So how can therapy help?

If you’re leaving your religion, or rethinking the role you want religion to have in your life, there can be a sense of grief, emptiness, and uncertainty—religion, especially fundamental religion, often shows up to tell us who to be, how to think, what to feel (and not feel).

Even though you’re leaving because it feels like the right thing to do, that doesn’t mean it’s not painful and scary.

This newfound sense of freedom can feel unnerving.

Therapy can help you process those feelings and get to know all of these parts that are showing up along the way.

It can be a space where, safely and at your own pace, get to know the you that you want to be now.

Identity work can be challenging, and also deeply rewarding, and therapy is a great place to do it.

As your therapist, I’m also a big believer in nuance and moving away from black-and-white thinking.

I find that embracing complexity, although hard, can be incredibly useful for moving through this world…and it’s especially difficult to do when your whole life has been hard lines and no both/and sort of ideas.

In therapy, we can identify where those binary ways of thinking are coming from, how they show up, and how to add in a bit more color!

Therapy can also be a supportive place to process changes in family dynamics—often people who leave their religious spaces are leaving behind family who still hold those beliefs.

This can feel so tricky and painful, especially depending on how family react to your decision.

In the therapy room, we can work together to help you identify your voice and get a stronger sense of what you want for yourself, even when this conflicts with the people in your life.

We can also process the harms that you may have experienced in your church life.

This might be from dogmatic ideas, shame-based narratives, pressure to please, a push to be self-sacrificing, a dismissal of your needs, or harm from purity culture, just to name a few.

These can live as trauma in our bodies, and therapy is a space where we can safely unravel those experiences, where you can move toward healing and growth that feels most supportive to you.

And, you may not identify with the word “trauma”—that’s ok! I also really appreciate the term “adverse religious experiences,” because it captures a wider variety of things people went through in fundamental religion.

Another way that therapy can be helpful here is a place to reconnect (or maybe connect for the first time!) with your body.

Many harmful religious experiences encouraged us to disconnect from our bodies, to believe our bodies are bad or mistrustful.

Therapy, I find, is most useful if we process with the whole self, not just from the neck up!

I use gentle somatic awareness tools to help clients slowly engage with their body’s wisdom, messages, and needs.

And, because autonomy is often not something we had a lot of in our religious experiences, it’s always at your own pace, and you get decide what feels helpful and what doesn’t!

I find that my approach in therapy—client-centered, strengths-based, narrative-minded, holistic—can be incredibly useful with these particular shifts clients are making. I partner with you, I’m not another authority figure, and I believe you have so many strengths that will help you connect with yourself, your identity, and your resilience.

There are so many ways that therapy can be helpful to you as you figure out what you want life to look like now—and it’s a space where you get to decide, and where that freedom can feel exciting and hopeful.