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 and you may even be hesitant to try therapy … again.

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 and if 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 therapists 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 matters. it influences how you perceive and make sense of the world. it also impacts how you are treated and experience the world. it’s a huge part of how you relate to yourself and how you relate to others.

while sexuality, however you define it and experience it, is for many, a deeply intimate and inherent part of their wellbeing, many of us are carrying so much shame about this part of ourselves. maybe you have grown up in a religious context. maybe you grew up being taught that gender is a binary. maybe you grew up being taught what good girls and good boys are and aren’t supposed to do. maybe you learned that pleasure is shameful, lustful, and wrong.

you probably didn’t even get the basics of sexual health as it pertains to your physical body. that one class in 7th grade, social media, and your peers have been your teacher, however insufficient. what you didn’t get taught has caught up with you.

you’re struggling with exploring your sexual orientation and your relationship to sex and to your body and to so many other things in the midst of all the lessons you’ve learned from your family and society. you want to feel more ease in this exploration but it feels wrought with struggle and anxiety.

you’re used to taking up as little space as possible, used to constantly surveying your environment to figure out whether it’s safe enough to be - to be you, fully. and you may not even know what you truly want and who you truly are given all the noise that you have absorbed.

if you live in a black or brown body, there are extra challenges, cultural paradigms that keep you feeling stuck between two opposing forces - love and respect for your family and love and respect for yourself. you wonder how you can ever have both together.

maybe you’re coming out to yourself later in life, as trans, as bi, as asexual, wondering what it all means. maybe now you have more safety than you had as a teenager and younger adult. maybe now you can ask some of the questions you’ve repressed for so many years. but where do you begin? it feels exciting and very, very overwhelming.

you need a therapist who understands that and works with you rather than against you.

there is a long history of lgbtq+ folks (esp black and brown queer, trans, and non-binary folks) being marginalized and oppressed in society, as well as pathologized within the mental health field - the very field meant to offer support. it’s critical that your therapist create 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. having a therapist who has lived experiences and identifies as a member of the larger queer and/or bipoc community can be an important piece, for some, of beginning to develop that foundation of safety and connection.

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.

reach out to learn about how therapy at noor can help you do the work of exploration in a way that increases your experience of pleasure, connection, and freedom.

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 to 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. sometimes it feels like the forces on you are too great to hear.
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.

you may crave having a therapist who has insight into the cultural pieces that often feel like powerful ghosts in your relationships. there are so many little, subtle ways in which the differences between you echo differences in histories, cultures, and meaning. you might find yourselves struggling with the ways in which your identities in society create power differentials that you play out in your relationship. you wonder whether there is actually a way to protect your relationship from the isms and systems of oppression that exist outside of it.

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. you may each hold your own stories about what going to couples therapy means for your relationship. 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 impact how you relate to one another. changing the small steps of 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 at noor can help you create the relationship you want.

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. or maybe you are looking at your life and wondering what else could have been possible had you been protected from the harm.

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 like this can be exacerbated by what we are witnessing in the world. living in a racialized body can itself be traumatic given the continuous threat of violence and othering present in a society that sees you as less than and treats you as such.
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 somatics and eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (af-emdr).

somatics refers most broadly to the body, and working with the body. trauma lives in the body. you cannot talk yourself out of a trauma response. trauma also disconnects from our body and our ability to hear and attune to its signals and needs. we might find ourselves disconnecting from our bodies because they were the source of the violence. we might find ourselves punishing our bodies. we might find ourselves feeling nothing at all. the work of weaving somatics into therapy involves reconnecting ourselves to our bodies so that we can feel safe in our bodies, our original home, yet again.

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 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. we focus on prioritizing 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, 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 processed effectively, views about the world and views about ourselves become positive and adaptive, which helps us build resilience that protects us in future situations.

reach out to learn more about whether emdr, somatics, and trauma-informed care is an appropriate choice for you.

we live in a grief illiterate society. we tend to only legitimize one form of grief - losing someone you love by death - and even that has its limitations.

we don’t honor the multifacetedness of grief. it has so many forms and it’s truly, a natural and inevitable part of life, from the changing of seasons to the changing of our bodies, to the changing of identities and relationships.

what we don’t understand, we fear.

maybe you have recently lost someone you love by death. maybe you feel the pressure to “move on” and maybe you feel ashamed that you haven’t yet. in this capitalistic society with so much responsibility on your shoulders, how can you even take the time you need to feel, to grieve? even if you knew how to, it feels inconvenient and overwhelming.

there is a part of you that wants to go “there” - to look at the gaping wound - and then there is another part of you that just wants to move forward and “forget” (as if this were even possible) that this happened to you. it feels too big, too painful, too scary. it’s hard to stay embodied and present. you want and crave escape but nothing makes you truly feel at ease.

maybe you need a space to explore what you have lost, who you are now, and how to move with the grief rather than move on from it. therapy can be that space that honors the loss. therapy can be a place to feel supported in facing what feels too hard.

and maybe your grief has nothing to do with the death of a loved one.

grief can be the death of an identity. the ending of a chapter of your life. it can be about grieving who you used to be. it can be the loss of a job, a relationship, your family home, and all that comes with each of these.

grief can be experienced with a health diagnosis, for you, for a parent, for your child. it means grieving what you thought would be so you can be present with what is.

if you are a child of diaspora, it can be diasporic grief related to the loss of your ancestral homelands or disconnection from the indigenous practices or family stories that you never got to fully inherit because of colonization, imperialism, oppression, war, immigration, and more. it could be the daily grief of watching the horrors of what is happening to your people. it can be the grief that comes when you realize how much was taken and extracted from you and your people. this kind of grief includes deep, sacred rage.

whatever the nature of your grief, you deserve to have a therapist who isn’t afraid of your grief, who doesn’t quickly rush to make it neat, who doesn’t talk you out of it, who lets you feel into the fullness and depth of your grief because grief is sacred. it is clarifying. it is purifying. it needs to be held and to be tended and you need someone who can be in it with you rather than rush you out of it.

reach out to see if therapy at noor can help you tend to your grief in a way that honors the fullness of your loss, and gives you the support you need to ride the waves.

Are you feeling overwhelmed by stress, anxiety, or past trauma? Are you an activist overwhelmed by the state of the world? Traditional talk therapy can be incredibly helpful, but sometimes it’s hard to find the right words. That’s where art therapy comes in!

Art therapy is an integrative approach to healing that engages all aspects of a person (mind, body, spirit) by incorporating creativity and expression into therapy. Art therapy allows you to express emotions and experiences that might be difficult to articulate. Whether you’re grappling with grief, seeking self-discovery, or simply wanting to manage daily stressors, art therapy offers a unique outlet for healing. It’s also a sacred way to reconnect to indigenous practices through your body rather than through cognition and thought - allowing for a deeper, more embodied connection.

In a safe and supportive environment, you’ll be guided in engaging in various creative activities. You don’t need to be an artist; this is about the process, not the product! Your therapist will guide you in using art to explore your feelings, uncover insights, and process challenges. In a society that operates on perfectionism, output, productivity, and efficiency, art therapy can be a powerful form of resistance, of allowing yourself to exist fully and holistically in process, quieting the impact of these social and cultural influences on our daily experiences. 

Art therapy isn’t just about talking; it’s about creating, exploring, and transforming. art therapy sessions may start with a verbal check-in, followed by an artmaking directive, and end with reflection and verbal processing of the art. The structure of the session depends on your needs and preferences. Some sessions may be more verbal, some may focus more on the creative process, and others may combine a mix of both.

Art therapy can be powerful for emotional release. It can help you connect to deeper insights and subtler, even hidden, emotions. Art therapy can help you improve your options for taking care of yourself and your spirit, discovering new ways to manage stress and anxiety. 

If you’re ready to incorporate creativity in your journey of healing, contact us today to learn more about art therapy options at noor.