Hello. My name is Paloma Andazola-Reza.
I am a cis-queer Xicana/Mestiza (she/her/ella) who experiences invisible disabilities. My own journey of healing and seeking a place of wholeness at all my intersections has brought me to this work. I do this work in honor of knowing what it takes to find grace, empowerment, and self-love in the process of healing, in honor of messiness and complexity, and in honor of living at the center of our unique, creative, sacred, and expressive beings. I do this work with the understanding that this journey is not linear, it often does not have a clear and definitive place to land, and requires us to unlearn and relearn how to honor ourselves as whole, fierce, resilient, intuitive beings and find ourselves in deeper connection and interdependence. I do this work in honor of my ancestors and communities, who have traditionally and continually known and found healing in all the brilliant and important ways that have often gone unseen, unknown, or unrecognized. I do this work in honor of the generations that are following us.
I am a licensed clinical social worker (associate) who works from somatic, creative, and integrative psychotherapeutic perspectives. My approach integrates expressive arts, narrative/plática, psychodynamic, somatic/sensorimotor, and culturally integrative healing approaches. I specialize in healing complex and developmental trauma, PTSD, grief and loss including traumatic loss and complicated grief, chronic stress, vicarious trauma and burnout. I specialize in working with Latinx/Xicanx/Hispañx and Indigenous/Native/First Nations/Aboriginal peoples and people with multiethnic, bi-racial, cross-cultural, and intersectional identity experiences. I also specialize in working with people who live with experiences of disability and neurodiversity, chronic illness and pain, terminal illness, new diagnosis, transplantees, people in remission, and end of life transitions - grounded in Disability Justice and deconstructing ableism and at the intersections of race, gender, and sexual identities. I am fiercely honoring and affirming of all LGBTQQIA+, two spirit and gender identities and fluidities. My work is aimed at transformative healing in wholeness and somatic connection, wisdom and liberation within the context of acknowledging the ways oppression, racism, colonization, historical and intergenerational trauma, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, sexism, fatphobia and body policing impact and compound how other stressors, wounds, traumas, and life transitions are experienced and how we navigate and find healing.
I am a politicized healer. As a politicized healer, I am committed to the healing liberation of individuals, communities, and transformative, systemic change. I support deep, personal, somatic transformation with the understanding that there are historical, political, economic, and oppressive contexts and structures under which we live and do healing work. I believe in healing as resistance to oppression, as cultural and community resilience, and as liberatory embodied work.
I will honor what you bring into your healing journey, in all your complexity, within your unique embodied, social, cultural, racial, economic, gendered, ability and access locations, as you show up for yourself in our work together. My personal ethical framework offers that I will maintain a deeply reflective and ever learning practice in order to offer you support in the most transparent, authentic, collaborative, ethical, and knowledgeable way. It is important to me to articulate that when I talk about anti-oppression and healing liberation that I offer our sense of what this means as I put this into humble practice. Here are some of the ways I orient myself in this my work:
- As a politicized healer, individual healing is connected to community healing. We heal as a form of justice and for our collective liberation.
- De-centering eurocentric values, practices, processes as the "norm" is critical to our healing.
- Anti-oppression has an important role in the healing relationship and the therapeutic space, in the healing practices and resources shared, and in my own continual learning and ways of showing up. Anti-racism, race consciousness, & intersectionality must exists in healing, in all ways, for all people.
- Disability Justice and anti-ableism are healing foundations to all our healing. I honor the ways bodies are unique and essential, have multiple and varied ways of expressing and being known, of processing, moving, knowing, learning, communicating, engaging, receiving and giving care, have strengths and needs that deserve to be fully met, and the knowledge that all bodies are powerful not despite complexities but because of them and that these complexities are intersectional, exist on fluid spectrums and are prisms of whole being.
- LGBTQQAI+ diversity and gender fluidity deserves fabulously affirmative and culturally resonant care and genuine connections for being seen.
- Our cultural, ancestral, and community roots, ceremonies, and medicines matter in our healing journey.
- I support and encourage the reclamation of creative expressions and arts as traditional ways of healing.
- I deeply honor the role of community, interdependency, and relationships in individual healing.
- All people deserve fierce embodiment, fat liberation, and Body Trust®.
I will hold a collaborative, honoring, compassionate, and authentic sacred space where your safety, dignity, wholeness, belonging, greatest gifts, sources of strength, inherent courage, and deeper wisdom get to exist and create space to allow for more generative, embodied, empowered, and holistic healing to take place.
*Gratitude for the collective wisdom in these ideas and words above. They are not exclusively my ideas only. They are collective wisdoms that exist from living at my own identity intersections, learning from and working in and collaboration with community, and from many, many others who share their wisdoms about healing and activism across time and generations.
Credentials
I am a Licensed Social Work Associate Independent Clinical (LSWAIC), license #60593287, Exp. 9/09/2021 and currently working under the clinical supervision of Vicki Nino-Osby, LICSW #LW00005055.
Education
Masters in Social Work (MSW) with focus on Community Centered Integrative Practice and Multicultural Mental Health; University of Washington, 2014.
BA in Ethnic Studies; University of Oregon, 2008
BA in History; University of Oregon, 2008
Certificates
Somatic Experiencing (Y1 2020) & (Y2 current 2021)
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (Y1 2020) & (Y2 current 2021)
EMDR (2019)
Expressive Arts Therapy, June 2019
Certified Clinical Trauma Professional, May 2019
Psychodynamic Clinical Theory and Practice Certification, May 2017
Professional Mediation Certificate, University of Oregon, School of Law, August 2006
Memberships
International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation, member since 2020
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute Professional Association, member since 2020
International Association of Trauma Professionals, member since 2019
Somatic Experiencing, member since 2019
International Expressive Arts Therapy Association, member since 2018
National Association of Social Workers, member since 2013
Washington State Society for Clinical Social Work, member since 2017
Clinical Social Work Association, member since 2015