Chapters. That’s how Lisa Tensmeyer Hansen describes the various seasons that have directed her to what she now regards as the pinnacle of her life’s work. All along, she has felt the guidance of an all-knowing hand.
The PhD and LMFT now resides in the heart of Utah Valley with her husband Bill, where she is co-founder and CEO of Flourish Therapy, which provides life-saving therapy for LGBTQ+ individuals. While none of her seven biological children, her foster daughter, or other “bonus children” identify as LGBTQ+, they joke that “maybe someone will come out for mom for Christmas.” Besides having a gay nephew whom she adores--and who is soon graduating in vocal performance from the U where he started a gospel choir. Lisa agrees it’s interesting how her path has brought her to this particular space. But she can’t look back without recognizing she’s always had an awareness and empathy for those often deemed marginalized.
Growing up in the LDS church, Lisa says, “I spent a lot of time thinking about what God as parent would want their children to grow up and be and do.” As she experienced various stages of faith development, she started by believing in a God who had reasons for the rules, even those that seemed to make less sense. She began to recognize a God who valued development and not just blind obedience--a God who saw something in each of us that needs to be deeply valued and seen and understood.
As a teen, Lisa believed somewhat in the idea of “the elect”—that finding a way to be like God was a narrow path and not everyone was destined for eternal greatness. But as she became a parent, she recognized that every single individual’s growth matters. That everyone has been given something to bring them closer to God and something to believe in. This paradigm was further cemented when her youngest children’s involvement in a theater program enlisted her to serve as the program’s director. A former member of the BYU Women’s Chorus, Lisa also ran her stake youth choir and served in the stake Young Women’s presidency. In these capacities, she recognized how some of the most vibrant and lively performers were those brave enough to later come out as gay.
In their small community of Payson, it was easy for Lisa to see how the community of church and school did not provide a safe haven for these performers to be powerful leaders and contributors, despite their phenomenal skills and talents. She witnessed some be excommunicated because they identified a certain way. Another was refused participation in a temple opening extravaganza even after being selected for the top spot, because they were gay. She saw many who were relegated to second class citizen status if they chose celibacy, but “never fully celebrated as they would be if straight.” Lisa says, “That was a powerful message to me… These were not people who were anxious to leave God behind; these were amazingly spiritually deep people whose communities decided they had no place for them.”
In another chapter of Lisa’s development years, she witnessed racism firsthand. Growing up in Indiana, there were both schools and swimming pools segregated based on the color of one’s skin. When Lisa enrolled in an integrated college preparatory high school in her neighborhood, her understanding of what it means to live in a democracy with people who are treated as less than shifted as she heard various viewpoints and recognized her own privilege. At the time, largely due to the teachings she was immersed in via gospel discussions in her home and what was taught over the pulpit, she complacently believed that “God had reasons for the way things were,” even racism. Never hearing anything else, besides the incredulous objections of her more broad-minded classmates, Lisa assumed things would just be that way forever. As she matured in the gospel, and especially after reading Edward Kimball’s carefully crafted summary of the events leading up to his grandfather’s reversal of the priesthood ban in 1978, Lisa experienced a substantial eye-opening. She came to realize that it wasn’t the people waiting around for God to change His mind or make His ways known, but that the people themselves needed to change. She asked herself, “Are we content to keep others at arms’ length so we feel we are holy enough?” As this dissonance set in and Lisa pondered her participation in what she had always believed was the restored gospel, she had an awakening to the reality that even though Jewish leaders at the meridian of time when Christ was on the earth kept many from full participation, that God continued to work in that space. That this delineation didn’t obliterate Christ’s teachings about scripture, prayer, the law and prophets. Lisa says, “This seemed like a path I could emulate.” Perhaps there was something to be gained, or something to be done, in this space of nuance.
As she watched so many in the LGBTQ+ space be excommunicated from a church she as a straight woman could still belong to, Lisa decided to do what she could to elevate the LGBTQ+ community “in the eyes of people like me, and in their own right.” She decided to start a gay men’s chorus in Utah Valley, patterned after the one she’d seen in Salt Lake. “So many I knew cherished the Primary songs and wanted a sense of connection to God that was being denied to them,” she recalls, in reference to LDS markers like missions and temple marriages. It took awhile, but Lisa was able to put together a small gay men’s choir that rehearsed and performed at UVU, the state hospital, and various library holiday celebrations. Once Lisa went back to school, one member of the Utah County Men’s Choir started the One Voice choir in Salt Lake City, and most of the performers followed him to that organization.
With this goal achieved, after some prayer, Lisa felt what she should do next was go back to school with a focus on studying mental health. She knew this is where she could be of most use to the LGBTQ+ community within the context of LDS life, and ultimately chose her alma mater of BYU as the only place to which she’d apply, after a former colleague agreed to mentor her. “At 50 years old, I felt lucky someone wanted to work with me,” she says. The timing was ideal, as BYU was facing accreditation challenges in 2010 and needed to enhance their LGBTQ+ research—a role Lisa eagerly took on. As she put in her hours toward earning her LMFT and PhD, her first client in the BYU clinic was someone with gender identity questions. Soon after, Lisa received an influx of clients who identified as gay, lesbian, gender queer, nonbinary, SSA and bisexual. She says, “I felt like this was confirming a particular direction for my focus.”
Lisa was instrumental in starting a research group at the clinic based on Kendall Wilcox’s Circles of Empathy wherein gay people would come and share their experiences with straight student therapists. Through the four sessions in which it ran, therapists-in-training participated at least once to expand their understanding. She was also able to help a professor build his curriculum on the topic and has been asked back to the MFT program more than once to talk about LGBTQ+ clients. Of her time in BYU’s graduate program, Lisa says, “I felt a lot of support for the things I wanted to do to benefit and support the LGBTQ+ community while at BYU.”
Just as she was graduating with her PhD, Lisa was approached by Kendall and Roni Jo Draper about helping start the Encircle program in Provo, launching her into a new chapter. She recruited two clinicians she knew to help advise a program in which they could offer free therapy. Along with Encircle director Stephenie Larsen, Lisa was there for the opening of the first home in Provo, where Flourish Counseling Services was born (as a separate entity). While “it was the right thing at the right time,” as Lisa oversaw 13 therapists to meet the clients’ needs, ultimately Lisa parted ways with Encircle. However, she still refers young people to the program for their friendship circles, music and art classes, therapy, and as a place where “they can be themselves without their queerness being the most important thing about them.”
After moving off campus from Encircle with those 13 therapists, Flourish Therapy is now its own entity with 50 therapists offering approximately 1800 sessions a month in offices from Orem to Salt Lake, all on a sliding scale based on what clients can afford. Thanks to generous donors and insurance subsidies, Flourish is able to keep their session costs well below national average and even offers free therapy to those in crisis who cannot afford it otherwise. Lisa says, “We deeply depend on people paying it forward.” Because of the large number of therapists available, clients are often able to select a therapist with a similar gender identity or orientation, if they prefer.
Unlike LDS Social Services, Flourish is able to freely adhere to APA guidelines and honor their clients’ authentic selves, however they may show up. They have clients ranging from those trying to stay in the LDS church with temple recommends (whether in mixed orientation or same-sex marriages), to those trying to withdraw their names from the church or seek letters for transitional surgeries. Flourish also often treats missionaries referred by mission presidents when the assigned field psychologist perhaps might be struggling to understand. Lisa’s efforts have been widely recognized, and she considers it “a real honor” that the Human Rights Campaign gave her its Impact Award a few months ago. The Utah Marriage and Family Therapy Association also recently awarded Lisa Supervisor of the Year for her work in mentoring student and associate counselors and Affirmation International awarded her Ally of the Year for her work in steering Flourish through its first five years and maintaining its mission to support the LGBTQ+ community despite outside pressures to change their structure and process.
When the tough questions resurface and dissonance reappears, Lisa finds herself traveling back to the early answers she received in Chapter 1 living—when she first knelt and prayed around age 10 to ask whether Joseph Smith had really seen the Father and the Son. She says, “I felt an enormous feeling of light and love. I received no specific answer to my prayer, but felt a love wherein I recognized that something here is the answer and secret and why of everything. God feels this way about us here on earth–that’s what has sustained me all this time and made me feel that what’s inside of us is valuable to God. God’s not looking at us to shed what we have that’s divine but to lean into it and live and cherish and value the learning experience. We will then become able to recognize everyone’s lives—identity and all--as stepping stones.” Lisa concludes, “The things that are true about me are what have moved me into this space where I hope I’m lifting others to that same place wherein they can see how their Creator recognizes the value—the holiness—within all.”
