Meet The Team

A woman with dark red hair, wearing glasses, smiling, and dressed in a green patterned shirt over a black top.

Sam Sellers (She/Her)

Co-Director

I'm a counsellor specialising in religious trauma and cult recovery working on Gundungurra Land in NSW, and one of the Co-Directors of RTC.

I found this work through my own experience. I know what it's like to question everything you were taught to believe. To be rejected and betrayed by people you called family. To be shunned from the community that shaped your entire world and have to rebuild yourself piece by piece, without a map. When I say I get it, I don't mean in a textbook way.

My practice is trauma-focused, affirming, and collaborative. I'm not the kind of therapist who sits quietly and waits for you to figure it out alone. I show up and I listen. I hold the hard and messy truth of what you've been through; without judgement, without jargon, and without rushing you toward a resolution that isn't yours yet. The harm you've experienced is real, and it didn't happen in a vacuum. It was shaped by power, ideology, systems, and control and I don't lose sight of that.

I work with people navigating religious trauma, spiritual abuse, and those leaving high-control groups and cults. I work with those in the LGBTQIA+ community untangling identity from shame. Ultimately, anyone trying to find their way back to their bodies, their agency, and themselves. Alongside client work, I'm deeply committed to education; both for survivors and the practitioners who support them. I create training and resources because this field deserves better than a gap where real knowledge should be.

Outside the therapy room, I'm a wife and dog mum, a queer woman, and an unashamed cricket fan. I'm usually either building LEGO or watching a cult documentary; sometimes both at once. I have strong opinions about smutty books, a soft spot for musical theatre, and a slightly embarrassing love of reality TV. I'm ADHD, and an Enneagram 4, which probably explains a lot about why I ended up doing this work and why I take it so seriously.

You can listen to my podcast Beyond The Surface on Spotify, Apple Podcasts & anywhere you get your podcasts.

Website — Email — LinkedIn — Facebook — Instagram — Substack

Close-up of a smiling woman with long, dark hair, wearing clear glasses and a brown sleeveless top, against a plain background.

Elise Heerde (She/Her)

Co-Director

I'm a mental health practitioner working on Wurundjuri land in Victoria, and one of the Co-Directors of RTC.

I came to this work because I lived it. My own experience inside a high-control charismatic evangelical church gave me an understanding of religious trauma that no textbook could, the slow unravelling of a worldview you were told was the only true one, the grief of losing community and identity all at once, the long and nonlinear road that comes after. That experience is the reason I do what I do, and it's the lens through which I do it.

My work is grounded in the belief that we are already good, whole, and worthy - not conditionally, not after enough spiritual growth, not once we've been fixed. Already. My practice draws on lived experience, professional training, and a genuine commitment to sitting with people in the complexity of their experience without rushing them toward resolution.

Alongside my client work, I'm deeply committed to education and advocacy by raising awareness of coercive control and high-control group dynamics at a systemic level, and building the kind of professional resources that survivors and practitioners deserve to have. I also wrote the book After The Exit: The Long Tail of Coercive Control, which explores recovery through the AFTER framework, because leaving is only ever the beginning.

Outside of work, I am most at home on the couch with a coffee and a book, preferably snuggled under a blanket. I have watched Friends and Gilmore Girls a frankly embarrassing number of times and I regret nothing. I build Lego when I need to stop thinking, and when things get genuinely stressful, I have been known to step out into the open paddock behind our house and scream into the distance - which does wonders for the nervous system and considerably less for the local kangaroo population. I am a homebody through and through, and I think that's probably where some of my best work comes from.

Website — Email — LinkedIn — Facebook — Instagram — Substack