About Me
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I’m John Wesley Wilson—a clinical psychologist, former Evangelical pastor, and author of Straight to Hell, a memoir forged in the fires of loss, identity conflict, and spiritual reckoning. My story explores what happens when faith and truth collide—and how healing begins the moment we stop running from ourselves.
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In both my clinical work and writing, I help others navigate religious trauma, identity shame, and spiritual abuse. I specialize in faith deconstruction, psychological transformation, and the lifelong journey of becoming whole—drawing equally from professional training and lived experience.​
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Outside the therapy room and the page, I write and produce original music in my home recording studio—a creative space where I explore the same themes that define my life and work: identity, freedom, and healing.
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I live in Atlanta with my husband, Chris—we’ve been together for twenty-two years. I’m the proud father of two daughters and two stepdaughters, and grandfather to nine (and counting).
Learn more about my clinical work at www.DoctorJohnWilson.com
About the book
John was a pastor, a husband, and a father—until the secret he spent a lifetime suppressing came crashing to the surface.
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Raised in poverty and shaped by abuse, he found refuge in the Pentecostal church, where salvation demanded conformity. But when his sexual orientation emerged at age twelve, he was thrust into an impossible war between a faith he couldn't abandon and a truth he couldn't change.
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Believing God would heal him, John married young, became a father, and rose to the pulpit—preaching a gospel that condemned the core of who he was. Then, after removing his straight brother from life support so he could die of AIDS, the foundation of his carefully constructed life crumbled.
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Telling the truth cost him everything—his marriage, his ministry, and his place in the church. Cast out and consumed by shame, he fled and begged God to let him die.
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But death never came. What followed was far more brutal: the slow, soul-wrenching work of unlearning, healing, and becoming.
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Straight to Hell is a memoir of collapse and reconstruction, shame and self-acceptance, exile and homecoming. It’s a reckoning with American Evangelicalism, to be sure. But it's also a love story of a father reclaiming his daughters and a man learning to be loved without pretense.
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Harrowing and redemptive, this memoir speaks to anyone who’s had to lose their world to find themselves.