You don't have to have a crisis to have been harmed.
Some people come to this work in acute pain — panic attacks, intrusive memories, profound grief. Others arrive quietly exhausted, carrying something they can't quite name. If faith was once the center of your life and something happened to damage, upend, or shatter that — you belong here. Whatever you're experiencing, you don't have to justify it.
What religious trauma can look like
Religious trauma doesn't always look like flashbacks or nightmares. It can look like:
Chronic anxiety, guilt, or shame with no clear source
Difficulty making decisions without external authority
Anger, grief, or numbness about your faith history
Strained or severed relationships with family or community
Confusion about your identity, values, and sense of purpose
Physical responses — tension, nausea, panic — triggered by religious imagery, language, or settings
Distrust of your own perception and judgment
These are real, recognizable responses to real harm. They are not signs of weakness or faithlessness.
Who I work with
I work with adults navigating all points on the religious trauma spectrum — from those who left evangelical, fundamentalist, or high-control religious environments years ago and are still feeling the effects, to those in the middle of an active faith transition, to those who remain within a faith community but have been harmed within it.
I offer teletherapy to adults in Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, Vermont, and New Hampshire. I accept most major insurance plans including Aetna, BCBS, Cigna, and UHC, and offer private pay sessions with a free consultation
You are not broken. You are not faithless. You are not alone.
What happened to you mattered. And you deserve support from someone who understands the specific landscape of religious harm — not just trauma in general, but the particular ways that faith wounds the self.
Religious Trauma Counseling for Adults
Religious trauma is the psychological harm that results from harmful religious experiences. It can come from a single congregation or from a lifetime of immersion in a belief system that used shame, fear, or control to shape behavior and identity. It can come from leaving — or from staying.
You may recognize yourself in some of these experiences:
Growing up in a high-control or authoritarian religious environment
Being taught that your worth depended on belief, behavior, or compliance
Experiencing spiritual abuse at the hands of a pastor, elder, priest, or religious leader
Leaving a faith community and losing your relationships, identity, and sense of meaning at the same time
Navigating the pain of purity culture and its lasting impact on your body and relationships
Questioning beliefs you built your life around and not knowing who you are without them
Being LGBTQ+ in a religious context that rejected or tried to change you
Watching your family or community fracture over faith
You don't need a clinical diagnosis to need support. Many people who've experienced religious harm don't identify as traumatized — they just know something isn't right, and they've been carrying it alone for a long time.
I have specialized training in religious trauma and deconstruction, and I bring 21 years of clinical experience to this work. I use EMDR — one of the most effective treatments for trauma — alongside CBT, ACT, and compassion-focused approaches tailored to each person.
I do not have an agenda about where your spiritual journey should lead. My role is not to talk you into or out of faith. Some of my clients are rebuilding their relationship with spirituality. Some are done with religion entirely. Most are somewhere in between, still figuring it out. All of that is welcome.
This work can include:
Processing painful or traumatic faith experiences using EMDR
Untangling inherited beliefs from your own values and sense of self
Rebuilding identity after leaving a community or belief system
Grief work around the losses that come with faith transitions — relationships, community, certainty, and meaning
Setting boundaries with family or former community members
Reclaiming your body, sexuality, and autonomy after purity culture
