Gabriel Mizrahi

rather than someone whose main goal might be interpreting what she had done through the lens of their system or, you know, trying to keep her in the fold or get her to double down on her existing beliefs or whatever.

I can see how that sounds a lot like, I don't want you to believe what you believe.

I want you to see someone who's, you know, going to poke holes in your beliefs, but that is actually not what I meant.

Theoretically, yes, in an appropriate way, if it's done in the spirit of following those questions wherever they lead and helping her come to her own conclusions, right?

Even if those are different from the therapist.

But it's not like I was hoping that she would end up with someone whose goal would be to get her to leave her faith.

Yeah, I hear that.

Good distinction.

Also, a lot of this, by the way, is informed by some letters we've gotten from people who have seen counselors in their religious community, and they have shared some really concerning stories with us.

Like, they went to a quote-unquote therapist at their church, or

an imam who does counseling quote-unquote and often these people are not licensed or even really trained and the person brings something really intense to them and it doesn't happen every time but a lot of these counselors have said to our listeners well the bible says this or god wants you to do that or you shouldn't think about this thought anymore or here's what you need to do to make this right and i just can't see how that is truly therapeutic even if that's what some people might want out of that experience yeah i'm with you there

So if that listener happened to end up with a licensed therapist who is also a Christian, great, and it's totally possible that they could do good work together.

I'm not opposed to that at all.

But just given how attached she was to her community and how much distress she was clearly in after what she had been through, I felt like the likelihood of her finding someone who could truly help her and somebody who could maybe give her a more objective point of view, that was higher outside of the community.

Oh, damn.

Yeah.

Perfect example.

I mean, look, I would hope that most religious counselors or people in counseling roles would not do something like that.

I have to assume or I want to believe that those are the outliers, right?

And also like we have experts we talk to regularly who are chaplains, pastors, priests, rabbis, you know, we turn to them and we value their advice deeply.