Life Transitions

By Jessica Dawson, LPC Inner Compass Counseling & Consultation  You know the photo. A mother at church, baby in arms, smiling in the pew. The caption might as well read blessed. What you don’t see is the sleepless night before, the intrusive thought she hasn’t told a soul about, or the quiet terror that admitting […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Who am I, if I’m not who they told me to be? One of the most common things I hear from clients who have left a high-control religion or cult isn’t ‘I don’t know what to believe anymore.’ It’s something quieter and more disorienting: ‘I don’t know who I am.’ Not what they believe. Not […]

And What It Means for Your Healing Have you ever tried to explain your experience in a high-control religious group to someone who wasn’t there — and watched their eyes glaze over? “But wasn’t it your choice to stay?” they ask. Or: “Why didn’t you just leave?” These questions, however well-meaning, miss something fundamental: leaving […]

Leaving Mormonism does not just change what someone believes. It can change the entire structure their life was built on. For many post-Mormon couples, this can be one of the most painful and confusing parts of a faith transition. A couple may have spent years, sometimes decades, believing they were working toward the same life, […]