It is not lost on me – “The Agnostic Therapist,” an EXvangelical queer woman who helps clients recover from religious harm – that my favorite team, the San Diego Padres, is named after the Catholic Franciscan Friar missionary colonizers who forced their religion on the indigenous folks of this region. Talk about religious trauma! I…
The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church, by Sarah McCammon As someone who left evangelical Christianity behind over 25 years ago, one of the most striking things I’ve noticed in my work as a therapist (and from reading about others’ experiences) is how much white evangelical culture has NOT changed. Clearly, the…
So you want to see a therapist. But how do you find the right one? Where do you even start with that? If you have health insurance coverage, you can go to your insurance website and get a list of names, but that tells you little-to-nothing about the actual therapists themselves. How do you know…
Purity culture. I didn’t have that name for it when I was young. I just heard over and over again that sex is only for married men and women, the end, full stop. To reinforce this, when I was 13 my parents gave me a gold ring to wear, with a little rose on it…
I recently had the privilege to be interviewed by Savio P. Clemente at Authority Magazine, for his series entitled Taking the Leap: How to Learn to Believe in Yourself. In the series he interviews people from various disciplines and industries about why it’s important to believe in yourself and how you can get better at…
CW: abortion ”Why should I care if my therapist is identified as secular? Don’t all therapists have to be unbiased with their clients?” This is a reasonable question. Psychotherapists do try to be unbiased about a great number of things, but we are also human beings. As licensed professionals, we are ethically obligated to, as…
Do you struggle with feeling like nothing you do is ever quite good enough? Do you find that doing something 99% correct still feels like a failure? If so, you might be a perfectionist, and you are not alone. The good news is that we can challenge that tendency in a variety of ways, and…
Imagine being in a crisis, being brave and vulnerable enough to seek help, being persistent enough to actually connect with help, paying good money to access that help… only to find that the therapist you found doesn’t approve of who you are. This story recently surfaced about a young man named Caleb who was living…
If you’re considering Text Therapy among your approaches to better mental health, take a moment to read this article and consider what’s right for you.