Faith Transitions Therapy – Liberated Mind

Something shifted.

Maybe it happened slowly, a question you couldn’t quite answer, a teaching that didn’t sit right, a period of honest study that took you somewhere you didn’t expect to go. Years of setting things aside until you ran out of shelf space for them.

Or maybe it arrived fast. A single conversation. A document. A moment where something cracked open and you realized you couldn’t go back to seeing things the way you had.

Either way, you’re in different territory now. The framework that once organized your life, your sense of who you are, what matters, what happens after you die, how to be a good person, what your community is, no longer fits the way it used to. And if you’re in Utah, that shift doesn’t just affect your private beliefs. It can feel like it touches everything.

You’re not broken! You’re not lost, even when it feels that way. You’re in transition, and transitions, when they’re this significant, deserve real support.

At Liberated Mind Counseling and Health Center, we work with people navigating faith transitions throughout Utah. We see clients in person in Salt Lake City and via telehealth anywhere in the state. This is some of the most meaningful work we do.

Book a Free 15-Minute Consultation → Contact

What Is a Faith Transition?

A faith transition is a fundamental shift in your relationship to the beliefs, practices, or community that once formed the foundation of your identity and your life.

For many people in Utah, that means questioning or leaving the LDS (Latter-day Saint, or Mormon) church; a process that is rarely just theological, i.e., just about believing. The LDS faith is deeply woven into the fabric of Utah life: its neighborhoods, its family structures, its social calendars, its sense of moral identity. Questioning it, or leaving it, is an act that reverberates far beyond Sunday attendance.

But faith transitions happen across traditions. Evangelical Christians who can no longer reconcile their doubts. Catholics navigating the gap between the church’s teachings and their conscience. People raised in conservative religious homes who have quietly been living a different inner life for years. What all of these share is this: the map you were given doesn’t match the terrain you’re actually walking.

A faith transition might look like:

Questioning — You’re still in the faith, still showing up, but privately asking questions you’re afraid to say out loud. You’re not sure you believe what you once believed, and you don’t know yet what that means for your life.
Doubting in place — You’ve been carrying doubts for a long time. You might still attend for family reasons, social reasons, or because you genuinely don’t know where you stand. The cognitive dissonance has become exhausting.
Leaving — You’ve resigned, stopped attending, or quietly stepped away. The decision is made, but the aftermath — the grief, the identity questions, the family strain — is ongoing.
Rebuilding — You’ve been out of your faith community for a while. The acute crisis has passed, but you’re still figuring out who you are, what you believe, how to find meaning, how to parent, how to build a moral life without the framework that once structured it.
Somewhere undefined — You don’t know what stage you’re in, and the categories above don’t quite fit. That’s fine. Most people in the middle of this don’t have clean language for it. That’s exactly what we’re here to help with.

There is no single right way to move through a faith transition. There is no correct destination. What there is — and what therapy can help you find — is a path forward that is genuinely, authentically yours.

Why Faith Transitions Are Hard — Especially in Utah

When people describe a faith transition to someone outside it, they sometimes get met with a kind of puzzled sympathy: It’s just religion. You can find a new church, or not go at all. Why is it such a big deal?

If you’re in Utah (or similar community where faith is more than just what you do on Sunday), you know exactly why it’s a big deal.

Faith transitions are hard because they are rarely, if ever, just about beliefs. When you leave a faith tradition, or begin to question one, you are simultaneously losing or renegotiating almost every significant dimension of your life at once.

You may be losing your community. For many people raised in the LDS faith, the ward is not just a church, it is their entire social infrastructure. Their closest friends, their neighbors, their family’s social life, their children’s peer group. When you step away from a community defined by faith, that community often steps away from you. Sometimes explicitly. Sometimes just gradually, as invitations stop coming and relationships quietly cool.

You may be losing your identity. If you have been shaped since birth by a faith tradition, if your sense of who you are as a person, what it means to be good, what your purpose is, what your future holds, is rooted in that tradition, then questioning it raises a question that can feel terrifying: Who am I, outside of this? That question is not abstract. It lands in the body. It affects how you move through every room.

You may be losing your closest relationships. When one spouse begins a faith transition and the other remains fully committed, the gap between them can become one of the most painful experiences either of them has ever navigated. The same is true of parent-child relationships, friendships that have always been grounded in shared faith. You haven’t changed your love for these people. But the common ground that once felt solid has shifted, and nobody yet knows how to stand on the new terrain.

You may be losing your sense of meaning. The faith tradition you’re leaving didn’t just tell you what to do on Sundays. It answered the deepest questions humans ask: Why are we here? What matters? How should I live? What happens when I die? When that framework goes, the silence where those answers used to be can be disorienting in a way that’s hard to describe to someone who hasn’t felt it. The world doesn’t suddenly become meaningless, but meaning has to be rebuilt, and no one tells you how to do that.

You may be losing your sense of moral certainty. When your ethical framework was handed to you, when you knew what was right and wrong because your tradition told you, losing that tradition means suddenly having to figure out your own ethics. That’s actually a profound opportunity. But it rarely feels that way at first. It often feels like free-fall.

And in Utah specifically, you may be losing your place in the surrounding culture. LDS membership touches business relationships, neighborhood dynamics, school communities, and social hierarchies in ways that are almost invisible from inside the faith and impossible to miss once you’re outside it. Being an outsider in a culture where faith is the dominant organizing principle of daily life adds a layer of loneliness that people in other parts of the country rarely have to navigate.

All of this is grief. Real grief, with real stages, real physical weight, and a timeline that doesn’t follow anyone’s expectations. The people who come to us in the middle of a faith transition are not people who are making a casual lifestyle adjustment. They are people navigating one of the most significant losses of their lives, often while trying to maintain their families, their jobs, and some version of their outward lives intact.

You deserve to have that taken seriously. We do!

How Therapy Helps

We don’t approach faith transitions with an agenda. We’re not here to help you find your way back to belief, or to speed up your exit, or to validate any particular position. Our job is to help you navigate this with clarity, with support, and with a growing sense of what you actually want your life to be about.

We draw on two primary approaches that are particularly well-suited to the specific work of a faith transition. Third wave Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) that is life-course oriented through Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT).

What is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)?

CBT is an evidence-based psychological treatment centered on the idea that our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are deeply interconnected. It is a highly practical approach that focuses on identifying, challenging, and changing unhelpful or distorted thought patterns to improve emotional regulation and develop healthier coping strategies.

Why CBT is Helpful During Faith Deconstruction

Deconstructing a belief system often means dismantling the foundational lens through which you have viewed yourself and the world. This process can be incredibly disorienting. CBT is a highly effective framework for navigating this transition for a few specific reasons:

Challenging Cognitive Distortions: High-demand religions or strict faith systems often rely heavily on “all-or-nothing” or “black-and-white” thinking (e.g., “If I doubt this one doctrine, I am a bad person,” or “If I leave, my life will fall apart”). CBT helps you identify these extreme, conditioned thoughts and replace them with nuanced, balanced reality.
Managing Conditioned Fears: Stepping away from a faith can trigger deep-seated, programmed anxieties—such as the fear of divine punishment, hell, or spiritual failure. CBT provides actionable tools to logically evaluate these fears and calm the nervous system when they arise.
Separating Identity from Dogma: It helps you untangle your core self-worth from your ability to follow religious rules. CBT teaches you to observe thoughts of religious guilt or shame objectively, rather than internalizing them as absolute truth.
Rebuilding a New Framework: As you deconstruct old beliefs, CBT gives you a structured, conscious way to reconstruct a healthy belief system based on your own authentic values, rather than external religious expectations.

What is Acceptance and Commitment Therapy?

ACT is one of the primary therapeutic frameworks we use at Liberated Mind. It’s a modern, research-supported evolution of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and it is exceptionally well-suited to the experience of a faith transition.

Why ACT is Helpful During Faith Deconstruction

Leaving a high-demand religion or shifting deep-rooted beliefs often leaves a void previously filled by absolute certainty. This creates a whirlwind of grief, anxiety, and existential dread. ACT is exceptionally well-suited for this transition because it focuses on navigating the unknown and rebuilding a meaningful life:

Making Peace with the Unknown (Acceptance): Faith systems often promise certainty and clear-cut answers. Deconstruction brings ambiguity. ACT helps you make room for the discomfort of not knowing, teaching you to sit with feelings of loss, anger, or confusion without trying to immediately “fix” or suppress them.
Unhooking from Conditioned Fears (Cognitive Defusion): Rather than arguing with deeply ingrained religious fears (e.g., “I am going to hell for doubting”), ACT teaches you to step back and observe them. You learn to reframe it as, “I am having the thought that I am going to hell.” This takes away the thought’s power and prevents you from getting tangled in it.
Discovering Your Own Compass (Values Clarification): When a religious institution dictates your morals and life path, losing that structure can leave you feeling adrift. A core pillar of ACT is helping you dig deep to define your own authentic values—what truly matters to you now, independent of dogma.
Moving Forward (Committed Action): Deconstruction can sometimes lead to paralysis or endless rumination. ACT helps you take tangible, daily steps toward building a life aligned with your newly discovered values, even while you are still experiencing doubt or healing from religious trauma.

Put another way: most therapeutic approaches try, in some form, to help you feel better, to reduce the distress, manage the symptoms, change the thoughts that are causing you pain. ACT takes a different position. It doesn’t try to argue you out of your grief, or teach you to think more positively, or convince you that your distress is irrational. Instead, it helps you change your relationship to that distress, to stop fighting a war against your own inner life, and instead learn to move alongside difficult experiences while still moving toward what matters to you.

For someone in a faith transition, this distinction is everything. The grief is real. The anger is real. The guilt and the relief and the confusion are all real, and they often show up simultaneously. ACT doesn’t ask you to resolve them before you can move forward. It helps you learn to carry them without being stopped by them.

The central question ACT keeps returning to is this: What do you want your life to be about?

Not the faith you’re leaving. Not the identity you’ve lost. Not what your family expects, or what your former community would think, or what the version of you from five years ago would recognize. You, the values you actually hold when you get quiet enough to hear them, the kind of person you actually want to be, the life you actually want to build.

A faith transition tends to disrupt exactly that sense of direction. When the framework that once answered those questions no longer holds, many people find themselves not knowing what they believe, what they want, or who they even are anymore. ACT-based therapy helps you find that clarity — or in many cases, find it for the first time, because the old framework never really asked.

→ Learn more about how we use ACT at Liberated Mind: ACT Therapy Utah

Existential Therapy

Dr. R.C. Morris, co-founder of Liberated Mind, also specializes in existential psychotherapy, a tradition focused on helping people navigate the fundamental questions of human life: meaning, identity, freedom, mortality, and what it means to live authentically.

If ACT is practical and skills-focused, existential therapy goes deeper, into the philosophical and experiential questions that underlie the skill deficits. For someone in a faith transition, those questions are not abstract. Who am I now that I am no longer who I was? is not a philosophical exercise. It’s a question that arrives in the middle of the night and sits on your chest.

Dr. Morris brings to this work both his clinical training and his academic background as a researcher and professor at the University of Utah. His approach is grounded in the research on meaning-making, identity, and psychological resilience, and delivered in a way that is direct, practical, and human.

Existential therapy doesn’t replace the old meaning with a new one. It doesn’t hand you a different framework and ask you to live inside it. It works with you to build a relationship with meaning that is rooted in your own experience, your own values, and your own honest encounter with the life you’re actually living.

For people whose entire sense of meaning was once provided by a religious tradition, that kind of work can be genuinely liberating. It can also be genuinely hard. We don’t pretend otherwise.

Our Faith Transitions Group

One of the most consistent things we hear from clients navigating faith transitions is some version of this: I feel completely alone in this. No one around me understands what I’m going through.

Our ongoing Faith Transitions therapy group exists because that isolation is one of the most damaging parts of this experience, and because it doesn’t have to be permanent.

The group meets regularly and is facilitated by a licensed therapist. It is small by design, typically six to ten members, because the work that happens in a good group requires trust, and trust requires knowing the people in the room. This is not a casual support group or a social gathering. It is active, structured therapy, using the same evidence-based approaches as individual sessions, with the additional dimension of doing that work alongside people who genuinely understand what you’re going through from the inside.

There is something that happens in a room full of people who all know what it’s like to sit in a church service feeling like a stranger, or to have a hard conversation with a parent who doesn’t understand why you’ve changed, or to lie awake wondering who you are now — something that individual therapy, as valuable as it is, cannot fully replicate. You stop being the only one. That shift matters more than it sounds.

The group is a good fit for people who:

Are in any stage of a faith transition — questioning, doubting, leaving, or rebuilding
Feel they cannot be fully honest about where they are with anyone currently in their life
Are seeking community with people who understand this specific experience
Have been out of their faith community for a while but are still processing the emotional and identity-level aftermath
Are curious about therapy but find the idea of one-on-one sessions more intimidating than starting in a group

Ask us about current group availability and timing when you reach out. New groups form based on interest and schedule alignment.

What It Looks Like to Work With Us

We know that reaching out to a therapist when you’re in the middle of a faith transition can feel like one more hard thing in a season that’s already full of hard things. We try to make the start of it as low-friction as possible.

Here’s how it works:

Step 1: A free 15-minute consultation. By phone or video call. No commitment, no pressure. This is a chance to tell us briefly where you’re at, ask any questions you have, and get a sense of whether we feel like the right fit. Most people come out of this call feeling better than they expected to, partly because just having the conversation can be a relief.

Step 2: A first session. This is longer (50 minutes) and more in depth. We’ll spend time getting to know you, your background, your current situation, what you’re hoping for from therapy, and what’s feeling most pressing right now. You don’t need to have things figured out before you come in. Most people don’t. That’s what therapy is for.

Step 3: Ongoing work at your pace. Some clients work with us for a few months on a specific set of concerns. Others are in for a longer journey. Some do individual sessions, some do the group, some do both. We’ll talk about what makes sense for you as we go.

We see clients in person in Salt Lake City and via telehealth throughout Utah. Evening and weekend availability varies — mention your scheduling constraints when you reach out and we’ll do our best to accommodate.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I have to have fully left my religion to come to therapy here?

Not at all! Many of our clients are in the early stages of questioning, still attending, still married to a believing spouse, still figuring out what they believe. You don’t need to have made any decisions to start therapy. In fact, therapy is often most useful before the big decisions get made, not after.

Are your therapists LDS or ex-LDS?

That’s a question we understand the impulse to ask, and we don’t take it personally. What we’d say is this: what matters more than our background is whether we understand the specific emotional and cultural landscape of faith transitions in Utah, and we do. We’ve worked with enough people going through this to know the terrain well. We’re not going to need you to explain what a bishop interview is, or what it feels like to stop wearing garments, or what the social math of a mixed-faith marriage looks like in a Utah ward. We get it.

Will therapy try to talk me back into my faith, or out of it?

Neither. We are not advocates for any theological position, and we have no stake in where you land. Our job is not to have an opinion about your beliefs. It’s to help you figure out what you actually believe, what you actually value, and how to build a life that reflects that, wherever it takes you. If you return to faith, we support that. If you don’t, we support that too.

What if my spouse is still fully in the faith and I’m not?

This is one of the most common, and most painful, situations we see. The mixed-faith relationship is its own kind of challenge, and it deserves its own kind of care. We work with individuals navigating this dynamic in their individual sessions, and we also offer couples counseling for partners trying to find a way to stay connected across a significant gap in belief. If this is your situation, mention it when you reach out and we can talk about what support might look like.

I’ve been out for a while, but I’m still not okay. Is that normal?

Yes. The acute crisis of a faith transition — the period of immediate upheaval — often resolves on a different timeline than the deeper work of rebuilding identity, meaning, and community. A lot of people come to us a year or two after leaving their faith, when they assumed they’d feel better by now and don’t fully understand why they don’t. This is very common, and it’s very workable. You haven’t missed a window.

Do you take insurance?

We accept select insurance plans and also offer self-pay rates. Visit our Fees page for current information, or simply ask us when you reach out, we’re happy to help you understand your options before you commit to anything.

Can I do this via telehealth if I’m not in Salt Lake City?

Yes. We see clients via telehealth throughout Utah. Whether you’re in Provo, Ogden, St. George, or a smaller community along the Wasatch Front, you can work with us by video from wherever you are.

You Don’t Have to Do This Alone

A faith transition in Utah can be one of the loneliest experiences a person goes through. The culture around you often doesn’t have language for what you’re feeling. The community that once held you may now feel like it’s on the other side of a wall you didn’t build. The people who love you most may be the ones who find it hardest to understand.

That kind of loneliness has a way of convincing you that something is wrong with you, that if you were stronger, or smarter, or more faithful, or less faithful, you wouldn’t be struggling this much. That’s not what’s happening. What’s happening is that you’re navigating something genuinely difficult, in a context that makes it harder than it would otherwise be, often without adequate support.

Therapy doesn’t fix that overnight. But it gives you a place where you can be completely honest — where what you’re actually thinking and feeling is welcome, not managed or minimized or redirected. A place where you can figure out, slowly if necessary, who you are and what you want your life to be about.

The people who come to us going through this are, consistently, some of the most thoughtful and courageous people we work with. We’d be glad to work with you.

Book a Free 15-Minute Consultation → Contact

Serving Salt Lake City and all of Utah via telehealth.
In-person sessions available in Salt Lake City.

Our Therapists

Julare Morris, LCSW — Clinical Director

Julare brings warmth, candor, and a genuine commitment to meeting clients exactly where they are. Her approach is open and direct, clients consistently describe her as someone who tells it to them straight, but in a way that feels like being cared for, not lectured to.

She specializes in anxiety, depression, grief, and life transitions, including the particular kind of loss and identity disruption that comes with leaving or questioning a faith tradition. Julare offers both individual sessions and facilitates group therapy.

She is accepting new clients. → Learn more about Julare

R.C. Morris, LCSW, PhD

R.C. specializes in existential psychotherapy, helping people find meaning during moments when the old frameworks no longer hold. He brings to clinical practice both his training as a licensed clinical social worker and his background as a sociologist and researcher at the University of Utah, where he studies the psychology of relationships and identity.

He works with clients navigating faith transitions, existential crises, grief, career and identity changes, and the kind of purposelessness that arrives when the life you’ve been living stops feeling like yours. His approach is thoughtful, grounded, and direct, with a focus on helping clients build a life that is genuinely centered on their own values rather than on inherited expectations.

He is accepting new clients. → Learn more about R.C.