CELEBRATING

Whether you are strengthening the foundation upon which you established yourself or relishing in a fresh welcome to a community you’ve found later in life, affirming your faith and cultural connections is a powerfully impactful time in your life.

Cultivating a space that makes you feel like you belong is important. Both culture and religion can give you a spiritual home and community, grounding your roots in a space feels good and authentic to you.

If you are re-connecting with the communities from your past or hoping to process your emotions through a cultural lens, let us support the way those threads can be woven into your life and untangle the places they’re stuck in your past.

RE-EVALUATING

For many, the culture we are born into is an intrinsic part of our identity. For some, it’s a misaligned edge or a painful thorn within the otherwise comfortable skin of who you are.

Questioning, rejecting or re-orienting your relationship with the culture or faith you have always known is an emotional process.

It may be a painful experience or a liberating one, but regardless, we are here to help you as you walk through each stage of such a profound life experience. Removing the chains of expectation and indoctrination for what you were taught without agency can be freeing, but even when it is, there are questions. There is learning, unlearning, and re-processing of experiences as you navigate life through a different lens. It feels like a lot, and it is, but you don’t have to do it alone.

Cultural and faith based value is important in therapeutic healing and support.

Cultural and faith-based consideration

Building a life that feels authentic with a community that is supportive of your cultural and religious needs is important. Diversity is valuable, and so is being understood. A healthy mix is best, including a counselor who can approach emotional exploration through a culturally considerate environment where you feel safe to explore and question as you need.

Reconciling choice and comfort

For some people, culture and faith feel stifling. It’s not always because they don’t share the values that are held dear within the communities they are a part of. Being stripped of the choice, even if you feel well suited to where you are, can be a difficult obstacle in which to recognize the validity of your position in those spaces. Perhaps you feel resentful of the roles thrust on you, or uncertain of the strength or root of your values when you were brought up in it instead of making an active choice toward it. While choice is important, embracing something because it feels right is always enough. We’d be happy to help you work through the emotions you feel, even if your faith feels well suited to your life.

How do I navigate my past while embracing a new faith?

One step at a time. Whether it’s an emotion, experience or trauma, you will move through your past and reprocess the things that shaped you with the knowledge and security you feel in the new choices you’ve made for yourself. Your renewed convictions and sense of self will offer you a new perspective on the old you. Perhaps among those things, you will also find fresh compassion for where you’ve been.

What if I don’t know what I don’t know?

You don’t need the answers. You don’t even need to be seeking answers to take up space here- not in our counseling relationship, or in your identity. Whether you know where your culture and faith questions have taken you, or whether you even want to know where you are going, you are valid exactly where you are. We want to be there with you, and there are no strings. There is nothing you need to be or know other than yourself. We can do the rest together.

I’m proud of my culture but I don’t feel connected to it. What now?

By exploring the reasons you feel disconnected from the culture into which you were born or raised, we can begin to develop an understanding of what you need to connect. Through that understanding, there are many directions you can take on the path to creating a connection that feels authentic and real for you. No matter how long it takes to feel it, your cultural identity is valid and we will work with you to support that knowledge.

I’m angry about the choices I made before I arrived in this space. How do I move past it?

Exactly like this! By seeking therapeutic expertise who can help you to move through your experiences with a culturally sensitive viewpoint will offer you the blueprint you need for lasting change. Anger is not a negative emotion. Much like pain, it lets us know there’s something we need to look at more carefully. With compassion and a guiding hand, we can explore your past and your current cultural kaleidoscope.

Support

Feeling understood and valid in your global and individual experience is a priceless gift, and we want to give it to you. Your culture, faith and identity will be validated as well as respected every time you share space with your therapist.

With a focus on compassionate support, we give you our word that we will meet you where you are. We aim to provide the therapeutic intervention that suits your needs and preferences, as well as sensitivity toward your cultural and faith-based experiences.

Healing

There is no wound so deep that you cannot heal past it, no matter how old or how ingrained the things that made it may be. You will heal when you are willing to walk through the ache of cultural and faith-rooted change.

While you may not be the same after the healing, there’s a future where you have moved beyond it. As you heal from the weight of culture and faith and find new comfort in the gravity of your choices, we want to support you.

Integration

You do not have to sacrifice who you were to blossom into who you’re becoming, no matter the culture or faith changes you’re undergoing.

When you are assimilating what you know with what you thought, and who you are with who you were, the places those things intersect may feel complicated. But through a compassionate and culturally sensitive therapeutic approach, you can navigate the way forward toward an integrated and hopeful future.