About Nicole
Clinical expertise. Personal experience. Deep faith. Not a curriculum — a calling.
Nicole Butterfield holds a Master of Science degree and is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT) based in Central Minnesota. Her clinical work focuses on grief, trauma, life transitions, and neurodivergence — and she brings all of it into every room she walks into.
But here's what makes Nicole different from every other mental health professional who speaks to churches: she doesn't just study neurodivergence. She has ADHD. She lives the experience she teaches about — the late diagnoses, the way the church sometimes doesn't know what to do with differently-wired minds, the exhaustion of masking in spaces that weren't designed for you.
That personal insight isn't a vulnerability she shares reluctantly. It's the thing that makes her uniquely equipped to speak to congregations who are full of people who've felt unseen by both the mental health world and the church.
Nicole holds evidence-based clinical frameworks in one hand and Christian faith in the other — without collapsing either. She doesn't water down the science for a faith audience, and she doesn't treat faith as irrelevant to healing. She holds both, fully, at the same time.
That's rare. Most clinicians speaking to churches stay surface-level on faith, or leave the clinical rigor at the door. Nicole does neither.
Grounded in what actually works — research on anxiety, grief, trauma, and neurodivergent experience.
Deep, genuine, not performative. Faith isn't a backdrop — it's woven into how healing happens.
Nicole isn't just a therapist who sometimes speaks. These presentations are specifically designed for faith communities — for the parent who doesn't know how to help their anxious teenager, for the deacon who doesn't know what to say at the hospital bedside, for the person in the fourth row who's been carrying grief alone for two years because they were told to "just trust God."
She understands the culture of the church. She knows what platitudes sound like from the inside and why people keep coming back anyway. That context changes everything about how she delivers these presentations.
"Tell them you speak Neurospicy."
— Client feedback that became a hallmark of Nicole's workNicole grew up in the kind of faith community where mental health wasn't really talked about. She's seen, firsthand, what happens when the church doesn't have the language or the tools — and what becomes possible when it does.
Her clinical training gave her frameworks. Her faith gave her context. Her ADHD gave her personal credibility in a room full of people who've been told their struggles are spiritual failures. And her years of clinical work gave her the patience and warmth to hold all of that in a room together.
Held Out Loud is the name for that work when it walks through church doors.
Work With Nicole
Not a keynote speaker with a deck full of statistics. A therapist who knows your world — and knows how to help.