Ep. 411 - The Self-Help Trap: Therapy, the Passions, and the War for the Soul, with Fr. Turbo Qualls

About this episode

Fr. Turbo Qualls joins Buck Johnson to discuss the intersection of modern mental health culture and spiritual issues, questioning whether psychological problems are misdiagnosed spiritual ones.

We're living in a moment where everyone is "doing the work"—therapy, healing, boundaries, trauma language—and yet people seem more anxious, unstable, and internally fragmented than ever. In this episode, Fr. Turbo Qualls joins me to challenge the assumptions behind modern mental health culture and to ask a deeper question: are we misdiagnosing spiritual problems as psychological ones? We get into the difference between trauma and the passions, where therapy can be helpful—and where it quietly falls short—and how certain modern practices can drift into spiritually dangerous territory when they're detached from the life of the Church. We also discuss why the Orthodox tradition emphasizes repentance over self-focus, how confession differs from therapy, and what real healing actually looks like—not as self-optimization, but as transformation. If you've ever felt like you're doing everything right but still feel stuck, this conversation goes beneath the surface. OINTMENT is a conference and movement centered on healing the soul through the life of the Church. At a time when "healing" is often reduced to self-focus and psychological frameworks, OINTMENT aims to reorient people toward…

People in this episode

Host: Buck Johnson

Guest: Fr. Turbo Qualls

Topics covered

• mental health
• spirituality
• therapy
• self-help
• Orthodox tradition
• healing
• repentance

Keywords

• therapy
• spiritual problems
• self-help
• healing
• repentance
• Orthodox
• mental health
• confession
• transformation

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: OINTMENT, the Church, Orthodox tradition

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