Meet Jesse Fister, Ph.D.
I’m a clinical psychologist, permaculture designer, and writer whose work has grown from a lifelong interest in how people make meaning, how living systems respond to change, and what helps both become more whole.
Early Life
A Life Shaped by Questions
I grew up as a pastor’s son in western Montana, spending summers picking huckleberries, catching crawdads at my grandfather’s Bible camp, going to church, playing drums, and taking faith seriously. But even early on, something in me was asking questions.
By the end of high school, those questions had become urgent. A desire to understand faith, purpose, and what I believed led to an intense period of spiritual searching.
At one point, I interpreted a dream about the end of the world literally and responded by immersing myself in wilderness survival and martial arts.
The world did not end. But the worldview I had inherited began to.
What followed was not simply a rejection of religion. It was the beginning of a much longer effort to understand
belief, extraordinary experience, identity, suffering, and
what happens when the framework that once organized your life can no longer hold everything you have experienced.
Those questions eventually became central to both my education and my clinical work.
Education & Early Work
Finding Language for Inner Experience
Education in Story & Psychology
I first studied
Theatre and Drama, earning my bachelor’s degree while developing an interest in story, character, and the ways people make meaning of their lives.
Later, I earned a
Master’s Degree in Transpersonal Psychology, where I was able to study spiritual and extraordinary human experiences with greater psychological depth.
Spiritual Guidance Training
I also completed
Spiritual Guidance Mentorship Training, preparing me to engage questions of spirituality across faith traditions—and outside of them—without assuming that one particular belief system holds the answer.
Early Professional Experience
Along the way, my work took me into very different human environments. I worked with:
- At-risk youth in the Arizona desert
- Individuals with developmental and physical disabilities
- Native American youth in Montana
- Struggling artists in North Hollywood
- Inpatient populations in Phoenix
- People experiencing homelessness and substance-related difficulties
- Individuals with eating disorders
- People living with severe psychological distress and trauma.
Those experiences taught me something no single theoretical model could: people make sense of
suffering within families, cultures, communities, bodies, histories, and systems of meaning.
From Survival to Regeneration
Learning to Work With Living Systems
My interest in wilderness survival eventually led somewhere I did not expect.
The more I studied individual survival, the more interested I became in a different question: rather than preparing to survive apart from systems,
what would it look like to build healthier systems in the first place?
That question led me to regenerative agriculture and permaculture.
In 2015, I purchased a six-acre homestead in Montana and began putting those ideas into practice. We grew heirloom fruit, built large hügelkultur beds, raised alpacas and rare Icelandic chickens, fermented food, hunted and processed meat, and built furniture. It was hands-on education in soil, water, animals, seasons, failure, adaptation, and patience.
In 2020, I earned my
Permaculture Design Certificate through
Geoff Lawton, whose work has helped bring permaculture design to projects around the world.
Today, I continue to apply those principles at my Denver-area property, where I maintain raised beds, compost systems, quail, heirloom fruit, and other elements of a small-scale regenerative landscape.
I have now spent more than a decade working with regenerative systems in both rural and suburban settings.
I don’t design only from theory. I design from lived experience.
Depth & Clinical Psychology
Training to Sit With Complexity
Depth Psychology Training
I completed my doctorate in
Clinical Psychology with an emphasis in
Depth Psychology at
Pacifica Graduate Institute, where I trained in psychoanalytic, Jungian, philosophical, and depth-oriented approaches.
That training taught me to look beyond symptoms alone and consider the histories, relationships, beliefs, identities, and patterns beneath them.
How I Approach Clinical Work
Today, as a
licensed clinical psychologist, I bring that perspective into psychotherapy and psychological assessment. My approach draws from analytic
psychotherapy, ISTDP, and
sensorimotor approaches to trauma, but the work always begins with listening and understanding the person in context.
My aim is to help people understand themselves more deeply and build a life that feels genuinely their own.
Religious Trauma & Faith Transitions
Religious trauma and faith transitions hold a particular place in my work. My understanding of this territory comes from both clinical training and lived experience, including growing up in a high-control religious environment and later reconsidering my own inherited worldview.
Changes in belief can reach far beyond theology, affecting identity, family, community, morality, relationships, purpose, and a person’s sense of where they belong.
My role is not to steer someone toward belief or unbelief, but to help make sense of what happened, what still carries weight, and what a meaningful life might look like now.
Religious Wounds Process Group
Specialized psychotherapy for people navigating religious harm, spiritual abuse, changing beliefs, loss of community, or the complicated process of rebuilding life outside a former faith system.
Writing
Following the Questions Further
Writing has been part of my life throughout these other transitions.
For years, I worked on memoirs about wilderness, religion, identity, and the experiences that eventually led me toward psychology. A memoir is currently under submission, and this website will continue to grow as a home for books and longer-form projects as they develop.
I also publish
Soul to Soil, where I write about depth psychology, philosophy, ecology, religion, culture, dreams, climate, and the questions that emerge when inner and outer life are considered together.
Writing lets me stay with ideas that do not belong exclusively to a therapy room, a psychological assessment, or a property design.
Religious Trauma & Faith Transitions
That training taught me to look beyond symptoms alone and consider the histories, relationships, beliefs, identities, and patterns beneath them.
My aim is to help people understand themselves more deeply and build a life that feels genuinely their own.
Psychology · Ecology · Meaning
Different Paths. A Shared Way of Paying Attention.
For years, I worked on memoirs about wilderness, religion, identity, and the experiences that eventually led me toward psychology. A memoir is currently under submission, and this website will continue to grow as a home for books and longer-form projects as they develop.
- Psychology asks what helps a person understand themselves, adapt, and become more whole.
- Permaculture asks what helps a living system become healthier, more resilient, and better able to sustain itself over time.
- Writing gives me a place to follow the questions that emerge between the two—to think more deeply about meaning, belief, culture, ecology, and what it means to live well.
Across all three, I find myself paying attention to the same things:
relationships, patterns, context, and
what is happening beneath the surface.
The relationship between a person and their history. Between belief and experience. Between soil, water, plants, animals, and the people who depend on them. Between our inner lives and the larger world we inhabit.
Each discipline has its own methods, boundaries, and purpose. But what connects them is a shared interest in
how living systems—human and ecological—respond to change, find greater coherence, and become more capable of sustaining life.
Religious Wounds Process Group
Specialized psychotherapy for people navigating religious harm, spiritual abuse, changing beliefs, loss of community, or the complicated process of rebuilding life outside a former faith system.
Credentials & Experience
Training Across Psychology, Spirituality & Ecology
Clinical & Academic Training
- Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology with an emphasis in Depth Psychology — Pacifica Graduate Institute
- M.A. in Transpersonal Psychology
- B.A. in Theatre and Drama
- Spiritual Guidance Mentorship Training Certificate
- Licensed Psychologist — Colorado License #PSY.0006964
- Licensed Psychologist — Montana License #PSY-LIC-5047
- New Mexico psychologist licensure — Pending
- PSYPACT (APIT) Mobility #24571
- Training informed by psychoanalytic, analytic, phenomenological, ISTDP, and sensorimotor approaches
Permaculture Training
- Certified Permaculture Designer
- Permaculture Design Certificate completed through Geoff Lawton
- More than a decade of practical regenerative-land experience
- Experience with both rural acreage and suburban systems
Clinical Specialty
- Anxiety
- Depression
- Spiritual, religious, and existential concerns related to meaning, purpose, career, cultural and global issues, and life & death.
- Complex trauma
- Eating disorders
- Mind-body (psychosomatic) symptoms, including gastrointestinal distress, panic attacks, migraines, and nausea.
- Men’s issues, including identity.
- Ecological distress related to climate change and environmental destruction.
Take the First Step
Sometimes the first step toward change is simply starting the conversation. Reach out to see whether working together feels like the right fit.
