Therapy for Religious Trauma
Depth-oriented psychoanalytic psychotherapy for adults. Telehealth throughout New York State.
You stopped believing it. But, something is still watching.
You can argue your way out of the doctrine. You cannot necessarily argue your way out of the guilt.
You make a decision you are certain about, and something still flinches when you act on it. Anger turns into shame before you have finished feeling it. So does desire. So does wanting something for yourself and saying so out loud.
That is because what you were given was never simply a set of propositions you agreed to. If it had been, changing your mind would have been enough.
What you were given was a verdict on your own perception, handed down underneath the level where you could argue with it. It does not require you to believe in order to keep running.
That is the level this work goes to.
45-minute sessions, weekly, by secure video anywhere in New York State.
The authority outlives the belief — you can argue your way out of the doctrine. You cannot argue your way out of the guilt.
Understanding it has not changed it — you can narrate your history in full paragraphs and still flinch every time you act.
What was called unspiritual may simply be human — desire, anger, ambition, doubt. The work goes toward them, not past them.
This is not faith-based counseling or deconstruction work
Those are the two options usually on offer. One helps you repair your relationship to the tradition. The other helps you complete your exit from it.
I don’t treat faith as pathology and I don’t treat leaving it as a cure. Both readings miss what actually happened to you. I won’t argue you out of God and I won’t hand you back to God. I stay with what’s actually there.
The grief no one gives you permission to have
You may have lost a community, a family, an entire architecture of belonging. But leaving was supposed to be the liberation, so the loss doesn’t get counted. The people around you treat the exit as the end of the story.
It isn’t. It’s where the work starts.
Why the belief left and the authority stayed
What you were given was a verdict on your own perception, and it was handed down underneath the level where you could argue with it.
For some people it arrived before they were old enough to weigh anything. For others it arrived later, inside a system they walked into as adults and gave themselves to entirely. The entry point varies. The verdict doesn’t: the doubt was the danger, the wanting was the danger, you were the danger.
That verdict does not require you to believe anything. It runs on its own. It outlives belief by decades, which is why the people who left are so often surprised to find it still working, and why the people who stayed cannot tell where their faith ends and the verdict begins.
You already understand this, and it’s still happening
You may know the doctrine, the family, the exact year the guilt arrived and who handed it to you. You can narrate it in full paragraphs.
Understanding is not transformation. Most therapy aims at insight and stops there.
There is a kind of change that’s real but episodic — something surfaces, moves, and yields something valuable. And there is a slower kind, where a person stays with what’s underneath long enough that the baseline itself shifts. The second one is what you came for.
It requires continuity, not a check-in. That’s why I work at a frequency that makes it possible.
What was called unspiritual may simply be human
Much of what gets called spiritual is a way of leaving: rise above it, empty out, evolve past the difficulty of being a person.
I work in the opposite direction.
The things certain religious systems mark as unspiritual are often the exact things a person has to come back into: desire, anger, ambition, the body, doubt that doesn't resolve.
When you stop treating those things as evidence against you, you become more fully human. And it is that humanity—not the transcendence of it—that makes a person more honest, more generous, more capable of love, and more able to stand in front of another person without performing.
The things you were taught to rise above may be the very things that bring you back to yourself and to other people.
You can arrive without a position on any of it
Deeply religious, done with it, or unable to say. Inside a tradition and staying. Out for a decade and still unsure whether leaving was right. None of those is the wrong answer, because there is no answer you are supposed to bring.
You also do not need the language yet. Most people who come to this work cannot name the thing accurately at the start. They know something still has authority over them and they cannot locate it. That is a starting point, not a disqualification.
And it does not have to have reached a crisis. Most of this runs quietly for years.
Why me
I majored in religion in college — the systems, the texts, the logic that holds them together. I was formed inside one of them, and I found my way out.
My psychoanalytic training is what let me turn that into a method. The work goes at the verdict itself — at the part of you that still requires permission, still treats your own wanting as evidence against you, still answers to something you no longer believe in.
I’m an Advanced Candidate at the Derner Institute for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, and I’ve been in my own analysis for nearly thirty years.
I understand this from the inside. I won’t manage you, and you won’t have to make any of it presentable first.
The practical details
Fee — $250 per session.
Frequency — weekly at minimum. Work of this depth sometimes asks for more, and that is generally something a person arrives at once they are in it rather than something decided in advance. We would take it up when the work indicates it.
Reduced fee — I hold a small number of reduced-fee slots. Whether one is open depends on the panel at the time you ask. When they are filled, the fee is the fee.
Insurance — I am an out-of-network provider. I can supply monthly superbills for possible reimbursement.
Format — secure telehealth for clients anywhere in New York State.
What you are actually after
You don’t need a new position on religion.
You need the thing underneath it to stop having the last word.