256. You Can't Counsel a Demon: When Mental Health Meets Spiritual Warfare256. You Can't Counsel a Demon: When Mental Health Meets Spiritual Warfare
Strong Tower Mental Health with Heidi Mortenson
Heidi Mortenson reflects on how mental health, trauma and spiritual warfare intersect, using lessons from a recent conference. She stresses ethics, discernment and trauma-informed care while holding together clinical practice and Christian faith.
32:47•7 Sept 2026
You Can’t Counsel a Demon: Holding Mental Health and Spiritual Warfare Together
Episode Overview
- Stay in your lane: therapists, pastors, coaches and doctors need to respect their scope of practice to avoid harming vulnerable people.
- Trauma-informed care means slowing down, noticing body cues and sometimes prioritising listening over immediate prayer or deliverance.
- Not everything is a demon and not everything is psychological; wise discernment considers physical, relational, trauma and spiritual factors.
- You can't cast out a person and you can't counsel a demon, so helpers need to recognise when they are dealing with a wounded part versus a spirit.
- Respecting a person’s agency and spiritual background, including church trauma, is crucial before bringing explicit Christian practices into care.
“You can't cast out a person, and you can't counsel a demon.”
What drives someone to seek a life without simplistic answers about faith and mental health? This conversation on Strong Tower Mental Health speaks straight into that tension, asking what happens when psychological symptoms, trauma, physical health, and spiritual warfare all collide.
Licensed marriage and family therapist Heidi Mortenson shares key lessons from the Mental Health & Deliverance Conference in Minneapolis, tackling the big idea summed up in the blunt phrase: "You can't cast out a person, and you can't counsel a demon." Rather than choosing between therapy or deliverance, she talks about how wise care means holding both together with humility, ethics, and discernment.
You'll hear Heidi break down why staying "in your lane" as a therapist, pastor, coach, or doctor protects vulnerable people, and why titles don’t give anyone permission to diagnose or do deliverance outside their training or authority. She explains how trauma‑informed care changes the way prayer, inner healing, and deliverance are handled, warning against rushing to "pray it away" when someone’s nervous system is already overwhelmed.
Drawing on teaching from conference contributors like Adele Vray and leaders from Truth and Freedom Church, she stresses the need to check basic factors such as sleep, hydration, relationships, and isolation before labelling something as demonic. At the same time, she admits that clinicians can over‑psychologise what may have a spiritual component.
A recurring theme is slowing down: asking the Holy Spirit, "What do they need right now?" Sometimes, she says, "the most effective thing you can do…is to just sit and listen and ask God to speak to them" rather than rush into advice or diagnosis. If you're a Christian, a helper, or just someone wrestling with where faith fits into mental health, this episode might nudge you to ask braver questions and seek wiser, more balanced support.
How might your approach change if you stopped trying to pick a side between therapy and spiritual warfare?
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