Why Do I Feel Stuck Even Though I Am a Woman of Faith?
It was 3am again.
I lay there in the dark, willing myself back to sleep the way I had every night for weeks. I tossed. I turned. I bargained with my body. I reached for my phone, hoping that distraction would somehow coax my brain back into rest. It never did.
Finally, out of sheer desperation, I did something different. I got up.
I walked quietly through my house, soaking up the stillness of the night. And somewhere in that silence, I began to pray. For my children. For my family. For my clients. For the circumstances. I walked and prayed until my body grew tired, and then I slipped back into bed, leaving the anxieties somewhere in the hallway, and fell asleep with an ease I had not felt moments before.
I continued to do this whenever I woke up in the middle of the night.
What started as frustration became a rhythm. What felt like an interruption became a sacred time. The 3am wake-ups I had been fighting were not my enemy. I had just not yet found the right way to meet them.
I wonder if that is where you are right now.
Stuck Does Not Mean Broken
So many of the women I work with come to me carrying a quiet shame alongside their struggle. They love Jesus. They pray. They read scripture. They show up for their families and their communities with everything they have. And yet something still feels off. Heavy. Unmovable.
And underneath all of it is a question they are almost afraid to ask out loud: if my faith is real, why do I still feel this way?
I want to say something clearly to you: feeling stuck is not a sign that your faith is failing. It is not evidence that you are doing something wrong or that God has moved on without you. Feeling stuck is often a sign that something inside you needs attention, care, and a safe place to be named.
Why Women of Faith get Stuck
There are a few patterns I see over and over again in my counseling room.
Sometimes we get stuck because we have been carrying pain that was never fully processed. Experiences from our past, losses we were never given space to grieve, wounds from relationships that shaped how we see ourselves and the world. We prayed about them, we handed them to God, and we kept moving. But the body keeps the score, as they say, and unprocessed pain has a way of quietly running the show even when we think we have moved on.
Sometimes we get stuck because we have confused surrender with silence. We have been taught that a woman of faith does not complain, does not struggle too loudly, does not take up too much space with her pain. So we tuck it away and call it trust.
But there is a difference between trusting God with our suffering and pretending the suffering is not there.
Sometimes we get stuck because we are exhausted. We have been pouring out for everyone around us and there is simply nothing left. Depletion looks a lot like stuckness from the inside.
And sometimes we get stuck because something in our story, something we may not even fully understand, has lodged itself in our nervous system in a way that makes it genuinely hard to move forward no matter how much we want to.
What I Learned at 3am
When I finally stopped fighting the middle of the night wake-up and started working with it instead, something shifted. Getting out of bed helped my brain reset. Moving my body allowed my muscles to release the tension they had been holding. Praying gave my worries and frustrations a safe place to go.
I was not broken. I was not failing at sleep. I was a human being whose body and soul needed something different than what I had been offering them.
The same is often true of stuckness. It is not a character flaw. It is your whole self, mind and body and spirit, signaling that something needs attention.
You Do Not Have to Keep Fighting Alone
Sometimes the most faithful thing you can do is ask for help. Not because your faith is insufficient, but because God has often worked through people, through community, through the kind of deep and honest conversations that happens when you finally let someone into the parts of your story you have been carrying alone.
If you have been feeling stuck and you cannot quite figure out why, I want you to know that there is a way through. Healing is genuinely possible. Not the kind that erases the hard things, but the kind that changes how you carry them.
You are more than what you have been through. And you do not have to keep walking this road alone.
Resources I Love:
If you want to keep exploring these ideas, here are some of my favorites.
Books
Get Out of Your Head — Jennie Allen For when your own thoughts feel like the enemy.
Try Softer — Aundi Kolber A gentle, honest book about trauma, your nervous system, and what it looks like to actually heal rather than just push through.
Breath as Prayer — Jennifer Tucker Simple, beautiful breathwork practices rooted in faith. Perfect if your body feels like it is always braced for something.
Podcast
The Place We Find Ourselves — Adam Young
Two episodes to start with:
"Five Objections to Engaging Your Story" — for when part of you wonders if looking at your story is even worth it.
"Nothing That Bad Happened To Me" — for when you minimize your own pain because someone else had it worse.
Hi, I'm Donna — a Christian counselor and EMDR therapist based in San Antonio, Texas.
I am passionate about walking alongside women through the hard seasons of life. Whether you are navigating anxiety, loss, trauma, or simply a season where everything feels heavier than it should, I believe real healing is possible. Not the kind that erases the hard things, but the kind that changes how you carry them.
If you are ready to take a next step, I would love to connect.
