Religious Trauma

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

A clinician’s guide to the terms we use — and why they matter. From a religious trauma therapist Gilbert AZ. As religious trauma therapists in Gilbert, Arizona, we hear these words used interchangeably almost every week: religion, spirituality, cult, abuse, trauma. And almost every week, we watch a client’s shoulders drop a little when we […]