing workshops. The mental health professions are good at defining new clusters; in this case, anger at political paralysis, negative information saturation, loss of faith in systems, and the creeping sense that no amount of individual action can alter an exceedingly dire progression.

All of this is worth taking seriously. And yet something is missing from the clinical picture.

When you sit with folks long enough, past symptom management and co-regulation, what’s underneath isn’t just anxiety, it’s disorientation; a loss of the ground that makes meaning-making possible. The structures that were supposed to provide continuity, if not security—democratic institutions, checks and balances, civic trust, verifiable markers of a common reality—have either proven inadequate or are contested to the point of incoherence.

Treating this as a psychological problem makes sense; the symptoms are well known to the field. But I’ve come to see it as spiritual crisis.

Part of what makes this era so destabilizing is that it undermines not only belief, but belonging. We humans are social creatures whose sense of self depends on community coherence; on experiencing ourselves through and alongside others. Political rupture doesn’t just threaten institutions; it frays the relational fabric. People describe estrangement from family, alienation from neighbors, grief over what has been lost in the way of social and political solidarity—a suffering distinct from fear about outcomes.

Spiritual crisis doesn’t require religious belief. It shows up as the collapse of a coherent story about what matters and why, and sometimes surfaces as what I’d call “existential looping”—the mind caught in recursive, unanswerable questions that cognition cannot resolve. What does any of this mean? How do I live with what I know? How do I protect the people I love? For some—especially those whose nervous systems process the world with pronounced depth and sensitivity—these loops can become all-consuming. And in an attention economy run by a handful of oligarchs who make untold moolah from the doomscroll, is it any wonder that the spiral deepens?

Therapy can help by building tolerance for uncertainty, interrupting avoidance, and establishing new behavioral patterns. These are not small things. But regulation isn’t the same as reorientation. What many people need is a way back to ground, refuge, or source. That’s the work of spiritual care.

What this looks like in practice is less dramatic than it sounds. Presence without agenda. Space for feelings to aerate rather than be micromanaged. Opportunities to reconnect with a non-judgmental inner openness that can accommodate what is present, even if those feelings are irreconcilable or inherently polarized. Not answers to the unanswerable, but accompaniment in the not-knowing.

This isn’t about transcending political reality or cultivating detachment from one’s core values. Those tender points are what makes us human, what allow us to feel resonance with the sufferings and joys of others. It’s about finding ways to remain present—to the grief, the fear, the uncertainty—without being overwhelmed or paralyzed. Avoidance, as any therapist will tell you, only amplifies what we are attempting to escape.

The Politico piece ends on a cautious note: political anxiety may get worse before it gets better. All of it is exacerbated by too much connection to information and too little human connection. And that includes to others who may be experiencing similar alienation, regardless of their political disposition.

When people lose access to what is sacred or sustaining in themselves, they contract and withdraw, unable to act from the part of them that recognizes our shared humanity. Spiritual care—at its best, across traditions—aids people in finding and restoring those connections. First in themselves, and then who knows?​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​