Religious Trauma Therapy in Salt Lake City
Find your voice when faith no longer feels safe.
Maybe you grew up knowing exactly what was right and wrong, what was expected of you, and what your life was supposed to look like.
And now you’re not so sure.
You may be questioning beliefs you once held with certainty. You may have already stepped away from your faith, or you may have no intention of leaving at all. Maybe you still believe, but there are experiences you can no longer make peace with.
Wherever you are, it can be deeply unsettling when something that once gave your life structure, community, and meaning becomes a source of pain or uncertainty.
You might be:
Feeling guilty or anxious for questioning things you were taught never to question
Grieving relationships or a community that no longer feels the same
Afraid of disappointing your parents, spouse, children, or people you love
Struggling to trust your own judgment
Confusion about which beliefs are actually ever truly yours
Carrying shame around your body, sexuality, relationships, or choices
Worried about spiritual or eternal consequences, even when part of you no longer believes them
Trying to navigate a marriage or family in which people you love are in very different places about faith
Wondering whether what you experienced was really harmful or whether you’re somehow making too much of it
Faith can become intertwined with nearly every part of your life: your family, your relationships, your identity, your values, your community, and the way you understand yourself.
When that foundation begins to shift, it makes sense that other parts of your life can feel unsteady too. You’re not overreacting. You’re paying attention.
Questioning your faith can change more than your Sunday schedule.
There’s room for you here wherever you are.
One of the hardest parts of a faith crisis can be feeling pressure to figure out what comes next.
Do I stay? Do I leave? What do I still believe? What happens to my marriage? What do I tell my parents? How do I raise my children? Who am I if I’m no longer the person everyone thought I was?
Therapy doesn’t need to give you another set of answers. It’s here to give you a place quiet enough to hear your own.
It can give you a place to slow down long enough to hear your own.
I don’t have an agenda for your faith. I’m not here to convince you to stay, leave, believe, or stop believing.
Some of my clients want to remain connected to their religion while healing from painful experiences within it. Others are grieving a faith they have already left. Some are building something new entirely. And some simply don’t know yet.
You don’t have to decide what you believe before coming to therapy.
Religious trauma has a long memory.
When you’ve spent years monitoring whether you’re good enough, faithful enough, obedient enough, whether you made the “right” choice, that internal alarm doesn’t just switch off.
You may understand intellectually that you’re allowed to make your own decisions now and still feel your stomach drop when you do it.
You may know you don’t need someone else’s permission and still catch yourself looking for it.
You may want a different relationship with your parents or spouse but feel flooded with guilt every time you set a boundary.
You may even miss parts of your religious life. The traditions, certainty, friendships, shared purpose, or sense of belonging, while also being fully aware of how much other parts of it cost you.
Those two things can be true at the same time. You don’t have to pick one.
Therapy can help you make sense of what happened, understand how it continues to affect you, and begin separating the person you are today from the expectations you learned to carry around like luggage that was never yours to begin with.
Therapy can help you trust yourself again.
My work with religious trauma draws on the same approach I use in trauma therapy more broadly: understanding how past experiences keep shaping your emotions, relationships, and reactions today, and helping you build something different on purpose.
Depending on what you need, our work may include:
Processing painful or traumatic religious experiences
Working through guilt, shame, fear, anger, and grief
Learning to recognize your own wants, needs, and values
Rebuilding confidence in your judgment and decisions
Setting healthier boundaries with family members or religious communities
Preparing for difficult conversations with people you love
Working through fears that persist even when your beliefs have changed
Making room for complicated feelings about the parts of your faith or community that you still value
Using EMDR when certain memories still feel more present than past
The goal isn’t to tell you who to become.
It’s to help you feel more confident that the life you’re building, and the choices you’re making within it, actually belong to you.
What religious trauma therapy with me looks like
We start with where you are now, not with where you think you should be.
You don’t need to arrive with your whole religious history organized into a timeline, or a tidy explanation of therapy.
We’ll talk about what brought you here, what feels hardest right now, and what you would like to be different.
Over time, we’ll also look at the experiences and relationships that shaped the way you learned to see yourself.
We make room for the complicated parts.
You can be angry and still miss your community.
You can love your family and need different boundaries with them.
You can question your faith and still want it to be part of your life.
You can feel relieved to have left and still grieve what you lost.
You don’t have to sand down your experience until it’s simpler than it is.
We aim for change you can feel outside the therapy room.
Insight is nice. I want more than insight.
That might mean saying what you actually think without an automatic apology attached. Setting a boundary without spending the next three days auditing whether you were selfish. Making an important decision without polling everyone you trust first. Being in a room with family without performing a version of yourself that no longer exists.
We’ll pay attention to those changes as we go.
You’re allowed to decide what comes next. All of it.
A faith crisis can make the ground feel like it moved without your permission.
But questioning what you were taught doesn’t obligate you to have a replacement belief system ready to go. And healing from painful religious experiences doesn’t require you to reject everything that came before.
You get to take your time.
You get to decide what you want to keep, what you want to change, and what you’re finally ready to set down.
FAQS
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No. Therapy is not about convincing you to leave your religion or convincing you to stay.
You may still value your faith and want help addressing experiences that have been painful. You may be questioning some beliefs while holding onto others with both hands. Or you may already know that you want to leave.
My role is to help you understand your experience and make decisions that reflect your own values.
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You can have a meaningful faith and also recognize that some of your religious experiences hurt you.
Those things are not in competition..
We can work on shame, fear, painful experiences, family relationships, or boundaries without deciding that your faith itself is the problem.
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Yes. In Utah especially, faith transitions rarely stays contained to belief. It tends to spill into marriages, extended-family relationships, friendships, parenting, community, and your sense of who you are.
I work with people at every point on that road: people still active in their religion, people in the questioning middle, and people who have left.
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No. Religious trauma is not a diagnosis in the DSM.
But the symptoms are real: anxiety, shame, intrusive memories, a shaky sense of trust in yourself, relationship problems, and trauma-related reactions.
Therapy focuses less on whether your experience earns a particular label and more on understanding what is happening now and helping you change it.
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You don’t need to decide whether the word trauma fits before you’re allowed to ask for help.
Sometimes there wasn’t one dramatic event. Sometimes it’s years of fear, shame, pressure, judgment, or the slow sense that important parts of you weren’t acceptable as they were.
If those experiences are still affecting your relationships, decisions, self-worth, or emotional well-being, they are worth talking about. Full stop.
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Yes. When one partner’s beliefs shift, it tends to raise questions about values, family traditions, parenting, intimacy, and what the future of the relationship will look like.
Couples therapy can give both partners a place to talk about those differences without requiring either person to give up what matters to them.
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Yes. I offer in-person therapy in the Salt Lake City area and online therapy throughout Utah.
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There isn’t one timeline for this work.
Some people come to therapy because they want help with a particular decision, relationship, or transition. Others want to work more deeply on experiences that have affected them for years.
We’ll talk about what you want from therapy early on, and keep checking in as we go. This isn’t a program with a finish line. It’s your life, and you’re allowed to take your time getting it back.
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Yes, I’m paneled with, BlueCross and BlueShield, EMI Health, HMHI-BHN, and University of Utah Health Plans.
More questions? Check out my FAQs page.
