FAQs

There are many different frameworks for both therapy and coaching, so this is using very broad brushstrokes, but the way I think about it is that therapy is for people who are having trouble functioning and need support to function well, and coaching is for people who are doing okay, but are looking to up-level in specific areas of their life, or who want specific help during life transitions. Therapy tends to look more into how the past impacts the present. Coaching tends to look more towards the future, and a good coach will spend time helping their client map out intentional ways of moving forward into the life of their dreams. Coaching also tends to be shorter term, and therapeutic relationships can last a very long time.

There is certainly some overlap between coaching and therapy, and both can dramatically uplevel your feelings of wellness. If you are struggling with serious mental health concerns, therapy is the best place to start, but if you are functioning but feel “stuck”, then try life coaching!

Everyone has different reasons for leaving, and mine were very much centered on social issues. I increasingly felt like the direction the church was going was at odds with my true moral compass and value system. 

At first, I started to have the distinct impression - from my hyper-gendered social encounters - that women really weren’t being asked or allowed or expected to live up to their full human potential. Then I came across statistics about the high rates of Prozac usage in the state of Utah, and the high rates of plastic surgery, and I came to believe that women in the church are not, as a whole, doing well. Then I came across a Bloomberg article about the sketchy financial practices of the church, and the huge gap between its wealth, and its infinitesimally small contribution towards humanitarian aid. I felt very disillusioned as it all started to crumble around me.

During that time, I felt daily like I was holding scales, with the balance tipping back and forth: do we go or do we stay? At the end of 2015 the church secretly released anti-LGBTIQ+ instructions in the leadership handbook - which was later called the "Exclusion Policy" - and my husband and I could no longer pretend that this was of God, or that we were okay with the direction the church was going. We left shortly thereafter.  

No, I joined the church when I was 16 years old. When I met the missionaries through my best childhood friend, I was excited by a community that provided a scaffolding with clear instructions for how to live a “good” life, and I loved the shininess of the families I saw at church. I was really on fire as a new convert and was quite “extra” for a lot of years. I graduated from BYU, went on to serve a mission to Tokyo, Japan, and was married in the Timpanogos Temple in Utah.

For most of us, deconstructing/unlearning/unfucking our brains from Mormonism is a lifelong process. I am still in process too, and always evolving. Most of us are still carrying stories from our early years in the Mormon church about how the world works, and we’re not even aware that they are stories. We think they are the Capital T Truth, because they were taught to us as Truth by the people who nurtured us in those early, formative years.  

Coaching is about making those stories visible to us as exactly what they are – optional beliefs about how the world works. Being able to see all of it as optional allows us to question whether or not these stories still serve our life, and if we still want to continue believing them and operating by them. This unlearning process will probably be a lifelong journey. If your exodus from the church was not terribly recent, but there are areas you are still feeling stuck, I can absolutely help you.

I was! And occasionally, when particularly gross stuff comes up in the news about the church, I still do feel angry at the church. When I left seven years ago I felt so many emotions – anger, grief, disgust... But after deeply experiencing and processing that range of human emotions that comes up when transitioning out of a high-demand religion, I was ready to release the hold the Mormon church had on me. I didn’t want to give the church any more power over my life, not even in the form of resentment or a grudge.

This wasn’t because I felt like the church deserved special treatment (quite the contrary!), or because I believe in toxic positivity, it was because I wanted to create a new chapter of life for myself, where I retook the authority I had abdicated. Being a very pragmatic person, I discovered that I gave the church less airtime in my brain when I chose a neutral story about it, than when I chose a painful story that kept me spinning. I worked to get to a place of feeling *mostly* neutral about the church so that I could move forward instead of being fixated on the past. I also noticed that when I was feeling so on fire, the result was that it spilled into my relationships with people I loved, and I realized that if I wanted them to respect my decision to leave, I also needed to respect their decision to stay.

In addition, although I had so many cringy memories of who I was when I was a church member, I also did the work to have compassion towards the earlier version of myself, who did the best she could with what she had. So my choice was to leave in peace - both towards the church (as much as possible), and towards the earlier “church member version” of myself. And I love to coach people who have that same goal. 

If that is not you, I totally get it, and you are absolutely free to choose whatever way out works for you. But this was my own personal journey, and I would love to offer it to others as well!

Yes. I made the decision with my husband to have our names removed from the records of the church, because we didn’t want our children to be even remotely church-adjacent, and we no longer had any desire to be mentioned in meetings. We had both been missionaries, and had spent countless wasted hours in Japan, hunting down people who were on our "inactive" lists. 

Hmmmm, no thanks! 

We met with the local leaders and we requested that our names be removed from the records of the church. We jumped through the (relatively straight-forward) hoops to have the process finalized, and then we went out for decadent chocolate mousse and tiny cups of Greek coffee to celebrate the occasion. I will always remember the sense of freedom we felt that night!

However, I have many friends who have decided not to have their names removed, and there is no one right way to go about it. Some of my friends like the idea of having Home Teachers (or whatever they are called these days) come to visit on occasion, and so they don’t mind keeping their names on the records of the church. Other friends like keeping it official, in case they are wrong about leaving, and can use it as a ticket in Heaven to argue for their entrance! But in all seriousness, like everything I will coach you on, there is no one right way to leave the church. There is just the way that works for you, and all of the ways that don't work for you. My job is to help you tap into your own wisdom on what to do, and then give you skills to navigate your way forward!