Typing “Christian counseling” into a search bar means you’ve already worked out whether you want your faith in the room.
So I’m not going to spend this page talking you into something you decided before you arrived.
What’s left is the harder question, and it’s the one I hear asked sideways: what happens to my actual problem once faith is in the room with it?
That question has an answer, and it lives in what a Christian counselor refuses to do.
That room exists, and I’ve sat in it, though never in the counselor’s chair.
It’s the one where a hard feeling gets answered with a verse, where your anxiety gets read as a spiritual failure, and where the counseling part turns out to be advice with a devotional attached.
Six years at the Center for Christian Counseling and Relationship Development taught me how this work is done well, and I’m a marriage and family therapist, licensed in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
Soul care, practiced honestly, is precise about its own limits, and those limits are the whole reason it works.
You shouldn’t have to spend three sessions interviewing me to find this out, so I’ll put it plainly.
Soul care is not:
If what you’re living with has a clinical cause, I’m going to treat it as clinical and tell you so directly, rather than hand you something devotional and hope it holds.
Ruling those six things out leaves a great deal, and what it leaves is all of you.
Soul care is:
My part is to bring clinical skill, curiosity, and respect to your story, and yours is to tell it the way it actually happened.
Once you trust that a hard feeling won’t be corrected out of you, you start saying the true version of things on the first try instead of the third.
Anger gets examined instead of confessed.
A question about God gets asked out loud, in front of somebody trained to help you think it through instead of settling it for you.
And the work stops being a choice between taking your faith seriously and taking your symptoms seriously.
The free phone consultation is a short version of everything this page describes, and it’s the only honest way I know to prove any of it.
You’ll tell me what’s going on, and I’ll listen for what sits underneath it before I say a word about what you should do. By the end of the call you’ll know whether this is the room you want to keep talking in.
I see individuals, couples, and families in my Blackwood, New Jersey office, and online anywhere in New Jersey or Pennsylvania.
Call me at (856) 395-9536, or write to aliveandwelltherapy@gmail.com.
A house divided against itself can’t stand. You’ve been living inside the proof of that for a while now, and somewhere along the way you stopped expecting the rest of the sentence to be true.
The rest of it is true. A house with two people standing on the same side of it will hold up under things that would have flattened it before. That is the whole aim of the work: get the two of you on the same team, and then let the two of you go after the actual problem.
When you and I talk, I’ll tell you plainly what I make of it. I’d rather be useful to you than agreeable.
Write to me at aliveandwelltherapy@gmail.com, and we’ll set up a consultation.