We are here for you, really and fully.
We bring our full selves - our identities, backgrounds, clinical interests, personalities, and lived experiences - to the work we do. We don’t see another way.
meet the team:
Pauline Yeghnazar Peck
licensed clinical psychologist
Helping educate, empower, and encourage the children of immigrants to live full, free, meaningful lives.
Seher Bajwa
registered associate marriage and family therapist, Registered associate Professional Clinical Counselor
I support 1st gen women cultivate a sense of belonging and multicultural couples enhance their connections.
Nichole Abdallah
registered associate marriage and family therapist
I help adult children of immigrants reclaim their cultural identities and feel liberated.
Jean Donabedian
registered associate marriage and family therapist, Registered associate Professional Clinical Counselor
I help the adult children of immigrants and the LGBTQ+ community find the balance between culture and self.
Marjan Modaresi
Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist
I help adult children of immigrants navigate their identities and find balance in their lives.
While celebrating our differences, we are connected by our shared values. We are committed to:
Acceptance: Every feeling and behavior has some function. We take a non-pathologizing view of what is happening to help you better understand yourself and move toward making more empowered choices. We operate with a deep respect for your wholeness, power, and inherent capacity for healing. We are not making healing happen but facilitating the right environment for your healing to unfold.
Acknowledgement: We acknowledge the ways in which intergenerational events (colonization, forced migration, war, genocide) and systems of power (white supremacy, racism, patriarchy, capitalism, etc.) negatively impact individual/collective mental health. We recognize how the entire industrial mental health complex continues to harm people. We are committed to unlearning and learning new ways to provide mental health care.
Authenticity: Good therapy is about a real human connection. We believe in showing up as real people who can hold space for all of you, without judgment or shame. We are trained professionals, yes, but you are the expert of your experience and we honor, and work with your values, beliefs, and knowings. We invite your full humanity to this experience.
our mission:
To equip you not just to deal with the “problems” of today, but also to develop an entirely different orientation and approach to life.
Once you have this understanding and framework, you can address any new issue with more tenderness and understanding.
Once you have a deep sense of how your past impacts you today, you have greater clarity for navigating the future.
The goal is to ultimately work ourselves out of a job and to have you more deeply trust in yourself and your natural, intuitive wisdom - the wisdom of your ancestors that is waiting for you to reclaim it.
Our work is adapted to you rather than squeezing you into a rigid way of working.
Your time and energy are valuable. Stop pushing thoughts and feelings aside, knowing their resurgence is around the corner.
Stop scratching your head and spinning your wheels trying to figure it out all on your own.
Stop wondering whether therapy could help or receive support from spaces that don’t attend to your culture and beliefs and leave you feeling unseen.
Take an active step toward living the life that speaks to you by seeking the support of a professional who gets it.
Interested in
joining the team?
Are you a passionate therapist based in California or New York? Ready to make a difference in BIPOC communities with trauma-informed, culturally-sensitive care? let's connect and make a meaningful impact together!
More on the name ‘Noor’
May the light + pomegranate and everything that ‘Noor’ represents help you find your way.
Find your light, Live bright.
-
noor means “light” in farsi/person, arabic, and other languages. while at noor we work with all the dark and difficult things, the more we do this work, the more we also believe in the truth, the potency, and the healing power of light. light refers to love, to the body and spirit’s natural capacity for healing, to resilience through softness, to connection and belonging. when we can sit with the dark winters of our psyches and our lives, we can savor the feeling of the warmth of the sun on our skin that much more.
in armenian, “noor” means pomegranate. beyond being pauline the founder’s favorite fruit, it is also a national symbol for fertility, life, and abundance. armenian lore holds that a perfectly mature pomegranate is 365 kernels, one for each day of the year. the idea of many parts within one whole speaks to us as diverse humans and therapists who acknowledge and honor that we are all made of different parts. recognizing and returning to our wholeness while honoring the many parts of the overall mosaic that makes each of us unique as well as universally human is what we love most about the transformation process.
-
cut, prepared plates of food are a certain universal language and experience of love shared by children of immigrants. The image of an immigrant parent hunched over a bowl carefully preparing little kernels of pomegranates can feel like a familiar scene. Whether your parents literally did this or not matters less than what it symbolizes - the love that may have been present from our immigrant parents even if it wasn’t always in the form we wanted or needed. It reminds us that we can be both deeply loved and deeply hurt by the same people and calls on us to carefully prepare for ourselves, through the work of reparenting, what would be most nourishing for ourselves. That is the work many of us have done, are doing, and are supporting you in doing too.