The  Blog

I got home from the Mormon Mental Health Association conference recently and couldn’t stop thinking about one sentence. A woman in the audience raised her hand and described something she called “the mistress of the patriarchy.” My friend sitting next to me and I both got goosebumps at the same time. She was talking about […]

Continue reading to find perinatal mental health care in Gilbert, Arizona. I Wasn’t Okay After My Babies Were Born. I Don’t Think I Was Supposed to Be Either. And sometimes I look back at the woman I was when they were little, with everything I know now after getting a master’s degree and spending years […]

Over the last two weeks I’ve written about the BITE model of authoritarian control and Lifton’s eight criteria for spotting a high-control religion. If you read either of those and recognized more of yourself in them than you expected, the next question is usually the practical one: okay, now what? Who do I actually talk […]

Am I in a high-control religion?’ is one of the most common questions I hear in my Gilbert office — usually asked quietly, by someone who’s already spent months or years turning it over privately before saying it out loud. It comes up often here in the East Valley, where tight-knit, high-demand faith communities are […]

If you searched your way to this page, there’s a decent chance you’re not researching this out of idle curiosity. You’re probably trying to answer something much more personal: was the group, church, or relationship I grew up in actually controlling me? I hear a version of this question often from clients in Gilbert and […]

This past weekend, therapists from across Arizona and Utah gathered at the University of Utah for a continuing education conference hosted by the Mormon Mental Health Association. Inner Compass Counseling was proud to be part of the committee that built this conference from the ground up, and one of the sessions has stuck with me […]

Healing is not about abandoning your values. It is about building intimacy without fear, coercion, or self-abandonment.

And why we hope the next generation won’t have to wait as long On June 29, 2026 — the last day of Pride Month — Secret Lives of Mormon Wives star Layla Taylor sat down on Jay Shetty’s On Purpose podcast and said something she’d been carrying for most of her life. “I’m gay and […]

Religious trauma therapy in Utah and Arizona | Inner Compass Counseling If you grew up in a faith community and something about your experience felt different from what you see portrayed as “normal” religion — more rigid, more fearful, more all-consuming — you’re not imagining it. There’s a real, definable difference between belonging to a […]

Most of us learned about the body’s stress responses in one simple phrase: fight, flight, or freeze. But there’s a fourth response — one that rarely gets taught, even though it may be the most common one in people who grew up managing chaos, criticism, or unpredictability at home. It’s called fawning, and it doesn’t […]