Religious de/Reconstruction

In How to Leave Mormonism: An Exmormon’s Guide to Rebuilding After Religion, Alyssa Grenfell emphasizes how lonely it can be to deconstruct your faith and rebuild your life on your own. That was my experience as well. I began by joining an online support group, which helped me find lifelong friends and a sense of community. Finding a new community was helpful in many ways. However, I still needed deeper support to process the trauma of growing up in the church.

Religious trauma can be persistent and show up in every aspect of our lives. I needed help addressing some of the human development gaps that came from being raised in a high-demand religion. This included learning how to trust myself and my own intuition, working through the damage that purity culture had left behind, and developing healthier emotional regulation. I also had to learn how to release the sense of responsibility I felt for everyone else’s emotional experiences. I had to wrestle with my tendency to people-please and the codependency I inherited from my religious culture. More than anything, I needed someone who understood the impact of religious trauma. Someone who could recognize what was happening in my nervous system and guide me in healing and regulating it when I felt activated.

Eventually, I found a coach who gave me exactly that kind of support. That experience inspired me to pay it forward. Deconstruction is often a grueling and painful process, and I would love to be the person who walks that path with you.

I believe that once someone has deconstructed their religious beliefs and processed their trauma, reconstructing a spiritual framework can help prevent the existential collapse that many people experience afterward.

The common narrative around deconstruction is that once you discover the truth and leave religion, you will feel free and excited to explore the world through a new lens. But for many people, the process leads instead to the depths of nihilism and existential dread. This can be a frightening place to land. Not many trained therapists are equipped to guide people through this kind of “dark night of the soul.” Religion provides many emotional and psychological benefits, and when we lose those structures, it can be difficult to thrive.

In our work together, we reclaim the human tools that religion often holds a monopoly on and learn how to use them intentionally in our own lives and families. These include awe, connection, community, ritual, myth and storytelling, and the creation of meaningful culture. This process is not about bypassing truth or ignoring the difficulties of being human. Instead, it is about honoring the reality we live in while also cultivating tools that help anchor us in a vast world that has no inherent meaning.

We become the architects of our own meaning.