Prayer and Pastoral Care

I recommend books by Lindsay C. Gibson, PsyD on healing from Emotionally Immature Parents or Emotionally Immature People. Since our parents or caregivers were often our primary example of love in the world, healing from the effects of unhealthy parenting can help heal us in other ways as well.

Our relationships are a fundamental part of our lives and often involve a complex balance of love, friendship, healthy communication, respect, good boundaries, and more. I recommend resources by The Gottman Institute and The Center for Non-Violent Communication‍ by Marshall Rosenberg, PhD. The Gottman Institute, by Drs. John and Julie Gottman, provides research-based or evidence-based information on relationships and their common challenges.

Grief is the experience of profound loss in life. Grief can involve the loss of a loved one, but it can also involve the loss of a friend, home, job or other elements that define our lives. I recommend resources by Elisabeth Kubler Ross, one of the world’s leading experts in grief and near-death experiences. GriefShare groups can also be found in many churches across the country.

Since love is the fundamental nature of God and ourselves, it is not “God’s will” that an unloving circumstance occur. It is up to us to listen to our intuition to get ourselves out of an unloving circumstance. If you feel you are being abused by someone and would like to talk with someone immediately, you can call the National Domestic Violence Hotline.

Certain church environments can foster abuse through things like a lack of proper accountability for leadership, hierarchal structure of authority, conflating human authority with divine will, autocratic or controlling leadership, financial manipulation, a focus on obedience over love, enforcement of gender roles, encouraging women to stay in unloving or abusive marriages, hiring or promotion of of narcissistic pastors in churches or ministries, condemnation or discrimination against people who are gay or LGBQTIA+, a lack of belief in or understanding of mental health care, criticizing emotions, lack of respect or understanding towards neurodiverse populations, discrimination towards minority groups or people with disabilities, institutional protection of leaders (such as honor culture), church coverups, and more. If you’ve been emotionally, physically, mentally, or otherwise abused within a church or Christian environment, feel free to contact me.

Community can be a wonderful thing as humans are hard-wired to be social beings. However, some communities or groups are not healthy from within and can be what is called a high-control group. High-control groups are churches, communities, or organizations (like Scientology) that expect high loyalty to the leadership or the group’s ideology. They often use tactics of overt or covert control to reinforce conformity to the group and/or its leader. For more information on HCGs, I recommend Dr. Steven Hassan’s BITE Model of Authoritarian Control and the Influence Continuum.

LGBQTQIA+ individuals and can have positive encounters with the God of Love and Light on the other side. I highly recommend research by Liz Dale, PhD to learn more about the spiritual experiences of gays and lesbians. She has written a book entitled Crossing Over and Coming Home. Christian Andreason is a prominent LGBTQIA+ experiencer who lives openly. You can read more of his experience of going to Heaven and others on near-death.com.

LGBTQIA+ individuals are at a special risk for suicide. Studies show there is a direct correlation between suicidality within the LGBTQIA+ community and religious beliefs. If you are on the LGBTQIA+ spectrum and are considering ending your life, please feel free to contact me, a licensed professional counselor, or someone at The Trevor Project for more immediate assistance. If you are considering ending your life for any reason, consider connecting with a trusted friend, contacting a trusted pastor, calling 988, or a seeking out a licensed professional counselor. Often times, talking with a compassionate person about what you’re going through can help ease the pain and give you the courage to move forward.

Life on the other side is often full of tales of a God of Love and Light. I recommend books like Jesus Calling by Sarah Young, Angels in My Hair by Lorna Byrne, and the Conversations with God Book series by Neale Donald especially Friendship with God and Communion with God. I also recommend organizations like IANDS, NDERF, ACISTE, SAI, Spiritual-Experiences, Near-Death News, and Dr. Raymond Moody’s Life After Life for understanding the full spectrum of spiritual experiences and why love is what truly matters to God. For children, I recommend The Little Soul and The Earth by Neale Donald Walsch and Grandma, What is a Soul? by Rev. Karen Herrick, PhD.

God showed me when I first came back from my experience of going to Heaven that “negative emotions” (feelings based in fear instead of love) are actually stored in our spiritual bodies and not our souls. Our souls are made of pure love that comes from God. Books like The Emotion Code by Dr. Bradley Nelson and The Body Keeps the Score by Dr. Bessel van der Kolk highlight this phenomenon. Learning to release the “negative emotion” (an absence of truth) or trauma from within the body often takes counseling or learning to relax the mind, body, and spirit enough to release the emotion (that might feel like heaviness, hardness, or darkness). You can begin to release the emotion when you learn to refrain from engaging in it. You can also pray, meditate, use your spiritual authority in Christ or ask God and the angels to help you release any emotion which is not beneficial to you.