Faith-integrated therapy, on your terms.

Licensed, faith-integrated therapy — on your terms, at your pace.

If you're looking for Christian counseling in Austin, you probably want two things at once: real, evidence-based therapy and a clinician who can speak the language of your faith. Not pastoral counseling. Not Bible study with a couch. Not someone who is going to weaponize scripture when you're already hurting.

Haven & Harbor Counseling is a licensed mental-health practice in Austin where Christian clients can do serious psychological work without leaving their faith at the door. Sessions hold scripture, prayer, and theology with the same care we hold psychology and the nervous system. Both matter. Both belong.

Brittany Zientek, LPC, is a Licensed Professional Counselor with eight years of clinical experience. She's trained in EMDR, Internal Family Systems (IFS), and Trauma-Focused CBT — and she's also a Christian. The integration is real, not bolted on.

What "Christian counseling" actually means here

The phrase "Christian counseling" gets used to mean a lot of different things. Here's what it means at Haven & Harbor.

It's not pastoral counseling. Pastoral counseling is a beautiful and important ministry, but it's not the same as licensed mental-health treatment. Brittany is a Licensed Professional Counselor, with the clinical training, supervision hours, and continuing education the state of Texas requires.

It's not Bible study with extra steps. Sessions are not built around scripture. They are built around your healing. Scripture and prayer enter the room when you want them to enter the room.

It is licensed, evidence-based therapy with room for your faith. Same modalities, same standards of care, same confidentiality, same insurance billing as any other therapy in Austin. The difference is that your therapist can sit comfortably with words like grace, repentance, sanctification, the Holy Spirit, or "I think God is using this season to show me something" — and not flatten any of it.

Who Christian counseling is for

Most clients who choose Christian counseling at Haven & Harbor are walking in with at least one of the following:

• Church hurt or spiritual abuse — a pastor, a community, a leader, or a doctrine that wounded you, and a faith that hasn't recovered yet.
• Performance-based or shame-based religion — growing up believing your worth depended on your behavior, your service, your purity, or your usefulness.
• Trauma alongside faith — the way trauma scrambles your sense of God's character, your prayers, your felt sense of being loved.
• Anxiety and perfectionism — the high-functioning Christian who has never given themselves permission to rest.
• Faith deconstruction or reconstruction — the season where what you used to believe stopped fitting, and you're trying to figure out what you actually believe now.
• Marriage, identity, and life transitions in a faith context — career shifts, motherhood, singleness, midlife, all held in the larger story you understand your life to be part of.
• Grief, doubt, and dark nights of the soul — when prayer stops feeling like prayer, and you wonder if anyone is listening.

You don't have to be in a tidy place with your faith to be here. Most of us aren't.

How faith shows up in sessions

You set the spiritual temperature of the room. Every week. It can change session to session.

Some sessions include:

• Sitting with a passage of scripture together
• Beginning or ending in prayer
• Talking about your image of God and how trauma may have shaped it
• Working through theological questions tied to what you're processing
• IFS work with the "spiritual parts" of you — the part that prays, the part that doubts, the part that performs

Some sessions never mention faith at all. That's also a full session of Christian counseling, because the therapist still understands and respects the frame of your life.

You will never be:

• Prayed over without consent.
• Handed homework that assumes a doctrinal position.
• Pushed back toward certainty when you're in the middle of doubting.
• Diagnosed with a "spiritual problem" instead of a clinical one.

Common reasons clients come — in more detail

Church hurt and spiritual abuse

Sometimes the people meant to shepherd you wounded you instead. Sometimes the community you trusted protected the wrong person. Sometimes you were taught that your body, your questions, or your femininity were the problem. The work here is to help the wound name itself, to help your nervous system finish what it couldn't finish while the harm was still happening, and to make space for the relationship with God that's underneath all of it to be re-examined honestly.

Faith deconstruction

Deconstruction is not the same as walking away from faith. For most clients, it's the slow and often painful process of separating what they were taught from what scripture actually says from what they have personally experienced of God. The goal of therapy is not to defend a particular theology. It's to help you do the work in a way that honors your nervous system, your relationships, and your story.

Religious trauma

A specific category of trauma where the wounding happened through religious systems, leaders, or beliefs. It often looks like classic PTSD or complex trauma symptoms, but with a layer of spiritual disorientation. EMDR and IFS both work well with religious trauma.

Anxiety and perfectionism in faith contexts

Many Christian clients carry an unspoken belief that anxiety is a spiritual failure — that if they prayed more or trusted more, they wouldn't feel this way. That belief makes the anxiety worse. The work here is gentler than that: holding both the body and the soul with care, and letting evidence-based treatment do what it does.

The modalities — same standards of care as any Austin therapist

EMDR

A first-line PTSD treatment that works particularly well for religious trauma and for the specific kinds of memories that have a doctrinal layer attached. Learn more →.

Internal Family Systems (IFS)

IFS is uniquely well-suited for Christian clients because it does not flatten the spiritual life into psychology. Your "parts" — the protector, the perfectionist, the wounded child — are not all there is to you. The Self in IFS resonates strongly with what many Christians call the soul or the imago Dei. Learn more →.

Trauma-Focused CBT, CBT, MBCT, SFBT

Supporting modalities Brittany draws on as appropriate.

Practical details

Insurance: Through Headway — Aetna, Cigna, United Healthcare, Oscar, Oxford, and Anthem are all in-network.

Self-pay: $130–$225 per session. Superbills available for out-of-network reimbursement.

Location: 6448 East Hwy 290, Ste E108, Austin, TX 78723. Telehealth available across Texas.

Free 15-minute consult: No-pressure phone or video conversation to see if we're a good fit.