Faith and Spiritual Integration

For Those Who Have Outgrown the Easy Answers

Perhaps you have been a person of faith for most of your life. But somewhere along the way, the easy answers stopped being enough. The faith of your childhood, or the faith of your community, no longer seems to hold the full weight of your experience.

Perhaps you have walked through something that shook your foundations: a loss, a betrayal, a season of doubt. Perhaps you have experienced what some call deconstruction, the slow, painful process of dismantling a faith that no longer fits, without yet knowing what will take its place.

Or perhaps you are simply exhausted by the performance of religious life: the pressure to appear certain, to project faith, to hold it all together in the pew while quietly carrying your shadowlands alone. As the developer of Life Telling Processing™, I have walked this territory myself, and I designed this work for exactly these seasons.

The shadowlands are not the absence of faith. They are often where the deepest faith is forged.

Sophisticated Care That Honors Your Journey

Most therapy treats what you feel. Life Telling Processing™ works on the story underneath it, including the spiritual dimensions of that story. As the developer of LTP, I bring a contemplative, neuroscience-grounded approach that takes your spiritual life seriously as a dimension of your whole story. This is not traditional biblical therapy. It is not a program of religious instruction or a set of spiritual disciplines to follow.

Drawing on my two decades of pastoral experience and my background as a seminary professor, I bring a deep respect for the Christian tradition alongside a genuine openness to the complexity of the spiritual journey. I am as comfortable with the mystics, Thomas Merton, Richard Rohr, the Celtic saints, as I am with the neuroscience of spiritual experience.

In our work together, we do not try to resolve your doubts or restore a faith that no longer fits. Instead, we explore the spiritual dimensions of your story with curiosity and compassion. We look at the archetypal injuries that may be shaping your spiritual experience. And we walk the couragepath together, toward a faith that is not smaller than your experience, but larger.

How Life Telling Processing™ Approaches Faith

The spiritual life is not separate from the psychological life. It is woven through it. In Life Telling Processing™, we do not treat your faith as a symptom to be managed or a resource to be leveraged. We treat it as a dimension of your story that deserves the same careful, compassionate attention as every other chapter.

We begin by mapping the spiritual landscape of your narrative: the formative experiences, the wounds inflicted in the name of religion, the moments of genuine encounter, and the long, quiet seasons of doubt. We pay particular attention to the archetypal injuries that often surface in spiritual life, the Uninitiated One who never received blessing from a spiritual father or mother, the Sovereign whose sense of worth became entangled with religious performance, the Lover whose capacity for connection was shut down by shame.

From that foundation, we move into the deeper work of integration. Not toward a predetermined theological destination, but toward a faith that is honest, embodied, and large enough to hold your whole story. The contemplative traditions have always known that the path through the shadowlands is not around them. Life Telling Processing™ walks that path with you.

Your faith has been shaken by loss, betrayal, or a season of doubt

You are in the middle of deconstruction and do not know what comes next

You are exhausted by the performance of religious life and want something more honest

You want a therapist who takes your spiritual life seriously without imposing a theological agenda

You are drawn to the contemplative tradition but do not know how to integrate it with your daily life

You want to explore the spiritual dimensions of your story alongside the psychological ones

You are ready to move from a faith that is too small for your experience to one that is larger

Processing my hurts and story through my faith has helped me feel far less shame than I used to. I don't feel like a failure to God, my husband, and my church any longer, and now I see how I was never truly alone, but always loved and cared about, even when it didn't feel like it.

Faith deconstruction is not the end of the journey. It is the beginning of a larger one. Through Life Telling Processing™, the fragments of a broken spiritual story can be gathered and rebuilt into a faith that is more honest, more rooted, and more whole than what came before.

The dark night is not the end of the journey. It is the passage to a faith that is larger than the one that broke. When the story that once organized your spiritual life begins to fragment, Life Telling Processing™ offers a way to gather the pieces and build something whole.

The recovery from a rotational brain injury was, at its deepest level, a spiritual journey as much as a neurological one. The questions it raised, about identity, continuity, and trust in a future not yet visible, are the same questions that bring many people to the threshold of faith integration work.

The contemplative traditions have always known something that neuroscience is only beginning to confirm: that the quality of presence in the healing relationship matters as much as any technique.

The Sage archetype is the capacity for wisdom, discernment, and the integration of experience into meaning. When this archetype is wounded, the knowing goes dark. Understanding this wound is the beginning of the path back to clarity.

Is faith integration therapy the same as Christian counseling?

No. Faith integration therapy and Christian counseling are distinct approaches. Christian counseling typically operates from within a specific theological framework and may incorporate scripture, prayer, or pastoral guidance. Faith integration therapy, as practiced here, is psychologically rigorous and does not assume a particular theological position. It honors the spiritual dimension of a person's life — including faith, doubt, deconstruction, and the questions that arise at the intersection of belief and experience — without imposing a religious agenda.

Can I work with you if I am deconstructing my faith?

Yes. Spiritual deconstruction — the process of questioning, revising, or leaving behind inherited religious frameworks — is one of the most significant and least supported transitions a person can navigate. It often involves grief, disorientation, and a profound loss of community. This work takes deconstruction seriously as a legitimate and often courageous act, and provides a space where the questions can be held without pressure toward any particular conclusion.

Do you work with people from non-Christian spiritual traditions?

Yes. While my own background is rooted in the Christian contemplative tradition, the work I do is not limited to clients from that tradition. I work with people navigating questions of meaning, identity, and spiritual integration from a wide range of backgrounds, including those with no formal religious tradition. What matters is not the specific tradition but the seriousness with which you hold the questions.