GREENVILLE — In the videos he’s posted on YouTube over the years, Gene Wagstaff speaks directly to the camera in front of a backdrop of gilded statues and bonsai trees.

He talks about mental health, his tone confident, deliberate, reassuring.

He explains how his counseling has helped people cope with issues including depression, addictions and bipolar disorder. He says he can heal your emotional wounds.

By his own count, Wagstaff has counseled 50,000 people since the early 2000s, when he opened the Word of God Counseling Center at his home in Greenville County.

Yet he is not licensed to practice mental health care in South Carolina. And The Post and Courier could find no evidence he has ever received clinical training, despite touting his ability to treat a range of psychological problems, from anxiety to dissociative identity disorder.

Multiple former clients said in interviews that Wagstaff’s counseling caused them significant harm through misdiagnosis, breach of privacy and what they characterized as abusive methods.

One woman said Wagstaff’s insistence that she had multiple personalities, along with his confrontational counseling style, left her in a state of psychological turmoil for years. Another said he pushed her to allow her abusive husband back into her home, a decision that wreaked havoc on her life.

Through a review of police reports, Word of God Counseling materials, and firsthand accounts from a half-dozen of Wagstaff’s former clients, The Post and Courier found Wagstaff’s operation is rife with questionable conduct and controversial practices.

Who can counsel?

He and other faith-based counselors fall into a legal gray area in South Carolina. The state has virtually no restrictions governing the certification of religious therapists who charge fees for their services, regardless of their qualifications.

With fewer regulations than its neighbors, South Carolina has attracted prominent practitioners of controversial counseling methods, and unlicensed mental health care has flourished, a Post and Courier investigation found.

These faith-based counselors operate from the mountains of the Upstate to the shores of the Lowcountry. A national group that does training in one such form of unlicensed counseling lists close to four dozen practitioners in the state.

South Carolina’s hands-off approach has essentially carved out protections for counselors whose religious beliefs may not conform to standards enforced by a licensing board. But critics say this freedom can come at the expense of vulnerable patients paying for treatment from counselors who are not subject to the same oversight as clinical providers.

Wagstaff argues that his ministry offers things that more mainstream therapy cannot, a sentiment echoed by other faith-based counselors.

“It’s a whole different way of counseling people,” he said. “I don’t just give them good advice. We resolve the issues. We get people actually healed of things. It’s unheard of today.”

But former clients and local mental health professionals say Wagstaff’s methods have had serious negative consequences and there is little that can be done to regulate his practice.

A Post and Courier investigation found that victims advocates, police, and former clients reported Wagstaff to state regulators at least five times. The complaints included allegations that Wagstaff was operating a counseling center without a license and that he failed to alert authorities when a teen told him during a session that a family member was sexually abusing her.

None led to any action against him or his center.

“I have been investigated several times by the state from people making complaints,” Wagstaff said. “They have found me clean.”

Dr. James Pruett, a pastoral counselor and licensed marriage and family therapist supervisor in Spartanburg, is among those who submitted a complaint about Wagstaff’s conduct to the licensing board. Through his work, Pruett said he’s identified and reported 36 other faith-based counselors for being unlicensed. But the regulatory body apparently has no authority to curtail their practice.

In a state where the Pew Research Center found 70 percent of adults consider themselves to be “highly religious,” faith communities often serve as a resource for dealing with emotional issues.

Experts say churches can be a crucial link between believers and mental health care providers. And faith can be an important tool in a counseling setting. But clinicians caution that treating serious disorders without proper training carries significant risks to patients.

Licensed counselors at the Julie Valentine Center, a Greenville-based children’s advocacy and rape crisis nonprofit, say they’ve been left to treat patients in psychological distress after counseling with unqualified, faith-based providers.

“It can be very damaging for clients who are going in and trusting them, opening up to them and coming to them with their most challenging situations,” said Shauna Galloway-Williams, executive director of the Julie Valentine Center. “Sometimes the effects of the counseling itself can be as traumatic and damaging as the traumatic experiences they went to this counselor to seek help for.”

‘It got to be pretty bad’

Wagstaff’s office is attached to the back of his home — a spacious house on a grassy, four-acre plot off of Old White Horse Road, just north of the city of Greenville. It’s here that the 75-year-old has operated for more than two decades.

Wagstaff said he became a counselor after retiring from the Army’s Criminal Investigations Division in 1987 as a senior special agent. He then went on to various “Christian schools,” including training for a method known as Theophostic counseling, but did not to elaborate further on his credentials in an interview with The Post and Courier.

In the years after opening his center, Wagstaff gained some prominence in local religious circles, partnering with large area churches. He also appeared on the regional Christian TV channel WGGS 16 and the HIS Radio station as a guest expert on suicide and depression.

Paul Fryar said he first went to Word of God for counseling in 2008. He said he found it so helpful that he went through training to become a counselor and later served on the nonprofit’s board for several years.

“It released me of the hurts and the pains and where they were coming from,” he said. “Then I saw that over the years for so many other people. So if you’ve got people that are trying to attack him, they’re Satan.”

But other former clients painted a very different picture of the counseling they received from Wagstaff.

Kelly Castellani, who co-founded the child abuse and domestic violence nonprofit Silent Tears in 2013, said her pastor referred her to Wagstaff after she separated from her then-husband.

Early on, she said, Wagstaff urged her to allow her husband, who he was also counseling, back into her home, despite her reports of severe emotional abuse.

She said her then-husband, who died last year, had previously forced her to quit her job because he didn’t want her to be around men. He then canceled their joint checking accounts and credit cards when she forgot to iron his jeans.

When she got another job to support herself, Castellani said, he started following her to work. He insisted on picking out her clothes every morning. His moods were volatile.

Wagstaff suggested the problems in her marriage stemmed from her failure as a wife, she said, not her husband’s erratic and often explosive behavior.

“The mindset that Gene taught was that, as a woman, we are to serve our husbands, and if we would love them correctly, they would not behave the way they did,” Castellani said.

Wagstaff’s focus on her supposed failings as a wife added to her confusion during a tumultuous time in her life, she said. And her husband capitalized on it.

“It was, ‘I’m seeing a counselor, the one you picked, the one the minister said to go to. I’m doing everything that everyone’s asking me to do,’” she said of how he used Wagstaff’s counseling to manipulate her. “It got to be pretty bad. There were multiple times where I thought I’d rather be dead than living this life.”

She wasn’t the only person to report concerns about Wagstaff’s ideas on a wife’s duty to her husband.

It’s part of the reason that Brookwood Church in Simpsonville, which previously referred members and staff to Word of God for counseling, cut ties with him, according to Nina Mitchell, a spokeswoman for the church.

“Some of the things he told people, from what I understand, was the wife is supposed to yield in all things to the spouse, and I think that is taking the Scripture completely out of context,” Mitchell said. “That could lead to sexual and physical abuse. So some of the ways he communicated things to people created more confusion and hurt for people who are going to him for assistance.”

Wagstaff, however, said the marriage counseling he offers is rooted in the Bible and that he teaches husbands to submit to wives as he teaches wives to submit to husbands.

“I try not to find fault with either one of them, I just teach what the Bible says and where you’re out of God’s will,” he said. “We shouldn’t force people to do anything. Even God doesn’t make us do things.”

Other former clients who spoke to The Post and Courier reported instances in which Wagstaff allegedly violated their privacy, crossed personal lines during sessions and engaged in behavior that made them uncomfortable.

Bob Castellani, a Spartanburg County businessman and philanthropist, married Kelly Castellani after she divorced her previous husband. Before he met her, he said, he also went to Word of God for counseling, attending about five sessions.

He said Wagstaff repeatedly named other clients during counseling and shared sensitive, detailed information they had disclosed in sessions. Castellani said he later learned Wagstaff was also sharing information about him with people he knew. His complaints mirror reports from other Word of God clients who spoke to The Post and Courier.

In an hour-long interview at his home, Wagstaff defended his counseling style and denied any wrongdoing. He insisted he does not share identifying information outside of counseling sessions.

“Nobody would come,” he said. “Then I would just be a gossip center, or a slander center. No, it has to be confidential.”

But in one instance, it was confidentiality that placed Wagstaff squarely in the sights of law enforcement.

A legal loophole

In 2014, Spartanburg County deputies responded to a call at Woodruff High School after a student there told a guidance counselor that her adoptive father was abusing her.

The 17-year-old girl told deputies that her father, a pastor in Spartanburg County, had sexually abused her repeatedly at their home over the course of a year. After each time, he he would tell her he was sorry, promising to never do it again. But he didn’t keep his promise, she said.

The teen eventually broke down in tears and told her boyfriend about the abuse. The father then called the boyfriend and begged for forgiveness, police records show.

Shortly after, the pastor, his daughter and his wife all began attending counseling sessions with Wagstaff.

According to police incident reports, Wagstaff continued counseling all three without reporting the father to law enforcement.

After they were contacted by Woodruff High School, Spartanburg deputies reached out to the sheriff’s office in Greenville County where Wagstaff’s center is located. Investigators then seized DVDs from Wagstaff’s home that contained recordings of the sessions.

Greenville County detectives opened an investigation into Wagstaff’s failure to disclose the reported abuse. He told them he hadn’t contacted the police because he believed the girl, who was 16 when the abuse began, was old enough to consent.

Wagstaff told The Post and Courier he continued counseling the girl and her abuser because he was unclear about the age of consent. He declined to say more, citing privacy concerns.

Ultimately, he never faced charges. Wagstaff was unlicensed, and therefore not required to report suspected child sex abuse under South Carolina law.

That has since changed.

State Rep. Bruce Bannister, R-Greenville, said deputies reached out to him and voiced frustration that they could not hold Wagstaff legally accountable.

In 2018, Bannister introduced a bill mandating “religious counselors who charge for services” to inform police of any child abuse disclosed during a session, a requirement that already applied to licensed counselors, as well as clergy. The proposed legislation became law later that year.

Pete Singer is the executive director of the national nonprofit Godly Response to Abuse in the Christian Environment (GRACE). He said regardless of the law, both Christians and counselors have a duty to protect children from abuse.

“There are many things that the law does not require me to do that I still do as a spiritual obligation, a moral obligation, an ethical obligation,” he said. 

Diagnoses or opinions?

Jennifer Massey, a licensed clinical social worker in Greenville, became familiar with Wagstaff’s practice after founding Still Wind Ministries in 2011. Her Christian counseling service aims to bridge the gap between mental healthcare providers and people of faith who may be wary of conventional therapy.

She said she has grave concerns about Wagstaff’s counseling style and his penchant for making complex diagnoses without any formal clinical training.

She and her colleagues have discerned a clear pattern, she said, in which Wagstaff incorrectly attributes all manner of psychological struggles to dissociative identity disorder, a complex and rare condition more commonly known as multiple personality disorder.

The disorder is associated with acute trauma, particularly during childhood, and typically causes severe symptoms, including self-harm, memory issues and a fractured sense of self.

Massey said Wagstaff has told client after client that the source of their anxiety, depression, addiction is dissociation linked to a childhood trauma, often one they don’t remember.

Wagstaff told The Post and Courier that while not all of his clients have dissociative identity disorder, he is “dealing with it (dissociation) with almost everybody that comes in, to some degree.”

Massey said for vulnerable clients struggling with mental health issues or recovering from trauma, that kind of assertion can exacerbate symptoms and lead to further spiritual or psychological injury.

Pruett, the pastoral counselor based in Roebuck, said he has similar concerns after treating several of Wagstaff’s former clients. He contends that it is unethical for an unlicensed practitioner to make diagnoses at all.

Wagstaff said that he does not make diagnoses during his counseling sessions, nor is he qualified to, but he does regularly offer his opinion on what may be causing distress.

Wagstaff said he might tell a client, “From the way you’re talking to me, the way that you’re responding to me, it indicates you may have multiple personalities, dissociative identity disorder. Do you know what that is? Let me explain to you what it is and let’s check and see if you do have it.

“That’s not a diagnosis, it’s an opinion, it’s a perception,” he said.

One of Wagstaff’s former clients spoke to The Post and Courier in the presence of a therapist with the Julie Valentine Center, the victims advocacy nonprofit in Greenville. The former client said Wagstaff told her that she had multiple personality disorder during her first session.

The woman said she grew up in a family and church community where therapy and mention of mental health was frowned upon. She was sexually abused as a child, she said, and as a result suffered from depression and anxiety in silence for years. The Post and Courier does not typically identify victims of sexual assault without their consent.

Despite her shock at Wagstaff’s original diagnosis, she said it was initially refreshing to go to a counselor who spoke openly about mental health issues.

Over the next two years, however, her mental health declined amid Wagstaff’s unorthodox methods and aggressive counseling style, she said. When she struggled to improve, she said, Wagstaff would blame her for the lack of progress.

At times, she broke down emotionally during sessions, she said, but Wagstaff kept pressing until she was sobbing. It began to affect her ability to function in life.

“I felt like I was going to suffocate,” she said.

She was also disturbed and confused by his continued insistence that she had multiple personalities living in her mind. He would push her emotionally, she said, and when she responded, he would assign different identities and names to her reactions.

“Pretty frequently, he would act like he saw a look on your face and then want to speak to whatever part of you twitched,” she said. “He’d say, ‘We need to talk to the part of you that is fearful right now.’ And then he would want the gender and age of this part of you.

“It felt really, really strange.”

Problematic foundations

Wagstaff’s focus on dissociative identity disorder and repressed memories derives from a controversial method formerly known as Theophostic counseling, a name that roughly translates from Greek as “God’s light.” It’s a practice in which Wagstaff said he has been “trained to the highest level.”

A central Kentucky pastoral counselor named Ed Smith created the method in 1996. Smith moved to the Greenville area in 2018.

His early work focused extensively on uncovering repressed memories, a controversial subject even among trained clinicians.

Experts emphasize that any work in that area should be handled by trained professionals in a highly controlled environment. But Smith for years taught laypeople and pastors with no clinical background to uncover repressed memories in a church setting.

Smith also wrote at length about a perceived epidemic of Satanic Ritual Abuse he believed was playing out across the country, an assertion investigators and child abuse experts say has no basis in reality.

Smith, who declined to speak to The Post and Courier for this story, is not the only founder of a popular, controversial form of counseling to settle in the Upstate of South Carolina.

Jay Adams, the hugely influential creator of Nouthetic counseling, lived in Simpsonville for three decades before his death in 2020 at the age of 91.

Nouthetic counseling, now more commonly known as Biblical counseling, has taken root across the country since Adams created it in 1970. In 2002, the Southern Baptist Convention endorsed the principles of the method, which is now taught at the denomination’s most prominent seminaries.

It has garnered intense criticism over the decades for its renunciation of evidence-based counseling and what detractors say is an overly confrontational approach. The word Nouthetic derives from the Greek word “noutheteo,” which means to confront or admonish.

It’s the same method highlighted in the Bob Jones University GRACE Report, a 2014 evaluation of the conservative Christian school’s response to sexual abuse. The report found counselors at BJU in Greenville for years consistently focused on the supposed culpability and sin of survivors of sexual abuse, and de-emphasized the responsibility of perpetrators.

BJU issued a public apology to any survivors hurt by the school’s response to sexual violence and made some policy changes in the wake of the report’s publication. But it continues to employ Nouthetic counseling on campus.

Donn Arms, who succeeded Adams as director of the Simpsonville-based Institute for Nouthetic Studies, said while Biblical counselors are encouraged to practice under the auspices of a church, there are those who have opened independent centers to offer Nouthetic counseling with a fee-based business model.

The Association of Certified Biblical Counselors, the organization Adams founded to regulate the practice he created, shows 45 counselors throughout South Carolina on its website. The noncomprehensive list indicates there are 28 in the Upstate, six in the Midlands, 10 in the Lowcountry, and one in Horry County.

Of those, 15 are linked to counseling centers or ministries that operate independently.

That’s permitted in South Carolina under the same legal conditions that have allowed Wagstaff to continue his practice.

Stricter regulations

Other states in the Southeast have stricter laws relating to pastoral mental health care.

In 1991, North Carolina passed a law to “protect the public safety and welfare” by requiring the certification and regulation of pastoral counselors who charge for their services. That law created a state pastoral counseling board to regulate mental health care with a spiritual component.

Lee Dukes, a pastoral psychotherapist based in Raleigh, helped draft that legislation and was among the first members of the board of examiners, at one point serving as its chairman. He said the primary intent of the regulation was to weed out unqualified practitioners.

“It started as a protection for the public and to differentiate that, even if you’re a pastor, if you’re going to charge fees, you had better have training in psychotherapy and counseling proper,” he said.

How those regulations are enforced has become a question in the years since the legislation was passed.

Robert Cooke, the current chair of the board, said the law lacks actual tools to prevent unlicensed practice. And The Post and Courier found instances of independent faith-based counselors operating without a license in the state.

Still, Dukes said the legislation and the board it created provides a clearer avenue for complaints from the public.

Tennessee has a similar law, which states fee-based pastoral counselors must be licensed with the state to practice outside their “role as clergy of a church.” In 2014, Kentucky also created a pastoral counseling board and licensure designation.

In Georgia, practitioners must have a master’s degree at a minimum and the counseling must be within their “established ecclesiastical authority” as a member of a religious ministry.

South Carolina, by contrast, has virtually no rules governing fee-based pastoral counseling, with the exception of the mandated reporting requirement passed in 2018.

Anyone who is a “member of an organized religious society or denomination” is exempt from licensure as a psychologist if they do not “represent themselves to be a psychologist or their services as psychological.”

Wagstaff, who has a profile on the website Psychology Today, apparently conforms with this law, despite offering services such as treating bipolar and obsessive compulsive disorder, that appear, by definition, psychological.

As with psychologists, state law exempts counselors from licensing if they operate under the auspices of an established church or denomination, as long as they do not claim to be licensed by the state.

Wagstaff’s practice is non-denominational. At one point, he operated a church out of his home, along with counseling services, but it is now dormant.

Wagstaff told The Post and Courier that Word of God previously had a board to which he was answerable, though it is now dormant.

Fryar, the former client turned Word of God counselor, is no longer associated with the center but sat on its board for several years. He said there were typically four board members, all of whom attended Wagstaff’s church. During his time on the board, he said, its role was largely administrative.

“I was there a good while on the board, and there was never really any complaints,” he said.

But years after going to counseling at Word of God, some former clients say they’re still dealing with the fallout.

The woman who received counseling from Wagstaff for two years said she hardly recognizes the person she was when she was going to Word of God. That time in her life, she said, was characterized by shame and fear.

She said she’s in a better place now, but it’s taken years and extensive counseling with licensed professionals to get there. It’s been a long time since she’s been inside a church, she said, and she feels distant from the faith that was once so central to her, a divide for which she said Wagstaff is largely responsible.

She went to him at her most vulnerable seeking help, she said, and instead found pain.