Welcome!

My name is Nima Saalabi (they/them). I am a non-binary QTBIPOC somatic therapist with a lifelong love of the cultural & liberatory power of play, dance, music, art, theater, improv, eros, somatics & embodied creative expression. I am particularly passionate about deepening into ancestral forms of embodied knowing towards helping trans, non-monogamous, BIPOC bodies. When our bodies face oppression, coercion, suppression, & other forms of cisheteropatriarchal, racist, & mono normative forms of violence they can feel like scary or unsafe places to be, thus the importance of reclaiming our deep sovereignty through direct internal & relational embodied knowing.

I am also a member of the Iranian Diaspora living and practicing on unceded indigenous land in what is colonially referred to as the United States. I am a licensed marriage and family therapist practicing a form of somatic trauma therapy that aims at embodied decolonization, pleasure activism, & sex-positivity. I work primarily with queer, trans (&/or genderfluid, non-binary, third gender), BIPOC, kink, & poly/enm communities.

While my website has a number of educational resources aimed at collective liberation, in this section I am primarily sharing my own personal story. My intention is to dismantle the euro-american colonizing & individualizing hierarchies in psychotherapy that normalize a strong role difference between client and therapist in which the therapist knows the client but the client does not know the therapist. I intent to do this by sharing my story so that I normalize our common humanity, and so that you too know I am human, that I too have experienced suffering, and that healing, purpose, & liberation are possible amidst suffering. I believe stories, in particular bodily-based stories arising from sensation, image, movement, and present moment experience are primary aspects of liberation and breaking oppressive hierarchies.

My Therapy Style

I work relationally and somatically as a therapist. What does that mean? Well, at the minimum it means I am not the “nod silently and say ‘hmmm’ every 10 minutes” kind of therapist or the never-show-you-my real-self-and-hide-behind-a-professional-facade kind of therapist.

I love listening to peoples stories, I believe in the healing power of storytelling. I believe in the healing power of contacting your direct present moment bodily experience, shift out of survival mode, and into a place of thriving.

I will treat you like a human being, not as a collection of symptoms or pathologies. I strive for a therapy that is decolonizing and liberatory. I honor the stories, experiences, wisdom and wounding of my family, culture, and ancestors, those who came before me, those here now, and those who will follow. I situate my life and my healing practice in social and historical context. Sometimes this means setting boundaries with aspects of my lineage that reinforce patterns of oppression. Sometimes this means inviting in.

Why I am a Therapist

I offer therapy to help folks recover from trauma as part of a larger movement towards collective healing. I work with developmental, complex, familial, relational traumas and situate these within the context of the traumas of colonization, oppression, immigration, history, & culture.

For many Black, Indigenous, POC, & Immigrant populations our stories go silenced, erased, and untold, replaced by colonialist stories of our denigration. I believe in the value of making a space where folks can be heard, heal, tell their stories, and live with purpose, joy, & meaning. I believe in helping you dismantle stories that dehumanize you and your people and reclaim stories of personal and cultural worth, value, resilience, hardship, courage, wisdom, suffering, & healing.

My Professional Journey

In my own healing journey I have drawn deeply from an integration of creativity, embodiment, & social justice.

I graduated in 2014 with an M.A. in Somatic Counseling Psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies. During this time I deepened into embodiment practices grounded in social justice, relational psychodynamics, interpersonal neurobiology, & attachment theory.

In 2013 I completed a comprehensive training in Somatic Resourcing from the Bill Bowen school of Psycho-Physical Therapy, developing tools to support folks in constructing creative and integrated psycho-physical resources to navigate life challenges and build deeper more meaningful modes of connecting, relating, and living.

Over the years I have also been told people like talking to me because they can tell I care, I’m real about and open to things, and folks know I got their back.

My goal is the decolonization of all healing practices. I work with diverse populations, and center working with BIPOC & 1st-3rd generation Immigrant populations. I work to help you reconnect with what is true for you culturally and personally. Sometimes what is true for you may be a distant voice drowned out in a sea of oppression, but the voice is there, and my aim is for therapy to make it stronger and clearer.

All of us face normative pressures to conform to social expectations of who we are supposed to be. Therapy can be a vehicle to help center your own personal, spiritual, racial, or cultural definitions of who you are, and who you want to become.

Nor does this need to be an individual enterprise, for the project of decolonization is not just dismantling of toxic relational patterns, but creating healthy relationships and communities of solidarity and mutual aid. We all exist within a social context. As Rilke says “where you are, there arises a place”.

I believe therapy that does not actively center issues of identity, power, oppression, & privilege serves only to implicitly center conformity to dominant social stories, narratives, and identities of straight, cis-gender, neurotypical, middle-class, able-bodied, male, whiteness.

Therapy conducted in such a manner is inherently colonialist, supporting larger colonial narratives that pressure folks to hide aspects of their social identities and lived experiences not in conformity to dominant paradigms. Thus, one reason I am sharing my story, is to deconstruct the idea that therapists are just ahistorical and neutral. As Howard Zinn put it, you can’t be neutral on a moving train.

One reason I support Black, Indigenous, POC, West Asian, South Asian, Central Asian, Immigrant, & 2SLGBTQIA+ folks in telling their stories is that for our communities, healing stories are a vital form of defense against the violence of other stories told about our ancestries and community.

Many have had their voices, cultures, stories, histories, homelands, narratives, lived experiences, scholarships, wisdom teachings, & healing practices erased, invisibilized, exotified, or appropriated by forms of hegemonic, white, patriarchal, imperialist, colonialist, capitalist, individualistic oppression.

In addition, these forms of domination impose narratives of brown, black, and immigrant bodies as culturally inferior, barbaric, uncivilized, animalistic. Sometimes the very same forces that stole our cultures from us sell them back to us capitalistic commodities for cultural consumption.

This serves as a triple erasure. Our stories are erased, replaced by false stories of our denigration, and this erasure is itself erased by re-selling our cultures back to us as commodities. When this is coupled with ongoing systemic oppression and gaslighting, many communities suffer, becoming estranged from their lineages, histories, wisdom, and potentials for dignity, solidarity, respect, and cultural worth. This has an enormous impact on mental health and there are far too few places where folks can address these issues in therapy.

This context is important! When our cultures are erased and our stories replaced by colonial stories of our denigration and cultural inferiority, we need to fight the internalization of these stories and create and reconnect to stories more native to us, stories of our worth, dignity, respect, self-determination, continuity, connectedness, visibility, and value. We must assert our dignity. Structural, systemic change, sacred stories, and personal and collective healing all go hand in hand.

My commitment is to offer a therapeutic space where you can engage in this sacred work. Human Beings are natural storytellers. We are inherently storying and storied creatures. We are all told stories and tell ourselves stories of who we are, where we come from, where we are going, our values, our sense of personal or cultural worth, our beliefs about ourselves and the world. These stories are passed down from generations and shaped by the political realities of the present. A story unifies multiple perspectives, truths, meanings, and experiences into a single gestalt, a whole. Stories can be toxic, oppressive, gaslighting, or empowering, dignified, playful, healing.

By being aware of how we are already storying ourselves we can begin to do so with increased intention, and make sure our stories are aligned with our values, and that we are indeed telling our story, not someone else’s version of our story. By consciously reframing and re-evaluating our stories within the collaborative context of socially contextualized therapy, you can create new healthier narratives of collective struggles against oppression, make sense of your personal, cultural, ancestral experiences, & dismantle & deconstruct false and limiting culturally denigrating stories of who you and your people are.

My Personal Healing Journey

My wish in the telling of my story is this: May it help you carry forward your own story and the story of BIPOC and Immigrant folk everywhere yearning for respect, dignity, visibility, representation, and a voice within society. May it also help you get to know me better so you can see if who I am, how I see the world, & how I see therapy, so you can more informed as to whether I might be a good fit.

Ever since I was a little kid I was super curious, exploring and learning what I could from every nook, cranny, and corner of the world's streets, landscapes, peoples, poems, stories, literature, & movies. One of the things I’ve learned is that we live embedded in social systems. While this means we are interconnected, it also means that sometimes our lives are swept up by social forces like revolution, war, colonial oppression, and social-political change. Sometimes our cultures, communities, homelands all fall apart and we re-assemble elsewhere. Growing up my family was always on the move. It seemed every year was an ending and a new beginning. I enjoyed adventure, yet my heart longed for depth, stability, roots, and friendships that did not abruptly end with another familial move.

My early childhood in Iran was shaped by war, revolution, western colonialism, change, state oppression, and eventual exile. I arrived on these lands in 1979 and again in 1984 by way of Iran and Turkey. I currently reside in Sonoma County and have lived in the greater bay area for over 27 years. The lands I dwell in are the stolen and unceded lands of the Pomo, Miwok, Wappo, Patwin, Ramaytush, Ohlone, and Yokuts people.

Today, I identify as a genderfluid BIPOC member of the Iranian Diaspora in Sebastopol, CA on unceded Pomo & Wappo & Miwok lands, ancestrally from the southwest region of Iran called Khoramshar. I have felt in my life at times of both cultures, neither fully in one or in another, but in a mysterious in between, that sometimes feels like a rich overflowing of two rivers, and other times like a void in between two homes.

I come from a region of the world that in the story of colonialism is called the “middle-east”, but in the story of my insistence that I am not defined through the gaze of Euro-American colonial interests, I refer to more accurately as West Asia or Iran.

I say West Asia intentionally, to show solidarity with Arabic and Turkish people in that region, and to seek solidarity with South Asians, North Africans, Central Asians, East Asians in homeland and diaspora.

I identify as BIPOC because that most accurately captures my experience of myself in the United States, and to show solidarity with other folks that are impacted by colonialism and white supremacy, such as black, indigenous, immigrants, and POC folk.

So, well here we go to the second bit of knowledge I was lucky enough to run into along the way, namely, that although what happens to us is sometimes is not in our control, how we respond to it, the stories, attitudes, values, meanings we bring to it, and the ways those inspire us to heal ourselves and engage in social change to fight injustice, well, those are more in our control.

What comes up for you when you hear my story? Do you get drawn in? Do you pull away? Does it resonate with parts of your story? Do you find yourself telling a story of how wonderful or horrible you imagine therapy might be with me? In deciding whether to see someone for therapy, listen to your body as you hear their story. Listen to what stories emerge for you, what happens for you. Our bodies, our stories, hold lots of information that can guide us in life.

Now, here’s one of the many tricky things about social identity. I may be identified by others in ways that match or do not match how I internally identify or how I externally express my identity. My identity is the story of what I take myself to be, a synthesis of what is told to me by myself and others, and told to others by myself. I am subject, like all of us, to validation or invalidation by others. We can be deeply heard, seen, valued in the truth of who we are. We can also be dismissed, unheard, unseen.

Looking at someone as an object is different from looking at someone like a human being. As R.D. Laing put it, Confirmation, or validation, is the registering by ourselves that we have been impacted by and are impacting others in a manner consistent with our expression and identity, To paraphrase the existential theologian Martin Buber - “a society may be termed human in the measure to which its members confirm one another…the wish of every…[person is] to be confirmed as what [they are], even as what [they] can become”.

We can all be validated or invalidated by others in relationship. The cultural context of systemic oppression serves as a global context of cultural invalidation to those that do not conform to colonialist, white supremacist, heteropatriarchal, capitalist, able-ist paradigms. What happens when we face a pervasive demanding, exotifying, othering interrogation of our identities. This is a stress many BIPOC and Immigrant folks face.

How does your experience of being invalidated feel? How does your experience change if the person invalidating you has more or less social power and privilege than you? How does your experience change if in being invalidated there is room to express your truth and be seen again? How does your experience shift if not only is your experience and identity invalidated, but your very experience of being invalidated is itself invalidated through being told you were not invalidated? How does your experience shift if you are told that your pain is just made up, that you are the one harming others by actually daring to have feelings or express yourself at all?

Is that story familiar? If so, you have my compassion and empathy. This is a common and brutal story. Gaslighting like this can lead us to believe a false story that we are broken, and wrong and bad for having feelings, setting boundaries, having experiences, speaking what is true for us, being allowed to have something be true for us at all, or even existing.

Many people, including myself, have parts of ourselves that believe these stories. These stories are one of the ways intergenerational traumas are passed down. What I have learned is that these stories are not eternal truths, they were born in relationship and can be changed in relationship. Imagine the empowering stories we can pass down to future generations if we interrupt generational trauma patterns. Part of my own healing journey has been this learning.

We all deal with oppression and trauma in different ways. One way to deal with it is to push back, to work somatically to reform our bodies, hearts, minds, relationships, & cultures so that they are centered on healing, wellness, & justice. We can refuse to cooperate with our own oppression, abuse, gaslighting, & invalidation. We can assert our existence, deepen into cultural rootedness, tactically disconnect from toxic spaces, and intentionally put ourselves in spaces with supportive folks. We can shift our own internalizing of dominant norms to interrupt ways we may oppress ourselves and others. We can radically reconnect with bodily experience and shift bodily and relational patterns of fight, flight, freeze, fawn, & feign.

We all deserve spaces where we are seen in our humanity. What happens when we learn about each other in spaces where there is a humanizing invitation to be ourselves? My commitment is to look at people as human beings. Therapy can be a place to process the times you felt you were looked at as less than that, and to honor the ways you make micro-adjustments throughout the day to present and preserve yourself as you navigate your contexts which are dehumanizing, oppressive, and othering.

These are all parts of my story. What we include or not include in our stories shapes the context out of which we view ourselves. What we speak or don’t speak, personally or collectively, is political, and shapes the politics of our experiences of ourselves and others, as well as the politics of who is remembered and who is erased from history. And if our ancestors are erased from history, we lose contact with intergenerational and ancestral support, struggle, connection, meaning, continuity.

My story is both unique and common. Many BIPOC and Immigrant folks have lived-experience of racial oppression, colonial subjugation, cultural erasure, state violence, and other forms of traumatic and violent injustices towards our ancestors and communities. Many people code-switch, alternating rapidly between stories depending on context.

Some folks were here, others forcibly brought here, others migrated here, and all three paths, among many more, intersect and are impacted by the systemic violence of colonialism and white supremacy.

For many black, indigenous, POC, and immigrant communities, the intergenerational and systemic traumas, injustices, and oppressions we have experienced cut us off from sources of ancestral wisdom, healing, ritual, resiliency, visibility, worth, and empowerment.

Our stories are silenced, our identities rendered invisible, our cultures erased. Cultural, historical, and intergenerational traumas are buried. We become invisible folks in a sea of whiteness and forced assimilation.

How did my healing journey lead to a decolonized somatic approach to therapy?

Throughout my healing journey, as a very intellectual youth interested in history, philosophy, and social psychology I quickly realized that my highly active, imaginative, and creative mind also tends to spin in circles, ruminate, worry, create doubt and fear, and create myriad fear-based self-sabotaging narratives. I realized that to manage my life, I needed to ground my mind back into my bodily experience.

Thus, I explored a variety of somatic-holistic therapies including authentic movement, improvisation, interplay, reiki, acupressure, emotional freedom technique, bodywork, kundalini yoga, ecstatic dance, biodanza, 5 rhythms, creative arts, poetry, and Vipassana and Nyingma Buddhist traditions. In many ways, this was a period of deep, creative, embodied, imaginal, sacred, spiritual, ancestral healing.

However, something was missing. Something I had long trained myself to ignore.

For the reality was, I was always a person of color, and as a person of color in none of these white-dominant healing practices did I find space to feel into, embody, or speak to my lived experiences of race, immigration, ethnicity, color, religion, colonization, oppression, and privilege.

Since childhood, I felt immense intergenerational pressure to work hard, educate myself, and make my ancestors proud by succeeding as an immigrant, which, I was taught, could only be done by accommodating assimilating into and adopting the values, dress codes, norms, and ways of being of whiteness.

My familial and community experience of state terror in Iran and hostile oppression in the United States fueled the narrative that opposition to dominant government, political, social, cultural pressures were death. And though Iran was far away, the trauma of revolution and war, and nostalgia for the economic and cultural success prior to the war (for some) was still very present.

As R.D. Laing says “we learn to be who we are told we are”. To fulfill the hero story I had been told of the immigration journey, the imperatives of success, and the dangers of revealing any cultural or racial difference, I learned to caretake others, compartmentalize my social identity, and hide under a homogenous socially approved mask of ahistorical middle-class whiteness. This followed me into my healing journey, for In assimilating into whiteness, I had also assimilated into white healing practices in which there was collective silence about social identity in deference to the idea that the healing practice transcended all issues of social diversity.

Over the last 10 years, however, my life radically shifted. I no longer had the voice to speak the story I had been told. It all fell apart. My assimilation into whiteness fell to pieces as the internal pressure of suppressing all parts of my social identity to fit in fell to pieces. I was then tasked with the deeply painful, raw, truthful, and empowering re-integration of parts of myself I had split off from.

A space for a new story emerged. My task in life shifted. My passion became reclaiming my lived experience of race, gender, culture, and immigration, finding my voice to feel into, embody, and speak to my experience of power, oppression, and social identity, coming to terms with the intergenerational traumas of colonial oppression, reconnection with ancestral wisdom and healing practice, solidarity with other BIPOC communities, disconnecting from toxic spaces, and asserting myself more fully into the world.

This personal passion also became a professional passion, to commit to conducting therapy for others in a way that makes space for all parts of people, their stories, social identities, backgrounds, ancestors, multi-generational narratives, and experiences of power and oppression at complex intersections of social identity.

I remain inspired by the traditions of scholarship and healing I utilized to recover from and navigate my lifelong experience of intergenerational trauma and colonial oppression. I remain aligned with, inspired, and informed by narrative and existential psychologies, postcolonialism, liberation psychology, somatic dance, and movement practice, ancestral healing, critical race theory, I believe body, ancestry, intellectual inquiry, creative arts, and community are primal resources for wellness. My style is warm, non-judgmental, curious, open, active, and engaged. I welcome all your feelings, questions, doubts, and yearnings and look forward to working with you.

My hope is it lands in a way that helps you reconnect with your story, with the truth of your experiences, and that you feel called to speak your name, speak the name of your communities and ancestors that they not disappear, and assert moments of dignity, self-respect, cultural respect, and racial respect.

My hope is you realize that despite the impacts of oppression, colonialism, and traumatic injustice, at the end of the day, none of us are fundamentally broken, we are just humans trying to survive challenging, and sometimes horrible and overwhelming situations. And we’re still here. We still exist. And as long as we exist, we can still move forward, we can still connect, heal, build solidarity, build community, build a life. Such is my hope for our journeys.

Perhaps part of that journey for you is therapy with me. If you feel called to explore that option, feel free to reach out. I would be honored to hear from you.