Spiritually Integrated Psychotherapy
I invite you to bring your whole self to therapy, including your faith, beliefs, values, and deepest questions about meaning.
For many people, spirituality, faith, or a deep sense of purpose is the foundation of how they move through the world. Those things often get left outside traditional mental health settings, sometimes because a client assumes they belong elsewhere, sometimes because a therapist feels unequipped to take them up.
This page is an invitation to bring them in. Your struggles, your relationships, your spiritual injuries, and the healing you are looking for all deserve to be understood. I have found that exploring these parts of a person's life can complement the therapeutic work, including the evidence-based approaches I use for trauma.
The Heart of the Matter
Some people find faith or spirituality central to how they understand themselves and their lives. Others arrive at questions of meaning during loss, change, trauma, illness, or a stretch of uncertainty, sometimes for the first time in decades. Spiritually Integrated Psychotherapy, or SIP, makes room for these questions inside the therapy itself.
In SIP, the beliefs, values, questions, and sources of meaning that matter most to a person are sometimes described as the Heart of the Matter.
The field also draws on the work of psychologist Kenneth I. Pargament, author of Spiritually Integrated Psychotherapy: Understanding and Addressing the Sacred.
You do not need to belong to a particular religion or think of yourself as spiritual for this work to be useful. A strong faith is welcome here and so is an existential crisis, and neither is required. Some people are simply curious. Others are looking to heal from religious trauma or a deep spiritual injury. Wherever you are, your starting point is whatever is important to you.
Your Worldview Is Part of Who You Are
Some people keep these subjects out of therapy because they worry their beliefs will be misunderstood, dismissed, or treated as a symptom of something. Others have had religion imposed on them in ways that left them ashamed, frightened, controlled, cut off from themselves, or genuinely traumatized.
SIP has room for all of that. Training in this approach emphasizes making room for your religious, spiritual, or secular worldview to guide this part of the work.
I gravitated toward SIP out of my own curiosity. I am interested in the range of ways people answer the big questions, I enjoy learning about beliefs, values, and traditions, and I hold real reverence for whatever a person finds to be the Heart of the Matter in their own life. I see therapy as a sacred trust, and I consider it an honor to help people make the changes they came to make.
Within this work we can draw on resources from your own religious or spiritual tradition. If religion and spirituality are not part of your life, they can stay out of the therapy entirely. Many of my clients find that existential questions surface on their own at certain points in the work, and there is room for that when it happens.
When Faith Is a Source of Strength
If you have a strong connection to a faith or spiritual tradition, you probably already know what it provides: meaning, community, comfort, identity, and a way of holding experiences that would otherwise be hard to make sense of.
What I want to understand is how those beliefs relate to what brought you here, and how they can serve as resources in the work you are doing.
When Religion Has Been Painful
Spirituality and religion are not always a source of comfort. Some people have experienced judgment, rejection, shame, coercion, or fear within a religious family, community, or institution. Others are in the middle of questioning teachings that shaped their identity, their relationships, and their sense of what was true.
Leaving or reconsidering a spiritual community or belief system carries its own losses. Relationships change, sometimes permanently. A familiar certainty gives way. Questions that seemed settled open again, often at a point in life when that is deeply inconvenient.
I can accompany you through that without judgment, and without asking you to defend the tradition or reject it. You set the direction of your own exploration, and you can leave the conclusion open as long as you need to.
Spirituality Without Religion
An interest in the spiritual or the transcendent is entirely optional here. Secular clients often tell me they appreciate having their questions taken seriously when life brings them somewhere unexpected. Self-actualization without a spiritual frame is a worthwhile pursuit on its own terms.
This work can help clarify questions that have been sitting unformed, particularly during a major transition or after a life-altering experience:
The answers can be religious or entirely secular. Both belong here.
How I Approach This Work
I work with people from a range of religious, spiritual, cultural, and secular backgrounds. I may ask about your tradition or worldview because a label tells me very little about what it actually means to you. I am also genuinely interested in the answer.
My aim is to help you work toward what you came to therapy for while keeping the Heart of the Matter in view: the values, beliefs, questions, and experiences that shape how you live. Where you land on any of it stays yours to decide.
Is This Right for You?
This may fit if you want therapy where faith, doubt, meaning, values, or questions of purpose can be part of the conversation.
That may include people with strong religious commitments, people who have left a tradition or are reconsidering one, and people who would not describe themselves as spiritual at all but are sitting with questions that have no simple answers. It can also include people carrying wounds from a religious community who want trauma-informed care that is spiritually sensitive.
What I offer is psychotherapy. Spiritual direction, pastoral counseling, religious instruction, and guidance from within a particular tradition are different things, and other practitioners are better suited to provide them.
Getting Started
If you are looking for therapy where spirituality, faith, doubt, meaning, or purpose can be discussed openly, I would welcome the conversation. We can talk through whether this is a good fit for what you are looking for.
I offer a free phone consultation. You can reach me at 845-202-9774 or through the contact page.
I see clients in person at my Suffern, NY office and via telehealth throughout New York State and Florida.
Curious if this feels like the right fit?
I invite you to start with a consultation. There is no pressure, just a conversation to see whether working together makes sense.
Are You a Therapist?
I am an authorized trainer in Spiritually Integrated Psychotherapy through the Association for Clinical Pastoral Education (ACPE) and provide training and consultation for clinicians interested in this approach.
Curious if this feels like the right fit?
I invite you to start with a consultation. There is no pressure, just a conversation to see whether working together makes sense.