My Relationship with Religion & Spirituality — And What It Means for Our Work Together

If you ask me what my religion is, I won't have a clean answer for you — and it won't be for lack of thinking about it. I've spent more time turning this over than almost anything else in my life, and I still can't hand you a single word for where I've landed. If you're looking for a therapist who shares your faith, or wondering what lens I bring to conversations about religion, identity, and belonging, I'd rather tell you the real story than hand you a word that doesn't quite fit.

A note before you read on: This post includes a fair amount of self-disclosure including personal history, past struggles, and details about my own life. If you're a current or potential client and you'd rather not know this much about me, it's completely okay to skip this one. We can always talk through these general themes together in a session or consultation if that feels more comfortable. If you do continue reading, and you have thoughts or questions for me, I invite you to share with me in session as well.

Where I've Been

I grew up Baptist, evangelical, and deeply embedded in it — my grandmother taught Sunday school, church wasn't a weekly event so much as the architecture of my childhood.

I remember being about fifteen, up way too late on my phone, when a lunar eclipse turned the moon red outside my window. I saw a post online quoting a Bible verse implying that a blood moon meant the rapture was near — urgently, imminently. I hadn't yet let myself admit that I wasn't sure I still believed any of it, but the post still landed like a physical blow. I went out into the yard and stood under that red moon and cried because I didn't have an answer and I was running out of time to find one. I was a bisexual teenager who had been taught that who I was made me unwelcome in heaven — that not being straight, not performing womanhood in the "right" way, was sinful on its own. I couldn't reconcile my own values with the Christianity I'd been handed, and there was a red moon over my head that felt like a countdown.

That was one of the more dramatic moments, but the quieter version of it ran underneath everything: constantly molding myself into a version that felt acceptable rather than authentic. Around the same time, I was starting to care deeply about politics and social justice, and that caring felt fundamentally at odds with the conservative Christian world I'd grown up in. I remember thinking — if I can manage to embody love this fully on my own, shouldn't God be capable of at least that much? It was disorienting to hold both the fear of hell and that question at the same time.

Eventually I stepped away from Christianity altogether. For a few years, I found real relief in new-age spirituality — astrology, energy work, that whole world. It gave me something church hadn't: a felt sense of connection, to the earth, to the people around me, to something larger than a set of rules I was supposed to follow without asking why. I don't regret a minute of it. But somewhere in there, I started to wonder if what I'd been missing in Christianity wasn't actually missing from Christianity itself — just from the version I'd been handed.

Where I Am Now

Moving to Toronto changed things. Through community and relationships in my life here, I found myself drawn into Islam in a way I hadn't expected. For the first time, I encountered an image of God rooted in mercy and compassion rather than fear. That shifted something I didn't know was still stuck. It was during this time that I had friends who took me to the mosque for the first time, and taught me how to pray.

Eventually, this led me to my first experience of Ramadan. Waking at five in the morning to pray while it was still pitch black outside. Fasting through the day. Spending an entire month with my energy and attention centred on this new, gentler version of God I was getting to know. It was unlike anything I'd experienced before. There was something about the sheer level of dedication it asked of me that felt like a marker in itself — proof that I was capable of showing up that fully for something again, after so many years of feeling unsure I could show up for any faith at all. Mostly, though, what I remember is gratitude. An overwhelming, almost disbelieving thankfulness that I had finally found this sense of connection and compassion.

Around the same time, I started encountering Christian liberation theology. What really cracked it open was a book called Hell Bent: How the Fear of Hell Holds Christians Back from a Spirituality of Love, by Brian Recker (2025). The idea underneath it stopped me in my tracks: that you are already fully loved and accepted, with nothing to earn and nothing to prove, because hell was never the threat I'd been taught it was. Recker points to some of the closing verses in Revelation, where the gates of the holy city are described as never being shut, and where anyone who's thirsty is invited to come and drink freely, without condition (Revelation 21:25, 22:17). Reading that, I remember feeling a relief I wasn't expecting. I think I'd spent years quietly bracing for rejection, and this was the first time I let myself believe it wasn't coming.

It did more than settle my fear of hell, too. It reframed the whole point of faith for me. Faith stopped being about escaping this world and started being about the work of building something good within it. Growing up, I was often taught the idea that caring for the earth or fighting for justice here didn't really matter, because we were all getting pulled out of here eventually anyway. That never sat right with me, especially as I was coming into my own politics and my own sense of what I owed the people around me. Liberation theology gave me language for something I'd already sensed but hadn't been able to put into words: that caring for this world wasn't in competition with my faith. It was the practice of it.

Today, my practice is genuinely rooted in a variety of different practices, though there are some I gravitate towards more than others. I keep the Bible and the Quran close by. I pray in the Christian way and the Islamic way. I practice dhikr alongside mindfulness. I also practice yoga, partly for my mental health, and partly because I've grown to appreciate the spiritual tradition it's rooted in as well. I read spiritual philosophy and liberatory thinkers from across these traditions and try to let all of it shape how I move through the world.

I don't experience religion and spirituality as competing systems I have to choose between anymore. I've come to think of them more as different languages, largely saying the same things in different words. I'm not Muslim. I'm not the kind of Christian I was raised to be. Looking back, I don't think I was ever actually lost — not as a scared teenager, not in my new-age years, not now, still piecing this together. I was just further along a path I couldn't see the shape of yet.

How This Shows Up in the Room

This isn't just a personal story I'm sharing for transparency's sake — it shapes how I actually work.

I don't come into the room with an agenda about what you should believe. I might, where it's relevant, expose you to more liberating ways of understanding faith than the ones you were handed — and I'll be genuinely curious what that brings up for you — but it's never my job to tell you what to think. A lot of religious trauma work focuses on deconstruction: taking apart what you were taught so you can understand it clearly. That's real and necessary work, but I think it's incomplete on its own. My goal is to help you get to reconstruction, too — building something on the other side of deconstruction that actually feels meaningful to you. There's real grounding for this beyond just my own opinion — physician and bioethicist Daniel Sulmasy's widely cited biopsychosocial-spiritual model argues that genuinely holistic care has to account for a person's spiritual dimension, not just the physical, psychological, and social (Sulmasy, 2002). If we only deconstruct and never rebuild, I think we leave that whole domain empty.

Part of what I hold onto in this work is a clear-eyed view that religion and God have been weaponized (by colonialism, white supremacy, patriarchy, systems of control) and that this has shaped a great deal of what many of us were taught to believe. Where I don't have an agenda is in what you do with that. I'm not trying to convince you of any particular conclusion about God. What I care about is helping you get underneath what you were taught, to whatever turns out to be true for you.

I've bumped up against moments before where the lack of a tidy religious label made people wonder whether I was "allowed" in these conversations. I understand that instinct, and I respect anyone's right to want a therapist who shares their specific tradition. But I also trust what it means to have actually lived inside this mess, not just studied it. Having to find my own way through that process has left me less interested in certainty and more interested in creating the conditions where people can discover something new for themselves. That's at the heart of how I practice therapy.

I work relationally, psychodynamically, and experientially, and with the knowing that this sense of liberation isn't limited to explicitly religious conversations. Whatever we're working on together, a core part of my goal is helping you hold onto the possibility that something else is possible. We may be more shaped by the stories, systems, and beliefs we’ve inherited than we realize, but that also means there is room to question them, understand them, and choose what you want to carry forward.

What This Means for You

If sharing a specific faith with your therapist is something you need, I hope you find exactly the right person, even if that's not me. And if you're in the middle of it all, still questioning, still grieving, still piecing together what you believe and who that makes you, I'd be glad to sit with you there. That's not a place I need you to explain or apologize for. It's a place I know well.

If any of this resonates, I would love to hear from you. You’re welcome to reach out through my contact page or email me directly at taylor@the4thspace.ca for a free 20-minute consultation.

References

Recker, B. (2025). Hell Bent: How the Fear of Hell Holds Christians Back from a Spirituality of Love. Convergent Books.

Sulmasy, D. P. (2002). “A Biopsychosocial-Spiritual Model for the Care of Patients at the End of Life." The Gerontologist, 42, 24–33 — Oxford Academic