Couples Therapy for Faith Deconstruction & Faith Transitions

Couples sessions are $350 for 50 minutes.

I don't accept insurance directly, which keeps your therapy records private and our work focused on what you actually need rather than what an insurance company will approve.

A note specific to couples therapy: most insurance plans won't reimburse for couples sessions, even out of network. Couples therapy uses a relational diagnosis code, which means the diagnosis applies to what's happening between you as a couple, rather than to either of you individually, and most plans don't cover that. All couples session fees are paid directly out of pocket. If you have an HSA or FSA account, those funds can typically be used, but check with your plan administrator to confirm.

No — I don’t share my personal beliefs in session, and I don’t have an opinion about where either of you should land with your faith. What I care about is whether you can be honest with each other without it threatening the relationship.

Some people find religion and spirituality deeply helpful and beneficial. If that’s your experience, I’m not here to change your beliefs. My focus is helping you and your partner navigate the fact that you’re in different places, not moving either of you toward a particular destination.

This work is about learning to be different from each other without that difference meaning the relationship is over.

Yes. But it requires something most couples weren’t taught to do: stay emotionally connected to someone who sees the world differently than you do. That’s a learnable skill, and it’s the core of what we work on together.

The marriages that struggle most aren’t the ones where beliefs changed. They’re the ones where both people are so afraid of the difference that they stop being honest, stop being curious about each other, and start protecting themselves instead of reaching for each other.

Pastoral counseling and therapy are doing different things. A pastor is usually working within a framework of shared belief and often has a perspective on what the “right” outcome looks like. I don’t.

I'm also trained to work with what's happening in your nervous system during these conversations, not just the content of what you're saying. When your partner brings up their changing beliefs and your chest tightens or your mind goes blank, that's a trauma response, and knowing you "should" stay calm doesn't help your body cooperate. That's the piece most counseling approaches miss.

Most couples therapists are trained to work with communication, conflict patterns, and compromise. Those are useful, but when the issue involves faith, identity, trauma, and deeply held beliefs about morality and meaning, communication tools alone tend to fall short.

My approach works with the emotional and physical responses driving your conflicts, not just the topics you're fighting about. We slow things down enough to understand what each of you is actually feeling underneath the defensiveness or withdrawal, and we work with that directly. For a lot of couples, that's the piece that was missing.

I ask couples to commit to three months of weekly sessions to start. That gives us enough time and consistency to move past the surface issues and into the patterns underneath. After that, if we're seeing real progress, we can talk about shifting to every other week.

Therapy for faith transitions tends to take longer than therapy for a single presenting problem, because the issues touch so many areas of your life — parenting, sex, community, family relationships, identity. Most couples I work with in this space are in therapy for several months to a year.

We're usually working with whatever is happening between you right now. If you had a hard conversation during the week, we'll start there. I'll slow things down, help each of you identify what you were actually feeling underneath the anger or shutdown, and guide you through a different way of sharing that with each other.

I pay close attention to your body during session — where you hold tension, when your breathing changes, when one of you checks out. A lot of the work happens in those moments, because that's where the old patterns live. I'm more directive than some therapists you may have worked with, which means I'll coach you through how to stay present and how to receive what your partner is sharing, rather than just reflecting what I hear.

No. Faith is usually the catalyst, but the work is about your relationship. We'll talk about how you handle difference, how you reach for each other (or don't) when you're scared, how you make decisions together when you don't share the same framework anymore. Sometimes that involves religion directly, and sometimes it shows up in conversations about parenting, sex, holidays, or what you're going to tell your families.