When someone calls us for the first time, this is usually the question underneath every other question. Some people are afraid we will push them further out of a faith they still hold. Others are afraid we will secretly be religious and push them back in. Both fears make sense. If you have spent years in a place where someone else decided what you were allowed to think, walking into a room where a stranger has influence over your inner life is not a small thing.
So we want to answer it plainly, in one place, before you decide whether to contact us. Religion and spirituality can hold deep meaning in our lives. When they become a source of fear, shame, anxiety or self-hatred, that is where we come in. What we treat is the harm. What you believe is yours.
We do not evaluate your beliefs. We do not tell you which ones are true, false, healthy or unhealthy. We help you notice what a belief does inside you, whether it settles you or frightens you, and you decide what to do with that.
We do not have a destination for you. Staying, leaving, returning, rebuilding something new, or staying undecided for a long time are all outcomes we have watched people arrive at. None of them is the goal of therapy. Feeling safe inside yourself is.
We do not share our own religious views unless you ask directly, and even then we will tell you why it does not matter to the work.
We separate the harm from the faith. Fear-based teaching, control, shame and shunning cause trauma whether or not the beliefs behind them are true. You can keep a belief and still heal from how it was used on you.
We use the same words you use. If you say God, we say God. If you say the organization, the church, the ward, the congregation or the group, so do we. We will not rename your experience for you.
No. Roughly a third of the people who contact us still believe and intend to stay. Some are inside a community that has hurt them and want to work out how to remain without being harmed. Some have a faith that is precious to them and a church, a family or a leader that is not. Some simply want the panic attacks and the nightmares to stop and are worried that getting help means betraying God.
Here is what we have found over decades of this work: a faith that is genuinely yours does not fall apart when the fear is removed from it. What tends to fall away in therapy is the fear itself, the sense of constant surveillance, the belief that you are one mistake from being cast out. What remains is whatever was actually holding you. For many people who still believe, therapy leaves them with a quieter and more honest relationship with the divine than they had before, because it is no longer built on dread.
If your community teaches that therapy is worldly, dangerous or a sign of weak faith, you are welcome to bring that with you. We will not argue with it. We will help you look at what that teaching has cost you and let you decide.
No, and we would be doing you harm if we did. Questioning is often the most frightening place to be, because the old certainty is gone and nothing has replaced it yet. People in this place sometimes want a therapist to make the decision for them, so that at least someone is sure. We understand the wish. We will not act on it.
What we can do is make the questioning survivable. Much of the distress in this stage is not really about doctrine. It is about the loss of certainty, the fear of losing people, and a nervous system that was trained to treat doubt as danger. We work on that directly, with the body and not just with ideas, so that you can think clearly enough to reach your own conclusions in your own time. Some people question for years. That is allowed.
This is the other side of the same fear, and it is just as reasonable. If you have left a high-control religion, you may have already met a counselor who turned out to have an agenda, a pastor who called himself a therapist, or a family member who suggested therapy as a way to bring you back. You are not looking for a secular therapist because you hate religion. You are looking for one because you need a room where nobody is trying to save you.
That is what we are. Several of our therapists left high-control groups themselves, and none of them will treat your leaving as a problem to be solved. We also will not treat your former faith with contempt, because that is not what most people who have left actually want, and because mocking what you once believed tends to mock the person you once were. Our job is to help you heal from what was done to you and to help you rebuild a self that was never allowed to exist. Whatever you come to believe or not believe afterwards is yours.
A lot of people do not fit the three groups above. You might attend but no longer believe. You might believe but no longer attend. You might have left one tradition and be quietly exploring another. You might be the parent of an adult child who has walked away and not know how to talk to them.
Many of the couples who contact us are in a mixed position: one partner has started to question or has left, and the other is still inside, and the marriage is straining under the weight of it. We work with couples in exactly this situation, and we will not take a side in the marriage any more than we take a side on the religion. The question in the room is whether the two of you can stay connected while believing different things, and that is a question about attachment, not doctrine.
Ask what you believe, and believe you when you tell us.
Help you tell the difference between a belief that steadies you and a belief that was used to control you.
Work with your body and nervous system, not only your thoughts, because religious trauma lives in both.
Use your own language for God, scripture, your community and your leaders.
Keep what you say confidential, including from your family, your church and your community.
Try to convert you, to anything, in any direction.
Debate scripture or doctrine with you.
Tell you to leave, or tell you to stay.
Report what you say in therapy to anyone in your religious community.
Treat your faith, or your loss of it, as the thing that needs fixing.
Yes, and so can a therapist who is not. What matters is not what your therapist believes but whether they are able to keep it out of the room. Every clinician in our collective works from the same commitment: your beliefs are not the subject of treatment, the harm is.
Both, and neither, and we do not organize the practice around it. Our founder is a former Catholic priest and Buddhist monastic. Others on the team grew up Mormon, Seventh-day Adventist, evangelical, or inside high-control groups, and have landed in different places since. None of them will tell you where unless you ask, and none of them will steer you there.
No. Therapy removes fear, shame and the sense of constant surveillance. It does not remove faith. A belief that is genuinely yours tends to become quieter and more honest once the dread is gone, not weaker.
We do not argue with it. We would ask you what that teaching has cost you and let you decide what to do with the answer. You are allowed to get help for panic attacks and nightmares without it being a statement about God.
Yes. We use your language. If scripture is a source of comfort to you, you can bring it. If scripture was used as a weapon against you, we can work with that too. The only thing we will not do is use it on you ourselves.
No. Christian counseling is therapy that works from within a Christian framework and toward Christian goals, and it is the right choice for some people. We are something different: therapy that is not for or against any religion. If you specifically want a therapist who shares and works from your faith, we will say so honestly and you may be better served elsewhere.
Then you are in the most common position of all, and you do not have to decide anything to start. Most of our work in this stage is about making uncertainty bearable so that you can think clearly. Some people take years. That is allowed.
Yes. Your sessions are confidential under the same professional and legal standards as any licensed therapy, and nothing you say will be shared with your church, your congregation, your elders, your bishop or your family. The only exceptions are the standard legal ones, which your therapist will explain at your first session, and none of them involve your religious community.
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