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I can't feel God

HoneyBee

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I'm on medication right now for my bipolar disorder. It's helping me to stay stable and healthy, but it also has the down side of taking away my ability to communicate with God as clearly as I once did. Before, I used to be able to talk to God and I could see his answers right in front of me and all around me. Now I can no longer do that because my medication clouds up the emotions and thought patterns I once used to be able to feel God. It makes me feel like a failure because I want to be with God, but because of my condition I have to feel far away from Him...

Maybe this is a challenge from God for me to find other ways to connect with Him? Maybe He wants to see if I will continue to try and connect with Him despite having to be on this sort of medication (and it has to be this one because I have other co-occurring conditions that it also treats). If so, I don't want to let God down, so I'll keep working at trying to connect with Him in the ways that I know how.

Anyone else ever feel like God is distant from them? And how do you cope with that?
 
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mukk_in

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I'm on medication right now for my bipolar disorder. It's helping me to stay stable and healthy, but it also has the down side of taking away my ability to communicate with God as clearly as I once did. Before, I used to be able to talk to God and I could see his answers right in front of me and all around me. Now I can no longer do that because my medication clouds up the emotions and thought patterns I once used to be able to feel God. It makes me feel like a failure because I want to be with God, but because of my condition I have to feel far away from Him...

Maybe this is a challenge from God for me to find other ways to connect with Him? Maybe He wants to see if I will continue to try and connect with Him despite having to be on this sort of medication (and it has to be this one because I have other co-occurring conditions that it also treats). If so, I don't want to let God down, so I'll keep working at trying to connect with Him in the ways that I know how.

Anyone else ever feel like God is distant from them? And how do you cope with that?
I'm not suffering with your issue child, so take what I say with a grain of salt. Often you don't feel God. You just believe and know that He exists. Mountaintop experiences of transfiguration are very few. We endure, as Moses endured, because we believe and see the invisible God (Hebrews 11:27). God bless :).
 
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GraceBro

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I don't believe it is a challenge from God. It is a real side-effect of the medication you are taking combined with your knowledge of God. You are experiencing what many people experience who are chemically altering their mind with prescription medications. With that said, if you are feeling distant from God, it may also have something to do with what you are believing about Him. Are you born again? Do you know your identity in Christ? Are your resting in the finished work of Jesus Christ? These are just some of the questions I think must be answered because if you feel distant from God, it is probably because you are believing something incorrectly about Him as well as the effects of the medication. Grace and Peace.
 
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Jeshu

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i so know what you are talking about, but i was deeply depressed at the same time as well. If this is true for you as well then please keep searching for the right meds, it is a symptom of ongoing depression.

Also, and in particular even, as bi-polar people in our up cycle we can have absolutely heavenly experiences with God and have real close emotional relationship with Him. However such comes to a sad end when depression takes over once more where it seems like God has forsaken us. At least that is how it went in my life. Later on in life i found that for years i served a wonderful emotion state in my heart as a relationship with God, and my depressive spells as His punishments on my sinner soul, but when they put me on meds that came to an end and God seemed to disappear completely. i had to relearn to appreciate God knowing Him through His Word in my heart as the Spirit of Love before that horrible feeling that God wasn't with me left me and consequently my depressive spells lifted enormously.

When i went on medicine the search lasted for many years to find the right ones. In the mean time each anti-depressant on the market either depressed me or turned me manic while anti-psychotic medications all made me depressed and left me bereft of God in the pit. i spend years searching for the right medicines often suicidally depressed, it was awful. i sincerely hope you get this sorted. No good feeling like God isn't with you, i absolutely hated it.

Peace.
 
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Presbyterian Continuist

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I'm on medication right now for my bipolar disorder. It's helping me to stay stable and healthy, but it also has the down side of taking away my ability to communicate with God as clearly as I once did. Before, I used to be able to talk to God and I could see his answers right in front of me and all around me. Now I can no longer do that because my medication clouds up the emotions and thought patterns I once used to be able to feel God. It makes me feel like a failure because I want to be with God, but because of my condition I have to feel far away from Him...

Maybe this is a challenge from God for me to find other ways to connect with Him? Maybe He wants to see if I will continue to try and connect with Him despite having to be on this sort of medication (and it has to be this one because I have other co-occurring conditions that it also treats). If so, I don't want to let God down, so I'll keep working at trying to connect with Him in the ways that I know how.

Anyone else ever feel like God is distant from them? And how do you cope with that?
The Scripture says that those who are justified in Christ shall live by faith. Faith is the act of believing what the Bible says about God and Jesus. According to that faith, we follow the instructions that are written in the Bible to us. Jesus said that blessed are those who have seen and believed, but blessed are they who have not seen and believed. We believe in a God we can't see, touch, or feel. There is an error teaching that one has to "feel" God to know that He is with us. The truth is that we have the Holy Spirit dwelling in our spirit, not in our emotions. The Scripture says that Jesus sticks closer to us than a brother, and that He would never leave us nor forsake us. We either believe that or we don't. We don't have to feel or sense the presence of God in order to have saving and sanctifying faith. We are to get on with our lives, developing the fruit of the Spirit in our lives, and if we have times that we sense the presence of God with us, that will be a bonus and not the norm. The norm for us is that we live our lives according to our daily routines, believing that God is with us whether we feel Him or not.

Our faith is either in the written Word of God or in our emotions. But our emotions make up an unstable platform for faith, but the Word of God never changes and therefore it is a rock. Building our Christian lives on emotions is building our spiritual house on the sand, and the house will fall when the storms of life come. But a house built on the rock of the Word of God will never fall, no matter what storms of life hit us from time to time.
 
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thesunisout

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There are definitely times when we feel distant from God and there are times when it feels like He is very near. The truth is, though, that when you have given your life to Jesus Christ and have been reborn spiritually, God is always close to you, whether you feel it or not. Do you believe you have given your life to Christ as Lord and Savior?
 
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Open Heart

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I'm on medication right now for my bipolar disorder. It's helping me to stay stable and healthy, but it also has the down side of taking away my ability to communicate with God as clearly as I once did. Before, I used to be able to talk to God and I could see his answers right in front of me and all around me. Now I can no longer do that because my medication clouds up the emotions and thought patterns I once used to be able to feel God. It makes me feel like a failure because I want to be with God, but because of my condition I have to feel far away from Him...

Maybe this is a challenge from God for me to find other ways to connect with Him? Maybe He wants to see if I will continue to try and connect with Him despite having to be on this sort of medication (and it has to be this one because I have other co-occurring conditions that it also treats). If so, I don't want to let God down, so I'll keep working at trying to connect with Him in the ways that I know how.

Anyone else ever feel like God is distant from them? And how do you cope with that?
I cannot feel God's presence when I am depressed. I have also noticed that when I am on my mood stabilizers, I do not ever experience the ecstasy of his presence. It is a sad loss.

Mother Theresa felt very close to God when she was young, talking with him, etc. Then as an adult, it was like she became deaf to the Lord. It wracked her with doubts. She wrote about all of this in her diary, which was published after her death. And yet, despite the silence, she maintained her faith in Him. She loved and served him until her death. This is why she has been declared a Saint.

John 20:29 Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.
 
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seekingmuch

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I'm on medication right now for my bipolar disorder. It's helping me to stay stable and healthy, but it also has the down side of taking away my ability to communicate with God as clearly as I once did. Before, I used to be able to talk to God and I could see his answers right in front of me and all around me. Now I can no longer do that because my medication clouds up the emotions and thought patterns I once used to be able to feel God. It makes me feel like a failure because I want to be with God, but because of my condition I have to feel far away from Him...

Maybe this is a challenge from God for me to find other ways to connect with Him? Maybe He wants to see if I will continue to try and connect with Him despite having to be on this sort of medication (and it has to be this one because I have other co-occurring conditions that it also treats). If so, I don't want to let God down, so I'll keep working at trying to connect with Him in the ways that I know how.

Anyone else ever feel like God is distant from them? And how do you cope with that?

Meds can do that to you. Most days I feel like I can't feel anything due to the Latuda. I've prayed to God about my general lack of emotions due to my meds for two years and pretty much no answers from him.
 
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seekingmuch

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I'm on medication right now for my bipolar disorder. It's helping me to stay stable and healthy, but it also has the down side of taking away my ability to communicate with God as clearly as I once did. Before, I used to be able to talk to God and I could see his answers right in front of me and all around me. Now I can no longer do that because my medication clouds up the emotions and thought patterns I once used to be able to feel God. It makes me feel like a failure because I want to be with God, but because of my condition I have to feel far away from Him...

Maybe this is a challenge from God for me to find other ways to connect with Him? Maybe He wants to see if I will continue to try and connect with Him despite having to be on this sort of medication (and it has to be this one because I have other co-occurring conditions that it also treats). If so, I don't want to let God down, so I'll keep working at trying to connect with Him in the ways that I know how.

Anyone else ever feel like God is distant from them? And how do you cope with that?

Meds can do that to you. Most days I feel like I can't feel anything due to the Latuda. I've prayed to God about my general lack of emotions due to my meds for two years and pretty much no answers from him.
 
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