Women Groups Can Take Advantage of the Faith-Help Relationship
Join Women Groups to Share in Faith and Health
One of the reasons women join women groups is because they are looking for help on the path to some sort of healing and ultimate health, whether it is physical, mental, or most often, emotional. Emotional health is a tough nut to crack, especially when it seems like a lot of entertainment, both the plots of TV shows and movies and the actors and actresses in them, are closely related to emotional instability. A lot of what we may feel is emotional instability may actually just be emotions. But that’s irrelevant, because mental health is about feeling healthy.
An online meeting place for women can help women to come together and share their experiences and the things they’ve learned to achieve mental health. This is definitely part of relatively standard treatment to achieve emotional health, often recommended by therapists. But there are some other, non-traditional remedies that offer additional ammunition to get feeling healthy.
One of them is faith. There is an extensive and growing body of work done on women’s groups that very clearly suggests a strong sense of spirituality, whether that entails adherence to a religion or just a set of repetitive spiritual practices and beliefs, has a profoundly positive correlation with emotional, mental, and physical health. Women who believe in something higher survive sickness better, recover from emotionally traumatic events more thoroughly, and handle daily difficulties and stress better.
Though most of the research is rightly hesitant to suggest that “finding God” will make someone healthy, the power of faith has been common knowledge in some circles for centuries. And when considered in conjunction with the success of programs like Alcoholics Anonymous, which have a very high success rate across broad swaths of society and contain a relatively heavy Christian component, it is hard to deny that the ability to surrender to faith is correlated with a several types of resiliency.
Don’t think of this as a push for organized religion: far from it. “Spirituality” is a deliberately ambiguous word. The point is that members of women groups seeking healing should certainly take a look at where they could find strength and comfort from spirituality.
