Trusting Yourself After Religious Change

Moving forward with Monica DiCristina

Entering 2026 — I’m currently accepting coaching clients from anywhere in the world. While only therapy can treat mental health symptoms, coaching can help with a lot! My coaching practice helps people work through everything from navigating the impact of faith changes in your personal life to making big life decisions, religious implications or not. More info here.

In today’s episode, I’m joined by licensed professional counselor Monica DiCristina to explore the question that haunts so many people leaving conservative religious environments: What can I trust about myself?

Monica shares her thoughts on navigating the messy reality of learning to trust your own intuition, emotions, and body when you’ve been taught that authority figures and scripture are the only reliable sources of “knowing.” We swap stories about our own religious upbringings—hers navigating both Spanish Catholicism and 90s evangelicalism—and how anxiety disorders complicated our ability to discern what was “the Holy Spirit” versus our own mental health struggles.

We explore how naming your pain is different from naming yourself, why wisdom feels expansive rather than anxious, and how Jesus’s command to “love your neighbor as yourself” actually validates self-trust rather than self-abandonment.

If you’ve ever wondered whether you can trust a gut feeling or found yourself paralyzed by the epistemological crisis of our current moment, this conversation offers a refreshingly non-anxious path forward.

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