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 (LICSW) who works from within somatic, creative, multimodal 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, historical and intergenerational trauma, grief and loss, traumatic and suicide loss, complicated grief, chronic and oppression related stress, vicarious trauma and burnout, medical trauma, and institutional abuse. I specialize in working with Latinx/Xicanx/Hispañx and Indigenous/Native/First Nations 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 healing as 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 grounded in decolonial, liberation, community, and Indigneous practices of healing. As a politicized healer, I view the healing journey as liberatory practice for individuals and communities and a sacred path towards transformative change. I support deep, personal/spiritual, somatic/embodied healing with the understanding that there are historically, politically, economically oppressive contexts and structures under which we live and do this healing work. I believe in healing as our resistance to these oppressions, as a way to build from our cultural and community resilience, and as liberatory practices for an embodied transformation.
I honor what you bring into your healing journey, in all your complexity, within your unique embodied, social, cultural, racial, economic, gender, 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, culturally responsive, 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, putting these into humble practice. Here are some of the ways I orient myself in this my work:
- As a politicized healer, I view individual healing as 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 a critical practice in our healing.
- Anti-oppression and critical race consciousness has an important role and is an important tool in the therapeutic relationship and space, in the healing practices and in the resources shared, and in my own continual learning and ways of showing up as your therapist. Anti-racism, anti-oppression, multiplicity, internalization & intersectionality must exist in the healing process for all people.
- Disability Justice and anti-ableism is a critical 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.
- LGBTQQAI2S+ diversity and gender fluidity deserves fabulously affirmative and culturally resonant care and genuine connections for being known and seen in fierceness.
- 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 centered, interdependent, and non-human relationships in healing.
- All people deserve fierce embodiment, fat liberation, body worth 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 co-create space to allow for more generative, embodied, empowered, and holistic healing to take place.
*Gratitude for the collective wisdoms in the ideas and words expressed above. These are not exclusively my ideas. They are collective and generational wisdoms that exist from living at my own identity intersections, learning from and working in collaboration with community, and from many, many people who share their wisdoms about healing and liberation across time, many struggles, and many generations.
Credentials
I am a Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LICSW), license LW61167644
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 2021)(Y3 2022)
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (Y1 2020)(Y2 2021)
Expressive Arts Therapy Certificate (2019)
EMDR (2019)
Certified Clinical Trauma Professional (2019)
Psychodynamic Clinical Theory and Practice Certification (2017)
Professional Mediation Certificate, University of Oregon, School of Law (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