(she/her)My story is one in which I organized myself around survival, adaptation, responsibility, certainty, belonging, and approval. Mostly because I was creative, inspired, high functioning, and passionate about meaningful connection.
I found belonging in faith and the mission of evangelicalism and started my mental health career in this worldview. As client after client shared their stories, I began to question the belief I had once held tightly—that we are inherently broken or evil. Their lives told a different story.
I started to see how fear had been used to control behavior, how spiritual bypassing disconnected people from their intuition, and how religious messaging moralized our disconnection from self.
So I began to pull apart the things that once held me together—and slowly, I started living in alignment with my embodied life. Now I work with people who are finding safety to stop organizing their life around adaptation and participate fully in their selfhood.
Hi, I’m Jillian
My work is shaped by trusting the pace of human transformation. We do not get to where we want to go by pushing toward outcomes. This only perpetuates the echo chambers and messages that may hold a fragment of truth but fall short of your actual values. History is, in many ways, a cycle of passed-down trauma and its recreation. Accompanying you back to yourself clarifies what next step breaks the pattern.
Being a therapist is my way of holding space for that change, one person and moment at a time.
My Perspective
I believe most people don't need to become someone different in order to heal. Many of the struggles we carry are adaptations that once helped us stay safe but now keep us disconnected from ourselves. My work focuses on creating enough internal safety for those patterns to loosen their grip so you can reconnect with your emotions, values, intuition, and sense of self. Healing is less about fixing what is broken and more about coming home to who you have always been.
Are we a good fit to work together?
Where You Might Find Yourself on Your Healing Journey Right Now
Maybe you’re in the thick of deconstructing old religious beliefs, trying to understand how certain teachings and practices have shaped your mind and body. Perhaps you’re navigating relationships in a new way—outside the constraints of purity culture or fundamentalism—or working through the impact of adverse religious experiences that left you with wounds you’re still trying to name.
Or maybe you’re unsure. You don’t know if what you experienced was oppressive, harmful, or even traumatic—you just know something doesn’t feel right.
Many of the people I work with are thoughtful, capable, and deeply self-aware. They have read the books, listened to the podcasts, developed insight into their patterns, and worked hard to understand themselves. The problem is not a lack of knowledge. It is the feeling exhausted, disconnected, or unable to create the changes they long for.
Healing isn’t just about what you leave behind; it’s about what you grow into and learning how to not organize life around the adaptation to stay safe, stay responsible, stay productive, stay needed, or stay acceptable. These strategies were often brilliant responses to difficult circumstances, but over time they can create distance from our emotions, our bodies, our desires, and our sense of self.
My Approach
I assume that you are intrinsically good and you have good reasons for things that are creating friction in your life so confronting them means offering acceptance, compassion, and avenues for healing. I am perfectly comfortable sitting in the heaviness of emotion that comes with healing, but I also offer feedback so you’re not just feeling stuck there. If you do feel stuck, we figure out how to approach it.
Healing from dehumanization requires rehumanization.
Reconnecting you with your body, intuition, and identity is the core of our work together.
Experience & Education
Degree
Liberty University (B.S.) degree with honors in Clinical Mental Health Psychology with a specialty in substance abuse and codependency.
Virginia Tech (M.A.Ed) degree with honors in Clinical Mental Health Counseling.
Licensure
State of Virginia Licensed Professional Counselor
Experience
Jillian has worked in both child and adolescent settings, along with university counseling and community organizations. In these settings, she has worked with clients to overcome and manage stress, anxiety, developmental transitions, depression, identity changes, relationship difficulties, trauma, addictions, and severe mental illness. Some of the settings that shaped Jillian’s experiences include: Carilion and Virginia Baptist’s child/adolescent psychiatric units, Jefferson College of Health Sciences, school counseling at a Roanoke Valley elementary school, sexual assault response advocacy programs, a local foster care agency, a community service board, a group private practice center, and emergency services. Jillian is now full time in her established private practice and coaching businesses.
Specialization
Religious abuse, spiritual trauma, recovery from high control environments, cults and undo influence, identity and sexuality, obsessive compulsive religious fears, chronic illness, codependency, family estrangement
