Recently, my voice has been annoyed and stifled by not understanding where all of my abuse and trauma began. And often we, as humans, don’t get the privilege to speak with the people who promote systems of harm and suffering and have them really want to hear our side and listen to how to remediate our pain and hurt. And maybe we can’t.

I spent so long wanting to be someone I was proud of.

I thought it was me wanting to impress my parents. But it wasn’t that.

It was that many of the things I loved that I was damn good at were full of people who only knew how to promote the damaging and harmful sides of themselves and their field, rather than being open to all the sections of the field that can help everyone.

I wanted to be in some form of ministry or counselling forever.

That’s the damn truth.

I don’t care if people are going to be conservative theologically. I understand that there are a lot of places where that exists. And I also now understand that being relgiously conservative is so different from political conservatism. And that is a whole separate discussion that is worth a whole set of posts and side bars and everything, I promise.

To me, God and Jesus and faith were amazing.

I fucking accepted Jesus into my heart when I was six. And I was like, that’s good enough for me. Don’t need a showy baptism. Accepting Jesus doesn’t need to be for the benefit of anyone else. That’s the Biblical side of it, no? And so I didn’t care to talk about it.

So when I became this really smart and quirky girl with a lot of neurodivergence, my faith and love of God somehow weren’t enough anymore.

Somehow it mattered more that I was bothered that leaders were picking fights with queer communities and mentally ill persons for not being good enough. Somehow my “Holy Spirit” fueled rage that people needing instant relief shouldn’t be ridiculed for the means to how they found solace, and even that queerness and mental health aren’t sin, were more blasphemous than accepted. It was a wild ride of complete insanity.

For some damn reason, I thought moving to a really conservative state would be where they’d accept my highly liberal and outspoken self. Um? It was a hot take. I agree.

I could take way too many words to throughly go through how many faith based organizations discriminated against me for all the wrong reasons. I really could.

But I’ll say it simply: It was never an issue until I made it clear that I was a strong Christian whose queerness did not separate her from God and in fact made her feel stronger in her calling and understanding of who God was and the Bible’s innate meaning.

It was fine to be queer. But only if it was in the past tense or part of a grand story of a sin God helped me overcome and am now better for having no longer engaged with. Gross.

And so, over time, I started to feel that the God I knew was hate.

I understood that the argument of the faith organizations was, “Well, this is what we believe and this our doctrine,” which was fine, I guess. But, to me, taking the stance that someone cannot be offended by you because it’s your belief is abusive. It’s wrong.

Maybe that’s too liberal or woke.

Or maybe it’s just really damn honest.

So when I realized I couldn’t do ministry, because there was no way I was going to spend any longer hiding a part of myself that made me wonderful, I considered that the aspect I adored wasn’t the “Preach about God” but “Hear your story and help,” which I later came to understand is not really ministry and is not something any religious organization sees a difference between, which formulated my entire argument in learning psychology.

Because I went to a school once, Grand Canyon University, and their Clinical Counseling program was amazing. It just wasn’t CACREP accredited, which was only a problem because I knew I wasn’t staying in Arizona forever. I knew this because the state was super conservative and many people there were treating mental illness as abuse and not wanting to help people who were mentally ill. I was alone and scared a lot.

The school was and is a Christian campus. And to their complete credit, you would never really know it. They don’t talk about theology in every class. I taught a math and sociology class there and we made it through the whole course and not once were we making the students talk about how they felt Jesus would interact. Colorado Christian did. And they said they were a Christian School. Not a Bible College. There’s a big difference.

To me, my fight has been that pastoral counseling is bad counseling.

I have had very, very bad counselors who were trained that way.

Their aloof and stupid responses were so harmful. I couldn’t believe it. It still sticks with me to this day that a clinical counselor didn’t think processing through a dilemma about feeling unheard in the church as a queer woman and being depressed for it was a use of therapy. She instead tried to get rid of me. Talk about adding to the mental health crisis.

As well, I have been in situations where pastors thought they were helping, but really, their “faith-based interventions” were used to promote and encourage ways to help cover up and gaslight abuse. I will never forget how multiple pastors helped him cover up his abuse by allowing him to lie and pretend that my illness was harming him.

Pastors also would hear me and their understanding of mental health was so harmful that I almost wanted to scream bloody murder. “Wow, it’s so cool that you’re a therapist with all the stuff you’ve been though.” It’s almost like they thought empathy didn’t exist in the mentally ill population. That was a firey take that was too hot. I did not like it.

It’s why I fight so hard to not attend a program that isn’t clinical.

I did my research.

I am still fighting to get a reasonable resolution, because, I actually do know the distinction between pastoral and clinical counseling. And when people lie to me about it after I ask a defining question but also a telling question, I am so upset.

My fight is not that people can’t or should never be pastors.

I don’t mind that there are pastors.

My fight is that pastors are not clinical staff, and this is because they intervene from the perspective of theology and God and thinking that “Well maybe it’s a faith issue” when some issues are real and hard and not fair, and faith is not enough. Pastors see the issue as always one of needing to have more faith or turn to God. Clinical staff see coping skills, interventions, techniques to soothe, or even offer assurance that life sucks sometimes.

To me, it’s worth fighting that pastoral counseling cannot represent itself as clinical.

They are vastly different.

I was helped by clinical staff who took me seriously and listened to my hard emotions and feelings and took the time to not say I was doing something wrong. I do know that we often learn more about how to do a job from those we see do it. And I also know that I have learned what not to do by witnessing some really shitty counseling.

I do not have that graduate degree yet.

But it’s because I was lied to about a program and what it was.

And recovering from being lied to by an organization is hard.

It feels like things are so challenging.

But my fight is worth fighting.

And my dream is worth going after, always.

It’s just on a pause.

XOXO,

Dorothy B.