Individual Religious Trauma Therapy & Coaching
Whether you are currently questioning your religion or changed your beliefs years ago, religious trauma can deeply impact many areas of your life. You may still struggle with religious fear, shame, sexuality, self-trust, relationships, or unresolved grief and anger. You may be trying to make sense of manipulation or abuse you experienced, or feel as though you no longer know who you are or how to move forward.
You may have spent years trying to work through these experiences through books, podcasts, or therapy with someone who didn’t specialize in religious trauma. Leaving or changing your religion is a uniquely challenging process, and you deserve support from someone who understands that experience from the inside and has the specialized knowledge to help you work through the particular ways it has affected your life. Through targeted individual work, we can focus deeply on your unique history, psychological makeup, and beliefs—and directly address how religious trauma shows up in your mind and body.
My Approach to Religious Trauma
As a religious trauma specialist, coach, and psychotherapist, I integrate trauma-informed modalities with my specialized approach to religious trauma, developed through lived experience and intensive study of religion, psychology, and coercion.
Working With the Mind and Body
I utilize an embodied, present-moment-focused approach to help clients heal from trauma and unresolved emotional wounds in the body and mind (bottom-up approach). I combine this with addressing specific issues of recovery and deconstructing indoctrination (top-down approach).
This includes helping you uncover and work through specific harmful teachings and indoctrination that continue to impact you and reconstructing your own value system and orientation to meaning, life, and spirituality or secular humanism.
Reclaiming Your Authentic Self
Rather than brute-forcing through emotional pain, I support my clients in befriending and working with their fears, internal resistance to change, and inner blocks, approaching healing from a place of calm, curious attentiveness, guided by their own intuition. My method helps people connect with their authenticity and reclaim aspects of their being that may have been outsourced to God, divine agency, or the group, or that were suppressed because of trauma and conditioning.
Why Work With Me?
I am so passionate about this work because I’ve been through it myself. I grew up as the son of a minister in an Assemblies of God Evangelical Christian church in New Jersey and believed I was called to a life of service to God and world evangelism. I became a minister and missionary to India after studying theology at Wheaton College and obtaining my Master of Divinity from Princeton Seminary. However, I began to realize that my religious beliefs were the cause of anxiety, low self-worth, and sexual repression, which caused me to seek therapy and question my religion. After an agonizing crisis of faith, I became a secular humanist atheist and quit my ministry job. I felt isolated and disconnected from myself and from community.
I worked through my trauma through psychotherapy, meditation, and holistic practices, including expanded, non-ordinary states of awareness and psychedelic therapy. This led me to get an MA in Counseling Psychology and then study Indian contemplative, philosophical, and religious traditions for an MPhil at Oxford (Sanskrit, Hinduism, Buddhism). Through these experiences and studies, I discovered a new sense of wholeness and meaning that integrates spirituality, science, and secularism in a grounded way, without reference to dogma or belief.
Training & Professional Background
I am trained in Internal Family Systems (IFS Level 2) and EMDR, mindfulness, relational psychodynamic depth work, and CBT, and work as a Registered Associate Marriage and Family Therapist (AMFT 146397) at Q Psychology Group, supervised by a licensed psychologist.
Who I Work With
I work with clients from a variety of religious backgrounds, cults, and high-control groups, specializing in Evangelical Christianity, Exvangelicals, Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, tantra and sex cults, narcissistic abuse, Catholicism, Eastern Orthodox Christianity, Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and others.
I see clients for religious trauma and deconstruction coaching in the US and internationally, and for psychotherapy in the state of California.