I am from Utah. I love it here, and I have spent the past 17 years here as a mental health therapist. I never set out to specialize in trauma or religious trauma. It became my work because, one after another, Utahns of every age and background sat across from me and asked whether it was safe to say out loud what they were actually feeling and struggling with.

They never asked me to take their faith away. They were asking whether they could have their faith and their mental health at the same time.

I have built my career on the belief that they can.

Across all my work, the thing I have seen most consistently is that people who get real help for their mental health do not lose their capacity for faith and spirituality. As they heal, they gain the capacity to choose it and to thrive in it.

That is what good therapy does. It is what good faith should want: people getting real support for their minds and still living the religion they choose.

I do not tell my clients what to believe, not directly and not through leading questions, because ethical trauma therapy is non-directive by design. My job is to help someone hear their own voice clearly enough to trust it and then to support whatever they choose. Some of my clients leave their religion. Most of them stay. Many who stay do so with more choice and less anxiety than before.

I have been called anti-Mormon for doing this work, which gets it exactly backward. If we believe a faith is true and good, we should be able to trust it to hold up when people look at it honestly.

Treating every hard question as a threat does not protect a religion; it sells that religion short.

I bring all of this up because of a perspective recently published by the Deseret News titled “7 signs your counselor may be undermining your faith,” The authors raise a concern that deserves to be taken seriously. No therapist is value-free, and a clinician who claims to be is not being honest with clients or with themselves. People of faith deserve counselors who respect what they hold sacred, and on that point I agree with them completely.

Where the article goes wrong is in what it chooses to call a warning sign. Several of the seven warning signs describe ordinary, ethical, well-trained therapy tools and a reader who takes the list at face value could easily walk away from the very help they need.

Take the claim that a therapist using the word “trauma” for a faith struggle is a red flag. Trauma therapists are not making that claim. Faith struggles and trauma are different things entirely, although they can affect each other. A faith struggle is a normal part of life. It comes with transitions, changes in rules or leadership, personal revelation and a hundred other ordinary experiences. Trauma is something else. It is what happens when an experience overwhelms a person’s internal ability to cope and the meaning they made of it keeps hurting them years later. That second thing is what I treat. I have sat with women who were taught as girls that their bodies were a danger to the men around them, with gay men who were taught that who they are was wrong and with people whose sense of worth was so tied to compliance that they learned to override every internal signal in order to keep worthy. None of that is a faith struggle. Calling it trauma does not pathologize faith. It describes accurately what happened, and that is where healing begins.

The authors also worry that therapists focus too much on shame. Shame is the central injury in nearly every trauma case I have treated. Guilt tells a person that they did something wrong and can repair it, while shame tells them that they themselves are bad or not good enough and can never do enough to repair it. A good therapist does not numb the conscience. A good therapist helps a person feel guilt cleanly, without drowning in shame, so that repentance and repair become possible and long-lasting. Far from threatening a religious life, that is what makes one livable.

The authors urge people of faith to find a counselor who honors what they believe, and I would urge the same thing. However, I would not assume that shared religion means a therapist will honor your faith and your needs.

Ask a prospective therapist how they handle a client’s religion and listen for a clear answer along the lines of: “I will not push you in either direction. I will support you wherever you land.”

If you hear that, you have found someone who understands that your mental health and your faith are not enemies — and that caring for one is a way of caring for the other.

Cassidy DuHadway is the founder and CEO of Purple Sky Counseling, an EMDRIA Approved Trainer and the author of “Becoming Me: Unraveling and Healing the Sacred Wounds of Religious Trauma in Women.”

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