Religion & Spirituality

Religion can be an important part of a person's identity, family, culture, values, and understanding of the world. It can also become an essential part of therapy when you are exploring questions about faith, meaning, identity, relationships, or major life shifts.

I work with people across a full range of religious, spiritual, and nonreligious backgrounds. Your beliefs are yours to bring into therapy; they are not something I am here to dismantle or replace.

Your Beliefs Belong to You

Therapy is not religious instruction. I will not tell you what you should believe, and I will not use therapy as an opportunity to change your religious beliefs.

You can bring faith, doubt, spirituality, religious tradition, burning questions, or a complete lack of religious belief into session. I do not view these through a shallow political lens—I am not a leftist or a conservative in the ways people usually try to pigeonhole providers. In fact, I often say I didn't have to read Marx to understand critical theory; I read the Bible. Scriptural text itself is a radical framework for understanding power, justice, suffering, and human care. I am deeply familiar with the text, the history, and the weight it carries in daily life.

For Parents

If you are considering therapy for your child and are concerned about religion, you can be clear about what you want from the beginning: I am not going to convert your child.

I will not use therapy to introduce your child to a religion, persuade them to adopt particular religious beliefs, or intentionally undermine the faith of their family. If Christianity is a core part of your family's life, that is part of the real context in which I understand your child and their experiences. A child's questions about faith, doubt, church, morality, family expectations, or religious experiences can be explored without therapy becoming religious instruction.

At the same time, therapy is a space where children and adolescents can talk honestly about their experiences. That means they may have questions or feelings that are complicated, uncomfortable, or different from what their parents believe. The purpose is to understand the child, not to recruit them into a belief system.

Faith & Identity

Religious beliefs are often intertwined with family history, culture, morality, sexuality, gender, relationships, and identity. Sometimes a person's beliefs fit comfortably within the world they grew up in; sometimes they create profound friction.

People's beliefs can change. You may begin questioning beliefs you once accepted, become interested in another tradition, leave a faith community, return to one, or simply exist in the uncertainty of not knowing what you believe anymore. Changes in belief directly impact relationships with partners, families, and communities, altering how you understand your own history and identity.

Religious Conflict & Harm

Religion can be a source of deep support, meaning, and community, but religious environments can also become sources of intense conflict, shame, coercion, and trauma. People often seek therapy after experiencing religious pressure, exclusion, or the pain of trying to reconcile church teachings with their own lived physical reality. Those experiences can be unpacked here without assuming in advance what conclusion you should reach about your faith.

Spirituality & Philosophy

I approach spirituality and philosophy with genuine scholarly rigor around the histories, frameworks, and structural mechanics of these traditions. I hold deep familiarity and fluency across broad traditions—including Western, Eastern, and Indigenous frameworks—and how they address existence, suffering, responsibility, and mortality.

Frameworks like Taoism and Buddhism are structurally very close to how I operate: grounded in non-coercion, honoring natural limits, accepting physical reality as it is, and rejecting forced compliance. I do not treat these traditions as interchangeable, nor do I assume one framework explains everyone. Different traditions carry their own distinct histories, concepts, and relationships to community. Therapy provides space to explore the worldview you already hold, the questions you are wrestling with, or the ways these philosophical ideas shape how you navigate your life.

These are related topics:

• Life Transitions & Stages of Life (navigating belief changes, identity shifts, and family friction)

• LGBTQ+ / Queer Experience (navigating tension or harmony between sexual/gender identity and religious traditions)

• Sex & Sexuality (unlearning religious shame, purity culture, and bodily surveillance)

• Grief (processing loss, severed ties, and the weight of religious or community rupture)

• End of Life (exploring mortality, meaning, and legacy through your own framework)

• Philosophical Therapy (engaging scripture, Western, Eastern, and Indigenous traditions on existence and responsibility)

• Indigenous Folx (engaging Indigenous philosophical, spiritual, and land-based worldviews on their own terms)

• Immigration & Cross-Cultural Experiences (navigating generational shifts, cultural displacement, and overlapping traditions)

• Identity, Culture & Community (examining family history, cultural belonging, and systemic isolation)