You don’t know how to be close to your immigrant family and also take care of your mental health.

Setting boundaries with your family is near impossible and you feel clumsy and guilty whenever you try to set them.

You struggle with self-care and knowing what you need emotionally. You tend to avoid your uncomfortable emotions altogether.

Your worth is definitely tied up in your accomplishments and how productive you are.

You don’t feel like the mental health guidance out there fits for you and your family.

You grew up with one foot in your parents’ culture and the other foot in the western world. Your entire existence has been spent straddling different cultures – each with its own norms, values, and standards. You are really good at being a social chameleon, keenly aware of how to switch your way of speaking, dressing, relating, and being to fit the environment and what is expected of you. Maybe too good.

You don’t always think about the weight of having to live here and there simultaneously but every once in a while you are reminded that you belong everywhere and nowhere at once. Being a child of immigrants feels like a lonely experience. You’re too “American” for your family and too “ethnic” for the white world. You wonder where you truly belong.

Although you’ve been raised to put family above all else, you and your parents can’t quite see eye to eye on everything. One part of you wants their approval and to make them happy. After all, they have sacrificed so much for you. You feel guilty at having so many experiences that they will never get. You know they gave up so much to give you a better life and you don’t want to be seen as ungrateful or disrespectful. But another part also feels like you need to find your own way. As you’re learning about mental health, you’re realizing just how much was wrong with your childhood. You feel guilty about seeing them in a negative light but you know that your issues with your setting boundaries, people-pleasing, overworking, self-care and feeling difficult emotions is directly related to some of the cultural messages you received. It feels overwhelming and slightly sacrilegious to explore further.

Even though you have unique dilemmas, you also have unique strengths. While you may have inherited intergenerational trauma, strengths, resources, and tools for healing have also been passed down. You need a skilled, culturally-informed therapist to help you navigate this messy terrain and work with, rather than against, your culture.

Most therapist have little training in working with the unique needs and challenges of children of immigrants and BIPOC folks. Most therapy theories and interventions are based in a white, western view of health and relationships. You need someone with both lived experience who understands and professional tools that work.

Reach out to learn about how therapy at Noor can help you feel deeply connected to your culture in a way that is healthy, sustainable, and meaningful.

Your identity maters. It influences how you perceive and make sense of the world. It also impacts how you are treated and experience the world. You need a therapist who understands that and works with you rather than against you.

There is a long history of the people of color and lgbtq+ folks being marginalized and oppressed in society as well as pathologized within the mental health field - the field meant to offer support. It’s critical that your therapist creates a space of healing rather than continued marginalization and wounding. Additionally, your therapist should take on the responsibility of continuously learning and educating themselves so you don’t waste precious time in session doing the work for them - or hiding things from them for fear of being judged, not believed, or talked out of your experience.

At Noor, we are committed to culturally-curious care. We are dedicated to anti-oppressive, anti-racist, gender and sexual orientation affirming care. We are transparent about our identities because we don’t believe there is such a thing as “neutrality.” We believe in contributing to decolonizing therapy.

You knew that dating someone outside of your race, religion, or culture would be hard, but you didn’t think it would be this hard. The differences that drew you together seem like they are the sources of strife and conflict now. You sometimes quietly grieve what it might have been like if you were with someone who understood your background more.

You have different communication styles and different needs for connection. You try and talk through disagreements but you can’t seem to find a common language. You disagree about how to allocate time with family and to each other. You argue about how to raise the kids and what’s most important. Sometimes it feels like you can’t see eye to eye about anything.

No matter what you’re fighting about, you don’t seem to have the tools for getting to a place of true understanding. You deeply care about one another but in these moments, it feels so hard to access anything other than hurt, anger, and hopelessness

The differences that drew you together seem to be pulling you farther and farther apart. You know you need to try something different but you don’t know what, and you’re afraid to try. What if you try and it doesn’t work out?

What if you try and it does?

Couples spend an average of six years trying to work out their issues on their own before seeking support. Don’t keep waiting. Couples therapy provides you with a roadmap for reconnection and effective communication. Your therapist can identify patterns that are invisible to you but impacting how you relate to one another. Changing the choreography can change the whole dance. Navigating the unique cultural clashes, we can help you create a collective mosaic that honors your unique differences and represents a unified whole.

You were courageous in choosing one another. Tap into that courage and choose one another again.

Reach out to see how couples therapy can help you create the relationship you want.

You always have a lot on your plate. Some of it happens to you by nature of the responsibilities in your life and some of it is self-imposed. You like being busy. Being idle makes you … antsy, restless, uncomfortable. Being productive feels good, feels right, feels like you.

You say yes to things – at work, in your personal life. You pile it on. And hey, biting off more than you can chew has often worked in your favor. You tell yourself that you thrive when you have a lot to do. It motivates you and keeps you going. Without it, you worry that you would get lazy and not get things done. You need the anxiety you say to yourself.

But it’s like walking on a tightrope. A small change – hello Murphy's Law – and the exciting busy energy can quickly turn into frenetic overwhelm.

Recently, your anxiety and stress has gotten the best of you.

Rather than energized, you feel depleted. Rather than encouraged, you feel stuck. You are less productive and procrastinating more. You find yourself rushing through your day. You find yourself constantly planning and preparing and thinking. It feels exhausting to have to be in control all the time.

Something isn’t working and you don’t know why.

Why are you running so fast in your life? When’s the last time you took a deep breath

While you may have gotten used to operating from a place of fight or flight, anxiety and stress are not sources of renewable energy. There is another way to get it all done and to feel grounded, collected, and calm in the midst of the chaos and noise.

Also, this moment is an opportunity to reflect on what you get from being so busy. Maybe rather than being a problem, your anxiety is speaking to you about some of the ways in which your busyness does not work for you.

Weaving together neurobiology, an acceptance and commitment-based model of treating anxiety, and a focus on the deeper functions and meanings of your behaviors and emotions, I can help you harness the power of your feelings. Together, we will explore your past, connect with your values, and design a sustainable lifestyle that invigorates you and brings you a deep sense of meaning.

Don’t let anxiety rob you of your joy.

Addressing, rather than avoiding, your anxiety is the first step.

Having a therapist guide you through the process is the next.

You’re going through the day when bam, something, seemingly out of nowhere, triggers you. One second everything is going ok, and the next, you’re either stuck in a loop of overthinking, frozen and unable to act, or yelling at your kids/partner.

Certain situations make you feel helpless and activated. While things are generally fine, these moments feel so distressing. They’re confusing and leave you feeling depleted and ashamed. You know that there have been experiences in the past that are catching up to you now. You’ve objectively had a great life but when you think back to childhood, you know there are things that either did happen (an angry parent, your parents’ messy divorce) or didn’t happen (being given the time, attention, and care you needed to thrive emotionally). You found a way to make it through and you’ve done very well for yourself but you know it’s impacted you in some ways.

You feel it in how it’s hard to trust others, how you search for the ways people are going to disappoint you and keep yourself protected so you don’t give them the chance. You feel it in how you search for external validation and approval for others, having a hard time knowing what you want and need until your body explodes or shuts down. You feel it in how critical you are to yourself, judging your decisions and criticizing your every move. You feel it in how angry you get over something that seems so small. You know there is more there.

Trauma isn’t what happened to you. It’s how you experienced it. It’s whether you had support and whether your experience was validated. Additionally, trauma can be inherited so you may now be experiencing the trauma that your parents and grandparents didn’t address.

Trauma lives in the body and even the slightest association of something that has hurt you in the past can cause an automatic reaction that you’re not consciously in control of. In order to truly heal, you need more than just a cognitive understanding of what happened. You need tools for helping your body adjust.

At Noor, we utilize a number of different trauma-informed modalities for helping you effectively address trauma, including Attachment-Focused Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (AF-EMDR)**.

Attachment-Focused Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (AF-EMDR) is a well-researched, effective treatment for addressing trauma. Every night during REM sleep, your eyes flutter from left to right while your brain sorts the experiences of the day. Your psychology is always moving toward the adaptative and functional – this is your body’s natural adaptive information processing system. That’s why our mood improves after a good nap or we have greater clarity after a good night’s rest. When we experience something traumatic, what we define as “anything that overwhelms the nervous system,” it gets stuck and left unprocessed. The brain’s mission to protect us locks these fragments of memory in place. However, it also means that they aren’t processed out and remain lodged in our psyches and most importantly, our bodies. Trauma wraps our view of the world as well as ourselves, so it makes moving through the world and finding peace in our bodies really difficult.

In AF-EMDR, we use bilateral stimulation to manually process these distressing experiences so that they can integrate and become more adaptive. It’s a non-invasive, safe process that parallels what your brain is doing on a nightly basis. The attachment-focus of this particular way of practicing EMDR focuses on client safety and remaining flexible in the application of EMDR to fit the unique needs of each person and each nervous system.

Whether you are confused about why you feel and act like you do or whether you have a clear understanding of the source of your issues, insight is not enough to change trauma. You need to work bottom-up (from the body up) to integrate mind, body, and spirit. Thus, AF-EMDR is a somatic (body-based) intervention that brings true, deep healing in a way that talk therapy may not provide. When distressing experiences are processing effectively, views about the world and views about ourselves become positive and adaptive, which helps us build resilience that protect us in future situations.

Reach out to learn more about whether AF-EMDR is an appropriate choice for you.

You have a client and you need some support working with them. You are a professional seeking support from another professional about their practice or professional endeavors. I am here to help!

Seeking consultation is an integral part of our work. It can be enlightening for our clinical work and enriching for us as professionals. I have learned so much from consulting with others.

​Whether you are a student, a trainee, or a licensed professional, I would be happy to lend a listening ear, a supportive environment, and suggestions for moving forward.

​I would be a good fit for consulting within any of the specialties listed on my specialties page (e.g., anxiety, depression, relationships) as well as within the following arenas:

• Multicultural Counseling, Anti-Oppressive Therapy: children of immigrants, first gen/1.5/2nd gen clients, middle eastern clients, intersectionality

• Trauma: sexual, childhood, attachment, racial, intergenerational trauma

• Group psychotherapy: interpersonal process, group dynamics

• Couples: intracultural couples, infidelity, sex and intimacy

• Human Sexuality: bisexuality, religion

• Women’s issues: gender roles, sexuality, pregnancy & postpartum, women in work

• College-aged/Emerging Adults: identity issues,

• Professional Pursuits: consulting, private practice, courses, diversifying income, being a business owner, social media

• Transference & Countertransference issues

• Professional Consultation: $250/45-minutes

Looking forward to speaking soon!