The  Blog

Written by Ashley Kirkpatrick, LAC Inner Compass Counseling & Consultation Leaving Mormonism can change a lot of things. Your beliefs. Your relationships. Your sense of community. Your understanding of sexuality. Your relationship with authority. But for many men, there is another question underneath all of that: Who am I supposed to be now? Mormonism doesn’t […]

Written by Ashley Kirkpatrick, LAC It’s the end of the night. You and your partner have been flirting all evening. You’ve been affectionate. Maybe you’ve even been talking about having sex later. When you finally make a move, she says, “Not tonight. I’m exhausted.” You feel the disappointment almost immediately. You were looking forward to […]

By Jessica Dawson, LPC Inner Compass Counseling & Consultation  For some people, leaving a high-control religious environment is not simply a matter of changing beliefs. It can mean rebuilding an entire understanding of themselves — their discipline, their choices, their worth, their sense of safety. For individuals with ADHD, that process often has an extra […]

By Mellissa Perry Hill, MS, LPC Inner Compass Counseling & Consultation A client once told me something that stuck with me. She said, “I can handle losing my faith. I can even handle losing some friends. What I can’t handle is Sunday dinner.” Her family still expected her at church every week. When she stopped […]

By Mellissa Perry Hill, MS, LPC, Inner Compass Counseling & Consultation A client sat across from me not long ago and said something I hear all the time, in one form or another. “I left the church. I don’t believe the things I used to believe. But sometimes I still want to pray, or light […]

By Mellissa Perry Hill, LPC Inner Compass Counseling & Consultation I sit with a lot of clients, here in Arizona and connected to Utah, who tell me some version of the same thing. “I don’t know what I feel. I just know I’m supposed to feel grateful.” They can quote scripture. They can recite the […]

By Mellissa Hill, MS, LPC, Inner Compass Counseling I have lost count of how many times I’ve sat across from someone in Arizona or Utah and heard a story that broke my heart. A young girl who was groomed by a youth pastor. A teen who was touched by someone she trusted at church. A […]

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 […]